Marvels

This writing every day thing is harder than it looks.

I went to the comic shop today (Legends Comics on Johnson St. in Victoria – great shop, you should shop there) and picked up 2 months worth of comics. Not with a lot of enthusiasm, mind you. I did grab up a collection of the Savage Sword of Conan stories from Dark Horse, though, and the Essential Captain America 4. Good nostalgia fodder, that. More modern fare includes The Immortal Iron Fist trade, collection Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction's story with the character, and the usual suspects: Punisher: MAX, Astonishing X-Men, The Spirit and World War Hulk. I wish I felt more of an urge to read the books, though.

What I did re-read recently is MARVELS, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' breakthrough series… it's actually 14 years old now, which surprises me. When the books first came out, I passed them up, mostly due to the cost. I think they were a little more expensive than other books, and I had only recently moved to working full-time. This would have also been back when I was collecting a whole bunch of books from DC, Marvel, and others – my monthly budget for comics was already used up. I didn't really pick up and read the collected trade until last year.

Well, I missed out on something grand. The books really do establish the tone and style of Busiek, with the emphasis on the human perspective on the super-humans and the impact of super-beings on the normal world. This is something he does very well in the best of his Astro City work, and even manages to inject him his more mainstream works (like his Iron Man or The Avengers runs). That's one key element of the series. The second key factor is that the books treat continuity and the old comics with respect and finds a way to weave the existing old stories together to create something epic, but also accessible. The final factor must be Alex Ross' art. The feel here is looser and rougher than his later work, on Kingdom Come or Earth X. It has life and energy that's often lacking from his latest works – Justice comes to mind. Even so, the painted images with their sense of reality and humanity transform the old stories from fantasy to something with a real weight and reality.

I look at what Busiek and Ross were doing in 1994 and have to remember that it was likely a response to the wild and irreverent approach to superheroes being taken by companies like Image and Malibu. Just as Mark Waid would later do in Kingdom Come, MARVELS is an attempt to restore a kind of respectability and luster to the older stories that these authors and artist grew up reading. There's no real attempt here to tear down the heroes, to bring them to earth by giving them flaws or new failings. Instead, even in their failures and flaws, Busiek gives them a grandeur and style that reminds me why I grew up loving superhero comics.

If you haven't given it a read, I recommend it.