The World of Marvel Comics 0367507218, 9780367507213

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The World of Marvel Comics

A detailed study of the history and long-lasting influence of Marvel Comics, this book explores the ways Marvel’s truly unique comic book world reflects real-world issues and controversies alongside believable, psychologically motivated characters. The book examines a decades-long dual focus on both tight-knit continuity and real-world fidelity that makes the Marvel Universe a unique entity amongst imaginary worlds. Although there have been many books and articles that analyze each of these aspects of the Marvel Universe, the unique focus of this book is on how those two aspects have interwoven over the course of Marvel’s history, and the ways in which both have been used as storytelling engines that have fueled the entire imaginary world of Marvel Comics. Andrew J. Friedenthal has crafted a groundbreaking, engaging, and thoughtful examination of how this particular story world combines intricate world-building with responsiveness to real-world events, which will be of interest to scholars and enthusiasts of not just comics studies, but also the fields of transmedia studies and imaginary worlds. Andrew J. Friedenthal is a writer, critic, and independent scholar living in Austin, Texas. His previous publications include Retcon Game: Retroactive Continuity and the Hyperlinking of America and The World of DC Comics (part of the Imaginary Worlds series).

Imaginary Worlds

Each volume in the Imaginary Worlds book series addresses a specific imaginary world, examining it in the light of a variety of approaches, including transmedial studies, world design, narrative, genre, form, content, authorship and reception, and its context within the imaginary world tradition. Each volume covers a historically significant imaginary world (in all its manifestations), and collectively the books in this series will produce an intimate examination of the imaginary world tradition, through the concrete details of the famous and influential worlds that have set the course and changed the direction of subcreation as an activity. The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Mark J.P. Wolf The World of The Walking Dead Matthew Freeman The World of DC Comics Andrew J. Friedenthal The World of Marvel Comics Andrew J. Friedenthal

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com/Imaginary-Worlds/book-series/IW

The World of Marvel Comics

Andrew J. Friedenthal

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Andrew J. Friedenthal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Friedenthal, Andrew J., author. Title: The world of Marvel Comics / Andrew J. Friedenthal. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Imaginary worlds | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021013647 (print) | LCCN 2021013648 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367507213 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367507237 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003051008 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Marvel Comics Group--History. | Comic books, strips, etc.--United States--History and criticism. | Comic books, strips, etc--Publishing--United States--History. | Literature and society--United States--History. | Imaginary places in literature. Classification: LCC PN6725 .F76 2022 (print) | LCC PN6725 (ebook) | DDC 741.5/973--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013647 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013648 ISBN: 978-0-367-50721-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-50723-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05100-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003051008 Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

To Kaley & Joanna more marvelous than words can say and David an ordinary hero who worked much harder and was far kinder than any superhero

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

viii 1

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Building a “Real World”: Marvel in the 1960s

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War on the Streets: Marvel, Vietnam, and Street Vigilantes

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The Marvel Multitude: The Era of Crossovers

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Terror and Paranoia: Marvel Realism in the Twentyfirst Century

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Conclusion

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Index

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Acknowledgements

Just as the Marvel Universe exists as the end product of numerous hands all contributing to a larger creative project, this book is also the end result of many conversations and exchanges with family, friends, and colleagues. First and foremost, I must thank Mark J. P. Wolf for inviting me to be a part of this series, and to saying yes when I asked if I could write about the Marvel Universe even though I’d already tackled the DC Universe. In addition to being a brilliant thinker and writer, he is a most gracious editor whose notes helped to strengthen this book, and his Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation remains the foundational text for all of today’s scholarly work on world-building. The anonymous reviewers of the proposal for this book helped me to shape the overall narrative of the text, pulling focus to a few areas/ eras that I was at risk of overlooking and allowing me to see the larger push and pull between forces at play in the history of Marvel Comics. At Routledge, Sheni Kruger, Emma Sherriff, and Megan Hiatt have supported this book every step of the way, making the process seamless and enjoyable. Copy-editor Peter Stafford caught numerous mistakes and made me look like a much smarter writer than I actually am. Thanks must also go to Pace University Press, publishers of The Journal of Comics & Culture. Portions of the second chapter of this book originally appeared in Volume 1 (Spring 2016) of that journal, albeit in a slightly different form. In my personal life, the Random Geeky, UT Grad Friends, and IBM Writers groups have provided me with endless engagement on

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all sorts of topics that touch either directly or tangentially on the subject of this book. The friendship, humor, and insight of these folks kept me going through difficult times and improved my thinking, writing, and ability to analyze various media texts. As always, thanks goes to my parents, Martin and Phyllis Friedenthal as well as my brother, Brian Friedenthal, for their unflagging support of my academic and literary endeavors. My brother David passed away, far too young, during the production of this book. He believed I could accomplish anything I set my mind to and had the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met. I love you and miss you, SuperDave; the world is dimmer without your light in it. Finally, the biggest thanks of all is owed to my wife, Kaley, who gave me the time and space to work on this book even while she was nine months pregnant, and to our amazing daughter, Joanna. When this book project began, JoJo didn’t exist; by the time it is released, she will be walking and talking. I can’t wait to discover all of the universes that we will create together.

Introduction

In early April 2020, while the United States was in the midst of an almost nation-wide lockdown to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, a Twitter user named Scott Gustin posted a 47-second video clip that was widely shared across social media. The clip featured a scene from a bootleg recording of the blockbuster Marvel Studios film Avengers: Endgame, which had been released a year earlier and gone on to become the highest-grossing film of all time. In this scene, the superhero Captain America, leader of the titular team of heroes the Avengers, rescues his compatriot Thor by picking up the latter’s hammer (which, up until then, could only be lifted by Thor, himself) and attacking the film’s massive, nihilistic villain, Thanos. What’s notable about the clip, though, is not the events of the film itself, but rather the audience’s reaction to those events—a mixture of gasps, cheers, whooping laughter, and triumphant applause. Gustin’s caption reads, “Just stop what you’re doing and enjoy listening to the #AvengersEndgame opening night crowd react to Captain America wielding Thor’s hammer. CHILLS.” He quickly followed his original post with another clip, presumably from the same bootleg filming, that takes place a few minutes later in the film. In it, Captain America stands alone on the battlefield, with Thanos’ massive army looming ahead of him. Though firm with resolve, his face betrays the fact that he knows defeat is imminent. Then, the crackling sound of his team communicator interrupts a silence that is otherwise only punctuated by the sound of his pained breathing. “Cap, do you read me?” a voice says. “Cap, it’s Sam. Can you hear me? On your left.” With that, a glowing mystical portal appears behind Captain America, the first of dozens of such portals DOI: 10.4324/9781003051008-1

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through which step (and fly, and swing, etc.) virtually every superhero who has ever appeared in the series of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films that built up to Avengers: Endgame. The entire scene culminates in all of the heroes uniting behind Captain America, who— for the first time in the MCU—says the catchphrase frequently used in the Avengers comic book. “Avengers assemble,” he shouts, magically calling Thor’s hammer into his hand as the music dramatically swells and the two armies run towards each other to kick off one final, epic battle for the fate of the universe. In the clip posted by Gustin, the audience reaction for this scene is overwhelming. The sounds of the film are drowned out by screams, cheers, and applause, growing ever greater with each hero who appears. “Oh my God!” one audience member shouts, “This is insane!” When Captain America finally says, “Avengers assemble,” the audience breaks out into a roar that sounds as if they, themselves, are about to engage in the climactic fight. This reaction mirrored what was felt by a number of pop culture analysts who watched the clips, particularly while viewing them in the midst of a pandemic causing unprecedented social isolation. Rachel Leishman, writing for the “geek girl” blog The Mary Sue, explained that, “Maybe it’s because we’re all weirdly longing to go to a movie theater … or because we just remember what it felt like watching Avengers: Endgame for the first time, but there’s a joy to the final battle of Endgame that really brings a lot of fans a feeling that is almost indescribable.” In a post titled “These Avengers: Endgame audience reactions will sustain us in theater-less times” on the video game website Polygon, Susana Polo noted that, “Marvel Studios builds its biggest moments on the electricity of live community responses,” Ana Dumaraog wrote for the film website Screen Rant that, “this scene was particularly special since it’s essentially a visual representation of what Marvel Studios built in the last decade. MCU architect Kevin Feige said this was the moment he’d been working toward in the last 10 years since the universe was born in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man.” Indeed, what is perhaps most notable about these tremendous audience reactions is that they not only far surpass the level of engagement that might be expected of a film, but that they are in response to moments that, according to the conventional logic of filmmaking, should not work. Virtually none of the characters who step through the portals in this climactic scene have appeared or even

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been directly referenced in the entirely of Endgame. Most of them were last seen in the previous Avengers film, Avengers: Infinity War, and some of them had not even appeared there. Captain America lifting Thor’s hammer pays off a moment from an even earlier film, Avengers: Age of Ultron, while the phrase “on your left” is a reference to the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which was released earlier still. The scene is filled with moments like this that call back to the more than twenty previous films that make up the MCU, all of them building upon the continuity of a shared narrative universe that leads up to this moment. For fans who had eagerly followed all—or even some—of the MCU’s eleven-year journey, these were massive payoffs; for somebody who was coming into Endgame fresh, or who had even only seen Infinity War (to which Endgame is a direct sequel), these might seem like moments of utter nonsense. That, though, is the logic of continuity espoused by the MCU, a logic that it directly takes from the Marvel Comics that inspire the films. The main line of superhero comic books published by Marvel all take place as part of one, giant, ongoing story, and although the nature of the timeline has often shifted (to account for characters who supposedly fought in World War II or Vietnam to still be in fighting shape today), today’s Marvel Comics take place in the same world as the one first glimpsed in 1939’s Marvel Comics #1. Competitor DC Comics’ first stories did come before this, but DC has rebooted its continuity on several occasions, making Marvel Comics the longest ongoing comic book universe in history. Indeed, as cultural critic Roz Kaveney posits, “the DC and Marvel continuity universes [are] the largest narrative constructs of human culture.”1 Though this assessment might be slightly hyperbolic, it certainly cannot be argued that the world of Marvel Comics is one of the most complex (and, in the medium of comic books, one of the longest-lasting) imaginary worlds ever created. Although the publishing companies that would combine to become DC Comics pre-date Timely Comics—itself the predecessor to Marvel Comics—and most of DC’s most popular superheroes debuted before Marvel’s, both companies seemed to have established the idea of a shared universe at around the same time. The summer of 1940 saw the release of both All Star Comics #1, which featured a team of DC’s heroes gathering together as the Justice Society, and Marvel Mystery Comics #8, which featured the first meeting/battle of two of Marvel’s heroes, the water-dwelling Sub-Mariner and the

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fiery Human Torch. For both publishing companies, what had been individual books and stories following separate heroes had now come together into shared universes coinhabited by a multitude of colorful characters. In short, both had moved into the business of creating “imaginary worlds,” a concept defined by media scholar Mark J. P. Wolf as, “All the surroundings and places experienced by a fictional character (or which could be experienced by one) that together constitute a unified sense of place which is ontologically different from the actual, material, and so-called ‘real’ world” (311). To Wolf, these imaginary worlds constitute interdisciplinary objects of study that don’t fit easily into analyses that are purely literary, historical, philosophical, etc. Both DC and Marvel’s comic book universes are prime examples of such imaginary worlds, as each has lasted for such an extensive period of time that the way in which those worlds have changed can reveal much about the ongoing changes in history, culture, narrative styles, and so on. Both are exemplars of how a fictional world can crowd out that world’s creators, as historian Michael Saler explains: The economic logic of mass-production created a situation in which fictional characters began to overshadow their corporeal authors, as publishers increasingly promoted lucrative, brand name characters whose public visibility overshadowed that of their authors … The advent of film, radio … comic strips, and comic books contributed to the torrent of popular fictional characters and worlds that were effectively dissociated from their original creators. An interesting instance of this is “crossover” fiction, in which an author brings together fictional characters created by other authors. (47) By constantly putting together characters created by a multitude of different authors, both the DC and Marvel Universes are long-term, extended pieces of crossover. As media theorist Henry Jenkins explains: For decades, DC and Marvel treated all of their titles as interconnected: characters move across different series, and universewide events periodically require readers to buy titles that they were not otherwise reading to understand their full ramifications. Each

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book adds new information, looks at the situation from a different perspective, each book has to satisfy the hard-core fan’s mastery over a complex mythology while trying to remain accessible to first-time readers. (304–305) Both Marvel and DC are thus constantly juggling conflicting desires amongst their readers, and put out different products to satisfy different sectors of their audience, some of which are standalone and some of which are intricately tied to the ongoing continuity of their primary imaginary worlds. Another important feature that both the DC and Marvel Comics universes share is the ways in which those imaginary worlds, taken as a whole, supersede their creators. Though Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster may be credited as the creators of Superman, and Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko are viewed as the “fathers” of the modern Marvel Universe, thousands of other hands have contributed to both comic book worlds, ranging from writers and artists to editors, publishers, and corporate owners. As such, even though to speak of “Marvel Comics” as the creator of the stories set in the Marvel Universe is to decentralize the idea of the creator and instead put authorial responsibility in the hands of a corporate entity, it is that corporate entity—which can be viewed as a conglomeration of financial demands, editorial fiats, and the individual contributions of specific creators—that ultimately does guide the development of the imaginary world. To that end, although most specific comic books and characters do have clearly identifiable original creators, the larger storyworld can be more accurately credited to “Marvel Comics” as an entity. The ways in which Marvel Comics, as that entity, has slowly built up its imaginary world over eighty years does not necessarily showcase a direct line or narrative of progression, but rather is a case study of the messy ways in which a massive, immersive storyworld gets created, with various creative and economic stakeholders vying for their say along the way. The only consistency that ties it all together is the publisher’s assertion that these stories all take place in the same imaginary world, and the efforts that individual writers, artists, and editors undertake to reify the existence of that shared universe through complex negotiations of continuity. Indeed, the Marvel Comics universe thoroughly fulfills the three criteria that Wolf notes an imaginary world needs in order to be

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“believable and interesting”—that is, “a high degree of invention, completeness, and consistency” (35). He defines invention as “the degree to which default assumptions based on the Primary World [our own world] have been changed, regarding such things as geography, history, language, physics, biology, zoology, culture, custom, and so on” (34). Completeness, meanwhile, “refers to the degree to which the world contains explanations and details covering all the various aspects of its characters’ experiences, as well as background details which together suggest a feasible, practical world” (38). Consistency, finally, is “the degree to which world details are plausible, feasible, and without contradiction,” a quality that “requires a careful integration of details and attention to the way everything is connected together” (43). With millions of pages dedicated to chronicling the locales, cultures, characters, metaphysical powers, and ongoing adventures set within its universe, Marvel Comics certainly exhibits a thorough display of invention and completeness, while the above-mentioned continuity negotiations have helped create a sense of consistency (however far-fetched) between each of those millions of pages. DC Comics, Marvel’s primary rival, is also home to an imaginary world that is inventive, complete, and consistent. Indeed, both companies share a great deal of world-building techniques in common, as described by Ramzi Fawaz: [E]ditors at DC and Marvel Comics reconceptualized their individual publishing houses as overseers of distinct fictional “universes” inhabited by particular cadres of superhuman characters. They encouraged readers to see each of the company’s superheroes as inhabiting the same unified social world rather than characters isolated in their own discreet stories. (17) However, what differentiates the Marvel Universe from the DC Universe, despite this structural similarity, is that DC has, by and large, achieved its biggest critical and commercial success when it has focused on cosmic-sized epic storytelling of godlike beings, the deaths and resurrections of entire universes, and a mythological focus that prioritizes plot and scope over character.2 Marvel, on the other hand, typically takes a more grounded approach to their characters, placing them in a world that more closely attempts to

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emulate our own via a greater level of realism and coherence (comparatively speaking). Media scholar Jason Bainbridge locates the difference between the two publishers as arising from how the characters are treated, with DC’s serving as “archetypes” versus Marvel’s “melodramatic protagonists.” The latter, Bainbridge asserts, are much more morally ambiguous, leading to stories wherein, “Alternative models of behavior are advanced and debated, and it is left to the reader to decide which, if any, are appropriate” (70). This lends itself to a key difference between the two publishers’ stables of characters: DC’s heroes impose their ideas of heroism in a very premodern way, as if they have a divine right, a conduit to the truth and justness of their role. Marvel heroes must work through their heroism—a heroism which is based in ideas of individual advancement, of enduring trials and emerging, virtue restored at the end. (70–71) What’s more, the larger imaginary worlds in which these characters operate differ as a result of those narrative arcs. Marvel stories, starting in the 1960s, were serial in nature (as opposed to DC’s generally episodic fare), continuing from issue to issue and sometimes crossing over with other titles. This effectively means that the Marvel Universe is a serial narrative that has been running for over forty years. (68) Because of this seriality, “the individual superheroes, were themselves melodramatic … in the sense that soap operas are melodramatic, that is, notoriously serialized and interweaving the stories of characters and events” (82). What differentiates the Marvel Universe as a unique imaginary world from DC Comics, then, is the ways in which it tries to reflect issues and controversies in the real world with believable, psychologically-motivated characters, while simultaneously working to make sure all of the moving pieces of that universe fit together in a series of interconnected, ongoing serial epics. While, for example, the imaginary world of Star Wars may pay as much slavish attention to continuity as Marvel, it doesn’t also reflect the exigencies and changing

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sociopolitical realities of the world its audience lives in. The alternate world of a fictional American presidency portrayed in the television show The West Wing, on the other hand, would frequently evolve along with events happening in the news cycle, but the show’s writers only had to worry about its own established continuity and not concern themselves with working within a larger “universe” of stories. Marvel Comics, somewhat uniquely, has an equal emphasis on both, beginning with the 1960s creations by Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and others that deliberately attempted to wed superheroic adventure, soap operatics, and light social commentary in a deliberately-linked shared universe, something that had never been done before in comic books. Historian Matthew J. Costello further explains that, this continuity creates a collection of stories that share referents, symbols, and a common cultural approach over a fortyyear period. This becomes something more specific than a genre; such continuity creates opportunities for marking changes in the meaning of cultural symbols more directly than within the broader structures of genre narratives. (12) Thus, by deliberately creating stories that reacted to contemporary issues—something that DC would lag behind at accomplishing— the entire Marvel Universe was built on the slow accretion of continuity that was less mythic than the DC Universe, but more specifically designed to reflect the real world. Though there are certainly exceptions to this in Marvel continuity— the mythological stories following the Norse god, Thor, for example, or the “cosmic” stories of writer/artist Jim Starlin—it is this decades-long dual focus on both tight-knit continuity and real-world fidelity that makes the Marvel Universe a unique entity amongst imaginary worlds. Those two aspects of the publishers’ output have engaged in a complex dance over the course of Marvel’s history, and both have been used as storytelling engines that have fueled the Marvel Comics universe. However, the limits of continuity and realism within Marvel’s comics are both ultimately beholden to corporate interests, as Marc DiPaolo notes: Because the rights to characters such as Spider-Man are owned by corporations, and not held by their creators, a

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variety of writers, artists, and filmmakers have told stories with iconic DC and Marvel characters. The different writers have a degree of leeway in the stories they tell with these characters, provided they respect the work done by previous writers in the name of preserving a storytelling “continuity” for the sake of the fans, and that they do not tell a story that is so unpleasant that it risks angering fans, lowering a given’s character “stock,” and threatening the company’s ability to sell merchandise with the characters. (21) Thus the delicate dance between continuity and verisimilitude at Marvel also reflects something of a political battle of ideologies. Comic book continuity is an inherently conservative idea, as it relies entirely on reaching back to the past and abiding by a certain set of rules, timelines, and characterizations that many fans will not allow creators to ignore. On the other hand, as with many other creative industries in the United States, the early comic book industry was founded by a group of generally left-leaning, largely Jewish, creators, often the sons and daughters of immigrants. Thus, even today the majority of comic book writers and artists tend to be more liberal than conservative, politically speaking. DiPaolo goes on to explain this tension: Some writers who have spent periods of their lives writing adventures for a given character have been politically liberal, some conservative, and some have strove to be more “apolitical” (although that term often implies a degree of unacknowledged conservatism). Consequently, it is possible for a superhero to represent radically different ideologies during the course of his or her career, depending on who has written the stories and whether they were published during a relatively conservative decade, such as the 1950s, or a more liberal one, such as the 1990s. (21) Even though Marvel Comics initially became popular with a college-aged audience because of the left-leaning stories crafted by Lee, Kirby and their compatriots,3 political philosophy was as ever-changing at Marvel as was its vacillating focus on realism and fantasy.

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This tension between reflecting reality and succumbing to the minutia of fantastical continuity has been a continual back-and-forth over the course of Marvel’s history, with a creative output that constantly shifts between realism and superheroic fantasy, and that often reflects both ideas at the same time in different comic books. Issues of race, gender, and sexuality would sometimes come to the forefront of particular Marvel books, only to later fall by the wayside as the stories succumbed to the tropes of white, heteronormative, hypermasculine adventure narratives. Unique inventions would stand sideby-side with borrowed character types from pulp fiction, movies, and TV. Although it is easiest to analyze Marvel Comics’ imaginary world chronologically—as this book does—that timeline often shows leaps and bounds of narrative ingenuity interspersed with fallow periods recycling the stale stories of yesteryear. Chapter 1 begins that chronology at a creative highpoint, with a look at the beginning of the “modern” Marvel Universe in the 1960s, when a group of writers and artists—led by Lee, Kirby, and Ditko— deliberately set out, for the first time, to create a shared universe of comic book superheroes who continually interact with one another in one larger, shared continuity. What truly differentiated Marvel from other comic book companies at the time, though—especially the biggest superhero publisher of the era, DC Comics—was the fact that this world in which the characters interacted followed the rules and realities of the world outside readers’ windows. This chapter examines the early output of Marvel, particularly the earliest issues of The Fantastic Four and The Avengers, with a focus on how Lee, Kirby, Ditko and their compatriots interwove the increasingly convoluted stories of their characters with plots and settings that reflected some of the key issues of the decade, all set against a fantastical background. Chapter 2 is a condensed look at the comics Marvel produced in the 1970s and early 1980s in reaction to Lee’s edict that the characters he had created needed to stop changing and growing, as they had throughout the 1960s. As a result, creators at Marvel focused on exploring the intricacies of the continuity that had already been laid down in the 1960s, on deepening and expanding upon ideas that had been churned out during that fertile period, and on turning the focus inward. This would create a greater sense of psychological realism for both established and new characters, many of whom were created as deliberate attempts to bring diversity to the Marvel Universe.

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These strands all come together in the florid, continuity-rich stories of X-Men writer Chris Claremont and the early stories featuring the character of the Punisher, a Vietnam veteran traumatized by witnessing the deaths of his family who took his grief and channeled it into becoming an urban vigilante. Chapter 3 explores what many people see as a creative low point for Marvel Comics (and indeed for the entire superhero comics industry), the era of baroque visual extremity and multiple crossover “events” that characterized much of the late 1980s and the 1990s, beginning with 1982’s Secret Wars. This was also a time that finally saw Marvel fully embrace the concept of a multiverse (which had been the defining feature of DC Comics for decades) in order to showcase multiple, sometimes startlingly different, versions of their most popular characters, as well as to present different takes on superheroes in general, such as in writer Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme miniseries. In the mid-1990s, as rival company Image Comics began to eat into Marvel’s bottom line, the company embraced both event storytelling and kinetic, hypersexualized Image-style artwork in the creation of the “Heroes Reborn” storyline that saw the company’s greatest heroes rebooted in an alternate dimension, under the creative direction of two Image co-founders. Though this initiative only lasted a year, the Ultimate line of comics that launched in 2000 ran for well over a decade, showing a full embrace of multiplicity that culminated in 2015’s Secret Wars crossover (named after the 1982 event) that paid homage to Marvel’s past while sowing the seeds for a full integration of the entirety of Marvel continuity. Chapter 4 begins by looking at a moment that forced Marvel, amidst these cosmic crossovers and multiple dimensions, to also come back to the ground and focus on events of the real world—the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the resulting “War on Terror” of George W. Bush’s presidential administration. While crossovers of the 1990s featured cosmic villains with world-shaking powers, the series of interconnected line-wide crossover events that defined Marvel post-9/11 would see the superheroes at odds with one another over issues of civil liberty, an infiltration of their world by alien terrorists who could look like anybody, and an all-out assault on a corrupt U.S. government to restore democratic norms. By looking closely at this period of storytelling, we can see the

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apotheosis of how the Marvel Universe reflects real-world events in a way that allows creators to expand the narrative of the imaginary world. During the Obama administration, though, Marvel seemed to more consciously work at balancing out the back-and-forth between metaphysics and realism that defined much of the publisher’s history. Stories with a cosmic scope focusing on epic battles between good and evil were accompanied by smaller stories that featured “legacy” characters (that is, new characters taking on the name of established heroes) from minority groups that were previously unseen or underrepresented in mainstream superhero comics. This was accompanied, not coincidentally, by an increase in diversity behind the scenes, with more than just straight white men finally allowed to contribute to the stories that went into building the Marvel Universe. The end of the chapter highlights some of Marvel’s line-wide crossover stories from the late 2010s that melded highconcept science fiction, complex continuity, and a grounding in realworld sociopolitical situations in order to respond to the presidential campaign and administration of Donald Trump. Finally, in the conclusion, we turn to the format through which most audiences today are familiar with Marvel’s characters—the MCU. This blockbuster movie franchise has proven groundbreaking and highly successful thanks to the way it has taken Marvel’s method of world-building—interlinking careful continuity with a responsiveness to changing times—into the medium of film. Though Marvel characters had appeared in many TV shows, cartoons, and even feature films prior to the beginning of the MCU, it was with only with the advent of this “cinematic universe” that the worldbuilding aspects of the comic books became central to how these movies told their stories. By exploring the MCU and examining how it has built on Marvel’s world-building techniques, we will see how Marvel’s style of world-building can work outside of the comic book medium, while at the same time noting what needs to change in order for that world-building to succeed in different media. That style of cinematic world-building, though only a little over a decade old, has already had a significant impact on transmedia storytelling. As a result, the Marvel style of world-building has become extraordinarily influential for creators who are crafting today’s imaginary worlds and for anybody interested in exploring the larger concept of transmedia storytelling. By breaking down

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Marvel’s world-building technique into its component parts, we can see how they provide a useful tool-set for anybody seeking to either examine other imaginary worlds or to create their own.

