ANTI-HERO WEEK #1--GOLGO 13

[Yeah, I do theme weeks here. This week (or as many days as I remember to or until I get bored) we look at those guys who aren't quite villains, but damn sure aren't heroes. Yes, this week is all about the good bad guys, or as we call them, the anti-heroes]

OK, I'm going to get this out of the way first. Jog, another member in good standing of The Savage Critics has covered Golgo 13's history and major themes in far more detail and far better than I ever will here, here, and here. In consequence, the following article will be more in the spirit of my personal reading on the character. But I totally urge you to read those two articles.

Golgo 13 is one of the least best-known Japanese properties out there.

Let me explain that.

My first exposure to Golgo 13 was Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode on the NES, which was a real "cult" game, even around the time it came out. Slightly mangled in translation, it was a fairly standard plot involving uber-assassin Golgo 13 sniping, kicking, punching, and generally being awesome as he fights his way through assassins, frogmen, annoying 3D mazes and brains in jars who are also Nazis, pretty much.

It was a demon bastard of a game to finish, let me tell you. But a lot of people who played it have really fond memories of it. Partly because it was a very different style of game than we were used to in those halcyon days of the NES. It's commonplace today, but trust me, restoring your health via packs of cigarettes and casual 8-but sex in between times when you graphically blow someone's brains out . . .yes, all this got left in the game. But they edited out the Nazis. You tell me what it all means.

It had a different tone, if that makes any sense--the plot was complex (convoluted) and the general mood of the game was harsh and brutal. It didn't take long to fail and there was nothing to really blunt the sting of failure. It was juvenile and grown-up in a way that appeals to the pre-teen mind--convinced he's older than he actually is. See also: comics nowadays.

Anyways, that faded into the background and a few years later, just as the whole anime thing was starting to get off the ground in America and I got a hold of The Professional: Golgo 13, which, even for the "anime is like cartoons but EXTREEM" bent of the time . . .again, was a little different.

For one thing, us Americans got an unexpurgated look at Golgo 13 in action and this too, was a revelation. For one thing--it's probably one of the most amoral (if not immoral--man, this movie is downright nasty in ways I didn't know it was possible to be) movies I've seen, and for another, the hero is almost defiantly aloof.

Golgo 13, for the uninitiated, is a character wholly without character. There are certain tics the character has (being near-superhuman in many many ways, chiefly in terms of marksmanship), but read a couple chapters of his manga and you'll notice he's barely there, really. He hardly speaks, we never get a sense of his interior monologue, and in some stories he doesn't show up at all. None of the expected mechanisms by which a writer makes a connection with the character are present.

That absence of character makes him a hard character to know or identify with, and, in fact, I'm not sure that you're supposed to. Most of the Golgo 13 stories I've read focus more on the motives of the people who hire him and the mechanics of the job (Golgo 13 is almost unheard of in that it is both gun porn and physics nut porn at times--few comics will ever explain what's involved in shooting something in the vacuum of space, but this one will) than anything Golgo 13 thinks about it.

I'm fascinated by this storytelling engine--it's at once complex and utterly simplistic. Somehow, a continuing series about a character who is utterly static has lasted 30+ years and doesn't really feel stale Admittedly, reading all 13 volumes released in the past few years in one sitting could be a bit numbing, but then you aren't supposed to--Golgo 13 prides itself on each story being a self-contained unit, there's little continuity between stories.

On the surface, this should be the kind of thing I hate--after all, a character's been around for 30 years with absolutely no change? But the concept succeeds--for me, anyway--with how it plays against my expectations. In how it works around Western expectations of this kind of story (it's worth mentioning here that Golgo 13 began life as something very close to the 60's-era James Bond, but has become something very different) and develops such a unique voice that the voice and the style of the stories are so unique that it's what I, as a reader, respond to.

It shouldn't work, and yet it does.

Next time: DANGER: DIABOLIK

I Read This--JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA ANNUAL #1

Time was, Earth-2 (that parallel Earth where the Justice Society was still fighting crime well into its emeritus years) was one of those things you only really saw during big-time Justice League stories and occasionally when they needed to fill some pages in Adventure Comics. Later on, it was Roy Thomas' personal sandbox, until Crisis happened, and then it became his albatross.

It was a funny fictional conceit when you think about it, because of how many rules that it was able to break, being the alternative to the regular DC continuity. Characters were allowed to age and die and retire, new characters took over from the old . . .it was intriguing stuff, especially when DC really ran with the "legacy hero" stuff in earnest years later.

