Remember When Comics Sucked?

Kind of a loaded question really. For as long as there have been comics there have been crappy ones. The 1980s, however, saw the introduction of the direct sale market which made it financially viable for smaller publishers to get their comics out there. Spurred on by the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which was a major success story for the small press, scads of comics which a few years earlier would have been lucky to make it into a xeroxed fanzine were popping up in comics stores.

The Stupid Comics section over at misterkitty.org has several interesting sections for lovers of dreadful sequential art, but the 80s section is particularly horrific.

• New Beginning is a particularly incompetent look at nuclear war with a disturbing wish fulfillment angle.
• Sometimes I think I'm the only one who remembers Geriatric Gangrene Ju-Jitsu Gerbils and perhaps that's for the best, but here's a page devoted to the Gerbils and other Ninja Turtle knock-offs.
• The Guardians of Justice and O-Force prove that even if you can afford color printing it isn't an acceptable substitute for a knowledge of perspective and anatomy.
• For several examples of godawful self-published 80s comics, give this a spin.

WARNING: After viewing the above links crack open your copy of Watchmen to give the 80s a sense of balance and to hopefully keep you from sandpapering out your eyes.

Six Mistakes the New Captain America Movie Should Avoid

Yes, box offices across the world are growing fat with Iron Man cash. Ol' Shell Head was the number one movie for two weeks in a row, and I bet the folks over at Marvel are pretty darn proud of themselves. Of course this means that we'll be seeing more super hero movies in the not too distant future, and I say bring it on. One such film currently in the early stages is The First Avenger: Captain America, featuring one of Marvel's oldest creations. I've enjoyed the character in the comics, particularly John Byrne's run on the book, and The Invaders series which told of the wartime adventures of Cap, his sidekick Bucky, The Submariner, The Human Torch and Toro.

For the sake of perspective, though, I'd like to remind everyone that Marvel has been associated with some seriously crappy films in the past, and four of those crappy films have starred Marvel's super soldier Captain America. I'm not saying this new film version is cursed, but it certainly has a lot to live down.

The most recent of these star-spangled atrocities is the steaming dog turd (the mushy kind with the swirly on top like soft-serve ice cream) that is the 1990 film Captain America which starred Matt Salinger. Reb Brown played Cap in two made for TV films in 1979 (Captain America and Captain America II: Death Too Soon) that thankfully never got picked up as a series. Fourthly, the Captain's first big screen appearance happened in 1944 when he was the subject of a 15 chapter serial (again titled Captain America but rereleased as The Return of Captain America), that took far more liberties with the character than should be allowed.

So what can the makers of this new Captain America flick learn from these previous versions?

1. Fake rubber ears are a bad idea. Seriously. Look closely. Captain America has traditionally been drawn with his ears poking out the side of his cowl. To replicate this look for the 1990 film, fake ears were applied to the outside of the mask, and they look pretty awful in closeup. Ironically, adding ears to the headpiece probably rendered actor Matt Salinger deaf as a post.
   
   
2. Try not to be embarrassed that your main character is wearing long johns. Cap disappears in the middle of the movie, and we only see his civilian guise of Steve Rogers for a long stretch. Salinger actually looked fairly convincing in the red, white, and blue tights, but the costume gets relatively little screen time. If you're embarrassed to have your main character running around in a super hero costume, maybe you should be making romantic comedies.
   
   
3. Just the teensiest bit of logic would be appreciated. As the missile to which Captain America is strapped is about to launch our hero grabs the villainous Red Skull and threatens to take him along for the ride. The Skull will have none of that and produces a large knife which he uses to cut off... HIS OWN HAND????? WTF?
   
   
4. Cap's shield was made by government scientists, not the R&D division of Wham-O. In short, it ain't a Frisbee, people. The shield Reb Brown carried in the two made-for-TV Captain America movies was made of transparent plastic. Unless he's fighting nazis at a beach party, this just doesn't work for me.
   
   
5. Shouldn't he at least LOOK like Captain America? No film adaptation is ever going to be 100% faithful to the source material, but the liberties taken with Captain America's costume for the first of the made-for-TV flicks made our hero look more like Eval Kneival than a super hero. For the second film Brown was sporting a more traditional version of the costume, but jeez, that helmet...
   
   
6. Shouldn't he at least to some degree BE Captain America? For the 1944 serial, the costume was more or less accurate, it's just every single other aspect of the character that was changed. Rather than being a G.I. named Steve Rogers, our hero is a crusading District Attorney named Grant Gardner (played by Dick Purcell, who died of a heart attack the same year this serial was released), he doesn't carry a shield but he does pack a gun. Essentially, this is a generic Saturday afternoon action serial using Captain America's name and likeness, but nothing else. Interestingly, I think the look of the recently rebooted Captain in the comics owes a debt to this take on the character.

Anybody else got any advice we can offer to the folks at Marvel Productions?

BLOGS THAT ROCK The Horrors of it All

I used to regularly purchase Overstreet's Comic Book Price Guide and drool over all those golden age and silver age comics that were just too ridiculously expensive to buy. The horror comics were of particular interest, especially since the ones published before the advent of the Comics Code Authority were far darker and more daring than the code approved comics that were the only game in town when I was a kid.

Well, now I need drool no longer. The Horrors of it All, which is put together and frequently updated by a blogger calling himself Karswell, features scans of entire stories from pre-code horror comics. If this is your sort of thing, this site will keep you busy for awhile. He's got 358 postings for 2007 and 291 so far for 2008.

I Am Not Iron Man, But I Really Like His Movie

By now the web is riddled with reviews of Iron Man, the film that launches the 2008 Summer movie season, so rather than adding to the glut I'm just going to give some quick impressions. Movies like X-Men and Batman Begins have set the bar pretty high for big screen super hero adaptations while Daredevil and Ghost Rider have shown just how low the form can get. In a nutshell, Iron Man is pretty awesome. Robert Downey, Jr. is pitch perfect as the charismatic, booze swilling billionaire weapons manufacturer Tony Stark who after seeing first hand the terrible things his company's products can do dedicates himself and his company to more people friendly pursuits. Stark builds a high tech but bulky suit of armor that allows him to escape from his terrorist captors, then devotes himself to perfecting the suit until he becomes one of the most badass superheroes the screen has ever seen. The effects are spectacular, characters are well-rounded, providing a satisfying plot to action ratio.

I first saw the character as part of The Marvel Superheroes animated TV show that debuted in 1966, a series that could be produced today by a brain damaged monkey with a passing understanding of Adobe Flash. Here's a glimpse at the Iron Man intro from that show:

I followed the character off and on over the years in his regular comic series and in Marvel's superhero knitting circle The Avengers. I was reading the comic when it was first established that Tony Stark was an alcoholic. Admittedly that was pretty groundbreaking stuff at the time, but the issue is oversimplified by having him get off the sauce after only an issue or two. A few years later when Stark began drinking again, the alcoholism went from oversimplified to ridiculously exaggerated with Stark living on the street as a wino.

Even if you haven't seen the film yet, I'm sure you've heard that you need to stay all the way through the closing credits for an important coda. Suffice it to say, this little reward for those who sit through all of the credits (and there are a lot of them) had this comic book geek grinning like an idiot.

NEXUS: SPACE OPERA #1Comic Book Review

The 1980s was a great time to be a comics fan. The new direct sale market allowed many small publishers to get their product into comic book stores without the large outlay of cash required for newsstand distribution. A lot of crappy comics got published, but for those of us willing to sort the wheat from the chaff there were finally books that presented an alternative in a market that had been dominated by Marvel and DC. One of the absolute best of this bunch was Mike Baron and Steve Rude's Nexus. The book was initially published by Capital Comics, then First Comics, Dark Horse, and now artist Steve Rude is self-publishing through his Rude Dude Productions imprint.

This is the first of a four issue mini-series, but the book also carries over the numbering from the last Dark Horse issue from ten years ago, making this also the 99th issue. Nexus is a fusion-powered assassin who targets mass murderers. His home base on a moon called Ylum has become a place where sentients of many species can seek asylum from tyranny. Nexus's long time companion Sundra Peale is about to give birth to the couple's first child. Nexus, however, has garnered many enemies over the course of 99 issues, and several nefarious looking villains of varying species are plotting the death of the unborn child. There is unrest between a pair of fanatical religious sects called the Alvonites and the Elvonites, and President Tyrone is hard pressed to keep the peace without Nexus backing him up.

Seeing these characters again after so long is like running into old and dear friends you never expected to see again. We've yet to get reacquainted with Dave of Thune and his son Fred, better known as The Hammer, and I'm hoping Baron and Rude are saving that pleasure for next issue. Many of the early issues of Nexus carried a quote from science fiction author Harlan Ellison that said Nexus "glows with originality." It was truly unique in its day, and it's still a great read. I eagerly await the second installment of Space Opera.

Who Wants to be a Super Hero? #1: Comic Book Review

I think of Stan Lee in much the same way I think of Lucille Ball. Lucy was a groundbreaking entertainer and her first TV show I Love Lucy is credited with inventing the three-camera sitcom format that is still used today. She went on to star in two more successful sitcoms and garnered four Emmys. I respect the hell out of her accomplishments, I just never thought she was funny.

Stan Lee, of course, co-created all the major hitters of the early days of Marvel Comics, in tandem with whichever artist was working on the book. Lee had a hand in Spider-man, X-Men, Daredevil, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four... It's an impressive list, and the early Marvel Comics had a level of characterization that was missing from the Distinguished Competition. As with Lucy I respect what he did, giving the world so many enduring characters, but Stan was never much of a writer, and I find most of those early stories unreadable.

Comics have evolved quite a bit since then, but judging from Dark Horse's Who Wants To Be A Super Hero? #1, Stan's writing has not. The subject of this first issue is a character named Feedback, based on the winner of last summer's Sci Fi Channel reality show Who Wants To Be A Super Hero? As was established in the show, Feedback is a computer tech geek who after being struck by lightning while holding a video game controller (dear God, did I just write that?) he is endowed with strange electrical powers. You might think this was being played for laughs, but the story is played as straight super hero melodrama. Without exaggeration, nearly every panel in this book had me inwardly shrieking "who the hell talks like this?" I'm not entirely sure if he's intentionally doing a retro thing here, trying to ape the ridiculously over the top style of his earlier work. If this is the case, my response is that an imitation of crap is still crap.

As the winner of last summer's Who Wants To Be A Super Hero?, Feedback was also supposed to appear in a Sci Fi Channel original movie. Given the quality of most such efforts, perhaps it's best that the movie hasn't materialized. I honestly enjoyed the show, and even though Feedback's win was a bit of a surprise (I had thought Major Victory was a shoe-in), I thought he was a deserving winner. Nobody, however, deserves this comic.

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!

I saw this over on boingboing.com and I'm fascinated. I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets is an anthology of World War II era comics by an obscure artist named Fletcher Hanks. "These strips were beyond terrible," according to the Boing Boing post, "filled with a kind of idiotic energy. Each panel tops the previous panel for freakish goofiness, each strip surpasses the previous strip for mind-croggling ham-fistedness." Hanks wrote and drew the adventures of Fantomah: Mystery Woman of the Jungle and Stardust the Super Wizard, the latter obviously being from a time when the concept of a superhero was so new that some people obviously didn't get it.

The samples of Hanks' work that I've found online are fascinatingly surreal and remind me a bit of Basil Wolverton's work, particularly in his rendering of neanderthalish villains. Stardust actually bears a resemblance to the British comic book character Marvelman (changed to Miracleman when he came stateside in the 80s), though Marvelman didn't appear until 1954. Since Marvelman was a blatant knock off of Captain Marvel I suppose it's conceivable that the character's look might have been cribbed from Stardust.

Anyway, if you go to the listing for I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets on Amazon you can check out a few pages of Hanks' work by using the "Search Inside" function. You can also read a couple full length stories at lambiek.net's Fletcher Hanks page.