Yeah, this is definitely a book review where the author has not quite 'crystallized' the core insight or idea that they are circling around. You can tell in part from the title - often with these things, once you realize the title, 'the rest writes itself'. But a mundane description like 'Marvel Silver Age Comics' is sometimes an admission that you still don't know what you are saying, and you only know what you are saying it about. They should've waited another year or two before trying, I suspect.
---
But if I may try to extract the latent thesis I see here in OP's essay, it would go something like this:
"Marvel's Silver Age of Comics: Humanizing Mythology", by Anonymous.
"Art progresses. Even the idea of having more than one actor in a play had to be invented. But we take these for granted because when we look back, we can't see how narrow the original concept of 'a play' was.
This is true of Marvel-Comics-style comics too. What makes Marvel Marvel is not any specific character or plot gimmick; what makes it is the innovation of taking classic mythological patterns like gods or superhuman warriors, who fight and feud and interact in a rich tapestry of stories (separate from ordinary people), and making these superheroes ordinary people as well, that its readers could identify with, fusing the psychological realism of novels with the archetypal resonance of mythology, to get something *new*. Something that was neither Archie Bunker nor Batman.
No one at Marvel Comics understood this; the key characters weren't even supposed to be 'heroes' but just science fiction style throwaways. They couldn't know they were inventing Marvel comics. But contractual limitation by limitation, sale by sale, gimmick by gimmick, retcon by retcon, contemporary topic by topic, Stan Lee & the Marvel artists backed their way into their great discovery: that in comics, one could create characters like Peter Parker could be both Spiderman *and* a pimply-faced teen who screwed up terribly once & can't forgive himself, and create an entire mythology of such characters, to play in endlessly.
DC Comics never quite figured this out, and instead continued to write 'mythology' like Batman (godlings in the cloak of mortality enacting tragedies or salvations), alienating the reader by going to wells that you can't go to every day; the MCU throve while it could use characters like Downey's Ironman, and balance both the humanity and the mythology, but lost its poise by the end for [reasons] and burned out viewers who got tired of the ever-escalating mythological epics.
This formula is now so familiar we can't even see the water in which we swim, but it gets easier if you go back to see the most flawed versions, and how different the original superheroes like Superman were from the ones Marvel incrementally introduced and refined.
I don't particularly advise doing so, however, because the newer versions really are better, now that people better understand what they are trying to do with this new innovation. If you really want to read the originals, at least the tablet app now makes it relatively easy now (compared to the crazy things we had to do back then like buy decades of used comics). But my advice: read the newer _Spiderman_ instead."
I would support this, but only if we take it to the obvious conclusion, and have a contest for best review of a review of a book review. your clear and concise analysis of gwern’s review of the review (that “it was good”) would certainly be in the running.
As the winner last year, can I say that I’d LOVE to see this? To write mine, I did a deep study of all the previous finalists, and realized there's a bunch of patterns that repeat in the most successful — I think it would be a boon to our community’s rhetorical abilities to argue out what those are, so as to better emulate them.
I’ll add that while I agree that this particular review was weak on enunciating its thesis, there are theses aplenty in it (as Gwern unearthed), and interesting ones at that! And I particularly enjoyed the use of comic book covers to illustrate points.
I second this - the review didn’t choose a single argument, instead it pointed out a bunch of interesting aspects of marvel comic books and helped me understand the historical context for their importance.
Frankly, this was one of my favorite book reviews!
This is a good take. I'd appreciate some more parallels to the original homeric fanfic which dominates storytelling for so long and which in many ways the MCU is just the latest installment. Heroes with fatal flaws or secret shame or whatever is the oldest fanfic in the world.
>Heroes with fatal flaws or secret shame or whatever is the oldest fanfic in the world.
Yup. If this was an innovation in comics, I'd count it as _transmitting_ a millennia-old technique from poetry and literature into a new medium, not as _inventing_ it.
