My prejudice wasn’t completely meritless. The first couple chapters are full of groaners, especially with the name-plays. See, in 1602 his name is Peter Parquagh – get it? It’s like Parker but archaic! And why does this boy have such an odd fascination with . . . spiders?! Hooo, I get that reference! Then there’s the muscled-up stranger from the New World who’s an unusually blonde and white captain-like Native American named Rogers . . . oops, I mean “Rohjaz.”

The rest of the set-up pages follow suit as we’re introduced to the cast and settings. Nick Fury is instead Sir Nicholas, and instead of a techy super spy he’s the Queen’s most trusted intelligence aide and protector. Dr. Strange, who normally lives in New York’s Greenwich Village, awkwardly states that he lives in “the village of Greenwich” to someone who already knows where he lives. The Fantastic Four are still a band of friends led by a scientist who gain powers in a freak accident, but here they travel to the New World in a ship called The Fantastick and are never heard from again except in legends of super-powered transformations and do-goodery. The “a-ha!” and “oh yeah!” moments are many and frequently grating.

But then I surprisingly found myself buried knee-deep in the middle of the book without pausing to take a note or breathe or eat a sandwich and I realized that the story is good despite itself. Or is it actually just good despite my knee-jerk presumptions of hokeyness?

Gaiman, as usual, has written a killer page-turner, setting up the stakes right away (the world is in indeterminate peril, Court intrigue threatens the life and leadership of the Queen, and a mysterious doomsday weapon is en route from the Holy Land and could fall into anyone’s hands) and giving us characters whom we instantly love for reasons that are hard to pin down; he just always does that with his magical writing mojo. Other players come into the mix to much less “I get it” eye-rolling, like Carlos Javier and the “Witchbreed” he is trying to protect from the Spanish Inquisition. The Witchbreed, of course, are the mutants we know as Charles Xavier’s X-Men, suffering persecution even in this long-ago and far-away reality, but suffering from the kind of persecution one would expect in such a reality. So as the story moves forward quick-like to the good stuff, Gaiman’s world-building starts to unfold far less clumsily and without your notice – you just want to find out what happens next, and you’re hoping that Sir Nicholas and Dr. Strange and Javier and the rest can figure out what is going down and put a stop to it.

Most of the fun, of course, is in the figuring out what’s going down. Watching the players move into place felt the same to me as reading the “real” comics growing up in the ’80s; the abject wonder at seeing Falcon fly through Harlem, or Daredevil dislocating a shoulder while scaling a wall to the Kingpin’s skyscraper office, or the Hulk holding up a mountain when it’s dropped on him and all the other superheroes. This is the book’s second surprise: Gaiman has changed the setting to give himself a challenge but in the end it’s still a superhero story, one that’s perhaps more distilled and pure than we’re used to. The heroes here are still performing remarkable feats like those I described above, only in their time, their situation, the point being that heroes must save the day, and they must do it against seemingly insurmountable odds, and they will do so regardless of what century they’re in.

Gaiman has been exploring issues of fate and power in all of his work for decades, culminating (in my opinion) with Sandman: A Doll’s House which is literally about being controlled by larger-than-life forces and how ordinary people can rebel against them. In 1602 these ideas manifest themselves in Strange, Fury, Captain America, and the resilient, imprisoned Mr. Fantastic, still affecting change deep within a lonely forgotten dungeon. They’re working against political forces, societal forces, and even the fragile physical makeup of their unusual splinter universe. They do this because of who they are. Right is right after all, at least within the superhero genre.

