Review: Rom #10

"Warrior over Washington." Rom flies through the skies of Clairton, W.V., looking for his friends, Steve Jackson and Brandy Clark.  He finds them in jail, where they have been locked up over the death of police officer Artie Packer. Rom bursts into jail, analyzes the police, sees they are human, and takes Steve and Brandy away. Leaving Brandy in Steve's care, Rom heads to Washington, D.C. to find Project Safeguard and his neutralizer. He is detected on radar, and attacked by military jets. He defeats the jets, but when he lands to check out the wreckage, a Dire Wraith ship appears and captures him.  Meanwhile, back in Clairton, Steve Jackson leaves Brandy to visit the jail, where he turns out to be a wraith, and the real one is still in prison.

Review: Rom #9

"The Stalker in the Night." Rom is trapped deep underground, having fallen there last issue.  What he does not know is that he is in the lair of Serpentyne, the last surviving member of a lizard race.  Rom's circuitry continues to rebel from the touch of the Deathwing last issue, but slowly he recovers, and he summons forth his Energy Analyzer. He follows a trail of energy, and behind him comes Serpentyne, wishing to fight.  Eventually, Serpentyne catches up, and tells the story of his race, and their destruction at the hands of the wraiths. He is the only survivor. Vengeance must be his. So he attacks Rom, seeking to stop him from being the one to take out the wraiths. Rom and Serpentyne battle, and Serpentyne breaks off a stalagmite, seeking to run Rom through with it, but he trips, and the point breaks off and skewers him instead.  His madness passed, Serpentyne apologizes, and then dies. Rom heads off to continue looking for his Neutralizer.

Review: Rom 8

"Deathwing." Steve and Brandy mourn the loss of their friend, a police officer named Artie, as Rom looks on.  Steve rages against Rom, blaming him and once again entertaining doubts about the Wraiths, but Rom tells the story of another world destroyed by the Wraiths, and warns that this could be Earth's fate. Then with his Analyzer, Rom determines Artie is alive, so he departs, and Brandy and Steve let in the rest of her lab, so that Artie can be taken care of.  Rom uses his Analyzer to track Wraiths, and finds them pretending to have a funeral for one of their own.  In the mean time, a mysterious reptilian creature seems to be hunting the other Wraiths in Clairton.  Rom arrives at the grave yard and attacks the Wraiths. Their leader summons a Deathwing, but the creature is hard to control, and ends up turning on him and killing him. Rom's arm is touched by the creature, and he loses control of it, falling into the grave, and then down into a deeper pit.  The monster hunting Wraiths appears, and is revealed to be Serpentyne.

Review: Rom 7

"As I lay dying." Steve Jackson hides out in his damaged filling station, trying desperately to repair the still form of Rom.  His friend, police officer Artie Parker, arrives, demanding to know what is going on, and Steve tells Artie about the Dire Wraiths.  The body of a dead Hellhound convinces Artie that something is up, and he agrees to help Steve get Rom to Brandy Clark's lab.  While they are out trying to save Rom, Wraiths and Hellhounds break into the filling station and steal Rom's neutralizer, which is still surrounded by a force field. And far away at Project Safeguard, the wraith leader summons the Thornoids to finish Rom off. At Brandy's lab, Rom's friends, and Artie, try to resuscitate him, but before they can finish their work, the thornoids, which are sentient plant creatures, attack. Artie tries to protect Brandy and Steve and is killed by the thornoids.  But now Rom is conscious again, and he attacks the thornoids, defending Steve and Brandy.

Review: Rom 6

"Dog Day Afternoon." Steve Jackson and Brandy Clark take Rom to Steve's filling station, where they hide him inside.  Rom absorbs some energy from an electrical outlet and then goes into "sleep" mode, while Steve takes Brandy to work.  Meanwhile, the Dire Wraiths blame Agent Kraller for the failure of the Archie Stryker/Firefall plot from issues 3-4, and punish him by having a Deathwing kill him.  Back near Clairton, W.V., two Hellhounds telepathically track Rom from the destroyed house (issue 5) to the filling station, and they attack him.  There is a great battle, in which the hounds trap Rom's neutralizer in a force field. Steve comes back to see the battle unfolding, and uses gasoline and a lighter to burn one of the hounds. Rom deals with the other one, but his armor is over-charged by an electric wire, and he collapses.

Review: Rom #4

"The Fire, the friend, and the foe." Rom battles Archie Stryker, the two-bit criminal who has been tricked by the Dire Wraiths into being grafted to the armor of the dead Spaceknight, Firefall.  Stryker wields the Living Flame of Galador, while Rom wields a neutralizer.  Throughout the battle, Stryker tries to kill Rom, whereas Rom is attempting to avoid doing the same, since he knows Stryker is misguided. As they battle in the sky over West Virginia, on the highway below, Brandy Clark is being abducted by Dire Wraiths, and Steve Jackson is pursuing them. Brandy and Steve manage to force the car being driven by the Wraiths to crash, which kills the Wraiths, and enables them to stumble free.  Meanwhile, Rom manages to subdue Archie Stryker, and convince him that the Wraiths didn't just put a suit of armor on him -- they bonded Stryker to it forever. It can never be removed!

Review: Rom #2

"Second Coming." Rom smashes into the vault area of Laserium Corporation, chasing a Dire Wraith. The Wraith is in the custody of the Stryker gang, led by Archie Stryker, and they're at the Laserium to steal from the vaults.  Rom ignores the humans and dispatches the Wraith to limbo, but Stryker only sees a human being turned to ash. When the police arrive and capture him, he tells the chief of police, who is also secretly a Wraith, that he will do anything to stop Rom. Next, Rom returns to the home of Brandy Clark to seek out her council.  Brandy's boyfriend Steve Jackson sees this and calls the police, thinking Brandy is in danger.  The Wraith-chief comes along and has the police employ "top secret" (actually Wraith-made) weapons. Rom defeats the police, and his analyzer shows that the chief is a Wraith, so he sends him to limbo.  Again to everyone else, it looks like Rom has killed someone. Rom then departs, not wishing to cause Brandy any further trouble.  Meanwhile, Stryker vows to get even with the Spaceknight.

Review: Rom #1

"Arrival!"  A comet crashes to earth, and out of it emerges Rom, greatest of the Spaceknights. A car approaches, and the shocked driver, Brandy Clark, loses control.  Rom saves her from going over a cliff. Then he summons his energy analyzer and scans her, after which he flies off. In the nearby town of Clariton, Rom scans the residents with his analyzer, and then summons his neutralizer and turns two of them to ash. As people flee in fear, Rom notices Brandy again, and this time he flies off with her. Using his translator, he tells his origin story: his people were at war with the Dire Wraiths, and he and others volunteered to give up half their humanity to become cyborgs.  The Spaceknights won a victory, but the shape-shifting wraiths fled to various worlds. Rom has come to earth to hunt them down.  Brandy isn't sure she believes him, but then the national guard shows up, and attacks.  Rom battles them. Among them are several wraiths, who try to kill him and capture Brandy, but Rom uses his neutralizer to send them to Limbo.  Then he flies off, leaving Brandy to wonder what is really going on.

New Comic-book Night - 2/19/13

It's been a couple of weeks since New Comic-book Night for me -- mostly because of the weather.  Once again it decided to snow last Wednesday, and this time a veritable blizzard visited my area.  Since comic-books are definitely not worth getting into an accident over, I waited until this week to pick up my haul. And since it had been a couple of weeks, plus many of my pull list titles come out during weeks 2-3 of the month, quite a haul it was indeed.

Among the list are two of the last three New 52 titles I still collect, and the only two I get in print form: Supergirl 28 and Batgirl 28 (the third, Wonder Woman, I get digitally, and I'm a couple of months behind on that).  Also in the mix was Thor, God of Thunder 19, my only Marvel comic.  Rounding out the list of seven were four titles from the smaller "independent" companies -- two regulars on my pull list from Image (Ghosted 7 and Alex + Ada 4), and one regular (Red Sonja 7) and one one-shot (Red Sonja Berserker) from Dynamite.

Movie Review: Thor, the Dark World

It's opening weekend for Marvel's latest superhero movie, Thor, the Dark World (hereafter: TTDW), which is a sequel to both the first Thor, and Avengers.  I saw the movie yesterday, and what follows will be a brief review of it.  Please note that there be spoilers here, so if you haven't seen the movie, go see it first.  Otherwise, certain plot points and surprises may be ruined.

The movie begins with a prologue showing that Malekith and the Dark Elves (who look strangely light-skinned given their name) ruled the universes until the Asgardians came and defeated them, bringing the light. Malekith created a powerful force called Aether which he would use to win, but it was taken from him by Odin's father, and hidden away in the deeps. The Dark Elves were defeated, but Malekith and a small number of them escaped on a giant space-ship.  This part of the film was pretty good, although even at this point, I thought Malekith was rather flat and uninteresting (as portrayed in the movie -- I love him in the comics).

Have DC and Marvel jumped the shark?

In 1977, a famous episode of the popular TV show Happy Days depicted Henry Winkler's character, "Fonzie," jumping over a shark in water skis.  For a series that had gotten its start depicting events most adults at the time would remember about their youth in the 1950s, this was a rather severe departure.  The stunt was viewed by the show's critics as a shameless attempt to "goose" the ratings, and many people mark that event as the "decline" of Happy Days.

Now, to be fair, Happy Days was a successful enough show that it ran for another seven seasons. But its ratings slowly declined year after year following this event, and many of the original fans felt that the show had lost something.  The shark-jumping episode is seen as an "inflection point" in the show, with higher quality, more "true to form" episodes before it, and increasingly hype-oriented, gimmicky shows following it.

Since that time, many TV shows have followed a similar pattern.  They start out with a certain thematic emphasis, and the show remains good or even improves each year for several seasons. But then, something happens. Maybe the writers run out of ideas. The episodes become flat, stale.  Perhaps people feel they have seen it all before. Ratings begin to decline, and that means the show is not making as much money (from advertisements).  The show's producers need to do something to get people to watch. So they start resorting to gimmickry in the hope that people will tune in to see this new change for the show.  Common changes to TV shows include events like having a new baby, or pretending (and not ironically) whole entire seasons have been "just a dream."

