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.
Too Many Marvel Shows, True, but Comics Subsidiary Looks Good On Disney’s Balance Sheet
By Dan Brown Bob Iger spoke for many of us last week when he said, in essence, there’s too damn much Marvel content. The question is: How is this pronouncement by the Disney boss – and his plan to scale back spending by the corporation— going to affect the comics arm of the company? During an interview with CNBC, Iger, Disney’s CEO, said the sheer volume of Marvel streaming series and movies has reached the point where the audience has been “diluted,” meaning that Marvel fans haven’t been as excited about recent big-screen releases like this February’s Quantumania as they were back in the days of Endgame four years ago. And no wonder. The third instalment in the Ant-Man series is, for those keeping score at home, the 30th film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe following 2008’s Iron Man. I mean, I love Paul Rudd as much as the next straight guy, but at some point even I have had my fill of his brand of non-threatening charm. Deciphering Iger’s ire, he appeared to be putting the blame on the avalanche of shows that were released by his Disney+ streaming service during the pandemic. And he’s got a point. I don’t know about you, but there are no longer a lot of people in my life who get excited whenever a new superhero show materializes on the small screen. No sooner had I finished watching 2021’s WandaVision than we were drowning in Marvel characters: the Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and they keep coming. They are making shows about characters I don’t even care about, which is saying something – I was raised on Marvel heroes in the 1970s and 1980s! Ah, the comics. I’m sure Marvel’s comics division won’t be spared from the billions of dollars in cuts that Iger signaled are in the offing, but there’s a simple fact of balance sheets that should shield it from excess financial pain. Simply stated, a comics company that is a subsidiary of a multibillion-dollar enterprise is going to appear on the financial statement as a cost-effective proposition because, compared with the investment required to make a movie, the cost of making a comic book or graphic novel is almost nothing – and the payoff is off the charts. As I’ve written elsewhere, my theory is that the purpose of Marvel’s comics is to serve as a kind of test kitchen where ideas can be thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Whether it’s Tony Stark donning a suit of armour for the first time, or a set of cosmic jewels that gives their possessor infinite power over reality, or a civil war pitting superhero allies against one another – those things all happened first in the pages of the comics. Groot. Thanos. Peter Parker. There are decades of stories about these characters to be mined by the writers of Marvel movies and shows. (There are so many comic and other adaptations coming out of Hollywood, it’s enough to make you wonder, in these days of a strike by movie writers, just exactly what Tinseltown scribes do, apart from plundering existing properties.) Another way of saying it is, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn didn’t have to invent the Infinity Stones because artist/writer Jim Starlin did the hard part for him five decades ago. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but I feel as though the cheapest talent working for Disney – those artists and writers who come up with the concepts that percolate upward into movies and TV shows – are going to be just fine. Or think about it this way: Freelance comic creator Jack Kirby, who arguably invented more characters and concepts than any other figure in comics history, in all the decades he toiled for Marvel (and DC), never had health insurance. Even years after Kirby’s death, I’d say Disney is getting its money’s worth out of him. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Why Didn’t Comics Version of Indiana Jones Set The World On Fire?
By Dan Brown All readers want from comics, I’ve said before, is compelling characters in interesting situations. Well, Indiana Jones – featured in the Dial of Destiny, which is in theatres now – is certainly a compelling character as played by Harrison Ford. And the makers of the Indy films have certainly been able to place him in some interesting (and deadly) situations. So how come the daring archeologist has never been able to sustain a comic title for long? I’m not saying Jones is a total washout as the headliner of a monthly series, but compared to adjacent properties, like Star Wars, he’s only been a blip in the grand sweep of comics history. Inspired by the success of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, It’s true Marvel Comics did publish more than 30 issues of The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones starting in 1983. Remember, those were the days when there wasn’t a property Marvel didn’t try to plunder. The gang from the bullpen attempted to cash in on every new fad, trend, craze and sensation that came along. How ridiculous did it get? This was the era when even the rock band KISS ended up in the pages of Marvel Comics. That’s right – for a brief moment, Gene Simmons was a Marvel protagonist, along with Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine and the rest. I’m guessing an Indy comic seemed like a no-brainer. As it turned out, that first series would pale beside the Star Wars monthly, which ran 107 issues from 1977 to 1986 and is credited by some with keeping the House of Ideas afloat during lean economic times. And those Star Wars comics were . . . fine. They weren’t the worst stories in the world, although I would argue Russ Manning was doing far more interesting things in the same universe in the pages of daily newspapers with the Star Wars comic strip. And Marvel certainly invested in the venture, attaching talents like Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson and John Byrne to bring Jones to life on the page. Yet the Further Adventures of Indiana Jones fizzled even before the original Indy trilogy wrapped up in 1989 with the Last Crusade. Here’s another comparison: Conan, Robert E. Howard’s pulp barbarian character, was also a Marvel Comics property during roughly the same period, and has been in the hands of one publishing house or another for decades since. Who knows how many Conan comic adaptations there have been to date? It’s also true Dark Horse Comics licenced Indiana Jones and his bullwhip in the 1990s for several more adventures. But those stories are only half-remembered now, if at all. So despite his enduring appeal on the big screen, why was Indy a comparative dud in comics form? I don’t have an all-encompassing answer, but the fact is some properties just don’t translate to other media. Some books don’t make good TV shows. Some movies don’t make good comics. Very few plays make for interesting films. (This is where I should also note that the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the network version of the character, barely lasted two seasons on ABC, so there may be something about the archeologist that just doesn’t work in other media.) Or perhaps it’s because the Indy films are the end product of pop culture, not the beginning. What I mean is, it was newspaper strips and adventure comics, along with silver-screen serials, that moved George Lucas and Steve Spielberg to come up with Indy in the first place. And maybe it just ends there: Dr. Jones was intended to be a creature of the big screen, so he is doomed never to transcend its limits. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
