Recently, Bloomsbury Academic announced their new collaboration with Marvel: a series of short nonfiction books titled Marvel Age of Comics. Inspired by the publisher’s 33 ⅓ series of books about albums, Marvel Age of Comics will profile various characters, storylines and historical events within Marvel’s long history. The first four books will be Doctor Strange: A Decade of Dark Magic by Stuart Moore; The Mighty Avengers Vs. the 1970s, by Paul Cornell; Daredevil: Born Again, by Chris Ryall; and Spider-Man: Miles Morales by Ytasha L. Womack.
To learn more about this initiative, I reached out to Haaris Navqi, Bloomsbury Academic’s Director of Publishing. We discussed several topics including similarities and differences with 33 ⅓, Marvel’s influence on the series, and Navqi’s affection for Daredevil: Born Again.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity and content.
WESCOTT: How did the Marvel Age of Comics series come about?
NAQVI: Marvel reached out to us initially. They liked the pop culture publishing that we did for film and music, so they wanted to see what we could do with Marvel Comics. We went away, drew up a proposal, and came back to pitch our editorial vision, which they loved. We worked closely with them from that point onwards to develop what is now Marvel Age of Comics.
The idea is fairly straightforward. It’s about celebrating the characters, creators, storylines and cultural impact of Marvel through its over eighty year history. We’ll cover the iconic characters and issues you might expect: Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America and so on. But we also want to do some interesting books on lesser known characters or periods of Marvel. These were important to the company’s history and to comic book fans, but maybe not as well known now. One of the books that’s in the pipeline is about Misty Knight, the first black female superhero. That’s going to be interesting to have in the mix as well.
Marvel is a big fan of our 33 ⅓ series of books on music albums. There are some general connections between that series and what we are aiming to do with Marvel Age of Comics, in terms of having people who are super knowledgeable about their chosen subject. They want to share why they love a particular story arc or character. But Marvel Age of Comics will be very different too in quite a few ways.
Every book for 33 ⅓ is about an album; it’s straightforward in that sense. For Marvel Age of Comics, some of the books will be about creators, some will be about storylines and some will cover periods of time. Our book about The Avengers covers the whole of the 1970s. It asks: how did that comic change through the decade? How did it affect what was happening in America? Who worked on the series and what unique aspects did they bring to the comic? That’s very different from what you could do in a series like 33 ⅓.
These books will be very visual as well. One of the most exciting things to me is being able to illustrate great writing about a particular character or storyline with art from the original comic. I think that will be the defining feature of the series and really elevate it.
WESCOTT: So you’ll have actual people who worked on the original stories providing extra details within the books?
NAVQI: We’ll have access to the full catalog of Marvel Comics. One of the first books, which I’m really excited about because I have a personal connection to it, covers Daredevil Born Again, by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. Chris Ryall writes about what was going on when that comic first came out. What Daredevil was like before, the typical style of comics at that point in time. That was such an original, influential comic book. How did it influence things afterwards? But the middle section of that book takes you through that story arc, and really goes into detail. When Ryle refers to a particular panel or page, we can illustrate it with the original art as well. That’s going to be really cool to see it all laid out with the art and writing together.
WESCOTT: That book seems to be more in keeping with the 33 1/3rd series as well. It’s about a single comic story arc and its impact rather than trying to cover a long span of time.
NAVQI: The first few books coming out are all quite different. Before it was a graphic novel, Born Again was just a handful of Daredevil issues. Ryall’s book is laser focused on that very specific story. Then the Avengers book, which I described already, covers a whole decade. It describes how Marvel Comics reflected the culture at the time, as well as the changing politics of the 70s in terms of women’s rights, racial justice, all that kind of stuff.
The Dr. Strange book is different again, in that it’s about the character specifically. Dr. Strange originates in the 1960s and then goes through the early 1970s. It’s also about how that character and his respective series reflect the counterculture of that time. These three books are all different in how the writers approach the material. I think it’ll give readers a good sense of the breadth of coverage we hope to achieve over the coming years.
