1.
I know nothing now, and I knew nothing then too.
2.
Why 1985? I blame the "Amazing Heroes 1985 Previews Issue". It promised so much for the mainstream of superhero comic books, it contained page upon page of commitments to radical change which were so exciting and so sweeping in scale that it seemed, compared to what had gone before in at least the previous decade, that the comic-book Millennium was just about to arrive.
There was talk of the soon-to-be-published "Crisis On Infinite Earths", of which Marv Wolfman was quoted as declaring "I know it's going to change things, and change them permanently." Change? Fundamental change had been anathema to the mainstream form for what seemed like time out of mind, and permanent change was surely an oxymoron. Consequently, the very concept of change was intoxicating in itself. And change seemed so necessary in the superhero worlds of the Big Two, which had been spiralling further and further into their long and painful creative and commercial declines since at least the mid-Seventies. Even the reinvigorated team-books which had helped to carry the superhero through the doldrums of the early Eighties, from X-Men to Teen Titans, from Legion Of Super-Heroes to the Fantastic Four, were hemorrhaging vitality with every passing month by the closing of 1984. "Change" was desperately needed.
And now it seemed as if, impossibly, the revolution was already here, or, at least, already beginning to roll off of the printing presses. Even Frank Miller was returning to the superhero, as promised in the Previews '85 piece about a "Batman Special Project", a three issue "limited series" which seemed to promise to free Bruce Wayne's alter ego from the character's slow degeneration downwards into a taciturn loner with a terrible attitude to any social activity he couldn't control. "Batman is not a psychotic", Miller declared, "He's not out for revenge against criminals", which all seemed very promising indeed. In fact, Miller's approach seemed quite thrillingly heretical, drawing on popular entertainment outside of comics as much as the stultifying continuity of the past 45 years, with his promise that Alfred would be portrayed in the light of John Gielgud's butler from "Arthur", while Catwomen would be "... 50 years old, and if you like Joan Collins, you'll like her."
John Gielgud, Joan Collins; the future was not just going to be radical and intelligent, it would incorporate a Batman characterised by humour as much as darkness! It almost seemed as Mr Miller's "Batman Special Project" was going to alter everything on its own, just as his "Daredevil" had promised to at the turn of the decade.
And then, then, as the excited reader reached page 134 after devouring the close-typed text of every previous page before it, and just before reaching the end of the "Special Issue", there was two-thirds of a page and three fantastically enticing columns concerning "The Watchmen" a new comic book by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, of which the writer said;
"Dave and I are really excited about The Watchmen; it'll be a great book ... People who've been reading standard superhero comics for 20 years will have one or two surprises with "The Watchmen."
And if they were excited, then I was excited. Because the mainstream had, with the exception of Miller's "Daredevil" and Moore's "Swamp Thing", been bereft of excitement, of the shock of the new, for so many years, and this sense that even the long-moribund mainstream companies were knowingly evolving, becoming perhaps daring at best and competent at least, charged the times in a way that I'd not known before and which I've certainly not experienced since.
After all, if "Daredevil" and "Saga of The Swamp Thing" could have been transformed into the very finest comics on the newstands and in the comic shops, then what wasn't possible? Because those books had been absolutely dead in the water, dull and time-serving despite the very best efforts of some exceedingly laudable writer-and-artist teams, and yet the right creators even in the worst of times had made something quite utterly unforeseen, something unimaginably fine of both of them.
Well, why couldn't everything be transformed that way? Why couldn't every month bring not one or two outstanding comic books from the Big Two, but 50 or 60?
Why ever not?
