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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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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On the other hand, the Fourth World was three-plus series, interlocking (usually with villains), right from the start.
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This is why I think
@ava ‘s New Gods is going to be special. It seems like it’s existing in its own vacuum and I think she’ll be able to do justice to Kirby’s political, anti-fascist themes, which never really come through when Darkseid is just DC’s big bad.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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he did repeatedly do that, though — the whole Fourth World, characters from 2001 popping up in Eternals, etc — never feels like editorial override, more like Kirby's plots took so many left turns from sci-fi to fantasy to horror that they circled the block and ran into themselves
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"2001," his most unrestrained/freewheeling series from his 70s Marvel return, kept bumping into minor characters from his 60's FF/Thor runs… plus Evanier says Kirby wanted to scrap "Thor" and restart that universe, but editorial overrode, so saved those ideas and took them to DC
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