A Chilling Admission from Your L.A. Mood Comic Correspondent
The views expressed in this column are those of the writer alone and should not be attributed to L. A. Mood or its employees. By Dan Brown I’ve got a horrible confession to make. You’re going to think less of me. But I can’t go on as L.A. Mood’s comic columnist without coming clean. If you’ve read any of my previous columns this year, you’ll know that I’m a fan of Marvel Comics from way back. (I always found D.C. heroes to be emotionally constipated, which made them seem less real and compelling to my younger self, a topic for a future column.) However, here’s the thing: As much as I’ve loved Marvel since the 1970s, I don’t feel much for the brand’s marquee character. That’s right. I don’t like Spider-Man. I can hear you gasping. I have to be honest with you, my fellow comic fans: I feel little for everyone’s favourite web-slinger, even though he’s been Marvel’s mainstay attraction for decades. It’s not that I actively dislike Peter Parker’s alter ego, it’s just that I’ve never gone out of my way to seek out the many books that feature him. How many different Spider-Man titles are there these days? About 5,000? That’s 5,000 I don’t have on my monthly pull list. I realize this is like a DC fan admitting they never liked Superman. Startling, but true. I guess I just never formed a bond with Spidey the way I did with characters like the Thing or Wolverine or the members of Alpha Flight. I started making mine Marvel in the mid-1970s. As the years went on, I fell in love with the Fantastic Four, Iron Fist, the new team of X-Men, Captain America, Iron Man, and others. Sure, I was aware of Spider-Man. Heck, one of his girlfriends had been killed by a baddie. Back then, characters died and stayed dead, so that was remarkable. And I knew a bit about supporting characters like the Punisher, who shot rubber bullets at his foes. That was cool. But in my childhood home in Poplar Hill, I wasn’t the one reading Spider-Man’s adventures. It was my four-years-older brother who brought Marvel Team-Up home off the spinner rack. Every month, the webhead partnered with a different character, usually one Marvel was hoping to promote to head up their own title. And I will admit, in the hands of artist John Byrne, Spidey could do some thrilling stuff. In one of those Team-Ups, Spidey runs upside-down through a hallway on the ceiling – it was such a brilliant use of a comic panel to show what the character is capable of. Yet it still wasn’t enough to fire my imagination. I drew a few pictures of Spider-Man in my school notebooks, but he was not the focus of my attention the way others were. I was a sucker for such anti-heroes as Deathlok, the warrior cyborg from the future. How could the wall-crawler compete? Somewhere along the way I even picked up a mini-digest of the first six or seven appearances of Spider-Man from the 1960s. Even though I loved that otherworldly Steve Ditko art and dug the crazy villains, it didn’t make me a regular reader. Were the modern movies any different? Nope. I went to see the three Tobey Maguire films, out of a sense of duty more than anything else. Maguire’s Spidey seemed just as . . . vanilla . . . as the one I remember from the comic books, so I gave up on him as a motion-picture character. Nor am I going to rain on anybody else’s parade. Don’t worry. If you’re a fan of Spider-Man, good for you. I’m just glad people are still reading comics and geeking out over superheroes in the year 2023. And hey, I’m a weird guy who likes weird things, so likely I’m the odd man out here. The fault is probably mine for not making a bigger spot in my heart for Aunt May’s favourite nephew. Are there any popular characters you never developed an affection for, even though they were bestsellers? I’d love to hear all about it in the comment box below. I promise I won’t think any differently of you! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Pedro Pascal a Meaningful Choice to Play Reed Richards
By Dan BrownDepending on which news source you believe, Pedro Pascal may be the next actor to play superhero scientist Reed Richards, the pliable leader of the Fantastic Four also known as Mister Fantastic.Just the fact the big brains at Marvel Studios are talking to Pascal tells us two things.First, Marvel wants to get the next Fantastic Four movie right.Second, the Marvel brain trust realizes they are in a slump.If Pascal does get the part, it would be a good sign for the many millions of Marvel movie fans on this planet. The Chilean-born performer is known for his acting on shows like The Mandalorian, The Last of Us, and Game of Thrones, as well as for giving Bad Bunny a helping hand during the musician’s Saturday Night Live appearance last month. In addition to being hugely popular, Pascal is immensely talented. It’s no surprise Marvel’s bosses want to tap into his star power. He is one of the few actors who could pull off the role; Richards is not exactly an exciting character, being part genius and part rubber band. Pascal would bring excitement, humour, and gravity to the part.Pascal can take comic-book dialogue – “We’ve got to get to the bottom of his strange powers, learn how to control them. After all, Sue, he’s our only son” – and sell it. The fact he brings Star Wars enthusiasts, gamers and other fandoms to the table is an added bonus, and I’m sure part of the calculus for why Marvel is apparently in discussions with him.Longtime Marvel fans know that the Fantastic Four is, well, a tricky property to get right on the silver