This descent into gimmickry in the desperate attempt to keep viewers tuning in has been named after that famous Happy Days episode.  Whenever a show starts churning out episodes with the express purpose of "getting people to watch," rather than just putting out quality stories, people say it has "jumped the shark."

What does this have to do with +DC Comics and +Marvel Entertainment? Well... everything.

Recently, for example, DC announced "Supervillain Month."  This will be a month where every single title in their line will star the hero's arch-enemy instead of the hero.  Additionally, each comic will sport a "3D effect" cover.  As I read the announcement for this "event," I could only shake my head. They're not even trying to cover up the fact that this is pure and utter gimmickry at this point.  This event is pure hype -- a bare-knuckled attempt to goose their badly slumping sales figures.  Rather than instructing writers to just write really great stories, DC is making its creative teams put out contrived one-shot stories whose only purpose is to sell comics.  This is the very essence of shark jumping.

And let us not pretend that Marvel is any better.  They have multiple "events" going on over there right now, including one that spans the mutant books, and the "Age of Ultron" crossover.  Books that are participating in Age of Ultron have an "AU" after their number (e.g., issue "14 AU") to try and induce readers to buy them for the "crossover content."  Here again, we have the companies attempting to attract readers using gimmicks, rather than just telling quality stories and figuring that quality will sell itself.

And let us not forget both companies' recent penchant for canceling and renumbering series back on issue 1 at the drop of a hat. Everyone knows issue 1 sells the best for any series, because thousands of people will pick up a first issue "just to try it." They may not buy any more, but #1 will get them to sample, and some will stay, and even if no one does, that first issue will make the companies a lot of money just because of its number.  This is yet another contrivance, designed to induce sales because of a numeral printed in the upper or lower corner of the cover, regardless of what is on the inside.

In the meantime, what is actually on the inside is, in many cases, unreadable sewage. Take the Superman Family's H'el on Earth crossover, for example.  Once again, the crossover is pure gimmickry.  The villain (H'el) is utterly contrived and given whatever powers they need him to have so that the entire Justice League plus Superboy and Supergirl can't defeat him.  The trajectory of stories in the Superman Family of books was utterly ignored by the writers.  The story-line was, in a word, awful.  DC seems to have figured that people will buy any issue with a gimmick in it -- again, this is what is meant by the term "jumping the shark."

What can be done about this? Well, that's hard to say. Although many TV shows have limped along for years after jumping the shark, I don't think I've ever known one to recover once the tailspin has begun.  Instead, typically, the show continues to spiral downward, getting worse and worse over time, until one can't bear to watch it any longer.  These shows tend to peter out, with ratings in the toilet during their final season, and everyone sighing with relief when the network finally pulls the plug.

The only other real option seems to be "going out on top." The cast and crew, writers and producers, realize that the show has run its course, that they are out of ideas, and they just stop.  The shows that do this tend not to last as long as the ones that jump the shark, but they also tend to be remembered as the greatest series in television. Examples include the Mary Tyler Moore show (which ended after 7 seasons), the Dick Van Dyke Show (which ended after 5 seasons and coincidentally co-starred Mary Tyler Moore), and Star Trek: The Next Generation (which ended after 7 seasons).  Each of these series produced some of their best work during the final season or two, and each was purposely ended while things were still good, explicitly because the creators did not want to have the show wither and die, to outlive its popularity.

And perhaps that's the real problem.  To keep publishing series long after they have outlived their popularity, there's really no option but to use gimmick after gimmick.  I would argue, however, that if the comics companies have been reduced to such contrivances, it's better to just put the series out of their misery, and let the creative teams replace them with something new, and different, and hopefully fresh and interesting.  I guess what I'm saying here is that I'd rather see them cancel Superman, than keep resorting to hype-oriented gimmicks to keep it afloat.

Either way, I think there isn't any argument about one thing: DC and Marvel have jumped the shark with nearly every series they currently publish.

The importance of a supporting cast

 Most great works of fiction include a vibrant and memorable cast of characters who play a supporting role to the protagonist or the antagonist.  If you think back to the greatest novels and movies of all time, you will almost certainly find yourself thinking about some characters who were not the stars -- not the main characters -- but who nevertheless had an important role to play in the story.  In fact, some of the supporting characters end up being quite memorable.  Here are a few examples:

• In the Star Wars movies, the two droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO, play an endearing and important supporting role in all six films.
• The Harry Potter series includes a vast array of popular and lovable supporting characters, including the Weasley children (Fred, George, and Ginny), Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, Professor McGonagall, Dobby, and perhaps most memorable of all, Professor Snape.
• Supporting characters play pivotal roles in the Lord of the Rings, including Treebeard, who causes the destruction of Isengard and the downfall of Saruman, and Eowyn, who slays the Witch King of Angmar.

Supporting characters serve a number of roles in any story, but one of the most important is to hold a mirror, or perhaps I should say a magnifying glass, up to the main character.  By this, I mean that we learn a great deal about our main character through the interactions he or she has with the supporting cast. Often, we learn far more from these interactions than we do from the protagonist's conflict with the villain of the piece.  For example, we see Harry Potter's kindness exhibited in his treatment of Dobby (in contrast to how most other wizards treat house-elves).  Clearly, the supporting cast is of critical importance to most fictional stories, and good writers know this and make sure to provide good supporting characters.  

Historically, comic-book writers have known this and have taken great pains to flesh out and develop the supporting cast for each super-hero.  Indeed, many of these supporting characters have become as integral to the heroes as their powers are.  What would a Superman story be, for instance, without Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen?  And can anyone really imagine Batman without also thinking of his butler, Alfred?  And what Iron Man story would be complete without Pepper Potts?

That's why I've been so surprised, since returning to the comics world last December, at how many comic-book series have few, if any, supporting characters, and at how under-developed the supporting cast is, if it even exists at all.  For example, as good as Thor, God of Thunder is, we have seen eight issues now, and there are only three real characters in the story -- all of them Thor.  Captain America has been trapped in a dimension where he and his adoptive "son" are basically alone (for 12 years and 6 issues) against the entire world, leaving him with just the child as a supporting character.  And in 21 issues of Supergirl, there has not yet been one recurring supporting character.

The lack of a good supporting cast is, in my view, a critical flaw in these series.  Supporting characters add so much to a super-hero story that I can't believe writers would make the monumental error of leaving them out.  These characters add depth and soul to a story, and give extra dramatic weight to the decisions the hero has to make.  Supporting characters give the hero someone concrete, someone we know and love, to defend. We care about Lois Lane; we like her; and we want Superman to save her.  Superman's actions thus carry more weight than they would if he is just battling to save an abstraction ("the earth" or "Metropolis" or "innocent people").

Nowhere is the harm that can be done by lack of a good supporting cast more evident than in the current Supergirl series.  As I said above, it has been 21 issues (1-20 plus #0), or almost two years, and in all that time, the writers have not seen fit to include a single supporting character.  Oh, there have been guest stars, including the entire Justice League, Superboy, and the future Silver Banshee. But none of these characters can be considered part of Supergirl's supporting cast.  Instead, the Supergirl series has been all-Kara, all the time.

And as much as I love Kara, having the series be just about her has harmed it in a very serious way.  We have gotten far less insight into the character of Kara Zor-El than we would have if there were some supporting characters with whom she could interact.  We only see what Kara is like under pressure, in combat, trying to just stay alive against powerful enemies.  And although that can reveal some elements of character, the finer revelations of personality and disposition come in the quieter scenes. And the really important choices happen when people both the reader and the heroine care about are involved. So far, we have none of that in this new Supergirl series.

Contrast this dearth of supporting characters in the New 52 Supergirl with the supporting cast of the third Supergirl series, penned by Peter David in the 1990s.  

Peter David's Supergirl had an extremely strong supporting cast that included Linda/Supergirl's best friend, medical resident Maddie Hayes, Leesburg reporter Cutter Sharpe, Linda's boyfriend Dick Malverne, Linda's parents Fred and Sylvia Danvers, Wally the "God-boy," and horse-like hero Comet.  Except for Comet, all these characters appear in the very first few issues of David's Supergirl run, and they are seen frequently.  They interact with Supergirl and with each other, and serve multiple purposes in the story. 

First, the supporting cast adds some comic relief.  In particular, Cutter and Maddie engage in a frequently hilarious relationship that will leave the reader smiling. Second, they help Peter David raise the level of suspense, because they give him side stories to which he can cut, interrupting the main action of the book. Thus, he can get Supergirl into a suspenseful mini-cliffhanger within an issue, and then cut to Cutter and Maddie having a lovers' quarrel, making you want to turn the pages and see what happens back in the Supergirl storyline.  Third, they add weight to the choices Supergirl has to make.  It's not just "the people of Leesburg" who are endangered, but Linda/Supergirl's mother and father who are threatened.

Because David makes good use of supporting characters, he can also tell emotionally and intellectually deep stories.  For example, issue 23 tells the story of a white supremacist who is scheduled to speak at Leesburg University.  The minority students protest this speech, and try to get the university to shut it down.  Maddie Hayes, who is African American, is part of this group. On the other side are those who believe in freedom of speech no matter how hateful the words may be, and this side includes Maddie's boyfriend, Cutter, who as a reporter holds the First Amendment sacred.  Linda/Supergirl is friends with both of these characters, and ends up caught in the middle. The inclusion of supporting characters in the debate transforms Supergirl's choice from an academic question of free speech, into an emotionally charged dilemma where she has to choose between two of her best friends.  This story is compelling and powerful because of the involvement of the supporting characters. Without them, it would have had no teeth. 

This is one example of why supporting characters are critically important to any story, but there are many others that could be invoked from the comic-book series of the past.  Supporting characters make the story better; they make it more impactful; and they raise the emotional ante.  Without them, all those things are lost, and we end up with a comic-book that is just about super-fights.  And without the emotional jolt provided by including supporting characters, even the super-fights become rather empty.

