Iron Man Epic Collection 13: Stark Wars, by Michelinie, Layton, and Bright

Iron Man Epic Collection 13 link

Captain America Epic Collection: the Captain, by Mark Gruenwald and Kieran Dwyer

 Captain America Epic Collection 14: the Captain, 2021, collecting material from the 1980s

Captain America Epic Collection 14 link

Reading Through 2021 101: Morbius Epic Collection 1: The Living Vampire

 Morbius: The Living Vampire (Epic Collection 1), by Steve Gerber, Gil Kane, and dozens more 

1971 to 1974, collected in 2021

One of my great personal discoveries of the Covid era has been 70s Marvel. I became a Marvel reader in the 80s, and 60s stuff was sometimes reprinted then, but there was this window of publishing, roughly between Kirby leaving in the early 70s and Jim Shooter becoming editor-in-chief in the late 70s, that didn't get much if any attention. I can't argue that it's good stuff meant to stand the test of time, but it's been a pleasure to read.

Putting Blade on the cover: cash grab!

When I saw the Morbius Epic Collection, it seemed like a cash grab tie-in for the long-delayed Sony movie, and I'm sure it is. But I was surprised to learn that there was an attempt to make Morbius a headlining character for a while in the 70s. I'd read his first appearances in Amazing Spider-Man through a dollar bin copy, but that was over 30 years ago. I knew he was Dr. Michael Morbius, a doctor with a blood disease who attempted to cure himself with a vampire bat serum. In doing so, he gains vampire powers, but loses Martine, the love of his life. There was a lot about the character I didn't know.

The first appearance of Morbius was in a legendarily ridiculous story where Spider-Man gets six arms

That was the draw to picking this collection up, reading those headlining stories. I enjoy these Epic Collections overall, but I've avoided the collections of characters like Sub-Mariner (who I love) and Venom (who I don't) because they can be simply a lot of odds and ends appearances in other characters' books. About a quarter of the stories in this collection are just that: appearances as the villain in another character's book. The rest are a very deliberate attempt to make a lead character out of the living vampire.

His second appearance is against Spider-Man and the original X-Men in Marvel Team-Up, drawn with an absolute lack of love and attention by Gil Kane

After a few appearances as a villain in Spider-Man books, he was given the lead in a black and white magazine called Vampire Tales, and shortly after, he started headlining a second book called Fear (or more ridiculously, Adventures into Fear with the Man Called Morbius the Living Vampire).

No Comics Code Authority seal on Vampire Tales!

While I enjoy his appearances as a villain, it's these attempts to make Morbius a star that are the draw of this book. There's nothing connecting the two concurrent series except Morbius himself, and both feature a rotation of artists and writers keeping either from being coherent when read as a whole. There's a quality of the artist's game Decapitated Corpse here, where every few issues it's passed along to someone else and that creator tries to make heads or tails of what they've been given.

Paul Gulacy gives a sinewy take on the character

Let me try to break down the general structure of Fear, issues 20 - 26. If it doesn't exactly make sense, then, yes, you understand correctly:

-20, written by Mike Friedrich, art by Paul Gulacy. Morbius has come to Los Angeles. He is confronted by Reverend Daemond, a demonic priest who mind controls Morbius and sends him to kill "The most innocent child (he's) ever seen!"

-21, written by Steve Gerber, art by Gil Kane. The little girl he was sent to kill, Tara, is revealed to have powers to incarnate a future version of herself. Morbius saves her and takes her to the Caretakers, humanoid aliens that crashed on Earth when humanity was still in the trees, and helped guide us as a species. They frame the battle with Reverend Daemond as a battle between the supernatural and science for the fate of the world, and send Morbius to kill Daemond. Daemond sends a cat person to attack Morbius and is seen to be manipulating Morbius' love, Martine.

Is this the most innocent child you've ever seen?!

-22, written by Gerber, art by Rich Buckler and L. Dominguez. Morbius and the cat person are summoned to The Land Within, an underground city with a giant orb to light it. He was brought there by the leaders of the cat people to deal with a population crisis. Because life is so peaceful, the population keeps growing, and food and air will eventually run out. So they've brought a vampire to naturally lower the population. Morbius rejects being used as a weapon against innocents, so he jumps in a river. Yes, it ends with him on a river asking "Where does this river lead?"

