RARE AND PRECIOUS JULES

When I was a wee lad, I borrowed a book called The Great Comic Book Heroes from the local Public Library. It was the first edition of this book, which has since been reprinted. I pored over this book with considerable fascination, as it was my first exposure to the Golden Age of Comics. As a pre-teen boy, I had no conception that there had been any such thing as a Golden Age of Comics. This is the period in the history of the medium corresponding to the end of the Great Depression through the Second World War, and it is the time when all the original archetypes of comic-book super-heroes were first coined. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Captain Marvel (the one who yells “SHAZAM!”), Plastic Man, and the Justice Society of America (not the Justice League, the Justice Society) all first appeared during the Golden Age. So did the first iterations of the Flash, the Green Lantern, the Atom, and Hawkman. For comic books, those were critically important years.

The Great Comic Book Heroes contained reprinted examples of those formative super-hero adventures, including some of the work that came out of Timely Comics. As a matter of history, Timely Comics is the company that Marvel Comics was way back then. Timely became Atlas in the 1950s, and Atlas became Marvel in the 1960s at about the time Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four. As a pre-teen boy, I couldn’t quite grasp what I was looking at when I saw the early Sub-Mariner and the original Human Torch. For one thing, this Torch wore red and was not one of the Fantastic Four; in fact there didn’t even seem to be a Fantastic Four! (Many years later, writer Roy Thomas had Johnny Storm, the Torch of the FF, switch from the blue-and-black FF uniform design to a red-and-yellow one inspired by that of his predecessor. There are some people who have a sentimental attachment to this version of Johnny’s outfit because it was the first version to which they were exposed. I have less than positive associations with it because it was also a depressing time in the series when Reed and Susan Richards were estranged, Medusa took Sue’s place in the team and wore a similarly non-traditional FF design, and it all seemed like just another hero team, which the FF really isn’t. I was relieved when Reed and Sue reconciled and Johnny went back to the team colors.) And I didn’t understand why the art looked so strange. Compared to the art of people whose work I enjoyed in contemporaneous Marvel Comics, like Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Gene Colan, and John Romita Sr., the drawing style of some of those old comics seemed a bit cartoony. Why does the Sub-Mariner look like that? I wondered. Why were those comics drawn that way?

Nonetheless, I never forgot the experience of reading The Great Comic Book Heroes and the window that it opened for me into the comics from the time before I was born. The reason I bring it up now is that Tuesday, just three nights ago as I write this, I got to hear a speech by, and later meet and shake hands with, the author of that book: the eminent cartoonist, playwright, and screenwriter Jules Feiffer. Jules gave a lecture at The Empire State Plaza, and I made a point of attending. Perhaps it was my small way, like Martin Sloan (Gig Young) in the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance,” of laying a claim to a part of my youth. Regardless, on learning that Jules Feiffer was coming to town, I wanted to see him and hear what he had to say.

Jules’s talk actually began about 19 minutes late because he had given another presentation earlier in the day and the people attending had taken him to dinner, which threw off the schedule a bit. But when he did at last take the stage, he proceeded directly into a reading of three chapters of his newly published memoir, Backing Into Forward. It would have been entertaining enough just to read the book, I’m sure, but hearing the author read it made it all the more so.

The chapters that Jules excerpted for us, in comic-book terms, might have collectively been called “The Origin of Jules Feiffer”. They covered his post-college life in Greenwich Village, culminating in his start as a cartoonist for The Village Voice. The first of the chapters he read dealt with his early sex life, his friendship with girls who were his intellectual peers, and his attraction to/pursuit of girls to whom he felt physically attracted, but with whom he had nothing in common. He actually accomplished the mission, so to speak, with young women that he found physically desirable, even though the relationships never amounted to anything. Or so many people would, think, anyway; to me, the enjoyment of and communion with beauty in any form in which you perceive it is a worthy purpose unto itself. (Even if, alas, nature has selected you to be a heterosexual man.) That’s because beauty in all things happens to be one of my absolute core values. But your opinion may vary.

More interesting, at least for me, was his segue into his early professional work in art studios--or, as Jules called it, his “hack work”. To pay the bills and keep himself off the street, he would get himself jobs at art studios and artists’ bullpens where he was expected not to be unique, to do work that was essentially interchangeable with that of the other artists around him. Jules described these people as not truly creative types, but rather a lot of pencil jockeys who were more interested in building lives of middle-class comfort and raising the proverbial 2.5 kids with the wife in the suburbs than in doing anything of real “meaning”. These artistic “Men in Grey Flannel Suits” tended to find Jules vaguely amusing, and enjoyed having him around because he entertained them. Jules didn’t have it in him to be an artist and a 1950s conformist at the same time (that was the decade when he started out), so he would do as he was told, but just to a point. Past that point, he would always start inserting his own individual ideas into what his art directors assigned him to do. As it turned out, the clients of the studios that employed Jules would always enjoy Jules’s non-conforming, individual concepts and his personal sense of humor, which was how Jules was able to keep working. Do I even need to spell out the lesson in that?

Hewing to the structure of the workplace was a problem for Jules. He didn’t like having to get up at a certain time, be at the office at a certain time, and go home at a certain time every day. (Go tell it on the mountain, Jules.) When called out by his bosses, he would tell them that to come up with the ideas that the clients liked, he needed to get up earlier at home and stay later at home in the morning to do brainstorming, and then he would have to go home earlier in the day for more brainstorming. He did his best brainstorming at home. Only the fact that clients actually did like Jules’s ideas kept him from getting the sack more often, and sooner, than he did. But his jobs never lasted because in the long run he would deliberately find ways to get himself fired.

He wanted to stay in a given job for no more than six months, you see, then get himself fired and coast for six months on unemployment and use that time and that money to devote himself to work that really mattered to him. So for a while his life was a cycle of having a job for half a year and being on unemployment for half a year (and going through the demeaning interrogations at the Unemployment Office about what he was doing to find work), which he called his personal “National Endowment for the Arts”. Living in Manhattan in the 1950s before the rents went into orbit, you apparently could actually do that. Jules described his experience with a company called Chartmakers, where he got himself fired by clandestinely going to movie screenings at The Museum of Modern Art during the business day; another artist from the bullpen had been assigned to shadow him and report back. This was someone that Jules actually liked, and considering his own motives Jules found it in himself not to resent this person. But at least it got him what he wanted, and they fired him at his requisite six-month interval.

