I couldn't read much of it [the writing is somewhat off-putting to me] but surely this is more than just a list of name and events devoid of analysis right?
To me this is a gutter ball, but it's a very good example of one way these can fail (too into the subject matter for objective representation, building an internal mythology from surface-level analysis)
I haven't read this review so don't know whether I agree with your take on it, but I think you put your finger right on a certain kind of failure. It's very well put.
It kind of lost the thread from the lede in there somewhere. It started with a thesis that comics=myths. Then it went into how the silver age came about originally. Then we got a general argument that new things are better than old things due to innovation. This was briefly followed by starting to look at what made them different to other comics. Then it was a slightly unnecessary defence of why '60s comics weren't progressive by modern standards. Then we went back to innovation. Any of these could have been interesting to varying degrees, but none of them were really fleshed out.
I think the underlying problem was the author is obviously near-obsessively familiar with the subject matter and has lots of thoughts about it, but hasn't got a clear picture of who they're talking to or what they're trying to tell them. I came into this having literally never read these sorts of comics (I've read the Beano, that's about it), and have come away not knowing anything about them, or why these are the "Silver Age." I suspect if I knew more about them, I still wouldn't have got much out of this beyond the historical anecdotes (which were interesting, but were missing any account of why the Silver Age ended; Google tells me the Golden Age was earlier, so presumably they got worse somehow but there's no narrative as to why). Personally, this is the angle I'd have gone more into, then possibly concluded with the mythology point and compared it to e.g. religions settling into fixed canons of dogma or whatever.
Yeah, this is definitely a book review where the author has not quite 'crystallized' the core insight or idea that they are circling around. You can tell in part from the title - often with these things, once you realize the title, 'the rest writes itself'. But a mundane description like 'Marvel Silver Age Comics' is sometimes an admission that you still don't know what you are saying, and you only know what you are saying it about. They should've waited another year or two before trying, I suspect.
---
But if I may try to extract the latent thesis I see here in OP's essay, it would go something like this:
"Marvel's Silver Age of Comics: Humanizing Mythology", by Anonymous.
"Art progresses. Even the idea of having more than one actor in a play had to be invented. But we take these for granted because when we look back, we can't see how narrow the original concept of 'a play' was.
This is true of Marvel-Comics-style comics too. What makes Marvel Marvel is not any specific character or plot gimmick; what makes it is the innovation of taking classic mythological patterns like gods or superhuman warriors, who fight and feud and interact in a rich tapestry of stories (separate from ordinary people), and making these superheroes ordinary people as well, that its readers could identify with, fusing the psychological realism of novels with the archetypal resonance of mythology, to get something *new*. Something that was neither Archie Bunker nor Batman.
No one at Marvel Comics understood this; the key characters weren't even supposed to be 'heroes' but just science fiction style throwaways. They couldn't know they were inventing Marvel comics. But contractual limitation by limitation, sale by sale, gimmick by gimmick, retcon by retcon, contemporary topic by topic, Stan Lee & the Marvel artists backed their way into their great discovery: that in comics, one could create characters like Peter Parker could be both Spiderman *and* a pimply-faced teen who screwed up terribly once & can't forgive himself, and create an entire mythology of such characters, to play in endlessly.
DC Comics never quite figured this out, and instead continued to write 'mythology' like Batman (godlings in the cloak of mortality enacting tragedies or salvations), alienating the reader by going to wells that you can't go to every day; the MCU throve while it could use characters like Downey's Ironman, and balance both the humanity and the mythology, but lost its poise by the end for [reasons] and burned out viewers who got tired of the ever-escalating mythological epics.
This formula is now so familiar we can't even see the water in which we swim, but it gets easier if you go back to see the most flawed versions, and how different the original superheroes like Superman were from the ones Marvel incrementally introduced and refined.
I don't particularly advise doing so, however, because the newer versions really are better, now that people better understand what they are trying to do with this new innovation. If you really want to read the originals, at least the tablet app now makes it relatively easy now (compared to the crazy things we had to do back then like buy decades of used comics). But my advice: read the newer _Spiderman_ instead."
I would support this, but only if we take it to the obvious conclusion, and have a contest for best review of a review of a book review. your clear and concise analysis of gwern’s review of the review (that “it was good”) would certainly be in the running.
As the winner last year, can I say that I’d LOVE to see this? To write mine, I did a deep study of all the previous finalists, and realized there's a bunch of patterns that repeat in the most successful — I think it would be a boon to our community’s rhetorical abilities to argue out what those are, so as to better emulate them.
I’ll add that while I agree that this particular review was weak on enunciating its thesis, there are theses aplenty in it (as Gwern unearthed), and interesting ones at that! And I particularly enjoyed the use of comic book covers to illustrate points.
I second this - the review didn’t choose a single argument, instead it pointed out a bunch of interesting aspects of marvel comic books and helped me understand the historical context for their importance.
Frankly, this was one of my favorite book reviews!
This is a good take. I'd appreciate some more parallels to the original homeric fanfic which dominates storytelling for so long and which in many ways the MCU is just the latest installment. Heroes with fatal flaws or secret shame or whatever is the oldest fanfic in the world.
>Heroes with fatal flaws or secret shame or whatever is the oldest fanfic in the world.
Yup. If this was an innovation in comics, I'd count it as _transmitting_ a millennia-old technique from poetry and literature into a new medium, not as _inventing_ it.
Orthogonal to that, I, personally, am ambivalent about introducing huge numbers of interacting characters. If someone wants to illuminate "the human condition" (with some variations), for the 10,000th time, fine. I tend to be more interested in puzzle stories (e.g. Larry Niven's "Neutron Star"), which focus on a central event with some unexpected consequence due to it.
It's frustrating cause one can kinda-sorta get the sense that something like this is what the review "intended" to be, but there's too many gaps and those assertions need to be filled out with more than tediously enumerated (I guess that's similar to the Bible!) names and dates and bibliographic references. The stronger polished version of this review probably *would* have been quite interesting to read. Alas, one must vote on the review that actually is, not the one that ought to be.
He has wonderful examples of how *hard* it was to invent 'the detective story', and how many detectives manqué there were before the trope-definers like Sherlock Holmes. For example, in one story (https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2005-moretti-graphsmapstrees-3-trees.pdf#page=6), the detective manages to infer from 'clues' which drink was poisoned... and he then *drinks it*. (Now there's something in desperate need of a retcon from Stan Lee - "NARRATOR: He knew the FATAL CHALICE was POISONED, and **drank it anyway**! Trusting in his training in *Shangri-la* to RESIST ALL POISONS known to mankind, and **sure** that this 'mistake' would *flush out a vaunting villain*, secure in his triumph --- only to be UNDONE BY HIS OWN WORDS!!!")
And think of all the mess and discomfort people went through before peanut butter sandwiches were invented! Many lives ruined by breadwiches, toast with a thick layer of pb&j on each side.
That you could put the peanut butter on just one side of each piece of bread, and not have to wash your hands after eating the sandwich each time, may strike us as absurdly obvious - but they just didn't know.
from one of Woody Allen's lesser-known pieces of historical research:
"1741: Living in the country on a small inheritance, [the Earl of Sandwich] works day and night, often skimping on meals to save money for food. His first completed work — a slice of bread, a slice of bread on top of that, and a slice of turkey on top of both — fails miserably. Bitterly disappointed, he returns to his studio and begins again.
1745: After four years of frenzied labor, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great and encourages him. Heartened by the philosopher’s friendship, he returns to work with renewed vigor."
I looked up the story in the link and it's entitled "A Race with the Sun" by L.T. Meade and Clifford Halifax.
The main character is not a detective, but an inventor, and has been invited to (of course) the lonesome out-of-the-way estate by two others in order to (he thinks) sign a contract about research they have all been independently conducting; he has information they need, they have information he needs.
The 'clue' about the third cup of coffee is not there because he suspects foul play and is trying to investigate a possible conspiracy; he is there in all good faith and doesn't (despite heavy hints in the story) suspect any foul play at all. So the clue is there for us, the readers, to heighten the tension and alert us to the fact that Something Fishy Is Going On. It's only in hindsight that the narrator/main character realises that something was up with that third cup.
It's melodramatic, in other words, rather than detection: it's like having your hero or heroine in a serial tied to the railroad tracks - oh no, how will they get out of it for the next instalment? Spoiler here: the "how will he get out of it?" in this story is that he has been drugged, tied up, and strapped to a balloon with a bomb beneath it which will be detonated when the sun rises, hence the title.
So I have to disagree that this is meant as an example of a *detective* story; it's good old-fashioned melodrama:
We have taken down these stories from time to time as our friend. Paul Gilchrist, has related them to us. He is a man whose life study has been science in its most interesting forms—he is also a keen observer of human nature and a noted traveller. He has an unbounded sympathy for his kind, and it has been his lot to be consulted on many occasions by all sorts and conditions of men."
L.T. Meade was a female writer and she wrote scores of books, sometimes with co-authors (as with Halifax above):
"Despite her wide contributions to genre literature, Irish author L. T. Meade is now remembered, if at all, for her girls’ school stories. However, in 1898 the Strand Magazine, famous for its fictions of crime, detection, and the uncanny, proclaimed Meade one of its most popular writers for her contributions to its signature fare. Her stories, widely published in popular fin de siècle magazines, included classic tales of the supernatural, but her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives, criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder, mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity."
There are collections of short stories by Hugh Greene entitled "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes", which are anthologies of detective stories written around the same time. Some of them were made into a television series in the 70s:
To me, this was one of the more enjoyable book reviews. As I grew up in a communist country, I am not too familiar with superhero comics (I've seen a few movies, but never read any of the comics mentioned). This review gave me good insights to why these comics are important
And notice something - no other country but America could pull it off. Captain Britannia was a failure and no one in continental Europe even tried. That's because they are based on individualism and optimism, and a citizen mentality, not a subject mentality.
I couldn't get through the first section, but was pleased that the author framed his introduction as an attempt to persuade to read the rest. I appreciate the self-awareness. I didn't read any of the first bracket entries, though, so I can't guess whether or not this is top-ten work for this year.
Very good review. It's an interesting statement, that the stories are bad by modern standards (to the point you wouldn't recommend we read them) but good for their time because they were better than what came before, and that's why they were popular.
But reading comic books wasn't the only form of entertainment... Were the other forms of entertainment just as bad back then? Films and books weren't? So what explains the popularity?
And would you say the increase in quality was gradual, or were there other seminal events that marked change?
I think other forms of entertainment had their own innovations. I've read that old movies used to be shot kind of like stage productions, with the camera mostly static and actors turned towards the camera like they would turn towards the audience on stage. But then someone realized you could have multiple cameras shooting from different angles and invented the now-standard "shot/reverse shot" for dialogue, and now you can frame things in more interesting ways with close-ups on people's faces and so on.
Ah thanks! It kept telling me something went wrong...
They did, but films from the 50s and 60s are still very enjoyable today. It's not like 'they were good for their time'. So my question is why would lots of people read comics if they were bad, even if they were better than what came before.
Though I suppose it wasn't like huge numbers of people reading them. I suppose marginal improvement led to slight increase in readership?
"So my question is why would lots of people read comics if they were bad, even if they were better than what came before."
Silver Age, we're talking about late 50s all through the 60s to the early 70s (more or less). The simple answer is "new and wider audience", with the invention of the teenager as a consumer with disposable income.
We're talking about what is really a slice of the entire comic book market, because there were romance comics, horror comics, crime comics, etc. for adults but for our purposes we're sticking with "superhero/SF" as the definition of comics.
After the entire kerfuffle during the 50s over worries about juvenile delinquency being caused by reading comics, and the introduction of the Comics Code, superheroes were brought back as both a 'wholesome' subject and also because if you had fantastic or science-fictional elements in the story, you could get around some of the restrictions (but that wasn't guaranteed).
So both wanting to hold on to the young readers as they got older, and to make up for restrictions on previously popular other genres, what we now know as the genre of comics (superheroes) got launched. I think what was pointed out in the review, that a lot of these comics looked more like SF stories than 'traditional' comics, had a lot to do with it - if you're a teenage SF nerd who is already reading the magazines, then these new comics look more like something you'd be interested in. That's a whole new audience right there.
Just to add to this, the Marvel books were a response to the comics code, which had been tanking the industry for a decade. The artists and writers were dying to do more adult books, but couldn't get around the editors/censors. Silver Age Marvel was revolutionary as it pulled in older (male) readers.
I always wonder what the comic world would look like today without the Comics Code. It effectively flushed a generation of artists and writers right out of the medium.
In addition to Deiseach's points, I wonder if it's possible the audience for comics just changed, rather than simply expanding, from the 1930s- 1980s. In the 1930s, I would expect comics and radioplays to be consumed by the same people, and in the same way, as lowbrow TV in the later 60s-80s and the biggest stunt YouTube channels today: that is, as casual, easy background entertainment for kids and distracted adults who don't want to think too much.
But if comics are easier and flashier than novels, TV is easier and flashier than comics (as YouTube is easier and flashier than TV). So the original readership of the truly dumb comic stories would have presumably have moved on to watch dumb TV in the 60s, leaving the market to be driven by the more discerning new nerdy-teen-and-adult readership that Deiseach talks about, who might have more focus to spare for extended character arcs and narrative nuance (and who might themselves have been reading serial novels back in the 30s).
You can make a similar case for a background "audience evaporative cooling" in various other mass genres that appear to magically get more sophisticated over time. For instance, the class of people who dubbed The Wire "peak TV" back in the '00s were not the same as the class of TV-watchers as the audience for Dragnet in the 60s.
>the class of people who dubbed The Wire "peak TV" back in the '00s were not the same as the class of TV-watchers as the audience for Dragnet in the 60s.
I watched both with enjoyment but at very different times of my life. Changes in sophistication can happen on a personal level irrespective of class.
Another thread to consider in this is animated cartoons from the 30's on, and photoplays that were very popular in a lot of places but not so much in the USA. They were basically stories told with still photographs, and have a lot in common with comic books.
I think you need to factor in the heavy-handed creative repression from the Comics Code in the mid 1950's. It pretty much guaranteed that comics were puerile trash. We don't start to see really interesting adult comics until the mid to late 70's and then only initially through the back-door as magazine publications.
In your example, it would be as if someone said Television could only show programs suitable for 7 year olds.
What films from the 1960s are you thinking of that are still enjoyable today? The only ones I've seen were the first couple Doctor Who episodes. My mom liked them, but I found them incredible slow-paced and predictable.
>> 've read that old movies used to be shot kind of like stage productions, with the camera mostly static and actors turned towards the camera like they would turn towards the audience on stage
How old is "old"? Because that sh*t was over and done with by the time "Birth of a Nation" came out in 1915.
As for any claim that movies today are better than those of the past, I would recommend this video:
I'm guessing that as TV got better (both technologically and in terms of sophisticated storytelling) the kinds of things that would get people into a movie theater changed. A serious drama works just as well on the "small screen" of a 50 inch HDTV at home, but you really want an actual theater for a movie that's heavy on spectacle, such as James Cameron's "Avatar". Similarly, romantic "date night" movies also give you a reason to physically go out instead of inviting someone to your own home to, what's the phrase? "Netflix and chill"?
Pretty much, though the history of movies competing with TV has been going on for seventy years now, and is a little more complex. During the 50s and 60s Hollywood used big-budget films -- whether consciously "epic" like "Ben Hur" or "The Ten Commandments" or merely possessed of elements and production values that outclassed TV, like "The Sound of Music" -- to draw audiences with something they couldn't see at home. Post-1970, with the ratings code replacing the censorship codes, movies tried outcompeting TV with sex, violence, language, and subject matter. They also came to rely upon a teenage/young adult audience that could be more easily drawn out of the house than their parents could.
Since 2000 (roughly), though, harsher fare has come to appear more regularly on pay-TV and cable, so that the industry has had to return to "epic" films like "Avatar" or superhero movies in order to distinguish itself from TV. At the same time, movie attendance by teen/young adult audiences has been falling pretty dramatically -- where TV keeps adults from movie theaters, it appears that cell phones is keeping the pre-adult crowd tied up.
> I've read that old movies used to be shot kind of like stage productions, with the camera mostly static and actors turned towards the camera like they would turn towards the audience on stage.
True. Sergei Eisenstein is mostly credited with the development of montage (cutting between different angles to create a more complex cinematic space.) A lot of silent films of the teens and twenties of the last century are quite sophisticated in this way (mostly German and Russian.) DW Griffith is another fellow. The next person to really push this envelope of cinematic structure was Jean Luc Goddard.
The advent of talkies really set cinema back in a way because the cameras and sound recording equipment were really bulky and forced a return to the proscenium form you describe. Some people argue that the development of talkies was really the death of cinema as a unique art form.
Comics were pitched at kids. When I try to watch a contemporary kid’s show like Paw Patrol I might say it is objectively bad, but I’m coming at it as an adult. My kids lap it up.
I’m not sure that Marvel comics of the early ’60s were actually better than DC comics of the same time, but they were signaled that they were more adult. I read my kids Silver Age DC comics all the time; I started reading Spider-Man from the beginning, and after only a dozen issues or so they lost interest because of all the soap-opera-y stuff. So much angst! The comics feel like they’re pitched at a 12 year old and not an 8 year old.
I would (personally) say that by 1965 Fantastic Four is quite good. Both FF and Spider-Man peak for me in ’66. Also: 1965 is actually a high point for Daredevil! But it’s true that a lot of early Marvel comics are a bit of a slog, being no better than DC comics but less fun because more ponderous.
I've always thought Spiderman really was pitched for an older audience - Peter is in high school then college, he's got a girlfriend, he has his older family member - Aunt May.
Maybe part of it was trying to hold on to the audience as they got older, but I do think part of it was also trying to be more 'real' and to have more 'adult' themes (before that simply meant 'swearing and nudity').
People used to watch cartoons at the movies, and that wasn't just for a kids' audience (as we would class them today). It was all part of the bill of fare.
I guess I’d point out that Superboy is in high school, too (also: Archie).
It’s hard for me to estimate the readership of comic books of the past. We know that soldiers read them in WWII (and indeed comic books were made specifically for the army as late as 1969). But Seduction of the Innocent (1954) takes as a given, more or less, that comics are for kids. Stan Lee always asserted "his" books were popular on college campuses; but he’s not the most…reliable source.
When I read a Superman comic book, Spider-man comic book, and (say) Steve Canyon comic strip all from 1963, I see them as being pitched just in that order, from youngest readers to oldest.
This doesn’t mean that Superman or Spider-man comics aren’t good, though. It’s just that you have to take them as kids’ media, especially at the beginning. By 1966, I think several Marvel titles stand on their own merit as stories
I think you’re dead right about cartoons before movies preventing kids’ media from being as sequestered as we may have thought of it later. Everyone read the funnies in the newspaper, too.
I always wondered who read "Archie" comic books. My best guess now is: little girls of 8 to 12 who idolized their big brothers in high school and looked forward to themselves enjoying a sophisticated high school social life of going to the prom and the like. It's quite charming when you think about it.
Stop your noticing! Really: I saw this review title and thought, oh dear, my only experience* of comic books is so thoroughly discrediting. There were "Archie" comics in the grocery store my grandmother frequented. I read as many as I could while she shopped. My mother would never have bought something like that for me anyway, but my granny did when I asked, on my annual visit to her. I really can't now remember why I would have liked them ...
