Animation Dracula, as depicted by Ron Lim , has a stiffness and fussiness of design that recalls action figures but his dominance over females is still in evidence, as the Black Widow ( the Black Widow!) swoons at his command.
Damsels were also in distress forty years ago, in the 1978 (Mighty World of) Marvel Annual- in at least one extra-sized story. I assume this book went on sale in the autumn of 1977. Although I received the previous year's MWOM annual at Xmas, I didn't get it that December- or the Dr. Who or Star Trek annuals for that year, either. So I bought it last month.
The stories featured in the annual reflect some semi-regular features in the weekly comic although the first was previously printed in early 1976, if I recall correctly. And a Child Shall Lead You serves as a re-launch for the Kree Captain Marvel. At that time, the character subsequently known as Shazam hadn't yet been revived by DC and certainly, in the late 60s, I had no idea this was a riff on Billy Batson and the Big Red Cheese; I hadn't heard of either.
Gil Kane experiments with panel layout and storytelling here: I wonder if Steranko and Neal Adams were influences? I'm reminded of Kane's Blackmark graphic novels and Mar-Vell becomes one of Gil's lithe, suffering athletes, with staring eyes and flaring nostrils. Rick Jones serves as the human POV in the story, something of an antidote to the alien hand-wringing that made the 60s Silver Surfer a repetitive read.
Paste Your Head , as Grace Slick almost sang
Mar-Vell's quest for vengeance ended shortly afterward, leaving the hero rudderless for some years until Starlin riffed on the New Gods. This annual reprints the original artwork for the Metamorphosis cover, sans the pasted head.
The other feature was more interesting to me: the one and only Luke Cage, Power Man annual from 1976. As I said last time, the UK annuals were often a rare opportunity to read stories from US annuals or giants.
Earthshock by Chris Claremont and veteran Lee Elias is a sequel to To Sow The Seeds of Death's Day from the Spider-Man Annual for 1977. The Punisher, quite a new character, has his name dropped a couple of times in this story.
Cage is hired by wealthy Amanda Sheridan to protect her daughter Samantha from Moses Magnum, now calling himself Magnum Force ( ugh!). The story is largely set in Japan and its own sequel will appear in X-men- the story that wrote out Banshee for many years. It takes 13 pages to clarify that Samantha is a geologist, after a long infodump by her grandmother. It's very Tell, Not Show.
Not only is the storytelling ,setting and the Bondian scope of the villain typical of Claremont: "futuristic commandos" claim their combat skills surpass those of "the dragon son of K'un Lun, Iron Fist", foreshadowing the future partnership by the two heroes. It's not clear how they know about the Living Weapon at all, given his decade of seclusion.
More interestingly, the commandos are employed by a mysterious Council to terminate Samantha before Magnum can get her to work on his laser-drill project. Centurion- and by extension Raven Darkholme in Ms, Marvel- worked for a Council and Steven Lang in X-Men was funded by the Council of the Chosen. I think we can assume Claremont had some grand, if vague, conspiracy in mind. Years and years later, the Council of the Chosen was retconned as the Hellfire Club. Their Homo Superior interests are only threatened in the same sense that the whole of Marvel-Earth is by Magnum's earthquake powers, so it's not a very elegant explanation. Of course, neither is Magnum gaining super-powers from the mutant dictator Apocalypse in the aftermath of this story. it shouldn't surprise, though: Magnum's on-screen melting to death from G-S Spidey was retconned in PM Annual 1.
The climax of this adventure is straight out of the movie version of You Only Live Twice - but that, like Cage's surviving being thrown out of a plane and landing on a mountain- is the kind of madly melodramatic ordeal which made Claremont's stories so visceral, compared to Wein or Wolfman. His heroes and heroines faced incredible odds and disastrous scenarios with potentially massive loss of life and they did it with irony and a soupcon of literate sci-fi.
I really enjoyed this story, for all its period flaws. The muddy, gutsy cartooning of Mancunian-born Elias reminded me of people like Bob Brown or Frank Robbins, who never had the impact or respect of a Cockrum or Byrne.
There are now only a couple of 70s Marvel annuals left to plug the gaps in my collection- but they're a tale for next year, I think. The next post will be about another kind of annual altogether...
All images presumed copyright of the original owners
No comments:
Post a Comment