2.The Big Two were undoubtedly economic as well as creative dinosaurs in late 1984, with Jim Shooter's Marvel trying to outmuscle and indeed bury the new independent sector by crushing it under a wave of expensive reprints and supposedly high-prestige projects. And for all that most of them were soon to fail, and usually fail messily too, the independent companies faced with Shooter's economic warfare had substantially raised the stakes where the superhero, and superhero-like characters, were concerned. If there were barely a handful of Marvel and DC books capable of accelerating the pulse-rate in December 1984, there was a host of what only a coldblooded capitalist cynic would define as "product"from the smaller publishers. The 1985 Preview, after all, listed the following prospects for the "alternative" superhero and its brethren from beyond the command economies of Marvel and DC for the coming year;
- "Alan Moore's Comic" (Fantagraphics)
- "American Flagg" (Howard Chaykin)
- "Aztec Ace" (Doug Moench, Dan Day)
- "The Badger" (Mike Baron, Bill Reinhold)
- "Cross fire" (Mark Evanier, Dan Spiegle)
- "Dalgoda" (Jan Strnad, Dennis Fujitake)
- "Flaming Carrot" (Bob Burden)
- "Grimjack" (John Ostrander, Tim Truman)
- "Groo The Wanderer" (Sergio Aragones, Mark Evanier)
- "Jon Sable, Freelance" (Mike Grell)
- "Mage " (Matt Wagner)
- "Love And Rockets" (The Brothers Hernandez)
- "Marvelman" (Alan Moore and Alan Davies)
- "Mr Monster" (Michael T Gilbert)
- "Moonshadow" (J Marc De Matteis, Jay Muth)
- "Mr X" (The Brothers Hernandez)
- "Nexus" (Mike Baron, Steve Rude)
- "The One" (Rick Veitch)
- "The Rocketeer" (Dave Stevens)
- "Scout" (Tim Truman)
- "Starstruck" (Elaine Lee, Michael T. Gilbert)
- "Strange Days" (Peter Milligan, Berendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins)
- "Warrior" (Various)
- "Whisper" (Steven Grant, Rich Larson)
- "Zot!" (Scott McCloud)
In fact, a more rational, and perhaps less youthful and naive, mind might have asked itself just how many bright and enjoyable comic books can anybody possibly need month-in and month-out? But my mind had its eye upon an ever greater bounty, the prospect of pretty much every book being produced by the previously dead-in-the-water Big Two being every bit as good as those of their "Third Way" independent competitors. (*1) Sixty books, ninety books, god-knows-how-many-books, every month, all excellent, all splendid, a comic-book utopia. Because if the Swamp Thing was savable, and capable of being transformed by Mr Moore, Mr Bissette and Mr Totleben into the month-upon-month mind-expanding wonder it was, then what couldn't be made into a thing of wonder? After all, Alan Moore was, we knew, safe in his Northampton arm-chair and enthusiastically producing story bibles for DC comics that he himself was never going to write;
"Alan Gold phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to write The Omega Men, but I couldn't because I've got a lot of other stuff and The Omega Men is not something I could see myself do easily without making some really really major changes ... But what I did was, I offered to write a synopsis of a possible way that the Omega Men could be sorted out and made into a more viable sort of concept. I wrote about 27-30 pages." (Amazing Heroes # 58, October 1984)
And where "Swamp Thing" had gone, and where "Omega Men" was undoubtedly going, then anything and everything would surely follow? This was the comic-book coming of age, and, very very dangerously for the easily self-deluded reader, there was evidence that the process was thrillingly underway.
*1 - If you're at all curious about this phrase "Third Way", please do check out the July archive for the piece entitled "Nexus, Zot! The Rocketeer, American Flagg & Mr Monster.
3.
You didn't have to be a coldhearted capitalist cynic to see the overwhelming mass of Marvel and DC books in 1984 as little if anything more than "product". Of quite everything being published, only "Swamp Thing" stood as a comic book that could have been passed among non-comic book reading friends as a proselytising text. Nothing else from Marvel or DC came anywhere close to the sheer incandescent, genre-shredding brilliance of that book, though there were a few highly entertaining and well-crafted books holding their ground in the ranks, of which Walter Simonson's "Thor" stood a winged-helmet's worth above any of the other competition. And of all those comics being churned out through the 52 delivery days of 1984, there weren't more than 10 or so that I'd pick up through anything more than a sense of nostalgia and a need for a comic-rush;
* Atari Force (Gerry Conway, Jose Garcia-Lopez)
* Star Trek (Mike W. Barr, Tom Sutton)
* Crisis On Infinite Earths (Marv Wolfman, George Perez)
* Avengers (Roger Stern, John Buscema, Tom Palmer)
* Power Pack (Louise Simonson, June Brigman)
* Daredevil (Dennis O'Neil, David Mazzucchelli)
Now, that's not a long list, and supplementing it with books where artists like Jim Aparo and Alan Davis carried stories which I cared little for still didn't make for any meaningful journey to the local newsagents for the monthly deliveries of thin, poorly-printed and overly-familiar comics. It was a cold time for those of us who refused to believe that the Big Two simply couldn't produce good books. After all, there were so many fine comics being produced beyond NYC's corporate offices, and if the fanboys, the amateurs and the new-to-the-business enthusiasts and pop-thinkers could do so well, then what couldn't the companies with the know-how and financial muscle achieved if they wanted to?
