Review: Black Widow: Web of Intrigue

Writers: Ralph Macchio, George Pérez, Gerry Conway
Artists: George Pérez, Bob Layton, Luke McDonnell, Paul Gulacy, George Freeman
Collects: Marvel Fanfare #10-13 (1983-84), Bizarre Adventures #25 (1981), Black Widow: The Coldest War OGN (1990)
Published: Marvel, 2016; $24.99

In the last few years, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has repeatedly insisted that making movies about female superheroes is an important priority for him. The claim is rather shocking given that Feige has produced more than thirty superhero movies over the last two decades, only one of which (2005’s Elektra) has featured a female character in the lead. While Russian super-spy Black Widow has long been considered the most obvious female candidate for a solo superhero movie at Marvel (given Scarlett Johansson’s portrayal of the character across five movies since 2010, with at least two more Avengers movies in the works), plans for any such film have yet to materialize. In fact, the first female-led Marvel Studios film will apparently be 2019’s Captain Marvel – not the most obvious choice, since the character has yet to appear in a Marvel film. It’s also disappointing in that both Captain Marvel’s world and her superhuman abilities are generally in keeping with the kind of superhero movies we’ve seen time and again, whereas Black Widow’s milieu is more in line with the likes of James Bond or The Avengers (the 1960s British television series, not Marvel’s superhero franchise).

I mention all of this because I’d hoped that Black Widow: Web of Intrigue might establish a worthy blueprint for the argument that stories about female superheroes – and the character Black Widow in particular – have just as much potential for mainstream appeal as Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and other white male superheroes. Of course, any number of more recently published female superhero comics (not to mention last week’s Wonder Woman feature film) could be marshaled to that argument – including, yes, a number starring Captain Marvel. But what might have made Web of Intrigue a more worthy proving ground is the ubiquity of its main attraction, a four-issue run on the 1980s series Marvel Fanfare by writer Ralph Macchio and artist George Pérez. It’s been reprinted several times, including in magazine form in 1999 and in a 2010 hardcover as part of Marvel’s Premiere Classics line. In the comics world, that sort of longevity – as in the cases of The Dark Phoenix Saga, The Death of Gwen Stacy, and God Loves, Man Kills, stories from the 1970s and 1980s that have been (or soon will be) adapted as feature films – tends to be its own kind of pedigree, at least in Hollywood’s eyes.

Unfortunately, Web of Intrigue is a profound disappointment in terms of how it represents its female protagonist, and I can only hope that stories like this one won’t ever be used as a model for superhero films starring women. The story sheds consistent doubt on Black Widow’s professional competence and emotional fitness for the job, linking those qualities explicitly to her gender: “If it came down to a showdown,” she wonders, “would Natasha Romanoff, the woman, allow Black Widow, the spy, to perform her duty? I had no answer.” The story also defines the character almost exclusively in relation to men. Her mission – to track down the father figure who raised her, who has possibly defected to the Soviet Union – is further complicated by the feelings she develops for a Soviet-employed American scientist she seduces while working undercover. Her top-secret S.H.I.E.L.D. dossier, as recounted by Nick Fury for a panel of the international spy organization’s all-male leadership, lists not her achievements in the field but rather which male superheroes she’s dated.

It doesn’t help that Web of Intrigue is painfully overwritten by Macchio, who is rightly better known for his various editorial roles at Marvel than as a writer. In action scenes, especially, he refuses to let Pérez’s artwork speak for itself. When Pérez draws Black Widow performing a (perfectly visually comprehensible) midair twist to take out two goons who are shooting at her, for instance, Macchio can’t resist scripting this clunker of a thought bubble: “I heard others scrambling about on the roof while I was inside…must twist as I fall to fire at them.” But worse is Macchio’s dialogue for Fury, who reads like a stereotypical Southern hick straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard: “Awright, Sam, I got all this info you wuz askin’ fer. But, in the future, howzabout lettin’ me give the orders around here. I wuzn’t hired to be no blasted errand boy, y’know.”

It’s actually pretty astonishing just how many offensive stereotypes Web of Intrigue manages to include in just four issues. A multiethnic team of assassins dispatched to capture Black Widow comprises a mostly naked sumo wrestler and an (even more naked) spear-chucking warrior who Black Widow refers to as “the African.” The book’s protagonist unreflexively calls Chinese-American S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Jimmy Woo an “Oriental,” despite the term having fallen out of fashion nearly ten years before these comics were published. And it all ends with a masterclass in the objectification of the female body, with the contrivance of this excuse for Black Widow to run around in her underwear for the story’s last ten or fifteen pages:

The trade paperback edition of Web of Intrigue includes another two stories beyond the four-issue Marvel Fanfare storyline. The first is a fairly incoherent black-and-white tale that seems mostly an excuse for artist Paul Gulacy to draw the story’s characters as various Hollywood celebrities of years gone by. It ends, inexplicably, with two pages of Macchio’s purple prose recited by a Humphrey Bogart stand-in.

This book’s second “bonus” is the 60-page graphic novel Black Widow: The Coldest War, by writer Gerry Conway and artist George Freeman. Published in 1990, it follows up on the story of Black Widow’s first husband: Red Guardian, the Soviets’ answer to Captain America. It’s the best part of this collection, but that isn’t saying much; like the previous stories, it’s still uncomfortably concerned with positioning Black Widow’s professional capabilities in relation to her gender and sexuality. Characters’ names are spelled inconsistently throughout the story and text is sometimes hard to read against the background colors, signs of how cursory the editing and production design for Marvel’s early-1990s graphic novels often were.

As much as I wanted to be able to advocate for this book, I’m afraid I can’t see much that’s positive in Black Widow: Web of Intrigue. It’s precisely the sort of female-led superhero comic that today’s films and comics should strive not to emulate. That doesn’t mean that film studios and comic book publishers shouldn’t strive for parity in their representations of women, though; it simply suggests that, in telling future stories about women superheroes, we might all be better served by looking to the cultural attitudes of our own time rather than seeking creative inspiration from the past.

Review: Spidey, Vol. 1: First Day

Writer: Robbie Thompson
Artists: Nick Bradshaw, André Lima Araújo
Collects: Spidey #1-6 (2016)
Published: Marvel, 2016; $17.99

When Spidey was first announced in 2015, it was pitched as “an all-new ongoing series of done-in-one, in-continuity tales set during Peter’s teenage years.” I was excited when the news broke. It had been a long time since a series like Untold Tales of Spider-Man had focused on the early years of the main-Marvel-universe Peter Parker; in fact, it had been a long time since Marvel published a really good creator-driven Spider-Man series not immediately tied to present-day continuity in general. What I expected of Spidey, based on the initial press, was a continuity-lite version of Untold Tales or maybe even something in line with the better issues of Marvel Adventures Spider-Man: a series with recognizably classic versions of the characters we’re familiar with, but without too much historical baggage. Instead, now having read Spidey, I find myself disappointed with a series that deviates significantly from what was promised and, on top of that, seems unable to decide exactly what kind of comic it wants to be.