I recall that they were ugly, stupid, and not funny - they must have been targeted at me: a little girl with teenaged brothers, who thought everything connected with high school was romantic and glamourous. Had they been smart, they'd have done Barbie comics, which I would have liked better. I saw decades later that they had figured out to make Barbie dvds for little children.
*That and Classic Comics, there was an old stack of those at home. "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Ivanhoe" and the like.
I sometimes read the Archie comics digests that were sold in grocery stores in the 1990s. Yes, the humor certainly did consist of a lot of dumb jokes ("Archie will inevitably break an expensive thing in Mr. Lodge's house" was a recurring plot/joke), but I did find them funny. I do still have a taste for the kind of stupid humor you sometimes see in Adam Sandler and Tyler Perry movies, so take my opinions on things like that with the proverbial grain of salt. 😆
I liked Archie at the age of nine or so. It prepared me for what was coming. As it turned out I never attended a coed high school so it was not very useful.
There was an NPR story a few decades ago about how Archie was the biggest comic globally and particularly popular in Africa. I was fairly shocked by this but it makes some sense. It's wholesome and inoffensive and reflects current American trends and fads. Not my thing, but apparently huge.
The Syndicated strips were the absolute peak of comic craft until very recently. Everyone wanted that gig. That was where the adult readers were. Milt Caniff, Alex Raymond, and don't forget Hal Foster's Prince Valiant! You can get a subscription to King Syndicate for like $50 a year (maybe less?) and re-read all that old stuff.
Heinlein's juvenile sci-fi novels usually feature a protagonist of 17-19 years old, while the readership was, I'd imagine, 12 to 14 years old.
Male movie heroes are typically envisioned as around 35 years old. The idea, I'd imagine, is to combine the vigor of youth with the skills of maturity, have one last ultimate adventure while finding true love and then settling down.
> Comics were pitched at kids. When I try to watch a contemporary kid’s show like Paw Patrol I might say it is objectively bad, but I’m coming at it as an adult. My kids lap it up.
Stuff for kids doesn't have to be objectively bad, though. Just look at Avatar: The Last Airbender. Very much a kid's show, but also a masterpiece that appeals to viewers of all ages.
I definitely agree! I love lots of kids media, including early Marvel. I just mean that if you look at a text, and say why would anyone want to consume something so stupid?, “it's for kids” is a sufficient response.
True. Kids are just less likely to notice the flaws/stupidity in something as long as there's something else in it that appeals to them. (I loved "Captain N The Game Master" and "The Wizard" as a child because I was obsessed with video games, even though my parents wouldn't buy me the NES I so desperately wanted.)
"But it’s true that a lot of early Marvel comics are a bit of a slog, being no better than DC comics but less fun because more ponderous."
Ha! agreed! That old stuff is unreadable to me. As far as a book review goes, this did not inspire me to want to re-read any silver age comics.
I'd way, way, way, way rather re-read Ed Piskor's X-Men Grand Design books.
I have to admit that I spend hundreds of dollars a month on comics with DC/Marvel making up 0.001% of that flow. When I do read a Marvel Comic, it's Conan the Barbarian. I low-key hate Marvel/DC so I was always going to be a hard sell.
For what it's worth, Howard Chaykin's "Hey Kids Comics!" is an insider's view of the comic industry's history from 1940's though the early '00's. I recommend it, though it's kind of depressing.
Things like continuity, where something that happened back in Issue 19 would have an effect in Issue 51, were an innovation - think of story arcs in TV shows now, which are commonplace, but which were an amazing new device when someone first used it instead of the "episode of the week, we introduce the love of his life to the main character this episode and kill her off in the same one, then next week he has a new girlfriend like nothing ever happened" format.
The Roman poet Horace is said to have complained about continuity errors in Homer: "and yet I also become annoyed whenever the great Homer nods off."
Still, I suspect the reading public has become nerdier over the generations. There are continuity errors in the Bible, but that didn't stop brilliant theologians from coming up with the theory of Biblical Inerrancy. Perhaps the latter day theologians tended toward the modern nerdish desire for perfect continuity, even if the compilers of the Bible didn't fully live up to their desires?
Robert Heinlein sensationalized the science fiction reading public with his linked "future history" short stories of the first three years of his writing career, 1939-1941. Heinlein was a close student of science fiction fans and tried to pander to their desires, even if they hadn't yet figured out what they want.
On the other hand, Heinlein got bored easily, so the high point of his career, his 1947-1963 juvenile novels, broke continuity with his old Future History short stories.
On TV, one of the first shows to do real continuity -- with an ongoing story arc where things changed -- was Babylon 5. Which, despite its flaws, was kind of made for streaming. I think in the old TV days, you had basically one shot at watching an episode, and then a rerun maybe. So they pretty much had to have Adam 12 or Star Trek reset to normal, aside from the occasional two-parter.
Babylon 5 at least was made in an era when all the nerds who were ever going to watch it, at least had VCRs. So you didn't have to literally be in front of the TV at the appointed hour.
That said, I was part of an international conspiracy to smuggle tapes of five episodes that were delayed several months in the US, from a contact in the UK. And I recall one space development conference in those years where you never had to worry about skipping anything interesting to watch B5 at the usual time, because they'd have it playing on tape in the conference room over the next day's lunch.
> But reading comic books wasn't the only form of entertainment... Were the other forms of entertainment just as bad back then? Films and books weren't? So what explains the popularity?
Accessibility. The target audience was children, mostly boys aged 7-13. If you're a kid in the 1960s then seeing a movie is a big deal, and most movies aren't of interest to you anyway. If you're lucky enough to have a television at home then children's programming is only on for a few hours a week. As for books, there's a handful of books aimed at your level, but books are expensive so you don't have that many, and reading a book sounds a bit too much like schoolwork. Video games won't come along for another twenty years, and YouTube won't come along for fifty. So you read a comic book, which has a fun story aimed at the uncomplicated interests of prepubescent boys, and is cheap enough for you to buy a new one every week.
Science fiction movies and TV shows were pretty bad and pretty few in number until they started to mature over the course of the 1960s.
Ronald Reagan would have thrived in science fiction movies -- he wasn't called Ronnie Raygun for nothing; my friend Jerry Pournelle helped write an early draft of Reagan's "Star Wars" speech, but when he got together with co-writers Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein to watch Reagan deliver it, they were amazed how much better Reagan had made their words -- but there were almost no sci-fi movies or shows until Reagan had retired from Hollywood.
The Twilight Zone was a big leap forward in the early 1960s but budget limitations made it more adult and allusive than boys liked. Then Star Trek in 1966 was a huge hit with with this 7-year-old. In 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey was an awesome shift upward in sci-fi realism. Seeing 2001 at the geodesic Cinerama Dome in 1968 remains the peak movie-going experience of my life.
So, boys in 1962 reads comic books when today they'd watch comic book, sci-fi, and fantasy movies and TV shows.
This is arguably starting to change, especially with the rise of dedicated fandoms. Hook the audience with a video game that's at least "innovative" enough to attract a fan-base big enough to do your marketing for you, and as long as the connected books, shows, etc. remind fans of what they originally loved about the property, you at least have a chance of success. The "Five Nights at Freddy's" movie did pretty well given that it was based on an independently developed video game that only internet nerds knew existed. Netflix's "Arcane" has also been hugely popular, with its fans saying it's better than the "League of Legends" game it's based on.
But are games inspiring songs the way movies used to inspire songs and songs used to inspire movies? Are there Broadway musicals based on videogames? What games have led to as many memes on Twitter as The Big Lewbowski?
I may just be overlooking examples of the broader influence of games, but they still seem to be a pretty isolated cultural silo ...
I grew up in a small town in the early 60s and went to the movies almost every Saturday afternoon. It was a crap shoot. I might see The Three Stooges meet Hercules one week and Dr. Strangelove the next. It didn't matter. I thought Strangelove was hysterical when I saw it at age 8. The best part was always Looney Tunes.
> the first Avengers film [...] the 3rd highest grossing film of all time.
Hollywood loves to say that their movies are constantly breaking records so they can attract investors, but we really should (as with any economic analysis) adjust for inflation, at which point it's no longer true.
I wasn't talking about Endgame, but even that is a good example; they were bragging to their investors that it was the highest grossing movie of all time, but it wasn't when adjusted for inflation.
There are various ways of adjusting for the fluctuating value of money across time, and even if you stick to using inflation rather than some of the other metrics, you can use different yardsticks there as well -- the historical price of movie tickets, for instance, rather than the general "inflation rate."
There's also a lot of guesswork that goes into estimating the popularity of old movies. Until the 1980s, "rentals" (the money that theaters paid to the distributors) was the most common yardstick, and so the "box office grosses" of movies older than that have to be extrapolated from studios' financial records (themselves incomplete or unavailable in many cases) using rules of thumb.
Bottom-line, estimates about how contemporary movies stack up against older movies are all over the place. I've seen lists that put "Endgame" at number 16, not at number 5.
>Neither comic was very “good”, but it didn’t matter. They were unlike any of the comics I had read in my life to date. I didn’t use the language at the time, but now I look back and can see that being good didn’t matter – the comics were innovative. I was hooked.
I think this deserves a highlight. Art exists in conversation with its audience and with the works that came before it. A lot of times what's popular isn't "the best art" but rather the art that fits into the current moment perfectly, grabs a particular audience really well, or introduces a new idea into the genre.
As an anime fan, I often point to Sword Art Online as my example of this phenomenon. Objectively, it's a cheap wish fulfillment power fantasy for nerds. But it was *innovative* - other works had done "trapped in a video game" plots before, but SAO was the one that codified the LitRPG concept and discovered that "nerdy protagonist + fantasy setting + literal video game mechanics" was a money printer. I loved SAO when it came out, because it was laser-focused at pandering to my interests in a way that other anime hadn't really done before. Now that everyone is doing this and isekais are a solid quarter of every anime season, critics are able to look back and say "yeah, SAO kinda sucks."
(Also, to dip a toe into slightly culture-war-y waters, I think this is what people mean when they say "representation matters." Yeah, the latest "queer rep" novel may not be Shakespearean in quality, but if you haven't read anything with a queer protagonist in mainstream literature, then that's innovative - it's going to grab you and expand your universe of possibilities in the same way that "you can play behind the net" or "you could put two superheroes into the same shared universe" did.)
At this point, there's so much out there that this seems not much different than asking 'what's a good fiction anime?'
What series have you bounced off of? It might help looking at the list to see if there are categories you missed. If everything you tried and disliked is overpowered-hero-action stuff, then perhaps slow-life comedy might be more interesting, for example.
I think Re:Zero is quite good, though I've only watched the first season so far. It's emotionally quite intense, so prepare yourself.
The other one I really like is That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, which surprisingly has a lot of stuff about economics and politics in addition to fantasy fighting. It's an interesting take on the genre.
I also agree with beleester on Konosuba. It's freaking hilarious. But it's good to watch a few "real" isekai first so that parody makes more sense.
How far back do you want to go, and how important are video game-y mechanics?
The whole idea of "person is transported to another world where they become a hero" is old, and it showed up in anime before the current craze. But in those cases the hero is going to another /world/, not a video game. (I like that better, but my tastes are not everyone's tastes)
So if you want to give, say, Vision of Escaflowne a try, it's an isekai...but the world the heroine goes to is absolutely not a video game. Magic Knight Rayearth makes a lot of video game jokes, because CLAMP was a bunch of nerds, but fundamentally, Cephiro isn't a game. (also, these are both aimed at girls) If you want a video game world...man, I dunno. I don't like those.
Isekai is a fun tie-in to this book review IMO because of how quickly it has developed compared to most genres (graduating from "trope" to "genre" in only a few years), mostly because of the new technology of the Internet ("modern" isekai was born in the pits of Japanese amateur serial web fiction sites).
Some interesting subgenres of modern isekai and suggestions:
Slice-of-life, low conflict isekais: "Campfire Cooking in another World" (guy cooks in a fantasy world using online groceries, accidentally tames monsters), "Ascendence of a Bookworm" (book nerd girl reincarnates in illiterate peasant family, obsessed with making books)
Off-the-wall premises: "Saga of Tanya the Evil" (sociopathic middle manager summoned into fantasy WWI Germany by evil God), "Re;Zero" (standard-ish fantasy crossed with Groundhog Day, with a psychological horror theme)
Funny Parodies: "Konosuba" (generic isekai fantasy combined with the narcissistic characters of It's Always Sunny in Philadephia), "Isekai Ojisan" (old guy comes back from fantasy world and recounts his adventures to his nephew; cringe comedy about old guy not understand isekai tropes)
I've found Jobless Reincarnation pretty fun to watch. (You do have to put up with the protagonist being lecherous at the start, but he mostly acts heroic later).
I agree with the general point, but disagree about SAO: I think what it really did to set itself apart was ramping up the wish fulfillment, the rest of the formula was already honed pretty well in .hack (though I guess it's weird since that's an actual videogame/anime hybrid franchise).
On a similar note: "Frankenstein" was *not* a good book. Was it innovative? Absolutely. It had good ideas that were very memorable and it became a "classic", but if it were written today nobody would give it a second look.
I'm going to get hated for this, but "Star Wars: A New Hope" is also an example of something that became famous for doing something first that has since been done better by a lot of other people. "Guardians of the Galaxy" is as good a movie as Star Wars; the difference is that Star Wars came out in 1977 and Guardians of the Galaxy came out in 2014.
I'd disagree about Frankenstein, which might actually be the only one of the foundational horror classics that this *isn't* true of. It's certainly much better written than Dracula or Phantom of the Opera.
EDIT: Actually I don't really agree about Star Wars either, I think Episodes IV and V are still maybe the tightest blockbuster movies ever made.
Well, I didn't read those, but I did read Frankenstein as a teenager along with literally hundreds of more contemporary books, and modern science fiction is better. :P The quality of the writing in Frankenstein was good, but the plot and characters didn't particularly grip me emotionally.
Incidentally, I have read some pre-WW1 literature I've really liked; I thought "The Three Musketeers" was really good (I felt it would make a great movie as long as they didn't change anything), and several Shakespeare plays are on my favorites list.
The Beatles would mostly not be considered good if they came out today. They became famous for short pop songs - 2 to 3 minutes with a catchy sound and banal but fun lyrics. They had some musically and lyrically better music, some of which became hits, but that's not really what made them famous.
Star Wars in 1977 did several things that others were not doing, and did it better than similar takes of that time or the 80s. Science Fiction was big, and Nazis were a natural foil antagonist. Throw them together with some pretty good production values and really good (for the time) special effects, and you've innovated something new. All three of the originals still hold up today, which is more than you can say for a lot of science fiction of the 70s and 80s. 2001 holds up okay, but it doesn't hit the "fun" and "approachable" marks that SW hit. SF from the 60s is called "campy" for lack of a better positive term. It was something people wanted, so lots was created, but they didn't have the technology and approach to make it work. SW was one of the first to do it well enough to break through outside of campy fans looking for a SF fix. Star Trek from the 60s definitely doesn't hold up, except for nostalgia and from the perspective of the movies and Next Generation.
I disagree with you about both Star Wars and Frankenstein. When I read Frankenstein, it wasn't what I expected, but I thought it was really good. I enjoyed the book, despite having to shake off the memories of the movie adaptations. I think Star Wars still holds up very well, though I admit I could be biased, having seen it in the theater at the age of 12. (Is there possibly any better age for a boy to see Star Wars the first time in the theater? I think not!)
I agree that Guardians of the Galaxy is also very good. At the time, I said that I thought it had as much sheer joyfulness as the original Star Wars, and I stand by that. I do think the comparison is apt, because both are just really uplifting movies.
Star Wars the movie was a disappointment after reading several of the Expanded Universe novels and playing Knights of the Old Republic. It worked as a mostly mindless action movie, but you know how a lot of Star Wars fans went to see the prequel movies and went "WTF is this crap? It's all flash and no substance!" I guess I had exactly the same reaction to the entire Original Trilogy when I finally watched them during the Special Edition theatrical releases - I expected something profound and got a story with all the depth of a puddle.
I watched SAO anime as it aired and it kinda sucked back then, too.
But I guess whatever claim to genre-defining SAO has, it should be attributed to the much earlier original novels. By the time the anime came out, the isekai wave was already well underway.
Admittedly, around the time of SAO anime debut, there was some kind of tipping point that soured me to the entire genre when isekai ceased to be [essentially regular stories, often poor in execution but saved by the inherent strength of the concept] and became [postmodern bullshit essentially giving up on worldbuilding, plot or characters in favor of genre conventions], but the timing is probably a coincidence, and it's a consequence of developments decades in the making. (In which, again, SAO the novel undoubtedly did have an influence. SAO the anime - nah, probably not.)
I think representation is a bit of a different thing. I think hobbits and elves are farther from the "norm", however one defines that, than queer people. So it had to be a very strange experience for queer people that apparently writers can imagine hobbits and elves but not them. It had to be a little offensive. The appeal of elves and orcs and hobbits is precisely their strangeness, unusualness. It takes an almost willful act of blindness to want to write explicitly about strangeness and unusualness and just somehow not notice well known human variations.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has said that the human characters in movies made in the 1950s are far more alien than almost all literal aliens in contemporary science fiction.
I enjoyed the bit above about the importance of myths in culture, putting the foundational myths of Western culture (Greek, Germanic and Levantine) in a single package with the superhero material created in the mid-20th century. Anecdotally, I confirm that they must be the same kind of stuff, because however culturally important they may be, I've never found them anything else than boring, the whole lot.
I've been able to get through a book or two of the likes of Wendy Doniger, who studies and analyzes myths, but never made it past a few pages of the actual lore, be it ancient or modern. At this point I give up, this kind of material is just not for me.
LOL! I did like reading Greek and Norse myths (as well as some Bible stories) as a kid, though I never got into comics.
Anyway, the “comics are the modern equivalent of Greek myths” seemed weird to me — maybe for a particular subculture, but otherwise I’m skeptical. Especially since, as the review mentions later, the readership was overwhelmingly male (and the population who cares about Marvel comics today probably still is at least majority-male).
If you asked me what the equivalent of ancient myths and folktales was in modern America, I’d probably have said something like that George Washington/cherry tree story that we learned about as kids even though it’s not actually true.
By the end I was believing the connection, because it was clear that it was intended to be that point, about the structure of separate stories interleaving through occasional overlaps of shared characters, sometimes as fan service and sometimes in service of greater literary goals.
But when one leads off with talk of mythology, it sounds like it's going to be about the foundational role it plays in culture (which I think even today the Simpsons still stands closer to that than Marvel).
It depends on what you think the purpose of myth and folktales are. If you're looking for a set of stories that resonate with the culture and influence values, then I'd say comics are more relevant than traditional stories like that of Washington and the cherry tree, but I think that this is missing the actual answer. While I certainly am old enough to remember the story of Washington and the Cherry Tree, it's certainly not something that I think about unless prompted. If you asked me for a morality story about lying, I'd say 'the Boy Who Cried Wolf'.
I think part of the problem is that people that talk about comics as modern mythology are only talking about three examples, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, all of which are solidly stories of 'With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility' in different ways. I've never read any comic books for any of the three characters, and I'm of a generation and part of the population for whom comics would be a more expected hobby. While they originated in comics, as in my case, I'd wager most people that know those stories actually know them from movies or TV. The whole rest of comics seems virtually irrelevant as far as myth-like influence goes (and most of that little relevance is also from movies).
