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
23 rd
of our regular
reviews:
on-line
13 Apr
2002 |
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Creatures on the Loose
# 10
Mar 1971 |
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Cover by
Marie Severin |
“The Skull of Silence!”
Scripted by Roy Thomas
Penciled and inked by
Berni Wrightson |
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Past reviews
are archived
in the
REVIEW INDEX |
Even before Marvel's first venture into the genre of sword & sorcery had proven its bona fides with Conan the Barbarian a year earlier, Stan Lee had given editor-in-all-but-name Roy Thomas the green light to feature another barbarian hero from pulp writer Robert E. Howard's stable of literary characters.
In retrospect, the move was surprising, given the uncertain performance of Conan (early issues were plagued by patchy distribution and sales were such that cancellation of the title loomed as a very serious possibility even as late as the fifth issue). The decision to feature King Kull in Creatures on the Loose # 10 was perhaps more indicative of Thomas' enthusiasm for Howard's work than a realistic view of whether sword & sorcery could find a niche in the marketplace.
Roy Thomas was by this time Marvel's top writer (Stan Lee had been in retreat as the company's chief creative force for at least 3 years) and worked directly from original material by Robert E. Howard. In an interesting convergence of talent, Thomas's script was graced by the pencils of Berni Wrightson in his only story length contribution to the company at its creative peak.
Wrightson was one of a handful of up and coming young artists working in the late sixties whose artistic influences didn't spring from Marvel in general or its top penciler Jack Kirby in particular. Unlike Barry Smith, these artists were influenced by an earlier generation of comics and a group of artists whose styles were derived from illustration rather than the comics. For Wrightson, and artists like Mike Kaluta and Jeffrey Jones, the old EC Comics of the 1950s and its stable of artists such as Wally Wood, Angelo Torres, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson and Roy G. Krenkle and especially Graham "Ghastly" Ingalls, were the source from which they drew their inspiration. As a result, they were lured first to DC because of its long standing stable of horror comics and the fact that they were edited by veteran EC artist Joe Orlando.
Over the years, these young artists honed their talents on 5-10 page stories of ghostly revenge, graveyard spooks and haunted castles. The most prolific (and arguably the most talented) was Wrightson, whose stories and cover images of moldering tombs and walking corpses became a trademark that almost reeked of rotting flesh and grave dirt. Loyal to DC, Wrightson and his peers seemed reluctant to cross over to Marvel where, as comics' creative and popular momentum shifted from one company to the other in the 1960s, super-heroes were the dominant genre. Few of DC's talented younger brigade ever left the company and when they did, it was reason to take notice.
Such was the case when Wrightson's work suddenly began to appear on scattered covers of Marvel's new line of horror anthologies. Eyebrows were further raised when he completed a 7 page story for Creatures on the Loose (formerly Tower of Shadows). An adaptation of the story "Skull of Silence," about a strange castle where silence is kept imprisoned, it featured the first appearance of Howard's original barbarian hero, King Kull. Scripted by Thomas (who had the Howard concession all to himself in these years) the story didn't look like a typical Marvel comic. In fact, it seemed more in the style of a Harold Foster Prince Valiant Sunday page or even a text heavy EC story. Filled with Wrightson's heavy use of blacks, much of the layout was made up of small panels headed by text blocks rather than dialogue balloons.
As he was doing in the Conan title, Thomas exercised good judgment in deciding what to keep of Howard's prose and what to sacrifice to the demands of the comics medium. The result became what was quickly emerging with Marvel's sword and sorcery features as a kind of poetic style that gave stories a certain dramatic weight (despite their blood 'n guts action scenes) absent from the looser, more self-deprecating super-hero titles ("No birds sing as Kull reins his proud stallion to a halt before the great stark castle, dark as doom. No wind stirs the grim jade gong which stands beside its door, its greenish shades ever shifting, ever changing. And even as Kull's brave comrades follow him up the slope, their footfalls on the rocks seem to tinkle drearily and far way, dying without echo.") But Thomas had the good fortune of working with some of the best material ever written in the field of fantasy, material with direct literary antecedents that went back at least a hundred years and of which Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) himself was only a late off-shoot.
