Comic books incorporated: industrial strategy and the legitimation of lowbrow media

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Summarize

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

COMIC BOOKS INCORPORATED:
INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY AND THE LEGITIMATION OF LOWBROW MEDIA

By
Shawna Kidman

Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN CRITICAL STUDIES

May 2015
ii

Dedication

to Tim, for your unconditional and unending support

iii

Acknowledgments

Researching and writing this dissertation has been a labor of love and at times a hardship,
an accomplishment I could not have achieved were it not for the support and encouragement of
everyone around me. I am grateful to all of you. First, I credit the community at USC. I owe
many thanks to my cohort, whose feedback, generosity, and support pushed me toward the finish
line and helped make my work the very best it could be. In particular, I want to acknowledge
Kate Fortmueller, Patty Ahn, Taylor Nygaard, Brett Service, Courtney White, Leah Aldridge,
Sriya Shrestha, Lara Bradshaw, and Elena Bonomo. Both Eric Hoyt and Julia Himberg have also
offered tremendous support, not only encouraging me in everything I do, but by serving as role
models and in demonstrating that hard work and kindness pay off, and making me feel hopeful
and excited about the future. I also benefitted from many brilliant and supportive faculty
members. In my course work and the early stages of conceptualization for this project, I was led
by the insight of Sarah Banet-Weiser, Josh Kun, David James, Aniko Imre, and Tara McPherson,
each of whom has played a large role in my development as a thinker and a scholar.
I am particularly grateful to my committee members, Steve Ross, Henry Jenkins, and
Ellen Seiter; I could not have been blessed with more intelligent, supportive, knowledgeable, and
engaged advisors. Each offered a different set of skills, expertise, and mentorship style, and each
brought something invaluable to my project and my development. Steve, your straightforward
insight, your detailed editing, and your ceaseless insight on organizing, re-structuring, and
pulling together a narrative have been invaluable. In particular, your ability to see the forest
through the sometimes unwieldy trees I presented you with really helped me focus, and get back
to the storytelling I wanted to be doing. Henry, your vast knowledge of these topics, your spot-on
reading recommendations, your fast and thorough feedback, and your ability to somehow know
iv

exactly what I wanted to say when I was still unable to articulate it has been a gift throughout
this process. I have also been blow away and humbled by your relentless support of my opinions,
even when they were at odds with your own, and your total enthusiasm in engaging with my
argument in deep and difficult ways. You pushed me and challenged and me, but somehow also
gave me the space to falter and come up short, and my work has been so much better as a result.
Ellen, your practical advice, emotional support, and candid comments quite frankly got me
through this process, and I cannot fully express how much your continuous encouragement and
praise has meant to me. And although I rarely say it, I am also deeply appreciative of your
scholarship and your teaching. Your work and your ideas have so deeply informed my own, and
your legacy looms large over this project. I am quite certain that it will continue to do the same
over everything I do in the future too.
I would also like to acknowledge the support of my family. My mother and my father-in-
law in particular have given so much of their time to pick up my slack, and I really could not
have gotten through difficult days or weeks or months without you. My husband Tim, to whom I
have dedicated this dissertation, has done far more than pick up my slack. You have held me up
in every way imaginable over the last eight years, and sacrificed so much to help me through
this, and I cannot thank you enough. I am so lucky to have you in my life and at my side, always.
And finally, I want to thank my little girl Cora, who at two-and-a-half-years old is already,
undoubtedly, the most impressive person I know. Your perseverance, your hard work, your
strong will, and your joy inspire me every day to be a better mom and a better person. I will be
eternally grateful to you too, for sharing me with this dissertation, and for lending me your smile,
your kisses, and your laugh when I needed it most.
v

Abstract

―Comic Books Incorporated: Industrial Strategy and the Legitimation of Lowbrow
Media,‖ tells the story of the comic book industry over the span of eight decades. It explains how
this once disreputable but immensely popular medium gradually transformed into a very niche
product whose strong intellectual properties became highly valuable to corporate multimedia
producers. As such, it provides a historical context for the media convergences that account for
the proliferation of comic-book-based texts in Hollywood and beyond. Instead of attributing this
medium‘s dynamic history to changing aesthetics, taste, and public attitudes, it arges that
industry economics and infrastructures, and the everyday practices that constitute both, actively
shaped this particular media culture by cultivating the context of reception. While this
dissertation draws on the growing subfield of media industry studies, the methodological
approach is one of historical materialism. It demonstrates how major industry players—in comic
books, and later, in television and film—were supported in their endeavors by a regulatory and
legal regime that explicitly favored their success. These actors were able to use their resulting
economic and political power to effect public attitudes about media. The resulting legitimation of
media texts that had previously been considered lowbrow helped to invigorate and stabilize
business operations, but also had the effect of containing the industry and therefore limiting
certain possibilities within the medium and its culture.
This dissertation is organized around the critical moments in the long history of comic
books‘ incorporation into multimedia infrastructures: the regulation of comic book distribution in
the fifties, the rise of fandom and licensing in the sixties and seventies, and quality media‘s
embrace of comic-book adaptations in the late eighties and nineties. Facing shrinking audiences,
increasingly niche tastes, disruptions to distribution channels, and a concentration in ownership
vi

as early as the 1950s, the comic book business has for many decades confronted many of the
challenges that today effect all media industries. In response, comic book companies developed
strategic solutions to these problems that have recently been taken up across the entertainment
landscape. As content increasingly moves across platforms with properties relying on longer
lives over multiple distribution channels, the media industry's ability to push the legitimacy of
certain products has become more important than ever and far more widespread. By tracing the
history of these strategies back through comic books, which now take up a significant part of our
media landscape, these case studies therefore establish a precedent for contemporary industrial
strategy. In highlighting the fundamental and long-standing interdependence of comic book
publishing and multi-media production, they also demonstrate the value of trans-industrial
analysis in media studies more broadly.

vii

Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract v
List of Tables/Illustrations viii

Introduction:
Incorporating Comic Books 1

One Comic Book Crisis:
The Crash of 1954, EC Comics, and Self-Regulation through Distribution 45

Two Superman Origins
Creative Labor, Authorship and the Struggle for Copyright 123

Three Tales of the Comic Book Niche:
Value Demographics, Quality TV and the Resurrection of Bad Taste 198

Conclusion:
Industry and Legitimacy 278

Bibliography 300

viii

List of Tables/Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Exhibition from Detective Comics vs. Bruns (1939) 13
Figure 1.2 Exhibition from Detective Comics vs. Bruns (1939) 14
Figure 1.3 Cover, Action Comics #1 (June 1938) 17
Figure 2.1 Cover, Crime Suspense Stories #22 (May 1954) 66
Figure 2.2 ―Are You a Red Dupe‖ Ad in EC Comics (Spring 1954) 69
Figure 3.1 Cover, Wonder Comics #1 (May 1939) 139
Figure 4.1 Image from Tales from the Crypt #31 (August 1952) 244
Figure 4.2 Publicity Still, Tales from the Crypt (Amicus Films, 1971) 246
Figure 4.3 Publicity Still, Tales from the Crypt (HBO, 1989) 247

1

Introduction: Incorporating Comic Books

Sixty years ago, comic books were one of the most popular media in America. In 1954,
publishers issued one billion of them, around 90 million copies each month.
1
This meant that for
every one book published in this country, there were two comic books, with each issue passed on
to an average of three readers. Even more impressive than the sheer volume of units moved was
the remarkable breadth of their reach. Market surveys conducted in the late forties, before the
medium‘s peak, reported that 93 percent of kids and 80 percent of teenagers were regular
readers, consuming at least a dozen every month. Even more remarkably, nearly half of adults
under age thirty read them, with more female readers than male, and as many as 30 percent of
adults over thirty read them too.
2
All told, the medium boasted seventy million fans, half of the
entire US population.
3
Before television irreversibly altered popular culture, Americans of all
educational backgrounds, men and women alike, were reading comic books—a lot of them.
And then, the comic book market crashed. Between 1954 and 1955 sales plummeted by
more than half, to just thirty-five million copies each month. Over the next several years, twenty-
four out of twenty nine active publishers closed their doors. And three quarters of the nearly 600
titles appearing monthly on newsstands vanished from sight.
4
Just like that, comic books went
from being one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America to a medium struggling
for its survival. Even more stunning than the speed with which this decline occurred is its
complete and total permanence. Comic book sales continued to decline into the early sixties,
5

temporarily stagnating only to resume their downfall into the seventies and eighties, when
comics sold just twenty million copies a month.
6
But for a momentary uptick caused by a comic
collecting bubble,
7
the medium‘s certain decay has persisted. Over the last decade, comic books
have sold just seven million copies per month.
8
Monthly sales of course represent just one
2

indicator of the industry‘s overall health, but its deterioration reveals an undeniable and ugly
reality: comic books have fallen on hard times since their peak in the early fifties. Fifty percent
of all Americans used to read comic books. Industry insiders estimate that today, that audience
likely stands at about one million, or 0.3 percent of the population. Comic books began as a mass
medium. Today, they attract but a tiny niche audience, a demographic so narrow, it continues to
threaten the health and survival of contemporary comic book publishing.
9

And yet, comic books seem about as popular as ever. Comic book stories and characters
dominate the summer box office, they fill the up the fall television schedule, they pervade
streaming platforms, and they consume entire aisles of the toy store. Comic book properties
account for five of the fifteen most profitable film franchises of all time, including the top slot,
for The Avengers, which has earned more than $4.5 billion in just the last three summers.
10
In
2014-2015, television networks will air no less than eight ongoing live-action series based on
comic books, with another four soon streaming exclusively to Netflix. These higher profile
programs join a full roster of original animated and interactive projects, including superhero-
based series for Cartoon Network and Disney XD, direct-to-video films, and dozens (if not
hundreds) of comic-book based video, mobile, and computer games. Targeting various age
groups and employing a variety of stylistic sensibilities, together, these products reach a wide
swath of the population, thereby creating a broad and lucrative market for licensed merchandise
of all kinds (from action figures to tee shirts to iPhone cases). The abundance of cross-media
comic-book adaptations and licensed goods has strengthened the properties‘ trademarks,
transforming the logos of characters like Superman into some of the world‘s most recognizable
icons.

3

A Structuring Paradox
―Once mainstream, comics are increasingly a fringe (even an avant-garde) form of entertainment,
one that appeals predominantly to college students or college-educated professionals. While few
read comics, their content flows fluidly across media platforms, finding wide audiences in film,
television, and computer games.‖
11

- Henry Jenkins

These two sides of the medium—the licensing and the publishing, the mass and the niche,
the popular and the esoteric—form a paradox that is fundamental to comic book culture and
permeates it on every level. Perpetually aware of its presence, most individuals involved in the
comic book industry struggle daily with its implications. As comic book and media scholar
Henry Jenkins has pointed out, even creators find themselves ―torn between the desire to create
content which will attract mainstream interest…and content which appeals to and retains their
hardcore readers.‖
12
Critics and scholars have been similarly vexed by this paradox, and comic
book studies has thus wrestled mightily with finding an appropriate framework for approaching
the medium. While many have used the popularity of comic book adaptations as a justification
for more serious inquiry into the form, others reject such an approach, arguing against the study
of ―comics-related phenomena‖ in other media.
13
Both methods within this growing
subdiscipline, unfortunately, tend to skirt the incongruities this paradox causes and which remain
so intrinsic to the form. As a result, too much comic book criticism allows for a kind of
unacknowledged slippage between the immense popularity and cultural relevance of comic book
properties and the rather limited reach of the comic books themselves.
This dissertation, in contrast, takes this paradox as a starting point and central focus. First
and foremost, I address exactly how comics declined in popularity so profoundly while mass
media simultaneously took them up so aggressively. The medium‘s transformation from a
lowbrow mass form to a highly exploited niche one occurred gradually, and was propelled by a
4

number of complicated political, economic, and cultural developments. Moving chronologically
through some of these critical moments, the chapters that follow outline the evolution of the
comic book industry, with a special focus on its intersections with other media infrastructures.
My analysis begins with the market crash of the fifties, continues through the growth of comic
book auteurism and fandom in the sixties and the narrowing of distribution channels in the
seventies, and concludes with the reemergence of comic books into mainstream American
consciousness in the nineties. This was a historical and industrial process that, at each stage in
the medium‘s history, served to shape its future.
It was also a process driven by strategic industrial thinking and informed by shifts in the
broader political and economic environment. At no point in time did comic books evolve in
isolation from other media; their development was both deeply informed by and deeply
impactful on developments across the culture industries. Additionally, as the medium came into
greater contact with other forms of entertainment, it gradually infused them with characteristics
once distinct to comic book culture. I argue, therefore, that the exploitation of comic book
properties across media not only supported and shaped comic book publishing, but helped
determine the course of corporate-financed multimedia production as well, with emerging
conglomerates gradually adopting the operating logic long employed by the comic book
industry. In short, mass media‘s embrace of the medium has been structural both to comic books
and to convergence era Hollywood. The possibility of licensing properties across media has been
shaping comic books from their very inception. And with each advance toward our current
conglomerated multimedia landscape, comic books have been an important part of industry
thinking. Accordingly, it becomes hard to imagine either comic books without multimedia
production, or multimedia production without comic books.
5

Approaching any analysis or history of culture from the opposite perspective—framing
either the media or the industry that produces it as an independent or discreet entity—tends to
deny the fundamental nature of media‘s evolution over the last eighty years. It also does little to
illuminate broader questions about our contemporary media landscape and the way we produce
and consume texts within it. Furthermore, as Jennifer Holt has argued, "examining [media]
histories vis-à-vis one another and in relation to law and policy also creates a foundation for
more explicitly politicized avenues of research—namely those taking place under the umbrellas
of media advocacy/reform, media activism, and cultural policy."
14
Propelled by these claims, this
dissertation works to emphasize legal and political discourse and also to demonstrate the value of
trans-industrial analysis by highlighting the fundamental and long-standing interdependence of
comic book publishing and multi-media production.
Drawing from research into legal decisions, congressional records, business reports, and
trade publications, I show how major players—in the comic book business, and in television and
film—were supported by a regulatory and legal regime that explicitly favored their success. They
were able to use their resulting economic and political power to effect public attitudes about
media and raise the cultural status of their product, thereby shaping the context of reception. The
resulting legitimation of media texts that had previously been considered lowbrow helped to
invigorate and stabilize business operations, but also had the effect of containing the industry and
therefore limiting certain possibilities within the medium and its culture.

Hegemonic Processes: The Theory of Incorporation
In focusing on industrial history instead of on aesthetics, narrative, or audiences, I do not
suggest that these aspects of comic book culture have not had a significant impact on the
6

medium. Indeed they have, and there is already a great deal of excellent research available that
covers their role.
15
Rather, I aim to push the field forward, beyond earlier scholarship that has too
often minimized the importance of industry actions, either by ignoring them entirely, or by
allowing them only minor causality. In doing so, I hope to expand an area of inquiry that has,
until now, received only minimal attention, and is at risk of being marginalized even further. A
number of comic book scholars have worked recently to place a greater emphasis on the
medium‘s specificity, moving toward a ―poetics of comics‖ that focuses on formal elements
within the medium at the risk of excluding a broader consideration of the historical and industrial
circumstances in which the medium has formed.
16
While textual analysis has its uses, this project
insists on a more comprehensive methodology that grounds all analysis in political and economic
context.
This insistence is partly based on the understanding that cultural legitimation, which is
inextricably intertwined with the medium‘s formal evolution, has been at least as much a
structural process as it has been an artistic one. Society‘s acceptance and eventual embrace of
comic books as an art form worthy of attention and investment facilitated the medium‘s artistic
development, but was very much rooted in political and economic changes across mass media.
Making possible new kinds of cultural mobility, these shifts saw a number of lowbrow forms—
like genre fare from the Hollywood studios and serialized television programming—gradually
come upon critical claim and elevated artistic status. The introduction of auteur theory and new
understandings of subcultural values shepherded in these openings, as a postmodern revolution
came closer and closer, promising to reorganize hierarchies of taste and break down boundaries
between high culture and low.
7

Writing in the years leading up to this cultural reorganization, Raymond Williams had
already noted a growing tendency among scholars to characterize society of the late twentieth
century as ―a complex whole‖ of various dynamic productive and cultural practices. It was a
language of totality that, even in the lead up to postmodernism, was beginning to evacuate
culture of historical and political agency and perceive it as an increasingly intricate but
essentially flat terrain. In response, Williams sought to remind cultural intellectuals that ―society
has a specific organization, a specific structure, and that the principles of this organization and
structure can be seen as directly related to certain social intentions, intentions by which we
define the society, intentions which in all our experience have been the rule of a particular
class."
17
His use of the word ―intention‖ unfortunately evokes the notion of a kind of conscious
exploitation, or even a conspiracy for social control. But the process Williams sought to
illuminate is far more subtle and dynamic. If it were ―merely the result of specific manipulation‖
or ―overt training‖ it would be easy to recognize and easy to change. In practice, however, the
ways in which organized social structures intentionally shape social experience tend to be
―deeply saturating‖ and often invisible.
18

This process, often referred to as hegemony, has long provided a foundational framework
for cultural studies, and in turn, for media history and analysis; as Steve Ross has noted, such
theoretical concepts are necessary in the discipline, since ―facts rarely speak on their own‖ and
require interpretation.
19
Providing a scaffolding for understanding cultural processes, hegemony
can in this case, offer an explanation and interpretation of the legitimation of comic books and
their incorporation into mass media. Writing in a very different context, Antonio Gramsci
decades ago described hegemony as the obligation of a successful ruling class to maintain
political and economic power by securing the willing consent of the majority—favorable public
8

opinion driven by intellectuals and supported by social, cultural, and educational institutions. He
noted that ―every state is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the
great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which
corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of
the ruling class.‖
20
While this definition conjures up a rigid social, cultural, and political
hierarchy, its basic principle may be more broadly applied, particularly if one understands
hegemony not through teleological determinism, but as a sometimes epochal process in which
various parties struggle for political and social dominance on a terrain that necessarily includes
the cultural.
21
As Williams notes, within this ―process of incorporation‖ that is ―continually
active and adjusting,‖ the ruling class, over time, chooses certain meanings, values, and
practices—both old and new—and neglects or excludes others in ways that ultimately support
dominant culture.
22
In this respect, the cultural power of the elite is never total and indeed finds
its strength in the way in which it can incorporate change and even opposition.
This project seeks to uncover this process of exchange as it relates to the expansion of
comic book culture, which has, year by year, decade by decade, evolved in such a way that has
consistently supported its incorporation into corporate multimedia and benefited those
individuals who produce it. In employing a theory of hegemony then, the analyses herein do not
attempt to characterize all productive and consumptive cultural practices as already contained
within structures organized or pre-ordained by an elite. Instead, they pursue a much simpler
proposition, encapsulated in classic Marxist theory by the assertion that the base determines the
superstructure.
Drawing from the Neo-Marxist cultural theory of Williams and the Birmingham School, I
interpret this construct to mean that the specific productive activities of men, structured by real
9

and hierarchical social and economic relationships, are responsible for setting limits and exerting
pressure on the cultural practices that give meaning to our lives. For Williams, it was essential
that we recognize this determining impact and understand that the ―laws, constitutions, theories,
ideologies, which are claimed as natural, or as having universal validity or significance, simply
have to be seen as expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class."
23
For this
project as well, this principle is essential, as is the understanding of contemporary media that it
promotes. More specifically, it insists that the infrastructures of industry, and the everyday
relationships that form them, determine the context in which cultural meaning and practice form.
While the social does, in turn, have its own impact, the dominant direction of influence flows
from structure toward culture. While the chapters that follow seek primarily to explicate a
cultural phenomenon and unearth a history that has yet to be told, they are deeply informed by
this theoretical approach.
I argue that business imperatives established the realm of possibility to which other
cultural agents were forced to comply. Comic book history is populated by a remarkable number
of unique creative voices and an extraordinary fan community, without which the medium would
look vastly different. These players were nonetheless constrained by the structures established by
the industry, which itself was responding to political and economic circumstances not of its
choosing. Criticism that ignores the latter part of this equation—the political and economic
context and the strategic thinking it generated—to focus on aesthetics or reception in isolation
inevitably produces historical inaccuracies. These, in turn, produce narrative accounts about how
comic books came to be that are, on the whole, misleading. I re-examine a number of these
accounts—some of the structuring myths of comic book culture—and bring the central paradox
10

discussed above back into consideration along with a greater focus on industry. This perspective
tends to produce a very different interpretation of various aspects of comic book history.
Covering six decades, this project does work to address almost the entirety of that history.
While some scholarly accounts have traced the medium‘s roots back to the creation of the comic
strip at the turn of the 20
th
century, or even further back, to the beginnings of sequential art in
ancient times, my analysis begins in the mid-nineteen-thirties with the establishment of the
modern American comic book industry. Over the remainder of the century, comic books
experienced a number of major upheavals, each of which is covered here with a special interest
in the way these transitions tended to bring comics closer to a convergence with other media
forms. This history ends roughly in 1996, just as comic books were resurfacing into mainstream
mass media with a force and intensity that has lasted for the two and half decades since. By this
point in the mid-nineties, with media deregulation nearly complete and the structural
convergence of the culture industries nearly total, the groundwork for this explosion of interest in
comic book adaptations had already been laid, the logic of comic books firmly implanted into
corporate franchise production.
Notably, an exclusive focus on the United States limits the scope of this history. For
almost all of the six decades covered in these pages, the American comic book industry was a
primarily domestic business. While publishers did distribute some comics to foreign countries,
international sales remained a minor consideration. A number of factors are responsible for this
restraint on the industry‘s growth, including periodic restrictions on imported comic books, and
more importantly, the vibrancy of regional comic book cultures, particularly in east Asia (where
manga was a much larger cultural force than comics were in the US) and in Europe (where bande
desinee in France and Belgium and comic books in England largely satisfied local demand).
11

While a comparative or genuinely transnational analysis of global comic book industries would
nonetheless likely generate worthwhile findings, such an investigation is unfortunately outside
the scope of this project.

Why Comic Books? The Logic of Incorporation
The incorporation of comic books into mainstream American culture has recently given
rise to a variety of mainstream responses that offer justifications and accusations of blame from
both sides of a vast spectrum. While many comic book fans recognize the medium‘s increasing
ubiquity as a vindication of the form‘s inherent worth, critics see the surge in superhero content
as evidence of American cultural infantilism. With neither of these popular perspectives proving
particularly satisfactory, scholars have offered a number of more nuanced explanations that
explore the theoretical, aesthetic, and narrative dimensions of this trend. Jared Gardener, for
example points to the development of home video and digital viewing technologies that allow
film audiences to consume texts in the same way comic book readers have for decades, that is,
on their own schedule, and able to stop, rewind, start over, zoom in, and freeze frame. These new
technologies of reception within cinema have opened the door to a different kind of frame-by-
frame, deeply layered, and exceedingly complex analysis of film, the kind in which comic book
readers have long engaged. As a result, Gardner argues, the two media have moved closer
together, pursuing similar visual and story elements—i.e. the loop, or the Easter egg—that
celebrate these shared possibilities.
24

While Gardner‘s observation here, among many others, is informative, the industrial and
historical focus of this project calls for an explanation of the medium‘s adaptability rooted more
explicitly in its political economy. Fortunately, the medium‘s regulatory, legal, and financial
12

history offer more than enough context to explain why corporate multimedia producers have
taken up comic books so aggressively. One factor in particular, an inherent characteristic of the
medium, plays an outsized role in this account: copyrightability. Comic book characters are
among the easiest properties to copyright and trademark, a quality that has long made them
attractive to licensors and corporations interested in exploiting synergies. As legal scholar Leslie
Kurtz has explained, their pictorial nature makes them less abstract, and accordingly, easier to
protect than most literary characters. Their visuality means that there is something "concrete and
delineated which can be the subject of objective comparisons‖ in court, enough so that similarity
in appearance on its own has been enough to constitute infringement (for an early and very
formative example of this principle in action, see Fig 1.1 and 1.2). That cartoon and comic book
characters can often be perceived in their entirety within ―a single mental image‖ only furthers
this legal protection, since courts can look to an isolated text, or page even, to define a
distinguishable look, personality, and manner of movement.
This inherent legal strength only improved with time. After the landmark Sam Spade
copyright case in 1955, characters that proved to be flatter, well-defined, consistent, memorable,
and easily removed from the story or context in which they were created ultimately received
more protection than more complex and fully human characters.
25
Many would of course argue
that most comic book characters are profoundly human and their stories deeply complex, and
that may be true of the form today. But early on in the medium‘s history, publishers were
motivated largely by the need to find visually striking and communicative cover art that would
bring back returning child-age readers. Unpredictable distribution channels, irregular publishing
schedules, and a lot of competition on overcrowded newsstands meant that customers could not
13

Figure 1.1 These images were used in Detective Comics vs. Bruns to establish substantial
similarity between the characters Wonder Man and Superman. Bruns lost the infringement
suit and cancelled their title.

14

Figure 1.2
15

be expected to follow titles on a regular bases. But a bright cover with a recognizable
protagonist, even in the absence of a strong serialized story within the pages of the comic, could
hope to build an audience anyway. The result of this strategy in comic books—and it was not
dissimilar in other media targeted at kids—were characters defined by a consistent and
memorable image that could be caught by just a glance, who did not rely on a continuing or
sequential narrative, and who could cross over into multiple titles should they prove popular.
The resulting fixedness of comic book heroes like Superman has long been remarked
upon. Back in 1962, Umberto Eco wrote the now infamous essay, ―The Myth of Superman,‖ in
which he describes the character as archetypal and immutable ―aesthetically and commercially
deprived of the possibility of development.‖
26
As Jane Gaines has argued, not only did this
flatness, typical of so many comic book characters, give the medium strong copyright protection,
but their intensely visual nature also gave them strong trademark protection.
27
That these
characters could often be roughly attributed to individual living breathing creators, happened to
additionally satisfy the romantic rhetorical needs of copyright law and thus further strengthened
their protections in court. By the quirks of copyright and trademark law then, the complementary
exigencies of early retail sales at newsstands, and their fundamental visuality, comic books
became a medium that naturally produced very reliable intellectual properties. This essential
characteristic of the form would go on to shape the entirety of its future by pushing comic books
toward licensing opportunities.

Establishing Era for Licensing (1940-1954)
In 1933, a print salesman named Max C. Gaines issued the first modern comic book to
newsstands. It was entitled Famous Funnies, and like most of the comic books published in the
16

mid-thirties, it consisted entirely of reprints from newspaper comic strips. At only ten cents a
copy, early comics sold well to children, who were still just emerging as a distinct demographic
of interest to producers of mass media and consumer goods. Times were tough, comic books
were affordable, and unlike radio and film, they constituted a possession—one that could be
traded, re-read, or cherished. Still, since reprints were popular enough, it took a few years for
publishers to actively seek out original content. Among the first who did were Harry Donenfeld
and Jack Liebowitz, who ran National Periodical Publications (NPP), and its subsidiaries, the
distribution company Independent News Co. and a publishing outfit that would soon be known
as DC Comics (after one of their first titles, Detective Comics). In the spring of 1938, they
released Action Comics #1 and on the cover was a character called ―Superman.‖ (See Fig. 1.3).
Like most other comics at the time, the issue was thirty-two pages long and consisted of a
number of different stories featuring different characters. The Superman piece was just thirteen
pages long, but, boosted by the cover image—vivid, dynamic, and in its clarity and simplicity,
already somehow iconic—it became a smash with kids, who began requesting follow-ups
immediately.
Word of the character‘s popularity slowly worked up the distribution chain, from
newsstand retailers, to wholesalers, and eventually to publishers, who learned of it at some point
that summer.
28
The phenomenal and quite immediate success of Superman had two dramatic and
very significant results. First, it helped establish the industry as an industry. A few publishers had
been active in this budding medium in the mid-thirties, namely DC, Dell, and Eastern Color; all
three companies had grown out of other businesses, and none ever worked exclusively in comic
book publishing. This changed after Superman. The success of Action Comics turned comic
17

books from an experimental form, of interest to companies with established ventures in printing
or distribution, into a viable medium that could stand on its own. New publishers, most of whom
dealt exclusively in publishing and used original content, if not always original characters and

Figure 1.3
18

stories, started popping up almost immediately. Archie, Fox, Harvey, Timely (later Marvel), and
Quality all opened their doors in 1939.
29

Second, Superman‘s popularity set off a licensing bonanza. The character debuted almost
immediately in a newspaper strip, a radio series, and countless licensed products, and over the
next decade, was featured in live-action film serials, animated film shorts, and a nationally
syndicated television series. Although no other character would undergo quite this level of
exploitation, many popular characters of the forties did follow in Superman‘s footsteps. The
decade saw nearly a dozen get their own radio programs or film serials, the latter produced
largely by Columbia and Republic, and exhibited as matinees targeted primarily at kids. Among
these characters were superheroes like Batman and Captain Marvel, but as other comic book
genres grew in popularity, like westerns and jungle adventures, studios licensed those stories as
well. For the most part, these early adaptations have failed to occupy a significant space in
American cultural memory, perhaps because they screened to a pre-baby-boomer audience, or
perhaps because they simply failed to make an impression.
There can be no doubt though, that industrially these early licensing opportunities had a
lasting impact, and reinforced the crucial role that intellectual property law was already playing
in the medium‘s formation. Almost as soon as DC Comics began selling Superman as a media
property, the publisher began defending its copyright in court. The company brought its first
infringement suit in 1939, and won, a victory that forced Bruns Publications to cancel their title
Wonder Comics, starring the rather derivative Wonderman (See Fig. 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3).
30
The
immediate objective of cases like this was to prevent other publishers, like Bruns, and later
Fawcett, from creating copycat superheroes that bore too strong a resemblance to Superman,
thereby giving DC a monopoly on the popular genre. The long-term and perhaps more
19

significant effect, however, was to shore up the character‘s copyright and trademark claims,
strengthening its legal protections for years to come; since popularity and uniqueness within the
market bolster IP claims, early wins like this tend to beget bigger ones later on. So while
Superman, and other early characters like him, represented important and lasting cultural
contributions, they were always also industrial products, shaped dramatically by publishers‘
attempts to strive for enduring commercially viability.
The logic of comic book licensing and character protection was at play in other spaces as
well. One of DC‘s biggest competitors, and in fact the leading comic book publisher through the
fifties was Dell, a company whose business plan was based on exclusive licenses it held to
publish comics based on a variety of copyrighted characters from film and other media. The
company negotiated a deal with Disney first, in 1940, but soon also secured the rights to titles
from Warner Brothers and MGM, and eventually got exclusive access to popular characters like
Popeye and the Lone Ranger.
31
By the early fifties, Dell was publishing seventy different comic
book titles at a combined circulation of more than 240 million copies a year.
32
Issues of
particularly popular ones such as Walt Disney Comics could often sell three million per issue,
with lesser performing comics regularly selling over one million.
33
Even after the dramatic
market downturn started putting other publishers out of business, sales of licensed titles at Dell
continued to rise.
34
By 1957, the company accounted for a third of all comic book sales, and was
soon enough of a powerhouse to start its own distribution business and toy company.
35
It was
only after Dell lost its exclusive licenses to Gold Key, an upstart publisher started by its former
printing house, that its fortunes quickly declined, leading to a closure in 1973.
36
This same
licensing strategy was responsible for the success and longevity of Harvey Comics, which
acquired a number of characters from Paramount, including Casper the Friendly Ghost, in the
20

early fifties. As a result, Harvey too, despite its smaller size and poor distribution, managed to
survive the turbulence of the mid-fifties, publishing comic books well into the nineties.
37

To be sure, not all comic book companies of the forties and fifties adopted DC, Dell, and
Harvey‘s approach to licensing and copyright. Plenty of publishers continued to focus solely on
publishing. But when the market crashed in 1954, most of them folded. As comic books
experienced a dramatic decline in popularity and public support, the industry underwent a
dramatic restructuring that took attention away from licensed adaptations. The continuation of
the Superman television series, which ran through 1958, was the only exception to what
otherwise became a multimedia comic book blackout. The maintenance of comic book
intellectual properties nonetheless remained a priority within the industry. In fact, in response to
the downturn, savvy and forward thinking companies like DC and Charlton, immediately
decided to buy up the titles of defunct companies, amassing vast catalogs of stories and
characters that they could exploit in the near or distant future. Many of the properties remained
dormant for decades, and some remain untouched even today. But the leaders of the comic book
industry had discovered the power of licensing, and they were determined to conduct business in
ways that would grow that sector. And, as Chapter One will demonstrate, these companies
(which included DC, Dell, and Charlton)—through control of distribution and censorship—
would eventually dictate the actions of everyone else in the market, effectively shaping the
medium on their own terms, and pushing the industry toward their new business model.

Lowbrow Adaptations (1966-1987)
After a decade-and-a-half-long disappearance of comic books from mainstream media,
the late sixties finally brought a revival of the medium. In the intervening time, the film serial
21

matinee had given way to the television series, which is where comics would make a comeback,
and remain for some time after. In the early days of television, sponsors had exercised
considerable control over programming and networks. The same was true of merchandisers and
licensors, who would largely oversee popular programs such as The Lone Ranger (1949-1957,
George Trendel, ABC) that were based on the intellectual properties they owned.
38
This
framework gave licensed characters an advantage in the medium, and helped forge an early and
lasting link between comic book publishing and modern media production. In 1951, DC Comics
sent Robert Maxwell out to Hollywood to produce The Adventures of Superman. A decade prior,
Maxwell had been put in charge of the character‘s merchandising and subsequently produced the
Superman radio series, even starting a company, Superman Inc. to organize his licensing
activities. Writing the television pilot episode himself, Maxwell produced the show for a time,
before handing the reigns to editorial director Whitney Ellsworth, another DC employee turned
Hollywood producer.
39

Even after television entered the Classical Network Era in the late fifties, with networks
acquiring more financial interest in their content and bringing licensing in-house, DC maintained
its foothold in the business. The industry‘s restructuring was opening up new opportunities for
co-productions with film studios and other media producers, including potentially, comic book
companies. Networks also began favoring a different kind of licensing arrangement, one in
which the property holder was willing to relinquish more creative control, and fully attend to the
interests of the networks.
40
Growing with the times, Superman Inc. evolved into just this kind of
licensor, in the form of the Licensing Corporation of America (LCA), headed by Jay Emmett, a
former publicist for Adventures of Superman. Modeling this new approach in a new era of media
22

production, LCA represented dozens of properties, from Bugs Bunny to James Bond, and was
ready to give the producers in television and film the kind of partner they desired.
41

According to Avi Santo, Emmett displayed a corporate loyalty both to LCA and to NPP,
which officially purchased LCA in 1966; run by his uncle, Jack Liebowitz, National had been
using LCA to license all its properties, making this, as Time noted, an ―all-in-the-family
transaction.‖ When the company subsequently struck a deal with ABC for a Batman television
series (1966-1968, 20th Century Fox & ABC), not only was Emmett willing to defer creatively
to the show‘s producer William Dozier, but he embraced a still innovative synergistic approach
to its production, working to integrate merchandising opportunities seamlessly into the show. It
was a strategy modeled by Liebowitz, who saw aggressive licensing as a way to further integrate
―NPP‘s existing properties within an increasingly transmediated and merchandised web.‖ This
approach to generating increased corporate profits would soon spread across the media
industries, as increasingly complex networks of ownership found new and ever multiplying ways
to merchandise popular culture. Liebowitz explained to shareholders at the time that DC‘s
characters could be and soon would be,

molded and merchandised to suit every taste—as television performers, as illustrations
for magazine advertising and point-of-sale displays, as promotional products for the ice-
cream, dairy, soft-drink, baking and confectionary industries, as syndicated comic strips,
and as hundreds of different toy and apparel products for children and teenagers.
42

Conspicuously missing from his list of possible ventures was film, or really any highbrow
or legitimized art form. For Liebowtiz, the key was widespread exploitation of the properties, the
23

kind that could bring in the kind of cash flow the struggling publishing business needed to
survive. Product visibility on this level would also help to further shore up DC‘s trademark
claims by making their characters, logos, and images more recognizable. Liebowitz‘s vision for
the company‘s future was quickly borne out. The ABC series paved the way for a flood of
merchandising deals for NPP in 1965, the same year it went public on the New York Stock
Exchange.
43
The marketing push helped make the series a hit and not only doubled sales of
Batman comic books, but boosted the entire publishing industry.
44
Perhaps more importantly,
Batmania seems to have caught the eye of rising media mogul Steve Ross. The CEO of a
cleaning and parking corporation, Kinney National Services, Ross was looking to expand and in
1967 he purchased NPP and its holdings. The acquisition gave Kinney a well-placed foothold in
the entertainment and leisure industry. Sharing a vision with Jack Liebowitz—who would remain
a board member of the corporation until he was ninety-one-years-old—Ross saw a great deal of
potential in both managing and owning licensable properties. These businesses would serve as
the foundation for Warner Communications Inc. (WCI), a multimedia empire borne out of
Kinney‘s 1969 purchase of Warner Brothers Seven Arts. Just a year earlier, Perfect Film and
Chemical (later Cadence Industries) had purchased Marvel, probably with similar aspirations,
although far less impressive results.
The long-established licensability of comic books had helped incorporate the industry
into corporate networks, ushering in a shift in infrastructure that would have a deep impact on
the medium‘s future. Under Cadence and WCI, a new era of comic book adaptations began, one
driven by the exposure and merchandising opportunities promulgated by Liebowitz, Ross, and
the emerging conglomerate model. Unfortunately, the Batman craze was relatively short-lived
and the show was cancelled after just three seasons. There were plenty of other comic-book
24

adaptations to take its place though, even while none reached quite its level of success. First
came a wave of Saturday morning cartoons, arriving in the late sixties with programs based on
DC, Marvel and Archie characters including The New Adventures of Superman (1966-1970,
WBTV, CBS) and Spider Man (1967-1970, Disney, ABC). A second wave would return in the
early eighties, with Marvel producing more aggressively against DC‘s most notable offering,
Super Friends (1979-1982, Hanna-Barbera, ABC). Continuing the tradition of the serial
matinees, these licensed media products were lowbrow affairs—produced largely by the low-
budget animation house Filmation, they were inexpensive and for kids‘ eyes only. They also took
a cue from the successful Batman series on ABC and approached their source material playfully;
while these cartoons may have lacked that program‘s aggressively camp aesthetic, they made no
attempt at seriousness either. Comic-book cartoons nonetheless had a tremendous impact by
introducing a generation of children to characters that they were less and less likely to ever
encounter on the physical page. Comic book sales had been in decline for some time, and the
child-age audience for the medium had dramatically shrunk. Animated series thus took on the
task of maintaining character recognition and shoring up publishers‘ future IP claims.
They were soon joined by live-action television series, with three notable productions
airing in the late seventies, all on CBS: Wonder Woman (1975-1979, WBTV), The Incredible
Hulk (1977-1982, Universal), and The Amazing Spider-Man (1977-1979, WBTV). These
programs had a tremendous cultural influence, and unlike earlier products, have often been
understood by fans and audiences as core or canonical comic book texts. As television series
though, they were far from prestigious. CBS picked up this superhero trend in a downturn, after
losing their esteemed president Fred Silverman to ABC, and before their profile rose again with
the success of Dallas in the eighties (1978-1991, Lorimar). For most of the public, they were yet
25

another example of the escapist fare and ―jiggle TV‖ appearing across the networks. The same
could be said of the half-dozen comic-book based films that hit theaters in the eighties, the dawn
of the blockbuster era. Movies like Conan the Barbarian (1982, Universal) and Howard the
Duck (1986, Lucasfilm) seemed to epitomize the troubling trend of ill-conceived, poorly-made,
big-budgeted films increasingly dominating summer box offices and often bringing in impressive
financial returns.
45
When the stars of these films were female, as with Supergirl (1984, Warner
Bros. and TriStar), Sheena (1984, Columbia), and Red Sonja (1985, MGM), critical responses
were even worse. Considered some of the least tasteful films of the decade, most were nominated
for Razzies, and quite a few won.
There were a number of higher quality exceptions to this trend though—comic book
adaptations that pointed the way toward new possibilities for multimedia exploitation. The first
were a set of films released in the early seventies that represented more fringe and underground
currents within comic book culture. Based on titles from independent and defunct publishers,
these were unlike almost all the other adaptations produced from the sixties through the eighties,
in that they did not emanate from either DC, Marvel, or Archie Comics. Most notable was Fritz
the Cat (1972, Cinemation), a feature-length, animated adaptation of Robert Crumb‘s X-rated
comic of the same name. A central figure in the Underground Comix movement of the late
sixties, Crumb had published the character in independent publications like Help! and achieved a
subcultural legitimacy that translated well to the independent circles in which the film was
released. Ultimately an incredible financial success, Fritz showed that the right comic book
material adapted the right way for the right audiences could broaden the medium‘s potential; it
seemed to show a potential way forward to leaders of the New Hollywood, who were more
willing to embrace niche audiences, and more specifically communities of young male hipsters.
26

The same year, Amicus Films and Metromedia released Tales from the Crypt, a low-budget
horror film, to mediocre reviews, and enough financial success to justify a sequel the following
year, Vault of Horror. Adapted from popular horror comics written in the fifties, these films also
represented a cultish current within comic book culture, one that would later prove very
successful within Hollywood, and which will be explored in more depth in Chapter Three.
The second adaptation worth noting here was the 1978 release of Superman (Warner
Bros.) and its three sequels. Written by Mario Puzo, of Godfather fame, directed by Richard
Donner shortly after his success with The Omen, and featuring film legends Gene Hackman and
Marlon Brando, Superman was a conscious attempt to produce a different kind of comic-book
movie. And by most measures, it succeeded, winning three Academy Awards, earning $300
million, and helping to launch a new wave of popular science-fiction cinema. The blockbuster
model it demonstrated however—in terms of establishing the right credentials and the right
tone—was not replicated in any meaningful way again until 1989 with the release of the Tim
Burton-directed Batman (Warner Bros.). And it took another ten years after that before Marvel
would begin producing similar films in any noticeable quantity. I would argue that the
singularity of Superman‘s success is attributable to two factors. First, there is the singularity of
Superman. The character that launched the industry, that began comic-book licensing, that was
continuously adapted across every mass medium over the course of forty years, Superman had
the recognizablity as an icon and the respect as a pop cultural institution to carry this franchise
on his back. Notably, these characteristics were at least partly the result of decades of vigilant
protection of copyright and trademark claims. Second, the entertainment industry was not yet
structured to take advantage of the opportunities that franchises like Superman had to offer. That
would change in the eighties and nineties.
27

Quality Transmedia in an Era of Convergence (1989-2009)
Although media conglomeratization was well underway by the sixties, technological
limitations, regulations imposed by the FCC, and the federal government‘s aggressive
enforcement of anti-trust law continued to restrain both vertical and horizontal integration into
the eighties. At this point, a deepening neoliberal ideology that had taken root during the Nixon
administration initiated a sometimes chaotic, but very aggressive wave of deregulation that,
between 1980 and 1996, supported significant consolidation throughout the media industries.
46

At the same time, advancements in satellite broadcasting, cable technologies, and computing
expanded distribution potential, facilitating a shift toward increased product differentiation and
personalization as well as greater exchange between producers and consumers. As Henry Jenkins
notes, prior to the eighties, ―each medium had its own distinctive functions and markets.‖ But the
U.S. was entering an era of convergence, a cultural paradigm shift that entailed ―a move from
medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the
increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media
content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down and corporate media and
bottom-up participatory culture." New technological innovations, along with new ―patterns of
cross-media ownership‖ had made it more ―desirable for companies to distribute content across
those various channels rather than within a single media platform.‖ In short, ―digitization set the
conditions for convergence; corporate conglomerates created its imperative.‖
47

As core media holdings for companies like WCI, comic books had for many years been a
part of emerging strategies in corporate synergy. But it was not until the late eighties, the dawn
of this new era, that the form assumed such a central role in the production of mass culture
across media. The growth of the franchised film product was one of the first signs of this more
28

aggressive integration of comic book culture. As Derek Johnson has noted, the term ―franchise‖
was not even employed within cultural contexts until the eighties, when market logics from other
business sectors (most recognizably, fast food) began migrating toward the media industries. The
structural changes noted above had brought a greater need for what he describes as networks of
production constituted across multiple industrial sites, or ―multiplied cultural production.‖
Corporations who wanted to create value across various businesses and territories over long
periods of time increasingly sought to ―develop brands that could be deployed across media
channels.‖ In this environment, strong content based on protectable intellectual properties
became more important rather than less, since companies could use them to coordinate,
streamline, and control production, distribution, and consumption systems that were otherwise
unwieldy.
48
Comic book characters had of course long been exploited in franchised production
when the practice gained prominence in a newly deregulated Hollywood. This history, and the
strong IP protections it engendered made comic books ripe for exploitation with producers
desperate for, and largely unpracticed in, this emerging media mode.
Thus came a dramatic increase of comic book adaptations in film, television, gaming,
publishing, and elsewhere. In the summer of 1989, the year WCI merged with Time Inc. (parent
company of HBO) to form Time Warner, the company released both the high-profile, critically
acclaimed Batman and the very successful HBO horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt.
The next few years brought a string of live action television series, including Lois & Clark
(1993-1997, Warner Bros. Television, ABC), and a new crop of animated series for kids. There
were also new comic book-based movies—scores of them. Some were for kids, like the
phenomenally successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990, New Line Cinema) and Richie
Rich (1994, Warner Bros.). But many targeted adults, and unlike the action-adventure comic
29

book movies of the eighties, these were much more respected, if not always highly prestigious
films. Among them were The Crow (1994, Miramax), The Mask (1994, New Line Cinema), Men
in Black (1997, Columbia), and Blade (1998, New Line Cinema). In a clear sign that approaches
to comic book licensing were changing, and expanding, these texts were increasingly coming
from publishing houses other than DC and Marvel and they often featured characters who were
not classic superheroes. This shift, at least in part, reflected a boom in comic book publishing
that had opened the door to new companies, thereby giving Hollywood more choices. But as the
nineties advanced, the most profitable and enduring new comic book publishers were companies
like Dark Horse, who were willing to shape their catalog and business strategies to take
advantage of this multimedia licensing boom. It was therefore more likely that Hollywood‘s
interest in comic books was boosting the comic book business, than the other way around. To be
sure, traditional comic book properties also found tremendous success in the nineties, including
Batman, with three blockbuster sequels to the 1989 film, and a beloved animated series on Fox
(1992-1995, Batman: The Animated Series).
Notably though, it was not just the comic book properties themselves that had become
useful to multimedia producers, but their underlying logic. As contemporary film and television
institutions faced a new set of circumstances—the disruption of distribution channels, a
fragmentation of audiences, and structural reorganizations—that pushed multimedia production
into transition, they looked to the comic book business for solutions. Initially a chaotic industry,
built on a shaky foundation, comic book companies had spent half a century occupying a
somewhat precarious position within the broader entertainment industry, often in the margins
between other, more stable media. Over the course of time though, they developed responses to
these challenges that, in the era of convergence, became increasingly applicable throughout
30

multimedia. As described above, the comic book industry had learned very early on to mobilize
its characters across various media platforms simultaneously and to assimilate itself into
corporate networks and infrastructures. They had also, importantly, fostered a more reciprocal
exchange with audiences. In all these ways, comic book culture had been a culture of
convergence for nearly half a century when the rest of the entertainment industry began moving
toward this logic. While it is easy to associate the characteristics of convergence culture—
content flows across media, networked infrastructures, and new relationships between consumers
and producers—with digital technologies, these convergences were always possible and had long
been present within comic books. Accordingly, in addition to the fundamentals that had driven
comic books‘ incorporation into the entertainment industries in years prior (copyrightability,
licensability), the medium‘s approach to the challenges of convergence drove a more intense
integration beginning in the nineties, as structural and technological changes intensified.
It was at this point that franchises grew more sophisticated in nature, and that comic
books genuinely began to blossom within mainstream mass media as Hollywood took up the
cultural logic of the medium. The growth of transmedia—as both a practice and a point of
discourse—highlights this deepening embrace of the form. In more recent years, the franchise—
which is often understood through an economic or industrial lens—has become closely
associated with this newer concept, defined by Jenkins as a story that ―unfolds across multiple
media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the
whole.‖
49
The development of transmedia relied on many of the same factors that drove
franchising, namely ―well-established configurations of concentrated media ownership which
create strong incentives to develop content across platforms.‖ However, the term is distinct in
that it demands an additive creative logic wherein each product brings with it a new artistic
31

element instead of merely replicating an original text. Moreover, its use within critical discourse
has given more attention to artistic possibilities, considering more carefully how such a
production model makes entertainment experiences more meaningful, particularly for committed
viewers.
50

With the growth of the transmedia trend then—an evolved model of a more primitive
conceptualization of the franchise—the comic book became even more relevant, driving the
uptick in adaptations noted above and eventually the explosion of comic book content in the new
millennium. Jenkins has noted this association between comics, transmedia, and convergence
repeatedly in his work, describing comic books as ―a medium for rapid prototyping for new
content strategies that [come to] shape the rest of the entertainment industry.‖
51
Pointing to the
popularization of aesthetic and narrative concepts like continuity, complexity, multiplicity, and
seriality—all of which have deep roots within comic book culture—he has characterized the
medium as a kind of research division for the rest of the entertainment industry, noting that
creative ―trends impact comics first‖ before emerging within other wider-reaching mass media.
52

At the heart of this exchange and of transmedia more generally, has been a question of
reception, with multimedia producers growing increasingly interested in finding the kinds of
engaged quality audiences that the comic book industry has cultivated so successfully through
these artistic strategies and other tactics. For this reason, the expansion of comic book culture
within the mainstream has been partly attributable to a dramatic shift in the media industries‘
audience preferences. For decades, television executives had aggressively pursued female
viewers, who helped drive big ratings. But starting in the nineties, shifts in advertising and in
infrastructure (also the result of deregulation) pushed the television industry more aggressively
toward young men. Studios were also pursuing an increasingly young and male demographic—
32

favoring the merchandising opportunities and big opening box office numbers these audiences
tended to support. Additionally, technological, structural, and cultural shifts that were facilitating
more product personalization, more tech commerce, and more ancillary possibilities, were
pushing corporate producers to seek out audiences who were more media literate, more engaged,
and more loyal. This ideal new consumer of the twenty-first century bore a strong resemblance to
the dedicated fans that the comic book industry had been cultivating since the early sixties—a
community that consisted largely of educated, tech-savvy men in their twenties, thirties, and
forties.
As the new millennium approached then, a confluence of factors had arisen to support the
final stage of comic book culture‘s incorporation into mass media. First, a structural convergence
in the entertainment industries drove media corporations to seek out new synergies that pushed
comic book properties toward a new strategic center. Second, the medium‘s sophisticated
approach to transmedia storytelling helped spread not only comic book properties across media
platforms, but the narrative and aesthetic logic that had evolved to support those properties as
well. Third, conglomerates in search of new demographics looked to comic books for help in
cultivating more engaged and loyal audiences of young men, a process that will be considered in
depth in Chapter Three. Finally, film and television experiments into comic-book based media in
the early and mid-nineties, listed above, proved very successful. This wave of higher profile
adaptations had relied on these various principles of convergence when they first emerged. As
their hold deepened within a newly established political and economic context, these factors
paved the way for an even greater incorporation of comic book culture.
The next wave of adaptations—a surge that has continued through today—began around
2000, with live-action prestige feature films soon outnumbering television texts. International
33

box office revenue had upended the significance of domestic success, and comic books offered
the rare product that struck a chord with both audiences. With X-Men in 2000 (20
th
Century Fox)
and Spider-Man in 2002 (Columbia), Marvel Entertainment claimed a larger space within
mainstream media, and has continued to dominate movie theaters ever since. Before long though,
DC-based superheroes were also breaking box-office records, most notably via a re-tooled
Batman franchise associated with director Christopher Nolan. The publisher has also been more
active in television production, most notably earlier on with Smallville (2001-2011, CW), and
backed a number of adaptations not strongly linked to either its company brand or the comic
book medium more broadly. These films, including Road to Perdition (2002, Dreamworks) and
History of Violence (2005, New Line Cinema), along with others like Ghost World (2001, United
Artists), American Splendor (2003, Fine Line Features), and Sin City (2005, Dimension), began
earning a level of widespread critical acclaim and cultural esteem that would have been
unimaginable for comic-book material at any point in time between the nineteen-forties and the
nineteen-nineties. Though most were not aware of the legitimation of comic books as it was
happening, this cultural ascent was a gradual process tied to their incorporation into mass media
infrastructures.

Cultural Legitimacy, Commercial Media and American Intellectual Discourse
When the modern comic book was born in 1934, it was ephemeral; initially conceived as
a promotional item, it was designed to be produced cheaply and intended to appeal primarily to
children. None of these qualities allowed for any significant measure of respectability, and as a
consequence, nor did they offer producers great promise of long-term financial success. With the
popularity of Superman though and the entry of Dell, with Disney, came the possibility of
34

licensing, and with that, the hope of longevity. But by the fifties, comic book publishers still had
not successfully established within the medium markers of quality or even a moderate level of
cultural respect, and the entire industry was subjected to unnecessary public interference,
government oversight, and a new regulatory regime. This early crisis in comic book history
suggested that appeals to taste never came unencumbered and that social and cultural meaning
always pointed back to structural concerns. Determinations about what constituted high art and
what constituted the lowbrow always also entailed seemingly unrelated assessments that carried
real economic and political consequences. In the case of comic books, it was whether the product
would face censorship or other forms of regulation, where it might be sold, and to what
audiences it would be exposed. In other mass media, determinations of taste had dictated whether
or not producers would receive broadcast licenses, whether their offerings could be considered a
public service, and even how the producers themselves might be perceived socially.
For purveyors of mass media then, appeals for cultural legitimation were always worth
more than the sum of their parts; taste, absolutely and explicitly, had to be accounted for. This
imperative was brought about by a centuries-old intellectual discourse about art and culture
deeply entrenched in dominant political and economic structures. As modern mass media
emerged at the dawn of the twentieth century, culture remained strictly divided along social
lines, with wealthy elites enjoying respected highbrow arts and the working masses finding
pleasure in largely lowbrow forms. Gradually, this hierarchy began to mutate and adjust,
responding to new social and cultural formations. But it remained, quite notably, a hierarchy, one
that was still dictated by political and economic imperatives. As comic books emerged into
popular culture and began to face the challenges posed by legitimacy—or more accurately, a lack
35

of it—the medium was catapulted into the middle of this shifting discourse, a discourse which,
over time, the industry would use to its advantage.
Notably, this conversation looked quite a bit different in Europe than in America, and
while the debate there only tangentially effected taste hierarchies in the U.S., it remains
noteworthy as a means of comparison. After World War II, the paralyzing threat of fascism,
together with the powerful influence of Marxism, led members of the Frankfurt School to begin
rethinking traditional cultural values. While Adorno and Horkheimer have been widely critiqued
for describing the masses as ―cultural dupes,‖ unlike their predecessors, they importantly decided
to place the blame not on the people themselves but on the purveyors of mass culture. With the
horrors of fascism still fresh, they feared immensely any cultural force that had a taming or
conforming effect, be it Nazi propaganda or American cinema. Recognizing the ways in which
consumers felt ―compelled to buy and use [the products of the culture industries] even though
they see through them‖, they described the commodification of culture and the ―absolute power
of capitalism‖ as an assault on individuality and freedom.
53
As European cultural studies
advanced though, it would be the continuing influence of Marxism and not the fear of fascism
that remained the driving force. Cultural critics like Richard Hoggart and members of the
Birmingham School eventually rejecting the implicit elitism of the Frankfurt intellectuals,
arguing that there were in fact ―no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.‖
54

If Europe was motivated by Marx and against fascism, then the U.S. was motivated by
Europe and against communism. Specifically, the New York intellectuals of the forties and
fifties were intent on defining a ―uniquely American form of modern art‖, a vernacular that could
validate the U.S. as a legitimate cultural power against Europe.
55
Perhaps more importantly
though, American anti-communist rhetoric, which was pervasive after the war, and in circulation
36

at least since the twenties, had deeply informed their writing. Accordingly, where the Europeans
were beginning to express a kind of investment and hope in the working class—which they
inherited from Marxism—American critics displayed only antipathy. For instance, Dwight
MacDonald‘s ―Theory of Mass Culture‖ is wholly preoccupied with the way in which mass
culture threatens to degrade high culture, blaming democracy itself for breaking down old class
lines and allowing mass culture to encroach on the high arts in the first place. While he
acknowledges that ―mass culture is imposed from above‖ by the ―Lords of kitsch‖, he seems
more comfortable with a culture based on profit and class rule than the alternative in the Soviet,
where culture is manufactured ―for political rather than commercial reasons.‖
56
Writing just
before the war but relying on similar theoretical underpinnings, Clement Greenberg also betrays
a kind of revulsion to the masses. Nowhere recognizing the role of the culture industries as did
Adorno and Horkheimer, Greenberg places the blame for abhorrent kitsch culture entirely on the
peasants, who ―set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their
consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised [emphasis
added].‖ Elsewhere, like Williams and others after him, Greenberg recognizes that a cultural
divide represents a social divide, and that working class dissatisfaction with the social order is
inextricably linked to dissatisfaction with the culture more generally; however, he sides with the
dominant class, using a warning of mass revolt to demand that the elite come to the rescue of
high culture.
57

Throughout this discourse, a kind of paradox begins to emerge around the commercial
nature of mass culture. Because high culture had, for many decades, been enshrined within non-
profit social institutions funded by elites, the commercial sector—deprived of legitimate art and
literature, the official culture—was left open to the immense possibilities of mass entertainment.
37

With dime novels, pulp fiction, films, radio, and of course, comic books, ambitious (and often
immigrant) Americans took the opportunity presented and developed in the early decades of the
twentieth century a robust and vibrant, but sometimes distasteful, commercial culture that
became synonymous with the lowbrow masses they served. European thinkers were willing to
blame the evils of this emerging mass culture directly on its commercialism, but that kind of
rhetoric was more difficult for American critics in an anti-communist, pro-business environment.
As Herbert Schiller has explained, pervasive anticommunism had set ―the parameters for
discussion and policy‖ and effectively eradicated ―a genuine spectrum of public opinion and
expression‖, namely any kind of overtly leftist agenda. The result was an unyielding embrace of
business that allowed the information-cultural industries to grow in power, and subsequently
produce messages that would only reinforce their dominance.
58

So while American cultural critics wanted to distinguish their own highbrow tastes from
lowbrow culture, their refusal to critique the commercial industries responsible for producing
and distributing that culture led them to blame the masses for something they quite literally had
no control over. In the American context then, taste hierarchies—while significant—were never
powerful enough to turn the tide of public opinion against the culture industries, and by
necessary association, mass culture. At most, there seemed to be a kind of ambivalence toward
both and it allowed savvy media producers to use taste hierarchies to their advantage. An
excellent example of this ambivalence can be found in the work of Robert Warshow, who
alternately and unpredictably expresses both loathing and adoration of various aspects of popular
culture.
59
Writing in the fifties, he was also one of the few cultural intellectuals who seriously
examined comic books.
60
Representative of broader patterns of thought in mid-century America,
his writing suggested that there was nothing intrinsically contemptible in commercial mass
38

media. This was a uniquely American perspective that opened the door for the culture industries
to play at cultural legitimation, and use the discourse of taste to advance political and economic
ambitions and even to obscure business practices.

Incorporation/Legitimation
This dissertation is in large part an exploration of how that possibility played out within
the comic book industry. Chapter One demonstrates how, when a number of events occurring in
the fifties threatened the comic book industry‘s future, publishers with a stake in merchandising
and licensing across media sprung to action. They used accusations that the medium was in bad
taste to justify aggressive self-regulation that brought the industry increased legitimacy, and with
it, increased stability. After the initial fallout of these incidents, the comic book business had to
transform in order to survive into the future. With a focus on the sixties and seventies, Chapter
Two explores this evolution, showing how the industry accomplished this metamorphosis by
reorienting itself toward cross-media opportunities. This effort brought major comic book
companies under the purview of emerging media conglomerates and saw comic book publishing
become subservient to licensing. The same era brought the growth of both comic book auteurism
and comic book fandom, two developments that helped increase the medium‘s legitimacy within
small circles invested in the form. It was a cultural shift that had a dramatic impact on the
industry‘s infrastructures in the seventies and eighties, creating tangible changes in distribution
and audience composition, but perhaps more importantly, changing the medium‘s potential for
integration in the years to come. Chapter Three examines how this subcultural legitimation of
comic book culture, cultivated by the industry, in conjunction with structural changes throughout
the entertainment industries, made the form profoundly attractive to multi-media producers
39

interested in synergy, transmedia storytelling, and quality demographics. By the end of this
incorporation into mass media, the legitimization of comic books was complete, with the form
earning an association with quality media of all forms.
Notably, the process of legitimation I describe here is distinct from, although not wholly
unrelated to, the medium‘s partial integration into the world of traditional high art, as described
by Bart Beaty in his recent book Comics Versus Art (2012). Whereas this project focuses on
comic books‘ gradual encroachment into mainstream quality media broadly accessible across
many platforms, Beaty is interested in more rarefied and exclusive spaces like art galleries,
auction houses, and museums.
61
Despite the medium‘s tremendous aesthetic and narrative
growth in the last thirty years, these institutions continue to give ―almost no thought‖ to comics,
giving them ―a marginal position in the hierarchies of American visual culture‖ that rankles
many comic book creators.
62
Beaty attributes the art world‘s reluctance to embrace the form to
comics‘ ―socially marginalized audience,‖ a ―powerless elite‖ that cannot help legitimize the
form until comic books either rise to the ―lofty standards demanded of other, cognate, art forms‖
or alternatively, until ―the criteria of value‖ simply shifts as a result of a culture of
postmodernism and its erasure of cultural boundaries.
63

In the pages that follow, I argue not only for the importance of a different kind of artistic
legitimation—one rooted in subcultures and visible in mass media production—but also for a
different means of legitimation, one that is structural and industrial, as opposed to cultural and
artistic. More specifically, I make the case that the gradual construction of quality within the
comic book medium was at the heart of the industry‘s stabilization and advancement. Good taste
within the form was a precondition of survival through rough times, and in subsequent years, the
cultivation of auteurism, fandom, and value demographics, markers that signal the presence of
40

quality—became central to the comic book industry‘s ability to establish itself as an
indispensable part of the contemporary media landscape. Although publishers often happened
upon these developments unintentionally, the result of a variety political and economic
circumstances, they became strategic areas of growth as the business evolved. In taking on this
focus, I reject a purely cultural perspective that attributes all change to shifting aesthetics, tastes,
and public morals and instead look to infrastructure and everyday business operations to explain
the dynamism that has characterized much of the medium‘s history. Ultimately, I argue that the
industry found itself in a position to actively, though not always consciously, curate cultural
perceptions around the medium in order to cultivate the perception of good taste and high
quality.
Over the last eighty years, shifting discourses around taste and quality have served as
both detriment and advantage to the comic book industry. But notably, with its gradual
incorporation into corporate multimedia production, the balance has shifted, with the business
increasingly benefitting from artistic hierarchies. The medium‘s ascension within taste cultures
and simultaneously within multimedia infrastructures is not coincidental; the growth of comic
books within mainstream media has relied upon its elevation in status, and that elevation has
long found support within industry. The fundamental paradox behind contemporary comic book
culture that began this chapter—its mass/niche nature, its publishing/licensing split, and its
popular/esoteric status—has also proved rather valuable to the comic book business. The pages
that follow seek to understand how and why that is. Parsing out a complicated web of cultural
and productive practice, the analyses map out the ways in which cultural hierarchies interact with
political and economic exigencies. Throughout, this history insists on attributing intention to
productive forces in a dominant position, situating the primary flow of power as emanating from
41

industry and infrastructure as they exert pressure on practices of reception and the cultural
landscape more broadly.