(As an aside, with Barry Allen and Hal Jordan now walking around for reasons no more or less than writer fiat, I think we can now declare the "Legacy hero" stuff over and done with, yeah?)

Anyways, then Crisis happened. This made a lot of people terribly upset and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Most of said people started writing comics, and, once ensconced in positions of power, began to undermine the new status quo.

But they undermined it piecemeal, and as a result, DC comics, which demands that the reader absolutely, positively comprehend without fail a huge amount of continuity simply to get their heads around what the hell is going on in just one book, has devolved into a hopelessly confusing mess where the creative minds in charge can't even keep things straight on one fictional Earth, never mind 52 of them.

But surely the incredible story potential of this new status quo will justify the haphazard way we got here, right? Surely now that these fans-as-creators have forcibly turned the clock back to where they wanted it (never mind what the people who pay to read this might have wanted) the welter of great stories that will result will justify everything. Won't they?

Won't they hell.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA ANNUAL #1 perfectly distills everything wrong with DC's approach in on $4 package. We begin with the Alex Ross cover. Now that Ross' painting has adopted the "shinier the better" approach, everything is far too bright and the focus of the composition (Power Girl, so happy that she's back home she's moved to tears, which, thanks to Ross' inability to convey subtle emotion, looks twisted and freakish is pretty much lost in the the glare.) How the hell do you make a cover this shiny without a glossy finish?

The actual story begins on rather bad footing--Jerry Ordway, in a sense returning to the start of his career, makes a game effort in rendering this stuff adequately, but he's let down by Geoff Johns' script, which is full of people being mopey and generally sulky about being a superhero.

The story begin and continues as a throughline how sulky the Huntress is (for those of you who came in late--the Earth-2 Huntress is Batman and Catwoman's daughter. This will become important later) because the Joker, in an effort to recreate Two-Face, has thrown acid onto her boyfriend in an effort to make him the new Two-Face in one of those obnoxiously obvious moments DC is notorious for--namely, the Villains showing us They're Not Screwing Around Anymore. 2 pages in, and I'm already rolling my eyes.

While she's moping around, she discovers Power Girl's back, having been thrown there by . . .whatever the hell was going on in JSA proper--it's not important. Upon returning to Earth-2, Power Girl meets the Justice Society Infinity (a gestalt of Infinity Inc. and the Justice Society, who are very helpfully presented as plotese speaking functionaries without personalities or anything that would make you at all interested in learning more about them if you didn't know who they were already.) Hemming and hawing results and generally gets us nowhere interesting and PG and Huntress end up going after the Joker, who's dying and the Huntress wants to kill him because of what he did to her boyfriend and then Power Girl ends up stopping her from killing him and the Joker dies anyway and it all ends up for naught . . .

. . .because in yet another character-speaking-as-infodump moment, has a think for Dick Grayson which is rather squicky (because they're sort of related, kinda) and even that is subordinate to our Big Reveal--there's another Power Girl who's native to Earth-2 and she's back as well and she's really pissed off and she and Power Girl fight, Power Girl runs off and the JSI chases after her.

To be continued in other comics I will not bother to read, presumably.

You know, reading this, I can't imagine why Crisis seemed necessary at the time to clean up a baffling knot of continuity. I just can't see how it would be necessary at all to put all this gobbledygook on the shelf and start fresh so maybe someone without a degree in Advanced Comics would be enticed to read, and maybe even pay for them. Lord, what a mistake it was to throw all of this into the bin.

Look . . .Al Kennedy said it first and best Sunday: "This is comics about other comics." No more, no less. It's a Murray Ward Index with more pictures and seasoned with a pinch of ridiculous ideas straight out of slashfic. We just about let Watchmen get away with this, if only because it was a self-contained metatextual statement that only required you be cognizant of the typical forms of the superhero comic rather than the specifics. If we are this determined that this fanboy notion that Everything Must Fit Together And Not Forgotten (this is distinct from Everything Must Be Consistent), then superhero comics are not only dead, I'll happily dig their graves.

In short--I really did not like this comic very much and would rather I had not bought it or read it.

Way Back When--LEGION OF NIGHT (1991)

If Reese's Peanut Butter Cups taught us anything, it's that two great tastes taste great together. Mind you, his has nothing to do with the following analysis of Legion of Night, it's just an attempt to have a witty lead-in.

