One Coin Reads 17: Trent, by Dino Stamatopoulos and Leah Tiscione

Trent, by Dino Stamatopoulos and Leah Tiscione

2017

Hands down, the weirdest thing I've read in years.

Dino Stamatopoulos is not famous, but he is well-known to comedy nerds as Starburns on Community and even better known to ultra-comedy nerds as one of the main writers on the legendary HBO sketch comedy Mr. Show.

Was Starburns the greatest thing about a great show?

He's a writer more often than a performer, but for years, if his name came up on a project, I'd check it out. So yeah, I was interested in buying Trent, and bought it not knowing it was a musical comic book about a dead baby. 

It's a musical comic book about a dead baby. 

In case you missed that on the cover

It wasn't going to be a home run. It's just too far out of the range of regular comics, neither fish nor fowl as the expression goes. Before even discussing what I thought of it, I need to explain how it works. 

The yellow box signals track one

The book is in black and white, but it shifts into color at certain segments. The color segments are musical, the black and white pages are plain comics. A track notification of what song to play from their website shows up with the color.

That site hosts the eight songs that appear in the book, which are mainly performed by Scott Adsit and Britta Phillips. Adsit is probably best known from his role on the sitcom 30 Rock and is an all around strong performer. Phillips was a name I didn't know, but she was actually singing in a very heartfelt way, and it turns out she was in the band Luna, a great little band in the 90's. The songs are all musical theater in nature, so it's nothing I would listen to outside of the experience of this comic, but it wasn't in any way amateur.

For the most part, Trent has no face

 And so, Trent tells the story of a couple who weren't excited to have a baby, have one that dies, and they learn to love the corpse. It's morbid humor. The chorus of the first song is, "I hope it's alive." 

The art by Tiscione is professional and well done, but it's not a style I enjoy. It seems like a style that might be in appear in a magazine to be read by people who don't usually read comics. I think the concept of the book needed to have 'straight' comic art. It's a book about normal people doing something very abnormal, so having art which leaned into the comedy would make it all less shocking and strange. So it's suitable and well done, just not exciting. Her art style wouldn't be out of place in a Muppets comic.

The neighbors have so many kids they can't count them

The book attempts to get into the head of people who are attempting to love a child they hardly knew, and there is room for pathos. The book gets a back cover blurb by none other than screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who calls the book "touching." And there are poignant points, but it is buried in a lot of goofiness. If you enjoy the goofiness and the art, probably the whole package will be appealing though. 

The grandparents are hooded puppeteers focused on one thing only

I love Mr. Show, but even there, the musical numbers were usually my least favorite sketches, (until the tenth watch when they sometimes become beloved). And though I've seen comics with soundtracks before, not with musical numbers; this was different. Stamatopoulos wrote this as a comedic play 25 years ago, and self published it through SBI (Starburns Industries). It's a labor of love, but it's hard to call this successful, it reads like theater adapted to comics. It would have worked better as an animated special for Comedy Central. Any time a book comes with instructions, it can't be much more than a novelty. 

I don't even dislike it either. It's just weird. 

One Coin Reads 16: RASL Book One The Drift, by Jeff Smith

RASL Book One The Drift, by Jeff Smith

2008, collected in 2018

Six years ago, I read comics to my daughter before bed every night. For months, we read one issue of Bone from the nine volume trades that make up the main Bone saga. She liked it, I loved it in places, I merely liked it near the end, but it's hard to be a comic fan and not respect the hell out of Jeff Smith and what he pulled off with Bone: he made a classic comic story over a thousand pages long, one that'll endure for decades if not longer. So I was interested in RASL from the moment I heard of it, though I'm only now getting around to reading it, after finding a copy for ¥323. There was no excuse not to read it.

RASL is not a very good title for a book

It was alright. Perfectly fine. It never built up the reputation of Bone, so I knew it wasn't going to have quite the same impact. But it had that Eisner sticker on the cover, so some people wanted to give it some love. The back cover blurbs excessively praise it: riveting, a masterpiece, sophistication, complexity. Those are big words, and I did not find them in this book. It was a comic, a well-done comic, but I didn't put it down hungry for more.

