I forget where I heard this, dunno if it's true. Ditco had drawn Spider looking at someone protesting (Protesting the Vietnam war maybe?), shaking his fist in anger. And the Stan Lee made Spiderman say something like "I'm with you!"
I once read that Ditko allowed Spidey to be relatable (i.e. mess up often, as opposed to his other, perfect Objectivist heroes) specifically because he was a teenager, a kid still becoming a hero. It sure worked (which is why I don't spend my time rereading Mr. A comics).
Peter Parker isn't like that, though. He's a scientific prodigy and a tactical mastermind. You could say that the part about struggling with mundane problems applies to him, but no more so than it does to most of Rand's own heroes.
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.
Heartless brute! Some of those people never recovered from their breadwich trauma. Decades later they were still trying to get rid of a greasy sticky hand feeling, and wailing that "all the perfumes in the world cannot wash the pbj from these little hands!" Plus if any of their descendants are on here you triggered them.
I'm convinced half the benefit of therapy is stuff like "y'all should really label your shelves", but at personal level. Just have somebody a bit more level headed, with more experience and looking from outside.
If only I could secure accreditation for my rock with letters painted on the side spelling "And if that thing you're worried about does come to pass, what do you think would happen next?"
That sounds reasonable. Many Thanks! Also, sometimes problems can turn out to be simple if one happens to have the proper tool - the equivalent of "look at this in polar coordinates".
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. 😆
Well, my childhood referents are Ma and Pa Kettle, The Little Rascals, the Apple Dumpling Gang, Carol Burnett, Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera. Thus an expert on humor (!!) - I should have known better about Archie but comics, especially newspaper comics, have always enjoyed an unusually low bar. Some like Cathy or Sally Forth almost existed in a state of tension, like the joke was you could have a very long running strip that was never once funny - which record must be kept pristine.
And if I remember right, "Sally Forth" did have a halfway decent joke once:
Sally: (looking out the window) Look at those poor homeless people, huddled around a fire!
Co-worker: Those aren't homeless people, Sally. They're smokers.
Sally: Add hypothermia to the list of things cigarettes cause.
On the other hand, I don't think "The Family Circus" was ever intended to be funny, and then there's Garfield, which apparently has been bad even by Garfield standards for quite some time now.
Cathy: Sweet. A real twist there at the end. Flirted with ruining the record.
Family Circus was mostly good for the draftsmanship which made some of the others look bad. As a child I liked the ones where little Billy (?) traced a path around the house/yard.
I remember once the subject of Garfield came up, at unnecessary length; and my grandfather-in-law, a man of few words, but one who read every one of the few words and all the comics in the daily paper of his town of 19,000, offered his laconic assessment: "That cat sure does love lasagna".
The cool comic guys on the college paper basically refused to acknowledge the existence of *any* of this - although there was one guy who did pretty fun and stylistically perfect parodies of Mary Worth and such when he needed to fill space.
They all worshipped Charles Schultz though.
ETA: my husband used to have a soft spot for Hagar the Horrible, I think largely based on one time that it was really funny.
"Peanuts" was pretty exceptional by the standards of 1960s comic strips, but not by the later standards of "Calvin & Hobbes."
"C&H" and "The Far Side" were to newspaper comic strips what "Seinfeld" and "The Simpsons" were to sit-coms: even an old guy like me had to admit they were vastly better than what I had consumed as a child in the 1960s and 1970s.
Can "Astral" readers get into "Peanuts" in 2024? Charles Schulz was extraordinary 60 years ago because he obviously had mental health issues involving depression and wasn't trying to hide it.
Family Circus is pretty good for its first few years; I personally think it settled into cute mediocrity, but my 7yo loves it, as honestly I did as well at her age, so I guess it has an audience.
Garfield also had a solid run for years. There's a reason America fell in love with it in the early '80s!
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'm kind of surprised it's taken this long for Broadway to get around to video games. Regarding songs, just to scratch the surface, there's Portal's "Still Alive", Witcher's "Toss a Coin to Your Witcher", Baldur's Gate III's "Weeping Dawn", Arcane/League of Legends "Enemy". Also, the fan-made songs are a HUGE rabbit hole. The most high-profile example right now would be the end credits of "Five Nights at Freddy's", which featured not a pop song, not a song written for the soundtrack, but an unofficial fan song written 10 years ago this month (and was already hugely popular).: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l18A5BOTlzE&list=PLKMCsqjSNmWEFSexT8ftPnHPRr5e5KNfr&index=8
Note how many views the video has (and that's not counting any other platforms).
I don't have the time or means to count number of memes, but personally I've seen way more video game references across the web than Big Lebowski.
I'll grant the silo is still there, but it's getting bigger and bigger as time goes on and more media people draw on videogames for creative ideas.
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).
So did you click the link to my own review of his take on Usher? I thought the problem with it was that Poe's various stories shouldn't be adapted into a family-drama miniseries in which they're all supposed to be connected (same with adapting Turn of the Screw plus some other Henry James stories into Haunting of Bligh Manor, and Haunting of Hill House earlier). But his Stephen King adaptations (admittedly just feature films so far) have been better, and The Dark Tower is actually a series rather than a standalone story, and is supposed to be interconnected.
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.
If you didn't know if that person won the lottery, you would say the odds of them winning are slim.
Of course you wouldn't apply a probabilistic argument to disprove a fact you already know. SBF is presenting the low odds as evidence in the debate on whether Shakespeare is the GOAT because people don't agree on it and we have no objective way to tell.
If you're assuming Shakespeare being the GOAT is a known fact, then the probabilistic argument doesn't apply, but that's not the context the argument was intended for.
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.
Marlowe is very good, but definitely has a different style. His version of Hero and Leander, for example, is full of the sort of quaint conceits that make striking, but also discordant, imagery: I can't help but imagine Hero walking around with a "splish-splosh" sound effect:
"Buskins of shells, all silver'd, used she,
And branch'd with blushing coral to the knee;
Where sparrows perch'd, of hollow pearl and gold,
Such as the world would wonder to behold:
Those with sweet water oft her handmaid fills,
Which as she went, would chirrup through the bills."
Shakespeare's characterisation is really interesting because some of his plots want his characters to be more modern than they are. Specifically, he wants people to develop instead of having fixed traits. Henry IV is the most glaring example with his "hiding like the sun behind the clouds so people think I'm wonderful when I stop getting drunk and mucking about" plan, but even Hamlet's development is more "learning how the world works" than "becoming a more serious person to deal with the situation he's in."
The counter to that is that Shakespeare inadvertently hits on a more realistic and more interesting view of how people are than would be conventional in contemporary fiction, so may have just been going for that all along.
Speaking of comparing Marvel to DC, most people understate (or under-remember) the degree of "shared universe" DC was doing. It's just that each editor had their own shared silo. 1950s/60s Superman lore is surprisingly deep if you're expecting simple standalones.
On the "art has gotten better" point: my specialty is anime girls artwork (having collected over 200k unique pieces over 15 years). I agree wholeheartedly with the thesis that innovations ripple and that the general level rises with time (and preservation, which is probably why most of the increase in quality for anime girls artwork is recent, as in, from the early 90s). I would argue that anime/manga style drawing has gotten much more detailed, with better shading, a better and more varied use of colors, many many many less errors in terms on anatomy or perspective. I remember talking to artists saying that it is now very easy to reach a professional level using the internet (professional as in: actual companies commission you work for games or promotional art). A few of the artists I follow have a side business selling courses or tips for aspiring artists, which was probably not a very common thing before internet or the VHS.
Ultimately to get back on the review at hand: superheroes are not something I know a lot about, but I am happy to see that there was also this dynamic at work back then, if only because the industry was over concentred in one man. What about modern day super heroes comics? Do they still continue to improve? I personally never really liked the genre so I am oblivious to any change for the past 20 years...
The broad consensus is that American comics broadly (superhero comics being very much the central pillar) are floundering and stagnant. I've read a fair number of them (mainly on pirate sites), and non-superhero comics tend to be substantially better, with both somewhat older comics like Garth Ennis' Preacher and newer stuff like Scott Snyder/Stephen King's American Vampire being quite good. I also very much like Ennis' comic update of The Shadow, who is a sort of proto-superhero, cf Fires of Creation. When I tried to get into superhero comics back in high school, mainly stuff like Moon Knight and Daredevil, I found some things to like which were mired in vague continuities and storylines that got picked up and dropped as if with no long-term plan. Every so often I hear about some new superhero comic event out of Marvel or DC, but almost always because of some CW contention, never because anyone is reading them.
This makes for a very interesting contrast to the booming japanese manga business. Among my friend group who speak not a lick of japanese, stuff like JJK, Chainsaw Man, One Piece, Kaiju no.8, and Dungeon Meshi are all known references, even if you haven't necessarily read one of them. They know about superheroes, but mainly from the movies, which themselves are rapidly losing traction. Reading manga is normal, reading superhero comics is weird. Hell, my college bookstore carries (and prominently displays) the Berserk Omnibus.
Speculating, I think there's a sense that the manga industry is capable of actually promoting talent, whether they're auteurs or more workaday creators, and a sense that its more stagnant forms or genres do occasionally get some fresh ideas and aren't choking creativity as much, despite its working conditions being much, much worse than their American counterparts. I have no idea who the cool, up-and-coming creators in American comics are. It seems that anyone good and inspired publishes webcomics and prints finished volumes independently (like Tom Morgan with Kill Six Billion Demons) while actually working for the Big Two is a route to safe mediocrity.
My interested in US *style* comics peaked in the nineties ... When the superhero thing was being rather deconstructed,...and there was one heck of a British Invasion as well. Moore, Gaiman and Ennis were doing their best work...very honourable mentions to Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan, as well.
I think the article unknowingly gets into what separates manga from contemporary American comics in part III when he talks about the factors that make something great.
Intrinsic and Innovative: Great works are never (or at least extremely rarely) great in all respects, or even good in all respects. Great works are great because they are great in one respect, usually in an innovative fashion. They may be mediocre otherwise.
The author misses the point in part V. "Lee wrote for boys, and it showed." Marvel's comics of the time were great at meeting the needs of their audience. It's hard, if not impossible for a creative artist (regardless of medium) to meet the needs of every audience, and attempts to retool something that was written for one audience to appeal to all audiences are doomed to fail.
One of the things manga does better than contemporary American comics is in identifying its target audience for a particular work and in recognizing the limitations of the medium. They don't expect shounen and shoujo manga to have the same audiences.
Relative, Generative and Innovative: These three are connected. Relative, generative and innovative all directly connect to the amount of examples and how fast they are created. If you only have two major comics companies producing series in two limited universes, your comparison for which series are relatively good is limited. If you keep within those two companies and their universes, you have little freedom for new innovation and few new successors are generated to allow the greatness of what inspired them to show.
Again, manga has an advantage that the environment is producing new titles all the time. Each generation has more works to compare as to which are relatively better, and What the consumers prefer is used to produce the next improved generation. It's SpaceX versus Boeing, where cheap costs producing constantly improving iterations works better than trying to make everything perfect from the get-go.
I stopped reading comics a bit over a decade ago, though I was quite the fan at the time. A question: Ryan North is one of my favourite internet authors, and I only got to read his forays into actual print comics in his first run at Adventure Time comics (which were great!). I know since then he went on to write a bunch for Marvel, has his stuff been any good? From your commentary here is doesn't seem like it's made an impact. Just asking since you seem to have dabbled a bit in recent times. It may be a matter of taste - North is a light hearted, silly, author, so if your interests are more serious then I can see the lack of appeal.
I'm afraid I've never heard of him. Looks like he's been pretty prolific at Marvel, though nothing since 2022. Lots of Fantastic Four, Howard the Duck, and Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. I can't say I know anything about the latter two, and I'm not about to dive into his stuff for a full review or comparison, but your question did surprise me. In particular, I'm surprised by the idea that a talented author entering mainstream comics *should* make some impact in the wider industry.
Say you get a really talented, possibly famous author on board for a comic series. How would people learn about this? That author's existing fans would probably learn via a social media announcement, and there's probably some kind of advertising for comic books (though I really can't remember a single time in my life I've seen one, online or in real life). Maybe geek news sites would carry it? But I'm a peripheral comic reader who doesn't read those sites and doesn't already know who Ryan North is. How would I learn? At that point, probably word of mouth.
Now, I would suspect the Marvel (and DC too, any comic ecosystem dominated by long-running titles) approach is particularly ill-suited to this. For me to get into Ryan North's Fantastic Four series, I first have to get into Fantastic Four in general, since I get the impression that this series isn't telling the story of the Fantastic Four from the start (which would get really old for longstanding fans) but plugging into a sort of assumed continuity. I'd need to either get briefed on the continuity somewhere (I assume there are primers for that?) or accept some confusion. That, and the fact that a lot of those issues seem to either have no credits on the cover or only surnames builds to the impression that it's less RYAN NORTH'S Fantastic Four, and more Ryan North (et al)'s FANTASTIC FOUR.
The fact that these are very much collaborative studio productions and not auteur pieces (no matter how talented the author, I don't expect Marvel is going to hand them the keys to one of their big properties without some pretty heavy control) should limit the impact any one author can have through them.
How fascinating, I can barely think of a time when I *didn't* follow authors in comics, where it was GARTH ENNIS' Punisher or BM BENDIS' Daredevil, even off to places like BRIAN WOOD's Northlanders. Certainly there were characters I'd have a proclivity to follow more intently, but authorship was always a big part of it for me.
Not only would I not agree with this, I don't think it's the consensus either. The average quality very likely has never been higher, due to the kinds of factors the reviewer mentions. It falls to select creators to rise above the average, but then, when was this _not_ the case?
For a very recent example, the first issue of Gillen/Wijngarde's 'The Power Fantasy' came out the other week, and stand to become an instant classic.
(Personally, I can't stand the vast majority of manga and anime. The tropes repel me.)
Started discussing on the ACX Discord #media channel. Would you say there's a distinction in terms of quality/stagnancy between the Big Two and more independent houses like Image?
The Big Two will tend to be more... what's a good word... predictable, perhaps? Consistent? Not stagnant or bad per se, but something you would know more in advance what you're getting. For these kinds of titles, you need to put your toys back into the box when you're done with them. There are very real limits on how wild you can get.
Overall quality isn't really a big difference - enough writers go back and forth between writing superhero comics for the Big Two and creator-owned stuff elsewhere. Hickman and Gillen are probably the best superhero writers of our time, and certainly do this.
A couple night ago, my family watched *The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob* (1973), a French comedy about a bigoted frenchman who goes on the run with a middle-eastern revolutionary, both disguised as rabbis.
At the end, everyone agreed on a few things: first, the movie was *excellent*. Absolutely hilarious, nails the Jewish humor in particular. Second, it could never be made today for cultural reasons. Third, and most important, it would never get made today for storytelling reasons.
That premise I quoted up top sounds neat, right? Well you have to wait until halfway through the movie for anyone to disguise themselves as a rabbi. Never mind the subject matter, the structure and pacing is dramatically off compared to any modern film in a way that no studio today would greenlight it without substantial rewrites. What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise? What movie switches from focusing on physical comedy to joke comedy partway through instead of evenly mixing them?
This is what came to mind reading the remarks on storytelling development above. It's clear that basically any modern film is paced and structured in a much more sound way than *Rabbi Jacob*.
And yet...
*Rabbi Jacob* not only remains great, it doesn't seem to suffer from its odd pacing, even to modern viewers (n=5). That might be a worthwhile corollary to the points about the development of storytelling: while the development is real (I also recently watched *Severance*, and I can hardly imagine what would happen if you showed it to 1960s audiences) it doesn't necessarily move in a direction of quality for the reader/viewer, but in the direction of greater ease for the creator or the people behind them. A film that strictly follows the Hollywood Formula won't necessarily be great, or even good, but it will almost certainly be watchable and won't confuse mainstream filmgoers. It also won't surprise or delight them. It won't innovate. It's safe.
> What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise?
A few years back, a friend invited me to watch The Fighting Preacher, a 2019 biopic about a Mormon missionary sent out about 100 years ago to reclaim a historical site important to the church in an area that was hostile to them.
The thing that made the strongest impression on me was that it was about the halfway point in the movie before he did any fighting *or* preaching.
I'm pretty sure Walter and Jesse cooked their first batch of meth in the pilot episode. Someone seems to have had an inadequate attention span for the task at hand.
Just checked: There are only seven episodes in season 1. Episode 1, Walter cooks his first batch of meth. Episode 3, his first unambiguous murder. Episode 6, he's become recognized (under the "Heisenberg" alias) as someone to be respected and feared by both the local drug lords and the local DEA office. Episode 7, he's completely OK with that and has found his new calling.
I suppose by cinematic standards, two-plus hours until the "antihero" kills anyone might count as a slow burn, but for a television series it seems about right.
Hitchcock's "Psycho" famously waits for almost an hour before the title slasher shows up - before that it appears to be setting up some sort of crime drama.
"Psycho" looks like a slasher movie only in retrospect. At the time, the interest was not in the "crazy killer" but in the surprise of having a movie jump the tracks plot-wise. Watch "Dementia 13" to get a sense of what it was like for the audiences of the time to see "Psycho."
> What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise?
Gymkata is a movie about a martial art "based on gymnastics", and only has one scene where the hero inexplicably finds a pommel horse in the middle of a village and uses it swing his legs around and kick everyone.
> What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise?
Oh man, there was this Chinese movie called Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and you literally see the end credits roll before you realise that in all the action and fun, at no point did you see either the tiger or the dragon. You expect it with the dragon. It's hidden. But the tiger? Come on!
(For those who know this was actually an idiom, feel free to reply and elaborate, but don't ruin the joke... just educate us!)
I really enjoy a lot of films from the 70s for that reason. Maybe it was the smaller budgets and the literal impossibility of creating a lot of special effects, but they are much more character driven. Dirty Harry is tame in terms of violence by modern standards, and he's not as competent as you might think based on how movies today would portray him. He's also almost realistic compared to various movies that have come out since that try to follow the same basic idea (hard nosed cop who pushes the boundaries). Those movies likely invented or popularized many of the cop tropes, including getting yelled at by the boss and getting partnered with someone unusual, but in a much more realistic way than we see later.
The 2005 King Kong takes about an hour of hijinx in New York City before getting to Skull Island. Honestly that first hour was the only hour of the movie I enjoyed.
I’m on a quest to read all of the comics on the Marvel Unlimited in order. I’m currently in 1963, and I have some nitpicks about this review.
The Fantastic Four reading a comic book about the Hulk doesn’t mean the Hulk is fictional to them. In Fantastic Four #4, Johnny reads an old comic book about Namor, and then meets Namor moments later. This is *before* Johnny reads the Hulk in #5.
At least two of the characters you list as new in the 1960s are older. Ka-Zar is from the 1940s, and Loki appears as an antagonist in a romance series about Venus from the 1950s.
A shared universe wasn’t completely new for Marvel in the 1960s. Namor and the original Human Torch started separate in 1939 but frequently met each other in the 1940s. Also, there’s a Namor story from the 1940s where he decides to stop WWII by conquering both the Axis and Allies. This story features, at least briefly, all of the major Marvel heroes at the time except for Captain America. (The other characters *are* fictional to Cap; FDR makes this clear in Captain America #1.)
Douglas Wolf did this and wrote a book about it, "Marvels". It's not very good. BTW did you know Trump bad? He'll remind you.
But he does relate a bunch of interesting crossover details, like one month early in Marvel where every single character appeared somewhere else in a big circle.
On “the art has gotten better”, the examples feel cherry picked. I’ve never read comic books so I can’t comment but when it comes to TV Shows, sure they’ve gotten far better, but they’ve gotten better from a really low bar. The TV Shows in the past, due to weird broadcasting requirements (that every episode had to be standalone enjoyable etc) never even attempted to tell a serious long arching story. There wasn’t any attempt to treat the medium with seriousness, now there is.
That said what about movies? We seem to be seeing a “marvelification” of movies. Every successful movie wants to be a franchise. Every franchise wants to be an easy going, popcorn flick where you can turn out your mind and enjoy the jokes, action and then tune in to the world at the end of the movie spending no significant afterthought into the movie.
One way to judge art is by how timeless we think it will be. What movie released in the 2000’s will be discussed a 100-200 years later? I can think of few candidates and none of them are Marvel Schlop. I can think of many more movie examples from the 1980’s, and I admit that for TV shows all my examples would come from the last decade or so (“Succession” and “Severance” being my absolute favorite pieces of art in recent history) but TV seems to be an exception to the trend.
Let’s go to other mediums, when it comes to paintings everyone knows the deconstruction that has happened with modern art to the point that most folk have no idea what is even trending in the painting world anymore and it also somehow has been captured as a medium by money launderers. There might be no paintings from this century that are timeless.
Poetry is pretty much dead. What about Novels? I will leave it to others to discuss, since no 1 person can reasonably even read a slice of all novels released in a year but among the categories I read of “fantasy”, I find it very hard to find any novel apart from “LOTR” that I would consider “GREAT”. In fact I’m seeing a dangerous trend of most fantasy novels released these days becoming more Mary Sue like wish fulfillment fantasy and less of a story.
And while SBF’s Shakespeare quote has been debated to death, one of the reasons Shakespeare is considered the Bard, is that a lot of his plays are indeed timeless. I don’t like deconstructing art a lot, but if I had to explain how an art becomes timeless, it’s when the art pokes at a fundamental timeless truth to the human experience that is too complex to explain in words but is express-able through a story. Hamlet is a play I still re-read and there is something fundamental about Hamlet’s indecisiveness that the story is pointing at, that feels very true to how humans behave that resonates with us to this day. Given this bar, I can’t help but conclude that as a whole, with some exceptions aside, art is on a negative downward trend.
I 100% agree — in general I think the decline looks a bit worse than it actually is because we never compare our stuff to the generic slop that got pumped out in the past(penny dreadfuls, soap operas, etc), but at the top I think it would be difficult to argue that any recent works are better than Shakespeare or the peaks of the 19th and 20th century in any domain.
Poetry has likely been displaced by recorded music. If you go back before audio recording technology had progressed far enough, music was once distributed by printed sheet music. Poetry was once easier to distribute via text, but now the accompanying music can go with it.
Here in Italy in the history of our popular music there has not been a cataclysmic genre shift such as jazz being replaced by rock (most of our 20th century popular music would fall under the umbrella of "pop", Americans are not familiar with ours but they are familiar with Abba which I think is somewhat related), but the lack of a big genre shift makes the gradual simplification even *more* noticeable from decade to decade!
It's impossible not to hear it when you compare songs from each decade.
It has been going on for a century, very steadily.
Even more than a century perhaps. In the 1800s, opera arias were hits, people would sing them in the streets, and they were more sophisticated in their composition that any popular tune from the 20th century. And then the music of each decade has been more direct and simple than the one before.
Finally in the last few years (less than ten years I think) we're gotten the rap disease. All kids listen to these days is horrendous Italian rap, and related genres that I can't tell from one another.
It's interesting to hear from a sophisticated popular culture outside of the Anglo-American pop culture hegemony. I'd like to hear from a Brazilian as well about pop music's evolution in Brazil.
RPG designer Kenneth Hite joked that when Bob Dylan won the Literature Nobel, it was the first time since Kipling it went to someone who primarily does rhyme.
"Twin Peaks" was considered impossibly complex for adults to follow when it aired but if it was pitched today it would be considered boring.
Lynch also had "weird" plots in the sense of "wow how random" that were kind of shocking when done then, but today the audience would yawn "oh you did something really weird to shock us? Whatever."
>among the categories I read of “fantasy”, I find it very hard to find any novel apart from “LOTR” that I would consider “GREAT”<
Well I'm using this as a tangent to talk about a thing because I just read Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass, and while some of the characters can perhaps be described as one-note, the ensemble as a whole creates a solid dynamic, and the villains are weird and intimidating, and the whole thing comes together in a big climactic showdown where all our heroes get their moment to shine, and it's a really solid ending.
And then the book continues for another 150 pages.
I'd say the "Marvelification" of cinema has improved it in a lot of ways. Making everything a franchise has increased narrative economy. Previously a movie had to spend time familiarizing the audience with the world and the characters each time. Now they can jump right into the story since a different movie already did all that. I've heard some complaints about this reliance on continuity from previous movies, mostly from casual movie goers who are upset that for once movies are being made for someone other than them. But overall it allows movies to do things that they couldn't do easily in the past. Something like "Avengers Infinity War" simply wouldn't be possible without previous movies to set it up.
I can think of numerous Marvel movies that are on par with some classic films of previous decades. The second and third Captain America movies, the Guardians Trilogy, the Deadpool Trilogy, most of the Spider-Man movies are some examples. I think they'll probably be as well remembered as classic superhero movies of the past like the Christopher Reeve Superman and Tim Burton Batman films. It clearly isn't true that most of these movies are merely light action movies that you stop thinking about when you turn them off either. They've inspired devoted fanbases who discuss them constantly, and a lot of them tackle fairly weighty themes for an action movie.
