Don't Be Blue!

Put a happy smile on your face! (I have to remember to follow my own advice.)

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Marvel's Space-Born Super-Hero Day!

Happy Belated Birthday to Gene "The Dean" Colan who was born on the first day of September in 1926. Colan was a fabulous artist for Marvel, breaking out on Daredevil and later such works as Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers. I will always adore Colan for his fantastic work on Doctor Strange and Marvel's Space-Born Superhero - Captain Marvel. 

I simply adore the Captain Marvel - Marvel's Space-Born Super-Hero. That adoration is no doubt to a degree the result of nostalgia. Captain Marvel was my first "favorite" comic book character. I started reading him with his debut issue and continued to do so for decades.

Those earliest episodes though, the more solidly science fiction ones are my favorites. The later cosmically aware hero is dandy, but the sci-fi warrior from the distant planet Kree, a secret agent among Earth's humans, here to take our measure and deciding ultimately to fight for us against his own people, that's the guy I fell for, that's the hero I admire.

The stories in this trade paperback Masterworks volume collect pretty much all of Cap's first wave. Here is merely a Kree warrior sent to Earth in wake of the Fantastic Four encountering the Sentry and then Ronan the Accuser. For more on the Sentry see this link.

He finds himself hidden in plain sight as Dr. Walter Lawson, a man with plenty of secrets whose identity gives Mar-Vell access to some of the most powerful weapons at an American rocket base. He struggles to fulfill his mission of espionage and battle threats from the likes of the Super Skrull, the Sub-Mariner, the Metazoid, Solamm, Quasimodo, and others, all the while surviving the manipulations of his devious commander Yon-Rogg. And there's his girlfriend Una too to attend to.


Mar-Vell is a man, a soldier in a faraway land who wants to be loyal to his society, but finds himself torn as the orders he is often given make little sense, seem callous and needlessly cruel. He begins to identify with the population he has hidden himself among, finding a kinship with the enemy as it were. He is a soldier in crisis, on a mission he doesn't understand, fighting a foe he doesn't hate. If that sounds screwy in 1967 and 1968 it is, and for a whole American generation being commanded to fight a spurious war in a faraway land, such ideas were potent. There's a lot to grok in the early days of Captain Marvel, that's for sure.

The series features the work of some of Marvel's best, starting with scripts by the big man himself Stan Lee, who created the character under direct orders from Martin Goodman, to monopolize the most logical name for a superhero the Marvel Universe could have. Gene Colan was tapped as artist and was inked by Frank Giacoia, Paul Reinman, and Vince Colletta. Colletta stayed on board as Don Heck stepped in to take the artistic reins. Roy Thomas had taken over the writing, but gave way to Arnold Drake after several issues. Lots of diverse hands were certainly involved in this alien saga.

It's pretty clear that Captain Marvel was a character who did not find the sales success they wanted as they began to tinker with his premise pretty quickly. The original set-up pretty much dwindles away by the end of the stories in this volume. In this one we see the alien soldier try to remain true to his oaths as well as to the basic decency this warrior of the Kree feels for us mere humans.

Roy Thomas in his introductory essay admits to the quiet echoes of Superman, an alien come to Earth and  getting some powers and living secretly among us. It's a great premise and this variation is intriguing in many ways. It's too bad it didn't yield better sales. Roy also admits to giving Cap his distinctive green and white color scheme, an offbeat look I love. Roy hates it and soon as we all know he'll ditch it for the more common blues and red and yellow.

But in this volume it's all the green and white soldier born in space. Good stuff!

Here's a gallery of the covers of the comics inlcuded included.

NOTE: This is a Dojo Revised Classic Post. 

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Gene "The Dean" Colan at the height of his powers was a compelling comic book artist, able to blend mundane reality with the utterly fantastic in a way which made you believe. His layouts were sometimes arcane, but his ability to draw real people was nearly unmatched. Here we have sundry examples of his work on Marvel's Space-Born Superhero, Captain Marvel. Vince Colletta, often derided and dismissed, really brings out the the best in Colan in these samples and adds a necessary snap to the pages.

 Mar-vell-ous stuff indeed!

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Star Slammers Day!

 

Walt Simonson was born on this date in 1946. Simonson first came to my attention on the utterly fantastic run of Manhunter stories with Archie Goodwin. He also stood out on the adaptation of Alien. His later stories for both Thor and the Fantastic Four proved that he was just as fine a writer as he was an artist. One of Simonson's earliest proofs of that talent was Star Slammers. 

