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A Barracuda Eating Neil Armstrong
Aug. 5th, 2010 09:31 pmI used to buy, and read, a lot of comics as a kid. At some point my buying just dropped off, or at least became more selective.
My brother was the one who got me started. It was probably Micronauts comics that first got me interested, because I liked my Micronauts toys, what I had of them. Ditto, to some extent for such other tie-in comics as Shogun Warriors, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. But it didn't take too long for me to get into the mainstream superhero comics as well, especially with the help of Stan Lee's Origins of Marvel Comics, an interesting combination of a history of Marvel Comics (somewhat simplified, I imagine) and a sampling of their early works, including the first issues of such seminal comics as Fantastic Four, Thor, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and the Hulk. So I was recruited early on into the Marvel side of comics, and never read more than the occasional DC, with a few exceptions (The New Teen Titans, for instance).
At first I was kind of limited to the stuff my brother was buying, but I soon got the wherewithal to make my own purchases--I don't think we ever subscribed to anything, just went down to Al's News (not quite a newsstand, but the next thing to) and saw what they had. There were always a few gaps, times when either I didn't get down to the store while it was there, or they ran out of copies before I bought mine.
The X-Men (I suppose I should call it "Uncanny X-Men" to keep it clear, these days--back in the late 70's and early 80's, there was just the one series) were always a favourite, as well as the ones I mentioned earlier (and Rom: Spaceknight, a slightly later addition), but I got sucked into a number of others. I read more Avengers and Defenders than Fantastic Four (which I didn't start buying until later), though I never more than dabbled in Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, or the Hulk. I read Dr. Strange when I could find it, but it seemed to be harder to come by. I got sucked into a number of marketing ploys, like buying the "Collector's Item 1st Issue" of anything new, which included a lot of the miniseries that were so popular back then. And the crossovers, which didn't get really out of control until the whole Secret Wars II thing, after which they decided to do it every frickin' year or something. And then there started to be a bunch of spinoffs--The New Mutants, Alpha Flight, X-Factor, West Coast Avengers...
I stopped reading somewhere about '87 or '88, after Secret Wars II, probably around the time of the Mutant Massacre. The Massacre itself was part of what turned me off, but also, I moved out on my own for university and had less disposable income. And that was mostly it, at least for Marvel Comics.
There were a few other comics I kept buying for years after that, though. My brother, who had been a big fan of Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey in Epic Magazine, bought at least the first few issues of the Dreadstar series that continued that storyline. (I've never read Metamorphosis Odyssey myself, though.) I started buying it again shortly after First Comics took it over, I think, and eventually filled in all of the missing issues from second-hand comics bins. I started buying the new Silver Surfer series, but didn't keep it up until I started hearing good things about it later, and once again backfilled that one. My friend Troy, who I met at college, introduced me to Watchmen, Grimjack, and (indirectly) Cerebus; I bought the Watchmen trade paperback when it came out, caught up on Grimjack, and eventually bought the Cerebus phonebooks and caught up on that too. I also picked up Love & Rockets (entirely on my own) and read that for a while, at least until petering out somewhere after they restarted the series. My brother also got me a few sampler comics for one birthday, of which Sandman was the one I stuck to; I read a little bit of Books of Magic and The Endless as well, but didn't keep them up. Ditto with the Infinity Watch spinoffs from Silver Surfer.
The only new comics I've been buying recently have been the Buffy Season 8 series, and those mostly in the trade paperbacks, because apparently I can't get back into the habit of buying a monthly comic anymore.
Anyway, I do dig them out to reread from time to time. I haven't kept all of them--I got rid of most of my Alpha Flight, Avengers, and Fantastic Four stuff a while back, but that's all the culling I've done, and sometimes I regret it. I could probably do more, though.
