An Exercise in Speculation on Our Favorite Stories, and What Could Have Been...

Redartz: Happy Friday, everyone! Just for fun, to start off the weekend, here's a little brain teaser. A game inspired by a recent comment from Martinex1, in which he speculated on the Avengers' "Celestial Madonna" arc, if it had been done by Steve Englehart and John Byrne/Terry Austin. The object of the game is deceptively simple: pick one of your favorite stories, and devise a creative team that might have made that story even more awesome. Blending eras is fine. For example: say, Jim Starlin inking Jack Kirby on the "Galactus Trilogy", or Steve Gerber handling Disney's Uncle Scrooge (now I would have read that...).

I will start off with a pick not too far removed from Martinex's posit: What if the Avengers/Defenders War had been brought to life by Englehart, Byrne, and Austin?  We know what a great co-plotter  John Byrne has been -- who knows where might that story have gone? And oh, the artistic possibilities... Byrne's skilled at drawing just about everyone; we saw him on Avengers -- he would have been loads of fun on the Defenders. Plus, with Terry Austin inking, we might have had Popeye make a background appearance in the domain of the dread Dormammu!

OK, now it's your turn. Can you think of a great story that might even have been greater? It's open season, and all's fair. Let's see what you've got!

The Splash Page Made Me Buy the Comic!

Martinex1:  We have frequently discussed covers that have made us buy a book, and there are indeed numerous examples of the great and colorful cover art that caught my eye from across a room.   But today let's talk about some of the splash pages that captured my attention.

As a kid purchasing comics in the late '70s on a very limited allowance, I typically circled a spinner rack numerous times as I considered all of the options for my precious fifty cents or dollar.   Sometimes even my favorite titles didn't totally draw me in and had to compete against all of the other four-color choices.  It wasn't always a slam dunk that I would buy Avengers, Fantastic Four, or the Amazing Spider-Man.  Sometimes the store proprietor wouldn't want me to flip through the book's pages but when given the chance I definitely took a peek to get a glimpse of the story.  And often it was the splash and not the cover that sealed the deal.  Here are a few examples of those experiences from my early collecting days:

One of the very first comic books I purchased was Avengers #164, the start of the Count Nefaria conflict, so it would seem natural that I would grab issue #165 as soon as it hit the rack.   But that wasn't the case at all.  I have to admit that today when I look at the George Perez art for that cover I admire it, but when I was nine-years old it did not grab me.   I can clearly remember thinking how small the team members were on the cover.  And I did not like the floating red Nefaria head screaming at them.  And on top of it, the white logo and lower right corners were a bit mottled from the printing.  Where was the hand-to-hand combat that I was expecting?  Where was the epic battle following the closing moments of #164 when Nefaria absorbed the strength of Power Man, the speed of Whirlwind, and the energy of Living Laser?  But once I opened the book, the John Byrne splash page answered all of my questions!  Nefaria just decked Captain America and Black Panther easily and he is totally unscathed; the villain is just standing there gloating.  This is going to be a huge fight; he's going to kill them all!  At least that is how I interpreted it in my youth.   As it turned out, I am glad I saw the splash page and snatched that issue up because the Count Nefaria storyline has remained my all-time favorite.  Looking back at the art, it may not have been Byrne's best but I loved it.  Here is the cover and splash of which I speak:

 

That very same month, August of 1977, nearly the same thing happened to me with the Fantastic Four.   However, this had a bit of a twist.  I had previously read the Len Wein penned and George Perez penciled FF issue #187.   I was mesmerized by the team's battle with Klaw and the Molecule Man.  That book had so much great art and suspense that I just could not put it down.  The last page overwhelmed young me.  It was monumental and shocking when down-on-his-luck Reed Richards picked up the mystical rod and transformed into the Molecule Man himself!  I know that I stared at that page for a long time.  Reed looked so creepy.   I looked at his jagged lips and his treacherous scowl and I just had to have the next issue.   What a great cliffhanger!

But when the next issue showed up at our local pharmacy, I was seriously underwhelmed by the cover.   "Seriosuly!  They are fighting a giant walking building!  How dumb!" young me thought at the time, "It looks like a silly cartoon not a dangerous battle. It is not scary at all."   In retrospect, it reminded me of one of those Twinkie advertisements we talked about a couple of days ago.  And again, the white background did not help.  It was a struggle to buy that book; it really was.  What carried me through was the memory of the closing splash of #187.   That crazy Reed in the green costume stuck in my head; so the previous issue's final splash made me buy issue #188.  Here they are for your viewing pleasure:

 

Hey!  Wait a minute!  That is bizarre!