Next came his experience with book editors, who loved his work as much as everyone else did, but didn’t want to offer him a publishing deal until he was “established”. Jules found himself in the position of needing to be already famous before he could be successful. This reminds me of something that I once read about Hollywood. I forget who said this, but someone once pointed out that Hollywood is a place/industry where no one wants to be the first, but everyone falls all over themselves trying to be the second. In other words, everyone wants to wait until someone else takes a risk before accepting or trying anything. (That tumult you hear coming from California right now is that of every movie studio in town trying to make another Avatar.) This, then, is the story of creative people’s lives. People will always pat you lovingly on the head and tell you what a good little artist/writer/whatever you are, and how much they truly love and believe in what you’re doing--”and we’ll show you lavishly just how much we believe in you and shower you with rewards for what you do, just as soon as someone else does!” It’s enough to make you want to strangle someone.

Well, Jules finally got what he wanted by going to the fledgeling Village Voice shortly after its founding, and offering to do his satirical and political comic strips for them for free to gain weekly exposure throughout New York. Among those who would see his work in print--and getting all that exposure--would be the selfsame book editors who didn’t want to accept what he offered them because he wasn’t already “a name”. See what you have to put yourself through? Jules had to give it away--investing all that time, care, and effort without seeing a cent--before he could sell it! This, while keeping up with his bill-paying “hack work”! At least it did, by the end of the 1960s, start getting him the book contracts he sought, which made him a publishing celebrity and a cartooning pioneer. Many people attribute the beginnings of what we now call the graphic novel to the work that Jules Feiffer did all those decades ago.

Jules talked about some of those early strips he did. One of them in particular sounded intriguing to me. It was called Sick, Sick, Sick, and was the story of a man so compelled to conform to the society around him (remember--1950s) that he actually began to take on other people’s traits and attributes. The whole idea reminded me of that clever Woody Allen movie, Zelig. I may actually have to look this up. Every so often I like to make a foray into comics outside the milieu of super-powered people in tight costumes--you just want to go exploring sometimes--and it’s been a while since my last such adventure. These detours from my usual path have at times turned up things I’ve enjoyed, so my next detour may just be into this Feiffer creation.

After the chapter readings came the requisite Q&A session. One audience member’s question touched on the movie Carnal Knowledge, which Jules originally wrote as a stage play after an experiment in which he wrote part of the play Oh Calcutta! The story of Carnal Knowledge traces the lives of two straight male best friends from college to retirement age, and how everything about their lives changes except their attitudes towards women and sex. In reminiscing about the making of the film, Jules remarked that it was about what he called “the narcissism and misogyny” of heterosexual men, the fact that, as he put it, “straight men don’t like women, they only like the sex that goes with women”. And he actually specified straight men, acknowledging that something exists besides heterosexuality, which not everyone does. (Neil Gaiman also impressed me in the Eternals miniseries when he had Sprite observe that Sersi had had sex with “all the straight male Eternals.” Not just all the male Eternals, all the straight male ones. You can’t take such acknowledgement for granted.) Hearing this from Jules, my ears perked up, my eyes widened, and I couldn’t suppress a smile. For I remembered my own early uncloseting, and my often unkind memories of the straight male friends and classmates of my past. How many times have I thought this very thing, that gay men actually like women better than straight men do? How many times, in fact, have I wished that straight people in general could distinguish liking the opposite sex from wanting the opposite sex? Indeed, I’ve thought more times than I can count that for lack of interest in women’s bodies, relatively speaking, we are free to appreciate women as people. I had this conversation with my old classmate Sven (not his real name) when I came out to him just to shut the coke-snorting pothead dullard up about the supposed women in my life: “We like women better than you do because we don’t want anything from them,” or words to that effect. I’m not proud of this fact, but when I first met The Gaylactic Network--the organization of gay science fiction fans to which my SF group, The Alternate Universe, once belonged--I was happy to have a space in my life where there were no straight men, at least not at the time.

I should hasten to point out that I am not a true heterophobe. I temper my less charitable thoughts about straight men by remembering that the ones important in my life--my brothers, my friends--are “not like that”. The Alternate Universe did admit straight men and I did welcome them, as witness my pal Danny B. in Corinth, NY. And my comic book dealer, a guy as straight as you please, was disgruntled over California banning gay marriage at the same time as Barack Obama won the White House. As Lionel (the late Mike Evans) on All in the Family once gently chided the uncomprehending Archie Bunker, “Don’t condemn a whole group of people for the actions of a few.” But hearing my own sentiments from the lips of the heterosexual Jules Feiffer (who has a 15-year-old daughter), I just had to smile. This man gets it!

For the record, Jules Feiffer’s personal comic-artist heroes include Walt Kelly, Hal Foster, Will Eisner, and Al Capp--at least until Capp went “right-wing” in the later years of Li’l Abner. He loves the work of Frank King, artist of Gasoline Alley. He loves the original Popeye strips of Segar. (He actually wrote the screenplay for the Popeye movie starring Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall.) And he laments the careless, thoughtless throwing out and destruction of innumerable comic strips after they were initially published, depriving the world of a vast treasure of beautifully rendered panel art. (Jules Feiffer, meet a generation of comic book fans who similarly mourn the callous treatment of the original art of Jack Kirby. Somewhere I have an issue of The Village Voice with a cover story about that.)

I topped off the evening by helping myself to the refreshments while other people stood in line for the book signing outside the auditorium, then going up to Jules after everyone else had finished and introducing myself, shaking his hand, and thanking him for my boyhood experience of The Great Comic Book Heroes. Remember, I don’t like standing in lines. The last person I stood in line to see was George Perez at a San Diego Comic Con, and that was because he was doing free sketches and I hadn’t seen him in twenty years! Seriously, you’d have to be Jack Kirby or Gene Roddenberry risen from the dead to get me to stand in a line to see you. So I waited till the book-signing line was gone, and helped myself to what Archie Bunker would have called “the horses’ ovaries” (his malaprop for hors d’oeuvres) to have my moment with Jules. I’m glad I did. I’m glad I took my Tuesday night out and recorded Lost while I was gone, and spent it seeing this inventive and accomplished man who has worked so well in so many different media. And it brought one moment of my boyhood full circle.

