The Beast as a Beat

Texts considered: The X-Men #7-8, Time 26 December 1969.

There's fewer issues considered today for two simple reasons. The first is the undeniable joy of seeing Hank McCoy and Bobby Drake spend 10 panels in a beat bar in Greenwich Village, while the second is the awesome spectacle of Time's final issue of the 1960s (as most people count a decade, anyway. Me and Al Franken will maintain that a year that ends with a 1 must always be the first of a decade... but that's a posting for a different sort of blog).

Anyhow: issues seven and eight aren't particularly notable for canon or plot or, well, much of anything beyond what I'm looking for in these issues. Simply, seven sees the Blob briefly team up with the Evil Mutants (not yet the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) and eight sees Hank McCoy briefly leave the team and then return to help them deal with the challenge of Unus, the Untouchable. (Insert jokes about him not being hugged enough here.) The Blob returns to the circus at the end of the former, while Unus is blackmailed into renouncing a life of crime. (Spoiler alert - if such a thing is possible for 40+ year old texts: the Beast creates a device which amplifies Unus's power so that he cannot touch anything, even food. Given the choice between neutrality and starvation, Unus goes sort-of-good.) The setting for neither fight is particularly notable, and there's little science to point to, let alone military-industrial complex fun. (Well, there are torpedoes that Magneto sends chasing after the X-Men, but for all the damage that they do they could just as easily be flying manatees.)

Oh, and issue seven sees Professor X leave the team under the leadership of Cyclops while he goes a-questing. Issue eight indicates that the villain he pursues - deep underneath the Balkans, naturally - is Lucifer. I shudder to think what this villain will be once we find out. Reading various appearances of Diablo in contemporaneous Fantastic Four issues makes me wonder how many more satanic figures there are to come - and makes me hope that most of them, or at least Mephisto, are kept within the pages of Doctor Strange.

So: outside of the Beast as a beat, what else is there of note? Well, when Magneto tries to convince the Blob to join forces with him, he imprisons the bally in an animal cage. Filled with righteous indignation - or simply the spirit of "we've not yet had an action scene in this issue" - the barker solemnly intones "I don't know what your game is, Mac, but if it's a fight you want, you came to the right place!!" and then yells - in red, hand-drawn block letters, no less, so we know it's on now - "HEY, RUBE!" What makes this fantastic is the narrator's text which follows: "Seconds later, in answer to the time-honored carny battle cry, a group of husky roustabouts charge the mighty mutant!" (I now know what my first filk album will be titled, anyway.)

Things move along once the Blob's catapulted backwards and has his memory restored by a jolt to the head. Actually, it's funnier than that - the mental blocks that Professor X put on him have apparently been jarred loose by that collision. (I suppose that the brain is a curious machine which we still don't understand, but that's a ham-fisted metaphor if ever I read one. Oh wait...)

The other oddity is that the Beast, once he departs from the team in the next issue, decides to join professional wrestling and make his fortune. He's only been gone a week, and yet he's already exploded "on the T.V. screens throughout the nation! He soon becomes a top-draw wrestling villain", which leads the Beast to muse - as he's led to the ring in cage accompanied by at least six safari-style characters - that "At the rate I'm going, as a pro wrestler I'll be a millionaire in a year!"

There's a few problems I have with this. First, this is Hank McCoy - there's no way that he would employ both a contraction and an abbreviation in the same sentence. (Yes, space is tight in that word balloon, but still...) Second, what is it with Marvel heroes and professional wrestling? (I'm looking at you, Spidey.) I'm not looking forward to finding some rare issue of Iron Man where he fights Bruno Sammartino or to a very special Avengers where Andre the Giant helps them fight Immortus. (And I'm trying to forget all the ridiculousness of Unlimited Class Wrestling in Captain America in the 80s.) Third, I suppose that I shouldn't question Hank's mathematical abilities - if he only had his allowance the week before and now was making three times as much, then he could well expect that things will increase at that rate - but it seems that wrestling's pretty darned lucrative yet open to any yahoo who happens to stop by.

