By Don Hall

I remember learning to read from Marvel comic books.

The Fantastic Four. Spider-Man. The X-Men. The Avengers.

I learned my words from them. I started with the pictures and would ask my mom what the words meant and she’d patiently walk me through enough of them that my interpretive skills honed in on the stories of ordinary people gifted and cursed with enormous abilities doing their best to navigate their relationships while alternately saving the world over and over became the mantra of my upbringing.

First and foremost, my literary education from Marvel comics spawned a love for science fiction in general. I read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy in fifth grade. I didn’t understand whole sections of them but I read them nonetheless. By the time I was in sixth grade, Huxley’s Brave New World, Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, and Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sat on a shelf next to The Amazing Spider-Man #206 (Peter Parker Goes WILD!), The Avengers #181 (Still Only 35¢!!), and the King Size Special Fantastic Four (Twice as Many Pages! Twice as Many Thrills!).

When I was eight years old in 1974, my first black girlfriend and I bonded over our mutual love of Luke Cage. When I was nine, Mike Eddie (who was two years older and a bit of a juvenile delinquent) and I would go out to an abandoned housing project and kick in the drywall in reenact Wolverine vs. Hulk fights. He was a foot taller than I but I was always the Hulk.

The 1981 release of Fantastic Four #232 (“Back to Basics”) introduced John Byrne to the storyline and I lived through the trauma of Reed Richards and Susan Storm having a miscarriage, the Thing quitting the team and She-Hulk becoming his replacement. The formation of the West Coast Avengers. Vision marrying the Scarlet Witch. Jean Grey becoming the Dark Phoenix. The Giant-Sized crossover team ups with splash pages that were huge, epic and often included almost everyone battling things out on the same canvas.

Sometime around my sophomore year in high school, my boxes and boxes of comics (none in any kind of sale-able shape because I’d read each one so many times they all looked like they’d been, well, read a hundred times by a grubby, dirty kid) went into the basement. I was in high school and the social weight was just too important.

“Just because you have superpowers, that doesn’t mean your love life would be perfect. I don’t think superpowers automatically means there won’t be any personality problems, family problems, or even money problems. I just tried to write characters who are human beings who also have superpowers.” — Stan Lee

Sure, I read DC comics as well but they seemed sillier to me. Batman was cool but he was super rich and I had little in common with Bruce Wayne. Not like I did with Peter Parker. I enjoyed Superman but the existence of Krypto and Mister Mxyzptlk felt more comic and less book. That said, in 1978, when Christopher Reeve flew and saved the world by spinning time backward, I felt like the movie was made just for me. So much so that in 2006 when I saw the homage to Reeve and 1978 in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, I bawled like a baby as the credits and music started the film. Unlike almost everyone else on the planet, I loved and love Superman Returns.

More than Star Trek, more than Star Wars, it has been the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has been the filmic journey I’ve been waiting for since I started to use language. The many attempts at the Fantastic Four onscreen have been pretty much crap yet I still kind of loved them anyway. The first time I saw Hugh Jackman bar fighting as Logan in Singer’s X-Men movie, an electricity went up my spine and the hair on my neck stood up because here, finally, was a real life version of the character I had followed for decades.

For a moment, let’s look at the ridiculous improbability of Marvel’s achievement.

What became known as the Marvel Era (when the comics company went from being known as Atlas Comics to Marvel) began in 1961 with the launch of The Fantastic Four. A lot can be said (and has been) about Stan Lee but with his incredible sense of timing, he introduced superheroes designed for an adult audience rather than the silliness of earlier comics creations. His heroes were not gods or from outer space (at least not at first) — they were humans gifted with extraordinary powers who still squabbled, dealt with betrayal, the consequences of fame, paying bills, self-doubt, depression, alienation on societal levels. His heroes grappled with the assassination of Kennedy, with the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement.

Marvel invented the ComiCon in 1975. They created their own Code when the Comics Code started restricting storylines about drug abuse and civil rights. The multiverse of crossovers was intense but by the middle of the 1990s, Marvel filed for bankruptcy. The industry was glutted and the Marvel Universe was too unwieldy. In 1998, with new money, the Marvel Entertainment Group was formed, pulled the company out of red ink, and cooperated with outside movie studios to create the Blade Trilogy, X-Men, and Raimi’s Spider-Man triptych. The first Marvel film was in 1944 with a fifteen-chapter serial featuring Captain America, and the company didn’t revisit the movies until 1986 with Howard the Duck. In 1989 and 1990 they gave us The Punisher and another shot at Captain America, both turds.

The cinematic attempts were spotty and infrequent and were, with a few exceptions, unremarkable.

Then came Iron Man. Kevin Feige saw the film and decided on the post-credits sequence introducing Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury and the most improbably huge series of cinematic dominos came into play.

“The Avengers films, ideally, in the grand plan are always big, giant linchpins. It’s like as it was in publishing, when each of the characters would go on their own adventures and then occasionally team up for a big, 12-issue mega-event. Then they would go back into their own comics, and be changed from whatever that event was. I envision the same thing occurring after this movie, because the Avengers roster is altered by the finale of this film.” — Kevin Feige

When 2012’s The Avengers finally arrived, it was as if I had been waiting my entire life for it.

Twenty-one movies. Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, The Hulk. Ant Man, Black Widow, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye. The Falcon, War Machine, Captain Marvel. The Black Panther, The Winter Soldier, Loki, The Guardians of the Galaxy. Spider-Man. A collective $18.6 billion in ticket sales. All one giant continuous storyline. All leading up to a singular massive crossover film.

There are some duds in the mix. The first two Thor films were lackluster but the decision to keep him in the MCU lead to Thor: Ragnarok, which is one of the best films in the twenty-one complete with a reference to the Planet Hulk storyline and suddenly making one of the least cool Marvel characters ever cool. Iron Man 2 is rough and Avengers: Age of Ultron is like watching the whole series struggle with how to set the stage for Endgame.

Sony finally allowed Marvel to include Spider-Man and Michael Keaton’s Vulture is amazing. Black Panther was not only a great movie but a jewel in a cultural shift in Hollywood. They had to go to Netflix to get Daredevil, Luke Cage, and The Punisher right but those shows are good. 

When I was a kid, I loved The Planet of the Apes series but the only way to watch Chuck Heston find himself on future Earth where apes could talk was on network TV with the infrequent marathons. My mom would set up a card table covered with a sheet in front of the 20-inch screen. I’d get a pillow, soda, and a bowl of candy and watch all night long.

With Marvel, I don’t need the card table or candy but I still feel like a wide-eyed kid when I boot up any part of the MCU.

I can’t wait for the final chapter.