1985 In Comics: An AMAZING HEROES Time Capsule

[jlroberson]

From, Jesus Christ, 26 years ago, a selection of AMAZING HEROES' previews(and ads) for upcoming 1985 comics. Note how many game-changing comics were packed into that year. Also a very different alternative scene, and books which were hotly promoted and then disappeared. And a LOT of Alan Moore, Los Bros Hernandez, and Frank Miller. Comics was about to change, hard.




Add this Fantagraphics Alan Moore project, never realized(although I'm sure it fed eventually into bits of LOST GIRLS), to the pile of Stuff That Would Have Been Way Cool But Never Happened, like his own FASHION BEAST and TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES, or Grant Morrison's SICK BUILDINGS(which Morrison just made up).

Tags-- publisher: eclipse, publisher: fantagraphics books, title: amazing heroes, year: 1985, creator: alan moore, creator: bill sienkiewicz, creator: marv wolfman, creator: george perez, creator: william messner-loebs, creator: dave sim, creator: keith giffen, creator: chris claremont, creator: howard chaykin, creator: jaime hernandez, creator: gilbert hernandez

Comments

[badficwriter]

"I'm going to write an Elektra graphic novel! And it will clearly answer questions--"

Riiiiiight.

[jlroberson]

"If Crisis didn't simplify DC, there would be no reason to do the book."

Snicker.

[james.huff.myopenid.com]

It simplifies it in the way that everything you once knew has now changed until the next crisis. Origins and backstories need not apply.

For some reason, it reminds me of this bit from Alec Trevelyan in Goldeneye:

"Did you ever ask why? Why we toppled all those dictators, undermined all those regimes, only to come home 'Well done, good job! But sorry old boy, everything you risked your life and limb for has changed."

I just get that feeling whenever I'm boxing up a couple hundred dollars worth of comics that have been made chronologically useless by Superboy Prime's reality-altering punches.

See, you got me started on the Crisis rant again. Shame on you.

[nezchan]

For a long time it actually did simplify DC. Back then, it wasn't simply a matter of hopping from one crisis to the next, as I recall there was quite a while before the DC cosmology, at least, got really screwed up again.

[tpsreports]

Except for the LSH, the Justice Society, Hawkman, should I go on?

[nezchan]

I thought they just rebooted the LSH? My memory's a bit fuzzy on that since I didn't follow their series, but I recall them being pretty much wiped out in Crisis itself.

Can't say much about the others, since I didn't read those books. But again, they weren't in different worlds afterwards, were they? I thought all that stuff was incorporated into the one, and it was just dealing with the fallout for a while, rather than making entirely new crises?

[wizardru]

They weren't a problem until some writers kept POKING things. Hawkman was a little muddied as they tried to rewrite previous continuity to accommodate his every appearance (and the fact that he was a pre-WWII character hanging around with characters who hadn't been BORN when he was created, but looking the same age). Then DC decided to reboot him in a way that invalidated what Crisis had tried to fix and never stopped trying to patch the problem and then fix the problems THAT patch would create. Repeat several times.

The Legion got rebooted, because now there was no Superboy. The Justice Society was again fine...until they decided they wanted to use them again and started retconning...the very kind of actions that made Crisis necessary in the first place.

But that's not the fault of Crisis, which was meant to clean the slate. This was the fault of Editorial at the time. Because the reboots of Superman and Wonder Woman took place at different times and some titles weren't set to handle the reboots, there were a lot of inconsistencies, especially with Crisis taking place over a year.

All told, those were minor issues. Most of the continuity was fixed. It wasn't like all of the reboots of the last five years, which left EVERYTHING in a mess. It's one thing to say that Hawkman's past doesn't make sense any more...it's another thing to say that you don't know if the Justice League did X or Y and if character X is dead or alive or was killed or not. Crisis was meant to remove the Batman of Zurr-en-Ahr and that time Batman wore a rainbow outfit...not to make it confusing if the Legion of Super Heroes ever existed or if Jason Todd was killed by the Joker.

[nezchan]

Well, I guess that's what I was trying to say in a way. Crisis did actually clean things up a lot, because huge event comics weren't the norm yet. So there was a space where you had minor disruptions due to editorial but for the most part they stayed cleaned up for a bit.

These days, it's just a mess. Problem with event comics, you really have to know the history of the characters involved, and that's a lot of characters.

[jlroberson]

There was also the fact that DC, a lot of it, was getting really good in pockets when the Crisis happened and some felt that was derailed. The Legion, I think, would be the most outstanding example of that. Levitz and Giffen had finally turned it into something really popular and coherent, and you may not believe it but back then it was thought of as one of the more "mature" superhero titles, along with Teen Titans.

[wizardru]

Right. It's not like when they change the JLA's history every year and then they have to adjust a ton of storylines. And it's not just that there are a lot of characters...it's that a lot of characters have long, involved and intertwined histories. Have Superman show up after the JLA has formed (as the change happened) and lots of things spin wildly out of that.

And DC insisted on poking the rough patches (which led us to 'needing' Zero Hour and so many other events to continually keep trying to 'fix' continuity).

[nezchan]

Kinda funny too, I just recalled that the 80's were the period where fans who wanted continuity went to Marvel, rather than DC. One of the big changes that came with Crisis was DC actually trying to get a consistent continuity between titles the way Marvel already more or less had.

