News to me, and I’m fairly fanatic about JB’s run on Alpha Flight. The hints about Northstar’s sexuality are still on the page as early as AF#7, which is the first story to spotlight the Beaubier twins. IIRC, Byrne’s said he was never allowed to explicitly confirm Northstar’s orientation in print, but that never stopped him from dropping hints in the comic, informing other writers of Northstar’s sexuality, or speaking out about it at cons and the like, such as the when he infamously answered “Who dies in Alpha Flight #12?” with “Not the Indian or the queer.”
Yip, feminists, of which Ms. Strickland was one. A lot of things we can’t imagine not being mainstream were really brought to us by feminist thought. That’s why I think people who act like feminism is bad are ridiculous. Feminism won, just like most of the liberal ideas from back then.
Still, Ms. Strickland herself says that she was mostly alone in her interpretation. So Fenris is unfortunately right, even if I would have chosen much better wording.
Still, even if you leave that line out, the comic is still a nasty way to look at women. Mind controlling them to get what you want is perfectly acceptable.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that Shooter’s “no gay characters at Marvel” policy had the unintentional and amusing side-effect of saving Northstar from being killed off when later Alpha Flight writer Bill Mantlo wanted to out the character by having him die of AIDS. Shooter forced Mantlo to do a last-minute re-write that took out any mention of AIDS or homosexuality, and ended up with a story where Northstar and his sister Aurora were revealed as half-elves before his being transported to Asgard and her to a nunnery. Both characters were written out of the book as opposed to dying. They were brought back later and the half-elf business retconned once Shooter and Mantlo were out of the picture.
Well, yeah… But just because he thought “undercover commies are a cool story,” doesn’t mean he also thought “undercover commies are a real thing that’s happening right now.”
Don’t forget “undercover commies will make the book sell better,” which is a factor, too.
No no no! It has to be because he was a closet Bircher.
I think that a certain level of aggressive anti-Communism was a more bipartisan position at that time, too.
It’s been a long time but I remember those communists being from countries like the USSR which was a dictatorship and an actual anti-US antagonist. Portraying them was being pro-US and anti-dictatorship. It was a fact of the time that communist ideology was used to justify very repressive regimes. And yes I am aware that there were also non-communist, pro-US repressive regimes.
Were there villains that represented domestic communists trying to corrupt the country? I don’t remember any but I could be wrong. That would have been a stronger indicator of simple minded anti-communism.
The liberal left spent most of the 1950s and early 1960s being anti-communist as a way of distancing themselves from McCarthyite accusations. The USSR was considered a real-world threat and atomic annihilation was in everybody’s minds.
There was nothing especially right-wing or conservative about hating Commies at that time. And everybody used Commies as their stock villains. Nazis were boring leftovers from the past, so who else was there? Communists had endless resources, official government backing, large numbers, and a stated determination to take over the world. Of course Lee used them. They were perfect for the role in 1963. A few years later, Vietnam changed everything and non-ideological villains took over all the groups, except for whatever Nazis Captain America fought.
Lee had typically mainstream liberal views for his entire run of 60s Marvel comics. Period.
Those who want to dig deeper in Marvel history, with lots of stuff on the Shooter Wars, should read Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
No–pretty much without exception, they were commie agents planted here to corrupt us (Black Widow trying to corrupt Hawkeye) or sabotage us (the Gremlin trying to mess with the army’s experiments in Hulk) or just commies trying to attack us.
And I’m not so sure there was anything wrong with that portrayal. This was the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis, of Khrushchev saying “We will bury you”*, of commie aggression overseas, of the Rosenburgs giving nuclear info to the USSR, etc. The commies, were, in fact, the bad-guys. And it was a very mainstream view to be anti-commie until Vietnam became a thing
*Yes, I know that it was more about economics, but people back then didn’t
ETA: Or…what Exapno said. 
Okay, if the reason there were so many communists was just normal comic book writing then why wasn’t DC comics full of them like Marvel was?
Because DC was aimed at a younger demographic. Weisinger famously gave out comics to younger kids in his neighborhood and asked them what they wanted to see Superman doing. That’s why all the “giant gorilla” stuff in DC. Because the kids kept requesting it (I don’t know why). Ditto with all the kid sidekicks (this includes Jimmy Olsen)–because it gave the younger kids reading DC someone to identify with (in theory at least).
Marvel, from about 1963 (Spider-Man) onward always played up that they were for a more mature audience. If you read the Stan’s Soapboxes columns from the times, he was always talking/bragging about how he kept seeing people reading Marvel comics on college campuses and how “Brand Eecch” wasn’t.
