Part Ten of an ongoing series.
Catch up with Part One here.
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FACE FRONT
The best way to explain both the premise and appeal of Marvels might be to describe a specific
scene. You don’t have to be familiar with comic books to understand.
The setting is familiar: the office of a major metropolitan
newspaper. Irascible publisher J. Jonah Jameson is in heated discussion with a
veteran photographer. “I call ‘em as I see ‘em, Phil,” Jonah says, “I always have! You know that!” Into the scene stumbles none other than Peter
Parker, AKA the Amazing Spider-Man, with fresh pictures to sell of Spider-Man
fighting the Looter. Parker boasts to his boss that “You’ll love ‘em – they make ol’ Spidey look terrible!” This is right up Jonah’s alley. He hates Spider-Man
and is happy to publish anything that paints the wall-crawling vigilante in a
poor light. The other photographer glares at Parker before storming out of the
room.
“Now there’s unbiased journalism in action for you!” Phil mutters. “If I were Spider-Man, I’d beat the stuffing out of that little weasel!”
You know how it goes. Peter spars with Jonah for a few
panels. He gets a voucher for the photos, musing to himself about
the bitter irony of making money defaming himself as Spider-Man. Then he ducks down the
hallway, climbs to the roof, changes into his costume and swings away to
whatever new adventures awaits.
Except that’s not how the scene plays. We leave Parker in
Jonah’s office and instead follow Phil. We know he can get away with talking
like that to the boss. He’s one of the few people in the newsroom who still can,
because Jonah and him came up together – why, Phil knows Jonah from before he
even had a mustache. Phil hates Peter Parker because he thinks Peter is a
sensationalistic parasite, tarnishing the name of a good man for a quick buck.
The argument he and Jonah had been having when Peter barged into the
publisher’s office? Phil was defending the superheroes who had just saved the
world and who the publisher had just smeared. None other than the Fantastic Four had successfully repelled the mighty
Galactus, preserving the lives of every man, woman, and child on the planet –
an act which Jameson flatly labeled a hoax on the front page of the Daily Bugle.
It’s an obvious but startling inversion. We as readers have
expectations. We are conditioned to want to follow Peter because his story is
the important one. We want to know what he’s thinking, and usually we do. Other
characters, however, aren’t privy to the protagonist’s inner feelings. They
can’t know the irony that Peter makes badly needed money by selling pics of
Spider-Man taken under questionable pretenses. They can’t help but see Peter’s
behavior as selfish and irresponsible. Suddenly we see Peter as selfish and
irresponsible too.
It may not seem like a big point but of all the memorable
images from throughout the book the one that returns to me most often is just
that image of Peter Parker stumbling briefly into someone else’s story. We’re
used to seeing that happen in other superhero stories, of course, with a nod and
a wink to indicate that some passerby on the street happens to be the hero of
his own magazine. It’s one of Stan Lee’s signature moves, later codified into a
trope of the company’s house style. The movies do it now. But since this isn’t
any kind of superhero story, it’s Phil we follow. Who knows what becomes of
Peter? Not us. You could probably figure it out if you remember your 60s Marvel
timeline, but it really doesn’t matter. In the context of Marvels it feels like running into an old girlfriend downtown.
She doesn’t even recognize you. You catch a glimpse of her walking away and
then she’s gone.
This isn’t a story about Spider-Man. Spider-Man appears in this story but he’s a minor player.
Phil’s the star here. Old, boring Phil.
People underestimate Marvels. It's the book that elevated Kurt Busiek from the backbench to the major leagues. People also unfairly dismiss Marvels
for the sins of Alex Ross’ later work. It’s an odd and precarious book because it
takes nostalgia as its subject matter without necessarily being nostalgic – a
fine point, but crucial. As pretty as it is, and as much as it seems to want to glorify its subject
matter, it’s really more a poison pill. The past is a nice place to visit,
sometimes, but you wouldn’t want to live there. It’s never how you remember it.
This is a subversive message for Marvel story, let alone one
of the most famous Marvel stories ever. Comic books – and let’s be clear what
we mean here, superhero comic books – are built on nostalgia. People start
reading comics when they’re kids and want to hold on to that feeling for as
long as they can. They want to pick up a comic book now and be transported back
to wherever they were when they first felt something akin to love, that feeling
of desperate affection for something bigger and more impressive than themselves.
The past is a safe place, after all. It’s a place to escape whatever ails you
in the present.
The people who became most attached to these stories were
often the people who most needed to escape. Comics are always there. They’re portable:
a small stack fits in a paper bag that slides right into your backpack. They’re
static: you can stare all day and the images never move. Time stands still. You
can always return to your favorites and read them in any particular order. Just
imagine if your favorite song never had to end. They’re something you can spend
the rest of your life collecting, a hole without a bottom. They’re a place to
go when the world around you isn’t quite living up to expectations.
Marvels is a book
about falling in love and falling out of love. The former occurs in an instant,
the latter can take the rest of your life. Sometimes the latter is your life.
Phil’s a boring guy, and that’s the point. He’s a dutiful
father and loving husband. We saw him courting his wife back during the War,
when he was just a kid who accidentally stumbled into the story of a lifetime
at a mad scientist’s press conference. It was a bit of fluff for the back pages
that just happened to be the first public appearance of Professor Phineas
Horton’s ingenious artificial man, the android “Human Torch” – named so by
virtue of his bursting into flame upon exposure to oxygen. At first the crowd
laughs at the apparent hoax. Then the Torch moves. The faces of the assembled
spectators and media go slack. Everyone realizes that instead of a laughingstock,
Horton has created a menace.
Phil was in that first audience, at the dawn of a very eventful
period in history. On the eve of World War II strange beings with strange
abilities began to appear on the front pages of newspapers across the world: not
just the macabre Torch, but the impetuous and savage Namor the Sub-Mariner,
young monarch of Atlantis gifted with awesome strength. At first the creatures are
deemed hoaxes, but eventually the “Marvels,” as Phil takes to calling them, are
recognized as legitimate phenomenon. A little later the
star-spangled Sentinel of Liberty, Captain America pops up, but no one is afraid of him (except for the Nazis, of course). Everything changes once superheroes appear
on the scene. As the young Phil muses,
Marvels, I called them – and that’s what they were. Next to that –
what were we? Before they came, we
were so big, so grand. We were Americans
– young, strong, vital! We were the ones who got things done. But we’d gotten smaller. I could see it in those same faces – faces that had once been
so confident, so brash. We weren’t the players anymore.
We were spectators.
Perhaps because he was there right at the very beginning, at
Professor Horton’s ill-fated demonstration, Phil feels a connection. He
understands that rather than being simple sideshow freaks or vigilantes, these
new creatures represented an existential threat to humanity. What good
was a man, any man, against a
half-Atlantean hybrid who could lift a car above his head and laugh while
bullets bounced off his steel-taut skin?
