Briefly on Stane Lee and Julie Schwartz's introductions to 2008's JLA/Aveengers trade

When I wrote about Kurt Busiek and George Perez's JLA/Avengers a few months ago, there was one interesting aspect of the trade collection I read that I couldn't quite find a way to fit into the post, so I've decided to return to it now in a separate post. The particular 2008 trade paperback collection I used for my re-read included a pair of introductions from comics veterans who were integral in the creation of both of the title teams (as well as so much else that went on at Marvel and DC over the course of decades), Stan Lee and Julie Schwartz.

Everyone, of course, knows Lee. Even if this is your first visit to a comics blog, and if you somehow arrived here and started reading this post by accident, you probably know who Stan Lee is, as he's perhaps the only true household name that the medium has ever produced. The legendary editor, writer and promoter of Marvel comics not only co-created the super-team The Avengers (along with his frequent collaborator Jack Kirby) and not only served as The Avengers' first writer, he also co-created all five of the team's founding members (again, along with Kirby, and a couple of others like Ernie Hart, Don Heck and Larry Lieber).

As for Schwartz, he spent over 40 years as an editor with DC Comics, and was pivotal in the publisher's recommitment to superheroes in the latter half of the 1950s, working with writers and artists to reintroduce new, second-generation versions of The Flash, The Green Lantern and others, helping usher in waht became known as the Silver Age of superhero comics (and, indirectly, as we'll see, inspiring Lee and company's creation of the Marvel Universe). It was Schwartz who decided to also update the Justice Society of America team, and thus the Justice League of America debuted in 1960.

In 2008, the year these introductions were published in this collection, Schwartz had already been dead for several years, having died in 2004 at the age of 88 (This may explain why his introduction says "By Julie Schwartz, As told to Robert Greenberger"). And as for Lee, he was 86, and about to start the last decade of his life (He would die in 2018, at the age of 95). 

The introductions are set side-by-side in two parallel columns, not unlike those that were printed on the inside front cover of the first DC/Marvel superhero crossover, 1976's Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1, although in that case they were penned by Lee and his then DC equivalent, Carmine Infantino. 

Amusingly, the Stan Lee introduction is much longer than the Schwartz one, continuing for another six paragraphs after Schwartz's had ended. More amusingly still, neither man gives much in the way of an indication that he's actually read the comic they are supposedly introducing (Not that I blame either man, given their age at the point they must have been writing these). 

Schwartz, at least, proves he's well aware of who the creative team is, the fact that there are a ton of characters involved, and that the story will involve the first fighting and then teaming up. His intro ends thusly:

It may seem like a tired old plot, but in the hands of true professionals they make it entertaining. Kurt and Georg have my admiration for taking the time and care to fit in so many heroes, villains and other familiar beings. I'm just glad I'm not the one who has to proofread it all!

As for Lee, he eventually gets around to saying "There are countless thrills and chills on the action-packed pages ahead," but then, that's the same thing he would say about any Marvel comic (or any comic he himself had anything to do with). 

So if not the comic collected within the trade, what do they talk about? 

The history of the two teams, or at least the origins of the team each man is involved with, although, in Lee's case, it takes a bit to get to it, and he also talks about himself (and, charmingly, Schwartz) quite a bit too.

Lee's introduction is perhaps predictably jokey and jocular, as well as somewhat self-deprecatingn and often about the very writing he's in the act of doing. It's very Stan Lee.

He talks about the legendary 1960s golf game between National/DC Comics publisher Jack Liebowitz and Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, in which Liebowitz said his new comic Justice League of America "was selling like there's no tomorrow."  

Writes Lee:

Well, might Marty didn't need a house to fall on him. As soon as the golf game was over he raced to a phone and called yours truly.

"Stan," he bellowed, "National's Justice League is a hot seller. I want us to get on the bandwagon too. Cook me up a book which stars a whole team of heroes — and to it yesterday!"

This, Lee says, is "comicdom's worst-kept secret," and the call that inspired not the Avengers, but instead the Fantastic Four. (As Lee puts it, it was "the reason I dreamed up the good ol' Fantastic Four, which I modestly called 'The World's Greatest Comic.'" Oh, did Lee dream them up? Well, that's one way of putting it; at least he mentions Jack Kirby in the next sentence, with "Aided by the artwork of the titanically talented Jack Kirby"...).

In Stan's telling, DC's JLoA and Marvel's FF were in " a no-holds-barred, neck-and-neck race," and, while that was going on, "we" (by which he means, but doesn't say, he and Kirby, Steve Ditko, Bill Everett and a handful of other collaborators) created  "a brand-new batch of additional super-heroes," those of the first generation of what was becoming the Marvel Universe.

He names them all, of course, and it's only after a few such years that Marvel actually has enough of its own superheroes with their own books to band together into a Justice League-like team, which is how Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, Ant-Man and The Wasp ended up facing off against Loki in 1963's The Avengers #1. 

He spends several paragraphs talking about writing a team like the Avengers, and then spends a paragraph on Schwartz:

But I cannot come to the end of this candid little confessional without saying a few words about my co-Introduction writer, Julius Schwartz. I'm both pleased and honored to have the opportunity to appear with this legendary comic-book great in a watershed collection such as this. In all the years that I've known and admired him, we've never actually worked together or appeared in the same magazine before. It's taken half a century for this to happen. But y'know something? Considering the respect and admiration I have for the countless accomplishments of Julie Schwartz, it was well worth the wait.

Well that was sweet, I thought. 

While Lee's introduction appeared in blue ink on the lefthand side of the first two pages, Schwartz's was in red ink, and on the righthand side of the pages. 

Schwartz jumps right in:

The revivals of super-heroes were going so well that my schedule was getting crowded. But when we came up with the next logical step — combining these heroes into a team — no one else would touch it but me! Obviously, we modeled the new team after the Justice Society of America, but as I've said for years, I've never liked the name Society. It sounded too upscale. I preferred something like League, since, after all, everyone followed the baseball leagues.

He goes on to explain that "Every super-hero who had a feature was going to be in the new team," which is why they numbered at seven, and why characters like Martian Manhunter and Aquaman ended up on the team, despite the fact that those two didn't, at that point, have the sorts of resumes  or track records of the other five (if we allow The Flash and Green Lantern to list their forebears' accomplishments as their own,, of course). 

And as for Green Arrow, Schwartz says he couldn't remember exactly why he wasn't there at the beginning, but he had enough heroes for 24 pages anyway (And it's not like GA would never join the team; he would sign up within a year of the League's Brave and The Bold debut, in the fourth issue of their own book).

Schwartz goes on to write a bit about the original creative team—Gardner Fox, who had also written the old JSA stories, and Mike Sekowsky, "the only artist I worked with who could uniquely fit all these characters on each page"—and how the early issues came together, how they were received, and how the team expanded ("Well, we relented and finally let Green Arrow in. I was then sticking to my guns, and waited for heroes to have their own title before they could join, like the Atom and Hawkman.")

And then, how he and Fox introduced the parallel world of Earth-2, and the JLoA met the JSoA, the sales of which were incredible enough to keep the two teams meeting regularly for decades.

"But I never imagined they would ever cross paths with the Avengers," Schwartz writes. "When DC and Marvel first tried to have the teams meet, I was just an innocent bystander, curious to see what would happen."

Nothing, as it turned out. But that was in the 1980s.

"But as the house ad said when we first gave the JLA their own title, Just Imagine!," he writes. "Just imagine seeing the best and brightest from two entirely different companies combatting one another and then working together."

Obviously, neither piece says all that much about the amazing story that follows, the ultimate DC/Marvel crossover, but it was interesting hearing about the origins of the two teams from men present at (and integral to) their creation and, particularly in Lee's case, I found it somewhat revealing of the men themselves to hear what they had to say and how they said it. 

On the creation of superheroes as gradual development versus instantaneous inspiration

I've been thinking a lot about where exactly new superheroes come from over the course of the last few months, thanks largely to some of the books I've been reading: Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's picture book biographies of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Douglas Wolk's All Of The Marvels and the late Lou Mougin's Secondary Superheroes of Golden Age Comics. I've also been thinking about the subject because of what I've been blogging about lately, like the Thunderbolts* movie, with its cast of characters created by almost 25 writers and artists over the course of some seven decades, and, of course, the related issue of who, exactly, created The Sentry and how.

Mougin's book, an exhaustive survey of Golden Age super-comics, rounds up the scores of characters created by over a dozen different publishers in the years following the first appearances of Joel Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics (and some of the more distinct characters to follow in his immediate wake, like Batman, Wonder Woman, The Human Torch and Captain America).

Given the pace at which this army of superheroes appeared and then disappeared from the pages of the comic books of the time, one imagines that most were created on-the-fly by the guys who wrote and/or drew them. 

When a modern reader thinks of how someone might have got the idea for a Cat-Man or a Crimebuster, a Wizard or a Boy King, a Daredevil or a Black Hood, a Mother Hubbard or The Face, it's easy to imagine that sort of out-of-the-blue, lightning bolt-style of inspiration, a deadline-driven act of creation that rushed from an image in someone's head to the drawing board to the printed page (For the more unique characters, anyway; a lot of these heroes seemed to come from artists doing their own riffs on a Superman, or trying a different animal theme for a Batman, or rearranging the stars and stripes on a costume to get their own Captain America).

As for the heroes of later generations, though? 

Well, they had these Golden Agers (and their peers from the pulps and radio and film serials and comic strips) as a vast reservoir of inspiration. Not only could later creators find various templates among the biggest  successes of those early years who are still starring in their own comic books today (Superman, Batman, Captain America, etc), but also the heroes I would consider the true second stringers (the characters who ended up on the JSA, for example, and those of publishers Fawcett, Quality and maybe MLJ). And then the more random-sounding also-rans that fill Mougin's book, like White Streak or The Conqueror or The Blue Bolt or Magno or the guys named The Reckoner, of whom there was more than one. 

Many of the later heroes of the late 1950s and 1960s created for DC and Marvel and Charlton and others could be traced back to Golden Age ancestors, and contemplating such second-generation heroes now, it's actually kind of hard to think of a character whose name, power or gimmick doesn't have Golden Age antecedents of some sort. (Seriously, try it!) 

