SMALLVILLE: Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating Superboy

[Note: the remarks that follow are based on the first four seasons of SMALLVILLE, and are written without knowledge of subsequent seasons.]

SMALLVILLE is terribly addictive. The ongoing revisionist tale of Superman's youth was several seasons old before I first jumped on board. Exposed to it by a friend, I started at the beginning and found myself fanatically absorbing the entire first season in four days and most of the second in a few more before, other life matters intervening, slowing my intake to a more leisurely pace and, at the dawn of season 3, putting it aside entirely. I picked it up again in recent days and, in spite of some naysayers who'd told me its quality dropped off at that point, found it no less captivating. I've flown through season 3 and most of season 4, and decided, tonight, I'd finally sit down and write about it a little, under the title I conceived for a review of it after I first started watching it nearly five years ago.

SMALLVILLE is Stan Lee's version of Superboy. Stan, mind you, has had nothing whatsoever to do with the production of SMALLVILLE, and he never wrote DC Comics' Superboy or any of the Superman books on which the show is based, but the show's debt to Stan is, like the comic medium's debt to him, virtually incalculable. When he hit his stride, Stan was the proletarian poet of pathos, a prolific pioneer of funny-book fantasy who fashioned fascinatingly flawed characters, relentlessly burdened by brimming barrels of almost unbearable angst. In his hands, their extraordinary abilities were often as much curse as blessing, and their lives were divided between living out soap-opera-ish personal dramas and bravely battling their way through grand, operatic adventures filled with wicked irony, plentiful plot twists, resounding triumphs, and torturous tragedy. And Stan loved alliteration. Credit where credit's due, SMALLVILLE picked up its own penchant for same from the DC books from which it was drawn, but it's definitely Marvel, rather than DC Comics, to which the show is most indebted. Even those viewers with no knowledge of Stan's work would immediately recognize the show in the description I just offered. If Stan and the Marvel gang had created Superboy back in the 1960s, this is how it would have been, and if Stan and the Marvel gang hadn't done what they did then, there wouldn't be a SMALLVILLE today.

A lot of people on the internet, it seems, wouldn't find the latter to be so terrible a thing, and though my overall assessment of the series certainly differs from theirs, I'd even agree with a lot of the criticism they've directed at it, but they'd be wrong to refract my remarks about its addictiveness as quips about addictions often being bad things. SMALLVILLE, it's true, suffers from many of the same weaknesses as the '60s Marvel books it so resembles. It has a lot of their strengths, as well, though, and there's a very good reason why Marvel, in that era, became the industry leader in this sort of story and remained so for nearly five decades while DC's post-Marvel history became, primarily, a story of repeated efforts to copy what Marvel was doing.

Rather than bland stuffed shirts, Stan wanted his characters to be "real people with real problems." As Spider-Man, the Thing, and so many others learned under his direction, sometimes it sucks to be a superman. With great powers came great responsibilities, but the same abilities that could allow one of sufficiently altruistic bent to be a great benefit to mankind could also make one's life a real mess. Clark Kent, SMALLVILLE's embryonic Superman, learns the hard way that living with a secret identity means living a perpetual lie that requires daily deception of almost everyone around him. Adolescence is hard enough as it is, but Clark finds it's even harder when--X-Men style--it brings sudden manifestations of new powers he doesn't understand and can't control very well. Trying to live something akin to a normal life can, in any case, be rather tricky when one is forever having to run off and save some damsel (or dude) in distress, or battle some dangerous mutant. Throw in the revelation that he's from another planet, and that his alien birth-father may have intended him to conquer the earth, AND that said father seems to have left a computerized simulation of himself on earth to "guide" Clark to that goal, whether he likes it or not, and you've got a serious angst-fest on your hands.

Stan loved constructing his little soap-opera subplots and milking them for all they were worth, and SMALLVILLE lifts a page (or two, or a thousand) from his many books, setting up a love triangle between Clark, Lana Lang (the girl he adores), and Chloe Sullivan (a girl who adores him).[1] The fourth party to the affair is Clark's secret, which, like that of Stan's Spider-man, perpetually fouls him up with both women. Clark's affection for Lana has always seemed very contrived to me, because it's something that has never been given any sort of real foundation. Lana isn't someone with whom Clark falls in love because of who she is. She's just Clark's dream girl, and why he would find her so compelling is never explored. Making it worse is the fact that Lana (Kristen Kruek) is, unfortunately, never really allowed to be very interesting. It's hard to say much about her character--she doesn't really have much of one. Chloe, on the other hand, is a keeper. She's an original creation of the show, an intrepid girl reporter for the school newspaper--essentially the series' stand-in for Lois Lane.[2] One of the shortcomings of the tri-angle is that Chloe--so well-written and so vibrantly brought to life by the beautiful Allison Mack--is so much better a character than cold fish Lana that it's almost impossible to believe Clark (or anyone else) would prefer Lana to her. It's impossible to watch and not think "Clark is an IDIOT!" But, warts and all, the dynamics of this triangle underlie, to some degree, nearly every episode after it's introduced, and the series has managed to wring some very touching moments from it.

Then, there are those pesky Luthors, who are forever trying to uncover Clark's secrets, and have limitless resources at their disposal toward that end. SMALLVILLE appropriates the notion of a teenage friendship between Clark and Lex Luthor, the man who will one day become his greatest enemy. In the early seasons of the show, Lex has some sinister quirks about him, but he isn't a villain yet, and the series has, as an aim, charting, alongside Clark's rise to hero-hood, Lex's decline to dastardly no-goodnik. By way of character motivation, the Super-comics posited, for decades, the notion that, as teens, Lex and Superboy were friends, but that this ended in a lab accident for which Lex blamed Superboy--the decades of feral enmity that followed were laid at the feet of Luthor's anger at Superboy/man over losing his hair in that accident. A fellow so brilliant he could create devices that threatened entire worlds thus tragically spent much of his adult life trying to kill Superman, rather than simply joining the Hair Club For Men. Fortunately, those behind SMALLVILLE had a much better idea, and brought it to large life in one of the series' great original contributions to the Superman mythos, the character of Lionel Luthor, Lex's father. Lionel is expressionistic foreshadowing personified--he is the very bad guy Lex will one day become.[3] Lionel gives Lex something he didn't have in the comics, a past that plausibly explains why he turns out the way he does. Lionel and Lex go at each other like cats and dogs, their relationship a perpetual feud between a seemingly omnipotent chessmaster and his unwilling understudy. Lex is horrified by the thought of becoming his father's son, and goes to great lengths to resist it, which makes for an interesting character study. The series makes good use of the fact that the viewer already knows how it turns out in the end by making an interesting, well-played, and original tale of how it happens; it's a story we've never seen, and it's a good one.

Michael Rosenbaum is spot-on as Lex, who, in his hands, is aloof, obsessive, and seems possessed of a terrible darkness lurking just below his calm exterior. If I have one serious complaint about the show's treatment of Lex, it's that I dislike how so many bad guys who come along are allowed to so easily makes him their bitch. His father is always ten steps ahead of him, and that always seems about right. Lex, however--even young Lex--needs to be at least ten steps ahead of everyone else (and with most "ordinary" people, he is). Lex Luthor doesn't call some security firm to deal with tattooed thugs who phase through walls, rough him up, and blackmail him--he gets his hands on some badass Anti-Tattoed Phasing Thug technology and makes them wish they'd never been born. In the first two seasons, he ends up on the wrong end of abuse way too often, and comes across, as a consequence, as far too ineffectual. You can't build an arch-villain that way, even if those abusing him are possessed of super-powers.

A lot of people end up with super-powers in Smallville. Clark's arrival on Earth, as a child, was accompanied by a punishing "meteor shower"--a hail of Kryptonite, the radioactive chunks of Clark's destroyed home planet Krypton. In the comics, Kryptonite is lethal to Superman, but harmless to humans. The creators of SMALLVILLE decided, instead, to allow it to affect ordinary people, making its radiation a source of all manner of bizarre mutations. This offered a handy means of providing Clark with super-powered adversaries, but the basic plotline--someone is exposed to Kryptonite, gains super-powers, goes nuts, and is, in the end, stopped by Clark--was, for the longest time, repeated almost every week. The repetitiveness of the "freak of the week" formula became a top complaint by the show's detractors.

