The QUARTER BIN: The Truncated "1963"

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Normally, the Quarter Bin Boneyard explores the untimely demise of ongoing concerns in comics, whether in newspapers or the conventional comic book format; and, very occasionally, on the scale of entire publishers, such as the canonically classic EC Comics. Yet even works of the scope of a mini- or maxi-series can pass on before their time - the difference appearing in the fact that a smaller work has a more obvious, logical conclusion inherent in its concept. Miniseries in particular very seldom pass on before completing their story cycles; and one might recognize some difficulty in attempting to identify one that, having failed to complete, presented the understood tragic side of comics in its failure to achieve a completed storytelling goal.

It requires exceptional circumstances to cut off a miniseries before its completion - after all, it has much less time to fail; in essence, it could appear in its entirety before returning sales figures confirm whether it made the grade or just fizzled out with readers. And not all shorter works necessarily represent tragedies if they do not fulfill their entire plot line; we could note as somewhat unlamented the abortive Unity 2000 that perished on the vine for lack of funding and because its author, Jim Shooter, withheld the last pieces of it pending his receipt of due payment.

Given my own limited experience with comics - the many, many books I've read don't really constitute a comprehensive sample of anything, no matter how many digits the total might get to - I nonetheless see as exceptional the sudden and generally pointless failure to complete on particular limited work. In Image Comics' "1963" series, then, a number of remarkable properties came together and built towards some kind of bombastic climax; but ten years later no one can say what this climax might have involved. And, characteristic of works that make it to the Boneyard, the forces that cut off this piece before it could achieve its purpose seem perverse - not simple economic failure, but the seamy underside of creator-owned comics and doomed collaborative distribution entities seems to have put the proverbial stake through this work's heart.

The Concept

Silver Age homages often miss the mark. Forces like imperfect understanding of the source material, Occasionally personalities enter into it, with talent sometimes considering its own idiosyncrasies more important than truth to sources; and the ugly spectre of retroactive continuity can invade purported tributes to a past in a way that makes them more serve today's interpretation than the period they pretend to evoke. But Image Comics, that coalition of talents producing in separate studios to provide content under a single heading, though much of their early-1990s work receives scant respect by 2002 standards, succeeded grandly with their own attempt to present what made the comics of the 1960s work. Indeed, the success surpassed works that began with advantages over "1963;" for example, DC's Silver Age event could proceed with the concepts from the period in context and, to a limited degree, with original talent, yet it blew its credibility on the dubious need to portray Lex Luthor in post-Byrne interpretation, depict superheroines in a fashion that would not offend late-1990s audiences supporting a more modern set of requirements for their ilk, and no-particular-purpose errors in detail like superheroes anachronistically knowing one another's secret identities. Largely through the vision of Alan Moore, though, 1963 books remained conceptually on track, doing very little to reinvent the material they claimed to reinterpret.

Six interconnected books explored both the conventions of the Silver Age of Comics and a theme of dimensional travel connected somehow with an aborted assassination of President Kennedy. The official beginning took place in Mystery Incorporated, a piece that owed a great deal to the early vigor of Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, the book that established the beginnings of that publisher's rediscovery and reinvention of superhero comics. The members of Mystery Incorporated discover an intruder in their hideout, the Mystery Mile, and, in the process of attempting to track him down, find evidence that the intruder operates in reversed time. While analyzing the evidence to conclude that he entered their headquarters running backwards in time - which would explain his peculiar reactions to attempt to subdue him - the intruder spirits away the teenaged member of the team, who therefore resolve to dive into the void of interdimensional space to follow his kidnapper.

Fury, the second installment, gets to the nuts-and-bolts of the received lore of Silver Age comics through following the travails of a character that borrows principally from early Spider-Man and Daredevil, though with a Golden Age intergenerational hook that connects it also to DC's superhero comics (then and now). Fury, a harried young superhero enmeshed in the kind of soap-opera crises characteristic of Ditko-era Amazing Spider-Man, concurrently faces the Voidoid, a figure that commits crimes from a hole in space shaped like himself, and the Warbeast, a mutant telepathic dinosaur accidentally awakened by incautious science to rampage through an unwary New York. While this piece remains essentially self-contained and fairly independent of the principal events of Mystery Incorporated, it does establish the interconnectedness of the premises - for instance, Fury's contact with the civilian identities of members of the Tomorrow Syndicate and mentions of other figures who play roles in other "1963" books. And, in the mystery of who provides the technology that empowers the Voidoid to engage in his characteristic mischief, it seems to foreshadow the ultimate revelations that the structure of the overall "1963" package imply will resolve the action at its terminus.

Tales of the Uncanny features USA and Hypernaut. USA, a kind of generic Captain America substitute with characteristics of the Golden Age Uncle Sam thrown in, confronts the Red Brain amid a mystery involving a Lee Harvey Oswald look-alike, another Oswald look-alike who dies in the course of investigating the mystery, and, an aborted assassination attempt on President Kennedy that provides a context for near-Oswalds to gather around. Some foreshadowing here occurs in the form of a newspaper from another time or timeline. The Hypernaut piece, for its part, establishes components of a relationship between that character and DC's Silver Age Green Lantern, with pieces of Iron Man and possibly Negative Man from the Doom Patrol tossed in for good measure.

