Comic Book Talk

This should not be too hard, I thought, as long as I stay disciplined. All I have to do is read 27,000 comic books, then write about them. I had just signed a contract to write All of the Marvels, a book about reading every superhero story Marvel has published since 1961 as one single gigantic narrative.

The Marvel story is omnipresent – its characters are everywhere, in movies, on television, even gracing shampoo bottles and bags of salad – yet also unknowable. It purports to be one big story: any episode can refer to, and be compatible with, any earlier one.

But not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing. That’s not how it was meant to be experienced.

I did not, however, read six decades of stories in order. That would have been unbearable – and it is one of the two mistakes Marvel-curious readers often make. It is a surefire route to boredom and frustration as the fun lies in following your whims.

The other error is trying to cherrypick the greatest hits, the pivotal single issues. Taken in isolation, these are peaks without mountain ranges. Their dramatic power comes from their context.

Instead, I would go grazing, looking at whatever seemed most fun that day: the plot-dense 1980s Spider-Woman, then the monstrously huge dragon Fin Fang Foom, followed by a bunch of 1970s romance comics that gave veteran cartoonists (who had been drafted into the superhero game) a chance to get back to their roots, specifically, drawing young women wearing very fashionable clothes and crying……..

And I had an absolutely great time. The best of Marvel’s comics, old and new, were as astonishing, thrilling and imaginative as popular entertainment gets. There was also plenty of sophomoric, retrograde stuff, rushed out to serve an audience of credulous kids or bloodthirsty nostalgics.

I was often aware that I was gorging on something that had only been made for snacking, indulging the worst part of the collector’s impulse: the part that strives for completeness (just like the Beyonder in Secret Wars II!) rather than enjoyment.

Fortunately, by the time I had by the time I’d waded in too far, a useful transformation had come over me. I realised that I was able to find something to enjoy in just about any issue: examples of a certain creator’s unique use of language or weird cultural references that could have appeared at no other moment.

That may have been Stockholm syndrome, I admit. But when someone recently asked me if I had actually read every issue of NFL SuperPro, a mercifully short-lived series about a super-powered American football player, I said: “Of course! And #10 includes both a parody of the mythopoetic men’s movement of the early 1990s and a character whose power is literally to throw money at problems – coins come flying out of his hands.”…….



https://www.theguardian.com/culture...beatable-squirrel-girl?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other