I expect to see the Land Within around Phase 6 of the MCU

-23, written by Gerber, art by P. Craig Russell (credited here without his P.). Morbius finds himself on the planet Arcturus, a planet of freaks. He's guided by a character confusingly called "I", whose face is an eye. Gerber was having some fun, but the comic is utterly off the rails at this point. To connect it to the earlier issues, it's revealed that the reason everyone is a freak is because of the interference of the Caretakers before they'd reached Earth, casting doubt on whose side Morbius should be on.

What if the freaks were normal, and the normals were the freaks? Mind blown

-24, with the same creative team! Morbius and I take a spaceship to Earth that crashes in a city where Blade, Vampire Hunter is hunting vampires. I is killed in the crash, while Morbius escapes. Blade sees Morbius and they have a fight, but Blade is thrown off by the fact that science vampire Morbius isn't afraid of Christian symbols like a supernatural vampire would be, giving Morbius a chance to escape. 

-25, script by Doug Moench, plot by Gerber, and art by Frank Robbins.  The sixth part of this storyline starts to tie it all together, as Morbius returns to confront Reverend Daemond. Morbius joins up with the Tara to take down Daemond's forces, but the Caretakers realize that Morbius is against them too, so they decide to go after both Daemond and Morbius, leading to the seventh and final part.

This reads as someone who was looking at Kirby, but didn't quite have the energy to fully channel his mojo

26, written by Moench, art by Robbins. The Caretakers' forces arrive to fight the Daemond, but realize they have a common enemy in Morbius and Tara. Tara is revealed to have pitted the two sides against one another, and energy swirls around her as she begs Morbius to kill her while she is still in control. He kills her. Then the plug is pulled on the arc and it's over.

I don't think Marvel today would allow a vampire to feed on a child, even a possessed one

The seven issue run had three writers and five artists, and this was at the height of the Marvel method where writers gave artists plots, not scripts, so the artists were contributing a fair amount to the story, and it was tied together with the final script. 

On the one hand, it's like a sprawling sci-fi version of The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye, with Morbius being bounced around from side to side, and the outcome being there are no good guys. On the other hand, it's a complete mess, and utterly incoherent, with characters switching directions over and over because the artists couldn't be bothered to follow what came before. I think a single writer and artist could actually remake this into something amazing, but that would be the key: a single set of creators for the whole of it.

And I kind of loved it. If this was all I ever read, it'd wear me down pretty quickly, but it felt like a wonderful antidote to the seriousness of contemporary genre writing. It's a treat to be surprised in every issue, and not merely have a plodding progression (I was reading Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four run as I read this, and they couldn't be more different).

I never saw this on the shelf, but it does take me back to the style of stuff that was out when I was a kid

The stories in Vampire Tales are of a very different tone, much more episodic. They reminded me of TV series with an overarching dramatic stake from back in the day, like the Fugitive or Quantum Leap.  Morbius and a woman he saves, Amanda, travel from town to town, and each one has some member of her family who has joined a Satanic cult. It's very B-movie type stuff. At a plot level, I could barely follow them, but in the moment they were fun. These were black and white magazines meant for a little older readership, so there's more sexual energy than the full color comics of the day, and lots of blood. 

Gallow's Bend is the setting for High Midnight, the vampire Western

The stories each try to have their own unique setting: a small town, a lighthouse on the shore, a Western ghost town. I enjoyed them well enough, but I had had enough by the time I finished the collection and wasn't itching for more. They were more professionally done than issues of Fear, but the drama in them didn't hook me.

It was baffling that these two series were running at the same time, but it shows that Marvel thought it was an interesting character, and probably there was positive, though not overwhelming, fan reaction at the time.

No, that was the formula that would finally allow Michael Morbius to live a normal life again!

The final story in the book is from another 70s character I have virtually no experience with, Werewolf by Night. Here, Morbius seems more like a Hulk character, a thoughtful scientist looking to cure his affliction. 

It seems like Marvel (I'm guessing Roy Thomas in particular) decided Morbius was something Marvel needed, as the Comics Code was loosening up and allowing supernatural characters to be published again. Marvel had science heroes, magic and mystical heroes, but not so much supernatural. Morbius wasn't a real vampire, he was a living vampire. But he was immediately sold as a vampire. That's not all that interesting, and when Morbius has been revived every ten to fifteen years, I haven't been compelled to check it out. I might have bought an issue of his Midnight Sons series in the 90s, but I don't even remember for sure... I bought some issues of Marvel's supernatural comics at that time, flipped through them and never touched them again. The supernatural in the Marvel universe has never been that appealing to me.  I don't think the character Morbius itself is very compelling either, it relies a lot on the creative team bringing something to it.

