Longshot's weird adventures in the Marvel Universe

Even four decades after it was first quietly published by Marvel, Longshot is a very strange series, and still feels like nothing else being put out by the company at the time. 

It had a tone that was slightly off from the regular Marvel universe, something that was incredibly appealing in the wild days of the 1980s. It still had She-Hulk running around Manhattan in her wonderful bike pants, but there was also constant use of overlapping dialogue, and plotting that moved in deeply unexpected directions, and nightmare characters spinning between universes.

It all left the reader wrong-footed, just in the way it was a little bit off from the normal superheroics. Even the fact that the title character and many of his pals only had four fingers was a subtle sign of the weird, and his charming naivete only made him more different from self-assured Avengers.

It also, of course, has amazing pictures by Art Adams. There had been this kind of obsessive detailing in Marvel comics before, with artists like Michael Kaluta and Barry Windsor-Smith putting out some eye-catching and meticulous. But Adams had some real dynamic energy with his figurework, ands again, it all looked a bit off, a bit different from the clear, simple lines of the Romitas or Buscemas, 

While Longshot himself would soon be incorporated right into the heart of the greater universe by popping out of thin air into the Danger Room, the closest vibe to Longshot was, unsurprisingly, Ann  Nocenti, who brought a similar off-kilter perspective and odd use of the conventions of comic storytelling to her Daredevil comics.

I came to Longshot through the X-Men, where he wasn't technically a mutant, but was a core part of the team during my biggest period of X-obsession. I only picked up the Longshot series in the years afterwards, long after he'd faded from the X-books, although I was familiar with Adams from his X-Men work on covers and the art on the Annuals (every second year, for some reason). Reading the limited series in such a non-linear fashion only enhanced its strangeness, and I've been happy to have a full run of the series for years now.

It just didn't feel like a classic superhero comic, and that's exactly what makes it one of the great superhero limited series of its time. It's still very much an artifact of the 1980ss, but also timeless in a way that only the truly weird can reach.