In the comics, Steve Rogers’ 4F condition was described in vague terms as “frailty,” and his visual depictions usually suggested mal-nourishment, which isn’t surprising given the poverty of his early life.
The MCU expanded upon this, showing us his medical intake report:
It’s a pretty comprehensive list – asthma (which cannot make the scarlet and rheumatic fevers or the sinusitis or chronic colds any easier to bear), a whole cluster of heart problems which were probably due to rheumatic fever having caused rheumatic heart disease, a generally poor immune system, and a family history of tuberculosis.
And a lot of these conditions – especially asthma, heart disease, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever – are illnesses associated with poverty.
Oh man, don’t get me started on the Civil War comics. Total trainwreck, and a huge part of it is that the writers couldn’t decide whether the Registration Act was gun control, the Patriot Act, or the total abrogation of the 13th Amendment. (And remember, if Civil War was supposed to be about the Patriot Act, Millar thought that pro-Patriot Act was the right side…)
Here’s what I want from the Civil War movie: make the conflict make sense for both Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. Let them both have important points to make that are grounded in their characters, rather than turn Iron Man into a fascist because you need that to make the fight happen.
Yes, it’s going to turn out that Baron Zemo and HYDRA are manipulating General Thunderbolt Ross. But let’s have that exacerbating tensions between positions that both men hold already.
We’ve already seen the foundations of this – Iron Man 3 and Age of Ultron show that Tony Stark (partially due to his PTSD) can’t stop himself from trying to build the whole world an Iron Man suit (or build a giant fleet of drones to be everyone’s personal Iron Man) despite the awful consequences of that, and if someone hurt one of the people he cares about (even in self-defense) that would kick it into overdrive. (Also, Tony tends to over-correct when he fucks up – hence blowing up the Iron Man suits, hence building Ultron, hence embracing Sekovia Accords after Ultron goes rogue)
And we already know that Cap will react to that kind of security state the same way he did to Project Insight – fear vs. freedom, the individual’s right to due process etc.. He’s not going to stand for Ross and Stark building a black site prison in the middle of the ocean, or preventative detention for people supposedly too dangerous to put on trial. This is especially the case when it comes to Bucky, someone whose possibility of redemption he has already shown himself willing to risk his life for.
**poli-sci… and you know what’s infinitely better than any Marvel movie? Jupiter fucking Ascending. Hell, any Wachowski film. Or Edgar Wright’s. Sorry for rant but you were praising CA like it’s a goddamn Edward Yang movie. It’s all shouted worldviews, heinous action coverage, grimdark fetishism, horrible use of lighting, no sense of even competent cross-cutting. Meta diologue analysis of American exceptionalism? No thanks.
I think you and I have fundamentally different aesthetics, Anon.
1. Marvel’s films can be incredibly stylistically different from one another – Joe Johnston, Joss Whedon, Kenneth Branaugh, James Gunn, the Russo brothers, are quite distinctive in their styles and interests, and indeed have produced movies that belong to different genres that all happen to be superhero movies.
2. Captain America: First Avengers is not grimdark fetishism. (If it’s grimdark fetishism you’re looking for, Batman v. Superman is over yonder) It’s 40s camp, and it’s absolutely expressive of Joe Johnston’s aesthetic. Seriously, go watch Rocketeer and then watch Captain America and tell me that you can’t see the visual and thematic similarities. And yeah, I like some ideas in my super hero movies; better that than Zack Snyder.
3. I don’t find your alternatives appealing in the slightest. Unbreakable is over-praised and incredibly self-serious from one of the biggest flash in the pans in cinema history. PWSA’s movies are video game movies rather than super-hero movies and they’re frankly unwatchable. Jupiter Ascending is ridiculously overstuffed, badly acted, poorly plotted, and strangely pro-bestiality, and if you don’t like cinema as polemic, how can you enjoy Matrix Reloaded or Matrix Revolutions?
But at the end of the day, this is just my opinion about my aesthetic preferences. You don’t have to like what I like or vice versa.
Amen. This widespread notion that the Marvel movies are homogenous frankly baffles me. It’s true that the MCU-building is their weakest aspect, but I kinda think people are just assuming any such studio-brand series must be inherently machine-tooled, ignoring the variety of the individual movies.
