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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
21 st
of our regular
reviews:
on-line
22 Nov
2001 |
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X-Men
# 29
Feb 1967 |
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Cover by
Werner Roth
and
John Tartaglione |
“When Titans Clash!”
Script by
Roy Thomas
Pencils by
Werner Roth
Inks by
John Tartaglione |
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Past reviews
are archived
in the
REVIEW INDEX |
By the mid-1960s, the majority of Marvel’s titles had moved from being uncertain upstarts to best sellers, in the comic book publishing world. Increased sales brought a sense of assurance from writer/editor Stan Lee, a new confidence that his handling of the line was on the right track. But the company’s evolution from its formative period to its grandiose stage didn’t come without a few casualties. The Hulk had been canceled after only six issues; Ant-Man, after an attempt to revive interest in the character by turning him into Giant-Man, failed, while in Strange Tales, the Human Torch was evicted in favor of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. But by far the biggest disappointment of these early years was the X-Men.
Launched simultaneously with The Avengers and within a few months of Sgt. Fury, X-Men was part of a mini-avalanche of titles intended by Lee and publisher Martin Goodman to
take advantage of the success of the early Marvel line. In addition to
being scripted by Lee himself, all three new books were to be penciled
by Jack Kirby, who by this time had become indispensable as the
company’s visual trendsetter. But despite being graced with a stronger
identity as a title, a slate of well-rounded, interesting characters,
colorful villains and the creative energies of Lee and Kirby, the title
seemed to falter early. While The Avengers went monthly with its sixth issue and Sgt. Fury with its seventh, The X-Men limped along
until its third year of publication before receiving the same honor.
Maybe it was the recurrence of the same villains issue after issue, or the title’s air of insularity from the rest of the Marvel Universe or maybe it was the lack of flashy costumes - whatever it was, readers didn’t seem to warm to it. Matters weren’t helped by the departure of Lee with issue # 20 or of Kirby’s full pencils with # 11. From there, the book’s creative potential began to zigzag, never again to offer the reader a firm foothold until near the end of the title’s run when Roy Thomas and Neal Adams managed not only to infuse new life into the by-then moribund strip, but a much needed (but too late) regularity (cf: review # 7; X-Men # 58).
Providing what regularity the book did have in the intervening years between the departure of Lee and Kirby and the arrival of Adams, Thomas nevertheless seemed lacking in enthusiasm for the strip when
compared to his later, more energetic work on The Avengers and Dr. Strange. To be sure, Thomas gave more attention to building up the personalities of the characters and introducing new villains, but he was somewhat hampered by the lack of help from the many artists with which the strip would be saddled: George Tuska, Don Heck (who had just passed his prime in these years), Barry Smith (in his very shaky first assignment for the company), Ross Andru and even Jim Steranko (who produced a trio of striking covers and two mediocre issues of interior art). But the artist who would contribute more work on the strip than any other was Werner Roth.
Roth used the pen name of "Jay Gavin" under which to debut in the brave new world of Marvel’s super-heroes (X-Men # 13). At first working over layouts provided by Kirby (as did almost all artists starting out on the company’s super-hero books), Roth eventually was allowed to fly on his own. Competent but unexciting, Roth nevertheless plugged manfully on and off until issue # 57.
Although Roth would eventually acquire the knack for presenting Marvel style action (issues 24-29 are perhaps his standouts),
his forte continued to be the quiet, character building scenes which so distinguished Marvel from its competition. And fortunately for Roth, he was paired with a writer whose plan for revitalizing the strip included many such interludes. Right from the start, Thomas chose to stress personality and soap opera over super-heroics: he gave the Beast (Hank McCoy) and Ice Man (Bobby Drake) girlfriends and had them spend a lot of time in Greenwich Village coffee houses, he focused on the tension between Cyclops (Scott Summers), Marvel Girl (Jean Grey) and the Angel (Warren Worthington III) by removing Jean from Professor Xavier’s school to a mid-town college and, in # 19, introduced the belligerent figure of the Mimic (Cal Rankin) as a new member of the team.
