This week saw the relaunch of Marvel's The Sentry, written by the comic book industry's utility man, Jeff Lemire and art by Kim Jacinto. With this relaunch (and the Fantastic Four next month), I began thinking about some Marvel and DC characters, teams, and titles that currently don't have their own books, that deserves one. So, here are my top 5 Marvel and DC characters and teams that deserve their own relaunches.
Read MoreThis review For Avengers: Infinity War contains minimal spoilers if you do not want to find out that Batman saves the day at the end of this movie then read another review or see the movie.
Ten years in the making indeed. The 19th installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has finally been released. No one would have ever thought the first Avengers movie would ever be made, or even succeed. Avengers brings together six superheroes, four with their own franchise, all for an epic movie. Infinity War’s marketing campaign mentions how there are 23 heroes in this movie. Is that a little too much? Some will say yes. Luckily the movie manages them all with ease (but do not expect all of them to play an equal role).
Read MoreLuke Cage’s history of a comic book character was born from the popularization of the Blaxploitation film genre during the 1970s. A bunch of white dudes caught on by how popular these action movies made by black people and starring black people were getting that they saw a new market to, well, exploit.
Read MoreIf the first two episodes of Luke Cage were like watching superhero Shakespeare, then "Who’s Gonna Take the Weight” is all about becoming an emotional catharsis to answer our pent-up frustration with tragedy. When people talk about Shakespeare or when they call something Shakespearean, they’re usually talking about dudes in puffy shirts, star-crossed characters, and big speeches. You won't catch me doing that, though. I'd offer up , rather, that at the core of every Shakespeare play are characters who are driven by complex needs and forced to navigate their complex social and political hierarchies. They’re a realm of emotional politicking and that description is what the first two episodes of Luke Cage felt like.
Read MoreLike its predecessor, episode two of Luke Cage moves at a slower pace. The simmering tensions between characters come to a head by the end of it. In a lot of ways, this episode coupled with episode one serve as the origin of Luke Cage as a hero. And while dramatic, the big bang at the end of this episode isn't the most surprising thing about the series' second showing. No, the most surprising thing turns out to be a little piece of character insight in the form of what I call the, "Pull the trigger" speech. To find out what that is and what I think of the show after the first two episodes check out my review below.
Read MoreLast Friday I sat down with my girlfriend to watch Luke Cage, Netflix’s most recent series in the quadfecta that is The Defenders. Now, I wasn’t the biggest Luke Cage fan going into this series. Don’t get me wrong; I was excited, but that excitement came from watching the others series Netflix has put out. I liked Daredevil, and Jessica Jones was even better, so my enthusiasm was coming from a place of wanting to see another great TV show rather than excitement about seeing a character I loved on TV. Now I wasn’t completely ignorant; I had read a few Heroes for Hire, and I was impressed when he showed up in a crossover or two. He was more like a historical figure for me, the Jack Johnson of comics. Historical and important, but not really fleshed out.
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It was a comic that was weird, inspiring and human and one that when I first read it, compelled me to hide it behind a bookshelf in disgust. Rom came down from outer space to save us all, and in 1979 this strange silver cyborg transformed what could have been a cheap, forgettable marketing ploy into an enduring folk hero within comic’s history. It told a story about war and what it meant to serve in a way only possible through the pathos of superhero storytelling. Rom’s story begins as one of desperation—both on the page and in the real world. The Parker Brothers, known for their board games like Monopoly and Clue, wanted to break into the toy industry but they wanted to do this as cheaply as they possibly could.
They started by buying a patent for a toy named COBOL—a robot with new and inventive internal electronics that caused its eyes to glow an eerie green. They renamed this robot ROM, downgraded those green eyes to red and gave it only three points of articulation. ROM was an ugly, clunky gray monstrosity—a toy that was a preordained to fail and be forgotten within a year of its release by degrees of sheer mediocrity.
This prophecy would have gone to self-fulfilling if not one for one writer who saw something no one else did.
Bill Mantlo was no reader’s favorite writer at Marvel Comics, but that was okay. Mantlo was a workman’s writer, someone who flourished under deadlines and became known internally as “the Fill-in King.” He was the guy relied on to quickly create stories for series when their own writers fell behind schedule. He would deliver despite being given short notice, little development time, and even less recognition. In spite of all that work and success, Mantlo was never given a full series of his own.
That is until one Christmas morning. He was spending the day with his family. They had just opened presents and Mantlo watched his son play with these new action figures—these strange and colorful robots—it was in that moment he experienced something akin to that primal imagination we tap into as children playing with our toys. He looked at these plastic figures and suddenly he knew. He saw their histories, characters and saw a story in them needing to be told.
He rushed down to Jim Shooter, Marvel’s editor-in-chief, and convinced him that Marvel needed to license these products—they had to turn these into comics.
