The Weird Longevity of Certain Comics Characters

Most of what I'm reading these days on Marvel Unlimited is X-Men related, primarily the original Uncanny series but also X-Men: Legacy, Astonishing X-Men and various other titles. However, I've also been following a couple of other books, the main ones currently being Walt Simonson's run on Thor and the original Daredevil comic from the 1960s.

Daredevil's a character I've always loved, having read snippets here and there of Frank Miller's take in the early 80s, plus a bit of Ann Nocenti's run after that, and then DG Chichester's 90s books. I was conversant enough with the character's history to know what was going on in Kevin Smith's Marvel Knights run on Daredevil, in the late 90s/early 2000s, but apart from a few issues translated in Italian, I didn't have much sense of what Daredevil was like in the 60s, when Stan Lee was writing him.

So at the start of the year I started reading Daredevil from the first issue, which was written by Lee and drawn by Bill Everett. I was interested to learn that Lee continued writing Daredevil until issue #50, in 1969, especially given that this early incarnation of the character isn't great. The book at this stage has certain Stan Lee hallmarks, such as Daredevil bemoaning the fact that he can't be with the woman he loves, Karen Page (which echoes the romantic drama in the X-Men between Cyclops and Marvel Girl). But it also feels underbaked, like Lee and his co-creators had this idea for a character concept but didn't really know what to do with it.

Most of the villains are pretty lame. The most notable one is Killgrave, the Purple Man, who would appear to such chilling effect in Brian Michael Bendis's Alias and in the Jessica Jones Netflix show. On the other hand, the villains DD tangles with the most are Stilt-Man and Gladiator, the latter of whom is a costume-designer with a chip on his shoulder. Both appear as minor characters in Daredevil's own Netflix show, but those are more easter eggs than loving tributes to fondly remembered characters.

The interesting thing is that, for all its lack of direction, crap villains and weird story directions (like when Matt Murdock pretended to be his own twin brother Mike), Daredevil went on, unbroken, until the late 90s. I've still only read to issue #51, when Roy Thomas took over, but I've glanced ahead and the 70s seem like a lost decade for Daredevil, until Frank Miller came along and turned him into something akin to Batman.

Daredevil wasn't the only character whose adventures continued despite nobody really caring. The Hulk is the most notable, because basically every issue until the 80s was the same: the Hulk would arrive somewhere, cause trouble, wake up as Bruce Banner and then feel bad, before moving on again. The Fantastic Four lost their creative momentum after Jack Kirby and then Lee left the book, and they never quite recovered it.

I find this fascinating because the X-Men were the only book that really seems to have been unloved among these early Marvel stories. Lee spent the exact same amount of time writing the X-Men as he did the Avengers (1963-1966), but in that period he wrote only 19, mostly bimonthly, issues of X-Men, whereas he wrote 34 issues of the Avengers. Lee then wrote Captain America until 1971, Thor until 1972, Spider-Man until 1973, the Hulk until 1968, and the Fantastic Four until 1972. The Hulk's original book was canceled after just six issues, but then the character came back in Tales to Astonish, which eventually was retitled as the Incredible Hulk. Compare that with the original X-Men book, which was published continuously until 2011 but which ran nothing but reprints between 1970 and 1975.

I'm more of an X-Men fan than a Marvel fan, so I find this all oddly suspect, but it does point to an interesting quirk of the comics industry in those years. Even books that weren't selling particularly well and that nobody seemed to care about were kept alive through the 60s, 70s and into the 80s, when they all seemed to undergo creative renaissances. Compare that with now, or indeed with the industry in the 90s, when a book that didn't sell could get cancelled without mercy after less than a year - the latest versions of X-Force and X-Factor, launched in 2024 after the end of the Krakoan Age of the X-Men, lasted just 10 issues each, for example.

Not that Marvel was so averse to canceling books in the 60s. Doctor Strange didn't get his own full book for a long time, and his was cancelled in the early 70s, before he came back to sharing books with other characters. But again, it's fascinating that Marvel didn't cancel more of their underperforming books in that period - although it's possible that, boring as Daredevil, Iron Man or the Hulk were in those years, they were still outselling most of the books DC and other publishers were putting out.

