Editor's Note: The following piece is an expanded version of Pierre's article "The Four Fantastic Phases of Silver Age Marvel" which features in the Sept 2000 issue of that excellent publication Comic Book Marketplace, also known as CBM. Without the constraints of the printed medium, we're able to present this fuller version. You might like to compare the two! - Nick
Author's Note: Regular visitors to this site will be familiar with the four phases of Silver Age Marvel's development described here, as they continue to serve as the theoretical basis of this writer's collaboration with Gregorio Montejo in our In-depth Reviews column. I first dreamed up the idea of dividing Silver Age Marvel's development into four phases in the early '90s, just before the completion of the original of this article around 1994. - Pierre
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Part II: The Years of Consolidation
Although there were isolated examples that indicated the direction Marvel's new line of comics would take between the Early, Formative Years and the later, Grandiose Years, it was in the two years or so that separated them, the "Years of Consolidation", that certain themes would be adopted in earnest. It was in these years that Stan Lee and his stable of artists, particularly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, began to actively exploit the disparate elements that had begun to define the increasingly popular 'Marvel style' (which they themselves had more or less stumbled upon), and started to weave them into a coherent universe. What characterized these years of consolidation? Mostly the deliberate attempt by Lee to tie his growing universe closer together, to develop its own internal consistency and give it a semblance of verisimilitude. To that end, a number of devices were used, most notably the crossover and the continued story. The reliance on multi-issue stories, some lasting more than a year, would become a hallmark for Marvel in the later, grandiose years, but began in the years of consolidation as more modest two-part tales. Also important in these years was that element of fun and excitement good writing invariably provides as Lee began to take upon himself the scripting for all the super hero titles. Such control in the hands of a writer/editor whose overall vision of the line was mature but experimental would prove crucial to Marvel's success. Lee, in partnership with such talented artists as Kirby and Ditko, whose skills were perfectly suited to the emerging "Marvel method" of creating comics, was able to strike a balance between the melodramatic elements that made them seem realistic while at the same time giving broad hints that none of it was to be taken too seriously. And so, working within the Comics' Code, Marvel found a way to simply have fun with the universe it had created in its Early, Formative Years, mixing and matching its elements and seeing how they turned out. And an enthralled readership was the beneficiary. |
7) Fantastic Four # 25 (Apr 1964) was billed as "The Battle of the Century" and so far, it looked to have been an accurate description. Following immediately upon the events of Avengers # 4, this issue and the next neatly divide the plot into two distinct parts. In the first, the concentration is on the first real knock-down, drag ‘em out fight between the Thing and the Hulk, at the time, two of the three powerhouse super heroes at Marvel, (the other being Thor). The two characters met briefly in FF # 12, but that was before the full development of the Marvel style. The action begins when the Hulk, still on the run from events in the previous month's Avengers # 3, decides to face his teammates in New York. Meanwhile, we learn that the Avengers, having survived events in their own book (no doubt to Namor's great disappointment!), are close on ol' Greenskin's trail, with the U.S. Army not far behind. Meanwhile, in New York, Reed Richards has contracted a virus and when the Hulk is sighted in the city, the rest of the FF must tackle him alone. With the Invisible Girl left behind to care for Mr. Fantastic, an inexperienced Human Torch is quickly subdued by the rampaging Hulk. The rest of the book is devoted solely to page after page of bludgeoning action as Kirby displays his ingenuity in coming up with ways for the combatants to use their strength against each other. The issue ends at a lull in the battle. Throughout the comic Kirby's art shines, despite Paul Reinman's inadequate inks in a choreography of shattered buildings and exploding machinery. Even the dull greens, browns and grays of the coloring of Marvel's early books seems to add to the drama of Lee's breathless scripting to produce a wild rollercoaster of a comic that never lets the reader go from first page to last.
