Tag: comic books

How do you write good comics about a being that’s essentially invincible, a force of nature incarnate?

The Spectre is one of those heroes who’s been hanging around DC Comics almost since the beginning. He was introduced in 1940 as hard-as-nails cop Jim Corrigan, who is murdered by criminals but brought back to life given a chance to serve as the “wrath of God,” the Spectre. 

His schtick was punishing criminals in gruesomely inventive ways, such as just full on skeletonising one particularly unlucky bad guy in his very second story:

He was made a bit friendlier over time (including a very goofy era when he was basically the sidekick to the dorky “Percival Popp, Super Cop”) and even joined the Justice Society of America, but the Spectre never quite fit in as one of the superhero crowd. He represents something far bigger, more cosmic. When he was brought back in the 1960s, his short-lived solo book had him wrestling bad guys by smacking them in the head with whole planets, because the Spectre always goes hard. But it was hard to make the character relatable when they’re that far beyond humanity, and the run didn’t last long. 

I first encountered the Spectre in his brief appearances in Alan Moore’s essential Swamp Thing, where the character was portrayed as an unknowable, awe-inspiring presence, one that reduced your average metahumans to stunned silence. 

There was also a great short run by Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo in the 1970s in Adventure Comics which made the Spectre into a full horror movie villain, punishing the guilty with some insanely creative kills – turning a man into wood and putting him through a woodchipper, or chopping him up with giant cartoon scissors, for instance. There wasn’t a lot more to the stories than “how will the Spectre kill this guy?” but they were a lot of gruesome fun. 

The problem with the Spectre is how do you really write such a character? “Embodiment of the wrath of God” doesn’t give you a lot of room for nuance. He’s had comics runs that played up the mystic angles and supporting cast and turned him into a kind of Dr. Strange character, but then he just blends into the wallpaper. Some stories had Jim Corrigan definitely part of the Spectre, others had the Spectre as a separate being hosted by Corrigan. 

Enter John Ostrander, who married the gnarly punishments with real character work on the Spectre and Jim Corrigan and their peculiar, never-ending bond. His superb 62-issue writing run in the 1990s was peak Spectre, with a comic that was both bombastic and over the top and yet fiercely humane. It embraced the duality of long-dead angry cop Corrigan and the barely contained rage of the Spectre entity for some absolutely banger stories. It richly expands the history of the Spectre entity and its origins in one of the best underrated comics runs – the first half recently was reprinted in an excellent new omnibus. 

This Spectre run cobbled together all the bits of the character over the years and spun it into a dense, melancholy epic, interrogating again and again what it actually means to be the “wrath of God” and what good vengeance can actually serve. In one story, we see the Spectre brutishly pushing forward to avenge a woman’s murder – in the process driving other innocent people he accuses to suicide. 

At one point the Spectre slaughters the population of an entire country torn by civil war – see it as an allegory for the Balkans, or Rwandan genocide – declaring angrily that “no one is innocent!” It’s a key moment that breaks the character free from the giddy righteous cathartic gore of the Fleisher and golden age comics and makes you realise that when you start punishing, it’s pretty hard to stop. 

In the end, Ostrander’s Spectre run is about the fluid toxic nature of hate, and how far it can spread and how much it can control even the most cosmic among us. 

There’s an operatic excess to Ostrander’s writing, aided by Tom Mandrake’s anguished and dynamic artwork. You can’t go small with the Wrath of God as your lead character. It’s also the rare comics series that actually builds to a firm ending, with Jim Corrigan finally allowed to go on to his reward in the masterpiece last issue. (Of course, being comics, this great ending has been fiddled with a fair bit since that 1998 “last issue,” but it’s still a great story.) 

The Spectre hasn’t always been the best fit for good comics and DC is always failing upwards by trying to reinvent the wheel with him (we won’t even talk about that time that, bizarrely, they turned Green Lantern Hal Jordan into a new Spectre for a while), but over the last 85 years, he’s starred in some remarkable stories.

Ostrander’s run is a reminder that you can take a heaven-sent angel of death whose life feels like the chorus to a hundred Black Sabbath songs and still turn it into compelling storytelling. Now, that’s totally metal. 

In his white-hot comics run through the 1970s into the 1990s, John Byrne was always one of my favourite writer/artists – his bold dynamic style felt to me like the platonic ideal of what good old-fashioned superhero comics could be. And I’ve got a special place in my heart for his run on Alpha Flight, a Canadian superhero team who debuted fighting fellow Canadian Wolverine in an issue of X-Men and were spun off by Canadian-raised Byrne into their own book. 

