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 103: The Eternals by Jack Kirby

 I have decided to keep writing, but I will be posting on a separate blog space, POP: Culture and Comics. 

The logic being that I can manage a little more random traffic on a site already populated by other writers, and on their end, I suppose I write about work that the people there aren't writing about already. 

My first piece is on the Eternals, the original one, not the many many attempts to make them happen.  Click through and read there!

70s art meets 21st century coloring

Kirby's Eternals

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 99: Acts of Vengeance: Avengers, by Marvel's 1989 crew

Acts of Vengeance: Avengers, by Marvel's 1989 crew

1989

A company-wide Marvel crossover in the 80's that didn't revolve around the X-Men. What a fresh concept!

That was a good image

Marvel first got into the crossover business with Secret Wars and Secret Wars II, but it blossomed with the in-title X-Men crossovers. First was the Mutant Massacre, which was loosely connected between Uncanny X-Men and X-Factor, both telling aspects of a single event, but the characters never really crossed over. It was followed by Fall of the Mutants, which featured those two books and New Mutants, but was mainly a crossover in theme and format. All the books featured independent stories. A year after that came, what was for me, the pinnacle of X-crossovers, Inferno. All three books crossed over into a mega-storyline which pulled in every New York-based comic from Avengers to Spider-Man. At this point, editorial was convinced this was to be an annual event, but there was some fatigue in the X-offices. 

Who could these mystery villains be?

In 1989, the Avengers were made the center of its own crossover, Acts of Vengeance. The concept was brilliant, in terms of a crossover event. Villains would fight heroes they had never fought before, hopefully succeeding with the element of surprise. For Marvel's creators, it was a mandated crossover, but they could basically take any villain from Marvel's history and have fun with them. It was a corporate mandate that creators could enjoy.  Some books were better than others, as always, but it was fun to read.

The crossover has been split into three books, this one focusing on the Avengers, another one being Spider-Man and X-Men, and the last being the rest of the Marvel Universe. I have some nostalgia for the Spider-Man of this crossover, where he gets goofy Captain Universe powers, but none of it is essential. This book, I'd read about half of it at the time and had some fond memories of it, and wanted to revisit it. 

A random assortment of creators

The main creators in this are basically a who's who of people who worked under Jim Shooter. Three of the writers, Gruenwald, Mackie and DeFalco, were never major players in comics, just dependable Marvel Bullpen writers. Gruenwald is really interesting in that he was obsessed with Marvel, and spearheaded the nerdiest Marvel project of all time, the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe. He did a lot to create a space where Marvel obsessives could explore their fandom. DeFalco at this point had replaced Shooter as editor in chief. I had no love for his work as a kid, but I've reevaluated it after enjoying a lot of his Thor run. I never enjoyed a Mackie book, and can't say I did here either.

Dwayne McDuffie was a newer writer at the time, and went on to be influential with creations like Damage Control and Static Shock, but this might be some of the first work I've read of his that I remember. He went on to work in TV and at DC before passing away too young.

And of course John Byrne, who famously threw a party with a burning effigy when Shooter was fired. I loved Byrne in 1989, and I like it a lot still, but there is a snideness in his work which turns me off. He seemed to think other creators were less than him, and it comes out in his work whenever he "fixed" what he thought was wrong with a book or characters. In this volume, he was writing Avengers, and both writing and drawing West Coast Avengers Avengers: West Coast. (His first act upon taking over WCA was to change the name, because it was a poor decision in his mind. Since he left, Marvel has gone back to the original title for its revival.)

Why would the Sub-Mariner attack his best human friend?!

So all the creators get to have fun. Gruenwald was writing Captain America and Quasar. His Cap run is not exactly beloved, but multiple ideas he introduced have stuck in the decades since, like John Walker and Crossbones. The first two issues feature the Controller, an Iron Man villain I've never heard of before or since, but the third features Magneto and is the high point of the whole crossover. I'll get back to that at the end. 

Eon basically just kills the conversation here. Awkward!

He also does Quasar with bland artist Paul Ryan. Quasar was not a comic I would pick up off the rack to even flip through. The costume, the hair... It was incredibly uncool. I have heard some Quasar fans in the years since say it was an interesting series, so I gave it a chance here, and there were positive and negative things about these issues. Quasar himself couldn't be more bland. A handsome, blond suit-wearing 80s corporate type. It was a dynamic that would have worked in the 50s or 60s, but he comes across as Marvel madlibs here: Tony Stark's aesthetic, Steve Rogers' hair, Peter Parker's bad luck. The peek into the cosmic stuff in the book is interesting though. Quasar's office has a cosmic doorway through which he can chat with tree-like entity named Eon.

Hey gloopy alien, I'll catch you in a net!