The show is, of course, guilty as charged on the point. It did run the formula to ribbons in the early seasons. Whatever one makes of the stories for which the freaks were used, there are other types of stories to tell in a series of this nature. Relying so heavily on the formula didn't give them a lot of room to be told.[4] The freaks, who are mostly one-shot characters, are sometimes allowed to take up too much of an already-limited running time, time that would be better spent with some of the regular characters and extended plotlines. And a small town in Kansas were, nearly every week, someone gains super-powers and goes on a murderous rampage, and practically no one notices? Please.

But I do think those who most harshly criticize the freaks tend to overlook the good use the writers get out of most of them. SMALLVILLE's writers have demonstrated an enduring fascination with creating parallel storylines that compare and contrast the characters and their lives by holding them up against various mirror images of themselves--it's virtually the defining characteristic of the show's storytelling. The freaks have been especially useful in facilitating this. Taking another page from Stan Lee's playbook, the freaks are expressionistic constructs. They have quirks, obsessions, cravings that mirror those of the regular cast, and, gaining powers that allow them to act on such impulses without restraint, are made to serve as twisted, amped-up-to-the-nth-degree alternate versions of the series regulars. Even given the repetitiveness of the basic "freak of the week" formula, this has allowed for some first-rate storytelling. Clark is forever pining for Lana? The writers throw in a freak who is utterly obsessed with her, and eventually decides to do something about it. Chloe craves the warmth of a romantic relationship? Send a freak her way who craves warmth, as well--he drains the body heat off those around him, leaving them corpse-sicles. SMALLVILLE is a show on which the characters are learning and growing as they go, and this provides a useful means of dramatizing part of that process.

While the freaks sometimes take away from time that would be better spent elsewhere, they also often raise themes that are, unfortunately, too rich to properly mine in the time alloted. One of the rare freaks who made a return appearance, for example, was a shape-shifting girl who assumed the identity of others, one after another--as a consequence of doing so too often and for too long, she'd lost her own. A very appropriate theme for SMALLVILLE. Her return appearance in which it was broached had the potential to be a real keeper, but, squeezed into a single, already-cramped episode, the idea barely got lip-service.

That isn't to suggest the series doesn't find something closer to the right balance more often than not. It does. There are weaknesses in the writing, though, there's no denying that. The generous rehashing of the "freak of the week" plot isn't the only repetitive element in the writers' work. Among other things, Chloe and, especially, Lana are stalked, kidnapped, and otherwise menaced far too often. It's a convention of the genre, it's true, but if it's going to be so overused, the writers need to at least show a little more imagination in how and why it's done. Blatantly contrived drama rears its ugly head from time to time. Clark's inexplicable attraction to and preference for Lana is only one example. Another is Clark's horrified overreaction, in the pilot, to learning he was an alien. Still another is a pair of episodes with a telepathic kid who is dying. Clark becomes very attached to him and starts speaking of him as his brother, but the episodes never establish why he would come to feel this way, and the viewer can't even come close to buying it. It just comes across as hokey and insincere[5] The series is woefully in need of something that establishes a firm rationale for Clark keeping his powers secret from his inner circle of friends. We haven't really been given one, and, watching episode after episode, it's impossible to believe he would be so secretive for no real reason, given how badly it disrupts his life. To their credit, the writers do seem to recognize this, and make an occasional effort to address the matter. Never, in my view, particularly satisfactorily.

One of the least forgivable shortcomings in the writing is the terminal underwriting of Clark's adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. For large portions of the early seasons, the writers treated them as little more than props. They were almost entirely undeveloped as characters, and, after the show established itself, were given virtually nothing to do. Their function too often became standing around looking grimly concerned about Clark, reciting cliche homilies, and repeatedly offering the same two or three canned sentiments warning him against the many dangers he may face in anything he may decide to do. Their dialogue eventually became virtually interchangeable from episode to episode. In the second season, Martha started getting some other things to do, and season 3 saw the beginning of some work on Jonathan, but as of 3/4 of the way through season 4, both characters are still terribly neglected.[6] One could argue it isn't really their show, but it seems gnawingly shortsighted when the parts are essayed by John Schneider and Anette O'Toole. They do their best to breath life into the characters, and do, at times, manage some nice touches, but it's unfortunate that, with two such solid talents at their disposal, the writers haven't shown more vision.

That isn't the only case of shortsightedness by the series' creators (though it is, in my view, the most glaring). While individual episodes are often quite good, the writers don't always keep an eye on the bigger picture. The show is going somewhere. They tend to lose sight of this. Continuity gaffes also crop up from time to time. Martha Kent, at one point, goes to work for Lionel Luthor, which inflames Jonathan, but, after Martha discovers that Lionel has accumulated a tremendous amount of data on Clark (one of the series best plot-twists yet), Jonathan starts to see the benefit of having her in a position to keep tabs on Lionel's activities. This happens at the end of an episode; by the beginning of the next--only seconds later, when watching it on disc as I do--it's as if that never happened, and, after having gone into a rage at Lionel, Jonathan stands credibly accused of his attempted murder.

All these caveats aside, though, the writing on the show is, as a rule, quite good,[7] and that Quite Good makes a good mate with all the Quite Goods I've already mentioned. And there are plenty of others. The series' cinematography is of the quality of a feature film--rich, expressionistic, beautiful. Lots of imaginative camera-work. The production design is uniformly first-rate. The series' technical elements are superb in every aspect. It's a regular breeding pool of Quite Good that vastly outweighs the series' shortcomings, and its ultimate offspring is, in my view, the best thing other media have done for the Superman mythos since the first Donner movie.[8] It is endearing, and, I suspect, will prove enduring (if, with 9 seasons under its belt and more likely to follow, it can't already be said to be so). Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster would have Quite Good reason to be proud of it.

Stan Lee, I think, has even more reason.

--j.

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[1] Actually, this was preceded by another Stan-esque triangle involving Clark, Lana, and Whitney Fordman (Lana's beau as the show opens), but Whitney was edged out of the picture very quickly--he'd been effectively gone for some time before its made official.

[2] It's hard to overstate how well she's done; Chloe is a solid-enough character that she could carry a series of her own.

[3] While the series creators deserve a round of applause for their part in crafting Lionel, the real kudos belong to John Glover for making such an evil bastard such a relentless delight to watch; Lionel gets some of his complexity from the page, but Glover is really the one who brings it to life and makes it work, and he so owns the role, it's difficult to imagine anyone else pulling it off, and impossible to imagine anyone doing it as well.

[4] But, to be fair, the series does, eventually start telling some of them.

[5] The second episode, in which the boy dies, also strikes one of the most monumentally false notes of the run to date. The boy is dying, and this provides the basis for a story built around the theme of Clark coming to grips with his limitations. The boy's impending death is used to demonstrate that Clark can't help everyone. And then, of course, Clark does help the kid, taking the boy up in a hot-air balloon as he'd always wanted.

[6] The consequences of leaving them so underwritten is that the viewer can never develop a feel for who they are. This is particularly problematic in Jonathan's case, because all we ever saw him do in the early seasons is obsess over the need to maintain Clark's secret and serve up one mindless rant after another against "the Luthors." These rants were frequently astonishingly unfair, when directed at Lex, and made Jonathan come across as a real prick, with little to contradict the impression (when, in one second-season episode, Lex finally tells him to shove it, I felt like cheering). He's also prone to other behavior that makes him not only unlikeable but a rather poor father to an embryonic Superman. Several times, now, he's blindly rushed off in angry--possibly murderous--rages at other characters. Because it was never given a proper foundation, his behavior toward Martha's father, when that character was introduced, came across as remarkably petty and even cruel. Ditto regarding a character in another episode who mistakenly thought she was Clark's mother. No one writing the show seems to realize this, or think about it.

[7] In spite of the fact that it does have too much overly serious, underly naturalistic talk about "destiny," SMALLVILLE mostly avoids the stilted, unnatural dialogue and over-the-top delivery so many filmmakers impose upon genre projects of this sort. When, in season 4, Lana Lang is possessed by the spirit of a dead witch and is handled in that way, it's surprisingly jarring.

[8] From shortly after I started watching it, I began to wish Warner Brothers would simply let the show evolve into the Superman feature-film franchise it was then in the process of rebooting. After the unfortunate SUPERMAN RETURNS, I felt even more strongly that this would have been the course to follow.

