Still, I'm somewhat ashamed that I enjoy returning to 70s stuff like Marvel 2-in-1 starring the Thing in Project Pegasus (which I think is now available as a trade).
Now we're talking!
The best issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE for me has to be the Marv Wolfman two-part story featuring the Thing, whose airplane is sent down in 65 million BC by the very same Bermuda Triangle portal used by Skull the Slayer. There, he and Skull the Slayer team-up. It was interesting because it was really, the finale of the short-lived Skull the Slayer series, giving it a wrap-up and closure, something rarely seen in serial comics.
If you want evidence that comics are fundamentally pre-pubescent in mindset, look at the TWO-IN-ONE with the Thing and She-Hulk at Diablo Reactor. The She-Hulk is an aggressive femme whose master plan involves getting the Thing laid. Yet, somehow, that makes her a sinister figure that Ben Grimm is terrified of and avoids. Paging Dr. Freud!
I love Archie comics and collect old digests (even recent ones have old strips). Silver Age Archie and Josie comics are great and have a lot in common with Superman.
I could never get into ARCHIE, for the same reason I did not "get" or like the Marvel Star Comics line either (HEATHCLIFF, MADBALLS, TERRY IN SPACE, STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE), and why, to this day, I can't stand the POWERPUFF GIRLS. Because I've always thought that the best comic books, especially superhero comic books, are ones that can be read and appreciated by both children AND adults, a fact proven time and again by very talented writers.
Superhero/science fiction/adventure comics just for children are just as insincere and ugly as comic books that are just for adults. There should be something there that children (and the child in us) can appreciate: monsters, powers, flashy action, and things that adults (and very discerning, intelligent children) can enjoy too: smart unpredictable plotting, good characterization, and clean, correct plots.
All of our favorite books as children are books we can read and appreciate as adults, not just for nostalgia, but because there's something THERE that's there.
A movie like BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is an extraordinary film because it has surprisingly complicated characters, every moment is sincere and not histrionic, and it is able to create the illusion of doubt for a story that even children already know the outcome of.
One might also argue that it was the last great Disney film, because once there was ALADDIN set up the formula for destruction that so many kids films afterward would follow: Robin Williams mugging the camera, cloyingly cute/sassy talking animals and emphasis on celebrity voices instead of trained voice actors. The whole emphasis on sincerity and real characters seen in LITTLE MERMAID and B&B gave way to too hip for its own good tongue-in-cheek and smarmy references to modern day.
Anyone familiar with my image here as a conservative, stodgy champion of Silver Age values might be surprised to learn that I was a huge fan of Howard Chaykin's sex-crazed, left-leaning "American Flagg!"...at least for the first dozen and a half issues or so.
Wow. I never would have guessed in a million years.
As someone who hates the very idea of comics sold to promote toy lines, I have to admit a great fondness for Bill Mantlo and Michael Golden's old "Micronauts" series.
Hear-hear! I wouldn't call MICRONAUTS a guilty pleasure, because it's GOOD, not "so-bad-it's-good," though. Truly, MICRONAUTS, along with CHAMPIONS, and the Midas story arc in IRON MAN are Mantlo at the height of his creative powers.
The very IDEA of a universe inside of an atom is so idiosyncratic it is deserving of praise. Like so many great 70s creators, Mantlo took the stuff you think about when stoned and transformed it into a series.
I love MICRONAUTS. It was STAR WARS space opera thrill from start to finish: swordfights in space, a living "bioship," prison planets where the uniform is zoot suits, serpent-tanks, a race of bugs with a sexy bug queen, and a Darth Vader type that can transform into a robot centaur. It also does STAR WARS one better: it explains why there are people that are willing to be cannon fodder for the Evil Empire: they have access to clone banks, ensuring immortality for their minions.
Don't forget the characters: Bug, the Farrah Fawcett-haired Marionette, Prince Acroyear, and the blobby, inhuman "Living Weapon."
The thing about American Flagg that is shameful is not the wild politics, sci-fi and T & A combined with a quirky, confusing post-Neal Adams art style but the fact that it was held up as the next step in comics evolution --an adult comic to rival Maus, Robert Crumb, Love and Rockets, etc. All of these claims have dated, in a way.
Be very, very suspicious of anyone outright deified in lettercolumns as being "the next big thing." Remember when it was Don MacGregor? Don't get me wrong, I love his JUNGLE ACTION and ZORRO, but his small-press books like SABLE were the most infuriatingly pretentious things ever written, and I'm including Jim Starlin's "Adam Warlock, Space Christ" in this equation. Here's a speech from, I think, SABLE (to be honest, the small press Mantlo stuff just runs together for me), that I have paraphrased but I swear, not by that much:
"Why does war happen? Why can't we learn to love each other? For love is beautiful, even for lesbians."As for me and my guilty pleasures?