And this is the last surprise of the book, the most satisfying one: this 1602 story counts. It’s real (or rather, “in continuity” to use the proper fan term). The Watcher, a character in our current recognizable Marvel Comics universe who passively watches and records important events from a celestial perch, uncharacteristically intervenes to help sort out a major anomaly that could threaten all of existence. As he puts it, heroes are appearing 400 years too early, and this must be set to rights very soon before everything goes all ‘splodey. The existence of the Watcher sets this story firmly within an accepted fictional reality and creates an ontological awareness of that fiction within this other fiction. James Fleming wrote a brilliant and concise exploration of Gaiman’s use of postmodern storytelling in 1602 that describes this aspect of the story much better than I can, but for my purposes here as a reader (rather than a cultural critic) the ontological spot the story winds up in leaves us with the coolest of “oh cool!” moments. We are witnessing something of consequence, not a literary thought experiment or a joke or a puzzle. And through the lens of those consequences we get to see the heroes being heroic rather than blank protagonists fighting blank antagonists in the usual endless flood of monthly comic books.

By the end of the book the in-jokes have been completely abandoned for narrative sincerity. The best example is the aforementioned Mr. Parquagh who never quite has any run-ins with radioactive spiders and takes a back seat until the very last scene. The promise of him as a new superhero within a somehow still-existing alternative reality long after the final page is turned leaves us with hope that this world will have its age of protectors, too, that the the days will continue to be saved, that no matter where (or when) the forces of oppression and greed appear, right will always be right in the end .

Maybe catching up on World War Hulk now is better since it allows me to read it as I like to read everything (a contained literary work) rather than how it must be read when it’s being published (a fan community social event). I’m still halfway through the Greg Pak-written main series and I love it so far. The gist of it is brilliantly simple: a group of superheroes blast the unstable monster of green destruction into space but when he lands in a far-off barbarian planet and starts a new life the spaceship in which he arrived self-destructs, killing his family. What happens next? You guessed it! But I took a sidestep to read Paul Jenkins’s tie-in story, World War Hulk: Front Line, mainly because I needed a respite from hardcore violence but also because Jenkins writes consistently satisfying superhero stories and I suspected I would like this even more.

Front Line is a series chronicling the trials of two reporters and a start-up alternative newspaper in Marvel’s superhero-laden version of New York City. Sally Floyd, a recovering alcoholic, sees it as a new lease on life while Ben Urich, a recovering lackey from the city’s biggest junk tabloid, sees it as a last attempt at a dignified career. In the middle of all this the Hulk’s warship lands with his bad-ass alien super brutes ready to start wrecking house if the guys who rigged his ship don’t surrender immediately. The aforementioned tabloid rag and other media outlets are shut down in the ensuing blackout and mass evacuation. Front Line manages to keep enough of a skeleton crew going to stay in the trenches.

Jenkins doesn’t riff on Greg Pak’s main story. He counterpoints it in ways that add meaning to the whole. When the Hulk and his brother warriors take the fight with his tormentors to Madison Square Garden, Ben finds a seat so he can cover the story for Front Line. Jenkins doesn’t let us see the fight as much as the crowd — their cheering and jeering as if this idiotic spectacle was more meaningful than the chaos raging outside in the streets. Ben writes, “These aliens had displaced twelve million people without so much as the blink of an eye. They had brought with them a lust for blood, a remorseless brutality. And I realized something. We hadn’t been overrun. You can’t be overrun when your invaders are exactly like you.” The crossover plotline itself can be seen as a kind of metafiction — it’s a sequence of events that exists regardless of the comics while the comics portray the events in different ways. Pak’s version focuses entirely on the events themselves, showing us superhuman gods engaged in an epic battle, winning, losing, tricking each other, and moving on. Jenkins’s version offers us an interpretation of the meaning of the events, a view of the superhuman gods that reveal things about ourselves we might not have seen otherwise, or paid attention to if we had. This is the superhero genre’s secret weapon.

