What Does Superwoman Want?

Four decades later, it is clear that Phoenix is the first in a long list of female characters whose godlike superpowers must be tempered, removed, or contained, and whose inability to cope starts to look as much like a reflection on their gender as on their individual character.   But at the time, Phoenix's dilemma was novel, as was her descent into the dark side.  This does not shield Claremont's, Byrne's, and Cockrum's decisions about her character from a critique on the ground of gender,  but it does mean that, when Jean Grey constituted a sample size of one, there was space to consider her character development as something more than a sexist trope that hadn't even been fully established yet.  As we shall see, Claremont's own preoccupation with powerful, but traumatized women retroactively makes Phoenix one of many female characters treated in this manner, but for the moment (and only for the moment) I propose giving Claremont and company the benefit of the doubt.  They were among the first to give a Marvel superheroine real power and personality, and seemed to have been attracted to the greater emotional range imputed to women than men in a heteronormative framework.  The very things that made Jean and characters like her feel more real were their contradictions, weaknesses, and flaws. Gender cannot be removed from this equation (look no further than how these women are drawn), but it is not the only factor.

In Marvel Comics in the 1970s, I argued that the best writers of Marvel's second decade took the limitations of the form and the medium as a challenge to represent the inner lives of characters who were available to their readers primarily through visual representation. Many of them moved away from Lee's predilection for monologues to voiceover narration (via captions) and introspection (via thought balloons),  in order to demonstrate the relative complexity of the characters whose adventures they chronicled. They also tended to complicate the metaphor implicit in the secret identity: rather than simply contrast the civilian identity and the alter ego (most dramatically in the cases of Thor and the Hulk, who became different people in order to wield their powers), they gave the reader access to the inner workings of characters whose complexity could not be encapsulated by simple binary oppositions (quite literally in the case of Deathlok, whose narration initially included the three different voices arguing in his head).   

Claremont did something different from Gerber, McGregor, and company:  he doubled down on Stan Lee's declarative mode. The monologues moved from word balloons to thought balloons (and back), but his characters still expressed themselves in soliloquies. The result felt like a continuation of his colleagues' preoccupation with inner states of mind, but with an almost complete lack of subtlety and a greater interest in melodrama (of both inter- and intra-personal kinds).  He revived Lee's binarism, but turned it into something resembling introspection:  Claremont's characters, rather than being split between one identity and another, were constantly balancing the opposing impulses that made them who they were. It was almost as though the heroes had a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, except that the devil and angel were the two halves of the characters themselves. 

In the case of Jean Grey, this meant that the power of the Phoenix constantly tempted her to throw off the WASPy repression of her Lee/Kirby/Thomas/Adams years and give herself over to her emotions.  The Phoenix, we are told, is a creature of passion, and Jean is always aware of the surprising satisfaction that comes from letting her powers (and passion) loose.  One of the strengths of Claremont's writing is how he takes advantage of the inherent contrast between words and pictures: while Phoenix is blasting Firelord with all her might, she is also watching herself from a distance, noting her own reactions.  Inner Jean both experiences her feelings and records them like an unsettled observer who is too fascinated to look away.  

Where the story becomes undeniably gendered is its representation of Jean's two sides through romance, particularly through the men she finds attractive.  On one side is Scott Summers, the X-Man whose superpower may as well be repression.  If Phoenix is a metaphor for women who embrace their sexuality, Cyclops is the adolescent male who is afraid of his own desire and its capacity to cause harm.  As often happens in superhero comics, the metaphor is quite clear (only Edward Scissorhands is more obvious about it):  Scott's optic blasts are so powerful that if he opens his eyes without the benefit of his visor or protective glasses, he could kill anyone he looks at.  In X-Men 94, when he considers leaving the team along with all the rest of the original X-Men, he stands at a window, delivering an impassioned soliloquy about his inability to live a normal life because of his "cursed, mutant energy-blasting eyes." The Hulk and the Thing can also function as a stand-in for the adolescent boy who doesn't know his own strength, but Cyclops's case is more clearly interpersonal and sexual: he cannot look anyone in the eye, and the projectile force he emits from his body is potentially lethal. This is why the scene in X-Men 132, when Jean removes his visor and uses her powers to block his optic blasts, is such a powerful rendering of Scott's vulnerability and Jean's strength:  finally, he does not have to be afraid of hurting her. And it is strongly implied that at last they have sex for the first time.

This one’s a keeper, Scott! I hope she doesn’t, I dunno, go crazy, eat a star, and kill herself on the moon

In contrast to Scott, we have two different men.  Decades of lore and some intense retconning by Claremont would have one of them be Wolverine.  When Jean is in the hospital after becoming Phoenix, Logan buys her flowers and hopes to reveal his feelings for her, before seeing that the rest of the X-Men have beat him to the waiting room (X-Men 101).  By the time Jean becomes Dark Phoenix, the readers know Wolverine is in love with her.  But it is only later, after she has died for the second time, that Claremont goes back and adds Jean's side of their relationship in the brief stories included in the Classic X-Men series.  There we find out that Jean's decision to leave with the original team was because of Logan. While Scott was monologuing by his window, Wolverine was hitting on Jean, and Jean found herself responding. 

 Next: Evil Mutant Bondage Goddess

Flight of the Bird Metaphor

Claremont was a master of the team book, developing back stories and inner lives for nearly all his characters.  But with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that, even as he deftly balances the X-Men ensemble,  there is usually one character or relationship around whom most of the action and angst revolves, even threatening to dominate the entire book.  By the time the series was reaching its 100 mark, all the way through the Dark Phoenix Saga, the center of gravity was Jean Grey (and, to a lesser extent, her relationship with Scott Summers). This was not a foregone conclusion; one could easily imagine a new writer on a revitalized franchise gravitating towards the characters with the least amount of backstory and, therefore, the most room for development.  Instead, Claremont and his collaborators used this longstanding, but rather undeveloped, relationship as the anchor for the series.

Claremont's transformation of Jean Grey now looks like the embodiment of his unspoken mission statement: to create a comic about powerful women. When Jean Grey was introduced as Marvel Girl, the newest member of the team in X-Men 1, she was yet another example of Stan Lee's nearly interchangeable heroines.  The early Marvel women tended to have non-physical powers that nonetheless put a strain on their delicate constitutions;  Marvel Girl, the Invisible Girl, and the Scarlet Witch typically used their minds to intervene in battle, and then swooned from the effort.  In their interactions with their team mates, they asked the questions that gave the men chance to explain things, exclaimed their shock and horror, and revealed their unspoken passions in thought-balloon encased monologues.  Every now and then, they expressed dissatisfaction with being coddled or sidelined, but their complaints were usually presented as amusing petulance.  The best that could be said about them was that their presence at least meant that the teams weren't made up entirely of men.

Claremont and Cockrum brought Jean back in Issues 97 and 98, only to have her (along with Wolverine and Banshee) captured by the Sentinels and transported to a space station.  The other X-Men come to the rescue, but the ensuing battle destroys the station. Barely escaping on a cramped shuttle, they have to make their way back to Earth through a solar flare.  Part of the craft is shielded, but not the cockpit.  Jean decides that her telepathy and telekinesis make her the only one who has a hope of surviving long enough to pilot the shuttle back to earth.  A cliffhanger at the end of issue 100 sees her overwhelmed by radiation; in the next issue, the X-Men crash land in Jamaica Bay.  Jean, who had been presumed dead, suddenly shoots up from the depths of the bay wearing a new costume, proclaiming the now-famous words:   "Hear me, X-Men! No longer am I the women you knew! I am fire and life incarnate! now and forever, I am PHOENIX!"

In real life, a man would immediately start imploring her to “calm down”

It would take months for the ramifications of Jean's new identity to begin to play out, since she spends a fair amount of time after Jamaica Bay in a coma. But when Claremont and Cockrum are finally ready for Phoenix's real debut, they immediately make it apparent that she is now operating on another level entirely:  the first antagonist she faces is Firelord, a former herald of the world-eating Galactus.  If it were not already clear enough that Jean is now a cosmic-level hero, she interrupts the fight to use to open a stargate to the far-off Shi'ar Empire with her power,  learns that a crack in an ancient MacGuffin called the M'Kraan Crystal is about to destroy all reality, uses the strength of the Phoenix to bind her teammates' vital energies together into a gestalt organized along the principle of the Kabbalah's Tree of Life, and saves the universe.

After this story, her power levels would fluctuate, largely because Claremont and Byrne disagreed over the wisdom of including an omnipotent X-Man (Claremont was for it, Byrne against). The course of the Phoenix Saga translated Byrne's and Claremont's arguments over Jean's powers into a crucial aspect of both the plot and her character development.  If Byrne's point was that a character so powerful made her team members extraneous (that is, undercut the very nature of a superhero team book), the story represented her near omnipotence as a threat to Jean's own selfhood (not to mention the continued existence of the universe).   The result was a  fascinating combination of the cosmic and the personal accomplished while also permanently grafting space opera and metaphysical drama onto the X-Men formula.

Jean's time as the Phoenix is the story of two simultaneous seductions, one by the power itself, and one by bad actors taking advantage of her situation: Jason Wyndgarde, better known as Mastermind, using his illusion-casting powers with the help of the telepathic White Queen to make Jean think she is mentally traveling back to the lives of previously unknown ancestors.  At roughly the same time that the first Star Wars trilogy was developing a none-too-subtle drama involving the lure of the "dark side" of the Force, Jean was confronting her inner demons with the assistance of a few of their outer counterparts.  While both Star Wars and the X-Men are thoroughly melodramatic, there are two key differences:  first, that Claremont is much better at getting into his characters' heads than George Lucas, and second, that the Phoenix is female.

Next: What Does Superwoman Want?

New Recipe X-Men

Claremont also quick to develop the X-Men’s distinct personalities (well, for most of them: Thunderbird was killed off almost immediately, while it took years for Colossus to be anything more than a simple Russian collective farm boy with a propensity for spouting non-existent Russian oaths).  Though Storm lived as a "goddess" in Kenya when Professor Xavier found her, she was actually the Chicago-born daughter of an American journalist and an African mother; when she was a child in Cairo, her parents were killed during an air raid, and her time trapped in the rubble left her with debilitating claustrophobia. [1] Nightcrawler offset his anxieties about his monstrous appearance with an easy sense of humor and a swashbuckling air.  And the book's breakout character, Wolverine, combined a propensity for savagery with nobler impulses, while coping on his own with a confusing and traumatic past.

Remembering the 1970s X-Men is complicated by a strange set of circumstances.  The comic entered the 1980s on the verge of becoming the company's biggest franchise, on the strength of the Claremont/Byrne run that began earlier and ended before 1980 was out. Claremont & Byrne's stories are widely regarded as foundational, the X-Men's golden age, and yet the franchise's commercial success came later; when Byrne started on X-Men, the book was still bimonthly (a sign of precarity).  Their biggest storyline, the Dark Phoenix saga, was the culmination of years -long plotlines in the 1970s, though most of it came out in 1980s. Perhaps the best way to look at would be to say that Claremont & Byrne's X-Men run was the 1970s comic that created 1980s Marvel.

In the lead-up to the Dark Phoenix Saga all the way through the first two years of the 1980s, Claremont (first with Cockrum, then with Byrne, then Cockrum again) established lore that would become fundamental to the X-Men going forward:

Would mutants be less hated and feared if they played more baseball?

1. The divided self.  Claremont's characters are constantly torn between two poles, hence the common refrain "Part of me wants... but part of me also..."

2. Mutant hatred as a long-term, constituent element of the X-Men's world, from local hate groups to secret societies to the top reaches of government

3. Seduction to the dark side

4. Tortured romance

5. A strong focus on female characters, and (eventually) their friendships

6. Trauma

7. Revelations of characters' secret backstories (Magneto, Moira MacTaggert)

8. The humanization and even rehabilitation of villains (tentatively begun with Magneto in X-Men 125, but becoming much more common in the 1980s)

9. Japan as a frequent location and set of tropes

10. Professor X's departures and returns

11. Space Opera (a favorite of Cockrum's). The introduction of the Shi'ar Empire (whose empress falls in love with Charles Xavier) and the Starjammers (whose leader turns out to be Cyclops' father)

12. Moral dilemmas about killing

13. Long-running subplots that could take years to pay off (if they ever do)

14. Alternate futures

15. Death and resurrection

16. Islands [2]

17. Magic (not a strong part of the Byrne and early Cockrum runs, but picking up immediately after)

18. Mind control that leads to the adoption of outfits resembling fetish gear

19. Baseball. Lots and lots of baseball. [3]

This is not even counting the many set phrases that Claremont uses throughout his run on the X-Men, to the point of near self-parody. [4]

Notes

[1] As if this backstory were not complicated enough, Claremont would eventually reveal not only that Ororo had a latent talent for magic because of a hitherto-undisclosed sorcerous heritage, but that, in her teenage years, she had a budding romance with T'Challa, the future Black Panther.

