Day 2: Tarzan (DC) #233, anthology issue, 1974

Ah, this is the life.  We start out with a great Kubert cover and a lead 18-page Kubert story.  Then, we get "The Land that Time Forgot" by Russ Manning, running a full 21 pages!  After a six-page Silver Age reprint with art by the under-appreciated Leonard Starr, we get an all-too-rare Rex, the Wonder Dog ten-pager with Gil Kane artwork, followed by a pair of six-pagers (Detective Chimp by Infantino and Congo Bill by Smalle).  Rounding out the volume is a Korak story with eight pages from the ever-experimental Alex Nino.  Add in a few pages of animal facts, movie trivia, and letters pages, and this is the type of comic you simply can't find on the stands--or the stores--anymore.

The Flash #251 July 1977
“Vengeance on Ice”

Cary Bates
Irv Novick
Joe Giella

Anybody who has read this comic would immediately know this could only be a sentimental choice. You’d be right. The comics above were my first. I’d read comics before (Doctor’s offices and such) but this is where I discovered that any three comics were more entertaining than any hour of television. At least until Wonder Woman #233, where I learned there was good and bad in every art form. That afternoon I was looking for characters I had heard of but not the ones everybody knew (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc.) As everybody here could understand, these choices changed my life. Only in terms of how much I’ve spent since, if nothing else.

I’ve always listed The Flash first. I believe now it’s because of Story. Michelinie’s Aquaman story was adventure based (perhaps intentionally so; it appeared in Adventure Comics, after all). Pasko’s Wonder Woman was focused on creating a superhero dynamic in the WWII era the Lynda Carter TV show had forced upon the comic. Cary Bates, as best I could tell, loved villains and plot twists. For plot twist to work, there had to a setup, and that meant something had to happen. Story.

There was a lack of story in other forms of entertainment at the time. It could be argued there is lack of story in comics today, for better or worse. In 1977 it filled a need that has, for the most part, kept me around to this day. For better or worse.

11. X-Men #94 (Marvel, August 1975)



I had always been a fan of the X-Men.  #6 was one of the first comics I ever read.  I enjoyed the "teens struggling to be accepted" angle and they had cool powers, and even cooler enemies.  It had very much solidified during the Thomas/Adams era, and afterward I religiously followed the reprints, filling in a lot of what I didn't have.  Then this one came out.

Hokey smokes, it was great!  Old members out, new members in (and I remember thinking "when did Sunfire start wearing a frog mask?").  And all drawn by one of my favorites at the time, Dave Cockrum, whom I'd nearly idolized on Legion of Super-Heroes and Avengers.  And not all American white guys for a change! Lots of different personalities and the room for growth new characters afford.  Frankly, it hit me a lot like the Legion had originally.  I love variety/diversity!  Grocery store distribution being what it was back in those days, I hadn't even SEEN the new Giant-Size earlier that year, so this was my true introduction.

I loved it so much it prompted me to write my first letter to a comic.  I filled two pages with my scrawly penmanship, mostly praise with a mention of how badly they'd telegraphed who was going to die by not putting Thunderbird in the "circle of heads" by the price.  But...this book didn't have a letters page yet, just coming off a reprint run.  Where do I send it?  Ah, here's an old Adams X-Men, I remember that had a letters page.  So off I sent my first missive.  And got it back a few weeks later, all marked up with "undeliverable" and "no longer at this address".  Crap!  Sometime between those Adams issues and 1975, Marvel had moved across town and I'd had no idea. And by that time the new issue was out, and it seemed pointless to sent it to the right address at that time, so my first writing attempt went into the circular file, like many first attempts do.  Sadly, those two issues were the last I'd see of them for a while.  Distribution hammered me again, not seeing another issue until #101.  But I read and read and reread those two issues until the covers were falling off!

Wow. So Stan Lee created this? You've really piqued my curiosity. I'm going to have to check this out.

Anyway, I got a little sidetracked talking about the much misunderstood (by DC writers and fans, at least) Orion. Getting back to NG#1 in general, not all of it works perfectly: for one thing, Vince Colletta's inks had deteriorated drastically from his work a few years earlier with Kirby on Marvel's Thor, and some of the panels look a little sparse and sketchy, with little or nothing in the way of background detail - though who knows, maybe some of that was down to Kirby creating, writing, and drawing three or four new series at the same time, all by himself. So not all of the artwork is as arresting as the few pages I've posted here. And then ...

Hmm, after all my ranting I wanted to provide some balance but I can't actually think of much else I'd criticise in a negative sense. The whole thing felt so intriguing and so big; the biblical echoes (the Moving Hand; "THEN - THERE WAS NEW LIGHT!"; etc) were so odd and yet so effective.