When Bill Mantlo started writing Rom Spaceknight, the original product had no backstory. There were no other characters in the line, not even any villains. Alone, Mantlo created a story about a man from the far-off utopian planet of Galador who sacrificed his life and humanity in order to combat the invading, tyrannical and shapeshifting force known as the Dire Wraiths. He created a story about a war between magic and science—about a war experience that encompassed two hundred years of an artificially extended life with that conflict now brought to Earth.
The comic series Rom Spaceknight was a fantastical, bombastic experience with stories that in part was driven by its pulp adventure elements—this was a world that might introduce an underground army of lizard guerilla soldiers, living houses and other dimensions. They pushed the boundaries of reality and reworked Marvel’s forgotten characters in new and more human ways. This cracked open the comic universe making it feel more expansive than people with accidental powers punching other people with accidental powers.
Mantlo accomplished this at least in part by tapping into this malleable sense of imagination that touches that experience we all have as kids coming up with stories in our crayon drawing and Lego buildings. Rom talks like a child’s idea of a hero through this grandiose and archaic speechifying. The Spaceknights, the Galadorian band of cybernetic warriors, look like they came from a drawing on the fridge. They each have designs based on basic shapes—some have square heads and bodies, others more hexagonal—with each defined with a primary color and a unique power that sounds something coming off a playground. Rom is really strong, another Spaceknight has fire powers, while another with light or dark powers. They’re vague but still simple. There are no proposed pseudoscience or outline limitations with these characters and they’re presented without a hint of self-awareness or pretentiousness.
These designs are driven by a type of visual purity and simplicity that, I think, invoke a mental space for us to enter: these stories were weird, the characters fantastical but at its core was why we came to superhero stories in the first place.
When I first encountered Rom it was forty years after his debut in 2009. I was a teenager still getting into comics but I’d never been to a comic book store. I’d read the hardcover and trades of Watchmen and Sandman but I’d never flipped through the leaf-thin pages of a single issue. This might sound insignificant but comics are nothing if built on tradition—characters have a legacy, writers and artists have legacies, and if the comics we love become our Bibles for understanding morals and empathy, then the comic book store is the church.
So one summer day my older cousin took us the forty minute drive to the nearest mall and into this small little boutique comic shop with barely enough space to walk. They didn’t carry trades; they didn’t even carry anything current—what they had instead were rows and rows of long boxes. These unmarked cardboard crates stacked on folding tables and filled with hundreds and hundreds of individual comics. Where, almost like a pew, you bent over and performed that sacred act of divination of finding the one issue you were meant to find. I went in looking for something by Alan Moore or maybe Grant Morrison but what I found instead was Rom Spaceknight #5.
I bought it as a joke—one of those teenage irony jokes. The cover said this was a Marvel comic but with a character I’d never seen before: this goofy silver robot with metal mitten hands spread apart by orange tentacles of smoke while household furniture smashed against his body and a couple cowered in the corner. There was a war of confusing aesthetics taking place. Was this science fiction? Was this a horror story? Was this Marvel's version of SummerSlam?
What was unknown to me at the time was how close my first impression captured a big part of what made Rom Spaceknight work—a thing appeared to be a goofy and a bad idea used this specific visual expectation to sneak in weighty realities.
A superhero comic isn’t bound by the visual limitations of a movie’s special effects budget and neither are they bound by the reader’s suspension of disbelief as with a book. What happens in here is limited only by what’s on the page and what’s on that page can be anything. They are a unique opportunity where the stories can mix genres, mix subject matters, tones, character archetypes and settings. A story can have an alien invasion battled off by a magical sorcerer living in Greenwich Village, men can fly, women can turn invisible and people came come back from the dead all within the same set of pages. The stories are fantastical, surreal and present a type of consistent, exciting strangeness that other mediums can never risk matching. Our brains buy into these stories because we can see it for ourselves across the page.
As much as this is a strength for the superhero story, it’s also their greatest weakness. The stories often stray too far from common sense logic and lean too heavily into a spectacle. They ultimately risk becoming inhuman but when they work, it’s almost always because they balance this flimsy unreality with very real-feeling characters and situations.
In that issue #5 of Rom Spaceknight I bought seven years ago, begins with Rom and his two human sidekicks hiding from the local police and military. These groups have been infiltrated by the Dire Wraiths and they lead these efforts using magic hounds without eyes to find them out. Rom and his friends take shelter in an abandoned home, only to discover the home itself is a living entity that has grown stronger by feasting on the Dire Wraiths and their magic.