4.But take a step ahead in time to 1987 and nothing seems to have quite gone as expected. "Crisis On Infinite Earths" and "The Dark Knight Returns" have both arrived and disappeared and the last quarter of "Watchmen" will be published in this year, but a glance at the comic books being produced doesn't provide any valid evidence for the presence of the new Millennium. For not only have so many of the Third Wave independent books gone under, but Marvel and DC are still locked into producing pretty much the same quality of books that they always have. In fact, Marvel had celebrated the year of the "Dark Knight Returns" with their suicidally poor "New Universe" line, a package of fourth-hand concepts and soulless production-line comics which wouldn't even convince as a satirical invention for a comedy piece on the Imperial Years of Jim Shooter's fading reign at The House Of Ideas. (Kicker, Inc? How was that possible?) And if there was a slight rise in the quality in DC's books, in the measure of enthusiasm and seriousness of tone which made their post-Crisis comics carry some sense of the new, it couldn't be said that every "Omega Men" had been made a king or Queen of comics. (In fact, the "Omega Men" title was cancelled in 1986, Alan Moore's notes or not. How was this possible?) Overall, the casual as well as the committed reader would be hard pressed to make an objective case for the world having changed in a very substantial way for the better at all. "Swamp Thing" and "Thor" continued to head the Big Two's products, indicating that little had really changed. There were revamps of familiar products, such as Andy Helfer's "The Shadow", Howard Chaykin's "Blackhawk", Mike Grell's "Green Arrow", John Byrne's "Superman, George Perez's "Wonder Woman" and John Ostrander and Kim Yale's "Suicide Squad", all of which delivered entertaining stories month in and month out for a period of time. And "Kraven's Last Hunt" in Spider-Man, by Matteis and Zeck, seemed to promise that Marvel were considering raising their sights where the content of a few of their books were concerned.
But the trumpet hadn't sounded so much as parped while the trumpeter was clearing their throat, and the dead hadn't risen so much as shuffled around a touch before settling down for a few more years sleep. And it seemed undeniable that 1985 and its promise had been frittered away at the very same time as it had appeared, invested into a few headline-gathering books while the underlying reality of the mainstream comics stayed locked on pretty much the same course as they'd been since Gerry Conway had spent his short time as Marvel's editor clearing out the mavericks who either couldn't get their work in on time, or who were writing the books he wanted to, or both. For all that DC had relaunched its key books with some determination and energy, they were mostly merely producing a slightly less complacent and a slightly more energetic version of what had gone before. Certainly, at no time did the reader experience the world-turned-upside-down exhilaration of reading Alan Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson", which he'd effectively relaunched the Swamp Thing with. If things were better, they were better versions of what had gone before. This was not the revolution at all.
Soon enough, in just five years, and instead of comic shops bursting with thrilling and bright mainstream comics, and rather than a luminous independent range of superhero books, there'd be the Image revolution and the rise of spectacularism over content and enthusiasm over craft. And then, memory assured me, the mainstream responded at it usually had, aiming low and swerving only to avoid being utterly flattened by each new threatening trend, while the Third Way dissolved into a couple of surviving books and a great deal of thwarted hope.
Ah, well. The memories aren't particular good ones.