Over the course of Marvels
Phil runs the gamut – from terror at the earliest days of the “Marvels,”
immediately prior and during World War II, to joy at their sudden return in the
early 1960s (just in time to enlist in the Cold War), to reverence at the
realization of just how significant they had become to the ongoing health and
safety of the planet. He ends disenchanted, however, and so must we.
‘NUFF SAID
One way to encapsulate the difference between Marvel and DC
– certainly reductive but not inaccurate – is to glance back to the beginnings.
Action Comics #1
and Marvel Comics #1 both portray the
same moment, albeit with different emphases. In the former, dated June
1938, Superman lifts a car above his head and smashes it against a rock. The
scene is observed by three men, two of whom are running away in terror, the
third of whom has been knocked to the ground. The famous expression of the man
in the foreground is one of sheer disbelief. He’s holding his head in his
hands, eyes bulging, as if he literally cannot believe what he has seen. Is he
a bank robber or bystander? It doesn’t really matter, the cover doesn’t tell
us. But he has seen something so profoundly uncanny as to defy belief: a man in
a circus leotard and a cape is throwing around cars like they were made of
cardboard. He’s running scared, and it’s hard not to imagine why. Put yourself
in that guy’s shoes: the characters on the cover of Action Comics #1 don’t know what a superhero is. Superheroes have literally never existed before this moment in time. He doesn’t
even have the vocabulary to describe
what he’s seeing. He remains a mute witness to Superman’s debut.
Contrast that with Marvel
Comics #1, cover dated November 1939. In the year and a half since the
release of the first Action, the
superhero has become, if not intimately familiar, then at least recognizable
from Superman and the first handful of Superman copycats. The genre is old enough
now that the copycats have to dig deeper for novelty: you can’t just
put another strongman in a union suit, you need to have something different for
your covers. Something to catch the eyes of readers with plenty of choices but
maybe only one dime in their pocket. Even in 1939 Marvel was already Marvel, so
they accomplished this in the most lurid manner possible: instead of just a man
lifting a car above his head, Marvel gives us a man on fire bursting through a
steel bank vault door, grinning maniacally as he lunges towards someone
shooting at him. That someone – presumably a bank robber? – is terrified, which
certainly makes sense. He’s being attacked by a demon seemingly conjured from
the pits of Hell. He’s shooting the monster but the bullets bounce right off.
That guy is toast.
On both covers normal human beings are confronted with an extraordinary spectacle, an event so far outside the realm of human understanding as to defy description. But there’s an important difference: the people on the cover of Action #1 are reacting to something amazing that Superman is doing, whereas the crook on the cover of Marvel #1 is reacting simply to the Torch’s existence. It may seem a fine point, but it's a telling distinction. Superman is a man who performs miraculous feats, whereas the Human Torch is himself a miracle. One possesses strange powers, one is strange power.
People aren’t usually afraid of superheroes in DC Comics, at
least not historically. Some of that changed over the years as the company
adopted many Marvel devices for their own use, but still, people generally
aren’t afraid of Superman even if criminals and villains may be wary of
some of the things Superman can do. Lex Luthor is a villain precisely because he doesn’t trust Superman and acts accordingly. In a Marvel book Luthor would
work for the US government because that kind of paranoia is standard issue.
Just the fact that superheroes exist is a source of danger and tension to the
denizens of the Marvel Universe.
Stan Lee figured out quite early that this was fertile
ground for stories. When he and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko laid the foundations
for the Marvel Universe in the early 1960s this was cemented as one of the
cornerstones of the company’s approach to storytelling: people aren’t naturally
trustful of superheroes. They certainly aren’t always grateful for their existence.
People in Metropolis genuinely like Superman, whereas the Fantastic Four had
already been evicted from their headquarters before their series even hit
double digits.
Certainly this was fodder for occasional stories at DC, but
if the citizens of Gotham turned against Batman there was usually a damn good
reason why they had been tricked into thinking that the Caped Crusader had
turned evil. Just by walking down the street Spider-Man risked catching a
tomato in the face thanks to a never-ending stream of bad publicity courtesy
of the Daily Bugle. This was a completely novel vector for ongoing stories:
what if, in addition to simply fighting the bad guys, the heroes could also be
at odds with society at large? Suddenly there was room for a character like the
Hulk who was openly regarded as a dangerous menace by the US Army (and to
be fair, he did spend most of his time smashing up Army bases and expensive
tanks, so it wasn’t entirely a specious antagonism).
The significance of this subtle but profound shift was not
lost on Kurt Busiek, so much so that it not only formed the backbone of his
exploration of the company’s themes in Marvels,
but was a significant plot point in 2003’s JLA
/ Avengers crossover. Much of that story hinges on the characters learning
to perceive differences in the ways their respective universes operate. The JLA
figure out immediately that even a relatively clean-cut group like the Avengers
is still subject to a great deal of resistance and resentment at home, whereas
the Avengers are stunned by the degree to which heroes are revered and
respected in the DC Universe.
In Marvels, Phil
is a special character not because of any great power or ability, but simply by
virtue of being able to see what so many people around him refuse to
acknowledge: the existence of superheroes is not normal, and their
existence warps society in insidious ways. In the early 40s when the
“Marvels” first appear, Phil is demoralized by their very existence, perceiving
that in a world where creatures like the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner can
demolish half of New York in a schoolyard fight, there’s very little room for a
normal person to matter.
When the heroes return in the early 1960s it’s a different
story. At first they’re the Beatles, JFK, and the Mercury Seven rolled into one. Tourists
to the Big Apple crowd the streets to catch a glimpse of Thor or Iron Man –
brightly colored avatars of the military-industrial complex and stalwart foot
soldiers in the war against Communism. Of course, even the handful of celebrity
heroes – the Fantastic Four and the first line-up of the Avengers, essentially
– were still victims of the occasional public backlash, despite the fact that
they generally got off easier than Spider-Man or the X-Men. And even among the
“presentable” heroes the monstrous Thing was still singled out as a
freak.
As the 1960s wear on the appeal of the returned superheroes
begins to wear off – just as, creatively, Lee and his various collaborators
also darkened the tone of the books ever so slightly, not necessary a conscious decision but one that followed naturally from Lee's commitment to deepening characterization over time. The reflexive
anti-Communism of the first half of the 60s was replaced by gestures in the
direction of a counter-culture that had turned on the Vietnam War, a shift
echoed by Marvel’s evolving popularity on college campuses. Early championed by
young Republican groups for the company’s partisan anti-Communism, those elements
were gradually dropped and characters like Dr. Strange began appearing on black
light posters.
After the first issue, more or less a prologue set on the eve of the War, Marvels traces the progress of public opinion through the 60s. At first,
everything is bright and new. Crowds gather to gawk at the resurrected Captain
America:
We were in awe of him. Of all of them. And even when we were
scared – when lives were threatened – we knew they’d come through for us – that they’d make everything all right. Like I said, it was a
different time. It was life or death – it was grand opera – it was the greatest
show on earth – and we – every single one of us – we had the best seat in the house.
