Comments on: Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Old Superhero Comics: Marvel

By: Gary Sweeney

Gary Sweeney — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:19:34 +0000

This brought back so many memories that I forgot about. I didn’t realise the originals gave birth to the newer characters.

By: Martin Skidmore

Martin Skidmore — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:41:43 +0000

These are short pieces, so don’t expect to learn a lot! It’ll go up tonight.

By: DV

DV — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:39:57 +0000

I’m looking forward to the DC one… partly because I know so little about DC, apart from Superman and Batman.

By: Martin Skidmore

Martin Skidmore — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:22:22 +0000

I don’t quite get the last comment, but it may be worth noting that I’ll be putting up a DC companion piece soon, maybe even tonight.

By: Lennie

Lennie — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:39:01 +0000

DC – to many words.

By: DJ Punctum

DJ Punctum — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:19:26 +0000

The thing that always puzzled me about Ditko (well, one of several things) is why all his male characters look like Sid James. And there must be something deeply symbolic about his trademark “half faces” (i.e. when facing forward you see only half the face of the character) at the border of each panel.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:33:38 +0000

Oh totally, when it works it really really works. The one huge exception to my little rule is Claremont and the X-Men, who were Marvel’s commercial motor during the 80s and 90s, and I’ll be really interested to see how Fraction handles them.

By: Al_Ewing

Al_Ewing — Sat, 31 May 2008 13:49:21 +0000

On the other hand, that self-conscious hipness is becoming actual freshness in the hands of Fraction and Brubaker, while DC are reknowned for being bogged down in self-importance – something that worked in their favour with the big ‘important’ projects of the eighties, giving them extra weight and cachet while Marvel floundered with the Dazzler Graphic Novel etc, and is presumably more useful to an epic grandmaster like Morrison than Marvel’s ‘ordinary joe’ heroic persona, but drags them down in other areas (cough COUNTDOWN cough).

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 30 May 2008 23:16:36 +0000

The most interesting thing I read about Stan Lee, in that Gerard Jones book, is that when he got the job at Timely or Atlas or whatever it was called back then, he didn’t like comics: he thought they were dumb and silly. And I think his big double-edged contribution to Marvel, and to comics, was to turn this disdain into a stylised, ridiculous hyperbole, which was a wink to the reader not to take this shit too seriously (and at the same time a comfort to the reader that these guys were smart and knew what they were doing). He was incredibly lucky of course that he had two actual geniuses to provide genuine usable seriousness, so his ridicule and the seriousness formed a kind of once-in-an-industry feedback loop and increased the reach and intensity of the comics being created.

Marvel has ever since been a natural home for creators who you get the impression think – deep down, maybe subconsciously – that they’re slightly too hip for the materials they’re working with.