Amazing Spider-Man Progress Update

Earlier this year I made it a goal to read every Amazing Spider-Man comic in existence.

So far, progress has been slow, I have to admit.

One question that comes to mind: Am I missing a lot reading these in black and white instead of color?

The Marvel Essential volumes (and DC Showcase, for that matter) were a great idea. WERE. Because, let's be serious, the story of Amazing Fantasy 15 is not worth the price. Neither are the first 55 issues or so with a couple exceptions, take my word for it on this one.

Something you notice about these early issues, a lot of this going on:

For some reason, it’s almost like they didn’t have comic books quite figured out yet. The words and the pictures, instead of complimenting each other, basically said the same stuff. You see Spider-Man webbing up the pin, AND he makes sure to remind us in the text as well. Not the most egregious comic book problem of all time, but it does make it clear (to me, at least) that they’re being written and drawn by separate people here.

There’s also a lot of this:

Okay, thanks for explaining the plan in detail. I did see a man with metal extend-y arms trashing the whole scene, but if I hadn’t known about the bulletproof glass and whatnot, I would have had an awful lot of questions about the realism of this scene, buddy.

Anyway, as someone who is far more a reader of comics than a collector, I was super-pumped when Marvel started putting out the Essential volumes in the mid 90’s. Finally I'd be able to read all those early stories without paying big bucks. Comics were no longer for those rich fucks who could afford to pay a couple million for a goddamn baseball every so often. That aspect of it was excellent, and well thought out if you ask me. The price to page ratio was pretty good for the time too. Long live the commie comic revolution.

Buuut, part of the issue is that I had never actually read these stories in color, so I never knew what I was missing. Potentially, I won't find out until issue 210, which according to my calculations, is when the essential volumes run out and I'll be in somewhat of a desert for most of the 200's. But comparing the color to the grayscale version of the same panels, you can see there’s something lost in the translation here.

The whole Essential thing, for me, is less a choice than a lack of options. There’s always the Marvel Omnibus, which is great except that it currently goes up to Amazing #38, about twenty issues behind where I’m at. That Marvel is always one step ahead/behind.

Progress is slow, but steady. And, breakthrough, I've given up on my self-image enough to read these volumes in the break room at work and the local Starbucks. Should help progress some.

I haven’t quit yet. With great power comes great responsibility. As any good rule, the converse is also true, and so in my case, with No power comes No responsibility, and therefore plenty of time to read comics.

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Plus, I got this rad patch which I will sew to my motorcycle jacket as soon as I finish. A Nerd merit badge, if you will. It's only a matter of time before my toughness is recognized and I am courted by any number of motorcycle gangs.

If that’s not motivation, pointing out to the world that I devoted a shitload of time to reading muddy-paged reprints of comics where the Scorpion looks like he’s wielding a giant dildo that was attached to his back for some reason, I don’t know what is.

Savage Dragon Archives vol. 1

In the last couple days I read through Savage Dragon Archives volume 1, which is published in the same basic format as the Marvel Essentials: black and white, cheap-ass paper, and a little lower quality printing. Granted, Savage Dragon was a little nicer than the Essential volumes. I shit you not, take a thumb and rub it on an inky panel of an Essential volume. That shit'll smear worse than a brand new sneaker on a blind guy walking into a dog park. But it had the same problems, maybe even more so by my accounting.

So for those who don't know, Savage Dragons is a guy who wakes up in Chicago with no idea who he is, who he was, or why he is a dragon man with immeasurable strength. He's not the only abnormality in the world, and the police force is losing the battle to the "freaks" that have started showing up. Through a chain of events, Dragon is convinced to become Officer Dragon and start fighting every man with a claw for a head or a leg for a head that comes along.

I think the thing that really appeals to me about the story, and about the way its told, is that they don't spend a lot of time fucking around with the details. Instead, this is a comic created in a world that is aware of comics. It feels almost like the writer/artist, Erik Larsen, is saying, "Look, you've got Wolverine, Nick Fury, tough guy with mysterious past. Got it? Good, let's go." The whole thing is very antithetical to John Byrne's Next Men, which felt like eight issues of origin. I'm sure that's some people's cup of tea, but some people also put cream in their tea which is gross and wrong. Don't make milk hot, people. Don't do it. You'll hate yourself later for it, I guarantee.

Another noticeable...feature of Savage Dragon is that a number of the characters wear outfits that are pretty damn revealing. The standard female crime-fighting togs of the time appear to be something along the lines of a woman's one-piece bathing suit, low cut in the front, thong in the back.