Steve Gerber is emblematic of a certain time at Marvel Comics, one in which, even in the bog-standard superhero books, it was more than possible to get away with stories that were weird, completely in their own world, and on occasion, oddly personal. I have (with tongue ever so slightly in cheek) called this the Magical Cocaine Unicorn Party era, as the mythologising of this period, like the early 1970's period of film making in Hollywood, is lionized as a moment when geniuses were allowed to roam free and then the corporations came in and Ruined It For Everyone.

This is, of course, largely nonsense, as both periods, however creative, are more distinguished by rampant self-indulgence more than anything, and a body of work perhaps best justified as being done in-between bong hits or something. Nevertheless, of the writers working back then, Gerber's work is as close to fulfilling the promise of the times than anything else.

Whilce Portacio, on the other hand, is emblematic of another time , a time when artists were in ascendancy at Marvel and their every whim was catered to. Mind you, this still didn't stop Portacio and a number of other hot artists from breaking away to form Image Comics a bit later, which forever excoriated them as money-grubbing primadonnas who left the welcoming arms of Marvel to do their own thing and get a bigger slice of the pie. No, seriously--this is what people were saying.

Thankfully, before all this happened, Gerber and Portacio collaborated on the two-issue miniseries LEGION OF NIGHT, and I'm rather glad they did, because it's certainly a singular piece of work, both for the artist, the writer, and the company itself. In many ways, well before the advent of Marvel's MAX imprint, it's almost a Vertigo book.

It's also going to be damned hard to review, as it's rather . . .elliptical. Let me demonstrate by trying to summarise it. Nominally, the story is this--a cult resurrects Fin Fang Foom (or a demon posing as him, because heaven knows, Fin Fang Foom's reputation must be preserved), who then proceeds to . . .suck the world into his dream, and the world will end if he's awake and also he has to get this girl pregnant, and the nominal "hero" of the book gets shot, stabbed, and takes a header out of a 30-story building and spends the rest of the story being not dead and also turning into Omen, who is the leader of the Legion and generally drives the story forward.

It's . . .very confusing.

Nevertheless, if one is willing to get into the spirit of it, there's an intriguing story here, full of familiar things for the longtime Marvel reader (even moreso if you're a Gerber fan--the Legion is largely made up of supporting characters from various books he's worked on) lover of satire (Gerber has few good things to say on the subject of cults) and the aficionado of generally weird stuff (More than once, the reader is subjected to some very odd and disturbing images, not least Baby Fin Fang Foom) it's helped immeasurably by Portacio's art, which is in full Jim Lee-by-way-of-Bill-Sinkiewicz mode, which gives the whole thing exactly the right kind of edge.

I can't exactly recommend it--it's more a curio than something You Must Read. But it's an interesting, strange artefact of several different times, possessing none of what usually distinguishes either creator's output, and it's certainly not the kind of thing one would expect the parent company to publish, mired as it was in the apex of its "play it safe" days, but perhaps, paradoxically, because of all of these things it's worth seeking out.

Certainly, there's nothing like it before or since.

I Read This--OVERQUALIFIED (2009)

Despite the black mark of being recommended by Warren Ellis, Joey Comeau's A Softer World is an intriguing use of the comics form--usually dark, occasionally funny, and occasionally disturbingly so.

It's a thread that runs through many of his work, perhaps even more concentrated in his collection of resume cover letters, Overqualified, now out in convenient book form and, amusingly, printed on resume paper.

Overqualified's basic conceit is that Joey Comeau has come unglued slightly following the loss of his girlfriend and the death of his brother, and in searching for gainful employment, has begun to share perhaps a little too much in his cover letters. The juxtaposition between the intensely personal ramblings of the possibly unhinged in the most facile and homogeneous of documents leads ultimately to the (often very black) humour.

I'll let Comeau say it, as he can get his point across better than me:

"Cover letters are all the same. They're useless. You write the same lies over and over again, listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least. God knows how they tell anyone apart, but this is how it's done.

"And then one day a car comes out of nowhere, and suddenly everything changes and you don't know if he'll ever wake up. You get out of bed in the morning, and when you sit down to write another paint-by-numbers cover letter, something entirely different comes out.

"You start threatening instead of begging. You tell impolite jokes. You talk about your sexual fantasies. You sign your real name and you put yourself honestly into letter after letter and there is no way you are ever going to get this job. Not with a letter like this.

And you send it anyway."

Initially, Comeau actually sent these letters out to companies, and those can be read here. The novel takes some of those letters and welds them into something of a coherent narrative (well, in a sense) which is no less hilarious, just slightly less anarchic than the web version was.

