Who Watches the Nightwatch Part 1: Respawn

4thletter! is a great comics blog.  As a Venom aficionado, I've especially enjoyed Gavok's We Care a Lot feature, a series of articles which chronicles the character's "lethal protector" escapades through the '90s and beyond.  For the next little while, I'd like to shamelessly rip him off emulate him, and run a similar series about a character's obscure '90s adventures.  But here's the twist.  I'm not going to write the article about a character like Venom, who's been featured in movies, TV shows, and made into innumerable action figures.  That would be too easy.  Too enjoyable for both me and this blog's tens of readers.  Instead, I'm going to write about a character nobody likes.  A character that nobody ever liked.  Not even me - and I like Cardiac.

"Where's my mini-series?  Annex got one!  Annex!"
(Web of Spider-Man Annual #10, art by Mark Tenney and Keith Williams)

Archie Metaphors: Kissing = Sex.

Best guess at the artist? Dan DeCarlo

When reading Archie comics it's important to remember that they were written and drawn (for the most part) by a bunch of dirty old men.

They're comics aimed at pre-teens, with stories about teenagers, written by men in their 30s and 40s. As such there tends to be a surprising amount of layers to the stories. They can't, for example, show full-on sexual relationships in these comics. On the other hand, it would be pretty realistic for Archie, Betty, Veronica and the gang to be sexually active, right?

So Archie comics get around this using a really simple metaphoric formula.

KISSING = SEX.

Now as always (and as we discussed when talking about Jughead's sexuality) it's basically impossible to talk in absolutes about Archie comics. The degree to which kissing = sex therefore changes from story to story. In some stories kissing is a straight up substitute for sex. For example in the strip we're sharing today.

The Geoff Senior Sideways Shot, Part 1

Sal Buscema has his trademark punch. He's not the only artist with a signature style.


Geoff Senior is one of my favorite Transformers comic artists ever. He started out with Marvel UK, where he drew the famous Ultra Magnus/Galvatron battle from the multi-part saga named "Target: 2006". He later drew several issues of the US title, including the extra-long issue 75, some issues of the follow-up title Transformers: Generation 2, and one issue of the 2007 movie tie-in comics by Titan.
One of his preferred perspective choices to convey a particularly dynamic scene is drawing a character from the side. Not at an angle, not diagonally, just perfectly straight on from the side.

Sal's Sunday Punch #1

New regular feature here at 80-Page Giant - Sal's Sunday Punch!  Most Sundays, we'll post a Sal Buscema Punch for your reading enjoyment!

"You didn't save me any mashed potatoes?"
 (Spectacular Spider-Man #189, written by J.M. DeMatteis, art by Sal Buscema)

In this debut installment taken from Spectacular Spider-Man #189, Harry Osborn's holding a special dinner for his wife Liz, son Normie, and brother-in-law Mark Raxton (aka the Molten Man)...in a walled-in dungeon, complete with a huge portrait of his crazy-ass father Norman.  Oh, and did I mention that he's doing this while dressed in full Green Goblin regalia and ranting about the Osborn legacy?  Spider-Man eventually shows up, fashionably late; once Harry totally goes off the deep end, Peter shows him what he thinks of his hosting abilities.

Wraithslayer

You know what's a terrible idea?

Toy-accurate ROM Spaceknight cosplay.

(Scanned from some issue of Marvel Age. I should really complete my run of those, because 20-year-old comics propaganda is pretty cheap.)

Good Political Cartoons: Giles

And yet England went on to win that world cup...

I know, I know. Surely political cartoons are those stupid things with big nosed versions of politicians and really stupid labels on everything so even the dumbest idiot can get the joke. They suck donkey's nuts right?

Well, they don't have to. Political cartooning, or perhaps more accurately, cartooning as social commentary, doesn't have to suck. In fact, social commentary is where cartooning and comics have their origin! It's magazines like Punch over in the UK that gave rise to the entire artform.

Which brings us to Giles.

This One's For Jameel.

Sometimes you're reading a comic and one or two pages just... stand out for some strange reason.

Merry frickin' Christmas.

Sometimes you can't put your finger on exactly why they stand out... other times, yeah, you totally can.

That Hilarious Racism and Xenophobia in Old Comics!

I'm glad you can tell they're not Korean or Chinese, Bucky.

There's a kind of strange attitude that I've noticed when people are reading old comics that says, "Well, they're old comics, of COURSE they're like that!" Sometimes this attitude is levelled against the structure of the plots, the art, and sometimes it's levelled against the social values represented in those old comics.

Of course they're racist! It's old comics!

This attitude tends to render these comics camp -- we laugh at the racism and xenophobia represented because, well, they're old! When talking about comics from the Super Hero 'Golden Age' (we'll talk about why I think the term 'Golden Age of Comics' is bullshit at another time) this dismissive attitude becomes heightened

It's hilarious when Superman tells us to slap a Jap, because it was World War II and that sort of attitude was acceptable back then. Of course it was okay to say all Germans were bad, or all Italians, or all Japs. After all, we were at war, weren't we?

Ben Grimm: Jerk

Hey, Ben Grimm - what do you say to your friend when you find out that his wife's been replaced by a Skrull?

(Fantastic Four #357, written by Tom DeFalco, art by Paul Ryan and Danny Bulanadi)

Yeah, uh...not that.

Given that the guy standing next to Ben there is noted evil mind-controller the Puppet Master, Johnny takes this about as well as you'd expect.  They spend the next five pages beating the crap out of each other; at no point does Ben dispel the notion that he's being mind-controlled, nor does he tell Johnny what the hell is going on.  Honestly, I think he just wanted an excuse to smack the Torch around for stealing his woman.

A little look at 1940s Wonder Woman

So lately I've been reading my friend Andrew Hobart's copy of Wonder Woman Chronicles #1. It reprints Wondie's Golden Age stories from her very first appearance onwards.

I'll be perfectly honest, I'm not a fan of Wonder Woman. This has definitely coloured my reading of these old... ahhh... classics. I'm far, far, too aware of... well... the fact that Wonder Woman is a bondage fantasy. I can't help but speculate on what it must have been like to read these stories as a kid in the 1940s, completely oblivious to the cliches and visuals of bondage. Fetish inducing probably.

At least according to some doctors.