In 1994 the limited series Marvels became an immediate classic, catapulting its creators, writer Kurt Busiek and artist Alex Ross, to the stardom they still enjoy. Now, fourteen years later, Busiek, along with new collaborators, has written the long-awaited sequel, Marvels: Eye of the Camera. The fourth issue (of six) is out this month.
Normally superheroes take center stage in Marvel Comics stories. But Marvels shifted the focus to photojournalist Phil Sheldon, showing major events in Marvel history from 1939 through the Silver Age of the 1960s from his perspective. Sheldon returns as the central character of Marvels: Eye of the Camera, set against the increasingly “grim and gritty” Marvel Universe of the 1970s and 1980s.
But why was there such a long gap between these two series? Kurt Busiek explains that when he was finishing the original series, “I had an idea for a sequel. It wasn't one Alex was interested in painting, but he encouraged me to do it anyway, so I sent it in.” This sequel would have been called Marvels: Crime & Punishment. “But that sequel foundered, on those old familiar rocks called ‘creative differences,’ and fell apart.” Instead, Busiek considerably revised this story, transforming it into Astro City: The Dark Age.
Then in 2002, “Tom Brevoort called me up and asked if I'd be interested in doing a project to mark the 10th anniversary of Marvels,” and Busiek revived another idea he had. “Way back when we were wrapping up the first series, I'd talked with Alex about the idea of someday doing a Marvels special, to see what had happened to Phil Sheldon. He hadn't been planned to be the lead in Crime & Punishment,” Busiek explains.
“So I talked to Tom about that, and we expanded the idea. What would have been the one-shot is still about the last 30 pages or so of Eye of the Camera. We just stuck a whole new story onto the front of it, leading up to it and exploring Phil's world and the world of the Marvels in the time period that the story covered.
“And Tom found Jay Anacleto to do the artwork, and Jay's a fantastic artist, but he's meticulous and slow, and we were asking him to do a bigger project than he'd ever done before, with tons or reference and period detail and such.
“And I think Jay's been ideal. What he does is these amazingly detailed pencil renderings, full of texture and mood and subtle shading—and then those pencil drawings are colored on the computer by Brian Haberlin. The result has the strengths of painted artwork, but it's not painted. It makes the world of the Marvels, and Phil's life, come alive beautifully, but it does it Jay's way.”
Busiek eventually brought in Roger Stern to help with the series, who had previously collaborated with him on Avengers Forever and Iron Man. “It must be close to three years ago that Kurt approached me about helping out on Marvels: Eye of the Camera,” Stern recalls. “He'd already written the first two issues, and was looking for aid in researching and co-writing issues #3-6. The research was a daunting task…there was about 10-to-15 years worth of Marvel Comics to wade through.’
“Kurt already had the broad strokes of the series outlined,” and Stern took over the historical research. “I'd dig through the back issues, finding important Marvel events of the period, and organize a timeline of what was happening when.” After talking with Busiek, Stern would do a more detailed outline, which they would then tweak. “Then I would write a first draft of the script,” which Busiek would then rewrite, and then, after the issue was drawn, rewrite further.
Among the events in Marvel history that the new Marvels references are the Frank Miller Daredevil/Elektra saga, the Watergate-inspired Captain America /Secret Empire storyline, “plus the debut of the Punisher, things like Man-Thing, the Son of Satan and Dracula turning up, the heroes vanishing in Secret Wars. . .the birth of X-Factor and plenty more,” reveals Busiek. But “Phil sees the events from a distance, so the characters are there, but they're present as events, almost as forces of nature, and the characters Phil interacts with as characters are his family and co-workers and such.”
Moreover, Busiek and Stern both caution that there are many Marvel events that Sheldon would know little or nothing about, since they happened out of public view, like the Dark Phoenix Saga.
Though The Dark Age and Eye of the Camera portray the rise of the “grim and gritty” era of superhero comics, Busiek maintains that “They're not meant to comment on the way the superhero worlds changed so much as react to what happened, exploring larger issues about what it's like to live through times of upheaval, using the superhero stuff as metaphor, more than as analysis of comics trends.”
The original Marvels was part of what Busiek dubbed the “reconstructionist” comics movement, which sought to restore an optimistic spirit to superhero comics. Do recent comics events like Civil War and the purported demise of Captain America suggest that superhero comics are again primarily grim and gritty?
“The ‘reconstructionist’ movement seems to have run its course, as these things do,” Busiek says, “and now we've got writers like Geoff Johns, who seems to be synthesizing elements of the ‘grim and gritty’ era with elements of the ‘reconstructionist’ stuff, and making his own thing out of it.”
Roger Stern observes that “I don't think it's a coincidence that super-heroes first took off during FDR's New Deal and came charging back during JFK's New Frontier. Things first started darkening for super-heroes during the Nixon era, while the Reagan years saw a strange mix of optimism and grim-and-gritty. ‘Reconstruction’ more or less started during Clinton's time in office. And as for the Bush years…well, 'nuff said about that.
“Funny, how the dark periods in comics have coincided with Republican presidents. I have to say that I'm optimistic about the Obama administration. If nothing else, we're getting a Spider-Man reader in the White House.”
Meanwhile, Busiek reports that “my plate is pretty full” between his work on Marvels, DC Comics’ 52-week Trinity series, and the next arc of Astro City: The Dark Age. Stern reports that he is “working on a story arc for Amazing Spider-Man that will probably see print sometime in 2009.”
And will Busiek continue the Marvels saga? “I suspect this is probably it for me. If I went forward into the 90s, and tried to research all of what was going on then, I'd probably go mad. But then, I thought I was done before, and Tom [Brevoort] called me up and I wasn't. So you never know. Tom's devious.”
