"Circus Jerk."

Flushed with throwing a hundred bucks against the back wall for dollar bin comics at Burbank's excellent House of Secrets I indulged the awful bad thing within me –– I pushed it. I fed the maw of the oven of the belly of the beast. As Ezra Pound says, "I over-egged the cake-mix."

I had the dumb idea.

We were coming back from walking in Griffith Park at sundown, and I said to wife, I feel like some freshly squeezed orange juice and some Thai veggie burgers, shall we go to Silverlake Trader Joes? Fine, she says, and off we go over the Shakespeare Bridge & down St. George & Hyperion &c. &c.

Then when we're out I say, "Now since we're right by Circus of Books, can we just drop by & I'll pick up this one dollar book I hid there yesterday?"

I'd been in there yesterday, using up quite useless time. As God Is My Co-Pilot called it, "Getting Out of Boring Time Biting Into Boring Pie." I'd gone to see Deadpool the movie at the Vista cinema  at its first matinee showing, but it wasn't on at 1:30 because a film crew was there making some no doubt spangled production. Some helpful son of a bitch on the crew says to me, "Deadpool'll be on at three." I amazingly took him for an authority. An expert on the subject of things in reality.

I didn't realize then that he was a master of deception.

The Lords of Life, the Lords of Life

So I characteristically drifted off to the Goodwill on Hollywood Boulevard & vaporized time there among the crazies screaming in the aisles. I picked up a Jimmy Webb LP, that I obviously didn't need, a copy of Interview from the early Nineties with nude photos of Drew Barrymore, and a first edition of The Body Artist by Don DeLillo. What the fuck, right? I might even read it. Then I had the terrific idea to pop over to Circus of Books to look through the comics there.

I had the dumb idea.

I found nothing of particular interest except for a Legion of Superheroes annual I already have, but it's in storage in Oxford, England. I had no "cash money" on me and assumed I couldn't pay with the card, so I rather mindlessly put it at the back of one of the longboxes and walked away.

Next day, almost inevitably, the siren call of this VG/Good copy of an old Legion annual from the Nineties was so great I compelled my wife to drive through the intricate and tortuous roadways around Circus of Books, those bridges and tunnels and impossible triangles, compelled her to park opposite the hobo jungle across Sunset from Circus of Books.

I flew across Sunset to get the comic, and of course the shop was shut, with the familiar sign promising the shop staff would be back at 7. I crossed Sunset again and got into our car, causing my wife to jump in terror. "Fuck Circus of Books!" I remarked. Tried to mitigate my shame. "They're shutting down imminently," I said.
"Good," said my wife. "I'm going to phone them up and ask them to close down tomorrow."
"You should." I said. "You should! Fucking Circus!"

Then as we were backing away to drive home, I saw the place had opened up. Saw a punter push the door inward. Wife rolled her eyes. We re-parked in front of the hobo jungle and I ran across Sunset to Circus of Books again.

In there, I was rushing through the longboxes, instantly aware that the Legion annual was not where I'd left it yesterday. A fatuous panic took over me. Thoughts of wife fuming outside the hobo jungle  were combined with a very specific self-awareness/self-loathing that only comes over me when I am rooting through the dollar bins at Circus of Books, and it quite overwhelmed me. I had a nervous mental breakdown of sorts.

Circus of Books is actually a gay "bookshop." I have never stepped past the front of the shop, beyond where the comics dollar boxes are. I don't know what is back there. Pete Kline went back there once and came out quite wild-eyed and muted. But on this day, a gaggle of Latina schoolgirls were gathered, talking about school with each other. I was puzzled, abstractly, as I flailed and lashed about me, looking for the Legion annual.  After about five minutes, my Circus of Books self-hatred being too intense to endure, I fled the shop in disgust and ran across Sunset for the sixth time.

There must be a name for this. Getting into the car for the umpteenth time I  said to my wife, trying to pre-empt her harsh words, "Circus of Books is a circus of jerks –– and I'm the clown!"

