I promised a history lesson a few days back, so I hope you're sitting comfortably. Unlike a lot of history lessons that I had at school, though, this one's actually interesting, and it involves political drama and comic books. It also involves scaremongering, paranoia, lapses in logic and denial of the First Amendment. Mostly, though, it involves a German-born psychiatrist by the name of Doctor Fredric Wertham.
Wertham was originally from Munich, but after qualifying as a psychiatrist had moved to the US and settled in New York, where he had become a specialist in the treatment of juvenile delinquents and disturbed and troubled children. He had also written a book called Dark Legend, which dealt with a young man who had turned to murder at the age of 17. Wertham picked up on the kinds of things that this boy had done in his free time, such as enjoy movies and comic books. Comic books were clearly the thing which stuck in Wertham's mind, and he began to formulate a theory that young people could be led down a bad path by the media which they consumed, comic books being foremost among these from Wertham's persepctive, mainly due to the fact that comic books were created to be entertainment for children. We can get very high-faluting about comic books nowadays, but the fact remains that they originated as colourful and disposable distractions for young kids, and many would say that most of them have never quite risen above that (not that they necessarily should have to, but I digress). He wrote several articles for noted psychiatric publications, one of which was entitled "Horror in the Nursery". This kind of sensationalism might not have been very appropriate for a supposedly professional doctor, but it was to be an indicator of the kind of rabble-rousing that Wertham would later embrace wholeheartedly.
Wertham became quite notorious on the juvenile delinquency criminal court circuit, frequently being called as an expert witness to testify to what he saw as the fact that comic books turned kids bad. For Wertham, there were no two ways about it - there was no greater threat to the morality of America's youth than American media, and no more pernicious corner of that same media than comic books. He believed that they weren't conducive to good "mental hygiene", and that they led children into criminal activity, mainly based on the fact that the majority of his young patients read them. This was what led him to publish the work for which he is most famous, and which causes his shadow still to be cast over the American comic book industry today - Seduction of the Innocent.
This book was inflammatory, from its title - which, consciously or not, echoed the very same lurid comic books that Wertham himself sought to do away with - to its content. In this book, Wertham put forward the position that there was no such thing as a comic which did not corrupt children. To give him the tiny bit of credit which he is due, his main targets were the horror and crime comics published by companies like EC, who are best known today for being the birthplace of the Tales from the Crypt brand and the original publishers of Mad Magazine. These were, in fairness, not suitable for younger kids, even though there was nothing spectacularly traumatising contained within their pages. To Wertham, though, every single comic was a crime comic. He believed that the Western genre was another branch of the crime genre, in that Western comic books "describe every kind of crime". War comics were "just another setting for comic book violence" and even the patently daft funny animal comics depicted crime in the form of ducks attempting to do in rabbits. It seemed that Wertham wasn't down on comics because they depicted violence and led children to crime, but that he believed that comics led children to crime and he saw violence in all of them because he was down on comic books. His lack of favour towards crime and horror comics had become a monomania.
In any other set of circumstances, Wertham could have been a Pat Pulling for the 1950s - a ranting kook whose views stayed on the fringes where they belonged. Unfortunately, they came at a time when McCarthyism was at its height. America had been at war for so long that its power blocs had forgotten that not everyone was their enemy, and had turned their attentions inward and begun to attack their own people. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, led by one-time Democratic Presidential hopeful Estes Kefauver (he was defeated for the nomination by Adlai Stevenson in 1952), had been established in an attempt to root out criminal elements of America's youth. Kefauver himself was a staunch anti-crime crusader, having held televised hearings investigating organised crime. Kefauver, together with chairman William Langer and executive director Richard Clendenen, decided that they had to have Wertham testify before them, and bring his experience to bear.
When Wertham took the stand, he found out that he had an ally in Clendenen, who was all too willing to let him push his half-baked theories as scientific fact (Wertham had evidently never considered that although many of his patients were comic book readers, it was likely that the majority of well-adjusted kids whom he never encountered in his work also read the same books without any noticeable ill-effects). Wertham gave a great deal of testimony to the Subcommittee, including such gems as his belief that romance comics led to child prostitution, that comedy characters such as Millie the Model would encourage young girls to stuff their blouses with tissue paper in order to emulate the "protruding breasts" of the actually none-more-wholesome lead characters, and that any expert whose opinion differed from his own was taking a bung from the comic book publishers.
Perhaps his most famous bit of barely-believable hokum concerned Batman and Robin, and he's famously quoted as identifying them as "corrupting" children into homosexuality. The most notorious passage from Seduction of the Innocent is almost amusing: "At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and 'Dick' Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a "socialite" and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce's ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Bruce is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. As they sit by the fireplace the young boy sometimes worries about his partner... it is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together". While this has to be read in the context of the prevailing mores of a 1950s American society which was prone to suspicion of itself with little provocation, it's not beyond the bounds of sensibility to say that Wertham was reaching more than just a little here.