PUNISHER WAR ZONE: Punishing the Guilty, Not the Viewer

The first two efforts to bring Marvel's Punisher to the screen were creative abortions and I held out little hope for the third, PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, upon learning it would soon be coming to a theater near me. There were early reports that Lions Gate (the studio behind it) was insisting it be a wimpy PG-13 flick. I knew nothing of the director--if I'd heard then that it was being made by a female German kickboxer, it would have probably drawn a lot more of my interest--and as it turned out, the movie was savaged by critics and pulled from theaters by the studio almost immediately after its release. Sounds like another pooch in the Punisher pound and I paid it little mind.

But the film grew a following. The internet buzzed with its words of praise, their persistent insistence that someone had finally gotten the Punisher right. This buzz drew sometimes angry retorts from those unfortunate souls--few but loud--who inexplicably found something of merit in the meritless Thomas Jane Punisher film from 2004. They resented these mouthy upstarts' insistence that their beloved turd of a movie had been upstaged and insisted that WAR ZONE was just a dumb gorefest.

PWZ, as it turns out, was something of a dumb gorefest.[1] It was also an absolute blast from beginning to end. Saying it's easily the best screen adaptation of the Punisher isn't really saying much--neither of the other two films even tried. It isn't sufficient to say it's the best we're ever likely to get either, because that sounds like we're settling for something that isn't as good as it could have (or should have) been. No, it's much closer to the mark to say PWZ is a great adaptation of the Punisher.

Over the years, there have been a few different "versions" of the Punisher and it should go without saying that as conceptually different as they are, no movie can be a great adaptation of all of them. PWZ isn't about the original version, which was, conceptually speaking, a top-to-bottom ripoff of Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan the Executioner character (had Pendleton ever decided to sue, Marvel would have lost a bundle). PWZ primarily adapts the far more interesting and original version of the character portrayed in Garth Ennis' very long run on the title.

Like Ennis, those behind PWZ knew what they had in the Punisher; a relatively simple pulp character who rages through a comic-book world of over-the-top-of-the-top ultraviolence, dishing out justice to superhumanly inhuman scum. That's what PWZ delivers in spades, a solid, violent, entertaining exploitation actioneer (albeit one made on a budget of which most exploitation films could only dream)[2]. And that's exactly what a Punisher film should be.

Noteworthies: Ray Stevenson, a dead ringer for the comic character, is rock-solid in the part, even if it does mostly just require him to look rock-solid, and Dominic West does a first-rate turn as the villainous Jigsaw. Director Lexi Alexander and cinematographer Steve Gainer tried an interesting experiment with the film's color scheme, attempting to replicate the color schemes of the comics. It succeeds, and makes for an interesting effect on screen. And the ending of the film? FANTASTIC!

Unfortunately, PWZ wasn't treated very well by Lions Gate. The production had been troubled from the beginning, and many of its troubles had been very public. Reading between the lines of the contemporaneous reporting, it seems as if the studio suits were determined to wring an anemic PG-13 film out of the material and when this wasn't possible, set out to intentionally make it fail in order to prove their "point." What isn't in any way speculative is that the film was dumped into wide release with virtually no promotion at all then pulled from theaters after only a few days and written off as a flop. Few were even given the chance to hear of its existence and of those who did, memories of the earlier Punisher films, unleavened by any knowledge that this one would be any different, no doubt kept large swathes of potential audience away in droves. It was never even given a chance and that it was deprived of any chance in such a dramatic way strongly suggests someone really had it in for the movie.

Now that Marvel is making their own movies, perhaps they should buy back their rights. I suspect they could get them for pretty cheap. Stevenson has expressed his enthusiastic desire to continue with the character as long as he's able. I suspect Lexi Alexander could be lured back for another go 'round. I'd like to see it happen. PWZ was the third attempt at a Punisher film but it's the only one that earned what the others got--another chance.

--j.

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[1] A "gorefest" relatively speaking, that is. For a contemporary "mainstream" film, that label would probably apply. For an action picture made these days--or, at least, one that isn't the latest RAMBO--it also seems appropriate. As a hardcore horror buff, I wouldn't personally regard it as a "gorefest" in general, but still, PWZ offers bloody deaths via various objects through the throat, one exploding head after another via gunshot, decapitations, cannibalism, a guy ground up in a glass grinder, a fellow hacked up with an axe, a man roasted on a spit over an open flame and so on. For some reason, the filmmakers, in assembling their list of horrors to cover, missed necrophilia. Something to save for the sequel, I suppose.

[2] By upbudget Hollywood standards, though, PWZ is a very small-budgeted film. It cost less than the 2004 feature but managed to be vastly superior.

Bill Mantlo's Life in Comics

In my younger days, Marvel was blessed with a talented, often brilliant, journeyman writer named Bill Mantlo who cranked out a mind-bogglingly voluminous quantity of some of the most exciting, ridiculous, literate, awful, thoughtful and sublime--in a word, great--comic stories of an era noted for great comic stories. Bill was generally never considered to be of the top tier of his creative contemporaries but even if one goes with that flow, any comic reader would have to concede he had some pretty stiff competition in that era. Probably, in fact, the stiffest competition he could have ever faced in any era in the comics business.

Bill began working at Marvel in the '70s as a production assistant to John Verpoorten. The story of how he broke into writing comics is a classic: one day, Tony Isabella bursts into Verpoorten's office, going on about how he desperately needs someone to script a story for DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG-FU. The thing is, it has to be done overnight. The two mull it over and it looks like Tony, who absolutely doesn't have time for it, is going to be stuck with it anyway when Mantlo, listening to the exchange, speaks up and volunteers to do it himself. Remarkably enough, Tony lets him, and this launches Mantlo's writing career. Lana Turner, eat your heart out.

Bill soon became, to '70s and '80s Marvel, what Don Heck had been in the '60s, a fellow who got the call when the Deadly Deadline Doom was approaching and the regulars just weren't going to make it. Fill-ins are unforgiving and a poor showcase for a new talent and though Bill wrote them for practically every major Marvel title at one time or another, he didn't seem to think very much of them.

It was when he got his own books that he really began to shine. A multi-part Spider-Man time-travel epic is pretty far out there without further elaboration; Mantlo's, in MARVEL TEAM-UP, co-starred the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Dr. Doom, Moondragon and 17th-century Puritan minister Cotton Mather and was set against the backdrop of the Salem Witch trials with the fate of all time and space hanging in the balance. How could you not read something like that? Bill put in runs of varying quality on, among other books, IRON MAN, MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, CHAMPIONS, HOWARD THE DUCK (his post-Gerber Duck stories are supposed to be wretched but I've never read any of them), and ALPHA FLIGHT (generally regarded as his creative low point).

His really great stuff came in his long and fantastic runs on SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, HULK, ROM and MICRONAUTS. ROM and MICRONAUTS were both licensed properties but Mantlo deserves creator credits for them. He took lame, utterly forgettable toys with sketchy, at best, premises and fashioned them into kick-ass star-spanning epics that outlasted the toy lines on which they were based by many years. He wrote every issue of both series. His time on Spider-Man was excellent. It's where he began Cloak and Dagger, gave us bionic Silvermane (a seriously hideous image, to be certain) and the great Owl vs. Doctor Octopus storyline culminating in "The Long Goodbye" (somewhere around #80), the best Spidey vs. Doc Ock battle ever published, bar none. He wrote a lot of first-rate HULK stories as well. He particularly seemed to let his imagination run wild on the Hulk and filled the book with insane fantasy elements--that's how we got Rocket Raccoon, among other things. He wrote a long arc in which he had Bruce Banner's mind gain control of the Hulk, which took the book in all kinds of new directions. His most significant contribution to the character, though, was, of course, in writing the story of Banner's childhood, the real origin of the Hulk.

Bill was a master of haunting stories, things so beautifully written and that got under your skin so effectively they'd stay with you long after you'd put the book down. I'd even call this his trademark, the thing he did better than anything. In particular, he would, every so often, pull, seemingly out of nowhere, some remarkably haunting one-shot short-story, plop it down in a book where it would seem, on its face, to have no business being at all and make it work so well that the reader not only thought it entirely appropriate but was left wanting much more of the same. These showed up in almost every book he wrote for any length of time. Many found their way into the Hulk (two of my favorites are "People In Glass Houses Shouldn't Hurt Hulks" from #262 and "Jack Frost Nipping At Your Soul" from #249). One became one of my favorite Marvel Conan stories, "The Army of the Dead," from SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN #110--a wonderfully odd metaphorical tale of the Army of the Dead besieging the City of Life with a nearly-dead Conan caught in the middle..

