gods and monsters
Dec. 4th, 2007 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sergebroom
Making Light recently opened up a thread the purpose of which was to remind people that there are plenty of comic-books out there that aren’t about superheroes. I read some of them, but I am drawn more to superhero stories. I read very few comics these days, being more choosy, but Kurt Busiek is to blame for all of it.
He is the one person who rekindled my love of superhero comic-books in the 1990s. There had been Alan Moore's short-lived MiracleMan in the early 1980s, which, even before Watchmen, followed the premise of superpowered beings to its nightmarishly logical conclusion. After that there was a long period where I'd read certain comics out of habit more than anything. Then Busiek came along with AstroCity, which took an approach different from Moore's, keeping the tropes and situations of comic-books, but turning them on their head and being more realistic without making the whole thing a storytelling dead-end. Before that, in 1993, Busiek (with Alex Ross's nearly photographic art) came up with the Marvels mini-series and reminded us how a normal human would see such a world.
There was so much energy in New York. As if fireworks had been going off for months...
The birth of the Fantastic Four.
Thor.
Giant-Man.
The return of the Submariner.
And of course the biggest blast of all... The showstopper that lit up the world like a dozen Fourth of Julys rolled into one...
"There he is!"
Just to catch a glimpse of him... Always in motion, always looking forward, like a force of nature in chain-mail... Never a hesitation or a backward glance...
And that's just for Captain America. You should see what he later does when his main character encounters the X-men, and how he becomes ashamed for instinctively hating them. And his witnessing Galactus’s coming to Earth still gives me the shivers when the man realizes that this is it for humankind and he walks away from it because he wants to be with his family when Extinction comes.
no subject
Date: Nov. 27th, 2008 01:30 pm (UTC)WOW, COOL! I need to read these.
Susan
no subject
Date: Nov. 27th, 2008 02:04 pm (UTC)