"Previously a movie had to spend time familiarizing the audience with the world and the characters each time"
"World-familiarization" (e.g., much of The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca) strikes me as often more interesting than trudging through the plot, especially in modern Quality Television. E.g., I loved the first few hours of "Mad Men" familiarizing me with upper middle class New York metro life in 1960, but quickly got depressed by the fear that there were going to be dozens of hours of the characters sleeping with each other.
That's often true, but in that case the movies can often build on existing world familiarizing and extend it instead of reinventing the wheel. For instance, the third "Thor" movie is one of the better recieved movies in the MCU, and Thor spends most of it stranded on an alien world. The filmmakers had more time to explore the alien world because they didn't also need to spend time familiarizing the viewers with Thor's home of Asgard.
> Previously a movie had to spend time familiarizing the audience with the world and the characters each time. Now they can jump right into the story since a different movie already did all that.
This would be good, except that Marvel movies don't generally bother to have a story either.
The phrase "Oscar bait" exists because everyone knows that the academy awards are biased towards certain types of movie.
In the period in which ROTK was made, it was fashionable to give Best Picture to epic movies with epic battles. Braveheart won, then Gladiator won, and then Return of the King (a movie whose two most famous scenes were beat for beat rip-offs of the most famous scene in Braveheart).
ROTK was Oscar bait.
(by the way, I like epic movies with epic battles; LOTR is one of the worst in that genre).
Take a look at a list of Best Picture winner. Do you expect each one of them to be discussed 100-200 years from now (which is what Steve said of LOTR)?
Do we still discuss Best Picture winners from 100 years ago? The Broadway Melody, the winner in 1929, has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 42% (critics) and 20% (audiences). The Metacritic score is a bit better, but that's because it includes reviews from 100 years ago. Whereas movies from that era that are actually good have a good Rotten Tomatoes score.
20 years ago, the Oscars thought LOTR was the kind of movie that should win Oscars. Do we *still* think it's actually good?
> In the period in which ROTK was made, it was fashionable to give Best Picture to epic movies with epic battles. Braveheart won, then Gladiator won, and then Return of the King (a movie whose two most famous scenes were beat for beat rip-offs of the most famous scene in Braveheart).
This isn't a complete analysis; oscars were specifically withheld from the first two movies because they were viewed as a planned set, so all of the oscars won by ROTK are partially due to achievements of the other two films.
The problem with movies is that it formerly occupied niches that have now been conquered by TV and online video. The only niche left for movies is "big loud blockbusters", and so that's what we get.
> The problem with movies is that it formerly occupied niches that have now been conquered by TV and online video.
Here are the top 10 movies (by box office receipts) in 1994:
1. The Lion King [Disney animated canon]
2. Forrest Gump [character-driven drama]
3. True Lies ["action comedy"]
4. The Santa Clause [comedy/Christmas; vehicle for Tim Allen]
5. The Flintstones [comedy; popular franchise]
6. Clear and Present Danger [action thriller based on a Tom Clancy novel]
7. Speed [action thriller]
8. The Mask [comedy; vehicle for Jim Carrey]
9. Mrs. Doubtfire [comedy; vehicle for Robin Williams]
10. Interview with the Vampire [horror; while I'm crediting vehicles I should probably note that this stars Tom Cruise alongside Brad Pitt]
It's not clear to me that this is a set of niches that has now been conquered by TV.
There's a Disney movie, and Disney is still doing those but the writing seems to have suffered. (The last one I saw was Encanto, which had excellent music and terrible writing, plot, and characterization. I haven't seen Wish but the impression I got was that the writing hadn't improved.)
#s 3/6/7 are action films and presumably they fit naturally into the surviving category of big loud blockbusters. (Of those, I've only seen Speed, which I remember as being more focused on dramatic dialogue in tense situations...) True Lies, as an "action comedy", appears to be a match for what Marvel tries to do.
There's one horror movie. I have no real knowledge of what goes on in that genre; maybe it's been successfully conquered by TV.
There's one character drama, Forrest Gump. What's the modern equivalent?
And finally, there are four comedies, three of which serve as vehicles for already popular comedians, and the last of which extends an already popular franchise. One of them is also a Christmas movie, which is a genre I'm certain hasn't been conquered by episodic shows.
But I don't hear about how comedy is thriving on modern TV. I keep hearing about how it's died and been replaced by political commentary given a light comedic slant, legacy of The Daily Show.
What are the shows that fill the comedy / celebrity vehicle / Christmas niches? This seems more like a bunch of niches that have stopped being served anywhere.
Horror movies are still doing fine. It's romantic comedies that have really suffered. Nowadays they're more likely to show up on Netflix than the big screen.
While Romantic Comedy as a genre used to be quite popular, were any of the individual movies really that good? I see a lot of them as more like the romance novel of the video world. They might be enjoyable and scratch some important itch (at least for the target audience), but the individual examples are poor and forgettable.
If I'm right, then maybe they've found their proper place, rather than dropping from a height.
Agreed, but there's a reason that romantic comedies were not AAA before. It's a difficult genre to do really well, but an easy genre to do at all. Outside of paying big name actors (optional), it's one of the cheapest genres to produce. Outside of big name actors, there's not much to pull someone to watch a particular movie or care about high production values.
Yes. When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, The Seven Year Itch, North by Northwest (it’s 100% a romcom, fight me), It Happened One Night, The Apartment, are all romcoms I could come up with off the top of my head that are considered classics.
We actually have surprisingly good evidence of how mythologies were applied to new places (oh yeah our town was totally founded by Hercules! Also turns out our country was founded by the Trojans!) and situations and mixed with and influenced each other.
I do appreciate this look back at the Silver Age, though I note you jump from the 60s to the 80s.
Did you deliberately leave out the 70s, when both DC and Marvel comics got rather strange? 😀 The 70s is when I started reading comics as a child, so I do remember some of it.
>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).
This is a fine review, but this line is a dead give-away that the author has not actually read Shakespeare — aside from high school English class maybe.
>One explanation is that Shakespeare may not have been the best writer, but he was a very good writer (the best of his time), and that he was able to pick up the low hanging fruit of writing ideas.
This line is also funny taken with the bits about Ancient Greek Theater — because if the author had actually read any Ancient Greek Theater(or at least some comedy through Plautus) he might actually see "the low hanging fruit of writing ideas" actually being picked up. Which is why reading ancient comedy, for example, is actually a good bit like reading those old comic panels.
But if you actually read Shakespeare outside of your English class, I don't think you will come away thinking he was "picking up the low hanging fruit." Some things are just timeless and don't conform to SBF's idiotic Bayesianism.
8 minutes later and it is still a bit baffling to me that the author of this piece thinks that Shakespeare invented the general plots of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, etc out of whole clothe and, as the author implies, this was his chief innovation in storytelling. It is shockingly impressive that the author picked the one part of Shakespeare that was completely derivative — Shakespeare took almost all of his plots from existing sources. I recommend reading Ovid's version of Pyramus and Thisbe and then Romeo and Juliet to maybe get a sense of what Shakespeare was actually doing.
Or
Please read a soliloquy. Please read a soliloquy. Any random soliloquy. It won't hurt. Please Please Please Please Please Please.
And actually he doesn't even have to read Shakespeare, just some sort of secondary source besides SBF and Richard Hanania. A.C Bradley would probably do him some good. Or even just Shakespeare's Wikipedia page.
Disagree with so many aspects of this that I could write huge screeds, but just one easily demonstrated one is that in the pop cultural space these kinds of shared universes of characters were already widely proliferating at the time Marvel comics was getting going, particularly with kaiju films and the later entries and derivatives of the Universal monster series, as well as partial implementations in cheap genre cinema & postmodern art films, and in comics with the work of Osamu Tezuka among others. Its also not particularly accurate to view the history of Marvel comics as a portal into how these grand mythologies were coagulated because the structure and content of past mythologies was an extremely strong, direct and self conscious point of reference (eg Thor) in the creation of the Marvel mythology.
The shared "universe" of Universal monster movies was much looser. Dracula's Daughter may be a sequel to Dracula, but it completely forgets the existence of all the human characters other than Van Helsing who could explain what it is that Van Helsing did. And of course there was no assumption back then that it would be in the same universe as Frankenstein or The Mummy. A lot of the crossovers were in Abbot & Costello movies, which everyone knew were comedies not to be taken seriously.
>> there was no assumption back then that it would be in the same universe as Frankenstein
"House of Frankenstein" (1944) *koffkoff*
Okay, if you try putting all those movies into a single continuity, it won't work, but there were more cases of monsters showing up in each other's movies than just in the Abbott and Costello movies.
1944 is more than a decade after Universal's first Frankenstein & Dracula movies (Dracula's Daughter is from 1936). Admittedly, House of Frankenstein is a sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man from 1943, but that's also more than a decade after the original Frankenstein (though not so long after The Wolf Man).
?? And this makes it different from the MCU, whose "universe" has now been strung out over 16 years? I think you've just identified longevity as another point of similarity!
Lack of strong continuity amongst the Universal films (which I acknowledge) is a much stronger argument against calling the Universal catalog a "universe."
My point was that the films were not linked for a long time. Whereas Iron Man (which I admittedly haven't seen) ends with a post-credits scene of Nick Fury recruiting Tony Stark into the Avengers Initiative.
I cosign what MaxieJZeus said and would add that rigorous internal consistency has never been the point (or perhaps never even really been an attribute) of these expansive network mythologies.
Well, that would just make the Universal... universe closer to Greek myths than the MCU is. The Greek myths don't even bother to struggle for consistency.
The Universal films started out as adaptations of different literary works (you could even go really far back with Lon Chaney in silent versions of Hunchback of Notre Dame & Phantom of the Opera), and since they'd been written by different people there was no expectation they shared a universe. Frankenstein is ~78 years older than Dracula, and both novels were written as being roughly contemporary with their publication date (the former is scifi, and the latter tries to be up to date with the latest science, which unfortunately wasn't late enough when it comes to blood types).
As a bit of a comic book nerd and a lot of a literary nerd, I'd like to contest a couple of these points.
First, I don't think it's clear-cut that the art style in comic books has improved. A lot of those early comics have a visual style that's beautiful in a distinctive way that modern superhero comic books don't achieve. To give an example, the Steve Ditko run on Dr. Strange is so gorgeous that I often enjoy flipping through those comics just to look at it—even though the storytelling is pretty much unreadably bad. On the other hand, Ultimate Spider-Man, which has much better writing, has (in my opinion) a fairly ugly style. It's more compositionally sophisticated, but not pleasant to look at, and like a lot of comics from its time, full of ugly gradient effects.
(Ironically, the gradient effects could be taken as a problem coming from this "progressive" notion of art. New digital coloring tech was available, and artists felt they had to take advantage of it whether or not they could use it in an aesthetically pleasing way.)
Second, I don't think you can equate progression within a medium to progression within art as a whole. This comic book thing gives some sense of that. Particular art forms emerge historically because of changing social and technological conditions. On one hand, improved cheap printing technologies made comic books as a medium possible. On the other hand, the kind of drama the Greeks created is no longer possible, as the social institutions that made it meaningful no longer exist. Are comic books "better" in some meaningful sense? They're better in the sense that they're more popular at this exact moment, but popularity waxes and wanes—they could easily be forgotten, in the same way that most Restoration plays are (deservedly) forgotten. I love comics but I wouldn't trade Aeschylus for any number of them.
"Improvement" in art is dubious because there are no common goals. Artists have never agreed on what the purpose of art is. Within narrow fields where artists share obvious goals, you can say that one artwork beats another. But when you're looking across centuries? To a listener from the renaissance, most twentieth century music would be intolerably dissonant. To a listener raised on post-Wagnerian classical music, most contemporary music would be intolerably simplistic both melodically and harmonically. On the other hand, to a modern listener, much older music feels far too simple rhythmically. And there's no authority to appeal to: great artists often have deeply idiosyncratic taste (e.g. Tolstoy famously hated Shakespeare, Paul Valéry disliked the novel as an art form, etc.), and extremely innovative artists often have classicist tastes (it's not coincidental that the modernists were obsessed with the classics) and dislike their contemporaries not merely from a sense of rivalry.
"First, I don't think it's clear-cut that the art style in comic books has improved."
Such as the terrible 90s Rob Liefeld style? Which was equally as awful for the male superheroes, see the infamous "What the hell?" version of Captain America:
I don't think this review is without merit - it's often quite interesting - but I find that its opening framing is really a perfect expression of the culture of artistic victimhood in the 21st century. The MCU is the most successful movie franchise of all time. Marvel characters just helmed the most successful R-rated movie of all time. This is dominant, mass culture. Every major university has credit-bearing classes on comic books now. They are discussed in the Paris Review and The New Yorker. There is no snooty highbrow culture as waved at in the beginning; such a thing simply does not exist in 2024. And yet the whole tenor of this thing is from the perspective of someone who believes that he's a beleaguered and marginalized outsider because he loves the same culture as everybody else does. It's exactly like the Taylor Swift fans who complain about being oppressed while their hero wins every Grammy, sells millions, and is feted in every cultural publication on earth.
We live in an era of all-encompassing cultural populism. You guys have to stop pretending that you're oppressed because you like comics. It's just so weird and untrue and senseless.
Now, come on, why should the ground of victimhood not be claimed along with everything else? It may only yield a faint scrap of moral power, but it's hardly vitalist and virile to just leave it in the hands of any actual victims.
Freddie, are you calling me weird? Are you saying that I'm - gasp! shock! horror! - a *Republican*??? 😁 (Well, 32-county Republican, maybe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsTyyfcf_yY Time to fire up the Wolfe Tones' Greatest Hits?)
I can truly claim never to have fallen out of a coconut tree! 🌴 Yes, I proudly and shamelessly reclaim the term and declare my weirdness!
This "nerd moment" we are living through is a recent development, and a lot of Gen Xers or older will remember a time when interest in comic books was considered very weird and unhip, so I'd cut the review at least a little slack.
It's also not clear that the moment isn't coming to an end, later if not sooner. In the 1930s, Walt Disney cartoons were for all ages (as Pixar is considered today), but 40 years later they were dismissed as "kid fare." Similarly, everyone in the 1970s thought "Star Wars" was for everyone; now, if you complain about current "Star Wars," you're as likely as not to be reprimanded with, "Why do you care about kids' movies about space wizards?" It wouldn't surprise me if in thirty years the MCU found itself in the nursery alongside "Snow White."
In defense of the reviewer, they are not writing for a general audience, but rather the ACX crowd. I'd expect old school elitists as well as people fed up with "Marvelslop" to be overrepresented here.
The cultural populism that you’re talking about here reminds me of the sociologist Richard Peterson’s idea of “cultural omnivorousness.” You ever hear of this? I really like this thought, and I wish more people knew about it, because I think it gets a lot of things right about today’s contemporary “highbrow,” cultural elite: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096460
I think you're trying too hard to shoehorn one of your critical idée fixes into your review of this review, I didn't find it to have an attitude of cultural populism or victimhood at all.
The reviewer did the opposite of what you're saying they did. The opening exhorted the serious people on ACX to take an interest in a review of comic books, something implied to be too lowbrow and pedestrian for the audience here.
Marvel can at the same time be dominant mass culture and widely despised. Plenty openly agree with Scorsese that it's "not cinema". I'll grant the Taylor Swift thing though. There's no modern highbrow music outside of irrelevant academic stuff that no outsider has ever heard, it's either Beethoven or "poptimism".
I agree with you in part, but are Comics really the same thing as the MCU? Marvel is certainly extremely popular and impossible to miss, but comics still seem to be marginalized and for unpopular kids.
There seems to be a small sheen from people who've read comics who can point to important plot points that the MCU might show us in a movie, but the movies do their own thing often and regularly do completely different things than the comics. I remember discussion of Civil War before the movie came out, and people discussing possible directions. Once the movie came out, there was very little interest in the comics anymore.
The only argument this review give for calling superhero comics "myth" is that they're interconnected.
Really? Is that all there is to it?
Is interconnectedness the definition of "mythology"?
I don't think superheroes are "myth" at all. I think the main reason people feel they should be called "myth" is that they are drawn with bulging muscles and heroic poses, somewhat resembling ancient Greek statues. It's a very shallow analogy.
When I think "mythology" I think of Adam and Eve and the snake, or Kronos devouring his children, or Prometheus giving humans fire and being punished for it, or the resurrection of Jesus. Stories that were originally believed in, explained the world and were entwined with religion. Marvel and DC have little in common with that.
Even Homeric heroes (who constitute only a part of Greek mythology) are not particularly like superheroes. They traits they have in common with superheroes are the same generic ones that they have in common with every action or adventure hero ever. Achilles and Odysseus are no more like Superman than they are like Rambo or Jack Sparrow.
Superheroes are only mythology if you define mythology so broadly that everything is mythology.
Edit: Balzac novels are all interconnected, are they "mythology" according to the reviewer?
"Stories that were originally believed in, explained the world and were entwined with religion."
I share Caba's reluctance to call Marvel stories myths. They are fantasies set in the modern world, reflecting culture rather than explaining it. But they're great at what they do.
I mean, I get it. They're interconnected, but they've also got larger-than-life characters with superhuman powers who are sometimes supposed to represent a cultural ideal or power fantasy.
Rabbi Jacob is probably Louis de Funes's second best film - try La Grande Vadrouille next! Also, neat link to comic books: De Funes's house was the inspiration for the house Captain Haddock's house in Tintin.
It seems to me 99 percent of the plots in Marvel comics and movies boils down to this formula, with slight variations: 1) Good guy meets bad guy. 2) Bad guy almost defeats good guy. 3) Good guy defeats bad guy.
I found Unbreakable interesting, where the director said he wanted to make a movie purely dealing with 1). Imo it didn't quite work, but at least it wasn't derivative.
The older I get, the more I care about whether a movie does things right, than whether it does things new. Movies can be done well, or poorly, separately from their budget or high level formulation. Winter Soldier is a better movie than Iron Man 2, despite both having aspects of your formula. The Avengers is better than Age of Ultron.
I've come to hate action films that essentially boil down to "main character mows down legions of enemies without a challenge" even if I still really like action movies. The only difference that seems to matter is how well the movie is executed. The Equalizer is far superior to its sequels, etc.
Not at all most fiction, no! You just have to know where to look.
For example "Slogans" (2001), one of my all-time favourites. The bittersweet, tragi-comic story of two schoolteachers in rural Albania anno approx. 1970, where children spend the schooldays making long communist slogans in the hillside - and the longest slogans are given to the teachers the local Party Committe wants to punish for some minor transgression, or for not responding to the advances of the principal. Stuff like that. Deeply human. No real villain, everyone plays their part and with the few cards they have been dealt. Life just as surreal as it is.
The whole movie is on youtube with English subtitles, by the way:
I'm claiming "most X are Y". You're claiming "not most X are Y". I gave 7 examples of X that are Y. You gave 1 example of an X that isn't Y.
But also, your example of a work of fiction which does not adhere to "1) Good guy meets bad guy. 2) Bad guy almost defeats good guy. 3) Good guy defeats bad guy." is a movie where:
1) A new biology teacher meets the local party secretary.
2) Local party secretary almost crushes the biology teacher's spirit.
3) In the climatic battle of wills, the biology teacher refuses to denounce his relationship with the French teacher, and stays true to his principles despite the local party secretary's best efforts.
And, ok, I stand corrected, sort-of. You are right that even this movie has a similar 1-2-3 structure. Although the ending is not a triumph for the teacher over the local party boss and principal. He & the kids are back at making slogans in the hillside, resigned to their fate. But - ok - arguably he and the kids (and the French teacher sent to an even remoter village) are still "inner free". It's not a pitch black 1984-type ending.
Lifelong hockey fan and player here, old enough to have seen Gretzky firsthand in his prime. This review repeats some cliches about him more than it actually summarizes his impact on hockey. I will try to summarize without asking the reader to know or care much about the specific sport.
To some degree Gretzky was simply a generational savant of his profession. He dominated every league he played in literally from age 8, was playing and succeeding against older boys from age 10, was a national figure in Canada by age 14. This despite never at any level being the fastest skater nor physically imposing.
The reviewer here is correct that Gretzky changed basic assumptions about how scoring in the sport could be maximized, and changed them forever. Combine uniquely-obsessive skillbuilding from a young age (there are a number of Canadian sports-fan legends about his father and he all of which seem to be basically true); way-out-the-long-tail gifts in hand-eye and other physical coordination; and what scouts call today a "hockey computer in his head" (it is after all a fast-paced real-time sport). The result was Wayne Gretzky.
Here is one hockey-specific sidebar on that. It is of course a physical sport -- it is not only legal but central to the game to stop scoring threats by successfully "bodychecking" a player who is skating in possession of the puck. (Without that every professional-level game would be 20-19 or whatever.) Gretzky demonstrated that a medium-sized player without blazing (by pro standards) skating speed could nevertheless make himself extremely difficult to "knock off of the puck". For many fans, me being one, this was actually his most awe-inspiring skill -- he could to an amazing degree evade checkers while maintaining control of the puck and without needing to actually look at the big skilled pros who were trying the check him. It was crazy to watch, we used to say that he seemed like a ghost dancing through expressway traffic -- on ice skates!
His specific gifts and new approach to scoring in hockey were also perfectly timed. For various reasons I won't bore you with, hockey in the 1970s/80s was pretty much set up for the right player to break a lot of its existing assumptions/habits of strategy and tactics. Gretzky was that player. The way Babe Ruth showed everybody that in baseball it was rational to change the basic strategy of hitting, Charlie Christian demonstrated that electrifying a guitar turned it into a melodic or "lead" instrument, etc.
The reviewer is correct that Gretzky today could not have the same marginal impact on his profession. He might well become the greatest single player, having when young benefitted from today's enormous advances in training, sports medicine, etc. But since hockey today has his own innovative leaps now baked in, and because of some other relative changes starting with the quantum improvement in goaltending, Wayne Gretzky 2.0 today would not break existing scoring records by 50 percent and so forth.
I'm specifically objecting to the idea that "skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been" was new, innovative, surprising, or anything similar.
In shooting sports this is called "leading the target", and it is a fundamental requirement of hitting anything that moves. It has been known since the first person was able to reliably hit an animal with a rock. It's as basic as the idea that "if you aim directly at the fish, you'll miss" in spearfishing.
It's a good thing to put on a poster because it sounds wise, but it's not anything that wouldn't have already been known.
I agree that it's an overused cliche regarding Gretzky's game. Other attributes of his were more innovative and, for knowledgeable viewers of the sport especially when watching in person, more striking.
That said, you appear to be misunderstanding it. The skill that quote referred to was not analogous to "leading the target" -- it wasn't about when Gretzky had the puck and was passing it to another player. It was the opposite: he had an unusual talent for anticipating and intercepting pass attempts or clearouts by players on the _other_ team. It seemed sometimes like he "just knew" where the puck was going to go and would suddenly appear all by himself in that spot to intercept the puck.
> That said, you appear to be misunderstanding it. The skill that quote referred to was not analogous to "leading the target" -- it wasn't about when Gretzky had the puck and was passing it to another player. It was the opposite: he had an unusual talent for anticipating and intercepting pass attempts
I don't see what it is that I'm supposed to be misunderstanding. Intercepting the puck is exactly what I had in mind. The target being led is not another player; it's the puck.
Sorry, we're beating the dead horse to a pulp here, but that doesn't make any sense. You seem to be imagining Gretzky, what, going out for a long pass like a wide receiver in football? That's not at all what that particular cliche referred to.
It was him seeming to be able to read semi-chaotic crowded action within especially the neutral zone and know where the next guy to collect the puck would decide to send it before he'd even collected it. Or understanding that somebody's pass attempt was going to get deflected to someplace else on the ice and moving himself towards that area before it even happened. Stuff like that. Very frustrating for those of us rooting for the other team (the Chicago Blackhawks in my case) because it appeared sometimes as if he had a cheat code or something.
When you use phrases like "able to read semi-chaotic crowded action" or "it appeared sometimes as if he had a cheat code or something", you make it sound like Gretzky is doing something that is very non-obvious, and hard for us non-hockey-fans laypeople to grasp and duplicate.
In contrast, the review's core point is that "What is obvious today once had to be invented by someone, and wasn’t obvious before that happened." I think the Gretzky thing is supposed to be analogous to the "what if we added a 2nd actor?" innovation in play writing.
So if you're referring to something non-obvious (even today), but the reviewer is referring to something obvious (at least to us, today), then I suspect the two of you are not referring to the same thing.
Hence, I'm inclined to agree with Paul Botts here. I.e. it's possible that the reviewer, Paul Botts, and I all have an incorrect understanding of hockey and what Gretzky did, but we all have the shared understanding of "leading the target", even if that's not what Gretzky actually did.