"Hickman's Beyonders–– No Prize Sought."

Is this Jonathan Hickman, or Aron, the "Rogue Watcher" (FF #330)?

1. General Remarks.

Hickman's Secret Wars was, finally, not equal to the often excellent (and lengthy) build-up to it that he wrote quite meticulously across two Avengers titles. (With a dismissive wave of the hand I discount that third, inferior title with Sunspot and Cannonball. Yes: two of the least interesting members of the New Mutants are now significant Avengers. Do you remember Fallen Angels? With the mutant lobsters. Yeah that's the one. That was the last time that Sunspot was an interesting character.

Although, remember that issue –– Brett Blevins drew it –– where he was a future fascist capitalist? Good times. As for Cannonball, he hasn't been interesting since Bill Sienkewicz stopped drawing him as an ungainly Southern stringbean with a long thin rectangular head.)

It were to be wished that Secret Wars had actually had scenes equal to its covers, where all the villains and heroes were in space or on a battlefield running harum-scarum at each other, fists  pumping and raised and shouting, "spiked breast to spiked breast". Like, in fact, Jim Shooter's original, and routinely maligned, toy–plug ("pig-fuck") –fest Secret Wars.

It were further to be wished that the superheroes had all been the actual versions of themselves, instead of (for the better part) nebulous and minor What If? alternate universe versions of themselves. Only purists (I count myself one, admittedly) care about the What If? universes. Instead one was left always wondering, "Are these the real versions of Galactus, Mr. Sinister, Apocalypse, or are they cheap knock-offs?" What was Galactus doing anyway the whole while –– wasn't he just a glorified light fixture? A garden ornament even.

You wondered if something more interesting was happening in a spin-off you weren't reading.

They should have set out, at least, who was who and from which universe. And: why would Doom from Universe 616 have brought back all these marginal footnote types, and not the real (sorry, "real") people from his own universe? Did Doom (and Doctor Strange) actually sit down and say, "Okay let's have a Steve Rogers from the nineteenth-century wild west, a Spider-Man who married Mary Jane Watson, "... &c. Unlikely scenario to imagine! And if they did, surely all these characters were mere phantasms  –– mere vapor –– and not worthy of our attention.

They'd have said, "Let's get the guys from our own universe. Love 'em or hate 'em they're still our guys." Like in the original Secret Wars, when Wolverine famously said of Cyclops, "He may be a jerk, but he's our jerk." Doom and Dr. Strange would have said,"They're all jerks but they're our jerks."

I'll concede that he would have excluded Reed Richards.

2. Questions of Influence and Precedence. 

A. A rather dry point this, perhaps, made from deep in the dry diggings of an academic's carrel, –– noting an antecedent for the denouement of Secret Wars (2015). In #9 (January 2016) Hickman had everything turn on Doctor Doom's reluctant admission of his error: to concede, indeed, that he is not Reed Richards's equal.

This convinces the Molecule Man to stop bankrolling Doom's illusory (and never very well explained) Battleworld, his garden of unearthly delights. Molecule Man –– a notorious flip-flopper –– now backs Reed Richards, and they recreate the Marvel Universe (no longer numbered 616 apparently), a task for which they are apparently considered eminently qualified. Sue, Reed and the kids are written out of the story for a spell, because they are not popular with readers.

I wonder if Marvel (presumably via Hickman, the one man qualified to do it) is going to explain all the peculiarities of continuity that this whole protracted fiasco was brimming with. Most obviously, Bendis's big hash of everything, Ultimate End. There are a plethora of smaller (although actually cosmic) inconsistencies, if you go back to the exacting standards of Gruenwald in Quasar (the Bible). For one: the Living Tribunal does not have a "body" that is actually him, cf Gruenwald's dimension of forms, where Eternity, Galactus and Celestials borrow bodies for various purposes. Ergo these scenes of his "corpse" on the moon are problem blunders –– I say nothing here of the Orb of all people (why not Paste Pot Pete?) shooting the Watcher on the Moon.

