Marvel's Behind the Mask (2021) - full transcript

JOE QUESADA:

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.

(SWISHING AND WHOOSHING)

"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.

BRIAN BENDIS:

As old a tradition as telling of stories,

there's always been a story about

a human with other powers

teaching us something.

CHRISTOPHER PRIEST: 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.

DAVID WALKER: Comic book superheroes,

they serve as our moral compasses,

they allow us to make sense

of the world that we live in.

ROY THOMAS: 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.

QUESADA:

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.

NARRATOR:

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.

JENKINS: 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.

PETER SANDERSON:

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.

SANA AMANAT: 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.

SANDERSON: 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.

SANDERSON:

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.

JENNINGS: 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.

WALKER: 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.

WEINSTEIN: 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.

NEAL KIRBY: 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.

(INAUDIBLE)

JENKINS: 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.

WEINSTEIN: 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.

KIRBY: 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.

ALL: One nation, indivisible,

with liberty and justice for all.

WEINSTEIN:

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."

WALKER: 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.

For example, The Hulk.

The Hulk was originally gray.

Gray being the golem, which actually

formed the blueprint of Frankenstein.

And many characters in pop culture...

The golem figure...

He's not really a bad guy.

He's just... He looks different,

and because he looks different,

you know, he's feared, he's misunderstood,

he's the rootless wanderer.

So, I think there is a particularly

Jewish worldview.

JENNINGS: To me, Hulk is a man of color,

to a certain degree. (CHUCKLES)

And, so, when you look at constructions

around The Hulk and Monstrosity

and how Black men are kind of

put into that particular box,

I can't help but think

of the James Baldwin quote,

"To be Black and conscious in America

is to live in a constant state of rage."

GREG PAK: Well, Bruce Banner

has this terror of The Hulk.

He sees The Hulk as a monster.

But The Hulk is part of him,

and Banner himself is a hero.

You've got this very simple kernel,

which is that anger

triggers you turning into a monster.

But what if this part of him

is the only part that's out there

and is thrust into a situation

where his anger

and his strength are seen as virtues?

And that very simple thing

allows you to look at this

monstrous version of ourselves and see

how the thing that we look in ourselves

and call a monster,

actually is redeemable.

I love that element of superheroes.

When you have a simple rule,

a very simple set-up like that,

it allows you to dig deep

and just do a lot with subtext

and with the emotional story.

PETER: Uncle Ben is dead and, in a sense,

it's really I who killed him

because I didn't realize in time...

REGINALD HUDLIN:

When you look at the Marvel characters

created in the '60s and '70s,

versus the DC characters

that were created in the '40s,

the big difference

is the introduction of psychology.

You have Spider-Man. He's a superhero,

but he's neurotic.

You have The Fantastic Four

who's this dysfunctional family.

So you get a new angle on things

that you didn't see

in those archetypes created in the '40s.

TOM BREVOORT: The thing that Stan and Jack

kind of brought, at least initially,

was they made the characters,

at the least, two-dimensional.

Which is to say,

they were more focused on them

as the people

inside the costumes and their problems

than they were in the overriding tropes

of superhero comics.

QUESADA: Batman. Young Bruce Wayne

walks out of the movie theater,

a criminal comes in,

shoots his parents dead.

From that moment on,

literally from that moment on,

little Bruce Wayne is dead.

Batman then becomes Batman

and as his life goes on,

he uses Bruce Wayne

in order to facilitate what Batman does.

Bruce Wayne is the mask.

Batman is the real character.

What Marvel did in the '60s

was they switched the paradigm.

It's Peter Parker who's really important,

and when he puts on the mask,

that becomes the facade.

He becomes somebody completely different.

He's able to quip.

He's no more the shy kid from school.

He's able to do all these different things

that he's not able to do

in his regular world.

RALPH MACCHIO: With Spider-Man,

for example,

you were really interested

in Peter Parker.

You were more interested in his life

than what he did as Spider-Man.

It was "What was

going to happen with Aunt May?

"Was he gonna be able to pay the bills?

"What was his romantic life

going to be like?"

You had Flash Thompson

who is this high school jock

and he despised Peter Parker

and he mercilessly picked on him.

But Flash Thompson

was a huge fan of Spider-Man.

So, that was great.

That was just another way of Stan playing

with the idea of secret identities again.

What lonely kid,

and if you're not a lonely kid

you have no business reading comic books.

What lonely kid

has not loved the idea of...

"Oh, if they only knew who I really was"?

Peter Parker, classic example, you know?

The kid everybody bullies

and picks on and takes lightly.

And he puts on the mask, he's not

just this great athlete and a superhero,

he's a smart aleck.

JENKINS:

I love that Peter Parker is tongue-tied

and Spider-Man zings

one-liners right and left.

It's circling the villain

and just making total nonsense

of his ability to even think as he's

trying to do his grandiose monologue.

But that gap between

the tongue-tied Peter Parker

and the zinger-slinging Spider-Man

sort of captures something

of the ways we see ourselves.

The person we see ourselves as being

and the person we'd like to be

are both brought together

around the same figure.

