Marvel Comics blabbery

Cheers, seems like that'll be the one.

xp -- Agreed.

The Bendis/Maleev series (12 issues, 2011-2012) wasn't so great. Scene-setting for Age of Ultron, killed off the character Echo. It did look good, though (I'm a big Maleev fan).

I think I read that and blocked out them killing Echo :/

I liked when she showed up to help in Japan as Ronin and it took until the very end for anyone to realize Ronin didn't catch what you were saying unless you had eye contact, even though there were clues

Didn't realize Echo was dead. Thanks for spoiling a story from three years ago, jeez.

Eh, she disappeared for years at a time anyway

They reprinted the first Moon Knight series also in Marvel Essentials, which you might still be able to find. It's one of those series that really looks just as good in black and white especially Sienkiewicz's artwork.

So, thanks to the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, Marvel has been reprinting Abnett & Lanning's GotG and various related titles (Annihilation Conquest, War of Kings, Realm of Kings, etc), which is nice, because I missed buying them in physical format when they first came out, I was poor back then and read them on the computer. Anyway, the second big GotG collection just came out, and rereading stuff has been tremendously fun and thrilling, I still feel these are among the best comics Marvel has put out in the last decade. (Too bad A&L exited the cosmic Marvel comics, and GotG is now being written by Bendis, in his trademark mediocre style.) They haven't reprinted Abnett & Lanning's Nova though, which is sad, because I remember it being almost as good and thrill-powered as GotG (even if the whole Nova Corps concept is a pretty shameless Green Lantern ripoff). Hopefully the sequel movie will expand the Nova stuff seen in the first movie and introduce Richard Rider, so they'd have an excuse to reprint that run too.

Yeah, the lack of Nova re-reprints is just Marvel being Marvel. The two books were pretty intimately linked and tied into no fewer than four crossovers. If they're smart, they'll put out a couple of Cosmic Marvel omnibi after the upcoming Annihilation: Conquest omnibus and collect this material in a way that makes sense.

FYI, Abnett is currently writing a new Guardians title featuring the OG team.

Ah, okay, I didn't know that! Does "OG team" mean the original seventies Guardians?

Yeah, as far as I know. I haven't read it yet but that's how it's been solicited.

the hype! this event will live up to it! really!

I'm gonna wind up spending so much money that I don't really need to be spending...

In other news, 6+ months later, I've just about finished reading all of the '60s Marvel stuff (up to mid-'69 at the moment). Trying to decide whether to just plunge insanely ahead into the '70s or if a break is advisable.

Maybe a break before you head into the auteur years at Marvel, which is the most fascinating stretch of its history to me. Englehart, Starlin, McGregor, Moench, Wolfman/Colan on Drac, etc. A mix of their highest highs and most embarrassing failures. Everything up to Jim Shooter's ascension as Eastern Pontiff Ed-in-Chief, aka The Day the Music Died.

I feel like I should start a thread for '60s Marvel questions and fun facts while this stuff is still relatively fresh in my brain. One of the bigger revelations for me was John Romita Sr.'s early work (I'd never found him particularly noteworthy before) and the extent to which that early work was clearly super influential on Jaime Hernandez. The early appearances of Mary Jane are basically proto-Penny Century.

my Bronze-era Marvel knowledge is p spotty, even though the tail end of that era was when I first started reading comics. The initial post-Kirby years are a total blank for me for the most part. I did pick up some Avengers vs. Thanos reprint collection the other day and it seemed to collect a lot of the key Starlin stuff, but it didn't blow me away or anything. It does seem like a v strange era.

By the time he came to draw Spider-Man Romita Sr had been a comics professional for something like fifteen years, so calling his Marvel stuff 'early work' is not entirely accurate. Romita had been toiling away mainly at DC/National, drawing romance and war strips; like many National artists of the post-war period, Romita he was a devout Caniff worshipper, so the way he drew his female characters was clearly indebted to (but not swiped from) things like Caniff's Male Call. Working initially from Kirby layouts on Daredevil, he quickly picked up on the kind of artist-driven dynamic storytelling that was the Marvel house style throughout the 60s, and was always excellent at things like 'modern' clothing, haircuts etc. Stan Lee clearly adored the way he 'sexed up' Spider-Man following Ditko's departureand it doesn't seem a coincidence that Spider-Man became Marvel's best-selling title once Romita took over. His main problem - he wasn't fast enough.

