The God of Thunder entertains questions from teenagers in the local malt shop (Lee/Kirby: The Mighty Thor #143, 1967).
t was the postage stamp that stopped an industry in its tracks.
In spring 1954, when the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency attempted to move to a speedy conclusion to its deliberations, it found itself blocked from enacting any legal restrictions that would regulate the comic book industry. Despite the outcries of various parents, church groups, and one psychiatrist in particular, the free market would be allowed to work its magic. However, the conclusion was clear: the comic book industry had to reform from within. Kefauver’s attitude toward the industry was the same as a mother asking her eleven-year-old son to clean up his room: do it, or else. Besides, it would be good for you.
The comic book publishers, never a group that had worked concertedly in their own mutual interests, realized that last point was inarguable: from a public relations standpoint—which really means a business standpoint—the industry had to clean up its act. It had tried once before, in 1948, when a subset of publishers came together as the Association of Comic Magazine Publishers and drafted a general six-item resolution, but the group soon fell apart. National and Fawcett already had in-house restrictions in place since the early 1940s which worked out very well for them. But there needed to be something formal, something that everyone could endorse.
Code president Charles Murphy promotes acceptable emendations, 1954.
In summer 1954, thirty-eight members of the comic book industry—publishers, printers, engravers—met in New York to form the Comics Magazine Association of America. They would hire an independent “czar” to oversee the final publications, a former judge named Charles Murphy; they would give him a budget to hire a staff; and they would draft a code of standards. Every important publisher signed on, except for William Gaines, who took his E.C. Comics football and went home, and, surprisingly, Dell Comics, whose wholesome “funny animals” line was actually the industry’s indisputable giant. Dell, who felt they did a perfectly fine job of policing Woody Woodpecker on their own, thank you very much, apparently didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept the other members as a member.
An educational pamphlet from the Comics Code Authority, 1954.
MAD #1, 1952: the only E.C. comic book to survive the Code—by ignoring it.
Five days before Halloween 1954, the CMAA published its code. In tone and breadth, it took its inspiration from the Motion Picture Production Code, which had been in place since 1930, but not seriously enforced until 1934. There was an initial section that encompassed what the movies’ Code referred to as “compensating moral values”: i.e., criminal or antisocial behavior would be punished and the social fabric (usually authoritarian) would be upheld. Specific to comic books, the CMAA forbade the use of “Crime,” “Horror,” or “Terror” in a magazine title, and presented restrictions against gruesome depredations, slang and obscenity, and sexual deviancy, while upholding respect for religion, racial groups, and the sanctity of marriage. It also required advertising in the comic books to be in “good taste.”
Judge Murphy’s policy was for all the publishers to submit their initial artwork—“boards,” as the roughly 2′ × 3″ white cardboard pieces were called—for review. Changes and alterations would be requested by the authority, if necessary, and despite the dilatory and frustrating nature of the request, publishers were forced to comply. Once the correction was made, the comic book cover would bear a stamp affixed to its upper right-hand corner: “Approved by the COMICS CODE AUTHORITY.” No business-minded publisher would dream of sending his product out on the stands without the stamp of approval, so a good deal of silliness and busy-work was endured. Stan Lee was submitting a host of science-fiction comics, romance books, and Western titles on behalf of Atlas Comics:
We got one page back in a Western book that showed a close-up of a hand shooting a gun, the cowboy was shooting a gun, and there was a puff of smoke coming out of the barrel of the gun, and a straight line indicating the trajectory of the bullet. That’s it: the gun, the puff of smoke, the straight line. And that panel was rejected. I had to phone the Code office, and I said, “What’s wrong with that panel?” And I will never to my dying day forget the answer. “The puff of smoke was too big, that made it violent.” So we redrew it. I mean, it just shows how ridiculous this whole thing could be.
Writer Denny O’Neil dealt with the absurdities of the Code into the early 1970s. He was particularly baffled by the way the CMAA split hairs in the realm of the supernatural; writers couldn’t use the word “zombie,” but they could use the word “ghoul.” In other words, O’Neil speculated, you couldn’t have the walking dead eating people’s brains, but once they sat down, it was okay.
The Comics Code was, to say the least, an imperfect document—largely because it was a reactive document, not an organic way of creating an ameliorating standard. In fact, if the given task were simply to draft legislation that would put E.C.’s horror line out of business, it succeeded admirably. (Gaines eventually threw in the towel, put all his chips on a little satirical rag called MAD magazine, influenced generations of anarchic souls, and became a millionaire in the process.) It also was pretty late in the game for any media industry to begin policing its standards, as times were changing quickly. Within a decade of the Comics Code’s inception, the Motion Picture Production Code would start to unravel, besieged by an inexorable wave of shifting social forces. The Comics Code seemed to be the last remnant of the McCarthy era, and it did more to slow down the production process, and to encumber business sales and the creative imagination, than it did to uplift and inspire an industry.
Comedian Jackie Gleason and the stalwart radio show star Mr. District Attorney kept DC (National) going in the late 1950s.
It was a tough time to be weathering the comic book market in any event. In 1955, a federal anti-trust suit demolished American News Company, the distributor that serviced 50 percent of the industry, which left publishers scrambling to find anything that would attract new readers. The previously successful crime and horror comics were no longer an option, so publishers, according to Carmine Infantino, “started putting out adventure comics, westerns, romance, science fiction and whatever they could try. And everything was flopping, one thing after another.” National Periodicals started adding titles devoted to comedians and television stars, such as Jerry Lewis and Jackie Gleason. Their most daring adventurer was called Mr. District Attorney. Artist Neal Adams recalled going to their offices as a young artist right out of high school to show off his portfolio:
A nice older guy came out to the lobby and he briefly flipped through it. And he said, “Look, kid, I can’t take you in there. Confidentially, in a year or two there’s not going to be comics. We’re phasing them out.” This—at DC Comics.
Showcase #17 gave spaceman Adam Strange his debut (1958), courtesy of artist Gil Kane.
TOP LEFT: Artist Carmine Infantino (left) and editor Jules Schwartz (right) led the DC (National) team of retrofitted superheroes. BOTTOM LEFT, AND RIGHT: Almost superheroes: the debuts of the Manhunter from Mars (Detective Comics #225, 1955) and the Phantom Stranger (1952).
eyond their trinity of heavy-hitters—Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman ‘one might say that National Periodicals’ attitude toward superheroes in the mid 1950s was akin to the attitude that business executives have when they murmur “Let’s have lunch” to each other: I’ll call you if I need you.
There had been a few half-hearted heroes under the “DC” logo, but they were hybrids with other genres: mystery (The Phantom Stranger), space rangers (Captain Comet, Adam Strange), even a man from Mars, who suited up in a blue cape and matching underwear for some terrestrial detective work (J’onn J’onzz, Manhunter from Mars). National staff artist Carmine Infantino had been a company regular since the mid 1940s; he had long given up his original assignments such as the first incarnation of the Flash in the 1940s—“a guy with a tin hat, running like crazy,” in his words—and was contenting himself with executing National’s stable of space rangers. Infantino was as surprised as anyone when he received a call from editor Julie Schwartz in spring 1956.
He says, “Come in, I want to talk to you.” I said, “Fine.” He says, “We’re going to do superheroes again.” I said, “That’s nice, good for you.” He says, “We want to do the Flash.” I said, “That’s nice,” again. He says, “You’re doing it. Go get us a character, draw a character for us.”
Working with writer Robert Kanigher, Infantino reconceived the Flash for the mid 1950s, effectively “re-booting” a character for the first time in comics. Gone was the tin hat, replaced with a zippy red suit emblazoned with yellow lightning bolts that emerged improbably from the hero’s signet ring. The revised concept brought out the best in Infantino’s work: the whole get-up was designed for maximum aerodynamics; the new Flash (a police scientist named Barry Allen who is caught in an accident between a lightning bolt and some unknown chemicals) was lithe, like a track star, and Infantino often drew him banking to one side, the better to gain momentum. The Flash was bristling with animation; even the panel arrangements on the page were built for speed. Flash’s Central City was all sleek, modernist architecture; everything was streamlined for fast, modernist adventure. If Frank Lloyd Wright had ever designed a comic book, it would look like Infantino’s Flash series.
Barry Allen gets the shock of his life (Infantino panels from the origin story).
A cinematic debut for the fastest man alive: Showcase #4 (1956).
National released the Flash tepidly, as the October 1956 cover feature of their magazine that showcased new strips called, appropriately, Showcase. “The Fastest Man Alive” would appear there three more times over the next two and a half years before he got his own title magazine in 1959 (National executives apparently weren’t as swift as their hero). But, as Julie Schwartz intuited, the time was right again for superheroes, and the Flash led the pack by several lengths. He was the perfect character for his times. His adventures had a rare puckish sense of humor; he had the niftiest “Rogues Gallery” since Batman in the early 1940s; and he mirrored the speed-freak mentality of the late 1950s. American car companies were retooling European sports cars for mass commercial production—Chevrolet brought out the Corvette in 1954 and Ford would compete with the Thunderbird in 1955. If land speed records weren’t tantalizing enough, the space race had begun the year before the Flash’s debut, when both the United States and the Soviet Union announced their intentions to put an unmanned satellite in orbit. It was a good time to be a superhero who mirrored every kid’s gym-class fantasy.
The success of the Flash among young readers encouraged National to launch another crew of superheroes into orbit as well. Green Lantern, one of the previous Flash’s wartime comrades, was reconceived with space-aged flair, thanks to the acrobatic elegance of artist Gil Kane, in the October 1959 issue of Showcase. The Lantern was now part of a vast, universe-wide police force, overseen by a bunch of interstellar (and cranky) blue-skinned guardians. As the 1960s began, editor Julie Schwartz put all of his extant A-listers, new and old, into a reconstitution of the Justice Society of America, now called the Justice League of America, as “league” had a preferable intramural resonance for Schwartz. Hawkman was taken out of mothballs for the March 1961 anthology The Brave and the Bold and, in October of that year, the Atom—who in the 1940s was simply a pee-wee-sized athlete—reemerged as a microscopic crime fighter. A Plastic Man knock-off named the Elongated Man bounced back and forth in various titles.
Green Lantern got his own comic quickly (Green Lantern #4, 1961), art by Gil Kane. Hawkman, lovingly rendered by Joe Kubert, had to wing it in the pages of The Brave and the Bold (1961).
Eventually, as National’s new stable of champions was amassing an invigorated fan base, some readers wondered what happened to their favorite heroes from the 1940s. Schwartz obliged their curiosity in Flash #123 (in fall 1961), when he commissioned writer Gardner Fox to team the new Flash together with the old Flash who was, apparently, still fighting crime on Earth-Two (although, technically, as he was the antecedent, the older Flash should be fighting crime on Earth-One—but no one had quite pondered the consequences of his reappearance). The crossover classic—“The Flash of Two Worlds”—threw open the barnyard door for a multitude of “alternative universe” adventures, the magnitude of which would be felt for years to come.
National deserves a good deal of credit for taking some undervalued assets and dusting them off in an imaginative way. Almost all of the revived heroes benefitted from the space age and from changing times. Green Lantern’s adventures had a yearning, visionary, science-fiction element to them; Hawkman (along with his high-flying wife, Hawkgirl) was now a policeman from a faraway planet; the Atom derived his new molecular metabolism via a thorough study of astrophysics. They all brought their new technologies as a symbol of heroic enlightenment to the readers of DC Comics; for these new heroes, scientific breakthroughs ennobled mankind to save itself and move forward (indeed, in the Atom’s origin story, he contrives a way to shrink down in order to save a bunch of kids lost on a camping trip in an underground cavern).
Fans and comic book historians would consecrate this era as the dawn of the “Silver Age of Comics.” Looking back on this visionary time, which coincided almost identically with the nomination, election, and inauguration of John F. Kennedy, it seemed more like the New Frontier.
