Supergods

  There was a new confidence here: Comic-book covers of the fifties had shown ordinary people running from symbolic monsters of the id. Now there were four people fighting back. Superman stood at the center of the elements on the cover of Action no. 1. These new heroes were the elements. The Fantastic Four formed a living equation. The exploration of their constantly shifting, always familiar, family dynamic made them a perpetual-motion story engine.

  Swooping in a half circle around the Invisible Girl, the blazing cometary figure of the Human Torch brought our gaze with him around the cover and back. The composition made a swirling figure eight that enclosed and trapped the monster. The figure eight was the eternal family braid of the FF, the promise of a saga that might never end, with characters designed to last. The figure eight was also the sign of the cosmic voyager, the astronaut of the infinite, and it looked forward to themes that Jack Kirby would develop in his mature work.

  The balloons seemed awkwardly placed, but they too were sited so that our eye was swept around the page in constant motion.

  “THE THING! MR. FANTASTIC! HUMAN TORCH! INVISIBLE GIRL! TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ONE MIGHTY MAGAZINE.”

  Soon Lee would establish a proud banner above the title that read simply, “THE WORLD’S GREATEST COMIC MAGAZINE.”

  It was no empty boast. In an astonishing 102-issue sustained run with Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four rebuilt the superhero concept for the Silver Age and gave readers a monthly ticket to a world of planet-eating gods, undersea kingdoms, alternate dimensions, and ever-changing, ever-returning family dynamics.

  That first Fantastic Four adventure began in midflow with a crowd of people pointing to the words The Fantastic Four, writ vast on a cloud in the sky. This alarm, outdoing Batman’s signal in scale and literalism, and turning the story and series title into active parts of the adventure itself, brought together a group of intriguing freaks, including a misanthropic monster whose every movement or transaction provided a new source of irritation or violent confrontation. Each character was given a few pages to display (or in the Invisible Girl’s case, not display) his or her superpower before the first act ended with the promise of a “fearful task” ahead for the quartet.

  Keeping readers on their toes, the story backtracked to the fateful day when each of these incredible beings received his or her strange power. Their leader, the smug, pipe-smoking Dr. Reed Richards, was shown deliberately ignoring the warnings of a man named Ben Grimm, who seemed to think that stealing an experimental space rocket and flying it through lethal cosmic rays was a potentially bad idea. Richards left the dirty work to his glamorous blond fiancée, Sue Storm:

  “BEN, WE’VE GOT TO TAKE THAT CHANCE UNLESS WE WANT THE COMMIES TO BEAT US TO IT. I NEVER THOUGHT THAT YOU WOULD BE A COWARD.”

  Sue’s passive-aggressive challenge was enough to send Ben off the deep end.

  “A COWARD! NOBODY CALLS ME A COWARD!”

  And so the rest of the group was able to convince the only level head among them to take part in a harebrained scheme that could only end in disaster. For some reason, Reed and Ben allowed both Sue and her teenage brother Johnny to accompany them on their suicidal mission to stop the Reds from getting there first.

  “WE HAD TO DO IT! WE HAD TO BE THE FIRST!” Richards yelled in triumph as the rocket accelerated through the ionosphere. It was the leonine roar of the Kennedy spaceman claiming the vacuum. It was the hubris of the golden young president and the atom-age scientist, and it preceded both Fall and Guilt.

  The only sound effect in the story occurred in the panel after Richards’s cockcrow and indicated the terrifying presence of cosmic rays—smashing through the unprotected hull to bathe the four rebel astronauts in pure Silver Age radiation.

  RAK TAC TAC TAC TAC TAC!

  When the stricken spaceship crash-landed, and the four stumbled from the wreckage one by one, we watched the rays wreak upon each a terrible transformation: Sue turned invisible for the first time. Johnny burst into flames and learned he could fly, on fire. Reed’s entire body became elastic, and Ben drew the short straw as his reward for trying to prevent this whole insane escapade from ever taking place, when he transformed into the monstrous orange-plated Thing, unable to return to his human form.

  Reed, quite rightly, blamed himself for Ben’s shocking deformity and loss of a normal life. Sue, meanwhile, had attracted the amorous attentions of a renovated Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner, back from the deep like a horny Peter Pan, and Johnny struggled with youthful impetuousness and a “hotheaded” temper.

