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22 July 03 |
Against Silver Age Marvel, the Cult of Stan Lee, and Fantastic Four
(Annual) #1 / For Comic Books as Literary Art |
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JULIAN DARIUS |
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This
essay was first published on PersianCaesar.com on 13
May 2002, and is reprinted here with permission of the author. |
To this day, one hears otherwise
intelligent comic book creators saying that they want to recapture the joy of
reading Fantastic Four #1, of its fun and its newness. This always shocks me, especially when it
comes from writers whose work is cerebral, challenging, fun and new but only
to those with education enough to catch the word play, the play with genre,
the play with comics history. Even
the uppity, anti-mainstream Comics Journal gave the early Fantastic
Four a place on its list of the 100 best comics of the 20th Century. Why?
Silver Age Marvel Comics set the industry on fire. Absolutely. But their products were crap. |
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Fantastic Four #1 would
never be published today. |
Fantastic Four #1 would never be published today. And not because it’s so different, or so
fun. Because it’s so stupid. A scientist for little reason kidnaps a space
plane and get himself and his crew mutated on the spot by cosmic rays -- then
battles an army of underground monsters.
This is more than camp, which suggests a bit more consciousness, a bit
more cleverness. Its best sequences
are those involving New York as setting, involving interactions with normal
people -- such as Invisible Woman holding a dollar bill for a taxicab
driver. But this stuff is just plain
bad. |
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I imagine that the creators of these
comics actually did a good deal of laughing at their fans. You have to imagine so, unless you picture
them like Ed Wood -- idiots who take themselves far too seriously,
admirable for their determination to make fictions even if they lack almost
any ability. I mean, these guys got
letters from people who asked how one ridiculous device or another worked --
or what Spider-Man did in his spare time.
From kids, really. And I
suppose, as writing for kids, Silver Age Marvel wasn’t so bad. But, for goodness’s sake, you grow out of
it. And Marvel responded with pages explaining
devices or powers, responding in their letter columns with explanations about
continuity errors, how each and every goof could be rationally
explained. Except you’ll notice that
those explanations weren’t incorporated into the comics. The creators didn’t care. They didn’t take it seriously. How else do you explain Stan Lee screwing
up the names of his protagonists? I
mean, really. All the “nuff said” and
“excelsior” and self-deprecating references to his bad memory on Stan Lee’s
part doesn’t obscure the facts. Stan
Lee was, and is, a kind of sideshow attraction -- a personality, a circus
ringleader, throwing out awesome and amazing alliterations to alleviate his
audience’s angst and attention to inadequacy. A huckster. And a good
one. But one with limited appeal,
after a certain I.Q. level. Remember “Make Mine Marvel!” -- as if you
should brand art. As if Paramount
Pictures should promote “Proud Paramount Paramour!” as a slogan designed to
get viewers to only see Paramount releases, as if nothing good was
done by the “Distinguished Competition” (a reference to DC Comics), as
Marvel still puts it, was just not important or worth seeing. This is a company that in the 1980s used
“Marvel Zombie” as an advertising campaign -- an even more insidious version
of “Make Mine Marvel” because it openly depicted its fans as the drooling
undead, hypnotized by a ringleader who one would suspect, by way of the
tradition of the use of zombies, to be actually evil. Marvel even rewarded letter writers who
proclaimed themselves “Marvel Zombies” -- who would purchase anything Marvel
published, regardless of quality, and who saw any art published by any other
company as beneath the touch. I mean, this really stupid stuff. And even if Silver Age Marvel Comic didn’t
use holographic alternate covers to encourage, as TV Guide does now
with an audience of similarly demonstrably questionable intelligence, it
stems from the same stupidity. |
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Spider-Man is saying: “I
should have thought of this long ago!