[2] The revived X-Men's first adventure involves the living, mutant island of Krakoa. Issue 104 reveals that Moira MacTaggert, introduced as the X-Men's new housekeeper, is actually a Nobel-prize winning biochemist with a Scottish research facility on Muir Island. The storyline culminating with Issue 150's "I, Magneto," takes place on a mysterious island that will briefly serve as the X-Men's home (as well as the gateway to Limbo). Over the years that follow, Krakoa is brought back in various forms,  Wolverine spends a great deal of time on the corrupt island city-state of Madripoor, the X-Men have numerous adventures involving the island city-state Genosha, which starts out as a country that enslaves mutants, is taken over by Magneto as a new mutant homeland, only to be the subject of the single largest genocide in Marvel Earth's history when Cassandra Nova wipes out the entire population. Later Cyclops establishes a mutant island utopia with the unimaginative name "Utopia." When Jonathan Hickman revitalizes the franchise in House of X/Power of X, he engages in a creative distillation of key X-Men tropes, not just resurrection from death and mutant separatism, but also the centrality of the island utopia (Krakoa once again).

[3] The X-Men first play baseball in issue 110, guest penciled by Ton Dezuniga.  Eventually it would become a frequent X-Men pastime.

[4] "I'm the best there is at what I do, but what I do isn't very nice." "Part of me... but part of me..." "And I, you, with all my heart." "For all my vaunted power..." "I possess you, body and soul!" "No quarter asked, none given."  "I...hurt"

Next: Flight of the Bird Metaphor

All-New, All-Different

When Lee and Kirby's X-Men first appeared in 1963, it was one of many creations that were released in the wake of the book that launched modern Marvel, the Fantastic Four. Some would become great hits (Spider-Man, Thor), others would forever remain second -stringers (Ant-Man, The Wasp), and a third category would need a fair amount of time to really take off  and sustain their own books (The Hulk, Iron Man).[1]  X-Men sustained a nearly seven-year-long run of original material before becoming a reprint series at the end of 1970, with occasional guest appearances by the characters in other books over the next five years.   

X-Men was a team book unlike the company's better-selling Avengers or Fantastic Four.  The Avengers, like DC's Justice League, were a combination of heroes who had their own titles (Thor, Iron Man, eventually Captain America) and characters who were building a fanbase as team players (over time, Hawkeye, Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, and the Vision).  The Fantastic Four was a family.  But the X-Men had more in common with the groups of characters favored by Jack Kirby:  the hidden civilization of the Inhumans, the far-off, self-contained adventures of the gods of Asgard, and, in the 1970s, the mysterious, isolated Eternals (who were never even meant to be part of Marvel's main continuity, let alone ruin the track record of the Marvel Cinematic Universe).  Though the X-Men's power sets could easily have been the results of the ubiquitous radioactive accidents that created the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, instead the characters were mutants: born different from the rest of humanity, and therefore marked as outcasts. It would take years for the public's love of the Avengers and their irrational fear and hatred of mutants to become a story point, but that did not matter on the pages of the X-Men comics themselves.  The purpose of a comic about mutants rather than generic superhumans was to explore alienation, racial hatred, and the possibility of reconciliation.

Where DC's heroes, and even many of Marvel's, were aspirational, the X-Men's appeal stemmed from their status as outcasts.  In the tradition of twentieth-century science fiction and fantasy written primarily by straight white men, mutants became an all-purpose metaphor for any kind of difference, facilitated by the fact that almost all the initial mutants were straight white men. [2] Mutants allowed for the exploration of alterity without the baggage of actually existing alterity.  The mutants could stand for Jews without being coded as Jewish, for African Americans without being Black, and, eventually, for queer people without explicit depiction of queerness. Sixty years later, the limitations of this approach are glaring, but this does not take away from its power at a time when real explorations of difference, particularly in a medium intended for children, were few and far between.  The X-Men offered avenues of identification for readers who might not even know that they needed it.

X-Men did not keep its original creative team for long; Kirby was frequently joined by a co-penciler,  and he and Lee both left after issue 19. During their tenure, they introduced several important features of X-Men lore:  Magneto, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Professor Xavier's evil half-brother the Juggernaut, and the Sentinels.  Though the Sentinels would not become frequent antagonists until years later, these mutant-hunting robots signified that more was at stake than in an ordinary superhero story.  Mutants were being threatened with genocide. [3] Lee and Kirby were succeeded by Roy Thomas as writer and Werner Roth (and then Don Heck) on pencils. Other teams followed, but the comic only started to stand out again when it was reinvigorated by younger artists (Jim Steranko, Barry Smith, and Neil Adams).  Thomas and Adams' run on the comic remains beloved, but cancellation (in the form of the shift to an all-reprint format) put this brief experiment to an end.

Yet the X-Men still had their fans, including in the Marvel Bullpen itself.  During the Seventies, both Marvel and DC were willing to take chances on a wide variety of new books and new approaches, which led to Len Wein and Dave Cockrum creating a new team of X-Men in Giant-Size X-Men 1 ("Deadly Genesis!" May 1975). The next issue of the regular book (94) dispensed with the reprints (in mid-storyline, much to the frustration of my eight-year-old self) and continued the story of these new characters. All the old X-Men were gone except for Cyclops (though Jean Grey would quickly, and memorably, return), and they took Len Wein with them. Chris Claremont was credited as Wein's co-writer on issues 94-95,  co-wrote the next issue with Bill Mantlo, and became the sole scripter for a very, very long time. [4] 

The Legion of Ethnic Stereotypes

As part of a team with Dave Cockrum (94-107 and 110, returning  not long after the Eighties began) and John Byrne  (108-109, 111-143; for much of this time, Byrne was credited as co-writer), Claremont carved out an expansive corner of the Marvel Universe that made the rest of the company's mainstream adventures look tame.  Fresh off of redesigning costumes on DC's long-running Legion of Superheroes, Cockrum brought a modern and exciting look to the characters, most of whom he designed.[5] Wein had established the new X-Men as a multiracial, multinational team, and Claremont leaned into this diversity hard.  Granted, he did so with a stunning amount of stereotyping: every Japanese character has samurai blood and is obsessed with honor, Native Americans are always angry, and always announcing their tribal identity, while Irish, Scottish,  and Southern characters' accents are transcribed in an almost indecipherable manner.  But it was diversity nonetheless.

Notes

[1] The original comic series featuring the X-Men has undergone a number of name changes. It started out as simple X-Men, and was renamed The Uncanny X-Men with issue 114 (October 1976). In 1991, a second title was launched under the old name, X-Men  (often referred to as "Adjectiveless X-Men), renamed New X-Men when Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely came aboard with issue 114 (May 2001).  Various relaunches have recycled all three of these names over the years.

[2] In 2015, founding X-Man Bobby Drake (Iceman) came out as gay.  Though fans had speculated about his sexuality for years (with some writers dropping the occasional broad hint), it's safe to say that he did not function as a "gay" character in the 1960s.

[3] Of course, this term was not used in relation to mutants until much later.

[4] X-Men 106 was a fill-in by Mantlo with Claremont's framing sequence that clumsily fit into the ongoing story.  When Marvel reprinted the first decade of Claremont's X-Men in a monthly comic called Classic X-Men (later X-Men Classics), they left this one out.

[5] Cockrum developed the look for Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, Thunderbird, and the re-design of Jean Grey as Phoenix.  Banshee, Cyclops, and Sunfire had already been established, while Wolverine had recently been introduced in an issue of The Incredible Hulk (drawn by Herb Trimpe but designed by John Romita, Sr.; he was co-created by Romita, Roy Thomas, and Len Wein).  

Next: New Recipe X-Men

Welcome to the X-Men

Chapter 1

Surviving the Experience (Chris Claremont and the X-Men)

Welcome to the X-Men

There are worse ways to track the evolution of Marvel than focusing on the transformation of the X-Men from poor-selling cult favorite in the 1960s to bestseller in the 1970s, unstoppable franchise in the 1980s and 1990s, to the subject of a creative rebirth in the 2000s, victim of inter-corporate fighting in the mid-2010s, and yet another renaissance led by Jonathan Hickman in 2019. [1]  Writing about Marvel in the 1980s without discussing the X-Men would be like writing about 1960s popular music while ignoring the Beatles. No doubt it's possible, but what would be the point?

The X-Men during this decade offer a wealth of material to examine, as well as a number of useful lenses through which to examine it.  As a story about Marvel and the marketplace, the X-Men are a fascinating study in the development of a multi-book franchise despite the misgivings of the X-Men's central creative figure, the writer Chris Claremont.  As the story of Claremont's seventeen-year run on the X-Men comics, it shows how the books changed along with the artists with whom he worked.  Or as the tale of the balance of power between the man most closely associated with the franchise and the dictates of the company that published it, it is that rare case when the writer manages to incorporate nearly everything the editors impose on him while still maintaining his overarching vision.  The story of the X-Men is also the story of a particular kind of storytelling: the apotheosis of Marvel's facility with soap-operatic long-term plotting, elevated by Claremont to near-Scheherazade levels of narrative complexity. And, last but not least, Claremont's X-Men succeeds thanks to his almost pathological preoccupation with depicting his character's inner lives as clearly expressed thoughts and speeches, and never more effectively than when he uses this approach in the service of exploring his female characters' response to trauma.

After Kitty Pride arrives at the Xavier institute for the first time, the cover of X-Men 139 introduces a line will stick with the franchise long after Claremont's departure: "Welcome to the X-Men, Kitty Pride. Hope you survive the experience!" Almost three years later, when, Rogue, up to that point a supervillain, is accepted into the fold by Xavier, the cover repeats the phrase, substituting Rogue's name for Kitty's.  Havok later gets the same greeting, and soon it moves from the cover to the stories themselves:  old X-Men use it on new X-Men, almost as if they were old fans greeting the next generation. The X-Men is all about "surviving the experience," whatever that experience might happen to be.

The Xavier School really needs to work on its marketing

It would take years for this theme to become central to the X-Men mythos.  When the 1980s began, not only were the X-Men a seventeen-year-old property, but Claremont had been working on the book for five years.  The first issue of X-Men with a 1980 cover date was number 132 ("And Hellfire Is Their Name!" pencils by John Byrne), not quite halfway through the most consequential storyline in the franchise's history.  A little bit of backstory is in order.

Note

[1] Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely reinvigorated the line with their New X-Men in 2001. A decade later, the company tried to push The Inhumans at the expense of the X-Men. The Inhumans are 1960s Lee/Kirby creation with a small but devoted fanbase; though mostly guest stars in other comics, they had their own series and miniseries throughout the last three decades of the twentieth century (including Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee's remarkable 1998 12-issue series published as part of the Marvel Knights imprint).  Though Marvel editorial has never confirmed it, the (temporary) retreat from highlighting the X-Men, along with the suspension of the publication of The Fantastic Four(the series that started Marvel as we know it), is widely understood to be the result of a dispute between Marvel's corporate owner, Disney, and Twentieth Century Fox. In the 1990s, when Marvel was experiencing significant financial distress, the company sold the film and television right for the X-Men and the Fantastic Four to Fox.  The Fantastic Four films were not hits, but the first X-Men movie helped launch the current era of superhero dominance at the Multiplex.  When Iron Man (2008) kicked off Marvel's incredible box-office success with Disney (and Disney's acquisition of Marvel the following year), the newly-formed Marvel Cinematic Universe could not use either of the Fox properties (and only managed to include Spider-Man after making a deal with Sony).    Disney announced its acquisition of Fox on December 14, 2017. The deal became final in 2019, which also happens to be the year that Marvel recommitted itself to the X-Men line.

Next: All-New, All-Different 

What Comes Next

Though the Eighties ended 35 years ago, Marvel Comics in the 1980s is very much a work in progress.  As this introduction has already indicated, there are a number of creative accomplishments and important writers and artists who stand out against an increasingly homogenized backdrop.  They cannot all be covered here, nor should they. I am still in the process of figuring out what works for the book, and what works for me. 

Weirdly, this was available through Creative Commons

At this point, I can say with certainly that Chapter One will be about Chris Claremont and the X-Men.  What is currently planned as Chapter Four looks at the Marvel comics of J.M. DeMatteis, particularly The Defenders, Kraven's Last Hunt, and Moonshadow.  There will be a chapter on Frank Miller's Daredevil run, most likely a chapter on Walt Simonson's Thor, and possibly a chapter on John Byrne's Fantastic Four. I'm also planning a chapter on Marvel's various experiments in publishing throughout the decade--the Epic line, Shadowline, the Marvel Graphic Novels  line, and, if I can stomach it, the New Universe. As always, plans may change.

Meet me back next week so we can talk about mutants.

