Jim Shooter

As I'm sure you know, Jim Shooter passed away this week at the age of 73. While Shooter got his start at a wunderkind writer for DC in the 1960s on stories with the Legion of Super-Heroes, it is his tenure as Marvel's Editor-in-Chief where he probably made his biggest mark. Certainly, that is where comics reader of my generation will most remember him.

No doubt due to my age at time, but the Shooter work most dear to my heart is Secret Wars. Secret Wars II, well, not so much.

Though I was a latecomer to it, I enjoyed his work with Bob Layton, Don Perlin, and Barry Windsor-Smith on the first year or so of Solar, Man of the Atom. It was both a solid addition to the post-Miracle Man and Watchmen wave of superhero deconstruction and a second attempt at the "realistic supers" approach he tried with the New Universe.

But these are just the ones that stand out for me. Shooter wrote a lot of comics, and no doubt helped shape others (for good and ill) to their final form as an editor. He had a big impact on the industry.

Attack of the (Star Wars) Comics Clones

The cultural phenomenon that is Star Wars had an effect on comic books, even in its first decade. Despite my pithy title, it's unfair to call these guys clones exactly, but some sort of force is clearly with them. Since science fiction comics and Star Wars draw on some of the same influences, it's not always easy to know what is Star Wars inspired and what isn't. Chaykin's Ironwolf had a rebel fighting a galactic empire in '74--3 years before Star Wars. Still, if one looks at Chaykin's followup Cody Starbuck (also '74) the pre-Star Wars appearances have the look of Flash Gordon and the widespread swordplay of Dune. In the post-Star Wars appearances, costumes have a bit more Japanese influence and guns are more in play; both of these are possibly Star Wars inspired innovations.

Star Hunters (1977)
Empire? A sinister Corporation that controls Earth
Rebels? Sort of, though the protagonists start out forced to work for the Corporation
The Force? There's an "Entity" and a cosmic battle between good and evil
Analogs? Donovan Flint, the primary protagonist, is a Han Solo type with a mustache prefiguring Lando's.
Notes: If Star Hunters is indeed Star Wars inspired, its a very early example. The series hit the stands in June of 1977--on a few days over a month after Star Wars was released.

Micronauts (1979)
Empire? A usurpation of the monarchy of Homeworld.
Rebels? Actually previous rulers and loyalists; a mix of humans, humanoids, and robots.
The Force? The Enigma Force, in fact.
Analogs? Baron Karza is a black armored villain like Vader; Marionette is a can-do Princess; Biotron and Microtron are a humanoid robot and a squatter, less humanoid pairing like Threepio and Artoo.

Metamorphosis Odyssey (1980)
Empire? The Zygoteans, who have concurred most of the galaxy.
Rebels? A disparate band from various worlds out to end the Zygotean menace.
The Force? There's Starlin cosmicness.
Analogs? Aknaton is an old mystic who know's he's going to die a la Obi-Wan. He picks up Dreadstar on a backwater planet and gets him an energy sword.

Dreadstar (1982)
Empire? Two! The Monarchy and the Instrumentality.
Rebels? Yep. A band of humans and aliens out to defeat the Monarchy and the Instrumentality.
The Force? Magic and psychic abilities.
Analogs? Dreadstar still has than energy sword; Oedi is a farm boy (cat) like Luke; Syzygy is a mystic mentor like Kenobi; Lord High Papal is like Vader and Palpatine in one.
Notes: Dreadstar is a continuation of the story from Metamorphosis Odyssey.

Atari Force (1984)
Empire? Nope.
Rebels? Not especially.
The Force? Some characters have special powers.
Analogs? Tempest is a blond kid with a special power and a difficult relationship with his father sort of like Luke. There are a lot of aliens in the series, so there's a "cantina scene" vibe; Blackjak is a Han Solo-esque rogue. Dark Destroyer is likely Vader-inspired, appearance-wise.
Notes: This series sequel to the original series DC did for Atari, taking place about 25 years later. The first series is not very Star Wars-y.

Neon Visions

The mysterious and pervasive algorithms of the internet offered me this book the other day: Neon Visions: The Comics of Howard Chaykin. I'm interested in checking it out. Though I'm not familiar with the author, I agree with his contention that Chaykin's contributions to the field haven't been analyzed with the same sort of detail afforded other creators. 

Once I got around to reading it, I'll report back.

Some Collections I Enjoyed

Sometimes, I finally get around to reading some stuff from decades back that's new (at least in part) to me. Here were my thoughts on a couple of things:

Incredible Hulk Epic Collection: Crisis on Counter-Earth: I hate that the Big Two don't number a lot of collections these days, but if it matters this is volume 6 of the Hulk Epic Collections, apparently. These are stories from the early 70s, written by Englehart and Thomas and drawn by Trimpe and they are crazy. The Hulk wanders from one situation (and fight) to another, often running into people he knows no matter where he is. The Marvel universe seems really small! 

