(This continues from Reading the X-Men Krakoa Era: Part 1.)
The first X-Men comic I ever read was Rom: Spaceknight #32.
In my childhood, when school was out for the summer, my parents would unceremoniously dump me at my grandparents’ house in Mumbai to get me out from under their feet. I didn’t know this was the reason, of course, and I was always delighted, because my grandma pampered me, and my uncles were wonderful – as only uncles have the luxury to be, given they don’t have to deal with you for the rest of the year.
Towards the end of the summer, when I’d run out of cartoons to watch and my grandmother’s patience was at an end, one of my uncles would take me off her hands by taking me to work with him. This was boring to me, because government offices weren’t nearly as entertaining as cable tv (which we didn’t have at our home at the time), but I was usually mollified with an old crime novel from one of my uncles’ bookshelves.
Once, when I was 8 or 10, my younger uncle, who has since passed away, told me that there was a secondhand bookshop close to his office that also kept old comics. If I came to work with him that day, he would take me there at lunchtime – which he did.
He told me that I could pick as many comics as I might like, and I managed to amass a collection of something like a hundred old half-torn comics. Many of these were Tintin and Asterix, several Archie digests from the 80s, some “Mature Readers” Malibu comics which I definitely shouldn’t have read at that age (at least one of which – Daerick Gröss’s adaptation of Necroscope1 – gave me nightmares for weeks), and some old Marvel and DC Comics, including this one issue of Rom: Spaceknight, originally published in 1982.
If you’re not aware of Rom: Spaceknight, he was originally a toy that Marvel licensed to make comics about. The toy (whose original name was COBOL, after the programming language, before they changed it to ROM, also a computer-y word) came with no mythology attached, other than his neutraliser gun and his enemies, the Dire Wraiths, so writer Bill Mantlo (along with initial artist Sal Buscema) created one from whole cloth, integrating him into the Marvel Universe and telling stories that are still fondly remembered by fans to the extent that a) the comic lasted longer than the toy that inspired it, and b) decades after its initial publication, Marvel has figured out the intricacies of the licensing with Hasbro and has begun to reprint the original Rom: Spaceknight stories as omnibi, the first of which is already out.
Rom: Spaceknight #32 isn’t included in this omnibus, which only goes up to #29, but, to my delight, as I wrote this, I found that this issue was reprinted last year in Rom and the X-Men: Marvel Tales #1, along with Rom’s other encounters with Marvel’s mutants.2
The issue teams up Destiny, Mystique and Rogue, all of whom were then part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, with a villain called Hybrid, who is a hybrid of a Dire Wraith and a human being. For most of the issue, the evil mutants work with Hybrid against Rom, but towards the end, they realise his intentions for them – which involve all women on earth, both mutant and human, being used as breeders to create more creatures like Hybrid – and they turn against him and help Rom defeat him, seemingly once and for all.
For an otherwise disposable issue of a licensed comic, this issue seems to have left an impression on the ongoing mutant story, by giving us the first glimpse of Rogue’s turn from villainhood to heroism.
Reading it again now, I’m frankly astonished at how clearly I remember this single issue of a comic I must have read 25 years ago at least. I flipped through it and found images that had seared themselves into my mind – Hybrid’s strange but arresting design, Rogue’s wink right before she kisses Rom to steal his powers, the criminals that Hybrid spins so hard only their skeletons are left floating in the air, Rogue’s repulsed resignation as she prepares to touch Hybrid again to help Rom in his fight, the nightmare vision of the future that Destiny glimpses (which I could’ve sworn was a page-long sequence, but is in fact a single panel).
The feeling I remember most clearly while reading this comic, though, is the way this battle centred around an ramshackle snow-clad cottage felt like the most important comic in Marvel history. The way it hinted at both Rom and the mutants’ wider world in a matter of panels, and the way the flash-forward felt like the potential future that our heroes needed to avoid. It felt like there would be consequences to them losing this fight.
