Why am I blogging so much? Because it's good practice; it's something I've done for 20 years and I think for a few years I missed writing in a way that feels natural to me. Blogging has always been informal, at least for me. Reviewing things has been something I've done for 30 odd years, although reviewing films and TV is relatively new (the first TV review thing I ever did was in 2014).
I might have worked for a comics magazine, but I wouldn't say I was a prolific reviewer of comics; it was not my principal job and I rarely wrote them in the desired house style so they often ended up being cut. I was asked to review the X-Men comics from about 1991, because - believe it or not - no one else wanted to review them and I reviewed the Hulk for almost ten years. So I've been doing it for a long time now, but I haven't reviewed a comic since 2003. So, that's 20 years then and that might be because I've bought three comics since then and not enjoyed any of them enough to want to brag about it.
However, just recently, in the last six months or so, ever since my brother sent me a comic, apropos of nothing, in November 2022, I've had a hankering for reading some of the comics that I enjoyed the most. The thing is I'm not going to buy any comics again; I'll be fucked by a horde of bison before I buy trade paperbacks (at the extortionate prices they ask), so I had to find an internet site that had a huge library of comics I could read on screen for nothing, and it seems there are quite a few of these floating about.
The first thing I fancied reading was Jim Starlin's extended run on Warlock (who dies), in a comic story which featured Thanos, pre-Infinity Gauntlet days, Gamora (who dies) pre Guardians days and Pip the Troll (who also dies) pre Eternals post credit scene days. There is also a cameo from Captain Marvel - the original and prior to his own death from cancer. It was pretty much the weirdest thing to come out in the mid-1970s and became a huge cult hit.
Adam Warlock had been a bit of lame-arsed character for a number of years and this gave him a huge purpose, a story of his own and a finite tale. It quickly moved away from the Marvel universe we knew and did very much what the Guardians films did, which was to introduce readers/viewers to just how vast the universe was. It was arguably an inspiration for Star Wars with it's weird settings, odd villains and yet, in a weird way, it also felt like it could have been a Silver Surfer series, given Warlock's noble intentions, philosophical rambling and survivor's guilt.
My memories of the Strange Tales issues and then his own book from Warlock #9 (until #15) was, in 1975, like nothing I'd ever seen. I was just a teenager and this was deeply philosophical and all the women were really sexy and looked like they were naked and had just been drawn on. These were important comics for an adolescent me... I suppose that's the point here, it has been at least 40 years since I'd read these comics and my memory was of something intellectual, adult and far more than just a comic. However, in truth, it's a load of psychobabble mumbo jumbo bollocks from a man who did far too much acid after coming back from Viet Nam.
In fact, the best thing about it was the reintroduction of Thanos as a major player in the Marvel Universe. The Warlock series fleshed out a character Starlin had introduced in an Iron Man comic in 1973 and the entire story was concluded in two Marvel annuals in 1977 - The Avengers and Marvel Two-in-One and featured a host of superheroes battling Thanos and his army, a little like we saw on film. This first time was over one single Infinity stone, Adam Warlock's Soul Gem. The two part story was one of the highest rated Marvel comics of the 1970s (not a high bar to be fair, but still pretty good).
I read the entire thing in about three hours and thought it was a load of rubbish. Grandiose ideas, huge amounts of cod philosophy and psychology and not really as well drawn as I originally thought. Could everything from my comics reading past be as ... dated and rubbish? These are comics after all, I shouldn't expect that many of them to stand the test of time.
Next on my list, after a week or so to recover, was a comic series from the late 1980s and 1990s that I raved about almost incessantly at times and - I believed - with a few exceptions was possibly the best superhero comic of that particular era. It was The Incredible Hulk, the character that originally got me into comics was now the best comic again.
I came late to this particular party. A famous comics writer and artist called John Byrne had taken over control of the Hulk's comic, but he stayed only for a few months before he quit Marvel and I had little or no interest in this. Now, I'd last read the Hulk around the #220s (in the late 1970s) and it was now in the 330s, a decade had passed and now everything seemed a bit daft. Rick Jones had been the green Hulk for a while and now Banner's Hulk was his original grey - much had changed indeed.
The run of comics in particular that elevated the Hulk back up the charts started with issue #330 and the arrival of the then unknown artist named Todd McFarlane and then with #331 with the arrival of the writer who would stick around for 130+ issues and transform the character beyond belief, Peter David.
