THE GER SHEKER
(Sean Howe, who later edited the Deep Focus series, asked me around 2003 to contribute to Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers, an anthology of essays on comics that he was putting together that includes, now that I haul it down to have a look at it, a pretty amazing group of writers -- Brad Meltzer, Luc Sante, Geoff Dyer, and Aimee Bender lead the thing off, and it never goes downhill. Interestingly, though maybe not surprisingly, the anthology leans more toward the personal than the critical [though there are some terrific critical essays]. Also not suprisingly, the book sank like a stone, but not before incurring THE USUAL WRATH among true believers for acts, errors, omissions, and so forth.
This version of my essay cuts a passage that the book's editor at Pantheon wanted me to insert because it "explained" the illustration that had been chosen (not by me) to accompany my essay. It always stuck out like a sore thumb to me.)
I.
We moved when I was seven, to an artist’s housing complex in Greenwich Village that had opened its doors maybe six months earlier, ample time for the kids who first dwelled within the boundaries of its award-winning design to construct an intricately petty social system from which, as a new kid, I was inevitably to be excluded. This brought a kind of malefic perfection to my discontent: I’d taken a dim view of the move to begin with, seen the whole idea as something of a downer. My parents had an abundance of reasons for leaving the old neighborhood, whose devastation during the 1960s was mild relative to that of some places but severe enough that before we left my father sometimes would hide silently in our darkened apartment, a homemade club in his hands, in an attempt to fool the burglars (who periodically made off with our TVs, jewelry, winter coats, blank checks, and spare change) into believing that the place was empty. Luckily, they were never tricked. Reason Number Two for leaving was that unhealthy preoccupation with victimhood, Number One being victimhood itself. But I had quite a different viewpoint. The burglars terrified me; being mugged and robbed was not fun--but these were matters distinct from the neighborhood itself, which was home. I barely noticed that the school was failing, that stores along Avenue B were closing, that junkies nodded off in the entryways of abandoned buildings that grew in number each month. I didn’t question why they put up sheets of plywood where there’d been the plate glass windows of a corner saloon (someone had blown away everyone inside)--weren’t, after all, a lot of windows covered with plywood? I had my friends, I had Tompkins Square, I had Mrs. Meller, whom I loved, for first grade.
Then, suddenly, what I had was this whitebread new group, all supremely at ease with each other and in their surroundings. Confident, well-adjusted, living in apartments that had in them, instead of stacks of cardboard boxes (or a crazed family man hiding in the shadows), furnishings and decorations, these young suzerains laid down the principles for living as a kid in the building--a male prepubescent kid anyway--laid them down simply so that there was no need to trouble oneself with nuance; so that, in their sheer, binary black-and-whiteness, the unsuccessful candidate for approval could easily spot where he had gone wrong. Some specific ways I fell short: They were thin, I was fat. They were righthanded, I was a lefty. They attended P.S.41, I attended P.S.3. They rooted for the Yankees, I was a Met fan. See? I was sometimes reminded that I lived on the wrong floor, that my parents should have chosen to live on the third story, not the sixth. There were a dozen or so boys roughly my age--and they had constructed the world according to their own exacting and arbitrary standards.
II.
But there was also Karen Barber. Karen lived across the hall in an apartment that would shortly be occupied by one of the building’s typically calamitous families (the mother would die young of cancer; the father would attempt suicide; the son would be killed, crushed by a freight elevator in the warehouse he and his playmates had broken into; the daughter would grow up to be a prostitute). For the time being, however, Karen lived there with her parents, a mild-mannered couple with whom my mother and father got along, and so Karen and I fashioned our camaraderie on the coattails of the adults’ friendship. She was a nice kid, and I think she felt as lonely and out of place in that building as I did. We spent hours together up in her loft bed, with stacks of comic books for company, fueled by snacks and sodas (Karen’s parents allowed her a free hand in the kitchen), interspersing flurries of conversation with periods of quiet, concentrated reading. It was a puerile sort of heaven but it was heaven nonetheless.
And what we read was strictly puerile stuff, titles like Casper and Richie Rich, and the expansive Archie series: Archie, Archie and Me, Archie at Riverdale High, Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica, Archie’s Joke Book, Archie’s Pals and Gals, Archie’s Pal Jughead, Archie’s TV Laugh-Out, Archie’s Xmas Love-In, Life with Archie, and the perhaps redundantly titled Everything’s Archie. Even if our genre choices were regrettable, my lazy afternoons with Karen were excellent preparation for the intense comic book reading I would embark on, with great seriousness of purpose, within just a year or so; they had the effect of fully immersing me in the medium for the first time. Even the ads spoke of an exotic, hitherto undetected world, one encompassing not only pedestrian novelties like X-Ray Specs, sacks of foreign stamps sent, in that mysterious phrase, “on approval,” and Sea Monkeys, but such extraordinary mail-order items as the “backyard Polaris Nuclear Submarine,” from which you and your similarly equipped friends could lob nuclear missiles at one another after school. There were great prizes to be earned peddling Grit (“America’s Greatest Family Newspaper”) and American Seeds, and perhaps I could carry with me for self-protection that Daisy air rifle I’d get for my birthday if I could demonstrate how responsible I was!
Ridiculous. Who did I know with a back yard? Could you own a personal nuclear sub and protest the Vietnam War? The family newspapers in our house were the Times, the Voice, and Dorothy Schiff’s evening Post, and anyway the only guy I’d ever seen selling newspaper subscriptions door to door came around once a year pushing The Militant. And the BB gun was something I knew not to ask about. But that these revelations of middle America puzzled and exhilarated me far more than Archie & Co.’s weird composite lifestyle of surfing, snowmobiling, big-city adventure, and subdivision comfort, all apparently achieved within the city limits of “Riverdale” (which clearly was not in the Bronx), was a clear sign of dawning maturity, of a kind. Effete, indecisive, impecunious Archie wasn’t going to do it for me and so, Karen’s good-natured disinterest notwithstanding, I began to incorporate DC superhero comics into our reading list.
Suddenly: a fellowship, or an adjunct professorship, and Karen and her parents were off to Woodstock or Santa Cruz or wherever it was that good fortune or karma or boredom guided them. I was back in the hands of the guys from whom I’d retreated up the shag-carpeted steps leading to Karen’s bed and, deserted, avoidance was no longer an alternative. As beguiling as those fairy tales about spirited nonconformists can be, children simply do not perceive things that way. God knows, it may be that one day we’ll all jingle in our pockets coins stamped with the image of that mythic loner, James Dean, but that is not what a kid wants to be, ever. And what an adult may view as puzzlingly self-denying behavior makes perfect sense from the perspective of the child who is expert at gauging his resources and chances, and what made perfect sense to me then was the zeal with which I sought to ingratiate myself. About some of my defects, there wasn’t much to be done. Some, like continuing unbroken a four-generation tradition of following New York National League baseball, were matters of quasi-religious significance. Others involved the gavel-stroke of heredity. But some were easily corrected. A pair of Pro-Keds to replace my unsightly “skips.” A zippered, hooded sweatjacket instead of my grandmother’s “bogus” sweaters. And then there were comic books. What kind of pussy was I to be reading DC? Suddenly, it was a very material question.
