Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a glorious work of journalism which manages to please me in equal parts as sociologist and comics geek. It manages to combine a gossipy attentiveness to the endless internal spats at Marvel with a high minded yet understated concern to explore the intersection between art and commerce. Howe skilfully tracks the changing fortunes of creators at the company, as well as the intergenerational influence of past exploitation. I found it fascinating to learn that the founders of Image comics, establishing ownership over their own creations, looked to the failures of past creators (who in many cases developed the characters that they’d been reading as young fans) when beginning to work collectively to assert their rights over their creative products. What’s even more impressive is how the author resists the temptation to lionise the Image founders while nonetheless resisting a slide into clumsy neutrality, discussing the changing lifestyles of comic creators and rapidly inflating expectations of those new to the industry, as well as the multiplicity of problems Image faced in keeping to a schedule and the very real financial implications this had for independently owned comic shops. He also avoids a crude populism that would look to the good old days before corporate marvel took the reigns. The present corporate form is unpleasant in many ways, with John Romita explaining how he was told by their new corporate masters in the 90s that “comic book production is the minor part of this company’s future”, but this crass commercialism was a feature of the business from the outset. Howe skillfully illustrates the complex transformations that Marvel has undergone in this time, driven by a changing industry and society as much as by people within the industry reacting individually and collectively to these changes. In this sense it’s a very sociological book and it’s also an immensely readable one. I would perhaps have enjoyed more about the editorial processes but that’s because I find the work that goes into ensuring ‘continuity’ so fascinating. It’s this more or less consistent intertextuality that has me still buying Marvel comics after 20 years, despite my growing apathy towards much of it. But it’s more than an autobiographical curiosity. The sheer narrative density of the Marvel Universe seems to be a cultural achievement, albeit in a very abstract sense of ‘achievement’. I’d like to better understand the properties it shares with something like Coronation Street or the Archers, as well as how the consistency of individual stories with decades of continuity is ensured at the level of day-to-day cultural production.
A week at the Airport is a book I was slightly surprised to find myself reading. It literally documents a week at the airport: our nation’s greatest pop-philosopher was invited into the new terminal 5 to produce a glossy advertising book for the airport. I loved Alain De Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy as an impressionable teenager but as an adult I have a mild dislike for the man that occasionally erupts into outright disdain when I read his work. On the other hand, I find him quite interesting as a popular public intellectual and recognize he’s staked out an interesting position in a changing intellectual landscape, particularly with his School of Life project, though I’m still curious about whether it’s self-supporting or if there’s a wealthy benefactor behind the scenes. Parts of this short book reminded me of why he irritates me. At times he writes like I imagine Frasier Crane would, lapsing into florid prose of the sort you’d likely place as satire if presented with it in the absence of any context. His politics are ambiguous, with a section about the first class lounge at Heathrow being particularly weird. It’s unclear whether he’s unsure of his own mind or if he privately lauds ‘wealth creators’ but deliberately seeks to avoid offending what he imagines as his left-wing audience. The section where he describes his interview with then British Airways boss Willie Walsh reinforces this impression. Perhaps he simply lacks much in the way of political sentiment and I’m projecting this on to him. More likely, this was a book written in the space of a week as a peculiarly high-brow exercise in corporate marketing by an external consultant. Nonetheless, it’s actually quite readable in its own way. I wanted to read books about airports after a lot of traveling recently, including spending 24 hours in Zagreb trying and failing to get to Dubrovnik. Having had lots of time to contemplate the airport, it dawned on me what strange spaces they are: sanitized, intensely controlled, dominated by commerce etc. I find them simultaneously unnerving and comforting. I’d like to read more to try and understand this paradoxical reaction to airports & De Botton’s was simply the first book that turned up in the post. It has some nice photography and some fleetingly illuminating observations. Much like the airport it describes, it would grate immensely if you were stuck there for many hours but as long as it’s over quickly, it’s bearable enough, though not something you’d choose unless it served some further purpose. It got me no closer to understanding how airports can be seen as illustrative guides to the post-democratic societies of the future.
Graphic Novels I’ve read recently:
- Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City is amazing. I thought I had a well developed sense of what this medium could do but this ‘visual biography’ did something I’d never encountered before. I’m also pretty sure that the person who I participated in a panel with at the Digital Sociology conference in New York was mentioned in the credits. I must check with her because I’m intrigued about her involvement.
- The Killing Joke by Alan Moore is every bit as accomplished (and significantly weirder) than I’d been led to believe. Until I happened to flick through this in Waterstones recently, I thought I’d read it and had long wondered what all the hype was about. Turns out I’d been confusing it with a completely different Joker heavy Batman story, which I must now dig out in order to compare.
Mark Carrigan 