Introduction To the Site

Welcome to the Grand Experiment! My name is Paul Brian McCoy and I would like to invite you to come along with me on a strange and wondrous journey, as I explore the creation of the Marvel Universe, beginning with 1961's Fantastic Four #1 and going all the way through everything published in December of 1969.

For those of you who've been along for the ride since the beginning, and those of you just discovering this column, I've been writing it for the past couple of years over at Comics Bulletin.  As there are already a pile of entries ready to go, I'll be re-posting them here, with minor edits and corrections along the way.  There's no drama with CB; I just wanted to have a place where I can easily access them at my leisure.  Future posts will be entered here shortly after going live at CB.

Here's the plan: I will be reading each of Marvel's superhero titles in chronological order, critiquing and commenting on how each successive issue worked to build and expand the Marvel Universe. I want to try to do so, however, without acknowledging what I already know about the development of the shared universe. I'm going to try to treat each issue as if I am reading and experiencing it for the first time, in order to get a real feel for how this world was put together.

I will be going by cover dates, which we all know aren't representative of the actual publication date, but should provide an easy way to keep track of things like the timing of first appearances and reappearances, the orchestration of cross-overs, and the occasional testing of the waters for giving characters their own features or independent titles.

The good news is that pretty much every one of Marvel's superhero titles from the Sixties are available in the very affordable Essentials collections, in case anyone would like to read along with me (or at least fact-check me as I go along).

The titles that aren't readily, or cheaply, available (Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., from Strange Tales and his own series) didn't begin publication until 1965. With any luck, by the time we get there, I'll have found a reasonable alternative source for those books. We'll see.

I intend to give every book, and every story, at least a short mention. Clearly some stories will be more substantive than others (I'm looking at you, Human Torch solo stories), so my attention will be adjusted accordingly, but they all should be in there when everything's said and done. And be sure to leave comments to tell me what I've missed or forgotten, as well as your own spins on what happened each month in the classic MU!