2002-07-09 - 11:36 p.m.

Someone has read too many comics

I am still plugging away on the Grand Reorganization of the comics downstairs in the store. I don't know why I point that out, since I'm probably going to be at it into the Fall. Right now I am progressing at the rate of about a box a day, but there are still 60 boxes left. I'm at the letter G in Marvel, but there is the rest of the Marvel alphabet, then DC, then Image, then all the lesser publishers. I am not going to be done for quite a while.

One thing that I've noticed, however, is that when I get so badly focused that I actually start READING the comics, it's generally time to quit.

Usually, I don't have to actually read the comics, I can just look at the cover and remember what went on inside. I have a frighteningly good memory when it comes to comics - I used to be able to terrify people by having them pick out a comic at random, they tell me the title and issue number, and I can describe the cover to them.

Only fellow comic nerds are impressed by this - most normal people take this as a sign that I really need to buy a life. Remembering stuff having to do with comics has always been effortless to me - I can glance at something once and remember it forever. I wish that my memory was that good when it came to chess openings! Now THAT would be very useful!

Anyway, tonight I was going through the tail end of Fantastic Four. That is, the tail end of the original series just before it was cancelled at issue #416. They started it up again and the new series is now passed issue 50.

At the time that these issue of Fantastic Four were coming out I refused to read them because I considered what was going on in them was close to sacrilegious. The core idea of the Fantastic Four has always been that of a family having adventures, but toward the end of the run this family became so dysfunctional and the plots became so tortured and convoluted that it was hardly recognizable.

Let me see if I can give you some idea of what was going on. The Fantastic Four consists of Reed (Mr. Fantastic) his wife Sue (The Invisible Woman), Sue's brother Johnny (The Human Torch) and Reed's college buddy Ben (The Thing). Their main adversary was another college acquaintance of Reed and Ben's, Victor (Doctor Doom).

By around issue 400 the following had happened: Reed and Victor were dead, Sue was the leader of the group, but had some weird personality problems where she became incredibly bitchy and turned into some character named Malice who liked to dress up in bondage-wear. After Reed died she began getting cozy with Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, ruler of an undersea kingdom that has tried to conquer the surface world on a number of occasions. Ben had gone on a leave of absence a bit earlier, and while he did Johnny moved in on his girlfriend Alicia, a blind sculptress. Johnny and Alicia subsequently got married, and Ben was none to happy about it. Then Ben took up with a superpowered woman who turned into a She-Thing, but was turned back into a normal-looking woman by Victor when she sold out the rest of the Fantastic Four. Subsequently, it was revealed that Johnny's wife Alicia was not really Alicia at all but an alien shapeshifter out to infiltrate the Fantastic Four. When her true identity was revealed, she admitted that she loved Johnny, but she was thrown out of the team anyway. Later she came back as a villain, but she also claimed to be carrying Johnny's child. She eventually became an ally again, but then she admitted that the child she was carrying wasn't Johnny's. Also there was some sort of love triangle going on with her and Johnny and Ben...

Whew.

The book just became this incredibly sprawling soap opera about a super-powered dysfunctional family. Much of this rigamarole was undone in the new series, so now that all of this is in the past I can appreciate the weirdness of it. It actually wasn't as bad as all that, and the art was pretty good throughout, but it did make a mess of the characters. Still this is much better than what happened to MOST marvel titles circa 1996-98. Marvel was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and many of their books became unreadable crap. This stuff was truly awful - horribly written and badly drawn. At the time Marvel was being very bad about paying their creative people, so it's small surprise that the quality should suffer.

Going through long runs of comic, it's really astonishing all the repetition there is. The same plots and story riffs get hashed and re-hashed, over and over again. Even in the golden days of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby you could see it. For example, in Thor some menace would march on Asgard, with the idea of pulling the Odinsword from its sheath (or whatever), thus ending the world. Thor and the rest if the Asgardians would fight it every step of the way, but just as the menace would be about to succeed, Odin would pop up and bitchslap it back to oblivion. This must have happened four or five times during Thor's first 150 issues or so. Lee and Kirby were incredibly creative guys, but everyone has an off day. It's not that amusing watching Marvel's lesser lights try to copy them using the same plots and story riffs, ad infinitum. Of course, there is always room for creative and unusual story ideas.

Well, that went on longer than I meant it to. Going through all these comics is giving me a weird perspective on comics as a whole.

Anyway, after I finally came upstairs I actually had the energy to do a little cleaning. The wood shavings that I'd used in the hamster's cages were getting traced all over the house, so I wanted to clean up the floor enough so I could vacuum.

There was a lot of stuff under Lily's desk in the library. I was able to put together a hairball the size of a baseball! I suppose that is the downside of having lovely long hair like hers. I also found a bunch of pens, and, to my utter astonishment, an uncashed check from her workplace for nearly 200 dollars! The check was dated some time in mid-May, and I guess it had just been misplaced. Well, we can certainly use the money! Maybe I should clean more often!