Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
A Jam Comic of Heroes and Legends
by Travis Hedge Coke
Heroes & Legends is emblazoned on the covers of two comics published by Marvel, one in 1996, one in 1997. Each tells a standalone story based on a storyline from the 1960s, with scenes drawn by different pencilers whose heyday, primarily, was the 1960s. Not all, not entirely, but these are very 1960s jam comics, which were on shelves at Sam Goody and mall tchotchke shops to audiences who had not been alive to experience that era the first time.
Made to look prestige, to look collectible, feigning to provide important collectible stories, the two comics also provide a respect to these artists in way that they had not often been shown by Marvel. (I can only hope they were paid well.) Stan Lee dialoguing the first one. Pencilers like Dick Ayers, Sal Buscema, Steve Ditko, Marie Severin, Gene Colan, and inkers including Joe Sinnott, Bill Reinhold, Steve Leialoha (whose name is misspelled in the credits), with Fabian Nicieza, John Costanza, John Kalisz and Matt Idelson, Heroes & Legends has its origin in an idea of Mariano Nicieza’s, giving the comics even more of a sense of all hands on deck. This is a house party. This is a big party.
Bigger and more experimental, really, than Marvel Comics tended to be in the middle ’90s, Heroes & Legends was really looked at, by many readers and critics, as purely a throwback and, sadly, often as a failed throwback. The jam nature of the art, with pencillers taking on particular characters or teams, was criticized as lacking cohesion or because a particular artist might not be on a character that an audience craved.
Steve Ditko does not draw Spider-Man in either of these comics. What he does draw, in the 1996 issue, is an amazing and rocking Fantastic Four. It is so good.
The bit in the Kevin Spacey biopic of Bobby Darin and the idea that people, “hear what they see”? Creepier, now, with Spacey revelations, but very apt to how 1990s audiences read, or even glanced at Heroes & Legends. In the way that Jacques Derrida found value in only critiquing the front and back covers of paperbacks – and what value! – there was a comfort, maybe, in reading the pop art part of these two comics, the palliation of classic comic book art in the death knell years of the Image artist boom. Retellings of old stories, as opposed to vintage issues, in a time when collectability and rarity were so prized.
Politics of the Marvel Method of writing and related crediting aside, the Marvel Method, at its genesis, was revolutionary and a new, powerful, and successful technology, a potent set of experimental techniques whose reverberations are still felt throughout the field. This is not that. Heroes & Legends are not written, drawn, or created the way 1960s superhero comics were.
Stan Lee dialogues the first of the two comics, but he did not plot it. James Felder is credited with “story” for the second, with a longstanding rumor that Lee dialogued it as well. And, you show me a comic from that decade which has this art jam style of divvying up pages. There is none. If pencillers or inkers traded off in a comics story, in the 1960s, it was pinch-hitting and stepping in for a page or two, or someone started a story and someone did the rest. Marvel Comics’ corrections department went in and redrew Thor’s face or changed where Hulk’s left hand is to make it more exciting. And, nearly all the smaller corrections or additions would go uncredited, unacknowledged where readers might find.
The jam comic comes out of those many hands applying effort into the same comic, that these are produced more than authored, and the difference may be in the intentionality and in the credits.
These are art. They are authored and the authors are there by names.
Heroes & Legends is able to embed newer creations, newer characters, like Phil Sheldon from 1994’s Marvels, mimicking clothing and technology appropriate to the 1960s or occurring in the ’60s comics being referenced, while also fitting in modern styles and applying metatextual elements so that the X-Men are hated and feared while also having mass-produced t-shirts with their logo and there are Millie the Model comics available based on famous in-story model, Milly Collins.
That the style shifts in art are applied to specific casts from long-running titles, Spider-Man looking this way, the Fantastic Four another, the world looking different while Daredevil is in frame than the X-Men are beating up Batroc is itself a risky venture in ’96/’97 for Marvel pretty conservative for the era Comics. There is an amazing flower skirt on a perfectly normal, very naturalist, human woman in the X-Men scene of the ’96 comic which is emphasized in a way that the swimming bodies and architecture in leaning panels of the Daredevil scene.
Heroes & Legends are hauntology, a Derrida term which he had only introduced in 1993. They are misread in the way I have mentioned because they were meant to be. But, the comics are hauntology, more, in the sense that begins to be applied to music in the 2000s. Each Heroes & Legends trades of cultural memory, on retrofuturism and temporal disjunction. They are and are not 1960s comics stories, 1960s comics, 1990s comics, and comics about reading/knowing comics. The real perspective, shifted and shuffled through the styles and approaches of different pencillers, inkers, and voices, is our perspective. We are reading the retelling of something that is more real, and the telling, the copying, is original and in front of us, the way memory always is and the reality cannot be.
But but but Travis please no one intended this! Fabian Nicieza and Stan Lee did not sit in the Marvel Bullpen on two swivel chairs trying not to spin while they chew on huge classic 1960s Marvel Bullpen cigars they stole from Tom DeFalco or Jack Kirby! It! Did! Not! Happen!
Characters know they are in the 1960s but not in the 1960s. They have a unique and magical perspective like Stan Lee’s disembodied voice rolling over the 1996 and a good imitation over ’97, a paradoxical atemporal temporality. Hank Pym can say, “Cool,” and his dashing partner in crimefighting, the Wasp, can remind him that it is too early in the ‘60s for cool to be something Hank Pym says.
The two Heroes & Legends deliver on the Marvel Pop Art Productions moniker the company had briefly adopted decades before their manufacturing. They are artifacts. Captain America’s post-traumatic stress and the Invisible Girl’s impatience with inane evil feel era appropriate to both eras and shocking for both depending not on the (other) comics from either era, but from our perspective, our biases and recollections.
It happened whether planned, intended, or not.