When it comes to comics, I love cosmic stories and cosmic characters. My favorite superhero is the Silver Surfer, who roams through space on a surfboard:
And my favorite comic book story is the 6-issue limited series The Infinity Gauntlet, in which Thanos the Mad Titan uses the Infinity gems to gain control over the entire universe.
(The plot of this series inspired the recent Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame movies.)
Back when I collected comics, there was another cosmic superhero who had his own series: Quasar, wielder of the quantum bands.
I would have loved to read more Quasar way back then (the early '90s), but I didn't have the funds to do so. After my deep dive into Darkhawk a few years ago (which I wrote about here), I started thinking about doing the same with Quasar. I went to ebay and found someone selling the entire 60-issue run of Quasar comics. The price was a bit too steep, though, and I didn't even know if the series was any good. All I knew was that I liked cosmic characters, and Quasar was one. So I didn't buy it.
Months later, I discovered the comic-book writer J.M. DeMatteis and went down a deep rabbit hole of reading his works (see this post, this post, and this one too). At some point during all of that, I came across a comment he made about Quasar. I can't find the exact quote, but it was something like this:
I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that. Here I was, uncertain whether to buy the Quasar series, and all of a sudden I see my favorite comic-book writer saying Quasar had outstanding writing. I looked up this Mark Gruenwald guy, since I wasn't familiar with him, and I learned he wrote 59 out of the 60 issues of Quasar. So I went back to ebay and discovered that the listing for the entire Quasar series was still available, 6 months after I initially saw it. I bought it right then."Quasar was the best writing of Mark Gruenwald's career."
And I am here to tell you that I LOVED it. All 60 issues. It was cosmic to the max. The writing was outstanding, and it was worth every penny. Apparently Gruenwald had realized that none of Marvel's cosmic characters were human (even the Silver Surfer was from another planet), so his goal with Quasar was to do cosmic from the human perspective. Well, it worked out great.
I looked around for other comics written by Mark Gruenwald, and I learned that he considered his 12-issue limited series The Squadron Supreme to be his magnum opus. It was available through my Marvel Unlimited digital subscription, so it went on my reading list. I actually started reading it last year, when flying home from Phoenix. I got through 3 and a half issues on the plane, but for some reason never kept reading it afterwards.
I was thinking about all of this last week, as Wendy and I were getting ready to fly to Phoenix to visit my family. So I started reading The Squadron Supreme again a few days before our flight. For whatever reason, I was hooked this time. I got over halfway through the series before our flight, and I just barely managed to finish reading it on the plane: I read the last page of the last issue right as our plane pulled up to the gate and the door opened!
The Squadron Supreme, although it wasn't cosmic, was still really good. It's about human civilization being on the brink of collapse, and a group of superheroes installing themselves as world leaders with the goal of solving all of humanity's problems: crime, poverty, hunger, war, disease, even death itself. As you can probably imagine, things go horribly wrong.
On the flight back from Phoenix, I read the much-shorter sequel, also written by Gruenwald, called The Squadron Supreme: Death of a Universe. It actually had a cosmic plot, and it was fantastic. Even better than the original 12 issues, in my opinion.
All of this is to say I am now a huge fan of Mark Gruenwald, but I am very sad to report that he died suddenly in 1996, in his early 40's, due to an undiagnosed heart defect. He was such a huge fan of comics, though, that he requested his ashes be used to make a comic book. To honor that wish, when the 12 issues of The Squadron Supreme were collected into a graphic novel, Mark's ashes were mixed into the ink used for printing.
How crazy is that!