TOP: The first crossover in the comic book universe: “The Flash of Two Worlds” (The Flash #123, 1961).
BOTTOM: John F. Kennedy places the space program at the forefront of the New Frontier (1961).
Spider-Man carries the burden of a new generation of comic book superstars.
f science and technology provided the visionary goalposts for the superheroes at National Periodicals, over at what would be called the Marvel Universe, science was the metaphor for the anxiety of the age, providing only transformation, terror, ambivalence, guilt, and, ultimately, responsibility.
Marvel’s editor and chief scribe, Stan Lee, would be loath to consider himself the progenitor of a worldview, but, when one co-creates a dozen new characters and titles within thirty months, there are—much like developing a gamma radiation bomb—a certain amount of unintended consequences. Toward the end of 1961, once it appeared that the Lee-Kirby title The Fantastic Four was going to be a hit, Lee would turn to his publisher Martin Goodman time after time, asking him to allow yet another superhero title onto Marvel’s corseted repertory of titles. Adding a new character or title meant cancelling another—it was like a game of musical chairs—and it taxed Lee’s creative imagination as editor; he often would sneak superhero characters into mystery or science fiction titles to see if, like the Human Torch, they would catch fire. At the same time, Lee was editing and/or writing the entire Marvel lineup, which continued to include Westerns, teen humor books, romance titles, and the occasional monster anthology.
Stan Lee banged out the outlines, vivified by Jack Kirby. A Kirby rendering of a fantastical team-up with him and Stan (What If?, 1978).
Perhaps this was why, as some commentators have pointed out, Lee seemed to hedge his bets by adding characters that were more grotesque than exemplary. “Stan’s attitude,” according to comic book writer Len Wein, “was just in case readers don’t like the superhero, look, here’s a monster in this book, they might want to buy it for that. Let’s try it, what the heck’s going to happen? Worse of it is, we’ll be doing Westerns again next week.” That made the next Lee-Kirby creation a logical extension of the monster books: the Incredible Hulk. Debuting in his own title at the beginning of 1962, the Hulk emerged out of perhaps the most potent and resonant stew of ideas in the Marvel canon. Nuclear physicist Bruce Banner is employed by the government to develop a “gamma bomb”—another collage of military ambitions, experimentation, and radiation. Lee tapped into the contemporary anxiety over nuclear destruction: “I am the least scientific person you’ll ever know,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t know a gamma ray if I saw it, but if it sounds good, I’ll use it.” And use it he did: when Banner saves a teenager who strays onto the gamma-bomb testing field, he absorbs the gamma rays’ unknown poisonous potential himself. When the sun sets, Banner transforms into a glowering, brutish monster with the strength of a score of ordinary humans. “Human? Why should I want to be human?” this hulking brute questions a fleeing soldier, not unreasonably.
The Hulk was admittedly a mixture of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde dialectic, along with a heavy dose of misunderstood monstrosity care of the Frankenstein creature. (For a while, there was a little of the Wolf Man mixed in as well, as Dr. Banner only transformed into the Hulk when the sun went down.) Jack Kirby’s yeoman’s service drawing Marvel’s various monster books over the previous few years came in good stead. His Hulk had the Frankenstein monster’s beetle-brow, but was far more expressive—there was something even balletic in the way the Hulk wielded his densely packed muscles, leaping over several counties in a single bound. (Apparently Kirby and Lee wanted the Hulk’s skin rendered as a dull grey flesh, but—felicitously—the printer couldn’t accomplish that with any consistency, so he was soon rendered in an appropriately alienating chartreuse.)
The Hulk (in his original grey form) comes face-to-grimace with “puny humans”: The Incredible Hulk #1 (1962).
In his initial appearance, the Hulk is captured by a deformed Soviet agent named the Gargoyle and transported to a lab in Moscow for observation (portraits of a lugubrious Khrushchev loomed over the corridors). Eventually, Banner helps the Gargoyle regain a vestige of humanity, but no such luck for the scientist himself, who is sent back to the United States via a remote-controlled jet plane, only to be persecuted as the Hulk for another half century. And “perhaps the beginning of the end of Red tyranny, too!” suggests the last caption, dogmatically, if hopefully.
The Hulk is the official outlier in the Marvel Universe. Indeed, he was even the first real failure of the new cadre of superheroes, as his own magazine was cancelled after a half-dozen issues. He was destined to bound across different titles (the Hulk bounded like no one else in comics), fight every other hero in the lineup, and then bound away, misapprehended and shunned—the most powerful being in the world, yet incapable of making the simplest human connection. As the Hulk himself grew increasingly inarticulate and incapable of parsing a simple sentence (“Hulk smash!”), the dilemma of his alter ego, Bruce Banner, grew more existential; one of humanity’s most useful scientists, Banner was now an exile and a pariah, unable to manage the raging beast inside him.
The next hero to emerge from the fecund factory at Marvel was a pariah to begin with. Lee conferred unsought heroism onto a character not unlike many of his readers: a bespectacled teenager who was shunned by the popular kids in high school. “I really hate teenage sidekicks,” claimed Lee, “but I thought it would be fun to get a character who’s a teenager who isn’t a sidekick, but a real hero himself. That would be a first!” The actual origins of Spider-Man are shrouded in a web of conflicting stories. Apparently, Joe Simon had developed a spider-themed character with Jack Kirby in the 1950s, but it came to nothing. When Stan Lee was looking for new characters to add to the Marvel roster, he either shopped ideas back and forth with Kirby and this one emerged, or he came up with an arachnid-oriented hero on his own. At any rate, Lee brought a much more unique version of the spider character to his publisher, Martin Goodman, and, according to Lee, “He said to me, ‘That’s the worst idea I ever heard. Stan, first of all, people hate spiders. You can’t call a book Spider-Man. Nobody’ll buy it.’ ”
Lee had developed his first two characters in close collaboration with Kirby, but there was something about Kirby’s steroidal powerhouse creations that seemed ill-suited to the Spider-Man alter-ego, a nerdy high-schooler from Forest Hills, Queens. Instead, Lee turned to another artist in the overworked Marvel bullpen, Steve Ditko. Ditko had been working as a cartoonist since the early 1950s, apprenticing first with Jerry Robinson, then Simon and Kirby. He had done some horror comics for Charlton Comics, an economy-minded firm based in Connecticut, and developed a few superheroes for them. Marvel (then Atlas) beckoned to Ditko in the late 1950s and he created some very effectively paranoiac suspense tales with Stan Lee for various anthologies.
Lee pitched the Spider-Man idea to Ditko and the artist created the costume and the various gizmos used by Peter Parker—the teenager who would become, in yet another freak accident of nuclear science, endowed with “the proportionate strength of a radioactive spider.” Ditko proved to be the right man for the job, making Spider-Man appear both creepy and appealing, dully realistic and amazingly fantastical. Kirby’s fantasy world was visionary and futuristic—his scientific gizmos looked as if they wouldn’t be invented for decades—but Ditko toiled in a crepuscular, almost grimy world of late-Depression-era melancholy. His scientific gizmos, for example, looked like vacuum cleaners from the 1940s and most of his characters—heroes or villains—had the rumpled affect of an unmade bed. Still, Lee opted for a Kirby-rendered cover when Spider-Man made his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15 in June 1962, a sort of end-run around Goodman, as the title was about to be cancelled.
While Lee and Ditko were awaiting readers’ reactions to Spider-Man’s eleven-page origin story, which was tucked among other science fiction stories in the anthology, two more superheroes debuted under Lee’s aegis that same month: the Mighty Thor (or “Thor, the Mighty,” depending on which panel you were reading) debuted in Journey into Mystery #83 and the lead character in a previous horror tale was repurposed as Marvel’s first microscopic hero—the Astonishing Ant-Man, who defeated villains aided by a battery of ants under his radio control, in Tales to Astonish. While helping to create the characters and plot their initial adventures, Lee jobbed out scripting chores for both characters to his younger brother, Larry Lieber. The next month, the teenaged Human Torch would break out from his home franchise, The Fantastic Four, and get his own solo showcase in Strange Tales #101.
TOP: A rare photo of artist Steve Ditko, circa 1959.
BOTTOM: Ah, to be a fly on the wall! From Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 (1964).
At the conclusion of the insanely productive year of 1962, Lee introduced yet another character in initial collaboration with Kirby, Iron Man, appearing in the anthology Tales of Suspense #39. Although there had been mechanically oriented superheroes in the 1940s, Iron Man represented a particularly original approach. Not only was his automated armor equipped with modern transistors, his alter ego and origin were very much part of an early 1960s ethos. Iron Man was, in reality, Tony Stark, a self-made billionaire and technological genius. He was the logical extension of the “wealthy young men about town” who had inhabited popular fiction for decades, but Lee had based Stark on the more solipsistic Howard Hughes, even giving him a moustache—always suspect in the superhero universe.
But Stark was also under a government contract to “solve [your] problems in Vietnam,” as he explained to some military brass. While developing a weapon that would wipe out the “red guerrillas” in jungles of Southeast Asia, Stark was captured by a Vietcong leader and forced to create a weapon for his troops; instead, he secretly developed his mechanized armor, foiled their plans, and returned to the States to run his multibillion-dollar empire. (This origin story has close parallels to Lee’s 1940s hero, the Destroyer, who began life as an experiment in a concentration camp.) Appearing only months after the American government committed to aid South Vietnamese forces by conducting combat raids, Iron Man’s origin played on the resonance with contemporary headlines that had eluded superhero comics since the end of World War II. Tony Stark’s conflicted relationship with his own industrialist enterprises would also make Iron Man one of the few truly ambiguously heroic characters of the time.
The one-shot appearance that spun a new industry: Amazing Fantasy #1 (1962).
TOP: Tales of Suspense #39 featured the metal-morphosis of Iron Man (1962, art by Don Heck).
BOTTOM: Howard Hughes was the conscious role model for billionaire Tony Stark.
Stan Lee kept moving forward in 1963, scripting the hallucinatory peregrinations of Steve Ditko’s shadowy magus Dr. Strange in Strange Tales in April and, three months later, putting Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, and Ant Man and his paramour, the Wasp, into an uncomfortably comprised team called the Avengers. Unlike the Justice League of America, who always seemed impeccably civil, the Avengers fought over their own membership, their own mission—even over Robert’s Rules of Order—during their meetings. The Avengers would go on to become one of Marvel’s most elastic and surprising titles. Also in July, Kirby and Lee collaborated on a team of young superheroes, each mutated at birth in a different way to manifest an extraordinary superpower. They were originally to be called the Mutants, but, ostensibly, publisher Goodman got squeamish about the name and so Lee redubbed them the X-Men. Thus, from their very beginning, there was something suspect and off-putting about the group; one felt sympathy for their leader, a middle-aged mentor named Professor Xavier, who knew intuitively how different—and vulnerable—his charges would be. According to Lee, “he was afraid that people would fear the X-Men if they knew about their power. So he kept them hidden in what seemed to be a school for gifted youngsters, but nobody knew how gifted they were.”
In February 1964, Lee released his final major new superhero, an acrobatic crimefighter named Daredevil, the “Man Without Fear.” Blinded by an errant canister of radioactive material (even on the streets of Manhattan, the Marvel characters weren’t safe from nuclear anxiety), the young Matt Murdock developed a compensating acuteness among his other senses, including his own personal radar. Initially illustrated by Bill Everett, who created the Sub-Mariner in 1939, Daredevil took a while to find his own style and his own audience. Still, he held up the rear as the tenth signature superhero title created at Marvel Comics in less than three years—an even more amazing feat when one considers that Lee and Goodman were still juggling Western gunslingers, fashion models, and howling army commandos at the same time.
LEFT: Journey into Mystery gave the Asgardian god, Thor, an earthly home (1962). RIGHT: Ant Man’s costumed debut in the Tales to Astonish anthology (1962).
