"A Review."
Do you remember how great they were, the good old days of gold?
GONE GONE GONE GONE
Everyone worth a damn is dead.
I was reading the trade paperback Absolute Vision Volume Two. I had taken it out at Los Feliz Library for an obscene tract of time without even picking it up. Indeed I had a wedge of comics trades from the library and they kept going overdue without being read. Waste of energy. I'd had the Kirby Captain America Omnibus out, & had tried reading Kirby's wacko Bicentennial Captain America. Whoever said that his scripting powers were weak was not wrong. I had also read some truly trite stuff from the pen of Rascally ("Radically Overrated") Roy Thomas.
Then I'd elected to order everything Mark Gruenwald, Roger Stern or Tom De Falco wrote or Al Milgrom drew, and so ended up with among other things a heap of 400-page Avengers trades. Hard going with the best will in the world! The library is having a promotion this week where you can return overdue books before Valentine's Day without incurring the fine, so I cynically kept the books out over their return date and have been scrambling madly to read them.
Boring backstory –– all right. Now you're up to date. All right. Go.
This trade's quite good. It'll reward the time you take to read it –– if you read it in the bath. It has a couple of interesting peculiarities. One is Joe Sinnott, probably the greatest inker of all time (him or Tom Palmer), inking the great Carmine Infantino (#244). Talk about your Marvel/DC crossovers.This is like when the Joker teamed up with the Shaper of Worlds!
I like looking at the Avengers through the warped beautiful colored lenses of die Flash-Welt. Now imagine Curt Swan drawing Deadpool –– JR Jr. drawing Night Force. –– Ramona Fradon drawing Franken-Castle.
Carmine Infantino drew a stray number of Captain America too, in the 250s I believe [#245 –– Ed.]. Also an issue of Marvel Team-Up with Power Man and Iron Fist teaming up with the Hulk (#105). Too bad it's as dull as dishwater! I bought it in Chicago and was disappointed. What can you do with the Hulk –– or Luke Cage really. Hard sell. Tough job. Iron Fist should be easy, because his costume is so great, but he's been mishandled systematically, by crude blunderers and poor masons and I quite deliberately include the Ed Brubaker iteration in my thoughts when I make that bold remark.
Come on people.
Pick it up folks.
Write a good Iron Fist.
Make a great mousetrap!
I like these people in the sorcerous fog. Something mystical in Carmine's style. You read those first numbers of Spider-Woman he drew? Yeah me too. Decades before Bendis stepped in and did what he does effortlessly, id est, fuck it all up beyond recognition or repair. Great characters. Real Dick Tracy grotesques. Gypsy Moth, Daddy Longlegs, The Needle, the Brothers Grimm.
Elsewhere in the same volume, in a pretty silly story from an annual (that's a license to write a dumb story right there: an annual), you get John Byrne inking Steve Ditko. Amazing team-up of two maverick bastards. Whose style will prevail? Which man was the more obstinate nutcase?! It's a weird hybrid. Byrne is in his thick-line rush-job incarnation. The ego of Byrne necessitates his general swamping Ditko's style, but occasionally the Ditko hand shines through.
Poor old Reed Richards. That purple goo is made of the Hulk's old pants!
Hank Pym is used to this sort of humiliation of course.
Ditko –– or Byrne? You be the judge.
Who is the "auteur"?
See: http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=40310
Classic Kirby fever-dream, Ditko/Byrne style.
Arnim Zola has these birds trained to carry pills they bury and then out of the earth come Hulk clones. Had Roger Stern been ingesting some of these pills we wonder, when he wrote this annual?
Well worth seeing dude! It'd still be dull work at the office, however, boring past all countenancing in fact, given that the threat at hand is a bunch of clones of the Hulk, but fortunately the Nazi sicko fuck behind the boring clones is that magnificent twisto with a tiny camera for a head and a TV screen where his thorax should be: Arnim Zola. Some good shots of Zola in what appears to be a room made of dripping flesh –– or strawberry ice-cream.