8) With a single creative entity (yep, we mean Stan Lee!) writing and editing the entire line, it was possible for Marvel to squeeze almost its entire stable of heroes into a single book, which is exactly what happened in Fantastic Four # 26 (May 1964) in which "The Avengers Take Over!" From its inventive and colorful cover, to its final panel, this particular issue epitomized everything Marvel was doing to make itself so popular. The story continues from the previous issue, with New York in a state of siege, martial law declared and a portion of the city sealed off. Inside this area, the Thing and the Hulk continue to do battle. Finally, the Hulk manages to slip away from the Thing and make his way to Avengers' mansion where he meets his former teammates who've just returned from the west after hearing of his presence in New York. Kirby does the impossible by having the Hulk fight the Avengers in the space of only two panels before escaping with Rick Jones. Following him, the Avengers and the reconstituted Fantastic Four meet for the first time and, not without some friction, join forces. Once again, Kirby packs so much action in 22 pages, it's a wonder even today how he was able to give each hero a turn in the spotlight. Besides being one of the earliest instances of a continued story at Marvel, the story also included the first crossover of the company's two major super teams and the first of many classic face-offs of hero and villain. Written by Lee with many instances of drama, humor and pathos, and still managing to co-ordinate events happening in other titles, this book is a landmark, any way you look at it! |
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9) Acting as a kind of epilogue to the epochal events of the previous issues in this multi-part extravaganza, Avengers # 5 (May 1964) opens as the team returns to its mansion headquarters in New York to survey the damage done to it when the Hulk had kidnapped Rick Jones in FF # 26. The Avengers disperse to pursue their private interests but are soon summoned together again by Thor after he learns of a mysterious, growing hill (!) in the American Southwest. As every Marvelite knew by then, the desert was the stomping grounds of the Hulk and in no time, (well, after about ten pages of prime Kirby action in which we discover that the hill in question isn't a hill at all, but a weirdly growing stone being thrust to the earth's surface by the race of lava men first encountered by Thor in Journey Into Mystery # 97!) the green goliath makes the scene (on page 19, panel 3, a fabulous depiction of the classic Hulk by Kirby!). No sooner than he does, the Avengers jump him. But they soon realize that with Thor out of action, the Hulk's strength is the only thing that can prevent the stone from exploding and "taking half the planet with it!" It's then left to Giant-Man to lure the Hulk into the proper position to strike the stone in just the right spot, causing an implosion rather than an explosion. The plan works but the force of the implosion causes the Hulk to revert back to his human identity of Bruce Banner, leaving the Avengers out in the cold in their efforts to find and help their former teammate. Thus ended Marvel's first extended/continued/multi-title crossover. Was it planned from the start by Stan and Jack or were they making it all up as they went along? It's hard to say so many years later, but one thing's for sure: it helped the two men become more aware of the story possibilities in the inter-connected world they were building, the essence of the years of consolidation.
10) One aspect of the Years of Consolidation was a growing realization by editor Stan Lee that the elements he'd begun using un-selfconsciously in the Early, Formative Years could also be used deliberately to create new characters and storylines. The increasing use of crossovers and continued stories demonstrated the application of these elements to stories, and the creation of Daredevil to that of characters. The launch of X-Men late in 1963 showed Lee applying the idea of the flawed hero to a whole team of characters and the appearance of (Here Comes) Daredevil # 1 (The Man Without Fear!) (Apr 1964) almost six months later to a single character. But in Daredevil, the last of Marvel's great Silver Age creations, there'd be an additional twist: far from demanding reader sympathy for his affliction (in DD's case, blindness) and the demands it made on his life, DD's unabashed exuberance and undisguised joy at being a costumed hero had the effect of making fans happy for him! So much so, that when Lee tried to show our hero's reluctance to make a play for his pretty secretary for fear of saddling her with a boyfriend who had a handicap, no one believed it! Unlike Spider-Man, who was a teenager unsure of himself, still trying to figure things out, DD was an adult with many of his insecurities behind him. When readers saw DD racing along high tension wires or balancing himself a hundred stories from the ground, they could believe that he was a "man without fear." Helping Lee bring DD to life here was veteran artist Bill Everett who lent the feature a street-level quality necessary for a strip in which the hero (in his bright yellow and red costume) would spend most of his early issues running down petty crooks and organized crime figures, an oeuvre DD would seemingly always come back to, no matter what other, later writers would have him involved in.