THE PACE IS SET!

We’ll return to our scheduled saga of my time with Star Trek in Hollywood in a couple of posts. For now, there are a couple of other things I want to talk about. One of them is the man I consider the single greatest living artist in comic books: The one and only George Perez!

Here’s the wrap-around cover of the portfolio book Perez: Accent on the First E, which I ordered through the mail in high school. Click on the image to get the full effect! This early rendering of the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, and Galactus demonstrates, even at the dawn of his professional career, everything that George’s work is about. I still have my copy of Accent, signed by George himself. At the time I was heavily into using Prismacolor pencils and I colored some of the drawings in the book, which are mostly black-and-white pencil reproductions. I wish now I hadn’t done that. It’s one of those things you do when you’re very young and not thinking about what you’re doing.

George is one of the last great “classical” comic book artists, the guys who came directly off the influence of the pioneers like Jack Kirby, et al. He names the long-running Superman artist Curt Swan, as well as Kirby, among his major influences. George is also one of the last Marvel artists to have a nickname. In the first generation of Marvel Comics, one of the ways that the company formed bonds and camaraderie with fans was by dubbing its creative talent with nicknames: Stan “The Man” Lee, Jack “King” Kirby, Rascally Roy Thomas, Jazzy John Romita, etc. George was very fittingly dubbed “The Pacesetter” and did his first major work on The Avengers, his favorite Marvel book, with writer Stainless Steve Englehart. (The name “Pacesetter” survives today as the title of the official magazine devoted to George’s work. The only other comic book artist with a regular magazine specifically about him is Jack Kirby himself. A couple of Pacesetter issues contain articles that I wrote about George’s incredible work on the 1979 X-Men Annual and his career breakthrough on the Marvel adaptation of the film Logan’s Run.)

I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t think highly of George’s work at first. At the time, I was under the spell of artist Rich Buckler (for whom George had once been an assistant!), who had adapted his style to emulate that of Jack Kirby, frequently to the point of actually swiping Kirby drawings from the past and putting them into new stories. (And if you know the King’s work well enough you can identify which images he took from where!) The inking of such luminaries as my old pal Joe Sinnott and Chic Stone only reinforced the effect. Well, the first book on which I spotted George’s work was The Inhumans, a Fantastic Four spinoff, and I was insulted that a book about FF characters wasn’t being drawn by Buckler! I looked at George’s art and thought, Who is this nobody? I didn’t appreciate it, to say the least, and I ignored Perez--at first.

Except for the early work of Jack Kirby himself, this shot of the inconceivable Inhumans is perhaps the best representation of those characters I’ve ever seen.

Then they put him in a place where I couldn’t ignore him: My longtime third-favorite comic book (after The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man), The Avengers. George quickly proved himself to be the ideal Avengers artist. He relished drawing large numbers of characters--the more, the merrier--in a variety of costumes. He took consummate delight in drawing elaborate action sequences with multitudes of combatants--again, the more the merrier. And what’s more, he drew everything in the most excruciating detail. The maxim “Less is more” has never applied to George’s work; with him “Less is boring!” George draws it all; nothing is too trivial to be left out. If someone else goes the extra mile in his work, George goes the extra light-year! Detail, detail, detail--and then more detail on top of that!

And his “camera” is never at a static, fixed point; he’ll take you from a panning wide shot to an upshot to a downshot to a closeup to an over-the-shoulder shot, all in one page. And he’ll pack twice as many panels into a page as any other artist will.

Here are the three most essential Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, captured in their purest and most classic form by the artist who draws them better than anyone else. I colored this one myself.

If that’s not enough, he makes every character look like his or her best, most awesome, and if applicable, most beautiful possible self. His heroes and heroines are more heroic, more handsome, more gorgeous. His villains are more fiendish and dangerous-looking. And he has a knack for capturing the best possible version of everyone’s costume. Oh, and about costumes: When it comes time to design a new character or give an old character a new look, very few people in the business can design ‘em better than the Pacesetter.

This is a design master for Nightwing (that’s Batman's first Robin, Dick Grayson, all grown up) that the character unfortunately never wore in any DC Comics story. It amply demonstrates George’s wondrous design skills. It is truly a masterpiece; you don’t know how I wish I had created this!

Indifference and disdain on my part quickly turned to respect, admiration, and awe. Where I snubbed George at first, now I couldn’t wait to see the next issue of every book he drew. (Which is a lucky thing, because the next book they gave him was The Fantastic Four itself!) And as I had with Kirby before him, I made it my business not just to look at his work, but to study every facet of everything he did, to learn how it all worked. It didn’t take long for George to establish himself as my all-time most important artistic role model in comics, after Kirby himself. It’s a position he holds with me to this very day.

This post of The Quantum Blog, then, is devoted to some of my favorite drawings I’ve found online by the former Mr. Nobody. Immediately below are my old friends, the Fantastic Four, in another shot that I personally colored. This one, showing the FF as I loved them, in their pure Kirby form, used to be one of the rotating images in the upper left hand corner of the FF Plaza Website, which my pal Sean Kleefeld used to run.

George never got a chance to work with my favorite member of the X-Men, Phoenix, besides a few isolated images. Here’s one where he captures her perfectly.

George has a special love of drawing super-heroines. This is a shot of Ms. Marvel, skillfully rendered in line and grey tones.

This shot of the sensational Storm in her original, classic Dave Cockrum design shows why it’s such a shame that X-Men characters have been made over so much. Storm has never looked better.

George’s most magnificent accomplishment was the miniseries Avengers/JLA, the battle between and team-up of the Avengers and the Justice League of America, which ran 4 issues and more than 200 pages--all of them penciled and inked by the Pacesetter. I consider it the all-time, single greatest achievement in comic book art. This drawing from the early 1980s commemorates the first time this story was attempted.

And speaking of the Avengers and the Justice League...

By far my favorite rendition of Wonder Woman was that of George in the mid-1980s. He took a character that I basically liked and a book that I never read, and made her my favorite DC character with a book I couldn’t miss. His work with the Princess of Paradise remains one of the most ingenious things I’ve ever read in comics. Here’s WW battling Marvel’s She-Hulk.

