‘Mark Gruenwald’
By Paul V. Allen
University Press of Mississippi, 164 pages
This biography declares Mark Gruenwald (1953-1996) “a pivotal figure in the history of Marvel Comics.” He spearheaded projects such as “The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.” It is not too much to say that without him, there might not have been a Marvel universe — at least not one so carefully curated and made into an alternative world that superhero comics are supposed to establish. Without Gruenwald, there might be no President Donald Trump posting AI-driven pictures of himself as a superhero on social media.
As Paul V. Allen shows, before Gruenwald no one seemed much to care if the stories of superheroes were logically consistent, so that over time they could be read as coherent biographies. The pressure was to put out best selling issues one after another as quickly as the market for them could be developed and exploited. As a result, Gruenwald realized, a dedicated fan might well be puzzled and perhaps even be put off — as he was — by stories that contradicted one another and thus shattered the illusion of the alternative world the comics purported to portray.
Gruenwald got his start in comics by writing and producing his own publications even as he avidly read the work of the two major rivals, DC Comics and Marvel. He was, you might say, a fan-scholar, and he noticed when the illusion of an alternative world was destroyed by careless inventions of details that did not contribute to the overall architecture and infrastructure of the Marvel and DC universes.
In effect, Gruenwald wanted what was essentially a business enterprise to take itself seriously as art and as counterfactual history while, of course, remaining entertaining and edifying, taking on important issues, including, Mr. Allen notes, “domestic abuse, race relations, religion, AIDS, and unrequited love,” all the while preserving the momentum of melodramatic plots that veered toward the sentimental.
Mr. Allen does not reveal all that much about Gruenwald apart from his devotion to comics, except to show that he was hard driving and could be neglectful of his married life and family. This driven man gave all he had to the world of comics, often distinguishing himself not only as a creator but as an editor who brought out the best in fellow artists.
Mr. Allen argues that Gruenwald saw the big picture, which should be a concentration on not only the “big themes” comics explored “nor solely the personalities of the characters themselves, but the combination of all those things in service of one another. . . In nearly ten years at Marvel, Mark had proved to have a unique ability to navigate both office politics and creative egos, and in the executive editor position he found a job perfect suited to those skills.”
Gruenwald lived the world he created. “Unsurprisingly, Mr. Allen reports, “many of the photos feature Mark wearing some sort of costume.” He wanted to lose himself and Marvel readers entirely within the alternative universe of the superhero.
Anyone familiar with Marvel comics will enjoy the inside stories in this biography, but if you are not an aficionado, like me, then you may yearn for more about the identity and purpose of superheroes. What is it about them that attracts a wide-ranging audience, including, for example, Sylvia Plath, a devoted listener to the 1940s Superman radio serial. She was as much taken with it as I was with George Reeves’s television rendition.
And then Plath evidently stopped her superhero infatuation — unless you want to think of her husband Ted Hughes as her superman — and the work of biographers who by concentrating on a single subject often abet the fascination with superheroes.
In short, Mr. Allen might have grown more of an audience for his biography if he had told more stories about what goes on inside the world of Mark Gruenwald’s comics, why it matters to fans and why it might matter, as well, to an audience not so familiar with those alternative worlds Gruenwald wanted to regulate so as to enforce coherence and continuity.
Thirty years ago Gruenwald died of a massive heart attack in his early 40s, and yet his work at Marvel seems to have been at an end. He no longer had a place there, and he was beginning to explore a shift to the art of screenwriting. Who knows what he might have contributed to the superhero franchises still so popular today?
Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘American Biography.‘
