Review: X-O Manowar: Retribution

Writers: Jim Shooter, Steve Englehart, Bob Layton
Artists: Barry Windsor-Smith, Bob Layton, Sal Velluto, Mike Manley
Collects: X-O Manowar #1-4 (1992)
Published: Valiant, 1993; $9.95

I probably never would have read X-O Manowar: Retribution if not for the Omnibus Collector’s Comic Swap and Community, a group I follow on Facebook. At nearly 3,000 members the group supplies my newsfeed with a constant barrage of content, typically in one of three forms: (1) posts recommending or inquiring about upcoming collected editions; (2) posts chronicling the pursuit of hard-to-find books, known as “whales,” that can fetch hundreds of dollars on the secondary market; and (3) posts effusing over whatever series or high-ticket item has, for the moment, wended its way into the group’s zeitgeist. Posts of the latter variety make for remarkable spectacles in social-media groupthink, with the most frenzied members spending thousands of dollars on books they know little to nothing about and will likely never read. Luckily, I’m relatively immune to the group’s more costly vicissitudes: I have access to two excellent libraries and very rarely purchase expensive hardcovers these days.

My interest was piqued, though, by the group’s recent fixation on Valiant, a comics publisher that was resurrected in 2012 following over a decade of financial insolvency. The Facebook group’s primary interest was in the spate of new series that had been launched over the last five years – or, more specifically, in the limited-run hardcover editions collecting those series. Historicist that I am, I found myself more interested in learning about the rise, fall, and rebirth of this decades-old publisher, one that I had barely heard of just a few months earlier. I read a few primers on Valiant’s characters and on its shared superhero universe and, on learning that X-O Manowar was currently the publisher’s flagship title, tried requesting the hundred-dollar X-O Manowar Classic Omnibus, Vol. 1 – collecting the first thirty issues of the original 1992 series – via interlibrary loan. Had any lending libraries owned the book, I would probably be writing a review of it right now. But none did, unfortunately (nor did any own the 2008-issued X-O Manowar: Rebirth, reprinting the series’ first six issues), leaving me with one final option: X-O Manowar: Retribution, a 1993 trade paperback reprint of the series’ first four issues.

Some may wonder why my impulse was to seek out a print edition of the original series rather than a reprint of the (now widely acclaimed) 2012 series that the Omnibus Collector’s group had gravitated toward. I suppose the answer is that, as far as comics are concerned, I’ve always been less interested in the present moment than I am in how we arrived to that present. The current roster of Valiant comics, renowned as it is, wouldn’t hold as much interest for me if not for the unlikely story of its publisher’s tumultuous history. Nor for that matter would a current series featuring any character or franchise – whether from Valiant or any other publisher – signify, to me at least, without some understanding of that character’s creative origins. And perhaps what often draws me to comics of the early 1990s in particular is that, despite the adolescent quality of that decade’s purest exercises in creative ownership – Spawn, Youngblood, WildC.A.T.s, Cyberforce – it was, nevertheless, the final era in which the dominance of corporate comics seemed truly vulnerable.

Ironically, the conflict between creator-owned and corporate comics was perhaps never more dramatically staged – at least, not in the 1990s – than in the case of Valiant, which former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter had founded in 1989 only to be ousted from the company just as it became profitable (and after having created or co-created virtually all of the publisher’s major characters). The next several years would see Shooter defending himself in court from venture capitalists determined to dilute his Valiant shares to zero – just in time, conveniently enough, for Valiant’s investors to beat the mid-’90s collapse of the comics market and sell the company to video-game developer Acclaim for $65 million.

All of which is more than enough setup, probably, for a discussion of X-O Manowar itself. X-O was the second original title in Valiant’s superhero line, following Harbinger. (Both were preceded by rebooted versions of the former Gold Key properties Solar and Magnus, which had launched the previous year and were to occupy the same shared universe as Valiant’s new, original characters). Cover-dated February 1992, X-O Manowar #1 would have hit stands about six months before Shooter’s exit from the company in June. And unlike some of the early-’90s comics series mentioned above, X-O was actually, well…kind of good, at least in its opening issues. That’s because Valiant initially employed writers and artists known for their all-around storytelling abilities: in addition to Shooter, the company’s Marvel expatriates included former Captain America and Avengers writer Steve Englehart and popular artists Bob Layton and Barry Windsor-Smith. All would have a hand in the first issues of X-O: Shooter, Englehart, and Layton as writers; Layton as intermittent inker; and Windsor-Smith as artist for the inaugural issue.

