A Brief introduction to
Marvel Comics
in the
Silver Age
Reviews and Analysis by
Pierre Comtois and
Gregorio Montejo
There can be little argument regarding Silver Age Marvel's impact on the comic book world since the inception of Fantastic Four #1 in 1961.
The definition of the super-hero as human being, encumbered with all of the same problems and challenges as ordinary people, stemmed from editor Stan Lee's personal vision and was translated into pictures by artist Jack Kirby. From there, it was the mutually supportive contributions of both men together that combined to reinvent the super-hero genre. But important as the work of these two men was in that creation, artist Steve Ditko, perhaps lacking Lee's facility with language and Kirby's dynamic artistry, nevertheless displayed a certain synthesis of both when he helped to create the single most fallible (and popular) of the Marvel stable of characters.
None of this, however, sprang whole from the brow of any single man, Lee, Kirby or Ditko. On the contrary, we believe it began almost by accident, and developed more or less unconsciously through 1963 until, after a gradual realization of the potentialities inherent in this new twist in super-hero writing, a more deliberate approach began to be taken.
As a result, the whole process, the rise and fall of Silver Age Marvel, can be broken down into four distinct parts:
| | The early, formative years (1961-1962) when characters began to be infused with the humanism that would become the hallmark of Marvel and the first steps were taken that would later reshape Marvel's entire line of books into a single coherent universe, |
|
|
| | ...the years of Conscious Consolidation (1963-1964) when editor Lee set the policy of infusing the new humanism into every character (and creating whole new books such as Daredevil and the X-Men based entirely around the concept) and solidifying the Marvel universe with increasing cross-over events, |
|
|
| | ... the Grandiose years when the consciousness of a deliberate humanism in the Marvel line resulted in comics written and conceptualized for adults as well as children (1965-1969), |
|
|
| | ...and the Twilight years (1970-) after Lee, Kirby and Ditko's creative energies seemed to have spent themselves and a new generation of creators succeeded them, prolonging Marvel's Silver Age in a new guise into the mid-seventies. |
|
|
Here's
the
12th
of our weekly
reviews:
on-line
20 Mar
2000 |
 |
|
Past reviews
are archived
in the
REVIEW INDEX
 |
It's hard to imagine now, but there was once a time when no self-respecting comics publisher would have been without a complete line of romance titles. But by 1970, the romance genre had virtually disappeared. All that remained was whatever romance could be found in Archie's teen titles, or in imitations like Marvel's Millie the Model or Patsy Walker. Beyond that, there were the eternal romantic problems of the super-hero set which at Marvel, had progressed only a little past Lois Lane's constant attempts to trap Superman in matrimony over at DC. Perhaps editor Stan Lee suspected that reader interest in the personal problems of the company's heroes might go beyond how they related to a character's costumed identity. Hadn't it been Lee's more humanistic approach to super-heroes that had earned the company the success it enjoyed in the heady years of the 1960s? Weren't fans, via letters, constantly urging the rewards of romantic bliss upon their deserving heroes?
Maybe Lee did have this in the back of his mind when Marvel embarked upon the first real expansion of its range since the Atlas implosion of mid 1957. The double features in Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish and Strange Tales were split into six new books. Monster and horror titles, dormant for a almost a decade, resurfaced, and Marvel also renewed its affair with romance, adding two new titles, My Love and Our Love Story.
Although conceived as an attempt to fill an abandoned niche, the two books would not be allowed to twist in the winds of chance. Not only would all the stories be written by Marvel's guiding genius, Stan Lee (who by now had achieved something of guru status among the international art set), but they would be illustrated by the company's best artists: John Buscema, John Romita, Gene Colan. Lee's new, breezy style, with its combination of forties' slang and sixties' modisms, seemed convincingly cool, hip and "with it." The artists pored over clothing catalogues and teen magazines to capture the latest in youthful attire and laid out the stories in overlapping or oddly-shaped panels.
But beneath all the modern flash, even the dazzle of this issue's most radical artistic departure, are all too familiar stories of pain and loss, mistaken intentions and love with the proper stranger.
In My Heart Broke in Hollywood! acting hopeful Victoria Grant goes to Tinseltown looking for an acting job in film auteur Artur Lavalle's latest opus. When Lavalle fails to choose her for a role in his film, she is crushed. Until, that is, she discovers that Lavalle wants her for a more demanding part, that of his wife.
But however familiar the story was, there was nothing average about the art. Jim Steranko, the design maverick who had used opportunities given him on such strips as Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD and Captain America to introduce the latest tools of sixties' pop art into comics, would now leave the field with a spectacular challenge for his peers. If Lee was the literary guru of the comics world, then Steranko was the voice of its youth. Cultivating a personal sense of "cool", Steranko proceeded to apply it to his work as well, each assignment breaking new artistic barriers and setting higher standards in comic art. His work on this story would not only become a design breakthrough, it would prove to be his farewell to regular participation in the industry.