  The Marvel superhero was born: a hero who tussled not only with monsters and mad scientists but also with relatable personal issues.

  Soon the storm-laden atmosphere of the early Fantastic Four episodes was replaced by an easy flow that could encompass high drama, science fiction, situation comedy, pathos, and an entirely innovative approach to the superhero concept that aligned it with the pioneering spirit of the astronauts. The fragmenting nuclear family would provide Lee, Kirby, and everyone who followed them on the book with an endless supply of stories that could become myths. Evil uncles, weddings, births, breakups—Fantastic Four gave everyone’s family album a superhero twist. After the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Fantastic, a new, more playful dynamic emerged, with Reed and Sue as Mom and Pop, Johnny as the brattish teenage son, and Ben the monstrous nightmare baby.

  The Marvel supermen were scientists too. The Fantastic Four were astronauts. The Hulk was Bruce Banner, a physicist. Henry Pym, the shrinking Ant-Man, was a particle physicist. Spider-Man, Peter Parker, was a science major. Thor’s Don Blake was a doctor, but Lee and his artists—primarily a reinvigorated Jack Kirby, who was beginning a period that would come to be regarded as his creative peak, and the prickly Steve Ditko—would show a new, darker side to the PhD hero.

  Lee and Ditko, on a roll, cocreated the next big Marvel hit: Spider-Man. There was another new wrinkle: a teenage superhero who wasn’t a sidekick, who could star in his own book, and who didn’t have a name ending in Kid or Lad. Peter Parker was, as Lee wrote at the end of the first adventure, “the hero who could be you,” and he brought a new level of realism to superhero strips, creating another revolution in the process. Parker, a bespectacled science nerd, was introduced to the world in Amazing Fantasy no. 15 in August 1962 as “MIDTOWN HIGH’S ONLY PROFESSIONAL WALLFLOWER.”

  It was unlikely that the young readers of superhero books could identify too closely with the likes of Barry Allen or Hal Jordan—handsome young men with careers and wonderful girlfriends—but Peter Parker brought the specky Clark Kent archetype back and gave readers a teenage hero who felt like a teenager. He couldn’t mitigate his geekdom by pointing to a reporting job or a science degree, and with his furtive behavior, gangly awkward posture, and bouts of self-lacerating guilt that alternated with elation, Spider-Man was a million miles away from the clean-limbed, well-mannered, thirtieth-century teens from DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes or from the Marvel Family, and a million miles closer to home.

  The first time we saw Parker, he wasn’t leaping through the air or catching crooks, he was standing isolated from a crowd of mocking teenagers, at a physical and emotional remove that seemed impassable. The bookworm himself, with sunken shoulders, dated clothes, and huge, round spectacles, gazed across what might as well have been an infinite abyss at the popular kids giggling among themselves at the ludicrous notion of inviting Peter to a dance. In one hand he carried his textbooks. It was a scene from every high school yard, and many of Spider-Man’s young readers must have projected themselves immediately onto the quiet, self-effacing Peter Parker. We could be in Riverdale High except that there was something extra, something strange and wonderful about Peter. Unlike Peter Pan, Peter Parker had a shadow.

  In fact, in the cover illustration he seemed to cast a three-part shadow: There was a proud muscular man with hands on hips standing at the center of a spiderweb with the black outline of a huge spider poised above his head. Clearly there was more to the shy wallfl
ower than met the eye. The picture was already evocative, but Lee had only begun.

  Lee’s conversational narrative captions dropped all pretense of a dispassionate authorial voice in favor of a chummy camaraderie that made it feel as if he were there with you, reading the same comic and cringing at the same “corny” moments. The comic itself became a buddy. Lee interjected his own persona into little editor’s footnotes that provided links between stories or reminded readers of salient facts, all in Stan’s wink-wink “How’s-it-goin’-pal?” style. Then came “Stan’s Soapbox,” a regular bulletin column in which Lee could sound off about whatever was on his mind. Mostly he was promoting new Marvel books with a knowing hyperbole that could do the huckster’s job while maintaining an ironic distance, but often he’d lay on the line his feelings about civil rights or world peace.