Creating characters is one kind of skill, but creating a mythos is another ball game entirely. By accident, design, or both, Lee created a personality and style for Marvel Comics that was larger than the whole of its disparate, dysfunctional, dynamically powered parts. The first was what came to be called the “Marvel Method.” Partly because he was overextended with sixteen separate storylines, partly because he trusted his artists, Lee typically didn’t type up an entire script, with panel-by-panel descriptions (the way it was usually done), but would present a premise or outline to his artist—Kirby, Ditko, Don Heck, Wally Wood, etc.—and then tighten up the story and render dialogue when the artist returned the penciled layouts. He described his m.o. with Jack Kirby:
See, in the beginning, I would just give Jack the plot, but I didn’t tell him how to draw. Jack would take an idea and … he would often add many thoughts and ideas and concepts that hadn’t even occurred to me.… We were such a good team because we fed off each other. I gave him ideas, he gave me ideas—I was able to run as far as the dialogue and captions were concerned with the ideas he gave me.
Kirby, in particular, enticed readers to dive headfirst into the Marvel Universe. In addition to creating the look for most of the line’s superheroes and villains, he could also be called upon to render an eye-catching cover, especially for an all-important debut issue. Already the most explosive—and prolific—artist in comics, the “Marvel Method” freed up Kirby to take even larger creative chances. Artist Neal Adams describes Kirby’s evolution at Marvel: “I don’t even know how to describe it except to say that he was fearless. You could say, ‘Draw a universe’ and he would.” Writer Len Wein concurred, “Jack was a machine who had infinite capacity to create ideas, one after the other, in any genre you ever wanted them. There was no genre where he wasn’t capable of coming up with something that topped everybody else in the room.”
Eternity showing his powers to Dr. Strange (Strange Tales #138, art by Steve Ditko).
But if Kirby’s action-packed frescoes and Steve Ditko’s detailed narratives got readers to part with their twelve cents per issue, it was Lee’s dialogue and characterization that sealed the deal and instilled brand loyalty. First, he simply looked at comic book characters differently:
When I was young, my favorite superhero was Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes was just a superior human being. So, to me, he was as super as any superhero. We tried to make our characters realistic at Marvel, even though they had superpowers. Now we’re talking about fantasy stories, but I tried to say, “If such characters existed, how would they act in the real world,” and that’s where we tried to inject a little bit of reality.… I had always felt that if I had a superpower (which is not to say that I don’t), I wouldn’t immediately put on a mask and a costume.… And, also, I wouldn’t go around looking for bad guys to fight: I’d be thinking, “How can I make some money on this? Maybe I can get a guest shot on Jay Leno’s show? I wonder what they’d pay me?”
In other hands, such sentiments might make a superhero a figure of derision or mockery, but Lee gave his heroes a kind of mortal dignity. Whether they still lived at home with their aunts (or even their ants); or bickered with each other; or couldn’t pay the rent; or even questioned their very avocation as superheroes, the Marvel characters had the courage of their restrictions. DC Comics artist Ramona Fradon summed up the difference between Marvel and what Lee called the “Distinguished Competition”:
You would never think of having Superman be neurotic or have doubts or anything like that. That was true of all the DC characters. [To me,] it was like Greek drama: there was Aeschylus, where the gods were in their heavens, unquestioned, and then Euripides came along and decided to analyze them and bring them down to a human level. Maybe it was time—you can’t have those characters running around forever without beginning to wonder what they did in their off-hours.
TOP: Bill Everett was the first artist to render the Man Without Fear (Daredevil #1, 1964); Everett departed the feature five issues later—the yellow costume quickly followed suit. BOTTOM: The Hulk never played well with others: from Avengers #2 (1963).
Lee demystified his characters’ environment as well; rather than creating fictitious towns to live in—Metropolis or Gotham City—all the Marvel characters lived in New York City. This made it easier for crossover adventures, which certainly couldn’t have hurt sales, but it also gave the Marvel Universe literal common ground with its characters, its creators, and its audience. It also, not coincidentally, made continuity easier.
It also didn’t hurt that Lee reached to a higher shelf when writing dialogue or constructing characters: “Well, I would like to think that we wrote our stories as if the readers were a little older and a maybe little smarter than our competition.” One Daredevil villain would be called Mr. Hyde; another, the Jester, had formerly been an actor famous as Cyrano de Bergerac; most of Thor’s Asgardian colleagues were borrowed either from Alexandre Dumas or William Shakespeare, who, for better or worse, had always inspired Lee to create farragoes of bombastically elevated dialogue. And, intentionally or not, the Marvel Universe contained a hierarchy of paternal, avuncular, or pedagogical authority figures. Some were inspirational, such as the benevolent Ancient One, who mentored Dr. Strange in the mystic arts, or Professor Xavier; some were nefarious, such as General “Thunderbolt” Ross, who was always using his military command to flatten the Hulk into a big green pancake, or Magneto, who was constantly trying to enroll errant mutants into his Evil Brotherhood. Young readers, who had to contend with such authority figures in their real lives, were drawn into the character-building exercise of choosing right from wrong.
Still, the Marvel Universe was hardly a series of pompous bildungsromans: Lee’s dialogue bristled with a sense of humor, often taking the piss out of the very idea of comic book superheroes. For example, when the helmet-clad Magneto marches onto an army base in X-Men #1, fully intent on eradicating it to smithereens, the sentry guard shouts at him, “Hold it, mac! If you’re looking for a masquerade party, you’ve come to the wrong place! Beat it!” Meaningful interior monologue was a rarity in comic books, but Lee upped the ante there, too. “I used thought balloons heavily, because a thought balloon could show the reader what the character was thinking of as well as what the character was saying, and you get to know the character better that way.” Lee even extended his approach to readers as an editor, speaking to them from his “soapbox” as if the company and the consumer belonged to the same club—and after a while, they did.
ABOVE: Kirby’s universe unleashed on Manhattan (Fantastic Four #50, 1966). BELOW: The X-Men’s high-flying Angel (1965).
The Ultimate Marvel Superhero interior monologue: Peter Parker comtemplates his existential destiny in The Amazing Spider-Man #50, art by John Romita.
I could come up with slogans, like “Make Mine Marvel,” “Marvel Marches On” and a membership club, “The Merry Marvel Marching Society,” things like that. You could give a mood and a feeling to the company. I really tried to treat everything like a big ad campaign. I wanted the readers to feel they’re part of this exciting little world that we have.
Carmine Infantino, eventually Lee’s opposite number at National, gave him credit for redirecting the dynamic: “Stan made it very personal. He was marvelous at that. He was buddy-buddy and we were not that way. At DC, we were: ‘We talk, you listen.’ That was the difference.”
The difference between DC and Marvel was also one of professional priorities. DC had maintained an unbroken corporate structure since the 1930s, with all the privilege and decorum that conveys; Marvel was a renegade company, which had almost disappeared down the sinkhole a few years earlier. DC’s workforce numbered in the dozens: artists, writers, editors, and administrative assistants who were expected to show up for work in suits and skinny black ties. By contrast, the entire Marvel staff could have fit into an elevator with room to spare. According to comic book writer and historian Mark Waid, “because Marvel didn’t have to answer to corporate shareholders, the buck stopped at Stan. It’s whatever he wanted to do that day, that’s what got published.” In contemporary parlance, it was the Mad Men culture vs. the beatnik culture. “Whenever Stan was writing, he would always have Peter Parker call coffee ‘java,’ ” recounted artist/writer Walt Simonson. “I think ‘java’ was out of date forty years earlier, but it sounded like something college kids drank.”
Indeed, Marvel’s first line of attack was the college campus. Not only was there the occasional Spider-Man story about campus unrest (in between sips of java), but baby-boomer college students were embracing the fractured, flawed superheroes of the Marvel Universe as comrades of their own. In September 1966, Esquire magazine published an unprecedented story about Marvel Comics, tellingly, in its “Back to College” issue. Jack Kirby created an original full-color illustration of ten of Marvel’s major superheroes, and various college students spoke of their allegiance to the company and its characters. One Southern Illinois University student was quoted: “My favorite is the Hulk. I identify with him. He is the outcast against the Institution.” Stan Lee himself brought his outcasts into the Institution, delivering lectures for college campus organizations across the country, including at Princeton’s tony Debating Society.
FROM TOP: Two authority figures: one enraged (General “Thunderbolt” Ross, The Incredible Hulk #1) and one enlightened (the Ancient One, Strange Tales #115); the Merry Marvel Marching Society reached out to fans (and their parents’ pocketbooks)—theme song included.
As the sixties moved forward, Marvel Comics provided DC Comics the first real competition that they’d had since the days, ironically, of Captain Marvel. Artist Jim Steranko suggested that the success of Marvel came about because, “Stan, of course, is a consummate pro and he surrounded himself with other veteran artists who really couldn’t draw a bad panel if they wanted to.” But perhaps the most revolutionary concept initiated by Stan Lee and Co. could be contained in a small all-caps squib at the bottom of various splash pages and advertisements: “FROM THE MARVEL HOUSE OF IDEAS!”
Ideas? In a comic book? As Ben Grimm, the transformed Thing, used to say, “Who’da thunk it?”
LEFT: The blockbuster John Romita cover showed college-age readers which hero swung to their side (1969). RIGHT: A house ad for Marvel from Fantastic Four #14 (1965).
A Ditko spectacular (The Amazing Spider-Man #8).
Like costumed heroes? Confidentially, we in the comic mag business refer to them as “long underwear characters”! And, as you know, they’re a dime a dozen. But we think you may find our Spider-Man just a bit … different.
Normally, a blurb like that, which appeared at the top of the first Spider-Man story in Amazing Fantasy #15, would be dismissed as typical Stan Lee hyperbole. But, if anything, Lee uncharacteristically undersold his product: Spider-Man was more than a bit different. And that difference would go a long way toward creating the most popular comic book superhero of the second part of the 20th century.
First, Lee took the teenaged sidekick and turned him, appropriately for a spider, upside down. Batman’s Robin had been cavorting about as a jocular teenager for two decades, but his highly contrived circumstances had always annoyed Lee. “Real teenagers have problems,” he said. “In those days especially, it was hell being a teenager. [This teenager] never had enough money, he wasn’t the most popular kid in school, he didn’t always do well with girls.… I wanted Peter Parker—Spider-Man’to have a lot of problems. His life isn’t that easy.”
Seminal moments from Amazing Fantasy #15.
The bespectacled bookworm, Parker resembled, for all the world, a junior varsity version of the hapless Clark Kent, but with one major difference: “Clark Kent was a disguise,” writer Len Wein puts it concisely, “Peter Parker was a fact.” Teenaged Parker wasn’t entirely a hopeless loser—he had a proficiency for science, which would come in very handy. “Transported to another world—the fascinating world of atomic science!,” Parker attends a science exhibit on “radio-activity,” where he is accidentally bitten by an atomically enhanced spider. Soon, he discovers he has the ability to scale buildings, balance on a thread, contort himself gymnastically through the air, and exercise “the proportionate strength of a spider”—one of Lee’s pet, and admittedly inane, phrases.
But, true to the new Marvel ethos, Parker initially decides not to right wrongs, but to pocket some much-needed cash. Apparently orphaned (a complicated situation resolved decades later), Parker lives with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May in a “neat frame two-story house.” Their strapped financial situation is spotlighted when Uncle Ben scrapes his pennies together to buy Peter a new microscope. Parker uses his scientific talent to fashion a pair of web-shooters that dispense a miraculous web-like substance; then, he dons a red-and-blue spider-emblazoned costume, and he’s off to the races.