One big thing the review fails to mention is the Comics Code Authority. In 1954, comic book publishers decided to self censor their works under threat of congressional action. The criteria they enforced was incredibly restrictive, and seriously limited the types of stories that could be told through the medium.
Cool to see someone review comic books, but you lost me in the “Why Superhero Comic Books?” section unfortunately …
> “One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. […] Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave).”
So understanding comic books is going to change how I behave and align my behaviors more with Western culture’s ideals? … Or it’s going to teach me about how I’m *expected* to behave? … Or it’s going to teach me about my culture’s values?
… How do comic books provide marginal value in those domains over and above, y’know, growing up and spending my whole life living in a Western culture?
> “My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture.”
How did your wife struggle? Like, did she struggle to understand those metaphors and allegories and was, therefore, confused? Or did she behave in ways that are inappropriate in a society where religion is widespread? I take it that it’s something like the former (rather than the latter) since you mention the “Western canon,” but then what do you mean by “Western canon”? Like, the Western literary/ philosophical canon? So understanding religion helped your wife to read the classics better? That seems kind of trivial. …
… This seems like a missed opportunity to have made concrete the unique, marginal value that you perceive an understanding of comic books to bring. If your wife was struggling in some non-trivial way, and if understanding religion provided her some value outside her English/ classics courses, it would have been great to hear about it.
> “I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ is an important idea to understand. So is, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’.”
What makes understanding these stories and ideas “important”? And how does understanding the source material from which they derive help us to understand/ better align with these common aphorisms over and above, y’know, knowing the aphorisms?
… With regard to all these points: I don’t mean to be nit-picky, but as someone who’s entering the 6th year of a PhD program in English, I’ve been exposed to MANY arguments like these, and I can’t help but to find them vague, hand-wave-y, and unconvincing. I like the rationalism community because this community tends to prize precision and specificity and tends to be critical of hand-wave-y clichés like these.
In fact, my personal take is that the vagueness of these clichés is a feature, not a bug. The vagueness allows people that are into studying and discussing cultural products in academic or online spaces to claim that they and their subject matter is “important” without making controversial and/or unsubstantiated claims that specify exactly how and why it’s “important” and/or without inviting debate and controversy amongst other cultural elites.
(In fact, I sometimes suspect that the real desire of these folks is simply to spend time thinking and writing about cultural products they like, and so they throw out some vague justifications—something something cultural literacy—that are broadly agreeable, insofar as they’re vague and, therefore, open to interpretation, which enables them study and write about the cultural objects they like.)
Plus, I can’t help but to be suspicious that there might be a certain amount of elitism in statements that invoke “educated people” like this one: “In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture.”
As I understand it, to be a public intellectual in some European cultures/ countries, you need to fit in with the elites by clearly signaling your “educated,” “refined,” “upper class” status by exhibiting your familiarity with stuff like the Western literary canon, the classics, the opera, etc.
I *like* that this isn’t expected of public intellectuals and other “educated people” in the US. … Don’t get me wrong—I think that there’s still a lot of ugly “education signaling” that happens in elite spaces in the US, but this signaling doesn’t seem as uniform nor as snobbish as it is in Europe: i.e. in some spaces you do this with social-justice-y arguments, in others you do it by signaling familiarity with science and engineering, in others you do it by signaling knowledge of concepts and heuristics drawn from economics (e.g. Stephen Dubner/ Freakonomics, wonky left-wing spaces like Matthew Yglesias’s Substack, the rationalism community, to an extent), and in others you do it by signaling a more general understanding of the social sciences (think: Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, etc.).
All virtue signaling has its problems and drawbacks, but I like the relative diversity of education signaling that we have in the US and I like how non-arbitrary and relatively un-snobbish this stuff feels. If the only reason to understand the opera (or, in this case, the Bible) is to fit in with other “cultured,” educated people and doesn’t provide any marginal value to those educated people and/or society over and above the ability to fit in with other educated people, then that only speaks poorly of the educated people in your culture. To me, it implies that your elite class has fallen prey to entrenched/ locked-in social dynamics that require you to devote time to arbitrary, outdated stuff (like learning enough about the opera to appreciate it) just to fit in, and which only really helps to differentiate (and in some cases alienate) your elite class’s culture from that of the “masses.”
This argument about familiarity with the Bible being important to being an “educated person” today is meant to apply to an understanding of comic books, which seems like the polar opposite of the opera—an artistic medium of the masses rather than the elite … But that’s the thing; in Europe, some of these older, snobbish elite dynamics are still at play, but across much of the Western world (and this is especially true of the US, I think), being “cultured” today doesn’t mean being snobbish and liking snobby stuff like the opera—it means being a “cultural omnivore.” (This idea comes from a sociologist named Richard Peterson: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096460) Cultural omnivores are more familiar with a wider range of artistic and cultural products than are the less educated, less elite, less omnivorous “masses.” Snobbish elite cultures require you to become familiar with stuff (like the opera) that separates you from the masses, while in more egalitarian/ populist elite cultures, developing broad, “omnivorous” cultural literacy is prized.
Personally, I prefer an egalitarian, educated, elite class that prizes cultural omnivorousness over cultural snobbishness, but the author didn’t say “Understanding comic books will make you more culturally omnivorousness, which will help you to fit in better with other culturally omnivorous, educated, elite people.” That, at least, would have been honest. Instead they said, “something something ‘valuable,’ something something ‘important,’ something something, ‘educated.’”
And that really gets my goat, because it’s vague, open-to-interpretation arguments like this that, in my view, preserve the status quo in the arts and humanities by reassuring everyone that they’re “important” and “valuable” without ever specifying what that value and importance is in any realistic or empirically justified terms.
> How do comic books provide marginal value in those domains over and above, y’know, growing up and spending my whole life living in a Western culture?
You don't have to read comic books specifically, but growing up in Western culture you'll inevitably be exposed to a thousand other versions of the same myth. Plucky underdog achieves power by being humble and virtuous, and uses this power to defeat an army motivated by pure evil and its arrogant leader. That's every comic book. It's also Star Wars, it's Lord of the Rings, it's Die Hard, it's James Bond, and it's World War 2 (the mythical version thereof, not the actual messy historical version.)
Arguably the WW2 myth is the real foundational myth of our current culture and everything else is just riffs on that.
Huh. I'm still quite attached to some of those elitist shared collections of myths (including the Bible myths - like the OP I taught my kids those stories as useful cultural hooks). But I like your point about how a broader, less prescriptive myth base and knowledge base has a lot of value. I hope you start writing on your blog, I would read that!
> The couple that could not be together because of “reasons” is not the highest art, but it is far beyond what was in play in any comic prior [to] Silver Age Marvel.
I think of Superman's keeping Lois Lane at arms' length because she is safer if she doesn't know his secret identity (or something) as a pretty canonical part of his narrative. Does it not go back as far as I imagine?
"The last comic book you read was more likely by Bryan Caplan than Jonathan Hickman."
If I ever knowingly read a comic by Bryan Caplan, it's time to take me out back and shoot me since I'm overdue for the glue factory. The last comic book I read was one of the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" series by Alan Moore, which at least is proper comics books, even if Moore is away with the fairies.
"I don't read comics, I read graphic novels" strikes me the same way. Yes, graphic novels have developed differently, but ultimately their roots, like speculative fiction, are deep in that grotty old rag-and-bone shop of the heart which were comics and science fiction.
Why should superhero comics not be worthy of discussion? Here in the UK, most of our political leaders (at least until PPE took over [that's Philosophy, Politics and Economics in case you might mistake it for something more currently relevant!]), and most of the senior civil servants studied mesolithic superhero myths (aka "The Classics") at university. At least the Marvel superheroes occasionally touch on current day issues.
Just a tangentially related thought: the reviewer makes a big deal out of innovation in the genre, and basically equates it with progress.
But innovation and improved capabilities in the arts has often been a mixed blessing! Most famously seen in classical music around mid 20th century, composers had become so good at the mechanics of the genre (Western harmony, melodies, form...) that they just kind of hit a wall, complained that making music that touches the heart had become too easy, called for a revolution, and proceeded to flail around, experimenting with deliberately ugly music (see: Boulez). That quickly lost its popularity, and many decades later, the academic genre is still collectively half stuck in "what to we do now".
Same kind of thing happened to painting to a certain extent - once they were good enough to do everything from photorealism to abstraction, what is left to explore without being more of the same?
In a way the successive innovations are as constraining in one way as they open paths in another. When Western music matured its system of harmonic tension-cadence-release, it became an obligation to use it with ever increasing intensity, and alternative types of expression were more or less lost. These days I often find myself gravitating to modal music, which avoids the common period harmonic system, and finding remarkable commonalities in everything from medieval tunes to modal jazz to non-Western traditions.
If there's a way to "like" a comment, I don't see it, so I'll just say "like" in a comment.
And I'll add that I especially agree with the observation about equating "innovation" with "progress." Innovations and improvements are not made across-the-board: they are made to particular areas, and in the arts these are often accompanied by simplifications to those aspects outside the immediate area of exploration/innovation. E.g., doesn't counterpoint simplify greatly in the time between Bach and Haydn precisely so it's easier to experiment with harmonies without having to worry about polyphony?
If so, it's not really about "progressing" to something better, but about an art evolving into a new form or style as innovations occur in specifc areas, causing further innovations in others. If so, then it becomes difficult to refer to artistic evolutions as "progress", just as it is difficult to refer to biological evolutions as "progress."
I enjoyed the review, but admittedly only skimmed some parts. A couple comments.
1) The bit about Shakespeare writing things so that everyone later would be derivative of him if they told the same story. This is sort of true, but not really. A lot of them were retellings of older works, written before the printing press, and not in English. Did he make them better? I'm sure in many ways he did. But he also was in the right place and time to have his works spread. And we do have modern retellings of very similar storylines, often self-consciously so. It's remixes all the way down, in some sense.
2) Personally, I think my favorite example of modern/later versions of a story being better than the original is The Wizard of Oz (and its sequels. The books are absolutely awful drivel. Stuff just happens, one event after another. No attempt to have a coherent plot or world *at all.* The movie was genuinely much better.
3) Since I already mentioned the printing press, I think it's worth pointing out that technological advance for cultural transmission plays a big role. A lot of the Greek gods were worshipped in mostly one city or another, and we can see (from surviving fragments of older versions of some myths) that they get merged and remixed and retconned over time into a more coherent whole. It takes a lot of cultural interconnection to form a coherent pantheon with stable myths. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Silver Age happened in an era of rapid economic growth where it became more feasible for more people to indulge in learning a whole new set of myths. And I don't think it's a coincidence that integrated world movies, or even complex intertwined ensemble cast TV shows, really took off after the invention of DVR (and later streaming).
As myths go, Comics run well behind the parables in the New Testament. To this day, the single most profound "myth" I have run across is the story of the Prodigal Son. And it has nothing to do with belief in God or being a Christian or religious at all. It gets to the heart of what it means to be a loving parent.
I was actually thinking about this the other day. I've known the story since I was a kid, but I never really got it. Nobody ever really gets it until they're the parent of multiple children.
The important part of the story isn't the part where the son decides to go home, nor the part where the father forgives him. The important part of the story is the part where the non-prodigal son comes to his father and complains. Until you've been a parent and you've spent years listening to your kids' complaints that It's Not Fair, you'll never quite understand the father here, but now I totally get it.
That part of the story is often overlooked but for me, the story also illustrates the relationship between love, repentance and forgiveness. I always cringe when someone who has been wronged says they "forgive" the wrongdoer, even though the wrongdoer has not repented. In the story the father's love of the son is constant and unconditional, but there could be no forgiveness unless the son gave up his wicked ways, returned home and threw himself on the mercy of his father. At that point, the father's love manifested itself as forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a two way street. Sometimes forgiving someone is entirely for one's own good; you are free of the resentment that comes from holding a grudge. Whether someone else feels forgiven or not is immaterial.
I agree that the act of "forgiving" someone who has not apologized or repented is a way of moving on. But it is a unilateral act, and it is unfortunate, IMO, that such an act is included in the word "forgiveness." The forgiveness illustrated in the Prodigal Son story is truly a "two way street," and it is focused primarily on the wrongdoer, not the forgiver. A person who has been wronged has a choice whether to hold a grudge or get over it. That is the essence of "turning the other cheek." The victim refuses to engage with the wrongdoer - i.e. does not stoop to the wrongdoer's level - and in fact refuses to be a victim. That is an admirable move, but I think it is a mistake to characterize it as an act of forgiveness.
Good question. I don't know of an existing single word that would work. Phrases such as "I'm over it" or "I've dealt with it" or "I'm moving on" are the best I can think of at the moment.
This review tried to say too many things without really fleshing out any of the points it touched on. It could have benefitted from narrowing its focus.
I liked the technical part about how Stan Lee worked on so many different projects at once, but I've no idea how true it is since I'm not familiar with the American comic book industry. Can anyone comment?
When I was young, I always thought that superheros were a mystery to me. These "comic book" heroes loomed so large and prominent in the popular culture, despite the fact that their existence was marked by an utter absence in the source material that spawned them. Put simply, I never read any comic books, nor saw any comic books for sale, nor saw anyone else reading comic books, nor heard any people at school discussing the latest comic books. Where are the comic books?
TLDR. In the past, comics readers were mostly children, as parents would buy their kids comics as cheap entertainment to keep them occupied. But as the kids grew up, and the comics industry noticed that their consumers were getting older, and had more disposable income. To capitalize on this, they moved their comics out of mainstream venues like news stands and convenience stores into dedicated exclusive comic book shops. This created an insular marketplace could effectively cater to existing consumers, but it had no reach to gain new readers. To stay relevant, the industry expanded into new verticals like movies and TV shows, which is where most people have been exposed to them. These spinoffs have been so successful that Marvel and DC don't really care about their comic books divisions any more, which sounds obvious, but belies a lot of drama over these companies "ruining" their comic books. At this point, Marvel/DC just use comic books to focus-test new characters before introducing them into movies/TV.
1. I believe (but I could be wrong) that pre WWII at least comics were very much an adult entertainment, just as manga is an adult entertainment in Japan. It was only in the 50s and 60s that they came to be seen as juvenile.
2. Former Marvel EIC Jim Shooter has explained that the shift from newsstands to comic books shops had most if not all to do with the appalling corruption of the news distribution business. Basically, comics (and other newsstand items) were distributed by local monopolies which were mob-controlled, and these became increasingly ruthless about exploiting return policies to the point that comics were becoming at best a break-even enterprise. Shifting to dedicated stores moved the comics out from under mobbed-up enterprises, but this also entailed shifting focus to a more adult clientele -- the kind that could travel to a comic book shop.
3. Ever since the 1960s the comic book companies have tried to make deals with Hollywood -- see all the cartoon shows dating back to the famous "Spider-Man" show ("Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can!") But the comic book companies (even DC, which has been a corporate sibling of Warner Bros. since 1969) have always been in the inferior position of having to interest the studios in their properties. There was never any "expansion" by the comic book companies into movies and TV. Rather, from 1966 onward they hustled and whored themselves out to anyone who would license the TV or movie rights to their characters. That is one reason the rights situation surrounding Marvel properties like Spider-Man (with Sony), the Hulk (with Universal), and the X-Men (formerly with 20th Century Fox) were and still are so complicated -- Marvel was desperate to dance with anyone who'd buy a ticket.
4. The entertainment industry is mostly organized today around the exploitation of copyrights and "intellectual property" across multiple platforms -- movies, TV, animation, toys and collectibles, etc. -- as revenue generators. Comics is simply one of the platforms, and is one of the smallest revenue-makers. Only inertia explains why Warners still owns a comic book publisher (they've owned DC since 1969), and Disney didn't buy Marvel because they liked the comic-book business, but because they wanted to own the characters for exploitation. These companies could easily sell or spin off the comic publisher to a third party while retaining ownership of the characters, and simply license the publishing rights to those characters to the new Marvel or new DC the way they license the "beach towel" rights to a maker of beach towels.
>The entertainment industry is mostly organized today around the exploitation of copyrights and "intellectual property" across multiple platforms -- movies, TV, animation, toys and collectibles, etc. -- as revenue generators.
Given how central this is to the history, I'm finding it strange that LearnsHebrewHatesIP hasn't commented on this book review yet.
My knowledge of Marvel superheroes stems entirely from those 1960s animated tv shows. I know nothing about the X-Men because they never had a 1960s animated tv show. Why is that?
>1. I believe (but I could be wrong) that pre WWII at least comics were very much an adult entertainment, just as manga is an adult entertainment in Japan. It was only in the 50s and 60s that they came to be seen as juvenile.
The predecessor of Marvel started publishing comics in 1939 (which would be before or during the war depending on what country you're in). I've read 1939 through 1963, and they're aimed at children until around 1960, when they shift to teenagers.
“To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”.”
I just have to fly the flag for the Brits here: James Bond! On TV there is Doctor Who, also forming a quite distinctive universe. And I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made that westerns constitute a mythic universe, with characters like Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill.
Except for the Westerns (which is a very interesting application of the idea of myth), all those other example are just series, which we expect to make up...if not a consistent story like HP, at least a plausible attempt.
The system of rights helps to make a mess of things - we could have had a Connelly-verse (Bosch, The Lincoln Lawyer, and others), or a Vertigo-verse (Lucifer, Sandman, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Dead Boy Detectives), but instead those get spread around different studios.
Maaaybe Doctor Who, but those are really just a main-series and the occasional spin-offs.
(Alien-Predator-Blade Runner could possibly qualify, but the connections are too loose and unexplored, IMO.)
Yeah, that's a good point. I was kind of ignoring the shared-universe part of it, because I don't see it as that important. What Bond shares with the Marvel films is that there are a lot of them; they contain a variety of different perspectives on a shared group of characters; they use some different styles and tones; but they maintain some core elements. You're right that Bond doesn't constitute a universe because there are no films outside of a single main line; but I think over the 25? movies there are enough disparate elements that it effectively does the same thing.
Maybe the same could be said for other movie series as well, like the western series back in the 1940s?
Wait, Godzilla! There's a nice example. Not a particularly high-quality or interesting universe, so far as I understand it, but I think they do constitute a universe in the strict sense, because there are a few that don't include the big lizard himself.
A few thoughts that I'm not sure what (if anything) to do with:
1.
"storytelling itself has advanced dramatically since the early 1960s – 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."
I wonder if there's any effect here parallel to the fact that hitting in baseball has gotten narrower—that is, we never see hitters over .400 any more (because pitchers as well as batters have gotten better) but also never see hitters hit as *poorly* as they used to. Is there any parallel for aesthetics? I ask because it would make some sense of the idea that Shakespeare was the GOAT but *also* the that there has been a general improvement of storytelling.
2.
Things can go down as well as up, obviously (e.g. decline in engineering knowledge in the dark ages). I suspect (or perhaps fear) that storytelling quality will go down as the audience attention wanes and people can no longer keep sufficient complexity in their heads. Perhaps this is an unwarranted fear, I'm not sure.
3.
And speaking of the idea that things can regress, we should remember Tartaria in this discussion:
This review was everything I thought it would be and it lived down to my expectations. Others have already pointed out how the arguments petered out. I was most struck by the insistence that silver age Marvel comics are modern day myths primarily because of recent box office success. The greek myths that started the review are what, 3000 years old or more? The tide has seemingly already turned against super hero stuff. Disney has well and truly ground out the enthusiasm. Will people really be revisiting these stories in 20 years let alone 1000? No, these are stories, not anything that deserves the status of myth. And yes, Deadpool is incredibly successful but I claim that is more of an action comedy than traditional superhero tale. At least that's my understanding.
I will give credit to Marvel for inspiring generations of comic artists and story tellers. Although I think that Swamp Thing and The Watchmen are still limited by their super hero trappings so don't represent the pinnacle of comic storytelling. Publications like Maus and Love and Rockets are amazing examples of story telling. I think that Penny Century's desire to be a super hero and eventual granting of that wish is a much better commentary on super heroes than The Watchmen. I think The Venture Brothers have put a cap on super hero mythology and shown us what they all really amount to. I guess I should be thankful everything led to that.
«Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from.»
One person writing a bunch of stories that end up being consistent was pretty standard during the age of SF; see also Asimov and van Vogt. The thing about Marvel is that you might not expect a bunch of different comics from the same company to fold together like that. One example not mentioned here: Nick Fury, Agent and/or Director of SHIELD, started out as Sgt. Fury, leader of the WWII Howling Commandos, in a war comic; the Universe transcended genre and tone. Possibly the you-wouldn't-expect-that factor is important here? As in, the revelation that Asimov was connected the Robot series to Foundation was hugely exciting (to me) even though I think it's aesthetically wrong.
I used to read comic books, hipster style, before they were cool. I say this only to point out that I really, really wanted to like this review. Unfortunately, I didn't. It is, at the same time, too thorough and not thorough enough, while being only occasionally entertaining.
While I doubt it was Stan Lee's inspiration, I have to say that the idea of purposely building a share literary universe is older than him. Balzac and Zola built their own shared universe in the 19th century (the Human Comedy and the Rougon-Macquart saga respectively). Both were highly successful and are considered among the greatest authors in the French literature. Of course, given the title, you already guessed where Balzac took his idea for the Human Comedy.
The medieval legends of the Arthurian cycle also are a shared universe with heroes from standalone stories sometimes teaming up to fight other threats.
I would add Anthony Trollope's "Chronicles of Barsetshire" to the list. Those who know Faulkner better than I can judge whether his fiction should also get a mention.
Since I think it's an outrageous statement that Marvel is "mythology" because its stories are interconnected, I was looking for a counterexample, but couldn't think of a good one.
Arthurian tales don't work, since there is the obvious rejoinder that that is mythology too.
I was thinking more about the Matter of France. It was much expanded in Renaissance works such as Morgante, Orlando Innamorato, Orlando Furioso (and even The Nonexistent Knight by Calvino), all essentially playful and extravagant Song of Roland fan fiction written in an era in which that kind of stories were no longer believed in, but the reviewer who think Stan Lee is mythology would call even that mythology.
But will the reviewer say that Balzac is "mythology"?
> In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage.
There's nothing specific to comic books about this. Paperback books worked the same way. They probably still work that way.
*Poorly written, dearly needs an editor. Asides should be footnotes, external links, or frankly just removed entirely; they add little and clutter up the review both formatting-wise and pacing-wise.
*Review just kind of...ends abruptly with no real conclusion or takeaway, premises left hanging in the wind, still unproven and under-supported. (I started with skeptical priors and left with them enhanced. Still much more in the Gwern "modern art is mostly slop full of degenerate derivative crap, value your time more highly and take advantage of survivorship bias, Good and Popular are weakly correlated" school of aesthetic thought.)
*Every one of those looks-nothing-like-a-superhero-comic covers looks exactly like a superhero comic cover to me?
*Lots of speculation and tangents, several of which are self-acknowledged as out of scope (so why bring them up?), unverifiable (should note this about sales figures at the start, not halfway through!), or half-baked ideas that would've added much more with extra oven time (I'd eagerly read a cleaned-up steelmanned version of an "Acktually, modern pop culture is way more sophisticated and intelligent" argument).
Look, it's nice to let a thousand book reviews bloom, try new stuff, innovate on tradition...but I really just wanna read book reviews about actual books, or very close book-likes (at least on ACX). The equivalent for doing comics would be, I dunno, a book review of V for Vendetta or something.
I don't necessarily disagree with your other criticisms, but I thought the asides were "a good innovation", and would like to see more authors (including Scott Alexander) consider exploring this style.
Oh, I'm not opposed on principle! It works for a certain kind of author...TLP was good at it (that was more than half the fun of reading his stuff, honestly), Tanner Greer at The Scholar's Stage is good at it, whoever wrote Hotel Concierge as well. Scott could definitely pull it off, worked for Unsong. But I found it jarring in this particular post because the asides were juuuust long enough + formatted in such a way as to disruptively break the flow, but not quite long enough to be a meaningfully useful diversion unto themselves. If they were Goldilocksed in either direction, that'd be an improvement. As is, I think they'd work better as footnotes, or perhaps an appendix of miscellanery, as some other reviews this year have done.
Wow, this was a really interesting review. I do have one nitpick though.
As far as the switch to more complex plots in TV, I don't think it was *just* that people hadn't thought of it. It's also a consequence of the distribution methods. In the broadcast TV era, people would just catch random episodes without any context, often out of order, often reruns from different seasons even. Therefore, stories had to be episodic or else noone would understand them. It's only in the streaming era that writers became able to rely on the audience watching the entire series in order.
Soap operas are like comics in that both of them engage in ret-cons once the existing list of characters and backstories gets too unwieldy.
One British soap opera in the 90s had a plane crash onto the village where it was set, in order to clear out some characters and enable a rebooting of the concept.
Are you claiming that before the mid 2000s or so, TV series had no overarching plot elements? That you could pick any episode from any show and get the same understanding of its plot whether or not you had seen any other episode?
