EPISODE 313: THE STORY SO FAR
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
In 1961 Stanley Lieber had had enough. Since he was eighteen years old he had worked for his uncle Martin as editor-in-chief of Timely Comics. He had seen the company in is hey-day during World War II, and then struggled to keep it afloat for the decades that followed, as super hero comics went out of fashion and his uncle was only willing to ape the successful moves of others.
Twenty years he had been at this, and he was done. Uncle Marty would either let him try something new or he’d go somewhere else where they would.
But when they sat down Martin Goodman had just had a revelation of his own. While golfing with an associate who worked for DC Comics, Goodman had learned that their big new idea, a super hero team comic book that brought together all their biggest characters, was going gangbusters.
“Stanley,” Uncle Marty said before his nephew could speak, “Make me a super team.”
And that’s how, in the summer of 1961, Stanley Lieber – known to the world as Stan Lee – came up with the Fantastic Four. ++ Did you think I was going to say The Avengers? As I was reading about this in Marvel: The Untold Story, that’s definitely what I expected to see. DC had Justice League of America; Marvel’s parallel would be The Avengers.
But no, the Avengers wouldn’t come until two years later, and not because Marvel needed a team book any more, either. No, it was more a matter of what we might call continuity. Between 1961 and 1963 Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created an incredible number of ground-breaking, super-popular characters – The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor the Mighty, Ant-Man, the Wasp, Doctor Strange, Iron Man and Sgt. Fury.
And given that they were all living in the same imagined New York City, Lee and Kirby had them appearing in one another’s books almost right away. Or there would be references to events from one story bleeding over into another. When Hulk got captured in his book, Reed Richards started to wonder what’s happened to him in his.
Seeing the power of these cameos, Lee decided to bring five of these characters together full-time: The Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp. Three issues later the Hulk would leave and Captain America, a character from the 40s who hadn’t been since for decades, would be discovered in the ice, frozen since World War II, and cement the team.
They called themselves “The Avengers”. Honestly, the name doesn’t make any sense. There is no event in the book that the heroes who come together to become the Avengers are avenging. The adversary, Thor’s half-brother Loki, tricks the heroes into fighting the Hulk so as to draw out his brother, who he wants to bring down. What follows is that most classic of super hero tropes, the good guys mistaking each other for bad guys, fighting and then teaming up.
But with all that there’s no real “avenging” going on here. Wasp just comes up with the name at the very end. And it seems to be derived from something Thor says earlier:
And therefore we should be called the Avengers.
Because "Avengers". Right?
(Read: We the authors don’t really know why this name, either,
but it’s cool so we're going with it.)
It’s also a strange team name, though, just for what it represents. A-venging is not the same re-venging, but it’s still somewhere on the vengeance side of things. That’s not exactly heroic.
Not that Lee and Kirby ever pursued the sort of anti-heroism of latter eras. Consider the first page of the second issue of Avengers:
Not exactly dark and broody. More like Seinfeld with naked green men.
In fact it’s very much the tone of Joss Whedon’s Avengers movies, comical, self-aware and fascinated first and foremost by the relationships among these characters.
(Also, Thor, can we talk about the sleeveless jersey? Because it’s really not appropriate for a work environment, either.) ++ In 2002 Marvel decided to reboot its entire line of characters in an alternate version of our modern day. Instead of the Avengers they had the Ultimates, a Bush-era military doctrine meets super heroes as celebrities mash-up that offered a much harsher take on the super hero team. Cap was a right wing America First type; Thor was a hippy environmentalist who was either a god or a total nutcase.
The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were siblings who were also...more than siblings. Hawkeye and the Black Widow were a black ops team styled after Neo and Trinity from The Matrix. And the Hulk was an insane force of nature that ate people.
It was riveting and cinematic and in many ways showed how much the idea of a Marvel super hero team could actually succeed as a movie. In fact the Nick Fury of the Marvel movies came directly from The Ultimates.
Do not even THINK to ask him about having a Royale with Cheese.
But unlike The Ultimates, the Marvel movies have never forgotten that universe’s original voices, Lee and Kirby, who always found room for pathos and light.
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Some people would call the Avengers a movie about family, or the oft-interpreted as stand-in for family, the office. When Thor sees the Hulk for the first time in Thor: Ragnarok he has that great line: “I know him! He’s a friend from work!”
Personally I don’t think the Avengers is a story about family. For me, it’s about friendship. It’s about the relationships that we stumble upon by chance or even against our wills that unexpectedly give us welcome and shelter and courage and challenge. When you think about it, real friendship is kind of a miracle. And I think the Avengers movies work insofar as they live out of that wonder and delight.
And also pain: it’s one thing to get hurt by family, who you’ve lived with all your life and who know all the cheat codes to drive you crazy. It’s a whole other thing to choose to be vulnerable with someone and then have them break that trust.