In a virtuoso opening panel, Roth and Thomas open this issue with an ice-skating scene that combines all of these elements in a single
image (divided into quarters by the foreground figure of Bobby Drake as he dashes onto the ice): the camaraderie of Hank and Bobby, the arrogant disdain of Cal and the Scott-Jean-Warren triangle, with Warren solicitous toward Jean while Scott stands aloof and isolated, in the background. The scene plays to Roth’s strengths as a former romance artist, and there's no doubt Jean had never been so well served, even under Kirby.
In the following few pages, Thomas allows room for a further
exploration of the personalities of the X-Men, emphasizing in particular
the tragic nature of Scott Summers. Simultaneously graced and cursed with the ability to emit deadly force blasts from his eyes, Scott is the confident leader of the X-Men, but while out of uniform is a young man wracked with doubt and self-pity for an affliction he cannot control. It is this fear of losing control of his powers that prevents him from declaring his love for Jean and gives Warren the opportunity to woo her himself. When Scott lets his powers loose in a remote part of the forest, it's an obvious release of romantic frustration rather than an exercise in self-control.
This frustration is later given outlet in conflict with Cal, who has been named leader of the X-Men in place of Scott. Cal, an
egotistical, arrogant and self-centered teenager, sounds a discordant
note in the usually amicable super-hero group and the tensions that have
been growing over the previous few issues, fueled by Scott’s angst, now boils over as the teammates come to blows. The hostilities end when Professor X is forced to expel Cal from the group.
Fate, however, takes a hand in the form of the Super-Adaptoid, a robot able to absorb the powers of any super-hero it comes into contact with. Making its appearance here, it still retains the powers of the Avengers whom it had last encountered in Tales of Suspense # 84. In quick order, the Adaptoid defeats the X-Men and is preparing to absorb their powers when Cal returns to “…tell off those mutant do-gooders!” But seeing his former teammates in trouble, nature takes over and he tackles the Adaptoid himself. Acting on a hunch, Cal tricks the robot into trying to adapt all the X-Men’s powers through himself guessing rightly that because he didn’t possess those powers naturally, the attempt might cause a backfire, rendering the robot helpless.
And so, through deft handling of the human elements established for his cast over past issues, Thomas, aided by Roth’s talent for depicting simple scenes of ordinary life, is able to manipulate the contending personalities and use them as the foundation for a story ostensibly involving super-heroic action, but actually about the continued maturation of his characters. It was why Marvel in these years was able to overtake its competition and why such creators as Kirby and Steve Ditko, when they chose to leave the company, didn’t succeed nearly so well elsewhere: that without the human qualities that made them seem “real” to readers, super-heroes became merely exercises in costume design.
Even so, X-Men # 29 is far from the simple slugfest or even slice-of-life morality play than might appear on the surface.
Inextricably entwined with his personal growth is the question posed by Cal’s alter ego. The curious ability of both the Mimic and the Super-Adaptoid to copy the powers of others brings to mind a number of questions regarding the nature of identity, change, and representation - questions that have intrigued and vexed the Western mind since the inception of rational thought almost three thousand years ago, and which continue to raise difficulties about the meaning of creation, communication, and the nature of existence itself.
At the dawn of classical Greek philosophy, discourse on the fundamental constitution of reality began with the seemingly simple conundrum of self and other. At that time, two great thinkers came to exactly opposite conclusions. Heraclitus saw the incessant change and motion of the universe, and concluded that this seething flux was the basis of nature. Parmenides saw this same ceaseless change and abhorred it; he determined that the flux was an illusion, and eternal, unmoving sameness the fundamental principle of existence. So two intractable positions were firmly established: reality was either difference or identity, the Many or the One.
Several generations of philosophers debated these two polarizing views, but it was left to Plato to attempt a systematic reconciliation of these two apparently irreconcilable philosophies. Plato was initially attracted to Parmenides’ explanation, for he felt that the universe must be founded upon an immutable principle. Otherwise the world would be reduced to an incomprehensible chaos. Nevertheless, he was also exceptionally aware of the never-ending alterations of nature that Heraclitus embraced. So, between the static monism of the one, and the fluid plurality of the other, the Athenian posited an intermediary metaphysical duality. Plato agreed with Heraclitus that we cannot trust our senses, because the world of sense-experience is a flood of unintelligible alteration, but he also agreed with Parmenides that there must be a level of existence in which eternally fixed verities reside. The Platonic universe is a two-tiered hierarchy consisting of a material world that imperfectly imitates a higher plane of eternally self-subsisting and immutable Forms or Ideas. These unchanging Ideas inform the mutable objects of the lower realm, which participate in the perfection of the Forms in varying degrees. Physical objects are flawed imitations of the Forms, and representations of the physical world are mere imitations of imitations, copies twice removed from their Ideal paradigms.
