Some Rambling Notes on Comic Books

I have plenty to do otherwise, but I have a need to get some of this rambling crud out of my brain.

I have long had a post in my memory banks concerning comic books, and as I've thought about different things to add to it, it kinda morphed into a series of posts, and those seemed to balloon into a a project of a different kind. Like, I may desire to write a kind of history of the form, or catalog the mid-'90s implosion or the new renaissance that's occurring currently.

There are so many angles and subjects that I want to discuss, and that really to do it like I want may turn it from a series of posts into a series of "post-chapters" that could be collected. Like any of us have the time for that.

I have plenty to do otherwise...

One of the resources I used to collect the images I'll be using here today is Comic Book Realm. They have an immense database of comic book covers.

There are many genres that were highlighted in the thirties, forties, and fifties that were blotted out by the hysteria over the "Seduction of the Innocent" era. Those same genres were kept alive in the form in Japan, and are part of the current landscape back here in the States. Superheroes were the meat of the medium here for the bulk of the publication history over the last sixty years.

The purpose of this post is to 1) serve as an intro; 2) show myself I can consolidate rambling rootless ideas into something more; 3) highlight the varying levels of publisher in the comic book industry that all too often focuses on DC and Marvel a little too narrowly.

One of the reasons this (series of) post(s) has taken so long to get going is the wide-angle lens needed to look at everything...so I'm trying to narrow the focus here as an exercise.

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Superhero comics have a wide array of types of characters, and besides character's abilities or powers, I'd like to momentarily highlight "popularity to the consumer" as a necessary element. Superman, Batman, Spiderman...these characters are all quite popular and will continue to have various monthly titles being published until...well, until they're no longer iconic members of a collected mass-media identity. Who knows when that may be...

But other characters who may not enjoy such lofty popularity levels get cancelled...and then brought back later, possibly altered, and put back out to a find a new audience. Sometimes they get cancelled again...and brought out again later...and cancelled again...you get the idea.

What I plan on doing now are looking at two specific characters and their mottled publishing history and how the character changed over those years. One character exists in one single comic book universe, both company-wise and fictional-universe-wise. The other character represents the extraordinary makeup of the publishing universe.

The first character is the Spectre, the white-skinned and green-cloaked apparition from the early DC universe. The Spectre started out as James Corrigan, a detective killed by gangsters who has his spirit fused with god's Wrath. He uses his powers to end bad guys, in creative ways, but after a while the talent behind the title lost interest, and the Spectre was relegated to help-out duty as a member of the Justice Society, the fore-runner of the Justice League.

In 1967 the Spectre returned with his own title, but lasted only until 1969:

On the shelf until 1987, the Spectre may have been used occasionally throughout the seventies and early eighties, but my own knowledge doesn't have that filled in so well. But in 1987, he was back with his own title. This time the Spectre was sort of a boss-like character, head of the section of the DC universe that deals with the occult and magic. Other characters with wizardly powers occupied this space.

Only they didn't really know what to do with the character. It only lasted until 1989. In 1992, John Ostrander came to DC with an idea for reviving Spectre...in truth it had to have been before, probably near the end of the Volume 2 series, seeing as how the Volume 3 series debuted in 1992.

One of the reasons I chose the Spectre for this discussion was primarily because of this Volume 3 and the following Volume 4 editions of this title. I read the John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake title for a few years. These guys had a plan...

Lasting until 1997, the title examined the internal battle between the dead Jimmy Corrigan and the nearly all-powerful Wrath. Many stories dealt with the Spectre being summoned to mete out vengeance upon some lowly subjects who had misbehaved (often committing acts far more socially acceptable-while-being-wrong rather than capital offenses), and the ensuing battle between the remaining humanity within Corrigan and the need for blind violent justice.

The stories were compelling and they gave the character some teeth. During a rather successful decade, the Spectre turned up in many titles, usually as a motivating character or uninvolved messenger (see the house-cleaning "Zero Hour" crossover or the fully painted collection of fine art "Kingdom Come").

Near the end, the readership skewed more mature, and with the speculative bubble-busting, the title was scrapped.

