Comics' New Age of Retro

Half of what seems to happen in comics at the end of this century seems to have happened before. An onslaught of reprints and reinterpretations seems to line the shelves at whatever comics retailer might attract your business, with the creations of Lee and Kirby at the turn of the sixties receiving the most (re)play.

So much retro material appears in print these days that it properly belongs in subcategories, depending upon its relationship to the shared universe and continuity and its literal originality.

Retrograde material may present considerable new insight into old themes and stories or may turn them on their heads. To many, however, to travel old ground implies a lack of anything new to say.

Old-school comics and updated variants thereof have, nonetheless, become hot items in recent years of comics publishing in a way that no one might have imagined prior to the deflation of the market in the early nineties. It requires some passage of time in which nothing seems worthwhile to properly encapsulate a period as "The Good Old Days" of anything, and a "Bad New Days" to establish the contrast by showing that a real barrier separates the present from the real or imagined past.

Between 1984 and 1994, comics set nadir after nadir until low points came to represent standards. This made a turn backwards almost inevitable.

So much retro material appears in print these days that it properly belongs in subcategories, depending upon its relationship to the shared universe and continuity and its literal originality. While it seems unlikely to threaten to oust new material altogether, the sales success of such items must incline comics editors to think about their approach.

Retro through Reprint

Those of you who have visited a comics store in the past couple of years may have noticed the "Essentials" line from Marvel, which reprints volumes containing about 400 pages (per volume) of Silver Age classics. These volumes appear in certain chain bookstores as well (Borders; Barnes & Noble).

Furthermore, the number of trade paperbacks reprinting comics from Superman's debut in 1938 to (say) the recent classic Kingdom Come has proliferated into a catalog probably unimaginable before 1980.

For the nostalgist or historian, this proliferation of reprints provides remarkable access to titles in an era in which the comics market doesn't support monthly reprints like Marvel's Marvel's Greatest Comics, Marvel Tales, Marvel Super-Heroes, Marvel Triple Action and Marvel Super Action.

Retro through Time Travel

Marvel realized, as early as 1968, that readers might enjoy seeing first- tier superheroes thrust back into earlier comics, literal or revised, and used time-traveling characters like the Scarlet Centurion to thrust the Avengers (for instance) into a situation where they had to confront several Timely characters in the forties (for instance). This type of story allows the reader to see heroes of earlier periods of comics publishing presented by modern talent, through the prism of modern editorial standards, although sometimes with remarkable fidelity to the original intent(s) or concept(s).

The whole notion of time-traveling superheroes who ran into the publisher's stable of heroes of earlier eras worked somewhat better before the burdens of a shared universe and the Strong Continuity Principle forced both DC and Marvel to attempt to streamline the convoluted histories of their respective comics universes. In this respect, Marvel had an advantage until the eighties, since its major characters dated mostly from between 1961 and 1964 (with exceptions from Timely).

One advantage that still serves the creators of such tales appears in the time-traveler's axiom that he must not change history; this spares overburdened editor-historians the task of perpetual significant revisions of established prior history.

For the reader, these tales offer something else: the opportunity to revisit periods of comics that may hold some sentimental value or simply represent favorite epochs of specific titles. For instance, in the Jerry Ordway panel above, the John Buscema/Roy Thomas version of Giant-Man appears, as he did for a few months in 1968. Readers who prefer this version of Giant-Man/Goliath have few back issues in which to admire this most Silver-Ageish interpretation of the character. Time travel, however, allows the reader a new view at old material or new material connected with the old.

Retro through Fill-in

Comics began as reprints (of newspaper cartoons) and thus have a long history in rehashing old material. With the coming of the Silver Age, characters occasionally could visit earlier comics.

The comics historical fill-in, however, might have begun for real with the work of Rich Buckler and Roy Thomas in creating the title All-Star Squadron, a book that presented new stories based on Golden Age characters and tales leavened with additional material and integrated through the encyclopedic talents of Thomas as a Golden Age comics historian.

All-Star Squadron created a matrix connecting old comics stories that predated the editorial model requiring a shared comics universe.

