By d. emerson eddy — Before Stranger Things. Before Summer of '84. Before many a Gen X or Millennial began mining the nostalgia of their childhood for pop culture revelry, there was Marvel 1985 by Mark Millar, Tommy Lee Edwards, and John Workman that stuck its toe in the reminiscences genre to gauge the temperature. Kind of.

I was 4 in 1985. A precocious kid growing up in the country who was probably too curious for his own good, already neck deep into reading things well above his age group. I can't say that I clearly understood everything I was reading—a lot of subtext, themes, and meaning were lost—but I was already well on my way into comics like Swamp Thing and The Mighty Thor. But there was one big thing raging through comics that year (that wasn't Crisis on Infinite Earths), Secret Wars. As someone whose purchases of Marvel comics was limited, it was an event that I largely read through hindsight, buying many of the tie-ins in those old three and four packs that used to bundle remaindered comics.

Marvel 1985 takes us back to that time, using the approaching end of the Secret Wars series as a springboard, and to a world like our own where the superheroes and supervillains are comics stories, and the biggest adversity our protagonist, Toby, is facing is the divorce of his parents and potentially moving to England with his mother and new stepfather. Until he thinks he finds Mole Man and the Red Skull moving in to an old mansion in town.

Comics that tap into nostalgia wasn't something new for Marvel by any means. Many of the regular superhero stories trade on it by playing with continuity and there have been two high profile hits in Marvels and Earth X that utilize it in different ways, looking back and looking forward. What Millar, Edwards, and Workman do with Marvel 1985 is somewhere in between. With some of the looking back even going further than 1985, back into the early days of Marvel Comics as we see a generational love of the medium going between Toby and his father. There's even inclusion of a comic shop, its owner and an employee in the mix, that will bring familiar stereotypes to readers, and a bit of a possible rankle as some of Millar's cynicism shows up in that indie comics pushing employee. Yet the crux of the story being dealing with the supervillains in the now, the oddity of the situation, and a potential workaround for the future.

It's absolutely beautifully illustrated by Tommy Lee Edwards. He has a style that I'd probably describe as a rougher Walter Simonson, scratchier lines and darker shadows (somewhat like Earth X's John Paul Leon), and I don't think there could be a more perfect choice to bring a world like ours to life. Along with the added mystery of how fictional characters could be appearing in a world that otherwise plays by our rather mundane rules. When the weirdness really breaks through, the artwork is thoroughly spectacular.

John Workman's letters for this series are also fascinating. There's a unique quality to his approach here. He uses a similar technique here as he does across many other books, with word balloons breaking panel borders, opening negative space, and bridging panels, but the style that he uses, an open balloon tail, asymmetrical balloons, and a mixed case type for narrative boxes, gives this series its own feel.

Marvel 1985 from Millar, Edwards, and Workman is a bit of an oddity within Marvel and apparently even further, as it was intended to also be part of Millarworld, though it still stands as an interesting viewing of 1985 and the power of imagination. Both in how the stories in comics can shape people's lives and in what you can create with that imagination.

Marvel 1985

Marvel 1985
Writer: Mark Millar
Artist: Tommy Lee Edwards
Letterer: John Workman
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Collects Marvel 1985 #1-6. Young Toby Goodman lives an ordinary life, filling his days with Marvel comic books as an escape from dysfunctional family. Then one day Toby stumbled across an old house, inhabited by the villains that terrorize the Marvel Universe. At first, no one believes what he claims to have seen, but that was before the bodies started turning up.
Release Date: July 22, 2009
Price: $10.99
Read This Comic: Marvel 1985 via Amazon, or Marvel 1985 on comiXology

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d. emerson eddy is a student and writer of things. He fell in love with comics during Moore, Bissette, & Totleben's run on Swamp Thing and it has been a torrid affair ever since. His madness typically manifests itself on Twitter @93418.