Though fans have the strongest attachment to Hal Jordan in the identity of the Green Lantern, the sexiest of the Green Lanterns and my personal favorite is Hal’s successor (who recently stepped aside as the “official” GL when Jordan was resurrected), Kyle Rayner. This costume that Kyle wore is my favorite of all the Green Lantern ensembles. Sexy character, sexy costume, the world’s best comic artist: It’s a win/win/win combination. I really should color this one...

To finish up, the Silver Surfer (whose book George used to write!) and a smackdown between the mighty Thor in his classic Kirby form and the ever-incredible Hulk! I have one more of these that I colored myself, but I’m saving that one because I’m sending a scan of it to my brother for his birthday in a few weeks and I want it to be a surprise!

Next in The Quantum Blog: Do you know what “Lilapsophilia” is? If not, try not to let your house be swept up over the rainbow until we meet again, and I’ll tell you about one of my secret passions. Then, it’s back to Hollywood and more of my personal Star Trek experience.

THE ETERNAL JACK KIRBY

When we left off last week, we were talking about the work of the King of Comics, Jack Kirby, with a particular focus on one of his greatest creations, Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, and the ways he has been depicted, correctly and otherwise. To start off this post, I was going to talk about some of the things that have been done with another of Jack’s iconic creations, the uniform of the Fantastic Four. As I got into that, I realized that that really should be the topic of a separate post, as I have more than a little to say about it. So you’re just going to have to look forward to that for the time being. For this post, then, we stick with the subject matter originally intended for it: namely, the only two times that, in my opinion, anyone ever changed Jack’s work in a way that was either as good as what the King originally did, or actually improved on what Jack established. For your entertainment this week: the origin of Galactus according to John Byrne, and The Eternals as reimagined by Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr.

Now, for the origin of Galactus: It has been established in places like The Jack Kirby Collector magazine that Galactus’s origin was initially intended to be a part of his and the Silver Surfer’s intro story in Fantastic Four #48-50. It seems the part of that story that would have told us where the planet slayer came from was cut from those issues, but Jack saved the pages against the possible need for them later on. The occasion arose in The Mighty Thor #169. This issue came at a time when Jack was winding down his Marvel work. He was mostly not creating any new, major characters and concepts for Marvel because Stan Lee had more control over what Jack created than Jack did. So from about 1968 to 1970, Jack was concentrating more on reuses of material he had created in the prior seven or eight years, with varying degrees of cleverness. And in the case of his last work on Thor, that meant using some characters imported from The Fantastic Four; namely Him (the character we call Adam Warlock today) and Galactus.

The origin of Galactus, as Galactus himself revealed to Thor, concerned an ancient planet called Taa, which had the most advanced, enlightened, and wondrous civilization ever to have existed in the universe. But Taa, and its whole sector of space, were dying of some plague that somehow confounded the Taa’s attempts to cure it. So one Taa scientist, for obscure reasons, decided to mount a final space expedition into the heart of a star, to go out in a last blaze of glory, as it were. The radiation of the star killed everyone aboard the craft except for that one scientist, who somehow survived and evolved into a new form of life. Incubating for eons (during which a Watcher could have destroyed the nascent being, but obeyed his oath of non-participation in the universe and let it live), it finally emerged as the godlike and hungry Galactus we know today.

In retrospect, this origin story is really not Stan and Jack’s best work, and doesn’t really do justice to one of their greatest and most important creations. What was this plague, and why couldn’t the all-achieving people of Taa cure it? Why would members of a race facing extinction decide to commit suicide by diving into a star? If there were some cultural reason for it, or some facet of their race’s psychology to account for it, the story didn’t provide one. I would ask why the radiation of the star did what it did to this scientist character, but then this is the Marvel Universe, where cosmic rays turn astronauts into super-people, gamma ray bombs turn nuclear physicists into Hulks, and irradiated spiders bite teenagers and endow them with great power (and great responsibility). Still and all, Galactus should have gotten a better origin than that. Why didn’t he? I think it was because it was 1969, Jack was fed up with Marvel and about to jump ship to DC (taking with him a whole universe worth of new characters and concepts he had evidently been withholding from Marvel since about 1966!), and like a Rhett Butler with a pencil, he frankly didn’t give a damn. It’s pure speculation on my part, of course, but as speculations go, I think it’s reasonable.

Apparently, artist/writer John Byrne thought Galactus should have had a better origin too, because back in the 1980s he took what Stan and Jack laid down in Thor #169 and refined it into a more pleasing story.

In a one-shot special called Galactus: The Origin, we learned that Taa was not a planet of the Marvel Universe we know. Taa, in fact, existed in the universe prior to the present Marvel Universe. Byrne invoked the cosmological theory of “the oscillating universe,” the idea that a Big Bang is followed by eons of cosmic expansion, and then a collapse into a “Big Crunch,” from which another Big Bang follows, in an endlessly repeating cycle. (The “oscillating universe” theory is starting to lose favor today, supplanted by the idea of infinite expansion to the point of galaxies and solar systems flying apart and all matter being torn into nothingness; this is called “the Big Rip”.) The plague against which Taa and everything in its cosmos was helpless was, in fact, the physical force of entropy--the final decay of the universe. The onset of the Big Crunch was collapsing the universe into a singularity, and the noble scientist Galen decided to defy the Big Crunch by captaining a spaceship right into it. The singularity killed all hands aboard except Galen himself, who was protected by the living consciousness of the universe, selected out of all living creatures to survive through the next Big Bang. But the creature that had once been Galen would be changed in the process, born into this universe as Galactus, the embodiment of the balance of nature on a cosmic scale.

This rather more logical account of Galactus’s origin, derived from what were state-of-the-art theories of physics at the time, has become the official origin, repeated in The Fantastic Four and elsewhere. It overcomes the problem of (what I speculate as being) Jack Kirby’s final apathy about the Marvel Universe that he did so much to build, and handily fixes a story that I believe he just tossed off on his way out the door.

During his final stint with Marvel in the late 1970s, Jack made his final pass at the theme of what happens “When Gods Walk the Earth!” Jack meant The Eternals to take place in its own world, not the world of the familiar Marvel Universe. Marvel, however, insisted on weaving it into the tapestry that Jack had woven a decade earlier with the Fantastic Four, Thor, et al. You could tell from Jack’s other Marvel work during that period that he really wasn’t interested in going over all that old ground again; his revisits with Captain America and The Black Panther weren’t picking up on any continuity from his earlier work or that of other writers and artists. Jack just wanted to keep telling fresh stories, and those just happened to be the characters with which he was working. The Eternals, the original series, was dropped after 19 issues and an Annual. But these characters, like everything else Jack created, made other people want to play with them, so the Eternals cast continues to be a presence in the Marvel Universe in various ways, including a new series that started last year. That new series peels off from the story of what has become one of my favorite miniseries, The Eternals by Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr.