John Byrne and Tom Palmer's X-Men: Hidden Years fits into this model, in a limited fashion, in its use of a specific period of comics history (the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams/Tom Palmer run of X-Men in the 1960s). The premise involves detailing what occurred with the X-Men between the cancellation of their first series (with the beginning of its short run as a reprint magazine) and the beginning of the second series (the Claremont/Cockrum X-Men that began with #94).

When Byrne took on co-writer duties with Claremont in the refurbished X-Men title in the seventies, a series of stories attempted to close off loose ends left by the Thomas/Adams/Palmer run, and those late-seventies stories seem to heal several holes without noticeable seams. However, the gap between 1970 (the last new X-Men story) and 1975 (the introduction of the "New" X-Men) left a hole in the calendar which Byrne means to fill with the Hidden Years stories.

Comics calendars defy completion. For instance, Franklin Richards, son of two members of the Fantastic Four, first appeared in comics as an infant around 1968, and in the thirty subsequent years seems to have avoided having more than ten birthdays in the process. Other characters managed to age a year at a time for short runs of their titles (the first two years of Spider-Man.

The curiosity of readers and the ambition of creators frequently brings about the filling of holes in the comics calendar. For instance, Roy Thomas (again) attempted to dilineate some of the history of the Justice Society during the years between 1947 and 1963 when it appeared in no stories; Gerry Conway during his stint on All-Star Comics also retrofitted Golden Age characters for some history during their absence from print.

The fill-in differs from revisionism because it builds on things left unsaid, such as the career of the X-Men between 1970 and 1975. It does not question continuity (in that it adds to it), but plays a Xeno-like game where each two points prove to contain a third point between them.

Retro through Reinterpretaion

Revisionist concepts might actually provide the most fertile ground for worthwhile retro creations. Sometimes pieces lack something, such as the Stern/Rude piece where the Hulk and Superman met (said piece remaining much truer to early Hulk than to contemporaneous Superman pieces, thanks to an editorial necessity of adhering to DC's post-1994 revised continuity).

Benefiting from a similarly tight focus, and from top-line talent, X-Men:Children of the Atom attempts to recast the established origins of the original X-Men in terms of more recent history (1990 rather than 1963). With Joe Casey and Steve Rude pulling tightly together, this piece combines elements of the earliest X-Men with contemporary trappings (skinheads; tabloid talkshows; cell phones) and comes up with something more relevant to the present while perhaps taking some liberties with the original Lee/Kirby concept.

One might direct at Children of the Atom criticisms based on this work's clear place in the literature of victimization and modern spoils-based identity politics. The X-Men originally dealt with attempts to integrate the fictional mutant community into the larger human community while dealing with menaces like the seperatist/supremacist Magneto. The modern equivalent includes endless dwelling on the persecution of the mutant, tiresome treatments of hypothetical pogroms directed against mutantkind by whoever gets to wear the hat of the latest writer's straw man, and wheelbarrow loads of angst and self-pity that (I choose to believe) Kirby would have found loathesome. Children of the Atom has not, in its first issue, sunk to such depths, instead pointing out that different characters cope and integrate better (Angel) or worse (Iceman) with the things that make them special.

Revisionism of this sort offers the talent more opportunities for entering new comics territory with the attendant risks of the panning one might expect from disappointed seekers of nostalgia. Such pieces represent considerable ambition (or, some might accuse, hubris) and do not always return a fair payoff to creators or consumers.

The Dangers of Retro

On television, the presence of repeats indicates the absence of anything to watch, and some observers shrewdly note that reruns in comics result from the deadness of the contemporary medium.

Some unfairness adheres to claims that repetition results from the death of imagination. Shakespeare, after all, borrowed heavily from older material to create the greatest of his own works; and even if we consider redundancy a sin against art, this does not itself validate originality as quality. New garbage must, after all, come from somewhere.

Do we see here a healthy appreciation of the strengths of past achievements in the medium? Or, instead, do we have a morbid obsession with a lost and falsely idealized past? The difference between a kind of neoclassicism of comics and a sickly nostalgia probably hinges on the quality of the product. Where looks into the past do nothing new with the old, where they fail to live up to the original such that readers can tell the decline in the medium from this failure, or where an older age's standard serves as a straitjacket that keeps the form from moving into any territory where one might find quality, a retro taste acts destructively.

The trick lies in following the neoclassisist's first law: Tell a story that others have told before, but never so well. If a work comes close, it has done right by its sources.