30 days of comics I love #22: It's big, too.

Avengers #167 

by Jim Shooter, George Pérez and Pablo Marcos

Long before Star-Lord beat Ronan the Accuser with an on-screen dance-off, I thought the Guardians of the Galaxy were a much bigger deal that they really were.

It was partly because, for some reason, I had a beach towel with the original Guardians flying through space for much of my childhood (I've tried to find an example of the art used on that towel, which I would always recognise, many times over the years, without any luck). But it was also because the archetypical Avengers for me will always be the brief time the Avengers were teaming up with the Guardians to take down the evil Korvac.

The Korvac Saga actually only runs for several issues, but still looms large over the hiostory of the Avengers. Written by Jim Shooter, and largely drawn by Pérez at his seventies heights, it has the Beast at his most eloquently humourous, Wonder Man in that bitchin' leisure suit, the colourful Vision and the Scarlet Witch blatantly getting it on, and Captain America, Iron Man and Thor to round out the iconic roster, and even that crew wasn't enough to stop the reality warping Korvac was bringing to the party.

Adding more characters to the long-term plotting would usually leave the story feeling crowded and thin, but with Shooter and Perez, it all flows remarkably well. Issue #167, a comic I've had since I was five-years-old, has all the heroes team-up and recognise the stakes they are facing, before shifting gears entirely and having Yellowjacket, the Wasp and freakin' Nighthawk beat up on the Porcupine for several pages. 

Decompressed comics had their day years ago, but the style still lingers in most mainstream superhero comics, so this kind of tight storytelling still feels impressive. As impressive as I always thought Starhawk and Charlie-27 were, drifting through the void on my towel.   

30 days of comics I love #21: I love adventure!

Detective Comics #38 (Millennium edition) 

By some golden age legends and a few literal unknowns

I've only read a tiny fraction of comics from the golden age, they are just something I've never seen around, and I have no idea how many even made it to this part of the world, all the way back in the day. The only things I've seen from that era have been reprints, and they are usually tiny slices of some extremely well-known comics and characters.

And then I get something like this, a facsimile reprint from the year 2000 (with some very 2000 advertisements) featuring the first appearance of Robin, and it reprints the whole lot, filler and all.

And there is a lot of filler in these comics, with strips and storylines that literally nobody cares about anymore. It's not hard to see why, the Batman story is clearly the most energetic and fun. even the colourful costumes alone makes it stand out from the pack. 

The Steve Malone, Cliff Crosby and Red Logan comics are all thuddingly dull to modern eyes, and even characters who still have some name recognition today, like the Crimson Avenger and Slam Bradley, have the same leaden art and tedious plots.

These are comics from a different time, and it's more than a little ridiculous to judge them with a modern eye. I don't begrudge anybody who gets real enjoyment from these crude comics from almost a century ago, and I even envy their ability to look past the simplicity of them.

But seeing them in a chunky package like this comic does leave me with the assurance that I don't really need to hunt out much more of this type of thing. I've read almost all of the early Batman and Superman comics in various reprints through the years, but his back-up crew from the golden age can happily fade away with history. 

They were only meant to last as long as the attention span of a 10-year-old boy in the 1930s anyway, and the fact that they have been reprinted at all gives them some kind of longevity, but it's only their proximity to the first Robin that put them in front of my eyes. 

30 days of comics I love #20: So much for subtlety!

Epic #4 

By Martin Edmond (and others, I suppose) 

It's in weird little series like this one - a four-part prestige format comic from Marvel's Epic line, largely published to bring more attention to the more regular Stalkers, Wild Cars and Nightbreed series that they were putting out - that you find real comics treasure.

I'm a massive, massive fan of the late, great Martin Emond, a kiwi cartoonist who did remarkable things with pencil, paint and tattoo ink in his short life, and I thought I knew of all the comics he had drawn, but I can still find a few precious pages lurking in this reject from the dollar bins.

Even better, it's Emond's take on Clive Barker's Nightbreed, and this short example shows that Emond was born to draw these wonderful freaks. Look at what he does with this spider hybrid lurking in the back of a pickup truck - 

- or the incredible way he draws Craig Sheffer's Boone in all his Cabal glory - 

or even just the wiry rednecks who have the misfortune to run into the Nightbreed crew - 

Even a tragically short artistic career can produce gorgeous comics hiding in the most mundane of places, and I know I'm never going to stop looking for them, especially when I see those bug eyes of doom staring back at me.

30 days of comics I love #19: I have taken his name, I must take his destiny

Legion of Super-Heroes #59 

by Levitz, Giffen, Bright, Gordon and Garzon 

With such a large and sprawling cast, a long-running series like the Legion of Super-Heroes always needed issues like this, where a solo member gets something of a spotlight, and usually learns an important lesson about life and heroism, often by studying something from the Legion's past adventures. 

This particular one was the last of the classic period Legion - the next issue saw the Magic Wars kick off, and then the whole concept was crashing into the five years later era, and literally nothing would ever be the same again. 

That v4 Legion is my favourite incarnation of the team ever, so I will never regret the decisions that led to those comics, but it is still a little wistful to see Levitz sign off from his long run on the regular Legion with a focus on the Invisible Kids (and poor old Chemical King).

It's a pretty standard effort, giving a little more depth to characters that were killed off years and years ago (although it is weird how much Lyle Norg keeps calling Chemical King a kid, when they're all basically children), and has some lovely Mark Bright artwork which looks a lot like something Curt Swan would have done in 1968, along with some gorgeously grimy Giffen pencils on the framing story.

And while it might not have felt like it at the time it was published in early 1989, it really is the end of an era. There was one more small epic too come, and then innumerable reboots and rethinks, but the simple pleasure of a basic solo Legionnaire comic book would never quite be the same again. The future moved on, a long time ago, and is already ancient history.

30 days of comics I love #18: You think the stain'll lift?

Warrior #26 

By Dez Skinn and pals 

You could always tell when a British comic paper that went after a slightly more sophisticated audience is about to fade away, because that's when the European reprints start overwhelming things. The comics from the continet are fun and stylish, but they're always a sign that the comic is running out of money.

Warrior only lasted a couple of years in the early eighties, but left behind a great legacy, if only because it was the first palce that Alan Moore's Miracleman and V For Vendetta appeared. The 26 black and white issues that were produced had a lot more than just Moore's post-modern superheroics going for it, before blazing out with this final issue.

Even at the end, and even with the overseas reprint crowding things out, the last issue of Warrior was a lot of fun. Moore and Lloyd were still doing V For Vendetta right till the end, and while Miracleman was absent, publisher Dez Skinn was still doing the very strange Big Ben spin-off with Will Simpson, and it is one of the very few comics that has both Moore and Grant Morrison in the credits box. 

The Morrison story - Liberators with the great John Ridgeway - is the first chapter of something that went exactly nowhere, but still hints at future greatness for the writer, while you also get a silly four-pager from a very young Carl Critchlow.

But, despite promises of big doings in the next issue, that was it for Warrior, although that more mature audience would still be a target for the rest of the decade, with comics like the brilliant A1 limited series giving writers and artists greater creative freedom, or efforts like Crisis and Deadline taking things in a more political and nihilistic directions.

So while this Warrior dies here, at least it goes down fighting and resides in the halls of comics Valhalla, where plenty of others would soon join it, once they resort to cheap reprints. 

30 days of comics I love #17: We all need hope.

Superman/Batman: World's Finest #3 

by Dave Gibbons, Steve Rude and Karl Kesel

My faith in the inherent justice of the universe took a major hit when I saw Steve Rude begging for comic work on social media. He should be fending away offers from every comic book publisher on the planet, not begging for scraps.

Maybe it's because he spent so much of the prime of his career on Nexus, an extremely 1980s sci-fi epic that is largely forgotten today, but Rude's art has always been incredible, with warmth, vitality and humour and should be appreciated more.

Consider this series from 1990, a period when Superman and Batman were hardly friends, and any sort of team-up between them was relatively rare. The scrip from Dave Gibbons is overloaded and overcomplicated in the way of so many superhero comics of the era, but Rude's art is genuinely timeless.

His Batman is sleek, flowing and mysterious, while Superman is open and powerful, always ready with an encouraging smile alongside some feat of super-strength. With able assistance from Karl Kesel and Steve Oliff, World's Finest looks like nothing else produced in the early 90s, which makes it even more appealing today. 

Rude's retro style helps with that timeless factor, but the storytelling is also always so clear, with plenty of visual gags and character moments to keep things moving. It is, quite frankly, so hard to understand why Rude isn't held up with the greats of the medium, and able to pick his projects on a whim. Maybe it's just too smooth, too pretty, and just too good for the world. 

We just don't deserve Steve Rude and his incredible style. 

30 days of comics I love #16: One cannot fall from so lofty a height without breaking.

Thanos Annual #1

by Jim Starlin and Ron Lim

With such an overwhelming personality and ethos, less really is more when it comes to Thanos. He was never more of an imposing presence than when he was taken off the table for more than a decade in the 1980s, and frequent attempts to do more with the character in the past few years have only diluted his appeal.

Even creator Jim Starlin can take it too far, with a number of graphic novels in the past decade that were painfully inessential, and all I've ever needed in 21st century Thanos is in the one-shot annual from 2014.

With typically slick art from Ron Lim and Andy Smith, this Thanos comic is set in the mad Titan's past, with one aspect of Thanos coming from the split second where he is about to pound on Captain America in the Infinity Gauntlet series from more than 20 years earlier, and clashing with an even earlier version who is still suffering a cosmic cube hangover.

Thanos likes the sound of his own voice as much as he literally loves Death, and this comic ensures that everybody is clear that Thanos' only great foe is himself, and that he has let omnipotence slip through his big chunky fingers time and time again, because deep down he believes he isn't worthy of it, and whether he is fighting Mephisto or the Silver Surfer or everybody in between, he's really only battling himself.

Everybody and their grandma knows who Thanos is these day, he was the ultimate villain of the Marvel movies, and had to be slain twice before it would take and the universe could be saved. And while Josh Brolin's performance found some surprising depths beneath that grey skin, it's Jim Starlin's version who is the one, true Thanos, defeating himself over and over again, because nobody else is worthy.

30 days of comics I love #15: Gentlemen, I hate you all.

War Story: Condors

By Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra

When Garth Ennis is interviewed about a new comics project, he often gets asked why he keeps going back to the war stories, and you can almost hear the writer roll his eyes. He'll usually just ignore the fact that nobody asks why there has to be so many superhero titles, and patiently explain that while the comics are set in times of conflict, you can never run out of storytelling possibilities in the stresses and emotions of the characters living through such times.

Because these stories are never about the great leaders, the generals and political leaders who decide the fate of the world, they're about the people that are trapped in these places at the sharp end of the bombs, and just trying to stay alive, and maybe hold onto some scrap of their humanity while they do it.

Condors is entirely set in a foxhole during the Spanish Civil War, where four men from different backgrounds are trapped together, and have nothing else to do but tell their stories until the shelling lifts. They're all fighting for different reasons, some for ideology, some for the love of their country, some because they have no choice, but they're all circling the carnage of industrial 20th century conflict.

Most of Carlos Ezquerra's long and distinguished career was spent telling comics in the far future, or on another worlds. Even the real-life setting of his war comics were usually in some unnamed battlefield, but this is his home, the land of his forefathers, and the disgust at the nations using his own as their testing grounds for mass slaughter given their horrible clarity

And it is horrible, with a graphic depiction of the bombing of Guernica, one of of the most terrible events of that time in history, unflinchingly portrayed in all its gore and pointlessness. This is the price of war, as babies are burned alive in their mother's arms, and makes a cruel mockery of any justification for any kind of war.

There is no justification for this, of course, and the same old arguments in the foxhole may be given more weight with the experiences of each of the men that ended up in it, but they're still horrible and stupid. And there is always room for more of these kinds of stories on the comic book shelves, alongside all the spandex and crises.

30 days of comics I love #14: I see my whole life flashing before my eyes

Star Wars #79 

By Jo Duffy, Ron Frenz and Tom Palmer

Even with all the constant product beaming its way from a galaxy far, far away, I keep trying out new Star Wars comics. They're usually fairly bland and disappointing, and full of 12-part sagas that explain why some lightsabers are green, but I keep looking at them all the same, because I'm trying to capture the thrills of reading this issue back in early 1984.

It's a simple done in one, when Lando and Chewbacca were searching for Han Solo (which I never really understood, even as an eight-year-old, because it was obvious that Han was being taken to Jabba's joint). But it's got a spark that is often missing in modern Star Wars, full of action and event, and plenty of silly little jokes.

Duffy's script doesn't treat the characters are untouchable icons, but leans hard on the charming rogue factor, and isn't afraid to show Lando making stupid mistakes. He drives the wrong way down a hyper-highway and gives the game away after a few drinks, and some of it is pure slapstick - the part where he puts the wig and eyepatch on the wrong way and blinds himself still makes me laugh.

And when everything goes wrong with the intergalactic gangsters and the shit hits the fan, there is some high-speed action through the crowded space city. Frenz's art isn't quite as defined as it will be, leaning less into the retro look that he will become associated with, with Palmer's typically detailed inks giving it real heft.

It's a tiny part of the overall Star Wars saga, but not everything has to be the most important thing ever, It can just be a fun romp, at ultimate velocity, with lasers flying all around.