You knew it. Admit it, as soon as you thought "Hmm, the biggest jerks in all of Marveldom, eh?" the very next thought that entered your head was "I wonder whether Quicksilver will be top of the chart." Well, of course he is. Not that it was a done deal - there was a long-list from which this top five was drawn, which also featured Professor X, Flash Thomson, Northstar, Henry Peter Gyrich and Ultimate Nick Fury, and any of those guys could easily have placed within the upper echelons of jerkinocity. When it comes to real, hardcore, refined and matured jerkery, though, only Magneto's kid Pietro Maximoff can stand proud and proclaim himself to be the best, which I'm sure he would not hesitate to do just before he sprinted off at a hundred miles an hour with a sneer on his face.
Quicksilver's another of these Marvel heroes who started out his comics career as a villain, in this case forming part of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who at least have nothing to fear from Trading Standards. He and his sister, the Scarlet Witch (a dead cert for a high placing if I ever do "Marvel's Biggest Lunatics"), were a little more reticent than most of the rest of the Brotherhood about the methods which they were employing to gain the upper hand in the struggle for acceptance from humankind. This was understandable, as these methods broadly equate to terrorism, and given that Magneto's plans involved things like kidnapping members of the X-Men and conquering tiny South American countries, they were also obviously barking mad methods too. Of course, his doubts may have come from the fact that he was dressed like an ice-dancing Christmas elf in his early appearances, but even his lack of faith in his dad's crazy crusade can't excuse the fact that he's also completely insufferable.
Eventually, Quicksilver joined the Avengers, at the same time as the Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye did. What a fun team that must have been to serve on, eh, readers? Two industrial grade irritants and a woman with a higher fruit loop quotient than even the most artificially-coloured American breakfast cereal, gathered together to wear Captain America down into a gibbering ball of tears. Quicksilver was the worst of them, his insufferable superiority complex and deeply-ingrained snobbery being off-putting to all around him. Nonetheless, he served with the Avengers for many years, eventually marrying Crystal of the Inhumans, with whom he had a daughter. Obviously driven past the annoyance boiling point by her husband's bad attitude and mass of personality defects, Crystal ended up having an affair, and when Quicksilver found out, the couple became estranged. This, of course, didn't stop Quicksilver from effectively stalking his wife for a bit, as via the unfortunate machinations of bored writers going through the motions of generic plots over the years the two kept turning up in the same place at the same time.
After leaving the Avengers, he eventually joined the second version of the X-Factor team, and it was during his tenure with them that the readers learned that Quicksilver's super-speedster powers mean that to him, every moment of every day feels like he's stuck at an ATM queue behind someone who doesn't know how to work the machine. Suddenly his impatience and snappish nature make more sense, and fans gained a measure of sympathy for him. His world wasn't like ours, it was a deeply frustrating one where everything was as irritating to him as he is to others. His attitude became much more understandable.
It's okay though, because we can still hate Quicksilver. The events of the House of M crossover, it transpires, were all orchestrated by him, and since he lost his powers at the end of that story, he's officially turned evil! Hooray! He's stolen the Terrigen Mists (the substance administered to Inhumans when they come of age which gives them their powers) and is going round restoring powers to those who were depowered as he was on M-Day. Only problem is that a lot of these people then go crazy or even die, but it transpires that Quicksilver doesn't care about that, and has even gone so far as to expose his six-year-old daughter to the mists and leave her in a condition whereby she is effectively addicted to them. Following this, he naturally returned her to Crystal, because who wants to deal with a drug-addicted kid? Not Quicksilver! Having gotten his daughter hooked on alien drugs (the obtaining of which involved the deaths of other Inhumans and an attempt on his own father's life), Quicksilver has now relocated to New York, where he spends his days bestowing the curse of the mists on ex-mutants and acting as official evil nemesis to X-Factor's Layla Miller.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Marvel's biggest jerk - for all I said earlier about it being a hard choice, that wasn't actually the case; as always with Quicksilver, it was never a close-run thing.
Tomorrow: indie comics, I promise.
Ooh, we're nearly there. Aren't you on the edge of your seat, wondering who's the most unpleasant Marvel non-villain of them all? I am, and I know who it is, so I can only imagine how the worldwide incidence of hypertension must be skyrocketing. It's still one more day before you get to find that out, though, so in the meantime, let's take a look at the best second-rate Marvel hero there is: the US Agent.
