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.