I can probably earn a fortune by joining forces with the Fantastic
Four! They’ll be real impressed
when they see how easily I can break into their skyscraper
headquarters!” You don’t need a magic
eight-ball to see where this is going. |
Let me give you an example clear as
crystal. Fantastic Four Annual
#1 (published in 1963) boasts a story with a Spider-Man appearance. It is actually an expansion of the
beginning of the second story in The Amazing Spider-Man #1 -- which,
one would think, would give them the hindsight and space to do it right this
time. The first panel, which consumes
almost the entirety of the first page (after a large blurb with “Spider-Man”
in enormous letters) depicts, with horrendously distorted artwork, Spider-Man
walking on a line of his web as if it were a tightrope, the ridiculous
webbing under his arms (from thighs to mid-arms) that served no purpose, made
no sense, and later disappeared. The
web tightrope is connected to a window of the Baxter Building -- the
headquarters of the Fantastic Four -- wherein we see the entire team at work,
reading, flying, and doing experiments in a ridiculously confined space, yet
apparently unaware of the web attached to the window. Spider-Man is saying: “I should have thought of this long
ago! I can probably earn a fortune
by joining forces with the Fantastic Four! They’ll be real impressed when they see how easily I can break
into their skyscraper headquarters!”
You don’t need a magic eight-ball to see where this is going: yet another excuse for Marvel heroes to
fight each other, as they so stereotypically did upon meeting, even when not
for the first time. The idea of
ingratiating one’s self by breaking into someone’s house -- especially a
house that is often attacked by super-villains intent on murder -- doesn’t
need much intelligence to meet its match.
Yet it stands in my mind as representative of the Marvel Silver Age. “We want Spider-Man to encounter and fight
the Fantastic Four. Maybe he could
break in. Why would he do that? Maybe he thinks it’ll impress them. Why not?
Run with it?” This isn’t
genius. It isn’t noble lack of
self-censoring. It’s just plain
stupid. Earlier in the same issue, in a story in
which Namor the Sub-Mariner battles the team, a panel showing Namor punching
the shape-changing Mr. Fantastic, sending his upper body flying like taffy,
is followed by a panel showing Namor with a tube of maybe two feet across and
maybe four feet deep. A caption tells
us that “seizing the pliable form of Reed Richards, Namor fashions a
crude candle-snuffer out of his stunned body!” How the hell did this happen?
You’d think this would be a complex maneuver -- to roll back the
60-foot-long form of a man and mold it into a perfect tube. But in Silver Age Marvel, it happens between
panels. This is the equivalent in
film of a fight scene in which someone pushes someone else off a ledge, then
is seen holding that person’s body and using it as a battering ram -- with a
voiceover that says “but he catches the stunned form of his opponent, then
uses him as a battering ram.” It’s
not only awkward. It’s stupid. And bad. |
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The “Marvel Method” of producing comic books is wonderfully
collaborative, but it hardly arrives at a finished product that flows well or
has the singular vision necessary to pull off a remotely complex story. |
All of this, of course, is the product of
the “Marvel Method” of producing comic books -- a horrible method of
production in which there is no script.
In this method, a writer and an artist meet to talk about the story,
both brainstorming and coming up with ideas, though the writer hypothetically
has the final say. Adapted for the
internet age, a writer fashions a paragraph summary of the next issue. The artist then goes off and draws it,
elaborating, constructing the setting and other people involved, depicting
the specific motions -- all with no input from the writer. Sometimes the artist changes the plot,
without consulting the writer, as he draws.
The drawn pages are then sent back to the writer, whose real work as
writer is simply to tell the letterer what captions and word balloons to
insert over the already-drawn artwork.
This is a wonderfully collaborative method, but it hardly arrives at a
finished product that flows well or has the singular vision necessary to pull
off a remotely complex story. In fact, that story isn’t even set until
rather late in the process. The
result is often captions explaining what you’re seeing in a panel and how it
relates to the one preceding -- or a couple word balloons that provide
Spider-Man’s motivation, lacking as it may be, to break into the Baxter
Building. This is a really stupid way of making
comics. It’s not a bad way to make experimental
art, but that art is, to say the least, limited by a process that tends to
prevent coherent vision. And the
negative effects of this process can be seen throughout Silver Age Marvel
comics. |
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Hastily-produced pamphlets with 22 pages or so of narrative are,
however curious as art objects, hardly great literature. |
In the 1960s, Marvel comics began
featuring an explosive balloon on their covers advertising the issues as “Pop
Art” -- capitalizing on Andy Warhol and Roy Liechtenstein, the latter of
which obviously drew on comic books, redrawing panels by Steve Ditko and
others at inflated sizes, complete with Ben Day dots. And I love pop art. But pop art, while provocative, while
aesthetically compelling, is intrinsically disposable, a sales job -- as Andy
Warhol’s “Art Factory” expressed. And
it seems to me that hastily-produced pamphlets with 22 pages or so of
narrative are, however curious as art objects, hardly great literature. |
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Marvel’s characters, originating in the 1960s, are far more
historically-bound than DC’s Superman or Batman, for example, whose roots
were in the pulps of the Great Depression. |
The heroes of Marvel Comics reflect
this. Spider-Man’s story is
fundamentally an adolescent tale of a kid in high school who was picked on
developing super-powers. His is the
greatest case for the “adolescent power fantasy” interpretation of
super-heroes. The Fantastic Four, who
flew into space to beat the Soviets, and the Hulk, irradiated by gamma rays
instead of cosmic rays (both of which do exist but do not cause on-the-spot
mutations) because of a new bomb he was testing, are products of the Cold
War. Captain America, whose tales
were told in the 1940s, was classic World War II era dumb propaganda, his
tales, since his revival in the 1960s, most resonant when ones of a man out
of his time. Marvel’s characters,
originating in the 1960s, are far more historically-bound than DC’s Superman
or Batman, for example, whose roots were in the pulps of the Great
Depression. None of these characters
are particularly intelligent. The
Hulk or The Thing epitomize Marvel’s Silver Age brainlessness. Though Mr. Fantastic was a scientist, his
insane and copious inventions, defying all common sense, were always created
without any visible work. |
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Compare this with DC’s Silver Age. |
Compare this with DC’s Silver Age. Barry Allen, the Flash, was a police
scientist, his powers resulting from lightning striking a set of chemicals
that doused him, electrified as they fell.
He was a nerd. Hal Jordan, the
Green Lantern, was a test pilot, hardly a scientist but also hardly without
intelligence. Batman was a detective,
solving complex and bizarre crimes.
Superman was a super-brain, someone who designed robot duplicates of
himself and had to convince an imp from the fifth dimension to speak his name
backwards. Silver Age DC comics
typically featured a splash page, a first page that introduced the tale, that
depicted some ridiculous and perilous situation, then spent the issue telling
how that situation came about and how it was solved. Mind-bending time travel stories and the
like were common. Ironies were
frequent. This may not be James
Joyce, but it is at least a creative mystery, a puzzle for the
creativity. The laws of chess, the
rules of realistic fiction, did not apply; but the rules of creativity
did. A character was not going to
roll another character up into a tube between panels -- that would break the
rules of the creative puzzle. By
comparison, Marvel comics feel thoughtless, its characters brawny and
brainless, its stories all Jack Kirby flair and bravado. |
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Which brings us to Jack Kirby. |
Which brings us to Jack Kirby. Admittedly, he rarely got his fair share
of credit for co-creating most of the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee went on to get his name listed as
“presenter” for every Marvel comic book because Stan Lee was inoffensive, a
corporate goof, a promoter who was never going to betray the company. Jack Kirby, on the other hand, left and
went on to draw and write, in some cases impressively, comics for the
“Distinguished Competition.” DC
announced “Kirby is here!” Marvel, a
company that only offered royalties as non-mandated “creator incentives,”
refused to return Kirby’s original art, which he legally owned, leading to a
brouhaha in the late 1970s in which Neal Adams and other creators campaigned
for Kirby. And Kirby had an
aesthetic, a unique and distinctive look.
It was a muscle-bound look full of foreshortened arms stretching
melodramatically, of bizarre technology full of zig-zag detailing and
overlaid dots to indicate energy, whether the business end of a gun or a
portal to another world. Kirby was
the artist of the Marvel brawny style, his faces just plain ugly, even on his
women. When he drew Superman, DC had
another artist redraw Superman’s face -- and not without reason. Kirby was not the artist for Spider-Man or
Daredevil; those sleek forms, muscled like swimmers or acrobats and not like
distorted weight-lifters, were hardly Kirby’s forte. His aesthetic would have been fine if it
had been one of a dozen, but it defined the Marvel Silver Age and continues
today as his ugly, muscle-bound aesthetic holds influence, however ebbing,
over American comic book artists generations later. The Image style of the mid-1990s was just a stylized version
Kirby, all exaggerated muscles and enormous bizarre weaponry. |
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The American public has reflected the mentality towards comics
that Stan Lee had: these can be cool,
amusing Pop Art relics, potentially rising in value, but they aren’t art. |
It’s a sad fact that Stan Lee has become
the ambassador of comic books to the American public. The American public has reflected the
mentality towards comics that Stan Lee had:
these can be cool, amusing Pop Art relics, potentially rising in
value, but they aren’t art. There is
no Citizen Kane, no Manhattan, no Natural Born Killers
or Chinatown of the comic book genre.
This is, of course, complete bullshit. First of all, we should be looking as much to literary
excellence, to Finnegan’s Wake, to Vladimir Nabokov, to Henry James,
to Milton and Homer, rather than only to film just because it’s visual. Comics are, after all, a printed
medium. And we have masterpieces,
from Watchmen to From Hell, from Jimmy Corrigan to Palestine,
from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Sin City to The
Invisibles to Cages. But
none of that fits into the Stan Lee mindset.
Stan Lee’s response to these works, when he’s asked such rare
questions in interviews, is always along the lines of “that’s cool” -- the
same flippant demeanor he takes to everything. Articles on Stan Lee proliferate in the wake of Marvel’s new
string of film successes, from X-Men (2001) to Spider-Man
(2002) and the upcoming Daredevil and Hulk films. Stan Lee was in Kevin Smith’s atrocious Mallrats,
associated in the public’s mind with the worst sort of adolescent
stupidity. Stan Lee, and the
mentality he represents, has meant stagnation for American comic books and
their cultural role. And, as I mentioned at the start of this
rant, even intelligent comic book creators -- whose work is to Silver Age
Marvel, and Stan Lee, like Philip Roth is to the Oprah Book Club -- still
praise Fantastic Four #1, Silver Age Marvel, and the Cult of Stan Lee. |
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Mark Millar got it right in The Authority: that shit’s the status quo and there’s no
real reverence due it. |
Down with all that. Put your Silver Age Marvel on the wall and
in display cases like the Pop Art artifacts that they are -- they’re
certainly not worth reading, except as historical curiosity. Mark Millar got it right in The
Authority: that shit’s the status
quo and there’s no real reverence due it.
The revolution of 1980s and 1990s comic books, the avant garde
mainstream work and the more mainstream independent work, will be remembered
long after the thoughtless super-hero battle books and poorly drawn
black-and-whites are studied as the Penny Dreadfuls of the latter half of the
20th Century. It’s not that there’s not a fun to the
Silver Age and its boundless creativity, its ability to throw bottled cities
and shrinking rays into a comic at a moment’s notice. But it’s like Dadaism, noteworthy for its
difference, for the philosophy behind it and not for itself. That sort of business only works as a
counter-movement, opposing the artificial “high art” values of the
establishment. The problem in
American comics is that, even within the industry, the establishment is
the disposable experimentation of Fantastic Four #1, with the
counter-establishment so counter as to presume anything in color or published
by a large press to be innately inferior -- an attitude no different,
qualitatively, than the dogmatic X-Men fans who think their shitty titles
great because they sell more (as opposed to being innately superior because
they sell less). |
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Imagine what would have happened if Stan Lee had died in the
mid-1960s. If Will Eisner and his
comics-as-literary-art had been more dominant. |
Imagine what would have happened if Stan
Lee had died in the mid-1960s. If
Will Eisner and his comics-as-literary-art had been more dominant. If we had literary greats, not faux greats
like Toni Morrison or Martin Amis, doing comic books instead of hacks like
detective and fantasy novelists.
Where’s our David Mamet or Tony Kushner comic? Our Philip Roth or Oliver Stone
comic? If it’s here, it’s here in Watchmen,
in Dark Knight Returns, in From Hell and Jimmy Corrigan
and Cages and Stuck Rubber Baby. Even in Miracleman and The Authority. And that trend in American comics --
stemming not from Stan Lee and Silver Age Marvel or the 1970s’ “social
relevancy” twist on super-heroes, but from Alan Moore and Frank Miller, from
Neil Gaiman, from Chris Ware and Joe Sacco and Dave McKean -- is what
deserves praise and what I think, finally, will survive past the
still-continuing Cult of Stan Lee as literary works in their own right. |
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Read about the author on our About page. Julian Darius can be reached at julian@sequart.com. Discuss this article online on Sequart.com’s messageboards. |
Read more about the Fantastic Four on Sequart.com. |
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