Creators have been making some vigorous efforts to promote their critically admired but low-selling titles. Peter David is trying his best to spread the word about FALLEN ANGEL, and Ed Brubaker is working hard to give SLEEPER a boost. It’s got me thinking about some of the books I liked but thought never got a fair shake in the marketplace.
Two of them in particular have resonance for the current state of both of the titles mentioned above. YOUNG HEROES IN LOVE and CHASE both stepped outside genre boundaries. YHIL was primarily a soap opera about superheroes, like NOBLE CAUSES but more tongue-in-cheek. CHASE had kind of an X-FILES feel, focusing on an investigator who monitored super-beings for a government agency. Both got reasonably good reviews, and neither made it much past a dozen issues.
I loved Gail Simone’s work on AGENT X, and I dropped it when Marvel revamped it with a new creative team. Happily, they ended the book’s run with a six-issue arc by the original creative team. Unhappily, it still ended.
There are two other titles by Peter David that fall into the “gosh, I miss that book” category. YOUNG JUSTICE got swept aside for the new TEEN TITANS and OUTSIDERS titles, as did the TITANS series at the time. Admittedly, TITANS was pretty weak, but YJ seemed to be plugging along just fine. To my thinking, it was a much better book about adolescent heroes than the frequently gruesome TT. (OUTSIDERS is preferable to TITANS, but any book that doesn’t feature a half-dozen “cute” kids to the exclusion of the title characters has an unfair advantage.)
From Marvel, there’s David’s CAPTAIN MARVEL. This is a more complicated case for me. I loved it prior to the re-launch, and I even liked the new take on the title for a while. But the “crazy Genis” story stretched out long past its expiration date. Still, it seemed to be moving back towards a direction and tone I liked.
I liked a lot of DC’s MARTIAN MANHUNTER ongoing, particularly the moody art by Tom Mandrake. Writer John Ostrander had a lot of interesting story ideas and didn’t confine himself to any particular genres. He mixed character studies, detective stories, and more traditional super-hero action in an effective way.
Did I have a point here? Other than, “Comics I like shouldn’t be cancelled?” Or am I just wallowing in nostalgia?