It only took thirty years, but I finally got around to reading Walter Simonson's Star Slammers. This Marvel Graphic Novel made an impression, even if at the time it hit the stands, I was not in a mood to sample it. It's been out there ever since, a book I was sort of curious about, but never so much so, that it pushed its way to the top and a need to buy it. It's not the price which has never been all that much, but for some reason my interest and my finding it never coincided. But some years ago, when I found it lurking in a back issue box for a mere two bucks. That was too good a price to ignore. For the price of a Coke, I could finally read this story which I'd known about for decades.

It's pretty good. The Star Slammers are a hidden race of magnificent warriors who are threatened by a much more abundant race of humans who seek to wipe them out. They have made a name for themselves by hiring out their impressive warrior skills as mercenaries, acquiring over the years an arsenal against the inevitable day when their enemies would come seeking their destruction. This is the story of that ultimate battle and of three Slammers in particular who spearhead the defense of their people.

(Thesis Version Page)

It's strange story of warriors who don't fear death, but only defeat. And it is a secret weapon they all possess but cannot use which is the key to their victory if they can only unlock its secret. Walt Simonson's artwork is impressive, and while his page layouts are at times bizarre, I never found my eye lost on the page as I strolled through the tale. Turns out, this is a revision of material he'd produced and used as a thesis at the Rhode Island School of Design. It was this material, which Simonson used as a portfolio which impressed Carmine Infantino and go him a gig at DC and eventually Manhunter. 

In the 90's Simonson dusted off the concept and produced four issues for Malibu's Bravura brand. 

There was supposed to be a fifth issue, but that had to wait a couple of years until it was published as a special by Dark Horse. 

Dark Horse also published a Star Slammers story in Dark Horse Presents #114. 

All of this material as well as Simonson's original thesis version were collected by IDW in 2015 and go for wild prices now. 

It took me thirty years to read Star Slammers. If you can find it cheap, don't let it be that long for you.

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Tales Of Asgard!

(The dates for 1975 and 2025 are identical.)

One of the earliest Marvel Comics I ever bought was the bodacious Tales of Asgard special which landed on the stands in 1968 under a singularly compelling Jack Kirby cover. I was already a fan of reading collections of myths from Greece and Rome among others. But the Norse myths appealed to me especially. 

When I read Kirby's Tales of Asgard later, it was with a keen eye to the notion that these stories are a direct precursor to the Fourth World material he'd generate at DC after his famous migration in the early 70's. For there to be "New Gods" there must have been "Old Gods" and these are them.

Thor started as a somewhat peculiar superhero feature with secret identities, offbeat romances, super-villains, and all the trappings. But slowly it became something else as more and more aspects of Thor's Asgardian roots appeared in the story. It became less and less about his timid romance with Jane Foster and more and more about his relationship with Odin and the other denizens across the Brifrost.

Eventually the drive to give the series a mythic thrust gives us small vignettes which dramatized Norse myths. We get the origin of the universe, the world, the gods and man. We meet Odin, his allies, his enemies, and eventually his sons Thor and Loki. We see Thor as a boy and Loki too, as their eternal enmity begins to express itself. We meet Heimdall, the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge and others such as Balder the Brave. More myth is adapted as the series slowly begins to slow its pace and offer up extended stories.

A real shift came when Odin sends Thor on a quest to investigate the advent of Ragnarok and along with him are a crew which includes Hogun the Grim, Fandrall the Dashing, and Volstagg the Voluminous. These "Warriors Three" begin in the the Tales of Asgard feature and then become a reliable part of the main modern story up front in the comic.

It is in this tale of Ragnarok that these warriors find their own end and the hints of a new world to come. It is in the pages of these short back up yarns that the seeds of the Fourth World are planted.  We even meet one of Kirby's first passes as a Hive community, an idea he develops in the Fourth World with Forager and his ilk. Later we'll meet the Lightning Lady and her minions in the pages of Captain Victory.

Following the discovery the end of the world and the hint of a new, the heroes go on other quests. They seek out Harokin, a brave warrior who ends up being embraced by the goddess of the death Hela. They find and confront the dragon Fafnir who offers up a terrible tempation.

They even end up visiting a distant territory which evokes the magic and wonder of The Arabian Knights. All along the way the stories grow more and more baroque with Kirby's art getting increasingly abstract as he develops into his mature stage. Vince Colletta supplies the inks to nearly all of these tales save for a few in the early days inked by Don Heck and  George Bell and a later tale inked by Bill Everett of all people.

The Tales of Asgard feature ends and is replaced by The Inhumans (and odd place for them, but the one comic which seemed to be largely controlled by Kirby). It offered up a delightful brew of heady adventures and it offered up a glimpse of what was to come.

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