La Zona Muerta

My first issue of Avengers was issue #222; not a fill in, exactly (and actually somewhat important as it’s the first outing for this particular lineup of the team), but it was not produced by a permanent creative team. The book was undergoing changes; a new editor had arrived and the editor in chief was still plotting the book, either because it was a job no one else really wanted or because he felt he was showing everyone else how things were done. Could have been a little of both, frankly, knowing EIC Jim Shooter. The new editor on the scene would be there for something around the next eighty issues of the book or so… one Mark Gruenwald.

Mark Gruenwald, the writer.

Mark Gruenwald, the explorer.

Mark Gruenwald, the goofball jester.

Mark Gruenwald, the artist (a self deprecating one, at that; he was actually pretty decent, but his heart lay elsewhere).

Mark Gruenwald, the compiler of the fanzine (prozine, really) OMNIVERSE and the author of A Treatise on Reality in Comic Literature. What was this, a doctoral thesis?

I could write about this man all day… but you know what was really funny? This wacky goofball of a man, with his rigid ideas about continuity and parallel universes and the way time travel ought to work in fiction… this living, breathing embodiment of the MIGHTY MARVEL MANNER?

He should have been a DC guy.

Oh, he would work just fine under the Jim Shooter regime, and go on to become second in command under Tom DeFalco… go on to write Captain America for over one hundred and thirty issues (!) but his heart was clad in go go checks, capes and gorillas. This was a guy who had a fancy treehouse as a child and converted it into the headquarters of his own fan club for the Justice League of America.

Mark Gruenwald was looking into a window that showed him the Marvel Universe as a real, living, breathing thing, and he felt that his job was to chronicle what he saw there.

This was a guy who thought a handbook of specifications, not unlike the Jane’s Equipment Guides, would be a benefit to BOTH editorial and the READER. The Marvel Super Specifications Book was soon born. Someone threw that clunker of a title out the window; The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe rose from the ashes; a format STILL copied today.

This was a guy who decided to use backup filler in the pages of What If to deal with confusing actual or untold pieces of Marvel continuity; a place for everything and everything in it’s place.

This was a guy who decided he was going to write the JLA story he had always wanted to tell… he used the preexisting Marvel analogues of those characters and wrote his opus; Squadron Supreme, a tale of good intentions gone horribly awry.

This was a guy who did a public access sketch show because it was fun.

Gru didn’t always get it right. He and Avengers writer Roger Stern eventually had… I don’t know if you could classify it as a falling out, but they certainly reached a creative impasse over the fate of one Monica Rambeau, the new Black, female Captain Marvel Stern had introduced (you might be familiar with her if you have watched the Captain Marvel MCU flicks). This impasse led to Stern, the greatest Avengers writer, to walk away from the Avengers, from Marvel altogether. I wasn’t there; I can’t tell you how contentious any of this was or wasn’t, but it was a rare blemish on Gru’s record.

To take it back to the Avengers, issue 222 introduced me to Hawkeye, the Marksman. Hawkeye is doing pretty well for himself for once; he has a cushy new apartment due to taking over as head of security for Cross Tech Enterprises. some money in his pocket and MAYBE, a new girlfriend in the offing. He scarfs down some potato chips, and exits the scene in an instantly entertaining, swashbuckling, manner. He trades some jovial barbs with the Savage She-Hulk, and gets dumped right on his keister, before the Masters of Evil come a’ calling.

This guy? This was my guy.

I didn’t read another issue of Avengers for YEARS… but not due to any sort of dislike; I was somewhere between the ages of three and four when issue 222 came out… but I remembered the purple-clad archer, totally smitten. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand that the Avengers title was a continuing narrative that I could ask for by name. By the time I did, probably a little under five years later, under Gruenwald’s stewardship, there was now not only the main Avengers title, but there was also West Coast Avengers (! what a clunky name) and Solo Avengers… and two of those books PROMINENTLY featured… Hawkeye the Marksman, now grown up, more mature and in charge of one half of the Avengers team.

I was smitten all over again.

My family pulled up stakes in 1988, from the wonderful, elegant house we were renting (my parents clashing with the landlord over a basic “buy the house from me or get out” type hustle) and moved elsewhere… still mostly in the same area, but closer to what is now called the “city” of Burien, Washington. Calling Burien a “city” is probably a charitable description, even today, but for some reason, the shopping district that comprised the heart of the place held always at least one comic book store, and sometimes two. Pretty good for a burgeoning four color aficionado / schmuck like yours truly. One of these comic stores (the less good one, to be honest) was more a used book store that also dealt in comics called, if memory serves, the Whaler. Maybe the proprietor was a former boat captain. Maybe he just REALLY liked Burger King’s fish sandwich offering; we’ll never know for certain. It seemed like he really didn’t like comics or the kids who bought them… but I went there one day to look at the things I couldn’t afford… and found all four issues of the Hawkeye mini series from 1983, spinning off essentially from the set up established in Avengers 222 (Hawk is a security chief for CTE with a new girlfriend who definitely WON’T betray him later). Perfect.

“What do you want to get THAT for?” the old man asked me, as if I had dug up something rotten as I brought the four issue bundle to the counter. “I, uh… like Hawkeye,” I told the man. I mean, ultimately I’m the one doing HIM a favor by taking this dog off of his hands, right? Transactions like this (being quizzed or scoffed at by bookstore owners, record store clerks, toy shop proprietors) have dogged me throughout my life. Maybe my glasses made me look like a snobbish intellectual (and I WAS) and I looked out of place? Who knows. It was a literal case of shut up and take my money. I left with what two dollars bought me; four issues of Hawkeye doing Hawkeye things.

So, the mini series ruled. I don’t have the time to get into the specifics (suffice to say that Hawkeye loses everything, including his hearing! By the end of the story… he triumphs over the bad guy and finds himself… MARRIED), but the writer and ARTIST behind this little gem…

… was Mark Gruenwald, ‘natch.

Quick ape by yours truly of the cover to Hawkeye (1983) issue one. I believe Gru had an interview somewhere where he said that, as a penciller, he could just about be saved by a good inker, which is almost exactly how I would describe myself, so I get it

Gru left this level of existence at the far, FAR too young age of 43. I doubt I’m the first to say it, but the destruction of Marvel Comics and the desperate slide of the comics industry in the mid 90s… it took a toll. Comics will break your heart, and in his case, that proved a grim, literal truth. Thirty years hence, we still remember the man, the editor, the writer, the goofball jester. He lives on; he’s the basis for those time-y wime-y guys, the Time Variance Authority, both in the actual Marvel Comics AND the MCU. The dude that played him in Loki actually LOOKED like him! A part of Gru is in my house, and I don’t just mean old issues of Cap or Omniverse… I mean that LITERALLY; when he died, his Last Will and Testament asked that his ashes be mixed into the actual ink of a comic book, and his widow made sure that became a reality. The first edition of the Squadron Supreme trade paperback actually has genuine particles of Mark Gruenwald in there. Weird, but cool.

That’s the best way to end this quick missive; Mark Gruenwald… weird, but cool.

Happy M-Day.