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Judging a Book by Its Cover

In one of my used-bookstore sessions - in these I generally wander somewhat randomly between themes and media, in a process I suspect relies on the same mental processes as automatic writing - I came across an unusual document called The Photo-Journal Guide to Marvel Comics, volume K-Z, by Ernst Gerber. This volume contains a purported 3900 cover images of Marvel Comics printed before 1990, and also evidently belongs to a two-volume set.

Seeing comics presented this way - as individual covers and in the context of other covers - invites an observer to view comics differently. Few comics readers might enjoy as complete a collection as referenced by the color images in the 150+ pages of the book; and someone with one of these volumes can visit or revisit comics from a span of decades, without the need to go fishing in back issue bins.

Viewed this way, some comics appear to say "Don't you regret not buying me when you had the chance?" Others might, through their visual first impression, say "Find more of the same here," which would offer a promise or a threat to a reader depending upon tastes. Another set, however, invites a prospective reader to strong reservations, either in fear of having once owned a truly dreadful piece he would rather forget, or in relief from having avoided something that has a cover which veritably radiates True Awfulness.

Relying on first impressions can do injustice to the material something (or someone) contains, but can also guide the prudent in allocating scarce resources to where they can do the most good, such resources including the limited comics dollar. And some comics, through their covers, announce badness almost as loudly as ten-foot neon letters would.

Disco Themes as a Red Flag

Where a comic seeks to hard to pay tribute to a cultural phenomenon that never really amounted too much in the first place, out of a dreadful fear of losing the presumed hipness of the medium, we see a strong cofactor of bad comics. In particular, where comics attempt to keep within the confines of "NEW!" and "NOW!" by bowing to something like the over-hyped seventies discoteque culture, one need not burrow too far to discover a kernel of awfulness.

This particular specimen goes even further, though. We have a super-villain with an electric guitar, which definitely means the Stupid Props Department had earned its pay that week. And, in tandem, the Atrocious Names Department scrambled to keep up by laying on him such a dysphonious moniker as "The Hypno-Hustler." Sounds more like a psychic prostitute than a super-villain, but, since I don't recall the contents of this particular gem, I can't really attest to whether he actually lived up to the name.

Some comics fans regret the general absence of people of color (albeit imaginary ones) from comics in general. However, I can't imagine anyone preferring characters like this to the unfortunate ethnic monotony of conventional superhero comics. Usages like this invite us to examine our definitions of the problem - should we say comics have a problem with the general lack of ethnic diversity of characters contained within, or do they have a problem with the general lack of ethnic diversity of good characters?

Misguided Attempts at Colorful Street Villains

We could state, as a general principle, that to avoid comics that feature Black men with red mohawks who menace a character's mother with an axe would do much to prevent exposure to Truly Awful Comics. And, furthermore, if any character on a comics cover says anything that sounds too much like "yo mama," the time might have come to step away from the comics rack altogether and investigate People or TV Guide.

I find myself at a loss to explain this goon on the cover. I may have owned a copy of this horse-apple of a comic at one time, but the decades and maybe a mercifully selective memory have purged any memory I might have retained about the events depicted therein. So I must resort to speculation. Perhaps this villain somehow reflects the growing Mister T phenomenon of the early eighties. Perhaps the red mohawk seemed, to an artist or writer, a way to make the ax-wielding villain seem to belong to some dangerous yet achingly hip club culture of the day. Or perhaps the tonsorial mishap reflected a method of investing him with street credibility by someone who didn't necessarily have much experience with street cred - by affecting some overtly obnoxious aesthetic mistake to one's outward appearance, one can deliver an implied taunt to the world to risk getting beaten by making saucy remarks about the same. Therefore, in such a model, the worse the fashion atrocity, the tougher we might consider the bearer.

Whatever passing madness brought about this cover, however, I can't really see it answering the question "What would you like to see in New Mutants?" I don't know if modern mathematics can yet handle numbers large enough to represent the number of people one would have to question before receiving an answer like "I want to see a Black man with a red mohawk and an axe and who says he intends to kill one of the characters' mothers."

Really Ridiculous Enemies

Superhero comics require a never-ending variety of goons, goobers, and cretins for heroes to fight, and, more or less, produce the same on demand, though generally not often enough to prevent the tiresome overuse of tarnishing arch-enemies who reappear, then meet their final end, every six issues or so.

Writers and artists must come up with something, month after month, and one can't expect every chapter in an ongoing series to contain masterpiece-level material. Nonetheless, the occasional piece provides a fairly unquestionable justification for loud and eloquent complaint.

If you can read Captain America's protest in the word balloon - and I apologize for the lack of clarity of the scanned image - you might notice his raised objection to having to fight a statue. But one might him to carry his protest further, for if a hero must fight the seated Lincoln statue from the Lincoln Memorial, where would it all stop? Would he eventually face the need to bloody all four giant noses on Mount Rushmore? Must he march onward to the gruesome necessity of punching the Statue of Liberty in the stomach? Could this ultimately lead to wrestling matches with every statue of a man (and, sometimes, a horse) in Europe? Should we expect to see him attempting to put a hammerlock on one of the 100-foot Jesus statues in South America?