Quasar fights the Absorbing Man, the Red Ghost and the Living Laser, but Gruenwald rips on Venom. The pettiness on display here was shocking. The most popular new character at Marvel in a decade, and Venom is promised on the cover. Quasar fights Venom and wins in two pages! He just catches him in a net and then ties him up. Gruenwald is basically just saying Venom sucks and he hates him without explicitly saying it. Hey, Venom does kind of suck, but all the same, Quasar defeats him without breaking a sweat, but also without acknowledging Venom's power set whatsoever. They must have gotten a pile of angry nerd mail after this. The Quasar issues weren't great, but they were competent 80s comics. I can imagine getting into it if I were 10 or 11 years old, but not when I was 14.

The street has no life, the brick building has a hedge behind it. No effort was made on this, this looks like a paycheck

The issues of Avengers Spotlight weren't all competently done though. Spotlight was an Avengers spinoff meant to highlight Hawkeye and other Avengers. The Hawkeye stories here, written by Mackie, and drawn by Al Milgrim and inked by Don Heck, are the kind of comic that made me mad as a kid, but I didn't know why. Some Marvel books just had lazy art on them. Milgrim was a Marvel editor who liked drawing, and Heck drew the Avengers after Kirby left. Heck had some skills, but these stories look rushed and not up to par. Backgrounds are inconsistent or missing, the world looks like nobody lives there. I think if a young artist submitted them to Marvel in 1989, they would have been turned down and told to come back after some practice. It's a shame, because I want to find something to admire the old artists continuing to work in comics for decades, but I just don't think Don Heck is my kind of artist. I already knew I didn't enjoy Milgrim's work.

Dwayne McDuffie's dialogue was surprisingly fun. It calls back to Stan Lee's quips in the 60s

Iron Man was being done by Dwayne McDuffie, with Herb Trimpe pencilling and Al Milgrim on inks. I was not looking forward to these at all, but I really liked them. I wouldn't say they were good exactly, but there was some good stuff going on in them. They were basic stories of a good guy beating on a bad guy. McDuffie had a great sense of humor here, while Trimpe surprised me with some nutty illustrations. 

Just for this single image, I'll never have any doubts why Trimpe was working at Marvel for decades

Back then, I would read Iron Man for a few issues and then drop off. I wanted to like it. I loved the suit and technology, I hated the mustache. I was so turned off by 80s machismo as a kid, I never watched Magnum PI, and I couldn't vibe with Tony Stark. As an adult though, it's a lot easier to wade through the testosterone of it all enjoy what's going on.

Is this what they mean when they say PC culture is killing America? Would Iron Man be allowed to show off his junk to a random hot blonde in a convertible these days?

Meanwhile the Avengers themselves are fighting off random baddies. On the west coast, they fight Hulk villains the U-Foes, an evil version of the Fantastic Four, and the Mole Man's monsters. They are inconsequential stories. In both cases, the villains were duped into attacking the Avengers, and when it's revealed to them, they give up and go home. 

Byrne can draw some exciting stuff. X-Ray is one of the cooler character designs in the Marvel Universe

On the east coast, they fight Freedom Force, the renamed Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and later the Mandarin and the Wizard. These are also drawn by Paul Ryan, with heavy inking by Tom Palmer. Palmer has such a strong brush that I can enjoy the meat and potatoes layouts Ryan gives. Byrne, for whatever frustrations I have with his attitude, always tries to do something inventive and new with characters. Shrinking Blob down and having him sink through the ground fits that bill.

Palmer brings a great John Buscema vibe to his inks

Next we come to Thor, by DeFalco and Frenz, who were in total sync at this point in their run. It's not a knock on them, but I definitely like their space and Asgard stories more than their New York stories. Here though, they bring the Juggernaut against Thor, which seems like a "why hadn't this happened already" idea. Not only that, they introduce a new team to the Marvel Universe: the New Warriors.

Ever since I read this, I want to send people a message the reads: It's war! Total war!

Thor can hold his own against the Juggernaut, but his infinite arrogance treats Juggernaut as a problem he can solve with punches, when in truth, nothing can stop the Juggernaut.

Skateboard to the Juggernaut's face! Frenz kills it in action scenes. These panels are hyper-kinetic while still being totally coherent

They fight for two issues, and Thor solves it by creating a vortex and dropping Juggernaut onto an asteroid. No matter how grounded a Frenz-DeFalco Thor story was, they always made sure something happened that was absolutely crazy.

How you gonna get home from there, tough guy?

One other book dropped in here is an issue of Cloak and Dagger, who were labeled as mutants at this point. Inker Terry Austin is writer, and I don't think it was very good. After a bunch of pages where it felt like the story never ended, I checked and it turned out to be a double sized issue. Avengers play a substantial role, which I guess was the logic for including it in this collection. It's competent, but very inessential.