Starting the book off in the desert is a nice call back to Bone

Rasl is the title character's unlikely name. He is an inter-dimensional art thief, though the art thief stuff only happens in the first issue of the book, from there the inter-dimensional travel becomes the focus of the story. He drinks hard liquor from the bottle and visits prostitutes and strip clubs. And trouble finds him.

The rest of the book hints about a bigger story: military cover-ups, inter-dimensional traveler groups, and is Rasl one of a kind between parallel dimensions? I wonder how it read in 2008, because this sounds like any number of Image books being put out in the last decade, and that includes not having much understanding of the story at the end of the first collection. The book is a mystery box which hopefully gets opened in the other two books which complete the story. 

While Rasl starts the book stealing a painting, from there, he becomes a lot more of a passive protagonist: he's on the run, things are happening to him. He initiates a fight, or he chases a guy down, but he's not doing a lot that reveal stakes or character.

Smith expands his range into noir

Jeff Smith is an artist as well as a writer though, and unfortunately I don't like the art in this nearly as much as Bone. Definitely they share the same creator's hand, but the cartoony tone of Bone suited the story. Here, Rasl is drawn with a pinch of Neanderthal and a slightly oversized head. It doesn't wreck the book, but it distracts from the seriousness of the noir tone he was going for. Other characters look better, including the two sultry women in his life, and the villain of the book, a man in a trenchooat and fedora who has a warp in his face. But the main character himself looks janky. 

The book wants so badly to be gritty, and while it manages to do it here and there, the art might just be too clean to consistently get there. 

He wants to establish Rasl is a lowlife, but not a bad guy lowlife

Where the book shines best is the actual storytelling. The panel layouts and pacing are expertly done. Smith is not afraid to use silent panels to extend the moment or let things sink in, and it makes the whole book more immersive.

The bad guy is by far the most compelling part of the book

He has action sequences and talky sequences, and is able to pull both off with seeming effortlessness. The book is easy enough to read. 

I kind of get it. In music, there is a thing called the difficult second album, where a band spends years developing their sound and making a big splash on their first album, and then in a short amount of time are expected to repeat that on a second album, without repeating the ideas of their first. It's hard to do. Smith hit a grand slam homer with Bone, and followed it up with something a little smaller, a little more adult-oriented, and simply something different. I'm sure this was a challenge of a different sort from Bone to make, and I have a lot of respect for him as a creator for that. He didn't just make Bone II.

Ultimately though, RASL is a sci-fi story that isn't treading new ground, it's a gritty noir without the grit, and doesn't quite manage to be the experience it seemed to be going for. If someone put the remaining books in my hand to read, I'd be up for reading them, and maybe the first part of the story reads better knowing where it's all going. But I'm not going to go out of my way to finish this story.

Reading Through 2021 55: The Originals, by Dave Gibbons

The Originals, by Dave Gibbons

originally published in 2004, Essential Edition 2018

Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.

He did the cover up like a James Jacket

Dave Gibbons was never an artist I followed around. Of course Watchmen was an amazing work, and his art, design, and layouts were a part of that, but his art isn't flashy. Some of it was my age and what was hot when I collecting mainstream art; in 1990, I was into Art Adams and the school of artists that came out after: McFarlane, Liefeld, Silvestri. Much more style over substance. I went from that art style straight to indie comics and missed out on a lot of mature semi-mainstream stuff, ie. Vertigo.

Last year, I read all of Martha Washington for the first time and enjoyed it wholeheartedly. As an adult, I can now appreciate just how good Gibbons is at what he does. Then I saw this book I'd never heard of and gave it a try. 

It's a perfect comic.

From Gibbons' intro to the book

Up front, I have some sentimental attachment to the content. I was a huge fan of Quadrophenia in high school, so I know some of where he's drawing from. He's not drawing from that movie, but The Originals and Quadrophenia both are coming from the same British subculture. And while I wasn't a mod, in my late teens I was into the music and clothes and sometime stupidity of my subculture, to the extent that I was blinded to the outside world. I did anything to hide my bland suburban roots.  I know exactly where the characters in this book are coming from.

The type of ads that woo in young Lel

While the book has a plot, it's a simple one, and is as much of a character sketch as anything else. For some, that may be a turn off. But it's not a typical comic plot. Despite the sci-fi setting, it's pretty down to earth.

