The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes

This first Avengers Epic Collection volume reproduces Avengers #1-20, published from 1963 to 1965. So let’s return to the heady days when Iron Man had all-yellow armour that rusted in the rain, Thor turned back into Doctor Don Blake if he lost contact with his magic Uru hammer for more than 60 seconds, the Wasp was swooning like a lovesick schoolgirl over every hunky hero she met (even Kang the Conqueror turns her head: “I’ll be he’s not bad-looking under that silly headgear he’s wearing!”), and the Hulk actually had hair on his chest. (You win a special trivia prize is you named Hulk as one of the original Avengers, because he didn’t stay on the roster for long). We’ll also return to the days of Rick Jones and the Teen Brigade, a bunch of Marvel superfans who don’t really do much of anything but sometimes get in trouble and need rescuing. And since this was the Cold War, we’ll return to the repressive communist Asian state of Sin-Cong and its brutal warlord leader the Commissar. This particular issue came out in 1965, naturally, and Quicksilver’s questioning of American involvement is prescient: “I thought our purpose was to battle crime! Why need we concern ourselves with international affairs?” Captain America, however, overrules him: “We’re supposed to avenge injustice, right? Well, when liberty’s threatened, justice goes down the drain! That’s it in a nutshell!” And so what would have been a timely debate on American foreign policy is nipped in the bud.

All the comics here were written by Stan Lee and illustrated first by Jack Kirby and then by Don Heck. Lee was in full carnival barker mode. Here’s some bumf from the covers and title pages: “This is the issue you’ve been waiting for!! One of the greatest battles of all time!!” (#3), “A tale destined to become a magnificent milestone in the Marvel Age of comics! Bringing you the great superhero which your wonderful avalanche of fan mail demanded!” (#4), “Caution!! Don’t tear this magazine or wrinkle the pages or get food stains on it! We have a hunch you’ll want to save it as a collector’s item for a long, long time!” (#6), “The Mighty Avengers Meet Spider-Man! And the only blurb we can write is ‘Wowee!’” (#11), “A Marvel tale of most compelling excellence!” (#12), “You’ll gasp in amazement at the most unexpected final panel you’ve ever seen!” (#13), “Possibly the most memorable illustrated story you will read all year!” (#16).

Did the comics deliver? I think so. Once the barker had drawn you in he did a good job presenting a three-ring circus of action. The plots here are madcap. I’ll just break down one issue (#14) as an example. Are you buckled in? Here goes:

This issue begins with the Avengers racing to get the Wasp to a hospital because she’d been struck by a bullet at the end of the previous comic (in case you were wondering, that was “the most unexpected final panel you’ve ever seen!”). At the hospital they’re told that her lungs will collapse in 48 hours unless she’s operated on by a Norwegian lung-restoration specialist named Doctor Svenson. Since Thor is the only one who “can span the ocean in minutes” he flies off to Norway, tears the doctor, protesting, out of his lab, and flies him back the U.S. At the hospital, however, it’s discovered that the doctor is actually an alien, and when his mask is pulled off he dies because he can’t breathe Earth’s oxygen.

Consternation! The Avengers now have to search the entire planet for the aliens who abducted Doctor Svenson and replaced him. They figure this will take them eight hours. After this time has expired they haven’t found anything, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Obviously the aliens must be hiding out in one of the uninhabited parts of the globe, which they quickly reason must mean either the North or South Pole. Thor sticks his hammer out the window of the Avengers’ jet and it points to the North Pole, so that’s where they head next.

Landing at the North Pole they start digging through the ice and end up falling into a giant subterranean alien city (the North Pole apparently being solid land underneath the ice). The aliens capture them by hitting them with a paralyzing ray. This forces them to stand immobile while Kallu, the leader of the Kallusians, explains how they came to Earth fleeing a more warlike group of aliens. Because the Kallusians can’t breathe Earth’s atmosphere they kidnapped Dr. Svenson, who designed masks that allowed them to deal with our air. Thor then jumps on Kallu (he’d only been feigning being paralyzed since the ray doesn’t work on immortals, you see) and the Avengers break free and there is a big fight (“And so, the inevitable battle begins . . .”). The action is interrupted though when Dr. Svenson shows up and agrees to help the Avengers, while at the same time the bad aliens, with their “robot detectors,” discover where the Kallusians have been hiding (it’s hard not to think that The Empire Strikes Back stole something from this part), forcing the Kallusians to scramble their battle fleet and head into space. Dr. Svenson successfully operates on Jan (the Wasp), and the Watcher makes an appearance to say that he’s been observing all of this and won’t make any comment other than to say that “the power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless, eternal universe!”

That’s a lot of plot in only19 pages of comic, especially with all the time spent running around and fighting.

There are things here that would continue to be of importance with the Avengers, no matter what form their changing line-up took. In particular the way that in-fighting and personal squabbles would be as greater or even a greater threat than any supervillain. It’s also refreshing to see heroes who aren’t quite so powerful. Iron Man being hit with an “emery dust pellet,” for example, causes his joints to stiffen. And Captain America is frequently disparaged as someone with no super powers at all. He’s basically just an athletic gymnast who knows how to fight. And when the Swordsman shows up in the final two issues he’s no different except that he has a sword instead of a shield. And still it takes the Avengers two comics to defeat him, and even then he mostly gives up because he doesn’t want to fight alongside the Mandarin.

Some examples of understatement are surprising sixty years later. Baron Zemo is built up as Captain America’s arch-nemesis, with Cap chasing after him to avenge the death of Bucky Barnes. But when he finally manages to kill him (by tricking Zemo into causing an avalanche that buries him, so Cap hasn’t killed him directly) it’s presented in a couple of tiny panels and almost seems like an afterthought. Today a moment like that would be given epic treatment.

The one thing I’m really glad they got rid of was the character of Rick Jones. He’s a completely useless tag-along who starts out riding on the Hulk and later is adopted by Captain America. And he even gets snippy about it. When Cap comes back from South America with Rick in tow, he (Captain America) is greeted by the other Avengers as a returning hero while Rick sulks in the background, muttering “And what am I – a fever blister?” I doubt he’d even rate that high. But somehow he thinks he’s going to be a real Avenger someday. When Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver join the team he’s still sulking in the background, thinking to himself “It isn’t fair! Those three Johnny-come-latelies are now official members and Cap still won’t let me be a full-fledged uniformed Avenger!” No mention of what Rick can do, but he wants a uniform and a membership card anyway. Maybe kids reading the comic were meant to identify with him, but I don’t think that’s likely. He’s just too big a wimp. Marvel would later give in and award him a power-up, but here in the early days he’s hard to take.

Graphicalex

Solo: The Deluxe Edition

Solo was a limited run of comics consisting of a dozen 48-page issues, with each issue being illustrated by a different artist. Some of the biggest names in the biz were recruited and given creative freedom to tell whatever stories they wanted, using DC characters as they saw fit. In some cases the artists also wrote their pieces but they also worked with writers. This Deluxe Edition collects the complete run.

Here’s the line-up:

#1 Tim Sale (with Jeph Loeb, Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke, and Diana Schutz)

#2 Richard Corben (with John Arcudi)

#3 Paul Pope

#4 Howard Chaykin

#5 Darwyn Cooke

#6 Jordi Bernet (with John Arcudi, Joe Kelly, Andrew Helfer, Chuck Dixon, and Brian Azzarello)

#7 Mike Allred (with Laura Allred and Lee Allred)

#8 Teddy Kristiansen (with Neil Gaiman and Steven Seagle)

#9 Scott Hampton (with John Hitchcock)

#10 Damion Scott (with Rob Markmam and Jennifer Carcano)

#11 Sergio Aragonés (with Mark Evanier)

#12 Brendan McCarthy (with Howard Hallis, Steve Cook, Trevor Goring, Robbie Morrison, Tom O’Connor and Jono Howard)

I’ll say right away that the art here is great. I have my favourites and others that I didn’t like nearly as much, but I have to acknowledge that even the ones that weren’t my thing were highly creative. As a portfolio of some of the best people working at the time (the series ran from 2004 to 2006) it’s a treasure chest.

That said, I really didn’t think much of most of the stories. They’re all over the map in terms of genre and tone, even within some of the individual issues. And a lot of the time they just felt like flimsy excuses for the art. Which I guess you should expect in what was a consciously art-driven project. Darwyn Cooke won an Eisner Award for his issue and I had no disagreement with that, as in my notes I had it down as one of the best. But overall I thought there were more misses than hits when it came to what was actually being illustrated, and I can’t say that any of the stories stayed with me for long.

Just as a final note, I have no idea why, for such a deluxe hardcover edition, they put Mike Allred’s drawing of Batman doing the Batusi on the cover. That’s no way to sell a book.

Graphicalex

Utterly Mad

In my review of the Visions of Poetry edition of Poe’s “The Raven,” illustrated by Ryan Price, I mentioned how I had memorized the poem as a kid from a Mad magazine adaptation. Well, the book I read that adaptation in was Utterly Mad. I’ve kept it around a long time now.

The stories collected here are mostly long-form satires of established properties like Robin Hood, Tarzan, Little Orphan Annie, and Frankenstein. And then there are a couple of cultural pieces, one on adapting novels to the big screen and the other on supermarkets. The latter I guess being something new at the time (the book’s first printing was in 1956).

Most of the humour hasn’t aged well. There are a lot of little gags that play out on the edges, but the verbal ones especially don’t land. Plus I think you’d probably want to be acquainted with the source material. “G. I. Shmoe” is a take-off, I think, of a G. I. Joe comic, but I didn’t get the punchline every woman delivers where they ask him if he’s got gum. And “Little Orphan Melvin” won’t work unless you have some idea of the original characters, how they talk and relate to one another, and the sorts of situations Annie finds herself in. Other stories, like “Robin Hood” and “Melvin of the Apes” just weren’t funny. Maybe they thought the name Melvin was funny. Also the Yiddish word “fershlugginer.” Sometimes the crammed visual style does work passably well, as with the “Frank N. Stein” story and the trip to the supermarket, but overall it wasn’t working for me.

That said, I love this little paperback for two stories that, for whatever reason, have stayed with me. Obviously one is the adaptation of “The Raven.” This is typical of the crammed style I mentioned, with lots of different stuff going on in every cell, including a lot that’s totally unrelated to the poem, like a dog that outgrows the narrator’s apartment. But where I give them the most credit is in including the full text of the poem and having all kinds of fun with it, from emphasizing the fearfulness of the narrator, hiding in his room, to presenting the lost Lenore as a beefy, cigar-smoking lady who presses clothes. To some extent, I’m still not sure how much, this interpretation of the poem has for me become a part of it that I can no longer disentangle from what Poe wrote.

The second story that stands out is “Book! Movie!” This is meant to illustrate how Hollywood takes gritty, realistic novels and cleans them up, turning them into tinselly trash. Which is something that I think probably happened a lot more often in the 1950s than it does today. Anyway, the Book part tells the story of a loser living in terrible poverty who cheats on his wife and is caught by a blackmailer (though I don’t know what the blackmailer could be thinking he’d get out of it). The guy then kills his mistress and the blackmailer (with lots of “Censored” dots covering up the gouts of gore) and is pursued by demons back to his home, where he learns that his wife, who he hates, has invited her twin sister to live with them “forever.” The man collapses in despair, saying: “This miserable hopelessly hopeless situation is just perfect for a book ending.”

The Movie part turns the man and his wife into an affluent couple who even sleep in separate beds. As was the custom on screen at the time. The man is pursuing an affair (because he can’t stand that his wife is a slob), and is caught by a blackmailer. He then kills his mistress and the blackmailer with a revolver, which mysteriously doesn’t leave any traces of blood (the man in the Book story had used a knife). Returning home, his wife runs to his arms and says that from now on she’ll be a perfect helpmeet and keep a tidier house, and they skip off together over the rainbow while singing about joy.

As I say, I think this phenomenon of the Hollywoodized/sanitized novel is probably not as big a thing today, but the outline presented here has always stuck with me as a way of thinking about how page-to-screen adaptation works.

As for the cover, I’m not sure how well it would fly in the present age. Probably a little better than Token Mad, and in both cases I’m hoping the sense of irony would help it out.

Graphicalex