First of all, Spidey is definitely not set in any kind of established continuity. In this book Peter Parker is being tutored by his high school crush Gwen Stacy (who doesn’t appear in Marvel’s main universe until Peter is in college). He fights a variety of Lee/Ditko-era villains that include the Sandman, the Lizard, and the Vulture, all of whom he’s seemingly met before in this universe; and yet, he hasn’t met J. Jonah Jameson (who first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #1) or sold a single photograph of Spider-Man by the time the series begins. Instead, apparently, he’s some kind of Internet sensation: “My last Spidey selfie got six zillion likes on Insta,” he proclaims in the second issue. And while being divorced from main-universe continuity isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, there are already plenty of high-school Spider-Men across a range of media: Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man in the comics, Sam Raimi’s and Marc Webb’s versions in the movies, and television shows like The Spectacular Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man (the latter being completely unrelated to Bendis’s comic book, sadly). But what’s most important about that statement is that all of those comics, movies, and television shows are a lot better than Spidey.

Even the two Amazing Spider-Man movies – the latter of which is probably the worst superhero movie I have ever seen – do a superior job of establishing believable characters than Spidey. Each issue (except for #5) begins with the same full-page illustration depicting the character’s origin, but with slightly different text overlaid in each instance. Often, this text establishes the general theme or conflict for the issue. These themes tend to be expressed in the form of some maxim conveyed by Peter’s Aunt May or Uncle Ben. But rather than ever exploring Uncle Ben’s most important shred of wisdom, the one that arguably defines the Spider-Man franchise – “with great power there must also come great responsibility” – the series harps on such banalities as “be yourself,” “never give up,” and “don’t fall down.” Almost every issue ends with Peter cryptically repeating the day’s lesson to Aunt May, who always seems to be either doing the dishes or making dinner. It’s a shockingly regressive portrayal of the character, especially in light of her far less domestic role as a humanitarian aid worker in recent issues of Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man.

Much of the painful simplicity of Spidey’s stories can be forgiven if we read it as simply being geared toward very young children. I’m hesitant to do so, however, mainly because of how thoughtlessly it approaches the subject of Peter’s bullying at school. Throughout the first six issues, Peter is tormented relentlessly by his peers: he is physically attacked, shoved, and spit on. His head is held underwater in a public toilet, and he takes the beatings administered by school jock Flash Thompson in dutiful silence. “I could crush Flash and all his buddies,” he thinks. “But if I do that? I lose the balance Uncle Ben always talked about. I’ll lose it and fall. No more secret identity. Which would break Aunt May’s heart.”

This line of thinking is a downright pathological extrapolation from Stan Lee’s portrayal of the character, in which Peter’s “bullying” mostly took the form of verbal barbs from girls he awkwardly asked on dates. By not using his powers in those cases, Peter was not merely protecting his secret identity; he was also choosing not to use his powers for personal gain or in the service of spite and pettiness. In Spidey, his tacit acceptance of extreme physical bullying represents an uncomfortable refusal to stand up for his own basic dignity as a human being. It doesn’t take superpowers to ask an adult for help or to speak up against the people who make your life a living hell, and Spidey’s failure to recognize that is deeply troubling.

All of that said, Nick Bradshaw’s artwork for the series’ first three issues is genuinely lovely. It’s filled with the kinds of fun details and Easter eggs you might expect of an artist like Mark Buckingham or a Generation X-era Chris Bachalo. The Sandman’s amorphous limbs transcend panel borders, emphasizing the character’s physical uncontainability, and when the Lizard’s minions invade New York City, dozens of tiny reptiles skitter around the panel borders. Bradshaw’s artwork does suffer from an overabundance of two-page spreads, though, which I suspect were designed for (and therefore probably read better in) digital formats; there’s just too much gutter loss in the trade paperback for me to believe that these pages were laid out with a traditional print book in mind.

André Lima Araújo’s artwork in issues 4 through 6 conveys the story well enough, but you can really feel Bradshaw’s absence in these issues, especially since writer Robbie Thompson still seems to be writing for an artist who’s going to supplement a sparse script with tons of visual detail. Araújo just isn’t that kind of artist, unfortunately, and his tendency to draw tiny figures inside huge panels results in a comic that often looks and feels cavernously empty.

In the end, I’m just not sure what this book wants or even is trying to be. If it’s intended to appeal to longtime Spider-Man fans, then why does it tell such juvenile stories in a totally unremarkable new continuity? If it’s trying to convey wholesome lessons for children, then why doesn’t it try harder to establish Peter as a good role model with at least some modicum of self-worth? If it was designed purely as a vehicle for Bradshaw to unleash his artistic talent, then why is Bradshaw gone after the first three issues? And why, ultimately, was this series promoted as something that it so completely is not? Perhaps what’s most frustrating about Spidey is that it seems so blissfully ignorant of these questions in the first place.

Review: Doctor Strange: The Flight of Bones

Writers: Dan Jolley, Tony Harris, Ray Snyder, Michael Golden, Jim Starlin, Michael T. Gilbert, Kieron Gillen, Peter Milligan, Ted McKeever, Mike Carey
Artists: Tony Harris, Ray Snyder, Paul Chadwick, Frazer Irving, Michael Golden, Jim Starlin, Michael T. Gilbert, Frank Brunner, Ted McKeever, Marcos Martin
Collects: Doctor Strange (vol. 2) #1-4 (1999); Marvel: Shadows & Light #1-2 (1997-98); Marvel Double Shot #4 (2003); and The Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange #1 (2010)
Published: Marvel, 2016; $24.99

My main interest in reading Doctor Strange: The Flight of Bones, which collects Doctor Strange’s short-lived Marvel Knights series from just before the turn of the millennium, was in seeing a mid-Starman Tony Harris drawing one of my favorite low-profile Marvel characters of the time. (It would be another ten years before a Doctor Strange movie was even rumored, and almost ten more before that movie was actually released.) I had always assumed that Harris also wrote these comics, since I’d never seen any other name mentioned in relation to them. I wasn’t completely wrong – Harris does receive “story” credit, along with actual scripter Dan Jolley and inker Ray Snyder – but he’s actually gone by the series’ halfway point, replaced by Paul Chadwick of Concrete fame. One can only speculate on what could have happened behind the scenes to cause Harris to abandon a four-issue miniseries after drawing just two issues, but the result, at any rate, is that Jolley is left holding the bag with a story that never really comes together.

Jolley’s writing isn’t bad, but he mostly seems to be doing damage control for a series that’s clearly gone off the rails. There are so many out-of-left-field narrative choices, even before Harris’s departure, that it’s difficult to imagine the final version of Flight of Bones as being at all similar to the series originally proposed. One is the jarring introduction of a third-person narrator halfway through the first issue, which is all the more baffling given that we see Strange dictating his thoughts to a magical, self-recording diary just a few scenes later. Would interspersing the story with first-person diary excerpts not have been a more engaging way of granting the reader access to Strange’s thoughts – and a cleverer one, too, given the diary’s presence as a physical artifact in the story? I also wonder at the choice to fill out Strange’s supporting cast with an obscure character named Topaz, a young woman who apparently featured in the 1970s horror title Werewolf by Night and a handful of issues in Strange’s first two ongoing series.