My most frequent rereads are probably the X-Men comics, especially after one of the movies comes out. I have some of the early Stan Lee and Roy Thomas issues in reprints, but I don't like those as much. I usually start with the Classic X-Men reprint series of the "New X-Men"; my original issues are spotty until about #130. I originally stopped around #219, but I've expanded that a few more years after that with back issues, until after the Fall of The Mutants, but not as far as Inferno or anything. Occasionally I'll reread some of the related series too, like New Mutants, Magik, X-Factor, or some of the limited series. I never read Excalibur all that much--it sounded a bit too silly.
The other series that I bought later--Sandman, Dreadstar, Grimjack, Silver Surfer, Cerebus, and Love & Rockets--get reread fairly frequently, too. Cerebus is too daunting to reread all of, which I've only managed once (some of it is extremely unrewarding). I usually slow down and stop in my Dreadstar rereading about the time that Jim Starlin leaves and Peter David takes over; curiously, I usually stop in my Silver Surfer rereads about the time that Steve Englehart leaves and Jim Starlin takes over. Go figure.
Every once in a while I pick out something else for my rereads. Something I haven't read in a while. Most recently it was Rom. Rom was another product tie-in comic, like Micronauts. In fact, I think they had the same writer, Bill Mantlo. (That's something I rarely noticed before that I try to pay attention to on rereads--writers and artists.) The art was mostly done by Sal Buscema, and one thing that I found interesting rereading it this time was noticing his art evolving. I kept having to check to confirm it was still him. Maybe it was changing inkers, I suppose--I'm still a little fuzzy on how much of a difference that makes--but it did improve as I read the series.
The basic premise of Rom was that a shapeshifting alien race called Dire Wraiths had infiltrated Earth. Two centuries earlier, they had attacked Rom's home planet of Galador, and Galador had responded by turning some of its citizens (volunteers all) into Spaceknights, making them into cyborgs encased in "living" metal armour and giving them weapons to use against the wraiths. Not bad, considering how awful the toy was, apparently. Rom is instantly misunderstood by the Earthlings he encounters, who see him killing people who look human, and only gradually do some of them come to find out what he's actually doing. It's a transparent screed against judging by appearances, I suppose, and sometime Mantlo takes it a bit far. Rom himself is a bit dour, embittered by his seemingly endless mission, and, of course by the fact that he falls in love with Brandy Clark, the human woman he meets in the first issue.
In a game effort to keep it from being too samey, things slowly escalate as the series goes on, until finally enough people are convinced about the wraith menace that the military actually comes in on Rom's side. There's a lot of inconsistency here--in one issue, the president (this is 1982, so I suppose it would be Reagan) announces the dire wraith presence to the world. The next issue, it turns out he didn't after all, and they're still trying to cover it up. Also, apart from one crossover--done quite well--in the X-Men, with Storm and Forge fighting dire wraiths in Dallas, the rest of the Marvel world seems completely oblivious (as far I could tell, anyway) to the fact that there's a war going on. Also, by this point, Steve Ditko has taken over the penciling, and I can't stand Steve Ditko's work; never liked it, not from the first time I saw it during a brief stint on the Micronauts. Anyway, they defeat the dire wraiths, and then the series kind of peters out, with Rom wandering through space for a while and eventually returning to Galador to find it changed.
There were a few gaps in there, at least one quite sizable, but unlike some series, I feel no great urge to go and find the missing issues. Instead, I feel like I can probably get rid of the series completely sometime.