This is by no means a big shocker in comics. I'm sure we can all agree on that. And the classic excuse offered by one character, something along the lines of the outfit serving as a distraction and an advantage, isn't terribly new either. What is different is that we actually see a pretty good number of men in suggestive poses and outfits as well. Not as many as the women, but the ratio is closer than you'll get from a Power Girl/Superman team-up wherein Superman is fully -clothed and Power Girl has for some reason decided to show all of her legs, plus cut a hole for her breasts to pop out of. All these years crime-fighting and not one titty pops out? I've seen it happen on a goddamn water slide, and that can't be nearly as bad as being shot with some kind of ray. To digress even further, I heard that Victoria's Secret only goes up to a certain size. I don't remember which exactly because I have absolutely no earthly reason to, but I do remember it being fairly small. This seems wrong to me as someone who is staring down the barrel of FFF's probably needs some real care and love put into bra-making. So fuck you, Victoria's Secret. You've been propagating lies for years, and now you're not even helping the people who need you most.

Ahem.

At any rate, readers of Dragon are treated to a smorgasbord of male semi-nudity, including the character Barbaric who has a sort of Sumo thong situation going on in back. We get a pretty explicit crotch shot of good ol' Super Patriot, and it appears that 1 out of every 10 freak males, good or bad, wears a shirt. Shirtlessness and hairy chests are the name of the game in this book, and I have to say that with outsized arms and shoulders tapering down to tiny waists, the male depictions are as distorted as the female.

The weird thing is that the equality of nudity only seems to make it MORE noticeable. It brings up the bigger issue, I'd say: Why do women in comics always look like pin-ups?

Okay, I know there are tons of examples of women who don't. But I'm not talking about Aunt May, Aunt Anna, or anybody's aunt anything here. We all know the prototypical female form in comics, but why is it that way?

I have some completely unresearched theories I'd like to share.

1. The less detail you have to devote to characters, the more iconic they have to be, the more you have to rely on visual stereotype clues to make everything easily identifiable. What are the visual body signatures that say "female" immediately, without a second glance? Hourglass, eyes, lips. Keep in mind, we don't see anyone move, we don't hear them talk, so there's no real way to know if a character is male or female without some kind of visual clue. Even the character Horridus from Savage Dragon wears a bra, which seems silly considering that there's no real reason for her to have breasts of any fashion if the rest of her is made entirely of spikes.

As an experiment, try looking at the faces, just the faces, in a lot of books. They're fairly androgynous a lot of the time, hard to tell them apart without hair and bodies attached.

Or, take as an example, what comes out of trying to do a female version of the Thing from Fantastic Four. Look at this. How is anyone supposed to know whether this character is female? Well, without the hair, face, or general body shape, they give it the bosom of a babushka. Not pretty, but we have to know somehow.

2. Boys read comics.

We all know that. I don't think that boys are necessarily writing emails and letters demanding to see a little more skin, but since when has the comic book industry ever listened to the quiet majority of comic book readers who really don't mind some ugmos thrown in for good measure? So it's kind of an industry thing that nobody really needs, but people are a little afraid to do away with all together.

3. Why the fuck not? Seriously, why the fuck not?

Look at TV. So many TV shows are cast with characters who are much prettier than we are in real life. Friends was a show about the 6...five-ish most attractive people on television at the time, and they all live in the same building somehow. For all his faults, George on Seinfeld must have dated more attractive women than any bald, middle-aged, doughy, neurotic, jobless fool on the planet. Even the Office, which is about as close as it gets to real, is probably hotter than your office. If your office is hotter, please let me know where you work and which positions are most likely to open up in the next 1 to 1,000 weeks.

The downside, we all know, is that sometimes you have to trade a little acting skill for hotness. Not to keep picking on the Fantastic Four movies time and again, but never has a better looking cast disappointed me so thoroughly. I would have settled for someone who looked less like Ben Grimm yet made me believe something he said now and then. And Jessica Alba? I don't even buy her in surfing movies, which is pretty much her real life as far as I can tell.

The difference in comics, however, is that you can make any character, with any traits, look exactly how you want. If you want to make a scientist who looks like your favorite centerfold, you can. Just throw some glasses on her and a labcoat, boom, scientist. And in comics, she IS a scientist. There's no believability curve like watching Franco be scientific with his gorgeous hair. It's all what you made up, so why not make everyone hot?

Mark my words: The first human-looking robot, the one that actually looks like a human, will be made to look beautiful. It's just how things work.