The findings of the Subcommittee were never finalised. The hearings were adjourned and never reconvened, with Kefauver and Langer evidently finding them more than a little preposterous, and a waste of time when faced with genuinely pressing criminal influences. The damage had been done, though. A large number of comics creators had been investigated by the Subcommittee (as fictionalised in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), and the industry was running scared, as the public were making their concerns known. Retailers boycotted comics, books were burned, and plenty of smaller companies went bankrupt. In order to try to combat this, the industry (or what was left of it) instituted a self-regulatory body - the Comics Code Authority. The Code put in place a draconian self-censorship programme which, for instance, disallowed the presentation of "policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions ... in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority." It also completely banned several words, such as "zombie", "crime" and "terror", from use in comics. Comics were not allowed to refer to homosexuality at all until 1989 if they wanted Code approval. Rather than establish a more morally sound comics industry, it drove it practically to extinction, and left what little remained a neutered shadow of what it previously was.
Even today, the Comics Code Authority stamp of approval on the front of a comic is looked on by some retail outlets as the only guide to whether a comic book is suitable for sale. Never mind the fact that most comics companies no longer submit to the Code (although this took until 2001 for Marvel Comics, and DC still submits most of its line for approval), of course - we appear to have grown out of it, thankfully. It might not be the case, looking around at so much of the pabulum pushed by the major publishers, that the comics industry is actually maturing and producing entertainment primarily for adults, but at the very least it appears to be accepting responsibility for itself and its own material. What Doctor Wertham would have made of all this, it's not for me to speculate, although I imagine he probably wouldn't have been a massive fan of Hellboy.
That's the end of the lesson. Hand in your homework as you leave, and everyone remember to bring in their field trip permission slips tomorrow.
There's a problem in comics, particularly superhero comics, with pretention and pomposity. While it's true that, say, Lee and Kirby's Thor comics were great yarns with smashing (literally) action scenes, nobody would dispute that they were often a little on the over-earnest side, and with aspirations to something which isn't readily apparent from the work itself. The worst time for this was the 1990s, when heroes with stubble, ponytails, grimaces and leather jackets (does anyone else remember the "A vest for every Avenger" period?) would strike terribly serious poses and pontificate about the ethics about shooting bad guys in, like, totally extreme ways. It's a breath of fresh air to find a character whose adventures take place within a genre which is most often as po-faced as they come, but who is a grounded, rounded, down-to-Earth guy who's got the fewest airs and graces of any major horror genre character. Enter Hellboy.
Hellboy's a character who was created by writer/artist Mike Mignola and first published in 1993. He's essentially a big red demon, but unlike his hellbound brethren he's not a bad guy. In fact, having been summoned to our world by Nazis in 1944, he ends up working for the US Army and its kooky offshoot the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (or BPRD for short), in which capacity he investigates and takes care of (in both the Mary Poppins and the Charles Bronson senses of 'takes care of') monsters, ghosts, folklorish creatures and other oogly booglies. He despises his demonic heritage, and keeps his horns filed down to avoid looking like one of his own kind. He also happens to have a giant stone right hand, aptly named the Right Hand of Doom, with which he is prophesied to instigate the Apocalypse. Understandably, that's a role he's not too chuffed about.
Hellboy himself fits in well with the other members of the BPRD, which includes such normal types as the amphibious Abe Sapien, pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, Johann Kraus (made of ectoplasm) and psychic guide/deceased pulp hero Lobster Johnson. They're a bit of an ol' gang of weirdos and no mistake, but they're a dysfunctional family and take care of each other, even if they're not always great at showing affection. Hellboy and the BPRD have undertaken a number of missions both together and separately, and it's to Mignola's credit that they don't stick to the traditional werewolf/vampire/Universal monsters axis of threat, but have encountered creatures from Irish, Russian, Japanese and Malaysian folklore, among others.
This is indicative of the kinds of stories Mignola is interested in telling (he said, in a bit of very banal observation). Hellboy is not about taking the beaten path. Instead, it's about subverting cliché and presenting the reader with something that's genuinely fascinating. Hellboy himself is the obvious example - being seven feet tall, bright read and sporting a tail and horns, you'd expect the big lug to at the very least be a bit on the angsty side. While he does have his moments of introspection, though, everyone's favourite demon tends not to let that side show too often. He's also not prone to big speeches and pontificating - perhaps the most archetypal Hellboy moment would be of him getting hit hard by a big monster, saying "ah, crap" as the floor gave way beneath him and plummeting into a cellar. He's a blue-collar, drinkin' and smokin' ordinary joe, and that makes his incongruity even more surreal and interesting.
