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
19th
of our regular
reviews:
on-line
09 Sept
2000 |
 |
|
Past reviews
are archived
in the
REVIEW INDEX |
One of the characteristics of Marvel's twilight era, that period marked by the beginning of Jack Kirby's artistic decline and Stan Lee's retreat from active scripting, was the distinct shift of creative energy from long established features such as Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four to newer, more esoteric titles such as Tomb of Dracula and Conan the Barbarian.
To be sure, there was still solid writing and art to be found in older books such as Gerry Conway's contributions to Spider-Man, Daredevil and Ka-Zar and Roy Thomas' Avengers, but after nearly a decade of continuous publication, many of those books had become prisoners of their own continuity. Readers knew what to expect in them and became upset when plots and characterization veered from established norms. Thus, Reed and Sue Richards could have a baby, but it could never grow up; Matt Murdock could move to San Francisco and live with the Black Widow, but they could never marry; Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin could even die, but Peter Parker would soon find himself with another girl and the Goblin could be reborn.
One of those established titles, born soon after Marvel had freed itself from the strictures imposed upon it by rival DC (which had been distributing its books since the late 1950s and that limited the company to the production of only eight titles per month), was Sub-Mariner. Beginning as a co-feature with the Hulk strip in Tales to Astonish, the Sub-Mariner was launched in grand style into his own solo title in 1967. Written by Roy Thomas (who was just beginning his career at Marvel with assignments on the Avengers and X-Men) and drawn by John Buscema (who was just learning the ropes at Marvel), the strip was soon embarked on an extended epic involving the Serpent Crown and illustrated in the wide open penciling style the artist would later use to such great effect on the Avengers (cf: review #10; Avengers #54).
But it didn't last long.
By #8 it was over and a long period of constantly shifting creators set in, turning the strip into a patchwork of incongruous writing and art styles with little internal plot cohesion. Over the years, the Sub-Mariner strip slipped into that moribund group of established titles that no one really looked to for exciting new developments in the comics world. For that, readers in the know turned to newly emerging features such as Gene Colan's Tomb of Dracula, Roy Thomas and Barry Smith's Conan the Barbarian, Gerry Conway and Marie & John Severin's Kull the Conqueror, Mike Ploog's Frankenstein or Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel.
At last however, Sub-Mariner seemed to have gained some much needed stability with a new, regular artist who would also write the strip. But where the newer titles featured, for the most part, younger writers and artists who'd grown up reading comic books, Subby's new writer/artist would be a veteran of the industry, a professional who'd spent his life creating comics but not necessarily reading them for pleasure. A man named Bill Everett.
By the time Everett was given the assignment on Sub-Mariner with # 50, he'd already become a legend as the creator of the character way back in 1939. Over the years, he'd worked on the feature off and on and in different capacities but now, in the twilight of his career, he was allowed the freedom both to draw and direct the course of the strip by writing it. According to Roy Thomas, at the time this was not seen as too much of a risk as the title's sales had continued to slip dangerously low, regardless of who worked on the book.
Taking advantage of the freedom that was only to be had from a book seemingly doomed, Everett proceeded to charge this issue's story with an underlying sexuality at odds with what was to be expected in a Marvel comic (or any comic!) of the time. First, the reader is greeted with what has since been labeled in the medium as a "bondage cover" with a very well rendered goddess of love chained to a post. In the course of the story, we learn that Venus, through the power of her magic girdle (!), keeps Ares, the god of war, in thrall to her by forcing him to love her. In retaliation for this humiliation, Ares captures Venus (who is portrayed by Everett in skimpy outfits including the very briefest of swimwear!), pulls off her "girdle" and binds her to a post. She screams for the Sub-Mariner to come and rescue her, in letters big enough to break the panel borders and underscore what was actually at stake: a fate worse than death! Throughout, Everett uses a lush, fully rendered pencil and inking style that lends an undoubted voluptuousness to his characters, leaving the reader in some doubt as to whether the story was a super-hero action adventure or a story of the sensual lives of the gods.
To find the answer, it might be helpful to learn a bit more about who Bill Everett was and where he came from.