Lee even has his lead character become a sensation on the actual Ed Sullivan Show, where the newly minted Spiderman (he would lose and gain his hyphen several times over his initial appearances) racks up not only a fistful of dollars, but an uncharacteristic sense of arrogance. Refusing to help the police apprehend a passing thief, he blithely lets the criminal slip by. Days later, as Peter Parker, he discovers that his beloved Uncle Ben has been shot dead by a burglar. Swinging into action as Spider-Man, he tracks down the burglar—only to discover that the burglar was the same thief that he brushed off earlier. Young Parker’s sense of guilt is overwhelming, but he transmutes it into something more virtuous and more useful: responsibility. In one of the most memorable phrases in comic book history, the story concludes, “A lean, silent figure slowly fades in to the gathering darkness, aware at last, that in this world, with great power, there must also come great responsibility.”
FROM TOP: Peter Parker’s alter ego always stood between him and happiness (The Amazing Spider-Man #30, art by Ditko); Spider-Man confronts his uncle’s killer: a shock so severe, it produces a rare shot of pupils in our hero’s eyes; the first Marvel hero to break out of an anthology and achieve his own magazine (1963).
Peter Parker’s personal loss was the most resonant since Bruce Wayne’s; Stan Lee had effectively combined Batman’s tragic history with Robin’s youth and Superman’s alter ego.
Intended as a one-off, Spider-Man enflamed young readers’ enthusiasms almost immediately. By the beginning of 1963, he was given his own bi-monthly book, The Amazing Spider-Man; by the summer, it went monthly. Spider-Man appealed on a variety of levels. Steve Ditko had given the character a variety of cool gizmos, including web-shooters and a spider-beam (eventually discarded), but beyond the tried-and-true appeal of a red-and-blue suit was the mask that covered Parker’s entire face. While this may have limited Spider-Man’s expressivity, it allowed generations of kids of all types and races to project themselves inside his suit, which no doubt extended his popularity. Besides, the acrobatic gyrations that Ditko conceived for Spider-Man were far more expressive than the faces rendered by most artists.
Peter Parker’s personality was unique in comic books at the time; an inveterate wisecracker, he frequently compared his ghoulish adversaries invidiously to movie characters, rock ’n’ roll stars, or contemporary politicians. Tweaking various civics lessons, he often referred to himself as “your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” and Lee frequently called him “Spidey” (“I could never imagine calling Superman ‘Supesy,’ ” Lee once said). Along with the Thing from the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man was the first meta-superhero, aware of the basic absurdity of his situation. When Dr. Octopus threatened to “end [Spider-Man’s] career for good,” our hero responded, “Yeah, some career! No vacations, no pension plan! Not even a salary! Go ahead and end it … who cares!!?” Parker was even denied the basic fantasy outlet of every other teenaged kid: “Boy! When I used to read comic mag adventures of super heroes, I always dreamed about how GREAT it would be if I could become one! It’s great, alright—for everyone except Spider-Man! Aw, NUTS!”
Spider-Man’s villains were a colorful lot, gnomish and cranky, frequently deformed (a veteran scientist who lost his right arm in World War II tries to grow it back and instead is transformed into the gnarly Lizard) and often intricately woven into his personal life. For example, the Green Goblin, who was slow to emerge as his arch-nemesis, would be revealed as the father of Peter Parker’s best friend and would ultimately deal the web-slinger his most painful emotional blow. In another storyline, the eight-limbed “Doc Ock” almost married Parker’s widowed Aunt May.
Spider-Man becomes a celebrity, even without a hypen (Amazing Fantasy #15).
Yet, although Ditko rendered Spider-Man’s encounters with his adversaries in epic proportions, sometimes it seemed as if the colorful villains were the least of his problems—and therein lay a great deal of the series’ charm. Parker was always being bullied at school by the arrogant jock Flash Thompson’the irony being that Flash Thompson was Spider-Man’s most fervent enthusiast. The irony extended into Parker’s workplace; using his unique access to Spider-Man to take brilliant snapshots of his escapades, Parker sold his photos to the Daily Bugle. (Imagine if Clark Kent and Peter Parker had been assigned to work the same story!) The publisher and editor of the tabloid newspaper was a xenophobic blowhard named J. Jonah Jameson who, for complicated reasons (jealousy, family tragedy, dyspepsia, you name it), took on Spider-Man as his life-long animus. Jameson was dedicated to smearing Spider-Man at every turn, in every headline and editorial; his megalomaniacal rants began to resemble Donald Trump’s incoherent screeds. It didn’t matter: the more “J.J.J.” turned up the heat, the more readers loved it; the fact that Peter Parker was financially dependent on his publisher’s tightfisted payroll made the irony all the more delicious.
If that didn’t make Parker’s life complicated enough, there were the girls. Initially spurned by the “chicks” at Midtown High, Peter Parker eventually became an assured ladies’ man (his alternate career must have boosted his confidence). He dated his school’s most comely blonde, his boss’s secretary, his aunt’s best friend’s niece—almost always screwing up his love life because some deadly adversary had clambered into town and required his attention instead. Clark Kent and Lois Lane were, for decades, trapped in the same immovable triangle, but Peter Parker’s romantic peregrinations were sometimes more involving than his knock-down, drag-out fights. It’s worth remembering that while Stan Lee was writing The Amazing Spider-Man (which he did for nearly 100 issues), he was still writing teen comics and romance comics (Millie the Model, et al.) for the Marvel line; his skill at creating soap opera for those titles came in handy. Author Michael Chabon sees Peter Parker’s emotional life as the essential truth of the character:
FROM TOP: Publisher J. Jonah Jameson was, in many ways, Spider-Man’s ultimate foe; his attacks on the webslinger even complicated Spidey’s love life (with Betty Brant). Another classic Romita cover—the ultimate identity crisis (The Amazing Spider-Man #50).
He’s a boy. He’s a real teenager. He’s self-doubting. And there’s a poignancy in that idea that you could have all these powers, these great powers, but you know what doesn’t come with great power? A love life. You’re still a hopeless case; even if you have the ability to swing from skyscrapers over the streets of New York, it’s not going to help you get a date on Friday night.
Even with these problems—because of these problems—Spider-Man was the most evolving character of his time. He was in a constant state of flux; he was, as it were, always spinning. He was unable to get his checks cashed, because he didn’t have any I.D. beyond his costume; he would come down with the flu and get his clock cleaned by Doc Ock; he would suspect that he was schizophrenic and attempt to see a psychiatrist—only to realize he would be putting his secret identity at risk. As the years went on, Peter Parker would grow up, attend college, date more interesting women (sometimes simultaneously), lose one of them tragically, settle down with another, and move toward maturity, even stability, to varying degrees of success.
But, more than anything, Spider-Man had a painful duality to his very existence, an ambivalence that resonated mightily in a decade that challenged the very assumptions of heroic authority:
I can never forget that I’M partially to blame for Uncle Ben’s death! And the fact that I’m the only one who knows it doesn’t make it any easier to live with! And now, no matter what I do … no matter how great my spider powers are, I can never undo that tragic mistake! I can never completely forgive myself! Sometimes, I hate my Spider-Man powers! Sometimes I wish I were just like any normal teen-ager!
The ultimate genius of Spider-Man was that there were millions of so-called “normal teen-agers” who saw in the web-slinger an avatar of their own problems and conflicts—and they loved him as much for his screw-ups as Peter Parker as for his triumphs as their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (1963).
ne wouldn’t necessarily expect the vanguard of the avant-garde to announce its presence in the store windows of a high-toned women’s clothing store on Fifth Avenue, but in spring 1961, there it was.
Andy Warhol had moved to New York City in 1949 to pursue a career in graphic design, while spending his free time developing his own projects, most often using the silk-screen reproduction process. By 1960, he was pursuing studio art full-time. His first public commission came from Bonwit Teller, a prestigious New York women’s department store. He was asked to “do” their windows; for the up-and-coming Warhol, this was a huge break.
He exhibited five silk-screened canvases: three were based on comic strip characters: the Little King, Popeye, and Superman (taken from an actual 1959 Superman comic panel by Kurt Schaffenberger). There was nothing particularly pointed about Warhol’s choice of comic strip characters—growing up as a sickly child in Pittsburgh, his mother frequently read to him from comics of Popeye, Dick Tracy, and Superman. In fact, much of his work from 1960 to 1961 revolved around a number of comics characters: there were several Dick Tracy canvases and another that replicated the Batman logo of the 1940s. “We all read a bunch of comic books, and it just happened to come out then [in the early 1960s],” he said in an interview. “Because comic books make things appear the way they are really today. I mean, you pick up a newspaper and it’s just like a comic book of eight years ago. There’s so much action.” By literally blowing up the images of his childhood heroes, Warhol was blowing up the New York art world while transforming into the High Priest of an international style known as Pop art.
The Bonwit Teller window display that made Andy Warhol’s career, thanks in no small part to Superman (1961).
As a movement, Pop art had its roots in Great Britain during the 1950s. After years of deprivation following World War II, a group of artists embraced art that was mass-produced, ephemeral, available to all, and eye-catching: popular, or even imagery that “popped.” As the 1960s began, a similar movement was coalescing in New York. Warhol’s genius was to memorialize those commercialized images by freezing them in time and expanding them vastly beyond their original use.
TOP: Batman silkscreen by Warhol, using the character’s 1950s logo (1960). BOTTOM: Justice League of America nemesis Dr. Light (art by Mike Sekowsky, 1962) gets his moment in the spotlight, via Lichtenstein’s Mad Scientist (1962).
While Warhol was installing his canvases at Bonwit Teller, another artist was memorializing the popular image along a parallel track. Roy Lichtenstein, a World War II vet, also turned to images from the past; in his case, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Look Mickey (1961) was his breakout canvas, and although Lichtenstein was originally stymied that Warhol had beaten him to the punch, as it were, with a Popeye canvas, Lichtenstein’s own version of Popeye socking it to Bluto enhanced his reputation as the other great apostle of Pop art.
Warhol would quickly move on to reproducing consumer goods such as Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo pads, but Lichtenstein delved further and further into the world of comic strips and comic books. In the first half of the 1960s, he repurposed more than 100 comic book panels into enormous canvases, usually sketching the panel by hand, projecting it onto a canvas, and then altering it by hand, repainting it in bold outlines and primary colors (often rendering the unique Ben Day dots used by printers). Critics have pointed out the irony of Lichtenstein taking a mechanically produced comic book, re-drawing it by hand, projecting it mechanically, then painting the final image.
Andy Warhol and sidekick Nico pose as Batman and Robin.
Lichtenstein availed himself of the genres of comic books popular in the early 1960s, most famously romance comics and war comics. He used superhero comics panels most specifically twice; the first, Image Duplicator (1963), was based on a Jack Kirby illustration of Magneto from X-Men #1; the second, Mad Scientist (1963), used a panel from a Justice League of America comic. One should also contend with Whaam! (1963), which was taken from a war comic, but did more to memorialize a comic book sound effect than anything before it.
Lichtenstein was promiscuous in his use of previously published comic books—rather than craft an original panel, he borrowed images from artists as prestigious as Kirby, Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, John Romita, and Mike Sekowsky. The fact that Lichtenstein would take a comics panel for which an artist was paid a fraction of, say, $15 a page, repurpose and recomposite it, then sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars a canvas, was an inequity that did not go unnoticed. It didn’t help Lichtenstein’s reputation among comic book artists and fans that he was quoted as saying, “The comics really haven’t anything I would call art connected with it. They are really using a craft ability almost entirely and artistic sense only slightly. There’s composition connected with comic strips, but in a very superficial way.”
For the Pop artists of the 1960s, the comic book conformed immediately to their purposes: they were mass-produced, they were resonant with nostalgia, they were already graphically appealing, they were pleasurable and popular. Pop art may have obliterated the narrative form of comic books by reproducing only one panel at a time, but it elevated the vocabulary of comic book art into fine art, or, at very least a vibrant discussion about what constituted high art and low art.
For the comic books themselves (if not for the repurposed artists), the emergence of Pop art was a cultural windfall. Less than a decade after the Senate Subcommittee debacle, comic book art was being talked (and argued) about in the most erudite art journals and newspaper columns. It would have been foolish for comic books not to ride the crest of this public relations bonanza. For a while, Marvel Comics even rebranded their comics as “POP ART PRODUCTIONS”—whatever that meant—on their covers.