Anyway, the Dr. Doom self-criticism/self-doubt motif scene echoes a comic I read today with great delight, Fantastic Four Annual #20, written by Englehart. I consider Englehart's phase on Fantastic Four as one of the impeccable runs. Some issues are drawn by John Buscema and inked by Joe Sinnott, for crying out loud. Also, Englehart must be one of the few writers to be able to script Ben Grimm without veering variously into repetition, bathos and cliche. Englehart managed to craft a sort of Hamlet out of the Thing. It was also obviously a run Hickman was well aware of as he wrote Secret Wars (2015) since it is here that the subject of the Beyonoders is first properly invigorated.

The Fantastic Four (sans Reed and Sue, NB) search for the Beyonders, with Doctor Doom in tow, and this leads to the jaw-dropping #319, where it is revealed that the Beyonder was just another cosmic cube granted sentience. Nice scene of the Shaper of Worlds –– that fan favorite.

In Annual #20, Englehart includes the crux of the identity war between Dr. Doom and Kristoff Vernard. You will remember that in the celebrated and lengthy and justly–considered classic John Byrne run on Fantastic Four that preceded Englehart's, Doom had quite forcibly implanted all of his memories and brainwaves (... or something...) into the malleable brain of a small peasant boy. In the event Doom should die, this was one of his wacko failsafes for his mind to survive. A somewhat hollow victory over the Great Leveler, I'd say. Like Mr. Sinister, continually cloning himself at every turn, each time gaining less from the transaction. A faded xerox of his own bad self.  This backfired when Doom came back from the dead in a Secret Wars II spin–off story (below). Doom's copy and the original begin to be confused –– primarily by the faithful Doombots, who are attuned to the exact readings of Doom's brainwaves.

When they meet, Doom inadvisedly makes a rare admission of failure aloud –– in this case, conceding that he cannot trust anyone –– which confession convinces the Doombots standing about that Kristoff is in fact the real Doom, since Doom, that vainglorious man, would never admit to a shortcoming. As the OHOTMU Update '89 puts it, "the real Doctor Doom admitted to a human weakness –– his inability to trust Franklin to defeat Mephisto in combat" (#2, August 1989, 33).

Weird moment of public introspection. 

Poorly-chosen time to have a public bout of self-doubt, Doom old mate!

These poor guys are shattered –– their world has caved in on them!! They've lost faith.

N.B. This is also before the word "Doombot" came into common parlance.

Now it seems everybody uses the word willy-nilly.
I feel like John Byrne, who hated people calling Captain America "Cap". 

Do you remember the late 80s, when people really didn't know which was the real Doctor Doom?

It was a world of illusions and mirages.

There's a great bit at the end, indicative of Reed Richard's suave, casual superiority to everybody really, when he just matter-of-factly says to Kristoff, "I don't suppose it would do any good to tell you once more that you're not Doctor Doom!" 

In the next issue in continuity (#306 –– drawn by Buscema and Sinnott) Reed remarks to Medusa, in a moment of uncharacteristic, unguarded pique, "very frankly, I've had enough of people with mental problems." That's it in a nutshell. Reed Richards is sane, Doom isn't. 

And yet it is worth noting –– and this was a good move by Hickman –– that the only person equal to the supreme threat of the Beyonders (hinted at ominously but never seen in Englehart's FF run) was that same wily nutcase Fiktor Fon Doom. 

Those issues of the Avengers were marvelous weren't they –– real authentic classic gold –– Steve Rogers and Tony Stark brawling knockdown and drag-out on the burning Earth –– too lost in their cage-match M.A.D. mutual hatred to even care about their home planet dying around them!