Now to some extent you can argue that, if people can do whatever they want, why aren't they doing more interesting things? Why not a crazy port stain like Gorbachev now and then, or maybe a nose with different -sized nostrils, or a modestly-chested female character. Okay, no need to make freaks , but you get the idea.

There is some credence to that argument, but the clear water tells us that it's a revival of a different point. That's not about them being pin-ups or not, just about them not being very interesting.

Erik Larsen isn't a stranger to comics, and there's no doubt he knows exactly what he's doing. I'm sure there are a million theories out there about how Dragon, in particular, is about taking common comic book themes, visual and otherwise, and exploding them to a ridiculous size in order to point out the comic book-y ness of the whole affair.

I don't know if that's what he's doing or not, and I don't care. Because these are compulsively readable, and if he's poking fun at comics, he's doing it well enough that you can enjoy the stories and art without getting into that too much. If he's not, then I say good for him. This is a comic that does right something a lot of comics can't figure out. Reading these comics FEELS like reading comics, and I'm up for that any time.

Half Black, Half Latino, All Spider

The big talk in the world of comics is that there's a new Spider-Man. And he's non-white.

In fact, he's half Latino, half black, so he's about as non-white as a person gets in comics.

There are a lot of times, in comics, when these sorts of changes are made for the sake of "changing things up." I really hate that phrase, "changing things up." How does making a character gay, for example, really change things up when the primary context I see him in is flying to other galaxies and punching aliens in the head(s)? Not to seem uninterested, but when the dude gets back home and is sitting on the shitter, flipping through a magazine, I don't particularly care whether that magazine is Playboy or Playgirl. Or King, for that matter.

My basic question: Are there stories you want to tell that require this kind of change, or is the change being made in hopes that the change itself will bring about stories? Because changing something like a character's race in hopes of bringing about stories....well, what kind of story would YOU categorize as "Half-Latino, Half-Black" stories?

I'm going to admit up front that I'm not the most racially sensitive person. When trying to type "latino" I keep typing "lotion" over and over again, if that's any indication. But I do think it's great to give room to characters of different races, and it can have a positive effect on the world.

As a young man, I had a fairly racially-charged experience with Spawn comics. For those of you who aren't familiar, Spawn is about a guy who gets killed, goes to hell, comes back with powers and lives like a bum while also occasionally fighting an obese clown. His whole face and body are covered by burns, so he is unrecognizable and wears a mask most of the time. Also, his name is Al, which might win the award for most underwhelming superhero name, especially as Married With Children was in heavy syndication at the time, so it was hard not to make a comparison.

I got a collection of the first few issues one Christmas morning, and I sat down and read the whole thing twice in a row. It wasn't until the second time through that I finally understood a scene that was bothering me.

Al decides that he wants to go and visit his wife, who's still alive and lives nearby. He uses some of his satanic power to make himself look normal, and the result is here on the left. Not bad, I thought. You could do worse than a ripped dude with the hair of Ghostbusters' Egon Spangler. Al, however, was not pleased with the new look, and it wasn't until the second time through that I realized it was because Al, before he died, was black.

And in my little, white, suburban heart, I had to accept that I felt...disappointed.

In retrospect, I feel okay about it and understand my young self. I don't think the disappointment was in the fact that he was black. It was that he wasn't like me, and as a kid it was important to me that I identify with characters, and the best ways I'd found to do it at that point were superficial. It's not uncommon. Babies like to look at picture books with photos of babies. White kids end up with white dolls.

But at the time, I felt disappointed when I found out the character was black, then kind of sad because I didn't think it should matter, but it did to me. On college admissions essays, I would always say I was an early reader, an early writer, and an extremely early adopter of white guilt.

Thus ended Pete's Christmas Racial Symposium of 1995.

The whole experience was kind of great. It was an early time for me to face my own racial beliefs that I didn't even know existed. And if it weren't for comics, I never would have confronted them. My elementary had somewhere in the neighborhood of .8 black kids in it. My high school had maybe 3. So this is not something th=at would have cropped up until way later if it weren't for that comic where an ice cream man is killed and chained up and stabbed with popsicle sticks.

The lesson was that white is not necessarily the default.

Which brings us back to Spider-Man, and this quote from an Italian artist who helped with some design work on the new Spider-Man:

"Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal."

That I agree with.

But there's a really big difference between what they are doing with Spider-Man and what happened with Spawn.

Al, Spawn, was a black man. He was always a black man, and continued to be a black man (as much as is possible when 90% of your skin is burned off, I guess).

Spider-Man was white, and now is not.

