"Hey Kids. Got Skrulls." Or, "Would You Read This Comic?"

Still going through my comics longboxes, still separating the wheat from the goats. In other words, a whole lotta chaff going on.

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. 

"Doctor Strange and Ms. Marvel Were Angry One Night."

Don't ask me how it happened but I came across this on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c87rtgF5bY

I knew a man in Altadena, CA who was quietly bankrupting his young family, jealously paying real money for virtual "powers" and strategic extras for his Marvel Comics "Contest of Champions" games. Today, after hours sifting through my comics ransacking the longboxes for copies to sell or throw out, googling Daredevil to see what the first appearance of fucking Bushwacker was worth, I was for some reason led awry by that pied piper the Internet into a wholly unanticipated woodland glade around about midnight. The demon bade me view a video on Youtube, a video of Contest of Champions. Having wondered what the fuss was, why our aforementioned friend was so recklessly selling his young family out for transient pleasures in an unreal realm, I looked at the sample game.

My nephew does this habitually. He watches people playing computer games online for hours. It's a generational quirk. To me and my antediluvian pre-reptile skull  that's about as interesting as watching somebody merrily masturbate –– or like tuning in faithfully to watch the colourful halfwits of Gogglebox.  I'd sooner sit down with a fist hatchet and bang holes into my face.

First section features Ms. Marvel beating the shit out of poor old Magneto. It ain't dignified. Personally I say Magneto deserves more reverence than this. He's an old man. He's done his time in the hard scrum. He survived the Holocaust they say –– although they may have to retcon that at some point, like Frank Castle participating in Vietnam. Magneto must be pushing eighty and Frank ain't far behind. It's becoming untenable. So there was that Tea Party lesbian Ms. Marvel punching and kicking an octogenarian Jewish gentleman a Holocaust survivor who also happens to be a mutant. The soundtrack is the dull grunting of a man being ferociously beaten up.

Incidentally, couldn't Magneto simply stop the flow of blood in Ms. Marvel's brain causing her to suffer a haemorrhage? Instead they fling each other about like it was a barfight. With these silly inappropriate actions I am reminded of the Marvel Top Trumps where that lumbering punchdrunk bum Apocalypse can easily beat Dr. Doom. It ain't right. As the late Mark Gruenwald would say, the continuity is lacking. But Trump is in the White House so what can you say, it's a world turned upside down.

All right nobody cares got it. Anyway the second bout is Dr. Strange versus Ms. Marvel and this is where it gets really silly. Doctor Strange, that sophisticated, refined, cerebral, enlightened, purified and very learned scholar of the mystical arts, swaggers into the nuclear wasteland that serves as a smackdown cagematch arena in this heat, and he starts to guess what kicking the shit out of Ms Marvel.

It is not elegant, it is not polite, it is not decent and worst of all it is not plausible. Doctor Strange doesn't classically favour karate kicks in his daily perambulations, especially not on that hard-bitten drunken slattern Carol Danvers. She'd wipe the floor with him all right, that rough hard vulgar brawler that fishwife, if only he couldn't send her to a distant dimension with but the wave of a digit. That digit being the so-called pinkie.

To sum up it was like the Charlie Poole song, "Husband and Wife Were Angry One Night."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub5WxUbc5yc

They should have that playing in the background as the slugfest goes on –– instead of having the weirdly realistic sound of Ms. Marvel grunting while she is being pummeled.

I thought, "Idea for a comic. Doctor Strange in a sick brutal fucking fistfight with Ms. Marvel." I read some dull Wolverine issues from the early Oughts and that was pretty much what you got. Whereas the classic Doc Strange story is the winking acid stoner reveries of the collegiate Roy Thomas––Steve Englehart––Jim Starlin––Mike Ploog set. You know, Doctor Strange talking to toadstools with third eyes. Maybe a punch-up would be nice.

"Strange Panels." (Fantastic Four #296)

"Made–Up Countries Have Got to Go" B/W "Boring Punisher Stories."

The new ("Legacy") Marvel revamps are abroad. Get 'em, get dem "lenticular" covers while you can.  Move the comic back and forth in your hands and squint hard. Ain't it clever. Ain't it a modern day miracle. You'll think a man can fly.  Two images, neither of which is particularly clear.

