Marvel Unbound - The Mighty Avengers: Assemble

I pick up trade paperbacks of comics I read back in the day all the time. I have no qualms about spending my time and/or money on books that collect story arcs that I remember fondly from the early to mid-’80s. But when it comes to more current runs of comic books, I tend to buy collected editions of material I haven’t read previously in single issue format. The oversized hardcover of Brian Michael Bendis’ The Mighty Avengers: Assemble is an exception.

I love it when Marvel reprints material in the oversized format; the art just explodes off the page! And Assemble collects the first few story arcs from the first 11 issues of Mighty Avengers that bridge Civil War and Secret Invasion. But to say it only serves to fill a gap between two events does the book a disservice. The stories further reveal the complexities of the Marvel Universe and move the overall narrative forward.

I haven’t read these stories in a couple of years, not since I read them in single issues as they were released. At the time, I was just getting back into comics after twenty years away, and I remember picking up that first issue of Mighty Avengers and being completely disoriented as to what was going on in the Marvel Universe. I didn’t realize at the time that the Mighty book was the pro-registration team and that the New Avengers book was the anti-registration team.

Frank Cho and Mark Bagley’s artwork perfectly suits that notion of a slick, sanctioned team. (And Leinil Yu’s more gritty visuals fit the New Avengers renegades equally well in that title at the time.) Although I’m not particularly fond of Cho’s renderings of Janet Van Dyne/Wasp or Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow throughout issues #1 through 6, the images collected here are still gorgeous enough eye candy that I had Cho sign my copy of the book at Wizard World Chicago earlier this year.

Bagley’s work on the subsequent five issues weaves the pre-Secret Invasion buildup with the “Venom Bomb/Doom’s Castle” storylines. I talk at length in the chapter “Panel to Panel” of Deus ex Comica about Might Avengers #9. I love the magic Marko Djurdjevic and Bagley weave in that issue, and I had forgotten just how retro-awesome the follow-up issue is!

Bendis seems to be having a lot of fun with the dialog in this book. I remember laughing out loud reading some of the exchanges in issue #11 the first time around and again here. I also like the way Bendis portrays the frustration and conflict in Ms. Marvel after being appointed team leader by Tony Stark’s Iron Man/Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. then having her authority undermined by him around every turn.

I figured I would get more out of reading these collected issues this time around just by virtue of my fully and immediately grasping the context in which these stories originally took place. But on the flip-side, I wasn’t sure how this would read for me given the Secret Invasion knowledge I was bringing to the table. The six-part “Initiative” storyline works well, providing an “into the deep end” mission for this new team by way of the classic Avengers foe, Ultron. Bendis does a good job balancing his talking-head moments needed to setup the selection of the team with the action of an all-out battle by using out-of-sequence flashbacks. And the Secret Invasion setup in the second half of the book never gets in the way of just telling a fun adventure story.

I’ll be to preordering the second volume, designed to take the reader through the end of Bendis’ run on the title (and the point where I jumped off the book), scheduled for release later this winter. During Secret Invasion the Avengers titles were used for event backstory, so I’m curious how cohesive a collection this next book, covering issues #12-20, might be.

Although the dimensions of a Marvel Omnibus, these deluxe hardcovers don’t overdo the extras. Apart from some Cho character sketches and page art, and some Bagley cover art, the focus is firmly where it should be: on the stories themselves. The Mighty Avengers: Assemble is a great collection for the shelf and a fun read in the tradition of my old-school Avengers books.

And the World Will Be a Better Place...

See How the Black Moon Fades

How awesome is it to see Sinéad O’Connor perform “Mandinka” at the 1989 Grammy’s? She looks so awkward and out of place. The shocking incongruity of her shaved head and strikingly beautiful features. The ragged jeans and black boots paired with such a “no mistaking she’s a woman” top. And I love that she is clearly lip-syncing. Such a great moment in time captured here, before the SNL scandal, before her ordination, and all the other personal troubles and controversies. Just a woman and her music alone on the stage.