When I would pick up

a Marvel comic book,

it taught me to, in life,

describe yourself with an adjective

and tell the world who you are.

For instance, The Amazing Spider-Man,

The Incredible Hulk,

The Invincible Iron Man.

And I remembered the description

of those characters always stuck in me,

you know, to the point where, sometimes,

when I would have to walk

from my house to school,

I would say, "Today I'ma be

The Invincible Iron Man,"

and if these bullies

come mess with me or, you know...

"I'ma be stealth today.

I'ma be like Spider-Man."

So when hip-hop came over,

well, to me it was like,

"Oh, my God, you can

tell stories about yourself over music?"

So my whole career,

I was just pretending to be

"the most powerful entity

in the hip-hop universe."

And that imaginative

creation of character and identity

was all because of comic books.

When I get on that mic,

I'm no longer mild-mannered,

Catholic school kid

wearing glasses, nerdy,

comic-book-reading, straight-A student.

I transform into the mighty...

DMC doesn't mean Darryl McDaniels anymore.

Now it means

"The Devastating, Mic-Controlling," DMC.

McDANIELS: (RAPPING)

A superhero like D when it comes to war

I come in like The Hulk

and The Mighty Thor

The most powerful

in the hip-hop universe

BREVOORT: The one choice

that got made very early on

was Stan and Jack put

The Fantastic Four and then Spider-Man

and then The Hulk and then Iron Man,

and so forth in the real world.

"Well, what's the big deal about that?"

Up to that point, superheroes existed

in sort of fantasy worlds.

Superman lived in Metropolis,

which was not a real city.

It was an idealized version

of whatever New York was,

but not a real place.

It blew my mind

when Peter Parker really lived in Queens.

Stan Lee was a genius because the

superheroes was really in New York City.

So, it wasn't pretend to me. It was real.

(CROWD CLAMORING)

QUESADA:

Stan was so ahead of the curve.

And to me, that was ultimately

the hope of Marvel comics.

'Cause if you're growing up in the '60s,

in those incredibly turbulent times.

The civil rights movement,

the women's lib movement.

Everything was just bubbling.

And Stan and Jack

and everyone that was there,

they present a world in which it just is.

BREVOORT: Stuff is going on everywhere.

It's in the news.

And both Stan and Jack, in their own ways,

are aware of it and respond to it.

Steve Ditko, he would just start sticking

characters of color into crowd scenes.

There'd be a bunch of kids

at Peter Parker's high school

and there'd be Black kids.

He would just draw them

that way and there they were.

And there would be

no comment about it, you know?

Nobody would address it or anything.

They were just there.

There's an issue of Spider-Man

where Spider-Man has been trapped

by the Green Goblin and the Crime Master

and these, like, two or three beat cops

come to help him out

and one of them is African-American.

Has the comic book industry

been pressured much by Black people

to get more Blacks into the comics

or does that have anything to do with it?

Again, I can't really talk

to the whole comic book industry,

but as far as we're concerned,

it didn't require any pressure.

We were doing it before there was

talk of the Black Movement.

Ten years ago we had a book called

Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos.

We billed it as the war magazine

for people who hate war magazines.

We didn't try to play up

Black people particularly,

but we tried to make it realistic.

And Sgt. Fury's platoon

had a Jewish boy named Izzy Cohen,

an Italian named Dino Manelli,

a Black soldier named Gabe Jones,

and we've been doing it ever since.

Just about every one of our books

has Black people in it

and people of all types.

And not in a token way

but, my God, there are people

of all types in the world we live in.

(INAUDIBLE)

And the one that sort of

changed the game in terms of,

yeah, bringing characters of color into

the superhero world is the Black Panther.

He was debuted in Fantastic Four,

and Fantastic Four was, at the time,

Marvel's best-selling comic.

And in that first issue, Panther

is treated like any other character.

In a sense, surprisingly well.

The fact that he is

an African hero is almost secondary.

He shows up.

At first, he's a mysterious player,

he invites

the Fantastic Four to his country.

He immediately jumps them and spends

20 pages beating the hell out of them.

It turns out, by the end of the thing,

he's not a villain,

he's actually a good guy,

and he's doing this to test himself,

you know, which is kind of a

crappy thing to do to the Fantastic Four,

but they're superheroes.

It's all part of the job,

and by the end of the issue,

he takes off his cowl

in front of the Fantastic Four

and they're all like,

"It's the King of Wakanda,"

and nobody says a word about the fact

that he's a Black man.

QUESADA: For the readers, you know,

when T'Challa takes off his mask,

the readers go,

"Oh, my God. It's a Black superhero."

But the Fantastic Four,

they don't say that.

The beauty of it was that it just was.

So if you're in the middle

of all this strife,

in the middle of all this upheaval,

you read those books and you go,

"That's the world I want to live in.

"That's where I want to be."

SANDERSON:

The Black Panther, T'Challa, is a king.

I think this was

a conscious choice to make,

that the Black Panther is very impressive.

That is, in effect,

the point of the first story.

I think it is meant to bowl the readers

over, to impress them with this guy.