But still, there are some. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's The Thing, for example, seems to be born more of monster comics than old superhero comics, and wow, where did the idea for the Silver Surfer come from exactly, you know? 

Anyway, some bits of Wolk's book that I found particularly interesting were the examples he gives when discussing the creation of certain characters. 

In the weeks since I read All of the Marvels, these examples seemed to only become more resonant, as I thought about Lee's work with Kirby and Ditko on the first wave of Marvel heroes while reading those picture books and then later reading of the avalanche of superheroes of the 1940s in Mougin's book. 

Very early in Wolk's book—page 5, actually—he mentions that the "Marvel's narrative," the focus of his book, "has a peculiar relationship with his authorship": 

Legally, it's "maker" is a corporation, one that's gotten bigger over time as its body of intellectual property has changed hands. In practice, it was made by a specific group of people whose names we (mostly) know, and whose particular hands are (usually) unmistakable on any given page. But it's also almost always been created collaboratively: if you think any one person is the sole creator of a particular image or plot point, you're probably wrong, which is why it's a mistake to think of any one person who's worked on a Marvel comic book as it's "author."

This passage then leads to an extensive footnote, during which he notes the difficulties involved in untangling who created what.

This can obviously be a contentious subject that fans and sometimes the creators themselves have argued about over the decades, be it how much (or even if) Stan Lee might have contributed to those early Marvel heroes with his collaborators Kirby and Ditko, or the later disagreements regarding the creation of Wolverine and Ghost Rider (the latter of which went to court), or the current issues with The Sentry. 

Wolk writes:

Even the question of who created Marvel's best-known characters is also often more complicated than it looks. It's easy enough to assess who came up with Marvel's first superheroes of the 1960s, the Fantastic Four: Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. (Except that the Human Torch's name and basic design had been created by Carl Burgos back in 1939).

He goes on to cite a few other relatively easier ones, like Captain America (Kirby and Joe Simon) and Doctor Strange (Ditko), before showing how quickly it can get rather convoluted.

Iron Man? That's a little trickier. Lee plotted his first story, but Larry Lieber wrote its dialogue; Kirby drew the first cover and designed the character's initial costume (which barely resembles the familiar rend-and-gold one, designed by Ditko a bit later); Don Heck drew the initial story and invented what its protagonists Tony Stark and Pepper Potts look like.

So the Marvel Universe hadn't even been around a year yet, and there was already a character who seemed to have at least four primary creators, whom Wikipedia lists under "created by" in its article on Iron Man. (As for Ditko, who Wikipedia does not cite as a creator of the character, where does he fit in? Is a redesign considered an act of creation? If it comes some time after a character's debut, is it seen as somehow less important? Does it matter if that redesign becomes the primary, default one?)

The next example is more complicated still. Writes Wolk;

Daredevil? Well, now you're running into trouble. Lee wrote the first story, and Bill Everett drew it, but the cover was drawn by Kirby, who might have designed Daredevil's original costume, too, although the much more familiar red costume was first drawn by Wally Wood starting in the seventh issue. When you talk about the now-familir look and feel and mythology of "Daredevil," though—the tormented Catholic romantic who leaps around the shadows of Hell's Kitchen and fights ninjas and Wilson Fisk—you're mostly talking about what Frank Miller added to the character in the '80s, along with his artistic collaborators Klaus Janson and David Mazzucchelli. (Except that Wilson Fisk had been created by Lee and John Romita Sr. fifteen years earlier.) And so on. 

Wolk doesn't mention it at all here (this is just a footnote, long as it is, of course, and this is outside the purview of his book), but it's worth noting that Marvel's Daredevil, who debuted in 1964, was preceded by another comic book hero named Daredevil from an entirely different publisher. 

The two-toned, boomerang-wielding Daredevil of Lev Gleason Publications, whose creation is credited to Jack Binder and Don Rico, debuted in a 1941 issue of Silver Streak and his own title ran 134 issues, not being canceled until 1956. (This is the character who, long since lapsed into the public domain, one might have seen more recently in the pages of Savage Dragon as "The Dynamic Daredevil" or in various Dynamite Comics as "The Death-Defying 'Devil".)

Mougin does mention the possible relationship between Lev Gleason's Daredevil and Marvel's Daredevil in his book:

The legend goes that publisher Martin Goodman wanted Stan Lee to do a comic based on [longtime Daredevil writer Charles] Biro's hero, in 1964. Since Lee admired Biro's work, that may not be unfounded. But, instead, Lee, Bill Everett, and Steve Ditko created a new Daredevil, switching the original DD's muteness for blindness and subbing a billy club for a boomerang. 

Does that not sound plausible to you? If not, well, Mougin did say "legend", didn't he? (I am curious about his mention of Ditko here, as Wolk doesn't mention Ditko at all when he discusses the creation of Marvel's Daredevil.)

The sense I got while reading this very early bit of Wolk's book was that rather than being created by a single artist or a single writer or even a single writer/artists team, sometimes it's more of a group effort, a creation by committee. That certainly seems to been the case with Iron Man, for example.

As for the Daredevil example, it shows not only that sometimes it's a team or a staff (or, in Marvel's case, a bullpen) that might create a superhero character, but sometimes it can take multiple creative teams and multiple years—hell, here some 20 years!—before a corporate character like Marvel's Daredevil reaches what will ultimately be considered his essential, perfected form.

Far later in the book, in a chapter entitled "Good is a Thing You Do" that is devoted to the debut and early issues of the current Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and to Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm and company's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (the latter of which was built around a 1991 character designed and originally drawn by Ditko), Wolk gives an even better example of a character being developed into creation, I think. He does so while also illustrating how newer Marvel characters are dependent on older ones, and how even their earliest antecedents can be traced back to still earlier, pre-Marvel ancestors.

"Kamala Khan is yet another of Marvel's collective creations, her real-world origin too complicated to be attributed to a single originator," Wolk writes.

She emerged from conversations between editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker about Amanat's experience growing up as a South Asian Muslim in New Jersey, as well as writer G. Willow Wilson's interest in creating a teenage Muslim superhero ("Sana and I initially had very modest expectations for this book," Wilson wrote five years later. "Our goal was to get to ten issues.") Artist Adrian Alphona came up with the images of Kamala and her supporting cast, although her costume was designed by Jamie McKelvie. 

Wolk also cites the particular creative choices made by colorist Ian Herring and letterer Joe Carmagna as distinct and important, each further defining and differentiating the initial Ms. Marvel comic book series from others in Marvel's line.

We could also note that while McKelvie designed Kamala's costume, a significant component of it, the lightning bolt-shaped symbol, was taken from Dave Cockrum's redesigned costume for the previous Ms. Marvel Carol Danvers dating back to the '70s.

And, of course, the superhero codename "Ms. Marvel" also came from Danvers, who was created, as Danvers, by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan in 1968, but made into the superhero Ms. Marvel by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in 1977.

And, just to make this into a game of superhero telephone, the original Ms. Marvel was a distaff version of the male hero Captain Marvel (created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in 1967). He took his name from the Golden Age Fawcett Comics character Captain Marvel (created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck in 1942), and that Captain Marvel was based on Siegel and Shuster's Superman...or at least, the company then known as Detective Comics was sure enough that he was that they took Fawcett to court, accusing them of copyright infringement (The case was eventually settled in 1953, in large part because, in Fawcett's estimation, superhero comics had by then ceased being profitable enough to fight over).

And thus we get from 2014's Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan all the way back to the very first superhero in 1938. 

Anyway, both Wolk and Mougin's books are very interesting reads, and ones that should be of interest to anyone who reads superhero comics. I'll be formally reviewing them in the future, but I wanted to touch on this idea of superhero creation as a process of development in a post of its own. 

On Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's marvelous comic creator biographies With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider

In 2021 and 2023, writer Annie Hunter Eriksen and artist Lee Gatlin released a pair of children's picture books through Page Street Kids, both unauthorized biographies of two of the three primary comics professionals who created what we now think of as the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (the third, Jack Kirby, appears in both men's stories, but doesn't didn't get his own book...at least not yet).

Attracted both by Gatlin's highly idiosyncratic, cartoonistly work, which I was familiar with from his posting on social media (where he posts great drawings of The Thing and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), as well as curiosity about how a writer might go about reducing such men's complex careers into something short and simple enough for a picture book, I recently brought them both home from the library. 

As a grown-up and a long-time comics reader, I liked them both well enough, and I would certainly recommend them to anyone in that same demographic. As far as the intended audience of children goes, well, I'm afraid I can't really imagine how these would go over, as it's hard to imagine anyone young enough to be read to really being too terribly interested in Stan Lee or Steve Ditko. They do seem to be serviceable first biographies on the men, though.

The first, With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee, tackles the most famous figure American comics history has ever produced, whether rightly or wrongly. With just 30 pages to work with, most of which could only support a sentence or two in addition to the images that will dominate them, Eriksen would zero in on Lee's career as a would-be novelist who stumbled into the writings of comics and then hit the big time when he wrote some heroes who were extremely popular in the 1960s, heroes who would eventually become movie stars in the 21st century.

In fact, there's a jump in time from mid-1960s to the turn in century, with an image depicting Lee walking down a red carpet, leading Spider-Man and the Avengers characters, most of whom are drawn wearing sunglasses (Except for Black Panther, whose all-black garb  wouldn't look right with them, and a tiny, too-small-for-them Ant-Man, shown running to keep up with the long strides of the regularly-sized heroes). 

The focus is mostly on Stan Lee as a youngster (appropriately enough, given the target audience), and his time working for Timely/Atlas/Marvel, until he co-created The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, at which point Stan Lee really becomes the Stan Lee we now imagine when we think of him (For a significant portion of the book, he will be balding, his face looking naked without his signature glasses and mustache).

It's not a bad way to frame Lee's career, really, and certainly focuses on what is perhaps most significant to the broader, mainstream world beyond the comics shop.

The opening, thesis-like two-page spread is pretty great. Eriksen writes:

Stan Lee didn't have hulking strength.

Or fantastic flexibility.

Or catlike reflexes.

His superpower was creating heroes who did.

Each of these sentences is illustrated by an image of Lee as we usually imagine him now, with the shaded glasses, mustache and full head of gray hair, exhibiting one of these powers. 

