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...except of course for sometimes in the early issues, when he communicates only by telepathy.
I guess I came off as a bit of a dick upthread (now there's a first!), but I've been a bit submerged in the early Silver Age stuff lately, and I just cannot stress enough how improvisational it all seems. They're just throwing it all together on the fly, and there's barely even an attempt at consistency. Stan Lee famously couldn't even keep the names straight; the whole reason he started relying on the alliterative names was as a mnemonic, and even then Bruce Banner kept turning into "Bob Banner" in early issues of The Hulk.
The "government connections" angle is one that keeps cropping up in the early Silver Age. There are reasons for that. Remember, nobody was sure that this "super-hero" fad was going to last—prior to 1962, Marvel had been making most of its money with monster comics, Westerns, and war stories—and the vocabulary and syntax of super-heroing had not really been established. There were no extradimensional hordes, no vast criminal conspiracies, no foes long-thought-dead to return; the Kree and the Skrulls hadn't even made their first appearances yet.
And so the writers and artists jammed these new characters into more-or-less standard war/spy/action plots——and with the Cold War was foremost in everyone's mind, that means that every superhero worth his tights went up against fifth columnists or banana-republic strongmen in the early days.
Early issues of Thor give probably the most blatant examples of how jerry-rigged the whole enterprise was. The concept of Thor keeps shifting—sometimes it seems that Don Blake becomes Thor, sometimes that he changes places with him. The specifics of Blake himself keep shifting; one issue he's a doctor in a ghetto clinic; the next, a research scientist working on a government project; the next, a Peace Corps doctor on a mission to Central America. He takes orders from the State Department in one story, and is denounced as a vigilante in another—all according to the momentary dictates of the story.
What's surprising, I think, is not that the stories were chaotic and slipshod in the beginning, but rather how quickly they found their voices and styles. Within three or four years, Thor's tone of cosmic grandeur was fully in place, the X-Men were an all-purpose cipher for all oppressed groups, the Fantastic Four's supporting cast and family-based melodrama were in full swing... remarkable, really.
That's what makes those very early issues so fascinating—to me, anyway. I'm a process geek, and for me reading that stuff is like listening to demos of familiar songs, and thinking about how they changed in the conception, and contemplating the directions they might have taken, if someone had made a different decision. |
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