What changes? Well, America. There’s a particular narrative in
thumbnail histories of the United States, where the 1960s begin with great
promise before eventually descending into tragedy, chaos, and disappointment. This is the folk memory progression from the halcyon 1950s to
the troubled 1970s, or (in contemporary terms) the span of Mad Men. Accordingly, the 60s in Marvels begin with everything quite pleasant, shiny, and new. People are smiling.
But that changes. Or rather, it is more correct to say the
thumbnail never captured the whole picture. The early 1960s were great for a
few, certainly, but racism and war didn’t spring into being the moment JFK died
in November of 1963. The truth is that as the decade wore on “mainstream” (read,
white middle-class) America became increasingly aware of unpleasant truths that
had been happily repressed or simply ignored
in the decades following the end of World War II. The “Good Old Days” exist
only in memory and only because people choose to be ignorant.
Phil’s view of the era begins to change when he falls into the
company of an angry mob gathered around the original team of X-Men. Having just
saved a construction worker from falling to his death, the crowd misinterprets
the action as an attack and react accordingly. The X-Men are mutants, after
all, and mutants aren’t good
superheroes like Captain America or Iron Man or even that nasty Spider-Man –
they’re born different. They’re
monsters.
Before he knows what he’s doing, there’s a brick in his
hand, and in the heat of the moment Phil beans Iceman with a chunk of masonry
roughly the same size and shape as the one that robbed him of his sight at the
end of the first book, where he was injured during a final climactic row
between the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. When fictional characters lose
eyes it typically signifies gaining wisdom, but Phil’s injury simply means he
has to work harder as a photographer. He only learns later that he was wrong, when
his children find a little girl – a mutant – who has run away from home.
To the book’s credit Phil isn’t portrayed as any kind of
hero for finally seeing through the reflexive bigotry of the anti-mutant
hysteria sweeping the nation. It takes the most extreme event to shake him out
of his ignorance and complacency: seeing a scared child huddled on the floor of
his basement. There’s nothing brave or righteous in needing a personalized
lesson to learn that bigotry is bad, rather, it speaks to a lack of moral
imagination in his character. When confronted with bigotry he’s forced to
confront his own cowardice. He’s not special and he doesn't know what to do when it's time for him to actually stand up. Put a brick in his hand and he’s
a bigot, too.
The “man on the street” perspective that Phil represents is,
literally, blinkered, unable to see the world in three dimensions. He can’t see
– chooses not to see – the underbelly of the supposed “Silver Age” until it’s
pointed out to him, until his nose is rubbed in the mess. Superheroes are great
as long as they’re just beefed-up celebrities, but the reality that they
represent for Phil is far more frightening. The violent back-and-forth of
public opinion in the Marvel Universe is shown as the natural consequence of
living in a world where normal human beings have become obsolete. Even something as simple as a quirk of genetics can turn a normal human being into a god or a monster. One day the Fantastic Four are great and
their wedding photos are being sold in commemorative magazines, and the next
the same publisher is lambasting them as frauds and crackpots. It’s only
natural. The truth is just too much to bear.
This was Lee's great insight: people are just no good. They turn on their heroes in a second, reward cowardice and celebrate racism, and generally prefer to be lied to. They don't like to acknowledge unpleasant truths until they absolutely have to, and even then it's often grudging. It's not a particularly uplifting message, and there's no real solution. Spider-Man is never going to get a fair shake from anyone who reads the Bugle. The X-Men are never going to be able to conclusively change the hearts and minds of bigots. Life goes on. If you doubt it, look out the window.
If the book occasionally indulges in bathos - as with the image of the little girl huddling in terror in his dirty basement - it’s for the
service of showing the real contrast between Phil’s more or less mundane world
and the melodramatic excesses of the uncanny milieu into which he occasionally
stumbles. Phil is a John Cheever character living in a Stan Lee world, and the
two don’t always mesh well. The contrast is intentional.
Excelsior
The first issue of Busiek and Ross’s Marvels hit shelves in November of 1993. The series was unheralded.
I knew it was coming because I read Marvel Age like I was supposed to, but
apparently no one else did because the series hit fandom with a thunderclap.
One month nobody knew who Alex Ross was and then the first two issues of Marvels were the most wanted comics in
the country according to Wizard (which
I also read, because it was 1993).
1993 was at once the zenith and nadir of the last few
decades of American comics. After years of explosive sales growth fueled partly
by speculation, more people were buying more comics – lots more comics. But people eventually figured out that comics
with print runs in the multiple millions were never going to be lucrative
collectors’ items. A scarce collectible is valuable only if its price reflects
legitimate demand: there are only so many copies of Amazing Fantasy #15 in existence, and there will never be any more.
Even though print runs were massive in the 1960s, most people threw their
comics away. Newsagents shipped unsold copies back to the distributor to be
pulped. Many of those few copies that survive are in awful condition. So the
first appearance of Spider-Man will always command a high price.
Speculator bubbles collapse when someone figures out that
they have paid a higher price for a commodity than they can reasonably expect
to receive on resale. After years of booming sales the industry entered the year
at a fever pitch, with new publishers appearing ex nihilo in order to fulfill a demand that had already evaporated
by the fall. The rub here is that whereas comics in 1962 (the year Amazing Fantasy #15 was printed) were
sold by newsstands and other retail outlets (such as supermarkets and
pharmacies), comics in 1993 were largely sold by direct market specialty stores
that trafficked exclusively in comics – or comics and sports cards, or comics and role-playing
games. A few stores stayed open during the dark times that followed the 1993
bust by selling palettes full of a new game called Magic: The Gathering – early
printings of which were legitimately scarce and still command a great deal of
money. (Incidentally, the sports card market had collapsed just prior to the comic
book market, meaning many stores were already hurting by 1993.)
Newsstands and retail outlets sell magazines on consignment
and on a returnable basis –as with the example of Amazing Fantasy #15, whatever the retailer doesn’t sell can be
shipped back to the distributor to be pulped. Due to a historical quirk most
comics sold to specialty stores are not
returnable. When unsold cartons of Turok,
Dinosaur Hunter #1 started clogging up floorspace, there was no way for a
retailer to recoup that investment. They were out the money for stock that
wasn’t selling to an audience that disappeared once they figured out that more
than enough copies of Turok, Dinosaur
Hunter #1 existed to ensure that every man, woman, and child who wanted a
copy could purchase a copy for pennies on the dollar. You can still probably
find a copy for a dollar today.
The problem was compounded by the fact that as more books
were produced companies struggled to maintain consistency across their lines. Especially Marvel. Even over multiple
decades and multiple owners Marvel’s corporate philosophy has remained
remarkably, brutally simple: flood the market and push competitors off the
racks. It doesn’t matter if a book is any good just so long as it exists in
place of another book by another company. (This has remained the company’s
philosophy even as it has expanded in recent years into movies and television.)