1
Peter C. Du Bois, “Superman, Batman and Ivanhoe: Comic Books Have Become Both Profitable and
Respectable,” Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly, September 18, 1961.
2
These surveys were conducted in 1948 and 1947, well before sales peaked in 1954. During this time, comic
book content became more mature in nature, so in all likelihood the adult audience only grew larger. Surveys
quoted by Norbert Muhlen, “Comic Books and Other Horrors,” Commentary 8 (January 1, 1949): 81–82.
3
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 57.
4
Peter Bart, “Some Comic Book Men Pine for Sin, Sex As Their Sales Skid,” Wall Street Journal, February 25,
1959.
5
Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 2nd Edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1964), 360; Patrick Parsons, “Batman and His Audience: The Dialectic of Culture,” in The Many Lives of the
Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, ed. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 110.
6
“Comic Books Profit by Rush To Legitimacy,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1974; Parsons, “Batman and
His Audience,” 110.
7
Paul Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2009), 110–117.
8
John Jackson Miller, “Comicron: The Comics Chronicles,” Monthly Sales, accessed November 21, 2013,
www.comichron.
9
The estimate, and the sentiment it inspired come from DC Comics co-publisher, Dan Didio. See: Dan Didio,
“The New 52” (Lecture presented at the Transmedia Entertainment, University of Southern California,
September 27, 2011).
10
“Franchise Index,” Financial / Entertainment, Box Office Mojo, (August 8, 2014),
http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/?view=Brand&sort=sumgross&order=DESC&p=.htm.
11
Henry Jenkins, “Comics and Convergence Part One,” Blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, (August 18, 2008),
http://henryjenkins.org/2006/08/comics_and_convergence.html.
12
Ibid.
13
For examples of the former, see collections like: Ian Gordon and Matthew P. McAllister, eds., Film and Comic
Books, 1st edition (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); Matthew P. McAllister and Ian Gordon,
eds., Comics and Ideology (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); Wendy Haslem, Angela Ndalianis, and Chris Mackie,
eds., Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007). For a
42

good example of the latter, see the comments of Scott Bukatman in a 2011 roundtable discussion: Greg Smith,
“Surveying the World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conversation,” Cinema Journal, In Focus:
Comics Studies Fifty Years After Film Studies, 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 106–47.
14
Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation 1980-1996 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 7.
15
For further reading On aesthetics, see: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Reprint
(William Morrow Paperbacks, 1994); Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the
Legendary Cartoonist (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2008). On narrative and cultural criticism, see:
Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (Manchester University, 1989); Randy Duncan and
Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (New York: Continuum, 2009); Paul Gravett,
Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know (New York: Collins Design, 2005). On fandom and comics
criticism, see: Bill Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom (McFarland, 2010); Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, All
in Color for a Dime, First Ed (New York: Ace Books, 1970); Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and
True Believers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).
16
For an example of the medium specificity argument, see: Bart Beaty, ed., “In Focus: Comic Studies Fifty
Years After Film Studies,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 106–47. Despite its placement in a film
journal, this special section lays out an argument for creating a whole new discipline for comic studies that
rejects attempts to link comics with other media, thereby, according to Greg Smith “compounding the
difficulty by studying two different objects” (p. 111). Accordingly, the authors included in this section push
for a narrative, aesthetic, and historical approach “that is medium-specific” and which has been and should
continue to be the “driving force” behind the discipline (p. 115).
17
Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review 82 (1973): 7.
18
Ibid., 8.
19
Steve Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 264.
20
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(New York: International Publishers, 1971), 258.
21
Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, 267.
22
Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” 9.
23
Ibid., 5–7.
24
Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012), chap. 6.
25
Leslie A. Kurtz, “The Independent Legal Lives of Fictional Characters,” Wisconsin Law Review, 1986, 450;
451–464.
26
Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” in Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, ed. Jeet
Heer and Kent Worcester, Originally Published in 1962. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 151.
43

New York Times comic book critic Douglas Wolk echoes this sentiment in: Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How
Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Reprint (Da Capo Press, 2008), 102.
27
Jane Gaines, Contested Culture: The Image,the Voice,and the Law (University of North Carolina Press, 1991),
210–225.
28
Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books, 2005), 141.
29
Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Taylor, 1993).
30
Detective Comics v. Bruns Publications et al., 111 F.2d 432 (2nd Cir. 1940).
31
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 108.
32
Stanley Kligfeld, “Comic Magazines: Crime, Superman, Love Help Them Set Records For Sales,” Wall Street
Journal, January 12, 1953,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/132066521/abstract/494677F191CF4550PQ/11?acc
ountid=14749.
33
Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and
Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 40.
34
J. Howard Rutledge and Peter Bart, “Comic Books: Slight Sales Recovery Leaves Volume Below Pre-Clean-
Up Days,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 1955.
35
Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century; “Sidelights: S.E.C. Is Fighting Cuts in Staff,” New York Times,
August 8, 1959, sec. Financial Business.
36
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 110.
37
Ibid., 127.
38
Avi Santo, “Batman Versus The Green Hornet: The Merchandisable TV Text and the Paradox of Licensing in
the Classical Network Era,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 2 (2010): 64.
39
Les Daniels, Superman: The Complete History (Chronicle Books, 2004), 47–54; 92–97.
40
Santo, “Batman vs. Green Hornet,” 68.
41
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 291.
42
Santo, “Batman vs. Green Hornet,” 69–70.
43
“Superman Leaps to the Big Board,” New York Times, May 27, 1965.
44
Santo, “Batman vs. Green Hornet,” 69–70.
45
See for example, Vincent Canby, “Fighting, Fantasy In ‘Conan the Barbarian’’,” New York Times, May 15,
1982; Richard Schickel, “Cinema: Overkill,” Time, May 24, 1982; Dave Kehr, “Unlovable Duck Makes ‘Howard’
an Unlovable Film,” Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1986, sec. N; “‘Howard the Duck’: Reviewers Still Quacking,”
Chicago Tribune, August 10, 1986, sec. 13.
46
Holt, Empires of Entertainment, 5–11.
47
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 10–11;
254.
44

48
Johnson, Derek, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York:
New York University Press, 2013), chap. Introduction.
49
Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 98.
50
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked
Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 137.
51
Sam Ford, “Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics: An Interview with Henry Jenkins,” in Third Person:
Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2009), 303.
52
Ibid., 306; Jenkins, “Comics and Convergence I.”
53
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Mass
Communication and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Wodlacott, Originally Published in
1944 (London: Sage, 1979), 383; 349.
54
Raymond Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary,” in Studies in Culture, ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (London:
Arnold, 1997), 11.
55
Lynn Spigel, TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University Of Chicago
Press, 2008), 3.
56
Dwight MacDonald, “A Theory Of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard
Rosenberg (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 59; 70; 60.
57
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939).
58
Herbert I. Schiller, Culture Inc: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 16–29.
59
Warshow, Robert, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
60
Robert Warshow, “Paul, the Horror, and Dr. Wertham,” Commentary 17 (1954): 596–604. This essay on EC
Comics remains one of the more even-handed considerations of the effects of horror and crime comics of the
era on child-age readers.
61
Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 12.
62
Ibid., 104; 57.
63
Ibid., 102; 13.
45

Chapter One: Comic Book Crisis
The Crash of 1954, EC Comics, and Self-Regulation through Distribution

In their first two decades of existence, comic books were an immensely popular form of
entertainment, a mass medium that appealed to a genuinely wide array of readers through an
equally wide array of genres and narrative and aesthetic sensibilities. Producing this varied art
form was a motley collection of publishers to match—big and small, upright and disreputable,
corporate and chaotic, and everything in between. In 1954, this all changed. Comic books
experienced a decline in sales so dramatic it profoundly shaped the medium‘s entire future,
setting it on an alternative course of development. Comic books ceased to be a mass medium, its
creative offerings narrowed significantly, they stopped appealing to a diverse audience, and
publishers who did not fit into a very particular model of corporate management vanished from
the landscape. This post-1954 environment provided a very different kind of terrain for the
medium, one that endured in a more or less coherent form over the half century that followed. A
medium and an industry contained by a variety of limitations, comic books have for this long
period of time existed at a significant remove from the glory days of the forties.
*

This marks 1954 as a very important year in the history of the medium. Before this time,
comic books were one thing, and after, they had to become another. An understanding of the
events that initiated this shift thus becomes essential to understanding the form and the industry
more broadly, even as it exists today. Unfortunately, despite receiving a great deal of attention
and scholarship from academics, journalists, and fans alike, this period in comic book history has
produced more myths than genuine clarifications. One reason for the interpretive challenge here
is the sometimes distracting concurrence of a cultural and political affair that was not only

*
This era, from roughly 1938 to 1954 is often referred to as the medium’s Golden Age.
46

sensational at the time, but has maintained its utter enthrallment to cultural critics since. At the
very same moment that the comic book market was beginning its dramatic decline, the medium
was undergoing a crisis in the political sphere. Psychiatrists, church officials, PTAs, and local
politicians had for years been trying to link comic books to juvenile delinquency, illiteracy, and
moral corruption. Finally, in the Spring of 1954, the government got involved. The Senate
Judiciary Subcommittee recently created to investigate juvenile delinquency decided to hold
televised hearings on the comic book industry and their alleged role in the corruption of
America‘s youth.
These events, perceived as scandalous at the time, have only grown more sensational
since. Accounts of the incident often describe a sinister anti-comics crusade spearheaded by an
―insane‖ psychiatrist, Dr. Fredric Wertham, who told ―apocalyptic‖ lies about the dangers of
mass media.
1
Coming to the medium‘s defense was an innovative publisher of horror comic
books Bill Gaines, who was allegedly besieged by Senators determined to repress the subversive
medium. All told, the incident and its aftermath are believed to have been so damaging to the
medium that they actually incited the market decline, giving ―the comics industry a near death
blow.‖
2
Depicting an archetypal cultural battle between censors and defenders of a vibrant and
dissident art form, this account of the events of the mid-fifties has become a kind of lore within
discourse around the medium, recounted time and time again in books, articles, and blogs and
cycled through conventions and gatherings. It has effectively become one of the structuring
myths of comic book culture, shaping the way in which fans and creators understand the art
form, its cultural status, and in relation, their own position within society.
What has largely been understood fans, critics and scholars alike as a cultural and social
affair, however, had deep structural roots. The anti-comics crusade was really just one problem
47

among many within the comic book industry, and it was a problem that was, on its own, neither
unanticipated nor irresolvable. It is clear, nonetheless, that the incident at the very least
constituted for the industry a major public relations disaster. Together with actions from a
number of local and state censors, the Hearings prompted the major comic book publishers to
join forces to form the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). This trade
organization drafted a code of self censorship and created an administrative body to enforce it,
known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA). Like the Production Code Administration (PCA)
created by Hollywood twenty years earlier, the CCA would for the next several decades issue a
seal of approval to those titles it deemed morally appropriate. Heavily promoted by the industry,
these actions seemed to satisfy government officials and consumers alike; within the year,
interest in the controversy faded almost entirely from public view.
3
In the years since, attention
to the incident has been confined almost completely to comic book discourse.

Towards an Alternative Interpretation
The industry‘s response at the time—which included a public relations strategy and the
implementation of self-regulation—far from further damaging the medium, had actually helped
to stabilize it. Not only did it quell the controversy, but more importantly, it allowed the biggest
publishers and distributors to take control of the industry. These major players used the public
outcry and calls for censorship as a basis for aggressive self-regulation that allowed them to
further marginalize their lesser competitors and put the business on stronger footing. Responding
to challenging political and economic circumstances, which included the threat of censorship,
distribution problems, oversupply, and unwieldy completion, the industry was merely acting
strategically in its own best interest. Of particular concern in this chapter are public relations
48

efforts and distribution practices, both of which were used to erect barriers to entry to the
industry in order to improve the medium‘s moral reputation as well as its long term stability.
If it had not been clear to every last publisher prior to this moment that the public
perception of the medium‘s quality and taste level was important, there was no doubt afterward;
the production of any mass medium without public sanction is ultimately unsustainable, and
comic books would not be able to survive without achieving a modicum of public respect.
Accordingly, achieving a wide base of support with an aggressive and deliberate public relations
strategy would have to be an industry-wide imperative moving forward. Intriguingly, a closer
examination reveals that even in the years leading up to this incident, at least a few companies
within the industry had already been expending considerable efforts to establish the moral and
cultural legitimacy of the medium, or at the very least, of their own publications. So while it is
tempting to view many of the events of 1954, as so many accounts do, as an unpredictable
spectacle followed by a managerial debacle, many of those involved arguably had a much more
nuanced understanding of what was occurring. And they arguably played a much greater role in
framing the controversy as it unfolded, and thereby our collective memory of it.
Similarly, while most accounts of censorship focus on texts and cultural contexts, the
regulation of mass media necessarily involves vast and powerful infrastructures of enforcement
capable of containing the inherent disorderliness of popular culture. So while we should not give
up on analyzing the objects and ideologies at the center of media censorship, it is equally
important to consider the material foundations that support systems of both restriction and
circulation. More specifically, distribution, which had driven the industry‘s early success and
subsequently caused many of its biggest problems, became the primary mechanism of self-
regulation, organizing the industry‘s basic infrastructure, and determining who would survive the
49

downturn and who would falter. Pointing to the importance of understanding the infrastructure
and everyday operations that constitute the media industries, this chapter reveals how debates
over censorship and good taste in this case functioned as a smokescreen for competitive business
practices. And while these business practices had the very positive effects of improving the
public reputation of comic books and legitimizing the medium, they also unfortunately served to
contain it, excluding new entrants to the industry and limiting the possibility of various creative
developments that would never come to pass.
Before delving into the specifics of the incident and its aftermath, however, it is
important to note the extent to which this story has played a genuinely important role within the
development of comic book culture. In providing an admirable hero and a certain villain, this
story has become a rather productive force within comic book criticism and fandom. The ire that
Wertham has generated, alongside immense admiration for Gaines, has for decade after decade,
helped shape writing on the medium, which was early on motivated by the simultaneous desire to
reverse Wertham‘s disreputable associations and recuperate Gaines‘ legacy.
4
This is clear as
early as the late fifties, when EC fans Fred von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, frustrated by
Wertham‘s effort to ―lump all comics together‖ and his failure to recognize the quality of EC‘s
line, helped establish and sustain a community of EC supporters, thereby establishing comic
book culture‘s first and longest-lasting fandoms.
5
Around the same time, comic critics Bhob
Stewart and Larry Stark created fanzines—amateur publications filled with original criticism, art,
and other features—with the primary purpose of countering Wertham‘s belittling claims.
6
Their
work, along with that of a number of other of EC fans, would become foundational in early
comic book writing and they would go on to contribute to the very influential Underground
50

Comix
†
movement in the late sixties.
7
Wertham continued to impact fandom and criticism well
into the nineties, as academics like Thomas Inge persisted in responding to his claim that comics
created social deviants.
8
Even today, there remain entire websites dedicated to Wertham‘s follies,
countless articles that falsely recount his story, and blogs, Tumblr pages, and Twitter accounts
created in his name, designed to further discredit his memory.
9
A vast amount of contemporary
criticism and attention is also dedicated to Gaines‘ legacy at EC, a topic that will be covered in
greater detail in Chapter Three.
The centrality of Wertham and Gaines has been somewhat more muted within comic
book scholarship. But here too, interpretations have characterized the anti-comics crusade, the
creation of the CCA, and the subsequent comic book crash in primarily personal and cultural
terms. Paul Lopes, for example, points to society‘s need to weed out subversiveness wherever
they could find it, often through institutionalized censorship.
10
And Jim Trombetta similarly
explains that ―the fifties establishment wanted to suppress terror, or at least control it.‖ They did
this very effectively with horror comics, a ―genuinely and brazenly subversive‖ medium deeply
reflective of America‘s subconscious and the ―unthinkable trauma of a whole society.‖
11

Historians who have examined the era in more depth also tend to emphasize the events‘ cultural
dimension. David Hadju describes the comic book controversy as part of a generational culture
war, one that was about "class and money and taste; about traditions and religions and biases
rooted in time and place; about presidential politics; about the influence of a new medium called
television, and about how art forms, as well as people, grow up.‖
12

James Gilbert similarly sees the comic book crusade, and other similar controversies over
mass media, as ―a struggle in which the participants were arguing over power—over who had the

†
For more on the development and influence of Underground Comix, see Chapter Three.
51

right and the responsibility to shape American culture.‖
13
And even though Amy Nyberg argues
that the anti-comics crusade did not cause the market crash, she draws heavily on Gilbert‘s work,
emphasizing the way in which children were used as a ―justification for taking action against
comic books.‖
14
This interpretation seems especially likely in light of a broad public
misconception about comic books and comic book audiences. Even though comic book
readership had aged considerably after World War II, with more than half of all soldiers reading,
and more than 30% of all civilian adults, older intellectuals continued to perceive it as a child‘s
medium, as it was in the very early years. The newsstand presence of increasingly sophisticated
content targeted at adults thus likely frightened non-readers unfamiliar with this shift.
All of these characterizations offer plausible explanations to the public controversy, and
there can be little doubt that the fifties were repressive in nature, that a coming generational
battle was beginning to seethe, and that the cultural establishment had repeatedly used censorship
(often unfairly) in the name of children. Nonetheless, in bringing attention to comic book content
and the social milieu, this history has had the effect of marginalizing the 1954 market crash
itself, an industrial crisis within the medium too often depicted as merely a side effect of the
public crisis around the medium. In some cases, it even stands in as an explanation for it, with at
least one scholar asserting it was ―almost solely responsible for the drastic decline in sales‖ that
followed.
15
This chapter accordingly looks beyond the mythologized aspects of the anti-comic
book crusade to understand why the events surrounding the controversy played out in the way
they did, and seeks out other factors that provide a more definitive explanation for comic books‘
near collapse. In so doing, it not only recuperates a lost history, but illuminates important and
still relevant truths about how mass media institutions deal with matters of taste and cultural
legitimacy.
52

The Early Comic Book Scares
Public concern over comic books arose in three distinct periods. Each time, interest lasted
for about a year before sharply falling off. Notably, sales of comic books suffered only after the
last wave of criticism; after the first two scares, sales rose. The relatively quick closure of these
early controversies were at least in part due to the actions of the comic book industry, which
responded to public criticism swiftly and deftly. By the third wave of criticism, however, a
number of factors—internal to the industry as well as external—had made such a resolution
unattainable.

Pre-War Jitters: 1940
In May 1940, author and reporter Sterling North wrote a column about comic books
entitled ―A National Disgrace‖ that spoke of ―lurid…sex-horror serials‖ filled with ―cheap
political propaganda‖ and a ―hypodermic injection of sex and murder‖ that had to be countered
by better quality literature. The article was eventually reprinted in newspapers across the
country, and stirred up concern among intellectuals.
16
At this time, comic books had been a
popular form of entertainment for less than two years. Their relative newness incited librarians,
psychologists, and cultural intellectuals to enter into a robust debate on the possible dangers and
values the medium represented. Some feared comics would divert children away from an
appreciation of higher quality literature.
17
Others believed it offered mental catharsis, providing
an outlet for violent tendencies,
18
and some even argued that they were so valuable they should
be incorporated into classroom instruction.
19

Long before the dust settled however, and with that any opportunity for possible
consensus, the comic book industry sprung to action. In 1940, within months of the first
53

rumblings of concern, National Periodicals (later DC Comics) began forming an advisory board,
composed of prominent psychologists and educators, to help counsel them on content and create
an in-house code. Within a few years, Fawcett, another leading publisher in the early days,
followed suit, and eventually, Lev Gleason and Magazine Management (later Marvel) would do
the same.
20
As early as 1941, the individuals hired by these companies were publishing scientific
articles, in both scholarly journals and in the popular press, that strongly argued for comic books‘
many benefits. It is in fact difficult to find writing in favor of comics during these early years
that was not authored by an intellectual associated with one of the major publishers. It is not
apparent whether these advocates spoke in favor of comics only after they came onto the
industry payroll or if it was their favorable opinions that helped them obtain that work in the first
place. Regardless, it is clear that companies like National and Fawcett were not willing to
complacently watch the debate from the sidelines.
As this controversy heightened though, the public seems to have been largely occupied
by the looming threat of World War II. And after the U.S. entered the conflict, the flamboyant
patriotism of comic book‘s many superheroes, and the fact that soldiers overseas were happily
purchasing them in droves, seems to have protected the medium from more widespread
criticism.
21
Certain members of the industry nonetheless maintained their vigilance in the debate,
not foolish enough to believe public concern would permanently disappear.
22
In short, some
publishers were actively involved in the conversation from the very start, visibly to consumers or
not, and that involvement helped shape the debate that slowly and quietly evolved throughout the
forties.

54

A Rising Threat: 1948
Their vigilance was warranted, since the issue reared its head again soon after the war
ended. In taking mothers and fathers away from the home front, war had roused public concerns
over juvenile delinquency.
23
Those fears were mounting in the late forties, when Dr. Fredric
Wertham came onto the scene. Born in Germany in 1895, he had studied psychiatry and
psychoanalysis in Europe before moving to the U.S. After briefly directing Bellevue‘s mental
health clinic in New York, he spent the forties and fifties doing psychiatric clinical work in both
Queens and Harlem. Intellectually, Wertham‘s work on media, culture, and psychiatry fell
somewhere between the New York critique of mass culture heralded by Clement Greenberg and
Bernard Rosenberg and the emerging social science on media effects. After years of working
with troubled youths, Wertham decided to take some of his research public, in particular, his
ideas about the threat of comic books. He quickly became the object of significant, if not lasting,
media fascination.
24

His public crusade against the menace of comics began in 1948 when two articles, one
about him and one by him, appeared in the popular publications Colliers and Reader’s Digest.
They criticized not only comic books themselves, but also the industry, for claiming their
product was harmless.
25
At the same time, reports began emerging of copycat events, in which
children re-enacting comic book scenes were finding themselves in sometimes mortal danger. By
year‘s end, there had been articles, radio debates and symposiums, committees founded to
evaluate and censor comics, local boycotts, and even a wave of comic book burnings. This last
development, a handful of bonfires sponsored largely by religious organizations, notably
occurred only in 1948, and thus—contrary to many claims in the media—could not have been
caused by either the Senate Hearings or the publication of Wertham‘s book, both of which
55

occurred in 1954. There was also a wave of local and state measures proposed, all of which
focused on curbing the dissemination of crime comics in particular, and most of which were
criticized by the press and ultimately struck down.
26

Wertham‘s quick success in the public arena had nonetheless caught the attention of
Washington, and of one politician in particular, Estes Kefauver. Brand new to the U.S. Senate,
Kefauver gained considerable notoriety in 1950 for spearheading televised congressional
hearings on organized crime and emerged a presidential hopeful.
27
The need to remain in the
public eye appears to have motivated his next project,
28
which dovetailed with Wertham‘s
interests—media effects research that perceived popular culture as a possible root cause of
criminality. Despite the doctor‘s contentious standing within both scientific and intellectual
circles, Kefauver asked Wertham to create a questionnaire for experts in law enforcement,
education, and media on a possible link between delinquency and comic books.
29

The industry was meanwhile rousing to action once again. In early July of 1948, they
formed the Association of Comic Magazine Publishers (ACMP) and quickly released a comics
code modeled after the Hays Code, Hollywood‘s self-imposed code of censorship, that addressed
the representation of nudity, divorce, and swearing. Only fourteen publishers joined the group,
representing just one third of the industry, but the organization seemed to help considerably in
alleviating public concern.
30
In a more subtle public relations campaign, academics associated
with the industry were again publishing articles in favor of the medium, most notably in the
December 1949 issue of the Journal of Educational Sociology. They were joined here by Henry
Schultz, the head of the brand new ACMP, and Frederic Thrasher, whose piece in that
publication would serve, five years later, as the Senate Subcommittee‘s primary rebuttal to
Wertham‘s incendiary theories.
31

56

Notably, many—if not all—of these researchers had for years received institutional
support from an organization known as the Child Study Association of America (CSAA). Dating
back to the eighteen-eighties, the group was established in its modern incarnation in 1924 and
had since concerned itself with providing parents scientifically-researched information about
publications targeted at children. While many of the members had impressive scholarly and
political pedigrees, in an obvious conflict of interest, the CSAA had for decades received
contributions from the country‘s ―most distinguished publishing houses.‖ Among these, not
surprisingly, were National Periodicals and Fawcett, comic book publishers who Subcommittee
Investigators later discovered, had donated thousands of dollars to the group during the forties.
32

The CSAA had by that time played a central role in the fourteen-year debate over comic books,
its researchers providing some of the most forceful and respected voices to which the public had
access. Publishers had used other tactics of persuasion as well. After World War II, National
Periodicals, for example, started including ―public announcement‖ pages in their comic books on
topics like ―how to study‖ and ―how to do chores.‖ According to Jack Liebowitz, who ran the
company, this was not only a direct response to concerns from parents and schools but a
―conscious attempt to present DC as a good citizen‖ when other, newer companies ―didn‘t have
any standards at all.‖
33
A strategy thus seems already to have been forming, one in which more
established companies set themselves in opposition to less established ones, using their possible
foibles to highlight their own virtues.
By November of 1950, the results of Wertham and Kefauver‘s survey had returned.
Issued from the Senate Crime Investigating Committee, it found that both experts and laymen
overwhelmingly considered comic books to be only a secondary or lesser cause of
delinquency.‖
34
Due to a lack of solid evidence and, notably, the industry's successful defense of
57

its product, the report could officially find "no causal relationship between comics and crime."
35

The public had already largely lost interest in the debate, but with this declaration, the matter
seems to have been formally put to rest, and with it, most of the attention both Kefauver and
Wertham were receiving in public debates about culture.
With dwindling public interest in the threat of comic books, the ACMP, plagued with
membership problems for the start, suffered even further. Dominated by some of the less
reputable publishers, the organization became anathema to more established companies, many of
whom relied on in-house codes and, again, wanted to distance themselves from their lesser
competitors. By 1954, the ACMP had only three members left, and had become totally
impotent.
36
In this respect, this first attempt at a comic book code suffered from some of the
same problems that plagued Hollywood‘s Production Code in its early days. Although both the
ACMP and the MPPDA (The Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America) were
industry organizations formed to protect their members from public calls for censorship, a lack
of urgency seems to have prevented producers, and in the case of comics, publishers, from fully
endorsing or conforming to what were ultimately non-binding rules.
37
The state of affairs
changed dramatically for Hollywood in 1934 when federal legislation seemed imminent, and
movie studios reluctantly agreed to give the Hays Office, who had been administering the code,
more compulsory power. Twenty years later, a different set of industrial exigencies would give
the CCA, the successor of the ACMP, a similarly powerful hold over members.

Motivations for the 1954 Subcommittee Hearings
It remains somewhat unclear why exactly public concern peaked again in 1954, and there
is nothing about the controversy in and of itself that accounts for the fact that only at this time,
58

was a scare followed by a dramatic decline in sales. The most likely explanation to the first of
these riddles is that efforts from the industry to self-regulate had failed. Comic books had
accordingly grown more lurid, violent, and sexual since 1948, instead of less. Despite the
medium‘s common association with superheroes, comic books of the postwar era were
amazingly diverse. Heroes like Captain America and Superman had been popular during the war
but their sales began to drop by 1945, and by 1948, the genre had almost completely
disappeared.
38
By 1946, teen comics, first popularized by Archie, had arrived to take their place,
along with funny animals.
39
In 1947, more mature genres developed, and the audience steadily
grew as comics increasingly appealed to adults and female readers. Crime comics came first. In
1948, Lev Gleason Publications, a minor firm with only three titles, saw their comic book Crime
Does Not Pay reach a circulation of 1.5 million an issue.
40
After that came westerns, then
romances (peaking in 1949), horror (popularized in 1951), and finally war and science-fiction.
41

In fact, according to Mike Benton, by the start of 1954, almost every type of comic book (with
the exception of superheroes) ―was still selling phenomenally well.‖
42
Even the more established
comic book publishers, each of whom had found genre success in the medium‘s first decade
(National with superheroes, Dell with funny animals, Archie with teens), began following many
of these genre trends in hope of finding new hits and maintaining their market share. And part of
what following these trends entailed was producing comics that were more sophisticated and
more provocative. Bill Gaines seems to have personified this tendency within the industry,
particularly as it was practiced by the smaller publishers, and he would soon willingly serve as a
symbol for the medium‘s increasingly visible social vices as well as its embrace of lowbrow
cultural values and bad taste.
59

Bill Gaines‘ was the son of Max C. Gaines, one of the founders of the comic book
industry, and a man who came upon early success with All-American Comics, and its popular
characters Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Hawkman.
43
In 1945, however, he decided to sell his
share of the company to his partner Harry Donenfeld at National Periodicals, retaining only one
title, Picture Stories from the Bible.
44
Picture Stories was one of All-American‘s least popular
books, but it served as the seed for Gaines‘ new company, Educational Comics, the fulfillment of
his vision of the future of the medium—enriching children‘s educational lives. Not surprisingly,
this vision was not popular with readers, and Educational Comics was $100,000 in debt when the
elder Gaines died tragically in a boating accident in the summer of 1947. The company
subsequently fell into the hands of his rebellious son Bill, who had wanted to become a
chemistry teacher, was reportedly uninterested in comics, hated the business, and resented his
deceased father. Eventually Gaines seems to have found inspiration, and proceeded to fire many
of his father‘s older employees, hiring in their place a new, younger, more cynical, and far more
talented staff that included Al Feldstein (future editor of EC and then MAD Magazine), Harvey
Kurtzman, and Johnny Craig.
Perhaps in rebuke of his father‘s lofty aspirations, he soon changed the company‘s name
to Entertaining Comics and began publishing the kind of genre books that his father had pushed
so hard against but which had grown so popular throughout the industry.
45
Finding only limited
success, he wanted to get out ahead of the curve, so in the spring of 1950, he tried out two horror
stories in one of his regularly published crime books.
46
They sold well, so EC introduced a New
Trend line that capitalized not only on horror, but a number of other more mature and racy
genres like crime and war. Before long, the new horror titles were selling up to 90% of their print
runs. Once the circulation numbers got out, other publishers quickly followed EC‘s lead until the
60

genre accounted for 150 different titles. With this success, Gaines finally climbed out of his
father‘s debt.
47
EC‘s move into horror, however, remained an exceedingly risky endeavor.
Following closely in the wake of the second wave of public concern, the New Trend titles—
visibly and proudly the goriest, most violent, and most disgusting comics yet—were tempting
fate when government officials and critics like Wertham still keeping an eye on the business.
The gamble served EC well in the short run, but building the company anew on a
foundation of shock was hardly a long term strategy, a reality of which more established
companies would have been well aware. Given Gaines‘ happenstance entry into the comic book
industry though, and his short tenure so far, longevity and stability may never have been his goal.
Gaines in fact remained a small player in what had become a very large business. By 1954, the
comic book industry was issuing up to 90 million comics each month.
48
The medium was at the
historical peak of its popularity. EC‘s share of this pie was relatively minute. The company
printed about 2.5 million copies a month, with individual issues reaching a circulation of only
about 300,000 copies, the minimum print run for most of the industry.
49
Meanwhile, Dell‘s 90
different titles averaged 800,000 copies an issue, with some regularly selling more than 3 million
copies.
50

Gaines had a surefire win introducing horror comics, and EC‘s were considered by fans
to be the best in terms of quality. But in terms of numbers, the fifties were by no means the age
of EC Comics.
51
With more than 600 titles hitting newsstands each weeks, EC‘s eleven comic
books would have been invisible to those not actively seeking them. The small size of his
company need not necessarily have been a problem for Gaines, if only the risks that he took had
been calculated and his approach to rebuilding EC was informed by strategic thinking. It remains
unclear however whether or not Gaines fully comprehended that New Trend was even a risk at
61

all. Years later, he would comment that he could never anticipate what was going to offend
people. He continued, ―we were always getting into trouble, and we never knew why exactly, so
it couldn‘t be prevented.‖
52

Even with the presence of EC Comics in the market though, and dozens of imitators in
the horror genre, not to mention crime, jungle adventures, and true romance, nobody was
throwing comic books into bonfires—either literal or metaphorical. When the Senate Judiciary
Committee created the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in April of 1953, the
medium was still not on its agenda. Then, at the end of 1953, two incidents occurred. First, an
issue of EC‘s satire magazine Panic featured a divorced Santa Claus that prompted the Attorney
General of Massachusetts to try to restrict its sale. The case was so flimsy, the judge ultimately
dismissed it, but the incident caused some insulting bad press.
53
Second, Wertham published
another article, in Ladies’ Home Journal, which provided a condensed version of his scathing
upcoming book on the danger of comic books and the comic book industry entitled Seduction of
the Innocent. Wertham‘s outrage again struck a chord with the public, and angry letters began to
arrive at the office of Senator Robert Hendrickson, chair of the new Subcommittee. On February
20, 1954, Hendrickson announced the Subcommittee would hold special sessions on comics.
54

Despite Wertham‘s role in putting comic books back on the public agenda, however, his
ideas were not universally or even widely embraced. While some intellectuals and scientists of
the fifties did read his work—a few who agreed with him, and a few who attacked him—the vast
majority of them completely ignored him.
55
Beaty notes that by 1957, he had already been
rejected by the nation‘s psychiatrists and social scientists for focusing too heavily on broad social
and cultural trends. He was also marginalized by the era‘s cultural critics, who opposed his left-
62

leaning political motives.
56
The prominent intellectual Robert Warshow, for example, criticized
Wertham for his lurid writing, his sense of doom, his weak logic, and his oversimplification.
For his own part, Warshow was able to contribute considerable nuance to the discussion
around comic books, which, far from historical claims of complete demagoguery, seems to have
made space for multiple viewpoints. To his credit, Warshow found the medium, and material
from EC Comics in particular, to display ―an undisciplined imaginativeness‖ not totally unlike
―the stories of Poe or other writers of horror staples.‖ He nonetheless found them to yield to
immediate gratification and feared they might have a negative impact on young readers. Though
he concluded that "some kind of regulation seems necessary,‖ he was against an official code
which would might make the medium seem "mechanically fabricated."
57
So appealing was this
perspective to the public, that his article was picked up by major publications like the Boston
Globe, which strongly recommended to anyone interested in the subject to ―read the entire
article‖ and learn that the ―wholesale effect of comic books‖ was probably not ―as devastating as
Dr. Wertham believes.‖
58

Warshow was by no means the only critic of Wertham who spoke effectively to a general
audience. And plenty of other critics and intellectuals were putting forward similarly sensible
and diplomatic arguments—acknowledging the potential harm of a new medium researchers
knew little about without blaming it for all of society‘s woes.
59
In a 1964 history, Theodore
Peterson noted that parents at the time could very easily ―find authorities who assured them that
comics were harmless and even educational.‖ Among those who represented the other side of the
debate were J. Edgar Hoover, and Laura Bender, the director of the Bellevue children‘s ward
after Wertham left the post, who, with the help of the comic book industry, also had considerable
access to national press.
60
So while the American public was undoubtedly intrigued, and to a
63

somewhat lesser extent frightened, by the possible effects of an emerging mass media
environment more expansive and frenzied than the one they had known in the first half of the
twentieth century, most were hardly convinced of its evils. In addition to doubts about the
genuineness of the threat of comic books, there was the very widespread fear of increasing
censorship. Americans were growing increasingly skeptical of committees tasked with
suppressing cultural products, even offensive ones. When the discussion came to indecent
comics, they seemed to many hardly worth attention, no less government inference.
61

These beliefs on the part of the public were consistent with long-held American attitudes
related to mass media. Despite the emergence around this time of media effects research, as well
as highbrow critiques of lowbrow culture, neither everyday consumers and citizens nor most
intellectuals were inclined to dismiss outright the potential value of mass media. And they were
certainly not likely to embrace government censorship or deny the very legitimate right of
commercial producers to sell their products in a manner of their own choosing. An American
fondness for capitalist enterprise would here and elsewhere serve as a barrier to cultural
repression as imposed by the government, but it would not, notably, prevent capitalism itself
from imposing the kind of limitations that would be viewed as abhorrent had they been imposed
by state actors.

The Hearings: Good Taste, the Causes of Delinquency, and All the Rest
Such was the context for the 1954 comic book Hearings for the Senate Subcommittee on
Juvenile Delinquency, which were held on April 21
st
, 22
nd
, and June 4
th
. Notably, it took place
during the exact same three month span as the Army-McCarthy Hearings, which initiated that
Senator‘s decline in public favor, and provoked increasing public disapproval of government
64

intrusion in private life. Pursued for the benefit of this same public (which was, by and large
ambivalent about the dangers of mass media), the Subcommittee Hearings on comic books put
on trial a relatively small culture industry that, as will be described, was under some amount of
duress. It was nonetheless led by individuals well-prepared for the national stage and adept at
protecting their product, subtly shaping public opinion, and quietly pursuing political action that
could help their own cause. For its part, the Subcommittee too was somewhat ambivalent when it
came to the accuracy of media effects research, but less so when it came to their own decidedly
small role in policing commercial industry.
And yet, this affair has often been characterized by history as a censorious and aggressive
witch hunt executed in the same vein as the Hollywood Blacklist.
62
This characterization is very
much in line with the way history remembers the Cold War more generally—as a time when fear
of communism pushed the nation to root out any potential cultural threat until social conformity
was the only option. But as Herbert Schiller has pointed out, the most significant feature of
anticommunism, which was becoming ―a permanent feature of the American landscape,‖ was
actually aggressive support of big business and the enthusiastic embrace of a free market model
opposed to government interference in private enterprise.
63
To the extent that the Senate
investigation into comic books is representative of Cold War culture then, it is as much in this
latter sense—as a prime example of mid-century pro-business politics—as any other, best
illustrated by the fact that the majority of the hearings would be dedicated to a lengthy discussion
of business practices.
The same overall attitude was reflected by Congress‘ ongoing examinations of several
media industries—comic books being only the first—conducted during the fifties and sixties.
According to Shawn Selby, these investigations were not about censorship, but rather the pursuit
65

of a core ―belief in the regulating power of a capitalist system.‖ Not only were the Senators
fundamentally against censorship from the outset, they were also very reluctant to place the
blame for juvenile delinquency solely on popular culture, and were certainly opposed to putting
all fault with a single medium.
64
Selby argues effectively that, with a core ―belief in the
regulating power of a capitalist system,‖ the Senators only ever wanted to find a way to help
industry help itself; they were in search of a laissez-faire approach to elevating culture.
65
So
while the threat of censorship may have seemed real to both those involved in the proceedings
and those watching from the sidelines, it was only ever a threat, and was designed to promote
business solutions over government intrusion.
Industry had been responding slavishly to consumer demand in a kind of rush to the
bottom, and the Senators were hoping that the same competitive approach could be used to
improve the product. For Senator Kefauver, the best strategy for achieving this goal was merely
to expose the industry‘s problems to the public, who could then make more informed purchasing
decisions. For others on the Subcommittee, it meant promoting self-regulation, and figuring out
exactly where on the distribution chain—between publishers, printers, distributors, wholesalers,
and retailers—it would be possible to encourage restrictions that could correct industry
practices.
66

With this latter goal in particular, the entire affair, with only limited television coverage,
could have passed relatively unnoticed as dry bureaucratic proceedings, but for the presence of a
number of individual actors, personally motivated by either passion or glory to raise the stakes
for everyone else. There was Wertham, who set the release of his book for April 19
th
, just two
days before testimony began. And then there was Senator Kefauver, the driving force behind the
Subcommittee hearings,
67
and Bill Gaines. The decisive moment came when Senator Herbert
66

Beaser asked Gaines if there was any limit to what he would put in his magazines, and Gaines
foolishly answered ―only within the bounds of good taste.‖ Kefauver then brought out the May
issue of Crime Suspense Stories (See Fig. 2.1) and this exchange followed:

SENATOR KEFAUVER. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's
head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
Figure 2.4
67

BILL GAINES. Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for
example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen
dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body
could be seen to be bloody.
SENATOR KEFAUVER. You have blood coming out of her mouth.
BILL GAINES. A little.
68

The following day, this conversation was reprinted in newspapers across the country.
69
It
was the nineteen-fifties version of a perfect sound byte and effectively shocked Americans who
collectively shook their heads at Gaines‘ dreadful notion of good taste. Sixty years later, this
exchange remains etched in the minds of many Americans, particularly those who love comic
books—albeit for a very different reason. Writing about a revival of interest in EC Comics in the
nineties, Digby Diehl called this moment ―an archetypal interchange between an advocate of free
speech and a politician seeking to capitalize on the hot topic of the hour to further his own
ambitions.‖
70
In this interpretation, shared by many who have recently written about the
exchange, Gaines was taken advantage of, his progressive conception of taste and art
misunderstood and mocked, and the affair turned into a spectacle for the public‘s pleasure. The
illustrative simplicity of the words spoken between Kefauver and Gaines have allowed their
debate to act not just as a stand-in for the entirety of the Senate Subcommittee Hearings, but as a
symbol of the anti-comic book crusade and the subsequent comic book market crash. For many,
it is almost as if all we really need to know about comic books in the fifties is contained in this
one exchange.
68

As it happens, Gaines‘ problems began well before this moment and his actions over the
several months leading up to the Hearings directly contributed to the unfortunate scenario in
which he found himself. As Amy Nyberg has found in her research, just days before the comic
book Hearings were announced in February 1954, Gaines was quoted by the Hartford Courant in
an exposé about the danger the medium posed to youth. Unhappy with his portrayal, he did two
things. First he wrote an accusatory letter to the newspaper, prompting not a retraction, but an
even more incendiary response. Second, he decided to run full page ads in his comic books that
bore the headline, ―Are you a red dupe?‖ (see Fig. 2.2).
71
In big bold letters, in the center of the
ad, Gaines included the phrase ―The group most anxious to destroy comics are the communists!‖
The ad‘s fine print, positioned under a zany comic strip about censorship in Soviet Russia,
included more specific accusations, even mentioning Wertham by name. In retrospect an
amazing piece of propaganda, this ad manages to mock the anti-comics crusade and
simultaneously launch a very serious attack against the Senate Subcommittee and thousands of
concerned Americans by claiming that all critics of comics were either communists or
communist dupes. Gaines decided to give this to the Senate Subcommittee prior to its
publication, and in advance of the hearings, because he thought they ―would be interested.‖
72

Indeed they were. Notably though, it is not clear that they would have taken any particular notice
of Bill Gaines or EC Comics had the publisher not actively brought himself to their attention,
both with this ad, and with a specific request to be heard publicly at the Senate Subcommittee
Hearings.
73
Similarly, even though Gaines singled out Wertham here, Wertham would not do the
same to Gaines; Wertham‘s upcoming book, his public crusade, and his testimony focused not on
horror or on EC Comics, but on crime books and the superhero stories of National Periodicals.
69

Figure 5.2
70

Unfortunately, when Gaines did eventually testify, he was not at his best. Critics have
since sadly acknowledged that Gaines was ―easily manipulated by his interlocutors‖ at the
hearings.
74
And Gaines himself reported, years later, that he had stayed awake the previous night
with the help of uppers, or more specifically the diet pill Dexedrine. By the time he spoke, later
in the afternoon, he had already started to crash and was left sitting there, in his own words, ―like
a punch-drunk fighter‖ getting pummeled by his opponents.
75
Gaines probably did not have a
chance at a fair hearing that day. But he certainly did not help his own cause, nor that of horror
comics more generally, when he arrived on the national political stage—at his own request—
physically and mentally unprepared to meet the opponents he had actively worked to alienate in
the months prior.
Ultimately, Bill Gaines was not a particularly effective advocate for a medium he has
since been praised for defending.
76
He struggled when it came to any kind of politics—even
within his own industry—and certainly when it came to public relations. It was therefore his
foibles rather than his genius that transformed him into a lightning rod for the controversy. His
contemporaries within comic book publishing fully appreciated his blunders and chose to
distance themselves from him. To an extent, they even offered him up as a straw man within
their own testimonies—if not directly and by name, then certainly by insinuation. He was
someone they could define themselves positively against, with his folly highlighting their virtue.
In his ability to attract attention without ever achieving any kind of control over the discourse, he
had a great deal in common with the controversy‘s other lightning rod, his supposed nemesis,
Fredric Wertham.
71

In contrast to Bill Gaines, Wertham was able to speak at the Subcommittee Hearings
almost without interruption.
‡
The interest and respect shown to him by the Senators gave the
impression that they embraced his ideas completely. And indeed, the Subcommittee seems to
have accepted his most basic and general claim, that comic books were one of many contributing
factors in recent cases of juvenile delinquency,
77
to which a number of other witnesses also
testified. Aside from this however, Wertham‘s arguments would be met with considerable
skepticism. Foremost among these assertions was his insistence that comic books were not
simply a preferred source of entertainment for youths already involved in bad behavior, but
actually had the power to drive otherwise normal children to delinquency. The only serious
questions Wertham received during his testimony were on this topic, from Senators Beaser and
Kefauver, and it was a subject the Subcommittee returned to repeatedly in the days that followed,
as they asked a number of witnesses whether or not comics might negatively affect decent
children. Ultimately, the Subcommittee decided against Wertham on this issue. Their final report
sided with the consensus of experts that comic books could not cause delinquency in well
adjusted children and noted that Wertham had failed to offer statistical results to prove
otherwise.
78

As for Wertham‘s other incendiary claims, and all of his detailed research? It was largely
ignored. Countless studies, critiques, and histories written over the course of several decades
have worked to debunk Wertham‘s thinking,
79
but the government, and conceivably most of
those attuned to the issue at the time, were willing to dismiss him almost immediately. To most
of his theories—about the dangers of advertising in comic books, and the damage the medium

‡
Wertham’s testimony came just two days after the release of Seduction of the Innocent. So while Kefauver
had already read it (or at least claimed to), the viewing public likely had not. What ultimately matters most in
Wertham’s legacy then was what he actually said that day to Congress, in the moment his ideas had the most
potential to influence policy, industry, and broad public opinion.
72

posed to proper reading techniques, the Senators paid no attention. Even his most reasonable
claim, that comic books may have been negatively influencing the ―theoretical development‖ of
children, seems to have been largely glossed over.
80
In making this particular argument,
Wertham suggested that repeated overexposure to the kind of violence regularly depicted in
comic books could over time lead children to ethical or moral confusion.
It would have been an unexceptional claim to make (since numerous other witnesses,
even those testifying in favor of comic books, made similar statements), except for the evidence
he used to explain it. Instead of citing the horror stories of EC Comics or some of the other racier
publishers as examples of this tendency, Wertham used the comic books Tarzan, published by
Dell, and Superman, published by DC Comics, as his primary examples. These two titles were in
fact the only ones he ever mentioned by name throughout his testimony, merely relating vague,
often unidentifiable, plots from other publishers, whose names and titles he could not even recall.
Wertham had taken a similar approach—accusing the industry‘s most respected and established
publishers—in his book, which gave more attention to the relatively clean superhero genre than
to horror and crime books.
81
Of course, when it came to write an official report, the Senators
chose not to highlight the superhero and jungle books Wertham took care to disparage publicly,
but the less prominent horror comics from small publishers like Bill Gaines.
82
The Subcommittee
was rejecting Wertham‘s explicit attempt to accuse the entire comic book industry of wrong-
doing, and the more established wing of it in particular.
Still, the most telling part of Wertham‘s overlooked testimony was his conclusion. While
he officially declared that he ―detest[ed] censorship,‖ Wertham argued that there should be a
legal remedy that prevented children under fifteen years of age from seeing on display or
purchasing comic books depicting violence and crime. This kind of proposed regulation was in
73

marked contrast to the self-censorship the Senators supported, but Wertham had very
pronounced reasons for favoring a legal solution over an industrial one. He in fact accused the
comic book industry of harassing him personally and claimed that the ―tremendous power‖
constituted by the major comic book publishers, printers, and distributors were preventing
parents from speaking out against the medium and were forcing helpless vendors to continue
selling smut.
83
In making this argument, and in targeting the more established publishers,
Wertham found himself in the same position as Gaines—in opposition to the most powerful
forces involved in this controversy, i.e. the big industry players and, to a lesser extent, the
Senators. He was also violating a central principle of American political and cultural ideology at
the time by turning a commercial industry motivated by capitalist values into the enemy.
When the Subcommittee ignored Wertham‘s recommendations, he was incensed. Within
a year of though, most people ceased to care about either his research or comic books more
generally; the controversy, and Wertham—its biggest enthusiast—faded from the public eye.
84

His argument about the dangers of mass media had certainly struck a chord with the American
public. The kind of fears he articulated in relation to a newly introduced cultural form have
arisen time and time again, in the years that came both before and after the comic book
controversy. Indeed, when Kefauver took over as Chair of the Senate Subcommittee, he
redirected its efforts toward television, which had become the latest source of America‘s
anxieties over the effects of new media on youth.
85
The ideas Wertham expressed were
ultimately very much at odds with the major strands of thinking in academic, intellectual, and
popular circles on the topics of mass media, commercial enterprise, and government regulation.
It would thus appear that while their personalities heavily impacted the comic book
controversy, neither Gaines nor Wertham were particularly successful in conveying their desired
74

message to the public. The competing versions of good taste and social value they presented
certainly helped shape the debate, at least as it was perceived by the public. It also helped
confirm the Senators‘ already well-established beliefs about comic books‘ minimal artistic and
cultural value. The Subcommittee seems to have been convinced from the start that too many
comic books were of exceedingly low quality; whether their concerns were based on
representations of violence or sex or merely their ―lowbrow‖ nature is not clear. But the whole
affair took a clear turn toward other issues, after Wertham and Gaines‘ early involvement
concluded. The impact of both men then, one more embarrassingly than the other, was ultimately
to put a sheen of excitement on the proceedings and attract public attention to what otherwise
were rather boring and administrative government matters.
The Senators ultimately questioned twenty-three other people over three long days of
testimony.
86
Among these individuals were just four mental health experts, and Fredric Wertham
was the only one of them who spoke to an unambiguous link between juvenile delinquency and
comic books. Most of the others who appeared in front of Congress were representatives from
the magazine and comic book industry and testified in depth on the ins-and-outs of the
business—shipments, bundling, returns, credits. Delivering boring and administrative testimony
actually seems to have been precisely the aim of many of these individuals. More specifically,
representatives from Dell, National, and Magazine Management—publishers that together
represented more than half of the industry‘s volume—all gave lengthy but ultimately
unmemorable testimonies. While these individuals faced what at first seems like tough
questioning, unlike Wertham and Gaines, they were far more effective at making their point, and
without drawing any additional attention to themselves. Their very presence has been expunged
75

from many histories that explicitly claim that nobody else from the comic book industry
appeared to defend the medium.
All were careful to explain that while there were many ―bad‖ and potentially harmful
comic books on the market, there were far more good comic books, many of which, incidentally,
these companies themselves were responsible for publishing. And when the Senators suggested
otherwise, pointing out the crime titles in their own catalogues, these representatives were quick
to explain that such books could be easily eliminated from their stock, and that some had already
in fact been cancelled (others, interestingly, they would continue publishing for a decade to
come). That the major publishers were able to deal with these ―bad‖ books so effectively, they
argued, served as evidence that the industry was more than capable of dealing with the problem
of corrupt comics all on its own.
87

On this point, the Subcommittee found itself in total agreement, as indicated by their
stated approval of the CMAA and its efforts at self-regulation.
88
There was, however, one major
topic discussed during the Hearings about which the Subcommittee remained skeptical:
distribution. While the Subcommittee continued asking witnesses about the content of crime and
horror comics, and about their possible effects on children, the most heated and involved
exchanges tended to be about distribution practices, and more specifically about the very
particular ways in which publishers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers brought comic books
to the public. The resulting record contains a vast amount of information about the way the
comic industry functioned from top to bottom. It also provides tremendous insight into the
market crash that was, at that point in time, already in motion.

76

How to Censor Mass Media
The Senators had argued that regulation was at least partially the responsibility of
citizens‘ and parents‘ groups,
89
who had, since 1948 been boycotting stores and pressuring
newsstands in an effort to reduce the sale of comic books to children.
90
Their hard work resulted
in more than fifty cities eventually taking action, either by passing ordinances or by setting up
censorship committees. According to a study conducted at the time however, this kind of
regulation tended to be ―spasmodic and highly localized,‖ not to mention ―quasi-legal.‖ It almost
always relied on the ―effectiveness of warning, threat, or boycott‖ alone since authorities almost
never brought legal action to fruition within the court system.
91
After the Senate Hearings, as the
CMAA was forming its code, states thus started stepping forward to do what neither the federal
government nor local authorities would. Between 1954 and 1955, twelve states introduced
resolutions to curb sales, most of which focused on preventing comic books featuring sex and
violence from reaching minors. Even these efforts though faced obstacles, with governors
vetoing the bills or courts striking them down for unconstitutionality.
92
According to Theodore
Peterson‘s 1964 study of the magazine industry, the only truly successful law—which made the
sale of obscene comics to minors an illegal act in New York state—was not passed until May
1955,
93
three months after the Senate released its report, a full six months after the establishment
of the CCA, and well after a decline in comic book sales had initiated.
These local acts of censorship seem to have had a limited impact on the comic book
market, particularly in comparison to that imposed by the industry itself. By mid-August, just
two months after the Hearings concluded, the comic book industry had formed the CMAA. The
introduction of a new code of ethics was announced just a month after that, on September 16
th
,
along with a comic book czar, Charles Murphy, who would head up the new CCA. The speed
77

with which publishers formed the CMAA and CCA in the wake of the hearings has the effect of
making this response seem hasty, perhaps even desperate. To the contrary, the big publishers
created the code with prudence and forethought. It was no different from the careful and
deliberate approach they had taken toward calls for censorship for the entirety of the fifteen years
prior. And while many have assumed the industry only took this tactic because the government
forced them to, the Subcommittee notably never made any legislative recommendations along
these lines, and certainly took no legislative action. If anything, it was a gentlemen‘s agreement,
willingly entered into by all involved.
Surprisingly though, it was actually Gaines who initiated the formation of the CMAA,
with an open invitation to other publishers in the industry to launch a collective public relations
campaign to repair the industry‘s image. He had even selected two Harvard researchers to write a
new study on the spuriousness of the link between juvenile delinquency and comic books.
94
Of
course, other publishers had been quietly and effectively pursuing such a campaign for years, and
had little to gain by joining forces with Gaines; understanding the depth of his failures in the
public eye, publishers with more effective PR strategies knew to distance themselves from him.
So even though a number of publishers responded to Gaines‘ invitation, the group he began soon
turned against him.
By the fourth meeting, nearly the entire industry had signed on to what had become the
CMAA and they elected John Goldwater, of Archie Publications, as its chairman, with Jack
Liebowitz of DC Comics, Monroe Froehlich of Marvel, and several other major publishers
elected to a Special Committee on Organization tasked with drafting a code of ethics for the
industry.
95
Unhappy with the new direction the group was taking and the impending decision to
limit horror and crime publications, Gaines walked out of the meeting. On September 14
th
he
78

wrote a statement to the press accusing the CMAA of lacking ―sincerity‖ and using a ―smoke
screen to deceive the public.‖ More specifically, he claimed, not wrongly, that in creating a code
of ethics, they planned not to eradicate harmful comic books as they publicly claimed, but
merely print deceptive covers with innocuous titles while publishing the same threatening
material.
96

When it came to the actual writing of the Code, the CMAA gave Wertham only slightly
more deference than they had given Gaines. Its general standards demanded that all comic books
show crime and divorce in a negative light, portray authority figures with respect, and refrain
from using profanity or depicting sex; these rules gave a nod to Wertham‘s concerns about
children‘s theoretical development and would have mandated minor changes in content at nearly
all of the publishing houses. The Codes‘ stricter and more explicit standards however—that
comics refrain from using the words ―crime,‖ ―horror,‖ and ―terror,‖ and that they eliminate,
specifically, the inclusion of ―walking dead, torture, vampires, and vampirism, ghouls,
cannibalism and werewolfism‖
97
—did not at all reflect Wertham‘s testimony and specifically
targeted the less established publishers like Gaines, whom Wertham generally ignored.
Ultimately, it was these more precise guidelines that caused the greatest strain on publishers,
since they demanded not just that changes occur within the pages of the narrative, but that entire
titles be totally eliminated should they seek CCA approval.
Popular accounts of the fifties comic book controversy often argue that this imposition of
censorship dramatically impacted the medium‘s future. By shaming the entire art form and
aggressively curbing content, the CCA supposedly limited the comic books to a narrow juvenile
audience, triggering a dramatic decline in sales.
98
A number of scholars, however, have taken a
more expansive view. Bart Beaty, Amy Nyberg, and Bradford Wright agree that there were in
79

fact other, perhaps more significant causes for market trouble; the decade saw ―a perfect storm‖
of damaging incidents, specifically, the popularization of television, the breakup of a American
News Company, a major distributor, and of course, the bad publicity caused by the anti-comics
crusade.
99
These presence of these additional factors help considerably in rationalizing the utter
enormity of the comic book crash. A more detailed look at the comic book industry‘s response to
these events, however, suggests that there is more to this series of events than bad luck, and that
in fact the market‘s decline may have been less chance than it was a function of strategic and
deliberate business practices.

Distribution as a Mechanism of Censorship
Censorship often seems like an occurrence that is primarily value-based, politically
motivated, and culturally contingent. Too often then, historical accounts fail to account for the
extent to which it is fundamentally also an industrial and economic process. Of specific interest
here is the considerable role that distribution in particular played in the implementation and
enforcement of the Comics Code. For a medium like comic books, which had to physically
traverse the country, sometimes multiple times over, access to reliable distribution networks and
strong representation along those routes was critical; a comic book, no matter how brilliant, was
valueless if it could not first reach its audience. While distribution has been cited as a
contributing factor in some of the struggles comic books faced, the extent to which distribution
practices actually organized the rest of the industry has been widely overlooked. Distribution in
80

his context refers to the space in between production and consumption,
100
the sectors of the
business commonly referred to at the time as distribution, wholesale, and retail.
§

That members of the Subcommittee believed self-censorship would even be possible is a
credit to the successful implementation of the Production Code two decades earlier. Since 1934,
Hollywood had been regulating itself quite aggressively and effectively through the PCA. Far
from being an immediate success though, this impressive regulatory achievement had taken
decades to build. A number of factors contributed to early failures as well as eventual adoption,
including, critically, achieving industry buy-in, and somewhat less critically, growing intensity in
external pressures to censor. Another key piece of this puzzle was control of film distribution,
which actually enabled enforcement, as it would later in the comic book industry. It was not until
all of these elements were in place that Hollywood had any real success with self-censorship.
While seldom recognized as such, that final factor, distribution, had often functioned as a
lynchpin in national censorship campaigns. In cinema‘s early years, local governments had
enacted piecemeal restrictions on the new medium based on ―public nuisance‖ legislation, with
results showing only ―varying degrees of rigor, predictability, and frequency.‖
101
But before any
kind of broad censorship campaign could succeed, the federal government had to invoke its
abilities under the Commerce Clause to limit the distribution of products across borders. As Lee
Grieveson has noted, this approach dated back to at least 1876 when the government authorized
post-office censorship by declaring all obscene matter to be ―non-mailable.‖ The Sims Act,
passed in 1912, briefly extended these same authorities to mass media by restricting the interstate
transportation and national circulation of the Jack Johnson-James Jeffries Fight film. In all of

§
Within film studies, distribution has traditionally been defined as separate from exhibition, which refers
primarily to theaters. In the context of comic books, however, exhibition is more akin to retail, which might
refer to newsstands and other venues of consumption that were often integrated with wholesale and
distribution businesses.
81

these instances, "legislation focused on the disciplining of circulation," pointing to the
importance of control over distribution—which had both economic and political advantages.
102

Faced with local and federal attempts to censor, the film industry tried to reign in film
content through self-regulation very early on, first via the National Board of Censorship
(established by the MPPC in 1909) and later by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America (MPPDA).
103
By the time of this organization‘s founding in 1922, Hollywood had
begun its move toward vertical integration, and with it, total control of distribution and the hope
of increased stability. As Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons note, this transition required capital
from Wall Street, and accordingly, fewer scandals both on-screen and off. This motivated the
president of the MPPDA Will Hays to embark on a decade long campaign to improve content.
104

Producers and distributors were also worried at the time about anti-trust legislation, which the
Justice Department pursued more aggressively during these years. The issues and motivations
behind the MPPDA‘s self-regulation efforts were thus ―determined more by economic
considerations than by matters of film content.‖
105
Not surprisingly considering these
motivations, a decade later, the MPPDA still had not solved the immorality problem. Under
increasing pressure from religious organizations, along with uneven state and local legislation,
and threats from the newly elected Roosevelt administration (which had severed Hays‘
previously affable relations with Washington), film studios finally gave in and decided to get
behind a real effort at self-censorship.
106

With full industry support, the MPPDA was able to create an immensely powerful and
effective code of censorship. Despite a general understanding that nobody was ―compelled to
produce motion pictures in accordance with the Code regulations,‖ the organization had a
powerful means of enforcement. The establishment of the PCA in 1934 brought a new set of
82

rules, one that barred films without the seal of approval from exhibition in theaters run by
MPPDA members, and another that fined violators $25,000.
107
The major studios had ―made the
Production Code Seal the passport that a film needed to enter the largest and most profitable
theaters in America.‖
108
Notably though, this approach would not have worked had the major
producers, distributors, and exhibitors not already been vertically integrated. With 95% of
domestic box office receipts, the eight major studios used their control over distribution to put ―a
lock on the movie business.‖
109
Independents who lacked such distribution and access to first-run
theaters inevitably found their market extremely limited.
110
With oligopolistic and vertically
integrated power behind it, the PCA thus had the ability to hinder any ―quick-buck producers and
bandwagon jumpers‖ not just from producing, but also from distributing or exhibiting, racy
material that could threaten the rest of Hollywood.
111
In short, compliance to the PCA was total,
at least in part, because there was no outside; to be a contender in the studio system of the
thirties, filmmakers had to play ball with the majors and follow their rules.
A closer look at censorship in the comic book industry reveals similar mechanics; there
too, distribution functioned as a point of enforcement, with distributors, wholesalers and retailers
refusing to accept comics that lacked the seal of approval. And there too, the major players
represented by the CMAA seem to have been motivated more by economic considerations than
by matters of content. In contrast to Hollywood, however, comic book publishers were only just
beginning to create the vertical integration, oligopolistic power, and stability in 1954 that the
studios already had in place in 1934. Accordingly, the motives behind the implementation of the
CCA were rather different from those behind the PCA, as was the eventual outcome of its
execution. In coming together to design and enforce the code, the CMAA deliberately shaped a
response to external calls for censorship that could also re-shape the structure of the business,
83

giving larger publishers increased power over smaller ones. Distribution played a critical role in
this strategy.