  Sometimes he’d even talk about visits to the Marvel offices by luminaries of the nouvelle vague such as film directors Federico Fellini, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard. Mostly they were “funky Frenchmen,” as Lee might put it, who had accepted the fantasy comics into the mainstream of their culture long ago in the form of expensively bound bandes dessinées or fumetti. Clever and innovative comic-book artists like Stan’s crew didn’t have to prove themselves to the Euro auteurs, but the American mainstream rarely took seriously the artwork or the language or the radical new storytelling structures of the work. They seemed barely aware that a new underground mythology was circulating. Within ten years, the Marvel universe would supplant DC’s as the most successful in both sales and fan approval.

  By 1965, with a successful stable of new and offbeat superheroes, including the Hulk, Daredevil, Iron Man, Thor, and Giant Man, Lee was bannering each new issue “A MARVEL POP ART PRODUCTION,” both to distance himself from his staid competitors at DC (whom Stan charitably renamed Brand Ecch in “Soapbox” columns that could sometimes resemble the balcony rants of Benito Mussolini) and also to ally himself with the wider currents of popular culture. Stan whipped up a fierce rivalry between Marvel and DC, while the giant paid him no heed, at least not in public. But the new Marvel heroes were so radioactive with rough-hewn novelty and pure personality, they made DC’s product seem like juvenilia, forcing DC to change in order to keep up.

  The very first words in the Spider-Man strips signaled the new compact between reader and creator that was the hallmark of the Marvel style. “LIKE COSTUMED HEROES?” Lee asked, knowing that we must if we’d bought the book. It was rare for readers to be asked such direct questions about the object in their hands. Then he opened up with a few trade secrets to gain our trust:

  “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 SPIDERMAN JUST A BIT … DIFFERENT!”

  With one caption, Lee became our friend, our confidant. He reminded us up front that we were reading a made-up story, then created with Ditko a story and characters so compelling, we were drawn in, despite its avowed fictional nature, in a display of showmanship. It was perfectly composed in just eleven pages. (When writer Brian Michael Bendis was called on to update and retell the Spider-Man origin for a new generation of readers in 2000, it took six twenty-two-page issues to tell the same story in the “decompressed” screenplay style of twenty-first-century comics.)

  Doted upon by his elderly guardians, Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Peter was nevertheless rejected by every girl he met.

  “SOME DAY I’LL SHOW THEM! [Sob] SOME DAY THEY’LL BE SORRY—SORRY THAT THEY LAUGHED AT ME.”

  Fortunately for our hero, “some day” turned up a few minutes later when Peter was bitten by a spider that had inadvertently absorbed an unusually high dose of radiation during a science demonstration. In the real world, Peter would have succumbed to radiation poisoning and died in confused agony with no hair and no teeth several weeks later, but this was the Marvel universe establishing its own rules of engagement. In the Marvel U, radiation was a kind of pixie dust: sprinkle it on a scientist, and voilà! A superhero was born. Radiation was responsible for the origins of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, Daredevil, and several other early Marvel superheroes, transforming the isotopes of fear into fuel rods of wonder and possibility. Lee stole back the annihilating radiation of the Bomb, and for children like me—raised in its icy shadow—he peopled the glowing darkness with extraordinary heroes.

  It was traditional for superhero characters to opt for a crime-fighting lifestyle as quickly as they could design an embarrassing costume and give themselves a ridiculous name. The Golden Age mystery men fought crime because that was what you did. DC’s Silver Age science heroes did it because they read about it in Golden Age comics. They didn’t need to see their worlds destroyed or their parents killed; they used their new abilities to fight crime because that was the community-minded thing to do. Stan Lee went back to first principles. In the Marvel universe, heroes needed reasons, motivations.

  On gaining his powers, Peter’s first choice was not to fight criminals but to make money, using his newfound “spider strength” in a wrestling match. This brought him to the attention of a TV promoter who offered him a wad of cash to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. Peter accepted and designed his Spider-Man costume not to frighten criminals or to represent his totem animal but to look good on TV.

  This was very new in 1962. Here was a hero who anticipated celebrity culture. Within days, Spider-Man was “THE SENSATION OF THE NATION,” but Lee and Ditko were not finished with us. They still needed to turn this slightly unlikeable power-tripping nerd into a superhero, and they accomplished this in a classic sequence. Spider-Man had just shaken off an adoring media crowd and was about to slip away quietly when a policeman called for his help in apprehending a fleeing crook.

