4. Kirby worked in a variety of genres (science fiction, war, superhero, mythology, romance). It was Lee as editor who pushed for having characters in different comics show up in each others book, in the spirit of cameos.
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5. The early Marvel world building really was just crass sales crossovers. Take popular character from one book & have him or her meet/fight/support character from another. As here:pic.twitter.com/wtH2UCRJmm
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6. It was really the epigonic younger writers after Kirby/Lee/Ditko who decided to take this ad hoc universe & give it rules & continuity, done in the fannish spirit of people who write biographies of Sherlock Holmes.
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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.
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This was a marvelous thread. As someone born in 1960 it really resonated with me as a comic book fan. Loved the NYT review too and your thread complements it well.
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