The Eternals is the story of the ongoing conflict between the different breeds of man, overshadowed by the creatures who experimented with prehistoric ape-men and created them. In Earth’s prehistory, the armored alien Celestials, who were big enough to spank Galactus, came to Earth and used proto-humans to bring forth two other species: the Eternals, who were generally beautiful, immune to natural death, and possessed superhuman powers; and the Deviants, whose inability to breed in a consistent form produced generations of endlessly varied, grotesque monsters. The Eternals became the basis for human myths about gods and angels; the Deviants gave rise to myths about devils and demons. Looming over all was the eventual judgement of the Celestials as to whether they would let their experiments--and the Earth on which they lived--survive. Derived in part from the writings of pop archaeologist Erich Von Daniken and his theories about “ancient astronauts,” The Eternals was otherwise pure, classic Jack Kirby storytelling of the most entertaining kind.

A few years ago, Marvel decided that it wanted to “bring the Eternals fully into the Marvel Universe.” This had been accomplished already with various stories in various books, including Thor, where the original Kirby storylines were concluded and integrated with established Marvel mythology (and Earth passed the Celestials' judgement), and The Avengers, where Eternal character Sersi became a member. The reasoning was a bit dubious. The opportunity to work with Jack’s last major Marvel creation went to writer Neil Gaiman and artist John Romita Jr., who proceeded to put their own stamp on Jack’s work. Unlike many other reinterpretations and makeovers of the work of the King, what Gaiman and Romita ended up doing was a truly wonderful seven issues’ worth of work.

The story for this 2006 miniseries hinged on the mysterious reason why all of the Eternals had been transformed into humans, their memories wiped, and other humans’ memories and records of them expunged. What was gradually revealed was one of the most truly ingenious, brilliant, and poignant motivations for an antagonist ever to see print in comics. It turned out that the enemy was one of their own, the Eternal known as Sprite, who had been mythologized in the writings of William Shakespeare and J.M. Barrie, among others. Sprite, unique among the Eternals, had been created as an eleven-year-old boy, and as the Celestials had made the Eternals unable to age and die, Sprite could never grow up! For all the eons of his Celestial-given lifespan, Sprite could never pass through adolescence and become physically, sexually a man! And he hated it! So he had clandestinely used the Eternals’ physical and mental gestalt, the Uni-Mind, to access the power of the Dreaming Celestial, a non-Kirby character that other talents (I think it was Walter Simonson) had left hidden on Earth.

With the Dreaming Celestial’s power, it was Sprite who had rendered all the Eternals human, including himself, so that Sprite could grow to maturity and experience a mature life! Restoring the Eternals to their true godlike selves would mean waking up the Dreaming Celestial, and resuming hostilities with the Deviants. You see, the Deviants worshipped the Dreaming Celestial as the only one who stood up against the rest of his kind for harvesting Deviants as food; that was why he was put to sleep! The Eternals was my first and so far only exposure to the writings of Neil Gaiman, but with his utterly brilliant use of Sprite and the Deviants he won my respect as a storyteller.

All of this was rendered in the luxuriously beautiful, awesomely powerful, and super-sexy style of John Romita Jr., who since the 1990s has risen to a position second only to George Perez on my list of favorite comic book artists. (I keep Jack Kirby in a class by himself; the King has no successor.) John Jr.’s revised character designs for the book hold as much of a place of honor with me as Gaiman’s story. I usually feel a knee-jerk hostility against people redesigning Kirby characters, but I absolutely love the things that John Jr. did with Ikaris, Makarri, Sersi, Zuras, and the rest of the Eternals cast. While the current Eternals book has restored Jack’s versions of the characters, I can pay no higher compliment to John Jr.’s work than to say I would happily have accepted his versions being made permanent and official. With artwork that made me want to linger and mentally drool over it (every so often I have to take out the hardbound collection of it just to admire it) and a story to make the brain cells do an intellectual tango, the Eternals miniseries of 2006 ranks with the 1980s Fantastic Four of John Byrne as one of the very best non-Kirby renderings of a Jack Kirby creation. It is sheer magnificence.

So, while as a rule I object to people rewriting or redesigning Jack Kirby (which is one my main reasons for not buying Fantastic Four books any more), it is possible, however unlikely, to make over the work of the King of Comics in a way that I’ll accept. It just has to be beautiful enough and inventive enough to match what Jack did (as in The Eternals), or an exercise of imagination that takes what Jack did and makes it better (as in Byrne’s origin of Galactus). It remains to be seen whether anyone will ever accomplish such a feat again.