On the other hand, DC was definitely canceling books more frequently in the 60s and 70s - I don't have any concrete numbers in front of me, but a lot of features like Animal Man, the Doom Patrol and, er Swing with Scooter, lasted only a few years. Would-be big names like the Atom or Hawkman weren't able to hold down their own books until the 80s or so (if then), but would get the occasional reboot.

But back to Daredevil. As I mentioned, I've now read through the entirety of Stan Lee's run on that book, apart from a backup story he wrote in 2001, so now I get to see what Roy Thomas made of the character, as well as whoever followed him. I'll get to see the book retitled to Daredevil and Black Widow, when the two characters were in a relationship, and then, hopefully, I'll get to connect the dots to Frank Miller's run.

In his book All of the Marvels, Douglas Wolk says not to read each of these series in strict chronological order, but in the case of these books, be they the X-Men, Daredevil or Spider-Man, I find it interesting to see how they changed over the years. X-Men had some distinct flavors based on who was writing or drawing it, and I look forward to seeing the different directions that subsequent writers took Daredevil down. At the very least, they'll have to introduce better villains than Stilt-Man, but I don't really have high hopes.

Romantasy Seems to Be Everywhere

Thought I'd spend a few paragraphs on this topic, since everyone seems to be talking about it, but it's interesting to me how prevalent romantasy has become on bookstore shelves and in online chat about books. Even I, who am not on TikTok or Snapchat and rarely spend time on Instagram, have seen enough to get a sense of what everyone's talking about when they discuss ACOTAR, riding leathers and spice levels.

I think the moment that crystalized it for me was this summer, when my dad asked me about an article he'd seen on the New York Times that talked about Alchemized, the dark romantasy novel by SenLinYu that started out as Dramione fan fiction online (Draco and Hermione, for the n00bs). The success of that book, both online and in stores, got me thinking about the genre/sub-genre and where it came from: specifically, it feels like a convergence of the long-standing urban fantasy subgenre that I've been reading for a while, plus a continuation of the furore caused by EL James's 50 Shades of Grey, which also started life as Twilight fan fiction. It also touches on strands of internet book fandom that has passed me by, mainly all the erotic fanfic on An Archive of Our Own and the headcanon/fanon stuff that's been percolating around Tumblr and other social media for decades at this point. Because I haven't been in this community, I'm probably missing 90% of the undercurrents that have coalesced to form this current craze, but let's take this as a useful Cliff's Notes for the moment.

I subsequently spent the last couple of months since getting back from Europe perusing the romantasy shelf at my local, Kepler's, looking at the kind of books they had and who was writing them. This is also partly because I've been turning over an idea for a story that could fall into that niche, and I wanted to do some research on how many dudes were represented (answer: one that I've seen at Kepler's). Incidentally, I love how Kepler's just went ahead and split romantasy off from the regular SF and fantasy books - I've always thought genre segmenting on bookstore shelves is better for discovering more of what you love, rather than ghettoizing genre books away from "serious" fiction.

Then, just this past week, a friend of mine asked me if I'd read A Court of Thorns and Roses, by Sarah J Maas, because she wanted someone to talk to about it, so I decided to take the plunge and check it out - I'd decided Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros was more my speed, but I ended up buying both on Kindle (I know, I know... but my physical TBR pile is a mess - of my own making - so I can prioritize them better on Kindle). Since I started, we've also been trading silly romantasy-related memes on Instagram, which has been fun too.

I'll leave the literary review for another post - I'm not far enough into ACOTAR to have much sense of how good Maas's plotting is, but at any rate the prose hasn't turned me off yet. What's more interesting to me is what the genre and subject matter is saying to women in this current cultural moment, as well as a recognition that women seem to be the only ones buying fiction at the moment, so what's on sale reflects that change in tastes.