First-Person Shooter

This book is not primarily about Jim Shooter, but about the range of comics published during his tenure as editor-in-chief.  Yet it is appropriate that the introduction begin and end with him:  Marvel's successes and failures during the 1980s reflected the strengths, weaknesses, and contradictory imperatives of Shooter's own work as a writer.  HIs mandate to make the protagonists' conflict between desire and duty demanded attention to character at the same time that it rendered these character beats clumsy and schematic.  The necessity of completing most stories in a single issue (a Shooter diktat) did him no favors when he returned to The Avengers, while his bottom-line preference for company wide crossovers undermined everything that made him an otherwise good writer: there was little room for the niceties of fine dialogue or character work. The results were often more marketable than they were memorable. 

It would be tempting to write off the entire decade of Marvel's output with the same words, but it would also be sorely unfair.  Though most of Marvel's best creators of the 1970s fled not long after Shooter took over, a number of teams at Marvel managed to produce excellent work that is still acclaimed to this day.  In some cases, they hit the sweet spot combining the artistic and the commercial; in others, they took advantage of editorial benign neglect of failing titles; and, in a third, they availed themselves of the opportunities provided by Marvel's brief experiments with new publishing imprints that provided much greater latitude.  Overworked and spread too thin, Shooter was poorly equipped to exploit the loopholes in the system he helped create, but a small group of newcomers (and even smaller collection of veterans) found a way to make theirs Marvel.

Next: Chapter One: Surviving the Experience (Chris Claremont and the X-Men)

Crossing the Line

Upon his return to the book in Avengers 211 ("...By Force of Mind!", September 1981), Jim Shooter accomplishes more than his aforementioned shake-up of the roster: he uses Hank and Jan's failing marriage as one of the prime movers of his brief run on the book (211-222, 224), with repercussions that every writer who takes on Hank Pym is forced to address.  Repeatedly over the next two years, Shooter and his successors will have the case for Hank's life-long instability made by various Avengers members as they think back over the past, providing a handy recap for the readers along the way. This is not just a helpful narrative device; it is an attempt to smooth over the suddenness of Hank's precipitous downfall.

"Men of Deadly Pride!" (Avengers 212, October 1981, by Shooter, Alan Kupperberg and Green) (re-) introduces the new roster by showing their morning routines: Tigra nearly scaring poor Jarvis to death, Tony Stark donning his Iron Man armor after a one-night stand for the flying equivalent of the walk of shame, Captain America leaping out of bed and singing World War II songs, and Donald Blake transforming into Thor.  Each of these moments is a distillation of the character to his or her essence, and the same holds true for Hank and Jan when they get out of bed. Jan tries to be light and playful, but Hank is the embodiment of barely suppressed rage. In a  particularly odd turn, when Jan asks which costume she should wear, Hank (already dressed as Yellowjacket) incinerates one of them with his sting-blasts.  Hank's assertion of his identity always comes at the cost of Jan's.

This issue and the ones that follow undermine Shooter's careful thematic planning with character development whose pace is so frantic that it verges on caricature.  For whatever reason, Shooter no longer had the patience for a slow burn; overnight (literally, since the issue starts in the morning), Hank has become even more aggressive and overbearing that he was when his psychotic break led him to assume the Yellowjacket identity for the first time. His insecurities are nicely paralleled in the issue's main plot, which features a powerful fairy queen who has spent centuries catering to the ego of her much less impressive husband.  Hank makes the near-fatal mistake of attacking the sorceress at precisely the moment Captain America was getting through to her, and suffers the added humiliation of being saved by Jan.

All this leads to the moment that made Hank the most toxic character ever to appear on the Avengers' Roster: in the very next issue, he hits Jan, leaving her with a black eye.  Shooter would later claim that this was not what he intended for the story:

 [t]here is a scene in which Hank is supposed to have accidentally struck Jan while throwing his hands up in despair and frustration—making a sort of “get away from me” gesture while not looking at her.  Bob Hall, who had been taught by John Buscema to always go for the most extreme action, turned that into a right cross!  There was no time to have it redrawn, which, to this day has caused the tragic story of Hank Pym to be known as the “wife-beater” story (Shooter, "Hank Pym Was Not a Wife-Beater," March 29, 2011, https://jimshooter.com/2011/03/hank-pym-was-not-wife-beater.html/) [1]

Regardless of his intent, for most of Shooter's abbreviated run, the Hank/Jan dynamic plays out on the literal level with a shocking lack of subtlety exacerbated by the accelerated pacing, at the same time that their character development is refracted through other characters with a much later touch.   Tigra, the newcomer to the team, appears to have the same lightness of spirit that Jan affected (at least before her break with Hank), but we soon learn that she does not have the courage to meet the threats faced by the Avengers every day. [2] At the same time that Jan sets aside her affected insouciance, quickly stepping up to become team leader, Tigra takes the opposite path.  A similar parallel develops a few issues later, but with the valences reversed: Jan's newfound confidence finds a much darker counterpart in the behavior of former Avenger Moondragon, who uses her mental powers to enslave an entire planet.  Where Jan once meekly suffered physical abuse at her husband's hand, now Moondragon kills her own father for daring to stand up to her.

As for Hank, his own insecurity and arrogance are reflected not just in the fairy queen's husband, or the jealous and tormented Ghost Rider encountered in a subsequent issue, or the megalomaniacal but profoundly insecure Molecule Man, or the pathetically outmatched Fabian Fabian Stankiewicz, who builds an exoskeleton to challenge the Avengers, but in yet another (male-coded) robot creation. This time, Salvation-1 (or "Sal") is meant to attack the Avengers during Hank's court martial; Yellowjacket should then save the day by striking him in his vulnerable spot. Naturally, he fails (again) and has to be rescued by Jan (again).  This lampshades his ongoing hostility to Jan:  the real problem is that she knows all his vulnerabilities.

By the 1980s, Shooter had done more to flesh out the characters of both Hank and Jan Pym than all his predecessors combined, following up on the important groundwork he laid in his 1970s run.  The newly-assertive Wasp is certainly a better fit for the times, and her growth, in reaction to Hank's abuse, feels fairly organic.  Hank, on the other hand, is completely unhinged in the two consecutive issues that re-introduce him to the reader, while the Avengers' rush to justice after his mistake with the fairy queen comes out of nowhere. [19] What could have been an insightful examination of an unstable and abusive personality all too quickly devolves into near-caricature. For all that Shooter advanced the characterization of Hank Pym, his 1980s run on The Avengers was a missed opportunity, providing a great deal for other writers to work with over the next four decades, but falling flat in its execution.

Next: First-Person Shooter

Note

[1] Mark Millar, for whom subtlety has never been a virtue, revisits this scene in The Ultimates (in a separate, updated Marvel continuity) and manages to make it infinitely worse.  This is not the first time Hank has hurt Jan, and the writing seems to put some of the blame on her for being "difficult."  At the end of a knock-down, drag-out fight, Hank uses a vacuum cleaner to capture and nearly kill his wasp-sized wife.

[2] Tigra has little patience for Hank's insecurities, but years later, becomes romantically involved with him, or rather, with a Skrull masquerading as Pym.  She even gives birth to a son fathered by the Skrull duplicate using Hank's DNA, and, eventually, she and the real Hank embark on a romantic relationship. 

Daddy's Issues

Shooter started to put the pieces together during his first run on The Avengers, specifically issues 161 and 162 ("Beware the Ant-Man!"  and "The Bride of Ultron," both by Shooter, Perez, and Pablo Marcos).  In a clever variation on Hank's first appearance as Yellowjacket, this story has Ant-Man show up at Avengers Mansion with no memory of the past several years; not recognizing his teammates, he attacks them , before being stopped by the Wasp.  His psychotic break and assumption of the Yellowjacket identity had let to their marriage; now, he does not even know that Jan is his wife.  In all of Shooter's work on the couple, Hank's decline is matched by Jan's ascendence. She had spent her entire career trying to stay within Hank's shadow, no easy task as he shifted from ant-size to giant, but this also means that she has been observing him more closely than anyone. It is Jan who, after knocking her husband out, reminds both her colleagues and the readers just how unstable her husband has always been:

It's almost as if he's never been comfortable with the hero's role that seemed to be demanded of him.

He gave up being the Ant-Man to become Giant-Man--then he took the identity of Goliath--and finally he abandoned his growth powers to become Yellow-Jacket!

Jan reveals that his research was going even worse than his heroic career, with fits of destructive rage that sent her seeking psychiatric advice. That advice  (to reinforce his positive behavior)  in turn explains some of the more frustrating aspects of Jan's character: her apparent flightiness and incessant good cheer were part of a desperate attempt to prop up her unstable husband's ego.

That ego could never be sufficiently housed in one identity, costume, or even body.  In the original appearance of both the Vision and Ultron, Thomas had established that Ultron suffered from an extreme version of the Oedipal complex (hence his desire to kill Pym, his "father"); later, Englehart attributed an Oedipal motivation to Ultron's creation of the Vision as his "son."  Now Shooter turns Ultron into Pym's wandering id; like the originally psychotic Yellowjacket, he is free to act out on Pym's repressed desires, even reenacting the original break by erasing Pym's memories of his entire life since his early Ant-Man days (leading him to attack the current Avengers as imposters).

Ultron's scheme here does what he always does, but on a larger scale, bringing together this Oedipal anxieties with Pym's identity crises and inferiority complex in order by externalizing his "father's" endless proliferation of identities onto other, newly created beings.  Hank Pym, childless (at least until a twenty-first century retcon), plagued by feelings of inadequacy, can only resort to the same tactic again and again: treating his very self as a canvas onto which to paint a new facade.  Ultron may also engage in continually self-improvement (he has only just abandoned calling himself "Ultron 5," or "Ultron 7," as if he were a new version of a popular sports car), but what he really excels at is creating new, artificial lives.  If the Vision was the rebellious son, now he will use the brain patterns of the kidnapped Janet Pym and the scientific genius of her addled husband to create a wife for himself, a robotic bride given the very on-the-nose name of Jocasta.  Jocasta, like nearly all of Ultron's creations, rebels, allying with the Avengers and existing on the margins of the Marvel Universe for the next several decades.  But all of this can be considered the extensions of Hank Pym's messy psyche.  And if Jocasta is a robotic version of Jan, her rebellion is also a warning:  Hank cannot control her.

Can’t live with ‘em, can’t replace ‘em with a robotic sex toy duplicate

From this description, and with the benefit of hindsight, all of this does not bode well for Jan, or for the Pyms' marriage.  Virtually every aspect of Hank's personality (or personalities) is a red flag: his insecurities, his obsessions with work and success, his casual dismissal of Jan's concerns, and, of course, his tendency toward dissociation.   In all of these relationships, Jan (and, by extension, Jocasta) is the one element not somehow based on Hank himself.  The Ultron-related dramas in which Hank gets entangled are not just Oediipal, but solipsistic. If it weren't for Jan, all his conflicts would be essentially a version of Robert Heinlein's classic story "All You Zombies," only without time travel: everyone turns out to be another version of the story's hero.

Next: Crossing the Line

The Triumphant Downfall of Hank Pym

Jim Shooter's high-handed leadership of Marvel makes him an easy, and justified, target of criticism.  His enthusiasm for handing over established heroes' costumes to newcomers led to a formulaic set of predicable transformations, while his demand that Doug Moench kill of the cast of Master of Kung-Fu and turn Shang-Chi into a villain showed a preference for dramatic change over character-based evolution. As a writer, however, Shooter demonstrated a knack for changing a character's status quo without doing violence to the character's history.  In his two stints as the writer of The Avengers (spanning a ten-year period between 1976 and 1986), Shooter turned an underdeveloped B-lister into a tortured soul whose mental instability undermined the cohesiveness of the team, ruined his marriage, and set him on a path to near-villainy, at the same time showing that the hero's breakdown was the logical outcome of years of storytelling.  By delving into the psyche of scientist and adventurer Hank Pym, Shooter implicitly argued that, for years, we had been understanding the Avengers all wrong.  Fans paid attention to flashy headliners like Captain America and Thor, along with mainstays like the Vision and the Scarlet Witch, whose exploits were told almost exclusively within the pages of The Avengers. But the inadvertent and unnoticed prime mover behind so much Avengers drama was the hero originally known as Ant Man.

Created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby in 1961, Hank Pym was a character who never quite made it to the big time, no matter how many opportunities his writers and artists gave him.  Not long after his first appearance in Tales to Astonish 27, Pym, along with his partner and future wife, Janet Van Dyne (the Wasp), became a founding Avenger, featured in the comic's very first issue.  But he and the Wasp would leave the Avengers only a year after they founded the team, returning periodically ever since.