Of course, it'd be churlish of me to talk about Hellboy without mentioning Mignola's amazing artwork. Equal parts Frank Miller and Alex Toth, Mignola makes use of heavy areas of thick blacks and a scratchy and expressionistic linework style to give each story a claustrophobic and spooky feel. It taps into something quite primal in the reader - if you know there are monsters out there, and so much you can see is in inky shadow, well, the things could be hiding anywhere. It's an atmosphere which suggests stillness and invokes feelings of being alone in the dark, and is an absolutely perfect match for the kinds of unsettling adventures which form Hellboy's bread and butter.
If you fancy checking Hellboy out (and why wouldn't you?), there are six volumes of the main title available, plus another eight of Weird Tales (non-Mignola stories), BPRD and Young Hellboy out there. He was also the subject of a really pretty good movie by Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro in 2004, with the dead-on casting of Ron Perlman as the eponymous big kahuna setting the tone for the whole endeavour - it wasn't quite 100% faithful to the original (a "normal" character was introduced, as was a love story for Hellboy), but it did have a scene where he was hit by a monster, said "ah, crap", and fell through a floor. When you've got that kind of essentially Hellboy moment in there, everything else is window dressing.
Erm... yes. Well, this is a little embarrassing. Remember when I said, back on Day Six, that I'd be doing a couple of these comparisons of frequently-homaged covers during the course of the blog's run? Well, I might have, y'know, completely forgotten. Still, I'm going back through the whole blog now, closing off any tangents that are still hanging around, and I think that over the next week and a day I'll have covered everything I said I was going to. And speaking of covers, back to the point.
In 1976, one of Marvel's lowest-selling titles was on the brink of cancellation. It was running reprint stories and was being published bimonthly. Rather than cancel it, Marvel decided to overhaul the line-up of the team whose book it was, and give it to new creators to re-stock the group with new characters and do something, anything, with it that would mean it avoided cancellation. The creators were Len Wein and the late Dave Cockrum, and the book was X-Men. When Giant-Size X-Men #1, featuring the debut of the new team (which featured characters like Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus making their first appearances, and also had some short hairy grumpy Canadian guy in it), nobody could have guessed that they'd just witnessed the birth of what would become comics' biggest publishing juggernaut. They also couldn't have guessed that Marvel had just published a comic that had one of the most enduring cover images in comics history.
Now, in later years, X-Men-related comics have tended to return to this well quite a lot. It's a striking picture, and the thought of the old team reacting in shock to the new is a powerful image in that it implies violent upheaval of the status quo. Strangely, though, three of the most notable instances of it being homaged by other X-books feature non-violent things like babies and fat people.
With the advent of the Internet, not to mention the fact that solicitations have to be thorough enough to allow retailers to know whether they need to order two or two hundred copies of any given comic, it seems that the opportunities for comics readers to be taken by surprise are minimal these days. This wasn't a problem that Stan Lee ever had back in the 1960s, when folks would buy their comics as and when they happened to see them on the newsstand, and I'm sure it's not something that Julius Schwartz ever lost any sleep over either. Trying to actually surprise today's fans is nigh-on impossible to do without serious obfuscation (exhibit A: clones of Thor being posited as the real deal). In fact, there are very few occasions which come to my mind which can be said to legitimately be examples of twists in a comic story being genuine jaw-dropping shocks. One of these, and a very fine one it was too, was the story of Marvel's most wanted, the Thunderbolts.
In 1996, Marvel (as previously discussed here) launched an event called Heroes Reborn, which took Captain America, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, plus other sundry characters such as the Inhumans and Namor out of circulation for a whole year. This left a bit of a void in the Marvel Universe, in that many of the major players suddenly weren't available for writers to use. Marvel launched a lot of new titles in this period, including Maverick (which gave Jim Cheung his start) and Deadpool (which did the same for Ed McGuinness) and Heroes for Hire (Pasqual Ferry's big break). Some of these, like the Waid/Kubert Ka-Zar series, had the benefit of a comics-y equivalent of a movie trailer in the form of the one-shot Tales from the Marvel Universe, a book which also had the second-ever appearance of the Thunderbolts, the stars of Marvel's big new team book. The team had previously turned up a couple of months beforehand in an issue of Incredible Hulk, attempting to apprehend the big green galoot, and with a number of other ongoing Marvel titles containing an advertising feature which showed pencil sketches and character designs for the T-Bolts' debut issue, it looked like Marvel were throwing quite a lot of weight behind them.
The Thunderbolts were made up of Citizen V (an updating of a Golden Age character, wearing a full-faced mask and wielding a sword), MACH-1 (an armoured, flying hero), Techno (a mechanical genius with a weapon-generating backpack), Atlas (a size-changer), Songbird (able to make solid sound constructs using her voice) and Meteorite (a super-strong flyer). To be honest, they didn't look like much. Some, like Songbird and Citizen V, had pretty good costume designs, but the powers these guys had been given were fairly generic, and the team appeared to be a bit of a second-rate version of the Avengers. That, of course, was until the readers reached the final two pages of issue one of the Thunderbolts' own book.