Marvel’s primordial visionaries Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are praised for their ability to boil down a story to its essential elements, then enhance them and present them. There is nothing subtle about Captain America punching the Nazi Red Skull — there is no adornment, no layers to think about. It is patriotism, violence, and conflict resolution — concentrated emotion and condensed action — in one single panel. This is less literature than it is a kind of vending machine of impulses (and I don’t mean that as a criticism but as an observation of technique — Lee and Kirby were very intentional about their art). Some writers attempt to make the superhero genre literary by keeping the same structure intact but adding “serious” writing to it — in this example that might be a fragmented realistic first person thought narration in the panel where Cap punches out the Skull. Better writers make the genre literary by removing its pieces and reassembling them in a way that, like all literature, forces us to reflect, to relate, and to engage.

The scan above from World War Hulk: Front Line illustrates this perfectly. The big guy is Korg, one of the Hulk’s fellow warriors. The human is Danny, a detective assigned to help Korg solve the murder of his android friend Arch-E. Korg learns that it was inadvertently his fault that Arch-E died. Danny’s response is mundane — he offers him a beer as a consoling gesture. We wouldn’t think twice about this if it were two humans in a literary fiction story; it would be par for the course there. We also wouldn’t think twice if Korg flew into the sky bellowing vengeful oaths; it would be par for the course for the Lee/Kirby style that dominates the genre. But his presence here next to Danny’s quiet gesture makes us think deeply for a minute on the feelings. Self-recrimination is new to Korg so we remember what it feels like in its raw, biting form. Knowing that Danny is terrified of Korg and that Korg probably doesn’t even know what beer is makes the gesture impossibly sweet. This way of drawing out meaning through contrasting realities can only happen in superhero comics and Jenkins is one of the few people who gets it.

When the war is over Jenkins doesn’t even tell us who won. He just takes us through the city streets. Most superhero summer blockbusters end when the last punch is thrown, with a couple perfunctory pages of falling action. Here, Jenkins allows a full chapter of aftermath. One striking, mostly silent page shows the city burning unhindered for three full days. Homes that families could barely afford are leveled. Ben’s is one of these. Their insurance doesn’t cover superhero destruction and his wife is in tears when he says he’ll find a way to fix it. “But that’s always the way, isn’t it?” she says. “They always break it and we always fix it.” In normal superhero stories we only see the spectacle of huge events and we only care about those who cause or try to stop the destruction. We’re not asked to care about its victims or think about what happens afterwards.

When I finished reading Front Line I took a long walk home and I passed the 9/11 memorial on Greenwich Avenue. Memorials are common in New York, more common than outsiders might realize. To most of the world, 9/11 was a historical moment, already in the past, already reduced to a text book “trigger event” that future high school students will have to discuss in their essays on the war on terror. But to the people who live here it was fire and noise and death, and more importantly, it was individual people — unpaid mortgages, pension checks, legal battles, hospitals, physical therapy. Politicians and outsiders look at 9/11 as a sequence of grandiose events. New Yorkers walking down the street see it for its tiny, almost imperceptible consequences. It’s 7 years on now and you can’t walk ten blocks without seeing something that reminds you of the dead. I walk past the empty space where the towers used to be and I don’t think about politics or real estate — I just get a quick, sharp pang of awful grief.

The end of Front Line captures this feeling well. No one in the story cares enough to ask why any of the insanity is happening or who is prosecuting it. They carry on with their lives, trying to find shelter, trying to make their newspaper work, trying not to drink. There’s a little feeling of triumph that they made it through — the same fleeting feeling we all have when something goes right — and a lot of questions about what to do next. There aren’t any lessons and there’s not much hope; only despair and resolve. But that’s always the way, isn’t it?

Halfway through The Golden Age I thought it was “fine enough.” An interesting plot, unpredictable characters, good solid Saturday-afternoon-in-the-park reading much like The Dark Knight Returns. A few more pages in and I realized it wasn’t even that. It’s just a bad comic — amateurish writing from James Robinson that any first-year fiction workshop would whip into shape and art from a normally brilliant penciler (Paul Smith) who tries so hard to change his style that he comes up with a mix of ugly and anatomically incorrect. So why bother writing about it at all here? Because this is one of the most critically acclaimed “graphic novels” of all time, a post-modern superhero genre critique that supposedly takes apart all of the things that make it work and exposes its dark underbelly, and it’s not at all. It’s a comic that forces its characters like so many chess pieces into a strategy that resembles something like an intelligent genre critique, leaving all relatable human feeling at the door.

