Comics: yet another X-Men #1!

Deafened still by the ongoing kettle-drum of DC Comics' "New 52" media phenomenon, I almost missed Marvel Comics' recent re-launch of "Uncanny X-Men" with a new first issue. And I might have given the whole thing a miss in any case, except the artwork is by one of my favorite working comics artists, Carlos Pacheco.

This issue is written by Kieron Gillen and takes off right where a recent mini-series left off: Cyclops and most of the few remaining mutants left on Earth (in the wake of the still-seminal events in "House of M") are gathered together in Utopia, their city/stronghold in the bay off the coast of San Francisco. Cyclops is determined that mutants will no longer be the meek targets of non-mutant aggression, but he's equally sure that the way to turn that aggression around is for his core team (for some mysterious reason perhaps known only to Gillen, he dubs this his "extinction team") to function more as a standard save-the-world superhero team, ala the Fantastic Four or the Avengers. It's an interesting idea - mutants using PR to sway public opinion (to my recollection, it hasn't been used since the launch of the original "X-Factor," many moons ago) - and Gillon bungles it right from the start.

If it's any consolation, he bungles it in the exact same way DC has bungled all but a couple of its own much more headline-grabbing first issues this summer (winter on the calendar, but I'm in shorts with the ceiling fan going in Boston, so as far as I'm concerned, it's summer until it's actually cold): he picks up a game in mid-play, tweaks it here and there in ways that may or may not be good ideas ("extinction team"?), but never pauses for even a moment to give new readers any reason to care about any of it. First issues are - at least theoretically - about providing a 'jumping on' point for those new readers, and yet in the many wide open spaces so helpfully provided by Pacheco's artwork, Gillon never bothers to explain anything, never bothers to catch us up on anything. In short, he makes the same mistake that's been plaguing the various X-books for decades now: he assumes every single reader is chapter-and-verse familiar with every jot and tittle of the X-catechism. The X-Man Colossus is intermittently possessed by the spirit of the old X-Men villain Juggernaut? Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner wears a modified X-Man costume and for some unaccountable reason takes orders from the team leader's girlfriend? Magneto too? It would have taken five minutes to write dialogue and monologue-boxes that grounded new readers on all of this, but Gillon doesn't do that. Instead, he assumes the worst thing you can assume about the opening of any drama: that his audience is already interested.

The result is as insular as most of what's been going on at DC lately, a first issue devoid of drama, meaningful only to the insider crowd, full of 'payoff' moments comprehensible only to a thousand people on the planet. I bought it for Carlos Pacheco's artwork (which didn't disappoint), but if his past is any indicator, he won't be around more than a few issues. Let's hope Kieron bothers to ground his story in that time.

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 2!

"Conan the Barbarian" (the phrase is synonymous with the character, and yet, in classic "Elementary, my dear Watson," or "Beam me up, Scotty" style, it was never actually used in the original material) became a modest, surprise hit for Marvel Comics shortly after its debut. Fans responded not only to the whole sword-and-sorcery sub-genre but to Roy Thomas' specific vision of the Hyborian Age created by Robert E. Howard for the pulp market decades before. The four-color comic sold well enough, in fact, to sustain a spin-off: "Savage Tales of Conan" was another great Thomas idea, a larger-format black-and-white magazine designed to showcase longer and more visually opulent stories than the regular comic book would usually do. And both "Conan" and "Savage Tales" drew sustained life from the pencilling talents of the same man: Marvel Comics' heavyweight fan favorite, John Buscema.

Buscema was already a legend when he came to the "Conan" titles, but they gave him a range usually unavailable in super-hero comics. In the pre-historic world Thomas was fleshing out from Howard's writings, Buscema was free to let his considerable imagination soar, without needing to conform to the super-strength and eye-beams norms of titles like "The Fantastic Four" or "The Avengers." He was far less meticulous than his predecessor Barry Smith had been, but he also never ran the risk of stylized, static lapses into which Smith's art could sometimes fall. At the height of his powers, Buscema could scarcely draw a cup sitting on a table without viewers worrying it would spill on them - his panels virtually vibrated with movement.

The result was the visual conception of an entire world - and of a character. Gone was the epicene rock star of Smith's run on the title. In his place stood a far more solid adult man, broad in the chest, wide in the waist, less the lithe superhero, more the thickset tavern-brawler. This Conan might still at certain angles have looked young, but he was unquestionably seasoned - he sported a shaggy Prince Valiant haircut, a fur loin-cloth, wide lips, and a broad, oft-smashed nose. He was a stoic, no-nonsense man of violence, and the visuals Buscema came up with issue after issue helped Thomas to refine his idea of the character to an immediate perfection seldom achieved by other writers with other characters (instinct and luck play a certain part too, and timing - think of Claremont and Byrne's Wolverine, or Miller's Daredevil). To most of us reading these issues eagerly every month, this was Conan.

The world Thomas and Buscema helped to create (the working partnership between these two was an amazing fluke on its own - both imperious control-freaks who fundamentally disliked collaboration, and yet here they were working in what seemed to be perfect tandem) was an enormous elaboration on the one Smith had begun to sketch. Monsters roamed everywhere - Buscema's talent for drawing most animals stood him in good stead as Thomas' scripts called for a veritable Noah's Ark of gigantic bears, moths, rats, lions, eels, squids, lions ... as well as the perennially-popular dinosaurs. Conan fights sabre-toothed tigers, pterodactyls, slugs the size of rhinos, and even, in a breathlessly-paced sequence, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And through it all, Buscema's Conan is as far away from Smith's virginal quester as possible. This is a man much closer to Howard's original conception (and, with any luck, the version we'll see in only a few days when the new movie adaptation opens in a theater near you): a boisterous creature of huge appetites - some of them frankly sexual. Buscema was able to indulge to the fullest his oft-announced affection for drawing sultry women - including every kind of evil-eyed seductress imaginable (one of them ends up being made of sea weed), a stunningly re-imagined Red Sonja (Buscema replaced the jerkin-and-skirt Windsor had given the character with ... nothing much at all), and, in a long and satisfying story-arc, the corsair-queen Belit, whose death and brief resurrection marked the 100th issue of "Conan the Barbarian."

