Duty Now for the Future

I have been long absent from this page. The absence started with the pandemic, when I was swept up in the first wave of infection, and has lasted through the present, which finds me retired for two-plus years now.

I could have picked up blogging again at the end of 2023, but I focused instead on my physical condition. I started retirement that September exhausted from the constant stress of running a short-staffed union local office, putting in 50-hour weeks for two-years straight absent any time off. 

I was shot. So goal number one was to jog regularly, improve my diet, relax and rest. And it has basically worked. I dropped weight and improved stamina. But it has taken much longer than I anticipated. I was initially clouded by the delusion that conditioning would snap back after a few months of dedicated exercise. 

One enormous lesson has been trying to figure out what are my physical boundaries now that I am in my sixties. It takes me longer to recover, longer to heal, and any kind of "fast start" or "need for speed" is pretty much off limits. But after two years of effort I have a much better grasp of what I am dealing with.

I am in a position to start fresh. But I'm not sure what it is that I want to concentrate on. I spend a fair amount of time on Twitter/X. I find it an excellent way to absorb a lot of information quickly. I might want to post there instead of here.

I still read a printed newspaper every Monday thru Saturday. Sunday during football season I watch three games. I try to read a modest two books per month, but lately I find even this hard to achieve since I am spending more time reading comic books. Like many older men -- just scan YouTube -- the Bronze Age of Comics looms large in my mind.

I'm not in any hurry. I'm giving myself until August before I commit to getting any project finished.

Uncanny Avengers #14

The most hits this page has ever received in a day were for a post I did on Uncanny Avengers #4. Like with so much else, I have failed to keep up with the title. Last weekend prior to the Super Bowl (the outcome of which I am still having difficulty dealing with) I picked up where I left off what seems like a long time ago.

Where I left off had something to do with Kang and the Apocalypse Twins, Uriel and Eimin, reanimating dead super-villains Grim Reaper, Daken and Banshee in a plot to have Wonder Man and the Scarlet Witch rapture all mutants to a new home world, Planet X, in order to subvert plans for a global hate war that a Red Skull augmented by the brain of a dead Professor X has in store.

Complicated, and I have provided only the lightest of glosses, which is what threw me off this Uriel and Eimin story arc. There is a lot of stuff happening -- too much for me to keep track of.

But in Uncanny Avengers #14 writer Rick Remender brings everything into focus; he, penciller Steve McNiven and inker John Dell treat us to a classic super-powered clash of heroes that is operatic, or at least as melodramatic as a Hollywood blockbuster.

Remender is doffing his cap here to the early Bronze Age Celestial Madonna Saga found in the pages of the Avengers, complete with Kang reanimated super-villains.

The Celestial Madonna Saga features the death of the Swordsman, which had a big impact on me reading it as a kid right around the time Nixon vacated the White House and Ford got started patching up any holes that had appeared in the U.S. Deep State. The early Bronze Age is when Marvel figures out the "crossover event," now the main organizing principle of the corporate comic book behemoth. Granted, the late Silver Age saw Marvel's first crossovers, e.g., the Skrull-Kree War. But it took the Bronze Age and the relaxing of the Comics Code Authority to allow for the introduction of pathos-inducing, crowd-pleasing superhero death.

In Uncanny Avengers #14, as you can see in the 11 scans below beginning with the cover page, the reader is treated to not one but three superhero deaths.

Trinity of Sin: The Phantom Stranger One-Shot

This marks a first for me. I've never devoted an entire post to a DC title. The current run of The Phantom Stranger is part of DC's "The New 52" reboot where 52 titles are started over at issue #1.

I've been accumulating issues of "The New 52" The Phantom Stranger for some time but had yet to dip in until I took the day off to renew my driver's license earlier this month. Following a long run I settled down with my endorphins high and a couple of comic books. One of those books was Trinity of Sin: The Phantom Stranger one-shot I had picked up the day before at my neighborhood comic shop.

I've always been a Marvel devotee, but when I collected comic books as a kid I read plenty of DC too. DC might not have done superheroes as well as Marvel, but they did the macabre much better. DC had several titles, Ghosts and House of Mystery come to mind, of new horror (meaning, the comics were not primarily composed of reprinted material), while Marvel could only muster the lightweight Supernatural Thrillers. Pretty much everything else Marvel did in the way of horror, monsters, mystery, SciFi was by way of reprints. (I've been sporadically engaged in the exploration of one of these Marvel reprint titles, Where Monsters Dwell.)

