Marvel's Behind the Mask

The idea of dual identity became...

really clear to me when I started at Marvel full-time.

It stemmed from a conversation I was having with Stan Lee.

I facetiously asked him a question

that I didn't think there was an answer for.

I said, "Stan, how do you create the perfect Marvel character?"

He's, like, "Joey, I'm gonna tell ya."

He said, "Imagine Spider-Man

"is standing at the precipice of a building.

"He's just overlooking the city.

"And he takes it all in,

"and he whups his web, and he jumps off.

"Awesome scene.

"But tell me who he is?

"Tell me who he loves.

"Tell me who loves him. Tell me what his problems are.

"And now, when he flies off that building,

"our hearts clutch because we're in that suit.

"Outside of that, it's just a red and blue suit jumping off a building."

And that really struck a chord with me

in understanding the alter ego

is the most important part of the superhero.

As old a tradition as telling of stories,

there's always been a story about

a human with other powers teaching us something.

It's the power of fantasy. I was hoping

that the hero would show up and rescue me.

In real life that rarely happens,

but in comics it happens every 30 days.

Comic book superheroes,

they serve as our moral compasses,

they allow us to make sense of the world that we live in.

Every comic book generation gets the comics it deserves.

You can't expect today's Spider-Man

to be exactly what it was 20 years ago.

Things change.

Who puts that mask on?

That's really what inspires me about superhero stories.

They are fundamentally about figuring out who you are.

You look at any great Marvel story,

I don't care who the character is,

what the team is,

it's always a great story about the person behind the mask.

In this 1941 edition of Captain America,

the Captain was up against a Nazi villain called the Red Skull

and the dialogue went like this,

"This nation was founded by dissidents, by people who wanted something better."

I think superheroes have always been there in American culture,

at least since the concept was first introduced in the late 1930s.

Superheroes got us through the tail end of The Depression,

through World War Two, through the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s.

Every moment along the way, the superhero has offered us

a language to think about our political, civic, and personal identities.

Comics, as a medium, speak very symbolically.

I think because they're so larger than life and are so allegorical.

You have this opportunity to build interesting social narratives.

At the core, are fundamentally civic questions.

Questions about how we govern our society.

Is it a vigilante? Is it someone in the service of the police?

Is it a man? Is it a woman? Is he Black? Is she white?

All of those questions are fundamentally questions about identity.

And Marvel's universe is right smack in the middle of those questions.

Marvel from the very beginning,

was radically different as a comic book company.

You had characters who sort of foreshadow

what the classic Marvel hero in the '60s became.

First of all, you had the original Human Torch.

Not to be confused with the later version in the Fantastic Four.

Despite the original Human Torch's name, he wasn't human.

He was an Android, an artificially created being,

who tried to pass as human and, in fact, did.

But you already have the idea of what became Marvel tradition

of the hero who is an outsider,

who is in some way alienated from the rest of the human race,

who, nonetheless, tries to fit in.

Who tries to help a society that, at times, was afraid of him.

What Marvel does really well

is play with secret identities

and plays with the concept of what an identity is.

And what that really means is about

the dualities that we all encompass, right?

At work, we're one person, when we're at home, we're another person.

And I think, specifically, within the Marvel landscape,

it's not necessarily about hiding yourself,

it's about uncovering yourself.

Characters donning masks to become superheroes.

This is the guise in which they can exercise their higher power.

The concept didn't originate in comics.

Before the rise of superheroes, you had Zorro.

The idea of a person who takes on

another heroic identity that's unknown to the general public.

If a man must die, it's up to the law to decide that.

It's not just a disguise.

A mask, the costume, enable a person

to express a side of himself that is not visible in his ordinary identity.

One of the reasons the idea of a secret or dual identity

is so powerful is 'cause we all have

these multiple notions about ourselves, right?

And, so, someone like Spider-Man kind of becomes every man.

This notion that, in our mundane world,

we're also capable of something far greater.

That's the thing, especially with Marvel characters,

where so many of them were mundane people.

