Daredevil

Stan Lee, Wally Wood & others Daredevil (1965)
The constitution of Marvel's great innovation - that which stamped its mark firmly on the public consciousness back in the sixties - hadn't really occurred to me, nor perhaps been expressed so well, until I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels. It wasn't simply the timing of the superhero revival, breaking out during a significant lull in the popularity of Superman, Batman and others. It was the blending of superheroes with other popular forms of the day, the romance, monster, humour, and horror comics - or what horror comics had become in the wake of Wertham's purge. It seems so obvious now, and I have no idea why I hadn't already seen it. Of course, it isn't that Superman's adventures had failed to incorporate elements of romance, humour, or whatever, but the emphasis seems more pronounced in those post-Fantastic Four Marvel titles where no issue passes without the necessity of secret identities causing a testosterone implosion in someone's trunks, or yet another subterranean monster whose name ends with a vowel finds his way to the surface. That said, it seems a safe bet that the shocking dynamism of Kirby and Ditko should also be considered a factor, rendering the blend all the more dramatic by having it seem to almost leap off the page.

Unfortunately, they can't all be classics, and while Daredevil doubtless went on to great things, his first steps were pretty subdued when compared to those of the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men and so on. This is because Daredevil - or specifically the first eleven issues as collected here - feels very much as though, having blown everyone's mind with the Hulk and the rest rendered as a series of explosive, angular punch-ups bordering on Vorticism, the Bullpen may have been wondering if there was still any mileage left in the traditional formula, hence something which is approximately a cross between Spider-Man and Batman - neurosis, doomed romance and weird powers combined with metropolitan decay and otherwise conventional detective stories.

I guess there was some mileage, although most of 1964 and 1965 were spent messing with the formula and not quite getting it right. The art is decent, mostly great, and occasionally stunning, yet pedestrian compared to Kirby - descriptive rather than expressive; and the ideas are as wacky as you like, but suffer from the means of their communication which is excessively wordy even by Marvel standards of the time and leaves the reader wading through verbiage for relatively little reward given that most of the verbiage is describing what we can see with our own eyes.

The premise of Daredevil, namely that a man blinded by some vaguely radioactive material will develop his other senses to a superhuman degree, while no more unlikely than any other implausible Marvel origin, tends to appear more and more ludicrous the closer you look. So Daredevil's endless account of his own powers as he reads a newspaper by feeling the ink on the page or decides that it sounds like the woman who just came into the room is wearing a red coat serve to highlight the inherent absurdity of his abilities rather than leaving us awestruck, as I suspect was the intention. Additionally, the whole notion of the sightless compensated with amazing hearing or sense of smell seems a bit Ricky Gervais in 2022, but never mind.

More than its contemporaries, the early Daredevil feels a little like a throwback to strips of the previous decades, the era of bank heists and henchmen and criminal masterminds revealed to be unscrupulous city councilors; and the weirder details work against themselves, somehow serving to emphasise the conservatism of the title. That said, early Daredevil wasn't actually bad, and certainly had both charm and potential; although in 2022 is probably mainly interesting as an historical piece.

The Golden Age of Marvel Comics

Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon & others
The Golden Age of Marvel Comics (1997)
I'm still half-engaged in researching the history of Marvel for something I'm soon to be working on, which I probably shouldn't mention in case I get bored of the idea and it never happens; but thankfully it's a loose form of research allowing for general impressions picked up from a greatest hits collection such as this. I'm not sure I have the patience to hunt down expensive reprints incorporating everything right down to the adverts for sea monkeys. I'm not sure I would have the patience to read them, for that matter.

Marvel, as you probably know, began life as Timely Comics publishing its first title just a year after Superman first hit the news stands, so the myth of Marvel having been the lively young marmoset stealing the dinosaurs eggs derives mainly from their having changed the name so many times prior to Stan Lee - or possibly Jack Kirby - introducing acne and difficult homework assignments to the traditional superhero strip in 1961. This is what some of that stuff looked like before the characters took to agonising over teenage concerns.