For Lee, Thomas, and their collaborators, Hank Pym was as much a problem to be solved as he was a character to develop. If Ant-Man was not a runaway hit, why not turn him into the 12-foot-tall Giant Man (Tales to Astonish 49).  If Giant Man was an unremarkable name, why not call him Goliath (Avengers 28)? His costume would also change repeatedly (as would the Wasp's--Jan was, after all, a fashion designer).  In their attempts to make Hank more interesting, his writers continually put him through the wringer.  He would be trapped at giant size, stuck at ant-size, and even be responsible for the creation of one of the Avengers' greatest foes, Ultron. His sudden marriage to the Wasp under the new guise of the Yellowjacket was surprising, as was his decision to maintain the identity, but the ramifications of his assumption of yet another heroic persona were left undeveloped until Shooter came alone. [1]

Reader, I married him

What Shooter made clear was that Hank suffered from a life-long, slow-moving identity crisis. [2]  Some of this could be dismissed as editorially driven:  as we  have seen, Hank's chroniclers spent years trying to give him a compelling hook, effectively rewriting his history and altering his personality repeatedly. In his first appearance, he has neither a costume nor a superhero name, because he is not even part of the superhero genre; as "The Man in the Anthill," he is only one of countless  throwaway sci-fi/monster protagonists in the Lee/Kirby repertoire before Lee decides to make him part of the superhero revival.  Just a year and a half later, Ant-Man's origin is retold to make him simultaneously a more tragic and more passive figure.  Now his choice to experiment in size-control is an oblique result of his Hungarian first wife's (mis)quotation of Proverbs: "Go to the ants, thou dullard!", humorously but pointedly suggesting her new husband lacks drive.  After her sudden and mysterious death, Hank resolves to fight injustice as Ant-Man, eventually (but in the same issue) recruiting Jan to be his partner after she, too, suffers the loss of a loved one (her father).

No matter his size, Hank suffers from the instability of his ego and a limited understanding of his own agency. Thanks to revelations, retcons, and sudden changes in plotlines, the very continuity of Hank's consciousness is under repeated threat. The Marvel universe's first, and most powerful artificial intelligence, Ultron, was created by Hank in between issues of the Avengers, but Hank himself had no recollection of these events after his own creation turns upon him and wipes his memory.  Just a few issues after Ultron's introduction, the Wasp agrees to marry the mysterious, swaggering Yellowjacket, who turns about to be an alternate personality resulting from Hank's accidental exposure to chemicals in his laboratory.  In the shorthand of mad science, it just so happens  that the chemical release Hank from the self-consciousness and inhibitions that have prevented him from asking Jan to marry him (despite the unambiguous signals she gives him that she would say yes).  As the writer of The Avengers, Roy Thomas showed that Hank Pym was a mess.  Yet on the comic's pages, Yellowjacket is simply the latest redesign of a character that never acquired the popularity of his teammates, while as the next step in Hank Pym's evolution, this new name and costume were a cry for help that neither the characters nor the writers noticed for another decade. 

Next: Daddy’s Issues

Notes

[1] Hank's chemically-induced breakdown, assumption of a new identity, successful deception of most of his teammates, and shotgun wedding with the Wasp were finally given a believable psychological context by Joe Casey, Will Rosado, and Tom Palmer in the 2006-2007 eight-issue miniseries Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes II, which built on the work Shooter did Pym during his runs on The Avengers.  

[12] Eventually, Pym would be diagnosed as bipolar.

Heroism as Hospice

This a series whose second issue begins with a "highdive," the Horde's practice of forcing human captives out of airlock while in earth orbit: the new recruits look up to see streaks of light falling in the sky, each one a human body burning up upon re-entry.   The Horde themselves wear human fingerbones and ears as jewelry, the visible reminder of their parasitical habits (they can't get enough of Earth's entertainment, chocolate, and human suffering). In fact, the Horde's consumption habits provide one of the keys to understanding just how Strikeforce: Morituri works: set nearly a hundred years in the future, all its characters, both human and alien, are at least in part defined by their relationship with twentieth-century popular heroic entertainments and their twenty-first century legacy.  The fact that Harold, the initial viewpoint character, is engaging in the exact same form of wartime journaling as his The 'Nam counterpart is a happy accident, but it demonstrates that, at least in form, Strikeforce:Morituri is borrowing from war genre traditions.  But beyond the first-person narration, Strikeforce: Morituri is reacting much more pointedly to the tropes not just of superhero comics, but of 1980s Marvel storytelling while it is still evolving. [1]

After all, not just anyone can go through the Morituri process, survive, and gain superpowers.   The only viable candidates are those who happen to have the right genetic markers, and such candidates are few and far between.  If contemporary readers of the first issue did not already notice the overlap with Marvel's most successful franchise, the X-Men, then the second issue made the comparison impossible to ignore.  The cover shows all six Morituri candidates wearing identical blue and yellow form-fitting costumes, fighting snakes and lasers under the heading, "Can you survive a walk in the Garden?"   Their clothing may not be identical to the traditional X-Men training uniforms (at that point still worn by the New Mutants team), but they were certainly close. The "Garden" in question is a transparent nod to the X-Men's Danger Room, where the mutants undergo combat simulations that are meant to test them without harming them.  The Danger Room's safety protocols had a nasty habit of failing at opportune moments, a plot device that injected an element of risk into an otherwise stale X-Men scenario. [2] The Garden is Gillis's critique of both the Danger Room in particular and superhero comics in general:  it is designed not to hone the Morituri's abilities, but to bring them out of latency by subjecting the volunteers to near-lethal stress.   The team's minders have agreed to a cruel, potentially fatal scenario justified by the exigencies of wartime. In plot terms this makes sense, and continues to elevate the stakes of Gillis's fictional future, but it also turns the leaders of Project: Morituri into surrogates for the creators of Strikeforce: Morituri.  The characters must be tortured because the genre itself demands it.  And this is only one step away from the recognition of the reader's own complicity:  we read Marvel books about physically and emotionally tormented super-teams because the stories of their suffering give us pleasure.  Small wonder that two out of three of the second generation Morituri had powers involving emotional manipulation: "Scatterbrain" projected a broad range of emotional states, while "Scaredycat" projected only fear).  Within the story, their powers crudely enact the effects the comics themselves were supposed to create.

Total Danger Room rip-off! Marvel should sue! Oh, wait…

At the same time, Strikeforce: Morituri is free to indulge the contemporary superhero preoccupation with death unburdened by the near-immortality of corporate IP:  Gillis and Anderson have created a story that builds readers attachments to characters while also maintaining the protagonists's fungibility:  had it continued in near-perpetuity, Strikeforce: Morituri would have been an almost-perpetual motion machine for the creation and destruction of new characters.

While the book's main theme is undeniably mortality, Strikeforce: Morituri is also about the affective feedback loop binding the comics, their creators, and their readers.   Harold, the viewpoint character whose sudden death in Issue 6 undercuts readers expectations that the center of narrative focus is likely to last until the end, is motivated not just be righteous anger at the alien invaders, but also by the superhero comics he read as a child.  Over time, Gillis makes clear that these comics are not just a generic stand-in for the ones produced in our world; they are, in fact, Marvel Comics.   As an adult about to volunteer for the Morituri process, Harold reads and re-reads the sequential adventures of the Black Watch, the now-dead team of Morituri prototypes.   These comics-within-a comic are wartime propaganda, like Captain America during World War II.  But they also introduce an element of optimism, however metafictional:  despite the perennial, predictions of the industry's impending demise, ninety years from now, comics are still going strong.  The Morituri themselves even get their own in-universe comic: a hacky, over-the-top melodrama whose emotional, expository dialogue is a cross between Stan Lee and Chris Claremont.

Nor are comics the only medium that is thriving:  one of the pleasures of Stikeforce: Morituri is seeing the story refracted through multiple media.  In addition to a children's animated show, Hollywood has created a live-action version to entertain and uplift earth's population. One of the actors who played a first-generation Morituri is so inspired by the original model that he himself volunteers for the process, joining the second generation.  Strikeforce is almost as media-saturated as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, repeatedly employing television broadcasts to bring the characters (and the readers) up to speed.  Appropriately for a superhero comic that interrogates its own form, Strikeforce is both a futuristic extrapolation and post-apocalyptic reclamation of late twentieth-century mass culture.  The futurism is not particularly novel (television is now holographic), but the series' main antagonists are unimaginative scavengers who collect and consume cultural, economic, and (literal) human resources with little regard for their original intent.  They cannot get enough of the Earth's detritus; their near-addiction to chocolate (junk food!) is a perfect example of their culture of consumption.  Their ships are full of looted alien artifacts that they do not even attempt to understand (and that will eventually lead to their downfall). Theirs is a cargo cult in reverse: instead of waiting for ships to bring magical cargo to their shores, they fly their own (stolen?) ships to plunder and pillage everything they could want from more creative civilizations.  The very name that humans use to describe them is doubly evocative: literally, it defines them as an endless, undifferentiated barbarian mass, but homophony also suggests one of their essential characteristics: the Horde are hoarders.   Thus they are not just savage, genocidal monsters: they are bad fans.

Next: The Triumphant Downfall of Hank Pym

Notes

[1] Add footnote for José Alaniz' great chapter on this series. 

[2] Nearly two decades later, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men would reveal that the Danger Room was sentient, which not only meant that Professor Xavier was knowingly enslaving a thinking being for his own purposes, but that the room's malfunctions might also be thought of as manifestations of its resentment.

End of Life, with Benefits

Like Ka-zar, Strikeforce: Morituri also had a limited influence on subsequent comics.  Created by Peter B. Gillis and Brent Anderson (of Ka-Zar the Savage fame), it did not cross over with the mainstream Marvel universe (although a dimension-hopping villain in X-Force 4 and 5 (2014) does steal a superpower-producing technology that is obviously from the Morituri world).. Perhaps fittingly for a series about mortality, Strikeforce: Morituri is also a rare example of corporate IP that has not been subject to resurrection; though a television series based on the comic has long been said to be in the works, Gillis's claim to ownership of the property had likely contributed to Marvel's tacit decision to leave it alone.

Nonetheless, Strikeforce: Morituri had a stronger connection to the traditions of mainstream corporate comics, even as it subverted generic expectations.  In point of fact, the book's innovations are legible precisely because of its relative proximity to the superhero world that was Marvel's bread and butter.  Men with guns and grenades in Vietnam (or any fictional representation of a real-world military conflict) can be heroes, but rarely pass for superheroes.  With no superpowers, secret identities, individual sense of mission, vigilante status, or eye-catching costumes, they belong to a genre of their own.  The Nazi-fighting Captain America and Wonder Woman were huge successes, but they were costumed, superpowered paragons who acted in concert with allied force but with a great deal of autonomy. Their very presence in the European theater pushed their military adventures into the new genre that Timely (Marvel) and National (DC) were developing in real time.

Strikeforce: Morituri was a much more conscious amalgamation of superhero and military tropes than could be found in the comics of the Golden Age. The entire series was structured around an ongoing war--with aliens.  The protagonists enlisted or were drafted--to gain superpowers that would kill them within the year. They were subordinate to the military, but wore colorful outfits with snappy codenames to match. And, of course, the series was set nine decades into the future, throwing science fiction into the mix.  The 'Nam was a war comic for readers who did not necessarily read comics; Strikeforce: Morituri was a war comics for comics readers who did not necessarily read war stories.

No, really, they’re all going to die

Anderson's visuals certainly did more than their fair share to sell the premise and the characters: the mastery of facial expressions, body language, and action he already displayed in Ka-Zar the Savage were an excellent fit with Gillis's writing (although the design of the alien Horde, whose bulbous pink chins bore an unfortunate resemblance to a human scrotum, was not destined to be a classic).  As for Gillis, though he never achieved the fame of Strikeforce's co-creator, he had spent the Eighties writing intriguing, underappreciated comics that tended to play in a minor key. Gillis put his characters through emotional crises involving psychological and physical loss, sometimes pushing them down dark paths.  His Doctor Strange loses an eye and apprentices with a black magician, while his treatment of the psychically-powered, pathologically arrogant Moondragon rescued her from years of one-dimensional characterization while nonetheless chronicling her descent into villainy. [1] Even his two issues of Super-Villain Team-Up were an exploration of physical and psychological torture, focusing on Israeli Shin Bet Commandos trapped in a latter-day Nazi concentration camp run by the Red Skull and a clone of Adolf Hitler. 

Those two issues happened to be the last ones in the series, a reminder of Gillis's mixed fortune at Marvel:  again and again, he was the one to close out an ongoing comic.  His two years on The Defenders were the book's last, while his four years of writing the Doctor Strange character spanned three different series.  Gillis inheritedThe Micronauts after Bill Mantlo left, writing all 20 issues of the second volume. But his start, with the last issue of the previous one, meant that he wrapped up their adventures twice in two years.