X-O’s main character, Aric, is basically Conan the Barbarian in an Iron Man suit – a conceit that adds up (creatively, at least) when you consider which characters Windsor-Smith and Layton in particular are most famous for having illustrated previously. But Aric lacks Conan’s occasional bouts of compassion and, unlike Iron Man, he kills without compunction. The character’s primary appeal is his fish-out-water quality: having spent thousands of years in alien captivity, the Visigoth warrior frequently misunderstands the most basic conventions of modern society. As a result, for all its rampant violence, X-O is a darkly funny book. After Ken Clarkson (an ordinary man who initially conspires with the aliens but later defects to Aric’s side) is non-fatally injured by an alien laser gun, Aric wonders: “He is my friend! Should I grant him the gift of a clean death?” After some thought, Aric concludes: “He is a wizard. Perhaps he can grow a new arm.”

For Aric, houses are “castles,” speeding bullets are “fire light,” and the X-O Manowar battle armor he liberates from the aliens is “a good skin.” There’s something oddly endearing about his naivete, which softens the brutal edge of nearly every interpersonal encounter he finds himself in. There’s something unconsciously prescient, too, about his and Ken’s eventual takeover of Orb Industries, the corporation established by the aliens as a front for their planned conquest of Earth. It’s fascinating to note that, just months before his own firing by Valiant’s corporate bosses, Shooter imagined a superhero universe in which corporations are evil – but only until the good guys are able to seize control and turn them into forces for good. Perhaps it was that sense of optimism that led Shooter to seek capital investments for the founding of two more comics publishers in the five years following his departure from Valiant. (Neither, sadly, would last more than a year.)

The revolving door of creative talent at Valiant meant that the art in X-O Manowar’s first four issues wasn’t very consistent, although it’s not bad either. Sal Velluto, who takes over from Windsor-Smith for issues two and three, has a style remarkably similar to the early Steve Dillon, while Mike Manley’s pencils in issue four lend a more whimsical tone to Aric’s New Orleans-set first encounters with villain Toyo Harada and the cast of Harbinger. Characters from the publisher’s various other series make quite a few appearances in X-O following the first two issues, reflecting Shooter’s directive (as he recounted to Michael David Thomas in a 2000 interview) to “put something in [the comics] that [meant] you’d have to buy all [of them] to make one complete thing.” These appearances don’t severely hamper the experience of reading X-O’s first four issues, although I can imagine this approach becoming fairly unmanageable for someone reading only this series before too long.

That being the case, maybe it’s for the best that I wasn’t able to get my hands on that Classic Omnibus collection of the first thirty issues; given the ramp-up in X-O’s interconnectedness with the larger Valiant universe in issues three and four alone, I’m sure I would have been out of my depth before even the collection’s halfway point. I would be happy to read other comics set in this universe if I can get my hands on them, though, and perhaps to return to X-O’s later issues (or even to the various series from Valiant’s 2012 relaunch) once I feel more firmly grounded in the histories of the universe, its characters, and the publisher itself.

Review: Marvel Visionaries: Stan Lee

Writer: Stan Lee
Artists: Jack Kirby, Al Avison, Joe Maneely, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Marie Severin, John Buscema, Neal Adams, Gene Colan, John Romita Sr., Gil Kane, Barry Windsor-Smith, Darick Robertson
Collects: Captain America Comics #3 & 16, Suspense #29, Amazing Adult Fantasy #11, Amazing Fantasy #15, Fantastic Four #11 & Annual #3, Daredevil #7 & 47, Silver Surfer #5, Thor #179-181, Amazing Spider-Man #96-98 & Annual #5, Marvel Premiere #3, Spectacular Spider-Man Super Special 1995 (1941-1995)
Published: Marvel, 2005; $29.99

When Marvel launched its creator-focused line of oversized Visionaries hardcovers in late 2004, it only made sense to start with the two most prominent figures in Marvel history: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. For both books, the process of selecting which issues to include couldn’t have been an easy one. Perhaps it’s wise, then, that instead of trying to create “best of” collections for either, Marvel opted to create volumes that simply give the reader a feel for the sheer range of these creators’ talents. Indeed, Marvel Visionaries: Stan Lee excludes a fair number of stories I would have numbered among the writer’s “greatest,” but that’s quite all right – after all, you would need multiple books to collect all of those stories, and the ones they did choose do just as good a job of demonstrating the sheer diversity of Lee’s talent.