Bill was remarkably prolific. His output amounted to hundreds of stories, almost all of them for Marvel. He created Jack of Hearts, Cloak & Dagger and probably more other characters for Marvel than anyone since Stan Lee. Jim Shooter notoriously dissed him after he was no longer capable of defending himself but Jim Shooter is a notorious prick and nobody really gives a damn what he has to say about anything, right?

Now I imagine that any of you who know who Bill Mantlo is will, by now, have heard what happened to him. Several years ago, he was clobbered by a hit-and-run driver while he was out rollerblading. It didn't kill him but his head took an horrendous whack and a lot of his mind just didn't make it. These days, he's a mess. The online sources don't go into too many details but it's certainly obvious it isn't a pretty picture. He needs constant daily care and will for the rest of his life.

A Mantlo fan, David Yurkovich, has put together a tribute to Bill called A LIFE IN COMICS, scheduled for publication in early summer. As the title suggests, it's a retrospective of Bill's comic career. The proceeds from the sale of it are going to help pay for Bill's care; you get a copy of it when you make a donation to the cause. It's a fine project. I made a donation earlier tonight. I almost felt ashamed that I couldn't give more. Money is a bit tight at the moment but, in all honesty, anything I could give, even in the best of times, would seem utterly inadequate. There isn't a dollar figure I'd ever be able to muster that would repay Bill for all the enjoyment his work has given me over the years. As inadequate as it seems, however, my donation this evening is at least something and, with the spirit upon me, I wanted to come here and urge all of you to follow my lead. If Bill's work has ever touched your heart, if you've ever experienced mad laughter at the audacity of the spectacle of Cotton Mather striking down the Scarlet Witch, if you've ever had your breath taken away by a seemingly doomed Spidey fighting back against, defeating, and ripping the mechanical arms from Doc Ock or if you've felt a shiver down your spine when pondering the grotesque Hybrid, click on the link below, punch up the old Paypal account, and share some of the love. We in comics are a small, marginal group. We have to look out for our own.

http://www.sleepinggiantcreations.com/comics-ogns/mantlo/sgc-mantlo-main.html

--j.

Green Lantern's Lite: My Reaction to "Showcase Presents Green Lantern" #1

I'd never read the earliest years of the Silver Age "Green Lantern." I'd read the origin story, and, over the years, I'd made a few half-hearted attempts to pick up Archive editions on Ebay. I always failed, because I was never willing to put up the money needed to beat out the competition for such pricey editions. The proposition of DC's new "Showcase Presents" compilation, offered for an incredibly low price ($9.99), was something like a dream come true for me--a chance to read the formative years of one of my childhood heroes on the cheap.

As it turns out, GL would have probably been worth the outlandish price of those expensive Archive books. "Green Lantern" was one of the original Silver Age titles, and it embodies a good deal of what made that age so great. The Showcase collection was a joy to read, and served as a refresher course on why I've always loved the books of that era.

Hal Jordan is an ace test-pilot, who, while playing in a flight simulator, is nabbed by "some incredible force" which draws him to a downed alien spacecraft. Inside, he meets Abin Sur, a dying alien, who informs him that he's just been chosen as the recipient of a powerful weapon to be used "against forces of evil and injustice," a "green lantern" described as a "battery of power, given only to selected space patrolmen." The lantern is used to charge a special ring which will give Jordan "power over everything except what is yellow." The exception is a result of an "impurity" in the battery, and, one suspects, of the need of the creators to place some sort of limit on their protagonist's power. Another limit: the ring must be charged from the battery every 24 hours. The alien dies without ever getting to explain much more than this. Jordan, in time-honored superhero tradition, dons a mask, dubs himself the "Green Lantern," and goes forth into the world--and, eventually, the galaxy--to do battle with evildoers.

John Broome writes nearly every issue in the Showcase volume.[1] His work, here, is feather-light when it comes to characterization.[2] This proves to be of little importance, though. Broome's GL wasn't character-driven; it was plot-driven, and this is where his work excels. Without decades of continuity baggage, the pressure to serve the prejudices of a long-established fan-base, or the need to reference a larger company-wide universe outside the confines of the book[3], Broome just cuts loose with everything he's got, and what he's got turns out to be quite a lot. He's well-schooled in pulp sci-fi and fantasy,[4] and his stories are a wild and heady mish-mash of genre elements. Parallel universes, weird alien menaces, and bizarre super-technological threats abound. Jordan is virtually omnipotent, and Broome feels free to throw anything and everything at him. As with the best Silver Age material, the reader never knows what may be coming next. Jordan's power battery speaks, ordering him to attend to emergencies on other worlds. Unable to find a great leader in their own era, the far-futuristic inhabitants of Star City (in the year 5700) use their advanced technology to snatch GL from the 20th century and fill his head with a phony identity so that he might aid them in fending off an army of invading mutated Gila monsters. The 100,000 residents of a west coast town vanish in a flash of light, leaving GL to solve the mystery of their disappearance. In one of my personal favorites, GL, desperate to avoid the marriage proposal he knows is about the pass the lips of gal-pal Carol Ferris, uses his power-ring to conjure up a huge monster to act as a distraction. He's immediately hit in the head and rendered unconscious by a model airplane some children were flying nearby, and the monster goes on a rampage! Even better, we get to read the monster's thoughts! "Strange... I know I'm a 'chiller-diller' but what that means.. or what I'm supposed to do... I don't know!" Classic! The stories are simultaneously exciting, goofy, imaginative, cheesy, action-packed, and fun. It's amazing how consistently well Broome juggles all of these elements; the book only tips over into tedium a few times.

I've always liked the most excellent Gil Kane. "Green Lantern" is the project with which he's probably most strongly identified, and he handles the art chores throughout the Showcase volume. His uniform design for the character is a real classic, but his major innovation is the fluidity of movement he gives GL. Over in the Superman books, at the time, Wayne Boring's take on the Man of Steel had become virtually the house style, but Boring's Superman (and even, to an extent, that of then-upstart Curt Swan, which was replacing it) looked incredibly awkward in flight. Kane's GL, by contrast, moves through the air effortlessly, appearing, at times, like a skydiver, a speed-skater, a swimmer, a runner; someone as completely at home sailing through the sky as he would be walking on the ground. Even after nearly 50 years of seeing this style ripped off, it's still impressive. Another of Kane's strengths in play, here: he draws remarkably beautiful female faces. His women, throughout the Showcase volume, are visions of loveliness. Also on display, however, is one of his significant weaknesses; he simply can't draw monsters worth a damn. I've read his monsters described as looking like Mardi Gras masks, and that's about right. I also thought of Macey's Parade floats, and, at times, even stuffed animals for children. Even less intimidating than the creatures in a Gamera movie.

On the whole, "Showcase Presents Green Lantern" #1 is, warts and all, a wonderful volume, a solid exemplar of the Silver Age at its finest, and I'm probably going to be hunting down some of those Archive editions of these issues after all.

--j.

---

[1] These books were written at a time when DC's editors were often much more active in the writing of the companies' books. For the purpose of this review, I've assigned authorship of the stories to the writer and artists of record, but it should be understood that the editor may have played a large role in their authorship, as well. The editor of "Green Lantern", at this tsime, was the legendary Julius Schwartz

[2] Hal is given a romantic interest in Carol Ferris, the daughter of his boss. When the father leaves for an extended world tour, he puts Carol in charge of the company in his absence, making her Hal's boss. It's a very unusual arrangement to be featured in a book of this era, but Broome never does very much with it. Instead, he opts for a nearly-exact clone of the Clark Kent/Lois Lane relationship that had been featured in the Superman books for years. Hal loves Carol, but she loves Green Lantern instead, she comes to suspect Hal is Green Lantern, but can never prove it, and so on. This had become tiresome routine in Superman long before Silver Age "Green Lantern" was even a thought at DC.

[3] A team-up with the Flash, in issue #13, and a stray mention of Lois Lane is the only acknowledgement of any wider DC universe.

[4] As the book unfolds, we learn more of the source of the power battery, and of the "space patrolmen" spoken of by Abin Sur--they're a sort of galactic police-force established by a mysterious, ancient race known as the Guardians, and Jordan is just one of many "Green Lanterns" who patrol the galaxy. As many have noted, the premise is a direct steal from E.E. "Doc" Smith's epic "Lensmen" books.