If you're actually talking modern myth and folklore, I'd think the classic fairy tales would be a better example, though you can't deny that for many the stories have been filtered through a Disney lens in the modern era.
< I've never found them anything else than boring, the whole lot.
I feel exactly the same about both. Myths seem to me like a game with gods as character cards and various violent actions as event cards, and the latter get randomly distributed to the former. Hera loves X and screws him. Zeus gets jealous and kills X. Yeah, OK. There's no real story, no character continuity, no emotion to get caught up in. It's all so schematic and fake.
One of the many theories of myth is that it is "philosophy before philosophy". The characters are one dimensional because they represent concepts. Zeus is permanently horny because he stands for creation/generation, etc
Thank you! I can easily understand why The Odyssey, etc. capture people's imagination -- they're great stories with great characters. But I have wondered all my life why people find these myths interesting. It's been like a pebble in my shoe. Now I get it.
Generally the other way round; Hera is goddess of marriage, Zeus screws everything with a pulse. Since Hera can't meaningfully punish Zeus, she tends to take it out on his lovers.
I think the author underestimates how familiar this audience already is with comics. Just because we're a little older and better educated, doesn't mean we're not mostly geeks here.
Well, speak for yourself, then. I've never read any Marvel or DC comics in my entire life. Not because I consider myself "above" this kind of entertainment – as a child I did read a lot of Micky Mouse and Donald Duck comics, as well as Asterix. It's rather that I never had any interest in superhero comics, or maybe because I never came into contact with them.
Marvel and DC, and perhaps even superhero comics in general, might be a predominantly American phenomenon, especially before the advent of the modern superhero movies and franchises.
I'm American and also grew up mainly with Donald Duck, Tintin, Asterix & Obelix, etc. and never managed to become very invested in any superhero comics, although I did have some and briefly kind of liked Spiderman.
>Marvel and DC, and perhaps even superhero comics in general, might be a predominantly American phenomenon, especially before the advent of the modern superhero movies and franchises.
I can't speak on a broad scale or about non-English speaking countries (you mention Asterix so I assume there's a good chance that applies to you), but my dad grew up in England (born in '61) and was obsessed with marvel as a kid.
But I agree with you that the author was right to not assume familiarity with the audience. I loved it when the marvel cinematic universe was coming out in theaters because I was a kid and it was a great way to connect with my dad on something he liked, but even now I hadn't read any of the old comics.
I'm Irish, and we got dribs and drabs of American comic books coming in to the newsagents in my small town. Not reliably, which was really frustrating because you could never follow a story all the way through as the next issues mightn't turn up at all, but we did get them.
And even one of the 'underground' type of comics, which did indeed blow my mind as a ten year old who innocently bought it thinking it was going to be Yet Another Comic Book. So my (American) comic book reading really is end of the Silver Age/through the Bronze Age.
Other comics I read were the British ones, and I stuck with 2000AD up to the end of the 90s. Comics changed, or I just got older, but the grimdark period really turned me off and I stopped reading them then.
There are entire websites about the availability of US comics in the UK in the 1960s/70s before the widespread existence of "comics shops". Marvel printed special copies in the US that were identical (down to ads) to the US editions but with UK prices on the cover, and shipped those over. DC just imported them. Marvel also had whole reprint series in UK comics format (larger and without glossy covers), issues weekly.
(I was a huge Marvel fan who lived in London 1970-3, so this whole thing is very much in my wheelhouse.)
Sure, but did you ever read any of the UK comics? Either the ones for girls (Mandy, Judy, Bunty etc.) or the ones for boys (Lion, Tiger, the Beano, 2000 AD when that one came along?) You never heard of Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx or the Bash Street Kids or Desperate Dan?
I read the Beano, and occasionally the Dandy, but I'm not sure they're all that similar. I get the impression they're a lot shorter, and more the UK equivalent of the Simpsons comics.
I'm not only not familiar with comics, I have so little interest in them (despite being American, which is apparently a risk factor) that I couldn't even manage to read this review!
I can't remember reading a single comic book as a kid. I must have, though, because I do remember that they were around -- other kids had them. But they must have made no impression on me. I did like Mad magazine as a kid, but that's way different. I read Heinlein and Walter Farley (horse racing stories) as a kid, and some weird mystical stuff my mother was into for a brief period, then discovered adult books and read Norman Mailer.
At least part of this shows signs of having been written previously for some other format/audience: the reference to the TV show Revenge as a current show, when Revenge went off the air in 2015.
> Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)?
Huh? Most sources give a broader range of years than that, typically 1956-1970. I've also heard it said that the Silver Age ended with the shocking tonal shift introduced to the comics world in The Night Gwen Stacy Died, published in 1973. Where are you getting this date range from?
> More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works.
It's not only "not politically correct," it's not culturally correct either, regardless of the actual truth status of these stories. It's been said that the ancient Israelites were rather unique in this regard: while most cultures understood their foundational stories to be mythical — they treated them, in their own time much like we do today, as simply stories that were important to know about — the ancient Israelites saw theirs as literal history, which gave them a different view of the world.
> Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths.
In movies, maybe. In print, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, and most recently Brandon Sanderson have all managed to pull it off, with varying degrees of success. Asimov is dead now, King tried to launch a Dark Tower film representing the center of his shared universe a few years back but it flopped, and Sanderson has been actively in negotiations with various people in Hollywood for over 10 years now, because these things take a while to get made. He recently (last year IIRC) reported that things had gotten to the point where he had seen "actors on set wearing mistcloaks" (an important costuming element from one of his books) but it ended up falling through in the end. He frequently talks about wanting to get a "cinematic universe" of his work going, though.
> No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”.
Italian history YouTuber Metatron once addressed this point, saying (and showing in a video) that this is a perfectly reasonable description of the sea in that part of the world, specifically at sunset.
> Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages)
These days we call that "Wolverine Publicity." It didn't start with Wolverine, though...
> Once Shakespeare had written Romeo and Juliet, no one else could write Romeo and Juliet (well they could, but then they would be derivative of Shakespeare’s work).
Which is different from Shakespeare how exactly? He adapted "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," published in 1562 by English writer Arthur Brooks, which his audience would have been familiar with. Romeus and Juliet was in turn based on an earlier Italian tale, which was based on an earlier work, so on and so on back to Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which a Roman poet from the first century BC recounted the ancient (even in his day) Babylonian tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. (And who even knows where the Babylonians got it from!)
> Johnson explains that The Sopranos was the show to take it to the next level. ... Where Hill Street Blues plotlines were generally started and then wrapped up within each episode, Sopranos plotlines would carry over from one episode to the next. Sometimes a new plot line would be created in a scene of an episode and then go dormant for multiple episodes before coming back.
And he says The Sopranos invented that storytelling model?!? Has Johnson never seen Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?
Maybe Shakespeare's plots are a bad example, but the point still stands that some people's work's value lies almost entirely in its originality, which can serve as inspiration.
A lot of "originality" is more unfamiliarity on the part of the reader. Most people today have never heard of The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, or the Danish tale of Amleth, or the real, historical Scottish king Mac Bethad. But Shakespeare and his audience knew of them.
If you ever heard of The Hidden Fortress or The Dam Busters, it's probably because you heard someone discussing their influence on Star Wars. Back in 1977, the vast majority of the audience was entirely unfamiliar with these movies. His major innovation was recontextualizing things in a new setting; Star Wars didn't *feel* like the pulp sword-and-sorcery adventure it very much is, because it has spaceships and robots and aliens and planets blowing up and people in high-tech powered armor suits.
Likewise, The Way of Kings, an epic war story set on a magical world so alien that they don't even have topsoil, really doesn't feel like an "underdog sports team" story. But per the author's own admission, that's exactly what the tale of Bridge Four is, and once you've heard that you can easily see how it applies.
Heck, the observation that "there is nothing new under the sun" is itself thousands of years old. Originality is highly overrated; everyone builds on what came before. A lot of times people see something unfamiliar and mistake it for something original. I've heard it said that this is responsible for the sudden popularity of anime in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We can look at stuff like Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z today and say "as anime goes, this is utter garbage," but to most Americans 25-30 years ago, it was something wildly new that they had never seen before, while also being the result of decades of polish and refinement so it felt very interesting in ways that actual new, original things typically don't.
You're partly right. Originality is highly overrated only in a pedantic sense, that there might be some obscure source material that most people are unfamiliar with; but, originality is not overrated in the sense that audiences do, inherently, seem to like new stuff (new to them).
In part because there was a huge appetite for More Like This after "The Lord of the Rings", Tolkien wasn't writing any more, and there wasn't yet anyone else doing the same thing. So room for a lot of "more like this" fantasy sagas.
The same way that we Trekkies were gasping for crumbs after the original show finished and the studio had no interest in producing anything else in that universe (before they discovered it could become a cash cow). So a ton of tie-in original novels filled the gaps, before finally the motion picture (which didn't do that well) and then the long gap before "The Next Generation" got made, and suddenly now it was viable to produce more Trek all the time (which is how we got to where we are today, with *too* much new stuff being churned out).
If you're British, you've seen The Dam Busters. If you're Japanese, you've seen The Hidden Fortress. The real trick was nabbing things from other countries and mass-marketing them; cf. The Magnificent Seven.
> The real trick was nabbing things from other countries and mass-marketing them; cf. The Magnificent Seven.
That's just the standard back-and-forth process of cultural exchange in action. The creators of the samurai films that later Westerns took inspiration from have openly admitted that they took inspiration from earlier Westerns. The large-heads-big-eyes-no-nose "standard anime look" can be traced to influential manga author Osamu Tezuka. He got it from Donald Duck comics that a random American soldier introduced him to one fateful day. And so on; everyone takes inspiration from other sources and puts their own spin on it.
I saw The Dam Busters on TV about 1971. Young people of George Lucas's generation watched an enormous number of World War II movies on TV.
I didn't see Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress until the 1980s, specifically because it was always said to be an inspiration for Star Wars. I found it pretty weak. In contrast, Kurowsawa's Seven Samurai was obviously an all-time classic.
Mike Flanagan is supposed to be adapting The Dark Tower as a series for Amazon.
Shakespeare had characters act out Pyramus and Thisbe in the ancient-Athenian set A Midsummer Night's Dream, though their play-within-a-play is treated as just fuel for mockery.
"Mike Flanagan is supposed to be adapting The Dark Tower as a series for Amazon."
Given Amazon's track record on adapting multi-volume fantasy series, that should make anyone's heart sink.
Especially since King went a bit bloated in the middle volumes of "The Dark Tower" and didn't really stick the landing for the conclusion. You'd need to do one heck of a lot of trimming away to hack out a coherent storyline from start to finish. The character of Susannah will have to be reimagined drastically, as in the books she is partially at least the Magical Negro trope, and her alter-ego could be viewed as the stereotype/caricature of black women.
If you're referring to Rings of Power, I do think there are reasons to expect it to be different. I haven't watched RoP, but my understanding is that it's a prequel with them making things up themselves. Plus, both JRR & Christopher Tolkien died before it was made. Flanagan will be adapting King's actual books, which he's already done for Gerald's Game & Doctor Sleep (and is currently doing for Life of Chuck).
Not just Rings of Power (new trailer out now! and I'm loving it! by which I mean, the idiocy continues apace and the new season is going to be a banquet of nonsense to carp about!) but adaptations like Wheel of Time and others, which I have not seen getting great reviews.
Don't think "oh but they've got the actual canon in the actual books" will stop them doing their own shit*. King still being alive and around and able to sue them for whatever may help, but of course the canned response is "gotta update it for Modern Audience, racism, sexism, some things don't work on the screen, have to change the timeline around and drop some characters and invent new ones".
*Gandalf was not in Middle-earth in the Second Age, but that hasn't stopped Payne and McKay giving us I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf who literally dropped out of the sky in a meteor. Oh yes, we don't have *Hobbits*. We have Harfoots. And for season two, Stoors. Who live in a desert. Even though these are the riverlands dwellers. And of course they're all as diverse as The Division of Equity & Inclusion at UC Berkeley:
I hadn't thought of Wheel of Time, but that's another instance where the original author is dead (and has been for years even before the books finished).
Have you seen any of Flanagan's King adaptations? Most people seem to regard Doctor Sleep, for instance, as a good example of being faithful to a book King wrote partly in reaction to his distaste for Kubrick's take on The Shining, while also working as a sequel to the film. On the other hand, I haven't liked Flanagan's miniseries adaptations of classic horror literature that doesn't belong in a miniseries format (I also thought his most recent one was a poor fit for the push for diverse casting) https://thepopculturists.blogspot.com/2023/10/this-weekend-in-pop-culture-october-27.html#comment-6311085172
No, I'm not familiar with Flanagan's work, so if you say he does good, reasonably faithful, adaptations, I'll believe you.
But I do think there can be meddling from executives in what gets put on screen; it was the executive producer Lindsey Weber who provided the quote about 'today's world' in the context of "this is why all the Diverse and Inclusive cast":
"Amazon’s series will also broaden the notion of who shares the world of Middle-earth. One original story line centers on a silvan elf named Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Córdova, who will be the first person of color to play an elf onscreen in a Tolkien project. He is involved in a forbidden relationship with Bronwyn, a human village healer played by Nazanin Boniadi, a British actor of Iranian heritage. Elsewhere, a Brit of Jamaican descent, Sir Lenny Henry, plays a harfoot elder, and Sophia Nomvete has a scene-stealing role as a dwarven princess named Disa—the latter being the first Black woman to play a dwarf in a Lord of the Rings movie, as well as the first female dwarf. “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”
(The irony here is that the Bronwyn/Arondir romance was *so* successful, the actress is not coming back for season two so that plot line has been scrapped).
This kind of thing is why I imagine there may be pressure, subtle or not, to update and change and revamp the characters and plot for "modern audiences".
*Some* change is not a bad thing, there's swathes of the multi-volume series that are just bloated over-writing (and I generally like lots of over-written!) and can be hacked out with no loss. But I think a character like Susannah, for instance, is going to be changed a *lot*. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if they changed other characters as well - where is all the LGBT+ representation in King's original,for instance? We must have Representation or else the world will end!
EDIT: Ah, I see he did a TV series of "The Fall of the House of Usher", which I didn't see, but going by reviews I read, the only thing it had in common with Poe's story was the title. Yeah, that's the kind of "well we need to tell a Modern Story with Modern Political Commentary for a Modern Audience" 'adaptation' I'd be concerned about (the same way they stuck in 'the knife ears will take our jobs' to the Númenor storyline in Rings of Power so Pharazon can be the Trump stand-in).
Also, HSB was definitely hybrid; there was guaranteed to be at least one self-contained plot per episode, but the running plots (I think) often outnumbered the standalones.
>Italian history YouTuber Metatron once addressed this point, saying (and showing in a video) that this is a perfectly reasonable description of the sea in that part of the world, specifically at sunset.
I noticed that when I was reading the Iliad earlier this year. The phrase is used only once there, and it's specifically at sunset. Color is rarely brought up in the Iliad, mostly only when it would be surprising - you're expected to know what color the sea usually is.
Then I read the Odyssey, and the sea is wine-dark in multiple places, sometimes during the day. That was when I really started to understand why scholars argue over if the Iliad and the Odyessy were written by different people. It does feel like the Odyssey poet was borrowing a famous phrase and overusing it!
There's a long controversy about whether color words functioned the same way for the ancients as they do for moderns. At least some people have claimed that the ancients primarily focused on the dark/bright contrast in their choice of words, and treated hue as secondary, while moderns treat hue as primary and the dark/bright contrast as secondary - though there are others who claim this is all a misreading of Homer.
Here's three good essays on the topic that I found from a quick search, all interesting enough for me to give a full read, and with some disagreements:
I only was into comic books for about a month, probably in the fall of 1969, when I was 10. I was more of a reader than a looker, so I read a lot of hard science fiction of the Heinlein-Asimov-Clark school.
Still, the notion that if the Golden Age of American superhero comic books was the introduction of Superman and Batman right before World War II, then it's reasonable that the Silver Age was Marvel's hot streak in the early 1960s that peaked with the introduction of Spider-Man in 1962.
To some extent, our views of that era are determined by the quality of subsequent movies. For example, Robert Downey Jr.'s impression of Elon Musk has elevated Iron Man higher in the pantheon than he had previously stood. For example, I had a friend in high school in the 1970s named Tony Stark. I can vaguely recall other friends making Iron Man jokes about his name, but I had to ask them to explain what they were talking about.
Still, the trajectory of superhero box office smash movies pretty much reflects this Golden Age to Silver Age accepted history, with 1978's Superman as the first modern superhero movie, 1989's Batman reviving the genre, 2002's Spider-Man launching this century's craze, 2008's Iron Man initiating the Marvel universe, and the Avengers of the first half of the 2010s as the peak.
> and so on back to Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which a Roman poet from the first century BC recounted the ancient (even in his day) Babylonian tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. (And who even knows where the Babylonians got it from!)
Oh, come on, what name could be more overtly Babylonian than "Thisbe"? ;p
Ignore the fact that Babylonian names are all full sentences.
Does Ovid actually claim that the story of Pyramus and Thisbe comes from Babylon, or does he just set it there?
>In movies, maybe. In print, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, and most recently Brandon Sanderson have all managed to pull it off, with varying degrees of success.
Additional examples:
Heinlein (as other commenters have noted), Larry Niven's "Known Space", Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequences, Vernor Vinge, Frank Herbert, H.P.Lovecraft...
I like this review, and I voted for it—professionally, socially, and esthetically my life revolves around comics, so perhaps it was inevitable—but I take issue with some of the review’s assumptions. One is the primacy of Stan Lee, perhaps actually more of an ancillary figure…
…but the other is the primacy of myth. I became convinced years ago after reading W. Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites (1888) that myths are just ex post facto justifications for established and perhaps arbitrary rituals. Muslims pilgrimage to Mecca because Muhammad did—but pilgrims had been going to Mecca long before Muhammad, and Muhammad was following in their footsteps. Christians take communion because of the Last Supper—but the Last Supper was itself a reenactment of the older ritual of Passover. Baptism predates Jesus, although Christians if asked will say they got baptized because Jesus did.
Myths explain something you were doing anyway. Sailors are forbidden from whistling on steamships because, they are told, their whistling could be mistaken for leaking steam. Actually, though, whistling has been tabooed on ships since long before the age of steam. The older superstition was that a whistling sailor might “whistle up the wind”; when sails became obsolete and this fear stopped making sense, sailors had to construct a new reason for the old taboo. Note that both reasons are not only spurious but implausible: Whistling empirically fails to summon winds, and whistling also sounds nothing like a steam leak. First came the custom, and then came the explanation. First comes the ritual, and then comes the myth.
Many of us want myth to be primary because we want to imagine that culture is invented by storytellers, not by obsessive compulsives who somehow bullied everyone into performing a meaningless action.
Smith implied that even our moral values are ad hoc explanations for arbitrary taboos and customs—which got him tried for heresy by the Presbyterians.
Anyway, I also think Lee’s contributions to the Marvel method or Marvel history are overstated, but that is the kind of controversy (at least in my circles) much more fraught, and I have no desire to be tried for heresy by comics clerks.
