A whole lotta precious lifetime being fatuously wasted by me going on.
Today I get to the bronze age titles that are about as old as I am. Some old Ghost Riders some old Fantastic Fours some old Captain Americas. Son of Satan, Strange Tales featuring our old friend Brother Voodoo. Hmmm. You might reason that these comics are simply by dint of being as old as I am, worth something, but that is a grievous error on your part. You suppose perchance that having stood on the face of this groaning planet for the passage of that much time without being smushed to dust nor having ascended to Heaven, they have innate value. We should treat all old things respectfully, nicht?
Our survey says: WRONG. History concurs with Thoreau: we treat the old too well. These bronze age comics are, because of a slight dog-ear here or a crease or a smudge of smutz there, actually pretty close to fucking worthless –– which is, coincidentally, true of most humanoid people of the same vintage.
Perhaps you were born in 1973 too.
I have lost the criteria to easily dismiss a comic as worthless or not. Why, I have to remind myself, do I have all these comics again? How is value determined? Is there a life of the mind?
"Does the race of man love a Lord?"
Take for instance for example: there are issues I have never read, so I have no knowledge of their contents. I hang on to them, I know not why. Let us look at them and evaluate them anew with the fresh eyes of a newborn babe in arms. This was precisely what I was doing when I got to this comic:
Trying to take its measure I was frozen for a moment. "What exactly the Hell is happening here?" I thought. At first it's such a generic Seventies Fantastic Four cover that it bypasses the conscious medulla, phases right through your transparent eyeballs and out the back of your head without engaging your brainpan let alone your third eye.
I was so perplexed that I turned to my wife, held the cover up, and asked "What is going on here?"
My wife does not read comics. My wife, it might reasonably be said, hates comics.
I shook my head, squinted and looked again. "Naow what exactly the ding-dong HADES is going on here?" There is none of the usual hyperbolic text of a Marvel comic –– it's solemnly silent, as though the events depicted are enigmatic truths we hold self-evident to quote the justly admired author of the Declaration, whose name need not be evoked here today.
It is a moment –– a scene –– a split second when everybody is busy doing something, but none of it is very significant. The Thing is lifting up a space hopper (or as he might term it, a "doohickey"), Sue Storm is demonstrating her force field, and Reed Richards is performing his celebrated elasticity. No sign of Johnny Storm on the cover of this funnybook but I think we'll survive. I think we'll be all right.
Only by looking closely do you notice that they appear to be fighting Skrulls on the cover. That poor bum struggling and failing to control a space hopper is the only identifiable figure on the cover, and he is tiny:
Who honestly hears that the enemy du jour is the Skrulls and thinks, "Oh cool, we're in for a great story today."
(Still Bendis thought it was a great idea for a crossover event.)
I am reminded of a conversation I once had with my learned colleague Kristian Moen, about who was the best super-villain in the Marvel pantheon?, and at around 3AM he left me an answer phone message seemingly following hours of intense reflection, to determine that the best villain of them all is the Puppet Master.
Who are these people who like the boring characters?
The general boringness of the Skrulls might very well explain why there is no colourful blurb on the cover indeed. What are they going to say, after all? "Hey kids. Got Skrulls."
A few issues later I turned up this cover:
Now what? A tyrannosaurus is all you have? And a poorly drawn one at that. It looks more like Spider-Man's erstwhile Manbat-style opponent, The Lizard. That one-armed bore! And so what if Thing has to fight it? Surely he's strong enough that he could quite easily break its skull in twain? The man can lift whole buildings up, are we to suppose he cannot break the sensitive jawbone of a dinosaur? Dinosaurs are no more terrible than a mugger with a mohican in a wifebeater, or a thug in a cloth cap with a cosh, or a purple minor demon in a crowded Hell scene. And if not? –– dare I say it –– who honestly cares if that dinosaur's jaws against all odds clamp down and cut clean through Ben Grimm's rocky hide and slice through his internal organs? They've killed off Reed, they've killed off Johnny, it's about time they killed off the Thing.
(They did kill him off one time, I remembered, and the Fantastic Four went to Heaven to get him back. God looked like Jack Kirby. That whole arc must surely have been sheepishly whitewashed out of continuity. It's like something that would happen in a DC comic! One written by J.M. DeMatteis –– or Kevin Smith.)
It's like with Wolverine. He became so boring even the comics company that owned the rights to him, that made money off him and viewed him as a beloved and vacant cash-cow, decided to kill him off. (Now after a dignified few years, a Golden Age without Wolverine, they are bringing him back, and almost immediately he is fogging up our airwaves with his boring routine. If I was to write Wolverine I would:
1. give him a haircut. Make him dress like Clark Kent.
2. make him give up booze and tobacco.
3. insist on better elocution. Make him speak like Clark Kent.
4. establish an absolute ban on the repetition of trite phrases, particularly those fostered in the first instance by one Mr. Christopher Claremont.
5. rename him "Clark Kent." )
One more FF cover before we go. It has gotten dark outside while I sat here writing this and there are still comics to be filtered and perhaps destroyed.
I fantasize more and more about driving them to the tip. Why go through all the hardships to sell them in Notting Hill or elsewhere.
Anybody want to make an offer on six longboxes of comicbooks?
Here's the cover:
Ooh, you think. Goody goody, you think. Finally, you might suppose, we are going to vicariously look over the proverbial shoulder of the "FF" as they tangle with a proper cosmic A–Lister, not some Skrulls or a dinosaur but none other than the being Damian Morgan calls "Galacticus". But then you would sadly squint again and look closer at Galactus's face:
Is that really Galactus? It looks more like Rodney Dangerfield! What's going on with his face? He looks like a used car salesman. They say (at least they did, once) that Galactus, not having a "body" as we understand it, takes on the appearance of whatever race is looking at him. Thus when the broccoli people that Dark Phoenix destroyed looked at him, they would have seen a sprig of broccoli dressed as Galactus. And when Skrulls look at Galactus, they see a giant Skrull dressed as Galactus. Then they yawn in open boredom because the sight of Skrulls make us all tired and sleepy and also somehow urgently suicidal, such is the sheer ennui, even when they are cosmic beings that can eat whole planetoids.
Anyone else familiar with those great issues of Quasar where Mark Gruenwald spelt out how cosmic beings hire bodies for appearances in the tedious temporal realm? Those great issues that every hack writer at Marvel ever since has singularly ignored?
Well I hope you have enjoyed this trip down Memory Lane with me.