I loved Byrne’s classic takes on Fantastic Four, Superman, X-Men and the like, but there was a rather raw edge to his Alpha Flight run that holds up well. Byrne fielded an oddball group of Canadian stereotypes, with Captain America fill-in Guardian, hulking Sasquatch, French-Canadian twins Aurora and Northstar, Native American Shaman and wilderness spirit Snowbird, the dwarf Puck and aquatic Marrina. 

Alpha Flight was a curious book about a team that wasn’t really ever a team. Marvel’s The Defenders tagged itself as the “non-team,” but for most of Byrne’s run, the entire team of Alpha Flight was rarely assembled together, and the book focused on a series of solo tales or small pairings of team members. It felt a bit exotic to me with its name-drops for Winnipeg and Quebec and glimpses of a culture alien to this small-town California kid. 

Canada was an unusual setting for superhero stories, and Alpha Flight was a superhero series that seemed unpredictable and energetic. It was no Watchmen or Dark Knight, of course, it didn’t deconstruct the medium – but it stood out on the comic racks to me in 1983 when it premiered. Byrne himself doesn’t think much of his Alpha Flight run and calls the characters two-dimensional, but I think he cuts himself short. 

(SPOILERS for 40-year-old comic books follow)

Because Alpha Flight were hardly top-tier characters, there was a real sense that anything could happen during Byrne’s run. The most notable was the still-shocking death of team leader Guardian in #12, which came as an accidental tragedy – Guardian’s damaged battle suit explodes when he’s distracted at a critical moment by his wife Heather Hudson. It was cruel and sudden, no heroic death but just one of those terrible things that sometimes happen. 

In the pre-internet age where nothing was spoiled, Alpha Flight #12 was stunning, and left teenage comic reader Nik feeling like the world was suddenly a far more shaky place. If you could kill off the leader of a superhero team, was anyone safe?

Byrne’s run constantly rocked the boat on the idea of a “Canadian Avengers” team. In the very first issue the team has been defunded by the Canadian government and broken up, and while they briefly reunite, in the first two dozen or so issues of Alpha Flight there’s only a few times all the members are together at once. In the second issue, the sprite-like aquatic member Marrina turns out to be an alien invader and nearly kills Puck. A few issues later, the sibling team of Northstar and Aurora have a brutal feud and break up. The burly Sasquatch loses control of himself constantly. There’s always a sense in Alpha Flight that everything is about to fall apart. Is there such a concept as an “anti-team” superhero comic? 

John Byrne’s work has often had a bit of a dark side and it is fully unleashed in some storylines that felt very brutal at the time – the villainous Master recounts being tortured and dissected alive by alien machines for thousands of years, the creepy Gilded Lily is basically a dessicated corpse kept alive by machines and sorcery, Sasquatch’s battle with Super-Skrull leaves a group of innocent scientists brutally murdered. Aurora battles a multiple-personality disorder, Puck is wracked with chronic pain and most of the team don’t seem to actually like each other that much. It feels like Alpha Flight rarely save anybody and it’s a real surprise late in Byrne’s run when the team battles a run-of-the-mill hostage-taking supervillain for the first time rather than malicious gods and murderous aliens. 

Byrne has a long history of leaving series abruptly, sometimes in mid-storyline, but his Alpha Flight feels more or less complete. It did end in a cliffhanger handed off to new writer Bill Mantlo after #28, but that was intentional. 

Byrne’s work kind of peaked by the late 1980s and hasn’t really felt as fresh for a long time. Alpha Flight carried on for a good hundred issues after Byrne left and I periodically checked in, but the book was really never very good again. The non-team was quickly turned into yet another standard superhero team, Wolverine kept showing up, and the inspiringly “normal” Heather Hudson immediately became a superhero wearing her dead husband’s costume. (The worst was Bill Mantlo turning Puck from a fascinating dwarf character into the subject of some inane ancient curse that made him a dwarf, although the gay character Northstar’s legendarily ham-fisted coming out story with some of the worst most 1990s comic art ever is a close second.)

They even brought Guardian back to life a couple of times, negating the stunning power of Alpha Flight #12. So it goes. 

I guess Alpha Flight are pretty much C-list Marvel characters these days and I couldn’t even tell you who’s dead or alive or resurrected or whatever. They haven’t shown up in the MCU yet and nobody is rocking Sasquatch T-shirts (although really, they should). But for a couple dozen issues before Byrne wandered off, they felt like one of the more exciting books in Marvel Comics – where anyone could die at any time, and where the bonds of the team itself were constantly breaking apart. In their chaos the comic felt weirdly alive. Not bad for a bunch of Canadians, eh?

Once upon a time, when I was a young card-carrying Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe-reading fanboy, I could’ve told you every single superhero who had been a member of the Avengers.

These days, pretty much every Marvel character other than Aunt May has been an Avenger (and she might’ve been, for all I know) and there’s been regular Avengers, Secret Avengers, Space Avengers, Young Avengers, X-Men Avengers and oh, so many more.

