G.Angstadt Assignment 1-3

          The article “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”: Cold War Culture and the Birth of Marvel Comics discuss the creation and rise of the most popular icon of comic books: Stan Lee and Marvel Comics.

     Comics were originally made popular in the 1930’s by a company named National Comics, now known as DC Comics, who created and made comics with superheroes such as Superman and Batman. In the 1950’s, comics had turned to ideas of crime and gangster stories that received criticisms from the public as well as the politicians of the United States. This is turn made National Comics resort to their old ideas of superheroes and created the comic book titled The Justice League of America which united various superheroes to fight crime on the planet Earth and throughout the universe. This was the beginning of bringing comic books back into American society and making them popular once more.

     The rival of National comics, Timely Comics, needed to make an adjustment to their line of comic books in order to keep up with their rival. Therefore the publisher of Timely comics asked a person by the name of Stan Lee to create an idea to keep pace with the comic The Justice League of America. His first successful creation was the taking of four normal people and adding their exposure to cosmic rays to turn them into superheroes. These individuals became what are known as The Fantastic Four. This comic book company shortly thereafter became known as Marvel Comics.

     After the success of The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee created more characters that were directly responsible for the incredible resurgence of comic books in the 1960’s which were Spiderman, the Hulk, and Iron Man. However, his characters not only had their superhero abilities, but these comics also honed in on the superheroes personal lives such as Peter Parker’s various teenage problems or Iron Man’s (Anthony Stark) problem with women. They also crossed over into the cultures and problems associated with American society and the Cold War.

     For example, the Hulk was created based upon issues at that point of time in our culture, which included being a warning of the result of scientific technologies, experiments, and developments, which were happening at the time to include nuclear holocaust. This is why David Banner was a scientist who had an experiment go terribly wrong and the government was always trying to hunt him down.

     With the case of Iron Man, Anthony Stark was also a scientist as well as a wealthy industrialist who was captured over in the Vietnam Jungle while doing military experiments by a communist tyrant named Wong-Chu who fatally inflicted damage close to Stark’s heart. This caused Stark to construct the Iron Man suit in order to keep his heart beating even after the shrapnel reached it. After Stark is fully able to move and use his suit properly, he easily destroys Wong-Chu and vows to conquer and fight any and all communist infiltration and threats. Stan Lee used the outline of Hugh Hefner for the character of Anthony Stark noting Hefner as a billionaire industrialist inventor and also depicted the character of Anthony Stark as a playboy who constantly had trouble with women.

     Spiderman put a twist on the creation of previous characters of Stan Lee. Even though Peter Parker was bitten by a genetically altered spider and was very fluent in science, his character dealt more with teenage problems than anything else. Since most comic book readers were young teenagers Lee’s focus went to everyday lives and problems of those teenagers. These included problems with school and young love, who can forget Mary Jane. This was a comic that enticed readers with the Spiderman character, but also was able to possibly influence their own personal lives.

     I believe this article is well written and really makes you think of how all these comic book characters came to being. With every one of these aforementioned characters having their own movies today along with sequels, except for the Hulk, I believe the target audience to be anyone who is a fan of the movie, comic book, or superhero character.

     The biggest thing that came out of this article is the premise of what these characters were based upon which included science, development of technologies, and cold war aspects such as communism and nuclear holocaust. In all of my years of watching these characters as a child until now I never made the connection of the characters. Sure I knew they were scientists or science affiliated, but never looked at them based upon scientists and technologies of the 1960’s and the direction science was going toward at that time or how the potential was created for science to go terribly wrong. This is especially true for the formation of the villains in the Spiderman series.

References

GENTER, R. (2007). “With great power comes great responsibility”: Cold war culture and the birth of marvel comics. The Journal of Popular Culture, 40(6), 953-978. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00480.x