How To Read Comics Part One
(a brief disclaimer)
I’ve rewritten this damn newsletter four different times now. I was supposed to have this out three weeks ago. I’ve been avoiding it. Something something, this feels trivial right now. But that’s defeatist attitude so I’m gonna cut it out. This newsletter is late because the fascists currently in power in the United States are accelerating our collective decline very rapidly. If this sounds familiar, you don’t need me talking about it. If this is news to you, brush up on the news. I recommend The Handbasket by Marisa Kabas as a good place to start (and she’s on Buttondown!)
This newsletter however, is about comics, and really it’s about me selling you comics by writing about them. Comics, like all art, are a reflection of the culture we live in. For this reason, I take writing about comics very seriously, and I believe that engaging with them critically is an important practice to keep up. The lack of critical thought about our consumption and actions in the world informs a lot of the problems we face, no matter how inconsequential the subject may be. My fellow dollar bin divers know this intimately whenever they find some forgotten treasure at the back of a dusty longbox that they then struggle to communicate the meaning of to someone on the outside. One person’s junk is another’s treasure etc etc. My mission is to talk about comic books meaningfully, regardless of the relative acclaim of an individual book in order to learn something about the world at large.
The above manifesto may be amended in the future, but for now it works as a sort of mission statement for this project. One other administrative note. Due to my lateness, this newsletter is coming out in February, which means that there will be another newsletter out to celebrate Black History Month. Look for that in about a week. There’s no discount code this month, instead, 20% of sales will be donated to Critical Resistance to support their work with prisoner solidarity and advocacy. I’ll add screenshots to the March newsletter to confirm my donation. This is 20% of ALL sales in the shop for the duration of February.
This newsletter marks the beginning of an ongoing project to look at the rhetoric beneath the surface of comics. How different artists and writers interact with publishers and the wider culture, and what that all means. Without further ado, here is part one:
HOW TO READ COMICS Part 1 of ???
Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross is one of those books that ends up on lists of ‘comics for people who don’t like comics’ or in my case, is the book someone’s cool relative gets them when they hear you’re into comics. Not really the kind of book we like to highlight in the shop. Nevertheless, the fully painted art by Alex Ross is compelling despite my most cynical inclinations. But Busiek’s story, which methodically winds through the early days of the Marvel Universe from the conceit of a pedestrian observer is the more important legacy of the book.
Busiek’s career in comics started in fandom before breaking into the industry himself in the 1980s. For example Busiek is credited with coming up with the idea that Jean Grey was not dead, and the Phoenix was a separate entity from her completely while he was still a nonprofessional fan. This is the kind of logical problem solving that ingratiates someone to editorial policy by finding plot loopholes that maintain old IP. Roy Thomas spent his entire career doing this, and it is a logic that Busiek has employed multiple times as evident in Marvels, Thunderbolts, Untold Tales of Spider-Man and more. But Marvels was Busiek’s first major project, and it captured the attention of a certain reactionary element in fandom that rejected the burgeoning hyper stylization of the Image crowd in favor of safe nostalgia.
The nostalgia that Busiek channeled in his prose found a perfect counterpart in the Norman Rockwell influenced painted artwork of Ross. There is a misconception among many people that the more realistic an art piece looks, the better it is. This belief explains not only the appeal of Ross, but also other photorealistic artists in general. Not to mention the advent of computer colored rendering instead of inkers, AI “art” and many other popular trends. However, realism ≠ quality. Ross himself has learned this, and I consider myself a fan of his work, if only for the times when he loosens up and shows his hand a little more, like in his recent Fantastic Four graphic novel. His work in Marvels is still young, which makes it some of his best, but at every possible moment the reader is reminded of what he is trying to achieve. Stan Lee’s introduction to the book praises Ross for making the scenes “astonishingly realistic.” At the back of the book are numerous pages devoted to Ross’ process, his use of models, and how he would actually assemble pages. This is all very impressive from a technical perspective, but it comes off as a bit hollow on both sides. Ross’ preoccupation with photo reference and shoehorning in cameos (the FF wedding scene not only has all four Beatles in attendance, but Paul is apparently dead in it) and the almost robotic reception from fandom and media that “this comic is different” simply by virtue of its medium of production. Despite these critiques, the book still gets me whenever I read it! Yes, I am an Alex Ross apologist.
The other innovation of Marvels is Busiek’s incredible knack for weaving a story through the dense overlapping continuity of the Marvel Universe. This again points to Busiek’s origins in fandom, as seen in his own introduction to chapter two wherein he details finding the exact moment within an issue of X-Men when they could have attended the wedding of Reed and Sue. This is an impressive level of research, but it’s not really a necessity of the story to explain things. It’s the writing equivalent of giving Captain America combat boots and tactical gear because that is more logical. This is the same thought process that drives Ross’ painting. It seems to say, “this was meant to happen because I discovered the perfect moment in time where it could have happened, everything finally makes sense.” Of course, things don’t make sense. It’s superhero comics. But the drive for verisimilitude in comics is unstoppable, and in the years since Marvels it took over the industry.
Another feature of this approach can be seen in Busiek’s choice of Phil Sheldon as narrator and audience stand-in. Sheldon is a pedestrian photographer, a literal witness to historic events throughout the history of the Marvel Universe. This creates a new dynamic for the reading audience, one that again appeals to fandom. No longer do readers fantasize about being Spider-Man fighting Doctor Octopus, instead, the audience fantasy is to be someone on the street witnessing the battle from afar—a statement implicit in Lee’s introduction when he writes that no other graphic novel has “made the reader part of the events that transpired the way Marvels does.”
Marvels was a commercial and critical success, and perhaps more importantly, a crossover hit with sympathetic portions of the mainstream public that appreciated the protagonist distance from the subject matter. However, Marvel was about to enter a period of investor caused upheaval that would result in bankruptcy before an eventual merger with Toy Biz in 1998. The quality of the books in this time period was something of an afterthought as editors, writers and artists shuffled through books, trying to navigate the temperamental changes mandated by those higher up. Further complicating things, was the fact that the industry was changing alongside the rest of the world. Marvels quickly appeared quaint and old fashioned to a certain set of readers, a feeling that would become embodied in the figure of publisher Bill Jemas. But in the meantime, the chaos allowed many oddball books to sneak through seemingly untampered with.
One such book was the relaunched Thor written by Dan Jurgens. The first 25 issues or so were all made in collaboration with John Romita Junior on pencils, but he departed with the conclusion of their twenty-fifth issue and Erik Larsen stepped in for a three issue stint as inked by Klaus Janson. The artistic team of those two is what caught my attention, but I was pleasantly surprised by the overall product. As noted above, this was an odd time for the company as it rebuilt itself from bankruptcy and attempted to define itself for the new millennium. Under Jemas (and Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti), the company pushed more into mature readers titles as it tried courting an older readership. Sometimes this was good (Milligan and Allred on X-Force) and sometimes it was bad (Mark Millar). Parallel to this push forward was a similar impulse to mine the past for nostalgia. The shadow cast by Marvels is long.
Thor is a perfect example of this push and pull, as several different versions of the character were put out in a matter of years. Thor: Godstorm teamed Busiek with Steve Rude and Mike Royer on a nostalgic tour of Thor’s early days. While not approaching the realism of Marvels, Godstorm is similarly concerned with conserving a (literally) mythic past, down to teaming Rude with Kirby’s premiere 1970s inker.
At the other end of the spectrum is Thor: Vikings by Garth Ennis and Glenn Fabry. Released as a five issue MAX miniseries in 2003, it recounts the story of a group of undead evil vikings laying siege to present day Manhattan. It is so Ennis it hurts, down to his recycled trope of a ‘noble’ nazi air pilot who disagrees with his government and only longs for a righteous fight (I find crap like this exceedingly dull). Given the timing, and the excessive brutality of the titular vikings, and the frequent air combat in the book, I read this title as Ennis and Marvel reckoning with a post-9/11 reality for New York City.
Thor also featured in the “Marvels Comics Group” gimmick that ran during the year 2000. This initiative imagined what the in fiction comic books of the Marvel Universe would look like and provided an opportunity for different takes on familiar characters (everybody loves that right??) Ty Templeton and Derec Aucoin handled Thor, and cast it as a sci-fi tech book with very fun Saturday morning cartoon vibe that has some nice art. KC Carlson has a good rundown of the initiative that I will link HERE
Which brings me more or less back to Thor, by Jurgens and Larsen. Being the primary Thor book, this exists somewhere between all three other books in tone. There is some reinvention (now Thor is connected with a hip young EMT instead of old private MD Donald Blake) and plenty of Larsen being Larsen, but by that same token, both Larsen and Jurgens are clearly fans of the old material. It is also telling that, unlike all the other examples, this is merely a selection of issues from the regular series, not a special miniseries or prestige event. This fits with Larsen’s general approach to comics. He is not a special project guy (even though he has done limited series). Rather, his comics practice is just as much about the deadlines and continuity and all the regular production line work that goes into monthly comics as it is about rendering the perfect illustration or writing the most monumental prose. What sets Larsen apart is that he is so naturally talented he can actually pull all this off.
I couldn’t leave without mentioning Larsen’s inker Klaus Janson. Janson is an artist held in the highest esteem here for his choppy slashes of ink and iconic runs collaborations on Daredevil and Batman with Frank Miller. Larsen is typically someone I like to see ink himself, but Janson is one of the few artists who can match Larsen beat for beat, and it is absolutely inspired to see them work together. These two artists were decidedly not the house style at the time of publication, which is yet another example of the gems that can be found if you look at this time period for Marvel.
Marvels demarcated a shift in direction for Marvel. A project unquestionably focused on the past while preparing the company for a pivot to box office domination in the 21st century. We see the various tendrils of this dynamic appear in three very different subsequent Thor books (a character noticeably absent from Marvels), that chart the sometimes contradictory visions for the company as it entered the new millennium. This is a pattern that would continue even as Marvel dominated the movie industry, even as the Thor movies were objectively really bad except for that one good one and even as the industry has once again expanded and convulsed. Everything old is new again, but we will always have the books that remind us of our past dreams. Or as Gwen Stacy would say in the penultimate pages of Marvels
There are so many more books available in the shop right now! Even if I wasn’t sending out newsletters, I have been working diligently behind the scenes to build up inventory. Please take a look around. Combined shipping is always available!
to purchase these books and more, visit me online at https://mostlyfrogs.bigcartel.com/