Infrastructure in the Comic Book Industry: 1945-1959
Nyberg points in this direction when she notes in her conclusion that the CCA ―forced a
reorganization of the industry,‖ pushing crime and horror comic books out of business, and
leaving the survivors to compete for children‘s waning attention.
112
Jean-Paul Gabilliet makes a
similar argument, remarking on the very uneven impact of the decline in sales; of the eight
largest publishers, only two went out of business, while the smaller companies were hit much
harder. Still, while he attributes the overall sales decline to structural problems like wholesaler
conflict, the rise of television, and a deterioration in public interest, he fails to account for its
disparate impact across publishers. To explain that, he points out that the smaller companies
looking to ―cash in‖ on a booming business ―churned out second rate fare‖ and ―questionable
content‖ that left them in a ―precarious financial balance.‖ The big publishers meanwhile, ―easily
adjusted to the Comics Code Authority‘s demands,‖ which they had personally crafted through
the CMAA.
113
Randy Duncan and Matthew Smith similarly attribute the crisis‘ disproportionate
consequences to the industry‘s ―natural boom-and-bust cycle,‖ explaining that only the more
established publishers, by relying on proven characters and innovative genres, could weather the
downturn of the fifties.
114
Bradford Wright makes a similar argument, showing how four of the
larger publishers were able to successfully adapt their titles to respond to a changing market after
the crash.
115

Reports on the comic book industry written at the time though indicate that editorial
decisions about content may have played a secondary role to pure market power in what was
84

becoming an industry-wide shakeout. Several smaller publishers quoted by The Wall Street
Journal stated that ―this is the kind of business you must be in in a big way or not at all‖ since
―no one but the bigger fellows is making any money.‖
116
A closer look at industry infrastructure
reveals that what actually separated the ―bigger fellows‖—those few publishers who were able to
take the power to regulate everyone else—from the small ones, as much as market share and
quality of content, was control of distribution. The importance of this sector of the business was
nothing new. From the beginning, distribution was a primary driver of the industry‘s basic
structure, its early successes, and eventually, its failures. More significantly, distribution
practices played a tremendous role in actually organizing the rest of the business. And
ultimately, the sector would be at least as important as editorial in determining the eras winners
and losers.
Between 1946 and 1949, the comic book market exploded. The industry doubled in size
until one in three periodical sold in America was a comic book.
117
This expansion in sales made
comic book publishing an enormously attractive business for young entrepreneurs who found
extremely low financial and infrastructural barriers to entry. The actual creative work for an
entire comic, including the artwork and the copyright to all characters, cost less than $1000. Print
runs started at 300,000 issues, and at less than two cents a copy, may have cost $6000. A comic
could thus be considered a success if it eventually sold half of its issues; with publishers earning
five to six cents on each comic sold (coming out to around $8000), the issue broke even, with
any advertising fees collected considered an added bonus.
118
This was not a high sales bar. And
not all of this money had to be paid up front. Once a publisher got a deal with one of fourteen
national distributors, that firm would subsidize a portion of the money in advance. Distributors
also arranged the shipment of comics from the printers to the wholesalers (of which there were
85

typically two to three per American town), tracked sales, and took care of all returns. They also
provided promotional materials and sent representatives to individual towns to teach delivery
men how to sell magazines to newsstand retailers and how to display them properly.
119
In short,
they provided all the infrastructure and took care of the nuts and bolts of the venture. These kinds
of activities were common practice throughout media distribution, which has long included the
task of convincing exhibitors and/or retailers not only to carry specific products but to feature
them prominently.
120

Accordingly, entrepreneurial individuals with access to writers and artists could quickly
assemble a book, make a deal with a distributor, and turn a profit in less than a few months. And
the commonness of new genre fads—which saw popular wartime superhero comics replaced by
westerns, romances, crime, horror, and sci-fi titles in brief succession—meant that new
publishers could introduce a new title in a new genre and have a chance at a genuine hit. A key
part of the entire process, maintaining a long-term deal with a distributor, seems to have been a
relatively easy task as well due to the structure of national distribution, and to the standing of the
nation‘s largest distributor, American News Company (ANC). American News Company was
founded in 1864, and it grew throughout the nineteenth century, establishing a nationwide
system of distributors and wholesalers, and also amassing a network of retailers—primarily
newsstands—through its subsidiaries Railroad News Company, and then Union News
Company.
121
For half a century, the company completely controlled the national distribution of
magazines in the U.S., with publishers only occasionally finding independent newspaper
wholesalers to sell their magazines. In the early twentieth century though, larger publishers, like
Hearst and Curtis, began using these channels, making contact with independent wholesalers and
sometimes individual newsstands. They gradually formed their own independent national
86

distribution companies as outgrowths of in-house circulation departments, finally giving
publishers across the country an alternative to ANC. Between 1919 and the early thirties, new
publications slowly began signing up with these new independent national distributors (INDs).
By the late forties there were thirteen of them, working with some 800 independent wholesalers.
ANC however, which boasted 400 of its own wholesalers and 1000 retailers, still maintained a
stranglehold on the business.
122

This power, along with its vast size, gave the company some logistical leeway. To get
distribution with ANC, a publisher merely had to submit a single issue, and if ANC executives
thought it could sell, the company would decide to carry it into the foreseeable future.
Distributing more than 700 titles, ANC could hardly keep track of them all, so at this point, once
a new publication was brought on, that was basically it—no one need ever review its contents
again.
123
Furthermore, because American News Co. was vertically integrated, almost any
publication they distributed had a good chance of appearing on newsstands nationwide for years
to come. This process allowed a lot of low-selling publications with only minimal profits, and
perhaps questionable content, to slip under the radar.
124
It was thus an ideal destination for comic
books. Not surprisingly then, by 1954, ANC was distributing 287 comic books for thirteen
different publishers, and because these included some of the industry‘s highest volume titles, the
company was handling about half of the industry‘s volume.
125
This category would have
included second-rate titles from minor publishers. These companies often entered the market
with just a few successful comics in a newly trending genre and on the strength of those, would
quickly expand their line to include others that would not perform as well.
126
The ease of this
distribution chain made comic book publishing an extremely attractive business.
87

Benton, a meticulous historian, has stated that so many publishers entered the business
between 1950 and 1955, there were simply too many to count.
127
This was partly due to the
industry‘s fundamental impermanence; both big publishers and individuals with no history in the
business could temporarily set up a company to put out one comic, and then dissolve the
company and disappear if the comic was either unsuccessful or too racy.
128
The Senate‘s inquiry
into the industry, which recorded the most established and traceable publications, indicate that by
1954 there were at least forty-four publishers in the market.
129
Overall, the industry efforts
seemed to be doing enormously well. In 1954, publishers issued approximately 650 titles, selling
as many as 150 million issues every month, and bringing in an estimated revenue of $90 million,
all on a product that cost just ten cents.
130

This success, however, was precarious. As noted previously, in addition to public
concern, there was the rising threat of television. Patrick Parsons has explained that that the
industry could have recovered from other problems had demand not been severely eroded by the
adoption of television. He cites a 1960 study that suggests that kids were between three and ten
times more likely to read comic books regularly if they lacked access to a TV set; since the
technology exploded in the US from 1950 to 1955, it follows that readership was likely already
on the decline when anti-comics sentiment peaked in 1954.
131
Gabilliet supports this claim by
arguing—against the majority of historians—that comic book sales actually hit their peak in
1952 (two years earlier than others‘ estimates), and had already begun to fall by 1953, well
before the Senate hearings.
132
While most other recent scholars only briefly mention the problem
of television, observers of the sixties seem to have recognized that this was undoubtedly a
primary factor in the industry‘s demise.
133
In most cases, however, competition from another
product—no matter how great—could not cause the kind of quick, dramatic, and permanent
88

decline in sales experienced by comics. Free market economics typically solves problems like
this in a more predictable and orderly fashion, as a natural decline in audience demand gradually
bring about a decline in supply.
Instead, a decade and a half of low barriers to entry were doing just the opposite,
propelling a persistent oversupply that would soon bring disaster. An article written at the height
of the crisis, in January 1955 just months after the Senate hearings, noted that ―the entire industry
for more than a year has been in a severe recession,‖ not only because of ―public resistance‖ to
the medium, but because of ―overproduction, both in terms of separate titles and the number of
each title printed.‖
134
According to Amanda Lotz and Timothy Havens, overproduction has been
a common problem in media, since distributors tend to subsidize production and ―pay producers
for rights to much more product than they [could] ever hope to sell.‖
135
Within the comic book
industry, which had to deal with the physical mass of the enormous volume of unsold
publications, this strategy was beginning to take a toll. The ease of distribution had driven
growth in the comic book market since the medium‘s origin in the mid-thirties, but a reckoning
was fast approaching; what had been a boon to growth was beginning to become, according to
trade publications, ―perhaps the industry‘s single biggest headache.‖
136

Part of the problem was that comic books could often turn a profit selling through just
half of their print runs. Unsold books would be sent back up the distribution chain, from
newsstand retailer to local wholesaler to national distributor, who would receive a full refund for
the product from the publisher. At first, this system seemed to benefit all those involved, but as
more and more comics were published, more went unsold, and transactional costs—for example,
the fact that newsstand retailers working on small margins had to wait weeks or months to
receive their refunds—were beginning to mount.
137
There was also a growing black market.
89

National distributors sometimes physically returned comic books to publishers in order to get
refunded, but more often, they either promised to destroy the books, or tore off the front cover
and sent them to publishers as proof-of-destruction. In practice, however, many of these books
were kept by distributors and put back into circulation through second-hand dealers at discount
prices, further distorting a market that was already glutted with product.
138
It was a problem that
would become increasingly commonplace and increasingly damaging throughout the next two
decades.
Furthermore, there seems to have been a worsening mismatch between large national
distribution networks and the mom-n-pop retail system they worked with. Even though the
market was producing in excess of 500 different comic book titles at a time, the average
newsstand had the shelf space to carry just 65 of them.
139
And given the choice, most of those
retailers were reluctant to increase that number. Not only did comic books have a much lower
profit margin at just 10 cents than the average 25 cent magazine,
140
but the product had a
reputation of attracting ―crowds of loitering children,‖ an exceedingly unpleasant by-product for
businesses at the time.
141
Not all comics were unwelcome, of course, and some continued to sell
well, like many titles from Dell, whose Walt Disney and Warner Bros. comics regularly sold 1 to
2 million copies per issue.
142
But an ever-increasing number of copycat titles pursuing the latest
genre trends—from romance to sci-fi— were becoming a growing burden to newsstands that
were, financially and physically, too small to handle them all.
There was also the problem of tie-ins. Retailers of the era claimed that wholesalers would
typically deliver large bundles that included both desirable and undesirable magazines and
comics. In order to continue getting and selling the desirable publications— those their
customers expected to find on the stand, like popular science magazines or TV and radio
90

periodicals—they had to take the material they did not particularly want, either because it was
too racy and brought unwelcome customers or because it just did not sell well. This tie-in
strategy was not unlike the practice of block booking employed by the studio system throughout
the twenties and thirties, which forced exhibitors to rent less desirable films in order to get those
with high box office potential. Block-booking helped the studios to form a vertically integrated
oligopoly, but as Maltby points out, it also angered exhibitors. In the Pre-Code days of the early
thirties, they used disagreements with local censors to combat the practice. Like comic book
newsstand retailers would do two decades later, they argued that they were well-intentioned
when it came to giving their communities quality cultural products that met local moral
standards, but that block-booking made them powerless to refuse ―sex-smut‖ films, and should
thus be regulated on the basis of moral reform. Ultimately, the government rejected this
argument, but still identified block-booking as an unfair trade practice; attention to the problem
from the Justice Department eventually played a part in the 1948 Paramount Decision, which
outlawed the practice.
143

Just six years later, comic book wholesalers and distributors afraid of a similar anti-trust
government intervention fervently denied the practice of tie-ins. Regardless of its true existence,
it seems clear that many newsstands were finding themselves stuck with far more comics than
they had the ability to display and sell. And they lacked the kind of control over supply they
needed to reduce those shipments.
144
In short, problems in the comic book industry were
mounting, with retailers and distributors becoming increasingly frustrated with the medium, for
reasons that had nothing to do with EC Comics or the CCA.
Given these difficulties and the complexity of national distribution, it comes as little
surprise that when the Senate Subcommittee began investigating comic books, their interest
91

quickly moved away from editorial policy and toward the epicenter of the business, distribution.
When the Subcommittee released its Interim Report on comic books in February 1955, they had
settled on an answer to this matter. The final section of the report, ―Where Should Responsibility
for Policing Crime and Horror Comic Books Rest?‖, largely exonerates from blame newsdealers,
wholesalers, and printers, all of whom appeared to lack the time and power to exercise any
regulating control over the industry. In contrast, the Subcommittee found—unsurprisingly—that
distributors held ―one of the key positions in the comic book industry‖ and that ―a major
responsibility falls upon‖ them to regulate material. Most of the accountability however fell on
the publishers, the major ones in particular, who with the creation of the CMAA were already
making significant ―progress in the right direction.‖ What the report failed to mention was a
primary reason why these larger publishers had been able to make such progress: they also
exercised significant control over distribution. These two sectors of the business—distribution
and publishing—had long been very closely linked. What separated the major publishers—those
who ultimately had the power to regulate themselves and others—from the minor publishers was
the extent to which they were invested in distribution networks.
The Senate Subcommittee Hearings and the public‘s response had made clear to most in
the industry the need to do something about the medium‘s increasingly visible social ills and its
now widely acknowledged low level of taste. The controversy had brought unnecessary bad
publicity and the threat of continuing government oversight into business practices, which were
becoming increasingly monopolistic. A code of censorship could respond to these challenges by
making immediate and visible changes to newsstand content. But there were other reasons to
adopt a censorship board as well, many of which had nothing to do with public concerns about
morals. Specifically, the industry was beginning to feel the effects of the all the market problems
92

noted above: a shrinking audience, massive overproduction, and mounting problems in
distributor relations. Business leaders needed to act, but this time around, they were not going to
let smalltime publishers hijack their organization, as had happened with the ACMP. To the
contrary, the CMAA intended to use self-censorship to limit further the power of the industry‘s
smaller players.
145

The CCA thus became an all-in-one solution to a looming crisis. Barron’s Business noted
at the time that ―through the elimination of [comics] that are objectionable‖ the Code ―expected
to reduce materially the overall number of titles published.‖ In the process it hoped to put the
business on ―stronger economic footing‖ so that the ―the industry may be restored to
profitability.‖
146
Numerous first-hand accounts also suggest the Code functioned as a competitive
mechanism. The editor of EC Comics Al Feldstein explained in a 1997 interview that ―this was a
very crowded, competitive field, and [EC was] a maverick publishing company that was
usurping a lot of the dimes that were available for comic books. And people like Donenfeld and
Liebowitz at DC and…the publisher of Archie, John Goldwater, wanted us out of business. We
were bad boys, and we were giving the comic book business a bad name.‖
147
Goldwater‘s own
description is basically consistent with Feldstein‘s; he has noted that he and other industry
leaders saw the publication of offensive comics ―as a threat to everything we had worked so hard
to create.‖
148
Although he claims that he worked to eliminate these distasteful comics out of a
―moral obligation‖ to a reasonable reading public, the public relations director the CMAA hired
while Goldwater was at the helm remembers it differently. He explains that the Code never
intended to create ―obstacles to the continued publication of the same basic material‖ and was in
fact designed to ―find a way to make the smallest possible concessions necessary to end the
controversy.‖
149
And, with the help of a big public relations push, the plan worked.
150
Although
93

comic books ―remained sufficiently violent‖ to continue enraging observers like Wertham, by
the end of 1955, it was ―no longer a problem that the public cared about.‖
151

Created with the primary intention not of changing content, but of helping the major
publishers weather the oncoming storm of market failures, the CMAA allowed elements of the
industry to survive into the next era. In 1961, Barron’s reported that ―the comic book business
appears to be flourishing.‖
152
To be sure, the medium would never be what it was in terms of
popularity or volume, but the business had been allowed to evolve into something else. Sales in
supermarkets and chain stores were on the rise as mom-n-pop corner stands began to wane, and
licensing was supplanting publishing as the industry‘s primary source of income.
153
There was
also this uncomplicated by-product of the Code: only eleven publishers were still in business—
just one quarter the number in 1954.
154
So while the overall pie was much smaller, those who
remained in the market, and at its top, could maintain a significantly larger chunk of it.

Winners & Losers
The role that distribution played in this work of reining in the industry was immediately
clear to smaller publishers like EC. Within weeks of the Senate Hearings—months before the
CCA was even announced—they began receiving massive returns from distributors, bundles of
comics that had never been opened. This problem only intensified after the Code was introduced;
wholesalers refused any publication that did not bear the CCA seal, meaning that a publisher had
to join in order to survive. Even then, however, a publication could still face resistance from
wholesalers. So if a publisher improved or changed their content to comply with the Code—as
some did several times—they still may have never had the opportunity to win the public back
over.
155
But wholesaler resistance was an obstacle that, in many cases, appears to have been
94

overcome with strong distributor support. As Lotz and Havens explain, media distributors have
long practiced ―differential promotion‖ in which they ―tend to shower praise, attention, and
money on only a small fraction of the products they acquire…[those] that they believe have the
greatest potential…[and] largely abandon texts they see as potentially unsuccessful, releasing
them to the public with little fanfare or promotional support.‖
156
This tendency was likely more
pronounced in the mid-fifties, as the distribution sector faced an increasing number of hardships.
In the case of comic books, the ability of distributors to pick and choose winners was
complicated by the industry‘s infrastructure, in which distributing was intricately intermingled
with publishing in the move toward vertical integration. Following is a closer examination of this
network, with the varying types of distributors broken up into three categories: the financially
invested distributors, the magazine distributors, and American News Company (ANC). Major
publishers tended to be backed by the first type, distributors (often a wholly-owned subsidiary)
who were invested in their product. Willing to give their titles the support they needed in the face
of wholesaler and retailer resistance, public controversy, and other market challenges, they were
able to push comic books past these obstacles and on to the market, where the consumers could
decide. In contrast, publishers who relied on disinterested distributors specializing in magazines
faced hemorrhaging sales. And then there were the publishers distributed by American News
Company; for years shielded by the distributor‘s monopolistic power, they would soon be facing
more trouble than anyone. Overall, the success of publishers operating in the early fifties turns
out to have been strongly correlated to which one of these companies they used. Distributors thus
had a determining impact on whether or not a publisher survived the turbulent years of the late
fifties to embark upon the next era of comic book history.

95

Financially Invested Distributors
As noted above, in the early nineteenth century, major magazine publishers had begun
spinning internal circulation departments off into distribution companies. Over time, these
Independent National Distributors (INDs) were joined by smaller competitors until there were
thirteen nationwide. When comic books proved profitable in the forties, a number of INDs
significantly invested in the medium. Independent News Co., a distributor of girlie magazines
and pulps, had actually helped establish the medium by introducing Superman through their new
publishing division National Comics (later known as DC Comics).
157
By 1954, they were a
vertically integrated company, leaders in both national distribution and comic book publishing,
with the standing to continue pushing their product through the distribution chain despite
possible resistance from wholesalers and retailers. Even with the enormous attention given to
National‘s comic books in Seduction of the Innocent (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman
were central targets),
158
National kept these titles in print and on newsstands, selling 1.5 million
copies of Superman per issue in the middle of the crisis.
159
The company gave the same support
to lesser selling titles from American and Prize Comics, and continued to distribute at least three
of their horror comics well into the sixties even after all were specifically named as objectionable
during the Senate hearings.
160
National‘s leadership role within the CMAA certainly contributed
to their ability to go on with business as usual and push their comics through the CCA. However,
unlike Bill Gaines, DC‘s executives were not receiving bundles of unopened comics back from
their distributor, since the same few men were in charge of both subsidiaries. They had the
infrastructural power to get their product through wholesalers, and to the public. From 1956 to
1960, revenues at the firm doubled.
161

96

Run by Martin Goodman, Marvel Comics (officially known as Magazine Management
Co.) also distributed their own comic books through a wholly-owned subsidiary known as Atlas
Magazines. As at National, comic books were a major source of income, but in contrast,
Marvel‘s distribution business was small. This meant that Goodman was able to keep his comic
books alive through the initial shakeout in 1955, but that the decline in comics sales and trouble
in the distribution sector eventually forced him to fold Atlas. After a brief time with ANC,
Goodman eventually asked his competitors at National to distribute Marvel comics through
Independent News. Determined to maintain its share of the shrinking market, National shrewdly
took Marvel on only after Goodman agreed to cut his output to just 8 titles, limiting the
company‘s competitive threat for years to come.
162
The power of distribution had again helped
National secure DC Comics‘ standing into the future, and also in this instance provided Marvel
with a lifeline to the sixties.
Two other publishers benefitted from close ties with distributors. John Santangelo
founded Charlton in the twenties, eventually transforming it into a completely vertically
integrated company boasting a paper mill and a major distributor, Capital Distributing, among
other businesses.
163
Running a medium-sized comic book publishing company throughout the
forties, Santangelo waited until after the crash to invest heavily in the business. Seeing an
opportunity in licensing, he began buying up titles from failing publishers. With his own
distribution business, he was able to profit from their discarded material, which boasted a
number of crime and horror comics.
164
Never known for its high quality or tame nature, Charlton
Comics managed to survive well into the eighties, when it finally sold its catalogue of titles to
DC.
97

Gilberton, who published Classics Illustrated also profited from strong distribution. Like
the executives at DC and Dell, the publisher‘s founder Al Kanter had for years insisted on his
books‘ ―complete separation from the ‗bad‘ comics.‖ He nonetheless suffered specific attacks
from Wertham for the way in which his titles depicted violence and threatened to distract
children from reading the real great novels upon which his comics were based. In response,
Kanter used his skills as a ―gifted orator‖ to defend Gilberton‘s worth, and also decided to
increase the cover price of his book, use painted covers, and even substitute in a heavier paper
stock—all attempts to further differentiate his product from others on the stands.
165
He also, quite
notably, refused to join the CCA. For many publishers, this decision would have proved
extremely problematic, but Classics Illustrated happened to be the only comic book client of
Curtis, a major distributor known for its aggressive promotional activities with retailers. With its
support, Gilberton was able to survive bad press and distributor resistance, and stayed afloat
through the sixties, when competition from paperbacks finally pushed them out of the market.
Finally, there was Leader News Co, who distributed EC Comics. Run by Michael Estrow,
this was the smallest of the national distributors. In addition to handling eight of his own comics
under various imprint names (Stanhall, Ribage, and Master) Estrow handled a few other
publishers who printed just one or two titles and have since become untraceable. Given the
composition of his business, Estrow likely would have supported all of these comic books if he
had the ability. But he was 69 years old in 1956, and both his distribution and publishing
businesses worked in very low volumes in an industry that was facing numerous challenges.
Finding himself $32,000 in debt to his printer, and $100,000 in debt to EC Comics, Estrow
decided to retire, Leader went bankrupt, and the man died just four years later.
166
Leader‘s
demise was the last straw for Bill Gaines, who promptly wrote the following note to a friend,
98

―EC is out of business except for MAD. Distributor went bankrupt and clipped us for
$150,000.‖
167
Gaines would later say this was ―the best thing that could‘ve happened to [him]‖
because it allowed him to get out of business with a weak distributor and bring his one remaining
publication, MAD Magazine, to ANC.
168
After that distributor‘s demise the following year,
Gaines would end up at Independent News, just as Marvel had and, with their support, MAD
prospered for decades. In short, publishers with strong distribution seemed largely able to
survive, and even sometimes strengthened their market position. Meanwhile, comic book
companies with low standing at their distributors folded one after the next.
Magazine Distributors
By the mid-fifties, magazine distribution was no longer a particularly profitable
business.
169
The multitude of problems described above with regards to comic books
(oversupply, shrinking audiences, bad relations with wholesalers) were especially acute with that
medium because of its low profit margins, but they effected a wide swath of publications. The
Senate Hearings had added to this list of woes the possibility of more government oversight.
Accordingly, for the five large and medium-size distributors who primarily handled other
media—like magazines and paperbacks—comic books were becoming a losing proposition.
Whether they dropped the titles completely or simply chose no longer to push them with
wholesalers, most INDs completely stopped distributing the medium by 1956.
On the one hand were the powerful distributors, who easily cut comic book publishers
who had become a drain. Among them was Hearst. Founded in 1880 as a newspaper company, it
went into magazine publishing in 1903, and soon created its own distribution company,
International Circulation Division, to handle that product. In 1955, well after the crisis began, the
company purchased Avon Periodicals, one of the first paperback book publishers. Avon also had
99

a small comic book business, but their costs went up when they joined the CCA and their sales
were in decline. So Hearst folded the division, and by the end of 1955, the company was back to
specializing in paperbacks.
170
In a similar vein was Fawcett, who had become a major publisher
and then distributor of pulps, fan magazines, and eventually comics. Known for only supporting
their best-sellers and cancelling low earners, they decided to drop comic books in 1953 due to
declining sales and legal troubles—more specifically, a successful copyright infringement suit
brought by DC. This was a full year before the Senate Hearings.
There was also Publishing Distributing Co. (PDC). Irving Manheimer had established
this global distribution empire back in 1927 and by the forties had begun plotting corporate
takeovers and mergers. By 1950, Manheimer had taken charge of the Macfadden publishing
empire and by 1962, PDC was a major national player in distribution and publishing.
171
In the
midst of all this, came the comic book crisis, during which the company was distributing for just
two publishers. With their attention elsewhere, PDC likely had little motivation to support either
company. This must have been particularly true for Lev Gleason Comics which, responsible for
the headline-making Crime Does Not Pay, had been targeted by the CCA and folded predictably
in 1956. Left standing was Harvey Comics, the only publisher who survived the crash without
strong support from a distributor. Their success was likely due to the company‘s astute move into
licensing and kids‘ comics; the company rode titles like Casper the Friendly Ghost and Richie
Rich into the early nineties.
On the other hand, were the small distributors who could not afford to continue
supporting a deteriorating medium in which they had no real financial investment. There was, for
example, Ace Magazines. The founder, A.A. Wyn got his start in pulps, confession magazines,
and paperbacks in the late twenties and entered comic books during the superhero boom in 1940.
100

A self-distributor, Ace published just eleven comic books (and only five of these were either
crime or horror), but faced enough trouble with them that it dropped them in 1956. The move
enabled the small company to focus its attention on paperbacks, just like Avon did over at
Hearst. As a result, it was able to hold on to its distribution division into the seventies when it
was bought out by Simon & Shuster.
172
Lastly, there was Kable News Co., which started as a
small science-fiction distributor,
173
and had more than half its business in comics. But when its
President George Davis testified to the Subcommittee in 1954, he seemed eager to please the
Senators, and more than willing to drop the comic book publishers who were beginning to
threaten his company, or at the least, prompt government oversight. Four of them were out of
business by the following year. The only one of Kable‘s clients that managed to hold on was
Farrell Comic Group. But according to a lawsuit that publisher brought in 1958—the year it
finally folded—Kable had for more than three years allegedly been accepting refunds on unsold
comics that it was actually re-selling on the black market.
174
This claim and the long legal battle
that followed suggest that Farrell may have been driven out of business by a distributor that
wanted nothing to do with it. For distributors who were not heavily invested in comics, there
seems to have been little motivation to give the medium the additional support it needed
following the Senate Hearings. Of the dozen publishers distributed by these companies, only
Harvey survived the decade.

The Demise of American News Company
A number of histories have attributed some of the industry‘s problems to the demise of
American News Company, which depending on the account, folded entirely, or just partly, after
facing a suit from the Department of Justice.
175
The company‘s exit from the comic book market
101

was a little more complicated than that, but nonetheless had an immense effect on the future of
the medium, and for a time on the entire news and publishing industry. By 1954, ANC
distributed, exported, and sold newspapers, magazines, and books, and also operated restaurants,
soda fountains, tobacco shops, toy stores, and ice skating rinks, among other business. It was the
largest wholesaler of books and the largest retailer of magazines in the world.
176
This market
dominance was particularly clear in the field of comic books, with the company handling about
half the industry‘s volume.
177
Its size and power had helped the comic book industry blossom,
but 1955 brought a slew of problems that had nothing to do with the CCA and that went above
and beyond the kinds of troubles other distributors had been facing.
The crisis began in earnest in June 1955, after a year of quietly declining sales, when
American News began losing major publications.
178
Time Inc. left first, bringing Time, Life,
Sports Illustrated, and Fortune to a competitor.
179
Weeks later, the company faced a hostile
takeover from a former newsstand dealer named Harry Garfinkle, who immediately began
changing company policy.
180
In July, ANC lost more publications: Look, Vogue, Glamour, and
Home & Garden. And in August the company faced a strike that halted deliveries in New York,
the epicenter of the publishing business, potentially scaring off even more of their best clients.
181

In September, Garfinkle settled an anti-trust suit the Department of Justice had filed back in
1952. They had accused ANC of using its retail business to acquire exclusive national
distribution rights. As part of the new deal, the distribution business was no longer allowed to
work with the retail business.
182
ANC soon laid off 8,000 employees and sustained losses of
$8,000,000.
183

Interestingly, the participation of American News Company in comic book distribution
may have hurt their cause with the Department of Justice. The Senate Subcommittee‘s final
102

report had explicitly mentioned their approval of those distributors who had since discontinued
comic books that were considered objectionable. ANC was not among these companies. This
seemingly benign comment came just months before the distributor finally had to settle the suit,
which at its core was related to the same kind of aggressive sales and distribution tactics that
were in question at the comic book hearings. As the largest distributor of horror and crime
comics in the nation, ANC had also made the probably unwise decision to send their VP William
Eichhorn to testify at those Hearings. His tone with the Senators was rather dismissive and, much
like Bill Gaines, he did not make any political friends that day, despite the fact that his company
was sorely in need of allies in Washington.
184

In response to all of the political and economic chaos, American New Co. began to
dramatically altered its entire approach to its business, and was remarkably successful in doing
so. Despite declining sales that year, among its many other problems, Garfinkle still managed to
raise earnings.
185
With magazine distribution bringing in lower profits, the company was looking
increasingly towards its other businesses. So while the distributor‘s vertical integration with
wholesalers, along with their sheer size and power, had for many years allowed minor
publications to skate by unnoticed,
186
that was no longer going to be their modus operandi. In the
midst of this transition, which happened to coincide with the nadir of the comic book crash in
1955, five comic book publishers distributed by the company folded.
Two years later, in May 1957, ANC announced it would close its distribution sector
entirely. Ultimately, the closure probably had little to do with the anti-trust settlement, which
ANC had been in blatant violation of for some time.
187
The decision did, however, come just
weeks after Dell—the nation‘s largest and most reputable comic book publisher—announced
they too would be leaving American News. Not only was the distributor about to lose Dell‘s $30
103

million newsstand business, but without them as a client, it was at risk of losing even more
publications nervous about the resulting ―diminished newsstand coverage.‖
188
With all the
trouble the distribution business was facing, it made more sense for the company to sell the real
estate of its wholesale branches and refocus their attention on merchandising and restaurants. In
the long-term, ANC would ―emerge more profitable than ever.‖
189

The effect of this decision on the rest of the industry was immense. According to
Business Week, magazine distribution was ―in for a period of disruption‖ and a ― seriously
chaotic situation.‖
190
With the disappearance of ANC‘s wholesale outlets (constituting one third
of the nation‘s total), other wholesalers had to manage a ―deluge of publications‖ they did not
have the capacity to handle.
191
Distributors meanwhile would be unable to ensure any continuity
in delivery—their established networks were in total disarray.
192
Publishers though would face
the greatest challenges of all. And the general consensus was that smaller publications with
lower circulations, ―the poor-quality magazines, the comic books and lurid sensation-ridden
periodicals,‖ would suffer the most because they were unimportant to wholesalers. One
executive explained that ―with all magazines crowded into one house, everyone is going to suffer
to a greater or lesser degree…some fringe publishers will find themselves squeezed out entirely
simply because they won't have the strength to command even a minimum distribution effort."
193

Accordingly, Preferred Comics, Magazine Enterprises, and Standard Comics, whose 88
collective titles had been distributed by ANC, all closed their doors within the next two years. Of
the twenty comic book publishers who folded between 1953 and 1959, nine had been distributed
by American News Company, and among them were some of the largest victims of the crash.
Dell was not one of these. Their business, which accounted for a third of comic book sales in
1957, were so robust they decided to follow in the path of other powerful magazine publishers,
104

and start their own distribution business. And it was quite successful. By 1963, Dell was
―perhaps the largest [company] concentrating on newsstand distribution.‖
194
John Goldwater‘s
Archie Publications, the other comic book powerhouse distributed by ANC, also managed to find
alternative distribution.
195
These challenges reiterate how important it was for publications like
comic books to have strong support from their distributors. Even though ANC had acted
monopolistically, their size and power had protected publishers from having to face the local
monopolies of individual wholesalers.
196
This was exactly why Bill Gaines had been so excited
to replace his weaker distributor with ANC—he would no longer have to do business with
wholesalers.
197

While Gaines though, on the heel of ANC‘s closure, was able to take his single remaining
publication MAD Magazine to Independent News (as did Marvel), National was not opening its
doors to any additional comic book publishers. Its top executives had played a major role in the
creation of the CCA, which had the specific intention of eliminating such competition. Control
over crumbling distribution networks during a moment of transition for the publishing and
newsstand industries provided an easy avenue to accomplish this goal. Accordingly, when
American News Company—whose monopolistic power had transformed them into a home for
independents—left magazine distribution, these publishers, along with any new potential
entrants, were left with nowhere else to go. In the span of the comic book market crash, an
industry that initially had no significant barriers to entry had become an exclusive club,
impermeable to anyone without prior standing and without their own pre-established distribution
network.
Notably, while government censorship is associated with an oppressed and closed society
and competitive business practices are associated with a free and open one, there are remarkable
105

similarities between the kinds of approaches used in both frameworks. Both forces—censorship
and the deregulation of free markets—tend to bestow upon a small number of actors immense
power to regulate their own markets and further consolidate their business. When the strength of
established networks of circulation is significant enough that they cannot be easily substituted or
replaced, they can further consolidate power by acting as bottlenecks for products trying to reach
audiences. Accordingly, once content and conduits are united under one roof, or even just closely
linked as they were in comic books, they display a remarkable ability to erect barriers to entry by
cutting competing producers off from these recognized distribution channels.

Conclusion
The determining role distribution and public relations has long played in the history of
comic books serves as a caution against the historicization of media in purely cultural terms. The
infrastructural and strategic nuances that dictated the industry‘s actions during the anti-comic
book crusade are perhaps not as colorful as the crusade itself, with its larger-than-life
personalities, archetypical debates, and seemingly powerful cultural symbols. The long-term
impact, however, of the particularities of comic book‘s distribution economies and its approach
to intra-industry organization and management were ultimately of more significance to the future
of the medium. There is sometimes an impulse to attribute the cultural longevity of particular
media solely to the power of their art. In the case of comic books of the fifties, the survival of
publishers like DC Comics has been ascribed to even less—their ability to give a reticent public
the repressed entertainment they demanded. Of course, the explanation may be even simpler than
that. DC and other major publishers had power on their side, power that enabled them to frame
the debate as it played out on a national public stage, and power rooted in their very tangible
106

ability to put their own comic books on newsstands and prevent certain competitors from doing
the same. Their subsequent capacity to experiment with content, to respond to readers‘ interests,
to pursue titles that appealed to fans, and eventually to develop their catalogue in creative and
innovative ways all flowed from that initial point of power, their essential ability to build
infrastructures that supported their own growth and success.
Not surprisingly, the transition comic books made from being an open industry to a
closed one had an enormous impact on the medium, and would influence nearly all of the
industrial and creative developments in the years that followed. Distribution also continued to
impact the form, functioning as an organizing force within the business for decades to come, and
profoundly shaping production and consumption in significant and tangible ways, just as it had
during the fifties.
**
During that decade, distribution had played a major role in shaping self-
regulation that, while prompted by the anti-comics crusade, served the primary function of
reorganizing and stabilizing the industry. Industrial analysis that examines sectors outside of
production, and that considers distribution especially, thus remains a critical part of all media
scholarship and of comic book studies in particular. Furthermore, distribution, from analog to
digital, across various media, and over long periods of time, boasts striking continuities that can
illuminate both past and present. There is, for example, the practice of tie-ins. This strategy
allowed magazine distributors to withhold their most desirable products in order to force upon
retailers their least desirable products. It is an antecedent to the block booking employed by film
distributors in the Classical era, but also a precursor to today‘s practice of cable bundling, in
which programmers package their less popular channels with more successful ones. In the case
of both tie-ins and block-booking, retailers/exhibitors contested the distribution strategy by

**
The most vivid example of the power of distribution is the development of the direct market, covered in
detail in Chapter Three.
107

appealing to the government on moral grounds—claiming that it prevented them from exercising
their own discrimination in choosing products of high quality. The Justice Department rejected
that argument officially, attacking block-booking instead on the basis of anti-trust legislation,
and threatening to do the same with tie-ins, something that has yet to happen to cable bundling in
today‘s deregulated media environment.
198

But the potential of a morality campaign to serve as justification for tighter regulation of
an industry has often succeeded, a detail that was not likely lost on established comic book
publishers who spent fifteen years publicly differentiating themselves from lesser elements
within their business. The tendency of government to reward such activities was by this time,
relatively well established. Twice during the twenties, the federal government restricted priority
access to the airwaves (which function in radio as channels of distribution) on moral grounds.
Reserving the most desirable licenses for wealthier and more established commercial
broadcasters, who could provide superior technology and expensive live programming, federal
agencies promised that regulation of distribution would protect Americans from both propaganda
and potentially threatening culture like jazz.
199
In practice, this approach to ordering the airwaves
was primarily a competitive business strategy that kept powerful network broadcasters
―profitable at the expense of the independents.‖
200
As Michelle Hilmes has noted, federal radio
regulation of this kind ultimately led to a ―restricted-access, vertically integrated oligopoly,
dominated by two large corporations and supported by increasingly blunt and intrusive
commercial advertising, [who] exerted what could be a called a stranglehold on radio
programming, outside of any kind of public supervision or control."
201
This situation is
remarkably similar to what developed within the comic book industry decades later as just two
companies—DC and Marvel—came to dominate the market completely; both had relied on
108

strong distribution from Independent News to survive the 1954 crash, and DC, at the very least,
had acted very strategically in making this future come to pass.
These reoccurrences point to a remarkable consistency over time and across media: the
way in which distribution functions as an instrumental force in censorship which itself serves as
a regulating force that contains not just content, but many other aspects of industry. This was true
of radio in the twenties, as the public and government alike found producers far more morally
acceptable once outsiders and independents had been pushed out after being denied better access
to the medium‘s distribution channels. And in the thirties in Hollywood, vertically integrated
distribution and exhibition arms enforced the Production Code in an effort from the major
studios to ensure their industry‘s stability into the future. In the fifties, distribution also became a
mechanism of self-censorship within the comic book industry, which like Hollywood, sought
economic and political stability through elimination of or control over unpredictable competitors.
In theory, public attention to the media industries through affairs like the Senate
Subcommittee hearings could shine a light on unsavory or unfair business practices. Similarly
distribution could be a part of the media business that expands access and provides creative
forces with new avenues to reach new audiences. In practice, however, these forces often serve a
regulating and restrictive function. That purpose becomes especially clear in well-orchestrated
public relations campaigns and instances of censorship and self-censorship (it should be noted
that the ―self‖ part of ―self-censorship‖ generally only applies to the most powerful parties
involved, since minor actors are subjected to something closer to ―competitor‖-censorship).
Fortunately, the constraining effects of public conversations hijacked by corporate PR
departments and of the vertically integrated companies typically behind them, are becoming
more and more visible. Indeed, the dangers posed by consolidated distribution channels linked
109

with oligopolistic content providers is today more apparent than ever, despite the best efforts of
those companies to remain invisible. The tendency of cable operators (contemporary media‘s
most powerful distributors), particularly those who have united with content providers, to restrict
access and creativity has been widely recognized by academics, media activists, and industry
insiders. The ability of those distributors to influence government policy on the issue, and not
only avoid anti-trust suits, but shape the law in their favor, has received even more attention,
particularly in the case of the FCC‘s recent approach to Net Neutrality.
In light of the public‘s increasing awareness of these tendencies within the media
industries, it is important to continue reevaluating sometimes popular conceptions of the past.
Contrary to collective memory about the nineteen-fifties, the anti-comic book crusade and the
Senate Subcommittee Hearings that followed were not a witch hunt or an evil plot to eradicate
subversive culture. These events were considerably more ordinary than many overly-ornate
accounts would have readers believe. What comic books encountered was what many new media
encounter—public suspicion accompanied by some amount of fear—and how the industry
managed it was quite similar to how many media industries have managed such doubts before
and since, which is to say, strategically. What really separates comic books was the fact that the
medium was simultaneously facing so many other, largely unrelated problems, and that the
industry‘s implementation of self-censorship thereby, was crafted to solve a range of issues that
have since been obscured.
What remains difficult about reimagining these events unfortunately is the extent to
which the established conception of them has so profoundly shaped comic book culture. The
somewhat overstated significance of Wertham, Gaines, and the evils of censorship have long
portrayed comic books as a medium besieged by vitriolic opponents and beleaguered by unfair
110

and incomparable restrictions and attacks. The supposed extent of its embattlement has long
given comic books an air of opposition and defiance; many continue to view the medium as a
cultural form that comes from a fundamental place of political defiance and cultural opposition.
It may well be true that as an art form, comic books have always been and continue to be
distinct, unruly, even revolutionary. But as a product, produced, distributed, and sold by a culture
industry that, from its inception, has resembled every other American culture industry, comic
books have been protected and promoted by the very same very powerful mass media institutions
that popularized radio, film, and television. Deeply enshrined in everyday industrial structures,
comic books as a medium emanated from a place of corporate intention far more than they did a
place of subcultural opposition. This need not have remained the case in the decades that
followed, as the industry and the form evolved. The next two chapters will asses to what extent it
did and to what extent it did not.

1
For quotes, Grant Geissmann, Foul Play! The Art and Artists of the 1950s EC Comics. (New York: Harper
Design International, 2005), 16–17; Howard Rodman, “They Shoot Comic Books, Don’t They?,” American Film
14, no. 7 (May 1989): 34–39; Brian Siano, “The Skeptical Eye: Tales From the Crypt,” The Humanist, March
1994. See also, Franklin Harris, “The Long, Gory Life of EC Comics,” Reason 37, no. 2 (June 2005): 64–65;
Barbara Carlson, “To Him, The Comics Aren’t Mickeymouse,” The Hartford Courant, February 17, 1973; Chris
Kaltenbach, “A Comic Book Kingdom: ‘Up, Up and AWAYYYY,’” The Sun, December 4, 1983.
2
Mark Gauvreau Judge, “Holy Censorship, Batman! Guess Who’s Banning Comic Books,” The Washington Post,
June 9, 1996; Max Alexander, “Seriously, It’s Comics: From Superman to Today,” New York Times, June 11,
1989, Sunday edition, sec. Arts & Leisure; John F. Brodsen, “Tempo: It’s Alive! Comic Terror Is Back From the
Crypt,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1984, sec. 5; Jim Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the
Government Didn’t Want You to Read! (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2010), 79; Paul Lopes, Demanding
Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 51–52;
Shirrel Rhoades, A Complete History of American Comic Books (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 58.
3
Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2005), 160–165; Shawn Selby, “Congress, Culture and Capitalism: Congressional Hearings into Cultural
Regulation, 1953-1967” (Ph.D. Diss, Ohio University, 2008), 88.
111

4
Jeffrey A. Brown, “Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital,” The Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (1997):
22; Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2000), 42.
5
Fred von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, Tales of Terror! The EC Companion (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books,
2000), 18.
6
Ibid. Similarly, Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson’s All in Color for a Dime (1970), the very first published
volume dedicated to comic book criticism, introduces its purpose with several defenses against Wertham’s
flawed logic.Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, All in Color for a Dime, First Ed (New York: Ace Books, 1970), 9–
11.
7
Bill Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom (McFarland, 2010), 86; 126.
8
M. Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 128.
9
In recent books, Wertham has been accused of trading in “hucksterism and salesmanship” and commanding
a “monocausal, obsessive, and populist” crusade. One critic longingly imagines him suffering in an “infernal
chain gang…using his bare hands to lay down hot asphalt along the Good Intentions Expressway.” On the
internet, he is referred to, among many other things, as a “quack,” a “douchebag,” and a “cultural elitist and
furious ideologist.” Digby Diehl, Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1996), 82; Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart
Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 216; Siano, “The Skeptical Eye: Tales
From the Crypt”; Harry Mendryk, “Fredric Wertham’s ‘Seduction of the Innocent,’” Simon and Kirby, August 1,
2008, http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/archives/1428; “Fredric Wertham- Douchebags of
Comics | A Waste of Time,” accessed January 23, 2014, http://www.rickworley.com/2012/06/22/fredric-
wertham-douchebags-of-comics/; Adrian Wymann, “He Was a Psychiatrist, So People Listened,” Panelology:
Where Comic Books Make Sense, February 2, 2013, www.panelology.info. For examples of articles, See: Ibid.
For an example of a website, see: Seduction of the Innocent.Org, “Dr. Wertham,” Lost SOTI, accessed January
22, 2014, www.lostsoti.org. For an example of a blog, see “Dr. Fredric Wertham, M.D.,” accessed January 23,
2014, http://www.ep.tc/wertham/soti/blog/. Twitter handles include: DrFredWertham and The
Werthamist. Tumblr accounts include Fredric-Wertham.
10
Lopes, Demanding Respect, 30; 58–59.
11
Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror!, 23; 31.
12
David Hadju, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 6–7.
13
James Burkhart Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 7.
14
Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1998), 155–156.
112

15
Brown, “Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital,” 18. For similar accusations, see: “Comic Books Profit by
Rush To Legitimacy,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1974.
16
Hadju, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, 41–44; Lopes,
Demanding Respect, 32; Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book
(Basic Books, 2005), 168–169.
17
Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 107.
18
Catherine Mackenzie, “Movies--and Superman,” New York Times, October 12, 1941, sec. Parent and Child.
19
Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 114.
20
Ibid., 107.
21
Patrick Parsons, “Batman and His Audience: The Dialectic of Culture,” in The Many Lives of the Batman:
Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, ed. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 69.
22
There was, for example the publication of the December 1944 issue of the Journal of Educational Sociology,
consisting of seven articles that discussed comics in a positive light (with titles like “Comics as a Social
Force”), six of which were authored by academics associated with the industry. Harvey Sorbaugh and Sidonie
Gruenberg worked with Fawcett while Josette Frank, Lauretta Bender and W.W.D Sones worked with
National. Paul Witty has no known associations with the industry. See: Harvey Zorbaugh, ed., “The Comics as
an Educational Medium,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18, no. 4 (December 1944): 193–256; Nyberg, Seal
of Approval, 15.
23
Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 14.
24
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 216.
25
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 239.
26
Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 116–117; 121; Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 218–
219; Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 101; Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 30–34.
27
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 266; Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 89.
28
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 266; Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror!, 79; von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales
of Terror!, Feldstein Interview (April 1996).
29
Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 146–147.
30
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 218; Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 119.
31
Harvey Zorbaugh, ed., Journal of Educational Sociology 23, no. 4 (December 1949): 193–247; Interim Report
of the Committee on the Judiciary: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency, S. Rep, (March 14, 1955), sec. Crime
and Horror Comics and the Well–Adjusted and Normal Law Abiding Child.
32
Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S.
Senate, 1954, pt. Testimony of Gunnar Dybwad (Apr 22 1954).
33
Les Daniels, DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1995), 92.
113

34
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 219.
35
Selby, “Congress, Culture and Capitalism,” 51.
36
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 241; Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 218; Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 83; Selby,
“Congress, Culture and Capitalism,” 50–60.
37
For more on the early years of the Production Code See: Leonard J Leff and Jerold Simmons, The Dame in
the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship , and the Production Code, Revised (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2001), 17–36.
38
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 234.
39
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 31.
40
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 43–44.
41
In 1949, romances replaced westerns, and soon became the fastest growing genre yet, accounting for more
than 25% of all titles on the market (Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Female Comics From Teens to
Zines, 54.) After Gaines introduced EC’s New Trend line in 1950, the horror comic took off, and like earlier
trends, soon accounted for one quarter of all the titles sold. (Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror!, 31.) With
the onset of the Korean War, sales of war comics also spiked around 1952, as did science-fiction comics.
(Benton, The Comic Book in America, 49–51.)
42
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 49–51.
43
Responsible for three of the four innovations that created the comic book industry, Max C. Gaines had
produced the very first comic book Funnies on Parade, was the first one to sell comic books on newsstands,
and discovered Siegel & Shuster’s character Superman, which kick started the whole industry
44
Frank Jacobs, The Mad World of William M. Gaines (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1972), 57–58.
45
von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, 10; Geissmann, Foul Play!, 10–13; Diehl, Tales from the Crypt,
18; Jacobs, The Mad World of William M. Gaines, 63–75.
46
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 23–26.
47
Ibid., 76.
48
Peter C. Du Bois, “Superman, Batman and Ivanhoe: Comic Books Have Become Both Profitable and
Respectable,” Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly, September 18, 1961.
49
“It Works!,” The Christian Science Monitor, September 16, 1954, sec. Editorials/Features.
50
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 40.
51
Kaltenbach, “A Comic Book Kingdom”; Carlson, “To Him, The Comics Aren’t Mickeymouse”; Judge, “Holy
Censorship, Batman! Guess Who’s Banning Comic Books.”
52
Bill Gaines, Spa Fon #5, Fanzine, 1969. Reprinted in von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, 180.
53
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 87.
54
Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 124–131; 155; Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 220.
55
Shearon Lowery and Melvin L. De Fleur, Milestones in Mass Communication Research: Media Effects (New
York: Longman, 1983), 234; Parsons, “Batman and His Audience,” 71.
114

56
Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 3–4; 207.
57
Robert Warshow, “Paul, the Horror, and Dr. Wertham,” Commentary 17 (1954): 596–604. Reprinted in:
Dwight MacDonald, “A Theory Of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard
Rosenberg (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 200–202.
58
Frances Ilg and Louise Ames, “Wertham View on Comics Is Questioned by Warshow,” Daily Boston Globe,
November 8, 1954.
59
Norbert Muhlen, “Comic Books and Other Horrors,” Commentary 8 (January 1, 1949); Munro Leaf,
“Lollipops or Dynamite? Millions of Comic Books Devoured With Gusto by Children. With What Effect?,” The
Christian Science Monitor, November 13, 1948, sec. Weekly Magazine.
60
Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 2nd Edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1964), 358.
61
Kingsley Amis, “A Threat to Our Culture,” Spectator, December 30, 1955.
62
For references to a witch hunt, see: Les Daniels, Batman: The Complete History (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 1999), 99; Teodora Carabas, “Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD: The Debunking of Spies,
Superheroes, and Cold War Rhetoric in Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy,” Journal of Popular Culture 40, no. 1
(February 2007): 4–24; “Tales From the Crypt’s Father,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1990, Orange County
edition, sec. TV Times; Television Desk. For broader characterizations, see: Trombetta, The Horror! The
Horror!, 23; 31; 79; Harris, “The Long, Gory Life of EC Comics”; Pustz, Comic Book Culture, 41; Lopes,
Demanding Respect, 51–52.
63
Herbert I. Schiller, Culture Inc: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 14–21.
64
Selby, “Congress, Culture and Capitalism,” 40–41.
65
Ibid., 66.
66
Ibid., 56; 67; 74.
67
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 219.
68
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt. Testimony of Bill Gaines (April 21 1954).
69
Peter Kihss, “No Harm in Horror, Comics Issuer Says: Comics Publisher Sees No Harm In Horror, Discounts
‘Good Taste,’” New York Times, April 22, 1954; Irving Kravsow, “Senate Comic Book Probers Learn Publisher
Attempt At Cleanup Failed,” The Hartford Courant, April 22, 1954; “Comic Book Publisher Boasts of Horror for
Child Reading,” The Baltimore Sun, April 22, 1954.
70
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 91.
71
Amy Kiste Nyberg, “William Gaines and the Battle Over EC Comics,” Inks: Cartoon and Comic ArtStudies 3,
no. 1 (February 1996): 6–8.
72
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Testimony of Richard Clendenen (April 21 1954).
73
von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, Feldstein Interview (April 1996) p. 87–88.
74
Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror!, 79.
115

75
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 31; 92.
76
Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom, 198.
77
This point is frequently lost in more cursory descriptions of Wertham’s research, but he was unequivocal
throughout his testimony that comic books could in no way cause juvenile delinquency all on their own and
that there “are many, many other factors.” See: Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt. Testimony of
Fredric Wertham (Apr 21 1954).
78
Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency, sec. Crime and Horror Comics and the Well–Adjusted
and Normal Law Abiding Child.
79
The close analysis of Wertham’s research has be a topic of scholarly interest at least since Shearon Lowery
and Melvin de Fleur published Milestones in Mass Communications Research in 1983. The authors dedicated a
whole chapter to Wertham’s version of media effects, dissecting Seduction of the Innocent by itemizing its
various arguments and pointing out its methodological flaws. More recently, Carol Tilley, combed through the
doctor’s old papers, seeking out discrete examples of his poor research—instances when he left extenuating
circumstances out of his final publication or surreptitiously combined case studies to make his case seem
stronger. Tilley’s resulting publication was covered widely by the national press, both print and online,
suggesting there is still considerable interest in Wertham’s work more than sixty years later. There are
dozens if not hundreds of other examples of similar efforts around Wertham’s work. Lowery and De Fleur,
Milestones in Mass Communication Research: Media Effects; Dave Itzkoff, “Flaws Found in Fredric Wertham’s
Comic-Book Studies,” The New York Times, February 19, 2013, sec. Books; John Farrier, “The Research That
Led to the Comics Code Authority Was Faked,” Neatorama, February 5, 2013,
http://www.neatorama.com/2013/02/15/The-Research-That-Led-to-the-Comics-Code-Authority-Was-
Faked/.
80
More specifically, Wertham hypothesized four “avenues” along which comic books might lead to
delinquency. Two spoke to the harmful effects of the products advertised within the books, specifically about
how the stories and worked together to degrade children’s ethics. The Subcommittee did reach conclusions in
their final report about false claims in ads and the sale of unsafe and illegal goods to minors through the mail,
but they seemed to disregard completely Wertham’s specific thoughts. Another ignored avenue considered
proper reading instruction, and the fourth is that detailed in the text.
81
A clarification of terminology is necessary here. Wertham wrote and spoke primarily of “crime” comic
books. The crime genre, as understood by nearly everyone except Wertham, had peaked in 1948 and 1949
and had declined significantly in popularity by 1954. Wertham, however, was not actually referring to this
genre when he said the word “crime.” Rather, he meant any book in which any crime or violence was
depicted. This category thus included nearly all the popular comic book genres: superheroes, westerns, sci-fi,
war, crime, horror, and even love confessionals. See: Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt.
Testimony of Fredric Wertham (Apr 21 1954); Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York:
Rinehart & Co., 1954).
116

82
Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency, sec. Specific Examples of Material Dealt with at New
York Hearing.
83
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt. Testimony of Fredric Wertham (Apr 21 1954). According to
James Gilver and Bart Beaty, representative from various publishers had launched a personal attack on
Wertham. They wrote to magazines, threatened lawsuits against him, and even tried to prevent his publisher
Rinehart from putting out Seduction of the Innocent. Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture,
145–147; Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 100.
84
Selby, “Congress, Culture and Capitalism,” 88; Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 237.
85
Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 163–165; Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 148.
86
Following is the full list of speakers at the Senate Subcommittee Hearings in 1954. April 21: Dr. Harris Peck
(Director, Bureau of Mental Health Services, Children's Court, New York, NY), Henry Edward Schultz (General
Counsel, ACMP), Dr. Fredric Wertham (Author, Seduction of the Innocent), William Gaines (Publisher, EC
Comics), Walt Kelly (National Cartoonist Society), Milton Caniff (National Cartoonist Society), Joseph Musial
(National Cartoonist Society). April 22: Gunner Dybwad (Executive Director, CSAA), William Friedman
(Publisher, Master Comics and Story Comics), Dr. Laura Bender (Director, Childern’s Ward in the Pyschiatric
Divison at Bellevue Hopsital, New York, NY), Monroe Froehlich Jr. (Business Manager, Magazine Management
Co.), William Richter (News Dealers Association of Greater New York), Alex Segal (President, Stravon
Publications), Samuel Roth (publisher of pornography), Helen Meyer and Matthew Murphy (Vice President
and Editor, Dell Publications). June 4: Hon. James Fitzpatrick (Chairman, New York State Joint Legislative
Committee To Study The Publication Of Comics), Benjamin Freedman (Chairman, Newsdealers Association of
Greater New York and America), Harold Chamberlain (Circulation Director of Independent News Co.), Charles
Appel (Owner, Angus Drug Store), George Davis (President, Kable News Co.), Hon. E. D. Fulton (Member,
House of Commons in Canada), Samuel Black (Vice President, Atlantic Coast Independent Distributors
Association), William Eichhorn - Vice President of American News Co.), Jerome Kaplon (Chairman, Juvenile
Delinquency Committee, Union County Bar Association).
87
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt. Testimonies of Monroe Froehlich (Apr 22 1954), Helen
Meyer & Matthew Murphy (Apr 22 1954), and Harold Chamberlain (Jun 4 1954).
88
Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency, sec. Current Efforts at Self–Regulation.
89
Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency.
90
Parsons, “Batman and His Audience,” 71–72; Lopes, Demanding Respect, 44–45.
91
Don Smith Somerville, “A Study of Local Regulations and Group Actions on the Circulation of Newsstand
Publications” (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1956), 18–21.
92
“Comic Book Curb Grows,” New York Times, July 11, 1955; “Legislatures Of 12 States Enact Comic Book
Curbs,” The Hartford Courant (1923-1987), July 11, 1955.
93
Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 359.
94
Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 108.
117

95
Ibid., 110.
96
One of the often told tales about EC Comics and the CCA concerns the title “Judgment Day.” Gaines wanted
to publish a story about a futuristic black astronaut that concluded with a moral about racial justice. Charles
Murphy, the comics czar, rejected the way the story humanized the black protagonist. The story, as told by
comic book culture, speaks to the inherent injustice faced by the noble Gaines and the horridness of the CCA.
Within the context of other events occurring at that time though, the incident seems to have been part of a
much larger personal dispute between Gaines and the CMAA, and not the pure morality tale it first appears to
be.
96
In February, Gaines ended up printing “Judgment Day,” without approval, in the very last comic book he
ever published; this particular fight with the CAA was supposedly the final straw that provoked him to leave
the industry forever.von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, pt. Feldstein Interview (April 1996) p. 93.
97
Ibid., 95.
98
Brown, “Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital”; Rhoades, A Complete History of American Comic Books;
Kaltenbach, “A Comic Book Kingdom”; Judge, “Holy Censorship, Batman! Guess Who’s Banning Comic Books”;
“Comic Books Profit by Rush To Legitimacy.”
99
Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, 205; Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 156–157; Bradford
W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003), 181–182.
100
This is the broader definition of distribution recommended by Alisa Perren. Alisa Perren, “Rethinking
Distribution for the Future of Media Industry Studies,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 166.
101
Richard Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern
Business Enterprise, 1930-1939, ed. Tino Balio, vol. 5, History of the American Cinema (New York: Scribner,
1993), 43.
102
Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 131–135.
103
Stephen Weinberger, “From Censors to Critics: Representing ‘the People,’” Film & History 42, no. 2 (Fall
2012): 7–13.
104
Leff and Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono, 4–5.
105
According to Richard Maltby,, censorship had long posed a much greater problem for exhibitors than for
producers and distributors, and the MPPDA was designed to protect the interests of the latter, who had
established a functioning oligopoly. For those players, concern over the threat of anti-trust legislation was
thus “much more important than censorship.” Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” 41–43.
106
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 216–
217; Leff and Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono, xiv; 43.
107
Ruth A. Inglis, “Self-Regulation in Operation,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 384–386.
108
Leff and Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono, xv.
118