The story is convoluted and frankly overwritten. Dialogue and caption boxes overcrowd on every page and the colors have already run together and faded. Yet there’s a moment between the strange, pulp movements of the superhero story that gives way to an absolute humanity. We get a flashback of Rom before the war and before he gave up his human body. He’s in an argument with his girlfriend, she just learned he’s volunteered to go to war, to enlist in the Spaceknight program and she’s afraid. She pleads with him not to go—that with so many people already volunteered why does he still have to do it? Why leave her? Rom is a man of values but he admits he’s scared too and that fear is exactly why he has to leave. He assures her, however, that he’ll return and that their love will outlast the war they’ve been drawn into.
Only that memory was two hundred years and staring at the couple he’s befriended (awkward wording), seeing them hold each other for comfort, he knows what he told her was a lie. War has guaranteed that their love could only have ever died.
For superhero stories, the baseline reality is a type of hyper-reality so when the writer taps into real human moments, human realities and situations, these pieces of writing stand out and stick with us. The unreality almost elevates the impact for when real and relatable things happen. This is the reason a kid from Queens is so many people’s favorite character despite constantly swinging between skyscrapers and dating super models. There’s a spark wherein we see ourselves and through that lens believe we ourselves can be so much better. It’s the dance of the relatable nestled inside the un-relatable—the idea that there’s something very real inside this insane situation and this is a big part of why Rom Spaceknight works.
After I first finished reading that issue, I was embarrassed at my own joke. I hid the comic somewhere in my bedroom bookshelf and for a long time pushed that story further away in my memory. I wasn’t an immediate fan of Rom and I wouldn’t even see him again until years later when I was in college. By then I’d gotten deep into retro comic book art—all the masterworks of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko—and following as many of these dedicated blogs I could find on Tumblr. That’s when they started posting covers of Rom Spaceknight.
There was a moment of instant recognition, that unearthing of old memories about a clunky robot that fought shapeshifting wizards from another world. When I started scrolling through them my roommate came in and immediately sounded off: “Holy shit is that Rom?”
When he was a kid his dad had a mountain of a comic collection. Stacks and stacks of single issues that spanned decades and companies and out of all of them he remembered this one issue of Rom Spaceknight in a sea of infinitely more survivable titles. His dad didn’t even remember the series, remember the character or even buying the issue but despite all that, the art and characters of Rom stuck with him.
We talked about what we remembered from the issues we’d read and how it was strange retro art and the contradictions in the character that stuck out most. Rom was a character, he described to me, who was very alien while having the personality of an orthodox superhero. A character whose internal monologs had all the emotions and motivations of a stand-up guy with powers but wasn’t a guy at all but a cybernetic war machine designed solely for xenocide.
That conversation launched me into seeking out and reading the entirety of Rom Spaceknight. It was here that I discovered Rom was a series built and succeeded by its contradictions.
Rom was a series licensed to sell a product but had little to do with that actual product. A series owned by a toy company but one Marvel fully incorporated into their world. Rom interacted with the X-Men, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four. Marvel heroes became retconned into making more sense with Rom’s world and where Rom had meaningful interactions with Marvel’s superheroes (Rom is even responsible for Rogue becoming a good guy).
These stories are meant to go forever—to constantly be reinvented and rebooted with new #1s—but Rom Spaceknight ran for seventy-five issues and ended. A series that made the world feel big with limitless possibilities yet for so many issues was restrained to a small town in West Virginia.
What should have been a fluke, a cheap piece of merchandising became a story filled with imaginative situations balanced with intricately written characters and themes.
My roommate was right. Rom had the personality of a typical superhero. He believes in empathy, he believes in never killing even though his mission is to effectively snuff out an entire race. In theory, he was that contradictory image of Full Metal Jacket—the soldier helmet with a peace sign next to the words “Born to Kill.” Yet the further the series expands, the more the story grows and details are given a purpose. Rom sticks with his morals and compassion because they’re the only things that keep him human. It’s revealed that he’s seen other Spaceknights lose themselves in death and in turn lose whatever sense of humanity they had left. Rom lives with that fear and that reality where the longer he stays inside this body of a war machine, the closer he inches toward becoming solely that juggernaut of death.
The more I read the series, the more I’d tell my former roommate about the stories inside—about the Dire Wraith who deserted the war and started a human family, about when Rom tricked Galactus into eating the Dire Wraith home planets and how the final villain turned out not to be the Dire Wraiths but Spaceknights corrupted by their power of war.
There was never an issue that didn’t have an interesting story beat or fantastical turn inside yet while that makes every issue something to look at, Rom Spaceknight only works as a story taken by its whole—the development of character, the enrichment of themes and a finality for the series.
Rom was only ever a licensed product and when that license ran out, Marvel lost all rights to the character. Rom would never appear in another story. Marvel could never reprint the issues and sell a collection. The survival of Rom Spaceknight lives on only by the ability of those that remember and talk about Rom.
