Arctic Ink is a site dedicated to analyzing and commenting on issues of Marvel Comics from the Silver Age of comics. The content is in the form of free-form analytical essays, which I attempt to keep in the 1500-2000 word range, allowing for some depth without being unreasonably time-consuming to read. The focus of these retrospectives is primarily on the narrative cohesion, thematic components, and structural solidity of stories, with things like dialogue and art as a secondary layer that I comment mostly when there's something of particular interest to comment about.
The current publication schedule is such that a new essay will be added on the site once per week, every Friday at 10am GMT. Each post will mostly cover 1-3 issues of a single series, with some special cases comparing issues from different series, or covering an overview of a larger number of issues at once. The series covered will vary, and I'll be rotating the series that I'm covering week by week. I will periodically write special one-shots on individual issues or arcs of series I'm not actively covering at this time.
If you like what I do and would like to help keep the work going, you can support me on Ko-fi; every little bit helps, and even just a one-time donation means a lot. I also welcome any and all feedback, which you can send using the contact widget in the side panel, or directly by email at igloosquid@gmail.com if you prefer.
The definition of Silver Age varies depending on who you ask and what context you apply it to. Many sources would consider the Silver Age to range roughly from the mid-50s until about 1970, with minor variance determined by which publisher we're looking at. For the purposes of this site, what I refer to as Silver Age is the period between the debut of the Fantastic Four and the time Stan Lee departed as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics; this means we're working with a range from August 1961 until May 30 1972. I'm not proposing this as a definitive historical stance, it's just the range that fits the content I'm planning.
I'm focusing on Marvel because I've been a life-long fan of Marvel Comics, and even though there's a lot that I don't know and many stories I'm reading for the first time now during this project, I'm significantly more familiar with this mythology and catalogue than any other. I haven't read more than a handful of books from DC Comics, and the only other property I've ever read any meaningful amount of is Spawn from Todd McFarlane's Image Comics.
If I'm in a place one day where I can handle an additional tangent to my comics retrospective work, and if there's demand for it, I would love to make a series on Spawn, or a whole other column of content where I delve into the vast archives of DC Comics for the first time. For now, however, this is a passion project all about Marvel Comics specifically.
The Silver Age is one of my favorite eras of Marvel comics, which is a natural reason for me to focus on it specifically. But it's also a period that many readers, old and new, have an interest in due to it being the time when many of the most popular characters of today first came to be: it's fascinating to explore the origins of the now-iconic stories and properties. It's also the only era featuring a significant number of these most relevant characters where the quantity of issues to analyze is still relatively manageable -- we're talking about hundreds, not thousands -- which makes it so that there's a theoretical chance of actually covering at least the majority of them.
There's a lot of comics to cover in the Silver Age, even with the limited selection of series I'm planning to read and write about, so there's enough work to do without considering expanding the time period. But if there's demand, I'd love one day to also write about some series from the Bronze Age that succeeded our period of choice, or inspect older comics from the 40s, or maybe comment on current comic runs as they come out. There's enough material for hundreds of essays just between 1961 and 1972 though, so it's not something I'm currently planning actively.
I've been a fan of comics as a medium probably since before I could actually read. I didn't start out with super-heroes though -- like many kids in my native Finland, I was reading Donald Duck comics, in the form of a weekly magazine, monthly pocket-book collections, and various other publications that I could read endlessly. As you might be able to tell, Donald Duck is huge in Finland, one of the few places where the bad-tempered bird is more popular than Mickey Mouse.
There's something similar to the way the narrative principles of DC Comics and Marvel Comics from the 1960s are said to differ in how Mickey and Donald distinguish themselves from one another: if DC was about the idealized, aspirational heroes, Marvel had the relatable, complex, and grounded ones. Mickey Mouse is the ideal -- friendly, determined, always ready to solve a problem; Donald Duck, on the other hand, considers himself unlucky, when in truth he brings most of his misfortunes on himself with his short temper, lack of social filter, and eagerness to seize any shortcut that he can see. Finnish kids learn to recognize the dissonance at a young age -- we don't feel like Donald is a victim, we become aware of his mistakes and grow to see them both as tales of caution as well as surprisingly complex characterization.
Those who spend as much time reading the Donald Duck stories as I did usually eventually go deeper and begin to devour Scrooge McDuck stories, most prominently by the legendary Don Rosa -- almost anyone in Finland who has ever seriously read Uncle Scrooge stories can identify the distinct style of a Don Rosa drawing at a glance.
Rosa's stories most famously explore the youth of the miserly millionaire, covering his childhood and earning his first coin, his time as a prospector, and a surprisingly multi-layered relationship with romantic interest Goldie O'Gilt. There's a vastness of what could now be referred to as "lore", and this must be where I first became aware of the idea of a giant narrative world buried behind the story on the page. Clad in a cartoon guise, these tales deliver actual, deep, character-driven storytelling without a young reader even realizing it.
