The Revolution Will Not Be Televised — How Marvel Comics embodied the trends of the 1960s

The Marvel Age Of Comics

America in the very early 1960s. Suburban conformity was an acceptable norm that seemed locked in a class-divided society with an underlying portent. A point reinforced by a quick glance at the inner gatefold of Led Zeppelin’s 1976 ‘Presence’ album – depicting a somewhat sinister black object providing a veritable ‘eyesore’ within the pictures of Cold War contentment.

During this somewhat ‘vanilla’ period book-ended by the death of Buddy Holly and The British Invasion. Rampant uncertainty was arguably the order of the day spearheaded by the McCarthy Witch hunts of the 1950s and the Bay of Pigs invasion. ‘The kids’, who had largely remained oblivious to newsreel intricacies, needed a new kind of escapism: something radical to shake the status quo.

The revolution began in November 1961 with the princely sum of ten cents – enough to purchase the first issue of ‘The Fantastic Four’, published by the still-struggling Marvel Comics. Coincidentally, that month was when Brian Epstein first encountered The Beatles at Liverpool’s The Cavern Club, as well as the construction of The Berlin Wall shortly before. Something was brewing. One era was about to overtake another slowly and subtly.

Saturday morning trips to the chemists via the hot dog and root beer stand were now never quite the same …

Creator Stan Lee took the lead from DC who were, at the time, riding high with the Justice League Of America Team. Superhero ‘teams’ were now all the rage. The Fantastic Four debut issue proved to be more than popular, ushering in a period of renewed creativity for the then somewhat stagnant institution of Marvel Comics that had been going for all of 22 years. By the third issue, it started to receive fan mail and The Marvel Age of Comics had begun!

The Fantastic Four were Modern Marvel's first superhero team. Writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby put themselves out on a limb to break away from the strong silent archetypes of yesteryear. Their characters were portrayed in a naturalistic environment – where they reassuringly squabbled and bickered minus the frustration of keeping a secret identity under wraps.

Keeping their own identities secret was now no longer an awkward emotional roller coaster a la Clark Kent and later Matt Murdock. Subsequently, Marvel comics developed a reputation for focusing on characterisation and adult issues to a greater extent than most superhero comics before them.

On college campuses, The Incredible Hulk (# 1, May 1962) was a very popular superhero. No doubt this was owing to his immediate anti-hero creditably and his rampaging transience.

Fittingly launched at the cusp of a decade which was barely two years old, but had yet to actually ‘swing’; The Fantastic Four were very much a ‘cold war’ product. The world seemed on the brink of destruction just under a year later. The reason why The Fantastic Four became who they were was owing to a freak accident befitting the times: accidental exposure to cosmic rays during a scientific mission.

Most of the Fantastic Four (Reed Richards, Susan and Johnny Storm) seemed to utilise their abilities in an almost potently sexual way. Only Ben Grimm aka The Thing drew the short straw becoming Marvel’s first anti-hero. With his rugged orange hide and nondescript visage; by default he embodied the flip-side of the cerebral family unit: he was a mature family member reduced to a baby subject to hard-hitting outbursts.

Grimm frequently squabbled with his nemesis Johnny Storm aka The Human Torch. Respite came with his romance with the blind sculptress, Alicia Masters. Such dysfunctionality was all part of the agenda. Marvel often presented flawed superheroes, freaks, and misfits. They were here to stay.

Interestingly enough, like the dichotomy of the sixties, The Hulk and the Thing (who looked like ‘the enemy’) embodied a sense of aesthetic discord and polarisation. In reaction to ‘the straights’, they were literally and figuratively ‘the freaks’: anti-authoritarian outsiders, prone to persecution, who craved social acceptance like ‘the straights’: which would forever leave them with a short fuse that would continue throughout the ensuing decades.

Genesis

The road to Marvel Comics’ belated success in late 1961 had been a somewhat inconsistent and erratic one. Their first publication simply titled Marvel Comics aka Marvel Mystery Comics was the Timely Comics corporation’s first publication launched in October 1939. This issue marked the debut of the coarse-natured Sub Mariner aka Namor created by writer-artist Bill Everett (he later created Daredevil in 1964). Also included was the first appearance of Carl Burgos’s android superhero, The Human Torch.

Thankfully, the issue was a success. It, along with a second printing the following month, sold a combined nearly 900,000 copies. Timely soon had its own staff in place by the following year. The company's first true editor, writer-artist Joe Simon collaborated with writer-artist Jack Kirby (1917-1994) to create one of the first patriotically themed superheroes, Captain America released in his own comic in March 1941. It, too, proved a bigger hit, with sales of nearly one million.

In 1975, writer Roy Thomas revived these early superheroes for his World War Two-set series, ‘The Invaders’ with an insightful emphasis on ‘boy companions’ as per the comics, The Human Torch’s Toro and The Captain’s Bucky Barnes. By the 60s, owing to changing morals, the whole idea of such companions seemed somewhat old hat, and weren’t exactly conspicuous by their absence.

However, the timing of Captain America could not have been more fortuitous. Released a mere nine months before America entered World War Two. Superheroes were now seen as having a substantial role to play not just in their ‘comic world’ but in society in general – fighting the Axis Powers.

This was like a precursor to 20 years later, when the more established Marvel Comics went out of their way to empathise with the nascent youth culture within 60s society coping with the threat of the draft breathing down their necks. The social wondering and dalliances of Peter Parker aka Spider-Man clearly embodied this.

Publisher Martin Goodman hired his wife's 16-year-old cousin, Stanley Lieber, as an office assistant in 1939. When Joe Simon left the company in late 1941, Goodman made Lieber, now known as Stan Lee (1922-2018), interim editor of the comics line, a position Lee kept for decades except for three years during his wartime military service. Like the ‘apprentice’ he technically was, Lee wrote prolifically for Timely, contributing to different titles.

