The Fantastic Four - First Steps

The Foxy Mr. Fantastic

The Fantastic Four - 
First Steps
Directed by Matt Shakman
UK/USA/Canada/New Zealand 2025
Marvel/Disney
UK cinema release print.

Foreshadowing: The only spoilers in this are hints of what doesn’t happen. I think you can read in safety... or, you know, Reed in safety. 

What is it with the July Blockbuster trailers this year?

I mean, the marketing has been terrible. 

The Jurassic World Rebirth trailer looked as awful as I assumed it would be, the Superman trailer, Krypto aside, looked pretty appalling and the trailer for The Fantastic Four - First Steps, was surprisingly bad. I’d been looking forward to that last one because I knew it was going to be set in the 1960s and, admittedly this meant the film had to have been set in a multiversal alternative version of Earth (since they are not past characters in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe aka MCU, other than in alternate cameos)... but they are right up front about that in this movie, with the characters living in a version of Earth named after original co-creator Jack Kirby’s birthday. 

And in each of the cases of the promotional campaigns mentioned above... the films they represented were some of the best blockbuster movies we’ve had in a while. Jurassic Park Rebirth (reviewed here), while totally not needed, was one of the better franchise entries. Superman was pretty solid (it probably helped that Krypto gets a lot of screen time... reviewed here) and, yeah, despite being totally miscast in terms of the way the characters look in the comics... with Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Susan Richards (The Invisible Girl), Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Benjamin Grimm (The Thing*) and Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm (The Human Torch)... this film is actually one of the better MCU entries to date. 

The main leads all work well together in terms of their on-screen chemistry and the whole movie looks spectacular in its creation of a kind of retro-fitted, futuristic vision of the 1960s. An aesthetic which I thought would work (until I saw the trailer) but, yeah, in spite of that, it still looks pretty amazing. One might even say... fantastic. 

The film kinda had me from very early on when, after skimping on a proper origin story... much like superhero movies are finally learning to do again, from their 1940s and 1950s on screen counterparts, just cut to the chase... it does a brief potted history of the origins of the team on an Ed Sullivan parody TV show and one of, I’m sure, many comic book homages throughout, it recreates, in live action format, something approximating the cover of the very first issue of the comic, dated November 1961. You know... the titular characters’ famous battle with the Mole Man. Actually, the Mole Man takes on a much more significant role as the film moves forward, rather than just being used as a throwaway for this sequence, it turns out. 

There’s even an homage to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, if my brief glimpse of them working in the offices of Timely Comics (Marvel’s original name in the 1930s) was correctly decoded by my brain. So, yeah, there are lots of homages to the original comics, even if the film strays far from the fine details. 

For instance, I meant to watch the WandaVision follow up TV show Agatha All Along before seeing this (I forgot) because I’d heard Sue Storm is pregnant in this one. So, obviously, Franklin Richards would need a babysitter and, in the comics, that was the witch Agatha Harkness. But, nope, she doesn’t make an appearance here. 

And similarly, you’ll know from the trailers (which include material which didn’t make final cut, by the looks of it) that the big bad of the movie is the mighty Galactus (and he actually looks just like him this time around). So, of course, that means his herald, the Silver Surfer will be making an appearance and... make an appearance he does. Um... no... actually that’s, make an appearance she does. Instead of Norin Rad being this movies Silver Surfer, we have his lover Shalla-Bal, played by Julia Garner, filling that spot. So, yeah, wrong again but, also again, it kinda works here.

What doesn’t work is that damned robot Herbie, who finally makes it to the screen. And why it doesn’t work too well is because, though it speaks English, you can’t really make out what it’s saying. At least, I couldn’t. Could maybe have used some subtitles here guys. 

But it is fast paced, simpler than the usual overcrowded superhero fest (in exactly the way Superman wasn’t... but still managed to make it work) with a lot of oomph and, actually, quite a lot of emotional heart. All set to a Michael Giacchino score which, again, despite being terrible in the trailers, really works for the movie... bet there’s no CD release though, because Marvel seem to have given up on giving their more music literate fans a score on the one useful format they could have put it on. Yeah, not getting into this again right now... their music policy sucks. 

But yeah, other than not being able to enjoy the music for the film away from the movie because it’s not released in an acceptable format at time of writing, The Fantastic Four - First Steps was a surprisingly charming movie and a good time at the cinema, for sure. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this links in to Avengers Doomsday next year (or even, since it’s not picked up here, how it related to the post credits scenes of Thunderbolts, reviewed here). A small hint might be found in the first of the two post credit sequences of this film, methinks.

*Actually, The Thing is based more on his original, early 1960s look here, instead of the more defined, better known version of the character from the 1970s. 

Marvel Comics - The Untold Story

 

Treasury Edition

Marvel Comics - The Untold Story
by Sean Howe
Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780061992117

Around about a year ago, I read and reviewed (right here) a book called Slugfest - Inside the Epic 50 Year Battle Between Marvel and DC by Reed Tucker. It was a pretty good read and I wanted to follow it up with another look at something about one of the comic book companies. Marvel Comics - The Untold Story by Sean Howe more than fits the bill. In fact, there’s not a lot of crossover at all between this and the earlier book I’d read. I mean, sure, there’s mention of DC but, when it comes to professional rivalry, Howe’s book looks as much at some of the more threatening independent labels like Image and Malibu as it does at DC.

So, as I started to read with a certain amount of trepidation, it soon became clear that I wasn’t just going to be reading a load of legendary and well told anecdotes about the long history of Marvel Comics. I mean, sure, they’re there but, at well over 400 pages, this book really gathers a lot of first hand research and the writer weaves it into a rich tapestry of many things I didn’t know about the comic book company (some of which I may have been happier not knowing, truth be told).