And I think that double consciousness

allowed these larger-than-life characters to also be very relatable

on a personal, human level.

We try to, just, ask the reader to accept one thing.

That a person has a superhuman power.

He can scale a wall or has the strength of 10 men or whatever.

But once accepting that, we then try to write it as realistically as possible.

The mere fact that he has superhuman power

doesn't mean that he may not have acne,

or he may not have trouble with his girlfriend,

or get a sinus attack in the middle of a fight,

or perhaps have money troubles, you see?

We don't just make them big and powerful

and they always win the case and everything is fine.

You look at a lot of the creators in the '30s, '40s and '50s,

many were Jewish immigrants, either born in America

first generation or some of them came over from parts of Europe.

And, you know, when you're an immigrant,

they lived, to a certain extent, a dual identity.

I think it's no coincidence that Stan Lee was born Stanley Lieber

or Jack Kirby was born, you know, Jacob Kurtzberg,

and they themselves create characters who have double identity.

One identity at home and another identity in the workplace.

My father, uh... Growing up, it was a rough life.

Street gangs back then were... You had a Jewish street gang,

an Irish street gang, an Italian street gang,

and it just depended which block you lived on,

and comic books in the late '30s were just coming out,

and he saw that as an avenue to escape the Lower East Side.

The late 1930s were a particularly anti-Semitic period.

Jews were barred from many Ivy League schools,

country clubs, even entire neighborhoods.

So I think...

Their creations, in many ways, paralleled their own lives

and what was happening in the world at that time.

For those groups that had been excluded from the political mainstream,

those metaphors of ripping your coat off and being a superhero,

putting on a mask and going out into the night.

Those metaphors are incredibly powerful ways of thinking

what you could contribute to a society that's in turmoil.

It's no coincidence

that the front cover of Captain America #1 sees, you know,

Captain America smashing Hitler across the face.

What a powerful image.

I think that's one of the most important images of American pop culture history.

And who better to be commenting than assimilated Jewish immigrants.

A lot of people were looking at them like, "Wait a minute."

We have an American character punching a foreign head of state in the face.

We weren't at war with them yet.

But if there's one thing my father did not like, it was bullies.

And Steve Rogers became a, you know, like, the vehicle for that.

"Punch me as many times as you like and I'm still getting up."

So, that was my father.

One nation, indivisible,

with liberty and justice for all.

I think, you know, the superhero

can be looked at as an assimilation archetype.

It's wanting to belong.

I mean, you know, like, look at Captain America.

He's the flag embellished as costume.

You know, he's Rockwell, he's apple pie.

But, really, he's the wish fulfillment of assimilated Jewish artists

who wanted to be accepted as All-American.

I think it's interesting that if you look at

a lot of early characters, they fit in.

But if you look at those particular characters

that actually couldn't hide their mutation,

that were created after the Golden Age of Comics...

To me, that actually starts to map itself onto other notions of otherness.

Then we're talking about, like,

"Well, you get isolated because of what you look like."

The way I grew up, I always felt like the odd one out.

Someone who didn't quite fit in, no matter how hard he wanted to.

Judged a lot by the way he looks, that...

You know, the clothes that I wore, you know?

And just wanting to be yourself.

Dwayne McDuffie and I had a conversation many years ago.

"Who's your favorite Black superhero?"

My favorite, you know, Black superhero is The Thing,

and he was, like, "Okay. Why?"

And I said, because he's the one that always stands out in a room,

no matter where he's at.

And he's always going to be judged by how he looks

before he's judged by who he is.

And, to me, that's something that's very universal

to my experience as a Black man.

You know, The Thing was my father.

Ben Grimm kind of acted the same way my father would act.

Or my father would act the way Ben Grimm would.

You could interchange the two.

I think, in some ways, my father almost envisioned himself.

This humanoid, tough guy creature that could protect people.

You know, you have the story of the golem.

A mythical creature from the mud

that would somehow save the Jews of Eastern Europe.

I think it's very simple that writers write about what they know about.

And many of these themes in superhero narrative are rooted in Biblical story.