Everybody says there are too many superhero movies and they’re all the same. (Including James Cameron last week, which given the fact he is currently working on producing four more Avatar movies seems pretty hilarious.)
And I pretty much feel the same way (he says, looking at his ticket to Avengers’ opening night). But you know, there really aren’t that many TV shows or movies these days that are about what it means to have friends, what gifts that brings and what it costs. And even if it is wrapped in tight, brightly-colored spandex, that’s a topic I always can use to hear more of.
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Greatest Marvel Movie Villains (So Far)
1. Killmonger
2. Winter Soldier
3. Magneto
4. Loki/Tony Stark (tie)
(No it’s not, it’s Tony Stark, Loki's just pretty)
5. Audience Members who WILL NOT STOP CHECKING THEIR CELLPHONES
WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY LIFE?
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In anticipation of The Avengers, Part Thirty-Seven, Infinity War, Part I, Josh Brolin has a Purple Chin, I was doing some research on the Avengers comic book stories. And if you think an enormous purple dude who wants to collect jewelry seems pretty out there for a story concept, check out these three stories:
1) LIKE A VIRGIN (BUT ALSO NOT)
You know Mantis, the anime-eyed green alien antenna’d lady from Guardians of the Galaxy Second Mix-Tape: The Less Fun One? Well in the comic book she was actually originally a Vietnamese prostitute.
Here’s the explanation of her creator, Avengers writer Steve Englehart:
Basically Mantis was supposed to be a hooker who would join the Avengers and cause dissension amongst all the male members by coming on to each of them in turn. She was introduced to be a slut. I’ve always been a big fan of sex, and I would see these grown-up superhero guys fight super villains, then they’d meet a woman, they’d blush and stammer. They were like big teenage boys, which always seem dumb to me, because I was accepting them as grown-up men, so why didn’t they act like grown-up men?
Ummm...yeah.
It gets weirder. Over the course of twenty episodes, Mantis discovers she had actually been raised by a race of psychic sentient trees, and in the end she is asked to marry one and becomes the “Celestial Madonna”.
This is your comic book writer on drugs. (Any questions?)
Also, you heard it here first, the sleeper love story of the Marvel universe might just be Mantis and Groot.
2) DO NOT MESS WITH WANDA’S CHILDREN
Speaking of crazy Avengers love stories, in the comic books the Scarlet Witch and the Vision fall in love. The movies are kind of hinting at the same, and actually so far it’s working so much better than it does in the comics, because in the movies the Vision is being played by Paul Bettany as a sort of new humanoid life-form, with curiosity and emotions and kindness.
There’s none of that pathos in the comic book Vision. He’s a cold robot-y android. She’s a human witch. It’s never explained.
I guess she’s just into metal.
Thanks very much. I’ll be here all week.
Somehow though their love prevails and they get married.
Then they have twins.
And if that seems like the kind of thing that would be hard to have happen, you are not alone in thinking that. The characters in the book wondered the same. But the Scarlet Witch is a witch, and witches do magic, don’t they, so there you have it. And they all lived happily after.
Or at least they do until this weird thing starts to happen where the babies occasionally vanish. And then eventually reappear.
And we learn that in order to create these children that she wanted so badly, Wanda actually had to pull...stuff...from the cosmos. Soulish kind of stuff. And as a result, the kids only exist as long as Wanda is thinking about them. So, for instance, if she’s in some big battle and her full attention is needed on a spell to save the day, Bloop go the boys until she thinks of them again.
This seems like most parents of newborns’ dream situation. But Wanda is pretty freaked out about it.
Maybe because when I said the boys were formed by soul-stuff from the cosmos, it’s not actually out of the whole cosmos, but just this one part – the soul of the Devil. Which is kind of bad, when you think about it. The Devil being the Devil and all, eventually he probably wants his stuff back.
You know, like, to use as hands or something.
So so disturbing.
So eventually Wanda learns all this. And the way it’s resolved is a) the boys gotta go back to being Devil soul-stuff (or gloves?); and b) Wanda’s mentor and mother-figure wipes her mind so that she doesn’t have to live with the memory of having lost these children.
I KNOW, RIGHT?
Now flash forward like, twenty years. This young upstart comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis has gotten the chance to take The Avengers, which had become sort of the wet garbage of the Marvel Universe, and make them interesting again.
So what does he do? For his very first story, he goes back to that old tale and HAS SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING THAT REMINDS WANDA, A MAGICIAN WITH THE POWER TO TOTALLY RESHAPE REALITY, THAT SHE ONCE HAD THOSE KIDS.
Uh Oh.
It would be safe to say that this does not work out well for anyone. In fact, a whole bunch of Avengers get killed in the process – the Vision actually gets RIPPED IN HALF by She-Hulk.