screen. If I am counting correctly, there have been four attempts to make movies based on the title Stan Lee dubbed “the world’s greatest comic magazine.”The Roger Corman-directed first shot wasn’t even meh enough to get a video-cassette release. The second and third were B movies constrained by their low budgets, and the most recent attempt is considered an abomination in the sight of the few fans who paid to see it.Is a new Fantastic Four movie a special-effects picture? Is it a family story? Is it a comedy or a drama? It’s all of those. And no filmmaking team has yet been able to get the tone of the Fantastic Four right. Even more significantly, adapting FF for the big screen means bringing one of pop-culture’s great villains, Doctor Doom, into the mix.Nor can anyone ignore the context these reported talks are taking place in. The Marvels, the latest feature film from the studio, had the worst debut in Marvel Cinematic Universe history when it landed in theatres earlier this month, failing to clear $50 million in its opening weekend. It also had the worst second weekend in MCU history, despite strong word of mouth.Not all of this can be blamed on the recently concluded strike by Hollywood actors, which prevented stars like Brie Larson from hitting the talk-show and podcast circuit to drum up interest in the motion picture. Superhero fatigue is a real thing, but don’t take my word for it. I wrote in the spring in this space about how Disney CEO Bob Iger feels the Marvel brand has been “diluted” over the pandemic by the release of too many streaming shows. Think Hawkeye, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Moon Knight, She-Hulk and on and on. Fantastic Four is one of the richest potential mines left for Marvel Studios to plunder. The downside of getting it wrong is huge. The potential upside? If they get it right, a Fantastic Four movie starring Pedro Pascal just might save the company. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
The Next Big Marvel Fad Is Here
By Dan BrownI’m not one to say comics were better when I was a boy – they weren’t better, they were just different.That said, I do miss the desperate attempts by the editors at Marvel Comics to cash in on the latest trend, whether it be kung fu or black power or disco music.I miss the slapdash efforts to tap into the collective consciousness from the folks at the House of Ideas whenever the Next Big Thing came along in the 1970s and early 1980s.You don’t see that much in today’s comics.What I’m talking about are the weird, wonderful books like Marvel Premiere No. 50, which came out in 1979 and featured shock rocker Alice Cooper.That’s right: Along with Captain America, Spider-Man and the rest, the then-edgy Alice Cooper was once a Marvel protagonist.You can imagine the wishful thinking: Cooper was selling a pile of albums and had generated a lot of buzz with his at-the-time outrageous stage shows, so the brain trust running the firm likely figured gangbuster sales would follow if they slapped Alice’s name on a comic. That may also be why comics and characters prompted by popular trends were mostly half-ass affairs.The creative team had to get them onto stands quickly, since by the time retailers reported sales figures back, the newest mania could be over.Nor was Cooper the first musician to appear in the pages of a Marvel adventure: Gene Simmons and the guys from KISS likewise showed up in the magazine-size publication Marvel Super Special No. 1, which landed in 1977.But the ultimate example of cashing in on a musical craze had to be Dazzler, the mutant who had the powers of . . . a disco ball. She first appeared in 1980’s Uncanny X-Men No. 130. You won’t be surprised to learn the mutant superhero team discovered her in a chic New York nightclub a la Studio 54. Having her debut in the pages of one of the brand’s most popular titles didn’t hurt, and the character went on to have a comic of her own for five years, thus outliving the music genre that spawned her.If it was hot, Marvel tried to jump on it. When martial-arts films featuring Bruce Lee drew audiences to movie theatres, the company responded with heroes Shang-Chi and Iron Fist, who chopped with their hands and kicked with their feet. Giving a new character the unsubtle name Power Man, as well as promoting Black Panther to headline his own series, were part of Marvel’s play for black readers. With real-life daredevil Evel Knevel generating headlines in the 1970s, the storied company answered with a stuntman of their own, the Human Fly. Shogun Warriors was aimed at fans of giant Japanese robots.When the Marvel team couldn’t secure the rights to The Lord of the Rings, they created their own fantasy world in Warriors of the Shadow Realm. Heck, Spider-Man even joined forces with the original cast of Saturday Night Live in Marvel Team-Up No. 74 in 1978. And it got sillier. In 1982, the latest to become a Marvel superhero was . . . the Pope. John Paul II made his comic debut in a biographical issue called The life of Pope John Paul II. “The entire story!” the cover blared. “From his childhood in Poland to the assassination attempt!” I’m sure kids everywhere were thrilled.Of course, if you do enough of these fad-based comics, eventually one will catch fire. And that’s just what happened in the mid-1970s when Marvel got the rights to a virtually unknown sci-fi property called Star Wars.It was arguably the smartest move in Marvel history, because the title became a massive seller. There were millions upon millions of us hungering for Star Wars content, of which there was little apart from Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye novel and Brian Daley’s Han Solo trilogy. Smarter people than me have argued how, without the Star Wars licence, the company might not have survived into the 1980s.I guess you could say there is one fad that Marvel editors have been trying to milk for the last 20 years, which is the popularity of the movies and TV shows based on Marvel characters. They’ve taken a hero like Samuel L. Jackon’s Nick Fury from the movies and projected him into their comics, erasing the original cigar-chomping Second World War stalwart.But apart from driving up the price of back issues, I’m not sure big-screen adaptations have done much for the sales of the comics themselves, which is both odd and sad.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