Yeah, I should've specified that I meant his early Marvel U work. Dude was clearly already super-polished by the time he started on Amazing so I figured he'd been doing it for a while at that point.

Also revelatory (although disappointing) is the dearth of standout Marvel artists in the '60s. I mean, it's pretty much Kirby, Steranko (more for design sense than draftsmanship), Romita, Colan, and Ditko (who, after extended exposure to his prime Marvel era, I'm realizing I'm not actually that crazy about). Buscema and Barry Windsor Smith have just gotten started. Everyone else is workmanlike at best and laughable at worst. I guess there's a reason why those particular names are still known 40+ years after the fact.

Those guys plus Heck and Ayers could, and just about did, draw the whole roster of titles before the distribution bottleneck was removed in 1968. There were some truly horrific inkers — coughgeorgeroussoscough — back in those days.

I also like the Severins, but John was, I think, doing mostly war and western in the '60s and Marie was mostly being inked horribly.

Buscema began drawing for Marvel in 66, slightly before Steranko. And I can't think of a comics company w/ a better frontline than Kirby, Ditko, Buscema, Colan and Romita (not to mention intermittent appearances from Wally Wood, Gil Kane, Bill Everett, Bob Powell, John Severin etc etc).

I sort've prefer the crude vitality of George Roussos' inking to the dead line of Ayers (or ugh Paul Reinman), but they had some great inkers in the 60s, too - a young Tom Palmer, already possibly the greatest comics inker of all time, Joe Sinnott, Chic Stone, George Klein, Everett again doing luscious work on Kirby; even Vince Colletta raised his game on Thor for a while (until he started erasing Kirby's backgrounds to save time).

You know, you're absolutely right that those guys really are top-tier. I think I'm just more disappointed because I'd hoped to stumble upon more quality artists from this period that I wasn't already familiar with.

I don't think I realized before that Colan was such a cornerstone of silver age Marvel. I associate him mainly with Daredevil and Tomb of Dracula and, because his style is so distinct in comarison to anything resembling the house style, I had always figured him for more of a niche guy.

Colan was the great third way of marvel storytelling, which wasn't really followed up. Lots of artists took after Kirby, some took after Ditko, but who the hell took after Colan?

Old Lunch you should totally get your thoughts down on this while they're fresh.

huh was unaware Colan took on Dr. Strange, and also

Colan admitted relying upon amphetamines in order to make deadlines for illustrating the series Doctor Strange,[28] for which he would personally visit the character's real-life Manhattan neighborhood, Greenwich Village, and shoot Polaroid photographs to use as location reference.

I bet Colan had colorists in the mechanical separation days pulling out their hair, with his blurs and speed lines.

xp -- yeah, iirc Colan was the artist during that funky run when Strange and Clea went back to 1776 and Ben Franklin seduced her while Strange was off saving the world.

Old Lunch, is there a timeline checklist that you're working off of?

also i find hickman's avengers work pretty much unreadable

Yeah, forks, I'm roughly following this site, which has been mostly on point.

And Jon, I may have been taking notes throughout this endeavor. Which is pretty much the only way to ensure that I won't have forgotten everything I've read six months from now.

OL, are you doing this through t0rrence or Marvel Unlimited? If the latter, i might play along someday.

The stupidest story element of the '60s, hands down, was Mike Murdoch. Secret identities are such a flawed and shaky concept to begin with (and require otherwise intelligent characters to suffer temporary brain damage when they get anywhere near putting the pieces together) that, naturally, the solution is to introduce a third identity in the form of your identical, jive-talkin' twin brother who no one has ever met before and with whom you're never seen. And then when the heat is on, kill off your fake twin (habeus corpus be damned) and just say that, uh, some other dude is Daredevil now...I guess?

i gotta say, everytime i try to read that era, the stan lee-isms just bring me to my knees.

xxpost Well, I have all of the '60s Essentials, so I have legit paper copies of 90+% of this stuff. But I've done a lot of my reading via Kindle on the train and don't want to deal with unnecessary gaps, so my electronic copies aren't precisely above board. I'll do Marvel Unlimited someday when my finances are a little rosier but I'm too much of a control freak about this stuff to not maintain my own complete collection on the side.