Born in Newton, Massachussetts, on May 18, 1917, William Blake Everett was a distant desendant of the English poet William Blake (1757-1827) marking his life and work with a love of romantic vistas and a mythopoeic imagination. An early and interest in the sea and adventure was sparked by Admiral Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic expedition (1928-1929), henceforth the sublime wastes of the South Pole would play an important part in the artist's imagination. After a teen-aged stint in the Merchant Marine, Everett attended Boston's Vesper George School of Art. There, his romantic temperament chafed at the institution's structured discipline and he left after only a year and a half of training. Yet his talent was evident, for he had packed some three years of instruction into only eighteen months of schooling.
For the next two years Everett worked at a number of newspaper and magazine jobs in such cities as Chicago, Phoenix and Los Angeles. In 1938 he moved to New York, and entered the comic book industry. His initial work appeared in Amazing Mystery Comics, and he quickly distinguished himself on a number of features including Dirk the Demon and Skyrocket Steele. But the first Everett creation to cause a stir was Amazing Man, a character in which he was able to infuse some of the romantic turmoil of his poetic imagination. Sixty years later Gil Kane could still remember the impact Everett's Amazing Man made on young fans:
"Part of the Amazing Man's character is that he was raised by
monks in Tibet, and that appealed to me right away. One
of the monks' tests (to measure his maturity) was to tie his
hands and throw him in with a snake, which he had to kill
with his teeth! But the part that I liked was that he stood
there, bound to a stake, and they threw knives at him. One
knife struck him in the throat. He sagged but didn't
die. So they bandaged him but it healed right away!
I just loved the whole idea, loved the resilience, loved the anger
-- the character was always in a rage, and taking on the Amazing
Man persona, he became insane and a homicidal maniac! I just
loved it!"
Everett's next creation melded those incipient themes of anger and alienation with both maritime and Antarctic motifs. Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner made his debut in Marvel Comics #1 (1939). The character was the embodiment of rage and estrangement, the scion of an American naval officer and an Atlantean princess, Namor never felt completely at ease in either the terrestrial or aqueuous world. This profound disquiet, or romantic angst, manifested itself in titanic fits of anger and destructive rampages against the surface-dwellers who both fascinated and repelled him.
The angst with which Everett embued Namor was drawn both from his own tempestuos character, and from the literary anxiety he picked up from his readings of 19th century English poetry. Making up for his scant formal schooling, Everett was a voracious reader and unlike many of his fellow comic book artists, became familiar with classic English literature.
"I read a great deal when I was young. I read what was
then considered the deeper novels, the high-class
literature. I didn't go much for the pulp material.
I didn't even read the daily comics much.
Wendy Everett, the artist's daughter, has attested to her father's wide ranging literary knowledge, mentioning "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" (1797) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a primary influence for Namor. There are a number of parallels: the frozen landscape, the nautical leitmotive, above all the accursed protagonist, a stranger on both land and sea. But a possible, yet oddly neglected source of inspiration, may have also come from Everett's namesake and precursor, William Blake.
Blake was the first, and perhaps most original, of the English Romantic poets. Along with a host of younger compatriots, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron, he was part of a greater cultural movement, now given the broad label of Romanticism, which swept through Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the characteristics of this intellectual and artistic movement were the revival of the gothic (the ascendancy of feeling over reason) and political radicalism. Blake embraced many of the extremist tendencies of the time: in politics he was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, intellectually he railed against the rational empiricism of Issac Newton and John Locke, spiritually he was influenced by the noncomformist mysticism of Jakob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg.
Yet WillIam Blake's enduring legacy is his poetry and art. Almost completely self taught in these two fields, Blake developed a highly personal style in both disciplines. His watercolors and engravings are notable for their unique blend of sinuous Gothic elements with Neoclassical figures inspired by Rennaisance models. In his poetry, however, Blake determined upon an entirely original course: unlike other Romantic poets, who adapted Greek myths and Medieval folk tales, he chose to create his own entirely new cosmos populated with a novel pantheon of fantastic demi-gods.