What's amazing about

a lot of the early superheroes

is that sometimes those

early characters came out perfect, right?

It's like, normally,

the first pancake isn't so good,

but Superman, perfect.

Batman, perfect.

(CHUCKLES) Wonder Woman, perfect.

Captain America, perfect.

So the first Black superhero,

Black Panther, comes out perfect.

He's this cool, elegant,

handsome guy who's just got it on locked.

I love it! This is the guy who has it all.

And one by one, he beats

each member of the Fantastic Four.

Now, a few issues ago,

they beat Galactus, who eats planets.

So Black Panther beats the guys

who beat Galactus.

Ergo, Black Panther is the baddest cat

in the Marvel Universe. The end.

BREVOORT:

Now, by '66, it was pretty clear

that the Marvel approach

to doing comics was working.

Stan and Jack and Steve,

everybody realized,

like, "Something's going on here.

We're selling really well

"and proportionately selling

better than everybody else."

And, in fact, it would be 10 years

before rival companies had any ongoing

Black characters in a lot of cases.

ARCHIE GOODWIN: These are character

sketches I had John Romita work on for us.

Great. Now this is the way he really is.

-This is it in real life.

-Yeah.

And this is how

Johnny's tried to glamorize it a bit.

LEE: I like the pilot very much, yeah.

She's a Black girl. That's good.

MAGGIE THOMPSON: One of the problems

with diversity in comics

is that though the creators may seek to

have diverse characters in their stories

and diverse storylines

for years and years and years,

the primary writers and artists

were white guys

in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

PRIEST:

I'm the first African-American editor,

and to my knowledge,

the first African-American writer

in, what we consider,

modern superhero comics.

I was 17 years old

when I started working there.

I had no idea that I was

the first Black guy in the front office.

I remember one morning,

I came out of subway

and I was skipping down Madison Avenue.

I was skipping to work,

'cause I couldn't wait to get there.

At some point, a couple blocks,

I realized I was skipping

and I said, "Black people don't skip."

DENYS COWAN: Rich offered

to take me to DC Comics

and introduce me

to editors there to show my work,

and the first person he took me in

to was the art director at DC.

I went and showed this guy my work.

It was a white guy. Everyone was white.

Nodded at me and he looked at it,

put it all together, handed it back,

and he said, "This is really great, kid,

"but we already got

a colored artist working here."

Shortly after that, I was up at Marvel

and I met the editor at the time.

I think it was Jim Shooter.

And he didn't call me a colored artist.

He just said, "Go see this editor

and they'll see what they can do for you."

NOCENTI: People always say,

"Was there sexism?"

There was kind of the opposite of sexism.

Even though there

weren't many female fans yet,

and, probably, the percentage

of the office was mostly guys,

everybody was a mentor.

On any typical day at Marvel Comic,

there was an open door policy,

any kid could come in with

his portfolio and annoy us long enough

'til somebody would pick it up and go,

"Okay. Well, here's a sample page.

Try inking that."

And then as the day went on, you'd get

the bottle of whiskey out of the drawer

and, you know, and then (BLEEP) happens.

Story ideas come up.

PRIEST: I can't express enough how much

fun these lunatics were who worked there.

Everybody was just a lunatic at Marvel.

It was completely unpolitically correct.

Yes, there were Black jokes,

but there were Polish jokes, there were

Italian jokes, there were Jewish jokes.

So I had no sense,

when I started writing Black characters,

of changing a paradigm

or making a statement.

BREVOORT: Moving into the '70s,

as there was more of an interest in

developing further superheroes of color,

I don't know how much

anybody was thinking that hard

about a lot of the choices that were made.

A lot of the writers

and artists were very young.

So, even the amount of life experience

that a number of these people had

probably colored the way

they depicted things.

They absorbed the culture

that was around them like everybody else,

and it filtered through

the work that they did.

So there are definitely instances

where people didn't present characters

as well as they could have.

You know, Luke Cage in particular,

he was intended to be, effectively,

a blaxploitation character.

Luke Cage was created

because of Shaft.

That's what led

to that blaxploitation period.

PRIEST: Marvel went through

a blaxploitation phase

with Brother VooDoo and Luke Cage,

you know, "Sweet Christmas."

TONY ISABELLA: I was very drawn

to characters of color.

And this stems

from my growing up in Cleveland,

which was a very segregated town,

and my first Black friends

were comic book fans,

and I thought it was really unfair

that there weren't

more Black characters for them.

WALKER: Luke Cage, as a child, was one of

my most favorite books at Marvel.

My cousin and I

discovered Luke Cage together

at a 7-Eleven in the '70s

when we were kids.

We read that comic until it fell apart.

DUFFY: I think it's because he was one

of the first African-American superheroes

that they didn't wanna mask him.

It's like,

they were so doing the right thing,

finally having heroes of color, it was,

like, yeah, they wanted people to see

this strong, handsome champion

of justice who was also a man of color.

If you read the Luke Cage comics,

there's nothing about Luke Cage

that is actually a Black person, right?

The way he talks, the way he acts,

there's this bizarre notion

of what "Blackness" is supposed to be.

