X-Men, Dr Strange, Wanda had a young boy marvelling

In a world where TV was still monochrome, the vibrant colours of Marvel comics were almost as arresting as the heroes portrayed.

Vintage Marvel comics on sale in New York.

Greg Sheridan

3 min read

12:00AMDecember 30, 2022

I remember four people made it one of the most magical, transforming, electrifying days of my childhood. It was 1965, I was eight years old and I was introduced to four adults, with the hearts of lions, who would become my very close friends for the next four or five years.

They were Wanda, Hawkeye, Quicksilver and Captain America. Little did I know it, but I had stumbled upon a great moment in history. These four were the new, slightly anti-hero line up of the Avengers, replacing big hitters like Thor, Ironman and the Hulk. I bought my first Marvel Super Heroes comic and I became a lifelong fan.

At some point, of course, I stopped buying comics but I re-established my devotion when Marvel super heroes came to the movies.

No modern kid could possibly imagine how exciting colour super hero comics were to us as kids back in the mid-1960s. For a start, those were the days of black and white TV, long before personal computers, laptops, iPads or mobile phones. We seldom went to the movies so colour images of any kind were an arresting novelty.

How I swooned at Captain America’s acrobatics, at Hawkeye’s ability to shoot niftily armed arrows as he fell through the air, at the green swish of Quicksilver. Hawkeye was in purple, my favourite colour as a kid until an art teacher told me purple was pretty low class. And Wanda the Scarlet Witch in, you guessed it, scarlet.

I’d never seen such colour, drama and movement. Opening the comic was literally entering another world, a whole new dimension of consciousness and possibility. The nearest I’ve come to seeing that feeling described was in CS Lewis’s marvellous memoir, Surprised by Joy. He talks of a feeling beyond his experience, captivating and uplifting, an intellectual excitement that was physical in its intensity, which evoked profound longing and strange nostalgia. He described this as joy, and saw it finally as an intimation of the divine. He first felt this joy when he came upon Norse sagas as a boy.

It tells you something about the intellectual distance between Lewis and me that I got something like the same feeling from Marvel comics. I was already reading books, but only kids’ novels, Enid Blyton and the like. I’ve never had a very visual imagination. I like character and dialogue in novels, and Blyton’s stories – though they transported me well enough to the England of her schoolchild characters – didn’t do that much visually.

But Marvel comics were not just gorgeous, sumptuous and thrilling to look at. Even by 1965 they were spiced with quite adult wisecracks, black humour and all manner of modern ironies. I found them infinitely preferable to the DC comics – Superman and Batman – which seemed two-dimensional by comparison, inferior as art and as literature, so to speak.

I grew devoted to the Marvel universe and read all the comics I could get – Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Daredevil, Spider-Man, Ironman and the rest. I quickly settled on the X-Men and Dr Strange as my favourites. The X-Men were led by the cerebral, crippled Dr Xavier, oddly enough the most faithfully rendered figure from the comics in the Marvel movies, where Patrick Stewart is perfect in the role.

Dr Strange himself was pretty cerebral. He cast his spells from his hand as though they were bolts of power, often deflected or overcome by the dark powers. In more modern hands, Dr Strange would be either overtly occult, or entirely anaemic, as he is in the hugely disappointing Dr Strange movies, where they’ve made his character, though played by Benedict Cumberbatch, a poor man’s Tony Stark as interpreted by Robert Downey Jr in the Ironman films. A lot of the Marvel heroes were champions of the wisecrack, but not Dr Strange.

Captain America circa 1941.

Xavier and Strange were enduringly popular, even though they were not the most violent or cinematic of the heroes. I suspect this is because super hero comics are really designed for geeks and nerds among kids, rather than sportsmen. Indeed, there is often a kind of geek fantasy wish fulfilment among the super heroes, many of whom are themselves transformed from geeks into all-conquering heroes by, typically, radiation, some unique drug or chemical treatment, cosmic rays, or some such.

The Marvel comics did have a serious theoretical and reflective side. Each comic contained a couple of pages of correspondence and questions answered at the back. These were often quite technical in their way – remember they mostly involved adolescent and pre-adolescent boys – and answered in full seriousness by the comics’ producers.

There were often esoteric bits of scientific information. Marvel was also brilliant at borrowing from other richly imagined worlds. In one comic I read, a villain appeared from the Lord of the Rings. It may have been Sauron himself, or perhaps one of the Nazgul. Forgive my imprecision here. I am writing from memory and first read the comic in question well over 50 years ago.

That in itself tells you something of how vividly it lodged in my mind. I loved all these comics and collected them devotedly. They taught me a central truth of life: there are strange and compelling worlds out there, waiting to be explored: Avengers … Assemble!

Greg Sheridan is foreign editor at The Australian.

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X-Men, Dr Strange, Wanda had a young boy marvelling

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