Marvel (Less Fat Too)

The Twenty-Ninth of March Two Thousand and Fifteen. Sunday.

How's your afternoon going? I'm listening to my vinyl copy of Television's Greatest Hits Volume II. Spider-Man's just been on. Nothing makes my heart soar more than a cracking TV theme and this is, of course, championship material. The lyrics are by Paul Francis Webster who won Oscars for Secret Love (off of Calamity Jane - and how fab a movie is that? Enough to make it my Tenth Film Recommendation) and Love is a Many Splendored Thing. If you could sum Spidey up in a couplet, it would be "wealth and fame - he's ignored, action is his reward". That's genius. And his name's Webster!

(Right, the first side's just finished with Mr Rogers' Neighborhood. I've got to get up and turn it over. I'll tell you where you can shove your retro...)

Yes, even though I am a grown man I still like to read about people in tights beating each other up. Thinking about Spider (hyphen) Man it dawned on me how my tastes have changed over the years. I was a dyed-in-the-spandex DC follower in my younger days. I'd buy the occasional Marvel book, but all my favourites seemed to be Metropolis and Gotham rather than New York.

More specifically the Metropolis of the 30th Century. The one comic I made sure I never missed an issue of was The Legion of Super-Heroes. It's difficult looking back to identify what exactly draws you into something. Every superhero has their own roster of rogues and supporting characters, but I suppose there was something about the Legion's huge cast of characters, set aside from the rest of the DC Universe by a thousand years, that appealed to a list-loving teenage nerd. For the most part each Legionnaire had a single power unique to them - you weren't allowed to join their club if you duplicated someone else's abilities. These arbitrary rules made perfect sense to a certain mindset, one that I definitely possessed (and still do - why do you think I work on the railway?)

I guess it was the intracacy of the 'rules' of DC's storytelling - with its multiple worlds and colour-coded kryptonite - that hooked me more than Marvel's 'messy' characters. Struggles with prejudice, alcoholism or even making rent money didn't resonate with me in the way that continuity minutiae did. I think most of my Marvel knowledge came from the black and white weekly UK reprint titles of the seventies. I'm looking forward to the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie coming out in a few months as it chimes with a hardback Avengers annual I had way back when that revealed Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch's true parents. My dad copied a portrait of the Vision from it in coloured pencil. I remember being surprised at this previously unseen artistic side of him.

Now, DC's reliance on complicated and rewritten histories is a bit of a turn-off to me (a notable exception being Grant Morrison's Multiversity, which positively revels in the notion of there being 52 different Earths, each with their own variation on the classic DC heroes). Somewhere, in the last couple of decades, Marvel's focus has shifted away from the perpetual second act structure of an ongoing narrative to discreet volumes of work where creators tell a story with a definite beginning middle and end before putting the toys back in the box for someone else to play with. I've spoken here about Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four comics. I think this is probably now my favourite run on a mainstream comic and he's following this up superbly with his work on the main Avengers titles at the moment.

So let me wrap up this vague waffle with a few recommendations.

I've spoken about Dan Slott, Michael and Laura Allred's take on Silver Surfer here. Now ten issues in, this title has only gotten better and better.

This morning I was reading Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing, with art by Greg Land and Salvador Larroca among others. Just good, action-packed, funny superhero comics by a UK writer.

But fully worthy of my Eighth Comic Book Recommendation is Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber's Superior Foes of Spider-Man. It's easy to poke fun at the super-hero genre, but that's a cheap laugh. Altogether more satisfying is humour that works within the tights and codenames paradigm, bending those conventions without breaking them. My friend, this is the book for you.

Featuring the Sinister Six (although, in true Blake's 7 style, there are only five of them), it relates the 'reality' of being a B-list supervillain in the Marvel universe. You can't help but root for these nearly-men even as they rob, double-cross and generally sell out in the search for that one big score that'll put them on the villain map. I know it's fashionable for comics fans to bemoan the quality of superhero movies in comparison to the books that spawned them, but there is no way that Sinister Six film is going to be anywhere near as good as this.

So of late I've been saying Make Mine Marvel. But that hasn't stopped me during this vinyl afternoon in unearthing Prince's Batman album and giving it a spin. Not for me using it as a weapon against an advancing zombie. I'll leave you now with the DC Vin of 1989 and the track Batdance. I was trying to find The Arms of Orion featuring Esther Rantzen protegé Sheena Easton but OoToobay isn't playing ball.

