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, |
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| | ...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, |
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| | ...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), |
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| | ...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. |
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Here's
the
20th
of our regular
reviews:
on-line
05 Nov
2000 |
 |
Journey into Mystery
# 83
Aug 1962 |
Cover by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
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"Thor the Mighty! And the Stone Men From Saturn!"
Plot by Stan Lee,
Script by Larry Leiber,
Pencils by Jack Kirby
"The Perfect Crime!"
Plot by Stan Lee,
Script by Larry Leiber,
Pencils and inks by Don Heck
"When the Jungle Sleeps"
Plot by Stan Lee,
Script by Larry Leiber,
Pencils and inks by Steve Ditko |
|
Past reviews
are archived
in the
REVIEW INDEX |
The mythological imagination is as old as humanity; indeed it is central to man’s view of the world. Myth is one of the central ways in which the human imagination makes sense out of the universe it inhabits. An imaginative story gives order to an existence at once perilous and wondrous. The ancient Greeks recognized this duality in nature: its perplexing combination of symmetry and chaos, and named it Cosmos, by which they meant a harmonic, orderly wholeness. Yet, within this cosmic order they also detected numerous chaotic forces, and gave them names like Death and Fate. The origins of myth may be traced back to the personification of the tumultuous, contradictory flux of life.
The mythic form reflects the dynamic order of nature in a number of ways. Its narrative shape, its embodiment in an imaginative story, itself mirrors the structured flow of the universe. The protagonists of myth are gods, heroes and monsters, and their fantastic adventures explore the wondrous boundaries of reality: those focal points where the contingent universe meets the transcendentally ordered Cosmos. As F.A. Murphy has written, "Because it contains extraordinary characters, the mythic narrative presses the limits of experience. The myth images the world, and human action, as stretching up to a surpassing meaning. The natural world swells to include the divine."
This holistic view of reality, a hierarchical Cosmos where a great
chain of being connects all of creation, from inanimate matter to transcendent glory, suffused human consciousness until the rise of the Modern worldview. In post-Cartesian thought (cf. review #17: The Incredible Hulk #1), the universe is no longer an organic and purposeful whole, but an accidental, randomly constructed mechanism without meaning or intention. The word myth now begins to take on connotations of fanciful make-believe, the tall-tale, escapist entertainment or foolish delusion. Modernism demythologizes existence and uproots the mythopoeic imagination.
Yet even in a reductively mechanical age myths live on and the
human imagination continues to long for tales of fantastic creatures and
amazing adventures. The comic book is one kind of medium in which that
yearning is expressed, its heroes latter day incarnations of the
battling demigods of Greek mythology, modern day evocations of the
mythological imagination. Although they would later come to understand
their work as a kind of modern mythmaking, writer/editor Stan Lee and
artist Jack Kirby were unaware at first of this aspect of their work.
And so in early 1962, when they began considering ideas for a new
character, it was with utter unselfconsciousness that they achieved a
conceptual breakthrough.
With little warning, and only a few months following the debut of
The Incredible Hulk, Lee launched the third in his fledgling line of super-heroic characters. One month, Journey Into Mystery featured giant monsters and weird stories and the next, a Norse god (in primary colors yet!) doing battle with those selfsame monsters and weird menaces! The character became the first to be launched not in his own self-titled magazine, but as the headliner in a pre-existing book.
How did it happen?
It seems the success of the Fantastic Four and the Hulk (and no doubt some prodding from publisher Martin Goodman as well!) had inevitably begun to put pressure on Lee to come up with more new features.
But there was a problem.
In 1957, Goodman had decided to get out of the comic book business
canceling titles and selling off the Atlas magazine distribution company he owned. Almost immediately however, he changed his mind and, closing a distribution deal with National Periodicals Publications (DC), jumped back into the business. The only difference now was that he would be limited to just 8 titles (or 16 bi-monthly books) each month. And so, when Lee launched the Fantastic Four and then the Hulk in their own magazines, room had to be found for them by canceling other books. Reluctant to cancel any more until he was more certain of the popularity of the new super-heroes, Goodman instructed Lee to feature any new heroes in pre-existing titles.