I've been back to reading comics for six months now, and I've read a fair few since my return (I'd estimate over 200).  Throughout this time, I've felt that something is missing from today's comics.  I've been struggling to figure out exactly what.  I suspect a lot of things are to blame, but probably the biggest one is the lack of a solid supporting cast for many of the series on the market today.  They can still have good stories and can still be interesting, but the emotional impact will always be lower without a supporting cast.  And it also becomes harder to relate to a super-hero, if there aren't any normal people around him or her with whom we can identify.

Supergirl, in particular, has been struggling to find her way in this New 52.  Her character still has not really been established yet (except that we know she has a very hot temper and can fly into super-powered rages at pretty much the drop of a hat).  We know so little about her as a person -- as a human being.  We know far less about her in 21 issues than we knew about the Linda Danvers character in the first nine-issue story arc of Peter David's run.  And why?  I submit the main reason is that the New 52 Supergirl hasn't had any supporting characters with whom she can interact. So we only see her temper, because we only see the "action" -- the fight scenes.

This over-dependence on action is not making comic-books better. It's making them worse -- because it's hamstringing the writer's ability to provide depth and complexity to the stories, and it's removing the traditional primary source of emotion and humanity -- the supporting cast.  If DC and Marvel know what's good for them, they'll bring back supporting characters in a big way -- and ASAP.

So they CAN still make comics like they used to...

The last time I seriously collected a comic-book put out by +Marvel Entertainment was way back in 1991, when they were still called "Marvel Comics."  I had slowly given up on my Marvel comics, and switched one by one to DC.  The last hold-out, in 1991, was Captain America.  After I stopped buying that title, for 22 years, I did not touch a Marvel comic-book.

Then, a few months ago, having loved the Avengers movie, and just gotten back into collecting comics, I tried Avengers Assemble. It was terrible, and after four issues I gave up.  A couple of weeks ago, having heard good things about some of the Marvel NOW! titles, and having gotten rather fed up with most of the sewage being passed off as "comic-books" by +DC Comics, I decided I would go ahead and try Marvel again.  I started with Captain America #1-6, about which I'm ambivalent. The story is odd, and the choice of having Cap age 12 years between issues 2 and 3 is going to be trouble in the long run.  I usually know after 6 issues whether I want to put a comic on my pull list or not, but I'm still reserving judgment on Captain America.  I'm leaning toward not putting it on, and it's going to have to get dramatically better by the end of this first story-line to prevent that.

I thought that might be the end of a very brief, probably misguided, attempt at re-acquainting myself with the Marvel Universe.  Two attempted series, one a dud, the other highly questionable. I decided to give Marvel one more try, this time with the Marvel NOW! version of Thor -- Thor, God of Thunder.  I'd heard good things about it from several people, and I've always liked Thor.  The comic shop had all 8 issues still out on the "current" shelves, so I didn't have to pay inflated "back issue" prices for it.  Picked it up on Wednesday, and started reading it... and could not stop. Within 24 hours I had devoured all 8 issues.  What a gem this title is.

By any metric of measurement, Thor, God of Thunder is sequential story-telling at its best.  The story-line is broad and sweeping, yet still delves deeply into character.  The dialogue rings true -- a difficult task with the normally stilted, old-fashioned speech patterns of Thor.  The art, although stylized, is exceptionally good and appropriate to the story-line -- moody, but with a surrealist quality to it.  The panels look almost like oil paintings rather than pencil-and-ink drawings.  As I say, just these characteristics alone would make Thor, God of Thunder a good read.

However, what struck me the most as I was reading these eight first issues of Thor, God of Thunder was just how much this sweeping, epic story-line reminds me of another great Thor story-line -- the one by Walt Simonson back in the 1980s.  Like Simonson before him, Aaron has delved deeply into the mythology of the Marvel Universe, creating new elements to it that feel like they have been there forever, while simultaneously drawing on older material that has been around since Marvel's inception.  Beyond this, the series has remained, at least for the first eight books, almost completely independent of the Marvel Universe (other than a brief cameo by Iron Man, you wouldn't even know this title shares that universe).  It can be read completely on its own.

One really important feature that reminds me of the old days, however, is not the story nor the art, but rather, the fact that this series (and apparently all Marvel titles) still has a letter column!  For regular readers of this blog, you know that I have complained vociferously about the lack of a lettercol in current DC titles.  Well, Marvel still prints letters in the back of their comics (well, e-mails... but it's the same thing), and they answer the letters as well.  How refreshing it's been to read those letters.  And how connected it makes me feel to the other comic-book fans -- much more so than the so-called "social media" do.  I'm not sure why that is, but it does.  In each issue there's a letter by someone like me, who hasn't been reading comics, or Marvel, for years (or maybe ever), and decided, for one reason or another, to pick up Thor, God of Thunder and give it a try.

What I love about the lettercols is that they allow writer Jason Aaron to respond directly to readers, and tell us what is on his mind.  He explains what he is thinking, hints at what he is planning.  And best of all, in issue 5, when a reader complained briefly about the Iron Man cameo and said he doesn't want a bunch of guest-stars and crossovers in this title, Aaron responded as follows:

That shared universe is one of the hallmarks of the House of Ideas. But I also want Thor to be a series you can continue to read and enjoy even if you're not following the overall thread of the Marvel U, though at the same time feeling big enough to be relevant to that universe as a whole. In other words, I wanna do big, epic Thor stories that anyone can enjoy.

This is what comics used to be like.  The shared universe was a backdrop, years ago, not an excuse to try and force people to buy every title in the line.

Another thing that seems readily apparent from both the way the story unfolds and the answers Aaron gives in the lettercol, is that, on Thor, God of Thunder, the writer is in control of the plot. Although I'm sure the editor has a say in the book's direction, there is no doubt who is in charge here.  Marvel seems willing to let Aaron, and presumably its other writers, do what they're supposed to -- write stories.

Between the sweeping, high-quality story, solid artwork, lettercols in every issue, and the writer's ability to control the story-line, I really felt, reading these eight first issues of Thor, God of Thunder, as if I'd gone back in time 25 years, to the days when comics were truly great, and high quality was the rule in both major comics companies, rather than the exception it's become today.  Since coming back to comics, with a few rare exceptions (Red Sonja, Batgirl), I had been wondering if they could even make comics like they used to.  Here, we have the answer... yes, they still can.  Thor, God of Thunder, is one such book.

Now, don't get me wrong.  The actual specific story is not like one would have read in the 1980s... it would have been far too violent and bloody, and the old Comics Code Authority would never have allowed it.  However, although the plot is modern and far more adult than the stories in those days, it is executed like they did back in the day -- executed the way the greats like Simonson, Perez, Wolfman, Mantlo, and Levitz used to do it all those years ago.

Kudos to the creative team.  Thor, God of Thunder is the first Marvel comic to officially make it onto my long-term pull list in 22 years.

Is everything just a mini-series now?

In the last couple of years, practically every series in +DC Comics and +Marvel Entertainment has been rebooted.

In September of 2011, +DC Comics closed down every one of their ongoing series, and restarted them all on number one.  Fifty-two series in all were begun that month on "issue 1," prompting the company to name its line "the New 52." Since this "relaunch," 16 out of the 52 titles have been canceled -- six after just eight months, six earlier this spring, and four more have been announced for termination as of August.  That's 16 series, or 30% of the line, that lasted less than 24 total issues, and many less than 10. Because DC insists on publishing 52 concurrent titles, this means 16 new series replacing the old, or a total of 68 new series started in two years.

Meanwhile, Marvel has created its own version of a relaunch, with the Marvel NOW! line, which will consist of more than 30 titles by year's end, all starting over on "issue 1" (with the older series generally being canceled).  Although this is certainly not the entire Marvel line, as it was with DC, we can say that a huge chunk of the Marvel titles have been re-started as new series.

This is something of a new pattern for comic books.  Although reboots are nothing new for the industry, having entire company-wide relaunches on number 1, and cancellations of old, often standby series like Action Comics or Captain America -- reboots done for no other purpose than a re-number -- is definitely virgin soil for DC and Marvel.  In prior decades, companies prided themselves on having the longest-running series.  A series in the 100s or 200s or higher was a sign of success and good editorial management -- high numbers were evidence that the series had sold enough copies, consistently, for many years.  I remember the fanfare with which Action Comics hit #600, and Thor hit #400, and Captain America hit #300.  These comics had been around for decades, and had sold so well and consistently that they had never needed to be halted.

Thus, a series was something that, once begun, was intended to be published indefinitely, and companies did whatever they could to maintain their series line.  When a series started to falter, companies pulled out all the stops to try and keep it alive, because the fact that a title was being published at all meant that the publisher was committed to it.  To save a flagging title, new creative teams would be brought in. Old arch-enemies would be called upon to grace the pages. Former love-interests would make reappearances.

Sure, these gimmicks often failed, and the series was, perhaps, canceled anyway.  Many series made it no further than the New 52 titles have (like the New 52 Legion of Super-Heroes, set to be canceled this August, 1982-4s Daring New Adventures of Supergirl was canceled after 23 issues).  But, back in those days, you had the sense that the companies meant the series they started publishing to run indefinitely, just like Action Comics (which eventually reached past issue 900) was (at least until 2011, when it was canceled for the New 52 reboot).

But today, it seems like comic companies do not begin publishing a series with the intention of it lasting indefinitely.  Today, even high sales and high issue number counts, seem incapable of shielding a comic from cancellation.  Because "number 1" issues sell so well, every series is potentially on the chopping block every single month.  And most series have been canceled and rebooted so many times that they have many different volumes. A few examples:

• The New 52 Supergirl is technically volume 6, if you count the 4-issue mini-series in 1993.
• The New 52 LSH about to be canceled is volume 7, unless you count The Legion (which was about the LSH but under a slightly different title) in which case it's volume 8.  This troubled series has seen four separate issue 1 relaunches in 13 years, and the individual "volumes" have averaged 28 issues per series.
• The new Marvel NOW! Captain America is volume 7, with each of volumes 2-6 averaging 28 issues running length (after volume 1 lasted 354 issues by itself).
• After volume 1 lasted 127 issues from 1999 through 2009, Birds of Prey has been renumbered twice in the last four years, with volume 2 lasting just 15 issues, and volume 3 currently on issue 20.