1993 was not just a year in which a great many comics were printed, it was a
year in which a great many bad comics
were printed, and even dedicated fans felt increasingly dissatisfied with
endless waves of substandard product. With speculators leaving in droves and
even the industry’s bread-and-butter fans drifting away, many stores closed or
began selling something else besides comics – like Magic cards.
This context is important to remember because the reason Marvels represented such a revolution at
its release was that it stood in direct opposition to these trends. It was an
expensive book, an almost unheard of $5.95, printed on thick paper with
eye-popping plastic overlay covers – but it was a rare gimmick that genuinely enhanced the
finished product by allowing for the cover art to be appreciated without logo
and trade dress. Marvels is still one
of the best-designed books in the company’s history. It pops off the shelf.
Looking back for this essay I was surprised to see that the
first issue of Marvels shipped in
1993. It seemed at the time to exist in a different universe from the rest of
the industry. It was a lifeline for the disenchanted. It was produced
by lifelong fans for an audience of lifelong fans, people who lived and
breathed these old books, people who needed to believe in these old books. It represented (for many readers, at
least) the first shot across the bow against a dominant comics culture that had
become crass and jaded. It was the tip of the spear
of a return to “traditionalism” that was (as reactionary movements are wont to
be) fixated not on the actual material conditions of the past but by a murky
vision of what the past was supposed to have been. Comics the way they used to be.
However, while it is possible to see Marvels as the harbinger of a movement towards nostalgia and
conservatism that infected parts of the industry in the mid 90s, it would be a
mistake to claim that the book was actually a part of this movement, and an insult to Busiek & Ross to infer
any such motivation from their work. A countermovement to the era of early
Image Comics and the “Extreme” stories that generation of creators produced was
an inevitable reaction to a shrinking retail environment and the graying of the
existing fanbase after many younger readers were burnt by the speculator bubble
and fled the hobby in droves. As fewer and fewer drug stores and supermarkets
stocked comic books, fewer and fewer kids read them. If you liked comics but
lived in a town where the only place that sold comics was the 7-11 and the 7-11
stopped selling comics, you were up the creek. What remained, what always
remained, were the lifers.
The entertainment industry celebrates success through
imitation, and comics is no different. Because of the relatively small
lead-time necessary for production comics is especially prone to faddishness:
movies and books and television can take years to produce even at breakneck
speed, but a comic book can sometimes be conceived, created, promoted, and ship
to stores in just a few months. A wave of “prestige” projects that trafficked
in nostalgia and catered to older fans followed in the wake of Marvels just as surely as night follows
day. But whereas many of the (now mostly forgotten) projects that clogged the
shelves in the wake of Marvels looked
nice, most of them missed the reason why Marvels
was so important in the first place. It wasn’t just the painted art, and it wasn’t
just the backwards-looking focus. To repeat: although Marvels is a book about nostalgia, it’s not nostalgic. The past can
be a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.
There’s an old saying, credited to a man named Peter Graham,
that the Golden Age of sci-fi is twelve. Knock a few years off and the same
goes for comics: the comics you read as a kid will always be the best comics.
Nothing will ever come close in your eyes to that first rush, from back before
you knew enough about the making of the books to become cynical. Even if the
comics you grew up with were awful (and they most likely were), they will
always be the pure and uncut high for which you will hunger for the rest of your
life.
More odd but incontrovertible is the aura of holiness invested by certain fans in eras of
comics prior to their own birth. Certainly not every fan - it's a tendency that seems to be on the wane among readers today, for instance - but the next step
after lionizing the era of comics you grew up with is the era of comics before
you were born. Nothing holds quite as much magic as an artifact of a lost epoch from
prior to your existence. Holding a comic book printed before you were even conceived
provides tangible proof of the existence of an Antediluvian world filled with wonders undreamt.
I
have no personal nostalgia attached to the Marvel Comics of the 1960s, as I
would not be born for many years yet by the time Jack Kirby left Fantastic Four in 1970. My mom read
Marvel not as a child but as a teenager and she passed some of the affection on
to me, but her reminiscences were hardly systematic (she's also perhaps the least nostalgic person I know). It fell to me to absorb
nostalgia for the Silver Age of comics second- and third-hand, from reading and
reaffirming the prejudices of older fans whose discourse dominated the period.
When Marvels hit
shelves, even though in terms of actual age I was far closer to that of the
typical Image fanboy, the borrowed nostalgia of older generations felt far more
solid to me. I didn’t buy many Image books at the time – Spawn, yes, but even people who hated Spawn bought Spawn. It was usually interesting to look at
even if the stories were repetitive drivel, and they usually were. My favorite
writer at the time was Mark Gruenwald, and I bought everything Tom DeFalco
wrote as well. I was more invested in Peter David’s Incredible Hulk than I probably should have been.
In hindsight the reason I was attracted to these books is
that I responded both to the level of craft involved in the construction of the
stories and the attitude of traditionalism that at the time permeated some of the
more long-running Marvel series. You could pick up an
issue of DeFalco and Ron Frenz’s Thor
and be assured a solid read, a story with a beginning, middle, and end with
plenty of long-simmering subplots and a reliance on long-game character
development to keep monthly readers returning even when the actual content of
the stories was a retread. A filling meal. These creators respected the past
and saw their job as part custodianship: compared to the average
issue of Spawn or even X-Force – published by the same company as Thor
but separated in both tone and execution by rigid Chinese walls – these were
extraordinarily square comics, and proudly so. They wore their old-fashioned
nature on their sleeve like badges of honor.
I wasn’t really happy with being a kid. I didn’t get much
joy out of liking the things I was “supposed” to like, at least in terms of the
comics that were considered cool at the time, and I was much happier digging
into back issue bins for issues of Marvel
Two-In-One with odd looking covers than waiting for whatever was selling
best on any given month. Sure, I read New
Mutants (for instance) and thought the book became more interesting once a
dude named Rob Liefeld came on pencils – but I was less than thrilled by the
results when he was given the opportunity to write his own stories. It it was a
lot easier to justify buying genial crap back when comics were only 75¢ or
$1.00, if it meant keeping up with the conversation. It was just a thing we
did – you sort of had to be there.
Eventually I stopped buying back issues as keeping up with
current comics became less of a joy and more of a chore – a happy chore, and
one that Marvel and DC were happy to encourage by still producing the odd good
books amongst bales of chaff, but a chore nonetheless. Routine buying habits very
easily became simple habit. Habit becomes expectation. Expectation become
dependency. If you’ve never been there, the idea of buying comics every week
being a kind of addiction probably seems absurd but – that’s how the industry
functions. Get ‘em hooked young and they’ll be customers for life.
