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| Copyright MARVEL COMICS |
I feel blessed, blessed I tell you, for the pure accident of my birth - for it was thanks to that cosmic coincidence that I saw the medium of comic books at its best, during the formation of the Fighting Marvel Age of Comics.
Yes, I know that's not how Stan Lee styled the era of his breakthrough, if only
because it's not alliterative. But I call it that, because the way Marvel
opened up the medium for the depiction of Big Spectacular Fight-Scenes was one
of the things that made the company great.
There were other aspects of the breakthrough. "Heroes with problems". More thought went into the SF and fantasy concepts. Lee's unequalled ability to give
all of his heroes slightly different ways of speaking and reacting. But I think
the sheer visceral power of Marvel fight-scenes may have been at least as
important as any of these.
One has to remember that even though superheroes and related genres had been
around for over twenty years, the people who made Golden Age comics in the U.S.
had grown up with other media when they ended up writing and drawing them. The
early raconteurs modelled early comics mostly on prose pulp stories, crossed
with elements from the comic strip medium. Both media did sometimes use
spectacular fight-scenes - but that wasn't a specialty. As a result, even
though there are some kick-ass fight-scenes in Golden Age comics, there aren't
as many as you might expect. Even those masters of kick-assery, Joe Simon and
Jack Kirby, varied a lot as to their use of sheer spectacle - though when they
did it, they were among the best.
Even when Lee launched the Marvel imprint in the
early 1960s, a lot of the earliest Fantastic Fours are fairly talky, like the
best selling DC Comics of the time. I tend to think that their second big
feature, The Hulk, may have opened Lee and Kirby up to a more visceral approach
to comic-book action - though to be sure, the Hulk's first comic pooped out
after six issues. But if it's true that great artists challenge each other,
then Steve Ditko rose to Kirby's challenge. The first couple of issues of
Spider-Man were a little on the sedate side, fight-wise - but then you get The
Vulture in issue #2 and Doc Ock in #3, and there was no going back. Some
artists, like Bob Powell and Alex Toth, didn't get this new approach, but
others - Gene Colan, John Buscema, John Romita - assimilated the high-action
approach to the funnybook page.
Back in 2011, having already started a blog dealing with comics and other
reading materials, I launched NATURALISTIC UNCANNY MARVELOUS, a review-blog for
all types of fantasy-films. Yet from time to time I wondered what it would be
like to devote a blog just to fantasy-films with spectacular action-scenes (or
even just the failed attempt at same). So I finally did so, with my newest blog
THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA. Most of what I post there was already blogged on
NUM, but I think I found an interesting way to organize the reviews into
subgroups, with perhaps humorous names like "Costumed Crusaders", "Space the Fighting Frontier", and "Fight Like a Girl".
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| Copyright relevant owner |
So that's my hype for the new blog (which you can find by clicking here), but I am curious to know if the readers at Crivens have any similar
orientation toward fight-scenes in general. I think of the Fleetway books as
the equivalent of sixties Marvel in terms of kick-ass fight-scenes, but I admit
there's a lot of British work of which I only have partial knowledge, like the
work of Frank Bellamy. How did fight-scenes evolve in British comics over the
years, compared to the way they did in the U.S.?
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C'mon, Crivvies - don't let GP down. Consider his question and give him your answer. After all, he wrote this specially for you!
