Comic books

The complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe are by now widely known. Their films follow predictable formulas and story beats. Characters become increasingly indistinguishable quip machines. The stakes are never high. The streaming content is overwhelmingly forgettable. Other than the death of Tony Stark onscreen and the sad passing of Chadwick Boseman offscreen, emotional moments are few and far between, as it's hard to care about characters when everything can be reset with a bit of multiverse mumbo jumbo. And then there's the problem of, well, as the Critical Drinker refers to it, THE MESSAGE. Expect a lot of that in the already twice-postponed production of The Marvels, girlbossing into theaters this winter.

Say what you like about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or the MCU, for short) — and I do, frequently — but you can’t deny that it has a grim efficiency. The MCU impressively herds tens of millions of unsuspecting moviegoers into theaters to watch the latest incomprehensible special effects behemoth, with a wildly overqualified and suitably embarrassed cast. As I write this, the latest installment to threaten audiences is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Now I don’t know what Quantumania is, and I will be perfectly happy to never find out. But as the previous film, Ant-Man and the Wasp (the titles lack a certain finesse), made more than $600 million at the box office, I accept I might be in the minority.

One of the few upsides to the pandemic’s peak last year was that no Marvel films were released in theaters. We’ve suffered for it this year, with the arrival in close succession of Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and, now, Eternals. But it was glorious to have a period of nearly two years without the deadening, soul-destroying presence of Kevin Feige’s Riefenstahlian masterplan deafening audiences in our multiplexes, and, increasingly, at home on our televisions. But the brief respite is over. Over the next eighteen months, no fewer than seven Marvel films will fight, bite, and kick their way onto our screens, in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Is it still possible to talk about movies without mentioning superheroes? For the first three months of last year, Black Panther accounted for nearly a quarter of all domestic box office receipts. Eight of the top 20 highest grossing films of all time feature men and women who wear capes and fight crime. The consequence of ticket sales being increasingly concentrated among superhero movies is an increasing concentration of superhero movies. Today this feedback loop has dredged up another one: Captain Marvel. The modern superhero was born in the 1930s. Many of them – like Superman and Captain America – were anti-fascists who smacked Hitler around while fighting for ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way.

If there was one character who was omnipresent in the Marvel comic books universe, it was Stan Lee. Lee, who died on Monday, defined an exuberant, confident American era that seems to have vanished along with him. A member of the World War Two greatest generation, he played a decisive role in making comic books great again, starting in the 1960s, when he sought to reinvent the moribund genre with characters who bickered with each other when they weren’t worrying about their love lives. [caption id="attachment_10404225" align="alignleft" width="269"] The Amazing Spider-Man #18[/caption] Gone was the sterility of DC’s Superman, a paragon of perfection, to be replaced with ironic detachment and human foibles. Sometimes heroes were scared.