It's here!

So, as I reported about a week ago, I had a great visit to Sterling Silver Comics (Mike Sterling, Esq., Prop.) when I was down in California for Winter break; the idyllic sojourn was marred only by my forgetting there was a Part Two to the story in the X-Men comic that I purchased specifically for one panel by Werner Roth - and of course that panel is not in Part One.

Undaunted, I made mail-order arrangements with the Mikester for the second issue; it was easy, since he's such an Ebay maven and has all the ducks particular that kind of exchange nicely lined up. And today, a package was delivered to my door by a uniformed representative of the federal government.

I want to digress a moment to say that the package was pretty impressive. It was a nice stiff manila envelope with a professional mailing label; inside was a thick backing board and a thinner protective cardboard sheet; and inside that the poly-bagged comic was wrapped in another plastic bag for added protection. Nice.

When I got the issue out, I realized the cover was cooler than I remembered - here it is scanned clear:

The story concerns Count Nefaria's (um, okay) attempt to revive the criminal organization The Maggia (cut it out, Stan!) and use the captive X-Men as pawns in a plot extort one hundred million dollars (that's three quarters of a billion in today's money) from the U.S. government by holding Washington, D.C. hostage in a weird transparent dome. The Count's lieutenants are The Eel, Scarecrow, The Porcupine, Plantman, and The Unicorn. (I thought this group had a name, but if they ever did, it came later.)

As achingly Silver-Age as much of the story is, this installment is as action-packed as promised on the cover, with lots of teamwork from both the X-Men and the Five Bad Guys as they battle through the capital. The Army steps in, apprehending super-heroes and super-villains alike (which was actually pretty reasonable), and that leads to the panel that I have remembered for decades: the not-capture of the Bad Guys.

The panel is almost exactly as I remembered; I had the figures a tiny bit smaller in the frame, but otherwise the layout and composition were just as I recalled. I don't know why this panel, of the thousands upon thousands that have passed my eyeballs, is among those that have burned that flashbulb memory into my brain. There's just something about the almost pictographic arrangement and the hyper-expository dialogue that is totally charming. It's almost like old-school filmmaking when they would interrupt a scene to freeze frame and zoom in and highlight with arrows or other markers the details of a scene before letting it resume speed and play out; I get that same explainer feeling with this.

It must have made an impression of some kind. And now I have it again.

Thanks, Mike.

Days of passed past

So, I want to make a big shout-out to cyber-pal Marc Burkhardt. We've been rattling around the same back alleys of the comicsweblogosphere for some time and have crossed paths pleasantly many times. Marc's still at the blog business and he's even got a Tumblr version, but I seem to run into him more and more on the Twitter. And it was there that he recently gave me a nice gift.

It's just a non-sequitur  Tweet, but it worked on me like a geeky version of Proust's madeleines.

You see, back in the early seventies, when I was a veritable comics-reading machine, the X-Men weren't the pop culture phenomenon they are now. In fact, their comic had essentially been cancelled - it was still being printed, but for about four years they were just reprinting the comics from about eight years earlier. They ended the practice before they caught up to themselves and destroyed the space-time continuum, but what's really important is that they were reprinting those Thomas-Roth stories that Marc is talking about.

And I loved them.

I particularly loved Roth's art. Roy Thomas himself is said have thought Roth's art was not suited for superheroes, since he was really a romance and westerns guy, but I totally dug his look and his diagrammatic approach to action:

He really did shine in the non-combat bits, though. Thomas and Roth created a fauxhemian beatnik world every time Hank McCoy and Bobby Drake (Beast and Iceman) would visit their favorite coffee house (decades before the Starbucks era), and it was a hoot.

Ah, those were the days, my friend. Not as flashy as today, what with the super-duper computerized color printing and grimness & grittiness and the every-comic-is-a-movie-treatment-in-disguise stuff. It was just action and adventure and fun - with some great art.

Roth died way too young, succumbing to cancer at age 52 in 1973 - when I was still reading and enjoying his earlier work. He continued to work in comics until his death, and will always be remembered for his work on the (in)famous Lois Lane race-switch story I am Curious, Black.

My past few days of googling and remembering has been an authentic joy, and I wanted to thank Marc and share the love. Peace out.

5x5 Movie Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

1. There are still over a million hits on Google for "Days of Future Past" when excluding X-Men, Marvel, or Wolverine, and only a few are misspellings of the Moody Blues album title: most use the expression in connection with articles about either about nostalgia or predictions. Was the 1981 comic book story arc the real source of this phrase, and has it really become that ubiquitous just since then? I never actually read the Marvel series, but I knew enough about the story going in that the movie didn't surprise me.

2. The seventies ambience was not quite as wonderful as the sixties ambience on display in First Class, but it may have been even more authentic. And it proved that even Peter Dinklage can't make seventies fashions look good, and that did surprise me.

3. The best thing in the movie was the Xavier-Magneto relationship, both in the past and in the future. Everyone else, even Wolverine and Mystique, seemed to be there just for window dressing, without any internal life at all.

4. I am pretty sure I am done with Wolverine movies, even if he is one of Wonder Wife's favorites to watch; Hugh can hang up the claws any time, as far as I am concerned. Not bloody likely: he's still in like every third Marvel comic, isn't he?

5. I am also getting close to being over superhero movies in general. After so long wishing somebody could do one right, it now almost seems that there are too many being done all the time. Maybe I am just waiting for someone to do one really well.


And was I the only one who thought Quicksilver was too fast?