109
William Kunz, Culture Conglomerates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and Television Industries
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 129–130; Thomas Schatz, “Film Industry Studies and Hollywood
History,” in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Wiley-Blackwell,
2009), 46.
110
Mae D. Huettig, “Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry,” in American Film Industry, ed. Tino
Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 310.
111
Leff and Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono, xv.
112
Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 156–157.
113
Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1998), 156–157; Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic
Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 44–49.
114
Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (New York:
Continuum, 2009), 40–48.
115
He explains how DC Comics and Dell used high profile characters, supported by licensing in other media, to
maintain affluent and wholesome public images that sustained sales. Marvel and Charlton meanwhile took a
different approach, finding niches in stories about relevant superheroes and the Vietnam war respectively,
that kept them alive into the following decades. Wright, Comic Book Nation, 182–212.
116
Rutledge and Bart, “Comic Books.”
117
Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Female Comics From Teens to Zines (San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1999), 11.
118
Gaines, Spa Fon #5, 182.
119
Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency; Interborough News Company v. The Curtis
Publishing Company, 127 F. Supp. 286 (US Southern District of New York 1954).
120
Havens and Lotz, Understanding Media Industries, 147; 155.
121
Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 91.
122
“Newsstand Giant Shrinks Away,” Business Week, May 25, 1957, 70; Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth
Century, 91–94; Interborough News Company v. The Curtis Publishing Company, 127 F. Supp. 286 (US
Southern District of New York 1954).
123
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt. Testimony of William Eichhorn (June 4 1954).
124
Michael Ashley, Transformations: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970 (Liverpool
University Press, 2005).
125
Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency.
126
For example, Toby and Standard—both distributed by ANC—had a handful of big successes like the
western John Wayne Comics and the adventure Exciting Comics. From there, they expanded into other genres
with comics like Tales of Horror, most of which never caught on. Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An
Illustrated History (Taylor, 1993), 96, 148.
119

127
Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Taylor, 1993), 90.
128
Edward Norworth, “Slump in Comics: The Industry Needs More than a Publishing Code,” Barron’s National
Business and Financial Weekly, January 17, 1955.
129
Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency.
130
Ibid., 53.
131
Parsons, “Batman and His Audience,” 71–73.
132
It is difficult to know if Gabilliet is correct about sales. He argues that there were 3000 titles in circulation
at the market’s peak while most other historians put the number at around 650, a figure confirmed by the
report issued by the Senate Subcommitte to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Nonetheless, Gabilliet’s
argument for an early decline is compelling. See: Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 46–49.
133
Peter Bart, “Advertising: Superman Faces New Hurdles,” New York Times, September 23, 1962; Peterson,
Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 360.
134
Norworth, “Slump in Comics.”
135
Timothy Havens and Amanda Lotz, Understanding Media Industries (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), 155.
136
Du Bois, “Superman, Batman and Ivanhoe.”
137
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt. Testimony of Benjamin Freedman (June 4 1954).
138
Four Star Comics Corp v. Kable News Company, 224 F. Supp. 108 (US Southern District of New York 1963);
Norworth, “Slump in Comics.”
139
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Testimony of Harold Chamberlain (June 4 1954).
140
Gaines, Spa Fon #5, 183.
141
Parsons, “Batman and His Audience,” 75.
142
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, (Testimony of Helen Meyer & Matthew Murphy).
143
Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” 47; 67.
144
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, (Testimonies of William Richter; Monroe Froehlich; Benjamin
Freedman; Harold Chamberlain; George Davis).
145
Bill Gaines had actually been the driving force behind starting the organization, but executive
representatives from Archie, DC Comics, and Atlas quickly pushed him out of the leadership circle, causing
him to quit the group completely by the fourth meeting. von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, 94.
146
Norworth, “Slump in Comics.”
147
von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, pt. Feldstein Interview (April 1996).
148
As quoted in Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 96.
149
As quoted in Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 112; 116; Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture,
162.
150
Daniels, DC Comics, 114–115.
151
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 237.
120

152
Du Bois, “Superman, Batman and Ivanhoe.”
153
For more on the rise of licensing, see Introduction and Chapter Two. The importance of licensing became
clear in the mid-1960s after DC Comics and Marvel were both bought out by emerging multimedia
conglomerates interested in their licensing potential. This was particularly true of DC, which had already
spun this end of the business off into the Licensing Corporation of America (LCA), one of the most profitable
media businesses in America in the 1960s. Charlton and Harvey had also moved into licensing and IP library
building by the mid-1960s, strategies that helped them to survive into the 1980s and 1990s respectively. For
more on corporate strategy, See: Kinney National Service, Incorporated Annual Reports (Kinney, 1971 1967),
ProQuest Historical Annual Reports; Warner Communications Incorporated Annual Reports (WCI, 1986 1971),
ProQuest Historical Annual Reports.
154
Du Bois, “Superman, Batman and Ivanhoe.”
155
Press Release from Bill Gaines (Sep 14 1954) Reprinted in von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!,
28; 94; Gaines, Spa Fon #5.
156
Havens and Lotz, Understanding Media Industries, 155.
157
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 89–122.
158
Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent.
159
Norworth, “Slump in Comics.”
160
Adventures into the Unknown and Forbidden Worlds from American Comics and Black Magic from Prize.
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt. Testimony of Harold Chamberlain (June 4 1954); Benton, The
Comic Book in America, 92; 142.
161
Du Bois, “Superman, Batman and Ivanhoe.”
162
Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 44; Wright, Comic Book Nation, 201.
163
Du Bois, “Superman, Batman and Ivanhoe.”
164
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 98; Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency.
165
Martin Barker, The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1995),
150; Michael Sawyer, “Albert Lewis Kanter and the Classics: The Man Behind the Gilberton Company,” Journal
of Popular Culture 20, no. 4 (Spring 1987): 8.
166
“Business Records: Bankruptcy Proceedings,” New York Times, March 9, 1956, sec. Business & Finance;
“Michael Estrow,” New York Times, April 15, 1956, sec. Obituaries.
167
von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, pt. Correspondence from Bill Gaines to Ronald Parker (Mar
7 1956).
168
Gaines, Spa Fon #5.
169
“Newsstand Giant Shrinks Away.”
170
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 95–96; John William Kitson, “Profile of a Growth Industry: American
Book Publishing at Mid-Century, with an Emphasis on the Integration and Consolidation Activity Between
121

1959 and 1965” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1968); von Bernewitz and
Geissman, Tales of Terror!, pt. Transcript EC Offices (Dec 1955).
171
Shanon Fitzpatrick, “Pulp Empire: Macfadden Publications, Transnational America, and the Global
Popular” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univeristy of California, Irvine, 2013).
172
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 91; Eleanor Blum, “Paperbound Books in the United States in 1955: A
Survey of Content” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois, 1955); “ARA, Others Are Sued On Antitrust
Charges By News Distributors,” Wall Street Journal, January 2, 1976, sec. 1.
173
“History,” Corporate Website, Kable Media Services, Inc., accessed January 11, 2014,
http://www.kable.com/about/history.aspx.
174
Four Star Comics Corp v. Kable News Company, 224 F. Supp. 108 (US Southern District of New York 1963).
175
Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 125; Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 44; Wright, Comic Book Nation, 181.
176
Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 91–92.
177
Interim Report: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency.
178
“American News Gain In Late ’54 Continues Into ’55, Holders Told,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1955,
sec. 1.
179
“S.M. News Will Handle Newsstand Distribution Of Time’s Publications:,” Wall Street Journal, June 15,
1955.
180
Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 70–72.
181
“Strike Halts Deliveries By American News to New York Area Stands,” Wall Street Journal, August 12, 1955.
182
“Antitrust Suit Against American News, Union News Co. Is Settled,” Wall Street Journal, September 2, 1955.
183
Periodical Distributors v. American News Co., Union News Co., Pacific News Co., and Manhattan News Co.,
290 F. Supp. 896 (Southern District of New York 1968).
184
Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pt. William Eichhorn (June 4 1954).
185
“American News Co. Earnings Rose Nearly 400% in 1955 Despite Decline in Sales,” New York Times,
February 29, 1956, sec. Business & Finance.
186
Ashley, Transformations, 189–190.
187
Warren Unna, “American, Union News Companies Under Anti-Trust Inquiry by FBI,” The Washington Post,
February 7, 1956, sec. Sports.
188
“Newsstand Giant Shrinks Away,” 59.
189
“American News Sees ’59 Net Well Above ’58,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1959; “Newsstand Giant
Shrinks Away,” 60.
190
“Newsstand Giant Shrinks Away,” 59–60.
191
Ibid., 59.
192
Ashley, Transformations, 189–190.
193
“Newsstand Giant Shrinks Away,” 66.
194
Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 291.
122

195
Nyberg, “William Gaines and the Battle Over EC Comics,” 126.
196
Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 94.
197
Gaines, Spa Fon #5, 183.
198
S. Rep. No. 84-62, sec. Comic Books & Authority; Ted Johnson, “Time Warner Cable Lawsuit: Another
Attack on Channel Bundling,” Variety, June 19, 2003, http://variety.com/2013/tv/news/time-warner-cable-
lawsuit-another-attack-on-channel-bundling-1200499130/.
199
In 1922, the ICC created Class B station licenses, reserved for quality live broadcasters who promised to
establish control and order within the medium. In 1927, the FRC used General Order 40 to give the
established general public service or commercial stations preference over propaganda or non-profit stations
in a reordering of frequencies that promised to improve the quality of the airwaves. Michele Hilmes, Only
Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning,
2007), 42; 64.
200
David Morton, Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006), 89.
201
Hilmes, Only Connect, 75.
123

Chapter Two: Superman Origins
Creative Labor, Authorship, and the Struggle for Copyright

In their first two decades of existence, comic books were an ephemeral, disreputable,
decidedly lowbrow medium produced largely by an ephemeral, disreputable, lowbrow industry;
creators were poorly paid and went largely unacknowledged, publishers operated under various
names, and often closed their doors without warnings, and many of those involved with the
industry had associations with pornography and organized crime. The hemorrhaging sales that
began in 1954 put an end to this state of affairs. The market decline that began that year was so
intense and long-lasting, that in order to survive it, the comic book industry had to reinvent itself.
This reinvention would require significant changes in content, resulting from even more
significant changes in infrastructure and business strategy. It would also entail a change in the
public‘s perception of the medium, the result of both intentional efforts to contain the industry
and constrain the medium as well as a few unintentional developments.
The elevation of comic books‘ cultural status began in the sixties and seventies, as the
two major comic book publishers—DC and Marvel—gradually cultivated a more sophisticated
readership. Deeply intertwined with the formation of this burgeoning community of fans was the
growth of comic book auteurism, a body of criticism and thought that elevated select artists and
writers within the medium to the status of creator geniuses. In the decades that followed, this
formation contributed considerably to the gradual elevation of the medium‘s artistic status within
a broader cultural arena; as in cinema, the presence of highly respected and talented creative
workers could bestow upon the medium increased prestige and an aura of artistic seriousness.
Some of those recognized in these early years were only just emerging on the comic book scene,
auteurs whose style was so innovative and unique it seemed to transcend the medium, or at least
124

advance it. Others were creators resuscitated from the past, cherished by fans for the
contributions they made to the medium‘s early formation. Among this latter group were Jerry
Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman.
Within comic book culture, Siegel and Shuster‘s story has gained a kind of legendary
quality—equal parts tragic and triumphant. In 1938, when the pair were still just teenagers, they
got a story about their character Superman published in the first issue of Action Comics. They
sold the piece, along with its copyright, to the publisher DC Comics (owned by National
Periodicals) for just $130.
*
The exchange began what is still remembered by many as ―one of the
most shameful and heartbreaking episodes in publishing history.‖
1
Almost from the start, Siegel
and Shuster understood their folly, and became convinced they had both a moral and legal claim
to the character. They thus initiated a legal battle over its ownership that would ultimately rage
on in courts for three quarters of a century, surviving in fact, all those personally involved in the
initial deal. For years, their travails went unacknowledged, and while their publisher was making
millions off their creation, Siegel and Shuster fell into near total disregard, their initial prosperity
withering away. Times were changing though, as were attitudes about the value of popular
culture and the individuals behind its creation. With this shift, and the support of a community of
comic book fans and creators, media attention resuscitated the legacy of Siegel and Shuster in the
mid-seventies. Article after article lamented how these ―real heroes‖ had gotten nothing for their
contribution to pop culture, ―not a dime, not even a credit for their creation.‖
2
In the face of
growing public outrage, DC Comics acted, offering the pair pensions for life and restoring their
byline on all future Superman media.

*
Adjusted for inflation, that payout would be equivalent to $2,192 today.
125

Much like the tale of Wertham and Gaines, the story of Siegel and Shuster has
experienced near-perpetual circulation within comic book culture. It has become yet another
structuring myth within the community, reflecting upon the way in which the industry and
society more broadly value the medium, its workers, and its fans. Slightly more complicated than
that of the anti-comics crusade however, this narrative represents both the instability of work in
the creative sector, and also the promise of great windfall and reward, with an overall emphasis
on the latter. A fundamentally hopeful tale, it serves to reassure the many writers, artists, and
editors who proudly create for an industry that sometimes undervalues their efforts, that the arc
of history will bend in their favor. The eventual cultural elevation of comic books—shepherded
by a community of loyal fans and gifted creators—helped Siegel and Shuster to ultimately
acquire the reward they deserved. And as comics continue to gain respect and admiration as an
art form, such happy endings seem increasingly probable.
The outcome that has often been attributed to a cultural and social transformation,
however, is more deeply rooted in economic imperatives than is often acknowledged. While the
sixties and seventies did see a marked increase in the cultural importance of comic book creators,
the same era saw a marked decrease in the structural and economic importance of these very
same individuals. Between 1966 and 1978, the comic book industry, initially a publishing
business, transformed into what was fundamentally a licensing business. It was a shift that saw
an increase in the large-scale cross-media exploitation of older characters with pre-established
copyright protections. It was also a shift that attracted and required large amounts of capital,
capital that came from corporations emerging as the nation‘s first multimedia conglomerates.
These developments turned the individual creators and workers within the business—artists,
editors, and secretaries alike—into cogs serving larger corporate enterprises. To the extent then
126

that increased cultural respect for comic book auteurs seemed to be improving the position of
creative workers, such advances were either additionally supported by clear economic
advantages for their employers, or generally remained confined to a symbolic, not economic,
sphere.
Likewise, the circumstances that frame Siegel and Shuster‘s journey from obscurity to
distinction, far from being rooted in personal heroism and greed, were predictably dictated by an
entrenched legal system enforcing centuries-old notions about authors, publishers, and
proprietorship. A common assumption behind the story—the the legal system and publishing
industry failed when it came to giving Siegel and Shuster the protection and profit they
deserved—could not be farther from the truth. This is not to say that Siegel and Shuster did not
deserve more compensation, more respect, and better working conditions; they most certainly
were due all of these things. Instead, it is to say that copyright law functioned exactly as it was
designed to in this encounter, which remains a quintessential example of cultural production in
America. A collective of creative laborers that extended beyond just two individuals had worked
to create a text that primarily benefitted a publisher who claimed ownership for itself. Public
credit for original authorship meanwhile went to just two men, while the many other workers
involved remained undercompensated and often wholly unacknowledged.
Although dozens of individuals contributed to Superman‘s production from his very
inception, auteurism tended to marginalize much of their work, thereby reinforcing degraded
conditions for laborers lower down in the artistic hierarchy. In this way, and others, emerging
theories around comic book authorship tended to give support to the publisher‘s shift to a
strategic economic focus on licensing, a move that, on the whole, de-emphasized the importance
of creative labor. At play in this reconsideration of Superman‘s creative and legal origins then, is
127

the complex relationship between the legal framework of copyright and artistic conceptions
around auteurism, particularly as they are confronted with the practical working conditions that
surround collaborative creative labor in mass media, conditions that are typically determined by
corporate producers. Ultimately, auteurism and copyright law acted as mutually reinforcing
discourses that tended to serve the needs of corporations over those of actual working authors
and artists.

A Brief History of Authors, Employers, and the Copyright Laws that Bind Them
The favorable relationship between copyright, authorship, and the media corporation is
hardly a new development, and is in fact profoundly embedded in the very existence of all three
entities. Copyright scholars often point out that intellectual property laws are ―deeply rooted both
in our economic system and in our conception of ourselves.‖
3
As the set of rules that effectively
govern the means and relations of cultural production, copyright law has become
―indistinguishable from the mode of production‖ itself.
4
As a result, the ways in which this legal
institution has for centuries shaped cultural standards too often remain invisible, as does the
impact that intellectual property laws have had on employment practices. Recent scholarship has
worked to remedy this by tracing the development of copyright laws within the context of the
contemporary discourses and social and economic institutions that shaped them.
In theory, copyright is a legal mechanism that grants authors control of their intellectual
creations in order to encourage their dissemination for public benefit. In practice though, as
historian Paul Goldstein has noted, ―copyright is about money.‖
5
And more often than not, this
money belongs to publishers, sellers, and companies, instead of to the authors and inventors
whose names are often used to justify the regulations imposed. This initial connection between
128

firms and copyright dates back to the very first Western intellectual property laws in seventeeth
century Britain. Prior to this time, literature was understood by means of more collaborative and
even communal writing practices. Most new works derived their cultural value not from their
perceived originality, but from their affiliation with earlier texts.
6
Then, in 1695, faced with a
wave of pirating facilitated by new print technologies, the central bookselling guild—which had
been favored and protected by the Crown—began to lobby for more stringent and expansive
restrictions on publishing.
7
This would of course not be the last time that the introduction of new
technologies threatened established cultural monopolies and brought about calls for increased
legal protections that could act as barriers to entry.
Appealing to the entrepreneurial spirit that typified the era, these publishers projected
―their own proprietary impulses onto writers‖ invoking a ―rhetoric of individual interest and
individual entitlement,‖ with the understanding that the authors‘ rights would be transferable to
them.
8
More specifically, as Mark Rose has documented, they used Locke to argue that all labor,
even if it is intangible, should result in the creation of property from which the individual
responsible is entitled to reap a benefit. Anchored in this conceptualization of creative labor, the
booksellers‘ campaign resulted in the Statute of Anne of 1710. It was the first modern copyright
law, and with it emerged the notion of the author in a contemporary sense. Intriguingly, this
conceptualization of authorship actually preceded the profession itself, since writing did not
become an economically feasible practice until after these new rules helped commodify
literature.
9
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Romantic literature and its discourse of
original genius flowed into Britain from Germany. There, it blended readily with the liberal
discourse of intellectual property first established by this law. Woodmansee and Jaszi thus
conclude that the concept of authorship, as well as its obligatory association with originality, ―far
129

from being timeless and universal, is a relatively recent formation—the result of a quite radical
reconceptualization of the creative process that culminated less than 200 years ago.‖
10

This reconceptualization was crucial for the development of the writing profession, in
that it provided authors with both economic and cultural capital. The poet or novelist or essayist
of the eighteenth, nineteenth and eventually twentieth century was dependent upon copyright law
for his livelihood, not because he owned a monopoly on his creative endeavors, but because it
transformed him into a valuable commodity for publishers and for the public. His very identity
was rooted in copyright law, made necessary by the publishers who wished to extend their power
over the book market. And yet, despite a very practical and economic motivation on the part of
publishers, this shift authors benefitted from took place primarily on the level of discourse,
without necessarily changing either the everyday creative process or the way in which they
profited from it. Writing was still in most cases a collaborative process that relied on the
derivation of prior works as much as on originality, as it had been for centuries before the Statute
of Anne. As Jack Stillinger has argued, even in the Romantic Era—during which the persona of
the individual author genius solidified—joint, composite, and collaborative literary production
was "an extremely common phenomenon,‖ and indeed proved to be one of the ―the routine ways
of producing literature all along.‖
11

Perhaps even more surprising than this disconnect between theories and practices of
authorship, was the similar disparity between legal rationalizations of copyright and its practical
implementation in courtrooms. Despite the centrality of the author in the justification of
copyright rules, this new legal institution remained the domain of booksellers, who were
responsible for nearly all the copyright cases brought forward in eighteenth century Britain.
12

The same was true in America, after Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1790, inspired by the
130

Statute of Anne. As Catherine Fisk has noted, U.S. courts had hoped the law would support
individual economic independence—which they considered an essential precondition for
democracy—by limiting the legal rights of employers, and in particular, by maintaining an
assumption that employees would control their own creative works. Even with this bias in favor
of individual authors, however, ―the pattern of copyright registrations suggests that employers
did acquire works of their employees,‖ particularly when there were multiple creators. In fact, in
the first ten years the Copyright Act was in place, almost half the registrations belonged to
someone other than the author.
13

This discrepancy between theory and practice intensified as legislators slowly extended
the scope of copyright. According to Aufderheide and Jaszi, this expansion of rights found
justification, as it had in Britain, in the creative and economic needs of authors, who deserved
―total protection because they have created it all by themselves (or perhaps with divine
inspiration).‖
14
Fisk has also found that copyright found rationalization in the need to ―encourage
and aid genius,‖ never to reward patrons ―who fatten on the labors of genius."
15
As Thomas
Streeter notes, copyright law nonetheless tended ―paradoxically to transfer power away from
authors,‖ serving the ―interests of publishers and distributors more closely than it serves the
interests of either authors or users of copyrighted works.‖ The prominence of the author in legal
rationalizations was thus primarily that—a means of validating a law that stood to benefit
publishing firms already in positions of some power, and not, notably, an assurance to creators
that they would reap the fruits of their labor. It would seem that just as authors needed copyright
law and the publishers who fought for it in order to maintain cultural capital, publishers needed
authors to justify the profits they earned as owners of copyrights. The result was a deep-rooted
131

"tension between the romantic image of creativity in copyright and the un-romantic results of
copyright's application."
16

This tension would survive into and even intensify in the twentieth century as a series of
decisions gradually established a new copyright regime to support mass media production.
According to Catherine Fisk, early in this process arose the new notion that ―all work
relationships are entirely contractual‖ and that not only could creativity ―be hired and the
products of creativity [sold],‖ but that employers were actually entitled to ownership of all
workplace knowledge. By 1900, the courts stopped demanding that employees even explicitly
assign their copyrights to their employers, signaling a shift in the assumption of employee
ownership to an assumption of employer ownership. Soon after, the work-for-hire exception
came into being. It established, first in precedent and later by legislation, that copyrights for
work done at the request and expense of an employer automatically belong to the firm and not
the individual. Within manufacturing and other sectors of American life, these changes had a
broad impact, but were ultimately embraced and normalized.
17

Within cultural spheres, in contrast, responses to this emerging legal regime were initially
mixed and considerably more complicated. With regards to established, highbrow forms,
romantic conceptions around the artist—themselves rooted in early copyright law—generated
resistance to the idea that an individual could so easily and perhaps unintentionally assign away
ownership of his creation. In the 1879 case MacKaye v. Mallory, for example, the press rallied
behind an author-for-hire who believed he received too little profit after his play became very
successful. The theater community was angered that this talented man was being treated like
factory labor and had been robbed of proper credit. They argued that his ―creativity entitled him
to his own innovations.‖ They were wrong of course, since by this time, only a contract could
132

entitle him to such rights; accordingly, the court sided with the theater and the harsh deal they
had struck with the playwright in writing, awarding them all financial and artistic rights to the
work.
18
There remained then, a clear disconnect between social ideas about creativity in the
respected arts and the legal realities of artistic ownership.
With the emergence of mass culture though, which tended to be more lowbrow in nature,
the public was less critical of such factory-like working conditions and more readily accepted the
right of employers to the fruits of their workers‘ intellectual and creative labor. Indeed the
industrial-style and collective production that characterized new culture industries actually
helped to justify the subordination of creative workers to employers. Michael Denning has noted
that in the late nineteenth century, the economic structure of the dime novel business, which
functioned as a ―fully equipped literary factory,‖ actually reinforced the medium‘s maligned
reputation. So the public took little interest in the fate of its authors, who lost creative authority
over their own work, saw their narrative voices disappear, and had to hold day jobs in other more
respectable professions to sustain themselves.
19
Developments in case law reflected this
indifference toward the creative workers of less vaunted forms, exacerbating their inability to
gain pay, credit, and respect for the work they did.
Notably though, the law‘s unwillingness to recognize lowbrow creative laborers in no
way represented a failure of our legal institutions to support the lowbrow media in which they
worked. To the contrary, the courts‘ insistence on assumed employer ownership of all creative
work and knowledge helped commercial media flourish in the early part of the twentieth century.
In 1903, the landmark case Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co. actually extended the
scope of copyright to include purely commercial artwork, in this instance, to graphic
advertisements. Since copyright continued to find justification in the need to aid genius and
133

reward individual creators for their intellectual labors, this expansion would seem to signal a
shift in attitudes about the value of both commercial media and those who create it. But public
sentiment toward lowbrow creative workers remained indifferent, so the courts were able to
grant, without controversy, the benefits of authorship in visibly commercial contexts solely to
corporations; this development was of course consistent with the development of copyright law
over the two centuries prior. As Fisk notes about Bleistein, even though the judge based his
argument for this expansion of protections on the ―artistic genius and the uniqueness or
singularity of the personality expressed in the works by the artist,‖ he showed no interest in the
fact that the artist responsible had no actual rights to the work in question.
20
While copyright law
continued to find justification in the concept of the author, courts had little interest in protecting
the rights of the people actually responsible for authoring cultural products.
Even though the language of copyright law continued to rhetorically elevate the symbolic
status of authors, courtroom decisions, now more than ever, were serving to marginalize them,
particularly if they created in a lowbrow medium. Key to this increasing marginalization was the
prevalence of collaborative creative labor in the new culture industries. Since the rhetoric of
copyright law relied so heavily on idealized conceptions of individual creators geniuses,
commercial media‘s tendency toward collective authorship provided further justification to deny
its workers ownership of their creations. This predicament grew considerably more complicated
as society began to bestow upon mass media products and their creators the respect they had
once reserved for only highbrow forms and traditional artists. Even with this change in public
sentiment, which notably still tended to gravitate toward individual creators, most commercial
media was still produced collectively, even more so than art and literature had been for centuries
prior.
134

The inability of either the discourse of copyright or the discourse of authorship that grew
out of it to account for these collaborations thus continued to hinder a wider embrace of the
actual working practices shaping popular culture. The fate of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster is
deeply intertwined in this complicated web of legal justification and cultural value. An early
twentieth century legal regime that favored publishers over authors dictated the basis of their
early employment, and while changing conceptions about mass media authorship restored their
cultural legacy, the limitations imposed by the logic of both copyright and authorship have
prevented a more expansive and indeed accurate understanding of their artistic contributions.

Creative Work in a New Culture Industry: 1938-1955
In 1938, Siegel and Shuster did indeed sell their rights to Superman for $130. The duo
had intended for the character to star in a newspaper strip, but Detective Comics wanted
Superman for their new magazine Action Comics, so the young men turned their panels into a
thirteen-page story and mailed it off to New York. Two weeks later, they received their pay, at a
standard rate of ten dollars a page, along with an agreement that assigned the perpetual rights for
the character to their new publisher. Siegel and Shuster signed the contract and returned it to
Detective Comics.
21
They also cashed the check.
The mythological version of the story assumes this was a tragic decision. I would argue
that it was in fact their only choice, and a rather shrewd one at that. The pair had been trying to
sell their Superman character, which they created in 1933, for at least four years. In the
meantime, they had sold a number of other creations, all of which were doing well, and none of
which they owned the rights to. That the editor of the brand new Action Comics Vin Sullivan was
interested in their story, and had even come across it to begin with, was something of a fluke,
135

according to legal testimony given in 1939.
22
So their willingness to accept such a fee was hardly
surprising, and really quite natural. An editor at DC Comics later noted that it was just ―standard
practice back then. It still is. Everyone who does art work for us signs a release saying we own
the copyright.‖
23

In the case of Superman, owning the copyright, however, turned out to be a matter of
another magnitude. Once it was clear to DC‘s editors that the character was popular on
newsstands, he became the star of Action Comics and was soon featured in a handful of other
comics as well (including his own Superman). Over the course of the following year, the
character got a nationally syndicated newspaper strip (which ran continuously through 1966) and
soon his very own radio show, premiering on February 12, 1940. The Adventures of Superman
got such high ratings, it was picked up by Mutual Broadcasting, who ran it three times a week to
audiences of millions—adults and kids alike. The series would run for eleven years, until the
same title was picked up for a nationally syndicated television series, starring George Reeves,
that would run for an additional six years. In the meantime, Superman also starred in a series of
high-profile animated shorts (1941-1942), financed by Paramount and created by Fleisher
Studios. He was also featured in a number of film serials produced by Columbia and targeted at
matinee screenings for kids (Superman, 1948 and Atom Man vs. Superman,1950).
24
These media
productions generated considerable revenue for their individual producers as well as for owner of
the intellectual property, DC Comics.
As a result, in the years that followed, Siegel and Shuster found themselves luckier than
almost all of their contemporaries. Their unexpected and extraordinary success with Superman
secured them steady jobs with National Periodicals, which as one of the more established comic
book companies at the time, refused to hire the exploitative freelance workshops on which most
136

publishers relied.
25
They negotiated for a ten-year contract with the highest page rate in the
business, and were able to set up their own shop in their hometown of Cleveland, hiring six full-
time artists to help them keep up with the workload.
26
Even as their only specialty—
superheroes—declined dramatically in popularity after World War II, Siegel and Shuster
continued to get steady pay, and were reportedly making $100,000 annually (in today‘s dollars,
more than $1.2 million), an immense amount of money for two men in their twenties working in
what was considered a lowbrow and disposable medium.
27
The pair lost these working
conditions only after they decided to sue their employers in April 1947, the year before their
contract was set to expire. They challenged the original contract they had signed, asking for $5
million (even in light of Superman‘s success, this was an extraordinary amount of money) in
addition to all the rights for the character. They promptly lost the suit. The release they had
signed, which transferred sole ownership of Superman to the publisher in perpetuity, held up in
court for decades.
28

Meanwhile, other creators in the industry had to contend with far worse working
conditions. And according to some critics, many of them had far more talent than Siegel and
Shuster. Writing in 1959, influential fan and critic Ted White referred to their work as
―amateurish‖ and rudimentary and in 1955, Bill Gaines has already determined that they were
just ―a flash in the pan.‖
29
Other creators meanwhile, many of whom would go on to illustrious
and respected careers, suffered on in far less ―lush‖ positions.
30
Bradford Wright notes that
comic books at the time were made by ―a creative assembly line‖ of guys ―fresh out of art
school‖ and anyone else who needed a job, and was willing to do work that was neither
―prestigious nor profitable.‖
31
This factory-like system of production, which ―negated the
identity‖ of overworked and underpaid creators ―privileged quantity to the detriment of
137

quality.‖
32
The environment was harsh enough that even future comic book luminaries preferred
to remain anonymous. Speaking about his early work in comics, acclaimed artist Bernie
Krigstein admitted, "I had a prejudice that comic books, as a form of art, were beneath my
serious attention…I never signed them; they were hack work of the purest distillation."
33

Similarly, in the freelance workshop he ran, artist and writer Will Eisner relied on a
number of pseudonyms in the late thirties. He had found that anonymity helped him maintain
steady and continuous work. Not interested in building any kind of personal reputation, he
purposefully worked to use different names and different styles on each of his features. It was
―better business‖ at the time, because it kept publishers from thinking that only one man was
doing all the work for a particular book.
34
Whether or not they were fooled by these attempts, the
publishers ultimately benefitted from this practice too. They wished to prevent the public from
noticing what was perhaps overly frequent staff turnover, and were more than happy to let their
freelancers remain anonymous, or at the very least, without distinction.
Public discourse of the forties and well into the fifties only reinforced this suppression of
authorship, as intellectuals brought an increasing amount of mostly negative attention to the
products of mass culture, comic books being a particularly visible one in the postwar, pre-
television era. Frankfurt School cultural theory had migrated to and evolved on U.S. shores
among left-leaning intellectual elites like Dwight MacDonald and Clement Greenberg. With it
came a loathing of forms they believed to be characterized by industrial practices that alienated
artists from their art. However, because their priority remained with the preservation of high
culture (as opposed to the elevation of anything perceived as lowbrow), the neglect and
mistreatment of creators in a cultural industry where ―writers don‘t even sign their work‖
35

warranted only disparagement, never concern.
138

The low visibility of comic artists was thus not a problem to be rectified but a
rationalization of the medium‘s plainly evident lack of value. That lack of value in turn provided
further justification for the rightfulness of publishers‘ continued erasure of creative labor. In
short, from the perspective of both prominent leftist intellectuals and publishers looking to profit
from a cheap and popular medium, creators were undeserving. The absence of proper
compensation, decent working conditions, and credit were thus not a matter of public or even
private concern, but merely the nature of lowbrow cultural labor. That Siegel and Shuster
actually fought for recognition in the forties defied the logic of this historical context. Two
decades later, as theories of auteurism, traveling again from Europe to America, began to change
public perception of the value of lowbrow culture, their desire to receive acknowledgment and
acclaim for creative work in mass media became far more commonplace and, before long, even
standard. In this way, Siegel and Shuster‘s struggle for recognition was ahead of its time, and
thereby highly appealing to later generations who would mythologize their fight.
Notably though, their genuine, while perhaps naïve, sense of entitlement did not
materialize out of nothing. While the work Siegel and Shuster did in creating Superman was
insignificant both to the public and to those within the industry, there was one place, even back
in the thirties, where it did matter: the courtroom. Copyright law, then as always, emphasized
―individual authors, individual works, and the notion that creativity is an individual act,‖
36
its
protections justified by the need to compensate authors for the intellectual labors they expend in
the process of creative work. That the origins of Superman could be traced to two living
breathing men, an author and artist according to legal definition—if not to public perception—
was a fact to be emphasized in courts even if it was downplayed in business interactions.
37

Because there is no place under copyright ―for truly collective authorship based on notions of
139

group work‖ and a denial of creativity as either a social phenomenon or a derivative and
referential process,
38
it was equally important to downplay the contributions of anyone other than
Siegel and Shuster, be it hired hands who helped draw the character or sources of inspiration that
came before Superman.
And so it was when, in 1939, Detective Comics sued Bruns Publications (and their
distributors Kable and Interborough News Companies) for infringement, claiming that Bruns‘
book Wonder Comics plagiarized DC‘s new Superman character in Action Comics (See Fig. 3.1).
The case, which DC eventually won, marked a decisive turning point for Detective Comics and
National Periodicals. Their attempt to prevent other comic book superheroes from competing
with their own growing portfolio (which
would soon include Batman and Wonder
Woman) ultimately failed; the character
type became too popular too quickly for
Detective Comics to attain a total
monopoly. But superheroes did become
their trademark genre, and it remained so
for decades. Additionally, the legal
muscle they flexed during this case did
succeed in establishing them as a force to
be reckoned with,
39
an industry leader
with regards to both sales and political
and legal clout, which they would
exercise repeatedly in the years that
Figure 3.6
140

followed. The first notable example of this of course came in 1954 when the comic book
industry faced a public controversy that targeted the threats posed by some of DC‘s most popular
characters, Superman included. Nonetheless, the Senate investigation and Hearings that followed
largely exonerated the publisher from blame, allowing it to lead a public relations campaign and
create a regulatory structure that positioned the company at the top of the market. Well into the
future, DC comics would wield considerable power over other publishers in the market.
†
In order
to achieve this very early legal victory though, DC needed a living breathing author; they needed
Jerry Siegel, a man they would have little use for ever again.
More specifically, the publisher had to assert their rightful claim to the copyright of
Superman, without which they had no legal basis for suing Bruns. This entailed then, as it does
now, that first, there be a tangible expression of the character: the thirteen-page comic strip that
debuted in Action Comics #1. Second, it had to be an original work of authorship, this latter
requirement reflecting copyright‘s long and inextricable link with liberal notions of individual
and entrepreneurial literary labor. Jack Liebowitz, the accountant behind DC‘s financial success,
and eventually its CEO, took the stand early on in the trial, helping to establish that Superman
was indeed a work of individual original authorship, testifying that ―one man writes it, and the
other man draws. Two men do the work.‖ Siegel himself, hours later, testified to the contrary,
that he and Shuster had already begun outsourcing their work to other artists, exchanging the
sketches through the mail.
40

The presiding judge however, as he made quite clear, was interested in neither their
actual working practices nor the process of conception that led to Superman‘s creation. His
priority was instead, in his own words, to ―tie up these authors of [Superman] as much as

†
For more on this series of events, see Chapter One.
141

possible with the person who is claiming a copyright to it,‖ the executives at Detective Comics.
This involved an examination of both the contract in which Siegel and Shuster assigned
Detective Comics their rights, and the $130 check they received in return. When lawyers began
quibbling about whether the pair sold their character as independent contractors (they did) or
whether they were in the employ of the publisher, and created it as work-for-hire (they did not),
the judge commented that it did not ―make the slightest bit of difference…we just don‘t pay
attention to those things.‖
41
By this time, employer control of the creative work of employees—
whether or not they were employees at the moment of creation—was simply assumed, as was the
tendency for firms, and not authors, to own copyrights. This issue would come up again decades
later and be of considerable importance.
That Siegel and Shuster had perhaps been undercompensated or were being exploited by
a publisher was of no consideration here. Indeed, when Siegel took the stand to testify to the
originality of his authorship, the court showed little interest in general, repeatedly expressing
utter indifference to and impatience with his story.
42
For all involved in the proceedings, Siegel‘s
only purpose was to prove that he did not copy the character from another source, and to provide
evidence (via the dates of early drawings and letters about the character) that it was not modeled
on The Phantom or someone else‘s work.
43
The appeals court would again treat Siegel with
disdain, referring to his work ―as foolish rather than comic.‖ And yet amazingly, though his
initial testimony was mostly ignored and his person mocked, the case ultimately relied heavily
on Siegel‘s presence at the trial. The final decision explained that Siegel had done genuinely
creative—if low quality—work, that the story indeed embodied ―an original arrangement of
incidents and pictorial and literary form,‖ and that as author he deserves to say of it ―a poor
142

thing, but mine own,‖ an implication that it was his property to protect, however shameful. This
claim destroyed Bruns‘ best defense, that Superman was no more than a general archetype.
44

Whether Superman was an appropriate subject of copyright came up again, a decade
later, when National Periodicals sued another competitor of Superman, this time Fawcett
Publication‘s Captain Marvel. Again, the court decided in favor of National, relying on the
decision in Detective Comics v. Bruns to establish Superman‘s originality via Jerry Siegel, laying
the basis for a substantial enough similarity between the characters to constitute infringement. In
the aftermath of the decision, Fawcett folded their comic book division and Detective Comics
(now known simply as DC Comics) actually purchased their intellectual properties, adding
Captain Marvel to their back catalogue to exploit later as the character Shazam!. It was the first
of a number of buyouts National Periodicals would pursue in the upcoming years, all of which
worked dramatically to strengthen the publisher in the decades that followed. The creative role of
the individual artist played little part in these business practices, so Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster,
not surprisingly, were treated as typical employees for the remainder of the decade. However, in
a fascinating display of the power of legal discourse to impact cultural rhetoric, and possibly
even self-awareness, the role Jerry Siegel had played during the copyright trial began to spill into
life outside the courtroom.
In the years that followed the trial, Siegel would time and again represent himself as a
creative genius of sorts, an independent author whose originality and intellectual labor entitled
him to reap the profits from his literary property. An important part of this self-portrait was
Siegel‘s oft-repeated claim that the character came to him whole on a single sleepless night, in a
kind of flash of genius.
45
For a time, this method of conception (instant, as opposed to invention
via tinkering) was a literal requirement for patentability, and though it was never required in
143

copyright cases, it certainly helps bolster claims of originality and individual authorship, both of
which Siegel was forced to testify to in Detective Comics v. Bruns. Numerous accounts,
historical records, and more detailed histories suggest that in fact, Superman was not and could
not have been conceived on ―one sleepless night,‖ and perhaps more importantly, that the
character was neither particularly original, nor attributable to the creativity of Siegel alone. It is
now widely acknowledged that Siegel and Shuster spent at least three years developing the
superhero. They had included a story called ―The Reign of Superman‖ in a 1933 issue of their
fanzine, and had made a number of significant changes to the character on the path to publication
in 1938, including transforming him from a villain into a hero.
46
Even if Siegel had, contrary to
this account, dreamt the character up whole, there is also the unavoidable existence of the half
dozen men who were essential to bringing Superman to fruition on the page.
First among them was Joe Shuster, Siegel‘s constant collaborator from 1931 to 1949.
47

As comics are as much a visual medium as they are literary, the necessary collaboration of artist
and author already serve to distinguish this work from the more highbrow individually created
works early copyright law was designed to protect. There was also the significant contribution of
Max Gaines, who had found Siegel and Shuster‘s proposed newspaper strip while working for
the McClure Syndicate, and thought it might be a good fit for National‘s new action adventure
comic book, passing it along to editor Vin Sullivan. Both men then looked over Siegel and
Shuster‘s work and advised the pair on how to edit it by literally cutting and pasting the strip into
a thirteen-page story. Ted White argued that the credit for Superman thus most appropriately
belongs to Gaines, also noting the recognizable contributions of the other artists working on the
strip.
48

144

When considering the extent to which Superman was an original creation of authorship,
there is also the question of influence and inspiration. Peter Coogan has executed an exhaustive
study on the long derivation of the superhero, an archetypal figure with origins in nineteenth
century fiction that evolved through dime novels, pulp fiction, silent films, and comic strips. By
1933, when Siegel and Shuster wrote their first Superman story, every aspect of the character—
the name, the costume, the origin story, the superpowers, and the psychological motivations—
had appeared elsewhere in popular culture, and his research has shown that the pair was likely
familiar with all of these antecedents.
49
This evidence suggests that Superman was original in
only the most basic sense required by law. Scarcely more than a general type, the character was
at least an original arrangement of incidents and forms, but hardly the result of a flash of genius
or the work of an independent and uniquely talented author.
Despite these origins—collaborative and in some ways even communal—Superman was
still unquestionably an important innovation. As noted in the introduction, the character‘s
phenomenon success actually helped establish both the medium and the industry that produced it.
And nearly as importantly, by opening the door to tremendous licensing opportunities, Superman
set that industry on its future course of development. Eighty years later, Superman remains one
of the world‘s most recognizable characters, and alongside Mickey Mouse has taken up a
permanent, highly visible, and ubiquitous position within American culture. Certainly, some of
this success and power can be attributed to the work of Siegel and Shuster, who helped bring to
fruition a character whom the public adored and whom corporations found exceedingly easy to
sell. But it is impossible to know how instrumental these two particular men were, and whether
or not one or two or many dozens of other men would have made possible these same
developments had Siegel and Shuster not been there to do it first.
145

Knowing the answer to this mystery though is less important than understanding how
these two particular men, perhaps merely the first ones in the right medium at the right time,
become extremely symbolic of what begins to occur throughout multimedia production for years
to come. More specifically, they find themselves subject to the vast complexities and striking
contradictions that constitute creative labor in mass multimedia production based on protectable
intellectual properties. Despite the immense success of the character they helped to create and
bring to the public, they remained dependent on and virtually defenseless against the corporate
media-makers responsible for both popularizing and exploiting their intellectual labors. At the
same time, the dependence of copyright law on originality and individuality gave them a sense of
proprietorship and ingenuity that—while out of place at the time—would become commonplace
in the years that followed. There is of course no way to know whether Siegel believed the story
about his own ingenious conception of Superman, but it is likely that he at least let this narrative
form his understanding of himself as an author, and it most certainly shaped perceptions within
the comic book industry more broadly, particularly after the campaign for credit he would begin
in the seventies. The discrepancy here between fact, legal discourse, and narrative fiction point
back to the very mythical nature of the tale of Siegel and Shuster as chronicled by comic book
culture, a fairy tale characterized by both disaster and prosperity.
In reality, Superman‘s origins for the most part typified emerging media practices.
Inspired by, if not explicitly based on, cultural texts and objects generally widely available, the
character was brought into being by a team of individuals, each fulfilling a different function.
The two officially recognized creators were compensated for their work in a manner that if
anything exceeded the standards of their industry. The publishers meanwhile followed usual
protocol in attaining the rights to the character and profiting from it in a manner that foretold
146

later strategies in licensing and franchising. They also defended that copyright in court by
invoking a living and breathing author who could testify to its originality, despite its
collaborative and derivative nature. That this process resulted in a creative laborer with an
exaggerated claim of original authorship for an intellectual property owned by a large and
powerful firm should come as no surprise. Siegel and Shuster acted exactly as they were
supposed to act, and copyright law did exactly what it was designed to do. If there is any
injustice in their story then, it has little to do with Superman, or DC Comics, or Siegel and
Shuster, and everything to do with the system they inhabited.

The Fallout of an Industry in Turmoil and Renewal: 1956-1978
After the 1954 market crash, comic book sales continued to contract for some time.
50

Comic book publishing had been a viable and profitable business for some fifteen years
preceding that crisis, but in the face of this recession, the few companies that remained had to
generate a new business model in order to thrive during the next decade. And thrive they would.
Even though comic book sales remained low, and in time would only go lower, companies like
DC, Dell, and Harvey had begun to rely on other revenue streams to prosper. As noted in
Chapter One, DC and Dell both ran distribution companies, which helped bring in some profits.
Increasingly, however, the future of comic books would depend on two distinct and at times
divergent developments: licensing and fandom.
Their growth, which began in the early sixties, constituted two key shifts within comic
book culture that were ultimately responsible for sustaining the medium. On the one hand, the
burgeoning of a dedicated fan community solidified a reliable base of readers as comics declined
in popularity with most general audiences. And while this audience was small, it become
147

increasingly valuable within the media industries, as will be discussed in Chapter Three. Second,
a wave of mergers brought comic books into the fold of multimedia corporations that could
better exploit characters through licenses and franchising. While the former development
rhetorically emphasized the role of authors, the latter development diminished their economic
and structural importance. These simultaneous shifts also contributed significantly to the
paradoxical structure of comic book culture which, even back in the sixties, was beginning to
move in two divergent directions. An embrace of corporate-backed licensing would grow comic
books as a popular commercial form while an increasing appeal to fans would limit the
medium‘s physical reach. Intriguingly though, these two opposing forces would gradually
converge in ways that made them mutually beneficial—even as they continued to appear to many
within comic book culture to be at cross-purposes. The role of the creator, as it evolved through
this era, is the first example of this growing tendency.

Fandom & Auteurism
In 1960, the editors at DC embarked on an ingenious and quite effective strategy that did
not spread to other media for decades: they began marketing their product to fans. The industry
had been exceptionally responsive to and supportive of readers since the late thirties, but not
until after the fifties, when the business was facing a massive decline in sales, did fans begin to
move to the center of their business model. This relationship appears to have begun when DC
Comics editor Julius Schwartz invited Jerry Bails, a fan who frequently wrote to the comics‘
letter columns, into his New York office. Unlike previous editors, many of whom had stumbled
upon pulps and then comics by happenstance, Schwartz and fellow editor Mort Weisinger had a
particular affinity for both media, having once been avid science fiction fans.
51
Along with
148

Siegel and Shuster, Schwartz was responsible for publishing some of the very first fanzines.
However unlike the Cleveland natives, Schwartz was able to use his commercial and social
savvy to channel these interests into a lucrative career.
52
When Bails arrived at the DC office,
Schwartz employed these business skills, along with his genuine interest in fandom, to regale,
and hopefully inspire, the younger Bails with tales of the good old days. Several weeks later,
Schwartz cleverly began publishing the names and addresses of all the letter column writers, and
Bails promptly started contacting them, co-publishing one of the first comic fanzines within
months.
Around the same time, editors also began occasionally publishing credits for writers and
artists, who up until that time had remained anonymous. In response, the fans began—within the
pages of the newly personalized letter columns—a guessing game over authorship in which they
would debate who the writer, penciller, inker, and colorer were in the many issues that still
lacked creator credit. Shrewdly, the editors let this game around creator identity continue.
Schwartz slowly revealed the names of more and more writers and artists, boosting their
reputation among fans along the way. By 1966, everyone was receiving full credit, and the
guessing game came to an end, but comic book authorship had been born.
53
Will Brooker has
noted how the letter columns worked to give names and voices to readers and creators at the
same time. They enabled a ―pleasurable to and fro with the editors‖ that ―effectively shaped the
concept of the comic book author, as an individual who, whatever his role in the creative
process, contributes a recognizable style—at the same time they were building their own fan-
networks."
54

The extent to which this promotion of authorship helped intrigue, connect, and eventually
motivate a developing community of fans may have been somewhat surprising at the time, but in
149

the years since, this association has become almost routine. As Jenkins has noted, ―fans and
auteurs were made for (and by) each other.‖ He dates the connection in film and television back
to at least Gene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek, who was understood by many fans to have
―authored‖ the series at a time when most television was ―still read as anonymous industrial
practice.‖
55
In the years since, particularly as digital technologies have allowed audiences to
connect around their mutual admiration for a text and the individual most associated with
authoring it, creators and showrunners like Rodenberry have increasingly become the focal point
around which many of popular culture‘s larger and more loyal fandoms rally around. Noting the
tendency even early on in internet culture, Jenkins described a message board dedicated to David
Lynch‘s series Twin Peaks, on which viewers worked to unravel the text, often by comparing it
to Lynch‘s other works, and using reappearing motifs and themes as guideposts. In this case, the
aura of the director also functioned as a kind of justification for their activities, providing a
―high-culture rationale for their preoccupation with what‖ was still perceived by many as a
lowbrow cultural form.
56

In the early sixties then, when mass media was still almost universally considered to be of
low cultural status, there must have been something revelatory in the discovery that creator
acknowledgement could actually excite fans and elevate perceptions of the medium.
57
And it
appears to have been a lesson learned fast and made much use of in a short time, particularly
within the comic book industry. Before long, Stan Lee at Marvel began working to solidify the
growth of fandom that Schwartz began, and he too counted on the power of creator
acknowledgment, most notably, his own. Appealing to Marvel‘s readers personally and directly,
he and Jack Kirby cultivated unique personas and worked to address fans as hip, sophisticated,
and knowing readers. Asking writers of the letter columns to call them ―Stan and Jack,‖ they
150

followed DC‘s lead in expanding creator credits, and then further personalized them through the
use of nicknames. Even occasionally appearing in stories with their characters, Lee and Kirby
were able to establish themselves as auteurs, a role Lee continues to foster and exploit even
today.
58

Notably though, even in these early days of comic book authorship, problems were
already beginning to arise. Lee famously restructured creative practices at the company by
establishing the ―Marvel Method,‖ a process in which Lee would dictate or talk through a story
with an artist, who would subsequently create the entire comic based on that outline. Later, Lee
would add dialogue for a letterer to finish. According to some critiques, this approach demanded
that artists do the bulk of the work but failed to provide them with either extra pay or appropriate
story credit, which generally went to Lee and Kirby, thereby solidifying their place in the
public‘s imagination. Before long, Lee had even gained a reputation as a ―gloryhound.‖
59
Of
little concern at the time, but of great import later, this work was largely being executed under
the work-for-hire exception that automatically assigned all copyrighted material created in the
workplace to the employer instead of the employee. This seems to have been true even for the
work of Lee and Kirby, although Lee‘s ownership stake in Marvel put him in a position to
benefit from the publisher‘s claim on all the intellectual properties produced.
Over the course of the sixties, these two companies, DC and Marvel, gradually reoriented
their product to the burgeoning fan community they helped foster; it was a significantly
narrower, but far more loyal, audience segment. From the very start, this fan strategy was very
closely linked with the revival of the superhero genre, which began in 1956, just a year after the
crash, when DC reintroduced a previously defunct character, The Flash, in the comic book
Showcase #4. Seeing DC‘s growing success with this character and, soon after, other reboots,
151

Marvel followed suit in 1958. These two companies would dominate the genre up through the
present. Due to their revival of ―Golden Age‖ superheroes, along with the introduction of new
ones like Spiderman and The Fantastic Four, the sixties would come to be known as the ―Silver
Age.‖ Despite its eventual success, at the time, the genre was far from being an obvious choice
for new content. Seemingly no more than a wartime fad, superheroes had peaked in 1944, after
which sales steadily declined until the genre‘s near-total disappearance in 1952.
60
DC alone
persisted in supporting it with their continuous publication of Superman, Batman, and Wonder
Woman through the early fifties. Notably though, even these titles ceased to be ―superhero‖
comics in the purest sense, as editors used the characters in stories shaped more by new genre
trends like sci-fi, romance, and teen humor. DC managed to sustain sales of Superman at close to
one million copies per issue through the decade; Wonder Woman sales in contrast, were barely a
third of this, but DC saw value in maintaining all three titles.
61

The publisher‘s interest in continuing to release them was likely less a function of the
narrative capacity of the superhero genre (of which they generally offered poor examples during
this time), than their persistent recognizablity to passing consumers. Having used strong
distribution and licensing to turn these characters into household names through the forties and
into the fifties, it behooved the publisher to keep the titles in front of consumers as long as
possible, maintaining a strong claim to their copyrights and trademarks, and thereby licensing
potential. As noted in the Introduction, all comic book characters tend to be easy properties for
which to maintain intellectual property rights. But this attribute may have been even more true of
superheroes, whose vivid costumes (with embedded logos), catchy names, and clearly defined
origin stories resulted in the kind of consistency, memorableness, concrete visuality, and
extractability from the text that met all the legal requirements of copyright and trademark
152

protection. That superhero stories—which tended toward patriotism—were generally tame
enough to pass the morality and representation requirements the publishers had set through the
CCA made the genre worth another go after the 1955 market crash.
The development of a fan community beginning around 1960 offered yet another reason
for publishers to gravitate toward superheroes. This new loyal reader base was in no small part
motivated by the narrative developments of the Silver Age, or as it was known back then, the
Second Heroic Age. According to fan historian Bill Schelly, it was the revival of The Flash that
first roused Jerry Bails, provoking him to start writing Julius Schwartz at DC, and leading to
their landmark 1960 meeting.
62
An avid reader of superhero comics when they first appeared in
the forties, Bails and many of his fellow fans represented a slightly older demographic than the
genre had initially targeted back during the war, and than competing companies like Dell and
Harvey had been focusing on in the post-CCA era. Over the next several years, these longtime
superhero fans were joined by newer fans in their teens and early twenties, many attracted by the
more realistic and ambiguous superheroes published by Marvel. The success of superheroes at
these two companies gradually spread across the industry as Charlton, Archie, and Harvey all
experimented with the genre, although to lesser results.
All the while, even as stories increasingly relied on company characters and house styles,
original authorship and individual creativity retained a central role in the development of this
fandom. Bart Beaty has pointed out that comic book fanzines tended to show a certain reverence
for creators, sometimes so totalizing that ―intentionality becomes the central organizing
episteme‖ of the publications, which frequently sought to discover the ―truth behind the work‖
they examined.
63
Along the same lines, one of Bails‘ first and most effective efforts in building
up the fan community was his organization of the Alley Awards, comic book culture‘s version of
153

the Oscars, recognizing the medium‘s best and brightest writers and artists. Notably, this
opportunity to single out and distinguish creators soon gave rise to comic books‘ first informal
convention, in March of 1964, when fans assembled at Bails‘ house to tally votes.
64
As Paul
Lopes reminds us, ―the role fans played in elevating comic book creators to their rightful place in
the comic book field‖ should not be underestimated. Equally important was the extent to which
DC and Marvel could begin using these ―popular fan-artists to ratchet up the symbolic value of
these properties and increase sales.‖
65
Indeed, in the first few years of the Alley Awards, most of
the recognition went to characters that Schwartz had helped edit, undoubtedly validating the
effort he had dedicated in initially establishing the relationship with Bails that helped jump-start
the movement.
This symbiosis would increase dramatically as DC and Marvel benefitted from the
attention of an increasing number of engaged fans and even at times, a mainstream press who
covered the growing trend. By mid-decade, creators were bold and self-conscious enough to
occasionally make themselves characters in their own stories and engage in some self-marketing.
One writer boasted in The Los Angeles Times that the job was such a great adventure he felt
―guilty getting money for doing this stuff.‖
66
What had developed within the comic book
community was a cult of authorship: a profound interest among fans and industry insiders in the
style, personality, and work of a particular subset of writers and authors. The handful of critics
and fans who were writing about comic books—and there were more each year—did not develop
a full-fledged theory of auteurism in the same way film critics of the same era did. However,
there is a great deal in common between what was happening in comic book culture in the mid-
1960s and the auteurist movement in cinema, particularly its later American iterations.
154

The origins of auteur theory in 1950s France were largely political and strategic, as New
Wave filmmakers like Truffaut worked to cultivate critical and theoretical space for their own
less traditional work.
67
Over time though, the theory developed into a more general approach
toward cinema, one that identified the director as a film‘s proper author and argued for the
importance and high quality of popular American films produced by the studio system. By the
early sixties, these ideas had begun to travel to the US, primarily through the writing of film
critic Andrew Sarris, whose theories might have had particular relevance for the slowly
burgeoning comic book culture. Notably though, there is no evidence to suggest that Sarris‘ work
directly influenced what was happening in the letter columns of comic books, particularly since
the authorship guessing game they contained began before he published his ideas. Still, there are
striking similarities between the tenants of American film auteurism and the views on authorship
that helped establish comic book criticism, and decades letter, still continue to shape it.
For instance, Sarris and his most vociferous opponent Pauline Kael, were both film critics
by profession, and were thus very interested in generating fixed evaluative standards to
determine quality.
68
This desire led Sarris to work to define directorial talent and subsequently
create a kind of pantheon of directors, not necessarily, according to him, ―a Ptolemaic
constellation of directors in a fixed orbit,‖ but an adaptable list of great men ―weighted toward
seniority and established reputations.‖
69
Early comic book fans were engaged in a strikingly
similar task in the late sixties and early seventies as they focused on creating checklists and
catalogues of the medium‘s greatest hits and the artists and authors responsible for them. In
1973, for example, Bails began publishing his four-volume Who’s Who in American Comic
Books; notably, it was a follow up to his 1964 list Who’s Who in Comic Fandom, yet another
reminder of the strong connection between fandom and auteurism.
70
Making minor celebrities
155

out of comic book artists and writers, the publication came just five years after Sarris released his
1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions. Both works established a hierarchy
of talent that impacted production, marketing and reception for years to come.
Like Jerry Bails and other comic book fans of the sixties, Sarris and his followers were
also intensely interested in the extent to which certain directors (authors and artists in the case of
comic books) had distinguishable personalities, proposing the existence of a recognizable style
as a primary criterion of value. Kael had argued that distinguishability in itself should not denote
quality, wryly noting that while the smell of a skunk is recognizable, it is not particularly good.
71

Of course, within comic book culture, where creators went un-credited for so many years, such
recognizablity had become incredibly important, indeed the only way for a worker to gain any
notice at all.
Also on the positive side, and perhaps most importantly in the long term, this focus on
authorship in both cinema and in comics helped to elevate the status of media widely considered
too lowbrow for the notice of serious academics and intellectuals. Just as collaborative
sweatshop working conditions and a refusal to assign credit to creators had in the forties damned
comic books as an unworthy cultural form, the restoration of the author in the seventies was able
to elevate the medium.
72
As a considerably more visible and popular medium, film was a great
deal more successful in earning widespread cultural respect. But gradually, comic book criticism
and history was increasingly seeing publication, and by the early nineties was the subject of
academic research.
73
The cult of authorship had effectively and permanently advanced the
medium‘s reputation and continues to do so today.
This was in part because auteurist film critics and comic fans were also both interested in
how an identifiable style could shine through even when the material was dry and mundane,
156

mass produced respectively by the Hollywood studio system or by the big comic book
publishers. Cinematic auteurism, just like comic book fandom, had found joy in discovering the
connections, internal meanings, and authorial signatures that more casual viewers and readers
likely missed or simply dismissed. At the time, this aspect of auteurism drew criticism, most
notably from Kael, who admonished Sarris and his ilk for making ―silly films‖ and ―trash‖ their
chosen province of analysis. Their auteurist method was all about working ―embarrassingly hard
trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to a preoccupation with mindless,
repetitious commercial products."
74
Kael identified the moral tendencies that characterized this
theory as emanating from the business world; its proponents emphasized style over substance
and reserved their highest critical praise for company products made by frustrated men working
against the many limitations of the material they were given.
75

While the feud between Sarris and Kael has perhaps been overstated, this particular
criticism has often been lost in the literature, along with the extent to which auteurism was able
to resolve the contradictions that seemed to emanate from the vast space between conceptions of
art as art and art as commerce. In identifying artistic value in the recognizable directorial styles
that could simultaneously make a film marketable and in celebrating the tensions generated by
corporatized practices of cultural production, cinematic auteurism helped transform commercial
mass media into art. Comic book auteurism would do the same.
Unfortunately, both cinematic auteurism and the cult of authorship in comic book culture
had several significant negative consequences as well. As film theorist Peter Wollen noted back
in 1969, auteur theory disregarded as ―noise‖ any element of the film that was indecipherable or
non-pertinent to the director and his vision, considering it all ―logically secondary, contingent, to
be discarded…[as] inaccessible to criticism.‖
76
Included among these irrelevant aspects of a film
157

are contributions made by all other personnel, like producers, cameraman, actors, and sometimes
hundreds of other individuals from set designers to grips. The same was true, although to a lesser
extent, within comic books. Fans of the medium tended to be a lot more interested in the
collaborative nature of comic book publishing, and long gave respect to multiple creative roles,
from editor all the way down to inker. But there remained a focus on a handful of select creators,
the Jack Kirbys of the medium, that tended to marginalize both the role of the publisher and its
employees as well as the contributions made to comic book narratives and characters within
other media, including radio, television, and even merchandising.
In this way, the theories of authorship that developed in the seventies in both comic book
and cinema culture tended to be nearly as blind to the practices of collaborative creative labor as
are the Romantic notions of authorship that validate copyright law. Both discourses prefer to
imagine one individual genius as responsible for a work of art—be it a poem, a novel, or a mass
produced commercial product—than recognize the contributions made by dozens or hundreds of
creative workers. For this reason, and many others, auteurism faced increasing criticism in the
U.S. and over time, lost favor among many film theorists and scholars. Regardless, it made a
lasting impact on the academy (where it continues to shape curricula), on cinema culture and
fandom (where it still dictates taste distinctions and art-house programs), and on the movie
business (in the packaging and marketing of many major and minor films).
Within comic book culture, the impact of the cult of authorship had at least as great an
impact. Because the publishing business was barely staying afloat in the late sixties and
seventies, companies were only growing more dependent on the loyalty of fans. And fans
increasingly were demanding creators with big names and recognizable styles. Appealing to
those tastes became a necessary strategy if comic book editors wanted to survive. And in the late
158

seventies and early eighties, it became so imperative, that publishers began pursuing aggressive
structural changes, most noticeably within distribution practices, as will be examined in Chapter
Three. Ironically though, throughout this entire period of time, authors and artists were growing
more and more irrelevant within the overall structures that organized comic book companies,
which were suddenly housed within major multimedia companies and had to answer to other
demands that soon superseded the needs of publishing.