Inevitably, Pop art would be appropriated by the very genre it borrowed from initially. It would take a few visionary artists—Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, to name two—to reverse the polarity of Pop art’s electricity. They didn’t create million-dollar canvases, but no comic book fan worth his or her salt would ever dream of parting with their works of art—even at twelve cents a pop.
Comic books’ favorite patriot rallies the country once again in the pages of The Avengers #4 (1964).
he term “retcon” has a military feel to it—like something Captain America might have done in some adventure:
“Cap and Bucky retconned the impenetrable fortress of the fiendish Red Skull!” “Retcon” actually refers to “retroactive continuity”—a term that bubbled up at a comic book convention in the early 1980s, referring to the need to go back into the past to alter a narrative for the present. It’s only fitting that Captain America was the first retconned character of the 1960s.
Among his buddies from the Timely days of the 1940s, Cap’s erstwhile partners the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner had already appeared on the new Marvel scene, but the Torch was a completely reinvented character, reconstituted as teenager Johnny Storm. The Sub-Mariner, for his part, hadn’t really changed at all, swimming along in his usual antisocial manner. Captain America was the only major character left unexamined as the fateful fall of 1963 beckoned.
Out-of-town tryout: Lee and Kirby float a revival of Captain America in the pages of the Human Torch omnibus Strange Tales #114 (1963).
On August 28, 1963, as Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed the throngs gathered at the Mall in Washington DC, and by extension John F. Kennedy, who was listening at the White House, Strange Tales #114 hit the streets, with a cover story of young Johnny Storm fighting—“out of the Golden Age of Comics!”—Captain America. It was the first time that Jack Kirby had drawn his star-spangled creation in almost two decades. By the time the tale had concluded, readers were disappointed to learn that it wasn’t Cap at all, but an impostor villain called the Acrobat. Still, Stan Lee, who had initiated and written the story, had used the Acrobat as a stalking horse—would readers be interested in seeing the real Cap back in print? The answer was a resounding “yes.”
But before Captain America could be launched in a new form, the vibrant young president who had become the new icon of America was assassinated in Dallas that November. At the Marvel Comics offices on Madison Avenue, all work stopped as the staff listened to the sad news on the radio. Within weeks, Stan Lee would begin to re-create Captain America for a nation in mourning, a nation that had lost a symbol of aspiration and youth, devoid of cynicism. If there were any doubts about the power of resurrection, they were dispelled in early 1964 on the cover of Avengers #4, which proudly displayed: “Captain America Lives Again!” And there, rocketing toward the reader, was Captain America as only Jack Kirby could render him, a powerhouse of patriotic passion.
The mighty Marvel Comics Group is proud to announce that Jack Kirby drew the original Captain America during the Golden Age of Comics … and now he draws it again! Also, Stan Lee’s first script during those fabled days was Captain America—and now he authors it again! Thus, the chronicle of comicdom turns full circle, reaching a new pinnacle of greatness!
TOP: A brilliant Kirby juxtaposition of past, present—and future—from The Avengers #4. BOTTOM: A socko Captain America splash page from 1941, reimagined by Jack Kirby a quarter-century later in Tales of Suspense #65.
After that ennobling epigraph, the story spun into action: the Avengers, hot in pursuit of the Sub-Mariner up near the Arctic Circle, discover the submerged figure of a man, floating in the sea, encrusted in ice. When Giant-Man pulls the man inside their ship, they notice that his shield and mask could only belong to one person: Captain America. When he awakes, Cap thinks the Avengers are Nazi agents, but is eventually subdued and recounts his story: the last thing he remembers is fighting in World War II, side-by-side with his comrade, Bucky. Against Cap’s wishes, Bucky decides to defuse a bomber as a last-ditch effort and is, effectively, blown to smithereens. Captain America falls into the sea, where he drifts to the Arctic, and is frozen in a state of suspended animation. Completely disoriented after his retrieval by the Avengers, he lashes out at them, but by the issue’s conclusion, he accepts them as worthy comrades and joins the team, eventually becoming their leader, off-and-on, for the next five decades. The new narrative allowed Lee to redact the awkward Captain America adventures from the mid-1950s, when he—d grappled unconvincingly with Communists.
For Lee and Kirby, Cap’s resurrection was fraught with both possibilities and obstacles. Kirby would, indeed, get the chance to tackle his creation again, this time with the formidable storytelling skills he had refined over two decades; imagine Michelangelo, who sculpted his David while still in his twenties, getting the chance to return to the same subject after having completed the Sistine Chapel—a wiser, sadder man. Lee—who conveniently airbrushed Joe Simon out of the narrative—would also be returning to a character whom he could now imbue with irony and tragic dimension. The post-1964 appearances of Captain America, in both The Avengers and his own exploits published simultaneously in Tales of Suspense, focused on spectacular adventure, to be sure, but usually had some scene where an older cop, moved by the sight of his childhood hero, brushes away a tear, or where some World War II army vet—now in his forties—trades combat stories with the seemingly immortal Captain America. For two World War II army veterans—recall that Kirby and Lee had to go into suspended animation from working on Captain America in the mid-1940s so they could fight the war—it must have been a gratifying way of recounting old war stories; Kirby, in particular, had some combat exploits he must have been eager to exorcise.
Captain America had fans—both in the comic books and in real life—that stretched across several generations (Tales of Suspense #79, 1966).
Cap himself was not so lucky. Tortured by the guilt of letting Bucky die in his stead, he moaned over his partner’s demise to a point that was almost unseemly; he was sometimes in danger of becoming more like Dickens’s Miss Havisham than a fearless champion of democracy. He took on another partner, a teenager named Rick Jones, who was usually pestering the Hulk instead, and groomed him to replace Bucky. Occasionally, Lee and Kirby took a break from the modern-day hand-wringing and returned to some actual Captain America and Bucky tales from 1940, rewriting and redrawing them with greatly improved graphics and dimension; they seemed to revel in a return to the less politically ambiguous days of the battle against Hitler.
But the revived Captain America’s narrative potency came from his contemporary adventures. As comics historian Danny Fingeroth puts it, “Everybody else that Steve Rogers had known and loved is either dead or a quarter-century older. He survived an era and survived a war where his peers didn’t. There’s some traumatized thing that I think Captain America hooked into and Lee and Kirby were astute enough to understand that and really let it play out.” Steve Rogers was, like his namesake Buck Rogers many decades before, a man literally out of his own time—always good for a compelling tale—but he was also the symbol of America, so what did that mean?
Just as the country would attempt to regain its footing after Kennedy’s death, so, too, did Captain America try to regain his footing after his own rebirth. Within the next decade, he would confront his own obsolescence and his country’s at the same time. In one of Stan Lee’s favorite lines, he had Marvel’s greatest iconic character ponder his situation in a 1970 comic: “I’ve spent a lifetime defending the flag—and the law! Perhaps I should have battled less—and questioned more!”
As the 1970s dawned, and the Viet Nam War raged a world away, Captain America suffered an existential crisis. Story by Stan Lee, art by Gene Colan (Captain America #122, 1970).
FROM LEFT: Writer/artist Jim Steranko at a 1971 comic book convention; Steranko availed himself of advertising art techniques circa 1968 with Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #4.
Jim Steranko burst on the scene in the mid 1960s. After a few false starts at other companies, he came to Marvel in 1966, where he was put on one of their worst-selling books, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Because there was little to lose, Steranko threw himself at the James Bond knock-off with, well, unshielded fury, bringing dozens of new innovations to the comic book page. His career at Marvel was brief—only three years—but unforgettable. Graphics historian Arlen Schumer puts it this way:
Many people consider Jim Steranko the Jimi Hendrix of comic book art in the late 1960s, because just like Hendrix he came on like a comet, an overnight sensation. And just like Hendrix left in 1970, Steranko pretty much leaves comics for good in 1970, but creates a body of work that its influence and impact is in inverse proportion to the actual quantity of comics he turned out.
Steranko himself: “Our competition was superheroes who could fly, who could knock down walls, who had colorful costumes, really great. Here’s a guy, Nick Fury, all he had was a cigar butt and an eye-patch, for god’s sake. How do you compete? Well, I used all of these things. I used modern music. I used modern design. I used psychedelic art. I brought surrealism into the mix. I brought expressionism. I brought Pop art, Optical art. I used everything I could to update comics and bring them into today. S.H.I.E.L.D. was very forgiving and it allowed me to do that very easily.
“I did this three-page silent sequence. And it began with Nick Fury penetrating an enemy fortress. It’s a monolithic structure of stone. And he was climbing up, climbing up, using some special tools, broke into the fortress, got down and then the next two pages played out in a little scene where he gets killed at the end. But it was all done silently. And when I say silently, I mean there wasn’t even a thought balloon. There wasn’t even a caption. There were no words anywhere. Three pages of silence for the first time in comics. I took it in and showed it to Stan and he went, ‘Oh my god.’ I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Don’t you know what you did here?’ I said, ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ He said, ‘Distributors and bookstores are going to think that this is misprinted, that we forgot the balloons and the captions.’ I thought, ‘Oh, come off it.’ He was probably right about that in a certain way.
The page and four panels from the opening silent sequence of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 (1968).
“I thought I was bringing a new concept, something really different to the House of Ideas, but I was getting rejected at the same time. So I took the pages in to production where Sol Brodsky held court. And Sol looked over the story, which I think was a twenty-pager. And he said, ‘I can’t pay you for writing these first three pages, there’s nothing here, so I can only pay you for seventeen.’ Now look, the pages were written—it’s all done visually. The writing is there. But when he said he couldn’t pay me for it, I hit the roof. We were on the eighth floor, I grabbed this guy by his shirt and I said, ‘I’m going to throw you out this window if you don’t pay me for those three pages. I swear to God you’re going to be out on Madison Avenue in a moment.’
“Well, in his infinite wisdom he decided to pay me for the three pages and we were cool about it. And those three pages, by the way, were imitated subsequently over and over again in the history of comics. So I kind of felt justified in creating that sequence.”
Roy Lichtenstein was brought in by the editors of TV Guide to memorialize the Batman phenomenon for the 3/26/1966 cover.
LEFT: Kids across America found Utility Belts and other Bat-paraphernalia under the Christmas tree, starting in 1967. RIGHT: Another death trap for Batman: the cover of Detective Comics #329 celebrates his “new look.”
n his nine-decade history, Batman could always be relied upon to use his bat-ingenuity to get himself out of an infinite number of death traps; his most remarkable escape gimmick would turn out to be a twelve-inch color TV screen.
Although Marvel Comics was publishing exciting exhumations of 1940s characters in the early 1960s, the Distinguished Competition was having a tough time keeping the second of their two major characters commercially viable; according to DC artist Carmine Infantino, Batman’s titles were selling about 20 percent each month. The Caped Crusader had lost his way, completely unmoored from his original intention. Batman and Robin’that most unique of comic book duos—had become generic superheroes, plopped down in any situation: science fiction, monster movies, comedy. The only mystery left in Batman was why National even bothered to keep him in print.
Infantino recounts that he and writer John Broome were called into editor Julie Schwartz’s office in 1963, as Schwartz brandished a couple of poorly selling Batman issues at him: “You two have six months to bring him back or he’s dead, finished.” Schwartz suggested that the team bring Batman back to his detective roots, jazz up the covers, maybe even jazz up Batman. Infantino was the right man on the National staff for the job, adding a yellow bull’s-eye around Batman’s forlorn bat-insignia and creating covers that intrigued and tantalized readers, beginning with Detective Comics #327 in May 1964. Sales picked up, but whether or not these cosmetic changes (called the “New Look”) alone would have restored Batman to his anointed spot on the comic-book Olympus is a question rendered moot by a series of decisions made a continent away in Hollywood.