11) Beneath one of Kirby's most impressive symbolic covers (enhanced by a vibrant color scheme that Marvel did better than anybody else in those days), X-Men # 4 (Mar 1964) continued the pattern set by Avengers # 3-5 in that the next few issues of the book would all feature the same villains (Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) in loosely connected stories that suggested little advance planning by the creative team. Here, Magneto, most powerful of the evil mutants, makes his second appearance along with a new group of villains that included the servile Toad, the venal Mastermind and siblings Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Whether intended to or not, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (who were portrayed right from the start as reluctant warriors on the side of Magneto) quickly became sympathetic characters whom readers very early on suggested they defect from Magneto's band to join the X-Men. It seemed that because Magneto had rescued Wanda, the Scarlet Witch, from a superstitious mob somewhere in central Europe, she and her brother considered themselves in his debt. Aware of their desire to leave his band as soon as they felt that debt paid, Magneto tries to indoctrinate them with his philosophy: "We are homo superior! We are born to rule the earth! The humans must be our slaves! They are our natural enemies…and together, with our super-human powers, we can conquer them all!" "Why should we love the homo sapiens?? They hate us ... fear us because of our superior power!" Magneto was the third and final of Marvel's triumvirate of great villains, but more than Dr. Doom and the Red Skull, his was the clearest, most reasonable argument for his villainy: however twisted by his own gigantic ego, he considered himself not the villain, but the hero of a struggle for freedom of an oppressed people. And so the struggle between the Brotherhood and the X-Men becomes one of ideologies rather than profit, or revenge or meaningless power. For that reason, the first eleven issues of the X-Men title seemed to be the chronicle of a single, extended struggle between the two sides as each coalesced into mutually antagonistic groups, constantly vying with each other for the recruitment of new members.
12) Although such serious topics as the environment, drug abuse, campus unrest and the war in Vietnam were to be treated almost exclusively in the company's 'Grandiose' phase, there was one theme that Lee seemed anxious to tackle as soon as possible. With the first issue of Sgt. Fury, when readers were introduced to a multi-ethnic squad of Howlers, Lee broke with the historical facts of military segregation by including a Black man in the squad. Obviously influenced by the national struggle over civil rights then being waged by men such as Martin Luther King and such landmark court decisions as Brown vs Board of Education, Lee (much as he would reason years later for using comics to address the drug problem), must've decided that comics were just as much a learning tool as entertainment. But he bided his time. The first few issues of the book never addressed the fact of Gabriel Jones' skin color nor how other characters felt about it. That all changed in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos # 6, "The Fangs of the Fox!" (Mar 1964). Here at last, was a story that addressed the issue of race that had been implicit in the title for months as George Stonewell replaces an injured Dino Manelli. Right off the bat however, the reader is signaled that not all is well with Stonewell as he shows disdain for the team's Italian and Jewish members and downright prejudice toward Jones. "You're Jones!! No! I'm not sleepin' in these barracks!" Then Fury proclaims what the readers had probably been thinking all along: "You're a 14-carat, dyed-in-the-wool, low down bigot!" "You so much as look crosseyed at Izzy, or Gabe, or anyone because of his race or color, and I'll make ya wish you were never born!" "Rats like him aren't on any side! They just crawl outta the mud long enough to poison whatever they touch!" And so, the Howlers are sent on a deadly mission to stop Erwin Rommel as tensions continue to mount among the squad members. At one point, a captured Nazi, sympathizing with Stonewell, tells him "...we do not allow inferior races to mingle with us…to be part of our culture!" But where others before and since would've portrayed Stonewell in unrealistic black and white terms, Lee skillfully, more realistically, gives the character patches of gray as he performs his duty as heroically as any of the Howlers even as he continues to reject some of them for their ethnicity. At last, after saving Izzy's life, Izzy returns the favor by saving Stonewell and in the story's denouement, Stonewell is kept alive due to a transfusion of blood from Jones. Unlike other writers who would've had Stonewell either be killed off for his sins or get over all of his earlier prejudices, Lee has left the story's end an ambiguous one with Fury delivering the final lines: "The seeds of prejudice, which takes a lifetime to grow, can't be stamped out overnight…but if we keep trying…keep fighting …perhaps a day will come when ‘love they brother' will be more than just an expression we hear in church!" The subject matter was somewhat risky since most publishers at the time feared loss
of sales should America's South react negatively to it, so it showed some courage on Lee's (and perhaps publisher Martin Goodman's) part to go ahead with it anyway. In any case, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos # 6 will always stand as an early monument to the many stories the company would tackle in later years dealing with other matters of social significance.
the next six... |
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