Marvel 1985 # 1 - Haunted

Before SECRET INVASION…before WORLD WAR HULK…before CIVIL WAR… The most powerful super-villains in the Marvel Universe gather their might to wreak havoc on the one place they’ve never before set foot—YOUR WORLD! As mankind’s enemies cut a swath of destruction with unprecedented ferocity and ruthlessness, the fate of the planet rests in the hands of one person: Toby, a 13-year-old boy who holds the key to uniting his comic-book idols, the Marvel Heroes! Superstars Mark Millar (CIVIL WAR, FANTASTIC FOUR) and Tommy Lee Edwards (BULLET POINTS, The Question) deliver a Marvel Event the likes of which you’ve never seen!

Let’s make this part clear for those who don’t read an entire review: loved the art. Loved, loved, loved the art. Tommy Lee Edwards has always been able to pull off the realism bit, but he does a superlative job with all corners of this issue. From recapping the events of the last couple of issues of Secret Wars from a retailer’s perspective to the day-to-day adolescent grind of the main character to the eventual super goings-on, Edwards does it all beautifully. The book just looks great.

As for the story part, well . . . it’s interesting. The first word that sprang to mind was “precious”, though I’m not sure that’s the vibe that the creative team wanted to establish. Really, there’s a tenuous metaphor at work here drawing a parallel between the events of the book and our own formative experiences as comic fans. Millar wants to tap that vein and explore the time when we first really, truly became immersed in that world.

On many levels, it plays as the flip-side to what he’s doing in Kick-Ass, which explores the ramifications of “super-heroes” in a real-world setting. Here, we see what happens when fictional super-heroes intrude on the real world. In some ways, it’s an obvious homage to “Narnia”, but I was more strongly reminded of The Neverending Story, the film version of which was released in 1984 in the States (though, perhaps not too ironically, not until 1985 in Millar’s home country.). The through-line of that film is the concept of literature as escape, a way to help us handle our problems until we are able to overcome them, in essence becoming the heroes of our own story. In 1985, that comes across in a fairly concrete fashion

The early scene in the comic shop is a little too cute; it’s layered with a bit too much post-millennial self-awareness in terms of comics culture as a whole. Here we meet our protagonist, a young man, a child of divorce, who has a variety of problems and an affinity for comic books. I was also very taken aback that this kid (with a comic fan dad and awareness of the field while being on a first-name basis with the shop guy) would not be into Secret Wars until near the end of the series. Honestly, if the kid’s so into comics that he’s conversant with the Frank Miller run of Daredevil that began in ’79 and ended in ’83, how on Earth could he have missed out on the beginning of Secret Wars? Especially given that every Marvel book that he purports to collect ended a month prior to the event with a cliffhanger into it, and picked up a month later with an outro from it? It’s a narrative conceit often befalls retro-comedies: people want to remember a decade as a big lump, rather than as a progression of events.

That strangeness aside, the rest of the story attempts to get into the young man’s head, reflecting his difficulties and bouncing his comic-mania off of some events encroaching on his everyday existence. It’s not a bad story, per se, it just seems like an overly familiar swing at the wish-fulfillment genre (“I really love comics, and golly, here’s heroes and villains!”). It’s an oddly old-fashioned approach to the tale, too. In many ways, it comes like a Boy’s Adventure book, but it doesn’t take into account what publishers failed to figure out about sidekicks back in the day: readers didn’t grow up wanting to meet the heroes or be the little buddy of the heroes; they wanted to be the heroes. So on a metatextual level, perhaps Kick-Ass is more successful since it embraces a DIY aesthetic in its wish-realization pattern. 1985 reads like a childrens’novel for an audience that isn’t composed of children (more irony, perhaps?), riffing on a completely different time in the business that our younger readers can’t really appreciate as much more than anecdotes, trade paperbacks, and YouTube clips.

It’s not precisely a bad first issue; the art is great and the writing is, for the most part, fairly technically sound. But it’s straddling a line - if Millar wanted to tell us about his own youth in relation to comics, let’s see that. If he wanted to apply some metafictional commentary to the 1985 Marvel Universe, let’s see that. This playing to the middle approach makes it seem like a bundle of influences without achieving independent existence as its own thing.