Book Review - The Stan Lee Universe by Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas (eds.).

Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas (eds.). The Stan Lee Universe. Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2011. 175 pp. ISBN: 978-1605490298. US $8.99. https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=123_140&products_id=934 (only digital version still available)

 

Reviewed by Michael Kobre

 

            A common image of Stan Lee for hundreds of millions of fans all over the world who've seen an Avengers or Spider-Man movie or who've read a few Marvel comics, is that of an avuncular genius who created a whole new pantheon of myth—"this generation's Homer," according to a Princeton student in 1966. Another image, distilled from the remembrances of some of his collaborators and from the comic book industry's long history of exploiting its creators, has shadowed Lee as well. In this version of the story, he's a carnival huckster shilling lies and stolen goods, claiming credit for work that isn't his, while reaping the wealth and fame that should have gone to the artists who really created Marvel Comics. This version of Stan Lee, in fact, looks a lot like Funky Flashman, a devious and numbingly loquacious promoter decked out with a toupee and a fake beard—a caricature of Lee, that is—who tormented Jack Kirby's Mister Miracle, one of the heroes Kirby created for DC. Kirby, whose art defined Marvel at least as much as Lee's words, had quit working for Marvel in 1970, fed up at last with all the broken promises of more generous financial rewards and creative credits for his work. And it's this version of Stan Lee as well who's the protagonist of Abraham Riesman's 2021 biography of Lee, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. Carefully researched and gracefully written, Riesman's biography nevertheless insistently views Lee through the darkest possible prism. For Riesman, Lee is, above all, a con man and liar. As Riesman writes in his book's prologue, "[Lee] lied about little things, he lied about big things, he lied about strange things, and there's one massive, very consequential thing he may very well have lied about. If he did lie about that last thing—and there's substantial reason to believe he did—it completely changes his legacy" (12).

            At the core of this divide over Lee's character and work is, of course, that other long-running argument about the respective contributions of Lee, Kirby, Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko, and others to the creation of Marvel's characters and worlds. Lee's "Marvel Method" of creating comic books, in which artists like Kirby and Ditko would work from loose plot descriptions generated in increasingly-rushed conversations (which may or may not have ever been written down) meant that Marvel's artists had unprecedented freedom to shape and pace the stories they told, in a form of creation that Charles Hatfield has called "narrative drawing" (Hatfield 15). But the free-wheeling, improvisational nature of the Marvel Method also meant that Lee's own contributions were unclear, in spite of the line in so many credit boxes in so many Marvel comics that claimed that they were "Written by Stan Lee" (or "Smiling Stan" or "Stan the Man" or any of the other affectionate sobriquets that Lee employed in credit boxes). Yes, Lee added the dialogue and captions after the artists submitted their pages, but what role had he really played in conceiving the characters and plots? By 1989, Kirby said flatly that Lee's role hadn't been much at all. "I've never seen Stan Lee write anything," Kirby told Gary Groth for a Comics Journal interview. "I used to write the stories just like I always did" (Groth 37). In True Believer, Reisman even questions Lee's role in creating Fantastic Four #1 in 1961, the book that launched the Marvel era. "…[O]utside Stan's own oft-repeated words," Reisman writes, "there is currently no known evidence that he created the premise, plot, or characters that appeared in Fantastic Four #1. No presentation boards, no contemporary legal documents, no correspondence, no diary entries. Nothing" (105).