Road to the 60s

The popularity of superheroes waned post-war. In 1950, The Captain America comic book was discontinued, but not without having a perfunctory short-lived revival in late-1953 to mid-1954. Since his main revival in 1964, Captain America has remained in constant publication both in his solo comic and as a member of The Avengers. This was also the case with The Sub Mariner and The Human Torch albeit Johnny Storm.

The compliant Timely Corporation – soon to be Marvel – published the rather generic titles that were wholly popular at the time: horror, westerns, jungle books, medieval adventure, sport and bible stories.

During this commercially fruitful 50s period. The comic code authority – that default bastion of anti liberalism – assured that the content was rather restrained. Up until the very early 60s. Safety rather than subversiveness was the order of the day. But this was a few heartbeats away from being challenged by the next advent of superheroes.

The Marvel Trendsetters

As the Marvel revolution got underway. Cold War themes aside, this naturalistic approach gradually extended to the topics of the day. In contrast to the ‘warts and all’ being of the Marvel pantheon; the DC one seemed ‘squeaky clean’ - a bit like the shaggy-haired Beatles or Rolling Stones replacing the blow-dried Everly Brothers clones of mere months ago!

Comics historian Mike Benton noted:

“In the world of DC comic books, communism did not exist. Superman rarely crossed national borders or involved himself in political disputes. From 1962 to 1965, there were more communists (in Marvel Comics) than on the subscription list of Pravda. Communist agents attack Ant-Man in his laboratory; red henchmen jump The Fantastic Four on the moon, and Viet Cong Guerrillas take potshots at Iron Man”.

It is therefore interesting to note that it was not until 2003 that Scottish writer Mark Millar created ‘Red Superman’ – which depicted Superman as a Communist superhero as if he landed in Russia instead of America.

Simplicity was initially high on the agenda. The art of Jack Kirby and later Steve Ditko (with Spider-Man) drew in a relatable way which actually conveyed a sense of emotion. The Pop Art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein explored a similar theme. The plain, almost woodcut-like panels of Ditko were evolved into the slightly more flamboyant art of John Romita later in the decade. Romita went out of his way to depict a cosy bohemian coffee bar culture enjoyed by Peter Parker and his chums but appropriately overshadowed by Peter’s former high school enemy, Flash Thompson volunteering for service in the Vietnam War.

The Marvel Pantheon systematically displayed the emotive values of the era: chiefly simple, but troubled family ties (FF/Thor/Spider-Man/ Daredevil) and the loner/nomadic spirit of the Hulk and The Silver Surfer intertwined with a kind of existential philosophy albeit less poetic in the Hulk’s case.

Other arbitrary, but important touches included the depiction of Thor. Thor’s golden locks and worthy otherworldly ideology (like The Silver Surfer) seemed to pre-empt the hippie movement in retrospect. Doctor Strange – who made his debut in 1963 – was another noted hippie prototype suitably residing living in Greenwich Village, and being namedropped in Pink Floyd’s 1969 song ‘Cymbaline’, effectively sealing the paisley deal.

Artists Marie Severin and Gene Colan managed to establish a more racier fast-paced and organic art form for the Hulk and Daredevil respectively, redolent of the popular screen-faves of the time, ‘The Fugitive’ and ‘Bullit’.

In the run-up to the Moon Landing, the early psychedelic art shown in The Fantastic Four was liberally used and ready to be gawped at as if to mirror the arcane musical worlds of The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Even Marc Bolan was a huge fan at the time, belatedly namedropping The Silver Surfer in T. Rex’s 1974 single ‘Teenage Dream’.

Trendsetting personas both political and stylish were a key facet of the both lurid and informative 60s media landscape. The first ever superhero of African descent in mainstream comics, The Black Panther aka T’Challa – the King and Protecter of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, made his debut in Fantastic Four # 52 (July 1966) mere months before the formation of the real-life Black Panthers. This was a “strange coincidence” admittedly stated by Stan Lee.

The swashbuckling Daredevil aka Matt Murdock arrived somewhat late to the 60s party. Working as a razor-sharp lawyer, Matt Murdock would to do all he could do idealistically set the world to rights amid a convoluted love life. For undercover purposes, there was even an alter ego developed: a fictitious twin brother know as ‘Mike Murdock’ who, in contrast, had a brash young ‘swinger’ persona not too dissimilar to Warren Beatty or Steve McQueen. Basically, everything that Matt Murdock wasn’t. However, Mike could be considered a springboard for the continued eclectic literary and artistic themes in Daredevil in the forthcoming years: ranging from science-fiction to downright poverty, light years away from the office politics of the Murdock and Nelson firm.

A Conclusion For Beyond

In 1965, Spider-Man and The Hulk were both featured in Esquire magazine's list of 28 college campus heroes, along with John F. Kennedy and Bob Dylan.

So yes. The 60s generally helped ‘invent’ Marvel for the subsequent decades. The blueprint was Kirby's artwork which thrived on both personal tension and psychedelia along with Lee's bravado and melodrama, which was somewhat insecure and brash at the same time. Such a happy accident would gradually inspire younger writers/artists of differing ages: such as John Romita (born 1930); Roy Thomas (born 1940), and Gerry Conway (born 1952).

Romita and Co. helped steer the transcendence away from a more innocent decade to an insidious feeling of urban unrest that would become de riguer in the 70s, and later in the 80s – epitomised by the Frank Miller-era Kingpin, The Punisher; Bullseye, and Elektra. But there was no denying it. The 60s invented Marvel, and Marvel invented the 60s just as much as the roll call of musicians, movie-stars, fashion-designers and photographers who ruled the world at the time.

Humphrey Fordham