Marvel And Me: A Soured Love Affair
My relationship with Marvel has changed a lot over the years
So, for anyone who’s new here, welcome! If you were expecting for me to write more stuff like the Neil Gaiman post I just did, well, I’m sorry. However, I hope you still hang around, tell your friends, maybe decide to throw me some money. I could use it.
Let’s talk about Marvel.
I’ve read comics for a long time. I’m going to paraphrase the beginnings of my superhero fandom quickly, because I’ve written about it here before. I was first exposed to superheroes through DC stuff like SuperFriends, the 1966 Batman show, and the Superman movies in the early ‘80s. DC was where my superhero love began, but down the road, when I started reading comics full-time in 1991, Marvel was where I began. The first comics that really gripped me back then were Uncanny X-Men #279 and Infinity Gauntlet #4. My friends in school were all mostly Marvel fans, and they influenced me. The Marvel series II trading cards had just come out, and those helped me learn a lot about the Marvel Universe. I became a massive X-Men fan, and while I bought comics from Marvel and DC (and later Image), I mostly was a Marvel fan.
I was a newsstand reader, so I picked up a lot of comics on a monthly basis. While the X-Men were my focus, I also read multiple Spider-Man books (with Amazing and Spectacular being my favorites), Captain America, The Avengers, Silver Surfer, The Incredible Hulk, and Fantastic Four, as well as multiple other Marvel books, everything from Quasar to the 2099 books. Sure, I read Batman and Superman comics, but that was about it for DC. The gas station where I bought my comics mostly had Marvel books, so that’s mostly what I got.
Later, I would get a pull at my local comic book store - it was called called Planet Earth Comics and I loved it - and fill it with mostly X-Men titles: X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine, X-Man, Generation X, and X-Force, along with The Incredible Hulk. I also ended up putting the Heroes Reborn Captain America in my pull (go ahead, laugh it up), as well as a few DC books like JLA and Preacher, but those wouldn’t come to much later. I’d also pick up all kinds of books off the shelves, many of which were Marvel books like The Avengers, Thunderbolts, and different event books and miniseries. High school would end and Planet Earth ended up closing down, so my monthly dose of comics went away for a while. I found another comic store, it closed down, and eventually I just started buying trades. While most of these were DC books like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Sandman, and Morrison’s JLA, I also picked up Marvel books like Avengers Forever, Earth X, and 1998’s The Inhumans (I still have my original copies of all three from back then). My love for New X-Men started because I picked up the first volume in trade, E Is For Extinction, and I kept picking up the subsequent volumes.
Eventually, a new comic store would open in my hometown - Yancy Street Comics - which was owned by the son of the guy who used to run Planet Earth. The store is actually still there in my hometown, although a new owner runs it. Anyway, again I got a pull and again it was mostly Marvel. This was in 2002, and the comic industry was going through something of a renaissance. The 1990s hadn’t been a great time creatively for the comic industry - although if we’re being honest, it was mostly bad for Marvel. The company even went through bankruptcy, which caused them to sell the film rights to the X-Men, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk. However, the year 2000 was a big change. Writer/artist Joe Quesada, fresh off a stint co-editing the Marvel Knights line with his longtime collaborator Jimmy Palmiotti, became the company’s editor-in-chief, and began to make major moves. Marvel started to get a lot of great talent and began to revitalize their publishing line. Of course, eventually, DC would follow suit and the two publishers would have a lively competition over who was the best publisher for the first time in decades.
So, at this point, I’m going to talk about why Marvel appealed to me so much for so long. A big part of that was because of the X-Men, a team which appealed to me because I was a gifted kid often mocked for being a nerd, so I felt like I was a superpowered mutant as well. But there was definitely another aspect to it and that was how easy it was to understand the Marvel Universe. The best way I can illustrate this is by talking about the difference between the Marvel series II trading cards and the DC ones that had come out at the same time. The Marvel cards did an amazing job of illustrating who the characters were, the rosters of the teams, showcasing the major league weapons and artifacts, and showed off the biggest rivalries in Marvel with the rivals cards, such as Wolverine vs. Sabretooth or Spider-Man vs. Venom, et cetera. They helped me understand the Marvel Universe without going back and reading a million comics - which was extremely hard to do back in the early ‘90s.