And what variety! Winter Soldier is a straight-up ‘70s paranoid thriller, complete with Robert Redford. Thor finds Branagh mashing up B-list Shakespeare, disarmingly sweet fish-out-of-water rom-com, and the Rainbow Road level from Mario Kart, and somehow making it work. Avengers is a superbly acted ensemble comedy interrupted by the Old Ones. Guardians (my fave of the bunch) is a staggeringly beautiful ensemble comedy with a Tarantino soundtrack. Iron Man is basically a Shane Black flick.
Oh but sure, they’re no Jupiter Ascen…bwahaha, I couldn’t get through that with a straight face! (Srsly, who praises Edward Yang and PWSA in the same breath? Don’t tell me “vulgar auterism” RE the latter is still a thing, that was the dumbest cinephile fad.) And yeah, calling the Cap movies “grimdark” while a Snyder movie haunts theaters, what even.
Speaking of the MCU-building, I think we may have to reassess that in the future. For the longest time, there hasn’t really been anything to compare it with. Sure, other studios wanted to do the whole shared universe/megafranchise thing, but most of those efforts stalled (Universal with the movie monsters, for example) before reaching the big screen . The only thing that comes closest is Deadpool and the X-Men, and even then it’s incredibly tangential and you really get the sense that Fox is not ready to let people play with its toys yet.
But by the old gods and the new, compare that to BvS trying to do a decade’s worth in one movie (that was already two movies), and suddenly Marvel looks like a master of understatement. Confining the world-building stuff mostly to post-credit scenes and visual hints meant that those who were there for the world-building could get it, but people who weren’t could just enjoy them for what they are.
It started to get a little unwieldy in Age of Ultron, and I would caution Feig et al. that they should look at the shortcomings of that film (mostly the fact that film only lets you have so many well-developed characters on screen, so don’t try to push it too far or you get Spiderman 3 syndrome) as a guide for how to steer the MCU into the future. Also, while I’m at it, now that moviegoers are broadly familiar with the main heroes, it’s ok to have non-intro solo films develop the villains a bit more.
I absolutely adore the Marvel Captain America movies. They certainly have some shortcomings – there’s not enough about Cap having domestic politics as well as opinions on foreign policy and civil liberties – but they really capture the essence of Steve Rogers.
Captain America: First Avenger isn’t a perfect film, but Joe Johnston gets Steve Rogers at a bone-deep level and understands how to make American pop culture of the 1930s and 1940s sing like no one else. (Seriously, everyone should watch the Rocketeer) The Cap origin story is rendered perfectly – skinny Steve standing up to bullies, Erskine and Steve’s discourse (”The serum amplifies everything that is inside, so…a strong man, who has known power all his life, they lose respect for that power. But a weak man, who values strength, and love, and compassion?… Whatever happens tomorrow, you must promise me one thing. That you must stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man.”), the wonderful camp sequence of “Star-Studded Man With a Plan” wonderfully evokes both the good and bad of 40s Captain America and WWII patriotism. The rest of it is a fairly decent action movie and love story, even it it’s not spectacular.
Captain America: Winter Soldier is one of the best Marvel movies, and the Russo brothers being at the helm of Civil War and the next Avengers movies gives me a lot of hope. And they absolutely nail Steve Rogers and Cap America – both the good and bad sides of him being a man out of time, the way that someone who really believes in America as an ideal not as its institutions is not a boring or conservative person but a genuine rebel, his secret super-power being weaponized ideology, using Operation Paperclip and HYDRA to reflect on the moral compromises that came out of WWII, all of it. A perfect adaptation of the 1970s Captain America comics.
I feel like a lot of the time Captain America is in X-Books, he’s there to fill a very particular authoritarian role and that role pretty much requires him to be a dick. It puts him out of character a lot of the time, which is unfortunate. Maybe he has some latent unreasonability superpower that is activated through proximity to mutants?
I mean let’s be real it’s about the most plausible excuse for someone as liberal and morally oriented as Steve Rogers fighting the mutant cause
Steve Rogers comes from the New York Left. While FDR’s New Deal may have be explicitly written to exclude Black people Steve Rogers has always stood against bigotry.
Folks should def read Attewell’s follow up essays @graphicpolicy about Cap in his new series: A People’s History of the Marvel Universe.
It’s canonical that Captain America doesn’t have any anti-mutant prejudice at all and never did:
So says Magneto’s prejudice-erasing helmet. And so powerful is Captain America’s belief in the inherent equality of all that he retains this belief, even when he’s been mystically transformed into a Hyborian warrior:
To answer OP’s question: Cap is a dick when he interacts with mutants when the people writing him don’t know dick about Captain America.