It would have been difficult to design a book better suited to appeal to the me of 1993 than Marvels . I was already a lifer. Marvels was a book that promised
exquisite delights for readers who knew the score, who got all the jokes and
noticed all the little details that two lifelong Marvel Zombies were able to
squirrel away onto every page. You don’t have to know all the little in-jokes
to get the book – in fact, I’ve given the book to people with very little
exposure to superheroes and they’ve gotten the story just fine. But the fact
that those details are there for
those who can see gives the story an uncompromising depth. Busiek knows his
shit, and anything he missed Ross could catch. This really is the same Marvel
Universe you grew up with, alive in every precise detail, looking like you
could just walk right onto the page . . .
If you only know Ross as a guy who paints covers, or (if
you’re a few years older) the mastermind behind a series of progressively less
interesting nostalgia projects, it may be difficult to understand just how big
a deal he was. Ross was an instant superstar the moment that first issue of Marvels hit. And at the time his work was a proverbial breath of fresh air.
After years of Rob Liefeld, here was someone who knew how to draw, how to do
all the old-fashioned things you saw in those Burne Hogarth books that actually
tried to teach you how to draw for real
instead of taking shortcuts with everything and covering it up with a bunch of
lines. (When I draw now I still can’t shake the habit of covering up every available
surface with excess lines. I don’t draw much anymore.) The main character in Marvels is a middle-aged news
photographer, the kind of serious 60s professional who wore a tie to the
breakfast table. He needed to look real, and Ross made him real.
All of the tics for which Ross later became infamous – the
stiffness of some of his posed figures, the slightly disconcerting feeling that
you’re looking at paintings of his next-door neighbor posed as Giant Man –
well, they didn’t seem quite so important at the time. Go back and look at Marvels in the context of everythingelse on the stands at the time and you should be able to appreciate why it
stood out. What Ross does well, he does extraordinarily
well: for all the flack he gets over the occasional stiffness of his posing,
his page composition and use of perspective are often dazzling. Much of Marvels is montage, and Ross makes
montage work on the comics page in a way that very few other artists have ever
managed, bringing a genuine sweep and cinematic scope to the book. “Cinematic”
is an overused and often abused term in reference to comic book storytelling,
but at his best he can pluck the sweep and woosh of a cleverly edited montage
sequence off a movie screen and place it on the page, intact for all intents
and purposes. Not an easy thing to do.
The time was ripe for a book like Marvels – a serious book that took its subject matter very
seriously, and set about to accomplish its goals with a quiet determination to
be unlike any other comic that had ever existed up to that moment. It is
unfortunate that the book became identified with a stylistic conservatism that
was very much at odds with the themes of the book itself, which argued
vociferously against being stuck in the past.
Ross followed up Marvels
with 1996’s Kingdom Come – an underrated book that nevertheless already shows signs of the calcification
in Ross’ style and approach that later became codified practically into
self-parody. But I still respect Ross for the fact that at the height of his
power, following one blockbuster project apiece for Marvel and DC, he could
have done literally anything he wanted, and he chose in 1997 to do an odd
two-issue reimagining of Uncle Sam for Vertigo. It’s an imperfect book but
nonetheless very interesting for the way it utilizes Ross’ talent for aping
Norman Rockwell as a means of exploring unpleasant aspects of American
iconography. Inasmuch as anything Ross
has ever done can be considered a “deep cut,” it’s underread and worthy of
rediscovery by a generation of readers who might not even have been alive when
the book was originally published.
As for Busiek, he used the high profile of Marvels to build a long and
distinguished career as one of the great American comic book writers, full
stop. With Ross and Brent Anderson he launched the still-ongoing Astro City – originally published by
Image Comics. I had a poster of the cover of the first issue of Astro City above my bed for many years,
with a group of awestruck city dwellers pointing their fingers skyward at the
angelic Samaritan.
There was a period in the mid-90s where it seemed the only
good comics Marvel published were written by Kurt Busiek – an exaggeration, but
only just. At a time when so many top-shelf creators had fled the company, or
were being poorly utilized by writing X-Men spin-offs, Busiek stuck around on
books like Untold Tales of Spider-Man
and Thunderbolts. Alongside George Perez he relaunched
Avengers in 1998, following the conclusion of Heroes Reborn, a year-long event
in which none other than Rob Liefeld (along with fellow Image founder Jim Lee)
was given control of the franchise. His run on the series coincided with Grant
Morrison’s run on JLA, and is perhaps
the only time in both company’s shared history when it can be said that the two
books were arguably the best books being published by each company. A couple
years later he also wrote JLA/AVENGERS,
inarguably the best such intercompany crossover ever produced.
There are few writers whose work I
respect as much, and none whose work has meant more to me.
Make Mine Marvel
There was never a time without them. Imagine that. Think
back as far as you can, is there anything you carry forward to the present day?
Your family, perhaps. I remember comics all
the way back, certainly before most of my family.
Do you know why we care? I go back and forth – I’m not sure
why I feel the way I do. There’s no conclusion here. Don’t look for a
revelation, unless it’s your own. Certainty is comforting. It’s familiar. I
don’t want to speak unless I know exactly what I’m about to say, and I don’t
want to express an opinion unless that opinion is completely solid. It’s a lot
harder to say, “I don’t know.”
I don’t know why comics hooked me. All I know is that they
did. All I can do is try to tell you what I feel and think. Maybe you can
provide your own answers.
Leaving the theater after Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 I was gripped by a terrible malaise.
During the movie I was impatient. I realized that I didn’t want to be
there, didn’t want to be sitting in that theater watching that movie. The
characters on the screen were CGI mannequins bouncing through
a frictionless CGI world, pausing between bounces only to quip at one another before
launching another round of shooting faceless CGI monsters that could have wandered in from
any middle-tier AAA franchise video game.
The final scene of the movie, after excessively long credits
(accompanied by a Guardians-themed disco song sung by David Hasselhoff, proving
Marvel Studios to be firmly thirteen years behind the cultural zeitgeist as
symbolized by the first Spongebob Squarepants movie), features Stan Lee
marooned on a distant planetoid and dressed in a spacesuit, being abandoned by
a crowd of Watchers. Lee is a diminished figure at this late date. How could he
not be, at age 94? He still looks as if he enjoys these endless cameos in endless
movies, many of which prominently feature characters he had no hand in
creating. But I am left wondering, and not for the first time, who these cameos
serve – Lee? He carries an Executive Producer credit on each film, strictly an
honorary title. Although the appearance of his imprimatur carries weight with
casual fans who unerringly associate Lee with Marvel Comics, he has as much to
do with the production of the films as I do. He’s part of the brand now,
essentially another piece of IP.
In the end Marvel finally figured out the best way to screw
over Lee. His family founded the company and he stuck around for decades,
fought tooth and nail against Martin Goodman at every step, believed in the
value of the characters years before anyone else, suffered great damage to his
reputation along the way. Now he’s just another piece of the Marvel brand, a
real man swallowed whole by the fictional version of himself as carnival barker
he created in order to sell comic books in the 1960s. Now in his tenth decade
he's just another circus performer.