Compare that to the DC cards. I bought those as well and enjoyed them, but they were automatically more complicated than the Marvel ones because DC was just more complicated. There were cards that talked about “pre-Crisis” characters and concepts, and at the time I had no idea what that meant. There were “Golden Age”, “Silver Age”, and “Modern Age” versions of the characters. While the cards helped introduce me to characters from the Justice Society and Infinity Inc., I didn’t really gain a better understanding of what the DC Universe was at the time. If anything, I was more confused by things than I was before. The Marvel cards helped me get into the Marvel Universe, while the DC cards showed me how daunting the DC Universe was.
The Marvel Universe was just easier to understand than the DC Universe. Sure, I would eventually learn what “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis” meant. I would learn about how the DC Multiverse worked and what it meant for the comics. I learned to love DC, but back in those early days of my comic fandom, Marvel was it for me. The Marvel Universe hadn’t had a massive reboot and didn’t have a confusing history, and it had characters that I could empathize with. Marvel’s “heroes with feet of clay” appealed to me a lot back then. I liked the fact that I could look at characters and understand their problems. I liked the way that the superhero community seemed like school - a bunch of cliques who sometimes worked together but just as often fought each other, with weird relationships knitting the groups together. Of course, as the years have gone on, I’ve become less interested in that sort of thing, but back then, the Marvel Universe was home for me.
I loved the way the Marvel Universe combined massive stories with huge stakes with smaller scale stories that felt personal. I loved how the creators were able to make statements about the real world with the comics - the X-Men’s civil rights metaphor or the way Captain America critiqued the United States as much as he fought for it. For years, I was extremely resistant to buying DC books - it took over a year of Wizard magazine telling me that JLA was the greatest team book being published before I would start reading it. Marvel was my jam and beyond Vertigo books - which were the creme de la creme of comics, the well-written and drawn books that were the closest that mainstream comics got to art - I mostly read Marvel books until about 2004, when I started to buy more and more DC books, around the time of Identity Crisis.
This was when DC started to pull ahead of Marvel in my eyes. There were several reasons for this - Grant Morrison leaving New X-Men was a huge blow to me. I loved the X-Men books, and Morrison’s New X-Men was my favorite book being published, combining my favorite writer with my favorite team. The X-Men books were still mostly good after they left - Astonishing and Uncanny were enjoyable while X-Men wasn’t - and Wolverine was awesome, but they weren’t as great as they used to be. Then there was House Of M, which pissed me off something fierce. Not just because I got mad about mutants being depowered, but because it was boring as fuck. Seriously, go back and read that book. Not a lot happens, huh? Lots of talking, right? Now imagine reading that month to month, waiting for something exciting to happen. New Avengers had started out well, but soon became boring as well - which made sense since it written by Brian Michael Bendis, much like House Of M. At the same time, DC’s build-up to Infinite Crisis had hooked me hard. My pull started to become majority DC, something that would continue until the present day.
Another blow for my love of Marvel would be the event cycle, which started with House Of M. The event cycle is exactly what it sounds like - a cycle of stories that lead to an event story, the consequences of which leads to another cycle of stories that lead to another event. The event cycle became extremely lucrative for Marvel at the time, with stories like Civil War and Secret Invasion becoming hits with fans and critics alike. However, while I enjoyed Civil War and the associated stories, the event cycle turned me off almost immediately. It didn’t help that the X-Men were often left out of these events, especially post-House Of M, and that I was mostly bored with Avengers and most of the rest of Marvel. The X-Men’s marginalization began back then, something that Joe Quesada had presaged years before in an interview with Wizard magazine. Quesada told everyone that he was going to “fix” Marvel, starting with the X-Men and Spider-Man, and then move on to the rest of the universe. Of course, none of us could have predicted that would mean sticking the X-Men into their own little corner of the Marvel Universe and destroying Spider-Man’s marriage.
