Mohicans: Endgame

About halfway through reading The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, I realized I was reading the nineteenth-century version of the Marvel Comic Universe.

Ok, I'll admit, I've not delved too deeply into the Marvel Universe (I think I watched Iron Man and Endgame?), but I know the basic narrative. And a lot of elements from the Marvel movies line up pretty neatly with elements from Cooper's novel:

• A group of disparate characters who face adversity together and by the end of the story have formed a bond;

A really nasty villain who seems to become more and more unreasonably obsessed by the end of the story and who also has a gift for persuasion to sort of miraculously sway public opinion;

A goofy character who comes around in the end to play an important role;

Female characters who represent the dichotomy of roles for women - the sweet, beautiful damsel in distress and the calm, courageous (but also beautiful) sacrificial heroine;

A sequence of action scenes with setbacks and small victories, leading up to an ultimate battle in a dramatic setting, with the loss of key team members and a dramatic defeat for the villain; and

A scene of mourning in which the other team members say goodbye to their fallen comrade.

It makes me wonder - did Cooper establish the pattern for the action genre that has been followed in the 200 years since he published his novels, or am I imposing a 21st-century pattern on his work? I'm going to dig out my American literature textbook from those long-ago college years and see what insight I can gain there.

Anyway, I'm now going to watch the 1992 film adaptation with Daniel Day Lewis. As I was reading, I could visualize how I thought Hollywood would portray these scenes. I'm eager to see if I was right.