Marvels!

There are good comic book series, great comic book series and then there are transformative comic book series. Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross is the latter. One can look back and see comic books before Marvels appeared and after and nothing is the same. To me 1994 seems not that long ago, but then that happens as one gets older. We are nearly twenty-five years into the 21st century and still the 90's feels like last week. Marvels covered a time period from 1939 to 1974, some key years in the development of the Marvel Universe. The series brings at once a warmth of nostalgia and a shock of the new, bringing fresh ways of seeing all-too-familiar yarns by great writers and artists from earlier decades. The story is almost literally told through the eyes of Phil Sheldon, a rather reflective news photographer who is on the spot when the superhero age began. 

"A Time of Marvels" takes us back to the Golden Age, to the very beginning when the Human Torch is first exhibited by his creator Professor Horton. We see him ignite and we see the reaction of fear spread across the room of reporters called in to witness this new creation. Sheldon himself is terrified of this new thing. Later the Sub-Mariner appears, and the world is turned upside down as he brings mayhem to the streets. He and Torch battle across the city, the average citizen represented by Sheldon is helpless, reduced to being a witness as beings not unlike gods battle overhead. Captain America comes to lead the fight against the Axis powers and before you know it a squad of mystery men have gathered. 

The story "Monsters" skips ahead to the 1960's and Sheldon and his wife Doris have two daughters. The "Marvels" have not stopped, the latest being the popular Fantastic Four who live largely public lives and are hailed as heroes by the people. Less understood are the Mutants, specifically a band of mutants dubbed the X-Men who seem fundamentally different and herald change, a change which the regular man and woman dread and fear. Sheldon falls victim to this bigotry and fear, as he tries to glean a living working for J. Jonah Jameson's The Daily Bugle and other newspapers. When a frightened young girl comes into his life thanks to the kindness of his daughters his attitude changes. 

In arguably the most bombastic of the installments is the story "Judgment Day" which shows how the world almost ended at the hands of impossible gods from space. The people of the world have become inured to superheroes, treating their presence casually, often with disdain as much as reproach. But things change when a gleaming silver figure arrives from out of space and behind comes a giant being who wants to destroy the entire world the people merely to satisfy its hunger. Sheldon like so many is terrified as he watches from a distance and struggles to remain confident the Marvels can save the day. His trust is warranted, but no sooner have the heroes saved the city than the citizens return to their old ungrateful attitudes. Sheldon is disgusted. 

Shifting forward to the 1970's and Phil Sheldon is a man looking to retire. But in the story "The Day She Died" he is bothered that the heroes he celebrates in his book of photographs titled Marvels are again treated with a casual disdain. His own confidence is shaken when a beautiful young girl he encounters dies during a battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. He rejects his own life's work which documents the rise of the superheroes, though his young assistant pleads with him to appreciate that work. In the end he decides that his time documenting the "Marvels" is done and hands the task off to the young woman he'd trained. He and his family prepare to leave the city to enjoy their golden years. 

In 2019 Alex Ross and Kurt Busiek revisited the Marvels project with another story in which Sheldon and his daughters see the battle between the X -Men and the Sentinels in Rockefeller Center. 

I have not actually read this story, but it's apparently available in the 25th anniversary edition of the series. Like the Beatles, the boys and girls at Marvel are always trying to jerk another quarter or two out of my pocket. They are really good at it. 

As I said at the beginning this was a transformative series when it first appeared. I had never seen anything like the work Alex Ross was producing. His more realistic presentations of the heroes I was so familiar with made them much specifically human in my eyes. The idea of a normal human being feeling in awe of them had been dealt with, but never with such clarity and soulfulness. Through the lens of Phil Sheldon we were able to see the Marvel Universe again for the first time, and it was glorious. 

But there were imitators, and some were often okay, but rarely has an artist been able to bridge the gap between the fantastic and the mundane as effectively as Alex Ross. That's why he was Kurt Busiek's perfect choice to fashion the covers for the series Astro City which he produced with the help of Brent Anderson. The trio of Busiek, Anderson and Ross went on to give us ever more fascinating insights into the secret minds of heroes and those who live beside them. More on that tomorrow. 

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