Marvel Comics: The End Of The Century, Part 1

 

Having traveled back fifty years to get a look at the comics which were showing up on Marvel's checklist in April of 1972, let's now be drawn forward again until we arrive just twenty-five years in the past. The calendar date is now April, 1997--and though some of us realize that perhaps the most significant day from that year is six months away on October 16 (the launch date of the space ship Jupiter 2 on its tragic flight toward Alpha Centauri), the fate of Marvel Comics was equally unknown, having gone through some financial difficulties and now in the midst of pulling itself together in terms of stability and direction.

If you were born in 1997, you would of course be 25 this year, another reason to note the twenty-five-year mark. Let's take a peek at what else was happening in April of that year:

• The launch of the pay-per-view Extreme Championship Wrestling event Barely Legal (I take "extreme" to mean that all the body blows and elbows to the face seen in the regular wrestling ring aren't staged in ECW--someone will have to educate me);
  
• Two environmental anomalies: the April Fool's Day blizzard which dumped rain, sleet and as much as 3 feet of snow from Maryland to Maine, as well as the Red River of the north breaking through dikes and flooding Grand Forks, ND and East Grand Forks, MN, to the tune of $2B in damages;
  
• Celebrities' births include actors Asa Butterfield, Maddison Brown, and Maisie Williams; YouTuber Crawford Collins; model Molly Bair; south Korean rapper Kim Min-gyu; football players Donny van de Beek, Matteo Pessina, and Oliver Burke;
  
• The first space burial: a Pegasus rocket carries the remains of 24 people into Earth orbit (this one threw me--not exactly a "burial," is it?);
  
• The TV series Pokémon premieres on TV Tokyo;
  
• Michael Chang (who turned 49 this year) defeated Grant Stafford in the U.S. Men's Clay Court Championships singles final;
  
• The comet Hale-Bopp meets or exceeds predictions when it passes perihelion (the point when Earth is nearest the sun), visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months.

Over at Marvel, the Bullpen Bulletins page has been expanded to two pages, which now include an editor profile, a February (?) Marvel checklist for books sold in April... and, well, a grand total of two bulletins, where the "Items" of yore have made the journey to what you and I might refer to as full-blown "ads."

As for the February April checklist, the PPC is going to do a little expanding of its own and run down a few more of the 1997 books sold that month.

Like Mr. Tuohy, your humble host also has a fondness for things Trek--in this case, Trek comics, where Marvel in '97 took one particular period of Trek history and boldly gave it life in print.

Thanks to its spelling, we know that the word our Rigellian "barbarian" is bellowing isn't referring to K'Ehleyr, a Trek character from the series' distant future. I'd also hasten to bellow that you can find the PPC's review on this series in a previous post.

A few other rowdy characters could be found in this month's Excalibur (apparently being billed as "the European X-Men")--specifically, the Dragons of the Crimson Dawn, who are out to capture Captain Britain in their bid to conquer the Earth, or destroy it (which to them may mean the same thing).

If you're already noting the abundance of oversized art pages, welcome to Marvel in the late 1990s, where the company's aim seemed to be in grabbing your attention with larger-than-life characters and action while not being bogged down by narrative or dialog which wasn't brief and to the point. And while greater care was taken with the Trek series in that regard, so too was the case with another new series, which I picked up on the advice of a friend (thanks, Jai!) and became a regular reader of--featuring a team which sought to fill the void left by the sudden absence of heroes caught in the grip of Onslaught.

Meanwhile, in addition to his work on Iron Man, writer Scott Lobdell was keeping a full plate with two X-Men books--plotting the story in issue #63 of the 1991 spinoff series, while scripting issue #331. In just about all of the X-books on sale, Cyclops somehow manages to be present and accounted for--while I'm afraid someone felt that Wolverine needed a drastic change in appearance for the '90s.

Given how Onslaught was in actuality a merging of the consciousness of Charles Xavier and Magneto, you have to wonder why the X-Men didn't fall under scrutiny of the authorities at having "escaped" the fate of most of the A-list heroes. (Maybe FBI Agent Fred Duncan threw them off the trail.)

Another new series which sprung up--though it's more accurate to say a series within a series--was the Journey Into Mystery: The Lost Gods segment which briefly took over the Thor book's numbering and explored the mystery of the missing gods of Asgard who appeared in human form on Earth bereft of any memories of their former existence. As will become apparent, [Mike] Deodato Studios (which got the art assignment) shared the notion that humans in the late '90s all sported legs that would have made even Stilt-Man do a double-take.

Spider-Man, Daredevil and the Hulk also lucked out and managed to avoid being swept up in the Onslaught event, and are fairly status quo in terms of staying consistent with their ongoing plots and style of presentation. Writer Tom DeFalco spends quality time on the origin of Electro; artist Gene Colan is enjoying a renaissance run on Daredevil; and writer Peter David's take on the Hulk's stay on the newly christened "Hulk Island" reflects his usual engaging wit when it comes to not only the title character but others caught in the man-monster's orbit.

In the beautifully painted Code Of Honor book, New York's finest have also been caught up in the aftermath of Onslaught, as the city's villain complement has remained a viable threat and even moreso now that there are fewer opponents--"the Marvels," as they're called in this series--to stem their tide. It's a human element that is often overlooked in depicting the lives and adventures of heroes, helping the title be counted among this decade's best efforts.

The Silver Surfer, of course, has a life apart from those on Earth--but with the destruction of his home world of Zenn-La, he returns to Alicia Masters on Earth to seek a cure for his amnesia and emotional void. In this issue, he enlists the aid of Alicia's father, the Puppet Master, to create a "copy" of himself with all the memories of the original--one which unfortunately turns on him, another part of this ongoing mystery.

NEXT:
What titles--and what heroes--are conspicuously absent here?
Witness the "rebirth" of their volumes with the launch of Heroes Reborn.

AND WITH OCTOBER 1997 ON THE HORIZON:
Schematics and revised cutaway of the Jupiter 2. You're welcome.