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The Marvel Age of Comics
In the early 1960's, the comic book hero formula was almost 25 years old and mostly came from Siegel and Shuster, the creators of Superman. Heroes wore tight-fitting costumes, they had secret identities (who often wore glasses), they always won, they had girlfriends. They had no problems, no outside concerns and fought bad guys with very little motivation.
Then along came Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, who changed all that, and raised the reading levels of comic books.
Ignoring traditional comic book conventions, Lee, Kirby, and Ditko added humanity to their characters and gave them a sense of motion. With the success of the Justice League, Martin Goodman, owner of Marvel, wanted Stan Lee to "clone" it. So Lee and Kirby created The Fantastic Four. But it was no clone. Here the characters had personalities. The characterizations drove the stories, adding elements of traditional action, but also that of soap opera. The FF originally did not have costumes or secret identities. Money, or the lack of it, was a constant issue. And of course The Thing, who didn't look like a super-hero, and didn't want to be one.
The Marvel stories were not just about fighting villains, or each other, but often just about the characters themselves. Sue and Reed dated, got engaged, got married, and had a baby in just a few years. There was continuity; you couldn't read the issues out of order. The characters developed. They became less super and more real. It was fun.
Jack Kirby brought a true sense of the dynamic to his drawing. Rather than having their super-heroes "pose" and appear static as they did at DC, Kirby's characters were always in motion, or showing great emotion. Gone were the days where a character's face and body had nothing to do with the text. The drawings seemed three dimensional, as they literally broke out of the comic book panels.
Kirby became the House style, the Marvel style. At DC, the goal, it seemed, was never to have the characters look different, no matter who was doing the artwork. At Marvel, artists were allowed to develop their own styles, influenced by the dynamics of Kirby. Gene Colan and John Buscema are great examples. Always good artists, they matured at Marvel. Reading Colan's Sub-Mariner and Iron Man, and Buscema's Avengers, you can see the artistic development from one issue to the next. Characters become more fluid, there is movement in every panel. And there is great emotion. You can see what the characters are feeling, not just what they are doing.
While Kirby gave the character a design and a look, Lee gave him depth and personality. Together they gave him an identity. The first appearances of the Silver Surfer betray little definition - he does not even have pants, implying no sexuality whatsoever. It is Stan Lee's writing that gives him depth and personality.
Lee added depth and a bit of tragedy to each of his characters, giving them complex motivations. The Thing didn't want to be an orange rock-creature, the Hulk didn't want to be a green-skinned monster. When Peter Parker became Spider-Man, he let a criminal run past, thinking "why should I bother?". He paid a heavy price when the same criminal murdered his uncle Ben. Lee and Ditko had given Peter a motivation for fighting crime and risking his life - guilt. This was a new concept in comic books. Peter not only had to live with his guilt, he needed to take care of his ailing, widowed aunt. By comparison, DC characters had no real motivation. Batman and Robin had similar pasts (their parents too were killed by criminals) yet, during the 1960's, this element of the "backstory" did not appear as a factor in any Batman story.
Another example of the difference between the two "house styles" can be seen by comparing Marvel's Silver Surfer and DC's Martian Manhunter. Both characters were trapped on Earth. Many of the Surfer's stories dealt with this circumstance, but virtually none of the John Jonzz stories did. The Surfer was never able to "blend in", but the Manhunter did, almost from the beginning. There was just no characterization in the DC style.
Stan Lee had a sense of drama. While DC characters had "weaknesses", they were not vulnerable, they could not be harmed. With vulnerability, Lee's characters had risk. With risk came conflict and with conflict came drama. Spider-Man risked something when he fought crime, often his Aunt's health. In the middle of a fight, he had to call home so she would not worry. Lee developed a method whereby the dialogue was written after the pictures were drawn, so he did not have to make sure certain points were duplicated in the dialogue, as DC's writers had to do. The result was that you got inside the characters as they anticipated their immediate future. Alfred Hitchcock said that to have suspense you couldn't just have a bomb blow up a bus. You had to know that the bomb was on the bus and was about to explode. Stan Lee did this, he created suspense, conflict, and drama, often without a tidy resolution. Later, when Kirby returned to Marvel and wrote his own dialogue, he was unable to reproduce the Lee formula with the same level of success.
Superman, Wonder Woman, the Martian Manhunter had the power to fly, but Marvel's characters, fantastic as they were, needed something more. Iron Man needed jets, Thor used his hammer and the Hulk jumped. But Iron Man's jets might fail, Thor might lose his hammer and the Hulk wasn't always the Hulk. These limitations only made the characters more real, more vulnerable. They couldn't lift absolutely everything, stretch forever or use telekinesis indefinitely. And teen-agers were no longer the sidekick, partner or observer of the hero. They were the hero. First was the Fantastic Four's Human Torch. And then, of courses, along came a Spider.
Steve Ditko, Spider-Man co-creator and artist, was in many ways, the anti-Kirby. Many accepted conventions and formulas went out the window with Ditko's Spider-Man. Ditko's characters lived in a dark, often wet, environment. They were not attractive, and sometimes not even appealing. Ditko's Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, was so different, and so out of this world, that he almost didn't fit into the Marvel Universe at all. But Ditko was a great storyteller and his stories always had the most twists and turns. Ditko's style was very different to Kirby's. The insect-influenced super-hero by Lee and Kirby was Ant-Man, who spent his life talking to ants. Ditko's Spider-Man didn't talk to spiders. It was something we had never seen before. Unlike a Kirby creation, Spider-Man was not attractive, and his super exploits never seemed to make his life better. His relationships with girls were not successful. But like the Fantastic Four, there was great characterization and development. We saw Peter Parker graduate High School, enrol in College and get his own apartment. Just like a soap opera, continuity was important. Ditko's influence was felt with other Marvel characters - he inked "Incredible Hulk" # 2 and drew issue # 6. He also drew the Hulk when he began anew in Tales to Astonish. Ditko brought a monster quality to the character. Ditko also took Iron Man out of that thick, monochromatic armour and gave him the sleek colorful costume he still has today.
It took John Romita Sr. and John Buscema to bring Spider-Man into the Kirby universe. Peter Parker got prettier, lost his glasses. Everyone got prettier and the stories became bright. For me they became more interesting and more dramatic. It was at this time that Spider-Man's popularity really began to grow. Few remember that John Buscema did the pencil layouts of Spidey during much of this period. But John Romita Sr. became one of my favorite artists of the Marvel Age.
While DC villains were almost always captured, Marvel villains often escaped. As such, many DC stories had to begin with the bad guy breaking out of jail, yet again. People forget this. Also, DC covers misrepresented what was on the inside. The drawings and captions often had nothing to do with the stories. Marvel's covers were not only more representative of the inside, they were better to look at. More often than not, Marvel left off dialogue, letting the cover art speak for itself.
What all this did for me was to keep me interested, every month, in Marvel Comics. By age 12 or 13, in 1964, I had totally given up on DC. I wondered why they "didn't get it" ... while Marvel soared to greater and greater heights, the company of Kane and Infantino struggled to put out an interesting story for the next two decades.
© Barry Pearl, Dec 2002
Read the conclusion in The Rise and Fall of The Marvel Age of Comics
Part III - All Good Things...
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