I am curious to know, in the post-Secret Wars continuity: how exactly are these the same people? Did Reed Richards, Franklin Richards, Molecule Man et al re-create the Marvel Universe #616 (number retired) faithfully, to the last quark? How can it be done? (Dan Slott asked the same question well in the Silver Surfer "Last Days" issues.) Does the current post–Secret Wars [2015] continuity's Steve Rogers have a vivid and pulsating memory of that last sturm und drang deathmatch with Tony Stark, or has it been diplomatically erased by the genteel Dr. Richards? 

I am unavoidably reminded of when Sise-Neg destroyed everything in existence and made it all again (Marvel Premiere #14, March 1974), and then Thanos did the same (Marvel: The End limited series, 2003). It never sits well with us –– is this really the same universe?, or are these people mere marionettes, facsimiles of their former selves? 

(It is worth remembering none of this is real.)

And yet––

And yet!

B. Aside from forcing your  memories and brainwaves onto a peasant boy, another useful methodology of avoiding death is depicted in the Secret Wars II crossover.

On this occasion, Doom, in the thick of battle with Terrax the Tamer, switches minds with a bystander seconds before his physical shell is obliterated by a plummeting fireball. He learnt this interesting party trick way back in continuity from the "Ovoids" (#10).  John Byrne liked to go back to the source –– a good thing we should all do more often.

Anyway, in the course of the story Doom –– by necromantic means at his disposal –– summons "the greatest power in existence" to compel it –– rather rudely –– to re-create his original body and transfer his brain into it. This being turns out to be our omnipresent, omniscient friend The Beyonder.

The Beyonder and Doom do not recognize each other. How can it be?, wonders Reed Richards –– magically echoing the thoughts reverberating in our own heads –– since, like us, he clearly witnessed the events of the first Secret Wars series, lovingly drawn by Mike Zeck. Nothing daunted by a conundrum or mind-teaser, Richards then brilliantly hypothesizes "how it was done."

Reed Richards, in more innocent times, speaks of "true bodies" –– as does Doom.

They hadn't been destroyed and reconstituted countless times by Thanos and Jim Starlin yet. 

You want to interject –– "Why were you so keen on having Doom there, but not Doctor Strange? Or  Daredevil? Or say, Madcap, or –– the Hobgoblin? He would have been good.Who cared if the Wrecking Crew, those serial rapists, were there or not? 

2018 Update.  Like most of my readers, I never reached the bottom of this article. Only rereading it now do I notice this. My final point –– I believe–– was that  in Hickman's new Secret Wars Doom defeats the Beyonders for the same reason: they do not have power over Time. 

This inevitably makes you wonder to a groaning void why the innumerable time-travellers in Marvel continuity, from Kang and Immortus to the lowly Zarkko and the mullet–headed X-Man Bishop –– heck, gosh, even Deadpool time-travels –– have mastered this interesting art, and not the supremely powerful Beyonders. 

It also makes you wonder why Kang/Immortus couldn't have seized the moment –– if at this point you can speak of "moments" with any degree of conviction! –– and taken over Mayfair and Park Lane with hotels on both.

THE END?

("When you see the end in sight

The beginning may arrive."

MONKEES.)

"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.

"Bad Patterer." Or, "Burnt By Bendis –– Again."

Last night Aaron Sorkin was on Charlie Rose promoting his Steve Jobs film. He had a stammering fit. He actually had epilepsy I believe. He had a "special" meltdown. He had a hoedown in his mouth.

All the while Charlie and Danny Boyle were extolling his hyper-real signature style ( –– they thought it was a good thing for society), which was (they said) a heightened simulacrum of naturalism. "Dialogue as action scenes," Danny Boyle gushed. "We edit out all glottal pauses," Sorkin stuttered. "Our characters don't have time to breathe."

Then Charlie had to give him the Heimlich maneuver.

The perfect image of the state of the art of writing: inarticulate writers fantasizing the illusion of themselves as drawing room wits.

I was, meanwhile, lying on my back on the floor half-heartedly doing crunches, as I always do through Charlie Rose, and I said to my wife, "That's just what I was saying was the problem with these two new comics."

