Burying Children With Daredevil

My earliest memory of Daredevil is also one of my most disturbing childhood comic book memories (on par with the clown that killed a child in a Charlton book), and it set me on course as a lifelong fan of the series.  The issue in question was 130, and it was a tale that dealt with voodoo.

I don't think I have the issue anymore, and I really don't remember much about it, but there is one scene (a panel, really) that stands out in my memory.  I don't remember what lead up to it, but that doesn't really matter, the end result was a close up panel of a young African-American boy buried up to his neck in the dirt, mouth open in sobs and tears coming from his eyes.

It was the mid-Seventies when this came out.  I was young.  Maybe between five and seven.  Possibly a bit older.  Either way, it didn't matter.  This image has stuck with me for decades.  I'm sure I bought the issue (or had my father buy it) because of the cover, but that was nothing compared to the inside horror of a child buried alive.

Voodoo was big in America at that time thanks to Live and Let Die and an interest in all things "occult."  To find it covered in comic books is no real surprise.  Daredevil was a mainstream title, though, put out by one of the two big publishers.  To find that sort of image still strikes me as odd.  I don't remember any other comics from Marvel or DC pulling off something quite like that.

I still read Daredevil today, but there has not been a panel to compare with that one.  Writers and artists have come and gone.  There's been great storylines and forgettable ones.  But that single panel has managed to worm its way deep inside my mind and has never left.  That's quite an accomplishment considering all the horrific things I've seen and read.  Kudos to the creators of this for creating something so powerful.  Unfortunately, the fact that I can't remember who they were or what the story was about doesn't speak well to the rest of the issue, but if success were based on a single panel alone, I'd have to say they were the most successful team in comics.


Mandatory FTC Disclaimer: I did not receive this issue for free, and if you click on a link I may earn a commission.

Revamping the Uncanny X-Men

It's a move that reeked of the usual sales desperation.  The Uncanny X-Men had lost its way (again).  Events in the mutant series of books dictated that this had to happen.  So on and so forth.  What it really boils down to is a fool and his money are soon parted, and I'm a fool missing some money.

I've been an Uncanny X-Men fan since the early 1980s.  I've been through good.  I've been through bad.  And worse yet, I've been through the boring.  I've been saddened by Claremont leaving, and horrified when he returned.  I've seen Wolverine undergo about 936 different variations.  I've watched my favorite characters killed ... and many brought back to life.  I've witnessed some incredible storytelling and have watched Marvel pander to the almighty dollar.  For a title that has been around in one form or another since the 1960s, this is not unexpected.  To start its numbering over with issue one ... well, that is worth looking at.  Let's look at some of the arguments that have been made.

"It's just a number."  That's what one fellow fan said to me.  He's right. It's just a number.  It doesn't detract from the issues that have come before it.  It erases none of those stories from my memory.  It does, however, give new readers no clue as to what has come before them.  Therefore a sense of history is erased almost like Orwell wrote it himself.  Yes, the stories are still out there, and a search of eBay shows you can get all the back issues.  But the days are gone when some new reader sees issue #143 and thinks, "Wow, what has gone before I got here?"

"The stories got too convoluted."  Yes.  Yes they did.  All the X-titles became a huge mess, dictated by a publisher that cared more about squeezing out every last dollar than it did making sure writers stuck to something cohesive.  All it takes, however, is good writing to fix those problems.  A relaunch just guarantees the same thing will happen again ... especially when you have about 50 other X-titles going.  It will get messy ... again.  The titles do, it must be said, clean house from time to time without relaunching a book.  It could've been done here, as well.  Marvel just saw dollars and decided that a lame attempt to boost sales could make some people forget how lame the attempt would actually be in the grand scheme of things.

"The direction the various mutants split in made this a necessity."  No it didn't.  It made it so that there were new stories that could be told.  Uncanny X-Men has been filled with direction changes.  They have been handled with various degrees of success.  Each time they have been done with a relaunch, they have not stuck and have been handled with all the finesse of a bull on meth.  Will this time be different?  Only time will tell, but I'm actually enjoying it so far despite all my complaints.

Yes, that's right, I'm enjoying the title.  Just a few months into its run, and I have to say it isn't bad.  It also didn't need to be relaunched, however.  We could be at issue #548 telling the same story.  This new direction didn't merit a total relaunch of the title.  It was pointless and unnecessary.  Perhaps a few new readers were picked up, but I can't help but wonder how many people said enough is enough and dropped it.  Probably not many.  If they are like me they know the title will go through cycles of various degrees of greatness, and when it's good it's really good ... and that's always worth waiting around for.