A Love Triangle Crumbles in a Single Rainy Night
By Dan BrownA short column this week reviewing a short graphic novel.Ivana Filipovich’s What’s Fear Got to do With It? is from East Coast publishing house Conundrum Press, which has been coming on strong the last few years.If you like graphic novels that feel and land like subtitled foreign movies, you will want to check this slender volume out. It runs 58 pages, but doesn’t suffer for its brevity.The setting – Vancouver’s Richmond Night Market – isn’t foreign, but the “feel” of the book is. This might have something to do with Filipovich being part of the Balkan Renaissance in graphic novels. “My main inspiration is (Anton) Chekhov,” the comic creator says in notes accompanying the book’s release last month.She goes on to say that growing up in the former Yugoslavia she was fed a diet of “the best of BBC, great Russian movies, Quebec TV series and, of course, the best world literature and comics from both sides of the ocean.” She also counts Ingmar Bergman among her influences, as well as Salman Rushdie.What does it all add up to? A moody tale that unfolds in a single night showing how a love triangle falls apart. The characters are the criminal Max, who may or may not be a crime kingpin, and his girlfriends Eva and Mia. “It’s a (triangle) in which all characters are faulty, despite some of them being more likeable than others,” Filipovich explains.Another way to put it would be, if you’re a guy and you ever thought having a harem of beautiful ladies would be fun, this story will make you reconsider. The saddest part is that love in this milieu has been degraded to the point where to show devotion, all one has to do is buy the beloved material objects. “You always got whatever stuff you wanted,” an unbelieving Max tells Eva when the triangle crumbles. The tragedy here is Max can’t understand why the unconventional relationship has failed – he spent a lot of money on his foxes, didn’t he? Isn’t that all there is to it? And don’t get me started on how a single question rules one of the girlfriend’s lives: How will this look to my followers on social media? “I was born online. That’s me,” Mia boasts at the outset of the evening.All of this is presented in a moody wrapper. Filipovich evokes another film, Blade Runner, with her scratchy lines. The cityscape is drenched in ever-falling rain, which means the one moment when the sun comes out lands with force.If you are looking for a departure from the same old, same old, I recommend What’s Fear Got to do With It? Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
R2-D2 and C-3PO Never Did This
By Dan BrownA bunch of robots walk into a bar, but they aren’t the strangest thing about the place.That’s the premise of Robot Comics No. 0, which Bob Burden – famed in comic circles for creating Flaming Carrot and the Mysterymen – published in 1987 as a one-off “cultural oddity,” to use the eccentric creator’s own words.The book describes one crazy night down at the Blind Pig, a bar where a mummy plays banjo in the corner, two guys with axes for heads scuffle, scuba divers float through the air, beans spill out of the pay-phone receiver, and a man walks by, carrying a tombstone in anticipation of his own imminent demise.Welcome to Bob Burden’s imagination. If you’ve ever had a frantic bout of drinking at a dive that didn’t make sense to you in the morning, yet was still a lot of fun, you’ll be able to relate. The whole thing plays like an extended scene out of a Flaming Carrot comic, and indeed, Carrot supporting players like Uncle Billy and the Artless Dodger are part of the watering hole’s crowd.Those readers with long memories and unconventional tastes know Flaming Carrot (and his sometime allies, the Mysterymen) as the blue-collar hero whose mask is, well, a flaming carrot. His secret origin: After reading 5,000 comics in one sitting, the poor wretch suffers brain damage, becoming Palookaville’s B-list protector in the process.So if you’ve read any of the Carrot’s irregularly published exploits, you will grok what Robot Comics No. 0 is all about.As with all of Burden’s work, this slender volume is a riot of invention. This bar could only have come from his fertile, twisted mind, and I was lucky enough to find a copy in the bargain bin at L.A. Mood just before the summer.The surreal comic makes for engrossing reading on a muggy August afternoon.By way of introduction, Burden says he composed the tale decades prior to its publication as an exercise in what he calls “electra-fiction.” The artist/writer says the panels “exploded on the pages with no bounds of reason or any attempt to conform to known standards. It is, in essence, experimental literature guised as a leaking barrelful of