I've always been into writing and reading, and I credit a lot of the ability I've developed with language to the Duck comics. In the Finnish translations at least, the language is always bouncy and dynamic, with synonyms playing a big part: if a dialogue is about a car, for example, it's very rare for the characters to actually say "car", but instead they use a different word each time the car is mentioned. I suspect I've developed a kind of sense for dynamic, non-academic writing specifically from these kinds of language patterns that I consumed so intensely as a child.
My first exposure to Marvel came when I was but a wee child, sometime in the mid-90s. I must have been around 7 when I first saw a TV commercial for the Spider-Man Animated Series; I don't remember what was on it exactly, but my best guess is that it was just the opening theme, with the Finnish network's overlays on top. It was one of the few times in my life when I felt my mind being blown -- it was the most awesome, exciting thing I had ever seen (and if you know the theme song, no wonder). I remember getting a spike of enthusiasm and running downstairs pretending to be Spider-Man, and I didn't even know what Spider-Man was or what he does, I just knew he was cool and I wanted to be him. The visual vibe was roughly similar to things I had seen before such as Biker Mice from Mars, but that never hit me quite as hard as just that brief commercial for this upcoming cartoon.
I watched that cartoon religiously and discussed it with my best friend whenever we had the chance. There was also an Iron Man cartoon and a Fantastic Four series that were broadcast in Finland at some point, but for whatever reason they played at an absurdly late hour: I believe they were on at 11pm, Fantastic Four on Mondays and Iron Man on Thursdays. Spider-Man was on Saturday mornings, which makes a lot more sense to me as a kids' show. Because of the schedule, I could only catch one or two episodes each of Iron Man and Fantastic Four, even though the interest was there -- I just couldn't do it when I had school the next day. I believe the X-Men Animated Series also played in Finland, but I never watched that one.
The Spider-Man cartoon had a storyline loosely based on the Secret Wars cross-over from 1984, which was absolutely mind-blowing at the time: it felt like such a massive story with all these different characters, and even though they were all from Marvel, it still felt like we were breaking some barriers that never got broken before. This was the time when I started to become aware of how vast the Marvel mythology actually was: we got glimpses of characters from other Marvel shows, and some of them would stick around for the whole story. What I loved the most about seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home for the first time is that it reminded me of this exact feeling: the awareness that some unwritten rule of visual entertainment was unraveling. I felt like a child again watching that movie.
My first actual comic book was The Amazing Spider-Man #403 (in Finnish), which is the middle chapter in the Trial of Peter Parker story arc -- needless to say I had no idea what was going on in that story, but I read it and re-read it many times, it being the only one I had for a long time. The book introduced me to Kaine and Judas Traveller, and it had an appearance from Carnage, who of course was a relatively recently introduced fan-favorite at the time. The tone of the story was immensely different from what I knew from the cartoon, even though the Animated Series was 90s edgy as well -- the comic was dark, oppressive, and kinda gross, but fascinating at the same time. For a long while, this vibe was what I was looking for in Spider-Man, even when I started to get deeper into the back catalogue.
It feels somehow appropriate that even after my tastes changed and I began to prefer the Silver and Bronze Age Spidey (and also some 21st Century periods) over the 90s, the writer and artist of that first issue still remain in my short list of favorite comic creators, as well as the lists of countless others. J.M. DeMatteis is, of course, iconic in his unrivaled ability to tell a complex, introspective, and moving story even around a previously ridiculous character, and Mark Bagley is one of the most recognizable Spider-Man artists, arguably the final evolution in the McFarlane-Larsen-Bagley lineage; his is the style I emulate whenever I attempt to draw the web-slinger myself. There's many other creators I've grown to adore since then, but I find it interesting that the very first comic I had was created (among others) by two people who would be some of my all-time favorites, even decades later.
My exposure to other Marvel characters has been mostly cursory, with Spider-Man always remaining as the core of my interest in comic books. Having explored the Spidey catalogue somewhat extensively, I eventually started to feel like investigating the other series and characters in similar depth, if only to gain more context for my favorite comic book -- understanding how the other books of the time were similar or different felt like a worthwhile project, which in turn inspired me to begin writing down my thoughts. Those thoughts became essays, and the essays became the content on this site.
My writing is about my personal observations from my specific angle centered around the narrative structures and thematic cohesion of the comics I read, which is what interests me the most. I'm entirely aware that there are people who know a lot more about Marvel, the Silver Age, or any other subject matter I cover better than I do. My hope is just to provide a little bit of insight or just food for thought for people who, like me, love getting deep into the stories and the craft of creating them. I think of it as conversation, even if the immediate response isn't there, and that's how I hope my readers will see it as well.
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