The Battle of Lexington, Part One

THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON was a fan comic book produced by Kurt Busiek and Scott McCloud while in High School. Never published anywhere, it featured an enormous battle between different Marvel super heroes that they liked set in and around the area of their hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts. As McCloud describes it on his website:

1976-1978: The Battle of Lexington. In high school, Kurt Busiek wrote and I drew a 60-page lovingly rendered slugfest between various Marvel superheroes we liked, battling in—and nearly destroying—various landmarks in our hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts. Shown as a public slideshow reading in 1994 at four conventions. Unpublished, of course.

It’s worth prefacing that this was a fan-produced comic book by creators who, while they would eventually go on to some fame within the field, weren’t yet working at a professional level. So it’s crude but energetic. And you can certainly see some of the seeds of how they would develop later on in these pages.

The pages are far too crammed full of small panels, and the tiny lettering is often difficult to read. But there are some novel layouts and compositions throughout.

There are places where you can see an influence from Neal Adams and Jim Starlin in terms of page layout.

And this page has a strong George Perez flavor in teh way events have been broken down.

A messy page layout, but the central design conceit is pretty cool.

This is an astonishing 21 panel page. Warning to newcomers: don’t do this!