III.
In the beginning Marvel created the Bullpen and the Style.
And the Bullpen was without form, and was void; and darkness was upon the face of the Artists. And the Spirit of Marvel moved upon the face of the Writers.
And Marvel said, Let there be The Fantastic Four. And there was The Fantastic Four.
And Marvel saw The Fantastic Four. And it was good.
--Stan Lee
Substitute “Stan Lee” for “Marvel” wherever the latter appears and you will more accurately capture the true, tenderly profane spirit of the exhibit furnished above[1]. It’s generally accepted that the so-called “Silver Age” productions of the Marvel Comics Group were patently superior to those of DC, their chief rival, but it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that this orthodoxy persists at least partly because of the tirelessly aggressive efforts of Lee--Marvel’s impresario, editor-in-chief, head writer, art director, and, by the early ‘70s, publisher--to promote his comics and the roster of superheroes inhabiting them as preferable to those of DC not merely for some frivolous, kid-like reason, but because they were so innovatively written and drawn as to constitute a form of high art, they were socially aware and in tune with the zeitgeist, they comprised a modern mythology that in its scope and complexity reached back to that of ancient Greece, and they formed the basis for a secret society equipped with its own shibboleths and cognomens for initiates to memorize and cherish.
The force of Lee’s splendorous bluster is such that even today I’m never completely sure when or whether this bullshit was written tongue-in-cheek. If anything, I’m understating the vehement razzle-dazzle with which he put forward his claims. Lee was fond of hyperbole, of alliteration, acronyms, and nicknames; he had the catachrestic knack of a dime novelist for deftly locating a ten dollar word precisely where he could wring the greatest effect from it. He could maintain a straight face when he piously spoke of the “sophisticated philosophy” a close reading of Marvel was supposed to impart to its readers, while simultaneously making it sound marketably innocuous. And what’s more, he took it all on the road, regularly speaking at the colleges whose students had begun to make up a substantial portion of Marvel’s readership.
To a 40-year-old person who has spent his adult life not reading comic books, some of Lee’s claims look pretty silly now, and his “frisky” style can be grating. But give the man his due: Marvel transformed the medium in the ‘60s, starting with the elemental visual impact of Jack Kirby’s drawing, which challenged the primacy of the paunchy heroes DC presented in their series of tiny, static tableaux (Jules Feiffer once dryly observed that ever since it had left Joe Shuster’s hands Superman looked as if it had been “drawn in a bank”). The scripts, building on the steady, accretive development of a vast narrative cosmos, soon were cross-resonating throughout the Marvel realm, so that to fully comprehend the action in a given issue of, say, Thor you had to first read the prior month’s issue of The Avengers. Consequent reader confusion was dealt with dismissively; an offhand footnote might stipulate, “If you’ve forgotten ish #45, you’ll have to take our word for it! ...Snide Stan.” (DC, on the other hand, found continuity to be a bugaboo--or maybe it just didn’t care: were Superman’s adoptive parents named John and Mary Kent? Eben and Sarah? Jonathan and Martha?) And the characters, if not the Molière-like creations Lee suggested they were, were not the interchangeable hero-drone units inhabiting the DC universe, either.
The ineffable virtue that all of Marvel’s wondrous qualities added up to was “hipper.” Hipper than DC, to be sure, but the sense you get is that Marvel aspired to a startling magnitude of hipness, to hipness commensurate with that of the ‘60s itself, that strange decade that brought cosmopolitan otherness and an irresistible pop sensibility into alignment. Marvel zinged along strings the culture had pulled taut, drew from the same energy source that throughout the decade transformed similarly nebbishy, equally improbable entities into cultural conquistadors, from the Beatles to the VW Beetle, from Lenny Bruce to Leonard Nimoy, from Peter Sellers to Alexander Portnoy, from the SDS to the ’69 Mets.
IV.
The Comic Art Shop was located on Morton Street, just a few doors down from that enduring immigrant bazaar on Bleecker Street where, even today, amid fake trattorias and antiseptic shops selling six dollar ice cream cones, remnants of my childhood such as John’s, Zito’s, Ottomanelli’s, Faicco’s, and Rocco’s persevere, survivors of an Italian Greenwich Village that now exists largely in the imagination of the tourist trade. In this setting, the shop probably was as out of place as it sounds, but the Village, though rising fast, still had something of an improvisational, bohemian feel to it then. A business could still be run on a shoestring. People leased storefronts and gave it a go until the money ran out. The Village was dotted with places like this; esoteric places that gratified their proprietors’ not-always-practical fixations on things like used books and houseplants and health food and gay pornography and, as one Hudson Street store put it, “Junque”; slightly squalid places run by youngish men and women who doubtlessly horrified their quasi-professional, vicariously ambitious parents by becoming the storekeepers their grandparents had been.
Even by these standards, the Comic Art Shop had a fugitive look to it, as if it expected to go out of business, to be hounded out of town, at any minute. It was an unadorned space, its bare walls destitute of the posters and other decorations now universally found in such stores. Remembering the austerity that heralded its single-mindedness of purpose, I’m reminded of the Harlem and Lower East Side “variety stores” where, a few years later, I’d go to buy nickel bags. But at that time, years before I required anything stronger than refined sugar to alter my brain chemistry, this was where I went for my shady thrills. This was where I went to educate myself in Marvel history and lore.
For the act of apostasy had come easily, occurring at the most private of levels and seeming to involve the most superficial of self-betrayals. It was my first conscious experience of a specific genus of cheating that I have since encountered many times; sometimes succumbing to temptation, sometimes not, and never being quite sure whether it’s made any difference at all: no one will ever know. What a delicious secret. I could fob this off as a casual decision, made freely and independently-- what a happy coincidence that for once my interests were in alignment with those of the majority! No one will ever know--is there anything more delicious? Anything that better offsets the everyday, quiet, automatic execution of what we know to be right and just and necessary (the return of the wallet to its owner, the proper disposal of the trash, the non-theft of the tip from the asshole bartender, the not rifling through the bureau drawers, the respected inviolacy of the personal diary)? Isn’t it a rare pleasure when it seems right, and just, and necessary to tell the superego to take a hike and, without asking anyone’s permission, to let the id step in and indulge itself?
