I started the first issue the day I lost my job. The call from my boss had come at the end of the work day, masked in the faux-casual tones of a friendly check-in. Only gradually did I begin to process what I was hearing: that the company had decided to hone its focus; that they no longer felt a need for off-site employees; that while they were grateful for the time I had spent with them, they felt it would be best if I looked for new work. Yes, the decision was firm. No, there was no chance that anyone would change their mind. Medical benefits would expire at the end of the month.
To say the call came at a bad time would be an understatement. This was early 2017, and alongside the obvious, unsexy things like rent, and food, and the ability to contract a cold without worrying about festering infection and death, there was the rest of the world to think about. Trump had taken office just a few months prior, and already a ban on travel from predominently Muslim nations and a rapid crackdown on immigrants were signaling that every terrified, paranoid fear we had entertained was valid and real. Just a few months before the election itself, my maternal grandmother who had helped raise me died after a rapid and unexpected decline in her health. It felt, in every sense that mattered, like things had become unhinged. There was no center anymore, no dependable pattern on which I could fix myself. I needed a point of focus, if only to find a reason to lift myself out of bed once every day. Working as a book critic in my spare time, I had been heavily invested in reading history and doorstop works of nonfiction, but under the circumstances I could barely fix my attention long enough to make it through a paragraph, let alone 1300 pages revisiting the legacy of William Howard Taft. I needed something different. I needed a reason to start fresh.
I decided to read a Marvel comic.
And where better to start than at the beginning, with 1961âs Fantastic Four #1, the comic that ushered in the Marvel Age. It was new to me, for one thing, having never been a part of my collection back in my youth, but more importantly it seemed easy and lightweight, exactly the kind of low-effort comfort food that the moment called for. What I found wasnât quite what I expected. The fun was there, all right: the sense of bright, Kennedy-era optimism that presumed four amateur astronauts could hijack a rocket ship and aim to be the first humans among the stars. But it was balanced by a strangeness and vitality that belied my expectations of Silver Age comics. The tortured, vengeful rage of Ben Grimm as he found himself trapped in a warped and broken body; the reserved arrogance of Reed Richards, even more the distant patriarch than he would later become; the unfeigned fear and shock of the public reacting to these wonders of an age of unknown nuclear possibility — it spoke to something raw, and and untested, and full of potential that neither I nor its original readers could have anticipated.
And there was something else there, too: a kind of history embedded in these early comics. Not just the history of the early sixties in which Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were working, but the internal continuity of an imagined world being born. By the fifth issue of Fantastic Four, references were being dropped to a new figure on the scene of super humans, the Frankenstein’s monster-esque Incredible Hulk. Follow that character over to his own adventures, and youâd find a crossover a few months in with the amazing Spider-Man. And before you got to him, youâd have to backtrack to the earlier creation of Ant-Man, whose earliest escapades were really just weird science tales dressed up in the trappings of superheroes. In their own way, these stories were as connected and interdependent as the real-world histories I had left behind. And like those histories, only a small fraction of the story was written explicitly in the text. The rest was left to me, as the reader, to assemble and orchestrate in my head. This was the brilliance that Stan Lee, by accident or design, had achieved: he made readers like me his unwitting collaborators in inventing a universe of their own.
This was what had attracted me to Marvel Comics in the first place, back at the age of seven, when, having watched my homemade VHS recording of the X-Men cartoon premiere enough times to break down the plastic tape, my mother finally decided it would simply be easier to buy me a comic off the spinner rack than to listen to my discourse on the leadership capabilities of Cyclops for one day longer. Why, I wondered, had I ever left this behind? There was the burnout of the later â90âs, for one, thing — the gradual disillusionment of the post-Onslaught years, when I realized for the first time that comic writers might not really have any idea what they were doing. There was the excitement followed by profound deflation of Chris Claremontâs circa-2000 return to his X-Men stomping grounds. There was the staccato aggression of Grant Morrisonâs writing, which made me feel like I no longer recognized the characters I was reading, or the style of storytelling they inhabited. Maybe more than anything, there was the distraction (and persistent financial pinch) of a college education to pull me away from this oddball hobby for nearly two decades. But here I was, regressed to the same sort of infantile uncertainty I had probably known back in 1993, and on the cusp of a decision bigger than I knew. I was going to return to Marvel Comics, and this time I was going to do it right. I wouldnât just read some of the Marvels, I would read them all, every one, in order, from 1962 on out. No more listlessness and depression. The game had begun.
And it was joyful at first, not to mention fast. Eight comics a month, nearly all of them written in the same breezy, casual, confident voice of Stan Lee. I was reminded of something I had forgotten comics â maybe fiction â could possess: the unbridled, unquestioning optimism of the New Frontier. In these early issues, the Thing might lash out violently at his friends and teammates, but his loyalty and dedication would always hold him back from the brink. Magneto might threaten nuclear annihilation against obsolete homo sapiens, but the cooperation of heroic mutants with humankind would always save the day. Spider-Man may have been born from an act of selfish tragedy, but the lesson he learned was as much an encapsulation of optimistic liberalism as could be imagined: that famous epigram (paraphrased from Franklin Roosevelt, no less) that with great power must also come — great responsibility spoke to a sense of light emerging from darkness, and sanity overcoming the unknown. It was a pleasure to end a day of fruitless job hunting and twitter doomscrolling, and sink into these 20-page capsules of innocent wonder. The sixties flew right by.
