Songs: The Marvel Age

notes / gigs / releases

'The Marvel Age' is a phrase
Employed in comics lore
To describe a time that's kicked off by
The first Fantastic Four
Everybody uses it
In historical texts
But no-one ever stipulates
When it's meant to end - they say

'The Marvel Age' ends in the days
Of pop-pickers T'Pau
But 'The Marvel Age' has never been defined
Until now

You see when constructing a corpus
You cannot rely
On such vaguely defined periods
The parameters must be precise
So I searched for methodologies
To help achieve my goal
The one I found that worked for me was the
Production Of Culture Approach

It views artistic outputs as
Human activity
Produced within the larger context
Of society

With these five constraints:

The structure of the institutions
Where the art's created
The occupations of the people
Who make it
The technology available,
The places where its sold
And finally the legal system
By which it's controlled

But my investigations found
Two elements were key:
It all comes down to cover dates
And editors-in-chief

'The Marvel Age' 'can be
Delimitated easily
With 'The Marvel Age' divided
Into these sub-periods three

Three sub-periods - here we go:

November 1961
Is when the Fantastic Four debut
With Stan Lee as boss and that goes on
To August 1972

After that there's turmoil
With five editors through the gate
Until Archie Goodwin resigns
In April 1978

Then it all calms down a bit
With Jim Shooter's succession
Which lasts until he gets kicked out
In October 1987

I've given these all names to aid with your
Memory retention
They are Creation, Chaos and
Consolidation

'The Marvel Age' is thus arranged
From November 1961
To October 1987 which is
25 years 11 months long

And if you’d like to have all this
Explained much more fully
Bloomsbury - here's my email
Call me!

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

There is a LOT of Explaining Things in Data and Doctor Doom but I think this might be the MOST Explaining Things - it's certainly the longest song that tries to do it anyway!

At time of writing I haven't PERFORMED this song live yet so I'm not sure if all the Explaining will actually work. I DO know that I'm inordinately pleased with how the list of Editors-in-Chief worked out!

Also, the open access chapter mentioned at the end is called Periodizing 'The Marvel Age' Using The Production Of Culture Approach and can be read online open access (i.e. for FREE) as part of the book Comics | Histories edited by Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Felix Giesa and Christina Meyer, published by Rombach Wissenschaft. It is FULL of good stuff, all ALSO open access!