Sunday, July 28, 2024

Comic Reader Résumé: Late August, 1986

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I liked Elfquest well enough when I read it, but I didn't pick it up regularly, and they all tend to run together in my memories. It doesn't help that I also read this material in the oversized collections you could check out from at least one of my school libraries. I read #14-16 some way, but aside from a moment here and there, there wasn't enough worth talking about worth bringing up. This third one though, I remember all too well, and may have contributed to my not keeping up with the monthlies. "Noisybad Highthing!" introduced these little multi-colored flying fairies with a very distinctly annoying speech pattern. They vomited sticky Spider-Man web fluid at people, and made victims hibernate for years at a time once encased in it. They fit that fairy tale sweet spot of being adorable to some and creepy to others, more the latter for myself. But Elfquest was also, in modern parlance, "horny on main," so that might have kept me coming back. Numerous pages were spent on two sets of half naked couples in some stage of getting their freak on, so despite being on the newsstand, the book did not carry a CCA approval stamp.

Embarrassing as it is to admit now, especially in light of the fantastically rendered headshot cover on The Mighty Thor #373, but in 1986, I couldn't easily tell Sal Buscema and Walt Simonson apart. I mean, if you put a Buscema Spider-Man and a Simonson X-Factor in front of me, sure, but they were similar enough on Thor to confuse me. The same subject matter and super-distinct work of the greatest letter of all time, John Workman, worked to muddy my perceptions. The book just kind of looked the same to my still developing eye for art styles. And it's not like I was regularly following the construction yard adventures of Sigurd Jarlson, which fairly screams "we're clear tired of the dual identity bit, but are unwilling to leave the safety of the familiar." The majority of this book involves Norse Gods babysitting other people's children. It was not my scene. But the last few pages drags Thor into the Mutant Massacre crossover, because I guess they figured to use a sales bump, or the Simonsons were just so deep into the plotting of more central books that it just spilled over. But yeah, a frog from the New York sewer told Thor about it while he was hanging in the park, and next thing you know, Angel's getting his wings pinned by harpoon. My half-brother bought this one a bit after the fact.

After utterly failing to live up to the hype, X-Factor #10 takes this bland, vestigial X-title and returns it firmly to the fold at the start of the Mutant Massacre and Walt Simonson's run as artist. If that wasn't enough, it's also a Marvel 25th anniversary cover with a Cyclops head shot and the well regarded gray border filled with Marvel heroes. Once again, I didn't buy it myself, but my brother did, and he loved it. I think Louise Simonson and Bob Harras knew the title needed a kick in the pants, so taking part in the first big X-title crossover, much less one with a huge body count that this specific issue contributes mightily to, was just what editorial ordered. We've got your Morlock tunnels lined with bodies, the Marauders, Sabretooth, Apocalypse, and it all ends with Angel's wings impaled to a wall. The kids were more responsive to this than Beast going clothes shopping, let me tell you.

Cracked #224 is scanned onto the Internet Archive, so I can confirm that I owned the issue, but I already had a good run at this magazine last month. It still looks pretty bad, but they've go some notable creators. Dan Clowes did an Ugly Family installment, Peter Bagge did a single page gag with Bill Wray-- I never realized how many '90s indie guys I dug were on this book first doing booger jokes. There's a Born in the U.S.A. cover and a Billy Idol on the back, both crossed with Sylvester the Janitor. There's a Cosby Show parody, and pop star Garbage Pail Kids, and this whole ninja mail order catalog thing. Whatever. Moving on. Unfortunately to Mad Magazine #266, which also took on Cosby, and they both took extended digs at Hands Across America. It was such a dumb idea. Other satires included Who's the Boss, Growing Pains, and Wheel of Fortune. Mad had all the guys that you associate with this type of mag, like Mort Drucker, Don Martin, Sergio Aragones, Dave Berg, Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, Angelo Torres, Jack Davis, and Al Jaffee. I don't think either title holds up, but at least Cracked was more visually fresh. Mad's art staff was more than a little long in the tooth, and the only way I can tell that this isn't a '70s issue is the subject matter.

