Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World inside Your Head

by Eliot Borenstein

Overview

Marvel Comics in the 1970s explores a forgotten chapter in the story of the rise of comics as an art form. Bridging Marvel's dizzying innovations and the birth of the underground comics scene in the 1960s and the rise of the prestige graphic novel and postmodern superheroics in the 1980s, Eliot Borenstein reveals a generation of comic book writers whose work at Marvel in the 1970s established their own authorial voice within the strictures of corporate comics.

Through a diverse cast of heroes (and the occasional antihero)—Black Panther, Shang-Chi, Deathlok, Dracula, Killraven, Man-Thing, and Howard the Duck—writers such as Steve Gerber, Doug Moench, and Don McGregor made unprecedented strides in exploring their characters' inner lives. Visually, dynamic action was still essential, but the real excitement was taking place inside their heroes' heads. Marvel Comics in the 1970s highlights the brilliant and sometimes gloriously imperfect creations that laid the groundwork for the medium's later artistic achievements and the broader acceptance of comic books in the cultural landscape today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501767821
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/15/2023
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, where he teaches an annual course on the graphic novel. His books include Overkill, Plots against Russia, and Pussy Riot. Follow him on X @eliotb2002 and visit him online at eliotborenstein.net.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Best Marvel Comic of the 1970s
1. Inside Out: Stan Lee and the Drama of the Visible Self
2. Everyday Transcendence: Steve Englehart and the Quest for Selfhood
3. Crouching Tiger, Running Commentary: Doug Moench on the Margins of Marvel
4. Blood Will Tell: Marv Wolfman's Tomb of Dracula
5. Bodies and Words: Don McGregor's Tortured Romantic Individualism
6. Subjectivity and Its Discontents: Steve Gerber and the Uses of Disenchantment
Coda: Claremont Rising

What People are Saying About This

José Alaniz

Eliot Borenstein sheds a thrilling new light on the ways superhero comics depict both the interior world of characters and the desires/anxieties of readers—and he does it in ways only a lifelong fan of Marvel comics could!

Ben Saunders

Providing fresh insights into an era in the history of Marvel Comics often overlooked by critics and popular culture scholars, Borenstein provides an enlightening thesis about the development of techniques to represent subjectivity within superhero comics.

Editorial Reviews

2023-01-31
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.

Kirkus Reviews

03/20/2023

Borenstein (Plots Against Russia), a Russian and Slavic studies professor at New York University, delivers an entertaining exploration of Marvel’s turn inward during the 1970s. He contends that over the course of the decade, Marvel authors—namely Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Don McGregor, Doug Moench, and Marv Wolfman—developed a style “focused intensely on the inner lives of the characters on the page.” Englehart, Borenstein suggests, bucked Marvel’s editorial mandate that characters can never fundamentally change and depicted character growth through introspection, as shown in his narratives in which Doctor Strange must explore his “ego in order to move beyond it.” Other innovations included Moench’s use of first person narrative captions to get inside the minds of such characters as the Werewolf and Deathlok, as well as the existentialist musings that Gerber wove into his Howard the Duck comics, which used the anthropomorphic character to offer an outsider’s disenchanted perspective on the human condition. Theory-driven discussions of Fredric Jameson’s and Umberto Eco’s writings on science fiction and superheroes give this academic heft, though lay readers will still have plenty of fun with Borenstein’s thoughtful close readings of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comics. Marvel connoisseurs willing to put up with some light scholarly jargon will appreciate the insightful takes on a pivotal era in the publisher’s history. Illus. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Marvel Comics in the 1970s is a detailed, wonky examination of a significant period in the history of Marvel Comics for die-hard comics fans and scholars of the graphic novel.

-- "Kirkus Reviews"

From the Publisher