US Agent, real name John Walker, was an ex-military man who gained super-powers from what was effectively a super-powers loan shark by the name of the Power Broker. Following that, and needing to pay for the treatment, he took corporate sponsorship, called himself the Super-Patriot, and began toting his butt around the States slagging off Captain America. As you might imagine, this didn't end terribly well for Walker, who was initially ignored by Cap before finally having his head kicked in by him.
When Steve Rogers quit as Captain America, Walker was appointed by the government to take his place, and this new Cap was not what readers had come to expect. Gone was the idealistic man Steve Rogers was known to be - instead, Walker saw himself as more patriotic than Rogers, and so just put his head down and got on with the task of being pretty brutal and right-wing and generally going against the established grain of what Captain America had come to symbolise.
Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Just because Rogers is a liberal doesn't mean that Captain America needs to be a liberal. Indeed, many would say that having a more conservative man in the role would accurately reflect the US government at the time the character was created in 1986. However, that's not the problem with US Agent. He can be as right-wing as he likes, it's not an issue. His jerkdom comes not from what he does, but how he does it.
Walker is possibly the most insufferably reactionary character Marvel have. He's preposterously quick to judge and massively intolerant of anyone he sees as being weaker than himself (which is epitomised in his fairly one-sided fight against the powerless Hawkeye). He has no interest in being friendly towards any of the other heroes he teams up with - indeed, when the Superhuman Activities Commission railroaded him onto the Avengers West Coast squad, he bullied his way into leadership and then generally acted like an insufferable prig. Years after giving up the Captain America mantle and assuming the role of the US Agent, Walker made some inroads to becoming a fairly accurate copy of a man whose stance on crime he clearly admires when he adopted the tactics and a litigation-baitingly close version of the costume of Judge Joe Dredd. He was unsympathetic and more than a little annoying.
Now we're getting into the real meat and potatoes of the unpleasant folks who aren't technically villains, but aren't sweetness and light either. This one's unique on our list in that not only is he not a supervillain, but he's also not a superhero. He can't fire arrows, he can't talk to fish, and he can't do the things that the two people who are going to be the subjects of the next two entries can do either, although I'm not going to tell you what those things are in order to maintain what tiny amount of suspense remains. All he's good for is giving the Marvel Universe something to wrap chips in and maintaining the "Hitler" as a style of facial hair.
J. Jonah Jameson is one of Marvel's most recognisable non-superpowered characters, and may actually be the most recognisable bar none. He first turned up in the very first issue of Amazing Spider-Man as the editor of the Daily Bugle, a New York tabloid for whom Peter Parker takes photographs on a freelance basis, mainly of Spider-Man. Ah, Spider-Man. Why must you torment poor Jolly Jonah so? Jonah has a mad rage for any super-powered types who insist on operating outside of the law, particularly Spidey. He believes that Spider-Man is a grandstanding, showboating vigilante, whose actions are irresponsible and likely criminal. Some of this comes from the fact that he believes what Spider-Man does is genuinely wrong; however, another large part of it is related to the overshadowing of Jonah's astronaut son, John, whose heroics never seem to garner as much press as Spidey's.
I need to do a post on John Jameson. He was an astronaut who ended up becoming a creature called Man-Wolf before becoming a being called Star-God. His therapy bills must have been astronomical (arf). But anyway. Jonah.
Not content with slandering Spider-Man's name all over the newspapers by accusing him of being in league with every rubbish minor villain to hold up a jewellery store, Jonah's taken a more hands-on approach over the years toward ridding the world of Spidey once and for all. He enlisted the aid of industrialist Spencer Smythe to create a robot known as the Spider-Slayer which did exactly what it says on the tin. It's a creature which has gone through many upgrades and variations but has always remained essentially rubbish. Not content with that, though, Jameson hired a private eye called Mac Gargan, and put him through a training regime and some scientific experiments which turned him into the looney-tunes whip-tailed villain called the Scorpion. Following that, he was responsible for the creation of the lame villain the Human Fly, also to take down Spidey. Both the Spider-Slayers and the Scorpion have tried to kill Jameson himself on several occasions, which should really teach Jameson some kind of a lesson, such as "don't create supervillains to kill Spider-Man", although that might be a little obvious and lack the kind of punch that sells papers.