If you're one of the uninitiated, or if A Softer World's humour doesn't appeal (there's an absolute deadpan earnestness to it that doesn't scream "this is a joke" from every corner) it's a hard sell to make. On the other hand, if you do like that kind of humour, or (and this is the level at which it worked for me) if you hate writing cover letters so much that you often fantasize about doing something similar, then this is the book for you.

I Read This--AGENTS OF ATLAS (2007)

FACT: All too often, owing to my generally stubborn and contrary nature, things that I might actually enjoy I have to be dragged to in very much the same way meth dealers are dragged out of their trailers by police officers.

FACT 2: Nostalgia exercises in comics are usually dreadful, excruciating things. Roy Thomas, especially, is notorious for this kind of thing--in later years, his work was characterised by characters who were dragged into present day continuity for scarcely understood reasons, and all of these characters spoke in dialogue meant to constantly remind you that these characters were from the 1940s or 50s because that's all they would talk about. That I need glasses today probably owes to the fact that I've rolled my eyes over many a story such as these.

FACT 3: Owing to Marvel's 2000-era stance of pissing all over their past for short term gain or revamping them into God knows what, the idea of doing a six issue miniseries about characters from the late 1940s, early 1950s--before there was even a proto-Marvel Comics as we know them, seemed . . .very odd, indeed, for current-era Marvel. It's the kind of idea, as Paul O'Brien once said, that Bill Jemas would have shot out of a cannon.

With all these facts on the table then, let's have a look at Agents of Atlas, a book that I am surely the last person on Earth to both read and enjoy. Sorry y'all--takes me rather long to get on the bandwagon these days.

Agents of Atlas is, at its heart, and attempt to make What If #9 ("What If The Avengers Had Formed In The 1950s?") into a workable, long-term premise. The whole 1950's Avengers thing ended up having a long shelf-life, despite being negated in both the original What If issue and later on in Avengers Forever. On some level, fans (or fans who later became creators) just like to see disused 50's heroes that didn't catch on at the time gathered together as a team to fight evil.

Comics--the only place where anachronism can be an asset.

Agents takes the position that the 1950s Avengers existed and didn't get negated--they simply went underground and worked together for a few months, then disbanded, going their separate ways and ending up in the rather curious circumstances. Jimmy Woo is now a SHIELD agent and now very brain-dead after leading a disastrous raid into one of the bases of his old foe, the Yellow--excuse me, Golden Claw. It's his journey, which is back and also forwards, that is the spine of the miniseries and the heart of the writer's approach as well, and it's worth quoting writer Jeff Parker in full here:

"But one of the themes of this whole storyline is the Second Chance. Life passes by and windows of opportunity close. Maybe, just maybe, if you stick to your guns and never give up on your goal, even in the final inning a window will open up again. And though you've been tainted by a grey world, that doesn't outweigh your time as a young optimistic idealist who could inspire some of the strangest people on Earth to go charging into the demon pit with you."

The Second Chance is the common link that runs through each of our main characters. Gorilla Man gets a second chance at being where he belongs and feeling useful again. Venus learns about her past and even when confronted with a shocking truth, finds the will to go on. Marvel Boy--er, Bob--doubly alienated from Earth and his adopted home, finds a place to belong again. Namora gets a second chance at life, as does Jimmy Woo--in their case, literally. By the end of the book, everyone not only has had their second chances (in some cases, third or fourth) but the book ends with a new sense of purpose that not only sets up a new series (man, lucky how that worked out, eh?) but infuses the entire book with a real sense of promise and new potential.

In short, it makes the book less of a nostalgia exercise as it's less about establishing how The Past Was So Great and more about establishing these characters and their history in the present and providing them with an interesting future direction (and really, one that gives the team a tangible reason to continue to exist, which is more than you usually get from these kinds of stories) that I'm intrigued enough by to give the ongoing a chance.

Mind you, it's not perfect--the eye-rolling dated references have been replaced by eye-rolling woefully puerile stuff about Venus making everyone horny and Namora wanting to bang her cousin, which is all rather silly and doesn't add very much to the proceedings because we get it, already, thank you. But it's a minor blemish, and considering how badly things could have gone, it's a minor miracle that that's my sole complaint.