He does, however, start off with a revisitation of a famous point in Marvel Comics history, that of the day in 1961 when the lonesome Stan Lee, having been ordered to fire most of his staff and now working almost alone, decided to make one last grab at the market by publishing some superhero characters his own way while, at the behest of publisher Martin Goodman, coming up with something that could compete with the new Justice League Of America super group book that DC were cleaning up with. Thus, with Jack Kirby and also Steve Ditko on board, we had the birth of the Fantastic Four followed by The Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Mighty Thor. At least that’s the way Lee tells it... the way Kirby remembered it was a lot different, as I’m sure long term fans of the comic world would know and, yeah, this book certainly addresses all that stuff later on too.

And it was at this point where I began to question things and say to myself... why the heck is this guy starting so late in the game? After all, Marvel started out as Timely (among others) with the 1939 issue which introduced characters such as The Human Torch (the original), Namor - The Sub Mariner and The Vision (the original) etc. Not to mention Jack Kirby and Joe Simon working on a Captain America comic during the war. And then I realised, like a typical Marvel Comic from a certain era of my youth, Howe was playing the game of starting off on a major action scene and then flashing back to the beginning of the adventure before catching back up with the tale and then moving forwards from there. So already I could tell he was really thinking about the way he structured this thing to resemble the subject matter he was exploring but, also, it turns out he’s a really great writer of this kind of stuff.

I mean, it’s one thing to do the research, organise all the facts into some kind of timeline and then diligently report them to the reader in as accurate and fair a manner as possible (I won’t say unbiased because, no piece of writing ever truly is but, you know, he probably comes close to that too). What the writer does here, though, is to go that one step further and takes you right into the details and action of the true life incidents like you’re reading a fictional tale come to life. Okay, it does get a bit more listy as the tome wears on when everything gets to be about deals and legality and office politics but, Howe impressed me with his knack of taking all those facts he’s had to crunch through and putting me right into the heart of the story with people like Bill Everett and the aforementioned Kirby.

And, because space and economics played against me for the last 30 years, he also goes into what is, for me, totally unknown territory and explores the changes and challenges of the company right through to around about ten years ago when this book was written. So, Stan Lee was still alive and, it would seem, available for comment (along with a whole host of creators and executives, many of whom have passed on now and it took this book to let me know about the deaths of the names behind the comics I used to see printed on pages regularly in the 1970s and 80s) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe had just started to get really successful with the first Avengers movie.

So, yeah, you’ll get stuff like that legendary, infamous weekend in the 1940s where all the artists and writers holed up together for a 48 hour period in a hotel room, working through the night and not sleeping (or sleeping in shifts) with the radio blaring as they quickly put together a 60 paged length Human Torch VS Sub Mariner tale which would rack up huge sales. But then, some 200 or more pages later, he’ll come up with an echo of that exact same behaviour in the 1990s or 2000s which was the equivalent, almost, of the same burst of creative energy from the early days in the 1940s.

He’ll highlight the things which made Lee and Kirby’s heroes different and appealing - the teenage angst, the insecurity, the fact that the Fantastic Four didn’t have secret identities - and he’ll also deal with the little things which would lead to injured parties having inflated negative feelings as the decades grew... such as Kirby assuming Lee got him fired from Timely at one point (while Kirby was moonlighting for DC as a kind of therapy for not being given proper profits shares for the amounts of money Captain America was raking in).

So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff which was new to me here and the writer takes you by the hand and leads you through Marvel history - Claremont’s X-Men, the arrival of John Byrne and Frank Miller, the split with Todd McFarlane, the issues with Steve Gerber - as well as all the politics and office wars along the way which resulted in many people walking away from the ‘house of ideas’ and into either a rival company or to start up a new one. And I have to say, it gets a lot darker than I thought it would.

Marvel and, even the likes of Stan Lee, are not painted in the best light here and you have to question a lot of the unbelievable stupidity on the part of the different management teams over the years who really, it seems to me, knew little about comics and were more concerned with the money than actually being true or even sensible to the characters in the Marvel stable. There are grudges aired, friends and colleagues betrayed by one another and even a few deaths, most likely from the stress of the situation that various managers made, that fill these pages and sometimes make the policies of the famed comic book company seem a little like a road accident. You know, those times when you pass a particularly bad one and curiosity compels you to look.

But you’ll also get insights into a lot of things such as the way in which Stan Lee wrote the stories... I still think writing using ‘the Marvel method’ is certainly still a topsy turvy way of doing things but it seems a lot less loose and random now that I think I understand the process a little better, for sure. I can also see how Stan’s ‘method’ could easily imbue everyone working on a title, including himself, with a sense of ownership which was much more of a team situation than various people might like to imagine.

So yeah, that’s me done dwelling on this stuff for a while, I think. Marvel Comics - The Untold Story is a dark but honest and, perhaps more importantly as far as the reader is concerned, hugely entertaining and fascinating insight into the behemoth that is the legendary comic book company. Not quite modern Marvel because, well, they weren’t owned by Disney then but, even then, there were some insights the author conveys about the idea of Disney looking into buying Marvel which, perhaps, he’d be less able to get away with now. But don’t take my word for that, read the book. It’s a great thing. My only real complaint, at least for the one I was gifted, is that there are pages of fascinating notes relating to each chapter in the back but, somehow, the numbers are left off the actual pages in the chapters so you’ve got no idea which note hooks up with which piece of text. Apart from this bizarre oversight though (I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen that particular mistake in a publication), it’s a stupendously interesting book and if you’re into comics and the state of the various environments behind them (art, writing, publishing, printing and, very importantly, distribution), then you will get a lot out of this one.

Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag

Grabby Christmas

Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag
by various writers and artists
Marvel Comics 1974-1976

Imagine, if you will, a young boy aged six years old, out in London with his parents at the tail end of 1974. There I was, in either Berwick Street in Soho or just down the road and around the corner in St. Ann’s Court (just off Wardour Street, depending on when the place I'm talking about moved) in what was my all time favourite shop, Dark They Were And Golden Eyed. This was the forerunner of such future shops as the short lived Eye In The Pyramid and, of course, Forbidden Planet (pretty much the only one of these types of stores which made it out of the late 70s/early 80s and which is still with us today, although there are some modern variants like Mega City Comics and Orbital, of course).

So, anyway, there I was in my favourite science fiction, fantasy, horror and comic shop gazing up at a huge (well, to me it seemed huge) tabloid sized, cardboard covered Treasury Edition called Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag. There was a load of Christmas Holly with red berries on the cover forming a wreath and, bursting through all that rich greenery were Spider-Man, Thor, The Hulk, Captain America, The Thing and The Human Torch. And then, on the back, there was a reverse of the cover with the same scene but with a view of them from behind, doing the bursting. It was gorgeous and I was actually very surprised when my dad took the thing down from the shelf and said we could take it back home with us. Surprised because, honestly, it was an exorbitant amount of money for the time... a real luxury item. Yep! It was 50p (I believe the US price was about $1.50, which says something about the state of the pound against the dollar these days, I think). How could a comic be priced over what was five times the amount of a regular comic back then? Honestly, fifty pence?

Anyway, we took it home and it got a lot of love and, I still have this and both the other two ‘sequels’ to this tome to this day... and it’s those which are the subject of today's review, an excuse for me to read and hang out with the fond memories. I think it was the first Treasury Edition I’d ever seen. Both DC and Marvel did these tabloid sized Treasury Editions (as they were loosely known at the time) and, although there were a few which pre-dated this one by a matter of months, I believe this was the first year that the two big companies started releasing them. Not a huge amount of them have survived these days because they didn’t travel through the mail too well and their relatively cumbersome size meant they tended to get folded and bent quite a bit. Not mine though. I managed to keep most I had and, although some were given away, I managed to buy many of them back and a few others in the interceding years. Actually, there are two I used to have which I still wish I could get back but, for some reason, those ones seem to go for very big money. As it is they usually go for a fair whack if you’re lucky enough to see them about in the wild. I have maybe 30 to 40 of these things and I still think they’re great buys, with their oversized artwork reprinted at something almost as large as the original artwork might have been before reproduction and with a full colour, no adverts experience of around 80 to 90 pages in total. These were a great deal.

It’s actually now that I read them again that I realise that, although the covers really 'brought the Christmas', the stories inside (which were mostly reprints in the case of these particular editions), were mostly not seasonal tales.

Here is what lurked between the covers...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Special - 1974
First up we have what was pretty much the only Christmas tale in this one (honestly, these things feel much more Christmassy than they actually are) with a tale teaming up everybody’s favourite web slinger Spider-Man with the Silver Age version of The Human Torch, Johnny Storm of The Fantastic Four. This is Have Yourself A Sandman Little Christmas by Roy Thomas And Ross Andru and it’s a truly brilliant little tale which humanises the super villain and in which, for a little while, the two lead heroes turn a blind eye for a minute and let him keep his annual ritual of visiting his sick mother in bed on Christmas Eve. It’s a heart warming story and nobody is really worried that The Sandman gets away at the end.

The next, very non-Christmassy story is In Mortal Combat With... Sub Mariner by Stan Lee and Wally Wood. This is a tale of Namor seeking a lawyer to challenge mankind’s rights to be the ruling surface dwellers and, yeah, no prizes as to which legal team he goes for. It’s not long before Daredevil and Sub Mariner are locked in deadly combat in the streets of New York.

And then there’s... And To All A Good Night by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan. Along with the opening tale, this is the other strong story in this collection and, although it has a Christmassy title, it could frankly be set on almost any night of the year. This one shows Black Widow’s chauffer rescuing a suicidal young man from taking a plunge into the river, so he takes the kid back to Natasha to help him. Alas, when the hoodlums who are the cause of the boy’s troubles attack them all in Natasha’s building, the teenager goes to save her and ends up plunging to his death from the rooftop anyway... much to the upset of the teary eyed Black Widow. This one is pretty grim and depressing and really shows that Marvel could take themselves seriously with different kinds of stories when they wanted to.

The last two tales in this first Grab Bag tome, Battle Of The Century - The Hulk VS The Thing and The Avengers Take Over is a two part tale by the classic writing and art team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It does what it says on the tin and shows the first real meeting between The Fantastic Four and the fairly newly formed The Avengers, as they learn how to work together in the second part to end The Hulk’s current rampage. It’s made more than clear in this story that The Hulk’s alter ego is very much Bob Banner... that would change over time.

And that was that for this first volume. Dynamic and, much simpler but much more engaging somehow, artwork than a lot of comics today and certainly a lot of fun. However, this must have been a very successful experiment on the part of Marvel because, a year later there was...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Edition Number 8 - 1975
This one goes with the same format with only two actual Christmas tales but there’s also a New Year’s Eve story in here too... of sorts.

Twas The Night Before Christmas by Gary Friedrich And Frank Springer is a nice opening story about Nick Fury, Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D going up into space to defuse a world threatening bomb on Christmas Eve. But it’s a trap and Fury is face to face with a Ku Klux Klan style super villain called The Hatemonger, who straps him to a capsule with the bomb and sends him back to Earth. If it wasn’t for a serendipitous intervention from an unknown entity (it’s strongly implied it’s Santa and his sled) then things might have turned out badly. Nice idea and love that there’s a Sean Connery reference in this, paying homage to the original idea of resurrecting the star of Sgt. Fury And His Howling Commandoes as a secret agent in the Cold War.

