Elektra: Assassin

This post might be even more scatterbrained than they usually are. That would be because I’m not yet exactly sure of how to react to Elektra: Assassin. First of all, I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to get to reading it. My writing about it would probably greatly benefit from having the chance to reread it a couple of times, but this will serve as a document of my first time through with a really challenging, strange, and exciting comic.

It must have been great to be Frank Miller in 1986. Seriously, nobody could compete with him. He had recently done great work on Daredevil in the Marvel house style. He jumped ship to do Ronin for DC, a project which undeniably laid some groundwork for the one spotlighted here. Then there was the big one...The Dark Knight Returns. Oh, and I almost forgot Daredevil/Elektra: Love and War, the first Frank Miller/Bill Sienkiewicz collaboration. That’s one of those books that I know I read years ago, but you really can’t ask me for a plot summary. I’ll have to revisit that story soon. So with all of this success, Archie Goodwin at Epic Comics probably just figured “What the hell? Why not just let Frank run amok and do whatever he wants with that Elektra character.” And so we got this.

Elektra: Assassin is a comic that I’m surprised came out in 1986. Surprised and yet very, very glad. Epic Comics was a good place to take this, since they were A.) a Marvel imprint, with all of the rights and privileges which that entails, and B.) not held to the censorship of the Comics Code Authority. It let Miller unleash the madcap genius he usually had to be a little careful about. I suppose I could give a plot summary, but really, this is not a comic in which the plot is essential to its worth. Yes, there is a story being told here, but the most important feature of it is how it is being told. Stream of consciousness narration fills the book and leaves you unsettled and wondering. Elektra is a woman of complete mystery. 

Elektra: Assassin has to be looked at as a satire. There really isn’t anything that is sacred here...American politicians are buzz sawed, as are a host of other subjects: the portrayal of women in comics, nuclear war (remember this is a “Cold War comic”), robots, violence, sex, even the kind of narration that Miller made so popular with The Dark Knight. Oh yeah, and I always love how the guns that people use are so ridiculously huge that they would never be able to fire them.

Frank Miller’s writing might take a little patience. The narrative is fairly scattershot, rapidly taking you into TV news reports and different peoples’ minds. But once you acclimate yourself to the kind of storytelling that is going on, everything works out. You start “to get it.” Elektra isn’t often the main focus. Garret, a SHIELD agent who gets blown to bits by Elektra and then reassembled by the agency, seems more like the protagonist here. A lot of what can be understood about Elektra comes from his narrative, and he definitely fits into the everyman’s shoes in this story. It’s a story about a person’s journey with a mysterious and deadly woman.

The art of Bill Sienkiewicz is also challenging, but I would say it’s more immediately rewarding than Miller’s script. As a painted comic, it automatically stands apart from whatever anyone could expect as standard. Sienkiewicz wears so many different stylistic hats in these eight issues. It’s just amazing. His characters are cartoonish but seem undeniably real. His portrayals of the politicians say so much: Ken Wind’s face hardly ever changes and looks like a newspaper photo tacked onto the face of a real man. He is a facsimile of a real person and the visuals back this up. Likewise, The President is a hideous disfiguration of a political cartoon, but it makes sense: everything he says is ridiculous and he couldn’t run America no matter how hard he tried. Sienkiewicz also captures the spookiness of SHIELD’s robot technology, making it clear that this is some pretty crazy stuff. 

Apologies if this isn’t an especially in depth look at the series. As I mentioned it’s all still swirling around in my head. What I can say with certainty is that I liked Elektra: Assassin, even if it takes a couple more read-throughs to be able to explain exactly why.   It was a unique comic and I’m glad that Frank Miller got the green light to make it.

One thing that I simply can’t explain: why this story has been so hard to find and read. The most recent printing was in the Elektra Omnibus, which was a big and expensive hardcover that collected other stories along with it. I want to be able to walk into a comic store and just buy Elektra: Assassin on its own and not spend $75 like they are asking for the Omnibus. It looks like it’s been more than ten years since a standard trade paperback has come out, which in my book makes it older than Marvel’s trade paperback program itself. Doesn’t this seem like the perfect story to put into Marvel’s Premiere Hardcover format? It’s just a mystery to me why this isn’t readily available. 

Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago...Volume Two

Now this is a book from a long time ago, and sometimes when reading it the stories even seem like they might have come from a galaxy far, far away. These tales are from the very early days of Star Wars being the phenomenon that it eventually developed into, and the results are often pretty squarely on the goofy side. The Omnibus captures perfectly what Star Wars meant to fans in the late 70's and early 80's.

Archie Goodwin is "the man with the plan" throughout most of the stories reprinted in this book. He served not only as writer but he also edited the book, so it's safe to say that Star Wars was truly "his" book. The main artist is Carmine Infantino, who is joined by a host of inkers. But of course Al Williamson has to be mentioned for his really beautiful work on the six-part adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back. Other names that show up in more of a supporting cast role are Chris Claremont, Mike W. Barr, Walt Simonson, and Michael Golden. So there's a lot of significant talent in these stories.

Al Williamson's detailed work from the Empire adaptation.

The comics reprinted in this Omnibus were from the series put out by Marvel. Having a tie-in of this caliber probably saved Marvel from bankruptcy in the late 70's, so yeah, you might be able to say that these comics were pretty important! What's fun about these stories is how you can see that the whole idea of what Star Wars really could be about was just forming. Half of the comics were made before there was even a sequel to the 1977 original movie.

Take the character of Jabba the Hutt for instance. He makes a few appearances in these comics, but Lucas apparently hadn't really figured out exactly what he wanted to do with the character yet. He was, after all, only briefly mentioned in A New Hope. So Archie Goodwin wanted to make use of this interesting character from Han Solo's past, and when he shows up he is nothing like the fat, slimy Hutt we know and love from Return of the Jedi. Jabba in the old comics is a skinny humanoid with a really ugly and almost baboon-like face. You can either be unsatisfied by a "lack of continuity" or you can just accept the fact that Star Wars was still very much of a work in progress while this series was being put out.

That's Jabba Version 1.0 there in the background, not the GI Joe-looking guy in front.

There is still an ongoing saga narrative behind these stories. Goodwin invented some new villains who cause some problems not only for the heroes, but also for Darth Vader. The Tagge family are a bunch of Imperials, true, but they would just love nothing more than to seize power from Vader. The fights with the Tagges build up over several issues and take some unexpected turns along the way. That might have in fact been the storytelling highlight of the Omnibus.

Maybe not what you'd expect from a Star Wars villain: Baron Tagge.

There are different issues focusing on different characters and you really get the sense that there was an effort being made to show this exciting new universe from as many angles as possible. It might not quite be the Star Wars that we all recognize today, but it's a great history lesson filled with a bunch of solid stories and a lot of exemplary Bronze Age art.