Corporate Restructuring
Despite the growth of an increasingly loyal fan base, the comic book industry was still
facing too much competition from television and too much opposition from a changing
distribution system to thwart a continued loss of readers. The Silver Age revival of superheroes
had managed merely to slow the medium‘s steady decline; sales through the sixties remained
basically flat
77
before beginning their fall again in the seventies.
78
Were it not for a second
development within comic book culture—a shift in focus toward licensing—comic books may
have disappeared from public view and accessibility entirely. Indeed, by 1974, only six
publishers remained in business: DC, Marvel, Archie, Charlton, Gold Key, and Harvey. The
latter two had built their business on popular licensed characters targeted at kids, a strategy that
helped them, along with Charlton, survive into the eighties before they had to close their doors.
And were it not for the success DC and Marvel had in licensing their characters out to other
media, thereby attracting the financial backing of major corporations, these two publishers may
not have survived either.
In 1979,The New York Times reported that licensing revenues in the comic book industry
had officially surpassed those generated by publishing.
79
This shift, of course, had been
159

aggressively pursued for at least two decades prior, and was in fact an ambition since the
medium‘s very inception. Superman had begun the trend toward licensing, with others following
suit through the forties. But once the medium hit tough times, it was rare to find either television
programs or films based off comic book characters, with The Adventures of Superman (1952-
1958), starring George Reeves, the noted exception. The program was so popular, it boosted
sales of Superman merchandise and comics, prompting DC to launch additional titles built
around characters like Superboy and even Jimmy Olsen. In forging early ties between the comic
book industry and Hollywood, as described in the Introduction, The Adventures of Superman
also helped the medium make a gradual transition toward licensing. It also gave Jay Emmett, the
nephew of National Periodicals‘ President Jack Liebowitz, his start in Hollywood, and he took
the opportunity to get into merchandise licensing for a growing number of popular culture
properties. This was the beginning of LCA, an outgrowth of Superman Inc., and eventually a
subsidiary of National.
80

By the mid-1960s, the company represented more than 30 properties from which it was
generating an annual gross of an estimated $100 million. What had begun with Superman
merchandise was becoming one of the most attractive entertainment companies in the country,
not just because of its profits, but because of the expanding licensing possibilities it offered its
increasingly ambitious parent company, National Periodicals, which went public on the NYSE in
1965. When it came to synergistic business strategies, Liebowitz was almost certainly a
visionary, a man way ahead of his time, but certainly not alone there. Steve Ross, president of
parking company Kinney National Services, decided to purchase National in 1967, shifting
considerably the entire emphasis of his own well established business. The following year, he
explained to stockholders that in purchasing National, they acquired not just DC, whose
160

characters held ―universal‖ appeal, but also LCA, which held ―enormous opportunities.‖ Also of
note in the 1968 Annual Report was the fact that LCA represented Warner Brothers-Seven Arts;
buying National gave Ross a foothold in the entertainment industry, and the following year,
Kinney would purchase the studio, transforming the company into a major multimedia
conglomerate.
81

These purchases, along with Cadence‘s buyout of Marvel, roughly coincided with the
return of comic books to mainstream media, most notably the live action ABC series Batman,
and later a stream of comic-book based cartoons and live-action series on television. As a
crowning achievement of this decade and a half of multimedia exploitation Warner Brothers
released Superman in 1978. The film ultimately became a rallying point for the many
contradictions and conflicts that had gradually been forming around the comic book industry‘s
transition from publishing to licensing. But too often—both then and now—the controversy that
arose around the film was viewed as a singular event; as long as the parties could work out their
conflicts in this particular situation, comic book culture was ready to rejoice, even if the victory
failed to make changes across the industry. And by 1978, it was clear that changes were needed
across the entire industry. Throughout this boom in licensing, the health of comic book
publishing continued to suffer. Shrinking audiences and a failed distribution system threatened to
permanently marginalize comic books as a tangible, physical medium, even while the medium
and its intellectual properties were actually increasing their visibility within American popular
culture more broadly.
The publishing sector‘s failures, along with the simultaneous success of corporate-backed
licensing, eventually forced in a new operating paradigm that disrupted traditional business
practices, including, importantly, those related to labor. Accordingly, while many have largely
161

understood comic books of this era primarily through the development of fandoms and
superheroes, the logic of licensing had at least as great an influence on the shape of the form.
One major reason for this tremendous influence is the way in which the new corporate focus had
a tendency of trickling down into everyday life within the business, effecting all of those
associated with it, including, especially, creators. Comic books were of course not the only
industry where this kind of corporatization occurred. In the sixties, conglomerates sought sources
of exploitable content in other businesses as well, most notably, trade book publishing. While
Kinney was buying up National Periodicals, large firms like RCA and Time Inc. focused in on
independent publishing houses based in New York, Boston, and London. Much like comic book
publishing companies, these firms were often owned and run by individuals who built their book
lists on the basis of personal taste and instinct.
82
These takeovers have been well-documented,
typically by those personally involved, and thus provide a great deal of insight into how comic
book companies experiencing nearly identical circumstances might have been impacted on the
inside.
Former editor Jason Epstein has noted that there was a considerable dissonance between
the practices of a cottage industry like trade publishing and the demands of corporate ownership.
Before being bought out, most trade publishers were ―decentralized, improvisational, personal‖
and run best by ―small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their
autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers.‖ Nonetheless,
industrial conglomerates demanded that they run more like conventional businesses.
83
The same
could undoubtedly be said of comic book companies when they were first bought out. DC
Comics had retained the same key employees for decades,
84
and depended upon those
individuals heavily; most editors were fully entrusted with overseeing content and talent, and
162

many artists and authors had been in the business from its inception. Marvel too was a very
personal and close-knit operation, Stan Lee having worked his way up from an office boy
brought on in 1939, and eventually hiring most of the writers and artists himself, collaborating
with them on stories. For these publishers to fit within their new corporate structures, a lot would
ultimately have to change.
Within both trade book and comic book publishing though, these transformations
occurred over long periods of time, as the businesses gradually evolved in new directions.
Epstein describes his workplace in 1958 as "an unusually happy, second family" and a "second
home for authors.‖ In later years though, after most publishing imprints dissolved within vast
multimedia conglomerates, authors came to depend on their agents as they once did upon their
publishers.
85
He laments how authors no longer showed up unannounced or developed the kind
of close relationship with editors they once had, in which "the editor's emotions are almost as
much committed to the outcome as the author's."
86
André Schiffrin, the former head of Pantheon,
which was purchased by RCA in 1965, has also noted the dramatic changes in the day-to-day
workplace, detailing the damage such changes brought on former employees. For example, when
RCA sold their purchase to media mogul S.I. Newhouse, the new owner fired the president of
Random House and replaced him with ―an illiterate businessman‖ who was known for saying
"there is no person here who cannot be replaced by a ten-dollar-a-week clerk.‖ In this new
environment, "rumor was used to attack the position of anyone in disfavor, either by weakening
their bargaining position or by preparing them for an eventual sacking."
87

The comic book business also saw dramatic changes in the workplace environment, with
senior employees bearing the brunt of the changes, and, as in trade publishing, relationships with
writers and artists also shifting significantly. Driving these changes was the increasing focus on
163

licensing that began with National‘s purchase of LCA that motivated their buyout from Kinney.
Newsstand sales had been on the decline since the mid-fifties and a decade later, the publishing
business was barely profitable. Accordingly, for the executives at Kinney (which became Warner
Communications Inc. in 1971), comic books were only valuable when and if they could generate
either licensing fees or content in more profitable media like film and television; they functioned
as a kind of loss leader for Warner‘s other entertainment subsidiaries.
88
Inevitably, the
corporation‘s disinterest in the publishing business along with its diminishing value, trickled
down to effect the staff. In 1968, writers at DC banded together to form a union. A piece of the
concepts they created, so they could profit from licenses, was on their list of demands, along
with better benefits. Their requests unfortunately were ill-timed, coinciding with the rise of
fandom, and most lost their jobs.
89
In their place came younger workers, many of whom had
their roots in the fan community and were willing to do anything to work in their beloved
medium, including, not surprisingly, accepting much lower wages than their predecessors did. In
fact, any wage was a welcome change to some of these young men, who had for years
contributed work to fanzines without any pay at all in hope of breaking into the industry.
90

By 1970, workers in comic book publishing got behind another attempt to boost their side
of the business with the Academy of Comic Book Arts (ACBA), an organization designed to
promote popular appreciation for the form and address industry working conditions. Promoting
the comic book auteurism was a significant part of this strategy, which included awarding the
best creators in the field. Neal Adams, a popular artist with young fans, served as the president,
but he owned his own art studio, unlike other creators who felt too vulnerable to make aggressive
demands of their employers. Lacking their support, the ACBA floundered and dissolved by
1975. This year was a turning point for the business and perhaps coincidentally, this is the year
164

that Siegel and Shuster came back into the public eye. Sales had fallen so dramatically across the
industry that most publishers had folded.
91
At Warner Communications, domestic publishing
actually began losing money, even though both Mad Magazine and Independent News (their
distribution arm) were in the black, indicating that DC and their trade publishing division were
performing very poorly.
92
Bradford Wright notes that executives were considering shutting down
the publishing side of the business altogether.
93
Instead, executives decided to bring in a new
publisher (just as executives would later do at Random House), replacing journeyman Carmine
Infantino with Jenette Kahn, a 28-year-old children‘s magazine editor with experiencing in
licensing, who promised to reorganize the company. Marvel followed suit in 1978 with a new
editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, also 28-years-old.
These corporate shake-ups had dramatic results, just as they did in trade book publishing,
particularly among creators and rank and file workers who increasingly complained of a ―chilly
corporate atmosphere‖ and ―executives who cared only about the bottom line.‖
94
According to
Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, early in his decade-long tenure, Shooter ―established a
streamlined, top-down structure that gave him greater influence over the editorial and production
flow…the company completed its transformation from a family-run hack shop to a corporate
publishing house." Shepherding in an era at Marvel known for ―blatant profit-seeking‖ and
―lifeless retreads‖ of older works, he quickly became known as a ―tyrant‖ and ―the most reviled
figure in comics.‖
95
In 1979, The New York Times reported that at Marvel, ―the dissatisfaction
was so thick, you can touch it,‖ as the ―power-thirsty‖ editors and ―callous and inhuman‖
atmosphere drove most of the staff to threaten quitting. The reporter noted that this kind of
warring was more commonly seen only in corporate environments and attributed it to an
increasing emphasis on licensing that saw Stan Lee spending all ―his time on the West Coast,
165

striking deals with Hollywood‖ and staff members being reassigned to ―working with licensed
products exclusively.‖
96

That the importance and profiles of writers and artists had risen within the fan community
precisely when their relevance to corporate publishers had virtually disappeared temporarily
exacerbated conflict within the industry, and stymied attempts to improve working conditions.
When creators again tried to unionize under The Comics Creators Guild in 1978, infighting
doomed their effort. The new generation of creators that had been brought in cheaply to replace
the old guard in the late 1960s had been emboldened by the rise of auteurism and felt even more
entitled to recognition and benefits than had their predecessors. For their part, more established
writers believed that "the financial demands being advanced by their younger peers were so
unrealistic that the entire effort looked ridiculous" and publishers thought "the whole notion of
creators' rights sprang from the wrong-headed and self-important thinking about what comic
books were supposed to be.‖
97
Even Stan Lee, who had helped invent comic book auteurism, felt
by this point that writers and artists had become so self-indulgent, writing only what pleased
themselves, that they were destroying the business.
98
In short, for executives, comics remained a
lowbrow medium useful primarily in their ability to generate licensed products and possible
franchises, while creators and fans saw an art form built on the backs of uniquely talented writers
and artists.
There was nonetheless a way for publishers to use the medium‘s elevated cultural status,
and the closely associated rise of the comic book creator, to their advantage. Placating the fan
community, freelance creators, and staff, Kahn began repositioning DC Comics as a ―creative
rights company‖ while still pursuing a strategy of maximizing the bottom line and focusing on
licensing and merchandising, which by the early eighties accounted for two-thirds of revenue.
166

First, she began giving creators 20 percent of licensing fees for characters created since 1976, a
move that would have little impact on most licensing deals, which focused almost entirely on
well-established characters (like Superman) that had been created decades earlier. A few years
later, she instituted a royalty policy that awarded creators 5 percent of revenue after the first
100,000 sales of each comic book they produced, a number that was achieved less and less often
in an era of declining sales.
99
Marvel followed their lead in the eighties, creating the ―Marvel
Incentive Plan,‖ which like Kahn‘s strategy promised increased benefits that were both tangible,
and just as often, quite intangible.
100

These measures, though minor in monetary impact, were greeted warmly by the creative
community. Still under the leadership of Neal Adams, the attention of industry laborer was
moving away from working conditions and proprietorship and towards the issue of moral rights,
the ―view that an author‘s rights should include not only transferable economic rights to exploit a
work commercially, but also rights personal to the author to safeguard the artistic integrity of his
or her work.‖
101
As Ian Gordon has noted, for members of the comic book community, in which
the intellectual properties already belonged to the publishers, ―the ability to assert a moral right is
an ability to claim a form of ownership beyond the economic‖ and thus proved quite meaningful
to many within comic book culture.
102

The concept of moral rights had developed gradually in Europe, and put authors at the
center of the culture of copyright there, ―giving them as a matter of natural right control over
every use of their works that may affect their interests.‖ It did not however cross the Atlantic, as
American copyright law and culture continued to rely on a ―hard, utilitarian calculus…a calculus
that leaves authors at the margins of its equation‖ and ignores their potential artistic rights.
103

With the artistic community pursuing moral rights—which were legally unenforceable and
167

successfully separated attribution from economic reward—comic book publishers found
themselves in a strong position. They could maintain ownership of their most licensable
properties, whose copyrights and trademarks were strong after decades of protection, and
simultaneously negotiate contracts that promoted artistic integrity in hope that it would give
increased incentive to do good work, all while facing only a minimal risk of financial loss.

The Comeback of Siegel & Shuster
It was in this context that Sigel and Shuster reemerged into comic book culture. Despite
earlier legal disputes, Siegel had managed to find employment at DC Comics again in the early
sixties. But again, he and Shuster filed a lawsuit against the publisher, which again tried to
challenge DC‘s ownership of Superman as established in the original 1938 contract. Again,
Siegel lost his job, and after eight years of legal battles, they lost their suit—again.
‡
But times
had changed, and so had public opinion regarding the artistic value of mass media. No longer
would consumers accept the disparagement and mistreatment of creative workers, even in a once
reviled industry like comic books, particularly after the fan community and creative guilds had
worked so hard to raise the medium‘s cultural status and that of its artists and writers.
Accordingly, DC had to be more concerned with appearances. Despite their repeated legal
victories—which made their contractual advantage seem ironclad—DC Comics promised Siegel
and Shuster an annual stipend in April of 1975, and then failed to deliver on it. Around the same
time, the company sold the movie rights to Superman for $3 million.
104

‡
This time, Siegel challenged DC’s copyright renewal rights, trying to claim those rights for themselves. But
the court again held that Siegel and Shuster had transferred all rights to DC in their 1938 agreement, and had
then reaffirmed that transfer in a 1938 employment contract and again in the 1948 settlement. Principal and
Response Brief of Warner Bros. and DC Comics, Laura Siegel Larson v. Warner Bros. and DC Comics, 11-
55863, 11-56034, 15 (9th Cir. 2012).
168

Jerry Sigel was not happy about this. In his frustration, he wrote an angry letter, and sent
1000 copies to every major media outlet in the country.
105
A month later, the press finally picked
up the story, inciting an outpouring of sympathy and indignance. Journalists began visiting the
pair and bemoaning their destitution, describing in detail their supposedly squalid living
conditions.
106
The reporting struck an immediate chord with the American public, who began
writing into newspapers lamenting the ―economic and psychological plight‖ of these ―two
pioneers‖ as they engaged in a battle against corporate greed that reflected ―quite adversely upon
the morality of [the] times.‖
107
The press also caught the attention of Jerry Robinson, an old
writer on Batman comics, and Neal Adams. After ACBA collapsed, he was gearing up his next
fight for creator unionization and Siegel and Shuster‘s story had the kind of mythic possibility he
needed to make his case. Their campaign soon reached far beyond the comic book community,
pulling in respected cartoonists like Jules Feiffer and even literary luminaries like Kurt Vonnegut
and Norman Mailer, all of whom were invested in a discourse of authorship that extolled the
virtues of original and individual contributions to art and literature.
108

There were television appearances and in late November an article in The New York
Times that suggested DC was ready to offer more. With an eye toward the potential good press,
and a renewed understanding of Neal Adams‘ interest in moral rights, Jay Emmett, an EVP at
Warner commented, ―there is no legal obligation…but I sure feel that there is a moral obligation
on our part.‖
109
By Christmas, DC Comics had signed a new agreement providing annual
pensions of $20,000 to both men, along with lifelong benefits to them and their heirs.
110
Walter
Conkrite reported on the development on Christmas Eve of 1974, stating ―today at least..truth,
justice, and the American way have triumphed.‖
111
As a by-product of Siegel and Shuster‘s
battle, which had become a media event, an attitude of respect and even sanctity was being
169

extended from the popular press and the public more broadly to comic books and the individuals
that created them.
The biggest coup at the time though seems to have been that DC agreed to return Siegel
and Shuster‘s byline to all future Superman products. In return for DC‘s ―voluntary‖ payment
and restored byline, Siegel and Shuster had to reaffirm the publisher‘s ownership of all rights to
Superman, a legal settlement they were well aware would jeopardize any future efforts to reclaim
rights or more money.
§
Unfortunately then, their winning public credit had very little to do with
their own careers or financial security. In their sixties by this time, the pair had no hope of using
the publicity to find additional work in the future; Shuster had been blind for decades and could
no longer draw and Siegel had given up writing. But the creators wanted to be known as authors,
geniuses even, in the Romantic sense of the word, whether or not they could profit from it.
Siegel and Shuster were hardly the first creative laborers in history willing to exchange
the promise of compensation for credit. Catherine Fisk explains that, in the early twentieth
century, as firms were establishing the notion of corporate authorship in courtrooms (typically
based on the argument that a single human author was unnecessary and impracticable in
collaborative work settings) they had to make the idea acceptable internally as well. Most
companies ―managed to substitute non-legally binding norms of internal attribution of creativity
to individuals for the old practice of copyright ownership‖ and still maintained employee loyalty.

§
Siegel and Siegel v. Warner Bros., 524 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2008). When Siegel and Shuster settled
their 1948 case, they had made a similar deal, relinquishing all future rights to Superman in exchange for a
modest sum of money, $94,000. When the pair sued in 1969, trying to claim that renewal rights belonged to
them and not to DC, it was that 1948 agreement that undid them, because it essentially strengthened the
original 1938 contract, making it ironclad. And indeed, when Siegel’s heirs tried to terminate the 1938
contract and take back their rights, the concession for all rights that they made in the 1975 contract came
under question. Ultimately, the judge ruled that because DC’s annual stipend to them was “voluntary,” the
contract could not invalidate Siegel & Shuster’s termination rights. However, the pair could not have known
the outcome would favor them (the law that instituted termination rights was written the following year),
and must have realized that again reaffirming DC’s rights in a contract was a risk.
170

As a result, employees increasingly ―sought recognition as much as financial reward‖ and
attribution ―began to substitute for intellectual property (and the legal status of being the inventor
or author) as the currency that would enable employees to advance their careers.‖
112

This interest in credit certainly drove Adams and Robinson, who were at the signing of
that 1975 contract and reported to the press that they were ―very, very happy.‖
113
The story
continued generating press for several years, as Adams campaigned for creator rights, and the
value of moral rights in particular, in the US and then in Britain, telling reporters how he had
appealed to the company‘s morality and most importantly had gotten Siegel and Shuster‘s
―names [back] on the comics; there for all to see.‖
114
Robinson‘s fight for moral rights would
also last for many years, as he quietly insisted on his own claim to credit within the medium,
most notably for his authorship of the Joker (from the Batman mythology), even while such
efforts had little hope of generating any future income for him.
115

When Warner Bros. released Superman at Christmas in 1978, an opening credit proudly
declared the character was ―created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster‖ and the comic book
community happily rejoiced again in their victory. Notably though, in the forty years between the
first publication of Superman in Action Comics #1 and the release of the 1978 film, thousands of
people had contributed to that character in a variety of media. Each had a hand in shaping the
vision that began with Siegel and Shuster, but none were credited alongside them on screen. The
writers of the radio program, for example, were responsible for Superman‘s famous tagline,
―faster than a speeding bullet,‖ as well as the character‘s ability to fly, and a number of the
hallmark characters in his mythology, including Perry White and Jimmy Olsen. Through the
forties and fifties, radio voice Bud Collyer, cartoon animator Max Fleischer, and TV producer
Robert Maxwell each gave Superman new dimensions as they introduced the character to wider
171

audiences and new generations of fans. Even with this expansion across media, Superman might
have faded away as ―just a fad,‖ had it not been for a creative renaissance in comic books
beginning around 1958, the result of work from longtime artist Wayne Boring, writer Otto
Binder, editor Mort Weisinger, and dozens of other DC employees.
116

When none of these names appeared as a credit in the 1978 film though, nobody within
the comic book community seemed to mind. In this way, the lionization of Siegel and Shuster
served to disavow the very collaborative creative practices that generated and sustained
Superman, and indeed constitute all mass media production. And it remains unclear to what
extent glorifying these ―original‖ authors at the expense of more rank and file creative workers
would help either current or future generations of laborers. Public acknowledgment of their
contribution to popular culture could have provided an opportunity to elevate the comic book
medium as a whole and bring more attention to all creators; Superman again was in a position to
pave the way forward for the medium. But the nature of their victory—which emphasized credit
over stable employment and good pay and which exalted initial invention over development and
collaborative creativity—set a poor precedent for future talent. The industry was still in the state
of turmoil described above, with conditions at Marvel worse than ever and the Comics Creators
Guild floundering. And Siegel and Shuster were simply not representative of what the industry
had become in the years since Superman first appeared. The medium was becoming even less
original and more derivative than it was in those early years, meaning their supposed victory
would have little applicability moving forward.
More specifically, most of the popular books coming out of the late sixties and seventies
featured superheroes, and most of those superheroes had been created either back in the forties or
in the early sixties. So creators were not just borrowing different elements of established
172

archetypes as had Sigel and Shuster, but taking wholesale the work of others and updating it.
And this would remain true well into the eighties as the medium‘s most renowned emerging
auteurs—like Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman—made their name on old-time
superheroes and re-launches of previously well-known and heavily protected characters.
**

Accordingly, most creators had little hope of ever owning copyrights to either the books that
made them famous or, more importantly, those that might prove lucrative as franchises.
So while it seemed to hold out some kind of intangible promise and justice, DC‘s
decision to restore the duo‘s byline was no more than a minor concession—the company‘s
willingness to prioritize good public relations over an old feud with employees who refused to
drop a lawsuit they had no hope of ever winning. And there can be no doubt that the move
helped the company‘s public image, with both a general mass audience (that included Walter
Cronkite no less) and its increasingly narrow target reading demographic. For established fans,
the primacy of authorship had become very clear. And as these fans increasingly moved to the
center of the publishing industry‘s business model—particularly with the growth of direct
distribution in the eighties—DC and Marvel had no choice but to publicly embrace creators and
take seriously the concept of comic book auteurism. Honoring creators had become a means of
maintaining sales, just as it was in the more widely respected medium of film (although notably,
this was not yet the case in television).
Of course, in establishing more forcefully the role of individual artists and authors in
their books, they were not only pleasing readers, but also establishing more forcefully their
rightful claim to protect those books under copyright law, both legally and in the court of public
opinion. The visible presence of living breathing authors was still useful, just as it had been thirty

**
See for example, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns (1986), Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986) and Killing Joke
(1988), Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (1989-1996).
173

years earlier in Detective Comics v. Bruns. And holding up individual authors in front of popular
media and society more broadly, could help justify the ever-increasing legal protections to which
they, and other corporate copyright holders were laying claim. Indeed since the nineteenth
century, intellectual property holders in a wide swath of media had looked to authors whenever
they sought to expand their rights and strengthen their cultural monopolies. Fisk points to the
MPAA and a number of other groups, all of whom represented themselves and their employees
as joint authors in campaigns to expand copyright. Looking for ―creative ways to shore up the
legitimacy of their legal rights and to quell resistance,‖ their appeal to authors who could put a
human face on the benefits of broad protection is a ―strategy as old as copyright.‖
117

Looking at this tactic in more recent years, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi add that
the "many invocations of the genius-creator today are mere gambits. Music, publishing and
movie executives constantly invoke the genius-creator with piety…[and] celebrate the Romantic
notion of the creator, while they depend on crude economic calculation to lay claim to works for
hire, done on their time and with their supplies."
118
And the inherent risk of it, that the authors
themselves might advance their own claims of ownership were still minimal in comparison. As
Peter Jaszi notes, "the interests most directly at stake in disputes over the content of copyright
law usually are those of firms and individuals with capital investments in the means by which the
productions of creative workers are distributed to consumers. These distributors have reaped
most of the benefits of copyright's cultivation of Romantic authorship.‖
119

Termination Rights and Ongoing Legal Battles
The primacy of the corporate copyright holder certainly became clear with the passing of
the Copyright Act of 1976 (a.k.a. the Bono Copyright Term Extension Act), which ―looked like a
174

gift‖ to the major media corporations who had spent a decade lobbying for it. A ―tectonic shift in
copyright thinking,‖ the legislation ―marked a shift away from a regulatory approach to
copyright, in favor of one based on property rights, pure and simple."
120
But in order to expand
the scope of copyrightable work and significantly extending terms of copyright protection, the
Act also had to pledge some considerable gains to individual authors, in whose names these rule
changes were publicly justified. Most notably, there was the addition of termination rights, which
allows creators to terminate contracts in which they awarded perpetual rights to another party.
Though there is only a brief window of time during which this termination is possible, it opened
the door for authors to unwind their original deals and renegotiate terms, a particularly useful
opportunity if the property became more valuable after the original transfer of rights.
Fortunately for the media industries, works made for hire—which constitute the majority
of their creative production—have been excluded from this provision; because authors of these
works never owned the copyright to begin with, there is no agreement to terminate.
121
Still, there
are exceptions to this rule, for example, Siegel and Shuster. Although the judge in 1939 cared
little about whether they were employees creating works-for-hire or independent contractors, this
mundane distinction in employment status suddenly gained monumental importance in their
struggle. And so the surviving heirs of Siegel and Shuster, who passed in 1996 and 1992
respectively, reinitiated their fight against DC Comics for the rights to Superman. After the 1975
deal, the families had maintained good relations with the publisher, who had increased their
stipends, awarded them additional bonuses, and extended additional benefits to family
members.
122

The Copyright Act of 1976 however had changed the rules of the game, opening up the
possibility that the 1938 contract could finally be upended and undone, after three lengthy legal
175

battles over sixty years failed to. Siegel had been reluctant to go back to court in his old age, so
his wife waited until 1997, the year after he passed, to take action, effectively terminating the
contract in the final allowable year, 1999. Kahn‘s successor at DC, Paul Levitz, who had started
his career as a fan and come up through the industry as a creator, reportedly bore no ill will at
this renewed legal action.
123
A representative of the new creative rights, licensing-focused, and
corporate-backed comic book regime, he believed it was in DC‘s best interest to honor the now
legendary struggle of Siegel and Shuster. He promised to continue paying Siegel‘s widow the
voluntary stipend as long as they worked together on negotiations, which held up until 2002. But
in 2004, under the guidance of copyright attorney Marc Toberoff, she and her daughter filed suit
against DC, demanding profits from the character since 1999,
124
and 50 percent ownership into
the future.
125

Since then, the two sides, which now include Shuster‘s heirs as well, have been fighting
out the intricacies of the case in court, to great interest from Hollywood and less and less concern
from those within the comic book community. This reaction, a dramatic shift from the 1970s, is
reasonable considering the course the legal battle has recently taken. The flurry of suits, counter-
suits, and appeals have taken up as their primary focus mundane legal minutiae, leaving behind
disputes over creator exploitation and artistic integrity. For example, DC has taken Toberoff to
court, accusing him of swindling Siegel and Shuster‘s heirs into awarding him half of any rights
recovered.
126
This claim might have elicited public sympathy for the families, had they not
received over $4 million since the 1975 deal, not including benefits, bonuses, or possible future
profits, which may be considerable.
127
Other disputes in the continuing legal battle include
arguments over accounting—as the heirs try to attain exactly their portion of the profits—which
makes for less compelling drama than did the more mythic tale of corporate greed told in 1975.
176

Whether or not old contracts hold up in court under new laws has also been a repeated concern in
these cases. Even though, as Catherine Fisk has argued, contracts have operated as the driving
mechanism behind the shift in idea ownership from individual employee to corporate
employer,
128
for most of the public, contract law lacks the sexiness of origin stories.
Attention has also shifted away from Siegel and Shuster, whose byline was restored
decades ago and has prominently appeared in all Superman media since, to Jack Kirby, whose
heirs have been waging a battle against Marvel and Disney that very much resembles the 1975
campaign for Siegel and Shuster. One of the most beloved artists in the history of comic books,
Kirby helped to create properties like the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four. Unlike
Siegel and Shuster though, who created Superman before they were hired by DC, Kirby worked
with Stan Lee at Marvel to bring these stories to print. Accordingly, there is no contract to
terminate or negate in court, only the question of whether Kirby‘s creative labor was executed as
work-for-hire, in which case, he would have no claim to the characters‘ copyright.
Ultimately, Marvel and parent company Disney prevailed, with courts enforcing their
claim to the characters and determining that Kirby was indeed a contracted employee, his
intellectual labors thus belonging to his employer.
129
Intriguingly though, the dull details of this
case, which include whether or not Kirby purchased his own pencils or worked from home, have
received less press than the issue of credit. When The Avengers came to theaters in the summer
of 2012, a number of comic book critics encouraged a boycott of the film based on Marvel‘s
treatment of Kirby, and a controversy arose around whether or not Kirby would receive a screen
credit.
130
As it happens, just like Siegel and Shuster, he did receive such a credit, allaying the
concerns of many fans, even though this recognition would have no bearing on his legal rights or
financial compensation. Kirby‘s heirs have recently reflected this sentiment, stating that they are
177

ceasing their appeals process, and having ―amicably resolved‖ their dispute with Disney, hope to
pursue a ―shared goal of honoring Mr. Kirby‘s significant role in Marvel‘s history.‖
131
It seems
then that credit continues to be a sticking point within comic book culture discourse, a space in
which discourses of authorship that prioritize individual recognition is consistent with corporate
interests in maintaining full control of copyright.
Diminishing interest among comic book fans and creators in the affairs of Siegel and
Shuster‘s heirs may also have something to do with the possible consequences of their legal
actions, which became clear with a decision handed down in March 2008. After seventy years of
fighting, the Judge proudly asserted that ―Jerome Siegel‘s heirs regain what he granted so long
ago—the copyright in the Superman material that was published in Action Comics, Vol. 1.‖ This
victory was unfortunately less complete than it sounds. The material contained in that single
issue (and a small number of other works whose copyrights were also granted to Siegel)
constitutes only a few of the characteristics that make Superman Superman, for instance, his
super-strength, his blue and red costume, and his alter ego Clark Kent. Meanwhile, many other
elements of the Superman mythology—such as Kryptonite, his ability to fly, and characters like
Lex Luthor—which were created either by Siegel and Shuster after they became employees or by
other individuals entirely, remained the property of DC Comics.
132
This split in the copyright
would have made future exploitations of the character a significant challenge, since all three
parties would have to enter into an agreement with each licensee, a daunting task.
As it happens, the heirs of both Siegel and Shuster, had separately, prior to the 2008
victory, decided to avoid such challenges and sell back to DC all of their rights to Superman and
all related characters for undisclosed, but presumably large, sums of money. In the case of
Shuster‘s claims, a 1992 deal between his surviving sister and DC had closed the matter, and in
178

the case of Siegel‘s heirs, a 2001 deal struck by their lawyer had relinquished, finally, any
remaining claims to the character. In the years that followed, individual family members
unhappy with the terms they had struck had brought the matters back to court, resulting in the
temporary return of Superman to the Siegel family. Nonetheless, subsequent decisions made in
2012 and 2013 reversed that victory and, pending more appeals, reinforced the earlier sale
agreements, conceivably putting an end to the sixty-five year legal fight.
133

Siegel and Shuster‘s disputed status as independent contractors, and their temporary
ability to terminate their contract did nonetheless reveal a kind of rupture in the careful balance
that the copyright regime maintains. During the two decades in which the duo retained public
credit for Superman—claiming a moral right to their creation—but were barred from asserting
attendant legal rights, that balance withheld. In that moment, the discourses of auteurism and
copyright, both of which rely on a rhetoric of individual and original authorship, were in perfect
accordance. With termination rights however, the purely rhetorical glorification of creators
obtained some legal muscle, and the fiction of solitary authorship came into contact with the
reality of artistic collaboration. Siegel and Shuster could represent creative laborers on the level
of cultural discourse, but their families‘ claim to the financial and legal rights that accompany
that claim to authorship exposes the incompleteness of their creation. Clearly, authors in
transmedia are only ever partial authors. It is for precisely this reason that almost all creative
labor in the media industries is executed as work-for-hire, protecting corporate copyright holders
from the complications like termination rights.
Were Superman a less lucrative intellectual property, Hollywood may already have given
up on him. Ongoing legal disputes have been known to hold up the development of films and
television programs based on preexisting characters.
134
No producer wants to find himself
179

embroiled in the kind of costly lawsuits that result from copyright disputes, or risk the possibility
he will have to offer profits to a previously unknown rights holder. Accordingly, were every
creator, writer, artist, director, and actor be able to retain the rights to the creative contributions
they made to every intellectual property, mass media production as we know it would cease to
exist. Anyone interested in further exploiting a title—in sequels, merchandising, spinoffs, or
even distribution in other windows—would have to hand-stitch a ―motley quilt of copyright
assignments obtained one by one from [their] motley crew.‖ As Bill and Ellen Seiter have noted,
―work-for-hire agreements make the process of piecing together a clean chain of title for the
motion pictures you produce much more manageable‖ and in fact are what makes large scale
multi-media production possible.
135

Even with this practical recognition of collaborative creative labor though, copyright law
managed to retain its historical rhetorical reliance on the original author genius in the notion of
the corporate author, who deserved credit by virtue of having invested in the creative process.
This anthropomorphism depended heavily on the simultaneous development of corporate
personhood, which helped to bridge ―the conceptual gap between collective and individual
creation just when a bridge was needed‖ and allowed corporations to be ―assimilated as rights-
holders within the traditional, individualist frameworks that dominated legal doctrines.‖
136

Accordingly as non-collaborative, non-derivative authorship has become increasingly rare with
the rise of mass media and the dominance of the franchise, the work-for-hire exception that
consolidates copyright ownership in the hands of a single corporate author has remained an
essential legal mechanism. And the discourse of authorship, particularly with regards to moral
rights, has proved just as essential, carrying out the erasure of collaborative labor within the
180

cultural sphere in the same way the language of copyright does in the political and economic
sphere.

Individual Auteurs vs. Corporate Authors
There is, in short, a considerable dependency between authors and industry, and between
ideologies of auteurism and those of capitalism. In spite of, or maybe because of this
fundamental connection, a kind of animosity developed, in the years after Siegel and Shuster
won their 1975 campaign, between the industry‘s major publishers and its major creative voices.
On numerous occasions, artists and writers have declared that the companies do not understand
the medium, that they depend on factory production, that they cower in the face of censorship,
and that they fear any amount of change.
137
These accusations may be true to an extent, but their
vitriol tends to belie the underlying symbiosis between the two sides.
Comic book criticism has also tended to maintain this antagonism between the larger
publishers and the medium‘s auteurist creators, particularly those that work in more niche
corners of the medium. It is a rhetoric that leads to considerable contradictions. Throughout his
widely read text Comics and Sequential Art (1985), for example, Will Eisner
138
contributes to a
kind of cult of authorship, appropriately highlighting the work of comic book darlings like
Robert Crumb and Alison Bechdel, but also making arguments like ―the writer and artist should
be one person‖ and untrue statements like, ―comics have a history of being the product of a
single individual.‖
139
These claims force Eisner into strange maneuverings that obscure the
collaborative nature of the medium. For instance, even after he admits that each position in
comic book production is important (including letterer, inker, etc.),
140
he argues that all creators,
including the writer, should be subservient to the artist, and then dedicates all but one chapter to
181

that role. He also claims that teams of creators are simply not natural, suggesting that it has been
publishers, and their avoidable need to meet schedules, that have made the medium strangely
collaborative.
141

This kind of revisionist history not only marginalizes countless forms of creative labor in
order to bolster claims of individual authorship, but also ignores the way business structures—for
better or worse—always have and always will play a fundamental role in shaping mass media.
For decades, comic book publishing and all those who worked within it remained totally
dependent on the corporate backing that kept distribution systems intact despite perpetually
declining sales and sometimes nonexistent profits. As the seventies and eighties wore on, comic
book writers and artists were finding that they could finally venture out on their own to create
work and sell it to readers, but had corporations not been there to keep the industry alive through
the fifties and sixties, there would not still be a medium to work in.
††
Still, critics like Douglas
Wolk, the New York Times comic book reviewer, blatantly denies this history, theorizing two
worlds of comic books, auteurist and mainstream, with ―almost no overlap between them.‖
Arguing that individual style matters almost at the exclusion of all else, he disparages the
mainstream publishers and the superhero genre for the length of an entire book only to at one
point reveal his own personal attachment and adoration of the all the marquee superheroes from
Marvel and DC.
142

Auteurist claims have more recently been moving into even less likely contexts. Just as
Romantic notions of the individual creator genius traveled from highbrow forms like art and
literature, into more collaborative and previously lowbrow media like cinema and comic books,

††
See Chapter Three for more on the history of distribution and the failures of independent approaches, most
notably the Underground Comix movement, to sustain readership and profitability without the political and
economic infrastructure provided by major publishers.
182

these theories continue following that trajectory, increasingly informing the most collectively
produced mass media texts. Throughout popular culture then, audiences are more and more often
identifying singular personalities as guiding, sometimes divinely inspired, forces behind
productions that are in actuality generated by armies of creative workers. This has been true of
television series, web sites, film franchises, and even vast transmedia narratives, with many
regarding Kevin Feige, for example, as the architect of the Marvel Universe, or identifying Joss
Whedon‘s works colloquially as the ―Whedonverse.‖
And as Jenkins has pointed out, quite often these individual authors, imagined as ―The
Guiding Spirit‖ of the texts they care for, are positioned in opposition to ―The Powers That Be,‖
the networks and corporations charged with making practical production decisions based on
economic calculations. Accordingly, even as most fans tend to show ―a surprisingly high
capacity‖ to disagree with the auteurs they adore and to think around the constraints and
limitations of the source material they otherwise love, they still put faith in this antagonism
between auteur and corporation. It can help manage frustrations around the text and reconcile the
sometimes visible conflict between creativity and commerce.
143
In this way and many others
then, auteurism continues to be a useful model for consumers thinking through conceptions of
creative production and its many pitfalls. Thus, as John Caldwell has noted, even while
negotiated and collective authorship have long represented the dominant paradigm in
Hollywood, and will to an even greater degree with the rise of transmedia, ―the auteur myth still
very much lives on‖ in discourses that maintain the illusion of personal creativity.
144

Although he wrote decades before this development, Michel Foucault offers a potential
explanation for why this understanding of authorship has become so useful and therefore so
prevalent. Acknowledging how intellectual property rights helped establish the conception of the
183

author in the first place, he argues that authors remain, first and foremost ―a function of
discourse.‖ Constructed as unifying, rational entities with transcendent powers of creativity and
profundity, they become capable of resolving unevenness and neutralizing any incompatibilities
and general contradictions within the text. In this respect, contemporary transmedia—which
often expands in unruly ways—can actually benefit even more from ―the author function,‖ as
Foucault called it, than traditional single-medium titles have. It is the very multitude of creative
hands and the disarray that can characterize their production practices that demands the
organizing and prioritizing force an identifiable author can provide, if only discursively. In
addition, more than ever before, audiences need help classifying the worth of texts and
distinguishing between content they care about and content they would prefer to discount, a
process that can be simplified through the use of author ―brands.‖
145

The author has thus lately become an essential mechanism for media producers—both
independent and corporate backed—who seek to embrace grassroots, user-driven circulation
systems. Accordingly, as Jonathan Gray explains, the entertainment industry has been working
hard to ―actively create artistic aura‖ in the texts they distribute, creating author figures behind
their origins, and insisting on the uniqueness and authenticity of what are otherwise standardized
industrial products, thereby rendering them works of art.
146
In this way, convergence culture has
supported a version of authorship that continues to bolster the interests of corporate producers
who have little in common with the individual artists on whose aura they so heavily depend.
While there is evidence that contemporary versions of auteurism better acknowledge
collaborative creative labor, an increasing interest in authorship on the part of fans and casual
audiences alike, continues to shore up copyright claims for major conglomerates, in court and
outside of it.
184

Conclusion
In many ways, DC‘s willingness, after 1975, to recognize Siegel and Shuster as
creators—rhetorically elevating their status—while denying them legal and economic rights was
fundamentally consistent with the company‘s strategy all along and indeed with the intentions
and legacy of copyright law more broadly. And of course, it was quite consistent with theories of
auteurism as well, in as much as these theories—particularly in an American context—tended to
idolize individual artistic ambitions in ways that celebrated and ultimately helped legitimize
mass media texts. In the process, these cultural and legal discourses also helped justify or
obscure the baser tendencies of commercial cultural production, including, in this case, poor
labor practices and overreaching intellectual property claims. While the legal battle for
ownership of Superman has been a particularly massive undertaking, and one not without
peculiarities, it nonetheless typifies the ways in which legal structures determine both cultural
production and reception. And the demands of copyright law, in framing public conceptions of
authorship, played a considerable role in the way attitudes shifted towards both Siegel and
Shuster‘s worth as creators and comic books artistic value more generally.
Unfortunately, neither the increased respect they earned nor the increased interest many
of today‘s media authors are finding are making significant strides in improving working
conditions for creative laborers. Because, despite this widespread attention to solitary creators,
most mass culture is still produced in the way it always has been—indeed the way most
highbrow culture has been as well—collectively. And this tendency toward collaboration and
derivative products has only intensified amidst the rise in franchised properties. The result is a
public culture that often idealizes and romanticizes original authors and an industry that rarely
creates the kind of media that would give such authors an opportunity to thrive. In film, for
185

example, as Eric Hoyt notes, "the market for original screenplays has eroded dramatically as
risk-averse studios gravitate toward pre-branded material" so that a "new generation of original
screenwriters finds it harder to sell scripts, see them made, and earn a produced screenwriting
credit—a prerequisite to getting steady studio employment working on adaptations or franchise
films.‖
147

The failure of auteurism to effect broader change is at least in part due to its fundamental
connection with copyright law which, for all its problems in the past, ―now fits ever more poorly
the way people are actually making culture". Production continues to be a social phenomenon in
which ―everyone makes work on the basis of, and in reference and relationship to, existing
work.‖
148
However, as long as intellectual property remains fundamental to the functioning of
the culture industries, corporations will continue to fight for protections to expand into every
crack and crevice of digital culture. Along the way, each of these spaces will necessarily be
reimagined in ways that suppress any complicating details, particularly those that point to the
collaborative, derivative, and messy nature of almost all creative work.
149
The myth of
Superman‘s real-life origin, in the way it glorifies original solitary authors, unfortunately
contributes to this artifice around creative labor, and in so doing, reinforces a proprietary logic
with regards to artistic and financial credit. The emphasis the comic book community placed on
moral rights and proper attribution in particular threatens to justify an approach to production
that replaces good compensation and employee stability with the promise of artistic recognition.
The importance of receiving credit for creative labor, be it internal or public, functions as
yet another industry narrative that threatens to further degrade working conditions, but it is
hardly the only one. The culture industries‘ continued suppression of details around labor has
recently been accompanied by narratives about the joys of creativity in the digital age and the
186

flexibility of freelance employment. Jyotsna Kapur has pointed out that many have hoped that
―meaningful and creative work‖ would rescue everyday workers from the fragmented labor that
used to characterize the culture industries. Some have even described it as ―an expression of
creativity‖ not unrelated to more Romantic conceptions of authorship. Meanwhile, a higher and
higher volume of cultural work is outsourced internationally each year, often to what Kapur calls
―soul-destroying sweatshops,‖ while most creative workers face worse conditions than ever.
150

Catherine Fisk has also documented degraded working conditions for creative laborers,
particularly freelancers who have exchanged job security for greater flexibility and the promise
of ―greater human capital development opportunities‖ and increased mobility.
151
She notes that
with the rise of independent contractor designations, employers can avoid federal and state labor
protections including the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the
Civil Rights Act.
152
In trying to understand how corporate media producers have been able to
shore up power and maintain a constantly ―churning workforce,‖ John Caldwell has also pointed
to industry narratives. Trade stories told between workers create an ―ethos of the survival of the
fittest,‖ that heighten job securities and personal anxieties as an increasing amount of labor is
offloaded onto ―underpaid/overworked aspirants.‖
153

Because nearly all employment contracts in contemporary culture industries define any
work accomplished as work-for-hire, most workers will never have the opportunity to claim their
own copyrights. Despite the fundamental and original purpose behind copyright law, the only
legal and financial benefits most authors reap from their own intellectual labors are those
explicitly delineated in their contracts. The achievement of credit without attendant rights thus
brings with it no guarantee of better compensation or increased job security. The occasional
willingness of workers to exchange these tangible benefits for the intangible promise of moral
187

rights, a byline, or internal recognition from colleagues, thus serves to prop up corporate interests
in ways that do not collectively serve employees. The same can be said for any industry myth
that gives rank and file creative workers the notion that properly attributed credit—could such a
thing even exist in most multimedia production—will one day help them strike it rich.
The debate over moral rights, the rise of auteurism, and the glorification of individual
creator contributions have oftentimes seemed to offer a kind of antidote to poor working
conditions and other problems within the creative industries. By extension, the prominence of
these discourses within comic book culture, particularly as they emerge in the mythological
telling of Siegel and Shuster‘s long struggle, has occasionally framed the medium as a kind of
antidote to these problems on a broader scale. Understood by many to be a quintessentially
auteurist art form, shaped by noble battles over creative control and creative rights, comic book
publishing seems at time like a fringe medium, with the potential to change the way other media
industries approach their workers, their fans, and even their content. But within the industry, the
rise of fandom and auteurism and creative rights—all of which were shaped by an exceedingly
powerful legal discourse—were a boon to business that was almost always consistent with
commercial success. And that commercial success was, in turn, always consistent with
conglomerate power; the way in which auteurism rose up alongside the growth of these corporate
infrastructures suggests that the two are neither oppositional nor disconnected. Indeed the
strength of the corporate author was built on the strength of the romanticized creator-geniuses
who made their gradual justification palatable, culturally and legally. The story of Siegel and
Shuster without the sheen of rebellion, victory, and glory suggests that comic books are auteurist
only in as much as that auteurism promises to support the collaborative corporate authorship to
which it is supposedly set in opposition.
188

The presence of moral rights and an auteurist discourse within comic books and the fight
they represent has seemd like an antidote to these problems within the creative industries, a
response to poor conditions in commercial media production. And the prominence of these
discourses within comic book culture has made the medium seem like an antidote to these
problems on a broader scale. Shaped by auteurs, by valiant creative fights, run by the creatives,
comic books are a rebel medium speaking truth to power. But within the industry, the rise of
auteurs was a boon to business and was always consistent with commercial success. And that
commercial success was in turn always consistent with conglomerate power, especially
considering that auteurism rode up alongside and along with the initial growth of the
conglomerates. Taking the rebellion, the victory, the glory out of Siegel and Shuster‘s fight and
their myth means looking at comic book culture for what it is—a medium that is auteurist only in
as much as that auteurism supports the collaborative corporate authorship its supposedly set in
opposition to.

1
Jerry Marsh, “Stealing ‘Man of Steel,’” Cleveland Jewish News, March 17, 2000.
2
Andrew Veitch, “How Superartist Won the Dough,” The Guardian, June 16, 1979. See also, Erik Knutzen,
“Man of Steel Splinters an American Dream,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1979; Mary Breasted,
“Superman’s Creators, Nearly Destittue, Invoke His Spirit,” New York Times, November 22, 1975; Samuel
Frazer, “Superman to the Rescue,” New York Times, December 1, 1975, sec. Letters to the Editor.
3
Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 1995), 8.
4
Jane Gaines, Contested Culture: The Image,the Voice,and the Law (University of North Carolina Press, 1991),
209.
5
Paul Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox (Stanford Law and Politics,
2003), 4.
6
Martha Woodmansee, “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,” in The Construction of Authorship ed.
Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
7
Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, “Introduction,” in The Construction of Authorship ed. Martha
Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 6–7.
189

8
Woodmansee and Jaszi, “Introduction,” 6–7.
9
Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 1995), 7; 1–2.
10
Woodmansee and Jaszi, “Introduction,” 3.
11
Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford University Press, 1991), v; 202.
12
Rose, Authors and Owners, 5.
13
Catherine L. Fisk, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property,
1800-1930 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 8; 63; 74; 61.
14
Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use (University Of Chicago Press, 2011), 16.
15
Fisk, Working Knowledge, 67.
16
Thomas Streeter, “Broadcast Copyright and the Bureaucratization of Property,” in The Construction of
Authorship ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 305–306.
17
Fisk, Working Knowledge, 219–226.
18
Ibid., 156–157.
19
Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America, 2nd, revised (Verso,
1998), 17–18; 20–21.
20
Fisk, Working Knowledge, 236–237.
21
Siegel and Siegel v. Warner Bros., 524 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2008).
22
Transcript, Detective Comics v. Bruns Publications (S.D. N.Y.: National Archives, 1939),
http://thecomicsdetective.blogspot.com/2010/07/dc-vs-victor-fox-testimony-of-will.html. Testimony from
Max Gaines. According to Gaines, Siegel and Shuster’s idea for Superman initially came to him in 1936. The
pair had submitted it to Dell Publishing, for whom Gaines was printing two comic books. He wasn’t interested
at the time, but the following year, he wrote Siegel and Shuster and asked to see drawings. They sent him
back a week’s worth of strips. He ultimately decided he did not want them, but thought they might be useful
to Jack Liebowitz and Vin Sullivan at DC Comics, and went ahead and forwarded the strips to them.
23
Knutzen, “Man of Steel Splinters an American Dream.”
24
Les Daniels, Superman: The Complete History (Chronicle Books, 2004).
25
These workshops, depicted famously in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay, were generally residential
apartments or small rented spaces in which dozens of artists and writers would work long hours together to
create individual stories or issues on an opportunistic and freelance basis. Most of them were defunct by the
mid-1940s. For more, see Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and
Culture (New York: Continuum, 2009), 110–114; Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the
Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books, 2005), 134–156; Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural
History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2009), 111–116.
26
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 118. These paid artists included Wayne Boring, Paul Cassidy, John Sikela, Ed
Dobrotka, Ira Yarbrough, and Leo Nowack. Gabilliet notes that Siegel and Shuster “benefitted from
190

exceptional conditions in comparison with other writers and artists.” By 1941, they were earning $35 per
page, which would have brought in $75,000 annually between the two men. By the late 1940s, they were
earning $800 per week from the comic strip alone.
27
Daniels, Superman, 44–63.
28
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 247–249; Siegel and Siegel v. Warner Bros., 524 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2008).
Filed in 1947 and decided in favor of National in 1948, the suit challenged the release form that Detective
Comics had asked Siegel and Shuster to sign upon publication of Action Comics #1.
29
Ted White, “The Spawn of M.C. Gaines,” in All in Color for a Dime, ed. Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson (New
York: Ace Books, 1970), 22; Fred von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, Tales of Terror! The EC Companion
(Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), pt. Transcript from EC Offices (1955).
30
Gaines had believed that Siegel and Shuster benefited from a “relatively lush position” until “a couple of
sharp lawyers got a hold” of them “and got them malcontented.” von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of
Terror!, pt. Transcript from EC Offices (1955).
31
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 6–7.
32
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 116.
33
Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 113.
34
Testimony, DC v. Bruns. Testimony of William Eisner, *299-300
35
Dwight MacDonald, “A Theory Of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard
Rosenberg (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 65.
36
Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University
Of Chicago Press, 2011), 20.
37
Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi have noted that “the court wants a living breathing author” and will
reward neither time and effort on its own nor more collective enterprises. Martha Woodmansee and Peter
Jaszi, “Introduction,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed.
Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 10–11.
38
Aufderheide and Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use, 23.
39
In the courtroom, DC’s lawyers proved to be far more competent than their competitors as did company
heads Jack Liebowitz and Harry Donenfeld upon taking the stand. Unlike their competitors at Bruns, these
were men who had vast experience with the American legal system, and they were at a place in their careers
where they were ready to use the law to their advantage, instead of being victimized by it. Testimony, DC v.
Bruns. Testimony from Harry Donenfeld. For more on Donenfeld’s long history with the law, see Jones, Men of
Tomorrow.
40
Testimony, DC v. Bruns. Testimonies from Jack Liebowitz and Jerome Siegel.
41
Ibid. Testimony from Jack Liebowitz.
42
Ibid., pt. Testimony of Jerry Siegel.
191

43
Testimony, DC v. Bruns. Testimony from Jerome Siegel.
44
Detective Comics v. Bruns Publications et al., 111 F.2d 432 (2nd Cir. 1940).
45
Reports have made this claim in a variety of ways: the single “sleepless night” appears in Breasted,
“Superman’s Creators, Nearly Destittue, Invoke His Spirit”; “Jerry Siegel Obituary,” Economist, February 17,
1996; Marsh, “Stealing ‘Man of Steel.’” Superman appearing to him “whole one night” Harmetz Aljean, “The
Life and Exceedingly Hard Times of Superman,” New York Times, June 14, 1981, and in one case, Siegel
figuratively giving “birth to a character” Veitch, “How Superartist Won the Dough.”
46
Siegel and Siegel v. Warner Bros., 524 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2008).
47
Starting in 1939, Siegel took the lead on both legal action and employment and rights negotiations for both
him and Shuster, and continued to throughout the course of their lives. Why Shuster did not take a more
active role is unclear, but it seems likely that it was quite simply a matter of personality; Gerard Jones (2005)
describes Siegel as angry and self righteous and consequently more litigious, while Shuster was quiet and
more mild in temperament. It is also possible that as the “author” or creator of the Superman story and
dialogue (as opposed to the images), Siegel felt more entitled to recognition and to financial reward. After all,
it was Siegel, and not Shuster, who was called to the stand to testify to Superman’s originality.
48
White, “The Spawn of M.C. Gaines.”
49
Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (Monkeybrain, 2006).
50
Bart Beaty, “The Recession and the American Comic Book Industry: From Inelastic Cultural Good to
Economic Integration,” Popular Communication 8, no. 3 (2010): 203.
51
Bill Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom (McFarland, 2010), 202.
52
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 37, 77, 132.
53
For the most thoughtful account of the simultaneous development of fandom and comic book auteurism,
see, Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (Continuum, 2001), 250–258. For additional
accounts, see Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture, 1st ed.
(Continuum, 2009), 175–185; Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 43–47 and the collected works of fan historian Bill Schelly.
54
Brooker, Batman Unmasked, 254.
55
Jenkins, Henry, “The Guiding Spirit and the Powers That Be: A Response to Suzanne Scott,” in The
Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (New York: Routledge,
2013), 53–58.
56
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University
Press, 2006), 127.
57
Up through this time, it was standard to suppress information about creators even when the texts were
enormously popular, so long as they were still a part of lowbrow forms. Miranda Banks, for example, has
written about how the head writer and executive producer of I Love Lucy (1951-1957, CBS) Jess
Oppenheimer, despite his enormous role in creating and shaping the role was completely unknown to the
192

public and even the object of some amount of disrespect within the television industry. Miranda Banks, “I
Love Lucy: The Writer-Producer,” in How To Watch Television, ed. Ethan Thompson and Mittell, Jason (New
York: New York University Press, 2013).
58
Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 175–181.
59
Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, Stan Lee: And the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book (Chicago:
Chicago Review Press, 2003), 214–216.
60
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 34.
61
John Jackson Miller, “Title Spotlights,” Resarch Resource, Comichron: The Comics Chronicles, accessed June
8, 2014, http://www.comichron.com/titlespotlights.html.
62
Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom, 21–2.
63
Beaty, Comics Versus Art, 113.
64
Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom, 24.
65
Paul Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2009), 96–98.
66
Barbara Saltzman, “Superman: From Phone Booth to Sound Booth,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1975.
67
Francois Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, vol. 1
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 224–37.In this article, first published in 1954 in Cahiers du
Cinema and republished widely since. In it, he harshly criticized the “Tradition of Quality” in postwar French
film, particularly its highbrow literary adaptations, arguing that less structured films in which one individual
writes and directs are better. Incidentally, these latter auteurist films were what Truffaut and his close friends
at Cahiers were making.
68
Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticims, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004), 556.
69
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and
Marshall Cohen, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 563.
70
Other examples include Jim Steranko’s History of Comics (1970), Aldridge and Perry’s Penguin Book of
Comics, Les Daniel’s Comis: A History of Comic Books in America, and Maurice Horn’s The World Encyclopedia
of Comics (1976).
71
Pauline Kael, “Circles and Squares,” Film Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1963): 12–26.
72
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 117.
73
The first two notable scholarly works are Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics
(Manchester University, 1989); M. Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1990).
74
Kael, “Circles and Squares,” 677; 675; 679.
75
Ibid., 674–675.
76
Peter Wollen, “The Auteur Theory,” in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1972).
193

77
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 56. According to Gabilliet, sales did peak around 1966, but they were in
decline by 1968, and had leveled off again by 1970.
78
Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Taylor, 1993), 74–82; “Comic Books Profit
by Rush To Legitimacy,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1974.
79
Lopes, Demanding Respect, 73.
80
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 291.
81
Kinney National Service, Incorporated Annual Reports (Kinney, 1971 1967), ProQuest Historical Annual
Reports.
82
John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed.
(Plume, 2012), 101–106.
83
Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future, 1st ed. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002),
1. Andre Schiffrin had a similar experience noting in particular that his imprint, though it had always earned
enough to cover its costs, could not keep up with the growth expectations of a major multimedia corporation.
In response, editors began to move into unexplored areas and genres, and before long, "the logic of the profit
center began to be counterproductive. The need for each entity to achieve an annual increase in sales and
profit forced every part of the publishing house to duplicate the other's efforts and to compete for the most
lucrative titles." Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over
Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (Verso, 2001), 76.
84
Wright, Comic Book Nation, 255. Wright explains that the economic structures had remained essentially
unchanged since the 1940s, and the publishers had retained many of the original staff.
85
Epstein, Book Business, 5–6.
86
Ibid., 36.
87
Schiffrin, The Business of Books, 88–89.
88
This perspective is reflected in the corporation’s annual reports from National’s purchase in 1967 through
1986, when Warner Communications merged with Time Inc. The reports suggest that throughout this period
of time, DC’s publishing business was actually losing money, or barely breaking even. These low profits
remained acceptable however, because DC continued to generate massive profits for LCA, which was housed
in the Motion Picture and Television division Kinney National Service, Incorporated Annual Reports; Warner
Communications Incorporated Annual Reports (WCI, 1986 1971), ProQuest Historical Annual Reports.
89
Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 59.
90
Describing the story of eventual Marvel and DC freelancer Richard Buckler, fan historian Bill Schelly writes
that "it took moving to New York City, and a period of near-starvation while staying week-to-week at the 34th
St. YMCA in Manhattan, for [him] to make a realistic attempt to break into the industry,” a not uncommon tale
at the time. Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom, 140. So-called successes like Buckler were thrilled to share
tiny living quarters with other artists, and rejoiced in a limited amount of freelance work from Marvel or DC,
hardly the kind of employment that could sustain the company’s former creative staff, most of whom had
194

been supporting families on their comic book salaries. Meanwhile, an untold number of failures—fans lured
by writing contests and short term promises of employment from publishers—moved their entire lives to
New York only to find themselves returning back home empty handed shortly after. Ibid., 129. The fans’
demands, as well as their aspirations, had changed the business and were pushing the industry in a new
direction, making old talent far less valuable to both management and to the new more active readers who
were excited by the prospect of new blood on staff.
91
DC Comics and Marvel were the only major players left. Archie Comics was still bringing in some profit.
That company went public in the 1970s and like DC and Marvel, relied on licensing to survive the decade. The
other three remaining publishers, Charlton (specializing in fad genres), Gold Key (specializing in licensed
characters, many of which they purchased when Dell closed its doors in 1974), and Harvey (specializing in
titles for young children), barely managed to stay alive through the 1970s, and all had to close shop in the
early 1980s. Benton, The Comic Book in America, 77–78.
92
Warner Communications Incorporated Annual Reports.
93
Wright, Comic Book Nation, 259.
94
Ibid., 256.
95
Raphael and Spurgeon, Stan Lee: And the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, 204–205.
96
N.R. Kleinfield, “Superheroes’ Creators Wrangle,” New York Times, October 13, 1979.
97
Wright, Comic Book Nation, 257–258.
98
Raphael and Spurgeon, Stan Lee: And the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, 203.
99
Phillip Gutis, “Turning Superheroes into Super Sales,” New York Times, January 6, 1985. The article, a puff
piece on Kahn, lauds these strategies.
100
Raphael and Spurgeon, Stan Lee: And the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, 208.
101
Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter, The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film
and Digital Media Production (Yale University Press, 2012).
102
Ian Gordon, “Comics, Creators, and Copyright: On the Onwership of Serial Narratives by Multiple Authors,”
in A Companion to Media Authorship, ed. Jonathan Gray and Johnson, Derek (Malden, Massachussets: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2013), 224.
103
Paul Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, Revised (Stanford Law and
Politics, 2003), 138.
104
Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books, 2005), 316.
105
Ibid.
106
Erik Knutzen, “Man of Steel Splinters an American Dream,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1979.
107
Samuel Frazer, “Superman to the Rescue,” New York Times, December 1, 1975, sec. Letters to the Editor.
108
David Colton, “The Crime That Created Superman,” USA Today, August 26, 2008, sec. LIFE.
109
Mary Breasted, “Superman’s Creators, Nearly Destittue, Invoke His Spirit,” New York Times, November 22,
1975.
195