Once constructed, Blake used his new poetic world to explore a number of unorthodox religious and philosophical themes. A number of these thematic elements were idiosyncratic extentions of older, more orthodox modes of thought such as Christianity. Blake's philosophical thought can be broadly designated as Neo-Platonic. That is to say, that it eschews the hylomorphic unity of form and matter, characteristic of Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, and embraces the Idealistic dualism articulated by Plato and systematized by Plotinus, Proclus and other members of the latter Platonic school.
The rise of modern philosophy can be traced to the mind/body split of Descartes, which bears considerable resemblance to certain formulations of Platonizing thought. The central conceptualizations of Platonism are the existence of eternal Ideas, and the descent from transcendant unity into materialistic disunity. The physical world is a mere shadow of the true world of immutable essences: a physical chair is only real to the extent that it imperfectly shares some of the attributes of the Ideal formulation of a Chair. Concurrently, creation is seen as a fall from the perfect unity of essentiality, into the inchoate plurality of the universe. This elemental disunity is evident at every level of reality, including the bifurcation of the sexes. In the Symposium Plato relates a myth of a primeval state of existence where all living creatures possesed both male and female characteristics. Zeus, jealous of their unified felicity, splits them apart. This is a mythopoeic explication of the travails of romantic love, all creatures agonizingly striving to find and rejoin their disjointed other half.
This radical cleavage of the self is at the heart of the Blakean mythos and is central to the foundations of Romanticism indeed, of modern thought itself. Freudian structural psychoanalysis and the Jungian paradigms of the Anima and the Animus, are direct outgrowths of this Neo-Platonic duality. In comparing Everett's Sub-Mariner story this issue, with Blake's poem "The Four Zoas" (c. 1795-1804), a number of fascinating parallels can be drawn. Indicating a seemingly shared poetic and intellectual tradition, these overlapping thematic elements might also point to a direct influence by Blake upon the comic book work of his descendent.
In The Ego and the Id (1923) Sigmund Freud posited an essential bifurcation in the human psyche, and in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he theorized two primary drives for all living organisms: Eros (the Life Force), and Thanatos (the Death Instinct). According to Freud, Eros and Thanatos are locked in a struggle for the appropriation of crucial libidinal energies produced in the subconscious, the source of all life.
Blake seems to anticipate much of Freud's psychoanalytic theory. In his mythopoeic universe, distinct mental faculities are embodied in a number of cosmic entities called Zoas. As in the broader Platonic theory, this psychic differentiation is seen as a fall from an original state of oneness. The goal of human existence is therefore the reunification of humanity back into its initial integrity. Blake identifies four basic psychological functions, which are incarnated as mythical beings: Urizen (reason), Luvah (energy), Urthona (poetic power) and Tharmas (integrative perception), known collectively as the Four Zoas, or life forces. Tharmas plays an analogous role to the Ego in the Freudian system, representing the primordial unity of vision.
As in Plato, the Blakean Self has suffered a further cleaving, the male and female principles have been torn apart. All four Zoas have been separated from their feminine halves which are now autonomous female entities, or emanations. Tharmas' female counterpart is Enion, together they embodied salutary, holistic perception, apart they personify the human psyche at war with itself. Enion now stands in judgement over Tharmas, they are rival factions of a fractured cosmic vision. The descent of Tharmas is physical as well as psychical, he falls from the heavens into the sea, the chaotic realm of riven understanding.
In the eternal realm of ideal Forms, Tharmas represented the integrative faculty which brings harmony to the marriage of love and intellect, now he is atomized. He is the Atlantic Ocean, a vast, inchoate body of water raging against the lonely isle Enion, who has become the fruitful, yet intransigently material Earth Mother. Tharmas is Noah's flood and Enion a besieged Atlantis: cosmic avatars which reprise another of Plato's myths. The ocean (Tharmas) ravages the land (Enion), and their brutal union gives birth to space and time, two further divisions of transcendent unity.
"Fury in my limbs, destruction in my bones & marrow
My skull riven into filaments, my eyes into sea jellies
Floating upon the tide wander bubbling and bubbling
Uttering my lamentations & begetting little monsters
Who sit mocking upon the little pebbles of the tide
In all my rivers, & on dried shells that the fish
Have quite forsaken O fool fool to lose my sweetest bliss
Where art thou Enion ah too near to cunning too far off
And yet too near
Dash'd down I send thee into distant darkness
Far as my strength can hurl thee wander there & laugh & play
Among the frozen arrows they will tear thy tender flesh
Fall off afar from Tharmas come not too near my strong fury
Scream & fall off & laugh at Tharmas lovely summer beauty
Till winter rends thee into Shivers as thou hast rended me."