After this, there’s a reprint of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s classic Spidey Goes Mad story, where Mysterio posing as a psycho-analyst almost makes Spider-Man think he’s going off his rocker with his illusions... if it wasn’t for J. Jonah Jameson accidentally foiling his plans, much to the editor of the Daily Bugle’s dismay. Next up is the second Christmas story, Jingle Bombs by Steve Engleheart, George Tusca and Billy Graham. This one tells of a super villain visiting Luke Cage, Hero For Hire on Christmas Eve and attacking him as people from the past, present and future (in a nod to Charles Dickens) before finding him worthy enough to tie up in his lair so they can die together when he lets off an atomic bomb. This isn’t a great story but it has a certain atmosphere to it that makes up for the clumsy plot.

Then we have Roy Thomas and Herb Trimpe’s Heaven Is A Very Small Place, which is... literally The Hulk in the desert reacting to a mirage of a friendly town before it fades out again. It’s... not got a lot of substance to it but at least it’s fairly short.

The final tale in this edition is Eternity! Eternity! by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan and is about Doctor Strange (back in the phase when he used to wear that blue face covering) and is about Nightmare and Eternity trying to destroy mankind on New Year’s Eve. It seems to be the first installment of a two parter because, just as the big fight is about to start, the editors obviously decided they didn’t want to go over the page count and instead have Doctor Strange reminding the readers that everything came out alright in the end.

So, yeah... that one was a bit of a cop out but it must have sold well because it once more paved the way for...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Edition Number 13 - 1976
Okay, so Marvel obviously never used to do that many Christmas stories (and I can sort of see why in terms of the long game and the age of the characters) because they manage to have their cake and eat it here. By that I mean, none of the reprints are Christmas themed in this edition but, to ease this and attempt to give the whole thing a seasonal feel, there’s a framing story of a bunch of completely new pages, called ‘Tis The Season, by Roger Stern and George Tuaka, which takes place during and after a Fantastic Four VS The Avengers charity snowball fight event... where various of these and other superheroes interact with the characters and each encounter has one or more of the characters reminiscing about a previous adventure... with a few pages of this popping up between each story and the bookends.
 
The regular stories start with ...As Those Who Will Not See! by Gerry Conway and Gill Kane, when Spider-Man turns up and we get a tale featuring him plus The Thing  and his blind girlfriend Alicia Masters teaming up to follow a thread created by Alicia’s step-dad, The Puppetmaster. It tries to be an emotional story of a father gone bad but, in the end, it’s not really a great story. The next in the volume reprints the story of The Vision becoming a member of The Avengers with the classic Even An Android Can Cry by Roy Thomas and John Buscema.

He Who Strikes The Silver Surfer by Stan Lee and Marie Severin is next but, nothing much happens as two titans, Hulk and Silver Surfer, lock horns and trade fists. Marvel seemed to be good at having ‘nothing much happening’ while two characters are pounding on each other for the required number of pages. Something to note here though is that Robert Banner has now become Bruce Banner (later this was glossed over with the explanation that he’s Robert Bruce Banner, if memory serves).

The last story, Once Upon A Time - - The Ox! by Gerry Conway and Gene Colan is Daredevil VS The Ox who, if memory serves, was originally one of The Enforcers in The Amazing Spider-Man but now seems to be a dormant personality in another character. It doesn’t make much sense and is not a fun story, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s me done with these for the forseeable future. They’re not what I remember them to be but it was nice to revisit these things and I’m surprised that Marvel haven’t gathered some of their more Christmas themed stories from the last sixty plus years of comics and released them under a money grabbing trade paperback reprint but, you know, that’s just what I’d do (and I’d certainly grab a copy for myself). The Treasury format is one of my fondest memories of comic book buying in the 1970s and, despite the weak content in some of these tomes, they will always hold a special place in my heart. Definitely worth tracking down if comic books are your thing.

Slugfest

Superhero Slamdown

Slugfest - Inside the Epic 50 Year
Battle Between Marvel and DC
by Reed Tucker
Sphere ISBN: 978-0751568974

Well, this is certainly a book I didn’t know I needed. The title says it all... Slugfest - Inside The Epic 50 Year Battle Between Marvel and DC. I didn’t even know there was an ‘epic battle’ and both companies have been going, in one form or another, since the 1930s so... maybe the title is a little misleading in terms of the timeframe (although I’ll get to that in a little while).

I was always a bit of a DC kid when it came to comics but then again, I also used to love both Harvey Comics and Marvel Comics too, growing up in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In fact, I learned from this very tome that Marvel, who pretty much always used to copy other people’s products, at least until the early 1960s (although a big case could be made for after too) had tried their own version of the Casper, The Friendly Ghost comic called Homer, The Happy Ghost. I’d love to see one of those. So I read more Superman, Batman, SHAZAM! and Casper than most other titles but I was always there for Marvel’s Spider-Man, Captain Britain and various others of their comics too. What did it matter who was publishing the things... isn’t there room for all the publishers in the marketplace?

As I got older and went to College, I got my first inkling that, quite ridiculously, there are people... many of them... who are either for one or the other. They lived in a world of exclusivity which meant that if they enjoyed DC, then they wouldn’t buy or support Marvel (Marvel and DC have always, until maybe very recently in terms of actually selling comics, been the dominant two of the four-colour comic book publishers on the block). And there was a wild rivalry between the fans of each... a bit like that bizarre split in fandom nowadays which means a lot of people are either Star Wars or Star Trek people. I mean, c’mon folks, really?