Aside from historical interest, I don't know how strongly I'd recommend '60s Marvel to the uninitiated. Not very strongly.

huh was unaware Colan took on Dr. Strange

Colan had two substantial runs on Dr Strange, in the 60s and 70s, both inked by Tom Palmer, both excellent - the 60s issues written by Roy Thomas (who gives Doc S a mask!), the 70s by Englehart at his most cosmically ambitious. Didn't know Gene the Dean was a speed freak tho (the history of comics and amphetamines still needs to be written).

I always thought Gene Colan had a pretty unique cinematographic perspective to his pages. Most of the big Marvel/DC artists of his period more often would have the angle so you are looking down at the item in the picture, Colan would often use the perspective from looking up at the character in the frame. I think Colan had this in his earlier comics, but as he got working for Marvel and on into the 70s then back to DC, it became more his thing. It kind of reminds me of some of the camera angle tricks you would see in some 60s movies and TV shows, especially something where they wanted to give the effect of 'things are not right'.

Can't think of too many pros that directly looked like Colan, but I think some of that panel layout and perspective many other artists picked up from him. I think you see it in Miller's Daredevil quite a bit. Tom Mandrake is one 80s/90s comic artist whose style seems to have a heavy Gene Colan influence except less smooth and maybe a bit more jagged like from say Joe Kubert.

Frank Brunner is another artist that has similarities in his style with Gene Colan, I'd think that is perhaps one reason Colan was used as one of the artists on Howard the Duck.

So glad that you dudes with the deep comics knowledge are around here, seriously. I've always been more focused on writers and story so it's nice to read some history/commentary on the artists.

(An aside: I'm pretty sure my first exposure to Colan was via an issue of the Archie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series.)

a quick marvel unlimited check suggests they have most if not all of the 60's for reading so i'm giving this half a shot and just cracked 1963. The writing is atrocious! The art is consistently astonishing.

Feel free to share non-atrocious highlights...

well right off the bat, did Lee get confused as to how many skrulls were left on earth? Three turn into cows, the other is apparently free to join the escaping armada?
And the grey/green hulk shift appears to be an accident of coloring, yes?

the early peter parker-looking mutant story in Tales to Astonish is the secret start of the X-Men isn't it?

Both Lee and Kirby had notoriously poor memories (which of course caused all sorts of grief later), and as production at Marvel cranked up, editorial resources were even more thinly stretched, so that there was nobody paying strict attention to the lore of the Marvel Universe until Roy Thomas turned up. A friend of mine owns an original Kirby Thor page where Jane Foster is described as 'Thor's Gal' in Jack's margin notes. Lee and Kirby were old pros enjoying a surprising second act; they weren't sweating the details, they were just riding the wave. The Fantastic Four between abt issues 25-80 is still, imho, pretty near-perfect superhero comics. Now most of that is Jack's doing, obviously, but I think Stan contributed something, too - not to mention Joe Sinnott, who really gave the comic a very sleek finish, with no details cheated on.

I've been surprised by how long some of the '60s stories lasted (I think there was a stretch of Thor that sustained an ongoing narrative for about a year and a half). Most of them are total shaggy dog stories that end up miles away from where they started, but still. I expected "one and done" to be more of the norm but that largely tapers off in the early '60s. Although I understand that it does become more the norm in the late '60s/early '70s?

There was definitely a period in the late 60s/early 70s where Marvel swore off continued stories, but they soon gave up on that.

a lot of the 60s Thor run is overlapping story arcs - in the middle of one three-issue story they'll introduce the elements that lead into the next three-issue arc *rinse and repeat*. this gets messed up towards the end of the Kirby run, the last 6 months or so there is clearly some editorial meddling/fighting over the direction of the book

also Ward mentioned him already but I wanted to give some more love to Chic Stone as a Kirby inker, some really nice looking issues got turned out under that combo

i totally get that it's not a good look to be all "WHY AIN'T THIS FUNNYBOOK CONTINUITY RIGHT IN 1962, I DEMAND CLARITY" but they're just barely trying to keep the train on the tracks for much of this year.
in any case, these are an easier read than i remember. reading on a pad is fun!

continuity is for chumps

hmm, i'm tempted to do the same. there a good reading guide for that era through MU?