Recap
11/12/2007

Recap

Since 1938 the comic book industry has experienced two growth cycles and three depressions.

The medium experienced tremendous success during the Golden Age of superhero until a flood of competitors and imitators that glutted the market along with concerned parents who questioned the appropriateness of many comic book stories applied the brakes. Soon after World War II helped produce artificially high sales figures that continue to represent the industry’s zenith. Comic book sales have never again been so consistently high, but after the war demand decreased. Sales took another hit at the beginning of the Fifties when concerned parents again questioned the appropriateness of many comic book stories. This led to the Comic Book Code, whose restrictions unintentionally benefited a renaissance of superhero comics.

“Fan culture grew to parallel the commercial success of superhero comic books,” Mila Bongco writes in READING COMICS. “In the 1960s, fan movement was generally acknowledged as having shaped part of the resurgence of superhero comic books[.]” DC, the industry’s establishment publisher at the time, was slow to react to this fan movement while upstart Marvel Comics quickly catered to it. According to Bradford Wright in COMIC BOOK NATION, Marvel’s Stan Lee gambled that a “compelling product carefully grounded in adolescent sensibilities could still win a sizable audience in those looking for an alternative to the more homogenize offerings of mass culture.” It was a good strategy, but one that took on a life of its own as fandom acquired more and more control over the comic book industry during the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties.

The most obvious change to manifest itself was in the superheroes themselves. “Although there have been many attempts to make superheroes more multi-dimensional, especially psychologically, since the 1960s, there was a marked difference in the changes in the 1980s; there seemed to an underlying cynicism in the revamping of the genre rather than simply an imaginative elaboration of an old genre.”

These were the times and events leading up to the Indy Revolution. This history shaped comic book stories published by Eclipse, Pacific, First, Comico, Dark Horse, Malibu, Caliber, and hundreds of other publishers during the Eighties and Nineties. Most of these stories, created by raw talents (and sometimes by people with no talent), were not very good. However more than a few were quite good and a very few were outstanding. As time passes these Indy gems are being lost and forgotten, but in my opinion they deserve a better fate than to become lost comic book literature.

Today the comic book market is mired in yet another depression as the fandom that rescued comic books in the Sixties has become the medium’s own worst enemy. Pop comics have become all the vogue in direct-market comic books, and as comic book writer and novelist Peter David (THE HULK) wrote in a 1991 article, “The bottom line is that everything [in the comic book industry] is so tightly knit -- publisher to distributor to retailer to fan to publisher again -- that there isn't a lot of room for other fibers to work their way in.” Nevertheless, graphic novels and manga (especially shojo manga) are attracting a growing audience in retail bookstores and other popular chain stores. The popularity of these manga could be a hint that a new and revolutionary Golden Age of comic books might not be out of the question.

Which brings us to the end of this series and the end of my run on the Komikwerks website.

It has been my pleasure the past year and half to share a little of what I know about writing comics and this important part of the history of comics with you. I would like to thank Shannon Denton, Patrick Doyle, Rob Worley, and Gary Reed for letting me be a part of this exciting comics outpost here on the World Wide Web. I hope you have enjoyed these columns, and if you have checked out the TALISMEN webcomic or my website I hope you have enjoyed those as well. Please remember to check out HENRIETTA HEX AND THE GHOSTS OF SPOOKS HOLLOW from Actionopolis when it comes out.

Until we meet again, be well, be kind to each other, and be sure to remember to support our troops. They are the ones who are risking and sacrificing so much so you and I can be free. For now I remain, as always, very respectfully yours.

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