The main thing that I see cited in talk about these books is female agency - Feyre in ACOTAR apparently makes a lot of questionable decisions, but at least they're her decisions. Moreover, if we look for ourselves in fiction, I suspect a lot of women appreciate seeing female characters getting into trouble and being at the center of things, rather than at the margins. Thinking about traditional big names in the regular fantasy genre, it's hard to point to women who drive the narrative in series like Game of Thrones or Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorne, even if they actually spend time giving dialogue and plot lines to female characters, unlike Lord of the Rings or other classic books.

This trend doesn't only apply to romantasy, by the way - looking at the SFF shelves right now, in any bookstore, it feels like the conventional fantasy and SF (at least the new books) is dominated by non-male authors. Which, again, is a reflection of the widening of book-buying patterns beyond just dudes who are looking for the next series that evokes the same sense of wonder as LotR did, way back.

My thinking is, when the momentum seems to be behind a certain book, or author, or genre, it's worth checking out, even if only to decide that something isn't for me. At the same time, when I have an idea that might fit into the genre, it makes it doubly important to see for myself how it works. And on that point, if my story ideas dovetail with what's selling - or more pertinently, has an audience - it's worthwhile to explore it. That's not intended to mean cashing in cynically - just that if you have an idea that seems to be gaining traction, it's worthwhile developing it to get the story out of your head and onto paper.

And even if nothing ever comes of it, then at least I can enjoy the memes.

UCLA TV Writing Courses Complete

This week marks the end of my cycle of TV writing classes through the UCLA Extension, and I thought I'd post a quick wrap-up as I come to the end of the fourth class. I last wrote at length about these classes back in January, when I'd just started and was plotting an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Well, I've now written the full script of that episode, and then gone on to write a pilot script for the third and fourth classes in the sequence. The same instructor taught all four classes, so the format of doing things was consistent across all four, and the pilot classes were fairly easy to navigate given that I'd already done that style of plotting in the first and second classes.

Another advantage of these classes, as I mentioned back in August, was that they gave me the tools to develop more stories in this way. As a result, I plotted three TV shows during TV III, and during TV IV I wrote three pilots, working on my pages for class in the mornings and then on the pages for my secondary story ideas in the evenings. This feels like a lot of output, given that the last time I produced anything comparable was in the first half of 2022, when I finished a novel I'd started the previous November.

TV seems to be my preferred medium now, as my attempts to tackle a big revision on that novel seem to be taking a lot longer - but on the plus side, it feels like this new version could lend itself to the TV format.

I'd also quite like to tackle the feature screenplay format again soon, but I don't think I can justify taking that class through UCLA Extension, given that I should really start saving more cash now.

In any case, now that I don't have the homework and reading for class to do, I should once again have more time on Sundays for this blog, as well as other types of writing. I'll be back to posting my thoughts on writing, football, politics and comics as I get back into the swing of things here - and maybe someday soon I'll be able to announce some good news? There's nothing on the horizon, but it'll come soon, I'm sure, whether that's a new job or something even more exciting.

Or I'll get bored of banging my head against this novel and sign up for the those feature-writing classes after all. Who even knows?

Marvel's Dark Reign Was the Perfect Trump-Era Preview

When I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels last year, I noted how Wolk drew a comparison between the Dark Reign storyline, in which Spider-Man's arch nemesis Norman Osborn becomes the de facto ruler of the US, and the first Trump administration. This past week I got to see for myself what Wolk was talking about, when I read the X-Men issues that took place during Dark Reign.

Wolk makes the point that Dark Reign is just an imagining of how to apply the authoritarian playbook, which I think accounts for the similarities. But the similarities really are striking: Osborn responds to a flashpoint of political violence in San Francisco by sending in his fake Avengers (similar to the Thunderbolts, a group of villains disguised as heroes). He then uses that as an excuse to suspend civil rights and puts the city on lockdown, portraying SF as an ungovernable hellhole that only he can solve.

