The HistoryMakers Cinematic Universe

When I was sick last week with Covid-19, I spent a lot of time thinking about Marvel movies and watching them, as well as buying some new comics online, because I was really anxious and didn’t feel up to doing much work! So, that was my excuse to research superheroes in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive this week. Hence the title of this week’s blog post, which I will not be apologizing for.

Now, I don’t mean “superheroes” in the abstract, laudatory way of, “Golly, so-and-so did so much in their life! They were a real superhero!” No, I mean, like literal comic book characters. Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Captain America, all those blokes. Of the current list of highest-grossing films of all time, four of the top ten are superhero movies. So, it’s obvious that these are very popular franchises and characters—and I wanted to see what the archive had to say about some of them.

I feel as if I can’t start this post any other way other than describing Robert Stull, a comic book artist by trade who goes into detail about his career and his opinions on superheroes in his interview with The HistoryMakers. Stull, who was interviewed here in Boston in 2005, has worked on comics featuring a number of the most famous comic book characters in world history, including Spider-Man (my personal favorite), Iron Man, and the X-Men. I feel as if most of what he talks about gets pretty specific about the characters and isn’t really well-suited to being quoted in a blog post, but his interview is definitely worth checking out!

Beyond Stull, many, many HistoryMakers remarked with deep nostalgia that comic books and superheroes had had profound impacts on them when they were younger. Here are some of the highlights I found in my research.

I thought Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, one of the founding members of the group Run DMC, had a very insightful quote in his interview about how comic books affected his education—and I think I had a similar relationship with comics when I was a younger student. In his interview, it was interesting to see a reference to the popular notion among some parents in the 20th century that comics (like race-mixing, pinball, and jazz) were making kids misbehave and causing their brains to rot.

“'Cause look, I'm into comic books so this real information was in my comic books 'cause I think what made me a good student now that I look back on it and you know coming into the late '60s [1960s], early '70s [1970s] all, every--now when I think about it I remember being a kid hearing TV shows and psychologists and doctors and educators say comic books ain't good, don't let the kids read comic books. I, I remember that. I was like why it's the best thing ever. But because I was reading comic books, because I was reading everyday it made school that much easier but also deeper than that, in school you learn about World War II [WWII] but Captain America took me there. When I'm reading Captain Amer- Red Skull took me there like I'm, I'm really there. My--you, you--I'm in World War II. In school you learn about the planets, it's the earth, moon, sun and stars and the rings around Saturn. Silver Surfer took me there you know what I'm saying and that's now when I speak to kids I said if anybody ever tells you, you into that corny make believe stuff, you jump up on your desk in the middle of the class and you beat your chest like King Kong and says you goddamn right I'm into this make believe stuff because think about that word; make believe, make believe, make believe, make them believe. Make--it becomes real. But I had no idea what those comic books along with that education was setting me up to be.”

James Causey, a newspaper reporter, spoke about how comic books got him interested in reading and even helped improve his vocabulary.

Edward Tunstel, a mechanical engineer and inventor who’s worked for NASA in the development of the Mars Pathfinder (among other projects), pointed directly toward Marvel Comics’s Iron Man as a character who influenced his career path:

I was, my head was in comic books quite a bit. And some of the characters in those comic books, most of whom, most which they've made modern day movies about now, and, in particular, Iron Man was something that really, really got me going. I thought that I could grow up to be this guy, Tony Stark. You know, I had, I had images of--when I imagined who I would become, without being influenced by my actual career in any sense, one thing that I thought I wanted to become was a wealthy guy, living in a penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan [New York] and being able to do the types of things that this guy Ton Starks could do. Now, I didn't really have aspirations to go out and make a suit, and, you know, fly around doing heroic things. But it was the connection to technology that this guy, Tony Stark, seemed to have. And Iron Man was just one instantiation of his ingenuity, if you will. But I wanted to have that sort of, be in a situation where I had sufficient wealth to do what I wanted to do. And part of what I would ever wanna do would probably be creating things on my own that were really cool and interesting.

Lastly, it was also interesting to watch a little bit of the interview with actress Judy Pace-Flood, who had some minor roles on the Batman television series starring Adam West in the 1960s.

Welp, I think that about does it for this week’s blog post. As The HistoryMakers project continues and younger people are interviewed, I wonder what (if anything) they’ll have to say about the superhero movies that have gained such a following in the early 21st century, like those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.