That's enough about the story, I think--I'd rather not spoil all of it as much as encourage you to read it. Marvel hardcover of Agents of Atlas is quite a treat--not only, do you get the complete miniseries, no only do you get all the promo stuff and design sketches that led up to the mini series, but you get the most copious and thorough amount of reprints I think I've ever seen, especially given the relative obscurity of these characters. In brief:

Marvel Mystery Comics #82--From 1947, the first appearance of Namora, during a time when distaff female characters were being tried out in features of their own. It's your standard Golden Age story, which means it's ropey and somewhat crazy, and Namora doesn't help her case as being an empowering role model for girls by getting captured very quickly, but Sub-Mariner gets knocked out by a mook with a slapjack, so really, no one comes off that well here.

Venus #1--From 1948, the first appearance of Venus and the beginning of a very odd (if not outright batshit crazy) comic. Venus is deeply bored with the whole goddess thing and decides to go stand in a busy New York Street. Wouldn't you know--a magazine mogul just happens along, decides she's nuts but gives her an editing job anyway, and the romance comic-esque engine of this comic starts, which later on in the run ends up as a horror comic. God knows why. Weird and all over the place as Golden Age stories tend to be, these post GA, pre-Silver Age stories tend to be even more nutty.

Marvel Boy #1--Marvel Boy comes to Earth from Uranus and flashes bright lights in people's eyes as they giggle relentlessly when he tells them where he's from. This is a pretty odd story, hinging on a very obscure point of law involving instant continents, that then turns into a battle with pirates and subterranean aliens who Marvel Boy inadvertently pisses off and has to fight. Marvel Boy doesn't really distinguish himself here--the whole story resolves itself while Marvel Boy acts fairly passively, to be honest. Also, I find his short pants disturbing.

Men's Adventures #26--Never let it be said that "comics aren't for kids" hasn't been a meme for, like, ever. This is the first appearance of Gorilla Man, which is not to be confused with the 18 other Gorilla Men they had around this time. Ken Hale goes into the jungle looking for the mythic Gorilla Man that continues to haunt his dreams, and in a shocking twist (and by "shocking" I mean "you could see it coming a mile away") learns that deep down in our hearts, we are all Gorilla Men. No, actually that's not what happens. It's a typical Atlas-era horror story, which depends on the twin tactics of a Twilight Zone ending and Stan Lee's overwrought purple prose (written in second person--the keystone of all quality prose) to work.

Menace #11--The Human Robot (not called that) makes his first appearance in another twist-ending extravaganza from the purple pen of Stan Lee (again doing the second-person narration thing) and some uncharacteristically moody artwork from John Romita. Basically, a robot takes his orders a bit too literally, and wacky hi-jinks ensue. There's not much to say about this one, except that Lee seems to have a nervous breakdown trying to sell the ending as something Very Frightening Indeed.

Yellow Claw #1--The first appearance of Jimmy Woo, the Yellow Claw (who is absolutely positively not Fu Manchu, because Atlas would have had to pay someone for that), and a whole mess of genteel racism from bygone days. Notable for its time because comics where the titular character was a villain were fairly rare and that our hero is Chinese himself, Yellow Claw is and otherwise forgettable attempt to blend the Yellow Peril stuff of the Fu Manchu stories with the equally didn't-this-turn-out-to-be-a-bugaboo spectre of Communism, and why in the name of GOD is every Chinese person coloured such a weird shade of canary yellow, but the artwork by Joe Maneely is quite amazing in terms of the level of detail, though his Black Knight run is a little more my speed.

Finally, the reprints end where it all began with What If #9, which started the whole ball rolling, as it were. It's not a story that's aged particularly well--Alan Kupperberg and Bill Black make every attempt at a likeness frightening and wrong and Don Glut's scripting is terrible in a late Roy Thomas kind of way--3D Man makes '50's references the whole time in case we forget when the story's supposed to take place and Gorilla Man is a stock Ben Grimm "bitching about what a monster I have become and fighting with everyone" type and no one else has a particularly engaging personality, and the whole thing gets retconned at the end. Nevertheless, I'm glad it's here, if only because a) I finally get to read it at last and b) it was the jump off point for Agents of Atlas and was so much what I feared it could be and was very thankful it wasn't.

(I should also add here--it has an appearance by 1950's Soviet super villain Electro, and holy cow . . .that the Soviets decided to create an agent who is:

1) Green
2) Wears a big red pair of y-fronts
3) Has big red EVIL EYES
4) Wears a . . .fez?

. . .was a fearsome enough foe is pretty much everything that is goofily awesome about comics)

All in all, this was a surprise, and gets my highest recommendation. Hopefully when I check out the ongoing here soonish, it'll continue in a like vein.

