I love comic books. Guess I was seven, maybe eight, when I got my first comic books. Certain covers from that era, the start of the so-called Silver Age of Comics, are indelibly etched in my memory. A good trick, given the noticeable holes in my memory I've been experiencing lately.
Although there was a lull between starting high school and doing my short tour of Ontario's colleges and universities (York University for Math, Ryerson Polytech for Journalism and Sheridan College for Business), I have been collecting comics for something close to 40 years. It won't hit the half-century because I finally stopped buying the latest drivel from Marvel and DC about three years ago. I continued to buy short-run series from the Big Two and selected works from independent companies, but on the whole, even that's come to a stop these days.
Instead, I buy books of comic books I already own.
Sounds bizarre. Looks wrong even typing it. But I've rediscovered a bit of sense of wonder about the comic book artform the last few months buying the DC Showcase series of 'telephone books.' Telephone books are black and white collections of reprints of long-ago issues of various titles. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and B-List characters like Green Arrow and J'onn Jonzz, Martian Manhunter, as well as C-List ideas like The War Time Forgot. The first Showcase issued was Green Lantern.
Now, I've got to tell you, the idea of printing Green Lantern, who used a power ring to form GREEN objects to fight crooks who might or might not know, his one weakness was fighting anything YELLOW, in a black and white book strikes me, even to this day, as, well, moronic. But I bought that volume and the NEXT Green Lantern Showcase when it came out. It was because I was looking for a particular story. Green Lantern against the Black Hand. Art by Gil Kane. I thought it might have made the first collection, but it didn't make the Showcase series until that second volume. It was issue #29. And it's buried somewhere deep in my boxes and boxes of comics.
And that's the beauty of these Showcase books. I get to re-read all the comics of my youth. All collected into a nice square-bound volume for 20 bucks, about a buck a story. I don't have to break the seal on my plastic-covered treasures and I get something I can pass along to A.J. I also get to find out that some of the stories I really loved as a kid don't stand up to the passage of time. A lot of early Superman is like that.
But some of it does. Speaking of C-List characters, DC put out a Showcase with all the early adventures of Ralph Dibny, The Elongated Man. It was a simpler time, with Dibny touring the States with his fiance and eventual wife Sue along for the ride. He solved mysteries aplenty with his malleable Mr. Fantastic-like abilities. His nose would twitch and I'd be right there with him, trying to figure out the puzzle. Sometimes Sue helped, because she was a strong female character, not a perpetual damsel in distress. The stories, many with completely implausible solutions, were a joy to re-read these four decades later. Absolutely recommended.
Which makes what DC has been doing in a battle for relevance lately. Sue Dibny was murdered last year in a vile series put out by DC that also hinted at her rape before her death. A Z-List villain named Dr. Light. He was mad because Batman, the do-gooder, had been doing bad by fiddling around with him memories. And he lashed out in a manner befitting of a real-life sicko. But not as a comic character I wanted to read about.
And that's the issue with DC and Marvel these days. In a time when a good-selling comic barely creeps over 100,000 copies (as oompared to the many million-selling issues of monthles when I started reading comics), the creators and holders of the legacies that are Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, have ratcheted up the violence and sex and sheer meanness of their characters to a point where it's like reading in a cesspool. Punisher and Wolverine are top-sellers, Wolverine getting there because he killed a couple of henchmen in an issue of X-Men. Batman has become a lunatic in deed, as well as concept. Afterall, we are talking about a man who wears underwear over his longjohns and battles gun-toting nasties, without resorting to firearms himself.
It's ugly out there, but it IS possible to find gems in all the manure that's being thrown against the comic book racks. Many an independent book has thrived (I guess it's the surrounding fertilizer). Y The Last Man, just ended it's run. Astro City shows how you can combine relevance with old-style story-telling. I miss Tellos terribly, as much for the end of the stories as for the too-early death of Mike Wieringo. Hero By Night has a contemporary old-fashioned vibe. Dynamo 5 and Fear Agent are producing monthly surprises. I wish Supernatural Law would publish more often, but Ex-Machina comes out monthly and is usually a treat. There's more, but you get the idea. Ask around. There ARE some continuing series worth reading.
And then again, there are the Essentials volumes by Marvel and the DC Showcases. Marvel got to the rack first and have been putting out black and white reprints of their major series for a few years now. A.J. managed to get most of Spider-Man read in black and white until this past Christmas. Then I handed him the 40 Years of Spider-Man DVD and let him finish off with the full-colour computerized versions of the same books he's been reading in black and white. Don't let him know, but there are more 40-year collections coming his way.
I prefer the DC Showcases to the Marvel books. It's the difference in styles that count. Marvel always produced soap-opera books as a counter-point to the DC one-and-done books. It makes for a better dipping-in experience. DC books were the ones I started on first. I thought they were better reading experiences as almost each issue featured several stories. And most of the stories were puzzles of one sort or another. The Me-Fight-You (for no apparent reason) stories were a Marvel staple then. Today, that story dominates both companies, but back then, you could actually learn things reading DC comics.
So, I'll be putting the second volume of The Brave and the Bold: Batman's Greatest Team-ups in the reading room. Won't be long before I'll read a story and remember back when I first read it.
Now, if I could only remember where in the basement I stored those originals!
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