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On Halloween 1986, a 10-year-old Vermont boy named Bryan Stratton donned a Dracula costume and made his way to a store called the Comics Outpost. There, he found something that would change his life: a Marvel Transformers comic book.
“That was my gateway drug into reading comics,” Stratton, who now lives in Portland, tells WW. “I dove headfirst into Marvel.”
Stratton didn’t just become a die-hard fan of Marvel superheroes like Captain America, Iron Man and the Wasp. He ultimately co-founded Marvel by the Month, a podcast where he and co-hosts Robb Milne and Jamie Wenger read and discuss every single Marvel comic in the company’s 60-year-plus history.
“It’s great doing a podcast like this in Portland, which is basically the center of the North American comics universe,” Stratton says. “We’ve been very spoiled and really well supported.”
Those waiting for the trio to be driven into a Wolverine-style berserker rage by their grand task will have to keep waiting. The podcast recently released its 200th episode, which features two special guests: Portland-based Marvel legends Matt Fraction (Hawkeye) and Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man).
In the wake of that milestone, WW spoke to Stratton about his journey through Marvel’s turbulent history—and why the myth of the superhero is more seductive than ever.
WW: A lot of times, I walk around thinking, “I’m a pretty good Marvel fan, I know a lot of shit,” but I couldn’t tell you what was going on with Marvel in September 1973. How did you come up with the month-by-month format?
Bryan Stratton: Robb has been one of my very best friends for the last 10 or 15 years. We started a little digital marketing agency together…and it was around that time that Marvel released their Marvel Unlimited app. It had 12,000 comics, and now it’s over 30,000. It became possible to read every Marvel comic, and that’s the kind of challenge that appeals to my OCD brain.
Do you have a favorite story you’ve talked about on the podcast about Marvel’s corporate intrigue?
One of the things that’s really interesting about Marvel is how they were ready to shut the door on the place when Fantastic Four #1 came out. They’d made a bunch of bad business decisions and overcommitted themselves.
There’s a real [sense of], “Well, let’s give this a shot, and if it doesn’t work, no one’s expecting it to.” You can literally see [legendary Fantastic Four artist Jack] Kirby rolling up his sleeves and sitting down at the drawing board and saying, “You need a universe of characters? I’ll give you a universe of characters.”
I’ve always thought that Marvel has the better characters, but DC Comics has the better stories, including graphic novels like Watchmen and Kingdom Come.
A friend of ours, Douglas Wolk, wrote a book called All of the Marvels and won an Eisner Award for it. He says in the first chapter that Marvel is this wild experiment in narrative storytelling, where you have 60 years, hundreds of creators—if not thousands—and millions of pages, all telling what is supposed to be one coherent story.
It’s like, “Why would we just want to sell someone a graphic novel, a fancy six-issue Spider-Man series, when we could get them hooked on reading Spider-Man and then they want to read all the Spider-Man titles?” Sometimes they push that too hard, and they start thinking about continuity as being the most important thing—which I don’t think it is.
Do you think that superheroes resonate more than ever right now because the pandemic and social media have divided and isolated us? In a sense, we’re all wearing masks, and not just literally.
If you’re at a point where you feel hopeless about the state of the world…there is something really appealing about an individual having an ability that allows them to be a corrective to whatever social anxieties you’re suffering from.
Is there a Marvel character who best embodies your fears for the direction the world is going or your hopes for where it could go?
One character who has been really fascinating to me is Captain America. Right now, with where we’re at in the podcast, it’s the end of Vietnam and Watergate is kicking into high gear—and having a guy running around with an American flag on his chest was maybe not something that the college-age readers of Marvel comics were super interested in.
But a writer named Steve Englehart—who was not too far out of college himself—took the book over and started doing some really interesting things with it, and having [Captain America] struggle with, what does it mean to be the symbol of America in times like these? You can get some really good stories out of that.
LISTEN: New episodes of Marvel by the Month stream at marvelbythemonth.com.