Notes 1 Kaveney credits this idea to her friend Nick Lowe, though it’s unclear whether she means the Marvel Comics editor/vice president, the British singer-songwriter, or the Reader in Classics at Royal Holloway University. Most likely she is referring to the last, who provided a cover blurb for her translation of the works of Roman poet Catullus. 2 For a full study of the DC Comics multiverse, see my own previous book, The World of DC Comics (New York: Routledge, 2019). These two books are in some ways companion pieces to one another, reflecting the differences in world-building techniques employed by the two publishers, but each stands independently, as well. 3 Steve Ditko, the third most important creator at Marvel in the 1960s, is a conspicuous exception to that, as a follower of the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand.

References Bainbridge, Jason. “‘Worlds within Worlds’: The Role of Superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universes.” In The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, edited by Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge, 2019. Costello, Matthew J. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books & The Unmasking of Cold War America. New York: Continuum, 2009. DiPaolo, Marc. War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011. Dumaraog, Ana. “Crowd Reaction to Avengers: Endgame‘s Portals Scene Is Awesome.” Screen Rant. Last modified April 8, 2020. https://screenrant. com/avengers-endgame-portals-scene-movie-audience-reaction-video/. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Gustin, Scott. Twitter post. April 6, 2020, 10:23 p.m. http://twitter.com/ ScottGustin/status/1247364405597220865 Jenkins, Henry. “Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics.” In Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. Kaveney, Roz. Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Film. London: I.B.Tauris, 2008.

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Leishman, Rachel. “Recorded Audience Reactions to Avengers: Endgame Just What We Need in the Absence of Movie Theaters.” The Mary Sue. Last modified April 7, 2020. https://www.themarysue.com/avengers-end game-audience-reactions/. Polo, Susana. “These Avengers: Endgame Audience Reactions Will Sustain Us in Theater-less Times.” Polygon. Last modified April 7, 2020. https://www. polygon.com/2020/4/7/21212000/watch-avengers-endgame-live-audiencereactions-captain-america-thor-hammer-iron-man/. Saler, Michael. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge, 2012.

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Building a “Real World” Marvel in the 1960s

Before the 1960s, superhero comics “continuity” took that term literally—the stories featured a “continuous” return to the same setup at the beginning and end of every story, with little to no reference to anything that had come before other than the most basic reference to heroes’ origins or previous encounters with villains. Even such superhero teams as DC Comics’ Justice Society of America and Justice League of America (the Society’s successors, first appearing in 1960), rarely referenced the individual members’ own titles and storylines. Though these heroes existed in the same shared universe, individual comic books almost never crossed over with one another. Even at Timely Comics (the company that would become Marvel Comics by 1961), the crossover in 1940 between the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner took place within the pages of the book shared by both characters. Semiotician Umberto Eco, in his essay “The Myth of Superman,” refers to this sort of loose continuity as a kind of oneiric climate—of which the reader is not aware at all—where what has happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy. The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again, as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said. (53) This “oneiric” continuity was still the primary editorial mode at DC Comics by 1961. The publishing company was seeing a resurgence in popularity for its superheroes, bolstered by the recent founding of the industry-wide, self-censoring Comics Code Authority that essentially killed off other popular genres like DOI: 10.4324/9781003051008-2

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horror, romance, and true crime. The comics industry lost much of its adult readership as a result, and the simplistic, moral, light science fiction tales of superheroes proved to be as irresistible a draw to children of the late 1950s and early 1960s as they had been to a previous generation of children in the 1930s and 1940s.1 When DC put together its most popular heroes into the Justice League, the result was a sales success. Marvel’s response to the Justice League was, by necessity, not a conglomeration of its most popular heroes. Indeed, at that time, Marvel had no popular heroes. Its stable of characters from the 1930s and 1940s—most notably the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and the patriotic super solider Captain America—were no longer starring in any books. Rather, the company’s output was mostly tame westerns and B-movie tales of giant monsters. The team behind the majority of these books was writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, both comics veterans who had been working since the 1940s (Kirby, in fact, had co-created Captain America with fellow writer/artist Joe Simon), who had hit upon their own unique working style that would come to be known as the Marvel Method. Comics historians Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs describe this method as follows: Lee discarded the full-script method that was standard in the business and developed a new method with Kirby and Ditko: writer and artist would discuss a story (or Lee would type a plot outline), the artist would go off and draw it, and then Lee or his brother [Larry Lieber] would supply the words. That not only saved Lee time and increased his income (for Kirby was never paid any part of the writer’s fee, and Lee could now increase his already frightening output), but it also freed him from the banal plot formulas that repetition had pressed into his brain. Working with Jack Kirby would teach Lee just how much could be done with a comic book. (49) Together, the pair would use this method to co-create the comic book that would usher in the “Marvel Age” of comics—The Fantastic Four #1. Kirby and Lee would later tell two different stories about the creation of the titular superhero team. Indeed, despite a fruitful partnership that would change the face of superhero comics and franchise

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storytelling in general, the pair would have an acrimonious relationship in later years, with Kirby claiming that Lee took all of the credit for conceiving and plotting ideas that had originated with the artist while Lee toed the company line and would not help Kirby receive fair compensation for lucrative spin-off media based on his characters and ideas. Though we may never know the real truth as to how the LeeKirby team worked together, and the disagreements between the pair certainly point to deep-seated issues of creators’ rights within the comic book industry, when it comes to the ways in which the two helped invent an entire new method of storytelling it is clear that the pair brought out the best in each other’s creative and innovative sides. In Kirby’s version of the origins of the Fantastic Four, “the company [was] slumping, [so] he was determined to create something new and startling, ‘with a real human dimension.’ He thought superheroes were still viable, and envisioned a team of explorers of the outré … but with strange powers” (Jones and Jacobs, 49). According to Lee, the Fantastic Four were a direct response to DC’s Justice League, created when Marvel publisher (and Lee’s uncle) Martin Goodman came back from a golf game with DC publisher Jack Liebowitz at which he learned of how successful the team was for DC’s bottom line. He ordered Lee, the company’s editor-in-chief in addition to its primary writer, to create an imitation. Lee, however, was coming to a crossroads thanks to conversations he’d been having with his wife, as he would later explain: She wondered why I didn’t put as much effort and creativity into the comics as I seemed to be putting into my other freelance endeavors. The fact is, I had always thought of my comic book work as a temporary job—even after all those years—and her little dissertation made me suddenly realize that it was time to start concentrating on what I was doing—to carve a real career for myself in the nowhere world of comic books. (Origins 16) As a result of this discussion, Lee describes (in his typical grandiose way) how he decided to put more effort than usual into the script for this new superhero title: For just this once, I would do the type of story I myself would enjoy reading if I were a comic-book reader. And the characters

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Building a “Real World” would be the kind of characters I could personally relate to; they’d be flesh and blood, they’d have their faults and foibles, they’d be fallible and feisty, and—most important of all—inside their colorful, costumed booties they’d still have feet of clay. (Origins 17)

Regardless of whose version of events you believe, then, both Kirby and Lee were clearly interested in creating a new kind of superhero story that would mix commercial appeal with deeper characterizations of slightly more “realistic” characters. What this meant in practice was the merging of superhero action with melodramatic, evolving soap opera-esque personal lives and stories that carried over from issue to issue. In other words, Lee and Kirby took the first steps in a journey to create not just a superhero book, but to build an entire superhero universe. Within the first twenty-five issues of The Fantastic Four, that universe would be in full flourish, with the all-star teamup book The Avengers eventually joining The Fantastic Four as a central hub for this newly established Marvel Universe.

Fantastic Firsts At first glance, the cover of The Fantastic Four #1 was nothing special for Marvel. The central figure is not a superhero, but rather a giant monster in the same mold as those that had been featured in many of the previous few years’ stories from Lee and Kirby. Surrounding that monster are the titular four stars of the book, but rather than appearing in spandex-and-caped glory, two of them are displaying strange abilities (invisibility and stretching powers) in street clothes, while the other pair (a man on fire and another made of rock) seem to be displaying monstrous transformations of their own. In fact, the Fantastic Four—consisting of super-genius, superstretching Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic; his girlfriend, Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl; her younger brother, Johnny Storm, the Human Torch; and Reed’s best friend, Ben Grimm, the super-strong but monstrously deformed Thing—don’t appear in superhero costumes anywhere within this first issue. The closest they come to them are the astronaut’s uniforms that the quarter wear on the fateful trip to outer space that bombards them with “cosmic rays,” imbuing them with their powers.

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Clearly, this was a different take on superheroes, one that experimentally imbued the characters with a sense of realism that went beyond the square-jawed, cookie-cutter science fiction gods of DC Comics. Not only did the Fantastic Four not wear traditional superhero costumes, but they lacked traditional superhero attitudes. While the Human Torch exulted in his powers, for example, the Thing was devastated by his monstrous appearance, exclaiming in his very first line of dialogue, “Bah! Everywhere it is the same! I live in a world too small for me!” (3). This was a new take on superheroes, wherein the character’s inner and personal lives were every bit as important as the villains whom they fought. Superman, for example, had never felt any conflict within him about the very nature of being Superman, nor did he ever receive anything but admiration from the American public that he protected. This was not the case for the Fantastic Four. Indeed, in the very next issue, shape-changing aliens named the Skrulls impersonate the foursome and frame them for various crimes, turning the public against them and the team against each other. The bickering and conflict that occurred amongst the heroes was another key difference from DC’s heroes. When Johnny and Ben get into an argument, Sue chastises them, telling Ben, “Thing, I understand how bitter you are—and I know you have every right to be bitter! But we’ll just destroy ourselves if we keep at each other’s throats this way! Don’t you see?” Ben responds with pure, distilled self-loathing: “I see … and sometimes … I think I’d be better off – the world would be better off – if I were destroyed!” (12, emphasis and ellipses in original).2 Even though the team would adopt superhero uniforms in the next issue, and reveal their secret headquarters and fantastic array of vehicles, the soap opera melodrama and conflicted characterizations would continue. While Lee and Kirby used the first three issues of The Fantastic Four to showcase their new take on the superhero genre, wedding Lee’s grounded characters with the epic-scoped flights of fancy that were Kirby’s trademark, in the fourth issue they hit upon another innovation that would, in some ways, kick-start the entire Marvel Universe. Though Johnny Storm borrowed his hero name and powers—The Human Torch—from a Marvel hero of the 1930s/1940s, it was clear from the outset that there was no connection between Johnny and the

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previous character.3 While the older hero had been an android imbued with life by a genius scientist, Johnny was an impetuous teenager, as evidenced by the ending of The Fantastic Four #3 in which he flies off in a huff, tired of being bossed around by the others on the team. The next issue begins with the team directly dealing with the fallout of Johnny’s departure. Looking out over the city, Reed explains, “Somewhere out there among the teeming millions of the city, the Human Torch is hiding from us! And we’ve got to find him.” What was so unique about this opening was the serialized nature of the storytelling. While some DC Comics would be continued in the next issue, these were all self-contained two-part stories that never featured ongoing subplots. Lee and Kirby thus added seriality on top of their more “realistic” version of superheroes, connecting each issue to the next in an ongoing, neverending story that allowed characters to learn, change and grow. What’s more, in this very same issue, Lee and Kirby connect that story back to Marvel’s past. While hiding from his family, Johnny checks into a men’s hotel in a sordid part of town. There, he discovers an “old, beat-up comic mag” from the 1940s, featuring the Sub-Mariner. He thinks to himself, “I remember sis talking about him once! He used to be the world’s most unusual character … I wonder what ever happened to him? He was supposed to be immortal!” (8). Though he stumbled upon the character in a comic book, Johnny’s thoughts establish the Sub-Mariner as a real person who once inhabited the same world as the Fantastic Four. In fact, when a fellow resident sees Johnny reading the magazine, he explains that there’s “a stumble-bum right here who’s as strong as that joker was supposed to be!” (8). When several men harass this man, who suffers from amnesia, Johnny rescues him, then uses his flame powers to burn off the man’s beard and long hair, revealing the face of none other than the Sub-Mariner himself. To restore the Sub-Mariner’s memory, Johnny flies him to the ocean and drops him in, with the results explained in a pair of captions: Once submerged in the mighty sea, a startling change comes over the strange derelict! In one sweeping motion, he hurls his outer garments from him … and stands revealed as the legendary prince of the sea … the invincible Namor, the SubMariner!! (12)

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Namor then returns to his undersea home of Atlantis, discovering it destroyed by (he assumes) atomic tests, which leads him to seek revenge upon humanity. He is opposed by the Fantastic Four, including the returned-to-the-fold Human Torch, and becomes the villain of this issue. In his original adventures, Namor had been an antihero, coming into conflict with the surface world and the android Human Torch, but the outbreak of World War II had turned him into a hero who joined forces with the Allies against the Axis powers. Here, though, when up against the heroic Fantastic Four, he is re-cast as a semi-sympathetic villain. As Marvel historian Pierre Comtois puts it, Namor was, Marvel’s first revival of a character from the company’s ‘Golden Age’ of the 1940s … and the first in a long line of bad guys whose personalities would be given enough wrinkles to prevent readers from completely hating them, if not sometimes sympathizing with them. (19) Stan Lee would later note that the villains in these early issues of The Fantastic Four were given sympathetic backstories intentionally, as a part of the new “realistic” types of stories he wanted to tell: [O]ur readers were given a villain with whom they might empathize—a villain who was driven to what he had done by the slings and arrows of a heartless, heedless humanity. It was a first. It was an attempt to portray a three-dimensional character in a world that had been composed of stereotypes … [O]ur attempt to inject realism into our stories— through both characterization and dialogue—grew progressively stronger and more successful. (Origins 72) Indeed, as Lee and Kirby’s run on The Fantastic Four (which would eventually go for just over one hundred issues) wore on, they would return to these early villains to continually reveal new layers. The villain introduced in issue #4, Doctor Doom, would evolve from a revenge-seeking mad scientist out to conquer the world to a figure of some nobility and complex motivations. The Sub-Mariner would recur as both hero and villain, torn between his own arrogance, a desire to help others, and a forbidden love for Sue Storm.

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This attempt at realism would become a staple of both The Fantastic Four and the rest of the new Marvel superhero titles helmed by Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and a handful of other creators. It extended not just to the characters themselves, but also to the world outside their windows, a world that looked suspiciously similar to the one in which readers lived. As Ramzi Fawaz explains, From its inception The Fantastic Four self-consciously positioned itself as a “realist” take on the superhero. Like all Marvel series, The Fantastic Four was set in a world that was socially and politically identical to America in the early 1960s … [T]he comic concerned itself with the same sociopolitical issues that were most salient to Americans in this period, including the threat of atomic fallout, the outcome of a cold war space race, anticommunism, changing gender and sexual norms, the dual evils of racism and fascism, and the problem of displaced populations and refugees. (105) As Terrence Wandtke explains, this realism was wedded to the serialized nature of the stories to deliberately appeal to a slightly older audience than the children who were the presumed readers of DC’s superhero books: Marvel superhero stories stressed the ordinary lives of the characters out of their costume, something that seemed to appeal to older readers (teenagers and beyond) who became very involved with the serial narrative. Rather than cultivate stories for the occasional reader, Marvel tended to develop multi-part stories “to be continued” in the next issue and made references to issues published years earlier. In many ways, this was an appeal to the continuity-obsessed fans who poured over superhero minutia in chatty letters published and responded to by editors in the comic books’ “letters pages.” (18) Bradford Wright expands on this idea, placing the intricacies of continuity at the heart of Stan Lee’s deliberate attempt to build an imaginary world:

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Central to Lee’s editorial strategy was his evolving concept of the “Marvel Universe.” Despite occasional lapses in consistency and continuity, the Marvel comic books all fit together as a collective narrative. Lee endeavored to weave his characters and plot references into a coherent modern mythology that invited an unusual degree of reader involvement. (218) Whether this was an intentional strategy or not, the fusion of Lee’s realism and continuity with the epic scope and expansive landscapes and mindscapes of Kirby and Ditko ultimately created the core style of the Marvel Universe, which from the very beginning existed amidst the tension between these two poles. As John Wells notes, this “fusion of subplots, soap opera, and never-ending stories would be the new normal for superhero adventures within a generation” (46). The final element that went into the mix of the Marvel Universe was crossovers between characters from separate books. In March 1963’s The Fantastic Four #12, the team encountered the Incredible Hulk, a misunderstood Jekyll-and-Hyde type man-monster who had just completed six issues as the protagonist of his own book. The Fantastic Four’s letters page had heralded this encounter two issues earlier, with the notice that, we cannot stem the tide of demands to have the FF meet THE HULK! And so, in a future issue of FF we think you will find one of the most unusual and thought-provoking tales of all, as the FF and THE HULK come face to face! (25) Rather than a friendly encounter, though, as was traditional when DC’s superheroes met, the story in issue #12 saw the team fight the Hulk at the behest of the U.S. military. The marquee battle of the issue was a slugfest between Marvel’s two super-strong characters, the Thing and the Hulk, which would prove to be but the first of many battles between the two over the years. In fact, whenever heroes would meet each other in these early years of the Marvel Universe, most frequently they would battle one another before teaming up. As Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs explain,

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Building a “Real World” Lee and his collaborators wanted to redefine the way heroes related to each other, their opponents, and their society. Guest appearances by heroes in each other’s stories were old hat, but no one had done them as often or as casually as Marvel started doing … DC’s heroes were always as chummy as could be, but nearly every time Marvel heroes met, some plot twist had them pounding each other, often tearing up whole city blocks in the process … Whether the heroes were fighting, joining forces, or just catching up on gossip, these crossovers were among Marvel’s most popular features. (89)

Following this initial appearance from the Hulk, The Fantastic Four would regularly become host to characters from other books, including Ant Man in issue 16, Sgt. Nick Fury in issue 21, the Hulk and all-star super-team the Avengers in issues 25 and 26, and mutant teens the X-Men in issue #28. These meet-ups and battles were quite popular with readers, as evidenced by the letters columns that were a regular feature in The Fantastic Four and other Marvel comic books. Indeed, using these letters columns to create a rapport with readers was another important innovation of the era introduced by Lee and Kirby.

Fans’ Soapbox Though letters pages had been a part of comic books for decades, in The Fantastic Four and Marvel’s other superhero comic books Stan Lee reinvented those pages as a forum for playful back-and-forth with the readers, rather than just presenting a staid editorial voice. This can be seen as early as The Fantastic Four’s first letters column, in issue #4. In response to a letter writer who said, “I think the Fantastic Four will become a great success,” Lee wrote sardonically, “It’ll become a great success? What do you think it is NOW? Chicken liver?” (25). He concluded the same column by complimenting the letter writers, perhaps in a bid to elicit more responses: We’ve just noticed something … unlike many other collections of letters in different mags, our fans all seem to write well, and intelligently. We assume this denotes that our readers are a cut above average, and that’s the way we like ’em! (25)

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Though this may have just been flattery on Lee’s part, it was also potentially a result of the older readership that Marvel was attracting from adult fans who enjoyed the resurgence of superheroes and from older teenagers and college students drawn to the more realistic stories compared to DC. As Jones and Jacobs explain, In discovering a new approach, Lee and Kirby also began to discover a new audience. The number of older comic book readers had been growing … Many of them were teenagers, still fascinated by the sheer fantasy of costumed heroes but more aware of the real emotional stresses of living, less comforted by familiarity than children are and more hungry for novelty. To the adolescent eye, DC comics were beginning to look simplistic and cliched … The FF gripped an audience smaller than DC’s, but it was generally older, more vocal, and more conscious of what it read. Letters began arriving, unsolicited, at Lee’s little office. (58) Years later, Lee himself would again note that he was surprised by the number and quality of letters that The Fantastic Four elicited: We found out that there were actually real live readers out there—readers who took the trouble to contact us, readers who wanted to talk to us about our characters, about our stories. With each new letter they got to know us better, and what was more important, we got to know them. We learned what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they wanted to see more of … and less of. After a while I began to feel I wasn’t even the editor; I was just following orders—orders which came in the mail. (Origins 73) As the letters columns continued to be a venue for debate amongst fans, and between creators and fans, Lee used them as an opportunity to gather information about the audience, sometimes asking them specific questions and other times just judging the tenor of fandom through his back-and-forth with readers. By issue #10, Lee would make these exchanges even more informal. He opened that issue’s column with, Look—enough of that ‘Dear Editor’ jazz from now on! Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (that’s us!) read every letter personally,

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Building a “Real World” and we like to feel that we know you and that you know us! So we changed the salutations in the following letters to show you how much friendlier they sound our way! (25)

The greetings for that issue’s letter columns were changed to “Dear Stan and Jack,” which then become the regular greeting of fans writing in to the book. As compared to the more staid, corporate DC Comics, Marvel publicly reinvented itself as a hip, friendly company that engaged with readers and gave them what they wanted. This attitude meant that Marvel was not chasing after the same audience of young children that was DC’s bread and butter. Rather, Marvel readers reveled in the sense of maturity and continuity that Lee, Kirby, Ditko and their co-creators attempted to instill in their stories, meaning that as the publisher’s line of comics expanded the consistency of its continuity became important to the entire Marvel Universe’s sense of reality. As Wright notes, [Lee] cultivated an image of Marvel Comics as a maverick within the comic book field, much like the outsider superheroes themselves. His cover blurbs, house editorials, answers to reader letters, and script writing all established a distinctive “Marvel style.” Willfully outrageous sales pitches … self-deprecating humor, cross-references between titles, and recurring in-jokes all defined what it meant to involved in this “hip happening” that was Marvel Comics. Lee built affection for Marvel’s characters while playfully acknowledging the absurdity of the whole enterprise. (217) Matt Yockey takes this further, connecting that “hipness” with, “a familiar and familial rapport with readers that, like the content of the comics themselves, fostered an empathetic connection with readers by projecting an affective authenticity” (24). What’s more, that rapport went hand-in-hand with the increasingly complex continuity developing across the line: As Marvel narratives became increasingly complex, running across consecutive issues of a title and even from title to title, captions would frequently remind readers about previous plot

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points and in what other comics they appeared … These various strategies legitimated fan subjectivity, a key trope of Marvel comic books. Lee was careful to always make his readers feel as though they shared in the creation of the Marvel line. (24–25) As Marvel’s creators and readers worked together to help navigate the path of Marvel’s developing continuity, they were also helping to develop a sense of what “Marvel Comics” stood for, both on and off the page. By nature of the books appealing to teenagers and college students in the 1960s, one of the most radical times for that age group, the conversations in the letters column would go back and forth between requests for guest appearances and more weighty, serious matters reflecting the tenor of the age.

