Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

In the late 90s, the quality black hole that had affected almost every comic released in the past decade was starting to lose its grip, not least due to the efforts of writers like Kurt Busiek, who was producing some top quality superheroics on both Avengers and Thunderbolts. In 1998, all of the Marvel Annuals took a “team-up” approach, and Busiek’s contribution (along with co-writers Karl and Barbera Kesel) was the “Captain America/Citizen V” team-up, which, with series regular Mark Bagley on art, was a Thunderbolts annual in all but name.

Bagley’s artwork was as strong then as it is now, delivering consistent, expressive superhero work that places him alongside the likes of John Romita Jr. In this issue, removed from the traditional urban superhero setting, Bagley gets the chance to render jungles and castles in a story that’s positively swashbuckling, as Citizen V and Captain America team up to fight Baron Zemo and Techno.

There are a few continuity-based oddities in the issue. At this point in history, for example, Captain America was using his bizarre photon-shield, The Fixer is in his “Techno” incarnation, and the current incarnation of Citizen V was pretending to be a man, which is a fairly major plot-point that gets addressed in this annual. Ten years later, it seems odd to see such things being treated as the status quo, but it’s also a constant reminder that any change, no matter how permanent it might seem, is usually just a story with an ending somewhere.

Indeed, even the traditional superheroic actions of Captain America seem far removed from the recent political intrigue of the character, both before and after his death. Busiek’s handle on him is actually remarkably effective, though, as he organises Zemo’s slaves against him and helps Citizen V assume her mantle, inspiring others through his actions. This issue (and ’98’s “Captain America / Iron Man” annual, also by Busiek) both suggest that Busiek’s Captain America might just be one of those great runs that never happened - understandably, given how much control Busiek already had over the Avengers franchise at the time, writing both Avengers, Iron Man and Thunderbolts (which had close ties to the property) but none of that makes it any less disappointing that a Busiek run on Cap never happened.

Taken in isolation, it’s a nice little story that treads some unfamiliar ground with some largely under-used characters who’ve fallen out of favour in recent years, though the issue really shines if taken as the chapter of Thunderbolts, slotting somewhere between #17 and #21. With Busiek’s writing and Bagley’s art, it was never going to be a mediocre turn, though, and it’s certainly worth picking up if you see it cheap.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Since we’re in the middle of an exciting! Spidey! Relaunch!, promising a return to classic Spidey storytelling and all that stuff, it was I suppose inevitable that at some point we’d turn our eye to the last time this all happened - and the first issue of J. Michael Stracynski’s run on Amazing. It’s almost as amazing to think of it now as it is to imagine the fact that it was seven years ago, but when JMS first came along he was seen as a genuine breath of fresh air after the full-on stagnation of the dreaded Mackie/Byrne years (which themselves were an attempt to finally pull Spidey out of the post-Clone Saga funk). Of course, back then we didn’t know how it would all turn out - but there was a definite sense of optimism, with the movie on the way and a revitalised character leading up to it.

At the time, then, I was one of the people wowed by this issue and the ones that immediately followed. And you know, looking back over it now, there’s still plenty to enjoy. Much as Dan Slott has managed to do in his early issues (and the other “Brain Trust” members to a much lesser extent), JMS sets out his stall with an opening sequence that, although it features Spidey swinging around on his own, grumbling to himself, is filled with classic “why me?” banter - a rambling monologue about pockets a particularly amusing highlight. He’s also economical with his storytelling, making good use of the first page to explain the current status quo (Peter living on his own, Mary Jane having left him) for those brought onboard by the relaunch. After bounding around for a bit setting up elements that will later be developed (such as the first suggestion that Peter might go and work in a school), we settle into the meat of the opening arc - the appearance of Ezekiel.

Now. It’s hard to really get too much into discussing Ezekiel’s appearance without considering the longer-term ramifications of him, and of the revelations that he makes about Peter’s powers. Put simply, JMS made a right royal cock-up of things by introducing all kinds of mystical rubbish that had no place whatsoever in a Spider-Man book. Not that it was a particularly bad idea that some kind of totemic spider-energy sought out a vessel for these powers once in a generation, and that Ezekiel had brought about all kinds of havoc by going and snatching them for himself - it just wasn’t Spider-Man. But that’s all retrospective context, and we’re supposed to be looking at these issues in isolation - and it has to be said, Ezekiel’s first appearance is great. His presence is a complete surprise - as much to us as it is to Peter - he’s sharp and funny (”Darn, there go my shoes again…”), and in an instant he raises all kinds of questions about things that Peter had spent his entire life taken for granted. The fact that the answers to those questions turned out to be crap is kind of irrelevant in the immediate context - this was exactly the kick up the arse that the series and character needed at that point in time.

