The Death Ray

Apart from all the “new 52″ brouhaha, one of the more interesting and talked about bits of online  was Michael Fiffe’s essay on the delineations between mainstream (i.e. superhero) comics and the alt/indie comics scene. Spinning off of his essay, I thought it would be fun to list my own favorite super-styled tales by folks who usually don’t do that type of material, some of which Fiffe talked about in his essay.

Note: For the purposes of this article I’m deliberately avoiding any of the officially sanctioned productions from the Big Two, namely Strange Tales and Bizarro Comics, just to make it a wee bit harder.

1. The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes. Clowes’ rare dip into super-genre waters involves Andy, a withdrawn and awkward teen being raised by his grandfather who discovers his late scientist dad gave him the ability of super-strength whenever he smokes a cigarette, as well as a special gun that helps … get rid of unwanted things and people. Unable to find a good use for his newfound powers — his attempts at heroics fall flat on their face — things quickly spiral out of control. Yes, to some extent the book is a comment on the superhero genre’s inability to deal with or examine real life issues, but Clowes is not drawing on snark here; Death Ray is a haunting character study of a young man whose inner demons drive him to do horrible things. Easily Dan Clowes best, richest work to date, Drawn & Quarterly is releasing a spiffy new hardcover edition of the book this fall, so there’s really no excuse not to check it out.

Panel from 'The Ti-Girls'

2. The Ti-Girls by Jaime Hernandez. The Hernandez brothers have never kept their love for classic superhero stories a secret, so it really wasn’t that much of a surprise when Jaime opted to mark the debut issue of Love and Rockets New Stories in 2008 with The Ti-Girls, about a an older all-female superhero team that reunites to stop a newly superpowered Penny Century from running amok due as she tries to find her lost children. The plot’s a bit convoluted, but there’s no question Hernandez has a knack for delineating kick-ass fight scenes. Ti-Girls isn’t just an example of how alt-cartoonists can enliven the genre, it’s an example of how poorly the Big Two handle female characters in general.

Destroy!!

3. Destroy by Scott McCloud. McCloud’s oversize smash-em-up, done after completing Zot! in 1986, is the most obvious parody of the bunch on this list, but it’s a fun parody, winking with affection at the sheer ludicrousness of most superhero battles. One long fight scene from beginning to end, Destroy is nothing more or less than two overpowered musclemen laying complete waste to New York City. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy I don’t know what will.

4. The Amazing Life of Onion Jack by Joel Priddy. AdHouse’s Project Superior anthology — a thick book of superhero tales by alt-cartoonists — was successful enough that publisher Chris Pitzer briefly attempted to spin it off into a pamphlet series. That in turn led to Priddy contributing this story for AdHouse’s 2004 Free Comic Book Day, turning in what ended up being the best of the bunch. Jack is a charming, minimalist tale about a WWII-era superhero who really would prefer to be a fine chef, but keeps getting pulled into battle. Each page chronicles a different era in the hero’s life, which really plays nicely to Priddy’s spot-on comedic timing. Though the original issuemight be hard to find, the story, thankfully is also included in the 2006 edition of The Best American Comics.

5. Batman by Josh Simmons. Simmons is one of the pre-eminent horror cartoonists working in the field today, and in this unofficial “tribute” he applies all his creepy skills to the Dark Knight. Batman’s been portrayed as borderline psychotic in some past DC books, but never to the extent he is here, as his war on crime seems to have driven him completely insane, to the point where he’s sleeping on dirty roofs and preying on helpless junkies. Even Catwoman has lost interest in the poor slob. It’s an unsettling in the best sense of the word that never comes off as a simple “superheroes are dumb” screed.

6. High School Analogy by Ron Rege Jr. Not every story in the seminal Coober Skeber #2 (i.e. “the Marvel Benefit Issue”) was gold, but it contained enough stellar work (and more significantly, introduced readers to the Fort Thunder crowd) to be fondly remembered and highly influential. One of the highlights — arguably the best story in the entire anthology — was Ron Rege Jr’s take on Spider-Man. Drawing heavily on Ditko and Lee’s original stories, Rege plays up Peter Parker’s angst and isolation with a slightly modern spin (“I’m on edge every day when I come to this fucking place,” Parker thinks about school at one point), to really capture the sort of inner turmoil a lot of teen-agers go through. In a way, Rege got what Lee and Ditko were doing better than some of the artists and writers that followed the duo in the “real” Spider-Man books.

Uncanny X-Men #141

Earlier this month ABC News ran a special report called Earth 2100, which imagined a possible “worst case scenario” if the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change converge, causing catastrophic effects to the planet. The report featured graphic novel-style sequences by Josh Neufeld, Sari Wilson, Joe Infurnari, George O’Connor, Tim Hamilton and Leland Purvis.

It wasn’t the first time that comic book creators have taken a look at a possible future where everything has gone to hell, both scaring and depressing you with its bleak look at what might be in store for us. So in honor of the show, here are six of my favorite apocalyptic doomsday scenarios, as presented by comics past and present …

1. Death by robots — Geekanerd recently did a post on possible robot apocalypse scenarios and how to avoid them, using Battlestar Galactica, Terminator and The Matrix as examples. Another story that falls into that category is the classic Uncanny X-Men story “Days of Future Past.” First introduced in issues #141 and 142, the storyline focused on a possible future where mutants have been hunted almost to extinction by the Sentinels, with the survivors being kept in internment camps. Giant robots = bad, bad things.

I remember reading these issues as a kid and being genuinely freaked out about the fate of the X-Men. It was bad enough finding out that Cyclops, Nightcrawler and many of the others were already dead, but to see Storm, Colossus and Wolverine meet their fates … I took it as canon, actually, that one day the X-Men comic would end with a similar scene, once it caught up to the future those issues portrayed. Of course, I thought Jean Grey was really dead, too, so …

Walking Dead

2. Death by zombies — Imagine waking up in the hospital after being a coma for a few months to find that not only have you been abandoned by pretty much everybody, but also that your world has been overrun by zombies. We’ve seen how similar scenarios play out on the silver screen, but Robert Kirkman’s taken us beyond that in The Walking Dead, past the feeling of pure fear and false hope, and straight into the realm of pure survival. It’s one thing to watch a group hole up in the mall for a couple of hours and fight off the undead; it’s another to watch them slowly disintegrate as human beings over the course of several years.

Although we still don’t know what caused the zombie apocalypse, Kirkman has introduced a new character, Eugene Porter, the mullet-headed doctor who could bring salvation. Knowing how the group’s luck runs, though, odds are that Porter gets eaten right before we find out how to end the nightmare …

Scout

3. Death by mystical forces — Back in the late 1980s, Eclipse published the adventures of Emanuel Santana in an America that had seen better days. Once a world superpower, sanctions against the country because of past ecological excesses had left it as a third-world country. Global warming had left most of the United States a desert, the government was run by corporations and the economy was pretty much non-existent.

Tim Truman’s Scout featured a pretty grim look at the future of the country, but it turns out it wasn’t completely our own fault. Four monsters from Apache legend had taken human form and basically ran the country into the ground, and it was up to Santana to fix things by, naturally, killing the monsters. And the human forms they took were powerful folks within the government, so of course this put our hero at odds not only with his former comrades in the armed forces, but also with himself … was the country taken over by these monsters, or was he just crazy? Either way, Truman did a great job mixing the geo-political with the mystical to create a compelling story.

If you’re curious to check out Scout, some of Tim Truman’s finest work, Dynamite recently collected them into two volumes.

Therefore Repent!

5. Death by scripture? — A couple of years back, Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam did a graphic novel called Therefore Repent!, a post-Rapture graphic novel about what happens to those left behind after all the Christians in the world take the express train to Heaven. Through the eyes of Mummy and Raven, the two main characters, we’re introduced to a world where magic is making a comeback, dogs talk, Splitters hope for a second rapture and angels wield machine guns as they start to take out the sinners.

Of course, the real story here is that Mummy and Raven are breaking up — which, let’s face it, can be a sort of doomsday of its own. You can check out the book for free on Jim Munroe’s site.

Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth

6. Death by mutated animals with opposable thumbs — Earth A.D., or “After Disaster,” is a future Earth inhabited by intelligent, mutated animals and what’s left of the Statue of Liberty — and a lone human. Nope, it isn’t Planet of the Apes, even if it does share some similarities. It’s, of course, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which was created by Jack Kirby in the 1970s.

So what happened to Kamandi’s world? Well, that was never quite explained. Something involving radiation, which resulted in some animals gaining human-like intelligence and movement. Whatever the disaster was really doesn’t matter … what does matter is that the book, no matter how weird it got, really worked.

Our friends at Comic Should Be Good had “>a great post about Kamandi last year. Alex Cox described it as “something of a masterpiece, and quite possibly the best comic of the Seventies. Against all odds, KAMANDI worked in a way that few comics do. It holds up, conceptually, even today. Despite major flaws, it remains infectious and joyous and a total kick in the ass.”

Age of Apocalypse

4. Death by Apocalypse — So what happens when you travel back in time, intent on killing a powerful evil mutant, but end up killing your own father instead? Well, if you’re Legion, and your dad is Professor X, you create an alternate history where Apocalypse rules North America and freedom fighters led by Magneto make trouble for him while trying to restore the old timeline. Throw in some genocide, the threat of nuclear war and a new version of the Four Horsemen, and you’ve got yourself an armageddon.

Luckily this one didn’t last very long … one crossover event and a few surviving strays later, and this world no longer existed except in the pages of Exiles.

+++

So what are some of your favorite end-of-the-world stories?

Miracleman #13

Like JK, the recent discovery of the third issue of Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers put me in mind of another much ballyhooed, but equally hard to find Moore series, Miracleman.

Of course, as with Flex Mentallo, there’s little chance this series will ever see print, at least for the nonce. Neil Gaiman, Todd McFarlane and a host of other lesser mortals have been arguing in court and other areas over who owns the character for over a decade now, and resolution seems as distant as the Orion belt.

The fact that the original Eclipse Comics trades and pamphlets are either a) tough to find or b) very expensive only makes the absence of a new collection only more irksome, as Miracleman still holds up remarkably well, despite having to constantly live in the shadow of its bigger and more popular brother, Watchmen.

Miracleman (or Marvelman as he is known in his native U.K. More on that in a minute) started out in 1954 as a blatant British rip-off of Captain Marvel (the guy who says “Shazam,” not the Kree warrior) — a boy reporter named Michael Moran who only had to say his magic word, “Kimota” (pronounce it backwards, as I said, the character wasn’t particularly original) to turn into a magnificent physical specimen with extraordinary abilities.

Miracleman #3

There’s a reason for that bit of copycat chicanery, as only a short time earlier Fawcett Comics, owner of the Big Red Cheese, had folded up shop, unable to win their lengthy legal battle against DC (then National) who felt that the Captain was a bit too similar to their own man from Krypton.

And yes, there is a certain irony in a fictional character being born as the direct result of a lengthy lawsuit and then decades later prevented from continuing his adventures due to another bit of legal snarl.

Anyway, the folks who had been publishing Captain Marvel’s adventures in Great Britain didn’t want to lose their star player, so they hired writer-artist Mick Anglo to create a substitute. Thus was born MM, and his adventures continued until 1963, when the series came to a close.

Enter Alan Moore, who in 1982 was hired by the new Warrior magazine, along with artists Gary Leach and Alan Davis, to bring back and re-interpret Marvelman. (The character became Miracleman, at least in the United States, when Marvel the comic book company objected to the title. Did I mention that this character had a long and confusing history of legal trouble?)

Moore, Davis and Leach’s vision fit perfectly in the new gritty, more “realistic” framework of fantasy stories that Warrior and other comic magazines were creating. The story opens with a grown-up Moran, now pushing 40. Having completely forgotten about his years as a superhero, he works as a freelance reporter, is frequently depressed and given to migraines. Then, while on assignment, he gets caught in the middle of a terrorist raid, remembers his magic word and transforms once again into Miracleman, ready to rid the world of evil.

Miracleman #1

But of course, it’s not nearly that simple is it? The memories that Moran has of his youth and origin are suspect to put it mildly. The seemingly cartoon villain he believed to be his nemesis was the force responsible for his creation and has returned to finish his experiments. His former teen-age sidekick, Kid Miracleman, has grown up to be the most psychotic and dangerous being alive. Oh, and his wife is pregnant.

These days, this sort of “everything you know is wrong” character reinvention has become a cliche in and of itself, but it’s important to remember that it was a relatively new idea when Moore came along. More significantly, Moore’s ultimate aim with the series is a lot grander and philosophical than merely shifting the tone and upping violence quotient a to fit a more cynical readership.

As with Watchmen, Miracleman explores the idea of what life would be like in a world with god-like superheroes. Parallel themes of the corruption of power, individual responsibility and such abound. As with Ozymandias, Miracleman does indeed ultimately save the world, reshaping it into a divine utopia, though not without a severe cost.

Because of the similarities, Miracleman tends to get seen as Watchmen redux, even though it was first down the pike. Certainly it’s not as tight a story — it’s a sprawling work that took several years to complete and had a revolving door of artists. In addition to Leach and Davis, Rick Veitch and finally John Totleben made significant marks on the series.

Miracleman #15

But if Miracleman lacks the clocklike craftsmanship of its big brother, it nevertheless remains a compelling work, full of stunning, indelible sequences and characters. At times it’s almost operatic whereas Watchmen is more like a concerto (my knowledge of musical terms is pathetic, so I apologize if I just offended someone with that anology). The birth of MM’s baby, which fell under a bit of controversy at the time for Veitch’s uncensored depiction of childbirth, or the death of intelligence spook Evelyn Cream are but two examples.

If Miracleman is remembered for anything, however, it’s issue #15, easily one of the darkest, most violent comics not only in Moore’s canon but quite likely in the medium ever (and I’ve read S. Clay Wilson). In the issue, a psychotic Kid Miracleman battles his former partner and friends, leveling London to the ground, with little left to the imagination as to the type of carnage wrought. Totleben’s art is chaotic and gruesome, with wreckage, severed limbs, dead bodies and other horrors crowding and choking each page.

Again, it’s a distinct rejoinder to the fan’s wish/wonderment of “what if superheroes really existed.” Well, Moore reminds us,they’d lay to waste the world around you. They’d destroy everything you ever believed in and replace it with a world that, while it might be filled with wonders and triumphs, would deny you your basic humanity. Beyond simple genre subversion, though, Moore is explicitly pointing out — as he did from a different perspective in V for Vendetta 00 the danger inherent in attempting to create any utopia, superpowered or otherwise.

Miracleman #9

After wrapping up the series with issue #16, Moore handed the reins and (what he though were) his rights to the series to Neil Gaiman, who picked up and poked and prodded at what Moore had left behind, sometimes brilliantly. Sometimes not so.

Gaiman never got the chance to finish his tale due to the afore-mentioned legal troubles, but really, apart from idle curiosity, I don’t mind so much. Moore arc felt complete in a way that few authorial “runs” on a comic book do. That final two-page spread, with a slightly uneasy Miracleman surveying his empire is a fitting end and the only conclusion I’ll need. I just wish it were readily available, in print at least, so that others could savor it as well.

For more on Miracleman, visit here, here, here and here. You may also want to buy a copy of this.