The Chip Zdarsky "how to draw" variants are pretty funny though. Which variant will be worth more in twenty years? Grown men are speculating in comics shops about this very controversy. Who can tell. Will there be a planet Earth in twenty years?

("Will there be a planet Earth in twenty days?")

I bought a heap of these things and very few seem to move me except towards that veteran feeling called "regret". Also I got a migraine.

I bought the Punisher one, gamely. The Punisher has been going over very old tired ground for a long time now. The mainstream (formerly "616") universe Punisher was always at his most enjoyable when he was going after costumed criminals. Now they are borrowing from the "Max" universe and having him pursue hordes of generic Eastern Europeans and African-American thugs and Middle Eastern terrorists. As "John" Rotten ("Johnny Lydon") would say, "Ooh yes they really turn me on."  The crucial error is that these sort of dull "black-op wetworks" could only be done successfully by Garth Ennis by that mystical magical way that he has.

The apogee of the 616– iteration of Punisher was Remender's "Frankencastle" story. Also some of the Eighties issues by Mike Baron, Chuck Dixon, even Abnett and Lanning if you're interested. If you're still reading. See: the "Eurohit" storyline, drawn by the excellent Dougie Braithwaite, back in 1992. Believe the reprint TPB is out in December just in time for my Christmas present.

Not much more to say about this dull stuff in front of me –– Punisher #218 by the new old numbering –– except for two points:

   1. The "new" Nick Fury is a patent disaster on the scale of one J.J. Binks. Who gets all excited when this guy makes an appearance? Answer: a negative number of human beings. That's right –– we have to raid the Negative Zone just to get people perverse enough that they want to read about this dull man. Trying to inveigle the Ultimates–Universe/Samuel L. Jackson version into the 616 universe by the clumsy means they used –– didn't they end it by putting his eye out purely for cosmetic reasons? –– was patently fudging the story for commercial reasons.

Oh I see.

Marvel is a company that tries to make money.

Marvel is not a radical arts commune forfeiting wealth, giving away art works for free.

Oh okay I got it now.

2.  Made–up countries have got to go.  This issue is full of them. I don't care a groat, a farthing or a goat's fart for all Marvel's imaginary states. "If all Marvel's made-up countries had but one neck." DC is the same. They had a hard-on for stories set in mythical Middle Eastern countries and that was invariably when my eyeballs rolled completely up, flipped over and rolled down my throat in sheer boredom. I required surgery.

There really (really) ought to be only one country in super hero comic books, and it should cover the entire planet and that country would be called America –– if it wasn't actually in fact called "New York City." Okay not that because I like the West Coast Avengers too.

But exclude Brooklyn please. Brooklyn in comics, and conversations about the best egg drop soup in Brooklyn, must go. Also comics set in the British Isles or France. Did you ever read those "Civil War" issues of Fantastic Four where the Thing protested the Registration Act by moving to France? It made you nostalgic for that bad awful thing, an issue of Justice League Europe. The words "nadir of my entire life on this planet Earth" drift to the forefront of my consciousness as I think of it.

I like the made-up countries in G.I. Joe okay as long as Larry Hama is writing it.  I don't mind Latveria, I don't detest Genosha (if it still exists), and I don't object to Wakanda or the Savage Land although it is well known that nothing interesting has happened in either imaginary country –– only 100% pure boring stories happen in Wakanda and the Savage Land.

Except for Kirby's stint on Black Panther.

To sum up today's tirade:  No more imaginary countries.

                                          Marvel ought to bring back the original Nick Fury, notwithstanding he is supposedly currently doing the tedious work of Uatu the Watcher on the Moon (or has Marvel sheepishly elected to forget that farcical "mega-event"and white-out it out of continuity?).

"Overrated Underrated."

                                                          Underground overground
                                                                       Wombling free...

When you are English, and a young man, and with a certain type of tertiary–level education, and you have an older brother who is switched on to with–it sounds, and then besides you have a certain slant to your way of thinking –– and I am, and I was, and I am, and I do, and I do –– you are very apt to veer perversely and deliberately from the main stream, the shining path, the Western Canon constructed by your humdrum peers, and to scramble into the hawthorne bush, and then to blunder on, deeper and thicker, into the most distant darkest precincts of thought.

Which is to say: the young men will always try to out-do each other in being willfully obscure.