THESE BOOTS WERE MADE FOR BATTLE

Not long ago, the world of comics lost one of its very best and most inventive artists: the man who designed the “new” X-Men, Dave Cockrum.
When the original class of X-Men disbanded in 1975, to be replaced with an all-new, international team, the artist on board was Cockrum, who created one of the most beautifully designed groups of heroes ever seen in comic books. For the X-Men, Cockrum created the looks of four brand-new characters, Storm from Africa, Nightcrawler from Germany, Colossus from Russia, and the Apache Indian Thunderbird.
I immediately grew to love and admire Cockrum’s design sense, which has been a lasting influence on my own work. He brought a style and panache, and dare I say it, a sense of fashion, to the ensembles of super-heroes that I don’t think anyone after him has ever truly matched. I especially loved what he did with his female characters. His “masterpiece” heroines were Storm, Phoenix (who had originally been Marvel Girl), and Ms. Marvel.The designs for these three were variations on a particular set of themes: Long gloves, hip boots with high heels, and sashes at the waist. (No one before Cockrum, to the best of my knowledge, had ever done heroines with waist sashes instead of belts.) His great innovation with Storm was her combination poncho/cape, which, when she was in flight or when she cut loose with her powers, would billow and float out into the shape of butterfly wings. She was incredible to look at. They all were! Most artists these days don’t really do that cape justice. To see the way that cape ought to look, you have to look at Cockrum’s own work or that or John Byrne or George Perez.
It’s been argued that these ensembles were a bit sexist, especially where the boots are concerned. It’s a predilection of straight men, including straight male comic book artists, to like to see women in high-heeled shoes and boots. This is, of course, highly impractical. A real woman in high heels who routinely did the kinds of things that super-heroines are called upon to do would surely put herself in traction or worse. I get that, especially since Marvel Comics coined the idea of super-heroes as real people in a real world. These days, when people draw the Storm, Phoenix, and Ms. Marvel ensembles that Cockrum created, there is a tendency to leave off the heels. (Well, George Perez still gives Ms. Marvel her heels. But George is like that, always respecting the details and the integrity of the design.) The women’s boots on these characters today tend to be flats. And I respect the reasons for this. But you know...they don’t look right. Leaving off the heels of these particular designs leaves them looking somehow...unfinished, incomplete.I consider myself a feminist sympathizer (if you’re a gay man and don’t sympathize with feminism, they’ll suspend or revoke your card, ha-ha), but in my opinion the Cockrum designs for these three characters ought to be an exception to enlightenment. If you really want these costumes to look the way they ought to look on the characters, you’ve got to give them the heels. Check out the shots of them, by both Cockrum and Byrne, accompanying this post and see if I’m right. I think I am!

THE CAPTAIN WAS A MARVEL, PART 2

So there she was: Monica Rambeau, an African-American woman, late of the Coast Guard in New Orleans. She had acquired the power to become energy of any wavelength and taken on one of the most venerable names in super-herodom, Captain Marvel. Directly she stepped off the bus in Manhattan, she was recruited into the ranks of the Avengers themselves. She rose quickly to the very leadership of the team. Captain Marvel had arrived. She stood at the top of the super-hero heap. She was one of the shining lights of the Marvel Universe.

And in a flash, she was torn down and discarded.

Marrina, formerly of Alpha Flight, betrothed of the Sub-Mariner (who had recently joined the Avengers), had gone insane and morphed into a colossal sea serpent. When the Avengers set out to corral her and contain her rampage, Captain Marvel struck with the full force of her power and became a mighty bolt of lightning...and disappeared! The Avengers feared the worst for their new leader, but a short time later, Captain Marvel rematerialized at the mansion as a shriveled, nearly dead, powerless husk of a woman. Having accidentally discharged herself over the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, she could barely pull together even this much of her mass. She was no longer in any condition to lead Earth’s mightiest heroes, and in a story centered on the dismantling of the Avengers as they were at that time, she stepped down and returned to New Orleans to recover. I was heartbroken. What had happened?

As I understand it, part of what happened was that Roger Stern, Captain Marvel’s creator and an old acquaintance of mine, was replaced as writer of The Avengers. The new writer was Walter Simonson, another former acquaintance. (In fact, Walter is an alumnus of Rhode Island School of Design, where I spent my first couple of years of college, which is a story for another time. A very, very long and unhappy story...) Part of Walter’s mandate for the book was to replace the Avengers lineup. And part of Marvel’s agenda was that the company wanted Captain Marvel gone. Since Roger was leaving, he couldn’t take his brilliant creation with him (all Marvel characters are Marvel’s property, to be done with as the company wishes), so he was forced to leave her fate in other hands. Hands that didn’t love her as much as Roger (and I) did. So, this most wondrous of super-heroines was doomed to be nearly killed, rendered powerless, and written out of the book that had been her home, never to be a regular, full-time Avenger, let alone their leader, again. To say the least, I was displeased.

At a comic convention a short time later, I approached a Marvel editor--and I only wish I could remember this person’s name--and asked him why Captain Marvel was treated so shabbily. The answer I got was exactly this: “She was too f***ing powerful.”

At that same convention, or perhaps another about that time, I approached my old acquaintance Walter himself about the Captain Marvel question. Do you know what he told me? “She was too f***ing powerful.”

Listen to how that sounds. Captain Marvel was an African-American woman. She was the single most powerful mortal, human character ever to serve in the Avengers. (Remember what I said about Thor last week.) She had risen to the leadership of Marvel’s most powerful hero team. She was one of the most prominent members of the Marvel cast. And... “She was too f***ing powerful.”

Mind you, Thor is not too f***ing powerful. But Captain Marvel was. And I have always been of the opinion that if this Captain Marvel had been male and white like the one before her (extraterrestrial that he was), she would not have been considered so f***ing powerful that she had to be torn down and discarded from Marvel’s most important team after the Fantastic Four.

Since the story in which she was nearly destroyed and written out of the Avengers, Captain Marvel has had to endure a series of indignities to her standing in the Marvel cast. They did a couple of one-issue specials about her. In the first one, she spontaneously manifested a different set of powers related to the dimensional field across which she initially exchanged her mass for energy. She seemed to have a personal static warp field that enabled her to move at supersonic speeds and simulate super-strength and invulnerability. Those were nice powers to have, I guess, but they were nothing compared to the powers that Roger gave her. But she remained only a reserve member of the Avengers.

In a subsequent special, CM manifested powers a bit closer to what she originally had. She could now emit electromagnetic energy of any wavelength. Not become it, just emit it. Well, that was a step in the right direction, of course. But she was still only an Avengers reservist, not a regular, full-time member.

In a miniseries called Starblast, CM was among the characters participating in some cosmic conflict. At the height of that battle, the cosmic entity called The Stranger decided that he needed all of the heroes that he had brought into the battle at their full strength. So he restored Captain Marvel to her original powers. She was back in full form--but not back on the team where she belonged.

So they had put her back the way Roger Stern had her, and what did they do next? They decided that the prior Captain Marvel, who was originally a warrior of the alien Kree Empire, had sired a hitherto-unknown son, and that this character was now going to be the official Captain Marvel with his own book. (Apparently the first Captain Marvel of Marvel Comics was a bit of an interstellar tomcat like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk. He has at least two other children from different affairs. One of them is his son with the Skrull Princess Annelle; we know him as the Hulkling, a gay character, in The Young Avengers.) With a different Captain Marvel headlining a new series, Monica could not keep the name with which Roger created her, so they had her rechristened as “Photon”. This was yet another comedown. Any super-hero with energy powers could be called “Photon”. This name was nowhere near special enough for this character. And yet...Photon she was. And even as Photon, she was still not restored to her standing in the Avengers.

