What’s it like to visit a Marvel museum? In space? With Deadpool and Wolverine?* Is it all nostalgia-bait, or will our heroes find something more? Discover the answer in Marvel’s 85th Anniversary Special, written and drawn by Ryan North, Joshua Cassara, Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Stephen Byrne, Alan Davis, Priest, Carlo Pagulayan, Jason Paz, Yuji Kaku and Steve Skroce; colored by Dean White, Rachelle Rosenberg, Morry Hollowell and Bryan Valenza; and lettered by Joe Caramagna.
What’s it like to turn 85? Most people (so far — ask an actuary), most companies (ask an economist) and most pieces of intellectual property (ask an agent, or an artist) don’t get to find out. Staying power is rare, and comes with disadvantages. Even the most with-it, vigorous 85-year-olds are likely too old to be president. And even the most versatile, many-faceted pieces of company-owned intellectual property find themselves constrained by commercial necessity, required to revert to what casual fans (and their kids, and their dads) think they always were. You can found an island nation on new principles, work like a dog to build institutions and raise questions about forgiveness and justice that no hero has raised before, but sooner or later you’ll go back to the status quo ante. Move your team to another planet? Pass on the super-suit to another kid who looks nothing like you? Go ahead and try it: When you belong to an 85-year-old intellectual property juggernaut, the crossover needs will get you in the end.** It’s not clear that Stan Lee ever said Marvel Comics seek “the illusion of change,” but in some ways that’s what they deliver, when you’ve read them long enough — no wonder half the major writers in cape comics say something, toward the end of a big run, like “time to put the toys back in the toybox.”
On the other hand — a really big hand, like Galactus’ — 85 years of storytelling makes for a big, full toybox. Characters great and obscure, absurd and touching; stories to reference, seriously or with tongue all the way in cheek; and callbacks, to several generations of fans, complicated enough to make for a form of entertainment few other media can produce. At worst all these callbacks can generate tangled-up, self-serious pointlessness. At best, the same sets of memories, references, double entendres and lightly drawn allusions can stack up into a delightful, sweet mille-feuille.
This anniversary special is a mille-feuille. Ryan North’s frame story puts us in a far future space station museum, using its computonium-powered holograms and Earth artifacts to animate stories of the Marvel Age. The not-quite-farce space opera tone ends up half Guardians of the Galaxy movie (the first one) and half 1970s Defenders (the best one). The “museum” adventures — drawn by Joshua Cassara, colored by Dean White — look great: a square-jawed, immortal, fleece-jacketed Wolverine (no Old Man he) and a Deadpool. Well, a Deadpool head. In a bell jar. Who won’t stop talking. Also a tiny, gross, half-regrown body. A little of that guy goes a long way, as everyone who’s put him into a team-up knows. And North knows more than that. He even knows how to play on science fiction tropes, like the misunderstood artifact (“hubcaps” were caps for husbands; “scarfs” were meant to eat off, as in “scarf down”) or the time dilation around a black hole, which in North’s hands also points to the glorious, necessary absurdity of Marvel’s sliding time.
North and Cassara’s and Logan’s, or LGN’s,*** frame tale isn’t even the best thing in this fun (and sometimes silly) book. What is? Depends on what part of Marvel history floats your boat: ingeniously, most of the inset tales look not at one era or character but at a few, linked up like guitar pedals. Iman Vellani (the actor), Sabir Pirzada and Stephen Byrne send a grown-up, semi-retired, happily domestic Kamala Khan back into deep space when she volunteers to save Earth by becoming the latest Herald of Galactus, charged to find the big purple guy a tasty but uninhabited planet for dinner. She belongs in more Fantastic Four stories, since the FF — like original flavor Kamala Khan — suit tales about nuclear families, about the people you’re born with. Also she saves a civilization of goats.
Yuji Kaku enters territory that feels more serious, making connections nobody (as far as I know) has made. Set in the Pacific theater during the Second World War, their comic looks nothing like the first Marvel staplebounds: It resembles, instead, some black-and-white comics of postwar Japan, detailed and action-oriented and sometimes disorienting to readers brought up on Western mainstream norms. It looks at first like a story about the people most Marvel readers would call (rightly) bad guys: the armed forces of Imperial Japan, and the subset who worked (on Earth-616) for Hydra, whose own attempt to create a super-soldier by fusing together dead recruits’ corpses generated, not a Japanese Frankenstein’s monster nor an Imperial Captain Anti-America nor a proto-kaiju, but (I’ll wait while you guess) a Japanese Moon Knight. “The Rising Moon Berserker,” with the multiple personalities of the corpses involved, and the Egyptian Khonshu’s sense of mysterious purpose: “Life is light as a feather,” they say. “We have no flag to raise, no sun to rise.” Whatever he does, he won’t kill for the empire. And the Invaders — the World War II Marvel team that featured Cap, Bucky and the Sub-Mariner — can turn their attention to genuine threats instead.
My own favorite thing here has nothing to do with space, and involves no real war: It’s Alan Davis’ story of classic Excalibur, with so many Easter eggs that it feels like an incubator. Here’s Captain UK, Linda McQuillan. There’s the full team of dinosaur-heroes (dino-Ant-Man; dino-Thor, who rides a bronto) from Excalibur (1988) #51. Davis riffs on the greatest sound effect ever to grace a Marvel comic**** as Shadowcat complains that Excalibur’s lighthouse can’t get adequate plumbing (see Excalibur #43; then see The Incredible Hulk #300). Meggan punches her handsy future husband, so hard he lands on the floor.***** Brian punches other things, and looks self-satisfied and a bit confused. Kurt looks like the only adult in the room, though he’s also having fun. And Kitty herself … did you know that on at least one Earth she carries the codename Flamingo? You should see how Davis draws our Kitty’s face when the news, um, comes out.
Are you more a Spider-person than an X-person? Marvel 85 has got you covered, which is more than the Daily Bugle can say about the in-universe antics of your friendly neighborhood web-slinger and rush-hour driver, who appears to get stuck like everyone else in gridlock on a snowy Cross-Bronx Expressway. (Don’t worry: Ben Grimm can come by to pick up the car. Literally.) Do you remember the first Secret Wars, or the second, or Contest of Champions, or the various video games in which Marvel heroes just kept punching each other? Steve Skroce (with colors by Bryan Valenza) remembers those eras too, and places them where they belong, in a far-future Mojoverse whose inset story feels like a flare gun pointed directly at the culture of pro wrestling.****** And then we get back to the space museum of comics nostalgia, and the illusion of change, and more jokes about immortal heroes and Jim Shooter’s New Universe, and the changing illusion that is cape comics at this point, whose best characters (Logan! Spidey! Kitty?) feel so strong that no matter how many canon resets they have to endure, they give readers the chance to feel seen — and to see something new.
*Not the ones from the movie. Or are they????
**If you belong to the actual Juggernaut, you’re probably safe, unless you lose the favor of Cyttorak. In which case, G-d help you.
*** LGNs are synthetic replicas of Logan created for the Mojoverse Contest of Champions; when they die in battle their adamantium skeleton goes on sale. If one escaped the arena, would he live forever, too? How could we tell it was him?
**** BA-THROOM!
***** It’s not really Brian. But what if it were?
****** For more on the crossover between pro wrestling and superhero comics, read both of Josephine Riesman’s recent books, the first a biography of Stan Lee, the second about the rise of WWE.
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Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