But the biggest head-scratcher is the total abandonment of the religious motifs that arguably define the first half of the series. Harris frequently intercuts the action of his two issues with Christian imagery – crosses, stained-glass windows, gargoyles, and gothic spires – that juxtapose (in a quite novel way for a Doctor Strange comic) the character’s simultaneous devotion to the occult and his non-belief in a Christian God. At one point Topaz even asks Strange about his religious beliefs, and Strange equivocates in a way that’s clearly meant to be revisited later in the story. That never happens, though, and the second half reveals that the apparently religiously motivated crimes of the series’ first half were all the work of a mind-control plot by Strange’s perpetual nemesis Dormammu. Following the reveal is an extended fight sequence in which Strange and Dormammu spout uncharacteristic quips and one-liners, making it clear that Jolley and company are just vamping for page length at this point.

Could the series’ intended interrogation of Christian belief have seemed simply too controversial to the series’ editors, inspiring last-minute changes that drove Harris from the title? (It seems unlikely that Jolley, Harris, and Snyder would have had a change of heart about the subject matter, given their future work together on the even more explicitly religious-themed Obergeist.) If so, the situation would be in keeping with that of Kevin Smith’s Daredevil: Guardian Devil – the very first story arc published under the Marvel Knights imprint, and one I’ve always suspected of editorial interference given its bizarre eleventh-hour plot turn, in which the apparent Second Coming of Christ is explained away as an illusion created by the Spider-Man villain Mysterio (who proceeds to commit suicide before any questions can be answered).

This collection is rounded out by a hodgepodge of Doctor Strange stories from various anthology titles, all by different creators, including such luminaries as Christopher Golden and Jim Starlin. The best one is probably the 2010 story by Kieron Gillen and Frazer Irving. Irving’s Doctor Strange was a welcome sight for me: his renderings of the character were by far the best part of his fill-in issues on Brian Michael Bendis’s Uncanny X-Men. Irving’s contribution aside, though, the art in these stories rarely compares to that of Flight of Bones’ first two issues; with its extreme detail, serpentine linework, and resolute portrayal of Strange as a dead ringer for Vincent Price(!), Harris’s work is certainly something to behold. It’s just a shame there’s so little of it to go around.

Review: Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1: Revolution

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artists: Chris Bachalo, Frazer Irving
Collects: Uncanny X-Men #1-5 (2013)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $24.99 (HC), $19.99 (TPB)

Brian Michael Bendis’s Uncanny X-Men exists at a strange remove from All-New X-Men, being at once a companion piece to the writer’s other flagship X-Men title and a series with a coherent raison d’etre of its own. The first collected volume, Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1: Revolution, focuses on the shambles Cyclops and his cohort (Emma Frost, Magneto, and Magik) find themselves in as they attempt to train a new generation of mutants. (It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Bendis’s “all-new” characters – Tempus, Triage, Fabio, and Benjamin – make their home in Uncanny, while the stars of All-New are the time-displaced “all-old” X-Men of the 1960s?)

Some of the most interesting and best-written moments in Revolution are actually ones previously seen in All-New X-Men, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, presented here with a focus on the character interactions we didn’t see in Bendis’s other X-book. When Cyclops & Friends show up at the Jean Grey School to recruit more mutants to their cause, for example, Bendis overlays the war of words between Cyclops, Wolverine, and Kitty Pryde with a psychic showdown between Emma Frost and her former protégés, the Stepford Cuckoos. The girls feel betrayed by Emma’s apparent loss of her mutant abilities, casting a harsh light on Emma’s own sense of betrayal – one directed at herself on the one hand, but also at Cyclops, both for unintentionally breaking her mutant powers and for breaking her heart as well.

As fascinating as moments like these are in their own right, they also serve as consistent springboards to what gives Uncanny X-Men its own identity in relation to All-New X-Men: the “broken” nature of its cast’s mutant powers in the wake of Avengers vs. X-Men. If All-New is about inexperienced young mutants learning to utilize their talents to their fullest potential, then Uncanny is about experienced older mutants half-conscious of their new limitations but who try to do what they think is right anyway. Throughout Revolution the utter inability of Cyclops and his team becomes increasingly disconcerting, especially considering that half of them are completely untrained. While the team narrowly escapes potentially deadly encounters with Sentinel robots and the Avengers in this volume, it seems only a matter of time before Cyclops’s hubris will result in tragedy. Chris Bachalo’s artwork, fittingly, is as beautiful as it is unsettling, his frequently off-kilter panel layouts creating a near-constant sense of unease and impending danger.

The final issue collected in Revolution features painted artwork by the equally talented Frazer Irving, but unfortunately the story itself – about denizens of the demonic Limbo dimension coming after team member Magik – leaves much to be desired. As longtime readers of this blog might recall, I’ve never been too keen on demons serving as the antagonists of superhero comics (see also: my reviews of Superman: Kryptonite Nevermore, Batman – The Dark Knight: Golden Dawn, and Nightwing, Vol. 1: Traps and Trapezes). At best such stories tend to read essentially as cardboard cut-outs of one another, offering up supernatural excuses for the main character(s) to fight endless hordes of generically ugly bad guys. At worst, though, they legitimize the use of sexually violent language and imagery as a plot device; just consider the number of stories we’ve all read and watched about death-cults sacrificing virginal young women to Satan (or some other demonic entity). Only adding to the unpleasantness is that these types of stories tend to wrap themselves in pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo, adding yet another dimension of poor taste to the proceedings.

In Revolution we have the worst of all these worlds, with characters threatening to “damn” and “punish” each other and Magik in particular singled out as a “stupid mortal girl,” a “broken doll” who “must be punished.” Magik, for her own part, sprouts horns and hoofs and begins referring to herself as “the Darkchilde.” It’s pretty insufferable stuff. It never gets quite as perverse as some of the character’s earlier appearances – I’m thinking especially of Chris Claremont’s Magik (Illyana and Storm) and the hopefully never-to-be-reprinted Magik miniseries of 2000-2001 – many of which more explicitly evoked pedophilia and rape. But even so, one might hope that this character’s thirty-plus years of publication would be long enough for us to have moved past this brand of storytelling.

Revolution ends right in the middle of this dreadful story, leaving it to drag on for another two issues in the series’ next collected volume. I’ll say more about the story’s conclusion should I get around to writing about that book, but in the meantime it’s worth noting how irritating it is that both this volume and All-New X-Men, Vol. 2: Here to Stay end on cliffhangers. Since characters weave in and out between All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men, this makes it impossible to read either series in trade without spoiling the other, even if you switch from one series to the other between individual collections. (And that’s to say nothing of how both series intertwine with Brian Wood’s X-Men, Rick Remender’s Uncanny Avengers and, eventually, Bendis’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man.)

In short, while the first four issues collected in Revolution represent some of the strongest work by both Bendis and Bachalo in recent years, the way this volume concludes sends up serious red flags. I’ve mostly enjoyed Bendis’s two X-Men titles so far, and I sincerely hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.

Review: All-New X-Men, Vol. 2: Here to Stay

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artists: David Marquez, Stuart Immonen
Collects: All-New X-Men #6-10 (2013)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $24.99 (HC), $19.99 (TPB)

All-New X-Men, Vol. 2: Here to Stay delivers on the promise of the series’ first volume with a story that, even more so than Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men, prioritizes character development over plot. In fact, this volume represents some of writer Brian Michael Bendis’s strongest character work in years.

There is forward plot progression, to be sure, with Mystique gathering the villains Sabretooth and Mastermind for a crime spree that comes to a head in the next volume. But the real star of Here to Stay is the series’ time-displaced version of Cyclops, who wastes little time, following the events of Yesterday’s X-Men, in stealing Wolverine’s motorcycle to search for answers about his present-day self. As one might imagine, this makes for an amusing series of misadventures in which Cyclops comes to grips with the modern world as Wolverine tries to track him down.