Magician, musician, artist, editor, publisher, lecturer, entrepeneur, Steranko was born Nov 5, 1938, just a few days after Orson Welles' legendary War of the Worlds broadcast. Like Welles, the young Steranko was fascinated with the realm of illusion - the possibility of creating images more real, more vital, than reality itself. By the time he was a teenager he'd become a master escape artist, and impressed audiences with an extraordinary facility for card tricks. The burgeoning illusionist studied the magic of the movies with equal enthusiasm. In the darkened theater he scrutinized the visual sleight of hand of his favorite conjurers of the silver screen: Welles, the enchanter of Xanadu, and Alfred Hitchcock, thaumaturge of dark, suspenseful visions.
Steranko's other love was comics. Even at a young age he saw the deep visual connection between the mediums of cinema and comics. He pored over the work of Will Eisner, Wally Wood, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby. They were magicians as well, storytellers creating new worlds by turns fanciful, poetic or whimsical with their artistic skills. Lacking any kind of formal training, Steranko taught himself these techniques in the same manner he had learnt magic, by closely analyzing the work of a few select masters. "I refer to them and many others as my teachers because I never went to art school - learning to draw surely would have spoiled my style! My storytelling techniques, however, were derived entirely from film."
Film, a collaborative medium of sequential visual narration, had many similarities with comics. Both used long chains of images, linked together, to tell a visual story. The comics and movies Steranko enjoyed and learned from the most were almost always the product of one guiding creative visionary. Despite the fact that movies required the talents and skills of many craftsmen, he was an ardent believer in the idea of the "auteur," a term which was first applied by French film critics to certain American movie makers such as Welles, Ford and Huston. According to the theory, great films always bore the personal, visual stamp of their directors, who harnessed the creative talents of individual craftsmen to produce a unified artistic whole. Steranko was a comic book auteur: whatever project he worked on was indelibly marked with his unique artistic vision. Everything he ever did was unmistakably a Steranko production.
From both film and comics, Steranko also acquired an early and abiding love for genres. "I thought that exploring every genre would be fun: a pirate saga, a WW1 aviation tale, a monster epic, a western, the list goes on." While Steranko never applied his talents to most of these genres, in My Heart Broke In Hollywood, he at least made a brilliant foray into that of romance.
A genre can be thought of as a literary genus (cf. review #11: Spider-Man #49). Like a natural species, each genre has a list of unique characteristics which helps to define it. The conventions of romance encompass several formulaic aspects: the plot usually revolves around a young, inexperienced woman leaving home for the first time, striking out into the world to find her dream. She meets an older, more experienced man, and becomes immediately taken by his power and wisdom. But though she might be inextricably drawn to him, she can't tell him; tradition holds that a young woman must be passive, allowing the assertive, dynamic male to make the first move. She despairs, thinking she must lose the man of her dreams. Then, in a climactic denouement, her situation is reversed, and she is chosen by the male protagonist to be his wife.
In keeping with the setting of My Heart Broke in Hollywood, Steranko has appropriately chosen to use the language of cinema in order to explore and expand on this familiar romantic formula.
Beginning with a three panel sequence across the top of the splash page, he creates the illusion of a strip of film whose strict regularity lends a subtle visual allusion to the hypothetical screen upon which the story is to be projected. Like the cinematic device of a voice-over narration, a caption (in words told by the story's heroine, Victoria Grant) announces both the story's premise and its filmic theme: "I had wanted to be an actress ever since I can remember! So, when my entire drama school class was chosen for a trip to Hollywood - to study and work with director Artur Lavalle - It was like a dream come true..." Lavalle, the reader is told, is an auteur, and this introduction foreshadows him as Victoria's romantic destiny. In a single page, Lee and Steranko establish all the elements needed for a traditional courtship ritual.
 On page 2 (right), Steranko repeats page 1's filmstrip design where the upper strip of three panels and the lower both resemble a moving camera. Here, the cinematic effect is even more pronounced with the continuous background of the two strips creating an illusion of movement. Arc lamps and microphone booms in the background establish the setting of the story as a busy movie set. Represented as silhouettes, they suggest the cinematic technique of rear projection and add a further layer of illusion. In rear projection, standing figures are placed before a background consisting of a translucent screen on which a picture is projected from behind. The moving image thus created gives the stationary figures the illusion of locomotion.
Between the upper and lower tiers, a center panel shows Victoria and Lavalle as they run into each other (accentuated by a halo of color), creating a visual pause in the action. Typical for such stories, Victoria's initial blundering encounter with Lavalle anticipates an impending attraction of opposites. Inevitably, the young woman is quickly enamored of the older man.
On page 3, panel 2 (at right), Steranko takes the reader from behind the camera to a place within the action in a sly wink and nudge about his storytelling approach. Behind the camera again in panel 4 (right), the reader sees Lavalle's head haloed by a lamp, symbolic of his power.
In panel 5, a rapt Victoria confirms this interpretation: "He's fantastic! So confident - so talented - so - magnificent!" The motif carries over to panel 9 where the smoke from Lavalle's cigarette encircles the enraptured girl. A symbol of Lavalle's masculine aura encompassing the object of his unspoken desire?
