Avengers Defeat Galactus!
This was the scene early yesterday morning in Sam’s bedroom, where one of the most fearsome titans in the universe was soundly defeated by the Avengers, aided by members of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Ben Grimm stood proudly upon the stomach of the fallen giant and surveyed the scene with a calm wisdom while Iceman, Spider-Man, Logan and Bishop covered the lower half of this seemingly unbeatable foe.
The Hulk stomped out the eyes of the intergalatic plunderer and gave a triumphant roar of “Hulk smash!” while Professor Reed Richards plunged his elastic arm deep within Galactus’s ear to scramble his brains.
Among the fallen was a collection of villains formidable in their own rights, but puny mortals compared to the immense, god-like Galactus. Left to right: Sabretooth, Magneto, Dr. Doom (his gun still clutched in his cold, dead hand), Dr. Octopus and Juggernaut.
Iron Man was unable to participate in the attack on the supervillains, as he was out of scale. He had to be content with providing moral support from the headboard.
Do the Justice League and the Avengers ever team up? A Superman by your side would truly make the battle breezier…
There was a JLA/Avengers team-up a couple of years ago that I liked.
Although for most of the issues, they didn’t so much team-up as fight.
Yeah, I know. But I meant in Sam’s World. We always see these two teams of toys, but always… apart..hmm…
Sam is acutely aware of his heroes living in different universes. Once I started telling him a bedtime story teaming Iron Man and Martian Manhunter and Sam said “Dad, Martian Manhunter doesn’t even know that Iron Man exists.”
To say that the Mighty Martian Manhunter knows not of Iron Man is an insult to the Martians mighty mental powers! [I wonder if that’s why he’s on watch duty in JLU…’knowing all’… hmmm…]
Sam’s not a big fan of crossover fic, eh?
He knows that there is a story where Spidey meets Superman, but hasn’t shown any interest in reading it.
(I’ve also been sticking to the “All Ages” titles, because one never knows when drug addiction, racism, sexual overtones, extreme violence or other adult themes will suddenly present themselves in comics marked otherwise. Not that I have anything against those themes being in comics, but there’s no point in throwing things that are more sophisticated at him than he can understand — it makes him feel inadequate and want to read fewer comics.)
I find, ironically, that Marvel’s All age Avengers comic is far superior to the main book at this point. Cap is noble, Spider-man is funny, Wolverine is cool, and tha Hulk is a big teddy bear. It really is a good book and a fun read.
And I used to have all of those die cast Marvel characters, but I gave them to a friend of mines little boy.
I can’t even begin to look at the main lines of either Marvel or DC at this point. I like Spidey and the FF as much as anyone, but whenever I see a regular continuity cover, whether it’s 52 or Civil War or any of the regular titles, I just can’t follow them. If I pick up a comic that says Issue 1 on the cover, flip it open and can’t understand a thing that’s going on, I just give up. I don’t have the time or money.
I can remember coming across stuff I was too young for and just being confused or thinking it was boring, such as most of the jokes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when I was 7. I was SO glad when Lancelot turned up at Castle Anthrax and started killing those girls. They were slowing down the action!
Actually, the thought of getting groundwork on social issues via comics is not bad at all. I was surprised, on re-reading them, how prosocial a lot of the old Weird Fantasy comics were. Like the one where an astronaut visits a planet of robots to determine if their society is advanced enough to enter a galactic empire. Even though their inner workings are the same, the orange robots have better jobs and live in nicer houses and are programmed better, while the blue robots do their best but start out with lesser programming and live in slums. The astronaut tells them they still have some work to do before they can be accepted, and when the orange robot protests he’s only one robot, what can he do, the astronuat tells him when he figures that out they’ll be closer to ready. And of course, in the last panel it turns out the astronaut is black (he’d been wearing a helmet all this time). Sure it seems simple to adults, but to a kid it a simple, almost schematic presentation of the issues would be like a revelation.
Race is a difficult subject to bring up in our house because neither of our kids have any concept of it. Some people have light skin and some have dark skin and that’s all there is to it (and that’s how it is on Justice League too). A comic like the one you describe, while it would be a great discovery once he’s old enough to read it, would take too much explanation of social history to be of much use as a bedtime story. We’re trying to get them to want to read things on their own, and if they can’t yet understand an issue of Fantastic Four that hinges on an understanding of who Walt Disney was (to pick one issue Sam plucked from the rack), they’re never going to understand one about racism in the 70s.
50’s, I think.
I guess 5 is a bit too young – I really don’t know much about the maturation of little kids – but would you really feel obliged to explain the whole history of racism? I was thinking of it more that a kid would reading it would think, “Hey, that’s totally unfair” and walk away with the basic point not to judge people or robots on the basis of their color.
Maybe it’s different nowadays or maybe your family is just different. My grandparents and aunts and uncles on one side of the family were really racist and I was always hearing about “negros” and “spics” and so on when I was a kid. Somehow I managed not to grow up like them. My sister has a theory that seeing so many tv shows and cartoon back when we were kids (late 70’s/early 80’s) where characters were black, even if it would be considered tokenism by adults, had a part in that.
I would have to explain that there is such a thing, that there is (or was, in the case of your comic) a large section of the population who think that black people are lesser and who work to systematically keep them poor and powerless, none of which would fully explain (to them, anyway) why the astronaut takes his attitude toward the robots.
There is an incandescent moment on Justice League where the League enters a “comic book” world, where cornball 50s superheroes reign over a charming, 50s small town with colorful, lame, utterly unfrightening villains. Green Lantern John Stewart pairs up with his comic-book-world double, the Green Guardsman, who was John’s comic-book hero when he was a kid. As they sail down the street, John tells his hero how honored he is to team up with him and the Green Guardsman says “The feeling is mutual, son. You’re a real credit to your people.” Which makes John pull a weird face, pause and say, grudgingly, “Um, thanks.”
