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ABSTRACT
People who contemplate the nature of time on conceptual grounds are philosophers. Although not usually counted as philosophers, the writers, artists and editors of Marvel Comics are nevertheless philosophers in the operative sense. In the pages of their comics, Marvel creators explore, investigate and hypothesize the realities and properties of time – including eternalism, presentism, the growing block view of time, branching time, and timelines as alternative universes (created or found). Unlike traditional philosophers, however, Marvel creators are not always explicit about the implications of their illustrated thought experiments. Instead, we are in their place. We trace conceptual contemplations about the nature of time in Marvel’s first two decades by focusing on stories involving Dr. Doom’s time machine, the plot device that established the trope of time travel in Marvel continuity. Doing so illuminates just how sophisticated Marvel’s stories are, philosophically. We begin in the early 1960s when Marvel introduced Doom’s machine, consider a series of subsequent stories involving the device, and conclude with the philosophical time-travel challenges facing the rebooted All-New, All-Different Marvel of 2015 and beyond.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. For an example of the medievals calling Aristotle ‘The Philosopher,’ see Timothy McDermott (Citation1993). On Newton calling himself a philosopher and his impact on what we now consider philosophy, see I. Bernard Cohen and George Smith (Citation2002) – where Smith is himself a philosopher. And on others calling Einstein a ‘scientist-philosopher,’ see Paul Arthur Schilpp (Citation1998).
2. Issues 1–20 are anthologised in Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 1.
3. The two views trace to J.M.E. McTaggart (Citation1908). McTaggart’s A-theory and B-theory are the basis for presentism and eternalism, respectively, explained below.
4. Below we question the assumption behind this claim.
5. David Lewis (Citation1976).
6. Later stories give the time-travelling supervillain an especially complex and diverging history with multiple versions of himself appearing from his own and alternative timelines. He and his counterparts have been called ‘Nathaniel Richards’, ‘Scarlet Centurion’, ‘Kang the Conqueror’, ‘Immortus’ and ‘Iron Lad’.
7. The makers of the 1978 Superman: The Movie presented a contrasting philosophy of time when Superman travels to his recent past to save the life of Lois Lane after she is killed in a nuclear bomb-triggered earthquake. Although Superman’s father warns him not to alter the course of human history, the change produces no negative consequences.
8. Marvel later retconned, or retroactively established continuity with, this moment to reveal in Ed Brubaker’s 2005 ‘Out of Time’ Captain America story arc that Bucky did survive and became the Winter Soldier.
9. The issues are anthologised in the unpaginated Essential Defenders Vol. 2.
10. The growing block view traces to C.D. Broad (Citation1923). Eternalism is sometimes called the ‘block’ view, because it imagines time as a single, undifferentiated, extant unit.
11. See Aristotle (Citation1961).
12. Lewis’s ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’ was published the same month as Mantlo scripted Spider-Man’s adventure in 1692 Salem and two months before Thomas scripted the Fantastic Four’s travel to 1942, eliminating the possibility of direct influence. Lewis instead references Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘By His Bootstraps’ (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1941) and ‘ – All You Zombies –‘” (Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1959); Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955); and H. G. Wells’, The Time Machine, An Invention (London: Heinemann, 1895).
13. While philosophers usually take different branches to be isolated from one another, Reed suggests otherwise. Although time-travelling vibranium prevented the main Marvel continuity branch from becoming the one in which Germany wins, Reed’s relief that this alternative branch ‘thank Heaven, will now be forever separate’ might imply that the creation of one branch nevertheless causally effects another. Indeed, as we saw above, Reed goes so far as to say that changes in one continuum ‘might eventually affect all of them!’ Nonetheless, because nothing like this is actually depicted in the comic, we do not pursue the possibility.
14. William James (Citation1979).
15. In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz called these alternative universes ‘possible worlds’, and contemporary philosophers do the same. The chief proponent of the view that possible worlds are as real as the actual world is David Lewis, while the chief proponent of the view that they are merely heuristic devices permitting us to understand things about the actual world is Saul Kripke.
16. DC Comics established a similar multiverse in the late 1950s, when it moved the events of its Golden Age comics of the 1940s from its new characters’ past to another world, newly dubbed ‘Earth-2’.
17. Nor does Roy Thomas have Reed address an additional paradox. While the 1976 Fantastic Four and the 1942 Invaders are battling Baron Zemo in 1942, Captain America knocks a vat of Adhesive X onto Zemo, permanently affixing Zemo’s mask to his face – fulfilling a Second World War historical event retroactively established in Avengers #6 (published in 1963). Had the Fantastic Four of 1976 not travelled to 1942, Captain America would not have faced Zemo at that moment and his mask would not have been affixed. And had the vibranium not been transported to 1942 first, the Fantastic Four would not have travelled there at all. How then was Zemo’s mask affixed in the Fantastic Four’s own branch in which no vibranium from 1976 ever appeared in 1942? This appears to be both a time loop (possible only in unbranching eternal time) and a point of divergence creating a new world in branching time.
18. Regarding the year 1942, Ben tells Reed: ‘Countin’ the stretch we did together when we wuz kids – I been there three times’ (#20, 31).
19. DC Comics accomplished the same in 1986 when it destroyed its own unwieldy multiverse to introduce a new, merged Earth after the limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths. DC has rebooted its universe several times since, including a return of all pre-Crisis universes after the 2015 limited series Convergence.
20. Because philosophers, like comic book writers, focus on time travel to the past, the first part of the objection is known as the ‘no-destination objection’ (see, for example, William Grey (Citation1999), although there should also be a ‘no-departure objection’ correlate.