The book opens with a great biographical introduction to Lee, written by longtime Marvel writer Roy Thomas (who was himself the subject of his own Visionaries collection); it’s a great crash-course on the writer’s history at Marvel, especially if you haven’t read anything else by or about him. Lee’s first-ever published work, from the pages of Captain America Comics, occupies the first few pages. While it’s fairly primitive in comparison to Lee’s later work, the stories are still interesting to see – and hey, you have to start somewhere, right?

The years between Lee’s first work in the Golden Age and the debut of the Fantastic Four in 1961 make up the most underrepresented time period in this collection, with only a few short stories from the mid-1950s. They’re nothing to write home about, really, although “The Raving Maniac,” a commentary on the public outcry against comic books going on at the time, is kind of amusing. The real meat of this collection comes in the form of Lee’s Silver Age superhero work, and this book delivers a great variety of characters and artists. It would have been easy for Marvel to include a ton of origin stories in this book, but luckily, they only include one – Spider-Man’s, which is arguably Lee’s best.

From here, the superhero stories range from an early issue of Daredevil – featuring an unlikely fight between the title character and the Sub-Mariner – to some of Lee’s final work as a regular writer at Marvel, including a Bronze Age Dr. Strange comic drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith. Along the way, the book showcases Lee’s ability to tell short, self-contained stories (such as a quick FF tale answering some of readers’ most frequently asked questions), in addition to well-developed, multi-issue arcs.

The first arc in the collection is a three-part Thor story in which Loki tricks the thunder god into switching bodies with him. Unaware of Loki’s evildoing, Odin banishes Thor (in Loki’s body) to Mephisto’s realm, while the actual Loki runs rampant in Midgard. The story is actually more notable for its art than its writing – it features Jack Kirby’s final work on Thor, and some of Neal Adams’ first at Marvel – but it’s a good example of the overblown, faux-Shakespearean style Lee was fond of using in comics dealing with gods and god-like characters.

Taken by itself, the Thor story might lead someone new to Lee’s writing to believe that he’s simply a cheesy writer. However, the book follows this story with an extremely well-grounded story arc from Amazing Spider-Man, which features Harry Osborn’s battle with drug abuse and the return of the Green Goblin. The drug subplot is a notable one in comics history, as it made Amazing Spider-Man one of the first mainstream comic books to be published without the Comics Code Authority’s seal of approval. Lee had actually been personally asked to do a story dealing with substance abuse by the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and the backlash resulting from the Code’s refusal to approve it led to a loosening of its restrictions and a more progressive era in comics in the years that followed. But the thing that’s most impressive about the story is how subtly it gets its message across and how intricately Lee weaves it into what otherwise simply would have been a tale about the return of one of Spider-Man’s old enemies.

The book ends by reprinting a number of vintage pages containing Lee’s famous “Stan’s Soapbox” column, and these are a real treat. The column was his way of connecting with readers on a regular basis and letting them know what was going on behind the scenes at Marvel (remember, these were the days before Twitter!). They make me eager for a complete collection of these pages; and yes, it’s true that the Hero Initiative published a book with just the text of the columns themselves, but I’d love to see a book consisting of scans of the pages in their entirety.

Whether you’re a new or old fan of Stan Lee, this book is a great read. It represents a huge variety of his work, some of which is a far cry from the sort of thing we’re used to seeing reprinted again and again in these types of collections. There are relatively few duds, too, the only real one being a short Spider-Man story (reflecting on the 1995 death of Aunt May) that Lee wrote long after he had stopped working in comics on a regular basis. Even despite its relative weakness in comparison to his other work, though, it contributes to the collection’s goal of showing that Lee is a writer unafraid to tackle any kind of story – not to mention one who almost always delivers a fun and entertaining experience in the process.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Review: The Chronicles of Conan, Vol. 2: Rogues in the House and Other Stories

Writer: Roy Thomas
Artist: Barry Windsor-Smith
Collects: Conan the Barbarian #9-13 & 16 (Marvel, 1971-72)
Published: Dark Horse, 2003; $15.95

At the end of my review of the first Chronicles of Conan trade, I worried that, going forward, the story-telling patterns I was beginning to notice could potentially grow stale within a few issues. Luckily, my fears weren’t at all justified in that respect. This second trade in Dark Horse’s effort to collect the original Marvel series from beginning to end is everything I could ask for story-wise, although it has some crippling issues in terms of presentation (more on that later).

