| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Friday, May 06, 2005 ( 5/06/2005 02:37:00 PM ) Bill S. "MAY HE REMAIN THUS. . . FOREVERMORE!" – Culling through the home library, I recently picked up the first of several trade comic book collections that I decided to revisit over the next few months: 1989's Marvel Monster Masterworks, an out-of-print collection of big rampaging creature stories that were originally published in the days before Marvel Comics reinvented itself as a superhero line. Written by Stan Lee and predominately illustrated by the team of Jack Kirby & Dick Ayers (with two five-page Steve Ditko shorties tossed in for seasoning), the stories were originally written in the late fifties and early sixties, though the stories published in this set appear to be versions that were reprinted over ten years later in a series entitled Where Monsters Dwell. The book's limited four-page cover gallery only gives us covers from the reprint series, as opposed to the original books (Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, et al) where they debuted. At least one fannish reviewer has subsequently fallen for the assumption that these stories are from the late sixties/early seventies since those are the copyright years indicated in the collection. Those of us who grew up with these cheesy gems know better, of course. As a pre-teen reader, I was a devoted follower of the Marvel (then called Atlas) monster comics. I was too young to be a part of the fifties EC horror comics boom, but these books – so close to the Creature Features that I also loved as a boy – were perfectly keyed to my sensibilities, so much so that when Lee & Kirby & Ditko started producing their early superhero titles like Spider-Man or Fantastic Four, I initially resisted 'em. I couldn't have been the only reader who needed to be won over: re-read the intro to the first Spider-Man and you can practically hear writer Lee wheedling to get the reader to take a chance on the story ("But we think you may find our Spider-Man just a bit. . .different!") Sure, Spidey was different – but he still wasn't Fin Fang Foom. As collections go, Masterworks (edited by Marc McLauren) is just a bit . . . haphazard. Story attribution, listed on the Table of Contents, only indicates where the tales appeared as reprints: "Titan, the Amphibian from Atlantis," for instance, is credited on the contents page as appearing in a title called Uncanny Tales from Beyond the Grave, but when you get to the story itself, a small footnote on the opening splash panel indicates that it first appeared in Tales of Suspense #28. Two pages (one from "I Learned the Dread Secret of The Blip!" and the other from "The Glop") are so poorly reprinted that they look like bad color Xerox, though, thankfully, most of the reproed artwork is more vibrant and clear. With comics like this, the art overrides the formulaic stories. Back when these tales first appeared, Marvel didn't include script and artist credits – so as a kid in the early sixties, looking at the Kirby & Ayers signatures that appeared on the splash page of many of these stories, I assumed Kirby was the writer and Ayers the artist for these tales. The trade edition corrects this potential problem at least, though most readers in the 80's were well aware of scripter Stan Lee's contributions to these deathless comic works. Much of Lee's writing was utilitarian at best, though you can see story elements that would also appear in the early superhero books: the misunderstood isolated hero who defeats the villain through trickery shows up time and again in these stories, though unlike poor "puny" Peter Parker, they usually receive credit for their deeds. In "I Challenged Groot, the Monster from Planet X," for instance, our scientist hero is initially berated by his wife for not being rugged and manly. After he implausibly breeds a batch of termites in his lab that defeat the wood-based alien (we see the creature "feeds on wood" in the forest, but amazingly there are no termites in that area!), his fickle spouse states that she'll never complain about his 90-pound-weakling physique again. I give that marriage another six months at the most. . . But, like I say, the primary draw of Marvel Masterworks is the art. Page after page of bald-faced Kirby spectacle: scaly monsters tossing cars and tanks, trashing buildings, rising imperiously from the depths of the ocean (an image that also memorably recurred in the early Fantastic Four Submariner adventures) or stomping through Transylvanian villages that you know come from the artist's memories of old Universal horror flicks. In "Zzutak, the Thing That Shouldn't Exist," Kirby's pencils are inked by Ditko – always a fun combination to read since the latter often added an atmospheric stylization to Kirby's more physicalized creations. Of Ditko's own two contributions, the most enjoyable has to be "The Threat of Tim Boo Ba" (Lee was fond of giving his creatures nonsensically "ominous" sounding names, but this 'un is especially tin-eared – sounds too close to the name of a Pogo character to be scary), a five-page fantasy featuring a tyrannical alien conqueror who lords it over his subjects only to himself drown when – big surprise! – a kid spills a drop of water on a tiny plastic globe. Ditko's imagery has an appealingly blunt simplicity: in one panel we see the power-mad despot kicking the flag of surrender from a fallen victim's hands, looking like one of Maurice Sendak's happily tantrumming young boys as he does so. (We know the Where the Wild Things Are creator was familiar with "Little Nemo in Slumberland." Do you think he read Amazing Fantasy, too?) Subtle it's not. But, hey, you want subtle, you don't look for it in a book where brutish monsters deliver three pages worth of exposition on their plans to conquer the planet, stopping only to sneer at the "puny humans" incapable of thwarting them. It's the kind of story world where most of the guys wear fedoras or bookish spectacles so roundly thick that they're practically opaque, and the women dress like they wax the kitchen floor in high heels. It's a world Where Monsters Dwell, but you know we'll be able to hold our own "against any form of life in the universe" with the force of our intelligence and imagination. Even as a none-too-critical kid I recognized all the patented clichés, tricks and contrivances – the cipher heroes, the cornball dialog, the pieces of story presented in the opener that you know will be used to defeat the menace – that Lee & co. were perpetrating in these dashed-off stories. But I loved 'em anyway. Turns out, I still do. # | |
|
|