Besides, it'll probably revert back to its old numbering in a year or so anyway.

Cover Review: Doctor Tom Brent -- Young Intern #2

Charlton put out a lot of comics I liked.  They weren't always good comics, but I enjoyed them nonetheless.  My guess, however, is that in 1963 there wasn't a single sane person who ever uttered this phrase: "Oh boy!  It's the new issue of Doctor Tom Brent -- Young Intern!"  Not a single one.

How many things can you count wrong with this cover?  Let's start with the obvious -- the title. 

Doctor Tom Brent -- Young Intern sounds about as exciting as watching Lawrence Welk on PBS with your grandmother as she starts to nod off.  There is really nothing about the title that says, "Read me."  If your parents hated you, this is the comic they bought you.  "I know you wanted Detective Comics, but you've been a little bastard.  Read this instead."  Even Ned Flanders finds this boring.

A cover's job is to sell readers on the comic.  The artists, of course, would have no control over the title or the story inside (in this case, the yawn-fest "A Doctor Heals in Many Ways"), so they had to make the artwork engaging on some level.  They have, obviously, failed here.  Instead of drawing a cover that pulls you, they decided to come up with something even more boring than the title.  One doctor at a microscope, another one telling him that they had 12 hours to come up with some way of keeping a boy from going home to die.  Our hero, Young Intern Brent, has no clue how to do this.  Way to sell a book.  The only thing that could have made it worse was a cover blurb stating, "Now with ten MORE pages of TEXT inside!!!"  What were they thinking?  Who was the audience for this?  Who bought it?  Tom Brent probably doesn't know.

I have none of these issues in my collection, and I doubt I ever will unless someone sends me the wrong item when I win something on eBay.  This series could be the most exciting young intern series ever written for all I know.  You can't tell by the cover, however.  What you can tell is that there were probably quite a few kids who spent their twelve cents elsewhere.



Confession is Good For the Soul

I have a confession to make, one that when made before seemed to take some people by surprise.  I haven't read a single copy of the new DC relaunch, and I have really have no plans to do so at this current time.

I hear shrieks of "blasphemy" and general wonderment.  How could I, a comics fan and writers of such stuff, not have read any of the relaunch and how could I not be planning on doing so?

Easy.  I don't care.

I've been around long enough to know when a publisher is pulling off a promotional stunt or is engaged in outright desperation.  This reeks of both, and I really don't want much to do with it.

I know all the reasons behind it, and some of them are actually valid.  Discarding decades of history not only of characters but of titles is not only insulting to audiences both old and new, it's also a death blow to people who liked that sense of establishment.  I was one of those people.  With a business plan that seemed a tad more thought out than Marvel's Silent Month, DC invalidated me as a reader.  So I returned the favor.  That's not to say I'll never read any of the relaunches, but it is saying that as of right now I couldn't care less about them.

What's even more surprising is what I've heard about them.  Some are winners.  Some are losers.  That is to be expected.  In the good new titles, however, people are telling me there are good stories, but not a single one has been described as something that could only be done under the guise of a relaunch.  So not only does this move seem like a gimmick and desperate, but it also seems lazy.  Lazy in the sense that the publishers and writers (most likely just the publishers) couldn't think of any other way of bringing in new readers and having a major shake-up other than this bit of carefree nonsense.  And those readers recommending the titles?  They all tell me they think the numbering and titles will revert back to normal sometime in the near future.  (No kidding.)  So, yes, DC, not even your fans believe it, though the mainstream news medias seem to have bought it as they usually do.

DC's move to seem less isolationist has sort of ended up seeming that very thing in a sense.  Unfortunately, it has also worked, with DC dominating sales charts.  I can't picture that will be the case for much longer (and it may have already started to wane; I have yet to see current numbers for the past month).  It's a short-term fix to a long-time problem, which is: attracting new readers.  This was a half-hearted good idea.  You can attract all kinds of new readers, but if you lose the old ones, you're sunk.

Wolverine and the X-Men #1

This title got added to my pull list when Uncanny X-Men looked like it was no longer going to be published.  (Yeah, that lasted long.)  I decided to keep it on the pull list ... knowing nothing about it ... because I like Wolverine, and I like the X-Men.  Plus, it added to amount of comics I needed to get to the next discount tier.

When the first issue arrived I looked at the cover and immediately thought I had made a mistake.  Hideous.  Luckily there was truth in advertising, as the story was just as stupid.

The premise is that Wolverine has taken over the job of running Professor Xavier's school.  That is a good premise, which has promise.  That said, the crux of the issue involves an inspection to make sure the school is safe for young mutants ... and it's all handled with comedy -- mostly of the slapstick variety.

