Volume 49, Number 10 · June 13, 2002
Popcorn Park
By Geoffrey O'Brien
On halcyon afternoons back in the Age of Pop, around 1966 or so, college students and other idlers—mostly male, as was and is the tendency—liked to use the latest stack of Marvel Comics as text for a free-floating commentary. The vantage point hardly mattered: aesthetics, Jungian psychology, the dynamics of American social life, the sexual implications of superhero costuming. Marvel's creations were grist for any kind of rumination, high or low. They provided a shorthand for categorizing personalities and situations (an analogy for almost anything could be found somewhere within the rapidly expanding Marvel Universe), and, most satisfying of all, could be taken as frivolously or as seriously as you wanted. In those days it was not unusual to hear Stan Lee (then still the writer of almost all the company's dozen or so titles) praised as a protean intelligence of near-Shakespearean dimensions, while the distinctive styles of Marvel's artists—Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko, and many others—fueled hours of discussion about the nature of the line and the employment of space.
Review, 2144 words
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