Helping with the revitalisation of the series - as he always seems to do - is John Romita Jr returning to art duties. I’m not sure quite how it is that one of Amazing’s longest-serving artists always manages to freshen up the series when he returns, but he does. Scott Hanna’s sharp and tight inks make for a different style to when Klaus Janson is finishing, but coupled with a fine, vibrant colouring job the whole thing looks utterly terrific - arguably better, in fact, than JRJr’s recent work on the Slott run.  In fact, it’s fair to say that it’s this particular run that confirmed Romita Jr’s place as my favourite Spidey artist.

While not an absolutely perfect beginning - even with his first appearance in the closing pages, Morlun seems to tick all kinds of “cliche” boxes - Straczynski certainly hit the ground running in giving Spidey fans a character and a series to be excited about again. As with Slott’s successful recent arc, the appeal of the early issues lies less in the specifics of the story and more in boiling it back down to classic, conventional Spidey storytelling, judging the tone perfectly between lightness and angst. But the fact that JMS would soon get bogged down in storylines that simply felt wrong for the comic, turning his run as a whole into an overlong and largely disliked slog, might act as a lesson for the Brain Trust should they get too confident in the book’s current success…

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

With the Secret Invasion event wrapping up, it’s worth reflecting on the change in Brian Bendis’s writing style the crossover has necessitated. After the mixed success of House of M, Mark Millar was brought in to write the core book for Civil War, with his explosive writing style seen as being more appropriate for the bombast of an all-guns-blazing crossover. Given the care with which Bendis has seeded the invasion, however, there was little option but for him to take the reins himself. However, as this issue makes clear, the venture has been considerably distant from his comfort zone as a writer.

After “Spider-Woman” abandons the team and removes the Skrull Electra’s body, the outlaw Avengers are at something of a loss, with the implications of the conspiracy beginning to sink in. Meanwhile, the attempted sale of a stolen SHIELD cyborg heralds a shakeup in the super-powered underworld. The issue flicks between the two settings fairly evenly, with the auction scenes adding some much-needed drive and energy to counteract the slow onset of paranoia during the team’s debates. Bendis’s understanding of Peter Parker is used to great effect here, as the character’s comic quips serve as a perfect way of articulating what the rest of the cast are thinking. The writer takes some elementary but sensible steps to build intrigue, keeping glimpses of the Hood to a minimum while having his “representative” do the talking, making the reader as much a victim of his sales pitch as the villains attending the auction. Jessica Jones’ ignorance of the doppelganger plot is used for a brief recap, and even niggling issues such as where Hawkeye acquired the combat skills now on show are tied into the ongoing development of the Marvel Universe. Everything feels so polished and coherent that it’s impossible not to get drawn into the wider world that the writer is crafting.

The final section of the book plays to Bendis’s strengths perfectly. With such a large cast, it makes perfect sense that one of them would go looking for trouble, and the writer picks the right character for the job. Wolverine’s confrontation with the Hood makes clear that the auction scenes are directly relevant to the arc, and leaves the reader intrigued as to how this new plotline will intersect with the larger Skrull story. Returning to the issue a year later, it’s hard not to miss the gradual progression of events which have characterised the author’s work. Irrespective of the weaknesses of the Secret Invasion’s structuring, Bendis is one of the industries brightest talents, and a return to his home turf is eagerly awaited.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Alternatively, file this one alongside Fantastic Four v1, #454. This issue marked one of the high points of Claremont’s run on Fantastic Four, following several months of rather tedious alternate-universe hopping crammed with villains devoid of personality and a lot of old Excalibur concepts regarding the multiverse thrown into the mix. Not the worst fit for Marvel’s explorers, admittedly, but you only had to look at the F4 fighting a legion of Captain Britains drawn from multiple dimensions to know that things aren’t being handled quite as tightly as they could be. Luckily, with Doom now scheduled to return to the spotlight following a 2-year absence from the Marvel stage, Claremont was free to begin the arc that ended his run, exploring the duality of Reed and Doom.

While Claremont’s run often suffered from fairly two-dimensional characterisation - something deeply evident in Claremont’s hammy dialogue - the plotting in the latter half is (believe it or not) engaging enough to make up for it. Claremont’s take on the F4 is at least consistent, so Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny all stick to their defined personalities just enough to keep you in the story, even if every time a character speaks it feels like they’re overacting.