The first time I remember putting off a social engagement in favor of my project was early 2018. I had a new job by then, and day-long binges on Galactus and Asgard had been replaced with the prosaic grind of grant proposals and staff meetings. But the comics, too, had changed. There is a story, probably apocryphal but famous nonetheless, of a dictum Stan Lee passed along to his successors at the company: no change for Marvel characters, but only the illusion of change. Make no cataclysmic moves of the kind that birthed the Marvel Universe in the first place, but only circular steps meant to preserve it in perpetuity. The statement itself might never have happened, but the people running the company in the years after certainly believed it did, and it sums up the ethos of the years that followed.
The lightness of the Lee/Kirby epoch had given way, by the mid-1970âs, to a kind of baroque complexity, the comics referencing themselves and their sister titles in an infinite regression of footnotes. Pick up a Strange Tales at random from 1966, and it would take all of three panels to sort out the main characters (Nick Fury and his ethnically-identified team of super-spies), their purpose (super-spying), and their enemy (the men in extremely evil-looking green hoods). Try that stunt on, say, a 1978 issue of Marvel Premiere, and you could spend the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out who Man-Wolf was and why he was trapped in a levitating interdimensional castle, let alone why a gem-powered werewolf astronaut ended up with an ongoing comic series in the first place. Narration boxes became ever longer and more flowery; story themes more maudlin and self-consciously political. There were high points, to be sure, like the heartbreaking cosmic psychedelia of Jim Starlinâs Warlock, or the genuinely thrilling left-wing agitprop of Steve Englehartâs Captain America. But by and large, what I processed in my reading were words for the sake of words, and footnotes for the sake of fans. The overall impression was of writers reaching for a literary sophistication they couldnât possibly achieve, and underpaid artists playing an endless set of hits in a John Romita cover band. The childlike wonder of the Kennedy era was gone, but the aging kids of the Nixon years couldnât figure out what to put in its place.
Greater complexity in the comics called for greater organization in my project, so more and more of my post-reading time became dedicated to the clerical minutia of recording and planning my next moves: keeping detailed spreadsheets of series and characters (the better to lay out the grand map of Marvel continuity, as if it were a thing that had ever actually existed in the first place), setting out reading goals and average reading times (the better to make sure I finished this increasingly unwieldy task in my lifetime). My daily readings took on the solemn seriousness of a church service. I told myself that this wasnât a waste, really; that Iâd find some way to make this a productive endeavor. And, really, were those cancelled social engagements all that important in the first place? Never mind the gnawing sense that this was all increasingly starting to feel like a second job that no one was paying me for. Never mind that the bulk of the stories I was reading were becoming a grim slog month in and month out. Were the creators of these comics enjoying themselves? Was I? Maybe it was too late to ask the question. Maybe I just didnât want to know the answer.
In any event, by the end of the â70âs, the first longboxes had emerged in my living room, side by side at first, and then stacked on top of one another as their numbers grew. By the start of Jim Shooterâs tenure as Editor-in-Chief, Marvel was beginning to embrace licensed properties like Godzilla and Shogun Warriors to which the company no longer owned the rights. My general aversion to piracy therefore obliged me to break my vow against floppy collecting, and start buying heaps of single issues off eBay. No matter: things were finally looking up. The spirit of the Shooter era, with its focus on the basic principles of core characters and its minute concern with line-wide continuity wasnât new, but after downing the merciless mid-â70âs without a chaser, it felt like a relief. The unbridled experimentalism of the previous generation may have vanished, but in its place was a consistency and quality that I hadnât seen since the earliest part of my reading. For the first time in what felt like ages, the average Marvel comic was actually pleasant to get through, even if there wasnât all that much depth to plumb. Perhaps it was all a bit corporate, but, then, having been gainfully employed for some time now, and with no shortage of bills to pay, I was beginning to see the virtues of corporate dependability.
And the high points were getting very high indeed. Frank Millerâs Daredevil! Chris Claremontâs Uncanny X-Men! Walt Simonsonâs Thor! This all felt like something new under the sun, as though comic creators had at last found a skill and content worthy of the self-serious ambitions they had been cultivating for the better part of a decade. Themes of violence and prejudice were (sometimes, anyway) being taken on with nuance and capable storytelling. The simple craft of serialized narrative was reaching a peak, with writers learning to juggle multiple subplots in and out, like spandex-clad daytime soaps. In a lot of ways, these issues were the reason I had entered into this project in the first place.