Tribute

To paraphrase Tenacious D, "This is not The Greatest Ad in the World, no. This is just a tribute."

Rise

I saw Public Image Ltd back in 1989 at Blossom Music Center when they toured with New Order and The Sugarcubes. Twenty years on and that show still holds a special place in my heart. I went to that show with John (in fact, I think I might still owe him money for the ticket), but virtually everyone from my future close college circle of friends and lovers attended that show, and then some.

I wouldn’t meet her for another six-and-a-half years, but my wife was there. While I was on the lawn, Tracy was in the mosh pit down front getting gobbed on by Johnny Lydon himself.

Some combination (or maybe all of) the people John and I would consider our closest circle of freshman year friends at Bowling Green just a few months later were there. I saw Erin wearing a PiL shirt during orientation, which prompted me to go up and talk to her. I’m pretty sure Jeff was at that show, and maybe Jennifer, too.

Marking the 30th anniversary of the landmark Metal Box, Lydon has reformed PiL, and I’ve been keeping tabs on the reissue and reunion news by way of Slicing Up Eyeballs. I doubt I’ll ever see Lydon or PiL live in Northeast Ohio again, but this pulsating seven-and-a-half minute live version of “Rise” from their first show in 17 years is enough to bring a nostalgic smile to my face.

I could be wrong. I could be right.

Catching Up on Music History

I met Simon Reynolds at the Pop Conference in Seattle back in 2007, where we were both presenters (on different panels). We ended up seated next to each other on the last day of the conference for the "Future of Thinking About Music for a Living" roundtable discussion. He was a pleasant enough guy and it was cool to meet him, but even with that personal connection and the fact that his book Rip It Up and Start Again is clearly right in my wheelhouse, I had not read the book before now.

Well, I take that back. After that roundtable, I recall having quite a bit of time to kill before my flight home that afternoon, so I wandered around downtown Seattle and found a bookstore to hole up in. While there, I read the chapter in Rip It Up on Pere Ubu and Devo and the Northeast Ohio influence on postpunk, along with perusing some of the 33 1/3 books that were written by some of my fellow panelists and others I’d met that weekend.

But this has been a fun year of filling embarrassingly huge holes in my personal music history knowledge. I finally got around to reading the incredible oral history of punk, Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. I also picked up I Swear I Was There: The Gig that Changed the World by David Nolan, another oral history that attempts to piece together who actually attended and the band genealogy that sprung out of the two Sex Pistol shows at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. And now, Rip It Up.

I can’t play a lick and Tracy would kill me if I attempted to carry a tune, but I love music. I love all kinds of music, but classic punk that bleeds into postpunk and alternative (what we called “college radio” back in the day) holds special sway over me from both a nostalgic perspective and an objective stance. There is a rich history to this branch of the rock and roll tree, and it’s great to have it chronicled so precisely. And Rip It Up is precise. If you’re looking for the loose and laid-back approach of Please Kill Me, this isn’t it.

Topically, Rip It Up is the perfect sequel to Please Kill Me. But Rip It Up takes a decidedly more academic, music journalistic bent in its approach, tone, and delivery. And this is not a complaint, because Reynolds is good at what he does. The book is a deep-dive into what punk begat, tracing the evolution from its beginnings with PiL rising from the fevered brain of Johnny Lydon after the dissolution of the Sex Pistols, spiraling out to synthpop, MTV, Goth, and beyond. Reynolds breaks things down chapter-by-chapter, with each one focusing on a specific sub-group or geographic location or set of similar artists within the larger postpunk movement.

2009 seems to have turned into The Year Adam Got Up-to-Speed on All the Music Reading Essentials He Previously Overlooked. If you’re digging on this topic, you should definitely check out Synth Britannia (in which Reynolds is the only non-musician talking head). And if you enjoyed 2002’s 24 Hour Party People, Anton Corbijn’s beautiful Ian Curtis biopic, Control, is a must see.

