Last time, I posted the wrong cover to the issue of Starburst I bought when Dr. Who Weekly came out. I had forgotten about Gandahar; IMDB indicates it took nearly another decade to reach the screen and it features a character called Ambisextra because, well, France. Nevertheless, you can see everything on this cover spoke to me.
I just finished the Big Finish re-imagining of Space:1999 yesterday, walking to Lossiemouth but there are a number of graphic novels from the summer I haven't yet reviewed, although I had planned to. The closure of Forbidden Planet in Aberdeen yielded some cheap hardbacks featuring artists I'm really interested in: Ditko, Kirby... but today's post is about a Marvel hardback from Plan 9, near His Majesty's Theatre, which I bought at the beginning of June.
At midnight, the hippies cried! WHY?!
My earliest memories of Gil Kane are from DC comics: there was something unsettling about his tormented, sinewy heroes, their eyes brimming with globular tears. His first Conan fill-in was my official introduction to the character and propelled me into a lifelong interest in sword-and-sorcery comics and books. The Hachette collected edition of Captain Marvel features Kane's late Silver Age collaboration with Roy Thomas on Marvel's Space-Born Super-Hero.
I first encountered the Kree Captain in one of his Arnold Drake/ Don Heck stories, in a colour album of reprints. His corny space uniform and pompous space rhetoric didn't really grab me. I didn't see any of his first Thomas/Colan exploits and didn't make any connections with stodgy Adam Strange for many years.
Nor had I any idea about Fawcett's Captain Marvel and his magic word "Shazam". As a teenager in the mid-to-late Seventies, I sampled the campy revival by O'Neil, Schaffenberger and others, but I certainly wasn't aware, as a child, that Thomas and Kane's version of Mar-Vell was an homage to the Big Red Cheese.
Some of Kane's heroes look a bit like him: Gullivar Jones, Rex from Star Hawks and Talus of the Wilderness Sea. But in his first new adventure, Mar-Vell is a dead ringer for Eli Katz. Of course, the new costume debuted in a Heck story, but it takes Kane to breathe dynamism and vigour into the hero.
The story ties into the Red Skull's contemporary body-swap with Cap, nicely mirroring the fate of Rick Jones, whose masquerade as Bucky from the Steranko trilogy ends here. (There's more Bucky to come, though - Kane drew the story of the first Bucky android in the spring of 1967 and another came along in late 1970).
A rejected, dejected Rick treks through a twisted apocalyptic Kane landscape to the Kree cave where he finds the Nega-Bands and swaps spaces with Mar-Vell in the Negative Zome. With its ever-changing panel designs and monologues ( Mar-Vell's skirmishes with Aakon, Skrulls and the Carnivorgs of Betelguese are referenced), the story is fast-moving and philosophical.
The next issue is driven by two elements: the new symbiotic bond of Rick and Mar-Vell and the Kree Captain's revenge on Yon-Rogg, his superior officer whose madness led to the death of romantic interest Una.
Issue 18 is a hybrid, art-wide, with 11 pages by Kane and 9 by John Buscema. The 17-year-old Rick Jones, dressed like Dean in rebel is scouted by a WC Fields promoter in a beatnik bar and performs a moody blues like bob Dylan some six years earlier. Thomas was usually good with pop culture but this feels like a Haney or Kanigher script with Kerouac-style hepcats.
Meanwhile, Thomas's supporting character Carol Danvers is being held captive by Yon-Rogg, who uses more abandoned Kree technology to manifest a Mandroid. This isn't the armoured operative from the later Avengers but a kind of robot-golem like Durok the Demolisher in Thor.
Yon-Rogg is killed off-panel, we presume, in a cave-in and Mar-Vell, having vanquished the Mandroid and rescued Carol, ponders his three-hour limit outside the Neg Zone. This vulnerability is reminiscent of Aquaman.
Kane is back for the third installment- and this is where I came in, aged about six. I recall this one was bought in East Kilbride, maybe at Bullochs in the town centre. It feels more like a Kane human interest story than a Thomas pastiche of the Golden Age. Rick finds an apartment in the futuristic Minos Towers, But this tenement utopia is secretly a giant experiment, run by Mr. Webb. who is a fugitive Nazi. This is the first ever-story I read anywhere with a concentration camp theme and its echoes of Auschwitz precede Magneto's origins by more than a decade. It features a disturbing ending of death and madness. Needless to say, as a six-year-old, I wasn't keen.
Despite the inversion of Superman's colours, I still wasn't wild about Marv. In these first three issues, the Captain only exhibits flying powers and super-strength of a level around Spider-Man, I think. He certainly seems to struggle with collapsing buildings and speeding cars. But Rick's beatnik characterisation outshines him.
Six months would elapse before the next issue, in 1970. In a future post, we'll continue our look at this collection; examine how Carol Danvers has adopted some of Mar-Vell's plot elements this year; look at what might have befallen Mar-Vell had Starlin not taken over a two-time failure; and discover which Silver Age DC hero I think Kane should've drawn in the Bronze Age.
Also coming this autumn: Star Trek/X-Men and the Green Lantern.
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