Television demographics were shifting in the mid-1960s; more families had color television sets and executives were looking for programs that might bridge the divide between kiddie shows and grown-up shows, moving toward what would eventually be called “family shows.” Programs with bizarre and fantastical characters began to litter the primetime broadcast landscape—My Favorite Martian, The Addams Family, The Munsters were all appealing to youngsters—but there hadn’t been a comic book hero on the air since Adventures of Superman called it a day in 1958. (Two years later, George Reeves was infamously found shot in his bedroom under still-mysterious circumstances; perhaps his tragic end cast a long shadow over enthusiasm to revive a superhero for television.)
ABC executives thought that comic strip crime-buster Dick Tracy might make a suitable addition to the primetime line-up, but, outbid in a preemptive strike by NBC, they reached a bit further down into the pile and came up with Batman. There’s a bit of murkiness about how the idea of the Batman character came to the attention of the programming directors at ABC—rumor had it that Hugh Hefner had been running the old 1940s Batman serials for laughs over at the Playboy Mansion—but nonetheless, by early 1965, ABC had jobbed out the series to 20th Century Fox to produce a pilot. Veteran producer William Dozier was tasked with developing the character for television and flew to New York to meet with the ABC top brass. Dozier apparently took the meeting on faith, knowing nothing about Batman or comic books; he grabbed a handful of Batman comics to read on the transcontinental flight, burying the covers deep in his attaché case, so as not to be mocked by his fellow first-class passengers.
Dozier thought he was in over his head, until it occurred to him that “the idea was to overdo it. If you overdid it, I thought it would be funny to adults and yet it would be stimulating to kids. But you had to appeal on both levels, or you didn’t have a chance.” Dozier hired Lorenzo Semple, Jr., to draft the pilot episode; Semple delivered, with a story highlighting a minor comic-book adversary called the Riddler. The story equally balanced comedy and adventure, making Batman into an incontrovertibly stolid pillar of civic virtue (i.e., a “square”) devoted to maintaining law and order in the vaguely unhinged, swinging ’60s. Dozier set his staff and crew to re-creating the Batman universe for color television from the ground of the Batcave up; costumes, sets, props, and a working Batmobile would be designed with unprecedented imaginative freedom. Even the music for the show, scored and arranged by Nelson Riddle, Frank Sinatra’s favorite arranger, was hip, jazzy, and unexpected.
Finding the face behind the cowl would be a challenge. The television Batman had to be suitably heroic, yet have a comic touch—and much of the time, the actor’s face would be obscured by an inflexible, silk-covered mask. Luckily, actor Adam West got the joke right off. A reliable player in various adventure and detective series and films, West was about to leave the country to make a spaghetti Western, when he was called in to read for Dozier. West doubled over with laughter reading Semple’s script and, supposedly, that was all the producer needed to know: West was signed to play Bruce Wayne. Youthful ward Dick Grayson proved harder to find, but, at the last minute, an inexperienced actor with some karate training named Burton Gervis walked onto the Fox lot. He fit the bill admirably, and soon Burt Ward, as he would now be known, completed the Dynamic Duo. West reveled in the challenge of creating TV’s first superhero of the 1960s: “In the comic books, Batman was lighthearted and he cracked wise from time to time. Now all I had to do was expand on that. But I wanted to let people watching know that anyone pretty much could become Batman, or become someone admirable, by doing good in the world. And that’s kind of the way I played it for the kids.”
The pilot episode was filmed in October 1965, and spotlighted the impressionist and actor Frank Gorshin in a career-making performance as the Riddler (his contorted paroxysms in the part would earn him an Emmy nomination). ABC executives made the inventive decision to split the hour-long show in two parts every week, providing a cliffhanger for audiences, and began screening the pilot episode to focus groups. Although Batman tested so poorly that the marketing department was convinced that the reaction monitors were broken, ABC and Dozier kept the faith and ordered sixteen weeks of the two-part weekly program for a January 1966 debut, smack in the middle of the traditional television season. Everything on the program—from its eccentric camera angles, to its saturated color palette, to its melodramatic voiceovers, to the Pop-art title cards that punctuated each knock-down-drag-out fight with “POW!” and “ZONK!,” to the ranks of under-employed character actors from the 1940s and 1950s who were knocking over themselves to show up on the program costumed as freakish supervillains—everything had been conceived with originality and underwritten with a generous budget to create a vibrant video equivalent of a comic book. Besides, as the “third network,” usually consigned to the ratings basement, ABC had nothing to lose but its conventionality.
CLOCKWISE, FROM RIGHT: Adam West and Burt Ward became national heroes as the Dynamic Duo, twice a week on prime time. The Batman phenomenon overtakes the comics themselves: a Pirandellian cover from Batman #183 (January 1967), and a promotional ad.
Adam West on a recycled Gotham City on the backlot of Desilu Studios, 1966; Frank Gorshin’s archvillain, the Riddler, was consciously modeled on screen heavy Richard Widmark.
Batman debuted on Wednesday, January 12, 1966, with the first half of the Riddler pilot episode broadcast at 7:30pm—a perfect time slot to capture both youngsters and their parents. Overnight, it became, quite simply, one of the great pop-culture phenomena of the 1960s. As Adam West says, “It was the Beatles, Bond, and Batman.” By the time Batman had broadcast its first 34 adventures in late spring 1966, the Thursday night episodes were ranked #5 in the Nielsen ratings and the Wednesday night episodes were #10; no show had ever had two weekly episodes in the Top Ten. “Bat-mania” gripped the nation and, in March 1966, Batman (in the guise of Adam West) became the first superhero to grace the cover of Life magazine. Even the Batman comic books, perilously close to extinction only two years earlier, were now selling in the millions.
Batman also hit the marketplace in a manner that far outpaced even Superman at his height: it was an unprecedented Bat-bazaar. Part of this was the nature of the show itself. “We were everywhere and on twice a week in color,” says West. “It was different. Anywhere you looked on the set, there was a bat-prop that I could use or a set dressing or something. We had props up the wazoo. So immediately, the merchandizing departments got into the act.” Marketing expert Ed Catto reflects that the show was “a game-changer that brainwashed an entire generation of kids, myself included. It had this crazy vibe that no one had seen before. Batman has so many tools and toys and gadgets and friends and villains—and all those things are just ripe for licensing. So, by Christmas of 1967, all these little boys got Batmobiles under the Christmas tree and Batman figures and Bat capes and Batarangs.”
The television series succeeded beyond ABC’s wildest dreams of unifying a children’s audience and an adult audience: it was the first time in media history that all generations could sit around the living room and enjoy a superhero saga. For kids, the derring-do appeal was obvious; for adults, Batman offered a window into some of the more complicated cultural conflicts of the 1960s. Pop art made several appearances, including one where the Clock King (a criminal actually borrowed from a Green Arrow comic) masquerades as Progress Pigment—“the true apostle of Pop art!”—in an episode written by none other than Bill Finger, Batman’s co-creator. Batman’s comic book origins were confined to one throwaway line in the first episode, where Bruce Wayne refers to the “dastardly criminals who murdered my parents,” but the character became an effective spokesman for civic virtues and Victorian respectability in an anxious time. Batman championed the use of safety belts, studying your homework, a refreshing glass of milk, and following the straight and narrow. The Batman series could pivot on a dime into satirical commentary. In one episode, the nefarious Penguin decides to run for mayor, so that he can pilfer the Gotham City Treasury. When the Caped Crusader tosses his cowl into the ring against the Penguin, he decides to run “a nice, clean campaign, without vaudeville tricks—after all, Robin, the public is interested in the issues.” Of course, it turns out to be the dullest political campaign in Gotham City history.
Life magazine devoted unprecedented attention to a superhero, March 1966.
Not everyone was thrilled with Batman’s transition into a stuffy, caped prism of contemporary sensibilities. Denny O’Neil, who would go on to create groundbreaking comic book scenarios for Batman in the 1970s said:
The Batman TV show was pretty much a one-line joke: “I loved this stuff when I was six years old and now—that I am twenty-seven, and I have a closet full of Nehru jackets, and a twice-weekly appointment with a therapist and a little tiny drug habit—look how silly it is.” In New York, you would go to the most literary bar in the city, the White Horse Inn, on one of the two days that they had the Batman shows on, and the cream of Village intelligentsia—at least the ones who liked to go to bars—were looking at that show behind the bar.
However, as the villain Bookworm might have quoted Shakespeare, “So do quick bright things come to confusion.” The highly anticipated second season of Batman debuted in fall 1966 with even more overacted and underbaked villains, poorer scripts, and strained sensibilities; none of its episodes landed in the Top Twenty. For the third season, the budgets were slashed and the episodes scaled back to once a week; but even the addition of the sassy Batgirl failed to provide enough engines to power or turbines to speed. One-hundred-and-twenty episodes later, Bat-Time had officially come to an end.
West, who has reveled in his iconic presence for six decades now, is philosophical: “I think of our Batman as ‘The Bright Knight.’ The kids loved it and we were funny for the adults. And that was our intention. If you play it that way, the show stays fresh and always kind of spinning around out there in its own little world, and people get into it once they get past three or four years of age.” Or, as Commissioner Gordon put it, five minutes into the first Batman episode, speaking for television executives, comic book executives, and eleven-year-old boys alike: “I don’t know who he is behind that mask of his, but we need him—and we need him now.”
CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT: Mighty Mouse was the first animated spoof of the superhero game (1945). MAD magazine had been spoofing Batman since 1953, both the comic book (below) and the TV show (1966—although they got Robin’s underwear wrong), as well as the Shadow (MAD #4).
When William Gaines stomped away from the proceedings of the Comics Code Authority in 1954, turning his back on the successful publishers of superhero comic books, he was no doubt plotting his revenge. The revered saying, “living well is the best revenge,” might have been revised by Gaines as, “laughing well is the best revenge.”
The one successful comic book that Gaines had left in his portfolio was an anarchic four-color parody magazine called MAD. MAD would eventually gain a storied reputation for satirizing just about every aspect of American culture worth mocking (which is to say, most of American culture) as a black-and-white magazine beyond the reach of the Code in 1955. But the early, crazy issues of the MAD comic book displayed a particular animus toward its colleagues in the funny pages and comic books.
Superheroes had been rather gently but rarely satirized since they arrived on the scene; there might be some jokes at, say, Superman’s expense on the Fred Allen radio show. Actual parody came in 1942 with the cartoon shorts featuring Mighty Mouse, who originally began as Super Mouse (even before that, the Terrytoons studio thought of creating a super-powered housefly called—wait for it—Super Fly), but it might be fair to say that, in the 1940s and 1950s, superheroes weren’t taken seriously enough to satirize.
The “usual gang of idiots” at MAD changed all that. In the fourth issue (1953), MAD took on both the Shadow and Superman, who was exquisitely rethought as “Superduperman!.” Harvey Kurtzman, who wrote the spoof, and Wally Wood (a tremendous artist who would render beautiful work on “serious” superhero comics in the 1960s) tapped right into the essential improbabilities of the hero, from Lois Lane derogating Clark Kent as a “creep” to Superduperman’s fight to the finish with “Captain Marbles,” a rival superhero with a dollar sign on his chest and possessed of a magic word—“Shazoom”—in which the “M” stood for “Money.” Four issues later, the same team tackled the Caped Crusaders as a pint-sized “Bat Boy” and his gangly sidekick, “Rubin,” chasing down a suspected vampire criminal. The final panel revealed that it was Bat Boy all along who possessed the real fangs—and knew how to use them. “Woman, Wonder!” (in MAD #10) undermined the basic premise of Wonder Woman—her boyfriend, Steve Trevor, had no intention of her being more powerful than he (and he was particularly pleased to catch a glimpse of Woman Wonder changing into her costume inside her invisible plane). The MAD parodies were not only clever, they were perceptive—they knew how to get inside the characters’ basic absurdities in order to turn them inside-out.