It seems so on page 4 when Lavalle kisses Victoria in a demonstration of acting technique (right). Then, in a brilliant combination of montage (another tool of the cinema) and pop-art sensibility, Steranko superimposes images to create a dream-like sequence in which all of Victoria's romantic fantasies seem to come true: "To him it was just a casual exercise - a lesson for the class - but to me - it was the first step into the paradise of my unbridled imagination..."
But in his concentration of filmic techniques, Steranko doesn't forget his actors. In the course of the story he establishes a strong visual contrast between Victoria and her friend Wendy: Victoria has long, curly blonde hair held back by a girlish bow, while Wendy's hair is a mod, brunette bob; Victoria wears frilly blouses and mini-skirts but Wendy is shown in vests, sleeveless sweaters and bell-bottoms. Steranko uses this visual distinction to suggest a deeper dichotomy between the two women. In effect, Victoria and Wendy represent different conceptions of femininity, the difference between the traditional woman of the romance genre, and the more independent woman of the emergent feminist movement of the time. Embodying contending notions of love and sexuality, Steranko deploys all of his graphic ingenuity to create in the two characters a dramatic representation of the conflict within the story itself.
This conflict is exemplified in a sequence extending from pages 4 to 5 in which an exchange between the two women indicates a deep discrepancy in the characters' respective conceptions of romantic love. The scene begins with the striking composition (page 4, panel 7) of Wendy embracing the outline of guitar that boldly thrusts out of the top of the panel. Her leg, meanwhile, arches above the tiny and partially obscured figure of her friend, whom she berates for her "foolish, lovesick expression."
In panel 8, the self-conscious Victoria nervously touches her hair: "I didn't know it was so obvious, Wendy!"
"Well, you better believe it, lady," Wendy responds (panel 9), holding the fretted neck of the guitar to her face. "What are you trying to do - scare him away?"
The unbridgeable gap between the older tradition of chastity, courtship and marriage on the one hand, and the modern separation of eroticism from monogamy is vividly represented in the most impressive image in the story: a wide screen panel spreading out across the top of page 5.
In imitation of deep focus photography (developed for the movies by cinematographer Gregg Toland, which allows a director to present objects in extreme close-up, while still capturing background objects in full detail), Steranko gives the reader a panoramic shot of the two girls in their apartment. Wendy, her hands dominating the foreground of the "screen," becomes an icon of liberated womanhood, confident in her newly-won freedom. She knowingly manipulates the guitar in a manner indicating aggression and experience. In contrast, Victoria's demure, dimunitive form shrinks into a pale, colorless background.
Panel 2, with its shot of Wendy holding the neck of her guitar conspicuously close to her pubis and the even more overt arrangement of blooming roses, also illustrates in no uncertain terms, the erotic undertone of the page and the cultural gulf between the characters.
 Its various themes established, the narrative now quickens to a climax. On page 6, Lavalle decides "to ask one of you to remain here - to prepare for a career in acting - as my protege!" The auteur chooses Wendy: "I knew it! I just knew it!", she shouts, vindicating her role in the story as a modern, independent woman. Victoria, meanwhile, is reduced to merely one silhouette among many, rushing away in distress.
But the formulaic happy ending of the conventional romance is not to be denied.
 Standing beside a movie camera pointed somewhere out of the panel (but where?), "It isn't just losing the part that breaks my heart..." Victoria confesses, "...although I had longed for a career in Hollywood - all of my life!"
Suddenly a voice declares off-camera: "But you shall have a career in Hollywood, Victoria!" It's Lavalle of course, and the image in panel 4 seems to answer the question of where the camera has been pointed: a close-up of the two lovers as they embrace in the final scene.
With the climax in the can, Steranko's camera can only pan modestly downward, then zoom in toward the director's chair, now significantly empty and bearing the words the end on its canvas back. Steranko, the director/visionary, fools the reader into believing a story of true love, then signs off in a manner reminiscent of French director/visionary Jean-Luc Godard and his famous "end of cinema" credit.
But no matter the mod trappings or fancy storytelling techniques, it seemed that readers' problems with romance barely changed over the years: the characters in these stories still suffer from the same kinds of heartaches that earlier generations had.
For instance, in this issue's first story But He's Not the Boy for Me!, Brenda plays the field always expecting her next conquest to be the man of her dreams, but when she finds him, she can't accept that he's "only a salesman,", refusing, it seems, to settle for anyone not rich and famous. But when she gives the salesman the brush off, she discovers to her sorrow, how wrong she was.
In But He's the Boy I Love!, fun-loving Mindy can't understand how social worker Allan can take his job so seriously. But when her brother Skip is arrested for participating in a robbery, Mindy realizes how important it is for people like Allan to tend to business.
In the end, the revived romance genre didn't last long, first lapsing into reprints, then cancellation. Victims of Lee and Marvel's own success, it seemed that in a world of comic books dominated by super-heroes (and in the 90s, of adolescent wet dreams of sex, lust and violence) there wasn't much room for love. |
|