After the horrible blows to Captain America's dignity from about five years previous to this cover, one could expect him to demonstrate a certain delicacy about subsequent affronts. And, perhaps readers might become a bit jumpy themselves about what a comic with such a cover would contain.

Importation of Degraded Cultural Icons

Some percentage (and we can ignore, for the time being, exactly what percentage) of organized and disorganized fandom likes to engage in a hypothetical roshambo of superheroes, supervillains, and miscellaneous figures from other fictional (and sometimes historical) media. We see one symptom of this in the never-ending debates such as "Can Captain America beat Batman up?" Occasionally the vehemence of such debates can induce surprise in even very jaded onlookers, who still can suffer from surprise at the very notion that anyone, let alone grownups, could care about such trivia.

The question of the outcome of a fight between Figure A and Figure B becomes all the sillier after one or both of these figures have moved, through over-familiarity, from acting as a vicarious power or persecution fantasy to playing comic relief. The example here, therefore, invites ridicule because of the faded nature of Frankenstein's monster to evoke more than snickers at the late day in the sixties when the original story this reprint contains first appeared.

Frankenstein's monster had appeared in an early-forties comic that ultimately faded to a comedy piece, and images of the monster became regular components of comedy across media by the 1950s and possibly earlier. By the sixties, the image had become so utterly un-frightening that Fred Gwynne would use it as a comedic hook in television's "The Munsters;" yet Marvel Comics, evidently in all earnestness, released a comic featuring some kind of free-for-all between the original X-Men and some version of the monster. This happened within a year or so of said monster definitely leaving a more comedic than horrible imprint via the aforementioned television show.

The fears voiced through the "classic" movie monsters more or less faded to distant second bananas to the realized fears of the Second World War, whose aftermath did not really leave much freedom from fear. The fear of a sudden death from a blinding flash of light that could come at any time, to any place; the fear of having to live under totalitarian rule; the fear of the creeping changes to culture in general that seemed insane to many (who could respond with little more than an overall feeling of helplessness at the direction the world had chosen to move) - all these things made the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, or the Mummy appear to belong in the lore of young children's bad dreams. To the increasingly precocious young people of the sixties, the monster must have appeared as more gag than threat; and we could expect more groans than gasps at a cover like this.

The Ever-Intrusive Doppelganger

In a Truly Awful Comics column of the recent past (here), I mentioned that the presence of doubles generally indicates a storyteller in trouble. I also examined one specially type of doppelganger story in Recycling Bin, where such characters provide a physical manifestations of a hero's neuroses so that he can hit them with his fist (here).

Sometime I should go through the volume that inspired this column and count exactly how many times the look-alike theme appears. Through ill-use in scores (or perhaps millions) of stories, the very notion of a superhero's double has become a strong indicator that the particular issue (or even the entire franchise) has slid into the oblivion of idea exhaustion.

The double, indeed, enjoys a long history such that distinct sub-types have developed over the years. Some stories involve simple impersonators, such as the Captain America that the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four fought not long before Marvel Comics decided to revive the character. In other cases, we have the dreaded secret twin, as in the case of a hunchbacked Kryptonian Superboy who showed up towards the dawn of the 1980s (however the resolution of said story chose to dispose of the character, perhaps through redefining his origins, afterwards). Where writers recognized the impersonator and the secret twin as obscenely overworked notions, they then moved on to create doubles via methods like cloning or extradimensional equivalence. Occasionally they resorted to time traveling versions of the same character from the near past or near future.

Whatever the pretext, it ultimately descends to one of a very few prefabricated scenes, such as the big bust-up between hero and duplicate, or the scene where someone has to identify the real version to prevent something like a bomb going off.

In the case of the doppelganger story, then, a comics buyer can observe that the writers didn't necessarily try very hard and can expect this to show in all aspects of the tale the book contains. As well, a reader can assert, with some confidence, that he has already read the story the book contains even without reading the book.

Superficial Judgment as Expedient

Superficial judgments do not always hold true, but can reveal strong cofactors for the elements of a bad comic. Any one of the titles getting the treatment in this column might contain someone's favorite comics story, and we need not fret too much over this; the appeal of some artists, writers, characters, or themes can shine through a veritable garbage dumb of storytelling rubbish.

Nor should we consider this listing exhaustive. In resorting to The Photo-Journal Guide to Marvel Comics, volume K-Z, I have, by definition, precluded indicative covers from other publishers. This forces me to omit swarms of pieces from other publishers and entire themes, such as many uses of cheesecake on a comics cover (see Witchblade and Lady Death) that can serve as warning signs.

Overall, though, in comics, the covers do strongly implicate the content in many cases. And recurring themes of badness can provide useful warnings (or guilty lures) to readers concerning comics from which we can expect many things, but not quality.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 234. Completed 03-MAR-2001.