Marvel Mangaverse

Some years back, someone at Marvel Comics said, "Golly, maybe there's somethin' to this Manga craze all the kids are all hepped up about." They tried a number of experiments about this time to combine Japanese comic style with mighty Marvel characters, including translating the licensed Japanese version of Spider-Man, but perhaps the strangest, most interesting of all was called MARVEL MANGAVERSE. They gave cartoonist Ben Dunn the keys to the Marvel Universe and let him re-make it, manga-style, for a fifth-week event.

Ben Dunn, founder of Antarctic Press and creator of NINJA HIGH SCHOOL, has been drawing manga-style comics since before manga-style was cool. Like the best of the "American manga" artists, he does not ape the look of Japanese comics as much as he takes visual techniques from manga and incorporates them into his own distinctive style. Oddly enough, the American artist Dunn most resembles is George Perez. Like Perez, he has a love of detail; and when presented with a fight scene of CRISIS-level proportions, says "Gimme a couple dozen more Para-demons! I can take it!" Which is just what is required for a story like MARVEL MANGAVERSE.

The title is appropriate. Ben Dunn was not just re-imagining a few popular characters; MANGAVERSE presented a densely-textured world with an elaborate history to it, just like the real Marvel Universe. Reading it is a lot like jumping into, say, an AVENGERS ANNUAL with no familiarity of the continuity. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a bit confusing, but Ben gives us enough points of similarity to keep us oriented and provides the backstory on the fly; and the complexity also gives a sense that this isn't just a miniseries to fill a hole in the monthly schedule, but that it truly is a universe with it's own history and rich population of characters.

The bookend issues of the series, NEW DAWN and ETERNAL TWILIGHT, were written and illustrated by Ben Dunn and provide the set-up and the resolution of the main story, how Hydra instigates a war between Atlantis and the surface world in order to seize a source of unlimited power. It also introduces the main characters: U.S. President Steve Rogers, who also leads the Avengers as Captain America; Doctor Strange and his familiar Tigra; billionairess Antionette Stark, a Godzilla-sized behemoth called the Hulk, and others.

Between the bookends were six issues focusing on individual characters and teams within the Universe. They are largely independent of the overall plot and of each other and vary in quality. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE (written by Ken Sui-Chong, with art by Alvin Lee, Arnold Tsang, Omar Dogan and Shane Law) takes the Avengers' battle cry literally as the team pilots battle craft which combine to form a giant robot: ULTIMATE IRON MAN!!! The story and art are fairly good; it lacks some of the goofy fun of Ben's work, but it's a serviceable manga pastiche.

MEGA-SCALE META-TALENT RESPONSE TEAM FANTASTIC FOUR has the most Japanese title of the six interior issues. It was written by Adam Warren, one of the best of the American manga artists, who did a number of first rate DIRTY PAIR miniseries for Dark Horse back in the late '80s. He did not draw this comic, but Keron Grant and Rob Stull did a fine job with the artwork. In this version, the Fantastic Four wear exo-skeletons which give them the team's familiar powers. (Reed's power is not exactly the one we're familiar with, but is brilliantly imagined). The team has been organized to combat other-dimensional threats to the Earth. The story isn't perfect; I did not find the characters terribly likable and Adam's liberal sprinkling of foul language, (represented by black censor bars), comes off as grating rather than naturalistic and clashes stylistically with the dialogue in the other books. Nevertheless, I like Adam's stuff and the story does a decent job of fusing manga themes with the Marvel Universe.

GHOST RIDERS is the weakest of the lot. Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, and Johnny Blaze, the Ghost Rider, two supernatural characters from the '70s, hang out in a bar while outside the kaiju-sized Hulk lumbers about. Daimon tries to convince Johnny that they're related; Johnny wants nothing to do with him. Their sister, Satana, shows up and is embarrassing. The story, by Chuck Austin, is not bad, but feels stretched and thin compared with the other stories in the set. The artwork, also by Austin, features simply-drawn characters with flat, animation cel coloring over 3-D computer-rendered backgrounds. It's an interesting technique, but comes off as garish and ugly.

