"In Which I Demand a No Prize."

Absolute Vision Volume Two. Stern, Milgrom, Sinnott. Marvel Comics.

"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.

Incidentally, you can observe in every stroke the powerful influence of Milton Caniff on Carmine Infantino's hand –– just as you can plainly mark it in the "original" style of Stan Lee. Secret history of the Silver Age: it all comes from Steve Canyon. That bombshell is for another time though.

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.

"Inter-Dimensional Overkill: A Review of the Recent Round of Marvel (Non–) Events."

A while ago, after around six years of fevered and uncritical abandon, around the time of the listless, baldly pointless, Marvel Comics come-all-ye known as Fear Itself, I quitted buying comics.

Induced by the sheer Bendisishness badness of the writing, I (who still consider the first Secret Wars a "high water mark of Western culture") had an out of body experience and saw myself, of a Wednesday, stood among the twit team irregulards at the comics racks, queueing up for my weekly dose of ampules.

I saw you queueing at the Gates of Hell
On that day – what were you doing?!

Not long after that, I did the inevitable elementary calculations in my head and realized that I was scheißing away the paltry few nickels and dimes I had, not to mention the second-best years of my life, on what was largely advertising. 


The stacked wads of comics in our railroad apartment were taking over the place, had become a fire hazard. Longboxes accrued, looked like coffins for pre-teens laid out jenga-style. Our "library" had come to look a little like the necropolises of New Orleans or the Mediterranean. I calculated, in my dawning recoil, that a good few hundred feet of that living-space-annihilation was composed of bad advertising.  

I stopped buying comics soon after. Followed an equally fanatical project to replace as many of those comics as possible with the bound collections (preferably the deluxe hardback edition) of the comics, i.e. sans the ads. I shall not speak of that folly, principally because I am still in the middle of it, intoxicated by the heady wine of the moment. 

(I remember reading on the fanboy message boards, one aspirant who was delighted with the hardback omnibus reprints of old comics runs, especially because the reprints included the original letters pages and Bullpen Bulletins. He only wished that in future editions Marvel would reprint the advertisements.)

Enough dull prefacing. Suffice it to say, I no longer buy the comics, I only buy collections. 

Hardly a superior pose, but it saves me a fortune. I have no particular concern about being six months or so "behind" my former brethren, the Wednesday morning clownshoe-wearers. Still, it remains that by not reading individual issues one might (one can) (one does) buy a clunker or two along the way without realising it until too late. I am right glad that I didn't buy the fathomless checklist of individual issues of the Avengers Versus X-Men fiasco, because the cost would have run into the thousands. I am less glad that I forked out even fifty dollars on the large hardcover of this trenchant torrent of tofu-flavoured fudge. "Forewarned is forearmed."

That X-Men farce seemed the last wheeze of the old-style Marvel BYOB–and-won't-ye-stand-in-a-circle epics, though. With their overhaul and reboot ("Marvel Now"), the company seems to be trying to intellectualize their fluffernutter – to sprinkle on some pink rock salt or artisanal red peppercorns.

In Infinity, I noticed with wry, urbane amusement that Wolverine was dispatched early and in a relative instant. A refreshing turn. Throw him out for the general embarrassment he is. I was reminded of that "sublime moment in the literature" (Bakhtin, I believe) when Deathstroke the Terminator floored Wolverine with debonair ease using only a glorified cattle prod (the X-Men/Teen Titans one-shot). Hickman, the author of Infinity, seems to be trying to minimise the recurrence of old tropes (i.e., the ubiquity of Wolverine, Spider-Man). 

This may however be at the cost of some valuable (Mark Gruenwald-era) continuity. For an example, I give you the unexplained panel of Iron Man and the Watcher standing over a catatonic or dead form of the Living Tribunal on the moon – or the whole debacle with resituating the so-called "New Universe" within the Marvel Universe after Gruenwald had done a most serviceable job of it (involving the aforementioned Tribunal) in Quasar in the 1990s.

Poor Mark Gruenwald's Quasar did so much for Marvel's cosmic pantheon, the body of which is now systematically ignored by the new wave of middling writers. 

They must return to their OHOTMUs. 

Further adding the tincture of a scorched earth DC reboot to the proceedings was the remoteness of the villain "Thanos" from his many earlier (often tedious) fracases with the Marvel superheroes. The poor fellow seemed like he'd never met, let alone tangled with, these people before. Thanos of old seemed to have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the arcana of the Marvel Universe. But for Hickman to achieve the requisite level of seriousness (rather dry and humourless) it is necessary to conveniently forget all the knock-down drag-out scrums and skirmishes Thanos gamely participated in over the last twenty-three years. Does Thanos have no recollection of his feud with the Pet Avengers? (He lost.) 

Continuity seems adrift. Babies –– bathwater. What, after all, does Hickman replace the old order with? Chiefly chaff; post-Bendis Mary Sues. Hickman isn't exactly Stan Lee ( – let alone Mark Gruenwald –– ) when it comes to portraying the quotidian existence of the superheroes. Captain America and Thor devolved into ciphers when the films started coming out. The Gruenwald and DeFalco iterations of these  two had individual foibles, replete with both the drama and the humour that comes with such flaws. 