Selling papers is what Jameson's all about, though, and it's one of the main reasons why he's so far up this list. He's undoubtedly a man of principles and honour, and he'll stand up for his staff to the point of almost suicidal bravery. When it comes to shifting units, though, he knows where the bottom line is. He was a tireless campaigner for civil rights (including mutant rights - he's not against people with superpowers, just those who choose to operate outside the law). At the same time, though, he ordered all his journalists to turn in copy which supports the Superhuman Powers Registration Act, the main civil rights-violating plot element of Civil War. He loathes Spider-Man, but he's willing to give him the publicity Jonah so often decries him for seeking by putting him on the front page of the Bugle every day. He's a good man, but only when it doesn't get in the way of him turning a buck.
Jameson's a bad enough guy to start really annoying anyone who thinks about it for long enough. He's often held up as a bastion of public decency, but when a guy creates his third super-villain, it's really time to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. Ol' Jonah may not be as bad as the other two guys we've yet to cover on this list, but it's a close-run thing. Jameson's a blowhard with double-standards and a massive chip on his shoulder. He's boorish, arrogant and insensitive. He has appalling hair. Ban this sick filth!
Moving on from the fashion disaster that is Hawkeye, it's a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire, sartorially speaking, with the next on our list of Marvel's biggest jerks. This guy is part of the bedrock of the Marvel universe, being one of the the first characters created for them back in the 1930s. He's hung around ever since, and has intermittently had his own series. He's never really been able to make up his mind whether he's a hero or a villain, though, and that (coupled with his abrasiveness) is the reason why Namor the Sub-Mariner is at the number four spot on the list.
Prince Namor McKenzie of Atlantis is the son of a human sea captain and an Atlantean princess, and has never been what you might call the shy, retiring type. In the 1930s and 1940s comics which he featured in, he was a brash teenager, fond of shouting great catchphrases such as "Suffering Shad!" After his revival in Fantastic Four #4 in the early 1960s, though, he went through a bit of a personality shift, and changed from just being a bit of a hothead to being a full-on raging pain in the neck.
Here are the top three reasons why Namor is a jerk:
1) He keeps attacking the surface world. His point of view is that his people are under threat from mankind, who keep doing things like filling the sea up with toxic waste, testing nuclear devices underwater and singing "Under the Sea", which he finds deeply patronising. So what does he do? Does he go to the UN and seek redress through diplomatic channels? No, of course not - he blows on a big conch shell and summons a big whale monster for him to ride as part of an invading Atlantean army, which for some reason appears to always come ashore in New York. You'd think he would get wise and invade Portugal or Alaska, but he continues to choose the town that's full of superheroes. Whatever floats his boat, as it were.
2) He's perpetually trying to crack on to Sue Richards. Ever since he was revived by the Human Torch after years wandering amnesiac, Namor has had a thing for the Invisible Woman, and has the stated aim of luring her away from her husband without much in the way of shame or guile. He believes that Sue's just a bit of a silly woman who can't see that he's the ruler of an entire undersea kingdom while Reed Richards is just a bit of a useless stuffed shirt. Sue's not above using this unrequited attraction to manipulate him into doing favours for the Fantastic Four or the superhero community in general, but Namor's bulletproof arrogance means that he continues to feel that Sue is eventually going to wise up and come and be his queen.
3) He's just a bit of a rude git in general. He's supercilious (literally, etymology fans) to the point of sneering and is massively impatient. He's easily needled into a fight, particularly when the Hulk, whom he regards as his inferior in every possible way, gets started with the name-calling. Namor's default outlook is that he has no interest in being a superhero, and unless Atlantis is in some way under threat, he'd much rather they just went away and left him alone. He doesn't tend to hang out with other heroes simply because he doesn't actually like any of them. He did have a short stint in the Avengers and a rather longer period with the Defenders, but even then he never learned to play well with the other children and perpetually rubbed everyone else up the wrong way.
Namor only makes fourth place on this list, though, because for all he's a misanthrope of the highest order, he's a good man at heart. In fact, he's such a man of his word that he bound himself to service to Doctor Doom for a while simply because Doom had pledged to help Namor restore the (then-destroyed) Atlantis in return for Namor's subservience. This kind of lunatic devotion to honour, coupled with his fanatical dedication to protecting the best interests of his people, means that he falls into the category of "You just have to get to know him". He tries, bless him, but he's not Marvel's biggest jerk, not by a long shot.
