Book Review: Analyzing the Marvel Universe. Critical Essays on the Comics and Film Adaptations

 reviewed by Cecilia Garrison, Teaching/Research Assistant, California Institute of Integral Studies

Douglas Brode, ed. Analyzing the Marvel Universe. Critical Essays on the Comics and Film Adaptations. Jefferson, NC:  McFarland, 2024. 245 pp. US $49.95 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-1-4766-9066-7. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/analyzing-the-marvel-universe/

 

     Douglas Brode’s Analyzing the Marvel Universe instructs us, from the prologue, to “[s]how me a nation’s mythology...and I will tell you all you would ever want to know about its people” (11). Brode’s contribution to the work of popular culture is extensive, and, as with this text, offers insight into the far-reaching impacts of something so simple as a comic, a television show, or a movie. He has collected, in this book of diverse essays, writings from medievalists, scholars of popular culture and English literature, sociologists, artists, novelists, and more. This winding text takes us through an array of the ways Marvel Comics lexicon has become increasingly multi-textual, increasingly a space of American mythos creation, and increasingly an exercise in what stumbling through slow and inconsistent progress towards modernity may look like.

The text combines the works of several authors, including Brode himself, covering topics that range from the astounding failure of the Broadway musical, “Spider-Man:  Turn Off the Dark,” to development of G.I. Joe from an action figure we must never refer to as a doll into a fully-fledged IP with comic books and a TV show, to the clumsy attempts Marvel has made over the years into intersectional and diversified narrative creation. The chapters include detailed histories of various Marvel IPs, critiques of mishandlings of characters and identities, and the importance of growth for the characters, Marvel itself, and the industry at large, in order to keep up with their ever-growing and evolving fan base.

The text’s initial essay is Lauer’s thorough assessment of why “Spider-Man:  Turn Off the Dark” failed so spectacularly, and it is with this opening essay that the reader receives what could almost be a warning, an instruction, a plea from fans both old and new:  “For an adaptation to have a chance at success, adaptors need to care about their source material, understand and work with their own medium specificity, and, ideally, have a new point to make by bringing the original’s concept to a new medium” (21-22). It is, with this understanding of what Marvel fans are looking for, their transmedia adaptations that the text takes off, acknowledging Marvel’s success, while pressing the media giant for more, for better. Anke Marie Bock’s critique of the characterization of Sue Storm as condescending and vilifying of feminine sexuality recognizes that while this stereotypical representation of women may have been what audiences in the 1970s were comfortable with, it none-the-less perpetuates uncomfortable stereotypes of women’s inferiority to men. In an essay on the four-issue anthology, Fearless, Christina M. Knopf argues that “[d]espite Marvel’s assertions that its books are not political, simply telling stories about the ‘world outside your window,’ such works cannot help but carry sociopolitical messages,” (107) and lays claim that the highlighting of female talent and female stories is what makes the anthology as remarkable as it is. Karl E. Martin argues that despite its diversion from the comics and the real critiques of the film adaptation, “Black Panther,” and its messaging, the film “engages African discourse in remarkable ways, exposing millions of viewers worldwide to a decades-old conversation” (217) around Pan-Africanism and the work of W.E.B. DeBois. The editor’s own treatise on the ways in which Black Mamba serves as a mirror to the changing perception of American female activists by broader society, ponders the origins of a villainess who is sometimes heroic and takes the identity of “a complex, ambiguous female deity that threatened the patriarchy of Western civilization” (74). These essays speak to the growing number of vocal comic and comic-adjacent property consumers who seek a more thorough and nuanced representation of the full array of spectrum-spanning identities in their superhero content.

