KID COMIX 005

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I realize, as these “Kid Comix” entries start stacking up (no pun intended), that I probably look more and more like I was a kid with a potentially dangerous obsession. Well, I suppose I was. But I’ll be goddamned if it didn’t all work out for me. Hallelujah!

At this point, I don’t think I have to convince anyone here what a big Avengers fan I was as a kid. The comicbook, that is. Back then, we were nowhere near any kind of a cinematic treatment, when I was faithfully devouring the series (as crafted by Jim Shooter, David Michelinie, George Pérez, John Byrne, Sal Buscema and others… and in back issues by Roy Thomas, John Buscema, Steve Englehart, Bob Brown, George Tuska and others). But, of course, that just wasn’t enough for me.

I had to make my own.

First up this time is my feeble attempt to create an AVENGERS #200 — once again, before the actual comicbook hit the stands. I managed to get a cover happening…

With no knowledge of the narrative catastrophe that the eventual, actual AVENGERS #200 ended up being (if you know the backstory, then you know what I’m talking about), I took my own educated guess what the cliffhanger promised at the end of issue #199 -- with Don Blake exclaiming, “Ms. Marvel’s gone into labor -- and it’s not like any kind of labor I’ve ever seen! I don’t know if I can handle it! Frankly -- I don’t know if anything human can!” -- and you can plainly see my hypothesis on this cover, with Dr. Blake’s melodramatic bit of dialogue, “I’m sorry, Carol, but your baby’s a mutant!” Shows how little I knew at that time… mutants in the Marvel Universe don’t typically present until puberty, right?

Not to mention, you can see I was channeling one of my very favorite George Pérez Avengers covers, issue #181…

And, of course, the actual cover for issue #200 is another classic George Pérez joint…

My Page One basically picks up right where the real issue #199 left off. So much so that I’m pretty much redrawing a panel from the last page of that issue. And while I love the trifecta of dialogue reactions: “What?”… “Labor?”… “Now?”… that story title, “More Than a Baby!” is complete and utter ass. Thankfully, this is the only page that exists. I imagine I either 1) got bored, or 2) the real AVENGERS #200 came out and, thus, rendered my version moot (yeah, right… as if my version wasn’t already the epitome of moot).

So, in the actual AVENGERS #200, the blurb at the end of the story read as follows: “Next issue: the clean-up… and the return of an old and adamant villain. Don’t miss Chapter One of… THIS EVIL UNDYING!”

Even at nine years old, I knew what that meant. Because it immediately sent me back to the drawing board. Or, in my case, back to the spiral notebook.

Y’see, a year previously -- in 1979 -- Pocket Books had published the 9^th in a series of novels of different Marvel heroes. This one was an anthology of four short stories called THE MARVEL SUPERHEROES…

… the first of these stories being an Avengers tale, written by one James Shooter, titled “This Evil Undying”. At the time, I remember thinking it was one of the greatest pieces of prose I’d ever read. Shooter’s meticulous descriptions of every Avenger’s costume may read as slightly clunky now, but when I was nine years old, this was one of my first experiences of seeing my beloved comicbooks somehow legitimized by being translated to a more “literary” medium. And so I was familiar enough with Shooter’s story that when I saw that Next Issue info, I knew exactly what it was referring to. Aside from the story title itself, the description of “an old and adamant villain” was the confirmation (“adamant” obviously referring to Adamantium), since the villain of the short story was none other than Ultron.

Historically speaking, it was a rare instance of a Marvel superhero comicbook adapting a prose story (in this case, by the formidable writer/artist combo of David Micheline and George Pérez). But more importantly, it meant that I knew the plot of an issue of AVENGERS before said comicbook was released… so I set my sights on adapting it first.

I would think that the following pages would be much more entertaining if you’ve actually read Shooter’s short story. But I sincerely doubt many (any?) of you have. But, in the spirit of a self takedown, let’s at least compare a few bits of what I did with the subsequent, printed comicbook (AVENGERS #202, for those of you keeping score)…

So far, it’s a pretty straightforward adaptation, although it’s very weird to see my horrible art paired with actual, Jim Shooter-written Avengers dialogue. Certainly that makes this the best-written comicbook I ever attempted to draw (although, as much as I might love it, Iron Man’s dialogue on Page Three, Panel One… “Much better, Jarv. And a side of machine oil for me, huh?” isn’t exactly Shakespeare, is it?). And I kinda like the moment at the end of Page Four where Iron Man checks the time within his faceplate which triggers the “Not yet…” response in the following panel. A little foreshadowing, no doubt…

Hang onto your seats, folks. When we continue this journey into the past in the next newsletter, shit gets real.

Joe Casey

USA