But I’m trying to say—like, I grew up thinking of communion as a reenactment of a specific event I knew from a story (Luke 22:19). Narrative/mythological primacy, in other words. But the story is already a reenactment of an older ritual. That ritual itself is a reenactment of a specific event from a story(Exodus 12:14). But while even an atheist could acknowledge that the Last Supper is a perfectly plausible event in history, the passover in Exodus requires some kind of theophany. Where does this ritual come from if there’s no narrative origin for it?
Smith changed my thinking in that I stopped looking at events I believed happened (such as Muhammad’s hajj) and viewing ritual as coming from them, and started looking at events I did not believe happened (such as Orestes arriving in Athens pursued by Furies) and wondering how it was that a ritual (the Athenian Chytroi) could be derived from such an event (answer: it wasn't).
I see what you mean: that the backstory for the ritual is invented to give a reason as to "why do we do this?"
Yes, that's common in antiquity. Even the Romans had "well nobody knows why we do this thing, but some say it's because this and some say it's because that".
I feel you'd approve of the account in Plutarch which said "the story of Romulus being taken up into heaven was faked up by the guys who assassinated him to explain why he disappeared":
"The rest of his proceedings were of lesser importance; but when of his own motion merely he divided the territory acquired in war among his soldiers, and gave back their hostages to the Veientes, without the consent or wish of the patricians, he was thought to be insulting their senate outright.
[3] Wherefore suspicion and calumny fell upon that body when he disappeared unaccountably a short time after. He disappeared on the Nones of July, as they now call the month, then Quintilis, leaving no certain account nor even any generally accepted tradition of his death, aside from the date of it, which I have just given. For on that day many ceremonies are still performed which bear a likeness to what then came to pass.
[4] Nor need we wonder at this uncertainty, since although Scipio Africanus died at home after dinner, there is no convincing proof of the manner of his end, but some say that he passed away naturally, being of a sickly habit, some that he died of poison administered by his own hand, and some that his enemies broke into his house at night and smothered him.
[5] And yet Scipio's dead body lay exposed for all to see, and all who beheld it formed therefrom some suspicion and conjecture of what had happened to it; whereas Romulus disappeared suddenly, and no portion of his body or fragment of his clothing remained to be seen. But some conjectured that the senators, convened in the temple of Vulcan, fell upon him and slew him, then cut his body in pieces, put each a portion into the folds of his robe, and so carried it away.
[6] Others think that it was neither in the temple of Vulcan nor when the senators alone were present that he disappeared, but that he was holding an assembly of the people outside the city near the so-called Goat's Marsh, when suddenly strange and unaccountable disorders with incredible changes filled the air; the light of the sun failed, and night came down upon them, not with peace and quiet, but with awful peals of thunder and furious blasts driving rain from every quarter,
[7] during which the multitude dispersed and fled, but the nobles gathered closely together; and when the storm had ceased, and the sun shone out, and the multitude, now gathered together again in the same place as before, anxiously sought for their king, the nobles would not suffer them to inquire into his disappearance nor busy themselves about it, but exhorted them all to honour and revere Romulus, since he had been caught up into heaven, and was to be a benevolent god for them instead of a good king.
[8] The multitude, accordingly, believing this and rejoicing in it, went away to worship him with good hopes of his favour; but there were some, it is said, who tested the matter in a bitter and hostile spirit, and confounded the patricians with the accusation of imposing a silly tale upon the people, and of being themselves the murderers of the king."
That story is interesting because Plutarch is creating a myth to explain a myth. Obviously Plutarch, and many others, did that all the time, such as when he theorizes that the Minotaur is just a good Cretan wrestler with a funny name, but this one is pretty ornate!
> But I’m trying to say—like, I grew up thinking of communion as a reenactment of a specific event I knew from a story (Luke 22:19). Narrative/mythological primacy, in other words. But the story is already a reenactment of an older ritual.
Sort of.
The Last Supper was a Passover meal. But the ritual of bread and wine instituted by Jesus at that particular meal was not a Passover thing, and could just as easily have been done at a different time.
Yeah, and clearly doing the ritual on a weekly or monthly basis (unless you're a Jehovah's Witness) is clearly an innovation. Even the method and ritual around communion in the church has changed radically over the last 2,000 years. This is probably my fault for bringing up a suboptimal example.
> clearly doing the ritual on a weekly or monthly basis (unless you're a Jehovah's Witness) is clearly an innovation.
Is it? 1 Corinthians 11 strongly implies that first-generation Christians were meeting on a regular basis to participate in this ritual. It doesn't specifically say "weekly" or "monthly," but it makes it clear that this was a regular occurrence for them.
Don't overcorrect and call Stan Lee "ancillary"; I think it's indisputable that he (and his publisher), not the artists, determined _which_ comics to publish and what, in general, would be in them. Everything is downstream of those decisions.
I think the "what, in general, would be in them" is precisely what is in contemporary dispute. The Marvel Method in 1960s practice may have had a lot more initiative taken by the artists than Lee usually conceded. That doesn't mean Lee contributed nothing—his dialog is punchy, he's great at building relationships with the audience, he's a natural hypeman—but I'm not sure he plotted the books he says he plotted.
This is a subject on which I defer to experts I've known, so I perhaps am not the best person to martial evidence. I'll just say it's not indisputable.
The point is more that you can take any individual comic book and say this artist or that one were the primary creator behind that issue. But if you are zooming back to "Marvel Comics" as a whole then Stan Lee has incredible influence because he touched every part of the process.
> it is not just comic books that are better today, it is storytelling generally, and comic books are but one of the more flagrant examples.
You gave some good examples, but missed to most blatant one: video games. Video game writing used to be so absurdly bad it often wasn't even intelligible (All your base are belong to us), but now the industry produces countless well-written and rich stories.
I think this supports Bob's argument—at the time, people cared so little about video game writing that they couldn't be bothered to hire decent translators. Now, if you watch a video game's credits, you'll spend about 3 minutes watching the names of internationalization team members scroll past. Even indie games often have credits like
person who singlehandedly created almost the whole game: <name>
music: <name>
followed by about 30 people who did internationalization.
"All your base are belong to us" comes from Zero Wing (1989 in Japan, 1992 in the west). Long before that was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984), and if Infocom hiring the legendary Douglas Adams is cheating, any of their own games like Zork had better writing than Zero Wing.
Other games known for incredible writing around or before Zero Wing reached the West are Star Control II (1992), Final Fantasy games, Ultima games (I'd never say Garrot was a master wordsmith, but the plot of IV was incredibly innovative and that's 1985). I could go on.
A lot of video games basically had no plot at all, or a few lines of text nobody cared about ("The president has been kidnapped by ninjas, are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?"). But even with the host of technical limitations early video games faced, when they wanted to invest in a story the writing was equal to other mediums of the time.
Once you stick to games that put some effort into writing I don't think games are notable for having a larger gap between modern and old compared to other mediums.
The SBF-on-Shakespeare thing has been beaten to death by now, including in this blog's comments, but I'd like to suggest that trying to correct for early mover effects works both ways.
Yes, 'low-hanging fruit', 'in the water now', and all that. On the other hand, if there are so many more of us, able to learn from so much of the past, enjoying all the other catalysing effects (more comfortable lives for many, greater access to vicarious experience, etc.), and we *still* haven't produced obvious superiors to Shakespeare and the early canon greats, doesn't that make them look even better by comparison?
Sort of on that note, I don't understand why the writing in those speech bubbles had to improve in its own silo, insulated from a world where good pulp writing had long existed. Even T.P. Prest would eat Lee's lunch – at least he wasn't deathly afraid of occasionally implying something instead of stating it outright.
Anyone who could spare a penny, I suppose? The Sweeney Todd story was serialised in something that called itself The People's Periodical and Family Library, and I imagine it found its way into the hands of quite a few Victorian teenage boys. The penny dreadfuls, boys'-own stories, etc. are a fairly good like-for-like comparison to comic books. Vivid, gory, and always arranged to stoke an urgent desire for the next issue.
I agree with your second paragraph, and thinking about it in terms of a Bayesian analysis, I notice that he only mentions the priors, based on how many people were alive and literate in Shakespeare's time vs. the last century. You fall back strongly on priors when the data itself is not especially informative; if he could have named some playwrights that are very obviously superior to Shakespeare, he would have done so instead of just saying "well there are so many more people writing plays now that some of them must be better."
My own view is that the best examples of older plays are just different in a way that defies a simple better/worse classification. There are tradeoffs, for example, between the realism of a modern play and the heightened poetic language of a Shakespeare play. Some of the comics examples seem a little more clear cut though.
We agree overall, but to me the worth of Shakespeare resides in the inventiveness and play of that language, rather than anything to do with the structure or originality or timelessness of human themes, etc. There's nothing lost there. Someone like Chekhov succeeds magnificently in completely the other way.
It's plain from other accounts that SBF finds reading boring (though I wonder if he's changed his mind in jail?) and didn't care about fiction, so he was just showing off both his ignorance and trying to impress people with "oh look I can maths".
I think the most important thing about Shakespeare is that he was the most skilled a practitioner of a genre that went out of fashion shortly after his death. Nobody has ever outdone Shakespeare in terms of writing plays in which the characters speak in well-crafted poetry, because the trend has been towards greater realism in dialogue ever since.
Wondering why nobody has outdone Shakespeare in the last four hundred years is like wondering why, with all our advancements in materials science, nobody has ever made a car with bigger tailfins than a 1959 Cadillac.
Fair point, but many (most?) major English-language poets have attempted verse drama, some quite recently, too. Eliot and Fry come to mind first, then to a lesser extent Auden and Yeats. Nothing extraordinary was achieved. All the while, the form remained more lively in other languages, which once more speaks to Shakespeare's dominance.
Besides, the coefficients in the population/expertise argument are so large that even a minority still toiling away at verse drama should have yielded at least fifty Shakespeares. They haven't, because mathematics simply doesn't work.
Being a bit silly here, but maybe nobody made bigger tailfins because the 1959 Cadillac hit the maximum level? That the tradeoffs for bigger tailfins were not worth it, so there was no beating the best.
More on point, maybe Shakespeare set the bar so high that the genre couldn't really be improved. No one could match what already existed, so they went to other conventions (realism in this case) to find their own niche?
Yeah, that's what cracks me up about this particular SBF quote. Like, if you knew nothing else, you'd certainly assume the best playwright in history wasn't in England in the year 1600, but maybe you should tweak your numbers if his work is still around 400 years later and people have written a million books dissecting and praising it.
This strikes me as a great example of how people can use rationalist reasoning to come to really poor conclusions while giving themselves the impression they're doing something clever.
Well said. Shakespeare really caught on in Germany about 200 years after his prime as the Romantic Age replaced the Age of Reason and has been the consensus #1 post-ancient writer ever since across all languages. That various early 19th Century German geniuses like Goethe swore by Shakespeare says a lot about his popularity.
In my view, most modern authors write better stories than Shakespeare. Shakespeare's themes are simplistic and his plot points are often cringeworthy. I find it's mostly people with only a little familiarity with Shakespeare that praise his stories and plots; aficionados tend to know the plots aren't original and love Shakespeare for his wordplay.
For example, the plot of Romeo and Juliet feels like a contrived tearjerker. Macbeth has an army cut down saplings and hold them to disguise their approach on Macbeth's castle (presumably Macbeth is supposed to think, "oh, just a forest marching towards us, nothing to worry about", but really it's forced writing to fit the prophecy). And of course the final twist is when Macduff goes, "Ha! I wasn't technically 'born'. I was a C-section baby!". Shakespeare is only partly to blame since these plays are based heavily on existing stories (The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet and Holinshed's Chronicles), but the plots remains bad.
As for Shakespeare's strength - his wordplay - I don't think many modern authors even try to employ that kind of wordplay, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it just went out of style.
That's a valid opinion and I don't think SBF would be as criticized if he made that argument. However, notice that your judgement of Shakespeare is based off of reading his work and comparing it to others, rather than making some sort of probabilistic argument. It's kind of absurd to do so.
An Italian player named Sinner recently got the highest rank in men's tennis singles. Is he better than Djokovic? I'm sure tennis fans could debate that. But they'd almost never debate it in Bayesian terms like "there's more italians than serbs and therefore my prior is that it's more likely that the best tennis player is Italian. Not only that, but prior observations have shown that being a native German speaker increases the likelihood of being the best at tennis. Sinner a German-speaking Italian is probably better than Djokovic, a Serb that does not speak German." It'd be absurd to make that sort of argument rather than one based on their playstyles or record.
Yeah, you're absolutely right about the principle. I think what's happening with SBF is he looked at Shakespeare's work and thought it was bad. But a lot of people consider him the best English language writer in history. Now a Shakespeare skeptic and a bardolator could argue all day on the merits and faults of Shakespeare's plays without swaying anyone's position, so SBF tries a different tack: he uses a probabilistic argument for why the bardolator is probably biased.
I'm not sure that argument convinced anyone at all either, so it failed in that regard. But the logic is valid: we should expect there to have been many English writing geniuses at and above Shakespeare's level born in the past 400 years, and if there haven't, there should be a compelling explanation for why there hasn't been. Looking directly at the quality of Shakespeare's plays would trump any probabilistic argument - if only we could objectively decide if the plays are great or mediocre.
There's another question to consider before SBF's probabilistic argument makes sense: can the intellectual elite be wrong? Can't we take the expert consensus on Shakespeare as truth? Maybe not. Expert consensus on art is not consistent over time. Bulwer-Lytton went from popular to mocked as one of the worst writers. Shakespeare himself didn't gain his prestigious standing until a century after his death.
I can think of other topics where the expert consensus, while not wrong, has become biased and punishes dissenting views while exaggerating their own position.
"But the logic is valid: we should expect there to have been many English writing geniuses at and above Shakespeare's level born in the past 400 years"
Of course, we should also expect there to have been similarly many scientific geniuses, and military geniuses, and great singers, and great physicians, and great hunters, etc, etc, etc. There are many categories of human achievement, so by pure random chance we should have at least a few where the recognizably-greatest lived in the 17th century.
And it doesn't seem to be the case that we always pick someone from that golden age. Yes, Isaac Newton is renowned as a great scientist of the 17th century, but he's usually regarded as great for his time, not smarter than Einstein or Von Neumann or Hawking. The greatest hunter would probably be W.D.M. Bell, early twentieth century. Greatest composes is debatable, but Beethoven worked in the 19th century and John Williams is still with us. Etc, etc, etc.
The cases where we do tend to find the "greats" in the annals of history rather than current events, seem to be things like military and political leadership, where there's a selection bias in that the real standard is always at least implicitly "greatest political leader who ran a country I've heard of", or "general who commanded an army in a war I've heard of". That tends to give you a relatively fixed number of candidates per generation, and for most of history not even close to meritocratically selected.
Otherwise, there are a whole lot of fields where the GOAT is still with us, or no more than a century gone, and a few where we reach back into history. Which is what we should expect.
> There are many categories of human achievement, so by pure random chance we should have at least a few where the recognizably-greatest lived in the 17th century.
This is true but it doesn't affect his argument. This is like if I said my prior for my odds of winning the next lottery is low, and you replied that many people play the lottery, so by pure chance, one of them is likely to win. The odds of someone winning are good, but my odds remain low.
Likewise, the odds of someone from the 17th century being the greatest at something are good, but the odds of the greatest English writer being from that century are low. (Obviously these "odds" are with respect to whatever model he is using which seems to be just going by the number of educated English writers living in the past 400-ish years. Odds are always for some model, whether implied or explicit.)
When someone wins the lottery, we do not say "the odds of that person having won the lottery are so small that we should rationally conclude that they didn't really win the lottery".
Which is the argument being made, as I understand it - Shakespeare wasn't "really" the GOAT, that's just the literary judges being biased.
I think it helps that you can compare Marvel to DC. Most people who talk about Shakespeare hardly bring up his contemporaries (although him writing further back means fewer works of that time have survived).
I have a theory that Shakespeare is not so much better as a poet than a contemporary like Marlowe, but he is much more modern (or novelistic) in his approach to character. Similarly, Chaucer is much more fondly remembered (and more read) nowadays than a contemporary like John Gower, and here the character aspect is even more pronounced—Gower has stories told by medieval allegorical abstractions, and Chaucer has stories told by and informed by the narrator. I think I would not have understood how good Shakespeare was if I hadn’t “read backward” through Marlowe, Greene, (both also great!) and Kyd.
I couldn't read much of it [the writing is somewhat off-putting to me] but surely this is more than just a list of name and events devoid of analysis right?
Yes
The author is making a number of arguments through analysis and establishing a historical record
I'm not sure if I agree with all of the arguments or the rather some of the underlying assumptions but...
To me this is a gutter ball, but it's a very good example of one way these can fail (too into the subject matter for objective representation, building an internal mythology from surface-level analysis)
I haven't read this review so don't know whether I agree with your take on it, but I think you put your finger right on a certain kind of failure. It's very well put.
Appreciate it, thank you 😊
It kind of lost the thread from the lede in there somewhere. It started with a thesis that comics=myths. Then it went into how the silver age came about originally. Then we got a general argument that new things are better than old things due to innovation. This was briefly followed by starting to look at what made them different to other comics. Then it was a slightly unnecessary defence of why '60s comics weren't progressive by modern standards. Then we went back to innovation. Any of these could have been interesting to varying degrees, but none of them were really fleshed out.
I think the underlying problem was the author is obviously near-obsessively familiar with the subject matter and has lots of thoughts about it, but hasn't got a clear picture of who they're talking to or what they're trying to tell them. I came into this having literally never read these sorts of comics (I've read the Beano, that's about it), and have come away not knowing anything about them, or why these are the "Silver Age." I suspect if I knew more about them, I still wouldn't have got much out of this beyond the historical anecdotes (which were interesting, but were missing any account of why the Silver Age ended; Google tells me the Golden Age was earlier, so presumably they got worse somehow but there's no narrative as to why). Personally, this is the angle I'd have gone more into, then possibly concluded with the mythology point and compared it to e.g. religions settling into fixed canons of dogma or whatever.
Yeah, this is definitely a book review where the author has not quite 'crystallized' the core insight or idea that they are circling around. You can tell in part from the title - often with these things, once you realize the title, 'the rest writes itself'. But a mundane description like 'Marvel Silver Age Comics' is sometimes an admission that you still don't know what you are saying, and you only know what you are saying it about. They should've waited another year or two before trying, I suspect.
---
But if I may try to extract the latent thesis I see here in OP's essay, it would go something like this:
"Marvel's Silver Age of Comics: Humanizing Mythology", by Anonymous.
"Art progresses. Even the idea of having more than one actor in a play had to be invented. But we take these for granted because when we look back, we can't see how narrow the original concept of 'a play' was.
This is true of Marvel-Comics-style comics too. What makes Marvel Marvel is not any specific character or plot gimmick; what makes it is the innovation of taking classic mythological patterns like gods or superhuman warriors, who fight and feud and interact in a rich tapestry of stories (separate from ordinary people), and making these superheroes ordinary people as well, that its readers could identify with, fusing the psychological realism of novels with the archetypal resonance of mythology, to get something *new*. Something that was neither Archie Bunker nor Batman.