Curiously, cancellation and reboots played to Gillis's strengths.  Gillis displayed a true affinity for the elegiac, perhaps inadvertently specializing in farewells.  When he was handed the final issue of the first volume of Micronauts, the team had just killed their archenemy, Baron Karza, for what seemed to be the last time, but only after he had committed global genocide on Homeworld. Gillis's debut ("Homeworld," Gillis and Kelley Jones, Micronauts 59, August 1984) is virtually action-free, as the entire team struggles to mourn the dead.  They decide to record their stories for a telepathic beacon to be left on Homeworld, culminating in two pages of melancholy poetry. When it is time to end the second volume, Gillis had already established that the wreckage of Homeworld was somehow destroying the entire Microverse (the realm in which the Micronauts lived). The only way to save it was for each Micronaut to jump into the Prometheus Pit (an interdimensional portal) and imprint their life force onto a section of Homeworld. Gillis foregoes the (literal) poetry this time, but once again, each Micronaut is allotted a few pages to catalogue their regrets and make peace with their deaths.  The Defenders ends on a similar note: every member of the team who is not a former X-Man (and therefore potentially valuable IP) dies in the last pages.  In order to stop their possessed teammate Moondragon and the soulless, corrupted version of the Gargoyle, Valkyrie and her teammates give up their lives. [2]

Eighties Marvel saw more than its fair share of death: the end of the X-Men's Dark Phoenix Saga, Elektra's murder at the hands of Bullseye, the Mutant Massacre (X-Men again), and the first in the series of Marvel Graphic Novels: Jim Starlin's The Death of Captain Marvel (which delivered exactly what it promised).  Phoenix's death was operatic, Elektra's gorey, and Captain Marvel's portentious; J. M. de Matteis (the subject of Chapter 4) killed off his Marvel characters right and left, with a combination of drippy sentiment and New Age "wisdom" (Aunt May, various supporting characters in Defenders and Moonshadow). But Gillis's protagonists faced death with reluctant, stoic acceptance and deep sadness at leaving their world behind.  In Gillis's comics, a quietly heroic death, devoid of histrionics, retroactively confers heroism on his characters.  Again and again, Gillis teaches a master class in death with dignity.

Or at least he does when he is not writing Strikeforce: Morituri, a comic that turns Eighties Marvel's death obsession on its head. 

Next: Heroism as Hospice

Notes

[1] Created by Jim Starlin as part of his Thanos saga, Moondragon proved difficult for subsequent writers to characterize after Starlin's departure.  Steve Englehart emphasized her sense of superiority as a "goddess of the mind" in the last issues of his Avengers run, while Jim Shooter made her progressively less sympathetic over the course of his two terms on the book. When The Defenders underwent an editorially-mandated sharp change of direction during J.M. de Matteis' last year as writer, Moondragon, now a somewhat repentant murderer, was forced onto the team by the Valkyrie as part of Odin's attempt at her rehabilitation. Gillis retconned her backstory to explain that she was intermittently possessed by a cosmic force known as the Dragon of the Moon, who took advantage of her vanity to slowly eat away at her soul.  Moondragon's plight provided much of the plot and nearly all of the emotional resonance of Gillis' work on The Defenders.

[2] Gillis's sole contribution to the Tomb of Dracula magazine ends as a ballerina who has been turned into a vampire stakes herself onstage, applauded by an incognito Dracula sitting in the audience.

The Brief Return of War Comics

In December 1986, Marvel brought out two very unusual projects that turned out to have a great deal in common, at least initially.  Each of them centered on an idealistic, blond-haired, blue-eyed North American young man who has enlisted in the fight against a far-off enemy.  Each young man is an aspiring writer whose journal entries, combined with his newcomer status, make him a compelling viewpoint character.  One of these men, Private First Class Edward Marks, is fighting the Viet Cong in the 1960s.  The other, Harold Everson, has volunteered to gain superpowers that will kill him in less than a year so that he can help Earth beat back the extraterrestrial Horde that arrived in 2069.  Neither character would last much more than a year, though their series continued: The 'Nam would run for almost seven years, while its science fictional counterpart Strikeforce: Morituri and its sequel miniseries, Electric Undertow, continued for four. [1]

The 'Nam was commissioned by Marvel editor Larry Hama and created by fellow veteran Doug Murray with artist Michael Golden.  Running from 1986 to 1993, The 'Nam was a surprise success, garnering attention and praise from constituencies that typically did not overlap with mainstream comics (it beat Oliver Stone's Platoon  in a veteran's group's award category called "best media portrayal of the VIetnam War."). It suffered little interference from Marvel continuity, at least before a desperate attempt at publicity that included Frank Castle, the future Punisher (Issues 52-53, January-February 1991). Marvel even attempted to expand The 'Nam 's audience by reprinting the first twenty issues in a black-and-white magazine.  Though hampered by a Comics Code that sharply restricted the comic's vocabulary and violence, it still managed to convey both the daily tedium and intermittent terror of a war that was not yet a distant memory, including a cover that reproduced one of the war's most famous photos from a different angle (Issue 24, "Beginning of the End," with cover art by Andy Kubert).  Golden departed after the first year, but Murray stayed on to write most of the book's first 51 issues, before being replaced first by Chuck Dixon, then by Vietnam veteran Dan Lomax.

Possibly one of the grimmest, most disturbing mainstream comics covers of the 1980s

The relative success of The 'Nam was surprising, in that war comics as a genre had long since fallen out of fashion.  Not only that: everything about The 'Nam resisted the standard heroic narrative that comics readers could come to expect.  Though the Reagan Era saw attempts to turn the Vietnam War into a site of neglected heroism in the face of a lost cause (see under: Rambo), The 'Nam 's general feel was much more in keeping with the previous decade's conflicted and depressive portrayal of America's post-World War II foreign interventions.  Daily life in The 'Nam was anything but "morning in America," and the comic, with its adherence to a "real-time" frame (each comic took place a month after the previous issue), its rotating cast of characters, and its preference for single-issue, roughly standalone stories meant that it offered few of the pleasures usually found in a Marvel title. Though generally praised for breaking new ground, The 'Nam  has, for the most part, been neglected by comics historians and scholars.  It is as though we are not sure what to do with it. 

Nor, really, do I, at least as part of a larger study on the decade.  Though long-running, The 'Nam is to the 1980s what Dean Motter and Ken Steacy's The Sacred and the Profane was for the 1970s:  a stand-alone entry that barely fits its ostensible genre (in this case, the science fictional first contact narrative) that was recognized at the time for its strengths, but exerted virtually no influence on the comics that came after it. Like The 'Nam , The Sacred and the Profane, which is a beautiful meditation on faith, power, and confronting the Other, has rarely been reprinted. Both seem destined to remain on the margins of comics history.

Next: End of Life, with Benefits

Note

[1] Ed Marks goes back home in The'Nam 13, but the series checks in on him now and then over the years.

Goodbye, City Life!

The debate over the idiocy of jungle life continues during the comic's witty banter (never before seen in a comic about Ka-Zar).  Kevin suggest that he and Shanna are "cowards" hiding from civilization, and Shanna responds verbally ("you're full of crapola") and physically (throwing "crapola" in his face).  Their dispute about the value of the jungle is always double-voiced, with sarcastic commentary both supporting and undermining the points being made (Shanna: "Oh, don't bother me, I"m just a mindless little savage lacking in civilized manners and social graces. / Psst!  I'm over here, stupid! / Careful now, you might get dirt on your loin cloth." ). When he meets Queen Leanne (who, despite the fact that she lives in long-lost hidden land, speaks a language Ka-zar knows, she dismisses him as an ignorant barbarian:

"They're stealing my cat!  My cat, you moron.  Don't just stand there! Do something!

"Like what?"

"Ohhh! Imbecile!"

"Fine. I'm an idiot, a moron, and an imbecile.  What's your name?

"You're speaking to Leanne, queen of Zarhan, you---you--"

"Try cretin. You haven't used that one."

Their "meet cute' is classic screwball comedy, but it highlights the jungle lord's intellect. Not only is he bantering with her, but he's showing off his vocabulary in a second language.

When Ka-Zar spars verbally with both Shanna and Leanne in the first issue,  he is highlighting the philosophical dilemma that underpins his mid-life crisis (nature vs. civilization) while demonstrating the relationship between his indecision about his life's direction to the overall problem of his motivation.  As a "jungle lord," Ka-Zar is an action hero, but, even more than the superheroes he occasionally meets over the course of his adventures, he is a fundamentally reactive character.  Things happen in front of him, or to him, and he responds. He accidentally discovers the comic's new lost-continent-within-a-lost-continent, Pangea, only because he is following the trail of Zabu, who has mysteriously disappeared.  Zabu, as we have already noted, has been led away by a primal mating instinct; Ka-Zar, being human, is not subject to the pheromones of a female in heat, but his actions and arguments in the first (and several subsequent) issues are usually in response to either Shanna or Leanne.

Shanna the She-Devil had been a Marvel character for nearly a decade at this point, and, though she had crossed paths with Ka-Zar before, their already-longstanding romantic relationship was something Jones and Anderson introduced as back-story.  Like Ka-Zar, Shanna O'Hara was a variation on a familiar archetype (most notably, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, who first appeared in 1938).  Yet despite the trappings of the genre they share, Shanna is more of a foil to Ka-Zar than merely his female counterpart. Created by Carole Seuling and George Tuska in 1972, Shanna is a veterinarian who spent her childhood in the Congo (Zaire) with her diamond miner father. Unlike Ka-Zar, she lives in the jungle by choice, but also unlike him, she is the product of multiple traumas (her father's accidental killing of her mother, the shooting of her beloved leopard Julani, whose pelt she would wear as her costume; the murder of her father at the hands of the mutant revolutionary Mandrill). In Rampaging Hulk 9 ("The Wrath of Raga-Shahi," June 1978, by Gerber and Tony DeZuniga), Shanna is a powerful but not entirely stable New Yorker who only feels alive when fighting her pet snake, and is also the reluctant patient of a psychoanalyst trying to help her sort out her feelings about civilization (by the end, Shanna decides to leave for the jungle once more).

By the time we see Shanna on the second page of "A New Dawn....A New World!" she has long since sorted out her feelings about nature and civilization; the Savage Land is where she wants to be:

I noticed how neurotic even the sanest of animals became when caged...

..and realized that the city--civilization itself--was a cage of sorts. I knew that if I'd hung around and become any more "civilized," I'd have gone nuts.

Shanna has her own philosophical point to make, though always within the context of the comic's romantic relationships.  It's fortunate that Shanna is given such engaging and intelligent dialogue; in the hands of a lesser writer, she would be reduced to nothing but tropes.  First, because she occupies the familiar role of the emotionally mature woman waiting patiently (and not so patiently) for her overgrown adolescent male partner to grow up. An even bigger danger is her obvious allegorical function:  by the time the issue draws to a close, the reader cannot help but notice that Ka-Zar's vacillation between "savagery" and civilization is handily embodied by his two female love interests.

Leanne is introduced as the polar opposite of Shanna.  Where we first see Shanna trying to rescue a baby dinosaur, Leanne herself has to be rescued by Ka-Zar. Shanna rejected "civilization," while Leanne extolls the beauty of the "ivory metropolis" she rules.  Shanna gets Ka-Zar to have spontaneous sex with her on the jungle ground, while Leanne spurns his advances as they hide in a treetop ("If I ever am unfaithful to my fiance, it won't be by hanging in the trees like an ape!").  Shanna's defense of the Savage Land only encourages Ka-Zar's longing for civilization, while Leanne's reservedness prompts him to remark that those in the Savage Land have a saying, "Live for today--there may not be a tomorrow." In the end, Leanne breaks off her budding romance with Ka-Zar by reminding him of her political duties and of the restrictions of civilized life, prompting Ka-Zar to recommit to "savagery": "I guess that's where we're different. I'd let the whole bloody jungle go up in flames if it tried to dictate my actions."

The first year's worth of Ka-Zar the Savage is a showcase for Jones' and Anderson's powerful storytelling, as well as for their deft exploration of the two main characters.  One particular standout is "The Ties That Bind" (Issue 5, August 1981, by Jones, Anderson, and Garzon), in which Ka-Zar tells Shanna about the senseless death of his best friend, Tongah (a supporting character in the previous Ka-Zar series); Kevin's powerlessness to save his friend after a rabies bite while knowing that "civilization" could have saved him, is essentially the secret origin of Ka-Zar's dissatisfaction with living in a state of nature.  But the romance plot, which had served so well as a vehicle for exploring the protagonist's philosophical dilemma, leans even more heavily on the screwball comedy after the first issue while adding on multiple layers of cheap melodrama.  In the second issue ("To Air Is Human!" May 1981, by Jones, Anderson, and Garzon), Shanna catches up with Ka-Zar, and both of them encounter Leanne. Shanna overhears Leanne talk about their feelings for each other even as she confesses that she is about to elope with still another man. In the last pages, Ka-Zar is forced to sort out his feelings when he is confronted with the mother of all cliches:  Shanna and Leanne are each dangling from a cliff, and Ka-Zar can only save one of them.