Just thinking about Marvel comics and specifically Captain Marvel yesterday got me ruminating on the types of characters which each of the Big Two publishing houses generally has. DC's thing has always been that their major heroes are gods who walk among us - Superman can do, for all intents and purposes, anything. Wonder Woman is pretty much impervious to all damage. The Flash can run faster than you can think; Green Lantern can make anything he can set his mind to happen, in a kind of mint-coloured way. Marvel, on the other hand, is the company which gives us more humanistic heroes. They're imperfect creatures who squabble and fight and reflect all our own natural instincts. In tribute to these flawed characters, this week coming I'm going to be doing the Top Five of Marvel's Biggest Jerks - the heroes whose entire personality is predicated around the fact that they would be deeply unpleasant to be around if you were to be out at the pub with them.
At number five, then, today's subject is one of the redemption stories that Marvel's so good at providing - this guy started life as a fairly rubbish villain, and eventually managed to turn his life around enough that he earned membership in the Avengers before going on to lead both an Avengers squad of his own and the other group of villains-in-search-of-heroism, the Thunderbolts. Of course, Marvel fans are saying, it's Clint Barton, but I thought I should give him the big build-up regardless. For everyone else who'se not up on their B-list Marvel heroes, though, here's a bit more information on the man they call Hawkeye.
Hawkeye started out as an Iron Man villain (and really, apart from the Mandarin, whose orange-based powers were fearsome, Iron Man had some really rubbish bad guys), Hawkeye was painted as being a reluctant villain whose motivations were based around impressing the female Russian super-spy known as the Black Widow, being led by his libido from one ill-advised heist to another. When he was selected to join the four-person line-up of the Avengers which came to be known as Cap's Kooky Quartet - gotta love the 1960s - his role became clear. He was the one who was on the team solely to wind up Captain America.
There was barely an issue of the Avengers that went by in the mid-1960s when Hawkeye didn't question something Captain America had asked him to do. He would bicker and bitch and moan the face off of Cap, while firing off some glue arrow or something equally pointless. He would take orders from Cap one moment, but would then think things like "Does he really expect someone as young and powerful as Hawkeye to take orders from a relic of World War Two like himself?" and say things like "Look, hotshot! Suppose we vote for our leader?!" Hawkeye was, not to put too fine a point on it, a jerk.
The reason that Hawkeye only manages to make the number five position in this list, though, is that he's the comics equivalent of Doctor Cox from Scrubs - he talks a good grouchy game, but he's forever revealing his soft underbelly and showing that he's not such a bad guy under that jerky shell he shows the world. He became the leader of the Avengers West Coast division, the one which was made up of guys who liked surfing, optioning properties and developing ground-breaking websites. Heck, he was the one who took leadership of the Thunderbolts, a group of former villains, when they were in danger of sliding back into their nogoodnik ways. He showed them how they could become more productive members of society, and if that doesn't say "pillar of the community" then I don't know what does. Hawkeye may pretend that he's a premier-league Marvel jerk, but he doesn't have the chops to cut it with the big boys.
Tomorrow: something fishy.
There used to be a tenet in comics that nobody stayed dead except for Bucky and Uncle Ben. Now, for those of you who don't know what on earth this refers to, it's to do with two Marvel comics characters whose deaths had profound effects on two of their other characters. There's James Buchanan"Bucky" Barnes, a kid who was Captain America's sidekick during the Second World War. He died towards the end of that particular big fight, and his sacrifice as a young man has haunted Captain America for the past sixty years. Then there's Ben Parker, uncle to Peter, who passed on the knowledge that with great power, there must also come great responsibility shortly before his senseless murder at the hands of a crook whom Peter had failed to stop. These are two of the lynchpins of the Marvel Universe, and their deaths underpin two of the MU's most central figures.
Bucky came back to life recently in the pages of Ed Brubaker's Captain America run. Ben Parker has recently been knocking about in Peter David's Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man book. It might be difficult to believe, but this kind of death-as-revolving-door thing happens all the time, and the resurrections of characters who should really have stayed dead is becoming an increasingly frequent event. Case in point - this week past, Marvel published Civil War: The Return, a comic which (and look away now if you honestly (a) care and (b) in caring, haven't worked it out) resurrected the original - well, the Marvel original, anyway - version of the superhero of the spaceways, Captain Marvel.
Captain Marvel (or Mar-Vell as his real name was, with "Captain" being an actual military rank which he held) was created in the late 1960s as the foremost of Marvel's "cosmic" heroes, setting the Silver Surfer aside for the moment. He was noble and bold, and generally had all the personality of a Ryvita crispbread. His two main claims to fame are having a pretty cool costume and dying. That's right, he's a big man on campus because in 1980 Marvel published their first graphic novel, entitled The Death of Captain Marvel. Y'see, ol' Marv had contracted cancer during a fight with a particularly dumb villain by the name of Nitro (he blows himself up. No, I didn't think it sounded particularly clever either), and died peacefully with his wife and friends around his bedside. This was important at the time. It was significant. Not because one of Marvel's heroes had died - that had been happening fairly regularly for years. It was the fact that he didn't go out saving the Earth from Galactus, or taking down Kang before he could use his time-destroying weapon. He died of the same thing so many of us die of; he died of something which he couldn't defeat by fighting it.