The run was immensely successful, and it defined the character for an entire generation. Even when the vogue of sword-and-sorcery started dying out, those Marvel issues kept coming: "Conan the Barbarian," "Savage Sword of Conan," "King Conan," and countless stand-alone specials and spin-offs (Thomas and Buscema spent less than a year on an adaptation of one of Howard's other great creations, King Kull, for instance, and it was a joyous event for fans of the character). Conan was drawn in this same period by other great pencillers - Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Gene Colan, and many others tried their hands at the Cimmerian - but he belonged to Buscema, and of course to Thomas. When their time with the character finally petered to an end, it seemed almost like a Hyborian funeral was in order. Those of us who'd loved the era thought: there might be crappy knock-offs in the future (done more to keep the copyright alive than out of love or craftsmanship), but this kind of genius won't come again.

We were wrong, of course. But we had to wait a while.

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 1!

Our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza of 2011 kicks into high-gear this week in anticipation of the new Lionsgate spectacular premiering on the 19th and starring Iowa's own Jason Momoa in the role that made a certain once and future California governor a star. And the most natural place in the world for our ongoing 'stravaganza to, um, go next is the medium where the character, the world, the very concept of Conan the Barbarian flourished - comic books.

And when we enter that medium, one thing becomes glaringly obvious: with all due respect to creator originality and meaning no disrespect to Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian as he exists in the popular consciousness has a fully equal co-creator, and that co-creator's name is Roy Thomas.

Thomas will be familiar to the more nerdy among you (and to those of you who dote on my frequent comics-postings here at Stevereads)(i.e. the most nerdy among you). He was the organizational and conceptual workaday genius who pretty much inherited the mantle of Marvel Comics from Stan Lee when the company was bought and Lee was promoted to Publisher. Thomas took all the bursting creativity of Lee and his artistic collaborators, added a much more intuitive and comprehensive grasp of inter-title continuity, and almost single-handledly created the next great age of Marvel titles. And in 1970, he managed to convince Glenn Lord, the literary manager of Howard's estate, to allow Marvel to put out a comic titled "Conan the Barbarian."

Despite a significant amount of reader demand, publishing a sword-and-sorcery literary adaptation in 1970 was a bit of a risk for a mainstream company like Marvel, so Thomas originally had a tight budget - too tight, in fact, to allow him to have the company's first choice of artist, the fan favorite (and correspondingly expensive) John Buscema. And in retrospect, this was a blessing: it forced Thomas to 'settle' for a sexy young Brit named Barry Smith, whose pencilling work (especially when he handled his own inking) was only just starting to show signs of the lavish, unique brilliance it would achieve in part because of the leeway Thomas gave the artist on this book. As Thomas remarked at the time when presented with the choice of artists, if he'd gone with Buscema in those early days, he'd have sold more issues and won fewer awards.

Looking at that initial Smith run on the book, it's utterly amazing how fast he throws off the unconvincingly Kirbyesque style he was using in issue #1. In a remarkably short time, Smith starts to show readers the sinuous, glittering detail for which he would later become famous. Most artists mature more slowly, but even by issue #4, the landmark "Tower of the Elephant," there are clear foreshadowings of Smith's more mature look.



Those earliest issues give us a very young Conan - lithe, boyish (indeed, many of Smith's '70s big-hair panels make the character look like the baddest-ass Bee Gee of them all), savage but inexperienced, and as such they make the perfect companion to this new movie, which features a Conan just at the beginning of his incredible career. He's not yet the preposterous monolith we were given in the last movie adaptation, and let's hope he never becomes it: the real Conan was far more than a simple strong-man - he's much more a lion than a bulldozer.

And magnificently sustaining Smith's evolving visuals was the scripting of Roy Thomas, who took a personal love of the character in Robert E. Howard's stories and re-created that character and his entire world for a much, much broader readership than Howard had ever reached. Long before the original movie and long after, mention of Conan was as likely to conjure the world Thomas created as visions of Austrian weightlifters. That world, like Howard's is full of torch-lit taverns and fantastic creatures who've survived from even earlier eras in Earth's troubled history. And more: it was Thomas who perfected the driving tension in the background of Howard's stories - the tension represented by Conan himself, a mortal man without super-powers who encounters all these fantastic creatures, these stubborn hold-overs from earlier times in which even Conan the Barbarian would not have survived ... encounters them, and defeats them. Not for heroism's sake (Thomas' Conan, like Howard's, is usually indifferent to heroism), but because he insists on dominating his own world. As paradoxical as it may seem, this Conan was both a representative of Everyman and an avatar of the 'modern' world.

For all his genius, Smith was never cut out for regular comic book series work, and everybody knew it (it's precisely this quality in his work that makes his frequent forays into the genre so instantly memorable). Luckily, as "Conan the Barbarian" sales blossomed, Thomas was able to acquire an artist who was not only cut out for regular series work but gloried in it, and that artist would go on to create as definitive a visual of Conan as Thomas had created a mental one. That artist of course is the aforementioned John Buscema, and we'll look at his contribution in our next chapter!

Comics! Fear Itself Accelerates!

