Saturday, May 31, 2008

Nostalgia, only more interesting: 1985 #1


If, like me, you clearly remember the 1980s, you are old! Ouch. That's depressing. Let's move on. Anyway, if you remember the '80s, you may remember horrible fashions, cheesy music, goofy hairstyles, lame TV and some really amazing comics. The '80s gave us awesome indies like Cerebus and Elementals. The '80s gave us Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns. And the '80s gave us a great age of Marvels, from Claremont's X-Men, to Frank Miller's Daredevil, to the first great slam-bang crossover, The Marvel Super Hero's Secret Wars! At least something good came out of that decade!

If you remember this era fondly, you are not alone. Mark Millar remembers too! And Millar is taking us all back there in his latest series from Marvel: 1985. Of course, Millar has found a way to make the mundane 1985 of memory a little more exciting. What if, while you were excitedly pouring over all those great comics, something opened up a door between our boring old hero-free universe, and the universe where all those Marvel heroes and villains were real? Wouldn't that have been cool?

Nobody else seems to notice, but young Toby, who has enough problems dealing with his parents' divorce and his unpopularity at school, realizes that something weird is going on at the creepy old Wyncham place out in the woods. It seems like, somehow, the worst villains from Toby's comics, the villains he thought were purely fictional, have come to our world. With no heroes to stop them, Doctor Doom, the Red Skull, and plenty of others, are set to cause some serious trouble. As if all that isn't bad enough, Toby bumps into something, or someone, big and green in the woods outside that house...

Millar seems to have a knack for stories where super heroes and the real world collide. He does a great job here, especially with Toby, a character a lot of us comics fans can probably relate to. When this project was first announced, it was going to be a fumetti-style story, told with manipulated photos instead of traditional art. While that would have been kind of interesting to see, Tommy Lee Edwards does a brilliant job with more traditional pencils. His sketchy, realistic style makes our 1985 look "real", so the misplaced heroes and villains seem appropriately terrifying and awe-inspiring.

If you have any nostalgia for the 1980s, you need to check out 1985. If you can't remember that decade, but want to see what all the fuss was about, you should check out 1985. And if you don't want to tick Doom off, you definitely need to check out 1985. Seriously, do not provoke the wrath of Doom. Try 1985 #1 now, while it is Four Color Fantasies' guaranteed Book of the Week.

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