To be fair to Marvel, the resurrected Captain Marvel isn't a man who's come back to take on cancer in a grudge match - the version of Captain Marvel who turned up in this week's Civil War special is a version of Mar-Vell who has been snatched from a point in his own past, and someday sooner or later he's going to have to go back there and live out his life to the point of his natural death. It's a bit of a cheat, a way to bring him back without really bringing him back, but it means Marvel get to use the character again without having to come up with a way to kill him a second time.
Why do comics keep dredging up their old dead characters, though? One prime example is Boring Old Uncle Hal, who had gone evil and killed a bunch of people and then had a sort of semi-redemptive death. It was the most interesting he'd been in years. For the next decade or more, though, a group of people with very little else to do, calling themselves H.E.A.T. (Hal's Emerald Attack Team, if you can believe that) campaigned for Hal's return with the sort of verve and good spirits that you generally associate with protestors against the Huntingdon Life Sciences lab. Now he's back as Green Lantern and everything's coming up 1970. Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin, apparently died a fitting and elegiac death in 1973, only to come back in the late 1990s when it was revealed that, erm, he hadn't died at all. No real coherent explanation for that one, he had just been faking it really hard for 25 years.
For some reason, comics creators can't just leave dead people dead. There are the usual reasons for resurrecting the fusty remains of former glories, such as not wanting to deny today's readers the opportunity to experience these characters. The point remains, though, that Captain Marvel's been dead for over 25 years. Few people still reading comics today have ever read the original series in which he appeared. We've been getting on fine without him. Instead of spending their energies Febrezeing something from the vaults, why not spend the time and effort making characters like Gravity or the Runaways or Chase or Sentinel big parts of the major superhero universes? Otherwise, there's no drama in bumping off a character if we know that if we wait long enough, the conveyor will come round again and we can just pick them up, check them for scuff marks and be on our way again. I would ask where Death's sting is, but to be honest, Death's just got wise - why bother at all, when the next event series is going to spin that celestial revolving door again?
Tonight, as you may or may not know, is Burns Night here in Scotland, commemorating the birth of Scotland's national bard and honarary shortbread tin mascot Robert Burns, who wrote such works as Tam O'Shanter, To a Mouse and Auld Lang Syne. In honour of one of Scotland's most famous writerly sons, today we're looking at another - more modern - literary Jock, Grant Morrison.
The rest of this post appeared originally on the quite superb comics analysis website Ninth Art, as part of an ongoing column entitled Alphabetti Fumetti which was written by myself and my colleague Bulent Yusuf. I've updated it a little, but only a little, because when it comes to Morrison, there are some things which are dependable enough never to change (such as his biography, although given how heavily Morrison is into magic, that might not be entirely true).
'Certifiable genius' is a phrase that gets bandied about quite a lot by people who don't really stop to think too hard about what they're saying. Most of the time they just mean 'someone who's produced/said/invented/discovered/written something which is very good and appreciated by many'. Grant Morrison, on the other hand, is one of the few people (certainly one of the few in comics) who could be said to be a) a genius and b) certifiable.
Morrison was born in the West of Scotland in the mid part of the 20th century, and by the time he was of an age to write comics, there weren't many games in town. His first high-profile gig was as the writer of Zoids for Marvel UK, and the first seeds of his usual themes can be seen therein - the Zoids, being big toys that fight each other, weren't just robotic dinosaurs and so on. Within the context of the story itself, they were quite definitely toys, and they were being 'played' with by fifth-dimensional beings on a distinctly 'meta' level.
This juxtaposition of the surface of reality and the external manipulators that determine its path is something that has emerged time and time again in Morrison's work, from the encounter between Animal Man and Morrison himself in the final stages of Morrison's run on the Animal Man book, to the Seven Unknown Men who exist outside the reality of the narrative in his later Seven Soldiers. Morrison said in 1998 that he believed that mankind was shortly to have its first contact with a fictional reality, he himself having intended to trade places with The Invisibles' lead character, King Mob. More recently, he announced his intention to coax DC Comics' superhero universe into a state of sentience. There are a few different ways to interpret remarks such as these. One is that he's right, and reality is something that can be sliced open and stepped through. Another is that his brain moves too fast for physics to keep up, and he's ahead of his time. The third is that, to quote Warren Ellis, "to be frank, Grant is on drugs".