110
Principal and Response Brief of Warner Bros. and DC Comics, Laura Siegel Larson v. Warner Bros. and DC
Comics, 11-55863, 11-56034, 15 (9th Cir. 2012), 15.
111
Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 322.
112
Catherine L. Fisk, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property,
1800-1930 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 220; 210.
113
David Vidal, “Superman’s Creators Get Lifetime Pay,” New York Times, December 24, 1975.
114
Andrew Veitch, “How Superartist Won the Dough,” The Guardian, June 16, 1979.
115
Ian Gordon, “Comics, Creators, and Copyright: On the Onwership of Serial Narratives by Multiple Authors,”
in A Companion to Media Authorship, ed. Jonathan Gray and Johnson, Derek (Malden, Massachussets: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2013), 232.
116
Les Daniels, Superman: The Complete History (Chronicle Books, 2004), 103. Daniels tells the long history of
Superman’s evolution and all those involved. It was Weisinger who feared that Superman would become a
fad.
117
Catherine L. Fisk, “Knowledge Work: New Metaphors for the New Economy,” Chicago Kent Law Review 80
(2005): 864–865.
118
Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University
Of Chicago Press, 2011), 23.
119
Peter Jaszi, “On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity,” in The Construction
of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1994), 32–33.
120
Aufderheide and Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use, 35–36.
121
Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter, The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film
and Digital Media Production (Yale University Press, 2012).
122
Siegel and Siegel v. Warner Bros., 524 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2008).
123
Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books, 2005), 336.
124
Termination rights allow a creator merely to terminate a contract, an action that does not retroactively
negate it. Even if Shuster and Siegel were to win back all the rights to Superman through this rule, they would
have no claim to the millions of dollars Superman earned prior to the termination in 1999.
125
Siegel and Siegel v. Warner Bros., 524 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2008).
126
Michael Cieply and Brooke Barnes, “Warner Brothers Sues Superman Lawyer,” New York Times, May 15,
2010.
127
DC Comics v. Pacific Pictures, CV 10-3633 ODW (C.D. Cal. West. Div. 2012).
128
Fisk, Working Knowledge, 240.
129
An initial decision was made in July of 2011, and it was upheld on appeal on August 8, 2013. Initially,
Kirby’s heirs had promised to continue the appeal process and bring the case to the Supreme Court, but as of
September 2014, they have withdrawn their petition. Marvel Worldwide Inc. v. Kirby, 777 F. Supp. 2d 720
196

(2nd Cir. 2011); Chad Bray, “Galactic Battle: Marvel Wins Legal Decision Against Artist’s Children,” Wall Street
Journal, August 9, 2013.
130
For examples, see, Geoff Boucher, “Hero Complex: A Credit to His Name,” Los Angeles Times, September 27,
2009, sec. Calendar; Kevin Melrose, “Stan Lee Questioned on Lack of Jack Kirby Credit on Avengers Film,”
Comic Book Resources, April 25, 2012, http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2012/04/stan-lee-
questioned-on-lack-of-jack-kirby-credit-on-avengers-film/; Jason McAnelly, “Jack Kirby ‘Avengers’ Credit
Controversy Finally Over?,” Nerd Bastards, April 25, 2012, http://nerdbastards.com/2012/04/25/jack-kirby-
avengers-credit-controversy-finally-over/; David Brothers, “The Ethical Rot Behind ‘Before Watchmen’ &
‘The Avengers,’” Web Magazine, Comics Alliance, (April 18, 2012),
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/04/18/creator-rights-before-watchmen-avengers-moore-kirby/.
131
Ryan Faughnder, “Comic Book Artist’s Heirs Settle Marvel Dispute,” Los Angeles Times, September 27,
2014, sec. Business.
132
Siegel and Siegel v. Warner Bros., 524 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2008). The publisher’s aggressive and
careful maintenance of the character’s many trademarks, which in contrast to copyright law is based more on
use than origin, also guarantee certain facets of Superman to DC, not Siegel and Shuster.
133
Laura Siegel Larson v. Warner Bros. Entertainment (Central District of California 2013); DC Comics v.
Pacific Pictures, CV 10-3633 ODW (C.D. Cal. West. Div. 2012); Brooks Barnes, “Warner Brothers Wins In
Superman Case,” New York Times, January 12, 2013; “Judge: Superboy Flies for DC Comics,” Variety, April 16,
2013.
134
Ted Johnson, “Caped Fear: Will Copyright Crunch Put Squeeze on Hollywood Franchises?,” Variety, July 12,
2010.
135
Seiter and Seiter, The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide, 6. This facilitating function was in large part what
motivated the development of the work-for-hire doctrine in the early twentieth century. As Catherine Fisk
has noted, publishers, authors, and legislators all seem to have agreed that in cases of “truly jointly authored
works” employers should automatically receive ownership, otherwise, firms would “have to go searching all
over the world for widows and legitimate children, and the search is so great that [certain rights] can hardly
be obtained.” Fisk, Working Knowledge, 225–226.
136
Fisk, Working Knowledge, 212.
137
For an excellent example, see Christopher Sharrett, “Batman and the Twilight of the Idols: An Interview
with Frank Miller,” in The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, ed.
Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991).
138
Eisner is a kind of patron saint for the medium, with the industry’s preeminent artistic awards are named
after him. Eisner ran one of the major freelance workshops during World War II, continued to produce
artistically significant comics through the fifties, and in 1978 created what many consider the first graphic
novel. He also played a major role in theorizing the medium with his series of books.
197

139
Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist (New York:
WW Norton & Company, 2008), 135, 128.
140
This argument was actually advanced by DC Comics in its latest defense against Siegel’s family. The
company’s legal brief claims that one of the copyrights returned to Jerry Siegel in 2008 was in fact a work-for-
hire that should belong to the corporate author, DC Comics, based on the fact that it was a collaborative effort
between writer, inker, penciler, and colorist. Principal and Response Brief of Warner Bros. and DC Comics,
Laura Siegel Larson v. Warner Bros. and DC Comics, 11-55863, 11-56034, 80 (9th Cir. 2012).
141
Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist, 127–128, 144–
149. Eisner’s dismissal of timetables and needs for efficiency seems especially odd in the contemporary
moment, as the comic book industry continues to struggle. Co-Publisher of DC Comics Dan Didio has
explained that he has recently made regular and predictable publication dates a core emphasis at the
company, after years of finding that even the most popular books created by even the most beloved writers
and artists, could not maintain audiences when they failed to meet fans’ calendar expectations. Dan Didio,
“The New 52” (Lecture presented at the Transmedia Entertainment, University of Southern California,
September 27, 2011).
142
Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Reprint (Da Capo Press,
2008), 27, 91–104.
143
Jenkins, Henry, “The Guiding Spirit and the Powers That Be: A Response to Suzanne Scott,” in The
Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (New York: Routledge,
2013), 53–58.
144
John Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Duke
University Press Books, 2008), 234.
145
Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media. Ch. 4.
146
Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately (NYU Press, 2010), 82.
147
Eric Hoyt, “Writer in the Hole: Desny v. Wilder, Copyright Law, and the Battle over Ideas,” Cinema Journal
50, no. 2 (2011): 39.
148
Aufderheide and Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use, 20–21; 11.
149
Jaszi, “On the Author Effect,” 38.
150
Jyotsna Kapur, “New Economy / Old Labor: Creativity, Flatness, and Other Neo-Liberal Myths,” in
Knowledge Workers in the Information Society, ed. Catherine McKercher and Vincent Mosco (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 164.
151
Fisk, “Knowledge Work,” 867.
152
Ibid., 844.
153
Caldwell, Production Culture, 58.
198

Chapter Three: Tales of the Comic Book Niche
Value Demographics, Quality TV, and the Resurrection of Bad Taste

After a long absence, comic books have recently reemerged into the American
mainstream. The ubiquity of comic book properties within a variety of media platforms—
including video games, television, films, and even books—has raised the medium‘s profile
considerably. Although sales in publishing remain low, public consciousness around comic
books is arguably as high as it ever was, even at the peak of sales back in the early fifties. And
perhaps more importantly, it is more positive than it ever was. While a minority of traditionalists
continue to view the medium as necessarily infantile and lowbrow, most audiences, producers,
and cultural critics recognize comic books as an art form capable of generating high quality texts.
The industry‘s expulsion of peripheral and unruly publishers following the 1954-1955 market
crash began this long process of legitimation. Their cultivation of comic book auteurism and
fandom, throughout the sixties and seventies, subsequently made great strides in elevating the
medium‘s cultural status, if only within small circles. But not until the nineties did the form gain
any kind of wide recognition as a worthwhile artistic form. This was, not coincidentally, around
the same time that Hollywood began aggressively adapting comic books for more respected
media products, namely, feature films and prime-time live action television series.
One of the first of these higher quality adaptations was the HBO series Tales from the
Crypt. Based on horror stories published by EC Comics in the early fifties, this series not only
made use of a medium still broadly understood as juvenile, but reappropriated a brand that was
specifically identified as representing the essence of bad taste. What‘s more is that the pay cable
network did this just as it was trying to rebrand itself as a home for good taste; its tagline went so
far as to promise that its content was ―simply the best.‖ In resurrecting the title at this time, HBO
199

took on what would appear to be the tremendous task of elevating EC Comics from the nadir of
quality to its very peak. By most measures, it was successful. The series was a hit for the
network and it kicked off an era of unprecedented creative innovation at the company. The
original programming that came in the wake of Tales was regarded as so groundbreaking by
critics and HBO audiences that it commenced a revolution for the televisual medium and
initiated what many have called a second ―Golden Age.‖
Comic book culture also generally regards the HBO series and the reemergence of EC
Comics into public consciousness as a momentous and ultimately righteous leap forward. Even
though publisher Bill Gaines shut down his comic book operation in 1956, for decades, loyal
fans had ―kept the flame alive.‖ EC‘s most ardent supporters had believed from the start that
Gaines had produced ―some of the best comic books ever published,‖ giving readers ―a
staggering amount of enormously high quality material‖ that even today ―withstands the test of
time.‖
1
For decades, they put out criticism that affectionately described the work as ―Pulitzer
Prize material‖ displaying a ―care and craftsmanship‖ of ―exceptional maturity,‖
2
and they
characterized the stories as so ―highly literate and stylistically effective‖ that ―they actually
helped make [readers] better human beings.‖
3
Along with this praise, fans published a
continuous stream of checklists, posters, and reprints, including a complete hardbound set of the
original EC library. Their dedication to these texts—which gave EC a subcultural visibility along
with a unique cultural cache—later played a role in Tales‘ triumphant resurrection on HBO. Fans
had worked to ensure that EC‘s body of art would not be among comics‘ many ―forgotten titles
and abandoned characters.‖
4
Their efforts around EC were also part of a larger project to gain for
comic books the respect they believed the medium deserved. The journey Tales from the Crypt
took from the Senate floor in 1954 to the home of quality television in 1989 thus seems
200

representative of the progressive trajectory assumed by comic books as a whole, from lowbrow
entertainment to quality status as a legitimate art form. Inherent in this crossing is the sense that,
with enough time, good taste, just like the truth, will out. The artistic and literary potential of
comic books has been justly recognized, the genius of Bill Gaines finally vindicated.
While there is some truth to this sentiment, cultural explanations cannot fully account for
comic books‘ emergence into quality media during the nineties. This advance, the final stage of
comic books‘ long-gestating cultural legitimation, like those before it, was also motivated by
strategic industrial needs, and deeply shaped by the era‘s political and economic context.
Specifically, aggressive deregulation in the eighties led to a structural convergence that
heightened the need for strong international brands and content that promised long ancillary
afterlives. Responding to a new set of market challenges in a changing entertainment landscape,
burgeoning multimedia conglomerates began more actively mining comic books for potential
transmedia adaptations. These same needs also sparked a renaissance in quality TV, which
turned out to be the perfect product for the transitional moment that was about to unfold. Of
particular interest here is the way in which both of these strategic responses—the exploitation of
comic book properties and a creative renewal within television—employed a rhetoric of
legitimation that relied on the strength of elite audiences. Shifting demographic needs ultimately
played a considerable role in the elevation of both media‘s cultural status, and also worked to
entwine the two forms, driving them toward a convergence.
This chapter examines that process and its outcome within both media, explaining how
the comic book industry gradually cultivated an audience of educated, engaged, largely male
readers that became immensely valuable when the television industry began pursuing this very
same demographic. For many years, television networks had focused on a very different kind of
201

audience—large, middle-class, and largely female—and their shift toward a more elite viewer,
came alongside and further triggered a wide array of structural and creative changes within the
medium. It can be tempting to view the elevation in the cultural status of both media, not to
mention the artistic developments that accompanied this shift, as unambiguously positive. But in
more aggressively targeting narrower demographics, the comic book and television industries
were both guilty of leaving behind certain kinds of viewers/readers and ruling out the possibility
of a broader audience. This exclusion has been largely rhetorical within television, which
continues to appeal to a genuinely mass, albeit intensely segmented, audience even as the
industry increasingly rallies around the quality programming directed at only its most elite
viewers. Comic books, on the other hand, have ceased completely to be a mass medium,
becoming instead, a niche art form. While television made a practice of simultaneously pursuing
multiple narrowly defined demographics, the niche-ing of comic books was always singular—
there was only ever one audience of interest. Although ultimately, due to the demographic
strategies of television ironically, that audience would prove to be extremely valuable.

Comic Book Audiences: From Broad to Narrow, 1954-1989
The Rise of the Direct Market
The winnowing of the comic book audience was a gradual process, the result of variety of
cultural, structural, and economic forces. As described in Chapters One and Two, it began in the
fifties when competition from television, problems in distribution, market saturation due to
overproduction, public apprehension, and the threat of government oversight incited a dramatic
decline in sales. The medium could have conceivably maintained a broad, if somewhat reduced,
audience despite this market contraction. But new barriers to entry erected during the crisis
202

limited creative and structural experimentation well into the future. For the three decades that
followed the crash, the comic book industry failed to diversify its appeal, and instead followed a
course that saw its audience continue to shrink and narrow, increasingly targeting established
male fans. The next two sections examine this gradual niche-ing. There is no simple reason or
singular explanation as to why it occurred; fighting for survival and facing chronic distribution
problems and shifting audience interests, the industry pursued solutions that were available and
intelligible, and rarely employed unproven tactics. Within this environment, there was a
propensity for fringe comic book culture to manifest a dramatic influence upon the mainstream.
More closely aligned with practices of artistic modernism, these forces from the periphery
pushed against the medium‘s more mass tendencies. Accordingly, structural and creative
innovations often moved from the margins to the center in ways that transformed comics from
something that seemed fundamentally popular into a subculture that was anything but. This
fringe or outsider sensibility, along with the large number of adult male readers with higher
levels of education and cultural capital, would eventually make comic book fans a highly
valuable commodity in an increasingly deregulated media landscape.
These tendencies first emerged in the late fifties as the handful of publishers who
remained in control—generally those who had been in business the longest—turned to a genre
that had proved profitable in comic books‘ early years: superheroes. These characters proved to
be strong intellectual properties, and as such tended to travel well across media, succeed in a
licensing context, and attract corporate financing. They also attracted an emerging fan
community that represented a more select demographic of young adult men, many of whom had
been comic book fans as kids back in the forties. Superhero comics unfortunately held less
appeal to a broader audience of women and general readers. Women had first come to comics
203

with the explosion of teen titles in the mid-forties, and then again with the romance fad just a few
years later.
5
But as Trina Robbins notes, many of the female creators initially working in those
genres had exited the industry by the fifties, leaving behind ―clueless forty-five-year-old men‖ to
edit, write, and draw genres they did not understand. When DC and Marvel discovered a male
college-age audience for their superhero stories, their inattention to female-oriented titles only
intensified.
6
The pursuit of fans was also leading DC and Marvel away from younger audiences,
a demographic that was increasingly left in the hands of Archie, Harvey, Dell,
*
and Gold Key.
7

So while Silver Age superheroes helped to stabilize the industry and temporarily forestall
declining sales (which peaked in 1966, when the live-action Batman show on ABC temporarily
brought mainstream popularity back to comic book superheroes), the profits were gone by 1968.
Again, problems in distribution—almost all of which had been in existence since the fifties and
contributed to the industry‘s initial downturn
†
—were visibly damaging the comic book business.
There was, for example, the continuing decline of mom-and-pop newsstands during this era,
caused by suburbanization and the rise of chain stores who were less interested in carrying
comics, with their perpetually low profit margins.
8
There was also a flourishing black market, an
outgrowth of the second-hand market that began driving sales downward as early as 1955.
9
The
problem had grown worse in the sixties, when publishers in search of cost-cutting measures had
stopped demanding that wholesalers asking for refunds bother returning the covers of unsold
books, replacing that proof of destruction with an honor system based on affidavits. Wholesalers
and distributors would then collect money from publishers on reportedly ―unsold‖ comics only to

*
In 1962, Dell, the industry’s largest publisher ended its relationship with Western Printing, who had been
publishing its comics for more than 20 years and also controlled the licenses for many of Dell’s most popular
titles, including Walt Disney Comics and Bugs Bunny. Western subsequently decided to publish these titles
under its own new imprint, Gold Key, which instantly became a major industry player. Mike Benton, The
Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Taylor, 1993), 110, 125–126.
†
See Chapter Two for a longer discussion of distribution problems during the 1950s.
204

turn around and sell those same comics to a growing number of specialized sellers. Farrell Comic
Group had accused their distributor Kable News of this practice back in 1958,
10
but the lawsuit
they brought seems not to have served as any caution to others in the industry, or influenced best
practices. As a result, by the seventies the problem had become rampant and was dramatically
impacting revenue industry-wide.
11

In short, flaws in the distribution chain had become intractable obstacles to growth. Still,
it took the major publishers another decade to figure out how to restructure the system, and the
impetus ultimately came not from within these companies—which had been protected, and
perhaps sheltered, creatively and structurally—but from external forces pushing for change. The
first sign of this innovation arose in 1968, out of the medium‘s most oppositional faction,
Underground Comix. The movement had roots in the early sixties, when artists—many of whom
were inspired by EC Comics and MAD Magazine, began creating edgy, anti-authoritarian, and
sometimes obscene comic strips in college newspapers and humor magazines.
12
With the rise of
the free press, their work moved into underground publications by mid-decade. Gradually, these
creators, together with publishers and distributors, formed a creative and entrepreneurial
community based out of San Francisco, where they kicked off what became a highly influential
artistic movement. The release of Robert Crumb‘s Zap in 1968 marked its official start, and this
alternative art-form became known as Comix, quickly developing a national readership driving a
small but thriving industry.
13

Essentially ―humor comic books geared to the counterculture reader,‖ these works looked
like mainstream comic books in terms of basic format, but in terms of content, were ironic,
political, sometime deeply personal, and often extremely sexual and violent.
14
Attempting to
break taboos, particularly those determined by American middle-class values, these works
205

satirized authority figures and mocked respected social institutions. Their irreverence was, not
surprisingly, also directed at the comic book establishment. Left behind by the narrative and
aesthetic developments that had taken over the mainstream (i.e. the Silver Age of Superheroes),
underground creators pursued a ―complete rejection of the rules of art in the comic book field‖
and snubbed its ―pure commercial ethos.‖
15
As Charles Hatfield has noted, this meant embracing
a ―new formalism‖ within the medium, narratively and aesthetically, and opening the door to
―the idea of comics as an acutely personal means of artistic exploration.‖ In the process, Crumb
and his cohort ―took back the comic book and redefined what it could do,‖ rescuing a medium
―hitherto associated with anonymous, industrialized entertainment, and [transforming] it into a
vehicle for self-expression in a highly romanticized and radical way.‖
16

In this respect, Underground Comix had much in common with contemporaneous avant-
garde movements in other media. Across the country in New York, for example, Jonas Mekas
and other experimental filmmakers of the New American Cinema had spent the sixties
developing intensely first-person, diaristic styles that worked to refocus the form on their own
generational concerns and liberate it ―from the bonds of Hollywood‖ and its
―overprofessionalization and overtechnicality.‖
17
The creators behind the Underground
movement, whom Hatfield points out were ―self-styled hipsters and iconoclasts who both
rejected and built on prior traditions,‖ also tended toward a self-reflexivity and irony that, once
turned inward, grew increasingly preoccupied with the medium itself and their rejection of it.
18

This has become a familiar artistic move, one that both deeply engages with and in some ways
admires the established medium, but also seeks to denigrate its formulaic and fundamentally
mass nature. In its self-reflexivity and its desire to distance itself from commercial culture,
206

Underground Comix, even as it rejected ―the establishment‖ more broadly, had aligned in some
ways with postwar modernism and institutions of high culture.
Similarly, while the Underground was inspired by genuinely radical political motives, its
pioneers had done little to push against the medium‘s rather traditional social structures,
specifically, its ever-increasing bias toward male, college-age readers, a demographic it shared
with other countercultural and avant-garde movements. As longtime writer and artist Trina
Robbins pointed out, in this respect, Underground Comix was just reproducing an ―alternative
version of the old boys‘ club‖ that had long existed at the major publishers. In 1972, she and
others formed the Wimmen‘s Comix Collective to counteract this bent, along with Comix‘s
tendency to depict women and blacks in violent and sometimes demeaning ways.
19
But the group
arrived at the tail end of the Underground movement and their push for better representation
made little to no impression on mainstream comic book publishing.
What did leave an impact was the underground‘s irreverent attitude, its auteurist
tendencies, and, perhaps more importantly, its infrastructural innovations. Due to the obscene
nature of their work, the underground community could rely even less on traditional newsstands
than could mainstream comic books. Accordingly, publishers and dealers had to generate an
alternative distribution network that consisted primarily of mail-order catalogs, head shops, and
counterculture record stores. For a time, these retail sites were tremendously successful at getting
comix to their desired target audience (college-age men) without interference from more
traditional market actors. A Supreme Court ruling in 1973, however, redefined the boundaries of
―obscene,‖ putting more authority in the hands of local censors. This, along with new anti-drug-
paraphernalia laws, left head-shops vulnerable, and many either closed their doors or refused to
continue carrying Comix, which now carried the threat of government interference.
20
As a result,
207

Underground Comix quickly faded from view. The movement had lasted just five years, but in
that time had intensified the medium‘s appeal to an audience of educated young men and in its
auteurist nature moved it spiritually, if not tangibly yet, in the direction of respectable culture. It
also demonstrated a new kind of distribution system that did not have to rely on the declining
newsstands, reluctant chain retailers, and dishonest national distributors who had, for two
decades, been driving mainstream comic books to ruin; another possibility for the medium had
finally emerged.
Between the success of the underground, the growth of collector-fans nationwide, and the
rise of fanzines, there was increasingly enough specialty interest in the medium to support small-
scale dealers and shops. There had long been stores that carried ephemera like pulps and movie
press kits, and also devoted special space to used comics. But shops that carried only comics, and
brand new comics, suddenly started popping up in the early seventies, arriving first in cities like
Berkeley, where Comix had thrived, but gradually nationwide.
21
Responding to their growing
demand, Phil Seuling, an active fan who organized some of the first comic book conventions, set
up Seagate Distribution. Replacing the independent national distributors, and bypassing
traditional wholesalers and retailers entirely, Seuling got a 60 percent discount from publishers
by promising to keep all of their unsold issues, passed a 40 percent discount on to his retailers,
and provided for them a far superior mix and quantity of comics that catered to the fan audience
both he and they knew so well. With this innovation, known as the direct market, publishers
could avoid the many problems associated with traditional distribution (including returns).
Furthermore, new specialty retailers had access to new comics from larger publishers, and fans
could rely on greater consistency in access to the titles they desired. Over the course of the
seventies, the number of specialty shops in existence increased ten-fold.
22

208

Although DC Comics signed on with Seagate as early as 1973,
23
for most of the decade,
these stores remained the domain of used and independent comics. Supported by this new
distribution system, and inspired by the underground, this latter category began quietly inciting a
creative revolution within the medium. According to Hatfield, it began as early as 1974, when
Mike Friedrich released Star*Reach and, with several others, began to push the newly emerging
category of fan-oriented ―groundlevel‖ comics. These titles ―attempted to reconcile underground
and mainstream attitudes‖ by applying an underground and more personal sensibility to familiar
genres like sci-fi and fantasy. Their early success in the direct market paved the way for the
establishment of a wave of new independent publishers who began issuing inexpensive, often
black and white comics, through these same distribution and retail channels.
24
Their sales tended
to be very small, but the direct market could sustain them nonetheless. With this innovation, after
twenty years of inaccessibility, the barriers to entry in the comic book business were, once again,
exceedingly low. Although this time, the business model was structured to promote not broadly
popular genre fads (as was the case in the late forties), but increasingly subcultural tastes and
interests. As might be expected, this had an enormous and long-lasting impact on comic book
production and culture. This transformation in the industry‘s infrastructure would drive a
creative transformation that saw the aesthetic of the margins gradually influencing the
mainstream.
Meanwhile, the larger publishers, stifled by a dying distribution system faced declining
sales for most of the seventies.
25
Finally, in 1982, Marvel and DC decided to fully embrace not
only this new distribution system, but its creative mode, and began issuing very fan-oriented
direct market exclusives, titles like Marvel‘s Dazzler and DC‘s Camelot 3000. The industry‘s
other major publishers, namely Gold Key, Harvey, and Charlton, none of whom could break into
209

a market that catered to adult fans, as opposed to children, were all forced to close their doors by
the early eighties (although Harvey would briefly resurface on the strength of good licensing).
26

Archie comics alone managed to sustain itself on a small number of newsstand sales to kids,
leaving mainstream comic book publishing to just two companies, DC and Marvel.
‡
Although
the market continued to decline through 1983, this nadir was followed by an industry-wide boom
that saw sales rise at the two big publishers as well as at a growing number of independents.
27

Together, they continued to feed the direct market, which spawned an estimated 6,000 to 10,000
specialty shops by the end of the decade, eventually accounting for up to 75 percent of comic
book sales.
28
Lopes estimates the number of publishers in this market at well over 100 by 1993,
although, as Benton has noted, most issued titles with print runs of less than 20,000 copies.
29

Their appeal to fans though was enough to push DC and Marvel to adopt a similarly
sophisticated narrative and aesthetic style. This creative evolution seemed to culminate in 1986,
when DC released Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, which many critics have described as a
major creative milestone both within the superhero genre and within the medium as a whole.
30

But perhaps an even more important landmark that year was the publication of Art Spiegelman‘s
Maus. Spiegelman released the first issue of his story in the alternative comics anthology Raw,
distributed through the direct market and reliant on the Underground and groundlevel comics
that had established the market in the decade prior. In 1986, it was collected into a trade

‡
By the end of the 1980s, their combined unit sales accounted for approximately three quarters of the direct
market. Twenty-five years later, the situation has not changed a great deal. Sales figures from April 2014
show that DC and Marvel account for 63% of market share in specialty shops. Three minor publishers account
for another 20%, including Image (whose content is similar to that from the big two) and Dark Horse and
IDW, both of whom specialize in licensed titles. See Patrick Reilly, “Superheroes Battle It Out in Comic Book
Resurgence,” Crain’s New York Business, June 3, 1986; John Jackson Miller, “1991 Comic Book Sales Figures,”
Comichron: The Comics Chronicles, accessed June 7, 2014,
http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/1991.html; “Publisher Market Shares: April 2014,”
Corporate Website, Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc., accessed June 7, 2014,
http://www.diamondcomics.com/Home/1/1/3/597?articleID=148604.
210

paperback—or, as many preferred to refer to it, a graphic novel—and eventually became a
crossover hit, the importance of which the next sections will consider.
The direct market had helped bring the comic book industry a measure of financial
stability and creative innovation in the mid-eighties; it was a brief glimmer of success that came
on the heels of nearly three decades of decline.
31
Phil Seuling, the emerging specialty shops, and
the fans that supported them had solved the problem of distribution, which was largely
responsible for the 1955 crash and much of the trouble that followed. Their success meant that
comics would never again be sold in the way they once had. But they were not quite the same
product they had been either. Increasingly, comic books reflected the interests and preferences
not of a broad audience the industry hoped to reach, but of an exceedingly narrow cult readership
of loyal fans, mostly educated young-adult men interested in art or literature, to which they had
established access via the direct market.

Carving Out a Niche
The distribution problem had been solved, but audiences had grown small, and continued
to shrink. There were a variety of reasons that comics no longer appealed to the masses:
competition from television and other media, the form‘s long-outdated reputation as children‘s
entertainment, and the nature of the industry‘s creative and structural innovation over the last
two decades, as described above. Unfortunately, the growth of specialty shops seem to have only
exacerbated the matter as the industry moved toward the nineties. As Patrick Parsons has noted,
even though the direct market saved ―the industry from collapse,‖ once established, it only
promised to reinforce ―existing demographic trends.‖ With the popular market now withered
away, ―a smaller, more specialized audience gathered at and was limited to the specialty store.‖
32

211

For fans, this proved a great beacon; shops provided the community with a physical space in
which they could ―consolidate their identity.‖
33

But for the rest of the potential reading public—which included women, kids, and really
anyone who was not already a fan—these stores tended to be somewhat alienating. They also
lacked visibility in that consumers who were not specifically seeking comic books, and thereby
willing to enter a specialty shop, no longer had the opportunity, through their local newsstand or
general use chain store, to peruse comic books or even see them on the shelves. To the limited
extent that comic books could still have appealed to a broad, if much diminished, audience, the
medium‘s repositioning out of traditional retail outlets and into specialty shops eliminated that
possibility and worked to further marginalize the medium. The particular demographic
dimensions of the industry‘s abandonment of a broad readership is of special interest here,
specifically its exclusion of women, who notoriously felt out of place within the space of the
comic book specialty shop, and thereby deterred from reading.
34

Again, there is no single explanation as to why specialty shops emerged as decidedly
male spaces, although there are a variety of possible explanations, ranging from the practical to
the very theoretical. Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber have suggested, for example, that the
very real social mores and female consumption patterns that characterized girl‘s and women‘s
lives historically had the effect of limiting their access to cultural trends that centered outside of
the home and the bedroom.
35
These boundaries likely played a role in keeping women out of the
emerging comic book subculture that centered around the collector bins, head shops, and early
specialty stores that existed in the sixties and seventies, and out of which emerged the comic
book shops of the eighties and after. An even more likely explanation of the exceedingly
masculine nature of the direct market though was the exceedingly masculine nature of the comic
212

book industry it mirrored. Populated almost entirely by men throughout the sixties and
seventies,
36
the publishing business remained rather unapologetic about its very apparent male
bias. Well after the civil rights movement had begun to affect social change in the population at
large, the industry‘s most visible personalities continued to view women and feminism rather
derisively.
In 1975, for example, DC editor Julius Schwartz said, about the character Lois Lane, that
she might be ―some sort of women‘s libber…[but] I don‘t know in my heart if she is or not. Like
any woman, she‘s not very consistent.‖
37
Stan Lee meanwhile, in 1978, vehemently denied the
existence of ―women‘s liberation‖ in Marvel comics, noting that ―in thinking about female
characters…we usually don‘t think of them as women. It‘s usually a case of trying to get a good
character.‖
38
A year later, Lee reluctantly acknowledged that he would like to have more women
working for him and that his male staff was ―more conscious of women‘s lib‖ and were trying to
write female characters ―in a way that won‘t offend women who are into women‘s lib.‖
39
By this
time then, just before the direct market boom, the industry seems already to have acknowledged
their failure in attracting a female audience; they were merely hoping not to repel them any
further. Unfortunately, the growth of specialty shops in the years that immediately followed did
just that. In this context, the assumption of a male audience became at least somewhat self-
fulfilling, in that it inhibited greater effort on the part of publishers and distributors from
reaching out to women, and in so doing, only solidified what may have been merely a tendency.
An understanding of comic book culture as a subculture can also provide possible
explanations for its decidedly male bent. Scholars have repeatedly theorized cult fandoms around
a variety of narrowly targeted and distributed media as subcultural communities that restyles the
commodities and objects of mundane or mainstream culture in acts of defiance or opposition.
40

213

Even as the readership for mainstream comic books narrowed significantly, the community was
not particularly defiant, but the increasing influence of Underground Comix and alternative
comics after it did express a certain disregard for and opposition to traditional commercial
culture. And as both Joanne Hollows and Sarah Thornton have pointed out, in as much as
subcultural and cult communities work to define themselves against a commercial mass, they are
often also defining themselves against a certain femininity. More specifically, "the characteristics
associated with subcultures are those commonly associated with masculinity and the
characteristics derided in portraits of the mainstream are those associated with femininity."
41
For
this reason, scholars like Angela McRobbie have long been critical of the ways in which
subcultures and, we might extrapolate, some cult audiences ―hinge on a collective disregard for
women.‖
42
Indeed the ―very term subculture has acquired such strong masculine overtones‖ that
they have long threatened to make invisible both female participants and possible female
counterparts.
43
Suzanne Scott has echoed these sentiments more recently, nothing that ―female
fans of comic books have long felt ‗fridged,‘ an audience segment kept on ice and out of view.‖
44

For the sake of clarity, this does not mean that there were not any female fans
historically. Women have always read comic books, and many more might have read them, had
the industry sought them out. There has been an inclination in comic book criticism—both
popular and academic—to describe comic book culture and comic book fandom, particularly as
it relates to superheroes, as entirely and intrinsically male. Karen Healey has pointed out that as a
result, "the female comics fan is discursively erased from fandom, both by mainstream media
and by those performing comics fandom."
45
It is important to emphasize then that the exclusion
of women from comic books‘ ever-narrowing target demographic was neither total nor
214

necessary, but a consequence of the structural and creative decisions the industry made between
the late fifties and the eighties, as detailed above.
Regardless of these associations, as far as Marvel and DC were concerned, by the late
eighties, their audience was quite distinct, and it did not include women. To the extent that this
assertion was not true—that some women did in fact read comics—was actually less important
than the well-established industry assumption that they did not. Marketing surveys at the time
tended to confirm this hypothesis, defining the average comic book reader as a very literate male
in his mid twenties who spent up to twenty dollars a month on the product.
46
With new easy
access to this demographic through the direct market, mainstream and independent publishers
alike were increasingly modeling its product with this fan in mind. Paul Levitz, future president
of DC Comics, reported in 1982 that ―for better or worse, a majority of comics published today
are produced for the entertainment of comic fans,‖ so publishers are ―consciously aiming their
efforts directly at the fan market as their chief area of growth.‖
47
Surely, there were other, more
inclusive, ways to expand the market, but those ways were not pursued; that failure is at least
partly a result of the working atmosphere at the time, characterized by internal strife, mounting
corporate pressures, and a turn toward licensing, all described in depth in Chapter Two.
The fan strategy they did pursue, significantly shaped by the atmosphere of the specialty
shop, had a number of implications in terms of creative content and business conduct. In the
forties and fifties, publishers had assumed that comic books were essentially ephemeral products
and that readers—inconsistent in their purchase patterns—would not follow specific ongoing
stories. The irregular distribution patterns of wholesalers and national distributors only
reinforced this assumption, which led publishers to eschew serialized narratives. This began to
change in the early sixties, when the Silver Age attracted more college-aged readers in addition
215

to more ―literal-minded youngsters.‖ Protesting plots that took ―liberties with the laws of
physics,‖ these audiences began to demand stories that better adhered to their own narrative
logic. According to Superman editor Mort Weisinger, speaking in 1962, ―kids today are much
more sophisticated…there are a lot of things they just won‘t accept nowadays.‖
48

By the eighties, specialty shops could guarantee the regular return of their customers,
who would come weekly or monthly to purchase their favorite series. These readers could also
now access back issues more easily—through their local specialty shop and also through the
growing network of collectors and sellers connected through these stores, collecting-based
publications like The Overstreet Price Guide, and increasingly, conventions.
49
Out of this
environment came a greater push for continuity, a textual logic that brought together separate
comic book stories into unified and essentially rational narrative universes. As Hatfield has
argued, specialty shops, which ―functioned as an elaborate paratext to the comic books‖, had the
effect of informing and disciplining their clientele, further heightening readers‘ awareness of this
profound intertextuality.
50
As a result, stories over time could become more ―expressly related to
one another‖ with continuity growing more and more complex.
51

According to acclaimed comic book writer and editor Denny O‘Neil, this increasingly
meticulous focus on details in the late eighties became ―a mixed blessing‖ for the medium and its
creators. There was much more attention to a sometimes ―foolish consistency,‖ but audiences—
largely ―bright kids, verbal kids‖ were reading ―a great deal more intently and with a great deal
of care.‖ For them, continuity set up ―definite physical laws and an established chronology‖ that
was able to add ―depth and a kind of realism to comic books.‖ And because deliberateness
mattered a lot more, so did quality and the ―names attached to that quality,‖ which meant that
216

publishers had more incentive to reward and respect the best creators
§
.
52
This style of reading,
particularly as it relates to comic books, has been traditionally understood as a typically
―affirmational‖ and ―masculine‖ mode of fandom in that it affirms a core mythology and
privileges correct interpretations of the texts and authorial intent; it is an approach often
juxtaposed against a more ―transformational‖ or ―feminine‖ style of fandom that seeks to
produce counter-readings and a multiplicity of interpretations.
53
As Jenkins has noted, however,
―the ideal of a perfected continuity‖ actually allows fans to critique and nitpick texts that do not
satisfy that vision, holding creators more accountable and pushing the narrative and the medium
more broadly to expand into new and alternative spaces that are, in some ways, also quite
transformational.
While this certainly happened in some areas of comic book culture, others remained
constrained, with fans‘ narrative preferences arguably bringing an end to the kind of creative
innovation within mainstream publishing they had initially stimulated.
54
Some have even
characterized the community as increasingly ―insular,‖ ―self-feeding,‖ and even pleasure-less in
their approach to the medium.
55
In terms of financial stability and long-term growth, however,
there was an upside. The comic book audience had gotten much smaller, and much more narrow
and indeed critical, but in all of these ways, it had also gotten better. In the emerging multi-media
landscape, maintaining an extremely loyal audience with a cult sensibility and a complicated
mode of engagement, composed of privileged, 18-34 year old men had its perks. This
demographic, which was incredibly hard to reach via television, was surfacing in the nineties as
the most-coveted for advertisers, and thus by producers, programmers, and distributors too.
56
As
the comic book audience became more niche then, it also became more valuable.

§
For more on the increasing push towards creator rights, see Chapter Two.
217

The industry‘s ability to leverage this highly prized readership into licensing and
merchandising opportunities became an incredibly valuable asset to a business that continued to
face financial problems and even more market crashes. The boom that began in the 1983 led to a
bust in 1987, followed by yet another larger crash in 1993.
57
Once again, the industry was facing
tough times, but yet another innovation in distribution was emerging, providing the industry with
yet another lifeline—comic books‘ move into book stores. The growth of the graphic novel
category was partly responsible for this opportunity, which was gradually putting the medium
back into a general interest retail space. Graphic novels, book length comics that have never been
published in classic comic book form (the standard thirty-two-page pamphlet),
**
were another of
the creative innovations that independent publishers initiated, and which DC and Marvel soon
took up. The trade paperback, a bound collection of previously published issues, usually united
by a single story-arc, was also gaining in popularity.
58
These formats helped comic books gain
their own shelf space in national book chains, like Waldenbooks (starting in 1986), and later
Barnes & Noble and Dalton.
59
Notably though, the medium‘s move into bookstores was highly
reliant upon another development, comic books‘ slowly ascending cultural status.

Mainstream Respectability
A shift in perception toward comics had begun as early as the sixties, with the initial
growth of fandom and the closely linked rise of comic book auteurism, as described in depth in
Chapter Two. At least at first though, this greater appreciation of the medium was largely
confined to the fan community; this enlightened perspective toward the form would not go

**
Critics and historians have defined the “graphic novel” in a number of different ways, with some rejecting
the term entirely. But for the purposes of this study—which maintains an interest in distribution practices—
this definition remains the most useful.
218

mainstream until at least the nineties. Nonetheless, things began to change, little by little, as the
popular press started taking notice of comic books once again. Instead of raising alarms about
comics‘ bad taste level as they had in the fifties, however, mainstream publications were now
touting their sophistication.
This coverage, beginning in the seventies, seems to have been initially rooted in a
fascination with the growth of fandom during the decade prior. Publications like The Washington
Post were noting the increasing number of comic book conventions, expressing awe at their high
attendance.
60
The collectors‘ market proved even more captivating. Journalists would describe
the intricacies of valuations—early superhero comics, for example, ―must be in excellent, or
mint, condition‖
61
—and then list the increasingly high costs of a growing number of comics.
62

To be sure, some articles were dismissive of the form—with comments like, ―trivia is what the
whole comic book boom is based on‖—as well as the fans, described as overgrown men who
still live with their parents.
63
But more often, a different side was emerging. A number of
journalists took special note of some fans‘ very impressive resumes; there were Harvard
graduates, professors with Ph.D.s, and ―doctors, lawyers and successful businessmen.‖ There
were even bold declarations, like an observation from the Los Angeles Times stating, "suddenly
comic books are respectable, hurtled into museums and classrooms by the rush of legitimacy that
followed their blindingly successful incursion into the college market…if comics get any more
respectable, they'll have to be sold with two pairs of trousers."
64

It was common for journalists to attribute all this to Marvel‘s Silver Age superheroes,
who were more realistic than those launched in the early forties, and Stan Lee, who ―literally
created the college market all by himself.‖
65
Indeed, in the early seventies, Marvel and DC had
attempted to bring greater sophistication and realism to their stories. It was a bid for social
219

relevance that resulted in their hiring a number of creators from the Underground movement and
which also brought some modifications in the standards at the CCA.
66
In retrospect though, the
effort appears to have been primarily a public relations strategy that played to reporters but
lacked genuine radicalism.
67
Ultimately, while Marvel had succeeded in attracting an older,
college-aged and educated readership, and generating some credibility there, mainstream
superheroes were generally not innovative enough to incite a wholesale public reconception of
the medium.
It would instead be Underground Comix and its heirs that shaped a more lasting critical
reevaluation of the form. As Lopes argues, alternative and underground works were responsible
for establishing the possibility that comic books were ―a serious art form open to expressions
comparable to any other art form‖ and one that allowed for ―authentic self-expression.‖
68
Bart
Beaty offers a similar assessment, pointing out how individual comics outside the mainstream, in
surpassing ―the threshold for aesthetic greatness established by the fields of literature, visual arts,
and academic criticism‖ were starting to change the public discourse around the medium.
69
More
specifically, he argues, Art Spigelman‘s Maus received such immense support from fans, and
eventually from art and literature critics, that it actually helped lift the whole form to a new level
of respect. It changed 'the cultural perception of what a comic book can be," making it okay for
educated people "to have an opinion about cartoons."
70
Hatfield agrees that the crossover success
of Maus ―served to ratify comic art as a literary form‖ and ―suddenly made serious comics
culturally legible, recognizable, in a way they had not been before.‖ But he emphasizes that
Spigeleman‘s success was only the crystallization of the long-gestating trend from which he
emerged, an auteurist, highly personal body of comic books with origins in the Underground.
71

220

It is notable then that while the Underground and its successors worked to disparage
mainstream comics, and offer an oppositional alternative, that these movements retained a self-
reflexive tendency that maintained their fundamental connection with the medium. The artistry
of individuals like Spiegelman was built on the shoulders of those who came before him, great
and small. Indeed many individuals who created comix for the underground had gotten their start
in early comic book fandom and in one fandom in particular, built around EC Comics.
72
Beaty
thus also gives some credit for the medium‘s rising respectability to that publisher, despite,
ironically, the reputation EC continues to carry for irrevocably tarnishing the form‘s image back
in 1954. With a slate of racy and sophisticated titles that included the horror comic Tales from
the Crypt, EC gained prominence in the early fifties before closing their doors in 1956 due to
distribution problems and public controversy over its lurid content.
††
While EC supporters were
small in number, they constituted an ―elite fan base, self-conceptualized as connoisseurs.‖ And
their dedication to the EC tradition motivated a body of criticism that took ―the first tentative
steps toward outlining a theory of the value of comics.‖
73
Spiegelman himself was an avid fan of
the publisher as a kid, and was deeply informed by their catalog. Beaty points out that he has
written much on the subject since, and has been so convincing about one particular EC story
entitled ―Master Race‖ (Impact #1, March 1955), that he helped transform it into one of ―the
most celebrated comics in history.‖
74

Indeed, prominent creators in a variety of media looked back fondly on EC‘s comics,
with many citing the publisher as a source of inspiration in their work. According to press reports
in the eighties, as EC and horror more generally were re-entering the cultural zeitgeist, this list
included a number of Hollywood‘s best and brightest—Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, John

††
For details on EC’s woes during this time, see Chapter One.
221

Carpenter (director of Creepshow), John Landis (director of Michael Jackson‘s Thriller), and
even Stephen King. At this point in time, these former EC fans, mostly baby boomers, were
entering their thirties and forties, and rising in power and prominence. As they did, instead of
championing the same high art traditions that previous generations of social elites had, this new
elite—informed by the countercultural revolution of the sixties and all it implied—would
shepherd in new cultural traditions. More specifically, they would shun official culture and
instead resurrect their most beloved childhood texts and forms, among them, the comic book.
75

That EC was a favorite of this new powerful cohort of filmmakers was hardly a
coincidence. Published within the chaotic mainstream of the early fifties, but serving as an
inspiration to more experimental and alternative comics of the sixties and seventies, EC Comics
was positioned squarely between the mass and fringe impulses of the medium. Despite its small
circulation, it had the possibility of reaching those slightly older fans who read them as boys as
they were published, and also the slightly younger fans, who would have discovered them during
the sixties, as comics and comix reached for male college-aged audiences and eventually
circulated within the hallways of film schools. One of these younger fans, power producer Joel
Silver, described how he used to see old EC Comics at friends‘ houses, noting that ―if you found
one you‘d pull it out and say, I gotta read this, they were like some kind of forbidden fruit.
Everyone knew they weren‘t ordinary comic books.‖ Of course, they were very much ordinary
comic books—cheaply produced and cheaply bought right alongside the 500 other titles hitting
newsstands in the early fifties, but they retained a subcultural and oppositional aura not unrelated
to their very public shaming. They held a similar dual appeal to director Robert Zemeckis who
remembered them as a beloved ―guilty pleasure.‖
76

222

This is how Tales from the Crypt ended up premiering as a horror anthology series in
1989 on HBO; comic books‘ unique cultural capital and positionality would also play a large
role the medium‘s overall reemergence into the mainstream. In a glossy, semi-promotional book
on the history of the title, Digby Diehl explains that, thirty years after the title‘s disappearance
from newsstands, "it took the influence and backing of five of the most powerful figures in
Hollywood to bring Tales from the Crypt to television."
77
The project had began with prolific
director/producer Walter Hill and his partner David Giler, who got Joel Silver on board. Silver
got the rights from publisher Bill Gaines for ―very little‖ and soon brought on Richard Donner
(who directed Superman, the first modern superhero film) and Zemeckis (right off his Back to
the Future success).
78
A reflection of most workers in their industry, the five were white,
educated men, and—like a number of other white educated men in their forties interested in the
arts and popular culture—they were longtime fans of EC. When they pitched the project to HBO,
they got an immediate green light. It was exactly the kind of series HBO had been looking for.
79

The executives at HBO, who hailed from similar cultural and social backgrounds, seem
to have understood quite clearly the property‘s appeal. Zemeckis promised they would translate
the comics to screen faithfully, creating episodes that would ―be stylish, full of irony and satire
and black humor,‖ and feature characters who ―had absolutely no redeeming value.‖
80
In
lockstep, HBO would market it by highlighting the title‘s sinister and censored past,
81
always
being sure to point out that ―you‘d never see anything like this on a network.‖
82
For HBO, which
was, at the time, actively trying to raise its own cultural status, promoting a forbidden text with a
cult following was a particularly valuable strategy. Michael Newman and Elana Levine have
usefully pointed out that

223

cult status helps to legitimate the television that achieves this designation. Conveniently
enough, it also serves the interests of the television industry by promoting additional
consumerism in the form of DVDs, episode guides, action figures, comic books, and
other ancillary paraphernalia that avid fans covet. With the growth of cult television,
then, we see an increase in television‘s legitimation but also the ways that this
legitimation serves capitalist interests.
83

Indeed Tales from the Crypt would serve a multitude of purposes for HBO, and for
HBO‘s parent company Time Warner, including all of those noted above. The series was
extremely popular with the network‘s established subscriber base, and it was so creatively and
financially innovative that it would dramatically shape the way HBO approached all of the
original programming it produced in the years that followed. While style and legitimacy play a
major role in its success, of particular interest here is the extent to which its value lay in its
demographic strengths, both on screen and off. With an aggressive appeal to upper-income,
upper-educated, young adults, and to men in particular—the same demographic that comic book
industry had been cultivating through the direct market—the series helped establish a new model
of television production that would succeed in the newly deregulated multimedia environment.
The debut of Tales from the Crypt on pay-cable also marked a major milestone for comic
books, at least as momentous as the medium‘s move into bookstores. Among several
contemporaneous projects that re-introduced the medium into mainstream American
consciousness, I would argue that Tales has the distinction of being comic book‘s first entry into
quality mass media. Comic books had long been adapted as cartoons, syndicated television
shows, B-films, and a small handful of higher profile projects, but they were rarely used in
224

prestige products before the late nineties. At that point in time, they began providing the source
material for a wide variety of content, from blockbuster movies to indie-branded films to
marquee television series.
The motivations behind this resurrection of the medium are, at their core, rather simple.
The individuals who were producing comic-book inspired media loved comic books and they
were hoping to sell their media to audiences who also loved comic books. The impulse to
support and create passion projects in an effort to expose them to others who will also be
passionate about them is hardly new. Admirers of high culture had worked tirelessly throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to fund painting, literature, opera, and other forms, and to
teach the general public to appreciate these works just as they did, although with sometimes
unimpressive results. Within commercial mass media however, the possibility of producers
supporting only their own favored culture was considerably more difficult, since their choices
were always subject to powerful economic and political forces. The disconnect between what
producers might have liked to create and what they were able to create, seems to have been
particularly great within television of the classic network era. Despite many attempts during the
fifties and early sixties to incorporate the visual arts, jazz, and other high cultural forms into the
broadcast schedule, networks soon resorted to pandering to audiences with the least
objectionable programming they could muster.
84

In the late eighties though, this paradigm shifted. Changes in the political and economic
context of mass media production rewrote the formerly oppressive rules of demographics. No
longer did network executives and television showrunners need to capture a thirty or even twenty
percent audience share.
85
Instead, they could focus on smaller demographics, defined strictly by
gender and age, and more loosely by income and education level, racial and ethnic identity, or
225

merely cultural interest. In this context, young educated men soon become the media industries‘
most coveted demographic. It was a narrowly defined media audience that closely mirrored the
social identity of most media creators. As such, producers had greater and greater opportunities
to pursue media products of their own choosing.
With this fundamental shift—in demographics and infrastructure—a great deal of what
we used to understand about television as a medium began to change. In the process, it opened
the door to media texts like Tales from the Crypt, a series that took the cultural capital comics
had been gradually accruing within the small circles described above, and sell it to a slightly
broader, although still elite, audience. The show‘s unqualified success—by a number of different
measures—demonstrated the viability of comic-book based media as well as its value and
efficacy amidst industrial and cultural convergences that were at that point in time refashioning
film and, even more uncompromisingly, television. The changing political economy behind
television culture thus becomes essential to understanding the changing political economy
behind comic book culture.

Television Demographics: From Domesticity to Quality, 1948-1996
Housewives in the Network Era
Unlike many of the mass media forms that came before and after it, including radio,
comic books, and the internet, television never had to undergo a period of industrial chaos and
extreme competition. As Michelle Hilmes has noted, ―television slid smoothly out of the retooled
factories of the major electronics firms and into American living rooms, complete with
established corporate owners, regulatory structures, and even programming.‖
86
Constructed in
this fashion, on the framework established by radio in the decades prior, the television industry
226

seemed collectively to understand from the very start the importance of properly positioning
their product within the cultural discourse. In the regulation of both media, the Federal Radio
Commission (FRC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after it, used notions
of ―quality‖—as defined by subjective factors like technological superiority, liveness, and
commercialism—to limit access to the airwaves to the wealthiest and most established
organizations. With the more powerful producers keen to reinforce this tradition, television came
―into being under a quality mandate‖ that was tied to ―centralized regulation and control‖ instead
of diversity and choice.
87

A desire on the part of television producers to attract an initial viewing base that was
upscale and urban also helped push television in the direction of traditional notions of quality
and good taste. Television manufacturers, for their part, had needed this ―well-to-do‖ audience to
buy the first television receivers.
88
This target demographic also pleased the first television
sponsors, like Alcoa, Firestone, and Philco, all of whom wanted to aim their corporate image
advertising ―at smaller audiences of higher-income groups.‖
89
There was also, very likely, a
personal desire on the part of television executives and creators. Writing about the movie moguls
of the early twentieth century, Neal Gabler has argued that many had wanted to use the movies
as a ―form of social climbing,‖ striving through the product they created to become known as
something other than low-class businessmen.
90
Although the executives behind television had
arguably already assimilated and succeeded, leaving behind whatever immigrant identities they
may have once had, there can be little doubt that producing respectable media remained a goal
for any individual who himself wished to appear respectable.
Thus supported by government regulators, television manufacturers, advertisers, and
television producers, this very concerted early appeal to a quality audience succeeded and
227

resulted in television‘s first quality programming, anthology dramas like Philco Television
Playhouse (1948-1955, NBC) and Studio One (1948-1958, CBS, sponsored by Westinghouse).
Live, intimate, and self conscious, these series worked to show policy makers and the public that
television would be serious and tasteful, and they have since been remembered as comprising a
Golden Age of television.
91
But the industry‘s desire to capture an urban educated audience and
the positive associations that would have been linked to it was never totalizing, and only ever
constituted a kind of temporary, highbrow sheen. From the start, television programming had to
answer to political and economic needs that demanded a much more diverse slate of
programming. Accordingly, alongside these theatrical showpieces, were vaudeville inspired
variety programs, game shows, kid series, and even ethnic working-class domestic sitcoms.
92

This tendency toward a more lowbrow and increasingly feminized audience only
intensified over time. Once the technology reached a critical mass, around 1950, manufacturers
were selling sets to an increasingly middle and even working class consumer, and government
regulators entered into a relationship of appeasement with broadcasters, all but eliminating their
need to demonstrate quality programming. In this environment, advertising economics, which
were moving away from corporate goodwill associations and toward point-of-sale promotions
marketing specific products, pushed the medium more aggressively toward female viewers.
93
By
1960, all three networks had taken programming control away from single sponsor advertisers
like Philco and moved to a multiple sponsorship model that focused on small-ticket consumer
goods like soap, along with the 35-49 year old housewives (with two to four children) who
bought them.
94

The result, television of the network era (roughly 1952-1985), has since been imagined as
a national pastime that brought all Americans together for a collective and synchronous cultural
228

experience.
95
But as numerous scholars have pointed out, this myth of the TV audience as a
coherent social entity was largely a fiction supported by ratings data that—in undercounting
social minorities, children, and the elderly—reconceived a diverse population as a white, middle-
class, and mostly female adult audience.
96
In this way, the industry was following in a long
cultural tradition of conflating mass with feminine, washing out difference in a genuinely broad
audience to collapse unruly masses into a better contained, idealized female consumer. Since
formulaic episodic shows tended to deliver this target female or mass demographic more
efficiently and more predictably than did live anthologies (not to mention some of the diverse
lowbrow programming that had aired alongside them), networks shifted programming
accordingly.
97

From the very start, critics and intellectuals were dismayed by the changes, which were
associated with the increasingly lower quality mass audience. The taste level was disturbing
enough to attract the scorn of Newton Minnow, the FCC chairman under the Kennedy
administration, who in 1961 referred to the medium as a ―vast wasteland.‖ Ultimately though,
Minnow did little to upset established regulatory relationships, and after making conciliatory
gestures to the industry following his comments, he allowed network economics and regulation
to remain undisturbed.
98
The middle-class housewife, accordingly, remained the networks‘
priority, and the negative associations she carried continued to beleaguer television. Throughout
the network era, despite its broad popularity and centrality within American leisure time,
television remained a widely denigrated form, ―identified as the inferior term in almost any
comparative context.‖
99
Highbrow intellectuals on the left and right could despite it for ―its
lowbrow appeal to the greatest common denominator of viewers and for its imbrications in the
proliferation of consumerism.‖ But criticism always retained a clear demographic dimension.
229

Avi Santo points out that because television ―has historically been gendered feminine‖ it would
be ―marked by cultural critics and in popular discourse as an emasculating pastime and a
feminizing preoccupation.‖
100
Television was certainly not the only mass medium scorned for its
fundamental association with the wrong kind of audience, and with women in particular.
Examining aesthetic discourses from the nineteenth century until more recently, Andreas
Huyssen explains that artistic rhetoric ―obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as
feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm
of male activities.‖
101

Quality Impulses
Despite the networks‘ overall pursuit of a mass, feminized, television audience,
executives continued to display a desire to reach the younger, better-educated, and higher income
families they had always wanted, and who would have more closely resembled their own upper-
middle class homes and social circles.
102
Accordingly, there was a gradual move toward seeking
out the ―right audience‖ for the right show and the right advertiser, as visible in the emergence of
demographic breakdowns and the creation of niche programming that targeted individual family
members.
103
While these impulses had been persistently bubbling under the surface, it took
political and economic change before the status quo actually began to shift, marginally in the
early seventies and visibly in the eighties, with the decline of the housewife demo and the
gradual rise of the medium‘s cultural legitimacy.
In the political sphere, the emergence of a neoliberal regulatory regime began to slowly
dismantle the public service principles that had justified commercial broadcasting in the fifties
and sixties. The ideology paved the way for the expansion of cable, which the public had earlier
230

resisted, as well as other financial innovations on the near horizon.
104
At the same time, baby
boomers were beginning to age into adulthood and proved harder to reach than had the
generation that came before. As a result, while high overall ratings remained important to
advertisers, a space opened up for programming that could also more effectively reach a
sophisticated and urban adult audience.
105
In response to this challenge, came a handful of
programs from MTM Enterprises (headed by Grant Tinker) and Tandem Productions (headed by
Normal Lear) like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family. Employing a dual address
through multiple layers of meaning, these series were able to simultaneously appeal to an elite
audience as well as a middle and working-class mass.
106

Together, these series constituted an emerging genre of ―quality TV.‖ As Jane Feuer has
characterized it, the ―MTM style‖ that defined this genre early on used high production values,
trained actors, and creative freedom for writers and producers; this formula allowed for an
auteurist sensibility, self-reflexivity, modernist satire, and warm, rounded characters with long
arcs.
107
Critics embraced the result, which seemed to demand careful consideration and a more
aesthetic approach from viewers.
108
Notably though, even as this early version of quality TV
appealed to upscale urban viewers, it still primarily targeted women, and as such, remained
mired in a conception of television as fundamentally lowbrow; Tandem and MTM had brought a
new kind of TV, but within public and intellectual discourse, it was still TV. Furthermore, MTM
still constituted only a portion of the network schedule, which, with programming trends like
―jiggle TV‖ and ―kidvid,‖ continued to pursue rural, youth, and elderly audiences into the early
eighties.
109

Increasing deregulation and more dramatic demographic shifts, however, began to make
additional allowances for quality. A gradual wane in the advertising of small-ticket consumer
231

goods targeted at housewives saw sponsors slowly lose interest in overall household ratings and
the housewife demographic they were imagined to represent. In their place, networks were doing
more business on their ability to attract more discrete demographics.
110
As Variety noted in 1987,
―virtually no national advertiser anymore, even package goods manufacturers, wants boxcar,
household numbers,‖ with almost all ad buys guaranteed on the basis of some particular
demographic.
111

Simultaneously, the FCC‘s new willingness to conflate the public good with increased
corporate profits was paving the way for media takeovers and mergers that eventually led to a
structural convergence throughout the entertainment industry.
112
The cable business was one of
the first beneficiaries and began to see growth in the mid-seventies, with a handful of multimedia
companies (including, notably, Time Inc. and Warner Bros.) showing immense profits in the
sector in the eighties.
113
Success in cable initiated a decline in network ratings as viewers
gradually fled to the proliferation of channels suddenly on offer. These new cable networks,
bankrolled by massive corporations, started winning over the highest-income viewers and also
appealing to men. The broadcast networks, having long prioritized women, were at a
disadvantage in this particular space, a problem exacerbated by the fact that advertisers were no
longer demanding housewife consumers in the way they once had.
Feeling squeezed, the major networks began pursuing quality programming more
desperately, setting off a kind of small scale arms race for audiences who were wealthier, urban,
young adult, male, or all of the above.
114
Mark Jancovich and James Lyons explain that ―as
network audiences declined in the face of competition from the proliferation of cable and
satellite channels in the eighties, the networks became less concerned with attracting mass
audiences and increasingly concerned with retaining the most valuable audiences: affluent
232

viewers that advertisers were prepared to pay the highest rates to address."
115
In terms of
programming, this strategy supported a handful of dramatic series that were effusively praised as
culturally elevated, including Hill Street Blues (1981-1987, NBC), St. Elsewhere (1982-1988,
NBC), and thirtysomething (1987-1991, ABC). Carrying on the tradition of quality TV the MTM
style had established a decade earlier, the aesthetic of these programs began making significant
inroads into the primetime schedule, and would eventually spread ―like a virus‖ across the entire
medium.
116

Critical praise for this trend in quality programming has since been attributed to a number
of individuals, including, most notably Norman Lear (the showrunner behind Tandem
Productions and recipient of countless awards for creative and social contributions—four
Emmys, a Peabody, and even a National Medal of Arts), Grant Tinker (the early mastermind
behind MTM and later the CEO at NBC in the glory days of the early eighties), and Fred
Silverman (responsible for the ―rural purge‖ at CBS, and the start of quality at NBC, but also for
lowbrow trends during his reign at ABC). These ―great men,‖ and the systems they inhabited,
were motivated by a variety of forces, each to a lesser or greater degree.
117
There were financial
imperatives, to remain profitable and to keep their jobs. There was certainly the hope of
improving television‘s reputation and in so doing achieving personal glory, and also, more than
likely, the genuine desire to create entertainment that was personally fulfilling. But in this, these
men were likely no different from the generation of television producers and executives that
came before them.
What had changed was the economic context that established the realm of possibility to
which they had to conform. In this respect, financial and demographic considerations had always
played an important, even intrinsic, role in the development of the quality TV genre, from the
233

medium‘s first Golden Age in the early fifties to this re-emergence in the eighties. Along these
lines, Michael Newman and Elena Levine argue that the hallmark quality program of the era,
Hill Street Blues, was ―as much a calculated business decision as an artistic triumph.‖
118
Though
it had a sluggish first season, the show not only attracted large numbers of increasingly valuable
young adult viewers, but eventually proved to be a genuine hit for NBC and its CEO Grant
Tinker, former head of MTM Enterprises. In the evolving television landscape, Tinker had
realized that ―quality makes money.‖

Aired alongside a more commercial line of programming
that included content with broad appeal and big ratings, like The A-Team (1983-1987, NBC), a
show like Hill Street Blues could pique interest among hard-to-reach viewers threatening to
defect to cable.
119
According to Tinker, these quality shows also tended to attract ―a very loyal
core audience‖ at a time when the public overall was losing interest in the medium and audiences
were taking longer and longer to discover shows they enjoyed.
120

Notably then, whereas the comic book industry‘s move toward a higher quality audience
occurred somewhat inadvertently—often in a bid for survival—demographic changes within
television had come about in a more deliberate manner. And notably, within television, these
shifts were far less totalizing. Even when the industry began pursuing new and increasingly
niche and quality audiences, there remained an overall interest in mass viewership; never
abandoning a broad base in the way comic books did, television simply split the mass audience
up into multiple parts, addressing different demographics simultaneously but separately within
the same program (as with The Mary Tyler Moore Show), the same network (as with Hill Street
Blues at NBC), and eventually, just the same conglomerate (as with HBO at Time Warner).