When it comes to the intersection of politics and Marvel comics, the X-Men’s “mutant metaphor” is justifiably at the forefront. Up until now, I’ve danced aroundthe topic a little because I lost a detailed set of notes that I had made on the original Lee and Kirby X-Men and Claremont’s entire run and am still in the process of reconstituting my research.
This means that my discussion of the “mutant metaphor” will have to build gradually, which is actually rather appropriate because I intend to argue in several succeeding columns that the “mutant metaphor” was something that took a good bit of time to emerge in the X-universe and as a theme ultimately owes far more to Chris Claremont’s work than to Lee and Kirby.
One example of this is the character of Magneto, the X-Men’s original antagonist who is often held up as the Malcom X to Professor Xavier’s Martin Luther King. There’s a lot of problems with this analogy, as I’ll discuss in future issues, but to the extent that there’s any truth to it, it’s entirely the result of Claremont’s run, because the original Magneto from the Lee and Kirby years is unrecognizable from his appearance in X-Men #114 through #161, and is frankly not that great a villain.
To begin with, Magneto’s motivations in the Silver Age are so generic and opaque that he decides to name his mutant revolutionary group the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. This kind of stuff is the weakest part of the Silver Age, because the adage that “everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story” speaks to a truth of human nature. Almost everyone, even sociopaths and sadists, feels the need to construct ideological frameworks and narratives which justify and legitimize their actions. But the closest that Silver Age Magneto gets an ideology is a crude Social Darwinism which posits an inevitable race war between humans and mutants in which mutants must rise up and subjugate humanity (which becomes more problematic when you consider the Silver Age depiction of anti-mutant prejudice…more on this in a future issue):
Despite these shortcomings when it comes to motivation, Silver Age Magneto could have been a more impressive antagonist if he was presented as a figure with some dignity (like Doctor Doom) or wit (like Loki). Unfortunately, Lee and Kirby depict the master of magnetism, the would-be messiah of mutantdom, as a straight-up Snidely Whiplash villain. To begin with, Magneto is repeatedly and habitually abusive to his underlings, especially to the cartoonishly obsequious Toad, who he makes wear a metal belt specifically so that Magneto can torture him with his mutant powers.
In addition, he’s also a lousy manager. He shows a blatant disinterest in his subordinates’ safety, makes it blatantly clear that he will throw each and every one of them under the bus the moment it can gain him the slightest of advantages, and repeatedly abandons them in moments of peril to save his own skin:
It’s not that these qualities can’t be part of a villainous background, but it doesn’t particularly fit a villain who aspires to be the leader of an entire race of people. At the end of the day, there’s just not enough Toads in the world who would be willing to follow someone who calls them cannon fodder to their face. The only way that Lee and Kirby explain why anyone would ever follow this guy, especially why they would continue to follow him after the first time that they get foiled by the X-Men, is that he’s a consummate gaslighter and emotional manipulator. Hence his long history of constantly holding over the heads of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch the one time he “helped” them, as well as pretending to be the father of both (plus Polaris):
Again, this isn’t adding to the portrait of a villain who impresses anyone. Add onto that the way that Magneto compounds this callousness with a sadistic streak that runs to the quasi-genocidal (which I think is where, if we’re in the mood to be charitable, Jeph Loeb got his idea from for Ultimatum), and you’ve got a real heel:
But of all of Silver Age Magneto’s personal behaviors, I find none so foul as the occasion where, to put it bluntly, he decides to pimp out the Scarlet Witch to Namor to gain his support.
There’s not really another way to interpret this scene, especially with the way that Kirby depicts Magneto pawing and leering at a shrinking Scarlet Witch in the manner of a cliffhanger serial villain tying a damsel in distress to the train tracks. All of this is truly despicable on a personal basis, but the reason why I argue that, in all the ways that really matter, Chris Claremont created Magneto as we have come to know him, is that Lee and Kirby’s Magneto is a Nazi (and I don’t make that claim lightly):
As I’ve mentioned before with reference to Captain America, Jack Kirby especially was not a man to make such comparisons lightly or accidentally, given his anti-fascist sympathies and service in the European Theater in WWII. Each visual detail – from the goose-stepping soldiers wearing M armbands and knee-high patent leather boots to the WWII era Stalhellms and forage caps and submachine guns – is meant to evoke not just fascism generally but Hitler specifically. And this is simply not compatible with the identity that Chris Claremont would develop of Erik Lensherr, the Holocaust survivor who bases his belief that humans will inevitably attempt to exterminate mutants on the fact that he saw genocide against supposedly dangerous genetic minorities first-hand. (Arguably there’s an interesting story to be told of a survivor so traumatized by their experiences that they seek to become the figure of their own nightmares, but that’s not a story that Lee and Kirby were telling.)
