The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Late of the 616: Mission Statement

The idea behind a new series of pieces.

I’ve been reading and collecting comics since roughly 1968, though comics had begun creeping in at least two years earlier, as my first comic was Fantastic Four #52, the debut of T’Challa, the Black Panther. Full of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby goodness, it was my introduction Marvel’s First Family as they and Johnny’s (the Human Torch) new college buddy Wyatt Wingfoot found themselves in a bizarre, high-tech jungle somewhere deep in Africa. Jack had a typical blast with the bizarre man-made terrain, and Stan & Jack accomplished in one issue what many of the current crop of writers would have taken at least two to do, and they did it better than any of those expanded versions would have likely been.

Feel free to picture me shaking my fist at kids and telling them to get off my lawn. People of different ages will have different idyllic ages for their comics, naturally. I'm still often taken aback as I meet fans who started during the early 1990s, making many of those comics "the way comics are supposed to be." To some readers I'm gong to come across as an old crank, while to a smaller group of others I'm going to be the naive kid who doesn't realize that the best came in an earlier time, or in another company's comics.

Over the years I had buddies here and there who read and collected comics along with me, though they all eventually dropped the habit. In the end, it was almost always the economics of it that factored heavily in the decision. Right about the time summer was ending and school was restarting in 1971, grade school pal Jack Pizzo found the jump in Marvel’s cover prices to 20 cents too much to abide. This was soon exacerbated by our strongly discounted, if erratic, supplier of comics (Bob’s Book Store) hitting a snag in his business operations, ending our supply of recent comics.

See, up until that time there was what I’ve since seen was probably an illegal flow of remaindered (unsold) comics from newsstands, magazine dealers, etc. that was flowing into spots such as Bob’s. Under the distribution system if comics (as with other magazines) didn’t sell, they were listed as “unsold” by the retailers, the distributor would issue credit to the retailer and the comics/magazines were supposed to be destroyed. Instead, someone in the chain was reselling them to secondary bookstores like Bob’s. If it wasn’t illegal then, then what it changed to next definitely was, as the distributors began to demand part or all of the covers to be returned with any claims of non-sale if the vendors were to get credit for them; the distributors didn’t want them back, seeing them as the cheap, disposable items they’d been considered to be for decades. They thought this would be the end of it, but the mutilated comics and magazines started to find their way to secondary “discount” book shops (again, like Bob’s) rather than being destroyed as they were supposed to be.

Sorry for the major digression there – one tale flows into the next.

In a pattern I would see again and again over the years, a comics fan exiting the hobby would always have to look for other reasons to drop comics. I suppose some of it is face-saving, as no one rushes to admit that they can’t afford something they want, and partially it’s emotional insulation because they want to declare it a dead issue and take some moral or intellectual high ground in the secret hope that others will follow suit, drop the hobby, and it will dry up and blow away. It’s a perfectly human thing to do, and it doesn’t mean their arguments were without basis. Still, there was often a hint of bruised feelings and sour grapes as parting shots were taken at the material. In Jack’s case it was the simple, straightforward observation that we knew the titular character was not going to be killed, so any sense of drama concerning that was artificial. I forget how his ten year-old self put it, but that was the gist.

Longer-time friend Bob White, who I’d only gotten into comics a little after that time, bowed out early in his Air Force career, when traveling made collecting difficult and the thought of having to haul a collection around became ridiculous. When he reached a point where he sold main chunks of his comics on short notice – his Iron Man and Captain America collections, I believe – to a dealer where he was stationed at the time and only got back a small percentage of their official market value, that was probably the final nail in the coffin. Oh, Bob made an attempt to keep up on some of them for a little while, but direct subscriptions to comics companies were generally lousy bets – if issues weren’t “lost” in transit they were often damaged, and finding one stationed in new locales made it even more difficult as mail took weeks and more to catch up. Once one makes that break by selling them off - unless it goes very well - that's usually the end of it.

Finally getting closer to the point, it has occurred to me that the early connections we make with the characters and their universes tend to remain, so that there's an interest even if it's not sufficient to get one to consider trying to formally catch up by reading the more recent comics. I know that my connections made with the Marvel universe in the sixties and early seventies remain strong despite the predations of various crap writers and almost criminally negligent, often seemingly clueless editors.

With the current cover price of a mainstream comic being a staggering $2.99, threatening strongly to jump to the almost mind-blowing level of $3.99 soon (quite a few are already there) the hobby truly has become insane. Even with my getting them for 60% or less of cover (after other fees and shipping) it’s still something I often find myself looking at cutting off. My need for a nostalgia fix, though – and that includes getting lost in new stories – has combined with my affection for the characters who are generally still under there, somewhere, to keep me plugged in.

Recent years have seen Marvel’s line of comics regularly, almost constantly, a party to large, multi-title story arc “events” that often have an interesting premise, and it occurred to me that former fans, those late of the 616 (the number retroactively assigned to Marvel’s mainstream reality in the multiverse), would be interested in reading summaries of these arcs and events written by a fellow fan. Someone who, like Mike Hanlon in Stephen King’s It, stayed back while his friends went off into a broader world and largely forgot about things of importance to their childhood selves, has kept up to speed on those things. This will hopefully provide an opportunity to catch up on some things at no cost aside from time and suffering through my style. While the likes of Bendis and Quesada and what they and others may be responsible for are as conceptually horrific as Pennywise the Clown, they can't actually harm you, and even they can't touch or mangle the likeness of the characters you have stored deep in your memories.


The fact that I noticed fairly early on that most of these “events” are much more interesting in summary than in the often disjointed details of the component issues, should help.

So, I’ll be aiming to provide summaries for the expatriate Marvel fans out there, tagging each with the “Late of the 616” label so they’re easier to spot and summon. I won't be taking these in any order, though I will try to remember to retroactively include hypertext in these pieces as I get around to providing similar summaries for stories I reference.

We’ll see how well and far this goes.

--Mike N.