And Wanda is also discovered to have had the decaying body of her old mentor in her room for quite some time. Oh and she recreated her boys again and had to have them erased from reality again, too.
Over the course of the next year or so, this leads to Wanda becoming seen as such an existential threat that pretty much everyone in the Marvel Universe eventually gets together to try and figure out what to do about her--
--which leads her brother Quicksilver to convince her in her now mentally-broken state to reboot all of reality into something happier so they can escape her being destroyed;
--then, when those who can remember this isn’t actually reality work together to change things back, Wanda’s final words are “No More Mutants”, which both permanently ends the mutant powers of some and dooms the rest to be the end of their line.
Which itself would take years to fix.
How's that for a comic book love story?
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Top Five Marvel Movie Couples
1. Natasha and Hulk – Come at me, haters.
2. Tony and Banner – Science Bros.
3. Thor and Banner – Work Bros.
4. Cap and Bucky – War Bros.
5. Shuri and All of Human Existence -- Because Brains Before Bros., Bro
(Tell me this isn’t a series about friendships...and the magic of Mark Ruffalo._
Also, Dear Marvel, You did better with Black Panther, but in general more female characters please?
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3) WHAT’S GREEN AND WRINKLED AND BAD ALL OVER?
When that young upstart writer Brian Michael Bendis rebooted Avengers, he did two other absolutely insane things.
First, he made Spider-Man and Wolverine into Avengers.
That may sound like a no-brainer. But it was not. (Or, consider the fact that if you have no brain, a no-brainer is actually a lot of work.)
Wolverine was in like, a million comics (now, in contrast, there are just a million characters called Wolverine). But he was an X-Man. That was his team.
Spidey at times would help out the Fantastic Four – in fact in Amazing Spider-Man #1 he tries to get a job with them, only to discover there’s no salary.
Spidey needs money down, people.
But it was always understood, fundamentally he was a loner. He had no team of his own.
But then Bendis comes on the scene along with Mark Millar, a Scottish writer who was doing The Ultimates, and they both ask why does it have to be like this. Millar told the editors, “When I was a kid, boy I used to love the Justice league because he can get all of the great characters for ten cents versus only Batman for ten cents.
So why isn’t the Avengers that, why isn’t all of the coolest in it?”
Bendis piped up: “Yeah, like Spider-Man and Wolverine.”
It did not go over well. Said Bendis (who tells the whole story here), “Some of the editors, literally steam was coming out of their ears.”
But there was a silver lining: “I looked over at my publisher and he literally had cartoon dollar signs in his eyes. He was like ‘ka-ching’ and ‘ooh-gah ooh-gah!’”
Fans freaked out over the change. And now they’re furious that Wolverine isn’t in the movies. :)
The other crazy thing that Bendis did was, over the course of his first few years on the book, he had a second story bubbling secretly in the background about shape-changing aliens who had invaded Earth and taken the place of various characters, in some cases years before any of it was revealed.
And no one reading the book saw it coming.
That’s what still blows me away: from the first issue of Bendis’ New Avengers, we were told there was something weird going on, some conspiracy. But Bendis and Marvel were so careful in the way they presented this mystery, so patient with what information they shared, that when the truth finally emerged into the light, it was a complete surprise.
That’s almost impossible to pull off today, not only because internet=spoilers but because the comic companies themselves tend to spoil their own surprises with day before or day of interviews in USA Today or The New York Times as a way of drumming up business.
Have you ever read a book that had a surprise that took your breath away so much you wish you could forget the book so that you could have that experience of surprise once again?
That’s how the beginning of Secret Invasion was for me.
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One last comic book anecdote: if you’ve ever bought a comic book, you have almost certainly noticed that the month listed on the label is not accurate. If a comic was released today, April 27th, the label might say July.
Supposedly, that was not a mistake, but sales strategy. Comic books were sold on newsstands; the companies wanted to fool the sellers into keeping the books on the stands as long as possible. So they would list a later date on the cover so as to make the books seem current even a few months later.
I just checked this week’s stash to try and provide you with an example, and discovered they apparently no longer list the date at all and now I feel old and foolish.
++ LINKS ++
And now, the real heroes:
The incredible photo essay of elderly Korean women who free dive to feed their communities.
The amazing twitter feed of an American woman who delivered her own baby during a 17 hour layover in Turkey.
The brilliant lady who collects funny comments from Tumblr to make our lives better.
And the end of a pepperoni lover’s long exile.
In Avengers #1, Loki makes it look like the Hulk was trying to destroy a train filled with people. Afterwards the Hulk hides out in a circus. As a juggling robot clown.
There's plenty of craziness out there. But a world that has room for Hulks dressed as circus robots juggling horses, otters and elephants and cannot be all bad.
Here we go.