As such, Howard's fiction must be considered in the larger literary and cultural context of late 19th and early 20th century Romantic literature (despite having lived and died in an obscure corner of East Texas!) Allowing a much broader view of the poetic and intellectual tradition within which he worked, Howard's immediate influences can be traced to Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), author of such novels as Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars, as well as other contemporary writers of occult, adventure and spicy adventure stories encountered in such popular magazines as Weird Tales. A world away from the literary ghetto of American pulp fiction was the English philologist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), whose life as an Oxford don could not have been more different from Howard's, but who, like the blustery Texan, was busy developing his own fantasy realm. But both men, Howard with his Hyborian Age and Tolkien with Middle Earth, had a common literary ancestor in William Morris (1834-1896), a painter, designer, poet, social activist and novelist with a penchant for the culture of the Middle Ages. Interested also in telling tales of the fantastic, Morris first combined his poetic talents with his knowledge of medieval lore in a series of translations of such ancient texts as Beowulf, The Volsunga Saga, Grettir the Strong, The Nibelungenlied and The Heimskringla. Not satisfied with merely copying what others had done, Morris then devised a series of original novels based on his reading of Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic and medieval tales of chivalry and romance: The Wood Beyond the World, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and his masterpiece The Well at the World's End. Howard's and Tolkien's parallel, yet independent creation of "Sword and Sorcery" can be traced back to Morris' earlier experiments with medieval literary models. His work, in art as well as literature, formed a part of the larger Pre-Raphaelite movement of Victorian England, which in itself was only one strand among many of the vastly larger 19th century European cultural movement that has since become known as Romanticism. (For an analysis of the development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its connections to fantasy, see Review # 8 Conan the Barbarian # 24).
The Romantic Movement had its origins in the Gothic revival of the late 18th century. This revival is best understood as a reaction against the excessive rationalism and materialism of the Enlightenment. Opposing the pervading intellectual and political tide of the time, which embraced mathematical clarity and a developing scientific method, Romanticsm offered a literary, artistic and spiritual counter-movement that emphasized sentiment and poetic insight rather than pure logic. The new movement (which actually harkened back to the Gothic era of the 12th and 13th centuries) was a reaction against the Renaissance, an aggressive, and at times excessively reductive, rationalistic spirit that had arisen in the 15th and 16th centuries. To the Romantics, the Middle Ages seemed to be a time of greater cultural simplicity and religious orthodoxy, an age of chivalry and the crusades which were invoked as a model of how the political, intellectual and artistic strands of society had once been woven into a seamless cultural tapestry. Such social cohesion, a holistic union of Church and State, where artists and philosophers could find patronage at once under both the sign of the cross and the orb, was represented by the Romantics as a utopian ideal during an era marked by tumultuous societal and technological change. It began in the decades immediately preceding the French Revolution when a vogue for "Gothic" culture became the rage. Knights jousting in shining armor, tales of chivalrous daring-do and romantic quests became popular and abandoned abbeys, Gothic cathedrals and haunted castles were considered "Romantic." In literature, the fashion for medievalism gave birth to two distinct genres: the Gothic tale, with its requisite retinue of ghosts and goblins, and the Romance novel, which concentrated upon the amatory adventures of suitably "romantic" heroines. (The origins of the Gothic, and its subsequent bifurcation into two different genres, is more fully explored in Review # 11 Spider-Man # 49).
In contrast to the standards of beauty prevalent during the Renaissance (which emphasized a neo-classical purity of delineation and an almost geometric lucidity of form), the nascent Gothic spirit of the 18th century counterpoised an aesthetic of darkness and evanescence that evoked not the clear outlines of the beautiful, but the terrible countenance of sublimity. The 1st century Neo-Platonic orator and statesman, Longinus, first codified the sublime as a literary term, but with the collapse of the classical world the concept was subsequently lost to history. Ironically, with the revival of ancient learning during the Renaissance, the manuscript Peri Hupsous, and the anti-classical idea of the sublime, once again entered the European mind. Longinus gives five distinguishing characteristics that define the term "hupsous:"
1. Great thoughts
2. Strong emotions
3. Appropriate metaphors
4. Noble diction
5. Dignified composition
Ideally, these literary devices should be used in conjunction, eliciting a strong emotion from the reader by creating a sense of vastness or grandeur which would in turn, inspire awe. These are emotional responses that are at variance with the balanced reason of classical aesthetics. This appeal to irrational sentiment may perhaps be attributed to the Hellenistic period in which these poetic principles were codified, a time of increasing decadence when traditional Greco-Roman civilization had begun to unravel.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the concept of "hupsous," under its Latin cognomen "sublimis," was reintroduced into post-classical aesthetics. But it took a young Irish law student, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), and his ground breaking work of artistic theory, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Idea of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), to propel the idea of sublimity into the forefront of European critical thought. Anticipating the artistic trends of the next century and a half, Burke forever sundered beauty from sublimity by ascribing each aesthetic response to a separate faculty within the human psyche. According to the Enquiry, man has two overwhelming passions (which are often at odds with each other): the need for self-preservation and love for society. The imminence of death causes fear and anxiety, which man perceives as pain, the elimination of mortal danger results in a diminution of existential angst, which is perceived, by contrast, as a delightful relief. Therefore, greater psychological delectation may be achieved through the contemplation of horrific imagery, because the resulting release of psychic energy is more powerful than the less disturbing pleasures afforded by beauty. The subjective emotional jolt of the sublime can be delivered by a number of aesthetic scenes: vast heights, great vistas, profound depths, deafening noise, impenetrable gloom, wild landscapes, all of which call forth an imaginative representation of indefinite terror. Such evocations of angst became the domain of the Gothic sensibility, dominated by gloomy forests, imposing mountains, desert fastnesses and ghostly ruins. In the 19th century the Romantic sublime became synonymous with awe-inspiring grandeur, the transcendent majesty and terror of the universe before which man falls silent.
