Ever since I was a kid, I've loved comics. There's a lot to love about this form of media: the focus on plot, characterization, and dialogue draws from a long tradition of popular literature, but the inclusion of visual artwork lets artists do all sorts of awesome things with color, aesthetics, and style. And, since they’re relatively cheap to produce (for popular media), there’s a great diversity of choices out there.

Of course, they can often be clunky, poorly written messes with crappy dialogue and lame artwork too (sometimes part of that “cheap to produce” thing means hiring some sub-par talent). But even so, the beauty of the form is that you always have a chance to make amends.

I know Marvel and DC always get a lot of crap from the blogs and the indie comic critics for being hackneyed and conservative. And you can’t deny that they ARE the “Big Corporate” players in this game, meaning they have to worry about stuff like brand identity, public opinion, and all that other lame Big Content Industry stuff. But when you encounter something like this timeline of the Marvel Universe, you start to get a feeling for the incredible weight of pop culture integration these companies have provided.

A quick look over that timeline gets you references to: ancient mythology, HP Lovecraft’s “weird” horror/fantasy, vampire myths (both pre and post Stoker), Robert E. Howard’s barbarian pulp, medieval European folktales, World War II propaganda, William Gaines’ pulp horror, Hugo Gernsback-style technological utopianism, classic Westerns, post-war neo-mythological “Big” sci-fi, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Victorian gothic fantasy, Raymond Chandler’s noir crime fiction, Atlantis myths, Phillip K. Dick or Harlan Ellison-style socially conscious SF, and of course mutants. Taken together, this represents a huge, living document that gathers together nearly every trend in pop culture from World War II onwards (at least -- many of these references go back to the whole first wave of “pop culture” in the Victorian Era) and turns it into a single, still-living, still-evolving dramatic arc.

Not a bad achievement for a Big Corporation marketing the lowest of low culture to us witless fanboys!