(In)Humanism
Like so many other aspects of 1960s Marvel Comics, the preoccupation with humanity now looks dated. But that is precisely the point: postwar American popular culture continually reasserted a naive humanism as a response to forces that, like Galactus, seemed horrifically indifferent to emotion, individuality, and life itself, from nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction to increasing bureaucracy and the advent of computers (a technology feared as widely as it was misunderstood). Whatever “human” was supposed to mean, it was under constant threat of metaphorical and literal extinction.
Science fiction (a genre from which Marvel Comics borrowed indiscriminately) was uniquely suited to playing out the drama of beset humanity, not only because it allowed the literal destruction of humanity to be part of a compelling narrative, but because it offered a possibility that “real life” does not: comparing humanity to some other form of sentience. On a literal level, there could be something underwhelming about affirming the choice to be human: as of 2020, earth people don’t have any other option. In science fiction and fantasy, alternatives abound. Humans encounter aliens, androids, elves, and orcs on a regular basis. By the 1980s, Jack Chalker would turn the transformation of humans into an almost endless variety of proudly alien species the big draw of his multivolume Well World series, and by the turn of the century, Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson’s comic series Transmetropolitan would feature humans who sought out alien DNA in order to become human/alien hybrids.
NOT EVEN REMOTELY CONNECTED TO THE TOPIC AT HAND
But human/alien encounters in popular science fiction of the 1960s (as opposed to the more cerebral and experimental works of what was then called the New Wave) still unfolded in the shadow of Golden Age science fiction editor John W. Campbell’s humanist challenge (“Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man”). Star Trek had the humanist approach to aliens down pat: Spock was the original series’ most fascinating character, but episode after episode reminded him and the viewers that being human was truly the highest value.
In the Marvel Comics of the same era, humanism and interiority were two sides of the same coin. The superpowered characters were made relatable to the extent that they had the same problems as ordinary humans, as demonstrated most effectively through interior and exterior monologue, emotionally-saturated narrative captions, and equally emotional interpersonal dialogue. Being human for the characters scripted by Stan Lee meant being messy and contradictory, ordinary as well as heroic. No matter how great their powers, the viewpoint characters (Thor as opposed to Odin, for example) had to be grounded, as though their fantastic exploits and amazing abilities needed the ballast of everyday humanity in order to keep the characters from floating too far away from the implied reader’s concerns.
In the 1970s, the emphasis on interiority would only increase, but the question of humanism would be asked and answered differently. At times the answers would be more cynical or jaded (Gerber), and at times they would constitute a call for transcendence (Englehart). Of all the writers examined here, only McGregor, with his heroic romanticism, would stay within Lee’s humanist framework. But nearly all of them learned the overall lesson of Lee’s emphasis on the characters’ inner life while improving on or simply rejecting his techniques for bringing the inner life into focus.