However, there are a few redeeming virtues of Silver Age Magneto that explains why he was revived when other antagonists like Unus the Untouchable were left in the circular file of history. The costume’s red with purple accents and the distinctive helmet are an iconic Jack Kirby design that would be carried forwards for decades (although in recent years he’s been rocking an all-white variation of same). And while Stan Lee didn’t have that good a fix on Magneto’s political ideology, he did have something that almost made up for it – a complete lack of understanding of how magnetism actually works. This allowed for some truly wacky moments while giving Magneto a useful power set for a powerful villain:
While the Magneto-turning-guns-against-their-wielders trick is a good one (that predates X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past by several decades), this is basically magnetism-as-telekinesis, which Magneto will use to block Cyclops’ eye-beams or fly through the air. And it only gets goofier from there:
While I’m willing to grant Lee and Kirby that there might be enough dust with a high content of iron or nickle or the like to spell out a giant skywriting message (and the cursive signature is an uncharacteristically dashing touch), Magneto’s hypnosis-by-magnets is clearly a callback to the long-discredited ideas of Franz Mesmer, who believed that you could use magnets and one’s own “animal magnetism” to cure diseases and mental illnesses.
However, a snazzy costume and a lack of understanding of magnets work is a thin reed to build a major antagonist on, which may be one reason why Lee and Kirby kept marooning Magneto on alien planets or de-aging him into baby. To make Magneto something more than a Snidely Whiplash, Chris Claremont would have to do some rewrites…which we’ll discuss the next time A People’s History of the Marvel Universe covers the X-Men!
As I mentioned in Week 3, Marvel had a lot of work to do to
update Captain America for the 1960s. That was true enough for the early 60s,
when the U.S Army was the undisputed good guy in the comics, when Professor X
worked with the FBI to track down mutants (more on that in a future issue), and
when beatniks were an easy comedy bit. By 1968, when Captain America graduated
from Tales of Suspense (where he double-billed with Iron Man) and got his own
book, things had changed even more so. The comics industry had to deal with the
counter-culture’s influence on visual media (both through hiring a new
generation of writers and artists influenced by the counter-culture, but also
as older creators like Jack Kirby got interested in surrealism, mixed-media,
and other trends), and at the same time the counter-culture started to show an
interest in comics.
And what was true for the industry
and Marvel as a whole was even more so for Captain America; as the
super-soldierly representation of all that’s best in
the U.S, Cap had
to respond to changes in America’s political culture. So how did Cap face the
60s?
To begin with, by experimenting
artistically so that Cap’s image kept pace with the times. Jack Kirby continued
to draw giant robots and intricate machines, but he also pushed his art to
become ever more elaborate and strange – the Cosmic Cube allowed him to bring
in some of the cosmic weirdness that we associate more with his run on
Fantastic Four and MODOK (more on that in a future issue as well) continued his
interest in giant Olmec heads. In addition, Jim Steranko was brought in as a
regular artist and brought with him a new interest in psychedelic art and
surrealism, an emphasis on flowing and contorting movement, and experimental
paneling:
Counter-cultural art can only get
you so far when that art is depicting a man literally dressed as the American
flag in the midst of the Vietnam war (more on which in future installments). So
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (and Jim Steranko, and so on) had to deal directly with
how Captain America was viewed by the new generation:
Between Captain America #120 and
#130, Steve Rogers is suddenly made aware of the generation gap, the
counter-culture, and that he himself is viewed as a giant square. But where
most people opining on Captain America go wrong is that Marvel didn’t have Cap
respond to this by becoming a reactionary, lashing out at the damned hippies.
Rather, Lee et al. leaned into their already-established trope as Cap as a man out of time in a different way, as Steve Rogers
takes the critique seriously:
This is how Captain America engages
in political analysis. Rather than writing off the baby boom generation, he
draws a direct link between the “injustice, greed, and endless war” that he has
observed in this new world and the rise of the “rebel and the dissenter,”
taking their complaints seriously. Moreover, as a good ally should, Steve
Rogers doesn’t stop at the structural level but also absorbs the
counter-cultural critique on a personal level, asking himself why he hasn’t
been more of an individualist and a dissenter rather than just a soldier.