The final example for today's post is Marvel Team-Up issue #70 that was on sale in March of 1978.  It had a perfectly fine cover and in fact I liked the cover a lot.   It was dynamic and cinematic.  I just wasn't particularly a Thor fan at the time so I wasn't convinced.  But when I flipped it open, the John Byrne art took my breath away.  I had seen giants numerous times in comics before, but this one looked monstrous crashing through the building, scaring the citizens, and getting ready to put a squeeze on the tiny Spider-Man in his right hand.  I had to have it!  Looking at it now, the inking is a little overdone for my taste.  It still packs a wallop, but I cannot take my eyes off the citizen in the foreground who looks like a zombie.   When I was young, I could only focus on the size of the Living Monolith.   Take a gander.

So there you have it - three splash pages that captured my cash. I cannot explain what hit me on such a visceral level, but it was definitely the interior art that I so clearly remember doing so.  What do you think?  Do you have any examples that you would like to share?   Cheers all!

Would You Rather...? Great Bronze Age Runs

Doug: Here's a poser for you, spinning out of last weekend's conversation on our buying zeniths. In terms of greatness, readability, sustainability, influence, and yada yada yada, would you rather go to the first 50 (I use that term somewhat loosely) issues of the All-New, All-Different X-Men, or the Avengers encompassing the "Kree/Skrull War" through the "Celestial Madonna"? I don't know about you, but that's a tough choice for me.

I'm going to have to lean toward the X-Men on the greatness of the art alone. And then there was the awesomeness from issues 97-104 as classic baddies like the Sentinels, the Juggernaut, and Magneto rose up to attack our new band of mutants.

Of course, on the other side there's Neal Adams. And the bi-weekly "Avengers/Defenders War". And Englehart's time/space opera that ran from Avengers #129-135 and included three Giant-Size issues. Can I reconsider?

For our purposes, your "50"-issue runs are:

Giant-Size X-Men #1
X-Men #s 94-143
X-Men Annual #3

Avengers #s 89-135
Giant-Size Avengers #s 2-4

Comin' In On a Wing and a Prayer: Batman & Captain America

Batman/Captain America (October 1996)
"Batman & Captain America"
John Byrne

Doug: It's hard to believe this, as well as many of the other latter-day wave of DC/Marvel crossovers, is 20 years old. Seems like only a few months ago I eagerly awaited this offering to reach my 30-year old paws. Even in the mid-90s, if John Byrne was involved, a project was still going to be big news. But... did this disappoint then, and what about now as seen through the eyes of a curmudgeonly middle-aged school teacher?

No, in answer to the first question, it did not disappoint then. John Byrne's one of those guys who "gets" comic book history. Well, for the most part (the Vision debacle, for which he shall never be forgiven on this space, aside). This book is one big homage, or love-in, or whatever else you want to call it with the Golden Age of these two lead characters. Right from the Batman's first appearance, we can see that Byrne is emulating the style of Dick Sprang, mostly fondly remembered for illustrating the adventures of the Dark Knight Detective in the 1950s. But here I go again, getting ahead of myself. Of course we first need to give you that nifty little plot summary called the 100-Word Review:

Toward the end of the War, Captain America and Bucky are ordered Stateside in order to investigate millionaire Bruce Wayne, believed to be secretly bankrolling sabotage of the Gotham Project (known to history as the Manhattan Project). Batman and Robin are tracking down the Joker, who has been stealing secrets of the Project. During Cap’s surveillance of Wayne, he and Batman learn one another's identities and collaborate to find the Joker. They find that the Joker and the Red Skull are themselves collaborating, but the unpredictable Joker soon turns on the Skull – and that means war of another kind!

If you've never laid eyes on this book, it's a 64-page prestige format graphic novel. And it looks great, which brings us to...

The Good: Yes, it does look great! The art is splendid throughout and the coloring (credited to Patricia Mulvihill) is phenomenal. I don't know that I'm qualified to discern or discuss coloring innovations of the 1990s, but it's fairly obvious that Mulvihill was able to employ then-modern computer coloring techniques without losing the four-color charm that many of us cling to. 

