I wanted to wish a very happy birthday to one of my favorite comic book writers, Louise Simonson, who was born on September 26, 1946. When I was a young reader who was just getting into comic books in the mid-1980s, Simonson’s writing played a key role in capturing my interest. With super-talented penciler June Brigman, she created Power Pack, a series about four young siblings who gained superpowers from a dying alien. Alex, Julie, Jack and Katie Power used their fantastic new abilities to defend Earth against the belligerent alien Snarks, as well as a succession of other strange menaces.
I had a lot of identification with the four main characters in Power Pack. They were all around my age. In addition to fighting aliens & supervillains, they faced much more mundane problems such as disagreements among themselves, arguments with parents who they felt just did not understand them, making friends with other kids their age, and having trouble with homework. Simonson did an amazing job scripting stories that young readers could relate to without ever talking down to them.
Simonson had previously edited writer Chris Claremont on both Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants. The two of them seem to possess a really good rapport and (in my humble opinion) under Simonson’s editorship Claremont wrote some of his best stories. Later on, when Simonson was writing Power Pack, her close creative relationship with Claremont resulted in her series occasionally featuring guest appearances by the X-Men, and the Power kids showing up now & again in the X-titles. Those crossovers were a major part of my introduction to the wider X-Men universe and Claremont’s work. For instance, Uncanny X-Men #205, written by Claremont with superb artwork by Barry Windsor-Smith, is an amazing story where we see Wolverine through young Katie Power’s eyes. It was a really great introduction to the character of Logan.
(This is the point where I risk embarrassing myself. When I was a kid, I used to make up stories where I gained superpowers and had adventures alongside Power Pack. Years later at a convention I admitted this to Louise Simonson. She smiled and told me that a lot of other readers had told her they did the exact same thing growing up.)
In 1986, Simonson took over as writer of X-Factor with issue #6. With penciler Jackson “Butch” Guice, she quickly introduced a mysterious, powerful new villain named Apocalypse. Her husband Walter Simonson came on-board as regular penciler four issues later, and together the two of them majorly revamped the original five members of the X-Men, as well as building up Apocalypse into a significant figure in the Marvel universe. Louise Simonson stayed on X-Factor until issue #64, in her later stories working with such artists as Art Adams, Paul Smith, and Terry Shoemaker. She also had a lengthy run on New Mutants that lasted from issue #55 to #97.
After departing from X-Factor and New Mutants in 1991, Simonson moved over to DC Comics. There she paired up with Jon Bogdanove, who she had previously worked with on her later Power Pack issues, and the two of them launched Superman: The Man of Steel. Both Simonson and Bogdanove would stay on the title for a lengthy eight year run. During that time, amidst the “Death of Superman” story arc, they co-created John Henry Irons, aka Steel, who first took up his armored identity in memory of the (temporarily) deceased Kal-El. Throughout her issues, while juggling the requirements of tying in with the storylines of the other three monthly books, Simonson managed to give Superman: The Man of Steel its own individual feel, introducing an interesting supporting cast and ongoing subplots.
When her run on Man of Steel ended, Simonson returned to Marvel for several projects. Among these was Warlock, a really fun but all too short-lived series drawn by Pascual Ferry featuring the wacky techno-organic alien member of the New Mutants, and Chaos War: X-Men, a miniseries co-written with Chris Claremont. She also penned the excellent X-Factor Forever, which was set in a timeline that picked up right after her point of departure from X-Factor in 1991. On that five issue miniseries, she worked with Dan Panosian, who showed off his amazingly improved artwork. He had really grown by leaps & bounds since his debut in the early 1990s.
There is a major theme running through much of Simonson’s writing. She often takes a look at the importance of family, of establishing emotional ties to other people. Power Pack was very much the story of the four Power children, their relationships with one another and their parents. In her X-Factor issues, Simonson tackled the complicated state of Cyclops’ personal life, at how he had basically wrecked his marriage to Madelyne Prior, and now had to deal with the consequences of that, his confused feelings for the newly resurrected Jean Grey, and having to raise his infant son Nathan who he’d previously had with Madelyne. (I think Simonson did an excellent job handling the extremely awkward editorial directive handed down to her and Claremont that had forced Scott Summers to leave Madelyne for Jean.) In Man of Steel, Simonson introduced a young African American boy named Keith. After his mother died, the orphaned Keith was adopted by Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White and his wife Alice, who had lost their own son some years before. In Warlock, Simonson had her oddball alien hero forming a sort of family unit with Hope, Psimon, and Chi-Chee the monkey, each of whom had also become outcasts.
The entire X-Factor Forever miniseries was all about family and relationships. Cyclops and Marvel Girl are still attempting to reconcile their feelings for one another, and to take care of baby Nathan. Bobby Drake, a.k.a. Iceman, is continuing his romance with Opal Tanaka, with the pair visiting her parents and discussing the possibility of marriage. Warren Worthington is in a growing friendship with policewoman Charlotte Jones and her son Timmy, all the while struggling to come to terms with his transformation from Angel to the dark Archangel by Apocalypse. And Hank McCoy, the bouncing blue Beast, is working on his on-again, off-again relationship with reporter Trish Tilby, who is thinking of adopting an orphan child.
Even Apocalypse is, in his own way, searching for a family. Born 20,000 years ago to a tribe of primitive humans, the man who would become Apocalypse was a freak anomaly, the world’s first mutant, gifted with shape-shifting abilities. As the X-Men would discover in the present day, so too did Apocalypse learn in prehistoric times: his powers were a double-edged sword. When he used them to serve as his tribe’s protector, they reacted with fear & hatred, driving him out. We can interpret Apocalypse’s subsequent millennia-long mission to insure the future supremacy of mutant-kind as motivated by a wish to no longer be alone, to one day have another family. In the 19th Century, he thought he had found a kindred spirit in young Nathaniel Essex, and transformed him into his apprentice Mr. Sinister. One could say that Apocalypse regarded Sinister almost like a son. And when Sinister rebelled, conducting his own dangerous experiments which threatened to destabilize all of his former mentor’s carefully-laid plans, on some level it must have hurt Apocalypse. It really shows Simonson’s talent & skill as a writer, that she brought a degree of empathy and pathos to a ruthless schemer such as Apocalypse.
I definitely think Louise Simonson is an amazing writer. I really enjoy her work, and I hope that we see more from her pen again in the near future. It would be especially great if she had the opportunity to work with her husband Walter again, or with June Brigman.
In My Not So Humble Opinion 