NB: Now my scanner's working I am not only adding images to new posts in this series, but I've updated the previous posts with scanned images. Wow! No expense spared!
Inevitably, Journey into Mystery #178 begins with a flashback. About a fifth of the total page count so far has been dedicated to flashbacks, so why not? It’s business as usual on that level, but there’s immediately something different about how the book looks.
The narrator never turns up again, by the way |
Since Kane left, the
art has been provided by Silver Age stalwarts Bob Brown and Herb
Trimpe. They’re decent artists – and Bob Brown makes a good fist
of things – but their style looks stolid and staid beside what
we’ve got here. After the flashback’s been packed away, the story
proper begins with this arresting image:
Surely no flesh and
blood comics fan could resist this! It’s got everything: amazing
angle on the firm-jawed hero, weird threatening aliens and a gorgeous
woman that needs saving. It’s more than a comics frame – it draws
more on the power of golden age SF illustration and the cosmic sci fi
surrealism coming out of Europe in the late 60s and early 70s than
the efforts of Brown and Trimpe’s 60s catalogue art approach.
We’re far away from
the Marvel Universe again – much further than Counter Earth – so
the story has an excitingly unconstrained feel. Worlds can be
destroyed, characters can die, things can be turned upside down and
there’s no consequence.
I don’t know how much
input Len Wein had into things, but this is written, pencilled and
inked by Starlin. The plot has the slightly deranged randomness of a
personal folly. Warlock’s encounter with the beautiful astronaut
above sets him against the Universal Church of Truth, a super fascist
religion that dominates the galaxy. The twist is that that the
Church’s living god – Magus – is a future version of himself.
To defeat the church he must destroy himself!
It’s a great
combination of space opera, fashionable anti-authoritarian parable
and psychic exploration, all within the typically bombastic verbal
and visual vocabulary of the Marvel way.
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