The (Web-)Swinging Sixties What may have begun as something of a gimmick to capture reader attention, appeal to an older audience, and encourage enough letters to fill several pages of each issue soon transformed into a forum to discuss headier issues, as Fawaz explains: From the outset Lee and Kirby self-consciously framed The Fantastic Four letters column as a forum for discussing the transformations taking place in Marvel Comics, and U.S. culture more broadly, in the 1960s … By taking the superhero comic book seriously as a site for developing an alternative reader sociality, one that was often (though not always) organized by distinctly left-of-center political ideals, Marvel writers and artists encouraged readers to see comic book aesthetics as a vehicle for producing alternative social and political imaginaries. Readers responded by developing sophisticated interpretive practices through which they linked the fantasy content of Marvel Comics to larger questions of political concern, consequently demanding new forms of conceptual innovation and political accountability from the creators of their favorite stories. (96) Marvel’s readers, in essence, came to view themselves as co-creators of the Marvel Universe, and they looked to that imaginary world to reflect realism not just in terms of characterization and

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scientific explanations for extraordinary powers, but also the social and political realities of the world outside their windows. Though this debate played out in the comics’ letters columns, there was far less political commentary within the stories themselves. As Matthew Costello notes, The stories represented the moral certainties of the Cold War, with plotlines that defined the conflict in stark contrasts between good and evil. With the exception of the deeper character developments of the heroes, the books mirrored the comics of World War II in their unquestioning portrayal of American virtue. (63) Indeed, various Communist villains from the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam were portrayed as ugly, almost sub-human, with the usual trite motivations of “world conquest” that had been imparted to Axis villains during World War II, frequently lacking even the rudimentary sympathy afforded to non-politically aligned supervillains. To Lee and Kirby’s credit, though, they allowed critique of this approach to be raised in a letter printed in The Fantastic Four #25: Enclosed you will find pages from several of your comic books. Each one has something about the hero fighting Communists (or as you call them, Reds or Commies). Are you trying [to] encourage World War III? … I believe in the American way of life and do not believe in Communism, however, why can’t we have our beliefs and let them have theirs, and still exist in friendship? (23) The editorial response to this was joking, but encouraged other readers to write in: “We spend billions for national defense … Who do you think we’re concerned about – the Eskimos? Anyway, how do the rest of our readers feel about this?” (23). In issue #29, Lee and Kirby published three readers’ responses, one of which was measured (“The Red’s magazines cut us down so let’s not bring ourselves to their level of propaganda”) while the other two were rabidly anti-Communist, almost to the point of parody: I feel that you should definitely continue to pit your heroes against the forces of Communism, which is a much bigger

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threat to our nation than crime is … Communism is not something to be shrugged off lightly. It is a constant threat to our entire nation and it should be dealt with accordingly. I am glad that at least one company is realistic enough to call our attention to this threat and arouse our interest against it. (23) Even within this extremist response, the letter writer noted an appreciation of Marvel’s “realistic” approach compared to (presumably) DC’s. Lee and Kirby closed the debate by stating, “So far, the proportion is heavily in favor of calling a spade a spade, or a red a red” (23). Although the pair may have shown themselves ready to err on the side of conservatism when it came to this anti-Communist rhetoric, in other places Lee would espouse a much more liberal point of view. In “Stan’s Soapbox,” a column that appeared in every comic across the Marvel line, the writer/editor would frequently take the time to discuss explicitly political issues, such as in the September 1967 column that directly addressed the Vietnam War: Many Keepers of the Faith have demanded that we take a more definitive stand on current problems such as Viet Nam, civil rights, and the increase in crime, to name a few. We’ve a hunch that most Marvel madmen pretty well know where we stand on such matters – and we’ve long believed that our first duty is to entertain, rather than editorialize. Of course, you’ve probably noticed that it’s not too easy to keep our own convictions out of the soul-stirring sagas we toss at you – but, in our own bumbling fashion, we do try. (reprinted in Soapbox 7) Though Lee hedged his bets here, he was much more straightforward in a “Soapbox” the following year that took a stand against racism: Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed supervillains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them is to expose them – to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are. (reprinted in Soapbox 16)

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Although Lee and his artists were, for the most part, not exactly hippies, they did tend to be left-leaning when it came to these domestic and social issues, especially in standing up to the kind of racial intolerance that many of them had fought against as soldiers during World War II. For example, issue #21 of The Fantastic Four features a villain called the Hate-Monger, who uses both a “hate-ray” and charismatic speeches to incite violence against “foreigners” on American streets. A bit heavy-handedly, the Hate-Monger is revealed at the end of the issue to be none other than Adolf Hitler himself. The issue concludes with Reed Richards philosophizing that, “Until men truly love each other, regardless of race, creed, or color, the Hate-Monger will still be undefeated! Let’s never forget that!” (22). While this issue focused on the social issue of intolerance, it also continued to develop the continuity of the Marvel Universe. It featured Nick Fury, a character who starred in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, a Lee/Kirby war book set during World War II. The Fury in The Fantastic Four, though, was an aged version of the character who had survived the war and was now working for the CIA. This incremental build-up of the Marvel Universe as an entity continued several months later in a two-parter that featured the first meeting between Marvel’s two preeminent super-teams, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers. It was within the pages of The Avengers, in fact, that this sort of intricate continuity became not only a regular feature, but often the focus of the stories themselves.

Some Assembly Required The plot of The Avengers #1 brings together the continuity of several Marvel comic books in order to create a story that draws in several of company’s heroes to form a team of all-stars. It begins with Loki, archnemesis of the Norse god of thunder and Marvel superhero Thor, tricking the Hulk into attacking a train, in the hopes that such an action will draw out Thor into a battle that the god will lose. The Hulk’s allies from his own book, a group of youths named the TeenBrigade, hear about this and believe the Hulk to be innocent, causing them to send a radio summons to the Fantastic Four asking them to find him before the military does. Although the quartet does receive the message, they are busy, and unable to come. Instead, the teens

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end up summoning Thor as well as Iron Man and the duo of Ant Man and the Wasp. Ultimately, Loki’s trickery is revealed, and the heroes team up with the Hulk to take down the villain, deciding to remain a team at the end of the issue. By The Avengers #2, the book was already reflecting the changing face of Marvel continuity. Having expanded his shrinking formula to a growing formula in his own series, Ant Man was now Giant Man, and by the end of the issue the loner Hulk was no longer on the team. The next issue picked up on that plot thread by teaming up the Hulk with the Sub-Mariner to fight the Avengers, while in the meantime Iron Man showed up in a new, more streamlined set of armor that he had created in his own comic book. The Sub-Mariner plotline then carried over into issue #4, wherein he discovered the frozen, still-living body of Marvel’s preeminent hero of the 1940s, Captain America, thus tying the series into Marvel’s historical continuity. What makes these early issues of The Avengers so innovative is not the concept of teaming up preexisting heroes. That was an idea that had been around since the 1940s, and was the central conceit of DC’s popular Justice League title. What Lee and Kirby did, rather, was to take that idea of a team-up book and pair it together with their more realistic take on conflicted heroes whose lives were an ongoing soap opera that crossed multiple titles. By the time The Avengers was well-established, then, Marvel’s style of world-building was in full swing. Lee and Kirby (along with Ditko on the Spider-Man and Dr. Strange stories) were combining the traditional grandiosity and fantastical battles of superhero comics with a grounded sense of realism in characterization, social reflection, and interconnected continuity. As Comtois puts it, during the following several years the three men and the rest of Marvel’s creative staff, began to actively exploit the disparate elements that had defined the nascent, but increasingly popular Marvel style and to deliberately weave them into a coherent “universe.” What especially characterized these years … [was] the deliberate attempt by Lee to tie his growing universe closer together, to develop its own internal consistency and to give it a semblance of verisimilitude … Making all this easier was the fact that Lee took

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Building a “Real World” upon himself the scripting for all the super-hero titles and in the process, found a way to simply have fun with the universe he and his artists had created. (57)

Even with the boundless energy that Stan Lee seemed to possess in those days, though, one man (with the occasional assistance of his brother Larry and a few others) could only script an entire line of comic books for so long. As the 1960s drew to a close, so too did Lee’s tenure as the mastermind behind the ongoing story of the Marvel Universe. As he moved on to a new position adapting Marvel’s intellectual property into other media, such as television and animation, he would slowly give over the reins of the comic books themselves to a handful of new writers and editors who would take what he and his artistic collaborators had created and push them in new directions.

Notes 1 For more information about the Comics Code Authority, and the history of the industry up to the 1950s that led to its founding, see Gilbert, Jones, and Wright. 2 Unless noted otherwise, all emphasis in quotes throughout this book is taken from the original source. 3 Contrast this with the way that Barry Allen, the character who kickstarted a new era of superheroes at DC Comics several years earlier, took his name and powers from existing hero The Flash based on the conceit that Allen had read the Flash’s old adventures in a comic book that secretly told stories of an alternate dimension. This idea would later be expanded into the basis of the DC Comics multiverse.

References Comtois, Pierre. Marvel Comics in the 1960s: An Issue by Issue Field Guide to a Pop Culture Phenomenon. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Press, 2009. Costello, Matthew. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books & The Unmasking of Cold War America. New York: Continuum, 2009. Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” In Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Media, edited by Jeet Heer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

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Gilbert, James. A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Jones, Gerard and Will Jacobs. The Comic Book Heroes. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997. Lee, Stan. “Fantastic 4 Fan Page,” The Fantastic Four 4. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan. “Fantastic 4 Fan Page,” The Fantastic Four 9. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan. “Fantastic 4 Fan Page,” The Fantastic Four 10. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan. “Fantastic 4 Fan Page,” The Fantastic Four 25. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan. “Fantastic 4 Fan Page,” The Fantastic Four 29. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan, writer, Jack Kirby, penciller, et al. “The Coming of the Sub-Mariner!,” The Fantastic Four 4. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan, writer, Jack Kirby, penciller, et al. “The Fantastic Four!,” The Fantastic Four 1. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan, writer, Jack Kirby, penciller, et al. “The Fantastic Four Meet the Skrulls from Outer Space!,” The Fantastic Four 2. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan, writer, Jack Kirby, penciller, et al. “The Hate-Monger!,” The Fantastic Four 21. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan, writer, Jack Kirby, penciller, et al. “The Menace of the Miracle Man,” The Fantastic Four 3. Reprinted in The Fantastic Four Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Lee, Stan. Origins of Marvel Comics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. Wandtke, Terrence R. The Meaning of Superhero Comics. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012. Wells, John. American Comic Book Chronicles: 1965–69. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2014.

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Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Yockey, Matt. “Introduction: Excelsior! Or, Everything That Rises Must Converge.” In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

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War on the Streets Marvel, Vietnam, and Street Vigilantes

The first Marvel writer to take over for Stan Lee in any large-scale way was fan-turned-professional Roy Thomas, who was perhaps even more obsessed with continuity than Lee had been. As Pierre Comtois explains, after cutting his teeth on some of Marvel’s western and teen humor books, Thomas took over The Avengers where, Taking his cue from … his own fascination with continuity, Thomas continued to build on the interrelationships between the team’s members begun by Lee and soon added elements from elsewhere in the growing Marvel Universe … In a way, he brought to full, robust fruition what Lee had been angling at for years: developing inter-title continuity to such a degree that it became as integral to the grand style as Kirby’s cosmicism or Lee’s belief in the human spirit. (1960s 173–174) Thomas’ continuity obsession would reach its apotheosis in 1971 with a storyline titled “The Kree-Skrull War,” which ran in issues 89–97 of The Avengers, and during which, according to Comtois, he not only expanded the boundaries of Marvel’s characters to include the universe … but opened the way for other writers to explore the rich story-telling potential in multi-part, galaxyspanning adventures that would eventually begin to tie together all the disparate elements of the Marvel Universe. (1970s 84)1 The main plot of the Kree-Skrull War revolved around two warring alien races, the titular Kree and Skrull (both of which had been DOI: 10.4324/9781003051008-3

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previously introduced in The Fantastic Four and had appeared in various Marvel titles since then), battling over control of the Earth as a strategic waystation halfway between the two empires. In addition to this primary plotline, though, Sean Howe explains, It was an ambitious, often thrilling tour through various Marvel mythologies, featuring not just the two battling alien races, and the Negative Zone, and Captain Marvel, and the Inhumans, but also appearances by Timely-era heroes like the Angel, the Blazing Skull, the Fin, the Patriot, and the original Vision. Paying tribute to what had come before him, with “The Kree-Skrull War” Thomas seemed to be touring disparate corners of the Marvel universe with a dustbin and craft glue, picking up the detritus left in Lee and Kirby’s wake and fitting it all together. (Howe 116) Thomas’ baroque exploration of the distant corners of Marvel’s cosmology2 was probably a bit of both, coming as it was at the start of the second major phase of Marvel’s history. In the early days of Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and their collaborators’ improvisational innovations, killing the sacred cows of traditional superhero tropes was a deliberate strategy. Most pointedly, Lee allowed for the characters to grow and change. Unlike the Justice League, The Avengers’ membership was a rotating door. While Batman’s sidekick, Robin, seemed permanently stuck in his pre-teens, Peter Parker graduated high school, went to college, and had several girlfriends. Clark Kent still pined over Lois Lane, who only had eyes for Superman, while Reed Richards and Sue Storm got engaged, then married, and finally had a child together. Once Lee took a step back from personally writing all of his character’s adventures, though, he proved to be a rather conservative editor when it came to continuity. In the wake of a slight down-turn in sales in 1968, according to Roy Thomas, Lee became afraid that Marvel’s massive success throughout the decade might be coming to an end. The answer, he seemed to think, was to freeze the Marvel Universe in place. According to Thomas, Lee, “didn’t want things to change in the books from that point on. We were to give ‘the illusion of change,’ but then bring them back to the status quo” (quoted in Wells 273).

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The writers and artists at Marvel were forced to abide by this edict, despite their desire to innovate, themselves: We weren’t wild about that, but it was Stan’s decision. When you get something going just right, you can become reluctant to meddle with it. Do you keep on evolving and hope your readers follow you, or do you figure at some point you’ve pretty much got the thing right? If you keep changing it, you may end up undoing what you did right in the first place. It’s hard to know. (Quoted in Wells 273) As the Marvel Universe entered the 1970s, then, its writers and artists lacked the same creative freedom that Lee, Kirby, Ditko, et al. enjoyed in the previous decade. Some, like Thomas, responded to this restriction by intricately exploring the details of the concepts laid down by those earlier creators, celebrating this complex continuity by weaving it together in new and interesting ways. Other creators, their hands tied by in inability to bring change to existing characters, would bring new heroes to the forefront in order to show character development and psychological depth, as well as to bring more diversity to the world of Marvel. Still others would use both new and existing characters to more firmly ground the Marvel Universe in the real world, tackling such thorny issues as the Vietnam War in the 1970s and the street crime and gang violence that dominated media conversations in the 1980s.

New Heroes for a New Age Though Marvel’s superheroes were different from DC’s in terms of their grounding in a bit more realism, they were similar in one key regard—they were overwhelmingly white and male. Even though Marvel liked to present itself as on the forefront of the “swinging sixties,” the publisher was still rather conservative when it came to the types of heroes that starred in the company’s books. Minority characters were, at first, virtually nonexistent, and women were relegated to secondary rolls. As Bradford Wright notes, “Although each Marvel superhero team had at least one integral female member, they were always subordinate to the male superheroes” (220). As the company entered the 1970s, with the edict that the many changes to characters from throughout the past decade were to in

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essence remain frozen in place, the door was opened for new characters to take the stage. In addition, with Lee taking more of an editorial role rather than single-handedly writing the entire line, there was an opportunity for more diversity behind the scenes as well. Though this “diversity” mostly just meant new heterosexual white men creating superhero comics, there was the occasional exception. 1972’s The Cat, for example, was Marvel’s first ongoing superhero comic starring a female protagonist, and it was actually written and drawn by two women, Linda Fite and Marie Severin, respectively. Unfortunately, though, as Anna F. Peppard notes in her feminist history of Marvel Comics, “It would be another forty years before Marvel would repeat this particular milestone” (105). Nor, Peppard notes, would The Cat and other, early attempts at Marvel books starring female superheroes necessarily reflect the most worldly take on feminist issues: “[D]eveloping a more nuanced understanding of Marvel’s attempts to appeal to female readers through female superheroes requires appreciating these characters as complex negotiations between female (and/or feminist) needs and male (and/or patriarchal) expectations” (109). Two other books debuted at Marvel in 1972 with female stars, both written by women—the action-romance Night Nurse, scripted by Jean Thomas, and the “female Tarzan” jungle girl book Shanna the She-Devil, written by Carole Seuling. Peppard notes that, “The ‘Marvel Bullpen Bulletin’ from November of that year foregrounds the female writers of these series as a potential selling point while also emphasizing the title’s wide appeal” (110), but unfortunately none of the series lasted for longer than five issues. As Peppard explains, these and other future female-starring books set in the Marvel Universe had to negotiate between attracting female readers to what had become a male-centric medium and appealing to male readers without alienating them: In general, female superheroes created during and after second-wave feminism represent attempts to devise ways of empowering female lives and bodies that seem liberating to girls and women, while not being threatening to boys and men (or, more broadly, patriarchal gender norms). (112) Marvel’s female-centered titles of the 1970s had various degrees of success meeting this challenge, in Peppard’s estimation:

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In the decade following the cancellation of The Cat, ongoing titles starring newly created female superheroes Spider-Woman, She-Hulk, and Dazzler, related to feminism largely by default rather than design. In general, the titles starring these newly created female superheroes lacked a clear vision … Although her creation was also the result of a mandate from publisher Stan Lee to “come up with another female hero who can use the Marvel name,” Ms. Marvel, who debuted in her own ongoing series in 1977, would ultimately be Marvel’s most focused effort since The Cat to appeal to female readers by incorporating feminist themes. (Peppard 112–113) Indeed, Ms. Marvel would prove to be the most important female superhero of the 1970s at Marvel, helming her own title for longer than the other superheroines and later coming to the fore in the twenty-first century as the company’s preeminent female character. Though she, herself, spun out of the earlier, male-starring Captain Marvel series, Ms. Marvel was notable for not being a female version of an existing male character, in the way that Spider-Woman and She-Hulk were. It is indicative of the way gender is approached in superhero comics that this kind of gender-copying only goes one way—while popular male heroes frequently spawn female versions, popular female heroes rarely if ever lead to male versions. In her first starring role, Ms. Marvel—whose secret identity was Carol Danvers—served as a kind of central pivot for issues of second-wave feminism at Marvel. Danvers was a former air force officer who was now helming the Marvel Universe’s version of Ms. Magazine. That occupation allowed for a discussion of feminism within the pages of her book, particularly as the character butted heads with her chauvinistic publisher, J. Jonah Jameson (borrowed from the Spider-Man titles) but those conversations were always shaped by the book’s series of male writers. According to Peppard, this context, is a crucial site of negotiation; it allows Marvel to criticize a patriarchal publishing industry while privileging itself above such criticism—because, after all, it publishes the (purportedly) feminist Ms. Marvel. The alignment of Steinem with Ms. Marvel against the extravagant chauvinism of J. Jonah Jameson

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War on the Streets represents a significant acknowledgment of institutionalized sexism as a problem worth addressing. However, the writers and editors of Ms. Marvel would often struggle to understand or admit their own implication in this sexism. (114)

Nor would Marvel perfect their approach to creating female superheroes that appealed to female readers any time soon. As late as 2017, Peppard accurately noted that, “the newsworthiness of female superheroes proves that it is still far too unusual to see superpowered girls and women doing what real girls and women are doing every day: fighting back, and saving the world” (131). The same would unfortunately be true of minority characters at Marvel, most notably black heroes. The distinct lack thereof was something that African-American readers had noted, an absence that again pointed to how Marvel’s comics were not actually reflecting the hip, cultural diversity that the publisher purported to celebrate. As Wright explains, Marvel managed to strike an antiestablishment pose without appearing political. For instance, Marvel’s comic books at the time rarely mention the civil rights movement, yet Marvel was the first publisher to integrate African Americans into comic books. In 1966 Marvel debuted the first black superhero, a cosmopolitan African prince called the Black Panther. Marvel’s black superhero was apparently coincidental to the founding of the black militant group, but both clearly chose the name because it evoked an image of black pride. Just as significant, perhaps, was Marvel’s gradual introduction of random African American citizens into common street scenes, in which they appeared as policemen, reporters, or mere passers-by. It was a belated but meaningful comic book illustration of America as a multiracial society. (219) Though the Black Panther may have been Marvel’s first black hero, as the ruler of the fictional, afro-futurist African nation of Wakanda he was not the company’s first African-American hero. That honor, rather, fell to the Falcon, a character who first appeared in 1969’s Captain America #117. According to John Wells, the announcement of the Falcon’s creation by Stan Lee at a campus visit to Duke University,

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was followed by a March 19 essay in the East Village Other … Despite the lightness of his tone, the writer’s goal was to encourage more prominent black characters … Despite Marvel assistant Alan Hewetson’s response to the Other that “we think we have approached a decent start with these characters,” The Comic Reader’s Mark Hanerfeld still worried when he reported in early May that the Falcon would be “an American Negro super-hero, not the king of some far-off kingdom! I hope this means no more cop-out!” (268) Clearly there was an appetite for greater diversity at Marvel, particularly for black characters, and to Lee’s credit, he made an explicit attempt to have his writers and artists add them to the books. Ultimately, the most notable black superhero in the 1970s was neither the Black Panther nor the Falcon. Both of those characters had been co-created by Lee, and so they shared the same commonalities of all of his heroes—heroic individuals with foibles who were ultimately motivated by a desire to make the world a better place. But with other creators given freedom to develop new characters, there was the chance for a new type of Marvel character to appear, grounded in a more urban-based sense of “realism” than Lee had focused on when tapping into the most idealistic aspects of both the atomic age and the hippie movement. These new characters, whether male or female, white or black, often held different motivations than pure altruism. One such example was the so-called “Hero for Hire,” Luke Cage. Like all of Marvel’s black characters in this era, Luke Cage’s cocreators—writers Roy Thomas and Archie Goodwin, and artists John Romita Sr. and George Tuska—were all white. Uniquely, though, at least one black creator, inker Billy Graham, did work on his book (the full title of which was Luke Cage, Hero for Hire). Bradford Wright sets the scene for Cage’s creation, an origin story that was equally inspired by Marvel’s expanding world-building, contemporary political conversations, a push for diversity, and a popular pop culture genre: In 1972, on Stan Lee’s initiative, Marvel took a chance with a new kind of black superhero … While the Black Panther was a stately African prince and the Falcon was a middle-class

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War on the Streets social worker, Luke Cage was a lower class black man from the ghetto. Inspired by recent “blaxploitation” films like Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972), Cage’s adventures took place in an inner-city underworld of pimps, drug-dealers, poverty, and white harassment. (247)

Cage was thus meant to stand apart even from Marvel’s previous black characters in an attempt at “gritty” realism that tried to keep up with the tenor of the times, an approach that ended up having some degree of success. In the first issue of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, we meet the hero at his lowest point, imprisoned for a crime for which he was framed. He is experimented on by a white scientist and a racist guard willing to use black prisoners as human guinea pigs, but when he unexpectedly gains superpowers from the experiment—super-strength and “unbreakable skin”—he uses them to escape from prison. Wandering the streets of New York, Cage foils a robbery at a diner, earning a reward from the manager. Later, he sees this encounter as the key to his future: “The dude at the diner was all right. Not only gave me a cash reward—but an idea how to turn what I got goin’ for me into a livin’!” (21). Rather than simply performing heroics out of the good of his heart, Cage turns into the superhuman version of a private detective, renting out his services to whomever is willing to pay him, which sometimes saw the character acting far from heroic. As Wright explains, The earliest issues stayed with the morally ambivalent premise of the character, who harbored a well-founded suspicion of white society, but after a few years of sluggish sales Marvel renamed the series Power Man and recast the character as a more conventional hero. Never among Marvel’s better selling titles, this initial effort at a leading African-American superhero still lasted into the 1980s. (247–249) Meanwhile, the Black Panther was being put through his own paces in a storyline (helmed by a white writer) that was expanding upon the bare bones of the character’s continuity as established by Lee and Kirby. Rather than the streets of New York, though, the Panther’s territory was Marvel’s version of Africa. Jones and Jacobs explain:

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When handed the job of writing a new Black Panther series (Jungle Action 6, Sept. 1973), [editorial assistant Don McGregor] tackled it with remarkable energy and serious intent. He designed a complex geography and socioeconomic history for the kingdom of Wakanda, with an intriguing political situation … For this, McGregor dropped all pretense of writing for children and put before the fans the most difficult and ambitious style yet employed in comics … The acclaim that McGregor’s writing won from many fans showed that storytelling was becoming less important to the readers than exploration of the heroes’ lives. Indeed, quite strangely for a genre that was once all about externalities, the inner lives of super heroes were becoming the sole concern of some series. (165) This inward, psychological turn would, in fact, prove to be a major feature of the expanding Marvel Universe in the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas Lee, Kirby, Ditko, et al. had married a grand, cosmic imaginary world of epic scope with slightly realistic neuroses and foibles, the creators who followed in their wake, hampered from effecting more than the illusion of change, were much more interested in taking deeper dives into the heroes’ psychology. Historian Matthew Costello attributes this to the changing nature of the post-World War II national liberal consensus, as Americans entered the “me decade” of the 1970s. This national trend found its way into Marvel in the form of, an increasing awareness of the domestic realm in the story line, an emphasis on the development of family and kin groups, and a growing psychologization of characters and problems, in which internal emotional states replaced ideology and politics as the sources of conflict. While the characters became more deeply drawn, they were increasingly domesticated and psychoanalyzed. (131) Perhaps no heroes of the era more epitomized this inward turn— while, ironically, simultaneously expanding the boundaries and concepts of the Marvel Universe—than the X-Men.