This Platonic dualism was an advance beyond the intractable dichotomy of identity and difference, but it left several perplexing issues unresolved, such as the mechanism whereby material objects participated in the transcendent formal template of the Ideas. Aristotle, Plato’s most talented pupil, further refined the Platonic compromise. First, he rejected the metaphysical dualism of his master.
For the radical split between the world of becoming and the realm of
absolute Being, he substituted a realistic account of nature that
encompassed both unity and diversity. Aristotle posited a universe at once mutable and durable, full of physical substances composed of both a form, which gave objects their coherence, and matter, which gave them a physical presence. This Aristotelian form is a universal essence that can be mentally abstracted from the material object, yet that object is not reduced to a mere shadow of the form, but retains its integrity as a physical manifestation of its inherent formal qualities. For Aristotle
the world is real. Furthermore, this objective world can be truthfully represented through mimesis, which is not so much a superficial imitation of the accidental outward appearance of things, as a duplication of the formal processes of an object’s coming-to-be. Mimesis is not static: it is a re-presentation of dynamic form in another medium.
Aristotle’s perceptive rapprochement between change and permanence was not the last word on the subject. Debate on the nature of alternation, invariance and imagery rages to this day. One of the most powerful contemporary attacks against the efficacy of all mimetic processes can be found in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Beginning with his seminal publication Of Grammatology in 1967, Derrida’s body of work comprises a sustained project of “deconstruction” against figurative language, the possibility of mimesis, and the Western metaphysical tradition itself. Derrida coined the term difference, a neologism combining the notions of difference and deferment, to describe the dichotomy between our attempts to refer to existence, and actual existence as such. For signification to occur we must begin with a difference, one sign must be the signifier, and the other, the object, must be the signified. That is, they must differ in function, and because a signifier can only furnish a trace—a mere shadow—of the object, it must defer to the signified. In effect Derrida has returned us to the imperfect shadow-lands of Platonic dualism, but, because Derrida dismisses the ideal realm of Forms, or our possibility to know or communicate those Ideas, the signified in turn becomes a signifier in relation to other signified objects. This process is interminable: there is no final significant object to stop the course of linguistic and metaphysical deconstruction. We are imprisoned once more in the meaningless Heraclitean flux.
The sequential visual narrative presented in X-Men # 29, a mimetic work published contemporaneously with Derrida’s groundbreaking exploration of deconstruction, not only exemplifies mimesis as a representation of dynamic form, but it also examines the related themes of sameness, difference, and imitation. At the beginning of the narrative, Cyclops, a member of the X-Men, inadvertently awakens the Super-Adaptoid from his subterranean slumber. Manufactured to absorb power synthetically, and to replicate other androids like itself, the Super-Adaptoid typifies the invariant yet insubstantial artifice of mechanical reproduction. By contrast, Cal Rankin, the Mimic, is the embodiment of a holistic, organic mode of mimesis. Not a “pantographic tracing” as the Adaptoid calls it, but a systemic transference of essential qualities into a different agent. In Aristotelian terms it might be said that essence (ouisa) is the first principle of operation for the performance of which a thing has come into existence. The coming into being of an essence is its activity (energeia). The actualization (entelecheia) of an essence is the dynamic process of a form continuously fulfilling itself through such an ongoing act of realization. Therefore, by extension, a representation (mimesis) is a technique (techne) for re-creating (poiesis) the characteristic
activities (energeia) of an essence (ouisa), through an embodiment of its formal processes (entelecheia). We can recognize this vital conception of mimesis as internalization in Prof. Xavier’s attempt to inculcate certain essential qualities in the Mimic through a rigorous program of repetitive exercise. It is only through such a process of internal actualization that an ethos, or ingrained form of activity, can be essentially embodied in a separate medium. Ultimately, such an ethos can only be fully internalized within a community of mutual mimetic discourse: a society that shares customary practices which instill and reinforce virtuous habits through commonly held stories, rituals, activities, and ideals. A communicative mimesis enacted within the life of a culture such as the one Prof. Xavier is organizing in his School for Gifted Youngsters. (For another examination of mimesis as energetic form, cf. review # 4, The Mighty Thor # 176; the relation between ethos and mimesis is explored in review # 14, Tales of Suspense # 66).
