MARVEL COMICS: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT THEM PT 2

 In Part 1, I credited Stan Lee with founding Marvel Comics. This does not mean that I think he created every Marvel character or even necessarily oversaw every development during his period of peak creativity from roughly 1961 to 1972. But I consider the opposite position-- that either Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko did everything and that Lee just took the credit-- to be utterly moronic. The slightly more nuanced view that Lee allowed Kirby and Ditko to maximize their creativity while he just kibitzed a little isn't much better. But it does at least touch on an important truth, one that impacts on how Lee's Marvel saved the comics industry from going the way of an extinct phenomenon like the Big Little Book (a comparison advanced by Big Name Fan Dwight Decker in the pages of AMAZING HEROES). 

Stan Lee as a writer did not possess the raw creativity of Kirby or Ditko, but in some cases his creative instincts were better than theirs and of anyone else in his employ. He was an editor first and a writer second, but since it's an editor's job to oversee a company's offerings to its customer base, that meant that he always had to see the Big Picture. And his oversight, starting with FANTASTIC FOUR #1 in 1961, can be summed up in one word: connectivity, "the state of being connected." 

In most of my earlier writings on Early Marvel, I've asserted that there were two factors that made Marvel appealing across several generations to fans of all ages. Factor One was that of continuity, the notion that all the Marvel characters existed in the same world and could all potentially interact with one another, even if some encounters might require traversing time, or space, or both. Factor Two was that of deeper characterization, at least for the superhero genre in comics.

Now, I would see those two factors as manifestations of one phenomenon, that of connectivity. Continuity as practiced by Stan Lee might be described as "outer connectivity:" the physical interactions brought about by assorted superbeings occupying the same world. This might range from various heroes just popping up in one another's features to detailed histories about (say) how ex-Nazi Baron Strucker launched terrorist cabals like Hydra and AIM. (Curiously, this history was first set forth in the ultra-obscure Marvel war-title CAPTAIN SAVAGE AND HIS LEATHERNECK RAIDERS.)  

Factor Two, that of more detailed characterization, may be fairly termed "inner connectivity." This was a much more radical innovation for comics, for the broad tendency in all genre-comics was to subordinate character to plot. There were a few exceptions-- the Golden Age BATMAN comics, the occasional contretemps between the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, and the better-conceived EC short stories. But at 1960s Marvel, it became de rigeur for all of the Marvel stories to have a greater focus upon characterization. (It's a separate question as to how well-done it was, on average.)  

Even at a time when Marvel Comics was limited as to how many titles their distributor would accept, the company's most popular titles started cutting in on DC's action. Further, Marvel's characters had an archetypal quality not seen in comic books since the decline of the Golden Age in the 1940s, and thus many characters remained evergreen for future generations, or even became received more sophisticated treatment by later raconteurs (Frank Miller on DAREDEVIL, Chris Claremont on X-MEN). Marvel's success story was that of the scrappy underdog who wins the day, and thus even people who weren't hardcore comics-nerds understood the rudiments of Marvel's new standard and of some of the more appealing characters. 

The perennial attractiveness of Marvel Connectivity forced DC and other companies to attempt to cope with the audience's new expectations. This resulted in a more dynamic direct market, which resulted in both small-press successes and major, adult-themed releases from the big companies, not least WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Keeping genre-comics viable may not have lightened the hearts of elitists like Gary Groth, but the survival of comics ensured that by the 1990s and 2000s Hollywood finally invested major money in adaptations of comic book properties. Thus more artists, even those that hated Stan Lee (paging *Alan Moore*) reaped the benefits of Lee's entrepreneurial skills. The medium of comic books may still perish, but at least it will have reached a point of superior vantage from where it was in 1961.

                

        

MARVEL COMICS: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT THEM PT 1

 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.                  

        

 

     

    

  

1950: THE NEXUS OF MARVEL "REALISM" PT. 3

 Well, when I announced this project early today, I assumed it would take me through the next day at very least to scan through the fifty-plus issues of JOURNEY INTO UNKNOWN WORLDS, the first "Timely-Atlas" SF-anthology series, even if I was only stopping to read the stories with strong SF-content. However, I found that JIUW had two phases, only one of which is relevant to my project.