I fell so deeply into this delirium, this revery of anti-commercialism, that I began to recoil from anything that was readily available. This bad trait has often led me to good places, of course, and is an instinct that has seen me right as often as it has led me astray. It is manifested even today in my unconscious (or semi-conscious, since here I am writing about them) habits. I will take books out through Los Feliz library and read them in the bath, while I leave neglected on the shelves all those books that I have purposely tracked down and actually bought because I want to read them, because I like them.  Instead I persist in looking for that which I do not have, do not know, do not need to know. It's like watching Real Housewives of Orange Country when I have had the DVDs of the Sabata Trilogy waiting to be watched for over a year.

I have written on a piece of paper and tacked to the top shelf of a bookcase the Thoreau quotation, "READ THE BEST BOOKS FIRST, OR YOU MAY NOT HAVE A CHANCE TO READ THEM ALL." I put it up, knowing it to be excellent good advice, but still from day to day I find myself straying very far from what I am actually excited by, in search of fresh game. Some of the directions this takes me in are patent cul-de-sacs. This is all prologue to a few brief remarks about the Bob Stanley–"curated" Robin Gibb three CD set.

Review #1. Robin Gibb, Saved By The Bell: Collected Works, 1968–1970. 

Which, I been listening to it.  This collects his first solo album, the excellent Robin's Reign, reproduced lovingly in Mono and Stereo versions –– a "deluxe extra" the merits of which have always eluded my understanding, but then I am not a subscriber to Mojo –– and a second disc with out-takes, Italian versions, demos, and interviews.*

It also contains Gibb's "lost classic" Sing Slowly Sisters, an album Bobbin Gibb recorded in some primitive style but never released.  I had read about this lost ana, and being an early Bee Gees cultist, had always wanted a copy.  So some years ago I got my regular bootleg man, one D. Oregon Morgan,  currently residing in northern Sweden they say, to procure a copy for me.  It probably wasn't that hard to track down using the internet, but I was always loath to download torrents for the very bourgeois fear of getting a virus, or I was too timorous and paranoid, afraid I would get arrested for making illegal downloads. Damian scoffed at me and took the "risks" on my behalf.

Boring aside.

I should say that as a preface, like when people say, "Long story short" before telling a story. Before you begin, say "Boring aside:"

Anyway I didn't really listen to the Bob Gibb lost album once I had it –– typical –– so it continued to wobble in the back of my conscious mind as a sort of lost classic. However, I did listen to the copy of the Warner Brothers Album by the Residents Oregon "obtained" for me and it was largely terrible.  Ditto another, unnameable, unmentionable, unreleased album the Residents made before their classic, Meet The Residents.

There should be a name for such crummy disappointments. It's like a Thomas Pynchon novel. You might read about it, read around it, hear it praised by critics who refer breathlessly to the various motifs and the obscure symbols and the erudition, and emit short quotations, and you think, "This sounds like a great book verily." Like Pound in "Moeurs Contemporaines," you'd say "This is a darn'd clever book!"

Then you finally get around to reading it, and it is a gross pronounced disappointment, a pathetic bellyflop from the high diving board into the kiddie pool, and the imaginary book it could have been floats away out of grasp, yet to be realized, never to be manifested at least from the gnarled, withered hand of TOM RUGGLES.

It's a Pynchonian effect. Well, so when Bob Stanley and Rhino Records released this 3CD Bobbin Gibbons set, I took about a year to get round to listening to it, listening to no end of marginal chaff first. Now I have finally listened to it, I thought: "This sounds like Tiny Tim with a metronome covering the Residents' Commercial Album but with the lyrics of Noel Gallagher."

That makes it sound better than it is––
Ach ––

Review Two: Tom DeFalco, Strange Days TPB (Fantastic Four #s 403–416)

As handsome partner to this disappointment, I had had it in my head for years that Tom DeFalco's period writing the Fantastic Four (early–mid Nineties) was a great underrated run. I must have read it in the Oughts in Brooklyn, and still thought so. Were my standards so far lower then? Did I think I could live forever, and so tolerate salt water? So comparatively recently?

Rereading the "run", it is quite urgently bad. DeFalco (or, as Autocorrect aptly calls him, "Deflate") does awful tracts of exposition "concealed" within asinine conversation. He is extremely guilty of writing the Thing as the most wearisome purveyor of stale quips in comicdom –– makes the current (loathsome) Spider-Man or Deadpool, even when he has a bad writer, sound like the late Dorothy Parker of New York City.