And so, in the same month as Spider-Man’s first appearance in Amazing Adult Fantasy and a month before Henry Pym became the Ant-Man in Tales to Astonish and the Human Torch graduated to his own feature in Strange Tales, Lee introduced Thor in Journey Into Mystery. Within another half year, with Iron Man’s appearance in Tales of Suspense, all of Marvel’s weird menace titles would feature each their own super-hero and in another year or so, with the trend of the future made clear, every last vestige of the company’s pre-hero era would vanish completely.
In the meantime however, the transition from pure weird fantasy to the somewhat more down to earth adventures of the super-heroes would be eased a bit by the continuing appearance of monsters and aliens as adversaries in their adventures.
Thor was no different.
Appearing full blown on the cover of Journey Into Mystery, a somewhat skinny god of thunder was first glimpsed by readers warding off craggy alien invaders with wide swings of his hammer. It turned out that the stone men from Saturn, under the impression that earth would be easy pickings for them, had decided to take over the planet. It was only their bad luck to choose a time and place where lame Dr. Donald Blake happened to be vacationing.
After landing somewhere in Norway and spending pg. 2 demonstrating to themselves their clear superiority to human beings, the aliens manage to scare off Blake who had been spying on them from behind some rocks. After fleeing in a blind panic, the limping Blake takes shelter in a nearby cave where he discovers a gnarled walking stick hidden in a secret chamber. Unbeknownst to him, he has discovered the most awesome weapon of all time, the magical hammer of the Norse god Thor!
Striking the stick to the ground, the lame doctor is instantly surrounded by a nimbus of energy and is transformed into the mighty Thor. In quick order, he learns how to use his new-found power, defeats the stone men ("Back! Back to the ships!! We must flee this accursed planet!!") and becomes dangerously overconfident ("I have proven that the hammer and the might of the thunder-god are invincible! Nothing can conquer Thor! Nothing!").
Lee says the inspiration for Thor had come from his own interests in myths and legends and in particular, those of the Norse myths (in later interviews, Kirby would also admit to the same interests). Casting about for inspiration in the creation of his next super-hero character, Lee says the only thing he could think of was some kind of "super-God."
"There was no way we could present a strip featuring God without possibly offending any reader of almost any religious affiliation," explained Lee, a full decade after the facts. Struggling with the possibility of creating a God-like super hero with divine powers, Lee said he had tried to dismiss the concept, which was sure to be controversial, then:
A thought suddenly struck me. During a recent radio interview the
talk-show host and I had been discussing our Marvel stories and he had referred to them as a twentieth-century mythology. It was his feeling that we were creating an entire contemporary mythos, a family of legends that might be handed down to future generations just as those we had read as children had been handed down to us.
One of the points he made was that Marvel's heroes had some of the
charisma, some of the flavor of ancient fairy tales, of ancient Greek and Norse Mythology.
And that was what grabbed me. That was the answer.
And so Thor was born.
But busy with other commitments, Lee decided to give the feature to
brother Larry Leiber to script.
According to Leiber, he was given a plot synopsis for this first Thor story by Lee from which he created a full script. Details, such as the name of the lame doctor (Donald Blake) and what Thor’s hammer was made of (uru) were left to his own imagination. Lee would then have edited, polished and rewritten (if necessary) Leiber’s finished script before sending it off to artist Jack Kirby to illustrate.
Kirby, who was extremely busy in these years drawing the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and features in most of the rest of Marvel’s line of monster, western and war comics, somehow managed to overcome the rushed quality that had crept into his work to provide much tighter pencils for Thor. In a series of images laden with power and majesty, the artist only hints at the grandeur to come when, after an extended absence from the strip, he would return, re-energized and newly self-conscious of the growing cohesiveness of the fantasy world he and Lee had created in the intervening years. Particularly impressive in this debut story is the opening splash page in which Kirby depicts a muscular, dynamic Thor, hair and cloak whipping in the wind as he thrusts his hammer directly at the reader. Later (pg. 5, pnls. 3 and 4), when Blake finds the enchanted walking stick and strikes it on the ground, a judicious use of dark and light not only delays revealing the shadowed figure to the reader, but adds a disturbing feeling of mystery and awe to the scene. Then, in a pause before the full figure of the transformed Blake is shown, the reader is given a close-up look at Thor’s hammer upon which are written the words "Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of ... Thor."