Hickman had a celebrated run on Fantastic Four a few years back, a comic that had previously been a poor earner for the company with the mainstream of hard junk ingesters. To accommodate the droves (never a good move) Hickman and Marvel chose to emphasise family and the sciences. You can imagine the conversation in a meeting. "What's Reed Richards got that the other characters don't?" 
"A one-thousand yard dingaling."
 "Apart from that."
"A wife and kids and a jerk brother-in-law. Plus the Thing." 
"So let's emphasise the kids Christ sake. All the putzes reading comics now are balding family men –– at least they are, if they aren't balding derelicts living in a twilight pocket universe of their own making in their mother's basement. And bald family men like nothing better than to drone on boringly after their kids. Let's appease them with talk about kids and how special and wonderful they are and can be." 
"Kids are great. And these are special kids! These are gifted kids with unusual attributes!"
"Adzactly."
"And when there's a lull in the proceedings we can bring in either Galactus or Doctor Doom. One or the other. The rest writes itself."
"Got it."
"Hickman, you can toddle right along now and write your little funny-book and let the big boys talk."

The sum of the recent Age of Ultron hootenanny, the punchline, was that it was all a prologue to another epic, which would amount to Galactus eating the Ultimate Universe. 

"No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to
Prologue to an egg and butter."

When this non-event happened it was tediously pointed out that the heroes of the Marvel Universe had ruptured the substance of time and space by all their exhaustive and really quite irresponsible rambling through the highways and byways of parallel dimensions. (Have you read the complete run of Exiles comic?) 

This could be taken (by a contemptible cynic) as an analogy for how worn and frayed the patience of the readers has become with the habitual sallying through time as the go-to escape route for the bankrupt writer. 

It is good for us to remember that when DC had its first fully-fledged Crisis of Confidence, they pointedly decided – back in 1985 –– that such inter-dimensional horse-flaying was played out, and they tidily consolidated all their earths into one, like the estimable Arab folding up his pup tent. 

The Science Police banned time-travel henceforth and Brainiac 5 was awful sore. DC has since routinely reneged on this (blame Booster Gold) but it was a noble ideal. 

Marvel seems to have taken another thirty years to deduce the opposite. They reason that the infinite splintering of possible futures is where the money is at. Bendis must have his way with the Silver Age X-Men and who at Marvel could possibly want to stand in the way of the march of Bendis. 

After all phantasies of time travel are fun and idyllic.  Old girlfriends can be returned to us all ship-shape and prelapsarian. Best of all, we can return to a world that predates cellphones and the Internet again––! A world before tedious comics web-logs about time-travel in the entertainment industry. 

What If... I Never Wrote This Article?

I too have enjoyed the time-travel alt-universe trope when it is done well (the aforementioned Booster Gold, Zero Hour, Legion of Super-Heroes passim, Steve Englehart's classic time-travel "arc" in West Coast Avengers, Avengers Forever, Universe X). However a trend is emerging and for better or for ill it would be a desertion of my duty as a citizen not to at least document the trend. 

I thought that the express realpolitik military-industrial corporate argument against such incessant  tampering – the infinite versions of Cable and X-Man, Doctors Richards and Von Doom, Cyclops and Wolverine et al. – was that they alienated the "lay reader" and watered-down the core brand. ("Mother, why is Reed Richards now a bald black man?") Has Marvel abandoned wholly the idea of a "lay reader"? Must we all now have bloated crania like Uatu, the man in the moon, to comprehend these multitudes?  

On the other hand, per the "Ultimates Universe" and the "Heroes Reborn" interregnum (and per DC) Marvel is also not above trying out a reboot of its well-trod myths for a new readership. As we know, these never work and we return eventually to the original continuity. Isn't that what Grant Morrison is supposedly planning, even now, over at DC? A meta-narrative that absorbs all the reboots & makes sense of them? 

And then he shall unravel the Gordian Knot––

Time–travel is fun and nostalgic, but we must be careful not to blunder into the path of our past-selves and cause a rupture. Also, imagine seeing your past self up close, you who hate to hear your voice played back on answer-phone message! 

Imagine if you saw yourself, crudely flirting with the girls. Gulping cider at the bar. 

Last year Laurence Remila and I returned, like old time-travellers returning to the scenes of our best skirmishing. We went to Camden –– visited the Mixer, the Dublin Castle and wound up in the Spread Eagle. It was like walking through a sunken ghost-ship. And we too were revenants, unremarkable to the few revelers who still walked there. Of course, Laurence lives in Paris and I live in New York so we were woefully out of date, but this must be rather how time-travel could be. We ended up drinking a last, strange pint in Kensington –– a pub on Church Street we never once drank ins. It was the only pub still open past midnight. 

What happened to that idea that London pubs were going to be open around the clock?