Tag: oddball comics

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. 

First, a disclaimer: Neal Adams is one of the all-time great comic book artists, and a favourite of mine ever since I picked up some tattered ‘70s Batman reprints and discovered that dynamic, bold style that truly changed comic art.

Adams exploded on the scene with his Batman and other work in the late ‘60s and was a loud revolutionary – he broke comics out of their staid grids and made the comics camera move, and gave Batman, Deadman, Green Arrow, Superman and many more a radically realistic upgrade. His characters heaved with emotion and muscle. Adams, who died in 2022, was truly a trailblazer for comics.

But man, I wish he could have stopped tinkering with his comics. 

Adams was notorious for recolouring, relettering and even redrawing entirely his vintage ’60s and ’70s work when it was reprinted in fancy collections in later years. It almost never improved the art. It often made it a lot worse. 

It was highly noticeable in a Deadman collection I was just re-reading, where Adams’ art is tarted up in garish colours that instantly look dated, re-lettered with bland computer lettering and woozy airbrushed looking highlights and backgrounds. The one on the left is the original. The one on the right in Deadman Book One is almost an entirely redrawn and reworked page.

A few pages later in this same collection, other Adams stories of the era are reprinted as they were – the same dynamic art is given a calmer, more fitting look with the original colours. The styles – old-school Adams and tinkering Adams – clash mercilessly when jammed together into one book. 

Even worse, in collections of his utterly iconic Batman comics of the era, too often they’re served up with gaudy new colors, hideous gradient backgrounds and art tweaking. Give me yellowing newsprint and the work that came from the pen at the time any day. 

Does it look more “modern” when Adams reworked colours and art? Sure, I suppose. But the point of old things is that they are old, and not intrinsically worse because of how they were done at the time.

I’m a developing cranky curmudgeon, I know, but the flatter colouring of vintage comics was just right for the time, and recolouring old comics in modern styles feels to me just as much of a creative violation as colorising old black and white movies is. 

This has all been quietly infuriating Adams fans for years, and it raises lots of hard to answer questions about fans, creators, and who has the agency. 

Like Adams, I believe in creators’ rights, and it’s a knotty question that if Adams wanted to “update” his work like George Lucas has bowlderised the 1977 Star Wars, isn’t that his right? I’m still working that one out. But I believe the work should be reprinted faithfully to how it was first produced. If you want to make a new “updated” version, too, knock yourself out, but don’t suppress the original.

Adams kept working all the way up to his death at age 80, although few fans would say later work like Batman: Odyssey and Fantastic Four: Antithesis lived up to the classics. Adams’ art also took a turn for the grotesque in his final years – all the dynamicism of his early work ‘roided up somehow to look more than a little weird. And let’s not talk about his writing, which was never his strong point:

All artists change their style as they go and so hey, Adams changed, that’s cool. But going back and reworking the work that put him on the map and making it difficult to even find the originally coloured and drawn versions in modern reprintings — well, I love Neal Adams, but I do wish sometimes he would have stopped tinkering and just appreciate his accomplishments as they stood.

He truly was one of the greats – and he was from the moment he first exploded onto the comics scene more than half a century ago. 

There’s nothing quite like the weird world of Basil Wolverton.

One of the great cartoonists of the 20th century, Wolverton’s distinctive vision is pretty unique. He could be silly and he could be scary, but most of all, his whole aesthetic vibe was vaguely disturbing. The New York Times called him “the Van Gogh of the gross-out.”

Wolverton did slapstick surreal humour and gritty, unsettling horror, as well as his oddball series of “heads” – staggeringly ugly, creepy little portraits that were like David Cronenberg nightmares. Some of them famously ended up on the covers of MAD and Plop. 

Yet this strange, exotic draftsman was actually a pretty conventional person in real life, quite religious and married to his high school sweetheart. It’s almost as if he was exorcising some hidden inner demons with some of his most distorted work.

Whether it was sci-fi, horror or humour comics, you’d never mistake a Basil Wolverton comic for someone else’s work. A couple of marvellous thick coffee table books by Greg Sadowski a few years back looked at Wolverton’s career and reprinted lots of his rare comics.

He was never “typical.” Even his earliest work like the Buck Rogers-esque Spacehawk felt like outsider art. On the surface they’re pretty standard 1940s spaceman adventures, but there’s a visceral weight to the drawings that makes them feel truly alien. A lot of golden age comics were hastily drawn, rough work, but Spacehawk still shines with its gruff leading man facing a never-ending horde of endlessly imaginative, goopy monsters. 

Wolverton also spent years doing screwball slapstick comics, packed with groan-worthy puns and wordplay and rubbery hijinks. I recently picked up a old reprint of some of his Powerhouse Pepper stuff, which is fantastic fun. Powerhouse is a kind of kinder, gentler version of Popeye who fumbles his way through a world of bullies and hucksters with an oblivious charm. There’s lots of silly wordplay and a general looseness (I’d love to see more of this rare work reprinted!) but there’s also some of Wolverton’s trademark shock such as this great sequence below (don’t worry, I’m sure that guy was OK). He brings the rubbery antic energy of Tex Avery cartoons to the still comics page. 

Horror comics were overflowing from the newsstands in the ‘50s but Wolverton’s works in the genre still have an in-your-face freaky quality that makes them stand out. On his covers for Weird Tales of the Future, boldly drawn monsters leap off the page with an intimate menace – if I was a kid reading these in 1953, I’d have had nightmares for years. The especially terrifying “Brain Bats of Venus” haunted entire generations of comic readers back then, I imagine. 

