When The Walt Disney Company announced the purchase of Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion last week, two strands of my childhood came together that once seemed irreconcilable. Back in the early 1960s, Disney and Marvel occupied vastly different places in the cultural landscape. My family, like millions of other Americans, gathered around the TV set on Sunday night to watch The Wonderful World of Disney, and Saturday afternoons often meant a matinee of one of those harmless family films starring Tommy Kirk or Dean Jones that the Disney Company rolled out at regular intervals.
By contrast, though, it could be hard in those days to even find Marvel comics, since the newsstand system of distribution was mysterious and unreliable—particularly if you had to rely on your parents to drive you to a drug store many blocks away that might actually have the new issues. If Disney defined the safe center of mainstream culture, Marvel existed somewhere on the fringe. As far as I could tell, despite Stan Lee’s typically hyperbolic proclamations about the new Marvel Age of Comics, only a small cult of readers even knew about them. And where Disney cartoons, television shows, movies, and toys inevitably looked mass-produced, Marvel Comics, particularly those early issues of its most iconic titles in 1962 or ’63, had a crude, almost hand-made feel to them.
Certainly, the introduction of the flawed, angst-ridden superheroes created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko was, for better or worse, a formative development in my own imaginative life. Something in me—and doubtless in tens of thousands of other readers too—responded deeply to the torment of a character like Ben Grimm, who as The Thing, the most powerful member of Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four, had gained his incredible strength at the cost of being trapped inside a monstrous exterior composed entirely of orange rocks. As a child, I would wonder endlessly at The Thing’s relationship with his nominal girlfriend, the blind Alicia. Could he even touch her? Did his rock fingers bruise her cheek when he was trying to be tender? And later, as an adolescent, I’d wonder too about the anatomy concealed under his plain blue trunks. Was everything made of orange rocks? Was he tortured by the same impossible desires that were beginning to stir in me too?
I think now that the struggles of characters like Ben Grimm or Peter Parker—The Amazing Spider-Man, that is—were for me and countless other readers a kind of figurative initiation into the conflicts and ambiguities we’d eventually experience too. Like all creatures of myth, the characters of the Marvel universe functioned, at some level, as symbols. They reflected our anxieties about our own bodies, about the transformations (physical and otherwise) we’d experience too, about the responsibilities we knew we’d someday have to assume. Unlike those other icons of the comic book rack, Superman and Batman, whose appeal in those days stemmed from their unquestioned power and mastery, it was the personal weaknesses of Marvel’s heroes that drew us in: their worries, their anger, their unruly passions. Indeed, the fact that Batman has now in films and comics become a grief-haunted vigilante and Superman is portrayed as an alien who worries about his connection to humanity only shows the enduring influence of Marvel’s innovations.
So what will it mean now that Marvel has been absorbed as one more part in The Disney Company’s massive means of production? The child in me, who never dreamed that digital technology and studio budgets could realize on film what visionaries like Kirby and Ditko could draw, is, I have to admit, a little excited about what Marvel Entertainment can do with the financing and production resources of Disney. Yes, I want to see on the screen the sprawling, inter-connected universe that gradually emerged in Marvel’s pages in the ’60s. But the adult in me, the consumer who knows how corporate giants can dominate the marketplace, flooding theatres and stores with product, is a little worried too. Will characters that were once distinctive become simply ubiquitous? After all those years of beating back threats from Doctor Doom, Galactus, The Red Skull and other menaces, will Marvel’s heroes finally be conquered by a lowly mouse?