But 40 years ago, the very first Avengers spin-off team took off in their own ongoing title. The West Coast Avengers debuted in 1984 in a miniseries, and in mid-1985 their own 102-issue run began. 

And man, I was a West Coast Avengers fanboy from the start. The idea of spin-offs of a superhero team was a novelty then, and best of all, these Avengers lived in California. Hey, I lived in California, too! It’s a common complaint that 95% of DC and Marvel superheroes seem to live in New York or elsewhere on America’s East Coast. West Coast Avengers was a rarity – a reminder that the rest of the country existed. Sure, it was set in a laid-back Hollywood version of the Marvel Universe, but it still was somewhere I’d actually been. 

There’s something about the West Coast Avengers that has lured a cultish fandom ever since – and I like to think it’s because it was almost always a team of underdogs, of B-listers and troubled superfolk who had something to prove. It’s a lot harder to be underdogs when Captain America and Thor are running around like on the main Avengers team.

The team was originally led by charming mook Hawkeye and his new bride Mockingbird, self-doubting hero Wonder Man, twitchy cat-woman Tigra and Iron Man at his most disheveled. Later on, more flawed heroes joined up – former Ant-Man Hank Pym, desperately needing redemption; arrogant Captain America substitute the USAgent, and the poster child for superhero mental issues, Moon Knight. 

Hawkeye, to me, is one of the main disappointments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The comics character has always been a bit of a ratbag, arguing with Captain America, getting into punch-ups with teammates and always pushing back against authority. Nothing against Jeremy Renner, who did what he could, but reimagining him as a kind of stoic secret agent married with children took away Hawkeye’s bratty appeal. Part of the novelty of West Coast Avengers was finding this character – who literally spent years telling others how to run the Avengers – put in a position of power for the first time. Hawkeye was a loveable jerk, and his struggles in the top job gave West Coast Avengers an edge the more polished main Avengers team lacked. 

Superheroes had been arguing and had their issues for a while – that was Marvel’s whole point of difference, really – but the struggles of the West Coast Avengers still stood out. You had Tigra battling with her feline side, Iron Man being filled in for by future War Machine James Rhodes due to Tony Stark’s alcoholism, or Wonder Man’s endless fear of death. (Don’t worry – Wonder Man’s been killed several times since. It’s really the main thing he’s remembered for.) 

WCA was written in the early years by Steve Engelhart, a veteran Avengers writer who could sometimes be workmanlike, but had a nice eye for character and soap opera melodrama. Dialogue was sometimes cringe, but that kind of fit in with this team of second-chancers. And for ‘80s mainstream comics, Englehart pushed at boundaries, tackling Hank Pym’s attempted suicide, or in a particularly raw storyline, Mockingbird being sexually assaulted. The execution could be awkward, viewed 40 years on, but the heart was there. 

The two best eras of West Coast Avengers were #17-24’s “Lost In Space-Time,” a sprawling classic time-travel epic that split the team all through Marvel history and had an unpredictable novelty to it all, and John Byrne’s shortened stint as writer/artist from #42-57. 

After the time-travel epic, the title began to fall into aimlessness, and then superstar Byrne suddenly came along and amped up the excitement. Byrne was a bulldozer – he tore apart the Vision and Scarlet Witch’s amiable marriage and it’s never actually been the same since, and he abruptly left the book in the middle of a storyline (also one of Byrne’s bulldozer skills). But for a year or so there he made West Coast Avengers stylishly cool and energetic, with his dynamic, chunky art the best the series ever had. 

After Byrne left with #57, it was a long slow slide down for West Coast Avengers. Changing the title around #50 to the more generic Avengers West Coast was a sign. There were some terrible fill-in issues, including one issue which killed off several characters only to go with the hokey “it was all a dream” ending, which I still remember as one of the worst comics I ever read. Journeyman Roy Thomas took over writing and there were a few good moments, but bores like Spider-Woman (the second, painfully bland one) and Living Lightning added little to the team, all those 1990s endless crossovers started seeping in, and some diabolical 1990s Image-style artwork erased any attempt for the book to actually look like it was set in California.

West Coast Avengers died at #102, long after I stopped reading it regularly, and there was a brief oh-so-‘90s “extreme” attempt to keep some of the group going called Force Works that is just plain awful. There’s been a couple of brief revivals of the book in years since that never understand its fundamental appeal or are too gimmicky. 

But for a while there, the West Coast Avengers were good comics fun. I’d never say it was another Watchmen or anything, but it took the age-old dream of going to California to reinvent yourself and gave us a bunch of second-tier superheroes grooving away under that endless sunshine.

They may not have been the best Avengers, but they were my Avengers.