So there's an image of a huge Stan Lee holding a coffee mug pinched between the fingers of a massive hand, the other one pinching the knob of a door that he's accidentally torn from its hinges. And then one of his left arm stretching into loops before returning to write on the yellow pad of paper he held in his other hand, as Mister Fantastic might be able to. And then one of him dressed in Black Panther's costume, complete with cute cat ears, the cowl open to reveal his familiar, grandfatherly face. And, finally, an image of him with his feet up on a desk, a lightbulb appearing over his head, while he raises a finger in a "Eureka!" like pose.

From there, Eriksen rewinds to his childhood: "But back when he was Stanley Lieber, a kid growing up in New York City, he didn't feel super." After a few pages on his childhood, the young protagonist lands a job in publishing: 

Luckily, a magazine called Timely Comics was hiring. With this gig Stanley could get his foot in the door in the world of writing. But for now, he would be Stanley Lieber: Errand Boy!

Eriksen doesn't mention a fact that tempers that "Luckily"; Lee's cousin was married to publisher Martin Goodman, a relationship which likely had something to do not only with his hiring as an errand boy, but also with his becoming an editor while still a teenager, after the famed comic book team Joe Simon and Jack Kirby quit Timely. 

She does detail Lee's work on that team's most famous creation, Captain America, which is when Stanley first became "Stan Lee," writing a filler story for the superhero under the pseudonym, wanting to save "Stanley Lieber" for his future great American novel. (Unfortunately, the story isn't clear that Captain America was Simon and Kirby's creation; the character just sort of exists here and is a steppingstone in Lee's transition from errand boy to writer.)

Gatlin's illustrations for the momentous occasion are pretty cool, though, with one page showing a cartoonish Captain America—none of the many Marvel heroes depicted within the book have the big, muscular, dynamic figures one would expect to see in an actual Marvel comic book—standing before a Hollywood-like chair labeled "Cap" and holding a script, saying, "Line? Line?...This is blank" in comic book dialogue balloons.

On the facing page, we see Cap and Bucky in action, battling the Red Skull and his men, while a young Stanley picks at a typewriter in the foreground.

That's soon followed by a scene in which Stan's wife Joan suggests he "finally sneak in a story he'd always wanted to tell," resulting in his "teaming up with Jack Kirby" and creating the Fantastic Four.  And then, "Stan furiously drafted while artist 'Sturdy' Steve Ditko drew the perfect design until a new face peered back at them: Peter Parker... The Amazing Spider-Man!"

After that second hit, his publisher's ask Stan, "What other superheroes do you have up your sleeves?" 

And this then leads to an image of a smug-looking Stan pulling at one of his sleeves, from which emanates a gusher of colorful stars, lightning, and Marvel ephemera (Mjolnir, pumpkin bombs, ants, Doctor Strange's cloak and so on). It's followed by a two-page spread featuring The Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Iron Man and Doctor Strange. 

The contributions of Kirby and Ditko (and Don Heck and Larry Lieber) aren't mentioned here.

It's a certainty a version of the creation of Marvel's most famous characters and the creation of the Marvel Universe that Stan Lee himself would have like! 

Granted, the creation and development of these characters has been something that the men who made them and the fans who loved them have contested and debated endlessly over the years and have long since been the source of high-stakes controversy. While Eriksen and Gatlin obviously include Kirby and Ditko as collaborators (at least on the FF and Spidey), reading this book, it does seem to suggest that Lee did the heavy lifting in the process. 

I don't think this is necessarily a sin on the part of the book's creators. I mean, how nuanced can we expect a book intended for a pre-literate audience to be, after all? And how much controversy should there be in a book serving as a first introduction to Lee's career? Still, adult readers (like me), are sure to notice these aspects, and to raise an eyebrow here and there. 

After the story ends—not with Lee's sad last years, nor his death, but with him standing in a crowd of cosplaying fans and declaring "'NUFF SAID!"—there's a two-page spread of mostly prose, followed by a bibiliography of sources (Not included? Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon's 2003 Stan Lee and The Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book from Chicago Review Press, which I'd personally recommend over some of those cited instead). 

There are three short sections across this spread, one on Stan Lee's cameos in Marvel movies, another on his collaborations with other creators and one on his "Stan's Soapbox" column. That second section, which appears under the heading "Friendly Neighborhood Bullpen", does mention Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Lieber and Bill Everet ("Like any good hero, Stan teamed up," Eriksen writes). 

This section also briefly details "The Marvel Method" of making comics (as opposed to the assembly line way they were mostly created previously), which allowed for greater collaboration between writer and artist...but, as an unfortunate side effect, likely contributed to the historical disagreements over who deserves credit for what (As I've understood it, artists working in "The Marvel Method" like Kirby and Ditko did with Lee are more properly understood as co-writers and artists, not just artists). 

Eriksen and Gatlin's next book, the wonderfully titled Along Came a Radioactive Spider: Strange Steve Ditko and the Creation of Spider-Man, seems to have been born, at least in part, by Eriksen's own dissatisfaction in the limited role Lee's collaborators played in the first book.

In fact, her bio on the back cover flap, begins with the fact that she 

realized while writing With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee...that she, like most people, was overlooking Steve Ditko's role in the Spidey origin story, which inspired her to create the biography he deserves (even if he would totally hate the attention).

It's true that Ditko doesn't get the credit Stan Lee does for creating Spider-Man, but then, much of that is likely due to the two men's very natures. Stan Lee craved the spotlight and spent much of his career in pursuing it and then nurturing the fame his comics work brought him (I think it's safe to say that the various producers and directors didn't have to twist Stan's arm too hard to do all those movie cameos he's now so well known for). 

Ditko, on the other hand, was Lee's polar opposite. He eschewed the fame his creation brought him (as Eriksen's bio alludes to) and eventually gained a reputation for being something of a recluse.

So yeah, the late Ditko likely wouldn't have wanted to see this biography about him, as flattering as it is. That said, it's a good one, and I enjoyed it more than the Stan Lee one that it followed, probably because, unlike Lee, I've never read an actual biography of Ditko, and, in fact, couldn't tell you anything about him other than maybe rattling off a list of comics characters he created, and what I've seen of his work.

The word the Eriksen and Gatlin team attach to Ditko is the one in the sub-title, "strange," and which, given the name of his second most famous Marvel hero, naturally has something of a double meaning. 

"There was absolutely nothing strange about comic book artists Steve Ditko," Eriksen writes in the book's opening, the format of which is an identical, four-part two-page spread to that which opened With Great Power. "His life was an open book!" 

This ironic statement comes above Gatlin's drawing of an annoyed looking Ditko shouting "No comment!" and trying to close his front door while a grinning, generic-looking reporter leers around it, and various arms holding cameras, microphones and notepads are seen on the other side. 

This continues into two more similar situations, in which the prose narration contrasts with Gatlin's cartoon-like illustrations (It's worth noting that this book is a much funnier one than the first), culminating in Eriksen relenting over an image of a smiling Ditko holding a pencil and seated at a drawing table, an image of Spider-Man in one of the panels on the big piece of paper before him.

Okay...so Steve Ditko wasn't really like the rest of the artists at Marvel Comics, but the same could be said about his—yes, Steve's!—most famous creation: Spider-Man. 

The next two-page spread details the strangeness of Spider-Man, and how greatly he differed from the typical superhero, a strangeness accentuated by Gatlin's particularly thin, angular and, well, spidery version of Marvel's flagship hero which, despite adopting a variety of famous poses, looks more weird and alien than ever (Honestly? After reading this, I think Gatlin's is one of my favorite portrayals of the hero; it's easy to see how civilians would be creeped out by this Spider-Man, and how J. Jonah Jameson would viscerally recoil from the strange figure Gatlin draws here).

From there, we get a fairly linear version of Ditko's story, just as we did Lee's before. Ditko also grew up poor in the Great Depression, and he was also attracted to the fantastic, which, for him, meant comics. 

There's a great spread devoted to his work at Marvel and the difference between him and editor Stan Lee, and his reaction to a new character that Lee and Jack Kirby were cooking up (Gatlin draws a great Kirby; his sole appearance in this book looking somewhat bored as he works, a cigar clamped in his jaws). 

It wasn't strange when Stan and The King teamed up yet again for their new story: a boy, a magic ring, and a transformation into the grown-up hero named "Spiderman."

Ditko's job was to illustrated the new comic, but "Spiderman was just another repetitive brave and brawny hero!...Steve itched to break the mold in the best way he knew how—by making Spiderman strange."

We see just how wide the gulf in the two Spidermen was through Gatlin's drawing of Kirby's version, a large, muscular figure sporting a more classic costume and wielding a web gun, and Ditko's version, which we are now all familiar with (Even if the artists that followed Ditko, starting with John Romita Jr., pretty quickly transitioned the hero into a bigger, better-looking, more heroic and, well, less strange figure). 

In this book, Eriksen has Ditko do the heavy-lifting with the development of the character, not just coming up with the desigsn and elements of the secret identity, but creating the book himself: "Suddenly, Steve found himself writing and drawing Spider-Man—a comic book history first."

The book concludes with a passage in which we see Ditko retreating from his own fame, dodging young fans and, in one great illustration, questions, as Gatlin draws Ditko, a pencil behind his ear, in a leaping pose, while a half-dozen dialog balloons, each containing a single question mark, go flying and bouncing all around him. 

The final spread shows a happy Ditko at a drawing board, surrounded by a colorful collage, and a dramatically posing new but familiar character. "So he did what he did best: got to work," Eriksen writes, concluding of his latest work, "The comic was out of this world...and his most fitting work yet! Steve named him DOCTOR STRANGE."

Throughout the book—which gives a shorter, more streamlined version of Spidey that sidesteps some of the questions regarding contributions from Lee, Kirby and possible influences from past characters—Gatlin draws not only the aforementioned comics creators, but also Peter Parker, Spider-Man and some of the hero's foes (The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, The Sandman and The Scorpion) but, somewhat surprisingly, Captain Marvel and Batman (as well as obscure Simon and Kirby creation Captain 3-D, and Captain Battle, who I didn't recognize*). 

As with With Great Power, this book ends with a short prose section and bibliography.  Here, that section offers a more detailed biography of Ditko, including dates and reference to some of the controversies that wouldn't really fit in a picture book, including aspects of Spider-Man's creation and Ditko's departure from the comic. 

