Marvel Comics are rather like the Rolling Stones: common cultural currency for the entire world, but the hardcore aficionado knows that the squares have got it completely wrong in giving all their attention to the loudmouth at the front.
Just as the true fan has for half a century disdained Mick Jagger’s swaggering pout as an irritating distraction from the wonder of Keith Richards and his five-string riffs, so it is with the writer and artist who were Marvel’s founding forefathers. Stan Lee — born Stanley Lieber — outlived almost everyone until there was no one left to argue with his version of events as the genius co-creator of The Fantastic Four, Thor, Spider-Man and pretty much all the other superheroes whose tales have been unavoidable at your local multiplex over the past decade since Marvel movies took off to hit the multi-billion-dollar big time.
Lee’s detractors will tell you another story: that he was a common hack with a long lease on the kind of toupee that needs its own kennel, plus enough of the car salesman’s gift of the gab to secure the limelight he evidently so craved.
But for the true spirit of Marvel, look to one Jacob Kurtzberg, better known to the comic book world as Jack Kirby: a pocket battleship of angry Jew who scrapped his way out of the Lower East Side, then created Captain America to go to war against Hitler before he donned his own Army uniform to fight the Nazis in France.
Flash forward to the Sixties, and Kirby had forged an instantly recognisable style — more boldly Pop than Andy Warhol, and laced with enough cosmic spectacle to satisfy not just school kids but also the college students who had discovered comics were the perfect thing to read when you were so high an actual book was just too much. Sales rocketed into the millions.
Those who knew Kirby would tell you he had put himself centre stage in his first successful creation with Lee, the Fantastic Four. The Thing — the muscled monster that had once been Ben Grimm before an unfortunate encounter with cosmic rays — was in a constant state of rage much like his creator’s. (That was mostly about money — and particularly the way that everyone at Marvel except for Lee was getting screwed. Eventually Kirby would have enough and quit for despised rivals DC.)
And that was about as close as Marvel came for decades to having a frontline superhero who was Jewish, which is pretty strange when you think about how many of the comic book pioneers were Jews — from Superman’s creators to the great Will Eisner — and not strange at all looking at how the decidedly ungentile Hollywood moguls knew better than to try and foist heroes who shared their own background on the great American public.
Now, of course, we live in a blessed era of diversity that shows up the entire history of humanity up to about four years ago for the shameful sewer of bigoted hate it surely was. Marvel movies have come on by prodigious leaps and bounds to court the approval of the progressive Twitterati, and the latest offering, Eternals, ticks every box you can imagine, plus a few no one even knew existed. Deaf superhero? Check. Gay superhero? Check. Early onset dementia sufferer superhero? Check. (Played by — I kid you not — Angelina Jolie. Why? Cheque.). And the list goes on.
The terrified critics have celebrated all the lovely representation while slating the film for an absence of anything resembling an engaging story, and dare not admit that the two facts might possibly be related.
The comic book Eternals were Kirby’s last great creation for Marvel after he returned from his dalliance with DC, and perhaps his most cherished: celestial demigods with more than a hint of the Old Testament about them, and suffused with a sense of awe entirely absent from the film. We can only guess what Kirby’s verdict would have been on the big screen adaptation of his vision, but a catchphrase of the Thing’s certainly springs to mind: ‘It’s clobbering time!’.
It’s years since the diversity tsars crushed all the fun out of the comics; no one buys them anymore. Now they’re in the process of bursting the superhero movie bubble. Still, you’ll look in vain for a Jew with a cape on the big screen even now. Oy gevalt.