The story is repeated for a host of titles.  Indeed, most comics, if they have retained their old titles are on at least volume 3 or 4 at this point, and many would be much higher than that if the companies did not (like Justice League) keep slightly changing the title name and calling it a "new" series.

When looking over all the different "volumes" of each series, and all the issue 1 relaunches, followed by cancellations, followed by re-relaunches, combined with the fact that hardly any series left in DC or Marvel's line will be higher than 30 by year's end, it seems to me like the concept of the series that is planned to be published indefinitely has gone the way of the dinosaur. The fans of a particular character need to prepare ourselves for a succession of short-lived series, rather than one long one.

Years ago, when a comic-book title was published with the intention of lasting a short while and then ending, they used to call it a "mini-series" (in DC) or a "limited series" (in Marvel). Mini-series stood as differentiated from regular series by this very fact -- that they were short-lived.  These days, with the rapid fire launch/cancel/relaunch sequence we've been witnessing, it seems like every series is expected to be short-lived.  Thus, every series on the market today can be viewed as a long mini-series, rather than a true, "permanent" series.  The only real difference is that we aren't told ahead of time that the series is of finite length, whereas with a limited series, they used to broadcast it ("issue 1 of 5").

What does this mean for the comic-book industry?  To be honest, I'm not really sure. I suspect it's not a good sign.  I'm sure the companies don't go into it with the plan to cancel these series right away. But I've got the definite sense that they lack commitment to these series, and that as soon as sales flag, they just quickly pull the plug.  It also feels a little like both companies are almost in what one could call panic mode -- that they are pulling any crazy idea for a title out of the hat, using any character they can think of, even ones who never had a series before, and trying to see if the book will sell.  If it does, fine, if not (like Threshold or Sword of Sorcery), pull the plug ASAP.

Whatever the long-term effects of this "musical series" pattern coming out of the comic companies, I'm sure of one thing as a reader and collector: we need to start viewing all series as mini-series. Even mainstays are not immune.  The days of the triple-digit issue number seem to be over.

The new style of first-issue stories

Although I certainly haven't gone and counted, I would bet that if you did, you would find that more "#1" issues of comic-book series have been published during the last five years than, perhaps, in all of comics history combined.  For instance, in 2011, +DC Comics terminated almost their entire line of comics, and rebooted everything back to number 1 (the New 52).  Last fall, +Marvel Entertainment launched the "Marvel NOW!" initiative, which didn't reboot their universe but started a whole bunch of series (Captain America, Thor, etc.) back on issue 1.  In between, many series have been canceled and re-booted (such as the ending of the Amazing Spider-Man series, replaced with Superior Spider-Man, starting of course at issue 1).

Thanks to all these reboots, and to the ready availability of back-issues on +comiXology, I have therefore read an unbelievable quantity of "issue 1" series launches in the last six months, including first issues of Captain America, Avengers Assemble, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Superman, Action Comics, Detective Comics, Batman, Batgirl, Earth 2, Worlds' Finest, The Movement, Red Sonja, Pantha, Justice League, Katana, and Justlice League of America.  What I have noticed, compared to the "old days" (pre-2000), is a dramatic shift in the style, pacing, and content of a typical first-issue series launch.

How comics used to launch a series

Years ago, a first-issue series launch was used in a very specific way.  That first issue was seen as a way to introduce the character or the team to the readers, and to establish the basic rules of the series. Let's use the 1979 series Rom: Spaceknight as an example.

In issue #1 of Rom, Rom arrives on earth and for the first few pages, seems almost evil, even attacking and seemingly killing some humans.  By page 8, however, Rom uses his translator to talk with the human woman Brandy Clark, and explains his background and origin.  He is 200 years old. He hails from the planet Galador, a peace-loving place.  The Galadorians entered an uncharted area called the Dark Nebula, and were attacked by Dire Wraiths.  Galador's armada was destroyed and the wraiths moved in on them.  To save the planet, the flower of Galador's youth would be asked to sacrifice humanity, becoming cyborg warriors (Spaceknights). Rom was the first to volunteer.  The Spaceknights prevailed, and drove the wraiths back.  But the wraiths, in defeat, scattered to other worlds. As shape-shifters, they could blend in, as they have done on our world. Rom is here to track them down and send them to the plane of Limbo.  The army, led by some wraiths in disguise, attacks Rom, and he defeats them, dispatches the wraiths, and flies off.  Word of his presence spreads to other wraiths, who now have to decide what to do about it.

This first issue of Rom accomplished everything a classic series-launching number 1 issue used to do. It established the character. It set up the dramatic tensions (in this case, between Rom and the wraiths, and between Rom and the humans who think he is killing them, as well as between wraiths and humans, though humans don't know it).  It established one of the main supporting characters (Brandy Clark, who quickly became a love interest for Rom).  And it told the backstory in enough detail that the reader knew exactly what was going on, and could easily follow the relationships between the major "sides" in the story (Rom, Human, and Wraith).  The ending leaves one in suspense, as a wraith in the local area hears of Rom's arrival and shape-shifts into a bird, flying away to warn her fellow aliens.

Now let's look at what Rom #1 did not do, relative to what #1 launches are like today.  Rom #1 did not confuse the reader.   It didn't leave the reader wondering who the heck this alien was or why he was blasting people.  It didn't leave the reader wondering who the shape-shifting guys were, and whether they were good or bad.  It didn't defer important, foundational explanations about the key elements of the series until later issues.

How series are launched today

If Rom #1 had been written in today's series-launch style, it would have been very different.  For example, no background of Galador and the Spaceknights would have been provided -- this would have been left until the 13th issue, which would have been called Rom #0.  Instead, we'd see an alien who can't speak any English, walking around blasting what appear to be humans. We'd see other seeming-humans suddenly change shapes, or whip out ray-guns, and blast Rom, and him retaliate. But we wouldn't know yet if Rom was an evil murderous robot, or an angel of mercy.  We'd probably see Rom rescue Brandy Clark from something, but there would be some ambiguity -- was he really rescuing her or just trying to kill her?

By the end of 'Marvel Now!" Rom #1, the reader would probably have no idea if Rom was going to be good or bad, or, frankly, what the hell was going on at all.  And this confusion would be purposeful.  The hypothetical "Marvel Now!" Rom writer would deliberately string the reader out, probably waiting until several issues in to reveal what a Dire Wraith was, and perhaps refusing to give Rom a translator, the better to keep things confused and uncertain.

What I've described above is, of course, pure invention -- there is no modern re-telling of the Rom story. However, my description is typical of the first-issue launches of today. Whereas in the old days, the goal of a first issue was explanation and providing a solid foundational base, these days, the goal of a first issue appears to be obfuscation and confusion.  Although I can't say for certain, I believe the probable motivation for this is that the companies believe the confusion will increase sales.  Readers of the fictitious modern Rom #1 would buy the next issue, and the one after that, because they want an explanation -- who is Rom? Where did he come from? And why is he shooting humans with a ray gun?  These questions, which were answered in the 1979 series halfway through the first issue, would probably not be answered in a modern re-telling for at least the first year, maybe more.

A major driver behind this new style is the tendency, in much modern storytelling, not just comics, to start a tale in the middle, rather than the beginning.  In the original Action Comics #1 in 1938, we saw Superman's origin told in a linear fashion - he came to earth in a rocket, and his alien body made him super-strong, able to leap buildings, and so forth.  The tale began at the beginning and worked forward.  Compare with 2011's Action Comics #1 relaunch, which starts with Superman floating in mid-air, with his Super-symbol already on his chest, apparently (somewhat) known but not yet understood by Metropolis, holding a rich white-collar criminal out over a ledge to scare him into confessing his evils.  The back-story of Superman's arrival on earth is not told until much later (issue #5), and even that is incomplete (more pieces are told later on).

But it's not just the "start in the middle" style that leads to confusion, because many movies and novels start in the middle today, but still don't leave the reader confused.  After all, the original Star Wars starts in the middle of a story, but we are given clear explanations of everything that is going on by the end of the first act (indeed, a lot of the explanation happens in the opening sequence, when the scroll of words tells us who Darth Vader is, who Princess Leia is, and that the Empire is evil, setting up the entire story for us in very clear, unambiguous terms).  So in comic-book launch issues today, it's the combination of starting in the middle, and not bothering to explain anything for several issues, that leads to seemingly disjointed, and definitely confusing, stories.

Which way is better?

Clearly, the style of the first-issue launch of a series is dramatically different today from the way it was in 1979.  Which way is better?

There is no objective way to answer this question, because it's largely a matter of preference.  If you like being informed, and having the overall themes and rules of the series laid out for you right away, so that you know where you stand, then you will obviously prefer the classic way to launch a series.  If you prefer being left in the dark, and don't like to be told why things are happening too quickly (maybe because you like trying to guess or figure them out yourself), then you will obviously lean toward the modern style.

My preference is for the classical style (I know, you're shocked).  Here's why:  The classical style established everything up front, which made it a snap to decide if I was going to like a series or not.  I could easily tell, by the end of the real Rom #1 (the one actually published in 1979, which established all the major rules and players of the series), that I was going to like it.  I knew where I stood relative to the comic.  The classical first issue really set the stage for me.

The modern style doesn't do that. For example, I just read #1 of Gail Simone's new series The Movement.  I have no idea if I'm going to like the series or not based on just this one issue.  The sides and lines of dramatic conflict are murky at best.   The characters are hard to tell apart (some of this is the fault of the artist). I can't tell who the protagonists are, vs. the antagonists. I'm not even sure who the major characters are going to turn out to be.   After an issue, the only thing I can say about whether I'm going to like this series or not is, "We'll see."  Compare with Rom, which after just one issue, I was easily (and correctly, since I stuck with it for 65 issues of its 75-issue run) able to say, "Count me in!"