Because I required social leverage and this was one way to obtain it. I needed it more than I needed some spurious self-fealty. Who would know? The real question was, who could know? Sure, I’d acquired a genuine fondness for DC’s characters, but face it--it was exactly nobody I was being faithful to! Would Superman give a shit that I’d abandoned him? Would the Fortress of Solitude echo with more loneliness? Would my absence mark another traumatic loss for the Batman? Would there be a pregnant silence when they called the roll at the Justice League meeting and my name met with no response? With how much weight was I supposed to invest the decision? My parents didn’t care. At school they wouldn’t inveigh against it. My grandfather wouldn’t shake his grey head sadly. This was just kid stuff--and the most important decision I had.
I’d found out about the Comic Art Shop from Kirk and Marco, two of the objects of my ardent pursuit, who deigned to tell me that the big distinction separating the callow juvenile who read the cretinous stories DC offered from the seasoned connoisseur who partook of Marvel’s “sophisticated philosophy” was that the latter was also a commodity fetishist who carefully catalogued his collection and who paid not inconsiderable amounts for select back issues, which were then placed individually in special plastic bags and stored away in special cardboard boxes. Being the sort of kid who left his comics in the bathroom, tore off their covers, and clipped order blanks from them, I’d had no idea. But it was pretty serious business: on Saturdays the shop resembled the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, with kids milling three and four deep at the counter, hollering out orders at the clerk, usually the same guy in his early twenties with blond steel wool hair, vivid acne, and an unfailingly patient attitude. You worked from a scribbled list. You had a price in mind. You tried to complete series, or to collect issues featuring particular artists; or you followed private criteria that would have been complicated and vaguely embarrassing to explain. You had an idea, in the Platonic sense, which is all collecting really is (whenever I'm in the presence of someone’s array of matchbooks or shoes or 45s I find myself imagining the pathology, the dream of order or comprehension or coherence it objectifies, for a collection is a snippet of dream-language, openly and inscrutably babbling away). In my case, the idea was simple: I was going to school myself in Marvel folklore, applying myself with the scholarly fervor of a convert, the Graham Greene approach--though, actually, the more appropriate analogy is that of the Ger Sheker, the mendacious stranger who converts to Judaism for ulterior motives or material gain. My scholarly aims derived from entirely unscholarly motivations--I stood in that shop, with its pleasant smell of moldering paper and cardboard, blowing my allowance and my birthday and Christmas loot because I’d started to make some progress, socially, and I wasn’t about to lose any ground.
V.
Still, it was a scholarly experience. To work my way back through Marvel was to grab hold of, understand, and form opinions about a literary canon. It was to intuit something about the nature of literary history; to see, literally graphically, the tumultuous effects of innovation on an art form. This was impossible to achieve reading DC alone because, as the megalithic presence Marvel was reacting against, DC had ceased to be fluid. Its here and now simply did not matter: its function, in view of Marvel’s existence, was to be of the past, even as it ground out issues every month. Like the Washington Generals, the Harlem Globetrotters’ perennial foils on the court, DC was there not merely to be defeated, but humiliated. DC’s own history had become a trap; it was at best a historical artifact--the “way things used to be”--at worst an indication of how remote DC had become from its own days of excellence, innovation, and uniqueness of vision.
By the ‘60s DC had domesticated the superhero beyond any possibility of awe. He was as much a part of the landscape as the Bell System, a quasi-public utility in a cape. Superman once was even depicted using his x-ray vision to repair a cracked plate glass window for a smug-looking storekeeper. How heroic, how astonishing, how splendid was that? Yet that’s how it was--the DC squad cruised around like members of a tenant patrol, looking for action. Today you rescued an off-course dirigible. Tonight you tangled with a bunch of safecrackers wearing tight pinstripe suits. And if what you happened upon tomorrow was a broken window--well, you took what you could get. Only when someone like Luthor or the Joker turned up was there any hint of the sort of epic grudge match that fueled nearly every Marvel story. The DC hero was always accepting the key to the city; the Marvel hero was, at root, blithely unconcerned with law and order. He paid it lip service; there was always the obligatory panel depicting panicky civilians, or cops blasting away ineffectually at the menace du jour, but generally the well-being of civil society was merely ancillary to the psychodrama involving the principal players.
That DC was well aware of all this is evident from the slightly penitential tone taken by DC editor E. Nelson Bridwell in his introductions to the 1971 books Superman From the Thirties to the Seventies and Batman From the Thirties to the Seventies, compilations appearing just three years before Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics. While Bridwell all but apologizes for DC’s missteps with its two flagship characters, Lee’s attitude is distinctly triumphalist. And why not? Marvel was Number One. Origins of Marvel Comics and its sequel, Son of Origins, marked a consolidation of the company’s fortunes, while DC’s clinically titled volumes seemed almost elegiac in nature.
VI.
The question I seem to be moving toward is “did DC suck?”, but the more apposite question, perhaps, is “was Marvel all that good?” Lee’s two books are arranged according to a simple then-and-now schema, which contrasts, sometimes startlingly, the characters’ original appearances with their later, presumably more familiar representations. Curious that, in the mid-1970s, Lee chose examples from the late 1960s to typify the “now” segments: the message coming through loud and clear was that Marvel had already peaked.
It had. When I wasn’t hanging around the Comic Art Shop watching people handle old comic books as if they were fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I was buying new ones at Andy’s candy store on West 11th. I bought them, but I don’t think I liked them a whole lot, because while I recall having been an RFO (a “Real Frantic One,” in Lee-speak: the purchaser of at least three Marvel comics per month; the lowest rank of Marvel nobility), my interest in Marvel lasted maybe two years, tops. The Marvel books I bought then are mostly bloodless and derivative. There had been important personnel changes--most significantly, Kirby had departed and Lee, now Publisher, was writing fewer scripts. Marvel was treading water. The stories became formulaic: for example, no installment of Spider-Man was complete now without Peter Parker cycling through recurring romantic, social, familial, financial, and academic worries. Every few pages he’d get into costume for some wiseass derring-do, but the rest was all a roiling soap opera[2]. When they tried to break out--killing off lover Gwen, making best friend Harry a psychotic junkie, introducing uninspired new villains, sending Peter to live in a lousy neighborhood--the title spun out. The last new issue I bought ends on a note of exhausted contrivance: Gwen has returned from the grave, as a clone.
What had drawn me in were the reprints Marvel put out, titles like Marvel Tales and Marvel Triple Action--that was the stuff that had started me throwing my dough around the Comic Art Shop each Saturday, buying up back issues. Such recycling saved some money, but it put Marvel in the position of competing against itself. It was like being given the option of watching Willie Mays at the end of his career or, simply by stepping through a discreet side door, seeing him as he was in his prime, and getting the Polo Grounds to boot. There is something urbane, something quickblooded and sophisticated, about those Marvel books of the ‘60s. You were given to understand that all those miniskirted bombshells on the streets, the guys in their nehru jackets, had more important things to do than just stand there and gawk when superheroes sailed through the skies overhead. Consider the fact that all the Marvel heroes came from hither and yon to live in New York, the big time (just what were all those DC VIPs doing in bush league burgs like “Central City”? Couldn’t they hack it?). For me, it was a nostalgic glimpse of “Fun City,” the chimera that the first Lindsay administration had celebrated. The nostalgia was illusory, of course: that was the decade through whose agency my old neighborhood had been destroyed, after all. But now the rest of the city had caught up; been enveloped in the sour funk that was the true aroma of those days, settled into a lingering fiscal and moral dilapidation: what better time for nostalgia, fake or otherwise?
VII.
And a good time, too, for relevancy--which DC was embracing like a life preserver, pursuing Marvel and trying to shake off its unquestioned irrelevancy of late. Its consequent jeremiads were typified by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ strident Green Lantern/Green Arrow series. Perhaps because of their lesser status in the DC pantheon, these characters were deemed most capable of shouldering the burden of relevancy and embarking on a journey through a landscape of racism, drugs, poverty, environmental depredation, and religious charlatanry. But nobody bought; the book was discontinued.
It’s not hard to see why. The stuff is naked propaganda, ultra-naïve, paternalistic, and pretentious, from the overt Christ-figures Adams doted on to the literary quotations O’Neil threw in. If Marvel’s “sophisticated philosophy” was a hodgepodge of pseudoexistentialist folderol (“With great power there must also come--great responsibility”), the philosophy of Star Wars, then DC’s was the philosophy of Star Trek: idealized case studies in which right and wrong are laid out like clothes. DC missed the point. Sure, Marvel characters attended protests. Sure, Marvel talked about drugs. Sure, Marvel portrayed the inner city, and raised the profile of black people in their comics. Couldn’t hurt. But what DC never got was that none of that was ever the point. The reason why, in the end, Stan Lee could get away with either taking blacks or leaving them, with either having characters protest or shipping them to Indochina, with either giving them drug problems or having them sip sodas at the drugstore, was because once the masks went on, Marvel heroes became Other. Out of uniform all the men may have looked as if they’d rolled off a Ken-doll assembly line; all the women like either Ann-Margret, Faye Dunaway or Raquel Welch, but everyone knew that they were marked by an exotic ethnicity all their own. This was powerful--and undefined--enough for anybody to identify with. Marvel’s “relevancy” was encoded in the implicit idea that any bunch of young people who looked different, who acted out the way Marvel’s heroes did, would be regarded as freaks by all the straights scurrying around on the streets. DC’s overt attempts at relevancy failed, finally, not because the posturing was less convincing than Marvel’s but because the dramatis personae were so ill-suited to it. Suddenly, at midlife, its heroes were born again, sanctified by the gospel of centrist liberalism?
Well, maybe. It may just have been middle age, which DC was wise to acknowledge. DC wasn’t in a position to start all over again, so it redrew what it could. Its stars handled change gingerly, but not completely unenthusiastically, and there is a persuasive feeling in these early ‘70s books of people facing a loss of potency, facing their own dwindling faith in authority, facing a growing sense of being out of touch--facing, finally, irrelevance. More than the “issues” themselves, a farrago of tepidly endorsed causes, what is intriguing is the sense you get of a mature soul being grafted onto the characters.
VIII.
So--if Marvel was maybe not so good, if DC was maybe not so bad, was it worth it, was it necessary, to leave DC? I didn’t know any of this history back when I started buying DC comics. If I made a conscious, uninfluenced, choice, it was based on the aesthetic appraisal of an eight-year-old: there they were--the famous Batman and Superman! They were, after all, on TV. But of their provenance, of their aesthetic rank relative to the competition, I knew nothing. I doubt that the juvenile commissars who suggested that I ought to watch what I read knew any of this either. And I doubt that it would have made any difference to claim that because its comics reflected the concerns of their makers at a difficult point in the country’s history, because they represented a genuine search for a new creative direction, because as an American person you could do worse than to acquaint yourself with Superman and Batman, DC was actually pretty interesting. These were arguments that didn’t even occur to me at the time. While my evaluation of the Fantastic Four, et al, was shrewdly political, it was still a relief to be told what to do. Marvel was a juggernaut then--it didn’t matter that the drawing was often second rate or that writers aping Stan Lee’s tone captured none of his flavor. It didn’t matter that DC was putting out elegant, stylish books drawn by the likes of Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, and Jim Aparo and written by the likes of Denny O’Neil (who was OK when he wasn’t saving the world), not to mention allowing Jack Kirby (who had defected) his head. It didn’t matter that when it came right down to it, aside from Spider-Man (to whom I became emotionally attached), Marvel sort of bugged me. What did matter? DC was toilet paper on my shoe; someone was informing me--snidely, OK, but they were letting me know.
It’s amazing to look back more than thirty years and realize how early received wisdom takes hold, and how tenaciously it retains that hold. I was wise, of course: I feel I have sometimes been astute enough to recognize the correct response when it looms before me. The corollary to this is that with the passing of each era of my life I’ve had to disentangle myself from one species of groupthink or another, but the key speculation is, from what would I have had to disentangle myself otherwise? Like no others, children provide you with the opportunity to provide unambiguously correct or incorrect responses. The preservation of feelings is never of concern. They ask you openly: do you want to belong--or not?
The fabulous appeal of Marvel heroes lay always in their isolation, their rejection of, and by, the worldly. And, through them, you may say, If I am alone, then I am a hero. There is a tremendous relief, a tremendous satisfaction in determining this about yourself. I am not just alone! Of course, that doesn’t even begin to approximate the satisfaction of identifying with the lone heroes of Marvel, of embracing their stark emotional seclusion, shoulder to shoulder with a group of fellow adherents.
If there’s a paradox here, it’s not one into which I feel inclined to read a lot of meaning. It may simply be that, no matter what their staunchest champions claim for them, comics really are intended for kids, who, whatever the quality of their social milieu, have yet to find their true lives, and who, in continuing to see things through a glass, darkly when searching for those lives, see only themselves.
[1] NB: There exists an ancient dispute over the principal authorship of many of Marvel’s creations. Jack Kirby long asserted that he was the actual prime mover behind the creation of some of Marvel’s most famous characters while minimizing Lee’s involvement (“Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK?”). Lee himself has offered up equally self-serving assessments of his own contributions. It’s not within the purview of this essay, nor is its author competent, to address this subject.
[2] It’s worth noting that Spider-Man artist John Romita, who had taken over from originator Steve Ditko and completely overhauled Ditko’s grotesque vision, had extensive experience in romance comics. A page of Romita’s teen melodrama stuff beggars anything in Lichtenstein’s canon.