Death & the Acrid Smell of Gunsmoke

By the 1970s the fire of the once-mighty Western was burning low. The wild popularity that had previously greeted the genre was over and in the face of oversaturation, audiences appreciative of its charms were rapidly drying up. Long over were the days of noble cowpokes shooting it out with black-hearted outlaws and taming savage red-skinned caricatures against Monument Valley backdrops. The brief, glorious resurgence from Europe had written its own epitaph then descended into self-parody. A few of the long-running Western comics were still chugging along but their days were numbered--the end of the decade would spell the end of them.

With one exception.

Out of the twilight appeared, in 1972, "Weird Western Tales," DC Comics' attempt to reinvigorate a flagging genre book by adding horror elements (and the word "weird" to the title, after Carmine Infantino discovered that books with the word in the title sold better--true story).[1] The experiment mostly failed but it did have one grand success story. Jonah Hex would go on to outlast his peers in the genre and continue a relatively healthy run right into the mid-1980s. There followed in the next two decades an ill-conceived sci-fi sequel series (Hex transported to the far-future), a commendable (and very funny) trilogy of Vertigo mini-series and now, a new monthly. To compliment the latter event, the folks at DC have published a large collection of the earliest Hex tales in their new "Showcase Presents" format.

The Showcase format is modeled on Marvel's Essential books. DC is long overdue for such a line and they couldn't have chosen a better subject for the treatment than Jonah Hex. This was one of the books I read when I was younger, sometimes regularly but mostly in stops and starts. Looking back, I'm a bit surprised I wasn't more faithful to it because I always liked it--it's one of the few books of which I don't remember ever reading a bad issue. Some were better than others of course, but the book's overall quality was, in my estimation, always remarkably high.[2]

Reading the new Showcase collection now, the fact that I didn't obsessively hoard every issue suggests to me that my younger self never realized just how high. After sequentially devouring the generous helping of Hex tales provided by the new collection--most of which I'd never read--I'm in awe of it. Put simply, this is some of the best work I've ever seen in a mainstream monthly. Rock-solid writing, rock-solid artwork and, over 30 years after their initial publication, they haven't aged a day.[3]

Jonah, an iron-tough post-Civil-War-era bounty hunter and gun for hire, is a grim misanthrope, with as bleak an outlook on life as had ever been displayed by any major character in a mainstream comic.[4] His was a tale of constant violence and he was capable of remorselessly exterminating fellow human beings with no more thought than he would give to swatting a mosquito. His proficiency as a manhunter and man-killer had made him something of a legend. Wherever he went, people told stories as he passed by. They found confirmation of the worst of it in his hideously disfigured face, which seemed an outward reflection of a hideously disfigured soul.

While he often plays to this perception to his own advantage though, Hex isn't merely the monster all of this suggests. He is all of those things, to be sure, but as we quickly learn, beneath all of this ever-present ugliness he's basically a good man, moral, honest and with a strong sense of fairness and of justice.

Not that it seems to matter very much in the world in which he roams. The tone of the series is set in the original Hex story, "Welcome to Paradise" (from All Star Western #10), which sees the businessmen of Paradise Corners hiring Jonah to stamp out a gang of outlaws who'd been terrorizing the town. Jonah takes out the trash in short order, to the delight of the businessmen, but when he then begins talking about retiring and taking up residence in town, his employers are horrified and tell him, rather unconvincingly, there isn't any place "in the whole territory" available at the moment. After he leaves, they indulge in a collective sigh of relief: "Have a savage like that living among civilized people like us? No sir!" Worse, a woman whom Jonah had earlier saved from one of the outlaws takes a shot at him as he rides by. She's furious because, in saving her, he'd become a hero to her son and he's, as she puts it, nothing but a "murderin' hellion" and certainly not someone she wants her son to emulate. "I put that bullet through your hat to show you that you're not welcome 'round here!" Through all of these indignities, Jonah puts on a hard, don't-give-a-damn front. As he leaves town though, he comes across a sign reading "Welcome to Paradise Corners." He stops, reads it, then angrily smashes it to the ground with his fist and rides away.

The story is heavy-handed, but quite effective in contrasting the good man beneath the apparently monstrous persona with the real horror that frequently lies beneath the well-scrubbed, smiling face of normal, "civilized" society. This becomes a recurring element throughout the series and often forms the substance of Jonah's wonderfully sardonic sense of humor.

Our anti-hero came by his bleak outlook honestly. At some point, it seems malevolent fate began to take a keen and enduring interest in the man named Jonah Hex and his life had been a relentless horror show ever since. A good deal of his time is spent in hunting down wanted desperadoes and he doesn't waste time on the small fry--his targets are as remorselessly sadistic as villains come. Forget slitting their own mother's throats for a buck; most of these guys would do it just for entertainment. The stories are always violent--often incredibly violent for a Code-approved book of their era--but the physical violence often pales in comparison to the violence inflicted upon the soul of Jonah Hex. Over and over again, he sees good people die merely as a consequence of their association with him. He, himself, accidentally kills one of his very few old friends. Another betrays him. A woman whom he'd come to love turns out to be an outlaw who was only using him for protection from those looking to bring her to justice. And so on. In these tales of an unrelentingly savage, lawless land, this vicious, scarred murderer is often the most virtuous character on display but he scores no karmic points for his virtues--he is, in fact, consistently made to suffer for them. The overarching story of Jonah Hex is that of a good man lost forever in Hell.

Hell, in this case, is the Old West as rendered by the remarkable Tony DeZuniga, the first (and, for my money, the definitive) Jonah Hex artist. DeZuniga's Hex work is one of the best arguments yet for the Essential/Showcase books' color-free reproductions (an element of the format that often faces misguided criticism from a handful of more-vocal-than-thoughtful commentators). His Hex always looked great; his uncolored Hex line-art is nothing short of breathtaking and actually manages to beg the question of why the book wasn't published this way in the first place. DeZuniga uses space masterfully, adopting a minimal, almost impressionistic approach to less relevant background features while concentrating an astonishing amount of detail in the characters and objects upon which his panels are centrally focused. Hex's world, through DeZuniga, looks worn and grubby. We see every wrinkle in the characters' clothing, every speck of mud on their boots, every line in their faces. We know one of DeZuniga's unwashed range-riders stinks because, looking at him on the page, we can smell him.

Most of the other artists represented in the Showcase volume largely adopt a variation on DeZuniga's established approach. Noly Panaligan puts in a solid run, favoring heavier line-work than DeZuniga. George Moliterni takes things in the opposite direction, going for an even lighter approach and using much wider angles on everything. The volume's only misfires, when it comes to the artwork, are a single uninspiring issue by Doug Wildey, and, most surprisingly, the two issues by the normally-solid Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, which are astonishingly flat and lifeless and well below the quality of the artists' regular output.

On the writing side, the Showcase volume reprints the complete run by John Albano, Jonah's first writer. Albano is often overshadowed by his successor Michael Fleisher, which is a shame, because his 10 Hex tales are excellent and some of the best in the collection. Particularly impressive was "The Hangin' Woman," from Weird Western Tales #17. In this very black tale (featuring the best artwork DeZuniga offers in the entire volume), Jonah is hired to bring in a gang of homicidal hooligans who like to play with dynamite. He gets the case after they use a few sticks of it to blow the local sheriff to spaghetti-sauce right in the middle of town. His employer is a wheelchair-bound, stogie-chomping old crone, a judge, as it turns out, and ominously known as "The Hanging Woman." Her name--no kidding--Judge Hatchet! Jonah brings down the bad guys but then he uncovers something disturbing about Judge Hatchet and her sons and decides his job isn't yet finished...

The incomparable Michael Fleisher assumes the writing duties with issue #22, beginning what would turn into a more-than-10-year run that would more closely associate him with the book than anyone who worked on it. In these issues, Fleisher begins to significantly flesh out what Albano had established. He immediately begins filling in Jonah's background and sets up a nemesis from the past who will plague Jonah for many issues. In one tale, Jonah breaks up an assassination plot aimed at President U.S. Grant, nearly getting himself killed in the process. In another, Jonah, temporarily blinded, must flee cross country to evade gunmen looking to take his scalp. One of my favorite of the Fleisher stories from the volume is "The Meadow Springs Crusade" (Weird Western Tales #27), which is basically a comedy. A feminist crusader looking to bring women's suffrage to Kansas finds her campaign plagued by masked agitators and hires Jonah--most definitely NOT a supporter of women's suffrage--to act as her bodyguard. The comedy in the issue works very well and it's a testament to Fleisher's skills that he's able to make it mesh so seamlessly with the book's usually bleaker tone.

The writing in the Showcase volume never becomes repetitive or descends to self-parody (both very easy to do with this kind of material). The cliche elements that pop up from time to time are handled well and are never groan-inducing (or they didn't get any groans out of me, at any rate, and a cliche rarely needs to work very hard to get a groan out of me). It's remarkable how well these stories hold up more than three decades after their original publication. "Jonah Hex" isn't merely a cut about the standard-issue sagebrush saga; it's a cut above a good deal of what the mainstream regularly produces and deserves a lot more recognition and respect that it has ever gotten.[5] Hopefully, the Showcase volume and the higher profile offered it by the new series will help see that it gets it.

--j.

---

[1] The book had originally been titled "All Star Western." It became "Weird Western Tales" with--appropriately enough--issue #13. (The format change was already underway before the official title change)

[2] Whatever mad distemper inspired my own decade-long exit from comics--an exit which saw the eventual dissolution of all but about three-dozen books of my former collection--didn't cause me to get rid of the three Hex comics I still had from the days just before I gave up the habit.

[3] With the exception of a few clunky elements, mostly in the first few stories.

[4] This was, of course, before such bleak outlooks became a fad.

[5] The same can not be said, however, of the series of tales DC unwisely chose to round out the Hex volume--a collection of unrelated stories drawn from All-Star Western which, in spite of some first-rate artwork from DeZuniga, Gil Kane, and Jim Aparo, only succeed in demonstrating, rather dramatically, why Jonah Hex eventually took over the book and caused tales like these to disappear from its pages.

Ultimate Waste: Some Ugly Ruminations on "Ultimate Avengers"

In the wake of the success of several live-action ventures based upon its popular characters, Marvel has embarked upon a collaboration with Lion's Gate Films aimed at creating a series of animated features. First up is "Ultimate Avengers," which hit DVD on Feb. 21st.

There's no more perfect candidate for screen treatment than the excellent "Ultimates" series by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. The book had offered a mature, psychologically complex tale that fixed many of the holes in the regular Marvel Universe Avengers book and was intentionally cinematic in its storytelling, something that could be brought to the screen with minimal alteration. The film project offered a golden opportunity to produce something quite unique, a groundbreaking film that would have heralded a triumphant entry by Marvel into the field of animated comic adaptations dominated since the early 1990s by their rival DC.

Unfortunately, Marvel is, it seems, still stuck in the increasingly distant past with respect to animated adaptations, still dedicated to the notion of grinding out Saturday morning kiddie cartoons in the mold of the mid-to-late '80s/early '90s and pretending as though "Batman The Animated Series" and its successors never happened.

Every aspect of "Ultimate Avengers" is, in fact, identical to animated product of that earlier era--incredibly cheap animation, horrible "G.I. Joe"-style music, voice "actors" who can't act,[1] reading embarrassingly awful dialogue from writers who can't write.[2] If you've seen the '80s "G.I. Joe" series, the "Transformers" show of the same era, or the early '90s Marvel cartoons, you've seen everything "Ultimate Avengers" has to offer. The film is a mess and, frankly, an inexcusable one.

More than that, it's a tragedy, an utterly wasted opportunity. Instead of the classic it should have been, we get just another Saturday morning cartoon aimed at 7-to-10-year-olds, but with a PG-13 rating.

...which brings me to another point: The PG-13 rating slapped on this clinker is a joke.[3] The movie is aimed squarely at the kiddie bracket and does literally nothing to earn that PG-13 rating. There's no gore, no cursing, no sex. It's actually far less mature than the prominent DC/Warner Bros. animated television productions of the past decade and could, in all likelihood, be run on children's television without altering a frame.[4] In a more reasonable era, it would have gotten a G rating. Even in this barbaric age, however, it's difficult to imagine any reasonable observer branding this with anything above a very soft PG.

The rating smacks of a marketing campaign. With that thought, it should also be noted that the film's pre-release ad campaign, which promised a more literal adaptation of the book, amounted to a colossal--and intentional--lie, arguably an even bigger one than the absurd rating. The teaser trailer released late last year--the only good thing on the "Fantastic Four" DVD--was made up, mostly, of scenes taken directly from the comic and rendered in fantastic animation. That, combined with the announced rating, created much anticipation among those of us hoping for a faithful adaptation but as it turns out, not a single frame of that material, shown in the teaser, is actually in the movie.

If I sound as though I'm somewhat vengeful towards the film, I was one of those duped by this campaign.

There doesn't seem to be much point in going into the "plot." There really isn't one--it's just a random stew of elements from the first volume of "Ultimates" with some regular Marvel Universe "Avengers" material thrown in. As I've been a fairly vocal critic of the regular Avengers comic, I feel compelled to point out that these inclusions from that original book are not the source of the problems with the "plot" and "characterization" in "Ultimate Avengers." As lame as "Avengers" has historically been, it would be wrong to smear that book with being the poison at the heart of this pooch.[5] Even at its worst--and the worst for the Avengers is as bad as mainstream books get--the Avengers was far more intelligent and thoughtful than "Ultimate Avengers." The two could still be mixed together and create a great movie (though I'd argue for a straightforward Ultimates flick). The deadly mixture here isn't of "Ultimates" and "Avengers"--it's of the comics and the most cretinously idiotic available breed of knockoff children's cartoons and it's the latter that poisons everything.

To speak bluntly--and vengefully--I'd love to see Marvel fall flat on its considerable ass on this one. This is impossible, of course--they spent virtually nothing on this trash, which means its pretty much guaranteed a hefty profit. Ominously, the second "Ultimate Avengers" release is already in the works, to be followed by an Iron Man and Dr. Strange project. After this one, I'd rather these other projects never occur. If the folks at Marvel ever gets their animation act together, they're sitting on a goldmine. If, as it appears, they're merely going to continue to pretend it's still the 1980s, I'd rather not see these other properties dragged through the mud in this manner.

--j.

---

[1] The sole exception is Olivia D'Abo, who brings more life to the Black Widow than the film deserves.

[2] All of this begs the question, "what on earth were they thinking?" If this was going to be an Ultimates film, it should never have been a project aimed at young children. If creating just another Saturday morning cartoon for very young children was the goal right out of the gate, there's a wealth of source material out there from which to choose (including the original Avengers) but they'd have to have gone with "The Authority" or "Supreme Power" to get something in the superhero genre less appropriate than "Ultimates."

[3] The fact that the filmmakers were willing to accept a PG-13, though, only makes the movie that much more of a tragedy, as the comic could have been properly adapted under that very same rating.

[4] That's no longer merely a supposition--Cartoon Network recently announced that they plan to do that very thing.

[5] The DVD's only redeeming feature is "Avengers Assemble," a great little documentary about the comics, principally the Avengers. It has George Perez, Tom Breevort, Kurt Busiek, Mark Millar, Joe Quesada, etc. It spends a great deal of time with Perez, who clearly loves the characters and loves working on them. I wish this had been a bit longer. It's so much better than the movie that the viewer is left wondering why it wasn't the main feature, with the "Ultimate Avengers" rubbish as an extra.

Ghastly Rider

Throughout the 1960s, mainstream comics were growing up, growing away from the silly, tame, light-hearted fare for children to which they'd been forcibly reduced by the Wertham-inspired witchhunt of the 1950s. Marvel Comics led the way, with Stan Lee and his merry band crafting a gigantic comic universe populated by a more diverse and complex group of characters than the medium had ever seen. The 1970s opened with Marvel successfully challenging the overbearing restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, that most prominent remnant of the Wertham reign of terror. The move led to the reform of the code and with the straight-jacket loosened, the medium hit puberty, and an era of wild experimentation was inaugurated at Marvel. Old ideas were re-tooled, while new ones blossomed in remarkable abundance and often seemed to be carried from thought directly to the page without much consideration as to how or even if they'd actually work in execution. It made for a lot of interesting work, both among the successes and the failures. Marvel has just collected, in one of their wonderful Essential volumes, the first few years of one such experiment, "Ghost Rider."