PRIEST: A lot of artists,

when they approach Black characters,

they give them this sort of slang.

And it's not real slang.

It's like what white people

think slang is.

WALKER: A lot of times you square with,

what I call, the lack of humanity

in some of these characters

the same way you reconcile

your childhood love of a James Bond movie

and then watch it as an adult and go,

"Ooh, wait a sec. James Bond

is hugely problematic, right?"

ISABELLA: When I was writing

Luke Cage in the '70s,

I wasn't, as they say,

as woke as I am now.

I tried to tell good stories

that respected the character,

that treated him not as

something special but just a great hero.

This was a growth process for all of us.

You don't suddenly wake up

to the world around you and go,

"This is how it should be."

You work your way towards there.

PRIEST: It's rare for me to craft a story

from the perspective

of being a Black writer,

because I don't

consider myself a "Black writer."

I'm a writer. I can write anything.

I wrote Luke Cage for a long time.

Eventually I said, "Well, on demerits,

"how should this person

present themselves?"

I didn't have him using the King's speech,

but some of that stuff had to go.

JENNINGS: I think that it does start out

as this exploitative piece,

but through, like, reappropriation,

we can actually start to sample

and remix these things

and make them our own.

To go from, say,

like this kind of jive-talkin',

steel-hard skin-having character

to this really complex

father figure and leader

who resonates with

a lot of people who live in this country.

I love Luke Cage, you know?

NICOLE GEORGES:

I think identity in comics is huge.

'Cause when you're a kid,

those are the people you look up to,

'cause they represent good.

On the page, it's like,

"This person's good, this person's evil."

I think everyone deserves

to see themselves

reflected in the media they consume,

and it is crazy to think

that people would spend

so much money on entertainment

that does not at all

reflect back their body type,

their class background,

their race, their sexuality, their gender.

It's wild that people have been

entertained solely by products

that didn't reflect

any of those things back to them,

or did in like a real homogeneous way,

for years and years.

(SINGING) Rubbley-ub-dub,

Oh, how she'll get ya with her

Rubbley-ub-dub

She'll really throw ya with her

Rubbley-ub-dub,

Hear them yelling...

JENNINGS: Comics in particular,

they utilize stereotypes to tell stories.

That's one of the reasons why

you have so many problematic constructions

around race in comics because they're

generally borrowing from social norms.

For instance, at the end of the heyday

of the Golden Age of comics,

you have these really,

really horrific racial stereotypes.

A lot of the propaganda around

Asian people during the Second World War.

PAK: There was a time when Asian people

in comics were colored yellow.

They literally used yellow.

Larry Hama talks about this.

I would just say, "Hey, maybe we should

stop coloring Asian people bright yellow."

"Well, why do we do that?"

"Oh, well, we've always done that."

"Well, uh, maybe it's time

we stopped doing that." (CHUCKLES)

BREVOORT: The very first issue of

Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos,

Gabe Jones is colored Caucasian.

And he's colored Caucasian

because essentially up to that point,

there really had not been,

in comic books, a character of color.

There were no Black people

apart from Amos 'n Andy,

stereotypical, bug-eyed, big-lipped,

Stepin Fetchit kind of caricatures.

And so, the book was sent

to the printer and the color separator,

and the color separator went,

"This must be a mistake,"

colored him Caucasian like everybody else.

And Stan had to call him up

and kind of ream them out over it

and get it corrected for future issues.

And, in fact, in those early issues

and in those early years,

they don't even quite have

a skin tone that works.

Gabe Jones ends up looking more gray

and more like stone in a lot of issues

than he does

a true, rich African-American brown,

because literally they just couldn't

figure out what's the combination

of red, yellow, blue

to get a skin tone that works.

HAMA: You can yell and pound the desk

all you want.

What that type of aggression does

is it steels people against you.

It's more lasting and it has more meaning

if you become part of what it is

and change it internally.

When I went to work at Marvel on staff,

they were reprinting stories

from the 1950s,

and one of the books

was Jungle Action.

And in those books,

they were reprinting

a lot of these really racist

jungle blonde Gods and Goddesses

saving the natives stories.

(CHUCKLES) I would say to editorial,

"I can't believe Marvel

is publishing this stuff in 1973.

"What are you guys, crazy?"

And I know I must have

said something like,

"Can't you at least have an African

character be the hero?" (CHUCKLES)

They came and said,

"We're gonna put

the Black Panther into Jungle Action."

I don't think editorial

had really thought what that meant.

Since everybody in the cast was Wakandan,

it was going to be

an all-Black cast of characters.

This has never been done

in an American comic book series before.

SANDERSON: Don McGregor, his Black Panther

was a cutting-edge series at the time.

He's the one who really created

this incredibly futuristic,

super-scientific society.

The world, the civilization of Wakanda.

DOUGLAS WOLK: One thing that Marvel

did a lot that's fantastic

is they loved to play with tropes

and they loved to turn them upside down.

So the Black Panther, he's in Africa.

It's deep, dark Africa.

This unexplored place.

Trope, trope, tropety-trope.

And Wakanda is a technological paradise

and the most wealthy country in the world.