Not literally none, but there was almost always mostly episodic at least. And shows that did have multiepisode subplots would include "previously on" segments so that the viewers weren't completely lost.
In fact, even after the mid 2000s, episodic television was still common. Even if you don't have literally no continuity like The Simpsons, you get stuff like Burn Notice where 95% of each episode is independent with only a token myth arc that went nowhere for seasons on end. (Michael looks for guy. Guy blows up. Rinse and repeat. There, now you know the plot of the first three seasons of Burn Notice.)
Made-for-streaming shows are very different in this respect. There's a lot less filler and a lot more continuity since they can assume that the audience is a) watching every episode, b) watching each episode in order, and probably even c) bingewatching.
The "previously on" segments were owing more to the fact that episodes were airing typically a week apart and viewers might have a spotty memory of what happened last episode, and less of an attempt to bring completely new viewers up to speed. A few seconds worth of highlights would be inadequate for that purpose anyway.
Also, I believe it's more than a quibble to say that the Simpson's don't have "literally no continuity". Yes, they are mostly stand-alone, but you still need to know at least the basic traits of the characters. Previous episodes are also important not just for little references to reward regular viewers, but also in shaping fundamental character relations such as between Bart and Sideshow Bob; the show writers could and would work their history into new episodes without explaining in too much detail their previous encounters.
I do remember watching one episode (Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?) where a guy shows up and mentions that Homer previously ruined him by designing a dumb car, presumably a reference to an episode that I hadn't seen. But even that kind of thing was pretty rare in the Simpsons, AFAIK.
For shows like Simpsons, I think it's generally *not* important to have seen the previous episodes, in the sense that if you were to uniformly randomly pick an episode, you could watch it and with very high probability, enjoy it and understand the plot. There may be references you might miss on, but it won't severely detract from your enjoyment, and it certainly won't have you be completely confused and have no idea what's going on plotwise.
Regarding "shaping fundamental character relations", I think you're overestimating this. Characters frequently change radically from their earlier personalities, such that "going back" to previous episodes to see what you may have missed may cause you *more* confusion. Ned Flanders, from the Simpsons, is actually the trope-namer for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization
There were some shows like that, such as "The Fugitive", where the main plot was "man is falsely accused of crime, he escapes and goes on the run to hunt down real killer, dogged but honest cop is on his trail" and each episode was bringing him nearer to the goal, but you could still probably watch them out of sequence without messing up the main story too much.
I don't dispute that such shows existed, not even that they were more common before convenient digital archives such as streaming services, but I very much dispute that it was the only format that existed. The claim that story writers couldn't show multi-episode stories before streaming is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
Sure, a sitcom like As Time Goes By has plot arcs over several episodes but they weren’t complex plots. Missing episodes wouldn’t have led to misunderstanding subsequent ones.
The difference between complex, long-arc storytelling TV shows like Level 50 Lapras mentions, and looser, more episodic TV series, is one of degree, not kind.
At one extreme are anthology shows (best known examples: "The Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents") where there is no continuity between episodes, and only a genre resemblance to them.
Further along would be the conventional TV series best represented between the 1950s and 1990s: sitcoms like "I Love Lucy" or "Seinfeld"; genre dramas like "Gunsmoke" or "The A Team." In these you have a common set of characters in a recurrent setting featuring similar sorts of stories, in which the only "continuing story" is likely to be that of a baby who is born into the family and grows older. These series are written so that their episodes can be watched in any order.
(These series are also written so that viewers can even enter an episode at almost any point -- joining after a commercial break, for instance -- and quickly suss out who the characters are and what they are doing.)
Some of these series will feature either multi-part episodes (a single storyline that stretches across two or even three episodes), like a mini-movie; or they will feature a simple plot evolution that will motivate stories across most or even the entirety of a season: the Ricardos go to Hollywood in "I Love Lucy"; interstellar war threatens the Federation in "Deep Space Nine." But even in these it is possible to quickly get up to speed about what is going on in individual episodes without needing to know the full plot from the beginning.
Further along are continuing soap operas, whether of the daytime or nighttime variety, in which multiple plot arcs stretch across many episodes or even seasons. These are much more difficult for the viewer to enter in medias res; but again, they are typically written in such a way that with a little patience a new or returning viewer can gather up the plot threads without having to go all the way back to the beginning.
Finally come the sort of storylines increasingly prevalent in streaming, in which the series is best conceived as a whole that has been artificially partitioned into parts, rather than as individual stories that are interconnected by continuity. The proper comparison here would be to a novel. The experience of entering this sort of story would be like picking up a thick, intricate novel and trying to read it from the middle forward.
As to the question, When did each of these get invented or were best represented?
Anthology series and episodic series have their roots in radio, as do the soap operas; I don't know old-time radio enough to know if radio shows regularly featured multi-part episodes or multi-episode plotlines, though I would bet they did. This was the format because producers wanted to make series maximally easy to enter into -- they didn't want audiences to be daunted by having to learn a lot about a series before trying it out, or to be confused if they happened on an episode by chance. Daytime soap operas could risk being confusing because they were a daily show, giving a new viewer more opportunity to sample it and come up to speed; episodes of nighttime soaps were more self-contained (a matter of degree), and written to create a sense of tension and drama that would go unresolved but feature a kind of hook -- something like a cliffhanger -- to get a viewer (even a new viewer) to return the following week to see how the tension was resolved.
It was much harder before streaming or time-shifting devices (such as videocassettes or Tivo) to hold onto viewers' attention. Series had to air at set times, and networks had to trust the viewers themselves to arrange their schedules so as to catch the next episode. Anything that could (as I said above) daunt a new viewer or tempt an old viewer into dropping out had to be avoided. The promise of standalone stories was the easiest way to tempt and retain viewers in such a world.
Streaming, wherein multiple episodes can be dropped at once, and in which episodes await the viewers' pleasure rather than demand attention at particular times, makes it much easier for viewers sample or invest in much more complex storylines, and so make it possible to write TV series that are more like multi-chapter novels.
This is also why it is a GIGANTIC MISINTERPRETATION by the review to say that "storytelling itself has advanced dramatically" in recent times. Storytelling has not advanced. Rather, changes in distribution models (from broadcast to streaming) have made it possible to deploy story forms and narrative structures that already existed, but which were not easy to adapt to existing formats.
A comparison: Before ~1912, most films were one reel in length, which is to say that they were about 15 minutes long. This is simply not enough time to tell anything like a conventional story -- a narrative featuring characters motivated to action in pursuit of a goal, undergoing an evolution or development in the pursuit of that goal, and climaxing in the achievement of that goal. And so before 1912 movies were just filmed incidents or anecdotes, or at best simply sketched a sequence of events. Once the industry became comfortable with offering two- or three-reel films to the public, with running times of between 22 and 55 minutes, it became possible to tell conventional stories. (Notice how those running times neatly anticipate the length of a sitcom or a one-hour TV drama, after the commercials have been removed.) At that point all the conventional narrative devices and forms that had been a staple of the stage (and novel) became available to the movies. And yet it would be ludicrous to say that "cinematic storytelling advanced dramatically" between after 1912. It's only that the technological form of one medium -- that of the theatrical movie -- had evolved to the point that it could comfortably employ storytelling patterns invented long before.
It's the same with TV. The economic imperatives of broadcast television discouraged the use of storytelling techniques long ago invented and developed by novelists. With the invention of streaming (thanks to technological improvements) those economic imperatives have substantially relaxed.
Small note on radio shows: checking an archive of radio Dragnet episodes (https://archive.org/details/Dragnet_OTR), I can see a few two-parters starting with "The Big Man". That aired in January 1950.
Probably if you poke around other long-running radio shows you'll also find multi-part episodes.
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar had a run starting in 1955 with Bob Bailey as the titular character, which consisted of five-part episodes spanning every weekday night (and one nine-part episode spanning two full weeks). Don't know how common that was elsewhere, but at least one show had multi-part episodes.
Considering that many novels have complex plots and reoccurring characters, I would guess that TV wasn’t like that *mainly* for the reasons you mention and other technical and economic reasons.
When the Sopranos and similar shows came out, I remember some critics said that it was TV becoming like the Victorian novel.
Things were shifting a little before the change in distribution methods. Babylon 5 is one of the earliest examples and the most distinct: it had a clearly defined mythos that built episode by episode - you can scramble a lot of the early seasons within themselves, but never across finales and by the middle of season 3 almost any reordering renders episodes incoherent. HBO shows also had a lot of ordered storytelling, though of course it was a prestige channel that relied on its cache to pull it off. Still, by the mid 00s there were plenty of shows running around with clear continuity from episode to episode, all before the dawn of Netflix's streaming.
That doesn't match the observed timeline. Buffy the Vampire Slayer started in 1997 and was definitely in "season-spanning story arc" mode by season 3. Streaming services were not on the horizon back then. DVD box sets, maybe, barely?
Between the term "Silver Age" and the words "Look at this print! It's IMPOSSIBLE! Nothing can be so huge!" in the header image, I assumed this was about a re-issued set of Marvel Comics for geriatric readers and fans, with larger print making it easier to read. Maybe expensive and leather-bound. Maybe Kindle editions, too
It's basically the origin story from the first movie, but set in an earlier war. I didn't see it when it first came out, but I read a reprint not many years later.
Never having seen the movie (I don’t know if you saw my other comment, that my sole knowledge of Marvel comics comes from 1960s animated tv shows), your point means nothing to me. What I find fascinating is the reference to Vietnam at a time when the war was not yet on most Americans’ mental maps.
People were hard on this review. I liked it, even though I don't agree with it.
1. I don't know if Marvel has reached the level of modern mythology. With all the attempts to make it less sexist there still isn't a huge female fanbase, though of course it's possible there were a whole set of Greek myths the women passed down to each other that haven't been preserved because they didn't tell the men (and I am not being snide about that--we did lose most of Sappho's poetry for instance; a *lot* of stuff from that long ago didn't make it). It might in 200 years, I actually could see that, but I don't see it reaching that point yet. If you're talking about modern mythology you have to at least bring up Harry Potter, though Rowling seems to be working hard to prevent that. ;)
2. A big issue I've never seen discussed is that we may simply not *know* who the next Shakespeare is for 400 years. A lot of the reason he's respected is his influence and longevity, and we won't know who the next author from our time will be of that stature until 2400, when likely all of us are dead. But perhaps all of you pronatalists' descendants will live to see members of the Grey Tribe in 2400 (so called because of their habit of painting their animal skins grey) fighting off raiders from the ruins of Los Angeles with the cry, "We can tolerate anything except the outgroup!"
3. Does storytelling really get better linearly? I think it's possible there is a secular increase in the quality of visual storytelling--you couldn't have mass-produced comic books before about 1900, so the field couldn't exist; same with movies. This may be a little too ACX, but modern trends in storytelling aren't necessarily all to the best--one big reason anime is so big among young men is nobody wants to make movies where they're the heroes anymore. I asked a few people in Barnes and Noble why they thought everyone was so fond of manga these days, and in addition to the wider range of stories and the huge number of titles, they all mentioned there was too much politics in modern comic books. We're all familiar with stories of Golden Ages followed by Dark Ages--it's entirely possible comic book storytelling, like every other art and culture, has its high and low periods.
4. Again maybe I'm being a little too ACX and should worry more if things are 'problematic' (nowadays when told that I tend to seek out the work in question), but it seems pretty credible to me Sue Storm would want to take time off being a superhero to do normal girl stuff. (And you could argue Prof. X realizes he'd be abusing his position to declare his love for Jean Grey.)
It's odd to split out superhero comic covers vs science-fiction adventure comic covers, as from the beginning Superman was "the spawn of the science-fiction magazines; created by a science-fiction fan, from ideas obtained from science-fiction stories, run by a former science-fiction editor and to a great degree written by science-fiction authors." (Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz, 1961*)
It's hard to say Superman isn't a science fiction adventure story: it's literally about an alien come to Earth who then fights threats scientific mastermind villains, interlopers from other planets or dimensions, or invaders from the future, and hangs out in a sophisticated secret base either alone or with his pals, which include other aliens, a brilliant investigator with self-invented gadgets, robots, and cyborgs. When you get right down to it, what is the difference between Green Lantern and a Lensman?
*In the next paragraph he theorizes the reason kids aren't growing up and turning to real science fiction after out-growing Superman is that since science fiction went "slick" in 1952 there hasn't been a "bridge" magazine like Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, or Captain Future to take young teenagers from comic books to grown-up magazines like Galaxy or The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. That might be why we ended up with this split between superheroes and "real" science-fiction.
I enjoyed learning more about the origins of these modern myths, thank you.
I wonder if the author would consider correcting the following summary of Lewis’s book?
“Michael Lewis’ book, Going Infinite, about Sam-Bankman Fried (founder of FTX and Alameda Research, and convicted of fraud in November 2023) was controversial mostly because Lewis suggested that Sam was a good hearted, misunderstood guy who wasn’t really doing anything wrong.”
Lewis lays bear all kinds of wrongdoing. He just never writes “and this is wrong.” Also he does try to show Fried as a full human. But none of this should be read as a defence of him, which Lewis has adamantly underlined in interviews. I think this is worth a correction.
I don't understand the "Lincoln's mother" thing. Aren't the imagined readers of this hypothetical Civil War comic correct? If someone were writing a comic about the life of Abraham Lincoln, it would be totally reasonable for his mother to be relegated to a minor role, or even excluded entirely.
Also how the hell is this an example of Lee "pulling [the readers] away from their far more extreme [sexism]"? Lee's the one who decided to write the only woman on the team as an incompetent weakling, not the fans. Criticizing a writer's use of sexist tropes is not itself inherently sexist.
I agree with you that Stan Lee's "Lincoln's mother" argument is very weak.
I think it is intended as an example of Stan Lee attempting to pull readers away from ever more extreme sexism in that what a "typical" person might have done in Stan Lee's position would be to agree with the fans and get rid of the female character (or demote her to a pure damsel in distress instead of part of the team of heroes).
The readers are presumed sexist because they lived in the 1960s, and "everybody" was sexist back then (relative to how we are now).
This was clearly intended for someone who grew up with the comics and knows the secret language of Marvel (a FOOM, you might say). I am such a person and, as such, I unreservedly loved it. Nice job, unknown author.
If you enjoyed this review (I did, though seems plenty of people have, uh, comments on it) and if you like the "world-building" aspect of Marvel, the way (sometimes with some effort, but a hell of of lot more elegantly than DC's constant reboots) everything kinda ties together, the book to read is NOT the one suggested in the review (which is a history of Marvel as a BUSINESS), rather it is
_All of the Marvels_ by Douglas Wolk. Obviously a single book cannot condense everything, but Wolk does about as good a job as can be hoped for, and overall provides something of a complement to this review.
And it ends with what has to be the craziest summary you might imagine - that the "central" character in the Marvel Universe (and who knows, maybe one day in MCU Phase 17 the star of her own movie) is someone named Linda Carter!
And if that doesn't strike you as some heavy level cosmic irony, then you're clearly utterly ignorant of anything to do with pop culture, and shouldn't be reading reviews like this. Sometimes it's not Clive who says "Peccavi", it's the universe itself!
I almost did not read this review because the sug=bject did not entice me, but I am glad I read it. A good and engaging read, although I am not sure it really delivers on the "Marvel is the new mythology" angle.
Stan Lee isn't a misogynist for one of his characters have a woman type out the report; he's being inclusive.
In my legal workplace, every single legal assistant is a woman. They are excellent at their jobs. It requires a skill-set that, apparently, only women have at an elite level.
For those tasks that they are organizationally responsible, they demand the work. It would be disrespectful to assign it to anyone else.
Legal assistant positions are coveted, internally. Everyone knows their role requires intelligence and precision, even if the workload isn't enormous.
So Lee including a typist is the hero recognizing an essential part of his team.
To the extent that I had heard of comic books having a "Golden Age" and a "Silver Age" before, it had always been in the context of seeing weird covers where Superman or Batman is being ridiculously petty and mean, or outrageously sexist, supposedly for pure shock value. I hadn't realized that it was a difference between the introduction of the classic DC standalone superheroes and the introduction of the Marvel universe. But now it makes me wonder what the connection is between these two uses of the terminology. Did DC have a weird phase contemporaneous with this introduction phase for the Marvel characters?
The Golden Age is pretty much the introductory period for superhero comics, running from Superman's introduction in 1938 until the late 40s or so as superhero comics fade in favor of other genres (particularly crime) and comics as a medium face backlash.
DC's Silver Age starts in 1956 when they begin to introduced updated versions of some of their discontinued Golden Age characters, starting with the Flash. It's pretty different from Marvel's Silver Age and the tone varies by book, but it tends to see a huge upswing in outlandish science fictional content and real supervillains. (The Golden Age and the surviving superhero titles of the intervening period had some supervillains. But the proportion relative to gangsters, mad scientists, etc. is much lower.) For DC's headliners, it's generally a safe bet that a majority of their main iconic villains (or at least the original version of that villain) debuted during the era.
(Less true for Batman, who has a few Golden Age adversaries kicking around. And Superman kept Luthor, though his Silver Age incarnation is probably more iconic. The tragedy that drove the Luthor/Clark relationship in "Smallville" was pure Silver Age.)
DC was having a renaissance of its own, proliferating titles, adding superhero teams that really functioned as teams (the Golden Age Justice Society was mostly a social club to frame the members' individual stories, though they might team up at the end).
Superman was at the peak of his steady increase in power level, to the point that stories tended to focus on gimmicks that he couldn't just power through. Wonder Woman tended to be kind of a fever dream. (Wonder Girl was originally, like Superboy, the main character at an earlier time, but then there were the Impossible Stories that were canonically just her mom superimposing home movies over one another somehow to notionally team them up. That explanation got so deemphasized that other writers at DC had Wonder Girl join the Teen Titans thinking she was a separate character, which she perforce then became.) Flash tended to rely heavily on (often rubber) science for its plots. And all of them would frequently throw in enough random ideas in a twelve page backup to drive a twelve-issue miniseries today.
The whole thing was much more siloed than Marvel until pretty late. DC was run almost as separate fiefdoms, to the point that Superman and Batman's appearances in the Justice League were rationed by their respective editors until late in the decade when they were told they couldn't do that anymore. It seemed that every hero visited a different version of Atlantis (which produced at least one love interest for a fair fraction of them). Crossovers were rarer, aside from team books and specific exceptions like Superman and Batman regularly teaming up in World's Finest.
And DC was more successful in sales during a lot of the period. (Granted, the fact that it controlled Marvel's distribution and limited its number of titles helped.) Not only was Superman the consistent best-seller, but titles like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen were comfortably top tier as well. It took quite a bit of time for Marvel's model to really seem like a direct threat to the Distinguished Competition.
When it did, DC eventually started adopting some of its innovations, like crossovers and continuity and heroes with conflicts and current social issues. (And sometimes just hired the people who'd been doing them for Marvel, including Jack Kirby himself to invent Darkseid and the New Gods.) But that was mostly post-1970, and the change is part of what defines DC's Bronze Age.
(Which I think is one of its best periods, which is of course in no way influenced by the fact that it was when I was first introduced to comics as a kid.)
But while I grant that it's a niche taste, I unabashedly love DC's Silver Age. It's often just nuts in a way that comics consciously trying to be more grown-up like Marvel couldn't be (let alone the more character and consistency driven genre of the 80s and later). Its less straitjacketed nature also made it a font of characters and ideas that have stuck for more than half a century. The Golden Age was the wellspring, but a disproportionate fraction of key characters, concepts, and relationships trace back to that 1956-1970 period. It's probably going to be even less friendly for a modern general adult audience to come to fresh than 1963 Marvel, but it's clear that creators are still taking inspiration from it.
(And while growing up I was all about the soap opera continuity, these days I find the one-and-done stories with a beginning, middle, and end-- generally more than one per issue-- incredibly refreshing.)
I’d recommend Tom Scioli’s “Jack Kirby: the Epic Life of the King of Comics” as well, as an interesting perspective and a corrective to the Stan Lee historiography.
I forget where I heard this, dunno if it's true. Ditco had drawn Spider looking at someone protesting (Protesting the Vietnam war maybe?), shaking his fist in anger. And the Stan Lee made Spiderman say something like "I'm with you!"
I once read that Ditko allowed Spidey to be relatable (i.e. mess up often, as opposed to his other, perfect Objectivist heroes) specifically because he was a teenager, a kid still becoming a hero. It sure worked (which is why I don't spend my time rereading Mr. A comics).
Why would those things be in tension?
Peter Parker isn't like that, though. He's a scientific prodigy and a tactical mastermind. You could say that the part about struggling with mundane problems applies to him, but no more so than it does to most of Rand's own heroes.
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.
lol..."wash your hands"
That's what the bread is for!
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... )
Heartless brute! Some of those people never recovered from their breadwich trauma. Decades later they were still trying to get rid of a greasy sticky hand feeling, and wailing that "all the perfumes in the world cannot wash the pbj from these little hands!" Plus if any of their descendants are on here you triggered them.
LOL! Many Thanks! Let them eat linzer tortes! (with peanut butter added?)
(When Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, shall it bring deep-fried Mars bars?)
I'm convinced half the benefit of therapy is stuff like "y'all should really label your shelves", but at personal level. Just have somebody a bit more level headed, with more experience and looking from outside.
If only I could secure accreditation for my rock with letters painted on the side spelling "And if that thing you're worried about does come to pass, what do you think would happen next?"
That sounds reasonable. Many Thanks! Also, sometimes problems can turn out to be simple if one happens to have the proper tool - the equivalent of "look at this in polar coordinates".
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/ )
You know, now that I read that I realize I read it myself, long ago. We stand on the shoulders of giants, you know?
Also the passage brings to mind a related bit of Allen humor: What if we had a day when everyone had to wear their underpants outside their pants?
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.
They made a comic book out of "Ren & Stimpy" that tried to have the same kind of humor as the Nickelodeon TV show.
Little Lotta.
Casper the Friendly Ghost.
The Phantom Blot
Richie Rich
Popeye
Mr. Mixyspidlick (sp?) in the Superman comics was comic relief.
Casper, Popeye, Richie Rich, Heckyll and Jeckyll - were cartoons on TV when I was little.
I think a comic book of any of those would have seemed like a step backward.
Well they were comic books to me, although animated Popeye cartoons were certainly around.
I never thought of them beginning as comic books.
I don't know about the others, but Popeye at least was a comic book hero before he was a cartoon.
Not just from Disney, though, but from the genius of one man - Carl Barks. An appreciation of him is as much in order as of Lee/Kirby.
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. 😆
Well, my childhood referents are Ma and Pa Kettle, The Little Rascals, the Apple Dumpling Gang, Carol Burnett, Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera. Thus an expert on humor (!!) - I should have known better about Archie but comics, especially newspaper comics, have always enjoyed an unusually low bar. Some like Cathy or Sally Forth almost existed in a state of tension, like the joke was you could have a very long running strip that was never once funny - which record must be kept pristine.
I laughed at some "Cathy" cartoons. This one, for example: https://home.assets.gocomics.com/cathy/1997/03/09
And if I remember right, "Sally Forth" did have a halfway decent joke once:
Sally: (looking out the window) Look at those poor homeless people, huddled around a fire!
Co-worker: Those aren't homeless people, Sally. They're smokers.
Sally: Add hypothermia to the list of things cigarettes cause.
On the other hand, I don't think "The Family Circus" was ever intended to be funny, and then there's Garfield, which apparently has been bad even by Garfield standards for quite some time now.
Cathy: Sweet. A real twist there at the end. Flirted with ruining the record.
Family Circus was mostly good for the draftsmanship which made some of the others look bad. As a child I liked the ones where little Billy (?) traced a path around the house/yard.
I remember once the subject of Garfield came up, at unnecessary length; and my grandfather-in-law, a man of few words, but one who read every one of the few words and all the comics in the daily paper of his town of 19,000, offered his laconic assessment: "That cat sure does love lasagna".
The cool comic guys on the college paper basically refused to acknowledge the existence of *any* of this - although there was one guy who did pretty fun and stylistically perfect parodies of Mary Worth and such when he needed to fill space.
They all worshipped Charles Schultz though.
ETA: my husband used to have a soft spot for Hagar the Horrible, I think largely based on one time that it was really funny.
"Peanuts" was pretty exceptional by the standards of 1960s comic strips, but not by the later standards of "Calvin & Hobbes."
"C&H" and "The Far Side" were to newspaper comic strips what "Seinfeld" and "The Simpsons" were to sit-coms: even an old guy like me had to admit they were vastly better than what I had consumed as a child in the 1960s and 1970s.
Can "Astral" readers get into "Peanuts" in 2024? Charles Schulz was extraordinary 60 years ago because he obviously had mental health issues involving depression and wasn't trying to hide it.
Family Circus is pretty good for its first few years; I personally think it settled into cute mediocrity, but my 7yo loves it, as honestly I did as well at her age, so I guess it has an audience.