The first two issues of Here to Stay, beautifully illustrated by guest-artist David Marquez, culminate in a conversation between Cyclops and Mystique (who this young version of Cyclops has never met). Mystique acts as something of a sounding board for Cyclops at first, allowing him to talk through the major events of Yesterday’s X-Men and granting readers the clearest access to his thoughts that we’ve had so far. But what makes this sequence most interesting to me is that it can also be read as a total inversion of Bendis’s much-celebrated Ultimate Spider-Man #13, in which Peter Parker comes out as Spider-Man to Mary Jane Watson (who, prior to this issue, thought Peter’s big secret was that he had a crush on her). The same honesty that characterized that conversation initially seems present here as well, with an empathetic-looking Mystique offering seemingly thoughtful advice to the angst-ridden Cyclops. Bendis turns that perception on its head, though, in the very next scene:

It’s a pretty surprising moment given the nature of the conversation that’s just taken place, and again, it strikes me as a particularly clever twist for those with an affinity for Bendis’s previous work.

The time-displaced Jean Grey develops in interesting ways here too, with the ethics of her newly acquired mind-reading powers brought repeatedly into question. The other three original X-Men – Beast, Iceman, and Angel – are given a lot less to do this time around. Angel in particular feels like a dead weight on this series, and despite a tedious subplot in which he fights generic Hydra robots alongside his present-day counterpart, his only real function here is to have his thoughts questionably manipulated by Jean. And while I’m not confident that the plot development teased by this volume’s cliffhanger ending – Angel’s departure from the Jean Grey School for the present-day Cyclops’s New Xavier School (and, thus, for the series Uncanny X-Men) – will make the character any more compelling or relevant, the prospect of a slightly decluttered cast in All-New X-Men is a hopeful one.

One final thing I couldn’t help but consider as I read these issues is exactly when Bendis proposes the original X-Men to have been formed. All signs seem to point to the late 1980s: the young Cyclops is baffled by cell phones and water bottles, and there are repeated references to the present-day Cyclops being around 40 years old while the younger version “looks twelve” (although I suspect he is closer to sixteen). For two and a half decades to have transpired since the formation of the X-Men contradicts the (frankly stupid) principle of Marvel’s “sliding timeline,” which would have us believe that all the events of the modern Marvel Universe have taken place over the course of less than ten years.

Here to Stay may lend some credence, then, to a theory advanced by Rich Johnston: that Marvel editorial at one point was purposefully seeding such continuity aberrations in order to justify a future “quarantine” of the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises – the Fox-controlled film rights of both being the subject of much dismay among top executives at Marvel and Disney – from the rest of the Marvel Universe. It’s impossible to render a verdict based on the issues collected here, of course, but it’s something I’ll certainly keep in mind as I continue to read this series.

Review: All-New X-Men, Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: Stuart Immonen
Collects: All-New X-Men #1-5 (2013)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $24.99 (HC), $19.99 (TPB)

All-New X-Men, Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men is one of the most compelling superhero time-travel stories in years. The X-Men have featured in more than a few such storylines over the last several decades, with a staggering number of the franchise’s major characters hailing from one alternate future or another. It’s become quite a lot to try to keep track of, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to characterize X-Men continuity, at this point, as being just shy of impenetrable. In All-New X-Men, though, writer Brian Michael Bendis scales back the onus other writers have often placed on the reader by effectively reversing the conventions of the typical X-Men time-travel story. The series makes no demands of us to keep track of alternate pasts, presents, and futures; the dystopic world it takes as its subject is our own.

The book’s high concept is that the Beast, in an effort to show a newly militant Cyclops the error of his ways, has brought the original five X-Men from the past to the present day. Much of the story takes place from the viewpoint of the time-displaced X-Men, thus casting a spotlight on just how far afield the franchise has come from those early issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. To the original X-Men, in fact, their present-day incarnations are often entirely unrecognizable – literally so, in the cases of Iceman and the Beast – with the notable exception of Jean Grey, who in the present has been dead for quite some time. The original Jean thus takes on an almost messianic quality in the eyes of several characters, including Storm, Wolverine, and Kitty Pryde – all strangers to this Jean, as they weren’t introduced until years after Lee and Kirby left the original series. Wolverine is especially affected by Jean’s “return,” and perhaps as a result his relationship with the time-displaced X-Men is the most vexed of any of his peers.

And while the young Cyclops’s showdown with his present-day self serves as the book’s climax, it may be Warren Worthington, the Angel, who ultimately inspires more pathos than any other character in Yesterday’s X-Men. While Bendis doesn’t give him a lot to do in this volume, Warren effectively closes the book with perhaps the most heartbreaking lines imaginable in a story so obsessed with the disparity between past and present: “No one is mentioning me. No one is talking about what has happened to me, Bobby. Where am I?” Although the dramatic irony of Warren’s question will be lost on those unfamiliar with the events of Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, the overall effect is still to underline how unsettlingly bizarre the world of the X-Men has become in recent years.

This volume’s only real weakness is that the original X-Men don’t get much face-time for the first few issues it collects, which focus more on the present-day Scott Summers and his efforts to establish a team of new mutants. As such, we get various de facto origin stories for new characters taking up space in a series ostensibly focused on the five original X-Men, and as a result we don’t see much of our protagonists until about halfway through the book. Bendis is setting up in these first few issues for his run on the rebooted Uncanny X-Men, which centers on Cyclops’s new team and began just a few months after All-New X-Men. Why that series couldn’t have just launched concurrently with All-New in order to give the original X-Men more time to develop on their own is anyone’s guess.

But the real issue that arises from Cyclops’s presence in Yesterday’s X-Men is that it undermines one of the book’s central premises: that what Cyclops is doing is terrible enough to warrant the Beast’s mucking about with the timestream in order to stop him. In point of fact, though, the Cyclops we encounter here seems pretty darn reasonable; while he engages in violence against “normal” humans with some frequency, he does so without killing anyone and only in order to save the lives of otherwise defenseless mutants. Thus, while future volumes in this series will see the characters of All-New X-Men come to view Cyclops with a greater degree of complexity, for the time being their opposition to Cyclops seems pretty thinly motivated.

Like many recent Marvel collections, Yesterday’s X-Men utilizes the company’s “Augmented Reality” app, which allows smart-phone users to access extra content by scanning obnoxious-looking red boxes littered throughout the book. This isn’t the first collection I’ve encountered with this “feature,” but it’s one of the more shameless in its execution. In one scene, Kitty Pryde prattles on about her concern for the Fantastic Four when they don’t answer her phone call; the panel’s “AR” box, when scanned, takes the reader to a minute-long advertisement for Matt Fraction’s Fantastic Four and FF series. It’s one thing to do a little tongue-in-cheek cross-promotion via editorial captions – a tradition inaugurated by Stan Lee himself in the early Silver Age – but it’s another to present such content as “bonus material” that adds value to a book. (Lest we forget, it wasn’t so long ago that collections like this cost a whole five dollars less.)

These criticisms aside, All-New X-Men is certainly one of the more interesting and original series to come from Marvel as of late. Despite the time-travel hook, Bendis seems committed to focusing on characters more than making a further mess of X-Men continuity, and for that reason alone I’ll be paying attention to where this series goes.

Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

Writer: Chris Claremont
Artists: John Byrne, John Romita Jr.
Collects: Uncanny X-Men #138-143 and Uncanny X-Men Annual #4 (1980-81)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $19.99

Although The Dark Phoenix Saga is most often cited as the high-water mark of Chris Claremont’s comics-writing career (and, in particular, of his much-celebrated collaboration on The Uncanny X-Men with artist John Byrne), it’s a story of relatively little social force, a fantasy more in line with the likes of Star Wars than with the more politically radical genre narratives whose attitudes Claremont would seek to emulate in his later work. Of greater political and ideological interest, I think – especially given the allegorical weight the X-Men franchise has been invested with in recent decades – are the issues Claremont wrote directly afterward, collected in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Here we see Claremont’s writing in a state of transition, grasping at the social consciousness he would achieve a year later with X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, and yet also falling noticeably short of it.

At the heart of Days of Future Past is a two-part storyline set, in part, in a dystopian future in which mutants have been hunted nearly to extinction by giant robots known as Sentinels. The last remaining X-Men – Kate Pryde, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Franklin Richards, and the red-haired psychic Rachel – conclude that their only hope is to change the past, and so Kate is vaulted back through time to prevent a political assassination in the series’ present day. Now possessing the body of her younger self – who has only recently joined the team’s ranks, as “Sprite” – Kate leads the X-Men in thwarting an attack on the U.S. Capitol, saving the life of the anti-mutant Senator Robert Kelly in the process. Whether Kate has succeeded in changing the future, however, is left an open question. (Later storylines, beginning with 1990’s nearly unreadable X-Men: Days of Future Present, would reinforce time and again that she did not.)

The reader is reminded with some frequency that events in the “present day” take place on October 31, 1980, described by the narrator as “the final Friday of one of the closest, hardest-fought presidential elections in recent memory.” And yet, despite setting the story at such a culturally charged moment, Claremont misses the opportunity to make anything more than a vague political statement. The only presidential candidate introduced to the reader is Senator Kelly, and what role his McCarthy-esque anti-mutant hearings play in his presidential campaign is never made clear. Ronald Reagan appears not once, although, as in real life, he would apparently win this election (he appears much later in Claremont’s run on this series, in 1986’s Uncanny X-Men #201).

Confusing things even further, a brief epilogue set a month after the election depicts the president re-activating the Sentinel project. The president appears only in shadow in this scene, although he is obviously (and, by historical necessity, must be) Jimmy Carter – who, if he has indeed lost the election to Reagan, could not realistically possess the political influence necessary for such a move. The attempt to conceal Carter’s identity is all the more baffling considering the fact that he had made a full appearance in the series just a few years earlier, at the height of the original Phoenix Saga.

Any potential for a coherent political commentary in Days of Future Past is thus lost in the book’s ambivalent attitude towards real-life figures and events. Furthermore, I think a great deal of its falling short in this sense can be contributed to artist John Byrne. While he’s credited as “co-plotter” on the issues collected here, the partnership between Claremont and Byrne had in fact all but broken down by this point, with Byrne often drawing scenes in direct contradiction to Claremont’s scripts; the issue following the two-part “Days of Future Past” would be his last on the title. One of the major contributing factors to the book’s confused politics, I would argue, is Byrne’s avowed refusal to draw figures from real life: the aforementioned Jimmy Carter appearance was in fact ghost-penciled by inker Terry Austin. Byrne was notorious, as well, for using his favorite characters (especially Wolverine, who Claremont didn’t care for and planned at one point to write out of the book) as vehicles for his own right-wing views.

It should come as fairly little surprise, then, that a book “co-plotted” by Claremont and Byrne would possess something less than clear political sensibilities. Nor should it surprise us that the story’s most pointed political statements occur only in its script. A caption accompanying an otherwise innocuous establishing shot of the Pentagon, for example, ends with a surprisingly perceptive diagnosis of America’s renewed militarism at the turn of the 1980s:

This is the Pentagon, the largest building of its type in the world, command headquarters of the mightiest military machine that world has ever known. To many people, it is more truly representative – for good or ill – of the reality of America than the White House or Congress just across the Potomic [sic] River.

Claremont addresses the post-Tonkin breakdown of the checks-and-balances system even more pointedly later, in this exchange between civilians fleeing the story’s climactic battle: “‘Good grief! That sound – someone’s bombed the Capitol!’ ‘Yeah – and it was probably the White House that did it!’” As in the narration, Claremont’s politics begin to come through only where Byrne is literally unable to erase them.

While initial printings of Days of Future Past included only Uncanny X-Men issues 141 and 142, an additional five issues have been included since the publication of the 2004 trade paperback edition; the added content begins three issues before the book’s two-part title story, and ends with the issue that follows. Despite the inclusion of a John Romita, Jr.-drawn Annual that relates only tangentially to the rest of the book, the new contents make for a more thematically coherent narrative than in previous editions. The first issue collected not only wraps up The Dark Phoenix Saga with Jean Grey’s funeral and the departure of Cyclops from the team, but serves also as a flashback-filled recap of the franchise’s nearly twenty-year history to this point. It ends with the arrival of a new student to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters: Kitty Pryde, whose character arc forms the crux of the 2004-and-beyond editions of Days of Future Past. The effect is to de-emphasize the dystopian and alternate-future aspects of the title story itself; newly framed, rather, “Days of Future Past” serves as a super-powered bildungsroman starring Kitty Pryde.

However, this shift in focus also further reduces the impact of a story already weakened by its artist’s failure to endorse the politics of its script. As we can see from later texts, Claremont’s politics would only become clear after he became the sole plotter of his work; in fact, as if to herald what was eventually to come, the first issue of Uncanny X-Men following Byrne’s departure was drawn (but not co-plotted) by Brent Anderson, who would go on to collaborate with Claremont on God Loves, Man Kills. We might well view Days of Future Past as not just the end of the Claremont/Byrne era, then, but also as the start of a progressive sensibility that would be fully realized only in the years that followed.

Review: Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil, Vol. 1

Writer: Stan Lee
Artists: Bill Everett, Joe Orlando, Wally Wood
Collects: Daredevil #1-11 (1964-65)
Published: Marvel, 2003; $49.99 (HC), $24.99 (TPB)

A lot changed at Marvel Comics in the first half of the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, the company was still mostly publishing science fiction, horror, war, and romance comics in the incredibly tame post-Comics Code vein. In 1961 Stan Lee and Jack Kirby debuted the Fantastic Four, and within three years, Lee and his various collaborators’ new creations were selling comics in numbers unseen for decades. Daredevil, who premiered in 1964, was among the last of Stan Lee’s major Silver Age co-creations. And yet, at many points in Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil, Vol. 1 – which collects the character’s first eleven appearances – the series feels like it could just as well have been among the first.

Some aspects of the character’s early issues feel downright proto-Marvel. The first issue, in which teenager Matt Murdock’s other senses are enhanced after a chemical accident leaves him blind, reads like a 1950s Jack Kirby crime comic. Matt’s childhood may be the sedentary one of a boy committed to his studies (his father wants him to “become a lawyer, or a doctor” – anything other than a prizefighter, like him), but the outside world we glimpse every so often is one populated by boy gangs, petty thugs, and organized crime – the same trappings that adorned so many of Kirby’s comics throughout the 1940s and ’50s.