"Steve Ditko Would Hate This Book," reads a headline-like label to one part of this feature, which briefly notes his post-Marvel career (namedropping The Question and Mr. A) and just how media-shy he was, including how few photos there are of Ditko (which did make me curious as to how Gatlin went about developing his Steve, which must have been much harder than drawing Stan Lee, whose look has at this point become almost as iconic as that of some superheroes), his dislike of the "poison sandwich" biography Blake Bell wrote of him and the "rule" imposed by Ditko upon those meeting him: You don't talk about it.

Regardless of what Ditko might think of the book, though, I liked it, and I wouldn't mind reading similar biographies from this particular pair of Kirby, Simon or other famous and influential comics creators in the future.

*Thanks to Anthony Strand for identifying him on Bluesky for me!

On Monsters Unleashed: Prelude

This 264-page collection is billed as a prelude to Marvel's 2016 between-events event Monsters Unleashed, but it's a bit of a retroactive prelude. That is, these are a whole bunch of comics, the majority of them by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and published decades before the first modern Marvel event series...Hell, they predate the Marvel Universe itself, some seeing publication long before 1961's Fantastic Four #1.

These classic monster comics are 13 in number, and come from the pages of Strange Tales, Tales To Astonish and Tales of Suspense. There doesn't seem to be too much in the way of rhyme or reason to them, with the exception of a pair featuring monsters that have been recurring characters in Marvel's superhero line of late--"I Challenged Groot, The Monster from Planet X!" and "Orrgo...The Unconquerable!"--so it's probably safe to assume that these stories were chosen because these 13 monsters will be among those in the pages of Monsters Unleashed. So the first 150 pages are so are devoted to introducing us to Grottu, Monstrom, Gorgilla, Groot, The Abominable Snowman, The Blip, Vandoom, Goom, Googam (Son of Goom), Rommbu, The Green Thing, Moomba, Bruttu and Orrgo.

These 13 short stories all read like mid-century monster movies, with incredibly crazy monster designs (thanks to Kirby) and all the boring parts of such schlocky sci-fi films cut out of them, as there isn't much room for character development or pseudo-science or extraneous exposition or any of that nonsense in such short stories.

After Orrgo's strange tale, the collection jumps to 2013's Fearless Defenders #8, followed by 2015's Marvel Zobmies #1 (that's the Secret Wars tie-in series) and then the first issue of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and the second and third issues of Totally Awesome Hulk.

Why those particular comics? Well, Fearless Defenders by Monsters Unleashed writer Cullenn Bunn and artist Will Sliney features monster hunter Elsa Bloodstone teaming up with the characters of that short-lived series (a sort of answer to DC's Birds of Prey), and Elsa is also the star of that particular Marvel Zombies miniseries. Though the stories aren't entirely complete, I suppose they give one the basics about Elsa: She hunts monsters, she's British, her father was the famous monster-hunter Ulysses Bloodstone (and an asshole) and she's kind of mean.

Devil Dinosaur is another Kirby-created monster, although he came along a decade or so after the others in this book, and Kirby created him without any input from Stan Lee. Rather than publishing Devil Dinosaur #1, however, Marvel chose the first issue of the ongoing series written by Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder and drawn by Natacha Bustos. Makes sense. Not only is that a very good and tragically under-read comic that could only benefit from a trade like this pushing readers towards it, but introduces both the original conception of DD and his current status quo, in which he is living in modern New York City and is aligned with a middle-school super-genius.

Those issues of Totally Awesome Hulk are similarly good, and that is a series that was similarly under-read. That particular Hulk is Amadeus Cho, who literally took the mantle from Bruce Banner in order to save his one-time hero's life--I never figured out how this book fit with Civil War II--and his first story arc was dominated by monster-fighting.

It features Fin Fang Foom, whose first appearance is notably absent from the first chunk of the book, and the new character Lady Hellbender, who is traveling the universe "collecting" monsters like FFF and the two-headed turtle that Cho fights in the first issue of the series and so on.

Given that they chose to include this story instead of an earlier Fin Fang Foom story, like his first one, which would have fit in better with the first section of the book, I have to assume that Lady Hellbender plays a role in Monsters Unleashed, and obviously The Hulk does...at least to some extent.

I guess one would have to first read Monsters Unleashed to be able to judge how well-chosen the stories in Monsters Unleashed: Prelude actually are. So maybe I can back to you on that later...?

But these are all pretty okay; the Defenders story is kind of generic and features at least one panel of downright terrible artwork, and the Marvel Zombies issue is kind of out of left-field, given that it's 1/4th of a tie-in to Marvel's most sprawling event ever, but everything is well worth a read.

Especially those first 150 pages, which we should probably spend some more time more closely reading...

*********************

First up, it's Grottu in "Grottu, King of The Insects!" He's a giant ant, who appears a golden yellow on the cover, but is a grayish black within. He's also said to be as big as an elephant, but is clearly much larger. Our hero here is blonde, lantern-jawed, chain-smoking reporter Frank, who receives an urgent telegram from a museum curator friend of his to got to Africa in search of the monster. I never received such telegrams when I was reporter. Perhaps I wasn't working at the right kind of newspaper. Wait, come to think of it, I never received any telegrams when I was reporter!

Grottu was apparently granted his gigantic size and incredible intelligence as a side-effect of testing by "white men from behind what white men call 'iron curtain' country." "Communists, no doubt!" In addition to being big, Grottu serves as a sort of giant super-general, commanding hordes of millions of ants as they raze villages. His unstoppable army of army ants makes its way to a port city, where the plan is to board various ships and then spread out all over the world, conquering it. There could be some subtle metaphor here, but I doubt it! The monster is killed when the white men dump a bunch of sugar on it, and the little ants swarm all over it, apparently crushing him under their weight?

Just six pages and 36 panels; Kirby, Lee and their collaborators didn't screw around!

That's followed by Monstrom in "I Found Monstrom! The Dweller in the Black Swamp!" Aside from the catchy name, Monstrom appears to be your then-typical, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen swamp monster from the cover. There he's depicted as a humanoid of giant statue, rising out of the water covered in a viscous, dripping mud...hell, he could be made of mud!

Now, I didn't know this until I read TwoMorrows' Swampmen: Muck-Monsters and Their Makers, but apparently the lineage of comic book swamp monsters can be traced pretty directly back to writer Theodore Sturgeon's prose fiction story "It!", published in a 1940 issue of Unknown (The Heap would first appear two years later, and he was the trunk of the comic book swamp monster family tree).

Monstrom is pretty immediately distinguished by all other monsters that rise from the swamps by the bizarre appearance Kirby gave him, revealed on an opening splash page: The unwieldy-looking creature appears to be almost as wide as he is tall when crouching, and has orange, wrinkly skin suggestive of an elephant. Where its face should be is only a single-staring eye, and a crown of horn-like projections adorn its conical head. It also has a tail, and like most of these Kirby kreatures, its size varies depending on the panel; on one page it's only as tall as five or six men high, on the next page it's that tall at the waist, and its foot is bigger than the speeding car it tries to stomp on.

The hero in this story is also a handsome, square-jawed, pipe-smoking blond writer--this time a novelist, rather than a reporter--who has rented a cabin in the titular swamp to work on his latest novel. His It's his son who first meets Monstrom, and the city slickers flee, inadvertently leading the monster into town.

A lucky bolt of lightning strikes a telephone pole, setting it ablaze, and making Monstrom say "ARRGG--" Realizing he's afraid of fire, the townsfolk get torches and chase the monster back into the swamp, and it seems to shrink smaller and smaller the closer it gets to the swamp.

While the hicks whoop it up about having defeated the monster, the story ends with an extremely wordy panel, in which a tiny drawing of the monster resting alongside a very Silver Age-looking rocket ship is sandwiched between two slabs of narration, which reads like so (Please imagine it in Stan Lee's voice):

An alien with enormous intelligence, who has waited patiently for the time when Earthlings might understand him...fort he time when Earthlings would be advanced enough to help him rebuild his damaged spaceship! But that time has not yet come! We are still too ignorant--too barbaric! Perhaps one day it will be otherwise, but not yet...

Not yet...

To which I say, fuck you space man. You're the one who was so terrified of a lightning bolt and a half-dozen tiny Earthlings shouting and bearing torches. If you're so smart that you can build a rocket ship and fly across the stars, how come you act like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein when you see fire? I don't think your enormous intelligence is quite as enormous as Stan Lee seems to think it is.

(You know, I keep saying "Stan Lee," but it's possible Larry Lieber wrote this. Lieber and Lee are both credited as writers for these 13 old-school monster comics. Similarly, while Kirby handled the pencils, the inking was done by either Dick Ayers and Steve Ditko. Marvel just credits them all on the table of contents page, rather than distinguishing who wrote what and who inked what. All we know from sure from the credits Marvel gives us is that Kirby drew everything.)

That's followed by the charmingly named Gorgilla starring in "I Discovered Gorgilla! The Monster of Midnight Mountain!" This seven-pager was apparently dashed off shortly after someone rewatched King Kong. Aside from the gorilla-esque name, Kirby's design certainly doesn't make the monster look all that much like Kong. Humanoid in shape, the monster has a long mane of gray hair and a short beard, a long hairy tail and just four digits on its hands, each of which end with a blunt, square claw.

The title creature is discovered in Borneo. The local head-hunters worship him as a god, and he's kept behind some sort of wall. The explorers traverse a bridge that looks a bit like the tree bridge on Skull Island, and, at a later point, Gorigilla menaces them with a tree in a panel that looks not unlike a still image from Kong. To top it off, the climax comes when Gorgilla is challenged by a Tyrannosaur, which he wrestles to death. The cover also lifts from Kong, as the explorers realize that what at first resembles a huge hole in the ground is actually a huge footprint.

The human hero of this story is yet another handsome, blonde, pipe-smoking guy---this time an archeologist. He believes he's found the final resting place of "The Missing Link," and so he and a band of his fellow archeologists are off to find a creature "to bridge the wide gap between man and ape...a life-form that was half-ape and half-man!" This is, of course, pretty dubious science, but what's actually kind of hilarious is that when they lay eyes on Gorgilla, they become convinced that somehow this dinosaur-sized, tail-bearing, four-fingered, two-toed creature is the missing link between man and ape.

Like, I'm no scientist, but even if we ignore the alien extremities, I'm pretty sure we can rule anything bigger than a house out as a relative of any anthropoid apes, let alone our direct ancestor.

The next monster story introduces Groot, the breakout star of the Kirby/Lee monster stories, the one who made it to the silver screen before even Fin Fang Foom! It is, of course, "I Challenged Groot! The Monster From Planet X!", recently reprinted by Marvel as part of their True Believers line. The human star of the piece is a biologist named Leslie, who apparently isn't as rugged or manly as his wife Alice would like him to be.

In the very first panel, he narrates that they were returning home from a party, "and she was on her usual subject." Her dialogue reads, in part, "Honestly, that George Carter is a wonderful guy! He's so manly--so rugged! If only you more like that, Leslie!"

Sounds like a happy marriage! I wonder if Leslie will get the chance to prove himself the alpha male before this story is over?

The couple see some kind of luminous object land behind the treeline on their drive home, and put it out of their minds, until something weird happens: A pair of trees goes missing from their yard. When Leslie does investigate, he finds "a wooden giant" who is somehow able to draw wooden objects of all kinds to himself, absorb them and thus grow even larger.

Even with Leslie's warning, local law enforcement is powerless to stop Groot, as bullets don't penetrate his wooden hide deep enough to strike any vital organs. He delivers his most famous line--"I am Groot"--but he does so couched in a whole bunch of verbiage:

Earthlings--hear me!! I am Groot, Monarch of Planet X! I come to take an Earth village--your village, back to my planet! We want to study you, to experiment on you!

Groot talks a lot, and as he does so, we see this striking, strange imagery, in which we see the how of Groot's plan to abduct the village via trees.

There's another panel on the following page too, in which the trees become animate, their roots like legs and their branches like arms:

The great thing about these images, about the story in general, isn't just how different this ur-Groot is from the current movie star Groot--dig those branch-like antlers and the log-like ends of his fingers!--but the way in which it reflects the very simple, very basic, very innocent comic book story generation of the "good old days." That is, you just know that Lee or Kirby happened by a tree one day, and since, at this point, they were always thinking of monsters for comics, they basically just cast a tree as the heavy in a monster story and extrapolated from there.

This is basically where every Golden Age superhero of the boom period came from: Artist sees a bird swooping, and bam!, there's Hawkman. Artist sees a bee, and there are a handful of insect-themed heroes, none of whom really stick. In the same way a guy thinking about making new superheroes all the time applies just about anything that crosses his field of vision into a superhero narrative, you can sort of see the sources of inspiration for so many of these stories, in either their casting everyday objects as monsters, or what seem like they must have been inspired by particular movies or news articles or whatever.

The next story seems like it may have been something from an article or maybe a movie. The monster isn't an original creation, but The Abominable Snowman, and he is the title character in "I Found The Abominable Snowman!" The human hero here is another blonde smoker, but he's not a thinker or a professional. Rather he's a rough-looking customer named "Big Carl" Hanson, "a guy who will do anything for a buck!"

When he sees a photo of the legendary beast--strikingly designed with a bizarre beard that starts at the bridge of his nose--that a guy in a bar is bragging about selling, Carl clobbers the guy and takes the photo for himself. His plan isn't to sell the photo, but to capture the Snowman in the photo and sell it for even bigger bucks.

His method of searching is pretty awesome as he basically journeys to the foot of the Himalayas and starts threatening and roughing up people, insisting they tell him where the Abominable Snowman is. Think of Batman or Daredevil knocking heads in Gotham or Hell's Kitchen, trying to strongarm the location of a particular criminal out of the local underworld. Only here it's an amateur cryptozoologist looking for a cryptid.

The story has one of the better, more satisfying of the twist endings in the collection, which I won't spoil (UPDATE: I will note that the Snowman does indeed show up in Monsters Unleashed, and he's perplexingly off-model, being giant in size rather than just slightly larger than your average man. His role, like that of all the old Marvel monsters, is decidedly small, and mostly consists of Deadpool talking to him about his smell in the middle of a battle against the newer monsters).

The next monster has a name that will be familiar to any fan of Marvel's comics, even if they have never read this story: Vandoom. Like Xemnu, The Hulk (who is perhaps surprisingly MIA here, but did share the previously mentioned issue of True Believers with Groot), this is one of those examples of Kirby and Lee semi-plagiarizing themselves, or at least coming back to something that appealed to them previously while working on their later superhero comics. This Vandoom, star of "Vandoom, The Man Who Made a Creature!", also lives in Europe (Transylvania, to be exact), but rather than the metal-plated villain, he is a humble proprietor of a wax museum devoted to monsters (As with Frankenstein, whose monster actually appears in the first panel of this story after its title page, the name of the creator gets transposed onto the monster).

With tourists no longer interested in his wax replicas of the Universal monsters, he and his wife are destitute. And so he embarks on a seemingly mad task to create a monster of his own invention, one that will be the largest wax figure in the world. It is so large that its head sticks out of the top of his building, in fact.

During a dramatic storm, a bolt of lightning strikes the wax monstrosity's head and somehow brings it to life. Kinda like Frankenstein, although here it doesn't even make sense by the laws of theoretical fiction or monster movie science. The villagers take up torches and pitchforks and chase the monster around for a while, as is villagers' wont, until a cool, cruel-looking rocket ship with a scary face sculpted into it (like a space-age Viking ship, I guess) arrives and disgorges some horn-headed Martians, bent on conquering the world, as if their wont. The monster fights them off until they flee, deciding Earth is just too heavily defended, and then, exhausted, it dies.

"Now we know why fate gave life to my monster!" Vandoom declares, after he rebuilds his museum and its new titanic wax star. That's right, God brought his monster to life to save Earth from Martians. That all checks out.

Next we meet one of the more familiar of this era of Marvel monsters, due both to a memorable name--Goom--and another great design by Kirby, this one featuring a spherical-headed, Muppet-mouthed, vestigial-winked monster wearing shorts the same color as his skin. Like Groot, apparently, Goom hails from Planet X, as this story is entitled, "Goom! The Thing From Planet X!"

This story stars Mark, another blond scientist--a polymath who is "a good astronomer and a terrific psychologist"--whose bearded, pipe-smoking peers all mock him for his belief that there are unknown planets in the solar system, saying that his "latest notion...is fantastic enough to be in a comic book!" Indeed it is! Why, it's fantastic enough to be in a comic book like, say, 1961's Tales of Suspense #15 by Lee, Lieber, Kirby and Ayers!

After he puts in a whole two days of work at the observatory, Mark discovers a massive planet just beyond Jupiter, and begins beaming radio waves towards it, not unlike the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) initiative, which would have been in an infancy when this comic was published. Mark gets a reply in the form of Goom, he boards a huge space ship with a scary face design not unlike the one the Martians flew into Transylvania a few pages previously, and immediately starts showing off his awesome technology and powers. These include a gun capable of disintegrating a mountain, a suspiciously human-sized glass box able to turn adult human beings into babies and back again (suspicious because Goom said he thought Earth was uninhabited) and, finally, the ability to lift an entire city into the upper atmosphere with just his mind.

Realizing they are hopelessly outmatched, Earth surrenders. Everyone save Mark, who beams Earth's location back to Planet X on the gamble that "any race as advanced as Goom's must be too civilized to be evil." What made him think this? "I knew because of my training as a psychologist!" Okay Mark. Stephen Hawking might disagree, but Mark's gamble paid off because a trio of much better-dressed Planet X-lings appear and arrest Goom.

I guess Earth need never worry about invasion from Planet X again, right?

Wrong! For the very next story stars "Googam, Son of Goom" in "Beware of Googam, Son of Goom!!" The scion of Goom, starring in the collection's very first sequel (and the first nod toward anything approaching "continuity," as Groot's hailing from Planet X is of course not mentioned in the story of Goom), looks a lot like his dad, save he's much smaller, much redder and his mouth is devoid of square, gravestone-shaped tusks, making it a yawning, black hole that gives him an even stranger and more unsettling countenance than his dad.

Mark, who has now taken up smoking like any respectable mid-century man of science in pop culture, recounts the story of Goom and tells us that his son had just returned from military school. Billy, Son of Mark meets the infant Goom, who Googam had apparently stashed in a cave between panels in the previous story, is captured. Googam then holes up in the family's house, keeping them all prisoner while he grows and matures to the point where he can take over the world.

This section of the story is actually something of a psychological thriller, and has an unusual set-up compared to all these other monster stories, as Googam is basically just hiding out and keeping the family prisoner in their own homes, as if he were laying low from the law or something.

Billy is able to dispatch the monster all by himself eventually, with no help from his dad or the ruling class of Planet X.

The next story is called simply "Rommbu!", and it features the monster known as, um, Rommbu. In both the creature's design and plot, this story echoes that of Goom and Orrgo (or I guess it pre-echoes that of Orrgo). Once again the monster is a giant-sized humanoid of red-ish complexion, and he has the blank, staring eyes of Orrgo (though smaller) and the gaping, wide mouth of Goom and Son (though bigger). He also sports a pair of shorts, although these seem to be some rather tight-fitting briefs, with some space-age ribbing around the hips.

Our human protagonist is a career criminal named John, who has been handed a life sentence. The train he's riding to prison, accompanied by police officers, comes to a SCREEECH!-ing halt when a huge flying saucer lands on the tracks in front of it. Out strides the giant Rommbu, telling the random train passengers that his people are on their way from the Fourth Galaxy to conquer Earth, and he's come to accept their surrender. To demonstrate his power, he whips out a huge pistol and fires it on some bystanders, who...shrink. After reading a bunch of these stories where the space monsters don't kill anyone, I'm guessing this is yet another intentional effort on the creators' part to keep the death tolls more-or-less non-existent, with generally only one (1) monster dying per story. It's not as dramatic a fate as Goom's box that turns people into babies though, as he's already a giant. Shrinking puny earthlings to quite a few times more puny just seems kind of redundant.

While Rommbu is conversing with the Earthlings, John sneaks aboard his ship in an effort to escape, and ends up Rommbu's captive. If he can only destroy Rommbu, he'll have saved all of Earth, atoning for his crimes. Can he do it?

Yes. Yes he can.

Next up is The Green Thing in "The Green Thing!" I guess Lee and/or Lieber had just plain given up on titles, at this point? The Green Thing is fairly lazy in terms of monster names, and though he' a monstrous humanoid plant, under Kirby's pencils, he doesn't look a whole lot like any other monstrous humanoid plants you may have read about in other comics.

This comic's hero is once again a scientist with a crazy dream. His is to prove that plants have intelligence, and, to prove it, he wants to develop a serum that can increase plant intelligence. Once he things he has it, he flies to a small island off the cost of Australia, where grows "the highest known specimen of plant life," Ignatius Rex. Unable to find this plant, he just injects the serum into an ordinary weed, which immediately grows, gains intelligence, and begins talking and walking.

It takes a few panels to get used to that last bit.

Once he learns to walk and throw boulders, he figures he's ready to conquer the world, and so he commands our hero to take him to the mainland and use the serum to create an army of plant monsters. Then it fights a shark. The day isn't saved until a specimen of Ignatius Rex is found, gets a dose of serum, and then this smarter, more noble living plant kills The Green Thing, which turned out to be a real dick. Why, one could even say it was a dickweed.

Sadly, when the Ignatius Rex springs to life and goes on the attack, it does not shout, "Ignatius Rex!"

The next monster in the menagerie is named Moomba, and he stars in a story entitled "The Unbelievable Menace of Moomba." I kind of love the cover to the issue he appeared in, Tales To Astonish #23, as it announces "Moomba Is Here!", as if people were awaiting Moomba's arrival, or not sure which comics magazine to purchase in order to read about Moomba. He's another variation on the huge, orange/red humanoid in shorts design Kirby was so enamored with, although Moomba's variation on the theme included short, stubby arms that seemed to hand from its shoulders (at least in the interiors; on the cover he was proportioned a bit more like an ape), and a gigantic face that covered much of his chest.

In Africa, big game hunter Frank is disappointed that people on the other six continents (well, five anyway) aren't interested in animals anymore, but are only interested in African sculpture. I have no idea if there really was a huge demand for such sculpture at the time, but for the sake of reading these 13-pages, let's assume that was indeed the case.

Almost immediately Frank encounters a comically attired witch doctor who is busy trying to cast the evil spirits out of the same sorts of wooden figures Frank is collecting. He of course thinks this is a bunch of poppycock, and goes on his way until he comes face to face with what looks like a huge carving that "must be at least twenty feet tall," although it's clearly no more than two, maybe three times taller than Frank himself (who is not, I should note, 8-10-feet tall).

This is, of course, Moomba, who wastes no time in telling Frank that he is from a planet where "all life is made of wood, even as yours is made of flesh and blood!" His people have infiltrated Earth, posing as African statues, and are simply awaiting Moomba's signal to attack.

That is...well, it's actually kind of awesome.

While his evil plot is akin to that of Grottu and The Green Thing, who sought to lead armies of ants and super-plants respectively, it seems a lot less likely to succeed, as while there may be a lot of wooden statues of African origins all over the world, there can't possibly be enough to overwhelm mankind the way an army of insects or plants might.

Anyway, Moomba and his wooden army kick all sorts of ass, and have conquered the world, until the witch doctor casts a spell on Moomba, turning him into an immobile, unthinking wooden statue...threatening to let the spell take hold unless Moomba agreed to leave the planet and never return. So Moomba, a wooden creature of his word, summons all of his fellow wooden warriors, they jump up into the air, form the shape of a giant rocket ship and then fly away into outer space (!!!!).

Frank has learned a valuable lesson:

I will never again ridicule the practices of a native witch doctor, fore there is just a chance--a slim chance--that it was an unheralded, unknown witch doctor, who saved all of mankind from the thing called--Moomba.

Yeah, sew that onto a throw pillow.

Just two more to go. The penultimate monster is Bruttu, and he appears in "Beware of...Bruttu." (What, no exclamation mark?) In this story, Lee and company make use of the extended page-count to offer a more psychological story than some of the others. Bruttu is actually a comic book monster within the pages of the comic book story. Our hero is a short, skinny scientist named Howard who has a short-temper and won't brook any insult, fighting anyone who makes fun of him...and losing the fight.

This is explained during three panels set on a college campus, and continued into three panels set at the lab where he works as an adult scientist. There are several tall, handsome, "husky" (in Howard's words) guys who are always making plays for the beautiful lab technician, Anne Benson. There's this one great exchange where Howard is in the background, fiddling with some science props and, in the foreground, one of those big, handsome scientists is pouring one test tube into an another, and makes a crack about Howard ("Howard ought to work on vitamin pills! He might discover one that'll help him grow into a man!"). A scientist next to him, of the balding, pipe-smoking variety, responds, "Careful, he's liable to hear you! Then he'll start another fight and you'll have to beat him up again!"

I would just like to pausefor a moment and appreciate the insanity of a science lab stocked with scientists who are all great-looking physical specimens, and where fist fights occasionally break out. Not to stereotype scientists or anything, but they're not exactly the sort of professionals one associates with big, strong, virile, handsome men, nor juvenile, schoolyard insults, nor regular bouts of physical violence. But maybe things were different in the 1960s...? I don't know. I wish I could tell what kind of scientists they were, exactly. The equipment suggests some kind of chemists, but the most important piece of equipment there is "a new type of atomic machine," one so powerful "no one can be sure how it will affect atoms at maximum power."

Meanwhile, after a date with Anne, who Howard is convinced only goes out with him because she feels sorry for him, he regards a magazine featuring a kaiju-sized fuzzy giant in underpants in a comic book. "Bruttu! Good name for a monster as big as that!" (I assume Lee wrote this script, based on the fact that the script itself compliments an element of the writing of the script.)

Howard is still thinking about how cool it would be to be a gigantic, three-fingered, hairy orange giant so no one could push him around when he accidentally turns on the machine, and guess what happens?

That's right, he has been transformed into Bruttu! Because his vocal chords have changed as well, all he can do by way of explaining himself is growl, gurgle and roar, and, not really wanting to squash humans, he begins running around the city, striking shock and fear in all passersby, and being fired upon by police. He runs through a series of monster movie set-pieces--rail car, wax museum, Ferris wheel-having carnival--before he writes a message to Anne in the ground with a stick, and she accidentally reveals to "Bruttu" that she truly loves Howard ("Howard disappeard when you arrived! You were first seen coming out of his laboratory! That's it! You killed Howard! You killed the man I loved!")

It ends happily, with Howard returning to the lab, thinking of his old self while the machine is on, and thus he returns to normal, and he and Anne live happily ever after, probably (He must have learned his lesson too, because he didn't imagine himself as his old self but, like, a foot taller or anything.)

This is another story that seems to prefigure elements of Lee and/or Kirby's later comics work for what would become the Marvel Universe proper, with Howard's school life recalling that of Puny Peter Parker's, and the puny scientist-who-accidentally-turns-into-a-hulking-misunderstood-monster aspect reading like a rough draft for The Incredible Hulk. Hell, Howard even seems to have the same sorts of pants that Dr. Bruce Banner would wear, as when he transforms into Bruttu, they tear at the knees, but otherwise continue to fit him at the waist and thigh!

And finally, it's time to meet Orrgo, also known as "Orrgo...The Unconquerable!."

I have to confess, I kind of love these opening four panels:

Everyday Earth life seems horrible. At least the women, who are doing their household chores, seem to be happy with their lot in life, as the woman singing "Dum...Dee Dee Dum" to herself seems really into polishing that vase. Look at he poor men, though, complete with a foreman yelling at them to go about their mindless task faster. They look like they can't wait for a weird-looking monster from outer space to end it all.

And that transition to the explosion in the fourth panel? Magnificent!

The particulars of the story all seem to be borrowed from earlier stories in this very collection, although the pace, as well as the level, of the weirdness in this one is remarkable. A group of large, weird-looking aliens regard Earth from their home planet, two billion miles away, and they decide to conquer it. They are so powerful, one of them, Orrgo, says it shouldn't take more than one of them to conquer the planet, and so he sets about it.

He has some vague, mental "do anything" powers, which allow him to transport himself to Earth via thought alone--"Faster than sound...faster than light...as fast as imagination itself"--and within panels of appearing in the center ring of a circus, he starts demonstrating those powers and conquering the world. He tells circus-goers that all of the worlds' governments must submit to him, and goes about levitating cars, bringing trees to life like Groot, melting artillery cannons, turning jet planes into bird plane hybrids and their missiles into eggs, even lifting an entire city high into orbit like Goom did.

Eventually he mentally enslaves all of man kind, and then, having conquered the world, takes a nap. At which point he's killed by a gorilla. That's our Orrgo!

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Remember when I said I can get back to you later on how well chosen the stories in Monsters Unleashed Prelude were? Well, I've since read Monsters Unleashed, and it is now later.

I think I'm going to go with "poorly." As an excuse for re-publishing a ton of old Kirby/Lee monster comics in a cheaper, more affordable format, it is totally a worthwhile endeavor, but if a reader picked it up for background or context into the Monsters Unleashed miniseries, they are going to be rather disappointed.

Of that portion of the book, I think almost all of the monsters appear, at least in terms of cameos...with the exception of that particular version of Groot, who isn't in the series at all (though he does appear on the most misleading cover of the series). Few of them have what one might call "roles" to play in the story, however, with only a handful of them getting speaking lines, or even getting named in the series. Appearing in the middle section of the six-issue miniseries, they are but one of three groups of giant monsters involved, and basically are there as a nameless mob of Earth monsters siding with the heroes to battle alien invaders (which, as you'll see have found in the Prelude, most of them are as well).

Oddly, a few of the Marvel monsters who get the most panel-time and/or a line of dialogue do not appear in this collection at all, so even having read it first, there were a handful of monsters that were unknown to me.

Elsa Bloodstone does play a sizable role in the series, although I don't know that the two stories featuring her are necessarily the best ones; I would probably have preferred a first appearance, in keeping with the theme of the book, or perhaps an issue of Nextwave: Agents of HATE, as that's where this particular design and take on the character came from (Also, she and her fellow Agents battled Fin Fang Foom and Devil Dinosaur in that series).

The Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur comic is well-chosen, as Moon Girl is probably the hero who gets the most and most important panel-time in the series, and that issue was her first appearance, if not Devil's (although, as I mentioned, it introduced Devil's original status quo as well as his current one).

Interplanetary monster hunter Lady Hellbender from Totally Awesome Hulk does not appear in the Monsters Unleashed at all, so apparently those 40-pages were included as a Fin Fang Foom story instead of a Hellbender story (She does briefly appear in Monsters Unleashed: Battleground, which collects all the tie-ins to Monsters Unleashed).

That's actually kind of weird, though, as one of the eyebrow-arching elements of Monsters Unleashed is that the heroes all profess confusion regarding the identities and intentions of the Marvel monsters, but Cho had just met/fought Foom. I think they may have been better served by using those 40 pages of space for more Kirby/Lee stories (like the first appearance of Fin Fang Foom), or maybe a few issues of Nextwave or some other Elsa Bloodstone arc.

Columbus gets a new superhero; no one in Columbus cares

I've been fairly fascinated with the National Hockey League/Stan Lee team-up, in which the latter helped create 30 new superheroes, each one named after and given powers to represent the name of an NHL team. The Guardian Project, as it's called, seemed like a pretty fun idea when it was first announced, and in the course of my (week)daily link-blogging for Blog@Newsarama, I've picked up quite a few interesting items relating to the Guardian Project: Complaints that The Penguin is derivative of Cyclops, jeering at The Maple Leaf, Chris Sims' noble attempt to narrow the 30 bat-shit crazy super-characters down to just “the Ten Most Insane” characters, Toronto Life’s snarky paragraph “reviews” of each Guardian, Heidi MacDonald's declaration that the surreal project may be “Stan Lee’s greatest achievement yet” and so on.

It wasn't until very recently that I remembered that Columbus, Ohio—my adopted hometown from 2000-2010—had an NHL team of its own, and thus Columbus has its own Stan Lee-created superhero: The Blue Jacket.

Why did it take me so long to put 2 and 2 together, "so long" being relatively lengthened by the fact that I was reading articles about the NHL Guardians on a daily basis for the last few weeks?

Well, probably just because I'm a little dense. Maybe too because I left the city limits of Columbus last year, returning to my ancestral home off the shores of Lake Erie, and have been therefore thinking of Columbus more as my former hometown than my current hometown, and thus I now feel less ownership over fictional characters that live there. Surely my not giving a shit about sports at all was also factor.

But despite all of those other certainly relevant factors, another remains: Columbus, Ohio still doesn’t seem to have really integrated having its own NHL hockey team into its essential, core being just yet.

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Columbus was, and is, a great sports town.

Saturdays during college football season there are semi-religious affairs, and, if that Saturday’s game happens to be a home game, many parts of the city become embroiled in a sort of strange, fevered pagan holiday feeling—those days are like Easter, Super Bowl Sunday and St. Patrick’s Day combined, only it happens every other weekend.

The city spends a ridiculous amount of money on police officers to direct traffic and to arrest fans for pissing in the public and/or rioting and setting things on fire (During one period in the early part of last decade, when the campus area was rocked by house parties-turned-riots on a weekend-ly basis, the streets in the neighborhoods on game day would have a positively surreal amount of different police vehicles present: Police cars, police trucks, police helicopters, bike hops, mortocycle cops, horse cops (those are the best cops), and even a few of these weird high-tech mobile home-sized mobile command center things.)

Also, and this is true, you can shout “O! H!” at nearly any group of two or three people in Columbus, Ohio, and you could count on this group to shout back “I! O!” This is apparently a cheer that is popular at Buckeye games (I don’t know; I’ve never been to one).

Yes, Columbus is a great sports town—as long as that sport is Ohio State University football.

I know Columbus is a great sports town because during that first half of a decade I spent in Columbus, I was a reporter for a (since-de-alt-ified) alt-weekly newspaper, on the Things That Aren’t Music or Arts beat (although I ended up covering music and arts in my “spare” time too), and would end up covering things like the debut of the Columbus Destroyers arena foot ball team, or the Columbus Landsharks indoor lacrosse team.

Both of them shared facilities with the Blue Jackets, both of them were announced with great fanfare, their owners citing Columbus’ embrace of OSU as a sure sign that they would enthusiastically embrace these exciting new sporting endeavors, and both have been gone for years now—The Landsharks started playing in Columbus in 2001, but relocated to Phoenix after the 2003 season, while The Destroyers moved to town from Buffalo in 2004, and folded in 2008, while

The Blue Jackets obviously fared much better than the Destroyers or Landsharks, yet they’re still nowhere near as beloved nor as inextricably entwined with the city as the Buckeyes are.

If you were to rank various sports teams in Columbus’ collective heart, I would guess the Blue Jackets are somewhere near The Clippers, the city’s minor league baseball team.

Of course, the Buckeyes had a massive head start—their first season was 1890, and they’ve been playing in their current stadium since the early 1920’s.

The Blue Jackets became an official NHL expansion team in 2000, but began influencing the city a bit before that, when the city’s biggest employer and biggest business (last I knew), Nationwide, along with Columbus’ last-remaining daily newspaper The Dispatch and other entities, built Nationwide Arena in downtown Columbus. It was sold as an effort to revitalize the dead, ghost town of a downtown (Downtown is filled with people form 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, but abandoned the rest of the time—in fact, finding a place that will sell you a cup of coffee on a Saturday in downtown Columbus is extraordinarily difficult).

I don’t know how well it’s worked exactly; I guess the level of development and night life and weekend life downtown is now much better than it was in, say, 1999, but I think it’s more than fair to suggest that downtown is more more vital than it is revitalized.

Anyway: Columbus has an NHL team, and while Columbus doesn’t mind the team, and in fact some folks in Columbus like it quite a bit, Columbus still isn’t a hockey town, and the Blue Jackets are a distant, distant, distant second or third in the hearts of Columbus sports fans.

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The team name comes from the uniforms of the Union Army during the Civil War. While it was fairly firmly part of the North and the Union, Ohio isn’t generally thought of as a big Civil War state, and its role in the conflict is thus sometimes surprisingly striking.

When Lincoln requested that Ohio raise ten regiments to fight for the Union at the beginning of the war, the state more than doubled his request, offering up 23 volunteer infantry regiments. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were both Ohioans, as was George Custer and Philip Sheridan. Ohio also produced a number of great Civil War figures, including William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Philip Sheridan, and George Custer. As for Columbus, there were two Civil War-era military bases there, Camp Chase and Camp Thomas.

The team name was derived via a contest in local, terrible newspaper, the Dispatch. This occurred before I moved there and had to pay attention to such things, but I’m told there was a contest in the paper to name the team, and “The Columbus Cows” or “The Columbus Mad Cows” received the most votes.

See, Columbus is referred to, both derisively and self-deprecatingly as “Cowtown” due to, uh, it’s general lameness and the fact that it’s perceived as more rural than urban by more urban parts of the country, so apparently the cow was regarded as a good animal mascot for a sports team based in the city.

I kinda like Mad Cows—why not name a sports team after a terrifying, deadly disease derived from the horrors of modern factory farming practices?—and think white uniforms with mottled black patches on them could have been rather neat looking. (An earlier Columbus hockey team, The Columbus Chill, apparently went by Mad Cows and had special jerseys made for at least one game)

But the powers that be went with The Blue Jackets instead; I guess Union Soldiers are cooler than cows. There was also an 18th century Shawnee war chief who went by the name Blue Jacket in Ohio, but the Blue Jackets’ logos and art usually feature elements of Civil War uniforms.

The Jackets’ mascot wasn’t a Union Soldier, however, but a red-eyed, yellow or green-neon-colored, bee-like stinging insect named Stinger, who wore a Union soldier’s uniform. I guess he was a play on the similarities between the words Blue Jacket and Yellowjacket. Wikipedia, which is never wrong about anything ever, says “The Blue Jackets have since distanced themselves from Stinger, removing him entirely from the jerseys beginning in the 2005 season.” What is the reason for this friction between Stinger and The Blue Jackets? I don’t know, but it’s probably for the best that the giant bee-man has had less to do with the team of late, as he didn’t influence the creation of Stan Lee’s Blue Jacket superhero.

Perhaps if Stinger were still part of the team’s logo, Lee would have given us a superhero akin to Marvel’s Yellowjacket, the name Ant-Man/Giant-Man Hank Pym would later adopt. Yes, Blue Jacket might have just been Yellowjacket, only blue.

Instead, this is Blue Jacket:

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Here’s what his “bio” at The Guardian Project website says about him:

The Blue Jacket is entirely encased in a metal suit of armor…For weaponry he has an armada of 1857 Napoleonic Cannons strapped all over his body. The cannons on his wrists, shoulders and thighs fire cannon balls loaded with explosives. At his side hangs the state flag of Ohio, only this is no ordinary flag. He can throw the flag and envelope his opponent, something he calls ‘cocooning’; temporarily freezing them in their tracks.

In design, he looks like more of a robot than a man in armor, a la Iron Man or Steel. If you look at his thighs, they look like pieces of girders, with no real room for a human leg in them. His costume is blue, steel gray and red. His metallic gray face and glowing red eyes call to mind DC superhero Captain Atom, although he wears a Union Soldier cap with the Blue Jacket’s logo atop it. His chest is open, and shows some clockwork-like gears in it, a neat little detail, giving him a sort of steampunk look, appropriate for a 19th century-themed superhero.

His cannons, which are ridiculous in number (I count eight) are all old-school cannon-shaped, and while his bio says he shoots exploding cannonballs, all of the art so far makes them look more like lasers or something.

Over all, it’s a pretty cool design, especially compared with many of his peers in The Guardians, which are…well, “pretty cool” isn’t the first, second, third or forty-first descriptive phrase that comes to mind when looking at some of them.

Although I’m not sure why he has a obelisk-shaped cod-piece, sticking straight up, over his crotch, the NHL logo on its tip. A surprise, ninth cannon, for those situations where eight cannons just aren’t enough, I assume.

One of the genuinely endearing aspects of Lee’s Gauridans is how complex they are; like, they never just have one power, or set of powers, but have something else thrown in. For example not only does The Shark have titanium teeth that can bite through anything, the ability to summon and command sharks, razor water-skis and enhanced senses, but he can also "telepathically interface with computer software."

Overkill? Probably, but overkill can be kind of charming in the world of superheroes, particularly ones from the hyperbolic mind of Stan Lee. It’s as if he thought to himself, “In the ‘60s, I was just giving every superhero one power each, how can I top that! I know, I’ll give these heroes three of four powers each!”

Kind of like if, in addition to his extra-sensory powers, Daredevil could also shoot eye beams and telepathically command his enemies to perform actions against their will, so long as his commands are phrased in the form of a dare.

So no only does The Blue Jacket have all these cannons, but he also has that stupid flag gimmick.

And the official press release from The Blue Jackets themselves goes into much greater detail than the bio at The Guardian Project website, unveiling a mystical power in addition to the old-fashioned, high-tech armor:

A great military mind, the Blue Jacket lives to fight and he has the power of mediumship to communicate with the Union Civil War Generals that he idolizes. In battle, he relies on his heart and intelligence and not on modern technology. The Blue Jacket is entirely cased in a metal suit of armor that houses a devastating array of weaponry. For weaponry, he has an armada of 1857 Napoleon Cannons strapped all over his body. The cannons on his wrists, shoulders and thighs fire cannon balls loaded with explosives. At his side hangs the state flag of Ohio made of astral plasma. He has the ability to cocoon his victim with the flag, giving the illusion the victim has disappeared when in reality, the victim is temporarily suspended in time.

So not only does he have this boss, cannon-filled armor, not only does he have a flag of “astral plasma,” but he also has the power of mediumship to communicate with the Union Civil War Generals he idolizes.

So The Blue Jacket is kind of like Iron Man, if Iron Man was The Haunted Tank.

I’m not going to lie—I completely love The Blue Jacket.

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This is very important: THE BLUE JACKET is essentially IRON MAN, IF IRON MAN'S ARMOR WAS MADE OUT OF THE HAUNTED TANK. And the tank were haunted by more than one Civil War general. And the ghost-generals fought for the right side of the conflict.

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Quick aside: If the type of cannon that comprises Blue Jacket’s armada of cannons sounds awfully specific, there’s actually a reason for it—The Blue Jackets have an 1857 Napoleon cannon housed at Nationwide Arena, which they fire off to celebrate certain good things happening during the course of their games. I think they pretend to fire it off, rather than actually shoot cannon balls, but I don’t know; the only Blue Jackets games I had to attend were pre-cannon acquisition.

They also have lots of t-shirt cannons, but those are of 21st century origin.

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Each Guardian stars in a short little comic book adventure, which you can download and read from the “Battles” page of the Guardian Project website. The Blue Jacket stars in a five-page comic, complete with a cover that recalls the cover designs of the earliest of Marvel’s Ultimate line of books, with a character posing, and a bar of solid color running vertically off to the side of the image, to set it off.

The story is written by Chuck Dixon, which both excited me—Cool, I like Chuck Dixon!—and made me kind of saddened me—Aw, why’s Chuck Dixon writing this instead of comics about Batman being awesome, or the Punisher punishing people?. Tony Chagrin gets a story credit, which is sorta funny, given that “the story” is simply this: Bad guys show up, Blue Jacket shows up, they fight, Blue Jacket wins. An Al Bigley and Bob Almond are credited with pencils and inks respectively, and Stan Lee gets a “Chief Guardian” credit, which is kinda vague, along the lines of his “Grand Poobah” credits in his Boom Studios super-comics.

The first panel is a blurry aerial photo of The Battelle Institute, near OSU’s campus, on King Avenue and near the bank of the Olentangy River. (If you want to go to the trouble, if you download the comic, and then open up the “About Us” section of Battelle’s website, you’ll see that it looks like the comic used the exact same image of Battelle that is on Battelle’s site—four different views of parts of Battelle alternate on that page, and one of them is a non-blurry version of the first panel of The Blue Jacket comic).

A narration box doesn’t quite name Battelle, although the photo and a later drawing make it pretty clear what it is, if you’ve ever heard of and/or seen it: “A local Columbus research facility…The world’s largest, independent research and development organization and a treasure house of classified projects.

There are probably legal reasons explaining why they didn’t name it, but they missed out on the opportunity to entitle the story “The Battle for Battelle.”

Anyway, “world’s largest, independent research and development organization and a treasure house of classified projects” sounds about right.

I’m not so sure about the narration box in the second panel, however: “And also a magnet for spies and international thieves.”

Here the spies and thieves are a uniformed group being called Hammersmith,” and they’re about to battle the police when Blue Jacket shows up.

Fun fact: The Columbus Division of Police uniform consists of a white shirt and white hats tucked into dark pants, not the all-blue outfits drawn in this comic. Also, their patrol cars are all white with read and blue stripes on them, and are not the traditional, generic black-and-white police car design.

Even more fun fact: It took me less than a minute of googling to find a photo gallery on the Columbus Division of Police’s home page with plenty of photo reference of what their uniforms and cars look like.

After the first page, there’s not much city-specific about the story. Blue Jacket talks in a computer-like font, his dialogue bubbles square and outlined by blue borders.

Hammershmith shoots at Blue Jacket, he re-boots by plugging a downed power line into the cogs in his chest (“Yeah…that’s what I’m talkin’ about!”), he shoots Hammersmith into submission, and when they start to run away (“You win this time, Jacket! But we’ll be back and you’ll be sorry”), he throws a giant flag on them.

At no point does he consult with any of the ghosts of any Union Generals, but the Dixon/Lee/Chagrin team only had five pages and 20 panels to work with here—I think a story exploring all of the potential awesomeness inherent in a Columbus, Ohio-based superhero who is kind of like Iron Man and kind of like The Haunted Tank is going to need a lot more room to breathe.

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Fortunately, it sounds like there will be more room to breathe for all of these guys, if the NHL and Stan Lee get their way. From a Washington Square News story:

The animated debut at the All-Star Game is merely the first step in a Guardians media blitz. The Guardians' online presence will include back-stories and animations, social media websites that parse out Guardians information and a game in which fans will battle with their chosen Guardian. Graphic novels, as well as a full-length novel, will be created. A major piece of the puzzle, however, is to "eventually expand into animated TV series, feature films, and console video games," [Guardian Media Entertainment’s chief creative officer Adam] Baratta said.

That all sounds very optimistic, probably naively so in the case of a feature film, but you can’t fault a chief creative officer for being super-ambitious.

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Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any one in Columbus paying any attention to the debut of The Blue Jacket. I visited the websites of Columbus’ two faux-altweeklies, The Other Paper and Columbus Alive, and could find nothing. I was particularly surprised that neither Googling nor poking around The Dispatch’s archives yielded any results, since The Dispatch is basically just a big daily sports page with a hard-right Republican editorial page and a bunch of wire features attached.

Cursory searches of both donewaiting.com and columbusundergroun.com didn’t yield any results either.

In fact, all I found was able to find was the following:

—Three sentences on a Dispatch site, linking a joke another paper made about The Blue Jackets.

—A January 30 post on Fire That Cannon, a Blue Jackets-specific blog

—Dara Naraghi posted a bit about the project on the Ferret Press/Panel blog, and several of Naraghi’s fellow Panel-ists weighed in.

And that’s all I could find and, you know, I’m not sure if the Panel posts even “counts,” given that it is from comic book-people on a comic book dedicated blog—if the goal of the Guardian Project was to get folks talking about/excited about NHL and/or they’re new heroes, than I assume the target audience is people who can’t recognize Neal Adams artwork or tell you which Marvel characters Stan Lee co-created, and with which collaborator.

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One of the regular features on The Ferret Press blog that I dig is their “Character Wednesday,” where they pick a comics character of some sort—Goody Rickles, Black Panther, Ralph Wiggum, Stilt-Man—and they all contribute their drawings of said character.

I think it is Panel’s duty as Ohioans and Columbusites to devote a future installment of Character Wednesday to The Blue Jacket.

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A frequent topic of conversation here on the comics blogosphere is the way black people, women and, really, any “minority,” with “minority” here being defined as “any group other than white, heterosexual males of the sort that defined the superhero genre when it arose in the 1930s-1950s,” are represented and portrayed in comics. One frequent sub-topic being the fact there are so few black superheroes, or so few superheroines, or no good gay superheroes, or non-stereotypical characters of Asian or Latin descent.

It occurred to me while scrolling through the 30 Guardians on The Guardian Project that they are a) all male and b) all white, excepting the ones that have unnatural skin colors (Avalanche is ice-colored, Blue Jacket is steel-colored, etc), are half-animal/half man (Bruin’s a bear man, Wild’s a werewolf type, The Shark has a shark head, etc) or have their faces and bodies completely encased in a skin-color-hiding costume.

And isn’t it kind of weird that there are clearly more bear-men and shark-men on The Guardians then there are black dudes?

Now, this isn’t meant to be a rant about race, and I’m not accusing The Guardian Project of anything malicious here; I’m just offering an observation.

The lack of ladies on the team could easily be explained away by the fact that these are heroes based on various National Hockey League teams, and there are no women on any of the NHL teams.

I’m not sure what the racial make-up of the NHL is, but it’s been my understanding that professional hockey—and hockey in general—is a “whiter” sport than many other sports.

So maybe that was a consideration…?

But, honestly, I doubt it. I think it was more a matter of just not thinking about race at all when creating the characters, and perhaps the subconscious default state of the superhero in the minds of the creators were white dudes. And bear- and eagle- and shark-dudes.

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I have a question about The Guardians: What is their relationship to the hockey teams they take their names and logos from within the context of the fictive setting they inhabit?

That is, in the Columbus that appears in that little Blue Jacket comic, is there even an NHL hockey team called The Blue Jackets? Because if so, and that Columbus is home to both an NHL hockey team called The Blue Jackets and a superhero who calls himself The Blue Jacket and wears the Blue Jackets’ logo on his head (not to mention an NHL logo on his crotch), then he would either have to be working with the NHL and Blue Jackets in some capacity, or else he would be violating their copyrights and trademarks and would likely be at odds with the team whose name and icon he bears, right?

And what are the chances that 30 cities in this fictional North America would all have superheroes in that exact same situation, in relation to professional sports teams in the same cities?

Unless there is no coincidence involved, and the back-story involves the NHL creating, licensing and employing all of these superheroes to fight crime and evil in their 30 host cities, but if that’s the case then the whole thing gets kind of disturbingly meta, doesn’t it?