But the great part of these issues has got to be the slice of bohemian New York that Hank and Bobby experience in issue seven. Naturally, there are a lot of beats with berets, cigarette holders, and turtlenecks to be seen, plus lots of sunglasses worn indoors and drippy, drippy candles. There's a jazz combo - "so far out that they'll be fired if anyone can understand the melody!", Bobby exclaims - which appears to feature a baritone saxophone, an oboe, and a mariachi-sized guitar, and there's also a "zen" poet doing a reading. Informed that it's poetry, Hank quips, "I assumed he was checking a housewife's shopping list aloud!" and is then informed that it is a shopping list - "That what makes him a genius!" (Naturally, someone yells out "Go cat, go!" I would likely have inverted the bold font for that sentence, but what do I know? I just blog about this stuff.)

Bobby's a little distressed that Hank's having such a rough time - "The trouble with you... is that you can't understand anybody who doesn't use ten-syllable words!" - but Hank's just uncomfortable because of the shoes he's wearing. The shoes go - the blonde at his table is pretty sure no one will notice in this place, but such is not to be.

"Say! Dig that crazzzy paperweight!" a turtleneck-clad passerby comments, while a trio at another table enumerates the possibilities for such feet - "They should be immortalized on canvas!" "Wait till Bernard sees them! He'll write a new poem immediately!" "This could start a whole new cult--we'll call ourselves barefoot beats!" Unfortunately, the first option is not seized upon (after all, we've all seen Hank's feet again and again), but at least the beats decide to hail him as their leader - the "king of the barefoot beats!" (But I'm relieved to not encounter the poetry.) Free coffee is offered to everyone as Hank is carried off on their shoulders ("I appreciate the accolades," Hank states plainly, "but I think you're all totally bereft of sanity!"), while Bobby tries to hit on the waitress, Zelda. (Bobby is written to be pretty goofy with the ladies, I suppose: "Y'know, if you twist my arm, I think I could learn to like you!"

Fortunately, the Angel sounds the alert and saves Hank from a fate worse than... well, it's pretty odd, anyhow. Someone's painted red-lined eyes on the soles of Hank's feet (but not a mouth) though very little else has happened so far. Hank makes his verbose pre-exit declaration - "I thought I was inexorably trapped here!" - which befuddles the hipster over his shoulder, and then leaves with an acrobatic multi-bounce departure. "That wasn't too wise," the Angel notes. "Someone might suspect your secret identity after a stunt like that!" "Not in that place," the Beast confidently replies. "Those far-out characters wouldn't be inclined to suspect anything unless it were normal!"

Two things come to mind after this exchange. One, I suppose you don't really need gritty discussions of the perils of drug abuse in this panel for Hank's point that the beats would not be reliable witnesses to be accepted. Two, you really have to wonder why the X-Men didn't all move to Greenwich Village if the hipsters there were so readily willing to accept offbeat characters. (Given Hank's intelligence and affinity for literate people, it's especially odd in light of his decision to become a professional wrestler in the next issue.) Still, the world is probably a happier place for not having issues of Bobby Drake's poetry readings interrupted by rogue caricatures of Jules Pfeiffer rampaging by, let alone having to rescue Hank McCoy or Henry Pym from yet another LSD tycoon who needs a new chemist.

Ad alerts: the most fun is the ad for "yubiwaza" in issue seven. (To see it in all its glory, the blog greeklish has a post which discusses it and includes a scan. Naturally, something this offbeat had to be googled, and it also turned up a bio for a character from the Tick - Paul the Samurai, a third degree fuschia belt yubiwaza warrior.)

Also of note is the shift in classified-style ads which appealed to readers who were poets or aspiring songwriters. Issue seven featured three ads which solicited poem submissions (so that they could be set to music) or song ideas and one ad from Boston's Ace Publishing which promised to teach you how to write and sell songs. There's also a classified ad - much larger - which promised "a new world of adventure - as exciting as the space age" through model rocketry. (The biggest ad was for baseball equipment, though.) Only two ads asked for poem submissions and song ideas in the next issue, though - Ace's ad is joined by "Guitarist Ed Sale's" money-back guaranteed seven-day guitar course. It's certainly not the target of this research - and it's only two issues rather than a meticulously charted trend - but I wouldn't be surprised if there's more emphasis on singer-songwriterly ads instead of calls for song ideas and poems as the issues move along.

Oh, and a letter in the seventh says that people should stop talking about Beatlemania and instead focus on Marvelmania. (The letters are almost relentlessly upbeat, positive, and so thesaurus-belabored as to give you sugar shock. Oddly, a few seem to think that Iceman looks strange without his boots. Really, there's little to report in the letters so far. Alas.)