How strange it is, then, that Kirby’s name appears not once in this collection; oddly, Daredevil was one of the few early Marvel characters he was never associated with. (A caveat: Mark Evanier has recently asserted that Kirby designed Daredevil’s original costume, but this remains unverified.) Instead, the artists here include Bill Everett, whose work had been appearing in Marvel publications since the company’s first comic book in 1939, and former EC artists Joe Orlando and Wally Wood – two comics veterans with styles uniquely their own. This is pretty remarkable for a Marvel comic published in 1964, since by this point the majority of the company’s output was drawn either by Kirby or, as in the cases of Sol Brodsky and the early Gil Kane, by a close imitator of Kirby’s style. (The major exception, of course, was Steve Ditko, but he rarely strayed from the pages of Dr. Strange and Amazing Spider-Man in these days.) The result is a comic that often looks as though it could have been published in the 1950s.

Art aside, the plots themselves often hearken to the conventions of the previous decade’s most popular genres. While other Marvel series of the mid- ’60s pitted their heroes against alien invaders, roguish demigods, and planet-devouring cosmic entities, Daredevil’s nemeses were run-of-the-mill thugs who, when struck by what little ingenuity they possessed, donned garish costumes to commit largely bloodless crimes. There is one notable exception in this volume: Daredevil #7, illustrated by Wood and often considered amongst the best of Lee’s writing. (It was even included in the anthology Marvel Visionaries: Stan Lee, a book I reviewed some years ago.) This issue implements what would become the signature plot formula of Silver Age Marvel comics – the superhero crossover battle – but here the guest-star, Namor the Sub-Mariner, is such an outlandish inclusion, and the story ends in such definitive stalemate (Lee was adamant that no character should ever achieve complete victory over another in these battles), that it stands as one of the formula’s great exemplars.

While Daredevil’s earliest issues may feel a bit anachronistic when compared to the likes of mid-’60s Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, the series is no less interesting for it. If anything, its reiteration of some of the previous decade’s most popular themes and iconography – the latter enhanced, no doubt, by the presence of ’50s mainstays like Everett, Wood, and Orlando – may actually complicate our understanding of comics’ Silver Age: for as much as the work of contemporary writers may evince nostalgia for this period, Daredevil is concrete proof that the 1960s were an age just as invested in the history of the medium.

Review: Fantastic Four: Season One

Writers: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Jonathan Hickman
Artists: David Marquez, Dale Eaglesham
Collects: OGN (2012); Fantastic Four #570 (2009)
Published: Marvel, 2012; $24.99

As much as Marvel’s “Season One” graphic novel initiative may seem a shameless attempt to emulate the success of DC’s “Earth One” graphic novels, the first book in the series, Fantastic Four: Season One, also happens to be a surprisingly well put together comic. Designed with both new and older readers in mind, the book tells an updated version of the Fantastic Four’s origin story – probably the most thematically coherent one, in fact, since the Lee/Kirby original.

One of the main differences between “Earth One” and “Season One” is that the marketing for the latter has focused much more on the characters than on the creators involved. Writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is no stranger to Marvel’s original team of superheroes, though, having written a handful of issues of the main series and its short-lived Marvel Knights spin-off back in the mid-2000s. Here he does probably the best work he’s done with the characters since Marvel Knights’ earliest issues, wrapping some of the most established plot devices from Fantastic Four history – cosmic rays in outer space, giant monsters attacking New York City, the Thing temporarily reverting to human form (only to choose to become the Thing again, to save his teammates) – into a fairly cohesive narrative.

It helps that Aguirre-Sacasa hits just the right notes with several of the characters – the Human Torch and the Thing, in particular – to give the story a fittingly light-hearted tone. This sense is greatly enhanced by the art of David Marquez, who takes clear inspiration from the work of Kevin Maguire, especially in the realm of amusing facial expressions. The book is saturated with light blues and greens, provided by colorist Guru eFX, with most of the action taking place in broad daylight. It’s a nice diversion from the darker color palettes used in so many superhero comics these days.

But the book isn’t without problems. The reason given for the team’s doomed space flight is that Reed Richards wants to fly “the first privately-owned, privately-financed, privately-designed, privately-launched, utterly rogue rocket ship.” Although Reed insists that “proving himself” in this way is a means to an end – space tourism, he argues, will eventually subsidize the rest of his scientific work – such a hubristic display of power doesn’t really square with Aguirre-Sacasa’s otherwise unfailingly humanitarian portrayal of the character. Reed plays the role of absent-minded professor here; his ego doesn’t even approach the level at which it’s been portrayed over the last several years in other Marvel comics. Reed the businessman has been done, and done more convincingly, by Aguirre-Sacasa himself – especially at the beginning of the Marvel Knights series (in which the Fantastic Four go bankrupt).

The book shifts focus in a major way about halfway through. Having gained their powers and defeated the Mole Man in the first half, the team goes on to face Namor the Sub-Mariner in an updated version of the events of Fantastic Four #4. The book ends without completely resolving this subplot (Namor is captured and held prisoner in the team’s headquarters), leading me to wonder whether this was originally meant to be an ongoing series or miniseries, rather than a standalone graphic novel. Aguirre-Sacasa also introduces a new female character, Reed’s lab assistant Alyssa, who serves both as the manager of the team and as a secondary potential love interest for Reed. Her inclusion is to the author’s credit – his Susan Storm lacks much of a presence, and Alyssa provides a surprisingly multidimensional feminine voice. It’s a shame that her only appearance is in this book.

It’s unclear whether Fantastic Four: Season One is intended to be the characters’ “official” origin story from here on out, or if it’s just meant to be another version among the many others already out there. The fact that Marvel pads out the book’s length by reprinting the first issue of Jonathan Hickman’s run on the main (i.e., canonical) Fantastic Four series makes me lean toward the former, although it doesn’t really matter either way – Season One is a book that, in spite of its flaws, works as a standalone retelling of a familiar story.

Review: X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills

Writer: Chris Claremont
Artist: Brent Anderson
Collects: Marvel Graphic Novel #5: God Loves, Man Kills (1982)
Published: Marvel, 2011; $19.99 (HC), $14.99 (TPB)

The collapse of America’s confidence in public institutions in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate set the stage for a corresponding shift in American genres. Within the crime genre alone, the early and mid-1970s saw the emergence of several new subgenres in film, including the “vigilante revenge” film (Billy Jack [1971], Walking Tall [1973]) and the “paranoid conspiracy” film (The Conversation [1974], All the President’s Men [1976]), as well as the transformation of more traditional subgenres, such as the film noir. In The Long Goodbye (1973), for example, the detective Philip Marlowe – a character previously portrayed by an even-headed Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) – is reimagined as a bumbling wiseass virtually incapable of putting two and two together. On the whole, genre narratives of the time displayed a largely pessimistic attitude toward state institutions, which were depicted as naive and ineffective, if not wholly corrupt.

By the late 1970s, however, the New Left’s failure to effect any real social change – as evidenced by the fizzling of the movements for black, female, homosexual, and labor rights – had resulted in a renewed public desire for strong leaders and institutions. That wish came to fruition as economic (and thus political) power shifted to the union-free South, leading ultimately to the election of a right-wing president at the decade’s turn. Among the many institutions restored to power in the era of Reagan was organized religion – which, although not state-sponsored, gained unprecedented political power in the 1980s as organizations like the Moral Majority attempted, for the first time, to legislate the moral dictates of the Christian Right beyond the borders of the Sunbelt.

