Highway 62

Ah, Marvel Comics, how I love thee! I love thee as the sun loves the horizon, as the moon loves the night. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Naw, it’s been done before. But in all truth, I do dearly love Marvel comics, even if more of my funnybook budget goes to the Distinguished Competition every month. Let’s talk about why I love Marvel.

Reason the first: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Go ahead, google it. It’s a relatively famous (as these things go) work of psychology that asks some very fundamental questions about how and who we are. And the first place that I ever heard of it was in a Marvel Comic. Micronauts Vol 1, #29, to be precise. In this issue, some of the Micronauts are literally shot into the imagination of one of their comatose comrades by Dr. Leonard Samson with the aid of SHIELD, all in an effort to fight off an attack by the devilish Nightmare. This was brilliant, mind-expanding stuff. At the end, the Micronauts save their leader by shattering the corpus callosum, the tissue that separates the left and right hemispheres of the cerebrum. I think I was 13 when I read this, and I haven’t forgotten it to this day. Seems that right about this time, Chris Claremont stuck the books in the hand of The Beast as well, though I had to read that in a back issue.

Reason the second: Jack Kirby. Really, he should be reason the first. There’s a lot of folks who will state plainly that The King was the reason why Marvel got as famous as it did and was as far out as it was. I’ll say that Mr. Kurtzberg certainly deserved the lion’s share of the credit, but that Stan Lee’s showmanship was a major part of the equation. But enough of that. Read the first issues of The Fantastic Four, read some of the later issues of Thor, read his reworking of Captain America. Mr. Kirby brought more imagination and power to the page than anyone before or since. Sure, artists like John Buscema may have been better renderers of action and Gil Kane may have cornered the market on sheer brutality, but nobody combined a love of sheer imagination with the titanic and staggering power that The King did. I ate up those reprints when I was a kid, and still come back to them today.

Reason the third: The All New Uncanny X-Men. My love of this title is open an unabashed, even if some of the luster wore off by the time that I all but gave up on it (and more or less gave up on comics), but for around 100 issues, it was probably the best superhero book on the stands. A lot of credit has to go to those that came before, and to the often-unsung Len Wein, who invented the New X-Men (as well as Wolverine, who he recruited to the team). However, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Terry Austin, Paul Smith and a host of others really made the book sing. Everything from tight, small character pieces to huge, galaxy-spanning epics, to tales of man’s own inhumanity to man. I really do regret the fact that Marvel mutants became such a huge part of their business in the 80s and 90s and they managed to dilute the titles through so many crossover events and superfluous books and the like. But I don’t have to remember those if I don’t want to, as I’ve got all the issues sitting in a couple of shortboxes in the garage. Not that I have time to read them, mind you.

Reason the fourth: Steve Gerber. But I’m going to do a whole column on him and his work, just you wait and see. However, if you want to know where Vertigo came from, look not to Grant Morrison or Neil Gaiman or even Alan Moore (who never wrote a Vertigo book, I have to remind some folks) but to the iconoclastic work of Steve Gerber for Marvel in the 70s. Go on, there’s a whole Essential Howard the Duck waiting for you to pick it up and read it. I dare ya. I double dog dare ya.

Reason the fifth: Origins of Marvel Comics, Son of Origins, and Bring on the Bad Guys. These, for those of you unfamiliar with them, were trade paperbacks in the days before anyone thought of making trade paperbacks. I remember getting these in the middle or late seventies for the princely sum of $6.95 apiece, perhaps a bit more (I think I had to have mom buy them. Mom rules.) By our standards, these are relatively shoddy reprints, gaudily colored and screenprinted into near-oblivion. But I’ll never forget turning the pages on the first Doctor Doom story, or having my mind blown by the cosmic spectacle of the Thing battling the Silver Surfer or the utter unearthliness of Doctor Strange battling mystic foes in dimensions hitherto undreamed of. And to top all of them was the reprinting of the origin of the Silver Surfer in Son of Origins and the battle between the Surfer and Mephisto in Bring on the Bad Guys. This was Shakespeare and Michelangelo at once in my young brain. Superheroes didn’t talk like this! Was he really fighting The Devil? Wow! And he wins, not by punching him out, but by giving up that which he holds most dear. Wild, wild stuff. Like I said, the fact that I can remember this all, how many years later, is testament to its power.

Reason the sixth: What If? Yeah, okay, some of them were utterly terrible and seemed pretty pointless (“What if the Fantastic Four all had the same power?”) but some of them were huge and dared to do some pretty crazy things with the story. There’s a couple of bleak ones, like the “What If Phoenix Had Lived?” which pretty much ended up with one less alternate dimension to worry about. As did the one that had the Avengers becoming pawns of Korvac, which ended with Korvac basically turning the Ultimate Nullifier on Eternity and throwing the switch on that particular universe. But not all of ‘em were that dark. If you were lucky, you caught Daredevil as an agent of SHIELD, drawn up quite nicely by Frank Miller. Which brings us to…

Reason the seventh: Daredevil by Frank Miller. I don’t think I’d even heard of a ninja or a sai or any of that other kung-fu stuff before then. Daredevil #172 was the first issue that I’d read, and it scared me. Frank Miller created a truly dark and frightening vision of New York as a breeding ground of crime, where only the truly heartless and evil seemed to prosper. Hell, these guys were drawing swords and hacking into one another and drawing BLOOD for goshsakes. I also think that this was the first time that I saw panels with no dialogue and no sound that really made sense to me. That was just something that you didn’t see in Marvel comics as a rule. But Mr. Miller made it work, dammit. For good or for ill, Daredevil was also the first place that I saw a bondage mask. Yeah, I know. Too much information. In all seriousness, though, Those issues of Daredevil took no prisoners and are every bit as good as everyone says they are. And to read them when they were coming out for the first time was absolutely huge. I still wish they were being reprinted on newsprint, because the glossy pages do them no justice whatsoever.

Reason the eighth: Adam Warlock. Have I bored you with my rhapsodizing about Jim Starlin’s work on Adam Warlock? I haven’t? Good. I was originally handed a couple of treasured issues of this book by a friend who was heavily into the Doors and a number of other psychedelic bands (this was maybe 1980) and soaked in the cosmic odyssey of a man who was given life and power and a curse that he never asked for, but still managed to live (and die) with with a measure of dignity. I’m not going to even try to encompass the cosmic weirdness and allegory that Mr. Starlin put into this work. It can’t be done in the space that I have here. He managed to write (and illustrate) the first comic that really resonated with me on a level approaching philosophy (though I really didn’t know it then.) Religion, authority, self-determination, fate, consciousness, death and living, all of this were at the heart of this book. Again, utterly essential. Why Marvel hasn’t seen fit to reprint all of this with some of the other Warlock work is just really baffling. Track down the reprints in your local quarter bin.

What’s that? I’m talking about stuff that’s years and years old? Talk about something current, something relevant, something now?

Perhaps later, gentle reader. When Marvel gives me something to say other than “Grant Morrison has made the X-Men readable again” or “Gosh, I love Kyle Baker’s work” or “That Ultimates is the most expensive movie that never was” then I will. And if folks want to make recommendations for why I should love Marvel now, then I’ll be all ears, waiting patiently in the forum.

See you there.