Far from being solely "that weird guy", Morrison has shown several times now that he understands superhero comics exceptionally well. He produced a run on JLA that contains some of the best work ever done with the title, peaking with the superlative Rock of Ages, and his three-year stint on New X-Men had more fresh ideas per page than Marvel could editorially mandate in a month of Sundays, while still remaining true to the core theme of heroes protecting a world that hates and fears them.
His most recent works, all for DC, have included the Prisoner-esque curate's egg Seaguy, the comparatively underwhelming Bollywood science fiction book Vimanarama, and the heart-shredding We3, which latter was previously covered on this very blog. He's also begun a run on Batman, a character whom he first explored in his twisted graphic novel Arkham Asylum, and is one of the gang of writers on DC's year-long weekly book 52. Of course, the ambition of these projects pale when compared to Seven Soldiers, a thirty-issue interweaving story spread across seven mini-series and two bookending single issues. These have been a mixed bag, it's true, but the intent can't be faulted; it's refreshing to see someone trying something genuinely challenging with superheroes for the first time in a while.
Like other comics creators who have reached a creative peak such as Neil Gaiman or Frank Miller, Morrison has reached the point where he can do whatever he wants in the comics industry. Whatever it turns out to be next, and no matter where you come down on the side of 'genius' or 'certifiable', it's undeniably going to be interesting.
One thing which has blighted Marvel and DC’s output over the
last few years or so is the awful creature known as the “event”. What this
generally means is a huge, stupid story with no coherent plot, wildly variable
quality of writing and artwork, pointless character deaths added to give the
story some artificial semblance of depth and “huge changes that will alter the
Marvel/DC (delete as applicable) Universe forever!”
This is clearly nonsense, of course. Taking DC’s Superman-based crossover event Our Worlds At War as an example, there were a lot of characters who bought the farm in that one – the junior speedster known as Impulse, fish whisperer Aquaman, the great Guy Gardner and many others. All three of those characters have since returned from the great beyond, and most of the more minor casualties have too. DC has been running what is pretty much one event constantly for the past three years, from Identity Crisis through to Infinite Crisis to One Year Later/52. Marvel are currently setting new records for plot-related idiocy and inability to keep their stories straight with their (admittedly huge-selling) Civil War, and prior to that there was the concept that walked like a story which went by the name of House of M.
That’s not to say that events can’t be good. Marvel’s last
really great many-title crossover may be as far back as 1995’s Age of
Apocalypse (which I’ll cover before this blog hits the big 100), but 1996’s DC
vs Marvel crossover – in itself not a great story, or anything approaching it –
at least allowed for the creation of what was a genuinely fun and largely daft
event, in the form of the Amalgam Universe.
It’s a simple concept. To get an Amalgam hero, you take one Marvel hero and one DC hero (or a multiple of each) and smoosh them together to make one character. If you can come up with a punny name, so much the better. Thus we get characters like Catsai (Catwoman + Elektra – who uses sais, you see?), Speed Demon (Ghost Rider + the Flash + Etrigan the Demon) and Bat-Thing (Man-Bat + Man-Thing). The most punsome of all had to be the amalgamation of the Howling Commandoes’ Izzy Cohen with Easy Company’s Ice Cream Soldier to make Ice Cream Cohen, although it would have had a run for its money had DC allowed the publication of Hank Oliver, Giant Queen. The amalgamation premise is an easy enough one to grasp, and actually makes for a fairly diverting pub game if you’re with a bunch of equally nerdy mates. The books gave no impression of having been published by anyone other than the fictional Amalgam company, complete with fake lettercolumns and Bullpen Bulletins-style editorial pages, and each one referred to prior comics and continuity which, of course, had never existed.
Amalgam was an excuse for creators to come completely off
the leash and give their most barking ideas free rein. Some of the particular
highlights are Karl Kesel and Mike Wieringo’s exceptional Spider-Boy book,
which merged Superboy and the friendly neighbourhood web-slinger and faced him
off against Bizarnage, a murderous symbiote who was also a backwards clone of
Spider-Boy himself. It was a comic which had a lot of fans and creators alike
asking why the regular Spider-Man book couldn’t be that much fun any more.