Garfield also had a solid run for years. There's a reason America fell in love with it in the early '80s!
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'm kind of surprised it's taken this long for Broadway to get around to video games. Regarding songs, just to scratch the surface, there's Portal's "Still Alive", Witcher's "Toss a Coin to Your Witcher", Baldur's Gate III's "Weeping Dawn", Arcane/League of Legends "Enemy". Also, the fan-made songs are a HUGE rabbit hole. The most high-profile example right now would be the end credits of "Five Nights at Freddy's", which featured not a pop song, not a song written for the soundtrack, but an unofficial fan song written 10 years ago this month (and was already hugely popular).: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l18A5BOTlzE&list=PLKMCsqjSNmWEFSexT8ftPnHPRr5e5KNfr&index=8
Note how many views the video has (and that's not counting any other platforms).
I don't have the time or means to count number of memes, but personally I've seen way more video game references across the web than Big Lebowski.
I'll grant the silo is still there, but it's getting bigger and bigger as time goes on and more media people draw on videogames for creative ideas.
There's a lot of electronic music that has obviously drawn inspiration from game soundtracks.
>What games have led to as many memes on Twitter as The Big Lewbowski?
Mario, as a series.
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).
So did you click the link to my own review of his take on Usher? I thought the problem with it was that Poe's various stories shouldn't be adapted into a family-drama miniseries in which they're all supposed to be connected (same with adapting Turn of the Screw plus some other Henry James stories into Haunting of Bligh Manor, and Haunting of Hill House earlier). But his Stephen King adaptations (admittedly just feature films so far) have been better, and The Dark Tower is actually a series rather than a standalone story, and is supposed to be interconnected.
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).
OK, fair enough.
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.
If you didn't know if that person won the lottery, you would say the odds of them winning are slim.
Of course you wouldn't apply a probabilistic argument to disprove a fact you already know. SBF is presenting the low odds as evidence in the debate on whether Shakespeare is the GOAT because people don't agree on it and we have no objective way to tell.
If you're assuming Shakespeare being the GOAT is a known fact, then the probabilistic argument doesn't apply, but that's not the context the argument was intended for.
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.
Marlowe is very good, but definitely has a different style. His version of Hero and Leander, for example, is full of the sort of quaint conceits that make striking, but also discordant, imagery: I can't help but imagine Hero walking around with a "splish-splosh" sound effect:
"Buskins of shells, all silver'd, used she,
And branch'd with blushing coral to the knee;
Where sparrows perch'd, of hollow pearl and gold,
Such as the world would wonder to behold:
Those with sweet water oft her handmaid fills,
Which as she went, would chirrup through the bills."
Shakespeare's characterisation is really interesting because some of his plots want his characters to be more modern than they are. Specifically, he wants people to develop instead of having fixed traits. Henry IV is the most glaring example with his "hiding like the sun behind the clouds so people think I'm wonderful when I stop getting drunk and mucking about" plan, but even Hamlet's development is more "learning how the world works" than "becoming a more serious person to deal with the situation he's in."
The counter to that is that Shakespeare inadvertently hits on a more realistic and more interesting view of how people are than would be conventional in contemporary fiction, so may have just been going for that all along.
Speaking of comparing Marvel to DC, most people understate (or under-remember) the degree of "shared universe" DC was doing. It's just that each editor had their own shared silo. 1950s/60s Superman lore is surprisingly deep if you're expecting simple standalones.
On the "art has gotten better" point: my specialty is anime girls artwork (having collected over 200k unique pieces over 15 years). I agree wholeheartedly with the thesis that innovations ripple and that the general level rises with time (and preservation, which is probably why most of the increase in quality for anime girls artwork is recent, as in, from the early 90s). I would argue that anime/manga style drawing has gotten much more detailed, with better shading, a better and more varied use of colors, many many many less errors in terms on anatomy or perspective. I remember talking to artists saying that it is now very easy to reach a professional level using the internet (professional as in: actual companies commission you work for games or promotional art). A few of the artists I follow have a side business selling courses or tips for aspiring artists, which was probably not a very common thing before internet or the VHS.
Ultimately to get back on the review at hand: superheroes are not something I know a lot about, but I am happy to see that there was also this dynamic at work back then, if only because the industry was over concentred in one man. What about modern day super heroes comics? Do they still continue to improve? I personally never really liked the genre so I am oblivious to any change for the past 20 years...
The broad consensus is that American comics broadly (superhero comics being very much the central pillar) are floundering and stagnant. I've read a fair number of them (mainly on pirate sites), and non-superhero comics tend to be substantially better, with both somewhat older comics like Garth Ennis' Preacher and newer stuff like Scott Snyder/Stephen King's American Vampire being quite good. I also very much like Ennis' comic update of The Shadow, who is a sort of proto-superhero, cf Fires of Creation. When I tried to get into superhero comics back in high school, mainly stuff like Moon Knight and Daredevil, I found some things to like which were mired in vague continuities and storylines that got picked up and dropped as if with no long-term plan. Every so often I hear about some new superhero comic event out of Marvel or DC, but almost always because of some CW contention, never because anyone is reading them.
This makes for a very interesting contrast to the booming japanese manga business. Among my friend group who speak not a lick of japanese, stuff like JJK, Chainsaw Man, One Piece, Kaiju no.8, and Dungeon Meshi are all known references, even if you haven't necessarily read one of them. They know about superheroes, but mainly from the movies, which themselves are rapidly losing traction. Reading manga is normal, reading superhero comics is weird. Hell, my college bookstore carries (and prominently displays) the Berserk Omnibus.
Speculating, I think there's a sense that the manga industry is capable of actually promoting talent, whether they're auteurs or more workaday creators, and a sense that its more stagnant forms or genres do occasionally get some fresh ideas and aren't choking creativity as much, despite its working conditions being much, much worse than their American counterparts. I have no idea who the cool, up-and-coming creators in American comics are. It seems that anyone good and inspired publishes webcomics and prints finished volumes independently (like Tom Morgan with Kill Six Billion Demons) while actually working for the Big Two is a route to safe mediocrity.
My interested in US *style* comics peaked in the nineties ... When the superhero thing was being rather deconstructed,...and there was one heck of a British Invasion as well. Moore, Gaiman and Ennis were doing their best work...very honourable mentions to Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan, as well.
Perhaps the nineties, with their postmodernism and deconstruction, should be called the irony age of comics.
The most common terms for it are 'The Dark Age', or jokingly, 'The Mylar Age'.
I think the article unknowingly gets into what separates manga from contemporary American comics in part III when he talks about the factors that make something great.
Intrinsic and Innovative: Great works are never (or at least extremely rarely) great in all respects, or even good in all respects. Great works are great because they are great in one respect, usually in an innovative fashion. They may be mediocre otherwise.
The author misses the point in part V. "Lee wrote for boys, and it showed." Marvel's comics of the time were great at meeting the needs of their audience. It's hard, if not impossible for a creative artist (regardless of medium) to meet the needs of every audience, and attempts to retool something that was written for one audience to appeal to all audiences are doomed to fail.
One of the things manga does better than contemporary American comics is in identifying its target audience for a particular work and in recognizing the limitations of the medium. They don't expect shounen and shoujo manga to have the same audiences.
Relative, Generative and Innovative: These three are connected. Relative, generative and innovative all directly connect to the amount of examples and how fast they are created. If you only have two major comics companies producing series in two limited universes, your comparison for which series are relatively good is limited. If you keep within those two companies and their universes, you have little freedom for new innovation and few new successors are generated to allow the greatness of what inspired them to show.
Again, manga has an advantage that the environment is producing new titles all the time. Each generation has more works to compare as to which are relatively better, and What the consumers prefer is used to produce the next improved generation. It's SpaceX versus Boeing, where cheap costs producing constantly improving iterations works better than trying to make everything perfect from the get-go.
I stopped reading comics a bit over a decade ago, though I was quite the fan at the time. A question: Ryan North is one of my favourite internet authors, and I only got to read his forays into actual print comics in his first run at Adventure Time comics (which were great!). I know since then he went on to write a bunch for Marvel, has his stuff been any good? From your commentary here is doesn't seem like it's made an impact. Just asking since you seem to have dabbled a bit in recent times. It may be a matter of taste - North is a light hearted, silly, author, so if your interests are more serious then I can see the lack of appeal.
I'm afraid I've never heard of him. Looks like he's been pretty prolific at Marvel, though nothing since 2022. Lots of Fantastic Four, Howard the Duck, and Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. I can't say I know anything about the latter two, and I'm not about to dive into his stuff for a full review or comparison, but your question did surprise me. In particular, I'm surprised by the idea that a talented author entering mainstream comics *should* make some impact in the wider industry.
Say you get a really talented, possibly famous author on board for a comic series. How would people learn about this? That author's existing fans would probably learn via a social media announcement, and there's probably some kind of advertising for comic books (though I really can't remember a single time in my life I've seen one, online or in real life). Maybe geek news sites would carry it? But I'm a peripheral comic reader who doesn't read those sites and doesn't already know who Ryan North is. How would I learn? At that point, probably word of mouth.
Now, I would suspect the Marvel (and DC too, any comic ecosystem dominated by long-running titles) approach is particularly ill-suited to this. For me to get into Ryan North's Fantastic Four series, I first have to get into Fantastic Four in general, since I get the impression that this series isn't telling the story of the Fantastic Four from the start (which would get really old for longstanding fans) but plugging into a sort of assumed continuity. I'd need to either get briefed on the continuity somewhere (I assume there are primers for that?) or accept some confusion. That, and the fact that a lot of those issues seem to either have no credits on the cover or only surnames builds to the impression that it's less RYAN NORTH'S Fantastic Four, and more Ryan North (et al)'s FANTASTIC FOUR.
The fact that these are very much collaborative studio productions and not auteur pieces (no matter how talented the author, I don't expect Marvel is going to hand them the keys to one of their big properties without some pretty heavy control) should limit the impact any one author can have through them.
How fascinating, I can barely think of a time when I *didn't* follow authors in comics, where it was GARTH ENNIS' Punisher or BM BENDIS' Daredevil, even off to places like BRIAN WOOD's Northlanders. Certainly there were characters I'd have a proclivity to follow more intently, but authorship was always a big part of it for me.
Not only would I not agree with this, I don't think it's the consensus either. The average quality very likely has never been higher, due to the kinds of factors the reviewer mentions. It falls to select creators to rise above the average, but then, when was this _not_ the case?
For a very recent example, the first issue of Gillen/Wijngarde's 'The Power Fantasy' came out the other week, and stand to become an instant classic.
(Personally, I can't stand the vast majority of manga and anime. The tropes repel me.)
Started discussing on the ACX Discord #media channel. Would you say there's a distinction in terms of quality/stagnancy between the Big Two and more independent houses like Image?
The Big Two will tend to be more... what's a good word... predictable, perhaps? Consistent? Not stagnant or bad per se, but something you would know more in advance what you're getting. For these kinds of titles, you need to put your toys back into the box when you're done with them. There are very real limits on how wild you can get.
Overall quality isn't really a big difference - enough writers go back and forth between writing superhero comics for the Big Two and creator-owned stuff elsewhere. Hickman and Gillen are probably the best superhero writers of our time, and certainly do this.
For anyone interested in the topic: book by Chris Knowles: The Gods Wore Spandex
A couple night ago, my family watched *The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob* (1973), a French comedy about a bigoted frenchman who goes on the run with a middle-eastern revolutionary, both disguised as rabbis.
At the end, everyone agreed on a few things: first, the movie was *excellent*. Absolutely hilarious, nails the Jewish humor in particular. Second, it could never be made today for cultural reasons. Third, and most important, it would never get made today for storytelling reasons.
That premise I quoted up top sounds neat, right? Well you have to wait until halfway through the movie for anyone to disguise themselves as a rabbi. Never mind the subject matter, the structure and pacing is dramatically off compared to any modern film in a way that no studio today would greenlight it without substantial rewrites. What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise? What movie switches from focusing on physical comedy to joke comedy partway through instead of evenly mixing them?
This is what came to mind reading the remarks on storytelling development above. It's clear that basically any modern film is paced and structured in a much more sound way than *Rabbi Jacob*.
And yet...
*Rabbi Jacob* not only remains great, it doesn't seem to suffer from its odd pacing, even to modern viewers (n=5). That might be a worthwhile corollary to the points about the development of storytelling: while the development is real (I also recently watched *Severance*, and I can hardly imagine what would happen if you showed it to 1960s audiences) it doesn't necessarily move in a direction of quality for the reader/viewer, but in the direction of greater ease for the creator or the people behind them. A film that strictly follows the Hollywood Formula won't necessarily be great, or even good, but it will almost certainly be watchable and won't confuse mainstream filmgoers. It also won't surprise or delight them. It won't innovate. It's safe.
> What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise?
A few years back, a friend invited me to watch The Fighting Preacher, a 2019 biopic about a Mormon missionary sent out about 100 years ago to reclaim a historical site important to the church in an area that was hostile to them.
The thing that made the strongest impression on me was that it was about the halfway point in the movie before he did any fighting *or* preaching.
I remember someone watching Breaking Bad who commented "when is he finally going to start cooking meth??". I'm guessing it had a slow start too.
I'm pretty sure Walter and Jesse cooked their first batch of meth in the pilot episode. Someone seems to have had an inadequate attention span for the task at hand.
I'm not sure where that comment came from then. They made it sound like nothing happens until near the end of season 1.
Just checked: There are only seven episodes in season 1. Episode 1, Walter cooks his first batch of meth. Episode 3, his first unambiguous murder. Episode 6, he's become recognized (under the "Heisenberg" alias) as someone to be respected and feared by both the local drug lords and the local DEA office. Episode 7, he's completely OK with that and has found his new calling.
I suppose by cinematic standards, two-plus hours until the "antihero" kills anyone might count as a slow burn, but for a television series it seems about right.
Hitchcock's "Psycho" famously waits for almost an hour before the title slasher shows up - before that it appears to be setting up some sort of crime drama.
"Psycho" looks like a slasher movie only in retrospect. At the time, the interest was not in the "crazy killer" but in the surprise of having a movie jump the tracks plot-wise. Watch "Dementia 13" to get a sense of what it was like for the audiences of the time to see "Psycho."
>What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise?<
The Ladykillers (2004). 1h 44m. Approximately ten minutes of ladykilling at the very end.
Wince. If you're going to reference "The Ladykillers," please reference the 1955 original, which is FAR superior!
> What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise?
Gymkata is a movie about a martial art "based on gymnastics", and only has one scene where the hero inexplicably finds a pommel horse in the middle of a village and uses it swing his legs around and kick everyone.
> What movie waits until you're an hour in to actually invoke its main premise?
Oh man, there was this Chinese movie called Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and you literally see the end credits roll before you realise that in all the action and fun, at no point did you see either the tiger or the dragon. You expect it with the dragon. It's hidden. But the tiger? Come on!
(For those who know this was actually an idiom, feel free to reply and elaborate, but don't ruin the joke... just educate us!)
I really enjoy a lot of films from the 70s for that reason. Maybe it was the smaller budgets and the literal impossibility of creating a lot of special effects, but they are much more character driven. Dirty Harry is tame in terms of violence by modern standards, and he's not as competent as you might think based on how movies today would portray him. He's also almost realistic compared to various movies that have come out since that try to follow the same basic idea (hard nosed cop who pushes the boundaries). Those movies likely invented or popularized many of the cop tropes, including getting yelled at by the boss and getting partnered with someone unusual, but in a much more realistic way than we see later.
The 2005 King Kong takes about an hour of hijinx in New York City before getting to Skull Island. Honestly that first hour was the only hour of the movie I enjoyed.
I’m on a quest to read all of the comics on the Marvel Unlimited in order. I’m currently in 1963, and I have some nitpicks about this review.
The Fantastic Four reading a comic book about the Hulk doesn’t mean the Hulk is fictional to them. In Fantastic Four #4, Johnny reads an old comic book about Namor, and then meets Namor moments later. This is *before* Johnny reads the Hulk in #5.
At least two of the characters you list as new in the 1960s are older. Ka-Zar is from the 1940s, and Loki appears as an antagonist in a romance series about Venus from the 1950s.
A shared universe wasn’t completely new for Marvel in the 1960s. Namor and the original Human Torch started separate in 1939 but frequently met each other in the 1940s. Also, there’s a Namor story from the 1940s where he decides to stop WWII by conquering both the Axis and Allies. This story features, at least briefly, all of the major Marvel heroes at the time except for Captain America. (The other characters *are* fictional to Cap; FDR makes this clear in Captain America #1.)
Douglas Wolf did this and wrote a book about it, "Marvels". It's not very good. BTW did you know Trump bad? He'll remind you.
But he does relate a bunch of interesting crossover details, like one month early in Marvel where every single character appeared somewhere else in a big circle.
On “the art has gotten better”, the examples feel cherry picked. I’ve never read comic books so I can’t comment but when it comes to TV Shows, sure they’ve gotten far better, but they’ve gotten better from a really low bar. The TV Shows in the past, due to weird broadcasting requirements (that every episode had to be standalone enjoyable etc) never even attempted to tell a serious long arching story. There wasn’t any attempt to treat the medium with seriousness, now there is.
That said what about movies? We seem to be seeing a “marvelification” of movies. Every successful movie wants to be a franchise. Every franchise wants to be an easy going, popcorn flick where you can turn out your mind and enjoy the jokes, action and then tune in to the world at the end of the movie spending no significant afterthought into the movie.
One way to judge art is by how timeless we think it will be. What movie released in the 2000’s will be discussed a 100-200 years later? I can think of few candidates and none of them are Marvel Schlop. I can think of many more movie examples from the 1980’s, and I admit that for TV shows all my examples would come from the last decade or so (“Succession” and “Severance” being my absolute favorite pieces of art in recent history) but TV seems to be an exception to the trend.
Let’s go to other mediums, when it comes to paintings everyone knows the deconstruction that has happened with modern art to the point that most folk have no idea what is even trending in the painting world anymore and it also somehow has been captured as a medium by money launderers. There might be no paintings from this century that are timeless.
Poetry is pretty much dead. What about Novels? I will leave it to others to discuss, since no 1 person can reasonably even read a slice of all novels released in a year but among the categories I read of “fantasy”, I find it very hard to find any novel apart from “LOTR” that I would consider “GREAT”. In fact I’m seeing a dangerous trend of most fantasy novels released these days becoming more Mary Sue like wish fulfillment fantasy and less of a story.
And while SBF’s Shakespeare quote has been debated to death, one of the reasons Shakespeare is considered the Bard, is that a lot of his plays are indeed timeless. I don’t like deconstructing art a lot, but if I had to explain how an art becomes timeless, it’s when the art pokes at a fundamental timeless truth to the human experience that is too complex to explain in words but is express-able through a story. Hamlet is a play I still re-read and there is something fundamental about Hamlet’s indecisiveness that the story is pointing at, that feels very true to how humans behave that resonates with us to this day. Given this bar, I can’t help but conclude that as a whole, with some exceptions aside, art is on a negative downward trend.
I 100% agree — in general I think the decline looks a bit worse than it actually is because we never compare our stuff to the generic slop that got pumped out in the past(penny dreadfuls, soap operas, etc), but at the top I think it would be difficult to argue that any recent works are better than Shakespeare or the peaks of the 19th and 20th century in any domain.
Poetry has likely been displaced by recorded music. If you go back before audio recording technology had progressed far enough, music was once distributed by printed sheet music. Poetry was once easier to distribute via text, but now the accompanying music can go with it.
Poetry used to be better than the song lyrics of today.
Songs themselves used to be more complex too. https://slate.com/culture/2012/07/pop-music-is-getting-louder-and-dumber-says-one-study-heres-what-they-miss.html https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/ Jazz was once the form of American-born popular music, but was displaced by rock, which was displaced in turn, and now the masses listen to drum-machine beats and auto-tuned vocals.
Here in Italy in the history of our popular music there has not been a cataclysmic genre shift such as jazz being replaced by rock (most of our 20th century popular music would fall under the umbrella of "pop", Americans are not familiar with ours but they are familiar with Abba which I think is somewhat related), but the lack of a big genre shift makes the gradual simplification even *more* noticeable from decade to decade!
It's impossible not to hear it when you compare songs from each decade.
It has been going on for a century, very steadily.
Even more than a century perhaps. In the 1800s, opera arias were hits, people would sing them in the streets, and they were more sophisticated in their composition that any popular tune from the 20th century. And then the music of each decade has been more direct and simple than the one before.
Finally in the last few years (less than ten years I think) we're gotten the rap disease. All kids listen to these days is horrendous Italian rap, and related genres that I can't tell from one another.
What is happening?
Thanks.
It's interesting to hear from a sophisticated popular culture outside of the Anglo-American pop culture hegemony. I'd like to hear from a Brazilian as well about pop music's evolution in Brazil.
Brian Winter touches on this in his interview by Tyler Cowen, it does seem like something similar is happening there as well.
I guess a masculinity crisis is happenning, which results in ever-simplistic attempts to regain it.
RPG designer Kenneth Hite joked that when Bob Dylan won the Literature Nobel, it was the first time since Kipling it went to someone who primarily does rhyme.
I wasn't aware Kipling had won it.
1907
"Twin Peaks" was considered impossibly complex for adults to follow when it aired but if it was pitched today it would be considered boring.
Lynch also had "weird" plots in the sense of "wow how random" that were kind of shocking when done then, but today the audience would yawn "oh you did something really weird to shock us? Whatever."
The Twin Peaks sequel was just 7 years ago and it's rated a very high 8,5 at IMDB.
It's almost as if David Lynch is an important American artistic innovator.
>among the categories I read of “fantasy”, I find it very hard to find any novel apart from “LOTR” that I would consider “GREAT”<
Well I'm using this as a tangent to talk about a thing because I just read Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass, and while some of the characters can perhaps be described as one-note, the ensemble as a whole creates a solid dynamic, and the villains are weird and intimidating, and the whole thing comes together in a big climactic showdown where all our heroes get their moment to shine, and it's a really solid ending.
And then the book continues for another 150 pages.
Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros?
I'd say the "Marvelification" of cinema has improved it in a lot of ways. Making everything a franchise has increased narrative economy. Previously a movie had to spend time familiarizing the audience with the world and the characters each time. Now they can jump right into the story since a different movie already did all that. I've heard some complaints about this reliance on continuity from previous movies, mostly from casual movie goers who are upset that for once movies are being made for someone other than them. But overall it allows movies to do things that they couldn't do easily in the past. Something like "Avengers Infinity War" simply wouldn't be possible without previous movies to set it up.
I can think of numerous Marvel movies that are on par with some classic films of previous decades. The second and third Captain America movies, the Guardians Trilogy, the Deadpool Trilogy, most of the Spider-Man movies are some examples. I think they'll probably be as well remembered as classic superhero movies of the past like the Christopher Reeve Superman and Tim Burton Batman films. It clearly isn't true that most of these movies are merely light action movies that you stop thinking about when you turn them off either. They've inspired devoted fanbases who discuss them constantly, and a lot of them tackle fairly weighty themes for an action movie.
"Previously a movie had to spend time familiarizing the audience with the world and the characters each time"
"World-familiarization" (e.g., much of The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca) strikes me as often more interesting than trudging through the plot, especially in modern Quality Television. E.g., I loved the first few hours of "Mad Men" familiarizing me with upper middle class New York metro life in 1960, but quickly got depressed by the fear that there were going to be dozens of hours of the characters sleeping with each other.
That's often true, but in that case the movies can often build on existing world familiarizing and extend it instead of reinventing the wheel. For instance, the third "Thor" movie is one of the better recieved movies in the MCU, and Thor spends most of it stranded on an alien world. The filmmakers had more time to explore the alien world because they didn't also need to spend time familiarizing the viewers with Thor's home of Asgard.
> Previously a movie had to spend time familiarizing the audience with the world and the characters each time. Now they can jump right into the story since a different movie already did all that.
This would be good, except that Marvel movies don't generally bother to have a story either.
> What movie released in the 2000’s will be discussed a 100-200 years later?
There was an excellent SNL sketch about this, "The Big Hollywood Quiz". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q2G9QePGoI
---
Host: Robert, you're still in control. Our era is the '80s.
Robert: (𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘸) Great!
Host: Here's the question:
Host: The year 1989 featured movies like "The Little Mermaid," "When Harry Met Sally," "Batman," "Dead Poets Society," and "Do the Right Thing."
Host: Robert, name three movies from the past five years.
Probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The sketch is from 2023; that would whiff by more than 15 years.
Is there really a consensus that the LOTR movies are good? They have always seemed so obviously bad to me.
The cinematography is good.
Being bad isn't really the movies' fault; the books aren't great either.
I don't think the cinematography is good.
I don't think the movies represent the books either.
I ranted at length about it in Open Thread 340.
....
Is an academy award for best picture not *some* form of consensus?
The phrase "Oscar bait" exists because everyone knows that the academy awards are biased towards certain types of movie.
