Saturday, April 07, 2007
Comic Art
We will begin our detailed look at the characters I have called "Omnipotents" with what has to be the most visually boring character of massive power ever invented -- The Beyonder. Technically, he's dead now which strikes me as funny for a character of nearly infinite power, but then its comics and no one really dies anyway.And as for the look of the Beyonder, well, it was the eighties, do I really need to say anything else?
Like most characters this powerful, the Beyonder is not really a character, he is a plot device, and in this case perhaps the most naked of character/plot devices ever devised.
Pretty much the entire raison d'etre for the Beyonder was to get all Marvel characters in one place hacking at each other. Look at the panels on these two pages I show here, I mean all the big names are present in nearly ever panel - it's pretty much a superhero convention. Which was the whole idea.The Beyonder and the "Secret Wars" miniseries that he is the plot device for were the very early days of publishers discovering the entire line-wide story line method of driving sales. Miniseries always sell well because they typically involve the creative teams best effort. The lack of necessity for publishing on a schdule and doing the whole series at once makes for very good work. So miniseries sales were great.
It didn't take long for publishers to figure out that if the miniseries stories leaked over into the regular books, they sold better too!
And thus, Secret Wars and its now inumerable progeny were born. The Beyonder was curious about our universe and so, using his omnipotence, made pretty much everybody into two teasm and had them go at it. Of course, this made allies of enemies and enemies of allies and had all sorts of characters on one page. As things happened in the 12-issue Secret Wars mini-series they bled into the character's regular titles - thus Spider-man gained his black costume that later turned into a bad guy and will be featured in this summer's Spidey movie.This was a very controversial idea because it took a lot of creative control out of the hands of the people producing the regular series. This trend is, in part, responsible for the rise in independent publishers and radically changed contracts between creative and publishers. The Beyonder's omnipotence was more than just on the comic page.
More on omnipotent characters in a couple of weeks.
Related Tags: comics, comic books, comic art, omnipotents, Beyonder, Secret Wars