                               Even the Thing's team mates –– including that professional lover of all things vacant, 
                                       fun foam and silly string, Johnny Storm, gracious sakes –– are sick of his incessant
                                      nervous wisecracking. They wish he'd lose his rocks and TRUCK off home! (#385)

                             

(#399)

                                        Johnny's sister, "Susie" Richards has no time for Thing's automatic knee-jerk 
                                        need to leaven the moment with an empty comic metaphor. She echoes the late 
                                        Ronald Reagan of California, who said, "Mr. Gorbachev, please tear down 
                                        this stupid ugly heap of bricks!" (#389)    

                                                   Their enemies feel the same way. This is not actually Dr. Doom's 

                                                   "faithful retainer" Boris, it is really Zarkko the Tomorrow Man, a 

                                                    Thor villain thoroughly superseded by Kang and Immortus,  

                                                    presumably using an image "inducer", very like that extremely 

                                                    interesting device used by Nightcrawler of the X-Men. Nevertheless,

                                                    the thought is one universally held. (#398. Zarrko recurs, used well 

                                                    for once, in Dan Jurgen's excellent Thor Volume 3.)

Aron the Renegade Watcher speaks for the many. (#398)

    So say we all. (#399)

This run also features the sensational disappearance of Reed Richards and Doctor Doom for about forty issues. Good call, Tom. Get rid of the most interesting characters to concentrate on the bit parts. Thist allowed DeFalco to develop (however cack-handedly) the interesting character created by that arrogant genius Johnny Byrne: Kristoff Vernard, the twelve-year old boy with the mind of Doctor Doom programmed into his own brain. Englehart continued it in FF and then West Coast Avengers in a storyline where Kristoff and Doom were at war, because it was unclear which one was the authentic Doom. The boring postgraduate in me nods and remarks: Good examination of identity. DeFalco ("Deflate") futzes around with the dregs of it.  

One touch I did like. Every few issues while Reed Richards is absent DeFalco features a panel where the Thing suspends momentarily his dreary wisecracking to indulge in a little revery about how he misses Reed Richards's windbag expositions. I don't know if DeFalco was aware that he kept repeating himself, or if it was a running joke.

(#383)

(#389)

(#398)

(#400)

This was the run after Steve Englehart s excellent few years writing the book. He was physically removed from the title for DeFalco to take over.  Rereading them in sequence, I reaffirmed the greatness of the Englehart run, the interestingness of the Walt Simonsson interregnum, and then the awful rapid decline under DeFalco. Englehart created a character in Silver Surfer afterwards called "Clumsy Foulup" who manages to become the ruler of the Kree Empire through scurrilous talentless ruthlessness, and despite his pronounced ineptitude. This character is generally understood (by the very few people who investigate such matters with such critical scrutiny) (the very few people who care) to be a sort of roman a clef about DeFalco ascending to being Editor-In-Chief at Marvel, as well as the writer on the Fantastic Four.

Why did I ever rate this run? Was it my awful perversity, my appetite for obscurity, creeping up and clouding my better judgement? I was girding myself to make a critical case for Tom DeFalco as a great underrated writer, alongside Larry Hama and Mark Gruenwald, while condemning Frank Miller and even Alan Moore as overrated. I had the thesis in my head. Even wrote down a brief summa. But rereading this, I thought, "This is bad awfulness. What demon possessed me, that I rated it so well?"

I had been looking for copies of the run (second copies, since I have the full run in storage in Oxfordshire even as I sit at my desk in Los Feliz) in Roger's Time Machine, now on Tenth Street. When I went to pay for them, Roger was justifiably aghast. "You're buying them, and passing over issues of the Byrne run?" I lisped faintly, "It's a great underrated run, Roger."

No it isn't. It has some great plot elements if you can abide the diabolical dialogues. These issues featured the heights of the obscure meddling done by that cocksman that old Priapus Nathaniel Richards, his unctuous insinuation that not only was he was the father of Reed Richards, he also fathered Dr. Doom and Kritoff Vernard. This is the storyline where Franklin Richards is transformed from a prating five-year-old to a dynamic alt–future twenty–something (presumably to cash in on Cable and get some of that X-Men money).