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Uncanny Continuity When they first came on the scene in September 1963, the X-Men proved to be an unusual misstep for the team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and their book was not an immediate sales success. They were also the youngest of all of Marvel’s superhero teams—while the Fantastic Four were a family, and the Avengers were a kind professional organization, the X-Men were a class of students. Unique amongst the other Marvel heroes, the X-Men were born with their powers, and the world hated and feared them for it. In their original configuration, the team—consisting of young mutants Cyclops, Beast, Angel, Iceman, and Marvel Girl—worked under the tutelage of their teacher, Professor Charles Xavier, to learn how to defend themselves and to protect humanity from their fellow mutants who might mean the world harm. For Lee and Kirby, though, as imaginative as they were, most of these stories ultimately boiled down to a struggle between good and evil. Though ostensibly the X-Men could easily stand in for minority groups—particularly African-Americans—fighting for civil rights in the 1960s, that was always more of a philosophical conceit for the series that Lee might trot out at public speeches, rather than something clearly evident within the stories themselves. By uncomfortably straddling the line between social commentary and traditional superheroics, without ever fully being able to commit to either, the original X-Men book lagged behind in sales compared to other Marvel titles. When Roy Thomas took over the writing duties in 1969 there was a slight period of renewed interest in the title, but it was short-lived, and new X-Men stories stopped appearing after issue #66 (though it ran until #93, reprinting earlier issues). Thus, when writer Len Wein (who was also Marvel’s editor-inchief at that time) decided to bring back the title in a story titled, fittingly, “Second Genesis!,” he felt free to mix things up. Together with artist Dave Cockrum, Wein created a new, international team of mutant heroes who—after a mission goes wrong—Professor Xavier assembles to rescue the original X-Men, most of whom then decide to leave the team. Though Wein scripted the mutant comeback in Giant-Size X-Men #2, and plotted out the first few issues of the team’s return to its regular title in issues 94 and 95, he quickly handed the reins over to his editorial assistant, Chris Claremont.

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Though Claremont had been making a name for himself on some of Marvel’s second-tier titles, he was by no means a household name amongst comic fans at that time. To the young writer, a successful run on the title would simply mean that it wasn’t cancelled outright within a few months. He would later describe the book he inherited as, “a bimonthly mid-list title, sort of a cult favorite with an extremely checkered career behind it, achieving some heights of critical fame but only marginal sales” (“Introduction” 1). In order to differentiate the new run from the old book, Claremont explains, Wein wanted to show, as dramatically as possible, that this team operated under a deadlier set of realities than their predecessors – or, for that matter, any other superheroes. Thunderbird [a team member who died in issue #95] changed that. It demonstrated to the new X-Men right off the bat that they were vulnerable, and suggested to the audience that this was a book where anything could happen. (“Introduction” 1) Because the X-Men did not have the same cultural cache that characters like the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the Avengers had attained by the mid-1970s, Wein and Claremont were able to present real growth and change in characters, something that many other Marvel titles lacked. As a result, Claremont’s long run on X-Men— one that lasted for almost two decades—was able to return to the expansive sense of world-building that had characterized early Marvel, wedded to the deeper psychological realism and emphasis on human relationships that had developed in the comics of the 1970s. According to Claremont, himself, part of what made his early issues of X-Men a success was the growth in the relationships between these new characters Wein had handed to him: “The characters had only just met then … There was the marvel of discovery to every aspect of the book” (“Introduction” 2). The X-Men’s popularity and sales increased as Claremont’s run continued, especially when artist John Byrne took over for Cockrum. Jones and Jacobs explain that, “Byrne was a compulsive idea man, jotting down notes as they popped to mind until he’d find himself with two or three years’ worth of plot materials, plus ideas for revamping everybody else’s comics besides” (236). Even though Claremont “might have overwritten and underplotted,” Byrne

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War on the Streets gave a charm and nuance to the characters that brought Claremont’s dialogue to life. He and Claremont had finally found a place to combine all their skills, and their X-Men blew the Marvel Universe wider than ever before. Anyone reading it could feel the electricity, and didn’t even have to hear sales figures to jump on the bandwagon. (236)

Throughout their run on the title, Claremont and Byrne constantly added new characters and concepts to both the X-Men and the wider Marvel Universe, creating an entire galactic empire (the Shi’ar), a renewed focus on anti-mutant biases, and a slew of strong female characters who were more than just receptacles for the male gaze (though they were often that, too). What’s more, as Jones and Jacobs describe, the creative team used the metaphor of persecution to appeal to minority groups in a way that the original Lee/Kirby run had never quite accomplished: Claremont, for his part, understood what no X-Men writer, including Lee and Kirby, had ever understood: that if mutants are a persecuted minority, they should react to persecution in everything they do, and their “team” should be more than a team, even more than a family; it should be their definition and their culture … Claremont was affirming comics, not as universal entertainment, but as the esoterica of a subculture. (236) Furthermore, as Marc DiPaolo points out, multivalent subcultures and minority groups were drawn to the X-Men because of the deliberate vagueness of the metaphor: The story of the X-Men is the story of the oppressed and the disenfranchised striking back against their oppressors, so any reader who feels oppressed may relate to the X-Men, regardless of the nature of the oppression, or its level of severity. Another reason that the allegory is so flexible is the vast, multicultural cast of characters who comprise the mutant community enables readers of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, sexual orientations, genders, and religious beliefs to see themselves in the XMen narratives and to see the X-Men “story” as being primarily about “their” particular life conflict. (219)

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One aspect of Claremont’s X-Men that led to this subcultural appeal was the focus on soap opera-style melodrama. Team members would fall in and out of love with one another, quit and return to the team, fight one another and become close companions, all in ongoing subplots that would ultimately span decades and boil to the surface as major story arcs. In a further example of the inward psychological turn at Marvel in the 1970s, the characters’ inner and personal lives became crucial to the stories’ plots. The Claremont/Byrne X-Men collaboration was thus reflective of the second phase of world-building at Marvel. It combined expansive ideas and an exploration of the established bits of continuity that fascinated Claremont with a deeper focus on rounding out the psychological realism of older characters and on creating new characters that reflected a greater sense of diversity. What’s more, as Claremont’s run went on, he became increasingly more explicit with his political commentary, directly comparing the fictional slur “mutie” to real-world racial slurs and creating the fictional island nation of Genosha to reflect the reality of contemporary apartheid in South Africa. Meanwhile, in another corner of burgeoning Marvel continuity, a different, darker character was similarly being used to comment on contemporary issues as he carved a path through the New York underworld, a path that would unexpectedly lead to direct commentary on the Vietnam War.

From Spider-Man to Vietnam The Punisher, complete with the distinctive and ominous skullface icon emblazoned on his chest, first appeared in 1974’s Amazing Spider-Man #129 as a hired assassin who, in his own words, only kills, “those who deserve killing” (2). As he seems to think that the heroic Spider-Man is one such person, he initially appears to be a villain. By the end of the issue, however, writer Gerry Conway and artist Ross Andru present a more complex motivation for the character. It turns out that he has been fooled by one of Spider-Man’s enemies, the Jackal, into believing that the hero is actually a murderer. During his battle with Spider-Man, he begins to reveal that he espouses an extreme right-wing take on the corruption of moral authority in America:

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War on the Streets Your kind of scum has ruled this country too long, punk—and I’m out to put a stop to it—any way I can! … You’re all alike … using whatever means to get control of the public … drugs, gambling, loan-shark operations … some of it legitimate … all of it evil. Sometimes I wonder if that evil’s rubbed off on me … but I know that doesn’t matter. All that matters is the job. (9–10)

However, when a drugged Spider-Man almost falls to his death, Punisher realizes that the Jackal is trying to turn him into a common murderer without any ideological beliefs. He decides to save the hero and explains that, “If I’m ever to life with myself, I have to know I’m doing the right thing … and letting a man die by accident doesn’t qualify” (14). From these exchanges, we gradually see that the Punisher is more an antihero than villain, a protagonist who is not an archetypal hero in the way that a Superman or Spider-Man is, but who tends to fight for good rather than evil. In fact, the Punisher was deliberately intended to be an ultra-right-wing version of Spider-Man. Both men are out to rid New York City of crime, but while Spider-Man does so through wit, good-heartedness, and, when necessary, a minimal amount of force, the cold and humorless Punisher uses deadly weapons, attempting to permanently end the city’s crime by executing its criminals. It is no coincidence that the character’s first appearance occurred in 1974, the same year as the release of the film Death Wish, which featured an architect, played by Charles Bronson, who becomes a violent vigilante in New York City after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by criminals. The movie became a cult classic, seen as a response to a rising crime rate across the nation in the 1970s. In his review for the Chicago Sun Times, however, Roger Ebert noted that the film clearly exaggerated these dangers: “This doesn’t look like 1974, but like one of those bloody future cities in science-fiction novels about anarchy in the twenty-first century … Urban paranoia is one thing, but Death Wish is another.” Though the Punisher’s New York is not quite as extreme and crime-infested as Death Wish’s, his paranoia is the same as Bronson’s, as is his violent response through the wholesale slaughter of the criminal element. Similarly, the appeal of the character is much like the appeal of Bronson’s character, as Ebert explains, noting that the movie has “an eerie kind of

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fascination” and that Bronson is, “a steely instrument of violence, with few words and fewer emotions.” The Punisher’s co-creator Gerry Conway’s own description show how the two characters ascribe to similar belief structures: The Punisher’s view of the world is a simple one – there are good people and there are bad people, and the bad people deserve to die. Some of us might have a problem with that, recognizing that there’s a gray area. Almost every “good” person can act in a destructive way at times, and even the worst scum can have a redeeming quality. I think in the Punisher’s world-view, redemption isn’t possible. I guess he’s something of a Calvinist. (Quoted in Mougin 6) Whereas heroes like Spider-Man fight against injustice out of a sense of responsibility, the Punisher is clearly fighting out of a sense of revenge that leads him to be far more violent than traditional superheroes, utilizing lethal force against his enemies more often than not. In this first story, however, we don’t learn the source of this anger, obtaining only the slightest of hints as to where it comes from. Towards the end of Amazing Spider-Man #129, the Punisher reveals to Spider-Man that he is a marine. After the superhero convinces the Punisher that he’s been framed for yet another crime, Spider-Man asks, “What’s this whole kick you’re on? You said you were a marine—so howcum you’re fighting over here?” Punisher responds, “That’s my business, super-hero, not yours. Maybe when I’m dead it’ll mean something … but right now I’m just a warrior … fighting a lonely war” (22). Thus, we begin to see a tiny piece of the Punisher’s psyche revealed—he is a U.S. Marine fighting what he sees to be a private war, one that is more important to him than the ongoing conflict in Vietnam (the unspoken “over there” contrasted to Spider-Man’s “over here”). What is most important to note here is that in his very first appearance, before his origin or even his real name is revealed, the Punisher is already subtly linked to Vietnam, and is cast as a soldier and a warrior in an ongoing war against the vague foe that is “evil.” This link would be reinforced in the next few appearances of the character, in a pair of Conway/Andru Spider-Man story collaborations. In both issues, the Punisher remains steadfast in his war

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against crime and corruption, which sets him against Spider-Man in a series of misunderstandings. Interestingly, the villains that the pair would ultimately team up to fight in these stories would, themselves, have military backgrounds: the Tarantula, who had been, “a member of a revolutionary band working to free a South American country from its oppressive dictatorship” (Amazing Spider-Man #135, 10); and Moses Magnum, who used soldiers who “don’t wear clearly identifiable uniforms” to kidnap scientific test specimens from an unnamed country in the “South American jungle” (Giant-Size Spider-Man #4, 8). In this latter story, we also get to see the Punisher utilizing what he calls his “War Journal” for the first time, wherein he tape records himself recounting the specifics of his particular missions and assassinations. It was not until later appearances of the character that readers would learn the full extent of the character’s history. Conway’s full exploration of this origin, would, as Comtois explains, “have to wait until other artists who were better able to portray the gritty, violent nature of the character had the chance to handle him” (1970s 157). The first such artist would be Tony DeZuniga, with whom Conway worked on Marvel Preview #2, featuring the Punisher’s first solo starring role. DeZuniga’s darker, more impressionistic and shadowy artwork would prove to be a perfect fit for Conway’s gritty, mature tale. In the course of the story, we finally learn the Punisher’s history, which, as the previous tales had hinted at, ties into Vietnam. Two FBI agents, exploring the Punisher’s past, uncover a military dossier which notes that he, was twice promoted in the field, in recognition of his extraordinary combat ability—an ability which won him the medal of honor, the bronze star, the silver star and the purple heart—four times! He was about to be awarded the presidential medal of freedom—when he deserted … It seems his wife and two children were killed—and that’s what drove him mad. (14–15) Their discussion then segues to the Punisher himself, thinking about the death of his family: “I’ve heard people call me crazy, and maybe they’re right … I only know there’s a war going on in this country— between citizen and criminal—and the citizens are losing—just as my family lost—just as I lost—so long ago” (15). The Punisher’s

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thoughts lead to a flashback, showing how he and his family, on his first day home on leave from Vietnam, are shot for witnessing a mafia execution. The Punisher survives, but his wife and children do not. Back in the present of the story, he thinks to himself, “After a thing like that, I suppose a man does go—mad. But at that point the war—it doesn’t really matter” (17–18). Though it took about two years, the Punisher’s origin was finally revealed, and it was intimately connected to the Vietnam experience. He was a disciplined, exemplary marine, one of the United States’ best, who had survived various battles and massacres only to come home and see his own family murdered. He realized that the “real war” he needed to be fighting was against crime, corruption, and urban blight in the United States, not against foreign enemies in Vietnam. This is an extremely right-wing approach to being against the Vietnam War, based around the idea that there are enemies at home who need to be hunted down and executed rather than focusing on political foes in a foreign nation. The Punisher is not, then, anti-war, but rather a proponent of urban warfare, an isolationist focused on the irredeemable enemy at home rather than the irredeemable enemy overseas. He continually hopes to get some kind of satisfaction out of his ongoing anti-crime campaign, but forever finds that satisfaction and catharsis denied to him (which is the moral that the left-leaning Conway was trying to instill in readers). The trauma of losing his family—and, underneath that, the trauma of the war he had fought in—was too much for him to bear, turning him into the Punisher permanently, with no end in sight other than his own eventual death. It would take many years, a series of guest shots, and a great deal of loosening of Comics Code Authority restrictions before the Punisher gained his own series, but it became immensely popular once he did. The period of “grim and gritty” heroes was at its zenith when the Punisher’s ongoing series began, and he served a large role in contributing to that trope by taking no prisoners and pulling no punches (or bullets) in his war on crime. The ability to portray greater violence, thanks to the gradual loosening of the Code, allowed other writers to make explicit the fact that the Punisher— whose name was eventually revealed to be Frank Castle—was as traumatized by Vietnam as by the murder of his family. As fan historian R. A. Jones notes, the character’s “psyche has run through the

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complete gamut of emotional traumas” (82). The skills that the Punisher used on the streets of New York were clearly linked to the training he received and experiences he underwent as a marine, especially in Vietnam, providing a kind of dark continuity between the breakdown of the liberal consensus in the 1960s and 1970s with these vicious heroes of the 1980s and 1990s.3 The link between past traumas and the kinds of contemporary breakdowns and societal ruptures these comics were “cathartically” reflecting is a theme that Punisher stories would come to explore time and again. For example, in 1980s Captain America #241, by writer Mike Barr and artist Pablo Marcos, the Punisher meets the titular superhero, whom he used to idolize but with whom he now finds himself at odds. Moments before preventing the Punisher from murdering a minor criminal, the Captain saves himself from falling to his doom by using a flagpole to leap to the next building, thinking to himself, “this maneuver has worked since 1941 … and there’s no reason … why it should stop working now!” (8). The confrontation between the two is thus preceded by a reminder that Captain America was forged in World War II, with an ideology that will soon come into conflict with the Punisher’s, spawned as it was by the more politically troublesome/turbulent Vietnam War. The story continually references Captain America and the Punisher’s ideologies as two types of war. This links each character to the respective wars that formed them and their beliefs and explores the difference between the “good war” of World War II and the “bad war” of Vietnam. Despite the similarities between the two—both of them were reborn in war—the different moralities of the times and places of those wars created entirely different soldiers—one who still believes in America’s ultimate virtuosity and another who sees America as nothing but a once-great nation that has started to decay. The Punisher, then, was an exemplar of one strand of Marvel continuity in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, reflective of the inward psychological turn that defined many books as well as the reflection of real-world issues of sociopolitical concern. As the character grew more popular, however, much of this original nuance was lost, as he become a herald of the “grim and gritty” period of superhero comics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rather than a traumatized veteran he became a kill-crazy vigilante the reader is meant to see as heroic. This “extreme” version of the character was just one of many

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examples of the baroque turn that Marvel took in this era, which became partially defined by over-the-top crossovers that made continuity increasingly impenetrable, leading to several attempts (of varying success) to “fix” the Marvel Universe.

Notes 1 The Kree-Skrull War would prove so influential on Marvel continuity that as recently as July 2020 a crossover event called “Empyre” revolved around the conflict between the two alien races, picking up various plot threads that dated back to this early storyline. 2 Thomas wasn’t alone in this endeavor, as writer-artist Jim Starlin’s runs on the Captain Marvel and Warlock books during the early 1970s explored the cosmic side of Marvel with a trippy, philosophy-and-psychologyfueled long-running story that introduced the alien nihilist Thanos, who would become one of Marvel’s most popular and threatening recurring villains. 3 See Costello for more on this.

References Barr, Mike, writer, Pablo Marcos, artist, et al. “Fear Grows in Brooklyn!,” Captain America 241. New York: Marvel Comics, January1980. Claremont, Chris. “Introduction to Uncanny X-Men.” Reprinted in The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus: Volume 1, edited by Mark D. Beazley and Cory Sedlmeier. New York: Marvel Comics, 2006. Comtois, Pierre. Marvel Comics in the 1960s: An Issue by Issue Field Guide to a Pop Culture Phenomenon. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Press, 2009. Comtois, Pierre. Marvel Comics in the 1970s: An Issue by Issue Field Guide to a Pop Culture Phenomenon. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2011. Conway, Gerry, writer, Ross Andru, artist, et al. “The Punisher Strikes Twice!,” The Amazing Spider-Man 129. New York: Marvel Comics, February1974. Conway, Gerry, writer, Ross Andru, artist, et al. “Shoot-Out in Central Park,” The Amazing Spider-Man 135. New York: Marvel Comics, August1974. Conway, Gerry, writer, Ross Andru, artist, et al. “To Sow the Seeds of Death’s Day,” Giant-Size Spider-Man 4. New York: Marvel Comics, April1975. Conway, Gerry, writer, Tony DeZuniga, artist, et al. “Death Sentence,” Marvel Preview 2. New York: Marvel Comics, August1975. Costello, Matthew. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books & The Unmasking of Cold War America. New York: Continuum, 2009.

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DiPaolo, Marc. War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011. Ebert, Roger. “Death Wish.” Chicago Sun-Times. January 1, 1974. Archived at https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/death-wish-1974 Goodwin, Archie, writer, George Tuska, artist, et al. “Out of Hell—A Hero!,” Luke Cage, Hero for Hire 1. New York: Marvel Comics, June1972. Howe, Sean. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. Jones, Gerard and Will Jacobs. The Comic Book Heroes. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997. Jones, R.A. “Punisher: A Hero (?) History of the One-Man War against Crime,” Amazing Heroes 75. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, July 15, 1985. Mougin, Lou. “Interview with Gerry Conway.” In Comics Interview: Super Special, edited by David Anthony Kraft. New York: Fictioneer Books, 1989. Peppard, Anna F. “‘This Female Fights Back!’ A Feminist History of Marvel Comics.” In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Wells, John. American Comic Book Chronicles: 1965–69. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2014. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

3

The Marvel Multitude The Era of Crossovers

While much of the 1970s at Marvel might have been defined by an inward psychological turn, the late 1980s and 1990s were all about excess. Just as hair metal music, TV shows like Miami Vice, and movies like Wall Street testified to the spirit of baroque exuberance in American cultural in general in the late 1980s, so too did superhero comics go through a period of extremes. Inspired by the immense critical success, and general cultural impact, of the 1986 DC Comics series Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, many creators turned towards violence and moral ambivalence in an attempt to make their stories more “realistic,” completely missing the fact that both of those groundbreaking series had used excessive violence as a way to comment on the fascistic impulses that their creators saw hidden within the superhero genre. This “grim and gritty” trend—frequently epitomized at Marvel by the Punisher’s war on crime, which was portrayed with decreasing amounts of accompanying critique—was only one strand of Marvel’s continued world-building in this period. While some Marvel Comics took their cue from Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, though, others were instead inspired by DC’s 1985 epic crossover “event,” Crisis on Infinite Earths. After decades of stories that had contributed to an ever-expanding “multiverse” of multiple parallel dimensions, the powers that be at DC had decided to clean up their continuity and reboot it in one clean, consistent story world, much as Marvel had been doing for decades. To accomplish this, the company created the comic book world’s first large-scale company-wide crossover, with a central twelve-issue monthly miniseries that spread out into tie-in issues in about half of the DC line during the course of the year. Practically every character DOI: 10.4324/9781003051008-4

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from the company’s fifty-year history put in an appearance, and the result was a commercial blockbuster with generally favorable critical reception.1 Just as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns had kicked off the “grim and gritty” era in the comics industry, Crisis began a period of semi-annual crossovers that saw creators exploring various corners of their fictional universes in order to mine them for threats that might be big enough to require a response from the world’s greatest heroes. At Marvel, this meant a continuation of the “illusion of change” that Stan Lee had told Roy Thomas to implement. Rather than diving deeper into the psychology of their protagonists, Marvel’s writers relied on the soap opera of characters’ personal lives mixed with action-focused stories that explored different corners of the Marvel Universe. No series epitomized this outward turn more viscerally than Marvel’s first line-wide crossover, Secret Wars.

Uncovering the Secret DC’s Crisis had come about because of pressure from the company’s publisher and editors to streamline continuity. As would become a common occurrence with these big-scale crossovers, creators on individual books were asked to alter their plans and ensure that their storylines properly tied in to the major events happening in, and after, Crisis. Though frustrating to many of DC’s writers, this was at least a crossover mandated for story purposes. Secret Wars, on the other hand, came about due to pressure from a different source—the toy company Mattel. As Marvel writer and editor Tom DeFalco explains, Mattel wanted to use only our major heroes and villains in their toy line. They also wanted an editorial concept which could tie them all together. We supplied that idea by creating the first companywide crossover in the history of comics. Sure, heroes had been forming teams from the days of the original Justice Society of America … but we had never seen so many gathered together in a story which spread out to cover so many diverse titles. (DeFalco) Though this is technically true, it is also quite likely that Marvel’s editorial team had caught wind of DC Comics’ plans for Crisis

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which—though it was released after Secret Wars’ 1984 debut— had been in the planning stages for years, with public mentions dating back to as early as 1982. The central creative voice behind Secret Wars was Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, who had been promoted to the position in 1978. Because this was the same point at which Stan Lee moved to Los Angeles to oversee Marvel’s multimedia projects, Shooter was given a type of control over the entire line that no other editor-in-chief had enjoyed, save for Lee himself. This amount of power, by some accounts, went to his head, and by all accounts created conflict with some of Marvel’s top writers, including John Byrne, Steve Gerber (creator of Howard the Duck), and even former editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman (who would leave the company for DC, where he ended up co-creating and writing Crisis on Infinite Earths). As Bradford Wright explains, Shooter endeavored to tighten up the editorial direction of Marvel’s comic books by reining in the self-indulgent excesses that he felt had marred many of the stories in recent years. In the process, his heavy-handed approach alienated a number of creators, who subsequently defected to the competition. (259) Out went idiosyncratic, psychologically-based stories like Don McGregor’s run on Black Panther or Gerber’s satirical stories of an anthropomorphic duck trapped in the Marvel Universe, and in came books that (though often no less deep or nuanced) were much more focused on heavy plotting mixed with soap opera, including the Claremont/Byrne X-Men run, Byrne’s own run on The Fantastic Four, and acclaimed runs on Daredevil by Frank Miller (before going on to create The Dark Knight Returns) and Thor by Walt Simonson. However, another aspect of Shooter’s tighter editorial control was an emphasis on corporate synergy that would bring Marvel’s characters and stories to new audiences. Some creators would much less forgivingly see this as Shooter completely selling out the spirit of creative innovation that had made Marvel popular in the first place. In a 1979 article in the New York Times, sources at Marvel went so far as to claim, “that the editor-in-chief is power-thirsty and that the top people are more interested in coining money from licensing deals

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than they are in the superheroes” (259). Secret Wars, as an explicit tie-in with a line of toys, was perhaps the apotheosis of this side of Shooter. As comics historian Keith Dallas explains, To cement the licensing agreement, Mattel required from Marvel a special comic book that the action figure line could tie into. Shooter suggested Marvel produce the star-studded story many of its readers had been clamoring for, which he had tentatively titled “Cosmic Champions.” Mattel, though, recommended a title that included the words “wars” and “secret” after focus group tests indicated that young boys reacted positively to those words. So the title of the event was changed to Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars. It would become Marvel’s best-selling comic book of the decade. (Dallas 105) Mattel, then, was active in the creation of at least the name of the series, clearly indicating from the beginning that the sales potential of the series were more important than the creative drive, which was perhaps why, with a few small exceptions, it proved to have very little impact on Marvel continuity. Secret Wars was not designed to explore unique corners of the Marvel Universe or to contribute new ones; in fact, the entire twelve issues took place on a vaguely defined new planet called “Battleworld” that was created from a patchwork of sections stolen from other planets across the universe. The cosmic entity behind its creation, the Beyonder, is only ever portrayed as a beam of light, with no depth of character beyond a curiosity that drives him to abduct heroes and villains from Earth in order to force them to battle one another. To whet readers’ appetites for the story, the regular comic books of characters who would appear in Secret Wars saw their stars investigating a mysterious structure that suddenly appeared in New York’s Central Park, only for the heroes to disappear along with the high-tech construction. They all would return the following month, having been gone for some unspecified amount of time during which they experienced changes to their status quo—the Thing was gone and replaced on the Fantastic Four by She-Hulk, for example, and Spider-Man had a new costume. These minor changes were heralded by Shooter and the rest of Marvel’s editorial team as having major impacts on the Marvel

