Available to watch now on Disney+

“We all make mistakes…No one wakes up and knows this is how it should be…” These lines, spoken by the writer Tony Isabella sum up the heart of this documentary.

Almost the first thing we’re presented with is Captain America punching Hitler and really the documentary takes its cue from this image. It is dense, packed full of history with important voices like Christopher Priest and Larry Hama and Sana Amanat given space not only to talk about where Marvel is now but where it’s come from.

Unlike the 616 documentaries there is more open discussion of where things truly were and how Marvel’s approach to identity has changed over the decades.

The danger for any documentary concerned with identity in this day and age is going all out and being performative about how much they care about the subject. Michael Jacobs, the director, successfully walks the line of focusing on identity without it becoming preachy or one note. Indeed, the journey is one I found enthralling.

The framing lens for the entire film is that of who’s the real character, what’s behind the mask? It’s a great conceit because it allows Jacobs to rove freely between different ages in the comic industry and still present a cohesive idea.

The narrative is one which starts with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, reminding us of their Jewish background, of the background of so many people at the start of the industry and how many of them were also immigrants. There’s a profound discussion of how they were living dual identities in real life – one for home and one for the workplace. We see how it was a rough life, how exclusion was the norm.

Among others, Kirby’s son explores how Captain America, wrapped in the US flag, is the dream of the immigrant – of belonging to their new home, of exemplifying its values. The metaphors of ripping one’s coat off and being a superhero are a powerful way of thinking through what you contribute (or would if you were free to).

We’re taken into the Golden Age of comics, post war, and the discussion turns to how heroes moved from being able to hide to being unable to hide their otherness. We see so much about how these kinds of heroes helped their readers find themselves – especially for those who felt judged by how they looked before they were assessed on who they really were on the inside.

As part of this we see the origins of the Hulk, how he was grey like myths of the Golem and we hear from both Jewish and People of Colour about how the Hulk was a powerful metaphor for their experiences.

We’re continually brought back to the emotional story. How each superhero has an angle behind their masks – personal insecurities, failures, struggles – all with the idea of helping readers see themselves in these alter egos. This juxtaposition of who we see ourselves as being and who we’d like to be is presented as core to the superhero again and again and it’s a powerful argument for their enduring appeal.

This leads naturally into further discussion about how the real world is explored within the pages of Marvel’s comics. How people of colour suddenly started appearing in background shots without social commentary – they were just there without anyone justifying their existence.

The two steps forwards and one step back on this is fascinating. Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos is a brilliant case study; one of the team, Gabe Jones, is Black, yet the printer on the first issue swapped out the colour palette to White because they thought it was a mistake. Even when corrected it took months, if not years, to get them to appear as anything other than grey because no one could figure out how to represent rich brown skin on the page.

In a clip from 1973 Stan Lee defends representing people of all colours in their books and goes out his way to say it’s not a token effort. Which makes you realise these kinds of discussion have been going on for at least fifty years and we’re still going around again.

This is reiterated in the introduction of Black Panther – who’s introduced without fanfare – he just was.

Yet Jacobs also shows some of the mistakes – whether it’s Northstar’s hamfisted presentation as a Gay man (who turns out to be, and I kid you not, half Fairy) or having Black Panther become Black Leopard rather than allow him to be associated with Black Power.

We hear from Denys Cowan who was denied work because ‘we already have a coloured artist’. There is no shying away from the challenges PoC faced when trying to work or create, not just representative characters but anything at all.

Larry Hama takes the discussion further by talking through how East Asians were coloured bright yellow until he asked for it to stop. If there’s one odd moment, it’s Ann Nocenti repeating the claims she made in the 616 docs that there was no sexism in the Marvel offices. It’s a claim I simply find hard to believe – not because they were living right through the Women’s Liberation movement but also because it was an environment built for and dominated by White men.

All of this self-examination isn’t there to make anyone feel bad – Jacobs masterfully presents these discussions as a history of the development of the industry, how it marched alongside, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, wider society.

This means there are definitely instances of characters and their presentation that have aged…not well. Luke Cage is a great example – a character who only exists because of the movie Shaft and how his sense of being ‘Black’ is a White person’s idea of what Blackness is.

Nicole Georges makes the point that identity in comics is huge – because the lines between good and evil are so clear and she reminds us that to consume this kind of media for years and years without seeing yourself ever represented there is a very strange situation to be in.

This leads us back into the history of the Marvel Universe with the first all Black comic as developed by Don McGregor and centred around Black Panther, about how it was a safe Black Space, untouched by colonialism but rather it’s a space of celebration and power.

As part of this discussion Tony Isabella is clear – everyone makes mistakes but he doesn’t condemn the people who made those mistakes instead talking about how it’s what we learn from them, how we move on and try again to get it right that is important.

Jacobs uses this point to double back and explore how women have been represented in the pages of Marvel’s comics. Amanda Shrendrik leads us on this bit of the journey, examining how women characters aped the ‘feeble’ female stereotype popular at the time before becoming more ‘point and pose’, allowed powers where the female character could act and still look ‘good’ on the page. They were often weaker than male superhero powers and designed to help support the men rather than take the lead.

We see how this changed, how feminism and equality became much stronger watch words for the heroes we see today – for instance in the appearance of Ms Marvel in 1977.

Jacobs brings us back to his central thesis – that representative story telling isn’t simply about metaphor but also about seeing those actual people represented on the page – whether they’re LGBTQ+, BIPOC or whatever. How each of us struggles, how each of us want largely the same things – stability, the chance to be who we believe ourselves to be and the respect of our peers.

Which brings the film to the present day. Jacobs explores what it means to be a person and asks: when we’re all different, what does that mean? Is there even a need to hide behind a mask in today’s comics?

The film ends with what is almost a call to arms – that everyone can find themselves reflected in comics, that in these stories we can all see our struggles, our triumphs and our hopes. It’s hugely uplifting and I was left feeling really inspired.

I’ve struggled to find anything wrong with this exploration of how comics show us back to ourselves – but I do have one quibble and I can understand why it’s not explored in the film and that’s the issue of who are superheroes fighting and what are they fighting for?

Too often for me heroes are trying to defend the status quo – a status quo which is frequently bad for their more diverse readership. To me it doesn’t matter if your heroes are BIPOC if they’re effectively tools of a society that rejects equality, right?

Nevertheless, the argument of so many of the creators in the film is that they changed their personal worlds by showing up and doing the work. It’s a powerful statement but Jacobs is smart to contrast this sensibility with Denys Cowan who is clearly moved by where he finds himself but remarks he’s seen it before and he’s seen this progress get rolled back with the clap of a hand. It’s a remarkably candid piece of commentary about both Marvel and wider society and sums up the strengths of this film perfectly.

Verdict: This film is well worth your time. More importantly, if you have younger people in your home who love Marvel this is a really, really good documentary about the world in which their heroes are made.

My rating: 9 secret identities out of 10.

Stewart Hotston