Marvel's Marvelous Movies #3: Star Trek: the Motion Picture (December 1979)

I'm going to tell you upfront this was one of my favorite individual comic book stories when I was 11 years old.  I have no idea how many times I read it.  The following year, Marvel's Empire Strikes Back adaptation would knock this one (and just about every other comic I'd ever read and loved prior to encountering Al Williamson) down a spot or two on my personal hit parade, but I still have a deep and abiding love for Marvel Super Special #15.  I'd been a Star Trek TV show fan for as long as I could remember, and this was in the wilderness years of the 1970s.  Back then, you had to find Trek at odd hours on some local station.  Ours came out of Tallahassee on Saturday afternoons, subject to atmospheric interference.  When your station dropped whatever Trek syndication package they'd licensed, you lost touch with the crew until they popped up somewhere else within antenna range.  In the interim, you could read the James Blish short story collections with episode adaptations, and the often silly Gold Key comics.  Or collect and play with the Mego action figures.  That was as Treky as we got before 1979's Star Trek: the Motion Picture came out and relaunched the franchise as a movie series.

It almost didn't.  The movie, directed by two-time Academy Award winner Robert Wise and based on a premise written by series creator Gene Roddenberry, made money, but it was expensive to produce and wasn't as big a hit as Paramount had hoped for.  It certainly looked fantastic, with a sleeker, updated Enterprise and everyone in pajamas for a sweet slumber party atmosphere.  But it suffers from endless shots of the Enterprise slowly drifting along set to repetitive music cues and people staring in awe at light shows.  It's like watching the audience at Laser Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon.  The film allows its characters to ask existential questions, but when it comes to answering them, the result is akin to a 2001: A Space Odyssey where, after boring you for more than two hours, Stanley Kubrick has the astronauts explain to each other (and the audience) exactly what the monolith represents and why it does what it does.  The cheaper, more action-oriented Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan turned out to be the franchise's salvation, not this glacially-paced epic.  But in 1979, for me, it was enough seeing Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov (along with Janice Rand, for cripe's sake!) back in action.

And, after watching this movie again on Blu-Ray recently, I've decided I'll take it with all of its flaws and dull stretches over either of the terminally stupid "reboot" flicks any day of the week.  Star Trek The Motion Picture at least has ideas and something to say about the basic human dilemma ("Is this all there is?  Is there nothing more?"), things it takes very seriously.  Can you imagine a major studio nowadays dropping this kind of money on a sci-fi flick starring a lot of middle-aged people and without any meta-humor or product placement?  There's not even a sky-diving sequence!  There's barely any sex!

But let's talk about the comic.

It must have been a daunting challenge to adapt into an entertaining comic a story that consists mostly of long sequences of nothing more than the Enterprise gliding over the giant V’Ger ship and then small groups of characters conversing about it in staff rooms and small corridors.  The comic really benefits from the deft way Marv Wolfman condenses scenes.  Wolfman ruthlessly edited down long scenes into a few panels, quickening the pace and generally tightening things up.  Wolfman uses his narrative captions-- always a strength of his writing-- to clarify character motivation and add descriptions and exposition to guide readers along.  We're engaged throughout.

For the art team, which consists of Dave Cockrum on pencils and Klaus Janson on inks, the problems are finding ways to make all the conversations work visually and reproducing the movie’s many, many special effects shots.  Cockrum, a master of crowded team compositions and action-packed superhero action, comes through with strong "acting" from the principals, downplaying the usual Marvel dynamics but upping the emotional content of various scenes.  His Commander Decker in particular comes alive with various angry faces and hand-chop poses emphasizing his frustration.  The likenesses are consistent throughout, a real plus when dealing with familiar, iconic characters.  The results aren't photographic, but Cockrum never confuses the readers.  Kirk has his poofy hair, McCoy his sharply arched eyebrows and drooping, lived-in face.  Of course Spock is easy to get right, but even more conventionally good-looking people like Uhura, Sulu and Chekov look pretty much the way you expect.  Every so often there's a dead face, but they never become a distraction.

What an ink job Janson provides, too.  While he and Walt Simonson outdid themselves on innovative lighting effects in Close Encounters, here he and colorist Marie Severin use color holds to reproduce Douglas Trumbull's lightning balls and wormholes.  This kind of stuff is easy to do these days with digital inking and coloring.  It's nothing to isolate an element and change the color channels to whatever you want.  But when Janson and Severin tackled Star Trek, they had to rely on acetate or vellum overlays.  It must have been a tedious, time-consuming process because they use one or more on practically every page.  The results are nothing less than astounding.

For all its pacing flaws, the film is effective at making space seem like an infinite frontier full of dangers.  It's not just that there are Klingons and V'Gers out there ready to zap unfortunate astronauts and Starfleet personnel.  Space itself is dark and perilous.  For one thing, the ships have to provide their own exterior lighting.  None of that Star Wars stuff where everything in space is brightly lit no matter how far away it is from an actual light source.  To the human mind, space appears largely empty, dark and vast.  Even the vaunted technology its space explorers count on for survival turns on them.  The transporter goes awry in a shocking incident and, later, the warp drive throws the ship into what the characters call a “wormhole.”  Contending with these, the Enterprise crew truly seems to be going boldly.  This isn't sailing along to some cute world where you find 1920s gangsters or the White Rabbit out of Lewis Carroll.  You could end up a data stream in a godlike machine's memory banks or transformed into a robotic copy of yourself with a lighted jewel embedded in your throat.  Or merge with the overmind into a stream of light.  Wolfman’s script reproduces each of these episodes faithfully and Cockrum, Janson and Severin provide some spectacular visuals to match them, with all the production design details faithfully reproduced.  Ultimately, this is an extremely accurate recreation of the film's look and mood, minus its shambolic tendencies.

The story also appeared in three monthly issues (Star Wars, a much shorter but action-oriented film, ran in four, which is further evidence of how Trek should have been pared down a bit) which led to a short-lived Marvel Star Trek comic.  I never read a single issue of that.  After all this time, I'm not sure why, especially considering how much I enjoyed this one.  Maybe it was enough for me Wolfman, Cockrum, Janson and Severin had already provided fabulous glimpse of what a Star Trek comic could be, one-upping its cinematic source material.  Too bad they didn't get a chance to take on Khan.