In Rogues in the House and Other Stories, writer Roy Thomas continues to use Robert E. Howard’s original Conan prose stories as the primary basis for the comics. However, he also adds a great deal of his own flavor by filling in the chronological gaps with stories of his own, as well as with adaptations of Howard stories which originally didn’t feature Conan at all. As with the first volume, Thomas’s stories fit so nicely into the Conan mythos that it’s hard to tell which stories are his and which are Howard’s (at least for those of us without a huge reservoir of Conan knowledge).

Each issue could theoretically be read on its own without much confusion, but Thomas’s attention to chronology is beginning to make for a very interesting overarching plot. That’s what I liked most about this book – seeing the story progress and the character of Conan develop from issue to issue. A significant portion of this trade takes place in the same city and features an impressive number of recurring characters, with one adventure leading directly into the next.

The highlight of the book is the double-sized story “Rogues in the House,” in which Conan must find his way out of a monster-filled, booby-trapped palace along with the city’s corrupt ruler and the leader of the ruler’s rebel opposition. It’s really interesting to see Conan forced to interact with characters so unlike himself (without fighting them, that is), and for a few minutes the story almost made me wish I could see how Conan would fare on a superhero team like the Avengers or the Justice League, as ridiculous as that may sound.

There isn’t a bad story in the book, to be honest, but among my other favorites are “The Garden of Fear” and “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter.” In the former, Conan must rescue his female companion Jenna (who joined up with Conan at the end of the first trade) from a winged, man-like creature in a tower surrounded by deadly, man-eating flowers – and he ultimately does so, with the help of a pack of woolly mammoths. In the latter (which is based on one of the few original Conan stories I’ve actually read), Conan is the last man standing at the end of a vicious battle, and when he sees a beautiful young woman, he begins to chase her through the frozen wasteland – but is she real, or just a figment of Conan’s battle-wearied imagination?

As you might have picked up, there’s a surprising amount of variety to the stories in this trade. Unfortunately, all of that is rendered almost moot by the patently awful job that Dark Horse has done in “restoring” these comics. Honestly, in all the time that I’ve spent reading comics over the years, this is one of the very worst treatments of older material I have ever seen in a collected edition. First of all, the original colors have been thrown completely out the window – instead, digital colorists have applied a repulsive “airbrush” style to Barry Windsor-Smith’s artwork, complete with pedestrian-looking color gradients that could only ever be created with a computer program like Photoshop. The result is a book that looks nothing like any comic would actually have looked in the 1970s – nor, for that matter, how any sane person with the gift of sight would color a book today.

Furthermore, Dark Horse’s colorists didn’t even follow the original color guidelines. Clothing, hair color, backgrounds, etc. – almost everything has had its color changed for this collection, without any explanation. They’ve even changed the thin black lines that Windsor-Smith occasionally drew on his characters to indicate streaming blood to a bright, garish red hue – something that never would have been acceptable in a Code-approved comic book at the time of Conan’s original publication. Nonsense like that not only betrays the original integrity of these comics, but it’s somewhat insulting to the reader. I appreciate the trouble, Dark Horse, but I really don’t need to see bright-red blood spraying everywhere like a Mortal Kombat game in order to understand that this comic has violence in it.

Worst of all, the colorists have inexplicably decided to actually erase portions of Windsor-Smith’s linework. It’s most obvious in the “Rogues in the House” issue, but it occurs throughout the rest of the volume as well. It absolutely baffles me to see such a heinous job done with the presentation side of this book, especially when the colorists who worked on the first trade were perfectly adequate and respectful of the source material. I hope future volumes in this series will return to that first batch of colorists, because if I find out that any more of them feature the work of this coloring team, this will be the last book in the series that I read.