Wait a second.

This is not a trope anymore.

JENNINGS: The most interesting thing

I think about the Black Panther story

is this idea of an untouched Black space.

It's a space of power

and it's a space of celebration.

Seeing this open, technologically

advanced, beautiful society,

it brought me to tears

almost instantaneously.

DON McGREGOR: There was a resurgence

of the Ku Klux Klan at the time...

and that's how

the Panther versus the Klan came about.

T'Challa is with Monica Lynne,

who's the woman

he is with at that timeframe.

And they start talking about an uncle

she had during the Reconstruction period,

after the Civil War, in the United States.

And when the mother tells the story,

she's telling what historically happened

to her Uncle Caleb.

And in alternate pages,

we have Monica thinking of it the way,

if T'Challa existed

back in 1868 Reconstruction America.

This goes right to the heart of,

"Why do people love costume

and superheroes in comics?"

'Cause T'Challa makes it come out right.

And in the real world, Caleb gets hung.

As the books went along,

it became more and more apparent

that they did not want

an all-Black cast of characters.

They wanted

the Avengers to be brought in

to help the Black Panther out.

I said, "No, this is not that book.

"I don't want it to be a book

where the white guys come in

"and help the Black guy

'cause he can't do it.

"T'Challa can take care of it.

"He doesn't need

anybody else to be coming in there.

"And he'll take care

of the important issues."

ISABELLA: There was a time when

The Black Panther became The Black Leopard

because Marvel was afraid

that he'd be associated

with the Black Panther party.

There was a time when T'Challa

became a school teacher in America,

and that seemed to me

not quite right for an African king.

Everybody makes mistakes.

The question is

what you do from those mistakes.

Do you learn from them?

Stay quiet!

CONWAY: There was a tendency under Stan,

and whatever his strengths were,

writing strong

female characters were not among them.

He tended to treat

all of the female characters

as the lady scientist

in bad 1950s horror movies.

Beautiful, but not too bright.

A female character has to be rescued.

(SCREAMS)

WOLK: So one really interesting thing

about Marvel's history

is that at the same time

as their superhero line

was starting in the early '60s,

the other half of the line

that they were publishing

was comics about young women.

They were doing Patsy Walker

and Patsy and Hedy.

They were doing

Linda Carter, Student Nurse,

the comedy romance

medical adventures of a student nurse.

And there's a way

in which those got integrated

into the superhero stories.

SANDERSON:

The heroines tend to have lesser powers.

The Wasp got to shrink down

and sting people and fly around.

Sue Storm was sort of

like the housewife at the Fantastic Four.

Originally,

her power was basically to hide.

She turns invisible.

Male characters

were given the very physical powers,

and female characters have

these sort of point and pose powers.

So these powers where

you just stand and look nice,

and you point,

and you can do something with your mind.

The power where you can look good

while affecting those around you.

Every time that gender and sexuality

has been addressed in Marvel comics,

it's very representative

of popular thinking at the time.

And strides have been made

with every subsequent generation.

WOMAN: What do we want?

CROWD: E-R-A!

-When do we want it?

-Now!

Stan wanted me

to create a female superhero

that would have the Marvel name

in her character name,

and I brought together elements

from other books that were pre-existing,

such as Carol Danvers,

and gave her an origin story that tied her

into the Captain Marvel series

and tried to create

a feminist superheroine.

When the strip was started in 1976,

like most of the things Marvel did in '76,

it was an attempt to tap into

whatever was going on in the zeitgeist.

Women's lib was big.

We'll do a female super.

She'll be Ms. Marvel.

That will be current.

The first issue cover had a blurb like,

"This female fights back."

My goal was to write a feminist superhero.

In fact, in the first issue,

there's a moment where,

there's a girl with her mom, she says,

"I wanna be like her when I grow up."

And I thought that was

an important thing to try to create,

was a strong-willed

powerful female character

who was independent

and not the object of a romantic liaison.

The book was a feminist book,

much more heavy-handed

than anything I ever did.

She's got the Gloria Steinem glasses

and part down the middle.

And he makes her

an editor of Woman Magazine.

But the Marvel Universe heroes

are ground level heroes.

They are people who have problems

and things go poorly for them

personally, often.

That makes sense to me,

but that also makes Carol a hard fit

because Carol

is this overpowered beautiful blonde.

Like, there's a record scratch there.

Our characters are fundamentally

about who they are behind the mask, right?

But then, anything that anyone knows

about Carol Danvers is the costume.

It's the first thing they look.

It's a bathing suit

with thigh-high boots and a sash,

which I think is the most ineffective way

to beat up bad guys.

And very cold when you're flying

at really high altitudes.

But it was a different time,

and the male gaze was at the forefront.

The way a woman is drawn in a comic

where she has a super skinny waist

and huge bullet boobs.

It's like a different version

of womanhood, and femininity,

and a different version of toughness

because when women are drawn by men,

and trying to show they're tough,

they're often givin' them

male marks of toughness.

Being a woman and being tough

sometimes is different than that,

or more nuanced than that.