Ideally, this is how every superhero comic should feel. While you can’t control how a reader perceives your work, there’s no reason for a creator not to treat every issue of a story as the most important one. It’s part of what a shared universe allows you to do – in that moment, you can put your characters in ultimate peril, and while you have to save them most times, ideally, you should infuse each story you write with the sense that this … this issue is where everything changes.
As a kid, most superhero comics worked on me like that. I only had access to random issues which were either standalone or formed chapters of continuing stories, and I had no idea of what else the universe entailed.3 So of course, it was easy to fool me with ideas recycled from older stories, or threats of character death (or in one of the Death of Superman issues a friend once brought to school – actual character death). Now I’m older, and it takes more to keep me happy.
What hasn’t changed is that I still read every story, every comic with the hope that I won’t be the same person after reading it as I was before. Most comics fail, but I live in hope.
Part of what worked on me with Rom #32 was a continuation of Stan Lee’s big strategy at Marvel to constantly remind readers that these characters appeared in other stories, with other characters, which are just as exciting as the one in your hands.
You don’t want to be shortchanged by the comic you’re reading now, but it’s good to feel like there’s a bigger world this story takes place in. But when done badly, this way of creating comics can lead to incomprehensibility. It’s one thing to have a reference in an issue that performs its desired function within the story but which opens up the universe for you. It’s quite another if you can’t follow the story that’s in front of you without reading something else.
This device can be used well or badly – sometimes by the same creator. For example, one of my great disappointments reading comics in recent years was reading Jason Aaron’s run on Wolverine and the X-Men, which was self-contained, entertaining and inviting for the first two volumes, after which its own story pumped the brake with a screech to spend several issues being odd chapters of Avengers vs. X-Men, which was a) incomprehensible without reading AvX itself and b) had little to do with what I’d been reading Wolverine and the X-Men for. This made me stop reading the comic, and it didn’t help that much of AvX was also written by Aaron.
So, when I decided to read the Krakoa era of X-Men, I had the following choices:
- Try to follow the main series and ignore everything else: This was impossible since the Krakoa era doesn’t exactly have a main series, which we’ll come to in a bit.
- Try to read everything, in the order that it was published: This was what I tried to do the first time around. The problem is, if you’re reading individual chapters of 8-10 series, the whole thing turns into a fugue of just … Stuff Happening, because it becomes nigh-impossible to follow the character journeys and plots that individual creators are following.
- Try to read everything, but in big, satisfying chunks: This is what would usually be the best choice, but a big part of me following off the Krakoa era the first time was that there are some series that just aren’t for me, and I’d just get tired following them.
So I made choice #4 – read The Krakoa Story, whatever that entails, and then go back and read books by people whose work I usually like. From what I can tell, the Krakoa stories are told with different flavours precisely so that people with different tastes could follow the series that they like, but occasionally have to dip back into The Krakoa Story when something important happens.
Now, given that the Krakoa era has been on for five years, and has changed hands a few times, I expected it to be complicated, but boy, this was Homework.
So here’s me, showing you my homework.
- As I was typing this, I looked up Daerick to check that I was spelling his last name correctly, and discovered that he passed on last December. I was Facebook friends with him, and not only was the man incredibly talented, he was very gracious to me when I told him that his comic had scared the crap out of me. Based on my limited interactions over the years, he seemed a lovely man. ↩︎
- It’s surprising to see how many names that worked on this I’m now familiar with – Ann Nocenti, who edited this, is now better known for writing Daredevil. Rick Parker is one of my favourite hand-lettering artists, who helped me learn how to prep nibs for lettering when I decided to learn hand-lettering a few years ago. ↩︎
- For example, I once misread an ad for a Green Lantern story featuring Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner which said, “The UNIVERSE isn’t big enough for the two of them,” as being about two very large people who were each as big as half a universe and clearly getting bigger. ↩︎