It's probably fair to say that Lee's big idea - or possibly Kirby's big idea - at the beginning of the sixties was to shift emphasis from story to character, prior to which we had illustrated equivalents to the radio serials of the time wherein mostly hard boiled heroes identify bad guys before punching them squarely on the jaw, thus saving the day. The bad guys here were mostly boggle-eyed Nazis, shifting to boggle-eyed reds after the war, so it's fairly repetitive, trades mostly in clichés, and you can usually see the punchline forming before you've made it to the second page. About three quarters of the stories collected herein revolve around the theft of secret plans. Nevertheless, even within this fairly limited formula, there was a lot of invention, some truly screwy twists of imagination, and even at its most peculiar, the art is rarely less than arresting with panel after panel slapping the reader in the face with its relentless dynamic action. Later Marvel favourites such as Captain America, the Human Torch, the Vision, and the Sub-Mariner began here, and the latter is particularly interesting as he evolves from a triangular headed morally ambiguous enemy of mankind - more or less Tarzan underwater - to whatever he became in the sixties, which at least remained a far cry from the square-jawed guy who foils diamond heists to a daily schedule.

I'm not massively familiar with this era of comic book publishing, and for all their early promise, I guess Marvel were never quite so wild as - for one example with which I'm familiar - Planet Comics, and if there's some weird stuff here, there isn't anything which comes close to the like of Fletcher Hanks; yet there's a lot of charm, even if a little goes a long way, and I'd still rather look at this than Roy Lichenstein's version - or even Neil Gaiman cleverly subverting these tropes towards the usual ends.

Also, having read this lot, Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot now makes one fuck of a lot more sense.

Essential Defenders volume one

Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema & others

Essential Defenders volume one (1974)

My guess would be that someone at Marvel noticed all those extraneous superheroes they had laying around making the place look untidy and decided to hoover a few of them up into brand new superteams, just like the Avengers, so as to maximise something or other. Then a couple of years later they reprinted this one in black and white weekly instalments in a UK comic called Rampage. I'd recently experienced something of an epiphany for the form, having discovered 2000AD just a few months earlier. I'd always felt well disposed towards Marvel from afar, but there were too many titles and most of them had been going for yonks. Rampage therefore represented an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Each week featured half an issue of the Defenders plus reprints from the Nova comic book. It was pretty great as I recall, but went monthly after less than a year, changed format and lost me to the extent that I almost forgot all about it - which was weird. When John Byrne introduced Xemnu the Titan to his run on She-Hulk at the end of the eighties, I knew the guy looked sort of familiar but had no idea where I'd seen him.

So I picked this up partially as an experiment to see how much I could remember forgetting, if you see what I mean, and partially because I'm a middle aged man who is screened for colon cancer to a yearly schedule so it seems only natural that I should be purchasing seventies superhero comics aimed at twelve-year old boys.

Marketing aside, the premise of the Defenders was the assemblage of supertypes who otherwise tended to go it alone - Dr. Strange, Prince Namor, and the Hulk for starters, meaning a lot of what transpires is usually the other two trying to explain things to the big green thickie in hope that he'll thump someone. This big fat paving slab additionally kicks off with issues of solo comics which foreshadow events in the initial run of the Defenders, and it makes for a surprisingly satisfying and thematically consistent whole. Additionally, it's all quite revealing in terms of what made Marvel tick in the early days, or at least what made it so much more appealing than all those frowning boy scouts and hall monitors over at the distinguished competition. Marvel's roots, at least on the evidence of this lot, seem to lay with all those horror comics that Wertham had pulled from the shelves. Marvel's superheroes always seemed to have a bit more texture to me, and it seems because they're mostly Gods and monsters, misfits who could never have held down normal jobs as mild-mannered reporters; and thus do we open with a sixties issue of Dr. Strange which quotes H.P. Lovecraft and introduces the Nameless One, a two-headed extra-dimensional tosspot who seems very clearly descended from the weird fiction of the twenties and thirties. In fact, even once we fully ease into the era of men in tights, or at least the era of a percentage of those men present wearing the same, the Defenders remains satisfyingly odd and quite difficult to predict.

The art is mostly top shelf, and is particularly striking in black and white, and Ross Andru and Bill Everett's work on A Titan Walks Among Us! from Marvel Feature #3 is downright gorgeous even aside from being the place where I obviously first met Xemnu - and boy, some of those panels leapt right off the page to kiss me in the centre of the forehead.

Additionally we have the Avengers-Defenders war, which drags on a bit, but is probably significant in foreshadowing all those headachey multi-title and allegedly sense shattering crossovers of the eighties, Secret Crisis and all that; despite which, this thing is still very much to be recommended. I thought it would probably be at least an interesting curiosity, but it's fucking magnificent for the most part.