Of the issues in this collection, I really enjoyed the craziness of Fear.  It made the whole thing worth reading. And I always enjoy reading 70s Spider-Man, a book that would be hard to mess up; the foundation of the character, setting and design were so strong. All the same, there are other collections of 70s comics I'd recommend before this. This collection isn't consistent and the quality jumps from issue to issue. 

I did get to see a planet of freaks though, and that definitely made it worth my time.

Reading Through 2021 92: Thor: The Black Galaxy, by Tom deFalco and Ron Frenz

Thor: The Black Galaxy (Epic Collection vol. 18), by Tom deFalco and Ron Frenz

1990, collected in 2019

When these comics were new, I absolutely hated them. I had many things to learn.

It's 1990. McFarlane is doing Spider-Man, Liefeld is doing New Mutants, and Lee is doing Uncanny X-Men. Walter Simonson hasn't been on Thor for a few years. This was a cold book to my teenage eyes. 

The brashness to label the first issue of a storyline a "saga"... So so good!

And I get why I didn't like it then. This was old school. Writer deFalco had been working under Jim Shooter, and was made editor-in-chief around this time. His policy as the head of Marvel Comics was to just keep doing what Shooter did. There is nothing in this book that would have been out of place in a 1980 Marvel book.

I'm here for it, Count Tagar. The inking here is incredible work by Joe Sinnott, but the colors on it pop as well

For me at that time, that meant the book lacked any freshness, especially compared to the soon-to-be Image artists that were the stars at Marvel. Thirty years later, I'm reading these simply as comics rather than as a barometer of the times, and they they read a lot better than, say, all of McFarlane's Spider-Man run. 

That's how you do a double-page spread

This work is a refined, classic Kirby homage with a quality of craftsmanship that would be hard to find today.  Frenz was an artist I loved on Amazing Spider-Man (he was the artist around the mid 200s, the time of the black suit Spider-Man), but he evolved into a much more retro artist on Thor. The first half of his run had Joe Sinnott inking with bold lines and dynamic feathering, giving it even more of a Kirby-esque vibe. And probably older Marvel fans were loving it, but at my comic shop, it was not part of the conversation.

Asgard crosses over to the Negative Zone

To really put this in perspective, two years later, Alan Moore would be making 1963 for Image, doing a similar homage to classic Marvel and be hailed for it. Around the same time, Mike Allred would also start mining Kirby, pairing it with ginchy kitsch and getting praised left, right, and center. At the very same time, deFalco, Frenz and Sinnott were making the real deal and getting no credit for it. The argument might be that Moore was choosing to make Kirby-esque comics, while the makers of Thor were simply making what they made, but that's a disrespectful argument. It's the same snobbery that gave Roy Lichtenstein credit for ripping off 50's comic art but not the artist who actually drew it, or gives a trendy restaurant credit for seeing the beauty in street food when it puts it on a nice plate and sells it at four times the price.

There's a bit of Kirby in this

No, this Thor run is the real thing, not a distillation of it. DeFalco and Frenz weren't slumming, they were being the thing itself.

This collection is the third of four Epic Collections that have most of their run. I have collection 16, War of the Pantheons, which I only bought because it was 50% off, and shocked me how much life and energy I found in it. I missed volume 17, In Mortal Flesh, and it's now unaffordable in the current Epic Collection collector's market. This volume is, relative to Epic Collections, pretty good. Some volumes have a lot of filler, and these don't. It starts with an annual which was not done by deFalco and Frenz, and it's not great. The annuals of the early 90s at Marvel were generally just places to give gigs to aged-out veteran artists or try out younger artists. Here, 70's Herb Trimpe does a competent but uninteresting chapter of a lackluster crossover.

I'm not going to dog on Trimpe's art. Instead, check out what Hercules does on his day off!

A number of the Thor issues in this were split in two with a back up Tales of Asgard story, written by deFalco  and drawn by someone I've never heard of, Gary Hartle. I think I get what he was trying to do, get a chance to write characters like Balder or the Warriors Three, and give Frenz and Sinnott some time to make deadlines, but these also just lack the energy of the main Thor stories.