Orthogonal to that, I, personally, am ambivalent about introducing huge numbers of interacting characters. If someone wants to illuminate "the human condition" (with some variations), for the 10,000th time, fine. I tend to be more interested in puzzle stories (e.g. Larry Niven's "Neutron Star"), which focus on a central event with some unexpected consequence due to it.
It's frustrating cause one can kinda-sorta get the sense that something like this is what the review "intended" to be, but there's too many gaps and those assertions need to be filled out with more than tediously enumerated (I guess that's similar to the Bible!) names and dates and bibliographic references. The stronger polished version of this review probably *would* have been quite interesting to read. Alas, one must vote on the review that actually is, not the one that ought to be.
He has wonderful examples of how *hard* it was to invent 'the detective story', and how many detectives manqué there were before the trope-definers like Sherlock Holmes. For example, in one story (https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2005-moretti-graphsmapstrees-3-trees.pdf#page=6), the detective manages to infer from 'clues' which drink was poisoned... and he then *drinks it*. (Now there's something in desperate need of a retcon from Stan Lee - "NARRATOR: He knew the FATAL CHALICE was POISONED, and **drank it anyway**! Trusting in his training in *Shangri-la* to RESIST ALL POISONS known to mankind, and **sure** that this 'mistake' would *flush out a vaunting villain*, secure in his triumph --- only to be UNDONE BY HIS OWN WORDS!!!")
And think of all the mess and discomfort people went through before peanut butter sandwiches were invented! Many lives ruined by breadwiches, toast with a thick layer of pb&j on each side.
That you could put the peanut butter on just one side of each piece of bread, and not have to wash your hands after eating the sandwich each time, may strike us as absurdly obvious - but they just didn't know.
Heartless brute! Some of those people never recovered from their breadwich trauma. Decades later they were still trying to get rid of a greasy sticky hand feeling, and wailing that "all the perfumes in the world cannot wash the pbj from these little hands!" Plus if any of their descendants are on here you triggered them.
I'm convinced half the benefit of therapy is stuff like "y'all should really label your shelves", but at personal level. Just have somebody a bit more level headed, with more experience and looking from outside.
If only I could secure accreditation for my rock with letters painted on the side spelling "And if that thing you're worried about does come to pass, what do you think would happen next?"
That sounds reasonable. Many Thanks! Also, sometimes problems can turn out to be simple if one happens to have the proper tool - the equivalent of "look at this in polar coordinates".
from one of Woody Allen's lesser-known pieces of historical research:
"1741: Living in the country on a small inheritance, [the Earl of Sandwich] works day and night, often skimping on meals to save money for food. His first completed work — a slice of bread, a slice of bread on top of that, and a slice of turkey on top of both — fails miserably. Bitterly disappointed, he returns to his studio and begins again.
1745: After four years of frenzied labor, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great and encourages him. Heartened by the philosopher’s friendship, he returns to work with renewed vigor."
I looked up the story in the link and it's entitled "A Race with the Sun" by L.T. Meade and Clifford Halifax.
The main character is not a detective, but an inventor, and has been invited to (of course) the lonesome out-of-the-way estate by two others in order to (he thinks) sign a contract about research they have all been independently conducting; he has information they need, they have information he needs.
The 'clue' about the third cup of coffee is not there because he suspects foul play and is trying to investigate a possible conspiracy; he is there in all good faith and doesn't (despite heavy hints in the story) suspect any foul play at all. So the clue is there for us, the readers, to heighten the tension and alert us to the fact that Something Fishy Is Going On. It's only in hindsight that the narrator/main character realises that something was up with that third cup.
It's melodramatic, in other words, rather than detection: it's like having your hero or heroine in a serial tied to the railroad tracks - oh no, how will they get out of it for the next instalment? Spoiler here: the "how will he get out of it?" in this story is that he has been drugged, tied up, and strapped to a balloon with a bomb beneath it which will be detonated when the sun rises, hence the title.