It was with David's second issue - #332 - that we started to see where he was going. When the Hulk was created back in 1962 due to a printer's fault instead of being green he was grey before reverting to his usual green the following issue. Peter David brought back that mean and nasty Hulk that first appeared in those early issues and he took him on an incredibly interesting journey.
What the writer needed to do was get this meandering behemoth back on track because since the revelations in the mid-1980s that Bruce Banner was the victim of parental abuse, the comic apparently did very little in terms of innovative and it was clear that the direction David was heading with the hot new artist was something that had never been done before. The smaller, meaner, grey Hulk was still a handful because what he lacked in raw power he made up for with smarts and there's was something decidedly Frankenstein's Monster about him and the way McFarlane drew him - not as tall, but just as ... scary. In the space of six months the comic had become this focused road movie featuring Rick Jones, Clay Quartermain - Rogue Agent of SHIELD and a Hulk that only became the Hulk at night and a Bruce Banner who resembled a scared nerd even a youthful Peter Parker would look down on. This odd trio were trying to track down hundreds of gamma bombs that the US government had stockpiled - Banner wanted to ensure there were no more Hulks.
By the time McFarlane was flying solo on the art duties, a lot of people in comics had sat up and were paying attention. This was not your 'Hulk Smash' any longer, but a strange concoction of menace, comedy and old villains seen in a new light. It was arguably the best period of the entire Peter David run because it was so new, fresh and different from what eventually followed. It had extremely good (for the time) artwork, cracking scripts (if a little corny 30 years down the line) and really 'adult' themes and ideas. David examined the Hulk's dark side; looked at how complex Betty's life had become in the many years she wasn't in the comic; reintroduced Rick Jones as not just the Hulk's sidekick but as his moral compass and made the Leader the villain he should always have been - nasty, malevolent and petty.
By the time Wolverine dropped in, we knew that the Hulk was effectively a super cancer made sentient and nothing really could kill him - although whether he could die or not was always a subject for pondering on in precarious situations for the rest of the writers time on the book. The Hulk's rule book had sort of been rewritten taking elements from the past, from literature and from real life and there were stories that absolutely blew you away, especially #345 where Betty has a chat with the Hulk and reveals to him that she's pregnant. It was probably the best dialogue Peter David wrote during his entire tenure on the book, because it was a conversation between two people who loved each other but also scared each other shitless. I sometimes, when I'm weighing up all of the run think this is probably the pinnacle, the best issue of the lot.
It was clear by issue #345 that McFarlane was struggling to meet deadlines and the double-sized climax to the last year needed a lot of help from the inker and other unnamed artists, which kind of spoiled what should have been a piece of Empire Strikes Back genius. Everything the Leader had planned, was executed, and the outcome was exactly what he wanted and he got away scot free. You almost lose sight of the fact you've just read a really fantastic run of comics that went from nowhere to 100mph very quickly and the hero lost. There's even a post mortem issue, with poor artwork, talking about the aftermath of the Leader wiping out a town of 4000 people and the Hulk.
#347 signalled the arrival of a new editor and a direction no one saw coming. McFarlane had departed to draw Spider-Man and new editor Bobbie Chase took the dramatic step of giving the job of artist to unknown Jeff Purves, an American artist born in Japan. To say Purves' style was an acquired taste is an understatement; it took him probably 20 of his 19 issues on the book to get it right. He was not what you wanted or expected and while the David/Purves team took the grey Hulk, now called Mr Fixit, in some strange and unexpected directions, the distinctive style of Purves made it a difficult comic to love again; it appeared to have had its year in the sun and now was sinking back into mediocrity...
Purves run on the book ended threequarters of the way through a four-part story about the Leader's crazier brother who devises a poison that can actually kill the Hulk or at least that's what all the scientists like Reed Richards and the Leader say. Behind exquisite Walter Simonson covers, Purves delivered some of his most bland work as good/bad as every previous issue, bar his first which was extraordinarily bad. However, the Hulk was now about to go on his most cinematic and dynamic journey yet. Enter former DragonForce artist, the Canadian Dale Keown - things were about to get BIG!
Let's be clear about the Purves era; the stories aren't bad; maybe the Las Vegas stuff was a bit, at times, difficult to comprehend, but for almost two years it gave us something we'd never had before - the Hulk as a mob enforcer, enjoying his life. When Keown came onto the scene everything changed; not only the artwork but the direction, the feel and the intent of the book - everything had a peculiar menacing feel.