Little Nemo: DC wasn’t entirely bereft of references to Communists in the '60’s. Action 355-356 (October & November 1967) featured a villain called the Annihilator, who found some Kryptonian chemicals that enabled him to beat the stuffing out of Superman. He hated Supes because he was enslaved behind the Iron Curtain and Kal-El did nothing to help out prisoners like him.
Teen Titans 18 (November-December 1968) featured Starfire (later Red Star) who was a Russian superhero.
Fenris: I had read in a couple of sources that Weisinger was hipped on gorillas because market research indicated sales went up everytime a DC book had a gorilla on the front.
I’m not sure what that cite is meant to prove, as it doesn’t contradict anything anyone has said in this thread.
Jack Kirby was a strong liberal democrat, of the New Deal variety. He was also a WWII vet that respected military service, and could at times be flag-wavingly patriotic. He was outraged by the Oliver North hearings and felt North had disgraced the uniform. He loved JFK and Adlai Stevenson but was distrustful of most other political figures. He hated Nixon. His stories, and especially his Captain America stories, are deliberately apolitical for the most part, though. (Cite from Mark Evanier.)
Lee was not nearly so dedicated to liberal causes, although Marvel comics of his era carried his monthly editorials against racism and sexism and war. These editorials are frankly pretty weak-kneed (and were lampooned savagely by Alan Moore in his 1963 series), but he certainly didn’t have to write them.
Although Steve Ditko was notoriously right-wing, nearly all of the younger blood employed by Marvel in the late 60’s, early 70’s were liberals. Denny O’ Neil’s first writing and editing work was with Marvel, and O’Neil was the stereotyped quintessence of the long-haired, dope-smoking liberal college student of the time. DC, by contrast, had a much older and more conservative staff.
Having Soviets as villains in the corporate-driven media of the 60’s would have been like having Nazis as the villains in the forties, or vaguely middle-eastern terrorists as the villains now. It may not be very creative, but it says almost nothing about the personal politics of the creators.
Jim Shooter was (and probably is) a huge asshole, to be sure, but in the 70’s there was very little editorial control at Marvel at all, and I suspect that by far his biggest offense against Englehart, Gerber, Starlin, et al., was his insistence that they do their jobs in a timely and professional manner. And I think his work with Valiant in the early 90’s demonstrates that he was a skilled writer when not ruining other people’s work.
Anyway, I would like to echo the sentiment that everyone should read Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
To add to that, look at how many issues of Steve Englehart’s Avengers were reprints. Anyone else remember the “Dreaded Deadline Doom” as an excuse to cram a reprint issue (maybe with a page or two framing sequence) in?
Shooter pretty much single-handedly killed that policy. To his credit. Yes, Englehart was the greatest writer Marvel had in the '70s, but that doesn’t change that fact that roughly 1 issue in 10 of his run of Avengers were reprints because he was chronically late. His Dr. Strange series (IIRC) had an even worse ratio.
When Shooter took over as EIC, he put a near complete stop to that. Almost instantly. IIRC the last Avengers book that was a reprint was 150/151 (it was split across two issues and was Englehart’s last issue on the book). DC which had a much smaller version of the same problem followed suit and the last deadline-doom type reprint I can think of was Superboy and the Legion 238, circa '78 or so*.
Shooter made it utterly unacceptable to try to pass a reprint off as a new book with a new cover and a new splash page. And he should get credit for that.
*The Alan Moore reprint of House of Secrets 92 was planned and needed for the story. It wasn’t a deadline thing.
Darn, now I really want to write a comic book named G. I. Bill.
Yes, but I never want to see a 1950s Marvelman reprint again as long as I live.
I think Marvel (and DC)'s current policy of relaxing deadline rules on top creators and just printing the damned issue when it’s finished is the right way to go.
Interesting sidebar: When Jim Shooter had his Valiant imprint in the late 80s/early 90s, Steve Englehart was one of the writers he tapped for it (on later issues of Shadowman). When asked about the incongruity of working for the guy who’d fired him so loudly over a decade earlier, Englehart replied “I never really had that big a problem with Shooter.”
Moved and seconded. Mick Angelo is no CC Beck and Marvelman (50s) kinda sucks, bigtime.
But there also seems to be more professionalism, Kevin “Eh, I’ll get to the next issue when I feel like it” Smith and a few others aside, we don’t seem to be seeing the 2, 3 month delays that we saw in the early '70s as a result of the writer not bothering to do the script on time. I read somewhere (don’t quote me on this) that for a while towards the end of Englehart’s run on Avengers, it was coming out more-or-less bi-monthly. Ditto FF under…um…woulda been Conway at the time, I think. Or maybe Wein. Defenders, post Gerber, same deal.