Continuing my week-long look at my inner child's favourite Marvel Comics...

Marvel Premiere #47-48 by David Michelinie, John Byrne and Bob Layton

When these issues first appeared in early 1979, it seemed obvious to me that a regular Ant-Man series must soon follow. Not only was I completely off-base, but Scott Lang (the new Ant-Man introduced here) languished as third-rate window dressing for the Marvel Universe until very recently, when he was given a brief moment in the spotlight in some Brian Michael Bendis-written comics before being utterly obliterated in Bendis's first Avengers issue.

The Bob Layton-drawn cover of #47 jumped right off the stands and grabbed my attention. The image of Ant-Man atop an ant, standing on a newspaper, reaching up toward a handheld magnifying glass (with a gun barrel pointing at him as well, although this was an unnecessary threat on an excellently designed cover) was a real eye-catcher. No one has ever improved on Kirby's original, retro-five-minutes-after-it-was-created costume design for this character, not even Kirby himself. Decades later, a mere glimpse at that cover sends me back to that period of my life. Marvel Comics was the best, and this comic proved it again in spades.

What we have in these two issues is a clever, if fairly standard, origin story. As I say, it's obviously a set-up for an ongoing series, and it's too bad Scott Lang never again got this kind of quality spotlight in the succeeding decades -- because he was given an exciting and top-notch introduction here by some of Marvel's top talents at the very top of their game.

Writer David Michelinie is much better known as a longtime Iron Man scripter whose work with inker/co-plotter Bob Layton remains some of the best-loved tales of the Golden Avenger. Layton is along for the ride here as well, and these two issues are very bit as entertaining and demonstrate the same solid storytelling found in their best Iron Man issues.

Penciler John Byrne was really getting into his prime here as well, turning in work that is both action-packed and well designed. It's probably much too late now to find out whose idea it was to begin the tale in the middle of the action, but the splash page of #47 features Scott Lang (we don't know yet it isn't Henry Pym) in the middle of a pitched battle with armed (and armoured) guards while a doctor tries to protect a covered patient obviously in the middle of surgery.

It's obvious from the dialogue on this splash page that this probably isn't the Ant-Man we all know and love. His thought balloons reveal he is worried because if the doctor's patient lives -- "My daughter will die!"

Ant-Man battles the goons for a few pages before we kick into flashback mode and find out our protagonist is not Henry Pym, but an ex-con named Scott Lang. We see Lang released from prison after a brief expository interlude where the prison warden informs Lang (and us, of course) that he has been a model prisoner and an electronic genius. See, as recently as two decades ago, heroes who were reformed bad guys had to have always had a heart of gold. Former serial killers and hitmen generally were not thought of as good super-hero material.

We meet the light of Lang's life, his 9-year old daughter Cassie (who later became a superhero herself, in Tom DeFalco's A-Next), a "bundle of towheaded love," who Lang soon discovers is suffering from an inoperable medical condition. Michelinie creates a true human drama here; imagine spending years in prison, only to get out ready to start again (Lang scores a job working for Tony Stark) and almost immediately learn your daughter is dying. It's tragic, and as it might in the real world, it forces Lang to consider turning to his old ways to pay for the mounting medical bills.

Lang learns about a cutting-edge surgeon, Erica Sondheim, and resolves to meet her to ask if anything can be done for his daughter. As he arrives at the Sondheim Institute, he finds a bunch of thugs "helping" the doctor move her practice to a new location. A gigantic arm reaches from a sedan and throws Lang into a wall, then the car departs with the doctor. Lang notes the license plate number, and uses his "contacts in the Department of Motor Vehicles" (yeah, we all have those, right?) to trace the car's owner.

Lang's investigation brings him to the heavily barricaded Cross Technological Enterprises facility. He decides he'll need to hire a small army to get in to talk to Dr. Sondheim, so he breaks into one of the houses he had been casing earlier. Luckily, the home is the Creskill digs of Henry Pym, and Lang stumbles upon Pym's old Ant-Man getup. Realizing the costume will allow him to get into CTE all by himself, he takes it back to his apartment and summons an army of ants.

Lang quickly (perhaps too quickly, but hey, it was the '80s, folks) figures out how to work with the ants and use the costume's shrinking canisters, and flies off to CTE to find the good doctor.

It should be noted here that Michelinie never wavers from the idea that Lang is basically a good guy. The Ant-Man costume would have allowed him to steal the money he needed to pay his daughter's bills, and he could have had a very profitable criminal career, but his first and only focus is his daughter's health. Arriving at CTE, the new Ant-Man finds Dr. Sondheim operating on an unknown patient, and we end up at the point we came in on the splash page.

As Lang battles the CTE armored guards, the patient on Sondheim's operating table wakes up. He looks a bit like a gigantic, muscular Richard Nixon as he informs Lang he intends to destroy him -- "Rather utterly!" (Isn't that a split infinitive or a dangling participle or somesuch?)