The Hulk robot from the worst issues of the Eternals is brought back and stuffed with gags

The collection ends with the big revelation of the crossover, that the mastermind behind it all is Loki, who has never forgiven himself for causing the Avengers to unite in the first issue of the series. Byrne does a pretty good job portraying Loki as a person consumed with hatred and frustration that they just can never win.

Byrne is a fanboy at heart, and he gives the crossover a sensible foundation rooted in the Avengers history. Compared to the X-crossovers, which often seemed cobbled together under their editor's orders, this feels like a naturally occurring Avengers storyline. And Byrne gets to draw a fairly traditional lineup of Avengers doing their thing, as the east and west (and Great Lakes!) branches have come together at this point.

This image of Thor and Loki felt retro in 1989

All in all, this was a great crossover. It managed to do the things a crossover is meant to, without falling victim to the common weaknesses of them. It helped sell books to people following their favorite villains to other books, and create a feeling of a unified continuity. At the same time, none of the crossovers were essential, and you didn't need to read the central books to grasp what happened in the crossover issues. It was good for the managers, good for the creators, and good for readers too!

Kids paid for this sort of thing!

The book includes an epilogue that was printed as a back up story in an annual, that basically just tells what happened. This was published a year or two after, and is exhibit A of why Marvel's annuals became a waste of money. In order to pad out 64 pages, they created "stories" like this that only left readers confused about why they paid triple price for filler.

Not even the Wizard thinks Nazis are tolerable

The best thing in the book has to be the loathing of the Red Skull. It's questionable if a Nazi should be made a villain to sit along with Doctor Doom and Loki. Nazism is a real thing, Latveria and the Lord of Mischief aren't. But, at the very least, the writers are fully aware of how no matter how despicable Marvel's villains are, Nazis are at the bottom of the totem pole. 

Magneto is not taking this crap sitting down

Magneto is a character whose revamped 80s origin was that Nazis were the prime reason he has no faith in humanity to treat mutants humanely. If the story had had them working together without any of this commented upon, in retrospect, it would have gone down as one of those tone-deaf stories that failed so hard that "it was a different time" wouldn't let it go, like the time Carol Danvers gave birth to her rapist and everyone was fine with it.

Here, the writers make an issue out of it, and in the final Captain America tie-in, Magneto takes down the Red Skull.

Magneto levitating out of the room is a great image, as is the dark falling on the Skull

Magneto loathes the Red Skull and all he believes in. Upon confirmation that this Red Skull is the same as the one from World War II, Magneto tracks him down and promises to make him suffer. He locks the Skull in a windowless room with nothing but water, and I'd like to think the Skull is down there to this day. As this was still a point in time when millions of Americans weren't confused about whether Nazis were bad or not, Magneto is an anti-hero here.  Always, the cry of some folks in the industry is to keep politics out of comics, but these comics of the 80s were some of the things that started to make me politically aware as a kid. The politics were always there.

Yeah!

All in all, I burned through this, and liked it even where it was a bit shoddy. It's not on my top ten Marvel books of the 80s, maybe not on my top twenty. But if you have an appetite for the format of the time, that is, complete stories every issue; art which makes sense, and colors which are never muddy; and fun; you would probably get a lot of pleasure out of this.

That mess has been cleaned up

I've spent so many years reading superhero comics being written for adults, and sometimes they're amazing. But as I get older, I'm finding that I love the work that was made under the comics code and when comics were aimed at young teens. Superheroes were never intended to be obsessed over by 40 year olds. I'm enjoying these older comics that embrace that fact.

Reading Through 2021 96: Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

2018

2015 to 2019 were the dark ages of X-Men for me, and this book might just be the eye of the storm.

It burns! It burns!

Let's go back to those dark days of 2018 and think about what was going on. The franchise was headless. The books had been spilt into Blue and Gold books to try to capitalize on aging fan nostalgia, and there was a concurrent Astonishing X-Men book out to capitalize on slightly younger fans nostalgia for that title. Basically, the line had been overextended for years, and the concept of a central "main" title had been lost.

At the same time, in order to "shake things up", the franchise had 

-killed Wolverine, only to immediately replace him with Old Man Logan, a time displaced version of him as an old man.

-killed Cyclops.

-left time displaced versions of the 1960's X-Men in the books rather than having Brian Michael Bendis finish off the storyline he'd begun with them. This was particularly egregious, as nothing those characters did after Bendis stopped writing them was compelling to me, or to most readers. The solo Jean Grey book had its fans, but I only lasted a few issues with it.

-left Jubilee a vampire.

-made Sabertooth a good guy, as opposed to a bad guy on a leash like he was the times he was an X-Man before.

-made X-23 the new Wolverine, despite Old Man Logan immediately filling the role on the team.