Our introduction to Lel

So what's it about? It's about Lel and his friend Bok, who want nothing more than to join the Originals, the coolest crew in their town.

Our introduction to the Originals

And they look amazing. Gibbons takes the mod aesthetic and tweaks it enough that it's his own vision. You can get why Lel wants nothing more than his own bike.

The Originals are a gang of sorts, and have rivals, bikers called the Dirt (by the Originals, I'm not sure if they call themselves that), who they will fight on a moment's notice. Both crews stupidly antagonise each other until it inevitably comes to a boil.

The Originals are not the good guys. Both sides have problems

The art makes full use of the page, and looks incredible in the oversized Essential Edition. Gibbons frames everything in black and lays white narration over that space to keep the images clear, interrupted only by text balloons. Despite both groups wearing near uniforms, you know who everyone is by their facial structures and haircuts. Sometimes he has cinematic storytelling, sometimes comic collage images, and sometimes just intimate little close ups. He also creates advertisements and newspaper clippings to flesh out the world. Gibbons is flexing his skills all over the place with this book.

An example of great comic art: many artists today would have simply cut and paste the faces from the larger pic to make panels out of them. Gibbons probably lightboxed them, then added details to them to make them more than just repeated images. He added that panic to their eyes

The whole book is done in gray scale, and giving it a timeless feeling. It feels old, but things were never like this.

It's a high school story

Gibbons has worked with Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Mark Millar over the past decades and lots of other writers. He's also written some superhero books himself. This book is his personal thing, I can feel the love he has for everything in here. 

The only complaint, and it's a minor thing, is the pages absorb the oils from your fingers, so there are fingerprint smudges all over the book now. That's the cost of reading sometimes.

Ah yeah

This is his auteur work. It has the energy of youth, and the refinement of decades of experience. I had no idea I was looking for this, but I'm so glad I found it.

One Coin Reads 15: Fear Agent, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Jerome Opena

Fear Agent, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Jerome Opena

2000's, collected in 2018

For weeks, as I was scouring the discount books, Fear Agent was looking back at me. ¥387. That's practically free. I read a bunch of Rick Remender work in the last few years: X-Force, Tokyo Ghost, Low, Deadly Class, Black Science. I like it, but it makes me a little tired with it's in-your-face rock and roll attitude. And I'm not a fan of Tony Moore's art (not a hater, but not a fan). Still, the cover looked fun. It has a Mars Attacks! vibe.

Anyway, long story short, I bought it and accidentally ordered the third book as well, so I'm on the way to knowing Fear Agent.

You know exactly what that beam sounds like just by looking at it

Fear Agent is a story about Earth as it gets involved in an intergalactic conflict. It was confusing at first, as book two opens with a four issue story of aliens landing, blowing things up, and the humans fighting back. I wondered if it was a pulp anthology series that restarted each arc, but in the second storyline, characters from the first arc appeared, years having passed and them looking grizzled. I was actively avoiding Wikipedia while reading since you shouldn't have to check a book's backstory when you read it, but I was genuinely puzzled as to what the concept behind the book was.  I had to do some leaps in logic to connect the dots between the first and second arcs, but it was nothing too challenging. After finishing the book, a Wikipedia check revealed that that first arc was a flashback, and the second story started where the first book collection left off.

I don't know if that's a case of, "That's what you get for starting with book two," but it wasn't exactly user friendly. 

There is excessive violence, verging on comedic

The book has a tone that's hard to pin down at first. The stories are very pulpy, and I'm all in for that, but the art, especially Tony Moore, is cartoony and takes away from the grittiness of it. If Remender could have time travelled and gotten Wally Wood to draw this, it would have been legendary. As it is, Moore's art doesn't suck me in. I had the exact same vibe with his art the first arc of Walking Dead: he's really a talented artist, but he's not a good fit for dramatic stories.

Moore is happy to draw gore, but it doesn't shock me

Opeña manages better, and I was amazed at just how different this art work was from his X-Force work. Here he does fairly traditional ink work, and it ranges from cartoony to classic EC. Some of it really captured a classic sci-fi style. He definitely becomes a better artist in the years to come, but his work here is strong.