There’s no denying that the stories in this volume are excellent, but this is one case where the abhorrent art reproduction simply can’t be ignored. As much as it pains me to tell anyone to pass up these great stories, the truth of the matter is that I think anyone truly interested should wait until Dark Horse gives this collection a properly re-colored second printing.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Review: The Chronicles of Conan, Vol. 1: Tower of the Elephant and Other Stories

Writer: Roy Thomas
Artist: Barry Windsor-Smith
Collects: Conan the Barbarian #1-8 (Marvel, 1970-71)
Published: Dark Horse, 2003; $15.95

Conan the Barbarian: a character whose very name is sure to elicit a knowing chuckle from most people. And rightly so, if we’re talking about the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies! I’ll admit, I went into this collection fully prepared for brainless stupidity, but since the series is an important part of comics history, and because it’s written and drawn by two industry legends, I thought it couldn’t hurt to see what it was all about.

To make a long story short, I was dead wrong about Conan. I quickly realized that in order to enjoy this book, I would have to throw out all of my preconceptions about the character. In The Chronicles of Conan, Vol. 1: Tower of the Elephant and Other Stories, Conan may be impulsive and headstrong, but he’s certainly not a dumb brute. While his stories are fairly straightforward, at least in this first volume, they’re often also poignant and moving. The image of Conan created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith is one of a young man coming of age, through a series of picaresque adventures, in an interesting and dangerous fantasy world.

As most people are probably aware, the Conan mythos wasn’t exactly an invention of either Thomas or Windsor-Smith; as a character, Conan had already existed in the works of Robert E. Howard for several decades, since the early 1930s. But this was his first venture into the world of comics, and his ongoing series was also the first true “sword and sorcery”-type fantasy comic ever to be produced by a major publisher. With Marvel having just snagged the rights to Conan from Howard’s estate, the first few issues consist mainly of adaptations of the original novels and short stories. At this point, neither Thomas nor Windsor-Smith had quite found their creative footing yet, although it’s hard not to at least appreciate how much effort they put into it.

The stories improve with time, though, and there are several standouts in this volume, my favorites being “The Tower of the Elephant” and “Devil-Wings Over Shadizar.” The former concerns Conan’s encounter with an alien being held captive by an evil sorcerer; the latter is the first of Conan’s adventures in which he is motivated by genuine affection toward another human being, making its tragic ending all the more powerful.

At times the stories can take on a somewhat formulaic feel – Conan arrives in a new place, Conan gets into a fight with the locals but befriends one of them, Conan and his new friend go on a hunt for treasure, Conan’s new friend is killed, and Conan just barely escapes death himself – but whenever it starts to get boring, Thomas throws a curveball of a plot into the mix and everything feels fresh again. One great example is “The Twilight of the Grim Grey God,” an excellent story which serves as a potent commentary on the nature of war itself. I can see the prototypical Conan plot wearing thin if it continues for much longer after this volume, but for now, I think it’s suited perfectly to the character as he makes his way through the world and grows into a man.

The art, in the beginning, is fairly average for the decade in which Conan was first published, but Windsor-Smith starts to come into his own by the third or fourth issue. Thomas had originally intended for the series to be drawn by John Buscema, and while he’s a fantastic artist, I’m glad things didn’t end up working out on that front. While the art style in Conan is actually very similar to Buscema’s – due in no small part, I’m sure, to the fact that John’s younger brother Sal fulfills the inking duties throughout – there is a certain visceral quality to Windsor-Smith’s pencils that lends the comic a sense of individuality. Even at this early point in his career, it’s easy to see why Marvel would later choose him as the artist to depict Wolverine’s brutal origin story in the pages of Marvel Comics Presents.

The only truly negative thing I can say about this collection is that it doesn’t include any of the series’ original covers. As Thomas writes in the afterword (which is excellent, and certainly one of the book’s highlights), the covers were an important part of the series and its history. It’s hard to blame anyone specifically for the omission, since I believe it was the result of legal issues between Dark Horse and Marvel, but it’s still unfortunate. (In case you’re wondering, the original issues were published by Marvel, but Dark Horse is now reprinting them since Marvel no longer has the rights to Conan.) From what I can tell, this problem has been corrected for more recent volumes in the series, although it would be nice if future printings of the first one could be updated as well.

Overall, the adventures of Conan far exceeded my expectations, and even if you think you already know what to expect from them, I would still recommend taking a look. It’s actually a pretty unique series, especially for its time, and features some truly great art. I’m looking forward to reading the next book, in large part because I’m curious to see whether Thomas will begin to flesh out some kind of overarching plot. Even if that’s not the route this book ultimately takes, though, Thomas and Windsor-Smith have demonstrated that the character has more than enough potential variety to keep things interesting for some time.

Rating: 4 out of 5