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Universe. That was why Shooter himself would write the title, to maintain editorial consistency across the line. According to Sean Howe, “Shooter’s ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ column and the articles in Marvel Age hammered it through the minds of readers and retailers alike: this is going to change everything about these characters and you are going to buy it” (269). Ultimately, though, most of these continuity changes were extremely short-lived. The one notable exception was Spider-Man’s new costume, which ultimately was revealed to be a living symbiote being who, after being rejected by Spider-Man, merged with one of Peter Parker’s enemies to become the grim-and-gritty 90s villain/antihero Venom. What’s more, in addition to having no real lasting impact on the Marvel Universe, Secret Wars was critically panned, in part because, as Howe explains, “One could argue that the fight-filled Secret Wars went against everything that made Marvel Comics special—although there were the usual squabbles and misunderstandings between the good guys, there was a minimum of moral shading” (269). As much as fans and critics may have disliked Secret Wars, though, it sold a decent number of toys and a massive amount of comic books, therefore proving itself to be a success. So much so, in fact, that it spawned a sequel. As with the first miniseries, Secret Wars II arose not out of a story idea, but out of financial impetus. Though not tied in with a toy release this time, the sequel was blatantly intended to capitalize on the massive sales success of the original event, this time spreading the wealth across the Marvel line. Keith Dallas explains: The first Secret Wars was an unqualified financial boon … and an equally unqualified critical bust. By the time the series ended, it was widely mocked as uninspiring, juvenile fare. It was so reviled, in fact, that at a 1984 comic book retailer summit in Baltimore, when Marvel’s Direct Sales Manager, Carol Kalish, announced the plan to produce Secret Wars II, she was loudly booed. Undeterred, Kalish quickly responded, “Let’s be honest. Secret Wars was crap, right? But did it sell?” With the crowd assenting, Kalish continued, “Well, get ready for Secret Wars two!” The meeting room then erupted into cheers. As Kalish assured, Secret Wars II became 1985’s bestselling comic book. (Dallas 139)

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Not only was Secret Wars II, the nine-issue main series, successful but it also spawned a huge number of crossovers into monthly Marvel titles, inspired by what DC had done during Crisis on Infinite Earths. What this meant was, For the first time in the history of Marvel Comics, someone who wanted to read an entire story had to purchase not just all the issues of one title, but all the ancillary issues as well. When all was said and done, that reader would have spent $30 to possess the entire Secret Wars II saga. (Dallas 140) Secret Wars II reversed the concept of the first Secret Wars by having the Beyonder come to Earth, where he gave himself a body and tried to learn what it meant to be human. This being the 1980s, that meant “shoulder pads, turned-up collars, jumpsuits, and Jheri curls” (Howe 282), plus a storyline that touched on sex, drug use, and prostitution. By setting the story on Earth, Shooter (who again wrote the series) was able to do more than just showcase battles between heroes and villains; there were quite a few moments of social commentary as the Beyonder tried to find his way through the world of the 1980s. However, Shooter erred too far in this other direction, with many tedious monologues, long scenes featuring unlikable characters, and too little focus on the heroes that were the selling point of the whole series. Howe notes: For all the gripes that the series was another cynical cash-in, it possessed moments of truly biting satire, often aimed at mindless consumerism … The series petered out into an endless shaggy-dog tale, in which the Beyonder repeatedly destroyed and restored people and places, his own fulfillment always just out of reach. (282) As a result, the critical response to the sequel was extremely negative, even more than it had been towards the first Secret Wars (which at least appealed to younger readers). According to Dallas, Secret Wars II was one of the most despised comics of the year, at least as far as the fan press was concerned. The series wound up on

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most ‘worst comics of the year’ lists and was the subject of many negative reviews in the fan press. Despite many fans’ hatred of the mini-series and the chaos that the comic’s production wreaked behind the scenes, the series sold phenomenally well. (140) Because fans ultimately speak louder with their wallets than they do with articles in magazines, this meant that crossovers had come to Marvel to stay. As journalist Reed Tucker notes, this new status quo of regular crossovers was the case at DC, as well: Whatever their respective virtues and weaknesses, Secret Wars and Crisis ushered in the era of the comic book event … Readers had now gotten a taste of a big important story that was perceived to matter more than the now-pedestrian yarns that filled the books month after month … As the comic publishers would quickly discover, anything branded an “event” sold to the comic book diehards, regardless of whether it was any good. Fans had invested so many hours in these fictional universes that the thought of simply skipping a story they were told ad nauseam held great important was not an option. (151) What the fans wanted to buy and what the creators wanted to work on, though, were not quite the same thing. With Secret Wars II, for example, While many of the crossover stories read well, there was tremendous tension behind the scenes to produce them. Shooter was often tardy in writing the Secret Wars II scripts and his lateness necessitated changes in the crossover issues. Shooter even removed the writers of some of the crossover comics and ended up writing the issues himself. (Dallas 140) Marvel writer/editor Mark Gruenwald would later describe crossovers as publishing initiatives that, sometimes seem like a necessary evil, and sometimes like an unnecessary good! … But as long as the idea of crossing over

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Gruenwald, though, would make his own major impact on Marvel continuity in another groundbreaking superhero series of the 1980s, one that would introduce an important new theme to Marvel’s ongoing world-building—multiplicity.

Squadron Goals Comic book superhero multiverses had been around since before the Fantastic Four—a month before, that is, when DC introduced the concept of multiple Earths housing different generations of their characters. While Earth 1 was home to the heroes of the 1960s, on Earth 2 could be found all of the heroes of the Justice Society from the 1930s and 1940s. Between 1961 and 1985, this concept had grown out of control, leading to the destruction of DC’s multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Marvel, on the other hand, had published a few stories set in the odd parallel universe or alternate future, but never established a multiversal cosmology in the way that DC had done. Ironically, though, at the same time as DC was destroying its multiverse, Marvel was first exploring its own. Media scholar and theorist Henry Jenkins has the following to say about multiplicity in superhero comics today, as compared to the type of ongoing, single-universe continuity established by Lee, Kirby, and Ditko in the 1960s: Today, comics have entered a period where principles of multiplicity are felt at least as powerfully as those of continuity. Under this new system, readers may consume multiple versions of the same franchises, each with different conceptions of the character, different understandings of their relationships with the secondary figures, different moral perspectives, exploring different moments in their lives, and so forth … [T] he new system for organizing production layers over earlier practices so that we do not … lose interest in continuity as we enter into a period of multiplicity. (20–21)

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What this means in practice is that though Marvel Comics may have begun its imaginary world with one single continuity—one version of the publisher’s characters and their stories—as time went on new versions of those characters crept in, whether these were specifically denoted as out-of-continuity tales (such as in the long-running What If? series that imagined what would happen to Marvel if past stories had taken a different path) or alternate universes that could, and would, cross over with the main Marvel Universe. Terrence Wandtke explains, Since the 1980s, some of the most popular stories had been stories of alternative universes such as the X-Men’s “Days of Future Past” and “Age of Apocalypse” that became known largely because of the crossovers of characters from one universe to the other. Alan Moore would randomly pick the designation Earth-616 for the primary Marvel universe as an homage to the DC tendency to number alternate earths … [T]he idea of a multiverse (or omniverse as it was sometimes called at Marvel) was becoming increasingly important to Marvel even though there wasn’t the same practical imperatives that existed at DC … Marvel has never demonstrated a desire to clean up their omniverse and have in fact taken steps that are quite contrary. (Wandtke 157) Rather than worrying about creating a coherent cosmology, as DC has done ever since Crisis, and focusing on creating a sense of consistency to the multiverse, Marvel has instead developed a system that accepts the messiness of multiplicity and trusts its readers to differentiate alternate versions from the “main” Marvel Universe. Worlds that were conceived specifically to be separate from the main Marvel titles, for example, such as the “New Universe” line of completely new heroes published in the 1980s, would eventually cross over with Earth-616. The first major parallel Earth fully explored as part of the growing Marvel multiverse was the universe of the Squadron Supreme, a world consisting of Marvel analogues of DC’s Justice League. Indeed, the concept for the Squadron Supreme dated back to an attempt by Roy Thomas to surreptitiously show fans an Avengers/ Justice League fight in The Avengers #70. That issue marked the first

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appearance of the villainous Squadron Sinister, a team of four heroes on the Avengers’ Earth patterned after DC’s Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and Flash. In issues 85 and 86, Thomas then introduced an alternate universe heroic version of the team with an expanded roster (still based on DC heroes). This Squadron Supreme would then make occasional appearances over the next decade or so, until a storyline appearing in the Defenders title left the team’s world in shambles following its takeover by a mind-controlling alien entity called the Over-Mind. This was the state of the Squadron Supreme’s world (later classified as Earth-712) when Mark Gruenwald’s twelve-issue miniseries began. In the first issue, the team deals with the reality of the broken political and social systems of their world following the Over-Mind’s defeat. The post-apocalyptic scenario prompts team leader Hyperion (a stand-in for Superman) to make a speech proposing radical changes to the team’s way of operating: I propose we dedicate ourselves to remaking the world … We should not just randomly stop super-criminals, an alien invader, or a natural disaster—and leave the rest of the world’s problems unaddressed … problems which inflict the majority of mankind with suffering and death. We should actively pursue solutions to all the world’s problems—abolish war and crime, eliminate poverty and hunger, establish equality among all peoples, clean up the environment, cure disease and—even cure death itself! (20–21) This prompts Nighthawk (the team’s version of Batman) to resign from the team, after voicing his concerns that, solving all the world’s problems and handing it to the people on a silver platter seems wrong to me. How meaningful will a utopia be if it is a gift and not something man has earned by his own labors? What if the people will not accept the utopia you give them? Will you force them to take it? (21). The rest of the miniseries revolves around these two opposing ideologies, with Hyperion and the Squadron Supreme remaking their world in increasingly extreme ways, including brainwashing

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supervillains into serving on the team. Meanwhile, Nighthawk gathers his own team of villains and estranged heroes to form a resistance group, culminating in a battle in the final issue that sees characters from both sides, including Nighthawk himself, dying. As Pierre Comtois notes, this was taking the “realism” of Marvel’s superheroes to an entirely new level: Although a precedent for setting characters in a realistic environment had first been set by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby with Fantastic Four #1 … even they never took things as far as they could have … Gruenwald’s members of the Squadron Supreme would struggle with issues of sexual obsession, the temptation of power, crises of conscience, and psychological motivation. (Comtois 130) The Squadron Supreme miniseries asked the question of what would happen if superheroes stopped just defending the status quo. The straightforward, classical art of the various pencillers on the series—Bob Hall, John Buscema, and Paul Neary—accentuated the fact that this was still a superhero series, complete with colorful costumes, fantastical set pieces, and epic battles, but Gruenwald’s script clearly wanted to interrogate what it really meant to believe the Marvel Universe mantra (originated in the first Spider-Man story) that with great power must come great responsibility. However, unlike with DC’s books of the era questioning the superheroic conceit, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, which were both stand-alone stories,2 Squadron Supreme was explicitly a part of the Marvel Universe. The miniseries crossed over into an issue of Captain America, which Gruenwald was also writing at the time, as Nighthawk sought help from the Marvel heroes in overcoming the Squadron. In a run on the “cosmic” title Quasar following the conclusion of the miniseries, the writer even brought the remainder team over to the main Marvel Universe miniseries, where they remained for a number of years. This would be the first of many times that Marvel folded alternate universes into Earth-616, as the company came to embrace the multiplicity that had for so long defined the DC Universe.

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Heroes Reborn and Rebooted 1996 saw two simultaneous occurrences at Marvel—the rebooting of several of their core titles in a separate continuity called “Heroes Reborn,” and the company filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. These events were not unrelated. In the early 1990s, as Marvel continued to focus on merchandising and media tie-in, several of the company’s most prominent creators began to feel frustrated that they were not receiving fair compensation for the ideas and creations they were contributing to the company under work-for-hire contracts. This was not a new complaint; Jack Kirby had been driven away from Marvel over the same practices that he saw as unfair, including the company refusing to return to him his own original art pages. What was different in the 1990s, though, was that a group of top-tier creators—primarily artists, though many of them wrote or co-wrote the books that they drew— decided to defy the corporate system by banding together to create work outside of Marvel, DC, or any of the smaller, independent publishers. The company that they formed, Image Comics, was founded on a platform of creator-owned characters and books, with writers and artists maintaining full control over their intellectual property. Bolstered by the hottest names in comics creating highprofile new franchises—such as Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.s, and Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood—Image had become the third-largest comics publisher by the mid-1990s. Most of the Image co-founders had been working at Marvel before leaving for the new company, which left Marvel in a doublebind—they lost several of their most popular, best-selling artists, plus they were facing financial pressure from a new competitor. Combined with a general industry slump and the aftermath of a poor decision to purchase its own distribution company, Marvel was in dire financial straits, which led to both the bankruptcy and the attempt to woo new readers with the “Heroes Reborn” Line. Although “Heroes Reborn” would very specifically feature Marvel’s non-mutant heroes (since the X-Men books, as well as the Spider-Man titles, were selling well at the time), it actually kicked off with a storyline arising out of the X-Men’s continuity. When a powerful mutant being called Onslaught—a combination of the darker sides of both Professor Xavier and mutant separatist/extremist

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Magneto—threatened the world, the X-Men had to call in the rest of Marvel’s heroes for help. In the process of stopping Onslaught, the Avengers (including Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk) and the Fantastic Four seemingly sacrificed themselves. In reality, though, they were actually rescued by Franklin Richards, the young mutant son of the Fantastic Four’s Reed and Sue Richards, and shunted into an alternate universe where their lives began anew. In practice, this meant that Marvel was able to restart four of its marquee titles with a new continuity that would welcome in new readers. To accomplish this feat, they turned to a pair of the era’s best-selling creators, Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, even though they happened to be two of the Image founders who had turned their back on Marvel just years earlier. This decision did not go over well with other creators and staff at Marvel, as Sean Howe explains: The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Iron Man would now be created completely by the California studios of Jim Lee and Liefeld. The news that Marvel was removing control of its characters from its own staff and handing million-dollar contracts (plus profit-sharing) to those who’d recently walked out on the company was, in the word of one editor, “catastrophic to morale.” (373) One of Marvel’s most popular and acclaimed writers, Kurt Busiek, would voice another concern, that Marvel was turning its back on 35 years of world-building: This is a turning point. The Marvel reader is essentially being told that Marvel’s long-term history is more or less irrelevant. It’s secondary to what will make the characters more popular and what will make the company more money. (Quoted in Howe 373–374) Despite the controversy, though, the “Heroes Reborn” line offered some unique opportunities for Marvel, both financially and creatively, as Matthew Costello explains: This convoluted process had several benefits for Marvel. It offered the opportunity to produce several major titles with the

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The Marvel Multitude number 1 on the cover, making the books attractive as potential collectibles to the investor market. This would escalate sales for these titles, for a short period at least. It also offered Marvel the opportunity to begin fresh, ignoring some of the continuity that made stories hard to tell, or even starting with a new continuity. (Costello 201)

What’s more, restarting characters’ continuity in the 1990s allowed Marvel to re-situate their origins in a context that was more representative of the post-Cold War era, where American virtue was no longer viewed as a given by most readers as it had been in the early 1960s. Unfortunately for Marvel, though, Lee and Liefeld were known and appreciated primarily for their artwork, not for their scripting abilities. Even though both would bring in various talented, wellknown writers to help improve the quality of the stories, the focus was still primarily on the artwork, which aped the Image style of multiple splash pages, exaggerated anatomies, impressionist imagery that radiated attitude rather than storytelling, and a focus on action over character work. The books all sold better than they had prior to the reboot, but they faced serious critical backlash in the fan press. Regardless of sales, however, the deal with Lee and Liefeld to essentially outsource the “Heroes Reborn” line proved to be too difficult to negotiate long-term. After a year, all four titles were cancelled, and Marvel published a miniseries called Heroes Reborn: The Return that saw the Avengers and Fantastic Four return to the regular Marvel Universe and regain their memories of their previous lives. When the four titles relaunched again (along with a new Thor), they were all branded under the banner of “Heroes Return,” which, Costello notes, combined a more classic style of art with a continuing interrogation of previously uncontested American values: The stories of the rebooted Marvel universe reiterate themes and tropes from the heyday of Marvel’s success. This is quickly apparent in the very look of the books, which returned to the bright colors, clear lines, and firm contrasts of the earlier period. Gone are the impressionistic and ambiguous images of the early 1990s. Instead, the books have a more contained look, with gutters separating panels, characters firmly distinguished from

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backgrounds, and a color scheme that accentuates bright background and primary colors … The clear and distinct images give a strong sense of certainty to the ideas being portrayed while the bright colors and stark contrasts suggest a positive message of a pleasant world. Within this visual assertion of positivity and truth, however, the re-creation of the earlier epoch’s themes and certainty fails. After the Cold War, American virtue and unquestioned progress cannot be asserted without irony or question. (Costello 201–202) What’s more, with the heroes back in the main Marvel Universe, the company’s continuity also returned, with storylines in the “Heroes Return” books immediately integrating disparate pieces of decades of continuity. The first storyline in the rebooted Avengers, for example, showcased every hero who had ever been a member of the team, while the second story arc featured the Squadron Supreme. As this was an era of increased multiplicity at Marvel, though, the “Heroes Reborn” Earth would not simply disappear. Rather, it was declared a “pocket universe,” which would interact several times with the heroes of Earth-616. Most notably, the only major original creation from the “Heroes Reborn” universe, Captain America’s female sidekick Rikki Barnes, would, like the Squadron Supreme, ultimately travel to the main Marvel Universe herself. As much as “Heroes Reborn” showed that Marvel was willing to publish two simultaneous continuities—the traditional, Earth-616 Marvel Universe where the X-Men, Spider-Man, and others still resided and the “pocket universe” of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four—there was, from the start, an explicit in-world story reason for these dual universes. Additionally, Marvel readers weren’t confronted with multiple versions of heroes at the same time, since each hero had been sorted into one of the two universes.3 When it came to Marvel’s next attempt to reboot its heroes for a new audience, this separation wouldn’t be quite as clear-cut.

The Ultimate Secret Though Marvel’s reintegration of its continuity after “Heroes Reborn” was popular with fans and critics, it did mean that one of the impetuses behind that experiment still remained—decades’ worth of complex

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continuity hampered new readers from being able to pick up any given Marvel comic and understand it. Rather than attempt to again restart that continuity, Marvel’s leadership at the time—president of publishing Bill Jemas and editor-in-chief Joe Quesada—decided to simply create a new line of comics, branded as the Ultimate universe, with a new, reader-friendly continuity. In combining the “clean slate” of the New Universe with the modern takes on classic stories from the Heroes Reborn titles, Jemas and Quesada struck gold, creating an extremely popular line of comics that appealed to readers old and new. William Proctor notes that the Ultimate titles were able to successfully draw in both types of readers by operat[ing] as a parallel counterpart to the central spine of Earth-616 and act[ing] as host for reversions and remediations of familiar faces. This strategy allowed creators to begin stories again for the generation of new readers who had not been around to witness the emergence of Spider-Man or the XMen; at the same time, it invited longtime fans to see how the old materials would be contemporized. (328) The Ultimate line launched with only two titles, Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men, written by rising stars Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar with art by Marvel mainstays Mark Bagley and Adam Kubert, respectively. Without worrying about how the Ultimate universe might tie into mainstream Marvel continuity, Bendis and Millar were able to reinvent the heroes to fit into the world of the twenty-first century. Spider-Man, for example, was back to being a high school student, and rather than keeping his secret identity private for decades he revealed it to his girlfriend, Mary Jane, within the first year of the series. When Millar followed up Ultimate X-Men with his take on the Avengers, called simply The Ultimates, they were a government-organized team of unlikable, self-interested individuals who had to learn how to work together as a team. These radical new takes on the heroes were unique enough to appeal to long-time readers, who wanted watch what other differences might occur as this new universe unfolded, but also didn’t require decades of knowledge to understand, thus bringing in new readers. When the line first launched, it skyrocketed in popularity. At the time, Quesada indicated that the Ultimate universe and Marvel

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Universe were entirely separate entities, and would only ever cross over with one another when the company had completely run out of new ideas. Twelve years later, though, the Ultimate universe had lost some of its luster, as it had developed its own confusing continuity over the previous decade. In addition, many Marvel Universe titles were outselling the Ultimate line, thanks to a series of successful linewide crossovers4 and new creative teams that had revitalized stale franchises such Spider-Man and the X-Men. Finally, in a high-profile story that received a great deal of media coverage, Brian Michael Bendis had killed off the Ultimate universe’s Peter Parker, replacing him with a new, younger, half-black/half-Latinx Spider-Man named Miles Morales. Given these changing circumstances, Marvel decided to publish the first crossover between the Ultimate universe and the Marvel Universe of Earth-616 in a series titled Spider-Men. In the story, written by Bendis, Peter Parker of Earth-616 travels to the Ultimate universe, now designated Earth-1610. This would prove to be only the first of several crossovers between the two universes, culminating in the lead-up to the 2015 crossover event Secret Wars, named after the original series. Not only would Secret Wars mark the end of the Ultimate line, but it would also serve to cement a new era of multiplicity at Marvel. Rather than appearing out of nowhere as a corporate tie-in initiative, as 1984’s Secret Wars had, 2015’s Secret Wars grew organically out of a years-long run on the Avengers books by writer Jonathan Hickman. His ongoing storyline had featured a series of multiversal “incursions,” in which two Earths from alternate dimensions would come into contact with one another and either one or both of them (and their entire universes) would be destroyed. By the time of the main Secret Wars miniseries, the only two universes left remaining are those of Earth-616 and Earth-1610. At the end of the first issue, both universes are destroyed, leading to the creation of a new Battleworld by the sorcerer supreme, Dr. Strange, and one of the Marvel Universe’s preeminent villains, Dr. Doom, who is known as the god-emperor of this new world. This time, though, rather than Battleworld simply being made out of nondescript pieces taken from alien worlds, the new planet consists of discrete “kingdoms” that have been taken from specific Marvel alternate universes and previous crossover events. In issue

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#4, when a small group of heroes who have survived the destruction of the two Earths come across Strange, he explains to them how Battleworld was explicitly constructed from what remained of the multiverse: It was formed from the shattered remnants of broken Earths—I know, for I watched Doom will them into singularity. If there’s one thing you hear, let it be this: the new world is unnatural, and survival is its first and highest purpose. As such, it is a place of testing—of constant conflict—and it needs a god with a firm hand. Thus, Battleworld. Thus … Doom. Long may he wear his crown. (5–6) Despite what this monologue might imply, however, the Hickmanpenned Secret Wars is not as action-focused as the original series. Instead, it is more concerned with exploring the various realms of this new Battleworld, celebrating the vast tapestry of Marvel’s imaginary world, and exploring the psychologies of Doom, Strange, and the heroes and villains who survived the incursions. The many tie-in miniseries flesh out the entirety of Battleworld in order to touch upon the vastness of the world’s realms, featuring multiple versions of the same characters. With a group of multiple Thors tasked as the peace-keepers in this world, Secret Wars clearly forefronts multiplicity, as different versions of the same characters interact with one another throughout the series. Indeed, the end of the series ushers in a new era of multiplicity for Marvel as, the multiversal slate wiped clean by the incursions, Reed and Sue Richards’ son Franklin is imbued with the power to recreate the entire multiverse. This would provide an in-story reason for future Marvel writers and artists to create whatever new universes they could imagine and to return to ones that, like Earth-616, were recreated as they were prior to Secret Wars. One universe that is not recreated, though, is Earth-1610. With the Ultimate line less relevant and popular than it had been when it launched fifteen years earlier, Marvel’s editorial team made the decision to end that universes’ continuity and simply use Secret Wars to transplant Miles Morales and his friends and family into the main Marvel Universe. With this in mind, Reed Richards’ monologue at the end of the series’ ninth and final issue seems to