Looks like I forgot to talk about the Bob Larkin fully-painted cover.  That's just as well.  I'd have written a paragraph consisting only of superlatives.  I look at it kind of like Kirk, McCoy, Decker, Ilia and the rest gaze at Laser Floyd.

Comixology has 45 old school Uncanny X-Men issues on sale for .99 each right now...

I can't help shilling for Comixology from time to time.  But sometimes I have to.  I really, really do.  I mean, I run a blog largely dedicated to old comics-- which I liberally define as "anything published prior to the year 2000"-- and a big part of that includes yakking at length about Uncanny X-Men back when Chris Claremont was writing it and Wolverine was but a hairy, beer-swilling pup.  Or whatever it is you call baby wolverines.  Right now they're selling 45 classic issues of Uncanny X-Men for .99 each.  I already bought them all for 1.99 apiece, and I considered that a bargain at the time.  If you haven't experienced the foundation of practically everything people love about Marvel Comics these days, this is your big chance to catch up.

The art is outstanding throughout, with Dave Cockrum and John Byrne pencilling most of the issues and a few guest art teams here and there.  And wow, beyond the visual treats, these are fun comics to read.  They're occasionally goofy, but they have all the theatrics and high drama you could possibly want in a superhero comic, with in-depth characterization of even the least-loved and lowliest of cast-offs.  You know, like Banshee.  Poor guy.  And the long-simmering "Dark Phoenix" storyline is one of those seminal comic book events, an era-defining tale, as is "Days of Future Past," which seems to have inspired a movie recently with a lot of familiar characters.  Where have we seen them before?

Anyway, Marvel can't seem to leave this stuff alone.  They must have retold all of Claremont's stories more times than DC has redone "Crisis on Infinite Earths."  Even Marvel movie guru Joss Whedon couldn't resist dipping into the Claremont well when he wrote his own much-lauded run not so long ago.

X-Men #101: Phirst Phoenix... and Wolverine gets all wiggly?

Uncanny X-Men #101 (October 1976) brings a bruised and battered group of X-sters back from a mission into space.  In the preceding issues, they'd taken a Starcore space shuttle-- accurately drawn for the most part (as was the Harrier jet in X-Men #94) by Dave Cockrum, even though NASA's real thing wouldn't get off the earth for another five more years-- to an orbiting space station (nothing like anything anyone's ever put up there, but still pretty cool) where they fought Stephen Lang (or, as some authorities have it, Steven Lang).  Lang is human, but more than that, he's a complete nutjob who hates mutants the way lions and hyenas hate each other. 

Maybe even more so, because Lang stoops to murdering even a non-mutant USAF officer who calls him out on just how insane his schemes are and lions and hyenas only kill each other in their feuds.  I can't think of a single lion who went so far as to bump off a leopard for telling him he's gone around the bend with the anti-hyena robot building enterprise.  Lang captures the team and forces them to fight for their lives in space.  It takes a couple of issues, but the good guys eventually prevail and, on the way home, fly through a solar storm.  Only Jean Grey (or Marvel Girl as she was known then) can pilot them safely back. 

The intense radiation, depicted psychedelically by Cockrum, triggers Jean's transformation into Phoenix, the all-powerful.  But let's let Chris Claremont tell us what the new Jean Grey is all about as only he can:


X-Men #101, script by Chris Claremont, art by Dave Cockrum and Frank Chiaramonte

Ahhhh!  My, that's some good Claremont.  "I am fire!  And life incarnate!" has always struck me as a characteristically Chris Claremont phrasing.  This may be because he was the guy who taught me the word "incarnate" in the first place.  It's certainly not a word one slips into everyday conversation, at least not when I was a southern kid and living in my childhood home, where people were letter carriers, school secretaries and baseball players, not all-powerful mutants.  And so this is the exact moment "incarnate" entered my vocabulary.  To me, "incarnate" and "eldritch" are forever Claremont words, and when I read them in other comics, I always assume the writer has stolen them from Claremont's run on Uncanny X-Men.  And by shouting this phrase, Phoenix lets us know she's here, she's for real, and readers look out!

This is the issue where Claremont found his X-voice.  While he’d already shown a sure hand at characterization, giving each rookie in his cast (and even the previously-established veterans) distinct personalities and moods, the first few issues trot out a tired Avengers villain, a random to the point of being non sequitor demon attack and some story elements from the first X-Men series.  The new faces and the ultra-detailed Cockrum art are the draws, not the stale plots.  I know things were beginning to spark before #101.  Claremont had already started one slow-building subplot about Professor X's strange dreams of distant interstellar conflict.  This has a major pay-off later, and for the moment it meant Professor X gained what he'd largely lacked before-- a personality. 

But the Phoenix story as it begins here is something else altogether.  Claremont allowed it to flicker around the edges of succeeding issues as he dropped clues and intriguing interludes before the whole thing blazed up into major event unto itself, at once epic in scope and intensely personal as well.  Jean Grey’s transformation into the most powerful of all the X-Men also serves notice Claremont’s stories will be about the women as much as the men of the group.  Jean and Storm wouldn’t act as cheerleaders or simple love interests, or worse, damsels in distress, with the stories really being about the boys in the band.  They wouldn’t be co-stars in someone else’s adventures.  They’d be stars, too.  The women would get to drive the narrative as much as anyone.

Cockrum emphasizes this moment in all its drama by having Phoenix dominate the page in a fury steam and lightning, one of those razzle-dazzle comic book light shows.  It's also significant her rebirth takes place as she bursts from water-- both Claremont and Cockrum would have been fully aware of the symbolism.  As she rises we see she's got this startling new costume and even seems to have more hair.  The rest of the team end up crowded into those narrow panels on the left so Phoenix can own the entire space to the right.  If you were holding this comic, this would be the outside part of the page, and this placing promises more Phoenix to come because she's the last thing you see before you turn to the next.  Jean Grey and X-Men would never be the same.