The impact in panels 1 and 4 is amazing, but the perspective and composition in the third panel really puts you in the action

The main title goes through roughly two arcs in the course of the 18 issues contained in the collection, with some smaller arcs in between. The first arc is the Black Galaxy Saga, which really wears the Kirby on it's sleeve. Thor investigates an organic galaxy being researched by the High Evolutionary, and witnesses things no man has seen before.

Again, the colors! You couldn't do this better using Photoshop

It involves one of Kirby's greatest creations, the Celestials, and Frenz is more than capable of bringing an epic quality to the work.

Double-page spreads should blow your mind

After the saga has ended, Thor returns to earth and fights the Wrecking Crew, one of Kirby's much less interesting creations. There is a crossover with Excalibur where they fight at a New York pier, and for me, this was a lull in the book. Thor fighting at street-level in New York isn't half as interesting as him having adventures in space or in Asgard. I'm here for the crazy stuff I can't get anywhere else. I was losing interest, when suddenly Excalibur's mission to recapture the Juggernaut takes them to an alien planet where Juggernaut has been proclaimed the almighty leader. And just like that, I'm back on board!

The back of the book reprints some of Sinnott's original inks

All in all, I loved this book and am looking forward to more, with a few massive caveats. I love what deFalco and Frenz were doing here. It was authentic, high-quality old school Marvel Comics. They weren't trail blazing, but they were doing a great job on what they were doing. As the volume is ending, the atmosphere of the book starts to shift, and it's a little troubling.

That is a 2/3's of the page panel. Look at that ink!

The first is that Al Milgrim starts stepping in on inking duties. Joe Sinnott was a classic heavyweight inker. Milgrim was a Marvel editor whose art and inking I associate with books on a deadline. I'm sure he enjoyed the job, but he was always competent, never much more than that. I have volume 19, and having flipped through it, it seems like Milgrim became the regular inker. It's not a deal breaker, but Sinnott was a pretty key member of this creative team for me.

A double-page spread with Milgrim inks lacks a lot of the power of previous ones 

Another downturn for me was the appearance of a superpower enforcement police team. They don't have powers, they just specialize in cases involving powers, and they aren't inspired in any way. As a kid, I was never into G.I. Joe or any men in uniform type characters, so maybe they worked for others better than for me.

That's not gonna work on an Asgardian god, you fool!

Lastly, whether it was pressure from the bean-counters at Marvel, or simply deFalco and Frenz wanting to create something that'll connect with the kids, the book starts trying to be "cool" toward the end. Make no mistake, deFalco and Frenz were not cool guys. And their uncoolness is part of what makes this run so great. And I understand their impetus to make something that jives with the kids like Cable did. But it's not great stuff.

This probably lost as many readers as it gained. Maybe it gained a little more, since it was 1991

In the Black Galaxy Saga, deFalco tried writing a cool, young character, and the silence was deafening, the character swiftly disappeared to the planet Poochy went to. A god created mere days ago using youth lingo. It has strong "Hello, fellow kids!" energy.

Frenz gets credit for Juvan's hairstyle

That said, I think this is one of the best runs from the era. I had this image of Tom deFalco as a hack for most of my comic-reading years. Actually, I have that image of a lot of the artists and writers at DC and Marvel from the 70s and 80s. Mainly the guys who worked there until they got pushed out by younger styles. I judged them a lot on what they couldn't do, which was stay fresh and dynamic forever. Now that I'm in my 40s, I'm reading their work a lot differently, and not judging them for not appealing to 13 year olds forever. Looking at the work now, I see the craftsmanship and passion in it, but I also see the fun. It's when it's trying to be cool that it starts being very uncool, and losing some of that fun. 

"It's the nineties, pal! Those days are OVER!"

This book isn't flawless by any means, but it has a lot of great work in it. It's nearly 500 pages of Thor, and I'd estimate about 300 of those are awesome, and the rest ranging from mediocre to solid. But it's a must-read for anyone looking for a Kirby fix. Of course, go get the Kirby reprints first, that's the source, but if you are into Moore's 1963, or anything Tom Scioli does, this belongs on the shelf with those.

Thor gets political

Reading Through 2021 62: Daredevil Epic Collection 15: Last Rites, by Ann Nocenti, D.G. Chichester, and Lee Weeks

Daredevil Epic Collection 15: Last Rites, by Ann Nocenti, D.G. Chichester, and Lee Weeks

1990-1992, collected in 2020

Holy, this was a lot of book. 

