Waiting for the Trade

That's what they call declining to buy monthly comics, often referred to as "floppies" these days, in favor of purchasing trade paperback compilations, usually of about six issues. Indeed, there is also a phenomena of "writing for the trade", in which comic book stories are written to fit neatly into those trades. Many have commented on the fact that this distorts the pace of the superhero comic and removes one of the sequential story elements, that of planting little subplots during ongoing stories that lead into later issues. Subplots don't fit neatly into the trade, which naturally works best as a single story.

I've mentioned that my life-long love of mainstream comic book narrative in Marvel and DC comics has lately been on the wane. There are many reasons for it; distress at the lack of stories I want to read; the frustrating knowledge that a lot of my old favorite artists and writers are still out there but can't get work; the irritating worship of movie and television-style storytelling and disdain for the art of the sequential graphic novel (if you will). I also have some personal issues, such as the great difficulty of storing and organizing what is now a very large collection of individual issues. Trades of the better material that will sit neatly on a bookshelf seem increasingly appealing, and if I'm going to buy them anyway, why buy the individual issues? The trades are cheaper and more convenient.

I speak, of course, as a reader, not a collector. There are some comics I want to keep because I deliberately collect them, naturally.

Tonight, I found, at a Barnes & Noble that has a large used section, two older trades: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D and Spider-Girl.

Nick Fury started life as Sgt. Fury of Sgt. Fury and the Howlin' Commandos, a fun 60s World War II strip sometimes drawn by Jack Kirby but usually by Dick Ayers. The strip lasted 121 issues but with many reprints in the later years. In the late 60s, during the great spy fiction craze that the James Bond movies started, Marvel had Sgt. Fury promoted to colonel and taking over a super-secret agency called the Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division: SHIELD. Fury took over the half-sized strip in Strange Tales from the Human Torch, sharing space with Doctor Strange until the strip ended in 1967 and split into two separate books, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD and Doctor Strange.

Neither strip lasted long, but in the later Strange Tales issues, something wonderful happened to the lively and entertaining Agent of SHIELD strip. A young man named Jim Steranko was hired, first to finish Jack Kirby's layouts, then to draw it himself. Eleven pages a month was about Steranko's pace; he began to stutter on output when the strip expanded, and never produced more than four complete issues out of the 18 before cancellation.

Steranko was quite a character. Movie star handsome and a good self-promoter, he was the one of the first great prima donnas of the comic book artists, along with Neal Adams. The pair of them revolutionized what comics looked like with unmistakably individualized and stylized pencils. Much imitated, you can tell the authentic Steranko or Adams just as much as you can sort out Jack Kirby from his many imitators. (Not that some of the imitators aren't good; Ron Frenz does a Kirby so passable that he's been used to finish missing pencils for one Kirby story that got mangled by a strange edit job back in the early 70s; Paul Gulacy started out as a Steranko imitator and developed his own similar but distinct style; no one has ever done a really decent Adams, though.)

Unfortunately, Jim Steranko and Neal Adams had something else in common - not only did they not produce as fast as the other greats, Kirby, John Buscema, John Romita, Steve Ditko - they also stopped producing work at the height of their powers and went into semi-retirement... as comic pencillers, anyway. Steranko produced a movie magazine; Adams became active as a promoter of creator's rights. Immaterial, I guess. They're legends.

The SHIELD strip went at a breakneck pace, one wild idea and exciting adventure after another. Not great writing; Steranko took over as writer almost right away, but the stories border on incoherence. I'm sure no one cared: this stuff is gorgeous.

The compilation I just got only has the Strange Tales material. The four full issues that followed have been reprinted elsewhere. I actually have the originals of all this stuff, but I haven't read them in years.

Spider-Girl is another story. This post is too long, so I'll come back to that another time.