With their new line of super-heroes, Lee and Kirby had been unconsciously creating myths for a generation coming of age in a demythologized time, and their young readers responded with instinctive enthusiasm. Marvel’s illustrated tales of fantasy and heroism (as opposed to those offered by their competition, whose heroes seldom displayed the necessary human characteristics and foibles that enabled them to function properly as genuine mythological figures) seemingly tapped an innate longing for a re-enchantment of reality through mythic storytelling. In the mechanized Cartesian universe there was no possibility of making contact with any transcendent value, consequently many young men and women in the post-war years began to look towards Jungian psychology, Eastern mysticism, and other esoteric practices for a renewed sense of connection with the divine. Fantasy art and literature, which provided an imaginative entry into the realm of the mythic, became widely popular within a youthful sub-culture yearning for transcendence.
One of the most celebrated literary manifestations of the mythological imagination during the 1960s was the paperback publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Initially published as a hardcover in England in the mid 1950s, its reprinting as a cheap, mass produced paperback in the United States ten years later, prompted a zealous world wide response.
In fact, both fictional universes, Tolkien's and Lee and Kirby's, seemed to attract the same readership with many letters written to Marvel by fans signing off with the phrase "Frodo lives!" Maybe the dual identification by readers of Tolkien's mythic epic and the heroic universe being created by Lee and Kirby was because both inventions bore interesting similarities. Beyond their contemporaneous rise to fame, there is also, in the particular instance of Thor, a common foundation in the myth, folklore and imagery of Norse culture. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, invented a whole new language, with its own alphabet based on Norse runes, and a complex new cosmology, influenced by the theogonies of the Norsemen, in his Rings trilogy. Lee and Kirby could not bring the historical and philological erudition of an Oxford don to their work on The Mighty Thor, but they similarly drew inspiration from Norse mythology to fashion an intricate universe replete with heroic deeds, cosmic vistas and primordial clashes between good and evil. In time, Lee even adopted an archaic, pseudo-Shakespearean idiom to distinguish the elevated parlance of the gods from the quotidian speech of earth-bound mortals.
But there were even deeper affinities between the mythopoeic imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien and Jack Kirby. For both men, it was form that revealed the imaginative substrate, the foundation of the Cosmos. The Greeks used an all-encompassing term to designate this harmonic order of the universe as it was revealed through balance and beauty: Logos, which can mean reason, speech, definition or proportion. A more recent rendition of this term is Gestalt, a configuration that reveals the complexity and symmetry of reality within its holistic totality. Neither man was an abstract theoretician, they intuitively conceptualized the world in terms of images rather than ideas, they preferred actions to analysis; in other words, they were born storytellers. Men like Kirby and Tolkien, relate the awesome grandeur, energy and beauty of the cosmos through narratives that resonate with a mythic timelessness. Tolkien coined the term "sub-creation" to describe this imaginative faculty of mythmaking, because he was convinced that myths are not childish stories that never happened, but archetypal tales that are always happening. They are eternal, because they capture in a small way the wondrous order of the universe, microcosm mirroring macrocosm, they are ranscendent, because they create worlds in the spirit of the Creator.
The mythological imagination is "the power of giving to ideal creation the inner consistency of Reality." It is not pure escapism, or immature play-acting, although it often evokes child-like wonder and innocent joy. It is the re-creation of an imagined Cosmos. (On the surface, Aesop’s fables, like the two weird stories that round out this issue, seem like nothing more than simple bedtime stories for children, but beneath their playful surface, universal moral lessons are taught). In its highest form fantasy re-enchants the material world, not with vain illusions or chimerical fancies, but with the mimetic force of images. In forming a secondary world, the creative artist ultimately re-directs our attention to the Primary World, which it reflects. In the joyful contemplation of the sub-creator’s gestalt, we catch a glimpse of the majestic Logos of the transcendent Maker. |
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