I've been thinking recently about how utterly amazing the work of Bill Sienkiewicz was, especially in this period. But as a kid, I wanted nothing to do with him, and he was perhaps the first penciller that I outright hated. I've never been a Bob McLeod guy, and my tolerance for kid heroes is limited, so suffice to say I tended to avoid New Mutants like the plague. At one time, it was enough to be X-Men adjacent to score top ten sales status, but with more related titles and stronger competition overall, the X-office needed to run a tighter ship. Of course New Mutants #46 would tie into the Mutant Massacre, but more than that, we'd get at least one crossover per year thereafter to keep that ship afloat. Barry Windsor-Smith was doing their covers in this period, and this has to be among the worst of them. The X-Men and a bunch of Morlocks burst through a wall in the X-Mansion, to the surprise of the barely present titular leads. It looks like it should be an interior half-splash, especially with Colossus being given a dialogue balloon, plus it was the umpteenth variation of "you X-Babies clear out so the adults can get the actual work done." The interiors were by Jackson Guice and Kyle Baker, an interesting combo that I found far more palatable than previous art teams. Not the main thrust was that the X-Men had evacuated the homeless mutants being slaughtered en masse by the Marauders back to their pad, now serving as a makeshift medical ward. Please don't ask me to explain the logistics of people who, if I recall correctly, lived in the sewers on the island of Manhattan, walking in one night to upstate New York via those same sewers. Besides, more pages are devoted to the New Mutants characters that I was largely unfamiliar with muddling in their own affairs in the periphery, contributing nothing. In the end, the bugger off to fight the evil father of the techno-organic alien member that they'd adopted, so they couldn't even be bothered to battle a mutant during the Mutant Massacre. I can't even blame my brother, because I bought this one, but not the next.

Psi-Force #2 picked up where the first issue left off, with the runaways carrying their dead mentor's body, wrapped in a stolen rug, around downtown San Francisco. They're trying to get it back to their shelter, but face a Warriors' style gauntlet in completing that task. Hilary Barta and Romeo Tanghal don't compliment Mark Texeira as well as Baker in the debut, but it's still a much more attractive and contemporary looking title than most of the New Universe's offerings. Steve Perry juggles a lot of nefarious parties of interest pursuing these kids, with a steady ratcheting of tension. He's much better here than on the abortive Blackthorne Omni-Men series, and this book didn't live up to the potential established in his two issues for the rest of my time following it. But I did enjoy the title enough to stick with it for a while yet.

I recollect tossing through Strikeforce: Morituri #1 at the 7-11, but not picking it up. Like many of my generation, I have to fight the Mandela Effect of associating it with the New Universe, since it was developed for that line and released at the same time with a similar trade dress. Instead, I was given my brother's brother's laminated-cover copies of the first three issues. So possessing personally gimmicked editions, I of course finally read the things, and I thought they were swell. The premise was that aliens that were a cross between the Predators, the creature from Explorers, and the enthusiastic consumerism of E.T. began a reign of terror over the Earth. They mostly acted like raiding parties in old westerns-- dropping onto towns, raping and pillaging, collecting slaves, and slaughtering anyone who got in the way. Humans were initially powerless to stop them, until a scientist developed a procedure to literally empower people. The Morituri process first gave a subject superhuman strength to endure the rest of the process, and then the subject would develop superhuman abilities. The first group were a trio called the Black Watch, who died valiantly taking out the leader of the alien's campaign against Earth. They were immortalized in comic within a comic, and their story inspired more volunteers for the procedure to take the fight back to the invaders. The catch was that the Black Watch was originally supposed to be a quintet, but two volunteers died while their powers were being developed. A third spontaneously combusted, accidentally killing a fourth in the process. The human body simply couldn't sustain the Morituri process for long, and anyone who undergoes it were expected to die badly within a year. If I recall correctly, the book ran in real time, unless that ol' Mandela Effect is acting up again, mixing it up with the New Universe or The 'Nam. Regardless, all of the characters introduced here should be dead by the twelfth issue, and the book is as much about how they deal with their imminent mortality as it is about using their powers to fight the aliens. 1986 is considered by many to be the greatest year in comic book history for mainstream content, with the much heralded works of Frank Miller and Alan Moore taking up most of the oxygen. The Strikeforce: Morituri got something to say. At the end of the day, it's still a sci-fi melodrama most indebted to Chris Claremont, but Claremont rarely operated at this level. I'd argue it as a career best for Peter B. Gillis and Brent Anderson, aided by the shine of a newcomer inker named Scott Williams. The inker's buddy drew the comic-within-a-comic, and While Portacio would soon offer a few fill-ins to establish himself as a penciller. Even the late Jim Novak is reminding me that he rates high ranking among the best letterers ever.