In the period in which ROTK was made, it was fashionable to give Best Picture to epic movies with epic battles. Braveheart won, then Gladiator won, and then Return of the King (a movie whose two most famous scenes were beat for beat rip-offs of the most famous scene in Braveheart).
ROTK was Oscar bait.
(by the way, I like epic movies with epic battles; LOTR is one of the worst in that genre).
Take a look at a list of Best Picture winner. Do you expect each one of them to be discussed 100-200 years from now (which is what Steve said of LOTR)?
Do we still discuss Best Picture winners from 100 years ago? The Broadway Melody, the winner in 1929, has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 42% (critics) and 20% (audiences). The Metacritic score is a bit better, but that's because it includes reviews from 100 years ago. Whereas movies from that era that are actually good have a good Rotten Tomatoes score.
20 years ago, the Oscars thought LOTR was the kind of movie that should win Oscars. Do we *still* think it's actually good?
> In the period in which ROTK was made, it was fashionable to give Best Picture to epic movies with epic battles. Braveheart won, then Gladiator won, and then Return of the King (a movie whose two most famous scenes were beat for beat rip-offs of the most famous scene in Braveheart).
This isn't a complete analysis; oscars were specifically withheld from the first two movies because they were viewed as a planned set, so all of the oscars won by ROTK are partially due to achievements of the other two films.
The problem with movies is that it formerly occupied niches that have now been conquered by TV and online video. The only niche left for movies is "big loud blockbusters", and so that's what we get.
The lack of subtitles in movie theaters encourages people over 50 to stay home and watch TV.
> The problem with movies is that it formerly occupied niches that have now been conquered by TV and online video.
Here are the top 10 movies (by box office receipts) in 1994:
1. The Lion King [Disney animated canon]
2. Forrest Gump [character-driven drama]
3. True Lies ["action comedy"]
4. The Santa Clause [comedy/Christmas; vehicle for Tim Allen]
5. The Flintstones [comedy; popular franchise]
6. Clear and Present Danger [action thriller based on a Tom Clancy novel]
7. Speed [action thriller]
8. The Mask [comedy; vehicle for Jim Carrey]
9. Mrs. Doubtfire [comedy; vehicle for Robin Williams]
10. Interview with the Vampire [horror; while I'm crediting vehicles I should probably note that this stars Tom Cruise alongside Brad Pitt]
It's not clear to me that this is a set of niches that has now been conquered by TV.
There's a Disney movie, and Disney is still doing those but the writing seems to have suffered. (The last one I saw was Encanto, which had excellent music and terrible writing, plot, and characterization. I haven't seen Wish but the impression I got was that the writing hadn't improved.)
#s 3/6/7 are action films and presumably they fit naturally into the surviving category of big loud blockbusters. (Of those, I've only seen Speed, which I remember as being more focused on dramatic dialogue in tense situations...) True Lies, as an "action comedy", appears to be a match for what Marvel tries to do.
There's one horror movie. I have no real knowledge of what goes on in that genre; maybe it's been successfully conquered by TV.
There's one character drama, Forrest Gump. What's the modern equivalent?
And finally, there are four comedies, three of which serve as vehicles for already popular comedians, and the last of which extends an already popular franchise. One of them is also a Christmas movie, which is a genre I'm certain hasn't been conquered by episodic shows.
But I don't hear about how comedy is thriving on modern TV. I keep hearing about how it's died and been replaced by political commentary given a light comedic slant, legacy of The Daily Show.
What are the shows that fill the comedy / celebrity vehicle / Christmas niches? This seems more like a bunch of niches that have stopped being served anywhere.
Horror movies are still doing fine. It's romantic comedies that have really suffered. Nowadays they're more likely to show up on Netflix than the big screen.
While Romantic Comedy as a genre used to be quite popular, were any of the individual movies really that good? I see a lot of them as more like the romance novel of the video world. They might be enjoyable and scratch some important itch (at least for the target audience), but the individual examples are poor and forgettable.
If I'm right, then maybe they've found their proper place, rather than dropping from a height.
I think it's more emblematic of how "non-AAA" mid-scale movies have moved off the big screen.
Agreed, but there's a reason that romantic comedies were not AAA before. It's a difficult genre to do really well, but an easy genre to do at all. Outside of paying big name actors (optional), it's one of the cheapest genres to produce. Outside of big name actors, there's not much to pull someone to watch a particular movie or care about high production values.
Yes. When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, The Seven Year Itch, North by Northwest (it’s 100% a romcom, fight me), It Happened One Night, The Apartment, are all romcoms I could come up with off the top of my head that are considered classics.
>I find it very hard to find any novel apart from “LOTR” that I would consider “GREAT”
Prince of Thorns?
The parallels comic universes and mythologies are pretty striking. I read this book a while back that really rubbed that in from the historical mythological side: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10133950-carthage-must-be-destroyed
We actually have surprisingly good evidence of how mythologies were applied to new places (oh yeah our town was totally founded by Hercules! Also turns out our country was founded by the Trojans!) and situations and mixed with and influenced each other.
I do appreciate this look back at the Silver Age, though I note you jump from the 60s to the 80s.
Did you deliberately leave out the 70s, when both DC and Marvel comics got rather strange? 😀 The 70s is when I started reading comics as a child, so I do remember some of it.
Giant Size X-Men, adding their most popular member!
Speaking of Shakespeare, faux-Shakespearean dialogue for Thor and the Asgardians, with that lush and slightly overdone 70s visual style:
https://50yearoldcomics.com/2020/11/03/thor-184-january-1971/
I remember when Thor was not Chris Hemsworth but a doctor with a limp and a cane which then transformed into Mjolnir!
Truly, the best time of anything was when you were a kid seeing it for the first time, and the new versions of course never stack up by comparison 😀
At that point, we've left the Silver Age.
>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).
This is a fine review, but this line is a dead give-away that the author has not actually read Shakespeare — aside from high school English class maybe.
>One explanation is that Shakespeare may not have been the best writer, but he was a very good writer (the best of his time), and that he was able to pick up the low hanging fruit of writing ideas.
This line is also funny taken with the bits about Ancient Greek Theater — because if the author had actually read any Ancient Greek Theater(or at least some comedy through Plautus) he might actually see "the low hanging fruit of writing ideas" actually being picked up. Which is why reading ancient comedy, for example, is actually a good bit like reading those old comic panels.
But if you actually read Shakespeare outside of your English class, I don't think you will come away thinking he was "picking up the low hanging fruit." Some things are just timeless and don't conform to SBF's idiotic Bayesianism.
8 minutes later and it is still a bit baffling to me that the author of this piece thinks that Shakespeare invented the general plots of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, etc out of whole clothe and, as the author implies, this was his chief innovation in storytelling. It is shockingly impressive that the author picked the one part of Shakespeare that was completely derivative — Shakespeare took almost all of his plots from existing sources. I recommend reading Ovid's version of Pyramus and Thisbe and then Romeo and Juliet to maybe get a sense of what Shakespeare was actually doing.
Or
Please read a soliloquy. Please read a soliloquy. Any random soliloquy. It won't hurt. Please Please Please Please Please Please.
And actually he doesn't even have to read Shakespeare, just some sort of secondary source besides SBF and Richard Hanania. A.C Bradley would probably do him some good. Or even just Shakespeare's Wikipedia page.
If it helps your emotional state, I was also struck dumb by the ignorance of that whole line of argumentation. Baffling.
The quality of Shakespeare criticism is astronomical. For example besides A.C. Bradley, there is William Hazlitt.
Disagree with so many aspects of this that I could write huge screeds, but just one easily demonstrated one is that in the pop cultural space these kinds of shared universes of characters were already widely proliferating at the time Marvel comics was getting going, particularly with kaiju films and the later entries and derivatives of the Universal monster series, as well as partial implementations in cheap genre cinema & postmodern art films, and in comics with the work of Osamu Tezuka among others. Its also not particularly accurate to view the history of Marvel comics as a portal into how these grand mythologies were coagulated because the structure and content of past mythologies was an extremely strong, direct and self conscious point of reference (eg Thor) in the creation of the Marvel mythology.
The shared "universe" of Universal monster movies was much looser. Dracula's Daughter may be a sequel to Dracula, but it completely forgets the existence of all the human characters other than Van Helsing who could explain what it is that Van Helsing did. And of course there was no assumption back then that it would be in the same universe as Frankenstein or The Mummy. A lot of the crossovers were in Abbot & Costello movies, which everyone knew were comedies not to be taken seriously.
>> there was no assumption back then that it would be in the same universe as Frankenstein
"House of Frankenstein" (1944) *koffkoff*
Okay, if you try putting all those movies into a single continuity, it won't work, but there were more cases of monsters showing up in each other's movies than just in the Abbott and Costello movies.
1944 is more than a decade after Universal's first Frankenstein & Dracula movies (Dracula's Daughter is from 1936). Admittedly, House of Frankenstein is a sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man from 1943, but that's also more than a decade after the original Frankenstein (though not so long after The Wolf Man).
?? And this makes it different from the MCU, whose "universe" has now been strung out over 16 years? I think you've just identified longevity as another point of similarity!
Lack of strong continuity amongst the Universal films (which I acknowledge) is a much stronger argument against calling the Universal catalog a "universe."
My point was that the films were not linked for a long time. Whereas Iron Man (which I admittedly haven't seen) ends with a post-credits scene of Nick Fury recruiting Tony Stark into the Avengers Initiative.
I cosign what MaxieJZeus said and would add that rigorous internal consistency has never been the point (or perhaps never even really been an attribute) of these expansive network mythologies.
I think there's much less emphasis on it in the Universal monster movies than the MCU.
Well, that would just make the Universal... universe closer to Greek myths than the MCU is. The Greek myths don't even bother to struggle for consistency.
The Universal films started out as adaptations of different literary works (you could even go really far back with Lon Chaney in silent versions of Hunchback of Notre Dame & Phantom of the Opera), and since they'd been written by different people there was no expectation they shared a universe. Frankenstein is ~78 years older than Dracula, and both novels were written as being roughly contemporary with their publication date (the former is scifi, and the latter tries to be up to date with the latest science, which unfortunately wasn't late enough when it comes to blood types).
As a bit of a comic book nerd and a lot of a literary nerd, I'd like to contest a couple of these points.
First, I don't think it's clear-cut that the art style in comic books has improved. A lot of those early comics have a visual style that's beautiful in a distinctive way that modern superhero comic books don't achieve. To give an example, the Steve Ditko run on Dr. Strange is so gorgeous that I often enjoy flipping through those comics just to look at it—even though the storytelling is pretty much unreadably bad. On the other hand, Ultimate Spider-Man, which has much better writing, has (in my opinion) a fairly ugly style. It's more compositionally sophisticated, but not pleasant to look at, and like a lot of comics from its time, full of ugly gradient effects.
(Ironically, the gradient effects could be taken as a problem coming from this "progressive" notion of art. New digital coloring tech was available, and artists felt they had to take advantage of it whether or not they could use it in an aesthetically pleasing way.)
Second, I don't think you can equate progression within a medium to progression within art as a whole. This comic book thing gives some sense of that. Particular art forms emerge historically because of changing social and technological conditions. On one hand, improved cheap printing technologies made comic books as a medium possible. On the other hand, the kind of drama the Greeks created is no longer possible, as the social institutions that made it meaningful no longer exist. Are comic books "better" in some meaningful sense? They're better in the sense that they're more popular at this exact moment, but popularity waxes and wanes—they could easily be forgotten, in the same way that most Restoration plays are (deservedly) forgotten. I love comics but I wouldn't trade Aeschylus for any number of them.
"Improvement" in art is dubious because there are no common goals. Artists have never agreed on what the purpose of art is. Within narrow fields where artists share obvious goals, you can say that one artwork beats another. But when you're looking across centuries? To a listener from the renaissance, most twentieth century music would be intolerably dissonant. To a listener raised on post-Wagnerian classical music, most contemporary music would be intolerably simplistic both melodically and harmonically. On the other hand, to a modern listener, much older music feels far too simple rhythmically. And there's no authority to appeal to: great artists often have deeply idiosyncratic taste (e.g. Tolstoy famously hated Shakespeare, Paul Valéry disliked the novel as an art form, etc.), and extremely innovative artists often have classicist tastes (it's not coincidental that the modernists were obsessed with the classics) and dislike their contemporaries not merely from a sense of rivalry.
>full of ugly gradient effects.
Not to mention full of "photocopied" repeated panels (like all Bendis books). Ugh!
Bendis, repeating himself? Really? Bendis, the cartoonist? Repetitious?
"First, I don't think it's clear-cut that the art style in comic books has improved."
Such as the terrible 90s Rob Liefeld style? Which was equally as awful for the male superheroes, see the infamous "What the hell?" version of Captain America:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Liefeld#Art_style
https://www.cbr.com/rob-liefeld-captain-america-heroes-reborn-art-auction/
And of course Greg "I traced expressions for female superheroes from porn" Land:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Land
No discussion of Rob Liefeld's art is complete without mentioning "The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings" plus sequel:
https://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2960508/worst-rob-liefeld-drawings
I don't think this review is without merit - it's often quite interesting - but I find that its opening framing is really a perfect expression of the culture of artistic victimhood in the 21st century. The MCU is the most successful movie franchise of all time. Marvel characters just helmed the most successful R-rated movie of all time. This is dominant, mass culture. Every major university has credit-bearing classes on comic books now. They are discussed in the Paris Review and The New Yorker. There is no snooty highbrow culture as waved at in the beginning; such a thing simply does not exist in 2024. And yet the whole tenor of this thing is from the perspective of someone who believes that he's a beleaguered and marginalized outsider because he loves the same culture as everybody else does. It's exactly like the Taylor Swift fans who complain about being oppressed while their hero wins every Grammy, sells millions, and is feted in every cultural publication on earth.
We live in an era of all-encompassing cultural populism. You guys have to stop pretending that you're oppressed because you like comics. It's just so weird and untrue and senseless.
Now, come on, why should the ground of victimhood not be claimed along with everything else? It may only yield a faint scrap of moral power, but it's hardly vitalist and virile to just leave it in the hands of any actual victims.
Freddie, are you calling me weird? Are you saying that I'm - gasp! shock! horror! - a *Republican*??? 😁 (Well, 32-county Republican, maybe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsTyyfcf_yY Time to fire up the Wolfe Tones' Greatest Hits?)
I can truly claim never to have fallen out of a coconut tree! 🌴 Yes, I proudly and shamelessly reclaim the term and declare my weirdness!
This "nerd moment" we are living through is a recent development, and a lot of Gen Xers or older will remember a time when interest in comic books was considered very weird and unhip, so I'd cut the review at least a little slack.
It's also not clear that the moment isn't coming to an end, later if not sooner. In the 1930s, Walt Disney cartoons were for all ages (as Pixar is considered today), but 40 years later they were dismissed as "kid fare." Similarly, everyone in the 1970s thought "Star Wars" was for everyone; now, if you complain about current "Star Wars," you're as likely as not to be reprimanded with, "Why do you care about kids' movies about space wizards?" It wouldn't surprise me if in thirty years the MCU found itself in the nursery alongside "Snow White."
In defense of the reviewer, they are not writing for a general audience, but rather the ACX crowd. I'd expect old school elitists as well as people fed up with "Marvelslop" to be overrepresented here.
The cultural populism that you’re talking about here reminds me of the sociologist Richard Peterson’s idea of “cultural omnivorousness.” You ever hear of this? I really like this thought, and I wish more people knew about it, because I think it gets a lot of things right about today’s contemporary “highbrow,” cultural elite: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096460
I think you're trying too hard to shoehorn one of your critical idée fixes into your review of this review, I didn't find it to have an attitude of cultural populism or victimhood at all.
The reviewer did the opposite of what you're saying they did. The opening exhorted the serious people on ACX to take an interest in a review of comic books, something implied to be too lowbrow and pedestrian for the audience here.
Marvel can at the same time be dominant mass culture and widely despised. Plenty openly agree with Scorsese that it's "not cinema". I'll grant the Taylor Swift thing though. There's no modern highbrow music outside of irrelevant academic stuff that no outsider has ever heard, it's either Beethoven or "poptimism".
I agree with you in part, but are Comics really the same thing as the MCU? Marvel is certainly extremely popular and impossible to miss, but comics still seem to be marginalized and for unpopular kids.
There seems to be a small sheen from people who've read comics who can point to important plot points that the MCU might show us in a movie, but the movies do their own thing often and regularly do completely different things than the comics. I remember discussion of Civil War before the movie came out, and people discussing possible directions. Once the movie came out, there was very little interest in the comics anymore.
The only argument this review give for calling superhero comics "myth" is that they're interconnected.
Really? Is that all there is to it?
Is interconnectedness the definition of "mythology"?
I don't think superheroes are "myth" at all. I think the main reason people feel they should be called "myth" is that they are drawn with bulging muscles and heroic poses, somewhat resembling ancient Greek statues. It's a very shallow analogy.
When I think "mythology" I think of Adam and Eve and the snake, or Kronos devouring his children, or Prometheus giving humans fire and being punished for it, or the resurrection of Jesus. Stories that were originally believed in, explained the world and were entwined with religion. Marvel and DC have little in common with that.
Even Homeric heroes (who constitute only a part of Greek mythology) are not particularly like superheroes. They traits they have in common with superheroes are the same generic ones that they have in common with every action or adventure hero ever. Achilles and Odysseus are no more like Superman than they are like Rambo or Jack Sparrow.
Superheroes are only mythology if you define mythology so broadly that everything is mythology.
Edit: Balzac novels are all interconnected, are they "mythology" according to the reviewer?
Can you define mythology other than giving examples?
"Stories that were originally believed in, explained the world and were entwined with religion."
I share Caba's reluctance to call Marvel stories myths. They are fantasies set in the modern world, reflecting culture rather than explaining it. But they're great at what they do.
By that definition the closest thing to modem myth is ...conspiracy theories? new age doctrine?
I mean, I get it. They're interconnected, but they've also got larger-than-life characters with superhuman powers who are sometimes supposed to represent a cultural ideal or power fantasy.
Rabbi Jacob is probably Louis de Funes's second best film - try La Grande Vadrouille next! Also, neat link to comic books: De Funes's house was the inspiration for the house Captain Haddock's house in Tintin.
It seems to me 99 percent of the plots in Marvel comics and movies boils down to this formula, with slight variations: 1) Good guy meets bad guy. 2) Bad guy almost defeats good guy. 3) Good guy defeats bad guy.
It is excruciatingly boring.
Even more boring variations are possible, but never seen.
1a good guy never faces any challenges,
2a lives boring life
3a dies of natural causes
.
.or....
1b good guy meets bad guy
2b gets killed instantly
Your second example is the entire slasher genre.
Well.slasher.movies aren't five.!minutes long. It 'a more like a series of good guys get killed, until one them triumphs.
For superhero movies it's often:
1) Guy discovers his superpower
2) Guy fights general evil
3) Guy fights specific evil
I found Unbreakable interesting, where the director said he wanted to make a movie purely dealing with 1). Imo it didn't quite work, but at least it wasn't derivative.
The older I get, the more I care about whether a movie does things right, than whether it does things new. Movies can be done well, or poorly, separately from their budget or high level formulation. Winter Soldier is a better movie than Iron Man 2, despite both having aspects of your formula. The Avengers is better than Age of Ultron.
I've come to hate action films that essentially boil down to "main character mows down legions of enemies without a challenge" even if I still really like action movies. The only difference that seems to matter is how well the movie is executed. The Equalizer is far superior to its sequels, etc.
Isn't that most fiction? E.g., going through IMDB's top movies of all time list...
- The Shawshank Redemption
- 12 Angry /Men
- Fight Club
- The Matrix
- Terminator 2: Judgement Day
- The Lion King
- Alien
Not at all most fiction, no! You just have to know where to look.
For example "Slogans" (2001), one of my all-time favourites. The bittersweet, tragi-comic story of two schoolteachers in rural Albania anno approx. 1970, where children spend the schooldays making long communist slogans in the hillside - and the longest slogans are given to the teachers the local Party Committe wants to punish for some minor transgression, or for not responding to the advances of the principal. Stuff like that. Deeply human. No real villain, everyone plays their part and with the few cards they have been dealt. Life just as surreal as it is.
The whole movie is on youtube with English subtitles, by the way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeAbkpoTKkE&t=4355s
I'm claiming "most X are Y". You're claiming "not most X are Y". I gave 7 examples of X that are Y. You gave 1 example of an X that isn't Y.
But also, your example of a work of fiction which does not adhere to "1) Good guy meets bad guy. 2) Bad guy almost defeats good guy. 3) Good guy defeats bad guy." is a movie where:
1) A new biology teacher meets the local party secretary.
2) Local party secretary almost crushes the biology teacher's spirit.
3) In the climatic battle of wills, the biology teacher refuses to denounce his relationship with the French teacher, and stays true to his principles despite the local party secretary's best efforts.
I'm glad you watched the movie!
And, ok, I stand corrected, sort-of. You are right that even this movie has a similar 1-2-3 structure. Although the ending is not a triumph for the teacher over the local party boss and principal. He & the kids are back at making slogans in the hillside, resigned to their fate. But - ok - arguably he and the kids (and the French teacher sent to an even remoter village) are still "inner free". It's not a pitch black 1984-type ending.
"Warner Bros. Discover"
typo: should be Warner Bros. Discovery
There are several typos I noticed throughout the review, it could have used a little more proofreading.
I really tried, but it lost me at Wayne Gretzky.
Read what the review will be, not what it is.
I'm really not sure that leading the target wasn't known before Wayne Gretzky.
For example, he's not quoted as saying "lead the puck".
Lifelong hockey fan and player here, old enough to have seen Gretzky firsthand in his prime. This review repeats some cliches about him more than it actually summarizes his impact on hockey. I will try to summarize without asking the reader to know or care much about the specific sport.
To some degree Gretzky was simply a generational savant of his profession. He dominated every league he played in literally from age 8, was playing and succeeding against older boys from age 10, was a national figure in Canada by age 14. This despite never at any level being the fastest skater nor physically imposing.
The reviewer here is correct that Gretzky changed basic assumptions about how scoring in the sport could be maximized, and changed them forever. Combine uniquely-obsessive skillbuilding from a young age (there are a number of Canadian sports-fan legends about his father and he all of which seem to be basically true); way-out-the-long-tail gifts in hand-eye and other physical coordination; and what scouts call today a "hockey computer in his head" (it is after all a fast-paced real-time sport). The result was Wayne Gretzky.
Here is one hockey-specific sidebar on that. It is of course a physical sport -- it is not only legal but central to the game to stop scoring threats by successfully "bodychecking" a player who is skating in possession of the puck. (Without that every professional-level game would be 20-19 or whatever.) Gretzky demonstrated that a medium-sized player without blazing (by pro standards) skating speed could nevertheless make himself extremely difficult to "knock off of the puck". For many fans, me being one, this was actually his most awe-inspiring skill -- he could to an amazing degree evade checkers while maintaining control of the puck and without needing to actually look at the big skilled pros who were trying the check him. It was crazy to watch, we used to say that he seemed like a ghost dancing through expressway traffic -- on ice skates!
His specific gifts and new approach to scoring in hockey were also perfectly timed. For various reasons I won't bore you with, hockey in the 1970s/80s was pretty much set up for the right player to break a lot of its existing assumptions/habits of strategy and tactics. Gretzky was that player. The way Babe Ruth showed everybody that in baseball it was rational to change the basic strategy of hitting, Charlie Christian demonstrated that electrifying a guitar turned it into a melodic or "lead" instrument, etc.
The reviewer is correct that Gretzky today could not have the same marginal impact on his profession. He might well become the greatest single player, having when young benefitted from today's enormous advances in training, sports medicine, etc. But since hockey today has his own innovative leaps now baked in, and because of some other relative changes starting with the quantum improvement in goaltending, Wayne Gretzky 2.0 today would not break existing scoring records by 50 percent and so forth.
I'm specifically objecting to the idea that "skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been" was new, innovative, surprising, or anything similar.
In shooting sports this is called "leading the target", and it is a fundamental requirement of hitting anything that moves. It has been known since the first person was able to reliably hit an animal with a rock. It's as basic as the idea that "if you aim directly at the fish, you'll miss" in spearfishing.
It's a good thing to put on a poster because it sounds wise, but it's not anything that wouldn't have already been known.
I agree that it's an overused cliche regarding Gretzky's game. Other attributes of his were more innovative and, for knowledgeable viewers of the sport especially when watching in person, more striking.
That said, you appear to be misunderstanding it. The skill that quote referred to was not analogous to "leading the target" -- it wasn't about when Gretzky had the puck and was passing it to another player. It was the opposite: he had an unusual talent for anticipating and intercepting pass attempts or clearouts by players on the _other_ team. It seemed sometimes like he "just knew" where the puck was going to go and would suddenly appear all by himself in that spot to intercept the puck.
