The World of Marvel Comics

Andrew J. Friedenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000431117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare

A detailed study of the history and long-lasting influence of Marvel Comics, this book explores the ways Marvel's truly unique comic book world reflects real world issues and controversies alongside believable, psychologically-motivated characters.

The book examines a decades-long dual focus on both tight-knit continuity and real-world fidelity that makes the Marvel Universe a unique entity amongst imaginary worlds. Although there have been many books and articles that analyze each of these aspects of the Marvel Universe, the unique focus of this book is on how those two aspects have interwoven over the course of Marvel's history, and the ways in which both have been used as storytelling engines that have fueled the entire imaginary world of Marvel Comics.

Andrew J. Friedenthal has crafted a groundbreaking, engaging, and thoughtful examination of how this particular story world combines intricate world-building with responsiveness to real world events, which will be of interest to scholars and enthusiasts of not just comics studies, but also the fields of transmedia studies and imaginary worlds.

1 Building a “Real World”

Marvel in the 1960s

DOI: 10.4324/9781003051008-2

Before the 1960s, superhero comics “continuity” took that term literally—the stories featured a “continuous” return to the same set-up at the beginning and end of every story, with little to no reference to anything that had come before other than the most basic reference to heroes’ origins or previous encounters with villains. Even such superhero teams as DC Comics’ Justice Society of America and Justice League of America (the Society’s successors, first appearing in 1960), rarely referenced the individual members’ own titles and storylines. Though these heroes existed in the same shared universe, individual comic books almost never crossed over with one another. Even at Timely Comics (the company that would become Marvel Comics by 1961), the crossover in 1940 between the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner took place within the pages of the book shared by both characters. Semiotician Umberto Eco, in his essay “The Myth of Superman,” refers to this sort of loose continuity as

a kind of oneiric climate—of which the reader is not aware at all—where what has happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy. The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again, as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said. (53)

This “oneiric” continuity was still the primary editorial mode at DC Comics by 1961. The publishing company was seeing a resurgence in popularity for its superheroes, bolstered by the recent founding of the industry-wide, self-censoring Comics Code Authority that essentially killed off other popular genres like horror, romance, and true crime. The comics industry lost much of its adult readership as a result, and the simplistic, moral, light science fiction tales of superheroes proved to be as irresistible a draw to children of the late 1950s and early 1960s as they had been to a previous generation of children in the 1930s and 1940s.¹ When DC put together its most popular heroes into the Justice League, the result was a sales success.

Marvel’s response to the Justice League was, by necessity, not a conglomeration of its most popular heroes. Indeed, at that time, Marvel had no popular heroes. Its stable of characters from the 1930s and 1940s—most notably the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and the patriotic super solider Captain America—were no longer starring in any books. Rather, the company’s output was mostly tame westerns and B-movie tales of giant monsters. The team behind the majority of these books was writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, both comics veterans who had been working since the 1940s (Kirby, in fact, had co-created Captain America with fellow writer/artist Joe Simon), who had hit upon their own unique working style that would come to be known as the Marvel Method. Comics historians Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs describe this method as follows:

Lee discarded the full-script method that was standard in the business and developed a new method with Kirby and Ditko: writer and artist would discuss a story (or Lee would type a plot outline), the artist would go off and draw it, and then Lee or his brother [Larry Lieber] would supply the words. That not only saved Lee time and increased his income (for Kirby was never paid any part of the writer’s fee, and Lee could now increase his already frightening output), but it also freed him from the banal plot formulas that repetition had pressed into his brain. Working with Jack Kirby would teach Lee just how much could be done with a comic book. (49)

Together, the pair would use this method to co-create the comic book that would usher in the “Marvel Age” of comics—The Fantastic Four #1.