I referred to the reboots of IRON MAN and SPIDER-MAN (Slott and Bendis the culprits respectively). Perhaps my malaise with this sort of writing is generational and people born after me have a facile love of this superficial sort of Hollywood wisecracking.

Nothing happens in either book. They are each of them long, dull, conceited, badly-done masturbation before their last panels, so bombastic witticisms (which NB they are not) is all the "action" you get. 

In Iron Man Tony "Starks" goes on a date and tries to make his dinner date's flesh creep with the super-power of sheer smarm. His dinner date, it turns out, is not sickened by him. Being a creation of BENDIS ( –– I accidentally wrote "BENIS" ––) she is as much of a Mary Sue as he is.

You would think that after the upside-down fudge cone Bendis made of the "ongoing" Ultimate Universe Secret Wars book (which has mysteriously disappeared from our shelves in a flurry of unanimous bad reviews) Marvel would hesitate before giving him more prime property to rend a poor fist from.

Not the case. Somebody up there seems to like Benis.
There is a dwarf star up there shaped like Bendis. 

The new Doctor Strange comic reinvents the title character (who had a well–crafted aloofness in Lee and Ditko's early stories and then particularly in the Englehart/Colan phase) as Tony Stark in Greenwich Village. 

I can imagine the rationale: "They both have black hair and moustaches after all. And Iron Man is really popular now. At least his films are."

(They don't know whether to draw Iron Man to have him look like Robert Downey Junior or not. So you get what you always did, a vague man with a moustache.)

Poor trivialization of Doctor Strange. Maybe they decided that Hickman took the characters to their logical end when the 616 universe burnt to cinders in the last panels of Avengers #44, and henceforth they can be recast as tween-YA burlesques of themselves.

Mary Sues abound in Slott's Spider-Man too. Slott seems to have forgotten that comics are meant to have a plot, not to be one long dream-fulfilment phantasy. Stan Lee, peeved at society's mistreatment of himself, originally imagined Peter Parker as a downtrodden omega male who revenged himself through violence. (Like the Punisher.) Slott, writing in 2015, has fantasies of being a benevolent charity worker. His fixation with charitable organizations is quite extraordinary. Perhaps he has forgotten he is writing a comic book. Slott wants to show Peter Parker's benevolence and liberalism and piousness in as many scenarios as possible. It's like listening to a pledge drive. In one panel, Parker says, "I've capped my salary at middle management level. As long as my pracices are keeping profits down I just can't justify paying myself more than my junior execs. Next question?"

Next question: What does $5.99 for a comic book get you these days? I might as well have given it to NPR.

Stan Lee, it hardly need be said, embedded scores of flaws, not all pleasant to admit, into Peter Parker and made it into a great narrative. This generation of writers has lost sight of that, the beautiful flaws of mankind, and so these comics are wish-fulfilment fantasies by squat bald men. Apparently they dream of being popular and benevolent. Scott's Silver Surfer is the same: the title character sails across the known cosmos with a comic nerd's fantasy girlfriend on the end of his surfboard, spouting precious stuff. I'd be furious if I didn't fancy the character ("Dawn Greenwood") so much myself. 

In his latest reboot Spider-Man sings with auto-tune as he flirts with Mockingbird, til you wish he would please stop. Compare to the ghastly scene of the female lesbian Captain America doing a dance and taking a selfie on the moon in the new Avengers #0.

Spider-Man next starts up a charitable institution.

He simpers benevolently at his own progressiveness at a same sex wedding.

I also have a sinking feeling that the artists have been expressly asked if they would make Peter Parker look like Timothy Olyphant.

You might wonder why I bought these comics, knowing as I do (and I learned it hard) the bad tendencies of both writers. Head in hands I reply that I had pathetically sought some insider dirt as to how Secret Wars ends, since Marvel has bollixed the release dates of Secret Wars and are this week publishing books that take place after Secret Wars in continuity. 