234

Young Men, Deregulation, and HBO
In the late eighties, advertisers were still showing a slight partiality to women and baby
boomers (who had been aging up through and slowly out of the 18-49 demographic), since these
audiences still guaranteed higher overall ratings. But with those big numbers in persistent decline
due to competition from cable, it was increasingly the quality audience everyone wanted.
121
This
mounting push for upscale consumers was hardly surprising. As Mark Alvey has shown through
his research, networks had, for many decades, emphasized upper income, upper-educated, young
adult viewers whenever ratings looked too low. Historically, executives deployed this tactic as ―a
post-fact defense…a rhetorical strategy by which to defend programs whose average audience
share was below par.‖
122
But as poor ratings became the norm, so did this strategy—so much so
that ―yuppie,‖ a term that succinctly described the long sought after demographic of young urban
professionals, suddenly became an industry buzzword in the late eighties. Unfortunately, yuppies
were hard to count in ratings breakdowns from Nielsen, which had become too blunt a tool to be
particularly useful to programmers and advertisers narrowing their address further and further.
123

Young men, on the other hand, were a measurable demographic, and in terms of
desirability, they came to replace the more elusive yuppies, and the less and less appealing target
audience of middle-class women that had preceded them as a network priority. There have been
a number of reasons advanced as to why tech-savvy men, aged 18-34, were becoming more
valuable as audiences. There was a broad perception that their disposable income was for the
taking, and that this money would be going disproportionately to e-commerce, technology,
blockbuster movies, and beer, categories that were constituting a larger and larger portion of the
products marketed on television and elsewhere.
124
Producers also believed that their long-term
brand loyalty—still up for grabs—could be gained with ―the right kind of programming.‖ Driven
235

by that promise, networks like Fox, UPN, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network, were moving
more and more aggressively into a wider variety of young-male targeted formats that included
animation, comedy, action, and almost anything sports-related.
125

According to industry trades meanwhile, this enormous demographic shift toward young,
affluent, men had an even simpler explanation. This was the most difficult audience to reach, and
therefore its most desirable, with scarcity driving value.
126
Of course, over the four decades prior,
the opposite was true; housewives were desirable because they drove big ratings, their appeal
proportionate to their numbers. In this demographic shift then, came the reversal of the medium‘s
long-established goal of reaching the many over the few, the very foundation of its mass nature.
The television industry‘s most fundamental operating logic had undergone a tremendous change;
but then, so had its most basic infrastructures. This would be especially true for industry players
who emerged at the edge of the business, but who gradually remade its center, in particular
HBO.
Since its inception, television had been an advertiser-supported medium, and accordingly
was motivated and shaped by trends in the production of mass consumer goods; networks‘
primary function was to sell large audiences to these manufacturers. The rise of pay-cable
disrupted that predominant profit-model by introducing subscription fees. But the rise of pay-
cable pointed to a far more significant upheaval within the television business: deregulation.
Impacting cable first, a new regulatory regime driven by neoliberal ideology quickly spread
across the entertainment landscape. It prompted a wave of mergers in 1985, and another in
1989;
127
in the process, deregulation transformed broadcast and cable networks alike, turning
them into cogs within major international multimedia conglomerates, and shifting their most
fundamental assumptions about economics and audiences.
236

While the FCC had, for decades, largely supported the economic interests of the more
established elements of the broadcast industry it regulated, anti-trust law dating back to the 1948
Paramount Decree had nonetheless prevented both horizontal and vertical integration within the
entertainment business. As Holt notes, throughout the network era then, ―studios, television
networks, and cable companies were legally, strategically, and structurally disconnected,‖
making them ―fierce competitors, still largely operating independently of one another in the
broader media landscape.‖
128
This environment worked to hold back the development of cable,
with other competing media sectors arguing in favor of its strict regulation.
129
Despite the
limitations the FCC agreed to impose on both cable programming and technology, in 1972, Time
Inc. nonetheless decided to take a gamble and launch the pay network HBO, originally an
outgrowth of a cable service operating in Lower Manhattan.
130
The company was not able to turn
a profit, however, until 1977. This was when the deregulatory impulses that had been simmering
since the Nixon Administration finally materialized in what became known as the HBO
Decision. In it, the US Court of Appeals struck down the FCC‘s most restrictive rules on the
network, giving pay cable much greater First Amendment protection; it was a huge win for the
company, which would later build its brand around its freedom from government censorship.
131

It came at the beginning of a wave of chaotic and uneven deregulation, administered in such a
way that cable was able to flourish, with film and television companies only occasionally
allowed to partake in the spoils.
132

In this environment, HBO, its parent company Time Inc., and its future sister company
Warner Bros., all found themselves extremely lucky. Both conglomerates were able to amass
significant holdings in both cable distribution (in the form of multi-system cable operators—or
MSOs—like ATC and Warner Cable Communications who were wiring up homes across the
237

country) and programming.
133
And as Holt explains, by 1979, HBO was able to establish a
virtual monopoly in pay cable, boasting nearly three-quarters market share, licensing $130
million of studio product a year, and spending $250 million a year to finance production. When
the film studios—angered by HBO‘s artificially low prices and the general power the network
exercised over their market—tried to compete on cable with their own subscription channels, the
Department of Justice used anti-trust law to stop them and uphold HBO‘s dominance.
134
HBO
was aided in these political battles by the fact that its owner was Time Inc., a publishing
company not subject to the same scrutiny film studios and broadcast networks were, the former
because they had a history of anti-trust violations, and the latter because of its low cultural
status.
135

The network‘s timing also happened to be ―impeccable.‖
136
Even though the Department
of Justice had just prevented a number of media acquisitions/consolidations, the agency decided
not to object to HBO‘s 1982 creation of Tri-Star, an instant major film studio also backed by
Columbia and CBS. Around the same time, HBO also made a major financing and licensing deal
with Orion Pictures and created a production company, Silver Screen Partners. These ventures
all made innovative use of newly established distribution channels and carried very low risk for
HBO—which partly financed the many films produced under them by pre-selling TV rights to
itself; the deals also helped the network fill its programming pipeline and increase profit
participation in what it was airing.
137

By 1987, HBO was the biggest financier of motion pictures in the world, and Time Inc.‘s
biggest cash cow. Both studios and broadcasters were incensed by the way the network wielded
this power. One executive described HBO as being ―so arrogant‖ that they made everyone they
worked with ―feel terrible‖ and MPAA President Jack Valenti referred to the cable industry as a
238

whole, with HBO at its top, as a great, and dangerous, ―unregulated monopoly.‖
138
According to
Holt, HBO‘s aggressive political and financial strategies were nonetheless demonstrating how
important it was to exploit both film and television holdings across media distribution pipelines,
and were also effectively laying out the guiding principles for the era of conglomerate
consolidation ahead.
139

Not surprisingly then, when the heads of Time Inc. and Warner Communications began
discussing a possible joint venture in cable, partly in the hopes of better leveraging HBO, it
quickly led to one of the most important corporate mergers in history. On the completion of the
Time Warner deal in the summer of 1989, Warner Bros. released Batman to theaters. Based on a
comic book intellectual property, the film was heralded as a paean to the synergy that inspired
the media consolidation underway. But as Jennifer Holt notes, while the press focused on the
potential of Warner Bros. film production post-merger, less attention was given to the equally
significant ramifications in cable, a sector which both Time and Warner had been integrating into
their portfolios for decades, and on which their union depended.
140
At the time of the merger,
cable accounted for more than a third of the conglomerate‘s profits, exceeding those from
publishing, music, and film/television production.
141
Ultimately then, the company‘s real
signature product would become original, high-profile, quality television programming from
their most profitable brand, HBO.
An essential component of this new entertainment empire, the pay cable network had a
number of corporate mandates to which it needed to answer. First and foremost, Time Warner
needed in HBO a branded entity that could strengthen and support the company‘s large and
always expanding MSOs as these divisions expanded reach and negotiated higher rates for
subscribers and licensors alike. An influential brand would also have the ability to appeal to
239

subscribers—new and old—and open up international distribution markets, particularly if it
appealed to a global middle-class audience.
142
Time Warner additionally stood to benefit from
HBO‘s role in film and television financing and production; the conglomerate needed more and
more titles to fill its many pipelines, with owned content carrying the potential to generate long
ancillary lives across many divisions. These objectives required media properties that had the
kind of cultural cache that could boost the HBO brand, and as importantly, the kind of fans that
could support the product through multiple iterations throughout the conglomerate. Less
important at HBO were massive ratings from broad and possibly unengaged audiences—a group
still assumed to be primarily composed of middle-age women—even as that demographic
remained important to broadcast networks. In fact, overall domestic household ratings at HBO
had declined in the five years leading up to the merger and would continue to over the next two
decades.
143
It was a problem that seemed not to hamper growth even within the subsidiary, which
had come to rely not just on subscription rates (which did not necessarily parallel ratings), but on
film production, ancillary revenue, and international growth. Raising viewership seems then not
to have been a priority, meaning that HBO was tasked with creating a new kind of cultural
product, one that had the freedom to envision itself as more masculine in nature and exclusive in
appeal.
To accomplish this task, the company had almost unlimited political and economic
capital—in the form of government support, immense power within the industry, its own deep
pockets, and the safety net of big corporate financing. According to Michael Fuchs, HBO
chairman at the time, if it had not been for HBO‘s savvy business strategy, which took a
diversified approach to the entertainment landscape, the company would not have even survived
through to the nineties, no less been able to launch this major creative revolution in original
240

programming.
144
By the end of the nineties, however, HBO had managed to develop original
programming so groundbreaking, some have argued, it helped change the cultural perception of
television and pave the way for a second Golden Age in the medium.
145
What was occurring in
the field of television then was not unlike what was happening, at roughly the same time, within
comic book culture. Notably, in both instances, the ability of producers to narrow their target
audience, and of creators to tell more personal stories to audiences who more closely resembled
them in terms of social identity, seems to have paved the way toward increased cultural
legitimacy.
Critics and historians have since credited HBO, its forward-thinking executives, and its
enormously talented and inspired creative talent with revolutionizing television, artistically and
structurally. As Janet McCabe and Kim Akass explain, "HBO purposefully liberated television
fiction from established rules and determined different industrial and creative approaches in the
post network, post 1996 era: authorship as brand label, the illicit as a marker of quality, high-
production values, creative risk-taking and artistic integrity, the viewer as consumer, consumer
satisfaction, and value for money."
146
It has been tempting to attribute this success solely to their
subscription model, which freed them from answering to advertisers, ratings, and traditional
schedules.
147
But the extent to which HBO was operating in a totally new environment (one that
went well beyond a new profit model) cannot be overstated. Flush with cash and power, the
company was in a unique position within the industry that allowed it to embark upon the creative
revolution it did. HBO could not have pursued this strategy had regulation not been in its favor,
had deregulation not changed the entire industry, and had its economics not demanded it; the
company‘s creative potential flowed directly from the position of power it occupied.

241

Resurrecting Tales from the Crypt
―Tales from the Crypt is a delightfully macabre and comical half hour anthology show on
HBO based upon William Gaines‘ horror comics from the ‗40s and ‗50s. It is one of the best
series on the air right now, or rather on cable, and it constantly stretches the boundaries of good
taste and civilized behavior. The production quality is high, the stories daffy and disgusting, and
the overall spirit is one of devilish and witty cynicism….‖
– Michael Dare, Billboard Magazine, 1990
―Tales from the Crypt should not be confused with serious, adult fare…yet it is not
pretentious. You‘ll never get highbrow points for watching. Call it a guilty pleasure, like comic
books. And television.‖
– Scott Williams, The Washington Post, 1991

Even so, this critically acclaimed creative revolution did not roll out overnight. HBO had
actually been developing original programming almost from its inception, and still, it would take
nearly a decade from the time of the merger for the network to perfect their model. In the very
early days, back in the seventies, these attempts were motivated largely by the network‘s
perpetual programming shortages—which forced them to play the same movies over and over
(and over)
148
—and which led to subscriber loss, or ―churn.‖
149
But there were so many potential
new subscribers back then that HBO managed to achieve consistent growth without ever
producing higher quality content.
150
In the late eighties, as domestic subscriber growth finally
started to flatten out,
151
HBO‘s mandate was still not to bring in huge amounts of new viewers
but to create branded content that could sustain an ancillary afterlife, generate a greater
international presence, and exert influence over major cable systems. In this environment, comic
books turned out to be an extremely valuable holding. Steve Ross—the visionary CEO of
Warner Bros., a media conglomerate that had begun with Kinney Parking—had made his initial
move into the entertainment industry by purchasing National Periodicals, a core investment in
comic book publishing, distribution, and licensing. Now that Time Inc. (and its subsidiary HBO)
was joining his empire, comic books would again lead the way.
242

The medium became part of a more aggressive and expensive original programming
mandate backed by the new ―simply the best‖ brand campaign, all rolled out beginning in 1989.
As Chairman Michael Fuchs explained to the press, the intention here was never massive ratings.
Instead, even more than the broadcast networks, HBO wanted to seek out an engaged niche
audience to help enhance its reputation as a quality network. Working very strategically, the
network was thus willing to bet on shows that might not bring a lot of new subscribers, as long as
it helped strengthen its brand and increase its public profile.
152
In the long term, a more
aggressive pursuit of original programming did also help domestic subscriber growth. By the
early 2000s, numbers had reached a plateau of around 28 million (up from 20 million a decade
prior) and that is, more or less, where it remains today.
153
The brand, meanwhile, made far more
impressive leaps forward, prompting growth in international markets—where subscriptions now
number close to 100 million—earning the company immense profits in syndication and DVDS,
and turning itself into a must-carry network on a wide array of distribution platforms moving
forward.
154
To accomplish this, HBO had worked to build a roster of series that made up for in
either shock value and/or critical interest what they lacked in broad appeal. These shows
included Dream On (1999), a standard sitcom but for an abundance of sex and nudity, The Larry
Sanders Show (1990), a highly-reflexive and dry comedy and critical darling, and Tales from the
Crypt (1990), with its brash display of violence, gore, sex, and nudity. Pay cable‘s strong First
Amendment protections, won in the 1977 HBO Decision, made the obscenities in these shows
possible, thereby allowing the network to easily differentiate its content from the competition‘s.
HBO had employed this strategy broadly from early on, distinguishing its programming with an
edginess and boldness not previously seen on television.
155

243

Tales from the Crypt premiered in the summer of 1989, as executives at Time and Warner
were finalizing their merger. While the series has largely been forgotten in critical circles, it
played a major role in making HBO‘s early nineties programming and branding strategy work. It
also lay considerable groundwork in re-conceptualizing the quality TV genre for the future by
establishing it anew on HBO. Initially pitched as a horror anthology feature, a Tales from the
Crypt film became an impossible sale after poor box office performances from both Steven
Spielberg‘s Twilight Zone Movie (1983, Warner Bros.) and George Romero‘s Creepshow (1982,
Warner Bros.). With the material thought to be too bold for broadcast television, the producers
needed a sweet spot between the major studios and the major networks, a place where they could
make ―the sort of film [they] couldn‘t do otherwise.‖ HBO became that place for them, and
would soon be the same for scores of other producers with similar needs. Boasting a perfectly
cult sensibility, innately controversial and obscene subject matter, a recognizable brand, and a
built-in audience that perfectly matched HBO‘s core demographic, Tales from the Crypt was an
ideal match. It also had the added benefit of not straying too dramatically from the channel‘s
long-standing expertise in horror and mystery anthologies (e.g. The Hitchhiker, 1983-1990 and
Ray Bradbury Theater, 1985-1986). Perhaps most importantly though, Tales could generate buzz
within the industry—populated by a disproportionate number of EC fans—to bring in the
heavyweight creative talent the network was eager to be in business with.
156
Indeed bringing in
that talent pool would be an essential tool as HBO embarked on its new quality strategy.
In 1950, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein introduced the Crypt Keeper, the freakish,
wisecracking narrator of Tales from the Crypt, to set up and explain their new horror stories.
Along with two other narrators, the Vault-Keeper and the Old Witch, he helped unite the
otherwise disparate horror tales collected in the EC comics Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, and
244

Tales from the Crypt.
‡‡
The Crypt Keeper had a characteristic ghoulishness and sarcasm that
turned him into a kind of brand, one that spoke to loyal readers and attracted bright and engaged
comic book readers—both young and old, but primarily male—to the EC brand. (See Fig. 4.1)
Gaines actively reached out to this emerging
fan community, years before such tactics were
typically employed in any medium, comic
books included. Regularly publishing
eloquently written fan letters within the comics,
Gaines also established the EC Fan-Addict
Club, offering members secret pins, patches,
and a regular Fan-Addict Club Bulletin that
advertised EC-dedicated fanzines.
157

The nature of this fandom in many ways
precipitated the Jerry Bails-Julius Schwartz fan
campaign of the early sixties, with Gaines
embracing the community and promoting their
affection for, and interest in, EC‘s artists and
writers.
158
Unfortunately, as described in
Chapter One, other decisions made by Gaines
brought national, and decidedly negative,
attention to his work, and the comics soon faced resistance from retailers, wholesalers, and

‡‡
Most comic books at the time were structured as anthologies, with a single issue containing multiple
distinct stories featuring different, but sometimes reoccurring characters. EC first introduced horror stories
in Crime Patrol #15 and War Against Crime #15 (both released in January 1950), but by April had given the
genre its own titles, with Tales from the Crypt initially named Crypt of Terror.
Figure 4.1 From “Survival or Death” in Tales from the
Crypt #31 (Aug 1952)
245

industry censors. After losing his distributor, Gaines—who had no way of getting his comics to
the loyal readers that loved them—cancelled the titles. In the years that followed, a number of
former EC fans
§§
—some of whom discovered the titles only after they went out of publication—
went on either to draw and write comics for the underground movement as noted, but also to
publish fanzines, comic criticism, and comic history, or to collect and sell comics in the
emerging specialty market.
159
There had been fewer than 18,000 members of the original fan
club, and just a small percentage of them went on to participate in fan activity later on.
160
But
this small community‘s affection for comic books generally and EC in particular, the force of
their fandom, and their prominence within their cultural communities clearly outweighed their
small number. It was an early example of how an audience that was undersized could still prove
highly valuable through intense engagement and social capital; EC Comics had a quintessential
cult following and Hollywood would soon come calling for it.
In 1971, seasoned horror film producers Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, of Amicus
Productions, attained the rights to adapt the property into an anthology film. Based in the UK,
where production costs were cheaper, Amicus ran on efficiency and relatively low budgets,
striking favorable deals with distributors to turn reliable profits on a stream of exploitation films.
For Tales, they managed to get backing from Metromedia Producers, a television and radio
station owner with a production company that specialized in syndicated television. In this
property, the company found good, commercial source material that was easily financeable at
their studio, with a brand they could exploit better than original content.
161
So in March of 1972,
they released the film amidst a marketing blitz that included a ―World Screamiere‖ open to
audience members with the best shriek, a ―Gravedigger Screening‖ for the New York Cemetery

§§
More prominent fans include Bhob Stewart, Larry Stark, Larry Ivie, Ron Parker, Mike Vosburg, Jerry Weist,
Roger Hill, Fred von Bernewitz, Grant Geissman, Russ Cochran, and Ian Ballantine.
246

Worker Union, and also a showcase of original art from EC Comics, with Gaines himself
featured prominently at a number of the events. Reintroducing the brand‘s trademark character,
The Crypt Keeper, the movie altered him considerably to meet casting needs (See Fig. 4.2).
With strong appeal to a young teenage
audience (it had a PG rating), the box office
results were positive enough—$1.6 million
in its first six weeks—that Amicus put out a
sequel, The Vault of Horror.
162
Both films
unfortunately disappointed Gaines, and also
failed to impress critics, and it would be
another fifteen years before the Crypt
Keeper found a new home on HBO.
163
But
the logic that brought the title to the big
screen was not unrelated to its homecoming on pay-cable. While the Amicus movies were
neither top-earning blockbusters nor prestige films, Tales and Vault still fit a financial model that
worked well at a time when Hollywood was in transition. The same would be true of the series
on HBO, when the network, its parent company Time Warner, and the televisual medium as a
whole were in the process of being remade.
Their best answer to the political and economic circumstances of that transitional moment
was the kind of quality original programming embodied by Tales. Costing $1 million per
episode, the show quickly gained the distinction of being the ―most expensive half hour in
TV.‖
164
Even high ratings could not offset these costs, because HBO did not sell any ad space.
Additionally, the cable network was paying the producers the same $400,000 per episode the
Figure 4.7 Ralph Richardson as the Crypt Keeper in the
1971 film

247

Figure 4.3 Publicity still from Tales from the Crypt, HBO,
1989.
broadcasters paid for their far less expensive programming. Accordingly, Tales, like much of the
quality programming that came before it, was financed on deficit, by the producers, in the
conviction that they could make up the difference in syndication, foreign broadcast rights, and a
plan to re lease the episodes as films in a number of territories.
165
This had become increasingly
possible with more options for selling syndication, which became a considerable driver in the
growth of quality.
166
There were also branding opportunities. The producers created a ―signature
feel‖ for the series and decided to re-invent the Crypt Keeper yet again in order to give the
―audience a personality to hook on to‖ and a recognizable thread through the stories (See Fig.
4.3).
167

Their gamble ultimately paid off. The series became HBO‘s first real hit, even beating the
broadcast networks in homes with HBO (about 20 percent of overall households). By 1994, it
had become a ―phenomenon‖ with the
Los Angeles Times reporting that it
would be ―the year of the Crypt
Keeper.‖ Silver successfully sold the
show into syndication on Fox, who
broadcast it to high ratings during
prime time; he also sold it as a
Saturday morning cartoon on ABC
(Tales from the Cryptkeeper, 1993-1999).
168
Then came two more feature films (Demon Knight,
1995 and Bordello of Blood, 1996 both released by Universal), and even a children‘s game show
(Secrets of the Cryptkeeper’s Haunted House, CBS, 1996-1997). All of these venues made
possible various lines of merchandise, for both kids and collectors, or as licensors described
248

them, ―the cultist who‘s been following the Crypt Keeper for years.‖ The character was
becoming ―a billion-dollar industry‖ unto himself.
169
Most of these spoils though went to the
producers, with the benefit to HBO a little less tangible, but significant nonetheless. In this
context, the connection the show retained with the original comic book source material proved to
be invaluable. This was because Tales from the Crypt was able to bring to HBO a dedicated fan-
base; executives reported that viewers were watching it ―with more loyalty than anything the
cable channel has offered.‖
170

Initially though, the series failed to garner the kind of intense and serious-minded critical
acclaim that typically solidifies a program‘s place in history. Indeed many critics were sure to
note that Tales was explicitly not highbrow.
171
Pointing out the ―bad taste‖ level that
characterized the series, the press harshly criticized its predictability, lack of subtlety, formulaic
quality, and excessive use of violence, sex and gore
172
True to HBO‘s long-established
reputation for indecency, the episodes featured over-the-top violence, nudity, and other
obscenities, but this was of course before HBO constructed a discourse of controversy that would
identify indecency as a hallmark of quality.
173
Repeatedly, the critics blamed these flaws on
Tales‘ comic-book source material, which suffered from ―built-in limitations‖ and trite twist-
endings.
174
Their inability to perceive in all of these aspects of the show something that was
irreverent and playful was at least in part what made the series appeal to its most hardcore fans.
In its essential difference from the mainstream, it had aspects of cult TV, fans of which, as Matt
Hills has noted, ―can claim an anti-commercial status as the appreciators of televisual art rather
than mere entertainment and as discriminating fans rather than as undiscriminating
consumers."
175
But it also resisted more elitist associations, resembling trash cinema, which as
Jeffrey Sconce has noted, was being taken up by a paracinema subculture that defined
249

themselves against both a mainstream other and a cinematic elite. Here, a ―calculated negation
and refusal‖ of more sophisticated fare suggested that the politics of taste and the social
hierarchies forming around HBO were ―more complex than a simple high-brow/low-brow
split.‖
176
Ultimately, it would be the very elements the critics rejected that connected so
effectively with media-savvy HBO audiences and the new generation of Hollywood power
players that were rallying behind it.
The anthology series was build around twenty-five-minute episodes, each based on an
original EC Comic horror story written in the fifties, meaning that no stories or characters—save
the Crypt Keeper as narrator—reappeared or continued. Staying true to their source material, the
plots almost always featured twist-endings with sardonically delivered morality lessons. The
show‘s anthology structure allowed for a rotating talent pool; each installment brought in a new
director and a new set of actors, many of whom were quite well-known from impressive careers
in film. One typical episode, for example, entitled ―And All Through the Night,‖ (based on a
1954 Johnny Craig story) features a woman who murders her husband on Christmas Eve while
her daughter sleeps upstairs. She is subsequently visited by a homicidal mental patient dressed as
Santa Claus. After a gory chase, her little girl innocently invites the blood-soaked man into the
house. As the newly-widowed woman screams her brains out, deranged Santa asks forebodingly,
―naughty or nice?‖. The episode ends with a commentary from the Crypt Keeper. He assures
viewers the little daughter will be fine, ―this particular Santa preferred older women…in pieces
that is! Well, it just goes to show, be very careful what you axe for on Christmas, you might just
GET IT!‖
Clearly, Tales from the Crypt did not conform to the quality TV genre in entirely
predictable ways. Scholars have typically defined quality TV by a common set of attributes that
250

include high production values, the use of recognized and esteemed actors, an innovative visual
and aural style that reflects a unique creative vision, and a complex and often symbolic structure
that encourages more active viewing.
177
Also common in quality TV is a tendency to rely on
media other than television for fundamental structures and signifiers, but simultaneously to
employ many of the small screen‘s existing templates.
178
Unlike contemporaneous quality
programs like NYPD Blue (1993-2005, ABC) and Homicide: Life on the Streets (1993-1999,
NBC), this horror anthology eschewed quality‘s typical seriousness and deep symbolism, instead
opting for the irreverent tone of the original comic books. With single-installment episodes, it
also necessarily lacked the complex and interweaving narrative structure that has defined so
much of the genre, from the seventies through today.
The series nonetheless had a number characteristics that did position it firmly within the
quality TV genre. As noted, it had one of the biggest budgets in television at the time, making for
high production values that wowed viewers and created an ―eye-catching package‖ and ―an
unmistakable cinematic look.‖
179
The series also prioritized an innovative, often auteurist, visual
style closely associated with its use of esteemed creative talent, both behind the camera and in
front of it. According to Diehl‘s glossy treatment on the series, in directing the first three
episodes, producers Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and Richard Donner worked early on to
establish for the whole series a ―sensationalist and totally nonconformist‖ feel. They constructed
their own unique styles through techniques like direct address, the use of extreme wide-angle
lenses, and an overall visual ―funhouse mirror unorthodoxy.‖ The producers subsequently
pushed each episode‘s new set of creative talent to ―do everything they were trained not to do‖
and ―go all out and have fun.‖ The only requirement was that ―the cinematography, the
251

storytelling, and the acting have the same level of quality as a feature film‖. As a result, each
installment had ―an individual look‖ associated with its distinctive creative team.
180

Enamored by these possibilities, the Hollywood elite immediately gravitated toward the
show. Tales from the Crypt built up a "cachet in the industry that few other television
opportunities could match" and before long "stars and directors were calling [the producers]
asking for a chance to do a segment…it became a mark of prestige."
181
According to Zemeckis,
it gave directors a chance to return to the kind of short films they did in school, in a form that
wasn't "completely ham-strung and censor-ridden, the way broadcast television is. You don't
have to worry about commercial breaks or censorship of any kind. You just have to do it with
complete abandon and go for it".
182
Producers paid even the biggest names scale wages, but
because production was typically only a week long—with no added expectation of handling
distribution or marketing—high profile directors and actors were still more-than-willing to fit the
show into their busy schedules.
183

The production culture of the show had initially failed to impress reviewers, who
complained of the first season that, despite ―big name directors‖ and cinematic production
values, the episodes simply were not special or scary or dazzling enough.
184
But gradually, the
cultural capital Tales built up within the industry spilled over into critical discourse. Although
members of the press found the product to be even more ―noticeably uneven‖ in later seasons,
they warmed up to the style considerably. Reviewers began making more note of its great
casting, ―stylistic fun,‖ redeeming ―wit, malice, and humor,‖ and overall superior execution—
―nowhere in television is formula, 30-minute drama done better.‖
185

Neither the critics‘ nor Hollywood‘s embrace of the show seems to have been greatly
hampered by the show‘s decidedly male bent, or what was possibly even a misogynistic edge.
252

Reviewers, for example, tended to criticize the show‘s use of obscenity for the purpose of
titillation but not the fact that it typically came at the expense of women. Years before The
Sopranos made the Bada Bing! a regular set-piece and Game of Thrones made ―sexplication‖ a
buzzword, The Los Angeles Times blithely pointed out Tales‘ ―penchant for setting scenes in
topless-dancer bars.‖
186
There was also the recurring mention of the show‘s graphic sex and
murder scenes hinging on the ―brutal and bloody murder of a young woman.‖
187
These
punishments could be meted out symbolically as well; Variety described an episode in which the
―viciousness‖ of one ―nasty‖ woman was curbed by a potion that turned her into a
nymphomaniac.
188
The Washington Post even included quotes from the series:

―Sample dialogue: Women: you can‘t live with ‗em, you can‘t cut them up in little pieces
and tell the neighbors they‘re in Palm Springs.‘ Euw, gross!...Sample dialogue: Women:
you can‘t live with ‗em, you can‘t fit more than one in the trunk.‘ Euw, gross!

The critic‘s explanation for the pattern—cheeky, but telling nonetheless—was that ―UCLA film
school graduates tend to think alike.‖
189
Ultimately, industry insiders, HBO audiences, and the
critics agreed that even the most exploitative scenes were ―very well executed‖—it was all ―class
trash.‖
190
The series was, after all, a ―sexually and viscerally explicit horror-and comic anthology
where most femmes are fatales,‖ and the rule seemed to be, ―the more tasteless, the more
delicious.‖
191
In this respect, Tales‘ cult status and its simultaneous rejection of both mainstream
cultural norms and of more serious or academic approaches to visual media may have provided a
kind of justification for its refusal to conform to notions of appropriateness with regards to the
representation of gender.
253

To be sure, critics never accepted the series as anything more than a guilty pleasure, and
it was certainly never celebrated as quality TV in the same way that either Hill Street Blues was
before it or that The Sopranos was after it. But their eventual support of the material—even at its
most violent, sexual, and misogynistic turns—represented a significant departure from the
critical reception the stories met thirty-five years prior, in comic book form. Social mores had
indeed changed, but the title‘s tremendous transformation in cultural worth—heralded in its final
stages by HBO‘s immensely powerful publicity machine—had involved a far more complicated
set of value conversions. The Tales from the Crypt series had earned itself a unique and
venerable position with an increasingly convoluted cultural hierarchy. More akin to cinema than
television in terms of budget, big name talent, and aesthetics, it used HBO‘s reputation, the
credibility of the series‘ respected auteurs, and the affluence of its audience to justify its
perceived ―tastelessness.‖
The storied legacy of its comic book source material further enhanced these building
blocks of credibility. Not only was EC‘s Tales from the Crypt a supposedly-censored object,
which can on its own ―render a text valuable,‖
192
but it too had auteurist credibility (most visibly
in publisher Bill Gaines, but for those in the know, also in writers and artists like Wally Wood
and Jack Davis), and perhaps most significantly, a cult audience. Comic book fans, particularly
those who continued to support EC thirty plus years after its disappearance, may have
superficially rejected the standards of both mass culture and high culture, but in terms of their
textual and critical sophistication, like Sconce‘s lovers of paracinema, they shared with the
highbrow a certain ―cultural pedigree.‖ And like those cultural elites, they also tended to embody
―primarily a male, white, middle-class, and educated perspective‖ on the comic book medium
they adored.
193
In this respect, they helped to support and legitimize an irreverent and camp tone
254

that could have been misread as cheap or tasteless had it not been targeted at HBO‘s discerning
and decidedly upscale male audience. These viewers warmly embraced the show, not because it
had realism and narrative complexity, but because it actively rejected those features, and
nonetheless maintained its cultural capital.
And perhaps as importantly, the EC Comics brand had succeeded in attracting a
Hollywood elite to the project and to HBO. In the years that followed, HBO would become a
―haven‖ for the industry‘s best and brightest, pulling in some of film and television‘s most
innovative talent. The cable company became widely known for offering creative talent freedom
from focus groups, censors, and network executives.
194
And on that reputation, HBO was able to
build a slate of programs that seemed to genuinely raise the aesthetics and narrative standards in
the medium. After six seasons, by which time it had cemented HBO‘s status as a refuge for
Hollywood‘s creative luminaries, Tales from the Crypt was cancelled. The decision was made in
1996, as Chris Albrecht and Jeff Bewkes, embarked on a new original programming strategy that
worked to transform HBO from an occasional use luxury brand into an habitual, regular-use
network more integral to viewers‘ daily lives and cultural and social identity.
195
Anthology
programs like Tales had a more limited appeal in this new era, which more aggressively pursued
serious and intensely serialized narratives. But the series had nonetheless made enormous strides
in the way it was able to highlight the more cinematic and more masculine side of HBO as a
brand, and of television overall. The support of comic book fans—both behind the camera, and
in affluent living rooms—helped make that re-conceptualization possible.

“Groundbreaking” Original Programming
Notably though, this re-conceptualization required something else too—good public
relations. As numerous scholars have pointed out, assessments of quality are never absolute and
255

are necessarily situated within interpretive communities that determine value.
196
And while these
communities may be constituted by independent-thinking individuals, they also rely on more
established institutions—social, educational, even political—to organize and legitimize certain
meanings and theories. As Christopher Anderson has noted though, television largely lacked
these particular kinds of institutions and the network of intellectuals that typically do this kind of
work.
197
To be sure, there were many TV admirers and fans, and even critics and fan
communities, but no institutional framework with the respect or size that could quite match the
magnitude of the task of improving television‘s reputation and general level of cultural respect.
Into this vacuum stepped HBO‘s public relations arm, which, with a massive marketing budget
and a whole new approach to the field, was able to mold an emerging interpretive community for
television to its liking.
Howard Rosenberg, television critic at the Los Angeles Times throughout the eighties and
nineties, remembers HBO‘s publicity department as functioning in a far more engaged way than
he had previously experienced. Before HBO, cable more specifically, but even television on the
whole, seemed a landscape littered with easily as many misses as hits, making criticism a
sometimes difficult job. But beginning in the nineties, representatives from HBO made an effort
to understand critics‘ individual tastes, connecting with them on a personal level and treating
both their company‘s product and the critic‘s profession with more intensity and seriousness than
was common at the time.
198
Before long, the popular press, which benefitted from the way in
which HBO was elevating the status of television criticism,
199
started taking greater notice of the
cable network‘s offerings, describing HBO as a brand worthy of attention, with the potential of
raising the bar for the medium more broadly.
200
And soon, this discourse spread to the general
public. The buzz had begun with Dream On and Larry Sanders Show, and to a much lesser
256

extent, their contemporary Tales from the Crypt. It spread considerably after the network‘s
infamous 1996 brand campaign ―It‘s Not TV. It‘s HBO‖ and a new slate of series that soon
included Arli$$ (1996-2002), Oz (1997-2003), Sex and the City (1998-2004), and The Sopranos
(1999-2007).
Of particular interest here is the precise tenor of the discourse HBO initiated, first among
critics, and then among segments of the public, particularly the way in which the rhetoric that
surrounded the network tended to lean heavily on the channel‘s established demographic,
characterized as both affluent and male. Widely discussed in scholarly literature about HBO‘s
critical and financial success, the often elitist and gendered nature of the cultural legitimation of
the network and of television more broadly is worth retreading here. While Tales from the Crypt
was not generally a part of this conversation, that program‘s embrace by the network was based
on similar branding impulses, and understood together, these strategies help in part explain
quality media‘s increasing reliance on comic book source material, which could bring to
feminized media forms both engaged male audiences and a cult sensibility.
One of the earliest and most important shifts in rhetoric around HBO was the reaction to
the network‘s use of obscenity. Early on, critics saw it as a cheap ploy—nudity and violence to
attract boys or men flipping fecklessly through channels. But increasingly, it was associated with
genuine controversy, an admirable attempt to achieve realism, and the willingness to give the
auteurs they worked with full creative control.
201
With the finesse of its superb public relations
department then, HBO was able to make controversial content that could have been a marker of
bad taste (which is what violence, sex, obscenity often represent in less rarefied contexts) instead
serve as a marker of quality. As Deborah Jaramaillo has argued, implicit in the idea that HBO‘s
indecency was intended not to titillate but to achieve realism and offer directors creative
257

freedom, was the assumption that HBO‘s elite audience could handle the controversial
content.
202

As Feuer has noted, ―the term quality describes the demographics of the audience‖ as
much as anything else.
203
Indeed, the air of exclusivity building around HBO, while carefully
cultivated, was also in fact quite genuine; as Anderson points out, the actual HBO audience had
remained small, with the original programming ―appealing to a restricted taste culture and to
viewers of privileged economic circumstances.‖ Press accounts of the time reified this sense of
elitism, and demonstrated that even within the industry, HBO was cultivating an air of unabashed
affluence. In one Los Angeles Times piece, a major film producer endearingly refers to the
network as ―elitist,‖ reassuringly noting that HBO offers ―totally satisfying work. It‘s not
déclassé in any respect.‖
204
Even without comments like these, the mere fact that so many
Hollywood luminaries—including Steven Spielberg himself—were deigning to work with HBO
in the first place seemed to confer on the pay network a revered status.
205
Veritable cinematic
auteurs, they projected onto television the authority and respect they had cultivated in another
other more respected medium and did so at a level that had not previously been possible in the
form. Despite the network‘s more elite associations and exclusive reach, the publicity machine it
employed was still able to function as a kind of ―echo chamber of cultural production‖ created
the widespread impression that the network‘s programming was playing ―a disproportionately
major role in American culture.‖
206
In all these ways, HBO in the mid-to-late nineties succeeded
in identifying itself as ―a luxury brand in a populist medium.‖
207

Central to this re-construction of taste within a long-established cultural hierarchy were a
number of implications regarding gender. As Avi Santo explains, in order to present itself as a
product worth paying for and a product worthy of its elite subscribers, the network positioned
258

itself as a ―home for oppositional, non-televisual experiences.‖ Of course, one of television‘s
core characteristics, which was in part responsible for its decades-long disparagement, was its
well-established association with female audiences. For Lynne Joyrich, the tendency to
understand television in this way was at least in part symbolic. She describes the televisual form,
particularly its more melodramatic qualities, as relying on ―strands of passivity and domesticity‖
that work to position all viewers, men and women alike, as feminized and susceptible
consumers.
208
HBO made possible, through the critical discourse it cultivated about its content, a
reversal of this association. The ―It‘s Not TV‖ campaign carried ―the implicit baggage of
everything TV is (feminizing, consumerist, emasculating, massified), and by contrast, everything
HBO supposedly is not.‖ In so doing, the company worked to "re-mark subscribers as masculine,
thus repositioning its audience as powerful bearers of cultural capital that is free from the
commercialized trappings of regular television."
209
The network‘s tendency to foreground its
creators as auteurs in a way that was, at the time, far more common in film, only amplified these
efforts. These figures further distinguished HBO from its more feminized competition on
broadcast by imbuing the network with a masculine, even paternalistic authority.
210

Of course, HBO‘s success in communicating a vision of television as more masculine and
elitist was thus not merely a rhetorical win, but a genuine display of the ways in which its own
demographic strategies differed from those of its broadcast competitors. Tales from the Crypt,
with its misogynistic undertones and an association with a masculine genre, fandom, and source
material, had played a large role in establishing HBO‘s new reputation for original programming,
particularly within the industry. And indeed, as the division grew, its products retained this edge.
As Bambi Haggins and Amanda Lotz have pointed out, HBO‘s most prominent series during the
nineties—which almost exclusively featured as protagonists white, affluent, male baby
259

boomers—were clearly telegraphing their target audience.
211
While the network drew from
classically masculine cinematic genres, most notably the gangster film, it also drew from more
feminine genres associated with television—the domestic sitcom, family melodrama or soap
opera, workplace sitcoms—but in each case populated them with primarily male characters. The
only exception to this tendency was Sex and the City, a show with a set of gender politics so
complicated it remains outside the scope of this project.
212

As a number of historians have noted, the cable channel was really only following the
programming lead in quality TV that broadcasting had cautiously and strategically established
during the seventies and eighties through MTM Enterprises and its successors.
213
But while
economic shifts in broadcast television had allowed them to only gradually shift their primary
address from women to men, and from masses to elites, structural imperatives at HBO
demanding an affluent male audience—smaller in size, but higher in value—were even more
exaggerated. Unlike broadcast quality TV then, which still needed women and the high ratings
they were associated with, HBO could pursue a version of the quality genre that was more
visibly elitist and masculine—a world populated by gangsters, prisoners, and athletes that looked
more like cinema and experimental video than television. As Newman and Levine argue, the
quality niche-targeted programming that emerged in the nineties, largely on cable channels like
HBO, can be understood via an entirely different set of terms from broadcast television of the
network era. Keeping with a ―discourse of uplift and change [embracing] a progress narrative
that naturalized classed and gendered hierarchies‖ the new era of television is ―masculinized, it is
of a higher and more elite class, it is sophisticated and adult (rather than simplistic and juvenile),
but still youthfully hip and cool.‖
214
Alvey offers a similar critique of both the industrial and
critical embrace of quality television and its affluent audiences going all the way back to their
260

origin in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He argues that this attitude has long represented a
fundamental ―betrayal of the medium‘s democratic promise‖ and its responsibility to serve the
public interest, and that it also relies on classist and racist assumptions.
215

Conclusion
Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the size, composition, and
nature of both television and comic book audiences changed dramatically, transforming from
broad to narrowly segmented. From the early days of both media through to the era of media
convergence, various industrial strategies have facilitated this narrowing, with more aggressive
moves toward upscale male demographics consistently associated with increased legitimacy.
Less valuable audiences (i.e., less educated, less wealthy, less urban, and less male) have thus
been largely left out of the mainstream elevation of both media. To be sure, female comic book
and television fans alike have long benefitted from texts they perceive to be in high in quality
and cultural value. But the titles associated with female audiences in both media continue to
receive far less visibility and critical acclaim, in addition to far more criticism.
216
This is
particularly true with regards to the media producers considered closely here, HBO and the two
mainstream comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, all of which have received considerable
criticism for their male biases.
For quite some time though, Marvel, DC and HBO have been generating for their parent
companies reliably large revenue streams, and this achievement, and consistency, has driven
countless imitators across Hollywood, with varying degrees of success. Their basic formula is
simple enough, and its logic dates back to HBO‘s ultimately triumphant gamble on Tales from
the Crypt: use powerful audiences to build powerful branded content. The execution of this
261

strategy, however, can prove more challenging, because it relies on an established relationship
with valuable demographics, typically composed of individuals who are educated, affluent,
media-literate, and more often than not, young, adult, white males. The comic book industry
spent nearly four decades cultivating a readership with these exact characteristics. Over the last
twenty-five years, HBO has done the same, although far more deliberately. Perhaps more than
any other brand, HBO has been able to consistently engage an elite male demographic without
relying on pre-existing properties from the worlds of comic books, video games, and toys. But
for most other producers, comic books and their built-in audiences continue to bring tremendous
value to the creation of a wide array of media products.
Not only do the medium‘s strong intellectual properties serve as solid foundations for
budding franchises, but in promising these built-in audiences, they are able to bring with them a
kind of subcultural cache that carries value both within the entertainment industry and outside it.
The cult sensibility associated with comic books and their fans rejects both mainstream
commercial media and also the elitism of the high arts, while making use of both modes;
anchored in the genres and forms of the former, comic book culture often employs the formalist
and critical tendencies of the latter. This blending, notably, relies on a kind of ―double access‖
that the medium, its creators, and its readers enjoy; they are culturally privileged enough to have
access to both high and low culture, a positionality that makes their embrace of commercial
culture and elements of tastelessness less radical.
217
So while subcultures nonetheless present
themselves as oppositional, as Mark Jancovich and Nathan Hunt point out, ―their specific
reading strategies not only are the product of a situation of relative privilege and authority within
the cultural field, but also frequently reproduce relations of power and authority within it."
218

Hollows offers a similar thought about what is at stake when cult tendencies help elevate the
262

cultural status of a form, in the case of comic books, enough so that even media associated with
it, like comic-book based television, comes upon increased legitimacy. She notes:

Cult, although it is usually associated with a challenge to cultural hierarchies and with
resistance, transgression and radicalism, serves also to reproduce cultural distinctions and
cultural hierarchies along the lines of gender…the radicalism of cult is only sustained by
the processes of othering and it is always important to remain aware of who and what is
being othered.
219

The decades-long exclusion of women from comic book culture suggests that this
particular population did not benefit from increasing legitimacy in the way male comic book
readers did. The way in which HBO has used its elite demographics to frame its content and
build cultural legitimacy has been widely acknowledged.
220
But the extent to which comic
books‘ increasing cultural legitimacy was associated with its elite audience has received less
attention. Over the last three decades, Tales from the Crypt, Maus, Watchmen, and Dark Knight
Returns have all reached genuinely mass audiences, whether in their original form or via
adaptations in other media. But these creative milestones were products of decidedly privileged
subculture. At their height in the fifties, EC‘s titles never reached an audience larger than
300,000 and the population of enduring fans was probably just 1 percent of that. The
independent publishing scene that supported Spiegelman survived on issuing titles that typically
reached less than 20,000 readers, sold exclusively to the collector‘s market through specialty
shops famous for their alienating atmospheres.
221
Even DC and Marvel were ―mainstream‖ in
only a very generous sense; well performing titles of the eighties were selling around 200,000
263

copies an issue, but many comics struggled to break even the 100,000 copy mark with half of
these sales in the direct market.
222
While this narrowing perpetually threatened the vitality of
comic book publishing, it allowed the form to cultivate a legitimacy that made its incorporation
into other media more viable and valuable.
Similarly, even though HBO has signed on more than eight million new subscribers since
it first aired Tales from the Crypt, the network‘s overall market penetration has remained
basically fixed, still capturing only a fifth of American homes; even the most popular HBO
programming will be seen by only a small percentage of the population. Of course, as Lawrence
Levine has noted, ―exoteric or popular art is transformed into esoteric or high art precisely that
time when it in fact becomes esoteric, that is, when it becomes or is rendered inaccessible to the
types of people who appreciated it earlier."
223
In the very act of rejecting television‘s mass base,
and the female viewers who composed it, HBO made genuine strides toward a greater level of
respectability. And comic books, merely in pursuing artistic developments that excluded the
broad audience that once defined it as popular, were already coming a great deal closer to
achieving the elevated cultural status that so many fans and academics long believed the medium
deserved.

1
Grant Geissmann, Foul Play! The Art and Artists of the 1950s EC Comics. (New York: Harper Design
International, 2005), 16–17.
2
Larry Stark, “Elegy,” Hoohah!, September 1956. Reprinted in Fred von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, Tales
of Terror! The EC Companion (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 215–217.
3
M. Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 128.
4
Digby Diehl, Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 145.
5
Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Taylor, 1993), 167–169; 181–183.
6
Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Female Comics From Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 1999), 67–70.
264

7
Paul Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2009), 63–65; Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans.
Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 72.
8
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 73; Lopes, Demanding Respect, 72; Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The
Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (New York: Continuum, 2009), 93.
9
J. Howard Rutledge and Peter Bart, “Comic Books: Slight Sales Recovery Leaves Volume Below Pre-Clean-Up
Days,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 1955; Peter Bart, “Some Comic Book Men Pine for Sin, Sex As Their Sales
Skid,” Wall Street Journal, February 25, 1959.
10
Four Star Comics Corp v. Kable News Company, 224 F. Supp. 108 (US Southern District of New York 1963).
11
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 76; 141; Lopes, Demanding Respect, 72; Duncan and Smith, The Power of
Comics, 93.
12
Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1993), 172; John B Wood, “Old Comic
Book Store Is No Laughing Matter,” Boston Globe, October 26, 1975.
13
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 636.
14
Lopes, Demanding Respect, 80.
15
Ibid., 75.
16
Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2005), ix; 8.
17
Mekas, Jonas, “A Call for a New Generation of Film-Makers,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney
(New York: Praeger, 1970), 74; Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema 1962,” in Film Culture
Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 102.
18
Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, 18–20.
19
Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Female Comics From Teens to Zines (San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1999), 85.
20
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 82; Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction, 174.
21
Bill Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom (McFarland, 2010), 41–48.
22
Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 68–69.
23
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 87.
24
Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, 26.
25
In a desperate attempt to compete and recapture shelf space, DC and Marvel brought back one of the most
disastrous practices of the fifties: overproduction. For three years, they saturated the market, only to reverse
direction in 1978, and cancel nearly a third of their titles in what became known as the “DC Implosion.” The
following year, Marvel finally entered the direct market. Meanwhile, legal action against Seuling opened his
new method of distribution up to more companies, creating a boom in comic book shops, which grew in
number from approximately 700 to 3,000 in just three years. See: Benton, The Comic Book in America, 79–80;
265

N.R. Kleinfield, “Superheroes’ Creators Wrangle,” New York Times, October 13, 1979; Gabilliet, Of Comics and
Men, 87; Lopes, Demanding Respect, 100.
26
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 262; Benton, The Comic Book in America, 85; Patrick Parsons, “Batman
and His Audience: The Dialectic of Culture,” in The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a
Superhero and His Media, ed. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991), 76.
27
Reilly, “Superheroes Battle It Out in Comic Book Resurgence.”
28
Patrick Parsons, “Batman and His Audience: The Dialectic of Culture,” in The Many Lives of the Batman:
Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, ed. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 77; Paul Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 110.
29
Lopes, Demanding Respect, 110; Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Taylor,
1993), 90.
30
Paul Gravett, Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know (New York: Collins Design, 2005), 77; Douglas
Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Reprint (Da Capo Press, 2008), 8.
31
Reilly, “Superheroes Battle It Out in Comic Book Resurgence.”
32
Parsons, “Batman and His Audience,” 77.
33
Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (Continuum, 2001), 260.
34
Decades later, this exclusion continued to be a problem. Suzanne Scott has noted that shops are
“reminiscent of a secret clubhouse with policed social barriers of entry” for female readers in particular and
Underground Comix artist and agitator Trina Robbins describes them as so alienating that, “if you’re of the
female persuasion, odds are you take one look at the scene before you, shrug, and decide you’d really rather
read a novel.” The industry’s tendency to alienate women has recently become such a notorious PR problem
for DC and Marvel, that it has generated countless attempts from fans to rectify the problem (see, for example,
the still-running webzine Sequential Tart, the defunct Friends of Lulu, and the kickstarter publication My-So
Called Secret Identity) and even a number of responses from the publishers themselves (see, for example, the
introduction of a female Thor reboot). Suzanne Scott, “Fangirls in Refrigerators: The Politics of (In)visibility in
Comic Book Culture,” Transformative Works and Cultures 13 (2013), doi:10.3983/twc.v13i0.460; Trina
Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Female Comics From Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books,
1999), 7.
35
Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, “Girls and Subculture,” in Feminism and Youth Culture (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1991), 1–8.
36
According to Trina Robbins, in 1974, there were just two female artists left in mainstream comics. Trina
Robbins, The Great Women Cartoonists (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001), 102.
37
Barbara Saltzman, “Superman: From Phone Booth to Sound Booth,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1975.
38
Robert Zintl, “Pow! Bam! Sock! Superwomen Muscle On In,” Chicago Tribune, February 26, 1978.
266

39
Darla Miller, “Heroines of the New Comics Have Character,” Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1979.
40
Joanne Hollows, “The Masculinity of Cult,” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional
Tastes (Manchester: Manchester University, 2003), 35; Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style
(London: Routledge, 1979).
41
Hollows, “The Masculinity of Cult,” 36; Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital
(Hanover: Wesleyan, 1996).
42
Angela McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique,” Screen Education 39 (Spring
1980): 20.
43
McRobbie and Garber, “Girls and Subculture,” 3.
44
Scott, “Fangirls in Refrigerators,” sec. 1.4.
45
Karen Healey, “When Fangirls Perform: The Gendered Fan Identity in Superhero Comics Fandom,” in The
Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (New York: Routledge, 2009), 144–146.
46
Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio, “Notes from the Batcave: An Interview with Dennis O’Neil,” in The
Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (New York: Routledge, 1991), 29;
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 280.
47
Quoted in Wright, Comic Book Nation, 261.
48
Peter Bart, “Advertising: Superman Faces New Hurdles,” New York Times, September 23, 1962.
49
Both of these developments date back to around 1970, the year of the first San Diego-hosted Comic-Con
and the first edition of Bob Overstreet’s price guide.
50
Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2005), 24.
51
Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (New York:
Continuum, 2009), 19.
52
Pearson and Uricchio, “Notes from the Batcave,” 23; Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and
True Believers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 129.
53
Scott, Suzanne, “Dawn of the Undead Author: Fanboy Auteurism and Zack Snyder’s Vision,” in A Companion
to Media Authorship, ed. Jonathan Gray and Johnson, Derek (Malden, Massachussets: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013),
442; Jenkins, Henry, “The Guiding Spirit and the Powers That Be: A Response to Suzanne Scott,” in The
Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (New York: Routledge,
2013), 53–58.
54
Noah Berlatsky, “Some of the Greatest, Most Popular Comic Books Are Feminist,” News, The Atlantic,
(August 13, 2013), http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/08/some-of-the-greatest-most-
popular-comic-books-are-feminist/278593/.
55
Wolk, Reading Comics, 66.
267

56
Mary Reinholz, “Where the Boys Are,” Broadcasting & Cable 130, no. 42 (October 9, 2000): 72–76; Alec
Foege, “All the Young Dudes,” Mediaweek 15, no. 31 (September 5, 2005): 16–20; Simon Houpt, “He Earns
Little Money...So Why Do Advertisers Love Him?,” The Globe and Mail, March 9, 2002; Marc Graser, “Young &
Restless,” Variety, June 18, 2012.
57
The success of the direct market had driven the industry to overproduction once again, creating a small
bubble burst in 1987, and hurting independently produced titles and small distributors. This was followed by
another, larger crash in 1993. Historians largely blame this one on the speculative market, which grew when
the direct market brought in more collectors in pursuit of financial gain; the mainstream press had spent
years alerting the public to the growing value of collectible comic books. In response, DC and Marvel again
saturated the market, this time with titles designed to appeal to these speculators; however when buyers
realized values were not increasing as expected, they walked away from the market, pushing hundreds of
specialty shops out of business. Benton, The Comic Book in America, 86; Duncan and Smith, The Power of
Comics, 76–77; 95; Wright, Comic Book Nation, 280–283; Lopes, Demanding Respect, 117.
58
Examples of the former include Will Eisner’s A Contract With God (1978), published by Baronet Books, and
considered by some to be the very first graphic novel, and also publications like Arkham Asylum (1989) by
Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, published by DC. Trade Paperbacks, or collections of previously published
stories include, Alan Moore’s The Watchmen (1987), published by DC, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991),
which originally appeared serially in the independent comic anthology Raw.
59
Reilly, “Superheroes Battle It Out in Comic Book Resurgence.”
60
Henry Allen, “Horror Comics From the ’50s Are Alive!,” The Washington Post, September 24, 1972, sec. Film;
Chris Kaltenbach, “A Comic Book Kingdom: ‘Up, Up and AWAYYYY,’” The Sun, December 4, 1983.
61
Anita Gold, “Pow! Awk! Shazam! Superman Flies Once Again,” Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1973, sec. W.
62
This reporting played a considerable role in the rise and fall of the speculator market in the early nineties.
Ibid.; John B Wood, “Old Comic Book Store Is No Laughing Matter,” Boston Globe, October 26, 1975;
Kaltenbach, “A Comic Book Kingdom”; Knight News Wire, “Comic Book Popularity Growing By Leaps and
Bounds!,” Hartford Courant, December 10, 1978; Andrew Kreig, “Craving for Comics a Funny Business,”
Hartford Courant, September 22, 1975.
63
Barbara Carlson, “To Him, The Comics Aren’t Mickeymouse,” The Hartford Courant, February 17, 1973.
64
“Comic Books Profit by Rush To Legitimacy,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1974. A similar assertion is
made in Cynthia Dagnal, “A Socially Relevant Superman?,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1976.
65
“Comic Books Profit by Rush To Legitimacy.” A similar claim is made in Mark Gauvreau Judge, “Holy
Censorship, Batman! Guess Who’s Banning Comic Books,” The Washington Post, June 9, 1996.
66
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 75; Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge,
1993), 174.
67
“Comic Books Profit by Rush To Legitimacy”; Dagnal, “A Socially Relevant Superman?” For others with a
similar assessment of the social relevance strategy, see: Wright, Comic Book Nation, 231–233; Lopes,
268

Demanding Respect, 69–70; Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic
Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 75.
68
Lopes, Demanding Respect, 75, 84.
69
Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 128.
70
Ibid., 118–125. For examples of the mainstream press commenting on the sophistication of Maus, see Judge,
“Holy Censorship, Batman! Guess Who’s Banning Comic Books”; Desson Howe, “Comic Strips Bad Image Off,”
Washington Post, August 18, 1989.
71
Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, xi.
72
Bill Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom (McFarland, 2010), 26, 36, 66, 83–6, 93, 125–6, 142, 148.
73
Beaty, Comics Versus Art, 112–113.
74
Ibid., 117.
75
John F. Brodsen, “Tempo: It’s Alive! Comic Terror Is Back From the Crypt,” Chicago Tribune, February 15,
1984, sec. 5; Wood, “Old Comic Book Store Is No Laughing Matter”; Allen, “Horror Comics From the ’50s Are
Alive!”
76
Digby Diehl, Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 166.
77
Ibid., 161.
78
Ann Hornaday, “Everywhere You Look, Crypt and More Crypt,” New York Times, September 4, 1994, sec.
Arts; Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 161–165.
79
Jack Mathews, “‘Crypt’ Disinterred for HBO,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1989.
80
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 166.
81
Every critic who reviewed the show’s first season dutifully noted the title’s sinister past. See: Chris
Willman, “Crypt Tales Subtle as a Sledgehammer,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1989; Tom Shales, “TV
Preview: Hauntingly Familiar HBO’s New ‘Crypt,’” The Washington Post, June 10, 1989, sec. Style; John J.
O’Connor, “A Summer Cycle of Horror Shows on HBO,” New York Times, June 15, 1989; Rick Kogan,
“Frightless: HBO’s Tales from the Crypt’ Are More Stereotyped than Scary,” Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1989. See
also: Mathews, “‘Crypt’ Disinterred for HBO.”
82
Mathews, “‘Crypt’ Disinterred for HBO.”
83
Michael Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, Kindle
(Taylor and Francis, 2012), sec. 784.
84
Lynn Spigel explores these attempts in considerable depth. See: Lynn Spigel, TV By Design: Modern Art and
the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2008).
85
Mark Alvey, “Too Many Kids and Old Ladies: Quality Demographics and 1960s US Television,” in Television:
The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
86
Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA:
Cengage Learning, 2007), 153.
269

87
The government twice used high quality, as defined by technological and programming superiority as a
justification to reserve the best airwaves for more established players like RCA—first through the creation of
Class B station licenses and later via General Order 40. Twenty years later, the FCC pursued a similar strategy
in its regulation of the burgeoning television industry, largely in the hope of avoiding the lowbrow populism
that had reigned in radio. Locating service on the more limited VFH band and instituting a freeze on new
licenses from 1948 to 1952, the commission produced an artificial scarcity that benefitted the most powerful
and vested interests. Ibid., 155; 42; 63–64; William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 28.
88
Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1994), 11; Jane Feuer, “MTM Enterprises: An Overview,” in MTM Quality Television, ed. Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr,
and Tise Vahimagi (British Film Institute, 1985), 3.
89
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 162.
90
Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1988), 69; 233.
91
Hilmes, Only Connect, 161.
92
As George Lipsitz has pointed out, this last category, the ethnic working-class domestic sitcom, was a highly
useful social product in arbitrating the “complex tensions caused by economic and social change in postwar
America” and easing the tension into a postwar society characterized by increased consumption,
suburbanization, and the decline of more traditional social networks. George Lipsitz, “The Meaning of
Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs,” Cultural Anthropology 1, no. 4
(November 1986): 356.
93
The shift was driven by changes in mass production and consumption. Boddy, Fifties Television: The
Industry and Its Critics, 162.
94
Ibid., 157–159.
95
Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc, The American Television Industry (New York: British Film Institute, 2009),
7; Karen Benezra, “The Fragging of the American Mind,” Brandweek 39, no. 24 (June 15, 1998): S12–19.
96
Curtin and Shattuc, The American Television Industry, 38; Hilmes, Only Connect, 204; Lynn Spigel, Welcome
to the Dreamhouse (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 35.
97
Jonathan Miller and Bill Steigerwald, “Why Is TV So Rotten?,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1984.
98
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 215; 227.
99
Horace Newcomb, “This Is Not Al Dente: The Sopranos and the New Meaning of Television,” in Television:
The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 562.
100
Avi Santo, “Para-Television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO,” in It’s Not TV:
Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era, ed. Marc Leverette, Brian Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley (New York:
Routledge, 2008), 33.
270

