Tony Isabella once wrote (IIRC at least) that what inspired him to write comics was reading Fantastic Four Annual #1 and noticing how much better it was than the previous issue, FF #18 (debut of the Super-Skrull). Not that #18 was bad, but the annual was outstanding. That made Isabella see that creating comics wasn’t some rote task Stan Lee and Jack Kirby turned out automatically; it was skilled work and skilled craftsmen improve over time.
As my Silver Age rereading takes me into late 1967 and early 1968 I’ve been thinking about the rise and fall of quality in the comics on the stands. I’ve now been rereading for (so to speak) more than a decade; I’ve seen mediocre books suddenly get good, good books run out of steam and series exhibit one brief flash of quality (or un-quality) before returning to their normal level. As economist Peter Bernstein says, that’s the nature of averages: if you’re performing way above (or below) your level one month, the odds are good you’ll be back to normal next month.
(And yes, there are exceptions, runs where the creative team breaks crappy and never recovers. Most of Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern run. Chris Claremont on X-Men after #200. I wasted a lot of money and reading time telling myself those books and several others would eventually have to improve, so why have a blank stretch in my unbroken run? Fool!).
That’s something I should have remembered writing about Thor in 1967. Thor vs. the Circus of Crime was such a silly plot I wondered if the bloom had finally come off the rose. But then comes several issues in which the Wrecker — a canny, cunning crook rather than the brainless thug he’d be written as later — gets charged up with Asgardian magic by mistake. Now he’s in Thor’s weight class but Thor isn’t, having been stripped of most of his might by Odin (yes, again). Needless to say, Thor’s still won’t run from the fight.
But he doesn’t have a chance.
No question it’s not up to the issues of a couple of years earlier; rather than interweaving two or three plots it’s a single tale stretched over several issues. But it’s a dynamic, exciting yarn that makes it easy for me to forgive the creators for that Ringmaster mess. The only complaint I have is that after going to the effort of replacing Jane Foster with Sif, she’s playing the Helpless Girlfriend just as much as Jane did. Sure, the dialog keeps reminding us that she’s an Asgardian warrior but the story doesn’t let her show it.
I also had reservations about how Stan Lee and John Romita were handling Spider-Man’s latest battle with Dr. Octopus, particularly when it ended up with Spider-Man suffering from the fictional world’s most common disease, amensia. To my surprise, it worked out well — in a sense it’s just another problem piled on Peter Parker’s plate. He has no memory of his identity so even after he takes down Doc Ock he’s wondering around while Aunt May freaks out, Harry freaks out, Gwen frets … once again Peter can’t seem to win. Even Jonah siccing a visiting Ka-Zar on Spidey for a Hero vs. Hero has it’s moments — Jonah almost convinces Spider-Man to unmask (if there’s one person he can trust, it’s Mr. Jameson!) when Ka-Zar, of course, pounces and ruins everything.
Avengers, on the other hand, has hit a below-average slump since I last blogged about them. Partly it’s that the Magneto plotline that introduced the Black Knight isn’t very good. A bigger issue is that with Captain America off the team (Stan’s call, not Roy’s), Natasha retired (Roy’s fault) and the Maximoffs hanging with Magneto again (that was Roy too) the team is now Hawkeye, Goliath, Wasp and Hercules — and the Lion of Olympus leaves at the end of #50.
To me the lineup is now less impressive than the Detroit Justice League. It just ain’t the Avengers any more.
In Strange Tales, Jim Steranko’s SHIELD work is still strong but the magic has gone out of Dr. Strange completely. Where the Lee/Ditko Dr. Strange was a true thinking man’s hero, the current creative team (Jim Lawrence and various artists) just has him zap things. And they don’t take much zapping — #165 and 166 assure us the robot Voltorr is a terrifying, unbeatable foe, but nope, he goes down easy.
Dan Adkins design doesn’t work either. For all his creator’s ranting, Voltorr looks like he’s about to perform a drum solo. Drummers are not scary.
Strange’s decline highlights one of the classic reasons series suddenly change quality — because the creators change. Archie Goodwin takes over as Iron Man’s writer in early ’68 and his run is amazing (I will be blogging more about it soon). On the other hand, Bob Haney takes over Hawkman with #22 (with Dick Dillin on art and George Kashdan now editing) and his run … is not.
The first story, “Quoth the Falcon, Hawkman Must Die” has an interesting angle: in the course of whipping up hysteria over Aliens Among Us, the villainous Falcon exposes Carter Hall as an extraterrestrial. Unlike the typical reveal of this sort, the story ends with the knowledge still out there, though nobody knows he’s Hawkman. That could have been interesting to play with but Haney just forgets this and never references it again (Isabella consigned the entire Haney run to Earth-B when he was doing Shadow War of Hawkman). Beyond that, while I’ve enjoyed Haney on other books, he just can’t make the Winged Wonder click the way the old creative team did.
Such is life when you’re a comic book character, or a comic-book reader.
#SFWApro. Art by Kirby (x4), Don Heck, John Romita, Dan Adkins and Dick Dillin.