This particular issue followed a 5th Week event full of comics set on the devastated Heroes Reborn Earth, which had been saved by Ashema in the “Heroes Return” miniseries, but not before it experienced massive environmental and social upheavel following the departure of the Marvel Heroes that had been living there while assumed dead for the past year. Free from (credible) interference, Doom effectively conquered the planet, becoming its champion in the process, and ”Heroes Reborn: Doom”, the final issue of the 5th week event, tied directly into the opening of Fantastic Four #25 as he finally escaped the Heroes Reborn pocket dimension, bringing the entire planet with him.

The Four spend much of the issue fighting Doom and his superhuman allies from the HR Earth, before guidance from Ashema leads them to the real threat - the insane and powerful Dreaming Celestial. With Doom now back on the table, Claremont takes the opportunity to explore the relationship between the teenage version of Valeria he added to the cast, and the man she knows as her father, and these two characters get perhaps the best material of the issue with their interactions. The story climaxes when Reed and Doom unite against the Dreaming Celestial and after the dust clears, only Doom appears to be left standing.

All is not as it appears, however - future issues reveal that Reed is actually trapped in Doom’s armour, with some fairly terrifying consequences resulting from this, and the remaining issues of the Claremont/Larocca run contain some unique and memorable moments. While many elements of the run go unacknowledged, a few have survived, such as “Wilhemina” Lumpkin, niece of the original (now appearing in Cornell’s Fantastic Four: True Story), Alyssa Moy (as previously documented) and Valeria, who was eventually added as a permanent member of the cast following some age-regression shenanigans. By no means is this a classic run, but certainly the “Return of Doctor Doom” storyline (encompassing #25) is a hidden gem that, at the very least, deserves to be collected.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

As you may have gathered, James, Seb and I share fond memories of “the UK’s official Sega comic“. Not to be confused with the US series published by Archie, STC was a fortnightly anthology book, published from 1993 to 2002. The title was closely modelled on 2000A.D., with which it shared an editor. Each issue was built around a seven-page Sonic strip, supported by three or so other stories based on Sonic’s supporting cast or other Sega franchises. But what made the title so endearing?

With global franchises so tightly controlled by their owners, it comes as something of a shock to reflect on the situation a mere fifteen years ago. Sega Enterprises were caught on the hop by the success of Yuji Naka’s creation, allowing their global subsidiaries to handle the character as they saw fit. This divergence, with the company’s three main territories each devising their own conceptualisation and tone for the franchise, resulted in some surprisingly different interpretations. Although striving to be consistent with the other UK holders of the Sonic licence, Fleetway had authority to portray the character as they saw fit, giving their creatives a surprisingly large amount of freedom. Although a number of writers contributed to the title, Nigel Kitching and Lew Stringer were the book’s mainstays. Their differing approaches complimented each other well, with Stringer’s self-contained episodic tales punctuating Kitching’s more in-depth epics. The artistic side was more varied, but Richard Elson’s clean and energetic style deservedly secured him priority for the lead strip, which he drew for most of the book’s life.

For a title with a bi-monthly publishing schedule, reaching the fiftieth issue mark is less of an achievement than might be initially supposed. Regardless, some sort of celebration was in order, and Nigel Kitching structured his ongoing “Day of the Death Egg” main-strip saga accordingly. He and Elson here serve up a showdown between Sonic, Knuckles and fan-favourite enemy Metallix. Although the writer has expressed pride at the emotional content he was sometimes able to introduce into the series, with one character experiencing a remarkably convincing nervous breakdown, the focus here is very much on action, with most of the instalment a straight fight sequence between Super Sonic and his robotic counterpart. In an example of the surprisingly loose control which Sega displayed over the property, the book portrayed the hedgehog’s alter ego as a bloodthirsty psychopath, who here decapitates his opponent before attacking Knuckles. Kitching first played this bold stroke in the early in the book’s life, and retained the concept’s power by carefully rationing Super Sonic’s appearances. The other strips in this issue are something of a mixed bag. While the short-lived Shinobi series adds some unexpected variety to the book, the team was never really able to find a way to make Tails an interesting character in his own right, and the fox’s strip here is distinctly weak. The high point of the trio of back-up strips is the Captain Plunder series, rounding out a comedy character first introduced in the main Sonic story several issues before. The writer’s affection for his own creations is obvious, and Plunder and his crew made several appearances throughout the book’s life.