Before that, I reread The Defenders. It's a bit of an oddball series; for most of it, the Defenders are a self-proclaimed "non-team", mostly consisting of Dr. Strange, his "assistant" Clea, Hellcat, Nighthawk, Valkyrie, and often the Hulk and one or more others. They spent some time on the mystical Tunnelworld, fighting The Unnameable One, in one of my favourite plotlines. The series switched writers a few times, and probably artists too, though I don't remember now. By Issue 125, the team included former X-Men Iceman, Angel, and the Beast, and acquired a more official status, with a headquarters and government clearance and everything. Even then it was a bit weird, with arrogant bald psychic Moondragon joining under duress (Valkyrie was keeping an eye on her for Odin, who had put limits on her powers), a recurring plotline involving an insatiable fungus lifeform, and a couple of memorable issues with the team dragged along behind two frenetic detectives (and, in one issue, a Grouchonian cab driver). Unfortunately, in hindsight, the series was derailed when whoever it was got the idea to reunite the original X-Men as X-Factor, and presumably decreed and end to The Defenders in the process. Shortly after proving herself worthy of having her powers back, Moondragon turned evil, and everyone but the three X-Men were forced to sacrifice themselves to defeat her. (I seem to recall that some of them were later brought back in the pages of Dr. Strange.)
That's a series I'd like to reread and fill in. It had great contrasts, like the whimsical, cheerful Hellcat (except during her bouts of depression, like after her mother died), the dignified Asgardian Valkyrie (as in, the actual valkyrie Brunnhilda), a somewhat more social side of the Hulk (I still remember a scene with him playing with superhero action figures in Dr. Strange's house), and of Dr. Strange, for that matter. Nighthawk, the millionaire playboy bankrolling the team (every good team needs one of those--Iron Man and Angel, for instance), ended up being investigated by the IRS and banned from superheroing for several issues. In one early plotline, one of the Defenders' friends makes a TV documentary about the Defenders, and a bunch of heroes show up to join them...just as a bunch of villains are robbing banks and impersonating them. So yeah, it's quirky, in a way that the Avengers, despite more light-hearted members like Wasp, The Beast and Wonder Man, couldn't manage (at least while I was reading), what with the gravitas of Thor, Captain America, and The Vision. (I hear that later on, Spider-Man joined the Avengers. I have trouble picturing that, myself. But whatever.)
Soon I should take out the Micronauts again. They had their moments, especially in the more mature second series, "Micronauts: The New Voyages". They tended to be lame when they were on Earth, doing tiny crossovers, but they generally rocked when they were home in the Microverse. (It just occurred to me--Acroyear =~ Lan Mandragoran. Hmmm.)
My brother was the one who got me started. It was probably Micronauts comics that first got me interested, because I liked my Micronauts toys, what I had of them. Ditto, to some extent for such other tie-in comics as Shogun Warriors, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. But it didn't take too long for me to get into the mainstream superhero comics as well, especially with the help of Stan Lee's Origins of Marvel Comics, an interesting combination of a history of Marvel Comics (somewhat simplified, I imagine) and a sampling of their early works, including the first issues of such seminal comics as Fantastic Four, Thor, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and the Hulk. So I was recruited early on into the Marvel side of comics, and never read more than the occasional DC, with a few exceptions (The New Teen Titans, for instance).
At first I was kind of limited to the stuff my brother was buying, but I soon got the wherewithal to make my own purchases--I don't think we ever subscribed to anything, just went down to Al's News (not quite a newsstand, but the next thing to) and saw what they had. There were always a few gaps, times when either I didn't get down to the store while it was there, or they ran out of copies before I bought mine.
The X-Men (I suppose I should call it "Uncanny X-Men" to keep it clear, these days--back in the late 70's and early 80's, there was just the one series) were always a favourite, as well as the ones I mentioned earlier (and Rom: Spaceknight, a slightly later addition), but I got sucked into a number of others. I read more Avengers and Defenders than Fantastic Four (which I didn't start buying until later), though I never more than dabbled in Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, or the Hulk. I read Dr. Strange when I could find it, but it seemed to be harder to come by. I got sucked into a number of marketing ploys, like buying the "Collector's Item 1st Issue" of anything new, which included a lot of the miniseries that were so popular back then. And the crossovers, which didn't get really out of control until the whole Secret Wars II thing, after which they decided to do it every frickin' year or something. And then there started to be a bunch of spinoffs--The New Mutants, Alpha Flight, X-Factor, West Coast Avengers...