So I have to disagree that this is meant as an example of a *detective* story; it's good old-fashioned melodrama:
We have taken down these stories from time to time as our friend. Paul Gilchrist, has related them to us. He is a man whose life study has been science in its most interesting forms—he is also a keen observer of human nature and a noted traveller. He has an unbounded sympathy for his kind, and it has been his lot to be consulted on many occasions by all sorts and conditions of men."
L.T. Meade was a female writer and she wrote scores of books, sometimes with co-authors (as with Halifax above):
"Despite her wide contributions to genre literature, Irish author L. T. Meade is now remembered, if at all, for her girls’ school stories. However, in 1898 the Strand Magazine, famous for its fictions of crime, detection, and the uncanny, proclaimed Meade one of its most popular writers for her contributions to its signature fare. Her stories, widely published in popular fin de siècle magazines, included classic tales of the supernatural, but her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives, criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder, mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity."
There are collections of short stories by Hugh Greene entitled "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes", which are anthologies of detective stories written around the same time. Some of them were made into a television series in the 70s:
Yeah, this is definitely a book review where the author has not quite 'crystallized' the core insight or idea that they are circling around. You can tell in part from the title - often with these things, once you realize the title, 'the rest writes itself'. But a mundane description like 'Marvel Silver Age Comics' is sometimes an admission that you still don't know what you are saying, and you only know what you are saying it about. They should've waited another year or two before trying, I suspect.
---
But if I may try to extract the latent thesis I see here in OP's essay, it would go something like this:
"Marvel's Silver Age of Comics: Humanizing Mythology", by Anonymous.
"Art progresses. Even the idea of having more than one actor in a play had to be invented. But we take these for granted because when we look back, we can't see how narrow the original concept of 'a play' was.
This is true of Marvel-Comics-style comics too. What makes Marvel Marvel is not any specific character or plot gimmick; what makes it is the innovation of taking classic mythological patterns like gods or superhuman warriors, who fight and feud and interact in a rich tapestry of stories (separate from ordinary people), and making these superheroes ordinary people as well, that its readers could identify with, fusing the psychological realism of novels with the archetypal resonance of mythology, to get something *new*. Something that was neither Archie Bunker nor Batman.
No one at Marvel Comics understood this; the key characters weren't even supposed to be 'heroes' but just science fiction style throwaways. They couldn't know they were inventing Marvel comics. But contractual limitation by limitation, sale by sale, gimmick by gimmick, retcon by retcon, contemporary topic by topic, Stan Lee & the Marvel artists backed their way into their great discovery: that in comics, one could create characters like Peter Parker could be both Spiderman *and* a pimply-faced teen who screwed up terribly once & can't forgive himself, and create an entire mythology of such characters, to play in endlessly.
DC Comics never quite figured this out, and instead continued to write 'mythology' like Batman (godlings in the cloak of mortality enacting tragedies or salvations), alienating the reader by going to wells that you can't go to every day; the MCU throve while it could use characters like Downey's Ironman, and balance both the humanity and the mythology, but lost its poise by the end for [reasons] and burned out viewers who got tired of the ever-escalating mythological epics.
This formula is now so familiar we can't even see the water in which we swim, but it gets easier if you go back to see the most flawed versions, and how different the original superheroes like Superman were from the ones Marvel incrementally introduced and refined.
I don't particularly advise doing so, however, because the newer versions really are better, now that people better understand what they are trying to do with this new innovation. If you really want to read the originals, at least the tablet app now makes it relatively easy now (compared to the crazy things we had to do back then like buy decades of used comics). But my advice: read the newer _Spiderman_ instead."
Is there a competition for best review of book reviews? This gets my vote.
I would support this, but only if we take it to the obvious conclusion, and have a contest for best review of a review of a book review. your clear and concise analysis of gwern’s review of the review (that “it was good”) would certainly be in the running.
Good.