Having fought the Wrecking Crew and saved the Statue of Liberty from destruction, the Thunderbolts did a meet-and-greet with the press. They were humble, personable and seemed to be generally all-round good guys, even if their leader, Citizen V, was a bit of a cold fish. When the team returned to their base in a disused warehouse, though, things took a sinister turn. As Citizen V removed his mask to reveal a familiar horribly scarred face, the readers realised that something was horribly wrong here, and suspicions were confirmed when he addressed the rest of the team by the names which Avengers fans had known them by for years. Beetle. Fixer. Goliath. Screaming Mimi. Moonstone. These were no heroes. These were the Masters of Evil, and their leader was the megalomaniac Nazi criminal Baron Zemo.
This was, not to put too fine a point on it, staggering. All through the build-up to the first issue's debut, none of the publicity material or either of the team's guest-starring turns in other books had given the slightest indication that they were anything other than a new and slightly humdrum hero team (although some eagle-eyed fans had speculated that at least some of the team's members were ex-Masters of Evil through carefully noting their powers). This kind of surprise was guaranteed to hook readers, and it certainly did the job on me. The Thunderbolts' story was an engaging one, and made all the more so by the fact that the rug had been pulled out from under the readers once already, and as a result, nobody knew how the plot was going to develop. As the tale went on and some of the Thunderbolts found that they liked being heroes more than villains, while other members of the team stuck to the wolves-in-sheep's-clothing plan to try to accomplish their plans by earning the trust of the public and the government, there was always the knowledge that this was a book where you could never take anything for granted.
Sadly, it seems that the point of the team has been rather swept away in a spectacular bit of point-missing by Marvel's current editorial regime, who seem to think that the whole concept boils down to "it's a bunch of bad guys on a team" rather than "can comic-book villains seek redemption, do they really want to even try, and can they cope with what they'll have to do to achieve it". Maybe that's doing them a disservice, though. Maybe they're going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and really surprise us. If any book can do it, this one can.
Can't believe I forgot this the other day. When I was banging on about terrible TV versions of existing comics characters, I completely neglected to mention the ill-fated and rarely-screened Justice League of America pilot from the late 1990s. Through the sci-fi dream of YouTube, I can now share some clips from this with you and let you see exactly how near a miss we had when the series wasn't commissioned beyond that stage.
Long before the great JLU was even thought of, this single episode of a live-action version of DC's premier super-team was put together. With Batman, Superman etc all tied up in their own TV and movie deals, the bank of saleable DC characters who could form part of a televisual League were limited, and so the most recognisable members of the team here are the Flash and Green Lantern, with the roster being rounded out with Fire, Ice, the Atom and Martian Manhunter. The special effects are, to be very kind, rudimentary, and the costumes are worse than you'd find in most fan-films. That said, there's a bit of enthusiasm at least, their versions of Ice and the Flash are likeable in a dizzy way, and the talking-heads style of introductions to the characters is a clever gimmick.
The clips below aren't the whole show, but should be enough to give you a taste of exactly how bad it was (clue: gloriously bad). Ignore the Spanish at the start, that's to do with the blogger who originally uploaded these clips and has nothing to do with the show itself. Anyway. Get comfortable, and prepare to witness the miracle of David Ogden Stiers in a green fat-suit.
There aren't enough stupid comics around any more. No, wait, that's not true. There are plenty of stupid comics around. For instance, there's Civil War, which brought itself to an abominably poor ending this week. I've decided, you may be interested to hear, that I'm not going to do a dissection of that particular dog of a story, as others have said it better elsewhere. Besides, for the most thorough kicking you're likely to read of it, you only have to wait three days and you can see it on The X-Axis. No, what there aren't enough of around any more are dumb comics. Ones where you can marvel at the big daft action and the people who punch people (they're the luckiest people in the world, I understand).
Unfortunately, since Thor is currently AWOL, there's a bit of a dearth of stories in which problems can be solved by hitting them really hard, sometimes with a utensil or other implement. Given how I've been pretty down on writer Jeph Loeb throughout the course of this blog, you may be surprised to learn that the book I'm going to recommend to you now came from him - it most certainly is a dumb comic, though, and a gleefully crazy one at the same time.
When Superman/Batman started in 2003, it was the first time those two characters had starred in a regular team-up book with each other since 1986, when the long-running title World's Finest reached the end of its pretty impressive 45-year run. This was a different beast, though - it was conceived as a showcase for a rotating group of artists, working on a series of story arcs, all written by Loeb, which formed a loose quadrilogy that in turn came together as one larger tale. It was a huge seller when it launched, and managed to lure Witchblade/Fathom artist Michael Turner back to a regular gig again after some time away from the drawing board, and after he was done with it the art chores were handed on to the (to be honest, much more talented) Carlos Pacheco. Turner's arc was about the return of Supergirl, and apart from a couple of great fights between Superman and Darkseid there's not a lot to really recommend it. Pacheco got to draw a tale of alternate universes, where various versions of DC Comics' chronology clashed and merged - it featured a cast of literally quite a lot, but if you don't have a Masters in DC continuity it's best steered clear of.
