Enough now, we get it
I’ve been getting the feeling with US superheroes, from the evidence of kids in my classes, that the general public has reached the “Enough now, we get it” moment. Again.
You see I feel, when something is breaking through to popular culture, that it goes through three distinct phases:
Phase one: What is this? I have genuinely never seen anything like this in my life before!
Phase two: This is the biggest and best thing ever, it deserves to be this successful and I hope it never ends!
Phase three: Enough now, we get it.
I’ve seen this with so many things that I’ve loved over the years, from movements in pop music, through TV shows, to the comic books that have been my life’s longest love.
The first one that I experienced was Glam Rock. Because of my age, the very first music I was aware of, via Ed Stewpot Stewart’s Junior Choice, was Bubblegum Pop. I bought, or had bought for me, The Archies, The Monkees, and The 1910 Fruitgum Company (from whom, I think, the name Bubblegum Pop, was derived).
The apogee of this “movement” was The Partridge Family, a TV show that cast a child actor and his step mom in the leads, put them in a studio with The Wrecking Crew and the last wave of Brill Building songwriters, and produced a string of hit singles and albums, every one of which I bought. However, at about the age of eleven, it was made clear to me that this was music for children, and what I really should be buying was the new “cool” music - Glam Rock.
The first Glam Rock artist I saw on Top Of The Pops was Gary Glitter, about whom we don’t talk much. Luckily about the same time the real cool acts came on screen: Marc Bolan, Roxy Music, and David Bowie.
So of course I went out and bought Slade, Mud, and The Sweet. Cos I was only eleven and couldn’t tell the difference between the cool acts, and the ones that kind of dressed like the cool acts. However, between them, the Glam Rock acts at both ends of the musical seriousness scale ruled the roost for about three years.
Until the start of 1976, when suddenly we all went “Enough now, we get it”.
Watch the re-runs of Top Of The Pops 1976 on BBC 4 and you’ll see the evidence. The final non-charting singles by everyone from Slade and Mud to The Bay City Rollers and The Glitter Band. With the exception of a very small few, who turned out to be proper rock stars - and who had stopped wearing the glam make up noticeably earlier than their counterparts - the Glam Rock gang mostly gave up the ghost and disappeared. And, by the end of that year, the next big thing had taken over (it was, depending on your sensibility, gender, or physical location, either punk or disco. If you were lucky it was both).
With TV shows I saw it with Monty Python (Phase one 1969, phase three just after Life Of Brian) and The Goodies (1970 till they left the BBC in 1979). And with comic books it was happening before my eyes, rolled out in real time.
I came upon Marvel Comics, and became a devoted reader, right in the middle of their first Phase Three. Around 1974, when I started picking up Marvel UK’s weekly black and white reprints, the readers in the States had already said “Enough now, we get it”.
The Fantastic Four’s heyday had ended when Jack Kirby left in 1969, Spider-Man’s ended with The Death Of Gwen Stacey in 1973. The X-Men had been cancelled in 1970 and were only gradually being reintroduced around then. Across the board, the superhero comics were seen as the last decade’s thing. Whereas Marvel was producing a whole raft of non-superhero books, many of which became the lead in their own British reprint titles.
Planet Of The Apes was the first one I started getting every week, then Dracula Lives, and Conan The Barbarian. I wasn’t too fussed about Mighty World Of Marvel (starring the Hulk) or Spider-Man Weekly, because I felt I’d done those comics when I read them as a five year old in Fantastic and Terrific comics. Conan, Dracula and the Apes were the cool stuff, the like of which I’d never seen before. Their back up strips would be sci fi stories from the US black and white magazines, and other left-field stories like Kull The Conqueror and Ka-Zar The Savage.
Other novel strips featured anti-heroes, like Luke Cage Hero For Hire, and Morbius The Living Vampire. All this was self-evidently cooler than the camp heroes running around with their pants outside their trousers. And when Howard The Duck and Man Thing came along, my pantheon of cool comic characters was complete. I’d witnessed Phase Three of the yawn superheroes, and was smack bang in the middle of Phase Two of the cool comic characters.
Which ended, for me, in 1979 when I grew up, went to art school, and realised I liked 2000AD comic all of a sudden. I had my own personal “Enough now, we get it” when Howard The Duck got cancelled and I wasn’t that arsed about the rest of them. When next I looked, all my favourite comics had either disappeared, or no longer had whatever magic they’d once had.
At which point Frank Miller came along, and the whole cycle started again.
Which brings us to now, and the rollercoaster ride that has been Marvel Superhero movies. When I started doing my first Comic Art Masterclasses in 2004, I’d try and impress the kids with my artwork from Dr Strange and Ghost Rider and they’d shrug, nonplussed. None of them had heard of any Marvel superhero, expect for Spider-Man, who was fast approaching his own Phase Three on the movie screen.
Then, since 2008, it’s been Nirvana. Not only did I enjoy about a decade where kids were Doctor Who fans (don’t ask me to plot all the Phases of Who, we’d be here all day), but at the same time they were blown away that I’d been a Marvel comics artist. I mean, obviously, none of them had ever read a Marvel comic, and over the subsequent fifteen years I would meet only a handful who ever had read one. But they all knew the characters from the movies, and that stardust rubbed off on my remote association working on the comics (which, I guess, they thought of as some sort of arcane merchandise spin-off or something).
Iron Man was Phase One. Nobody had seen superheroes movies as good and exciting and original as this since, maybe, Tim Burton’s Batman or even Christopher Reeve’s Superman. The Avengers in 2012 remains an iconic high point in cinematic culture which I can happily rewatch endlessly to this day. That was very Phase Two.
Then, to my constant surprise, Marvel’s Phase Two kept going on and on, for year after year. I was already getting a bit Phase Three-y by Avengers Age Of Ultron, but they’d win me back round with an Ant Man or a Doctor Strange movie, and dammit those Guardians Of The Galaxy movies were good. But by the time of Infinity War, I was mind-boggled that they’d kept the audience going along with them for all this time. No phenomenon lasts that long, it was beyond belief. One got to thinking they had made some deal with the devil and this success would never end.
Then it ended. Some would say thankfully. Since Covid, and the streaming situation, Marvel have made a string of movies that, though some have distinguished themselves at the box office, are solidly Phase Three. The success this year of DeadPool Vs Wolverine is both deliberately ironic and ironically ironic, in that it’s a movie whose strapline may as well be “Enough now, we get it.”
Superhero movies will carry on, and there’ll be jump-starts to a dozen franchises whose last rites have been read more than once. But it’ll be a while before we get another Iron Man to Endgame sized “I hope it never ends” phase.
The exciting thing is, somewhere out there now a new Phase One is starting. And none of us knows what it is yet. Any suggestions?
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