JEANINE SCHAEFER: It's not that we need

women to be badasses,

or that we need women

to be strong in some, uh...

socially acceptable way,

but when you have women

who aren't allowed to be flawed,

or they can only look like this,

and they can only do these things,

and they can't make bad choices,

that's boring. You know?

That's nobody's favorite character.

CHRIS CLAREMONT: My mom, when she was

in college, ended up joining the RAF

because she wanted to be a fighter pilot.

They wouldn't let her be one

because women

aren't allowed to fly Spitfires.

So she ended up serving on a radar station

on the south coast of Britain in 1940,

which was an extremely adventurous time

to be in that place, doing that job.

So I figure if I know

people who do this for real,

why can't I put their equivalent on paper?

Why should women in comics

just be girlfriends?

Why can't there be boyfriends?

Why can't you create

idiosyncratic individuals

and then put them through hell?

No one else was doing it, I figured,

"The heck?

I'll take a shot and see what happens."

BREVOORT: It's what we think of as

The All-New, All-Different X-Men

that came in around 1975.

They took a group of characters

who originally

were five white American kids

and replaced them

with an international team.

IVAN VELEZ JR.: When I became a teenager,

the Uncanny X-Men came out

and something just took it

to another level for us.

Maybe it was the time, maybe it was

coming off of the civil rights era

but it just seemed like brown skin

and not even brown skin,

like that Black skin,

and their attempts to do Asian skin,

which was still too yellow for my taste,

but it was just

like a beautiful thing just to see.

The X-Men

of the '70s is totally fascinating,

because it's such an aggressive attempt

at the idea

of a representational diversity.

If we look at the X-Men of the early '60s,

they were supposed to be different

than ordinary humans

by virtue of being mutants,

but they were essentially a group

of white, privileged teenage kids.

And, so, in many ways,

it didn't live up to its own promise.

The X-Men of the 1970s reinvigorates

the imagined category of the mutant,

and it says,

"What if there were lots of mutants,

"but they all

were radically different from each other?"

And then they had to create common cause.

CLAREMONT: The whole point for me

of the X-Men has been,

they are the outsiders,

summed up by the phrase,

"Serve and protect

the world that hates them."

And the idea was

that they can never get away from that.

BREVOORT: The X-Men were

the first superheroes who were the same,

whether they were in the costumes or not.

With Wolverine,

it didn't matter whether he was wearing

a plaid shirt and a cowboy hat

or the yellow and blue superhero outfit,

he was the same dude and he reacted

to people exactly the same way.

There wasn't any artifice

of not being the person that you were.

CLAREMONT: The idea of wearing masks,

it just didn't fit.

If I was a normal kid

and I woke up on my 13th birthday

and I'd turned into Nightcrawler,

I'd be pissed.

But if I'm born this way,

if this is what I look like

coming out of the box,

what kind of a person am I?

And then I thought,

"Okay. I might as well make the best of it

"because I can cling to walls,

I can teleport,

"I have a tail that's articulate.

"I'm cool. I am just so cool."

If you're that far

on the outskirts of norm,

it's either an asset or it's a liability,

and why would you want it

to be a liability?

Embrace it and see where it leads.

NOCENTI:

Chris was pretty ahead of the curve

with the diversity

and the female empowerment,

like no one else was.

When you really look back on it,

the female characters

have the best storylines in Chris' X-Men.

He was also doing the early versions

of having people play around

with switching genders

like you have all the time now.

And I remember at one point he wanted

somebody to brainwash Professor Xavier

and have him in a dress with heels,

and I was like, "Chris, that's too far."

FAWAZ: What is so fascinating

about the X-Men in this period,

is that it is very much invested

in the cultures of women's

and gay liberation in the '70s,

even though the series would never mention

any of those terms

in the actual comic book.

Gay liberation,

that social movement is saying,

"We wanna be

able to perform our identities

"visually in the way we dress,

the way we dance,

"in the way we make love,"

and that comic book said what does it look

like to transform those ideals

into the way

that mutants look on the page?

The characters look

like they're dressed in drag,

their costumes

are extraordinarily flamboyant,

and there are all of these epic scenes

where they go off into space

and they really look like

they're a menagerie of disco divas.

Seeing that joy, it really spoke to me.

Like, "Oh, you can revel in this thing

that makes you different."

The question is just, "Who am I?

Who am I in the world?

"Who am I to the people around me?

Who am I to myself?"

So, sure, the superpowers were fun

'cause you've got big spectacles

and people flying through space

and punching each other.

But really it was all dressing

for the really intimate discovery

of who you were

and who the people around you were.

If you found the X-Men, you suddenly found

a community of people who knew you.

I was raised in the Bronx

and it was a rough time.

Comics were a great place to hide,

especially if you have stuff

to hide about yourself.

So, the queer part of me

always loved the isolation,

and loved the parallels

between being a gay youth

and being a X-Man.

For the first time,

we felt like we were part of the story,

and that was really important

because before that it was like nothing.

CROWD: I turn my back on AIDS.

I turn my back on AIDS.

VELEZ: There was a movement going on

because of the AIDS crisis,

I think Marvel missed an opportunity

to have gay characters there.