            In light of all the questions raised again by Riesman's biography and as part of the inevitable ongoing revaluation after Lee's death in 2018, it's helpful to look back at a 2011 collection of Stan Lee interviews, tributes, critical examinations, and miscellanea from Lee's archives, The Stan Lee Universe. Edited by Danny Fingeroth, whose own 2019 biography of Lee,  A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee, offers a more conventional portrayal than Riesman's, and by long-time Marvel writer and editor Roy Thomas, who describes himself here as Lee's "left-hand man" in Marvel's glory days, The Stan Lee Universe is, not surprisingly, an unequivocally admiring portrait of Lee. Arranged more or less chronologically, the collection follows Lee's career from a 1957 profile which focuses on the short-lived comic strip about a group of cub scouts, Mrs. Lyons' Cubs, that Lee created with artist Joe Maneely (Lee, always hungry for recognition, notes with "very great satisfaction" in the profile that the strip "has been approved by the chief Scout executive") to at least brief references to some of his final projects, including his mostly forgettable reality shows Who Wants to be a Superhero? and Stan Lee's Superhumans. Along the way, we also see family photos; notes Lee exchanged with film directors, including Alain Resnais, James Cameron, and Oliver Stone; pages from an unpublished screenplay for Resnais; an advertisement featuring Lee for Hathaway shirts; stills from a 1976 razor blade commercial, also featuring Lee; pitches for unrealized Marvel projects from Will Eisner and Richard Corben; and even a note from Lee to the president of United Airlines praising a stewardess who helped Lee and his wife Joan when she became ill during a flight. Among other odd discoveries in this material is Lee's suggestion to Resnais that he direct a Spider-Man movie starring Henry Winkler.

            But the heart of the book—as the center of Lee's story always will be—concerns his years as Marvel's most prominent scripter and its editor-in-chief. And it's on this subject that the interviews, analyses, and testimonials in the book do, in fact, help us understand a little more clearly the significance of Lee's contributions to the creation and rise of Marvel Comics. The Stan Lee Universe accomplishes this though, whether intentionally or not, by shifting the terms in which we might consider those contributions. Although there's a fine analysis by Peter Sanderson late in the book of Lee's style in dialogue and captions—Sanderson is particularly good at discussing Lee's use of the words "naught" and "smoldering" in a Thor caption—Lee in the interviews and the other artists and writers in their various testimonials don't actually have much to say about his work as a writer. There are general comments about the importance of characterization and vivid dialogue, but there's no sustained conversation about any individual story. Instead, what the book illuminates is Lee's work as an editor, shaping some of Marvel's signature characteristics (including ones essential to its wildly successful screen adaptations) and, of course, defining its brand.

            In remembrances of Lee, for instance, by writers like Thomas, Denny O'Neill, and Gary Friedrich and by such artists as Gene Colan, John Romita, and Herb Trimpe, Lee is consistently portrayed as an exacting editor with a clear vision of what he wanted on Marvel's covers, in its plots, in its art—Trimpe remembers Lee tossing pages of layouts into a trash can because Trimpe had used too many small panels—and even in the placement of dialogue and captions. For the writers, in particular, Lee was a teacher also. "He'd call us in and have us stand by him in front of the drawing table and go over the completed artwork of a story we'd written or one he'd written," Friedrich recalls, "and he'd edit it with us standing there, explaining any changes he'd made, why he put a balloon in a certain place, why he had a character say this rather than that, etc. One thing in particular I remember that he continually drove home was to always move the story forward. 'Every word that's spoken should be for the purpose of moving the story along,' he'd tell us again and again" (54). Even in later years, when Lee would receive almost finished pages, Thomas remembers, "the fact that Stan hadn't seen the dialogue and captions before they were rendered in ink in no way inhibited him from making changes … substantial changes" (50).

            Lee was, of course, also a master at developing Marvel's brand. "Thinking back," he says in a 1974 interview, "the whole thing was treated like an advertising campaign. The catch phrases, like 'Make Mine Marvel' and 'Face Front' and 'Excelsior' …I did it unconsciously, but it was all in the direction as though … I was building a product. I wanted to make Marvel Comics a product that people … would love" (124). In a detailed analysis of how Lee shaped Marvel's letter pages and then conceived and wrote the Bullpen Bulletins Page, which in 1967 began including "Stan's Soapbox," David Kasakove writes that "Stan Lee's editorial voice—at once frantic, comic, self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek, good-natured, wildly self-congratulatory and (sometimes) moralistic—was a years-long tour de force, the glue that held the Marvel Age of Comics together" (130).

