The Marvel Universe: An appreciation
By Dan Brown Did you ever have one of those posters showing all the Marvel superhero characters gathered together in one place? Over the decades, successive generations of Marvel artists have depicted that crowded scene – row after row of colourful do-gooders, a cast of literally thousands, standing at the ready to fight evil.. Whether this heroes’ gallery was drawn by Jack Kirby, John Byrne or Michael Golden or someone else, my jaw hits the floor every time I see it. I am in awe of the creative energy it must have required to come up with backstories and costumes for all of them. So what I want to do this week is take a moment to praise the folks at Marvel for doing such a good job of churning out one interesting character after another since 1939. This will come as no surprise to regular readers who know I was raised on Marvel Comics in the 1970s. (And don’t worry, DC fans, I’ll do a tribute to that company’s stable when I figure out the right way to do it.) When it comes to being prolific, no other comic publisher has the track record Marvel does. What a riot of invention! What a unique assemblage of talent! What a big bang of creativity that set and kept the Marvel Universe in motion! The Marvel Universe is what results when the right talented people get together and are allowed the freedom to let their minds wander. It’s an example of what no less an authority than Willy Wonka calls “pure imagination.” Jack Kirby and Stan Lee – who launched such comics as the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and the Uncanny X-Men – were undeniably the creators among creators at Marvel. I don’t want to get too much into the weeds on the question of which man possessed the real vision, so let’s just state for our purposes here today that Kirby and Lee combined are among the greatest and most prolific American originators of characters, in the same league as Walt Disney, Jim Henson, Dr. Seuss and Mark Twain. It’s true the different creative teams at Marvel were motivated by economic necessity. They never met a trend they didn’t try to plunder, like the disco craze. No sooner, it seemed, had Studio 54 opened than Marvel came up with the mutant Dazzler – who has all the powers of a disco ball! When kung fu movies likewise hit it big, Marvel answered with Shang-Chi and Iron Fist. Sometimes the plundering was done for the right reasons, as when characters like Black Panther and Power Man were devised to give black readers heroes of their own. Although some fans have by now grown weary of the offerings from Marvel’s movie division, the studio hasn’t even begun to scratch the surface of the vast library of characters it owns. No one would call the comic-book Agatha Harkness a major Marvel character, but there’s currently an entire series streaming right now devoted to her solo adventures. A series about Wonder Man – another B-list character – is set to debut next year. As someone who appreciates and values imagination, I can’t help but be deeply impressed by how productive Marvel has been over the decades, creating a surplus of diverse characters who have now become recognized around the world. And yes, the chumminess of the Marvel Bullpen was likely an illusion created by Lee to help infuse the Marvel brand with an air of fun, but at the end of the day we are still left with what all of those artists, writers, colourists, letterers and editors wrought: An entirely original group of compelling heroes. There’s literally a character for everyone. I stand in awe. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 31 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Let’s Stop This Comic Trend While We Still Can
By Dan BrownIt started, as far as I can tell, with Watchmen back in 1986.And it ends now, if I have anything to say about it..What am I on about?I’m not even sure what the correct term is. Some call it “back matter,” others say “supplemental material.”I’m referring to the several pages of prose that appeared in every issue of the landmark DC series back in the day. The same material was reproduced when all 12 Watchmen issues were collected into one volume and sold as a graphic novel.In Watchmen, it took the form of faux newspaper articles or documents or book excerpts that shed light on the rest of the story and the characters in it. Alan Moore came up with the stuff when DC was unable to sell ads in the individual issues of what was then an experiment in more mature storytelling.I don’t honestly know how many other comics have used the same device. I have noticed that at least one other series – the alien-invasion tale Wild’s End by Dan Abnett and I.N.J. Culbard – features the same kind of afterword section. I recently read the collected Wild’s End for L.A. Mood’s graphic-novel group, it was one of the books we covered this summer. And each chapter ends with supplementary material.In individual Wild’s End issues, which started appearing in 2015, the back matter takes up as many as five pages. The goal appears to be the same as with Watchmen — to give readers pertinent information in a way that adds context and shading to the story told in comic panels in the front of the book.Maybe you’ve read comics with the same device. I know there is a vast audience out there of comic enthusiasts who don’t even bother to read these pages, which are akin to the bonus material you get with a DVD.In the ideal case, these back pages would flesh out certain aspects of a given story, supplying readers with an even deeper reading experience. That’s fine, but what I fear is these prose epilogues will become the norm.I’m not opposed in every instance to non-comics material in my comics. I grew up reading Marvel Comics in the 1970s and at least two pages in every issue of, say, the Uncanny X-Men, were devoted to a letters column and Bullpen Bulletins. I loved that stuff, it was fun. Those pages made me feel like I was a part of the Marvel community at a time when there was no global communication device like the internet (you can imagine how crushed I felt to learn Stan Lee had made up reader letters in some early Marvel issues). But enough already.This is a pet peeve of mine I’m hoping comes to an end before other creators take it up and it becomes a full-on trend.For starters, five pages out of an individual issue is just a huge chunk of space. I know the justification