By this point, the choice no longer seems to hold any implications beyond Ka-Zar's personal feelings.  Leanne now acts selfish and cold, as opposed to Shanna, who continues to be a well-rounded, complex character.  Shanna is the one he saves, but this is hardly the end of their romantic woes.  Shanna is convinced that Ka-Zar thinks he made the wrong choice.  But just in case the reader might have any doubts, Jones and Anderson continue to stack the deck.  Leanne survives, but is paralyzed, and tries to take over Shanna's body. The love triangle that held such potential in the first issue gives way to one-dimensional characterization divorced from any of the larger questions that it initially helped explore.

Ka-Zar the Savage sputtered on for nearly three years, under multiple editors demanding multiple changes of direction.  Jones continued to turn in clever scripts, but Anderson's departure hit the series hard.  After Jones' tenure came to an end,  the remaining seven issues written by Mike Carlin brought the comic to a forgettable close. The overall unevenness of Ka-Zar the Savage is probably why it is so rarely discussed in comics criticism, overshadowed by the decade's more solid and lasting achievements (such as Watchmen). In this regard, though published in the 1980s, Ka-Zar the Savage is a very Seventies Marvel book:  it had moments of brilliance interspersed with filler, and never had the chance to become a coherent, sustained narrative that might be enjoyed by less hardcore readers.

Next: The Brief Return of War Comics

Mid-life, with Loin Cloth

Some of the more interesting experiments within the Marvel Universe had the hallmarks of the previous decade's turn towards introspection, but with the advantages brought by the ongoing changes in the comics market. In October 1981, Marvel decided to shift a few of its more marginal titles (including Moon Knight and, the following month, Micronauts) from the traditional news stand model (aimed at a mass audience, with unsold copies returned to the publisher) to selling directly to the growing network of specialty shops.  No longer returnable, these comics were also marketed towards grown-up fans: gone were the advertisements that disrupted the reading experience every few pages, as well as the barcode that obscured part of the cover art.  The cover price jumped according, from 50 cents to 75. 

Micronauts was a toy-based property already past its brief heyday, but still appealing to hardcore fans. Moon Knightwas just hitting its stride as artist Bill Sienkiewicz began to break from the influence of Neal Adams, abandoning his initial hyperrealism for the gonzo expressionism that would become his trademark.  The third comic moved to the direct market was a particularly unlikely artistic success: Ka-Zar the Savage, written for its first 27 issues by Bruce Jones, with pencils for most of the first two years by Brent Anderson.

Ka-Zar was a character who had lived on the outskirts of Marvel for a decade and a half--literally, since most of his adventures took place in the Savage Land, a prehistoric jungle hidden in the center of the earth. Introduced in a 1965 issue of X-Men, Ka-Zar was pathetically derivative. In fact, the man born as Kevin Plunder was the second character to adopt the name "Ka-Zar." Timely (Marvel's predecessor) had briefly published the adventures of a different Ka-Zar in the 1930s; when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the new Ka-Zar for X-Men 10, they didn't even bother to consult any of his predecessor's earlier appearances.  The only thing that distinguished him from Tarzan and his many, many imitators (Tor, Tharn, Jungle Boy, George of the Jungle) was his blond hair. Otherwise, he was a rugged white man from central casting, helping and fighting the benighted dark-skinned Savage Land denizens, and alternating between a third-person, sub-Tarzan patois ("Stronger than mastadon! Stronger than giant boar! Mighty is Ka-Zar...Lord of Jungle!" X-Men 10, March 1965, Lee and Kirby) and the bombastic nobility of Thor ("There must be an end to human sacrifice!! /Such is the will of Ka-Zar! (Incredible Hulk 109, November 1966, by Lee, Frank Giacoca, and Herbe Trimpe).

To be fair, the only way for Ka-Zar to go was up, and his characterization and dialogue improved greatly over the course of the 1970s.  But even at his best, Ka-Zar was a noble savage, protecting the primitive and natural world and distrusting of civilization.  Ka-Zar the Savage, which ran from April 1981 through October 1984, changed all that. [1] In the eight years since the end of Ka-Zar's last solo series (as the headliner for Astonishing Tales), he had made a handful of guest appearances (most notably in X-Men, simultaneously wrapping up the loose ends from Astonishing Tales and re-establishing the Savage Land as a recurring setting for Marvel's mutant franchise).  Now the attention was turned to Ka-Zar's psychological state, and to questions of adulthood and purpose.[2] What does it mean to be living out a young boy's heroic fantasy of jungle adventure if you're pushing thirty and inexplicably well-read? It's a premise worthy of Steve Gerber:  the muscle-bound hero pauses, looks around, and questions the generic and existential premises of the life he leads.   

But the differences from Gerber's comics are also instructive. Even when Gerber was writing about an anthropomorphic talking duck, the generic reference point was always superhero comics.  In Howard the Duck 9 ("Scandal Plucks Duck," by Gerber, Gene Colan and Steve Leiloha, February 1977), the cantankerous waterfowl is summoned by a Canadian superpatriot wearing a giant beaver suit to fight to the death on a tightrope over Niagara Falls.  For a moment, Howard gives in, and steps on the rope, but then he changes his mind; later, he calls the incident "the only fight I'd ever walked out on--'cause it was just too ludicrous" (Howard the Duck 10, "Swan Song...of the Living Dead Duck!" by Gerber, Colan, and Leiloha, March 1977). Ka-Zar is also the protagonist of an action genre, and, like Howard, his role in it is the product of sheer bad luck: Howard accidentally ended up surrounded by hairless apes in a "world he never made," while Ka-Zar was stranded in the Savage Land due to complex machinations involving his (now deceased) father. Both Howard and Ka-Zar are the hapless stars in variations of a "boy's own adventure" fantasy that neither one actually chose.

The new series' title "Ka-Zar the Savage" was a concession to generic expectations, a potentially powerful hook, and an ironic description of a character who no longer is sure that "savagery" has a lasting appeal.  As "Lord of the Savage Land," Ka-Zar is implicated in narratives about the natural order, noble savagery, and unsentimental recognition that he is surrounded by animals who live and die as part of the food chain. The first issue begins with a splash page showing a starving wolf pack attacking and killing a rhino. A series of narrative captions explain that the law of the food chain "would not be questioned," but two inset panels of Ka-Zar on a hilltop, staring down at the slaughter declare the hero's dissonance with the land of which he is supposedly lord: "Ka-Zar watches it...and Ka-Zar does question" ("A New Dawn....A New World!", Ka-Zar the Savage 1, by Jones, Anderson, and Carlos Garzon, April 1981).

Though "A New Dawn..A New World" sets up the romantic and interpersonal conflicts that will dominate the first year of the series, the story itself is structured as a series of decisions Ka-Zar makes about intervening to save a life in peril: the rhino (he declines); a young dinosaur sinking in the mud (he helps, but only because his partner, Shanna the She-Devil, insists); Leanne, Queen of Zarhan (whom he helps because she is a damsel in distress); Leanne's cat Felina, who is about to be killed by her attackers (Ka-Zar tells her he sees no need to "sacrifice my own life along with your cat's"); his sabretooth tiger companion Zabu (who leaps into the fray to save Felina; "Where Zabu goes, Ka-Zar follows!"), and the calf Zabu orphans by attacking its mother for dinner (which he slaughters, so as not to let it "suffer needlessly"). Nor should we forget Zabu's own actions: in Ka-Zar's flashback origin story, it is Zabu who saves little Kevin Plunder from murder at the hands of the "savages" that had "hunted the great cats to extinction," Zabu who saves Felina (he is at least as attracted to her as Ka-Zar is to Leanne), and Zabu who kills the mother of the calf. [3]

The parallel between Ka-Zar and his cat works well here. Each is driven by instinct, but each makes decisions that go beyond predictable animal desires (Zabu essentially raises the young Ka-Zar, while Ka-Zar assesses each potential intervention through a combination of impulse and introspection).  The first issue of Ka-Zar the Savage features a protagonist who is fighting against the script; this is rendered literal on the first page, when Ka-Zar, contradicting the captions about the unquestioned nature of the food chain, does wonder why. But it is also figurative: does he want to be a jungle king all his life? Is the alternative settling down with Shanna, a well-worn script of its own? And is the big city really the only alternative to the Savage Land?

Next: Goodbye, City Life!

Notes

[1] Jones left the book after issue 27 (August 1983), replaced by Mark Carlin, who took the series in a different, action-oriented, direction.

[2] Besides the first issue of Ka-Zar the Savage, there can't be many Marvel comics whose listing on marvelfandom.com includes Ayn Rand and as one of the "other characters" mentioned in the story. 

[3] The species of the animal is unclear; it looks like a bull, but, despite its horns, the discovery of its calf leads Leanne to state that it's female.

You Wouldn't Like Me

The Hulk, who constantly professes to “hate puny Banner,” is both Banner and not-Banner.  But if he is a part of Banner, he is not merely Bruce Banner’s secret identity, initially unknown to those who would hunt him; he is the part of Bruce Banner that Bruce refuses to recognize as himself.  This is one of the reasons that the Hulk contrasts so well with the Thing. The tensions between Ben Grimm and the Thing nearly always resolve in the recognition of common identity: Ben and the Thing are one persona, occasionally alternating external form.  The case of the Hulk is the opposite; no matter how many times we see points of commonality between the two, Banner and Hulk are fundamentally antithetical identities, nearly always in conflict with each other.  

In some ways, the characters are closer to Spider-Man:  Peter Parker is always more or less the same person, even when masked (though he does become more extroverted when is face is concealed); most of his woes arise from the very fact of being one self maintaining two identities.  Bruce and the Hulk are two different people whose troubles at least in part stem from the fact that they are forced into a dissociative time-share. To the extent that Banner and the Hulk are distinct, they are at least consistent in their self-presentation:  the Hulk’s body is an appropriate form for reflecting his inner rage, while Banner is every inch the wimpy, repressed egghead.  

This status quo remained basically unchanged throughout the 1970s, but Eighties' Marvel's infatuation with (temporary) shake-ups helped make the Hulk's comic much more interesting.  Instead of turning new characters into a Hulk,  a series of writers exploited the premise's potential by redefining the personas involved. [1] Chief among them were the two who crafted most of the Hulks' adventures during this decade: Bill Mantlo and Peter David.  Mantlo started his six-year run on The Incredible Hulk just as the decade began (Incredible Hulk 245, March 1980, but published in the last weeks of 1979), continuing until the end of 1985 (Incredible Hulk 313, November 1985). This was the longest run by a writer on this book to date, a record that would be beaten by David (331-445, from 1988-1995).[2] 

But not in a MAGA way

As writers, Mantlo and David had little in common, sharing only an indefatigable work ethic.  Mantlo was a reliable, unsensational scripter who had gained a reputation as the "fill-in king": give him a deadline, and he would meet it.  Unhappy at Marvel, Mantlo attended law school while still writing comics, leaving the company not long after his tenure on the Hulk  in order to work as a public defender.[3] David, who started his career in the marketing department at Marvel, wrote fan-favorite comics for both Marvel and DC,  as well as a great deal of best-selling prose fiction (including numerous contributions to the Star Trek expanded universe).   But they each did more to develop the Hulk's character than anyone had since the character's initial conception. 

Mantlo began this process first by giving Banner control over the Hulk; this was not the first time Banner's personality was dominant over the green monster's superhuman body (Bruce's mind came to the surface every time he visited the subatomic world of his beloved Jarella in the 1970s), but it was the first time this arrangement served as the status quo. [4] Mantlo was also the first to posit that the Hulk was as much a psychological problem as he was the product of mad science, forever redefining both Banner and Hulk as reactions to trauma. 

The first inklings that Banner might have a gamma-powered case of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) come when he is losing to a virtually unstoppable foe.  The narration tells us that Banner realizes that the Hulk, powered by rage, is untiring and unbeatable, where Banner is merely mortal, even when occupying the Hulk's body.  A dark shadowy outline of the Hulk grows in the background of the battle, until Banner relents and lets the Hulk take over ("To Kill or Cure!"). Over the next few issues, the Hulk is more savage than ever, unable even to use rudimentary language, while inside the recesses of his mind, a psychodrama unfolds pitting Dr. Robert Bruce Banner against his demons (at the behest of Dr. Strange's nemesis, Nightmare). After Dr. Strange exiles the Hulk to the Crossroad dimension ("Days of Rage!" Incredible Hulk 300, by Mantlo, Buscema, and Talaoc, October 1984),  the Hulk and Banner spend the next year in real time fighting a series of external enemies while renegotiating their psychic balance  Along the way, he is assisted by a mysterious set of creatures collectively referred to as the "Triad," all of whom are eventually revealed to be manifestations of Bruce's childhood trauma, like alters can in cases of DID: Guardian, as the name suggests, was his instinct for self preservation; Glow was his reason, the force that guided his life and yet also invented the Gamma Bomb that released the Hulk; and Goblin, Banner's rage. They took shape when Bruce was still a child, the victim of his father's ongoing abuse as well as the object of his self-fulfilling prophecy (the elder Banner was convinced Bruce was a "monster").