No one at Marvel Comics understood this; the key characters weren't even supposed to be 'heroes' but just science fiction style throwaways. They couldn't know they were inventing Marvel comics. But contractual limitation by limitation, sale by sale, gimmick by gimmick, retcon by retcon, contemporary topic by topic, Stan Lee & the Marvel artists backed their way into their great discovery: that in comics, one could create characters like Peter Parker could be both Spiderman *and* a pimply-faced teen who screwed up terribly once & can't forgive himself, and create an entire mythology of such characters, to play in endlessly.
DC Comics never quite figured this out, and instead continued to write 'mythology' like Batman (godlings in the cloak of mortality enacting tragedies or salvations), alienating the reader by going to wells that you can't go to every day; the MCU throve while it could use characters like Downey's Ironman, and balance both the humanity and the mythology, but lost its poise by the end for [reasons] and burned out viewers who got tired of the ever-escalating mythological epics.
This formula is now so familiar we can't even see the water in which we swim, but it gets easier if you go back to see the most flawed versions, and how different the original superheroes like Superman were from the ones Marvel incrementally introduced and refined.
I don't particularly advise doing so, however, because the newer versions really are better, now that people better understand what they are trying to do with this new innovation. If you really want to read the originals, at least the tablet app now makes it relatively easy now (compared to the crazy things we had to do back then like buy decades of used comics). But my advice: read the newer _Spiderman_ instead."
Is there a competition for best review of book reviews? This gets my vote.
I would support this, but only if we take it to the obvious conclusion, and have a contest for best review of a review of a book review. your clear and concise analysis of gwern’s review of the review (that “it was good”) would certainly be in the running.
Good.
As the winner last year, can I say that I’d LOVE to see this? To write mine, I did a deep study of all the previous finalists, and realized there's a bunch of patterns that repeat in the most successful — I think it would be a boon to our community’s rhetorical abilities to argue out what those are, so as to better emulate them.
I’ll add that while I agree that this particular review was weak on enunciating its thesis, there are theses aplenty in it (as Gwern unearthed), and interesting ones at that! And I particularly enjoyed the use of comic book covers to illustrate points.
EA but for book reviews
I second this - the review didn’t choose a single argument, instead it pointed out a bunch of interesting aspects of marvel comic books and helped me understand the historical context for their importance.
Frankly, this was one of my favorite book reviews!
Did you write anywhere about the patterns you noticed? I'd find it interesting to read.
This is a good take. I'd appreciate some more parallels to the original homeric fanfic which dominates storytelling for so long and which in many ways the MCU is just the latest installment. Heroes with fatal flaws or secret shame or whatever is the oldest fanfic in the world.
>Heroes with fatal flaws or secret shame or whatever is the oldest fanfic in the world.
Yup. If this was an innovation in comics, I'd count it as _transmitting_ a millennia-old technique from poetry and literature into a new medium, not as _inventing_ it.
Orthogonal to that, I, personally, am ambivalent about introducing huge numbers of interacting characters. If someone wants to illuminate "the human condition" (with some variations), for the 10,000th time, fine. I tend to be more interested in puzzle stories (e.g. Larry Niven's "Neutron Star"), which focus on a central event with some unexpected consequence due to it.
Thanks, this makes sense to me, and much easier to read.
It's frustrating cause one can kinda-sorta get the sense that something like this is what the review "intended" to be, but there's too many gaps and those assertions need to be filled out with more than tediously enumerated (I guess that's similar to the Bible!) names and dates and bibliographic references. The stronger polished version of this review probably *would* have been quite interesting to read. Alas, one must vote on the review that actually is, not the one that ought to be.
>backed their way into a great discovery
That is a great phrase, and I think it captures the way many things develop, including human lives.
Oh, I'm sure it's not my phrase. The point about serendipity and innovation only being obvious in retrospect has been made by many. If I were OP, I would've been writing this as a parallel to Moretti's study of the invention of the detective story: https://blogs.lanecc.edu/dhatthecc/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2015/06/Moretti-Slaughterhouse-of-Lit.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2005-moretti-graphsmapstrees-3-trees.pdf https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-3/reviews/adventures-of-a-man-of-science/
He has wonderful examples of how *hard* it was to invent 'the detective story', and how many detectives manqué there were before the trope-definers like Sherlock Holmes. For example, in one story (https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2005-moretti-graphsmapstrees-3-trees.pdf#page=6), the detective manages to infer from 'clues' which drink was poisoned... and he then *drinks it*. (Now there's something in desperate need of a retcon from Stan Lee - "NARRATOR: He knew the FATAL CHALICE was POISONED, and **drank it anyway**! Trusting in his training in *Shangri-la* to RESIST ALL POISONS known to mankind, and **sure** that this 'mistake' would *flush out a vaunting villain*, secure in his triumph --- only to be UNDONE BY HIS OWN WORDS!!!")
And think of all the mess and discomfort people went through before peanut butter sandwiches were invented! Many lives ruined by breadwiches, toast with a thick layer of pb&j on each side.
That you could put the peanut butter on just one side of each piece of bread, and not have to wash your hands after eating the sandwich each time, may strike us as absurdly obvious - but they just didn't know.
That's quite an image! LOL!
( Though you may want to look at this comment from Level 50 Lapras: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers/comment/64879712 Some companies' methods were comparable to breadwiches... )
from one of Woody Allen's lesser-known pieces of historical research:
"1741: Living in the country on a small inheritance, [the Earl of Sandwich] works day and night, often skimping on meals to save money for food. His first completed work — a slice of bread, a slice of bread on top of that, and a slice of turkey on top of both — fails miserably. Bitterly disappointed, he returns to his studio and begins again.
1745: After four years of frenzied labor, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great and encourages him. Heartened by the philosopher’s friendship, he returns to work with renewed vigor."
("Yes But Can The Steam Engine Do This?" https://myanaloguelife.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/yes-but-can-the-steam-engine-do-this/ )
I looked up the story in the link and it's entitled "A Race with the Sun" by L.T. Meade and Clifford Halifax.
The main character is not a detective, but an inventor, and has been invited to (of course) the lonesome out-of-the-way estate by two others in order to (he thinks) sign a contract about research they have all been independently conducting; he has information they need, they have information he needs.
The 'clue' about the third cup of coffee is not there because he suspects foul play and is trying to investigate a possible conspiracy; he is there in all good faith and doesn't (despite heavy hints in the story) suspect any foul play at all. So the clue is there for us, the readers, to heighten the tension and alert us to the fact that Something Fishy Is Going On. It's only in hindsight that the narrator/main character realises that something was up with that third cup.
It's melodramatic, in other words, rather than detection: it's like having your hero or heroine in a serial tied to the railroad tracks - oh no, how will they get out of it for the next instalment? Spoiler here: the "how will he get out of it?" in this story is that he has been drugged, tied up, and strapped to a balloon with a bomb beneath it which will be detonated when the sun rises, hence the title.
So I have to disagree that this is meant as an example of a *detective* story; it's good old-fashioned melodrama:
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Strand_Magazine/Volume_12/Adventures_of_a_Man_of_Science/A_Race_With_the_Sun
"The Adventures of a Man of Science.
By L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax, M.D.
We have taken down these stories from time to time as our friend. Paul Gilchrist, has related them to us. He is a man whose life study has been science in its most interesting forms—he is also a keen observer of human nature and a noted traveller. He has an unbounded sympathy for his kind, and it has been his lot to be consulted on many occasions by all sorts and conditions of men."
L.T. Meade was a female writer and she wrote scores of books, sometimes with co-authors (as with Halifax above):
https://swanriverpress.ie/2021/10/how-i-write-my-books-an-interview-with-mrs-l-t-meade/
"Despite her wide contributions to genre literature, Irish author L. T. Meade is now remembered, if at all, for her girls’ school stories. However, in 1898 the Strand Magazine, famous for its fictions of crime, detection, and the uncanny, proclaimed Meade one of its most popular writers for her contributions to its signature fare. Her stories, widely published in popular fin de siècle magazines, included classic tales of the supernatural, but her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives, criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder, mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity."
There are collections of short stories by Hugh Greene entitled "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes", which are anthologies of detective stories written around the same time. Some of them were made into a television series in the 70s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rivals_of_Sherlock_Holmes_(book_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rivals_of_Sherlock_Holmes_(TV_series)
Thanks for that essay! What a great read
As a nerd-American of a certain age, I come away wanting to have the author over for dinner, after which we'd geek out for hours.
To me, this was one of the more enjoyable book reviews. As I grew up in a communist country, I am not too familiar with superhero comics (I've seen a few movies, but never read any of the comics mentioned). This review gave me good insights to why these comics are important
And notice something - no other country but America could pull it off. Captain Britannia was a failure and no one in continental Europe even tried. That's because they are based on individualism and optimism, and a citizen mentality, not a subject mentality.
I couldn't get through the first section, but was pleased that the author framed his introduction as an attempt to persuade to read the rest. I appreciate the self-awareness. I didn't read any of the first bracket entries, though, so I can't guess whether or not this is top-ten work for this year.
My guess is that Scott's readership tends to be high IQ but aesthetically unsophisticated and rather nerdish.
Very good review. It's an interesting statement, that the stories are bad by modern standards (to the point you wouldn't recommend we read them) but good for their time because they were better than what came before, and that's why they were popular.
But reading comic books wasn't the only form of entertainment... Were the other forms of entertainment just as bad back then? Films and books weren't? So what explains the popularity?
And would you say the increase in quality was gradual, or were there other seminal events that marked change?
I think other forms of entertainment had their own innovations. I've read that old movies used to be shot kind of like stage productions, with the camera mostly static and actors turned towards the camera like they would turn towards the audience on stage. But then someone realized you could have multiple cameras shooting from different angles and invented the now-standard "shot/reverse shot" for dialogue, and now you can frame things in more interesting ways with close-ups on people's faces and so on.
Also, you quadruple-posted by accident.
Ah thanks! It kept telling me something went wrong...
They did, but films from the 50s and 60s are still very enjoyable today. It's not like 'they were good for their time'. So my question is why would lots of people read comics if they were bad, even if they were better than what came before.
Though I suppose it wasn't like huge numbers of people reading them. I suppose marginal improvement led to slight increase in readership?
"So my question is why would lots of people read comics if they were bad, even if they were better than what came before."
Silver Age, we're talking about late 50s all through the 60s to the early 70s (more or less). The simple answer is "new and wider audience", with the invention of the teenager as a consumer with disposable income.
We're talking about what is really a slice of the entire comic book market, because there were romance comics, horror comics, crime comics, etc. for adults but for our purposes we're sticking with "superhero/SF" as the definition of comics.
After the entire kerfuffle during the 50s over worries about juvenile delinquency being caused by reading comics, and the introduction of the Comics Code, superheroes were brought back as both a 'wholesome' subject and also because if you had fantastic or science-fictional elements in the story, you could get around some of the restrictions (but that wasn't guaranteed).
So both wanting to hold on to the young readers as they got older, and to make up for restrictions on previously popular other genres, what we now know as the genre of comics (superheroes) got launched. I think what was pointed out in the review, that a lot of these comics looked more like SF stories than 'traditional' comics, had a lot to do with it - if you're a teenage SF nerd who is already reading the magazines, then these new comics look more like something you'd be interested in. That's a whole new audience right there.
Just to add to this, the Marvel books were a response to the comics code, which had been tanking the industry for a decade. The artists and writers were dying to do more adult books, but couldn't get around the editors/censors. Silver Age Marvel was revolutionary as it pulled in older (male) readers.
I always wonder what the comic world would look like today without the Comics Code. It effectively flushed a generation of artists and writers right out of the medium.
Beware the Moral Panic, eh?
In addition to Deiseach's points, I wonder if it's possible the audience for comics just changed, rather than simply expanding, from the 1930s- 1980s. In the 1930s, I would expect comics and radioplays to be consumed by the same people, and in the same way, as lowbrow TV in the later 60s-80s and the biggest stunt YouTube channels today: that is, as casual, easy background entertainment for kids and distracted adults who don't want to think too much.
But if comics are easier and flashier than novels, TV is easier and flashier than comics (as YouTube is easier and flashier than TV). So the original readership of the truly dumb comic stories would have presumably have moved on to watch dumb TV in the 60s, leaving the market to be driven by the more discerning new nerdy-teen-and-adult readership that Deiseach talks about, who might have more focus to spare for extended character arcs and narrative nuance (and who might themselves have been reading serial novels back in the 30s).
You can make a similar case for a background "audience evaporative cooling" in various other mass genres that appear to magically get more sophisticated over time. For instance, the class of people who dubbed The Wire "peak TV" back in the '00s were not the same as the class of TV-watchers as the audience for Dragnet in the 60s.
Wow, I never thought about that before.
>the class of people who dubbed The Wire "peak TV" back in the '00s were not the same as the class of TV-watchers as the audience for Dragnet in the 60s.
I watched both with enjoyment but at very different times of my life. Changes in sophistication can happen on a personal level irrespective of class.
Another thread to consider in this is animated cartoons from the 30's on, and photoplays that were very popular in a lot of places but not so much in the USA. They were basically stories told with still photographs, and have a lot in common with comic books.
I think you need to factor in the heavy-handed creative repression from the Comics Code in the mid 1950's. It pretty much guaranteed that comics were puerile trash. We don't start to see really interesting adult comics until the mid to late 70's and then only initially through the back-door as magazine publications.
In your example, it would be as if someone said Television could only show programs suitable for 7 year olds.
What films from the 1960s are you thinking of that are still enjoyable today? The only ones I've seen were the first couple Doctor Who episodes. My mom liked them, but I found them incredible slow-paced and predictable.
>> 've read that old movies used to be shot kind of like stage productions, with the camera mostly static and actors turned towards the camera like they would turn towards the audience on stage
How old is "old"? Because that sh*t was over and done with by the time "Birth of a Nation" came out in 1915.
As for any claim that movies today are better than those of the past, I would recommend this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx5JEvP5og&t=927s
(and the channel in general) for a discussion of ways in which filmmaking has devolved in recently decades.
I'm guessing that as TV got better (both technologically and in terms of sophisticated storytelling) the kinds of things that would get people into a movie theater changed. A serious drama works just as well on the "small screen" of a 50 inch HDTV at home, but you really want an actual theater for a movie that's heavy on spectacle, such as James Cameron's "Avatar". Similarly, romantic "date night" movies also give you a reason to physically go out instead of inviting someone to your own home to, what's the phrase? "Netflix and chill"?
Pretty much, though the history of movies competing with TV has been going on for seventy years now, and is a little more complex. During the 50s and 60s Hollywood used big-budget films -- whether consciously "epic" like "Ben Hur" or "The Ten Commandments" or merely possessed of elements and production values that outclassed TV, like "The Sound of Music" -- to draw audiences with something they couldn't see at home. Post-1970, with the ratings code replacing the censorship codes, movies tried outcompeting TV with sex, violence, language, and subject matter. They also came to rely upon a teenage/young adult audience that could be more easily drawn out of the house than their parents could.
Since 2000 (roughly), though, harsher fare has come to appear more regularly on pay-TV and cable, so that the industry has had to return to "epic" films like "Avatar" or superhero movies in order to distinguish itself from TV. At the same time, movie attendance by teen/young adult audiences has been falling pretty dramatically -- where TV keeps adults from movie theaters, it appears that cell phones is keeping the pre-adult crowd tied up.
> I've read that old movies used to be shot kind of like stage productions, with the camera mostly static and actors turned towards the camera like they would turn towards the audience on stage.
True. Sergei Eisenstein is mostly credited with the development of montage (cutting between different angles to create a more complex cinematic space.) A lot of silent films of the teens and twenties of the last century are quite sophisticated in this way (mostly German and Russian.) DW Griffith is another fellow. The next person to really push this envelope of cinematic structure was Jean Luc Goddard.
The advent of talkies really set cinema back in a way because the cameras and sound recording equipment were really bulky and forced a return to the proscenium form you describe. Some people argue that the development of talkies was really the death of cinema as a unique art form.
Comics were pitched at kids. When I try to watch a contemporary kid’s show like Paw Patrol I might say it is objectively bad, but I’m coming at it as an adult. My kids lap it up.
I’m not sure that Marvel comics of the early ’60s were actually better than DC comics of the same time, but they were signaled that they were more adult. I read my kids Silver Age DC comics all the time; I started reading Spider-Man from the beginning, and after only a dozen issues or so they lost interest because of all the soap-opera-y stuff. So much angst! The comics feel like they’re pitched at a 12 year old and not an 8 year old.
I would (personally) say that by 1965 Fantastic Four is quite good. Both FF and Spider-Man peak for me in ’66. Also: 1965 is actually a high point for Daredevil! But it’s true that a lot of early Marvel comics are a bit of a slog, being no better than DC comics but less fun because more ponderous.
I've always thought Spiderman really was pitched for an older audience - Peter is in high school then college, he's got a girlfriend, he has his older family member - Aunt May.
Maybe part of it was trying to hold on to the audience as they got older, but I do think part of it was also trying to be more 'real' and to have more 'adult' themes (before that simply meant 'swearing and nudity').
People used to watch cartoons at the movies, and that wasn't just for a kids' audience (as we would class them today). It was all part of the bill of fare.
I guess I’d point out that Superboy is in high school, too (also: Archie).
It’s hard for me to estimate the readership of comic books of the past. We know that soldiers read them in WWII (and indeed comic books were made specifically for the army as late as 1969). But Seduction of the Innocent (1954) takes as a given, more or less, that comics are for kids. Stan Lee always asserted "his" books were popular on college campuses; but he’s not the most…reliable source.
When I read a Superman comic book, Spider-man comic book, and (say) Steve Canyon comic strip all from 1963, I see them as being pitched just in that order, from youngest readers to oldest.
This doesn’t mean that Superman or Spider-man comics aren’t good, though. It’s just that you have to take them as kids’ media, especially at the beginning. By 1966, I think several Marvel titles stand on their own merit as stories
I think you’re dead right about cartoons before movies preventing kids’ media from being as sequestered as we may have thought of it later. Everyone read the funnies in the newspaper, too.
I always wondered who read "Archie" comic books. My best guess now is: little girls of 8 to 12 who idolized their big brothers in high school and looked forward to themselves enjoying a sophisticated high school social life of going to the prom and the like. It's quite charming when you think about it.
Stop your noticing! Really: I saw this review title and thought, oh dear, my only experience* of comic books is so thoroughly discrediting. There were "Archie" comics in the grocery store my grandmother frequented. I read as many as I could while she shopped. My mother would never have bought something like that for me anyway, but my granny did when I asked, on my annual visit to her. I really can't now remember why I would have liked them ...
I recall that they were ugly, stupid, and not funny - they must have been targeted at me: a little girl with teenaged brothers, who thought everything connected with high school was romantic and glamourous. Had they been smart, they'd have done Barbie comics, which I would have liked better. I saw decades later that they had figured out to make Barbie dvds for little children.
*That and Classic Comics, there was an old stack of those at home. "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Ivanhoe" and the like.
Now that I think about it - was there ever any funny comic books besides "Scrooge McDuck"? And isn't it odd that that should have sprung from Disney.
I sometimes read the Archie comics digests that were sold in grocery stores in the 1990s. Yes, the humor certainly did consist of a lot of dumb jokes ("Archie will inevitably break an expensive thing in Mr. Lodge's house" was a recurring plot/joke), but I did find them funny. I do still have a taste for the kind of stupid humor you sometimes see in Adam Sandler and Tyler Perry movies, so take my opinions on things like that with the proverbial grain of salt. 😆
I liked Archie at the age of nine or so. It prepared me for what was coming. As it turned out I never attended a coed high school so it was not very useful.