When Hank Pym and Reed Richards get swallowed up by a blob of goo that was previously a pair of the Hulk's purple shorts, you must needs concur with Captain America when he says,"Only one man could have devised something this devilish! ZOLA!! SHOW YOURSELF!"
(He actually said "Only one man could have devised something so deeply ravaged and severely fucked up!" but Marvel couldn't print that at the time.)
What else –– the overarching "arc" to these two volumes is a real inverted wet fart of a yarn about Vision taking over the world –– and then not doing so. He is talked out of it. Common sense prevails. Thanks for resisting the bad urge, "Vizh," but it don't make for one hell of a story! Still, you get a core bullpen of Roger Stern, Al Milgrom & Joe Sinnott and Mark Gruenwald editing to boot. Stats like these you can't make up. It's a "dream team"! Sinnott inking Al Milgrom (c.1984–6) is, perhaps, the absolute classic Marvel style done 100% right. How to draw right.
AH FUCK YOU.
Should I note with a bored sigh that these are the issues that tried to introduce that "fan non-favorite" Captain Marvel. She's boring! I'm reminded of a later Kurt Busiek storyline (Avengers Vol. 3) where the Avengers are being criticized from all sides for being racist, but they refuse to inveigle new black members into the roster just for the sake of it. Iron Man was a real stickler on this political nicety, funny to relate. And they had that lame character "Triathlon" (a Scientologist I believe) foisted on them. Remember that storyline. Daring stuff. But what were they thinking of with Captain Marvel's blob of hair? Who is her stylist –– Arnim Zola? Is her hair constructed from a pair of the Hulk's purple plasm pants? Or from the corpse of Zola's "Doughboy"?
Anyway, before I return my copy to Los Feliz Library and blandly flout the overdue charges I'd like to point out, albeit late by thirty-two years, a heinous howler.
On page nine of this story, which is a crossover with a Walt Simonsson-Era Thor epic, that interminable one about that dreary character Malekith the Dark Elf (Dear Malekith: FUCK YOU) and the "Cask of Eternal Winter", there is a scene of a rent-a-mob of "demon hordes" invading downtown Manhattan. Panel five says "Surtur's advance men hack their way past Union Square heading north up Broadway!"
Heh –– I remember Union Square. All out for Strand Books and Roger's Time Machine.
IS THAT SO!
Next panel (page ten, panel 1) we see the "demon horde" heading towards the thin edge of the Flat iron Building, with Madison Square Park to their demon LEFTS. In other words, they are shown heading SOUTH. On Fifth Avenue even! –– not Broadway. Broadway and Fifth cross in the panel, but that crossing is meters AHEAD of the demon horde!When I first read these stories, I lived in Sonning Common, a suburb of Reading, and didn't know the Flat Iron's south side from the back end of the Butts Centre! Who'd have guessed I'd have ended up living in New York for fifteen years, and would have routinely walked up and down Fifth so often I became bored with tracts of it. The supreme dullness between 40th and 25th. I never, I might note, became bored with the zone below the Museum of Sex and above Housing Works.
To win a "No Prize" from Marvel, you have to not only point out the error, you also have to explain it. So I would explain: there were two demons hordes, and while one of them was heading north from Union Square, another was trying a pincer movement by coming down from 34th Street.
Boring story anyway. Any tale where the sheer mass of characters swarming all around is the "threat" is a bore. Like that X-Men "Inferno" story a few years later –– all those demons that rained down on Manhattan, and for what? An unruly mob of louts and rascals is all. Petty criminals on a tear.
Starfox is shown punching one of these demons out –– that's the level of "brute strength" we're dealing with here.
Sad to say Mark Gruenwald, who was editor on this issue, is no longer alive to give me a No Prize. It's sad also because what the world needs right now is a new run of Quasar as written by Mark Gruenwald, which, along with his Captain America, remains one of the great unsung comics of the time.
It's a shame. The whole thing.
The planet –– the times we're in.
Damned pity.
