Why did I get this book?
I haven’t quite read every single comic book ever published by Marvel, unlike Douglas Wolk, but pretty close. So this was not a hard sell for me. Plus I’ve read Wolk’s other work and liked it a lot.
Is it what I thought it was?
Not necessarily, but that’s not bad. I was afraid it was going to turn out to be a ponderous chronological history of Marvel’s entire output, which would really just be a slightly different way to do a history of the company, something that I think has already been done ably enough. It’s definitely not that. Wolk is very alive to the dangers of trying to say everything about all those Marvel comics, and the book is very intentionally structured to avoid that danger. It’s also consciously structured to avoid just talking about the highlights or “greatest issues”.
On the other hand, I was a bit taken aback at the lack of what I might call “summary reflection” in some of the chapters—I expected something a bit more like literary analysis of the full text of some of the thematic veins of Marvel’s output that Wolk sets out to mine. It’s there, but embedded to some extent inside a historical frame in each chapter that doesn’t always trace out the reverberations and echoes of a particular leit-motif or character and there isn’t quite as much evaluative commentary as I’d expected.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It’s a good read and a fun one. If I were teaching a class that focused on Marvel comics, I’d definitely try to find a way to use this as a central text for the course. It’s not quite a reference work but I can definitely see how I might go back to it in order to organize my own re-readings and possibly at times to dissent from Wolk’s curation of particular themes.
Quotes
“The Marvel story is a mountain, smack in the middle of contemporary culture…It’s not the kind of mountain whose face you can climb. It doesn’t seem hazardous (and it isn’t) but those who try to follow what appear to be direct trails to the summit find that it’s grown higher every time they look up. The way to experience what the mountain has to offer is to go inside it and explore its innumerable bioluminescent caverns and twisty passageways.”
“The big Marvel story is a funhouse-mirror history of the past sixty years of American life, from the atomic night-terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and pluralism of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filagreed story about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders.”
“Good comics, though, are often very much of their moment. They’re serials; the only ones that survive are those whose readers are willing to wait to find out what happens next.”
“I’m making it sound like immersion in this stuff is all fun, which it’s not. Caring about superhero comics will empty your pockets, break your heart and fill you with red-eyed indignation. They linger over stupidity and violence, and prey on their audience’s emotional understanding and sense of incomplete understanding; there is cruelty and unfairness to creative geniuses stamped into every page. The whole structure is balanced on a disintegrating pile of flimsy, trivial amusements created for children of the baby boom.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I really like Wolk’s proposition that the famous panel from Fantastic Four #51 where Reed Richards is travelling into the Negative Zone for the first time, that was rendered in an unusually creative visual design even for Jack Kirby but also has a pitch-perfect Stan Lee dialogue bubble, is a kind of iconic touchstone for all of Marvel’s eventual output, a sort of master trope that reverberates through not just the Fantastic Four but everything else.
Wolk is really perceptive about the era of Marvel’s output that followed the end of the Lee-Kirby and Lee-Ditko collaborations, that it was mostly just done by journeymen writers and artists who got stuck recycling their second-hand readings of the initial stories. (Important exception: Spider-Man, which kind of kept moving on in some interesting ways.) I just happened to be re-reading some of Roy Thomas’ dispirited and boring work on Fantastic Four recently, where Galactus returns and what was awe-inspiring just becomes sort of silly. But in an odd way, that’s an important era to probe for how persistent tropes and characterizations become cemented in a long-running serial project like this one—it’s not necessarily the creative heights that matter, it’s whether they get reproduced by lesser students in the atelier. Grant Morrison did really interesting work on X-Men but the people who took over the book next didn’t have the faintest idea how to keep it going (a persistent part of Morrison’s career, in fact) and so a lot of what he did just slid right off until much later creators went back and pulled up some of his ideas. To some extent, recent Marvel has embraced that idea that each creator does some work and then the next person just ignores it—that sense of industrial seamlessness and long-term continuity is gone, which is fine. But the journeyman stuff does matter, in its way.
One of the best chapters is on Master of Kung-Fu, the title that focused on Shang-Chi. Wolk really gets at what felt so different about Shang-Chi as a character, a difference that even other writers besides Doug Moench, who really defined the character, were able to reproduce. Wolk doesn’t mention a memorable (at least to me) story arc in Marvel Team-Up from 1979 written by Chris Claremont, a writer frequently prone to making his characters talk too much and himself writing too much exposition, where Shang-Chi is as Moench usually writes him, very quiet, very much about interiority. As a relatively young comics reader at the time, I remember that being very interesting, that here was a character who didn’t banter and didn’t make long-winded speeches, who was written as often looking at himself and his adventures from some kind of cool distance, disturbed by the violence of his life. The other thing I like about the chapter is that Wolk really traces the dynamic relationship between Marvel’s readers and creators through the letters columns, in this case especially about the racist iconography that hung around Shang-Chi due to the use of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and associated characters. (I often longed to be the kind of reader who wrote to Marvel as much as some did, but I never could quite summon up the gumption and focus, though I did eventually write a letter full of graduate-school politics to DC’s Legends of the Dark Knight that was in fact published.) There’s a great postscript to the chapter where Wolk talks about his earlier expectation that the one character Marvel would never try to use in their films was Shang-Chi.
The Spider-Man chapter disappointed me a little because it’s a good opportunity to probe a bit behind the scenes. Wolk does a good job of summarizing how the character actually did evolve, unusually for comics, cycling through possible father figures, growing up by going to college, living through trauma, developing his relationships to peers and maturing as a person, getting married, and then (for a short time) finally seeing his Aunt May die. What I guess I’d love to hear a bit more not-on-the-page analysis of is that Marvel infamously made a decision that this long arc of character progression left Peter Parker and his stories adrift, that what seemed like creative stasis (with accompanying commercial decline) needed to be reversed by returning the character to his roots: returning May to life, undoing the marriage (so that it had never been), undoing the revelation of his secret identity, giving him work-life balance issues again, and so on. But that’s felt ever since like Marvel is the one who did the deal with the devil, not Peter Parker, and just as in most such deals, not getting what they wanted. Wolk is savvy about how this is a basic problem for comics (DC has its own version of the same quandry), that characters are perpetually trapped in some kind of arrested development. (There’s a fun chapter in this book about all the appearances of U.S. Presidents that underscores how often there’s a soft reset of the Marvel Universe.) But with Spider-Man it feels genuinely painful—almost a choice to prefer some new high school reader who wants to grow alongside a high-school aged Parker than the established reader who had grown up with him. That the choice was made in such a clumsy way is probably what made it so glaring—but also really denied subsequent writers a chance to tell new stories about the reset Peter Parker. (That got done by Brian Michael Bendis in the Ultimate universe instead.)
I would have liked to see at least one chapter deal with the evolution of some of the formal components of Marvel storytelling—dialogue, exposition boxes, the coming of “decompression” as an approach. I keep thinking about the really weird, kind of bad issues of Mighty Avengers where Brian Michael Bendis suddenly decided to write thought bubbles with the clear intention of making the entire idea of thought bubbles seem stupid—which in the end is a weird kind of metacommentary on the history of the comics he was writing. (Along with the equally strange but more palatable “oral history” of the Avengers that he published for good while in the back of some of the books he was writing.) Equally I kept wishing there were at least a few more characterological chapters—say, one about a character who was a relatively stable company-wide presence and one who just was totally unstable in how he/she/it was treated or imagined even after numerous appearances. Doctor Doom seems a great example of the former—when a writer got him wrong (not often), not only did fans instantly recognize it, but later writers often set out to correct or discount the errant portrayal. But both of these themes might seem more generically “superhero comics” overall and less specifically Marvel, I guess.
The book is absolutely bending over backwards to try and invite someone who has read no Marvel comics into its analysis, to be a guide to a vast, sprawling text just as a book about the work of Charles Dickens or Stephen King might try to welcome a reader who has never read the author in question. I have no idea whether Wolk succeeds because I’m not that reader, but I did appreciate that he tried to pull it off.
I didn't read comic books much growing up. I wanted to read 'serious' books about fairies and ghosts and how 'mysteriousness' was imbued in everything. I started reading Chris Claremont's X-Men issues while I learned as a university freshman to misbehave. I vaguely recall that, during the month-long personal episode when I was trying to write my senior thesis on Thomas Nashe's _Lenten Stuffe_---which all seemed too magnificently satirical and enormously contemporaneous and generally too big get on with---I took time to re-read all the Chris Claremont X-Men arcs I had. And also all the New Mutants, especially, the Alan Davis/ Chris Claremont New Mutants Annual 2 with its crossover to the X-Men annual. Clearly, if Chris Claremont had a rep for talking too much, I didn't notice. ---It wasn't The Dark Knight but, rather, reading one issue of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol that changed my landscape.