My big problem with Marvel is that it ushered in the era of soap-opera subplots and the beginnings of "relevance" and "reality" in comics. When Stan did it, it was fresh and -- this is important -- funny. Spider-Man was a gag strip, you know. The idea of a hero who had to do homework, sew his own costume, run a prescription home to his aunt on the way back from fighting villains...that was funny stuff and it was played for laughs. But all the lieutenant Stans who followed took it deadly serious and sucked the fun right out of the book, and by extension a lot of others as well. And once the whole thing had been run into the ground and done to death, DC -- as ever three steps behind -- jumped on the bandwagon and started doing it, too.
Bravo, Nightwing - I've never heard what works about Spider-Man put better.
Although humor has a funny way of leading into something sad and poignant, especially if you've got somebody as skilled at characterization as Stan was. This point was really brought home by one particular sequence in Molly Shannon's SUPERSTAR, which was not a great film, but it does have a textbook illustration of this phenomenon:
For the first 70 minutes of the movie, we have Molly Shannon as Mary Katherine Gallagher clowning around, falling down and breaking things, and being placed in Special Ed. Then, finally, she takes her glasses off. Her eyes are wet. She whimpers and confesses "Sometimes...sometimes I'm so ashamed that I am the way that I am..."
Your mind doesn't even switch gears here. The qualities one found humorous in this ridiculous schoolgirl suddenly became tragic.
Alan Moore understands this phenomenon better than anyone. Many people point to MIRACLEMAN as being the first true Modern Age (or Iron Age, whatever term you prefer) comic, an assessment that I don't agree with, for one reason: the Modern Age is predicated on 1) outright embarassment at comics' past, or 2) laughing at comics' great legacy, and MIRACLEMAN did neither. MIRACLEMAN used the past not to evoke a laugh, but the opposite: to trigger poignancy. The vistas of the carefree 1950s were juxtaposed with the far different 1980s. Nostalgia is inherently very melancholic, because the thing about the past is, it's gone, never to return; when Alan Moore envokes Miracleman's past, it is to create a sense of tragedy, a sense of loss. The very things that the Modern Age got you to laugh at, in MIRACLEMAN, were things that made you cry.
"Realism" isn't necessarily bad
in and of itself - Fabian Nicieza's PSI FORCE and Jim Shooter's STAR BRAND were science fiction with an emphasis on plausibility, for instance, and were very successfully done. But "realism" means something different in a superhero comics world where civic-minded people punch out giant robots instead of doing what they'd do in our world, which is rivet girders in Ghana for the Peace Corps. The trick to crafting a superhero world is to be consistent with those rules that you've established. In this sense, the Iron Age emphasis on dark grittiness ironically is MORE "unrealistic" in this context: it violates the rules we've seen so far about how superheroes work, namely, they wear costumes, don't kill, and shave more than once a month.
"Soap Opera", or character-centered stories, aren't necessarily bad either if you have characters people care about (and I don't know about you, but I read comics to see interesting people), but the trick is to have a
resolution to the stories and not to use them as page-killers. Every good writer introduces a story, lets them work like steps, and finally, lets them be resolved and come to an end. This happened with the Wonder Man/Vision/Scarlet Witch triangle in Busiek's Avengers; eventually, it got resolved and ENDED, finally restoring Simon's self-confidence, restoring the Vision's soul, human emotions, and basic humanity, and restoring Wanda's strength. This happened with Stan Lee's rivalry between Hawkeye and Captain America; eventually, both save the life of each other, and where he once swore Cap off as an "overaged square," Hawkeye is filled with trust and respect. The point here, though, is these stories have beginnings, middles, and most importantly, endings.
That said, some of my favorite runs ever are from Marvel books. Besides the above, there's Miller's Daredevil, Simonson's Thor, Claremont and Byrne's X-Men and...so sue me...Bill Mantlo and Mike Golden's Micronauts.
I'll agree with you for no other reason than to give props to Mantlo. Part of the reason he doesn't get the attention he deserves is because he was writing SUPER-VILLAIN TEAM-UP and CHAMPIONS at the same time Englehart was writing AVENGERS and DOCTOR STRANGE and Gerber was writing DEFENDERS, MAN-THING and HOWARD THE DUCK and Roy Thomas was writing CONAN...
This reminds me of my college course on Renaissance Art, where there were discussions of all sorts of obscure artists I had never heard of but were brilliant nonetheless. It's easy to lose a genius here or there if you're painting in the Renaissance, after all.
Veering closer to "back on topic," favorite fights include Dr Strange vs Dormammu (Ditko days), the Hulk vs the FF and Avengers (FF #25-26), the FF versus a Silver Surfer-powered Dr Doom(FF #60), Captain America versus Baron Blood (Cap #254) and various episodes in the Kree-Skrull War.
Speaking of Mantlo (and also getting us back to topic) don't forget the Red Skull/Doctor Doom fight on the Moon in SUPER-VILLAIN TEAM UP #11 (1974 or thereabouts).
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