Marvel has always pushed the envelope with their comics establishing such, now standard, comic conventions as the “normal person” who goes through a “transformation” to become a “superhero”. This was a contrast from the first superheroes such as Superman who was an alien that crashed into earth, Sandman who was a figure taken from mythology and Batman who isn’t really a superhero at all. With more plausible characters appearing more sci-fi than fantasy allowed Marvel to take the next step.
Marvel was the first publisher to set their comics in the real world. Previously, because of the fantastical nature of the characters, made up cities were created such as Metropolis for Superman and Gotham City for Batman. The Fantastic 4 were the first comic book characters who lived in the real world, New York. This was a huge step as Marvel as they then had to acknowledge certain rules and the choice had huge influences on the nature of superheroes as a genre.
The first most obvious question was because the comics were not set in isolated environments, the Fantastic 4 lived in New York and Spiderman lived in New York, why can’t they meet up? Thus the cross over was born, hugely popular and always hugely fun. Cross-sequeling has been part of Marvel since its inception. Of course Marvel never stopped making characters and so an alternate reality was born where superheroes are a common phenomenon and are quite numerous. Superheroes teams were created a la ‘The Avengers’ and superheroes had conflicts between themselves a la the ‘Civil War’ comics.
I’ve always loved this in comics. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a notable example elsewhere. For those of you that don’t know all of Terry Pratchett’s novels are set within the Discworld and the more you read of his books the more you become familiar with the world, it has it’s creation story, a very substantial history and it’s apocalypse. Sometimes you can read one book and stumble upon events that happen within another book from another perspective. What’s so great about sequels and spin-offs are that they build on already established set of rules and the more sequels you get the stronger the mythology becomes. Marvel comics have always had an incredibly complex and interesting mythology behind them. Nerd culture dictates one must know everything to become a true nerd and its always fun to see arguments over Marvel stories, you can tell they really got it right.
There have been so many attempts to bring comics into film but what I’m particularly excited about is that only now have Marvel taken the brave step of translating this feature into their films. For those who don’t know the reason there have been so many Superhero films recently is that Marvel are making all of the origin stories and soon ‘The Avengers’ is going to come out with the combination of them all. A few years ago Marvel made a Hulk origin story and it was crap, about a year and a bit later they made another one and it was also crap but with the introduction of this new philosophy of a consistent reality they cannot afford to do that any longer.
So, after this decision the quality of their films have increased enormously. Serious consideration has to be put into the new films as any mistake made will make its mark and stay there. Its hugely encouraging Marvel are able to learn from whats going on around them. Thor is by far the hardest of the superhero franchises to revamp simply because its outdated. Thor is one of the only Marvel heroes that doesn’t conform to the ‘ordinary person’ convention and his whole character is a bit silly really. Not one person looked at the initial trailers and didn’t think it looked terrible. However, Marvel picked a very serious director Kenneth Branagh from all his Shakespeare glory in a response of Nolan to Batman. Branagh was a stunning choice because, as with his Shakespeare films, he has to appeal to the even more vicious nerd purists. He managed to maintain a tone that wasn’t annoyingly self-referential but humorous and genuine when it had to be.
Origin stories have always been really popular with film/comic translation and there’s no doubt why. X-Men did their origins and then 2 and 3 got progressively worse. So they decided to make another Wolverine origin and now X-Men First Class which is the origin story for the first generation of X-Men. Even the Iron Man franchise which everyone thought was infallible made a sequel that was quite frankly a bit shit. This is because origin stories are the only isolated narratives within the comics. To make a financially safe film to make sequels have to be stand alone in some way or another which leads to somewhat shoddy formulaic stories that are just a bit crap.
Taking the Lord of the Rings trilogy as an example. The reasons those books work so fucking well is that you really get the impression that Middle-earth is a real place. Tolkien was so fucking into this place that he wrote history books and folklore for Middle-earth in the form of ‘The Silmarillion’ and ‘The Children of Hurin’. The benefits to having a consistent reality, or disadvantages for a fantasy author, is that you have to conform to a standardized logic. Tolkien wrote ‘The Hobbit’ and there was one point where he used a little narrative cheat available only to fantasy authors. Bilbo manages to escape a really shitty situation with the expense of a ‘get out of jail free card’ in the form of a magical ring. Tolkien felt so bad for this unexplained way out that he dedicated an entire epic trilogy to an insignificant ring. Just happens to have been the greatest fucking trilogy ever created and notice how very little magic happens during the course of it.
Now that Marvel have a similar sort of consistent reality to Middle-earth, with an incredibly rich history, everything is going to be a building process. Nothing will be a sequel but at the same time everything will be a sequel in a Discworld-esque sort of way. Its always the best part in any of their new films when they make cross references to the other films a la ‘Is that one of Stark’s’ ‘Tony never tells me anything’. They have definitely taken the steps to doing so, signing multiple-year contracts with A-list actors including Robbert Downey Jr. and Natalie Portman and establishing a strong foundation with what I hope to be 3 very solid origin stories and plenty of introductory cameo appearances, what I assume to be Jeremy Renner playing Hawkeye. I really hope they don’t fuck it up and director’s massive egos get in the way. Nerd-out.
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