Soon after, Mantlo was replaced by John Byrne, who, uncharacteristically, did not try to return the Hulk to a Silver Age status quo: he divides Hulk and Banner into two separate bodies and has Bruce finally marry Betty Ross.  Instead, it is Byrne's replacement, Al Milgrom, who restores a status quo almost no one remembered:  the Hulk comes out only at night, and is gray rather than green. All of this sets the stage for the longest extended treatment of Bruce Banner and his multiple identities, written by Peter David.  Towards the end of 1988, David gives the Gray Hulk a new, smart and cynical persona (Mr. Fixit), with ramifications that will only find their full development in the 1990s.

Next: Mid-life, with Loin Cloth 

Notes

[1] Eventually, other characters would, in fact, become Hulks. In the 2000s, virtually the entire supporting cast hulked out:  Rick Jones, Betty Ross, Thunderbolt Ross, Amadeus Cho, and the Hulk's half-alien son, Skaar. And that's not even counting a thankfully brief, uninspired event from the same time period, "Hulked-Out Heroes," in which virtually every Avengers characters becomes a Hulk.

[2] David's work on The Incredible Hulk warrants a chapter of its own, but the bulk of his Hulk output belongs to the 1990s.

[3] In 1992, Mantlo was the victim of a hit-and-run, leaving him with irreparable brain damage.  He has required constant medical care ever since.  A 2014 settlement with Marvel following their use of a character he co-created (Rocket Raccoon) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe put him on slightly better financial footing.

[4] Banner was in control for two years in real time, from Incredible Hulk 272 ("Weirdsong of the Wen-Di-Go" by Mantlo and Sal Buscema, June 1982) to issue 296 ("To Kill or Cure!" by Mantlo, Buscema and Talaoc, June 1984).

New Faces, Old Masks

Venom never actually replaced Peter Parker as Spider-Man; it would only be in the nineties that the convoluted Clone Saga pushed Peter into temporary retirement.  But between the symbiote's function as Spider-Man's black costume and Venom's role as the hero's monstrous, distorted reflection, the storyline fit within the larger dynamics going on at Marvel in the 1980s:  the (always temporary) passage of the hero's mantle to a new character.

This was not a new trope for superhero comics.  Captain America in particular was prone to replacements. When Steve Englehart was writing the book, Steve Rogers briefly gave up being Captain America after Watergate, with two other men substituting for him. Englehart also introduced a retcon explaining away Captain America's adventures in the 1950s, when he was supposed to be on ice:  the government replaced the missing Cap and Bucky with two eager young men who would be rendered mentally unstable by an imperfect super-soldier serum. Nor was this the only new Bucky; when Captain America awoke from suspended animation, he mistook young Rick Jones (the Hulk's former sidekick) for his dead partner. In what now looks like a disturbing turn of events, Cap could not let this coincidence go, first training Rick and then actually giving him a Bucky costume. [1]

Given Shooter's demands that Doug Moench kill off Shang-Chi's entire cast, turn him into a villain, and replace him with a new Master of Kung-Fu, it should not come as a surprise that replacement heroes proliferated at Marvel in the 1980s.   When Tony Stark falls off the wagon, his best friend Rhodey becomes the new Iron Man, although he lets the rest of the Avengers think that he is still the man who was originally inside the armor.  Thor's hammer is wrested from him by the horse-headed alien called "Beta Ray Bill," making him the new Thor for a few issues.  Captain America is replaced by the ultraconservative patriot John Walker and She-Hulk takes over for the Thing in the Fantastic Four. In all of these case, the series eventually, and unsurprisingly, revert to the norm, but not before they have done their job in expanding their headliner's world.  When Tony Stark returns, Rhodey gets a new suit of armor and takes on the name "War Machine." Beta Ray Bill is given a hammer of his own by Odin, and becomes a recurring character in Thor's comic.  After Steve Rogers takes back his shield, John Walker becomes the USAgent.  The Fantastic Four continued Roger Stern's effort to build up the popularity of She-Hulk; her departure from that book facilitated Byrne's next project, a solo Sensational She-Hulk title that stood out for its lighthearted approach and frequent breaking of the fourth wall.

Hey, kids! Let’s call this “woke” and get angry!

When Shooter returned to The Avengers 211 (with art by Gene Colan and Dan Green, September 1981), he shook up the roster more drastically than anyone had in a decade and a half.  Avengers mainstays The Vision and the Scarlet Witch leave the book, along with Wonder Man and the Beast, who had been central to the cast for half a decade. Only a few years later, a group of current and former team members were spun off into West Coast Avengers (later retitled Avengers West Coast).

Finally, the status quo for the Hulk would change repeatedly throughout the decade, but his identity was already more complicated than that of the aforementioned costumed heroes.   When Bruce Banner is exposed to the energy released by his Gamma Bomb, the profound and periodic changes in his body are not at first accompanied by as stark a change in his mind.  The initial series ran for only six issues before its cancellation (1963-1964); it was only after his appearance in the first two issues of The Avengers, his guest appearances in Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man,  and his earliest adventures in Tales to Astonish (staring with issue 60 in 1964) that he somehow lost the ability to use personal pronouns and express complex thoughts. After Hulk settles into his childlike, cognitively limited persona, and after the mechanism for transformation from Banner to Hulk has become firmly associated with a loss of temper (as opposed to the early issues, when Bruce became the Hulk at sundown), the comic has wholeheartedly adopted the Jekyll/Hyde model.  The Hulk is not so much Bruce’s dark side, since he is not evil, as he is the embodiment of Bruce Banner’s suppressed rage. 

Next: You Wouldn't Like Me

Note

[1] Susan Richards was also frequently replaced before the 1980s, initially because of her pregnancy with Franklin.

Spider-Man Grows Up

Giving Spider-Man a new look in and around Secret Wars was a sensational move. His costume had barely changed since its introduction. And why would it? Steve Ditko’s design was already unique and eye-catching on the cover of the character’s first appearance. But a costume change would be big news: after two decades, Spider-Man would have a new outfit.

At first, the question of Spider-Man’s costume was quite literally superficial. The black costume was cool and convenient, but it wasn’t reflective of any serious internal change on Peter Parker’s part. Far from it: his costume was damaged on Battleworld, and a machine provided him with a new one that happened to be black. This was not Storm of the X-Men cutting her luxurious hair into a mohawk and dressing in tight leather; no one seemed particularly worried that he might be on his way to becoming Dark Spider-Man. Only when the costume literally seemed to have a life of its own was Peter obliged to fight and defeat a glorified unitard. 

Yet the black costume ended up playing a significant role in Spider-Man’s Eighties renaissance.  The issue where he defeats the costume is also the one that follows up on a huge cliffhanger: ex-girlfriend Mary Jane Watson, who had only recently returned to the Spider-Man titles,  reveals that she has always known Peter was Spider-Man.  Over the next few years, the ongoing development of Spider-Man’s image (the costume, Venom, the non-symbiote version of the costume after that, and Todd McFarlane’s stunning reinterpretation of the Spider-Man’s classic uniform) was paralleled by major steps forwards in Peter Parker’s character.  In the hands of up-and-coming writer Peter David, he confronts the senseless death of a longtime ally.  In the main title, he rekindles his romance with Mary Jane, whose backstory and connection to Spider-Man are nicely fleshed out in a graphic novel called Parallel Lives. He marries Mary Jane, only to suffer intense trauma almost immediately after the wedding (complete with a near-death experience that forces him to dig his way out of his own grave). [1]  And, finally, as he and Mary Jane build a life together, his spurned symbiote suit finds a new host named Eddie Brock. Together, they become Venom. 

Spider-Man’s marriage would later become a bone of contention at Marvel; under the Jemas/Quesada regime that brought new life to the company in the early 2000s, the consensus was that it made him too old and limited the avenues for storytelling.  Did readers really want to see Spider-Man as a husband and, heaven forbid, a father?  In typical superhero comics fashion, Marvel would eventually get to have it all ways at once:  a pregnancy storyline in the 1990s ended in what Mary Jane was told was a miscarriage, but actually a kidnapping. This plotline was (thankfully) left undeveloped, but an ongoing alternate universe comic called Spider-Girl told the story of their teenage daughter and her harried, middle-aged Spider-parents. The marriage itself would be undone in 2007 in a much maligned story about Peter making a deal with the devil to save his Aunt May’s life; now the marriage never happened. 

Good thing no one has ever had second thoughts about a wedding

The wedding was a large-scale media event that took place simultaneously in the Spider-Man comic and the Spider-Man newspaper strip (which had its own continuity), as well as in a live performance in front of thousands of Mets fans in Shea Stadium, officiated by none other than Stan Lee himself. But Peter’s rekindled relationship with Mary Jane was also a chance to expand the book’s emotional core. Their courtship and marriage worked by deepening the character of Mary Jane, who was introduced by Stan Lee and John Romita in the 1960s as a carefree party girl (complete with cringey “hip” dialogue).  In Amazing Spider-Man 259, Tom De Falco, Ron Frenz and Joe Rubinstein reintroduce the reader to Mary Jane, and give Peter the first real glimpse of her inner life:

Mary Jane: Relax, Peter! … I'm not the space cadet I appear to be…

It’s funny. We’ve known each other for a long time…

…but we don’t really know each other.

We’re supposed to be friends, but we never really open up to each other. We don’t share…

We’re a great pair, aren’t we?

Peter: I guess I never looked at it that way. 

Mary Jane: Friendship carries some pretty big responsibilities, but we’ve just been coasting along.

Mary Jane is talking about herself and Peter, but she could just as well be talking about their characterization at the hands of their writers over the previous two decades. Most of the issue is devoted to their conversation, with Mary Jane revealing a previously-undisclosed family history of abuse and dysfunction that led her to create her carefree party girl persona. But it also advances an ongoing plotline about the mysterious Hobgoblin, as well as the event featured on the issue’s cover: the return of Spider-Man’s original costume. It is unlikely that all this came together as part of careful thematic planning; DeFalco had only taken over the book from Roger Stern seven months earlier (with issue 252), and the question of the Hobgoblin’s true identity was a mess subsequently made even more complicated by James Owsley’s ascension to Spider-Man editor. [2]  Yet it works beautifully as an introduction to the themes that would dominate the Spider-Man books for the rest of the decade: inner lives behind (real and figurative) masks and the psychological toll of balancing multiple identities. 

The Hobgoblin was the latest iteration of the Goblin as Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis. The first two versions, both called The Green Goblin, were effective as an assault on both of Spider-Man’s identities.  The original Green Goblin was Norman Osborn, a rich industrialist who was also the father of Peter’s best friend, Harry. This Green Goblin discovers Spider-Man’s secret identity, but conveniently develops amnesia.  His amnesia was more than just a plot device, however: it also highlighted the tenuous balance between ordinary life and a masked persona, a balance that involves tethering on the edge of insanity. Norman’s two subsequent return engagements as the Green Goblin were threats to the very foundation of the Spider-Man mythos, since he could reveal Peter’s secret identity at any time.   Peter was also hampered by concern for the man who was Harry’s father (even as Harry was succumbing to drug addiction during the Goblin’s first return).  Norman’s murder of Gwen Stacey was a turning point for Marvel, if not the entire industry:  before then, heroes’ girlfriends were perennial damsels in distress who never suffered real harm. [3]  After Norman dies, his son Harry becomes the next Green Goblin, inaugurating a new phase of secret-identity related torment for Peter (he, too, forgets the truth about Peter between bouts of psychosis).  

With the Hobgoblin, the instability of dual identities multiplies.  Not only is the man behind the mask an ongoing mystery, but he also ends up, once again, impinging on Peter’s private life (Ned Leeds, one of the men who was the Hobgoblin, was Peter’s friend). Moreover, the Hobgoblin plotline unfolds at roughly the same time that Peter is repeatedly changing heroic outfits  (and even fighting with one of his former costumes).  To the extent that there is anything coherent about a franchise spread out over multiple books, multiple creative teams, and multiple editors, Spider-Man in the 1980s, it is the parallel drama of Spider-Man’s appearance (regular costume, symbiote, other black costume, McFarlane’s version), villains who affect and reflect Peter’s private life (Hobgoblin, Kraven, Venom), the exploration of Peter’s and MJ’s inner lives, and the twists and turns of their careers (Peter goes from photographer to graduate student, while MJ becomes a glamorous supermodel).  Nearly all of this is united by the preoccupation between surface appearance and interiority. 

Mary Jane’s revelations about her difficult life and her knowledge of Peter’s secret identity perform a reset of the characters, if not the franchise itself: Peter returns to his old costume, he and Mary Jane embark on a new relationship as best friends (before eventually becoming lovers again), and the Spider-Man books will now engage in repeated explorations of Spider-Man’s identity, sometimes refracted through his supporting cast and enemies.  