is that certain aspects of a story are better told in text, but if you’re like me, you don’t like chocolate in your peanut butter. Prose already has a showcase, they’re called books.Taking five pages away from a powerful creative team is too much of a sacrifice. With five extra pages an issue, a creator like Jack Kirby could have launched whole new universes full of interesting characters, concepts and locations.And, frankly, those prose pages never have the same impact as the rest of a chapter or a specific single issue. Reading them feels like homework, frankly. At least it does to me.Also, they just reek of literary pretense. Comics don’t have to be more like books. They are a perfectly legit artform without text passages, so let’s nip this incipient trend in the bud.Creators, the work you do with drawings and word balloons is perfectly fine on its own. You don’t need a prose section at the back of your latest comic to give you credibility, comics are perfect the way they have always been presented.Disagree? I’d love to hear why in the comment box below!Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 31 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
If I’m Not Reading A Book, I’m Lost
I feel weird.I’m at a loss. Like a part of me has gone missing.I’m uneasy. At loose ends.I feel . . . lacking. Out of sorts. As though something unnatural has happened to me.It can only mean one thing.There’s nothing on my nightstand.That’s right: I don’t have a book on the go at the moment.Hard to believe, I know, but your L.A. Mood graphic-novel correspondent isn’t reading anything right now. Talk about unnatural!I don’t know if I’m the only person who feels this way, but my usual state of being is that I have my nose stuck in at least one book.Sometimes more than one.But at this moment, I’m between books. I finished a bunch of graphic novels at the end of August, and I have yet to decide what’s next on my reading journey. This doesn’t happen often. I typically have a long mental list of the titles I want to tackle.But for whatever reason or non-reason, I haven’t been able to settle on my next reading choice.Why does this make me feel leery? I guess it’s because having a book beside my bed is the natural state of things for me, whether it’s a graphic novel or a non-fiction title or something else.Not to be all psychoanalytical about it, but reading has been a constant in my life since my parents read to me as a little kid at bedtime.Out of all the generous things they did and do for me, this has had the most powerful impact on the person I am today. They gave me the gift of literacy.Every night, there would be a book like Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman or a Dr. Suess title or a volume from Richard Scarry.If I was cranky and they wanted to get me to take an afternoon nap, my parents would offer me a “read rest,” which meant I would work my way through a pile of books until I dropped off, thus forever connecting two of life’s most awesome things – reading and sleeping – in my mind.These gave way to more mature books as I aged, and it wasn’t long before I was reading on my own. Comics like Fat Albert, Star Wars, and Captain America came first, followed by the Merlin trilogy from Mary Stewart and the pulpy Morgaine books by C.J. Cherryh.Naturally, English was my favourite class in high school and I picked up an undergrad and grad degrees in the same topic prior to heading to Ryerson for my journalism education. I don’t want to overstate it, but reading has been a thread running throughout my life. And of course I married an avid reader who burns through a different urban fantasy every couple days. When we finished our basement in Poplar Hill, she and I agreed there had to be room for lots of bookshelves – finally, a library of our own.I agree with the columnist who once wrote that some books aren’t just books for me, they are events in my life. Turning points.Marvel comics fascinated me with their wordplay. Where else was I going to see terms like “mutant,” “stasis,” “uncanny” and “eldritch”?Although he was a fiction writer, Charles Bukowski has influenced my journalism writing deeply. And when I stumbled across James Stockdale’s A Vietnam Experience in the D.B. Weldon Library at Western University, I began my lifelong quest to be a Stoic.The problem, come to think of it, may be that there are too many books I want to read right now.So I feel kinda paralyzed. Ever felt that way?I had a friend in grad school who had a solution. He told me once that he wanted to be a university professor so badly because he figured it was the only job where he could get paid to read for a living.If you have any suggestions for what I should read next, I’m all ears. Oh, and what book do you have on the go right now? I’d love to hear all about it in the comment section below! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 31 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Make mine Byrne
What you probably don’t know about the Forest City is how it’s the hometown of the leader of the Marvel comics superhero team Alpha Flight.That’s right, James (Vindicator) Hudson hails from London, Ontario.This bit of trivia is on my mind because last October the company re-released the Alpha Flight comics by John Bryne Omnibus, which collects the team’s early exploits in its own title and others from the 1970s and 1980s.I’m almost 600 pages into the hefty tome, which clocks in at 1,248 pages long. Being a fan of Byrne, the sometime Canadian artist/writer, obviously I love the thing.I began following his work earlier in the Me Decade when he penciled titles like Doomsday+1 and Space: 1999.What can I say? Something about his precise, elongated lines spoke to my younger self. I was part of the generation whose puppy love for superheroes grew into something deeper when Byrne was assigned to such Marvel titles as Iron Fist, Team-Up and, of course, the Uncanny X-Men.We were Wolverine fans before the Canadian X-Man became an unkillable killing machine. And we were thrilled when Wolvie’s former allies, Alpha Flight, got their own series.What we didn’t know was Byrne did not have a fun time doing the first 29 issues of Alpha Flight, which appear in this collection along with their appearances in mags like the Incredible Hulk, Machine Man and Two-in-One. For a while there, the Alphas – Sasquatch in particular – were perpetual Marvel guest stars.As he has stated in interviews in the years since, Bryne was frustrated with the limits of Canada’s own super-team. All Alpha Flight had been created to do, he famously noted, was to survive a fight with the X-Men. They were flimsy, two-dimensional.Some fans have pointed to how Bryne would kill off major characters as evidence he had soured on the character. Which didn’t stop the title from selling. Indeed, his first royalty check for Alpha Flight, at a time when royalties were not standard practice at Marvel, was reportedly the biggest Marvel had issued to that point.What jumps out at me in the omnibus edition?