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An analysis of Marvel’s failed strategies in 1976.
The Impossible Man Visits MARVEL COMICS: Paratexts, Reflexivity and Editorial Intrusion, 1976
by Dale Jacobs
Since the 1960s, much of Marvel’s success had been built on the way that they were able to create a distinctive discourse community around their line of comics, which clearly marked who were insiders and who were not. The key to this discourse community was the creation of a shared narrative world, a strategy that pushed their readers to follow multiple titles, thus creating a shared canon of texts. One of the ways this continuity was promoted was through editorial notes that placed events in the diegetic world of each comic within the larger diegetic frame of the shared narrative universe. These notes, along with other paratextual elements such as responses to readers’ letters, editorials in the letters pages, and items in the Bullpen Bulletin and Stan Lee’s Soapbox, acted as a guide to making connections and assuming insider status as a reader.
By 1976, however, these various paratexts were being used not only to create a community of loyal readers, but also to allow those readers an unprecedented degree of access to the problems that plagued Marvel at this point – missed deadlines, use of reprints as filler material, frequent changes in creative teams, changes in direction of books, cancellation of books, and changes at the level of editor-in-chief. This presentation examines how this use of reflexive editorial paratexts altered the relationship between Marvel and its readers as the publisher attempted to both attract new readers and retain those readers they already had.
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