I think, once upon a time, I would have argued with myself about whether this was my favourite period in the Peter David era. Artistically it is almost incomparable - I think Keown is a better artist than McFarlane, but in a purely subjective way - however, this is a comic that would continue to churn out superstar artists for years to come because when you were on the Hulk, you had carte blanche to go as big as you like. That's what Dale Keown did and Peter David gave him the stories and created the toys for him to really go to town. Except, it went from pathos to wisecracking - the dialogue became snappy, almost like a Hollywood script. It was like Peter David was seeing his artist's work and upping his ideas to accommodate and seeing them as Hollywood blockbusters rather than 20-page comic stories; the artist had that ability.
However, for all of the brilliance you got over the entire Dale Keown run, there is superficiality about the way the writer went from the Hulk almost dying to leading a top secret ideologically questionable organisation. The artist was everything the 1960s promised us but in a 1990s style; he did big better than probably anyone and raised the bar, so it seemed a really strange decision for him and Marvel to part company two issues before the 400th anniversary issue, but he did and a sense of dread descended on the room...
Jeff Purves aside, Marvel's success rate with Hulk fill-in artists (a concept I believe no longer happens in comics due to its 'whatever, whenever' attitude about scheduling) was pretty poor; occasionally you'd get a Sam Kieth thrown into the mix, but most of the time you'd get someone who was just trying to do a pale imitation of whoever the main artist on the book was at the time. Keown's departure opened the door for bang average journeywoman Jan Duursema to have a crack at the book, although she was only ever going to be a stop gap, she did far too many issues in the end.
You would have thought that Marvel would have realised from sales and critiques that the Hulk as a comic worked very well with Peter David writing it, but readers quickly lost interest when the artwork looked cheap. The Incredible Hulk had now almost become synonymous with Top Quality Artwork and when the bar drops the comic suffers. David had cinematic, Hollywood scripts for the likes of McFarlane and Keown to play with and he needed someone of that ilk to replace them and that person was Gary Frank who had made his name at Marvel UK.
In many ways, the unclear and poor ending of the first half of the Pantheon arc with David and Keown just having fun drawing/writing about whoever they fancied meant that the book in general needed a kick up the arse. The Pantheon story didn't seem to be going anywhere, Professor Hulk continually teased the reader into thinking he was about to lose his control, so a new artist gave the writer impetus to get the ball rolling again. The comic's stories had become a bit stale, it needed freshening up.
Gary Frank is another artist who likes big canvases, however, he's also very good at being big in small areas; very similar in execution to Keown, but with a smoother, more comic book style like fellow Brit Alan Davis. He was given lots more toys to play with straight away and Gary got the Avengers, classic villains, characters he helped create for Marvel UK, Nick Fury, the Starjammers and all of the Hulk's usual rotating supporting cast and he quickly made his own dramatic mark. The British artist might not stay on the comic for as long as Dale Keown, but he made his mark.
Almost as if Marvel realised their errors, Gary Frank's departure was handled in a pretty cool way; the guy following him as artist was fellow Brit Liam Sharp (and an old friend of mine probably because of this run of comics). Gary drew the first half of a double-sized finale, while Liam drew the concluding half, it was goodbye and hello in the same issue, but that was probably as good as it was going to get...
Liam's Hulk was a mess and I let him have it with both barrels. Month after month I tore his work apart in my reviews and inside a year after taking the book over he was gone. I don't know if I had any influence on that, from what Liam told me years later, they might have, but they gave him the boost he needed to sort his own style problems out.
We had a period of about six months with fill-in artists until a new regular penciller was brought on board. David had written over 100 issues of the comic and the direction was becoming a wee bit stale. No one wanted a return to the bad old days of Hulk Smash, but progression had slowed down and the Hulk felt like a comic led by style rather than substance with the writer dialling in scripts and coasting along. When it became clear that Sharp wasn't working and needed to be replaced, it happened at a time when Marvel Comics was going into crossover overdrive, which made continuity a nightmare and recruiting a new artist almost impossible. It was around this point in the comic's life that it started to drop down my list of important reads; not that there were that many comics I read by 1995.