As quickly as American genres had adjusted to the cultural shift of the early 1970s, so they conformed by the decade’s end to the triumph of social and political conservatism. Fantasy genres such as science fiction, in particular, lost their political edge as blockbusters like Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Superman (1978) came to define the mass entertainment landscape. What was true for the American cinema held for mainstream superhero comics as well, which by 1980 had all but abandoned the social and political undercurrents that had once defined such Stan Lee/Jack Kirby creations as the X-Men.

Chris Claremont’s graphic novel X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, originally published in 1982, is a superbly articulated comment on this shift in political power and ideology. It is remarkable, as well, for the fierceness with which it launches itself against the intense conservatism of its time, producing what remains an incredibly radical message for a mainstream superhero comic. The book pulls few punches in its portrayal of a hateful televangelist, William Stryker, who believes that mutants are genetic affronts to God – beings with, in his words, “no right to live.” The parallels between Stryker’s views toward mutants and those of the real-life Jerry Falwell toward homosexuals are impossible to ignore. Furthermore, Claremont’s setting of Stryker’s headquarters within the World Trade Center aligns the villain – and the evangelical right, by association – not with religious devotion or moral teaching, but with the corporate concerns of big business.

When Stryker sets his target on the X-Men, the team goes down without much of a fight. In a single stroke, Stryker’s radicalized followers kidnap Professor Xavier, Cyclops, and Storm, leaving the rest of the team to believe the three were killed in a seemingly random accident. While they eventually learn the truth, it is only when Magneto, their archenemy, arrives to help that they make any real headway. This is one of the first stories by Claremont to depict Magneto not as a megalomaniac, but as a man whose system of ideals has been thought out just as clearly as Xavier’s. Originally, the character was actually meant to die in God Loves, Man Kills (the original artist, Neal Adams, even drew the story pages), but Magneto’s role was de-emphasized in the final version – a decision that works strongly in the book’s favor.

Before the story is through, two more characters – Kitty Pryde and Colossus’s sister, Illyana – are captured by Stryker’s forces. The team’s relative ineptitude throughout the story (after all, have the X-Men not dealt with greater threats than a few zealots with guns before?) recalls, in many ways, that of the incompetent protagonists of 1970s genre narratives – the sort of characters Thomas Elsaesser has described as “unmotivated heroes.” With the addition of a superpower or two, it’s safe to say that the Philip Marlowe of The Long Goodbye would be right at home on this team.

The consistent inability of the X-Men to measure up to Stryker and his forces is underlined most obviously in the story’s conclusion, when it is not a super-powered mutant who saves the day, but a non-powered human with a gun. Although the book ends with the X-Men engaging Stryker in a televised debate about the hypocrisy of his views, their efforts fail: it is finally a nameless police officer, tired of Stryker’s rhetoric, who guns the man down in his own megachurch. The suggestion that social change can only be effected by the average American who “wakes up” and “strikes back,” so to speak, is surprisingly radical for a superhero comic, especially for one published at the height of Reaganite conservatism.

According to Claremont, God Loves, Man Kills was essentially written as a treatise on racial tolerance – there is even an early scene in which the slur “mutie” is passionately compared to the N-word – but today, as mentioned earlier, it resonates even more strongly as a comment on the continuing struggle for gay rights in America. Its ethos is all the more admirable for its adherence to that particular brand of political pessimism espoused by 1970s genre narratives, an attitude which had all but disappeared from popular entertainment by the time of the book’s publication in 1982. That it remains so relevant more than thirty years later is, on the one hand, a sad testament to the state of modern society; on the other, though, it serves as a welcome reminder that even popular forms and genres carry the potential to advocate for social justice.

Review: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

Writer: Sean Howe
Published: HarperCollins, 2012; $26.99

Most published histories of Marvel Comics have been decidedly narrow in their scope. Several have focused on Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the superhero explosion of the early 1960s; others, like the Marvel-endorsed Marvel Universe and Marvel Chronicle, have centered on the evolution of the company’s characters and continuity. One book, Dan Raviv’s Comic Book Wars, has been written about Marvel’s legal wranglings in the 1990s (including its two years of bankruptcy and eventual sale to Toy Biz), and to my knowledge, it’s the only book to devote itself fully to a single period in Marvel history other than the 1960s. No other book has attempted to look as broadly (or as candidly) at the company’s business practices, publishing strategies, and editorial philosophy as Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

The enduring figures that emerge in Howe’s book aren’t fictional characters like Spider-Man, Captain America, and the Hulk, but real-life personas ranging from Lee, Kirby, and Martin Goodman in Marvel’s early years to Steve Gerber, Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, and Jim Shooter (among many others) in more recent ones. Of course, Marvel has published so many comics, and its characters have been the focus of so many cross-media tie-in products (ranging from action figures to billion-dollar movie franchises), that it would take far more than one book to detail the entirety of the company’s output. A book like this must utilize some principles of selection to narrow its focus, in other words, and the ones Howe chooses are fairly transparent: the longest and most detailed sections of the book cover the 1970s comics – written and illustrated by a motley crew of acid-trippers that included Gerber, Jim Starlin, and Steve Englehart – which introduced Howe to comic books when he was young.

At other times, though, Howe’s focus seems more arbitrary, and he makes some startling omissions. For example, there is little discussion of Marvel’s forays into licensed properties like Conan the Barbarian, Transformers, He-Man, and the Micronauts during the 1970s and 1980s. Even the acquisition of the Star Wars license merits a mere half a page, with no follow-up on Marvel’s subsequent exploitation of the franchise or the manner in which the company ended up dropping most of its licenses by the early 1990s. And while Howe is quick to point out Marvel’s penchant for allegorizing real-world issues during the 1960s and ’70s, he fails to comment on the often frighteningly conservative nature of so many comics that attempted to do the same in the 1980s, ranging from Secret Wars to The ’Nam (which briefly toppled The Uncanny X-Men, one of the comics Howe discusses most, as the industry’s highest-selling comic book).

In the end, although it’s respectable on the one hand that so much information on Marvel’s history has been gathered in one place, Howe actually tells us fairly little that hasn’t been “told” at some point before. There are even places where he uses misinformation to construct the “story” he wants to tell; Jack Kirby’s tale about encountering a crying Stan Lee as movers carried furniture out of the Marvel offices, for instance, has long been considered apocryphal. It certainly aids Howe in his aim to undermine Lee whenever possible, though, as well as in his characterization of the Lee/Kirby relationship as little more than a decades-long feud.

The book’s almost immediate status at the time of its publication as Marvel’s “definitive” history is interesting, since Howe’s book probably tells us less about Marvel’s history than it does about prevailing opinions toward Marvel (and mainstream superhero comics in general) today. In fact, with its focus on the battles fought between writers, editors, and corporate management, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story actually emerges as a sort of vague protest on behalf of creator rights. The ethics of staging such a protest in a book like this are complicated, though – more complicated, I think, than Howe seems to want to acknowledge. That’s especially true when it comes to his characterization of individual creators as essentially either saints to be pitied or sinners who deserve every lick they take – as people who have either “earned” or forfeited their rights as creators, by virtue of the quality of their work.

