Where Monsters Dwell #12

As the media peddles furiously to convince us that Russia has plans to make us a nation of Manchurian Candidates, it is helpful to consider a simpler time, the first Cold War.

By happenstance -- to see how old newsprint paper that the interior pages of comic books were printed on scanned, I reached into my closet and arbitrarily grabbed a handful of comics -- I started working my way through old issues of Where Monsters Dwell.

Where Monsters Dwell was a Marvel title from the dawn of the Bronze Age of Comic Books (1970 to the mid-1980s) that reprinted Silver Age (1955 to 1970) science fiction and horror. While not having a quote from Stan Lee or Roy Thomas at hand to explain why Marvel did this, my guess is that the company was expanding and it had a lot of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko material from the period directly preceding its blastoff as a superhero factory of the 1960s. So why not introduce it to a new generation of readers (like me) who missed it the first go-round a decade earlier?

What my intermittent study of Where Monsters Dwell has revealed is that Marvel's Silver Age monster stories were about the Cold War. The space aliens and evil robots from another world like Orogo! were stand-ins for the specter of nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union. The usual story has the alien appear, promise global domination, crush some buildings before it is defeated by the pluck and ingenuity of a boy; in Orogo's case, a blind old man.

"Orogo! The Nightmare from Outer Space!," reprinted in Where Monsters Dwell #12 (November 1971), was originally published in Journey into Mystery #57 with a cover date of March 1960, a little more than a year before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Stan Lee penned the story and Don Heck supplied the art. If you want to get the flavor of the guileless rootedness and materially secure America of the 1960s, look at Don Heck's work.

 

If you're unconvinced that these stories of aliens and robots are metaphors for the Cold War, "The Pretender!" should change your mind. Originally appearing in Tales to Astonish #31 (May 1962), "The Pretender!," a filler story penciled by Paul Reinman, posits that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is in fact an alien space invader. (The story, whose author is not credited, was probably written after the alleged "shoe-banging incident" at the United Nations in the fall of 1960.)

Marvel became the top comic-book publisher in the 1960s by taking these Silver Age monsters and through a neat Kirby-Lee alchemy making them heroes. What are the Fantastic Four if not a exemplary bourgeois family of space monsters returned to Earth? What is Spider-Man if not a teenage laboratory abomination? We're not talking about Barry Allen here. We're talking about characters who seemed much more real than Batman and Superman. How Lee, Kirby and Ditko did this, I'm saying, is by taking all that ambient fear of the Cold War and putting it inside their heroes. 

The monsters became the heroes, but the monsters were merely stand-ins for the Cold War Soviet enemy. In other words, the whole Marvel superhero revolution of the 1960s was based on the conversion of the fear of an existential foe into a new more human heroism.

It's no wonder now that Marvel is experiencing trouble it has tried to go back to the Monsters Unleashed formula. The political parties in the United States are attempting the same sort of reboot with Cold War 2.0. 

But that era of Silver Age social conformity can't be Jiffy-Popped from on high. That cohesion is an organic thing. And the Marvel heroes of the 1960s played a big part in its undoing.

Now in the "Modern Age" Hollywood is dependent on Postmodern comic-book heroes. The lines are crossed. The cookies have crumbled. The New Cold War won't boot. It might work for partisan New Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans, but a cultural revolution it is not.