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be a direct mission statement for a more expansive Marvel Universe that accepts its entire history: I learned that the difference between living and dying is managing fear. Not being so afraid of losing the things you love that you hold them too tight. I used to believe in universal contraction. Entropy and the end of all things. Well, I’ve changed my mind. I’m letting go. Because now I believe in expansion. I believe we endure. Don’t you see? Everything lives. (37–38) As we shall see in the next chapter, this new expansiveness was one of greater diversity in characters and creators, as well as of a continuity that embraced multiple versions of the same character (like Peter Parker’s Spider-Man and Miles Morales’ Spider-Man existing in the same world), reaffirming that the entirety of Marvel’s continuity remained the ongoing tale of a single imaginary world. Two series would directly follow up on this assertion, providing inuniverse explanations for how characters created in the 1960s were still young and vital a half century later. The first of these, a new version of The Ultimates that shared only its name with the Ultimate universe’s version of the Avengers, was a team book from writer Al Ewing that explored the cosmology of the new universe created at the end of Secret Wars. In issue #5, this culminates with the cosmic entity Galactus explaining the way that time works in the Marvel Universe: Behold space-time. The present moment – the “now – hurtling from past to future along a stream of events. And events have weight. Sometimes the weight is vast – sometimes so light as to be undetectable. But some events – those with a peculiar, unique gravity – are caught by the present. Dragged in its wake, like planets about a sun. Always just a handful of years behind … [The past] shifts. Slides. As does the future. Behold – future events, cohering from the infinite possibility. As they grow more probable, they can be reached – or reach back. Changes can be made. New branches and sidestreams – alternate histories. Or ripples in the main flow that change the past further. Altering the present … Perhaps too much disruption will wash you all

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The Marvel Multitude away. But does that make time broken? Or fluid? The past changes with you or without you. History is never fixed. (13–14)

Accompanying this monologue is a series of images showcasing important events in Marvel history (the formation of the Fantastic Four, the appearance of Onslaught, etc.) and then images of different alternate futures that have been presented over the course of Marvel’s publishing history. What Ewing and artist Kenneth Rocafort are indicating is that time itself in the Marvel Universe is a fluid construct that constantly places important events at just “a handful of years” prior. This provides a cosmological structure for why the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men, Spider-Man, and all the other Marvel heroes are still in their twenties, thirties, and forties despite having been fighting crime and evil-doers for half a century. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this concept to Marvel’s unique form world-building. While DC Comics had always relied on a multiverse and various reboots to shunt older stories away into alternate universes, and continually rebooted their characters so that their youth made relative sense, Marvel took the opposite tact, simply continuing to tell its one, long, interconnected superhero narrative, and even bringing in the stories that were originally alternate universes. Until this point, there had never been a consistent reason as to how, for example, the accident that made Tony Stark invent the Iron Man armor could have happened during the Vietnam War if he was still a young, vital man in the twenty-first century. Now, this idea of “fluid time” allows for both truths to co-exist. In essence, Ewing narrativized the sliding scale of continuity in the Marvel Universe, reifying the publisher’s entire history and retroactively justifying all of its incongruent timelines. Though not directly invoking this logic as its justification, writer Mark Waid (a fan-turned-pro with a long history of continuity obsessiveness at both DC and Marvel) would show how just such a cosmological conceit could be used in practice in the Marvel Universe. Waid’s sprawling History of the Marvel Universe, created with artist Javier Rodríguez, is an attempt to integrate the entire history of Marvel Comics, dating back to the Timely era of the 1930s and 40s, into a single, cohesive story. In the process, the writer creates an explicit fictional stand-in for Vietnam to justify

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the backstories of heroes and villains that were tied into the Vietnam War and even World War II. Issue #2 describes this conflict: When the Asian nation of Siancong resisted communist takeover, the conflict turned international. Nations both from the West and the East entered the decades-long Siancong War, in time struggling to lay first claim to Siancong’s primary asset: a mysterious energy known only as “The Dragon’s Breath,” around which cults and legends had grown … It was in Siancong that marines James Rhodes [the hero War Machine] and Frank Castle, Army Air Force pilot Ben Grimm, military consultant Reed Richards, and many others who would later become key figures in history fought in service of their country. (20) Whereas the Vietnam War is a real-world event firmly entrenched in history, the Siancong War can instead be “dragged along” behind the heroes as part of the Marvel Universe’s fluid timeline. The issue’s annotations make this explicit: To accommodate for the passage of time, some Marvel Universe references of character involvement in the Vietnam War have been retroactively refitted to be the Siancong Conflict; the Vietnam War remains a world even that took place from 1955– 1977 in the Marvel Universe as well as it did in reality. Therefore, due to the retroactive continuity, some in-story presentations of Marvel characters in the Vietnam War should be considered a depiction of the Siancong Conflict (36). Marvel was thus deliberately working to make its storyworld continuity make sense, justifying its oldest stories as well as its newest ones using in-world explanations.5 All of Marvel continuity, in both the main Earth-616 universe and the various pre- and post-Secret Wars multiversal variations, were part of the ongoing story now. But as we have seen, intricate continuity maneuverings are just one half of Marvel’s approach to world-building. The other half—a grounding in realism that comments on contemporary issues—was on display as never before in the years from the founding of the Ultimate line through Secret

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Wars and beyond, particularly in response to the real-world tragedy of September 11th, 2001, and the global “War on Terror” that would follow.

Notes 1 For much more on Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the DC Comics style of world-building that relied on the concept of the multiverse, see my own The World of DC Comics, New York: Routledge, 2019. 2 Though Watchmen was later integrated into the DC cosmology, and elements of The Dark Knight Returns have appeared in continuity, at the time they were written they were both explicitly meant to be set apart from the ongoing DC Universe. 3 The exception to this was the Hulk, whose human persona of Bruce Banner was taken to the “Heroes Reborn” universe while the unbridled id of his monstrous form remained behind, a story point addressed over the course of the year in the Hulk’s own title. 4 See the next chapter for more on these crossovers. 5 A goal perhaps influenced in part by Marvel’s online service providing access to digital versions of thousands of issues in the publisher’s massive back catalog.

References Comtois, Pierre. Marvel Comics in the 1980s: An Issue by Issue Field Guide to a Pop Culture Phenomenon. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2014. Costello, Matthew. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books & The Unmasking of Cold War America. New York: Continuum, 2009. Dallas, Keith. American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1980s. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2013. DeFalco, Tom. “Introduction,” in Secret Wars, edited by Ben Abernathy. New York: Marvel Comics, 2001. Ewing, Al, writer, Kenneth Rocafort, artist, et al. “Unimaginable,” The Ultimates #5. New York: Marvel Comics, May 2016. Gruenwald, Mark. “Mark’s Remarks,” reprinted in The Infinity Gauntlet Companion, edited by Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel Comics, 2018. Gruenwald, Mark, writer, Bob Hall, artist, et al. “The Utopia Principle,” Squadron Supreme #1. New York: Marvel Comics, September 1985. Hickman, Jonathan, writer, Esad Ribic´, artist, et al. “All the Angels Sing, All the Devils Dance,” Secret Wars #4. New York: Marvel Comics, September 2015. Hickman, Jonathan, writer, Esad Ribic´, artist, et al. “Beyond,” Secret Wars #9. New York: Marvel Comics, March 2016.

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Howe, Sean. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. Jenkins, Henry. “Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics.” In Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. Jones, Gerard and Will Jacobs. The Comic Book Heroes. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997. Kaveney, Roz. Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Film. London: I.B.Tauris, 2008. Proctor, William. “Shrödinger’s Cape: The Quantum Seriality of the Marvel Universe.” In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Waid, Mark, writer, Javier Rodríguez, artist, et al.History of the Marvel Universe #2. New York: Marvel Comics, October 2019. Wandtke, Terrence R. The Meaning of Superhero Comics. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

4

Terror and Paranoia Marvel Realism in the Twenty-first Century

In the final months of 2001, Marvel Comics tried to approach the events of September 11th seriously and soberly through several “tribute” books whose goal was to showcase America’s firefighters, police officers, emergency medical technicians, military forces, and other first responders as the “real” heroes (compared to the fictional superheroes), as well as to raise money for 9/11-related charities. As editor-in-chief Joe Quesada noted in a Today show interview at the time, “I was getting e-mails from fans almost instantly saying, you know, Marvel needs to step up” (quoted in Faludi 50). As journalist and media critic Susan Faludi notes, though, these tribute stories failed to break free from the simplistic morality stories at the core of superhero comics. Instead of questioning the heroic ideal, she argues, these comics pointed out how such an over-the-top view of the world had actually permeated reality itself: “The reversal of hero worship in the comic books underscored a troubling question in real life: why were our serious media insisting on portraying us and our leaders with such comic hyperbole?” (51–52). The apotheosis of these 9/11 stories came in a special tribute issue of Amazing Spider-Man (featuring a somber all-black cover) written by J. Michael Straczynski (known to fans as “JMS”) and illustrated by John Romita, Jr., with the proceeds given to 9/11-related tragedies. This issue firmly set the terrorist attacks in Marvel continuity, which led comics scribe Grant Morrison to call it, a genuinely heartfelt tale in which the superheroes aimlessly assembled at Ground Zero. They were compelled to acknowledge the event as if it had occurred in their own simulated DOI: 10.4324/9781003051008-5

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universe, but they hadn’t been there to prevent it, which negated their entire raison d’être. (346) However, the issue also included a now-infamous image of archvillain Dr. Doom crying, something that was criticized by many fans for contradicting the established continuity of the villain as an autocratic dictator who had committed terrorist acts himself. The debate over the scene served to highlight, once again, the importance that continuity holds to comic book fans. As such, a regular issue of Amazing Spider-Man may not have been the best place for a 9/11 memorial, serving as it did to highlight the ridiculous nature of such debates in relation to the real-world mourning following the terrorist attacks. Marvel would go on to launch a new Captain America series that dealt directly with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the new “War on Terror,” but soon after moved all of its books away from such political stories and back into the realm of superheroic adventure fiction1 (a path that DC had never quite strayed from). The publishers found that readers did not want to see any kind of jingoistic heroism or period of extended mourning. Rather, audiences wanted superhero comics to do what they did best, and provide an escape from the horrors of the world outside. As a result, the mainstream superhero stories—with the exception of the above-mentioned short run of Captain America—shied away from dealing with September 11th or the resulting War on Terror for several years. In this respect, the comics companies were taking part in a larger culture of consumption and comfort that arose following 9/ 11, as epitomized by President George W. Bush’s exhortation for Americans to maintain confidence in the economy. American citizens were being told by their government and by big businesses to return to normality by seeking out (and paying for) comfort in the face of a mentally disturbing national trauma. As Marita Sturken argues, this comfort culture was serving a larger national purpose: “The selling of comfort is a primary aspect of the affirmation of innocence in American culture” (37–38). After a few years passed, however, and America returned to a sense of something resembling normality, readers felt less of a need for comfort and were once again willing to accept more than just escapist narratives in their superhero comic books. As a result, both

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DC and Marvel Comics began to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of a post-9/11 America. Rather than crafting stories that put the superheroes into conversation with the actual real-world events and effects of 9/11, though, both publishers used the anxiety and tension in the American mindset and mediascape in order to create massive crossover events in the vein of Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars. DC’s approach to this would be to draw upon the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that permeated the country by creating a series of cosmic, metaphysical events that, like Crisis, obsessively referenced and reworked the company’s almost seventy years’ worth of stories, with one apocalyptic event following closely upon the heels of another. Marvel, on the other hand, reflecting the way in which it had differed from DC since the 1960s, chose to deal with several of the issues raised by 9/11 more directly, and produced a lengthy series of crossovers that reflected upon such topics as the Patriot Act, terrorism, and the Bush administration.

Wars Civil and Secret While DC Comics used the anxiety and desire for control and catharsis of a post-9/11 America to retreat further and further into the metatextuality of its own fictional realm, Marvel Comics took the opposite path. Though, like DC, the company engaged in a series of crossovers that built upon each other, Marvel chose to tell stories that, rather than dealing with epic cosmic forces, brought its heroes down to earth. If DC purposely avoided any overt references to recent and current events, Marvel decided to take those events, give them a bit of a fictional twist, and use them as the basis for line-wide crossovers. Philip Smith and Michael Goodrum argue, in reference this era at Marvel that, By telling a story with a different location, happening to different people and with different outcomes (essentially, by telling a different story) an event can be stripped of its immediacy and horror whilst maintaining a certain kernel of truth which could not otherwise be told. (488) This was the path that Marvel took in the wake of 9/11, retelling and reliving the traumatic events of the terrorist attacks and their

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political fallout, but clothed in the realm of a science fiction universe where the good guys win out against the “evil-doers” (to borrow a phrase utilized by President Bush in the years following 9/11). The stories maintain an element of realistic “truth” while being distanced enough from the real-world events so as to not be tasteless or inappropriate. Rather than directly engaging in real-world events such as the Patriot Act or the War on Terror, Marvel’s stories represented these ideas via thinly veiled metaphors that addressed contemporary issues through the lens of Marvel continuity. The first of these “event” stories was a 2004 crossover that ended the classic Avengers team and series, fittingly entitled Avengers Disassembled. The story was helmed by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist David Finch. Bendis was, by this point, one of Marvel’s most popular and acclaimed writers. He began his career as independent cartoonist, specializing in noir-ish stories of small-time criminals and bounty hunters, but by this time he had become famous at Marvel for a lengthy, revitalizing run on the Daredevil title; for the creation of Jessica Jones (a private eye whose “womanon-the-street” experiences in the Marvel Universe were initially told in an adults-only title, Alias); and for Ultimate Spider-Man. In 2004, Bendis was handed one of Marvel’s flagship properties, the Avengers, which he quickly put his mark on by violently “disassembling” the team and then putting together the New Avengers, which included both long-time members such as Captain America and Iron Man and new-comers (yet popular Marvel franchise characters) like Spider-Man and the X-Men’s Wolverine. Avengers Disassembled thus needed to be a story featuring enough devastation to cause the Avengers to disband, and it did this by crossing over into various titles and invoking images of 9/11, in the form of destroyed buildings, crashing planes, and seemingly endless amounts of rubble. This was the first step in a longer process of destabilizing the Marvel Universe so that it could follow a path similar to America’s after 9/11. With his takeover of the Avengers franchise, Brian Michael Bendis became one of the architects behind the evolving Marvel Universe’s continuity, a position which he took to with gusto, often using the line-wide crossover stories he was responsible for in order to speak to recent and current political issues. His next “event” was a miniseries entitled Secret War, with fully painted

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interiors by Italian artist Gabrielle Dell’Otto. Secret War focuses on a small group of superheroes recruited by spymaster Nick Fury to go on a secret mission to the tiny European nation of Latveria in order to infiltrate the country and put a stop to the export of technology to American criminals. A year later, Latveria’s prime minister, Lucia Von Bardas,2 orchestrates a devastating revenge attack on New York, bringing Fury’s secret machinations to light. Given his background as a soldier in World War II and a longtime Cold Warrior, it is unsurprising that Fury frames the entire affair as a war (justifying the series’ title): I’m a wartime general. I have weapons and I have soldiers and I have a job to do … I didn’t start this war, but damn it to hell, I’m not going to lose it … I just don’t have the time or inclination to debate the finer points of wartime morality, with a bunch of people who wear masks. (24–25) As a result of his actions, defensible or not, Fury is kicked out of spy organization SHIELD and branded a war criminal, an aging superspy cast out in the cold. With this plot point, Bendis and Marvel are symbolically bidding farewell to the Cold War, which, confusing and painful as it was for many Americans, was nevertheless a modernist conflict of two gigantic international systems. In the postmodern world of terrorist cells and dispersed enemies, Fury is no longer the man who can lead America’s covert forces into battle against a clearly-defined enemy. Secret War thus continues what Avenger: Disassembled began, further destabilizing the Marvel Universe and turning it into a world of moral inscrutability where the heroic ideal is questioned and the stakes are raised ever higher. This, in and of itself, reflects America’s post-9/11 tensions and fears, but Marvel would address the Bush administration’s post-9/11 politics head-on in its next major event, the 2006–2007 crossover series Civil War. In Civil War (with a main seven-issue miniseries created by writer Mark Millar and artist Steve McNiven, along with multiple tie-in miniseries and crossovers into the majority of Marvel’s titles), a battle between superheroes and supervillains in Stamford, Connecticut leads to the deaths of a playground full of children, sparking off protests against unregulated heroes and the passing of the “Superhuman Registration Act.” This act is never explicitly printed in any Marvel

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comic, and its implementation is differently represented in a variety of conflicting comics, but the general gist of the law is that all superhumans must register their name and powers with the government, and then must undergo training before becoming licensed to act as superheroes under governmental control. Captain America, however, expresses his belief in issue #1 that, this plan will split us down the middle. I think you’re going to have us at war with one another … super heroes need to stay above that sort of stuff or Washington starts telling us who the super-villains are. (24–25) His words prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as he turns against the government and forms an underground rebellion of superheroes against both the Registration Act and the “pro-registration” superheroes led by Iron Man. Despite its vague, confusing, and conflicting descriptions over the course of the Civil War crossover event, the Superhero Registration Act is clearly meant to stand in for the controversial Patriot Act enacted by Congress in 2001. Pushed quickly through legislation in the wake of 9/11 as a perceived precaution against future terrorist attacks, and playing off the fears of a traumatized nation, the Patriot Act immediately brought forth a plethora of detractors, who saw it as fascist government surveillance of private citizens. Civil War is a metaphor for the battle between detractors of the Patriot Act and those who felt that it was a legitimately benign way to protect America from further terrorism. The Superhero Registration Act would force all heroes to give their personal information to the government, which would keep a database of their names, addresses, powers, and so forth, plus make them undergo military-style training before allowing them to patrol the streets. Captain America, once more calling upon his connection to World War II and its evocation of individualistic morality, believes that placing this information and power in the hands of the government is inherently dangerous; even if a good man such as Tony Stark, Iron Man (ever the representative of the militaryindustrial complex), is the only person who can access the information at present, there is no guarantee that it won’t be turned over to someone untrustworthy in the future. This was a reflection

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of real-world arguments regarding information gathered by the Patriot Act, and whether it would actually be used to ensnare terrorists or if it might also provide a way for unscrupulous members of the government to enact revenge upon their political enemies or otherwise be used against the American public. Civil War, far from escaping these complicated issues, grapples directly with them; however, in order to do this it must simplify them so greatly that the metaphor stretches to the point of breaking. Whereas Avengers Disassembled and Secret War had utilized imagery and the atmosphere of fear, trauma, and grief created by 9/11, Civil War confronts this major aftereffect of the terrorist attacks head-on, and finds that metaphorical political wrangling is harder to maintain than atmospheric appropriation. Nevertheless, the way this commentary played out proved successful for readers, as Civil War was both a sales juggernaut and generally well-reviewed, with critics particularly commenting on the core conflict between Captain American and Iron Man as the driving force of the story. At the conclusion of the miniseries, in issue #7, the story once again comes down to the two men. Captain America is on the verge of winning the physical battle against Iron Man when he is tackled by a group of citizens who, in a moment of over-the-top symbolism, are all firefighters, police officers, and EMS workers, the groups heralded as the heroes of 9/11. When this happens, Captain America notices the devastation that the superheroes’ battle has caused and he surrenders to the government authorities, realizing that, “They’re right. We’re not fighting for the people anymore … Look at us. We’re just fighting … [We were winning] everything except the argument. And they’re not arresting Captain America … they’re arresting Steve Rogers. That’s a very different thing … Stand down, troops … that’s an order” (18–21). He is then taken into custody, in exchange for a general amnesty for all the heroes who sided with him, and shortly thereafter he is temporarily “killed” in his own series. Unfortunately, although Civil War raised the promise of dealing with heavy political issues, what it carries through on is more of a seven-issue slugfest with a ham-fisted ending. The emergency workers who tackle Captain America indicate how the ordinary citizens of the Marvel Universe are swamped with fear, even of their iconic superheroes, and thus want the reassurance of the Registration Act. However, by ending the conflict because he sees how it is harming these

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people, but not conceding his point of view, Captain America wins something of a moral victory over that of the “establishment” heroes fronted by Iron Man. Marc DiPaolo notes how this ending shows that Civil War sides morally with the dissenters, in both the fictional world and the real world: Despite the presence of some occasionally well-expressed conservative sentiments … the Civil War story as a whole … [is] essentially an indictment of President George W. Bush’s policies … Civil War asks us … to remember that dissenters are often the bravest, and most patriotic, among us, despite the fact that they are derided and vilified by the establishment and by television pundits. (99–100) Though this political slant may be due to the traditional liberal outlook of most comic book writers, it also attests to the fact that the central story hinges on a superhero genre trope—that of the “underdog” versus the entrenched, institutional forces of the government and the rest of society. Captain America and his team are, in essence, fighting against the cultural hegemony being enforced by Iron Man and the government, and in a superhero story the protagonist is always the one who must overcome the odds that are stacked against him or her. However, Henry Jenkins notes that the expansive nature of the line-wide crossover allows for alternate perspectives, and often more nuanced ones, outside of the main series: No other medium could have done a story with this scope and intensity, with several new stories appearing every week for more than a six-month period. Civil War exploited this transmedia system’s ability to show the same events from multiple characters’ points of view and conflicting (and self-conflicted) political perspectives … This ability to spread the story across all of these different vantage points also increases the likelihood that for at least some readers, their favorite hero ends up on an ideological side different from their own, opening them to listening more closely to the arguments being formed out of sympathy for a character they have invested in for years and years. All of this used the potential of a publisher-wide event to

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The very nature of Marvel’s imaginary world, which allows for multiple stories featuring many heroes to occur simultaneously and all contribute to the larger continuity, thus led to a greater exploration of the issues at the heart of the event. In the fallout of Civil War, with a series of stories loosely tied together under the banner of “The Initiative,” Marvel explored what the world was like in the aftermath of the Registration Act. Some heroes remained outside the law, some joined the government-sponsored super-teams, and some waffled back and forth. Captain America was assassinated, while Iron Man became the head of SHIELD and the chief security agent of the United States. These stories largely continued the general political rhetoric of Civil War, but they also slowly began to reveal the fact that much of this post-Registration Act political structure had been infiltrated by a race of shape-changing aliens known as the Skrulls. Using advanced science and magic to render themselves undetectable in any way—to the point of copying the memories and thought patterns of the people they have replaced, sometimes even serving as unaware sleeper agents—the Skrulls prove to be a massive threat to the heroes operating both inside and outside of the law. The discovery of their presence by both sides leads to an increase in suspicion between the heroes, and all of that tension would eventually boil over into Marvel’s next crossover, 2008’s Secret Invasion, by Bendis and artist Lienil Yu. With its villains who are able to blend into the American populace, Secret Invasion clearly contains echoes of America’s post-9/11 “War on Terror.” The miniseries’ imagery, as Smith and Goodrum note, continually returns to that of 9/11, as it is, repeatedly drawn back to images of attacks on towers … With the ability to disguise themselves seamlessly the Skrulls, like the terrorists described in President Bush’s State of the Union Address, “spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning.” (489) When this time bomb does eventually go off, and the Skrulls reveal themselves, they are able to topple the entire power structure of the

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Marvel Universe. The heroes are only able to overcome the Skrulls by joining together both pro- and anti-registration forces in a last, desperate battle in Central Park. This, however, does not heal all of the wounds created by the Civil War. Thor, the Norse god of thunder and Marvel’s strongest hero, returns to the world of superheroes (he had been “dead” since Avengers: Disassembled) for Secret Invasion, but afterwards he tells Iron Man, “Don’t misunderstand my intentions, Stark. I came here because I was needed … I abhor what thou hast become and I’m sure I will not be the only one who finds the blame in all this to fall square on thy shoulders” (21). The lesson of Secret Invasion thus seems to be lost on some of Marvel’s most important heroes, who continue to bear grudges against one another while a different force secretly rises to power. “Dark Reign” was the overarching title for the series of crossovers and miniseries that followed up on Secret Invasion in 2008 and 2009 by showcasing the political career of Norman Osborn. Osborn was a wealthy industrialist and a Spider-Man villain named the Green Goblin who, in the wake of Civil War, had risen to the head of a program called the Thunderbolts, which utilized supervillains to perform missions mandated by the government. During Secret Invasion, Osborn takes the kill shot against the Skrulls’ queen, making him a national hero and leading to him replacing Iron Man as the head of national security. A year’s worth of stories would follow that featured all of Marvel’s heroes as outcasts and underdogs, thanks to a government security agency headed by a supervillain with a vendetta against them. With “Dark Reign,” Marvel once again invoked the same rhetoric as they did during Civil War—that of individual freedom versus governmental interference in daily life, with the latter severely threatened by untrustworthy (and archly conservative) politicians. Though none of the creators or editors at Marvel directly stated as much, Osborn’s reign can easily be equated to the Bush administration, which was criticized for infringement upon personal liberty through such measures as the Patriot Act. The difference here from Civil War is that the earlier series, whether successful or not, had been an attempt to explore both liberal and conservative reactions to the Patriot Act, with both sides doing what they thought was best for the American people. “Dark Reign,” on the other hand, showcases government intervention to its fullest extent of corruption, where an

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evil politician obtains power and abuses it in order to pursue his own sinister agenda. It is a warning against the consolidation of power into one person’s hands, since that one person may switch from a noble individual like Iron Man to a corrupt one like Osborn. In essence, “Dark Reign” retroactively wins for Captain America the debate enacted in Civil War. With the powers created by the Superhuman Registration Act placed into Osborn’s hands, he becomes an almost unstoppable force of evil, able to impose whatever martial law he likes wherever and whenever he so desires. The argument for individual freedom and liberty, and the fear of the government deciding just whom superheroes should go after, is proven correct. In this final “event” in Marvel’s post-9/11 sequence, the 2010 Bendis-written crossover miniseries Siege, Osborn oversteps his bounds, attempting to incite a war between the United States and Asgard, a city full of devastatingly powerful Norse gods. He does this despite a direct order from newly elected President Obama to stand down. Iron Man, Thor, and a recently resurrected Captain America, along with an emerging-from-the-shadows Nick Fury, all join forces to lead the Avengers against Osborn. To rally the superheroes, many of whom have not spoken to one another since the events of Civil War, Captain America gives a speech that helps them find the common ground that they had lost: I know I’ve been away for a while. But now I’m back, and I look around, and I can’t stand what I see … All I see now is a madman leading a march of troops into battle and for the life of me I can’t see why. To me it looks and feels a lot like the events that made me want to be Captain America in the first place. I know not everyone here sees eye-to-eye … And I know we’ve had to go so far as to defend ourselves against each other … But if you came here tonight, if you chose to stand up and be counted … Then I think you agree with me. It’s time to take back this country. Our friends and allies are being attacked, maybe killed. And we’re going to do something about it. All of us. (9–10) Captain America’s reference to World War II and Hitler is not incidental—it is another example of the character’s iconic connection to the “good war,” a time which cultural memory has

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retroactively deemed to have been less divisive than the present,3 when Americans were able to unite against a great evil instead of arguing over partisan issues. It is by calling upon this memory that Captain America is able to pull together the heroes for the first time in years. When the assembled heroes finally defeat Osborn and restore order to the Marvel Universe, it follows as a matter of course that the Registration Act is repealed. In its stead, Obama appoints Captain America as the head of a revived SHIELD. The Captain insists on protecting world security while also maintaining individual privacy and liberty, something that many supporters of Obama hoped that the new president would be able to achieve, as well. Symbolic of this moment providing closure to a long, dark, post-9/11 storyline that had begun with Avengers: Disassembled, Marvel began publishing a new Avengers title in the wake of Siege under the line-wide banner of “The Heroic Age.” This newfound optimism, reflective of the hopeful outlook espoused by many liberals following Obama’s election, would not lead to an end of crossovers, which remained a semi-annual event. For the next several years, though, the crossovers lost much of their explicit commentary on current events, and were focused on bringing together and teasing out different aspects of Marvel continuity. Though each of these series were, to a greater or lesser degree, attempting some degree of social commentary regarding the prevalence of things like fear, hatred, and revealed secrets in a digital era dominated by social media, none of them approached the level of direct stand-in of explicit political concerns that Civil War and Secret Invasion had. One of the reasons for these more generalized events might be the relatively disparate anxieties of the Obama administration. In the post-9/11 era, fears about terrorist attacks and the erosion of civil liberties freely co-mingled into an ongoing cultural conversation that was easily represented metaphorically in large-scale superhero storylines. Once George W. Bush was out of office, though, cultural anxieties became more dispersed—some on the right resented having a black president or feared socialist encroachment, some on the left became involved in Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protests, while many in the middle enjoyed the feeling of a return to a sense of security they hadn’t felt since 2001. As President Obama’s

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second term drew to a close, though, long-simmering anxieties surrounding race and class erupted to the surface, and a new culture war would erupt that contributed to Marvel’s ongoing worldbuilding.

