My essay's title references the title of Dinesh D'Souza's 2014 political-philosophy book AMERICA: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER, but the resemblance goes deeper than that.
D'Souza, who immigrated from India to the U.S. in his youth, seeks to articulate a reasoned argument in support of American exceptionalism. Rather than depending upon self-aggrandizing patriotic bromides-- "we're freer than anyone else," "we're more generous than anyone else"-- D'Souza follows the historian Alexis de Toqueville in finding America's uniqueness in its entrepreneurial spirit. In D'Souza's view, all the nations of the Earth-- including the native tribes who originally occupied the territories of "The New World"-- were governed principally by an "ethic of conquest," in which the strongest tribe or nation prospered by non-consensual force of arms. America, however, was the only nation of the New World to fully invest in the entrepreneurial spirit.
...entrepreneurs created demand by introducing a product that no one asked for, but millions of people wanted once it was available. I call this "extreme empathy" because it's a case of entrepreneurs providing for the wants of consumers before consumers even know what they want. -- Chapter 10.
What D'Souza proposes as the antithesis to the ethic of conquest might best be termed an "ethic of commerce," though D'Souza does not advance this term. The commerce-ethic serves the self-interest of the entrepreneur as much the ethic of conquest serves that of the conqueror, but the entrepreneur can only profit by empathetically anticipating the wants of customers, and by persuading them to give him their business, consensually.
One may cavil at this or that aspect of D'Souza's thesis, but I believe he's on solid ground with regard to the element that sets the United States apart from other nations. Fundamentally the country's foremost virtue lay in being founded either by merchants or immigrants who wanted to become merchants, leading to an emphasis upon consensus over conquest. And that leads me to the man who saved the medium of comic books with his relentless promotion of his company's unique products.
Imagine a world where Stan Lee quits the company founded by his uncle-by-marriage Martin Goodman and never brings together a diverse of writers and artists-- some great, some mediocre-- to formulate the Marvel Universe. Lee himself might have faded into obscurity-- but the comics-medium might have followed him within another 10-15 years.
Some things would have remained the same, without Marvel. The "DC Big Three" who had survived the Golden Age-- Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman-- would have stayed the course. Yet by the late 1950s, DC Comics, the premiere publisher of funnybooks, would still have had mediocre sales on their westerns and SF-books, and the editors still would have sought to goose sales by launching new versions of the company's 1940s superheroes. So The Flash, Green Lantern, and the Justice League would have appeared in that world just as they did in this one. The new heroes, juxtaposed against the staid "Big Three," would have still galvanized the nascent comic-book fandom. And one of the defining events of the sixties, the 1966 BATMAN teleseries, would have driven the nation temporarily Bat-mad for a couple of years. Various publishers would still have jumped on the superhero bandwagon in that same period. But Martin Goodman might not have been one of them. Without Stan Lee to run the funnybooks on a shoestring budget, the publisher probably would have shuttered his comics division to concentrate on his line of "sweat mags."
Yet without Marvel, DC probably would have stayed locked in the creative attitudes of the 1950s. A few of DC's more oddball creations might have still appeared, such as Robert Kanigher's METAL MEN, but without FANTASTIC FOUR, does any DC editor okay DOOM PATROL? Carmine Infantino might still have ascended to the position of editorial director in 1967, and he might have suggested that DC invest more heavily in horror in case the superheroes flamed out, just as they had at the end of the 1940s. Yet without Marvel as competition, maybe Infantino gets overruled by the people who liked to play things safe. And so the fans don't get Gothic Batman or SWAMP THING, much less a "British Invasion" of US comics.
Worse, in a comics-world where the dominant voices are only those of Gardner Fox and John Broome, comics fandom might have foundered. There might not be enough fans to support the direct market at a crucial time, and the lack of The DM puts all surviving comics-companies at the tender mercies of traditional distributors. And so maybe by the 1980s, DC's the Last Comics-Company on Earth, eking out an existence publishing Superman reprint books.
Fortunately, in our world Stan Lee did not quit, but discovered, without entirely meaning to do so, a way to create something that his audience didn't even know they wanted. As to what he founded-- see Part 2.
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