> That said, you appear to be misunderstanding it. The skill that quote referred to was not analogous to "leading the target" -- it wasn't about when Gretzky had the puck and was passing it to another player. It was the opposite: he had an unusual talent for anticipating and intercepting pass attempts
I don't see what it is that I'm supposed to be misunderstanding. Intercepting the puck is exactly what I had in mind. The target being led is not another player; it's the puck.
Sorry, we're beating the dead horse to a pulp here, but that doesn't make any sense. You seem to be imagining Gretzky, what, going out for a long pass like a wide receiver in football? That's not at all what that particular cliche referred to.
It was him seeming to be able to read semi-chaotic crowded action within especially the neutral zone and know where the next guy to collect the puck would decide to send it before he'd even collected it. Or understanding that somebody's pass attempt was going to get deflected to someplace else on the ice and moving himself towards that area before it even happened. Stuff like that. Very frustrating for those of us rooting for the other team (the Chicago Blackhawks in my case) because it appeared sometimes as if he had a cheat code or something.
> You seem to be imagining Gretzky, what, going out for a long pass like a wide receiver in football?
Is there a reason you're saying this?
Fair question….you appear to have no conversational skills or value so, no. And welcome to my mute list.
I don't know very much about hockey.
When you use phrases like "able to read semi-chaotic crowded action" or "it appeared sometimes as if he had a cheat code or something", you make it sound like Gretzky is doing something that is very non-obvious, and hard for us non-hockey-fans laypeople to grasp and duplicate.
In contrast, the review's core point is that "What is obvious today once had to be invented by someone, and wasn’t obvious before that happened." I think the Gretzky thing is supposed to be analogous to the "what if we added a 2nd actor?" innovation in play writing.
So if you're referring to something non-obvious (even today), but the reviewer is referring to something obvious (at least to us, today), then I suspect the two of you are not referring to the same thing.
Hence, I'm inclined to agree with Paul Botts here. I.e. it's possible that the reviewer, Paul Botts, and I all have an incorrect understanding of hockey and what Gretzky did, but we all have the shared understanding of "leading the target", even if that's not what Gretzky actually did.
Sports provide a colossal amount of data for understanding how the world works.
One big thing the review fails to mention is the Comics Code Authority. In 1954, comic book publishers decided to self censor their works under threat of congressional action. The criteria they enforced was incredibly restrictive, and seriously limited the types of stories that could be told through the medium.
It does allude to it a few times, like mentioning that using SF elements let you bypass some code restrictions.
Cool to see someone review comic books, but you lost me in the “Why Superhero Comic Books?” section unfortunately …
> “One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. […] Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave).”
So understanding comic books is going to change how I behave and align my behaviors more with Western culture’s ideals? … Or it’s going to teach me about how I’m *expected* to behave? … Or it’s going to teach me about my culture’s values?
… How do comic books provide marginal value in those domains over and above, y’know, growing up and spending my whole life living in a Western culture?
> “My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture.”
How did your wife struggle? Like, did she struggle to understand those metaphors and allegories and was, therefore, confused? Or did she behave in ways that are inappropriate in a society where religion is widespread? I take it that it’s something like the former (rather than the latter) since you mention the “Western canon,” but then what do you mean by “Western canon”? Like, the Western literary/ philosophical canon? So understanding religion helped your wife to read the classics better? That seems kind of trivial. …
… This seems like a missed opportunity to have made concrete the unique, marginal value that you perceive an understanding of comic books to bring. If your wife was struggling in some non-trivial way, and if understanding religion provided her some value outside her English/ classics courses, it would have been great to hear about it.
> “I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ is an important idea to understand. So is, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’.”
What makes understanding these stories and ideas “important”? And how does understanding the source material from which they derive help us to understand/ better align with these common aphorisms over and above, y’know, knowing the aphorisms?
… With regard to all these points: I don’t mean to be nit-picky, but as someone who’s entering the 6th year of a PhD program in English, I’ve been exposed to MANY arguments like these, and I can’t help but to find them vague, hand-wave-y, and unconvincing. I like the rationalism community because this community tends to prize precision and specificity and tends to be critical of hand-wave-y clichés like these.
In fact, my personal take is that the vagueness of these clichés is a feature, not a bug. The vagueness allows people that are into studying and discussing cultural products in academic or online spaces to claim that they and their subject matter is “important” without making controversial and/or unsubstantiated claims that specify exactly how and why it’s “important” and/or without inviting debate and controversy amongst other cultural elites.
(In fact, I sometimes suspect that the real desire of these folks is simply to spend time thinking and writing about cultural products they like, and so they throw out some vague justifications—something something cultural literacy—that are broadly agreeable, insofar as they’re vague and, therefore, open to interpretation, which enables them study and write about the cultural objects they like.)
Plus, I can’t help but to be suspicious that there might be a certain amount of elitism in statements that invoke “educated people” like this one: “In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture.”
As I understand it, to be a public intellectual in some European cultures/ countries, you need to fit in with the elites by clearly signaling your “educated,” “refined,” “upper class” status by exhibiting your familiarity with stuff like the Western literary canon, the classics, the opera, etc.
I *like* that this isn’t expected of public intellectuals and other “educated people” in the US. … Don’t get me wrong—I think that there’s still a lot of ugly “education signaling” that happens in elite spaces in the US, but this signaling doesn’t seem as uniform nor as snobbish as it is in Europe: i.e. in some spaces you do this with social-justice-y arguments, in others you do it by signaling familiarity with science and engineering, in others you do it by signaling knowledge of concepts and heuristics drawn from economics (e.g. Stephen Dubner/ Freakonomics, wonky left-wing spaces like Matthew Yglesias’s Substack, the rationalism community, to an extent), and in others you do it by signaling a more general understanding of the social sciences (think: Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, etc.).
All virtue signaling has its problems and drawbacks, but I like the relative diversity of education signaling that we have in the US and I like how non-arbitrary and relatively un-snobbish this stuff feels. If the only reason to understand the opera (or, in this case, the Bible) is to fit in with other “cultured,” educated people and doesn’t provide any marginal value to those educated people and/or society over and above the ability to fit in with other educated people, then that only speaks poorly of the educated people in your culture. To me, it implies that your elite class has fallen prey to entrenched/ locked-in social dynamics that require you to devote time to arbitrary, outdated stuff (like learning enough about the opera to appreciate it) just to fit in, and which only really helps to differentiate (and in some cases alienate) your elite class’s culture from that of the “masses.”
This argument about familiarity with the Bible being important to being an “educated person” today is meant to apply to an understanding of comic books, which seems like the polar opposite of the opera—an artistic medium of the masses rather than the elite … But that’s the thing; in Europe, some of these older, snobbish elite dynamics are still at play, but across much of the Western world (and this is especially true of the US, I think), being “cultured” today doesn’t mean being snobbish and liking snobby stuff like the opera—it means being a “cultural omnivore.” (This idea comes from a sociologist named Richard Peterson: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096460) Cultural omnivores are more familiar with a wider range of artistic and cultural products than are the less educated, less elite, less omnivorous “masses.” Snobbish elite cultures require you to become familiar with stuff (like the opera) that separates you from the masses, while in more egalitarian/ populist elite cultures, developing broad, “omnivorous” cultural literacy is prized.
Personally, I prefer an egalitarian, educated, elite class that prizes cultural omnivorousness over cultural snobbishness, but the author didn’t say “Understanding comic books will make you more culturally omnivorousness, which will help you to fit in better with other culturally omnivorous, educated, elite people.” That, at least, would have been honest. Instead they said, “something something ‘valuable,’ something something ‘important,’ something something, ‘educated.’”
And that really gets my goat, because it’s vague, open-to-interpretation arguments like this that, in my view, preserve the status quo in the arts and humanities by reassuring everyone that they’re “important” and “valuable” without ever specifying what that value and importance is in any realistic or empirically justified terms.
> How do comic books provide marginal value in those domains over and above, y’know, growing up and spending my whole life living in a Western culture?
You don't have to read comic books specifically, but growing up in Western culture you'll inevitably be exposed to a thousand other versions of the same myth. Plucky underdog achieves power by being humble and virtuous, and uses this power to defeat an army motivated by pure evil and its arrogant leader. That's every comic book. It's also Star Wars, it's Lord of the Rings, it's Die Hard, it's James Bond, and it's World War 2 (the mythical version thereof, not the actual messy historical version.)
Arguably the WW2 myth is the real foundational myth of our current culture and everything else is just riffs on that.
Yep! This is more or less the point I was making.
Huh. I'm still quite attached to some of those elitist shared collections of myths (including the Bible myths - like the OP I taught my kids those stories as useful cultural hooks). But I like your point about how a broader, less prescriptive myth base and knowledge base has a lot of value. I hope you start writing on your blog, I would read that!
Who was it who said, "There are only two stories; someone leaves home, or a stranger comes to town."?
> The couple that could not be together because of “reasons” is not the highest art, but it is far beyond what was in play in any comic prior [to] Silver Age Marvel.
I think of Superman's keeping Lois Lane at arms' length because she is safer if she doesn't know his secret identity (or something) as a pretty canonical part of his narrative. Does it not go back as far as I imagine?
"The last comic book you read was more likely by Bryan Caplan than Jonathan Hickman."
If I ever knowingly read a comic by Bryan Caplan, it's time to take me out back and shoot me since I'm overdue for the glue factory. The last comic book I read was one of the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" series by Alan Moore, which at least is proper comics books, even if Moore is away with the fairies.
The closest I've come to comics is graphic novels. The last I read back in the ~80"s? by Larry Niven. (IIRC)
Oh, graphics novels. The equivalent of those SF writers who went "We don't write skiffy, that's uncool" (see Margaret Atwood's remarks about it, though she seems to have rowed back now: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/speculative-or-science-fiction-as-margaret-atwood-shows-there-isnt-much-distinction) "We write *speculative* fiction, that's like, deep, man, and more like proper literature".
"I don't read comics, I read graphic novels" strikes me the same way. Yes, graphic novels have developed differently, but ultimately their roots, like speculative fiction, are deep in that grotty old rag-and-bone shop of the heart which were comics and science fiction.
Why should superhero comics not be worthy of discussion? Here in the UK, most of our political leaders (at least until PPE took over [that's Philosophy, Politics and Economics in case you might mistake it for something more currently relevant!]), and most of the senior civil servants studied mesolithic superhero myths (aka "The Classics") at university. At least the Marvel superheroes occasionally touch on current day issues.
Just a tangentially related thought: the reviewer makes a big deal out of innovation in the genre, and basically equates it with progress.
But innovation and improved capabilities in the arts has often been a mixed blessing! Most famously seen in classical music around mid 20th century, composers had become so good at the mechanics of the genre (Western harmony, melodies, form...) that they just kind of hit a wall, complained that making music that touches the heart had become too easy, called for a revolution, and proceeded to flail around, experimenting with deliberately ugly music (see: Boulez). That quickly lost its popularity, and many decades later, the academic genre is still collectively half stuck in "what to we do now".
Same kind of thing happened to painting to a certain extent - once they were good enough to do everything from photorealism to abstraction, what is left to explore without being more of the same?
In a way the successive innovations are as constraining in one way as they open paths in another. When Western music matured its system of harmonic tension-cadence-release, it became an obligation to use it with ever increasing intensity, and alternative types of expression were more or less lost. These days I often find myself gravitating to modal music, which avoids the common period harmonic system, and finding remarkable commonalities in everything from medieval tunes to modal jazz to non-Western traditions.
If there's a way to "like" a comment, I don't see it, so I'll just say "like" in a comment.
And I'll add that I especially agree with the observation about equating "innovation" with "progress." Innovations and improvements are not made across-the-board: they are made to particular areas, and in the arts these are often accompanied by simplifications to those aspects outside the immediate area of exploration/innovation. E.g., doesn't counterpoint simplify greatly in the time between Bach and Haydn precisely so it's easier to experiment with harmonies without having to worry about polyphony?
If so, it's not really about "progressing" to something better, but about an art evolving into a new form or style as innovations occur in specifc areas, causing further innovations in others. If so, then it becomes difficult to refer to artistic evolutions as "progress", just as it is difficult to refer to biological evolutions as "progress."
I enjoyed the review, but admittedly only skimmed some parts. A couple comments.
1) The bit about Shakespeare writing things so that everyone later would be derivative of him if they told the same story. This is sort of true, but not really. A lot of them were retellings of older works, written before the printing press, and not in English. Did he make them better? I'm sure in many ways he did. But he also was in the right place and time to have his works spread. And we do have modern retellings of very similar storylines, often self-consciously so. It's remixes all the way down, in some sense.
2) Personally, I think my favorite example of modern/later versions of a story being better than the original is The Wizard of Oz (and its sequels. The books are absolutely awful drivel. Stuff just happens, one event after another. No attempt to have a coherent plot or world *at all.* The movie was genuinely much better.
3) Since I already mentioned the printing press, I think it's worth pointing out that technological advance for cultural transmission plays a big role. A lot of the Greek gods were worshipped in mostly one city or another, and we can see (from surviving fragments of older versions of some myths) that they get merged and remixed and retconned over time into a more coherent whole. It takes a lot of cultural interconnection to form a coherent pantheon with stable myths. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Silver Age happened in an era of rapid economic growth where it became more feasible for more people to indulge in learning a whole new set of myths. And I don't think it's a coincidence that integrated world movies, or even complex intertwined ensemble cast TV shows, really took off after the invention of DVR (and later streaming).
As myths go, Comics run well behind the parables in the New Testament. To this day, the single most profound "myth" I have run across is the story of the Prodigal Son. And it has nothing to do with belief in God or being a Christian or religious at all. It gets to the heart of what it means to be a loving parent.
I was actually thinking about this the other day. I've known the story since I was a kid, but I never really got it. Nobody ever really gets it until they're the parent of multiple children.
The important part of the story isn't the part where the son decides to go home, nor the part where the father forgives him. The important part of the story is the part where the non-prodigal son comes to his father and complains. Until you've been a parent and you've spent years listening to your kids' complaints that It's Not Fair, you'll never quite understand the father here, but now I totally get it.
That part of the story is often overlooked but for me, the story also illustrates the relationship between love, repentance and forgiveness. I always cringe when someone who has been wronged says they "forgive" the wrongdoer, even though the wrongdoer has not repented. In the story the father's love of the son is constant and unconditional, but there could be no forgiveness unless the son gave up his wicked ways, returned home and threw himself on the mercy of his father. At that point, the father's love manifested itself as forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a two way street. Sometimes forgiving someone is entirely for one's own good; you are free of the resentment that comes from holding a grudge. Whether someone else feels forgiven or not is immaterial.
I agree that the act of "forgiving" someone who has not apologized or repented is a way of moving on. But it is a unilateral act, and it is unfortunate, IMO, that such an act is included in the word "forgiveness." The forgiveness illustrated in the Prodigal Son story is truly a "two way street," and it is focused primarily on the wrongdoer, not the forgiver. A person who has been wronged has a choice whether to hold a grudge or get over it. That is the essence of "turning the other cheek." The victim refuses to engage with the wrongdoer - i.e. does not stoop to the wrongdoer's level - and in fact refuses to be a victim. That is an admirable move, but I think it is a mistake to characterize it as an act of forgiveness.
Would you suggest another word for it?
Good question. I don't know of an existing single word that would work. Phrases such as "I'm over it" or "I've dealt with it" or "I'm moving on" are the best I can think of at the moment.
“It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”
I think this parable is only superficially about forgiveness now that I am thinking about it.
This review tried to say too many things without really fleshing out any of the points it touched on. It could have benefitted from narrowing its focus.
I liked the technical part about how Stan Lee worked on so many different projects at once, but I've no idea how true it is since I'm not familiar with the American comic book industry. Can anyone comment?
Wow, I really like this review. Thanks. I wish the end tied back to myths and story telling.
(I kept thinking of Heinlein, my favorite story teller of that era.)
When I was young, I always thought that superheros were a mystery to me. These "comic book" heroes loomed so large and prominent in the popular culture, despite the fact that their existence was marked by an utter absence in the source material that spawned them. Put simply, I never read any comic books, nor saw any comic books for sale, nor saw anyone else reading comic books, nor heard any people at school discussing the latest comic books. Where are the comic books?
Say what you will about the youtuber Moviebob (and yes, his cringe politics shows up in this video), but as to my question over the status of comic book superheros, he provided the answer: https://youtu.be/pmXA08jzUfc?list=PLSDJobFjsnB6PjSPeY15lD5pd3uvYU--L&t=155
TLDR. In the past, comics readers were mostly children, as parents would buy their kids comics as cheap entertainment to keep them occupied. But as the kids grew up, and the comics industry noticed that their consumers were getting older, and had more disposable income. To capitalize on this, they moved their comics out of mainstream venues like news stands and convenience stores into dedicated exclusive comic book shops. This created an insular marketplace could effectively cater to existing consumers, but it had no reach to gain new readers. To stay relevant, the industry expanded into new verticals like movies and TV shows, which is where most people have been exposed to them. These spinoffs have been so successful that Marvel and DC don't really care about their comic books divisions any more, which sounds obvious, but belies a lot of drama over these companies "ruining" their comic books. At this point, Marvel/DC just use comic books to focus-test new characters before introducing them into movies/TV.
1. I believe (but I could be wrong) that pre WWII at least comics were very much an adult entertainment, just as manga is an adult entertainment in Japan. It was only in the 50s and 60s that they came to be seen as juvenile.
2. Former Marvel EIC Jim Shooter has explained that the shift from newsstands to comic books shops had most if not all to do with the appalling corruption of the news distribution business. Basically, comics (and other newsstand items) were distributed by local monopolies which were mob-controlled, and these became increasingly ruthless about exploiting return policies to the point that comics were becoming at best a break-even enterprise. Shifting to dedicated stores moved the comics out from under mobbed-up enterprises, but this also entailed shifting focus to a more adult clientele -- the kind that could travel to a comic book shop.
3. Ever since the 1960s the comic book companies have tried to make deals with Hollywood -- see all the cartoon shows dating back to the famous "Spider-Man" show ("Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can!") But the comic book companies (even DC, which has been a corporate sibling of Warner Bros. since 1969) have always been in the inferior position of having to interest the studios in their properties. There was never any "expansion" by the comic book companies into movies and TV. Rather, from 1966 onward they hustled and whored themselves out to anyone who would license the TV or movie rights to their characters. That is one reason the rights situation surrounding Marvel properties like Spider-Man (with Sony), the Hulk (with Universal), and the X-Men (formerly with 20th Century Fox) were and still are so complicated -- Marvel was desperate to dance with anyone who'd buy a ticket.
4. The entertainment industry is mostly organized today around the exploitation of copyrights and "intellectual property" across multiple platforms -- movies, TV, animation, toys and collectibles, etc. -- as revenue generators. Comics is simply one of the platforms, and is one of the smallest revenue-makers. Only inertia explains why Warners still owns a comic book publisher (they've owned DC since 1969), and Disney didn't buy Marvel because they liked the comic-book business, but because they wanted to own the characters for exploitation. These companies could easily sell or spin off the comic publisher to a third party while retaining ownership of the characters, and simply license the publishing rights to those characters to the new Marvel or new DC the way they license the "beach towel" rights to a maker of beach towels.
>The entertainment industry is mostly organized today around the exploitation of copyrights and "intellectual property" across multiple platforms -- movies, TV, animation, toys and collectibles, etc. -- as revenue generators.
Given how central this is to the history, I'm finding it strange that LearnsHebrewHatesIP hasn't commented on this book review yet.
My knowledge of Marvel superheroes stems entirely from those 1960s animated tv shows. I know nothing about the X-Men because they never had a 1960s animated tv show. Why is that?
>1. I believe (but I could be wrong) that pre WWII at least comics were very much an adult entertainment, just as manga is an adult entertainment in Japan. It was only in the 50s and 60s that they came to be seen as juvenile.
The predecessor of Marvel started publishing comics in 1939 (which would be before or during the war depending on what country you're in). I've read 1939 through 1963, and they're aimed at children until around 1960, when they shift to teenagers.
I'll take your word for it. But the comment was about comics in general, not only Marvel.
“To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”.”
I just have to fly the flag for the Brits here: James Bond! On TV there is Doctor Who, also forming a quite distinctive universe. And I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made that westerns constitute a mythic universe, with characters like Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill.
Also Harry Potter.
Except for the Westerns (which is a very interesting application of the idea of myth), all those other example are just series, which we expect to make up...if not a consistent story like HP, at least a plausible attempt.
Agree.
The system of rights helps to make a mess of things - we could have had a Connelly-verse (Bosch, The Lincoln Lawyer, and others), or a Vertigo-verse (Lucifer, Sandman, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Dead Boy Detectives), but instead those get spread around different studios.
Maaaybe Doctor Who, but those are really just a main-series and the occasional spin-offs.
(Alien-Predator-Blade Runner could possibly qualify, but the connections are too loose and unexplored, IMO.)
I wouldn't call James Bond a shared universe. Who's he sharing it with? He's always the main character. Same for Doctor Who.
I also wouldn't call stories with Billy the Kid or Buffalo Bill a shared universe, because those were real people.
Really, if you want to point out a British shared universe, it's King Arthur.
Yeah, that's a good point. I was kind of ignoring the shared-universe part of it, because I don't see it as that important. What Bond shares with the Marvel films is that there are a lot of them; they contain a variety of different perspectives on a shared group of characters; they use some different styles and tones; but they maintain some core elements. You're right that Bond doesn't constitute a universe because there are no films outside of a single main line; but I think over the 25? movies there are enough disparate elements that it effectively does the same thing.
Maybe the same could be said for other movie series as well, like the western series back in the 1940s?
Wait, Godzilla! There's a nice example. Not a particularly high-quality or interesting universe, so far as I understand it, but I think they do constitute a universe in the strict sense, because there are a few that don't include the big lizard himself.
A few thoughts that I'm not sure what (if anything) to do with:
1.
"storytelling itself has advanced dramatically since the early 1960s – 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."
I wonder if there's any effect here parallel to the fact that hitting in baseball has gotten narrower—that is, we never see hitters over .400 any more (because pitchers as well as batters have gotten better) but also never see hitters hit as *poorly* as they used to. Is there any parallel for aesthetics? I ask because it would make some sense of the idea that Shakespeare was the GOAT but *also* the that there has been a general improvement of storytelling.
2.
Things can go down as well as up, obviously (e.g. decline in engineering knowledge in the dark ages). I suspect (or perhaps fear) that storytelling quality will go down as the audience attention wanes and people can no longer keep sufficient complexity in their heads. Perhaps this is an unwarranted fear, I'm not sure.
3.
And speaking of the idea that things can regress, we should remember Tartaria in this discussion:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria
>https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria
>So (continues the conspiracy) probably we suffered some kind of apocalypse a hundred-ish years ago.
The Doom That Came From Gropius? :-)
This review was everything I thought it would be and it lived down to my expectations. Others have already pointed out how the arguments petered out. I was most struck by the insistence that silver age Marvel comics are modern day myths primarily because of recent box office success. The greek myths that started the review are what, 3000 years old or more? The tide has seemingly already turned against super hero stuff. Disney has well and truly ground out the enthusiasm. Will people really be revisiting these stories in 20 years let alone 1000? No, these are stories, not anything that deserves the status of myth. And yes, Deadpool is incredibly successful but I claim that is more of an action comedy than traditional superhero tale. At least that's my understanding.
I will give credit to Marvel for inspiring generations of comic artists and story tellers. Although I think that Swamp Thing and The Watchmen are still limited by their super hero trappings so don't represent the pinnacle of comic storytelling. Publications like Maus and Love and Rockets are amazing examples of story telling. I think that Penny Century's desire to be a super hero and eventual granting of that wish is a much better commentary on super heroes than The Watchmen. I think The Venture Brothers have put a cap on super hero mythology and shown us what they all really amount to. I guess I should be thankful everything led to that.
I'm old enough to remember when the conventional wisdom had it that John Ford Westerns were our "contemporary mythology."
May I live long enough to be similarly nostalgic for the "Marvel is our mythology" moment.
John Ford is hard to beat.
«Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from.»
First? What about Heinlein, though?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_History_(Heinlein)
One person writing a bunch of stories that end up being consistent was pretty standard during the age of SF; see also Asimov and van Vogt. The thing about Marvel is that you might not expect a bunch of different comics from the same company to fold together like that. One example not mentioned here: Nick Fury, Agent and/or Director of SHIELD, started out as Sgt. Fury, leader of the WWII Howling Commandos, in a war comic; the Universe transcended genre and tone. Possibly the you-wouldn't-expect-that factor is important here? As in, the revelation that Asimov was connected the Robot series to Foundation was hugely exciting (to me) even though I think it's aesthetically wrong.
I used to read comic books, hipster style, before they were cool. I say this only to point out that I really, really wanted to like this review. Unfortunately, I didn't. It is, at the same time, too thorough and not thorough enough, while being only occasionally entertaining.
