Marvel super heroes exhibit and Zephyr train delight all visitors
ILLINOIS: If there is an official greeter at the Museum of Science and Industry, it is the Pioneer Zephyr train. This 3-car, 98-ton artifact — the second-largest at the museum after the U-505 WWII submarine — sits by the subterranean admission desks, sort of a freebie for visitors even before they enter. “It’s a little bit of a hood ornament for the museum,” MSI Creative Lead John Llewellyn says of the 1934 streamlined train, the one-time show pony of the Western rails. Now it is a freshly polished and, in a sense, remounted hood ornament following an extensive renovation of train and exhibit that visitors will discover when the museum reopens Sunday after its second Covid-19-forced closure. That’s a good thing because it’ll probably be greeting more visitors than it would have thanks to a second exhibit making its debut with the reopening.
“Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes” offers an expansive, engaging and intelligent look at the comic-book company, from early ink-on-paper pages to contemporary cinematic blockbusters and a seemingly endless string of TV series. The show has been something of a blockbuster in its own right, drawing more than 900,000 visitors at three previous stops, including Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, where it debuted in 2018. Its Chicago premiere was originally slated for October, but its life, too, was affected by the pandemic. What is now on the walls and in the galleries was worth the wait. Exhibitions of this sort can be scant of muscle and floppy of backbone, excuses, essentially, to glom onto the popularity of the movies, the portion of the world being explored that contemporary audiences would most know and most want to know.
But the “Marvel” show’s roots in the work of a comics scholar are clear throughout. The chief curator Benjamin Saunders, a University of Oregon English professor, even owns at least one of the first-edition Marvel comic books on display. Right away, his show explains how superhero comics arose out of a combination of newspaper funny pages and pulp magazines, with World War II cementing the American interest in all-powerful good guys. It gives us Marvel floundering in the 1950s as superhero interest waned and the company tried to jump on other industry trends: “Homer Hooper” was Marvel’s knockoff of the Archie comics, and “Homer the Happy Ghost” was its “Casper” imitation. It was probably fortuitous that the Marvel crew, especially pioneering creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, never named a superhero Homer.
It was “The Fantastic Four” and an early 1960s “amazing explosion of creativity” by Lee and Kirby, the exhibit explains, that set the fortunes for Marvel as they developed characters that have since sold billions of dollars worth of movie tickets. “The Fantastic Four” followed quickly by Hulk, Thor, Iron Man and the X-men brought novelistic sensibilities to the genre through what Saunders describes as “the Marvel formula: The flawed humanity of the heroes; character-based humor; and continuous subplots” — and, he adds elsewhere, characters whose stories intersect.
“Comic books were considered disposable entertainment, momentary monthly publications, where there was not a lot of thought given to them persevering and resonating with anyone past the following month, when a new issue came out on the newsstand, let alone many years later,” says Patrick Reed, an associate curator of the show and marketing and cultural consultant with SC Exhibitions, which co-developed “Universe of Super Heroes.” “Marvel was unique in that they started building a larger tapestry out of this.” Visitors, to be sure, don’t need to read the text like that, which pretty deftly puts the company into popular-culture context. Like most good exhibition design this one lets you dig deeper via the words or just have a mostly visual experience — which in this case means looking at lots of comics pages and perhaps even more movie-character outfits.
An original “Black Panther” costume is on hand, of course, along with a life-size model of the character you can pose with. You can stand beside an upside-down Spider-man or get cozy with the life-size Thing, sidling up to his bumpy plastic self on a couch. But as someone who has ignored all but a handful of Marvel’s recent on-screen flourishing — I tend to like movie characters whose superpower is their representation of actual humanity — I found myself drawn to the detailed descriptions of how Marvel worked. Especially impressive throughout is the way the company developed, well ahead of entertainment industry peers, a rainbow coalition of characters. Yes, part of this was chasing contemporary youth trends and part of it was just the relentless demand to create new product, but what also comes across is a progressive spirit.
“Marvel was created by people living and working in New York and telling stories about things that they knew,” says Reed. “So even from the early days of the comics, you had, you know, different sorts of people on a subway, different sorts of people on the street, in the background. And that sort of feeling of reality and inclusiveness, it’s not pandering. It’s not even necessarily intentional. It’s just the way it always has been.” Split between the museum’s two main spaces for traveling exhibitions, the show wanes a little in its second half, which becomes more of a list of the more recent characters, aka likely future stars of the screen. But even there it’s intriguing to see the company factoring in women’s liberation and developing its first Latinx character, for instance.
So if the idea was not only to give hard-core fans material to revel in but to bring along the skeptics, to sell them on the notion that there’s a lot more to the Marvel universe than superhuman powers deployed during interminable fight scenes, then that mission has been accomplished. The retooled Pioneer Zephyr, meanwhile, accomplishes another sort of mission. Foremost, at least in this moment, it makes you almost physically ache to take a trip — anywhere. The train’s retro glamour — its sleek, streamlined, stainless steel design was mean to spur interest in rail travel — is alluring even to this day.
And in addition to recovering the upholstery and redoing the signage explaining both the train’s revolutionary engineering and its own place in popular culture, museum designers have surrounded it with screens. When you step aboard — limited these days by COVID concerns — you get a sense of the train in motion. When the Pioneer Zephyr debuted after being given to the MSI in 1960, it was an outdoor exhibit and an example of recent technology all visitors were likely to remember — akin to the early Tesla that’s now on view in the transportation hall. But now it really is an antique, a representation of an American era and aesthetic, and it’s a delight to see it treated with new reverence in its manner of exhibition. What you take away is that, in the speeds it achieved, the design it displayed and the impact it had on people, the Pioneer Zephyr was kind of a marvel.