When Batman debuted on national television in 1966, MAD weighed in almost immediately with “Bats-Man,” in which “Sparrow, the Boy Wonderful” disguises himself as a villain in order to knock off Bats-Man, so he can finally hang up his cape and date girls and sniff airplane glue like all the other teenagers in Gotham City. That issue (#183) was billed as the “Special Summer ‘Camp’ Issue,” referring to a cultural phenomenon that had excited literary circles two years before the television show premiered.
Susan Sontag had published her influential essay “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” in the Partisan Review in 1964, attempting to give coherence to a disparate set of aesthetic sensibilities that she identified in fifty-eight separate markers. Although Sontag only mentioned comic books once, in a passing note about “old Flash Gordon comics,” her comments about science fiction films could be equally well applied to superheroes:
The reason … books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Camp in … numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy—and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.
Although it was hard to know when the term was being applied accurately or not, “camp” became a convenient label among critics, and the television version of Batman appeared to be a poster child for a sensibility that, in Sontag’s definition, “incarnates a victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality, of irony over tragedy.” Apparently, there was no sillier occupation than being a superhero; but since superheroes took it all so seriously, the whole enterprise couldn’t possibly be serious—it must be silly. Defining something as “camp” was also a way for folks with heightened sensibilities to enjoy superheroes or comic books without having to admit they actually enjoyed them.
CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT: Broadway actor William Daniels turned goofy in primetime in Captain Nice (1967). MAD artist Don Martin came up with the amiable adventures of Captain Klutz. Not Brand Echh was Marvel’s parody omnibus; in issue #2 (1967), it provided fans with an early, if irreverent, crossover.
Whether they were technically camp or simply exhaustingly derivative, there was a wave of satirical superheroes after Batman appeared. Exactly a year after Batman's debut, network television immediately came up with two witless parodies, Captain Nice (NBC) and Mr. Terrific (CBS), which premiered on the same night—and were also cancelled on the same night, five months later. (ABC decided to play it straight by hiring William Dozier to produce The Green Hornet; it, too, was a flop but it was effective crime drama.) Underdog and Atom Ant had preceded Batman on Saturday morning television, but soon other animated spoofs—Batfink, Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossibles, Super Chicken—joined the kiddie line-up. Comic book publishers—no fools, they—saw the commercial possibilities in biting the fans that fed them. Marvel put out a parody anthology devoted to superheroes called Not Brand Echh (referring to DC), with their own mascot, Forbush-Man; DC countered with The Inferior Five, a hapless quartet who were the grown-up children of parody versions of the DC pantheon. There were also dozens of funny superhero comics from lesser publishers.
The Johnson Administration provided suitable mockery at the height of the superhero satire movement: a one-shot from 1966.
The inimitable MAD magazine artist Don Martin turned in an amusing paperback book character called Captain Klutz, whose unforgettable alias was Ringo Fonebone. Perhaps the oddest of this odd-lot was The Great Society Comic Book, a 1967 one-off parody, published by an independent company, that recast the Johnson Administration as superheroes. The president himself was Super LBJ and his nemeses were not supervillains, but the fraternal-hero team Bobman and Teddy—the Kennedy brothers, recast as pretenders to LBJ’s seat in the White House.
As long as superheroes run around at night in their underwear and tights, they’ll always be targets for parody. Most of the sideswipes are obvious, but a few are so perceptive that they stand a good chance of living on as long as their inspirations. Saturday Night Live’s animated parody of Batman and Robin—“The Ambiguously Gay Duo”—is like a Frederic Wertham nightmare come true, and the geriatric pair of aquatic heroes on SpongeBob SquarePants, Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, not only head-dunk every cliché about undersea heroes, their comic book adventures are drawn by none other than Ramona Fradon’the glorious artist of Aquaman’s Golden (and Silver) Age of comics. Imitation is clearly the sincerest form of parody.
SpongeBob Comics Freestyle Funnies (2012) matched artist Ramona Fradon, who defined Aquaman for DC in the 1950s, with Mermaid Man, his komedy kounterpart.
Splash page from Luke Cage’s debut in Hero for Hire #1 (1972): “Sweet Christmas!” was Cage’s anodyne epithet (art by George Tuska).
The Black Panther Party made its political positions known to the world a few months after the comic book character debuted (from 1966).
hen the Marvel Universe coalesced around Manhattan, it was inevitable that, one day, they would wake up to recognize that New York City contained the largest black population in the United States.
With the exception of the music world, African Americans had traditionally been underrepresented in popular culture, but the world of comic books was perhaps the slowest genre to recognize blacks in any meaningful form. By the early 1940s, there were black stars on Broadway, black musicians on the song charts, even an African American winner of an Academy Award. But, as stereotypical as Hollywood portrayals of black characters could be, they seemed practically enlightened by comic book standards. When comic books deigned to portray black characters at all, they were usually gullible, inarticulate sidekicks, caricatured physically as well as culturally, with names like Whitewash Jones or Ebony White, the Spirit’s cab-driving sidekick. According to comics historian Gerard Jones, “Some beautiful stories by Will Eisner about the Spirit are to some extent forever marred by his caricatured black sidekick.”
As Marvel Comics moved into the 1960s, the hermetically sealed comic book world would slowly open up. Jack Kirby, who was drawing most of Marvel’s cityscapes, occasionally inserted a black spectator pointing up at the Fantastic Four’s Baxter Building, for example. A World War II comic, created by Kirby and Stan Lee, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, which debuted in 1963, featured a black commando named Gabriel Jones (although the printing plant was so surprised to see a black character that they accidentally colored him white in the first issue). A 1964 Captain America adventure has Cap venturing behind enemy lines into North Vietnam to rescue a downed black pilot; over at the Spider-Man book, artist John Romita gave J. Jonah Jameson an African American editor at the Daily Bugle named Joseph “Robbie” Robertson in 1967. “There was a time when I realized, we don’t really have any black characters,” said Stan Lee. “I felt we should be representative of the whole world—every type of person should be represented in these stories.”
“Robbie” Robertson was the Daily Bugle’s editorial voice of reason (The Amazing Spider-Man #52, December, 1967).
The first major black superhero appeared in the pages of Fantastic Four #52, which would have hit the stands in late spring 1966, nine months after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the horrendous devastation of the Watts riots. The hero was the completely masked Black Panther, a lithe, mysterious figure who summoned the Fantastic Four to a jungle kingdom in Africa called Wakanda. After outwitting the team, the Panther pulls back his mask to reveal that he is the African chief T’Challa, whose kingdom owns a mine of Vibranium, a rare metal that is the source of their great wealth and astonishing technical expertise. Unfortunately, the vibranium renders Wakanda vulnerable to looters and poachers (one of whom murdered T’Challa’s father, the previous Black Panther). The Panther was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who had conceived an earlier black character, the Coal Tiger, that never made it to the starting gate. Introducing a black superhero busted down enough doors to begin with, but the subtle twist in the two Black Panther issues was the depiction of Wakanda as the most enlightened and tech-savvy country in the world; even the cynical Thing, who yawns that he has “seen [the jungle action] in the movies before,” is suitably impressed with the tiny African nation before he returns back home.
TOP: The identity of the Black Panther was an easy guess—but in 1966, comic book readers were shocked when he was revealed to be a black superhero. LEFT: Two real Black Panthers: Bobby Seale and Huey Newton at an Oakland rally. RIGHT: A Kirby splash page for a groundbreaking character (The Fantastic Four #52, 1966).
Intentionally or not, the character was packed with several conflicting themes from African American culture, dating all the way back to the early 20th century, when activists such as W. E. B. DuBois were trying to define the role of blacks within a larger social structure. Writer Gary Phillips frames the issue:
There’s always that tension, particularly in pop culture, in terms of uplifting the race, of showing the best, one true example of the race. In a lot of ways, the Panther exemplifies that. On one hand, he is the noble savage, but on the other hand, he’s this king of this hidden, scientifically advanced kingdom that has purposely hidden itself from the world so as to avoid a lot of conflicts of racism that have taken place on the African continent and, by extension, in America.
The Panther would bestride both continents as a fixture in the Marvel Universe from 1966 on, earning several different versions of his own title, and becoming a loyal member of the Avengers for decades. He ran into some public relations problems when the Black Power group devoted to social revolution called the Black Panther Party emerged out of Oakland a few months after the character’s comic book debut (the two occurrences were completely unrelated). At one point, the character changed his name to the Black Leopard but, realizing he wasn’t fooling anyone, changed it back: “I did not want my personal goals and tribal heritage confused with political plans made by others.… I am not a stereotype. I am myself. And I am—the Black Panther!” Ironically, the character far outlasted the political party, which was dissolved by 1982.
Artist Gene Colan let the Falcon fly for the first time in the pages of Captain America #117 (September 1969).
African American comic book fans were still waiting for a hero of their very own. Marvel artist Gene Colan nudged Stan Lee into creating a rival character for Captain America called the Falcon. A social worker in Harlem with a gift for remarkable telepathy with a falcon named Redwing, Sam Wilson donned his own pin-feathered costume and became the Falcon in 1969. By 1971 the Falcon was Cap’s full-time partner; and, thanks to some Wakandan technology, he eventually gained the power to fly on his own steam. Alas, there wasn’t enough technology to make him a particularly interesting character; luckily, in spring 1972, the Blaxploitation movement in films and music had opened another opportunistic door in the Marvel Universe.
In the early 1970s, when Marvel was undergoing a feverish expansion, new characters usually appeared first in “showcase” comics, but Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, was given his own eponymous magazine right off the bat. The time was right for a streetwise, gritty black hero. With Roberta Flack, Al Green, and the O’Jays topping the charts, and the black detective film Shaft earning back seven times its original investment (and with Super Fly about to open), even mainstream white teenaged readers were ready to embrace Luke Cage. In homage to Captain America, a stubborn black prisoner named Carl Lucas, stuck in an impenetrable penitentiary where he is constantly victimized by white guards, agrees to participate in a strength-enhancement experiment in exchange for parole. When the experiment goes horribly awry, he is transformed into a being of incredible power and invulnerability. Lucas escapes prison, returns to Harlem, and re-invents himself as Luke Cage, Hero for Hire—a super-powered mercenary, complete with business cards and a costume with a huge chain for a belt, just in case anyone might miss the symbolism. “Yeah! Outfit’s kinda hokey,” Cage admits, “but so what? All part of the super-hero scene.”
“Reading those early Luke Cage comic books you can almost hear the soundtrack of Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield playing in the background,” writes comics historian Bradford Wright. Cage would be part of the superhero scene for the next five decades, undergoing various transformations (he was Power Man for a while), but still an essential lodestar for different groups and titles, including the Avengers. Actor Nicolas Cage has said that he changed his last name from “Coppola” in honor of the character, but the character’s greatest contribution was representing a real African American superhero that spoke to all audiences, even though it was a risky choice to render him as an unapologetic troubleshooter who charged for his services. Gary Phillips recalls that the Panther was “all regal wisdom and graceful power, the Sidney Poitier of the Marvel Universe; Luke Cage was street-savvy, stubborn, and built for hellacious mayhem—Jim Brown without the referees.”
DC Comics was much slower to enfranchise black heroes and characters. According to comics historian William Foster, “Marvel was the young maverick, so they could make changes, they could move quickly. They were like a speedboat, unlike DC Comics, which was more like an aircraft carrier. They couldn’t maneuver as easily with the changing times.” In 1968, up-and-coming writer Marv Wolfman attempted to add a black superhero named Joshua to the Teen Titans comic book, but for reasons never completely confirmed, the character didn’t make it out of the starting gate.