Sunday, July 21, 2024

Comic Reader Résumé: Early August, 1986



My reading of books published in August of 1986 starts with a belated comic. I got Batman #401-403 is a three pack together, and I believe that it was from a toy store this time? Maybe another deal like that Man of Steel partial set with the cardboard envelope at Circus World? Despite still considering myself a Batman fan in this period, as with Superman, I had never made much of an investment in the hero's comics adventures up to this point. Their Pre-Crisis solo outings mostly bored me, but these stripped down post-400 Batman logo treatments had that air of late '80s sophistication. Decades removed, this genre-embarrassed generic fontiness would get an immediate veto, but at this point gave the title a cool aloofness. I wasn't used to seeing John Byrne drawing DC characters, and Magpie barely qualifies, as she's a rarely seen again new villain with a rare penchant for voluntary alopecia. I'd turn to crime too if I had to maintain three separate Mohawk hairstyles simultaneously on the same head. But anyway, getting past the Byrne, you had admittedly rough and rushed Trevor Von Eeden interiors, coming off the failed Thriller series. He'd drawn what is still one of my favorite Batman things ever, the 1982 Annual with Ra's Al Ghul, and his minimalism just played into that "yes, it is a Batman comic, but we don't care if you know that" vibe. Von Eeden was the original artist chosen for Year One, before being replaced by David Mazzucchelli, and there's a continuity between their Tothian styles. I'm not sorry things worked out as they did, since Mazzucchelli was at the peak of his powers on a story that remains a high water mark for the medium nearly four decades on. But if I may be so bold, I can't say Von Eeden wouldn't have had at least a similar impact, and he manages to convey a real menace in Magpie that nothing about her name, look, or modus operandi would suggest she could pull off otherwise. It's a little insane to me that there's a Brian Bolland pin-up at the back of this thing, that may well have been intended for the cover, and it's the least visually striking element of this package. "The New Adventures" branding is many months out, but Barbara Randall's edgy story suggests the attitude well in advance.

This is the last week of launch titles for the New Universe line, and it's probably not a great sign that I went to read the first issue of Displaced Paranormals, or D.P. 7, and realized that I'd already read it in recent weeks but forgotten. It had a police line-up cover that was like Love & Rockets on Lithium, and was about a more mundane but diverse team of X-Men who run away from the School for Gifted Youngsters when they found out Professor X was going to lobotomize and sell them out to the C.I.A. I was never that into the late Paul Ryan, and gave this book a pass on art alone, but my brother bought it, so I eventually read his.

On the other hand, I did buy Justice #1, which was more of a New Universe breaker than Star Brand, which took all the heat. Created by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson, Justice borrowed heavily from the Terminator, featuring a tall, well-built New Wave Punk in a trench coat with glowing red eyes who wanders around Alphabet City killing other punks, seemingly indiscriminately. Simonson bailed as soon as the development money ran out, but Goodwin had a staff editorial position, so he was stuck teaming with young artist Geoff Isherwood to get the book out. Isherwood was more in the Neal Adams vein, and therefore my own, plus I wasn't hip enough to know Justice's whole scene was derivative and years out of date. It helped to cover that this was actually a stealth high fantasy series, with the silver-mulletted quasi-knight Tensen having been exiled to Earth from another dimension by magical ninjas after his affair with the queen was discovered. With patchy memories and no clear way home, Tensen uses his ability to see the auras of others to judge good versus evil. His right hand is a "sword" that fires destructive energy to reduce to ash any wicked that Tensen finds, while his left hand is a shield that erects force field squares to protect those deemed innocent. And again, since Star Brand was comparatively morally and structurally complex, the Justice vigilante just goes from drug dealer to pimp and so on, killing all the bad ones, and learning of the joys of hot dogs paid for in blood. All inked by Vinnie Colletta, looking like Jim Mooney doing a Death Wish comic. So it was dumb and violent when that was the style of the time, and I'd be back for seconds.

