This decade in Marvel’s history is often remembered as an awkward transitional period-which it was-but the growing pains felt during this time are just like the ones we experience in our youths: aching pangs that promise future advancement. The adults are here, so let’s get serious.īut what if that narrative was as simplistic and reductive as the pre-’80s comics were accused of being? What if that supposedly stagnated adolescence contained all manner of innovation, experimentation, and maturation that have simply been overlooked? What if the actual groundwork for 1986’s radical departures in the form was laid not just by auteur geniuses, but also by the journeyman practitioners of mainstream titles, whose forced capitalistic productivity led to many formal innovations that often go unacknowledged, languishing as they are in the childish, artless pages of unserious comics?Įliot Borenstein’s new book Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head convincingly argues that writers and artists like Steve Gerber and Don McGregor, who worked on characters like Howard the Duck and Black Panther, made smaller, more incremental contributions to comics, ones that are harder to notice but are ultimately just as vital. By 1979, monthly comic book circulation was its lowest since the early ‘40s.” This state of things-comics being immature, unpopular, and creatively stagnant-makes the maturation of the form represented by Miller, Spiegelman, Moore, and others look almost heroic. Comics, in other words, were for kids, and increasingly few of them. In Jeremy Dauber’s fascinating book American Comics: A History, he notes two crucial-and seemingly related-points about the comics industry in the late ‘70s: at the time, “Scholars pegged the reading level of twenty popular comic book titles as ranging from 1.8 to 6.4. Phase Five of the MCU Is Just Beginning.What Do Marvel and Faulkner Have In Common?.Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies, Ranked.

Alan moore author