There are some terrific artistic touches in this first part of the two-part tale. Layton was probably second only to Terry Austin in terms of meshing with Byrne's still Neal Adams-esque style in those days (although rumour at the time had it Byrne disliked Layton's inks), and the shots of Ant-Man's gleaming helmet or the Zip-A-Toned helmets on the CTE thugs gave the art a real shine that came through even on the crappy paper the books were printed on. Byrne has some fun with the angles, as any clever artist working with a shrinking hero always does, and the double-page spread that concludes this issue is quite dramatic, despite the somewhat goofy dialogue and the Nixon-esque look of the villain.

Part two of the origin of the new Ant-Man in issue #48 doesn't start as strong as part one, given a fairly unspectacular Dave Cockrum/Bob McLeod cover. The most prominent item on the cover is the ass of the ant Scott Lang is riding, although the big, goofy pink villain Darren Cross is also a large part of the design. Compared to the cover of the previous issue, to my mind a classic of the era, this one seems pretty generic.

The story itself picks up right where #47 left off, as big, pink, Nixon-esque Darren Cross rises from the operating table and confronts Ant-Man. From page one, the issue suffers from the loss of #47's letterer Tom Orzechowski, whose elegant work always lent Byrne's Uncanny X-Men a gravitas it might not have had with the more ordinary lettering style of Diana Albers, who handles the task here.

And while these two issues remain some of my all-time favourite Marvel comics, I have to say they'd be more well-regarded in my memory if more thought had been put into the look of the villain. While Darren Cross's origin (he became big, grotesque and pink after suffering a heart condition and receiving an experimental treatment) is serviceable, his appearance, especially the black Speedo, is just goofy. I think part of the reason I remain fonder of part one than part two of this story is that Cross hardly appears in the first half. Once he comes out from under the sheet of that operating table, the drama of the story is somewhat undermined.

The plot and the artwork are otherwise strong, as Cross breaks the antennae off Lang's helmet, takes his shrinking gas cylinders and tosses his ass in the convenient CTE slammer. We learn through flashbacks that since contracting his unfortunate condition, Cross has had to undergo a series of heart transplants, lately using his army of thugs to round up winos and bums who he keeps imprisoned until he needs a new ticker. But Cross now decides he will forego the use of the heart of the next appointed bum and instead have the heart "of a strong and irritatingly clever superhero." Oh, my, what a turn of events!

In a stunning display of Deus Ex Machina, we learn Lang hid a pair of back-up antennae in his boots, fearing he might break the helmet's original pair because of his inexperience. Lang calls in the ants, who bring him his (well, Hank Pym's!) gas canisters. He escapes his cell, and confronts Cross once more. In the heat of their second battle, Cross suddenly crumples -- and we learn Dr. Sondheim had had enough of the evil industrialist's illicit transplants. She had put Cross's old heart back in his chest during the operation Lang interrupted at the beginning of the story, knowing full well that Cross would die as a result of her (heh) double-cross.

Sondheim is anguished at what she has done, but she knows she has saved lives by taking that of Darren Cross. Ant-Man tells her there's one more life waiting for her to save -- his daughter.

It's a fairly convenient wrap-up to the story, and as an adult it seems a little more contrived and abrupt than it did when I was 13 years old. But the two-part tale is an excellent setup for the new Ant-Man, giving him both a good reason for taking on Henry Pym's former identity and a well-drawn supporting cast including Dr. Sondheim and Cassie Lang.

In the epilogue in #48, Scott Lang learns Sondheim's surgery has been a success and his daughter will fully recover. Lang knows he will have to go back to prison once the ants tell Henry Pym what went down -- he's such a hero it never occurs him to just stomp the little buggers -- but then Pym himself appears, and we learn it's not his first appearance in the tale.

In the first part of the story, we saw a security laser blast that Lang had assumed was controlled by a timer. Here, Henry Pym tells him he was following him all along, from the moment Lang broke into his Creskill home, and it was he, Pym, that was zapped by the laser. Pym was stunned, but able to observe the events that followed, and tells Lang to keep the Ant-Man costume. After all, "The world can always use another hero."

In reading this story again (I've read it dozens of times since buying it new off the stands in 1979), I agree wholeheartedly with Henry Pym. It's too bad no regular series ever followed. Scott Lang (and his daughter) have appeared off and on in the decades that followed, but I can't help but think that his potential as a character was really thrown away even before he was incinerated in Avengers #500. Here was a real hero, who put his life in jeopardy to save his daughter, and who found forgiveness and redemption in his brief moment in the spotlight.

