Diaspar

 I've been gone from comics a long time. (Jack Thoth is coming, don't you worry.) Chatting about it with my comics shop owner, I observed that my gap is longer than the gap between the Golden Age of comics and the (excuse me) Marvel Age of Comics. That observation naturally set me back some, because as I was growing up that gap was vast as the Deadly Desert surrounding Ox. Of course I knew about it: the very first Marvel Age comic I read at the barber shop, Fantastic Four #4, referred to the Golden Age and returned the Sub-Mariner to the stage--and on the DC side there was the Justice League's Crisis on Earth-2 and the Flash of Two Worlds, so we knew about the period and the heroes. (Just a footnote, because I don't know if it'll ever come up: the very first Marvel Comic I ever read was at my friend Sigurd Johnson's. I later deduced that it was Tales of Suspense #9, featuring a Kirby Monster story, Diablo, the Demon from the 5th Dimension, who was this big cloud guy. But I was too young to know what I was reading--just enough to keep repeating to myself that big puffy cloud people weren't all that scary. They weren't. But when I later picked up the FF, I had no connection between it and the previous book.) But the comics were not reprinted, and cost a fortune at the one comics convention a year, so it was a completely legendary time. 

But I started thinking: if I take that Golden Age Gap and flip it, the resultant time would span from the beginning of Marvel until roughly the time I started working for them (which of course makes my absence seem still longer, but I'll quit it). And the results were astounding. From a group whose output as well as its staff could (it seemed, though it wasn't really true) be counted on ten fingers even well along into the era, to well over 40 books a month and unguessable books like Conan the Barbarian and Master of Kung Fu being hot books, it was a radical transformation.

The point I'm leading up to is that the startling thing--looking across the real gap of my absence, from roughly 1990 to the present, the really disturbing thing is how much things haven't changed. 

Of course, of course, we've got full digital color now and slick paper and high prices. And of course their are new companies and all that. But I mean it in one simple way: Where are the new books?

I've got the list carven into my bones--the Marvel List from it's 10-book era. (I swear, when I'm doing something really tedious, I'll find myself chanting it under my breath.) Fantastic Four. Spider-Man. Avengers. X-Men. Daredevil. Thor. (Strange  Tales) Nick Fury. Dr. Strange. (Tales of Suspense) Iron Man. Captain America. (Tales to Astonish) Sub-Mariner. The Hulk. And at the Bottom, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. That was the order in the Mighty Marvel Checklist, and that's how i forever remember them.

I'm well aware that there was this explosion in the 90's of books I've never even heard of, but that's all sunk in the deadly desert. What new books are there? I can't recite the DC canon the way I can Marvel, but how far away from the 60's JLA has DC's line moved--allowing for the properties they bought, like Quality Fawcett Charlton and Archie? Where are the brand new hot books? Or even 15-year old new hot books?

And no, no, no, it's not like I can just pick up an issue of a familiar character and start reading--things have been shuffled and reshuffled. How many times have the X-men been dead/thought dead/lost their powers? How many times has the Justice League disbanded/rebanded? 

I'm not complaining about change, because this isn't change. It's the fashion-like illusion of change. Why are the two big companies where they were when I left?

I'm pretty sure I know the answer, and it's one of those things that's aggravating in that it's an external  pressure that restricts and cramps an art form where things should be freer--and used to be, even in non-idyllic times.

The fact of the matter is that the folks who own Marvel and DC view them purely and only as reservoirs of intellectual properties. 45 years later Marvel is finally getting around to an Iron Man movie, and is redoing the Incredible Hulk origin again on screen. DC is doing their third set of Batman pitchers, so of course there's still lots of untapped potential. No ned for them to worry.

But the major problem I have with that is that the comic book companies have historically been generators of intellectual properties, not just meat lockers for them. 

I know better than most that one of the main reasons for their refrigerated state is that the Big Two want to own everything outright, and most creators of any worth don't want to hand them a possible series of major motion pictures for next to nothing. Largely, the innovation and new characters have migrated to the smaller presses and special labels like DC's Vertigo--the creator owned islands in the big stream.

But I'm not talking about the industry right now--I'm talking as an old fan. It's certainly an industry problem that the two biggest chunks of comic book publishing are standing there like Captain America being worshipped by a decreasing band of Eskimos--but what bothers me more right now--as it's bothered me for a while--is this process of turning these enormous fictional constructs into claustrophobic cement mixers, in which the same old elements are tossed over and over again.

Yes, I'm being bombastic, a bit. But perhaps it takes an exile to come back and point out that it resembles nothing so much as Arthur C. Clarke's City of Diaspar from his first novel Against the Fall of Night (and its reworking, the City and the Stars) that I blogged about before, where the remnant of humanity lasted a billion years by having a memory bank of stored humans, who would periodically be revived, given bodies, and after they've lived a life, return to the banks to sleep for a hundred thousand years or so. From where I sit, that's what I see. I came a cross a listing for Hawkman volume 5 . Volume 5! And although I'm guessing, the origin got shook up like a snowglobe each time. And I read Infinite Crisis, which shook the multiverse up like another snowglobe, to undo a previous Crisis and to bring forth--among other things--a new Blue Beetle! I have also previously lamented the rise of these big summer shakings which generated low-level excitement but disenfranchised readers in any sort of exile. After the Mutant Massacre, Fall of the Mutants, Onslaught, House of M and Decimation, will there be Anything left of my hard-won X-men knowledge? Other than the fact that the trademarked characters are ultimately intact? 

It's that second part that's the unpleasant part.

If you look at most comics of the 40's every book had six or seven strips--with names like The Purple Mask, K-4 and his Sky Devils, Monako Prince of Magic, Whirlwind Carter of the Interplanetary Secret Service, Marvex the Super Robot, G-Man Don Gorman, Breeze Barton in the Land of Savages, and Trojak the Tiger-Man. These names are real--they're all from Daring Mystery Comics #4, 1940, Timely/Marvel. Clumsy, primitive, imitative--but there's enough in that one issue for an entire comic book company today. And every book was like that. (In fact, I'd make a modest proposal to Marvel: I could make a whole new line of comics just based on this one book. Marvel doesn't like me at all, so there's no chance, but I could do it.)

Comics creators all along have been good about this to the point of arrogance. Doug Moench said it out loud: I forget what property was being ripped from his grasp, but he smiled and said "What do I care? I'll just make more! And shortly after I watched him create,, as if to prove it, two highly underrated books for DC, Electric Warrior and Lords of the Ultra-Realm, effortlessly. (least it looked like it...)

Invention is really one of the great joys of comic books. One of the marvelous things about Spider-Man was that, over and above the different approach and all that stuff, Steve Ditko (and Stan Lee) came up with a new spiffy and distinctive villain practically every month. Sure, Peter Parker was kind of scrawny and unpopular and his life was shit, but the book also had The Vulture, Doctor Octopus, the Lizard, Electro, Mysterio, the Green Goblin, and Kraven the Hunter. All villains with staying power, and all within the first 15 issues. And I sincerely doubt that comics creators have changed that much.

So there's something extremely artificial about this preserved state of the Big Guys. The Nth new approach to Wonder Woman, or the n+1th version of the Black Widow are unsatisfactory replacements for fresh air, and shuffling is no substitute for a new book. It should be possible, if not to do creator-owned properties, to, erm, pay the creators to come up with new characters for the company. But that doesn't even seem to be thought of. Pull someone else out of the Diaspar banks and give him a life--then back in, world without end, amen.

Come on. Open the shutters. Unlock the gates. Even if it's to Whirlwind Carter of the Interplanetary Secret Service. Somebody.