Blake advocates an apocalyptic reintegration of the humam faculties. There is both a millenial and a political component to such a radical reunification. The first step toward union is a revolution destroying the present political systems, the governmental and ecclesiastical institutions have been fatally compromised by mankind's fall into division. Armed insurrection is merely a precursor to a coming epistemological reconciliation. Often there is a revolutionary subtext to dualistic philosophies, the radical fragmentation of the self may lead to an equally rebellious call for revolutionary reintegration. The connections between Blake's mythos and Karl Marx has often been made.
The hidden relation between Freud's psychoanalytic dualism, and the Marxist socio-political agenda, has been uncovered, most strikingly, by the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In Freudian theory, the repression of the erotic urges of the Id by the rationalizing force of the Ego, is necessary for the development of life and absolutely crucial for the maintenance of civilization (cf: review #17; The Incredible Hulk). Warring Eros and Thanatos keep a perilous balance of contending forces in check, the triumph of either of which would lead to chaos and destruction.
It was Marcuse who recognized that the overwhelming energies of the libido could be used as a political weapon.
Identifying Capitalism with the repressive coercion of the Egoistic death instinct, he advocated the militant unloosing of libidinal Eros by the young as a revolutionary act. The resulting collapse of the Capitalist military industrial complex, would lead inevitably to a utopian reintegration of the life and death instincts, and a millenial unification of human society.
For "In the Lap of the Gods," Everett captured many of the dualistic themes raised by Plato, Blake, Freud and Marcuse in a charming fable of the battle between the mythological Mars and Venus. The contrarieties embodied in the god of War and the godess of Love reflect the contentious dualites of Thanatos and Eros, the tragically separated male and female principles now in constant conflict. Like Enion, the beleaguered Venus holds fast to a small spot of land against the engulfing wrath of Mars (Tharmas). Everett's virtuoso pen work depicts the sundering flood of the War god's anger with sublime swirls of ink (pp. 1-5). No one could match his ability to illustrate watery vortices and bellowing storms. Reflecting the ubiquitous influence of Marcuse, and many of his fellow ideologues, during the Vietnam War period, Everett attempts to portray the link between erotic liberation, youthful rebellion, and political activism (pp. 6-8). Lithe, semi-nude female bodies are naturally coupled with the struggle against repressive and militaristic forms of authority. How else to explain the entrance of Venus (in her guise as campus rabble rouser Victoria Starr!) into Nita's home wearing nothing but the skimpiest of bathing suits and interrupting a conversation on democracy and authoritarianism? And is it coincidence that a sign held prominently over the heads of anti-war demonstrators reads "Make love, not war?"
Finally however, Eros vanquishes Thanatos, but the consequences of an unfettered eroticism unburdened by reasonable restraint, are disquietingly left unexplored. Instead, Venus resumes her earthly identity as a college teacher, presumably to continue preaching her anti-establishment rhetoric to impressionable youth.
So, was it all planned out by Everett, this symbolic struggle between love and death (Venus and Ares)? Maybe not, but there's no denying that Marcuse' ideas involving the sexual dimension of political struggle was in the air at the time. Ideas that circulated in intellectual circles in the 1960s had a habit of spilling over onto the quadrangle of the college campus and from there, into an active counter-cultural movement to become part of the zeitgeist of the time. If Everett was at all aware of current events (and the interlude this issue involving the discussion among the characters about authority and democracy would tend to support the idea), it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility not to expect him to include them in his comics' work.
Everett's short tenure on the book proved to be the great artist's last professional assignment. Tragically, he died the next year. And although he did little to improve on the book's sales, he did manage to breath into it a limited vitality that not only seemed to skirt the edge of what was permitted under the Comics Code Authority, but added a layer of complexity not generally expected from comics creators of his generation. |
|