Other high points included Ty Templeton’s Dark Claw Adventures (Wolverine +
Batman), done in the style of the DC animated series tie-in comics; Mark Waid
and Dave Gibbons’ two Super-Soldier (Superman + Captain America) issues; and Alan
Grant and Val Semeiks’ brilliantly stupid Lobo the Duck (fairly
self-explanatory).
A number of the creators were also able to work elements of both universes’ continuity into their stories – Bruce Wayne, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. featured the eponymous hero and his partner Moonwing (Moon Knight + Nightwing), and had as one of the villains a character who was an amalgam of Midnight and Jason Todd, who had been Moon Knight and Batman’s partners/sidekicks respectively, and who had both died in the line of duty and who have both since come back from the grave with major grudges against their former buddies. If you knew both characters, it was a nice Easter egg, and if you didn’t then it wasn’t important enough to the story to make a difference to your enjoyment of it.
Unfortunately, they weren’t all great – books like Speed Demon, Thorion of the New Asgods and Amazon were pretty incomprehensible, and suffered from trying to stuff too many concepts into one comic - or, in the case of Speed Demon, being written by the awful Howard Mackie on one of his worst days. Still, even though they can’t match up to the ones which drunken evenings in the pub can produce (the Ray + Daredevil = Ray Charles, or the matching up of a Batman sidekick with Peter Parker’s school bully to form vigilante journalist Huntress Thomson), the Amalgam books are a relic of a time when DC and Marvel were more interested in having fun with their books than whether they can justify bumping off another member of the JLE or the New Warriors and needling at each other all the way. They litter back issue bins and are likely to set you back about 25p each (US $4.22 at current exchange rates). Go on – it’s two great tastes that taste great together.
In the 1980s, the highly estimable Henson Corporation ventured into the world of non-Muppety films with two movies which have survived to this day through the magical playback media of VHS and DVD. The first was the Dark Crystal, a fantasy about a boy called Jen whose race, the Gelflings, are targeted for extermination by an evil bunch of ugly monsters known as the Skeksis. He has a number of frankly dull, humourless and over-earnest adventures before managing to tediously beat the bad guys. Whoop-de-woot, frankly, because there's no way anyone half-sane would choose to watch the Dark Crystal when they could be watching the other Henson movie of the time, the stylish and funky Labyrinth.
The movie told the story of Sarah, a girl who is disheartened by her life, which she feels is constantly unfair. Her parents take her for granted and she's forced to babysit her baby brother Toby. She foolishly wishes that goblins would take Toby away, which, given that this is a Henson fantasy movie, they promptly do, forcing her to enter the surreal and baffling Labyrinth to reclaim her brother from Jareth, the Goblin King, before her time runs out. Labyrinth is, not to put too fine a point on it, an absolutely cracking adventure, stuffed to the gunnells with memorable characters such as the gentle monster Ludo, diminutive and ineffectual fox-knight Sir Didymus and, of course, the Goblin King himself. Jareth is played by David Bowie in a pair of extremely tight trousers, and - bad mullet aside - is the quintessential rock star throughout.
Some twenty years on from the original movie, the Henson corporation has partnered with Tokyopop to produce a three-volume OEL (Original English Language) manga sequel to the movie. The description of it as a sequel, to be honest, is kind of stretching it a little - while Sarah does feature briefly, the bulk of the action is carried out by Toby, who is now a high school student and quite unaware of the history his sister has with the fantastical world of the Labyrinth. However, when he starts seeing strange (and strangely androgynous) visitors at his school and goblins in his house, he follows them down the rabbit hole into the same weird land his sister had discovered years previously. What Jareth wants with him, though, is not perhaps what you would expect - if he can't steal young Toby away, maybe Toby can be persuaded to come to him.
This book effectively sidelines the main protagonist of the movie in a deeply unsatisfying way - Sarah has become a frustrated twentysomething with no aspirations, even though the film's conclusion saw her realising that "fair" is what you make it, and that she could make her own future whatever she wanted it to be if she took responsibility for herself. Toby, at first, is little better than this new version of Sarah, seemingly spoiled, whiny and lazy. It's only as the book reaches its final third that we start to see a more determined Toby emerge, and the cliffhanger of this first volume (of an intended three-book sequence) puts him in a position where he's most certainly going to have to get his act together, stop moaning at everyone, and start kicking some goblin posterior.
