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.

Big-Ass Sword

Coincidentally, the day after I posted about the anthology comic I bought in Germany, Fantasy 3000, I saw this article about an upcoming (English language) collection from Rebellion of the Big-Ass Sword stories that have appeared in that anthology by writer/artist Andreas Butzbach. 

The ad copy says: "In a world far from our own reality, a robot warrior wanders through a vast and hostile techno landscape, filled with strange lifeforms and mechanical beings left over from a long, forgotten war. At the robot’s side is a talking Skull. On his back, a BIG-ASS SWORD!" 

Anyway, it's up for pre-order.

 

Comics Find in Germany

 While on vacation last week, I went into a bookstore in the Franfurt Airport and saw some Germany comics. There was a book of various Flash Gordon reprints and a few comic anthologies from a publisher called Weissblech Comics. I picked up this anthology, Fantasy 3000:

These are big: 80ish pages and large format--maybe like 10'x`12'-ish, though I haven't measured it to get the exact dimensions. It contains 3 strips: "Warriors of Gorakon", "Big Ass Sword", "The Sword of Tuatha", "Gorrn", and "Space Pilot Resi Stenz" with a range of art styles. Here's the splash page of the first story:

Middle-earth in Blacklight

It's well known that hippies were into Tolkien's work. Some of its themes appealed to them, certainly, but like with Lee and Ditko's Dr. Strange comics, there was also the idea that the works might somehow be drug-influenced. The author, it was assumed, might be taking the same trip as them. This was, of course, a false belief, but it was one that existed.

I this appreciation of Tolkien filtered through 60s countercultural and mixed with the prevalent cultural representations of fairytale fantasy led to a subgenre or aesthetic movement within fantasy, most prevalent in the late 70s and early 80s, before D&D derived fantasy came to ascendancy. While this subgenre likely finds expression in literature and even music to a degree, I think it is most recognizable and definable in visual media. It's evident in works like Bakshi's film Wizards and the Marvel comic Weirdworld (both in 1977), and in the Wizard World sequences (starting in 1979) of Mike Grell's Warlord. Elfquest (1978) shows the influence to a degree. Bodē's Cheech Wizard (1966) and Wally Wood's Wizard King (introduced 1968 but significantly presented in 1978) are either the oldest examples or its direct progenitors.

Essentially, the subgenre eschews the serious world-building of LotR for a more drug-influenced riff on The Hobbit, often with greater use of anachronism, camp, and sexiness, and often with a degree of psychedelia. Beyond the Tolkien influence, these works tend to share a number of common features:  a "traditional" visualization of elves and dwarfs as "little people," arising in folklore and classic illustration, but coming more directly from Disney animation and the fairytale comics of Walt Kelly; the influence of Denslow's Oz illustrations or the design aesthetic of The Wizard of Oz (1939); absurdism and humor borrowed from underground comics and Warner Brothers cartoons; unreal landscapes and visually alien settings informed by Sword & Sorcery and science fiction comics rather than historical or mythic sources of Tolkien.

Given they were contemporaries, D&D shows some in influence from these sources, primarily in its early art and occasionally humorous tone. But as a game that arose from wargaming there was always a thread of verisimilitude or equipment fixation that runs counter to this freewheeling psychedelic adventure vibe. Also, the violent, heroic narratives tended to have less room for the silly or less competent characters of psychedelic fantasy works.