It opens with Hulk returning to Earth after a sojourn in Jarella's microverse world, which he accidentally kicked out of orbit when he grew big again. He's briefly reunited with some of his supporting cast, but then he's attacked by the Rhino being mind-controlled by the Leader. He pursues Leader/Rhino into a spacecraft and keeps trying to fight him as the ship veers off course and takes them to Counter-Earth. They are there for 1 issue and get involved in conflict with factions of New Men, before grabbing a rocket back to regular Earth. There, Hulk goes looking for Betty who's marrying Talbot. Ross sends Abomination to fight him, but Hulk prevails, and Abomination has a breakdown over the fact he had ben unconscious for 2 years (since his last appearance where Hulk punched him out of space). And all this isn't even halfway! The Hulk goes to Counter-Earth again before it's all over and bears witness to the death and resurrection of Adam Warlock.

This the sort of flying by the seat of the pants comics' storytelling we don't get in this age of decompression. 

Solar, Man of the Atom (1991): Valiant wasn't on my radar when it started and by the time it was it was the darling of Wizard. I was skeptical and avoided it. So, 30 plus years later I'm getting around to reading it's second title. And I'm actually pretty impressed.

Shooter is definitely still cogitating on the concerns that led to the conception of the New Universe. Valiant is realistic superheroes. Where for Moore "realistic" means a whole lot of sexual fetishes, for Shooter it means them having to deal with problems like the unexpected difficulties of flying (it's like a motorcycle but worse) or what to do if your powers keep destroying your clothes. (Maybe some sexual fetishes, too, but they show up less.) Shooter's protagonists in this realistic mode, from Star Brand to Solar, have a hard time figuring out how to do the superhero thing--the sort of stuff that somehow just seems to happen for people when they get powers in most comics.  

Shooter's protagonist, Phil Seleski, definitely can't get things right. He gave himself powers Dr. Manhattan-style in a fusion mishap, but then something bad happened that resulted in the deaths of a lot of people. So, now he's back in time trying to stop that. Maybe he'll kill his past self--but then he accidentally creates his childhood superhero fav Dr. Solar from parts of his psyche, and now that guy is convinced future Phil is a super-villain. Which, in a way, he sort of is. 

Eventually, all of this resolves into more standard stuff, but it's a pretty interesting origin, perhaps given additional resonance by the sense of foreboding Windsor-Smith's art creates with the flashback backstory--though maybe this is only for me since I last read his stuff in Monster. For some reason, comics in the 80s and early 90s at least tend to do interesting things with nuclear test related heroes: Dr. Manhattan, the Bates/Weisman/Broderick Captain Atom, and this. Firestorm is perhaps the odd man out.

Blackstar's Planet Sagar

Recently, I revisited the 13 episodes of the 1981 Filmation Saturday morning animated series, Blackstar. Jason and I watched an episode of Blackstar back in our Classic TV Flashback series. Watching most of the episodes, I feel like I came away with a good sense of the worldbuilding that was (or wasn't) being done to develop the planet Sagar as a fictional place. And I noticed some interesting details.

Sagar is a sparsely populated world. The few cities we tend to be small in area. There is no apparent surrounding farmland or outlying villages. Indeed, I don't think a village is seen in the series outside the arboreal home of the Trobbits. Sparsely populated worlds are common to animated and live action TV science fiction of the 60s to 80s, no doubt for budgetary reasons, but desolation is also a trait shared by Barsoom, the progenitor of literary Planetary Romance. Barsoom, of course, has the excuse of being a dying world and its city-states are presumably grander than what we see on Sagar. With the land of Gondar in episode 13 as perhaps an exception, you might think Sagar is inhabited by only a few thousand people, or even less.

This small population estimate is reinforced by the relatively inhospitable terrain of much of Sagar. We see a of rugged desert, broken by mountains and jungles, and a lot of very active volcanos. There are a lot of ferns and palms in evidence (in alien colors), and perhaps cycads. There is little evidence of grass, much less fields of grain. The Trobbits, the people we see most involved in food preparation, seem to live pretty much exclusively on the varied and fantastical fruit of the Sagar tree. Well, we do see them fishing in one episode, so there's that too.

Illustration from the Dinosaurs Little Golden Book

These details: rugged terrain, sparse grass, and volcanism, really make Sagar resemble the depiction of ancient earth in dinosaur illustration of the midcentury. Combined with the number of large animals/monsters it projects the feeling of Sagar as a primitive or primeval world, a trait it shares with Filmation's portrayal of Mongo from Flash Gordon and the variously named world of The Herculoids.

Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All (1982)

Beyond these Planetary Romance or pulp science fiction elements, Sagar seems to borrow from fairytale fantasy. The show's recurrent opening features a scene of Blackstar and the Trobbits that is clearly an homage to Snow White (1937).