The cover to G.I. Joe a Real American Hero #53 is a Mike Zeck Snake-Eyes head shot, and I bought it on a t-shirt just this year. Hey, it's a chest-up, and he also draws a forearm holding up an Uzi. Within the parameters of the assignment, Zeck went above and beyond. But also, Snake-Eyes isn't even in this issue. "Pit-Fall" is about Cobra forces assailing the headquarters of G.I. Joe while the team is on suspension and the actual members are off-site. It's mostly about older brass who were deliberating on the Joes' fate being put in the position of having to replace them. But more importantly, it was a Flint spotlight issue, as he and Lady Jaye are two of the few members in the area, and Flint sacrifices himeslf to make sure his best gal could serve the greater good.

Uncanny X-Men #211 was the proper launch of the Mutant Massacre crossover, with another iconic JRJR Wolverine cover, this one a close-up of popped claws and frayed mask with a Marvel 25th anniversary border. Not being well versed in detecting art styles, I just assumed Romita had done his usual work on the interiors, though it's now obvious Bret Blevins provided a fair share of the pencils on this issue. Credit to Al Williamson for keeping the overall look consistent, though I was easily distracted by all the murder the Marauders were up to, followed by the X-Men getting ripped to bits trying to stop all that murder. We lapped this up in the '80s, but I admit that it's harder on the system at middle age to watch all this wholesale slaughter as entertainment. Honestly, it was much more abstract and fanciful back then, before you could watch videos of actual atrocities online. Given how much I and much of my generation hated Blevins' New Mutants run, looking at these pages, it's kind of a shame that he didn't get the Uncanny assignment instead. Objectively, Blevins was great at drawing awkward teenagers, where Marc Silvestri would have sexed them up like he did the kids in X-Factor. However, I don't care about New Mutants, and Blevins would have been a smoother transition from Romita. I'll also point out that this issue offered The Marvel Mutant Massacre Map, with Walt Simonson doodling in Beast, Nightcrawler, Angel, and one of the Power Pack kids while detailing the reading order of the sprawling 11-part, five title crossover. This was an extremely successful and well regarded event story that led to Marvel having their entire line of $4 books loosely connect for months on end today. This entire event cost barely more than two of those modern books, and involved three closely associated writers. We've lost so much common and story sense in the intervening decades.

I don't have the time or interest to go back and read all of these comics, but for various reasons there are a number of 1986 titles where I'm reading along with or ahead of this coverage. In the case of Classic X-Men #3, I bought an omnibus collection a while back, but I'm not sure when I'd ever read the thing without being prompted. I haven't had the slightest interest in the X-Men's modern adventures in decades, but I was deeply invested in the mutants of this time period. Since the collection only reprints the newly created material, as it progresses, we're talking about an investment of 6-8 pages a month, though they're written by Chris Claremont, so that's only about 48 pages worth of contemporary comics reading. Unfortunately, I waited three issues in to start. To make the original Len Wein issues more his own, plus to summarize a giant sized comic into a standard one, dozens of new pages were commissioned to, ironically, shrink the overall narrative. In other words, I went through pages 6-73 of the omnibus in service to following these "short" stories going forward. As it turns out, Dave Cockrum did come back for a lot of those interstitials, but he was so heavily embellished by Bob McLeod that I thought the inker did the whole page himself. Cockrum's work was already in decline by his second stint on X-Men, and we'd had the Paul Smith and John Romita Jr. runs since, so maybe that was for the best. I also didn't recall John Bolton's work being so impressionistic as I find it here, and in fact I now think I see a strong influence of this period's work on the artists Brian Stelfreeze and Jason Pearson, who are a few years out from getting published. Another head shot cover, this time of Storm. This issue involves the death and funeral of Thunderbird, but he was little remembered in this period, so commercial considerations exiled him posthumously to the inside frontpiece by Art Adams and Bolton's back cover.