Wow.  That's all I can say.  Wow.

Wolverine heading the school actually makes sense for his character, and it shows some good growth.  Handling the situation as a comedy is a huge mistake.  It really doesn't even make sense, and I doubt it will last all that long.  I hope it won't last that long.

I may have issue two by now.  (I think it's in my stack.)  I'm in no rush to read it.  I will, however, stick with it a few issues until I make the final decision on it.  I think the premise has promise, so I'm willing to give it a chance.  All it needs to do to fix the problems is get a new artist and writer team ... and keep Frank Miller away from it.


Mandatory FTC Disclaimer: I paid for this garbage.

Cover Review: Doc Savage #7

I never read Marvel's Doc Savage series.  Covers like this one, to issue seven, is why.  It is bland, boring and bad.

The title logo is fine.  It reeks of savagery.  Everything else, though, just reeks. 

First there is the werewolf.  If it stood upright, it's head would be awfully tiny.  And why does it look like it should have four arms?  I do like the thick drool, however.  I am a big fan of thick drool.

Savage himself is ordinary.  If I knew nothing about the character or the title, I would know that Savage was oddly colored (bronze?), and liked to wear a vest, white pants, boots and little else.  He also had weird sideburns.  I would imagine he was some kind of werewolf hunter, based on what the werewolf is saying, and the fact that his name is Doc Savage. 

What is stranger than the werewolf or the odd coloring of the cover, is the werewolf's prints in the snow.  The footprints don't seem to resemble the werewolf's feet, they are drawn oddly, and it looks as if the werewolf was possibly hopping on one leg that those Oriental ghost vampire things.  Perhaps this was part of the story.  I have no idea.  I never read the issue, and with this cover I never would.

One last note: How the hell are the clouds behind the sun or moon?  (I can't really tell which it is.  It resembles the sun, but there is little reason why a werewolf would be out in the sun since they traditionally turn into their namesake during full moons.)  Has the moon/sun suddenly entered our atmosphere?  If so, this cover should look radically different.  Rick Butler, you've done better.  I'm not sure you've done worse.


Mandatory FTC Disclaimer: Clicking on a link may earn me some cash.  This issue was not sent to me to review.

Wish Fulfillment Personified -- The Punisher

Marvel's character, the Punisher, is about as basic a character you can get.  Overtly based on Mack Bolan in The Executioner series written by Don Pendleton, the Punisher, in the most basic of terms, is a man whose family is killed by bad guys and because of that he decides to kill all bad guys.

End of story.

The Punisher is a lone wolf.  He listens to no authority, lets no one stand in his way.  He rights the wrongs and does it with finality.  If you are engaged in a crime, he will kill you.  This is teenage male wish fulfillment at its finest.

The idea of doing harm to all the people who have done you wrong ... and then taking it further to make sure no wrong is ever done again is appealing.  The notion that authority, be it law enforcement, your parents or school, cannot contain you is a fantasy second only to sex in a teenage boy's mind.  When the Punisher steps into the fray he becomes symbolic of what every wronged teen boy has imagined at one time or another ... guilt-free, rampant vengeance.  It's part of why he's so popular, and since teen boys grow up to be teen men, he remains popular.

If revenge were all the character had to offer, though, he would be soon relegated to second tier status, and that's being generous.  Through the hands of various writers, however, Punisher has taken on something that goes beyond mere violent masturbation material.  (Excluding, of course, those ill-conceived detours into the realm of angels and pseudo-Frankenstein monsters.)  He has become an almost tragic figure.  A twisted Christ.  He wipes evil from the Earth, but is destined to do so alone (or with the help of a few select friends) and be alone.  He has been resurrected (again, in those horrible storylines).  He has attracted the ire of self-appointed protectors who find his methods too extreme and have punished him for it.  Is he to be worshipped?  Only by the psychotic, but there are plenty of readers who can understand and even sympathize with is actions.

There is something cathartic about ridding your world of evil.  Not just locking it away with the hopes that he or she will be reformed.  Sometimes your problems can only be solved by defenestration or massive explosions.  Were you do to those things in real life, you would be hunted and most likely caught.  You would have to hope a jury of your "peers" would understand that sometimes rapists have to be shot in the face.  And you would hope they have pity on you.  The Punisher has these concerns, but they don't matter much in the grand scheme of things.  His titles sell well enough that readers know he will never truly be reformed or cancelled.  He will live to kill another day ... once again brought back from the dead to show the world the error of its ways.