JIUW Phase One consists of just three issues. The first issue, #36 (Sept 1950), picks up the numbering of an Atlas teen-humor comic, and two more issues follow in Dec 1950 and Feb 1951. All three have space-opera covers and contain a mix of both "gosh-wow" and "thoughtful" SF. 

JIUW Phase Two picks up in April 1951 with a new numbering, starting with issue 4 for no apparent reason, but the covers begin emphasizing horror, as shown by the supernaturally-themed "Train to Nowhere." I read about 20 issues of Phase Two and in my opinion all the stories with SF-content were horror-themed. That makes them the affective opposite of "gosh-wow" in that such stories emphasize the excitements of the grotesque rather than the sublimity of heroic triumph. Then, just to make sure that there was no major shift in Phase Two down the line, I chose a few random issues to survey, and got the sense that horror still held sway by the time JIUW Phase Two ended with issue 59 in 1957. (I assume that all the terror-tales published after the Code were "horror in name only.")

Now, both phases were edited from start to finish by Stan Lee. Since JIUW appeared on stands a few months after EC's WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, and since Lee's boss Martin Goodman was notorious for imitating perceived trends, Goodman may have told Lee to turn a SF-book like the EC titles. But the EC SF-titles did not sell as well as their horror-books, and Goodman may have ordered a quick shift to horror for JIUW once Phase One didn't sell well enough. All this means that only those first three issues of JIUW, covered in Part 2, focused upon "thoughtful SF," though I did stumble across a rare example of same in "The Faceless Man" (JIUW #51, 1956), by writer Carl Wessel and artist Steve Ditko:

            

I did have another observation from my partial survey of JIUW Phase Two: those horror-stories I did read were bad. Atlas Comics did publish some decent if rarely exceptional horror in the 1950s, but I have the strong sense that Stan Lee, unlike William Gaines and Al Feldstein, didn't really care that much about horror, even when he wrote terror-tales himself. By contrast, I see him coming back to "thoughtful SF" again and again, even in the last days of Marvel's anthology-comics in the early 1960s. Additionally, Lee showed little interest in the "gosh-wow" SF that so strongly moved Julie Schwartz. (Schwartz's STRANGE ADVENTURES, of the three titles launched in 1950, lasted through the early 1970s and so was the most successful title.)    

My current hypothesis, then, is that though Lee enjoyed writing and/or editing "thoughtful SF," he couldn't make that SF-subcategory sell well. But I think that he, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were able to channel the reflective attitude found in "thoughtful SF" tropes into superhero-tropes, with obvious success. And that's what helped give the Marvel Universe fantasy-verse a veneer of realistic character-values.          

1950: THE NEXUS OF MARVEL "REALISM" PT. 2

 As I said in Part 1, in this and succeeding installments I'm examining Atlas' first SF-anthology, JOURNEY INTO UNKNOWN WORLDS, for examples of SF-stories that display at least as much characterization as the SF-stories in EC's WEIRD SCIENCE. The WEIRD SCIENCE tales are not masterpieces of "thinking man's SF" any more than are the stories of the Atlas title, but in the first three issues-- numbered 36-38-- there's a mix of both simplistic "gosh-wow" space opera and somewhat more reflective storylines. After those three issues, JIUW began new numbering in 1951, starting with issue 4 and concluding with issue 59 in 1957.       

JIUW 36

 "The Strange Car" (art Russ Heath) -- car thief steals wrong car; "gets religion" after he saves Earth.

"Prisoner of Time" (art Sol Brodsky) -- space-conqueror meets ironic fate due to misunderstanding how time works.

"The End of the Earth" (art Vern Henkel) -- two alien races intend to rescue the people of Earth, Through a misunderstanding, both rescuers abjure giving aid, but the story ends on a message of self-reliance.

JIUW #38

"The Last Man" (Don Rico/Dave Berg) -- man dreams that he's destined to be the last survivor of devastating atomic war.

"The Metal Monsters" (art Pete Tumlinson) -- rebellious apostate correctly predicts that Earth will suffer for becoming too dependent on their robot protectors.

My tentative conclusion is that these reflective tropes anticipate many of those that would appear sporadically throughout 1950s SF comics from Atlas, particularly those of the late fifties that Marvel tended to reprint in the 1960s and 1970s.  

