New collections featuring the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers and Doctor Strange remind us how these stories have become our new fairy tales.
Recognizing this, last year I read six sumptuous comics collections — three from Penguin Classics, three from the Folio Society — devoted, with some overlap, to four of the most beloved Marvel characters: Black Panther, Spider-Man, Captain America and the Hulk. I honestly hoped to recapture some of the excitement I would have felt about them at the age of 10.
These same two publishers have just issued similarly lavish volumes about other Marvel superheroes. Penguin focuses on the early years of the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Avengers; Folio gives us a broader, more deluxe survey of the career of Doctor Strange, master of the mystic arts. As before, these collections are mainly intended for general readers rather than confirmed fans.
While adults may quickly grow bored with this repetitiveness, kids love it: They’d feel shortchanged if the Thing didn’t exclaim, “It’s clobberin’ time!” On one level, then, these adventures seemingly work best for young and inexperienced readers. But for adults there are other ways to approach these comics than through their plots. As many critics have pointed out, Marvel superheroes quite obviously reflect or critique the attitudes and prejudices of postwar America.
These Silver Age superheroes initially appeared when psychoanalysis was all the rage, when most people worried more about being alienated than they did about aliens from space. Hence the insistence, now a tiresome cliché of the genre, on the self-doubts and anguished souls of their protagonists. Consider the Fantastic Four.
Still another way to approach these comics is to see them as attempts to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork. In this regard, one needs to start with the “Marvel Method,” which essentially allowed — compelled? — some pictorial artists to function as writers. Editor in chief Stan Lee would often give Jack Kirby the precis of a plot, then leave it to the artist to lay out each page, sketch the appropriate pictures, and even write the narration and dialogue.
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