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I Accuse:

DeBricazar

of dissing the Hulk

with his Marathon bully pulpit

on the Marvel Masterworks Message Board.

I also Accuse him of dissing Daredevil and the Green Goblin.

The Marathon is such my favorite thing on these boards. Thanks so much, Bric. Prior to this, I had only read up to FF 26 plus ASM Masterworks 1-6, Doctor Strange V1, Avengers V1-2 and I think most of X-Men V1. (And a couple of the very earliest issues of Thor and Iron Man.)

The Marathon has given me the impetus to further my reading, and it's pretty joyful. Sharing thoughts between ourselves is really enlightening and rewarding for me. I love reading the next issue of all these series each month. ASM is always a treat, and I also like Doc Strange quite a bit. Avengers and X-Men are still pretty early to judge, but Avengers 1-4 was quite a run. Thor has obviously gotten a lot better in Volume 2. Iron Man sort of treads water, but the addition of Tony's love for Pepper is a boost. I liked about half the FF issues out of the last 10.

I say all that as a sort of personal State of the Marvel Universe Address, in order to follow with this: I am really really looking forward to the second half of the 1960's. I've read very little of it, excepting the Ditko stuff. My previous paragraph explains what my level of enjoyment is recently, and to sum up I'd say that the stories and art are not blowing me away lately, although Ditko's two series are the exception. I'm so pumped to eventually get into the better art and better stories that are coming, and I'm really grateful to be able to share the experience with you guys, reading your reviews of each issue.

But I'm saddened that the Marathon no longer features guys like GHastly and austex. I wish those guys would rejoin the Marathon, along with all the other people who have contributed in the past.

Most wonderfully, I believe this particular thread is the last Hulkless thread we'll have until...

My first reactions to the covers in this thread:

A third consecutive issue of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?????!!!!! At least it'll be freshened by the addition of Namor, who is really keeping up a presence with Avengers 3-4, FF 27, and X-Men 6. This time next year we'll be celebrating the addition of monthly GNCLN solo Namor. It'll be interesting to see if, and how, his antihero side is lessened between now and then.

The Sinister Six is complete. I always liked Kraven. Part of it that comes from enjoying "The Most Dangerous Game" in junior high. And I'd forgotten that the Chameleon returned in #15, that's a cool development, the return of Spidey's first quasi-supervillian. "I was your very first."

A fairly stunning FF cover, and finally Doc Strange gets at least half the cover of Strange Tales!

The only reason I let myself look at these covers is that I've completed reading most of the issues in Part 35. Now to get over there and work on posting my reviews and reading yours.

Bric said: SGT. FURY #8: While the Avengers are fighting Baron Zemo this month, the Commandos are taking on Dr. Zemo!

Although this issue was nothing all that special overall (other than the introduction of Zemo) it actually featured what I think is the single best panel in a SA Marvel comic up to this point in the Marvel Silver Age. I was blown away. I'll try to find the words to explain why I think this panel is so artistic, but I'm not sure I can do it justice.

From looking at that panel, you'd be forgiven for wondering why the heck I would think it's so spectacular. But notice both aspects of the panel - what's being shown and what's being said - and then come with me on a short trip to Avengers #4, as the Editor would have us do. (I had already been referring to Avengers 4 as I read Avengers 6, to see if Zemo's mask was shown).

Are you ready for it?? Here's the 2nd panel of page 7 from Avengers #4:



Maybe it doesn't float your boat the way it does mine. I will say that Stan slightly detracts from the process, ironically by highlighting it with an intrusive editorial caption in Avengers 6's panel, but I can't honestly blame him. It's obviously more important to alert the reader to a previous issue he or she may have missed, rather that leave the subscribers and attentive readers to find the gem for themselves (which in my opinion would be the most rewarding way to allow "the chosen" to experience it). Placing that caption in the best panel up to this point in the Marvel Silver Age is like shouting through a microphone, "HEY DON'T MISS THIS SUBTLETY RIGHT HERE!!!" But I can't fault Stan for it, it makes sense to do it so that "no reader is left behind".