There was an NPR story a few decades ago about how Archie was the biggest comic globally and particularly popular in Africa. I was fairly shocked by this but it makes some sense. It's wholesome and inoffensive and reflects current American trends and fads. Not my thing, but apparently huge.
The Syndicated strips were the absolute peak of comic craft until very recently. Everyone wanted that gig. That was where the adult readers were. Milt Caniff, Alex Raymond, and don't forget Hal Foster's Prince Valiant! You can get a subscription to King Syndicate for like $50 a year (maybe less?) and re-read all that old stuff.
Children's stories quite often feature heroes somewhat older than the audience; they become "who I could be when I get older".
Heinlein's juvenile sci-fi novels usually feature a protagonist of 17-19 years old, while the readership was, I'd imagine, 12 to 14 years old.
Male movie heroes are typically envisioned as around 35 years old. The idea, I'd imagine, is to combine the vigor of youth with the skills of maturity, have one last ultimate adventure while finding true love and then settling down.
> Comics were pitched at kids. When I try to watch a contemporary kid’s show like Paw Patrol I might say it is objectively bad, but I’m coming at it as an adult. My kids lap it up.
Stuff for kids doesn't have to be objectively bad, though. Just look at Avatar: The Last Airbender. Very much a kid's show, but also a masterpiece that appeals to viewers of all ages.
I definitely agree! I love lots of kids media, including early Marvel. I just mean that if you look at a text, and say why would anyone want to consume something so stupid?, “it's for kids” is a sufficient response.
True. Kids are just less likely to notice the flaws/stupidity in something as long as there's something else in it that appeals to them. (I loved "Captain N The Game Master" and "The Wizard" as a child because I was obsessed with video games, even though my parents wouldn't buy me the NES I so desperately wanted.)
>a contemporary kid’s show like Paw Patrol
My grandkids lap that thing up while all I can do is pine for Bugs, Daffy, Elmer and Tweety Bird, before they were completely neutered.
Try them on Animaniacs?
"But it’s true that a lot of early Marvel comics are a bit of a slog, being no better than DC comics but less fun because more ponderous."
Ha! agreed! That old stuff is unreadable to me. As far as a book review goes, this did not inspire me to want to re-read any silver age comics.
I'd way, way, way, way rather re-read Ed Piskor's X-Men Grand Design books.
I have to admit that I spend hundreds of dollars a month on comics with DC/Marvel making up 0.001% of that flow. When I do read a Marvel Comic, it's Conan the Barbarian. I low-key hate Marvel/DC so I was always going to be a hard sell.
For what it's worth, Howard Chaykin's "Hey Kids Comics!" is an insider's view of the comic industry's history from 1940's though the early '00's. I recommend it, though it's kind of depressing.
Things like continuity, where something that happened back in Issue 19 would have an effect in Issue 51, were an innovation - think of story arcs in TV shows now, which are commonplace, but which were an amazing new device when someone first used it instead of the "episode of the week, we introduce the love of his life to the main character this episode and kill her off in the same one, then next week he has a new girlfriend like nothing ever happened" format.
Now there was lore. Now you could know the lore.
The Roman poet Horace is said to have complained about continuity errors in Homer: "and yet I also become annoyed whenever the great Homer nods off."
Still, I suspect the reading public has become nerdier over the generations. There are continuity errors in the Bible, but that didn't stop brilliant theologians from coming up with the theory of Biblical Inerrancy. Perhaps the latter day theologians tended toward the modern nerdish desire for perfect continuity, even if the compilers of the Bible didn't fully live up to their desires?
Robert Heinlein sensationalized the science fiction reading public with his linked "future history" short stories of the first three years of his writing career, 1939-1941. Heinlein was a close student of science fiction fans and tried to pander to their desires, even if they hadn't yet figured out what they want.
On the other hand, Heinlein got bored easily, so the high point of his career, his 1947-1963 juvenile novels, broke continuity with his old Future History short stories.
On TV, one of the first shows to do real continuity -- with an ongoing story arc where things changed -- was Babylon 5. Which, despite its flaws, was kind of made for streaming. I think in the old TV days, you had basically one shot at watching an episode, and then a rerun maybe. So they pretty much had to have Adam 12 or Star Trek reset to normal, aside from the occasional two-parter.
Babylon 5 at least was made in an era when all the nerds who were ever going to watch it, at least had VCRs. So you didn't have to literally be in front of the TV at the appointed hour.
That said, I was part of an international conspiracy to smuggle tapes of five episodes that were delayed several months in the US, from a contact in the UK. And I recall one space development conference in those years where you never had to worry about skipping anything interesting to watch B5 at the usual time, because they'd have it playing on tape in the conference room over the next day's lunch.
> But reading comic books wasn't the only form of entertainment... Were the other forms of entertainment just as bad back then? Films and books weren't? So what explains the popularity?
Accessibility. The target audience was children, mostly boys aged 7-13. If you're a kid in the 1960s then seeing a movie is a big deal, and most movies aren't of interest to you anyway. If you're lucky enough to have a television at home then children's programming is only on for a few hours a week. As for books, there's a handful of books aimed at your level, but books are expensive so you don't have that many, and reading a book sounds a bit too much like schoolwork. Video games won't come along for another twenty years, and YouTube won't come along for fifty. So you read a comic book, which has a fun story aimed at the uncomplicated interests of prepubescent boys, and is cheap enough for you to buy a new one every week.
Science fiction movies and TV shows were pretty bad and pretty few in number until they started to mature over the course of the 1960s.
Ronald Reagan would have thrived in science fiction movies -- he wasn't called Ronnie Raygun for nothing; my friend Jerry Pournelle helped write an early draft of Reagan's "Star Wars" speech, but when he got together with co-writers Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein to watch Reagan deliver it, they were amazed how much better Reagan had made their words -- but there were almost no sci-fi movies or shows until Reagan had retired from Hollywood.
The Twilight Zone was a big leap forward in the early 1960s but budget limitations made it more adult and allusive than boys liked. Then Star Trek in 1966 was a huge hit with with this 7-year-old. In 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey was an awesome shift upward in sci-fi realism. Seeing 2001 at the geodesic Cinerama Dome in 1968 remains the peak movie-going experience of my life.
So, boys in 1962 reads comic books when today they'd watch comic book, sci-fi, and fantasy movies and TV shows.
...or, even more likely, play computer games; that's where much of the writing on this field happens now.
Right.
The problem with computer games is that they don't seem to spill over much into other art forms.
This is arguably starting to change, especially with the rise of dedicated fandoms. Hook the audience with a video game that's at least "innovative" enough to attract a fan-base big enough to do your marketing for you, and as long as the connected books, shows, etc. remind fans of what they originally loved about the property, you at least have a chance of success. The "Five Nights at Freddy's" movie did pretty well given that it was based on an independently developed video game that only internet nerds knew existed. Netflix's "Arcane" has also been hugely popular, with its fans saying it's better than the "League of Legends" game it's based on.
But are games inspiring songs the way movies used to inspire songs and songs used to inspire movies? Are there Broadway musicals based on videogames? What games have led to as many memes on Twitter as The Big Lewbowski?
I may just be overlooking examples of the broader influence of games, but they still seem to be a pretty isolated cultural silo ...
I grew up in a small town in the early 60s and went to the movies almost every Saturday afternoon. It was a crap shoot. I might see The Three Stooges meet Hercules one week and Dr. Strangelove the next. It didn't matter. I thought Strangelove was hysterical when I saw it at age 8. The best part was always Looney Tunes.
> the first Avengers film [...] the 3rd highest grossing film of all time.
Hollywood loves to say that their movies are constantly breaking records so they can attract investors, but we really should (as with any economic analysis) adjust for inflation, at which point it's no longer true.
Endgame is still at number 5 adjusted for inflation.
I wasn't talking about Endgame, but even that is a good example; they were bragging to their investors that it was the highest grossing movie of all time, but it wasn't when adjusted for inflation.
There are various ways of adjusting for the fluctuating value of money across time, and even if you stick to using inflation rather than some of the other metrics, you can use different yardsticks there as well -- the historical price of movie tickets, for instance, rather than the general "inflation rate."
There's also a lot of guesswork that goes into estimating the popularity of old movies. Until the 1980s, "rentals" (the money that theaters paid to the distributors) was the most common yardstick, and so the "box office grosses" of movies older than that have to be extrapolated from studios' financial records (themselves incomplete or unavailable in many cases) using rules of thumb.
Bottom-line, estimates about how contemporary movies stack up against older movies are all over the place. I've seen lists that put "Endgame" at number 16, not at number 5.
>Neither comic was very “good”, but it didn’t matter. They were unlike any of the comics I had read in my life to date. I didn’t use the language at the time, but now I look back and can see that being good didn’t matter – the comics were innovative. I was hooked.
I think this deserves a highlight. Art exists in conversation with its audience and with the works that came before it. A lot of times what's popular isn't "the best art" but rather the art that fits into the current moment perfectly, grabs a particular audience really well, or introduces a new idea into the genre.
As an anime fan, I often point to Sword Art Online as my example of this phenomenon. Objectively, it's a cheap wish fulfillment power fantasy for nerds. But it was *innovative* - other works had done "trapped in a video game" plots before, but SAO was the one that codified the LitRPG concept and discovered that "nerdy protagonist + fantasy setting + literal video game mechanics" was a money printer. I loved SAO when it came out, because it was laser-focused at pandering to my interests in a way that other anime hadn't really done before. Now that everyone is doing this and isekais are a solid quarter of every anime season, critics are able to look back and say "yeah, SAO kinda sucks."
(Also, to dip a toe into slightly culture-war-y waters, I think this is what people mean when they say "representation matters." Yeah, the latest "queer rep" novel may not be Shakespearean in quality, but if you haven't read anything with a queer protagonist in mainstream literature, then that's innovative - it's going to grab you and expand your universe of possibilities in the same way that "you can play behind the net" or "you could put two superheroes into the same shared universe" did.)
I love isekai stuff, but I keep bouncing off of actual anime. What's a good isekai anime with a decent # of episodes out?
Arguably the first isekai story, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, still holds up pretty well today.
At this point, there's so much out there that this seems not much different than asking 'what's a good fiction anime?'
What series have you bounced off of? It might help looking at the list to see if there are categories you missed. If everything you tried and disliked is overpowered-hero-action stuff, then perhaps slow-life comedy might be more interesting, for example.
Log Horizon
Konosuba is a really good parody of the genre, if you're looking for comedy.
I think Re:Zero is quite good, though I've only watched the first season so far. It's emotionally quite intense, so prepare yourself.
The other one I really like is That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, which surprisingly has a lot of stuff about economics and politics in addition to fantasy fighting. It's an interesting take on the genre.
I also agree with beleester on Konosuba. It's freaking hilarious. But it's good to watch a few "real" isekai first so that parody makes more sense.
How far back do you want to go, and how important are video game-y mechanics?
The whole idea of "person is transported to another world where they become a hero" is old, and it showed up in anime before the current craze. But in those cases the hero is going to another /world/, not a video game. (I like that better, but my tastes are not everyone's tastes)
So if you want to give, say, Vision of Escaflowne a try, it's an isekai...but the world the heroine goes to is absolutely not a video game. Magic Knight Rayearth makes a lot of video game jokes, because CLAMP was a bunch of nerds, but fundamentally, Cephiro isn't a game. (also, these are both aimed at girls) If you want a video game world...man, I dunno. I don't like those.
Isekai is a fun tie-in to this book review IMO because of how quickly it has developed compared to most genres (graduating from "trope" to "genre" in only a few years), mostly because of the new technology of the Internet ("modern" isekai was born in the pits of Japanese amateur serial web fiction sites).
Some interesting subgenres of modern isekai and suggestions:
Slice-of-life, low conflict isekais: "Campfire Cooking in another World" (guy cooks in a fantasy world using online groceries, accidentally tames monsters), "Ascendence of a Bookworm" (book nerd girl reincarnates in illiterate peasant family, obsessed with making books)
Off-the-wall premises: "Saga of Tanya the Evil" (sociopathic middle manager summoned into fantasy WWI Germany by evil God), "Re;Zero" (standard-ish fantasy crossed with Groundhog Day, with a psychological horror theme)
Funny Parodies: "Konosuba" (generic isekai fantasy combined with the narcissistic characters of It's Always Sunny in Philadephia), "Isekai Ojisan" (old guy comes back from fantasy world and recounts his adventures to his nephew; cringe comedy about old guy not understand isekai tropes)
I've found Jobless Reincarnation pretty fun to watch. (You do have to put up with the protagonist being lecherous at the start, but he mostly acts heroic later).
Shield Hero. He's totally based!
I agree with the general point, but disagree about SAO: I think what it really did to set itself apart was ramping up the wish fulfillment, the rest of the formula was already honed pretty well in .hack (though I guess it's weird since that's an actual videogame/anime hybrid franchise).
As was said of "Charlie's Angels": "Never underestimate the power of an idea whose time has come. Even a mediocre idea."
On a similar note: "Frankenstein" was *not* a good book. Was it innovative? Absolutely. It had good ideas that were very memorable and it became a "classic", but if it were written today nobody would give it a second look.
I'm going to get hated for this, but "Star Wars: A New Hope" is also an example of something that became famous for doing something first that has since been done better by a lot of other people. "Guardians of the Galaxy" is as good a movie as Star Wars; the difference is that Star Wars came out in 1977 and Guardians of the Galaxy came out in 2014.
I'd disagree about Frankenstein, which might actually be the only one of the foundational horror classics that this *isn't* true of. It's certainly much better written than Dracula or Phantom of the Opera.
EDIT: Actually I don't really agree about Star Wars either, I think Episodes IV and V are still maybe the tightest blockbuster movies ever made.
Well, I didn't read those, but I did read Frankenstein as a teenager along with literally hundreds of more contemporary books, and modern science fiction is better. :P The quality of the writing in Frankenstein was good, but the plot and characters didn't particularly grip me emotionally.
Incidentally, I have read some pre-WW1 literature I've really liked; I thought "The Three Musketeers" was really good (I felt it would make a great movie as long as they didn't change anything), and several Shakespeare plays are on my favorites list.
The Beatles would mostly not be considered good if they came out today. They became famous for short pop songs - 2 to 3 minutes with a catchy sound and banal but fun lyrics. They had some musically and lyrically better music, some of which became hits, but that's not really what made them famous.
Star Wars in 1977 did several things that others were not doing, and did it better than similar takes of that time or the 80s. Science Fiction was big, and Nazis were a natural foil antagonist. Throw them together with some pretty good production values and really good (for the time) special effects, and you've innovated something new. All three of the originals still hold up today, which is more than you can say for a lot of science fiction of the 70s and 80s. 2001 holds up okay, but it doesn't hit the "fun" and "approachable" marks that SW hit. SF from the 60s is called "campy" for lack of a better positive term. It was something people wanted, so lots was created, but they didn't have the technology and approach to make it work. SW was one of the first to do it well enough to break through outside of campy fans looking for a SF fix. Star Trek from the 60s definitely doesn't hold up, except for nostalgia and from the perspective of the movies and Next Generation.
I disagree with almost everything in this post, which is always fascinating to encounter. Give me stock tips!
(Intended tone: friendly).
I think the Beatles would do fine today, with the quality of their songs being comparable to Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Meghan Trainor, etc.
I disagree with you about both Star Wars and Frankenstein. When I read Frankenstein, it wasn't what I expected, but I thought it was really good. I enjoyed the book, despite having to shake off the memories of the movie adaptations. I think Star Wars still holds up very well, though I admit I could be biased, having seen it in the theater at the age of 12. (Is there possibly any better age for a boy to see Star Wars the first time in the theater? I think not!)
I agree that Guardians of the Galaxy is also very good. At the time, I said that I thought it had as much sheer joyfulness as the original Star Wars, and I stand by that. I do think the comparison is apt, because both are just really uplifting movies.
Star Wars the movie was a disappointment after reading several of the Expanded Universe novels and playing Knights of the Old Republic. It worked as a mostly mindless action movie, but you know how a lot of Star Wars fans went to see the prequel movies and went "WTF is this crap? It's all flash and no substance!" I guess I had exactly the same reaction to the entire Original Trilogy when I finally watched them during the Special Edition theatrical releases - I expected something profound and got a story with all the depth of a puddle.
I watched SAO anime as it aired and it kinda sucked back then, too.
But I guess whatever claim to genre-defining SAO has, it should be attributed to the much earlier original novels. By the time the anime came out, the isekai wave was already well underway.
Admittedly, around the time of SAO anime debut, there was some kind of tipping point that soured me to the entire genre when isekai ceased to be [essentially regular stories, often poor in execution but saved by the inherent strength of the concept] and became [postmodern bullshit essentially giving up on worldbuilding, plot or characters in favor of genre conventions], but the timing is probably a coincidence, and it's a consequence of developments decades in the making. (In which, again, SAO the novel undoubtedly did have an influence. SAO the anime - nah, probably not.)
I think representation is a bit of a different thing. I think hobbits and elves are farther from the "norm", however one defines that, than queer people. So it had to be a very strange experience for queer people that apparently writers can imagine hobbits and elves but not them. It had to be a little offensive. The appeal of elves and orcs and hobbits is precisely their strangeness, unusualness. It takes an almost willful act of blindness to want to write explicitly about strangeness and unusualness and just somehow not notice well known human variations.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has said that the human characters in movies made in the 1950s are far more alien than almost all literal aliens in contemporary science fiction.
I enjoyed the bit above about the importance of myths in culture, putting the foundational myths of Western culture (Greek, Germanic and Levantine) in a single package with the superhero material created in the mid-20th century. Anecdotally, I confirm that they must be the same kind of stuff, because however culturally important they may be, I've never found them anything else than boring, the whole lot.
I've been able to get through a book or two of the likes of Wendy Doniger, who studies and analyzes myths, but never made it past a few pages of the actual lore, be it ancient or modern. At this point I give up, this kind of material is just not for me.
LOL! I did like reading Greek and Norse myths (as well as some Bible stories) as a kid, though I never got into comics.
Anyway, the “comics are the modern equivalent of Greek myths” seemed weird to me — maybe for a particular subculture, but otherwise I’m skeptical. Especially since, as the review mentions later, the readership was overwhelmingly male (and the population who cares about Marvel comics today probably still is at least majority-male).
If you asked me what the equivalent of ancient myths and folktales was in modern America, I’d probably have said something like that George Washington/cherry tree story that we learned about as kids even though it’s not actually true.
I agree.
How come that almost nobody in the comment thread has challenged the absurd claim that "superheroes are modern myths"?
As if the reviewer had provided any good argument in support of it. I don't think he did.
The only argument that has been given is that they are "interconnected", which I don't think is the main feature of mythology.
By the end I was believing the connection, because it was clear that it was intended to be that point, about the structure of separate stories interleaving through occasional overlaps of shared characters, sometimes as fan service and sometimes in service of greater literary goals.
But when one leads off with talk of mythology, it sounds like it's going to be about the foundational role it plays in culture (which I think even today the Simpsons still stands closer to that than Marvel).