Later in his career, Wolverton actually became an ordained minister, and he combined his religious life and his comics life in very idiosyncratic drawings from the Bible which took all the fire and brimstone apocalyptic imagery usually smoothed out of biblical comics and rolls with it for all it’s worth. His portraits of the Book of Revelation and the foretold biblical apocalypse have a terrifying immediacy. 

And his famous “heads” portraits, which are just snarled, twisted and blackly humourous masses of fluid flesh – well, they’re still freaky today, the most deformed almost pornographic somehow, yet weirdly innocent, too. The heads were Wolverton “playing,” making flesh his medium. This mild, churchgoing man could haunt you with his dreams. 

The key to a lot of Wolverton’s visual style is the thick weight of his lines, I think, bold outlines and vivid shadows, combined with a painstakingly intense amount of stippled or speckled details. There’s an almost woodcut quality to his finest work. It doesn’t feel sketched on a page so much as it seems to be forged, raw, from some hidden universe just beneath our own. Wolverton’s distinctive comics DNA is hard to duplicate, although you can see some of his influence in the work of ‘Rat Fink’ Ed Roth, Peter Bagge or John Kricfalusi’s Ren and Stimpy. 

While comics boasted a lot of great artists in the classic era like Jack Kirby and Will Eisner and Steve Ditko, Basil Wolverton is the only one who seemed somehow haunted to me.

These things he drew were in him, rubbery and weird and sometimes holy and sometimes hellish, but he just had to get them out. Decades after his death, there’s still nobody quite like him in comics history. 

Black Goliath, ironically, may not have been the biggest superhero of all time, but he’s always one I’ve been weirdly fond of.

Yet this C-list Marvel superhero, who has only made a token appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in his civilian identity to date, always seemed to get the short end of the stick. His solo series died before it even got going, his character changed names a lot, and ended up being pointlessly killed in a mega-hero crossover event to give it some weak dramatic heft. 

Back in the day, I found a single issue of Black Goliath in a pile of ‘70s comics I was trading with a friend. I’d never even heard of this hero, so I was intrigued. I liked the very ‘70s goofy costume design, all bright blue and yellows, bizarre bare midriff and his towering swagger. 

Black Goliath was Bill Foster – described as “a child of the ghetto who has pulled himself out of the Los Angeles slums to become director of one of the nation’s most prestigious research labs” and who could now turn himself into a 15-foot-giant. He first appeared in a few Avengers issues as a civilian back in the 1960s before turning up with super-growing powers in a few issues of Luke Cage, Power Man. 

But his hyped 1976 solo comic lasted a mere five issues, failing to ever get out of first gear. He fought nondescript villains like “Atom Smasher” and “Vulcan” (plus the towering Stilt-Man, which was actually a pretty clever match-up) and plotlines were teased but never fully explored. 

Black Goliath never quite got a chance. After his series was cut short, Black Goliath briefly popped up as a member of second-tier superhero team The Champions before they too got cancelled. 

Years later, Foster turned up as a supporting character in Marvel Two-In-One starring The Thing, where he was slowly dying from radiation poisoning and eventually cured. It was at this point he changed his hero name from Black Goliath to plain Giant-Man, at the Thing’s suggestion. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious that you’re black – and if I remember my Sunday school lessons, Goliath was a bad guy,” he noted. 

He moped around for a while, but Black Goliath/Giant-Man’s defining characteristic in his appearances always seemed to be that he never made the ‘big time.’ He tended to lose fights a lot. Too much of the time he appeared, his major defining characteristic was an inferiority complex, which was a bummer – as a successful Black biochemist in that era, Bill Foster could have been written a bit more uplifting (literally and figuratively). 

Kind of like another favourite obscure 1970s hero fave of mine, Omega The Unknown, Black Goliath is kind of a failure at the job. 

Worst of all, Black Goliath was killed off as random cannon fodder in Marvel’s overwrought Civil War comic years ago, murdered by a clone of Thor (!) and dismissively bid farewell in a cringey panel showing his giant-sized body was too big to properly bury. In an added bit of debasement his corpse was dug up in an issue of Mighty Avengers so bad guys could attempt to steal his powers. Black Goliath, Giant Man, whatever you wanted to call him, deserved better.

I recognise the whiff of exploitation that hangs around those early ‘70s Black superheroes like Black Goliath, Black Lightning and Luke Cage – mostly written entirely by white guys, most of them were rage-filled angry Black men stereotypes in a lot of ways. And yet – they were also representation for a group who were roundly ignored in mainstream comics before then.

Superman debuted in 1939 but the first major Black superhero, the Black Panther, didn’t debut until 1966. (There were earlier Black heroes, but they were pretty obscure.) Nearly 50 years ago, having a Black genius biochemist – or an African king – be a superhero felt a bit revolutionary, despite some of the more cliched acts of their portrayals. 

Laurence Fishburne played scientist Bill Foster in a small role in 2018’s Ant Man and the Wasp, but we were denied the glory of ever watching him Goliath up himself. 

Though he’s not likely to end up the next big MCU superstar anytime soon, I still like Black Goliath. Perhaps it’s because he is kind of an underdog superhero, and I always liked those. 

Sometimes you gotta stick up for the little (but really actually very big) guy.