I Read This--THE BEST OF DINOSAUR COMICS 2003-2005 AD: YOUR WHOLE FAMILY IS MADE OF MEAT

Dinosaur Comics is something not easily explained. Wikipedia takes a stab at it, and while it gets some of the technical details across, it doesn't quite get across the peculiar humour that characterises the strip that has, since the time I discovered it, made my workdays somewhat bearable for a year and change now.

It's also one of those things that when I try to explain it to people their reactions are usually blank stares and utter confusion. This isn't something wrong with them (Humour is subjective, after all) it's just that Dinosaur Comics is rather unique.

Here, let me have a stab at describing it:

Dinosaur Comics features the same six panels over and over again with the same pictures of clip art dinosaurs every day since 2003. The gag is that while the pictures may be the same, the dialogue is always different, covering such diverse topics as the origin of superheroes, considerations of philosophical approaches, and perhaps the most awesome and simultaneously stupid novel idea, ever.

. . .hmm, yeah--you're probably better off just looking at the links.

The book is, as you might have surmised, a "best of" collection of the early years of Dinosaur Comics, from the first few relatively simplistic strips and is quite a fat little collection (250 pages, give or take) and that may be a bit daunting for the neophyte reader, because a cursory flip-through will only yield that it's the same art over and over again. It's really only by actually reading through the strips and coming to appreciate the completely bent and frequently unpredictable style that the author brings to it that it will either win you over or deter your utterly.

There's something to be said for the fact there's no middle ground there, I reckon.

In any case, I found it to be a book well worth reading, and perhaps you will as well!

I Read This--ESSENTIAL X-MEN CLASSIC VOLUME 3

Apparently, I have a special place in my heart for well-intentioned failure. Even moreso for well-intentioned failure that turns into success somehow.

The X-Men are a curious property--when originally launched, they were one of the few Marvel launches that didn't catch on, and they tried pretty much everything--new team members (The Mimic, who probably failed because he was another milquetoast white dude in a team of them except he had all their powers and was a serious asshole besides) a long, over-arching storyline (Factor Three, which has to be the one continuity backwater no one's tried to mine again, possibly because it was completely asinine) hot-shot deaths (Professor Xavier, killed by a cave troll in the subway) breaking up the team, getting the team back together, two crossovers with Avengers, a Spider-Man guest shot, and, when all that failed, two issues by Jim Steranko, presaging the tactic of dropping in hot artists to revive a flagging title.

None of it worked. There's a lot of theories as to why this is--the scripting vacillated between Arnold Drake's lifeless and leaden writing and Roy Thomas' then-frequent habit of writing everyone as a whiny hysteric, the lack of any credible villains leading to never ending Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants--a lot--and somewhat also it was meant to parallel racism and address the issues of discrimination with a cast of well-to-do honkies in a fancy prep school, which sort of undercut the message slightly.

But no one thought to cancel the book--at least not yet--so X-Men kind of thrashed along, working through its growing pains in public, occasionally succeeding, often failing, and sometimes having the X-Men fight bad guys dressed as grasshoppers.

It is, I should add, my favourite period of X-Men ever.

Perhaps it's morbid curiosity.

Anyways, Essential X-Men Classic Vol. 3 (geez, what a title) covers the end of the original X-Men run, which ended up being a bit on the bittersweet side. It begins with a few dreary issues from Drake and Roy Thomas and Don Heck, who gamely try to convince us simultaneously that the Living Pharaoh is at all an interesting villain and Cyclops' heretofore unknown brother Havok is interesting despite being written entirely in Stan Lee Angstese. They're redolent of the plodding kind of storytelling and lack of characterisation that got us here.

Things pick up substantially (kinda) three issues in, as the stories Roy Thomas/Neal Adams runs begins. The story itself is still rather dull--the Living Pharaoh's alternate identity, the Living Monolith, isn't any more interesting--and it's full of the genteel racism of bygone years (watch as Cyclops calls Arabs "camel jockeys!") but the art's real nice to look at (in some places, looks a lot better in black and white) as Adams was really feeling his oats back then and packed every page with dynamic layouts and very kinetic action that all too often seems barely contained by the panel borders, and sometimes not even then.

The old urban legend is that Adams wanted to work on Marvel's lowest-selling title when he jumped from DC to Marvel, and I've always wondered if that was by design--working on the lowest-selling book, it didn't matter if what he did didn't work, because the book was pretty much on the block anyway, so he was free to cut loose.