After the book had reached the five-year lifespan which Fleetway’s management had always envisaged for it, they began winding the title down, replacing back-up strips with reprints and eventually axing new content altogether. For dead licensed comic, however, it’s enjoyed a surprisingly active afterlife, and most of its creators still work in the industry today. The one exception to this, however, is Kitching. The book’s lead writer sadly never found another home for his scripting talents, and these days works mainly as an illustrator in the children’s book market.

With hindsight, the key to the book’s success lies in its ability to treat the characters as its own. Normally only licensed comics with direct input from the franchises’ original creators have the confidence to up-end concepts without descending into fan-fiction. However, Kitching and Stinger’s effective ownership of the European iteration of Mobius, together with a near-instinctive feel for the tone of the series, still leaves a warm glow in many of their readers’ minds.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Our occasional trip through DC crossoverville now brings us to Millennium, the 1987/88 event that has bafflingly recently been collected in trade form (while the far superior likes of Armageddon 2001 are spoken of in the same breath as Marvel’s Clone Saga). Before DC had hit upon the technique of setting these annual crossovers’ in the respective books’ annuals, with individual tales that were largely standalone but at least followed the theme of the crossover, such events would tend to simply weave their entire narrative through a limited miniseries and various spin-off books. It’s not a hugely satisfying way of doing things, especially when the story is as weak as this (basically, the Manhunters are a bunch of red robotty things created by the Guardians of the Universe as a first attempt to run an “intergalactic police force” - the second attempt being the Green Lantern Corps. Manhunters now attacking the Guardians as well as Earth, yadda yadda yadda, secret sleeper agents planted among the supporting cast of various DC books in a Secret Invasionish kind of way, etc. etc.).

But as with all crossovers, it’s not like you can’t get decent issues out of it, depending on the creative teams at their time. Giffen, deMatteis and Maguire were at the absolute height of their Justice League powers at this point, and the curious thing about this issue - which sees a group of heroes, some of whom are current JL members, some former, mounting an assault on the Manhunters’ homeworld - is that it gives us the opportunity to see how they would have coped had they been allowed to have A-list characters in their team (in addition to JLI members J’onn J’onnz and Captain Atom, the team here includes Superman, Hal Jordan and Hawkman/Hawkwoman).

And the answer is… very well, as it happens. In the absence of characters like Blue Beetle and Guy Gardner, there’s less in the way of laugh-out-loud, outright character comedy. But deMatteis’ dialogue still absolutely zings, and there are a lot of character moments to enjoy. Most notably, there’s an excellent portrayal of the relationship between the two Hawks (Shayera having a blast, Katar grumpily wondering “why everyone feels so compelled to make jokes all the time”), but there are great little lines dotted throughout. Superman gets played entirely straight, of course, but his earnestness is used playfully rather than being made fun of.

The other thing the issue is notable for is the introduction of probably Giffen/deMatteis’ most famous creation - the woefully underqualified, walking catastrophe of a Green Lantern known as G’Nort. Despite the fact that his design hadn’t really been nailed down yet - he’s more “furry bloke” than out-and-out “walking dog” - he’s great fun in his first two-page appearance, cheerfully telling Katma Tui (apropos of nothing) that “They don’t even have a john in here!”, while being saluted by Superman for his bravery in taking on the manhunters alone (”By the way… uh… what’s a manhunter?”). It also draws some great comedy out of the usually-strait-laced Jordan: “Do you really think it’s fair, calling him a yo-yo?” “Believe me, Superman - I’m being kind.”

Topping it all off, as ever in the early part of the JLI run, is Kevin Maguire’s excellent art. Right from the first time I read this - and we’re talking almost twenty years ago, here - it made me think what a great job he’d do on a main Superman title, as he gets the character spot-on with a very Christopher Reeve-esque interpretation. He and colourist Gene D’Angelo also cope well with the storytelling handicap of having to draw almost an entire issue against a yellow background (the Manhunters having built their homeworld specifically to defend against Green Lanterns).

Despite being hampered by the constraints of a slightly naff crossover, team JLI were still able to turn out great comics. If anything, it’s only a shame that they were only given some of these characters for one issue - although, of course, you’d never want to trade Beetle, Booster and Guy for anybody. Nowadays, though, this particular issue still stands up well - it’s a little jarring if you try to just read it in sequence with the rest of JLI, but as a part of Millennium itself, it was by far the standout moment.