Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel Comics

What kind of story does Marvel want to tell about itself? That’s the driving question one constantly feels when reading Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel. It's published with the endorsement of Marvel itself, and written by Margaret Stohl, Jeanine Schafer, and Judith Stephens, all of whom worked for Marvel at some point in one capacity or another. Let there be no mistaking this title for anything other than a sympathetic, insider’s history, as a book on the history of Marvel officially approved of by Marvel is only slightly less biased than a biography of Jesus written by John the Baptist. 

Calling Super Visible a history would probably irritate most trained historians. This is not, in any sense, a scholarly work. There are no footnotes, no endnotes, not even an index to help a reader find quotes from over a hundred interview subjects who contributed. It is, on the other hand, visually appealing in a way that university press surveys of comic book history almost never are. Super Visible is colorful, with a varied layout and plenty of eye-catching images. The amount of interview subjects shows a strong effort was made to cover an impressive amount of ground.

As someone who was always enthralled by the mythological Marvel Bullpen, how the company actually functioned during the spirited '60s is always interesting. There are plenty of winsome anecdotes about “Mirthful” Marie Severin and “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg. Annie Nocenti’s time on Daredevil is always worth hearing about and Margaret Loesch’s story of bringing X-Men: the Animated Series to air as president of Fox Kids was informative, entertaining, and worth reading for any fan of the show.

It doesn’t take long, though, for the stories of women mentoring each other and sticking together in a male-dominated industry to recede, and an unrelenting corporate spin to come to the fore. One’s enjoyment of Super Visible is going to depend on two things: 1. How interested are you in the most recent Marvel product?; 2. How much self-flattery can you tolerate?

Marvel creative decisions are always presented in the best possible light. The origin of the '70s X-Men team was not, as one can read elsewhere, an attempt at pandering to potential Marvelites in other countries. Rather, it was purely a noble attempt at universal tolerance in comic books. The authors of Super Visible write of how noble Marvel was to “plant a global flag at a time when American xenophobia took aim at the specter of ‘the Other.’” Contrast “Rascally” Roy Thomas’s more mercenary sentiments expressed in Les Daniels’ Marvel: Five Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics: “If we could come up with a group that had characters from several different countries — and of course we would target particular countries — we could sell the book abroad.” Marvel, like all entertainment conglomerates, is exactly as progressive as they feel will be profitable.

Similarly, titles Shanna the She-Devil, Night Nurse, and Claws of the Cat, were not, as it might appear, attempts to cash-in on women’s liberation and second-wave feminism. Savvy businessman that he was, Stan Lee was merely fulfilling his readers’ deeply felt needs. There’s no retelling of Wally Wood’s infamous original art on Claws of the Cat, where he depicted the heroine buck naked, leaving it to Severin to clean it up. It’s also left unremarked that the Cat’s first appearance subsequent to her own title being canceled was a spot in Marvel Team-Up helping Spider-Man tackle the Man Killer, a caricature of a militant feminist.

There are, in addition to these slanted retellings, occasions where the facts are plain wrong. Chris Claremont is described as being the original writer on the X-Men relaunch, not Len Wein. Oddly, these mistakes are most prominent when discussing Captain Marvel, one of the company’s premiere female superheroes. She is referred to as “a spin-off of a character who goes all the way back to the 1940s,” which would be news to Fawcett’s version of Captain Marvel. A sensible possibility would be that the authors are alluding to Marvel’s jumping on the lapsed trademark of that earlier Captain Marvel, but that’s more cynical than a book like this is willing to go.

A paragraph on Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers) mentions her relative obscurity despite a “star turn in the cult favorite NextWave.” One problem: The Captain Marvel appearing in Ellis and Immonen’s series was Monica Rambeau, not Carol Danvers.

As the book progresses, the relentless boosterism eventually becomes a grind. In the '80s, Jello Biafra proclaimed: “There’s something I don’t like about a band that always smiles.” There’s something similarly grating about a book that always smiles. Where’s the conflict?

Part of the problem comes from this book’s lack of villains. The sheer harassment (including sexual harassment) faced by women in the comic book industry, creators who traffic in sexist ideas, and alt-right hate campaigns led by Eltingville Club rejects like ComicsGate, are mostly absent or glossed over, and rarely named. An exception comes when Jo Duffy recalls Will Eisner being unable to “get his head around” the idea of a woman both being talented enough to do comics and having a desire to do so in the first place. Sexism is the provenance of clueless old men, not dangerous hate groups.

Super Visible proceeds in more or less chronological order. This is a logical choice but it means at a certain point if you are not interested in Marvel’s output from the last 5-10 years — as I mostly am not, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl aside—your interest is going to nosedive. The authors give it the hard sell, but I found it backfired and started quickly skimming those pages to get to the end.

Multinational corporations like Marvel want to protect themselves from scrutiny, and are not about to publicize any damaging or controversial information. Marvel are not alone here as a hypothetical Women of DC book would follow a similar tack. Super Visible is definitely aimed at the kinds of people who would have joined the Merry Marvel Marching Society. While it's of some interest to general superhero fans or scholars of comics history, it in no way should be relied upon as a definitive document, much like how anyone looking for a true account of Marvel history should avoid Disney’s Stan Lee documentary.

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