Classic EBI #78: Canceled Comic Cavalcade (and a tribute to Dwayne McDuffie)

Yesterday the news broke that Dwayne McDuffie, one of the smartest, most original writers working in mainstream comics, unexpectedly passed away. This weeks’ Everything But Imaginary column is my little tribute to him, and my feelings on just what made him so great.

Everything But Imaginary #388: McDuffie Proved Diversity About More Than Race

Traveling back in time, though, we go to September 1, 2004. In this week’s Classic EBI, I talked about a few comics I loved that were all getting canceled at about the same time… It happens, sadly, far too often.

Canceled Comic Cavalcade

They’re doing it to me again.

It happens to all of us every so often — we start reading a comic book, we get to love it, get invested in it… but since it’s only us and about three other people who feel that way, the book gets cut off before its prime. So Sentinel fans, I feel your pain. Supergirl lovers, your loss is my own. X-Treme X-Men readers… well, you’ve still got like six X-Men books to choose from, so it’s not exactly comparable.

But the reason I’m out of sorts is because DC Comics is pulling the plug on Will Pfiefer’s excellent series H-E-R-O. Pfiefer resurrected the classic Dial “H” for “Hero” concept with this book, about a mysterious dial that granted a person a different superheroic identity each time it was used. While the old versions of this story always kept the dial with one or two bearers who used it over again, in H-E-R-O, the dial traveled from person to person (some deserving, some not), while Robby Reed, the original holder of the dial, tried to track it down again.

A bit more than a year and a half into the run, this book has really hit its stride and Pifefer is telling fantastic stories… just in time to see it die. Why? The same reason most comic books die, sadly — just not enough people buying it.

There are other reasons comics are canceled other than low sales, of course. Sandman ended at issue #75 because Neil Gaiman had finished the stories he wanted to tell. The original Marvel Team-Up title was canceled back in the 80s because it simply became too implausible for Spider-Man to meet up with a new guest star every month. (Of course, this did not stop them from trying it again years later with Spider-Man Team-Up, Marvel Team-Up Vol. 2, Ultimate Marvel Team-Up and, later this year, Marvel Team-Up Vol. 3.) The Legion is being canceled only to be relaunched again under its original title, Legion of Super-Heroes, which should be a great book with Mark Waid and Barry Kitson at the helm.

But no matter what the reason, when a well-written, thought provoking comic book meets its end, it’s a reason to feel down.

Just last week the final issue of Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Statix hit the stores. Resurrected from the ashes of the old X-Force comic, this series depicted a team of mutants that were celebrities instead of outcasts, but carried with them all too human faults and frailties. I’ve always thought that the outcast storyline is the basic flaw in the X-Men concept — yes, granted, it made for a good allegory for the civil rights movement in the 60s, but in this day and age people with wings or claws or blue fuzz and a tail wouldn’t be shunned from society. They’d be superstars. They’d have endorsements for sneakers and breakfast cereals. They’d appear on every talk show in America talking about how much they had to struggle then go home to their million-dollar mansions and wait for the supermodels to arrive and join them in the hot tub.

Milligan took that reality and showed that you could still tell great stories with characters like that. He made them much more interesting than most other X-books out there, but some people didn’t like it because it was too different, because of Allred’s art style (which ironically, I always thought resembled that of X-Men co-creator Jack Kirby) because it wasn’t what they were used to. I heard a story once — possibly apocryphal but who knows — that when Milligan and Allred started their run, X-Force co-creator Rob Liefeld sent Milligan a copy of X-Force #1, on which he wrote, “Dear Peter, thanks for ****ing up my book.”

Which I also thought was ironic, because those were my exact feelings when Liefeld turned the once-excellent New Mutants series into the “Cable and His X-Stormtroopers” book they called X-Force. New Mutants, then, was another book canceled for a bad reason – to be turned into a different title entirely.

The point is, no matter why X-Statix is ending, I’m sorry to see it go, and I can only hope that this means Allred will soon be returning to his baby, Madman, which has been a favorite of mine for years.

Sometimes fan response can save a book that’s been slated for cancellation. If I were to count all the times Spider-Girl was supposed to get the axe, only to be rescued by outraged reader response, I’d use up both hands and have to take off at least one shoe. Other times, no amount of reader response can save a title, as we learned earlier this year when the last issue of Captain Marvel faded from sight.

We all know it will happen again. Every one of us has a book in our pull folder that we dearly love but that we know may not last another 12 issues. And there’s only one way to prevent it. Talk the book up. Tell people about it. Tell people why you love it and try to convince them to give it a try. Ronée makes jokes all the time about me reading She-Hulk, teasing me about having a thing for green women. Well, I’m not gonna deny that fantasy has cropped up from time to time, but that’s not why I read this comic. I read it because Dan Slott has crafted a smart, funny superhero series that celebrates continuity at a time where everybody else seems to be ignoring it. In just six months it has become a favorite title of mine… but it’s not clocking in at Batman numbers, so people get nervous about it being cancelled. So I tell people — if you’re not reading She-Hulk… start.

Other fans go to even greater lengths — I’ve heard of an effort by some Fallen Angel fans to cut a deal with She-Hulk fans: you buy our book and we’ll buy yours, and both titles will get a sales boost. It’s an unusual pairing — in everything from theme, tone, writing style and genre, I really can’t think of two titles less similar than She-Hulk and Fallen Angel. But supposedly the movement has the blessing of the writers of both titles, and hey, if it helps stop someone’s favorite comic book from getting canceled, who can complain about that?

But no matter what, chances are a book you love will get the axe sooner or later. When it happens, don’t despair. All of the great stories you’ve read are still there, sitting in your long box. And don’t give up on the title either. Sometimes love for a book can bring it back even after the most ignoble death. If you don’t believe me, come back in November when the first issue of New Thunderbolts hits the stands. (For a non-comic situation where this happened, see the Fox cartoon Family Guy.)

Heck even X-Men was canceled for a few years once upon a time. Now you can’t escape the mutants.

It may be too late to make a difference, but everybody out there, go out and buy a copy of H-E-R-O while you still can. Love it. Enjoy it. Maybe even cajole DC to resurrect it. And next time a book you love is on the brink — don’t just sit there. Spread the love.

FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: August 25, 2004

For the second week in a row Bill Willingham managed to nap the top spot on my reading list, and for the second week in a row, it wasn’t for Fables. Batman #631 closed off the first act of the “War Games” storyline in fantastic fashion. With Tim Drake’s high school under siege, Batman, Nightwing and Batgirl break in to save the students before any more blood is shed. This book really gets into the heart of the Batman mythos, particularly what makes Robin tick, and the finale will have major repercussions for the future of the entire line. “War Games” is already becoming one of the best Bat-family crossovers of all time.

Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast and the weekly audio fiction podcast Blake M. Petit’s Evercast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page, and check out his new experiment in serial fiction at Tales of the Curtain.

 

Classic EBI# 135: Halloween Happenings

In this week’s Everything But Imaginary, I take a look at the recent announcement that DC and Marvel Comics, finally deciding they’ve got enough of my money, are going to be lowering the prices of many of their comics in the coming months. And may I say: wah-hoo.

Everything But Imaginary #370: Another Price Point

But in this week’s Classic EBI, we’re going back to Oct. 26, 2005, a time when I (and all of the Gulf Coast) were still suffering from the recent shock of Hurricane Katrina, and we needed a little Halloween to get our minds off it. This is also the reason, by the way, that you’ll find no “favorite of the week” in this column. At the time, I had no shop from which to get my comics weekly, and thus couldn’t make regular picks…

Everything But Imaginary #135: Halloween Happenings

Well gang, here it is, October 26, just five scant days before Halloween. Anyone who knows me well can tell you that Halloween is one of my three favorite times of the year (the other two times being Thanksgiving and Christmas – January through September are basically just the months I have to slag through to get to the good stuff), and I enjoy it for many reasons: the opportunity to dress up as some outlandish character, the chance to embrace my dark side even just for a little while, and of course, the fact that you can eat enough candy to choke a camel and nobody looks at you funny.

Another major reason I like Halloween (and Thanksgiving and Christmas) is the surfeit of holiday-themed storytelling you get this time of year. In the case of Halloween, it’s scary stories, monster movies and cartoons about kids waiting up all night in a pumpkin patch hoping to see an enormous gourd that never quite materializes. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but if I brought it up I’m liable to invite a whole plethora of armchair analysis, so I think I’ll leave that alone.

As comic book geeks, of course, we don’t just look to the television or the silver screen for our holiday offerings. We look to comic books as well. In past years, we’ve had lots of comics to choose from. This year, not so many. I’ve only come across three specifically Halloween-themed comics so far this year. Would you like a rundown? Heck, I knew you would.

First and foremost, we’ve got to mention the Donald Duck Halloween Ashcan from Gemstone Comics. This was a stroke of brilliance on Gemstone Comics’ part – a comic book, a trick-or-treat giveaway, a promotional item. Sold in bundles of 25 copies for a really cheap price, this comic reprints “Hobblin’ Goblins” by the immortal Carl Barks, and is intended to be given away on Halloween night to trick-or-treaters. Personally, I want this to be a huge thing. I love Gemstone comics and getting them into the hands of their core audience – kids – is a great thing. We all trick-or-treated as kids. The point of the night, admittedly, was to get as much candy as humanly possible. But we always thought it was cool if we got one or two little trinkets that had a little more permanence – toys, trading cards or comics.

The Donald Duck ashcan, of course, isn’t the first comic ever printed as a Halloween goodie. In the late 80s, Marvel comics put out a set of ashcans reprinting issues of Captain America, Spider-Man and Heathcliff (part of their STAR Comics line for younger readers). These comics enjoyed a pretty healthy life and were circulated for several years. I, of course, got them all. Comic books make a great giveaway, although they’re far too expensive to give out in their full-sized editions. Kind of like Snickers bars. So I’m really glad to see Gemstone putting out this special. I hope some of the kids lucky enough to get it in their treat bags will look for more of their titles.

Next up is Bongo’s annual offering, Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror. This year we get issue #11, which begs the question, what’s harder to believe? That the Simpsons TV show is in its seventeenth season, or that the Simpsons comics have been around for over a decade?

Just as each year’s Treehouse of Horror TV episode is an anthology of cartoons (usually spoofing popular horror movies and the like), the Treehouse comic is an anthology of Halloween stories, typically done by the biggest name comic creators (or other celebrities) they can get. In the past, Treehouse has featured the works of Chuck Dixon, Gail Simone, Sergio Aragones, Gene Simmons and – I’m not making this up, folks – Pat Boone. This year’s crop includes a vampire story by Blade co-creators Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, a Swamp Thing parody by Len Wein and the inimitable Bernie Wrightson, and a great parody of classic EC comics written by Chris Bonahm and Steve Ringgenberg, with art by James Lloyd, Angelo Torres, John Severin and Mark Schulz. It’s definitely one of the better offerings, and a lot of fun.

The only other specific Halloween-themed comic I’ve seen this year was Action Comics #832. It’s tradition for one of the Superman comics to offer up a Christmas story every December, but a Halloween offering isn’t unheard of either, and this one (although it isn’t marked as a tie-in) links up with the Day of Vengeance miniseries. The Spectre, on a crusade to eradicate all magic from the universe, has set his sights on Metropolis, where a Machiavellian demon called Satannus has been hiding for years. And I mean years in real time – in the early-to-mid 90s he was a fairly major villain in Superman’s universe, but he sort of faded away, with his major plotline (the fact that he was disguised as Newstime magazine’s publisher, Colin Thornton), left dangling. I’m not really sure why DC (or writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning) decided to bring him back at this time, new readers certainly won’t know the history there, but it’s a nice nod to some unanswered history for longtime fans.

What makes this more of a Halloween story, however, is the Lois Lane subplot in this issue. As ghosts swarm Metropolis, she finds herself coming face-to-face with a very personal ghost. It’s a really strong story for her, and one that sets up a couple of good plotlines for the future as well.

Although I haven’t seen Marvel put out any specific Halloween-themed comics, they have taken advantage of the season with other projects. They’ve launched a new version of Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos starring some monstrous soldiers and put out a “Horror” edition of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. They’ve also got a Marvel Zombies series coming up soon by Robert Kirkman – would that they could have squeezed that out in time for Halloween.

My favorite Marvel Monster project, though, are the four “Marvel Monsters” comics – a set of four one-shots spoofing the classic monster titles they put out back in the 50s and early 60s, before the superhero genre took over with Fantastic Four #1. They wisely decided not to play the genre seriously, doing a Fanastic Four spoof with Fin Fang Foom and having the Hulk tussle with Devil Dinosaur.

The only one of the specials I’ve been able to get my hands on so far is actually the one with the weakest ties to the current Marvel Universe, Where Monsters Dwell. The theme of this issue is to bring back some of those goofy monsters from the past in new stories. The prize of this issue is Bring on the Bombu, by Keith Giffen with excellent finishes by Mike Allred. This tells of Bombu’s second attempt to invade Earth (the first having taken place way back in Journey Into Mystery #60), which comes across with very comical results. Peter David and Arnold Pander supply a new Monstrollo story and Jeff Parker, Russell Braun and Jimmy Palmiotti give us a surprisingly strong tale of the monstrous Manoo. There’s also a reprint of another classic tale, I Was Trapped By Titano (not the super-ape with Kryptonite vision from DC comics), which is actually my only beef with this issue – not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I wish Marvel had provided us with credits for the story, or at least noted where it had been originally printed. (I eventually located that information in the text page that, presumably, is running in all four Monster specials.)

So you do have some choices for Halloween this year, friends, but you know what? It’s not enough! I want to see more Halloween offerings next year. I’d love to see a new Batman Halloween special (although with Jeph Loeb exclusive to Marvel now, it wouldn’t be the same). I want to see Halloween editions of Looney Tunes and Marvel Adventures. I have no idea who currently owns the reprint rights, but I want to see some nice archival editions of the old Tales From the Crypt comics in the vein of the DC Archives or Marvel Masterworks. (2010 Note: This was later achieved by copyright owner Gemstone Publishing.)

There’s lots more that could be done, folks, and the comic book industry has a whole year to get ready for it.

Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast and the weekly audio fiction podcast Blake M. Petit’s Evercast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page.