The story opens up at the end of what’s known as the Golden Age of comic books (the era spans roughly from the art form’s birth in 1938 to the late 1950s when the industry bubble burst). The fun, lighthearted, often goofy heroes like Green Lantern, Starman, and The Atom are presented here as heavy-hearted gloomy guys in their various mid-life crises. The war has been over for more than a decade and almost all of these superbeings have retired because of personal choices or personal tragedies. The story kicks into gear when one of the era’s lesser-known heroes, Mr. America, runs for a US Senate seat on a McCarthyistic anti-communist and anti-secret identity platform. His vaguely fascistic power grab and attempt at consolidating the aging superhero community behind him is kind of interesting in a “hmmm, interesting” kind of way. The characters all speak in the same stilted voice of their omniscient narrator so you don’t care about them enough to be empathetically interested in what’s going on.

And that’s the root of the problem here. Stories are living things, not intellectual treatises. When each character speaks in formal eloquent essay-speak you know that Robinson cheated. He didn’t do the emotional and imaginative work that a sprawling novel like this requires. He didn’t get behind his characters’ eyes and show us what they feel. He just told us in prettily strung together phrases, some not as pretty as others. (In one of the more clumsy scenes in the book, the former Green Lantern is in his office alone brooding on how involved he should be in the coming conflict, standing in front of a statue of Atlas so it looks like — wait for it — the world is on his shoulders. In another, Mr. America rudely tells off his former sidekick and when the poor guy leaves he looks down at a photo of the two of them together and rips it into pieces. Such heavy-handed images are not only annoying, they also betray a sloppiness that most editors weed out of real literature.)

The biggest sign that you’ve wasted your time comes when the intellectually curious plot involving Mr. America’s subtle turn to fascism is revealed to be an actual fascistic plot by the Golden Age heroes’ greatest villain, the Ultra Humanite. He’s disguised himself as Mr. America and tricked U.S. citizens into playing into his grab at global domination. Then the heroes get together and beat him up until they win. Any meager attempt at a critique of power and responsibility and how it played into the Atomic Age was done away with a flourish of Scooby Doo. I’m not sure what we were supposed to learn from reading this. Bad guys always lose and superheroes always win? Why didn’t I just read an actual Golden Age comic that gives me the same message but isn’t gloomy and depressing and overwritten?

I always hear comics fans complaining about the standard “holy gosh — an actual literate comic book!” response to things like Maus and Fun Home when they’re published. I agree with them — why do we constantly have to prove ourselves? Maybe The Golden Age is an example of why — our most precious canonical works are poor. Our industry editors and writers — ostensibly the arbiters of taste and quality — grew up reading on-the-nose self-conscious superhero bang-ups and learned to write by imitating these. To this day editors and writers aren’t coming from literature and creative writing backgrounds, but from fandom.

I love superheroes. They’re amazing and they touch a cultural nerve in the mainstream (TV’s Heroes is the best example of that). But the genre doesn’t challenge itself to grow, and maybe that means it will stay where it is while the non-genre comics geniuses cropping up more and more these days will be the ones to keep evolving the medium towards the legitimate art form we all know it is.

It might be nostalgia, or habit, but I think it’s mostly hope — hope for an immersive reading experience as awesome as Runaways, the ongoing super-book created by Brian K. Vaughan and mostly drawn by Adrian Alphona (NB: Brian recently handed over the writing reins to my personal hero Joss Whedon but I’m not up to those issues yet!)