But I trust you've noticed the two similarities between these two panels from two separate issues. On the one hand (ouch), Zemo is remembering in Avengers 6 how he tried to kill Cap and Bucky. And in the Avengers 4 panel, we see him red-handed in the act (ouch #2). So both panels feature the same literary theme. Both panels also feature the exact same visual construction (minus the background), that being a closeup of Zemo's curved hand.

Now I noticed this because I was flipping back and forth. And it would be so much sweeter if the readers hadn't been directed to this sublime and subtle artistry by the Editor waving them in as if at an airstrip (ouch #3?). Nevertheless, this cannot be coincidence that Kirby constructed the Avengers 6 panel to hearken back to the Avengers 4 panel. I'm trying to find the words to describe the effect and the artistic phenomenon that Kirby is employing here, and my arts theory vocabulary is sadly just not up to the task. Let me try a musical analogy which will be easier for me (and will also coincidentally tie into the "German theme" of Zemo! Well weird.) The method that Kirby employs here resembles a "leitmotif" from some of Richard Wagner's operas, whereby a short musical theme would reappear at various points throughout the opera, symbolizing either a character, a place, an event, or even an idea, and serving to remind the listener of that past event (etc.) at a crucial juncture in the story's "present", and so to create a thematic link between the two in the listener's mind, bridgind the temporal gap and even creating a brand new idea - the significance of the link itself. I guess the closest term I could use to describe Kirby's method here would be a recurring visual motif which acts almost subliminally by making Zemo's curved hand visually represent (for the reader) his remembered nonvisual frustration at having failed to kill Captain America. A dynamic context is created (in this case, verbal and visual) which is constituted by the two hands and the two dialogue captions, and which points in both directions - the later panel carries echoes of the earlier one, and the earlier one is completed by the later one.

I could argue that the hand curves in Avengers 6 for psychosomatic reasons - Zemo's experience of the memory causes his hand to curve in the same gesture in frustration as it did 20 years earlier.

It's conceivable (in fact highly probable) that at least some readers, upon seeing the Avengers 6 panel, remembered the Avengers 4 panel without having their memory jogged by referring visually to the earlier issue. That's the most awesome part of the whole phenomenon - the readers' participation in the artistic experience. The readers get to experience the joy and personal artistic discovery of realizing the underlying connection between the two panels and between the literary and visual aspects of this part of the story. This is akin to filmic modes of representation.

The only thing that almost presents a problem is that the Avengers 4 flashback is Cap's, and assuming for the moment that he could hear Zemo's words, how could he see Zemo's hand position from so far away when his head was turned toward the plane? We have to assume that this is Cap's assumption of what Zemo was saying and doing during the fateful moments. (Hey, you try using the root word "assume" in three different forms in one paragraph. Would that it were otherwise.)

Anyway, thanks for gamely plowing through my fanboy ramblings about this. As you can tell, I really love it. It's certainly one good reason to "not get food stains on this magazine!" I have to believe that these two panels have been discussed by others many times before when Silver Age Marvel has been analyzed.

OK, forcing myself to move on from Avengers 6's "Reigning Best Moment in Silver Age Marvel". I'll stick with Zemo for just a bit longer though. He has a nice little origin, and page 4 marks only the second solo Cap "story" including Avengers 4's page 7. It's nice to see a solo Cap moment, and you can hear the crash of the shattered glass as Cap bursts in, and again when the shield smashed the vat of Adhesive X. This moment reminds me of the Captain America Power Record, where the shield causes the baddie to fall into a vat of acid. This "solo Cap" scene in Avengers 6 reminded me that there has been no "Origin of Captain America" so far in the Silver Age. Maybe Stan and Jack are saving that for Tales of Suspense?

But back to Zemo. Why was he "so hated even by his own people"??? I guess we have to bring our imaginations to bear on that one. Maybe he was authorized by Hitler to perform dangerous experiments on Germans in an effort to create supersoldiers? Hopefully this mystery will be explored in a future issue. Stan imbues this Nazi war criminal with a bit of pathos later in Avengers 6: "With such a solution I could tear this accursed hood from my head and walk the streets like a normal man!" In this respect he reminds me of the Gargoyle from Incredible Hulk Vol. 1 #1.

I'll leave Zemo after two more short observations - it's good characterization to show him literally walking on the backs of natives, and it must take some doing to shred a newspaper by stomping on it.