I liked the pulp vibe the book was going for. The aliens are ridiculous looking. The physics don't have to make sense. This is not hard sci-fi. It's called science-fiction, not science-boring. 

Kipferia brings John Carter of Mars to mind

This came out before Remender and Opeña did X-Force together, so it was an opportunity to see them before they had developed into the heavyweight creators they are today. I mostly enjoy Remender's 2010's work. He's got a good pace to his stuff, and creates fleshed out worlds. And he has some fun with his work. It's not serious stuff to over-analyze, but old fashioned melodrama polished up for a modern audience. More than his current books like Deadly Class or Low though, Fear Agent is a fun book.

I liked that panel on the right: classic pose, classic ray gun

When I'm reading with a book review in mind, I often stop to take a few pics to remind myself what stood out as I was reading, and with this book, while there was tons of crazy stuff, I didn't take any pics. None of it is exceptional. But I enjoyed the book overall and will keep it. I'll probably pull this trade and give it a reread in a few years. It's fun and breezy, and sometimes that hits the spot.

I Really Should Read This 18: Uzumaki, by Junji Ito

Uzumaki, by Junji Ito

late 1990s, Deluxe English Edition 2010

Junji Ito is probably my last major manga blind spot. There are roughly infinity manga books out there, but I've made an effort to try out most creators who resonated strongly with English audiences. When I first saw his name popping up, he was labeled a 'master of horror,' a genre I'm not into. But like all genre works, the best of it rises up above the genre, so I've taken the plunge into the world of Junji Ito. Is Uzumaki his best? I have no clue, I just know that my friend shrugged off the book I was originally about to get as "not his best," so here's hoping this is good representation of his work. 

(I want to say that the fact that it's released in a deluxe edition would hopefully mean it's a better book, but that doesn't actually mean anything these days, other than the publisher wants to charge you more for it.) 

When the light hits the cover just right...

The book gets a gorgeous hardcover treatment. The paper is manga newsprint, so up front, I loved the production values. And it's quite a tome at over 600 pages. 

Uzumaki is the story of Kirie Goshima, a high school girl living in the seaside community of Kurouzu-cho. The town, as the back cover states, is contaminated with spirals. The first half of the book are the stories surrounding the death or disappearances of townsfolk, all related to spirals. Characters are obsessed with spirals, haunted by spirals, turned into spirals. Spirals.

Foreshadowing: the book is comically unsubtle

It took a while for me to clue in: this is not a horror book, this is a horror/comedy. Much like the old EC Tales From the Crypt might scare a kid, for an adult reader, it's just so over the top that it never really sinks in that this might be really happening. Kirie watches as the most crazy stuff happens, and then just goes to school the next day like it was nothing at all. Comedic horror is a genre of horror, and one I used to enjoy, it just wasn't what I expected before reading. 

These things happen

When her two Romeo-and-Juliet-style-forbidden-romance classmates run away from their parents and finally coil themselves up like giant snakes and crawl away entwined into the sea, you'd think there'd be some investigation. When a slow classmate just turns into a giant snail and slugs his way up the school walls, you'd think class might get canceled. But life goes on in the small seaside town of Kurouzu-cho. Perhaps the town founders made a mistake in naming the town "Black Spiral" (黒渦).

This sort of thing happens too

Once you understand that crazy stuff is going to keep happening, and everybody in the town is only going to shrug it off (except Kirie's boyfriend Shuichi, who knows the spiral is going to destroy everything), it's a fun book. Not scary, but fun. Ito tries to surpass himself chapter by chapter on just how weird the town can get. Blood-sucking pregnant women, with placenta that grows mushrooms. A flaming lighthouse. Tornado riding youth gangs. Houses so stuffed with people that they become clumps. When it finally gets to the end, he takes it as far as he could have and the town becomes a spiral. Does any of it make any sense? No, none of it. No more than a mummy's curse or a werewolf does. He just creates his own nonsense mythology, which holds up under its own logic.

Spiral hair battle

I'm a little surprised this resonated so well in the West. Japanese stories don't always resolve like Western ones. Sometimes they don't resolve at all, they simply end. But probably the sheer weirdness of Ito's ideas make up for whatever foreignness one could feel from the story construction.

