This is a pretty good overview of Bill Mantlo.

Gotta go with the Micronauts. I encountered them at just the right time for them to catalyze a whole lot of sense of wonder. Michael Golden's wonderful art, then new to me, helped. I think fondly of that work yet, and will be picking up this book at the start of the month.

Mr. Mantlo was a staple of my childhood reading and I too would like to give a big love hug to this underrated writer. I really like Micronauts (Kane! Chaykin! Golden! Ditko!) and although reprints are unlikely they can be picked up on E-Bay for a song.
But Hulk #261 sticks in my mind. It's a bit vague now but I'm pretty sure Hulk washed up on Easter Island and encountered The Absorbing Man. It kept this then 11-year old rapt. I'm not saying he was the greatest writer but - 22 pages and at the end one happy kid. Sounds like good comics to me. Respect is due.

The thing is...well, I admire Mantlo as a human being, because it takes a real quaslity human being to do the sort of criminal defense work he did. But as a comic book writer, he sucked. I mean, hard. I mean Vogon poetry hard. Rom was terrible. What he did to Alpha Flight was the sort of thing you might expect someone to phone into the police to claimed credit for like a terrorist bombing or the like.

Basically, good human being, bad comic writer.

I haven't read enough Rom to judge whether it was good or bad. I've heard enough people say it's good, and the summaries of the stories make it seem really good, but maybe it's not as good as it sounds.

But Alpha Flight? Bad? Come on. That was some great stuff. OK, the whole "Northstar is a fairy! Get it!?" thing was a little heavy-handed. But the rest was good. Mantlo did interesting things with the existing characters (I liked what he did to Puck, thank you very much, and what he did to Madison Jeffries, and Sasquatch and Snowbird), and he also created some pretty damned good characters (Purple Girl, Manikin, the Dream Queen, to name a few).

Was Mantlo an all-star? Heck no. But he was a solid member of the Marvel bench, and I can name a dozen writers worse than him without breaking a sweat.

I am so glad there are other Micronauts fans. This book hit me, as someone said above, at THE perfect time. This was my GI Joe or Transformers. I was too old for both of those by the time they came out so this era was my toy fetish (outside of Star Wars, of course, but that was ubiquitous so who counts that?).

When I first saw an issue, #3 (and I remember it clearly) I figured it would be some crappy toy tie-in with no more quality than the Hostess Fruit Pie ads staring Spiderman.

Boy was I wrong. What I got was a very fun, pulpy, space opera with LITTLE ALIENS IN SPACE SHIPS invading earth. They didn't even try to make them anything but the toys we played with but kept the size and added a rich and surprisingly engaging back story. Pure pulp, to be sure, but great fun and an epic read. The first dozen were the best and I think deserve a nice reprint, if you ask me. Cool story, great use of the toys without being ridiculous about it and that wonderful art.

Same with ROM (yet another toy franchise, though which came first??). I liked the early issues of ROM and the background for why his race was stuck in the armor (and boy howdy was it fun to see them...and Bug!!...referenced in the new Annihilation book). Sure, it doesn't stand up to the best of today's writings but for the time, my age and expecations and love of toys at the time Mantlo offered up some fun writing and cool stories. Good on ya for bringing this topic out.

Bill Mantlo wrote Peter Parker: Spectacular Spider Man #120, a book that I read when I was 8 years old and scared the hell out of me. I tracked it down recently, and it's still a scary book. A lot of that is Keith Giffen's art, but it needs a script to go where it goes... In what's probably a lift from Eisner's Droopsie Avenue, Mantlo has Peter Parker investigating arsonist thugs driving tenants out of a teniment. There's apathetic cops, terrified citizens, and Peter Parker feeling disempowered because beating up and scaring thugs somehow isn't enough... It's a damn fine book, and I'm grateful to the man who put it into the world.

In fact, I thought his Alpha Flight was beyond atrocious, but so what? Mantlo also wrote many, many comics that I liked a lot, and I think he was at his best doing stuff a bit further away from the core properties and the costumes -- I always enjoyed him most on more science-fictiony books, where there was room for him to move without tripping over a cape. His first issue of Skull The Slayer is still a favourite comic. ROM and Micronauts were fun and readable. Woodgod was atmospheric (and the title character well-designed, to boot). I like to think that if he hadn't been such a reliable utility writer he might've done more of the stuff (it seems to me) that he was genuinely interested in, and as a result he might be more well-regarded today. Because he would be better-known for his "A" material, which is out there, if you can only find it.