Kirby and Lee would later tell two different stories about the creation of the titular superhero team. Indeed, despite a fruitful partnership that would change the face of superhero comics and franchise storytelling in general, the pair would have an acrimonious relationship in later years, with Kirby claiming that Lee took all of the credit for conceiving and plotting ideas that had originated with the artist while Lee toed the company line and would not help Kirby receive fair compensation for lucrative spin-off media based on his characters and ideas. Though we may never know the real truth as to how the Lee-Kirby team worked together, and the disagreements between the pair certainly point to deep-seated issues of creators’ rights within the comic book industry, when it comes to the ways in which the two helped invent an entire new method of storytelling it is clear that the pair brought out the best in each other’s creative and innovative sides.

In Kirby’s version of the origins of the Fantastic Four, “the company [was] slumping, [so] he was determined to create something new and startling, ‘with a real human dimension.’ He thought superheroes were still viable, and envisioned a team of explorers of the outré … but with strange powers” (Jones and Jacobs, 49). According to Lee, the Fantastic Four were a direct response to DC’s Justice League, created when Marvel publisher (and Lee’s uncle) Martin Goodman came back from a golf game with DC publisher Jack Liebowitz at which he learned of how successful the team was for DC’s bottom line. He ordered Lee, the company’s editor-in-chief in addition to its primary writer, to create an imitation. Lee, however, was coming to a crossroads thanks to conversations he’d been having with his wife, as he would later explain:

She wondered why I didn’t put as much effort and creativity into the comics as I seemed to be putting into my other freelance endeavors. The fact is, I had always thought of my comic book work as a temporary job—even after all those years—and her little dissertation made me suddenly realize that it was time to start concentrating on what I was doing—to carve a real career for myself in the nowhere world of comic books. (Origins 16)

As a result of this discussion, Lee describes (in his typical grandiose way) how he decided to put more effort than usual into the script for this new superhero title:

For just this once, I would do the type of story I myself would enjoy reading if I were a comic-book reader. And the characters would be the kind of characters I could personally relate to; they’d be flesh and blood, they’d have their faults and foibles, they’d be fallible and feisty, and—most important of all—inside their colorful, costumed booties they’d still have feet of clay. (Origins 17)

Regardless of whose version of events you believe, then, both Kirby and Lee were clearly interested in creating a new kind of superhero story that would mix commercial appeal with deeper characterizations of slightly more “realistic” characters. What this meant in practice was the merging of superhero action with melodramatic, evolving soap opera-esque personal lives and stories that carried over from issue to issue.

In other words, Lee and Kirby took the first steps in a journey to create not just a superhero book, but to build an entire superhero universe. Within the first twenty-five issues of The Fantastic Four, that universe would be in full flourish, with the all-star team-up book The Avengers eventually joining The Fantastic Four as a central hub for this newly established Marvel Universe.

Fantastic Firsts

At first glance, the cover of The Fantastic Four #1 was nothing special for Marvel. The central figure is not a superhero, but rather a giant monster in the same mold as those that had been featured in many of the previous few years’ stories from Lee and Kirby. Surrounding that monster are the titular four stars of the book, but rather than appearing in spandex-and-caped glory, two of them are displaying strange abilities (invisibility and stretching powers) in street clothes, while the other pair (a man on fire and another made of rock) seem to be displaying monstrous transformations of their own. In fact, the Fantastic Four—consisting of super-genius, super-stretching Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic; his girlfriend, Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl; her younger brother, Johnny Storm, the Human Torch; and Reed’s best friend, Ben Grimm, the super-strong but monstrously deformed Thing—don’t appear in superhero costumes anywhere within this first issue. The closest they come to them are the astronaut’s uniforms that the quarter wear on the fateful trip to outer space that bombards them with “cosmic rays,” imbuing them with their powers.

Clearly, this was a different take on superheroes, one that experimentally imbued the characters with a sense of realism that went beyond the square-jawed, cookie-cutter science fiction gods of DC Comics. Not only did the Fantastic Four not wear traditional superhero costumes, but they lacked traditional superhero attitudes. While the Human Torch exulted in his powers, for example, the Thing was devastated by his monstrous appearance, exclaiming in his very first line of dialogue, “Bah! Everywhere it is the same! I live in a world too small for me!” (3). This was a new take on superheroes, wherein the character’s inner and personal lives were every bit as important as the villains whom they fought. Superman, for example, had never felt any conflict within him about the very nature of being Superman, nor did he ever receive anything but admiration from the American public that he protected. This was not the case for the Fantastic Four.

Indeed, in the very next issue, shape-changing aliens named the Skrulls impersonate the foursome and frame them for various crimes, turning the public against them and the team against each other. The bickering and conflict that occurred amongst the heroes was another key difference from DC’s heroes. When Johnny and Ben get into an argument, Sue chastises them, telling Ben, “Thing, I understand how bitter you are—and I know you have every right to be bitter! But we’ll just destroy ourselves if we keep at each other’s throats this way! Don’t you see?” Ben responds with pure, distilled self-loathing: “I see … and sometimes … I think I’d be better off – the world would be better off – if I were destroyed!” (12, emphasis and ellipses in original).² Even though the team would adopt superhero uniforms in the next issue, and reveal their secret headquarters and fantastic array of vehicles, the soap opera melodrama and conflicted characterizations would continue.

While Lee and Kirby used the first three issues of The Fantastic Four to showcase their new take on the superhero genre, wedding Lee’s grounded characters with the epic-scoped flights of fancy that were Kirby’s trademark, in the fourth issue they hit upon another innovation that would, in some ways, kick-start the entire Marvel Universe.

Though Johnny Storm borrowed his hero name and powers—The Human Torch—from a Marvel hero of the 1930s/1940s, it was clear from the outset that there was no connection between Johnny and the previous character.³ While the older hero had been an android imbued with life by a genius scientist, Johnny was an impetuous teenager, as evidenced by the ending of The Fantastic Four #3 in which he flies off in a huff, tired of being bossed around by the others on the team. The next issue begins with the team directly dealing with the fallout of Johnny’s departure. Looking out over the city, Reed explains, “Somewhere out there among the teeming millions of the city, the Human Torch is hiding from us! And we’ve got to find him.”

What was so unique about this opening was the serialized nature of the storytelling. While some DC Comics would be continued in the next issue, these were all self-contained two-part stories that never featured ongoing subplots. Lee and Kirby thus added seriality on top of their more “realistic” version of superheroes, connecting each issue to the next in an ongoing, never-ending story that allowed characters to learn, change and grow.

What’s more, in this very same issue, Lee and Kirby connect that story back to Marvel’s past. While hiding from his family, Johnny checks into a men’s hotel in a sordid part of town. There, he discovers an “old, beat-up comic mag” from the 1940s, featuring the Sub-Mariner. He thinks to himself, “I remember sis talking about him once! He used to be the world’s most unusual character … I wonder what ever happened to him? He was supposed to be immortal!” (8). Though he stumbled upon the character in a comic book, Johnny’s thoughts establish the Sub-Mariner as a real person who once inhabited the same world as the Fantastic Four. In fact, when a fellow resident sees Johnny reading the magazine, he explains that there’s “a stumble-bum right here who’s as strong as that joker was supposed to be!” (8). When several men harass this man, who suffers from amnesia, Johnny rescues him, then uses his flame powers to burn off the man’s beard and long hair, revealing the face of none other than the Sub-Mariner himself. To restore the Sub-Mariner’s memory, Johnny flies him to the ocean and drops him in, with the results explained in a pair of captions:

Once submerged in the mighty sea, a startling change comes over the strange derelict! In one sweeping motion, he hurls his outer garments from him … and stands revealed as the legendary prince of the sea … the invincible Namor, the Sub-Mariner!! (12)

Namor then returns to his undersea home of Atlantis, discovering it destroyed by (he assumes) atomic tests, which leads him to seek revenge upon humanity. He is opposed by the Fantastic Four, including the returned-to-the-fold Human Torch, and becomes the villain of this issue. In his original adventures, Namor had been an antihero, coming into conflict with the surface world and the android Human Torch, but the outbreak of World War II had turned him into a hero who joined forces with the Allies against the Axis powers. Here, though, when up against the heroic Fantastic Four, he is re-cast as a semi-sympathetic villain. As Marvel historian Pierre Comt...