Comic Book Echoes

I don't know for sure but I'm going to guess that in the age brackets of F:AT I inhabit the older end of the spectrum so the following reference goes back a ways.

This morning I was thinking of something I saw for the first time well over 35 years ago. Specifically I am referring to the "Night Gwen Stacy Died" story arc in Amazing Spider-man 121-122, published in 1973.



Why was I thinking of this? I don't really know. But then I got to thinking about why I was thinking about it. That a bit of pop culture from what was at the time considered a low grade throw away medium should still inhabit a corner of my mind over 3 and a half decades later is pretty impressive.

I guess one of the reason it was so powerful is that it took brass balls to make that story. Gwen Stacy had been Peter Parker's love interest for almost 7 or 8 years. To kill her off really was a bold decision to take. I don't know that it the world of modern comics, not counting self contained graphic novels or alternate universe things, that this would be possible. Such an unalterable change in the life of one the most important super heroes just doesn't seem to happen without escape clauses or "reboots" built in.

The story itself is probably the other reason it stays with me. The horrible, bitter, terrible irony that it was Spider-man himself that deals the death blow to Gwen when attempting to stop her fall with his webbing and ends up snapping her neck. As the story goes that was inspired, perfect, AWESOME.

The message: No matter what your intentions, no matter how hard you try, sometimes Evil is going to win. Despite that, you carry on and still do what you believe in.

What comics have stuck with you?

The Dark Knight Returns was probably the book that stuck with me. I grew up in a small town with few comic readers, so I was always exploring and finding things on my own. I was only eight when this came out and didn't buy comics then. I found a beat up trade paperback of it for $5 and thought it looked cool.

I was probably 13 or 14 at the time. I devoured the book and loved it. At the time, it seemed like a realistic superhero story and I had never seen such a thing (Watchmen was still lying in wait for me). I absolutely loved the Batman versus Superman portion of the book, but everything else was great too. Completely psychotic Joker, check; Batman barely surviving his encounters, check; and the list goes on and on.

I must have read that book four or five more times over the next couple of months. I also passed it along to anyone who would read it and helped other people discover the awesome story.

The other story that sticks with me is Preacher. This is difficult, because it is not any one storyline, but the book as a whole opened my eyes to non-superhero comics. I found issue number two and bought it because the price guide said it was worth $10 (I only paid 50 cents), but when I read it, I was fascinated by the violence, cursing and adult material. I bought the first trade to catch up and became a regular reader for the rest of the series.

It's hard for me to pick out a single comic and say that it had an especially powerful impact upon me. I started reading comics around the time I started reading. My mom was really into comics when she was a kid, and she thought comics might motivate me to start reading early. New comics were cheap and very accessible to kids back then, at 20 cents an issue at grocery stores and drug stores everywhere. You could buy used comics for even less at a garage sale, and kids were always trading comics.

No one issue really stood out, but the cool thing was that comics seemed to be growing up with me. I missed the death of Gwen Stacy at the time, but I bought issues around that time period and understood what happened. Maybe two years later, Swordsman died and the Avengers finally earned their name. The brief Deathlok run in Astonishing Tales was inventing the cyberpunk genre. A year or two later, I vividly remember Jake Fury (aka Scorpio) committing suicide while listening to his favorite song. In college, I was dazzled by Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, but also a whole slew of independent comics from First, Comico, and Eclipse. Elementals in particular was about a decade or two ahead of its time. After college, Vertigo came at just the right time, though I was already reading some of those titles before they got the Vertigo label.

Then something went wrong in the '90s. A whole bunch of creators and even fans misunderstood DKR and Watchmen, and the industry lurched in the wrong direction. The artwork got sloppy and amateurish, and much of the writing became downright stupid. Grim, gritty and meaningless. I decided that I had outgrown comics at last and moved on to other pursuits, like playing CCGs and chasing women like there was no tomorrow.