Howe’s heart may be in the right place, but linking a creator’s rights with the “quality” of his or her creations, even implicitly, is problematic – not just because “quality” lies in the eye of the beholder, but also because Howe often equates quality with sales figures. (It’s for this reason, I assume, that Howe feels comfortable heaping praise on creators like Frank Miller, despite the casual misogyny inherent to even the “best” of Miller’s work.) Accounted for this way, the efforts of writers and artists are of merit only in proportion to their contribution to an employer’s bank account. Sadly, this is an attitude toward creator rights tacitly espoused by a huge percentage of readers and even creators today, who are either unwilling or unable to stand up for the rights of artists and writers – or even for such universally acclaimed figures as Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, and Alan Moore – when they (or their estates) are deliberately and blatantly wronged by Marvel and DC.

If this argument seems far-fetched, or overly cynical, then consider the example of The Avengers, the 2012 film directed by Joss Whedon. Whedon was paid more to write and direct the film than Kirby was paid by Marvel in his lifetime (and Whedon will be paid even more to work on the sequel), despite the fact that Kirby co-created nearly the entire cast of characters and toiled on the stories Marvel’s films are largely based on for nearly two decades, in some cases. Furthermore, unlike Whedon, Kirby’s name did not appear in the film’s marketing and only appeared in its end credits after controversy was raised over reports of its absence. All of these things were apparently non-issues for casual filmgoers (most of whom likely were not aware of them) or even, more surprisingly, for long-time fans in a better position to know the facts; with a worldwide gross of over $1.5 billion, The Avengers remains the third highest-grossing film of all time. Amidst its success, it was Whedon, not Kirby, who got the credit (and the paycheck).

Whedon is an exception to the rule, though; Avengers was destined for financial success, with or without him. The film was heavily marketed as “Marvel’s The Avengers,” reinforcing a disturbing perception that has entered the public consciousness in the last several years. This perception, aggressively fostered by movie-marketing campaigns but nonetheless bought into (literally) by movie-going audiences, is one of Marvel and DC not as corporations, but as the literal authors of the adventures of their franchised characters (again – “Marvel’s” The Avengers). This is the precise mentality which proponents of creator rights have long struggled to combat, and which threatens constantly to absorb the ideas of so many writers and artists within the ever-widening corporate maw that has already swallowed up so much of America’s intellectual property.

But, more to the point, it is a mentality which histories like Howe’s, in spite of its author’s seemingly good intentions, subtly reinforce. This is perhaps most obvious in the book’s title, which claims “Marvel Comics” (not “the creators of Marvel Comics”) as the subject of its “untold story.” However, it comes through even more clearly in the book’s final chapter, a sparsely written apologia for the last decade of Marvel’s cultural output which ends not with a discussion of the creators, but of their creations. “Multiple manifestations of Captain America and Spider-Man and the X-Men float in elastic realities, passed from one custodian to the next,” Howe writes, discussing the pervasiveness of the characters across all forms of media, “and their heroic journeys are, forever, denied an end.”

With these lines, Howe abandons his sympathetic tone toward comics creators, who are now figured as the mere “custodians” of their own creations. And while on the one hand Howe’s final discussion of Marvel’s focus on corporate synergy is hyper-critical of the company's business strategies, the author ultimately locates tragedy not in the ways the company’s architects have been creatively straitjacketed and legally mistreated over the years, but in the fact that a collection of corporate-owned, fictional characters will never receive a proper end to “their” stories. In the end, Howe asks us to feel moral outrage on the part of multi-billion-dollar franchises rather than for the men and women who built them from the ground up, many of whom have died (or are currently dying) completely impoverished, forced to turn to fans on the Internet for help paying their medical bills.

And so, as with “Marvel’s” The Avengers and so many other examples we might draw from popular culture today, the torch of moral ownership is passed smilingly from creator to corporation. The seduction of Howe to this attitude, despite his affection for the individuals whose creative efforts have resulted in the rich history he celebrates, may well be indicative of more than the failings of a single historian. Indeed, it may point to the ultimate inability of our culture to resist the constant sensory bombardment, staged by multimedia corporations, which we face, morally and intellectually, on a daily basis. It is a frightening world, in which corporations can be popularly imagined as both the legal and moral owners of intellectual property, and in which the obligations we perceive to fictional characters and their corporate masters take precedence over our obligations to other human beings.

Review: Maximum Fantastic Four

Writers: Stan Lee, Walter Mosley, and Mark Evanier
Artist: Jack Kirby
Collects: Fantastic Four #1 (1961)
Published: Marvel, 2005; $49.99

There’s probably little to say about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four that hasn’t already been said by people more knowledgeable and more eloquent than me. Still, I feel like I’m constantly reading comments from people who have never read a single page of their work, and I find that terribly saddening. If you’re one of the many people who haven’t experienced this seminal run at least in part, I encourage you to pick up the first Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four trade paperback, which collects the first ten issues of the comic. For those already initiated, though, Maximum Fantastic Four is a truly amazing presentation of the series’ first issue, one that fully lives up to its name.

Conceived by the novelist Walter Mosley as a “visual exegesis” of Fantastic Four #1, the book provides perhaps the most innovative reproduction of a single comic book that I’ve ever seen. Nearly every panel is blown up to extraordinary size and devoted its own entire page, with some of the pages folding out to give certain panels an even more dramatic flair. Segments of dialogue and narration are occasionally pushed off the page in order to give more room to the artwork, placing the emphasis on the utter spectacle of Kirby’s artwork rather than the plot itself.

That being the case, Maximum Fantastic Four certainly isn’t the way to read this issue if you’ve never read it before. But if (like me) you’ve already read it several times or more, the presentation here is more than a breath of fresh air; it’s a release, a chance to marvel at the sight of super-powered men (and one super-powered woman) doing the spectacular things that we only wish we could do. Indeed, this book suggests a way of reading comics completely different from that which many readers today are accustomed to – one in which each and every panel is a work of art unto itself, and worthy of individual attention.

It’s a way of reading that I’ve embraced (without even realizing it) ever since I started reading comics by Lee and Kirby as a kid. Over the years, I’ve often puzzled over why I seem to take longer to read my comics than a lot of people do. The answer, it’s clear to me now, is that while I often pause to admire an artist’s work, many readers simply let their eyes fly across the page without taking the time to truly absorb what they’ve experienced visually. In many cases, especially when the artwork is average or subpar, there’s not much fault to be found in that; but, as Mosley reminds us with this book, the rewards for taking our time with artists like Kirby are nearly limitless.

The main content is supplemented with wonderful essays by Mosley and Mark Evanier (author of Kirby: King of Comics). In addition to explaining Mosley’s reasons for creating the book, the two writers also contextualize the comic within its time and provide the reader with a deeper understanding of its enduring influence on American popular culture. If you don’t already believe that it was pure magic flowing from Lee’s typewriter and Kirby’s pen when they created the Fantastic Four, these pieces, in combination with the unique presentation of the material itself, will likely change your mind. In the end, Maximum Fantastic Four is truly an affirmation of the genius of two creators at an artistic peak, one of the many peaks that each would experience throughout his long career in comics. And even more importantly, it’s an affirmation of why we read comics – of that sense of exhilaration and wonder that draws us back again and again to the medium we love.

Rating: 5 out of 5