DC tried with some one-off stories, the most remarkable of which was the episode in the November 1970 of Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane, #106: “I Am Curious (Black).” Written by DC veteran scribe Robert Kanigher, the issue borrows heavily from the 1961 nonfiction book Black Like Me, where a white writer tints his face so that he can “pass” as a black man in the America South. In the comic book, our intrepid lady reporter is moved to better understand the tensions in “Little Africa” (Metropolis’s answer to Harlem). Lois seeks Superman’s help, who obliges her with an effective, but presumably little-used, device from his home planet Krypton that can turn white-skinned people black for twenty-four hours. During her one-day adventure, the dark-hued Lois Lane does in fact do her bit for racial equality and brotherhood, but in the end she is a little more concerned whether Superman would still love her if she were black. DC’s more effective commitments to African American characters included John Stewart, a black architect who was selected by the Guardians to become Green Lantern’s “understudy” in 1972, as well as characters such as Black Lightning and Cyborg.
In the early 1980s, comic book writer and editor Roy Thomas lamented, “You could get blacks to buy comics about whites, but it was hard to get whites to buy comics in which the main character was black.” But even with a slow start, the comic book industry has eventually embraced the possibilities inherent in multi-racial characters. The results are imperfect; Hollywood movies and, to a lesser degree, television programs also still wrestle with how to place African American characters, along with other races and ethnicities, at the center of their mainstream narratives. But, there is no denying that in the late 1960s and early ’70s, it was the Black Panther and Luke Cage who kicked the door down. Writer Gary Phillips recalled:
When I was a kid growing up in South Central back then, you were kind of considered a chump and a sissy if you were reading DC Comics. Marvel was where it was at—not only because you had the Hulk and Spider-Man, with their angst and their worries and what have you, but the fact that that’s where you had some black superheroes showing up.
CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT: Black Lightning debuted in the April 1977 edition of his own DC comic, but never really sparked with readers; Lois Lane undergoes an incredible transformation in “I Am Curious (Black)” in the pages of Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane #106 (1970); Luke Cage fearlessly travels deep into the enemy territory of Latveria to reclaim the 200 bucks owed to him by the world’s most despotic villain, Dr. Doom (Luke Cage #9).
The shocking cover by Neal Adams (inked by Dick Giordano) to Green Lantern/Green Arrow #86 (November 1971)—ripped from the day’s headlines.
s the 1960s turned into the 1970s, there were a variety of problems facing the American people —the war in Viet Nam, urban poverty, street riots, assassinations, a devolution of law and order—but, perhaps only one directly confronted a comic book-reading teenager at the time: drugs.
The counterculture of the 1960s had embraced marijuana and hallucinogens as part of their creed, but more powerful narcotics were entering the illegal marketplace, especially heroin. A senate committee revealed that 10 to 15 percent of American combat troops were addicted to heroin; the government had just backed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which tightened the medical supply lines; and President Nixon had declared the illegal drugs were “Public Enemy Number One.” Hadn’t comic book superheroes been created to fight public enemies?
The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare evidently thought so. Early in 1970, Stan Lee received a letter from a representative in the government agency: “It was something like: ‘Recognizing the influence that your character, Spider-Man, has on young people, we think it would be very beneficial if you would do an anti-drug story in Spider-Man.’ Well, no kid wants to be lectured to, so I wasn’t about to do a story that said, ‘Don’t take drugs!’ ” The story that Lee did come up with, illustrated by Gil Kane, was a three-part series that began in The Amazing Spider-Man #96 and focused mainly on his arch-enemy, the Green Goblin. While Spidey is swinging across the city, he saves a young black man, perched precariously on a rooftop, obviously strung out on drugs. (“I had never taken drugs so I know nothing about them,” admitted Lee. “I just wrote that he overdosed on something.”)
Three panels from The Amazing Spider-Man #96 and 97 display the perils of drug abuse: art by Gil Kane.
The story arc was smart enough to leave that issue alone for awhile, as Spider-Man pursued the Green Goblin, only to discover his roommate, Harry Osborn (who is actually also the son of the Green Goblin’s alter ego), is also “pill-popping” a combination of uppers and downers. Stuck between helping his friend battle his addiction and battling the Green Goblin himself, Spider-Man resolves the conflict neatly by the third issue in the series. Would that Lee and Marvel Comics could have resolved the conflict with the Comics Code Authority quite so easily.
When Lee and his publisher, Martin Goodman, submitted the three-issue story arc to the Code office for approval in June 1970, it was summarily rejected. Lee’s recounting of the discussion:
They said, “You’re not allowed to mention drugs in the comics.” I said, “But we’re not telling the kids to take drugs, it’s an anti-drug message!” “Sorry.” I said, “But we were asked to do this by the Office of HEW in Washington.” “Sorry.”
While the story languished in the limbo of the Code Office, a parallel development was occurring over at DC Comics. It involved two superheroes on the verge of extinction and a pair of young comic book creators who shared a visionary sense of comic books’ possibilities. Denny O’Neil was a former journalist from the Midwest and Neal Adams was a former advertising artist; they were both of the first generation that had grown up reading comics to enter the field, and they had secured a berth at DC Comics in the mid 1960s, where they had worked together to get Batman back on his feet after the cancellation of the television show.
In summer 1970, O’Neil was called into the office of editor Julie Schwartz and was told that both Green Lantern and Green Arrow were about to be cancelled and, as a last-ditch effort, he was going to combine them into one title. The only real rationale for combining the swashbuckling Green Arrow and the space-age Green Lantern was that they shared a nominative color. O’Neil thought the only way to make sense of this shotgun marriage was to take it all in a completely new direction:
What if we plotted the stories from the headlines? What if we did the stuff that as U.S. citizens, and veterans, and fathers, we were really concerned about? So I don’t know how detailed a plot I gave Julie for that first one. But we agreed on a direction and a story and then I went home, writing, and thinking that the usual Green Lantern artist would get the art job.
Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 wasn’t much of a story, but it had a hell of a premise. Green Lantern flies through an urban ghetto to stop an apparent beating in progress, only to discover that his old pal, Green Arrow, is on the other side of the angels: the “victim” is an avaricious landlord. Green Arrow lectures Green Lantern that he has spent too much time fighting mad scientists in outer space to see the evil right in front of him in the real world. The point is driven home by a scruffy, aged black man who lives in the landlord’s tenement. When O’Neil saw the page proofs, he realized for the first time that the book had been given to Neal Adams to illustrate:
I looked at the first page and thought, my God, this is great. And got to the end of the first chapter and he did that black guy’s face and I thought, this is the tragedy of slavery encapsulated in this one incredible drawing. And we were off and running.
The conclusion of the story literally had Green Lantern and Green Arrow off and running, deciding that true superheroes needed to, in Green Arrow’s words, “forget about chasing around the galaxy and remember America.” Lantern and Arrow (accompanied by one of Green Lantern’s “blue-skinned” alien guardians) decide to go on an extended road trip incognito: “Seeking an identity, an answer—to find America, to learn why this land of the free has become the land of the fearful.” It was, in many ways, the comic book equivalent of the 1969 film Easy Rider, with the soundtrack to Paul Simon’s lyrics from the following year: “And we walked off to look for America.”
For the next eight issues, Green Lantern and Green Arrow (eventually joined by the Black Canary, a middle-rank heroine from the 1940s who served as Green Arrow’s paramour) traversed the country, confronting inequity, prejudice, and cruelty among striking workers, oppressed native Americans, polluters, brainwashed schoolchildren, and would-be Messiahs. In essence, they battled the same kind of bullies and miscreants tackled by Superman in Siegel and Shuster’s stories from the late 1930s. But O’Neil and Adams crafted their stories at a level never previously seen in comic books. In particular, Adams’ photo-realistic art style and innovative composition matched O’Neil’s hardcore journalistic style; the work looked as if it were torn from that day’s front pages. Of course, there were the obligatory action sequences—also rendered with a heart-racing momentum, courtesy of Adams—but Green Lantern’s extraordinary powers were taken down several notches to make the character’s wanderjahr reasonably credible. Like the Lantern and the Arrow, O’Neil and Adams were on a mission. Reflected Adams, “I grew up at a time when I was told many times that comic books were analogous to toilet paper. So we made our own little statement in our comic book. It reminded college students and high school students that comic books weren’t just crap.”
In Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76, our two heroes square off; they are left speechless by an unnamed black man, who became one of the most iconic figures in comic books.
O’Neil and Adams had tackled most of the statements about which they felt passionate, but the issue of drug abuse was still closed off to them by the Comics Code. It was an issue that Adams wanted to explore more deeply, and he had a notion—perverse, perhaps—that Green Arrow’s trusty ward from the old days might be a useful character to investigate the problem: his name was Speedy—a resonant name for a potential heroin addict. That idea had too much street potency, so it was tabled by DC’s editorial staff. But over at Marvel Comics, Stan Lee was moving forward with his drug-related series in The Amazing Spider-Man. He felt so strongly about it that he wanted to publish it without the Code’s seal of approval. Publisher Goodman supported him, and The Amazing Spider-Man #96 hit the streets in late February 1971; it would be the first mainstream (non–funny animal) comic book to be published without the Code’s seal of approval since its inception in 1955, as were the two subsequent issues in the series.
LEFT: The Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics often drafted-in thinly veiled versions of contemporary figures: in GL/GA #78 cult leader “Joshua” is a dead ringer for Charles Manson. RIGHT: The first major title to be released without the seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority: The Amazing Spider-Man #96.
The roof did not cave in. Comic book distributors still put the magazine on their racks and stands (it was one of the most popular titles in the business, after all). “The book sold like it always sold,” recalled Lee, “but we got more mail from teachers and parents and doctors and everybody all over the country, saying how much they loved that book and how delighted they were! And the folks in Washington liked it. So after that they got a little bit more lenient at the Comic Code office.” Indeed, that spring, the Code loosened their restrictions somewhat, especially in the area of narcotics, some sexual situations, and, amusingly, monsters. This allowed O’Neil and Adams officially to tackle the monster of drug addiction.
“The next book that came out was [Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, in summer 1971],” said Adams. “Denny sat down and wrote a two-parter for that [heroin] cover and we put it out. One of the most revolutionary covers there ever was. But it took Stan to get it sold. Incredible.” “Snowbirds Don’t Fly” was the first of a two-part series where Green Arrow investigates a heroin ring, unaware that his neglected ward, Speedy, is at the center of it. In the next issue, “They Say It Will Kill Me … But They Won’t Say When!,” Green Arrow discovers Speedy’s addiction and uneasily guides him toward withdrawal. Unlike anything before it in comic book history, the narrative of the adventure was woven directly and thrillingly into the tragedy of the times—at one point, the henchman of a drug kingpin injects Green Arrow and Green Lantern with heroin in order to incapacitate them.
LEFT: Minutes from the Comics Code Authority from February 1, 1971, regarding the groundbreaking (and code-breaking) issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. RIGHT: One of the most searingly topical panels in comic book history: Green Arrow lectures the Guardians of Oa in the epilogue from Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (1970).
This new trend of comics for grown-ups made the front page of the New York Times Magazine, the first time comic books had been given that kind of showcase, let alone praise. In “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant” (published on May 2, 1971, after the Spider-Man stories, but before the Speedy storyline), the author wrote, “Today’s superhero is about as much like his predecessors as today’s child is like his parents.” Alas, Green Lantern/Green Arrow—the most critically acclaimed and media-celebrated comic book of its day—also suffered from a dichotomy between fans and consumers; three issues after the drug abuse storyline, the title was cancelled, due, ostensibly, to poor sales.
Perhaps its day in the sunlight of topicality had peaked; “[The title] was in danger of becoming ‘Cause-of-the-Month’ comics,” said O’Neil. Many fans, and some insiders, felt uneasy that a superhero title would sell its action-packed birthright for a pot of message. Still, in its time, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, a contrived title if ever there was one, attained an exceptionally high standard as a groundbreaking work of art. Far more explosively than Green Lantern’s power ring and far more incisively than Green Arrow’s weaponry, O’Neil and Adams had used their narrative powers to destroy the wall that arbitrarily separated comic book fantasy from the real world. The shockwaves that reverberated when fantasy combusted with reality would be felt for the next four decades.
