With great power comes great responsibility. Sixty-five years of stories have been working out what that means.
Marvel Comics was founded in 1939, but it was the early 1960s — Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in a small New York office producing ideas at a pace that still seems impossible — that created the universe most of us know. Spider-Man. The Fantastic Four. Iron Man. Thor. The Hulk. The X-Men. The Avengers. Characters built from recognisably human anxieties — loneliness, responsibility, belonging, the fear of what you might become — given superpowers and set loose in a world that looked, unusually for the genre, like the world outside the window. Marvel's heroes had jobs and rent and complicated feelings. Their problems did not end when the villain was defeated. That was the innovation. That was everything.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, launched with Iron Man in 2008, became the most financially successful film franchise in history by understanding exactly what made the source material work and scaling it to a global audience across twenty-three films and a universe of television series. Whatever comes next in the MCU, the achievement of the Infinity Saga — twelve years of interconnected storytelling building to Endgame's extraordinary conclusion — will not be surpassed easily, if at all.
