In defence of Marvel

The teaser for Spider-Man: No Way Home, out this Christmas, which had a record number of 355 million views in the first 24 hours of online availability, delivers three minutes of thrills. Tom Holland is back, in the titular role, with his girlfriend from the previous Spidey movie, his best friend Ned, references to Mysterion, jokes from Benedict Cumberbatch as master wizard Dr Strange, plus engagement with that most playful of Marvel concepts, the multiverse.

Bring in the multiverse, and anything, everything, is possible. Are you old enough to recall that moment in Dallas when the shooting of JR was revealed to be a dream? Well, the multiverse does all that, and some. Time is not a constant. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) can die in Avengers: Endgame a few years ago, and then suddenly arrive back in her own movie, this summer.

This is the glory of Marvel, which has been playing with time and reality since the early 1980s when Captain Britain was tasked to defend one of an entire series of alternate Earths. More recently the critically acclaimed Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse managed to cope with a whole load of Spider variants, including Spider-Ham, a pig.

Moreover the franchise is not a dull series of carbon copies, as some critics (including this magazine’s) have claimed. It is more like a set of loosely connected essays, each with a different emotional pull. Some (Endgame), overwhelmingly so. Iron Man dies so that others can live. And if that doesn’t boomingly reverberate in our cultural hinterland, I don’t know what does. Thor: Ragnarok is a comic delight with a properly nasty but magnificent villain in Cate Blanchett. Guardians of the Galaxy looks at how a spaceman fixated on 1970s pop and brought up by hippie parents might behave. All look astonishing, since they have somehow retained the comic-book aesthetic in the moving image.