vintagegeekculture:

therobotmonster:

Is bombast.

The corny, expository dialog, particularly when it’s combined with the 60s-through-80s Marvel mandate to love your thesaurus like it is your own child, brings a special kind of melodramatic, dare I say megalodramatic, flair to the proceedings. 

The space-hopping heroes, the Adam Warlock/Rom: Spaceknight/4th World style guys were the best at this. Gonzo tech and characters in a vast cosmic ocean of science, magic and the former advanced to the point of being indistinguishable from the latter. The mystic heroes also excelled at this. 

Characters boasted their intentions and philosophies openly in big bold speech bubbles. In a way, its like watching a musical. Everyone’s souls are laid bare through open confession, just surrounded by a massive splash-page battle scene instead of a horde of well-practiced dancers. 

There’s a bellowing bigness to the proceedings, one that is not incompatible with genuine emotion or characterization, but is incompatible with the cynical, often sneering, nature of deconstructionist comics. 

This bigness isn’t the sole property of comics. Early James Bond has a lot of bombast to it, action cartoons of varying eras did as well. Hell, one could argue Shakesphere road a wave of bombast. Star Wars dripped with it, and there are those still carrying the torch.

For a closer, I leave you in the capable hands of a man clad in living extraterrestrial armor designed to fight a race of alien, brain-eating shape-shifting sorcerers:

Nice article, and I agree…to a point. Bombast and scale play a role, sure. In science fiction, this is what they call “sensawunda.”

But bombast and scale and melodrama mean nothing unless there’s something to contrast it against, without human stories to anchor the scale and relate it to us.

There’s a reason every single Doc Savage novel, before they head to unexplored lost cities, begins in the totally normal and grounded location of New York City. The everyday, commonplace locations of New York feels real and so it provides a contrast to the far-out things and exotic locales that are to come.

I refer you to maybe the greatest comic ever written: Fantastic Four. FF is a comic that created a whole new way of telling stories. I can’t praise FF enough, it’s like Stan and Jack discovered the formula for coca-cola. However, the key to FF’s success is that all the far out action is grounded in four approachable, understandable people. We see the story through the POV of these four ordinary people, instead of some space weirdo. Ben Grimm wisecracks in his old New York style in the middle of an attack by Galactus about to devour the earth. The ordinary problems of the FF, like Johnny’s girl troubles and Sue and Reed’s marriage issues, make the jaunts into the Negative Zone and battles in Doctor Doom’s robot filled castles feel as exotic as they are.

There’s a reason that they made the earthman Star Lord the POV character in the Guardians of the Galaxy film, instead of Adam Warlock. 

There’s a reason the general public loves Spider-Man and Daredevil and has yet to be introduced to the Fourth World, Eternals, and Adam Warlock. 

You know the gag strip, Garfield Without Garfield? That’s what the Fourth World is: Fantastic Four without the Fantastic Four. It’s all cold, bizarre space weirdos mumbling space nonsense to each other. 

Why do people praise the big scales and bombast, and not the little human moments that connect us to them? I think it’s because we explain why we like and dislike stories in terms of texture level details. For instance: many people blame Jar-Jar Binks for why Star Wars: Episode I sucked. Jar-Jar is a liability for sure, but not the only one. He’s just the big visible detail that dissatisfaction with the movie crystallized around.