It depends on what you think the purpose of myth and folktales are. If you're looking for a set of stories that resonate with the culture and influence values, then I'd say comics are more relevant than traditional stories like that of Washington and the cherry tree, but I think that this is missing the actual answer. While I certainly am old enough to remember the story of Washington and the Cherry Tree, it's certainly not something that I think about unless prompted. If you asked me for a morality story about lying, I'd say 'the Boy Who Cried Wolf'.
I think part of the problem is that people that talk about comics as modern mythology are only talking about three examples, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, all of which are solidly stories of 'With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility' in different ways. I've never read any comic books for any of the three characters, and I'm of a generation and part of the population for whom comics would be a more expected hobby. While they originated in comics, as in my case, I'd wager most people that know those stories actually know them from movies or TV. The whole rest of comics seems virtually irrelevant as far as myth-like influence goes (and most of that little relevance is also from movies).
If you're actually talking modern myth and folklore, I'd think the classic fairy tales would be a better example, though you can't deny that for many the stories have been filtered through a Disney lens in the modern era.
"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" is not at all a bad moral to make memorable to boys.
< I've never found them anything else than boring, the whole lot.
I feel exactly the same about both. Myths seem to me like a game with gods as character cards and various violent actions as event cards, and the latter get randomly distributed to the former. Hera loves X and screws him. Zeus gets jealous and kills X. Yeah, OK. There's no real story, no character continuity, no emotion to get caught up in. It's all so schematic and fake.
Do we have a learning disability?
One of the many theories of myth is that it is "philosophy before philosophy". The characters are one dimensional because they represent concepts. Zeus is permanently horny because he stands for creation/generation, etc
Thank you! I can easily understand why The Odyssey, etc. capture people's imagination -- they're great stories with great characters. But I have wondered all my life why people find these myths interesting. It's been like a pebble in my shoe. Now I get it.
The theory is expounded in Henri Frankfurt's Before Philosophy
Generally the other way round; Hera is goddess of marriage, Zeus screws everything with a pulse. Since Hera can't meaningfully punish Zeus, she tends to take it out on his lovers.
I think the author underestimates how familiar this audience already is with comics. Just because we're a little older and better educated, doesn't mean we're not mostly geeks here.
Well, speak for yourself, then. I've never read any Marvel or DC comics in my entire life. Not because I consider myself "above" this kind of entertainment – as a child I did read a lot of Micky Mouse and Donald Duck comics, as well as Asterix. It's rather that I never had any interest in superhero comics, or maybe because I never came into contact with them.
Marvel and DC, and perhaps even superhero comics in general, might be a predominantly American phenomenon, especially before the advent of the modern superhero movies and franchises.
I'm American and also grew up mainly with Donald Duck, Tintin, Asterix & Obelix, etc. and never managed to become very invested in any superhero comics, although I did have some and briefly kind of liked Spiderman.
>Marvel and DC, and perhaps even superhero comics in general, might be a predominantly American phenomenon, especially before the advent of the modern superhero movies and franchises.
I can't speak on a broad scale or about non-English speaking countries (you mention Asterix so I assume there's a good chance that applies to you), but my dad grew up in England (born in '61) and was obsessed with marvel as a kid.
But I agree with you that the author was right to not assume familiarity with the audience. I loved it when the marvel cinematic universe was coming out in theaters because I was a kid and it was a great way to connect with my dad on something he liked, but even now I hadn't read any of the old comics.
I'm Irish, and we got dribs and drabs of American comic books coming in to the newsagents in my small town. Not reliably, which was really frustrating because you could never follow a story all the way through as the next issues mightn't turn up at all, but we did get them.
And even one of the 'underground' type of comics, which did indeed blow my mind as a ten year old who innocently bought it thinking it was going to be Yet Another Comic Book. So my (American) comic book reading really is end of the Silver Age/through the Bronze Age.
Other comics I read were the British ones, and I stuck with 2000AD up to the end of the 90s. Comics changed, or I just got older, but the grimdark period really turned me off and I stopped reading them then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_AD_(comics)
I'm from the UK, and I've never seen them there. To that extent, I think I missed some of the review's points.
There are entire websites about the availability of US comics in the UK in the 1960s/70s before the widespread existence of "comics shops". Marvel printed special copies in the US that were identical (down to ads) to the US editions but with UK prices on the cover, and shipped those over. DC just imported them. Marvel also had whole reprint series in UK comics format (larger and without glossy covers), issues weekly.
(I was a huge Marvel fan who lived in London 1970-3, so this whole thing is very much in my wheelhouse.)
Sure, but did you ever read any of the UK comics? Either the ones for girls (Mandy, Judy, Bunty etc.) or the ones for boys (Lion, Tiger, the Beano, 2000 AD when that one came along?) You never heard of Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx or the Bash Street Kids or Desperate Dan?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_the_Menace_and_Gnasher
They weren't the same thing as the US comics, but there was an entire British comics culture of its own going on.
I read the Beano, and occasionally the Dandy, but I'm not sure they're all that similar. I get the impression they're a lot shorter, and more the UK equivalent of the Simpsons comics.
I'm not only not familiar with comics, I have so little interest in them (despite being American, which is apparently a risk factor) that I couldn't even manage to read this review!
Same. Whatever we're got, skaladom has a case of it too.
I can't remember reading a single comic book as a kid. I must have, though, because I do remember that they were around -- other kids had them. But they must have made no impression on me. I did like Mad magazine as a kid, but that's way different. I read Heinlein and Walter Farley (horse racing stories) as a kid, and some weird mystical stuff my mother was into for a brief period, then discovered adult books and read Norman Mailer.
At least part of this shows signs of having been written previously for some other format/audience: the reference to the TV show Revenge as a current show, when Revenge went off the air in 2015.
This comment section suggests the opposite (e.g. one person wishing they explained the difference between Golden Age and Silver Age).
> Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)?
Huh? Most sources give a broader range of years than that, typically 1956-1970. I've also heard it said that the Silver Age ended with the shocking tonal shift introduced to the comics world in The Night Gwen Stacy Died, published in 1973. Where are you getting this date range from?
> More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works.
It's not only "not politically correct," it's not culturally correct either, regardless of the actual truth status of these stories. It's been said that the ancient Israelites were rather unique in this regard: while most cultures understood their foundational stories to be mythical — they treated them, in their own time much like we do today, as simply stories that were important to know about — the ancient Israelites saw theirs as literal history, which gave them a different view of the world.
> Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths.
In movies, maybe. In print, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, and most recently Brandon Sanderson have all managed to pull it off, with varying degrees of success. Asimov is dead now, King tried to launch a Dark Tower film representing the center of his shared universe a few years back but it flopped, and Sanderson has been actively in negotiations with various people in Hollywood for over 10 years now, because these things take a while to get made. He recently (last year IIRC) reported that things had gotten to the point where he had seen "actors on set wearing mistcloaks" (an important costuming element from one of his books) but it ended up falling through in the end. He frequently talks about wanting to get a "cinematic universe" of his work going, though.
> No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”.
Italian history YouTuber Metatron once addressed this point, saying (and showing in a video) that this is a perfectly reasonable description of the sea in that part of the world, specifically at sunset.
> Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages)
These days we call that "Wolverine Publicity." It didn't start with Wolverine, though...
> Once Shakespeare had written Romeo and Juliet, no one else could write Romeo and Juliet (well they could, but then they would be derivative of Shakespeare’s work).
Which is different from Shakespeare how exactly? He adapted "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," published in 1562 by English writer Arthur Brooks, which his audience would have been familiar with. Romeus and Juliet was in turn based on an earlier Italian tale, which was based on an earlier work, so on and so on back to Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which a Roman poet from the first century BC recounted the ancient (even in his day) Babylonian tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. (And who even knows where the Babylonians got it from!)
> Johnson explains that The Sopranos was the show to take it to the next level. ... Where Hill Street Blues plotlines were generally started and then wrapped up within each episode, Sopranos plotlines would carry over from one episode to the next. Sometimes a new plot line would be created in a scene of an episode and then go dormant for multiple episodes before coming back.
And he says The Sopranos invented that storytelling model?!? Has Johnson never seen Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?
Maybe Shakespeare's plots are a bad example, but the point still stands that some people's work's value lies almost entirely in its originality, which can serve as inspiration.
A lot of "originality" is more unfamiliarity on the part of the reader. Most people today have never heard of The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, or the Danish tale of Amleth, or the real, historical Scottish king Mac Bethad. But Shakespeare and his audience knew of them.
If you ever heard of The Hidden Fortress or The Dam Busters, it's probably because you heard someone discussing their influence on Star Wars. Back in 1977, the vast majority of the audience was entirely unfamiliar with these movies. His major innovation was recontextualizing things in a new setting; Star Wars didn't *feel* like the pulp sword-and-sorcery adventure it very much is, because it has spaceships and robots and aliens and planets blowing up and people in high-tech powered armor suits.
Likewise, The Way of Kings, an epic war story set on a magical world so alien that they don't even have topsoil, really doesn't feel like an "underdog sports team" story. But per the author's own admission, that's exactly what the tale of Bridge Four is, and once you've heard that you can easily see how it applies.
Heck, the observation that "there is nothing new under the sun" is itself thousands of years old. Originality is highly overrated; everyone builds on what came before. A lot of times people see something unfamiliar and mistake it for something original. I've heard it said that this is responsible for the sudden popularity of anime in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We can look at stuff like Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z today and say "as anime goes, this is utter garbage," but to most Americans 25-30 years ago, it was something wildly new that they had never seen before, while also being the result of decades of polish and refinement so it felt very interesting in ways that actual new, original things typically don't.
You're partly right. Originality is highly overrated only in a pedantic sense, that there might be some obscure source material that most people are unfamiliar with; but, originality is not overrated in the sense that audiences do, inherently, seem to like new stuff (new to them).
The Sword of Shannara was a big success.
In part because there was a huge appetite for More Like This after "The Lord of the Rings", Tolkien wasn't writing any more, and there wasn't yet anyone else doing the same thing. So room for a lot of "more like this" fantasy sagas.
The same way that we Trekkies were gasping for crumbs after the original show finished and the studio had no interest in producing anything else in that universe (before they discovered it could become a cash cow). So a ton of tie-in original novels filled the gaps, before finally the motion picture (which didn't do that well) and then the long gap before "The Next Generation" got made, and suddenly now it was viable to produce more Trek all the time (which is how we got to where we are today, with *too* much new stuff being churned out).
If you're British, you've seen The Dam Busters. If you're Japanese, you've seen The Hidden Fortress. The real trick was nabbing things from other countries and mass-marketing them; cf. The Magnificent Seven.
> The real trick was nabbing things from other countries and mass-marketing them; cf. The Magnificent Seven.
That's just the standard back-and-forth process of cultural exchange in action. The creators of the samurai films that later Westerns took inspiration from have openly admitted that they took inspiration from earlier Westerns. The large-heads-big-eyes-no-nose "standard anime look" can be traced to influential manga author Osamu Tezuka. He got it from Donald Duck comics that a random American soldier introduced him to one fateful day. And so on; everyone takes inspiration from other sources and puts their own spin on it.
I saw The Dam Busters on TV about 1971. Young people of George Lucas's generation watched an enormous number of World War II movies on TV.
I didn't see Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress until the 1980s, specifically because it was always said to be an inspiration for Star Wars. I found it pretty weak. In contrast, Kurowsawa's Seven Samurai was obviously an all-time classic.
And Kurosawa's "Ran" is apparently just a retelling of King Lear.
Right. Kurosawa caught on in the West both because he was great and because he'd obviously watched a ton of Western movies.
I find it hard to believe that every member of a given culture would have the same view of myth.
Mike Flanagan is supposed to be adapting The Dark Tower as a series for Amazon.
Shakespeare had characters act out Pyramus and Thisbe in the ancient-Athenian set A Midsummer Night's Dream, though their play-within-a-play is treated as just fuel for mockery.
> Mike Flanagan is supposed to be adapting The Dark Tower as a series for Amazon.
Cool, I hadn't heard of that. I'll keep my eyes open for it.
> Pyramus and Thisbe in the ancient-Athenian set A Midsummer Night's Dream
Yup. I did that in high school. (Most people today think Shakespeare invented it as a silly riff on his own story of Romeo and Juliet.)
"Mike Flanagan is supposed to be adapting The Dark Tower as a series for Amazon."
Given Amazon's track record on adapting multi-volume fantasy series, that should make anyone's heart sink.
Especially since King went a bit bloated in the middle volumes of "The Dark Tower" and didn't really stick the landing for the conclusion. You'd need to do one heck of a lot of trimming away to hack out a coherent storyline from start to finish. The character of Susannah will have to be reimagined drastically, as in the books she is partially at least the Magical Negro trope, and her alter-ego could be viewed as the stereotype/caricature of black women.
It's a big task to take on.
If you're referring to Rings of Power, I do think there are reasons to expect it to be different. I haven't watched RoP, but my understanding is that it's a prequel with them making things up themselves. Plus, both JRR & Christopher Tolkien died before it was made. Flanagan will be adapting King's actual books, which he's already done for Gerald's Game & Doctor Sleep (and is currently doing for Life of Chuck).
Not just Rings of Power (new trailer out now! and I'm loving it! by which I mean, the idiocy continues apace and the new season is going to be a banquet of nonsense to carp about!) but adaptations like Wheel of Time and others, which I have not seen getting great reviews.
Don't think "oh but they've got the actual canon in the actual books" will stop them doing their own shit*. King still being alive and around and able to sue them for whatever may help, but of course the canned response is "gotta update it for Modern Audience, racism, sexism, some things don't work on the screen, have to change the timeline around and drop some characters and invent new ones".
*Gandalf was not in Middle-earth in the Second Age, but that hasn't stopped Payne and McKay giving us I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf who literally dropped out of the sky in a meteor. Oh yes, we don't have *Hobbits*. We have Harfoots. And for season two, Stoors. Who live in a desert. Even though these are the riverlands dwellers. And of course they're all as diverse as The Division of Equity & Inclusion at UC Berkeley:
https://diversity.berkeley.edu/
https://ew.com/rings-of-power-the-stoors-season-2-exclusive-8691234
I hadn't thought of Wheel of Time, but that's another instance where the original author is dead (and has been for years even before the books finished).
Have you seen any of Flanagan's King adaptations? Most people seem to regard Doctor Sleep, for instance, as a good example of being faithful to a book King wrote partly in reaction to his distaste for Kubrick's take on The Shining, while also working as a sequel to the film. On the other hand, I haven't liked Flanagan's miniseries adaptations of classic horror literature that doesn't belong in a miniseries format (I also thought his most recent one was a poor fit for the push for diverse casting) https://thepopculturists.blogspot.com/2023/10/this-weekend-in-pop-culture-october-27.html#comment-6311085172
No, I'm not familiar with Flanagan's work, so if you say he does good, reasonably faithful, adaptations, I'll believe you.
But I do think there can be meddling from executives in what gets put on screen; it was the executive producer Lindsey Weber who provided the quote about 'today's world' in the context of "this is why all the Diverse and Inclusive cast":
"Amazon’s series will also broaden the notion of who shares the world of Middle-earth. One original story line centers on a silvan elf named Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Córdova, who will be the first person of color to play an elf onscreen in a Tolkien project. He is involved in a forbidden relationship with Bronwyn, a human village healer played by Nazanin Boniadi, a British actor of Iranian heritage. Elsewhere, a Brit of Jamaican descent, Sir Lenny Henry, plays a harfoot elder, and Sophia Nomvete has a scene-stealing role as a dwarven princess named Disa—the latter being the first Black woman to play a dwarf in a Lord of the Rings movie, as well as the first female dwarf. “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”
(The irony here is that the Bronwyn/Arondir romance was *so* successful, the actress is not coming back for season two so that plot line has been scrapped).
This kind of thing is why I imagine there may be pressure, subtle or not, to update and change and revamp the characters and plot for "modern audiences".
*Some* change is not a bad thing, there's swathes of the multi-volume series that are just bloated over-writing (and I generally like lots of over-written!) and can be hacked out with no loss. But I think a character like Susannah, for instance, is going to be changed a *lot*. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if they changed other characters as well - where is all the LGBT+ representation in King's original,for instance? We must have Representation or else the world will end!
EDIT: Ah, I see he did a TV series of "The Fall of the House of Usher", which I didn't see, but going by reviews I read, the only thing it had in common with Poe's story was the title. Yeah, that's the kind of "well we need to tell a Modern Story with Modern Political Commentary for a Modern Audience" 'adaptation' I'd be concerned about (the same way they stuck in 'the knife ears will take our jobs' to the Númenor storyline in Rings of Power so Pharazon can be the Trump stand-in).
Wheel of Time & Rings of Power don't give me a lot of hope for anything Amazon is doing, tbh.
Also, HSB was definitely hybrid; there was guaranteed to be at least one self-contained plot per episode, but the running plots (I think) often outnumbered the standalones.
>Italian history YouTuber Metatron once addressed this point, saying (and showing in a video) that this is a perfectly reasonable description of the sea in that part of the world, specifically at sunset.
I noticed that when I was reading the Iliad earlier this year. The phrase is used only once there, and it's specifically at sunset. Color is rarely brought up in the Iliad, mostly only when it would be surprising - you're expected to know what color the sea usually is.
Then I read the Odyssey, and the sea is wine-dark in multiple places, sometimes during the day. That was when I really started to understand why scholars argue over if the Iliad and the Odyessy were written by different people. It does feel like the Odyssey poet was borrowing a famous phrase and overusing it!
I can't speak to the Mediterranean, but sometimes in summertime here I've seen purple patches in the sea during the day.
So I suppose the *real* controversy is "why is Homer reputed to be blind, when this is something a sighted person would have observed?"
Homer was presumably borrowing from a long standing tradition of oral histories.
There's a long controversy about whether color words functioned the same way for the ancients as they do for moderns. At least some people have claimed that the ancients primarily focused on the dark/bright contrast in their choice of words, and treated hue as secondary, while moderns treat hue as primary and the dark/bright contrast as secondary - though there are others who claim this is all a misreading of Homer.
Here's three good essays on the topic that I found from a quick search, all interesting enough for me to give a full read, and with some disagreements:
https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/05/ancient-greek-colours.html
https://www.slowboring.com/p/greeks-blue
https://greekreporter.com/2024/02/17/did-ancient-greeks-see-blue/
I only was into comic books for about a month, probably in the fall of 1969, when I was 10. I was more of a reader than a looker, so I read a lot of hard science fiction of the Heinlein-Asimov-Clark school.
Still, the notion that if the Golden Age of American superhero comic books was the introduction of Superman and Batman right before World War II, then it's reasonable that the Silver Age was Marvel's hot streak in the early 1960s that peaked with the introduction of Spider-Man in 1962.
To some extent, our views of that era are determined by the quality of subsequent movies. For example, Robert Downey Jr.'s impression of Elon Musk has elevated Iron Man higher in the pantheon than he had previously stood. For example, I had a friend in high school in the 1970s named Tony Stark. I can vaguely recall other friends making Iron Man jokes about his name, but I had to ask them to explain what they were talking about.
Still, the trajectory of superhero box office smash movies pretty much reflects this Golden Age to Silver Age accepted history, with 1978's Superman as the first modern superhero movie, 1989's Batman reviving the genre, 2002's Spider-Man launching this century's craze, 2008's Iron Man initiating the Marvel universe, and the Avengers of the first half of the 2010s as the peak.