WESCOTT: I think you could write 500 pages or more about just Dr. Strange, if you bring in the counterculture as well as the different artists and their approaches. But the book itself is only about 160 pages, right?
NAVQI: They will be short format books. Slightly larger size than 33 ⅓, but still a small collectable book. We will also be printing collectable hardcovers of each title. We haven’t revealed the look and the style of the hardcovers yet, but that’s next.
WESCOTT: Of the four writers that have been tapped for this project so far, three of them are comics writers. Just one of them is an academic who has written essays about genre fiction.
NAVQI: It’ll be exciting to see how the series will develop from here. Up to now, it wasn’t public. We’ve been working carefully and deliberately to approach people who we thought would be good for the first books. But now we’ll be receiving queries from all kinds of people, great writers who we didn’t even know were comic book fans. We’re open to wherever this goes and whatever ideas that people come up with we haven’t thought of. We also work closely with Marvel on all the pitches that come through, and select the ones that are most exciting to us. When you’re doing a series like this, you want a good variety of books, approaches and writers from different backgrounds.
WESCOTT: That was one of the strengths of the 33 ⅓ series as well. You’d have some books by folks who wrote about music, but also people who were musicians themselves, or had a career outside of those fields, so you had a mix of different perspectives.
NAVQI: I’m sure we’re going to have books by people with a long history at Marvel. We’ll have books by outsiders from the perspective of a pure comic book reader, too. In terms of my own perspective, I grew up in London. My brother was a massive comic book fan. There used to be a comic book store called Reader’s Dream that used to order American import comics. We were obsessed with those, and even preferred them to English comics as they were at the time. He and I would visit Reader’s Dream every month.
My brother was buying the Daredevil: Born Again issues and I was reading them as well. This series, if we do it right, it’ll be perfect for someone like my brother. He’s a big reader and likes pop culture, but he’s the comic book person first and foremost.
Multiple generations of people grew up with Marvel through the decades: the 60s, the 70s, the 80s and onwards. Nobody knows it all. You might have grown up with Spider-Man in the 90s, but you might not be familiar with the earlier issues. There might be important characters that you missed. I want to make sure that we speak to all those different kinds of readers.
The best possible outcome would be if you pick up one of these books for a comic or character that you love, but then move on to other subjects you’re less familiar with because you like the style and approach of the series. That’s a phenomenon we see with 33 ⅓ as well.
WESCOTT: Have you kept abreast of what different comics critics have been doing on the internet over the past couple decades?
NAQVI: It’s interesting, because now we’re getting proposals and ideas from people who’ve been talking about the way comics have changed. Comics used to be more of an underground cult thing. Now they’re more popular. I would like for the series to be very contemporary and up to speed with what’s happening in comics now. But I also want to keep that underground cult vibe, for people who want to immerse themselves in that world.
WESCOTT: The reason I bring it up is that there are writers who have been on this beat for a while. Kelly Kanayama has written hundreds of thousands of words about the Punisher. Tegan O’Neil has done lots of great stuff, including a recent column series about Rogue. Not to mention everybody writing for Shelfdust.
You used to have more opportunities to do this kind of thing back in the 2010s, with the existence of sites like Comics Alliance. But that site closed and the well dried up. This line of books may be one of the few opportunities to do this kind of writing. Have you thought about the weight of that responsibility?
NAVQI: Ideally, every book will be written by someone who knows as much about if not more about that topic as anyone else. How they engage with other longform writing, or the history of longform writing about comics…it’ll be interesting to see how much of that comes out in the series. But it’s not front of mind in terms of what we want the books to do.
What I love about the Born Again book is that it’s one reader engaging with that comic and why it’s so important to them. The whole history of other people’s writing, thoughts and theories about that comic disappear from view in the wake of that one person’s love. We’ll have different kinds of writers bringing different kinds of knowledge to the table, too. So I don’t know if it’ll pick up the baton in terms of that kind of criticism you’re talking about. We’ll have to see.