Of course, it just wouldn't be manga if we didn't have some sexy schoolgirls. But PUNISHER, written by Peter David and drawn by Lea Hernandez goes against expectations. By day, Sosumi Brown is the strict disciplinarian principal of a boarding school. By night, she adopts the guise of the PUNISHER to give crime a sound spanking. One might expect the character to be drawn as a scantily-clad dominatrix, as in some of the manga of Japanese artist Go Nagai; but Hernandez draws her fully-clothed in kimono and Geisha make-up. (The obi of her kimono tied in an elaborate knot that looks like a skull, referencing the skull on Frank Castle's outfit, is a nice touch)

Perhaps the most successful story in the series is SPIDER SCROLL, written and drawn by Kaare Andrews. In this re-imagining of Spider-Man, Peter Parker's Uncle Ben was the last of the Spider Ninja Clan, and Peter his student. When Sensei Ben is killed on the orders of the villainous Kingpin, Peter vows vengeance; but since he has promised his Aunt May that he will turn his back on the Way of the Ninja, he must do it in secret, wearing a mask. The story skillfully blends all the essential Peter Parker elements with those of a martial arts story. SPIDER SCROLL was spun off into a limited series; and more recently, the character has resurfaced in the “Spider-verse” storyline, in which Peter encounters alternate versions of Spider-Man from other universes.

X-MEN, written by C.B. Cebulski, penciled by Jeff Atsuda and A.J Jothikumar with inks by Andy Owens, was another disappointment. It came off as just another X-Men story with slightly different costumes. Theoretically, these X-Men's powers are based on magic rather than genetic mutation, but I didn't really see much to make this group special and different than the regular Marvel Universe version.

Ben Dunn returns for the final chapter, ETERNITY TWILIGHT, which brings everything back together. We get the defeat of Ultimate Iron Man, the betrayal of Baron Strucker, the return of Black Panther, the arising of the Dread Dormammu and the coming of the one hero on earth who can stop him!

MARVEL MANGAVERSE was followed by a monthly series, once again written and drawn by Ben Dunn, that lasted eight issues. The second series was more focused, benefiting from a single writer. The first story arc introduced a re-imagined version of Captain Mar-Vell and a weird and fantastic version of Galactus. The second arc introduced this world's Doctor Doom, who has a tragic connection to the Black Panther.

Truthfully, not everything in the series works; (I thought the appearance of Spider-Man in the conclusion of the initial story, for example, a little forced); but there are just so many fantastic ideas in MARVEL MANGAVERSE, so many appealing and intriguing characters and such promise that I was more than willing to overlook it's weak spots and just revel in the sheer Marveltude of it all.

I've long been a fan of Ben's work, and MARVEL MANGAVERSE was a fun look at the Marvel Universe through a different lens.

Whatever Happened to Speedball?

I remember a Marvel panel at a comics convention in Chicago I attended back in the late ‘80s. I think it was their Assistant Editor’s Panel, mostly a kind of comics pep rally to promote the books Marvel was putting out that year, and it was a bit gimmicky but fun, full of audience participation stunts. They had a group of volunteers from the audience come up on the stage to be a cheering section. Their job was to cheer any time anybody mentioned “SPEEDBALL”, a new title the company was pushing.

At one point, during an audience Q&A session, an editor from the company’s Distinguished Competition stood up and asked: “At our company we’ve had some success recently in taking some of our old, worn-out, boring characters and completely re-vamping them...” He was alluding, of course, the John Byrne MAN OF STEEL Superman reboot. “...Do you suppose a similar approach might work for... say... SPEEDBALL?”

And the peanut gallery on the stage cheered.

Okay, it was a cheap joke; but it reflected the fact that SPEEDBALL really wasn’t terribly popular. The character didn’t fit the Comics Zeitgeist of the late ‘80 - early ‘90s.. I only picked up one or two of his comics myself and although I found him mildly interesting, I wasn’t interested enough to follow him.

The reason Marvel was trying to promote the character was because he represented the return to Marvel Comics of one its legends: Steve Ditko.