Of course, it was also about the same time as Secret Wars, which I hated.

[jlroberson]

Compare that. DC had Wolfman, Miller, Moore, and all the rest you see here.

Marvel had X-Men and Secret Wars. And DC wanted to be more like them.

[nezchan]

Why anyone would want to be like Secret Wars is beyond me. It wasn't so much an event as just a big team-up book, and other than Venom eventually showing up, I don't recall it had any lasting effect on continuity.

X-Men was pretty hot at the time though, so I can see that.

[jlroberson]

I'd say that WW was the only one who could have been called unquestionably improved by the Crisis. Or rather, a great deal of untapped potential was finally enabled.

[wizardru]

I'd argue Superman was vastly improved from his sorry state pre-Crisis, IMHO. He had become kind of a parody character...he was hard to use well. Byrne's reset (in particular, his re-imaging of Luthor from Super Science Villain to Untouchable Industrialist) did wonders for the character.

[halloweenjack]

I'm still not convinced that the things that CoIE supposedly "fixed" really needed fixing. Was it really that confusing that there was a parallel universe with evil counterparts of the main heroes, or one in which they showed up a few decades earlier than they did in Earth-1? If you don't want to acknowledge the existence of the Rainbow Batman, then don't.

It really is that simple... unless you're trying to fit everything into one grand, overarching continuity and really get obsessed with filing all the corners off the square pegs to get them to fit into the pre-drilled round holes that you've made, which seems to be where Wolfman and the other elevated fanboys were on this. I don't think it's an accident that the books in this retrospective that have aged the best are those that are done by individual creators like William Messner-Loebs and Howard Chaykin, or by people like Alan Moore who, even though he was working on company-owned characters, always made continuity his servant rather than his master.

[cmdr_zoom]

You can either have a tidy compressed archive or a usable file; a neatly organized living/work space, or one in which you can actually live/work.

More to the point, every writer wants to tell his or her own stories with a character; and over time, they end up just not fitting together. No matter what Morrison likes to claim, you can't make all 80 years of Batman, the silly and the grim, work as one story. The multiverse allows that freedom for creativity. And that, along with nostalgia, is why it keeps coming back.

You can either have one "official" version at any time, and reboot things every once in a while so you can have a new one, or allow more than one to be true simultaneously.

[akodo_rokku]

Man, American Flagg. Howard Chaykin could actually kinda *draw* once upon a time, couldn't he?

[jlroberson]

He can't now?

[aaron_bourque]

Nope.

[nezchan]

I remember reading that, I actually liked his style. Kept liking it on The Shadow, but not so much on Black Kiss. Haven't paid much attention to him for a long time, what's he being doing lately?

[jlroberson]

A lot of stuff for Marvel and DC. I know I saw some CIVIL WAR issues he did, though as I saw it in trade I don't recall which. He did an amazing little ENEMY ACE story and a great issue of SOLO. And MIGHTY LOVE, though I only liked the art in that.

[halloweenjack]

Did you see his run on Hawkgirl? Not what you'd hope for on a Simonson/Chaykin collaboration.

[northstarfan]

Interesting. I remember Colleen Doran was supposed to have left Warp because the Pinis tried to claim copyright on her characters, but I didn't know that Richard Pini ever had a co-writer credit on 'A Distant Soil'.

[sir_razorback]

Just how many different publishers have printed Dredd over the years?

[nezchan]

Man, I remember a lot of those books. Hell, I collected a lot of those books. Crisis, of course, Cerebus, Normalman, Journey, even Moon Shadow (which was gorgeous) and Dalgoda! I was the only one I knew who was into Dalgoda back in the day, but I still remember it fondly.

I loved the mid-80's indie scene, honestly. It was a really exciting time to be in comics, with an explosion of first-time creators, mostly working in black and white. The only thing I can really compare it to is the more recent explosion of webcomics, but even that wasn't as dramatic a shift in the industry.

Either way, there were a lot of great comics back in the day.

[wizardru]

Yeah, this takes me back. Sure, we had the mid-80s comics Indie glut...but comics changed a LOT then and changed FAST. And you weren't the only one who like Dalgoda...but it came out so infrequently as to be impossible for me to collect. :P

[phosfate]

Good times, my friends. Good times.

[saralakali]

Wow, a nice, neat snapshot of Where Everything Went Wrong.

[halloweenjack]

Man, this takes me back. I probably still have this around somewhere--I love Hopey looking at American Flagg! centerfold-style, and Chaykin gleefully owning up to that guns-n-garters tendency of his inside--and remember being excited by some of the teasers and previews here. (It's also amusing to look at the Watchmen preview and realize that it not only gives you the basic setup of that book, but also the basic plot of Moore's final arc on Miracleman.) The eighties kind of sucked for me personally, and at times the best thing--really the only worthwhile thing--that I had to look forward to were some of these books. Good times, baby.

[foxhack]

The One == Onomatopoeia?

[silverzeo]

Is Dalgoda Gnort's brother or cousin?

[jlroberson]

I never thought about it but it's possible G'nort was a tribute to Dalgoda.

[nezchan]

Man, tributes like that could get you punched!