Tales from Beyond features Johnny Beyond and N-Man. Johnny Beyond fuses important aspects of Marvel's Doctor Strange with a kind of comics-interpretation of a young man of the much-analyzed "Beat Generation." Beyond's troubles begin when he encounters a curiously-out-of-place young woman who demonstrates a lateral inversion across a single linear axis (like a mirror reflection) and talks a great deal of nonsense readers might recognize as references to dawn-of-the-1990s technology. Beyond establishes her as a visitor from another time, and in the process of attempting to help her, meets an older version of himself. A hyperdimensional brownstone in which the time-twisting escapades tend to occur collapses upon itself, leaving Beyond stranded in a Ditkoesque other-universe. And in N-Man we encounter the "1963" synthesis of big mutated goons that owes both to the original, gray Hulk, to the Thing, and to a bit of disturbing imagination; N-Man must explore a region of bizarre radiation-induced phenomena at a bomb test site while dealing with the malicious machinations of Comrade Kakarokov in an environment of fused-glass, weird mutated creatures, and peculiar violations of known principles of gravity and geometry.

Horus, Lord of Light explores the Kirbyesque art of mythos-building, using methods inferred from Journey into Mystery with the development of the Thor franchise. The events of the story - a female significant-other from Horus' alter ego's life stowing away on his barge of the sun as Horus proceeds through the cycle of twelve hours of the night - do not centrally involve themselves with the interconnected narrative much, devoting a limited number of pages instead to the task of creating credibility and setting for the Silver Age interpretation in which the story proceeds.

Tomorrow Syndicate begins to tie threads together, with the members of an Avengers-like super-team (including members like N-Man, Horus, and the Hypernaut from earlier installments) attempting to discover what has become of Mystery Incorporated. Their travels take them to a nexus of alternate realities - a kind of clearing station for the multiple universes that DC once tended to breed like roaches - where they receive instructions to the final destination of the captive of the time-distorted kidnaper from Mystery Incorporated.

Characteristic of the material to which these books sought to pay homage, each remains a complete and (mostly-)independent tale requiring little knowledge of interconnectedness to understand or appreciate - and, using editorial principles similar to those of a young and vigorous Marvel Comics when it began to invent continuity, each contains small pieces allowing the reader of multiple titles to formulate something of the big picture that causes the greater whole to cohere. Such continuity, used as the 1963 staff used it, could still inform the comics of today, if only to show how the shared-universe notions behind it can provide substance and grounding without becoming a kind of editorial straightjacket. And readers could tell, from the various cliffhangers and hooks, that something big approached, whether through the angle of the duplicate-Oswalds, or the variously disappeared superheroes that the Tomorrow Syndicate sought to locate. It all worked, largely because the small but dedicated and able team brought to make these books happen had a clarity of vision, talent, and a dedication to working within the formula that made for a comics Renaissance in the 1960s.

Working with the Formula

Down to details as fine as the grade of paper, one can see how the folks who produced this tribute work attempted to give it credibility on as many levels as they could. From the Marvel side, most of the drive, concept, characterization, and even approach to art found inspiration. And, indeed, even the notion of the double book, in which two separate concepts each presented its ten (or so) pages, presented a format for the "1963" books, with certain titles like the syncretic Fury remaining singletons (as had its inspiration Amazing Spider-Man and Daredevil).But DC Comics did not lack representation in "1963," what with the entire alternate-universe scenario that the Mystery, Inc. piece explored - all very much in the vein of the Earth-1, Earth-2, ad absurdam, characteristic of Julius Schwartz' influence on DC's superhero books in the 1960s.

Readers could enjoy a number of elements that spoke truth to the source material in ways not always remembered by the architects of less-successful tributes. The loudness of material in the Marvel Comics (and, perhaps, Mighty Comics) tradition, the pandemic technophilia promising advance-and-redemption through the invention of tools and methods, the soap-opera angles of dawn-of-the-sixties comic books, and the pervasiveness of comic-book radiation as a potentiogenic force all played a role in these books credibly equivalent to the defining product of figures like Lee, Kirby, and Ditko. And other elements more often overlooked or deliberately submerged by reinterpretations that lack the ability to detach from the comics and values of their own generation in order to bring out those of a previous one here creep forward, sometimes with irony, sometimes with simple fidelity - the condescending attitude towards superheroines (who frequently played roles limited to that of hostage and Doe-Eyed Unrequited Lover), the belligerence towards the communist bloc (a quality rapidly abandoned between the late 1960s and early 1970s), and the dated striving for chicness that defined a contemporary elan via the ability to misappropriate a caricature of beat-era babble. Perhaps, if one sought to perfect what content actually made it to the printers from this series of books, one might add small doses here and there of hot-rodder chic, surfing, and baseball to get both the spirit of the times and of the comics of the times.