Several of the essays within the text contend with the relationship between representation, responsibility, and engaging storytelling. Hafsa Alkhudairi, in her essay on Kamala Kahn, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, explains that the responsibility for an entire identity’s representation, at this time in the Marvel lexicon, often falls onto the shoulders of one or maybe a few characters of that identity group, and protests this. She claims, at the close, that both Marvel and the audience “need more stories of people from different genders, races, and religions, all thoroughly nuanced to relieve the pressure on those who do exist” (98). This essay, and others like it, including Jaclyn Kliman’s critique of the Black Widow’s film presence as indicative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s problem of being “stuck in the supposed obstacle of writing a complex, leading superheroine,” (79), laud Marvel and the MCU for their progress towards a more inclusive and diverse character array. However, they are also pointing out what many fans may see as obvious. Marvel’s attempts are often clumsy, falling short of, or missing the mark entirely. From the call to acknowledge where current and past X-Men comics (and films) have been lacking in terms of a genuine critique of structural oppression and systemic racism, by Quincy Thomas, to the analysis of the ways in which even our ideas of what a villain or a bad guy looks like to modern audiences according to J.S. Starkweather, to Susan Aronstein and Tammy L. Mielke’s assessment of the value of high-quality, consistent character development and the importance of modernizing male characters such as Tony Stark--Analyzing the Marvel Universe, argues that Marvel fans and scholars are looking for better from their comics and film studios.

Historicity plays a significant role across the essays in the text. Cyrus R. K. Patell urges comics readers and scholars to approach comics reading with a cosmopolitan reading practice, using comics as a way to explore the “interplay of sameness and difference, of comfort and discomfort in texts we encounter” (181). In this cosmopolitan reading practice, the non-realistic fiction of comics of yore provide a unique perspective into what those at the time of writing may have understood about the world, with what authors believed would resonate with their readers. In Edward Salo’s exploration of G.I. Joe, from toys to comics to television and beyond, he seems to unknowingly put Patell’s urging to work, providing a unique analysis of the impact of historical context on the changing scope of a character aimed at depicting the ideal American soldier and role model for young boys. Scott Manning’s unique take on Marvel’s recurring visual trope depicting Wolverine punctured with arrows situates Wolverine as both indestructible in the Marvel cosmos, but also as in reference to a distinctly medieval mythos, drawing connection from history’s storytelling and our own. When seeking an ideal example of the changing landscape of comics into transmedia universes, Mark Hibbett holds Doctor Doom up as the shining beacon for others to follow, pointing to his remarkable consistency through his appearances in comics, movies, video games, and television shows, even when his components become stretched or altered. Perhaps among the most notable for our current time is Ora C. McWilliams and Joshua Richardson’s essay on Secret Empire and the conversation it forced readers and Marvel writers and executives alike to have about the histories of comics characters and the comics industry broadly, about bigotry both in the industry and the fan base, about fascism, about cultural divides, and about fan response to the way characters are used and for what messages. To move forward into each new era, Marvel and their fans must acknowledge the history of both their comics and characters, and of what context has brought them into creation.

With certain essayists, a close reading allows for Marvel’s limited expression of difference to shine in new light. Dennin Ellis and Melissa Guadrón urge readers to look past the Thing as a stand-in for disabled people everywhere, and acknowledge that he has qualities that characters, such as Man-Thing, the Zombie, and Omega the Unknown, inherently lack:  “a healthy support system in his family and friends, and the ability to determine his own destiny” (151); they urge readers, and Marvel more broadly, to consider how some powers may come at a cost of explicit disability and what loving those characters could look like for fans. In Jerold Abrams and Katherine Reed’s essay on “Guardians of the Galaxy,” they argue these wisecracking, explosion-laden films provide viewers with the opportunity to investigate the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity through the characters of Rocket Racoon and Groot, exploring the nature of language and of self-consciousness. Jeffrey McCambridge posits the Nameless as a means of looking to the unique language of trauma, memory, and pain. He describes their haunted, apathetic existence as indicative of the nihilism inherent in Marvel’s cosmos and their lexicon, forever doomed to repeat itself in an effort to balance the cosmic scales of justice and tell their stories again and again.

