English 204 Final: Question 1b
In his essay Jack Kirby and the Marvel Aesthetic, Charles Hatfield credits Kirby for introducing an “epic approach to the superhero genre that was ‘mythic’ both in its scale an in its pantheonic complications” (149). Marvel’s comic book universe is a platform where writers can have characters from one narrative interact with anyone else in that universe. It opens up new possibilities for creative storytelling and can lead to large scale adventures with far reaching effects that incorporate a diverse cast of superheroes. However, the writers at Marvel took it further when they released The Edge of Spider-Verse. This collection of stories spans countless universes in the Marvel multiverse, and it successfully amalgamates many different versions of the Spider-man figure into a single unified …show more content…
The purpose of this book is to introduce the heroes and the main conflict for the Spider-Verse storyline in The Amazing Spider-man series, but we can still see the beginning of the writers’ efforts to condense the many narratives into a single story arc. In the last panel of the first issue, we see Spider-man Noir standing with five other versions of himself in what Hatfield would call a “pantheonic treatment of superheroes”(151); many heroes who each have their own history coming together in order to fight a villain as a group. Over the course of the book, readers learn that someone is traveling through dimensions in order to kill all of the Spider-people, and that only the collective strength of the remaining Spider-people can fend off the threat. The writers chose an epic, and arguably cliched, plot that gave them reason to assemble members from separate universes and the most room to dive into each character in order to explore how their unique combination of powers and personalities can defeat such a dangerous
In his essay Jack Kirby and the Marvel Aesthetic, Charles Hatfield credits Kirby for introducing an “epic approach to the superhero genre that was ‘mythic’ both in its scale an in its pantheonic complications” (149). Marvel’s comic book universe is a platform where writers can have characters from one narrative interact with anyone else in that universe. It opens up new possibilities for creative storytelling and can lead to large scale adventures with far reaching effects that incorporate a diverse cast of superheroes. However, the writers at Marvel took it further when they released The Edge of Spider-Verse. This collection of stories spans countless universes in the Marvel multiverse, and it successfully amalgamates many different versions of the Spider-man figure into a single unified …show more content…
The purpose of this book is to introduce the heroes and the main conflict for the Spider-Verse storyline in The Amazing Spider-man series, but we can still see the beginning of the writers’ efforts to condense the many narratives into a single story arc. In the last panel of the first issue, we see Spider-man Noir standing with five other versions of himself in what Hatfield would call a “pantheonic treatment of superheroes”(151); many heroes who each have their own history coming together in order to fight a villain as a group. Over the course of the book, readers learn that someone is traveling through dimensions in order to kill all of the Spider-people, and that only the collective strength of the remaining Spider-people can fend off the threat. The writers chose an epic, and arguably cliched, plot that gave them reason to assemble members from separate universes and the most room to dive into each character in order to explore how their unique combination of powers and personalities can defeat such a dangerous