The dumb comics, and the only ones I can wholeheartedly recommend, were streets ahead of those two stories. They were the first and last arcs which Loeb wrote for the series, and were drawn by ex-Deadpool artist Ed McGuinness, whose huge and blocky figurework proved to be a natural fit for the kinds of gung-ho daftness that Loeb's stories provided. These elements included:
- Lex Luthor on super-steroids and with veins popping out of his forehead, taking the old purple and green battle armour out of mothballs to smack Superman around a bit;
- a giant rocket-ship shaped like a composite of Superman and Batman, split down the middle;
- someone who looks a lot like the Superman from Kingdom Come but is actually... well, that'd spoil it;
- Bizarro and his Gotham-styled counterpart Batzarro;
- gender-swapped versions of Batman, Superman and Superboy;
- and a Super-Batman made of Kryptonite.
Both of the Loeb/McGuinness arcs are currently available in hardback collections, and are well worth checking out. Partly for the stopped-clock occurrence of decent writing from Loeb, and partly for the brilliantly bold Fisher Price artwork of McGuinness, but mainly because these two stories take a silly idea, then layer on another silly idea, then twist both of those together into a really strange and silly idea, after which you pile on some utterly bizarre new elements and present the whole thing with chocolate sauce and chopped nuts on top and a straight face. The only word for it is dumb; these truly are dumb comics. With all the stupid comics clogging up the racks at the minute, a few more dumb comics would be a breath of fresh air.
OKAY! QUICKLY! FIVE REASONS WHY STAN LEE IS THE GREATEST LIVING AMERICAN!
1) Stan Lee invented comics.
Okay, so Stan Lee didn't invent comics per se. That's what we in the comics-reading fraternity (and now sorority - thanks, manga!) have to believe, though. Because what we know today as "comics" in the western world are, not to put to fine a point on it, predominantly superhero comics. The industry is, particularly in America, geared up to give us the adventures of the Amazing Pants-Man fighting Super-Jerk nine times out of ten. The other one time out of ten, he's fighting ennui and his own lack of self-worth and Chris Ware is drawing it. Stan Lee, though, gave us the superhero paradigm as we know it. Not the previously-existing DC dynamic, where barely capable men would struggle through utterly bizarre problems until they breathed a collective sigh of relief and reached the end of the story, but the Marvel method, which merged soap opera with superheroes to give us stories which reached beyond the end of their 18 pages and made the reader want to pick up the next one, just to see whether Sue Richards was going to run away with Namor or Peter Parker was really going to give up being Spider-Man. Stan Lee created the Marvel Universe, in conjunction with some of the finest artistic minds of his time; a universe which, as Marvel's marketing department is so fond of reminding us, has over 4,700 characters in its library. Stan Lee co-created the vast majority of the characters who interacted with the characters who fought the characters who make up that 4,700. Next time you have to buy 100+ issues of a Civil War-style tie-in, remember, this is because Stan Lee made something beautiful and evil people broke it.
2) Stan Lee is excitement made flesh.
There is nobody, but nobody, who is a bigger cheerleader for comics than Stan Lee. I love Marvel. I quite like DC. I like indie comics like they're my third replacement pet whom I love very much. I don't evangelise about them to half the extent that Stan Lee does. Ever since Stan became the editor and head writer of the Marvel Comics superhero line back in 1961, he has constantly been the most unreservedly pro-comics person in the world. Joe Quesada bends himself into pretzel-like shapes trying to pat himself on the back for the most recent awful Marvel Comics stunts and hopeless non-events. Stan Lee just has to breathe one word in favour of these doddering superhero universes, which we love (we really do) beyond all rationality, regardless of how often they hurt and disappoint us, and we're ready to take another look at them. Stan Lee is able to make the most humdrum of plots, the most regular of occurrences seem like the most dramatic of turns of events. Stan Lee adores comics, and he makes everyone else adore comics too.
3) Stan Lee is a terrible writer.
If you look at any comic Stan Lee has written since about 1970, you'll find that the one inescapable truth about them is that they're really, really bad. His Silver Surfer graphic novels, his Ravage 2099 series, his Just Imagine one-shots that he did with DC (which even he said would be like Walt Disney going to work for Hanna Barbera) are all poorly dialogued and have plots which could charitably be described as paper thin. His stories, though, were only ever the framework on which he could hang his trademark character work, where he would take someone with the power of Spider-Man and put him through scenarios which would make Job give up and go home. It didn't matter if you couldn't quite bring yourself to believe that an ordinary person would speak the words Stan gave them to say. All that mattered was that you did believe that the one saying those words was an ordinary person. Stan Lee made superheroes relatable, and no amount of melodramatic, sturm und drang dialogue and convoluted plots can detract from that.
4) Stan Lee is the greatest creator of all time.
Stan Lee may not have been amazing at plotting, and his dialogue may sail perilously close to cheesy at times, but you cannot deny that Stan the Man has the biggest imagination this side of the Pecos (and if there's anyone on the other side of the Pecos who has a bigger imagination, then they need to come out and show themselves now before we hunt them down as a danger to society). Nobody else could have given life to the Hulk, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Avengers, Doctor Strange, Nick Fury, Daredevil, She-Hulk and others. Okay, there may have been others (most notably Jack Kirby, whose contribution to the creation of the classic pantheon of Marvel heroes only the most drunken idiot would seek to dispute) who had a hand in the gestation of Marvel's massive roster of heroes and villains, but the common denominator in every case is the ever-willing imagination of Stan Lee.
5) You will cry when Stan Lee dies.
I know I will. Stan is not a spring chicken, and although he's in good shape and is always gregarious and ready for a chat on any given DVD featurette, Stan Lee is 84 years old and can't keep going forever. Stan Lee was the man who made Marvel Comics from an also-ran publisher of romances, horrors and westerns into the juggernaut that could take on the might of the dominant power of the time, DC Comics. In doing so, he paved the way for other imaginative publishers to take the wheel and steer their own courses through whatever seas they wanted to sail. Stan Lee is still creating, most recently coming up with a new superhero, Foreverman, which he was (at last count, anyway) still developing for an original motion picture. Marvel even saw fit to comemmorate the man who gave life to Marvel and, in turn, the US comics industry, through an event which saw their top writers and artists produce stories in which Lee himself interacted with some of his greatest creations. Stan Lee's inventions, from Iron Man to the X-Men to Doctor Doom, will outlive him. They'll probably outlive all of us. Right now, we have Stan Lee. We won't have him for long. When Stan Lee goes, the most earnest voice crying for comics to be enjoyed will go with him. If you love comics at all, you'll cry at that.
Stan Lee is the greatest living American. Those are five reasons why. There are 4,695 more.
We're now firmly in the final two weeks of this blog, and there's not a lot of room left for mucking about. We're going to have a lot of top stuff in the next thirteen days, although I haven't read Civil War #7 yet so it's possible we might have to drop everything and have a jolly good complain about how, on the whole, the main Civil War titles (and the over-arching plot) are so hopelessly inept and poorly done that they actually serve to drag down the few tie-ins which were actually any good. I'm also intending to do a short history lesson at some point over the next few days, which I promise will be more interesting than it sounds. For today, though, it's time to tuck into a slice of comics fried gold - the biggest indie hit of the last few years, and the comic which became a byword for quality comedy/adventure, Scott Pilgrim.
I know that every blogger and their gran has written about Scott Pilgrim by now, but it's of a sufficient quality to mean that I'd be negligent if I didn't mention it here (particularly if I'm going to be devoting entries to things like Fin Fang Foom). The series is a bit of an odd concept, but not a particularly complicated one: Scott Pilgrim is Canadian, 23 years old and is dating a high-schooler. He's in a band, he's as indie as you can get without being Steve Lamacq and Mark E. Smith's lovechild, and generally lives (as the title of the first volume says) a precious little life. The whole applecart's upset when Ramona Flowers, an American courier for Amazon.ca, starts taking shortcuts through his dreams at night in order to make her deliveries faster, and Scott's smitten. The high-schooler gets shown the door and Scott begins a quest to become Ramona's boyfriend. It all looks like it's going well, but there's a snag. It turns out that in order to become Ramona's boyfriend, Scott has to defeat Ramona's seven evil ex-boyfriends in combat. As you do.
Scott Pilgrim is about as far away from traditional indie slice-of-life comics as you can get without involving Superman. For a start, there's no realism involved here - instead, video game logic takes the place of conventional physics. Scott's is a world where after you beat someone up, they disappear and are replaced with a gold coin, and where energy drinks give you modifiers to your statistics rather than a refreshing isotonic burst. When something awful is about to happen, Scott spots a glowing circle on the floor in the corner of the room, and correctly identifies it as a save point. Even beyond the references to Mario and Final Fantasy, what goes on in Scott Pilgrim is ruled by what would make a great scene and by creator Bryan Lee O'Malley's flights of fancy, whether that being a girl being punched so hard the highlights fly out of her hair or a bad guy having secret powers gifted on him by his years of training and study as a vegan. It's the kind of comic where you're laughing out loud and grinning with a complete lack of self-consciousness because you've just read a bit where the plot stops for a few pages so one of the characters can explain to you how to make shepherd's pie. It is, above all, great fun to read.
The oddness and nerd references wouldn't make it a good comic if the writing and characters weren't up to scratch, though. Scott himself is perhaps the least layered of the book's mainstays - he's goodhearted and resourceful, but not the sharpest +2 sword in the armoury. He's lazy and can be pretty selfish, but he means well and he's no quitter. He's a clear hero, but he's not some cookie-cutter generic lantern-jawed lunkhead - he's a cleverly flawed mop-haired lunkhead instead. The other characters are more nuanced, which helps the book from descending into vacuousness (vacuity? I dunno). Knives Chau, the previously-mentioned high-schooler, is at first smitten with Scott, then blazingly angry towards him, then appears to move past him to be with a boy closer to her age (although O'Malley's not letting Knives wear her heart completely on her sleeve with that one, and it looks like she might just be using the kind of make-him-jealous tactics that we all remember so dearly from our own schooldays). Scott's bandmate Kim Pine is a taciturn presence, an ex-girlfriend of Scott's who plays drums in their band and who conceals a genuine concern for Scott's physical and emotional wellbeing behind a finely-honed veil of sarcasm and grouchiness. Ramona herself is not letting Scott in on the whole truth about her seven ex-boyfriends - one in particular, a boy named Gideon, is shaping up to be the end-of-level bad guy for the whole series - and that could well end up hurting Scott in the long run. Her relationship with Scott is sweet and relatable; there are no sweeping string sections and kisses in the moonlight, just teasing each other and walking in the snow.
I don't want to gush in an unseemly manner, but it's not really easy to talk about this book without banging on about it like a really determined Jehova's Witness who needs to get into your house to use the bathroom. For one thing, it's funny. I don't want to get into quoting lines at you, because then I'll just start quoting whole scenes at you, and at that point you might as well just buy the book anyway. The characters are immensely likeable - everyone's known a guy like Steven Stills, who's standoffish and quiet but not actually a jerk, or a guy like Scott's gay roommate Wallace, who's together and smart but gets drunk and heckles bands like the rest of us. You'll end up being annoyed when you reach the half-way point in any particular volume because that means you've got less than half of it left to enjoy. It's really very good indeed.
The story's set to run for six volumes, of which three have been published to date, with O'Malley hard at work on the fourth. A movie's also in the early stages of production, with Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright at the helm. Before that hits the screen, you'd do well to get hold of the published volumes of the book - it's true that if you don't know why a band called Sex Bob-Omb is funny, then you might not get as much out of it as someone who knows who Samus Aran is would, but at the heart of it, Scott Pilgrim's not about nerd references and video games and jokes about the X-Men. It's about the feeling you get when you start a band, the feeling you get when you rollerskate to work, the feeling you get when you decide to fight someone's seven evil ex-boyfriends to win the right to date them. It's about being young, and about being in love. Flawless victory!
Super-heroes have had a bit of a rum time of it on the telly, at least as far as live-action shows are concerned. The terrible spectre of the 1960s Batman show casts a long shadow, and the Littlest Hobo riff of the Lou Ferrigno Hulk series is, for many people, an indelible impression of the character, for better or worse (hint: worse). The 1970s also brought us the dreadful live-action Spider-Man show, starring the youngest boy out of the Sound of Music, and the 1990s gave us a double-header of mediocre at best DC shows in the form of Lois & Clark and the Flash. Most recently, Marvel’s latest attempt to stake out some terrestrial territory turned to ashes when the Blade TV series was brought to light (sorry, everyone).
It looks like the only way to make a successful superhero TV show is to get it in under the radar – no codenames, no costumes, no branding. The 4400 was the first series to give this a go, but it’s a bit of an acquired taste, and when a show takes two seasons to get going it’s probably not going to set the world on fire (or stretch it, make it invisible or clobber it). The other major superhero show which has been steadily building its audience in the US, and which arrived on UK screens last night, is the rather succinctly named “Heroes” (American readers, this is all old hat to you, so you can come back tomorrow when I'll be talking about something else).
Heroes follows the stories of a disparate group of individuals, who for better or worse have developed superhuman powers. There’s Nikki, a single mum who strips for webcams to make ends meet, and who discovers that she has a murderous mirror double who takes great joy in doling out punishment to anyone she thinks deserves it. There’s Isaac, a smackhead artist whose paintings depict scenes from the future every time he gets high. There’s the aptly-named Hiro, a Japanese devotee of science fiction and comics whose powers of control over space and time fill him with joy. There’s Claire, a suicidal cheerleader whose superhuman healing factor foils her at every Chuck Jones-inspired attempt. So on, so forth, etc.