But what's this?  Back in those early, free-wheeling days before the X-Men became one of the major pillars holding up the Marvel cosmology, there was another little subplot happening, one Claremont didn't choose to develop into a major storyline.  Back then, Wolverine wasn't a huge fan favorite and star of every single comic Marvel puts out each month plus his own movie series.  In the first year or so of X-Men, he was just a short asshole mainly known for having fought the Hulk, but Claremont wasn't about to leave him as simple or one-note as all that.  So the team rebel, the loner who doesn't need anyone (needed by no one in return, it seems) turns out to have a bit of a sweet side.  Seems Wolverine has a cute little crushy-crush on none other than Jean "Phoenix" Grey herself.

X-Men #101, script by Claremont, art by Cockrum and Chiaramonte

Aww!  Like a lovestruck high school boy, he's not sure how to go about wooing her, but in his insecurity he plays the arrogant fool in his mind.  Little bit of the caveman, I suppose.  Claremont's narration is pretty harsh on the poor guy, though, don't you think?  I mean, yeah, Wolverine thinks some dickish thoughts while awkwardly trying a tender gesture, but does he deserve the caption box hectoring he gets here?

X-Men #101, script by Claremont, art by Cockrum and Chiaramonte

Probably.

In the last panel Claremont really lets the guy have both barrels, even though everyone involved knows there's a heart inside Wolverine's gruff, hairy, somewhat psychotic exterior.  Actually, I've always thought of the intrusive, judgmental narrator as representing Wolverine's self-recriminations.  That he didn't really like himself.  It would be a while before they humanized him... and then overexposed him... but isn't it fun to see Wolverine getting a case of the goofies over Jean?

October is Spookey Month: Uncanny X-Men #96 in which the X-Men meet H.P. Lovecraft or a version thereof...

What is your favorite Halloween fright creature?  Is it the ever-popular vampire?  The werewolf?  The ghost?  The demon?  How about the demon who's a riff on H.P. Lovecraft's whole "Old Ones" mythology?  I can't even pretend to understand Marvel's cosmology or theology, but if we're to believe "Night of the Demon" from X-Men #96 (December 1976), we are dealing with a universe where Lovecraftian analogues co-exist with gods and demi gods from just about every religion past and present alongside science both ordinary and extraordinary.

Our story opens on a lovely fall day with text-heavy narrative captions floating in the air.  This is a seasonal tradition in upstate New York, from what I understand.  They do help Chris Claremont establish mood, and the first couple of pages are all about mood.  Guilty over his role in teammate Thunderbird's death in the previous issue, Cyclops broods alone in the woods near the X-Mansion.  The setting proves aptly symbolic:  the recently deceased Thunderbird and the crunchy leaves combine to produce not a winter but an autumn in Cyclops' soul.  Also, it's September, which is close enough to Halloween for our purposes.  Penciller Dave Cockrum and inker Sam Grainger conjure up a tasty forest setting, aided by a crackerjack coloring job by Phil Rachelson.  You can almost hear the wind through those crisp red and orange leaves and feel the dry air.  Then Claremont taunts poor Cyclops so much, the man loses control of his optic blasts.  Cyclops accidentally decapitates an ancient obelisk-shaped cairn with indecipherable hieroglyphics carved on its sides.

This suave move-- I'm wondering how far Cyclops' eye-blasts travel before their energy or force dissipates enough to be harmless to anyone unlucky enough to be caught by one of his indiscriminate outbursts-- frees a demon from a type called "N'Garai" (Claremont was always fond of apostrophes in his monster/demon/alien species names).

The cairn itself is kind of an oddball element.  Sure, Claremont has to introduce this issue's enemy somehow.  It's just hard to suspend disbelief such a spectacular artifact would be undiscovered so close to the X-Mansion.  There must be county roads or even an interstate or something similar running nearby, too.  Plus, this thing is supposed to be thousands of years old.  You can't tell me a hunter, hiker, birdwatcher or Cub Scout pack hasn't stumbled across it before now, with a horde of archaeologists following soon after.  And to have Cyclops blast it open at random stretches belief to the breaking point, even for a book where we have a blue-furred teleporter running around.  But it's in the story, and we all know the gang at Marvel was simply working from reports submitted by the actual superheroes they published comics about, so it must have happened in exactly this way.

The boss N'Garai is a bat-winged, shaggy, one-eyed dude named Kierrok, and he burst through the mansion's wall like the Kool-Aid Man on a PCP rampage.  As a bit of side trivia, his name is an in-joke because he's portrayed by none other than William Shatner himself in a spectacular costume of someone's design. 

Someone?  I can't say who gets credit as creature-creator here.  Marie Severin and Sal Buscema drew the rather hectic cover instead of Cockrum, and no one has ever told me why.  I read in Comic Book Artist magazine many years ago how Stan Lee used to demand all monstrous enemies be humanoid in appearance to the point where he had Severin re-pencil a dog-like beastie originally drawn by Neal Adams, even if it meant the stupid thing was too big even to stand upright thanks the confines of the page layout.  There may have been a similar situation here, with editorial deciding not to use Cockrum's original design because it didn't fit the Marvel anthro-centric standard.  As you can see, there's also a slight continuity mistake thanks to the cover/interior art duties split.  On the cover, Kierrok is mean and green and pretty far between, but in the story he's kind of reddish or magenta.

Whoever designed him and whatever his color, inside the book Cockrum makes damned sure this nutty Kierrok creature can not only stand on a couple of muscular legs, but also flail about.  Kierrok tosses the heroes around like a big brother lumbering into a little kids' pretend wrestling match.  He also drains their powers and makes Wolverine frown as if he's an offended Sunday School teacher out of some Mark Twain book.  Tom Sawyer, perhaps.  What I love about Kierrok isn't so much that he gives the X-Men all sorts of trouble, but the way he insists in perfect English he's not likely to suffer defeat.  He's like a three-way cross between the Mugatu from Shatner's cult-fave series Star Trek, one of those body-suit Muppets and an enraged pro wrestler in an after-match interview.

As far as I can tell, this is where Claremont starts making his reputation for writing strong women (mostly justified, with caveats extensively covered elsewhere), because Storm comes into her own in this issue.  While the X-Men first attempt to deal with Kierrok one at a time-- which really makes their team training exercises seem useless or Cyclops even a worse leader than he thinks he is-- it takes Storm to shut the magic gateway between our world and wherever it is the N'Garai come from.  While Storm braves the demon hordes alone and also fights off a flashback to her childhood, the male X-Men apparently huddle around Professor X and pray for salvation.

