Marvel Comics in the 1970s

March 1, 2023
A detailed, wonky examination of a significant period in the history of Marvel Comics. A generation of Marvel writers who explored themes of interiority and subjectivity in the 1970s bridged the gap between Spider-Man in the 1960s and the modern graphic novel. So argues Borenstein, whose comics coming-of-age occurred during this fertile era. Steve Englehart sent Doctor Strange on a journey of enlightenment; Doug Moench expanded the possibilities of the narrative caption in Werewolf by Night and Master of Kung Fu; Marv Wolfman developed the antihero with Tomb of Dracula; Don McGregor explored racism with Luke Cage and Black Panther; and Steve Gerber pursued absurdity and dissociation in Man-Thing and Howard the Duck. Borenstein is an admitted fan of these comics, but he faces their frequently problematic aspects, often trenchantly, as when he introduces the Werewolf's girlfriend: "Topaz is the blond, white-skinned adopted daughter of a Punjabi sorcerer named Taboo (bonus points to anyone who can effectively decolonize this sentence)." There's some discussion of in-house goings-on, mostly in the form of character handoffs, but readers hoping for the stories behind the stories will be better served by Sean Howe's entertaining chronicle, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Instead, this volume is largely devoted to exegesis, walking readers through story arcs and analyzing text with a granularity not seen in Douglas Wolk's monumental survey, All of the Marvels. Normalizing all-caps original text to ordinary prose in quotations, Borenstein otherwise reproduces the comics' orthography, with often silly-looking results: "The screams from below are shrill. / The snarls of jungle cats...satisfied. / And the brittle sound of violence... / ... necessary?" Shang-Chi ruminates during a fight. The occasional inclusion of full-color pages makes readers wish for more. A good half of the characters discussed are (currently) absent from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which skews Borenstein's audience to enthusiasts of the MCU's print origins. For die-hard Marvel Comics fans and scholars of the graphic novel.

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March 20, 2023
Borenstein (Plots Against Russia), a Russian and Slavic studies professor at New York University, delivers an entertaining exploration of Marvel’s turn inward during the 1970s. He contends that over the course of the decade, Marvel authors—namely Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Don McGregor, Doug Moench, and Marv Wolfman—developed a style “focused intensely on the inner lives of the characters on the page.” Englehart, Borenstein suggests, bucked Marvel’s editorial mandate that characters can never fundamentally change and depicted character growth through introspection, as shown in his narratives in which Doctor Strange must explore his “ego in order to move beyond it.” Other innovations included Moench’s use of first person narrative captions to get inside the minds of such characters as the Werewolf and Deathlok, as well as the existentialist musings that Gerber wove into his Howard the Duck comics, which used the anthropomorphic character to offer an outsider’s disenchanted perspective on the human condition. Theory-driven discussions of Fredric Jameson’s and Umberto Eco’s writings on science fiction and superheroes give this academic heft, though lay readers will still have plenty of fun with Borenstein’s thoughtful close readings of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comics. Marvel connoisseurs willing to put up with some light scholarly jargon will appreciate the insightful takes on a pivotal era in the publisher’s history. Illus.