MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1970S

A detailed, wonky examination of a significant period in the history of Marvel Comics.

A generation of Marvel writers who explored themes of interiority and subjectivity in the 1970s bridged the gap between Spider-Man in the 1960s and the modern graphic novel. So argues Borenstein, whose comics coming-of-age occurred during this fertile era. Steve Englehart sent Doctor Strange on a journey of enlightenment; Doug Moench expanded the possibilities of the narrative caption in Werewolf by Night and Master of Kung Fu; Marv Wolfman developed the antihero with Tomb of Dracula; Don McGregor explored racism with Luke Cage and Black Panther; and Steve Gerber pursued absurdity and dissociation in Man-Thing and Howard the Duck. Borenstein is an admitted fan of these comics, but he faces their frequently problematic aspects, often trenchantly, as when he introduces the Werewolf’s girlfriend: “Topaz is the blond, white-skinned adopted daughter of a Punjabi sorcerer named Taboo (bonus points to anyone who can effectively decolonize this sentence).” There’s some discussion of in-house goings-on, mostly in the form of character handoffs, but readers hoping for the stories behind the stories will be better served by Sean Howe’s entertaining chronicle, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Instead, this volume is largely devoted to exegesis, walking readers through story arcs and analyzing text with a granularity not seen in Douglas Wolk’s monumental survey, All of the Marvels. Normalizing all-caps original text to ordinary prose in quotations, Borenstein otherwise reproduces the comics’ orthography, with often silly-looking results: “The screams from below are shrill. / The snarls of jungle cats…satisfied. / And the brittle sound of violence… / … necessary?” Shang-Chi ruminates during a fight. The occasional inclusion of full-color pages makes readers wish for more. A good half of the characters discussed are (currently) absent from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which skews Borenstein’s audience to enthusiasts of the MCU’s print origins.

For die-hard Marvel Comics fans and scholars of the graphic novel.