Both these rather excessive plot elements were revived to good effect by the good Hickman decades later. It also features the very interesting (if thoroughly botched) Celestial/Watchers war. Still, I bought the trade paperback Strange Days collecting #s 403–416 and it has taken me about 180 "strange days" just to try and read half of it. The book never seems to end. I started it with the naive thought, "This will be a good prologue to rereading the Hickman run." That was almost a year ago.

Not much more to say than that. Did you ever claim something was underrated, and then realize in the tabernacle of your inner soul that you'd overrated it?

* * * * * * * * * * 

Speaking of Bob Stanley, I love to tell the story of the time in the late–mid– Nineties when Laurence Remila and I were in the Spread Eagle, Camden, where we habitually went to drink junk, and snarl and ogle at gurls, and to bait the minor indie rock stars. We'd go from the Mixer to the Dublin Castle to the Eagle. Ash and Menswear and Bob Stanley. We were bugging Bob there then, and I was ker–blunk on Strongbow cider and avowing forcefully that Pussy Galore's Dial M For Motherfucker was the single greatest LP in the known space–time hemisphere. (That might still be true.) "Do you not like it?" I said to BOB with malice. "Rock?! Does it frighten poor Bobby?" I said. "Don't you get it? The rock machine? Don't it turn you on?" I said. "Don't you love to kick out the jams?"

Then (or was it another time) I was swaying in the passage between the bar and the front door leading down to the sort of lounge, cornering Bob to lament anent the sad state of pop and waxing nostalgic about the Manchester band World of Twist. "Zzvat was a good group. Zzzz a good group out uh Manchester! Remember that zong, 'Sons of the Stage.' Good group!, toally vuhgotten by the timezzz. Lost to us forever, helas, sad to say, never to return." Bob Stanley replied, "Actually, they're sitting over there at my table." I squinted over to where he and his cronies sat, the banquette seats in the front side of the pub, and there indeed were several members of World of Twist. And I went, "Oh yeah. So they are. Oh well, they were all right I guess."

Same principle. You get my point, right? Same thing going on.

We love to rate things and overrate them because of our own petty egos. We attach ourselves parasitically to works done by others to elevate ourselves socially in the marketplace and in the boudoir. Like we're the best fucking curators of refined and delicate objects in the world.

Well we're NOT.

* On one interview the Radio 1 deejay –– could be Alan Freeman [It's Brian Matthew –– ed.] –– asks Robin what he's been up to and Robin reveals he's been writing a short story collection. Robin mispronounces the word "Dickensian" and then reveals, in that rarefied noli mi tangere voice, without the crucial sense of his own ridiculousness that marks common mortals, that he is also looking to make a film of his writings. "And again there is the writing of musical scores." The deejay shoots back, with some irony, "Mm. Well, there you go. You can do the lot. You don't paint do you, by any chance?" Unusually astute barb, I thought. Robin obliviously replies, "Well yes I do actually."

"Variant Fever." Or, "Strange Austerity."

Wife lost her job a few days ago; or, as they put it, "the position has been eliminated." We have returned to the old routine of intense anxiety in an uncertain future. "Time to tighten the belt." From Flush Times of Alabama to Hard Times Come Agin in a matter of days.

I was naturally leery of spending any money unduly or frivolously. Still, we driving in Burbank, going as it happens to the recycling centre down there (to avoid the international homelessness conference that is our local recycling centre) and the car, following an absurdly tortuous route, emerged suddenly as if by magic on Olive, next to Tally Rand. We were so near to my regular comic shop that I said, in the voice of a wheedling five year old (that is, my customary voice), "Can we go to the komeeks shop please?"

Wife said I could spend whatever we got from the recycling centre on comic books. We had a couple of sacks full of a) Calpico bottles and b) Original New York Seltzer vanilla cream soda bottles.

We got two dollars exactly for them. 

Chastened, in the comics shop I went straight to the dollar bins at the front of the shop to see what was new. A kind of autistic single-mindedness to my actions. There were some nice old (i.e. 80s) Green Lanterns, one with art by Alex Toth, one drawn by Gil Kane, the rest Joe Staton era stuff. I like Joe Staton –– he's underrated. Picked em up. 