The cover is the original cover of issue 300, not recolored!

I'm a fan of the Marvel Epic Collections, they are dense collections offering a snapshot of their time period. Unlike themed collections which collect a single storyline, this is all the Daredevil that was being published in the featured time period. Probably more than any Epic I've read, this was an unfocused book. It covers the transition between Ann Nocenti and D.G. Chichester as writer of the book, and is divided by an annual with a third writer, Gregory Wright. As a result, even though I'm reviewing one book, it feels like I'm reviewing three.

Before picking this up, I was already a fan of Nocenti's DD run. The incentive to read this was to finish reading her run, as I'd fallen off when it came out in the 90's. I've never read anything by Wright to my memory, though if he was working at Marvel in the late 80's to early 90's, I must have. Chichester I only know from the Midnight Suns comics line of the time, which I never read more than an issue of. And I know he was writer when Daredevil got his "realistic" black armor in the 90's, so I never really gave him a chance at the time, and haven't given him much thought in the decades since. With these Epic Collections coming out, I've heard people say they have affection for his run, so I went into this with an open mind.

This feels subversive today! If Cap complained that America was cutting social programs in an issue today, it would be the next right-wing Twitter cryathon. "Is this what they're indoctrinating kids with now?!"

Ann Nocenti's Daredevil has it's problems, but I love it. She wore her feelings on her sleeve, and the editor, Ralph Macchio, must have just not cared at all or been extremely sympathetic. Since the stories make sense, the spelling is correct, there's a fight or two every issue, let her talk about how white collar crime is way worse than the petty crime that takes up newspaper ink! Every time people online today complain about politics in comics, the appropriate reply (if I had time to talk to a brick wall) is: not being "political" is a form of being political, and comics have always been political. Ann Nocenti made some of the most political mainstream comics of the time.

For a scene written by a white person that was mostly read by white kids, it's good? This sort of thing was not on the Cosby Show

As an adult reader, a lot of it is heavy-handed, but when I was a 15 year old reader, I was dense, and I needed something this clearly stated to get through. Sometimes it is just soapboxing, but in other places she weaves it in to the story naturally. One of her best characters, Bullet, is a bad guy, an enforcer, but he's also a single father unequipped to raise his son. His son rarely leaves their apartment, and constantly worries about the bombs dropping in a new world war. That sunk in to me as a kid at the time, and their portrayal in this collection was similarly sympathetic. I still remember a lot of the comics I read in the 80's, and often it was the hamfisted morality they espoused that set me on the path I went down in life. I was impressionable when it came to comics.

Even the drug lords tire of the war on drugs

Unfortunately, the bulk of Nocenti's stories here aren't great. In her main arc, Daredevil returns to New York and immediately gets amnesia for reasons I couldn't understand. I flipped back and forth to get what I was missing, and couldn't find it. Fine, I'll go along with the story anyway. So Bulleye steals Daredevil's costume and goes out into the city as him to ruin his reputation. Meanwhile Daredevil, now using his father's name Jack Murdock, becomes a blind boxer and boxes at a massively hyped match at Madison Square Gardens. That's character breaking stuff. Whenever he goes back to the status quo, there are still newspaper articles and photos of him using his own last name boxing blind. How could he ever have a secret identity again? It's weird. 

The story ends with DD wearing Bullseye's costume and beating up "Daredevil", while the two of them have trouble remembering which person they really are. The ingredients of a good story are there, but it's underbaked. The penciler who replaced John Romita JR on the series, Lee Weeks, can't carry it with his art either. I'm not a Weeks fanboy as I don't have much of his work, but what I'd seen was fairly good. The stuff here is not very strong. And it was inked by the excellent Al Williamson, who did such an incredible job with JRJR's run. I was not feeling great about the rest of the collection.

From Weeks' first issue on Daredevil. It's very 80's Marvel

Then the book takes a break for the 1991 annual. In the 80's, annuals were delightful issues where the writer got to play and make something special, often with artists who didn't do the monthly series. By the 90's, the Marvel editors had decided they could sell more through crossovers, and they were usually uninspired rush jobs with a bunch of filler backup stories, and that's what this was. It was pretty bad.

What editor thought these three characters could support a four series crossover? "It's like those G.I. Joes the kids like."

I don't know who Gregory Wright was, but I feel like he hated his job, or he thought he was writing for kids so he didn't have to try. It's lazy, and while there was a ton of places I got irritated with it, there was only one part that was written even a little interesting.