Oh yeah, dig those crazy demons.  They look like something out of Disney's "Night on Bald Mountain" Fantasia sequence.  Cockrum keeps the mayhem contained within some tight, narrow panels that emphasize Storm's ever-growing claustrophobia.

We all know Wally Wood and Gil Kane influenced Cockrum's art.  Well, there's one panel that I swear looks like Cockrum and Grainger channel a little Kane.  Maybe it's Cockrum's choice of camera angles and Storm's clutching hand, both of which are very Gil Kane-like, or the way Grainger inks the demon's scaly texture and Storm's face.  On the other hand, the rest of the drawing elements seem less like Kane, like the double lines on Storm's knuckles and the hatching on the demon's bicep and under Storm's arm.  If Cockrum had chosen a full-figure pose for Storm and the cairn below her in the background, we could blow this image up into a pretty cool cover for this issue.

At this point-- because we only have about a page left before the comic ends-- Storm shrugs off the smoke demons and puts the finishing touch on the events courtesy of a huge lightning bolt.  And so concludes an action-packed one-off that falls one Innsmouth denizen shy of being a full-blown "Cthulhu Mythos" tale.

Claremont and Bill Mantlo share plot credit here, so it's difficult to know who came up with all these events.  The overall characterization and quick flashback to Storm's childhood scream Claremont, but the way Kierrok lumbers into the story without any foreshadowing or much of a set-up is generic comic book stuff that could be by anybody.  I don't know if Mantlo had a Lovecraft fixation-- I can't find much evidence of it in his Micronauts work-- but if you've read Giant Size Dracula #2 (September 1974), you've already encountered Claremont's appropriation of Lovecraftian elements.  That story pits our favorite vampire against a cult led by an Elder God-worshipping demon or warlock or warlock-demon named... wait for it... Y'Garon. 

This isn't a criticism by any means.  After all, just about everyone working in creepy genre fiction, film or art cribs from Lovecraft at some point.  Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, H.R. Giger, Sam Raimi, Mike Mignola (who does it best, as far as I'm concerned), Frank Sinatra (remember his his hit song, "Fly Me to Yuggoth?"), Tony Bennett, Alan Alda.  I've read Lovecraft's stories dozens of times and enjoy them, but to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, "If only he could write!"  Claremont's writing might have some cloying tendencies at times (especially in his post-John Byrne Uncanny X-Men era), but even at his wordiest he's never as awkward as Lovecraft and his rhythms and modern vernacular are much more appealing.  Mix the two writers together and you get Professor X doing a mindmeld and falling straight into the Necronomicon.

Yep.  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!  Eyeballs, tentacles, winged creatures that fly through the void between planets, geometries unknown on earth.  That's Lovecraft all over, but "... and in that moment, Charles Xavier... screams!" is pure Chris Claremont.

We're not through with the N'Garai by any means.  They make a reappearance a few years later in a story that borrows even more heavily from a more contemporaneous horror source, this time a little movie called Alien.  We'll discuss that in our next installment.

Now I'll share with you my favorite part of this comic.  It has to do with yet another of those strong women, for this is also the issue that introduces Professor X associate Moira MacTaggert, who will play an increasingly important role in stories to come.

That's some advanced Irish-Scottish stereotype-speak, Marvel-style!  All that's lacking is an argument about whether or not leprechauns eat haggis.  She may not have powers, but does Dr. MacTaggart have the toughness to hang with the X-Men?  Check this out:

She does what none of those highly-trained military dudes at our Valhalla Mountain NORAD command could manage in X-Men #94, firing from the hip, no less!  And all at once we have an exciting addition to the cast and we know never to mess with her.

X-Men #94: Nefarious Nefaria and how he blew a fortune

X-Men #94 (August 1975) was the first X-comic I owned.  A friend's mother worked for a regional magazine distributor and he got the leftovers.  This kid had piles of comics in his room, but he kept the X-Men issues in a cabinet in the living room for whatever reason.  Probably anti-mutant bigotry on his part.  After all these years I can't remember why he decided to sell some comics to me that day, nor can I remember why I wanted to buy them.  I liked comics, knew the difference between Jack Kirby and Alex Toth, loved Joe Kubert's art and had already discovered Al Williamson.  I just don't remember being comics crazy, but I was a junior high sequential art connoisseur of sorts because I loved drawing.

So years later, I'm going to claim it was the Gil Kane/Dave Cockrum cover that caught my fancy.  Even now, this cover impresses with its high (literally) drama and contorted heroes hurtling earthward to their deaths.  Well, except for Banshee, who seems to be flying to the rescue.  Poor Storm has completely forgotten she knows how to ride the winds-- and note Wolverine and Thunderbird don't even rate appearances!  Even without those two adding to the excitement, it looks kind of like Count Nefaria (the guy with the giant white head) is barfing mutants.  That characteristic Kane up-the-spout shot of Nefaria's face influenced the heck out of me for the next few years and I drew noses from that angle blacked in so I wouldn't have to work out the difficult low-angled perspective of the various nasal planes.  It seemed an elegantly simple solution to a drawing problem that had me stumped.  And you absolutely cannot beat the energy of Colossus in the foreground, boldly sporting primary colors of red and yellow.  Barfed or falling, that figure practically bursts from the picture plane and lands in your lap.  I probably bought the comics because I wanted to draw this particular cover.  I still do.  Good gravy, I love me some Gil Kane! 

My friend and I worked out a little deal where I paid him all the money I had in my pocket with a promise for more.  I think the original deal was supposed to be twenty bucks for a stack of books that, amazingly (or uncannily, if you will) included the first five or six issues of the "All-New, All-Different" X-Men.  In the end, I forked over a grand total of fourteen dollars and  the use of my left-handed baseball glove in P.E. a couple of weeks later.  By the time my pal and I completed the transaction on that long-ago spring day, I was in completely in goo-goo-ga-ga love with comic books in general and X-Men in particular.
 

Enough biography.  Let's read!