At least Photon still got to take part in some Avengers missions, even if it was only as a reservist. She got some play in the stories of Kurt Busiek, George Perez, and company. In the opening story of the “Heroes Return” Avengers, she was among the characters with enough of a strong sense of having been an Avenger that she could shake off the effects of Morgana Le Fey’s spell on the world and join Captain America in fighting back. She stood with the Avengers against the menace of Pagan and Templar. She was part of the resistance against Kang the Conqueror’s overthrow of Earth. Roger Stern got to write his creation again in the miniseries Avengers Infinity, in which Photon, Thor, Starfox, Moondragon, Tigra, and the Jack of Hearts faced the threat of the Infinites. That was another of Monica’s shining moments, reunited with the writer who brought her into the world and loved her best. The Avengers Infinity team also took the spotlight in The Avengers Vol. 3 #35, the only story except for her origin in which the former (and still rightful) Captain Marvel was drawn by her originating artist, John Romita Jr.

Perhaps Photon’s greatest moment at this point in her career was her participation in Avengers/JLA, the George Perez-drawn miniseries in which the Avengers met and battled DC’s Justice League of America. This was where Photon actually defeated the Green Lantern! In the epic clash between the two teams, she matched the energy output of the Green Lantern’s ring and sucked all the power out of it, leaving him helpless, and used his power to put a righteous zapping on Firestorm and Captain Atom to boot! That was one of the few stories after her ignominious takedown in which Monica really demonstrated what she’s capable of doing. Talk about “justice”!

And even so, not only has Monica remained on the sidelines, they’ve even gone so far as to take away her name--again! When the first Captain Marvel’s son thoughtlessly assumed the name of Photon, Monica was furious with him at first (as well she should have been), but relented and decided to call herself “Pulsar”. Can you believe it--from Captain Marvel to Photon to Pulsar? Why not just call her Generic Energy Power Woman and have done with it? And even this didn’t stick. Next, they decided to make her the leader of something called Nextwave: Agents of HATE, a group of third-string and lower Marvel heroes in which she called herself “The Captain” and nattered on about having once been the leader of the Avengers. And even more recently, in Ms. Marvel, the robotic hero Machine Man had himself a Life Model Decoy made of the former Captain Marvel who whined about having once been the leader of the Avengers, and onto whose body Machine Man put his own head! So there we have it: Monica Rambeau has gone from Captain Marvel, most powerful (mortal, human) Avenger and leader of the team, to a throwaway character on reserve status, to “Photon” to “Pulsar” to the leader of a lot of third-stringers, and finally to being a JOKE!

But what else could Marvel do with her, right? I mean, after all, she was black, she was female, and she was “too f***ing powerful”.

After Roger Stern was removed as writer of The Avengers, the entire history of the great and awesome super-heroine that he created has been about people taking something away from her. Take away her powers (and almost her life), take away her place in the team, take away her name. And oh yes, she doesn’t even use the costume that John Romita Jr. designed for her any more; let’s rob her of that as well!

I told you last week that this was not going to be a pretty story. As I write this, I have given up on Marvel Comics ever doing right by this magnificent character. She is an unloved, devalued creation, seen as being nothing but fodder for jokes. Here we have this heroine who could have battled the entire Justice League of America single-handedly and probably defeated most of them, this leader who once took the Avengers through a battle with the Greek gods themselves and hurled a bolt of lightning that actually hurt Zeus--and this is all they can do with her.

It’s another one of those situations that make me wash my hands and just say, “They’re not my characters. I have no responsibility for them and no one has ever wanted me to have any responsibility for them, so just let them do whatever they see fit with their property.” No one at Marvel seems to care about this character or have any kind of positive regard for her, and it’s a shame and a disgrace and a waste.

It’s been argued that Monica Rambeau was created as “a placeholder,” a means of retaining Marvel’s rights to the Captain Marvel name and keeping that name “in play” until the company decided what it really wanted to do with the property. The trouble is that the character my old acquaintance Roger Stern created had far greater possibilities. Even at the pinnacle to which Roger took her, she was a character on her way up. Roger had given her a history and a family and the potential for a relationship (there was this Denzel Washington-like government agent character who had his eye on her), and could have made her something truly unique in the super-hero genre: a fully developed, fully realized black, female lead character. This, however, was not to be.

But you know what? No matter what they call her and no matter what indignities they heap on her, she’ll always be Captain Marvel to me.

THE HOMELESS FAN

The week before last, I tuned in to Jay Leno on Monday night as I customarily do, looking forward to a new monologue and some new Headlines--and found that Jay had gone into reruns. Why was Jay in reruns now, with Nielsen Sweeps looming? Jay should be all-new now. What was going on?

What I had forgotten was what Jay had been joking about just three nights earlier: The Writers' Guild of America was preparing to strike. The first shows to be affected by the strike, if it happened (make that when it happened now), would be the ones that required fresh material every day, meaning the late-night talk shows and the daytime soaps. Thus, Jay Leno had been driven immediately into reruns, and in several weeks the same fate awaits All My Children, General Hospital, The Days of Our Lives, and the rest of the soap genre, shows that shoot an episode every day about a month in advance of what we see. The scripted, weekly prime time shows have until about January, give or take, before they exhaust their supply of all-new episodes.

And what does that leave for me in terms of entertainment? That mostly leaves DVDs, my iPod--and comic books.

I'm not panicking by any means. I have plenty of DVDs and a portable player. My iPod is well stocked. And as for comic books...actually, this comes at a very interesting time. More and more these days I am struck by the fact that my relationship with comics has changed, and it's never again going to be what it once was.

At the height of my fandom I was a collector of as many as 24 comic book titles a month, give or take for comics that were released bimonthly. I was getting just about all of the regular Marvel Comics line, a small selection of DC books, and a few independents. It was the time when I was most excited and enthusiastic about comics. That time is a period of history now. I'm talking about a time when the Berlin Wall was still up and the Reagan presidency was in its first term. Truly, a period of history!