I stopped reading somewhere about '87 or '88, after Secret Wars II, probably around the time of the Mutant Massacre. The Massacre itself was part of what turned me off, but also, I moved out on my own for university and had less disposable income. And that was mostly it, at least for Marvel Comics.
There were a few other comics I kept buying for years after that, though. My brother, who had been a big fan of Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey in Epic Magazine, bought at least the first few issues of the Dreadstar series that continued that storyline. (I've never read Metamorphosis Odyssey myself, though.) I started buying it again shortly after First Comics took it over, I think, and eventually filled in all of the missing issues from second-hand comics bins. I started buying the new Silver Surfer series, but didn't keep it up until I started hearing good things about it later, and once again backfilled that one. My friend Troy, who I met at college, introduced me to Watchmen, Grimjack, and (indirectly) Cerebus; I bought the Watchmen trade paperback when it came out, caught up on Grimjack, and eventually bought the Cerebus phonebooks and caught up on that too. I also picked up Love & Rockets (entirely on my own) and read that for a while, at least until petering out somewhere after they restarted the series. My brother also got me a few sampler comics for one birthday, of which Sandman was the one I stuck to; I read a little bit of Books of Magic and The Endless as well, but didn't keep them up. Ditto with the Infinity Watch spinoffs from Silver Surfer.
The only new comics I've been buying recently have been the Buffy Season 8 series, and those mostly in the trade paperbacks, because apparently I can't get back into the habit of buying a monthly comic anymore.
Anyway, I do dig them out to reread from time to time. I haven't kept all of them--I got rid of most of my Alpha Flight, Avengers, and Fantastic Four stuff a while back, but that's all the culling I've done, and sometimes I regret it. I could probably do more, though.
My most frequent rereads are probably the X-Men comics, especially after one of the movies comes out. I have some of the early Stan Lee and Roy Thomas issues in reprints, but I don't like those as much. I usually start with the Classic X-Men reprint series of the "New X-Men"; my original issues are spotty until about #130. I originally stopped around #219, but I've expanded that a few more years after that with back issues, until after the Fall of The Mutants, but not as far as Inferno or anything. Occasionally I'll reread some of the related series too, like New Mutants, Magik, X-Factor, or some of the limited series. I never read Excalibur all that much--it sounded a bit too silly.
The other series that I bought later--Sandman, Dreadstar, Grimjack, Silver Surfer, Cerebus, and Love & Rockets--get reread fairly frequently, too. Cerebus is too daunting to reread all of, which I've only managed once (some of it is extremely unrewarding). I usually slow down and stop in my Dreadstar rereading about the time that Jim Starlin leaves and Peter David takes over; curiously, I usually stop in my Silver Surfer rereads about the time that Steve Englehart leaves and Jim Starlin takes over. Go figure.
Every once in a while I pick out something else for my rereads. Something I haven't read in a while. Most recently it was Rom. Rom was another product tie-in comic, like Micronauts. In fact, I think they had the same writer, Bill Mantlo. (That's something I rarely noticed before that I try to pay attention to on rereads--writers and artists.) The art was mostly done by Sal Buscema, and one thing that I found interesting rereading it this time was noticing his art evolving. I kept having to check to confirm it was still him. Maybe it was changing inkers, I suppose--I'm still a little fuzzy on how much of a difference that makes--but it did improve as I read the series.
The basic premise of Rom was that a shapeshifting alien race called Dire Wraiths had infiltrated Earth. Two centuries earlier, they had attacked Rom's home planet of Galador, and Galador had responded by turning some of its citizens (volunteers all) into Spaceknights, making them into cyborgs encased in "living" metal armour and giving them weapons to use against the wraiths. Not bad, considering how awful the toy was, apparently. Rom is instantly misunderstood by the Earthlings he encounters, who see him killing people who look human, and only gradually do some of them come to find out what he's actually doing. It's a transparent screed against judging by appearances, I suppose, and sometime Mantlo takes it a bit far. Rom himself is a bit dour, embittered by his seemingly endless mission, and, of course by the fact that he falls in love with Brandy Clark, the human woman he meets in the first issue.