Hey, crooked cop! Don't take your bribe on the crowded street five meters away from New York's greatest reporter

One of the bad guys created for this story, the Crippler, is not a good character at all. He's Punisher, but he likes making criminals suffer, not just killing them. But, in his origin, we see that before he was a psycho vigilante, he was a cop and a marine, and then he joined Hydra. 

That is throwing some shade on authority figures, and I doubt that would be allowed in a post-9/11 mainstream comic.

The Crippler was too much of a bad boy for Baron Strucker

Still, that annual has little redeeming value beyond a Mike Mignola cover.

"And then, Baron Strucker stands up and cackles maniacally." Take that, Frank Miller

Thankfully, Marvel decided not to publish the other three connected annuals in this collection as they have in some other Epic Collections. I'm figuring the villains were the connecting tissue and DD doesn't appear in them. Moving on.

We then start D.G. Chichester's run, with Lee Weeks carrying over from Nocenti's. The first few issues have some stunt casting. The first story has Punisher, and the next has Ghost Rider. The Punisher story features Tombstone (mainly a Spectacular Spider-Man villain) and Taskmaster (who I only knew from Gruenwald's Captain America run back then), and it was nice. A new writer injects some fresh blood into the stories, and both villains are appropriately down to earth for DD to fight. The two villains are trying to take down criminal targets meant to get them into a fraternity of criminals. It's alluded to more than explained, and it seems to be the ninja organization the Hand, but it's never really clear, and the whole "street level criminals are killing targets to get into a mysterious organization" just disappears. Maybe it's picked up again in the next book, but it's just as likely he had an idea, then decided it wasn't very interesting. I didn't think it was that interesting anyway.

At the end of Nocenti's run, she starts seeding a subplot where Kingpin wants some legitimate business. Chichester picks it up and makes it the center of the last eight issues of the book, culminating in the four part Last Rites storyline. And the book starts getting good.

Weeks' art a year into his run is much better

Weeks' art gets better from issue to issue, and Al Williamson seems to get more in sync with it. The JRJR work was very much rooted in line, and Weeks' work is rooted in shadow. Williamson starts using a brush more liberally on clothes and backgrounds. There are still the odd janky faces in the book, but on the whole it looks good. Drawing 22 pages a month is a great way for a young artist to get in shape, and you can see it here.

The Kingpin story is good too, with a bit of Marvel goofiness on the side. He decides to buy a TV station to influence the public. Because he is a crime lord, he needs legit investors to avoid the FCC, and is duped into opening his bank accounts by Baron Strucker in a Texan costume (white Colonel Sanders suit and goatee with a white cowboy hat) and a Foghorn Leghorn accent ("I say, I say"). The Nazi super-criminal was able to fool the Kingpin into thinking he was a Texas business man. Don't think about it too much.

Long story short, Hydra and everyone who hates Kingpin go after him at once, and DD piles on to make sure he hits rock bottom. The DD in this is kind of malicious. It's a bit out of character, but at this point in DD's history, DD barely knows who he is.

He said it! He said it!

The best story in this, as in, I had to stop and wonder about what I'd just read, was the taking down of Typhoid Mary. Mary is Kingpin's enforcer, but she's sleeping with him too. Kingpin pines over his wife Vanessa, who wants nothing to do with him. He's receptive to Typhoid Mary on a physical level, but he has no love for her. You can feel some pity for her, despite being a villain.

Daredevil, as Matt Murdock, tries to rekindle his relationship with Karen Page, but she isn't receptive. She likes him, she probably loves him, but knows a relationship with him would destroy her. Cut from that to Typhoid Mary taking out some low level mafiosos. Matt/DD has a history with Mary, so rather than fight her, he decides to do things differently.

Weeks and Williamson earned their pay on this page. Did it need captions?

He takes her to a hotel, sleeps with her ("sleep" is such a weak word, Daredevil bangs), then sneaks out while she's sleeping. He then forges her name on a psychiatric admission form, calls the cops and has her locked up in a psych ward.

The issue ends with Matt crying on the floor of a bathroom next to a dirty toilet.

That's crazy. I don't know if it's a sign that Matt is full of vengeance, foreshadowing the his cruelty to the Kingpin. Maybe? But it's not normal for a super-hero. Just to reiterate: he was turned down by one ex, he then slept with another mentally ill ex-girlfriend, forged her signature, then had her admitted to a psychiatric ward. It's not what the hero would do. 