On a meta-level, I think we can also
see this as a kind of generational reckoning as well, with Steve Rogers
standing in for the Marvel staff in their 40s who had spent their youth in the
U.S Army in WWII, confronting a new culture that valorized the “anti-hero”
rather than Marvel’s more straightforwardly earnest style of protagonist. Without
backing down on his insistence that the values he believes in are timeless and
that there is important things that his generation has to offer the youth – in
#122, Rogers will namedrop Martin Luther King Jr., JRR Tolkien, the Kennedy
brothers, and Marshall McLuhan as examples of “establishment” types who have
influenced the youth movement – Cap nonetheless starts to experiment with a
more counter-cultural way of life, suggesting that the counter-culture might be
right about his generation.
Not only will Captain America begin
questioning authority (usually in the form of Nick Fury of SHIELD) more, but
he’ll also take to the road on a motorcycle to carve out an identity as Steve
Rogers apart from the mantle of Captain America, setting up a big part of his
Easy Rider-inspired Nomad persona in the 1970s:
When Steve Rogers rides off into his
bike, looking for the Real America, he finds not just open road and existential
quandary but the radical student movement of the 1960s. And both Rogers himself
and his creators interact with the student movement much in the way that
mainstream liberals at the time did, sympathizing with student demands but
viewing radical direct action as dangerous and illiberal:
Thus, Steve Rogers in his civilian
guise goes into action to protect a professor from being kidnapped by dangerous
radicals, but also takes the campus administration to task for not listening to
their students. Meanwhile, Stan Lee and Gene Colan depict student radicals as
unrepresentative of their peers and threatening the destruction of the larger
institution. At the same time, however, when it comes down to a clash between
campus protestors and the police, we know which side Captain America will come
down on, and it’s not the police:
While this might not rise to the
level of Denny O’Neill on Green Lantern and Green Arrow, it’s still an
important symbolic statement. Despite how wildly unpopular the New Left had
made itself by the late 1960s (71% of Americans believed that the “country
would be better off if there was less protest and dissatisfaction coming from
college campuses” in 1968) here’s Captain America siding with the kids against
the cops – as we’ll see, an association that will be enduring across issues.
At the same time though, Marvel also finessed this potential controversy with
some rather strange symbolic politics. That long-haired, pink-panted gentleman
standing next to Mart Baker and the megaphone isn’t actually a bona-fide
student…he’s an undercover agent of AIM. AIM is secretly infiltrating the
student movement and deliberately intensifying conflict in order both to weaken
American society, but also as a cover for the abduction of various professors
in the sciences whose research AIM wants to steal:
If you strip out the inherent Marvel
wackiness of MODOK’s giant baby head and AIM’s beekeeper helmets, this isn’t
too different from contemporary conservative arguments that the student
movement had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. At the same time, though, Lee
and Colan frame the situation as AIM having seized upon “legitimate grievances”
and show the students as unwitting tools rather than actively disloyal, and
when AIM’s involvement is unmasked, Cap and student radicals team up to take
them down:
It’s hard to look at this particular
storyline and not see the whole thing as condescending at best, but Marvel
Comics didn’t leave it at that. Hot off the heels of his intervention in campus
politics, Steve Rogers gets approached to become the TV pitchman for a “law and
order” backlash against the New Left that’s hiding sinister motives:
And because he’s Captain America,
and Captain America’s secret super-power is weaponized morality, Cap sees right
through the slogans of “law and order” to the sinister plot of men wearing
white hoods over their faces (not hugely subtle symbolism there, but some anvils needed to be dropped in 1968):
This is what I mean when I say that
Captain America is a progressive: he’s reframing patriotism and American
national traditions as inherently radical and de-linking the defense of the
status quo from the defense of the values that the status quo supposedly
embodies, while taking a strong pro-non-violence line with regards to protest. It’s also Marvel re-defining Captain America as a dissident, as
someone who will fight for America’s ideals rather than America’s establishment
(which will eventually lead Captain America to go into the belly of the beast
and confront Richard Nixon directly, a topic for a future issue).