As the winner last year, can I say that I’d LOVE to see this? To write mine, I did a deep study of all the previous finalists, and realized there's a bunch of patterns that repeat in the most successful — I think it would be a boon to our community’s rhetorical abilities to argue out what those are, so as to better emulate them.
I’ll add that while I agree that this particular review was weak on enunciating its thesis, there are theses aplenty in it (as Gwern unearthed), and interesting ones at that! And I particularly enjoyed the use of comic book covers to illustrate points.
EA but for book reviews
I second this - the review didn’t choose a single argument, instead it pointed out a bunch of interesting aspects of marvel comic books and helped me understand the historical context for their importance.
Frankly, this was one of my favorite book reviews!
Did you write anywhere about the patterns you noticed? I'd find it interesting to read.
This is a good take. I'd appreciate some more parallels to the original homeric fanfic which dominates storytelling for so long and which in many ways the MCU is just the latest installment. Heroes with fatal flaws or secret shame or whatever is the oldest fanfic in the world.
>Heroes with fatal flaws or secret shame or whatever is the oldest fanfic in the world.
Yup. If this was an innovation in comics, I'd count it as _transmitting_ a millennia-old technique from poetry and literature into a new medium, not as _inventing_ it.
Orthogonal to that, I, personally, am ambivalent about introducing huge numbers of interacting characters. If someone wants to illuminate "the human condition" (with some variations), for the 10,000th time, fine. I tend to be more interested in puzzle stories (e.g. Larry Niven's "Neutron Star"), which focus on a central event with some unexpected consequence due to it.
Thanks, this makes sense to me, and much easier to read.
It's frustrating cause one can kinda-sorta get the sense that something like this is what the review "intended" to be, but there's too many gaps and those assertions need to be filled out with more than tediously enumerated (I guess that's similar to the Bible!) names and dates and bibliographic references. The stronger polished version of this review probably *would* have been quite interesting to read. Alas, one must vote on the review that actually is, not the one that ought to be.
>backed their way into a great discovery
That is a great phrase, and I think it captures the way many things develop, including human lives.
Oh, I'm sure it's not my phrase. The point about serendipity and innovation only being obvious in retrospect has been made by many. If I were OP, I would've been writing this as a parallel to Moretti's study of the invention of the detective story: https://blogs.lanecc.edu/dhatthecc/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2015/06/Moretti-Slaughterhouse-of-Lit.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2005-moretti-graphsmapstrees-3-trees.pdf https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-3/reviews/adventures-of-a-man-of-science/
He has wonderful examples of how *hard* it was to invent 'the detective story', and how many detectives manqué there were before the trope-definers like Sherlock Holmes. For example, in one story (https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2005-moretti-graphsmapstrees-3-trees.pdf#page=6), the detective manages to infer from 'clues' which drink was poisoned... and he then *drinks it*. (Now there's something in desperate need of a retcon from Stan Lee - "NARRATOR: He knew the FATAL CHALICE was POISONED, and **drank it anyway**! Trusting in his training in *Shangri-la* to RESIST ALL POISONS known to mankind, and **sure** that this 'mistake' would *flush out a vaunting villain*, secure in his triumph --- only to be UNDONE BY HIS OWN WORDS!!!")
And think of all the mess and discomfort people went through before peanut butter sandwiches were invented! Many lives ruined by breadwiches, toast with a thick layer of pb&j on each side.
That you could put the peanut butter on just one side of each piece of bread, and not have to wash your hands after eating the sandwich each time, may strike us as absurdly obvious - but they just didn't know.
lol..."wash your hands"
That's what the bread is for!
That's quite an image! LOL!
( Though you may want to look at this comment from Level 50 Lapras: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers/comment/64879712 Some companies' methods were comparable to breadwiches... )
Heartless brute! Some of those people never recovered from their breadwich trauma. Decades later they were still trying to get rid of a greasy sticky hand feeling, and wailing that "all the perfumes in the world cannot wash the pbj from these little hands!" Plus if any of their descendants are on here you triggered them.