The thing is, I’d always assumed that this rivalry between the companies was only existent in the heads of the readers themselves. After all, grown adults working for these companies wouldn’t stoop to such shenanigans, would they? Well, as it turns out, the answer is yes and that’s why I needed this book to come along and make me realise that the constant, perceived rivalry between Marvel and DC was and, very much still is, a very real thing... and this details quite a lot of the interesting stories from 1962 onwards, when Marvel started launching their very different superheroes such as Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. Almost immediately they became a serious threat to the huge market share that DC had a grip on prior to those early days, as Stan Lee at Marvel finally hit on a winning set of ingredients for the comics that Marvel were putting out. So yeah, Marvel have been around almost as long as DC but this really looks at the early 1960s onwards.

Now, it has to be said, while writer Reed Tucker does a truly fantastic job of researching this with some of the key players and their colleagues, getting this stuff down in as entertaining a way as possible, he owns up right from the start of the book that he was pretty much a Marvel kid. Nothing wrong with that of course, one of my best friends is similarly blinkered in that respect but... I did feel that the book is definitely written with a not so hard to detect bias towards Marvel comics. So what we have, for the most part here, is a catalogue of errors as DC start to slide and continue to lose more of their place in the market, with the occasional period of upturn every now and again where they are holding their own against Marvel. Now, I’m pretty sure it’s all true and that, from the stories indicated here, DC weren’t always doing things right... and a lot of that came from the head people who were, quite often, fairly distanced from the product they turned out. They are the classy, distinguished, ‘olde worlde’ comic book company (not that Marvel were any less old) who ran their line of comics like a well oiled machine... Marvel were the upstart pranksters who were mixing it up and outselling them (proportionately, based on the sale or return model of comic book distribution... so they were selling less comics but pretty much most of their print run as opposed to DC who were putting out loads of comics with huge print runs, technically outselling Marvel but with a huge amount of their comics returned unsold).

It’s a fascinating story and there are lots of hugely serious Marketing mistakes made along the way in a desperate bid to gain dominance of the four colour market, many of them by DC but occasionally by Marvel also. So you get the industrial spies, the defection of major creative names to one side or the other and a lot of grim stuff happening... like the time Marvel were printing special versions of their issues which they knew their distributors could charge higher prices for in return for pulling 10 covers off the DC product for each copy and sending it to them so they knew the competition’s comics were not getting to the shop floor. So yeah, underhanded stuff like that.

A favourite story detailed here is where there was a big board meeting held at DC in the early sixties, with a big stack of Marvel comics on the table, so that everybody could figure out why Marvel had gained such a significant share of the market and work out how to combat it. The ‘kids’ in the room knew exactly why Marvel were winning but the executives and managers would not ever deign to actually read one of their competitors comics. They saw the art as crude and bad compared to theirs and they focused on things like... well Marvel have been using ‘more red on the covers’ or using ‘more speech balloons on the covers’, so that’s what needs to be done. They didn’t once think to stoop to reading what was actually between those covers and twigging just why the Marvel superheroes were so different from theirs. And this was going on for a huge amount of years.

And when they did manage to score a major, famous Marvel talent to defect to DC, such as the time they got Jack ‘King’ Kirby, who was pretty much the co-creator, along with Stan Lee, of the Marvel Universe (which was always a more coherent universe than the Distinguished Competition’s comics), the people at the top didn’t know why they needed him, thought he was a terrible artist and treated him badly. For instance, the young executive who managed to get him hired gave him Superman to work on but, the people at the top didn’t like the way Kirby drew him (which was the reason you would hire Kirby in the first place, frankly)... and so they ordered other artists to retouch the artwork by drawing new faces and hands on the character. Seriously? This is not how you treat a legend like Jack Kirby!

There’s a lot of stuff not covered in this book obviously... probably because it showed nothing of the rivalry between the two companies... such as highlighting the coming of the brilliant Jeanette Khan to DC without actually talking about, or perhaps even mentioning, the DC Vertigo line.

It does, however, cover some amazing stuff such as how some of the company crossovers like the original Superman VS Spider-Man Treasury from the mid-1970s (yep, still got mine) came to be. One of the things I either learned from this or had probably just forgotten was that the first crossover project between the two companies was another Treasury Adaptation of the 1970s, The Wizard Of Oz... so there’s a lot of these things covered in this tome. Not to mention... secret company crossovers that even the editors didn’t know about... but I won’t spoil that for you here, read the book. I especially liked the inclusion of the whole Captain Marvel/SHAZAM! legal issues which have dogged the original Fawcett Comics character since he was owned by DC too.

And yeah, not going to say much more about this book because the writer does manage to cover a lot of stuff and he does so in a very entertaining manner... even if Marvel almost consistently come acrosss as ‘the winners’ from decade to decade. Especially when it comes to the chapter talking about the movies and TV shows of the two companies. This book, however, came out before the release of Wonder Woman in cinemas and so the author didn’t know yet that, despite the Justice League movie, DC have made three truly great movies that are easily as good as the Marvel films... since this book was written we’ve had the aforementioned Wonder Woman (easily better than anything Marvel has ever done, cinematically speaking), the pretty great Aquaman movie and, of course, the truly brilliant Captain Marvel movie which DC were forced to call SHAZAM! due to the legal wranglings you’ll find detailed in this book. So maybe the author will update those chapters and give DC a better time in the movie section in future years, assuming they can keep up their winning streak at the cinema and it’s not short lived.

Either way, Slugfest - Inside the Epic 50 Year Battle Between Marvel and DC is an interesting and satisfying read, not just for fans of comic books but also, I suspect, for people who want to see how Marketing can just go wrong and backfire on companies (Can I hear you say Variant Enhanced Cover?). Much to be recommended in this book and I’m certainly glad I have this one on my shelf.