The answer is that nothing has happened. Marvel has summarily frittered away any narrative tension Secret Wars might have had. Without telling us how Secret Wars ends, Marvel has killed any dramatic uncertainty by emphasizing conclusively that after the excellent aberration of Hickman's last run on two Avengers titles, we are now resolutely back dead-center and neck deep in the Bendis-Slott-verse.

"Cable: Still Ill (Touch Me I'm Sick)."

I read another iteration of that thrice-doomed title X-Force, this one by Simon Spurrier. I had some hopes for it because his Legacy title was a surprise hit –– for me. Dunno how the hell it did in wider comixville.

This one's not so not-ungood. Partially it's because there is nothing left to be said with the mean, dried crusts and funeral meats left behind of that character Psylocke. In truth Betsy Braddock was pretty much used-up and burnt-out by the time Alan Moore had finished with her, but still in came Chris Claremont with a patent Mary-Sue hard-on for her and further exhausted the character. He had a Beckett-like grim tenacity. "Nothing left to do. Nothing to say. I can't go on. I'll go on." He made her Japanese for reasons presumably his own and psychosexual in nature.

What can you do with a girl like Psylocke? 

(I miswrote her name just then as "Paylock" ––  nearly "Paydirt" –– which I don't suppose is the least bit apt for this boring drain on our resources!) 

Rick Remender did a fair okay job with her on Uncanny X-Force, which was generally a high point in the recent years. That was the last good thing Betsy Braddock was going to do or say on this earthly plane. 

In the next series she did what a lot of boring people do to desperately garner attention. No, she didn't get lots of tattoos. Instead she became flamboyantly bisexual.

As for Cable, all I thought at the end of this first arc was, "Why is Cable always ill?"

"Am I still ill? Oh oh oh oh oh."

This character has been infected with a crippling virus, then he was in a coma, then he was killed, then he –– he has some auto-immune deficiency. He has lupus. In this version he generates a new clone of himself every day because his real ur-self is in a water tank dying day by day.

I'd say that Marvel needs to come up with a scenario where this man Cable is not dead on his feet. All the readerly energy is quite used-up in worrying about the poor guy's health. You read it and in the back of your head is a quiet, inexact anxiety about how much longer he has to live. That doesn't create narrative tension, it creates a dull gnawing tristesse.  Not what fanboys come to the table to have.

I'd say that Marvel needs to do that but what the deuce difference does it make when in a few months they're going to destroy the entire multiverse anyway. None of it matters. We're all going to die. Devil take Cable and his poor health. When the new golden multiverse comes, as it must, praise God inna Jerdan and hallelujah in the highest down to ole Beulah Canaan land, maybe they'll revisit the character with a clean bill of health.

Or at worst a headcold.

"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?

"Hoarders Are Weird."

My wife was telling me a story about somebody who was a chronic hoarder, as I was going through a pile of comics bags and boards separating them into two piles. All the while she was talking about hoarding, I was coolly making these two piles. One pile was of bags and boards where the bags were wide enough that you could fit an average-sized trade paperback inside it. The other pile was for bags and boards that were too narrow to hold a trade paperback and could only hold a single issue of a comicbook (or as the fanboys now term them, a "pamphlet"). When I had finished I put the first pile into a cardboard box so they would be neat and easily available. The other pile, for which I had less time and esteem, I thought I didn't want to waste a box on so I decided in a flash of artistic inspiration to put these bags and boards inside a Trader Joe paper bag. I was influenced in this not so much by the art world as by the Chinese shoe repair people down the street who keep all the shoes they are fixing in brown bags. They can never find your shoes. It's a sort of trademark they have. We will almost certainly lose your shoes. This our personal promise to you.

When my wife had finished her interesting story I took a pause from my industry, as I said putting these bags and boards into two piles according to size, prelude to placing the piles in respectively a box and a paper bag, and as I said I paused from my work to remark:

"Yes. Hoarders are peculiar."