FAWAZ: There are different ways

of representing

the experience of human beings.

One way that comics

have been really successful at,

is to produce

elaborate fictional metaphors.

So, you say being a mutant is like being

a racial minority in the United States.

Or you say being a mutant

is like being gay.

At the same time, there comes a point

in which real people say,

"I need to see myself in these texts.

"I can't always be a fictional metaphor

because I'm a living human."

So another way of representing

the lived experience of human beings

is to actually just represent people.

I mean, they tried. They really did try.

They had that thing

when Northstar came out.

ALLAN HEINBERG: Northstar was

the first out gay Marvel character

and huge for the gay community

in terms of representation.

But the focus was never on his

personal life or his relationship life.

It was always sort of a "I'm gay"

and that was it.

BREVOORT: But the writer of the series

wanted him to go through a journey

where he got AIDS.

And he started that story

and Marvel got skittish about it.

(CHUCKLES) And so that story

got changed in the telling,

and instead

it became this really bizarre thing

where it was actually

that Northstar was half...

And I swear this is true. Half fairy.

It was nobody's intention,

but it's a really bad set of comics.

PAK: If the only characters you see

are the stereotypes,

that's when they become stereotypes.

That's almost the definition of it.

If that's the only image you see

of an entire group of people,

then that's a little bogus.

But you let a character live and breathe

in multiple dimensions, it's a person.

And it's not a stand in for a community.

At the end of the day,

what creators must do

is to simply pay attention

to the world more closely.

To introduce characters

who come from different walks of life,

and then take their own creative license

to take it somewhere else.

So ultimately, the purpose of the creator

is to take what we already know

about the world,

which is that it is diverse,

and to represent it to us

in new and exciting ways.

It's like run 'em through the mill.

Run 'em through the mill

that we run every Marvel character through

no matter who they are.

Go from hero to villain,

die, get resurrected,

get seriously injured,

come back from the injury,

join the Avengers,

get thrown out of the Avengers.

Anything and everything

that's happened to Spider-Man,

Captain America, or Iron Man

over these years,

I want to happen to that character.

Because what it means then,

is that writers

want to write that character,

artists want to draw that character,

and that character now is included

into the fabric of the Marvel Universe.

A lot of people wanna say it's diversity.

I wanna say it's inclusion.

BENDIS: We were sitting around

at lunch. We weren't having a meeting.

We're sitting, talking

about what we'd do differently

with certain things we've done,

and with Ultimate Spider-Man,

it was working fine. It worked great.

It was a hit book for many years.

And we were talking about

if you unpack the origin of Spider-Man,

a New York kid, and he lives

with his aunt, he's a science nerd,

there's really nothing there

that says Caucasian.

There's a lot of things there that say,

just from location

and other things that he may be a kid

with a different kind of background.

And then, once that idea is in your head,

it's hard to let go of it.

Like, if we did this again,

we would have made this kid a kid of color

and developed a completely new voice.

And we were like, "Yeah."

I'm like, "Hmm. Why don't we do that?"

Peter Parker passed away

in a very heroic way

of saving Aunt May's life in the way

he couldn't save Uncle Ben's,

but he didn't know that another young man

had also been bitten by a spider

and his name is Miles Morales.

As everyone dealt

with the shocking death of Spider-Man,

Miles pulls off his mask

just to get some air

and that's when we see who he is.

George Lucas said, the easiest thing

a writer could do is kill a puppy

'cause everyone's gonna go, "Oh!"

So by killing Peter Parker,

I had killed the puppy.

That wasn't a good enough story.

But when it became that Peter Parker dying

inspired Miles

the way Uncle Ben inspired Peter,

I knew this story

had elevated beyond dead puppies.

Miles was looking at the theme

of "With great power

comes great responsibility"

from a completely different point of view

than the way Peter Parker did.

The idea of these roles

being taken over by other characters

is something we've seen before.

The difference in this round

of the stories that we're seeing,

it is more a cast that reflects

the world that we actually live in.

So, with Carol, I go back to

what is at the center of her identity?

Where does her pain come from?

How can I make her

not just aspirational but relatable?

She has to (BLEEP) up.

She has to fall down,

she has to get back up,

she has to have her ass handed to her.

So I go back, I read as much as I can

about her biography,

and I find that her father who she loves

and adores has two boys and a girl,

and he can't afford to send everybody

to school, and he's gonna send the boys.

So Carol enlists in the Air Force

to pay for her education

and spends the rest of her life

trying to prove to her father

that she is just as good as the boys.

And that is a thing

that is human and relatable.

And even though she's beautiful,

and even though she's powerful,

like, she has a very real,

very human pain,

and that's how

you make a character you can root for.

When I started writing Black Panther,

I said I'm gonna make the comic book

equivalent of a Public Enemy record.

When they make Bring the Noise,

when they make Party for Your Right

to Fight, It Takes a Nation of Millions,

they're just like, "This is for us

"and our friends,

and we're gonna super satisfy us."