In a game effort to keep it from being too samey, things slowly escalate as the series goes on, until finally enough people are convinced about the wraith menace that the military actually comes in on Rom's side. There's a lot of inconsistency here--in one issue, the president (this is 1982, so I suppose it would be Reagan) announces the dire wraith presence to the world. The next issue, it turns out he didn't after all, and they're still trying to cover it up. Also, apart from one crossover--done quite well--in the X-Men, with Storm and Forge fighting dire wraiths in Dallas, the rest of the Marvel world seems completely oblivious (as far I could tell, anyway) to the fact that there's a war going on. Also, by this point, Steve Ditko has taken over the penciling, and I can't stand Steve Ditko's work; never liked it, not from the first time I saw it during a brief stint on the Micronauts. Anyway, they defeat the dire wraiths, and then the series kind of peters out, with Rom wandering through space for a while and eventually returning to Galador to find it changed.
There were a few gaps in there, at least one quite sizable, but unlike some series, I feel no great urge to go and find the missing issues. Instead, I feel like I can probably get rid of the series completely sometime.
Before that, I reread The Defenders. It's a bit of an oddball series; for most of it, the Defenders are a self-proclaimed "non-team", mostly consisting of Dr. Strange, his "assistant" Clea, Hellcat, Nighthawk, Valkyrie, and often the Hulk and one or more others. They spent some time on the mystical Tunnelworld, fighting The Unnameable One, in one of my favourite plotlines. The series switched writers a few times, and probably artists too, though I don't remember now. By Issue 125, the team included former X-Men Iceman, Angel, and the Beast, and acquired a more official status, with a headquarters and government clearance and everything. Even then it was a bit weird, with arrogant bald psychic Moondragon joining under duress (Valkyrie was keeping an eye on her for Odin, who had put limits on her powers), a recurring plotline involving an insatiable fungus lifeform, and a couple of memorable issues with the team dragged along behind two frenetic detectives (and, in one issue, a Grouchonian cab driver). Unfortunately, in hindsight, the series was derailed when whoever it was got the idea to reunite the original X-Men as X-Factor, and presumably decreed and end to The Defenders in the process. Shortly after proving herself worthy of having her powers back, Moondragon turned evil, and everyone but the three X-Men were forced to sacrifice themselves to defeat her. (I seem to recall that some of them were later brought back in the pages of Dr. Strange.)
That's a series I'd like to reread and fill in. It had great contrasts, like the whimsical, cheerful Hellcat (except during her bouts of depression, like after her mother died), the dignified Asgardian Valkyrie (as in, the actual valkyrie Brunnhilda), a somewhat more social side of the Hulk (I still remember a scene with him playing with superhero action figures in Dr. Strange's house), and of Dr. Strange, for that matter. Nighthawk, the millionaire playboy bankrolling the team (every good team needs one of those--Iron Man and Angel, for instance), ended up being investigated by the IRS and banned from superheroing for several issues. In one early plotline, one of the Defenders' friends makes a TV documentary about the Defenders, and a bunch of heroes show up to join them...just as a bunch of villains are robbing banks and impersonating them. So yeah, it's quirky, in a way that the Avengers, despite more light-hearted members like Wasp, The Beast and Wonder Man, couldn't manage (at least while I was reading), what with the gravitas of Thor, Captain America, and The Vision. (I hear that later on, Spider-Man joined the Avengers. I have trouble picturing that, myself. But whatever.)
Soon I should take out the Micronauts again. They had their moments, especially in the more mature second series, "Micronauts: The New Voyages". They tended to be lame when they were on Earth, doing tiny crossovers, but they generally rocked when they were home in the Microverse. (It just occurred to me--Acroyear =~ Lan Mandragoran. Hmmm.)