I was quite a "Ghost Rider" fan when I was younger, but I'd first gotten into it a little later in the run, during Michael Fleisher's excellent stint on the title and I've never gotten to read most of these earliest tales. Unfortunately, having now done so, I can only report that "Ghost Rider" was a book that radically improved after the period covered in this first Essential volume. GR was launched by Gary Friedrich and Mike Ploog, the writer/artist team that would subsequently unleash upon the world the classic "Monster of Frankenstein." GR proves not to have been their most glorious moment. Ploog departs after four issues and art chores on the title become a revolving door but Friedrich stays on for 13 of the first 14, at which point he's replaced by the normally rock-solid Tony Isabella, whose run, reprinted in its entirety, is, likewise, not his finest moment. The book suffers from--and, in fact, is crippled by--a most common ailment of books from its era: no vision. Right from the beginning, there's no sense of what the book is supposed to be about or where it's supposed to be going or even what it is, and there's no more of a direction evident at the end of the 28 issues collected in this volume as there was at its beginning.

"Ghost Rider" tells the story of Johnny Blaze, stunt cyclist extraordinaire, who makes a pact with Satan to spare "Crash" Simpson, his adoptive father, from a disease which is killing him. There's not a single line or hint of buildup to Blaze's interest in the occult, prior to the page in which he decides to enter into this arrangement, and the panel in which he does so had me howling:

NARRATION:
...you couldn't go... Not when they needed you! Still, there was no one you could turn to... No one except...

BLAZE:
SATAN!

That "Satan" in HUGE letters, on the page, would have been funny, in any circumstance; a reader in a world that has experienced Dana Carvey's Church Lady character will hear her voice at that point.

That little bit of silliness aside, Blaze makes the deal and Simpson miraculously recovers from his illness. But the Devil proves, as devils usually will, not to have been an honest broker and, three weeks later, Simpson is killed while performing a motorcycle stunt. Satan appears to collect on Blaze's debt, but, in the midst of working some horrific hoodoo on the stunned cyclist, he's interrupted by Roxanne Simpson, Blaze's adoptive sister and the love of his life. As it turns out, she's a woman "pure in heart," and her love for Johnny prevents Ol' Scratch from carting off Johnny's soul. Vowing vengeance, the stymied Satan departs, leaving his intended hoodoo half-worked. Half a hex is still a hex though, and with the coming of each night, Blaze finds himself transformed into... the Ghost Rider!

From this point, it becomes painfully clear the creative team had no clue where to take the story. Later in the series (beyond the scope of the Essential volume), the book's writers would introduce a Jekyll and Hyde element, explaining that the Ghost Rider is Johnny bonded with a VERY violent, ruthless, and powerful demon (the two having separate personalities, always battling for dominance). In these early issues, however, the transformations, aside from being visually stunning, are pretty lame, as such transformations go. Blaze retains his thoughts and full control over himself, and the change doesn't even seem to give him any more strength or durability than he normally has. It almost begs the question of why the writers had him transform at all. Admittedly, having one's head change into a blazing skull every night is an inconvenience but under the circumstances established in early GR, it isn't really much more than that. In any case, it doesn't give one a direction in life, particularly one worth chronicling in a bi-monthly comic, so the book's standard plot, introduced in the second issue, becomes "Ludicrously incompetent Satan hatches some absurd and needlessly complex scheme to get revenge on Blaze, and fails." That, believe it or not, adequately describes the substance of the first 19 issues of the book.

Even that, however, doesn't come close to doing justice to how very little direction there seems to be to the title. Plot points are introduced then contradicted or discarded. The Ghost Rider's powers seem to change from one issue to the next, often with little or no explanation. Characters are created, developed, then disappear forever. It's quite a mess.

Satan proves to be one of the most incompetent Masters of Evil in comics. Unfortunately, this is an inherent flaw in the scenario established by the book's creators. For over half of the Essential volume, Roxanne's love for Johnny is the only thing protecting him from Satan--if she dies, Satan will possess his soul. The obvious answer, if you're Satan, is to kill her, which would seem a VERY simple matter for any Prince of Darkness worthy of his title. This one doesn't quite seem to have gotten the hang of this "Evil" business, yet, though. He tries to kill her once, in the second issue, but his plan for seeing it done is so absurdly convoluted, it comes off as farce. He has the soul of Roxanne's father, Crash Simpson, returned to earth in a new body to do the deed, but instead of simply having Crash shoot her, stab her, bludgeon her or kill her in any of the hundreds of easily available ways, Crash is ordered to "sacrifice" her to Satan. This leads to some cheesy b-horror-flick-derived "Satanism," and Roxanne escaping, as GR rides to the rescue. Satan and Crash are even thoughtful enough to schedule the planned sacrifice at night--the night after they kidnap Roxanne--so that Blaze could be transformed into GR for the occasion. From this point, issue after issue is filled with Satan huffing and puffing, threatening, menacing and all the while watching his laughably ineffectual scheming fail miserably because he can't think to set up a simple assassination that would solve all of his problems. Worse, four issues after trying to do her in, one of Satan's minions actually saves Roxanne's life when she's on the verge of death from snake-bites!

As those snake bites indicate, the fact that Satan is too incompetent to simply arrange for her death doesn't mean Roxanne has a very good time in these stories. She is, in fact, kidnapped four times in the first four story arcs, menaced by a mentally unstable fellow in the the fifth, then kidnapped again in the sixth, this time by Satan himself. When she leaves the book for a time, the damsel-in-distress role is assumed by Daredevil gal-pal Karen Page, who dutifully gets kidnapped by the Orb then by Death Stalker. Before the book's end, however, Roxanne is back and being kidnapped again, this time by a being known as the Challenger, who swipes her in order to force Johnny to run an odd "race" designed to challenge him "on every level" (the Challenger, btw, turns out--no surprise, here--to be Satan, undertaking another of his ridiculous schemes).

Storywise, the collection's lowest point is the story arcs set in Arizona, during which it's fairly obvious that the very creative people working on the book are merely grinding it out for a paycheck. It's difficult to overstate this; the book becomes almost completely incomprehensible. Johnny plans to jump "Copperhead Canyon" on his bike. He run afoul of some local Indians who say the canyon rightfully belongs to them. They're in court trying to get it back, but if Blaze jumps it and "makes if famous", they're afraid they won't be able to reacquire it. Go figure. Their leader is a medicine man named Snake Dance, who describes his goal as delivering his people from "hunger" and "despair." In his first appearance, he demonstrates the power to control the minds of others, conjure serpents from thin air, and even transform himself into a giant snake monster. By his second issue, he's revealed to be a charlatan without any real powers, and no effort is ever made to explain how he accomplished any of his previous feats. This revelation also makes rubbish of his grand scheme, which is to kidnap and sacrifice Roxanne to a "snake god." He sees her death as an unfortunate but necessary part of his charade. It's never clear how needlessly bringing kidnapping and murder charges upon himself would further his aims of helping his people. It's just an excuse for filling more pages. So Roxanne is once again kidnapped, once again about to be sacrificed and once again saved by GR. By the next issue, Snake Dance's story changes again and he's presented as a crazy old man who genuinely believed that the sacrifice would mean "the gods would smile on our people once more." Whew.[1]

With this last flip-flop, we're introduced to Snake Dance's daughter, Linda Little Tree (in later issues, because, I guess, no one could remember, "Linda Littletrees"). Much time is spent on Linda and it seems as though she's being primed to become a major character in the book. It's revealed that, as a child, she was once saved from being hit by a truck by Crash Simpson. She's given a lengthy origin story; most of Spotlight #11 is dedicated to detailing her past. Unfortunately, Friedrich simply treats her as more page-filler--she's created, developed, then thrown away, just when it looks as though she's about to become a regular. Her story begins with her posing as a skeptic of superstition. She's quickly revealed, however, to be a witch in the service of Satan. Roxanne is, at this point, dying from those snake bites (acquired during her near-sacrifice), but Linda, Satan's little helper, inexplicably saves her life. Even more inexplicably, she then goes forth to claim Johnny's soul for her boss, something she'd theoretically just rendered impossible. She fails, of course, and she's ordered to destroy herself. She does so in spectacular fashion, setting herself ablaze and diving from a cliff. In the next issue though, her entirely unburned and unbroken self turns up at her father's house in a trance. Satan possesses her body and goes forth to commit more mischief. Much pointless page-filler follows, including a crossover with Daimon Hellstrom, the rebel Son of Satan. At the end of it, Linda is returned from Hell to Earth and apparently restored to normal; no longer dead, no longer a witch, no longer under Satan's power, and stripped of her own powers--no explanation for any of it.[2] She was earlier established to have a fiancee, but he disappears and is never mentioned again, as Friedrich begins setting up Linda as a romantic rival for Johnny's affections--she's suddenly seriously aflame for Blaze and she has it bad. So bad, in fact, that she follows him to Las Vegas. Seeing Roxanne there in his arms, she seethes. "I should just march in and claw her eyes out. But I won't! If I bide my time, my moment's sure to come!" She apparently stays there, in Vegas, for two months while Johnny recovers from some injuries. The first time she tries to put the moves on the cursed cyclist though, he kicks her to the curb and she's never seen again!

