History of the Marvel Universe #3 (of 6): A New Silver Age Dawning

Ah, the constraints of the six-issue format: considering issue three of The History of the Marvel Universe covers Marvel’s most crucial and creatively fertile period, the 1960s get very short shrift in the grand narrative scheme of things. Given the chosen format for this detailed history, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the swingin’ ’60s could have had three or four issues allotted for it, and that still wouldn’t have been enough space to do the era justice. There’s no need to go into that here; thousands of pages elsewhere have already been written on it, dissected, cross-referenced, and argued endlessly over.

So, yes, for the sake of expediency, major characters’ origins are given quick one- or two-sentence blurbs and then whoosh, it’s off to the next major historic occurrence. This comic reads less like a cohesive narrative and more like a bullet-point list with pictures.

It also makes the grievous error of getting the order of many of these events out of sequence. For example, Black Panther is shown to have met the FF prior to “The Galactus Trilogy,” and the Punisher’s debut is shown to have happened prior to the death of Gwen Stacy. There’s more, but going over them in excruciating detail only serves to lend credibility to gross errors that Mark Waid, the editors, someone should have caught. As it stands, it takes away from any impact the comic may have had and instead shifts the focus to niggling over the botched details.

At the very least, though, the art is gorgeous. Javier Rodriguez has a real Marcos Martin vibe, and frankly, any one of his pages here is worthy of the poster treatment. It’s a shame more attention wasn’t given to the details; the end result here is a comic full of pin-ups coalesced by a loose narrative of highlights that fall far, far short of the historic impact this era had on not just Marvel, but the entire comics medium in general.