After a slew of fill-in artists, Angel Medina arrived as artist in a period that I presume was hoped to settle things down and set up things for the next big story arc. Medina's problem was he was very hit or miss, more often 'miss'; he was trying to mimic the absurd bulk of the Hulk (introduced by Sharp) and introduce his own [cartoon] quirkiness to proceedings, but he simply wasn't very good at telling a story and Peter David's were becoming increasingly dull; it seemed illogical that one of the most consistent comics of a ten year period could be getting boring, but it was. Then there was another stream of crossovers, upsetting the rhythm of the storytelling and causing more fill-in artists. By the time Medina's run was concluding it was almost as absurd as Sharp's - the Hulk needed someone on the art with the dynamism of McFarlane, Keown or Frank.
The arrival of Mike Deodato was supposed to settle things down - the Hulk was going off in a new direction, the unified Banner/Hulk personality was dead and we were left with a savage but devious Hulk, a kind of cross between Mr Fixit and the savage, original, Hulk but with a nasty streak. Deodato is a fantastic artist (and friend of mine) but his Hulk wasn't very good and while the stories were suddenly taking on an interesting angle, the book's decline was quickening because of the quality of the artists employed.
So when it was announced that Adam Kubert was taking over the artistic reins there was a murmur of approval (this was an established 'hot' artist joining the team). The problem was now Peter David's convoluted stories tied into far too much of the past and were not going forward with anything innovative. Arguably, he'd already rung more miles from a two-dimensional character than anyone could have imagined, so if he'd run out of steam it was only natural.
I was still buying these comics in the summer of 1997, but my love for the entire scene had moved from a fan in his dream job to a disgruntled employee who was growing bored with the actual genre that was giving me a decent living. I couldn't honestly say to you if I was reading them or just skimming them to get a rough idea of what was going on. Today, it almost seems frivolous to have continued collecting comics despite pretty much hating them...
Equally, it must have been difficult to tell a story when your editor keeps informing you that at least a third of your schedule is going to be taken up with comic crossovers and huge story arcs that have nothing to do with your own plans, yet a lot of the David/Kubert run on the book seemed to be taken up with drawing lots of other superheroes (not an uncommon theme in this title) in parts of bigger overreaching stories. To be frank, the act of giving Peter David new artists wasn't working as well as it once did and to quote John Kricfalusi, 'it's the artists who make the character popular' and in comics it's the artist that makes a character really popular and Gary Frank had been the last one to make the Hulk popular.
Adam Kubert was very good in some people's eyes, I found him a little cartoony at times, but by the late 1990s tastes were changing in comic art, which might be why it was time for a massive shift in the comic. There hadn't been a discernible direction for the book since the seemingly hasty end of the Pantheon, which had happened nearly five years prior to this; in fact it was the ambition of the Pantheon storyline that ended the comic's fine storytelling run. However, having just read the entire Peter David era again, I can safely say he was a better plotter than he was a scripter; some of his dialogue was woeful and he had some superb ideas that didn't seem to be realised. Perhaps it was the Future Imperfect specials that started the descent into mediocrity or, in my opinion, not replacing Gary Frank with another artist of his ilk.
The first half of David's tenure has the best stories, but it also has some of the worst production values and Jeff Purves; the second half never got into any kind of groove, it was like the editorial staff kept getting in the way of interesting stories, or possibly worse than that Peter David didn't really have more than a few good ideas, everything after seemed to be a rehash of elements of previous ideas.
I can honestly say that it's crushed my desire to read some of the classic comics I remember; both Warlock and more recently these Hulk comics both feel dated and shallow - style over substance and no real direction. This period of the Hulk was a classic era for a drab comic, but in reality apart from maybe 25 issues it was just a good idea done reasonably well for a few years.
My main problem with comics - as an ex fan/pro - is I now think even some of the alleged proper 'classics' are just... comics. There's nothing special in them and the odd time comics throws up something palatable or actually artistically good is so few and far between I kind of think the industry is exactly what its detractors have been saying for years - a genre for kids, geeks and people who wouldn't know a good story if it bit them on the arse and gave them a satisfying wank.
I am well aware that I fell out of love with comics a long time ago and I'm a bit [ahem] jaded, but none of that nostalgic warmth you get from well-loved old things exists in me for comics. They're all generally a load of shit; although I am talking largely superhero comics, I have to say that independent comics also suffer from many of the same problems - it's the genre, it doesn't really allow itself to be anything other than throwaway ephemera, regardless of how much comics are worth in 2023. 99% of comic books are soap opera fan wank, the 1% that might qualify as 'art' is lost, generally, in a sea of less than mediocrity. It's as relevant to the world as CBeebies is to HD TV.
