Make Ours Marvel
Make Ours Marvel
Media Convergence and a Comics Universe
The creation of the Fantastic Four effectively launched the Marvel Comics brand in 1961. Within ten years, the introduction (or reintroduction) of characters such as Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, and the X-Men catapulted Marvel past its primary rival, DC Comics, for domination of the comic book market. Since the 2000s, the company’s iconic characters have leaped from page to screens with the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which includes everything from live-action film franchises of Iron Man and the Avengers to television and streaming media, including the critically acclaimed Netflix series Daredevil and Jessica Jones. Marvel, now owned by Disney, has clearly found the key to transmedia success.
Make Ours Marvel traces the rise of the Marvel brand and its transformation into a transmedia empire over the past fifty years. A dozen original essays range across topics such as how Marvel expanded the notion of an all-star team book with The Avengers, which provided a roadmap for the later films, to the company’s attempts to create lasting female characters and readerships, to its regular endeavors to reinvigorate its brand while still maintaining the stability that fans crave. Demonstrating that the secret to Marvel’s success comes from adeptly crossing media boundaries while inviting its audience to participate in creating Marvel’s narrative universe, this book shows why the company and its characters will continue to influence storytelling and transmedia empire building for the foreseeable future.
Well-written. . . .[A]nd packed with information about the workings of the Marvel Universe. There is much to ponder and learn here.
Make Ours Marvel is a well-timed anthology that fairly and critically examines Marvel’s long history as one of the great myth-makers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The contributors [to Make Ours Marvel]...lay the groundwork for the future study of Marvel Entertainment, a great achievement unto itself. The audience for this book may be wide considering the popularity of the subject matter, but more specifically it is highly recommended to those scholars invested in studying Marvel Entertainment. This strong collection of essays on transmedia study is undoubtedly made for those studying Marvel Entertainment across its permutations in comics, film, TV, and more.
In an age of Marvel dominance in popular culture, there are almost no academic books about the comics brand. This book is a significant, and needed, contribution to the field, in locating Marvel—and its tumultuous universe and corporate history—at the center of global popular culture. To the book’s strength, it is not a ‘film studies’ or ‘comics studies’ anthology, but both, and much more.
Introduction. Excelsior! Or, Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Matt Yockey
Chapter 1. Reforming the “Justice” System: Marvel’s Avengers and the Transformation of the All-Star Team Book, by Mark Minett and Bradley Schauer
Chapter 2. Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the “Bounds of Difference” in Superhero Comics, by Henry Jenkins
Chapter 3. “This Female Fights Back!”: A Feminist History of Marvel Comics, by Anna F. Peppard
Chapter 4. “Share Your Universe”: Generation, Gender, and the Future of Marvel Publishing, by Derek Johnson
Chapter 5. Breaking Brand: From NuMarvel to MarvelNOW! Marvel Comics in the Age of Media Convergence, by Deron Overpeck
Chapter 6. Marvel and the Form of Motion Comics, by Darren Wershler and Kalervo A. Sinervo
Chapter 7. Transmedia Storytelling in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” and the Logics of Convergence-Era Popular Seriality, by Felix Brinker
Chapter 8. The Marvel One-Shots and Transmedia Storytelling, by Michael Graves
Chapter 9. Spinning Webs: Constructing Authors, Genre, and Fans in the Spider-Man Film Franchise, by James N. Gilmore
Chapter 10. Playing Peter Parker: Spider-Man and Superhero Film Performance, by Aaron Taylor
Chapter 11. Spotting Stan: The Fun and Function of Stan Lee’s Cameos in the Marvel Universe(s), by Dru Jeffries
Chapter 12. Schrödinger’s Cape: The Quantum Seriality of the Marvel Multiverse, by William Proctor
Notes on Contributors
Index