In the Vegas storyline that follows, Johnny goes to work for stock car promoter Dude Jensen. At first, Jensen is just a corrupt businessman. He owns enough police and politicians to get Johnny out of a legal jam and he even puts out a hit on an independent driver who, he says, is "costing me a fortune." The book's lack of focus rears its head again though. After the first issue set-up, Friedrich leaves and the story is completed by Doug Moench and Marv Wolfman, who have Jensen suddenly emerge as yet another of Satan's little helpers. He partakes of the book's tradition of kidnapping Roxanne then sets out to burn Las Vegas, but the Ghost Rider puts him away.

With "Ghost Rider" #6, Tony Isabella assumes the authorial reins with the obvious intention of turning the book into more of a regular superhero comic and away from horror-related stories. The pronounced shift in tone isn't as jarring as it would be on most books precisely because the book had already proven to be so lacking in any other direction--it comes across as par-for-the-course. In his first storyline, Isabella has GR team up with the Stunt-Master, a rather lame reformed villain (the Stunt-Master's own creator once dismissed him as "a very lackluster character."[3]). The two join forces to take down a super-villain, Aquarius, but, in a tip of the hat to the previous GR tales, the villain turns out to be--you guessed it--another servant of Satan. Ack!

By his third issue, Isabella begins his most talked-about change in the book. Satan kidnaps Roxanne, insists he still has possession of her father's soul, then tells her he could be persuaded to release it if she'd only renounce her pesky love for Johnny. Poor Roxanne comes across as a bit of a twit; after a little finagling, she takes the bait. Satan howls with delight, tells her he'd never had possession of her father's soul and mocks her for handing him Blaze's soul on a silver platter. Why her "renouncing" her love for Johnny when she still, in fact, loved him would have changed anything isn't clear, nor is there any reason offered for why, when informed she'd been duped, she can't just un-renounce him on the spot. As sloppily as it's done though, this still comes across as a gutsy move by Isabella. The whole "Roxanne's love" thing had been used as a deus ex machina device from the beginning of the series. No matter what else happened in the book, it was always there to foil Satan's various schemes. Isabella would have deserved kudos for removing it, except for the fact that, only six pages later, he immediately replaced it with an even bigger deus ex machina.[4] Just as GR is about to buy the farm, no less than Jesus Christ appears on the streets of Sausalito to save his bacon and tell Satan that "Johnny Blaze's soul is beyond you."

The introduction of Jesus acts as a check on Satan's scheming and results in a brief period of stability wherein the book focuses on standard-issue superhero stuff. GR battles the Orb, the Trapster, and, most implausibly, the Hulk, who can withstand brief period in the open vaccuum of space but is defeated, in "Ghost Rider," by having GR use fire to "burn up all the oxygen in the air around him" (while the jade behemoth just stands there, stationary) until he faints. Yeah, that's really in the book. There's an even worse fill-in issue during this period by Bill Mantlo and Geoge Tuska, where GR goes to Mexico and tangles with a fellow who obsessively shoots dolphins (don't ask). The standout story in the entire Essential collection, however, occurs during this period. It's "Phantom of the Killer Skies," from issue #12, which sees the Phantom Eagle, a hero of the first World War, return as a ghost to haunt the man who, 60 years earlier, murdered he and his parents. It's a fantastic read from beginning to end and features the first--and best--work on GR by the late, great Frank Robbins, whose artwork here, under the inks of Frank Giacoia and Mike Esposito, is pure Golden Age-style poetry. Though GR's involvement is merely peripheral, the story is much closer to the kind the book would see in its later glory days and is actually out-of-step with the rest of Isabella's effort to turn GR into just another superhero book. Reading through these stories, I came to see that effort as terribly misguided. Admittedly, I'm perhaps not the best judge of this, being tainted by knowledge of (and affection for) what the book later became, but this sort of approach came across, to me, as an extended exercise in missing the point; failing to recognize what made GR unique. Nearly all of these stories could just as easily have appeared in Spider-Man, Daredevil, Captain America and any number of other Marvel books of the time, with GR seamlessly replaced with one of those characters. "Phantom of the Killer Skies," on the other hand, would have looked quite strange in one of those books. It looks out of place among the other superhero tales in this phase of "Ghost Rider," but it points the way to the better material that was to come.

Isabella has complained bitterly about the sabotaging of the conclusion of his run by Jim Shooter (who, after Isabella's departure, would briefly assume writing chores on the book). Shooter changed Isabella's story so that the Jesus whom Isabella had introduced was revealed as a phony, a--yes, really--ploy by Satan. Shooter's actions, as described by Isabella, were undeniably ham-handed--among other things, the changes were instituted after the issue had already been finished--and, of course, Shooter is notorious for being an overbearing ass. Still, given the title as it had existed to that point and given the fantastic book it later became, I suspect history's ultimate judgment is that those changes were for the best, whether anyone at the time realized it or not. I'm a fan of Isabella's work and I certainly disagree (quite strongly) with his own assessment that his run was "one of the best extended stories I ever wrote." Aside from the excellent #12, I found very little in his time on GR to recommend, and I found his description of what he would have done with the book, had he remained on it, equally uninspiring,[5] particularly compared to the direction in which the book was ultimately taken. It's undeniable that Shooter's changes made a hash of the Jesus plot. In all honesty though, the book was already a hash. As I think I've indicated here, a lot of what Isabella had, himself, done with the book was just as bad (including introducing the Jesus plot in the first place). The changes by Shooter aren't particularly jarring by the time one gets to them--by then, it's just the sort of thing one has come to expect from the book.

The Essential volume concludes with a two-part crossover with Daredevil, a standard-issue superhero slugfest written by Marv Wolfman and with art by John Byrne. Byrne's artwork is excellent, as usual. The story wouldn't belong in this collection, though, if it didn't inaugurate some new and bizarre change, and Wolfman's script radically alters Johnny's previously rather nondescript speech pattern into a thick Southern accent reminiscent of Jonah Hex! Go figure.

Early "Ghost Rider" hasn't yet found its way, and in this respect it's reflective of many of the various experiments of its era. A lot of the others never got their act together and went away. GR grew into a much better book and became a success. Another pair of Essential books could collect the rest of the original run. The good news is that Marvel has, for a while now, been timing the release of their Essentials to coincide with the release of films based on the characters, and with the "Ghost Rider" movie scheduled for next year, we're likely to get a second--and much better--Ghost Rider volume in the near future (probably the only good thing that will come out of that movie).

--j.

----

[1] The Arizona-set storylines put away another page-filler subplot Friedrich had introduced then taken nowhere. Back in Showcase #7, he'd brought in a character named Bart Slade, a security man for the cycle show Johnny and Roxanne own. In the course of his 7 issues, he appears a handful of times to secretly pine for Roxanne, then, in Arizona, is ignominiously killed while trying to jump Copperhead Canyon, after Johnny goes MIA.

[2] While all of this is going on, Roxanne is kidnapped yet again, this time by a no-good thug of a biker by name of Big Daddy Dawson. Blaze being a bit of a celebrity, this bright boy assumes he's all money-bags, and plans to ransom the lass for big bucks. Unfortunately for him, the Ghost Rider, freshly returned from Hell, catches him first and the hog-riding pig is reduced to a pork rind.

[3] Roy Thomas, interview, Comic Book Artist #13.

[4] He later admitted "I set up the scenario...and probably discovered I'd written myself into a corner." --Tony Isabella, "Vengeance Unleashed" interview

[5] Johnny becomes a Christian, reclaims his soul and "you wouldn't have seen either Jesus or Satan in the book again. Johnny would have led his new life according to Christian principles but without the heavy religious overtones I'd brought into the book specifically to bring Johnny to this point. He would have continued his dual careers: working as a Hollywood stuntman and helping people as the Ghost Rider. He and Roxanne would have married and had as normal a life--kids and all--as possible in a super-hero comic book. I'd always pictured Johnny as a motorized cowboy and this new direction would have transformed him from Kid Colt Outlaw to the Lone Ranger." --Isabella, interview with John Knutson