When Hurricane Katrina happened

and it's this incredible tragedy

in a very Black city,

I thought, "Here's a situation

"where we could do a test run

of an idea I really wanted to do

"which is Black Avengers."

Let's get Black Panther,

Luke Cage, Blade, Photon,

put together basically, a Black super team

to come solve this problem.

It's the wish fulfillment

that I've been wanting to see

my whole life

and that's what happened.

PAK: I remember thinking about

Marvel Universe

and realizing that there were

very few Asian American characters

and very few, in particular,

young Asian American male characters,

and I was like,

"That's a niche I'd like to fill."

And, so, Amadeus Cho, this brilliant kid,

he has a close encounter with The Hulk.

He's like, "Okay. Bruce,

you've had enough tragedy in your life.

"I'm gonna cure you of being The Hulk,

"since I'm a cocky kid

who knows everything,

"I'll take the power of The Hulk.

"I'm gonna be the best Hulk.

"The Totally Awesome Hulk."

And that was the book,

The Totally Awesome Hulk.

I was actually in middle school.

I was around 12 years old

when I realized

that people had a perception

of Muslims

that was antagonistic or misunderstood.

Marvel really welcomed me

and encouraged me to use my voice

to tell a different kind of Marvel story.

Kamala Khan, the all new Ms. Marvel,

she is a young, newly discovered inhuman.

She's South Asian,

a Muslim girl from Jersey City,

and Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers happens

to be her most favorite superhero ever.

She is tall, she's blonde,

she has blue eyes,

she's everything that Kamala Khan is not.

First thing that happens

when she gets her powers

is that her body morphs

and she subconsciously decides

that she wants to look like Carol Danvers.

So, her kind of finding

a way back to herself

and her sense of balance within her power

is the beginning of her journey.

From a purely thematic point of view,

the idea of the masked superhero,

the person who is afraid

to reveal themselves,

that doesn't have

as much power as it once did.

I think we're actually seeing a broadening

of acceptance of differences,

and of uniqueness of each individual,

and under those circumstances,

you don't need a dual identity.

You can be yourself.

You don't need to hide who you are.

AMANAT: When we look at Captain America,

we look at Thor,

we look at these big name characters,

we look at them

through those ideals that they represent.

These ideals

can really be encompassed by anybody.

The metaphor of putting on a mask,

and taking off your mask,

and trying to figure out if you're

a superhero or just a regular person.

You can be both. And we should be both.

We have to live in that space in between,

so that's really

where our power comes from,

and I think that's what makes

the Marvel Universe

all the more interesting.

We got Captain Marvel #6, legacy 140.

It's The War of Realms tie-in.

JENKINS: So what happens next,

none of us know.

I think, though,

the possibility is really exciting

as we try to find our way through

a demographic transition,

where, by the end of the next decade,

America will be

a majority minority culture.

And how do we live in that world?

How do we live with each other, I think,

is shaped by the stories we consume.

I always tell fans of these comic books,

a lot of us think that these heroes,

and these characters,

and these villains was made for you.

I said, "No, they're made

because you exist, they exist."

QUESADA: The real world is our canvas.

If we stop looking out our window

and noticing what the real world is doing,

then inevitably our books fail,

and our stories fail.

HUDLIN: I don't think comics

have an obligation for representation.

I just think you're a damn fool

if you don't have representation

as a piece of business,

as a piece of storytelling.

There's every reason to do it.

COWAN: It has potential

of being pretty wonderful

what's happened to Black Panther,

and Hollywood's awareness of inclusion

and what diversity means.

I look at it in wonderment

and amazement and I'm like,

"Oh, this is great."

The other half of me

looks at it with a squinty eye.

Because I've been through this before.

And the door shut

almost as fast as it had opened up.

But no matter what,

we'll still do what we do.

We'll still keep doing

these kinda characters

and telling these kinda stories,

because it's too important not to.

AMANAT: With comic book stories in general

and superhero stories specifically,

there is something so aspirational

and amazing about what the human spirit is

and what it can become,

it's that it encourages us

to look within ourselves

and find what is great.

We'll dig through all that grit

and that uncertainty,

and find what it is that makes us unique,

and what it is that makes us powerful,

and bring that to the forefront.

In a lot of these superhero stories,

the aspiration is the hero. You know?

And what always spoke to me about Marvel

was that the aspiration was the human.

And that's what's really exciting to me,

where we are right now.

Who are you?

Who do you want yourself to be?

NARRATOR: Open bulletins,

Stan's Soapbox, February, 1980.

"Bear with me, gang.

It's philosophy time again!

"Human nature doesn't change.

It's the environment.

"What's happened to us is,

the world has been wildly changing,

"producing new sets of rules

each time you blink your eye.

"None of us is different from each other.

"We all want

essentially the same things out of life.

"A measure of security, some fun,

some romance, friendship,

"and respect of our contemporaries.

"That goes for Indians, Chinese, Russians,

"Jews, Arabs, Catholics, Protestants,

"Blacks, Browns, whites,

and green-skinned Hulks.

"So why don't we all stop wasting time

hating the other guys?

"Just look in the mirror, mister.

That other guy is you.

"Excelsior! Stan."