And I'll tell you another thing: people say Kirby's writing was bombastic and simplistic, even crude, but for me, not only does he succeed in raising the tone of his narrative to an epic level without being silly (given the comic book context within which he was working) far more than almost any other comics writer I can think of, I find he often displays more subtlety, more of a fine touch than many another comics scribe held up by fans as an example of a more sophisticated style or sensibility. Here's the last page of New Gods#1, the "prologue" that bookends the opening "epilogue":





He's responding to a challenge Orion made in the last panel of the previous page ("Darkseid I have come [to earth]! The battle begins!" ) - but the thing is, in that preceding panel there was no sign that Orion was actually speaking directly to Darkseid - the Boom Tube that brought him and the earth people he'd rescued from Apokolips to earth had already closed and disappeared, so it seemed to be a purely rhetorical statement on his part. But then you get the full-page response from Darkseid on Apokolips, "I hear you Orion! the battle begins!", with no sign of any technology or anything that might be enabling them to carry on this exchange.

It's one of a few times in the series where Kirby gets across to the reader that these are not just superpowered aliens, there's something different, something more, going on here. These are archetypes speaking - a Grant Morrison might say they were speaking to each other through the very medium itself in which they live - the comic book page and our, the readers', minds - a medium inaccessible for use in this way to other characters in the story.

Now look at the expression on Darkseid's face: it's typically (in the original Kirby books) calm and impassive, as is his speech - characteristics shared by Orion, not coincidentally. Both are, in different ways and for different reasons, all about control - yet another point lost on supposedly more sophisticated writers who habitually write Darkseid as a pompous ranter and Orion as a crude bully - or, in the recent Wonder Woman, as a petulant fratboy. Darkseid obviously is striving to control all reality to an even greater degree, at an even more fundamental level, than he does Apokolips. But he is also all about self-control in his quest to achieve that end.

Orion too is all about self-control - in his case, of his menacing Apokoliptan nature. In a way, he's the opposite of a Batman who works to project a frightening image to his criminal enemies. Orion's problem is that he is all too frightening just by being who he is, and he has to work hard not to be - to the point of changing his face. That's one of the poignant aspects of the character - to me, anyway.

I haven't seen any writers pick up on this very basic idea since Kirby presented it in his original series. They've kept the part about Mother Box disguising his real face, but dropped the subtlety and tragedy of the motivation behind it. Because of the ridiculous changes to his personality in the recent WW, for example, he came across more as Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf than as the reverse Jekyll/Hyde Kirby gave us (a Mr. Hyde who's trying to change into Dr. Jekyll).

Ah well, I can see I'm slipping back into ranting mode again, so I'll put a stop to this now. At least all this blithering has probably gotten across that this comic and later the entire  - what should we call it? series, plural; what? - it was so far ahead of its time we still haven't invented a name for it yet, it seems - that the entire whatever-it-was made a huge impression on me, and hence its place here in my reverse-chronological list of favourite comics.

11. Marvel Graphic Novel #13: Starstruck by Elaine Lee and Mike Kaluta




Starstruck was one of the richest, densest comics I had ever read when I picked this up in the mid-80's. I had never really gotten into Heavy Metal, where portions of this had first appeared, and I admit that my first read-through of this left me befuddled. I got the general idea, but there was so much going on, so many details in this world, so many curious characters whose nature wasn't just spelled out for me--this was an adult piece of fiction, not just a simple story being told in a straightforward way.
Starstruck, out of any comic I'd yet to find, gave me more "bang for the buck": Every time a new issue came out, I'd read it, then go back to this graphic novel and read the entire story so far. I think this may have been my first comprehension of the possibility that sometimes in fiction, knowing what's going to happen next makes the reading better, not worse.
As a work of visual art, well, it's Mike Kaluta, doing work on something that he is personally invested in. It's gorgeous. Every blasted panel is gorgeous, inviting, and reveals layers of story, atmosphere, history, motivation and action. Writer Elaine Lee didn't have much experience in conventional comics, and it shows: Marvel and DC writers of the era didn't tend to make a reader work for his reward. Lee's attitude seems to be "If you didn't get it, read it again, and pay more attention this time." I got into a CBG letters page debate with Don Thompson over this book. Don contributed a lot to comics fandom, but he didn't seem to want comics to rise above superficiality. He compared this to a Ukrainian Easter egg, with lots of layers but nothing of substance inside. Boy, was Don wrong...just this first installment had more story content than 3 years of contemporary Spider-Man adventures.

This nearly made my list, excellent choice.