The story, while a little flimsy, does manage to capture some of the deeply strange atmosphere of the film. The art, on the other hand, is more inconsistent. Superbly detailed images such as the one above are the exception rather than the rule, and in general the artwork is more in line with Yu-Gi-Oh! than Brian Froud, the designer of the Labyrinth movie's creatures, sets and general feel. It's perfectly serviceable, but you can't help thinking as you read through it that the weak points of the writing and of the artwork exaggerate each other rather than help by concealing their mutual flaws.
That said, there's no doubting that this is proper Labyrinth, with many of the major characters from the film making at least cameo appearances, and the central theme of the ordinary kid out of their depth in a baffling, terrifying and wonderful world where common sense comes second to dream logic remains the same. The Goblin King is still regally cool, and the promise of the story kicking into high gear is enough to tempt you into buying volume two. Not magic, then, but these days, what is?
Linda Medley's Castle Waiting isn't the only series out there at the moment covering what happened to fairy-tale characters once the story ended. One other, which has sadly gone on temporary hiatus while artist Jay Anacleto works on Marvels: Eye Of The Camera, was the eye-wateringly beautifully-drawn Image series Aria, although it often steered clear of stars of specific stories in favour of chronicling the lives of the fairy folk in New York City. One series which merges both approaches to great effect is the award-winning Vertigo book Fables.
Fables, written by Bill Willingham and drawn initially by Lan Medina (although most of the series has to date been pencilled by the equally talented Mark Buckingham), centres on the dramatis personae of a metric tonne of fairy tales and nursery stories and rhymes, from the obvious (Snow White and the Three Little Pigs) to less obvious ones (the North Wind, Bluebeard) and some who don't seem to fit into the whole mileu at all (Mowgli, Santa Claus). Y'see, they've been driven from their storybook homelands by the mysterious Adversary, and for the last few hundred years have been living in our world, some struggling to get by through working in bookstores, while others, who managed to get some of their wealth out of the kingdom and into the real world, have the kind of opulent lives they always had.
The cast is pretty big, moving around between stories and rhymes both familiar and obscure as it weaves the protagonists and antagonists of all of them into each other's lives. Snow White is the hard-as-nails deputy mayor of Fabletown, the building complex where many of the more human-looking fables live, serving under the former King Cole and doing the day-to-day running of the fable shadow government. She's helped and occasionally hindered by the former killer Bigby Wolf, the closest thing she has to a chief of police, and tormented by her ex-husband Prince Charming, who, ahem, gets around a bit. While she's one of the major characters in the series, it would be misleading to suggest that the book revolved around her - others, such as Jack of the Fables (who, it transpires, was Jack of the beanstalk fame, Jack of Jack and Jill, little Jack Horner and many other Jacks from story and rhyme) and Red Riding Hood, have had major storylines focus on them, and this ensemble cast means that Willingham is free to tackle whatever kind of story takes his fancy, as appropriate characters suggest themselves.
The political maneuvering and seedy goings-on among the characters gives Willingham an opportunity to keep the book fresh by changing the styles of the stories featured - beginning with a murder mystery, the next story is a conspiracy thriller, and the rest of the series has seen war stories, capers and explicit political allegory move to the forefront in turn. To his credit, Willingham has been able to integrate all of these seamlessly into the ongoing storyline, which deals with the identity of the mysterious Adversary (I won't spoil it here, but it's smart and makes sense) and the struggle to return the fables to their homeland.
The artwork on the series complements Willingham's stories well - guest artists such as P. Craig Russell (who famously drew the Ramadan issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, among other things), Luther Arkwright creator Bryan Talbot and Castle Waiting's own Linda Medley. The lion's share of the art has been handled by Hellblazer, Miracleman and Spider-Man penciller Mark Buckingham, whose work is just realistic enough while retaining the soft-edged style which is just right for the storybook nature of the protagonists. He's such a good fit, in fact, that Willingham has gone on record saying that Buckingham will be first in line to take over the writing of the book if circumstances ever require Willingham to step down.
Don't be fooled into thinking that this series shares much with Castle Waiting other than a level of quality and a basic commonality of premise; Fables is a Vertigo title, and as such has enough swearywords and bloody death to keep Thomas Bowdler busy in his next life. The point of the series being to show the true nature of the characters we remember from our Ladybird books and bedtime stories, though, that's not in any way a negative point - after all, you can't spell "Grimm" without "grim", and not all stories have happy endings. With the success of Fables being what it is (seven Eisner awards, a spin-off ongoing starring Jack, a hardback original graphic novel featuring the 1001 Arabian Nights), though, it looks as though the series could continue, happily, ever after.