Derrida would contend that essences are not communicable, because language, the medium of transference, can only signify itself. Let us attempt a contrary assessment of the power of mimetic communicability by way of a three-fold analysis. First we will look at Plato’s analogical account of the cognitive ascent towards Form, and Derrida’s critique of that Platonic theory; then we will posit an anthropological account of the origins of mimesis; and finally examine a mimetic sequence in X-Men # 29 in the light of Aristotelian metaphysics.
Imagine a cave, Plato writes in The Republic, full of prisoners all chained facing towards an interior wall. A large fire burns behind them, so that the only objects they can perceive are the flickering shadows cast upon the granite surface by figures, which occasionally walk before the flames. This is the common lot of men trapped by their senses in the material world. Now imagine one of the prisoners breaking loose from his shackles and escaping from the cave. Emerging from the tenebrous interior, at first he would only see vague shapes, before his eyes, adjusting to the unaccustomed brightness, could begin to discern forms. Ultimately he would be able to see the source of light: the Sun, the illuminator of all forms. This is man released from the fetters of illusion, finally witnessing the Forms themselves. For Derrida this extended analogy is already a fall into the trap of metaphoric language. From the time he leaves the cave, Platonic man is ensnared in the abstraction of self-referential imagery, so that the Sun, the ultimate Form, or any other image we can formulate, is from its inception prey to the fatal duality of representation.
Let us now examine the actual emergence of the mimetic arts from the dark underground of pre-history. In the caves of Lascaux and Altamira we have the oldest pictorial representations that have ever been discovered. These twenty thousand year old images, painted by men in the bowels of the earth, lit only by the fitful light of a few primitive torches, and employing the most rudimentary tools to create paintings of immense beauty and power, do not convey a process of existential abstraction, or a metaphoric distancing from the objects they depict. On the contrary, these pictures of bison, mammoths, horses, and reindeer manifest representation as a means of predicating being itself. The image of the animal attempts to capture the essence of the creature, very much in the same manner, as the artist/hunter will try to catch the physical animal. There is an almost magical correlation between the immanent representation and the objective form. So that we can state, with a fair degree of confidence, that mimesis does not originate in a synthetic duality, but with the primacy of identity.
In conclusion, we analyze X-Men # 29, as both a work of mimesis, and an artistic exploration of the meaning of unity, diversity, and simulation. After being roused from sleep, the Super-Adaptoid emerges from his underground abode, and into a sun-drenched landscape (page 5, panel 4). The synthetic man, archetype of abstracted essence, ascends from his metaphorical cave, and goes forth into the self-referential glare of its insignificant signifier, or master trope. So might a Derridean deconstructionist, with a satirical nod towards Plato, interpret this scene. Yet an Aristotelian gloss of the culminating action, may allow for a significantly different reading of this sequential narrative as a representation, or better yet, a conceptual and thematic realization of mimesis as dynamic form. The Super-Adaptoid quickly defeats the X-Men (pages 12-13); the Mimic approaches the android, but cannot appropriate its artificial powers, and volunteers to be transmuted into a replica of the Adaptoid (page 14, panels 2-6). The Mimic recants at the last minute (page 15, panel 4), and the Super-Adaptoid attempts to absorb Cal's powers into itself, unleashing a destructive backlash of energy, which defeats the android, but at the cost of stripping the Mimic of his acquired powers (pages 18-20). Yet, this seemingly tragic conclusion is, paradoxically, also a moment of triumph. For Cal, it is an instance of cathartic recognition of the true nature of his existence. With the last vestiges of imitative artificiality taken from him, he finally realizes the form of his humanity.
Thus, Cal's victory is necessarily bittersweet: while he finds his powers erased, he’s learned a valuable lesson in humility and cameraderie. "I was a self-centered, glory-hungry fool…who didn't deserve such power…it took an inhuman, emotionless thing…to make me realize the value of…friendship… Even if the Mimic is gone forever, it was worth it, if Cal Rankin became…a man!" |
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