So in the 1960s, Captain America
becomes the defender of youth (in a future issue, I’ll discuss how Captain
America saved rock music by fighting the Hells Angels at Altamont). And it’s
just in the nick of time too, because as it turns out, the man in the white
hood pushing for “law and order” backlash politics is none other than actual,
factual Nazi, Baron Strucker of HYDRA:
So there you have it, folks. The
political movement behind Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan is secretly being run
by a Nazi cabal, MODOK is heightening the contradictions, and Cap says the kids
are all right. However, we really can’t talk about Ca in the 1960s without
talking about one Sam Wilson, better known as the Falcon, which we will tackle
the next time A People’s History of the Marvel Universe covers Captain America…
As is no surprise to anyone who read Week 2’s issue, Claremont X-Men is a huge touchstone for me, one of the few comics runs I re-read annually. However, it took a while for Clarmont’s X-Men to feel like X-Men. Issues #94 and #95 focus on Count Nefaria, who’s really more an Avengers villain than a X-Men villain.[1] Issue #96 gives us the demonic N’Garai, and while I love the Cthulhu references, it feels a bit like Claremont borrowed them from a Doctor Strange spec script.
Where it really starts to feel like X-Men is issue #98 (April 1976), where the Sentinels return and ruin the X-Men’s Christmas in order to abduct them to Stephen Lang’s space base. To begin with, the Sentinels are one of the only explicitly and specifically anti-mutant threats that the original X-Men fought, so a lot of the mutant metaphor is grounded in those wonderful purple and pink Kirby robots. And Claremont sharpens the analysis by having these genocidal robots be built by a racist lunatic working within the U.S military (which is something that the U.S Army-aficionado Stan Lee wouldn’t have allowed back in the day), giving added emphasis to the “world that hates and fears them” part of the X-Men’s story that was largely lacking in the original 93 issues:
Second, the Sentinel attack sets up the disastrous space shuttle landing that turned Jean Grey into the Phoenix, the first example of Chris Claremont’s epic long-form storytelling that will define the X-Men for 18 years.
But the other reason that this issue stuck with me is that, far more than anything in the original X-Men’s run, this issue made the X-Men feel like a part of New York City. The issue opens with the X-Men at the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center on Christmas Eve, which is a little touristy, but before the sentinels attack on page X, we get to see the X-Men out on the town:
And critically, the town is there for more than window-dressing. A lot of ink has been spilled in the years since Fantastic Four #1 about how Marvel’s decision to have their comics be located in New York City made it a more realistic shared universe, how it reflected a generation of post-WWII second generation immigrant/“white ethnic” artists and writers, and so on.
In this panel, however, we can also see that it also created a keyhole through which real-world politics could enter. Claremont’s word balloons set the scene of New York as a place grappling with “default and layoffs and garbage and politicians who couldn’t care less” – referring to New York City’s fiscal crisis that brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975 and led to the layoffs of tens of thousands of city workers, an eleven-day garbage strike that took place in December of 1975 and led to “70,000 tons of trash, most of it lining mid-Manhattan curbs in piles as high as six feet,” and Mayor Abe Beame, the hapless and hated mayor whose one term included both the 1975 fiscal crisis and the 1977 blackout and who was the model for the hated mayor who can’t set foot outdoors without getting booed in The Taking of Pelham 123.
These are the worries that the X-Men are trying to put out of their minds with a night on the town, and by extension it implies that one of the real daily annoyances that New Yorkers had to deal with in the 1970s – along with the 1973-1975 recession, the oil crisis, and skyrocketing inflation – was Sentinel attacks in Midtown. In fact, we know that these were real problems for New Yorkers because Issue #98 shows us that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee exist within their own Marvel universe and have run into the X-Men[2]:
In turn, it also suggests that the same real-world problems facing the X-Men are also some of the problems facing Marvel Comics in the 1970s. And indeed, if you’ve read Sean Howe’s excellent Marvel Comics: The Inside Story, you know that one of the big 70s issues that affected Marvel was 70’s inflation. Comic books, after all, were bought primarily by young people without a lot of disposable income who might respond to 1975’s 9% inflation rate by cutting back on non-essentials. Hence, the cover of X-Men #98 prominently displayed that this issue would still cost only 25ȼ (or $1.05 in 2015 dollars, which is a steal, compared to $3.99 an issue today).
However, even Mighty Marvel couldn’t resist the forces of stagflation forever. By October of 1976, when Jean Grey emerged from the waters of Jamaica Bay as “now and forever – the Phoenix,” an issue of X-Men was up to 30ȼ an issue; and when Jean Grey was buried in October of 1980, the regular price went up to 50ȼ an issue, double what it had been four years ago. To try to hang onto their readers, Marvel enlisted the Incredible Hulk to sell subscriptions that came with discounts:
No wonder then, that Chris Claremont started coming up with some unusual solutions to New York City’s economic policy woes:
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