Fast forward to today, and my comics consumption is down to three monthly Marvel books, with two others that I expect to be picking up again in the next year, and another that I'm looking forward to continuing with at whatever unspecified time it may resume. I had just one monthly DC book, but as of this week it will be two. There's another book from a division of DC, which I get whenever there is a new issue (which is not regularly), and a couple of independents, one of which has had a single issue this year, the other of which I hope to see in 2008. So, that's roughly a possible ten comics--less than half of what I was reading in the days of the Gipper. And that's not counting the miniseries (which may run from 4 to 8 issues) and the trade-paperback and hardcover collections of past material that make of the rest of my comic reading. But those are the comic-book equivalent of TV specials, cable reruns, and boxed DVD sets; they're not regular items.

The reasons for this are many. What it really comes down to is that I don't feel the same way about comics now as I did then; much of my enthusiasm and excitement for the art form--and its content--are gone. Part of it is that comics now just aren't the way they were then. Part of it is that I'm just not the same person today that I was at the time. Comics have changed, and I've changed. We've grown too much apart. As a fan, I used to feel "at home" in the Marvel Comics Universe. It was a place that I believed in, with stories that engaged me, told by storytellers that I trusted with characters that I loved. It doesn't feel like "home" any more today. It feels like an oppressive place, filled with cynicism, ugliness, paranoia, and brutality. Marvel's books were always filled with pragmatism and ambiguity, which used to be called "realism". That's part of why I enjoyed Marvel's books so much better than I did DC's. But they've taken it to such extremes today that they've lost the purity of their concepts and the basic appeal of their characters. Marvel is no longer my "home," and after decades of being at home there, I can't put down roots any place else. DC never did it for me then (I most enjoyed DC's books when they were written and drawn by Marvel talent, and when they "looked," "felt," "sounded," and "thought" something like Marvel books), and I just can't bond with those characters and their world now. Elsewhere in the medium, there's even less for me to hold on to. So, except for reprint collections that gather the material from the past that I loved into hardcover and trade-paperback volumes, I feel like a "homeless" comic book fan. And there may be no going home, in a real sense, ever again.

I expect that in future Blogs I'll be talking more about my state of fandom homelessness, and the feelings behind it. They're very complicated and very deep feelings, because fandom has never been just a hobby for me. A hobby is a pastime; I am not a hobbyist. I have things that the world foists onto me, and things that my life is about. Comics has always been one of those things that my life is about. But in months to come, I expect we'll be returning to this subject. In the meantime, here is my comics reading list (excluding miniseries and reprint collections) as of this month.

FANTASTIC FOUR. Sometimes the actual favorite, always the sentimental favorite, The FF is at "sentimental favorite" status right now. At the beginning of 2008, the new writer/artist team of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch takes over, and Hitch insists on "bringing the FF into the 21st Century" with a gratuitous, needless redesign of the Fantastic Four uniform. Few things in this or any other world are as wrong-headed as bringing a comic book about science "into the 21st Century". The Fantastic Four was a "21st Century" comic book in the mid-1960s, folks, before there even was a 21st Century! This is one of the things about the FF that some people seem completely incapable of understanding, and is such a personal gripe of mine that I should probably devote a "Pet Peeve" to it. And there is every possibility that I will...

THOR. I wish they hadn't dropped The Mighty from the title, and in redesigning Thor's costume I would have kept the bare arms of the classic Jack Kirby version. But right now, Thor is the best thing happening at Marvel. Winning scripts by J. Michael Straczynski and stunning art by Olivier Coipel (whose work I used to loathe with a passion--this is one of the greatest metamorphoses of an artist's style I've ever seen) make Thor one of the best reads on the market. And it'll get even better when the restoration of Asgard is finished and Goldilocks can get back to the business of being a hero again!

Ms. MARVEL. Another solidly entertaining book with beautiful art by Aaron Lopresti, the adventures of the divine Ms. M are worth your time.

Returning in 2008: CAPTAIN AMERICA. I don't think I will ever accept the resurrection of Bucky. Stan Lee decreed that Bucky was morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, postively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably dead, and he should have been kept that way. (For that matter, so should Captain Marvel I.) But I'm intrigued with the buzz surrounding Cap's "death" (wink, wink, until the movie is ready) and by the arrivial of the mysterious--and beautifully designed--"all-new" Captain America, and I like the art style (Steve Epting, I believe), so I think I'm going to have to get behind the man with the shield again.

Returning in 2008: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. Some time in the coming year, John Romita Jr. ends his Spider-Man sabbatical and comes home to the Webhead. By the time he returns, Spider-Man is supposed to be once again a super-hero who engages in battles with costumed, super-powered villains! And I'm not talking alien symbiotes, vampiric chimeras, and monsters from other dimensions, either, but the kind of super-villains that Spidey has traditionally come to blows with! For the past I-can't-tell-you-how-long, Spider-Man--even when John Romita Jr. was drawing his adventures--was simply NO DAMN FUN TO READ! (Except for a brief period under J. Michael Straczynski, which won an Eisner Award.) From what I've been reading of Marvel's plans for Spidey's future, it almost sounds as if the stories are about to go back to being as wonderful as John Jr.'s art! Could it be true? Here's hoping, but if John Jr. is on board, so am I.

Returning--I dare to hope--in 2008: THE YOUNG AVENGERS. Some day, this wonderful book will be back. Till then, I wait.

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. Two words: George Perez. As long as he's there, I'm there. 'Nuff said.

WONDER WOMAN. You know, Wonder Woman must be my favorite DC character. Whenever she's written and drawn in a manner that I can enjoy, going back to her 1980s George Perez period, I'm on board for her. As of this month, she'll be written by Gail Simone (whose Superman stories drawn by John Byrne in Action Comics I enjoyed) and drawn once again by Terry and Rachel Dodson, whose previous work with the character I liked a lot. So yes, for this creative team, sign me up.

ASTRO CITY. When there's a new issue, I get it automatically. It never fails to entertain.

NEXUS and THE MOTH. Steve Rude has formed his own company and brand, Rude Dude Productions, to publish his own work with his own characters. As the Dude is one of my favorite artists (and a heck of a nice guy), whenever he's able to release an issue, I'll look forward to getting it.

And who knows? 2008 may hold some more surprises. But the above is the drop in the comic-book ocean that this homeless and thirsty fan is willing to swallow these days. My philosophy of comics has become, "Buy and read only those comics you truly enjoy, and appreciate what is truly beautiful in comics while it's there." And that, at least on the fan side, is my present relationship with the art form.