American Pop Culture Comes of Age, and Marvel Comics in the 1970s

I was just getting around to Being at the time, but looking back at the early and mid-70s, I have a question that applies to movies, books- even my starting point, comic books, which took on a moody, melancholy aspect, particularly with Marvel Comics, which had just begun its publishing period of the roster of characters that we see in abundance across media and toys, today.

What are the causes of the increase in violence and death and overall downbeat tone that defines 1970s storytelling?

Do you think the new permissiveness post-60s was at the root of the violence and death portrayed?

My first thought was, word was getting back about Viet Nam, and young people were disillusioned with institutions they'd been inculcated culturally to trust. I often think the idealism emerging within the counter-culture was just not manifesting quickly enough, for the impatience of the youth. I'm clear, too, that the rise of counter-culturalism 1) certainly does not match the rural values still in play in most of the country
and 2) was riddled with the vices of the disingenuous folk who exploited what they saw as naive young adults.



The 1970s saw the creation of cinema that towers above the pop culture landscape: The Godfather movies, Star Wars, Jaws, Halloween. So much of what has followed has been influenced by these, often created with shoestring budgets. Aside from spawning blockbusters, it was an era with a new sophistication in writing and directing.

My question started with Marvel Comics. For several years, you have the horror comics, a re-iteration of the Universal Studios monster craze of the 1940s; sword and sorcery fantasy, which had emerged with the popularity of The Lord of the Rings and reprinted pulp fiction blessed with the work of Frank Frazettamartial arts, which peaked as a fad with the advent and death of Bruce Lee as a movie star, only to return as endless action movies in the 1980s; and a pushing of the Comics Code restrictions on portrayals of sexuality and the consequences of violence and drugs. This was still a business meant to attract adolescents with its colorful IPs, who would return in popular cartoons and of course, go on to become blockbuster movie material. Spider-Man was the company's flagship character as they began to overtake the market. It's during 1973 we saw youthful novelist Gerry Conway, hired by Stan Lee at age 19, turn in the script for "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" and the subsequent death of her killer, longtime foe The Green Goblin. (It's true that artist John Romita, who developed the popular look for the wall-crawler found on lunchboxes, t-shirts and toys, was apparently the one to suggest Gwen's death as a shakeup to the series, which was now a decade old.)

Reprints were a big part of the flood of products from both Marvel and DC. Taking a wrecking ball to some of the tropes that had flourished without being chilled by Realism would've seemed experimental, too. Having interviewed Conway for his work on Firestorm, it's ironic that he generally did not take the absurdly-premised comics stories seriously. Perhaps, youth prodigy he was, he matured to that point, later. I do appreciate his writing on Peter Parker, gloomy and introspective and grieving, and MJ especially. Mary Jane Watson was presented with rich complexities that touch upon the emerging feminism and independence of the day, a big step forward as female supporting characters went. Dealing with the death of Gwen opened an adult sensibility, threaded with the colorful over-the-top nature of The Amazing Spider-Man. It's funny- you wouldn't think of this as 'kid's stuff' topics, even while the melodramatic presentations of individual determination versus Evil and the viscissitudes of Life carried on.

Which is to say it was a heady (inconsistent?) blend of titles, offerings directed at the potentially more profitable magazine market (where Marvel's dominant brand recognition led to confusion on where to display their more adult-oriented creations), and four-color absurdity intended to appeal to younger readers. To cite Conway again, an issue of Marvel Team-Up ended with the company's iteration of Hercules aiding Spider-Man by towing the island of Manhattan back into place, in the manner of Greek myth (honoring Herc's penchant for the tall tale). But you also had the brooding, rich-vocabulary presentations of The Tomb of Dracula and Conan The Barbarian. (so much of their roster is borrowed from previous literature!) You have the idiosyncractic satire of Howard The Duck, which, while at times ingenious, if occasionally isolated by its genre-consciousness, really messed with vendors who thought they were looking at another funny animal comic, like Disney and Harvey Comics. Over in Man-Thing you get a two-issue discussion of Censorship and book-burning which has shocking resonance with the comics of today.

Master of Kung Fu #39, art: Paul Gulacy

If 1977 counts as an end to the mid-70s- this is before Jim Shooter, a teen prodigy writer for DC Comics, is appointed Editor-in-Chief, and the line becomes brand-conscious of its appeal to youngsters- that's the year The Defenders features a meditation on middle age-crisis and some realistic conditions of Depression, resulting in the dramatic suicide of minor SHIELD villain, Scorpio. (That one was written by my late friend, David Anthony Kraft, still in his 20s.) Questions about our political system and disillusionment with our national symbols had erupted over in Steve Engelhart's Captain America. In an era now dominated more by the young writers dictating plots to workman artists like Sal Buscema (who drew up to four comics a month!), we see a strange blend of Stan Lee's 'world outside your window' ethos with the patently outrageous and child-like imaginings of its superhero line. Doug Monech, especially when paired with the excellent Steranko-influenced Paul Gulacy, is writing about Zen and betrayal and manipulation in the martial arts/ James Bond pastiche, Master of Kung-Fu. It's an identity crisis of sorts, during an era of experimentation often reflecting the changes permitted in cinema, to tie back to my opening theme.

