There was a time before Kevin Fiege. I know. I know. Hard to believe in this age when we are living through the Marvel-ification of mainstream Hollywood cinema. In the last few years Fiege, the president of Marvel Studios, has completed the mainstreaming of superheroes into the culture. Ideas of comics as a second-rank, low-rent cultural force are now in the dustbin of history. As the writer Mark Millar once told me, “the geeks have inherited the earth.”

Is this a good thing? I am ambivalent on the matter. The 12-year-old boy in me thinks it’s thrilling. The adult is less sure. That’s because the adult hates CGI special effects (they look dead on the screen), finds that even when Marvel films are visually inventive (the Ant-Man film springs to mind) they are all too often built into a narrative structure that is generic, unimaginative and frankly dull. They are also bolted into a Marvel universe infrastructure that can feel as much a marketing device as a storytelling one.

I guess part of me thinks superheroes are really an adolescent idea that doesn’t really make sense in an adult world. Others plainly disagree. Beyond that, I have to say that no superhero film has ever had the impact on me of a Jack Kirby double-page spread.

Still, if we all now live in a Marvel-coloured universe the temptation is to look around for alternative worlds. So it’s intriguing that this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival is giving viewers a chance to revisit some examples of the pre-Fiege era of comic strip adaptations.

Pow!!! is curated by Niall Greig Fulton and David Cairns. I’m presuming the ironic quotation marks are just invisible. And I’d take issue with the retrospective strap line which reads “live action comic strip adaptations: the first generation.” First generation? You can trace comic strip adaptations back to 1906 and Edwin Porter’s silent film version of Windsor McCay’s strip Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend and nothing in Pow!!! dates back further than 1961. (That would be Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece, which is screening on June 19.)

The Herald:

Pow!!! covers two decades and 11 films and is a reminder that  comic strip films didn’t always have to fit into pre-existing narratives (or introduce characters who will appear in the next movie); didn’t always take superheroes seriously (when I was 12 I would have hated that; now I rather like it); and could be more visually daring, more self-reflexive and often more knowingly camp than anything CGI has ever dreamed of.

That’s not to say they’re necessarily good. To be honest I’ve never liked the 1960S Adam West Batman TV series or its 1966 movie spin-off, Batman: The Movie (screening June 23). That’s probably the 12-year-old boy in me who grew up on the dark knight detective idea of the character.  Knowingly camp wasn’t what I wanted.

The Herald:

Still, it was definitely swirling around in the cultural waters of the 1960s.

In her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp” Susan Sontag argued that “Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.”

That knowing stylisation is all over many of the films in the Pow!!! retrospective, most notably films from the 1960s, most obviously Joseph Losey’s curious take on the newspaper strip Modesty Blaise (June 16) which offers a catsuited Monica Vitti and Dirk Bogarde literally kicking the bucket and Maria Bava’s big screen take on Danger: Diabolik (June 16). You can even stretch it as far as Mike Hodges’ 1980 take on Flash Gordon (June 26).

Sontag listed “the old Flash Gordon comics” among her random items in the canon of camp and Hodges undoubtedly buys into the idea in his film. There would have been a time – some time around 1980 when I first watched Flash Gordon – that I assumed that meant that the director was not taking the subject matter seriously.

That might have been the overprotective comic book lover in me. I have rather warmed to Flash Gordon over the years. It is a silly film and yet it has a mild kinkiness and flashes of intelligence that can let me see beyond Brian Blessed, the Queen soundtrack and Sam J Jones balsa wood performance in the lead role.

But it’s in Barbarella that the camp comic book movie reaches some kind of apotheosis. In fact, I’d argue that the peak arrives in the title sequence of Roger Vadim’s none-more-sixties movie. Designed by Maurice Binder, who is best known for his work on the James Bond title sequences, Barbarella opens with a comic strip tease (in both senses) as Jane Fonda divests herself of a flimsy looking space suit. As The Glitterhouse sing the theme tune Fonda takes off her fishbowl helmet her hair and the letters of her name spill across the screen.

It’s a sequence that sums up the position of the comic strip and the idea of camp in the culture of the time, taking in acid colours, plastic age futurity, Paco Rabanne costumes and 1960s male gaze objectification of female film stars. (Proving that male gaze objectification of female stars doesn’t date, both Kylie in the 1990s and Arianne Grande more recently have made pop videos that homage/rip off the Barbarella title sequence.)

Barbarella, like many of these films, is a celebration of artifice. It both adopts and teases the comic book’s approach (I may be alone in preferring Vadim’s film to Jean-Claude Forests’s original strips which seem to me to suffer from Forest’s rather pedestrian storytelling abilities.)

In the Marvel universe – and this is a broadsweep generalisation so feel free to shoot me down – for all Robert Downey Jr’s sarky asides there is all too often a humourlessness that seems to fear that if we laugh at all we’ll realise that the concept of people dressing up in funny clothes and flying around hitting each other is, well, a bit silly. That might explain why Guardians of the Galaxy – the least serious of Marvel films – is my favourite.

Campy humour, by the way, is not the only register to be found in the Pow!!! retrospective. Kenji Misumi’s violent, blood-drenched adaptation of Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s manga Lone Wolf and Cub has been often seen in the west in a re-edited, dubbed version Shogun Assassin. Even so, Misumi’s imaginative visual staging and his willingness to find cinematic rhythms to match the comic strip rhythms should make Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (June 19) a revelation on the big screen.

But as is the case with all film festivals, the most intriguing films on show are those few of us will have seen before. These include Jun’ya Sato’s 1973 film Golgo 13 (June 20), based on the manga character Duke Togo, played here by Ken Takakura  and Arthur Marks’s blaxploitation take on newspaper strip Friday Foster (June 22), with Pam Grier in the title role.

And what does Corrado Farina’s 1973 adaptation of Guido Crepax’s BDSM fantasy Baba Yaga (June 21) look like? Over and above the inevitable sexual subject matter does Farina find a visual equivalent for the way Crepax would often splinter the page into small panels in his work?

 But if I’m honest the film I’m most looking forward to is Robert Altman’s musical version of Popeye (June 25) . Altman made the film in 1980, his last big-budget excursion for years and as The A.V. Club once had it, a “wonderfully Saturday-morning makeover” of the typical Altman approach. The late Robin Williams plays Popeye in the days before he was a hideously self-conscious screen actor and the result has, if memory serves, a rubbery bravura to it that to me sings of the offhand grace and silly-cum-sublime imagination that can be so thrilling in comic strips.

Then again I haven’t seen it since 1980 and back then I was a lot closer to the 12-year-old me than I am now.

For more information and to book tickets visit edfilmfest.org.uk