Because of his steadfast support of the company line against
artists and other creators who spoke up against Marvel, he is also
an ethically toxic figure. While much of the world without any extensive
knowledge of the issues at hand consider him to be synonymous with Marvel, and
surely the prime mover behind the company’s greatest achievements, many in the
comics community conversely underrate
his contributions for those reasons. He will remain a vexing figure for cultural historians for
so long as Marvel remains an object of fascination and study – that is, for
many decades to come.
If he had done just a few things differently, just a few
decisions and decisive actions across a career spanning over eighty years, this
conversation would be different. And a part of me hates him for that, hates him
for having imprinted himself on generations of readers who grew up loving
Smilin’ Stan only to later learn the truth of the matter. He’s not a hero but
he’s not quite a villain, either – his great sin was to have been consistently
wrong about almost every major ethical challenge he faced as both a creator and
a businessman. At every turn he thought he was making the right decision for
the good of his company. He won every battle but lost the war.
For decades he almost certainly considered his lifelong
struggle with Goodman (Marvel’s founder, his uncle, and constant foil) to be
the defining conflict of his professional life. Now Goodman is a minor player in
the story of Lee & Jack Kirby & Steve Ditko, one of the great morasses
of comics history, coming in third only to DC’s barbaric treatment of Joe
Siegel and Jerry Shuster following the creation of Superman, and that company’s
erasure of Bill Finger from the creation of Batman. Unlike the faceless
businessmen who stole Superman for a song – and certainly unlike Bob Kane, whose portrait runs in the dictionary
alongside the definition of “shitheel” – it is impossible to hear Lee speak now
and not hear some degree of honest regret
in his treatment of Kirby and Ditko. But regret for what, exactly, he
seems unsure. Where his own culpability begins is a question he cannot begin to
answer.
It didn’t have to be this way. Because he did write those comics. He did co-create those characters. Both
Kirby and Ditko are immensely talented creators whose solo work, while
enduringly great, is also inescapably eccentric. Every creator to tackle
Kirby’s solo characters in his wake has struggled to replicate his magic
combination of bombast and guileless invention. Every attempt to revamp Ditko’s
solo work has began with the wholesale jettisoning of the uncompromising and
astringent integrity at the heart of his vision of the world. But Spider-Man
endures, and does so in large part because he speaks in Stan Lee’s voice. The
Fantastic Four endure not just because of the visual splendor at the heart of
the concept but because Lee framed the stories as grounded domestic comedy.
That’s him. His name deserves to be on that creator credit just as much as any
of his collaborators, even if it also deserves an asterisk.
But Marvel is no more or less
compromised than any other major media conglomerate. Disney bought Marvel in
2009. Kirby & Ditko get to share a bunkhouse with Ub Iwerks and Marcia
Lucas. Good company.
Both of my grandfathers are dead. Both of them lived
compromised lives. My father’s father was an alcoholic and an adulterer who
squandered a brilliant surgical career. My mother’s father was a gambler who kept my mother’s family in penury until being kicked out of the
house on my mother’s sixteenth birthday. Both men were also extraordinarily
kind to me. Does their kindness to me erase their checkered lives? My dad’s dad
saved countless lives on the operating table, does that negate treating his own
family like shit?
It is important to remember that these questions don’t have
answers. Life goes on.
People get into comics for a number of reasons. The
important question usually isn’t why you started
reading comics, but why you never stopped.
I needed something. I needed something to hold onto when so much about the world didn’t make sense.
I didn’t exclusively gravitate towards particular characters, although I
obviously have my favorites just like everyone else. The characters themselves,
I have always maintained, are relatively unimportant: what matters is the
whole. What matters is that it hangs together into something resembling a
cohesive aggregate entity, one story being told over decades by hundreds of
people. Sometimes it comes together and sometimes it doesn’t, but ideally every
creator is working on an even playing field, with an equal opportunity to add
something unique to what has come before.
That’s why I gravitated to Mark Gruenwald, both in his
comics writing and his “Mark’s Remarks” columns for Marvel Age. He seemed like a genuinely decent human being. Some of
his writing is a little dated – his understanding of the connection between
drugs, poverty, and crime is embarrassing in hindsight, as seen in both his
columns and his work on Captain America, particularly the strange “Streets of
Poison” storyline. But his overall attitude towards comics, and towards the
world in general as illustrated by his runs on books like Quasar and D.P.7 seemed
remarkably simple and straightforward: it is our responsibility to leave the
world a better place than we found it. People can become better by learning from
their mistakes and moving forward. It is possible to be a good person in a
compromised world.
He believed in the Marvel Universe as a living organism unto
itself. He cared about things like The
Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, a unique project that typified a
certain kind of fan in a certain era of comic book collecting. It wasn’t about
anal-retentive organization as a way of calcifying and compartmentalizing
creative works – the kind of criticism I usually hear leveled against that and
similar efforts by subsequent generations of readers who dismiss handbooks
altogether. It was about keeping the firmament organized so that the people who
came after, creators and fans alike, could enjoy the characters. Everyone
deserves the same opportunity to make these stories their own, and that
requires a great deal of work to keep all the moving pieces behind the scenes
humming smoothly. Even the exhibits no one sees still have to be cleaned regularly.
After some early missteps (i.e. The Scourge), he felt bad about
killing characters. Even “bad” characters were someone’s favorite, or had the
chance to one day be someone’s favorite – and the current success of characters
like Squirrel Girl and Devil Dinosaur vindicates that perspective. No one had
any use for Squirrel Girl for decades, until suddenly someone did. Every
creator should be as distinctive and interesting as their talent allows, so
long as they do their best not to step on the toes of another creator or act in
a mean spirited fashion.
Watching the 2017 Guardians of the Galaxy on the big screen,
I was taken aback by just how banal these wonderful characters had become.
Gamora and Drax the Destroyer were both created by Jim Starlin, the latter with
Mike Friedrich; Mantis by Steve Englehart and Don Heck; Groot and Ego by Lee
& Kirby; Rocket Raccoon by Bill Mantlo & Keith Giffen. Every character
onscreen was the product of distinctive creators with distinctive ideas, who
each worked under different constraints, exploring different themes and telling
very different kinds of stories. The Guardians who appear onscreen are based
not on the original Guardians of the Galaxy, created in 1969 by Arnold Drake
and Gene Colan, but on a version of the team created in the mid-2000s by Dan
Abnett & Andy Lanning and built off the Annihilation
crossover written by Giffen. The Star-Lord who appears onscreen as played by
Chris Pratt bears little resemblance to the Star-Lord created by Englehart and
Steve Gan in 1976. I go down this laundry list of creators and reinventions in order
to point out just how many individual voices went into the creation and
continued relevancy of every character.