Well, Dad just about fell out of his chair laughing at that. It’s such a perfect joke and a great, rich character beat, but of course Sam was utterly confused. “What,” he cried, “what did he say? Why was that funny?”
What could I say? Sam doesn’t even know there’s a history of comic books, that they exist in a timeline and have changed over the decades; as far as he knows, there is no “history,” just that his heroes are drawn in different styles. How is he going to understand the well-meant liberal sentiments of a 50s comic-book character, that to the Guardsman he was being friendly but to John he was being patronizing and racist? It would load too much meaning onto an already densely layered episode. Better he watch the show over and over and slowly pick this stuff up than have it freighted with too much meaning.
You’d really feel obligated to explaining ALL THAT to a kid that young? You couldn’t just say that the robots were wrong because they were only paying attention to the outer shells and not the inner parts, which were all the same, and just leave it at that? My parents certainly never sat down and explianed the racially weighted social issues underlying jokes on “The Jeffersons”, but I managed to figure it out eventually. Maybe give Sam a little more credit, that a seed of understanding can be planted that will flower when he’s a bit older and had time to process it.
Sure, I could tell him that, and we often explain weighted social issues in a simple, superficial way — if he asks. If he doesn’t, we just keep reading. But the goal at this point is to make reading a habit for him, not to teach the unpleasant sides of social history. If he feels like each comic book is a test he won’t want to read them any more.
Come to think of it, his class just did Martin Luther King day a couple of weeks ago; I have no idea how they explained who King was to a class of well-to-do 5-year-old kids in Los Angeles, only one of whom is black. All he’s told us is that King was a real-life hero, like Superman but real.
Mea Whoops
Sorry, I should have figured that.
Sam’s organization also impresses me — I don’t think I even knew about the difference between Marvel and DC until I was well past his age.
Re: Mea Whoops
I don’t know how Sam figured it out (except that the branding on the toys is acute and omnipresent) but he never mixes toys from different universes. Not only does Hawkgirl never play with Kitty Pryde, but she never plays with Thomas the Tank Engine either, never visits the Playmobil zoo, never chats with Dora, never trades fashion tips with Polly Pocket.
Re: Mea Whoops
Well, Shayera is kind of anti-social.
“Iron Man was unable to participate in the attack on the supervillains, as he was out of scale.”
I was very particular about scale back when I played with action figures too (a period that when on far too long). There were no G.I. Joe vs Transformers battles on my bedroom floor, even though both toy lines were by the same manufacturer and (arguably) existed in a shared universe. On the other hand, semi-retired Star Wars figures and Fisher-Price action people often wound up playing supporting roles as visiting scientists or being taken hostage in Cobra’s schemes.
Man, why doesn’t my six year-old nephew have any action figures? The closest he has are Playmobil knights. Playmobil toys are fascinating because they’re such blank slates the child (or childish adult) can project any personality onto them, but you can’t… I dunno… share STORIES between generations the same way you can with pre-existing characters like JUSTICE LEAGUE or TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.
Re: “Iron Man was unable to participate in the attack on the supervillains, as he was out of scale.”
My daughter Kit (4) has a slew of Playmobil toys she loves (although not as much as she loves Polly Pocket). Whenever she gets out her Playmobil toys, Sam always puts down what he’s doing to horn in on the action.
Your son will like Marvel more when he’s an angsty teen who can only relate to Peter Parker or Bruce Banner… 🙂
PS- I always felt bad for Galactus… he eats because he’s hungry. What’s a poor immortal to do?!
Sam appreciates the power and dread that, say, Hulk represents, but he likes Marvel heroes best when they’re being human. Spidey and Human Torch are always aware that they live in a comic book and that makes them approachable for Sam.
How are Spidey and the Human Torch aware that they’re in a comic book?
As far as I know, the only character that breaks the fourth wall in Marvel is Deadpool…
Spidey and Johnny know they’re in a comic book in the sense that (and they share this with other Marvel heroes, Power Pack for instance) when they wake up inside a bad guy’s spaceship, chained to a table and threatened with flying buzz saws, they never panic or fret, they say something ironic like “Ugh — I hate Mondays” or “Doesn’t this guy ever give up?” Their flip tone lets the reader relax and have fun — the world isn’t going to end today; their hero will save the day and have fun doing it. They may not say “Hey, didn’t I fight you last issue?” (that’s left to the editor’s notes) but they know exactly how absurd their situation is and they know that “real life” isn’t like this.
Oh, I see what you mean. I usually just call that a coping mechanism. 😉
Not to Galactus, he bears “no malice toward any living thing”, he was just hungry.
And not only that, but he has a miserable time finding good help.
Galactus has the best hat in comics.
I’ve often wondered about Galactus’s hat and why he wears it. And why it’s pink. Does he wake up in the morning (if it can be said to be morning when one drifts endlessly through space) and say “I’m hungry, I think I’ll go eat a planet,” and then decide to wear the pink hat?
I should also note that my Galactus (now Sam’s Galactus) I bought sans one of his broad pink antennae. Fellow LJer r_sikoryak fashioned new antennae for him, which have now tragically been lost through much play.
I think he wears a giant pink hat because he can. He is Galactus, devourer of worlds. You do not mock the hat of the Devourer of Worlds. It might be the silliest hat ever, but who’s going to say so?
“We got the chessboard out, but you playin’ whack-a-mole!”
Where is Herald of Galactus?!, It’s all about the Silver Surfer. Sadly I believe myself to be the last living person on the planet that has such love for the surfer
The Herald of Galactus, sadly, is also out of scale, on a shelf on the other side of the room.