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,
when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment;
and astonishment is the state of the soul, in which all its
motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In
this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object,
that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason
on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great
power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it
anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible
force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the
sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration,
reverence and respect.
Burke - A Philosophical Enquiry/Part II, Section 1
And so, an analysis of Howard's story (the source material for this issue's tale) "The Skull of Silence" according to the paradigms of sublimity codified by Longinus and Burke, reveals its canonical location within the European Romantic tradition. The tale's theme is declared in the second paragraph:
Yet there was a time that Kull knew Fear, stark, terrible,
and unreasoning, and his marrow weakened and his blood ran cold.
So men speak of the time of Kull's Fear, and they do not
speak in scorn, nor does Kull feel any shame. No, for as
it came about, the thing rebounded to his undying glory.
This fear that Kull will face will not be a childish fright, but an encounter with Fear itself, with the dread source of existential angst, and it will only add to the awe and respect that men already have towards him. This fearsome source is elucidated by a wise slave, appropriately named Kuthulos (from the ancient Greek katholou, which means universal), who identifies the cosmic nature of Fear:
"All is illusion," Kuthulos was saying. "All outward
manifestations of the underlying Reality, which is beyond human
comprehension, since there are no relative things by which the
finite mind may measure the infinite. The one may underlie
all, or each natural illusion may posses a basic entity. All
these things were known to Raama, the greatest mind of all the ages,
who eons ago freed humanity from the grasp of unknown demons and
raised the race to its heights."
"He was a mighty necromancer, " said Ka-nu.
"He was no wizard," said Kathulos. "No chanting, mumbling
conjurer, divining from snake's livers. There was naught
of mummery about Raama. He had grasped the First Principles;
he knew the Elements and he understood the natural forces…
In this short passage, the young Howard, in his East Texas isolation, with intuitive wisdom, places the nexus of sublime fear within the venerable Platonic tradition, which is founded upon the age-old dichotomy between reality and illusion, between the shadowy realm of subjective appearance, and the true plane of essential Form (This Platonic dichotomy between essence and appearance is examined at length in Review # 21 X-Men # 29):
"Yes, you say all is illusion," persisted Ka-nu, shrewd in
statecraft, but ignorant in philosophy and science, and respecting
Kuthulos for his knowledge. "How is that? Do we not
hear and see and feel?"
"What is sight and sound?" continued the slave. "Is not sound
the absence of silence, and silence the absence of sound? The
absence of a thing is not material substance. It is nothing.
And how can nothing exist?"
"Then why are things?" asked Ka-nu like a puzzled child.
"They are appearances of reality. Like silence; some-where
exists the essence of silence, the soul of silence. Nothing
that is something; an absence so absolute that it takes material form…
One reason why Thomas was so successful in adapting literary fiction to comic book form was his innate understanding that comics were primarily a visual medium. We can see this savvy insight at work in his adaptation of "The Skull of Silence." Eliminating Howard's extended opening dialogue between Ka-nu and the slave, Thomas instead opts to use the opening two pages of his script to introduce Kull and his band of warriors. It is only when Kull, his men, and the bleak, mountainous setting of the story have been adequately established that Thomas launches into the narrative proper. It's only on the third page that he introduces Kathulos, and with a skillful blending of Howard's prose and his own, presents the fearful Skull:
Have you ever heard silence, my lord? Nay, never…for
always there is the whisper of the wind…the murmur of the shifting
sands. Only ancient Raama, greatest mind of all the ages,
ever battled the Spectre of Silence. With his arts and his
knowledge, he imprisoned it yonder for all time…and woe unto the
world if any man unleash what even Raama could not fully destroy!
