“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!”
~William Shakespeare, Henry V
I do not recall my initial encounter with the X-Men, though I remember the comics readily enough. I had an edition of the first dozen or so issues, in black and white, over which I spent hours poring as a child. This was the era of my life when the act of reading was a newness to me, though I hasten to note that this was not so with literature; Mom had been reading to me since infancy, and I like to think that I had a somewhat sophisticated literary appreciation by the age of ten. But reading to myself? Now there’s a different story. Without deviating overmuch into self-indulgent autobiography, I was not a reader until this late stage. There was never a professional diagnosis, nor is there any real consensus between my parents as to my deficiency, apart from “I wasn’t ready.” The story of how I did finally arrive at reading letters myself is for another time; let it here suffice to justify my early and dear love for comic books; that is, for pictorial narrative.
My earliest comics (if you’ll forgive the appearance of pretension) were Franco-Belgian: Yakari and the White Buffalo was a gift from my paternal grandmother, and the peerless Adventures of Tintin were discovered in waste bins at my Dad’s used-book warehouse. Of Asterix the Gaul I’ve no original memory except for a life-size cutout or mural at a mini-golf circuit someplace in Europe when I was four or five; apart from that non-sequitur observation, the little gallic warrior has always been around someplace. Add to this lineup editions of Calvin and Hobbes, The X-Men, and The Fantastic Four, and you have what a selective memory places as the foundation for my (graphic-novel) literary frame of reference.
Comic books were a sort of freedom to me. While it was agony to puzzle over why any sensible person would like to see Spot run or care to know what Jane thought about it, comics were there for the interpreting; one could very easily follow Spot’s progress, though what he and Jane were up to was anyone’s guess. Perhaps that was part of the fun. One needn’t know why Asterix needed to rescue Getafix before the centurion Crismus Bonus wrung from him the secret to the magic potion; one had only to look at a series of pictures depicting a venerable druid spooning out samples from a cauldron, the super-enhanced Gauls beating the Romans senseless, the ruffled Roman leadership with their heads together and conniving expressions upon their faces, a plot hatched to capture the druid (who expressed his displeasure through what we would today label “rage emojis”), and the distressed Gauls agonizing over a nearly empty cauldron. The rest of the comic dealt with Asterix enacting his brilliant rescue plan. In short, the story told itself, the word bubbles just noises that made clear what the images first heavily implied.
This was all predicated, of course, upon attention to detail, flow, and (above all) patience on the part of authors and illustrators, the sort of care taken by Japanese manga-ka today—in my experience best exemplified by the gifted Tite Kubo. (As an aside, I first “read” Kubo’s internationally famous Bleach in the original Japanese, which is to say, I reverted to my pre-literate days and interpreted the whole story thanks to his outstanding use of the visual medium; imagine then my horror upon flipping through an English edition years later to discover that, at least in translation, Kubo comes across as perhaps one of the worst prose authors I’ve ever encountered). American comics, at least in the tradition of MARVEL's numerous titles, came from a different stock entirely, stemming maybe from the unusual method employed by the first creatives.
Years having passed and my original collection nowhere to be found, I turned to the Penguin Classics X-Men (for such a thing happily exists, with forwards and series introductions and chapters chockablock full of literary analysis) and threw myself into the first issue: September, 1963. The summer of ’63 concluded with the tenth anniversary of the Korean War armistice; troops had been in Vietnam for almost eight years; the Cuban Missile Crisis was not yet eleven months past. “Surfin’ USA” (The Beach Boys) was competing with “Twist and Shout” (the Beatles); man would not set foot on the moon for another six years. And in New York, Stan Lee had a dilemma. His publisher cousin-in-law, Martin Goodman, wanted a new superhero team, and he wanted them fast. Fast was something that Lee (his nom de plume, the real man being Stanley Lieber) certainly understood and had mastered in his two decades at the company (not yet branded MARVEL). In the three years since the launch of The Fantastic Four, Lee and artist Jack Kirby (with the assistance of Lee’s brother Larry and artist Don Heck) had developed five different comic book heroes for their new universe, each with his own title, culminating in The Avengers in July of ’63.
In a stroke of creative genius (it bears the sort of simplicity that one recognizes only in hindsight) Lee and Kirby made two key contributions to the superhero genre that differed from their rivals at DETECTIVE COMICS (DC). The first was to conceive of their characters as flawed, mortal, subject to suspicion by those that they had sworn to protect, or even genuinely tempted to do evil; the second innovation was the shared universe. To claim this as totally original would be to mislead: DC had already pioneered a composite world for their heroes with The Justice League, yet it must be stressed that they still adhered to the stand-alone episode—one needn’t bother which comic one read in a year, as each Superman or Batman issue was self-contained. What Lee and Kirby developed was a new method for integrated storytelling: a self-contained episode that fed a longer story (linear) while also referencing and drawing upon material from adjacent titles (lateral). This was innovation that drew a crowd, and crowds were another thing that Lee came to understand (to the sad detriment of several of his working relationships, it must be added). Yet innovation may be accidental genius as often as is intent; Lee’s next creation would certainly be such.
After all, “Fantastic Four," “Iron Man,” or even “Thor” are self-explanatory; but what exactly (or even why) is an “exman”?
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