Byrne's pencils are magnificent. Some criticisms (maybe just of mine) of Byrne in this period are that his art had become flat, or scratchy, or that his figures' torsos were sometimes oddly elongated. None of that is here. In fact, if you ask me to compare eras of Byrne's career, I'd gladly put this alongside his work in the Claremont/Byrne/Austin heyday of the Uncanny X-Men or his collaboration with Dick Giordano in the Man of Steel limited series. It's that good. 

His writing is spot on as well. I mentioned at the top the homages to Dick Sprang's art. Byrne captures the spirit of the era in his writing as well. It's not over-the-top sappy or dated in any negative way. But you can just hear Cap or the Batman talking "that way" if you were watching this on film at a Sunday matinee. The inclusion of Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, when Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos would have been included, was a nice touch. Great job of further blending the universes.

There are a few twists in the story that caught me off guard when I read this the first time twenty years ago, and again a couple of weeks ago when I re-read it. That the Joker would double-cross the Red Skull because the Skull was a Nazi seemed strange -- was it the racism, the world conquest, or the supreme egomania that turned off the Clown Prince? It was never stated, but the Joker's seeming patriotism struck an odd note. I'm not saying it was bad... not at all. In fact, it was good because it was so unexpected.

In addition to the wonderful splash of the Batcave, late in the story there is (of course) a perilous trap, timed to kill Batman and Bucky (the crossover with the sidekicks was fun). It definitely hearkened to the days of the cliffhanger endings popular in the serials of the 1940s as well as to the 1966 Batman television series.

Byrne gives a "thanks" to Roger Stern for the epilogue of the story. It's a nifty "What If?", as 20 years after the War Batman and Robin are patrolling the ocean for any signs of the Joker... Junior. "Jr.", huh? Well, this ain't yer daddy's Batman and Robin. Nope -- this is Dick Grayson wearing the mantle of the Bat and Bruce Wayne, Jr. as Robin. And as they pilot the Bat-sub, what's in that ice floe they find up ahead? I think you know what (or who) it is...

The Bad: I guess if I have one complaint it's that Bucky got a little short-shrifted in this story. He has a moment here and there, but largely it's Robin who does the more-heroic stuff. Bucky sort of comes off as a whiner, which I felt was interesting given that I'd have assumed Bucky to be older at that time than Robin -- maybe a little more mature. Too, and if we are to believe the Winter Soldier retcon (which obviously wasn't a thing yet when Byrne penned this story), I'd have liked to have seen Bucky as a bit more take-charge. But then, and as I've said, whenever I was reading the Invaders I never thought of Bucky as carrying out any "collateral damage".

Oh, and another thing -- when the Joker stole the atomic bomb, Fat Boy, and it went off in the Atlantic after our heroes worked their (lucky) magic, what are we to assume? In our reality, the bombs dropped on Japan were nicknamed Fat Man and Little Boy. So in this story was there only one bomb, and if so, was the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to pass? This is in no way a situation that ruins this story for me. Far from it. But it just left me to wonder. Sooooo many universes! Someone should write a Crisis...

The Ugly: Nada.

Check this out if you're able. It's been reprinted in one of the Crossover Classics volumes, and can probably be found at your LCS or online for only a buck or two. It was a nice half hour diversion, and one I'm glad that after all these years I read again.

If I Had A Buck... Deja Vu Again!

Martinex1: Did you ever have the feeling that you've seen a comic cover before?   Some call it an homage.  Some call it a swipe.  Some call it a tribute. Whatever you call it, there has been a long tradition of honoring classic covers with a retake or reimagining.  Today's $1 Challenge explores this artistic tendency.

Recently we looked at the "Pieta Cover" and the myriad versions of that memorable pose.  Comic covers like the iconic Fantastic Four #1 have been recreated too many times to collect them all here. If you search the web you might find dozens of examples.  Here we will look at archetypal covers as well as the oddball and obscure.  A number of artists have handled the pencils, but John Byrne seems to enjoy the process as many of the examples below are his.  Sometimes he even paid homage to his own earlier work.  Other covers are from the likes of Mike Zeck, Ron Frenz, Pat Broderick and John Buscema. 


Modern comics have started to recreate the classics regularly; I've tried to stick to comics from the 20th century (but there may be an exception or three because I particularly liked the styling).  To make it challenging, sometimes I have included the original inspiration and for others I have only included the inspired.   Do you recognize these?  A couple even reference images from sources other than comics!

There are more than 40 opportunities today, choose your favorite 4 and get the conversation rolling. And please try not to repeat your comments!