Jim Starlin's auteur turn writing and drawing Adam Warlock deserves its own post. It's rare to encounter all of this being done with the ingenious subtlety of Man-Thing writer Steve Gerber, who turned the unlikely roster centered on Doctor Strange and the Incredible Hulk, and its 'non-team' premise, into a series-defining run of 26 issues of The Defenders. While turning the interactons of the non-team into what he came to see as a take on "encounter groups," he gave Dr. Strange a mentor role in healing the very-interesting shortcomings of the core friends of the group. The Valkyrie, who made it to the Marvel Cinema Universe with none of these complexities intact, had been created as a sort of female chauvinst character under Roy Thomas and John Buscema.

Under Gerber, the tragedy of the Asgardian's identity replacing a previously-married young woman's psyche became a cool metaphor for issues related to the emergence of Women's Liberation, as domestic parameters began to dissolve and women, now granted access to credit cards and bank loans (in short, financial independence), began carving out their own individualistic niche, rather than the subordinate roles and family-oriented expectations. I don't doubt he was heavily influenced by Mary Skrenes, a frequent collaborator and writing partner, and these understandings helped his work stand out in a male-dominated industry, directed increasingly at boys and young men. It's worth noting that some of the fans were growing older, too, and growing up with comics, shaping their continued involvement with the medium with more adult interests.

Satanna debuts in the magazine, Vampire Tales, 1974. Art: John Romita. If I didn't mention it, the b-movie culture got very Satan-y. The creation of the super-heroine The Red Guardian is one of the hidden pinnacles of this era. I ran across the analysis of one of the many wonderful blogs of the '10s (how does one say that aloud?) peak era of discursive blogging, and was reminded of encountering this character during the last eight issues of Gerber's Defenders run. No father, no lover, no son- finally, a female character defined on her own terms as a woman, with a deeply-interesting philosophical perspective. As an accomplished neurosurgeon, she was brought in to resolve the deeply-weird situation of transplanting Kyle (Nighthawk) Richmond's stolen brain! This established her private identity as a colleague to Doctor Stephen Strange, a professional equal. While she maintained her Soviet citizenship (we are in the post-Viet Nam era of the Cold War, here), she abhorred the oligarchy behind the statist iteration of the USSR. Her dialogues with street-canny cynic Luke Cage are excellent. She's a Communist, idealistically, but also a law-breaking costumed vigilante, whose existence is still kept secret by the KGB. She comments on the excesses and squalor of Times Square, which was a wild place in the 1970s. She sees individualism and communism as compatible, and considers herself a dissident to the reigning Soviet agenda, while maintaining her citizenship.

The team of which we should have seen so much more: Tania Belinsky and Luke Cage, running loose in the Big Apple. art: Sal Buscema/ Klaus Janson


Her practical costume was unusual for the more-revealing designs of the time. It also may have been a tribute, with its white star-on-red simple design, to the anti-Fascist fighters. You can find her in The Defenders Essentials Vol. 3, if you don't mind the black-and-white but affordable presentation, and appeared in Defenders #35-41 and Defenders Annual #1 in 1976. Especially for a costumed heroine, she has a rich intellectual spawning, and I only wish she could have maintained those individual qualities in the hands of other creators. We were still a long-ways off from the political subtleness of Ed Brubaker on Cap in the 2000s, or even the 'which way is he going' satire of The Ultimates under Mark Millar (which I found ghastly at the time, lol) If I could pair with someone more experienced with the Iranian experience, I've long had an idea inspired by the Women's Revolution over there.

It was Colin's observation over on his blog that set me off musing about the melancholy air of 1970s Marvel, particularly in its superhero line, that touched my own maudlin memories of adolescence, and gave me pause to reflect on the cultural moment happening while I was just starting Life. I'm sure the thesis could be expanded, with research, tieing the doors opened by 1960s counter culture to the hallmarks of 1970s pop culture. I realize it was hardly all so well-thought-out, and subtle analysis was left largely to auto-didacted intellectuals. But I doubt the changes went unnoticed by those precisely old enough to see the changes from the homogenized offerings of the 1960s (think The Andy Griffith Show, the LAPD-edited Dragnet, even Petticoat Junction, to really dig back in by-gone nostalgia).

Stephen, Luke, and Tania (a.k.a. Red Guardian) discuss their predicament in Defenders #38. art: Sal Buscema, inks by Klaus Janson What are your thoughts? I sense we are more in a YouTube vlogging era, but think pieces pop up on TikTok and Instagram, also, and that might be where I carry over the discussion. I miss my blog brethren and our thoughtful niche.