*Wolverine had his roots as a mortal character. In one X-Men story collected here, he even gets winded from running a lot. That destructible version of the character is long gone.*Byrne has spoken of how he always wrote Northstar true to his sexuality, even before Marvel was ready to reveal him as the company’s first queer superhero. It checks out. From the vantage point of being an adult reader, it’s clear Northstar is gay.*Vindicator, who changed his name to Guardian, was just getting interesting before he died in action.*I love Byrne’s depiction of Canada as home to ancient evils. He handled both pencils and inks on Alpha Flight, which means each panel lacks the background detail of when Terry Austin was inking his work in X-Men.*The issues here have a good balance of magic-driven storylines, street-level adventures and out-and-out superheroics. A favourite Byrne villain, the Super Skrull, even makes an appearance.*Each issue raises as many questions as it answers. Byrne was doing a superb job, given the constraints of monthly comics, of adding layers to each character. Keep in mind he was in the middle of a long run on Fantastic Four at the same time he launched Alpha Flight. All in all, the Alpha Flight by John Byrne Omnibus is a worthwhile trip down Memory Lane for any comic fan who grew up Marvel.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 31 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
This is a Golden Age for Comics
Let me begin by making a bold statement.There has never been a better time in human history to be a fan of comics than now.The Golden Age of Comics is upon us. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.There has never been a greater variety of comics dealing with a multitude of subjects. Comics art has never been better. Plus comics are finally being taken seriously as a form of expression. And there are more opportunities to discuss comics and appreciate them than at any time before.Don’t believe me? Imagine a time when most of the comics on the spinner rack at your local drug store were published by two companies. They were all dismissed as stuff for children. There was no such thing as graphic novels, no major publisher looking for sustained narratives that weren’t about heroes with superpowers. And if you wanted to share your love of comics with fans around the world, you had no outlet to do so.I grew up in such a time. It was called the 1970s. Trust me, things were not better in my day. Back then, the general view was that comic books were something children grew out of. Why didn’t Stan Lee use his real name when he helped create the Marvel Universe? Because he was saving it for his attempts at “serious” literature.Nor was he the only one, as creators were made to feel embarrassed about working in an industry not treated like a legitimate trade. When new comic books came out, they weren’t reviewed in the newspapers of record. Movies featuring costumed do-gooders were few and far between.Fast-forward to 2024. Things are so much better in so many ways.Comics and graphic novels are recognized as a valid medium for telling all kinds of stories, not just ones about guys and gals in tights.Want to write about what it’s like to work in Alberta’s oil sands? Want to recollect your teen years toiling in a pulp and paper mill, dreaming of being a cartoonist? Want to explore the effects of an autocratic government in North Korea? Want to recount your hilarious attempts to capitalize on the “vinyl resurgence?” All of those stories have been told in graphic novels by Canadian creators. It’s true superhero comics did have a mass audience in the 1940s among children, but let’s suppose you’re a fan today of a particularly obscure character – say Marvel’s Rocket Raccoon. If you want to learn more about him, there are entire monthly titles devoted just to his exploits, featuring only him without any of his Guardians of the Galaxy teammates. Plus you can buy action figures and every other possible piece of merchandise based on Rocket.In fact, thanks to big-budget motion pictures and streaming shows, superheroes are more central to our culture than they were even back in the post-Second World War period. These productions feature serious talents like Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, Jack Nicholson and Natalie Portman.The New York Times wasn’t reviewing comics or graphic novels when I was falling in love with them as a kid growing up in small-town Ontario. Academics weren’t doing serious research on them. There wasn’t a Scott Pilgrim or Sweet Tooth series on Netflix for me to enjoy, because none of that infrastructure existed.Nor did we have creators like a John Porcellino, whose work is so perfect that I consider it poetry in the form of sequential panels. Hey, I still love the Marvel mags of my childhood, but they weren’t that creative. And now we have a dedicated network of retailers like L.A. Mood devoted to selling comics, connected by a global-information source that gives everyone the tools to express their love for whatever title or character or storyline they fancy. If you like a property, there’s a website for it. All of which is bolstered by a group of in-person events – here in London, that includes Free Comic Book Day, Forest City Comicon, and Tingfest. One of the big secrets in life is to know you have it good WHEN you have it good, not later. As the song says, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, so my advice to anyone reading this column is to revel in this current Golden Age while it lasts.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 31 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
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.