We have vampire Jubilee, teenage original X-Men minus Jean, and Wolverine is dead, just the old version of him

Most of this was pretty ugly stuff, though I was fully approving of killing Wolverine off for a few years, and letting X-23 step in. Ultimately, the company went with Old Man Logan, and never really let X-23 become the star she might have.

Kitty, Colossus and Nightcrawler were in a pretty traditional place.

With this special mini-series, that's the environment it was trying to thrive in, and it's an uphill battle. It's not a great book, it's not an all-time classic, but it has elements in it which place it firmly in the neighborhood of Claremont X-Men (good), as compared to Bob Harass X-Men (very bad).

Why would X-Men still bury bodies? Why wouldn't they at least have alarms and scanners on the corpses at this point?

The book is very continuity heavy, as in, if I weren't already a hardcore X-Men reader, I wouldn't even bother with it. Beyond the fact that a casual reader would have no idea who half the characters are, the versions of the famous characters aren't themselves, and there's no attempt to explain any of it. Why are there two Iceman characters? Figure it out, check Wikipedia. The book assumes you know exactly who everyone is, and why most of the main characters are nothing like they were five years earlier, much less twenty. Every Marvel team book needs a character page at the front or back, this one being a prime example.

Annie (in the glasses) is the key to the story. Annie's death during Jean's childhood triggered Jean's powers originally

The prologue and much of the story is focused on Jean Grey's origin story, which is also not explained in the book. If you're a diehard fan, you'll know that Jean was playing frisbee with her friend Annie when Annie ran out onto the road and was hit by a car. Jean's telepathic powers were triggered and she experienced her best friend's dying pain. You've read the black and white Marvel magazine from the 1980's Bizarre Adventures #27, which had the origin of Jean Grey, right? I'm sure it's been retold elsewhere, if only in single panel flashback, but it's just not that well known. Writer Rosenberg's choice to make this a key part of the story is the correct choice in order to make a story with an emotional core that's true to the character. The choice not to retell the story in the book, or even reprint a single page for newer readers in the ancillary material at the back, is... I don't want to say baffling, because Marvel makes comics for 40 year olds these days. I'm too accustomed to it to be baffled by Marvel. But it is symptomatic of a bad publishing strategy.

The art is very understated for a modern X-Men comic, and that is really nice

So far, almost all the problems I've described are things that are the responsibilities of the editor and publisher. Given that the X-offices decided Jean needed to come back, that the "X-Men" were in a sorry state, how did Rosenberg do with these lemons? I think he did fairly well. The plot of this is that dead mutants are appearing and disappearing, and it's the Phoenix Force at it again, the cosmic entity that can't quit Earth.

In terms of double page spreads, I found this one lacking

The dead mutants are merely a distraction from the Force's real plan: bringing back Jean from the dead to be the new avatar for it. The Phoenix has had multiple avatars and they've never been stable, not like it was with Jean. So it's incubating her a new body to bond with. Why the Phoenix creates a town populated with dead mutants and a diner run by a grown up version of her dead childhood friend is vague, but sure, maybe the emotional resonance is soothing. It's a superhero comic. 

It's such a weird concept to make another book about dead X-Men... Necrosha was probably a year ago in Marvel continuity

What I liked about this is that, despite the fights, this is not a fight book. When it's all resolved, it's an emotional resolution. I've been reading pieces of the Claremont run recently, and when that book was at its best, it wasn't because characters were punching each other. It was because the characters talked and expressed themselves. It was a sensitive book. 

I'm not going to make the thesis that that is what an X-book has to be; books and characters evolve with the times. But if you think about what made X-Men stand out on the stands in the 1980's, when it was the number one selling book in America, it was the heart of it. It was the way the characters expressed longing and fear, and supported one another through it all. 

The book has battles, but ultimately it's about personal relationships and philosophies on living

Rosenberg, at least with this book, got that, and made it a story about Jean's heart, not about overcoming a cosmic being. 

He went on to write the short run of Uncanny X-Men before House of X/Powers of X, and I think it was pretty terrible. So I don't know if it was the assignment here that raised his game, or if the assignment of killing time (and a ton of characters) before HOXPOX left him uninspired.

Even if it is only for one book, I like seeing this variation on Phoenix's costume

In the current HiX-Men continuity, death has been removed from the narrative of the X-Men. All characters now can be reanimated in a snap, so I wonder why this book was even editorially mandated to be made. Shortly after, Cyclops also would be mandated to return, using some other comic book logic. Why did they bother to do that when in HOXPOX, they brought back everyone any writer wanted to use? 

It's baffling, and makes me question just what the point of this book even was, when it's unlikely to ever be referenced in continuity ever again. But, if you ignore the convoluted continuity it was based in, and that within a year, all of the continuity in this would be ignored, the book itself is pretty good! It has some of the stuff that good X-Men comics are made of.

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