On the Road to Find Out

Chapter 4:

Everyday Transcendence:

Steve Englehart and the Quest for Selfhood

On the Road to Find Out

For a company so committed to its vision of humanism, Marvel Comics had a complicated history when it came to the question of enlightenment.  The characters co-created by Lee, Kirby, and Ditko were defined by their inherent, personal flaws, leaving ample room not just for interpersonal drama, but personal growth.  The serialized nature of Marvel’s storytelling, however, led to a widely-recognized problem: if characters are allowed to change too much, they could depart from their initial premise and foreclose the possibility for future storytelling.  Critics and comics professionals often point to Lee’s dictum on the “illusion of change” over actual change as the moment when Marvel veered off course, but emphasizing this alleged shift is to play down the conservative impulses that had already guided Marvel’s storytelling. Things certainly happened to the characters whose adventures appeared under Lee’s bylines:  Reed and Sue got married and had a baby, and Peter Parker went to college. But these events fit squarely within the respective series’ metaphorical frameworks (the Fantastic Four is a family and Peter Parker gets “A”s in school and “Fs” in work/life balance). 

What these characters were not allowed to do was to surmount their own psychological barriers and become more psychologically healthy or spiritually enlightened.  Enlightenment for Marvel superhero comics was like marriage for the classical comedy: it marked the end of the story.  When the mysterious Conclave engineers an artificial being who is supposed to outclass all of humanity, the man known only as “Him” kills his creator and immediately leaves Earth to explore the universe. [1]  The High Evolutionary, a scientist whose experiments in accelerated evolution create bizarre humanoid animals, turns his science on himself and becomes a bodiless spirit that also leaves Earth behind. [2] This trope of transcending the human only to abandon the planet becomes a commonplace (Alpha, the Ultimate Mutant in Defenders 16), even speeding beyond the confines of the Marvel Universe (the newly transfigured Rhea leaving Earth behind in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol).  

In other cases, enlightenment is part of the character’s origin.  Stephen Strange set out in search of a cure for his damaged hands, but what could anyone really expect from a trek to a Tibetan mountaintop and an audience with a mystic calling himself “The Ancient One?” Investment advice?  Strange’s enlightenment was an inevitable byproduct of the overdetermined path he chose.

Lee & Kirby’s recurring or headlining characters were more often godlike beings who could gain wisdom from slumming with humanity.  Thor was consigned by Odin into the identity of Dr. Donald Blake in order to teach him humility, while the Silver Surfer becomes a better person when he sides with mundane humanity and is trapped on our planet.  Lee, at least, preferred to have his characters learn from their earthly experience rather than leave the planet behind.

In this, Lee and his collaborators were at something of a remove from the young adult audience that flocked to Marvel comics in the 1960s and formed the readership for the underground comics revolution during the same decade.  The trippy visuals of Ditko’s Doctor Strange and the cosmic weirdness of a silver bald spaceman on a surfboard struck a chord with readers who might have been toying with the idea of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, but the comics creators were middle-aged (mostly) liberal white men from the outer boroughs of New York.  For all their attempt at being “hip,” Marvel comics were, at best, the product of the product of the audience’s cool uncle who tried to prove that he was cool with what the kids were doing while still holding down a nine-to-five office job.  [3]

It would fall to the next generation of Marvel comics writers to weave their generation’s concerns into the Marvel fabric.  These included conscientious objectors, pot smokers, and spiritual seekers.  Or, to put it more simply, Steve Englehart.

We have already mentioned Englehart briefly as the co-creator of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung-Fu, who remained with the book for only a few issues before being replaced by Doug Moench.  It was Englehart who came up with not only Shang-Chi’s name, but the specific English interpretation of that name that has stuck with the character ever since: the rising and advancing of the spirit. Setting aside the question of linguistic accuracy, Shang-Chi’s name is a handy encapsulation of one of Englehart’s primary themes:  the quest for enlightenment and personal growth.  

Throughout his Marvel work, Englehart appeared to be interested in his characters only to the extent that he could show them growing and changing before the reader’s very eyes, preferably in a manner that required a great deal of introspection and, not infrequently, esoteric or pharmacological assistance.  Englehart’s drama was that of self-development, but that did not mean that all his characters advanced along the same, predetermined path. [4] For some of Englehart’s characters, the self was something to be altered and reaffirmed, using super heroic adventures as a crucible (Captain America);  transcended entirely (Mantis); extended and explored (Wanda and the Vision), reforged through partnership (Doctor Strange and Clea; Captain Marvel and Rick Jones, among many others), or utterly annihilated in the name of an ego-less enlightenment (The Ancient One and, to a lesser extent, Doctor Strange). At the same time, Englehart also explores the more harmful results of obsession and compulsion (Drax and Kang), of selves who are doomed to repeat the same patterns again and again. 

Notes

[1] Eventually, he becomes Adam Warlock, but that was the work of other writers and artists. 

[2] Though he does come back. 

[3] See the notorious incident when Peter Parker expresses his disdain for campus protesters. 

[4] This would be my critique of a talented later writer who is in some way’s Englehart’s spiritual heir, J. M. DeMatteis.  Most of DeMatteis’ characters reach an important moment of self-discovery, but the form and content of that discovery never vary (it always involves a moment of sentimental satori).