Brode’s text closes with an essay which brings each of the other essays together in a seamless, comprehensive conclusion. Without Garret L. Castleberry’s essay on “The Spreadable Media Model of Mass Communication,” there is a real chance this text could have come across as unfinished and even disparate. However, Castleberry takes the reader through Marvel’s growth from a mom-and-pop comic shop with extraordinary name value somehow still teetering on the edge of total bankruptcy, to an incredibly and increasingly powerful arm in what may well be the strongest mass media conglomerate in the world, providing Disney with necessary broad appeal and cultural investment even among the most vehemently critical. He details the conflict between what he labels “fantagonists”--the aggravated, “mostly male, mostly anonymous” (226) fans whose demographics make-up is that of historic majority of comics readers who set out to derail stories, such as Black Panther or Captain Marvel, because these stories did not represent them; and incredible value-add that “inclusive storytelling and character diversification” (227) had, not only to movie-goer’s experiences and superhero movies’ showings at high-culture awards shows, but also Marvel executives’ bankroll. At the close of the text, Castleberry’s succinct contextualization and analysis of the way that Marvel, their cinematic universe, and their acquisition by Disney informed, and was informed by, a changing landscape of fan interaction styles, media consumption modalities, and the power of intergenerational and cross-cultural consumer branding.

Analyzing the Marvel Universe leaves the reader hopeful for a time where Marvel, and their media parent, Disney, are able to acknowledge the gaps they have left in their history, and, in fact, the places where they have done harm, and move towards a new superheroic future. The research is clear, based on this text, that comics and superhero fans are not going anywhere, but, in fact, the number of people invested in the content is ever-growing, and the faces of those fans are ever-changing. The writers here are clear in their messaging:  fans are intrigued by the history, wanting to understand where their beloved characters are coming from both in the Marvel canon and within historical context, but fans also want to see characters that move forward into a world of increasing diversity, acceptance, and affection, for that which is different. Brode attests that Stan Lee, the proverbial father of Marvel Comics, insisted his characters be as three-dimensional as possible and dared to dream of a superhero team in Fantastic Four that included not just men, but even a woman with powers and a position of her own, stereotyped and strained though it may have been. This, according to the essayists included in this text, is all the modern Marvel fan wants:  to expand the full realm of individuals “of valor who, despite their strength and courage, revealed deep psychological problems when alone and lonely” (10). At the end of the day, Marvel is growing, media are changing, and the fans are responding in kind.

 

• Table of Contents

Introduction: Prelude to a ­Pop-Culture Phenomenon
Douglas Brode 1

With Great Power Ballads, There Must Also Come—Great Responsibility! A ­Re-Assessment of the ­Spider-Man Legacy
Emily Lauer 15

“I am…”: Tony Stark’s Evolving Masculinity from Comic to Endgame
Susan Aronstein and Tammy L. Mielke 24

Armored Warriors Full of Arrows: From Obscure Crusader and Arabic Texts to Marvel’s Wolverine
Scott Manning 38

Not a Giant, But a “Real” American Hero: Reinventing the American Military Man in G.I. Joe, a Real American Hero Comic Book (1982–1994)
Edward Salo 50

Doctor Doom: Marvel’s Transmedia Supervillain
Mark Hibbett 59

Beyond Good and Evil: DC’s Catwoman, Marvel’s Black Mamba, and the Tradition of the Dark, Dangerous Woman
Douglas Brode 69

“You are ­mind-blowingly duplicitous”: Black Widow and the Male Gaze
Jaclyn Kliman 79

Finally, a Muslim Teenage Female Superhero: The Intersectionality of Feminism and Islam in Ms. Marvel

Hafsa Alkhudairi 90

The True Meaning of Fearless: Feminism in Fearless and the Marvel Universe
Christina M. Knopf 100

Sexuality as the Devil’s Tool: Namor and His ­Never-Ending Love for Invisible Girl
Anke Marie Bock 109

“We are Groot”: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Guardians of the Galaxy
Jerold Abrams and Katherine Reed 119

“I remember a shadow, living in the shade of your greatness”: Tracking Thor and Loki’s Codependency Across the Nine Realms and Beyond
J.S. Starkweather 130

“Foul of form and barren of mind”: Disability in the Comics of Steve Gerber
Dennin Ellis and Melissa Guadrón 150

A Kree by Any Other Name: The Nameless and the Problems of History, Forgetting, and the Pain of Memory
Jeffrey Mccambridge 160

