Marvel Comics and me

I had a short, intense period of Marvel Comics fandom in my early teens. Marvel became an important part of my life in 1975. The popularity of Marvel movies over the past few years has made me think about how Marvel slithered into my life at a crucial time. For me Marvel is not just important because I read and loved the comics, but because they helped determine the direction of my life. My tastes and artistic direction were formed in part as a reaction to Marvel comics. But despite my puberty-related rejection of Marvel Comics,  Marvel guided my life in positive ways, too. I don’t think I would have become a lifelong reader of comics if Marvel hadn’t walloped me as a young teen.

When Marvel movies started appearing in 2000, I wasn’t super-impressed. The first one I saw was X-Men, which I got to see in an advanced screening in a theater full of Marvel Comics employees in New York. I was invited to the screening  because I was working for the company that distributed Marvel books to bookstores. We assumed that sales of Marvel books would skyrocket because of the movie. (They didn’t, partly because there were so many X-Men books in print that it was impossible for newbies to know where to start.) I remember thinking the movie looked a little cheap and I found it confusing. But it was a culmination of a fandom that for me started in the mid-70s.

The first Marvel Comics I remember reading belonged to my cousin Ed. Ed was a little older than me. He decorated his life with Revell Model Kits and Marvel Comics. I was visiting Ed and my other cousins in Louisiana when I read his copy of The Defenders #27, cover-dated September 1975. Comics appeared on the newsstand months before their cover dates in the 1970s, so I suspect I saw this comic when the family traveled to rural Louisiana for the 4^th of July. I had just turned 12.

The first Marvel comic I ever read. Cover art by Gil Kane, John Romita and Gaspar Saladino

The story in Defenders #27 involves the Guardians of the Galaxy—a superhero team from the future--teamed up with a current-day superhero team based on Earth called the Defenders to fight an evil alien species called the Badoon. You could tell the Badoon were bad because they looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and they had “bad” in their name. The Guardians of the Galaxy were quite different from the ones we now know from the movies—this beta version of the group were a superhero team formed a thousand years in the future. Some of the members of this older Guardians of the Galaxy are the same as the present members. Yondu, the alien archer (why did Marvel and DC Comics think that archers were formidable warriors? In the history of the world, archers were pretty much obsolete as soon as the first gun appeared on the battlefield), and Starlord seems like a variation on a character in the old Guardians hero Starhawk (although Starhawk was way more cosmic). The Defenders #27 was objectively not a good comic book, but it affected me deeply. I was enthralled.

Back in the 1970s, Marvel comics were produced on an assembly line. Each of the artistic tasks was handled by a different specialist, not unlike making a movie but on a much smaller scale. This issue was written by Steve Gerber (who would go on to be my favorite comics writer for several years) and drawn by Sal Buscema and Vince Colletta (two journeyman artists with boring drawing styles who could churn out mind-numbing numbers of pages on demand, which was how they demonstrated their value to Marvel Comics).

That year I had started going to Memorial Junior High but was still playing football for my elementary school team, the Frostwood Tigers. But when I turned 12, I aged out of the elementary school league and started to play for the junior high team, the Eagles. Because I was now on my school’s team, football practice required that my class schedule be rearranged, which also changed my lunch schedule. Because of this, I met a whole bunch of new friends. In a way, I feel like my life as the Robert I am now started when I went from sixth grade to seventh grade. I became friends with a bunch of super-creative pop culture fans. Fandom is so well-developed now, but back then it was a minor, somewhat despised subculture. Fandom had existed since at least the 1930s, but in 1976, this history was unknown to me. I just liked looking at Jim Mooney’s massive comics collection and listening to his records. He was a dedicated collector of both—which made him a perfect friend for a comics and music newbie like me.