Return to The Bottom Drawer
(Sean Howe, who later edited the Deep Focus series, asked me around 2003 to contribute to Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers, an anthology of essays on comics that he was putting together that includes, now that I haul it down to have a look at it, a pretty amazing group of writers -- Brad Meltzer, Luc Sante, Geoff Dyer, and Aimee Bender lead the thing off, and it never goes downhill. Interestingly, though maybe not surprisingly, the anthology leans more toward the personal than the critical [though there are some terrific critical essays]. Also not suprisingly, the book sank like a stone, but not before incurring THE USUAL WRATH among true believers for acts, errors, omissions, and so forth.
This version of my essay cuts a passage that the book's editor at Pantheon wanted me to insert because it "explained" the illustration that had been chosen (not by me) to accompany my essay. It always stuck out like a sore thumb to me.)
I.
We moved when I was seven, to an artist’s housing complex in Greenwich Village that had opened its doors maybe six months earlier, ample time for the kids who first dwelled within the boundaries of its award-winning design to construct an intricately petty social system from which, as a new kid, I was inevitably to be excluded. This brought a kind of malefic perfection to my discontent: I’d taken a dim view of the move to begin with, seen the whole idea as something of a downer. My parents had an abundance of reasons for leaving the old neighborhood, whose devastation during the 1960s was mild relative to that of some places but severe enough that before we left my father sometimes would hide silently in our darkened apartment, a homemade club in his hands, in an attempt to fool the burglars (who periodically made off with our TVs, jewelry, winter coats, blank checks, and spare change) into believing that the place was empty. Luckily, they were never tricked. Reason Number Two for leaving was that unhealthy preoccupation with victimhood, Number One being victimhood itself. But I had quite a different viewpoint. The burglars terrified me; being mugged and robbed was not fun--but these were matters distinct from the neighborhood itself, which was home. I barely noticed that the school was failing, that stores along Avenue B were closing, that junkies nodded off in the entryways of abandoned buildings that grew in number each month. I didn’t question why they put up sheets of plywood where there’d been the plate glass windows of a corner saloon (someone had blown away everyone inside)--weren’t, after all, a lot of windows covered with plywood? I had my friends, I had Tompkins Square, I had Mrs. Meller, whom I loved, for first grade.
Then, suddenly, what I had was this whitebread new group, all supremely at ease with each other and in their surroundings. Confident, well-adjusted, living in apartments that had in them, instead of stacks of cardboard boxes (or a crazed family man hiding in the shadows), furnishings and decorations, these young suzerains laid down the principles for living as a kid in the building--a male prepubescent kid anyway--laid them down simply so that there was no need to trouble oneself with nuance; so that, in their sheer, binary black-and-whiteness, the unsuccessful candidate for approval could easily spot where he had gone wrong. Some specific ways I fell short: They were thin, I was fat. They were righthanded, I was a lefty. They attended P.S.41, I attended P.S.3. They rooted for the Yankees, I was a Met fan. See? I was sometimes reminded that I lived on the wrong floor, that my parents should have chosen to live on the third story, not the sixth. There were a dozen or so boys roughly my age--and they had constructed the world according to their own exacting and arbitrary standards.
II.
But there was also Karen Barber. Karen lived across the hall in an apartment that would shortly be occupied by one of the building’s typically calamitous families (the mother would die young of cancer; the father would attempt suicide; the son would be killed, crushed by a freight elevator in the warehouse he and his playmates had broken into; the daughter would grow up to be a prostitute). For the time being, however, Karen lived there with her parents, a mild-mannered couple with whom my mother and father got along, and so Karen and I fashioned our camaraderie on the coattails of the adults’ friendship. She was a nice kid, and I think she felt as lonely and out of place in that building as I did. We spent hours together up in her loft bed, with stacks of comic books for company, fueled by snacks and sodas (Karen’s parents allowed her a free hand in the kitchen), interspersing flurries of conversation with periods of quiet, concentrated reading. It was a puerile sort of heaven but it was heaven nonetheless.
And what we read was strictly puerile stuff, titles like Casper and Richie Rich, and the expansive Archie series: Archie, Archie and Me, Archie at Riverdale High, Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica, Archie’s Joke Book, Archie’s Pals and Gals, Archie’s Pal Jughead, Archie’s TV Laugh-Out, Archie’s Xmas Love-In, Life with Archie, and the perhaps redundantly titled Everything’s Archie. Even if our genre choices were regrettable, my lazy afternoons with Karen were excellent preparation for the intense comic book reading I would embark on, with great seriousness of purpose, within just a year or so; they had the effect of fully immersing me in the medium for the first time. Even the ads spoke of an exotic, hitherto undetected world, one encompassing not only pedestrian novelties like X-Ray Specs, sacks of foreign stamps sent, in that mysterious phrase, “on approval,” and Sea Monkeys, but such extraordinary mail-order items as the “backyard Polaris Nuclear Submarine,” from which you and your similarly equipped friends could lob nuclear missiles at one another after school. There were great prizes to be earned peddling Grit (“America’s Greatest Family Newspaper”) and American Seeds, and perhaps I could carry with me for self-protection that Daisy air rifle I’d get for my birthday if I could demonstrate how responsible I was!
Ridiculous. Who did I know with a back yard? Could you own a personal nuclear sub and protest the Vietnam War? The family newspapers in our house were the Times, the Voice, and Dorothy Schiff’s evening Post, and anyway the only guy I’d ever seen selling newspaper subscriptions door to door came around once a year pushing The Militant. And the BB gun was something I knew not to ask about. But that these revelations of middle America puzzled and exhilarated me far more than Archie & Co.’s weird composite lifestyle of surfing, snowmobiling, big-city adventure, and subdivision comfort, all apparently achieved within the city limits of “Riverdale” (which clearly was not in the Bronx), was a clear sign of dawning maturity, of a kind. Effete, indecisive, impecunious Archie wasn’t going to do it for me and so, Karen’s good-natured disinterest notwithstanding, I began to incorporate DC superhero comics into our reading list.
Suddenly: a fellowship, or an adjunct professorship, and Karen and her parents were off to Woodstock or Santa Cruz or wherever it was that good fortune or karma or boredom guided them. I was back in the hands of the guys from whom I’d retreated up the shag-carpeted steps leading to Karen’s bed and, deserted, avoidance was no longer an alternative. As beguiling as those fairy tales about spirited nonconformists can be, children simply do not perceive things that way. God knows, it may be that one day we’ll all jingle in our pockets coins stamped with the image of that mythic loner, James Dean, but that is not what a kid wants to be, ever. And what an adult may view as puzzlingly self-denying behavior makes perfect sense from the perspective of the child who is expert at gauging his resources and chances, and what made perfect sense to me then was the zeal with which I sought to ingratiate myself. About some of my defects, there wasn’t much to be done. Some, like continuing unbroken a four-generation tradition of following New York National League baseball, were matters of quasi-religious significance. Others involved the gavel-stroke of heredity. But some were easily corrected. A pair of Pro-Keds to replace my unsightly “skips.” A zippered, hooded sweatjacket instead of my grandmother’s “bogus” sweaters. And then there were comic books. What kind of pussy was I to be reading DC? Suddenly, it was a very material question.
