Essential Marvels, Part 1

Lately I've been reading a lot of old comics. I don't know why, except that many of the newer comics just aren't doing it for me. I love superhero comics, but with Marvel and DC seemingly hellbent on destroying anything I could ever love about both of their universes, I've been heading back to the earlier days, and I've been enjoying myself a lot more than I have been with the cynicism and desperate attempts to be cool and modern that are being shat out by both companies right now. (With occasional exceptions, I admit, like the wonderful All Star Superman.)

Since I've always loved Marvel characters, I decided to go back to the beginning of the Marvel Age and sat down with The Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 1. It's always a trip to go back and see the goofiness, sexism, and "science hero" beginnings. Much has been made (and deservedly so) of the epic pairing of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as well as the idea that Marvel Comics hit with an audience by presenting heroes for whom everything didn't come easily. (Although I'm not sure that's accurate--it reminds me of the idiot perception now that there's no drama for Superman because, supposedly, he's invincible--there's no question that Lee and Kirby's heroes here are flawed human beings who view their powers in different ways, and not always as a gift or a responsibility.) I hadn't read any old issues of The Fantastic Four in a very long time--this covers the first 20 issues--and it was as fun as I hoped it would be. And it's not that there wasn't angst--brother, there was tons of it--it's that the angst didn't consume all of the drama and action. You have Ben Grimm's constant anger and the villainy of Dr. Doom (and he is a great villain; every Doom story here is a classic), but what you don't have is the melancholy that comes from characters sitting around heavy-handedly pondering themselves.

What surprised me was the level of sexism here; at one point, Invisible Girl's hobbies are listed as "baking" and "reading movie star magazines." Sue Storm's major drama is that she's torn between Reed Richards and Prince Namor, to the point where she even has a hidden 8x10 of Namor behind a bookcase! You can tell Lee's written romance comics for years (and would up until, I believe, the early or mid 70s), but his attempts to marry that to the science fiction stories don't always work. They're not really jarring moments, but they do make me roll my eyes and laugh at something very dated. And Lee does try to balance it out by making sure that Sue is shown as useful and important to the team, despite what was apparently a large number of fan letters complaining to the contrary.

What I also loved was the adorable goofiness of it. Lee and Kirby were forging a relationship with a responsive audience as part of creating a brand identity, and if the comics themselves are anything to go by, it didn't take them long. This is the kind of thing comic book companies don't really do (or care about doing) anymore; I guess the idea that comics should be fun is out the window at the Big Two these days. I love that there's a story where the Fantastic Four go through their fan mail and take us on a tour of their facilities and demonstrate their hardware and powers. I'm not suggesting that this is something publishers should do now, I'm just saying acknowledging the fans and having fun with them goes a long way.

There are some classic stories in this volume (Ben Grimm as Blackbeard, Prince Namor attacking the surface world with the forces of Atlantis, the Super Skrull), and some that aren't really so classic (turning the Skrulls into cows, the Impossible Man), but I loved the whole thing.

I wish I could say the same for The Essential Astonishing Ant-Man Vol. 1, which ended up being torturous to read. Terrible villains, some really bad art (Don Heck, WTH?), awful writing, and rampant sexism (the Wasp just keeps on wondering why, why, why won't Ant-Man love her) made this one a downer. Somehow, it gets even worse when Ant-Man becomes Giant-Man. It just makes him a giant dick. Moving on...

I was surprised by how tedious I found The Essential Incredible Hulk Vol. 1. Stan Lee seems to have not known exactly who or what the Hulk was when he created him, and the volume really suffers from Lee and others desperately throwing story elements at the wall to see what sticks. First the Hulk only comes out at night, then he comes out whenever, then Bruce Banner is always the Hulk, then the Hulk is under the mind control of Rick Jones, then the Hulk can fly, then the flying is only leaping, then Banner can turn into the Hulk whenever he wants by dosing himself with gamma radiation, then the Hulk comes out whenever Banner's overstressed--but if the Hulk gets overstressed, he turns back into Banner. Will you guys just pick something and go with it?

There's also an inconsistency because of the art. The original run of The Incredible Hulk only lasted six issues before cancellation; then he became a recurring feature in Tales to Astonish (home of Ant-Man; what a joyless purchase that must have been). I'm actually not a fan of Jack Kirby's Hulk; he looks off to me. Steve Ditko's is actually worse, and there are a number of artists in here who also don't work. For my money, Bill Everett is the best of the Hulk artists in this volume. He really captures what the Hulk is all about to me.

The worst thing, though, is that Bruce Banner never registers too much as a character, and we're supposed to buy this love triangle he's in, where Betty Ross loves him, but Major Glenn Talbot, who is set on proving Banner is a communist traitor, loves Betty and wants her to see Banner for what he thinks he is. It's more romance comic melodrama, and it actually makes the book less readable.

The best of the four volumes I've read, hands down, is The Essential Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1. I'd forgotten just how compelling and involving the early issues of Amazing Spider-Man were. Everything Stan Lee had been trying to do in other superhero comics just clicks perfectly here. Peter Parker stands in for overworked, harried, unpopular teenagers every where, and his fights with supervillains are only a part of his struggle. He's also struggling for money, struggling with his fear that his Aunt May can't get by without him, and struggling with his guilt over his Uncle Ben's murder. Peter Parker is a fully three-dimensional character, dealing with real problems that make his life a constant uphill battle. The real genius is to put Parker in situations where his spider powers can't really help him; swinging on webs and crawling up walls don't help his self-esteem, his problems with his boss, or his aunt's mortgage payments. He's juggling so much, and it's a perfect understanding of and metaphor for teenage stress.

Spidey has the best villains of any Marvel superhero, so every one is creative and menacing, even potentially lame ones like the Enforcers. This volume also has the epic story "The Sinister Six," in which six villains team up to get the best of Spidey, and every superhero in the Marvel Universe makes cameo appearances. Steve Ditko's art shines.

About Ditko: he was so the perfect artist for The Amazing Spider-Man. There's a back-up story in here from Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 drawn by Jack Kirby, and Kirby's Spidey is too muscular, too cocksure, too beefy. Ditko's Spider-Man looks like a teenage kid; he's lithe and even scrawny, simply bluffing and sometimes blundering his way through battles with villains. Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man art handily beats, for me, Kirby's Fantastic Four.

Gosh, these were fun.

I'm moving on next to Thor and Iron Man. Can't wait to enjoy more old Marvels!