Within a few years, though, it was decided that Hal Jordan, former Green Lantern turned bad-guy named Parallax (again, see "Zero Hour"), was just too important to be gone forever. He was brought back, but not as a Green Lantern, but rather as the ghost tied to Wrath.

This was between 2001 and 2003, and soon enough Hal was back to being the young, non-white-templed Green Lantern everyone loved, but for a while he acted as the Spectre. I'm not quite sure what happened during the title's run, and I'll look into it later.

I find it interesting how upon each cover of each iteration, the Spectre's doing something magical with its hand(s).

Now the second character was brought back a few times, but has as many companies publishing him as there are editions. This character is Solar, Man of the Atom, but occasionally called Doctor Solar. He was one of three Gold Key characters from the fifties and sixties that Jim Shooter purchased the rights to to launch his own fully consistent and inclusive fictional universe in the nineties in Valiant. This was right after Shooter failed in his bid to purchase Marvel; he left and formed his own company, but that's the subject for a different day.

Solar debuted in 1962 for Gold Key Comics, and arrived at his "iconic" outfit by issue 3. Here's a neat cover from issue 7:

Gold Key was neat because they had oversized comics and didn't follow the Comics Code Authority. The other two characters who's rights were purchased were Magnus, a robot fighter from the 40th century, and Turok, a dinosaur hunting native American. This iteration ran through 27 issues to 1969, and was brought back in 1981 with issue #28:

This version lasted for four issues that stretched into 1982.

The Valiant universe from the nineties was created inadvertently by Solar, and while I wasn't a reader of Solar specifically, I was/am a fan of the Valiant line of reading material. Here, is issue #7's cover, because I thought I'd do my part to follow the thread:

This title ran from 1991 until 1996, when Valiant stopped publishing under the Valiant banner and the video game company Acclaim revamped the universe it had bought at the height of the bubble in '94, finally using their own banner.

As the following cover states, indeed, "Look what we've done":

The Acclaim folks had a few one-shots and this miniseries (from 1998), and they were relatively well received, but the industry was in a changing mood, and by late '98, Acclaim was shuttering the comic book part of their company.

The jumped in at a tough time, strangled their titles, decided to revamp them to make them more video-game-showcasing friendly, and by the end took a bath on the whole enchilada.

Years later, the mega-independent publisher Dark Horse, the first label to find a steady life on the Marvel and DC margins, approached Jim Shooter with an idea to revamp Solar once again. Here is that series' cover for issue #7, this time from 2011:

That series was well received enough to garner the attentions of one of the newest companies that had carved out a niche on licensed material. Both IDW and the company here, Dynamite, have made a very successful business out of producing high-quality licensed material: stuff from movies, television cartoons, and old comic properties.

Here's one of the variant covers from issue #1 from just last year, in 2014.

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I enjoy specifically how both of these titles can, when properly informed, trace out so much of the industry's history over the past 80 years. Purpose and popularity cycle greatly over the years, and both the Spectre and Solar can attest to that. 

With the Spectre one can watch one of the comic book blue bloods---DC---flail about and try to milk a lucrative idea out of a misunderstood property and find varying levels of success.

With Solar, one can see how much of an industry isn't controlled by the blue bloods, and how only two major current publishers have been left out of the story (Image and IDW).

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Going about some research for my students about the comics I'd be "selling" for Sherbux, I stumbled upon some reporting of the reemergence of the Valiant comic book universe. That was the impetus for the return to researching ideas for and about comics.

While I'm not fully convinced I did what I wanted to do with this post, I started the ball rolling on an idea I've been scratching notes on for a while now. 

More Flanagan Magic

At the end of the long camping trip we took earlier this summer, and after a long walk from the ocean to the Haight---all the way through Golden Gate Park---we stopped in at an independent bookstore. It's one of my habits: trying to find something to buy at independent bookstores.

