Marvel comics are also world literature, thinks Penguin Classics

It doesn’t get much more elegant. The British Penguin Classics series – with which Penguin Publishers has set itself the goal of capturing all the big names in world literature since 1946, and has already re-released more than two thousand classics – recently made it official: comics can also be world literature. Fans everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief. See! Banned from high school reading lists for decades, and now Penguin recognizes its value.

Not just an empty slogan. Three beautiful editions – hardcover; gold on edge; sturdy size; color printing; approximately 375 pages per volume – make up this new line, of which more volumes will appear. The aim is to teach us to look at comics as cultural heritage. And that is striking at a time when film directors such as Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Ridley Scott have indicated that they are now done with the superhero genre, because it is ‘not cinema’, and they ‘fall asleep with it’.

Read the foreword by Penguin editor Ben Saunders, professor of popular culture at the University of Oregon: “It’s impossible to imagine American pop culture without Marvel Comics. Marvel has released groundbreaking visual stories that stick on multiple levels. As explorations into the relationship between power and responsibility; as metaphors about fluid characters and otherness; as meditations on the growing pains of adolescents and the development towards an own identity; as an investigation into the meaning and limit of patriotism; as an ironic juxtaposition of the cosmic and the everyday and as a source of understanding of political and social history. This made Marvel a timeless watermark in the American comic book tradition.”

Quite an academic mouthful, yes. But don’t panic. Of course you can also just enjoy it. Another tentative conclusion: the strongest thing about the series is that it shows the origin of all those long-running series, the so-called Golden Age of Marvel. We already find the following parts in this collection:

Captain Americacreated in 1941 by artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; The Amazing Spider-Mancreated in 1962 by Stan Lee (screenplay) and Steve Ditko (drawings); Black Pantherpublished in 1966, created by Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby.

To increase the academic quality, the books have been enriched with annotations and clarifying essays: higher comics. And what’s also nice: contemporary cartoonists and screenwriters reminisce about their first encounter with the above characters. They illuminate the side of the receiver, the reader. That way we learn a lot about that huge American comics scene.

For example, the Nigerian-American fantasy and science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor (48) writes about Black Panther: “When I was growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, the comic book store was always full of white guys. It didn’t bother me, I grew up in a white neighborhood, but what bothered me was their reaction to me. They stared at me, there was a painful silence, I felt like an intruder. My eye slid along the covers of the magazines and books, and I saw only white men, no black people, no women. I left quietly again.’

It took years before she, sentenced to a long illness, read the comics of Black Panther discovered, with King T’Challa and his mysterious African kingdom of Wakanda. And lo and behold: in 2017 I was asked by Marvel to write three episodes for the Black Panther-to write a comic strip. Great thing to do.’

Similar anecdotes can be found in the other Penguin volumes. The mission statement of editor Ben Saunders may be very riveting, but as you leaf through you find out that he is indeed right.

When it comes to political and social history, it was of course no coincidence that Black Panther—the character was introduced before the eponymous militant movement took hold in October 1966—made its entrance in the mid-1960s. During the struggle for civil rights, the time had come for the first black action hero. In 2018 we still have the nicest marvel movies in years to thank, with lamented actor Chadwick Boseman (1976-2020) starring as T’Challa annex the unbeatable Black Panther. And if you pay close attention, you will see in a Korean casino creator Stan Lee (1922-2018) are usual cameo making in his own work, credited as ‘thirsty gambler’.

You can say: all comics of any importance are a mirror of their time. The same goes for Captain America, who would teach the emerging fascism a lesson. Its creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were both sons of humble Jewish immigrants, and news of what was happening in Nazi Germany reached that group much earlier than the average American. He didn’t wake up until after Pearl Harbor.

We write March 1941. Captain America Comics No.1, 45 Thrilling Pages. On the cover we see Cap – as he is affectionately called – lashing out at a man dressed in a brown uniform with a swastika on his arm and a wimpy mustache under his nose: Adolf Hitler. But the details are a lot more subtle. On the ground in the Nazi headquarters are maps of the US, and we also see German infiltrators blow up ammunition depots in New York. The meaning is clear: America, watch your business!

Propaganda? Absolute.

Effective? Absolutely.

At that time, two wars were raging within American families. The fathers had to serve and would be sent to the front. For the children left behind there was Captain America. He kept his spirits up because he was always winning. The American soldiers overseas also read the books themselves.

And then there’s antihero Peter Parker. As his alter ego The Amazing Spider-Man, he gets to wear part III of Penguin’s Marvel collection. The special thing about Spider-Man is that it was the first comic for wavering teenagers, and that’s how Peter Parker was drawn. Childhood pimples, wallflower, clumsy with the girls, until he puts on his spider suit and makes the world a better place in his fight against the rapaille.

Three times classic Marvel, expressions of what has been called the Marvel method. What is that then? Stan Lee explained it at a comic convention: ‘We did it differently than most comic publishers. There an author writes the screenplay, gives it to the artist, and he makes a comic of it. It’s a marriage of talent for us. Beforehand, the writer sits down with the artist and they brainstorm uninhibitedly. The draftsman takes notes and then goes to work autonomously. He returns with his sketches and the screenwriter fills in the dialogues. This method gives you so much more freedom. That’s the Marvel method.’

And that is now being rewarded by Penguin Classics. With the great Marvel competitor DC Comics – that of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman – that will give some crooked faces, but who knows, they may also come up at a later stage.