A Secret Empire Among Us: Or, “When Is There a Good Time to Discuss Fascism?”
Ora C. McWilliams and Joshua Richardson 168

“They do things differently there”: Not Brand Echh, 1967–1969
Cyrus R.K. Patell 179

Children of a Lesser Atom: The Dearth of Difference in Marvel’s ­X-Men
Quincy Thomas 191

Black Panther: From W.E.B. Du Bois to Wakanda
Karl E. Martin 210

The Spreadable Media Model of Mass Communication: Tracing the Corporate Continuity of ­Disney-Marvel and the MCU
Garret L. Castleberry 219

About the Contributors 239

Index 243

 

Graphic Novel Review: Madame Choi and the Monsters: A True Story

 reviewed by Cord A. Scott, UMGC-Okinawa

Patrick Spät and Sherce Domingo; translated by Michael Waaler. Madame Choi and the Monsters: A True Story. London: Self-Made Hero Publications, 2024. ISBN 978-1-914224-22-5. $22.99. https://www.selfmadehero.com/books/madame-choi-and-the-monsters-a-true-story

Sometimes true historical stories seem so outrageous that they can feel like a fictional script. When visuals such as comic art are added, the stories become even more engaging. Madame Choi and the Monsters is one of those stories -- so engaging that it seems that it must be fake. Here is the book’s advertising blurb:

The incredible-yet-true story of celebrated South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, abducted in 1978 by North Korean secret agents on the orders of their film-crazed future leader Kim Jong-il. Six months later, filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, Choi Eun-hee’s ex-husband, is abducted in turn. Choi and Shin remain unaware of each other’s fates until they meet again at a dinner hosted by Kim Jong-il in 1983. Kim forces Choi and Shin to make films, including the infamous kaiju cult classic Pulgasari (1985), all while convincing the world that they serve North Korea willingly. Choi and Shin’s love rekindles slowly in this reunited captivity. Only at the 1986 Vienna Film Festival do they escape, fleeing in a daring car chase to the American embassy.

The script of Madame Choi was written by Patrick Spät. He took the approach of weaving in the script of Pulgasari, as well as biographies of Choi and Shin, as an effective way to give readers exposure to each creator as well as their most famous movie. Some additional liberties were taken with the storyline, particularly the spirit within the Pulgasari arc that allows for a conscience and narrator device. Both Spät and Domingo are based in Berlin, and this book is translated from German.

Spät’s script also allows readers to understand the other quirks within the North Korea (DPRK) regime of the 1970s. Kim Jong-il was so obsessed with movies that he had amassed a reported 20,000 film library, and the first part of the graphic novel shows that obsession as Kim sent infiltrators into the South to steal movies and bring them back. Eventually, Kim decides to take the next logical step of making his own films, but with South Korean (ROK) creators.

While Choi Eun-hee was well known as an actress, she was also from a conservative country. Soouth Korea had traditional expectations for people, and when Choi divorced her abusive first husband, she felt repercussions. She met Shin, a director, and they fell in love and married. While unable to have their own children (another stigma in South Korea) they adopted two children and continued to produced films that were both popular as well as critically acclaimed. They produced 60 films throughout the 1960s and 1970s. (48) However, the South Korea of the 1970s was a military dictatorship, and not the free democracy of today. They fell afoul of government censors, and this led to strain on the two, both professionally and personally. (63) This constant tension of creativity and morals is one that now seems oxymoronic compared to North Korea and its repression, and while the censored events in the films may seem quaint by today’s standards, within South Korea at that time they were serious.

Purportedly, the strain in the marriage from censorship caused Shin to engage in an affair with another actress. This is critical to the story as it set in motion their divorce, their problems with each other’s careers, and the lure by which Kim brought the two at different times to Hong Kong, when they were then kidnapped and brought to the DPRK to make films for him. They re-met in North Korea in October 1983. (127-129) As Shin noted, he had the ability to do things like blow up an actual train on film (140-141), but at the same time, he suffered far more degradation than Choi did, although both were held in North Korea for years.

