Marvel and I: The Story of a Long-term Misunderstanding, Part Three

In the summer of 2000, I'd just graduated high school. Director Brian Singer's X-Men was released. A few of my friends wanted to see it. I had no interest, having not been that into comics for a few years, and having never liked Marvel in the first place (as illustrated in the previous two posts in this series). But, I figured, "Eh, what the hell, I'll go along with you guys. I always like going to the movies just for the sake of going to the movies, anyway."

Thoroughly enjoying the film, I didn't regret paying for my picket. Visually, it was conservative and tasteful; none of the (at least as I'd perceived it) rancid, seizing violence that, as a child, had turned me off of Marvel.  It had a strong, engaging narrative, as well as well-developed and performed characters that were easy to identify with and root for. This was especially true of Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman in the American tradition of the hero as rugged individual. 
Singer's 2003 X-Men 2 retained all of these qualities, but presented on a bigger-scale and with the stakes raised; none of the big set pieces were excessive or indulgent, but in proportion to the story. 

On the other hand, I didn't get what all the rage was with director Sam Raimi's Spider-man, Spider-man 2, and Spider-man 3. They were likable, giving off a warm, friendly vibe; but watching them was no more filling than a pack of Lifesavers. Still, at least I could now see the appeal in Spider-man. 

The first X-Men movie had inspired in me an interest in going back and reading Chris Claremont's defining 1975-81 run. Nothing came much of that thought, though; throughout college and most of my 20's, reading comics wasn't something that I did much of. 

That changed circa 2009, when I dove headlong back into comics. However, my deep-seeded preference for DC held firm. Obsessed with one day being able to read Crisis on Infinite Earths and recognize everyone in it, I dedicatedly acuqired and read the shit out of every book in the softbound Showcase Presents and hardbound DC Archives collections that I could, determined to attain a mastery of DC history.

Sooner or later, my fixation on the history of superhero comics was bound to bleed over into Marvel ... at least, that seems like the the transition sentence to use at this point, right? Reading Grant Morrison's Supergods -- which starts out as a history of comics but then halfway through suddenly becomes an autobiography -- I became very curious about an early `70's Avengers storyline called "The Kree-Skrull War". What particularly intrigued me was Morrison contextualizing it as the Marvel version of an aspect of my DC obsession that I'm particularly obsessive about: Jack Kirby's Fourth World.

Avengers #89 -- the issue featuring the first chapter of Roy Thomas' "Kree-Skrull War"

Of course, I couldn't just read that serial without being familiar with the Avengers themselves, right? (Seriously, I didn't know until 2012 that Marvel's version of Thor's alter ego was a crippled doctor based in Manhattan.) So, I started reading the original run from the very beginning. But, wait ... first had to go back read each of the Avengers own title or feature from its inception -- meaning, respectively, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and Ant-Man, each in its own turn! But, oh, wait, here's a crossover with the Fantastic Four! And another with Spider-man! And another with Daredevil! And yet another with the X-Men! And another with Doctor Strange! Better put this off until I've caught up on every issue of their series up until the month this crossover first hit the stands!

I went back and read the Marvel Essentials collections of the Golden Age versions of Captain America, Human Torch, and Sub-Mariner, too, just for good measure.

Consequently, I've now read every Marvel superhero comic from 1961 through late 1964 (with some titles) or early 1965 (with others) -- the first few years of the self-proclaimed "Marvel Age of Comics". And, you know, what? They're GOOD comics! Not the trash I'd once though Marvel to be, across the board. These works of Stan Lee, Jack Kiby, Steve Ditko, and the rest of "the Bullpen" are replete with same "wholesomeness" and type of exciting storytelling that I found in Superman and Batman comics in cartoons -- in my favorite Disney Afternoon series, ranging from Adventures of the Gummi Bears to Gargoyles.

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At this point, I'm familiar enough with the Marvel Universe that I probably will concentrate exclusively on X-Men, finishing the `60's run and graduating to Claremont's; and Avengers, working my way along to "Kree-Skrull War". Oh, but first, I want to read Roy Thomas' Captain Marvel run, which Morrison seemed to indicate was somehow linked to "Kree-Skrull"; however, he was vague on that point, and the only link may be Roy Thomas. If that's so, reading Marvel's Captain Marvel (heh) first still seems like a good idea, to follow the evolution of Thomas' writing. In fact, I'm a huge fan of the work he was to do several years later on the revival of All-Star Comics and subsequently on All-Star Squadron, so I have high expectations of his earlier Marvel work. Oh, and, having left off Fantastic Four #40, I'd at least like to finish Lee and Kirby's run, at some point.