Madness In The Method

Methadone Actor

Madness In The Method
2019 USA Directed by Jason Mewes
screening at FrightFest 24th August 2019.

Okay, so my second feature at this year’s Arrow Fright Fest (now in its 20th year) was a much more positive experience for me than Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary (which I reviewed here).

Madness In The Method is the directorial debut of actor Jason Mewes, who most people would best know as Jay to director Kevin Smith’s Silent Bob. This one was a blast and though I was initially skeptical of this guys ability to helm something like this, given his on and off screen personae and how easy it is to be fooled into thinking the character created by Kevin Smith based on Mewes,,, and Mewes himself... are one and the same, I found myself very pleasantly surprised at how good this was. Of course, since I am already an admirer of the duo in all their big screen appearances (I even forced myself to watch Scream 3 just to catch their cameo), I am part, of a ready made target audience and, although this movie wasn’t written by Jason himself (I suspect he had a fair amount of input in that process, credited or not), it’s actually a kind of mockumentary fantasy written about him.

Right from the outset, fact is blended with fiction as Mewes fills us in on just who he is and charts both his career path with Kevin Smith (done with some nice animated Jay and Silent Bob inserts) and his various trouble with substance abuse in one form or another. We learn about his former trade as a roofer and how tough it was for him growing up etc. And... I suspect it’s one of those films which Hollywood loves where fact and fiction are blended. The film is full of cameos, some as major roles such as Vinnie Jones and others falling somewhere in between that and what is, in this movie, Stan Lee’s final cameo performance. So, for example, both Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher, the two title character actors from TV’s Lois And Clark - The New Adventures Of Superman, have recurring roles in this.

It’s a bit like Fellini’s great masterpiece Eight And A Half, only filtered through a young Hollywood vibe.... in terms of the central character, Mewes playing a fictional version of himself who very consciously wants to crawl out from his stoner typecasting in which he finds himself trapped and reading a not so mythical book about Method Acting before ‘really’ getting into the ‘killer’ mindset of his latest role. I should probably also mention Paul Mazursky’s 1970 movie Alex In Wonderland as a kindred spirit to this film also... but I haven’t seen it myself (or I have and it's been so long I've forgotten it) so I’ll just drop that here in passing.

Okay, so this is a film which never gets dull and explores Mewes’ ‘descent into the method’ as he turns from accidental murderer to, by the end of the film, something else entirely. This is not a horror movie rather than a comedy thriller with the emphasis firmly on the comedic (so I don’t know why it’s playing at FrightFest but I’m certainly not complaining) but it is quite impressive and I especially liked the way the film is edited. Mewes calls some nice cuts here and, although it annoyed me at first, there’s good use made of a little, rotating, ball of Mewes’ head bouncing off the sides of his computer on a screensaver which shouts his catchphrase ‘Snootchy Bootchies’ every time it hits a side of the screen, used to punctuate the structure of the film and to show time and location shifts in the narrative... which is, by its nature, quite freestyle.

I also loved the idea that Brian O’ Halloran, who played Dante Hicks in three of the Jay And Silent Bob movies to date, plays himself as a director who is about to direct a large budget, major Hollywood production of Homer’s The Odyssey. It was genuinely nice to see this guy again although he is in a somewhat darker story here. And like I said, this film is full of cameos from the likes of Danny Trejo, Judd Nelson and even Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith. There’s also an interesting performance by a modern character actor (future Elisha Cook Jr in the making?) called Mickey Gooch Jr, who plays a handle-barred moustached detective obsessed by his suspicion that it is, indeed, Mewes who is behind the killings in the movie. He’s pretty good in the movie but he was even better in the Q and A before the movie, regaling the audience with his tales of the production, which is obviously set in LA but had its shooting locations split between LA and Derbyshire, here in the UK. A very entertaining fellow, despite his choice of head gear.

Oddly, Kevin Smith himself comes off as a little of a darker version of what I perceive to be his true life persona here. However, I’m pretty sure this is one of a few deliberate deviations from real life, especially when Mewes and Moobs (Smith) do the lion face, lemon face routine from Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Also, it’s kind of a dead giveaway that this is definitely portraying a heavily fictionalised scenario bearing in mind the final fate of Vinnie Jones in the movie, which is actually pretty funny, I thought.

So there you have it. Turns out Mr. Mewes can actually direct pretty well, as well as act and, cannily, put together a movie which, in spite of its free form narrative style, holds together very well as a coherent, linear story. Whether it will actually get any kind of physical home media release over here in the UK is anybody’s guess but, if it does, I’ll certainly be shelling out to have another look at Madness In The Method, for sure. So now looking forward to the next film in my 2019 FrightFest experience, The Banana Splits Movie. Review to follow in a couple of days.

Captain Marvel

A Brie Variation

Captain Marvel
2019 USA
Directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck
UK cinema release print.

I’ll only rant about this for a brief paragraph... Captain Marvel was always my favourite superhero but he wasn’t a Marvel comics character. When DC comics sued Fawcett due to similarities to their Superman character, the comic stopped publication and DC eventually published the character in the 1970s, under the title SHAZAM! You can read my review of the original theatrical serial based on this character here. He’s been a staple of the DC Universe ever since. However, the reason they had to call their comic SHAZAM!, although he was still called Captain Marvel on the interior pages, is because Marvel comics successfully got the rights to use the name for their own character in the 1960s.

Their Captain Marvel was a completely different character and it was a huge thing when, in the 1980s, the character died of cancer. However, by then another character called Ms Marvel, with her alter ego Carol Danvers, had been unleashed in the Marvel universe and, it’s my understanding, since I’ve never read any of the Marvel branded comics featuring this character, that she was later renamed Captain Marvel and that a different Ms. Marvel is currently also in existence at the moment. I believe it’s the Captain Marvel version of the female equivalent character (brought out originally in her Ms Marvel form at the same time as Spider-Woman, in a bid to attract more female readers to Marvel, if memory serves) that this film is based on... although I believe she also uses some of her male counterpart’s various costumes through the years during the course of this movie.