rip-snorting, foot-stomping belly laffs.”I call it the cartoon equivalent of jazz. Or a nonsensical salad stocked with one random ingredient after the other.There is no plot, no A to B story, just a profile of an unforgettable night in a drinking establishment whose existence defies logic.If you’re a fan or student of tavern-derived literature, you could also classify it as Burden’s answer to the classic New Yorker piece by Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.Indeed, the evening’s events are narrated by a nameless reporter who figures, “As a journalist and an artist, I ought to record it all for posterity.”What does he observe? Harry Lime, from the Third Man, appears in one panel in all his Wellesian glory. The house band’s cover of Neil Diamond’s Cracklin’ Rosie upsets a patron. One of the bar’s many denizens refers to two of the Three Stooges. And then the female (?) robot leaves in the company of a Maytag repairman. Of course, several bodies are buried at the local drive-in theatre following the night’s mayhem.If all of that sounds like your kind of madness, it’s worth hunting down this little-known Bob Burden creation.No wonder his motto is “The wild shall wild remain!”Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Visit Strange New Worlds In Byrne Star Trek Omnibus
By Dan BrownFew comic creators do Star Trek as well as industry legend and sometime Canadian John Byrne. That thought entered my head as I was watching a recent episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Have you been following the show? I think this summer’s second season is much stronger than the first.Indeed, it’s a Golden Age on the small screen for Star Trek fans, who now have several series to choose from, including the workplace comedy Lower Decks, the recently concluded third season of Picard, the just-axed Prodigy, and the unwatched-by-me Discovery.SNW, which features doomed Captain Christopher Pike, offers a fresh twist on established Trek continuity. As we know from the original series, Pike has a tragedy waiting for him in his future, but SNW sets that premise on its ear by positing that Pike knows he is in for a world of hurt.One of the other characters from SNW – the Enterprise’s Number One – is fleshed out in an anthology published in 2014 by IDW, which contains four interconnected stories Byrne drew and wrote. If Star Trek excites you, I recommend you hunt it down.I would put Star Trek: The John Byrne Collection at the top of the heap as far as Trek comic adaptations – of which there have been many over the decades – go.My suspicion is that Byrne, famed for his work on Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four and Superman, had very specific stories in mind for his stint at IDW. (I honestly don’t know if he approached the publisher with a pitch, or if IDW asked the illustrator/writer to create the comics that make up this collection.) Reading the hefty volume, I get the sense Byrne is a huge Star Trek fan and knew exactly what he wanted to do, including putting the spotlight on Pike’s second-in-command. And, for the record, the Number One in SNW follows an entirely different path from the comic character, so I doubt the show’s creators read the Byrne compilation before SNW launched, which is fine by me since I can’t get enough of her in either medium.The Byrne treasury also offers an intriguing look at another minor character from the original show, Gary Seven. If I remember my Gene Roddenberry lore correctly, he aimed to have the mysterious and powerful Seven star in his own show. Byrne offers a tantalizing glimpse at what such a program might have looked like, had Roddenberry’s ambitions been realized. Byrne also sheds light on the inner workings of the Romulan homeworld, where the spheres of politics and romance are indistinguishable. And what Trek fan could resist a storyline with the title Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor? Being just a humble country doctor doesn’t make his adventures in deep space any less compelling. Another anthology I read this summer is 2009’s Star Trek: Mission’s End. I prefer Byrne’s clean lines to Steven Molnar’s art, but the real reason to grab this trade paperback is the writing by Canada’s own Ty Templeton, who was given the daunting task of bridging the gap between the original series and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.In other words, Templeton had to explain why Kirk takes the desk assignment as an admiral that he is so ambivalent about at the beginning of the first Trek movie, why McCoy quits the Enterprise (you’ll recall he has to be drafted by Starfleet to join Kirk before they investigate V’Ger’s march toward Earth), and what led Spock to depart for Vulcan to get more in touch with his logical side. One other item on my summer reading list is Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs Volume One and Two, which harken back to the very earliest era of Star Trek in comics form back in the Gold Key days. I think it’s fair to say these earliest imaginings of Trek on the page are, well, a mixed bag. Sure, each issue was about Kirk and company, but I’m pretty sure they were written and drawn by individuals who hadn’t actually seen the show on TV. This leads to some inadvertent comedy, as when Scottish Enterprise engineer Montgomery Scott is depicted as having blond hair.Heck, the artist or artists (Gold Key had a policy of not including credits in these comics) didn’t even put the Starfleet logo on the crew’s uniforms!Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