That's why I like it. It's what a person might do, and Matt Murdock is not a flawless hero. He's got issues.

I think I want to read some more of Chichester's run.

I Really Should Read This 16: X-Men Epic Collection 1: Children of the Atom by Lee, Kirby, Roth and Thomas

X-Men Epic Collection 1: Children of the Atom by Lee, Kirby, Roth and Thomas

1963-1966

The X-Men debuted in September 1963 and the legend goes that it wasn't very good. It was nearly canceled and barely survived to 1975 when it was rebooted under Len Wein and Chris Claremont with Giant Size X-Men 1, where it then went on to be the number one comic for decades. I am a huge X-Men fan. Not obsessive, but in the 80s and early 90s, I would have been classified as obsessive, and today, X-Men are the single largest block of my comics collection. Yet I've read almost no silver age X-Men except for the brief Neil Adams run in the late 60s. I decided I would change that.

Epic Collection 1 collects issue 1 through 23, and unlike later collections, there are no annuals, crossovers, or miscellaneous appearances. I wish more of these Epic Collections were like this. 

It's hard to see mutants as a parallel for other minorities when they spend half their time fighting "evil" mutants

Right from the start, the stories in this are not great. While some of the villains become legendary characters, there are villains who never came close to being legendary. And the characters are not nearly as well defined as they would be in the Bronze Age comics. Xavier has very poorly defined abilities, shifting from issue to issue. Magneto appears a lot, probably in about 10 of the 23 issues, and though he has magnetic abilities, he can astrally project himself and do other things that future writers would ignore. 

The famous single page where Xavier thinks about being in love with Marvel Girl. It was panel six of a page where all the boys on the team are horny for the single female on the team (except Scott, he's in love)

Of the original five X-Men, Beast stands out most as a character. He's smart and in his free time he writes equations with his feet, which would have been Kirby's joke, but then Stan Lee pulls out the thesaurus to write his loquacious dialogue. It's easy to see the contemporary character's roots here.

Cyclops is a stick in the mud; when the team is given free time, everyone goes out to have fun, and Cyclops stays back to feel sorry for himself. His other main feature is a thought balloon every issue pining over Marvel Girl. 

Marvel Girl's only character is to wish Cyclops would acknowledge her and take her out. 

Iceman is initially defined as a prankster, but in later issues would be shown as Beast's best friend, and gets to play off of their relationship. 

Angel is never really a character, simply a character design. The closest he gets to showing his personality is in his over-confidence in his success. Reading his original appearances, I understand why he was so completely revamped as an angsty bad boy in the 80s. I'm not a big Archangel fan, but he is a better defined character than he was as the Angel.

Cyclops on this page is pure Kirby

Kirby's art here isn't his best. A lot of it feels like 1950s style. Occasionally it pops out and you see the bold blacks, and I love it, but overall, this is not exciting Kirby art. The character design is great though. You get so used to seeing these characters that you forget just how strange it is that the leader of the team shoots red force beams out his eyes. It's a really weird concept.

I just love this image so much

From Pussey! by Dan Clowes 

Beast also stands out from a design standpoint; Kirby really emphasizes the massive feet and toes on him. It's been decided that he will be a blue-furred character from here on in in Marvel continuity, but he's pretty cool without the fur. I think a lot of artists just had difficulty making his feet look as weird as Kirby did. 

Iceman starts out looking like a snowman, much like the Thing starts out as a lumpen rock before being refined into his famous design. In issue 8, snowy Iceman becomes icy Iceman and never goes back. It's interesting to see Kirby evolving his character design.

At first, the stories are focused on mutant themes: finding mutants and fighting mutants. Issues 1 has Magneto, 2 has the Vanisher, 3 has the Blob, and 4 has the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants with Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, Toad and Mastermind. That's great initial line up of villains. But Magneto is overused until he his taken off the board with a ridiculous story in issue  11 (A powerful being, The Stranger, is discovered and both the X-Men and Magneto investigate. The Stranger is revealed to be an alien on Earth to collect mutant specimens, and takes Magneto and Toad back to his alien world with him.) Other winners in the early run are Juggernaut and the Sentinels. Kirby created a huge amount of characters, and there are a lot more that stuck around than ones that fell through the cracks. We don't hear much from Unus the Untouchable these days.