So it was strange that, all the same, I was starting to feel a very unexpected pang of nostalgia for comics I had read only a year or so earlier — longing for the fresh-faced experience of those first Amazing Spider-Man issues even as I knew intellectually that they couldnât hold a candle to anything like âBorn Againâ or God Loves, Man Kills. It was as though I was echoing the emotions the creators of the 1980âs were putting on the page. They and I were feeling a Janus-faced ambivalence toward comics as a whole: looking forward toward uncharted artistic waters and backward toward more innocent days when everything felt new and possible, and none of our choices had yet been made. But the good was good enough that we were willing to put our reservations aside and push on. It was too late to turn back, anyway.
I had made a huge mistake.
By the middle of 2019, I had closed the circle of the space-time continuum, and reached the precise point where I had exhaustedly abandoned comics in the first place. I was coming to remember why. What in Godâs name were these unplanned, uninspired, speculator-market-driven stories? Why on earth was I being subjected to these distorted, unappealing drawings, done in some dime-store approximation of Japanese manga? What could I do to make it all stop?
This wasnât a pleasure anymore, it was a job, and that statement was increasingly becoming literal. What had begun as a hobby and an emotional lifeline had spun out first into social media groups, then into a series of YouTube videos discussing and analyzing modern comics, and finally into a series of ongoing writing gigs for comic review websites. It was madness. The hobby had become self-sustaining, neither a good nor an evil, but simply a self-justifying end in itself. You could probably say the same about the comics themselves. The grim â90âs didnât last forever, but after the brief flower of weirdness under iconoclastic Marvel president Bill Jemas, the story of the Joe Quesada years was a solid, unremarkable dependability. Modern comics had all the quality control of their â80âs forebears, but without the peaks of brilliance that had periodically punctuated that equilibrium. They were comics for the sake of making comics, because making comics is what Marvel does, and has always done, and what we expected them to do.
But I was being productive at last, and that meant something, didnât it? Never mind that I was feeling increasingly boxed in, literally and figuratively, at work. Never mind that I was even more isolated, solitary, and friendless than I had been two years prior. Never mind the sense of lurking panic and depression that crept up at the end of each dayâs reading, only to be stuffed away under an itemized list of tomorrowâs issues-to-be-read. Anyone could see that my work was making real progress in my life. Surely, this was progress in my life, I told myself. Not forward momentum, exactly, but movement, anyway. Not change, but the illusion of change.
The following year was 2020. I was lucky. I never lost anyone close to me to illness. I never lost my job (I came close). Still, the year took me as it took everybody. Working from home, seldom leaving my front door except to sprint to the pharmacy and back, communicating solely through 30-minute Zoom meetings, I felt the same sense of spiraling uncertainty that I had known three years earlier. My project was ending the way it began, except that now my infinite potential had been replaced by a rapidly approaching horizon. Over the course of three years, dozens of comics had turned into hundreds, and into thousands, and into tens of thousands. But the walls were closing in now: I was running out of comics to read.
It was funny. I had thought, when the moment came, that there would be, if not a thrill of accomplishment (good God, I knew better than that), at least a palpable sense of relief. And there was, I suppose, but there was also an ache that I hadnât expected. It wasnât just the anxiety of uncertainty, either: I felt myself quietly mourning for the loss of this thing that I had come increasingly to resent. It was absurd to say it, and painful to admit it, but there it was: these comics meant something to me. It hurt to lose them.
I had constructed this project to fill a void, but what was wrong with that? That’s what we do with stories, after all. We take them in, and internalize them, and use them to find whatever meaning we’re looking for. It was all make believe, but so are the rest of the stories we tell ourselves. Writers are fond of calling comic books a modern mythology, but for me that wasn’t quite right. Comics were my synagogue and my liturgy: they were a practice I invented to make myself whole. And here they were coming to an end.
Perhaps it was appropriate that I was hitting Jonathan Hickmanâs 2015 series Secret Wars around this time, seeing as that series was consciously designed as a destruction of the Marvel Universe that Lee and Kirby had fashioned. Watching realities warp and dissolve on the page was like a mocking echo of the way I had reconstructed my own world around this popcorn escapism — how a pastime had become kind of self-definition, masked in the guise of a purposeful mission. Only there was one key difference. Hickmanâs story ends with the universe being reborn out of its own ashes, the drumbeat refrain of âeverything diesâ rising to a triumphant final note of âeverything lives.â The comics might feint at an ending to all things, but the flip-side to the illusion of change is that nothing ends forever: it just alters, and turns, and comes again to the point where it started. The comics are forever; itâs just the readers who are finite.
And when my project ended? There was no trumpet fanfare, no certificate of completion. No No-Prize arrived for me in the mail with Smilinâ Stanâs signature affixed to the envelope. That was the irony, really: the only lesson of the comics worth learning. That the only way for a story to conclude is by resetting from the start. Thatâs the fiction. Thatâs the escape. The only way to live with the end is to begin again.
This past April, I took a hardcover omnibus collection off the shelf, having plunked down $60 on it two years earlier. It was Fantastic Four volume 1.
Zach Rabiroff edits articles at Comicsxf.com.