G.I. Joe Order of Battle #1 started a four issue mini-series cover-billed as "The Official G.I. Joe Handbook," but drawing direct comparison with OHOTMU does it no favors. And it's in the drawings where it most comes up short, because instead of enlisting talented artists associated with both, like Mike Zeck, everything here is drawn by Herb Trimpe and Joe Delbeato. Simply drawing 32 Joes in full body static poses could be numbing for a set of artists, much less the same two guys, and they're rendered in an oddly passive manner for a bunch of rugged soldiers. Besides the lack of visual variety, there's no sourced reprint images to break things up, just one figure per page insides a file folder shaped box. The order is also rigid, listing only heroic Joes in alphabetical order for two issues, a third just for Cobra, and the fourth all vehicles. They don't even maintain the single creative team policy, because Eliot R. Brown does the vehicle issue by himself. Greater stylistic liberties are taken with Cobra, and they're just visually more dynamic in general, so it really would have broken things up to mix them and the vehicles in with the Joes. In my case, it was a fatal error, because I was so bored by the first issue that I didn't go back for more. Larry Hama was in file card mode, maybe offering an extra paragraph on top of what could be found on the action figure packaging, and far too fixated on dry data like what weapons they'd trained with, vehicles they were cleared to operate, and so on. The one almost backhanded compliment I can give is that I think Trimpe was enamored with Paul Smith at this time, because most of these entries have a PMS vibe. I was also a big Smith fan in this period, but I'm not sure he's the artist to ape for this subject matter or the target demographic.

Friday, July 5, 2024

Comic Reader Résumé Podcast #24

(July 1986)


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ré·su·mé [rez-oo-mey, rez-oo-mey] noun 1. a summing up; summary. 2. a brief written account of personal, educational, and professional qualifications and experience, as that prepared by an applicant for a job.
In Comic Reader Résumé, I use Mike’s Amazing World of Comics to travel back through time via his virtual newsstand to the genesis point of my lifelong collecting of comics. From there, I can offer a “work history” of my fandom through my active purchasing of (relatively) new comic books beginning in January of 1982, when my interest in the medium went from sporadic and unformed to routine on through compulsive accumulation. To streamline the narrative and keep the subjects at least remotely contemporaneous, I will not generally be discussing what we call back issues: books bought long after their publication date. Sometimes, I will cover a book published on a given month that I picked up within a year or so that date, and I give myself an especially wide berth on this aspect in the first couple of “origins” episodes. We’ll get more rigidly on point as my memories crystallize and my “hobby” spirals out of control into the defining characteristic of my life (eventually outpacing squalor and competing neuroses.) It’s part personal biography, part industry history, and admittedly totally self-indulgent on my part.

This episode includes Alpha Flight #39-40, Captain America #322-323, Casper #225, Classic X-Men #2, G.I. Joe a Real American Hero #52, Mark Hazzard: Merc #1, Marvel Saga #11, The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition #11-12, Psi-Force #1, Richie Rich #219, Son of Ambush Bug #4-6, Super Powers Vol. 3 #2, Uncanny X-Men #210, X-Factor #9, and more!

“Transcripts” Alpha Flight, Big Trouble in Little China, Captain America, Cracked, DC Comics, G.I. Joe, Marvel Comics, New Universe, Pac-Man, Spider-Man, Super Powers, Wolverine, X-Factor, X-Men, Atari, Maximum Overdrive, Movies, Music, Q*bert, Superman, Video Games, Comic Reader Résumé