Accidental Classics

Despite the double digits on the calendar page, I am still gently feeling my way into 2011, so much so that this sentence ended at the comma with the number “2010” all the way up until the proofreading process.

I don’t know what you did to ring in 2011, but I ended last year by doing as little as possible while still technically generating a pulse, innovating new ways to repurpose Christmas ham, and catching up on my dust-covered DVR. In addition to helping me discover exactly how much Jimmy Fallon I can absorb before needing some space, this last item entailed burning through what felt like roughly eleven hundred episodes of The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes!. This wasn’t a bad thing, mind you; for a kid’s cartoon, Avengers is as good as it gets. (For a while, I felt a little silly watching a Disney XD show like my 3-year-old daughter, but then I realized that every time I visit The Office for my day job I overhear people gossiping about The Biggest Loser and Bridalplasty and thought, “You know…? I think I win this one. I give this one to me.”)

As someone steeped in Marvel continuity, one of the things I love most about The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! is the way the writers appropriate old comics’ storylines to use in a new context like so much delicious Christmas ham. They take Avengers #1 from the sixties, stir in a little New Avengers “prison break” from the new millennium, add a little chopped Secret Invasion and serve piping hot. Neophytes get a good story, old timers get some inside jokes to chuckle at and feel smart about, and everyone goes home happy.

The storyline mined for episode #1098 was The One Where The Masters Of Evil Take Over Avengers Mansion. I’ve scarcely read an issue of Avengers from before Bendis took the wheel, and yet even without knowing exactly what issues were being referenced I knew immediately that issues were being referenced. The One Where The Masters Etc. Etc. is a classic Avengers run mentioned in the same breath as the Kree-Skrull War. Every time any villain who was ever in any iteration of the Masters of Evil is in a comic, that villain brings this incident up, like a stand-up who was named “Best Newcomer” in 1982 and still demands to see it printed on the poster outside the Funny Bone.

As I watched the show, it struck me that this storyline was a classic that didn’t know it was a classic when it was coming out. Roger Stern and John Buscema were given Avengers, and they were just telling the best story they could from roughly #273 to #277. (It says something about the classic nature of this story that, until I looked into it, I always assumed this story happened about ten years earlier than it actually did. “1986? Are you sure?”) People are still talking about it twenty years later, but I promise you that while it was coming out, Stern never once turned to Buscema and said, “People are gonna be talkin’ about this one twenty years from now. You can take that to the bank, baby!”

That seems rare in this day and age. Now, it seems like we have Events where we used to have events. There was no six month countdown preceding the death of Gwen Stacy. (Thank Christ.) The Dark Phoenix Saga wasn’t some presaged happening with a blacked-out figure in the ad in Previews. It just… sort of… happened. The team who worked on that book just worked on a great story for that book.

That random episode of The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! made me daydream quite a bit about whether those old creative teams realized what they were doing as they worked on those seminal issues. Did “Demon in a Bottle” feel like something people would reference decades later? Did Claremont and Byrne put the finishing touches on “Days of Future Past” and think, “Get used to seeing homages to these covers for the rest of your life, nerd”? I picture Frank Miller watching the ink dry on Daredevil: Reborn and thinking, “Well, I guess this is the definitive work I’ll be known for until I die. Time to hang it up, I guess.”

For the most part, I assume these were actually just creators punching the clock and accidentally defining the eras in which they lived. Often, they had no idea grown men and women would be studying their output decades later; they were just trying to cash a check. I’ve read Stan Lee’s autobiography (which, by the way, do yourself a favor) and I believe with my whole heart that Stan Lee would not remember he wrote Fantastic Four #50 if people didn’t keep telling him.

These days, the era-definers are determined and declared a year in advance. Flashpoint and Fear Itself may legitimately be great, but we’ll hear that they are many, many times before we get the chance to decide for ourselves.

It reminds me of the movie biz, actually. Twice a year now, blockbusters are planned out on a calendar. Years ago, Jaws was a game-changer, but that was an accident. At no point while he was trying to get the cameras to stop rocking in the chop for five frickin’ minutes did Spielberg exclaim to anyone, “Summer of ’75 is ours, bitches!” He was just happy to get the shark to work for a couple of shots. I mean… they hoped it would be a hit, sure, but nobody was preassembling lunchboxes.

This is why my heart still sings whenever there’s a Chew or a Walking Dead. In an age when you can’t go six months without hearing about “an Event that will change the universe forever!”, it’s nice when something occasionally makes a dent just by doing its best to be a good book.

Jim Mroczkowski didn’t mean to write the best article of all time just now; it just happened. Measurements for the plaque can be taken on Twitter.