It was simpler time.
By 2006, I was way more into DC than I was Marvel. I still loved Marvel, but I just wasn’t as interested in their comics anymore. Even the X-Men had fallen in my estimation. Sure, there were stories I loved - Old Man Logan came out and is one of my favorite Wolverine stories ever, Rise And Fall Of The Shi’Ar Empire is a perfect twelve-issue X-Men epic, and Dark Avengers took Bendis’s boring, seemingly endless at the time Avengers run and breathed new live into it. It would lead into Avengers/X-Men: Utopia and Siege, a four issue event book that for me represented Bendis’s best event comic… partly because it was too short for him to drag out into a boring, action-free morass. DC had books that I loved - Justice Society Of America, Justice League Of America, Green Lantern, Action Comics, Superman, Morrison’s Batman, Dini’s Detective Comics, and more I can’t remember at this point - so that’s where my money went. This was around the period Final Crisis dropped, which I believe is the greatest event comic ever, for reasons I’ve gone into while writing at CBR many, many times.
Now, eventually, 2008 came around. 2008 is a massively important year in Marvel history. In fact, an argument can be made that it’s more important to the history of the company than 1961, which is the year that the modern Marvel Universe began. The reason for this is simple - a little movie called Iron Man came out. Like every other Marvel fan - and millions of moviegoers that summer - I saw Iron Man and loved it. I didn’t think it was better than The Dark Knight, but it was still a cool movie, a superhero popcorn movie that I enjoyed immensely. I was very happy about it and I was even happier about the movie’s success. I was excited to see where Marvel was going to take things in the future and I loved the fact that I would be able to share my love of Marvel with other people. I honestly thought that comics would become a big deal again, because I thought that people would be like me - that they’d love superheroes so much that they would go and devour everything superhero-related, including comics.
The MCU came along and changed the way the world looked at superheroes in general and Marvel in particular. The early MCU was so hype for me. It was cool seeing these characters I loved so much on the big screen and I loved the fact that Marvel movies could finally bring in that most Marvel of comic tropes - the interconnected universe. As much as I love DC nowadays and will talk about how important the company is to the history of the superhero, Marvel’s introduction of the connected universe - where the heroes all lived in the same city and their actions had effects on their fellow heroes - changed the way superhero comics operated for decades, and are one of the reasons why I love them so much. This was impossible in the Marvel movies of the early ‘00s, which were all put out by different film companies. The MCU was able to bring Marvel characters together in a way they never had been before, and I was there for it.
Fuck, we all were.
So, I can honestly say that for the first four years of the MCU, from 2008 to 2012, Iron Man to The Avengers, I loved it. The movies were fun and I loved talking to the new fans of these characters that I had loved for so many years Plus, on the comic side of things, Marvel was starting to get really good again. DC’s New 52 reboot had turned me off, doing away with many of my favorite DC concepts, and Marvel was killing it, especially after Avengers Vs. X-Men, with writer Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers/New Avengers, Rick Remender’s Uncanny Avengers, Wolverine And The X-Men, and more all putting out impressive stories. Of course, they put Bendis on my beloved X-Men comics, but you can’t always win, you know?
My personal life went on a spiral around 2012, and I was only reading comics by keeping up with collected editions, which because of a lack of money I’d shoplift from a local chain big store. After seeing The Avengers in theaters, I missed out on Iron Man III and The Winter Soldier until a few year later, when I had moved to Orlando and got a job working at Disney World. I also missed out on the Internet discourse about the MCU from 2012 to 2014, including the post-Avengers blow-up, when the world became MCU fans. By the time I rejoined the nerdy side of the world online, the MCU was a full-blown phenomenon. This should have made me happy, but I quickly realized something - these fans didn’t really care about the comics. They just liked the movies. Not only that, but they thought that the movies were the greatest thing ever. You couldn’t talk badly about the MCU online; even the most middling of critiques were met with vitriol. These people loved the MCU, but they didn’t love Marvel, not really.
Marvel as an entity knew about this shift in the fandom and suddenly started catering to these fans. I honestly can’t really fault them for that; there were millions of MCU fans and there hadn’t been millions of comic buyers in a long time. Get that bag and all that. However, this wasn’t the best change. To begin with, Marvel started to tailor the comics towards the movie fans. Movie/comic synergy became the name of the game, but there was a problem with that, something that every comic fan online had encoutered while talking to MCU fans - MCU fans refused to read comics. Of course, that’s not to say that all of them wouldn’t read comics, mind you, but most of them had little to no interest in ever reading comics. Catering to them never really made sense to me because they weren’t the ones reading comics at all.
There was another problem with Marvel, one that got worse and worse. As the years went by, I noticed just how formulaic the films of the MCU had become. Every movie used the same plot formula; while the factors were different in particulars, there were still the same general things happening. For example, remember how all of the MCU movies had big fight scenes in end that all somehow involved flying enemies/and or allies? Basically, post-Avengers, every MCU movie did it. Fucking Ant-Man did it somehow. Then there were the quips. Marvel’s comics had always had a lot of humor; in fact, humor is a hallmark of superhero comics no matter what publisher makes them. However, the MCU took it to an extreme. Back in 2004, when my old nemesis Bendis became what amounted to Marvel’s head writer, his writing style revolved around a quippy dialogue style. The MCU picked up on this, partly because Bendis was part of the short-lived advisory council of comic creators that worked with the MCU and partly because of Joss Whedon’s writing style.
I was so tired of all of the jokes in the MCU movies. Every time there was any tension being built up in the plots, someone told a lame joke. Sure, the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies were always funny, but those were written by someone who was actually funny. Most of the MCU wasn’t funny. The stories weren’t interesting and the villains sucked. However, there were Easter eggs and the movies rewarded fans who had watched every movie. It often felt like the fans were more interested in that than they were the stories. They wanted to be rewarded for their fandom. They wanted to be patted on the head.
I was so tired of the MCU by 2016 and I was even more tired of the fans. They still pretended everything was great, that the MCU was the height of superhero fiction, and they lashed out at anyone who believed otherwise. Marvel didn’t respond to any criticism of the movies, keeping the formula alive and pretending that everything was fine. And, sure, I’m not made of stone; I loved Infinity War and liked Endgame. However, the MCU had become middling to me and the fans had soured me on it as much as the mediocre quality of the films.
Over on the comic front, things weren’t doing much better for me. Marvel didn’t own the film rights to the X-Men, so they shoved them into their own corner, eventually trying to replace with the Inhumans, a laughable disaster that still makes me chuckle. The event cycle had long since ran out of steam, but Marvel just kept it chugging along, creating terrible stories like Civil War II, Secret Empire, and Infinity Wars. I hadn’t cared about the Spider-Man books in years, mostly because Marvel decided that Peter Parker should never progress as a character, enforcing stagnation on him because the boomers and older Gen Xers in charge of the comics felt that Spider-Man should be exactly like he was when they were teenagers. The Avengers books were dead in the water after writer Jonathan Hickman left. DC was resurgent again, and my pull remained mostly controlled by them.
My relationship with Marvel has waxed and waned for years now. The MCU has somehow gotten worse than it was at the height of my hatred of it in the mid to late ‘10s. I liked Loki, WandaVision - well until the end which squandered everything, and Eternals - I’m not saying it’s a good movie, but it’s way more interesting than most of the MCU had been in years. The nostalgia based pandering of Spider-Man: No Way Home was entertaining, although I didn’t let it blind me to how terrible the story was. Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness was cool, mostly because Sam Raimi’s directing style made the movie feel different than any MCU movie not directed by James Gunn, but the story was so-so. Shit, I even really liked She-Hulk - I found it hilarious and I loved what it did with the characters. It was way more comic accurate than most of the MCU had been in years, which definitely mattered to me. However, for the most part, I found that the MCU’s tendency to not change at all - keeping its formulaic nature long past fans had gotten tired of it - have killed any respect I have for it.
The return of RDJ and the Russos doesn’t give me a lot of hope that things are going to change and I’m dreading what the MCU will do with my beloved X-Men.
As for the comics, I’m actually reading a lot of Marvel comics - The Immortal Thor, The Avengers, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, The Ultimates, X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine: Revenge, Wolverine (when it starts later this month), and several others that I’m probably not remembering right now. However, while most of these books are at least entertaining, I’m not really nearly as impressed with them as I am with the DC books I’m reading. Marvel is… fine, but with the talent the company has, I should be way happier with it.
I love Marvel. The characters of the Marvel Universe have been there for me when no one else was. They’ve gotten me through some rather dark times. I don’t know if I’d love superheroes nearly as much as I do right now if it wasn’t for Marvel. That’s why I’m so disappointed by the company currently.
One thing I love about DC is the fact that the publisher has done a lot to progress the art of superhero comics. DC did more to mature superheroes than Marvel and show all of the types of stories that could be told with them. Marvel has this reputation for being progressive, but if you look for the comics that did the most for queer reputation, DC is where you should look. DC proudly had trans creators and characters long before Marvel did. DC told stories that paved the way for the LGBTQIA+ representation that we have today. DC published the first gay wedding with Wildstorm/DC book The Authority #29 in 2002, a decade before Marvel crowed about the wedding of Northstar and Kyle in Astonishing X-Men. DC’s Vertigo line was telling stories in the 1990s that Marvel wouldn’t even attempt today.
Marvel, on the other hand, has continued to tell superhero stories, and most of the time they aren’t groundbreaking ones. Marvel definitely has some stories that fit this bill - 1984’s Squadron Supreme #1-12 should be talked about in the same breath as Watchmen - but modern Marvel feels like it’s found its niche and has no interest in telling stories that progress superhero stories. Look at the way the publisher has treated Miracleman since it got the rights to publish the book. Instead of keeping it perennially in print so that fans could marvel (ha ha) at one of Alan Moore’s greatest masterpieces, they reprinted the book in single issues, put out one printing apiece of the four hardcovers - Fear Of Flying, The Red King Syndrome, Olympus, and The Golden Age - and that was it until recently when they released an omnibus while Miracleman: The Dark Age was published. Miracleman should always be in print. It’s that amazing of a story, but Marvel seemingly has no interest in that. There are so many brilliant Marvel comics that the company should be showcasing, much like DC with so much of its back catalog, but they don’t. They’re more than happy to put out stories that more often than not just retread ground that longtime fans have experienced multiple times. Just look at the current X-Men publishing intiative From The Ashes. It’s a mishmash of rehashes from multiple eras of the X-Men.
And then there’s Marvel Studios. Marvel Studios had a chance to transform the way that people looked at superhero stories. Instead of telling superhero stories in new ways, pushing the boundaries of what a superhero movie could be, they just went with a formula that was popular. This wasn’t always the case; Phase One of the MCU wasn’t formulaic. Iron Man may have set up stuff like quippy heroes, but there was no plot formula. Each movie was different from the one before it. The Incredible Hulk, which is way better than it gets credit for, played into the horror aspects of the character’s story. Captain America: The First Avenger was an amazing war movie starring a superhero. Thor played with the Shakesperean directorial experience of Kenneth Branagh to highlight the familial drama of Thor and Loki. Iron Man II felt like it had been ripped right from the comics, and The Avengers was the perfect capstone. These movies gave me hope for the future of the MCU. Phase Two had brilliant movies like The Winter Soldier, a spy movie with superheroes, Guardians Of The Galaxy, a superhero comedy that still hasn’t been matched, and Iron Man III, a movie that swung for the fences and tried to be something different. However, it also had Thor: The Dark World, The Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and Ant-Man, a trio of mediocre to bad movies that completely misused the burgeoning Marvel plot formula. Phase Three was where the formula took complete control and while there were good movies there, it all felt the same. The same jokes, the same character beats, and the same bad villains.
Since then, the movies have been stuck in a cycle of diminishing returns, following a formula that fans have finally gotten tired of. The shows aren’t much better, giving fans stories that have done nothing to challenge the status quo. Now, we’re getting inundated with multiverse stuff, movies that trade on nostalgia. Marvel Studios had all the potential in the universe to be something special, but instead it found the worst parts of superhero comics - trading on nostalgia and formula - to create stories that aren’t special.
The fandom is another problem I have. Comic fans have always been a contentious lot and I’m okay with that. I love arguing with people about their opinions on comics. However, MCU fans are a different animal. One of the things I love about comic fans, even the ones I disagree with, is the passion they have. Comic fans want to experience everything. MCU fans aren’t like that. MCU fans stay in their lane. They don’t want to experience every part of Marvel. They stay with the movies and while I can respect not wanting to get into comics - they can be quite daunting - there’s something about the way they operate that bothers me. Too many of them look down on comics, while also trying to act like they know everything about the comics. They’re dismissive of the comics, yet they also want to be in control of the conversation even when it’s about comics.
They like to talk about “comic accuracy”, but the only thing they know about comic accuracy is what they find in wikis or YouTube videos or TikToks. They talk about how happy they are that Wolverine is finally in a comic accurate costume, but then defend the fact that the only thing accurate about the costume is the colors. They try to find reasons why it makes sense that RDJ can play Doctor Doom, trying to use Infamous Iron Man as proof without realizing that story does nothing to prove that. They listen to podcasts and get their opinions from people who read the comics for them, and even then twist everything so they can prove that the MCU is the best part of Marvel.
I love the comic medium. I find it to be a near perfect way to tell stories, combining words and pictures in a way that makes the reader a huge part of the process. I want more people to love comics. Marvel’s superheroes are the biggest things in pop culture, but the comics are selling badly. There’s no reason for this. I wish that MCU fans would give the comics more of a chance and I do my best to help fans that want to get into comics. At CBR, I wrote multiple guides to Marvel and its characters, highlighting stories MCU fans would like and be able to get into. I want these fans to go out of their comfort zone and give the source material a chance, to see how much better Marvel is on the page than it is on the screen.
My love for Marvel has soured for a variety of reasons. I’ve been told multiple times that maybe I should move on, that Marvel isn’t for me anymore, but I don’t think that’s the case. See, it’s not that I’ve outgrown superheroes - my love for DC is as rabid as ever - but that Marvel has regressed. While there are still Marvel books and comics I love - the new Ultimate line is brilliant and The Immortal Thor is another hit from writer Al Ewing, although I’m not on the book’s nuts as much as others are - I’m disappointed in the publisher in a number of ways. I don’t want to be; I want Marvel to wow me like they used to. They just don’t anymore. But I stick around, because I know that they have that ability still.
The MCU and its fans don’t help. I’m so tired of being made to feel like some kind of second rate fan because I don’t love the MCU. I’m tired of a fandom that actively looks down on comics while also trying to act like they know everything about the comics. I’m tired of them talking about why the MCU shouldn’t be comic accurate while also talking about how it is. I’m tired of the bad villains and formulaic storytelling. I’m tired of multiverse stories being used for nostalgia porn.
I love Marvel. I just wish that it lived up to what it can be.
So, thanks for reading. Leave a comment and tell me I’m an asshole for being mean to MCU fans. Or leave a comment and let’s talk about it. Either way, thank you for getting to the end. Hey, maybe you press this button:
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Anyway, I’m going to do another post tomorrow. It’s a short story that I wrote but couldn’t sell. I hope you like it.