Rolling Stone’s 1971 cover story on Marvel Comics (discussed here) is one of the best-known and most-referenced documents of the comic book industry in that era. It’s a glimpse inside Marvel at a seminal moment, from an era when comics weren’t often given serious consideration from established journalists.
It’s not common knowledge, however, that Rolling Stone’s UK edition ran a feature on Marvel Comics two years earlier, in an issue dated October 18, 1969.
Upon finding a copy, I was amazed to discover that the author of the article is Anthony Haden-Guest, a journalist who has since gone on to write bestsellers like True Colors: The Real Life Of The Art World and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, And The Culture Of The Night. (He is also a renowned cartoonist, and the older brother of filmmaker/comedian Christopher Guest.) Unlike Robin Green, the author of the later, better-known Rolling Stone US article, Guest doesn’t devote much time to discussing the day-to-day workings of the Marvel company – instead, he recaps stories, retells characters’ fictional histories, delivers some choice quotes from Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and gives a subjective ranking of the Marvel heroes, from weakest to strongest. The article occupies six pages in the middle of the tabloid (with the opening two-page spread in glorious color), and it falls somewhere between an extended fan appreciation and a sales pitch to the London counterculture about how groovy these American superheroes are.
Haden-Guest’s approach is a bit inconsistent: on the one hand he explains characters and plotlines in excruciating detail, on the other, he seems to assume that the reader is intimately familiar with the Marvel Universe. His descriptions of these fictional events, while impassioned, are not always strictly accurate. But throughout, he exhibits the gift for colorful phrasing that would become his trademark: he describes Jim Steranko’s portrayal of The Incredible Hulk as “apple green, and pulsating like a thermonuclear avocado”, to cite just one magnificent descriptive passage. His prose is effusive and engaging, even while rattling off lists of names and superpowers.
This is an artifact of a time when comics were just beginning to be accepted as more than kids’ stuff, a fascinating bit of pop-culture history – and it’s a lot of fun to read, thanks to the over-the-top authorial style. Haden-Guest has a clear affection for the topic, and packs a lot into six pages: illuminating the fictions and fantasies of the Marvel universe, giving insight into the British perception of American comics art, and describing a world of imagination in appropriately larger-than-life terms.