I've never really enjoyed being confused as a reader.  I don't have to know the answer to every question (I hate mysteries where the killer is revealed to the audience at the beginning, for instance).  But I do like to understand what is going on, and I don't enjoy when seemingly random events occur for no known reason.  Too long of a separation between the event and knowing the reason for that event destroys the reader's sense of cause and effect, leading to the impression that the writer is making things happen for arbitrary reasons (although many events do occur for arbitrary reasons too, and not coincidentally, in many of the same series that are the most obfuscatory).

From what I have seen, the obfuscatory method of confusing the reader and taking many issues to clear things up, does not seem to be working.  For example, the New 52 Superman, which started out with strong sales, had a very confusing first story arc that left the reader unsure of what was going on for six issues.  If we are right in guessing that the confusing nature of the story is purposeful, because the execs at DC think obfuscation will make readers keep coming back to find out what the heck is going on, then we should see strong sales from this arc.  But we don't. Instead, Superman's sales went into free-fall, plummeting from 118,000 copies sold for issue 1, to 70,000 for issue 6 (rounded off to the nearest thousand).  That's a 41% decline, and a loss of almost 50,000 fans in six months.  Thus, 50,000 people who started out reading Superman, did not stick around to find out the explanations for all the confusing events of the first issue.  Does that sound like a win for the "make it confusing" model?  Not to me.

As a second example, Action Comics, written by Grant Morrison, is a prime specimen of a story written for maximal obfuscation.   I stopped reading this series on issue #6, and by then, hardly anything had been cleared up or explained. Morrison adds more and more complications and threads, without explaining any of the old ones, and ends up with a disjointed and very confusing story.  Again we can look at sales figures and ask, was Steve the only one turned off by this? Did the sales ploy, if it is one, of suspending explanations until much later on, work?

Once again, the answer is a resounding "no."  Although I can't say when any story threads were explained or plot elements were resolved, I can say definitively that none had been by issue 6 (when I finally gave up).  Action Comics began as a top-seller, with 183,000 print copies purchased.  Over the first six months, when the vaunted Morrison's patented obfuscation was in top form, sales of Action Comics plummeted by 47% to under 97,000 copies.  By issue 7, which is the earliest the confusing elements could have been cleared up (since they had not been as of issue 6), the series had lost fully half of its original readership.  Now I ask you: does this sound like a marketing ploy that is working?  It seems to me that at a good half of comic readers don't like stories that remain confusing for months at a time, or else these sales numbers would be better.

Now, I have heard it argued that one must read the totality of Morrison's run on Action Comics, which lasted until issue 18, to really "get" it.  Only in toto, the Morrison-apologists assert, can the whole logic of the story he crafted be appreciated.  I have no desire to read any more of Morrison's sewage, but we can look at the numbers and see whether many other fans were willing to wait eighteen months to have the events in this series explained to them.  Once again, the answer is a resounding no.  By issue 10, Action Comics had fallen out of the top 10 (remember, it debuted in the top 3 and stayed there for the first few months after the reboot), having lost another 11,000 readers since issue 7, and by number 15, Action Comics fell out of the top 20, and never recovered for the rest of Morrison's run.  By the time he left, he had lost fully two-thirds of the readers who started out with him at the beginning of the series.  I find it hard to imagine how anyone could argue that this was a successful run. And since one of Morrison's core "strategies"  is to confuse the hell out of the reader, I conclude that a majority of comic-book readers don't like to be confused for long periods of time.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I love being surprised at appropriate times in stories, and I like having explanations revealed slowly to me.  But as the story is going along, I need to understand what the hell is happening.  For example, J.K. Rowling doesn't explain how Voldemort used Horcruxes to prevent death in the first Harry Potter book. But she provides enough (although vague) explanation of how Voldemort had used magic to "cheat death" that the book is entirely comprehensible and stands on its own.  You don't have to wait until book 6 to understand what happened in book 1.  Certainly, you will have a better appreciation for the book 1 events after reading the whole series.  Going back and re-reading the books leads to many "aha!" moments.  But while you are reading book 1 for the first time, you don't feel completely at sea with the story, the way one does in both Superman 1 and Action Comics 1 (and many, many others).

I've said before on this blog, and I will say again today, that I believe the comic-book writers of today need to go back and re-read some of the old classic series, like Rom.  And they don't need to just peruse them casually -- they need to study these books, and understand what made them work, and what made them great.  Like the Harry Potter series, Rom's first issue provided a good, simple, basic explanation for what was going on -- it gave the reader a baseline -- and then slowly, over the next 30 or 40 issues, more details about the explanation evolved.  That is how to write a good series -- not giving the reader absolutely no baseline and then filling in random details in a deliberately confusing way over the course of a year or more.

More on the over-coordination of comic-book universes

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a long article about how much +DC Comics and +Marvel Entertainment's insistence on putting out a large, multi-title crossover every single year (along with smaller ones in between) disrupts the normal pattern of story-telling in each individual series.  In that article, I stated that the companies have a, "foolhardy tradition of producing a universe-spanning crossover every summer."

Two days ago on IGN, the editor of DC's Justice League line, Brian Cunningham, actually admitted that they do this on purpose (I'm not sure I've ever seen it admitted up-front before, but maybe it has).   Indeed, he used the same word I did ("tradition") to refer to these idiotic, series-disrupting events, stating, "Summer is traditionally the 'big summer popcorn extravaganza.'"  This year's will be DC's Trinity War (which is what the interview is about), but with that one sentence, Cunningham shows exactly what the editorial/managerial thinking is at the DC front office.  They are doing exactly what I accused them of doing a couple of weeks ago: they deliberately produce a mega-crossover every summer. It's now become a "tradition."

This one is a bad tradition, Mr. Cunningham.  Stories should evolve of their own momentum, and should not be forced into the rigid mold that requires a crossover at the same time every year. It is exactly this foolhardy "every summer is a popcorn extravaganza" mentality that is the problem.

Interestingly, in the interview, IGN asks Cunningham why it's a crossover and not a stand-alone miniseries.  Here, Cunningham's answer is either untruthful, or naive. He claims they're doing this story as a crossover because it feels more like it's "part of the fabric of the DC Universe." My guess is, this is a line that DC throws out to avoid admitting the truth, which is that in today's publishing atmosphere, crossovers are produced solely and exclusively for sales-hype purposes, and have nothing to do with the stories themselves.  This crossover is not something that evolved, slowly but surely, out of the brilliant minds of several writers.  It was imposed upon them from above (i.e., "Next summer you will produce a JL, JLA, JLD crossover").

I simply refuse to believe that Cunningham is ignorant of this fact, but even if we take his words at face value his answer is silly.  Tons of one-shots and mini-series are produced every year by both DC and Marvel, and nobody considers them any less a part of each universe's "fabric" than if they appear in ongoing series. Indeed, in an atmosphere were most comics get terminated and re-numbered to issue 1 every few years, one could argue that all series are now mini-series, and that the true, ongoing series no longer exists.

This is just a follow-up of my previous article, so I won't say a lot more about this topic.  I just thought it was interesting that Cunningham used the same word I did ("tradition") and that he openly admitted to it. Again, I'm not sure I've ever seen them admit to doing these crossovers every year on purpose -- they usually like to pretend they are "just doing it for the story" and rarely admit to purposely publishing comics just to sell them. Even Cunningham didn't say those words here, and he probably doesn't realize what he openly admitted to doing (or else he probably would not have made the statement).

How comic-book universes can become too "coordinated"

People who don't read comic-books at all have very little appreciation for how complicated the "continuity" of a comic-book universe can be.  For example, one day at lunch I was trying to explain to a co-worker, who has never read a comic-book in her life nor even watched most superhero movies, what the "New 52" is in the +DC Comics universe.  As I described some of the difficulties and inconsistencies in the continuity, she stopped me and said, "Wait a minute.  You're telling me that Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern... all these characters co-exist in the same universe?"

"Yes," I responded. "That's why they can all be on the Justice League.  And then on top of that there are the Teen Titans, and the Birds of Prey, and the Legion of Superheroes. It's all part of one continuity."

"Well, then that's the problem," she answered. "Trying to make them all co-exist would obviously lead to trouble."

Now, the typical comic fan's knee-jerk reaction to this might be to laugh at her, since after all, these characters have co-existed in the same universe for decades.  However, it struck me then, and still does today, that she had a good point.  The reason there are so many continuity problems in both +DC Comics and +Marvel Entertainment universes is that there are so many titles, following so many characters, all happening at the same time, that these many threads are impossible to coordinate into a logical and coherent whole.

However, the really severe continuity problems bubbling up to the surface every month in title after title are relatively new to the medium (the last couple of decades).  Early on, even though the overall continuity may have been messier if you tried to, say, make a flow chart of it (with all the infinite DC Universes), the average reader could ignore most of the chaos while following a given series, because each series was relatively independent.  Writers and artists answered to the editors of individual titles, but those titles could go wherever the creative team and editor wanted them to.  There was very little "top down" control of the universes, and they were not all that well coordinated (other than practical concerns, such as making sure that the same villain wasn't appearing at the same time in multiple books).  To facilitate this, artificial "barriers" were constructed from book to book. For instance, the major characters tended to operate in their own unique city -- Batman and Robin worked out of Gotham City; Superman worked out of Metropolis; Supergirl worked out of Chicago.

Back before the mid-80s, universe-wide crossovers simply didn't occur (Marvel's Secret Wars limited series was the first one, followed the next year by DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths).  Absent that, or the limited "guest star" appearances from time to time, because they took place in different locales, each comic-book operated sort of in its own miniature "universe." The hero had his or her own "rogues' gallery" of rotating enemies, the series had its own supporting cast, and so forth.  This setup caused the overall universe to be only loosely connected (Supergirl and Batman theoretically took place on the same planet at the same time, but one almost never saw any of the characters from one book appear in the other).  As a result, creative teams had great autonomy and freedom. The focus of all stories and content in those days revolved around the unit of the series.

Today, things are very different.  Since the 1980s, comics publishers have become obsessed with producing crossovers. DC, in particular, seems to have fallen victim to the mentality of having a crossover just to have a crossover.  With the New 52, for example, there seems to have been a company-wide mandate that each group or "family" of books would have a crossover during the post-zero-month issues (#13-17 in most cases, or thereabouts).  For example, the Superman Family of books had H'el on Earth (Supergirl, Superboy, and Superman 14-17 plus additional bits pre and post).  The Bat-Family of books had the Death of the Family Crossover (roughly issues 14-17 of most books in the family).  The "Justice League" family had a sort-of crossover (Throne of Atlantis, JL and Aquaman 15-17).  Other crossovers at the time included Swamp Thing/Animal Man, and the Green Lantern family, among others.

To get all these crossovers to happen on the same months, the front office (the editors and assistant editors and higher-ups like Dan Didio and Jim Lee) had to issue a company-wide fiat that all the post-zero issues will be crossovers.  Indeed, they also issued a company-wide mandate that all the 13th issues of New 52, in every single series, would be issue 0 origin stories, and that every issue 0 would have some "shocking" piece that would lead into the second year.

Here is the problem with this kind of rigid coordination: it is simply not possible that dozens of different series about dozens of different characters, with creative teams that write stories at different paces, and thematic material that runs at different speeds, could all be in the right place for a zero issue or a crossover all at the same time.  Stories take different amounts of time to develop because characters and hero teams are unique, and storytellers delve into character backgrounds unequally.  It's simply not the case that the pace of a Batman storyline, which usually involves lots of detective work and crime solving, and the pace of a Superman storyline, which may involve flying into outer space facing universal threats, would be even remotely similar.  These stories should (no -- must) take place at different speeds covering a different number of issues by their very nature.

By forcing crossovers to happen all on the same month in every title, DC's front office is ensuring that the crossover story will not fit well into many, perhaps even most, of the participating titles.  They are trying to force a highly rigid and inflexible coordinated structure onto what ought to be an inherently organic, dynamic process (the creativity of many different teams each doing its own thing).  Thus, DC and Marvel have become, quite literally, too coordinated.

A great example of how the over-coordination does not work is the companies' foolhardy tradition of producing a "universe spanning" crossover every summer.  By forcing most of their titles to participate in one of these 3-month affairs each year, they are implicitly forcing what I call a "9+3" structure on every title in the line -- 9 months of series stories, then 3 months of crossover, then 9 months of series, then 3 of crossover.  The problem is that stories don't always take the same number of issues to develop.  Some stories may take four issues. Others may take eleven.  Because of the rigid structure of these highly coordinated universes, however, the writers end up having to squeeze or stretch stories to fit a given number of issues, rather than just letting the stories resolve of their own momentum.

The over-coordination of comics universes is, I think, a huge mistake.  Instead of a story taking "as long as it needs to take," we have editors forcing creative teams to wrap things up this month so the crossover can happen next month, or telling them to stretch the story out for two more issues because there's a crossover coming and there's no point starting another arc now when it will just get interrupted.

Now, both +DC Comics and +Marvel Entertainment would argue that crossovers increase sales.  But I think that argument rests on faulty assumptions.  For instance, to what are they comparing the sales? Regular sales rely on non-crossover story arcs that are being artificially squeezed and stretched into a rigid, coordinated structure that is dictated by the timing of crossovers.  I argue here that this very coordination is making today's story arcs dramatically inferior to the story arcs of the pre-crossover-crazed era.  I maintain, in other words, that sales are down across the line compared to years ago because the storylines in each series today are inferior to the stories of the past. And the storylines are inferior because of the interference of the crossovers.  Thus, crossovers are needed to boost sales that are lagging because the crossovers are cramping the styles of creative teams and making the storylines of each series inferior in the first place.

I will always believe that quality sells, and great stories will sell comic-books.  If the companies are producing quality, such as the Great Darkness Saga, or the Dark Phoenix Saga, then no sales gimmicks (which all a crossover amounts to) are needed.  The only reason crossovers are needed now is because the quality isn't there. And I argue that the iron-clad coordination companies need to run crossovers in the first place, is making it impossible for creative teams to produce good content.

If companies are ever going to get back to selling hundreds of thousands, instead of tens of thousands, of copies per title, the only way to do it is with quality, not sales gimmicks.  It's time for DC and Marvel to realize that the "crossover every year" model does not work, and that their sales are declining in part because of that model.  Yes, it's a sales gimmick, so yes, participating series see a small, temporary sales boost during the crossover.  But the series are hurt, not helped, in the long run.  

That's why if you look at comichron's sales figures through March, you'll see that H'el on Earth did not boost sales in the Superman Family.  For the four months before that crossover, Superman sold an average of 55,000 issues per month.  During the crossover, it sold an average of 51,000 per month (a drop in sales during the crossover!).   Issue 18 (the first post-crossover story) sold 48,000.    Superboy had fallen to 25,000 copies per month right before the crossover, and its sales were (slightly) boosted to 27,300 copies per issue of the crossover. However, sales went right back down again post-H'el, to 24,455 (issue 18).

And the story is not true just for H'el on Earth.  Looking at Death of the Family, the Bat-family crossover earlier this year, we see a similar pattern.  It's a little less "clean" because, for example, Detective Comics only participated in this story with issues 15-16, whereas Catwoman crossed into it in issues 13-14.  The pattern, however, is clear for every title as well as across the family line.  Batman averaged about 130,000 copies per month before the crossover, about 151,000 during, and dropped back down to 137,00 after it (even considering that the "post" issue was a crossover into the death of Robin).  Batgirl averaged 48,000 copies per month before the crossover, 68,000 during, and is back to 51,000 after.  Detective Comics averaged 75,000 copies per month before the crossover, and soared to 99,000 per month during it, but two months later has crashed back down to 76,000 per month.  Total sales across the family averaged 421,000 before the crossover, and 482,000 during it (showing that yes, the crossover itself does boost sales in the short term), but has now dropped to 416,000 total for the most recent month -- slightly worse than the pre-crossover numbers.

These numbers suggest that, although crossovers do boost sales for the short term, they do nothing for sales in the long term, and by my argument, they are actually hurting sales long term.  Because the crossovers interrupt, screw with, and ultimately worsen the main storylines of the individual series, readers get frustrated and give up little by little, month by month.  The short-term sales boost this month, this spring, from a big crossover is paid for in spades during the months down the road, as readership declines due to the overall lack of quality that is caused by forcing story-arc rigidity onto creative teams.

It's time comic book companies stopped looking at the short run, and started thinking long term. And in the long run, it is much better to give creative teams freedom than to restrict them by forcing universe-spanning crossovers onto every series every single year.  DC and Marvel need to go back to having the series be the unit of publication, rather than the crossover.  That's the only way we're going to get the quality to go back up in our favorite titles.

The death of the 'series' concept

As I looked over a picture of the upcoming "Trinity War" mega-crossover in DC, and pondered the idea of many books I'm reading having yet another crossover after having already been through one this year, a thought came to me: the traditional concept of the comic-book series is dead, at least in +DC Comics  and +Marvel Entertainment .  Truly, with very few exceptions, there is no such thing, anymore, as a comic-book series.

This may sound crazy to you, because series nominally do still exist.  They have names, editors, creative teams, logos, sequential numbering, and everything, just like they always did.  And yet, my claim today is, that these are series only in name, and not in actual fact.

First of all, let's get our definitions straight. What do I mean by a "series" - how do I define it?  I define a comic-book series, to paraphrase the definition of a TV series on Dictionary.com, as an ongoing, regularly published comic-book title with three traits:

1. it has the same cast of characters
2. it has a continuing story that gradually progresses from issue to issue; and 
3. it has a relatively stable creative team.  

Every single comic-book series when I was growing up met this definition.

The reason I argue that hardly any "series" meet this definition today is that almost none of them meet all three criteria, and many only meet the very first.  That is, most series do have a consistent cast of characters -- the Batgirl series is pretty much about Batgirl, and a few of her friends/family.  But for many titles, that trait (consistent characters) is the only one they can claim.  Many series have had rapidly changing creative teams (Superman had three different teams in 13 issues), although some, like Batgirl, have had a relatively stable team.

But the second criterion is where the "series" of today no longer make the cut. They lack a coherent, continuing story that gradually progresses from issue to issue.  And the reason why they lack a continuing story is the insistence by +DC Comics and +Marvel Entertainment to have multi-title crossovers every few months.  These crossovers are not self-contained, but spill over into every title, often for many months, and can de-rail or even utterly destroy the thread of continuity in the individual title.

Don't get me wrong: I like a good crossover now and then.  But the comic-book companies do it entirely too much these days.  To see what I mean, let's use the New 52 Batgirl series (one of my favorites, thanks to the scripting of Gail Simone) as an example.  To date, 19 issues (if we include #0) of this title have been released. Out of those 19 issues, 9 (or nearly half) have been part of crossovers, or had their stories strongly impacted by crossovers.  Issue 9 was a "Night of the Owls" Bat-family crossover. Issue 11 was a Knightfall Bat-family crossover, and issue 12 was the aftermath of Knightfall.  Issues 13-16 were Batgirl's part in the "Death of the Family" crossover, and issue 17 was the aftermath of DOF.  Issue 18 was part of the "Requiem" for the death of Robin.  In all, as I say, this is nearly half (47%) of all Batgirl issues to date -- meaning that only half of the issues can possibly be part of "a continuing story that gradually progresses from issue to issue."

And now, DC is getting ready to publish the Trinity War, which will probably consume most of the summer, which means even more issues will be crossover tie-ins rather than stories specifically about Batgirl.

Therefore, the concept of the comic-book series has altered.  No longer do we have a continuing story about the same set of characters by a relatively stable creative team.  What we have instead can be thought of as a container of sorts.... the Batgirl, Batman, and Nightwing comics are a delivery system, a vehicle by which crossovers can be brought to the reader.  This seems to be the main purpose for which comics exist.  Telling their own story month in, month out, about a small set of characters, no longer seems to be the job of these titles.  Instead, the series is used by the comic company to set up and portray crossovers.  All titles revolve now, not around their characters, but around whatever crossover is going on at the time (because there's always another one getting ready to come out, another one for which the title has to "prep").

There are happily some exceptions to the rule.  Wonder Woman, so far, has remained a series despite what the rest of the DC Universe is doing.  And the smaller companies, like Image and Dynamite, seem perfectly happy to produce series -- often completely stand-alone series that have nothing to do with the rest of their "universe."  But these are the exceptions, and they are few and far between.  By far the bulk of comic-books are simply vehicles whose purpose is to deliver crossover content to the reader.

The other readers out there must like this new formula, the "title as a crossover venue" approach, because otherwise I imagine the companies wouldn't do it.  I guess if you don't care all that much about the actual characters, the incessant crossing over would be fine.  But for those of us who become attached to, and grow to love and enjoy reading about, specific characters like Batgirl, having her series constantly be interrupted by stories that really have nothing directly (or sometimes even indirectly) to do with her is frustrating in the extreme.

If you're a fan of the true series concept, there really is no remedy at this point, unfortunately.  The bigger companies long ago embraced the "crossover after crossover" model of marketing. It's what they do now.  The only option is to go for the titles produced by smaller companies. And I'm starting to do just that.

Years ago, I gave up comic-books in part because of this very issue -- because each series I was collecting kept being dragged into one crossover after another, and the storyline of each title suffered as a result.  I'm obviously sad, but certainly not surprised, to see this pattern has not changed for +DC Comics or +Marvel Entertainment, but I think the solution isn't to give up comics. Rather, it's to find some titles produced by independent companies, or titles the big companies are willing to allow to stand alone, and follow those.  Dynamite's Red Sonja series is an excellent example of the former, and Wonder Woman (so far) of the latter.

As for Trinity War.... like most mega-crossovers since probably the late 1980s (when they first started doing them), I will do my best to ignore it. If there are special issues or a limited series called "Trinity War," I will probably not buy them.  When the TW issues of those titles I collect come out, I will buy them, read them, accept that I will be confused since I am only reading a tiny portion of the story, bag them, probably never read them again, and wait until it's over.  And if it lasts long enough, some of my pull list titles will probably get dropped, and replaced by independent titles.

The Uncanny X-Men - Year 1

One of the great advantages of buying digital comics from +comiXology is the ability to get one's hands on back-issues that would be impossible to find, and read, in their original paper format.  There are many comics from the Silver and even the Golden Ages that I have never read, but always wanted to, and a few of them (though not as many as I would wish) are now available digitally, and more are being uploaded to +comiXology every day.  One such series, of which I was a huge fan back in the day, is the classic Uncanny X-Men, originally written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby.  Along with more modern comics, I've been buying 2-3 issues each month of this original X-Men series (published starting in 1963). I've now reached issue 12, and so I am going to comment on "Year 1" of X-Men. As I proceed with later issues, I will add new installments of this article series.

Before I proceed, a few comments.

First, I put "Year 1" in quotation marks because, back in those days, X-Men was published bi-monthly, so the first 12 issues, which would represent a single year of a monthly series in modern times, actually took two years to publish in the 1960s.  Because all my other reviews are based on modern publishing schedules, I've decided to continue to review 12 issues at a time.

Second, there have been many series with the term "X-Men" in the title, and I want to clarify which series is being discussed here.  When I refer to the X-Men series in this article (and the 4-5 following ones, which will take us through X-Men #66), I will be referring to the original series (aka. volume 1), published by +Marvel Entertainment (called "Marvel Comics" back then) starting in 1963 and published for almost 50 years.  I will not be referring to any other incarnation of the X-Men title in these articles.

X-Men #1 - Origin

X-Men #1 opens by introducing us to a new team of super-heroes.  After 50 years, it's hard to imagine, but in this first issue in 1963, we have the very first appearance of super-humans born with their powers, and referred to by the term "mutants."  Prior to this issue, just about every superhero you can name derived his or her powers from some external force (an accident, being an alien, being a robot, etc).  But here, we have four teenagers -- Scott Summers, Hank McCoy, Bobby Drake, and Warren Worthington III -- who were simply born with these superhuman abilities.

The story begins with another mutant, Professor Charles Xavier, who has mental super-powers, putting these young men through their paces.  Xavier runs a "school for the gifted" -- in this case, gifted with superhuman abilities. He believes that, with these powers, comes great responsibility to protect and defend the rest of humanity -- especially against those who are born with super-powers but may use them for evil purposes.  Thus, we begin in the "danger room" of the X-Men, with Cyclops, Beast, Ice Man, and Angel training to use their powers.

Shortly after the training, the team of young men is joined by their first female character, Jean Grey, who has telekinetic powers, and is given the code-name "Marvel Girl."

The guys, being teenage boys who have rarely been around girls, make fools of themselves flirting with Jean, and she shows off her powers a bit.  Meanwhile, a helmeted, caped man is hatching a plot to take over the world.  He refers to mutants as "Homo superior" (for X-Men fans -- yes, this term was coined in the very first issue) and plans to take control of the nuclear arsenal of the U.S. and use it to blackmail normal humans into bowing to him.  This man is, of course, Magneto, for years the greatest arch-enemy of the X-Men.

Magneto uses his powers to take over a military base, gain control of the missiles, and then put a force-field around the base to prevent anyone from attacking him.  The news of this gets out, and Professor X summons the X-men, and sends them off to try and stop Magneto.  This leads to the very first battle between Magneto and the X-men, in which each X-man uses his or her powers against various attacks hurled at them by the villain.  In the end, the X-men manage to fight him off, and Magneto flees, vowing to return.

X-Men #1 is a classic first issue from the Silver Age.  I was amazed at how much is crammed into this issue. We have the introduction of the "born with our powers" mutant concept.  We have the first appearance of all five original X-Men plus Professor X.  We have the introduction of Magneto the "evil mutant," and a setup of the "mutants vs. non-mutants" conflict that will dominate this title in years to come.

There are also many surprises in this issue if you came to the X-Men series much later on (in the days of Storm and Wolverine, or in recent times), because in this issue, rather than being hunted by the government, the X-Men team is actually sanctioned by it.  Additionally, there is no hostility between normal humans and the X-Men -- all the hostility is on Magneto's side (he hates non-mutants). The X-Men confuse and surprise the military when they first appear (of course), but by the end, the base's general is shaking their hand and talking about what an honor it was to work with them.

How different this reaction is from the reactions we see toward mutants in modern times, and indeed, the reactions we've seen for decades.  One wonders if, when they started all this, Lee and Kirby had any idea how much the mutant theme would change over the years, and indeed, whether they would, back then, have approved of what was coming.  We know that years later, as publisher, Stan Lee allowed the mutant hatred that came to dominate +Marvel Entertainment, but I have to wonder if the 1963 Lee and Kirby would have warmed to the idea, given the stories they were writing at the time.

Overall, X-Men #1 is an extremely fun, as well as educational (from the perspective of comic-book history) read.  Yes, the dialog is a campy and the actions of the characters are a sometimes silly.  Yes, the X-men, who are portrayed as being in their late teens, sometimes act childishly (especially around Jean, they act more like they're 12 than 17).  But we have here all the classic elements that became hallmarks of the X-men for years to come, and there is no question that this light-hearted story is worth a few smiles.  Unlike today's comics, this is an issue I will be able to share with my nephew when he is old enough to read, and I know he will love it.

Adventures under Professor X

Following the first issue battle against Magneto, Professor X leads the X-Men through a series of battles against villainous mutants.  Each issue, the danger room provides greater and greater challenges, as Professor X hones his students' skills.  And in each issue, we see a new villain to challenge the X-Men.  In issue #2, the X-men face the Vanisher, who can turn invisible.

In issue #3, they try to recruit the Blob, who is a circus performer but also a mutant, only to have him turn on them and try to attack their school.  Professor X solves this problem (temporarily), but making the Blob forget he is after them.

Then, in issue #4, Magneto returns, this time accompanied by his "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants," consisting of Toad, who has acrobatic powers, Mastermind the illusionist, Scarlet Witch, who has 'hex' powers, and Quicksilver, who has superspeed.  The evil mutants take over the fictional island of Santo Marco as a first step to conquering the world.  In this issue, we see for the first time Professor X and Magneto making "astral projections" of themselves, in which Magneto asks Xavier why he insists on protecting the "lowly" humans from superior mutants.  Xavier says he will not stand by and watch innocents hurt, and this sets up the first-ever show-down between the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and the X-men.

In the end, the X-men defeat the Evil Mutants, forcing them to flee the island. However, there is a cost... Professor Xavier is caught in an explosion and, on the final page of the issue, says he has lost his mental powers and can no longer lead them.

In the next issue, we find out that the Evil Mutants have an asteroid base in orbit around the earth, and that Magneto wants to find and defeat the X-men.  Mastermind searches for them unsuccessfully, and so Magneto sends Toad out to pretend to be a track star. When Toad's powers appear to make him "cheat," the crowd at the track turns into a mob and attacks him (first instance in comic-book history of a mob attacking a mutant for "being different"), and the X-men go to save him.  While bringing him back to their base, however, they recognize him, and a fight breaks out, with the other Evil Mutants joining in.  In the end, the villains flee back to their base, and the X-Men give chase in a second rocket that was meant for Toad.  This leads to a battle royale on the asteroid, and another escape by the evil mutants.  At the end of the story, Professor X reveals that he was never without his powers, but he was just pretending to be to further the education of the X-Men.  This was their final exam, and they passed.  And so, at the end of issue #5, the X-Men have graduated from the "school for gifted youngsters."

As the series continues, the battle between X-Men and Evil Mutant continues. In issue #6, both Magneto and the X-Men attempt to recruit Namor, aka. Submariner, to their cause.  There is a three-way battle, by the end of which Namor decides he doesn't want to be associated with either group, and returns to the ocean.  The Evil Mutants escape once again, after being defeated by the X-Men.

Adventures under Cyclops

Although they passed their final exam in issue #5, the X-Men don't officially graduate until issue #7. In this issue, which began the second calendar year of X-Men (since it was published bi-monthly), the students officially graduate, and Professor Xavier leaves them on their own.

Before leaving, Professor X shows Scott Summers his "Cerebro" machine, which detects mutant activity, and then leaves it, and the X-Men, in his hands. Cyclops will be the new leader of the X-Men.

Meanwhile, Magneto and his Evil Mutants go to the carnival where Blob is performing, and manage to break the mental block Professor X had placed upon him. They convince him to join them and fight against the X-Men.  Together with the Blob, the Evil Mutants battle the X-Men. But when the X-Men end up in a group around the Blob, Magneto sends a flight of torpedoes at them, not caring what this will do to his new underling.  The Blob sees Magneto's true colors as a result, and decides, much like Namor, that he wants nothing to do with either team. And of course, once again, the villains escape (starting to see a pattern here?).

Under the leadership of Cyclops, the team continues to develop and to meet, and battle, new foes.  They battle Unus, whose mutant power makes him impossible to touch. And in issue #9, they meet the Avengers for the first time, and through a misunderstanding, battle them.  The battle is caused by both groups searching for the same villain, a man called "Lucifer" who is an old arch-enemy of Professor Xaveir's.  Eventually, Thor comes to understand what is going on, and calls off the Avengers, telling them to leave this to the X-Men.  Together, Professor X and the X-Men defeat Lucifer, and Professor X returns to the school.

The Return of Professor X

With Professor X back, we begin to see the eventual leadership arrangement of the X-Men taking place.  Xavier remains the director of the team, giving strategic orders and making large decisions, while Scott (Cyclops) remains the tactical leader in combat.  This relationship is very much like a coach and a quarterback, with Xavier calling the plays and Cyclops commanding their execution.   The X-Men go on three new adventures with this new leadership structure.

The first adventure, in issue #10, is in the Savage Land underneath Antarctica, where dwells Ka-Zar.  The X-Men encounter dinosaurs, mammoths, and ape-men, and at first battle Ka-Zar himself, until they realize they are both on the same side.  Then Ka-Zar helps Cyclops, Beast, and Ice Man rescue Marvel Girl and Angel from the ape-men.  However, as with most individual mutants met by the X-Men in these early issues, he decides he wants no part of superheroes or supervillains, and bids them farewell.

In issue #11, the story of Magneto finally wraps up (at least for the moment) as another mutant is detected by Cerebro -- this one more powerful than any to date.  Once again, both the Evil Mutants and the X-Men vie to recruit this being, called simply the "Stranger," but he proves to be too powerful for either.  Finally, he reveals that he is not from earth, and that his civilization collects mutants from other worlds. He has decided to "collect" Magneto and Toad, and takes the two of them off-world, seemingly forever.

Meanwhile, Mastermind has been transformed into solid matter by the Stranger and is no longer a threat, and the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, freed of their debt to Magneto, decide to return home to Europe. Since they were never truly villains, the X-Men allow them to leave.

Finally, in issue #12, a new mutant of incredible power is detected. Cerebro raises a loud warning siren, and all the X-Men gather to learn of the new threat.  Professor X tells them that this mutant is on his way to the school and will be almost impossible to stop, but he has them prepare a series of defenses around the school. Then, as the mysterious mutant crashes through one defense after another, Xavier tells the story of his origin.

He was born to parents who had been around nuclear test facilities, which probably caused him to be born a mutant. As he grew older, he developed mental powers.  But his father died in an atomic test accident, and his mother married his father's colleague, Dr. Marko.  Marko had a son, named Cain, who was cruel and mean to Xavier.  The two step-brothers never really got along.  Cain eventually caused a lab accident that killed Dr. Marko, leaving Xavier alone with him. The two remained antagonistic for years, until finally, during the Korean War, Cain fled into a cave and found a powerful gem of dark magic. Taking it, he was transformed into a being of unstoppable strength and power -- the Juggernaut.  North Korean shelling caused the cave to collapse on him, but now (10 years later, when the comic was being published), he had dug himself out and was back to defeat Professor X.  After smashing into the school and blowing past the X-men, he stands before Professor X ready to exact vengeance at the end of issue 12 - the first true cliffhanger of the X-Men series.

Reflections on Year 1

Re-reading the first "year" of classic Silver Age X-Men issues while simultaneously reading the first year worth of DC's "New 52" titles has been an educational study in contrasts.  Although I will readily admit that the plots, and the dialogue, of X-Men 1-12 are clearly aimed at kids and relatively unsophisticated by today's standards, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby also clearly illustrate, in the larger view, how to launch a brand new series in a relatively clean, new universe (as Marvel's was at the time).  Here, I will compare and contrast what is going on today, with what we see in the first 12 issues of the 1960s X-Men series.

Continuity vs. Story Arcs

The first thing that jumps out at the reader of X-Men 1-12 is the lack of what we call "story arcs" today.  In modern comics, storylines last about 4-8 issues, averaging 6, and are relatively self-contained.  Thus, if you look at the "Year 1" summaries I have written about other titles, you will see them broken up into two (or perhaps 3) story arcs. Often (as with Superman 1-12), each story arc has a different creative team.  Within the story arc, supporting cast members appear, but they may not carry over into later story arcs.  And often, although the title characters may remain the same, hardly anything else will be consistent from arc to arc. Indeed, these arcs are most commonly written as stand-alone stories so they can be collected into a trade paperback and sold separately later.  Thus, one can read the arcs in almost any order.

Lee and Kirby did not follow that pattern 50 years ago.  Instead, each individual issue was written as a stand-alone story.  The characters remained consistent from issue to issue, but the main plot was relatively self-contained.  Thus, the plot that began in issue #10 involving Ka-Zar, ended in issue #10.  There were generally no "cliffhanger" endings, and plots did not continue from one issue to the next.

On the other hand, there were sub-plots and character development points that did carry over from issue to issue.  Jean Grey begins falling for Scott early on, and then Scott starts falling for her, and the thread of their unspoken mutual attraction continues throughout all 12 issues.  The training from Professor X accelerates through the first 6 issues, and then in issue 7 the X-Men graduate, followed by Professor X leaving for a few issues, and then returning.  Thus, there is a strong continuity from issue to issue, where what happened previously clearly affects the future.

And yet, despite this strong continuity, it is easily possible to read any one of these 12 issues on its own, without being confused.  Lee and Kirby use the first page or two of each issue to recap what has gone before and explain who the X-Men are, or they use some short flashbacks or narrative boxes to remind readers of the past.  By today's standards this might seem to "slow things down" and would probably be considered heavy-handed, but it was actually quite brilliant. Back then, when comics were still not really being "collected" by many people, and comics specialty stores did not exist, Lee and Kirby knew that the reader could not easily go back and read up on the earlier exploits of the X-Men. They also knew if someone tried to read this month's issue and got lost, he might be frustrated enough not to try any more issues. So they wisely kept readers abreast of what was going on.  This was done gracefully enough that if you have been following along, the recaps were actually fun to read rather than obtrusive.

The continuity in X-Men 1-12 keeps people looking for the next issue, without confusing new readers or forcing people to "buy all the back issues" to figure out what the heck is going on. This should be an important lesson for today's comic-book creators.  Continuity is important, and having a sub-plot continue for many issues is one of the great joys of reading comics.  But in the interests of providing constant "jumping on" points for new readers, comic creators are better served with single-issue stories that are part of a larger continuity, than by producing stories that span many issues, and then are disconnected from the rest of the series.  The way X-Men 1-12 present their stories and continuity is therefore superior to the "story arc" method of today, and I encourage writers and editors to consider at least trying to build a series or two like this again.  (One rare example of this is the New 52 Wonder Woman, which has followed the 1960s Lee/Kirby model rather than the "story arc" model.)

Stability of creative team and story

The primary reason the strong threads of character development and continuity are seen in the first 12 issues of X-Men is the stability of the creative team.  Stan Lee and Jack Kirby worked together on all twelve issues.  There were no fill-in artists or writers. The creative team didn't get fired and replaced after 4 issues.  Rather, Lee and Kirby worked together to slowly build their storyline over 12 issues, and gradually introduced new characters and elements of the story.  As a consequence, there is a consistency and uniformity of style to X-Men 1-12 that only rarely exists in the comics of today.

Today, in contrast, creative teams often come on board for a single story arc, produce 4-8 issues, and then move on, to be replaced by another team.  This causes the quality of most titles to rollercoaster wildly up and down, and causes the characters to be extremely inconsistent from issue to issue.  A great example is the first two story arcs of the New 52 Superman series. Issue 1-6, done by George Perez, has a completely different feel, tone, and emphasis on supporting characters, than does issue 7-12, done by Dan Jurgens, or issue 13-17, done by Scott Lobdell.  These books are so different it almost seems like they're depicting Superman on 3 different Earths.  This inconsistency destroys any sense of continuity the books may have.

Campy stories

Probably the primary criticism that could be leveled against these early Lee/Kirby X-Men is the "campy" tone of the stories. The X-Men are supposed to be young, but they act far younger than their supposed ages (they should be around 17 years old, but they sometimes act more like they are 11 or 12).  The villains love to give corny speeches and act somewhat unrealistically.  However, if you're willing to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy these issues for what they are -- a fun diversion from reality -- these classic X-Men stories can be a lot of fun.  I will certainly admit that, objectively, some of the stories are pretty unsophisticated. But they're plotted well, and they are enjoyable. And after all, that's what we read comics for, isn't it? Enjoyment.

Conclusion

Overall, I greatly enjoyed re-reading the first 12 issues of X-Men.  Although some aspects of the series definitely show their age, the way this series was handled by Lee and Kirby is really an object lesson for how to introduce a new comic-book series, with a new set of characters, to the comic-reading public.  If the companies of today did things more like Lee and Kirby and less like Morrison and Lobdell, we'd all have a much better material to read each month.