  As Spider-Man selfishly ignored the cop’s yells, the thief darted into the elevator and made his escape. “LUCKY THAT GOON IN THE COSTUME DIDN’T STOP ME!” he cackled, rubbing it in.

  When the cop admonished Spider-Man, the not-quite-a-hero-yet had his dismissive reply ready:

  “SORRY, PAL! THAT’S YOUR JOB! I’M THRU BEING PUSHED AROUND—BY ANYONE! FROM NOW ON I JUST LOOK OUT FOR NUMBER ONE—THAT MEANS—ME!”

  It was easy to see, when a doting Uncle Ben and Aunt May bought Peter the microscope he’d always wanted, that the stage was set for tragedy.

  Peter returned from another TV performance to find police lights around his house. A burglar had shot and killed Uncle Ben, and when an enraged Spider-Man tracked the killer to his lair, he recognized the man as the thief he’d ignored three pages earlier. It was Peter’s fault that Uncle Ben was dead. At least Batman could blame someone else for his parents’ deaths. It was at this point that Spider-Man the entertainer was replaced by Spider-Man the crime fighter, driven to expiate his own awful guilt.

  As Ditko’s tiny, lonely silhouette walked into the darkness under the moon in a blacked-out city, Lee closed off his first sobering adventure with these immortal words:

  “WITH GREAT POWER THERE MUST ALSO COME—GREAT RESPONSIBILITY!”

  The final caption, like the first, led us out of this intense, emotionally charged situation with an oddly phrased reminder that none of this is real: “AND SO A LEGEND IS BORN AND A NEW NAME IS ADDED TO THE ROSTER OF THOSE WHO MAKE THE WORLD OF FANTASY THE MOST EXCITING REALM OF ALL.”

  Spotty, hormonal outsiders had a new hero in Peter. Clark Kent had his own apartment and a steady job, but Peter was a genuine loser. Peter revealed the truth behind the sugared lies of Barry Allen and Ray Palmer: No good-looking girl ever fancied a scientist. Peter fucked up, got the flu, ran out of money and hope. Peter would sit hand sewing his damaged Spider-Man costume in his tiny room at Aunt May’s in Queens while newspapers condemned his crime-fighting alter ego as a menace to society.

  Straight out of the oven, Marvel Comics had delivered two hit series that completely reinvented the superhero paradigm. As new troubled heroes were added to the mix, the stories
began to build on one another, cross-referencing various titles to develop an engrossing mosaic of a whole new world. At DC, an earth-shaking event could happen in one issue and be forgotten by the next. Batman might be nursing a broken leg in his own title while bouncing across the rooftops in World’s Finest, Detective, or Justice League, but the Marvel universe was laying down more solid foundations. Thus, if Peter Parker had a bruise at the end of one story, he’d still have it at the beginning of the next, which made the entire Marvel line one huge and interwoven saga.

  Fantastic Four had turned familiar family dramas into superhuman epics. Now Spider-Man transformed ordinary teenage life into a weird symbolic soap opera. Spindly and angular, Spider-Man was as creepy as his namesake, and Ditko made a point of posing him in twisted, unnatural attitudes. He had no face. In the Golden Age, his faceless mask design would have suited a spooky and taciturn avenger of evil, but Lee’s genius was to turn Spider-Man into comics’ most talkative hero. Spider-Man never shut up! He mocked his enemies, cracked gags, and kept up a running commentary on his every movement, every feeling. It was as if shy Peter came alive only when he hid his face behind a mask. As Spider-Man, he spun and tumbled weightlessly down the avenues of Manhattan, spurting sticky web fluid in ecstatic abandon.

  Between them, Kirby and Ditko overhauled the look of American comics and established the general tenor of two interdependent strands of expression. On one side, you had superhero books, as represented by the bluff, physical war veteran Kirby—the Picasso, or perhaps more plausibly, the William Blake, of the superheroes, who set the ground rules for manipulating and distorting perspective. On the other side, the reclusive, bespectacled Ditko was preparing the way for elements of the underground alternative comics style, with a measured pace and thematic concerns that led all the way to the politics and formalism of later works like Watchmen and beyond.