Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2: Angela (Marvel NOW!)

  I've got to get my hands on the crossover event 'Infinity.' With completing volume 2 of Guardians, that will make it 4 'Infinity' tie-ins that I have read. If there's one thing I can tell you about that storyline is that I know Thanos is involved and he has his sights set on earth. Other than that, I am at a loss as to what that series really is about.

   Marvel's done a fantastic job getting just about every one of their series to tie-in together. The bullpen of the 2010s have built upon Lee and Kirby's philosophy established during the Marvel Age of Comics in the 1960s and exceeded that vision to the Nth degree. Events in this volume relate to important storylines in the various Marvel NOW! Avengers titles as well as Iron Man. I give major kudos to the editors at the House of Ideas for keeping all of these threads straight. I know I've would've made a few knots if that was all up to me.

  In this volume, the bounds of reality have continued to crack throughout the Marvel Universe. Star-Lord is plagued by a terrible vision of all his possible realities and now he seeks out his biggest enemy for answers. Meanwhile, the rest of the Guardians attempt to exercise some R & R  but when an Asgardian princess from an alternate universe that shouldn't exist attempts to kill Gamora, the most dangerous woman in the universe, it's back to business as usual. For the Guardians, that means rescuing SWORD from the clutches of Thanos' armies and eventually saving the earth from the Mad Titan himself.

    'Angela' sees the end of Iron Man's tenure with the team. But I suspect that with the appearance of the assassin of Asgard, the Guardians are going to have a new teammate albeit probably only for a short while. Having two deadly women on one team will make for some killer moments but eventually there's only going to be room for one alpha female.

   The art is dynamic and it matches the might of this action-packed volume. The array of variant covers is stunning as well. But I must say that as an EC Comics fan, I just adore the Weird Science variant covers the most.

   Now to get my hands on that Infinity book I mentioned earlier...

  Worth Consuming

   Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.
 

Weird Science-Fiction Fantasy Annual #2 (Banned Comics Week)

My final selection for Banned Comics week is a unique time capsule of the changes that EC Comics would have to endure after the Juvenile Delinquency Senate hearings and with the coming of the comic’s code. Sales of comic books had been plummeting across the board. To spare jobs and to keep from closing, EC cancelled its horror comics and began to merge other titles together. For instance, Weird Science and Weird Fantasy were merged together after both published their final issue #22. The new title was called Weird Science-Fantasy.

The new title was still edgy with bizarre aliens, screaming femme fatales and twist endings that stunned the reader back into reality. But when the CCA formed in 1954 one of the rules stated the word “Weird” could not be used in the title of a book. Thus, Gaines and Co. changed the name of the series to Incredible Science Fiction at issues #30. This book has the distinction of the being the very first comic to be approved by the CCA (as according to the reprint editors of this annual.)

ISF is tepid. The stories are no longer thrilling. The endings still have a twist but EC’s stunning style had been neutered. Incredible lasted 4 more issues but thanks to an confrontation with the CCA, Gaines decided to stop publishing comics altogether.

Before issue 34 was published, William Gaines sent a reprinted story for approval called “Judgment Day!" (Weird Fantasy  #18). This anti-racism story, was rejected because Judge Charles Murphy, the Comics Code Administrator, demanded that the star of the story, a black astronaut, be changed into a white hero. Gaines refused and threatened to take the matter all the way to the Supreme Court. The CCA, not wanting an early case of more unwanted publicity, backed down.  Gaines went on and  printed the story both without any changes or the CCA approval stamp. It would be the last comic printed by Gaines who would go one to devote his energies to the now magazine formatted MAD Magazine. Yes Mad would be just as subversive but because the book was no longer published in the size of a comic book, it was free from the intrusion of the Comics Code.

I’m not so much a fan of this treasury of latter day EC reprints. But for their historical value, this collection is priceless. You can see through volume 1 and later this second volume how EC’s style was slowly reined in to fit an Ozzie & Harriet lifestyle. Ultimately, by focusing on MAD, Gaines got the upper hand, thumbing his nose at American society all the way to the bank.

Worth Consuming.

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.

Tales from the Crypt Presents the Vault of Horror #5 (Banned Comics Week)

The main horror titles of EC Comics were Tales from the Crypt, the Haunt of Fear, and the Vault of Horror. The most well-known of these titles is obviously Tales from the Crypt thanks to a 1990s TV series on HBO, hosted by the delightfully funny, Crypt Keeper. But my favorite of the EC horror anthologies was the Vault of Horror.

It was hosted by the Vault Keeper and featured tales of deception, corruption, passion, murder, and intrigue. There was always a twist ending to these tales but the bad guys didn’t always get their just desserts. Sometimes, the hero took the fall! For the American government, that just couldn’t do! Thus, when the Comics Code Authority was established, titles were required to tell stories in which the villain got punished for his crimes. An allowance was allowed for stories to have cliffhangers throughout several issues as long as the villain received punishment before the story was captioned ‘The End.’

In this issue, a young wife who’s trapped in a loveless marriage takes advantage of a sinkhole on their family farm. We then meet a talented surgeon who loses his arm and conducts dangerous experiments in an attempt to make himself whole again. Then a young man meets the woman of his dreams at a masquerade ball. But when it’s time to unmask, it becomes his worst nightmare.  Lastly, a weight loss remedy bears some dangerous fruit.

The masquerade story, entitled “the Mask of Horror” is such an example of a story in which a rather innocent man meets a tragic demise. The man is spurned by his finance whose is cheating on him with an older gentleman. Determined to get over the harlot, the bachelor goes to a party only to take his troubles off his failed relationship. It’s when a drunken friend introduces him to a woman dressed as a miserly vampire does things go sour. The guy forgets his troubles and feels that this woman is his true love. But the only thing he feels at story’s end is her fangs in his neck.

  The only thing that guy did was fall in love with another woman. But, I don’t see him as immoral because his first relationship was destroyed by his fiancé. Just because the guy didn’t end the relationship while his girl was in another man’s arms, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t kaput. Still, I am sure that the message of the story was a misogynistic “beware of wanton women” that was the moral of many of EC’s stories involving passion. In the sinkhole story, the woman falls in love with a handsome health inspector but he turns out to be married. The wife had previously killed her husband, faking his death in a sinkhole, but she is forced to be with her loveless hubby forever, when his bloated corpse rises from the household well and snatches her into the underground river below that formed the giant crevice.

EC was as nourish and ghoulish as they come and I loved it. I still do. My dad until he died took pride in how I saved my money doing odd jobs to buy the complete Vault of Horror Collection from Gemstone in the late 80s. It was the first time I ever set a financial goal and made smart decisions with my hard earned cash. Nowadays, I continue to save my money trying to collect the entire EC library that Gemstone reissued continuously from circa 1988-2000.

Along with the reprint of Vault of Horror #18, this edition also reprints Weird Science #11. In those pages, the great Wally Wood regales us with a futuristic story in which a uranium company condemns both the earth and the moon with its questionable mining practices. Then a computer system learns about love for the first time and gets terribly confused. Then a ship is stranded on a planet of giants while a man goes back in time and ends up becoming his own father in a head-scratcher that makes Terminator seem plausible.

Worth Consuming

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.