On this trip I found a nice paperback copy of Richard Flanagan's Man Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North:

Flanagan's other majorly well-received work, Gould's Book of Fish, is one of my favorite books ever, and I've picked up and read over the years two others of his (Wanting and The Unknown Terrorist) at our erstwhile local Dollar Bookstore solely on the merits of Gould's... They weren't as good of the ...Book of Fish, but that's unfair, as few books are.

Having finished Narrow Road to the Deep North, I'd like to report that it is as good, but in a different way. Structurally the storytelling may be superior, and as the back of the paperback says, "This is the book Richard Flanagan was born to write." That's true.

I was under the impression, gauging from reviews, that it was a brutal look at a Japanese POW camp in Burma as orders came down from the Emperor to build the un-buildable railroad from Siam to the west and hasten both the planned invasion of British-held India and continue a supply chain to the western-front Japanese troops, a supply chain that had been cutoff from the seas by the American military.

I was surprised then as the sections of the book unfolded and the Camp took a while at which to arrive. After I'd finished the book, I went back through and reexamined the opening chapter, and then set about marking off the five sections in my own pencil. I'd mark my own titular label, the pages it covered, how many pages are in the section, a brief recap of the section's content, and even the previous section's beginning and ending pages. Check out the page for Part III, labeled by me as "The Camp/The Line":

I did this to illuminate a few things for myself in the middle of trying to scratch out my own first novel. I used it mostly as a guide for pacing.

The return to the first chapter of a book about suffering, deceit, infidelity, leadership, and history's ramifications was fully enlightening. I marveled how in the 52 pages Flanagan sets up each one of the character types and characters---outside of Major Nakamura. Everything's there. The introduction of our hero, Dorrigo Evans, happens in the very beginning, and we get a look at him as a boy--oversized and confident. We meet his brother and see some shenanigans between Tom, the brother, and a neighbor's wife. The section jumps around through time effortlessly, as we get the post-war and now sorta famous Dorrigo as he's lamenting having to write the forward of book based on a collection of prison camp paintings while also not being sure why he's still keeping an affair going with his mistress, the wife of a fellow surgeon.

We then get glimpses of Dorrigo and Amy, from before being shipped out, and it seems like Dorry and Amy may have had something. We get an internal issue from older Dorry about one of his prison camp soldiers, Darky Gardiner.

So far, no prison camp itself stuff.

The next section is nearly a hundred ages, and chronicles Dorrigo and Amy's torrid love affair, and his constant self-loathing through it all, Amy being the much-younger wife of someone who qualifies as Dorrigo's uncle.

Over a hundred-and-fifty pages in, and we finally get to the Camp. Here we get Nakamura and Darky, Colonel Kota and all the boys on the Line. Here we meet Dorrigo Evans as the "Big Fella", soon enough in charge as commanding officer and reluctantly having to choose which men to send on one-way tickets to the reaper. The scenes of brutality, of starvation, of tropical ulcers and uncontrollable diarrhea during the monsoons of Siam and Burma, of the shabu-addicted Nakamura (shabu is Japanese meth-amphetamine), are painted with stomach-churning power.

The fourth section covers the random lives of the survivors in the intervening years up until their deaths, and how each of them were severely affected by the Camp, including Nakamura in the ashy remnants of Tokyo. The fifth and last section is mostly the same, but we get the end of Dorrigo and Nakamura and even Amy, the revelation about Darky, and even a big forest fire action sequence.

Heartbreak and loss and pain are the pieces of life that literature can best showcase over the course of work, and here, coming full circle with the first section, an idea is driven home masterfully. Coming in at under 400 pages also shows off Flanagan's abilities.

This book is a masterpiece.

Odd note: there is much discussion by characters both Aussie and Japanese about poetry, and each of the section markers that I drew on have tiny fragments of poems. Even the book's title, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is taken from the travelogue writing of Japanese master Basho. I find it interesting that this masterpiece by Flanagan takes as a title the exact same name of another, much older well-known work.

That's interesting because the exact same thing happened with his other masterpiece, Gould's Book of Fish. That work is named for the original William Gould's Australian-prison project that carries the same name and exists in the Aussie National Archives as a treasure.

Symmetry of some kind I suppose...