the death of the Marvel Universe

What was the Marvel Universe?

The Marvel Universe was not the same as a collection of characters. Every comic company has a collection of characters, but the Marvel Universe was what united them: shared continuity.

"The Marvel Universe is the fictional shared universe where most of the comic stories published by Marvel Comics take place. ... Though the concept of a shared universe was not new or unique to comics in 1961, writer/editor Stan Lee, together with several artists including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, created a series of titles where events in one book would have repercussions in another title and serialized stories would show characters' growth and change." - Wikipedia

Marvel Time destroyed the shared universe by
(1) retconning early stories,
(2) preventing long term character development, and
(3) ensuring endless repetition, which makes continuity too confusing.

The Marvel Universe meant a bigger story

Most comic stories were over in a month, or half a year at most. The Marvel Universe allowed stories to be told over ten or twenty or forty years. You could watch a character develop. You could follow a minor character or a subplot, and know that, even if they were ignored for a few months, their story would continue when another writer decided to take them up again.

The Marvel Universe simply gave you a bigger story. It attracted people like me, people who like the big story. It kept people buying comics even in the years when not much happened, because you cared about these people..

Peter Sanderson wrote (in "Comics in Context #14: Continuity/Discontinuity")
"The consistency of Marvel continuity over forty-some years is not just a means of keeping nostalgic Baby Boomers with long memories happy. Properly seen, the Marvel canon, from Fantastic Four #1 in 1961 onward, is a grand epic saga, spreading through thousands of interconnected stories. Former Marvel writer Peter Gillis once said that it was the largest collection of interrelated stories since the mythos of King Arthur [actually far more!]. This is an achievement with its own aesthetic grandeur and beauty. Moreover, throughout the decades, each writer has built upon the work of his predecessors. Just think over what I have told you about the evolution of the Squadron Supreme from Thomas to Englehart to Gruenwald, from a one-dimensional joke to three-dimensional personalities embroiled in serious philosophical issues. Over time, and through development by the better writers, characters grow in psychological depth, they become more distinct as individual personalities, and their personal histories grow rich in significant events that can spark ideas in writers for new directions in which to take these characters. A fictional world whose characters remain the same quickly turns stagnant; a world in which they are allowed to change and develop is a fictional world that retains its vitality, evolves with the times, and stimulates creativity."

And now it is gone.

Great individual stories are still being written

This is not intended as an insult to current stories being published by Marvel. In many ways they are beter than most of what was published in the 1960s. If nothing else, the artists and writers are paid more and the printing is better, so we should expect a generally higher standard of work (although at a much higher cover price). Great individual stories and great runs of stories are still being written.

Marvel still produces great individual stories. So does every other comic publisher. But Marvel used to offer something extra, an overarching continuity called the Marvel Universe. The small stories survive, but the big story died in 1991 (as we shall see).

Is this just uncritical nostalgia for bad stories?

Critics point out that plenty of stupid stories were published in the 1960s. True enough! But readers were encouraged to find rational explanations for any mistakes. That was why "no-prizes" existed. Back then the fans were encouraged to care about continuity. If you won a "no-prize" you were praised in the comic and got letters after your name! But today writers openly criticize obsession with continuity. if you care about continuity you're treated like a troublemaker. When is the last time a fan won a no-prize for fixing a continuity error? It doesn't happen. Errors now stand forever. Broken stories stay broken.

The Marvel Universe finally died in 1991

Marvel Time had been around since around 1970, and by 1990 the problems were so great that nobody could ignore it any longer. Tony, of the Wastebasket blog, described this period in detail. This is a highly edited version, used by kind permission.

"The end began in 1991, as, Stepford-like, the Original Marvel Universe was replaced by an overlapping second Marvel Universe – although nobody realized it at the time. In this world, the characters began to act bizarrely. The formerly demure Invisible Woman became a slutty exhibitionist. Wolverine devolved into a noseless caricature with gnarly bone claws. Spider-Man endured the much-maligned “Spider Clone Saga.” Iron Man suddenly became 19 years old again. The heroes of the preceding thirty years soon became all but unrecognizable.

