I think a larger point I’ve been trying to make here (in my usual charming dance-around-it-until-the-heat-death-of-the-universe way), with regards to my evolution from someone who was aware of Marvel Comics to a lifelong dedicated fan, is that being a comic book fan is a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing behavior. Which, on the one hand, is pretty obvious, as demonstrated by the fact that you could say the same thing about being a fan of anything. Doesn’t matter if it’s other storytelling mediums, from classic cinema to daytime soap operas to prog rock, or seemingly non-narrative interests like Texas Hold’Em or antique cars or the NBA. The deeper you get into something, the deeper you can get into something, and you usually do, which means you can get even deeper, and on and on and on. But on the other hand, understanding the influences one musician had on another or what older forerunner led to a certain coupe model or sports strategy or whathaveyou is both deeply satisfying yet completely unnecessary. You can appreciate athleticism or say “that’s a beautiful car” without the prior references and touchpoints taking up any space at all in your brain. And that’s a perfectly fine and valid way to engage with things, and people do it all the time!
But superhero comics, with their serialized storytelling and their foundations of continuity, have an unparalleled and powerful way of getting their hooks into you. Or into me, at least. Unless you happened to be the right age with money to burn at the right time, said time being the day the first appearance of Superman or the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man hit the newsstands, whatever your personal first comic was you’d be coming in on the middle of the story. In the earliest days of comics (decades of DC’s publishing, and a fair amount of Marvel’s pre-superhero output) this was actually a non-issue because they didn’t emphasize the ongoing nature of one big sprawling story. Monthly issues were self-contained stories, so that any given offering could be someone’s first comic ever and a comprehensible entry point. The publishers assumed kids read comics for a few years and then outgrew them, so every few years stories would get recycled. The core concepts of the characters, meanwhile, remained constant in the spirit of not fixing what ain’t broke. So everything did a timeless kind of treading water, narratively speaking.
Marvel’s superhero comics didn’t take long to break the rules of the game. The Fantastic Four fought Doctor Doom something like three different times within the span of the title’s first twelve issues. And at first glance it might seem like there’s very little difference, in terms of creative output, between running the exact same Superman versus Lex Luthor story fourteen months apart, and running two similar FF versus Doom stories five months apart. To the casual, occasional or intermittent reader that’s true enough. But to the dedicated fan it’s night and day. By the third time Doom (or the Mole Man or the Super-Skrull or whoever) fights the FF, they’ve learned more about him and he’s learned more about them. The stakes are higher because it’s an ongoing feud, and the story logic can be more complex, with fewer deus ex machina solutions and more ‘oh, that makes sense, he would have been ready for that this time because he applied the lessons from last time’.
Marvel tried to balance things, erring on the side of caution at first. The earliest non-#1 issues of Marvel superheroes would literally recap the heroes' origins, just in case a kid picked up #2 or #3 as their first exposure. They wouldn’t be so put off by having missed the beginning of the story that they would give up; they’d get a crash course to bring them up to speed and then continue along with the rest of the audience. Later the recaps went away but the writers and editors made liberal use of footnote captions. A character’s dialogue balloon would say something like “But it can’t be YOU -- you’re DEAD!!!*” and that asterisk at the end would tie to a caption at the bottom of the panel that said “* Last time Hero saw Villain was when he was falling into a radioactive volcano in Tales to Blow Your Mind #145 - Editor” This addendum acknowledged the past continuity and provided the bare minimum context, while avoiding putting clunky exposition dialogue directly in the character’s mouths. It also pointed the reader to a specific older issue, and maybe that kid would have a friend who owned that issue, and the kid could borrow it, and fill in the gaps and be that much closer to becoming a dedicated deep reader. (Later still it would be theoretically possible to obtain any issue at any time from a comic shop or comic dealer at a convention or a mail order service, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)
Of course not everything could be recapped or footnoted, and not everything needs to be, and that’s the real endorphin-buzz potential of being a dedicated fan. At some point, as the comic stories become less self-contained and more one ongoing sprawling tapestry, a reader will run across something that obliquely references the past, with no accompanying editor’s note, and the reader will recognize the reference and feel the thrill of being In The Know. For a certain stripe of geeky nerd (myself very much included) there’s nothing more satisfying than receiving affirmation that you’ve internalized some bit of knowledge which has just come up in another context. It’s absurdly specialized, of course - the only time it’s going to come in handy knowing how many times Spider-Man has met Thor is when you’re reading more Spider-Man or Thor comics - but that’s the point I led with up above: it’s all self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. The more comics you read, the more knowledge about their fictional universe you gain, and therefore the more comics you can read, which gives you more foundational knowledge, which makes you want to read more and learn more, which makes the reading you do more rewarding, ad infinitum.
Marvel pioneered this hook-em-and-keep-em-coming-back approach but DC realized its value and pivoted to a similar approach soon enough, and that sea change happened before I was born, let alone reading comics. But the thing is, when I turned eleven in late 1985, DC was leveraging 45 years’ worth of their back catalog, and had swung from timeless recycling to ongoing epic maybe halfway through all of that. Marvel had been telling the tales of a single unified universe from the get-go, starting a mere 24 years prior and really only reaching critical mass in the mid-60’s. So, point number one in Marvel’s favor, two decades’ worth of (relatively) rock-solid continuity felt surmountable. It was enough to promise a fulfilling experience without being so daunting that I felt I could never truly catch up, and any effort I put into learning the history would assuredly pay dividends going forward. Whereas four and a half decades of false starts, imaginary stories, and infinite earths at DC was both too much and too likely that something might catch my eye and turn out to not really “count” anymore.
Point number two in Marvel’s favor, they were more committed to the bit than DC, even long after DC followed their lead. It’s all well and good to realize you can wring more drama out of the culmination of a series of hero-villain throwdowns, as opposed to the fifth iteration of episodic, could-be-read-in-any-order donnybrooks. But it’s quite another thing to allow your main characters to grow and change. As I alluded to in my earlier post about learning to love Spider-Man, Peter Parker had started out in high school, and after a suitable amount of in-story time, he graduated from high school. He went to college, and he dropped out of college. He had a serious relationship with Gwen Stacy, and she died, and then he had a serious relationship with Mary Jane Watson. Eventually he told MJ his secret identity, and they got married in the summer of 1987, basically the 25th anniversary of Spider-Man’s debut. Superman had been around almost 50 years at that point and was still stuck in eternal chaste courtship with Lois Lane, never daring to reveal his double-life as Clark Kent, status quo forever. Clearly the promise (however illusory) of meaningful change was its own kind of siren call, that it was not just worthwhile to get to know the history to better enjoy the current installments, but that I had better come back faithfully for each monthly update because otherwise I might miss something important! A birth, a death, a wedding, or some other milestone! A contrarian voice might argue that missing an issue wasn’t the end of the world, that I had already missed hundreds (maybe thousands) of issues published before I became a regular reader. But, again, there’s something viscerally thrilling about feeling like a first-hand witness to history in the making. The only thing better than getting hold of some rare old issues from the earliest days of Marvel’s superhero universe would be to have been fortunate enough to grab those mags in real time off the newsstand, to have magically been eleven in 1962 instead of 1985 or 86.
Next post, I’ll talk about what happened when that "right time, right place" lightning did strike a second time, in the summer of 1986 ...
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