Too many people is a safety hazard

The art is great. Sometimes, he draws people standing in a static way, with Kirie and Shuichi making the same facial expression from the same angle throughout the book, but overall, his art is imaginative, the backgrounds give a sense of place, and he draws dozens of things which nobody has ever drawn before. Repeatedly, I found myself muttering, "What...?" as I read at the audacity of the images he creates. The line work is gentle though. He draws each strand of Kirie's hair. This is not brash, loud art. Ito keeps most of the book quite restrained, letting his 'loud' images have much more impact.

Ito can be really delicate with his art

I read this quickly over a few days and really enjoyed it, but I probably won't buy another of his books soon or become a completist collector. As cool as it was, the characters were just ciphers for the story. I don't need a library of this sort of book. But I get why people love Ito's work and I'm glad I read it.

One Coin Reads 14: Justice League United Volume 1, by Jeff Lemire and Mike McKone

Justice League United Volume 1, by Jeff Lemire and Mike McKone

2015

Justice League Canada? I'm Canadian, I gotta like that, right?

I was actually excited to see a chimpanzee in the book, but it was just an image for Animal Man

It turns out, no. No, I don't. I'm not interested in dunking on books, and when there's a book I don't care for, I've been trying to critique it as if I knew the creators. You wouldn't say something is out and out terrible to someone's face.  This isn't terrible, but it's not good. It's another in a long line of corporate books created for the sake of taking up space on the shelves.

Why did I buy it? At first, I skipped over it multiple times. But it was only ¥497. That's a reason to buy. It's part of DC's New 52. That's a reason to skip. Jeff Lemire's a Canadian who likes making Canadiana, he's not an American simply making poutine references. That's a reason to buy. Jeff Lemire wrote one of the least interesting X-Men titles I've ever read. That's a reason to skip. Mike McKone is a solid, interesting artist. That's a reason to buy. DC editorial insists on their being multiple Justice League titles for brand recognition's sake. That's a reason to skip.

But I decided to buy it, and was actually kind of curious once it arrived. This wasn't like the Cyberforce book I pushed aside for three months afraid to open it. I put this ahead of a lot of other books hoping it would be a breezy, fun book while I read other heavier ones.

Next page, that guy is flying in a space suit. That's the origin of Adam Strange

Justice League United is a book. It has a beginning, middle and ending. It's all professionally done, but it feels so uninspired. The story is related to Ontario, and the action is spit between Moosonee and outer space. 

A quick synopsis: some Justice Leaguers investigate a disappearance in Moosonee and find an alien research center. They get teleported to space and fight a space terrorist trying to kidnap a super alien baby. The good guys win and they come back. A B-story involves a Cree high school student learning she has powers.

That's how you join the League

Potentially, Lemire could explore a lot of interesting things over a 40 issue series, but DC just cancels series that aren't juggernaut sellers, so judging this book on the six issues inside is completely fair to do. This book doesn't offer much new except for a novel Canadian setting, and it doesn't do much with that. You'd have to already be taken with the characters to want to know more, and I suspect that was the audience. Few people found this title by accident, as compared to the main Geoff Johns' Justice League title which probably did end up as some folks first exposure to the team.

This Justice League is: 

-Martian Manhunter, who is a stoic leader. I wish he had some of the dry humor of the 80s version of him, but this version is dour. I skipped 20 years of Justice League comics, so that is probably just what the character is now. 

-Green Arrow is an idiot, apparently. His one character trait is insulting Animal Man. I know this was the younger, cooler Nu-52 version, and it sucks. I'm not going to tone down my disdain here. It was a poor choice on whoever decided to recast him as brat.

-Animal Man, who is one of my favorite DC characters from back in the Vertigo era, basically acts like the MCU Ant-Man. He has a no respect schtick. 

Characterization

-Stargirl is a character I don't really know at all, but she was mostly interesting, and probably the best character in the book. She plays the role of an enthusiastic newbie. When a team of heroes goes into outer space, it's good to have at least one character not be bored by it. Of the main team, she is the most likable.

-Supergirl makes an appearance, but isn't in it much to give a sense of her character. She does have an interesting scene where she takes offense to Stargirl talking about aliens.