            Reading The Stan Lee Universe also reminds us of how Lee's editorial vision helped shape Marvel's signature characteristics in the 1960s, innovations that would effectively redefine the conventions of virtually all superhero narratives in comics and later in other media. Looking back in a 1974 interview, in the context of retelling his familiar story about creating the Fantastic Four (and, as usual, taking credit for the characters' conceptions), Lee singles out his insistence on a kind of realism. "I tried to do everything I could to take these super-powered characters and in some way to make them realistic and human," he says. "To have them react the way normal men might react if these normal men happened to have superhero powers" (124). But while the respective contributions of Lee, Kirby, and Ditko to the creations of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man will always be—at least to some extent—uncertain, the kind of realism Lee describes, particularly in Marvel's early years when he was practically the company's only writer, seems to have more of his imprint. We hear Lee's voice, I'd argue, in scenes like Spider-Man's failed attempt to cash a check in his name in Amazing Spider-Man #1 or a scene in Fantastic Four #9 that Lee recalls in that 1974 interview when "They're evicted from their headquarters because they can't pay the rent because Reed Richards invests all their reward money in stocks and the markets take a nosedive" (124). For all of the qualities of Marvel Comics that flow into the solo work of Kirby and Ditko after they left Marvel, there are no moments like these: poignant, comic scenes, anchored in mundane realities and steeped in a kind of wry melancholy that turns superheroes into Yiddish shlemiels.

            Moments like these, however, would become less prominent as Lee became more involved in promoting Marvel Comics than in writing them and as Marvel's universe expanded too. But that concept of a shared universe, which was as much about branding and marketing as it was about storytelling, was clearly Lee's innovation. As he says in a 1968 interview, "… what we try to do, and I think we were probably the first at this, we try, even though they're different characters in different magazines, and possibly even living in different places, we try to make it all like one little world in which these characters exist, the Marvel world …" (44). Even Reisman concedes that Lee deserves credit for Marvel's shared universe: "Kirby never took credit for that idea—indeed, his assistant and biographer, Mark Evanier, says Kirby found it cumbersome and irritating, because it forced him to incorporate other people's ideas into his own comics. But Stan was enormously proud of the notion of the Marvel Universe and maintained it in all the superhero books" (129). Over time too, in light of Marvel's success, all superheroes existed in shared universes like this, and it's no exaggeration to say that the translation of this concept to the Marvel cinematic universe is a vital component of Marvel Studios' success on-screen, a narrative convention that's since been adapted, for good or ill, in so much other franchise storytelling in movies and other media forms.

            So what about that other question then? Who really created Marvel's characters and the universe-spanning epics they inhabit? Lee in the interviews here mostly tells the familiar story that he created the Fantastic Four and so many other characters. As the years pass in the book, we see him growing into the persona that would consume him for the rest of his life, as, for instance, in a 1974 interview, when he considers at length how he's absorbed Shakespeare's influence. But Lee is also careful to acknowledge how Marvel's artists, especially Kirby, co-created its stories. "… [T]he artist is part writer—" he says in a 1969 interview, "—he's breaking the story down as he sees it …" (78). In the earliest interview in the book, from 1965, Lee is remarkably open about Kirby's role in creating stories:

 

Some artists, of course, need a more detailed plot than others. Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean, I'll just say to Jack, "Let's let the next villain be Doctor Doom" … or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He's so good at plots, I'm sure he's a thousand times better than I. He just about makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing… I may tell him he's gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, I'll occasionally give him a plot, but we're practically both the writers on the things. (11)

    

         The documentary evidence in The Stan Lee Universe, however, doesn't settle anything. The book reprints a plot synopsis for Fantastic Four #1, which Reisman describes as "a curious document with a questionable history" that may have been written years after the comic's publication (106). Indeed, Roy Thomas' notes about the document here do little to clarify its provenance, as Thomas tells us how he was summoned into Lee's office one day late in the '60s so that Lee could show him the synopsis which Lee claimed to have found in a filing cabinet the night before—although Thomas does note that the synopsis looks like other typed plot summaries from the early '60s that Lee had previously shown him, including one for Fantastic Four #8 that's also included in The Stan Lee Universe. If anything though, other documents in the book don't make much of a case for Lee as a writer. Reproductions of pages from occasional prose stories he wrote for Marvel publisher Martin Goodman's other magazines and from Lee's unproduced screenplay for Resnais are all pretty routine stuff, mired in genre conventions or heavy-handed stereotypical characterizations. For that matter, the reproduction of materials from Lee and Kirby's last collaboration, a 1974 Silver Surfer graphic novel published by Simon and Schuster, strongly suggest that the book's story was mostly Kirby's, as he carefully details the plot in lengthy typed letters accompanying his artwork which are addressed to "Stanley" (and signed "Your pal, Jack") (153-155).