The ultimate guilty pleasure for me, is the book I know it's bad, but I love it anyway: Claremont's IRON FIST. It was absurd, it was outright stupid at times (boomerangs that only home on people with Kung Fu training?), but it was fun - I'd rank it higher even than the Byrne/Claremont UNCANNY X-MEN. And the Byrne art was incredible: that guy could do the most dynamic fight scenes this side of Buscema or Kirby. What a sense of speed and acrobatics!
Speaking of fight scenes, as loathesome as he is both as a writer and as a human being, Todd McFarlane is a very, very gifted artist. His AMAZING SPIDER-MAN in the eighties is a guilty pleasure of mine. One need look no further than his three-dimensional panels, faces that could be given to personalities, and his va-va-voomworthy Mary Jane and Black Cat never looked better.
Allow me to launch a pre-emptive strike: no, Archie's MIGHTY CRUSADERS was not any good. Yes, I know, it's not possible to have a "wrong" opinion, but...c'mon. The Crusaders, on facing certain doom, had one of their members say "Wait...I have the ability to teleport, but I've never mentioned it before...and I can only use it ONCE!"
Speaking of Archie, I've often talked before about the Impact! Comics JAGUAR, particularly under William Messner-Loebs, however, I wouldn't count it as a guillty pleasure (at least in the usual sense of "guilty pleasure," e.g. XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS or a Nick Carter novel) because it was honestly a well-written book with a likeable female heroine, fun stories, and tons of cool monsters and the most interestingly written supporting cast since the Lee/Ditko SPIDER-MAN.
One guilty pleasure is the 1972 Sword and Sorcery action comic, DAGAR THE INVINCIBLE, by the Whitman Western Publishing Company. These are the guys that in the early 1970s got the rights to do TUROK: SON OF STONE and MIGHTY SAMPSON. DAGAR THE INVINCIBLE featured Mac Raboy-clone art, over the top purple prose and fruity half-assed philisophy like "There was a time when GODS and DEMONS walked the earth as men - and certain men possessed the best and worst of BOTH!" This book also had a fight with an elephant skeleton come to life, Princesses in need of rescuing that were (SHOCK!) revealed to have been GHOSTS ALL ALONG (SPOOKY!), and a hero that looks a lot like the lead singer of Styx.
THE SCORPION by Atlas Comics is another great guilty pleasure book, and is pretty much what you'd expect from a company founded by Stan Lee's less talented brother. It features swinging seventies-haired hero the Scorpion saying "Man, this CIA business is downright fascistic! Get me the president!" It also has a Rabbi kidnapped by Neo-Nazi groups to raise dead Nazis from the grave.
The early 1980s miniseries AMETHYST: PRINCESS OF GEMWORLD is the sort of book that smiles at you and makes you smile back. Unca Cheeks, the most terminally unfunny man on the internet, loves this book and did a whole article about it where he compares it to Harry Potter, a surprisingly astute observation. And if a book can bring guys like me and Unca Cheeks together, it's GOT to be good.
Any time Tom DeFalco writes MIGHTY THOR, magic happens. Really, really cheesy magic. The guy just GOT what Thor was about. From the Thor Corps to his best work, the Silver Age Flashback issue of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY, featuring Balder and Sif, in a display of a dysfunctionally insane understanding of reality, saving all creation by preventing rats from chewing at the root of Ygdrasil.
For me, the greatest guilty pleasure I can think of is the Malibu PRIME and HARDCASE. Not because the series was any good (it wasn't) but it explored two interesting ideas: the Captain Marvel-type kid hero Prime, but who unlike the Big Red Cheese, acted like a real thirteen year old kid: stupid, inarticulate, and horny. Likewise, HARDCASE was about a haunted, Los Angeles celebrity superhero. Though the plots dragged and were nothing to write home about, as someone that reads to read about interesting places, HARDCASE did for the superficial Los Angeles what Englehart's COYOTE did for Las Vegas.
Does it count as a guilty pleasure if you enjoy work by an otherwise lousy writer? For instance, I can't think of a single bad thing to say about Gerry Conway's seventies run on Spider-Man. Or his Justice League of America, for that matter, though maybe the Don Heck art worked. Even Byrne, usually a terrible writer, delivered, at least the first few issues of his original SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK series featuring the Ringmaster, before Byrne reverted to type as a creepy, broken pervert and did nonsense like have her jump rope naked for an issue and childishly insert himself as a godlike character.
Hell, even the accursed Ron Marz has done two things I like: the first is an Elseworlds that has Superman become a Green Lantern (yes, for the umpteenth time, but it was a space opera story with an interesting resolution), and the Green Lantern PULP HEROES annual, featuring Kyle Rayner as a John Carter type hero in a world of Glass Men, and "breathing seas."
Then of course we have Jack Kirby and his CAPTAIN VICTORY. I can't find it in my heart to hate anything with a Fighting Fetus.
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