Now I will always go and see whichever Marvel movie is out and I will always go to these things thinking that, at the very least, it won’t be as dull as Black Panther (reviewed here) or Guardians Of The Galaxy 2 (reviewed here)... but there were two more reasons why I was particularly looking forward to this one. Firstly, it ties in with the post-credits scene of Avengers Infinity War (reviewed here) and tells the back story of that sequence before going full tilt into the upcoming Avengers End Game movie in one of the two post-credits scenes on this one. The other reason was that the title role in this one is played by Brie Larson, who I’ve not seen in much but, I have to say, I really enjoyed her performance in Kong- Skull Island (reviewed here) opposite Samuel L. Jackson, who returns here as a digitally de-aged, pre-’Avengers Initiative’ Nick Fury. Also joining him is a de-aged Clark Gregg as S.H.I.E.L.D regular Agent Coulson, Annette Benign, Ben Mendelsohn and Jude Law.

And... it’s not a terrible movie by any means... although there seems to be some bizarre, online backlash at the moment for reasons I can’t quite discern (and which I’m sure won’t matter once the box office results are in). It’s also not one of the best of the Marvel movies but I did quite enjoy it and I suspect it’s one of those slow burn Marvel flicks like Avengers - Age Of Ultron that get much better on the second viewing. It has nice performances by the central actors and some okay special effects work.

It’s also very confusing.

Not in terms of the deliberately non-linear flashback stuff which is actually quite nice and somewhat brave of Marvel in terms of the normal flow of their superhero films... but actually in explaining what the character is about, what she can do and why she can do it given how, without giving too much away, we see a typical 1960s Marvel comics style ‘transforming accident’ by way of an origins incident. So, yeah, I totally didn’t understand the character, although I did very much enjoy her breezy personality and Larson’s portrayal of her. However, for me, despite having a 'Mar Vell' character in the film (who isn’t Carol Danvers), the real weak point of the movie is... why the heck is this character actually called Captain Marvel? She’s not once referred to as it in the film (nor is anyone) and there’s no reason why she would be, truth be told. We just have the title card at the end of the film, before the big mid-credits scene which I can only assume is directly lifted from Avengers End Game. It makes no sense to me and I’m hoping this is just a cool tactic by Marvel so they can give a reason and character reveal in that next movie (like coming up with a hastily thought out name after meeting Captain America, for example). Fingers crossed they’ve got this all sorted.

Okay, so it was big on action and, although I did find some of the heavily laden special effects scenes a little dull, it was refreshing to have a fully formed hero from the opening of the movie (a few of these kinds of films are beginning to get back into this pre-1950s ‘get them on quick without a long, movie length origin sequence’ aesthetic and I think that’s a good thing) and the way in which the storyline did develop was not as formulaic as many of the superhero movies have been of late... which was refreshing. Also, since the movie is obviously set in 1995, as you’ll see from this film’s Stan Lee cameo which I also won’t spoil, there are some nice pre-millennial jokes and pop culture references here (although some of them seemed to be more like something that would have fit a movie set in the 1970s than the 1990s, to be honest). There’s also a very nice, new Marvel logo animation at the start of the film which I also, really don’t want to spoil for you.

And, there’s a great feline character too which, while not quite looking like a cat all the time because CGI is still not quite good enough to render these things as accurately as we might hope, has some nice moments in the film and sets up a second post credits scene that, while it’s totally predictable, helps tie up another slightly loose thread in the long chain of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and does it in a way which is quite humorous, even if you do see it coming.

So yeah, not much else to say about this one. Pinar Toprak’s score is pretty good with some nice electronica components coming in at key points in the action narrative but, once again, the score is not released on CD so, big shout out to Hollywood Records for only making a rubbish, compressed electronic download file commercially available so that nobody can actually appreciate the music as it should be heard. Honestly people, this throwaway attitude towards the score these days is something which has to stop. This is like constantly insulting the composers on these films.

But, anyway, asides from the shoddy and disrespectful attitude to the music in this film by the record label, Captain Marvel is really not a bad night out at the cinema and certainly not worthy of the bizarre backlash it’s getting on the internet (which I think will disappear soon anyway). A nice debut for Brie Larson in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and, I have to say, a nice moment for her in the mid-post-credit scene where, I can tell you now, the audience in my cinema let out a big cheer at the last moment of this sequence. Seriously looking forward to Avengers End Game now.

Amazing Fantastic Incredible

Ex Sales Sayer

Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir
by Stan Lee and Peter David and Colleen Doran
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4711-5259-7

Well this was a nice surprise present for Christmas... mainly because it wasn’t even a blip on my radar. I didn’t know it existed but I would have jumped on it myself, straight away, if I’d have known about it.  Subtitled ‘A Marvelous Memoir’, Amazing Fantastic Incredible tells the story of one of the giants of modern culture, the man behind so many of the fantastic characters that people have loved since their inception in the early 1960s... Stan Lee. And what’s so wonderful about this autobiography is that it’s done, as it really should always have destined to be, I think... in comic book form. A hardback graphic novel, if you want to get technical about it, although I would have loved it if this had been serialised monthly with cheaper looking covers.