Daredevil #233 by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

It's difficult for me to pick a single issue of Frank Miller's Daredevil as my favourite. Miller made his reputation in a spectacular run on the title (#158-191, with only a single fill-in issue by Steve Ditko very early on), first as artist (#158-167) and especially once he began scripting with #168, which also introduced the character of Elektra and set the tone and pace of the rest of Miller's initial run.

Even after Miller left with the extraordinary Daredevil #191 (in which Matt Murdock plays Russian Roulette with a paralyzed Bullseye), he was never far from the character. He did some graphic novels, including Elektra Lives Again (a solo hardcover) and some collaborations with Bill Sienkiewicz and John Romita Jr.

But despite my love of Miller's first stint on Daredevil, my all-time favourite superhero storyline has to be Daredevil: Born Again, which ran from #227-233, and was drawn by David Mazzucchelli (who also illustrated Miller's Batman: Year One).

Mazzucchelli had been pencilling the title for a while, but was not considered an extraordinary artist. Competent, but not that exciting. When Miller returned to write this outstanding run of issues, Mazzucchelli was seemingly transformed as a talent. Whether he was energized by Miller's scripting (far superior to the issues Mazzucchelli drew under other writers), or guidance from Miller or editor Ralph Macchio, Mazzucchelli turned in a transformative comics work that stands as one of the finest examples of American superhero comics ever.

Miller and Mazzucchelli's story told how a heroin-addicted Karen Page sold Matt Murdock's secret identity for a fix, and how the Kingpin subsequently dismantled the entire life of the Man Without Fear.

If you've never read this story, you are denying yourself the single finest story Marvel has ever published. Miller used adult themes in a way that surpassed his previous run, and Mazzucchelli's artwork complemented it perfectly. Even Miller himself illustrating this story would not have achieved the impact of the two of them working together.

By "adult themes," by the way, I don't mean sex and drugs, although both make significant appearances here. No, I mean such adult themes as trust, loss, betrayal and redemption. I am not kidding when I call this the most adult superhero story I've ever read. Yeah, stuff blows up, but this is a story grounded in the simplest parts of being human, and the heights and depths to which people can go, of their own design or not. And it all comes to a head in this final issue of the arc.

For a story that so wonderfully incorporates some of his finest creations, Jack Kirby gets a "Respectfully dedicated to" box on the explosive splash page. The Kingpin's trump card, a psychopathic super-soldier named Nuke, is dropping napalm on Hell's Kitchen, and Matt Murdock has finally reclaimed his identity as Daredevil, now struggling to save lives amid the carnage.

Nuke is a good answer to those who say Miller's Batman in Dark Knight Returns was some sort of Neo-Fascist. We see what Miller thinks of mindless dedication to the cause of American Justice, and it's not much. Nuke is a pathetic, hulking brute of a moron, literally painted with the flag and ready to lay down lives (except his own) at the behest of any properly-garbed authority figure. Batman in DKR may have wanted things his way, but at least he wanted to make a better world. Nuke just wants to kill things and uses patriotism as an excuse.

Frank Miller did not create Ben Urich, but he certainly developed the character into one of the most human supporting characters ever seen in superhero comics. Here, he has been put through his own personal hell (also at the hands of the Kingpin), and finally has found his redemption. Urich documents the battle in Hell's Kitchen at the risk of his own (and his photographer's) life. He knows this story is more important than his safety.

Suddenly, in one of their most riveting appearances, and quite unexpectedly, the Avengers show up. Captain America was on the cover, but when he and Thor and Iron Man arrive on the scene, each is given a single panel which defines their character better than dozens of issues of attempts by other writers on their solo titles.

Matt Murdock and Captain America have an extraordinary exchange a little while later on a rooftop, which ends not with the thoughts of Daredevil but Captain America, offended by Nuke's flag tattoo, and bewildered by DD's seeming indifference to it (he can't see it of course, but Cap doesn't know that):

It doesn't mean anything to them, thinks the soldier. To them, it's just a piece of cloth. Sometimes I feel so weak.

Captain America gets to the bottom of Nuke's origin as the brutal madman escapes military custody. A battle ensues in which Nuke is mortally wounded, and in his dying moments Miller manages to give even this horrific creation a modicum of redemption. The Kingpin has been thwarted, utterly. The final shot of the villain of this piece is reminiscent of the final panel we saw of Bullseye when he was crippled at the end of #181, and we are left with the impression that the Kingpin's efforts to destroy Matt Murdock have crippled the Kingpin's empire as much as that fall many months ago crippled Bullseye.

The final page is a wonderful, full-page spread of the newly-reborn Matt Murdock and Karen Page walking along the street of their (also being reborn) Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood. Miller's final words are both simple and profound, and the reader is given a supreme sense of closure: this story had a definite beginning, middle and end, as the best stories do, and it retains a depth and power unmatched by any other superhero story in the 60-plus years of American comic books.

Daredevil: Born Again is as good as superhero comics get, and probably as good as they will ever get.