III.
In the beginning Marvel created the Bullpen and the Style.
And the Bullpen was without form, and was void; and darkness was upon the face of the Artists. And the Spirit of Marvel moved upon the face of the Writers.
And Marvel said, Let there be The Fantastic Four. And there was The Fantastic Four.
And Marvel saw The Fantastic Four. And it was good.
--Stan Lee
Substitute “Stan Lee” for “Marvel” wherever the latter appears and you will more accurately capture the true, tenderly profane spirit of the exhibit furnished above[1]. It’s generally accepted that the so-called “Silver Age” productions of the Marvel Comics Group were patently superior to those of DC, their chief rival, but it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that this orthodoxy persists at least partly because of the tirelessly aggressive efforts of Lee--Marvel’s impresario, editor-in-chief, head writer, art director, and, by the early ‘70s, publisher--to promote his comics and the roster of superheroes inhabiting them as preferable to those of DC not merely for some frivolous, kid-like reason, but because they were so innovatively written and drawn as to constitute a form of high art, they were socially aware and in tune with the zeitgeist, they comprised a modern mythology that in its scope and complexity reached back to that of ancient Greece, and they formed the basis for a secret society equipped with its own shibboleths and cognomens for initiates to memorize and cherish.
The force of Lee’s splendorous bluster is such that even today I’m never completely sure when or whether this bullshit was written tongue-in-cheek. If anything, I’m understating the vehement razzle-dazzle with which he put forward his claims. Lee was fond of hyperbole, of alliteration, acronyms, and nicknames; he had the catachrestic knack of a dime novelist for deftly locating a ten dollar word precisely where he could wring the greatest effect from it. He could maintain a straight face when he piously spoke of the “sophisticated philosophy” a close reading of Marvel was supposed to impart to its readers, while simultaneously making it sound marketably innocuous. And what’s more, he took it all on the road, regularly speaking at the colleges whose students had begun to make up a substantial portion of Marvel’s readership.
To a 40-year-old person who has spent his adult life not reading comic books, some of Lee’s claims look pretty silly now, and his “frisky” style can be grating. But give the man his due: Marvel transformed the medium in the ‘60s, starting with the elemental visual impact of Jack Kirby’s drawing, which challenged the primacy of the paunchy heroes DC presented in their series of tiny, static tableaux (Jules Feiffer once dryly observed that ever since it had left Joe Shuster’s hands Superman looked as if it had been “drawn in a bank”). The scripts, building on the steady, accretive development of a vast narrative cosmos, soon were cross-resonating throughout the Marvel realm, so that to fully comprehend the action in a given issue of, say, Thor you had to first read the prior month’s issue of The Avengers. Consequent reader confusion was dealt with dismissively; an offhand footnote might stipulate, “If you’ve forgotten ish #45, you’ll have to take our word for it! ...Snide Stan.” (DC, on the other hand, found continuity to be a bugaboo--or maybe it just didn’t care: were Superman’s adoptive parents named John and Mary Kent? Eben and Sarah? Jonathan and Martha?) And the characters, if not the Molière-like creations Lee suggested they were, were not the interchangeable hero-drone units inhabiting the DC universe, either.
The ineffable virtue that all of Marvel’s wondrous qualities added up to was “hipper.” Hipper than DC, to be sure, but the sense you get is that Marvel aspired to a startling magnitude of hipness, to hipness commensurate with that of the ‘60s itself, that strange decade that brought cosmopolitan otherness and an irresistible pop sensibility into alignment. Marvel zinged along strings the culture had pulled taut, drew from the same energy source that throughout the decade transformed similarly nebbishy, equally improbable entities into cultural conquistadors, from the Beatles to the VW Beetle, from Lenny Bruce to Leonard Nimoy, from Peter Sellers to Alexander Portnoy, from the SDS to the ’69 Mets.
IV.
The Comic Art Shop was located on Morton Street, just a few doors down from that enduring immigrant bazaar on Bleecker Street where, even today, amid fake trattorias and antiseptic shops selling six dollar ice cream cones, remnants of my childhood such as John’s, Zito’s, Ottomanelli’s, Faicco’s, and Rocco’s persevere, survivors of an Italian Greenwich Village that now exists largely in the imagination of the tourist trade. In this setting, the shop probably was as out of place as it sounds, but the Village, though rising fast, still had something of an improvisational, bohemian feel to it then. A business could still be run on a shoestring. People leased storefronts and gave it a go until the money ran out. The Village was dotted with places like this; esoteric places that gratified their proprietors’ not-always-practical fixations on things like used books and houseplants and health food and gay pornography and, as one Hudson Street store put it, “Junque”; slightly squalid places run by youngish men and women who doubtlessly horrified their quasi-professional, vicariously ambitious parents by becoming the storekeepers their grandparents had been.
Even by these standards, the Comic Art Shop had a fugitive look to it, as if it expected to go out of business, to be hounded out of town, at any minute. It was an unadorned space, its bare walls destitute of the posters and other decorations now universally found in such stores. Remembering the austerity that heralded its single-mindedness of purpose, I’m reminded of the Harlem and Lower East Side “variety stores” where, a few years later, I’d go to buy nickel bags. But at that time, years before I required anything stronger than refined sugar to alter my brain chemistry, this was where I went for my shady thrills. This was where I went to educate myself in Marvel history and lore.
For the act of apostasy had come easily, occurring at the most private of levels and seeming to involve the most superficial of self-betrayals. It was my first conscious experience of a specific genus of cheating that I have since encountered many times; sometimes succumbing to temptation, sometimes not, and never being quite sure whether it’s made any difference at all: no one will ever know. What a delicious secret. I could fob this off as a casual decision, made freely and independently-- what a happy coincidence that for once my interests were in alignment with those of the majority! No one will ever know--is there anything more delicious? Anything that better offsets the everyday, quiet, automatic execution of what we know to be right and just and necessary (the return of the wallet to its owner, the proper disposal of the trash, the non-theft of the tip from the asshole bartender, the not rifling through the bureau drawers, the respected inviolacy of the personal diary)? Isn’t it a rare pleasure when it seems right, and just, and necessary to tell the superego to take a hike and, without asking anyone’s permission, to let the id step in and indulge itself?