While I was going through the bins, the excellent shopman Eric called across the counter, "Oh, hey, Fabian, you know that Adam Hughes Doctor Strange variant you wanted on Wednesday? Well a copy became available. The customer we saved it for passed on it." 

I came over eagerly, saying, "But how much is it I wonder?'

"I think that was why he passed on it," said Eric. 

Price was $24.99.

I recoiled from the book, albeit with some reluctance.

(How does one recoil with reluctance, sage Kung?)

I made the universal sign of "burnt fingers". 

"Too much for my poor purse I fear" I said with a queasy smile. "My wife just lost her job and we're having to prioritize. Gotta change my whole philosophy." As the shop folk made kind commiserations I went back to the dollar bin. "Austerity."

Anyway I spent about ten dollars there and left. In the car back I recounted what had passed to wife, like it was a tale of great temptation and heroic restraint.  "They had a rare variant of Doctor Strange but I said I couldn't pay for it. I wouldn't do it! Time to rethink things. Austerity measures." 

I sat in silence all the way home, grinding my back teeth to a fine dust.  

When we got in the house, my wife was concerned with something at one end of the apartment and I seized the opportunity. I leapt across the room, grabbed the phone and called the comics shop. Said in a hushed voice, "Eric? You still got that Hughes Doctor Strange variant? Yes? Well set it aside for me  then man could you? Austerity be damned!"  

"Ultron Is Short For Ultra-Boredom."

I've been reading Kurt Busiek's third volume of Avengers. I grew up with the first iteration (#s 1–402) which ended, rather bathetically, in the "Onslaught" campaign (September 1996). How symbolic –– thirty-three years of Avengers (and Fantastic Four) continuity wiped in a mediocre , nebulous X-Men super-saga. Nobody cared. I feel like absolutely everybody started dating beautiful women around that time and lost all interest in comics for the next ten or so years. I know I did.

Volume Three came hot on the heels of that glorious reboot implosion, the silly shit fest that was Volume Two, which lasted a full year and twelve issues only and ended in grievous mortal riotous shame for all concerned.

Volume Three resumed the continuity pretty much as it had been before wunderkind blunderer Rob Liefeld  Franklin Richards had fudged the brand with childish bravado. It had writing by journeyman extraordinary Kurt Busiek that was pretty okay –– at least it was respectful of continuity. You got George Perez drawing it and then Alan Davis. Busiek was if anything a bit of a continuity nerd–Nazi amalgam. Which is a good thing in principle, vide Gruenwald, if not always practice (I tried rereading Avengers Forever recently, which I remembered enjoying, and found it passing boring for the same reasons as I lay out below).

Quite dull going though, partially because of Busiek's wearisome interest in that tortuous and interminable triangle Vision–Scarlet Witch–Wonder Man. The poor android VISION –– how he bleats like a human male. The Young Werther seems like Frank Castle in comparison. Throw in Hank Pym and Ultron and their [JOHNNY ROTTEN voice here] endlessly rewarding father-son relationship and you have an awful vortex of Roy Thomas–inspired dulness.

As for Wonder Man, conceived solely as an inversion of Wonder Woman –– a buh-rilliant legal coup, snatching the copyright on the name before before DC thought of it –– even as a fierce defender of the Englehart/Milgrom run on West Coast Avengers I am hard pushed to explain him. Wonder Man, so named because you wonder why he's here.

Several good writers have come a cropper on the pons asinorum that is the Vision. You ever read that Jonathan Lethem short story about the Vision? Ha. My mother-in-law gave me a Vision bobble-head one Christmas –– that and the Lethem story are the best two things ever to happen involving the Vision. Sad indictment when Jonathan Lethem and my mother-in-law come up with your best moments.

Roy Thomas, that dreadful awful poor bad writer, that rascal, created Vision out of the patent hard-on he had for Golden Age comics.

"Take me back to those dreamy days before Mort Weisinger bullied me in the DC offices."

Ooh, is the Vision the original Human Torch?
Can it be possible?!
Set a spell and let RASCALLY ROY inflict some more gone-but-not-forgotten (by me!) shit upon you, like... the Liberty Legion! Or is Vision driven by the brainwaves of Wonder Man? Is the Grim Reaper his brother? They are always fighting. Is the Whizzer the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's real father? DULL STUFF IN EACH CASE but begad successive writers on the tile love to return to it.