When Peter was put in the odd position of fighting his own (black) costume, he was also wrestling with the question of continuity and change. The costume’s return as Venom (in Amazing Spider-Man 298) was part of an overall visual revamp: not only has the black costume never looked more menacing (as Venom, it has huge fangs and an improbably long tongue), but McFarland’s reinterpretation of Peter’s classic costume doubles down on its defining elements while giving it a more modern feel (the ropey webbing).  Mary Jane gets an even more radical makeover: gone is her 60s-style perfectly straight, shoulder-length hair. Now she has a a huge head of luxurious Eighties hair and a curvacious body that is always on display.  The glamour is at odds with her previous depiction, while her body type is less that of a model (her new career) than a men's magazine pin-up.  It's a good thing that both she and Peter have maintained their friendships from high school, because nether of them would be recognizable at a reunion.

The Eighties represented a simultaneous deepening and fragmentation of Spider-Man.  The deepening resulted from the greater exploration of Peter's and Mary Jane's characters, while the fragmentation presaged the uncontrolled growth of Spider-Man as a franchise. First, there was the unexpected popularity of Venom (himself a variation on Spider-Man), then the proliferation of Spider-Man titles in the 1990s, not to mention actual clones of Spider-Man dominating the narrative for several years in the middle of the decade.

Next: New Faces, Old Masks

Notes 

[1] This is a reference to "Kraven's Last Hunt/Fearful Symmetry," which is discussed in the chapter on J. M. DeMatteis.

[2] Stern had planned to reveal that the Hobgoblin was either Roderick Kingsley and his twin brother Daniel (taking turns); DeFalco wanted him to be the Kingpin’s son, Richard Fisk, and told Owsley that the Hobgoblin was Ned Leeds. When. Owsley (who is now better known as Christopher Priest) killed off Leeds in another comic, he told writer Peter David to reveal that the Hobgoblin was another villain called the Foreigner. Eventually, Leeds was retconned to have been the Hobgoblin all along, with Jason Macendale (Jack O’Lantern) taking up the identity after Leeds’ death. Subsequent retcons would complicate things even further. 

[3] In the aftermath of Gwen’s death, the murder of a hero’s love interest became such a cliche that it got its own slang term, “fridging,” from the gruesome death of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s Girlfriend in a refrigerator in 1994. 

Once More, Without Feeling

Secret Wars was a sales juggernaut, which meant that a sequel was inevitable.  Announced even before the first crossover was over, Secret Wars II was the Platonic ideal of a bad superhero event, starting with its pedestrian and predictable name.  Where the first Secret Wars was structured in a way that only minimally interfered with ongoing titles, Secret Wars II was a recurring train wreck that crashed into nearly every comic Marvel published. Where the first event had the slick pencils of Mike Zeck, the second was handed to Art Milgrom, who was not doing his best work here.  Shooter was also not firing on all cylinders:  for all his faults as an editor, Shooter was an experienced and capable writer who had produced comics that are still widely acclaimed to this day (his first runs on Legion of Super-Heroes and The Avengers, for example).  He had signed on to write Secret Wars II, but his attention was divided and his interest intermittent; in particular, the characters’ dialogue suffered. 

Secret Wars II seemed determined to make all the mistakes the first series avoided. In an inversion of the original premise, now the heroes stayed put, but the Beyonder, who had decided to house his omnipotence in a human form, made appearances in every ongoing Marvel superhero comic, dropping in at random points and either bringing the action to a halt, steering it in an unexpected or barely motivated direction, or functioning as a Beyonder ex machinabefore going his merry way.  He also repeated one of the greatest cliches of low-rent sci-fi:  he wanted to learn what it was like to be “human.” Unfortunately for him, he launched this particular quest in the Eighties.  When he first appears, the Beyonder is a generically handsome blond man (Captain America as Aryan Ideal), before switching to long, black Jheri curls, a white jumpsuit, and shoulder pads. 

Can an omnipotent God make a hairstyle so bad even He can’t pull it off?

Since the Beyonder was omnipotent and could teleport, both his adventures in the main series and the tie-ins followed a logic that a charitable reader might call picaresque. The Beyonder attempts to woo two different female mutants (Dazzler, the disco queen and Boom-Boom, a teenage hooligan), gets Peter Parker to teach him how to use the bathroom, turns a building into gold after hearing Luke Cage complain about money, and hires Matt Murdock to represent him in his attempt to take over the world through legal means.  His motivations seem to be as much Shooter’s as his own.  Shooter used the series to settle scores.  One of the first things the Beyonder does is encounter a neurotic loser of a television writer clearly modeled on Steve Gerber, the creator of Howard the Duck fired by Shooter and sued Marvel over the rights to his creation.  The Beyonder bestows powers on the writer, but this only proves how pathetic the writer actually is. 

It’s a strange choice on Shooter’s part; given the power dynamics involved, his clumsy satire of Gerber would be punching down, if the punch were not so poorly aimed.  But it is also one of many signs that, intentionally or not, the Beyonder reads as a stand-in for Shooter himself.  As Sean Howe notes, “sneaking into Shooter’s stories, almost helplessly, was a recurring motif of persecuted deities,” particularly in the multi-issue Avengers storyline known as the “Korvac Saga.” In 1977 and 1978,  Shooter had Marvel’s heroes confront a cyborg from the future who had ascended to godhood (complete with the requisite perfect Aryan body).  Though his actions seemed sinister, Michael (as Korvac renamed himself) was  motivated by the desire to make the universe more just:   “I was in the unique position to alter that, to bring all of existence under my sane and benevolent rule,” he told the super-team. “I am a God! And I was going to be your savior!” Where others saw megalomania, Jim Shooter saw a beleaguered hero who only wanted to bring order to the galaxy.

Or, as Howe puts it later in the book, Shooter’s big theme was “trust power.”  The Beyonder is different from Michael, however, and not just because he used his godlike power to dye his hair black. Where Michael prizes order, the Beyonder is an agent of chaos, demanding that everyone around him cater to his whims. Where Shooter demanded that his writers kill off characters willy-nilly, both the Beyonder and Michael killed multiple heroes only to resurrect them; Michael was trying to maintain his plan, while the Beyonder (in keeping with his origin as a nameless force forcing living action figures to battle each other), simply tired of his toys.

Towards the end of his tenure at Marvel (he was fired in April of 1987, just a year after Secret Wars II ended), Shooter allegedly told his staff that

every single comic had to have a ‘can’t-must’ moment: I am not a thief . . . I don’t want to steal. But I must steal because my grandmother is starving. Every comic had to have that in the first three pages. Literally, a panel where the superhero had to say, ‘I can’t steal—but I must, for my grandmother.’... He was sending comics back to the Bullpen to have the ‘can’t-must’ panel squeezed in, in the middle of the page” (Ann Nocenti, quoted in Howe). 

Late Shooter is The Beyonder (or Michael)  in his decadent phase, when power has completely warped his judgment and made him lose the plot. 

Though Shooter would not be around to see it firsthand, the Secret Wars events permanently changed Marvel, if not quite the way comparable crossovers did at DC.  At both companies, the sales success of crossovers would make event comics a perennial feature, but it was only at DC that such events radically changed the nature of the company’s storyworld. At Marvel, it simply meant chasing after the next big event.  For the remainder of the Eighties, Marvel experimented with a few different formats and premises for its next events.  Two crossovers were limited to annuals (yearly special issues of ongoing titles) in order to recreate the thrill of the event without interfering with the monthly storylines:  The Evolutionary War (1988) and Atlantis Attacks (1989). Two more crossovers were closer in scale to Secret Wars, but without a miniseries to anchor them: Inferno (1988-1989) and Acts of Vengeance unfolded over several months’ worth of regular series.  Inferno had the advantage of being the culmination of years’ of X-Men-related subplots, as well as the follow-up to two previous crossover event that had been (mostly) limited to the X-books:  The Mutant Massacre (1986-1987) and Fall of the Mutants (1988), but both stories intruded on most of the comics almost at random.  Acts of Vengeance had a premise that could not be more basic:  a disguised Loki convinces Marvel’s villains to swap archenemies and fight heroes who were unfamiliar with them. 

Marvel would return to crossovers over the next several decades, to varying degrees of success. In the 1990s, Jim Starlin’s The Infinity Gauntlet (1991) and, to a lesser extent,  its two follow-ups, The Infinity War (1992) and The Infinity Crusade (1993), recaptured the excitement of the crossover story, while in the early twenty-first century, Civil War (2006-2007) and Secret Invasion (2008-2009) were huge commercial successes.  All of these series also found their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in one form or another. In 2015, Marvel published another (much better) Secret Wars event, which inspired an upcoming movie.  The legacy of Marvel’s events is undeniable. 

Next: Spider-Man Grows Up

Secret Wars and the Rise of the Event Comic

As most of this book is about Marvel's artistic successes and near-misses, the rest of this introduction is meant to provide an overview of the general trends in the company's output, regardless of critical acclaim or disapprobation. Marvel introduced a number of elements to its storytelling and marketing that have had a huge impact on both the company and the industry.  And in many cases, even if the initial Eighties output might be of dubious quality to readers who did not grow up with it, some of Marvel's worst creative decisions have their fans, and, more important, gave later creators material that could be transformed into something far better.   This overview is also an opportunity for brief discussions of the many strong runs and fascinating experiments for which there is simply not enough room in this book.

Secret Wars and the Rise of the Event Comic 

In the mid-1980s, both Marvel and DC would be forever changed by the introduction of line-wide crossover events, although the nature of these changes was different for each company.  The financial success of each event incentivized the creation of further such events, with ramifications for the companies; storytelling that are felt to this day.  But where the impetus for DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths came from concerns about the company's storyworld (Crisis was meant to simplify DC's complex system of alternate universes), Marvel's Secret Wars started with a failed toy deal and ended with a change in Spider-Man's costume that benefited comics sales and merchandising tie-ins.  Without Crisis, DC's storyworld would be vastly different from what it is today.  Without Secret Wars, Marvel wouldn't have the black costume that eventually merged with Eddie Brock to become Venom.  Venom may have been the most successful new character of the decade, but in terms of the overall canvas of the Marvel Universe, a Venom-shaped hole would not in and of itself make today’s Marvel unrecognizable. 

Nothing will ever be the same again! Except that it will be exactly the same again

In the medium-term, Secret Wars led to significant story beats, such as She-Hulk’s replacement of the Thing on the Fantastic Four, Colossus’s break-up with Kitty Pryde in X-Men, and the introduction of the second in a long line of Spider-Women. But the timeframe of the event meant that, unlike so many other such crossovers, it did not hijack ongoing Marvel titles.  The set-up of Secret Wars was simple, if random: at the end of each of Marvel’s comics that came out in January 1984 (cover dated three months later, in keeping with industry traditions), the main characters are compelled to investigate the sudden appearance of a huge, alien construct in New York’s Central Park.  They enter and disappear, only to reappear the next issue (in most cases; occasionally, it took two months).  The entire twelve-issue miniseries takes place between these two issues, creating an unusual kind of suspense: we know that Spider-Man has a new costume, and that She-Hulk has replaced the Thing, but we don’t know why or how these changes happened. For that, we have to read the monthly installments of Secret Wars. 

The series itself was never going to be mentioned in the same breath as Watchmen or Maus, but that was not what it was for.  The premise could not have been simpler, if not simplistic.  Most of Marvel’s heroes and villains are transported to a strange planet referred to as Battleworld, by an all-powerful, unseeing being who would become known as the Beyonder, who tells them: "I am from beyond! Slay your enemies and all that you desire shall be yours! Nothing you dream of is impossible for me to accomplish!" (Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars 1, May 1984, by Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck, and John Beatty.).  The Beyonder would never coalesce as a character over the course of the series (a deficiency remedied in the sequel, though with terrible results), but that was fine.  The Beyonder was a placeholder for the implied reader:  however uninspired Secret Wars turned out to be, it is hard to deny the intrinsic fanboy appeal of the question, “Who would win in a fight between X and Y?” One can practically see the hands smashing together the action figures that initially failed to materialize. Secret Wars had a simple job to do, and it did it. 

Who says comics aren’t profound works of art?

Along the way, Secret Wars actually managed to advance a few character beats.  The Beyonder separates the characters into two camps, heroes and villains, with the X-Men quickly separating themselves out. But Magneto, who had been introduced as an antagonist in the very first issue of X-Men, was already on a slow journey of redemption in Claremont’s X titles.  Thus all the characters in Secret Wars are surprised to find Magneto placed in the heroes’ camp rather than the villains’.  In part thanks to the complications arising around Magneto, Secret Wars also pays attention to the fundamental differences between the X-Men and the Avengers as teams (the latter are acclaimed as heroes, the former are outcasts).  

Next: You guessed it, Secret Wars II!