1950: THE NEXUS OF MARVEL "REALISM" PT. 1

 In my 2023 essay THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION, I said in part: 

...comic book SF took on its own schizophrenic division in the very early 1950s. Going by my partial reading of the early issues of DC's flagship SF-anthology comic, STRANGE ADVENTURES (1950), I would say that DC remained steadfastly committed to the "gosh-wow" method. In the same year that ADVENTURES debuted, William Gaines' EC Comics published its two SF-titles, WEIRD FANTASY and WEIRD SCIENCE. EC experts would know more than I of Gaines' reading-proclivities. But for whatever reasons-- which probably include the proclivities of contributors like Wally Wood-- EC's two magazines proved to be more in the spirit of "philosophy-SF" that had been best propagated in the forties by ASTOUNDING MAGAZINE and in the fifties by THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (said magazine having begun in 1949). To further support the sense of a changing ethos, American cinema suddenly began investing heavily in "thinking-man's SF," with DESTINATION MOON in 1950 and both THE THING and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in 1951. 

I now feel that the term "philosophy-SF" is misleading, especially in terms of gauging how the tropes of science fiction, even those communicated mostly through SF-films, influenced early Marvel. The term doesn't quite capture the essence of "What Made Sixties Marvel Successful." There are Marvel stories from the 1960s that had varying degrees of philosophical significance, but philosophy was not a constant factor in Marvels rise to success, as one might say that philosophy was important to the fiction of Robert Heinlein (who was, incidentally, one of the contributors to the groundbreaking Hollywood SF-film DESTINATION MOON). The two factors in Marvel's meteoric sixties success were (1) the concept of a vast, intertwined universe of genre-heroes, and (2) the sincere attempt to give all these heroes and their villains at least a modicum of characterization. 

Now, of these two factors, the idea of a comics-company using a "shared universe" was not derived from any other medium or genre, since Marvel, in its 1940s incarnation of "Timely Comics," had already played around with heroes meeting each other, as had other publishers of the period. But the second factor, that of characterization, may owe a substantial debt to advances in the way SF in various media used the same factor, beginning ten years before the advent of the Marvel Age of Comics. 

I mentioned above that in America prose science fiction received a boost in terms of sophisticated treatments when the MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION was launched in 1949, and the same is true of its competitor GALAXY MAGAZINE, launched in 1950. I assume both magazines sought to monetize the public's growing awareness of "space-age" technology, just as producer George Pal did with DESTINATION MOON, followed by many more raconteurs throughout the 1950s decade. And I would assume something similar influenced the way three comics-companies launched science-fiction anthology-titles in that same pivotal year of 1950.

EC Comics-- WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, June 1950

DC Comics-- STRANGE ADVENTURES, August 1950

Atlas (formerly Timely) Comics-- JOURNEY INTO UNKNOWN WORLDS, September 1950.    

Of these three companies, DC made no major inroads in using multifaceted characters; STRANGE ADVENTURES remained in the 1940s mode of gosh-wow SF. William Gaines, though, sought to produce more deeply textured SF-stories, even if he had to swipe from the best authors, such as Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, to accomplish that feat. But what of JOURNEY, the first SF-anthology comic published by Timely/Atlas/Marvel? Which side of the characterization fence does it fall upon?

"To be continued" in Part 2...       

 

                   

 

SLAVE WAGES PT. 3

 I found myself revisiting this two-part essay, particularly the second part, after reading these two sentences from Dinesh D'Souza's AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER:

The impulse to conquest comes from what Augustine termed the libido dominandi, the lust for power. This powerful passion included not merely the desire for goods but also for slaves and concubines.

The D'Souza book does not explore in depth the nature of any "lust for power," Augustinian or otherwise, but aligns any desires for dominion with what he terms "the ethic of conquest," which depends on the use of non-consensual force. This ethic is contrasted with the ethic D'Souza champions, which might be termed an "ethic of commerce," in that D'Souza argues for commerce as the exercise of consensual interactions between assorted parties. And I may explore this thesis further in another essay, but here I want to contrast this one Augustinian assertion with what I wrote in the 2021 essay.

