The Politics of the Silver Age Marvel Comics

Amid all the talk of the politics of Marvel's films it seems worth saying a word of the politics of the original comics that were their basis--the '60s-era first numbers that gave us the Marvel universe's iconic characters.

Having read them in the good old Marvel Essentials volumes that made them conveniently available for 21st century readers, I would say that Marvel's politics were "centrist"--subscribing to the essentially conservative, staunchly Anti-Communist, view that prevailed in that era (and has never ceased to dominate American life since, even after the supposed "end of history"), but in contrast with the right that was the principal alternative taking the view that existing institutions had to be made to "work for everyone." Thus in Marvel's pages the Commies were endlessly infiltrating, spying on, plotting against America and the Free World, and Marvel celebrating the good fight against them--so much so that scant years after Dwight Eisenhower himself warned the country about the dangers posed to its the "military-industrial complex" to the nation's "liberties or democratic processes" in his Farewell Address Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made a latterday Edisonade hero out of the very embodiment of that military-industrial complex in Tony Stark/Iron Man (in his first appearance, making his personal contribution to a war effort in Vietnam they obviously supported, at least at the time). Yet one can also acknowledge that Marvel's X-Men were unquestionably a call for tolerance and inclusion--and warned of the dangers of society failing its minorities (with intolerance drawing forth intolerance in the form of Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants).

Of course, the center did not quite hold over the years that followed, and just as American movies of the day reflected the change, so did Marvel comics, with more pointedly leftward stories appearing, and some stories taking a more sharply right-wing tone. Thus did Captain America in the wake of Watergate face down Richard Nixon. But thus did we also see the story of the Hulk, who might seem a natural Anti-Establishment figure as a patriotic scientist whose life was destroyed by the nuclear arms race in which he participated and ruthlessly persecuted by the state he had served in the form of a caricature of a General, go in the extreme opposite direction, with the Hulk facing down not Nixon but anti-war protesters presented as no-good hippie punks stupidly menacing Bruce Banner's kindly old mentor in their loyalty to their wrong-headed cause, while taking their cue from Tom Wolfe shortly thereafter going in for a sneer at so-called "radical chic" by making the Hulk another "cause" for the Upper East Side crowd (with, of course, Mr. Wolfe and his white suit actually visible in one panel).

Still, in the center Marvel began, and to the center it has generally tended, with it seeming to affirm rather than refute this that the rancor over the politics of Marvel's films has most had to do with their identity politics--for in spite of much mislabeling it is not the left but the center which has embraced such politics in the manner fueling the culture wars of today.