"The Doomsmith Scenario" introduces us to a man who has access to a matter transporter (maybe he invented it; the story never says where it comes from) and has also used some kind of genetic technology to mutate humans into anthropomorphic animal weirdos (which, admittedly, is a process that has fewer immediately-apparent practical applications).  Rather than launch a second Industrial Revolution by transforming the travel, transportation and medical industries and reaping billions, if not trillions, in ongoing profits, all he can think to do with this technology is invade a military base to hold the world hostage for a one-time payoff.  Granted, that involves each nation paying as much as it's capable, but it's still taking a huge risk versus a guarantee of unprecedented wealth if he just patents his tech and sells, sells, sells.

His name is Count Nefaria, and he is one of the most visually boring antagonists I’ve ever seen.  I believe these days he's some kind of immortal energy being, but when this book hit the spinner racks, Nefaria was just a goateed twerp in a suit with a ruffled shirt and evening cloak, a second-rate Bela Lugosi impersonator.  Off-the-rack, ready-to-wear, one-size-fits-all villainy.  His name essentially means Count Bad Guy, just to further illustrate how little effort went into his creation.  We can argue that dumb names are a hallmark of ol' Marvel.  I certainly will... Doctor Doom.  But to look at the magnificent Doom is to understand Nefaria's generic quality.  The Avengers dealt with the Count in #13 (February 1965) of their own book-- the synopsis of which makes the story seem completely interchangeable with just about any found in other Marvel team titles of the era-- and the unfortunate X-Men get stuck with him in the first regular issue of their revamped title. 

Our kid Nefaria and his Ani-Men invade Valhalla Mountain, home of NORAD’s super-sensitive defense center.  Despite looking like refugees from a line of He-Man knock-off toys, the Ani-Morphs or Ani-Men (one of whom is female, by the way) quickly subdue thousands of armed soldiers and military police who don’t simply shoot them on sight. 

The Ani-Men have the advantage of surprise for a few minutes, plus they're fast and strong.  That's more than enough to defeat the first bunch of uniformed slackers.   After that the entire base is on alert, yet the troops commit themselves piecemeal and not one soldier or airman gets off a shot despite being armed to the hilt.  They don't even try to shoot.  They must have been trained to use their rifles as clubs, and badly at that.  After this inexplicably incompetent response by our armed forces, Nefaria gasses everyone else to sleep.  It's just that easy for our tuxedo-wearing criminal genius.  I understand that in 1975, our armed forces were doing some serious soul-searching as the country emerged from the prolonged humiliation of the Vietnam War, but even the Mayaguez incident had a more satisfying military conclusion than this Nefaria deal. 

Of course, if we closed this plot hole we'd have a five page story where the X-Men watch a news report about a strange incident where Nefaria and the Ani-Men died in a hail of gunfire, and the rest of the comic would consist of pre-Thor Journey Into Mystery reprints.  That would never do, so the men and women guarding the United States' most important and secure military installation allow themselves to get their asses handed to them and, with the Avengers conveniently shelved, it’s up to our new X-Men to fly in and try to save the world.

Which they eventually do, but not before Cyclops spends an entire night roaming the halls of the mansion and bellowing his despair to the world, the original X-Men say a tear-filled farewell and a training montage where Thunderbird injures himself and Cyclops plays drill sergeant.  Since Chris Claremont takes a little time in his dialogue and thought-balloons to give both men clear motivations for what they do and how they act (Thunderbird is insecure, Cyclops is seasoned professional who has seen too many deaths and injuries in his time), the conflict between them works better than the seemingly random arguments that plagued Giant Size X-Men #1, where characters sniped at each other on practically every page and with no good reason.  It also pays major dividends in X-Men #95, but that’s a story for another day.

Penciller Dave Cockrum already had experience with group books, having worked on stories featuring the Legion of Superheroes in Superboy over at DC, and he co-created Nightcrawler, Storm and Colossus for this book.  Oh, and he drew the aforementioned Giant Size.  You'd imagine drawing a living island would tax a guy's creative faculties.  Not Cockrum's.  And here?  Wow, the man just absolutely cuts loose.  He must have wrecked his drawing hand filling panels with detailed backgrounds-- his Valhalla features a gargantuan situation room with elevated walkways between digital maps that must be hundreds of feet high to judge by the teensy-tiny antlike figures teeming all over. 

I remember being especially impressed by the training sequence and a collage-like one-page panel centered around Cyclops’s giant shouting head.  I copied that head line-for-line on notebook paper dozens of times over the next few years, always hoping to glean those Cockrum art secrets.  With the fine-lined inking of Bob McLeod giving the figures a bit of roundness and generally introducing a little bit of a Neal Adams-vibe, Cockrum's dynamic art dazzles.  It's pretty.  I mean, X-Men #94 has some of the prettiest art of its era.  I look at it and I feel joy.

Part of that joy comes from the absurdity of it all.  The first half of this book tends towards the talky, which leads to what I think of as a very fun kind of dissonance, like having a company of acrobats in spangled costumes perform Arthur Miller.  At one point, angry Japanese hero Sunfire scolds Professor X starting in the X-Mansion living room, but concludes his rant thousands of feet in the air above it.  All alone.  Well, the Professor is a telepath, so he probably read Sunfire's thoughts or something.  When Dave Cockrum provides the acrobats at least you’re getting a primo Cirque du Soleil version of Death of a Salesman.  Come to think of it, I’d pay good money to see that.

Since these are by far the best and most entertaining parts of the book, I kind of get the idea Chris Claremont would have been content to have his characters actually hang out around the mansion and watch Nefaria die a pathetic death on television while carrying on various conversations about their feelings and why they're sticking with Professor X.  Cyclops may look a little ridiculous expressing his essential dilemma, but at least Claremont gives him one.  All these years later, it's easy (and fun!) to parody Chris Claremont's more precious elements (many have, including this blogger) which would eventually overwhelm the book, but the man knew how to invest his audience in the characters and their dilemmas in a way that obsessed readers as never before.  When I was 14 years old, I was more emotionally involved in Kitty Pryde and Dani Moonstar than I was in the flesh-and-blood kids of the same age surrounding me at school, and Claremont made it good to feel that way.

But oh yeah-- superheroics!  Let's get back to Count Nekot Wafer.  After the tearful goodbyes and character-building, the X-Men finally get the call to action.  With almost all the pages already used up, the story ends on a cliffhanger, the X-Men falling to their apparent deaths as the result of a “sonic disrupter” Count Nefaria finds in Valhalla’s arsenal.  A sonic disrupter is a magical death ray that can disintegrate a supersonic aircraft but leave its passengers intact.  Pretty selective!  And yet we had to settle for a tie in Southeast Asia.

You can’t tell me any country that can produce a weapon like that and surround it with thousands of armed troops is going to tumble its nuclear warfare nerve center to a ragtag group even Dr. Moreau would discard as failures.  Then again, what is Marvel paying all its mutants for?  We’ve got the colorful suits, we’ve got Colossus and Storm and Wolverine.  Might as well use ‘em!

Let's take a fond look back at Soviet-style collective farming with our pal, Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin

I'm sure many of you out there in Comic Book Land wax nostalgic for the glory years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its socialist paradise.  From 1920s to the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, agriculture there took place on kolkhoz, or farming collectives.  And it was on one of these collectives a true hero of labor was born and lived his early years.  His name is Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin, but he is better known under his revolutionary nom de guerre, Colossus.

Piotr Nikolaievitch was born on the Ust-Ordynski collective farm in Siberia.  At some point in his early teens he manifested an unusual power-- he could transmute his flesh to living metal, increasing his strength to that of one hundred Stakhanovites.  Soon the young man began producing several times his daily quota, which benefited his comrades and the state greatly.  And it was there in the beautiful wheat fields of his motherland Piotr Nikolaievitch attracted the attention of noted capitalist psychic Professor Charles Xavier, who, as leader of a team of superheroes and despite his counter-revolutionary upbringing, had become something of a champion of collectivism (albeit allowing his charges to sport outlandish, individualistic garb).  The Professor appealed to young Piotr's desire to learn to harness his powers in the interest of the workers of the world.  And so it was the strapping lad left the farm and dared the decadent West.

 

The state began collectivizing agriculture with the First Five-Year Plan, which called for the organization of 20 percent of arable land into collectives.  The Central Committee decided in 1930 to extend this to most of the country's grain-producing areas.  Stalin took a hand with his Urals-Siberian Method, which essentially forced the farming people of those regions to surrender their grain to the state.  Stalin's civil servants also seized farm equipment and livestock, their slogan being "Eliminate the kulaks as a class!"  The peasantry resisted.  A kind of civil war erupted, with peasants killing livestock rather than surrender it, but forty years later in Giant Size X-Men #1 (May 1975), written by Len Wein and illustrated by Dave Cockrum,  readers find the Rasputins living a Spartan yet idyllic existence.  By then Nikita Khruschev had denounced Stalin himself in his famous 1954 "Secret Speech" to the Communist Party's Twentieth Congress, the Cuban Missile Crisis had come and gone, also Czechoslovakia, the Vietnam War and the world relaxed a little bit during the thaw era under presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford.  The time was right for a nice boy like Piotr to leave the collective and make his mark in American superhero funnybooks.

 

Compared to previous comic book portrayals of communist countries as Orwellian nightmare realms, this new view startles in its National Geographic picturesqueness.  Whether in the west or inside the communist sphere, farming remains a dangerous business, however, and Wein presents a convenient tractor accident by way of demonstrating Colossus' powers.  The raw, farmboy version of Colossus comes across as kind of a Soviet Li'l Abner in his first appearance and again in X-Men 97 (February 1976) where he and his pal Nightcrawler-- who at this point in his character history uses an "image inducer" to disguise his natural blue-furred appearance-- engage in a little girl-watching.  Chris Claremont provides a little fish-out-of-water humor, which artist Cockrum emphasizes with a perfectly chosen "camera" angle.

 

 

It's more a cultural moment rather than a political one.  Claremont doesn't have Colossus denounce western immorality.  Rather, Claremont has the lad make it more personal level, as a young man who has lived a very sheltered sort of existence-- not much different than some guy from a ranch in Montana, for example-- encountering a flash of skin for the first time.  Colossus isn't sure of it, but he's learning. 

 

Colossus' home country lasted just over a quarter century more before its economic and political systems could no longer sustain themselves.  At that point, the USSR collapsed and divided itself into independent nations.  The Cold War had ended, leaving the world with ever-more complex and confusing struggles, but these vintage X-Men comics capture a moment in geopolitical history when two vast powers with ostensibly opposite philosophies faced off through diplomacy and proxy wars across the globe, but the comic book creators from the English-speaking one were willing to humanize the foe and add nuance to their portrayals of our differences.

 

A few years before Piotr Nikolaievitch would more than likely have been a member of some commie bunch of X-Men counterparts the home team would fight to prevent some kind of moon shot sabotage or balance-of-power altering assassination.  Star Trek's Pavel Chekov prefigures Colossus' positive portrayal (even as the show's Klingons exploited the old commie/Cossack/Mongol horde tropes), but during the Seventies and before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the "Evil Empire" rhetoric of the Ronald Reagan administration, Wein and Claremont present their metal-skinned hero as a decent kid.  Chris Claremont would later reveal Colossus as a talented painter in his own right, a nice contrast to the character's hulking appearance and job as team muscle, fully rounding-out Marvel's favorite Red.  His question to Professor X about whether or not his powers should belong to the state shows Colossus is very much a product of his system, but he's basically good-hearted and kind.  Sort of like the submarine crewmembers from Norman Jewison's 1966 comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming!

 

Once the regular series starts, Colossus doesn't spend a lot of time trying vainly to re-educate his teammates with Leninist dialectics.  Or any at all, if I remember correctly.  The only time his politics really come to the forefront is in The Uncanny X-Men #123 and 124 (July and August 1979).  During a battle with Arcade a mind-controlled Colossus turns into exactly the kind of stereotype Wein and Claremont so carefully avoided-- the Proletarian.  It's a powerful switch, and with it Claremont gives us a satirical taste of the stuff Marvel printed in the 1950s, when Captain America wasn't frozen in ice but actively combating the International Communist Conspiracy and possibly flouridation of water, as well.