"It was in 1991 that the editors at Marvel Comics decided that the characters had evolved too far from their beginnings and that not only was there to be no more character development, but much of the previous character development was to be undone. Therefore, Wolverine, for example, who had just spent 15 years overcoming his savage animal instincts to become a man with a deep sense of honor, was summarily returned to square one – even being put back in his original yellow and blue costume (which he’d abandoned in 1980) – to symbolize the undoing of all character development! Now that’s just cheeky. Spider-Man’s marriage to Mary Jane Watson was busted up, because kids apparently couldn’t relate to a Spidey who had a wife and was a grown-up. Eventually they even made him 16 years old again. Torturous storylines were introduced to explain away inconvenient events, such as one in The Fantastic Four where Alicia Masters Storm – the Thing’s former girlfriend, now wife of the Human Torch – was revealed to be a shape-changing alien. The real Alicia knew nothing of this marriage, and hey, presto! – she and the Thing could continue the same tragic love affair that had long ago exhausted its story potential."

After 1991

The interference that Englehart identified seems to have run riot as Marvel imploded and they tried to recreate the universe they had just destroyed. As one insider recalls:

"I can't say for sure how things are going at Marvel and DC now, but the mid-'90s became a festival of second-guessing and dictating storylines. Often, the editorial mindset was "Here's what we want to do, make it work," and then the parameters would keep changing as this consideration or that came into play. It also emphasized an official fixation on "universe building," conveniently forgetting that the most successful "universe" in the history of comics, the Marvel Universe, really came about by accident and accumulation, by people like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Roy Thomas and various others throwing this idea or that out there without much concern for the big picture."

Marvel comics in the 1990s were famous for the Image style, where all the emphasis was on the art, and the story was almost an afterthought. "Continuity" became a dirty word. .

With nowhere to go, Marvel published more and more comics in the popular X-Men and Spiderman franchises, and then began multiple versions of the same characters. We had Heroes Reborn, Ultimates, 2099, 1602, Zombie, Marvel Adventures, and endless out-of-continuity miniseries. Tony concludes:

"Now there appear to be three or four simultaneous but mutually-exclusive Marvel Universes, and keeping track of what happens in which is well nigh impossible. It used to be that you could take an adventure the X-Men were having and figure out what the Fantastic Four were doing at the same time. Not any more. Now you have multiple versions of the X-Men being published every month. In fact, there is no “Marvel Universe” anymore, just a bunch of characters being published in various titles with splashy yet interchangeable covers. Now Marvel just publishes whatever the hell they want with no regard to what has come before. Sometimes this can be liberating, but sometimes it just makes the audience say “who cares?”

What went wrong? A different approach.

Another way to look at the death of Old Marvel is to ask, "how did the Silver Age end?" How are Marvel comics today different from Marvel comics in the boom years of the 1960s? The answer is given at the Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index (SAMCCI). The SAMCCI Reviews Section offers an in-depth analysis, issue by issue, of silver age Marvel. The era is divided into four parts: (1) The Early, Formative Years, (2) The Years of Consolidation, (3) The Grandiose Years, and (4) The Twilight Years. naturally I am interested in the twilight years, to see what caused the decline.

The decline was not caused by changes in the creative teams.

"Despite the temptation to use Jack Kirby's departure from the company as marking the end of the Grandiose Years, the fact is, no era can be demarcated by a single event. In fact, it's the contention here that Marvel's exit from the Silver Age began almost two full years before Kirby left."

Instead, these are the reasons identified in the reviews:

1. Not taking risks. The new generation of writers and artists "steered their most creative energies away from the books that had become the bedrock of the line."

2. Reusing ideas. "Elements such as characterization and realism began to fade and humor became stale; formula trumped originality." See the SAMCCI reviews of FF 84, 85 and 87 for examples.

3. Less care over continuity. "There was some internal consistency with past events, but little reference to the wider Marvel Universe" with stories "Riddled with more inconsistencies than readers this late in the silver age could be expected to swallow without abandoning their suspension of disbelief"

4. Loss of institutional memory. The authors refer to "the eventual loss of the institutional memory of the industry's older professionals." The older professionals remember a time when superheroes did not dominate, when there was no fan base, when they had to constantly change to attract new readers.

5. The end of optimism. "The high-flown, optimistic language of Stan Lee that not only captured the spirit of the 1960s, but caught the imagination of a generation of readers coupled by the soaring visions of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Jim Steranko, John Buscema & Gene Colan, had all but vanished by the mid-1970s." I especially miss this.

The common thread seems to be Marvel Time:

1. Not taking risks.
Marvel Time was created so that the status quo could be dragged out indefinitely.

2. Reusing ideas.
See above.

3. Less care about continuity.
Marvel Time allows the same villains to crop up again and again. This makes continuity both confusing and dull, so nobody cares.

