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Frank Dent's avatar

Okay, you’ve convinced me to see this, even though like Luiza I’m not much of a Marvel fan. Although I do enjoy animation.

Perhaps the narrative analog to the “photo-surrealism” of the animation would be the pseudo-realism of Marvel’s stories. I always found Stan Lee to be kind of a one-note writer. Always the New York setting, always too much unnecessary dialogue, always the shady milieus from pulp magazines and bad film noir. But where Chandler’s Philip Marlowe mocked his underworld opponents, how their speech and gestures were copied from what they saw on screen, years later we were still getting these same characters and settings from Lee as though they reflected some kind of urban reality.

Lee’s best stuff was when he had someone like Jack Kirby, an artist with an actual visual imagination, to bring it to life.

It’s always worth contrasting the artistic vision of Lee and Kirby, New York-born sons of immigrants, with that of their exact contemporaries, those other immigrant sons, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, who created Superman. But Shuster and Siegel hailed from Cleveland, not New York. Perhaps sensing they did not live in the center of the universe, their world always felt more unrealistic, more deliberately fictional, so that Superman lives in Metropolis, for example, not New York.

I can’t help but think that some of the differences in these visions still hold in comic book movies. Obviously, Lee’s vision won out, just as the fiction of Hemingway and Steinbeck won out over that of, say, Kafka. Of course, today’s comic book movies are created by committees, but perhaps to coin a proverb, once the channel has been dug, it’s hard to change the water’s course.

Here’s an example of Lee and Kirby at their worst (the speech bubbles almost crowding out the art) and their best (that image of the Blob refusing to be moved):

https://earthsmightiestblog.com/the-x-men-3-1964-1st-blob/

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Luiza B. Campos's avatar

Reading so much good things about this movie! Although I’m not a Marvel fan, I’ll check it out. It seems pretty worth it.

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