WESCOTT: I think what you’ve said about different kinds of knowledge is important; there are so many angles by which you can approach comics. You can discuss the historical or cultural background. Others think the illustration aspect is the most important. Then there are folks who just really like the characters and want to read more about them. How are you thinking about covering these different aspects?
NAVQI: The series won’t be academic. What’s important is to foreground great writing. Every book should make the reader want to go out and reread the subject matter, or learn about the character. Variety will also be important. Every book will do something slightly different, so that when you put all the books together, you get a good picture of Marvel Comics and its history.
There will be a little bit of behind the scenes stuff in these books as well. The Avengers book goes into the writers and their different styles. The Marvel bullpen, how people came to work at Marvel…these things will be folded into the book. But it won’t necessarily be the focus.
The series will have room for academic deep reading of the original stories. But it’ll depend on what take a given writer wants for a particular book, and if we think that’s right for the mix of the series. It’s also a matter of what Marvel would like to do, since we work closely with them.
WESCOTT: There are many different creative eras of Marvel. Do you think this series will focus on earlier or more recent stuff?
NAVQI: We want to cover every decade. That’s one area where we’ve been deliberate with these first few books. Dr. Strange covers the ‘60s, Avengers is very ‘70s based, Daredevil is ‘80s based. Miles Morales is more recent. We’re looking to do a book on The Ultimates, which is the early 2000s. For later books in the series, we’re thinking about where they fit in terms of the periods we cover. We won’t try to cover every decade with each year of publication. But to begin with, it makes sense to signal what the scope of the series will be like.
WESCOTT: It’s funny, because I think of Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America, which is where the Winter Solider came from, as being “recent.” But that’s a decade old or more, at this point.
NAVQI: Even people who are huge comic book readers have weird gaps. Periods of time they may not be as familiar with. I was familiar with Daredevil Born Again, but didn’t read much Dr. Strange as a kid. It’s been really interesting to read the Dr. Strange manuscript as it’s coming in, because a lot of it is fascinating and new. But it does intersect with stuff I read at the time.
With a series like this, while we hope that folks enjoy the initial titles, the turning point will be when there are fifteen or twenty books. Then you can see what the series as a whole is trying to do versus every individual book. That sparks people’s ideas regarding what we could do in the future, and that’s when it gets really exciting–when writers take us in directions that we haven’t even thought of.
WESCOTT: To speculate about those directions: do you think you might put out books on Daredevil that might cover material other than Daredevil: Born Again? That character is one of the most consistently well written and perhaps drawn characters in the Marvel line. You could pick three or four distinct runs by different creative teams, and do whole books on those.
NAVQI: You’ve highlighted one of the interesting questions in terms of what to do. We aren’t restricted to just doing one book on one character. If we can do multiple books on Daredevil, sure. But for these first few books, we want to have variety. That said, I’m sure we’ll have more than one book on Spider-Man. At the beginning we’ll focus on characters and storylines. Later, maybe, we’ll cover individual writers and artists.
WESCOTT: Since you’ve said that you’ve read and enjoyed comics in the past…if there was another character or storyline you could pick for a Marvel Age of Comics book, what would it be?
NAVQI: I’d love it if we did a book on Secret Wars, the 80s one. Covering Secret Wars could mean that we could cover alternate universes, or what else was happening in comics at the time. It could also be fun to do a book about Wolverine, or Weapon X. There’s no shortage of ideas; we’ll be doing about 6-8 books a year.
WESCOTT: Any last words on Marvel Age of Comics?
NAVQI: It’ll be a fun, collectable series with beautifully rendered visuals. I hope that hardcore comic book fans feel the love of comics that comes through; the feeling of going to the comic book store and reconnecting with their favorites.
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