Reading Through Marvel's Silver Age

[mcoorlim]

I picked up a subscription to Marvel Unlimited so I decided to, with the help of a couple friends, start a podcast about reading through the silver age of Marvel Comics starting with Fantastic Four #1. I'm going to chronicle a bit of that here, giving my general thoughts and opinions on the issues, the development of Marvel as a whole, etc. For my fairly arbitrary purposes, the end of the silver age is going to be the death of Gwen Stacy.

I'm not going to read and review EVERY Marvel comic released between those two points because frankly I don't have the time or the attention span; as such I'll be using the Complete Marvel Reading Order's essential list as a general guideline; I'll be adding a few that aren't on the list and skipping a couple that are, but this is a pretty good resource if you want a good foundation on the universe. This is still hundreds of comics and it'll be a miracle if I get through them all.

The Marvel Unlimited copies are reprints. This kinda sucks as it frequently alters the color and linework of the originals. I'll do my best to compare them to scanned art where I can, but there's only so much I can do. It should go without saying that hey, spoilers abound.

The Before Times

In the early 50s comics and magazine distribution networks were mobbed up to the gills. In his zeal to fight organized crime, Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) teamed up with other moral crusaders to form the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. These hearings decided that comic books were largely to blame for the decline in youth morality, a theory supported by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent.

In response to the bad press and to head off government attempts at regulation, the Comics Magazine Association of America decided to implement the Comics Code Authority, inspired in part by the film industry's own 1930 production code.

At the time the biggest sellers were the horror, true crime, and romance comics, and with their content severely curtailed, readership fell into a steep decline. Out of desperation DC comics turned back to their wartime superhero books, relaunching The Flash in the anthology book Showcase #30.

This did well enough that Marvel - formerly a shell company under Timely and Atlas - saw fit to follow suit in 1961 with The Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four #1, a bridge between Giant Monsters and Superheroes

Let's talk about the cover firs, a classic Silver Age "scene that never happens in the comic." It works fine as marketing, though, because it's eye-catching, has a strong composition, and brings to mind a lot of questions in the reader. While none of the Fantastic Four are in uniform, they obviously have some kind of strange powers. Superheroes in street clothes fighting a giant monster. This is, I think, the element that tells us that this comic is a bridge between the old-school aliens and monster sci fi of the 50s to the new age of superheroes we're about to embark upon. The comic opens with a sequence in which our protagonists use their powers in situations where it isn't strictly necessary - and in fact, makes for a lot of needless attention and unnecessary property damage. Unseen, Reed pops off the Fantastic Flare - which spells out the whole name of the team rather than the more reasonable '4' - and his teammates respond by: Sue, visiting with a friend, turns invisible and leaves without saying anything.1 Ben is shopping for some threads. He sees the signal and kool-aids his way out through the wall, despite clearly having gotten inside without destruction, then jumps down into the sewers. Johnny is hanging with a buddy at his garage, and when he sees it he just... flames on and melts through first the car then the garage. Some friend. Unnecessary property damage is going to be A THING with the Fantastic Four... especially when it comes to Reed's plans. But still, the point here is that it shows off their powers, a good way to get readers up to speed fast when we have a page budget to work within. This culminates in Reed giving a flashback to how they gained these powers - you know the story. Reed wanted to beat the commies into space, bullied Ben into serving as test pilot on an untested craft for an unauthorized flight, and let his girlfriend and her little brother tag along for REASONS2. There's an economy of story here in giving the reader the context they need to "get" what Lee and Kirby are going for here. Immediately upon being exposed to cosmic rays, the team decides to use their powers to fight crime. And good for them!3

Reed explains the situation -power plants are going missing - and he's managed to pinpoint the cause to MONSTER ISLAND which is totally a real place. They go there, fight some monsters, meet the Moleman - our first Supervillain with the power of being really unlikeable.

There's a lot less combat than you might otherwise expect - we're coming to the end of our page-count - but basically when danger rears its ugly head the Fantastic Four bravely turn their tails and... flee... escaping just as Monster Island is destroyed.

And that's it! That's Fantastic Four #1, the issue that launched a thousand ships and several comic book universes. Stan's bosses are going to wait and see whether or not this experiment takes off, and in the early 60s Marvel's distributors are still owned by DC's parent company so it'll be a while before publication of new books picks up steam. I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts on the issue, or my take on it, and I'll be posting my thoughts on Fantastic Four #2 in a few days.

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^{1 Back home we called this an "Irish Goodbye."
2 Irresponsibility. The reason is irresponsibility.
3 This origin gets a lot of revisions, starting with Issue #2 where I guess Stan realized that Yuri had already made it into space, so Reed's goal here becomes to be the first one to Mars. It sees more and more revisions due to the sliding timescale dragging the events of Fantastic Four #1 forward in time as the real world's decades roll on.}