Brevoort’s an editor at Marvel, and responded to some comments on his blog with this gem:
"Here’s the thing: the characters are invulnerable.
"I’m not talking about super-powers here; I’m talking about the ability to survive bad stories and bad times and to live on and prosper again. The primary Marvel characters have been around for four decades at this point, and have been translated into animated cartoons, movies, television shows and more toys than you could ever hope to collect. They’ve become immortal, and a part of the pop culture landscape…
"The characters are indestructable. The worst you can do to them (assuming you’re behaving somewhat responsibly) is to tarnish them, and to make them unpopular for awhile. But literally anything can be fixed–and nothing repairs a character like good, compelling, exciting stories. As long as you can produce that, you can’t go wrong…
"The best of the Marvel characters are now functionally immortal–created before I was born in most cases, they’ll survive long after I’m dead and gone."
This is the silliest, most arrogant quote I’ve ever read from Marvel management. And it’s quite wrong.
Now I like Tom Brevoort a lot, and I like Civil War a lot. I think the mega-crossover is the most interesting superhero story in many years. It’s a period piece that’s perfect for post-9/11 America. Rather than replicating the events of that day with some sort of superterrortist, Mark Millar’s story captures the paranoia, fear, and bad decisions we make when we try to restructure society after a horrible event. I think many Internet critics have gotten it wrong when they criticize Millar’s handling of Tony Stark and Reed Richards; as Marvel’s wealthiest superheroes, it’s not surprising to me to see them strongly support the Registration Act. They have the most to lose if the public fully loses trust in superheroes. This is an argument I’ll get into more another day, but I have little qualms with how Millar’s written Civil War, and McNiven’s art is gorgeous.
What I have a problem with is the idea that Marvel’s characters are somehow iconic, eternal, or everlasting.
Somehow, we got it in our heads that superheroes have the ability to resonate forever, that Superman and Batman and Spider-Man will always look fresh and inviting to future generations. If that were so, they’d be a very rare subset of characters in human literature, because there’s very few eternal iconic characters out there.
Look at the great characters of the first comics boom in the thirties and forties. Little Orphan Annie, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Popeye- are any of these eternal icons? They’re all great characters, especially Annie (I have collections of the old strips, and they’re simply amazing). But iconic? Hardly. Sure, Hollywood can strip the Depression and WWII elements of the character, slap some CGI and breast implants in there, and present a fresh version of the character for today’s audience. I’m sure that, in 50 years with its smell-o-vision and virtual flesh and in-brain infobeams, similar techniques will be used to update the character for another audience.
But does that mean the characters are eternal? No, of course not. Is an updated Spider-Man really eternal? No. What happens is you take the character out back, shoot it, gut it, and put someone else in its skin. It’s got all the trappings of Spider-Man, and it may be fit for a new audience. But part of the old character is rotting in back of the shed.
There’s no guarantee of success when you’re creating something like the Marvel Universe. In fact, it’s the greatest storytelling experiment of the 20th century: a multitude of characters that germinated in the minds of three or four people (Lee, Ditko, Kirby, maybe Martin Goodman) that were then handed off to others, who then created their own characters. And then all of these went to someone else, and some characters were killed off, and some new ones were created, and the process grew bigger and smaller at the same time.
In any month, there are tens of Marvel comics published, each with its own subset of characters and viewpoints, but all in the same universe (or, if you want to include the Ultimate books, multiverse). All of it was created by the same company; it may have had different owners along the way, it may have been bankrupt at some times, it may have been flush with cash, but it’s always been Marvel. (Whereas a lot of DC Comics were created by companies that DC then bought, such as Shazam, the Blue Beetle and the Charlton heroes, and the Wildstorm universe with Jim Lee.) It’s an organic whole created by thousands of artists over 65 years (if you consider Namor was created in 1941; 45 years if you just look back to the start of the proper Marvel universe in 1961).
And every month, hundreds of thousands of readers poke holes into this storytelling concept 50 or more ways, each hole a different issue on the monthly schedule, and we change the Marvel universe through the act of observation (remember your quantum physics?). Some readers drop out each month, the concept/multiverse/mothership no longer resonating with them. Others drop in, sometimes accidentally. Occasionally, one of the readers becomes a creator and makes changes to the universe directly, and is himself or herself changed by the process.
There’s nothing else like it. And that’s why it’s so curious to see someone say it’s eternal, indestructable, immortal. Why? Many have tried to recreate the Marvel concept and have failed miserably, in some cases with much more money than Lee/Kirby/Ditko/Goodman had access to in 1961. If the concept can’t be duplicated, why is it guaranteed success forever?
The answer is, it isn’t. There’s no guarantee that this very week, a Marvel comic isn’t going to come out that will throw the whole concept into oblivion and extinction. The chance of such an occurence is small, true, but it’s not zero. Every week, Marvel walks a multidimensional tightrope, and so far they’ve stayed upright.
Heck, I think the concept’s thriving. But entropy watches the whole thing, waiting patiently. Now that’s functional immortality.