The Marvel Universe is Technically Only TEN Years Old

The Marvel universe of the comics has spanned at least half a century for the readers, but comic book time is a very different creature. Between soft reboots and the odd cosmic shenanigan here or there, the Marvel Universe is much younger than readers might suspect. In fact, it’s ten years old and barely done with its training wheels.

Time in comic books has always been a tricky proposition for readers and writers alike. After all, characters need to grow and develop, and to do that, they need to age. But aging too much risk losing readers, especially as the ongoing serialized format of comic books appeals to a generation shift every couple of years. This has lead Marvel to squeeze decades’ worth of material in a single year of comic book time.

While Marvel characters have been around since World War II during the publisher’s days as Timely Comics, the Marvel Age didn’t really kick off until 1961 with the first issue of Fantastic Four. While the Silver Age of Marvel and DC was both rooted in the expanding scientific frontier, the Marvel Age was firmly defined by the turmoil of the time. Tony Stark battled Vietnamese agents in his first appearance. The X-Men were a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Civil Rights Movement. While this timeliness made Marvel relevant at the time, it did make their established histories quite a bit more complicated. After all, Tony Stark should be pushing ninety if he first appeared in the Vietnam War.

This is where the reboots came in. During the events of Hero Reborn, Tony Stark was abducted during the first Gulf War. This was updated a decade later and changed to reflect the still-ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. Otherwise, most of the Marvel characters have undergone a decade worth of characterization – even if the number of collected stories featuring them is far higher.

The success of Marvel’s characters – now box-office topping IP – lies in not how they have reinvented themselves for the time, but ultimately, how their archetypes seamlessly blend into the historical context from decade to decade. Iron Man is a superhero resisting the industrial-military complex first warned against by President Eisenhower, and still a thorny question even today. The X-Men have come to represent not racial rights but also rights for the LGBT+ community. As a result, it’s little surprise that the Marvel universe will probably turn fifteen in another fifty years give or take. However, one does have to wonder what this means for the MCU. After all, as of last year, the MCU is now technically older than the Marvel Universe that created it.

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