In 2000, one of the guys in my rpg group discovered that I still had a sizeable comic collection, but that I wasn't buying anymore. He loaned me a stack of great comics: some Planetary, some Top Ten, some Busiek/Perez Avengers. The only stuff I didn't enjoy was the Luther Arkwright stuff, which seemed like a pointless ripoff of various Moorcock stories.

For several years after, I was happily buying plenty of comics again. But when the price hit $4, that felt like too damn much, and the quality seemed to slip again. Not as bad as the '90s, just not good enough for $4 an issue. At the moment, I'm buying nothing. DC's big reboot seems like a convenient stopping point, though I will probably go back and pick up trades of the better stuff later. Marvel seems to have dumbed down most of their line to two monolithic concepts: the Avengers and the X-Men. That wouldn't be so bad, but they keep putting the wrong writers on these titles. Guys like Bendis and Fraction should be writing street-level solo titles, not team books with high-end powerhouses and cosmic threats. And the big, stupid, expensive crossover events that have come to dominate both DC and Marvel just disgust me.

So for the last several months, the only comics that I have been reading are trade hardcovers and paperbacks from the awesome local library. They have several tall bookcases filled with them. Hilariously, most of the mainstream Marvel stuff tends to be in the teenager section of the library, while most of the DC and indie stuff is in the adult section of the library.

Kraven the Hunter's suicide in the late 80s Spiderman books was the one that still sticks with me. (Also was the first indication to me any time William Blake's poetry shows up in something I'm reading, whatever is about to happen, it's gonna be in the "nothing good" category.) Marvel built its brand on that sort of "superheros with feet of clay" worldview--Tony Stark's alcoholism, just about every later mutant title, etc.--but suicide, particularly of a long-running [if not exactly A-list] character, was pretty extreme. I still think Kraven's breakdown over that arc was one of the better written Marvel books of the era.

Dogmatix wrote: Kraven the Hunter's suicide in the late 80s Spiderman books was the one that still sticks with me. (Also was the first indication to me any time William Blake's poetry shows up in something I'm reading, whatever is about to happen, it's gonna be in the "nothing good" category.) Marvel built its brand on that sort of "superheros with feet of clay" worldview--Tony Stark's alcoholism, just about every later mutant title, etc.--but suicide, particularly of a long-running [if not exactly A-list] character, was pretty extreme. I still think Kraven's breakdown over that arc was one of the better written Marvel books of the era.

I remember that Kraven storyline. I thought it was great, and yet I somehow had a feeling that I was done with Spider-man after that. I have never bought another Spider-man comic since, though I still like the character. It was probably the right decision for me, because there has been so much garbage since then: the Clone Saga, the MacFarlane run, Sins Past, One More Day, etc.

The Kraven story was a biggie. I wasn't reading Spider-man at the time, but picked up that run for some reason.

Biggest impact for me as a little kid would have been the Phoenix/Jean grey death ("SHE'S STILL DEAD TO ME DAMMIT!"). I (and everyone else?) was a big X-Men fan at the time - the Claremont/Byrne X-men comics were the first I ever collected, ie. looked for the next issue every time we went to the drug store. Yeah, the whole hokey "they were young, they were in love, etc." made a pretty big impact at 8.

The superhero comic that made by far the biggest impact on me as a kid was Amazing Fantasy #15, much moreso than any of the other silver age Marvel comics. People talk about Catholic guilt; I've got Spider-Man guilt. It instilled in me this feeling that, despite life being full of all kinds of shitty random things that happen to you that you can't prevent, you can't just throw up your arms and give up, or you'll be responsible for that shittiness. I fucking IDOLIZED Spider-Man as a kid. I think it made me a little neurotic, completely seriously. I'd say it had the biggest impact of any comic I read as a kid, but I think the EC horror comics almost single-handedly made me fall in love with horror, especially reading them (as well as the Spider-Man comics) at the wholly inappropriate age of 4 years old.

As a teenager, Bone and Preacher were the keys to getting me excited about comics, but Jimmy Corrigan ended up being the key to rewiring my teenage brain to become a better person, and it remains my favorite book.

I was in High School when I lost the woman I loved. Never got over it.