Magic Moments

I began to collect comic books in 1970 when I was in junior high school. As told in previous postings to this blog, I had been buying them since before I knew how to read, but the idea that collecting comics might be a hobby like collecting stamps had never occurred to me before then.

To fully appreciate the story I am about the tell, you have to understand that in Iowa in 1970 many of the things a modern collector takes for granted did not exist. There were no comic book stores, so there was virtually no place to buy back issues. Comic books were purchased at supermarkets off those squeaky wire carousels. After a few weeks on the stands they were pulled by the magazine distributor and destroyed if they weren't sold. Furthermore distribution was very spotty. When I first started collecting I visited three to five different stores that sold comics on a weekly basis just to make sure that I got every issue of the ones I collected. There may have been comic conventions, another source for purchasing back issues today, but if there were, they weren't anywhere near Cedar Rapids, the city I lived in.

It is in this particular time and place that my story, my magic moment, takes place. I was checking out the newsstand at one of the grocery stores that sold comics. It was a small store called Jack and Jill, about a fifth of the size of a modern supermarket. It was so small and the aisles were so narrow, that they had miniature shopping carts for their customers. It was a place my parents shopped every Saturday as I was growing up because they had an old fashioned meat market where the butcher cut, weighed and packaged the meat for each customer to order. You wheeled your cart up, told him what kind of meat you wanted, pointed through the glass case at the piece you wanted and he cut it for you right then.

In any case, one day in particular in the early, early seventies, I was browsing the comics on the stand and I came across five comics that didn't belong. Comics at the time cost 20 or 25 cents, These comics were 12 cents. One was a Teen Titans comic, which I knew from the issue number was several years old. I picked them up, looked inside the front cover at the indicia a the bottom of page one. They were all from 1968! How in the world did four comics from 1968 arrive on a newsstand three years later? Had someone walked in with them, set them down and forgot them? Had they road around on some magazine distributor's truck for four years hidden in the back until he unknowingly pulled them out and put them on the stand with their contemporaries? Or maybe, just maybe, I was the beneficiary of an honest-to-god space-time anomaly that had deposited four and only four periodicals from the near past in the present. And maybe if I returned to this store frequently enough, I would be its beneficiary again! Maybe next time there might be comics from a few years in the FUTURE!

For several minutes I leafed through them, not certain what to do. If they were left by someone else, maybe that person would come back to get them. If I took them, I might be stealing them. What would the checkout clerk say when she rang them up and saw they were only 12 cents. But the price of comics was completely beneath the notice of adults. She'd never notice anything at all.

So, with my palms damp, I snagged them up with the two or three other books I planned to buy that day and took them to the checkout counter. As the clerk rang them up, I mentioned that they looked old. I mentioned the date inside the cover.

"Probably just a reprint," said the woman at the cash register.

Not likely, I knew. It's true that comics publishers published reprints, but they NEVER printed exact replicas with the original indicia and all the original ads!

So I paid my 48 cents for all four, plus sales tax and walked out, my feet just an inch or so from making contact with the ground, excited at the small mysteries of my world, hopeful that they might somehow continue, but pretty certain that nothing that impossible would ever happen to me again in all my years of comic collecting.

And you know what?

Nothing nearly as magic as that ever happened to me again.

Strange Adventures

This week Amazon shipped my preordered copy of the Adam Strange Archives, Volume 3.

How it came to be that a book I ordered three months ago, and which became generally available two months ago, was just now shipped is a story I won’t tell in this blog.

When DC first published their hardcover archive editions several decades ago I wasn’t a big fan. The early ones featured stories from the Golden Age Comics. I’m old, but not old enough to be nostalgic for the forties, and in my opinion the stories don’t wear well today. But in the last few years, as DC began releasing hardcover editions of stories from the Silver Age, I began collecting them. Particularly gems I missed during the sixties like Hawkman, the Flash, the Blue Beetle, the Doom Patrol and the Kirby stories of the Challengers of the Unknown, when I was completely focused on the Superman family.

My introduction to Adam Strange came in the early seventies when I began collecting the comics I read. DC’s science fiction anthology reprint comics were some of the first non-Superman family books I began to buy regularly. At the time DC published two: From Beyond the Unknown and Strange Adventures. Both featured wonderful written and illustrated short sci-fi stories, many written by comic writers who also wrote science fiction short stories for magazines or who wrote science fiction novels, and drawn by DC’s best artists of the fifties. I would happily place most of these stories along side the best of EC comics of the same era. Their tone is more wholesome, but they are just as imaginative and skillfully crafted.

Before it was given to editor Julius Schwartz, Strange Adventures had featured the original Deadman series, illustrated by Neal Adams. From the beginning, Julie began reprinting Adam Strange, a series he edited in the fifties. And what could be more appropriate than publishing Adam Strange in Strange Adventures?

Early in the run, Julie experimented with a couple new Adam Strange stories that he assigned to Denny O’Neil. Unfortunately, by the early seventies Gardner Fox and John Broome, the authors Julie had worked with for decades, the two men he used most frequently on all his super-hero revival books, and the men most suited to writing science fiction, had left DC and were not available to write new Adam Strange stories. Denny O’Neil wrote New Wave science fiction, stories less focused on science and plot and more focused on character and dialog. Apparently neither story sold well enough for DC to revive Adam Strange as a new series and the reprints continued for several years.

