Bill Mantlo…
There I said it. After years of soul searching and turning
the magnifying lens inward, you could never get me to say who my favorite comic
book writer was. When I was young lad, I couldn’t be bothered by who the writer
of the current comic book I was reading. Then when I was older, just the
getting into my teens, I read nothing by Marvel Comics. I loved Marvel writers!
Like John Byrne, Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, Ann Nocenti, and Bill Mantlo.
But then the 90’s opened up to an even more exaggerated 80’s style, and then I
was done with hyper stylized heroes of Image comics and a splash page every two
pages and every artist had jumped on Rob Liefield’s jock.
That’s not how you do good storytelling in my book. Nope, no
sir.
Thank God for DC comics or I would have quit comics all
together. Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, The Sandman, Shade the changing man,
Hellblazer, Animal Man...
I was seduced! I couldn’t get enough of the stories and amazing characters! (I
could go on and on here but I’ll not bore you.) So then in January of 1993
Vertigo comics was born and all of these titles under one roof and I dove in
heard first and never looked back. It was my “Salad Days” for comic books. But
this post isn’t about them.
You tend to go back and look at your life and what you loved
as a kid when you get older. So I was looking back at the comics that I re-read
until the covers fell off and that was Micronauts, and Rom Spaceknight both
written stunningly by Bill Mantlo. I know that there are dozens of blog posts
out there written about him and his works. But this is how he influenced me and
how it took a long introspective voyage for me to realize that. What pulled me
to the comics that Mantlo wrote were that he took at toys that had no back
story, toys that didn’t have a popular run and let his imagination run amok. I
mean have you ever looked at the box art of the old Micronauts toys from the
1970’s?
They amazing!
Those toys opened up my head and rewired it! Literally! Well
not literally but I used to stare at Ken Kelly’s artwork and my imagination
would put my brain in a atmospheric diving suit, and scream, “SEE YA LATER!” and
just jump into the box art and not come back for 48 hours.
I still have all my Micronauts comics that I had as a kid
and the ones that I collected as an adult as well. Mantlo’s world building for
the book was second to none! His character’s were well thought out and had a
voice that was identifiable and interesting. I found none of them boring and I
felt like I was much a part of the crew of the HMS Endeavor as they were.
(The character list below was taken from Wikipedia because I
am not trusted to write the descriptions because I am a giant NERD and will get
way too sappy in this part.)
Acroyear - Energy sword-wielding stoic and super-strong
former ruler of the armor-clad Acroyears of the harsh and rocky planet Spartak.
Biotron - Tall & stalwart first of the part machine,
part organic Roboids who accompanied Arcturus Rann on his 1,000 year mission.
The loyal and dependable co-pilot of the H.M.S. Endeavor was destroyed and
later resurrected in giant form as a sentient starcraft known as the Bioship.
Bug - A wisecracking master thief who is an antenna-headed
green Insectivorid from the planet Kaliklak. Armed with his rocket-lance and as
agile a wall-crawler as any Spider-Man, Bug tends to "tik" when he
talks and loves to eat snail-loaf.
Marionette - Princess Mari, beautiful acrobatic rebel
fighter who is the daughter of the slain rulers of Homeworld and sister of hero
turned villain Prince Argon.
Microtron - Marionette's loyal little personal Roboid whose
clever computer brain and extendable pincer arms always come in handy.
Arcturus Rann - Heroic explorer and rotor-winged Space
Glider who returned from a 1,000 year mission only to find his world taken over
by his former teacher who had become a Darth Vader-style despot while he was
away.
Bill said he was looking at his son playing with them once
Christmas morning and imagined the stories behind the characters.
The conversations that the Micronauts had were sometimes
over my child comprehension, but I did learn a lot from them. In 1986 my family
was going through a tough time. My aunt died and my parents were going through
a divorce. One Friday after school I was walking with Mother to the car and I
was worried about how my Father would be behaving later that night. He usually
got very drunk on Friday and Saturday nights. I remembered Biotron asking a
wino in a Micronauts comic about his state of inebriation.
I asked her, “Do you think Dad will be in full possession of
his faculties?”
I didn’t want to say, is he going to be blind stinking drunk
and make me cry. So I
found id easier to say it that way.
I pretended that I was Biotron a lot in my spare time. Just
a self reliant robot that could think his way out of any predicament, he was
resourceful, smart, and right there with
Acroyear as my favorites of the crew.
Even though he was a drunk and abusive, I would keep
everything that he gave me when he came home from Guard Duty and that was
usually comic books. One of them he told me to never get rid of which was
Micronauts issue #28 that had the major fight between Acroyear and Baron Karza.
I re-read that comic book over and over until it no longer had a cover of a
first page.
So then about 4 years ago, I rediscovered them and went
about collecting all the issues that could find in the wild. And after that I’ll
go via the internet finding the rest.
I felt a closeness to Mantlo that I’ve ever felt with any of
the other writers of my past or present. He knew how to tell a story and just
keep you nailed to your seat. If I was a writer for marvel back then and saw
the part he did in Micronauts with Dr. Strange. And I was told that I’d be writing
series of the ex-Dr. now Sorcerer Supreme. I’d saw, “Naw!”
He killed it in one page! That’s Dr. Strange and no else can
say different!
Mantlo’s writing was a force to be reckoned with. It’s no
wonder he went from fill in king to the most sought after writer in Marvel so
quickly. Sadly, like all things we love as
a kid, we abandon them for the most part, or we put them
away and out of site so that we discover them again later, and fall in love
with them all over again. And that was the case
for me and the writings of Mr. Mantlo.
Four years ago I was going to track him down and writer him
a book sized thank you letter about what he did for me, and that’s when I found
out that he’d been struck by a car while rollerblading in 1992. They never
found the driver and Bill never regained a normal thought process. His brother
Mike takes care of him now, and there’s a funding for all the medical expenses
that he has accrued over the years. I know if I ever became rich or won the
lottery, I’d give it all to help him out. He gave me a world that I could
escape to and leave the one that plagued me in 1986 far behind.
It’s been said that the first Velvet Underground record sold
only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important
record for so many people. Because everyone who bought one of those 30,000
copies started a band. I feel the same way with Bill Mantlo’s work. Micronauts
may not have been a household name but everyone that knows about it went out
and did something important.
If you would like to know more about Bill or want to donate to help him out, check out these
sites below:
