{"id":3752,"date":"2023-06-26T10:48:35","date_gmt":"2023-06-26T14:48:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=3752"},"modified":"2023-06-26T10:56:00","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T14:56:00","slug":"visiting-discovery-places-marvel-universe-of-super-heroes-exhibit-with-michael-kobre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2023\/06\/26\/visiting-discovery-places-marvel-universe-of-super-heroes-exhibit-with-michael-kobre\/","title":{"rendered":"Visiting Discovery Place\u2019s Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes Exhibit with Michael Kobre"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Visiting Discovery Place\u2019s Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes<\/em> Exhibit with Michael Kobre \u2013<\/strong> Charlotte has long been a hub for all things related to comic books.  It\u2019s the home to Heroes Aren\u2019t Hard to Find, which opened in 1980 and is now widely recognized as one of the nation\u2019s premier comics shops. It\u2019s the location of the annual Heroes Convention, which is organized every June by Heroes Aren\u2019t Hard to Find. And now Charlotte\u2019s Discovery Place Science Museum is hosting the blockbuster touring exhibit titled Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes<\/em>. Charlotte is the exhibition\u2019s only stop in the entire Southeast.  After the exhibit closes on September 4, 2023, it will go on tour in Europe.  For more detailed information about this exhibit, please click on the following link:  https:\/\/my.discoveryplace.org\/marvel\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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When I first heard about the opening of the Marvel exhibit, I immediately thought of Dr. Michael Kobre. Mike is the Dana Professor of English at Queens University of Charlotte.  In addition to being the author of a scholarly book about Walker Percy\u2019s novels, Mike is an expert on Marvel superheroes.  His publications on this topic include an essay titled \u201cOnly Transform: The Monstrous Bodies of Superheroes,\u201d which is about the transformative bodies of Marvel\u2019s superheroes. I contacted Mike and asked him if he would be willing to provide me with his responses to the Marvel : Universe of Super Heroes <\/em>exhibit, and he kindly agreed to do so.  Here is what he sent to me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a panel at this year\u2019s Heroes Convention on the \u201cMarvel: Universe of Super Heroes\u201d exhibition now on display at Discovery Place, one of the exhibition\u2019s curators, the comics scholar Ben Saunders, explained how the exhibition was designed to tell a story about the history of Marvel in comics, film, and television and its enormous influence on our culture. And that\u2019s exactly what you find when you step into the exhibition and you follow the history of a second-tier comics company that became over decades a media giant and a cultural phenomenon. Richly illustrated, the exhibition is filled with costumes and props from Marvel\u2019s cinematic universe and a lavish display of original art from the comics, which are all featured in multi-media spaces that include a room designed to look like the surreal dimensions of Doctor Strange and another that lets you feel like you\u2019re stepping into the suburban community conjured into existence by the Scarlet Witch in the Disney+ series <\/em>WandaVision.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Framed throughout the exhibition in large display cases, the costumes show the extraordinary detail and craftsmanship of the filmmakers, including the Academy Award-winning designs of the <\/em>Black Panther costumes created by Ruth E. Carter, the first Black artist to receive an Oscar for Best Costume Design. But for this longtime comics fan, whose imagination was forever transformed when I discovered Marvel Comics as a small child in the early 1960s, the real magic of the exhibition comes from all that original comics art. Seeing the pages that created this universe in this form is a revelation, since so much of the art\u2019s detail and its bold, energetic lines were lost in the muddy reproduction of old comic books printed on cheap pulp paper. Among the work here is the only surviving page of original art from the very first Marvel comic book, <\/em>Marvel Comics #1 from 1939: the last page of the Sub-Mariner story by Bill Everett, one of the greatest artists of the first wave of comic book creators, whose signature character, Prince Namor, would come to life on the screen in 2022 in <\/em>Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But all of the greats are here too, including Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, Marie Severin, Gene Colon, and so many others, along with contemporary creators like Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. In fact, a short visual essay on one of the exhibition\u2019s media tables on Miller\u2019s storytelling techniques in his groundbreaking run on <\/em>Daredevil in the 1980s offers a superb overview of how comics work as a form. For those who want to learn about comics and comics history, this exhibition is a great place to start.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the presentation of all this art highlights a problem too in the story that the exhibition tells. Because for decades artists like Kirby and Ditko toiled in what was seen as a junk industry, creating seemingly disposable pages at work-for-hire rates. Kirby, for instance, would work 14 hours a day, seven days a week, in a basement studio he called \u201cthe dungeon\u201d to pay his bills and support his family, with no ownership of characters he at least co-created which would come to be worth billions of dollars. By contrast though, Stan Lee, who as editor was a salaried employee of his uncle Martin Goodman\u2019s publishing company, enjoyed much greater financial security and, as the company\u2019s public face, could claim greater credit for the characters\u2019 creation. This inequity, which is baked into the history of the American comic book industry, is manifest in the exhibit too in the way it echoes the conventional\u2014and inaccurate\u2014story that Lee was the guiding hand in creating the Marvel universe and that artists like Kirby and Ditko worked to realize and develop Lee\u2019s vision, rather than serving as principal architects of that universe themselves.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not long after you walk into the exhibition, there\u2019s a giant display filled with images of Lee and clips of his cameos from the movies, with a much smaller reproduction of Kirby\u2019s drawing table right around the corner, in the shadow of Lee\u2019s monument. But in what Lee would called \u201cthe Marvel method\u201d of producing comic books, artists like Kirby, working from plot descriptions generated in loose conversations which may or may not have been written down, would create finished pages that Lee would add dialogue and captions to later. And given this method, which the exhibition does in fact detail, it\u2019s hard to know who was responsible for the creative choices in almost any given issue. With all this in mind, as much as I enjoyed everything around me, I was bothered by what seemed like the insufficient credit in the exhibition given to Kirby, who co-created the Fantastic Four, Thor, The Hulk, the Black Panther, and so many others, and to Ditko, who co-created Spider-Man and almost surely solely created Doctor Strange.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, <\/em>Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes lives up to its name. Walk past the costumes and the props and the art, through the swirling shapes of Doctor Strange\u2019s Dark Dimension, past the life-size statues of Spider-Man, the Black Panther, and others, and you\u2019ll feel like you\u2019re in another universe. As Stan Lee, who was always a master promoter, might say on the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page in a 1960s comic, \u201cFace Front, True Believer! This one\u2019s for you!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thank Mike for sharing his responses to the Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes <\/em>exhibit. I urge everyone who is interested in comics and superhero narratives to visit this Marvel exhibit while it is still in Storied Charlotte. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visiting Discovery Place\u2019s Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes Exhibit with Michael Kobre \u2013 Charlotte has long been a hub for all things related to comic books.  It\u2019s the home to Heroes Aren\u2019t Hard to Find, which opened in 1980 and is now widely recognized as one of the nation\u2019s premier comics shops. It\u2019s the location […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[266],"class_list":["post-3752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-superheroes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3752"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3765,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752\/revisions\/3765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}