It doesn't end there though. Episode 7 reveals that winter (at least in the vicinity of the Sagar tree, but perhaps on the whole world) only ends when the Cloud Princess Lailana arrives to unlock the box that holds Springtime for the Trobbits. She is pursued on this mission by Creos, the Ice King, who has a flying fortress himself in a storm cloud, outfitted with technological equipment that appears to be made of ice. This is a fairytale like Baum's children's books or some of Jack Kirby's comic book flights of fancy: one that is updated to the technological conceits of its era. In fact, I think a not unreasonable elevator pitch description of Blackstar would be "John Carter of Oz."

With only 13 episodes and the budgets each episode must have had, Sagar isn't as developed as it's progenitor Mongo or it's descendant, Eternia. Still, it's broad strokes portrayal is a window into the conceits and influence that undergird these imagined worlds.

The Incredible Shrinking Particle [Omniverse]

In the waning days of Google+ (remember that site?) I did a series of superhero-themed posts inspired by Wold-Newton essays with the conceits that there was only one Earth (encompassing both the Marvel and DC and possibly other "universes") and the world tended to work like our own, despite its somewhat altered history. This served to both ground the characters in history--making them more "realistic" and making history stranger! The name for the series was taken from Mark Gruenwald's 1979 fanzine about alternate comic book realities.

Like baby Kal-El, those posts were rescued from the dying G+, and the Flashback Universe seems a good place for some of them to crash!

It took a bit of chutzpah for a guy who almost died in an ant-hill on the occasion of its discovery to name a physic-defying particle for himself, but that’s what Hank Pym did in 1961, and somehow, he got it to stick.

He didn’t get there first, of course. That mad genius Miguelito Loveless tortured James West with shrinking in 1875, but that incident was classified. It’s likely Pym’s own experimentation was spurred by the tragic case of Scott Carey, “the Shrinking Man,” a few years earlier. Or perhaps he had heard of Darrell Dane’s exploits as Doll Man in the 1940s? (The late thirties to late forties were the heyday of chemists and pharmacists inventing super-powering concoctions. They were churning them out like they had soft drinks and tonics in the late 19th Century. There was a brief resurgence of this in the late fifties and early sixties, but by the seventies, the FDA and DEA made sure this was only the province of major corporations and government agencies.). At Ivy University, Ray Palmer was making his discoveries around the same time, isolating the magical particles through a lens made from exotic “dwarf star matter.”

On the subject of dwarf star matter, it seems that South America has the largest supply. Alexander “Dr. Cyclops” Thorkel was shrinking things in his lab in Peru. The radioactive cloud that passed over Scott Carey off the coast of Southern California likely originated in South America. Ray Palmer would later discover a hidden civilization of shrunken alien humanoids in the Amazon rainfrost, purportedly made so by a malfunction in their ship’s drive which used dwarf star matter. Perhaps their crash is the ultimate source?

More Lost Marvels

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Fantagraphics' Lost Marvels, a new archive series of presumably non-superhero, forgotten Marvel material. Volume one is out now and is Tower of Shadows, collecting most of the material from the 9 issues of the horror anthology series. Volume two is titled Howard Chaykin vol. 1 and collects his work on several minor Marvel characters like Dominic Fortune.

Volume 3 seems to have been announced last week. It's Savage Tales of the 1980s. Based on the description from Fantagraphics, I assume it collects the eight issues (Oct 1985 - Dec. 1986) of Savage Tales volume 2. Its somewhat artsy cover is amusing to me as it strikes a very different vibe than the typical cover of the actual series:

Anyway, it's interesting to me that an article from April 28 on Comics Beat essential gave a different description and list of contents for this volume:

In November, Fantagraphics will publish Lost Marvels No. 3: Savage Tales. Best known for Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan the Barbarian and the first appearance of Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow’s Man-Thing, 1971’s Savage Tales was a stunning comics magazine in the spirit of Creepy and Heavy Metal. This volume will collect all 11 issues of the series featuring work from Stan Lee, John Romita, Dennis O’Neil, Al Williamson, Jim Steranko, John Buscema, and a host of other legendary creators delivering a high-octane combination of fantasy, horror, and action.

This clearly sounds like first run of Savage Tales instead. It clearly would not have included the Conan and Kull stories that appeared in that volume since Titan now has the Robert E. Howard properties license, but presumably the Ka-Zar stuff and other things.

Does the switch mean we won't be getting this material in Lost Marvels? The specificity of "of the 80s" in volume 3 title suggests to me that maybe there is still a consideration of publishing the Savage Tales vol 1 (i.e. "of the 70s") material, but we'll see. 

It doesn't sound like there's more to come. This is what an article from Publishers Weekly back in March had to say:

Subsequent Lost Marvels volumes will include...stories from Marvel science fiction titles like Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, and action/war material like Doug Murray and Michael Golden’s The ‘Nam. Dean hopes to collect Chamber of Darkness, the companion title to Tower of Shadows, featuring a similar mix of horror and fantasy.