Oh, You Pretty Things

April 14, 2020

Oh you Pretty Things

Don't you know you're driving your

Mamas and Papas insane

Let me make it plain

You gotta make way for the Homo Superior

—David Bowie, 1971

Modern Marvel Comics began with the first issue of Fantastic Four in 1961, so it should be no surprise that the 1970s would see the company move through adolescence.  That decade would, in fact, prove to be a turning point for North American comics as a whole.  The delightfully profane world of underground comics had brought in a new, countercultural readership, but it would not last out the decade.  Not only were the counterculture’s own days numbered, but local ordinances banning the sale of drug paraphernalia would eventually put headshops (their primary point of sale) out of business.  Some of the stores that survived did so by turning themselves into comic shops, which would facilitate the spread of “ground-level” (adult-oriented, but not underground) comics in the 1970s and the direct market in the 1980s.  

YEAH, NO ONE KNOWS HOW THE MONSTER TIED REED’S HANDS. JUST GO WITH IT

Marvel Comics was not immune to these changes.  Quite to the contrary, the company that prided itself on its youth appeal (even if much of the attempts to get “hip” are cringe-inducing now) was swept up in a rapid aesthetic transformation that its main rival, DC Comics, could barely begin to match by the end of the decade. Marvel’s approach to the superhero in the previous decade had been revolutionary, gy touting their new “superheroes with super problems.” The neurotic, latter-day Hamlet of Spider-Man, the fraught relationships of the bickering Fantastic Four, and the persecution complex of the mutant outcast X-Men brought hints of new depth to the starts of four-color comics.  Granted, this could seem like faint praise.  The new emphasis on the heroes’ personalities was largely an advance in characterization from one dimension to two. 

Two key elements of Marvel Comics in the 1960s paved the way for the progress that would come in the 1970s: the emphasis on the adventures’ connection to what would later be termed “the world outside your window” (i.e. despite the existence of superpowers, Marvel’s heroes lived in a place that was supposed to resemble that of the readers), and a decade-long preoccupation with humanism.[1]  Like Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek at roughly the same time, Stan Lee used fantastic situations as a chance to explore “what it means to be…human” (the ellipses were practically mandatory) while extolling humanity’s virtues. [2] On the surface, proclaiming the wonders of humanity might seem like a pointless proposition, since we humans do not have the option of one day deciding we would prefer to be, say,  trilobites.  But that’s the beauty of fantasy and science fiction (and the heroic fantasy of superhero comics): not being human becomes thinkable and viable, which makes humanity a category worthy of contestation. Superhero stories are often derided as escapist fantasies, and, indeed, the invitation to imagine yourself into a superheroic or even alien body sounds like the essence of escapism.   But Stan Lee’s Marvel work closed the  loop by indulging the reader’s superhuman fantasy only to place the human front and center.  Being super was fantastic, but being human was paramount. 

Marvel in the 1970s saw a transformation that initially looked seamless on the surface, but proved almost as dramatic as Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk.  As Stan Lee stepped away from scripting nearly all of Marvel’s titles, his younger replacements were Marvel fans-turned-pro who, rather than looking at the counterculture from a skeptical, calculating distance, were the product of Sixties youth culture.  Moreover, the writers who joined after Lee’s initial hire, Roy Thomas (whose primary task was to preserve and adapt the approach pioneered by Lee and Kirby),  were well-read, with literary ambition of the sort to which Lee only gestured.[3]  Their ambitions met with numerous constraints: the strictures of the comics code, the dictates of Marvel editorial policy; the narrowness of the existing comics market; the presumed immaturity of the readership; and the limits of their own talents. But what united the best of them was a shift in emphasis and perspective from the “world outside your window” to the “world inside your head.”  In a thoroughly visual medium and a decidedly action-oriented genre, these writers went beyond mere quirks of characterization and and angst-filled monologues to a quixotic attempt at interiority. 

DON’T WORRY, PETER! ONE DAY YOU’LL MARRY A SUPER-MODEL! WELL, AT LEAST UNTIL YOU SELL YOUR MARRIAGE TO THE DEVIL. [FROM SPIDER-MAN 18]

Interiority was conveyed through thought balloons, spoken dialogue, and narrative captions.  All of these were devices that had been exploited by their predecessors in the 1960s. Stan Lee had pioneered a comics narrative voice that functioned along the faux oral storytelling device Russian formalists called skaz:  a verbal style that sounded as though it came from the mouth of a character, even if that character wasn’t actually part of the story.  Stan Lee’s voice simulated a conversation with the reader, simultaneously creating a sense of intimacy between narrator and reader but also a bit of a remove from the characters themselves (even as the reader was treated to their endless monologues).  The writers of the 70s used this technique as a platform for something different: a narrator/reader dialogue focused intensely on the inner lives of the characters on the page. As these writers shifted their focus towards the characters’ inner lives, they grappled with formal questions of both genre and medium: medium, in that two-dimensional representational art has obvious limitations for depicting abstract subjectivity, and genre, in that internal drama seemed to be the antithesis of the obligatory fight scene.  

Though it would take one more decade for mainstream comics to engage more seriously with the experimental and the avant-garde (largely at DC rather than Marvel, thanks to the “British Invasion” begun with Alan Moore), Marvel in the 1970s paved the way through certain writers and artists’ preoccupation with their characters’ inner states.  Here I see a parallel with the genealogy of science fiction elaborated by Frederic Jameson in Archaelogies of the Future. After briefly suggesting that the science fiction of the 1960s might represent a turn from “sociology” to “psychology,” Jameson proposes a term he finds more apt:

Psychology is not merely disqualified by its humanist overtones (psychological tricks and paradoxes probably belong back in Asimov's second or "science-and-technology" stage); it also finds itself displaced by psychoanalysis and relegated to the status of a pseudo-science if not to that of applied science and of testing and marketing techniques. "Subjectivity" is a more capacious and less dogmatic category under which to range what we find at work in Dick's hallucinations as well as in Lem's cognitive paradoxes or Le Guin's anthropological worlds (92-93)

Marvel’s superhero comics in the 1970s do not even remotely approximate the sophistication of Lem and Le Guin, a comparison that, due to differences in their respective media and corporate comics narrow room for self-expression, would in any case be patently unfair.   But Jameson’s highlighting of “subjectivity” could be productive when applied to post-Lee/Kirby super heroics. The comics credited to Stan Lee did not so much reproduce or convey a state of mind; rather, they declared it though the characters’ spoken words or the contents of their thought balloons. There are a variety of reasons why this makes sense, starting with a lack of faith in the reader’s sophistication and ending with the very means by which the comics were produced.  Lee and his collaborators pioneered the so-called “Marvel method” of comics creation, essentially a labor-saving device that allowed Lee to script numerous comics each month.  Lee and Kirby (for example) would talk about the plot, with Kirby taking notes.  Or perhaps Lee would write a brief outline.  Then Kirby would breakdown and pencil the entire issue (often jettisoning many of Lee’s ideas and replacing them with his own), after which Lee would add the dialogue.  Wordiness can be seen as an instrument of writerly control, and also as a symptom of a process that looks ill-equipped to produce nuance. 

In the world of underground and alternative comics, as well as in the cases of particularly talented mainstream figures such as Frank Miller and Jim Starlin, one might more often find comics produced by a writer/artist, a single individual with equal responsibility for words and pictures.  But the shift to interiority at Marvel in the 1970s was almost always the work of a writer/artist team.  Only Starlin and Kirby produced a significant writer/artist output towards the end of the decade, and even there, Starlin’s writing was largely in the Stan Lee mold, while Kirby’s many gifts did not include anything remotely resembling subtlety. 

Notes

[1] “The world outside your window” was Jim Shooter’s tag line for his ill-fated “New Universe" line of comics, launched in 1986.  This slogan was both nostalgic and aspirational, in that it represented an attempt to return Marvel comics to its roots in the (relative) realism and timeliness of Lee, Kirby, and Ditko’s early 1960s work. Since then, it has become an unofficial catch-phrase associated retroactively with the Marvel ethos from its beginnings in 1961, with Lee himself invoking it in a memorable 2017 video address insupportable of diversity and tolerance.”. 

[2] I specify Lee not in order to take a stand in the controversy over Lee’s and Kirby’s authorship of the stories that made them famous; it is quite clear that Kirby deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the ingenuity of such comics as Fantastic Four. But even a cursory comparison of the comics Lee wrote with Kirby to Kirby’s later solo works confirms that “being human” was not a particular concern of Kirby’s; by contrast, it comes up in a wide range of Stan Lee comics with different artistic collaborators. 

[3] Technically, Don Rico, Ernie Hart, and a few other veteran comics writers had been hired before Thomas, but they did not stay long, and did not leave a significant imprint on the comics line.  Thomas was the first novice writer to join Lee’s Bullpen.