 

Since superhero comic book characters age very slowly (if at all), and because I've long since given up following current continuity, I'm not sure how Marvel handled the Soviet Union's dissolution.  The most recent X-Men story I've read-- the Joss Whedon run-- didn't address it at all.  Colossus was just there, as apolitical as he'd always been.  It seems unlikely a guy like Colossus, who was in his late teens when he first appeared and must only be in his twenties or early thirties now, could possibly have grown up under communist rule on a collective farm.  Maybe he's just a simple Siberian farm boy without the political ramifications.  Maybe he always was.

Early Uncanny X-Men finally available at Comixology

Comixology just added Giant-Size X-Men #1 (May 1975) and Uncanny X-Men 94-100 this week.  Technically, the title isn't Uncanny X-Men.  Just X-Men.  Or, if you prefer, The All-New, All-Different X-Men.  The X-people didn't become uncanny on the cover until issue #114 (October 1978), but Comixology cleverly lumps them all together under one easy-to-find title.

Isn't it strange X-Men managed to go so long without an adjective?  It has precedents.  After all, the Avengers starred in The Avengers.  Daredevil settled for "Here Comes."  But with all the incredibles, amazings, mightys and invincibles, you'd think someone at Marvel would have already slapped some kind of descriptor on these kids before the middle 70s.  Exasperating, exaggerated, exacting.  Anything.  Right?

These issues join the already-available later ones comprising the "Dark Phoenix Saga."  Now you can check out the earliest days of the international X-Men, the characters who made this book one of Marvel's flagship franchises after the original version sickened and didn't exactly die, but entered a sort of zombie-state.  Reprints, we call them.

What does this mean?  It means I just bought a bunch of comics I've bought many times before (including the originals!) in various forms (including, once again, the originals!) and we're going to have some fun with them here sometime in the future after I read them yet again and decide just what the heck I want to point out.  Probably something obvious other people have pointed out about ten thousand times before, but I'll stupidly treat as if I'm the first because that's what I do.  This is my way.

It also means I'm missing Dave Cockrum right now.  That guy could draw.  The stories in these issues are your usual Marvel gang-warfare stuff with a few surprises and then-unique touches but the art was the main draw for me.  The character designs really dazzled my junior high self and I spent a lot of my free time copying Cockrum's splash pages and coolest panels-- there are many of them in these issues-- instead of studying and doing homework...

Now I DRIVE the school bus!

Giant-Size X-Men #1: A retrospective look back in anger at a remembrance of things past!

Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum create
a classic image!

Giant-Size X-Men #1 (May 1975)

Publisher:  Marvel

Story/Script:  Len Wein

Art: Dave Cockrum

This is where it all began.  The X-Men legend.  This is where the title began its rise from obscure Fantastic Four knock-off to Marvel’s flagship franchise.  Hugely influential and source material for a lucrative film series that helped jump-start the idea of “superhero movies” as we now know the genre--  yet its characters remain fairly obscure outside the comic book world.  We insiders—damned as we are-- may know how Banshee lost his sonic scream and chuckle knowingly at the strange concept of Nightcrawler’s being able to turn invisible in shadow yet have a face that’s always shadowed, but our moms and dads probably couldn’t tell Wolverine from tangerine if you spotted them a tree, a juice squeezer and six Hand ninja.

But hoooo baby, they love that singin’, dancin’ man Hugh Jackman!

Anyway, here we are at the beginning at last.  Giant-Size X-Men #1.  Years ago I bought a run of early X-Men from a friend for the grand total of 20 dollars and the use of my left-handed outfielder’s glove one day in P.E.  In return I had X-Men numbers 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 107 and 112.  And I read them.  I took them to school, passed them around to my friends and we read them until they were wrinkled and puckered at the staples.  Take that, graded mint collectors!  But I didn’t have Giant-Size X-Men #1 and by the time I realized what I had that foolish friend of mine was on drugs and would rather trade his back issues for white powder and green leaf, neither of which I could easily obtain and transport back into the States despite possessing diplomatic clearance through customs thanks to a childhood spent overthrowing Communist-friendly regimes in Central and South America.  I was a precocious child and I will soon publish my memoirs detailing my cover story as a violin prodigy on a perpetual world tour that just happened to intersect certain geopolitical hotspots.  That is, if I’m not assassinated first!

I digress.  Eventually Marvel reprinted this story and I’ve since read it too many times.  And last night, I read it again.  The cover—by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum—is a classic image, one copied and homage many times.  Led by—of all things—a filthy, atheistic Red made entirely of metal, including his filthy, atheistic genitalia, the new internationally stereotyped X-Men burst through the old homogenously white American X-Men.  The cover copy promises something it calls “Deadly Genesis!” but the title page introduces a story calling itself, “Second Genesis!”  What the hell?  Can’t you people get it together?  Plus, that title sounds a little like a new herbal shampoo, superior to the previous formulation.

Herbal shampoos—I mean, getting it together is what this story is all about.  I’m speaking of the super-team.  With the original X-Men missing after an ill-advised trip to a tropical island in search of an all-powerful mutant, Professor X travels the globe and recruits his new students.  There’s Nightcrawler, who finds himself pursued by angry Germans—the inverse of what my great-uncle did to the lousy Hun with one of Patton’s tanks during the Big One.  There’s Storm, who flies around topless with her startling white hair conveniently covering her breasts no matter how many howling thunderstorms of wind and rain she calls up with her magical mutant abilities.  There’s the aforementioned Red, a beefy simpleton from a collective farm.  He’s later called Colossus and wonders aloud if his powers are everything Professor X claims, shouldn’t they belong to the State?  Not on my watch, Pinko!  Professor X also recruits a trio of ringers, three characters who had already appeared in Marvel continuity.  I’m referring to the Impossible Man, Flash Thompson and Irving Forbush.

Okay, okay.  He signs Sunfire, Banshee and Wolverine.  We all know Banshee thanks to the many movies made about him in the last few years, but Wolverine remains an obscure piece of comic book trivia.  Sunfire is one of those arrogant, angry, ultra-traditional “I hate the West” Japanese guys beloved by American comic book writers.  Because you can never have too much racial animosity in your superhero group where teamwork is at a premium and cooperation can mean the difference between life or death in heavy combat, Professor X also brings in Thunderbird, an Apache who beats up buffalo with his bare hands, feels “ashamed of his people” and has to be persuaded with the old reverse psychology trick.