            Ultimately, the exact details of Lee's collaborations will never really be known. As Thomas notes in his comments on the Fantastic Four #1 synopsis, by 1965 Lee "was increasingly dispensing with written synopses, with Marvel artists often working merely from brief conversations, in person or over the phone" (15). Instead of written documents, we have Gene Colan's memory of recording phone calls with Lee or John Romita, Jr.'s memories of his father's anxiety after driving away from a plot session with Lee. "Oh, God, I didn't write any of this down," Romita, Jr. recalls his father saying, "how am I gonna remember all of this stuff?" (108). But if we must continue to dwell in uncertainty about what exactly transpired in Lee's work with Kirby, Ditko, and so many others, The Stan Lee Universe is an informative and entertaining field guide to that territory. Copiously illustrated, it brings to life again Lee's crowning moment as he helped to usher in the Marvel Age of Comics. If, as Reisman asserts, Lee's impulse to exaggerate his claims as a creator while failing to properly recognize his own achievements as Marvel's editor "was a core tragedy of Stan's existence and legacy," The Stan Lee Universe helps us at least to see those achievements more clearly (67).

 

References

Fingeroth, Danny, and Roy Thomas, editors. The Stan Lee Universe. TwoMorrows Publishing, 2011.

 

Fingeroth, Danny. A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee. St. Martin's Press, 2019.

 

Groth, Gary. "I've Never Done Anything Halfheartedly." The Comics Journal Library: Jack       Kirby, Fantagraphic Books, 2002, pp. 18-49.

 

Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

 

Riesman, Abraham. True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. Crown, 2021.

 

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.

           

Book review - The Wakanda Files. A Technological Exploration of the Avengers and Beyond.

 

Benjamin, Troy. The Wakanda Files. A Technological Exploration of the Avengers and Beyond. Epic Ink, 2020. 160 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7603-6544-1. $60.00.

 reviewed by Aaron Ricker

Troy Benjamin is the author of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Declassified book series, and a contributor to the Official Guidebook to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His new book The Wakanda Files is, like these other titles, an illustrated look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) aimed at fans in a hardcover book with plastic slipcase.* The book’s creative conceit presents The Wakanda Files as a collection of top-secret intelligence assembled by the royal scientists of Wakanda (a fictional African kingdom featured in the MCU, led by the Black Panther). The high-tech information thus collected by Wakandan spies and scientists is arranged into five sections: “Human Enhancement” (pages 4-69), “Weapons” (70-105), “Vehicles” (106-129), “AI and Mind Control” (130-143), and “Energies and Elements” (144-162). Chapter 1 therefore presents data on how Steve Rogers was transformed into Captain America, for example, and Chapter 2 talks about the development of his shield. Chapter 3 includes a discussion of the ups and downs of Howard Stark’s flying cars, and Chapter 4 highlights the AI breakthroughs (lucky and otherwise) achieved by Tony Stark. Chapter 6 presents some of the most fantastical science of all, including wonders like the fictionalized powers of palladium and the “Infinity Stones” whose blatantly magical character does not even get a perfunctory scientific fig leaf.

 

As this list of representative items suggests, the focus of The Wakanda Files is squarely on the MCU and the Avengers. The book’s subtitle touts it as “a technological exploration of the Avengers and beyond,” but the scope of its attention never extends far beyond the marvels of the Avengers-related movies. Even the illustrations are often just screenshots from the films, run through various Photoshop filters. If Wakanda has been patiently collecting data on exotic science related to human enhancement for years, one might ask, why do these files include no mention of achievements like Dr. Doom’s ultra-high-tech armour? The answer seems to be that the narrative focus of The Wakanda Files is restricted by the marketing needs of the real world outside the MCU: the Fantastic Four movies were (by MCU standards) commercial flops, and done by a rival studio which controlled the intellectual property. Hot Marvel properties that are fresh in people’s minds from the Avengers blockbusters are more likely to sell books.

 

The presentation of The Wakanda Files is not only limited by the MCU’s Avengers high-tech context in terms of the fictional technologies deemed worthy of attention. As intimated above with reference to the Infinity Stones, the book is also noticeably shaped by the way the Avengers movies tend to casually “retcon” the magic found in their source material as exotic science. On the very first page, chief scientist Shuri-Kimoyo specifies that the goal of the project is to “bring our planet the forefront of technology and innovation” (Wakanda Files, p. 3). The first file presented, though, is about the magic herb that allows the Black Panther to “access the ancestral plane” (Wakanda Files, pp. 6-7).

 

As a result of this artistic, or commercial, decision to accept the MCU’s preference for non-explanations, The Wakanda Files squanders some of its potential. A book about science (and) fiction can help scratch the hobbyist’s itch for collection and escapism. Such a book can also serve at times, though, to inform and inspire. It can give readers a pleasant chance to marvel at how elegantly the fantasy has been made to dance with the hard science. The lazy approach that The Wakanda Files picks up from the MCU shrugs off this opportunity. In Chapter 3, for example, Howard Stark explains that Captain America’s shield is bulletproof because it’s “[c]ompletely vibration absorbent” (p. 72). What do readers interested in scientific information gain from the suggestion that bullets are dangerous due to vibrations as opposed to their weight and speed?

 

At times, the loss in terms of potential infotainment value is exacerbated by losses in narrative coherence. According to The Wakanda Files, for example, the Bifrost bridge from Asgard to Earth controlled by the thunder god Thor is an Einstein-Rosen wormhole – an idea floated as theory in the movies and repeated here as fact. As such, the Bifrost is said to permit travel through space and time (pp. 80, 149). In narrative terms, though, this picture just doesn’t work. If Thor had the ability to open portals for time travel, the Avengers wouldn’t have needed to spend so much time and energy building a time machine (the very device discussed on pages 59-61 of The Wakanda Files). Now and then, this unfortunate streak of intellectual laziness drags the book down to the level of absurdity. In Chapter 3, for example, the reader is presented with Dr. Hank Pym’s plans to become smaller than an atom, which for some reason include worrying about how breathable the air might be. “Oxygen levels within the Quantum Realm are undetermined,” Pym notes (p. 129). This is a truly bizarre concern to attribute to a brilliant scientist. How many oxygen molecules per billion is he hoping to inhale, once he’s smaller than an oxygen molecule? The services of a good scientific advisor/editor would have come in handy at such points.

 

On a less serious, but nevertheless distracting and disappointing note, The Wakanda Files also suffers from a lack of basic editing. In Chapter 1, the head of the German super-soldier program is found writing, “I need resources. I need men” (p. 12). Two pages later, the head of the American super-soldier program writes, “We need resources. We need men” (p. 14). In Chapter 2, SHIELD agent Phil Coulson recommends copying Asgardian tech because “we’ll want to fight fire with fire” (p. 95). Two pages later, he also recommends copying Asgardian tech because “we’ll want to fight fire with fire” (p. 97). Proofreading mistakes appear in every section. Benjamin writes “burying the lead” as opposed to “the lede” (p. 142), for instance, and invents the new English expression “of which I’m familiar” (pp. 123, 146). In short, the timing of The Wakanda Files seems wise from a sales point of view - hot on the heels of the movies and ready for holiday sales - but a less derivative and more precise approach could have provided fans and students of comics culture with a more enjoyable read while enriching the backstory of the MCU.

 

*editor’s note – Ricker’s review was written from an advance copy pdf. His comments with page citations have been checked and confirmed against the final text. The finished book also comes with a small ultraviolet light designed as Wakandan technology with which the reader can find concealed messages. The plastic slipcase is necessary to hold the light together with the book. A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 22:2.

Book Review: Ms. Marvel’s America: No Normal

by Matthew Teutsch

Jessica Baldanzi and Hussein Rashid (eds.) Ms. Marvel's America: No Normal.  University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 280 pp. 978-1496827012, $30. 
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Ms.-Marvel-s-America

While Kamala Khan first appeared in the background of a panel in Captain Marvel #14, she formally debuted on the last page of Captain Marvel #17 in November 2013, with the writer hinting that the second-generation Pakistani immigrant, Muslim-American teenager from Jersey City would become the next Ms. Marvel. In February 2014, Khan became the latest Ms. Marvel, also becoming, as Jessica Baldanzi and Hussein Rashid note, "the first Muslim superhero to headline her own series" (vii). Khan, created by editor Sana Amanat and writer G. Willow Wilson, is more than a "Muslim superhero" as she does not embody one, monolithic identity. As Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric Berlatsky point out in "'The Only Nerdy Pakistani-American-Slash-Inhuman in the Entire Series': Postracialism and Politics in the New Ms. Marvel," Khan "is American and Pakistani, human and Inhuman, brown and white," and I would add a teenager, a comics' culture fan, a video game fan, and more (66).

Baldanzi and Rashid's Ms. Marvel's America: No Normal serves as the first scholarly volume on Khan, collecting essays from scholars in various disciplines. While Baldanzi and Rashid mainly focus the scope of the collection on Ms. Marvel's first volume, issues #1-19, the editors provide readers with a wide range of articles that examine everything from the troubled publication history of Khan's predecessor Carol Danvers, to discussions of identity and politics within the series, to insights into using Ms. Marvel in the classroom, to the atypical fandom surrounding Khan. In this manner, the collection serves as a starting point for numerous discussions surrounding Khan in relation to the comics' industry, teaching, activism, fandom, and more.     

The first section, "Precursors," contains two essays which examine two of the most prominent forerunners to Khan: Carol Danvers and Dust (Sooraya Qadir). In "Mentoring Ms. Marvel: Marvel's Khan and the Reconstitution of Carol Danvers," J. Richard Stevens looks at Danvers' publication history and the lead up to Khan's appearance in Ms. Marvel where she receives the superhero mantle from Danvers. Stevens dives into Danvers' source texts, pointing out that while she became a symbol of feminism as a female superhero in the male Captain Marvel's 1960s series, "her role in the series was to serve as a damsel in distress for Captain Marvel" before she received her superpowers and her own Ms. Marvel series in the late 1970s (7). With her series cancelled, she was arguably raped while part of the Avengers and written out of the team. Upon her reintroduction as Captain Marvel in 2012 and the subsequent creation of Khan, Danvers became a mentor to the teenage hero, bringing an "interaction between second-wave feminism and post-feminism" to the series, even though as Stevens argues, the positioning makes her "less relevant to the concerns of millennials" (17). Martin Lund's contribution examines the representation of both the X-Man Dust and Khan within "superhero comics [which] use space to frame issues of identity and belonging," specifically following 9/11 (22). Lund emphasizes that out of her one hundred and twenty-two appearances, Dust only speaks in sixty-eight of them and plays a leading role in three issues. Lund focuses on issues where she speaks, and he details how Dust merely exists and "functions strictly as an Other," playing into readers' preconceived notions about Muslim men and women (28). With Khan, he argues focus is on "to what extent and how she negotiates a sense of cultural citizenship that is both flexible and multicultural" instead of the question of whether or not she belongs (31). Ultimately, Khan's position as both an outsider and someone who feels at home in Jersey City makes her relatable to readers, and it also underscores the internal struggles she has with her own identity as a teenage girl, Pakistani-American, Muslim, daughter, and superhero.       

The essays in "Nation and Religion, Identity and Community" present varying, and differing, examinations of the ways that Khan and Ms. Marvel navigate the community and setting in which she exists.  Focusing on the multiple identities and spaces that Khan occupies and navigates, Hussein Rashid's "Ms. Marvel is an Immigrant" argues that we need to look at the ways that Khan, not Ms. Marvel, traverses and engages with the multiple pulls in her life, and in this manner "we can more clearly see how the hybridity process functions and the changes it makes" (48). Throughout the essay, Rashid shows that we do not need to read Khan "as a Muslim superhero" because reading her narrative in this manner "flattens her character and misses the ways in which she is doing important cultural work"; rather, we need to think about Khan "as a superhero who is Muslim" (61). David Lewis' "Hope and the Sa'a of Ms Marvel" explores the ways that Islam influences Khan's narrative and works in conjunction with her identity and community within the narrative. Lewis argues that these connections showcase that "Khan's religious identity is not peripheral to her mission as a superhero; it is quietly integral" (126). It is central because it informs her reaction to the apocalyptic events outside of her control and the ways that she works to save her community in Jersey City, even as New York and other areas encounter the same destructive forces.   

In their essay, Dagbovie-Mullins and Berlatsky examine the ways that Ms. Marvel exists as the product of large corporations who value the bottom line more than they value true diversity; as such, while Khan and the series presents positive diverse narratives, "it is also important to acknowledge the limits of the post-racialist discourse in which it partakes" (84). These limits cause the series to be more apolitical and assimilationist instead of speaking to national and global politics.  Jessica Baldanzi's "'I Would Rather Be a Cyborg': Both/And Technoculture and the New Ms. Marvel" looks at Dana Haraway's 1984 "Cyborg Manifesto" in relation to Ms. Marvel. Ultimately, Baldanzi argues that through interrogating discussions and terms used to describe technoculture Ms. Marvel "find[s] interconnections rather than divisions" that point to the work that we still have to do (110).  

Building upon the previous section, the essays in "Pedagogy and Resistance" draw attention to the impact that Khan has within the classroom on students in the real-world, not just within the pages of Ms. Marvel. Drawing on the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and on critical race theorists such as Mari Matsuda and bell hooks, Peter Carlson and Antero Garcia's "The Transformational Resistance of Ms. Marvel in America" shows the ways that "Khan's civic voice and agency are intertwined with her personal identity; her growing, adolescent sense of self; and her initially conflicted feelings about how her superpowers are presented" (134).  By tracing Khan's movement towards transformational resistance throughout the series, Carlson and Garcia point out how the series helps students, especially students of color, explore and come into their own civic voices and duties.

In "'Classroom Heroes': Ms. Marvel and Feminist, Antiracist Pedagogy," Winona Landis looks at the ways that Ms. Marvel works in the classroom as "a feminist, anti-racist pedagogical tool" (154). Landis does this by highlighting the ways that she incorporates Ms. Marvel into her classes and the ways that students respond to Khan and other characters within the text. While she does, as others do throughout the collection, note some of the problems with Ms. Marvel, Landis points out that "it is the nuance and imperfection therein that allows this comic . . . to reach wide audiences and to affect students in noteworthy and powerful ways" (167). Kristin Petersen's contribution showcases the ways that Khan's fashion functions a visual form of resistance, specifically by tracing Khan's costume from the un-pc costume that Carol Danvers originally wore to the more conservative Ms. Marvel costume which she fashions out of her burkini, leggings, and sweatshirt. Khan's costume and fashion works to "visually demonstrate that the intersection of cultural values that Ms. Marvel represents are essential to American culture" (185).

The fourth section examines comics fandom and Aaron Kashtan's and Nicholaus Pumphrey's essays each challenge the narrative of comic fans solely consisting of male fans who constantly resist change. Kashtan highlights Khan's own fandom of comics and shows how as a fangirl "Khan demonstrates that comics are not the exclusive property of white male fanboys, and that traditional comics fandom is not the only way to be a fan" (192). Kashtan details the ways that Khan positions herself as a fan of comics, science fiction, video games, and more; he shows how she navigates these spaces as well, engaging in massively multiplayer online role playing games and writing fan fiction about her favorite superheroes. In all of these endeavors, Khan counters earlier depictions of fandom in comics through "her creative (or 'transformative') fan practices and because her fandom is presented in a generally positive light" (197). Pumphrey continues Kashtan's exploration by looking at "the racist and sexist commentary from white male fans" to the introductions of Miles Morales and Khan to the Marvel Universe (207). Pumphrey presents statistical evidence highlighting the misnomer of comics' fans as "fanboys," and he argues that calls for continuity in comics "preserves the institutionalized racism of the 1960s" (215). At its core, Pumphrey's essay explores the tensions between fans' reactions, comics company's bottom lines and marketing strategies, and the growing need for "diverse representation" in the medium (221). In this manner, Pumphrey points out that while Morales, Khan, and other characters present diversity, the continued presence of "the fanboys of yesterday" push back, and in order to move forward "diverse representation needs to be mandatory and widespread from the top down."