4. Loss of institutional memory.
Nobody remembers a time when you had to fight for readers, because Marvel Time allows you to offer the same product to the same fans, forever.

5. The end of optimism.
Marvel Time means nothing really changes, so there is nothing to look forward to.

What can we look forward to?

One day somebody at Marvel might decide to make great comics again. Maybe they'll remember how real time comics sold so well. Maybe they'll experiment with a new real time comic or two. But until then? We'll always have the reprints.

Marvel Time became more and more significant as more time passed, until by the mid 1980s character development and any long term stories were effectively impossible.

Late 1970s: homogenization

Steve Gerber was possibly Marvel's most original creator of the 1970s. he was dismissed in 1978, and had this to say:

"Right now I think the general trend, the main thrust of Marvel's whole editorial policy is homogenization, to make everything so much like everything else as humanly possible.
Q: I guess their strategy is that if it worked once, it will again — or still.
A. Very sound reasoning. I mean, nothing else has changed since the 1950s, has it? Why should comic books? Speaking of movies again, there's now what I call the Peter Bogdanovich syndrome, where —
Q. It sounds horrible.
A. Yeah. It amounts to a vain and futile attempt to recapture past glories. Nova is an example. Nova was supposed to be cast in the old mold of the early 1960s Marvel Comics, and it bears no resemblance whatsoever to those books. It's basically a fan's interpretation of what those books were like. To compare Nova with the early Ditko or Romita Spider-Man is fatuous. All the evocative elements are completely lost. It's an attempt, again, to formularize what was done in the early '60s. Every attempt at that has fallen just short of pathetic. What can I tell you? Nova is one particular book; there are others. Nova, strangely, when it first appeared, had its own interesting charm about it. I liked the first couple of issues. And then the degeneration was rampant and apparently irreversible. It didn't fool anybody."

The early 1980s saw what many consider to be a creative renewal under Jim Shooter. A lot of Marvel staff hated him, but the average quality of the product definitely improved, and sales went up. But when he was forced out the destruction continued.

1988: a ban on change

The effective ban on change became a conscious ban by 1988. Steve Englehart noticed a sudden cranking up of the policy in 1988, forbidding radical change to any major title: Read about it here, here, here, here and here. Some choice quotes:

"At this point, Marvel made its infamous decision that innovation should end. ...
I took my name off the series altogether, opting for the pseudonym I'd created years before for work I didn't want to be associated with: 'John Harkness.' ... Marvel was consciously cutting back on 'unique,' a move that would drive out their big-name creators, lead the company to bankruptcy, and drag down the entire industry. ... Unfortunately, Marvel has never rectified itself, and now sells one-tenth of what these books sold."

Marvel today: no Universe

Lest anyone thinks I am exaggerating, here are some examples of the chaos that replaced the Marvel Universe. Remember that the Marvel Universe is defined as shared continuity. My thanks to the original poster (sorry I accidentally deleted your name and my computer is not online - long story)

"For instance, one of the most long-running mysteries of the Marvel universe has been Wolverine’s mysterious past, and how he himself has never been able to figure it all out, due to various false memory implants and blocks and whatnot. Now, thanks to House of M, for the first time he remembers his entire life. You would expect this to be a rather big deal, wouldn’t you? But no, outside of his ongoing title, it has not been mentioned again since House of M. Not in the New Avengers, where he appears in every issue, nor in the X-titles, where he also appears.

"There are also such fun things as Warren Ellis’ new run of Iron Man, who seems to have only the artificial trappings of the normal Tony Stark, and could easily be considered a What If? story itself if not for how it’s supposedly meant to be in continuity. Then there’s just general madness like Grant Morrison’s run on X-Men, where he threw everything he could think up into the story lines just to see what could work there (examples: Beast suddenly being gay, then not, or Colossus dying heroically, then Morrison realizing he needed Colossus for an upcoming story so he invents “secondary mutations” in all mutants so that he can give the White Queen Colossus-like powers, and then Joss Whedon coming along later and deciding to bring Colossus back to life anyway). Again, as said before: confusing the audience is not the best way to keep the company going. Indeed, if anything, all this manages to do is convince us to stop caring about any of the characters or stories, because we know that in another year or so, the character will be completely changed or the story will have suddenly happened differently than it did, or may not have happened at all."