The Worm Turns
March 26, 2008 by The Fortress Keeper
Here’s some good news.
DC plans to reprint the original “Monster Society of Evil” saga in 2009.
For a longtime Captain Marvel fan like your humble host, this tale represents the Holy Grail of Golden Age reprints.
We’ve only seen bits and pieces of the 232-page serial over the years, which some have argued comprise one of the first graphic novels.
Plus it features the grand entrance of the one and only Mr. Mind, an awesome character who has resisted all attempts at “improvement” by some of the medium’s hottest creators - including Mark Waid, Jeff Smith and Grant Morrison.
They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.
Invariably their first mistake is believing those characters need “improvement.”
(I must have written about this a thousand times already in various forums…but you’ll be kind to me in my dotage and let me rant about it one more time, won’t you?)
The Fawcett Captain Marvel comics were in many ways more sophisticated and accomplished than the superhero comics published by DC at the same time. When those books were subsequently displayed by DC in the Seventies as exemplars of crudeness and naivete, it required a complete lack of historic context to pull off the misrepresentation. If, say, Batman had been cancelled at the same time Cap was, he would have been known in 1972 exclusively as that goofy jut-jawed hero who fought aliens and travelled back in time and lived with a boy sidekick…not as the grim dark detective of Neal Adams.
(Funnily enough, Frank Miller treated the original Cap with more respect than most, in the one genuinely moving sequence from Dark Knight Strikes Back…
I’ve been wanting to read “Monster Society of Evil” for ages, and I’m tickled to learn we’ll finally get the chance.