Marvel is flooding the market right now and Marvel Universe is all the rage. So much so that even a nontraditional nonsuperhero comic book lover might want to check it out. And our library has gone mad on Marvel and acquired tons of the titles, even doubles, in a sort of thoughtless uncurated grab.
Up to now my main association with Marvel, outside of the ubiquitous movies, has been nonfiction books about Marvel as a company and its main players. So I figured I’ll check out a female Marvel character, immortalized on screen by ScarJo, created and recreated by the one and only master of spectacle and alliteration Stan Lee. Not the finest of experiments, to be honest. Definitely didn’t make me into more of a fan and took too freaking long to get through. This collection only covers 1964 to 1971 and it is only in the 70s that Madame Natasha got rebooted into the tight black skinsuit wearing flamehaired sexbomb we know and love. Prior to that she was comely brunette in a ridiculously skimpy, although just as revealing of an outfit, who was mostly characterized by her torn (between her Motherland and US/Avengers) loyalties and her torrid love affair with a certain adroit archer. And the bulk of the book is concentrated on those years. And it get so tired and tiresome after the first few comics. It begins quaintly enough with Black Widow/ Tony Stark flirtations, but then it just stays repetitively similar for ages. And Stark vanishes too, though a bunch of the other Avengers are still there. Because of how these giant compendiums are structured, you get years worth of the Avengers but only through the comics where Black Widow makes appearance. So it’s a weirdly incomplete journey and makes for a weirdly disjointed read. You have to wait until the reboot, when Natasha gets her own comic, to have proper continuous storylines. So this book doesn’t really do much in a way of reading for the pure joy of storytelling. The main interest for me here, after the initial novelty of vintage, was a sort of cultural anthropology thing, where it’s just fascinating to behold how the social and cultural mores changed and evolved over the years. And as a comic book fan it was interesting to witness the evolution of comics as a format. For all of Stan Lee’s admirable qualities, the early comics were just so freaking hokey and silly and cheesy. I’m not sure if they were targeted strictly to kids or to…more simple minded adults, but the overbearing narrative style, the exhaustive text heavy panels, the ridiculously overexplained contents…I am so glad those are largely a thing of the past. It seems people just didn’t realize how much of a visual format comics are meant to be and how much of the talking the art should do. The change even as early as the 70s was staggering. And then there’s the art, which is actually also just as hokey and silly and cheesy. All those bright unsubtle prime colors, which went on for so long, even Watchmen had them. And all those women drawn exactly the same, save for a different dated ‘do. Stan Lee knew his business and was a master of self promotion, so apparently that style of comics worked back in the day and for a long time, but, like gender politics of yesteryear, it’s a good thing to have evolve away from. Overall, on a purely comic fan reading comics level, this was a giant waste of time. It’s entirely possible a more nostalgia driven fan or someone obsessed with Black Widow would get more out of this. For me…I’ll stick with the movies.
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