Wait, did I say autobiography? Well it’s co-written, by the looks of it, by the famous Peter David and illustrated quite wonderfully by Colleen Doran. So the question really arises as to what this book actually is because... well it’s kind of shimmering incandescently in a state between autobiography and biography... I think. For the sake of my own sanity and as something to refer to it as for the purpose of this review... I’m going to remind myself that a lot of autobiographies were actually ghostwritten by or with other people and don’t technically count as an autobiographies at all. At least this book is giving all the credit where it’s due and, since Stan so obviously has a strong stamp on what his life story contains and how it plays out here... yeah, I’m going to go with autobiography. ‘nuff said.

So I have to start off here by saying that it’s a wonderful book. There are some things I would have liked to have seen a little more of and I’ll get to those in a minute but one of the main plus points here is that it’s a vastly entertaining read and, luckily, it’s really well written. Stan Lee’s personality and jokey trademark sense of aggrandizement shine through the pages right from the outset as it tells the tale of young Stan Leiber and his home life, growing up poor, and how he joined the company which, decades later, would become Marvel Comics. Also, how he took some time away in the middle of his job there to serve, in a capacity he probably didn’t expect, in the Second World War and of the various challenges of creating and editing some of the characters he’s come up with over the years.

And it’s really warm, fuzzy and lovely... some of it actually brought a tear to my eye... oh, lay off, I’m getting older and the tear ducts open up at the drop of a hat, these days, okay? Also, though, he did manage to surprise me a few times.

The structure is not completely linear, instead he opts to do what many good tale tellers do by highlighting things which lead in to one another and go together which could be many years apart. Obviously this helps to focus on the points being made... rather than completely doggedly following a straight route through the timeline. Lee also accentuates this necessity himself in the context of that structure and it gets him to places where he’s eventually talking to his younger self about his future. It’s pretty good in the way it does this...

... but that’s not what I meant by it managing to surprise me.

What I meant is that there are a few times in here where Stan The Man’s humour got the better of me by setting up a ‘story beat’ to follow a pattern of ‘monologuing’ he might have been using earlier in the strip and then, as you turn the page, pulling the rug out from under you... making you smile and also keeping you interested because you know you can’t always predict when his humour is going to kick in. Like the time he tells of his quick divorce and marriage (into one office for his future wife’s divorce and then into the next office to immediately get married) which had a nice little set up in the style of writing that when you turn the page... oh heck. I’m really not going to spoil it for you here.

Now this book is probably going to come under fire from some quarters, I’m guessing. I was expecting Stan to gloss over certain things and, I suppose, to an extent he does. He does, however give full page (and sometimes more) shout-outs to some of his co-creators over the years, the most famous (and possibly most troublesome in terms of whose side of the story you believe) being Steve Ditko and Jack ‘King’ Kirby. Now, as it happens, I don’t think Lee is trying to make light of any of the serious issues which became problems at certain stages in the history of the company... such as when Steve Ditko parts ways by becoming a ghostly, vanishing figure from his desk. The story about the big argument surrounding the identity of The Green Goblin is a well known one and I’ve certainly heard Stan tell it himself in various interviews... so I don’t think he’s particularly trying to hide anything here... he just doesn’t mention it again because it’s such a well known one, I suspect.

We’ll probably never get to hear about the full stories behind some of these problem issues where people became kind of casualties but one throwaway comment he makes about artists retaining their work and why he wasn’t able to do that did remind me of one thing... Stan Lee is not Marvel Comics. Sure, he is synonymous with them and he’s their mascot but... he is not always guilty for some of the mistakes made in the past. When you become a figurehead, though, sometimes you find yourself caught in the crossfire whether you like it or not. I’ve got no idea myself so I’m just going to shut up about these issues now... other than to say it certainly felt like Stan has done a good job here in giving people their due and there must have been some moments in this memoir (or autobiography as I like to call it), not just dealing with the day in and day out of Marvel, that must have been very painful for him to write and include. However, if you’re going to do a project like this, I think you have to realise there’s stuff you can’t leave out and, thankfully for us, Stan certainly seems to realise this too.

The artwork by Colleen Doran is amazing and when Stan talks about some of the comic books successes, we are presented with reproductions of the covers in question with Stan’s monologue continuing the story in little strategically placed boxes over them. It’s a nice touch, as are the pages which give you a fly on the wall perspective of the recording of the first Merry Marvel Marching Society record. Its great stuff actually and although I never had much of this kind of stuff at the time, it took me straight back to being a kid in the 1970s again because... well, Marvel were never shy on their self promotion were they? We all knew about this fan club stuff, even over here in the UK.

One thing I really would have liked to have seen, since Stan mentions his rivals DC a fair few times, is the inclusion of what was, when I was a kid, one of the most stupendous publications around. The first teaming up of Marvel and DC heroes in the Giant Sized Treasury Edition of Spider-Man VS Superman is not mentioned here... and it’s a shame because I used to love laying that big tome out on the floor as a kid and pouring over the words and pictures as Lois Lane and Mary Jane Watson got themselves into trouble.

The other thing I would have liked more of is actually dates put to incidents. You kind of have to guess a lot about when things were happening and reference your own knowledge of when certain incidents might have slotted into history... so there’s a possibility some readers may have trouble keeping up in certain areas, I think. Especially when, as I said, the narrative structure tends to hop around a bit in terms of the time frame. It doesn’t make the narrative any less compelling, though, so it’s not something that should stop anyone from picking it up.

These minor quibbles aside, I have to say that Amazing Fantastic Incredible is one of the more entertaining books I’ve read in a while and is... exactly what the title says it is. It's also a lovely homage.. or self homage... to one of comic book fandom’s greatly loved figureheads which even takes us right up to date with his cameo appearance in Avengers: Age Of Ultron earlier in the year. A nice thing to own and done in a medium which really captures the spirit of the man... or at the very least the spirit of his public persona. Greatly enjoyed and recommended by this reader, at any rate. What more is there to say?

Excelsior.