Usually a massive presence at San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Entertainment is largely out of this year’s virtual iteration of the 50-year-old fan convention, Comic-Con @ Home. That is, except for a panel on “Marvel’s 616”, a series of Disney Plus documents that covers the history of Marvel Comics through the lens of a series of individual filmmakers.
Actors Gillian Jacobs (“Community”) and Paul Scheer (“Black Monday”) joined the panel to share their experiences directing episodes for the series, the first time they made a documentary film. Jacobs and Scheer joined executive producer Sarah Amos (also vice president of new media development and production at Marvel) and executive producer Jason Sterman (whose production company Supper Club did the series) to talk to moderator Angélique Roché about their different approaches to your episodes. .
Sterman explained that “Marvel’s 616” was designed to feel as tonally and thematically disparate as the vast universe of Marvel Comics, so that each filmmaker from series eight episodes can immerse themselves in Marvel history “in their own unique way.”
To prove it, Roché played clips from the Jacobs and Scheer episodes that Disney Plus released extensively on Wednesday. The Jacobs episode clip, “Higher, Later, Faster: Trailblazing Women of Marvel Comics,” tracks the creation of Ms. Marvel, the first Muslim superhero in the history of Marvel comics. Jacobs interviewed Sana Amanat, vice president of character and content, Marvel Entertainment, about how her experiences as a Muslim woman inspired the company to create a character that spoke to her experiences. Amanat then recruited Muslim writer G. Willow Wilson, who could not believe what Marvel wanted to do.
“I thought you were going to have to hire an inmate to open all this hate mail,” Wilson says in the clip. “It just seemed to wave a red flag in front of all the people who thought that people like me and Sana shouldn’t be in the comics.”
On the panel, Jacobs said that when he got to the project, he knew next to nothing about comics: “I don’t think I’ve read a comic at all times, so this was a really exciting process to learn about Marvel and fall in love with comics.” .
To understand how the comic book industry evolved to be so male dominated, Jacobs said his research led her to the origins of the industry in the 1920s and 1930s. However, although Jacobs said the experience of making his episode led her to regret all the years that she hadn’t been reading comics, first of all she never explained how she got involved with the “Marvel’s 616” project. (The panel also omitted the origins of the show’s title, a reference to “Earth 616,” the version of Earth within the Marvel comic book multiverse where most of the stories take place.)
By contrast, Scheer is a comic book fanatic who is the author of Marvel Comics titles. His episode, “Lost and Found,” continued his quest to meet the dark and forgotten characters favorite of other Marvel writers who have appeared on the pages of Marvel. The clip for their episode included Doctor Druid, a “bargain basement”, Doctor Strange; Typography, a villain who paints letters on his face and then throws away letters like weapons; and the Whizzer, which achieved its ability to run super fast by injecting mongoose blood.
“We all know the top players, but then there’s that weird guy who only meets once every four years,” Scheer said during the panel discussion. He also mentioned other Marvel characters like US Archer, who essentially has a CB radio installed in his brain, and Hellcow, a cow that is bitten by a vampire and turns into a vampire cow.
There is an intriguing, and apparently unintended, tension between the Jacobs and Scheer approaches. Obviously, they both sought to cover lesser-known territory within the Marvel universe, but while Scheer’s knowledge base within Marvel is much deeper and more personal than Jacobs’, their episode clip did not feature any female writer or character. . (During the panel, Scheer mentioned Asbestos Lady, powers that are self-explanatory.)
For his part, Amos said that one of his goals with “Marvel’s 616” is to capture the great diversity of the audience and the theme of Marvel.
“A lot of people have an idea of what Marvel fans or Marvel fans are like, or what the people behind the comics are like,” he said. “And what I like most about the series is that we will introduce you to so many different types of faces and different types of people who have been so integral to the stories we tell and the content we create and have. They all necessarily had a moment at the center of attention.
“Marvel’s 616” will debut later in 2020. You can see the full panel above.