DC also did a better job of butting up against the weakened Comics Code Authority (thanks to Stan Lee's Amazing Spider-Man) in the late Silver Age and early Bronze Age with Michael Kaluta's Watergate-era The Shadow, Spectre, Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing and The Phantom Stranger. Marvel had its superhero monster titles -- Werewolf By Night, The Tomb of Dracula, etc., the best of which was Man-Thing by Steve Gerber -- but they couldn't match DC's dark intensity, captured in this cover of The Phantom Stranger Vol 2 #26, September 1973, by Mike Kaluta:

Below you will find ten scans from The Phantom Stranger one-shot, the cover and nine interior pages. Phil Winslade is the artist; Dan Didio, the plotter; J.M. DeMatteis, the scripter. The interior pages are all suitably dark, transporting me back to the early comicbook Bronze Age of my youth.

Where Monsters Dwell #23: "The Monster Waits for Me!" by Lee, Kirby & Ayers, Pt. 2

Here is pt. 2 of the post on the Lee-Kirby-Ayers story of "The Monster Waits for Me!" It is the cover story of Where Monsters Dwell #23, September, 1973. Nineteen-seventy-three is ground zero in Watergate America. With a publication date of September, 1973, this meant that Where Monsters Dwell #23 started appearing in stores around the time Nixon's goose is cooked. The summer of '73 is when Alexander Butterfield reveals that all Nixon's office telephone calls and conversations have been taped since 1971; Nixon then refuses to supply the tapes to Congress and special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

The period 1970 - 1975 that coincides with the early Bronze Age of Comics fascinates me. It is a time when the old post-war paradigm of labor-management cooperation and constant upward mobility gives way to our current downsized, privatized, offshored neoliberal/neoconservative paradigm. I've been exploring the period on Fridays through the lens of "Hippies vs. Punks." By 1975 Ford is in the White House, Saigon has fallen and the Punks are coming. To make sense of how this happened I am of the opinion that one has to understand Watergate as well as the Oil Crisis Recession of November, 1973 - March, 1975. Part of that understanding is to look at the little-appreciated "disposable" media of the era, comic books.

"The Monster Waits for Me!" feature story of Where Monsters Dwell #23 is a reprint of story that appeared in Strange Tales #92, January, 1962, the same month, the end of JFK's first year in office, that Fantastic Four #2 is published. Both comic books feature shapeshifting aliens from outer space: the giant flying-squirrel-like monster in the title of "The Monster Waits for Me!" and the famous first appearance of the Skrulls in Fantastic Four #2.

The story "The Monster Waits for Me!" opens with a young, beautiful unemployed woman who needs a cheap place to live in the city. She goes to a rundown rooming house and ends up in an apartment next to an old man who supposedly never leaves his room. One night after dinner the old man knocks at the beautiful young woman's door and implores her to come back to his room and listen to a tale he has to tell, a story he has told no one else. That story is of his near-death escape from aliens he saw land a flying saucer in the woods. The aliens are large monsters capable of flight. Right when the old man finishes his story there is loud pounding at his door. He panics, thinking the alien monsters have finally found him, and his frail heart gives out. The medical examiner arrives along with the police and landlady and other lodgers (the pounding on the door was from a downstairs neighbor coming to tell the old man that he had left his water running and it was dripping into his room below). The old man's death is ruled routine heart failure. Everyone leaves. The beautiful young woman is left alone. She says to herself:

Well, it's all over! And, in a way, I'm glad . . . 

I'm glad the old man died the way he did -- of natural causes . . . 

 . . . Because it might have been dangerous . . . 

 . . . With a house full of humans . . . 

 . . . To have had to kill him . . . Myself!

And with that the beautiful young woman flies off into the night, shapeshifted back to her true alien form.

What a treat! A beautiful blend of '50s crime/horror and science fiction elegantly told by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers.

Where Monsters Dwell #23: "The Monster Waits for Me!" by Lee, Kirby & Ayers, Pt. 1

I didn't have a copy of Where Monsters Dwell #23. So I went online to AtomicAvenue.com via my ComicBase 16 Professional Edition and found a copy graded "Good" for not too much more than the current market price. Since I feel like I'm starting to hit some sort of wounded stride with weekend posts devoted to Where Monsters Dwell, Marvel's early Bronze Age title devoted to Silver Age monster, sci-fi, horror reprints, I wanted to keep the run up.

The title story of Where Monsters Dwell #23 is "The Monster Waits for Me!" Though there are no credits, the work is obviously vintage Jack Kirby. You have to go to ComicVine.com (the first link at the top of the post) to find out that Kirby's inker for "The Monster Waits for Me!" was Dick Ayers. And you have to go to MarvelWikia to learn that Stan Lee wrote the story and that it originally appeared in Strange Tales #92, published January, 1962.