The Thomas/Adams run is fondly remembered, and Adams has remarked--not unfairly--that pretty much every successive X-Men creative team has run through the same subjects they would--Sentinels, the Savage Land, Magneto--often in the very same order that they'd occurred in the Thomas/Adams run. If you look at Claremont's early run with the newer X-Men of the 70's you'll see he's not far wrong.

Of course, some of the Thomas/Adams run doesn't work today, and has been mostly abandoned. The Living Monolith, for instance, has rightly been put on the shelf, more or less. Sauron, yet another in a seemingly endless line of villains with hypnotic powers (seriously, they were a dime a dozen in Marvel in the 60's) fares a little better in that he's fondly remembered at all, but again, as he basically Ben Casey MD who turns into a Pterosaur who wears cutoffs in his off hours and no one remembers who the hell Ben Casey is anymore, he's fallen into disuse. And the less said about the Z'Nox story which closes out their run (wherein the most potentially devastating and astoundingly boring invasion force is defeated by a great big beam of love, as Paul O'Brien says) the better.

The Sentinels, the Savage Land, and the Magneto stuff plays a bit better, and these went on to become the major tentpoles of the franchise, really--even if the Savage Land stuff is a curious artifact that was bolted to X-Men continuity because Stan Lee felt like it that day.

In-between the Adams issues, Don Heck makes a yeoman's effort to draw very much like him in a story that introduces future X-man Sunfire and good God, talking of the genteel racism of bygone days, read this and cringe cringe cringe. To be fair, Sunfire is one of those elements from this run that hung on--he's one of the charter new X-men, after all (and, to show us how far race relations have come in the 5 years since X-Men was cancelled, he is less "Japanese villain" and more "inconsistently characterised asshole" and he quits real fast anyway, so. . .yeah.) it's just that the issue introducing him is . . .well, very problematic.

Then, X-Men ends with a very confusing issue involving the Hulk. But fret not, True Believer--there's still several hundred pages in this volume.

Our first stop post-cancellation is an issue of Amazing Spider-Man, wherein Iceman fights Spider-Man because Spider-Man has been set up (yet again) as a bad guy. It's a very middle-of-the-road story (it reads more like Iceman's wandered in to ASM's ongoing soap opera by accident) but, funnily enough, formed the basis for a Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends episode back in the day, which is probably the most current reference I will make in this entry.

From there, we stop in at Incredible Hulk, wherein, on the run from the damn US Army for the 90th time, the Hulk fights Havok while Havok tries to decide whether or not to go back to the X-Men (spoiler: he does) It's a fairly pedestrian issue of Incredible Hulk (I do not for the life of me know how they got so many issues out of the Hulk vs. the Army storytelling engine) livened up by John Severin inking longtime Hulk penciller Herb Trimpe's pencils, giving it a grittier than usual feel.

From there we go to Amazing Adventures #11-16, featuring the Beast.

Oh Lord.

There's not much to say about this--Beast gets a job at the Brand Corporation (for you old school continuity wags, you will recognise Brand as supplying disposable villains for more Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-In-One issues than one could shake a stick at) turns grey and furry and then kinda bitches and moans about it in typical Marvel-esque "Oh God, what kind of monster have I become" gibberish for awhile, as Steve Englehart tries everything to make this rather stunted premise work (Patsy Walker, pre-Hellcat, even shows up. Why, I do not know) and Tom Sutton does a pretty good job with the art, but really. It's an unworkable premise in the long run and Englehart, like so many fans who'd become creators is writing too much like Stan Lee and aping the surface tics without the style or energy Stan brought to Marvel's formative days.

It also contains my least favourite fans-who-became-creators tic, wherein Englehart writes himself and a bunch of the Marvel Bullpen into one story wherein they give Beast and his girlfriend a ride so he can fight Juggernaut. This stuff stops every story I've seen it used in stone dead and I'm glad the practice is largely gone now.

There's a brief detour in-between Amazing Adventures issues, wherein, the X-Men pop in to an early issue of Marvel Team-Up and fight Morbius. Nothing of consequence happens, except an attempt to re-launch the X-Men fails and Spider-Man kisses Jean Grey because he's got a thing for redheads and their book's in reprints anyways, so nuts to them.