While I doubt it was Stan Lee's inspiration, I have to say that the idea of purposely building a share literary universe is older than him. Balzac and Zola built their own shared universe in the 19th century (the Human Comedy and the Rougon-Macquart saga respectively). Both were highly successful and are considered among the greatest authors in the French literature. Of course, given the title, you already guessed where Balzac took his idea for the Human Comedy.
The medieval legends of the Arthurian cycle also are a shared universe with heroes from standalone stories sometimes teaming up to fight other threats.
I would add Anthony Trollope's "Chronicles of Barsetshire" to the list. Those who know Faulkner better than I can judge whether his fiction should also get a mention.
Balzac is the perfect counterexample!
Since I think it's an outrageous statement that Marvel is "mythology" because its stories are interconnected, I was looking for a counterexample, but couldn't think of a good one.
Arthurian tales don't work, since there is the obvious rejoinder that that is mythology too.
I was thinking more about the Matter of France. It was much expanded in Renaissance works such as Morgante, Orlando Innamorato, Orlando Furioso (and even The Nonexistent Knight by Calvino), all essentially playful and extravagant Song of Roland fan fiction written in an era in which that kind of stories were no longer believed in, but the reviewer who think Stan Lee is mythology would call even that mythology.
But will the reviewer say that Balzac is "mythology"?
> In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage.
There's nothing specific to comic books about this. Paperback books worked the same way. They probably still work that way.
“If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this is stolen property” and all that.
The cover is the least useful part of a book! They should've had them send back the last few pages
Invisibility may not contribute much to fighting an alien armada, but if there's one thing it should be good for, that thing is evading capture.
*Poorly written, dearly needs an editor. Asides should be footnotes, external links, or frankly just removed entirely; they add little and clutter up the review both formatting-wise and pacing-wise.
*Review just kind of...ends abruptly with no real conclusion or takeaway, premises left hanging in the wind, still unproven and under-supported. (I started with skeptical priors and left with them enhanced. Still much more in the Gwern "modern art is mostly slop full of degenerate derivative crap, value your time more highly and take advantage of survivorship bias, Good and Popular are weakly correlated" school of aesthetic thought.)
*Every one of those looks-nothing-like-a-superhero-comic covers looks exactly like a superhero comic cover to me?
*Lots of speculation and tangents, several of which are self-acknowledged as out of scope (so why bring them up?), unverifiable (should note this about sales figures at the start, not halfway through!), or half-baked ideas that would've added much more with extra oven time (I'd eagerly read a cleaned-up steelmanned version of an "Acktually, modern pop culture is way more sophisticated and intelligent" argument).
Look, it's nice to let a thousand book reviews bloom, try new stuff, innovate on tradition...but I really just wanna read book reviews about actual books, or very close book-likes (at least on ACX). The equivalent for doing comics would be, I dunno, a book review of V for Vendetta or something.
I don't necessarily disagree with your other criticisms, but I thought the asides were "a good innovation", and would like to see more authors (including Scott Alexander) consider exploring this style.
Oh, I'm not opposed on principle! It works for a certain kind of author...TLP was good at it (that was more than half the fun of reading his stuff, honestly), Tanner Greer at The Scholar's Stage is good at it, whoever wrote Hotel Concierge as well. Scott could definitely pull it off, worked for Unsong. But I found it jarring in this particular post because the asides were juuuust long enough + formatted in such a way as to disruptively break the flow, but not quite long enough to be a meaningfully useful diversion unto themselves. If they were Goldilocksed in either direction, that'd be an improvement. As is, I think they'd work better as footnotes, or perhaps an appendix of miscellanery, as some other reviews this year have done.
Wow, this was a really interesting review. I do have one nitpick though.
As far as the switch to more complex plots in TV, I don't think it was *just* that people hadn't thought of it. It's also a consequence of the distribution methods. In the broadcast TV era, people would just catch random episodes without any context, often out of order, often reruns from different seasons even. Therefore, stories had to be episodic or else noone would understand them. It's only in the streaming era that writers became able to rely on the audience watching the entire series in order.
I think the explanation is even less dramatic than that. Has the author of the review never heard of "Days of Our Lives" or "Dallas"?
Soap operas are like comics in that both of them engage in ret-cons once the existing list of characters and backstories gets too unwieldy.
One British soap opera in the 90s had a plane crash onto the village where it was set, in order to clear out some characters and enable a rebooting of the concept.
Are you claiming that before the mid 2000s or so, TV series had no overarching plot elements? That you could pick any episode from any show and get the same understanding of its plot whether or not you had seen any other episode?
Not literally none, but there was almost always mostly episodic at least. And shows that did have multiepisode subplots would include "previously on" segments so that the viewers weren't completely lost.
In fact, even after the mid 2000s, episodic television was still common. Even if you don't have literally no continuity like The Simpsons, you get stuff like Burn Notice where 95% of each episode is independent with only a token myth arc that went nowhere for seasons on end. (Michael looks for guy. Guy blows up. Rinse and repeat. There, now you know the plot of the first three seasons of Burn Notice.)
Made-for-streaming shows are very different in this respect. There's a lot less filler and a lot more continuity since they can assume that the audience is a) watching every episode, b) watching each episode in order, and probably even c) bingewatching.
The "previously on" segments were owing more to the fact that episodes were airing typically a week apart and viewers might have a spotty memory of what happened last episode, and less of an attempt to bring completely new viewers up to speed. A few seconds worth of highlights would be inadequate for that purpose anyway.
Also, I believe it's more than a quibble to say that the Simpson's don't have "literally no continuity". Yes, they are mostly stand-alone, but you still need to know at least the basic traits of the characters. Previous episodes are also important not just for little references to reward regular viewers, but also in shaping fundamental character relations such as between Bart and Sideshow Bob; the show writers could and would work their history into new episodes without explaining in too much detail their previous encounters.
I do remember watching one episode (Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?) where a guy shows up and mentions that Homer previously ruined him by designing a dumb car, presumably a reference to an episode that I hadn't seen. But even that kind of thing was pretty rare in the Simpsons, AFAIK.
For shows like Simpsons, I think it's generally *not* important to have seen the previous episodes, in the sense that if you were to uniformly randomly pick an episode, you could watch it and with very high probability, enjoy it and understand the plot. There may be references you might miss on, but it won't severely detract from your enjoyment, and it certainly won't have you be completely confused and have no idea what's going on plotwise.
Regarding "shaping fundamental character relations", I think you're overestimating this. Characters frequently change radically from their earlier personalities, such that "going back" to previous episodes to see what you may have missed may cause you *more* confusion. Ned Flanders, from the Simpsons, is actually the trope-namer for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization
There were some shows like that, such as "The Fugitive", where the main plot was "man is falsely accused of crime, he escapes and goes on the run to hunt down real killer, dogged but honest cop is on his trail" and each episode was bringing him nearer to the goal, but you could still probably watch them out of sequence without messing up the main story too much.
I don't dispute that such shows existed, not even that they were more common before convenient digital archives such as streaming services, but I very much dispute that it was the only format that existed. The claim that story writers couldn't show multi-episode stories before streaming is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
Why is it ludicrous? Give some examples.
Sure, a sitcom like As Time Goes By has plot arcs over several episodes but they weren’t complex plots. Missing episodes wouldn’t have led to misunderstanding subsequent ones.
The difference between complex, long-arc storytelling TV shows like Level 50 Lapras mentions, and looser, more episodic TV series, is one of degree, not kind.
At one extreme are anthology shows (best known examples: "The Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents") where there is no continuity between episodes, and only a genre resemblance to them.
Further along would be the conventional TV series best represented between the 1950s and 1990s: sitcoms like "I Love Lucy" or "Seinfeld"; genre dramas like "Gunsmoke" or "The A Team." In these you have a common set of characters in a recurrent setting featuring similar sorts of stories, in which the only "continuing story" is likely to be that of a baby who is born into the family and grows older. These series are written so that their episodes can be watched in any order.
(These series are also written so that viewers can even enter an episode at almost any point -- joining after a commercial break, for instance -- and quickly suss out who the characters are and what they are doing.)
Some of these series will feature either multi-part episodes (a single storyline that stretches across two or even three episodes), like a mini-movie; or they will feature a simple plot evolution that will motivate stories across most or even the entirety of a season: the Ricardos go to Hollywood in "I Love Lucy"; interstellar war threatens the Federation in "Deep Space Nine." But even in these it is possible to quickly get up to speed about what is going on in individual episodes without needing to know the full plot from the beginning.
Further along are continuing soap operas, whether of the daytime or nighttime variety, in which multiple plot arcs stretch across many episodes or even seasons. These are much more difficult for the viewer to enter in medias res; but again, they are typically written in such a way that with a little patience a new or returning viewer can gather up the plot threads without having to go all the way back to the beginning.
Finally come the sort of storylines increasingly prevalent in streaming, in which the series is best conceived as a whole that has been artificially partitioned into parts, rather than as individual stories that are interconnected by continuity. The proper comparison here would be to a novel. The experience of entering this sort of story would be like picking up a thick, intricate novel and trying to read it from the middle forward.
As to the question, When did each of these get invented or were best represented?
Anthology series and episodic series have their roots in radio, as do the soap operas; I don't know old-time radio enough to know if radio shows regularly featured multi-part episodes or multi-episode plotlines, though I would bet they did. This was the format because producers wanted to make series maximally easy to enter into -- they didn't want audiences to be daunted by having to learn a lot about a series before trying it out, or to be confused if they happened on an episode by chance. Daytime soap operas could risk being confusing because they were a daily show, giving a new viewer more opportunity to sample it and come up to speed; episodes of nighttime soaps were more self-contained (a matter of degree), and written to create a sense of tension and drama that would go unresolved but feature a kind of hook -- something like a cliffhanger -- to get a viewer (even a new viewer) to return the following week to see how the tension was resolved.
It was much harder before streaming or time-shifting devices (such as videocassettes or Tivo) to hold onto viewers' attention. Series had to air at set times, and networks had to trust the viewers themselves to arrange their schedules so as to catch the next episode. Anything that could (as I said above) daunt a new viewer or tempt an old viewer into dropping out had to be avoided. The promise of standalone stories was the easiest way to tempt and retain viewers in such a world.
Streaming, wherein multiple episodes can be dropped at once, and in which episodes await the viewers' pleasure rather than demand attention at particular times, makes it much easier for viewers sample or invest in much more complex storylines, and so make it possible to write TV series that are more like multi-chapter novels.
This is also why it is a GIGANTIC MISINTERPRETATION by the review to say that "storytelling itself has advanced dramatically" in recent times. Storytelling has not advanced. Rather, changes in distribution models (from broadcast to streaming) have made it possible to deploy story forms and narrative structures that already existed, but which were not easy to adapt to existing formats.
A comparison: Before ~1912, most films were one reel in length, which is to say that they were about 15 minutes long. This is simply not enough time to tell anything like a conventional story -- a narrative featuring characters motivated to action in pursuit of a goal, undergoing an evolution or development in the pursuit of that goal, and climaxing in the achievement of that goal. And so before 1912 movies were just filmed incidents or anecdotes, or at best simply sketched a sequence of events. Once the industry became comfortable with offering two- or three-reel films to the public, with running times of between 22 and 55 minutes, it became possible to tell conventional stories. (Notice how those running times neatly anticipate the length of a sitcom or a one-hour TV drama, after the commercials have been removed.) At that point all the conventional narrative devices and forms that had been a staple of the stage (and novel) became available to the movies. And yet it would be ludicrous to say that "cinematic storytelling advanced dramatically" between after 1912. It's only that the technological form of one medium -- that of the theatrical movie -- had evolved to the point that it could comfortably employ storytelling patterns invented long before.
It's the same with TV. The economic imperatives of broadcast television discouraged the use of storytelling techniques long ago invented and developed by novelists. With the invention of streaming (thanks to technological improvements) those economic imperatives have substantially relaxed.
Small note on radio shows: checking an archive of radio Dragnet episodes (https://archive.org/details/Dragnet_OTR), I can see a few two-parters starting with "The Big Man". That aired in January 1950.
Probably if you poke around other long-running radio shows you'll also find multi-part episodes.
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar had a run starting in 1955 with Bob Bailey as the titular character, which consisted of five-part episodes spanning every weekday night (and one nine-part episode spanning two full weeks). Don't know how common that was elsewhere, but at least one show had multi-part episodes.
Considering that many novels have complex plots and reoccurring characters, I would guess that TV wasn’t like that *mainly* for the reasons you mention and other technical and economic reasons.
When the Sopranos and similar shows came out, I remember some critics said that it was TV becoming like the Victorian novel.
Things were shifting a little before the change in distribution methods. Babylon 5 is one of the earliest examples and the most distinct: it had a clearly defined mythos that built episode by episode - you can scramble a lot of the early seasons within themselves, but never across finales and by the middle of season 3 almost any reordering renders episodes incoherent. HBO shows also had a lot of ordered storytelling, though of course it was a prestige channel that relied on its cache to pull it off. Still, by the mid 00s there were plenty of shows running around with clear continuity from episode to episode, all before the dawn of Netflix's streaming.
That doesn't match the observed timeline. Buffy the Vampire Slayer started in 1997 and was definitely in "season-spanning story arc" mode by season 3. Streaming services were not on the horizon back then. DVD box sets, maybe, barely?
This is garbage. I enjoyed it.
Between the term "Silver Age" and the words "Look at this print! It's IMPOSSIBLE! Nothing can be so huge!" in the header image, I assumed this was about a re-issued set of Marvel Comics for geriatric readers and fans, with larger print making it easier to read. Maybe expensive and leather-bound. Maybe Kindle editions, too
Iron Man was kidnapped in Vietnam? In 1963? Wow.
It's basically the origin story from the first movie, but set in an earlier war. I didn't see it when it first came out, but I read a reprint not many years later.
Never having seen the movie (I don’t know if you saw my other comment, that my sole knowledge of Marvel comics comes from 1960s animated tv shows), your point means nothing to me. What I find fascinating is the reference to Vietnam at a time when the war was not yet on most Americans’ mental maps.
People were hard on this review. I liked it, even though I don't agree with it.
1. I don't know if Marvel has reached the level of modern mythology. With all the attempts to make it less sexist there still isn't a huge female fanbase, though of course it's possible there were a whole set of Greek myths the women passed down to each other that haven't been preserved because they didn't tell the men (and I am not being snide about that--we did lose most of Sappho's poetry for instance; a *lot* of stuff from that long ago didn't make it). It might in 200 years, I actually could see that, but I don't see it reaching that point yet. If you're talking about modern mythology you have to at least bring up Harry Potter, though Rowling seems to be working hard to prevent that. ;)
2. A big issue I've never seen discussed is that we may simply not *know* who the next Shakespeare is for 400 years. A lot of the reason he's respected is his influence and longevity, and we won't know who the next author from our time will be of that stature until 2400, when likely all of us are dead. But perhaps all of you pronatalists' descendants will live to see members of the Grey Tribe in 2400 (so called because of their habit of painting their animal skins grey) fighting off raiders from the ruins of Los Angeles with the cry, "We can tolerate anything except the outgroup!"
3. Does storytelling really get better linearly? I think it's possible there is a secular increase in the quality of visual storytelling--you couldn't have mass-produced comic books before about 1900, so the field couldn't exist; same with movies. This may be a little too ACX, but modern trends in storytelling aren't necessarily all to the best--one big reason anime is so big among young men is nobody wants to make movies where they're the heroes anymore. I asked a few people in Barnes and Noble why they thought everyone was so fond of manga these days, and in addition to the wider range of stories and the huge number of titles, they all mentioned there was too much politics in modern comic books. We're all familiar with stories of Golden Ages followed by Dark Ages--it's entirely possible comic book storytelling, like every other art and culture, has its high and low periods.
4. Again maybe I'm being a little too ACX and should worry more if things are 'problematic' (nowadays when told that I tend to seek out the work in question), but it seems pretty credible to me Sue Storm would want to take time off being a superhero to do normal girl stuff. (And you could argue Prof. X realizes he'd be abusing his position to declare his love for Jean Grey.)
It's odd to split out superhero comic covers vs science-fiction adventure comic covers, as from the beginning Superman was "the spawn of the science-fiction magazines; created by a science-fiction fan, from ideas obtained from science-fiction stories, run by a former science-fiction editor and to a great degree written by science-fiction authors." (Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz, 1961*)
It's hard to say Superman isn't a science fiction adventure story: it's literally about an alien come to Earth who then fights threats scientific mastermind villains, interlopers from other planets or dimensions, or invaders from the future, and hangs out in a sophisticated secret base either alone or with his pals, which include other aliens, a brilliant investigator with self-invented gadgets, robots, and cyborgs. When you get right down to it, what is the difference between Green Lantern and a Lensman?
*In the next paragraph he theorizes the reason kids aren't growing up and turning to real science fiction after out-growing Superman is that since science fiction went "slick" in 1952 there hasn't been a "bridge" magazine like Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, or Captain Future to take young teenagers from comic books to grown-up magazines like Galaxy or The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. That might be why we ended up with this split between superheroes and "real" science-fiction.
I enjoyed learning more about the origins of these modern myths, thank you.
I wonder if the author would consider correcting the following summary of Lewis’s book?
“Michael Lewis’ book, Going Infinite, about Sam-Bankman Fried (founder of FTX and Alameda Research, and convicted of fraud in November 2023) was controversial mostly because Lewis suggested that Sam was a good hearted, misunderstood guy who wasn’t really doing anything wrong.”
Lewis lays bear all kinds of wrongdoing. He just never writes “and this is wrong.” Also he does try to show Fried as a full human. But none of this should be read as a defence of him, which Lewis has adamantly underlined in interviews. I think this is worth a correction.
i agree. I read Going Infinite, and also listened to Lewis’s
podcast about the trial while
it was going on. During the podcast he actually said that if was a juror
he would have voted SBF guilty on all counts.
I don't understand the "Lincoln's mother" thing. Aren't the imagined readers of this hypothetical Civil War comic correct? If someone were writing a comic about the life of Abraham Lincoln, it would be totally reasonable for his mother to be relegated to a minor role, or even excluded entirely.
Also how the hell is this an example of Lee "pulling [the readers] away from their far more extreme [sexism]"? Lee's the one who decided to write the only woman on the team as an incompetent weakling, not the fans. Criticizing a writer's use of sexist tropes is not itself inherently sexist.
I agree with you that Stan Lee's "Lincoln's mother" argument is very weak.
I think it is intended as an example of Stan Lee attempting to pull readers away from ever more extreme sexism in that what a "typical" person might have done in Stan Lee's position would be to agree with the fans and get rid of the female character (or demote her to a pure damsel in distress instead of part of the team of heroes).
The readers are presumed sexist because they lived in the 1960s, and "everybody" was sexist back then (relative to how we are now).
Would they even still BE underpants?
This was clearly intended for someone who grew up with the comics and knows the secret language of Marvel (a FOOM, you might say). I am such a person and, as such, I unreservedly loved it. Nice job, unknown author.
If you enjoyed this review (I did, though seems plenty of people have, uh, comments on it) and if you like the "world-building" aspect of Marvel, the way (sometimes with some effort, but a hell of of lot more elegantly than DC's constant reboots) everything kinda ties together, the book to read is NOT the one suggested in the review (which is a history of Marvel as a BUSINESS), rather it is
_All of the Marvels_ by Douglas Wolk. Obviously a single book cannot condense everything, but Wolk does about as good a job as can be hoped for, and overall provides something of a complement to this review.
And it ends with what has to be the craziest summary you might imagine - that the "central" character in the Marvel Universe (and who knows, maybe one day in MCU Phase 17 the star of her own movie) is someone named Linda Carter!
And if that doesn't strike you as some heavy level cosmic irony, then you're clearly utterly ignorant of anything to do with pop culture, and shouldn't be reading reviews like this. Sometimes it's not Clive who says "Peccavi", it's the universe itself!
I almost did not read this review because the sug=bject did not entice me, but I am glad I read it. A good and engaging read, although I am not sure it really delivers on the "Marvel is the new mythology" angle.
Stan Lee isn't a misogynist for one of his characters have a woman type out the report; he's being inclusive.
In my legal workplace, every single legal assistant is a woman. They are excellent at their jobs. It requires a skill-set that, apparently, only women have at an elite level.
For those tasks that they are organizationally responsible, they demand the work. It would be disrespectful to assign it to anyone else.
Legal assistant positions are coveted, internally. Everyone knows their role requires intelligence and precision, even if the workload isn't enormous.
So Lee including a typist is the hero recognizing an essential part of his team.
I love this review, in particular its implications for innovation-in-storytelling.
To the extent that I had heard of comic books having a "Golden Age" and a "Silver Age" before, it had always been in the context of seeing weird covers where Superman or Batman is being ridiculously petty and mean, or outrageously sexist, supposedly for pure shock value. I hadn't realized that it was a difference between the introduction of the classic DC standalone superheroes and the introduction of the Marvel universe. But now it makes me wonder what the connection is between these two uses of the terminology. Did DC have a weird phase contemporaneous with this introduction phase for the Marvel characters?
The Golden Age is pretty much the introductory period for superhero comics, running from Superman's introduction in 1938 until the late 40s or so as superhero comics fade in favor of other genres (particularly crime) and comics as a medium face backlash.
DC's Silver Age starts in 1956 when they begin to introduced updated versions of some of their discontinued Golden Age characters, starting with the Flash. It's pretty different from Marvel's Silver Age and the tone varies by book, but it tends to see a huge upswing in outlandish science fictional content and real supervillains. (The Golden Age and the surviving superhero titles of the intervening period had some supervillains. But the proportion relative to gangsters, mad scientists, etc. is much lower.) For DC's headliners, it's generally a safe bet that a majority of their main iconic villains (or at least the original version of that villain) debuted during the era.
(Less true for Batman, who has a few Golden Age adversaries kicking around. And Superman kept Luthor, though his Silver Age incarnation is probably more iconic. The tragedy that drove the Luthor/Clark relationship in "Smallville" was pure Silver Age.)
DC was having a renaissance of its own, proliferating titles, adding superhero teams that really functioned as teams (the Golden Age Justice Society was mostly a social club to frame the members' individual stories, though they might team up at the end).
Superman was at the peak of his steady increase in power level, to the point that stories tended to focus on gimmicks that he couldn't just power through. Wonder Woman tended to be kind of a fever dream. (Wonder Girl was originally, like Superboy, the main character at an earlier time, but then there were the Impossible Stories that were canonically just her mom superimposing home movies over one another somehow to notionally team them up. That explanation got so deemphasized that other writers at DC had Wonder Girl join the Teen Titans thinking she was a separate character, which she perforce then became.) Flash tended to rely heavily on (often rubber) science for its plots. And all of them would frequently throw in enough random ideas in a twelve page backup to drive a twelve-issue miniseries today.
The whole thing was much more siloed than Marvel until pretty late. DC was run almost as separate fiefdoms, to the point that Superman and Batman's appearances in the Justice League were rationed by their respective editors until late in the decade when they were told they couldn't do that anymore. It seemed that every hero visited a different version of Atlantis (which produced at least one love interest for a fair fraction of them). Crossovers were rarer, aside from team books and specific exceptions like Superman and Batman regularly teaming up in World's Finest.
And DC was more successful in sales during a lot of the period. (Granted, the fact that it controlled Marvel's distribution and limited its number of titles helped.) Not only was Superman the consistent best-seller, but titles like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen were comfortably top tier as well. It took quite a bit of time for Marvel's model to really seem like a direct threat to the Distinguished Competition.
When it did, DC eventually started adopting some of its innovations, like crossovers and continuity and heroes with conflicts and current social issues. (And sometimes just hired the people who'd been doing them for Marvel, including Jack Kirby himself to invent Darkseid and the New Gods.) But that was mostly post-1970, and the change is part of what defines DC's Bronze Age.
(Which I think is one of its best periods, which is of course in no way influenced by the fact that it was when I was first introduced to comics as a kid.)
But while I grant that it's a niche taste, I unabashedly love DC's Silver Age. It's often just nuts in a way that comics consciously trying to be more grown-up like Marvel couldn't be (let alone the more character and consistency driven genre of the 80s and later). Its less straitjacketed nature also made it a font of characters and ideas that have stuck for more than half a century. The Golden Age was the wellspring, but a disproportionate fraction of key characters, concepts, and relationships trace back to that 1956-1970 period. It's probably going to be even less friendly for a modern general adult audience to come to fresh than 1963 Marvel, but it's clear that creators are still taking inspiration from it.
(And while growing up I was all about the soap opera continuity, these days I find the one-and-done stories with a beginning, middle, and end-- generally more than one per issue-- incredibly refreshing.)
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I’d recommend Tom Scioli’s “Jack Kirby: the Epic Life of the King of Comics” as well, as an interesting perspective and a corrective to the Stan Lee historiography.