As you've seen, all of this backtracking work stemmed from me wanting to read just one story ("Kree-Skrull War"). In a case of outright cosmic irony, if I understand correctly, "Kree-Skrull" will bring my relationship with Marvel full circle. It will be an opportunity for me to atone for long ago slighting someone who didn't deserve it, with whom I'd (thanks to the "Marvel and The Infinity Gauntlet is better than Darkwing Duck, nyahhh" boasts of  a childhood friend) gotten off on the wrong foot: Thanos.

-- Ryan

Marvel and I: The Story of a Long-term Misunderstanding, Part Two

When we last left off, it was late 1991. Ryan was in the fourth grade, and Darkwing Duck, which had started airing on The Disney Afternoon and ABC that very same fall, had become his favorite show. However, much to his vexation, a friend and classmate kept boasting (as if it were somehow HIS accomplishment) that some Marvel Comics villain named Thanos had killed off all of the heroes in the Marvel universe (at least according to Ryan's friends) in some allegedly awesome mini-series called The Infinity Gauntlet. Thus, Ryan's friend reasoned, Thanos would be able to kill Darkwing Duck with his pinky finger, if he felt like it.

To begin with, Ryan already didn't care about, and found no appeal in, Marvel Comics. But now, he'd been pushed over the edge, and became an active Marvel detractor.

This growing aversion didn't extend to just Marvel, but to the action-dominated, thriller-oriented arm of the sci-fi genre, across all media. A lot of Ryan's grade school peers who liked X-Men and Spawn (I think of this as the era of the X-Men, Image, and all that I repelled me) also liked the Terminator movies. All of these things seemed gnarled, grizzly, and coldly metallic to Ryan. When a friend would describe the blood and gore in a movie they'd seen over the weekend, Ryan would ask him what was wrong with him and how he could possibly enjoy such fare.

In short, in the early `90's, Ryan was reading these comics:

He was not reading these comics:

(In fact, to Ryan, the above were not even comics -- they were just in the way. A meaningless din.)

But he ESPECIALLY wasn't (no way in Hell; over his dead body) reading THIS (as he considered it at the time) atrocity:

(The Marvel superheroes were in trouble. Didn't they know to call DW?)

At this point (reverting to first person), in my mind, all superhero comics were all lumped together in the "yuck" bin. I thought little more of DC than I did of Marvel. Now, as a longtime DC fan, that's hard to believe. But, it's not such a stretch, considering how that was the era of the bloodletting that transpired in major story arcs like "A Death in the Family" and "The Death of Superman" -- both of which I'd been to some extent exposed to. (How could I not have been, in the case of the latter?) A few years before my unpleasant run-in with Thanos, at a friend's birthday party, as part of a goody bag, I received a copy of a recent issue of Batman that happened to be a part of "Death in the Family". When you're six years old and a couple of years earlier, your favorite show had been Super Friends (via syndicated weekday reruns), a bleak, angst-caked story about Robin being beaten with a crowbar to a bloody pulp just isn't going to work.

Within a few years, I would have come around on DC. I had just become active in fandom, via a certain A.P.A., and Joe Torcivia encouraged me to give DC a chance.The Paul Dini-Bruce Timm animated series also played a role. They weren't cheesy, not "hardcore", but just right. These distillations of the DC characters converted me. Batman and Superman came to have a "feel" much closer to that of Uncle Scrooge than to my conception of the Marvel and Image properties. Batman: The Animated Series had actually only premiered a year later than my friend drove me away from superheroes with Thanos, and, in keeping with that, at first, I found it drab, boring, and depressing. It was actually falling in love with Gargoyles a couple of years later that warmed me up to B:TAS.

But, even with the influences of Torcivia, Dini, and Timm, I might not have ultimately gotten hooked on DC if, in my most formative years, an attachment to the characters hadn't been ingrained into my psyche. Super Friends was one of my earliest favorite shows, remember? Before DuckTales premiered and, at the age of five, I immediately went nuts over it. Before my first Uncle Scrooge comic. I've actually been a DC fan longer than a duck fan! I just forgot that for several years.