-Adam Strange. He finds an alien suit and instantly becomes a superhero. This was ridiculous. His wife Alanna Strange is given a similar suit and would seem to provide a similar role as him. It's an interesting twist, but in the context of the story it doesn't work.

-Equinox is the new character, but she doesn't have a code name in the story. They just invite her into the league.

I kinda love this?

They use Lobo in the space scenes, and not the Main Man version people like, but the NU-52, manscaped, DC-editorial-is-trolling-you Lobo. I kind of love it. It was a pointless change to make Lobo sexy-handsome, but it's so stupid that it goes all the way into amazing. I think this version is going to make a comeback one day, or at least live forever in clickbait lists of the worst changes ever made. I'm not trying to say it's good, but it is interesting.

So the story is bland, the characters are mostly thin and less likable than past incarnations, and nothing is compelling about it. How much of this is Lemire's fault? How much is it him simply working within the strict (so it has been said) editorial confines of the New 52? I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that they paid him to make a lemon and he tried to make lemonade. He put some Cree culture in a mainstream DC book. It wasn't a very good book, but most of the New 52 books weren't very good, so it's not like he was doing any worse than most there.

Panel 3 looks good

McKone is a good artist. He works in a style of hard, tight inks which isn't usually up my alley, but I like it when he does it, and have been a fan of his since I first saw his work in the 80s Justice League International. Whatever gripes I have with this, it isn't with him.

The coloring is bland for the most part, digital airbrush tools. On a few alien pages, it jumps to dayglo colors, and I thought it popped in a nice way, then it went back to "realistic" colors and I lost interest. There was one thing they did where action would get accented by flat red colors over black and white characters, foregoing all realism. That looked good. It didn't add up to much, but it was a neat technique and break from the rest of the book.

I couldn't recommend this to anyone. I checked Wikipedia, and it lasted 16 issues. That sounds about right. Everyone involved can do better than this.

I Really Should Read This 17: How to Be Happy, by Eleanor Davis

How to Be Happy, by Eleanor Davis

2014

I went into reading this with a huge respect for Davis' talent, and came out of this with that estimation doubled.

I've read three other Davis books (The Hard Tomorrow, Why Art?, and Libby's Dad), but they were self-contained single works. How to Be Happy is a collection of short stories showcasing the versatility in her work. Just opening to the first page of the first story, you see a virtuoso use of color and printing. It looks better than most other work I see.

It's not just the colors, it's layering yellow over the blue to create the paths of green. It's delicate work

Each story has a slightly different process. Some are ink, some are paints, some are done with a computer, but most are a combination of processes. Her line work and character design is much more in line with traditional illustration than with any school of American comics, and it seems she is a successful illustrator outside of her comics work. We're lucky to have her making comics, because it's likely illustration is paying her ten times what comic work does.

A short venture into sci-fi storytelling

The stories themselves show a range of themes, but I'd classify all the work in it as 'human'. The story climaxes are emotional ones, rather than solving objective goals. And they are great. The worst are pretty good, and the best are just on the edge of exquisite. What is it all about? Well, great writing is often slightly obtuse and leaves some space for the reader to make their own meaning of it. 

A story about skinning a fox is barely a story, but it's a good read

 My personal favorite in the book was Stick and String, where a musician lures a beast of a woman to his small shack and soothes her with music. I can't say how Davis is intending it to be read, but I had deep reflections from it about how humans keep themselves from going crazy while living divorced from nature... music, art, culture are used to soothe us. That is just me, and her intent could be something altogether different, but the story is not didactic in what its saying. It gives the reader the space to do their own math about what it adds up to.

Stick and String

The book itself is not a guide to being happy as the title suggests, but a lot of the stories are themed around desire and connections. It manages to cover such heavy topics without being burdensome to read or feeling too much like Art. Each story is just people doing things. Some stories are built like stories, and others are quick character sketches.

She can do a lot with negative space

The portrayals are personal and affecting.

The cure for depression is just around the corner

The entirety of the book shows an artist who is exploring ideas and making their own creative space. It's one of the most idiosyncratic and original books I've read in a long time.

I used to be so unhappy

Her only other major work I haven't read is You & a Bike & a Road, and I didn't buy it when it came out as it sounded like a travel sketchbook. Maybe it is, but now I really want to read her travel sketchbook.

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.