What all of these characters have in common isn’t clear at this stage – some of them seem to be linked by mutual friends or acquaintances, but at the moment that appears to be more of a device to get them to interact than any deliberate plot-related point, although you never can tell. The first inklings of the first season’s arc plot comes near the end of the pilot, where it’s revealed that one of Isaac’s paintings depicts New York with a gigantic mushroom cloud rising out of it in a hellish rage of black and red. It’s not a massive stretch to guess that the cast, of whom only a few have even met each other at this point, are going to have to band together in some way to prevent this from happening. The reason for the impending nuclear doom isn’t obvious yet, but it’s a fair bet that where there are superheroes, there has to be at least one supervillain…
The touchpoints for Heroes are obvious – the X-Men are the
one which springs to mind immediately. Not just because we’ve got
Nightcrawler-San and Buffy Wolverine, but because a lot of the characters
clearly don’t feel like their powers are any kind of blessing; most of those
whom we’ve encountered as of the end of the pilot, in fact, feel like they’ve
been cursed. Seeing how they unite – if indeed they do – and how they come to
terms with their powers looks like it’s going to be at least as interesting as
the actual main kaboom-focussed plot. We’re also going to be treated to a turn
by Northern Doctor Christopher Eccleston and Star Trek alumnus George Takei later in the season, just to tickle
that nerd funnybone a little. The show's official site is also commendably thorough, and features exclusive Heroes comics which tie in with the ongoing stories.
It’s not without flaws, of course – some of the protagonists have powers which are a smidgen too close to existing comic book characters, there’s a heck of a lot of chatting going on and the various leads are going to have to be fleshed out a bit from the broad-strokes archetypes they fall into at the moment, but the advance word from the US is that these problems are minimised as the season goes on, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. As long as the eventual fight scenes don’t feature big graphics which say “BIFF!” “POW!” or “BANG!”, I’ll be happy.
Yesterday we saw that Marvel Comics can do "serious" and "meaningful". Today we see, not for the first time and doubtless not for the last, that it can also do "daft". Today's topic is perhaps only second to MODOK in the ranks of notably bizarre villains whose very name is guaranteed to elicit a little cheer from the less reverent Marvel fans - He Whose Limbs Shatter Mountains And Whose Back Scrapes The Sun himself, the lizardy wizard, Fin Fang Foom!
Take a moment where you are right now, and enjoy saying that name a few times. Revel in the terribly satisfying repetitive fricative of it, the great pleasure to be taken in bellowing it directly from the diaphragm like you've dug him out of La Brea yourself and are ready to conquer your local 24-hour shop and off-licence. Fin Fang Foom! FIN FANG FOOM! Everyone, all together now:
Lord Foom (as he likes to be called) hails originally from the planet Kakaranathara (also known as Maklu IV). He came to Earth squillions of years ago, with nothin' but conquerin' on his mind. He got hopped up on ancient Chinese goofballs and had a bit of a severely long lie, peppering his dormancy with occasional forays into terrifying rampage. Most recently, Iron Man's arch-nemesis the Mandarin decided that he wanted to hang out with someone else for whom "orange" was a big part of their shtick and revived Fin Fang to do his bidding. Since then, it's been hero fights a-go-go. He used to be orangey-brown, now he's green. He wears huge purple pants. GSOH, own car, likes long walks on the beach & chick flicks.
Fin Fang Foom, as a story device, is brilliant. He's a walking destruction machine with a bulletproof ego and a bulletproof hide who can be guaranteed to give Thor, the Hulk, Iron Man or whoever dares (or, as FFF himself would say, DARES!!!!!) to go up against him a jolly good fight with plenty of property damage and over-the-top melodramatic banter on the way. In recent years, he's been a source of deserved ribbing - I mean, I'm all for maintaining the dignity of the fictional characters, but they're not real people, y'know? We are allowed to have a bit of fun at their expense. If it helpes soothe the consciences of those who believe that these pretendy people should be spoken of reverently, if Foom was a real person (or dragon, or alien) then he'd already have such a massive chip on his shoulder that he wouldn't notice. Anyway, yes, the comedy. He's been sighted recently in Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen's Nextwave, putting robots into his purple pants. He's also featured in Scott Gray and Roger Langridge's excellent Marvel monsters stories, which feature a sarcastic Fin Fang Foom who's been shrunk to human size and rehabilitated (one of which I linked to just before Christmas).
In all seriousness, though, there really are people who can't see the joy of Fin Fang Foom. His very name cries it from the rooftops - he's the only remnant we have now of the brilliantly strange and demented 1950s monster comics, where Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others would give us creatures like Tim Boo Bah, Monstrollo, Googam (Son of Goom!) and the Creature from Krangro (as dutifully and fascinatingly detailed on this blog). He's a symbol of invention and a total lack of self-consciousness. He's a big daft monster with a huge chip on his shoulder and he wears purple pants. There is absolutely nothing that is not to love about this guy. Fin Fang Foom. A name to say with pride!
