We're to think about the history of Marvel Comics. It's almost like something that spider man spun out of his wrist. It is very complicated history. Marvel comics was a sideline of a much larger publishing enterprise by a guy named Martin Goodman. He was related to Stan Lee, it just never really add any financial viability to it. Until finally you get to the late 50s. Early 1960s. In Stan Lee has a decision of do I want to walk away from this industry entirely. And Goodman was basically saying, if you want to do something with this, do something with it.
The larger than life heroes of comic books have dominated the film industry in the last few years, none more so than the Marvel stable of characters like The Avengers, Iron Man Spider Man in their cohort. But what has made this material that used to be dismissed as just kidstuff such an indelible part of our popular culture. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today, we'll be talking about Marvel comics as both a business and a pop culture staple. Our guest today says that a few early decisions put Marvel on the map and in the minds of a generation. And that impact does not seem to be winning.
My name is Mark Harper. I teach Film Studies at Heartland. And this is the end of my first year teaching at Heartland before that I taught at IUPUI in Indianapolis, and within IUPUI they have what's called the Herranz School of Art and Design. And for several years while I was teaching there, I taught the history of American comic books and graphic novels.
What first got you interested in comics and graphic novels? Did you start when you were a kid,
I kind of stumbled into it as an academic discipline. It's not something that ever really occurred to me because when I was growing up, I probably read as much or as little comic books as anybody. I understood by the time I was in high school that there are comic book nerds. And definitely with him as an undergraduate, I knew there's comic book nerds. And I liked comic books, I just never necessarily identified as that. I loved film. But in the late 1980s, I noticed some things were changing and publishing and I was working in a bookstore. And I noticed more and more books were coming out in comic book form. And this is during a big publishing shift to market more graphic novels and Art Spiegelman had published his autobiography historical account of the Holocaust called mouse. And I picked those up and I was like, wow, what is this? From there? I just began discovering more and more what's called alternative comics, non-mainstream very weird, very edgy kind of books. And I thought, this is interesting. So I guess from there, it just began to grow as a secondary area of intellectual interest and
curiosity. So what got you interested in I guess you would say the more popular mainstream superhero comics, because you mentioned Art Spiegelman's book may have won like appealed surprise or something, oh, yeah, it was considered a literary work. And not all of the comics that you discuss in class, and that we think about today are necessarily considered literary works. What got you more interested in the popular comics of the 60s and beyond?
Well, that's interesting, because I needed to create a course that I could teach. And I approached the dean at Heron School of Art and Design about the idea of teaching a history of comic books class. At that point, I was mainly interested in these more edgy underground comics. And so she said, Yes, absolutely, we'd love for you to teach this course. And then as I began becoming kind of comic book historian, I began discovering this whole history of mainstream comics that had completely missed, and I guess piece by piece by piece, I just began kind of experiencing a second childhood, almost of just loving reading the golden age of superhero comics, the DC Comics, the old Batman and Superman comics from the 40s and 50s, the Marvel Comics from the 60s and 70s. And then I also began discovering if you're going to teach students about what is a graphic novel, you can't have some sort of high art lower bias, it's all part of the same thing, just because Art Spiegelman has a sort of literary credential to him. He's building off this exact same history, and other books like watchmen and Dark Knight. Those have received just as much literary critical attention as Art Spiegelman's book has and once I read those books, I discovered this is every bit as fascinating and intellectually deep as the other works. So we really have to kind of throw the high art low art divide out the window.
So in particular, when you're looking at Marvel Comics, which are probably the most mainstream right now, with the success of all of the Marvel movies, what sets that apart, in particular in popular culture? Is it something that is different than other approaches, as you mentioned, like Batman and Superman, go back to the 30s, and 40s. Those are considered part of the DC flagship of comics. But when you get into Marvel, with Spider Man and Iron Man, etc, what set those apart?