As most comics fans probably know, Ditko was the artist who along with Stan Lee created Marvel’s iconic character, the Amazing Spider-Man. He drew, and to a great extent co-plotted AMAZING SPIDER-MAN for the first four years of its run, and also worked on the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man. He also co-created Doctor Strange, and his surreal, otherworldly artwork for Strange became that character’s hallmark.

Ditko often disagreed with Lee, who was more liberal in his politics than Ditko; (although not nearly as liberal as his fellow artist in the Marvel Bullpen, Jack Kirby) . Due to the “Marvel Method” Stan developed to work with his artists, Ditko rarely had to butt heads with him, though. Stan would give his artists a brief plot synopsis, which they would elaborate and draw. Only after the pencils were completed would Stan go back and write dialogue for it. Because he was doing so much of the plotting of the stories he drew, Ditko demanded credit for it -- and got it.

But eventually Ditko left SPIDER-MAN and Marvel. The popular legend is that he objected to a scene in the comic in which Spidey villain Green Goblin was revealed to be Norman Osborne, the father of Peter Parker’s best friend. Ditko wanted the Goblin to be some anonymous guy whom Peter didn’t know. Comics writer and historian Mark Evanier has speculated that the real reason might have been that Marvel had licensed the rights for a Spider-Man cartoon. Previous cartoons Marvel had done for TV, like CAPTAIN AMERICA, THE MIGHTY THOR and IRON MAN, had been done on the cheap, using actual panel art from the comic books and a minimal amount of animation. The artists who drew the original art were neither credited, nor compensated for this use of their work, and Ditko strongly objected to this. His precise reasons for leaving Marvel, however, are unknown. Ditko does not talk a lot about himself and rarely if ever gives interviews, saying he prefers to let his work speak for itself.

During this period, Ditko had also been working for Charlton Comics, and after leaving Marvel, he continued to work there. Charlton was something of an anomaly; it wasn’t exactly a comics company, it was the sideline of a magazine publisher. Unlike many magazines, Charlton owned its own printing company; and its comics line were a way of keeping the presses busy when they might be otherwise idle. The pay rate at Charlton was notoriously low, but they also allowed their creators comparatively more freedom than Marvel and National (DC) Comics. At Charlton, Ditko retooled the Golden Age Blue Beetle character into a modern science-based hero, and created characters such as Captain Atom and the Question. Much later all these characters would be acquired by DC and incorporated into the DC Universe.

He also did a lot of work for little independent publishers, for whom he did some of his most personal work. His best known character of these is Mister A, whose stories usually featured densely-worded polemics on Objectivist philosophy and whose uncompromising vision of moral absolutes inspired the character of Rorschach from Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN.

During the ‘70s, Ditko worked occasionally for DC, creating characters such as The Creeper, Hawk and Dove, and Shade the Changing Man.

So when he returned briefly to Marvel in the late ‘80s, it was something of a celebration for one of their Legends returning to the House of Ideas. Or at least it should have been.

Speedball was created by Ditko and writer Tom DeFalco, originally as part of Marvel’s New Universe line of comics. The New Universe crumbled, and instead the character was moved into the mainline Marvel Universe, appearing first as a guest in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #22, and following that in his own series, which was plotted and penciled by Ditko and scripted by Roger Stern. Which one of them thought that it would be cool to name a super-hero after a street drug is unknown; although to be fair, “Speedball” is also the name of a manufacturer of pen nibs for lettering and inking, which might be where the name came from.

The character was a high school student named Robbie Baldwin who, while working part-time at a research laboratory, becomes accidently exposed to cosmic other-dimensional energy which gives him the ability to generate a kinetic energy field that manifests as a swarm of pink energy bubbles that – stop laughing, now. They’re pink, okay? When he gets hit by anything, he can redirect the kinetic force in various ways, like force-fields, kinetic blasts and, obviously, by bouncing. Yes, he is Marvel’s answer to the old LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES character Bouncing Boy.