To sum up, I considered various reasons as to the etiology of slavery in antiquity. Reasons included the "eff you rationale" (where the people you're "effing" are rival tribes, by subjugating captives of those tribes), the potential for ransom, and the motive of economic security.

Now, however, I think I oversimplified. I do believe that most if not all cultures regarded the keeping of slaves as a form of personal wealth. And not all slaves are necessarily of enemy tribes or of different races, given that Leviticus mentions that ancient Jews kept other Jews as slaves. Slavery may have evolved as a retaliatory practice during tribal conflicts, but plainly once the practice got going, tribe-members were as vulnerable as outsiders to becoming enslaved, whether for economic or other reasons.

While my "eff you rationale" was conceived purely in terms of Tribe X wanting to enjoy the upper hand over Tribe Y, the rationale may apply in the more general sense of Human X wanting the upper hand over Human Y, irrespective of tribal allegiances. Though I have not read, nor am likely to read, any Augustine, his idea of the *libido dominandi* might be consonant with what I mean by "upper hand"-- though even that may not speak to the full nature of homo sapiens. From some quickie readings online, I see that Augustine's solution for man's domineering nature is "love of God," and that's not precisely a solution for me. In a future essay I may explore this line of thought in concert with earlier posts on the writings of Fukuyama. But with respect only to the etiology of slavery, it's feasible to see both "an ethic of conquest" and an "ethic of commerce" playing equal roles.                 

THE READING RHEUM: AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER (2014)

 

I've had only a nodding acquaintance with the life and works of Dinesh D'Souza. I knew that after he wrote a negative book about on Barack Obama, New York prosecutors, possibly doing the will of the Obama administration, charged D'Souza with illegal campaign contributions. The eight months D'Souza spent in a low-security prison may have been good for his career in that both his books and documentary films have become popular with right-leaning audiences. Over the years, I read a few D'Souza essays and liked some ideas but thought he sometimes resorted to sophisms (like the well-worn "the Democrats were the party of slavery," which is broadly true but misleading).

AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER contains a few sophisms, but its theme statement provides a solid philosophical response to the Left's condemnation of the United States as irretrievably evil and imperialist. D'Souza marshals an impressive roster of intellectuals and academics-- including Marx, DeToqueville, James Madison, Adam Smith, and many of the 20th-century radicals, whose justifications of their hatred of America lay bare their dubious motivations, as well as their insidious influence upon Leftist politics. From these diverse voices D'Souza articulates his thesis: that America was unique in championing entrepreneurship as no country had before or has since. 

Further, D'Souza connects good entrepreneurship with the quality Adam Smith, conceiver of the market's "invisible hand," called "empathy:"

...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.

Now neither Smith nor D'Souza denied that the entrepreneur is motivated by what Smith termed "self-interest." But D'Souza asserts that such self-interest manifests in the maintenance of commerce, and because commerce is generally consensual, it stands in marked contrast to the ethic of conquest that dominated all older cultures:

The impulse to conquest comes from what Augustine termed the libido dominandi, the lust for power. This powerful passion included not merely the desire for goods but also for slaves and concubines.

To buttress this argument, D'Souza even quotes the 12th-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (albeit in paraphrase), to the effect in his time violent conquest was deemed more honorable than the tradecraft of merchants, because conquest was more overt in its purpose to exploit others. But D'Souza's thesis persuasively argues that the ethic of conquest has been transcended by the actions of the colonists of early America, made up largely of either merchants or immigrants who aspired to be merchants.

I won't cover in detail the ways in which D'Souza exposes the grievance-based methods by which Leftist radicals have sought to tar the United States with the sins of the past. But he throws considerable doubt upon the motives of politicians like Obama and Hilary Clinton, and even if all of D'Souza's charges don't stick, it's a relief to find some of these sacred cows gored (so to speak).

One last comment: this 2014 book mentioned the fact that Obama was going to pass the Presidential torch to Hilary, which was correct. D'Souza thus makes no mention of the Presidential gamechanger Donald Trump, who announced his candidacy in June 2015. But it's fitting that Trump, whatever his faults, should arise to oppose the shame-dependent Left, not least because Trump is also-- an entrepreneur.