Because I required social leverage and this was one way to obtain it. I needed it more than I needed some spurious self-fealty. Who would know? The real question was, who could know? Sure, I’d acquired a genuine fondness for DC’s characters, but face it--it was exactly nobody I was being faithful to! Would Superman give a shit that I’d abandoned him? Would the Fortress of Solitude echo with more loneliness? Would my absence mark another traumatic loss for the Batman? Would there be a pregnant silence when they called the roll at the Justice League meeting and my name met with no response? With how much weight was I supposed to invest the decision? My parents didn’t care. At school they wouldn’t inveigh against it. My grandfather wouldn’t shake his grey head sadly. This was just kid stuff--and the most important decision I had.
I’d found out about the Comic Art Shop from Kirk and Marco, two of the objects of my ardent pursuit, who deigned to tell me that the big distinction separating the callow juvenile who read the cretinous stories DC offered from the seasoned connoisseur who partook of Marvel’s “sophisticated philosophy” was that the latter was also a commodity fetishist who carefully catalogued his collection and who paid not inconsiderable amounts for select back issues, which were then placed individually in special plastic bags and stored away in special cardboard boxes. Being the sort of kid who left his comics in the bathroom, tore off their covers, and clipped order blanks from them, I’d had no idea. But it was pretty serious business: on Saturdays the shop resembled the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, with kids milling three and four deep at the counter, hollering out orders at the clerk, usually the same guy in his early twenties with blond steel wool hair, vivid acne, and an unfailingly patient attitude. You worked from a scribbled list. You had a price in mind. You tried to complete series, or to collect issues featuring particular artists; or you followed private criteria that would have been complicated and vaguely embarrassing to explain. You had an idea, in the Platonic sense, which is all collecting really is (whenever I'm in the presence of someone’s array of matchbooks or shoes or 45s I find myself imagining the pathology, the dream of order or comprehension or coherence it objectifies, for a collection is a snippet of dream-language, openly and inscrutably babbling away). In my case, the idea was simple: I was going to school myself in Marvel folklore, applying myself with the scholarly fervor of a convert, the Graham Greene approach--though, actually, the more appropriate analogy is that of the Ger Sheker, the mendacious stranger who converts to Judaism for ulterior motives or material gain. My scholarly aims derived from entirely unscholarly motivations--I stood in that shop, with its pleasant smell of moldering paper and cardboard, blowing my allowance and my birthday and Christmas loot because I’d started to make some progress, socially, and I wasn’t about to lose any ground.
V.
Still, it was a scholarly experience. To work my way back through Marvel was to grab hold of, understand, and form opinions about a literary canon. It was to intuit something about the nature of literary history; to see, literally graphically, the tumultuous effects of innovation on an art form. This was impossible to achieve reading DC alone because, as the megalithic presence Marvel was reacting against, DC had ceased to be fluid. Its here and now simply did not matter: its function, in view of Marvel’s existence, was to be of the past, even as it ground out issues every month. Like the Washington Generals, the Harlem Globetrotters’ perennial foils on the court, DC was there not merely to be defeated, but humiliated. DC’s own history had become a trap; it was at best a historical artifact--the “way things used to be”--at worst an indication of how remote DC had become from its own days of excellence, innovation, and uniqueness of vision.
By the ‘60s DC had domesticated the superhero beyond any possibility of awe. He was as much a part of the landscape as the Bell System, a quasi-public utility in a cape. Superman once was even depicted using his x-ray vision to repair a cracked plate glass window for a smug-looking storekeeper. How heroic, how astonishing, how splendid was that? Yet that’s how it was--the DC squad cruised around like members of a tenant patrol, looking for action. Today you rescued an off-course dirigible. Tonight you tangled with a bunch of safecrackers wearing tight pinstripe suits. And if what you happened upon tomorrow was a broken window--well, you took what you could get. Only when someone like Luthor or the Joker turned up was there any hint of the sort of epic grudge match that fueled nearly every Marvel story. The DC hero was always accepting the key to the city; the Marvel hero was, at root, blithely unconcerned with law and order. He paid it lip service; there was always the obligatory panel depicting panicky civilians, or cops blasting away ineffectually at the menace du jour, but generally the well-being of civil society was merely ancillary to the psychodrama involving the principal players.
That DC was well aware of all this is evident from the slightly penitential tone taken by DC editor E. Nelson Bridwell in his introductions to the 1971 books Superman From the Thirties to the Seventies and Batman From the Thirties to the Seventies, compilations appearing just three years before Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics. While Bridwell all but apologizes for DC’s missteps with its two flagship characters, Lee’s attitude is distinctly triumphalist. And why not? Marvel was Number One. Origins of Marvel Comics and its sequel, Son of Origins, marked a consolidation of the company’s fortunes, while DC’s clinically titled volumes seemed almost elegiac in nature.
VI.
The question I seem to be moving toward is “did DC suck?”, but the more apposite question, perhaps, is “was Marvel all that good?” Lee’s two books are arranged according to a simple then-and-now schema, which contrasts, sometimes startlingly, the characters’ original appearances with their later, presumably more familiar representations. Curious that, in the mid-1970s, Lee chose examples from the late 1960s to typify the “now” segments: the message coming through loud and clear was that Marvel had already peaked.
It had. When I wasn’t hanging around the Comic Art Shop watching people handle old comic books as if they were fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I was buying new ones at Andy’s candy store on West 11th. I bought them, but I don’t think I liked them a whole lot, because while I recall having been an RFO (a “Real Frantic One,” in Lee-speak: the purchaser of at least three Marvel comics per month; the lowest rank of Marvel nobility), my interest in Marvel lasted maybe two years, tops. The Marvel books I bought then are mostly bloodless and derivative. There had been important personnel changes--most significantly, Kirby had departed and Lee, now Publisher, was writing fewer scripts. Marvel was treading water. The stories became formulaic: for example, no installment of Spider-Man was complete now without Peter Parker cycling through recurring romantic, social, familial, financial, and academic worries. Every few pages he’d get into costume for some wiseass derring-do, but the rest was all a roiling soap opera[2]. When they tried to break out--killing off lover Gwen, making best friend Harry a psychotic junkie, introducing uninspired new villains, sending Peter to live in a lousy neighborhood--the title spun out. The last new issue I bought ends on a note of exhausted contrivance: Gwen has returned from the grave, as a clone.
