Don't miss gwerns' comment and review of this review:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-silver-age...

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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.

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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."

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