Although maybe that's too much of a generalization, because judging from this post he's probably associated more firmly with ROM and Micronauts than he is with, say, the Hulk. And that's good.

But he was definitely always a bit of a dark horse.

Well, that's my two cents anyway.

Without a doubt, best Bill Mantlo story for me is the Doctor Octopus/Black Cat storyline from PPTSM #75-79. Peter faces his fears, his demons, but in the end triumphs like any good hero should, and learns to love the Black Cat. I think this paved the way for the marriage, oddly enough. He opened his heart again.

And he gave Octavius the whuppin' of his LIFE.

I have loads of Bill Mantlo comics from when I was a kid, it seems like he was everywhere, and I was generally entertained by his books. Unfortunately, it wasn't until he took over Alpha Flight that I actually took note of his name in the credits, and that was because I couldn't believe how bad the book had become.

But focusing on the good, I look back and realize that his Hulk run defined the character as I got to know him, and while I think Peter David is a better writer, Mantlo is my "golden age" writer I associate with the book. I think my favorite story is still #254, which introduced the U-Foes, who remain alongside the Leader and the Abomination as my favorite Hulk villains.

Recently tracking down his Hulk issues from the 280's, I admit the writing doesn't hold up that well, but the fun of the stories still does. I can't help but grin as Hulk and the Avengers stumble through various historical settings while chasing the Leader through time. Even the insanity of #286, where Hulk gets blasted through time by a random freak lightning bolt (?), then at the end gets sent back to his own time exactly the same way without any explanation (!?!)...even that was a fun story.

He wrote stories that kids could lose themselves in. If more writers did that today, I'm sure the business would be a lot healthier.

Mantlo has, of late, struck me as a transitional writer. He broke into the field in the mid-70s, which with a few exceptions may have been the nadir of superhero comics. At that point, the books he took over, such as Iron Man, were more interesting and probably better written than their immediate predecessors.

However, other, better, writers were arriving on the scene in the next few years. Mantlo's Iron Man was better than a lot of what had previously been going on in the title, but it was then overshadowed by Micheliene (sp?) and Layton's work on it. Similarly, a lot of aspects of the Hulk which Peter David is often praised for originated with Mantlo's run...but Peter went a lot further with them and wrote them better.

Thus the transitional writer label; he was an intermediate step between the nadir of the early-mid 70s and the significant revitalization of superhero comics in the 80s. Alas, his own writing level stayed pretty much static, so with a lack of improvement his rep declined in comparison to the mass of other writers as that mass improved with other new folk coming onto the scene.

That sounds very fair to me, Tom.

I have to disagree with one point of Mike Chary's comment (and agree with another).

Mantlo's work WAS fairly basic (and almost comedically predictable in places - as a kid, the friend who first got me INTO the comic habit would joke about how Mantlo's stories were frequently along the lines of: "Hero has a challenge, hero doesn't think he can succeed/is worthy/is on the brink of defeat, hero says "NO! I won't succumb!" and then hero fights back and wins"), but his work wasn't BAD.

It was solid and basic and FUN (writing for KIDS and young adults to totally enjoy their comics - which you must remember was STILL the target audience during those years)!

While later issues fell to disarray, the majority of his ROM series was completely AWESOME!

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That said, I agree that he is a phenomenal human being to take the beliefs he wrote about in super-hero comics and espouse them as a Defense Attorney.

To totally reinvent himself in that manner shows astounding bravery and heroism.

I WILL be getting this tribute book.

~P~
P-TOR

HI Jason,

Thanks for generating this topic. I'm glad you found my tribute book to Bill's legacy to be informative. As you probably have learned, I'm a very big fan of Bill's writing. To those naysayers, I don't think we can judge the man's work from his ALPHA FLIGHT run; it was my understanding that it was not his choice of assignments. I think Bill did a decent job on the book, but I don't think his heart was in it. His run on PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN remains one of my personal favorite runs of any Spider-man series. And if anyone hasn't read the first dozen issues of MICRONAUTS volume 1, they are definitely required reading. As far as one-shots go, everyone should read Bill's Spidey-Hulk team-up in MARVEL FANFARE. Awesome story; beautiful art by Michael Golden. This one should definitely be reprinted again and again.

Best-
David

he write a story that started in Super-Villain Team-Up that ended elsewhere, but it's essentially the same story Emperor Doom from the Marvel graphic novel series that gets high critical acclaim. Doom takes over the world, no one knows, so he allows Magneto tro challenge him for control. It was a lot of fun!