More soonliest

Not a Hoax, Not an Imaginary Story

The Twenty-Third of June Two Thousand and Eleven. Thursday.

This blog starts on York station and will probably make its way back to Scarborough before it's done. I don't think my poor head could manage another 2 o'clock finish so this one's coming to you on the move.

Spider-man is dead.

Don't worry, not the real Spider-Man. You see, back in 2000 (a phrase that still makes my tiny space age brain spin) Marvel comics came up with a new line of comics that started some of their best known characters - such as Spidey and the X Men - from scratch. They called this line of comics Ultimate Marvel and Ultimate Spider-Man was the first title to be launched (and the collection of those superb first few issues is my Third Comic Book Recommendation). (Wait a minute - I haven't made a Second Comic Book Recommendation. Well, it was suppose to be Grant Morrison's Batman Inc. So there you go)

The idea was that a streamlined history - this world would deliberately not feature more than 4 or 5 titles at any time - would be more accessible to new readers. As time passed though, this version of the Marvel universe began to get almost as complex in its own right. Indeed, the recent run of Marvel movies has based much of its background on Ultimate Marvel. In a case of art imitating life imitating life artist Bryan Hitch based the likeness of the Ultimate Nick Fury, head of superspy agency S.H.I.E.L.D., on Samuel L Jackson.

When it came to Fury's cameo appearance at the end of Iron Man who did they cast but...

Ultimate Spider-Man has just reached its 160th issue, with each of those written by one man: Brian Michael Bendis. The first 111 were drawn by Mark Bagley, his collaboration with Bendis being the longest on a Marvel title, outstripping Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 105 issue run that kick started the Fantastic Four. It's a substantial body of work. And in that latest issue Peter Parker dies fighting the Green Goblin.
I've dipped in and out of Ultimate Spider-Man over the years (I used to subscribe to the UK reprint edition that was available in newsagents here) and I've bought this latest issue today. It's excellent, totally true to the characters Bendis has written for this last decade while underlining the Ultimate universe's raison d'être - things can happen here that wouldn't happen in the regular (Alan Moore called it Earth 616 in a Marvel UK story back in the 80s, of all places, and the handle stuck) Marvel universe.

So does that mean it doesn't count? Or to put it another way is one story more real than another?
Certainly the regular comics Spider-Man is to all intents and purposes the same character that first appeared nearly 50 years ago. (In contrast with DC characters that are regularly rebooted. Heck, they're rebooting their whole line in September - everything back to No1 ). Except he hasn't aged but the world around him has. Why should he 'count' more then when he's clearly as fictional as Ultimate, or Movie, or Cartoon Spider-Man? (An interesting version of this is Grant Morrison's run on Batman these last few years. His take is that everything we have seen in the 70+ years of Batman, from the hard-boiled stories of the 40s, through the wacky 'bam!' 'pow!' adventures of the 60s, to the grim vigilante stuff of the 90s, all took place but over the last 15 years or so of Bruce Wayne's life. Everything counts.)

Followers of Sherlock Holmes consider the stories of Conan Doyle 'canon' even though inconsistencies within them make them no more real than those by other authors. Only certain Star Wars spin offs are considered as true additions to that saga. So clearly it does matter if a story is 'real'. Fiction or not, we feel cheated if we're told something we've invested in didn't happen (I'm thinking Bobby Ewing in the shower in Dallas here, perhaps the most famous example of the 'it was all a dream' cop out). If we say to an author 'I know this isn't real but I'll play along as if it is' the last thing we want is a 'yah-boo, fooled you' betrayal in return.

So when does an honest, non-cheating alternative version count? Well that's easy- when it's good. In long-running narratives like comics or popular characters if something made an impression, or was just plain cool, in a 'what if?' story it quite often turns up in the 'official' version eventually. Villains from the superb 90s Batman cartoon - such as Harley Quinn - moved over to the comics and Chloe from TV's Smallville made it to the paper and ink Metropolis.

So does Ultimate Spider-Man's death count?

It's good enough to.

More soonliest.

(ps Ha! They've just showed Stewie Kills Lois and Lois Kills Stewie episodes on BBC3. What are the chances?)