This is probably my favorite storytelling moment in the entire book, because artist Dave Cockrum has Thunderbird walking away in a huff, only to stop and rub the back of his neck with his hand.  It’s reminiscent of my beloved Billy Jack movies, one of those moments I used to anticipate with my little heart all a-flutter where Billy Jack finally has had enough redneck bullshit and prepares to lay aside his pacifism in favor of kung fu mayhem.  Wein’s dialogue—Thunderbird says, “Ho-kay… that does it!” and you can almost hear his slow, husky, exasperated voice—only makes the moment more Billy Jack-ish.  Billy Jack-ish? 

Anyway, the Professor’s mind game works on the proud, angry Thunderbird and soon the petty squabblers find themselves at the X-Mansion where Cyclops shows up and starts barking at them like an army officer and addressing them as “people” in a clipped voice. People, the X-Men are missing!  Only you can save them!  Cyclops is curt and snappish because he’s a professional and time is of the essence.  But despite sharing a flashback with the newcomers, he fails to explain why they should care about his problems, much less participate in them. 

Take Colossus, for example.  Two days ago, Colossus had never heard of X-Men or capitalism or honkytonk music or Peyton Place.  Suddenly, he’s expected to go off on some dangerous, possibly lethal mission with a group of strangers, all of whom appear to despise each other and aren’t exactly shy about expressing it, to risk his metal neck for another group of strangers who, to hear Cyclops explain it, are just as hateful as the ones he’s with.  If I were him, I’d be heading back to the land of vodka and women with five o’clock shadows.  If I were Storm, I’d take off my shirt and go flying back to Africa where people worship me as a goddess.  Sunfire has that sweet castle and kimono-clad wife to go home to, Banshee can score sweet seats to the Tom T. Hall concert at the Grand Ol’ Opry.  If I had their lives, I wouldn’t be mucking around with this junk, either.  As for Nightcrawler and Thunderbird…

Well, if I were either of those guys, I guess I’d be stuck because their lives seem to have the least purpose, unless being chased by angry mobs or manhandling buffalo while seething with contempt for your own tribe count as purposes.

Len Wein was and continues to be a fine writer and editor—I point you to his run on the original Swamp Thing, various stories in DC’s horror titles and hundreds of fantastic stories over the years plus his editorship of Watchmen, but reading Giant-Size X-Men #1, I’m struck by how shrill and unpleasant he makes his cast.  Character conflict is one thing—the Fantastic Four used to bicker a lot-- but having Professor X deliberately court this particular group of truly unpleasant people is quite another.  There’s no reason for their snappish behavior other than the transparent mandate they flaunt “individuality,” and because conflict adds interest.  With almost 40 years of comic book reading hindsight, I can’t think of a reason why Wein couldn’t have used a little subtlety or at least balanced out the nastiness with a little sympathy. 

In the classic days of Marvel, Human Torch would needle the Thing until they came to blows or at least fireballs and angry threats, but there was always sense of brotherly love beneath it all.  And they were likable.  You could go to the movies with them, if you could ever get them to agree on what picture to see.  Human Torch has always favored those Judd Apatow comedies, while the Thing prefers anything with Steve McQueen in it.  At this point in the X-Men narrative we barely know any of these jokers, but I can’t imagine spending more than a minute listening to their lame cracks and randomly vicious insults, if even that long.  It’d be like hanging out with the Let It Be Beatles without ever having experienced A Hard Day’s Night.

Because she only throws one fit—and off-panel at that-- Storm retains the most dignity, despite wearing a cape, a monokini and thigh-high go-go boots.  By the time they’re all fighting for their lives against the menace of a living island that calls itself Krakoa— Shocking twist!  The ISLAND is the mutant, thanks to that catch-all explanation for anything that doesn’t other make any sense, magi—er—radiation— I was just sick of them as individuals and collectively.  By the end, I was rooting for the island.

Dave Cockrum’s art on this job isn’t as slick as the guy he’s imitating, Neal Adams.  Cockrum’s characters pose dramatically but stiffly, lacking the Adams fluidity.  Adams’s superpeople might run around with every muscle in their bodies tensed, but they’re flexible and sinuous.  Cockrum’s figures here are dynamic but awkwardly constructed.  They also seem to be shouting a lot, even when they’re alone—as Cyclops does when he finds himself on the X-Jet minus his teammates and his powers, or Sunfire when he’s flying along outside the very same jet well beyond earshot of whoever it is he’s supposedly addressing.  That’s probably due to their being a bunch of jerks.  Cockrum confines himself to traditional panel shapes for the most part, and the result is a bit cramped.  He didn’t really hit his artistic stride until the regular series, especially #94 where he and Bob McLeod teamed up to produce one of the sweetest superhero art jobs I’ve ever seen, the one that made me want to draw superhero funny books for a living way back when before life sent me off on a more punk rock filled course that led me to Japan for some reason.

On the other hand, Cockrum shows the one thing that really matters—artistic charisma.  Appeal.  You want to look at these pages.  And you have to admire the man’s effort.  He even manages to draw the impossible.  There’s a very strange moment where Cockrum has to depict magnetic waves descending to the ocean floor as the team finally comes together with a typically silly comic book solution to the the Krakoa situation.  Who knew islands actually float, kind of like icebergs?  In Cockrum’s defense, it’s easy for a writer like Wein to describe this kind of thing.  I just did it, and I’m a complete idiot. 

But as an artist, I can’t think of another way to depict visually one of the prime forces of the universe which is difficult enough to account for in physics theories, much less as the work of a team of superpowered human beings.  It’s best to think of this panel as symbolic, like an editorial cartoon where the inner workings of various congressional committees are turned into a visual metaphor so the kind of idiots who still read newspapers, much less their editorial pages, can understand how they’re getting shafted this week.  Unless you disagree with the artist’s politics, of course, in which case you need to know enough to write an angry blog entry about it or at least comment on a political message board thread about it.

No one can see magnetic force itself, only its effects, and no one really knows what goes on in committee.  It’s all guesswork on the artist’s part.  I don’t know what Cockrum’s politics were at this time.  Perhaps a kind of pro-mutant, anti-sentient island stance that manifested itself in that remarkable panel. 

He certainly made the ridiculous look ridiculously cool.  I miss him.