5.But memory simply isn't to be trusted. Take those Image years, for example. My memory is of long years of books from all companies, independent or not, containing little but impossible muscles and poorly-designed spandex, a plague of shallow storytelling and the horrible sight of the Big Two falling into line behind the flash and fireworks of McFarlane and Lee and company. And yet, taking but 1993, the year after Youngblood's astonishingly high-selling debut, I was shocked to realise that it's the year which saw the publication of the greatest number of quite excellent superhero titles I that know of since my childhood;
* "Batman Adventures: Mad Love" (Bruce Timm & Paul Dini, my favourite comic of all time!)
* "The Golden Age" (James Robinson, Paul Smith)
* "Marvels" (Kurt Busiek, Alex Ross)
* "Sandman" and "Death: The High Cost Of Living" (Neil Gaiman)
* "Doom Patrol" (Grant Morrison & Richard Case)
* "Flash" (Mark Waid & Greg LaRocque: "The Return Of Barry Allen!)
* "Green Lantern: Mosaic" (Gerard Jones & Cully Hammer)
* "Sandman: Mystery Theatre" (Matt Wagner & Guy Davies)
* "Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo" (Tim Truman, Joe R Lansdale)
* "Spider-Man" 2099 (Peter David & Ric Leonardi)
* "Hulk" (Peter David, Dale Keown & various)
* "The Spectre" (John Ostrander, Tom Mandrake)
That's a fine, fine selection of books, and these are of course only those which caught my eye from Marvel and DC. And it's not what I expected to find at all. Memory lied. In fact, it would seem from the examples above that the mainstream companies were in the rudest of health, or at least in some small part of it, even given that many of those titles must have been commissioned before the truth of how successful Image was had been processed by management. And the excellence didn't peter out in 1993 either, even if it never stretched beyond a handful of books; the year afterwards, for example, brought the likes of Mike Mignola's "Hellboy" from Image and "Starman" by James Robinson and Tony Harris. The history I'd taken as gospel was obviously quite incorrect, for if none of the above shone quite so intensely as Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" had, still all of them would have sparkled in its orbit on the newstands of 1985 as they did in their own company in the comic shops of 1993. These were smart and moving books which if they'd been published in the mid-Eighties would have been remembered today as the markers of a period of remarkable conceptual fecundity and craftmanship.
So, in a sense, the millennium did occur, just as of course it hadn't.
Or; the selective sampling of comic books picked on the basis of personal taste and recalled by an all-too-fallible memory is no foundation for an understanding of the history of a period at all. For, to take but one other example, 1978 can be read as the absolute nadir of the superhero's existence, but there was the first run of Levitz on the LSH, and the counter-intuitively smart and thoroughly entertaining Mantlo/Golden "Micronauts", there's the Gerber "Mr Miracle" and the Fleischer "Jonah Hex", Kubert and Rodgers absolutely on top of their game, Claremont and Byrne's X-Men was at its height, and say what you like, I loved Ernie Colon's art on "Battlestar Galactica".
But change the reader, of course, and the same books are watertight evidence to the quite opposite conclusion.
6.
History is one damn comic book after another.
7.
The ridiculous flaw in my thinking, for whatever little its unravelling is worth, was that I was distracted, indeed mesmerised, by genius. The comic book "millennium" of 1985 was never going to exist, the line-wide books of incredible achievement were never going to happen, because the assumption that I made was that everybody could be, if not Alan Moore, then at least creators who could operate at a significant fraction of Alan Moore's abilities. And just as the subsequent writers of "Omega Man" had Moore's notes and yet couldn't produce a comic that's lodged in the historical memory, so too the industry as a whole couldn't grasp what he was doing, or how he achieved what he did.
The "Swamp Thing" hadn't succeeded because of some long-ignored potential buried where the journeyfolks and the breadheads, man, couldn't see it. Every book has hidden potential, but that doesn't mean that the potential is that considerable or particularly commercial. The "Omega Men" no more carried the promise of greatness within it than did "Swamp Thing", or any other fondly conceived if relatively commonplace idea launched with a measure of sweat and a prayer for success into the marketplace.