Now we're in for a long answer. I'm going to break this down into three different categories. So we're going to start first of all with the financial history of this. And if we were to think about the history of Marvel Comics, it's almost like something that spider man spun out of his wrist. It is a very complicated history, financially, without going into all this detail about it. Marvel comics was a sideline of a much larger publishing enterprise by a guy named Martin Goodman. He was related to Stan Lee, and Goodman liked having comics around. But this is not something he took very seriously. So Marvel Comics existed in some form, you know, as long as DC Comics and the other comics did, it just never really had any financial viability to it. And it was constantly having to layoff employees who was just limping and limping, limping. Until finally you get to the late 50s, early 1960s. In Stan Lee has a decision of do I want to walk away from this industry entirely, or, and Goodman was basically saying, if you want to do something with this, do something with it. But I'm kind of done with dealing with Marvel Comics. So Stanley took it over in the late 1950s, early 1960s. And it became so successful, that I think this idea of a rags to riches industry, we love that story. We really, really love that story in American business. And that's part of how Marvel Comics I think established so much presence in the public is because they're going this is such a great industry, it's happening. This is exciting. So there's the financial part of that, and they continue to do that I'm definitely had their share of financial problems, they went bankrupt in 1996 1997. But then, you know, within 15 years, they're bought out by Disney. And they're just making tons of money right now. And we've worked as a Marvel logo everywhere. Socially, they kind of reinvented themselves at the exact same time, the baby boomer generation is coming of age in the late 1950s, early 1960s. And these were children of the Atomic Age, think about the victory of World War Two. And love the victory of World War Two is basically saving the world for democracy, and establishing a safe place for this new generation. But it also establishes a sense of reality, because we're now in the Atomic Age, we now have dropped two nuclear bombs. And we're capable of mass genocide. So this younger generation is growing up with science on the brain in a way that the previous generation had not been accustomed. So Marvel Comics, they're superheroes are the products of science. These are alienated individuals. And the key word here is individual they feel sort of separated by the rest of society. They longed to express themselves, they long to sort of fit into society, but they also feel like outcasts. At the same time. They're also the products of scientific mishaps. For example, the fantastic for this is a sort of four person family unit, who they built a rocket basically to try to compete in the space race with the Soviet Union and the rocket malfunctioned. And now their superpowers had to do with the disastrous side effects of this rocket crash. Spider Man, Peter Parker was bitten by an atomic spider. So here we have science, again, kind of entering into this. So the superheroes didn't ask necessarily to have their superpowers. They're angry at their superpowers themselves. At the same time, they're experiencing all sorts of problematic social fit with each other as superheroes, but also with the rest of society. And there's a strong love hate relationship with science and with themselves as a result of this. So Marvel Comics in the 1960s discovered, we have a generation of people who are high school and college age who are reading us with the same amount of attention and devotion, that they would read The Catcher in the Rye, or a separate piece or To Kill a Mockingbird. That's what this generation wants to read. So it was a very strong social fit. There's probably more I could say about that, but I'd say the financial and the social is a lot of what had to do with that early success that continues to happen.
When you talk about some of that early success, how much of it came down to the creators of those characters, the artists and the writers? Was it something that it's a formula? And it didn't matter necessarily who executed it? Or was it something that was given its enduring popularity by the individual people that took it to this new level?
That is an excellent question. And let me get this out of the way. I know this a podcast, I can't kind of build on visuals I wish I could. But let me briefly kind of describe in words what the Marvel method is. Previously, if we were to look at superhero comics, or any kind of genre comics from the 1950s, we had to think about how do these things get created? How do they reach the printed comic book page? Well, usually there was a writer, and there was a story outline, and there was dialogue, there's all these things kind of put down on paper. And the artists come along, and they say, Okay, well, I've got 12 pages to fill. So let me very carefully create images that fit these words. So basically, images subordinate toward the Marvel method was we want to re invent the visual artistic beauty of comics here. So let me take probably the biggest known name of Marvel Comics, and that is Jack Kirby, he's a huge artist for the 1950s 1960s. Under the Marvel method, Jack Kirby would sit down with Stanley, and they would come up with an idea, say for okay, we're going to have the Fantastic Four encounters some sort of adversary, and they're going to have to save the city of New York from his adversary. And adversary has the power of dropping green slime all over the city. So that's all we got going on. So Jack, take it away. So Jack Kirby, basically would take that germ of an idea, and he would fill the 12 pages with images, then the images would tell the story, basically, no words, just simple images. And sometimes it'd be more sentence, they'd be less unique. That's the role of the editor is to kind of come in and say, Okay, we need another image here to help follow through on this particular sequence, or you have to cut that out that kind of we need to simplify this story. But again, it's all images, it's no words. So move on to phase three. Stanley sits back down again. And he says, Okay, now I will add words. But I'm going to add words in ways that don't detract from the images and help facilitate the storytelling. So there in a nutshell, is just basically the Marvel method. It's really promoting the visual artist, kind of at the expense of the words, and it's kind of getting back at the purity of comic book form. And in many ways, Marvel Comics never leaves that formula behind. Jack Kirby is such a talented person, his sort of approach to storytelling to visual storytelling kind of sets a blueprint for a lot of the artists that Follow MARVEL for the decades to come. As you can well guess that means, okay, well, who takes the credit? Well, there's a lot of fighting, because on this because Stan Lee, owner of the company, and also the sort of face of the company, he's like a carnival barker, or the Master of Ceremonies at his circus, and he's sort of like, come one come all to the Mary Marvel Comics band, and he would give credit in the comic book pages to the artists. But Stanley is still the main guy, he'd have Stan's bullpen page on the comics where people could write in letters and things like that. And so this begins kind of a long history of difficulty for artists to maintain control over what they're doing, because different people take the credit for this. And there's all kinds of infighting. For example, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have known each other for a long, long time, they're well acquainted with each other, they were not BFFs. By any stretch, though, there's strong competitiveness that run between them. And Kirby would come and go from the Marvel Comics, just like a lot of their other artists have kind of come and gone. And it's usually on the basis of I want to have the rights to the art that I've been contributing here. And I feel like those rights are being taken away from me. So when you say who's responsible in a lot of ways, they all are responsible and credit is just something you have to sort of carefully sorted out on a case by case basis.