None of these voices can be heard onscreen. Only the endless
empty howl of IP management, the essences of characters ground down into thin
pulp to be processed into the standard action movie template. Complete with
quips.
The effect is that of seeing children soiling the legacy of
their betters – even Lee’s contributions ultimately being little more than
grist for the mill of endless bowdlerization. (It doesn’t help that these video
game creatures move around onscreen to the sound of classic rock songs
produced by greater talents. Seeing George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”
soundtrack a weightless sequence of CGI “splendor” almost inspired me to walk
out of the theater on its own.) Marvel is both the unified sum of thousands of
different characters and the product of the sweat of hundreds of creators
working to express themselves through a limited but also paradoxically
unrestricted genre. Anything goes as long as you can fit your ideas through
certain narrow apertures. It’s surprisingly easy to use comic books to tell very
personal stories, whatever your definition of personal may be. If the stories are any good they stick around and become
definitive, and new creators take these stories and use them as the foundation for new stories. If they aren't, whatever is left survives in a Handbook entry,
awaiting another creator to come along and see something of value in a
space raccoon with a jetpack.
Everyone was always getting screwed but no one was making
much money. The irony is that a creator’s given IP could only become valuable
once every shred of personality was drained, leaving multicolored action figures to be
digitally manipulated onscreen while screenwriters hammer every character into
the same Marvel Studios formula template. Now Drax the Destroyer is
worth quite a lot of money, even as everything that ever made the character
interesting has fallen by the wayside.
Somewhere along the line Marvel lost me. They lost
themselves. I pick up a comic now, even a good comic, and it takes me maybe
five minutes to read. If I try to
stretch it out. There’s no feeling that these characters have any connection to
the ones I grew up with. It’s not that they’re different: different is good.
Characters change all the time. There was a point in the late 80s when Thor had
ugly blue-and-gold armor and a beard, the Hulk was grey, Captain America wore a
black suit, and Iron Man faked his own death because he had gone rogue. The problem now is that the
characters I’ve been reading without pause since the Reagan administration feel
as blank and featureless as their universe has become. Constant art changes leave the
majority of books without visual identity. Most writers have become so used to
the expectation of cancelation that they don’t even bother with things like
subplots, romantic entanglements, or long-term characterization. If a book is
going away after six or eight issues, why bother spending the time to build a
supporting cast who will probably never be seen again? Characters float aimlessly
from reboot to reboot with no direction. The wheat falls alongside the chaff.
Although this may seem a reductive answer to may, one of the
major factors in the weakness of the current line is that the books just don’t
have that many words in them. Decompression and the turn away from thought
bubbles are two culprits – there’s no one source of the problem. A comic that
costs $4 and takes 5 minutes to read is just . . . not a good bargain. For all
the systemic and economic problems that have hamstrung the contemporary comics
market – which are not the subject of this essay, and have been written about
by many more able parties than myself – the bulk of the books themselves just
aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Good art doesn’t make up for a loss
of captions and thought balloons: as much as a great artist can convey through
visuals, comics are a hybrid medium. I want to sit down and read a comic, not just scan the art.
Good art doesn’t tell a complete story, not in comics.
This is to say nothing of the fact that the company’s
flagships – Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers,
Uncanny X-Men – have little in them to interest a kid who wanders
into a comic book store. Amazing
Spider-Man should always be accessible to any kid in America. Now Marvel
has to publish younger-readers versions of their core titles, because the
regular Amazing Spider-Man is no
longer a book you can give to children, or would want to.
Kids aren't stupid. Give them something that doesn't insult their intelligence and they'll stick around. That's something that Marvel always did well: creating something designed to be read by kids that didn't condescend and could also hold the interest of an older audience. That's Stan's blueprint. Kids don’t want a
watered-down version of the real thing, and with the notable exception of Spidey Super Stories (specifically aimed
at very small children, another
market the company has abandoned), Marvel has never seen fit to do so until recently.
Marvel’s core competency is selling comic books to children. If the company has
lost the ability and the desire to do that, what exactly can they do?
Give me a complete story told in 22 pages. Give me all the
changes you want, all the diversity I can stomach, give me weird politics, give
me wonky art. Just give me a story. Any story. Don’t give me bullshit about
storytelling conventions having changed: the system isn’t working anymore.
Every comic – every single comic on the stands – has to work its ass off to
give me my money’s worth. Right now, Marvel barely has a pulse.
It’s been bad before. The mid-to-late 90s was rough, but
there were always highlights. There are still highlights now. But everything –
the good, the bad, and the indifferent – is drowning in a sea of bad business
decisions reaching back decades. I won’t even begin to touch on the level of
indefensible rancor between the company and its fans, or the way that dubious
creative decisions made by the movie division have a habit of trickling down
into the books themselves (which, you may recall, is the same kind of
synergistic “logic” that locked Spider-Man into a dubious marriage for over two
decades). Being a Marvel fan has always been a difficult and nigh indefensible
proposition. Now it’s impossible.
If you've gotten this far you're more than welcome to dismiss me as a crank. Someone who read too many comics and lost the plot along the way. I don't have answers, is the thing - I said that a while ago. I may even be wrong about a great deal. Anyone who cares to disagree is encouraged, with my blessing, to dismiss my words as the petty grievances of a tired critic. They certainly are. Am I just hankering for my own lost Golden Age, when comics were an escape and not just another depressing reminder of how crappy the world is? Maybe. You tell me.
If you've gotten this far you're more than welcome to dismiss me as a crank. Someone who read too many comics and lost the plot along the way. I don't have answers, is the thing - I said that a while ago. I may even be wrong about a great deal. Anyone who cares to disagree is encouraged, with my blessing, to dismiss my words as the petty grievances of a tired critic. They certainly are. Am I just hankering for my own lost Golden Age, when comics were an escape and not just another depressing reminder of how crappy the world is? Maybe. You tell me.
People get into comics for a number of reasons. The
important question isn’t why you started
reading comics, but why you never stopped.
Marvels is a
complicated book because as much as it appears to be a celebration of
superheroes and comic books, it ends on a down note like a bucket of cold water
thrown in the reader’s face. After the near-armageddon of the third issue –
which ends with Phil lambasting a crowd of New Yorkers for their ingratitude at
the Fantastic Four – the fourth and final issue focuses on the death of Gwen
Stacy.
By general consent there are two possible end-points for the
Silver Age: Kirby’s last issue of Fantastic
Four (#102) in 1970, and 1973’s Amazing
Spider-Man #121, featuring the death of Peter Parker’s one true love Gwen
Stacy. I prefer the first for the sake of order: if you begin with Showcase #4 in 1956 that gives you a
solid 14 years. It’s hard to argue that the Bronze Age hadn’t begun in earnest
by the time Gwen took her infamous swan dive, but her death is often cited by
fans as the era’s sentimental end.