The secret ingredient wasn't anything to do with the properties of DC Comics at all. It was Alan Moore and his closest collaborators that created the illusion of promise in 1985, as he threw around stories as if they were nothing of consequence at all, as if his first-thought-best-thought premises were of no real importance when they were in fact more substantial examples of the comicbook writers craft than just about anything his contemporaries could ever conceive of for themselves. In those four years at DC, he effortlessly grafted onto the Green Lantern mythos a conceptual framework that informs so mucn of what the estimable Geoff Johns is doing today, a quarter-century later. His Chimera of the DCU Elemental has been explored every which way and still no-one else has been able to make it work again. His Superman is a fond, touching and surely definitive take on the character. From Adam Strange to Thanagar, the Joker to the only substantial modern-era Vigilante tale ever spun, the DCU is in many ways Alan Moore's child even now.
In fact, if he hadn't proven so unable to get a grasp on Batman's character, he'd be quite beyond any slither of criticism at all.
7.
Take away the false and impossible self-invented promise of 1985 and today's business by the Big Two suddenly doesn't look half-as-bad as it did to me just a few hours ago. In fact, if I'd've been picked up in 1984, or 1994, or 2004, and shown the spread of mainstream superhero comic books today, I would have been as impressed by the base-level competence as I would have been disappointed by the absence of genius. But there's never been a host of such fine writers as we have today, writers whose work far outstrips that of just about every wordsmith mentioned in the Amazing Heroes 1985 Previews Issue. There's Gail Simone and Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar and Paul Cornell and Jeff Parker, Matt Franction and Grant Morrison, Jonathan Hickman and Rick Remender, Geoff Jones and Ed Brubaker, Warren Ellis and Peter Milligan, Adam Beechum and Brian Azarello and Allan Heinburg, JMS and Peter David, Jimmy Grey and Jimmy Palmiotti, Dan Slott and Bill Willingham, and all those who've I've regretfully forgotten to mention. And, and!, there's quite frankly too many highly-competent, if not always entirely-distinct, artists to list here from today's ranks, and again, there's far far more of them than at any other time since at least the middle of the Seventies.
These are, in truth, unexpectedly good days.
In fact, if transported forward in time 25 years from 1985 to today, I might not have thought that the mainstream comic book millennium had arrived, but I'd have believed that it was far far closer than perhaps my new contemporaries would believe. I'd know how much progress had been achieved, for all the disappointments and compromises. And short of being dumb enough to imagine that there could ever be three or four dozen Alan Moores slaving away at three or four dozen Omega Men books, while another score or so Frank Millars pick up the slack on the night shift when the Moore clones need their sleep, I'd have been rather pleased to be here, in 2010, for all of its weaknesses as well as its strengths.
8.
Of course today's mainstream superhero books are far from perfect. The text is often too sparse, continuity's regularly and regretfully the sole driver of story, diversity can still be a matter of tokenism, books too often carry worrying moral meanings, many comics are far too expensive, some artists seem committed to money-generating and time-saving splash pages and cheesecake, and, god damn it, I miss a host of writers and artists from Steve Gerber to John Ostrander, from Mike Golden to John Buscema, from Stan and Jack and Steve and pretty much everyone before them and after, and somebody's got to get the blame for why I can't have exactly what I want all the time and every time I howl for it.
But then, that's pretty much how I felt in 1985 too, give or take a problem or two from the list directly above, and, despite what I believed when I started to write this, things are so much better now than they were then. There's been progress, there's been quality, and if the world of mundane mainstream superhero comics wasn't consumed in a healing Last Judgement and a more perfect era set into train afterwards, well, it was never going to, was it? And I can't judge the success or otherwise of a genre by whether or not it's lived up to my naive preconceptions of 25 years ago, although I fear, without realising it, that I may well have been doing so for longer than I'd ever care to admit.
9.
What if the End Of History came and went and nobody noticed, and everybody just carried on, and did a pretty fair job too?
What then?
Next off: "Ultimatum". And then perhaps a look at the end of the week at some of the new week's books, and there's a piece on the Broons strips from World War II that's perculating. Why not? If I know nothing, it means that there's lots to get round to and pay attention to. My thanks to everyone that's left a comment. Should anyone care to join in here or in the older threads, please do. Every word's appreciated, as is every reader who pops in and doesn't feel that the comment boxes are for them. Why should they be? My splendid best wishes to anyone who's read down this far, and to everyone who hasn't too, from the Splendid Wife's Central Command Bunker here in the windswept East of England!
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