(Page 2, panel 3)
The artist's task here is no less daunting than Thomas'. How does one depict an abstraction? Howard at least, was somewhat helpful with his description of the metaphorical tentacles of silence; therefore Wrightson gave his own interpretation of Silence an octopus-like appearance. As much as Howard, Wrightson was an heir of the Romantic spirit. All throughout the 19th century its two predominant strains, the gothic macabre and the chivalric ideal, were present in both the fine and graphic arts. At the dawn of the 20th century these twin elements entered American popular culture, where they eventually filtered into such comics as those of the EC line mentioned earlier, which in turn, became an influence on Wrightson's style. Thus, indirectly exposed to the larger movement, the artist brought this unique re-incorporation of the Romantic from EC to his work on "The Skull of Silence," capturing perfectly Howard's verbal description of the sublime:
The Silence enters Kull's soul, it claws at his heart,
it sends tentacles of steel into his brain. As it engulfs him,
he can see visions of the silence spreading out over the land blotting
out all sound, all life on earth, then reaching monstrously upward
until it crushes the very singing of the stars.
And then Kull knows fear!
(Page 5, panel 1)
Silence was one of several forms of Privation enumerated by Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry that also included Vacuity, Darkness and Solitude as particularly powerful sources of sublime terror. In "the Skull of Silence," Howard's instinctive genius is apparent in hisvcounterbalancing of Silence with the roar of the Sea, whose vast expanse and stormy furies are also a primal symbol of sublimity. Thomas' succinct adaptation captures this titanic clash with brilliant fidelity to the spirit of the original:
For the silence lives! It twists, it writhes in unholy wisps
and shadows…and it is destroying him. But now Kull sees the
Gong, with its changing, shifting color and his dizzy brain suddenly
reads the riddle Old Raama left as a safeguard for the race, even in
death. The Sea! The Gong is like the Sea, changing green
shades, now deep, now shallow, never silent. The Sea!
Vibrating, pulsing, booming day and night, the greatest Enemy
of the Silence! Reeling, Kull catches up the jade mallet…and
strikes the Gong! The first stroke is like a nail striking a
silver coin on the other side of the universe…but the Silence gives way!
Aye, at each blow it shrinks back, its tentacle shortened…and
still Kull strikes again, like some awesome living hammer…back and back
and back! Now the wisps hover in the doorway, now all the silence
is within the chamber again and now, No! The silence has geared
all its forces for one last assault! Kull reels, stunned,
blinded, cloaked by the whirling tendrils which encircle him…
(Page 5, panels 2-9)
In Part IX, Section 11 of his Enquiry, Burke comments on the psychological effects of repetitious sound for the creation of what he termed the artificial infinite. Howard used an analogous psychological device to bring his exploration of sublimity to a shattering conclusion:
We have observed, that a species of greatness arises from the
artificial infinite; and that this infinite consists in an uniform
succession of great parts: we observed too, that the same uniform
succession had a like power in sounds…When the ear receives any
simple sound, it is struck by single pulse of the air…If the stroke
be strong, the organ of hearing suffers a considerable degree of
tension. If the stroke be repeated pretty soon after, the
repetition causes an expectation of another stroke. And it
must be observed, that expectation itself causes a tension…But though
after a number of strokes, we expect still more, not being able to
ascertain the exact time of their arrival, when they arrive, they
produce a sort of surprise, which increases this tension yet further
…The tension of the part thus increasing at every blow, by the united
forces of the stroke itself, the expectation and the surprise, it is
worked up to such a pitch as to be capable of the sublime; it is
brought just to the verge of pain.
Finally, on pg. 6, of Creatures on the Loose #10, script and art combine in a seamless union of words and images to convey the awe-inspiring climax of Howard's tale, when the collective Voice of the Universe drowns out the wailing death rattle of the Silence itself:
The clangor of the Gong has died once more. Hells
of soundless cold and noiseless flame whirl about Kull. But
the Silence is somehow weaker now…and in its loathsome grasp is
one who neither grants nor asks for quarter…for, no longer is Kull
a mere barbarian, a' thirst for the nectar of battle. Now he
is a king, again striking for his nation, his world. He lifts
his deadened arm…Then a last blow! All the sound in the universe
rushes together in one roaring, yelling, shattering, engulfing burst of
sound. The Gong flies into a million vibrating fragments…and
Silence screams!
Epilogue: It would be an extreme disappointment when readers learned that the team that had produced such a mini-masterpiece as "The Skull of Silence" would not go on to the regular King Kull title which debuted only a few months after this issue. In fact, Wrightson would never again draw a story for Marvel and the Kull feature itself would endure a checkered on again, off again, career at the company going through many desperate artistic changes until petering out with Kull the Destroyer # 29.
(Fun facts: Awkward as her inking over penciler Herb Trimpe is on this issue's cover, Marie Severin would go on, in partnership with her brother, John, to become the regular artist of the later Kull strip, producing some of the most beautiful work of the 1970s; also, this issue is rounded out with a Kirby reprint from the company's pre-hero era called "Trull! The Unhuman!" which owed much to Theodore Sturgeon's classic SF story "Killdozer.") |
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