Diversity and Legacy While Marvel had come a long way since the early 1960s as regards representation of minority groups, at the start of the 2010s the company’s marquee heroes still consisted largely of heterosexual white males. Though the African monarch Black Panther had risen to a higher level of prestige in Marvel Universe, and the Black Widow had debuted as the first (and, for a while, only) female superhero in Marvel’s film franchise, the vast majority of Marvel’s heroes starring in their own solo titles were still white men. During this decade that began to change, as Marvel created more characters belonging to various minority groups and brought in more diverse creators behind the scenes, all in order to deliberately appeal to a more diverse reading audience. The year 2014, for example, saw the introduction of a new, young Ms. Marvel named Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenager of Pakistani descent. Co-created in part by Pakistani-American editor Sana Amanat and Muslim writer G. Willow Wilson, Kamala’s heritage and religion were important aspects of her backstory, but did not define her identity. Rather, she embodied the optimism, hopefulness, and hero worship of the sorts of teenage girls who read Marvel’s comics and were looking for a character like them. The early issues of Ms. Marvel highlighted Kamala’s nerdiness more than they focused on her religious beliefs, reminiscent of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s early Amazing Spider-Man stories and Brian Michael Bendis’ Miles Morales Spider-Man stories. At the same time as this new Ms. Marvel debuted, the first Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers, was also undergoing something of a renaissance. Under the pen of writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, Carol took on the mantle of Captain Marvel and the character’s military background became more central to her identity. Rather than being used by male writers to enable broad discussions about second-wave feminism, Carol was now cut in the mold of a classic test pilot like Chuck Yeager, showcasing female empowerment and leadership

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through action. Carol Danvers’ inspiration, in fact, is what causes Kamala Khan to choose the superhero codename of Ms. Marvel. Ms. Marvel and Miles Morales would end up being the template for a trend at Marvel in the 2010s, which was to temporarily replace a marquee hero with a younger character representative of greater diversity, only to spin that character off into their own series (or a team book) when the original character returned. For example, African-American teen prodigy Riri Williams reverse engineered Tony Stark’s Iron Man armor and took his place during a time when he was in a coma; Korean-American genius Amadeus Cho became the “Totally Awesome Hulk” when Bruce Banner, the “Incredible Hulk,” lost the ability to transform; and Thor’s former love interest, Jane Foster, took on the mantle of the hero at a time when he was unworthy to lift his magical hammer, Mjolnir. These plot machinations had the benefit of creating more diversity amongst Marvel’s heroes, especially those starring in their own titles. To the publisher’s credit, many of the solo spin-off titles starring these characters were handled by writers other than white men, such as Arab/Muslim-America writer Saladin Ahmed on Miles Morales and Kamala Khan’s books, African-American sociologist and poet Dr. Eve L. Ewing writing Riri William’s adventures, and Korean-American film director Greg Pak chronicling the story of Amadeus Cho (a character he had co-created). The downside of this “temporary replacement” trope, though, was that these characters were only ever seen as short-term stand-in by many readers, who always knew that the “real” hero would at some point come back. Eventually, Thor reclaimed his hammer and title, Bruce Banner returned as the Hulk, and Tony Stark became Iron Man again, with the legacy heroes relegated to a sort of secondstringer status. However, a pair of Marvel’s crossover events, both of which debuted during the political turbulence of the late 2010s, would toy with these concepts of legacy and replacement even as they directly grappled with high-stakes, relevant political issues.

Wars for America’s Soul Marvel’s 2016 crossover Civil War II and 2017 crossover Secret Empire were both extremely pointed political allegories regarding major real-world issues of their day. In contrast to Civil War,

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Secret Invasion, and Siege, each of which came out a few years into the long-lasting public conversations surrounding the issues they were reflecting, these were stories created in the midst of the social upheaval they were depicting. As a result, they were a little more haphazard and less well-received than those earlier crossovers, but they nonetheless showcased Marvel’s method of worldbuilding by synthesizing the realism of character-driven soap opera and contemporary political/social issues with the exploratory expansiveness of the wilder, science fiction-infused landscape of the Marvel Universe. Civil War II was a sequel to the 2006 series essentially in name only (and in the trade dress that would appear on the covers), an attempt to draw upon the immense sales success of the prior series and to tie into the film Captain America: Civil War that was released that year. Written by Bendis, in his last “event” series for the publisher before signing an exclusive contract with DC, Civil War II eschewed the focus on issues of legality versus righteousness of the original Civil War to instead talk about profiling. This being the Marvel Universe, though, rather than debating some new AI technology or policing technique, the heroes argue over what to do with a new superpowered young man named Ulysses who seems to possess the ability to see the future. Rather than the two central figures of the conflict being Iron Man and Captain America, in Civil War II the opposing sides are led by Iron Man and Captain Marvel, who had by this time ascended to the ranks of Marvel’s top-tier heroes. Bendis calls upon the vast backstories of both figures in order to ground the conflict in continuity. He focuses on Carol Danvers’s military ties in order to have her present the utilitarian view that the heroes should use Ulysses in order to stop villains before they have a chance to act. Tony Stark, on the other hand, who sees the future as unwritten and malleable, finds Carol’s position to be problematically deterministic, as he explains in issue #4: It’s profiling. It’s profiling our future. And by Carol acting on it as if it were the Bible … she is, by any definition, profiling individuals. She’ll call it something else. But she didn’t know what I know now. She’s begging on the math being absolute. But … it’s not. No one involved in these visions is being given a choice. I’m

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saying free will is being eliminated from the process of choice. I’m saying if you allow this kid’s power to have the final say—no one has accountability for themselves. And without personal accountability, what are we? And if we’re officially in the world of algorithms and probability … what are the odds of these visions being pure and right? (13–15) In response to this, Carol says to Tony (and the other assembled heroes they are talking with), A person comes up to you and says: that guy over there has a gun and he said he’s about to open fire. Do you go check it out or do you say to yourself: well, I’ll wait until he opens fire to see if the first guy was right? (15) When Tony asks her what if there was only a 10 percent chance of that future coming true, she replies, “That’s more than enough for me” (16). Bendis handles the political debate in Civil War II with greater nuance than Mark Millar did in the original series. Both Tony and Carol provide solid, good-faith arguments, making the political collision (and resulting superhero battles) between their two sides feel inevitable rather than something that a compromise could resolve. Neither side is portrayed as malevolent nor as the underdog, allowing readers to appreciate both perspectives. Perhaps most importantly, rather than declaring one side the ideological victor, Bendis concludes with the deus ex machina of Ulysses evolving into a cosmic entity beyond the reach of the heroes. Though Tony ends up in a coma after a final battle with Carol, neither side is afforded a moral victory, leaving the political and philosophical debate about aggressive profiling open-ended. Marvel’s next event, Secret Empire, was much more clear-cut regarding right and wrong, as it cast perhaps the ultimate irredeemable villains in the role of antagonist—Nazis. The crossover was the conclusion to a storyline that writer Nick Spencer had been building to since 2015, in his run on Captain America. However, despite this long-term planning, Secret Empire ended up being more chillingly relevant than the writer first intended. Spenser’s story picked up from writer Rick Remender’s previous run on the character, which had concluded with Steve Rogers

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being drained of the “Super-Soldier Serum” that had given him his incredible strength, agility, and longevity, turning into an elderly man as a result. He handed the mantle (and shield) of Captain America over to his protégé and partner, Sam Wilson, Marvel’s first African-American hero. While Remender had showcased Wilson’s anxiety over filling the legendary shoes and making the role of Captain America his own, Spencer instantly made the storyline more political by having the hero publicly espouse a left-leaning, progressive political viewpoint that acknowledged the realities of racial disparity and police brutality. This move sparked immense backlash within the Marvel Universe, partially reflecting the real-life vitriol espoused online by conservative fans who saw Sam Wilson’s assumption of the role of Captain America as a kind of surrender on Marvel’s part to a liberal agenda. After less than a year, Spencer seemingly gave these fans what they wanted by having Steve Roger’s vitality returned by the reality-bending “Cosmic Cube,” with both men retaining the title of Captain America (akin to Peter Parker and Miles Morales both being Spider-Man). In a new series starring the revived Steve Rogers, Spencer also brought back his archnemesis, the Red Skull. The leader of Hydra, a cult-like organization that had become the Marvel Universe stand-in for Nazis, the Red Skull has begun recruiting new members from the American working class, utilizing rhetoric taken directly from the real-world campaign speeches of Donald Trump, as seen in the following monologue from the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers: I have just come from Europe—my homeland in fact. And do you know what I saw there? It was an invading army. These socalled “refugees”—millions of them—marching across the continent, bringing their fanatical beliefs and their crime with them. They attack our women, and bomb our cities. And how do our leaders respond? Do they push them back and enforce the borders as is our sovereign duty? Of course not. They say, “Here, take our food. Take our shelter. Take our way of life. And then take our lives.” Despicable … But that is only the beginning— your entire culture is under siege. The principles your country was founded upon lost in the name of “tolerance.” Your religion, your beliefs, your sense of community—all tossed aside

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like trash. And you cannot even speak out against it, lest you be called a bigot! And who benefits from all this but the vultures feasting on the carcass? The bankers who stole your homes out from under you, and the politicians they purchased. Well, let them call you what they will. I know who you truly are—the beginning of a revolution. The first to see the collapse of the old guard, and the road to something glorious! (8) The racial and class grievances stoked by the Red Skull in this extensive monologue situate the character not just as an evil, cackling remnant of Nazi Germany, as he had often been portrayed previously. Rather, he now reflects the changing face of white supremacy represented by smooth-talking Neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and the racist rhetoric of Donald Trump. Though this might have been controversial enough in and of itself, particularly for conservative readers who planned to vote for Trump, the association of the thencandidate with an actual Nazi supervillain was overshadowed by a plot twist at the end of that same issue, where Steve Rogers reveals himself to be in league with the Red Skull by intoning, “Hail Hydra.” In the following issues, we learn that it was actually the Skull who had used the Cosmic Cube to restore Steve’s vigor and, in the process, he twisted Steve’s history so that he was now, and had always been, a secret member of Hydra. This move received an extreme amount of negativity from fans and critic alike, many of whom saw it as an insult to the memories of Steve’s creators, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Both men had been stridently anti-Nazi Jewish artists who made the bold decision to feature Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw in his very first comic book appearance, before America was even involved in World War II. However, within the context of the storyline that began with the backlash to Sam Wilson’s progressive take on the role of Captain America, the reveal of Steve as a member of Hydra feels like a statement that there is nothing inherently more “American” about blond-haired, blue-eyed Steve Rogers compared to the AfricanAmerican Wilson. Unfortunately, Marvel quickly gave in to the public backlash against the storyline and spoiled Spencer’s upcoming denouement by revealing that Steve’s Nazi turn would be undone. This ultimately happened in Secret Empire, in which Steve reveals his Hydra

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allegiance to the world as he leads the organization in a takeover of America. Though Secret Empire is more action-heavy than the Captain America stories that led up to it, early in the first issue Spencer provides a bit of commentary comparing the Hydra-run America to the Trump administration’s explicit attempts to rewrite history. A teacher tells her elementary school class: At the end of the war, as they were facing total defeat, the Allied powers committed an unconscionable atrocity, a crime against all of humanity. They made us forget who we really are, and made us believe that they had instead won the war. But now we have awaked from the dream … thanks to Captain America, who was restored to his true self and is now helping all of us do the same! (2) Similarly, in the tenth and final issue, when a Cosmic Cuberestored, non-Hydra Steve Rogers fights his evil doppelgänger, Spencer comments on their battle as one over the heart of America, reminiscent of the rhetoric employed by those Americans opposed to the Trump administration hoping for a national resistance to its many untruths: It was more than just a battle between two men … it was a war for the heart and soul of a people. It would decide the kind of future we would live in. What our dreams would be … This is how you are tested. And how your enemy is tested. They had come to power on the back of a lie. A lie some of them even believed … that others let them believe. They had made us feel small, weak, fearful. They had reveled in their strength. In their power over us. But … they had never been worthy. (26–31) As promised by Marvel, anti-Nazi Steve Rogers ultimately wins out, and uses the Cosmic Cube to restore America to its preHydra reality as much as possible. While Civil War II had taken on one specific political issue and explored it with relative nuance, Secret Empire couches itself as an explicit battle for the soul of America, with a clear-cut line between the progressive, diversity-embracing heroes and the fascist, Nazialigned villains. In tying so closely into contemporary real-world

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politics and taking such a firm political stance, the series succeeds as a piece of inspiring superhero fiction (to readers who agree with its politics), but fails as incisive commentary. What it also does well is to serve as a kind of crucible of Marvel Universe continuity, as it touches on practically all of Marvel’s current characters and many of its unique locales. Events in the series would become crucial in the ongoing storylines of multiple characters, ranging from Captain Marvel and Thor to Black Widow and the Punisher, tying into the stories and subplots of several ongoing titles. In essence, Secret Empire combined the three main aspects of Marvel’s world-building—realistic characterization, reflection of real-world issues, and elaborate, line-wide, world-building continuity—into one piece of event storytelling. Whether or not it succeeds on its merits as a satisfying story to readers or as trenchant commentary, it undeniably stands as an important piece of imaginary world-building.

Notes 1 Even a short-lived series called The Call of Duty, focusing specifically on “real-world heroes” in the form of police, firefighters and EMS workers, was little more than a vehicle for supernatural adventure fiction. 2 Latveria is the fictional Marvel country ruled by the supervillain Dr. Doom. However, during the time at which Secret Wars was published, Dr. Doom was dead (later to be resurrected, of course). 3 In actuality, according to historian John Bodnar, there was far less national unity during World War II than Americans currently tend to think. See John Bodnar, The “Good War” in American Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

References Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, David Marquez, artist, et al. Civil War II #4. New York: Marvel Comics, September 2016. Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, Gabrielle Dell’Otto, artist, et al. Secret War #5. New York: Marvel Comics, December 2005. Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, Leinil Yu, artist, et al. Secret Invasion #8. New York: Marvel Comics, December 2008. Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, Olivier Coipel, artist, et al. Siege #2. New York: Marvel Comics, February 2010. DiPaolo, Marc. War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011.

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Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Jenkins, Henry. “Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics.” In Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. Millar, Mark, writer, Steve McNiven, artist, et al. Civil War #1. New York: Marvel Comics, July 2006. Millar, Mark, writer, Steve McNiven, artist, et al. Civil War #7. New York: Marvel Comics, February 2007. Morrison, Grant. Supergods. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011. Smith, Philip and Michael Goodrum. “‘We have experienced a tragedy which words cannot properly describe’: Representations of Trauma in Post-9/11 Superhero Comics.” Literature Compass 8/8. August 17, 2011. Spencer, Nick, writer, Jesús Saiz, artist, et al.Captain America: Steve Rogers #1. New York: Marvel Comics, July 2016. Spencer, Nick, writer, Steve McNiven, artist, et al.Secret Empire #1. New York: Marvel Comics, July 2017. Spencer, Nick, writer, Steve McNiven, artist, et al.Secret Empire #10. New York: Marvel Comics, October 2017. Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Conclusion

Adaptations of Marvel properties into other media are not a twentyfirst-century phenomenon. They date all the way back to 1944, in fact, and a fifteen-chapter Captain America serial. Then, in the late 1960s, Marvel co-produced low-budget cartoons that re-used artwork from the comics themselves, kicking off a series of forays into animation that served as the company’s main multimedia output for the better part of three decades. Despite a successful foray into live-action television—1977–1982’s The Incredible Hulk—and several unsuccessful feature films—1986’s Howard the Duck, the direct-to-video The Punisher in 1989 and Captain America in 1990, and producer Roger Corman’s unreleased The Fantastic Four from 1994—Marvel stuck mostly to animation until the success of 1998’s Blade, starring Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire hunter. This was the first film based on a Marvel character to receive commercial success, as well as fan approval and a mixed critical reception (as opposed to straight-out panning), which opened the door to a number of Marvel films over the next decade. The Spider-Man and X-Men franchises proved to be the most popular of these, and on the success of those films Marvel made the decision to start producing its own movies, rather than licensing out the characters to other production companies. However, Marvel’s most iconic characters, Spider-Man and the XMen (including the very popular character of Wolverine) were already enmeshed in deals that meant that Marvel Studios, the company’s in-house production studio, could not use them in any films. This would lead the studio to turn to a roster of characters who, though well-known in the comics, were not exactly household names—the Avengers. What began as a potential risk, however, DOI: 10.4324/9781003051008-6

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would turn into one of the most lucrative film series of all time, and completely reinvent the way Hollywood looked at blockbuster franchises. Marvel’s success in this endeavor, though, is owed in large part to borrowing not just characters and plotlines from the comics, but the very methods by which Marvel Comics had built up its imaginary world.

World-Building the MCU When Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk (the first two films produced by Marvel Studios) came out in 2008, audiences didn’t necessarily have expectations for them to be any different from previous stand-alone films starring Marvel heroes, such as 2005’s The Fantastic Four or 2007’s Ghost Rider. Once both films were released, though, it became clear that even though each movie could stand on its own as a complete narrative, the two films were meant to be in conversation with one another. Iron Man, for example, not only showcases the origin of the titular hero as portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. but also introduces the spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. as a powerful behind-the-scenes force in Tony Stark’s world. A postcredits scene then features Nick Fury, the director of the agency (in a surprise cameo by actor Samuel L. Jackson, on whose likeness the Ultimate universe version of Nick Fury had been directly based), welcoming Tony to a “bigger universe” and informing him about something called “the Avenger initiative.” In The Incredible Hulk, meanwhile, a similar surprise cameo occurs just before the credits, except this time it is Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark who appears, making a similar off-hand reference to building a team. Though neither film was in any way a direct sequel to the other, and in fact both were in production at the same time, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk were clearly and specifically set within the same imaginary world. This intertextual relationship was masterminded behind the scenes by producer and Marvel Studios president (and self-professed geek) Kevin Feige. Thus was born what came to be known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU. After both films proved to be financially successful, Marvel Studios announced plans for four more films—a sequel to Iron Man, a Captain America film, a Thor film, and, finally, a film version of The Avengers that would bring all of the heroes together into one film. The following films

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continued to develop the shared continuity of the first two, building up to The Avengers, which drew upon elements of all of the preceding movies in the MCU. This gambit proved hugely successful, with The Avengers becoming the third-highest-grossing movie of all time when it was released. That record has since been eclipsed by several other films, including two direct sequels to The Avengers; indeed, as of 2020, eight of the top twenty-five highest-grossing films of all time were Marvel Studios productions. Additionally, the MCU films have, on the whole, received favorable critical reception, with one of them—2018’s Black Panther—even being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and winning Academy Awards for best original score, best costume design, and best production design. When the Walt Disney Company purchased the entirety of Marvel in 2008, the level of corporate synergy between the films in the MCU and various spin-off projects set in the MCU only accelerated. 2013, for example, saw the launch of an ongoing network television series (on Disney-owned ABC) set in the MCU: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., starring actor Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson, a popular secondary character who had seemingly died in The Avengers only to be resurrected for the series. This would prove to only be the first of several MCU TV shows, including ABC TV shows Agent Carter and Inhumans; a series of interconnected shows on the streaming service Netflix featuring heroes Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist in an urban setting with a grittier, more realistic tone; cable television shows Runaways and Cloak & Dagger; and several miniseries directly produced by Feige and Marvel Studios for the Disney+ streaming service. In addition to these television shows, Marvel also released a series of short films, called “One-Shots” (named after the term for a one-issue special comic book), on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of various films, in order to flesh out different corners of the MCU. All of this was on top of the more than twenty theatrically released films in the MCU, leading up to the culmination of storylines begun as far back as Iron Man and The Avengers in the three-hour epic Avengers: Endgame. With all of these various movies and television shows, plus several tie-in comic books, sourcebooks, and young adult novels all set within the MCU, it would seem counterintuitive that the franchise would prove so extraordinarily popular. The secret to the MCU’s success, though, lies in large part in the ways it borrows from Marvel

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Comics’ three pillars of world-building—characterization, realism, and continuity. For example, much of the critical success of the MCU results from the films’ focus on character moments, combining humor, sentiment, and soap opera-like dangling plotlines and romantic arcs, all of which is grounded by performances from actors cast for range and gravitas rather than just generic action star physiques. Thus, when fans speak of the characters in the films, it is with affection for “Steve” or “Tony,” rather than Captain America or Iron Man. These characters are also placed within a reasonable facsimile of the real world, just as Marvel’s superheroes are within the comic books. The first Iron Man film is explicitly situated within the global War on Terror as an important plot point, for example, while Captain America: The Winter Soldier comments on the growing distrust of government and Black Panther discusses issues of colonialism, global racism, and isolationist politics. Though some films in the MCU more directly belong to the genre of science fiction (such as the Guardians of the Galaxy films that take place in outer space), most of the movies assume the sociopolitical systems of the real world as an important part of their setting. Finally, the films are tied together by an intricate continuity, with references, in-jokes, postcredits scenes, and cameos that place each film and TV show within the elaborate, unfolding story world of the MCU. Avengers: Endgame, for example, is a virtually nonsensical film without some measure of knowledge of at least half of the films that came before it, and yet it still became the highest-grossing film of all time. This last fact might seem contrary to what one might believe regarding a franchise mired in dense continuity. As Felix Brinker notes, neither the MCU’s complex overall narrative structure nor its open appeal to specialized fan-knowledge has so far detracted from its mainstream success—in fact, these aspects seem to represent one of the MCU’s primary advantages over competing film and television series. (208) Brinker situates this success within the multimedia continuity of the MCU: Although the serial unfolding of the MCU within the medium of film is relatively linear, the franchise’s expansion into

