Quick Rating: I Remember It Well
Title: various

And where is Luna Moth?

Writer: Michael Chabon, Jim Starlin, Kevin McCarthy, Howard Chaykin
Artist: Eric Wight, Jim Starlin, Kyle Baker, Howard Chaykin, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Lieber
Colors: Michelle Madsen, Christie Scheele, Dan Jackson, Jeff Parker, Dave Stewart
Letters: Virtual Calligraphy, Jim Starlin, Dan Jackson, Steve Lieber
Editor: Dave Land, Diana Schutz

Michael Chabon has been cropping up all over the place these days: comic books, popular movies, New York Review of Books, McSweeney’s, etc. If you’re unfamiliar with his name, then you need to glance around at popular culture a little more widely than American Idol and People Magazine. He wrote a book a couple years ago called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It describes the adventures of two golden age comic book creators. Among their creations was the Escapist. Now, he leaps from the realm of fiction to the… realm of… graphic fiction. This comic contains 80 pages selected from the Escapist archives, presented as a loving retrospective on the character.

Pseudo-nostalgia (the longing for a past which you did not experience) is apparently an already established concept. This should not surprise anyone who has been influenced by their parents’ taste in music or has shopped at any clothing chain store. Yet, it is always an odd experience seeing someone in bellbottoms flashing a peace sign or a leather jacket and green hair. Do those people truly long for a lost life? Do they just want to live in a world apart? Do they honestly think they look good when so many others did not?

Pseudo-nostalgia is a weird and treacherous thing. Where one person sees harmless fun, another is insulted. Is it artistic creativity or game play? If you’re unaware that the entire thing is false, then can you still enjoy the experience? If the creation has no basis in reality, what exactly is the point? The point is that pseudo-nostalgia is safe. And I think that is what pseudo-nostalgia is truly about. It turns on the pleasures of lost youth. It provides all the comfort of real nostalgia without the nasty aftertaste and bloated sensation that accompanies the discovery that you’re nostalgic for something that was horrible in reality.

Much of Alan Moore’s current output turns on pseudo-nostalgia. The same could be said of the Ultimate line put out by Marvel. Superman is practically the embodiment of the concept. In some sense, the entire comics industry turns on actual nostalgia as it relies on adults to buy comics written for adolescents.

He is a comic book dilettante which is not a problem. Any adult who still reads comic books probably has a few other fish to fry. Hopefully they’re shuffling in a newspaper or a non-comic-book-based movie every now and then. Only pre-adolescence provided anyone the blinders necessary to be a comic book obsessive.

And yet I really liked this comic book. The stories were entertaining. The hero felt different enough that I remained interested. I worried at the right times. And I enjoyed the prose sections which elaborated the history of the character. And I hope it’s okay. I did not come out of it with that gnawing sense that Chabon is hiding the ball and going to turn on me as a reader. I did not feel insulted for being entertained. I liked the art a great deal- consistently enough that I don’t feel any need to single out a particular artist for kudos. My only hope is that Chabon’s quarterly concern does not devolve into a series of in-jokes and poor pacing. But that’s for another review on another day.

It’s worth noting that the price on this book is steep, but it works out to the same per page price as every other pamphlet sold in this expensive hobby.

March, 2004

Plot: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Writer: Sean McKeever
Artist: Joe Dodd
Editor: C. B. Cebulski

Remakes make the world go around. From toys to movies to comic books, we are surrounded by remade products in our popular culture. (In high art, it’s called re-interpretation or forgery, depending on whether the new artist acknowledges their creation.)

In the toy world, we apparently want to own the toys of our youth or, at least, given them to our children. This is perhaps the most explicable since toys wear out (we’ll pretend that everyone actually plays with the toys they buy and never places them in a display case). Like any other useful item, a good toy (or tool or whatever) may not go out of fashion. Consider the fork, the chair, the potted plant.

At the other logical extreme, we recreate movies. The traditional arguments in favor of this behavior are: 1) updating an original for modern tastes; and 2) improving an inappropriate/poor original. (Sometimes an original is redone as a means of making a separate, unrelated point, such as Mario Van Peebles just-released remake of his father’s [b]Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song[/b]. These works are making something entirely new.)

Comics have a long history of remaking popular tales. Most commonly, superhero origins are re-visited to fit modern tastes or plot requirements. Wolverine’s claws and Green Lantern’s power ring change with the stroke of a pen. Even with the re-envisioning, it is not so common to restart a comic series from the beginning. DC’s Year 1 explorations might be viewed as such. Marvel’s Ultimate line continues to plumb the same territory. Marvel Age is the first series, however, to take the actual plots and follow along issue by issue. It is an interesting experiment, but it does beg the question of why Marvel does not simply re-publish the original issues at user-friendly prices. Throughout their history, Marvel has had whole series of reprints, ensuring that new readers could catch on to current happenings.

So, we are to gather the original required improvement, if only for the sake of modern audiences. It can not be because the original issue was inappropriate for all ages. That was the whole point of comic books in 1962. If the child was interested in the comic book based on the cover, then it was appropriate for them, especially if it featured superheroes.

So, the remake is to fit the current world and modern tastes require new artwork and fewer words? I’d like to believe that it is not true, but I’ll grant that it may be. But doesn’t a remake need to remain true to the original and what made it special?

This issue is a re-make of Fantastic Four #3 from March, 1962. That issue introduced the team’s costumes, their “skyscraper hideout”, and the Fantasti-Car. They also confronted Miracle Man for the first time. Miracle Man was a lousy villain and the plot involving him was mediocre. The cool stuff in the story involved sub-plots and technical details. The Baxter Building is mapped out within the original issue. The uniforms provide wacky entertainment. The Marvel Age issue focuses too much on Miracle Man and not enough on the cool stuff. The Skrull issue did a delightful job updating the original with a heaping dose of humor. MA FF #3 started in the same vein, but faded down the stretch until my co-reader and I grimaced at the lame ending. And the soap opera cliff-hanger was no masterpiece forty years ago either.

All in all, though, I still think that you should be giving Marvel Age comics to every child on your shopping list. They don’t need to see Spiderman 2. They need to read the $6 trade paperback collecting Marvel Age Fantastic Four.

July, 2004