Marvel Unbound - Captain Britain Omnibus

I am a huge fan of the oversized collections comic book publishers produce, including DC’s Absolute Edition line, Marvel’s Omnibus series and their general oversized hardcovers, and Dark Horse’s Library Edition collections. There is a certain prestige to the format.

Whether you shop DCBS or conventions or even Amazon, there is really no reason to pay full cover price for one of these books. But if you’re going to publish a book in one of these formats and put a $100 price tag on it, I expect some care to be put into the final product. Marvel’s Captain Britain Omnibus has been a bit of a let down from a packaging perspective.

Of the material collected here, I don't think I'd previously read any of it, so it’s fair to say I didn’t bring any prior character knowledge to the table. From a content perspective, it’s great to have these stories collected and the window into the Marvel UK format is fascinating. Unfortunately, the presentation is marred by stripped-down credits and incorrect table of contents on the opening pages.

I have a fair number of omnibuses on my shelf, and to be fair, there are others besides the Captain Britain book that sport the boring opening page format (Devil Dinosaur and Secret Wars for starters), but the errors in the Captain Britain Omnibus compounds the problem. The original publishing date of Captain America #306, June 1985, is incorrectly cited as June 1986. This oversight is more glaring by the fact that Captain America #305 is also in this collection and the covers of both are reprinted here, so the correct date is easy to divine.

Also, there are introductions by Alan Davis and Alan Moore, both from 2001, then a character recap that is completely uncredited. As far as the actual reprinted content, I’m torn. The storylines are enjoyable and an interesting glimpse at Marvel’s early 1980s presence in Britain, but there are words missing from dialog boxes throughout... sometimes there is white space in a sentence where it’s obvious there was a printing error, and other places words were just plain left out of the original published material.

Maybe I’m making too big of a deal out of this, and maybe I’m overly sensitive to it for a number of reasons: First, I have edited a book and articles and have an eye for simple errors like these. So I know these things should be caught, and when they’re not it just feels sloppy. Also, I am a writer who has published my own book and agonized over finding the right price-point for it in the hopes that my readers feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth out of it and the value was inherent (including a lack of typos and the facts correct). Finally, I am a consumer who, although I didn’t pay cover price for the omnibus, spent my hard-earned money on it. And when there are issues like this from a book at this price from a company of Marvel’s stature, it’s disappointing and feels a little like they didn’t really care about the product they were putting out there. But the contents of the book are enough to recommend it.

The first half of the omnibus (23 issues of Marvel Super-Heroes and The Daredevils) weaves a wonderful story of alternate universes that affect one another and contains the first mention anywhere in Marvel comics of the Earth 616 designation. It’s pretty cool to see the way the story is handed off between Dave Thorpe and Paul Neary to Alan Moore to Jamie Delano. Threads are never left unresolved, each chapter in the story has meaning and future implications. The Marvel UK model of six- to ten-page stories per book are a study in efficient recaps, wasting not a moment beyond what is necessary to bring the reader up to speed.

The second half of the book, comprised of 25 issues of The Mighty World of Marvel and Captain Britain, along with a handful of US Marvel comics appearances (New Mutants and X-Men annuals, the previously mentioned Captain America issues), remains pretty consistent even when the writing duties jump around a bit.

I believe there is just one thing missing from the collection: There is a reference in Captain America #305 where Cap thinks, “That doesn’t look like the Captain Britain I’ve met before – ” and it references ROM #65. I know there are rights issues to the ROM property, so it makes sense that issue isn’t included.

The bonus material is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that befits an omnibus. Alan Davis’ character and costume designs, scripts, pin-ups and posters, back-up stories, all the covers of all the issues and previous collections that contained any of these stories, a Grant Morrison story and a Chris Claremont essay, and even reproductions of both covers offered for this omnibus are presented here.

Despite the nuts and bolts of the packaging falling well short of the expectations set by the collection’s label and price tag, the Captain Britain Omnibus is an incredibly entertaining read and can be recommended on the strength Marvel UK model it exhibits.