There's the usual body-building ads, cover splashes for other Marvel titles, and a few education or business opportunity bits. One gets a rather odd sense of 1964 society from the juvenile entrepreneurship jobs - were there lots of door-to-door shoe salesmen to be had? (You did get your free selling outfit when you joined the Mason Shoe Company, but this almost makes pets.com sound stable.) There's also the option to become a Grit salesman. (I wasn't impressed when Richie Rich tried to get me to become a Grit salesman, and I'm not about to listen to some plain-o ad in X-Men.) And there's various ads for becoming an electronics repairman or an auto mechanic - training in your own home! I'm pretty sure that's not the training that Hank used to defeat Unus, but there's still quite a few issues to go. All I know is I want the same program that Doctor Doom used - I put my faith in despotic cartoon experts, after all.

***

The real fun of the last bit has been packing and weeding through boxes. (Moving, moving - now my parents are joining the fun and my old stuff's gotta get packed up.) In a box with my yearbooks and various photo albums, I found a variety of early-70s Time issues - and the 26 December 1969 issue. The cover's missing, but there's a list of major accomplishments of the various departments which the magazine covered then - Film, Music, Theatre, Books, and so on. The popular music list is pretty unsurprising (though it doesn't have Abbey Road) with the Beatles, Coltrane, Davis, Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Aretha Franklin, and Cash all listed. Press notes include mentions of the LA Free Press and the death of the Saturday Evening Post (and that the subscription numbers for Playboy rose from 1 million to 5 million over the course of the decade). Naturally, there's no mention of hockey on the sports list.

But there's plenty of countercultural events memorialized in these lists (and some preparation for a retconned death of counterculture via the first disco in Manhattan in 1961). The "modern living" section notes Timothy Leary, the first hippie "be-in" in San Francisco, and Woodstock, while the environment section mentions Rachel Carson. But most of the key events are on the education page.

The education section's notes open with the "First Negro student sit-in at Greensboro, N.C. lunch counters, 1960", moves through integration and the acceleration of curriculum reform by Educational Services, Inc., and mentions Clark Kerr's "multiversity" and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (which "certifies an old philosopher for the New Left, 1964"). Notes are made of "mass arrests at Berkeley (1964) [which] prefigure later campus revolts at Columbia and San Francisco State (1968), Harvard and Cornell (1969)" and of the "first teach-ins and draft card burnings [which] dramatize student reaction to Viet Nam War, 1965." (There's also note of Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and of the Supreme Court's order that southern universities desegregate.) I was nagged by the notion that something important was missing, and then remembered - Kent State was in Spring of 1970. That certainly changes the spin a little. (But I learned about Kent State from an issue of GI Joe that made fun of yuppies so now I don't even know where to stand on this one.)

Other than a shout-out to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - my fave of the plays listed - and to the note which accompanies The Graduate - that it "alerts film makers to the news that more than 60% of their audience is 30 or under" - the major categories of note which remain are in art and in television. Lichtenstein's comic-strip images are named as part of pop-art's arrival in 1962. Actually, that's about it for art -given the parameters I'm running with - though I should note that Buckminster Fuller's Expo '67 edifice is also mentioned.

The last note for television would make an excellent Marvel Team-Up - hero x and hero y have to deal with "Vice President Agnew attacks the networks, 1969"! - but most of the others are still worthwhile or curious.. Yes, there's men on the moon and Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, but there's also instant replay for sports and "A black, Bill Cosby, co-stars in NBC series I Spy." Sure, there's the Kennedy-Nixon debate and Newton Minow's "vast wasteland speech," but there's also "all network shows are now broadcast in color, 1967." (Someone'll inevitably tell me that the switch to HDTV has nothing on the shift to color, I'm sure.) From the distance of 38 years, though, I'm trying to decide which of the last two events wins out - Viet Nam War brought directly into the living room or the announcement of the invention of Electronic Video Recording. (Yes, probably the broadcast of the war, if only for the way that it helped along the culture wars - but given current war rhetoric, I'd imagine that a video iPod would probably be much more impressive to a time-traveling 1960s astronaut than current reports from Iraq.)

Anyhow, that's just a quick flavor of this issue. I suppose I shouldn't be suprised that Marvel Pop-Art productions didn't get posted as either books or art achievements (actually, there were no lists for books of the decade), but it would have been interesting.