LOL! Many Thanks! Let them eat linzer tortes! (with peanut butter added?)
(When Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, shall it bring deep-fried Mars bars?)
I'm convinced half the benefit of therapy is stuff like "y'all should really label your shelves", but at personal level. Just have somebody a bit more level headed, with more experience and looking from outside.
If only I could secure accreditation for my rock with letters painted on the side spelling "And if that thing you're worried about does come to pass, what do you think would happen next?"
That sounds reasonable. Many Thanks! Also, sometimes problems can turn out to be simple if one happens to have the proper tool - the equivalent of "look at this in polar coordinates".
from one of Woody Allen's lesser-known pieces of historical research:
"1741: Living in the country on a small inheritance, [the Earl of Sandwich] works day and night, often skimping on meals to save money for food. His first completed work — a slice of bread, a slice of bread on top of that, and a slice of turkey on top of both — fails miserably. Bitterly disappointed, he returns to his studio and begins again.
1745: After four years of frenzied labor, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great and encourages him. Heartened by the philosopher’s friendship, he returns to work with renewed vigor."
("Yes But Can The Steam Engine Do This?" https://myanaloguelife.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/yes-but-can-the-steam-engine-do-this/ )
You know, now that I read that I realize I read it myself, long ago. We stand on the shoulders of giants, you know?
Also the passage brings to mind a related bit of Allen humor: What if we had a day when everyone had to wear their underpants outside their pants?
I looked up the story in the link and it's entitled "A Race with the Sun" by L.T. Meade and Clifford Halifax.
The main character is not a detective, but an inventor, and has been invited to (of course) the lonesome out-of-the-way estate by two others in order to (he thinks) sign a contract about research they have all been independently conducting; he has information they need, they have information he needs.
The 'clue' about the third cup of coffee is not there because he suspects foul play and is trying to investigate a possible conspiracy; he is there in all good faith and doesn't (despite heavy hints in the story) suspect any foul play at all. So the clue is there for us, the readers, to heighten the tension and alert us to the fact that Something Fishy Is Going On. It's only in hindsight that the narrator/main character realises that something was up with that third cup.
It's melodramatic, in other words, rather than detection: it's like having your hero or heroine in a serial tied to the railroad tracks - oh no, how will they get out of it for the next instalment? Spoiler here: the "how will he get out of it?" in this story is that he has been drugged, tied up, and strapped to a balloon with a bomb beneath it which will be detonated when the sun rises, hence the title.
So I have to disagree that this is meant as an example of a *detective* story; it's good old-fashioned melodrama:
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Strand_Magazine/Volume_12/Adventures_of_a_Man_of_Science/A_Race_With_the_Sun
"The Adventures of a Man of Science.
By L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax, M.D.
We have taken down these stories from time to time as our friend. Paul Gilchrist, has related them to us. He is a man whose life study has been science in its most interesting forms—he is also a keen observer of human nature and a noted traveller. He has an unbounded sympathy for his kind, and it has been his lot to be consulted on many occasions by all sorts and conditions of men."
L.T. Meade was a female writer and she wrote scores of books, sometimes with co-authors (as with Halifax above):
https://swanriverpress.ie/2021/10/how-i-write-my-books-an-interview-with-mrs-l-t-meade/
"Despite her wide contributions to genre literature, Irish author L. T. Meade is now remembered, if at all, for her girls’ school stories. However, in 1898 the Strand Magazine, famous for its fictions of crime, detection, and the uncanny, proclaimed Meade one of its most popular writers for her contributions to its signature fare. Her stories, widely published in popular fin de siècle magazines, included classic tales of the supernatural, but her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives, criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder, mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity."
There are collections of short stories by Hugh Greene entitled "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes", which are anthologies of detective stories written around the same time. Some of them were made into a television series in the 70s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rivals_of_Sherlock_Holmes_(book_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rivals_of_Sherlock_Holmes_(TV_series)
Thanks for that essay! What a great read