Today is also the birthday of the late, great Mark Gruenwald. I love comics, you love comics, but I don't know if anyone loved them as much as Mark. A superb editor and writer, and a truly good person, Mark left us way too soon. Still sorely missed.
IMHO his Squadron Supreme is a critically overlooked masterpiece. People should be reading it alongside Watchmen as the two essential deconstructions of the superhero genre.
I absolutely agree. It's a great showcase of how desperate circumstances lead good people astray. As opposed to Watchmen where everyone is already damaged and broken.
Don't forget J. M. DeMatteis's lead-up in Defenders 112-117 that tells you how the world broke.
Yes, exactly! That’s what separates it from just about every other “superheroes go bad” story. Their intentions remain noble even as their methods become more and more questionable.
Like many my generation I was an X-Men fan first, but Gru's Captain America was the run that got me hooked enough to search out as many back issues as I could. It was unreal to me when I found out he had passed less than a year after his last Cap issue. Way too soon. The stories live on.
Only later did I find out you wrote the seminal Cap run before Mark's (with a brief fill-in period) and that feels like such a convergence of good fortune. Mark did a lot of other fantastic stuff - the Marvel Handbooks were essential to my generation. Squadron Supreme, Quasar... I still miss him.
I think he played well with the stories you set up. I always enjoyed that feeling when the new writer would pay attention to the previous run and try to build off it organically.
People point to CAP and SQUADRON, and make no mistake, they're great--but I think his peak works were DP7 (the only time he got to create a superhero world from the ground up) and QUASAR (where he reveled at length in the absolute bonkers cosmology of his favorite existing superhero universe).