> and so on back to Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which a Roman poet from the first century BC recounted the ancient (even in his day) Babylonian tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. (And who even knows where the Babylonians got it from!)
Oh, come on, what name could be more overtly Babylonian than "Thisbe"? ;p
Ignore the fact that Babylonian names are all full sentences.
Does Ovid actually claim that the story of Pyramus and Thisbe comes from Babylon, or does he just set it there?
>In movies, maybe. In print, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, and most recently Brandon Sanderson have all managed to pull it off, with varying degrees of success.
Additional examples:
Heinlein (as other commenters have noted), Larry Niven's "Known Space", Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequences, Vernor Vinge, Frank Herbert, H.P.Lovecraft...
I like this review, and I voted for it—professionally, socially, and esthetically my life revolves around comics, so perhaps it was inevitable—but I take issue with some of the review’s assumptions. One is the primacy of Stan Lee, perhaps actually more of an ancillary figure…
…but the other is the primacy of myth. I became convinced years ago after reading W. Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites (1888) that myths are just ex post facto justifications for established and perhaps arbitrary rituals. Muslims pilgrimage to Mecca because Muhammad did—but pilgrims had been going to Mecca long before Muhammad, and Muhammad was following in their footsteps. Christians take communion because of the Last Supper—but the Last Supper was itself a reenactment of the older ritual of Passover. Baptism predates Jesus, although Christians if asked will say they got baptized because Jesus did.
Myths explain something you were doing anyway. Sailors are forbidden from whistling on steamships because, they are told, their whistling could be mistaken for leaking steam. Actually, though, whistling has been tabooed on ships since long before the age of steam. The older superstition was that a whistling sailor might “whistle up the wind”; when sails became obsolete and this fear stopped making sense, sailors had to construct a new reason for the old taboo. Note that both reasons are not only spurious but implausible: Whistling empirically fails to summon winds, and whistling also sounds nothing like a steam leak. First came the custom, and then came the explanation. First comes the ritual, and then comes the myth.
Many of us want myth to be primary because we want to imagine that culture is invented by storytellers, not by obsessive compulsives who somehow bullied everyone into performing a meaningless action.
Smith implied that even our moral values are ad hoc explanations for arbitrary taboos and customs—which got him tried for heresy by the Presbyterians.
Anyway, I also think Lee’s contributions to the Marvel method or Marvel history are overstated, but that is the kind of controversy (at least in my circles) much more fraught, and I have no desire to be tried for heresy by comics clerks.
"Christians take communion because of the Last Supper—but the Last Supper was itself a reenactment of the older ritual of Passover"
Yes, we know 😁
Well, sure, it’s not a secret.
But I’m trying to say—like, I grew up thinking of communion as a reenactment of a specific event I knew from a story (Luke 22:19). Narrative/mythological primacy, in other words. But the story is already a reenactment of an older ritual. That ritual itself is a reenactment of a specific event from a story(Exodus 12:14). But while even an atheist could acknowledge that the Last Supper is a perfectly plausible event in history, the passover in Exodus requires some kind of theophany. Where does this ritual come from if there’s no narrative origin for it?
Smith changed my thinking in that I stopped looking at events I believed happened (such as Muhammad’s hajj) and viewing ritual as coming from them, and started looking at events I did not believe happened (such as Orestes arriving in Athens pursued by Furies) and wondering how it was that a ritual (the Athenian Chytroi) could be derived from such an event (answer: it wasn't).
I see what you mean: that the backstory for the ritual is invented to give a reason as to "why do we do this?"
Yes, that's common in antiquity. Even the Romans had "well nobody knows why we do this thing, but some say it's because this and some say it's because that".
I feel you'd approve of the account in Plutarch which said "the story of Romulus being taken up into heaven was faked up by the guys who assassinated him to explain why he disappeared":
"The rest of his proceedings were of lesser importance; but when of his own motion merely he divided the territory acquired in war among his soldiers, and gave back their hostages to the Veientes, without the consent or wish of the patricians, he was thought to be insulting their senate outright.
[3] Wherefore suspicion and calumny fell upon that body when he disappeared unaccountably a short time after. He disappeared on the Nones of July, as they now call the month, then Quintilis, leaving no certain account nor even any generally accepted tradition of his death, aside from the date of it, which I have just given. For on that day many ceremonies are still performed which bear a likeness to what then came to pass.
[4] Nor need we wonder at this uncertainty, since although Scipio Africanus died at home after dinner, there is no convincing proof of the manner of his end, but some say that he passed away naturally, being of a sickly habit, some that he died of poison administered by his own hand, and some that his enemies broke into his house at night and smothered him.
[5] And yet Scipio's dead body lay exposed for all to see, and all who beheld it formed therefrom some suspicion and conjecture of what had happened to it; whereas Romulus disappeared suddenly, and no portion of his body or fragment of his clothing remained to be seen. But some conjectured that the senators, convened in the temple of Vulcan, fell upon him and slew him, then cut his body in pieces, put each a portion into the folds of his robe, and so carried it away.
[6] Others think that it was neither in the temple of Vulcan nor when the senators alone were present that he disappeared, but that he was holding an assembly of the people outside the city near the so-called Goat's Marsh, when suddenly strange and unaccountable disorders with incredible changes filled the air; the light of the sun failed, and night came down upon them, not with peace and quiet, but with awful peals of thunder and furious blasts driving rain from every quarter,
[7] during which the multitude dispersed and fled, but the nobles gathered closely together; and when the storm had ceased, and the sun shone out, and the multitude, now gathered together again in the same place as before, anxiously sought for their king, the nobles would not suffer them to inquire into his disappearance nor busy themselves about it, but exhorted them all to honour and revere Romulus, since he had been caught up into heaven, and was to be a benevolent god for them instead of a good king.
[8] The multitude, accordingly, believing this and rejoicing in it, went away to worship him with good hopes of his favour; but there were some, it is said, who tested the matter in a bitter and hostile spirit, and confounded the patricians with the accusation of imposing a silly tale upon the people, and of being themselves the murderers of the king."
That story is interesting because Plutarch is creating a myth to explain a myth. Obviously Plutarch, and many others, did that all the time, such as when he theorizes that the Minotaur is just a good Cretan wrestler with a funny name, but this one is pretty ornate!
> But I’m trying to say—like, I grew up thinking of communion as a reenactment of a specific event I knew from a story (Luke 22:19). Narrative/mythological primacy, in other words. But the story is already a reenactment of an older ritual.
Sort of.
The Last Supper was a Passover meal. But the ritual of bread and wine instituted by Jesus at that particular meal was not a Passover thing, and could just as easily have been done at a different time.
Yeah, and clearly doing the ritual on a weekly or monthly basis (unless you're a Jehovah's Witness) is clearly an innovation. Even the method and ritual around communion in the church has changed radically over the last 2,000 years. This is probably my fault for bringing up a suboptimal example.
> clearly doing the ritual on a weekly or monthly basis (unless you're a Jehovah's Witness) is clearly an innovation.
Is it? 1 Corinthians 11 strongly implies that first-generation Christians were meeting on a regular basis to participate in this ritual. It doesn't specifically say "weekly" or "monthly," but it makes it clear that this was a regular occurrence for them.
I meant an innovation from Jewish Passover (annual).
There's a fan joke that the New Testament is the most successful retcon of all time.
Don't overcorrect and call Stan Lee "ancillary"; I think it's indisputable that he (and his publisher), not the artists, determined _which_ comics to publish and what, in general, would be in them. Everything is downstream of those decisions.
I think the "what, in general, would be in them" is precisely what is in contemporary dispute. The Marvel Method in 1960s practice may have had a lot more initiative taken by the artists than Lee usually conceded. That doesn't mean Lee contributed nothing—his dialog is punchy, he's great at building relationships with the audience, he's a natural hypeman—but I'm not sure he plotted the books he says he plotted.
This is a subject on which I defer to experts I've known, so I perhaps am not the best person to martial evidence. I'll just say it's not indisputable.
I just thinking at the level of "Spider-Man #1 has the FF", but should have been clearer.
The point is more that you can take any individual comic book and say this artist or that one were the primary creator behind that issue. But if you are zooming back to "Marvel Comics" as a whole then Stan Lee has incredible influence because he touched every part of the process.
> it is not just comic books that are better today, it is storytelling generally, and comic books are but one of the more flagrant examples.
You gave some good examples, but missed to most blatant one: video games. Video game writing used to be so absurdly bad it often wasn't even intelligible (All your base are belong to us), but now the industry produces countless well-written and rich stories.
All Your Base is a mess because it's a bad translation.
I know, that doesn't change the intelligibility
I think this supports Bob's argument—at the time, people cared so little about video game writing that they couldn't be bothered to hire decent translators. Now, if you watch a video game's credits, you'll spend about 3 minutes watching the names of internationalization team members scroll past. Even indie games often have credits like
person who singlehandedly created almost the whole game: <name>
music: <name>
followed by about 30 people who did internationalization.
"All your base are belong to us" comes from Zero Wing (1989 in Japan, 1992 in the west). Long before that was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984), and if Infocom hiring the legendary Douglas Adams is cheating, any of their own games like Zork had better writing than Zero Wing.
Other games known for incredible writing around or before Zero Wing reached the West are Star Control II (1992), Final Fantasy games, Ultima games (I'd never say Garrot was a master wordsmith, but the plot of IV was incredibly innovative and that's 1985). I could go on.
A lot of video games basically had no plot at all, or a few lines of text nobody cared about ("The president has been kidnapped by ninjas, are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?"). But even with the host of technical limitations early video games faced, when they wanted to invest in a story the writing was equal to other mediums of the time.
Once you stick to games that put some effort into writing I don't think games are notable for having a larger gap between modern and old compared to other mediums.
The SBF-on-Shakespeare thing has been beaten to death by now, including in this blog's comments, but I'd like to suggest that trying to correct for early mover effects works both ways.
Yes, 'low-hanging fruit', 'in the water now', and all that. On the other hand, if there are so many more of us, able to learn from so much of the past, enjoying all the other catalysing effects (more comfortable lives for many, greater access to vicarious experience, etc.), and we *still* haven't produced obvious superiors to Shakespeare and the early canon greats, doesn't that make them look even better by comparison?
Sort of on that note, I don't understand why the writing in those speech bubbles had to improve in its own silo, insulated from a world where good pulp writing had long existed. Even T.P. Prest would eat Lee's lunch – at least he wasn't deathly afraid of occasionally implying something instead of stating it outright.
Was TP writing for adults or children?
Anyone who could spare a penny, I suppose? The Sweeney Todd story was serialised in something that called itself The People's Periodical and Family Library, and I imagine it found its way into the hands of quite a few Victorian teenage boys. The penny dreadfuls, boys'-own stories, etc. are a fairly good like-for-like comparison to comic books. Vivid, gory, and always arranged to stoke an urgent desire for the next issue.
I agree with your second paragraph, and thinking about it in terms of a Bayesian analysis, I notice that he only mentions the priors, based on how many people were alive and literate in Shakespeare's time vs. the last century. You fall back strongly on priors when the data itself is not especially informative; if he could have named some playwrights that are very obviously superior to Shakespeare, he would have done so instead of just saying "well there are so many more people writing plays now that some of them must be better."
My own view is that the best examples of older plays are just different in a way that defies a simple better/worse classification. There are tradeoffs, for example, between the realism of a modern play and the heightened poetic language of a Shakespeare play. Some of the comics examples seem a little more clear cut though.
We agree overall, but to me the worth of Shakespeare resides in the inventiveness and play of that language, rather than anything to do with the structure or originality or timelessness of human themes, etc. There's nothing lost there. Someone like Chekhov succeeds magnificently in completely the other way.
It's plain from other accounts that SBF finds reading boring (though I wonder if he's changed his mind in jail?) and didn't care about fiction, so he was just showing off both his ignorance and trying to impress people with "oh look I can maths".
I think the most important thing about Shakespeare is that he was the most skilled a practitioner of a genre that went out of fashion shortly after his death. Nobody has ever outdone Shakespeare in terms of writing plays in which the characters speak in well-crafted poetry, because the trend has been towards greater realism in dialogue ever since.
Wondering why nobody has outdone Shakespeare in the last four hundred years is like wondering why, with all our advancements in materials science, nobody has ever made a car with bigger tailfins than a 1959 Cadillac.
Fair point, but many (most?) major English-language poets have attempted verse drama, some quite recently, too. Eliot and Fry come to mind first, then to a lesser extent Auden and Yeats. Nothing extraordinary was achieved. All the while, the form remained more lively in other languages, which once more speaks to Shakespeare's dominance.
Besides, the coefficients in the population/expertise argument are so large that even a minority still toiling away at verse drama should have yielded at least fifty Shakespeares. They haven't, because mathematics simply doesn't work.
Being a bit silly here, but maybe nobody made bigger tailfins because the 1959 Cadillac hit the maximum level? That the tradeoffs for bigger tailfins were not worth it, so there was no beating the best.
More on point, maybe Shakespeare set the bar so high that the genre couldn't really be improved. No one could match what already existed, so they went to other conventions (realism in this case) to find their own niche?
21st Century theater kids love Shakespeare.
That's a really long run.
Yeah, that's what cracks me up about this particular SBF quote. Like, if you knew nothing else, you'd certainly assume the best playwright in history wasn't in England in the year 1600, but maybe you should tweak your numbers if his work is still around 400 years later and people have written a million books dissecting and praising it.
This strikes me as a great example of how people can use rationalist reasoning to come to really poor conclusions while giving themselves the impression they're doing something clever.
Well said. Shakespeare really caught on in Germany about 200 years after his prime as the Romantic Age replaced the Age of Reason and has been the consensus #1 post-ancient writer ever since across all languages. That various early 19th Century German geniuses like Goethe swore by Shakespeare says a lot about his popularity.
In my view, most modern authors write better stories than Shakespeare. Shakespeare's themes are simplistic and his plot points are often cringeworthy. I find it's mostly people with only a little familiarity with Shakespeare that praise his stories and plots; aficionados tend to know the plots aren't original and love Shakespeare for his wordplay.
For example, the plot of Romeo and Juliet feels like a contrived tearjerker. Macbeth has an army cut down saplings and hold them to disguise their approach on Macbeth's castle (presumably Macbeth is supposed to think, "oh, just a forest marching towards us, nothing to worry about", but really it's forced writing to fit the prophecy). And of course the final twist is when Macduff goes, "Ha! I wasn't technically 'born'. I was a C-section baby!". Shakespeare is only partly to blame since these plays are based heavily on existing stories (The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet and Holinshed's Chronicles), but the plots remains bad.
As for Shakespeare's strength - his wordplay - I don't think many modern authors even try to employ that kind of wordplay, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it just went out of style.
That's a valid opinion and I don't think SBF would be as criticized if he made that argument. However, notice that your judgement of Shakespeare is based off of reading his work and comparing it to others, rather than making some sort of probabilistic argument. It's kind of absurd to do so.
An Italian player named Sinner recently got the highest rank in men's tennis singles. Is he better than Djokovic? I'm sure tennis fans could debate that. But they'd almost never debate it in Bayesian terms like "there's more italians than serbs and therefore my prior is that it's more likely that the best tennis player is Italian. Not only that, but prior observations have shown that being a native German speaker increases the likelihood of being the best at tennis. Sinner a German-speaking Italian is probably better than Djokovic, a Serb that does not speak German." It'd be absurd to make that sort of argument rather than one based on their playstyles or record.
Yeah, you're absolutely right about the principle. I think what's happening with SBF is he looked at Shakespeare's work and thought it was bad. But a lot of people consider him the best English language writer in history. Now a Shakespeare skeptic and a bardolator could argue all day on the merits and faults of Shakespeare's plays without swaying anyone's position, so SBF tries a different tack: he uses a probabilistic argument for why the bardolator is probably biased.
I'm not sure that argument convinced anyone at all either, so it failed in that regard. But the logic is valid: we should expect there to have been many English writing geniuses at and above Shakespeare's level born in the past 400 years, and if there haven't, there should be a compelling explanation for why there hasn't been. Looking directly at the quality of Shakespeare's plays would trump any probabilistic argument - if only we could objectively decide if the plays are great or mediocre.
There's another question to consider before SBF's probabilistic argument makes sense: can the intellectual elite be wrong? Can't we take the expert consensus on Shakespeare as truth? Maybe not. Expert consensus on art is not consistent over time. Bulwer-Lytton went from popular to mocked as one of the worst writers. Shakespeare himself didn't gain his prestigious standing until a century after his death.
I can think of other topics where the expert consensus, while not wrong, has become biased and punishes dissenting views while exaggerating their own position.
"But the logic is valid: we should expect there to have been many English writing geniuses at and above Shakespeare's level born in the past 400 years"
Of course, we should also expect there to have been similarly many scientific geniuses, and military geniuses, and great singers, and great physicians, and great hunters, etc, etc, etc. There are many categories of human achievement, so by pure random chance we should have at least a few where the recognizably-greatest lived in the 17th century.
And it doesn't seem to be the case that we always pick someone from that golden age. Yes, Isaac Newton is renowned as a great scientist of the 17th century, but he's usually regarded as great for his time, not smarter than Einstein or Von Neumann or Hawking. The greatest hunter would probably be W.D.M. Bell, early twentieth century. Greatest composes is debatable, but Beethoven worked in the 19th century and John Williams is still with us. Etc, etc, etc.
The cases where we do tend to find the "greats" in the annals of history rather than current events, seem to be things like military and political leadership, where there's a selection bias in that the real standard is always at least implicitly "greatest political leader who ran a country I've heard of", or "general who commanded an army in a war I've heard of". That tends to give you a relatively fixed number of candidates per generation, and for most of history not even close to meritocratically selected.
Otherwise, there are a whole lot of fields where the GOAT is still with us, or no more than a century gone, and a few where we reach back into history. Which is what we should expect.
> There are many categories of human achievement, so by pure random chance we should have at least a few where the recognizably-greatest lived in the 17th century.
This is true but it doesn't affect his argument. This is like if I said my prior for my odds of winning the next lottery is low, and you replied that many people play the lottery, so by pure chance, one of them is likely to win. The odds of someone winning are good, but my odds remain low.
Likewise, the odds of someone from the 17th century being the greatest at something are good, but the odds of the greatest English writer being from that century are low. (Obviously these "odds" are with respect to whatever model he is using which seems to be just going by the number of educated English writers living in the past 400-ish years. Odds are always for some model, whether implied or explicit.)
When someone wins the lottery, we do not say "the odds of that person having won the lottery are so small that we should rationally conclude that they didn't really win the lottery".
Which is the argument being made, as I understand it - Shakespeare wasn't "really" the GOAT, that's just the literary judges being biased.
I think it helps that you can compare Marvel to DC. Most people who talk about Shakespeare hardly bring up his contemporaries (although him writing further back means fewer works of that time have survived).
I have a theory that Shakespeare is not so much better as a poet than a contemporary like Marlowe, but he is much more modern (or novelistic) in his approach to character. Similarly, Chaucer is much more fondly remembered (and more read) nowadays than a contemporary like John Gower, and here the character aspect is even more pronounced—Gower has stories told by medieval allegorical abstractions, and Chaucer has stories told by and informed by the narrator. I think I would not have understood how good Shakespeare was if I hadn’t “read backward” through Marlowe, Greene, (both also great!) and Kyd.