But, as I was entering high school and getting more into DC, I was simultaneously and paradoxically moving away from comics and animation. I had never really changed my mind about Marvel; but now, I was indifferent to it.

Next time: The early `00's come along, and I go to college. A couple of movies come out. I see and like them. That makes me say, "I should go read the original comics." Another entire decade later, I get around to it.

-- Ryan

Marvel and I: The Story of a Long-term Misunderstanding, Part One

Before the past year and a half or so, I've spent most of my life being Marvel-illiterate. Now, I didn't, at 30, emerge from under a rock, so for most of my life, sure, I've been, each to a different degree, acquainted with Spider-man, the Incredible Hulk, and Captain America: in the case of Spider-man, I knew that his alter ego was Peter Parker and that he struggled with teen angst and his crush on the red-headed Mary Jane; but the Hulk and the Cap were no more to me than mere icons. Case in point: in second grade, myself and a few friends would play Batman every day at recess. One of our ranks urged that, along with the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, and the like, someone on the bad guys team should play "the Incredible Hulk". Now, I knew that the Incredible Hulk wasn't a Batman, let alone a DC, character, but I went along with it; some brute muscle seemed to round out our play-acting game's villain super-team.

(When I was in second grade, being familiar, via pop culture, with both characters but not a follower of either's comics, this would've made perfect sense to me.)

One evening after school, when I enthusiastically updated my parents on how I'd been spending my recess, my dad laughed and informed me, "The Incredible Hulk is a good guy!" Having doubted my friend in the first place, I knew that my dad -- whose foremost reference point was the 1978-82 CBS live-action Incredible Hulk TV series -- was right. But as in my mind it made sense that spindly, craven wretches like the Joker and the Riddler kept a *cough* hulking brute on hand to serve as their "brawn", I held my ground[*], and the makeup of our recest cast went on changed ... until we moved onto, each in its own turn, Ghostbusters, our self-created team of time travelers, and eventually even Darkwing Duck ...

([*] As I would eventually learn, neither my friend nor my dad had it quite right. In the original six-issue run of The Incredible Hulk and his subsequent run in Tales to Astonish, the character [or at least his alter-ego, Bruce "Bob" Banner"] is squarely the protagonist, but not necessarily a hero of any sort; at best, an anti-hero. And in his crossover appearances in issues of the same era of The Avengers, Fantastic Four, and Amazing Spider-man, he was depicted as an outright public menace and, format-wise, the indisputable antagonist of each respective story.)

Ah, Darkwing Duck. My fourth grade coincided with that series' fall 1991-spring 1992 first season, co-run between The Disney Afternoon and ABC's Saturday morning lineup. (No, despite what any Wiki or DVD episode order says, the 13 episodes that premiered in the fall 1991 do not comprise the series' "second season". They were part of the first season ... well, an argument could be made that the episodes that were "previewed" [in full] on The Disney Channel in the spring of 1991 should be considered the first season, and that both the 1991-92 syndicated and ABC episodes together comprise the second season ... but that totally flies in the face of conventional wisdom, so at best, those Disney Channel-"previewed" episodes can collectively be considered, "er, the "pre-first season".) And during those months, Darkwing Duck dominated my life. I was obsessed with it. My best friend and I developed handwritten-and-drawn fliers for our "Darkwing Duck Fan Club", and distributed photocopies of them to every boy in the fourth grade. (Oh, don't get me wrong; at that point, I already had several crushes on girls under my belt, but we figured that our "club" wouldn't appeal to girls. If we were smarter, we would've found a way to entice them into joining us!) 

But then, a friend and classmate started boasting to me that some Marvel villain named Thanos had conquered the world and could easily kick Darkwing's ass. Thus began a longstanding revulsion on my part by any Marvel comics, one which took me nearly 20 years to undo and get to the heart of the matter. (For the record, though, I'm still a DC man, at the end of the day.) And, ironically, my coming-around has been centered on ... Thanos. 

This is not the post that I meant to write tonight ... but it's far better than the one that I did! And so, our story is ... to be continued!