So Marvel is now owned by Disney and you have to give Disney as a parent company a lot of credit for developing the franchises that they have with these Marvel characters because over several years, many people tried to translate the enduring success of culture of those characters into movies and They weren't ever really quite as popular as they are now, at least from a monetary standpoint, how has this universe and Marvel method on the page translated onto the screen and into this entertainment industry,
Marvel and DC and any other mainstream commercial company from the 1960s Onward discovered, we're going to make a lot of money. If we set up a licensing office within our company that handles the very lucrative sale of these figures to other forms of media. For instance, growing up the 1960s and 70s, I watched the electric company on PBS. And I can remember the first time I saw Spider Man on the electric company, and thinking to myself, wow, how did he get on here? How'd that happen? So this has been decades and decades of very careful licensing. And so now we'll reach the point after a Marvel Comics has gone bankrupt, and they discover, okay, we're going to put a lot of our money into film. And as a company, we're just going to be very forward about this and simply say, we want to be known as a independent film company. And we're going to let the medium of film lead the way because we're living in a digital age, we're definitely living in an age of convergence, where the same people that really enjoy certain video games and really enjoy certain comic books and certain TV shows, and certain channels are going to come see our movies. So we can't necessarily depend upon the comic book reader ship, or our base audience. We can't necessarily depend upon that, even though that's where it starts. So licensing has a lot to do with this and Marvel realized well are a lot of our main money is coming from licensing. So we simply need to promote this and it film as a better medium, or home for our Marvel Comics characters, then the paper pages of comic books themselves, then so be it, we need to go where the money is. So all the way through the Late Late, Late 90s. But then the first decade of the 21st century, we see independent productions of Marvel comics, movies, getting a pretty nice chunk of money, you know, from summer movie going audiences. And then finally in 2008, when John Fabbro directs Ironman, which is just fantastic state of the art digital techniques, and said, Okay, this is it. This is how we need to let our superheroes live. And so 2009 Disney buys them. And that we live in our current age where people say, Yeah, I'm not going to read the comic books. But yes, I'm definitely gonna go see that movie. I have to
part of that success is the licensing for everything from Spider Man pajamas to that far beyond the comic books. And I guess that's one of the things that's interesting to me about the enduring nature of some of these comic book characters. Because whether or not there was a successful Spider Man movie, there are always seemed to be Spider Man pajamas. Yes, there always seem to be these licensed products. And they kind of go into overdrive, when there are these other bits of entertainment people react to. So as part of that enduring success, I guess, using the movies, almost as if they are planting a flag for brand awareness, those images and that iconography of a spider man or an Iron Man. Yes, yes,
absolutely. And this is where I kind of segue back into something you kind of touched on a second ago, and that is kids pajamas. There is this interesting, fascinating and undeniable, childlike aspect of reading comics, it has nothing to do with the subject matter. It has nothing to do with the actual images that you're reading. It has to do with something about this experience. And this is kind of potentially get us away from talking about Marvel Comics. But I do think it's important for us to acknowledge this. If we think about comic books and literacy, then we're thinking about the ability of young minds to look at the Comic Book page and feel as if I'm in control of this. It's not like a kids first reader where there's no pictures and it's horrifying. And they think how am I gonna get through this page? And kids look at Chapters especially when they start learning, okay, I'm expected to read through a chapter. And it's horrifying because they look at line and line and line of word word of word. And it seems uncontrollable. And that's why kids I believe, really love comic books before they even know that they're a special part of a publication world. They say this is great. I can look at these images and I feel as if I have control over this. And I can linger on one image as long as my eye It will allow me or I can move on to the next image. If I'm having trouble understanding the relationship from one panel to the next, I can go ask my Mom or Dad, what's going on here. And they can tell me. And so there's this kind of mastery, there's a sort of acquisition to this. Now, back to iconography, which you mentioned, that