Jim Henley and I had an enlightening back-and-forth over email about the Marvel Age line, which I discussed earlier. After first backing me up on his own blog, he later offered some insight into the uproar over M.A., specifically the manga-style remakes of the classic Stan-Jack-Steve stories:
Some of the loudest complainers are people who disdain superhero fanboyism, but by their complaints about messing with the purity of the Silver Age Marvels they sound like nothing so much as their nemeses (superhero fanboys) bitching about some flouting of The Way Things Used to Be. Why, they sound oddly like John Byrne Message Board posters.
Indeed! This attitude towards the Silver Age is something I’ve spotted before, even amongst the most iconoclastic of comics pundits. It’s understandable, to a degree: Those are some remarkable comics, and the thoroughly lousy treatment over the years of many of the people who created them, by the very companies who couldn’t exist today without them, probably makes us all view them more protectively than we otherwise would. But referring to “the lost innocence of the Silver Age,” as Alan David Doane did back during that whole Seth X-Men cover kerfluffle, implies a belief in some mythical pre-Fallen state of grace for mainstream comics. And as much as I enjoy all the great stuff from that era, I don’t think they bear being treated as Scripture very well.
This is actually something touched upon by David Fiore during that same comics-cover crisis, in a couple of posts: “[T]here is no ‘lost innocence’ in the sixties for Seth to harken back to!” and “Next we’ll be hearing that super-hero comics are only suitable for children, and are best left unanalyzed! Oh, wait, we hear that every day from certain quarters…” No, most of the folks I’ve encountered who are upset about Marvel Age aren’t as far gone as your average John Byrne or Comics Journal messboard crackpot (both of whom treat superhero comics like kid stuff, albeit for very different reasons). But given how indistinguishable Marvel Age is from everything else Marvel does, legally and logically speaking–to say nothing of all the arguments in favor of Marvel doing just such a thing–it seems that the problem is mainly an emotional, or indeed sentimental, one.
In other words, I don’t get the outrage. Well, I get it–it’s just that I don’t think it makes much sense. Marvel Age is different from everything else Marvel does only in the sense that it is literally rewriting and redrawing the Stan/Jack/Steve stuff, as opposed to simply milking it for forty years while the people whose genius made those forty years of milking possible don’t make a whole lot of money from it. Legally, I don’t think this is any more or less distasteful than everything else Marvel does; the original writers and artists are being properly credited, so in that sense it’s even better than things were for ages on end. I think the uproar is a “sacred cow” issue more than anything else, and that’s fine, but it’s no way to run a business, especially one like Marvel in the position that Marvel’s in these days.
Obviously there are aesthetic arguments about redrawing Kirby or Ditko and rewriting Lee–I’ve heard it compared to the remake of The In-Laws or, God help us, Psycho–but I think that in intent it’s a lot closer to Peter Jackson’s upcoming remake of King Kong. The point in both cases is to take a great story and make it accessible to generations that are no longer comfortable with the storytelling and film- or comics-making conventions of yesteryear. Fine by me. (The goal is also to make a lot of money, but that’s also fine by me.)
For those of us who simply can’t get past the perceived lack of respect being shown to the legacy of Lee, (and especially) Kirby and Ditko, please keep in mind that even a revamped, redrawn, rewritten version of a classic Spider-Man or Fantastic Four yarn would be a hell of a lot closer to the originals than the manga kids would otherwise ever get. Furthermore, those kids would certainly be a lot more likely to eventually seek out the original Stan/Jack/Steve stuff than they are now! I don’t think I share Jim’s confidence that Marvel might even, get this, “try to sell them the originals” if they like the newfangled versions, but it would make a lot of sense, and again it’d be a lot more likely to actually work thanks to the exposure to the material made possible by Marvel Age.
All of this, of course, hinges on whether the books are any good, and (to a lesser or greater extent, depending on your perspective) whether or not they sell. But the principle behind the thing is as sound as it gets, in my book. And my attachment to the great works of the past doesn’t stop me from seeing the need to adopt, adapt, and (as far as accessibility goes) improve, for the present and the future.
UPDATE: Alan David Doane writes:
…I definitely think there IS a “lost innocence of the Silver Age.” Whether it was actually DURING the SA or was how we later readers looked at it, specifically up to the early ’80s before the truth came out about how Marvel screwed Jack Kirby and the Shooter “Little Fucks” era is debatable, one supposes. But there was a time when even the most informed comics reader could believe at least some of the myths about comics in general and Marvel in particular, and Seth’s piece evokes that era. In a time, now, when you have to pretty much have NO interest in comics NOT to know such trivia as Joss Whedon’s contractual machinations or Ellis’s online sex-farce, I’d say that innocence is gone.
In other words, when he’s talking about “lost innocence,” he’s not referring to the comics of that era, but Comics of that era–the industry/medium/art form. That does make sense, in terms of the readers and our view of the business side of the Silver Age and its aftermath: Ignorance truly was bliss.