I know what-all I'm supposed to be noticing in this week's release of the 5th issue of Marvel's increasingly entertaining "Fear Itself" mini-series about an Asgardian super evil-god (who happens to be uncle to the mighty Thor) and his attempt to take over Earth by transforming a handful of heroes and villains into mindless, hammer-wielding agents of destruction. At the end of the previous issue, we saw several plot-lines cranking up the excitement: Captain America was charging into the fight to avenge his fallen friend and former sidekick Bucky, Tony Stark was sacrificing his hard-won sobriety merely to gain the listening ear of Thor's near-omnipotent father Odin, and Thor himself was squaring off against both the magically-transformed hammer-wielding Hulk but also the magically-transformed hammer-wielding Thing. This current issue has been billed for the last month as exactly what its title suggests: a mammoth brawl.

So I duly paid attention to Tony Stark's wonderfully testy dialogue with Odin ("I can't express to you how disappointed I am that you actually showed up")(which is met by the perfectly imperious, "You are a war-brother of my boy, Stark, and thus I grant you special dispensation. But don't push it"). And I duly paid attention to Thor's scenery-exploding battle with the possessed Hulk and the possessed Thing, which was done in the Stuart Immonen style to such perfection that I begin to wonder if Marvel currently has a better artist. When Thor blasts his hammer right through the possessed Thing, he's fairly businesslike about it, noting that things are different with the possessed Hulk ("And him I liked. But you? You were always a giant pain in the ass")(a far cry from the Stan Lee style 'thees' and 'thous' of cherished memory). And I duly paid attention when the mad god bad guy shatters Cap's supposedly indestructible shield like cheap china (difficult to get worked up about it, since this is the third time in thirty years Marvel's pulled that particular surprise).

But despite all that, I couldn't help feeling distracted by one other scene, one that wasn't heralded by the fanboy press but is in its own way far more significant, in terms of Marvel continuity. The possessed Thing lies dying, and his 'niece' and 'nephew' Franklin and Val Richards rush to his side. And Franklin makes an astonishing revelation: "'Member how I told Mom and Dad that I wouldn't use my powers? That I knew how powerful they made me, and how dangerous that was until I got older, so I wouldn't ever, ever, never use them? I lied." And then, in a burst of white light, he not only heals Ben Grimm but completely undoes the Asgardian enchantment that had transformed him.

I'm not sure how old mini-series author Matt Fraction is, but some of us remember the original story of Franklin's mysterious powers like it was yesterday. Gigantic, reality-warping powers on a level to worry the Watcher and prompt the boy's father to put him in a coma for a while, to save all life in the universe. Fraction's deus ex machina here is a far more drastic measure than I suspect he realizes - in that one panel, he raises the possibility of a far greater threat to the Marvel universe than some dime-a-dozen crazy Agardian. The powers that be at Marvel have said over and over again that "Fear Itself" will have lasting consequences for continuity, but I just bet this particular consequence hasn't been thought through at all. How could it be? Franklin could simply disintegrate Thor's crazy uncle - and restore Bucky to life, and restore Manhattan to its pre-invasion state of repair, etc. Fifty years of Fantastic Four stories have characterized Franklin Richards as the ultimate ticking time-bomb, and in this issue of "Fear Itself" Fraction detonates that time-bomb without seeming really to notice what he's doing.

A great, enjoyable issue, of course ... but some things distract from the main events ....

Comics: Essential Thor Volume 5!

Our book today is Marvel's new Essential Thor Volume 5, which for some unknown reason features a retouched version of this cover:



- which is just a run-of-the-mill John Buscema (the volume claims the cover is done by Buscema and John Romita, even though that's visually not the case) fight scene with the dialogue removed, instead of this cover, which is a vibrant basic from the tuxedo-neat pen of John Romita:



And the mis-choice of cover maybe gives readers a hint of the trouble to come: this is an uneven volume, to put it mildly. It collects 25 issues from the early 1970s, all written by the great Gerry Conway, almost all drawn by the great John Buscema (a couple are done by his perennially-underrated brother Sal, and a couple more are only roughly laid out by either Buscema, with finishes done by the, shall we say less inspired? pen of Don Perlin), almost all inked by the great Vince Colletta. And don't get me wrong: the volume has dozens of great moments in Thor's comic book history. But unlike previous Essential Thor volumes, it doesn't really boast a classic Thor-style epic storyline like some we've examined here over the years.

Not that it doesn't try real hard! Gerry Conway took over the writing and plotting chores on "Thor" directly from the master himself, Stan Lee, but even if you're encountering the stories in this thick black-and-white volume for the first time, you'll notice right away that Conway doesn't quite have the knack that Lee had for crafting just the right mixture of super-heroics and bargain-rate Wagnerisms to keep Thor a believable character. And again, it's not from want of effort - there is, in fact, the sketchy idea of a great big epic-storyline unfolding across a large number of the issues contained in this volume, but it only comes close to coalescing.

Festivities start off with him again - Mangog, the mole-clawed prehensile-tailed super-baddie with the strength of ... wait for it ... a billion billion beings. He's wreaking havoc in Asgard as this volume's set of reprints gets underway, and he's once again intent on killing Odin, the king of the Asgardian gods, killing Thor just 'cause, and last but not least, drawing the Odinsword from its scabbard and thereby killing the universe (Mangog only and always talks about revenge, so the point of that last part is a little trick to follow). The Asgardians are losing badly - including Odin: Conway very much liked the concept of Odin as an older and wiser-but-still-powerful king-god figure, rather than the energy-wielding cosmic heavyweight favored by Lee.



But Odin, as always, has a plan. Many plans, in fact, so many plans that not only Thor and the readers but Odin himself have no hope of understanding them. Take this storyline, for instance: Odin has sent Thor (and his comrades the Warriors Three) to the Twilight Well at the World's End, to collect some of its mystical waters, and he's sent Thor's beloved goddess Sif (under the protection of Hildegarde, a gigantic fur-caped warrior woman of Conway's invention, a wonderfully hard-bitten character who's never used again in "Thor" and really should be) to a mysterious world populated by dragons, knights, and steamboats. Odin has his reasons for both these decisions - but they make no sense and end up only pointlessly complicating things and, briefly, costing him his life. The reasons involve Kartag, the huge but noble guardian of the well, the Norns, who have some interest in Thor's errand, Ego-Prime, a giant-sized avatar of the living planet Ego, and three apparently normal humans who've been picked by Odin to play a part in some kind of cosmic-upgrade to godhood. No explanation of the need for three brand-new gods is ever given, nor do we ever see those brand-new gods again, although Thor's outrage over the manipulations involved in their creation causes Odin to banish him to Earth forever for about the tenth time. During this banishment Thor and his friends interrupt their bouts of self-pity to fight various Earthbound menaces like the Absorbing Man, but when Balder the Brave shows up and has a nervous breakdown because of what he's seen back in Asgard.



Thor and crew determine to go back to Asgard even though they've been banished, to see what's going on. They find the city deserted of gods and infested with talking, gun-toting reptiles who inform Thor that Asgard was attacked by marauding space-ants in flying saucers who somehow defeated all of Asgard including Odin and took the whole of them back to their homeworld to sell as slaves. Anybody familiar with comic books would have sniffed out the falsehood underneath this story in two seconds: in comics as in the movies, reptiles are always the bad guys. But Thor must not have read comics when he was a kid, because he trusts the lizards and voyages with them to the space-ants' world, where he does indeed find a battered and drugged Odin being held as a slave. The rescuers are briefly held as slaves as well, until Thor discovers that the stinking gruel the prisoners are being fed is the thing that saps both their will and their power. He refuses it eat it, breaks free, frees everybody else, deals with the lizard-men (who - duh - turned out to be playing a treacherous game of their own), and everybody sails back to Asgard, having adventures along the way.



Like I mentioned, all of this raises a lot more questions than it answers. For instance, how the hell does an invasion force of space-ants conquer Asgard? And how do they manage to break the will of every single Asgardian - including Odin - so quickly? And how's come Balder made it out in one piece? And no matter how he escaped, why did it cause him to lose his mind - isn't he a several-thousand-year-old warrior god?



The last story-arc in this volume concerns Tana Nile and the Colonizers of Rigel, whose far-off space empire (curiously unused elsewhere in the Marvel Universe) is being threatened by the Black Stars, enormous wandering space-bodies that consume every planetary system they touch. Throughout these stories, Conway yields over and over to the temptation to mix the mythological elements of Thor's world with this kind of science-fiction plot (there are no fewer than six space-related menaces in these issues), and the results often make for great moments. Thor and his comrades travel in the Starjammer, a Viking-style wooden longship complete with rudder and sails but mystically capable of interstellar flight, and Buscema does some wonderful work juxtaposing its archaic appearance against the space-hardware called for by Conway's plots.

Another aspect that crops up again and again in Conway's stories is his conception of what Asgardians are like as a people - especially, that they love to fight. Time and again in these stories, we're told that their eyes gleam at the prospect of battle, that they enjoy it for its own sake, etc. I think this kind of characterization is a whole lot more sensible - and enjoyable - than the saintly oafs who so often cropped up in Stan Lee's Asgardian mini-epics; Conway's Asgardians aren't saintly, they're bloodthirsty (and, in another refreshing twist, unapologetically randy) - and their immortality can make them fairly obnoxious ... most certainly including Thor himself. One of my favorite moments in this volume illustrates both these things, when, gazing in wonder at the vast space fleet carrying the entire fleeing race of Rigellians out of the path of the Black Stars, Balder asks the quintessential Asgardian question:

Nine billion people, milord ... the entire population of the Colonizer's lost world, in flight from a menace they cannot escape! 'Tis a most strange insanity. Why do they not stand and fight?

To which Thor replies:

Because they are only mortal, brave Balder ... and their lives are too short to be spent on useless warfare. They seek only to live, and honor can mean nothing to such creatures ...Only life matters, and only death is feared. And, in the end, who can say if this is strange insanity ... or a strength we may never hope to understand!

There are lots and lots of other great moments scattered liberally throughout this volume, of course. Just because Conway was usually much better suited to writing more down-to-earth stuff doesn't mean he doesn't rise to the cosmic occasion quite often. We see Hildegarde chewing out Thor for yelling at the Avengers' butler Jarvis; we see a depiction of the king and queen of the Trolls that's actually sympathetic; we get some fascinating Freudian exchanges between Thor and his evil half-brother Loki during one of their obligatory fight-scenes (Loki's angry because Thor connived to steal Odin's love! Apparently he hasn't been reading "Thor" back-issues, or keeping up with all those banishments-to-earth); we get a wonderful sequence where Tana Nile complains that a massive door is made of "Mondurian steel - a foot thick and electronically sealed as well! It would require a company of good Rigellian battlecraft to even penetrate it!" To which Thor responds, "Hildegarde - I shall have need of thy good arm! Shall we see if the strength of two lone Asgardians be equal to that company of Rigellian battlecraft?"



And in a charming little scene, we get ... Gerry Conway himself! He and some of his colleagues in the Marvel bullpen (including Glynis Wein, whose fantastic coloring work is uncredited through most of this reprint volume - and invisible anyway, the only price readers pay for the cheap cover price and bountiful contents) have travelled to Rutland, Vermont to watch the famous Hallowe'en parade presided over by Tom Fagan, and in a move that was almost unheard of at the time (the classic example being the moment when Nick Fury's men turn Stan Lee and Jack Kirby away from the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm), we hear a little of their banter before the fighting erupts.

Great moments, then, though no really great sustained story-arcs this time around. But a collection of great moments is certainly justification enough for this volume, especially since otherwise many of these issues would just crumble to dust unread by anybody. It's my hope that Marvel's craze to cash in on the hoopla surrounding the upcoming "Thor" movie will push them to reprint just about everything Thor-related they've got in their capacious archives. There's a LOT of great stuff there, and it all deserves a new audience.

Comics! Great Expectorations!

It's Marvel Comics' show this week at the comic shop, and the obvious reason is the launch of yet another sooper-dooper multi-crossover event, "Fear Itself." If you're thinking it's been only a very short time since the end of the previous sooper-dooper multi-crossover, you're entirely right, and what's even odder is how similar "Fear Itself" is to its predecessor, "Siege," in so many ways. In both cases, continuity-wide changes are promised that almost certainly won't happen; in both cases, the central story revolves around Thor and his fellow Asgardians - and in both cases, the actual issue-by-issue execution of writing and art will in all likelihood be irresistible. The writer-artist team here is Matt Fraction and Stuart Immonen, and the first issue is so good that even a reader as sceptical as I am will be entertained even while they're muttering "but, but."

Our story so far: the Asgardian god of fear, Skadi, has delusions of all-fatherhood and has seeded the human world with hammers that look bigger and sleeker than Thor's famous Mjolnir, and Skadi is found by the daughter of Captain America's old foe the Red Skull. As those two start to cook up eee-vil, a more domestic strife is brewing in the city of Asgard itself, which crashed into the Oklahoma plain at the end of "Siege." Thor's irascible father Odin, the original all-father of the gods, is irritated that Thor is joining with his mortal allies the Avengers to rebuild Asgard. Odin interrupts a feast his people are sharing with the Avengers in order to tell everybody that Asgard is returning to the stars, that he's rebuilding Bifrost the Rainbow Bridge and taking all the Norse gods and godlings back home (the ominous Watcher shows up briefly to, um, watch - which enrages Odin still further, prompting him to shout "I am the father of all things! I am the fury and the extinction! The leader of souls! The commander of warrior gods!" It brought back many memories, for this long-time Thor fan).

He demands that Thor choose between his mortal and immortal loyalties, and when Thor chooses mankind, Odin slaps him around just for kicks and tells him he's coming back to Asgard anyway. The all-father senses that Skadi has returned, and he's obviously preparing for the battle that's coming, in which the heroes of Asgard and Earth will face off against the god of fear and his hammer-wielding warriors. Fraction has very little in the way of character-based writing to do here (and far too many opportunities for social commentary, but what can you do?), it being basically a premise-setting issue, but Immonen's artwork is yet another step forward in a progression that hasn't slowed down since "Superman: Secret Identity." Although even upward progressions can have nervous tics, I guess, and this issue certainly does: everybody spits. The good guys, the bad guys - there's spittle everywhere. We can hope for dry mouths in future issues.

Marvel's other ongoing 'big event' mini-series, "Avengers: The Children's Crusade," continues this week as well, with really good writing by Allan Heinberg and rip-snortingly fantastic artwork by Jim Cheung. In the last issue, the fat hit the fire when the impetuous Young Avengers went to Latveria in order to find the long-lost Scarlet Witch, who fled there and gave herself amnesia in the wake of the "House of M" storyline. We learned that she had fallen in love with Latveria's king, Doctor Doom - and that he had fallen in love with her and very much didn't want her to remember her own past, for her sake and humanity's safety. The grown-up Avengers followed the Young Avengers, and Magneto (the Scarlet Witch's father) followed as well, and a gigantic, predictable battle ensued that was momentarily interrupted by the return of Iron Lad, the teenager who would grow up to be Kang the Conqueror, and who in this issue helps the Young Avengers to spirit the Scarlet Witch back in time to an alternate time-line - only time-travel is very complex, and they don't really know what they're doing, and by issue's end all they've succeeded in doing is restoring her memories and thereby putting the whole Marvel Universe at risk.

If that all sounds confusing, that's because it is - but then, this issue is just the mid-point in the mini-series, so some amount of textual muddle is to be expected, Cheung's artwork certainly makes the confusion easy to bear, including yet another eye-popping two-page splash panel like the one we commented on last time:



And Heinberg's writing is very enjoyable too, including his ongoing and very refreshing characterization of Doctor Doom as a bit more complex than he's usually portrayed. "She was happy here," he tells the Avengers. "We were to be married." And when Magneto says, "My daughter would never have married you. Not willingly. What have you done to her?" Doom's response is chillingly correct:

I have been trying to save her. From You. From all of you ... who sought to destroy her. And now, because of you, the most powerful force in the universe has been unleashed into the timestream, where she can rewrite the past or the future just as easily as she said the words "No more mutants."

Two big event-titles, both firing on all cylinders, and yet the Marvel comic that pleased me most this week was a regular old ongoing title that hardly ever pleases me at all: "The Uncanny X-Men." Marvel has been coming out with "Point 1" issues of its books, billed as good jumping-on points for potential new readers who might be leery of picking up titles in the middle of long-running stories. This latest issue of "Uncanny X-Men" is one of those: 534.1 (that "534" seems utterly unbelievable to yours truly, but we'll let that go), written by Kieron Gillen and pencilled by Carlos Pacheco. It has a straightforward, two-pronged plot: the X-Men (now basically comprising almost all the handful of mutants who were left on Earth after those three little words "No more mutants" - including both former villain Magneto and Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner, who, as the super-powered son of a human man and a woman from Atlantis, was Marvel's first mutant long before anybody but Mendel had ever heard the word) race to stop an evil group of scientists from causing a major earthquake, and a media consultant tries to work with Magneto to improve his image with the public. I certainly wasn't expecting the issue to please me more than those big-e events for which I admit I have a sweet-tooth, but it did: Gillen's writing sparkles, and of course Pacheco's artwork is always great. The highlight of the issue for me was Gillen's characterization of Namor as a bit of a lout, not a sterling super-hero at all. When he's confronting one of the evil scientists, for instance, he snarls, "Only Namor has the ability to make the earth move. And he reserves the privilege for one woman at a time. Unless they have experimental friends." That's a far cry from the 'tortured hero' conception of the character that held sway back in the '70s, but I like it just the same.

Of course, there's a couple of sooper-dooper crossover events brewing at DC Comics as well, but this week clearly belonged to Marvel. Maybe we'll get to Superman and Doomsday next time!

Comics! The passing of the Torch

Marvel's two flagship comics continue to deal with the aftershocks of the death of Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, a couple of issues ago in "The Fantastic Four." Nobody this side of Aunt Petunia believes the Torch is really, permanently dead (since a revived and all-growed-up Bucky Barnes is now on the Avengers as Captain America, my old ironclad Marvel Comics rule "Nobody dies but Bucky" has now been amended to "Nobody dies, period"), but these long-arc storylines where a major character seems to be dead allows writers at Marvel and DC to pretend it was all true and put all the related characters through all the Kubler-Ross stages of grieving, kind of like Tom and Huck getting to watch their own funeral.

Such a gambit can be flubbed, of course - DC dropped the ball big-time twenty years ago with its "Death of Superman" arc, and then, not to be outdone, they dropped the ball again last year when Batman allegedly died. But Marvel tends to do it right, as was seen in their recent headline-grabbing "Death of Captain America" story. And the approach they're taking this time is low-key and entirely believable.

The stress is on family, and Dan Slott's writing captures something of the tone of that quite nicely. The current issue of "Spider-Man" (lamentably titled "Torch Song") features nothing more than Spider-Man going to the Baxter Building late at night to share the company of the remaining members of the Fantastic Four (we're treated to a neat little homage to Spidey's first visit to the team, when he's accidentally caught in a pneumatic intruder-tube). It's all very quiet and sad and real-seeming, just four old friends talking about a loved one who's died. Gruff Ben Grimm matter-of-factly tells Peter Parker that he's a member of the family, and Sue Richards seconds it. They're sitting in the kitchen talking - no super-villains erupt through the walls, no surprises explode in splash panels.

The timing is off a bit in terms of titles shipping to stores - readers already know Spider-Man will join the team - but that doesn't dull the enjoyment of the last bit, where Reed Richards reveals that Johnny left one last holographic video message for Peter Parker:

Pete? If you're hearing this, I'm sorry, pal. Sorry that I'm gone, 'cause ... well, I know how you feel when it comes to losing family. And that's what you are to me. Family. So ... if you're thinking of this as my last will and all ... I'm not leaving you my sports cars or stuff like that ... I'm leaving you the best thing I ever had ... my spot on this team. A place in this family. The best sister, two brothers, niece, and nephew a guy could ask for.

Slott hits all the right notes in these scenes (including the hokey-but-effective signature FF hand-pile), but for my money, the single best evocation of what this whole story means is Marcos Martin's wonderful, understated, incredibly sad cover illustration. The combination of elements - the Empire State Building, the old-style water tower, the '4' signal-flare that will never now mean what it once did, and a small-looking Spider-Man looking up at it - makes this the best Marvel cover I've seen this year.

Thor: The Mangog Saga!

Our story today is "The Mangog Saga," but it wasn't written down by Snorri Sturluson a thousand years ago - it's of much fresher vintage. This is a four-part tale that ran in "The Mighty Thor" back in 1968, a grand, rip-snortingly epic tale brought to life by writer Stan Lee, penciller Jack Kirby, inker Vince Colletta, and colorist Sam Rosen.

Obviously, I was nudged to revisit this story by that last comics entry, where I mentioned that the revamped "Kid Thor" hero Thunderstrike faced off in his latest issue against a Thor super-villain named Mangog, a gigantic claw-fisted creature with a long tail, troubling teeth, and ... the strength of a billion billion beings. Some of you wrote in (some taking advantage of the snazzy new 'write to me' box the right-hand margin; more such improvements to follow!) curious about my all-too-obvious eagerness to talk about this particular villain, but honestly, when it comes to all things Thor-related, I probably didn't need the urging. I've read the four-issue run I'm dubbing "The Mangog Saga" many, many times in the forty-something years since it first appeared - indeed, I read it first as it was appearing, traipsing with my beagles to the town variety store month after nail-biting month. It's something of an Asgardian miracle my issues haven't disintegrated completely.

Our story starts in "The Mighty Thor" #154, a chapter called "To Wake the Mangog!" - and that chapter starts where pretty much every Thor story starts: in the middle of a fight between him and his scheming half-brother Loki. This fight is interrupted by an abrupt call from Asgard, the home of the Norse gods - a call from Odin, Thor's irascible father, the king of the gods. Odin has sensed a menace looming in Asgard's future, and he's calling all his people back home to face it. While Thor stands at rapt attention listening to this warning, Loki takes the opportunity to flee - but then the warning stops, no further details forthcoming, and when Thor realizes Loki has escaped, he flies to the hospital where his immortal beloved, the goddess Sif, lies recovering from wounds she suffered at Loki's hands. Thor finds her sleeping peacefully ("Thought the eyes of the thunder god now peruse my lady's medical report," he muses, "'twill require the brain of Dr. Donald Blake to comprehend what it doth signify" - an interesting indication that in Stan Lee's original conception, Thor and his mortal alter ego Dr. Blake are entirely separate entities - they don't even share the same knowledge - which is a far cry from how things are nowadays).

It's always in hospitals that we're most aware of how close 'resting peacefully' is to 'rest in peace' - and we're not the only ones! While Thor is standing there fumbling with Sif's chart, Hela, the Norse goddess of death, suddenly appears in the room. Thor draws the natural conclusion and speaks up immediately, barring Sif's bed: "She did but suffer wound in battle! I vow she shall recover!"

But Hela's not there to claim Sif - she's there, for some inexplicable reason, to tempt Thor (that 'inexplicable reason' bit crops up more than once in this issue, reinforcing my theory - and longstanding gripe - that unlike so many writers, Lee always found the beginnings of big stories more difficult than any other part). She can't simply kill him until he's once again mortally wounded - a point of etiquette she's going to forget in only ten years, as we've seen in a previous Thor post - but she can show him the wonders that await him: "Now come I to show what thou hast but postponed! Behold - the promised glory of Valhalla! Do but say the word, and everlasting battle can be thine!" She gestures, and Thor sees a hilly vista covered in armies with banners flying - it's here that we get our first real taste of the great job Rosen will do in these four issues, masterfully playing somber deep-blues against garish bright yellows.

And Hela has an extra spokesman: Harokin! "God of Thunder - join us!! 'Tis they once and former foe Harokin who calls thee! Eagerly we await thee - for thou art surely the mightiest of all!" As we've seen here at Stevereads, Lee introduced Harokin in his "Tales of Asgard" backup feature (a feature that had been all but shelved by the time of this issue) - that storyline was immensely popular with readers, hence the nod to Harokin here. It's a very nice little gesture, but Thor declines the invitation, and Hela and her infomercial vanish. Lee shifts the scene to a far outlying district of Asgard, where the troll Ulik encounters a mysterious door inscribed "Let No Living Being Disturb What Lies Within." As any fan of old Bugs Bunny cartoons will attest, there is only one moral thing to do when confronted with a door that says "Don't Open Me" - and Ulik promptly does it. Thereby releasing the Mangog, who's very big, very ugly, and very ticked off: "Let the Universe tremble! The Mangog Lives Again! I have one goal - one aim - one destiny: to destroy him who crushed the invasion of my race!"

But like so many of Thor's villains, Mangog isn't exactly well-stocked in the brains department; only one panel later, he tells Ulik "Mangog is the foe of all who live!" ... not just Odin and Asgard. And he goes on to prove that point, but first, we cut back to Thor, who changes back to Dr. Blake and sits vigil at Sif's bedside. Once she wakes up and he's fairly certain she's out of danger, he turns back into Thor and resumes his search for Loki, who in the meantime has fled to Asgard. There he finds turmoil - the city's defenses are in hurried preparation, because they're aware that Mangog's chamber has at long last been opened and that one of the greatest evils of the city's past is now free again. Loki's nonplussed by all this - Odin jailed Mangog originally, after all, can't Odin just re-jail him? Then Loki learns that Odin is sleeping the Odin-sleep: a deep regenerative trance from which he can't be awoken. Lee introduced this rather homely plot device - an old guy who's naps absolutely can't be interrupted - and future writers would make great use of it, for obvious reasons: it takes the deus out of the machina long enough to make things interesting. Naturally, Loki only sees it in selfish terms - with Odin sleeping and Thor still on Earth, he himself is in charge: "Know you all that Loki now doth rule! Asgard at last is mine!"

Lee then temporizes again, putting Thor through some fairly mundane adventures - he stops a robbery and gives a pep-talk to some hippies (for you youngsters out there, 'hippie' was our word for 'hipster' - but the revolting, pretentious, unwashed phenomenon itself was completely the same) - before shifting to one last plot-strand: Balder the Brave, who's dallying with Karnilla, the Queen of the Norns, when he suddenly senses the danger facing Asgard and tries to take his leave. This angers Karnilla, who's hopelessly in love with Balder, and she shows him the price of defying her: there stands the Legion of the Lost, a small group of long-missing Asgardian warriors who now stand like statues on display in Karnilla's hall.

It's an odd, disjointed start, but things pick up pace considerably in the next chapter, "Now Ends the Universe." The sense of menace has increased a dozenfold, and Balder's not the only Asgardian who can sense it: Thor now grimly flies back to Lady Sif's hospital room, where a nurse is sitting reading by her bedside. She's startled when Sif suddenly sits bolt upright, and she's terrified when Thor shows up in the room. Kirby and his inker and colorist do a very effective job here - by throwing Thor's face entirely into shadow, they make this day-glo colored good guy suddenly alien and menacing. The technique works so well that David Mazzucchelli would use it forty years later in the great story "Daredevil: Born Again," shrouding Thor in shadow to maximize the mystery and power of his one-panel-only appearance:



Thor is here on business this time: "Thou hast seen the omens! Thou hast heard the silent call!" He transports them both to Asgard, where they find the same chaos Loki found before them: the city in arms, dire reports already coming back from outlying garrisons .... and they find Loki himself on the throne.

At which point, characteristically, Lee pauses to check on his sub-plots! First he takes us back to Karnilla's stand-off with Balder, as she reveals the "The Legion of the Lost" aren't just a collection of statues - they're the warriors themselves, which she now brings out of suspended animation and unleashes on the man who spurned her love. Balder is more annoyed by this than anything else - he can sense that Asgard is in danger, and he longs to answer the call, not fight some brainwashed minions. The second sub-plot Lee invents on the spot, again for no discernible reason: he shows us the far-distant Colonizers of Rigel dispatching the robot Recorder to investigate the source of the energy-waves they sense coming from Asgard. How they can sense energy-wave disturbances that haven't happened yet - much less how the Recorder can simply fly to the mystical dimension where Asgard is located - isn't explained, but this is something of a habit of Lee's, this invoking an impartial witness to comics events he's writing on a grand scale (the Watcher serves the same purpose in that first great Galactus story over in "The Fantastic Four")

In any case, Loki shrilly defends his right to the throne and sends Thor and the Warriors Three - Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg - out to face Mangog, whose rampage through the outlying districts of Asgard we see in some typically rollicking action-panels by Kirby. During this rampage, Mangog begins hinting at why he's such a bad-ass: an evil race, in a final act of defiance against Odin, distilled their entire population's life-essence into the creature called Mangog: all their hate, all their thirst for revenge, and all their physical power. The result? You only have to listen to Mangog for about five seconds to know the result, because from this point out he repeats it whenever he opens his mouth: he has the strength of a billion billion beings! In other words, incalculable power - just as Doctor Strange can't possibly defeat Eternity, just as the Fantastic Four can't possibly defeat Galactus, just as the Silver Surfer can't possibly defeat Mephisto, so even Thor can't defeat a being with incalculable physical power. As one fallen Asgardian croaks out before he dies, "Not all the fabled strength of Thor - nor a thousand such - can make him cancel half a step!"

Lee likes this gambit - it allows him to throw the sheer courage of his heroes into sharp relief. Mangog can't be stopped, yet all of Asgard (with the exception of Odin, who's still sleeping, Balder, who's still battling the brainwashed Legion of the Lost, and Loki, who's still under the impression he'll have a kingdom left to rule when Mangog's finished) marshals in a desperate attempt to do just that. As this chapter ends, Asgard's defenses lie in ruins, the Warriors Three are trapped under boulders, and Thor himself is in pitched, losing combat with Mangog.

The next issue, "The Hammer and the Holocaust," that battle is fought in earnest, and here's where a novice reader might expect Lee to pull back from his own premise, to make the give-and-take between hero and villain more even - but it doesn't happen: Thor is completely and hopelessly outclassed from the beginning. The most he can do is slow Mangog down a bit with storm and wind and rain (Colletta and especially Rosen do fantastic work in these sequences), all the while rousing his comrades: "Are we not warriors born? Are we not Asgardians all? Are we not akin to gods? Not for such as we the pale cast of surrender! Whilst we live, we fight! And as we dare - so shall we win!"

Winning isn't an option, however, and in very short order our heroes retreat to Asgard just ahead of Mangog. In the center of the city itself, Thor joins the final knot of resistance, the last line of defense before the main palace. Everybody now knows - because Mangog has been repeating it every few seconds, that the monster's goal is now to pull from its scabbard the gigantic Odin-sword, which will release shock-waves of such ferocious power that they'll destroy the entire universe. Why Odin would forge such a device and then leave it lying around like a Ming vase in the front foyer is yet another journey into mystery - and I'm also more than a little curious how in the dickens Mangog even knows the thing exists. Maybe he became a fan of Marvel comics during all those eons he was imprisoned behind that warning door (and as for why a monster with the strength of a billion billion beings couldn't break down that door but scruffy old Ulik the troll could, well, it's not all that clear to me either).

However he came by the knowledge, Mangog is in the home-stretch when our fourth chapter, "Behind Him - Ragnarok!" opens. He's wading through the cream of Asgard's defenders with no trouble at all when suddenly a wave of reinforcements arrives - Balder, leading Odin's reserves, headed by the Legion of the Lost, who've been freed from their brainwashing by the sight of his bravery! This four-part saga is liberal with full-page shots, and all the artwork is quintessential Kirby, a bludgeoning symphony of action, but this panel, with Balder leading one last desperate charge of mounted warriors, is a hum-dinger (it's the kind of thing a modern artist would ostentatiously sign and sell at conventions).



It's all for naught, however - Balder and his reinforcements are brushed aside just as every other defense has been. Thor races to the palace of sleeping Odin (there's a wonderfully understated moment where he encounters Loki in the chaos - the one brother hurrying to the center of the danger, the other fleeing from it - neither has any use for the other, and they part with harsh, dismissive words), where he finds the Lady Sif and the robotic Recorder standing lonely vigil by the Odin-Sword. Lee gives us a perfect cinematic counterpoint, slowing down all the action to a single moment, which Kirby captures with an extreme close-up: "The very walls begin to crumble," Thor marvels. "Art thou frightened, most fair Sif?" Sif answers serenely: "Whilst I stand with thee, my lord? Nay - whatever befalls, my heart is calm ... and ever thine!" Then the moment is shattered in a classic Kirby panel of explosive movement, as Mangog breaches the final wall and sees the Odin-Sword at last.

This is yet another point where you might expect Lee to side with his embattled heroes even at the cost of his own premise - last-ditch efforts and characters shiningly out-doing themselves are, after all, stables of his comic book writing, especially when the end of the world is at stake. But again, it doesn't happen - Mangog is simply too powerful to be inconvenienced. He swats aside all last-minute opposition and seizes the Odin-Sword. The Recorder observes, "And now begins the ultimate end ... already the cosmic shock waves start to form." But still Thor doesn't yield - he summons a raging thunderstorm, and at the very last minute, it becomes clear why: he's trying to wake up Odin - and it works. Odin halts Mangog, re-sheathes the Odin-Sword, and then undoes the process by which Mangog was created: we see an image of a billion billion beings repopulating distant planets. Odin implies that these are now a peaceful people, and he declares that the crisis is passed (he also implies that it was he himself who bottled up their collective essence in the form of Mangog, whereas earlier Mangog states categorically that 'his people' created him themselves). It's an abrupt ending to a rousing Lee-Kirby cosmic saga, a four-issue gasp of sharp air before Thor inevitably returns to Earth and resumes battling with armed gangsters and giant robots. Lee was never truly able to reconcile the two worlds of his mightiest hero; when Thor's on Earth fighting super-villains, he ridiculously over-matches his opponents - but Lee feared that if he spent all his time in Asgard fighting cosmic menaces like Mangog, he'd lose his super-hero appeal. Personally, I never believed this (and most of the fans who wrote in to the magazine during those years didn't believe it either - "Tales of Asgard" arose in part from those letters imploring Lee to give readers more of super-heroic Asgard), although taking Thor entirely out of his more mundane story lines would have deprived readers of some peachy moments.

Shall we deal with one of those Earthbound story-arcs next time we examine Thor in Marvel Comics? Or shall we pick another mega-saga instead? Only the spinning Norns know for sure! In the meantime, here's an image to cut-and-paste into your Christmas cards next winter: