Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four are off the menu. Beyond that, what was the best idea Marvel ever had?
Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four are off the menu. Beyond that, what was the best idea Marvel ever had?
Not sure if this counts because this happened in FF, but it's not the FF themselves. I'll just throw it out there:
Namor appearing in FF as a hobo that Johnny takes in, then gives a shave triggering his memories and welding the Timely era into the continuity.
Think of it as the shared Marvel Universe at Ground Zero.
Definitely the creation of the THUNDERBOLTS
Archie Goodwin and Roy Thomas taking the license for Star Wars. It saved Marvel at a time of low sales.
Stan Lee came up with the concept of mutants out of lazy writing. When he was working on what would become X-Men, he had the five students and their Professor's power sets down, but couldn't think of a way to explain how all of them got their powers. So he just said "they were born with it, mutants" and went from there. Furthermore, the idea of using mutants as an allegory for racism or any discriminated minority stems from that, specifically the idea that mutants themselves are a special minority of people born with their powers and that racism in real life is illogical so a superhero version should be as well.
I think it worked well.
Giving the X-Men to Claremont and letting him do whatever he wanted for decades.
It changed the industry, and informed the culture.
Daredevil.
The blind DEFENCE lawyer, who has heightened senses. A catholic who dresses like the devil.
His father was a boxer and his mother a nun.
It’s fantastic, and makes him such a compelling character.
Captain America. America had not joined WW2 yet. We were in a state of isolationism. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both Jewish, thought this was pretty terrible. Especially considering that there were a crap-ton of Nazi sympathizers in the states. So they created Cap as a form of political protest.
As Paul Levitz said (of Cap) during the History Channel's Superheroes Decoded special: "All popular culture reflects the time it was created in, GREAT popular culture helps change the time it lives in."
The others listed above are more to my liking, but just for the sake of it . . . Iron Man. It was the 1960s, a lot of the reading audience for Marvel was increasingly if not heavily antiwar . . . and then Marvel got it into their heads to make a hero out of a billionaire munitions manufacturer, exactly the type of person Marvel's audience would have lambasted as a war profiteer. And fifty-odd years later, he's the centerpiece of Marvel's wildly successful, multibillion-dollar Cinematic Universe. Best idea just for the sheer audacity and nerve of it.
The spider is always on the hunt.
The ultimate Spider-man- best Spidey stories and made the character fresh again
X-Men: The idea of the born with powers mutant. Better than all the origin stories
The MCU build up. Never seen before, no one will repeat that successfully.
What-If, just as a concept. The first two What-If volumes helped me get up to speed on the Marvel universe because as much as they showed what didn't happen in Marvel history they showed what did. Every story had something old, something new, and something cool. And writers could go crazy because no matter how OOC a character was or who died it was all in another world.
Reimagined public domain superheroes in a 1945 that never was!
Read the superhero webcomic THE POWER OF STARDUST!
The Hulk. If you think about it, the Hulk was Stan Lee taking the Captain Marvel concept that had sold like gangbusters a couple decades earlier and updating it for the older, angstier audience of the Silver and Bronze Ages. Instead of a little kid transforming into a personification of righteousness, you had a man transforming into a personification of pent-up anger. The concept spawned a television series that was arguably Marvel's most successful venture outside of comics until the MCU.
Creating Isiah Bradley and tying the idea of the SSS to a loose analogue of the Tuskegee Experiments and Operation Paperclip.
Creating Miles Morales and the idea of Spider-Verse.
Pull List:
Marvel Comics: Venom, X-Men, Black Panther, Captain America, Eternals, Warhammer 40000.
DC Comics: The Last God
Image: Decorum