The truth was that even though the old Adam Strange stories were ten to fifteen years old, they far outclassed the new stories. They were illustrated by Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson, who were both at their peak, and whose pencils and inks perfectly complement each other. Even with the limited 16 color palette of “four color” comics, the artwork was uncommonly beautiful. The skies of Rann ran the gamut of soft pastels: yellow, pink, light green and blue. The desert plains stretched as wide as the page, and in the distance the horizon was usually broken by far-off fanciful futuristic spires of some Rannian city. Infantino drew Adam flying by jet-pack through the skies like he was swimming underwater.

The stories generally followed a familiar formula. In the sixties all series fiction, not just comics, but television too, adhered to formula. Think Gillian’s Island, where the story was always about trying to get off the island; or Bewitched, which was always about Samantha trying to conform to suburbia for her husband.

Adam Strange was an archeologist from Earth, who was accidentally captured by a teleportation ray, the Zeta Beam, which took him to Rann, a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, Earth’s nearest neighbor. The Zeta Beam intersected Earth’s path at regular intervals, as the two planets aligned themselves, always in the southern hemisphere, because Alpha Centauri is only visible in the southern skies and the Zeta Beam was like light -- it traveled in a straight line. However the teleportational effects of the Zeta Beam wore off after a few days, and Adam faded back to the Earth location he had been taken from. Each time Adam arrived on Rann, the planet was faced with some terrible adversary or natural disaster. Armed with technology from Rann, and powered purely by his intelligence, wits, and logic, Adam routinely saved his adopted planet, while forging a romantic relationship with the daughter of the scientist wore invented the Zeta Beam and brought him to Rann in the first place.

Adam was perhaps one of the earliest post modern hero, in that he was acutely aware of the formulaic nature of this adventures on Rann, and because of his desire to stay on Rann with Alanna, tried to defeat it’s limitations. Julie and Gardner Fox sometimes tinkered the formula as well, having the Rann’s menace come to Earth, or starting the story with Adam’s departure from Rann.

Modern series fiction avoids formula like the plague, but however maligned it may be today, I never tire of its application. In my opinion a formula frees the author from worrying about being original in unimportant ways and allows him/her to concentrate their originality on the other areas of the plot. Think Bill Murray in “Ground Hogs Day”. Bill’s character knew certain things would happen every time the day was repeated, and that certainty freed him to experiment with his behavior in ways he could never have imagined. Authors of series fiction today spend too much energy on imagining how a character can change and not enough on telling a story.

Of course you might ask, why did I bother to buy three pricey volumes of the Adam Strange Archives when I already own the seventies reprints? I suppose that I love the series so much I simply wanted to own it in hardcover and have the excuse to read the stories again.

As much as I am glad that DC is using Adam Strange in new stories today, such as the Rann/Thannagar war series, I wish that they would recognize the qualities that made Adam Strange great -- the nobel qualities of Adam and the Rannians, and the tight science fiction plots of his early adventures.

Skaar-ed

Skaar, Son of Hulk

I did not read much of last year's Hulk series, nor the spin-offs, and considering I find most sword based adventure stories dull, I would not normally pick up Skaar, Son of Hulk. However Ron Garney's art, so I was looking forward to this series.

Unfortunately I was disappointed. The artwork is muddy and low contrast, and the situations and characters do not offer much opportunity for Ron Garney to show off what I believe he does best, which is to wonderfully illustrate enormously muscled heroes.

After the first few pages I just skimmed the rest. I won't be buying more of this title.

Turn Turn Turn

Action 866

To everything there is a season.

The more things the change the more they stay the same.

The most villanous bottler since Dasani is back! The version of Brainiac that was responsible for stealing Kandor and keeping it in a bottle has returned to the Superman mythos. I don't know whether I found this story charming because it brings back the Brainiac I grew up with or because of Gary Frank's art.

Also revived:

• The Steve Lombard/Clark Kent practical joke rivalry. This I could do without. It was lame in the seventies when Cary Bates and Elliot Maggin created the character. It's still lame. It also signals the return of Clark Kent as wimp.
• Clark Kent's bangs. (Is this a nod to Brandon Routh's hairstyle in Superman returns?) In any case they remind me of the sporadic 1960s series featuring the Superman of 2965, who also wore his hair draped down over his forehead. At the time I remember thinking how handsome and mod it made him look and even deciding to wear my hair the same way.

The Big Undo

Secret Invasion 3

Is the Tony Stark who led the majority of Marvel heroes to register during Marvel's Civil War series last year a Skrull?

I make no secret of my distaste for the Civil War story and it's effect on the Marvel universe. I think that government registration of heroes, while perhaps a realistic request, introduced to heroic fantasy one of the saddest elements of our modern, post terror-obsessed society. It tainted my escapist reading pleasure with the same poisonous paranoia I face when I read the newspaper.

If, as is hinted by the Skrull Spider Woman in this week's Secret Invasion, Tony is a Skrull, perhaps that explains the registration drive. Wouldn't registering all Earth's heroes make it easier for a Skrull invasion force to corral them all?

If so, wouldn't the removal of the false Tony Stark from influence in the Marvel Universe restore the pre-Civil War status quo?

I admit that I often go off on flights of fancy as I read fiction, seeing endings I hope I will read as I work my way through a series, and I'm usually wrong and disappointed. Still, wouldn't it be nice if I were right?

Trinity 1

Unlike DC's previous weekly series, Trinity does not rely as heavily on creation by committee. There is one writer. And the main section of every issue is drawn by one and only one penciller -- and a talented one! This makes me hopeful that perhaps there might actually be one or more cohesive stories to be told, not just a series of interwoven events. I hope this is the case.