There has been recent speculation that we have crossed over into a new comic book era – that the Copper Age had crossed into the Modern Age, and the Modern Age had crossed over into the Plastic Age (concrete phrasing for this has not yet been agreed upon), and that in turn has crossed into the Pixel Age. This age was birthed by the massive, impossible alterations of our society (and the comic book industry) as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This feels right, to a degree, though the actual shift of culture is more often imperceptible in the moment, and an event rarely instigates the reshaping of a medium. The Silver Age didn’t end at the precise moment of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963, or during any televised event of the Vietnam Conflict; the Silver Age ended when narratives in comics began to reflect the Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture surrounding the anti-war movement. Our so-called Pixel Age has barely had a chance to begin.
Modern comics did not shift on the morning of September 11th, 2001. The began to shift when comics like Avengers: Disassembled began to grapple with effects on the public consciousness after the attacks of 9/11.
Marvel Comics
Three years in, American culture had not yet come out from under 9/11’s shadow (and wouldn’t for many years, as long as the Bush White House pushed the War on Terror narrative). Novels such as Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, released in 2006, featured survivor narratives, and comics’ heavy hitter Art Spiegelman released the woe-begotten In the Shadow of No Towers the very same year that Avengers Disassembled was hitting the stands.
The Disassembled narrative is by no means subtle in the post-attack imagery overwhelming nearly every other aspect of American culture at the time: it begins with an explosion, followed by the destruction of a (Earth-616) New York City landmark by a crashing Quinjet. In an alarmingly jingoistic turn, a fevered (and Scarlet Witch-influenced) Tony Stark unleashes a very public, xenophobic rant against a perceived “enemy nation. An air of baffled distrust pervades the final four issues of Avengers and its Finale special.
New Avengers, which directly follows those events, carries that legacy of fear forward. The attack motif continues as an explosion at super-criminal prison The Raft unleashes a hoard of super-powered criminals – a cadre of potentially violent adversaries who go to ground, hiding among civilian populations. The New Avengers gather to round up domestic terrorists. The nation, swathed in a narrative of fear and vulnerability being broadcast by the White House and news outlets, could only see its own (misguided) fears reflected in these pages.
New Avengers is neither supportive nor critical of this real-world narrative – it existed too firmly in its time to fully grasp the ramifications of public distrust. There is a suggestion that the book – and its writer Brian Michael Bendis – was skeptical of the governmental mechanisms set in place to antagonize its own Islamic citizens. Discovered during a prison breakout, with limitless power and a distinctly untrustworthy instability, what could Sentry be if not a representation of unilateral power levied against “America’s enemies”? A power so massive and unknowable that even Marvel’s Mightiest might be reduced to a watchdog entity, nervously attempting to keep it in check? The Sentry, the Marvel Universe’s knowing acknowledgment of the deeply dangerous and antagonistic Homeland Security.
The terror similarities wouldn’t end with the issues collected in New Avengers Modern Era Epic Collection: Assembled – 2006’s Civil War, engineered not by Brian Michael Bendis but Mark Millar (whose post-Attack output could be said to be rather extreme in its reactionary violence) begins with its own terroristic explosion in Stamford, Connecticut. The lingering effects of fear-mongering can also be seen in Secret Invasion’s implications of enemies hidden within, and a distrust of leadership oozes through Dark Reign’s neo-corporate Republican stand-in, Norman Osborn.
A lot can be said (and has been, eloquently) about the concerns of making Wanda Maximoff the inciting incident of this hazy, frightful future, let alone her portrayal as a base crazy woman unleashing these tides of terror on the Marvel Universe again and again. It is, with the 9/11 reading, even more disconcerting. It reads as a sort of blood-staining of legacy and undermines the legitimacy of the allegory, however quickly the narrative threads are wiped under the rug following House of M. Regardless, the paradigm shift of comics stands.
Where other Marvel books (including but not limited to Bendis’ own Alias and Daredevil) had already been hard at work shifting the aesthetics of comics themselves, doing away with the lingering stodginess that the medium hadn’t yet shrugged since its Golden Age. Now 20 years past its prime (an entire generation has been born, grown, and developed their own unique voice inside the medium and out), the era’s work might read stodgy in its own way. Still, the purported Pixel Age cannot establish itself without the foundations of that turn-of-the-century shift that lightened the medium even under the shadow of heavy darkness.
The stories collected in New Avengers Modern Era Epic Collection: Assembled, then, mark a major paradigm shift not just in the Marvel Universe but in the medium at large. They exemplify a new generation, a modernization, a revitalization. Older creators sat up and took note, dropping old conventions and reimagining characters, and an ever-diversifying wave of new creators banished the fear narrative with a wave of inclusive optimism. The era of New Avengers has passed, but the book remains revolutionary.
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