What had drawn me in were the reprints Marvel put out, titles like Marvel Tales and Marvel Triple Action--that was the stuff that had started me throwing my dough around the Comic Art Shop each Saturday, buying up back issues. Such recycling saved some money, but it put Marvel in the position of competing against itself. It was like being given the option of watching Willie Mays at the end of his career or, simply by stepping through a discreet side door, seeing him as he was in his prime, and getting the Polo Grounds to boot. There is something urbane, something quickblooded and sophisticated, about those Marvel books of the ‘60s. You were given to understand that all those miniskirted bombshells on the streets, the guys in their nehru jackets, had more important things to do than just stand there and gawk when superheroes sailed through the skies overhead. Consider the fact that all the Marvel heroes came from hither and yon to live in New York, the big time (just what were all those DC VIPs doing in bush league burgs like “Central City”? Couldn’t they hack it?). For me, it was a nostalgic glimpse of “Fun City,” the chimera that the first Lindsay administration had celebrated. The nostalgia was illusory, of course: that was the decade through whose agency my old neighborhood had been destroyed, after all. But now the rest of the city had caught up; been enveloped in the sour funk that was the true aroma of those days, settled into a lingering fiscal and moral dilapidation: what better time for nostalgia, fake or otherwise?
VII.
And a good time, too, for relevancy--which DC was embracing like a life preserver, pursuing Marvel and trying to shake off its unquestioned irrelevancy of late. Its consequent jeremiads were typified by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ strident Green Lantern/Green Arrow series. Perhaps because of their lesser status in the DC pantheon, these characters were deemed most capable of shouldering the burden of relevancy and embarking on a journey through a landscape of racism, drugs, poverty, environmental depredation, and religious charlatanry. But nobody bought; the book was discontinued.
It’s not hard to see why. The stuff is naked propaganda, ultra-naïve, paternalistic, and pretentious, from the overt Christ-figures Adams doted on to the literary quotations O’Neil threw in. If Marvel’s “sophisticated philosophy” was a hodgepodge of pseudoexistentialist folderol (“With great power there must also come--great responsibility”), the philosophy of Star Wars, then DC’s was the philosophy of Star Trek: idealized case studies in which right and wrong are laid out like clothes. DC missed the point. Sure, Marvel characters attended protests. Sure, Marvel talked about drugs. Sure, Marvel portrayed the inner city, and raised the profile of black people in their comics. Couldn’t hurt. But what DC never got was that none of that was ever the point. The reason why, in the end, Stan Lee could get away with either taking blacks or leaving them, with either having characters protest or shipping them to Indochina, with either giving them drug problems or having them sip sodas at the drugstore, was because once the masks went on, Marvel heroes became Other. Out of uniform all the men may have looked as if they’d rolled off a Ken-doll assembly line; all the women like either Ann-Margret, Faye Dunaway or Raquel Welch, but everyone knew that they were marked by an exotic ethnicity all their own. This was powerful--and undefined--enough for anybody to identify with. Marvel’s “relevancy” was encoded in the implicit idea that any bunch of young people who looked different, who acted out the way Marvel’s heroes did, would be regarded as freaks by all the straights scurrying around on the streets. DC’s overt attempts at relevancy failed, finally, not because the posturing was less convincing than Marvel’s but because the dramatis personae were so ill-suited to it. Suddenly, at midlife, its heroes were born again, sanctified by the gospel of centrist liberalism?
Well, maybe. It may just have been middle age, which DC was wise to acknowledge. DC wasn’t in a position to start all over again, so it redrew what it could. Its stars handled change gingerly, but not completely unenthusiastically, and there is a persuasive feeling in these early ‘70s books of people facing a loss of potency, facing their own dwindling faith in authority, facing a growing sense of being out of touch--facing, finally, irrelevance. More than the “issues” themselves, a farrago of tepidly endorsed causes, what is intriguing is the sense you get of a mature soul being grafted onto the characters.
VIII.
So--if Marvel was maybe not so good, if DC was maybe not so bad, was it worth it, was it necessary, to leave DC? I didn’t know any of this history back when I started buying DC comics. If I made a conscious, uninfluenced, choice, it was based on the aesthetic appraisal of an eight-year-old: there they were--the famous Batman and Superman! They were, after all, on TV. But of their provenance, of their aesthetic rank relative to the competition, I knew nothing. I doubt that the juvenile commissars who suggested that I ought to watch what I read knew any of this either. And I doubt that it would have made any difference to claim that because its comics reflected the concerns of their makers at a difficult point in the country’s history, because they represented a genuine search for a new creative direction, because as an American person you could do worse than to acquaint yourself with Superman and Batman, DC was actually pretty interesting. These were arguments that didn’t even occur to me at the time. While my evaluation of the Fantastic Four, et al, was shrewdly political, it was still a relief to be told what to do. Marvel was a juggernaut then--it didn’t matter that the drawing was often second rate or that writers aping Stan Lee’s tone captured none of his flavor. It didn’t matter that DC was putting out elegant, stylish books drawn by the likes of Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, and Jim Aparo and written by the likes of Denny O’Neil (who was OK when he wasn’t saving the world), not to mention allowing Jack Kirby (who had defected) his head. It didn’t matter that when it came right down to it, aside from Spider-Man (to whom I became emotionally attached), Marvel sort of bugged me. What did matter? DC was toilet paper on my shoe; someone was informing me--snidely, OK, but they were letting me know.
It’s amazing to look back more than thirty years and realize how early received wisdom takes hold, and how tenaciously it retains that hold. I was wise, of course: I feel I have sometimes been astute enough to recognize the correct response when it looms before me. The corollary to this is that with the passing of each era of my life I’ve had to disentangle myself from one species of groupthink or another, but the key speculation is, from what would I have had to disentangle myself otherwise? Like no others, children provide you with the opportunity to provide unambiguously correct or incorrect responses. The preservation of feelings is never of concern. They ask you openly: do you want to belong--or not?
The fabulous appeal of Marvel heroes lay always in their isolation, their rejection of, and by, the worldly. And, through them, you may say, If I am alone, then I am a hero. There is a tremendous relief, a tremendous satisfaction in determining this about yourself. I am not just alone! Of course, that doesn’t even begin to approximate the satisfaction of identifying with the lone heroes of Marvel, of embracing their stark emotional seclusion, shoulder to shoulder with a group of fellow adherents.
If there’s a paradox here, it’s not one into which I feel inclined to read a lot of meaning. It may simply be that, no matter what their staunchest champions claim for them, comics really are intended for kids, who, whatever the quality of their social milieu, have yet to find their true lives, and who, in continuing to see things through a glass, darkly when searching for those lives, see only themselves.
[1] NB: There exists an ancient dispute over the principal authorship of many of Marvel’s creations. Jack Kirby long asserted that he was the actual prime mover behind the creation of some of Marvel’s most famous characters while minimizing Lee’s involvement (“Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK?”). Lee himself has offered up equally self-serving assessments of his own contributions. It’s not within the purview of this essay, nor is its author competent, to address this subject.
[2] It’s worth noting that Spider-Man artist John Romita, who had taken over from originator Steve Ditko and completely overhauled Ditko’s grotesque vision, had extensive experience in romance comics. A page of Romita’s teen melodrama stuff beggars anything in Lichtenstein’s canon.
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