The story of Pulgasari is a folk legend in Korea, and the film is a monster movie made with both Japan and China. The film itself also had themes of the corruption of power, the need of a supreme (and ultimately ineffective) weapon to defeat monsters, and the idea that enemy forces would be defeated on the strength of traditional values. In the end, it was this movie, made with some of the crew who worked on the Toho Studio-era Godzilla films, that served as the basis for their escape. The film was sent to the Vienna film festival, and Choi and Shin carefully planned their escape from the hotel where they were staying. After a high-speed chase through the streets, the two ended up at the US Embassy.

While the graphic novel ends with the destruction of Pulgasari, and the real-world result of the guards being shot for allowing Shin and Choi to escape, there is a timeline which gives the further movements of the film-making family, from their reuniting with their adopted children in Virginia, their time in Hollywood, and their eventual return to South Korea, which was also a time of clarifying the stories about their time in the North. Both have since passed away, without gaining any residual rights or money from Pulgasari, which is now considered a cult classic.

In all, the book is a quick overview of geopolitics and monster movie making, that also gives insight into a closed society, one that is led by dictators obsessed with the very culture they deride. It gives one pause to think about what other stories might be out there to tell.

Book Review - Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon by Terence McSweeney

Reviewed by Jason D. DeHart, PhD

Terence McSweeney. Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon, University Press of Mississippi. 978-1496836090. $20. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/B/Black-Panther

I am not sure of the point at which I became acquainted with T’Challa, the Black Panther superhero and hereditary King of Wakanda. The character was introduced in a 1966 issue of Fantastic Four, as a support player whose unsteady allegiance was reflected in other characters such as Namor, but who was Marvel’s first black superhero. As originally created by Kirby & Lee, Black Panther’s interests have always been mostly closely aligned with Wakanda, his fictional futurist African nation; it is only when the concerns of this nation and the wider world intersect that he springs into action. He first battled the Fantastic Four, and then became a regular member of the Avengers. This was all established well before I was acquainted with the character, whose first introduction to me was likely through a collectible Marvel trading card or action figure.

            These days though everybody knows the Panther, largely due to the success of the 2018 film starring the late Chadwick Boseman which is the focus of this book. That is not a surprise as the film is amazingly well done, and addresses social and cultural issues whose resonance was only just beginning to spread in wider circles of white privileged culture. The original movie storyline, when pitched in the early 2000s, was going to be along the lines of an Indiana Jones adventure featuring a lost relic. In the film that was made, that lost relic McGuffin transformed into the interaction of Wakanda and the wider world as T’Challa sought to reconcile an unsteady and misrepresented past with the hope of being a good king.

            In spite of the title, much of the book’s focus is on the film, rather than the comic book origins of the character, reflecting the author’s interest and research. McSweeney knows the film world well, but this reviewer wonders to what degree can he speak to the vicissitudes of Black experience? In the first chapters, the reader is offered a brief history of the character with nods to the comics, as well as the story of the film’s opening. All of this sets the stage and provides the background knowledge that the reader needs, although more information from the comics would have been helpful for knowing more about the 50-year-old character, in terms of his origins, motivations, and changing interpretations over time.

            McSweeney also analyzes moments in the film featuring the supporting characters and villains, almost in summary form. Both the relatability and unappealing aspects of the characters, particularly in the Panther's rival and political antithesis, N’Jadaka, aka Eric Killmonger, are mentioned, but only briefly explored. McSweeny’s focusing on the film in itself reveals too much to uncover both in terms of historical context and character analysis – it seems each moment in the story deserves a full volume’s worth of summary and exploration, especially relating back to the foundational comic books.

            A reader will encounter the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s view of Wakanda’s world, leading to what will hopefully become a fuller view upon reading the comics and engaging with what will certainly be an entire film series (at the time of this review, production on the second film is well underway). In sum, what McSweeney offers is more than a primer or appetizer, but still not a full course on one particular aspect or dimension of this transmedia character. This is understandable given the depths of how much information would have to be consumed, summed up, and explained to produce a more complete treatment of the Black Panther. I recommend reading this book alongside a stack of Black Panther comics, including the work that has been done by writers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Christopher Priest, and Don McGregor who created much of the underlying sources of the stories that the film redevelops.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA.