The Death of Captain Marvel

Jim Starlin, Stan Lee, Steve Englehart & others
The Death of Captain Marvel (1982)
I may be wrong, not least because I don't care enough to bother looking it up, but I think The Death of Captain Marvel may have been the first graphic novel, or at least the first comic book to be labelled as such on the grounds of being square bound with fancy paper and a higher price tag, although really it's still a comic book. The idea that it might be aimed at a more mature audience, by some definition, came later, but I'll return to that.

This being a 2018 reprint, we also get five or six issues of the comic book as background to himself snuffing it during the main feature. This is good news because we get three issues worth of the first Captain Marvel story written by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, and drawn by Gene Colan. It's superheroism as space opera, more or less, or arguably Superman rewritten as superheroic space opera given the detail of our man - an alien who passes for human - finding himself unusually enhanced once arriving on our planet. It's nothing life changing but has retained a certain power through the art of Gene Colan - surely one of the most underrated comic book artists of our time - who duplicates Kirby's monumental dynamism with his own expressionist realism to equally great effect. If his art seems hastily rendered, it doesn't seem to matter given the depth of the mood and that the reader can pretty much feel every punch and explosion.

Later issues included here date from the mid-seventies period of the comic book having grown up, as demonstrated in Jim Starlin's thoroughly peculiar Warlock and Rich Buckler's Deathlok the Demolisher - to name but two; except it didn't quite extend to Captain Marvel. Doug Moench and Pat Broderick's version is not without a certain screwy charm, but it's not Starlin's Warlock by a long shot, and, strangest of all, Starlin's Death of Captain Marvel isn't Starlin's Warlock by a long shot either. It pulls some of the same cosmic moves which were doubtless very much appreciated by one's older brother and his doobie rolling pals, but the art is anatomically clunky in places, pretty much top end fan stuff - and I've never regarded the term fan art as a compliment - suggesting as it does that this person 1) has never taken a life drawing class and 2) probably listens to a lot of Yes. Starlin, much as I love the man's work, compensates with fussy lines and an excess of detail, but it doesn't really help.

Also, particularly when compared to Warlock, the story could almost be an episode of Star Trek with more capes. It's one of those deals attempting to answer the question of why Superman doesn't end world hunger, but thanks to all the space fags and the fact of Tales from Topographic Oceans having been stuck to the turntable since October, it's a fairly safe, conservative, and even self-involved version of the question: what if Captain Marvel had cancer, just like in the real world? The answer is pretty much incorporated in the title, in case you were wondering, meaning we get scenes of the entire pantheon of Marvel superheroes all stood around the Captain's bed looking sad, interspersed with bouts of crying and the Beast asking why, Lord why? He had so much to live for.

It's not the worst thing you'll ever read, but it's burdened with the emotional sophistication of an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man and lacks the flair to capitalise upon its own essentially ludicrous narrative, even before we get to the art not being anything like so mind-blowing as Starlin's otherwise much deserved reputation might promise. Somehow, Gene Colan drawing Captain Marvel punching a giant robot who says things like know you this: he who would oppose me - - must be annihilated! has a lot more soul.

Essential Defenders volume one

Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema & others

Essential Defenders volume one (1974)

My guess would be that someone at Marvel noticed all those extraneous superheroes they had laying around making the place look untidy and decided to hoover a few of them up into brand new superteams, just like the Avengers, so as to maximise something or other. Then a couple of years later they reprinted this one in black and white weekly instalments in a UK comic called Rampage. I'd recently experienced something of an epiphany for the form, having discovered 2000AD just a few months earlier. I'd always felt well disposed towards Marvel from afar, but there were too many titles and most of them had been going for yonks. Rampage therefore represented an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Each week featured half an issue of the Defenders plus reprints from the Nova comic book. It was pretty great as I recall, but went monthly after less than a year, changed format and lost me to the extent that I almost forgot all about it - which was weird. When John Byrne introduced Xemnu the Titan to his run on She-Hulk at the end of the eighties, I knew the guy looked sort of familiar but had no idea where I'd seen him.

So I picked this up partially as an experiment to see how much I could remember forgetting, if you see what I mean, and partially because I'm a middle aged man who is screened for colon cancer to a yearly schedule so it seems only natural that I should be purchasing seventies superhero comics aimed at twelve-year old boys.

Marketing aside, the premise of the Defenders was the assemblage of supertypes who otherwise tended to go it alone - Dr. Strange, Prince Namor, and the Hulk for starters, meaning a lot of what transpires is usually the other two trying to explain things to the big green thickie in hope that he'll thump someone. This big fat paving slab additionally kicks off with issues of solo comics which foreshadow events in the initial run of the Defenders, and it makes for a surprisingly satisfying and thematically consistent whole. Additionally, it's all quite revealing in terms of what made Marvel tick in the early days, or at least what made it so much more appealing than all those frowning boy scouts and hall monitors over at the distinguished competition. Marvel's roots, at least on the evidence of this lot, seem to lay with all those horror comics that Wertham had pulled from the shelves. Marvel's superheroes always seemed to have a bit more texture to me, and it seems because they're mostly Gods and monsters, misfits who could never have held down normal jobs as mild-mannered reporters; and thus do we open with a sixties issue of Dr. Strange which quotes H.P. Lovecraft and introduces the Nameless One, a two-headed extra-dimensional tosspot who seems very clearly descended from the weird fiction of the twenties and thirties. In fact, even once we fully ease into the era of men in tights, or at least the era of a percentage of those men present wearing the same, the Defenders remains satisfyingly odd and quite difficult to predict.

The art is mostly top shelf, and is particularly striking in black and white, and Ross Andru and Bill Everett's work on A Titan Walks Among Us! from Marvel Feature #3 is downright gorgeous even aside from being the place where I obviously first met Xemnu - and boy, some of those panels leapt right off the page to kiss me in the centre of the forehead.

Additionally we have the Avengers-Defenders war, which drags on a bit, but is probably significant in foreshadowing all those headachey multi-title and allegedly sense shattering crossovers of the eighties, Secret Crisis and all that; despite which, this thing is still very much to be recommended. I thought it would probably be at least an interesting curiosity, but it's fucking magnificent for the most part.

Star Lord: Guardian of the Galaxy

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Carmine Infantino & others
Star Lord: Guardian of the Galaxy (2014)
Nostalgia does it again. Naturally Mrs. Pamphlets and I took Junior to see Guardians of the Galaxy, assuming it would probably be one of those films we could all enjoy to a greater or lesser extent, as indeed it was. I had relatively fond memories of the Guardians of the Galaxy strip as reprinted in the back pages of Star Wars Weekly when I was Junior's age, but of course neither Martinex nor the fat guy from Jupiter were anywhere to be seen in the big screen adaptation, and Yondu had somehow grown up to be the ornery neighbour from The Waltons; and more confusing still was the presence of Star Lord as portrayed by the lead singer of Mouse Rat. Apparently it's all something to do with Dan Abnett, a man whose work is probably not for me given the girth of his bibliography and the presence therein of a Torchwood novel, but anyway the point is that I had similarly fond memories of the Star Lord strip, also from the back pages of Star Wars Weekly; and so here we are.

Star Lord, as I hadn't realised because Marvel UK chose not to reprint the more ropey material, was Steve Englehart's vision of an astrologically based cosmic superhero. Thankfully the character was soon rescued from its creator by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, which was where both myself and Star Wars Weekly came in. Star Lord was supposedly an attempt to write a comic with the sophistication of a novel, but a comic by the standards of 1976 specifically with the sophistication of a novel by Robert Heinlein; so as a graphic novel I suppose the guys beat more or less everyone but Will Eisner to the term, albeit with a strip which nevertheless reads like something aimed at precocious twelve-year old boys who listen to Boston.

When your starship captain wears a cape, gauntlets, and something on his head resembling a tiny model of a supersonic aircraft, then you know you're still very much in the Marvel cosmos, as distinct from Jim Starlin's Warlock which inhabited a similar realm as seen through a ton of drugs. Claremont overwrites as always with text heavy pages of soul-searching rhetoric written in the portentous tones of Leonard Nimoy addressing the main character.

Did you seek to raise a wry smile with your dandy turn of phrase and casual sarcasm, Lawrence Burton? Was it that passing pleasure which you didst sought?

Additionally, the stories are kind of thin and generic, with a surprisingly high quota of large breasted women in bikinis with affiliations to rebel or revolutionary forces, and those talkative alien bartenders who happily describe the entire socio-economic history of their respective planets to the alien dude in the funky costume. Star Lord predated Star Wars by about a year, which is probably why it flopped, having taken its best shot before the audience was really there; but it's roughly the same ball game, even to the point of beating the Lucas series to one of its major punchlines a few years ahead of time. Neverthless, Claremont somehow gets away with it - as he so often did - and for all his laboured corn, he keeps things moving in a way which holds one's attention and never feels quite so stodgy as it probably should, doubtless aided by John Byrne's generally wonderful art and Carmine Infantino's striking, almost Vorticist linework in the later strips.

Following Chris Claremont, Doug Moench took over the caped typewriter and the saga reverts to generic Marvel landfill of a kind which may well do the job if you're about eight, but seems otherwise unremarkable. The strip returned yet again in the nineties resembling one of the more forgettable series you might have seen in issues of 2000AD from the same era, but beyond a neat explanation as to the working of Star Lord's otherwise preposterous element gun, it all feels a bit pointless with innocent planets menaced by bad guys for the sake of our hero having someone to save whilst agonising over whether or not he's doing the right thing. Sadly, more than half of the collection fulfils all the promise of its bloody awful cover, but fuck it - never mind the filler; anything reprinting Carmine Infantino's breathtaking run on this strip is justified in my book.