The truth-to-origins, perhaps, owes a great deal to the vision of the talent brought to the task here. If we might continue to analyze based on the successes of "1963" compared to DC Comics' "Silver Age" books, we might note that working for the original publisher of the material guaranteed no particular honesty to roots; note the catalog of anachronisms DC's nostalgia event included, from a conspicuously post-Byrne Lex Luthor (who does not seem likely to work well against a hypothetical Weisinger-era narrative) to superheroes all knowing one another's secret identities (which DC avoided with a consistency that bordered on obsession in most cases) to the pro-active, post-feminist versions of superheroines and supervillains (which simply did not appear in the comics of the 1960s, however much we might wish to impose our standards on the past). All this, perhaps, owes much to over-editing; as with big-dollar movies, the core characters of DC Comics' canon can only do things - even in retrospect - that make it past the screen of multiple vetoes. Where one leaves a Silver Age tribute to one or two figures - and so much the better if Bisette and Moore and Veitch rise to such duties - we can expect what appears on the page to evoke what it actually claims to, rather than show some mixture of 1960s and post-Crisis content.

The Final Installment

With all things ready to go, with the six books making up the brief but worthwhile piece collectively labeled "1963," Jim Lee held the football, ready to tie up loose ends in a piece that would answer unanswered questions, explain how modern-day Image characters like "Shaft" might relate to a Silver Age homage universe, and, perhaps, leave things in a state to allow some future use of the concepts.

Simple timing may have prevented the resolution of this bag of loose ends crafted through six previous retro-homage pieces. Just as the matter of the resolving piece came due, the key players coalition called "Image Comics" began spending more time in internal administrative matters - including the shunning of one of their own that would forecast the ultimate dissolution of their confederacy of talents back to a series of independent studios - and less in the follow-through phase of projects like the much-awaited "1963" annual. The world waited - or at least that part of the world following these books - and Lee never delivered it. And in the meantime Image Comics fractured into pieces like Awesome Comics (Liefeld), Wildstorm (Lee), and the remaining Image Comics (McFarlane and Larsen). And subsequently a number of the key talents behind Image would involve themselves more and more with the business (and, unfortunately, legal) side of things and less with the creative.

By this time, litigation had become a kind of ever-present Spirit of Image Comics Interactions Present (and Future). Thus we can expect that any kind of reprinting or anthology of these six stories as considerably less likely than (say) a comprehensive reprinting of Miracleman. And the subject of Miracleman brings to mind the lawsuits between Todd McFarlane and Neil Gaiman that, circa 2003 - ten years later - still have yet to reach some resolution. Though rare examples exist of comics completed ten years after some installment left off - Gilbert Shelton did this with a Wonder Wart-Hog tale featuring three variant pigs that he began in the sixties and finished off in the late seventies or later - we can assume, as a general rule, that if ten years pass after the last installment in some series, that the next issue or resolution becomes less likely with the passage of time. And with legal action thrown in, we can expect even greater barriers to resolution - Fawcett's Captain Marvel might have returned from publishing death after a 20-year exile, but he did so after some ten years and more of publication and a frequently prominent market share, qualities the "1963" books did not enjoy. Cultural penetration and momentum will not, most likely, rescue the pieces that fell into the fault lines of lawsuits when Image crumbled.

The principal players here, even after upstart Image Comics almost, but not quite, took over American comics in their entirety, nonetheless largely survived the disaffiliation of their publishing concern into pieces like Wildstorm and Awesome Comics. Look for their names and you will find them in contemporary pieces - Moore all over the America's Best Comics imprint, Veitch doing books for ABC and DC, and the others either still drawing comics or controlling something from behind the scenes. The talent, therefore, while not necessarily doing well by a 1992 standard (and in the 2003 economy we might not expect too many names in the comics industry to anticipate the kind of cash-harvest that seemed to come so much more easily back then) have nonetheless gone on to other things or persisted in their own visions. Names might have sunk to places of lesser prominence, but not (in general) into unqualified obscurity.

But someone came out of this debacle with little reward. Here the readers themselves seem to have ended up empty-handed, short-changed by promises uncompleted and commitments unfulfilled. If such language seems overblown, consider that the cliffhanger and open story thread that provide the central tools of continuity-bound comics (of whatever scale of connectedness) represent a kind of burden (dealing with not knowing what happens after that big revelation in the final splash of a story) redeeemed by an ultimate payoff (the resolution of the mystery or tangled situation in the next, or subsequent, issues).

We can tell that a piece has ended before reaching its goals when it ends hanging on a cliffhanger, regardless of whether the resolution of the remaining crisis or crises lived up to the expectations built up in getting to that point. And, even though the structure of the "1963" books largely suggested that the completion of the building tale would also resolve, complete, and end the larger whole - meaning that the loss of the never-to-appear annual did not foreclose the potential stories to follow because no one intended such an ongoing model for the collective work - that the story should end without at least the one final bust-up and revelation-fest means, in the end, short-changing the readers teased, one hook at a time, into getting on the roller coaster for the ride. In the big picture, there we have the essential tragedy of preemptive cancellation, played out in miniature for a single mini-series.

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Column 361. Completed 09-Feb-2003.

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