is key and Marvel Comics discovered, okay, well, we need to sort of rebrand the superhero in the 1960s, they discovered, we need to kind of create a different sort of superhero, something that's a little bit more kind of spooky, and maybe has some roots in crime imagery, and maybe has some roots in horror imagery, it still needs to be identifiable as a superhero. So it's got to have that sort of symmetry. And we've got to have the, you know, the physical human bodies that have amazing powers or some sort of amazing string. Because an icon needs to have that, you know, that sense of empowerment that if you stand next to it or look at it, it's going to sort of give you that sense of hey, I can be better than myself, I can be like that. So it follows that young readers are really going to be attracted to superhero comics, because it gives them a sense of a world outside of themselves and a world of empowerment. I don't think that ever goes away, ever. And that's why I think licensing probably became so crucial to the Marvel Comics, because they said, these are very powerful images, the way they're drawn, and we have gold mines here. And if we can come up with new ones, for instance, let me take a more recent Marvel comic creation like Deadpool, if we can come up with a new one that ends up getting a lot of traction and finds its own audience, right, let's keep coming up with this huge universe of characters that people are going to be drawn to. Now I think I can mention DC here real briefly, DC success had a lot to do with a much more classically drawn human body is something that we could associate with the Italian Renaissance and the depiction of the human body, Italian Renaissance, and also all the way back to the Classical Age, and the high Greek sort of representation. Because they're muscular, they're symmetrical, there's a certain logic to the depiction, the proportion of the body always seemed just exquisite, but at the same time, maintain the kind of ideal. So when you get these classic images of Superman soaring through space, or you know, being able to fly, that has a different kind of impairment on its own, because it reminds you of these images and icons, you've always seen a Batman is no different. Batman is definitely, you know, the perfect renaissance man of strength, beauty and intelligence. And plus, it's just so dark and brooding and romantic, too. So, DC kind of maintains a lock on that kind of iconography, I guess.
So when you're teaching students about comic books, what are the big takeaways that you hope that people consider from really examining the source material?
With any type of lecture about comic books, I'm hoping that these types of lectures don't necessarily just kind of give us a, you know, blow by blow historical account of something that somebody could go and sit and watch a documentary or read a book on or something like that, I'm hoping it really kind of opens up questions and gets people thinking about certain things. We do have so many different forms of media, for connecting with the superheroes that we love, and with the energy of the stories that we love to see, and read, and watch video games, movies, Netflix series, there's just so many different ways to experience this. What is it about the paper page that keeps us coming back? Because that has died. And something we could have talked about earlier is The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead began as a comic book series for Image Comics. And anybody who's watched The Walking Dead has discovered I have to go back and read that book. I have to, I have to and so whereas maybe a Marvel Comics, somebody who likes Marvel movies might not necessarily be compelled to go buy the comic book, a lot of the fans of The Walking Dead, went back and said, No, I'm gonna read this. Now. I'm gonna read this. And that happened because an independent comic book company created this story and turn it into a great series. So what is it about the actual paper page that keeps people coming back? When there's so many different forms of media out there? And sometimes I'm hoping people think about especially if they're fans of the Marvel movies, specifically, what is it about the Marvel Comics heroes that sort of brings us out of ourselves and sort of helps us understand ourselves as individuals. and not necessarily larger than life figures like what you might find in the DC Comics are characters born from mythology are born from supernatural experiences. What is it about the Marvel Comics characters that we find so identifiable? That keeps us coming back to that to
Mark, thanks so much for joining us today to talk about this.
Well, thank you. This has been great.
Mark Harper teaches Film Studies at Heartland Community College. He also gives lecture presentations on Marvel Comics in their financial history to the general public. If you're interested in hearing more interviews about art, culture and history, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, Spotify, audio boom, or wherever you found this episode. Thanks for listening