Beast's run in AA finishes off with a reprint issue, wherein Beast fights El Conquistador (and his sidekick Chico!) and we tie up a loose plot thread in an issue of Incredible Hulk, wherein the Beast gets dragged to Canada because the Mimic could potentially kill everyone on the planet. Englehart and perpetual Hulk artist Herb Trimpe demonstrate a rather dodgy understanding of Canadian law enforcement (I'm virtually sure Mounties don't all dress like Dudley Do-Right in these modern times) and bring off the rather odd trick of having an issue of Incredible Hulk wherein the Hulk's appearance is kind of an afterthought and really only happens because the story required that the Mimic die, and the Hulk was the easiest way to make that happen It's all a bit ropey, as the Beast feature in AA wasn't particularly successful (Beast's character renaissance would come in Avengers) and the Mimic's most current appearance had been in one of the reprints X-Men was running at the time, so the whole issue feels a bit . . .pointless, somehow.

The volume finishes out with a gallery of covers from the reprint run and some original art, and well, the whole mess with the X-Men finally rises like the Phoenix (see what I did there?) in Giant-Size X-Men #1, wherein the new X-Men, a more diverse and vital team that more accurately reflects the book's innate concept . . .totally failed again and is barely remembered today. These days, it's all pirate comics.

I kid, I kid.

Despite the fact that I'm very hard on the issues contained here, it's because, objectively, most of the stories in this book are rubbish. Those that aren't rubbish are very dated, and those that aren't rubbish or dated don't appear in this collection. The real value of this book is its existence as a record of just how Marvel evolved, re-evolved in the 70's and the dead ends they ran into as things developed. That, some pretty awesome Neal Adams art, and the fact that some of those dead ends lead to extremely goofy fun (God bless them for actually calling a story "DO OR DIE, BABY!") that can be had if you're in the right mood for it.

Witless Dictionary #18--Continuity A La Carte

Continuing once again our . . .uh, continuing . . series of installments in a greater effort to create a lexicon for comics criticism (or, sometimes, to set up cheap shots without five paragraphs of buildup) the Witless Dictionary opens wide once again and provides us with a new definition:

Continuity A La Carte--Term which describes the action on the part of the reader wherein, rather than obsessively trying to juggle multiple decades of often contradictory continuity, readers simply pick and choose what seems consistent and makes sense to them and lets the rest kind of fall away to nothingness.

Adherents of this condition are characterised by extreme well-adjustment, lack of stress when companies announce Big Changes and how Things Will Never Be The Same Again, aversion to retcons, and . . .well, let's just say they probably pick up more trades than singles now.

Obviously, It's Not Just Me.

Steven Grant, on the BSG finale:

(You have to scroll down a bit, but it's well worth it. Highlights below.)

"Lemme get this straight. After four seasons, during which Ron Moore and the other writers have all prattled on about how the show is genuine hard science fiction, no alien races or trad space opera or like that, and "down to earth" except for a handful of technological advances, it all turns out to be warmed over anti-technology "back to the earth" (literally) hippiefied twaddle by way of the Bible belt?

The end message: forget science and put your faith in nature and the supernatural, because God (though he doesn't like to be called that) loves you and will provide.

Seriously"

And this bit is also funny:

"The problem of bringing God into it is the problem of bringing God into anything proposed as "destiny." In terms laid out by the conclusion, the entirety of the series can be seen as the machinations of a "loving" God to bring 38,000 some-odd humans and assorted Cylons to a new promised land. That's fine, but it involves a cosmic mechanism so detailed as to require His hand going back at least decades, at least as far as the Final 5 contacting the Cylons and Starbuck as a little girl receiving the benediction of The Music from her father. If you conceive the series as God's rescue following the destruction of the Colonies, that's one thing. But all the machinations means God willingly turns a blind eye to the horrific deaths of hundreds of millions of people – their society as presented doesn't exactly smack of Sodom and Gomorrah – in order to "save" 40,000. Even if the ultimate goal is the creation of a new species – us – no God capable of juggling that many balls and guiding that many events would need to go to all that trouble. If it all comes down to God's will, then God is either rather cruel or something of a dope."

MAN TRUE #2--The Power Battle

Continuing our canvassing of the Interwebs for offhanded bits of commentary wherein an offhanded comment inadvertently is revealed to speak to a larger truth. Or as they used to say in pro wrestling "I love shoot [legitimate] comments that weren't meant to be shoot comments."

This one comes to us from Greg Burgas, of Comics Should Be Good:

"Brian Michael Bendis, Ruler of All He Surveys, has written many, many, many, many superhero comics since he started his coup of the Marvel Universe. So why, pray tell, isn’t he any better at them now than he was five or seven years ago?"

If anyone listened to anyone on the Internet, you could almost call it speaking truth to power.