to be continued

 

 

et’s look back at the 1960s, before Marvel Time was invented. Back in then, Marvel comics were different, and sales rocketed. What was so different? First, the comics were more realistic than today. Heroes lived in the real world, in real time. Second, the comics had three times as much story as other comics. Each comic had three different layers of story running at the same time. Layer 1 was the comic itself, a complete story usually involving a fight. Layer 2 was the multi-issue stories and crossovers. Layer 3 was the a masterstroke that the world had never seen before: all the comics linked into a grand meta-narrative called the Marvel Universe!

Three levels of story! How cool is that! You got the simple escapism of a wham-POW story every issue. Plus you got big cliffhanger serials and soap operas themes that were too big for just one month. Plus it was all part of a grand cosmic epic that spanned a universe full of wonder! No wonder people kept buying them!

But today it’s different. We still have crossovers and we still have a collection of characters we call the Marvel Universe, but the only changes take place at the monthly level. If you step back and see what happens over a few years, nothing really changes. There is no large scale narrative. There is no large scale story any more. Don’t believe me? Let’s see what happened at the end of the 1960s.

How Marvel Time killed the stories

When the people at Marvel saw the money rolling in they said “we’ve struck gold! Don’t change anything!” So they invented Marvel Time. Marvel Time is the internal comic book clock that says the characters must never change. Which is a crazy! Change is what it’s all about! Change is why you have to buy each issue, to see what comes next! But they didn’t understand. People didn’t buy Marvel for particular heroes (back then they were all new). We bought Marvel because we liked great stories! And Marvel gave us stories that were alive and relevant, and gave us three times as much story as other comic book companies. But Marvel Time killed all that. And this is how.

Marvel time killed the realism. A story is about characters you care about! If those characters never grow up and never change, they cease to be real. And Marvel Time compresses 5 or 10 real years into the superhero’s typical year, which is just an insane level of confusion.

“But comics were never supposed to make sense” you say? Rubbish! They can make sense if you want them to. Why do you think those early Marvels published pages on how powers work and cutaway diagrams of the Baxter Building? Why did the heroes have weaknesses? Because it added to the realism. Realism matters!

Marvel Time kills 2 out of 3 stories. The whole point of a story is “what happens next?” Marvel time means that nothing happens next because nothing ever changes. Oh sure, there are still simple fight stories, so there is still one level of story, but the other two levels of story have been removed:

The first level story is still there. We still have a simple battle each issue, except that after 46 years of the same old stuff, writers run out of ideas. The simple battle is now moved up a level. The simplest story now takes six issues to tell. This means that individual comics aren’t as good value, but that’s another story.

“But we cannot create new ideas at such a rate any more” you say? Rubbish! In the 1960s Lee and Kirby didn’t have many new ideas either. Most of their stories are similar to previous comics, contemporary movies, and news events at the time. See what they had in common? They were inspired by comic book continuity and real time events. Writers talk about “story engines” as situations that make it easy to think of new stories. Real time continuity is the greatest story engine of all. And add the three levels of story (issues, arcs, and universe each have narrative direction) and Marvel comics seemed packed with new ideas every month.

The second level story is effectively dead. In the early days, a year’s worth of comics would see real progress. Spiderman would leave high school. The Thing would accept his monstrous form. The Avengers would get a new headquarters. An epic battle like Dr Doom stealing the surfer’s power change the landscape forever. But those stories have lost their power. Any changes now are either superficial or temporary. Nothing changes anything forever. Marvel Time cannot allow real change, since the whole point is to maintain the status quo.

The third level story, the grand Marvel Universe, is dead. The grand themes of the past, the cold war, the 1970s, have been removed from history. The great events, like the end of the world in Dr Strange’s mag, or the Kree Skrull wars, or the childhood of Franklin Richards, are either forgotten or frozen in time. The grand narrative is denied, forgotten, or simply dead. Even grand events like Heroes Reborn and Civil War are retconned or forgotten. At the third level, the level of the Marvel Universe, there is no direction, no sense of “what will this lead to” because it leads nowhere. There is no narrative. No story. The Marvel Universe is no longer a mighty epic, it is now just a collective name for the lower level stories.

With no realism and no story, why do people still buy comics? Answer: they don’t. Well actually a few diehard fans still do. Marvel Time still allows a very limited range of stories as long as you don’t expect too much. But to all intents and purposes the stories are dead, killed by the desire to pickle and preserve and freeze the 1960s.

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