Lucifer's boss, Dominus

One of the subplots in the early run is about a space alien, Lucifer, who was responsible for the loss of Xavier's legs. One of the reasons Xavier formed the X-Men was to stop this menace. The character never really works and when Roy Thomas takes over as writer he quickly wraps up this plot, and the character doesn't appear in X-Men again. 

The creators were all feeling their way toward what the X-Men were, and there were naturally going to be some dead ends.

The original Cerebro was quite different

Other trademark X-Men ideas appear in a different form. The Danger Room is there early on, but it is very much like a gymnasium obstacle course, though not too different from what would be in the early Claremont run. Cerebro is nothing like Cerebro I've ever seen. It's a 1960s stereo with names of specific mutants on it. The X-Men of the movies and cartoons didn't spring from nowhere, it evolved over decades and under different writers and artists. And you always have to remember with these books: none of the people working on them thought that adults would be following these stories half a century later.  These were disposable books for kids.

Very subtle, Professor. Nobody will know you're secretly the leader!

From issue 12, Kirby is credited with breakdowns, with Alex Toth doing a bland fill in before it's taken over by Werner Roth (credited as Jay Gavins), who then takes over as full penciller in issue 18. Stan Lee is credited as plotter/scripter until Roy Thomas takes over in issue 20. Roth's art is unexceptional for the most part. He feels like someone more suited to 1950s westerns or romance comics. He apes Kirby action in places, but it doesn't seem like it comes natural to him.

Roth had some nice hatching

Occasionally though, he draws a character in a clean line and it looks incredible. It'll be just one panel over two pages, but if he drew like this all the time, he would have been like Bruce Timm before Bruce Timm.

Look at Marvel Girl's face and mask! It's perfect! 

Thomas gives the book a jolt of energy though. He takes care of Lucifer immediately, but he seems more specific in his writing than Stan Lee was. Lee was giving quick elevator pitches for stories, "The X-Men fight mutant hunting robots!" And the artist drew that pitch for 20 pages. Thomas seems to be injecting more specific occurrences into the story, like Beast and Iceman going on a double date together with their Greenwich Village girlfriends Vera and Zelda.

This is pretty funny

I'm looking forward to the next Epic Collection to see how the book evolves. Roth is not an artist I love, but Thomas is a writer I'm interested in knowing better. Most of his work was before my time. I mainly know him from his stories in Avengers with the Vision and Squadron Supreme. It seems so crazy that a fanboy off the street managed to insinuate himself so deeply into Marvel at the height of its heyday.

I enjoyed reading this collection. I didn't love it, but it's so weird to see the original five X-Men as teenagers in a school, not as adults. It's the roots of the X-Men. I would never recommend this to someone as a starter X-book, or even as a sample of Marvel in the 60s, but if you've already read over 200 issues of X-Men and you're all in on the concept, this is an interesting book and has little treasures to uncover.

Other notes about the book:

-There are a number of continuity errors. I don't know if the writer or the letterer was at fault, but I was surprised. It's nice that Marvel stays true to the original vision/can't be bothered to fix them.

Who is this mystery man named Bobby Blake?

-The Kirby in this book isn't the best Kirby, but when the Kirby comes out, it's great. I wish I understood his skill better as a kid, because I skipped over a lot of great Kirby books in the four-for-a-dollar bin as a young collector.

That's what I'm talking about

-Epic Collections tend to recolor the front and back covers. Is it better than the original coloring? Is the modern X-Men logo better than the original? How about that little Angel flying over the logo every month? There was a lot of magic going on in the 60s Marvel books.

-In the mid 80s, X-Men was the number one book, but the only issues of the original run available were the Neal Adams series. Instead, I bought the Official Marvel Index to the X-Men, an encyclopedia of the golden age stories.

Art by Sandy Plunket and P. Craig Russel

Each issue would have a lengthy breakdown. I loved reading X-Men, but at a certain point it became a kind of studying. Boys and men have this competitiveness in their circles, be it comics or baseball or video games, where when a friend doesn't know some trivia, others snort derisively, "You didn't know that?" It's gross, I did it too, and it hammered in some obsessive traits into me at that age. If I couldn't play sports even remotely well, at least I could know more about X-Men than all my friends.

I read every single one of these entries

The entries give creator credits, list the characters that appeared, notable items that appeared, gave a synopsis, and helped you become a better Marvel Zombie.

Countless hours of my life has gone into this.