Assembling the Team
Marvel in the 1970s concentrates on the work of five writers: Doug Moench (1948-), Marv Wolfman (1946-), Steve Englehart (1947-), Don McGregor (1945- ), and Steve Gerber (1947-2008). Each pushed mainstream comics in the direction of interiority, but each in his own way.[1]
After a first chapter on Stan Lee and humanism, Chapter 2 will Marv Wolfman’s run on Tomb of Dracula (1973-1979). Closely collaborating with artist Gene Colan, who drew every single issue of the series, Wolfman focused on the inner lives of the supporting cast in order to show the effects the vampire had on the people whose lives he ruined, while also inviting the reader alternately to sympathize with and recoil from Dracula. Doug Moench’s work on Marvel’s monster characters is part of the following chapter, though most of Chapter Three treats Moench’s run on Shang-Chi: Master of Kung-Fu, a series whose success rested on the ongoing contrast between martial arts action and the internal monologue of the title character.
On the surface, Englehart (Captain America, Doctor Strange, The Avengers) is the most traditional of the bunch, often employing a Stan-Lee-like direct second-person address and persisting with his abuse of exclamation points long after comics stopped using them to end every single sentence. But he took the 1960s-era technique of using an external struggle (the fight against a “bad guy”) as a parallel for an internal conflict and, with the help of wide reading in esoteric philosophy and a hearty appetite for hallucinogens, made the theme of most of his comics work what he called the “rising and advancing of the spirit” (the translation of the name of one of the characters he co-created, Shang-Chi). Englehart’s work is the subject of Chapter Four.
The writer treated in Chapter 5, DonMcGregor (Black Panther, Killraven, Luke Cage) saw Lee’s humanism and raised it with heroic romanticism, creating adventure stories tinged with a wistful nostalgia for a mythical time when human relations were more straightforward and honorable. Though McGregor has a flair for humorous banter, the defining feature of his work is a preoccupation with narrating internal states at great length and in remarkably purple prose. Not only is the fighting a parallel to an inner struggle, the very images we see on the page are often a pretext for a lengthy meditation based on the protagonist’s conscious and bodily experience of the scene depicted by the artist.
Finally, the greatest inroads in conveying subjectivity were made by Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck, Man-Thing, The Defenders, Omega the Unknown). Gerber’s scripting represents a high point in mainstream comics’ development of an authorial voice, as well as a consistent focus on the characters’ perspectives. In his run on The Defenders, Gerber managed to combine an attention to his protagonists’ inner lives with a long-running plot line that literalized interiority: the heroes face the threat of the Headmen, four villains whose preoccupation with mind control and self-improvement are manifested in their grotesque experiments on their own heads. The Headmen’s challenge to the Defenders is entirely one of perspective: given the opportunity to brainwash the heroes, the Headmen choose to “merely” alter their perspective on the world, rendering them a bit more cynical and disaffected. The Defenders simultaneously face off against a movement called “Celestial Mind Control,” a thinly-disguised parody of EST that brainwashes its followers into admitting they are all “Bozos” (and requiring them to wear clown masks). But Gerber’s clearest artistic triumph is Howard the Duck, who is the waddling embodiment of alienated skepticism. Howard allows Gerber to render his own verdict on the “humanity” so venerated by Stan Lee. An unwilling student of the human condition, Howard comes to an inevitable conclusion: being human stinks.
I am well aware that so far I have spoken exclusively about writers in a medium defined by the combination of words and pictures, leaving me open to the accusation of naive literary bias. But I am well versed in comics criticism, and in the classroom I spend most of the time lecturing about form (paying attention to page layout, panel transitions, closure, etc.). Yet to the extent that it represented a step forward, Marvel in the 1970s was a writer-dominated phenomenon. Sometimes the writers in question had the good fortune of long relationships with their artistic collaborators, but often they found themselves writing for artists who either hadn’t been selected yet or stepped in at the last minute. Moreover, while Gerber worked frequently with master craftsmen such as Gene Colan (and occasionally with fan sensation Frank Brunner), most of the time his artists were highly competent storytellers who never rose to the level of fan favorite (Sal Buscema, Jim Mooney). Englehart, too, was often paired with Buscema, and even with such deeply unpopular artists as Don Heck and Frank Robbins (though Colan and Brunner illustrated some of his work as well). Only McGregor, the least acclaimed of the three, had more consistent luck in this regard (P. Craig Russell on War of the Worlds (Killraven), Billy Graham and Rich Buckler on Jungle Action (Black Panther), but saddled with Robbins nonetheless for Power Man (Luke Cage)). I will certainly pay attention to the artists’ contributions, but my subject matter is largely writer-driven work.
DON’T WORRY. SHE’LL BE BACK
My conclusion will be about Chris Claremont, the X-Men scribe who turned Marvel’s mutants into a runaway commercial success. Claremont represents both the apotheosis and the downfall of 1970s interiority. In his wordy soap operas, Claremont made the inner lives of his heroes of paramount importance. But he did so by reviving and retooling Stan Lee’s declarative mode, with his characters carefully laying out their motivations and angst in lengthy monologues that, more than his plots, required a superhuman suspension of disbelief.
Note
[1] In the 1970s, Marvel employed virtually no female writers. One of the exceptions, Mary Skrenes, was Gerber’s credited co-writer on Omega the Unknown and uncredited collaborator on Howard the Duck, among other titles.