Overall, the collection presents a wide range of examinations of Ms. Marvel. In this manner, the essays provide ways to look at Kamala Khan and the series while the last two parts of the collection present teachers with ways to incorporate Ms. Marvel into the classroom and challenge the still-prevailing myth of comic book readers as solely white males. At the end of the collection, Shabana Mir's interview with G. Willow Wilson touches on the themes that the essays in the collection explore. Along with this, the "Coda" contains an a single-panel piece by José Alaniz that encapsulates the importance of Khan through the anecdote he shared of encountering Madia, a deaf teenager from Somalia, who tapped Alaniz on the shoulder as he read Ms. Marvel and told him, "That girl is me."        

 

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 22:2.

Exhibit review: Superheroes at the National Museum of American History

by Mike Rhode


Superheroes. Washington, DC: National Museum of American History. November 20, 2018 to September 2, 2019. http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/super-heroes

The Smithsonian museum has mounted a small, but choice, exhibit made up of some extremely surprising pieces. The terse description on their website only hints at it:

This showcase presents artifacts from the museum's collections that relate to Superheroes, including comic books, original comic art, movie and television costumes and props, and memorabilia. The display includes George Reeves's Superman costume from the Adventures of Superman TV program, which ran from 1951-1958, as well as Halle Berry's Storm costume from the 2014 film X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Of the five exhibit cases, two concentrate on comic books and original art, while the other three contain props from movies and pop culture ephemera. Surprisingly, the Black Panther costume from the Marvel movies which the museum collected this summer is not included, but as noted above they have displayed George Reeve's Superman costume (since it is in color rather than grey shades, it came from the later seasons of the television show), Halle Berry's Storm uniform, along with Captain America's shield, Wolverine's claws and Batman's cowl and a batarang. Those three cases are rounded out with the first issue of Ms. Magazine which had a Wonder Woman cover, two lunchboxes (Wonder Woman and Marvel heroes), and a Superman telephone.

courtesy of Grand Comics Database

 Surprisingly, the two cases of comic books and original art include a very wide variety of comic books including some that just recently came out such as America (Marvel) along with older issues such as Leading Comics from 1943 which featured Green Arrow among other heroes such as the Crimson Avenger and the Star-Spangled Kid. The existence of an apparently extensive comic book collection in the Smithsonian comes as a surprise to this reviewer and will need to be researched more in depth. Even more of a surprise were the four pieces of original art on display – the cover of Sensation Comics 18 (1943) with Wonder Woman drawn by H.G. Peter, a Superman comic strip (1943) signed by Siegel and Shuster, a Captain Midnight cover that the curators did not bother to track the source of (it appears to be an unused version of #7 from April 1943), and a April 27, 1945 Batman comic strip. Actually, none of the creators of any of the works are credited, although the donors are.

The small exhibit lines two sides of a hallway off the busy Constitution Avenue entrance of the Museum, but the location has the advantage of being around the corner from a Batmobile from the 1989 Batman movie that was installed earlier this year. The car may be tied into the nearby installation and branding of a Warner Bros. theater showing the latest Harry Potter spin-off movie which seems like a true waste of space in the perennially over-crowded and under –exhibited (i.e. they have literally hundreds of thousands of items worthy of display in storage), but one assumes that besides the Batmobile, the theater came with a cash donation or promise of shared revenues.

Notwithstanding that cynicism, the Batmobile and the superheroes exhibit are fun to see, although most people quickly passed them by during this reviewer's visit. Also of interest may be a bound volume of Wonder Woman comics and a reproduction of an unused idea for her original costume, around the other corner from the Batmobile in the Smithsonian Libraries exhibit gallery. The museum has recently acquired some Marston family papers.

Bruce Guthrie has an extensive series of photographs including the individual comic books at http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/keys/2018_11_22D2_SIAH_Superheroes

 

(This review was written for the International Journal of Comic Art 20:2, but this version appears on both the IJOCA and ComicsDC websites on November 23, 2018, while the exhibit is still open for viewing.)