Although that might seem kind of doofy, and to a lot of readers at the time did, I can see a reason for it. Ditko liked to build his characters around themes. The Question was driven to seek answers; Hawk and Dove personified America’s division over the Vietnam War; Shade the Changing Man was all about self-perception and illusion. Often. Later writers who took over these characters didn’t quite get what Ditko intended. (Or thought they had a better idea, and some of the revamped characters were fairly good). Under writer and former hippie Denny O’Neil, the Question became a zen philosopher, the very antithesis of Ditko’s Mister A. Where Ditko’s Hawk and Dove represented opposing but valid points of view, illustrating that pacifism and force can both be valid responses to evil based on the situation; later writers made Hawk an irredeemable jerk who is always wrong; (although later still, Barbara and Karl Kessel brought the characters closer to Ditko view by redefining them as avatars of Order and Chaos). And Shade went to Vertigo.

Robbie Baldwin, at least as I read the character, was at heart an optimistic and resilient character, and his powers matched his personality. Not that Robbie was free of Peter Parker-ish angst; he had to hide his powers from his father, a crusading DA opposed to costumed crime-fighters; and his parents ultimately went through a messy divorce. Ultimately, though, Robbie was a Good Kid.

About this time Marvel put out a team book titled NEW WARRIORS featuring a line-up of previously-established teen heroes, such as Firestar, Namorita (The Sub-Mariner’s sort-of kid sister), and Nova; and new ones such as Speedball and the team’s leader, Night Thrasher (a black kid from the streets who fought crime on a skateboard; it made sense, it was the ‘80s). Writer Fabian Nicieza expressed a liking of Speedball and wrote him as cocky and arrogant, although Robbie’s civilian identity in NEW WARRIORS came off as angstful and sullen.

The sad fact is that Robbie was out of synch with his time. The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were the Golden Age of Tarnish, when Grim ‘n’ Gritty ruled the comics and when joyful exuberance and playfulness were considered Old School and Hokey. Occasionally, we’d get some whimsical push-back; Dwayne McDuffy’s superb DAMAGE CONTROL, about a construction company that repairs the collateral damage done by super-hero slugfests was one; and Dwayne made Robbie an intern at Damage Control in one of his story arcs, doing a good job with the character.

The nadir – for Robbie, at least; we aren’t nearly out of the Grim ‘n’ Gritty Era yet – came with Marvel’s CIVIL WAR crossover series. The premise of the series was to pit much of the Marvel Universe against itself over a federal law requiring the registration of super-heroes. The intent was to have both sides in this conflict have valid points so that the issue could be seen as a real debate instead of just an excuse for a big punch-out, and to reflect real-life debates over Security vs. Liberties. As it played out, however, the Pro-Registration side was guilty of some horrendous abuses of power that for many readers turned heroes like Tony Stark and Reed Richards into outright villains.

The event was triggered by a horrendous tragedy which prompted the adoption of the Supers Registration Act. The New Warriors, it was established, had become the subjects of a TV Reality Show. During the shooting of this show, a fight with a team of villains went terribly wrong, resulting in an explosion killing over 600 people including an elementary school full of people in Stamford, Connecticut. Speedball was the only member of the Warriors to survive the blast and became the scapegoat for the disaster. Running through the CIVIL WAR series, we get the personal story of Robbie enduring guilt, public objurgation, guilt, loss of powers, guilt, imprisonment in Reed Richard’s Super Gulag in the Negative Zone, guilt, and, oh yes, guilt.

In the end, he designed a new costume for himself featuring spikes on the inside constantly driving themselves into his flesh – one for each victim of the Stamford disaster. And he renamed himself “Pennance”. That’ll teach him to be optimistic and resilient.

I don’t think it was intentional, but you’d almost think the writers hated Ditko’s character so much that they went out of their way to destroy him.

After CIVIL WAR, Robbie bounced around a bit more, and not in a bubbly fun way like before, getting manipulated by various villains, but eventually he was able to kind of center himself. He became a teacher and mentor for young aspiring heroes in AVENGERS ACADEMY and even resumed the name of “Speedball”. More recently, he’s joined a re-formed version of the New Warriors and has even regained some of his old, upbeat personality.

So maybe Ditko did win in the end after all.

I guess that’s the way the ball bounces.