STAN LEE

So the news came out this past Monday that Stan Lee had passed away. I remarked to my wife that day that I felt as if I'd lost another grandparent -- which is in no way meant to diminish my grandparents, who I loved dearly, but is simply meant to illustrate the extent of Stan's presence in my life. I mean, I only met the guy one time (though I was in the same room as him a few more times after that) -- but during my childhood, as was the case for countless others besides me, Stan Lee was Marvel.

I'm not here to discuss the rightness or wrongness of that, by the way. Debates about creator credit and "who did what" will rage for as long as there's any sort of historical interest in sequential art. But regardless of the truth or fiction behind the whole situation, the unchangeable fact is that Stan Lee represented the public face of Marvel for more than one generation.

THE "PERSONAL GOLDEN AGE"

It's weird how these things go. A month or so back, I was thinking about typing up a debriefing on this year's Comic-Con -- but as usual, while I enjoyed myself, I find that I have very little to put to screen regarding my time there. It was fine, but a lot of the experience for me is simply spending time with friends who I don't see as often as I used to. The con itself is almost secondary nowadays to the hanging around, the games, and the eating out around town.

But as I mulled over whether or not to bother with a recap essay, I mused that the first SDCC I attended was nineteen years ago, in 1999 (and if you think that means I'll find a way to commemorate twenty years of Comic-Con next summer, True Believer, you've got me figured out). I started thinking about what the convention was like back then and the sorts of panels I attended. Then, the kicker -- my iPad wallpaper as I entertained these thoughts was an Avengers image by George Pérez, and I noted the year he'd drawn it beside his signature: 1997 (that's it at right).

I thought some more. We're more than twenty years removed now from the start of the Busiek/Pérez AVENGERS run, the Busiek/Bagley THUNDERBOLTS run, Spider-Man's Clone Saga, "Onslaught", and so forth, and it's been almost twenty years since my first Comic-Con. That got me thinking about the concept of the "Personal Golden Age" of comics, which I've seen now and then on the internet: the idea that everyone has an era where comics captured their imagination more than any time before or after. For some, it was probably right when they got into comics. For others, like me, it came a bit later.

AVENGERS BY BUSIEK & PÉREZ - REMINISCENCES

This is a post I'd hoped to have up much earlier this year, to coincide with the release date of AVENGERS vol. 3 #1 back in February, but I just wasn't able to pull it together in time. Though at this point the post is already years in the making*, so being eight months late isn't too bad when you look at it that way.

Let's start at the beginning, a year or so prior to that late 1997 release date: It was in the aftermath of "Onslaught" that Marvel launched a slew of new #1 issues. You had DEADPOOL, HEROES FOR HIRE, KA-ZAR, MAN-THING, MAVERICK, MARVEL TEAM-UP, and more. Among this group was THUNDERBOLTS, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley. I'd never heard of Busiek at the time, but Bagley was familiar to me from his days on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, and I generally liked his artwork. Nonetheless, I nearly didn't grab THUNDERBOLTS because: what's a Thunderbolt? I was a senior in high school at the time and I had a tight budget; why read some random series about a bunch of new characters I'd never heard of?

Thank goodness for internet spoilers, then! I learned the twist ending to THUNDERBOLTS #1 via an America Online message board within a few days of its release, and promptly went straight out to pick it up. It quickly became one of my most eagerly awaited titles every month. And, eventually, when I learned that its writer would be picking up AVENGERS and IRON MAN when those two returned to the mainstream Marvel Universe after the year-long "Heroes Reborn" event wrapped up, I made sure to put those on my monthly reading list as well.**

CUCKOO FOR COMIC STRIPS

For some reason, lately I've been almost infatuated with newspaper action/adventure strips of yore. If you'll pardon several paragraphs of self-indulgence, I'm going to try to figure out exactly how I got to this point.

I think I can pinpoint the kernel of when it started, at least. At some point about five or six years ago, I was, "researching" sword-wielding barbarian gals in the mold of Red Sonja (as you do), and I came across a character named Axa, the heroine of a post-apocalyptic wasteland who starred in a strip for Britain's Sun newspaper back in the early eighties. The strip, created and illustrated by Enric Romero with scripts from Donne Avenell, had been released in the United States many years earlier, but those collections were long out of print. However I found some scans online and read nearly the entire Axa canon in short order. I really liked Romero's mostly realistic artwork in the black-and-white format, and I found the daily newspaper strip format pretty interesting. It didn't hurt that the strip was "mature" (i.e. juvenile) in nature, with the title character constantly losing her top in battle.

Somewhere around that same time, circa 2009/2010, Marvel released two volumes collecting the original Spider-Man newspaper strip run by Stan Lee and John Romita. However these books were panned by critics for their presentation of the material, so I skipped them -- but they stuck in my mind as something I might be interested in checking out someday. (And, as noted a while back, I have in fact gotten into these strips by way of IDW's more recent Library of American Comics reprints of the same material.)

HOBGOBLIN LIVES: THE 20th ANNIVERSARY

Twenty years ago this very day, per Mike's Amazing World of Comics, the first issue of SPIDER-MAN: HOBGOBLIN LIVES hit stands. I talked about this series before when I ran my Spider-Man by Roger Stern review series a couples years back. I covered it issue by issue (#1 | #2 | #3). I followed those up with a little missive on how it might have benefited from a different length or format. You'd think I might have written all I had to say on it at this point.

You'd be wrong.

I can't quite articulate how, but I'm about to do my best: this mini-series is incredibly important to me on multiple levels -- but to explain why, I should start at the beginning: As noted when I covered some of the Hobgoblin issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, the very first comic I remember owning was AMAZING #245. I said in my review of that issue:

According to Mike's Amazing World of Comics, it went on sale in July of 1983. I would've been a little more than four-and-a-half years old. Barely old enough to read the thing, but the pictures told me plenty. The scene in which Lefty Donovan drives back to the burnt-out mansion and descends into the Hobgoblin's mysterious lair stuck with me more than anything else as the eeriest imagery I had ever seen in my then-brief lifetime. I didn't quite understand the whole story, but I remembered it for years to come, so much that when I picked up the ORIGIN OF THE HOBGOBLIN trade paperback about ten years later, I recognized the artwork from this chapter as if I had just seen it the day before. And when something sticks with for that long, all through the haze of early childhood and into your teens, it's pretty amazing.

Then came the ORIGIN OF THE HOBGOBLIN trade paperback mentioned here. It was released in May of 1993 (again, per Mike's Amazing World) -- almost ten years to the month after issue 245 -- and I was fourteen at the time. It collected AMAZING SPIDER-MAN issues 238, 239, 244, 245, 249 - 251, and SPECTACULAR #85 (though it was heavily edited to excise unrelated sub-plots and focus solely on the Hobgoblin material). ORIGIN was one of the very first trade paperbacks I ever owned, and I read the thing over and over until it was battered and dog-eared, so enthralled was I with the stories it contained.

(To contrast, the issues of the regular ongoing Spider-Man comics released in May of '93 were all chapters of "Maximum Carnage". And while I have great love for some of the more questionable nineties Spider-stuff -- the Clone Saga, for instance -- even back then I recognized "Maximum Carnage" as a pretty lame story.)