Over the past few years, especially since the relaunch of Rom at IDW Publishing, more and more writers have come out and talked the praises of Rom—praises for the character, setting and the series—and that’s brought questions of why? Rom was a clunky, dumb looking, generic science fiction story from the 80s, why should anyone care about him?
I think what it comes down to is that when a story gets told—that is the story. Yet when someone retells that story it becomes something different, something elevated by our opinions and our experience of first reading and engaging with that story.
We tweak the details we liked, represent the parts we found most interesting sometimes in spite of how they were originally laid out. Through that, I think the readers and fans of Rom Spaceknight have turned him into a comic book folk hero.
You can’t easily access these issues I’ve talked about and neither can you easily experience the totality of this series, but you can listen to me talk about it. I’ll tell you about the story of a man who sacrificed himself to protect his country and fought every day of his life to retain that humanity he could have so easily lost. A story about the often cyclic nature of violence but most important a story about a lone knight from a faraway land who came to save everyone.
Big thanks to Justin Wood for sending this my way. I'll be honest, I've kind of stopped looking and posting things like this, but ah fuck it. This struck a cord because score and music is something that has always been a part of my life and so I loved this. But not just for the music aspect. The overall point is that fans remember risk and if you ask me, Marvel doesn't take risks in their movies just like they don't in their scores. Also, I always loved Danny Elfman, but I love him even more after this video.
If you recall a month ago on the CBMFP, Steve and I talked about some DC and Marvel formal wear suits that were coming from Fun.com. Well, they're available for pre-order now, and we'll likely revisit this on the podcast, but in the meantime, you can check them all out here. There're some images below along with my initial thoughts on a few of them. My initial thoughts are that the "secret identity" suits are way better than the... non-secret identity suits. You can tell them apart because one looks like a suit and the other looks like cosplay... but still a suit. They're strange and hey I'm sure someone will buy them, and I'm not knocking that. My personal taste is that I liked the "secret identity" suits because they were subtle. That's what made them cool. Every comic book shirt, jacket or merchandising product, in general, is flashy. Too flashy. It's why I shy away from it because it says "tacky" more than it does "comic fan."
Here's what I'm mean.
And it's not just a Marvel suit problem in case you were wondering.
There are two authentic DC suits as well. One for the Joker and the other for the Riddler. I'm not a fan of that version of the Joker, so I have no interest there, but it does come with the overcoat. The Riddler one is almost cool enough to get away with wearing it regularly, but I can see assholes walking up to you and making bad puns all night long or worse, asking you things that aren't technically riddles which would annoy me.
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There is a catch... you have to know your suit size already. Meaning if this is your first suit, don't do it. You'll end up with a mess on your hand. That and any suit needs to be tailored to you to make you look good. Those guys in the pictures didn't just walk in the morning of the photo suit and pick out their size and go to it. No, they had that tailored to them. That's not a bad thing, but it's something you want to consider. The prices are pretty reasonable, so I have no complaint there. It's in line with the suits I've had to purchase, but I live in L.A. Someone that buys a lot of suits in another state could be shitting a brick right now, but I kind of doubt it.
Bottomline for me, I still want that subtle Joker suit. I would love to think that I'm capable of rocking the Justice League suit, but light colors on me will make me look like Kimdotcom, and I do not want that comparison made in the real world. There are kids suits, but that's like throwing money into a toilet in my opinion. "Oh hey Juan, you want to wear your Iron Man suit today? No? Yeah, fuck me for spending $200 on your ass." Or something like that.
Now more pictures:
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We're not done playing Pokemon Go! We'll start there. Thankfully there's not a lot of news this week because we have a lengthy episode for you. What news we do cover ranges from TV in the form of Powers and it's future on the Playstation Network and Fun.com's superhero inspired suits. You read that right. Before we dive into a lengthy discussion about The Vision from Marvel Comics and Tomboy from Action Lab/Danger Zone, we have a question from Patrick about our favorite Frank Miller panel/moment. Books reviewed on this episode:
It's the week after Comic-Con! You'd think there wouldn't be any news, but then Superman was revealed on Supergirl! That's not the only movie news... since that's primarily what we have to cover. Marvel Studios clarifies the next two Avengers films, while Captain Boomerang is tripping shrooms. On a completely non-comic related story, Luc Besson is found guilt of plagiarizing John Carpenter?! And on the actual comic side of things Marvel's Prostate Cancer Awareness Variants aren't all they're cracked up to be. Books reviewed on this episode:
International Comic Con is coming and so we have a new titles and new deals to talk about starting with BOOM! Studios snagging the WWE comics license. After that we run through the two new iron people and the controversy surrounding that. Then it's on to Champions with Mark Waid, US Avengers and Squirrel Girl, The Great Lake Avengers returning again and The Unworthy Thor. That's not all though, there's a new Justice League animation possibly in the works, find out what the guys think about that.