Obviously in real life this stuff has happened elsewhere, mostly Portland and Washington DC. And as far as I can tell, none of the things the Trump administration is responding to involved anti-mutant protests or the introduction of bio-Sentinel robots designed to trigger when in the presence of mutants.

But as I say, the similarities are striking, especially when they're rendered against the backdrop of Union Square and other parts of SF that I know. Reading these issues I didn't get a sense that this was back in 2009, long before most people were worried about the far-right or about fascist takeovers.

It's also a good encapsulation of how Wolk sees the various modes of resistance: fighting back doesn't work, especially when it's a small group, like when Hellion gathers a bunch of mutants together and they get their asses kicked by Emma Frost's Dark X-Men; hunkering down also doesn't work, as when Cyclops first locks down the X-Men's base in the Marin Headlands and then raises Asteroid M to serve as a separate mutant state; nor does Emma Frost's attempt to moderate the chaos from the inside do much, as she finds herself arresting Hellion's group and delivering them to Osborn's base to be tortured.

It doesn't come up in the X-Men parts, but Wolk notes that what brings down Osborn at the end of Dark Reign (apart from getting beaten up by Iron Man, Thor and Captain America) is journalism. That is to say, documenting his administration's misdeeds, who they hurt, and where they're getting their funding from, among other questions, is what lays bare the truth of Osborn's plan. The implication is clear: exposing everything they're trying to hide is the main thing that'll help us.

Too bad Obama can't step in at the end, like in Dark Reign, and put a stop to it in one fell swoop.

Marvel's Ultimates is Weird

The latest comic in my reread of my whole collection is the collected first storyline of the Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvel version of the Avengers, from 2002. I'm three issues in, but it's a weird book, in both good ways but perhaps more bad ways. It's one of very few Ultimate Marvel books I still have from back then, and I'm not sure I'll keep it after this read.

To start with, it's written by Mark Millar, whose work I don't particularly enjoy, apart from Superman: Red Son and a couple of issues of the Authority. It's drawn by Bryan Hitch, whose work I do enjoy, and who brings the same widescreen sensibility to the Ultimates that he evinced in his run on the Authority with Warren Ellis, and in his run on JLA with Mark Waid. Overall, the book looks gorgeous, with some beautiful splash pages and some good action - the first issue, where we see Captain America's last mission in WWII, is colored a bit oddly, so that it all looks muddy, but the rest looks amazing.

The team consists of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp and Giant Man, plus the Hulk in a support role (as Bruce Banner) and as an antagonist (when he inevitably hulks out). That provides one of several cognitive dissonances, because I'm reading this with the memory of the first MCU Avengers movie. There are definite overlaps between these versions of the characters and the movie versions, but they're not totally the same, which accounts for the whiplash. This book also has the version of Nick Fury that looks like Samuel L Jackson, which was brought to life in the actual movies.

Part of why I don't like Millar's writing is that everything is extreme and amped up. Iron Man is pretty recognizable from the movies (I'm not sure if he's meant to look like Robert Downey Jr, but there's at least one reference to the actor), in terms of his womanizing and partying. Giant Man is on prozac, because I guess Millar thought that would be modern or something? Thor is positioned as an environmental activist who's suspicious of Fury's motives, which I suppose allows Millar to claim he's putting his own politics into the book.

The portrayal I find least easy to enjoy is this book's version of Captain America. He's described as having "John Glenn's buzz-cut cool and John McCain's politics", which even back in 2002 was a red flag for me. There's a lot of comments where Cap calls people sissies or girls or whatever, and he's generally an asshole (cf that panel where they finally turn Hulk back into Banner and Cap kicks him in the face).

Obviously a guy from the 1940s who suddenly wakes up in 2002 (or 2012) wouldn't be a weekly guest on MSNBC or Air America, but this version has none of the vulnerability that Chris Evans brought to the character in the movies. Instead of the skinny nerd who became Cap because he hated bullies, this version feels like a bully himself.

I blame all this on Millar because he's that kind of self-proclaimed left-of-center person who uses that as a smokescreen to write a lot of gross stuff. Of course there's a difference between the art and the artist, but Millar always seems a little too pleased with himself when he's transgressing.

And more to the point, all this stuff dates the book horribly. In the third issue, SHIELD unveils the Ultimates and Cap in his new uniform, and there's an appearance from George W Bush. Hitch's drawings of Bush are weirdly stiff, because they're taken from photos, but even with all of Trump's outrages, just seeing Bush is off-putting. The regular Marvel Universe generally did a better job of not putting actual politicians into the books (the less said about that time Spider-Man hung out with Barack Obama, the better), and I wish Millar had done the same.

Anyway, it's a flawed book, but it's fascinating as a time capsule of what Marvel thought was cool in 2002, as well as an embryonic form of the Avengers we'd later see in the movies. It's also an attempt to make the Avengers cool, something that they definitely weren't in the regular Marvel Universe up until then. In fact, the best description of the 90s version of the team that I've heard is as a repository for characters whose books have been cancelled - that came from Max Carleton speaking on Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, and it feels so right.

I lost touch with the Ultimate Universe not long after this, and I no longer have the Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men issues I bought when they came out. I'm given to understand that it was a weird time (apparently Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were in an incestuous relationship, which was treated as "modern" by the characters at the time, rather than deeply fucked up. Blame Jeph Loeb, who was writing it by then), but on the positive side it gave us the Miles Morales version of Spidey, so I can't complain too much.

But one of the pleasures of reading old comics is seeing how they fit into their cultural milieu, and the first arc of the Ultimates definitely transports me back to the early days of the War on Terror. Your mileage may vary as to whether you want to be transported back to then.

A Day at the Renaissance Faire

A thing I've always aspired to is taking advantage of all the cultural stuff I have nearby, wherever I live. Admittedly it's a little easier to do when I live in a big city like London than when I live in a suburb like Palo Alto. But suburban places mean cars, and cars means getting out to places that aren't well-served by public transportation. And today that meant visiting the Northern California Renaissance Faire, in Hollister, which is one of those towns to which you're probably never going to get a train connection or bus depot.

(BTW, I have a number of thoughts about urbanization and suburbs vs urban places, but I'll address that in another blog post sometime)

I knew about the RenFaire because I saw the edge of it once when driving back from Southern California. It's always hosted right next to Casa de Fruta, which has become one of my perennial stops whenever I drive down, and this year I'd seen billboards for it, so I decided to check it out. I got a few friends out, driving down with one and meeting the others there.

I also had a bit of an idea about Renaissance Faires, because of a sort of jokey tone about them in popular culture. You're led to expect a lot of nerds with neckbeards and cod-English accents, playing dress-up and waving swords around. And there was some of that! But also, everyone seemed super nice and happy to be enjoying a day out. There was food and drink - not much of it too medieval, unless they had poke and root beer floats back then - but also stalls selling trinkets, from D&D dice sets to carved wooden mugs and drinking vessels. You could even pay to shoot arrows, fire crossbows and throw knives, shuriken or axes at wooden targets.

I took advantage of the archery booth (because I always play a ranger in D&D, of course), and despite never having picked up a bow before, a nice lady working the booth coached me on how to nock the arrow, draw the string and release. I may have hit the target only once, but thanks to her most of the rest of my shots still flew straight. Though the less said about my attempts at flinging throwing stars, the better.

We caught a little bit of the joust, but the sun and crowd got to me and we went exploring again. There was also commedia dell'arte, sword-fighting, and all kinds of foolishness. I was sorely tempted by a massage, but opted against.

But if I seemed dismissive about the nerds and the cod-medieval accents, I don't intend for that. Sure, I heard some guy holding forth to his friend about publishing in BiOS, but what do you expect a) in the Silicon Valley and b) at a RenFaire in general? Sometimes it's nice to be surrounded by nerds just openly enjoying themselves.

The other nice thing about it, I have to admit, is the large number of attractive women all over, most of them wearing costumes. There were faeries, as well as fairies, elves and pirates and assassins. As I left the grounds I even saw a woman dressed up as a knight, which was quite cool. I've probably still internalized a lot of the messaging I got when I was young, that women wouldn't be interested in nerd-stuff, so I was glad to see, once again, that this isn't true. And maybe one time I would like to go and chat some of these ladies up...

The main thing is that my friends all seemed quite pleased to have done this thing, and that I'd pushed for us to do it, even if it's a bit of a drive and a hassle to get into the grounds. It's easy to fall into the routine of going to bars or coffee shops or movies, or even of just not doing those things as a group, so at least we had a nice day out together. And now I want to go learn archery for real.

A Mid-Term Report on X-Men Evolution

My usual rule is not to write about a show that I'm watching until I've finished it, but there are extenuating circumstances this time around. I'm only halfway through X-Men: Evolution, the second animated show about Marvel's mutant flagship, but given that I'm probably going to let my Disney Plus subscription lapse next week, I figured I'd write down my thoughts so far.

I think I've gone on record as not having been the biggest fan of the original animated series from 1992 (hereafter to be called X92). Whereas Batman: The Animated Series had a bold new design for the characters and a visual aesthetic borrowed from the Tim Burton movies, X92's visual language was a bit more nondescript - the character designs were the then-current looks that Jim Lee came up with for his and Chris Claremont's 1991 relaunch, but the animation style was pretty generic 90s Saturday morning. At least for the first four seasons: season 5 featured a notable decline in animation quality, as 10 new episodes were ordered and animated by a cut-rate animation house.

X-Men Evolution was meant to be a complete reimagining: instead of a team of adults, the core team (Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, Rogue and new character Spyke) would be kids learning how to use their powers and navigate teenage life. Storm and Wolverine were teachers at the Xavier Institute, which was also a nice touch, and they'd be joined by Beast later in the second season. A new set of younger characters, mostly based on the New Mutants, would also join in Season 2.

The bad guys, or antagonists, were a group of mutant misfits drawn from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (just the Brotherhood here), led first by Mystique and then by Magneto. But they weren't "evil mutants", because characters would switch between the X-Men and the Brotherhood, and there were themes like Shadowcat's kinda relationship with Avalanche that meant the relationship wasn't just trying to kill one another.

The big thing I like from this show, at least so far, is how it treats Cyclops and Jean. Cyclops is the victim of character assassination in the movies and X92 - if someone hates him, it's a good bet that they first encountered him in the original animated series. Here he gets more personality, kind of a dork, kind of a regular kid who likes cars and is in love with his best friend, but he's not the authority figure and killjoy from X92. Jean, meanwhile, is the popular girl who's also cool, but who's still prone to making mistakes and getting jealous (like when her friend Taryn moves in on Cyclops - meow). This version of Jean is quite a bit better than the X92 version who just yells "Scott!" and faints whenever she uses her powers.

I can't deny it: the development of their feelings for one another is my favorite plot thread in Season 2 of Evolution, and I can't wait to see how it plays out in the third and fourth seasons.

The other thing I like is the theme of the characters choosing whether to be X-Men or Brotherhood members. Avalanche tries to join the X-Men once, Boom-Boom joins the Brotherhood (and then leaves), and the two teams have to work together a couple of times. That question of how to be, and how to use their powers, is central to the X-theme in a way that X92 never really managed, as far as I could tell.

Now, I don't want to over-romanticize this show. It's clearly a kids show from the early 2000s, with sometimes dodgy animation, character designs and writing. Boom-Boom looks off-model most of the time, there are times when the movement looks cheap, and some of the plots make little sense.

But if you can get beyond those issues, it's a good reimagining of the concept that highlights the themes well. And it introduces one of my favorite characters, X-23, although not until Season 3. I'm looking forward to seeing if the subsequent seasons are as fun, as well as the 2009 follow-up, Wolverine and the X-Men. I have to do something while I wait for season 2 of X97, but as I got to the midpoint of Evolution, I couldn't help thinking that this show would also be ripe for a reboot. 

Anyone at Marvel want to take that on?