As you can see from the scan below, one could quibble with the seller's grade of "Good." Grading isn't easy. But if it had been me evaluating the condition of this comic book, I would have graded it "Fair."

I was just happy to have received it in five business days. I read the issue this morning, and it's a great one.

Not only does Where Monsters Dwell #23 feature a "state-of-the-art" Silver Age Lee-Kirby collaboration, but it also has a Lee-Ditko backup story, as well as a rare Lee-Infantino crime/horror tale. Carmine Infantino is the artist credited with helping to usher in the Silver Age with his clean, crisp, suburban-based The Flash.

But what I really would like to talk about is the concise perfection of "The Monster Waits for Me!" In this post look at the beautiful first page following the splash, in particular the depiction of the rundown boarding house our gorgeous unemployed Sue-Storm-lookalike narrator finds herself in. In later posts I'll deal with the rest of the story and the Lee-Ditko and Lee-Infantino backup stories.

But for now check out the old lath and plaster walls: first, in the panel where our comely narrator talks to the battle-ax landlady as they ascend the staircase; then, in the panel where she appraises her room while unpacking her bags.

 

When I read "The Monster Waits for Me!" this morning and I studied the panels showing the old rooming house and its deteriorating walls I was immediately reminded of the loft I slept in with my live-in girlfriend (who would become my wife). The apartment we lived in was part of building that was older than the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which it weathered, though with its architecture altered. Originally it was two separate structures. But the earthquake shifted the foundations to such an extent that a decision was made to conjoin the two buildings where they face the Durant Avenue, creating a large horseshoe. At least this is the story my landlord liked to tell drinking a 16-ounce can of beer, his handyman coveralls open down to his pendulous belly.

In any event, my father, who is a amateur carpenter, built me and my girlfriend a sleeping loft with closet space underneath. He did this because the bedroom was not much larger than a double bed. The loft provided space for shelves.

We climbed up a wooden ladder, which my father also made, to get into bed at night. There was not much space between mattress and ceiling up there. You could prop yourself up on a pillow and read but you couldn't sit fully upright without banging your head.

One night my girlfriend and I were arguing up in the loft; I have absolutely no memory what the argument was about. Whatever it was, my girlfriend, who could be tempestuous and had no qualms about violence, became so agitated that she started kicking the ceiling. The ceiling crumbled, exposing the old lath and plaster in a good-sized hole.

In the months that followed the hole widened and dusty, rocky grains of old mortar showered down on us as we slept. We attempted half-hearted repairs with packing tape and paper bags. But invariably the tape would lose its adhesion and a pile of dust and mortar would drop down on top of us.

The hole got bigger, and the problem got worse. How long did we live that way -- sleeping beneath that gaping wound as the old Victorian-era building breathed its decay into us? Finally during one of his visits my father took pity on us and repaired the hole; I can't remember if he used a thin sheet of plywood or a piece of drywall.

Seeing the exposed lath and plaster in the Lee-Kirby-Ayers story brought it all back. I felt ashamed.

Where Monsters Dwell #21: Fin Fang Foom

Where Monsters Dwell was a Marvel reprint title -- its longest running, 1970-1975 -- from the beginning of the Bronze Age of Comics; it reprinted monster and horror material mostly from the Silver Age. The blurb about Where Monsters Dwell from The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide that appears in my ComicBase 16 Professional Edition database reads: "Admittedly reprinting 1950s horror material meant a comic with reduced overheads, but just who bought this lackluster stuff?"

The answer is that I did, a grade-school kid who loved Marvel. The covers were great, often showcasing new artwork. By studying the covers of Where Monsters Dwell one can appreciate the importance of Silver Age monster comics to the explosion of Marvel's superhero books in the 1960s.

No better example is the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creation "Fin Fang Foom!" reprinted from Strange Tales #89 (October 1961) in the May 1973 Where Monsters Dwell #21. It's classic Lee-Kirby. The art is beautiful. The story is boilerplate Cold War anticommunism spiced up by a sleeping dragon awoken by a Ricky Nelsonesque protagonist named Chan Liuchow. Chan Liuchow uses Fin Fang Foom to stave off a Red Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

At the end of the story our youthful hero manages to subdue Fin Fang Foom with a handful of sleep-inducing herbs, proving his dismissive establishmentarian father wrong. Chan Liuchow's love of reading ancient Chinese texts is indeed powerful stuff "against the armed might of the Red hordes." It's an elegant, rich comic book.

Below are six scans from Where Monsters Dwell #21: the cover, splash page, the two opening pages setting up the story and two pages that show Fin Fang Foom rising from his slumbers. I wanted to see how the old Bronze Age newsprint scanned (some pages better than others):