Whenever a new volume of Runaways comes out (and by that I mean the paperback collections — you can’t beat that “6 Issues for 8 Bucks” bargain, kids!) I’m totally gonzo giddy until I get it home and start ripping through it. I just noticed this for the first time last week when I picked up “Parental Guidance” (Volume 6), and I also noticed how little I look forward to any other superhero comic by contrast. It set my mind to wondering what happened to those days of my youth when every comic brought that same feeling.

As a kid I was lucky enough to have a mom who fed me a steady supply of books and comics, so each weekend brought new worlds to explore. I knew how each story would end (Superman always wins, of course) but that was so much less important than the fact that, for a half hour or so, there really was a Superman, and more importantly, a Metropolis, a 31st Century full of superheroes you could travel to, and a thousand other things I never could have imagined on my own. In The Neverending Story, there’s a great break in the action when Bastian looks up from the book because he remembers he has to eat something. But partway through his sandwich he stops himself – he’s only halfway through the book or so. The journey ahead will be long and arduous, and he should conserve. That’s how I always felt about those bygone Sunday afternoons.

When reading this last installment of Runaways I couldn’t stop for a second — some major heavy crap was going down and I wanted to see the kids through. I love them partly because each of them are awesome people in their own way, and partly because, being so awesome, I want them to be OK despite all the bad stuff that happens to them every issue, starting with the revelation way back in the first issue that their parents were viscious super-villain bastards. For all the adventuring the kids have had to do to keep alive, stop their evil parents, stop other bad guys, and try to cobble together some semblance of a life, Vaughan always pauses once in a while to remind us that these are, in fact, kids — homeless kids at that — who have nothing and nobody but each other.

This is what makes the art form of the serial so beautiful, and so necessary to our culture: when done correctly, and artfully, the serial draws you in to a world you feel like you can reach out and touch, with characters whom you know as well as your friends, and it comes together to become so much more than a story. Those who do the serial poorly come up with indigestible leftovers like “Lost” or most of today’s superhero schlock — these creators feel that all they have to do is manipulate the loyal reader, throw some tricks and twists in their way as they go, and keep them guessing as to what might happen next so they keep buying or tuning in. On the surface I’m sure this results in some sort of boost in sales or ratings or whatever, but the stories aren’t real — they’re tricks, and obvious ones at that. They will never develop the kind of devotion that something like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Harry Potter” has, because the best serials benefit from one simple thing: lovable, believable characters. Everything else follows suit after that.

I know that when I pick up a copy of Batman or Spider-Man in the comic book store it’s only because of some vague loyalty to the lovable characters of my youth that bore the same name. But I don’t buy the books because these titles have become something else — vehicles for sales gimmick “events” and licensing material. Whenever a major superhero crossover happens and the PR says that “nothing will ever be the same” it’s pretty clear that the superhero publishers are now desperately grasping for a rope as they sink in the mud. The only way to drum up sales and interest, apparently, is to tell the readers that something terrible and earth-shattering is about to happen to their beloved characters, so we spend money to be outraged. In something like Runaways we don’t need something terrible to happen. We just need something to happen, and it does. Their creators breathe life into their creations, and because they have lives, bad things will eventually happen to them (as they do to us in real life) and so will many good things (just like real life). And we’ll love it because we’re included.

Terrible, life-altering things do happen to the Runaways, but it’s not to cynically drive up sales. They happen because Chase, Molly, Gert, Victor, Karolina, Nico, and that oh-so-cute dinosaur Old Lace face daunting odds and don’t always come out on top. At the end of this last chapter I found myself uncontrollably sobbing for a solid ten minutes. And I mean that sincerely — I actually tried to control it, as I was reading a comic book in a public place and felt remarkably silly, and I couldn’t. Stray tears kept streaming down my face. I wasn’t expecting it, and I wished it didn’t happen that way. But life’s unfair as well as beautiful and I know that both the thrill and tragedy of life will be found in stories to come as I stick with these kids and see where they wind up next. I hope they find a place for themselves and I hope their journey there will have the same page-turning adventures. I’ll be there for every step.