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television and short films complicates this linearity by introducing additional, media-specific models of serialization (each with its own norms of episodic closure or openness, rhythms of publication, and demands for audience engagement), a movement that gives rise to a complex transmedial chronology and hierarchization of series and installments. (217) Though this transmedial continuity situates every element of the MCU as equally important, in reality this is not actually the case: The logics of multilinear serial narration in Marvel comics, however, are somewhat different from the logics of such narration in TV and film. Whereas crossovers in comics could, and frequently did, go in both directions, there is often an asymmetric relationship between the events of the blockbuster movies and those of weekly TV episodes … The television series and the One-Shots thus each expand the MCU’s storyworld in different ways, but are similarly subordinated to the core narrative that unfolds in the big-budget feature films. (218–219) That said, though, the primacy of the MCU films over the other media actually is representative of certain aspects of Marvel Comics’ worldbuilding narratives, beyond just the straightforward linearity from film to film that reflects the linearity from issue to issue of the comics. In the same way that the MCU films can be seen as a primary source of truth for the continuity of the entire storyworld, in crossover “event” storytelling the primary miniseries will often impact subordinated ongoing titles, but not vice versa. Early in Civil War, for example, Peter Parker publicly unmasks as Spider-Man, and the three regular ongoing Spider-Man titles are forced to deal with the fallout of that decision. Later in the series, when Peter switches sides from agreeing with Iron Man to believing that Captain America is correct, the entire Spider-Man line reflects that change. In both cases, the central event takes place in the Civil War series, to which SpiderMan’s own titles are subordinated. The MCU mode of world-building, then, follows this style of storytelling from Marvel Comics, with the films serving as the “event” stories and the various tie-in media (particularly the television shows) as subordinated ongoing titles. As Michael Graves points out, these tie-in media serve to flesh out the

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MCU storyworld by focusing on different points of view in the same way that crossover tie-in issues do, thus demonstrating, “the principles of seriality and narrative continuity. Such continuity is achieved through a focus on notable secondary characters … in a way that provides new insights through access to multiple points of view” (241). The other way in which the MCU’s world-building copies that of Marvel Comics is through the logic of capitalism. In both cases, asking readers or audiences to access a multitude of discrete story packages (be they comic books, movies, or television shows) in order to understand the full continuity means asking that audience to spend more money, either in a direct sense or through the ad revenue garnered by their viewership. As William Proctor explains, “For Marvel, the promotion of continuity between disparate media … obeys the logics of capitalism through the commodification of narrative forms” (339). However, though both are spurred on by a money-making impulse, Marvel Comics and the MCU are narrative constructs as much as capitalist ones: In many ways, Marvel has adapted the comic book model of continuity to its live-action universe, the largest example of worldbuilding and sequentiality in film history. Each film or TV series can be seen as a chapter, or “micro-narrative,” in an ongoing sage, or “macrostructure,” that adheres to the principles of continuity and sequentiality. The characters repeatedly cross over into each other’s diegetic realms, thus forming a hyperdiegesis that continues to grow exponentially into a vast narrative body. (339–340) On this matter, Brinker agrees, noting the importance of the vast, multimedia MCU narrative to future franchise storytelling projects: In many ways, the MCU thus represents a radicalization of recent trends in transmedial and serial storytelling, and, as such, can be understood not only as a particularly successful media franchise, but as a model for a new type of multidimensional, complex seriality that will go on to characterize popular culture in the coming years. (226) In fact, multiple film franchises have already attempted to follow this model, with varying degrees of success—the “DC Extended

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Universe” (or DCEU), featuring DC Comics’ superheroes; the action franchise of sequels and spin-offs to The Fast and the Furious; both a reboot and a continuation of the Star Trek television and film franchise; and the aborted “Dark Universe” of Universal movie monster characters. Perhaps the most successful franchise to copy the MCU’s style of world-building, though, is Star Wars, which not coincidentally is also a property owned by the Walt Disney Company. When Disney purchased Star Wars, the company decided to jettison the previous “Extended Universe” of novels, comic books, video games, and countless other media spun off from the six theatrically released films in the franchise. With the exception of those six films and two cartoon series, every previous Star Wars story was now considered to be part of the “Star Wars Legend” line, while everything that would be produced from then on—including novels, comics, games, children’s books, animated and live-action television series, free mobile games, and even a Disney theme park experience—would be considered part of the official canon (unless it was specifically excluded from that canon), as overseen by the “Lucasfilm Story Group.” Star Wars was now being viewed not just as a film franchise, but as a storyworld akin to the MCU or Marvel Comics, where every side story would somehow tie into the larger universe. According to Proctor and Matthew Freeman, the oversight of this franchise by the Story Group is vital to understanding the similarities between Star Wars and the MCU (and thus Star Wars and Marvel Comics, who were now actually publishing the main Star Wars comics): The Group … is to oversee the new continuity … to ensure that “all aspects of Star Wars storytelling moving forward will be connected.” … The idea of “every Star Wars story” functioning as a “gateway” into the universe encapsulates the transmedia economy of Disney’s Star Wars. (234) Furthermore, the transmedia nature of this new continuity clearly owes something to the MCU: Given that the new Star Wars canon includes both the sequel and anthology trilogies, a raft of comic book series and adult/ YA novels, the Rebels animated TV series, the video game

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The intricate complexity of the new, transmedia Star Wars continuity, one that gives primacy to the films but still weaves in and out of various other projects and storylines, can thus trace its lineage back through the MCU to Marvel Comics itself. If such a method of world-building can be successful for two of the most beloved and profitable franchises of all time, it becomes important to the understanding of audience desires and capitalist modes of producing consumable narratives that we understand the basic building-blocks of how these imaginary worlds are created.

The Marvel Method of Building an Imaginary World Not all imaginary worlds are built the same way. The failing of the “Dark Universe” franchise, for example, can be attributed to Universal Studios putting the big picture first. 2017’s The Mummy attempted to plant seeds for an entire franchise, but didn’t establish a believable reality for future stories or create characters that fans could relate to and enjoy watching. The DCEU, though slightly more successful, faces similar criticism of putting continuity before character. It is telling that the most critically successful films in the franchise (2017’s Wonder Woman, 2018’s Aquaman, and 2019’s Shazam!) stand alone, without specifically tying into earlier films in the franchise. The successful world-building method of the MCU, though, follows the technique started by Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and their collaborators at Marvel Comics back in the 1960s—an equal mixing of social realism, grounded characterization spiced up by soap opera melodrama, and intricate continuity. In the introduction to this book, we situated the Marvel Comics universe within the concept of imaginary worlds and world-building developed by Mark J. P. Wolf. We will now return to Wolf ’s systematization of the disparate aspects of world-building in order to codify the unique mix that makes up Marvel’s approach.

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Realism Though stories can only be so “realistic” when they feature a man with the powers of a spider or a team of astronauts who get super powers (rather than cancer) from cosmic radiation, a hallmark of the Marvel Universe as compared to the universe of DC Comics is its increased emphasis on realism. While DC’s heroes are often demigods with outrageous, world-shaking powers, Marvel’s heroes tend to be slightly less powerful on the whole (with many exceptions, of course, including well-known characters like Thor and the Hulk); while DC’s characters live in fictional cities like Metropolis and Gotham, Marvel’s heroes live in fictionalized versions of real cities, particularly New York City; and while DC’s central cosmology revolves around a multiverse of infinite possibilities, Marvel’s focuses on one central universe that happens to, at times, cross over with other dimensions.1 The DC Universe can thus be seen as less “realistic” than the Marvel Universe, or, more appropriately, as further down the spectrum from the Primary World (J. R. R. Tolkien’s term for the real world) than the Marvel Universe. As Wolf explains: As we move further down the spectrum, the notion of “historical,” or even “realistic,” applies less and less, as stories increasingly replace or reset Primary World defaults, even though the stories are still ostensibly set within the Primary World. Here we find what we might call “overlaid worlds”; for example, the stories involving Spider-Man (a.k.a. Peter Parker) are set in a version of New York City in which Spider-Man and the supervillains he fights remain conspicuously in the public eye, both in person and in the media. In such cases, fictional elements are overlaid onto a real location, but without separating a secondary world from the Primary world. (27–28) The innovation that Lee, Kirby, and Ditko brought to their superhero universe was to situate it closer on the spectrum to the Primary World than DC Comics. The Marvel Universe was meant to be the same world inhabited by its readers, just with the addition of superheroes. This also meant bringing in more relevant sociopolitical issues than DC Comics had up to that point, creating a greater sense of verisimilitude that provided an accessible

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entryway to this world of fantastic heroes and villains and that frequently allowed Marvel to more directly comment upon contemporary issues than DC was able to.

Characterization The second component of Marvel’s approach to world-building is, ironically, to eschew world-building and focus, instead, on storytelling. Though many fans return to Marvel Comics to enrich their understanding of the larger fictional world, another portion of fandom (as well as casual readers), follow specific characters, storylines, and/or creators. These readers are following narratives, rather than a larger imaginary world, an important difference noted by Wolf: [S]torytelling and world-building are different processes that can sometimes come into conflict. One of the cardinal rules often given to new writers has to do with narrative economy; they are told to pare down their prose and remove anything that does not actively advance the story. World-building, however, often results in data, exposition, and digressions that provide information about a world, slowing down narrative or even bringing it to a halt temporarily, yet much of the excess detail and descriptive richness can be an important part of the audience’s experience … A compelling story and a compelling world are very different things, and one need not require the other. (29) Marvel, then, situations compelling stories within its compelling world, so that the two “work together, enriching each other” (29), in Wolf’s words, in order to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. To make those stories compelling, the focus has to be less on the nuances of the world and more on the experiences of the characters. That’s why, while DC spent the 1960s exploring far-out science fiction concepts, Marvel’s heroes lived in New York City and grappled with their own neuroses and love lives as much as they did supervillains. A healthy dose of soap opera-style melodrama kept readers coming back to the never-ending narratives of their favorite characters, many of whom experienced real change (at least at first) in a way that DC’s heroes never did. The ongoing saga of the Marvel

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Universe consisted of a series of discrete narratives following characters like Peter Parker and Tony Stark, and Marvel at its best ensures that the characters in each story are every bit as important as the universe.

Continuity The final element in Marvel’s approach to world-building is a rich, complex continuity that situates all of its heroes within the same world. While both DC and Marvel now feature shared universes where what happens in one hero’s title can explicitly impact upon something happening in a different book, Marvel pioneered this style of continuity, becoming the first comic book publisher to create a “saturated” universe. Wolf explains: When there are so many secondary world details to keep in mind that one struggles to remember them all while experiencing the world, to the point where secondary world details crowd out thoughts of the immediate Primary World, saturation occurs … Saturation is the pleasurable goal of conceptual immersion; the occupying of the audience’s full attention and imagination, often with more detail than can be held in mind all at once … Worlds offering a high degree of saturation are usually too big to be experienced completely in a single sitting or session … This overflow, beyond the point of saturation, is necessary if the world is to be kept alive in the imagination. (49–50) Today, this sense of saturation is as true of DC as it is of Marvel; in fact, DC’s multiversal cosmology arguably makes for an even more saturated continuity than Marvel’s more straightforward/realistic approach. The crucial difference, then, is in how this element of Marvel’s world-building interacts with its other two pillars. In order to create an elaborate, saturated continuity, Marvel moved further away from the Primary World and created unique locales, civilizations, and events that were integral parts of the Marvel Universe. This also meant expanding upon the “overlaid world” and creating more expansive concepts like cosmic beings and warring, interstellar empires. Whereas DC’s godlike heroes might feel at home in such situations, though, Marvel more often than not

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approaches these grandiose storylines through the perspective of its more grounded characters who feel ill at ease confronted with such a massive scale. At its heart, the Marvel Universe tells the ongoing story of fantastic things happening to ordinary people who face the same inner conflicts and doubts as Marvel’s own readers. In the words of Stan Lee himself, shortly before his death, Marvel has always been and always will be a reflection of the world right outside our window. That world may change and evolve, but the one thing that will never change is the way we tell our stories of heroism. (Quoted in Butler) Bringing together that world outside the window with the worlds of the fantastic, and telling stories of heroism within that universe, is ultimately what makes up the foundation of the Marvel Method of world-building.

Note 1 Many of these differences, in fact, became plot points in the JLA/ Avengers crossover series published jointly by DC and Marvel in 2003 and 2004.

References Brinker, Felix. “Transmedia Storytelling in the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ and the Logics of Convergence-Era Popular Seriality.” In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Butler, Bethony. “Stan Lee used his platform to call out racism in the 1960s—and he never stopped.” The Washington Post. November 12, 2018. Archived at https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/ 2018/11/12/stan-lee-used-his-platform-call-out-racism-s-he-never-stopped/ Graves, Michael. “The Marvel One-Shots and Transmedia Storytelling.” In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Proctor, William. “Schrödinger’s Cape: The Quantum Seriality of the Marvel Universe.” In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

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Proctor, William and Matthew Freeman. “The First Step into A Smaller World’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars.” In Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf. New York: Routledge, 2017. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Index

9/11 11, 76, 78–90 Agent Coulson 101 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 101 “Age of Apocalypse” 63 Ahmed, Saladin 91 Alias 81 All Star Comics 3 Amadeus Cho 91 Amanat, Sana 90 Amazing Spider-Man 47–50, 78–79 Andru, Ross 47–50 Angel 44 Ant Man 24, 31 Aquaman 106 The Avengers 1–3, 24, 30–31, 35–36, 44–45, 63–64, 67–71, 73–74, 81, 99–100, 110n1 The Avengers (comic book) 10, 30–31, 35, 63–64, 67–68, 81, 89 The Avengers (film) 100–101 Avengers: Age of Ultron 3 Avengers Disassembled 81–82, 84, 87, 89 Avengers: Endgame 1–3, 101–102 Avengers: Infinity War 3 Bagley, Mark 70 Bainbridge, Jason 7 Barr, Mike 52 Batman 36, 64 Beast 44

Bendis, Brian Michael 70–71, 81–82, 86, 88, 90, 92–93 The Beyonder 58, 60 Black Lives Matter 89 The Black Panther 40–43, 57, 90 Black Panther (film) 101–102 The Black Widow 90, 97 Blade 99 The Blazing Skull 36 Bodnar, John 97n3 Brinker, Felix 102–104 Bronson, Charles 48–49 Buscema, John 65 Bush, George W. 11, 79, 81–82, 85–87, 89 Busiek, Kurt 67 Byrne, John 45–47, 57 The Call of Duty 97n1 Captain America (comic book) 40, 52, 67–68, 79, 93 Captain America (direct-to-video movie) 99 Captain America (movie serial) 99 Captain America (Sam Wilson) see The Falcon Captain America (Steve Rogers) 1–3, 16, 31, 52, 67, 69, 81, 83–89, 92, 93–96, 102–103 Captain America: Civil War 92 Captain America: The First Avenger 100

Index Captain America: Steve Rogers 94–95 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 3, 102 Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers) 36, 39, 90–93, 97 Captain Marvel (comic book) 39, 52n2 The Cat 38–39 Charles Xavier 44, 66–67 Civil War 82–89, 91–93, 103 Civil War II 91–93, 96 Claremont, Chris 11, 44–47, 57 Cloak & Dagger 101 Cockrum, Dave 44 The Cold War 22, 28, 68–69, 82 Comics Code Authority 15, 32n1, 51 Communism 28 Comtois, Pierre 21, 35 Conway, Gerry 47–51 Cosmic Cube 94–96 Costello, Matthew J. 8, 28, 43, 52n3, 67–69 Crisis on Infinite Earths 55–57, 60–63, 76n1, 80 Cyclops 44 Dallas, Keith 58–61 Daredevil 57, 81, 101 The Dark Knight Returns 55–57, 65, 76n2 Dark Reign 87–88 “Dark Universe” 105–106 “Days of Future Past” 63 Dazzler 39 DC Comics 3–11, 13n2, 15–20, 22–26, 29, 31, 32n3, 36–37, 55–57, 60–66, 74, 76n1, 76n2, 79–80, 105, 107–110 DC Extended Universe 104–106 Death Wish 48–49 DeConnick, Kelly Sue 90 DeFalco, Tom 56 The Defenders 64 Dell’Otto, Gabrielle 82

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DeZuniga, Tony 50–51 DiPaolo, Marc 8–9, 46, 85 Ditko, Steve 5, 8, 10, 13n3, 16, 22–23, 26, 31, 36–37, 43, 62, 90, 106–107 Doctor Doom 21, 71–72, 79, 97n2 Doctor Strange 31, 71–72 Downey, Robert, Jr. 100 Dumaraog, Ana 2 Earth-616 63, 65, 69–72, 75 Ebert, Roger 48–49 Eco, Umberto 15 Empyre 52n1 Ewing, Al 73–74 Ewing, Eve L. 91 The Falcon 40–42, 94–95 The Fantastic Four 17–21, 23–24, 30, 44–45, 58, 67–69, 74, 107 The Fantastic Four (comic book) 10, 16–30, 36, 57, 65, 67–68 The Fantastic Four (film) 100 The Fantastic Four (unreleased film) 99 The Fast and the Furious 104 Favreau, Jon 2 Fawaz, Ramzi 6, 22, 27 Feige, Kevin 2, 100–101 The Fin 36 Finch, David 81 Fite, Linda 38 The Flash 32n3, 64 Franklin Richards 67, 72 Freeman, Matthew 105–106 Galactus 73 Genosha 47 Gerber, Steve 57 Ghost Rider 100 Giant Man 31 Giant-Size Spider-Man 50 Giant-Size X-Men 44 Goodman, Martin 17 Goodrum, Michael 80 Goodwin, Archie 41

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Gotham City 107 Graham, Billy 41 Graves, Michael 103–104 Green Goblin 87–89 Green Lantern 64 Gregg, Clark 101 Gruenwald, Mark 11, 61–62, 64–65 Guardians of the Galaxy 102 Gustin, Scott 1–2 Hall, Bob 65 Hanerfeld, Mark 41 The Hate-Monger 30 “Heroes Reborn” 11, 66–70, 76n3 Heroes Reborn: The Return 68 “Heroes Return” 68–69 “The Heroic Age” 89 Hewetson, Alan 41 Hickman, Jonathan 71–72 History of the Marvel Universe 74–75 Hitler, Adolf 30, 88, 95 Howard the Duck 57 Howard the Duck (film) 109 Howe, Sean 36, 59–60, 67 The Hulk 23–24, 30–31, 67, 76n3, 90, 107 The Human Torch (original) 4, 15–16, 19–21 The Human Torch (Fantastic Four member) 18–21 Hydra 94–96 Hyperion 64 Iceman 44 Image Comics 11, 66–67 The Inhumans 36 Inhumans 101 The Initiative 86 The Incredible Hulk (film) 100 The Incredible Hulk (TV series) 99 Invisible Girl/Woman 18–21, 36, 67, 72 Iron Fist 101 Iron Man 31, 67, 74, 81, 83–88, 90, 92–93, 100, 102–103, 109

Iron Man (comic book) 67–68 Iron Man (film) 2, 100, 102 Iron Man 2 100 The Jackal 47 Jackson, Samuel L. 100 Jacobs, Will 16, 23–25, 42–43, 45–46 Jameson, J. Jonah 39 Jane Foster 90 Jemas, Bill 70 Jenkins, Henry 4–5, 62, 85–86 Jessica Jones 81, 101 JLA/Avengers 110n1 Jones, Gerard 16, 23–25, 32n1, 42–43, 45–46 Jones, R. A. 51–52 Jungle Action 43 Justice League of America 15–17, 31, 36, 63 Justice Society of America 15, 56, 110n1 Kalish, Carol 59 Kaveney, Roz 3, 13n2 Kirby, Jack 5, 8–10, 16–31, 35–37, 42–44, 46, 62, 65, 95, 106–107 Kree 35–36 “The Kree-Skrull War” 35–36, 52n1 Kubert, Adam 70 Latveria 82, 97n2 Lee, Jim 66–68 Lee, Stan 5, 8–10, 16–32, 35–44, 46, 56, 57, 62, 65, 90, 106–107, 110 Leishman, Rachel 2 Lieber, Larry 16, 32 Liebowitz, Jack 17 Liefeld, Rob 66–68 Lois Lane 36 Loki 30–31 Lucia Von Bardas, 82 Luke Cage 41–42, 101 Luke Cage, Hero for Hire 41–42

Index Magneto 66–67 Marcos, Pablo 52 Marvel Cinematic Universe 1–3, 12–13, 100–106 Marvel Comics 3 Marvel Girl 44 Marvel Mystery Comics 3 Marvel One-Shots 101, 103 Marvel Preview 50 Marvel Studios 1–2, 99–100 Mattel 56, 68 McFarlane, Todd 66 McGregor, Don 43, 57 McNiven, Steve 82 MCU see Marvel Cinematic Universe Metropolis 107 Miami Vice 55 Millar, Mark 70, 82, 93 Miller, Frank 57 Moore, Alan 63 Morrison, Grant 78–79 Mr. Fantastic 18–20, 30, 36, 67, 72–73, 75 Ms. Marvel 39–40 Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers) see Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers) Ms. Marvel (comic book) 90 Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan) 90–91 The Mummy 106 Neary, Paul 65 The Negative Zone 36 New Avengers 81 New Universe 63, 70 Nick Fury 24, 30, 82, 100 Nighthawk 64–65 Night Nurse 38 Obama, Barack 12, 88–90 Occupy Wall Street 89 One-Shots see Marvel One-Shots Onslaught 66–67, 74 The Over-Mind 64

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Pak, Greg 91 The Patriot 36 The Patriot Act 80–81, 83–84, 87 Peppard, Anna F. 38–40 Polo, Susana 2 Primary World 6, 107, 109 Proctor, William 70, 104–106 The Punisher 11, 47–52, 55, 75, 97 The Punisher (direct-to-video movie) 99 Quasar 65 Quesada, Joe 70–71, 78 Rand, Ayn 13n3 The Red Skull 94–95 Remender, Rick 93–94 Rikki Barnes 69 Riri Williams 91 Robin 36 Rocafort, Kenneth 74 Rodríguez, Javier 74 Romita, John, Jr. 78 Romita, John, Sr. 41 Runaways 101 Saler, Michael 4 Schuster, Joe 5 Secret Empire 93–97 Secret Invasion 86–87, 89, 92 Secret War 81–82, 84 Secret Wars (1982) 11, 56–61, 72, 80 Secret Wars (2015) 11, 71–73, 75–76, 97n2 Secret Wars II 59–61 September 11th, 2001 see 9/11 Seuling, Carole 38 Severin, Marie 38 Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos 30 Shaft 42 Shanna the She-Devil 38 Shazam! 106 She-Hulk 39, 58 Shi’ar 46

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Index

SHIELD 82, 86, 89, 100 Shooter, Jim 57–60 Siancong 74–75 Siege 88–89, 92 Siegel, Jerry 5 Simon, Joe 95 Simonson, Walt 57 Skrulls 19, 35–36, 86–87 Smith, Philip 80 Snipes, Wesley 99 Spencer, Nick 93–96 Spencer, Richard 95 Spider-Man (film) 99 Spider-Man (Miles Morales) 71–73, 90–91, 94 Spider-Man (Peter Parker) 9, 31, 36, 39, 45, 47–50, 58–59, 65–66, 69–71, 73–74, 81, 87, 94, 99, 103, 107, 109 Spider-Men 71 Spider-Woman 39, 49 The Squadron Sinister 64 The Squadron Supreme 63–65, 69 Squadron Supreme (comic) 11, 64–65 Stan’s Soapbox 29 Starlin, Jim 8, 52n1 Star Trek 105 Star Wars 7–8, 105 Steinem, Gloria 39 Straczynski, J. Michael 78–79 Sturken, Marita 79 The Sub-Mariner 3, 15–16, 20–21, 31 Super Fly 42 Superhuman Registration Act 82–83, 86, 88–89 Superman 5, 19, 36, 48, 64 Super-Soldier Serum 94 The Tarantula 50 Thanos 1, 52n1 The Thing 18–19, 23, 58, 75 Thomas, Jean 38 Thomas, Roy 35–37, 41, 44, 52n1, 56

Thor 1–3, 8, 30–31, 67, 72, 87–88, 90, 97, 107 Thor (comic book) 57, 68 Thor (film) 100 Tolkien, J. R. R. 107 Thunderbird 45 Thunderbolts 87 Timely Comics 3, 15, 36, 74 Trump, Donald 12, 94–96 Tucker, Reed 61 Tuska, George 41 The Ultimates 70, 73 Ultimate Spider-Man 70, 81 Ultimate X-Men 70 Ultimate universe 11, 69–72, 75, 100 Ulysses 92–93 Venom 59 Vietnam War 3, 11, 29, 37, 47–52, 74–75 The Vision (Timely Comics) 36 Waid, Mark 74–75 Wall Street 55 Wandtke, Terrence 22, 63 Wakanda 40, 43 Walt Disney Company 101, 105 Warlock 52n1 War Machine 75 The War on Terror 11, 79, 81, 102 The Wasp 31 Watchmen 55–56, 65, 76n2 Wein, Len 44–45 Wells, John 22 The West Wing 8 What If? 63 WildC.A.T.s 66 Wilson, G. Willow 90 Wolfman, Marv 57 Wolf, Mark J. P. 4–6, 106–109 Wolverine 81, 99 Wonder Woman 106 World War II 3, 21, 28, 30, 43, 52, 75, 83, 88–89, 95, 97n3

Index Wright, Bradford 22–23, 26, 37, 40–42, 57 The X-Men 24, 43–47, 66–67, 69–74, 81, 99 The X-Men (comic book) 11, 44–47

X-Men (film) 99 Yeager, Chuck 90 Yockey, Matt 26 Youngblood 66 Yi, Lienil 86

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