1. This @aoscott review of Infinity Wars is as -- as one would expect -- super smart & wickedly funny. It also got me thinking about how Jack Kirby grew alienated from the Marvel Universe: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/movies/avengers-infinity-war-review.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur …
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7. The Marvel Universe, in other words, was a work of fan fiction. It was fans-turned-writers who decided they liked cohesiveness, continuity, and putting all the characters into big epic battles (key figures here Roy Thomas, Mark Gruenwald & Jim Shooter)
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8. The interesting thing is that Jack Kirby, while he didn't mind doing epic stories with many characters, wasn't keen with limitations of continuity-bound cohesive universe.
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9. In his auteur works of 1970s/1980s, Kirby kept each project conceptual distinct. Fourth World books were for epic space opera, Demon for gothic horror, Kamandi for dystopian sci-fi. He didn't try to fuse into coherent universe or mix characters together.
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10. When Kirby returned to Marvel Comics in 1975, one of the problems he ran into was the younger editors/writers wanted him to follow continuity rules of Marvel Universe, which he couldn't give a fig about.
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11. Biggest problem was Kirby's ambitious series The Eternals - about ancient alien astronauts. Kirby conceived of it as a stand-alone book but editors kept wanting him to bring in characters like The Hulk & fuse it with Marvel Universe.
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12. Kirby's instincts were right, in the sense that the Marvel Universe -- filled with countless superheroes, aliens, mutants, Gods & sorcerers -- is way too crowded. No individual story is meaningful in universe of so many world destroyers.
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13. That's why the Marvel movies that work best -- Black Panther for instance -- are the ones that carve out a space from rest of over-stuffed universe, to get greater narrative weight & focus.
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14. All of which is to say that
@aoscott is, as always, spot on, in this in his suspicion of how the sprawling universe-ness of the Marvel universe itself defeats criticism.Show this thread
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You’re making a mistake by leaving Avengers out of this analysis. That’s where a lot of young MU threads came togetherpic.twitter.com/9Rjy7eIfcX
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