That’s the tack Busiek & Ross take. Phil gets to know
Gwen in the aftermath of the death of Gwen’s father George Stacy at the hands
of Doctor Octopus (an event which occurred in Amazing Spider-Man #90), a death for which Spider-Man was
subsequently framed. After having published a successful volume of superhero
photography Phil is being pressured by his publisher for a sequel, possibly
involving super-villains. He bristles at the idea for the very sound reason
that people don’t need more reasons to be scared. Finally it occurs to him that
what the world needs isn’t a new book of photos, but a book about the
ingratitude and indifference superheroes receive.
Phil puts the evidence together and discovers the truth. He
strikes up a friendship with Gwen. He learns that the elder Stacy believed
Spider-Man to be a hero, and that his own daughter believed the wall-crawler to
be innocent. Rather than publish a book about super-villains, he resolves to
write a book exonerating Spider-Man for Captain Stacy’s death. He muses:
This wasn’t an article or column or
anything that small. It was my book. My new book. . . . A major work
on the marvels and what they should mean to us. . . . Everything would work. I knew it. It was the book I’d been
learning to write my whole life
without knowing it – and the centerpiece would be a vindication of Spider-Man. Absolved
by the daughter of the man he was accused of killing – and praised as a hero by the man himself.
But then Gwen dies. Thrown off the George Washington Bridge
by the Green Goblin, she dies of a broken neck after Spider-Man’s webbing stops
her sudden fall.
Phil deflates. He doesn’t want anything to do with
superheroes anymore. He had relied on them to help people, to save innocents –
but when the chips were down, they were human just like the rest of us. They
made mistakes, only when they made mistakes people died. “I swear I could still
hear that flat crack, echoing across
the water, echoing in my ears,” he thinks as he looks out across the waters to
the scene of the fight. “I read later that it was the shock of the fall that killed her, but it sure
looked like . . .”
The thought trails off. Phil doesn’t have the heart to
finish it.
And I don’t feel like I have the heart to finish it,
either. I don’t know what there is left to say. Comics started off a shady
business built to entice children into spending their money. They are still a
shady business built to entice children into spending their money, but
inflation and retail conditions meant their audience grew older without ever
growing up. Just like me.
It’s all about the movies now. Most of them, even the
enjoyable ones, aren’t really very good. Mostly they manage the neat trick of
selling children’s stories to grown adults by dumbing-down the source material.
There’s a lesson there, if you know to look for it.
The books are caught in a bad feedback loop. The trade-off
for working in comics (at least Marvel & DC) used to be that you’d get paid
like shit but maybe get the chance to create interesting work if you cared
about what you were doing. Now everyone gets paid like shit and the market is
so attenuated that nothing sells, not editorially driven event books and not
eccentric personal projects. People who could be doing interesting work figure
out that they can make more money doing just about anything but working in
superhero comics, while the people who work consistently and manage to make a
living in superhero comics treat gigs like jealously guarded sinecures.
It’s not that comics themselves are bad. Comics are great. I
make money writing about comics of all kinds. But the place in my heart where I
used to hold Marvel Comics is a dead and blackened cinder, burnt by decades
of being taken for granted by successive generations of creators and editors
who appear by all accounts to hold their audience in seething contempt.
I go to the shelf five feet from my desk and pull down a
favorite volume – Jim Starlin’s Warlock. Of all the thousands and
thousands of Marvel comics I have bought and read and the tens of thousands of
all kinds of comics I know, no stories mean more to me. None. I flip through
the book: there’s Warlock, and Thanos, and Pip the Troll and Gamora and hey,
Spider-Man sneaks in there, too, in a couple places. Old friends.
Such wonderfully evocative images – Jim Starlin on fire working through early iterations of the same themes he
visited dozens of times since. There’s religious oppression, the line between
madness & sanity, the moral argument for and against suicide, questions of destiny and
predestination, and even some sex. There’s vivacity here, life and
passion that screams off the shelf and demands I read through, even as I scan
over pages I’ve read dozens of times before.
Next to Warlock
there’s a copy of The Death of Jean
DeWolff, a hardcover of a story I’d never read before which I picked up for
a song a while back and only recently got around to reading. An odd story –
written by Peter David and drawn by Rich Buckler, it’s an attempt to create an
80s revenge thriller with Spider-Man and Daredevil instead of Charles Bronson.
It shouldn’t really work. Something about the grisly milieu, seeing Spider-Man
bouncing around trying to find a serial killer whose gimmick is emptying a
shotgun into peoples’ chests, it seems off while at the same time remaining
thoroughly entertaining. There’s an energy here that animates what should be a
lousy premise. It’s an honestly conflicted story that can’t decide where it
stands, but seeing Spider-Man tackle a Son of Sam analogue on the streets of
New York just a few
months after the real-life Bernhard
Goetz shooting is compelling. Never boring, at least.
These
stories live in my memory. But they’re not dead. Nothing ever ends.
Phil realizes, too. “It just went on,” Phil thinks to himself. “And it was never going to stop. Not even if I held my breath until I turned blue.” He hasn’t been the same since Gwen died. He’s sitting in his office at home, still in shock. Can’t really concentrate on what he’s doing. There’s a TV on his desk, an old General Electric model with a handle – people used to call them portable but they still weighed a ton. It’s playing footage of a fight between the Hulk, Hawkeye, and Zzzax. It doesn’t mean anything. Lives saved, property damage. Just another fight.
He
throws his camera at the screen. It explodes with a WHKASSH. Phil is done.
“You’ve
got to have the eye for it, and mine
is gone,” he explains to his
assistant. “I lost it somewhere. I’ve seen too
much, and I’m inside now. Where I can’t see anything straight.”
There
aren’t any answers. There’s no grand epiphany or cosmic conclusion. No meaning,
ultimately. If you’re waiting for everything to add up, you wait in vain. I
could tell you I was done with comics, that I was never going to bother again
with Marvel, that I was never going to let them break my heart again – but we
both know that’d be a lie. It’s home, for better or for worse. I hate it and I
love it but I’m stuck here with you for the rest of my life. And you’re stuck
with me, too.
Fuck
you, I love you, forever and ever, amen.
*
Part Ten of an ongoing series
4. Someday We Will All Be Free
5. Trifles, Light As Air
Let's Talk About What We Talk About When We
Talk About Teaching Let's Talk About Love
6. One - The Modern Age
7. Two - Slow Decay
8. Three - A Time To Be So Small
9. The Last Star Wars Essay
10. True Believers
5. Trifles, Light As Air
Let's Talk About What We Talk About When We
Talk About Teaching Let's Talk About Love
6. One - The Modern Age
7. Two - Slow Decay
8. Three - A Time To Be So Small
9. The Last Star Wars Essay
10. True Believers
*
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Subscriber-exclusive political essays are posted periodically,
along with episodes of my new podcast Tegan Reads Wookieepedia.
Subscriber-exclusive political essays are posted periodically,
along with episodes of my new podcast Tegan Reads Wookieepedia.
*