These exhausted questions still hang around like a pungent corpse at the banquet. Dick Remender, when he was burnt out and spazzing urgently and writing badly for a living, revisited the Scarlet Witch / Quicksilver family tree project and rather pointlessly retconned it so that Magneto was now not their father –– again. Although in fairness, perhaps he was robustly compelled to write that by the Disney lawyers for reasons pertaining to the film rights to Pietro & Wanda. I think Mark Waid, who should know better, is wading through this dull matter even as we speak.  Reinvigorating the moribund. The Disney lawyers must have their way.

I say, "Even as we speak," but we're not speaking. I'm writing, and you are –– you are not reading this. Nobody is.

Who cares! I'll continue. Steve Englehart did a stand-up Christlike good job on two limited series of Vision & Scarlet Witch, and then for a while he wrought lilies from the acorn. On West Coast Avengers he had that inspired twist with the twin baby sons of Vision and Scarlet Witch being revealed to be demonic shells, evil illusions of life sucked up to become the hands of Mister Pandemonium.

But even the great STEVE fell too far in sentimental love with the minutiae of the Wanda/Vizh myth –– just like he did with his achilles heel, Mantis. Steve had a Pynchonesque crush on Mantis, like Claremont did with Kitty and Storm (––and Rogue ––and Psylocke), and so kept force-feeding us Mantis well past her expiry date. Like Dan Slott does with the sexy Allred girl in the new run of Silver Surfer. Can Slott be taken off Silver Surfer so that the cute girl ("Dawn Greenwood") can be retconned and we can move on?  Slott is a bad one for nursing awful crushes on his characters.

In my revisiting of the third volume of Avengers, I hit a wall of dulness with a supremely unnecessary one-shot about Ultron written variously by Roger Stern, Steve Englehart, Busiek and (who else) Rascally Roy. Divers hands make a poor fist! This one-shot (ironically called The Ultron Imperative –– since nothing about it is "imperative") is  a hopeless affair but a crystal-clear indictment of what is wrong with Ultron.

Robots, like demons, are nebulous.
"Oh we have to fight hundreds of robot versions of ourselves."
"Oh they have made robot amalgams of us."
(SEE: another boring trend, the amalgam: The Super-Adaptoid, The Super Skrull, DC's Amazo and the so-called Composite Superman.)

Good issues with Ultron:

Secret Wars, when Galactus snuffs him out like a candle.

Daredevil by Ann Nocenti and JR Jr, an Acts of Vengeance tie-in that revolved around the incongruity of Daredevil fighting Ultron. I believe the Inhumans wandered in and managed not to plumb Roy Thomas–level dullness as well. This is because Ann Nocenti is a good writer and JR Jr. was drawing well at the time, not yet high on the fumes of his own raging ego.

West Coast Avengers by Englehart, Milgrom & Sinnott. The "dream team" mentioned in a previous post. I can't remember what exactly they did with boring Ultron but I feel like it was quite good.

The recent film was an all round bad fudge sundae. Red Reddington = Ultron? This was about as riveting as an episode of The Blacklist can be. Also, the damp flatus  that was the "Age of Ultron" round robin circle jerk. Wolverine and Sue Storm stumbling through realities. More mismanagement of time and future outcomes. The only characters who should mess with the weave of the time-space continuum are:

Kang/Immortus
Zaarko (see –– possibly exclusively –– Dan Jurgen's superb run on Thor [Volume Three] where maybe five real-time years of the comic took place in a future that was eventually cancelled)
The Time Variance Authority (led by Mark Gruenwald)
The Time Keepers / Time Twisters

In DC there are more legitimate time travelers; it can be

Brainiac 5 & the orange alien with a beak and big eyes  in the original Legion continuity
Time Trapper
Glorith
Per Degaton
Chronos
Hourman
Rip Hunter (not the shitty TV version NB)
Booster Gold
Black Beetle

All these characters have been involved in interesting time travel stories. Per Degaton is particularly interesting, since DC had a running joke that he would always try to divert from the same moment, and always return to that moment, with the same lines of dialogue &c. The Time Trapper/Superboy/
pocket universe  storyline and then the Glorith/Time Trapper universes in Legion are also exemplary cases of how willfully complex comics can get and still be good.