The difference is, when you change a character from one thing to another, you can't expect people not to notice and to pretend that is doesn't matter. Because it does. Obviously it does, because otherwise you wouldn't have done it. To use a parallel example, a man being gay isn't a newsflash, but if you knew a man for forty years who was living a straight lifestyle, wife and kids and all that, and then one day he announced he was gay, you would still be his friend, but I think both parties would be surprised if you acknowledged the new information and then moved on immediately without talking about it. It's even more confusing with race because in real life you can't really change your race. Lord knows I've tried. They've got that scholarship money locked up tight, I'll tell you what.

The other thing is that people don't like character changes in comics regardless of who the new character is. Green Lantern has reverted ALL the way back. The Flash has been 40 different guys, but somehow the old ones keep coming back. As someone smarter than me pointed out, Peter Parker was once replaced by his EXACT CLONE and people were outraged. I suspect that the race is far less an issue than the replacement of a known character.

The story here, in my mind, isn't that Spider-Man is half black, half Latino. It's that he BECAME half-black, half-latino. Maybe this will be a good thing, and maybe some kid will see that picture of him lifting the mask and it will improve his life in the long run, although in the short run it kind of ruins his 1995 Christmas. But in my personal opinion, this doesn't really open the door to new Spider-Man-centric storylines of interest, and though it remains to be seen whether the stories are great or not, I'm skeptical, as always when it comes to change for change's sake.

And finally, I'm sure that nobody should be offended by this change, but I don't know what is really empowering about it. These sort of changes, changing a character from white to black, straight to gay, man to woman or whatever change that's made with no real thought other than change itself doesn't really acknowledge the true, deep-seated cultural differences beyond a tip of the cap.

A Drifitng Life, Reviewed by Pete the Friendly Jingo

Holy lord, that bastard was long. I mean long. I mean like [Apatow joke] long.

This epic graphic novel follows the life of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, from a young manga fan to a writer to, apparently, a manga master.

I don't know much about manga, so don't take my ignorance here as a slam on ol' Yoshi.

The best parts were the stories from his personal life, and the small details about living in post WWII Japan were interesting. For example, it was years after the war before Japanese citizens were allowed to drink Coca-Cola. It was all saved for the occupiers, I guess. Ah, freedom.

I do have to say, based on a few incidents in this book, Japanese teens of the 50's and 60's were grossly uneducated about sex. At one point, Yoshi is gettin' bizay with a young lady, and she asks him what that hard thing is. Not in a, "Is that a hard cock in your pocket or are you just happy to have someone touch the hard cock in your pocket" kind of way. In a way where you realize, holy shit, this teen doesn't even know that a penis gets hard at some point along the way. If she saw a boner in a boy's pants, she would assume that it was...well, I don't know what she would assume. It does make me wonder if Japanese underpants are different, and if they may be better designed for the suppression of teenage boners. Or maybe they're just too busy studying all the time. But too busy to know that a boner is a thing? I just don't know about that.

On the flipside, most chapters start with little historical bits that don't really mean a lot to me, what was going on culturally, especially pop-culturally, in Japan at the time. The big movies, the big songs, and so on.

Here is where the review borders on culturally insensitive. Brace yourselves.

I had a hell of a time connecting to these parts because they all read like this to me:

[Japanese name] came out with [bizarre magazine name] which revolutionized manga with its [Japanese word] style.

I shit you not, there must be a couple hundred different Japanese names in this book, and being only a seven-year student of Japanese, wink, I had a hell of a time keeping them straight, and eventually I just skipped them over if I had a sense that the characters weren't sticking around long. It would be like a Japanese person reading an American book, and the names were Joe, Joey, Joseph, Jake, John, James, Jamie, and any other bullshit name you can think of with a J in it.

Johnny.

On the plus, this almost seems like a book made for Western audiences, by which I mean the boys look like boys, the girls look like girls, and the characters look different from each other. It's super not okay to say that all people of a certain type look the same, but I think it's okay to say something like, "All the men Frank Quitely DRAWS look the same," and it's honestly a problem I have with a lot of Japanese comics. But this one, between its differentiated characters (Flop of Hair in Front Guy, Beret Man, Glasses Dude) left-to-right style, and fairly consistent layout is a breezy read for most comic folks.

The art is tidy and well-expressed, and there's a definite impressive quality to the simplicity of the drawings that is worth a looksie. Outside of that, I can't honestly think of much reason to read this unless you're a fan of the man or really interested in the history of manga, but a history ending thirty years ago.