101
Andreas Huyssen, “The Vanishing Other: Mass Culture,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 47.
102
Alvey, “Too Many Kids,” 18.
103
Jason Mittell, for example, describes the fate of cartoons which, used a dual address to bring in a mass
family audience in the late 1950s. By 1965, however, such programming was seen as better serving
advertisers as kids-only programming. Spigel has also examined the fragmenting of the family audience,
which she shows was hastened by the 1960s introduction of portable TVs which presumably allowed
individual members to watch separately. Jason Mittell, “The Great Saturday Morning Exile: Scheduling
Cartoons on Television’s Perphery in the 1960s,” in Prime Time Animation, ed. Carol Stabile and Mark
Harrison (New York: Routledge, 2003), 33–53; Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse, 64.
104
John McMurria, “A Taste of Class: Pay TV and the Commodification of Teleivsion in Postwar America,” in
Cable Visions, ed. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas (New York: New York University
Press, 2007), 44–65.
105
Miller and Steigerwald, “Why Is Tv so Rotten?”; Feuer, “MTM Enterprises,” 3.
106
Feuer, “MTM Enterprises,” 6–7; Alvey, “Too Many Kids,” 24–27.
107
Jane Feuer, “The MTM Style,” in Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 52–84.
108
Christopher Anderson, “Drama Overview: Producing the Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” in
The Essential HBO Reader, ed. Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2008), 26.
109
Feuer, “MTM Enterprises,” 25.
110
See for example: Fred Rothenberg, “Soap Sponsors: Long in the Tooth,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1982,
sec. Part VI; “ABC-TV Demos Appear Improving Despite Household Ratings Slump,” Variety, October 22, 1986,
sec. Radio-Television.
111
Morrie Gelman, “Radio-Television: Meters & VCRs Shaping P’time Ploys,” Variety, May 20, 1987.
112
Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation 1980-1996 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 18.
113
Ibid., 22–35.
114
Reinholz, “Where the Boys Are”; Feuer, “MTM Enterprises,” 25–28; Curtin and Shattuc, The American
Television Industry, 49.
115
Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, “Introduction,” in Quality Popular Television, ed. Mark Jancovich and
James Lyons (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 3.
116
Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, sec. 658–687; 729;
Robert J. Thompson, “Preface,” in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe
and Kim Akass (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), xvii.
271

117
Mark Alvey writes well about who and what was responsible for this shift in television. Ultimately, he
attributes changes to the system these folks inhabited, and the many forces that gradually shifted the various
imperatives behind its everyday operation. Alvey, “Too Many Kids.”
118
Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, sec. 687.
119
Feuer, “MTM Enterprises,” 26–28.
120
Ben Brown, “Dialogue on Film: Grant Tinker,” American Film, September 1983.
121
Houpt, “He Earns Little Money...So Why Do Advertisers Love Him?”; Stuart Miller, “Television: Buyers Give
TV Numbers a Different Face,” Variety, July 8, 1991.
122
Alvey, “Too Many Kids,” 21–22.
123
Benezra, “The Fragging of the American Mind”; Kenneth Clark, “Yuppies Viewed as a Big Deal for TV, but
the Advertisers Aren’t Buying It,” Chicago Tribune, September 4, 1988, sec. 5.
124
Terry Lefton, “Ups and Downs: 18-49 Men,” Brandweek 40, no. 19 (May 10, 1999): S12–14; Kipp Cheng,
“Setting Their Sites on Generation ‘Y,’” Adweek, August 9, 1999.
125
Reinholz, “Where the Boys Are,” 76; Foege, “All the Young Dudes.”
126
Carol Vinzant, “Some Couch Potatoes Are More Equal Than Others: The Dollars and Nonsense of TV
Advertising,” On The Issues 6, no. 3 (July 31, 1997): 32; Houpt, “He Earns Little Money...So Why Do Advertisers
Love Him?”; Reinholz, “Where the Boys Are.”
127
Holt, Empires of Entertainment, 18.
128
Ibid., 2.
129
The FCC began regulating cable in the late sixties, restricting content on new networks like HBO. There
was for example, a 1972 ruling, advocated for by the National Association of Broadcasters, which prevented
cable from showing sports events that had aired on commercial television. For more, see: George Mair, Inside
HBO: The Billion Dollar War Between HBO, Hollywood, and the Home Video Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead
& Company, 1988), 15–28; William Kunz, Culture Conglomerates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and
Television Industries (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 168.
130
The cable service was Sterling communications, founded by Charles Dolan in 1965. Time Inc. invested
$1.25 million in the venture for 20% ownership, eventually increasing their share to 45%. When profits failed
to materialize, Dolan decided to introduce the Green Channel (which would show Hollywood film and sports
events), which he could rent to other cable systems, as a way to offset costs. With the backing of Time, Dolan
launched the network, transmitted at first via microwave and temporarily renamed Home Box Office (HBO),
in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on November 8. 1972. The following year, Time bought out Dolan, renamed
Sterling Cable as Manhattan Cable, and tried to sell that service and HBO to Warner Cable. When the deal fell
through, HBO began to pursue satellite transmission, which helped a broader-based launch in 1975. Mair,
Inside HBO, 1–25.
272

131
Deborah Jaramillo, “The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a
Quality Brand,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26, no. 1 (January 2002): 59–75; Holt, Empires of
Entertainment, 22–27.
132
Holt, Empires of Entertainment, 41; 67.
133
This was especially true after The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 shifted regulatory authority to
the federal government, stabilizing the industry and opening it for further investment. Notably, while the Act
made cable and traditional broadcasters equal players in some respects, cable still received First Amendment
rights and protections from government intervention that broadcasters did not. Patrick Parsons and Robert
Frieden, The Cable and Satellite Television Industries (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998), 59; Holt, Empires of
Entertainment, 25; David Crook, “Smut Issue Still Thorn for Cable TV: Smut Issue,” Los Angeles Times, June 4,
1985.
134
In 1979, the Department of Justice (DoJ) refused to investigate HBO for monopolistic practices and instead,
in a 1981 decision, prevented Paramount, Universal, Fox, and Columbia from developing their own movie
channel Premiere. This ruling was based on the notion that HBO should benefit from its bold
entrepreneurship, and that the studios would be introducing complete vertical integration into an industry
that did not currently have it. Of course, Warner Communications Inc was already fully integrated, as was
Time. In 1983, the DoJ again used antitrust law to limit studio involvement in a proposed merger between
Showtime and The Movie Channel. Holt, Empires of Entertainment, 26–43; Mair, Inside HBO, 47–49.
135
Holt, Empires of Entertainment, 35; 62.
136
Ibid., 46.
137
The films also received outside financing from Wall St. and benefitted from very deep corporate pockets,
including those of Coca-Cola, which owned Columbia. Mair, Inside HBO, 44–73; Holt, Empires of Entertainment,
47–53.
138
Mair, Inside HBO, 13; 79; Penny Pagano, “Cable TV Official Sees 1987 as Watershed Year,” Los Angeles
Times, January 20, 1987; Jane Hall, “HBO Chief Fuchs Sees Diversity as Key to the Future Cable,” Los Angeles
Times, November 4, 1992, sec. Calendar.
139
Holt, Empires of Entertainment, 50.
140
Ibid., 122–123.
141
Albert Scardino, “Problems Beset Time-Warner Talks,” New York Times, March 6, 1989.
142
John McMurria, “Long-Format TV: Globalization and Network Branding in a Multi-Channel Era,” in Quality
Popular Television, ed. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons (London: BFI, 2003), 65–87; Parsons and Frieden, The
Cable and Satellite Television Industries, 196–198.
143
Bill Gorman, “Where Did Primtime Broadcast Audiences Go?,” Entertainment, TV by the Numbers, (April 12,
2010), http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/04/12/where-did-the-primetime-broadcast-tv-audience-
go/47976/.
144
Hall, “HBO Chief Fuchs.”
273

145
Chris Anderson writes that “cultural critics, including those in the employ of the venerable New York
Times, have grown comfortable with the notion that a television series may be judged, first and foremost, as a
work of art. In some respects, we have HBO to thank for this turn of events." Anderson, “Drama Overview:
Producing the Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” 24.
146
Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’s Original Programming: Producing Quality TV,” in It’s
Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era, ed. Marc Leverette, Brian Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 92.
147
See, for example, the explanation offered by Amanda Lotz, “If It’s Not TV, What Is It? The Case of US
Subscription Television,” in Cable Visions, ed. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas (New
York: New York University Press, 2007), 91.
148
Jube Shiver, “VCRs Beckon: Pay-TV Fans Turned Off by Repeats,” Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1984;
Miller and Steigerwald, “Why Is Tv so Rotten?”
149
These problems are part of what motivated the network to get involved in film financing and production.
150
There had never been enough Hollywood films to run continually, and HBO’s demand for exclusivity
further limited its options, particularly as it faced competition from other movie channels launched in the
early eighties. Churn thus remained a considerable problem, with 60% of customers disconnecting within the
first six months; HBO had to sign up two subscribers for each one it hoped to keep and thus put a fair amount
of money toward retaining the customers it already had. Mair, Inside HBO, 56–57.
151
Bill Carter, “HBO Finds Hits the Networks Miss,” New York Times, July 15, 1991, sec. Media Business; Ann
Hornaday, “Programming For Reputation. And Profits.,” New York Times, November 7, 1993, sec. Arts &
Leisure; Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, “HBO’s Ongoing Legacy,” in The Essential HBO Reader, ed. Gary
Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 315.
152
Hornaday, “Programming For Reputation”; Hall, “HBO Chief Fuchs.”
153
Edgerton and Jones, “HBO’s Ongoing Legacy,” 317.
154
Justin Bachman, “HBO Finally Reveals Profit Numbers. Take That, Netflix,” Bloomberg Business Week,
February 5, 2014.
155
Bambi Haggins and Amanda Lotz, “Comedy Overview: At Home on the Cutting Edge,” in The Essential HBO
Reader, ed. Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 152–158.
156
Mathews, “‘Crypt’ Disinterred for HBO.”
157
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 145.
158
Beaty, Comics Versus Art, 110.
159
Schelly, Founders of Comic Fandom, 26, 36, 66, 83–6, 93, 125–6, 142, 148.
160
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 145; Beaty, Comics Versus Art, 113.
161
“Amicus Beats Dollar Devaluation By Streamlining Shooting Schedules,” Variety, April 26, 1972; Mary
Murphy, “Tales First Film for MPC,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1971; “Metromedia, Columbia in Joint
Venture,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1972.
274

162
“‘Tales’ Of Solid Merchandising Showmanship Unearthed In ‘Crypt’ Campaign,” The Independent Film
Journal, March 30, 1972; “Screamieres Highlight ‘Crypt’ Campaign,” The Independent Film Journal (Archive:
1937-1979), March 30, 1972; “50 Top-Grossing Films,” Variety, April 26, 1972.
163
Reviewers found them to be “misguidedly unsubtle,” full of “cliched dialogue,” a “cold turkey” of a film that
was “just barely” a horror movie. The “ingenuous plots” of the original stories failed to translate on screen,
where they came off as “dumb” and “ancient plot devices” with “heavy morality,” resulting in “a controlled
excursion into deliberate, though stylized, tastelessness.”David McGillivray, “Tales from the Crypt,” Monthly
Film Bulletin, January 1, 1972; Vincent Canby, “The Screen: Tales from the Crypt,” New York Times, March 9,
1972; David Sterritt, “On Film: Crypt-Ic Tales,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 19, 1972, sec.
Arts/Entertainment; Tom Shales, “Barely Horrifying Tales,” The Washington Post, March 18, 1972; Tom
Shales, “EEK! A Low-Creepie!,” Washington Post, March 17, 1973; Tom Milne, “Vault of Horror,” Monthly Film
Bulletin, January 1, 1973.
164
Tom Shales, “Chills and Chuckles: HBO’s New Season Of ‘Crypt’ Creeps,” The Washington Post, June 19,
1991.
165
Carter, “HBO Finds Hits”; Mathews, “‘Crypt’ Disinterred for HBO.”
166
Santo, “Para-Television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO,” 23.
167
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 169–172.
168
Hornaday, “Everywhere You Look, Crypt and More Crypt.”
169
Ibid.
170
Carter, “HBO Finds Hits.”
171
Shales, “TV Preview”; Chris Willman, “Another Batch of ‘Tales from the Crypt’ on HBO,” Los Angeles Times,
April 21, 1990, sec. TV Reviews; Scott Williams, “HBO’s Horror Anthology Keeps Its Macabre Tone,” The
Washington Post, July 21, 1991.
172
Shales, “TV Preview”; Willman, “Crypt Tales Subtle as a Sledgehammer”; Kogan, “Frightless.”
173
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 185–186.
174
Willman, “Another Batch of ‘Tales from the Crypt’ on HBO”; Willman, “Crypt Tales Subtle as a
Sledgehammer.”
175
Matt Hills, The Cult TV Book: From Star Trek to Dexter, New Approaches to TV Outside the Box, ed. Stacey
Abbott (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010), 68.
176
Jeffrey Sconce, “Trashing the Academy: Tase, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen
36, no. 4 (1995): 372.
177
Sarah Cardwell, “Is Quality Television Any Good? Generic Distinctions, Evaluations and the Troubling
Matter of Critical Judgment,” in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe
and Kim Akass (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 25–26.
178
Jane Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and
Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 149–152.
275

179
O’Connor, “A Summer Cycle of Horror Shows”; Kogan, “Frightless.”
180
Diehl, Tales from the Crypt, 169; 180.
181
Ibid., 176.
182
Ibid., 180.
183
Daniel Cerone, “Nightmarish `Tales’ Turns Into a Director’s Dream,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1990, Home
edition, sec. Television; Daniel Cerone, “Toned-Down `Tales From Crypt’ Starts on Fox Tonight:,” Los Angeles
Times, January 22, 1994, sec. Calendar; Mathews, “‘Crypt’ Disinterred for HBO”; Hornaday, “Everywhere You
Look, Crypt and More Crypt.”
184
Willman, “Crypt Tales Subtle as a Sledgehammer”; Shales, “TV Preview”; Kogan, “Frightless.”
185
Willman, “Another Batch of ‘Tales from the Crypt’ on HBO”; Williams, “HBO’s Horror Anthology”; John J.
O’Connor, “Winning His Heart, Not to Mention His Gallbladder,” New York Times, June 26, 1992, Late edition;
Van Gordon Sauter, “Tales from the Crypt,” Variety, June 22, 1992.
186
Willman, “Another Batch of ‘Tales from the Crypt’ on HBO.”
187
O’Connor, “TV Weekend; Winning His Heart, Not to Mention His Gallbladder”; Sauter, “Tales from the
Crypt.”
188
Tone, “Tales from the Crypt,” Variety, June 17, 1991.
189
Williams, “HBO’s Horror Anthology.”
190
Sauter, “Tales from the Crypt”; Shales, “Chills and Chuckles.”
191
Matt Roush, “Contrasting HBO Offerings Showcase Beau Bridges,” USA Today, June 14, 1991, sec. Life; Matt
Roush, “Crypt Opens with Trademark Creaks and Chills,” USA Today, September 30, 1993, sec. Life.
192
Mark Jancovich and Nathan Hunt, “The Mainstream, Distinction, and Cult TV,” in Cult Television, ed. Sara
Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta E. Pearson (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 31.
193
Sconce, “Trashing the Academy: Tase, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” 374–375.
194
See for example, Michael Sragow, “The Great Migration,” Film Comment, May 2012.
195
Anderson, “Drama Overview: Producing the Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” 30–33; Gary
Edgerton, “Introduction: A Brief History of HBO,” in The Essential HBO Reader, ed. Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey P.
Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 1–20; RB, “Cable Special Report: Original Cable
Programming - HBO,” Broadcasting & Cable, February 19, 1996.
196
Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” 145.
197
Anderson, “Drama Overview: Producing the Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” 28.
198
Rosenberg, Howard, Personal Interview, July 3, 2013.
199
Anderson, “Drama Overview: Producing the Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” 38.
200
Rosenberg, Howard, Personal Interview.
201
McCabe and Akass, “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’s Original Programming: Producing Quality TV.”
202
Jaramillo, “The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality
Brand,” 585.
276

203
Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” 147.
204
Nancy Mills, “Cable Beckons the ATeam Box-Office Giants,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1991, Home edition,
sec. Calendar.
205
Anne Thompson, “Directors Break Barriers Between Big Screen, TV,” Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1989, sec.
Hollywood Report.
206
Anderson, “Drama Overview: Producing the Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” 34–38.
207
Ibid., 30.
208
Lynne Joyrich, “All That Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture,”
Camera Obscura 6 (1988): 131.
209
Santo, “Para-Television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO,” 33–34.
210
In this respect, they functioned as precursors to the emergence soon after of what Scott has referred to as
the “fanboy auteur,” liminal figure like Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams who have blurred the line between the
often feminized “fanboy” and the typically masculinized “auteur” to make authorial content on film and
television alike appear more relatable and approachable and less paternalistic. Thriving “within tensions
between the commercial and the subcultural, the mass and the niche,” these figures have also continued to
elevate in cultural status both television and the comic-book content that increasingly populates it. Scott,
Suzanne, “Dawn of the Undead Author,” 444; 456.
211
Haggins and Lotz, “Comedy Overview: At Home on the Cutting Edge,” 163.
212
For discussions of gender and sexuality in Sex and the City, particularly its deployment of post-feminist
politics and obscenity, see: L.S. Kim, “Sex and the Single Girl in Postfeminism: The F Word on Television,”
Television & New Media 2, no. 4 (November 2001): 319–34; Diane Negra, “Quality Postfeminism: Sex and the
Single Girl on HBO,” Genders, no. 39 (2004).
213
Thompson, “Preface,” xviii; Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV.”
214
Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, 352; 957.
215
Alvey, “Too Many Kids,” 31.
216
For example, there are the much beloved female-centered comedies The Mindy Project (Fox, 2012-present)
and Girls (HBO, 2012-present). Both snubbed by the Emmys in 2014, the two series have also been the object
of a great deal of sometime vitriolic criticism around their representation of class, gender, race, and sexuality.
Notably, similar-themed comedies with a male focus are rarely, if ever, subjected to even a fraction of this
level of criticism. For more, see: Emily Nussbaum, “Hannah Barbaric,” The New Yorker, February 4, 2013,
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/11/hannah-barbaric; Kate Dries, “Mindy Kaling Is Too
Busy Working Her Ass Off To Engage With Critics,” Jezebel, October 16, 2014, http://jezebel.com/mindy-
kaling-is-too-busy-working-her-ass-off-to-engage-1647059938.
217
Sconce, “Trashing the Academy: Tase, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” 383–384.
218
Jancovich and Hunt, “The Mainstream, Distinction, and Cult TV,” 28.
219
Hollows, “The Masculinity of Cult,” 49.
277

220
Santo, “Para-Television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO”; Jaramillo, “The
Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality Brand”; McCabe and
Akass, “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’s Original Programming: Producing Quality TV.”
221
Benton, The Comic Book in America, 90.
222
John Jackson Miller, “Title Spotlights,” Resarch Resource, Comichron: The Comics Chronicles, accessed June
8, 2014, http://www.comichron.com/titlespotlights.html; Reilly, “Superheroes Battle It Out in Comic Book
Resurgence.”
223
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988), 234.
278

Conclusion:
Industry and Legitimacy

Comic books and comic book audiences often seem to occupy a subcultural space within
contemporary media even as the form becomes increasingly ubiquitous across the entertainment
landscape. The medium‘s storied past of censorship, the rebellion of the Underground, its
auteurist struggles, its cult fandoms, and its exceedingly narrow reader base enhance its aura of
otherness and resistance. But comic books do not, and never have, generated a particularly
oppositional or outsider culture. A favored art form of contemporary society‘s elite classes, the
medium today sits atop the cultural hierarchy that organizes media and art in the digital age. And
it has long been deeply intertwined with entrenched cultural institutions and media systems.
Structurally and socially, comic book culture is hegemonic.
This becomes more clear in the context of the medium‘s history, particularly that of its
industrial and infrastructural facets, which show that the form‘s incorporation into mass media is
neither new nor coincidental. While a variety of factors—artistic, aesthetic, cultural—have
contributed to comic book‘s rise in popularity within the mainstream and its simultaneous
legitimation within more refined taste communities, industrial strategy has played a considerable,
and arguably dominant role in this process. The impulse to elevate comic books‘ cultural status is
also an impulse to incorporate them into multimedia and to profit and grow financially,
motivated by structural convergence, and driven by those who wield power within the culture
industries and beyond them—largely white, educated, men. That political forces, more
specifically government bodies, legal discourse, and regulation regimes, have consistently
supported and aggressively championed the comic book industry and its incorporation into
279

corporate networks further accounts for comic books‘ gradual legitimation and its tremendous
strength within conglomerated production complexes.
The metamorphosis that saw comic books transform from a lowbrow mass medium into a
quality niche product did not happen overnight. It was a gradual process which, over the course
of many decades, saw the medium gain immense value to multimedia production. Early on in
comic books‘ history, the chaotic, and rather precarious state of the industry, in publishing a
disrespected, ephemeral, and populist product, had the positive effect of allowing the medium to
develop in new ways and expand into myriad possibilities. As the comic book industry was
gradually absorbed into corporate production, however, the medium‘s instability and bad
reputation became liabilities. Accordingly, over several decades, the comic book industry—like
so many other culture industries before and after it—worked to fortify itself, a process that
elevated the medium‘s status by containing it structurally.
This process began in earnest in the nineteen fifties, a decade and a half after the
medium‘s inception. As discussed in Chapter One, competition from television, problems in
distribution, market saturation due to overproduction, public apprehension, and the threat of
government oversight all worked to dramatically and visibly reduce comic book sales by 1955.
The industry responded by establishing a restrictive code of censorship, and enforced it by
tightening distribution channels. Both solutions functioned as significant barriers to entry well
into the medium‘s future; these strategies not only reigned in existing content, but actually
constrained the medium‘s realm of possibility moving forward, since only those players with
pre-established distribution would have the opportunity to experiment with the form. These
structural limitations in part explain the industrial strategies and cultural shifts that dictated the
medium for the decade and a half that followed.
280

Faced with continually declining sales in the late fifties, the industry, now consisting of
just the handful of publishers who had been in the business longest, returned to publishing a
genre that had proved profitable in comic books‘ early years: superheroes. Not only did these
characters appeal to an burgeoning fan community—many of whom had been fans as kids back
in the forties—but, as strong intellectual properties, they tended to travel successfully across
media and work well in a licensing context. Accordingly, superheroes wound up taking over the
comic book market in the sixties. In so doing, they helped cultivate the two major trends of the
decade as described in Chapter Two: an intensification in conglomerate-backed licensing and an
increasing reliance within publishing on a loyal fandom and the auteurist creators they sought
out. The tension these trends created, between the corporate authors required by licensing and the
individual auteurs pushed by fans, initially created strife within the industry, negatively
impacting creative workers.
Ultimately though, the industry learned to use fans, the emerging discourse of auteurism,
and the increased legitimacy both brought about, to its advantage. Facing tough times and
declining sales, the major publishers were able to survive by increasingly targeting this dedicated
community of readers, a narrow but increasingly valuable demographic. In response to their
reading preferences and buying habits, the big publishers made major structural changes in the
seventies and eighties, altering distribution infrastructure and approaches to format and content
that reestablished the medium as a decidedly niche product. Simultaneously, the industry worked
to placate the authors and artists emboldened by fandom with increased recognition and
attribution, while simultaneously using individual creators (both in and out of the courtroom) to
strengthen their intellectual property protections, and also to elevate the medium‘s artistic
credibility.
281

For some time though, this increasing level of esteem was largely restricted to small,
culturally privileged circles consisting largely of comic book fans. Even as comic book
adaptations crept into the mainstream, the medium maintained its low culture associations. The
same was true for television, which, in the eighties, was still widely criticized for tastelessness
and a tendency to cater to broad and undiscerning audiences. By the end of the decade however,
significant change had come to both of these previously lowbrow media. As Chapter Three
explained, a neoliberal regime that favored deregulation greatly intensified the structural
convergence of the media industries, bringing comic book publishing even closer to film and
television. These political and economic shifts created a more networked but increasingly
segmented media landscape that allowed a new mode of ―quality‖ television production to
flourish and also increased the value of comic-book based properties. Fundamental to both of
these trends was the growing importance of a young, educated, male consumer demographic
whose social and cultural background more closely resembled that of media producers. As the
structural changes behind these shifts began to solidify in the nineties, a wave of higher quality
television programming and more tasteful comic book adaptations proved the viability and value
of both products.
In the new millennium, amidst considerable technological innovation and change, their
worth has only increased. And the trends that begun to characterize comic book culture in the
sixties have only intensified. Within publishing, the pursuit of fans and a culture of auteurism
continues to shape strategy, but publishing itself continues to be undercut by the power of
licensing, with the entire business growing more corporate with each passing year. The nineties
saw Marvel get bought by a speculative investor who went on a buying spree, amassed a mini
media empire, and then declared bankruptcy, leaving the publisher a subsidiary of a toy
282

company. For the next decade, the company licensed its properties to every major studio in
Hollywood, before finally, in 2010, accepting a buyout bid from Disney. The largest multimedia
conglomerate at the time, with interests in franchising and licensing dating back to the twenties,
Disney paid $4 billion for the company and quickly and strategically began exploiting its value.
Meanwhile, DC has been brought deeper into the fold of its parent Time Warner, which shut
down the publisher‘s New York headquarter in order to more effectively connect the company
with Hollywood-based licensing operations. Despite some setbacks, the conglomerate has
remained convinced that exploiting DC‘s properties across every media platform it owns will
provide steady profits even as the company undergoes continual structural transformations.
There can be no doubt, that over the course of the last six decades, the perception of
comic books, within the industry and amongst the broader public, has changed considerably.
Once volatile, dangerous, and tasteless, they have become reliable, safe, and distinguished. These
characterizations are surprisingly legible across multiple contexts, whether comic books are
being characterized as a business, an investment, a cultural product with social impacts,
entertainment, or as art. This fluidity points to the extent to which cultural value often seamlessly
translates into economic and political value. As long as comic books were lowbrow, perceived as
a threat to readers, the business remained fundamentally unstable. Decades later, now that the
medium has come into its own, canonized within academic and cultural institutions and
simultaneously celebrated by cult audiences, the business of comic books is booming; there is no
sounder bet in Hollywood, whatever the platform, than a superhero, a comic book adaptation, or
a sci-fi title closely associated with the form. This has been particularly true in the international
era of Hollywood—with foreign language markets becoming ever more important to earnings
than the domestic box office—in which broad effects-driven action films tend to perform better
283

than more culturally specific comedies and dramas. The conclusion here should not be that a
cabal of producers sought to systematically elevate a medium‘s status in order to turn it into a
reliable profit stream; the creation of quality was not, at least in this situation, a conscious
industrial strategy.
Industrial strategy, however, is intricately and innately intertwined with conceptions of
taste. At its very core, quality is a business construct. In this respect, good taste—which so often
appears to be a natural occurrence—has much in common with the author, a seventeenth century
invention that filled a particular economic need and subsequently acquired tremendous cultural
meaning and social value.
*
Taste and quality, as well, have long served various political and
economic ends. With respect to comic books, the impact of government oversight, legal
discourse, and shifting regulatory regimes have all played a large role in determining the
particular moral status and cultural character of the form, in as much as these forces, acting
through industry, favored particular formations of ―quality‖ within the medium. Those notions of
―quality‖ have subsequently impacted the way in which comic books are received by their
readers and by the general public, with the comic book business generally benefitting from their
ability to shape the cultural context of reception.

Taste, Quality, and Industrial Strategy
The notion that artistic taste and conceptions of quality are contingent, and that they are
things that individuals construct, cultivate, and sometimes fight for, is a well-established idea.
Fifty years ago, Pierre Bourdieu did considerable theoretical work establishing the first and most
fundamental part of this hypothesis by arguing that the ways in which people relate to culture are

*
See Chapter Two for more on the construction of authorship.
284

very closely linked to their social position and bound up with the general disposition of their
class and lifestyle, or habitus. As a result, displays of taste are always also displays of class, or in
the words of Bourdieu, ―taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified
by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make.‖
1
The concept of
habitus here implicates taste within larger social patterns, and thus works against tendencies to
make cultural preferences seem natural instead of socially or economically determined.
Importantly then, the taste hierarchies that appear in different political contexts are not incidental
or inconsequential. In uniting ―all those who are the product of similar conditions while
distinguishing them from all others,‖ they both reflect social and economic hierarchies and help
to sustain and justify them; assigning a kind of natural inferiority and superiority to different
classes, cultural consumption becomes ―predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to
fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences.‖
2

This has certainly been true within an American context, where culture long ago came to
serve various social and political purposes. This was not always the case though, and seems not
to have been true very early on the nation‘s history. While the United States was never a
classless society, in the first half of the nineteenth century, its culture lacked the rigid hierarchy
that characterized it later on. Lawrence Levine describes a fluid, shared public culture that
offered choice to a broad audience, and freely mixed what would later be considered high culture
genres with low or amateur culture; for instance, traveling companies would perform both Italian
operas and folk songs in the same program.
3
Visiting America in the 1830s, Alexis de
Tocqueville had even noted that the country was surprisingly without ―a conspicuous elite
culture‖. But as Steve Ross notes, by the turn of the century, as ―a new generation of wealthy
285

citizens began forging a highly visible American elite,‖ there appeared to be a ―growing
separation of leisure into respectable high culture and suspect low culture.‖
4

Paul DiMaggio describes in some detail exactly how this split came about, focusing in
particular on Boston‘s Brahmin class. Facing in the mid-nineteenth century a precipitous loss of
social control as immigrants inundated their city—which was growing larger, denser and
generally more threatening—the elite begun supporting cultural institutions that could seal them
away from the city‘s chaos. Through the building of museums and symphonies, they would be
able to permanently maintain cultural capital and, through education, legitimize their social
dominance.
5
In this endeavor, the Boston Brahmins were hardly alone. Capitalists across the
country had stepped up to fund similar new cultural centers. They also took the liberty to
establish new social norms that dictated how people were to receive the high arts, and also to
determine which forms of culture were to be valued and which were to be disparaged. By
century‘s end, the American cultural landscape had changed irrevocably. These shifts though
were far from conspiratorial, but were instead the result of a system of political, economic, and
social power that sought to replicate itself in the cultural arena.
Notably, the working classes also had much to gain from the solidification of social
identity through the creation of cultural boundaries. As Michael Denning explains, nineteenth
century workers were far from monolithic and could only understand themselves broadly as
―producers‖ defined against the ―exploiters‖ of the dominant class. Accordingly, a cultural
preference for the dime novel, despite its disparaged low culture status, was a useful way to
reinforce class boundaries.
6
Similarly, Ross describes silent films before World War I as a ―poor
man‘s amusement‖ that easily integrated into workday rhythms and became a vehicle ―capable
of expressing a new public identity dominated by working-class sensibilities‖. For labor leaders,
286

this articulation of class held promise in film‘s potential to mobilize the masses against the
dominant political order.
7
Both cases suggest that while elites may have instigated and even
financed the cultural divide, multiple classes played a part in its construction by using it as a tool
to articulate their identities and interests ―against other men whose interests [were] different from
(and usually opposed to) theirs.‖
8

Maybe in part because of this mutual benefit, simply distinguishing classes along cultural
lines was not enough. As Marx argued in The German Ideology, the ruling elite had to represent
―its interests as the common interest of all the members of society, that is…give its ideas the
form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.‖
9
This was
perhaps the role played by cultural criticism, which emerged roughly contemporaneously with
cultural institution building in America. Perhaps most notoriously, British writer Matthew
Arnold described culture at the time as ―the best which has been thought and said in the world,‖
justifying the cultural re-education of the masses in which American capitalists were engaging
by arguing that it was their job to counteract the anarchic tendencies of the uncivilized poor.
10
In
the thirties, the discourse had changed little as F.R. Leavis continued to argue that art and
literature depends on a ―very small minority‖ with ―discerning appreciation‖ and hence the
responsibility to keep good culture alive.
11
With broad reach, these ideas assured the working
classes that even though emerging commercial media offered them pleasure and class alliance,
they remained lowly diversions to be ashamed of and nothing more.
These ideas could theoretically have passed through history without impact, ignored and
subsequently disregarded as the elitist drivel they were. But as the dominant ideas of the ruling
class, these cultural theories were institutionalized, built into the political and economic
infrastructure of America‘s burgeoning culture industries. As noted in Chapter Three, both the
287

radio and television industries formed within an environment fundamentally ordered by
hierarchies of taste. The earliest and wealthiest producers in both media found that as long as
they were able to brand their own content as higher in quality and more refined in taste—as
characterized by various, sometimes arbitrary traits like commercialism (as opposed to non-profit
or religious programming) or medium specificity—they were not only able to maintain their
licenses over the airwaves, but actually exclude lesser competitors from doing the same. The
monetary value of the public perception of quality was reaffirmed again and again in this regard
by the federal government, through actions like General Order 40 in 1927, the Communications
Act of 1934, and the FCC licensing freeze in 1952, all of which used sometimes elitist notions of
good taste to award additional market power to the most established players.
12

Without a dependence on public airwaves, film producers would seemingly be able to
avoid such maneuvering. But the early studio heads in Hollywood also made considerable efforts
to make cinema appeal to the middle and upper classes. These strategies were in part an attempt
to expand the audience, and thus revenue, but there was also a desire to turn ―movie going into a
respectable entertainment‖. As Steve Ross explains, early silent films oriented toward working
class audiences and thus working class values, were very often targeted by censors who feared
any political content, particularly if it promoted class conflict.
13
Accordingly, government
intervention here (or merely the threat of it), as in television and radio, encouraged a move away
from the masses and toward high culture, one which producers, who were increasingly facing
union struggles from working class employees, welcomed. The divide between high and low
culture became a way to secure the medium‘s independence from censorship, an answer to
unionization, and in the case of early media moguls, who also sought higher social status, a
means of personal salvation.
288

In making sense of these tendencies within cultural production, and understanding their
tremendous influence and powerful, a dynamic conception of hegemony—as a gradual, even
epochal process in which various parties struggle for political and social dominance on a terrain
that necessarily also includes the cultural—becomes extremely useful.
14
Indeed, the wealthy and
powerful producers of mass media in America, in many ways, represent just the kind of adaptive
ruling class hegemony theorizes. While many early media moguls came from lowly social
backgrounds, as the twentieth-century wore on, these leaders of industry were increasingly
plucked from the elite class, and were largely white, male, and upper-class. And their always-
growing ability to leverage artistic taste and determinations of quality in favor of their own profit
and power motives very much resembles what Gramsci describes as the elites‘ obligation to
shape culture in ways that are consistent with and supportive of their own productive needs. It
also approaches Lawrence Levine‘s similar understanding of cultural formations informed by
structure. In his description of the origin of cultural hierarchies in America, he describes ―a drive
for political order [that] was paralleled by a drive for cultural order, [a] push to organize the
economic sphere [that] was paralleled by a push to organize the cultural sphere, [and a] quest for
social authority [that] was paralleled by a quest for cultural authority.‖
15

Over the course of the last century, it seems that the discourse of cultural legitimacy has
often been deployed for purposes other than those stated, and in the interests of someone other
than the public broadly defined. In the nineteenth century, aristocrats used it to secure the social
order and separate the elites from the masses. And in the mid-twentieth century it became a tool
not of social elites per se, but of companies interested in securing their dominance in a given
culture industry. This was certainly true of the comic book business. In order to avoid regulation,
government oversight, and inter-industrial strife that was contributing to a significant market
289

downturn, the medium had to establish itself on higher moral ground. And in seeking out at least
the veneer of quality, its most powerful parties were able to stabilize and transform the business.
In the years that followed this shakeout, the industry developed a number of strategies—around
auteurism, fandom, narrative complexity, and a narrowing demographic—not for the explicit
purpose of achieving artistic integrity or even of selling quality (as television arguably did) but
as a way to remain viable as an industry and simply survive. Legitimacy was not an industrial
strategy as such, but achieving it became an essential component of growth.
Appeals to taste with American culture have never come unencumbered, and social and
cultural meaning have always pointed back to structural concerns; determinations about what
constituted high art and what constituted the lowbrow always also entailed seemingly unrelated
assessments that carried real economic and political consequences—whether a product would
face censorship or other forms of regulation, what audiences it would be exposed to, whether it
would be considered a public service, or how its producers would be perceived socially. For
purveyors of mass media then, appeals for cultural legitimation were always worth more than the
sum of their parts. In the context of an American cultural discourse that made high cultural status
attainable for producers of commercial media, hierarchies of taste have enabled media producers
in many instances to strengthen their industries, and in turn reinforce their own social, economic,
and political power. In the last thirty years, as traditional boundaries between high and low
culture have given way to more complicated hierarchies of taste, many have argued that cultural
legitimacy has become less significant. But the purveyors of mass commercial culture—the
members of today‘s ruling elite—continue to use and shape cultural norms and aesthetic
assessments in ways that serve their own economic and political needs. And to the extent that
290

this elite continues to be constituted largely by affluent and educated men, social identities and
the cultural hierarchies to which they correspond, continue to be meaningful.

A Comic Book Elite
Industry is, of course, not the only space within which individuals strive toward cultural
legitimacy. In the case of comic books, there has been a long, deliberate, and impactful campaign
for increased respectability, one stewarded by creators, fans, and critics. Additionally, even more
so than in television studies, legitimacy has been a particularly insistent motivator within comic
book scholarship, with academics working to justify its study alongside cultural forms typically
considered to be high art.
16
An increasing acceptance of the form both within the academy and
outside of it has thus represented something of a cultural win for both scholars and fans invested
in comic book culture, a community not unlike media producers in that it is largely composed of
college-aged and -educated men who take an interest in art and literature broadly defined. As
Jeffrey Brown has explained, there has been the sense, at least among some within this group,
that they had been ―disempowered‖ because their aesthetic preferences tended to threaten
―dominant cultural hierarchies‖ and ―challenge what the bourgeois have institutionalized as
natural and universal standards of ‗good taste‘.‖ Accordingly, he notes, those within the fan
community sought to ―achieve the social prestige and self-esteem that accompanies cultural
capital without surrendering to the hegemonic rules of Official culture.‖
17

Absent from Brown‘s observations, unfortunately, is a recognition of the social context
by which such reorganizations—of the boundaries between good taste and bad, high culture and
low—typically occur. While individuals who are part of comic book fandom may have felt shut
out of the Official culture he references, many, if not most, of them belong to a higher social
291

class that has historically always benefited from the power to determine the standards by which
that culture is defined. Indeed, the most prominent and unwavering characteristic of high culture,
since there has existed such a thing, has been not any single or fixed artistic standard, but the fact
that it has been enjoyed by an elite class. Marx and Engels theorized in The German Ideology
(1845) that the class that controls the material forces of society necessarily also controls mental
and intellectual production, but this necessary link between social and cultural power has hardly
been confined to leftist theory. Critics from Arnold to Leavis to MacDonald have at least partly
understood culture to be whatever stuff of life elites believe they must, out of political and social
responsibility, bestow or even force upon the masses.
18
That, as MacDonald noted in 1957, ―all
the great cultures of the past were elite cultures,‖ was thus not a coincidence as much as it was
their constituting characteristic.
19

Mass culture in turn, has long been defined in direct opposition to elite, high culture;
whatever forms of entertainment were enjoyed by those peoples who were not educated and
powerful, and thereby white and male, were necessarily denigrated as culturally inferior. As
Clement Greenberg wrote in 1939, there was, ―on one side the minority of the powerful—and
therefore the cultivated—and on the other the great mass of the exploited and poor—and
therefore the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first."
20
He accordingly judged
comic books, a cheap and mass form still, at the time he wrote, in its infancy, to be far from
transcendent art—not simply because they lacked certain aesthetic requirements—but because
they were too restricted and embedded within their low-brow audiences, the ―contemporary
American literate middle classes.‖
21
A half century later, as academics and fans were forcefully
making the case for the medium‘s cultural worthiness, this was no longer the case. Having long
since abandoned a mass audience, the medium was the domain of 18-49 year old males with
292

higher levels of education. Historically, this demographic would have made up society‘s elite
class; more than any other social group, men of this age and position would have held the power
to dictate, or at least, shape cultural standards.
As the 21
st
century approached, however, everything seemed to be changing and the
advance of postmodernism had seemingly rendered such traditionally defined notions of high
and low culture far less meaningful. In this context, it would seem that both comic books and
television could be re-imagined—if not as highbrow art, than at least as capable of producing
cultural texts of genuine aesthetic and narrative quality. Indeed, Beaty identifies this collapse of
boundaries, and a culture of postmodernism more generally, as important factors in creating the
conception that comics could be serious art, allowing for their integration into the art world.
22

This kind of transcendent movement across and between traditional cultural hierarchies had
become more commonplace since Fredric Jameson had first observed, in 1984, that mass culture
increasingly existed in a ―field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm.‖
But his accompanying suggestion that elite classes were no longer dictating the dominant
or hegemonic cultural ideology was not entirely accurate.
23
Social status and business strategy
continued to profoundly shape artistic production in very hierarchical ways. Cultural capital was
as potent as ever, and it continued to reside within the very same group it always had: educated,
presumably white, adult men. Cultural politics and the advance of a postmodern aesthetic had
been anything but predictable and simple, but neither were they random. As Lynn Spigel has
noted, postmodernism did not just occur through a ―general postwar condition of late capitalist
production,‖ and was not merely about style. Rather, there were ―social agents and material
processes through which the mergers between high and low took place.‖
24

293

Comic books, a formerly lowbrow cultural form that was increasingly incorporated into
higher quality media, was thoroughly implicated within these material processes. The means by
which comic books found increased respectability in the late twentieth century—within both
intellectual circles and more mainstream media—was neither predetermined, nor certain, nor
unrelated to the inherent merits of the form. Still, the gradual cultural ascendance of the medium
was never an unlikely or unnatural occurrence. Early on, a political necessity for the industry,
legitimacy became a requirement for growth, itself dependent on comic books‘ incorporation
into other media. As importantly though, comic books have long benefitted from supporters who
were was privileged in terms of social identity and rich with cultural capital. This status put those
individuals in a position from which they have had easy access to the media industries, and
thereby the means of cultural production. Accordingly, not only have many comic book fans
risen to positions of power within the comic book, television, and film industries, but they enjoy
preferential treatment as a coveted demographic and a more fluid interaction, boosted by their
technological and cultural savvy. In this respect, the legitimation of both comic books and
comic-book based media reveals itself as being far less radical than it first appears.

The Identity of Comic Books Today
Comic books have long played a foundational role in the multimedia strategies of
entertainment conglomerates, who benefit intensely from the support of highly favorable
political and legal regimes. In addition, comic book culture has long been populated by
individuals who come from considerable social, economic, and cultural privilege, which they
have not hesitated to deploy in support of the medium. Given this context—the political and
social strength that backs the form—it can hardly be surprising that comic books have recently
294

done so well economically. Today, Marvel is the most profitable cinematic brand in terms of box
office receipts (beating Pixar and DreamWorks), and its Avengers franchise is the most profitable
film franchise of all time (beating both Harry Potter and Star Wars).
25
Recently referred to by
The Hollywood Reporter as ―the only-live action brand that matters to mass audiences,‖ Marvel
―prompted nearly every major studio to mimic its ‗universe‘ strategy for building franchises.‖
26

On top of the four properties Marvel has licensed out to other studios (X-Men, Fantastic Four,
Spider-Man, and the Hulk), Disney has at least seven major Marvel films slated for release
through 2019, in addition to a major network series (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), another in
development (Agent Carter), and four others set to stream on Netflix. The latter is part of a
landmark deal Marvel made with the distribution platform, one that speaks to the continual and
persistent importance of access to strong properties with strong (usually male) audiences,
particularly as the entertainment landscape continues to shift in new and often unpredictable
ways.
DC Comics has had less theatrical box office success than Marvel, even with films like
The Dark Knight, which made over $1 billion worldwide. Its superhero properties nonetheless
remain the central pillar of Warner Bros.‘ film strategy, with the studio planning to release ten
feature films based on them before 2020. DC Comics‘ non-superhero titles have also been
lucrative, for Time Warner and other companies, with successful adaptations including Red
(2010, Summit), V for Vendetta (2006, Warner Bros.), and A History of Violence (2005, New
Line). Warner Bros. and DC have arguably had more success outside of the box-office though,
with a slew of successful live-action television series—most notably Smallville (2001-2011,
CW/WB)—and a total six programs based on DC properties slated for 2014-2015. DC Comics‘
sister company HBO, which established its creative growth on many of the same principles that
295

have supported the growth of comics, nonetheless remains the crown jewel in the Time Warner
empire. Recently, as the company opened itself up to takeover bids, media attention focused
largely on the film division. However, HBO, with an annual revenue of $1.4 billion, is driving
growth for the conglomerate and remains the only subsidiary with enough value to attract a
buyer. One analyst mused though, that purchasing Time Warner for HBO would still be like
―buying the whole dairy farm to get a quart of milk.‖
27

These achievements have made these companies the envy of the entertainment industry.
And each year, more producers seek to reproduce their successes, pursuing quality television,
comic book properties, and the engaged fans of both with such enthusiasm it leaves an imprint
across the entire media landscape. Notably, this total incorporation of comic book culture has
had tremendous impacts on comic books themselves and the people that continue to publish and
read them. Although licensing has long eclipsed publishing in terms of profits, corporate
priorities, and public interest, this continued absorption of the latter into the former has begun to
make comic book critics more nervous than ever. Matthew McAllister, among others, has
recently expressed his concerns that these conglomerates may subordinate the ―comic book
subsidiary to the larger licensing goals of the parent corporation‖ and set ―less priority for the
creation of good books [to] allocate more resources to the marketing and licensing of comic book
characters to other subsidiaries or media outlets.‖
28

The San Diego Comic-Con, a convention created by and for fans before becoming a
multimedia marketing extravaganza, has become the perfect physical embodiment of this fear,
while remaining a source of pride and celebration. It annually threatens to enlarge ―the
boundaries of comic book culture…at the expense of the comic book itself.‖
29
Jenkins described
the event as a ―meeting point between a transmedia commercial culture and a grassroots
296

participatory culture,‖ which has attracted industry insiders and fans from all variety of media.
The result is what is ―perhaps the most media saturated environment you can imagine.‖
30

Attracting more than 130,000 attendees each year, including A-list celebrities, Hollywood
networkers, costumed fans, academics, and writers and artists, the country‘s most important
comic book event has in many ways ceased to have much to do with comic books themselves.
Anxieties around this particular event, and everything it represents, are simultaneously,
and strangely enough, both justifiable and somewhat unwarranted. There can be no doubt that the
comic book industry prioritizes licensing and corporate needs over the creation of good comic
books—but this much has been true of the medium almost since its inception and indeed this
particular hierarchical arrangement is at least in part responsible for the basic character of the
form, and many of its most important innovations. And not a great deal about this set of priorities
has much changed in the last twenty years, save, perhaps, their intensity, and more likely, their
visibility. This is in some ways a result of the strategy‘s success. As comic book publishing
continues to reliably cultivate a niche reader base and an elite community of fans, comic book
licensing is reaching out to an ever-expanding population of media consumers across a widening
array of platforms. The inherent imbalance of this approach gives the impression of the comic
book receding further and further in the shadow of comic book licensing, but the fundamental
discrepancies between these two sides is part of what makes both of them, and the medium they
constitute, so enduring.
In general, the structuring paradoxes of comic book culture—its publishing/licensing
split, its mass/niche nature, its popular/esoteric status—are not quite as contradictory as they
seem, and have actually been a rather productive force for the industry, if not the medium more
broadly. These seeming inconsistencies have the effect of making what is dominant culture
297

appear less so. Licensing is more palatable when it is based in publishing, mass is less
contemptible when it is associated with niche, and the value of the esoteric helps to validate the
popular. As a medium split between two seemingly distinct modes, with two distinct sets of
characteristics, comic books benefit from the cultural value of being two things at once. While
the publishing business exists in some corners merely to justify the presence of licensing, the
strength of licensing has long kept publishing alive and solvent when it may not have been
otherwise. On the ground, in the everyday relationships and practices that constitute the comic
book industry—both its publishing and licensing sides—the predicaments caused by this dual
existence are not always quite so plain or easy. Work in this business, as it is across the media
landscape, is unstable and often undercompensated, and the infrastructural barriers that have long
constrained the medium continue to restrict its development today, albeit in new and different
ways.

1
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984), 6.
2
Ibid., 56; 7.
3
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1988), 107.
4
Steve Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 14.
5
Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston,” Media, Culture & Society 4, no. 1
(1982): 33–50.
6
Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America, 2nd, revised (Verso,
1998), 58–60.
7
Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, 12; 24.
8
E.P. Thompson, “Preface from The Making of the English Working Class,” in Cultural Theory and Popular
Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, Fourth (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 41.
9
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A
Reader, ed. Storey, John, Fourth (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009).
298

10
Matthew Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. Storey, John,
Fourth (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 7–8.
11
F.R. Leavis, “Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed.
Storey, John, Fourth (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 12.
12
Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA:
Cengage Learning, 2007), 63; William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1992).
13
Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, 109.
14
Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, 267.
15
Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 228.
16
From the earliest days of comic book criticism in the late 1950s, writers like Larry Stark and Bhob Stewart
were determined to show that comics were “a valid art form” deserving of “ongoing critical discussion.” This
impulse has remained strong, as foundational comics scholars like Scott McCloud, Thomas Inge, Will Eisner,
and Douglas Wolk have worked to establish the medium’s artistic pedigree by tracing its history through
ancient and medieval Western artistic traditions, associating it with artists like Max Ernst and Monet, and
criticizing the lack of “serious intellectual review” around it. See von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of
Terror!; Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Reprint (William Morrow Paperbacks, 1994),
18–20; M. Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990); Will Eisner, Comics
and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist (New York: WW Norton &
Company, 2008), xi. This desire for status has been so prevalent that more recently, scholars who nonetheless
lament comics continued status as a “devalued popular object” within academia recommend that we stop
working so hard to legitimize it. Greg Smith, “It Ain’t Easy Studying Comics,” Cinema Journal, In Focus: Comics
Studies Fifty Years After Film Studies, 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 111; Greg Smith, “Surveying the World of
Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conversation,” Cinema Journal, In Focus: Comics Studies Fifty Years
After Film Studies, 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 139; Angela Ndalianis, “Why Study Comics,” Cinema Journal, In
Focus: Comics Studies Fifty Years After Film Studies, 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 114.
17
Jeffrey A. Brown, “Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital,” The Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4
(1997): 28–29.
18
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, Anniversary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 25–38;
John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th ed. (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited,
2009), 6–15.
19
Dwight MacDonald, “A Theory Of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard
Rosenberg (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 70.
20
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939). Republished in Bernard
Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free
Press, 1957), 106.
299

21
Greenberg, Clement, “Steig’s Cartoon,” The Nation, March 3, 1945. Republished in Jeet Heer and Kent
Worcester, eds., Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004), 40.
22
Beaty, Comics Versus Art, 13; 151.
23
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146
(August 1984): 65.
24
Lynn Spigel, TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University Of Chicago
Press, 2008), 174; 8.
25
“Franchise Index,” Financial / Entertainment, Box Office Mojo, (August 8, 2014),
http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/?view=Brand&sort=sumgross&order=DESC&p=.htm.
26
“How Marvel Became the Envy (and Scourge) of Hollywood,” The Hollywood Reporter, August 1, 2014.
27
Brent Lang, “Why Google Likely Won’t Buy Time Warner,” Variety, August 5, 2014; Brent Lang, “Time
Warner Unveils $5 Billion Stock Buyback, Earnings Rise Thanks to HBO,” Variety, August 6, 2014,
http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/time-warner-earnings-rise-thanks-to-hbo-1201276632/.
28
McAllister, “Ownership Concentration in the US Comic Book Industry,” 28–30.
29
Johnson, “Will the Real Wolverine Please Stand Up?,” 65.
30
Jenkins, “Performing Our ‘Collective Dreams’: The Many Worlds of San Diego Comic-Con.”
300

Bibliography

―50 Top-Grossing Films.‖ Variety, April 26, 1972.
―ABC-TV Demos Appear Improving Despite Household Ratings Slump.‖ Variety, October 22,
1986, sec. Radio-Television.
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. ―The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception.‖ In Mass Communication and Society, edited by James Curran, Michael
Gurevitch, and Janet Wodlacott, 349–83. Originally Published in 1944. London: Sage,
1979.
Alexander, Max. ―Seriously, It‘s Comics: From Superman to Today.‖ New York Times. June 11,
1989, Sunday edition, sec. Arts & Leisure.
Aljean, Harmetz. ―The Life and Exceedingly Hard Times of Superman.‖ New York Times, June
14, 1981.
Allen, Henry. ―Horror Comics From the ‘50s Are Alive!‖ The Washington Post. September 24,
1972, sec. Film.
Alvey, Mark. ―Too Many Kids and Old Ladies: Quality Demographics and 1960s US
Television.‖ In Television: The Critical View, edited by Horace Newcomb, 7th ed. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
―American News Co. Earnings Rose Nearly 400% in 1955 Despite Decline in Sales.‖ New York
Times. February 29, 1956, sec. Business & Finance.
―American News Gain In Late ‘54 Continues Into ‘55, Holders Told.‖ Wall Street Journal.
March 31, 1955, sec. 1.
―American News Sees ‘59 Net Well Above ‘58.‖ Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1959.
―Amicus Beats Dollar Devaluation By Streamlining Shooting Schedules.‖ Variety, April 26,
1972.
Amis, Kingsley. ―A Threat to Our Culture.‖ Spectator, December 30, 1955.
Anderson, Christopher. ―Drama Overview: Producing the Aristocracy of Culture in American
Television.‖ In The Essential HBO Reader, edited by Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones,
23–41. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.
———. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1994.
301

―Antitrust Suit Against American News, Union News Co. Is Settled.‖ Wall Street Journal.
September 2, 1955.
―ARA, Others Are Sued On Antitrust Charges By News Distributors.‖ Wall Street Journal.
January 2, 1976, sec. 1.
Arnold, Matthew. ―Culture and Anarchy.‖ In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader,
edited by Storey, John, Fourth. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009.
Ashley, Michael. Transformations: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1950 to
1970. Liverpool University Press, 2005.
Aufderheide, Patricia, and Peter Jaszi. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in
Copyright. University Of Chicago Press, 2011.
Bachman, Justin. ―HBO Finally Reveals Profit Numbers. Take That, Netflix.‖ Bloomberg
Business Week, February 5, 2014.
Banks, Miranda. ―I Love Lucy: The Writer-Producer.‖ In How To Watch Television, edited by
Ethan Thompson and Mittell, Jason. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
Barker, Martin. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester University, 1989.
———. The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. Univ. Press of Mississippi,
1995.
Barnes, Brooks. ―Warner Brothers Wins In Superman Case.‖ New York Times, January 12, 2013.
Bart, Peter. ―Advertising: Superman Faces New Hurdles.‖ New York Times, September 23, 1962.
———. ―Some Comic Book Men Pine for Sin, Sex As Their Sales Skid.‖ Wall Street Journal,
February 25, 1959.
Beaty, Bart. Comics Versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
———. Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2005.
———. , ed. ―In Focus: Comic Studies Fifty Years After Film Studies.‖ Cinema Journal 50, no.
3 (Spring 2011): 106–47.
———. ―The Recession and the American Comic Book Industry: From Inelastic Cultural Good
to Economic Integration.‖ Popular Communication 8, no. 3 (2010): 203–7.
Benezra, Karen. ―The Fragging of the American Mind.‖ Brandweek 39, no. 24 (June 15, 1998):
S12–19.
Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Taylor, 1993.
302

Berlatsky, Noah. ―Some of the Greatest, Most Popular Comic Books Are Feminist.‖ News. The
Atlantic, August 13, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/08/some-of-
the-greatest-most-popular-comic-books-are-feminist/278593/.
Blum, Eleanor. ―Paperbound Books in the United States in 1955: A Survey of Content.‖ Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of Illinois, 1955.
Boddy, William. Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1992.
Boucher, Geoff. ―Hero Complex: A Credit to His Name.‖ Los Angeles Times. September 27,
2009, sec. Calendar.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard
Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticims. 6th ed. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
Bray, Chad. ―Galactic Battle: Marvel Wins Legal Decision Against Artist‘s Children.‖ Wall
Street Journal. August 9, 2013.
Breasted, Mary. ―Superman‘s Creators, Nearly Destittue, Invoke His Spirit.‖ New York Times,
November 22, 1975.
Brodsen, John F. ―Tempo: It‘s Alive! Comic Terror Is Back From the Crypt.‖ Chicago Tribune.
February 15, 1984, sec. 5.
Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. Continuum, 2001.
Brothers, David. ―The Ethical Rot Behind ‗Before Watchmen‘ & ‗The Avengers.‘‖ Web
Magazine. Comics Alliance, April 18, 2012.
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/04/18/creator-rights-before-watchmen-avengers-
moore-kirby/.
Brown, Ben. ―Dialogue on Film: Grant Tinker.‖ American Film, September 1983.
Brown, Jeffrey A. ―Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital.‖ The Journal of Popular Culture
30, no. 4 (1997): 13–31.
―Business Records: Bankruptcy Proceedings.‖ New York Times. March 9, 1956, sec. Business &
Finance.
Caldwell, John. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and
Television. Duke University Press Books, 2008.
303

Canby, Vincent. ―Fighting, Fantasy In ‗Conan the Barbarian‘‘.‖ New York Times, May 15, 1982.
———. ―The Screen: Tales from the Crypt.‖ New York Times, March 9, 1972.
Carabas, Teodora. ―Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD: The Debunking of Spies, Superheroes,
and Cold War Rhetoric in Mad Magazine‘s Spy vs. Spy.‖ Journal of Popular Culture 40,
no. 1 (February 2007): 4–24.
Cardwell, Sarah. ―Is Quality Television Any Good? Generic Distinctions, Evaluations and the
Troubling Matter of Critical Judgment.‖ In Quality TV: Contemporary American
Television and Beyond, edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, 19–34. London: I.B.
Tauris, 2007.
Carlson, Barbara. ―To Him, The Comics Aren‘t Mickeymouse.‖ The Hartford Courant, February
17, 1973.
Carter, Bill. ―HBO Finds Hits the Networks Miss.‖ New York Times, July 15, 1991, sec. Media
Business.
Cerone, Daniel. ―Nightmarish `Tales‘ Turns Into a Director‘s Dream.‖ Los Angeles Times. June
3, 1990, Home edition, sec. Television.
———. ―Toned-Down `Tales From Crypt‘ Starts on Fox Tonight:‖ Los Angeles Times. January
22, 1994, sec. Calendar.
Cheng, Kipp. ―Setting Their Sites on Generation ‗Y.‘‖ Adweek, August 9, 1999.
Cieply, Michael, and Brooke Barnes. ―Warner Brothers Sues Superman Lawyer.‖ New York
Times, May 15, 2010.
Clark, Kenneth. ―Yuppies Viewed as a Big Deal for TV, but the Advertisers Aren‘t Buying It.‖
Chicago Tribune, September 4, 1988, sec. 5.
Colton, David. ―The Crime That Created Superman.‖ USA Today, August 26, 2008, sec. LIFE.
―Comic Book Curb Grows.‖ New York Times, July 11, 1955.
―Comic Book Publisher Boasts of Horror for Child Reading.‖ The Baltimore Sun, April 22,
1954.
―Comic Books Profit by Rush To Legitimacy.‖ Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1974.
Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Monkeybrain, 2006.
Crook, David. ―Smut Issue Still Thorn for Cable TV: Smut Issue.‖ Los Angeles Times, June 4,
1985.
304

Curtin, Michael, and Jane Shattuc. The American Television Industry. New York: British Film
Institute, 2009.
Dagnal, Cynthia. ―A Socially Relevant Superman?‖ Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1976.
Daniels, Les. Batman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.
———. DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1995.
———. Superman: The Complete History. Chronicle Books, 2004.
DC Comics v. Pacific Pictures, CV 10-3633 ODW, (C.D. Cal. West. Div. 2012).
Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America. 2nd,
revised. Verso, 1998.
Detective Comics v. Bruns Publications et al., 111 F.2d 432 (2nd Cir. 1940).
Didio, Dan. ―The New 52.‖ Lecture presented at the Transmedia Entertainment, University of
Southern California, September 27, 2011.
Diehl, Digby. Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives. New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1996.
DiMaggio, Paul. ―Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston.‖ Media, Culture &
Society 4, no. 1 (1982): 33–50.
―Dr. Fredric Wertham, M.D.‖ Accessed January 23, 2014. http://www.ep.tc/wertham/soti/blog/.
Dries, Kate. ―Mindy Kaling Is Too Busy Working Her Ass Off To Engage With Critics.‖
Jezebel, October 16, 2014. http://jezebel.com/mindy-kaling-is-too-busy-working-her-ass-
off-to-engage-1647059938.
Du Bois, Peter C. ―Superman, Batman and Ivanhoe: Comic Books Have Become Both Profitable
and Respectable.‖ Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly. September 18,
1961.
Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New
York: Continuum, 2009.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Anniversary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008.
Eco, Umberto. ―The Myth of Superman.‖ In Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular
Medium, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 112–21. Originally Published in 1962.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
305

Edgerton, Gary. ―Introduction: A Brief History of HBO.‖ In The Essential HBO Reader, edited
by Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, 1–20. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2008.
Edgerton, Gary, and Jeffrey P. Jones. ―HBO‘s Ongoing Legacy.‖ In The Essential HBO Reader,
edited by Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, 315–30. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2008.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary
Cartoonist. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2008.
Epstein, Jason. Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. 1st ed. W. W. Norton &
Company, 2002.
Farrier, John. ―The Research That Led to the Comics Code Authority Was Faked.‖ Neatorama,
February 5, 2013. http://www.neatorama.com/2013/02/15/The-Research-That-Led-to-
the-Comics-Code-Authority-Was-Faked/.
Faughnder, Ryan. ―Comic Book Artist‘s Heirs Settle Marvel Dispute.‖ Los Angeles Times,
September 27, 2014, sec. Business.
Feuer, Jane. ―HBO and the Concept of Quality TV.‖ In Quality TV: Contemporary American
Television and Beyond, edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, 145–57. London: I.B.
Tauris, 2007.
———. ―MTM Enterprises: An Overview.‖ In MTM Quality Television, edited by Jane Feuer,
Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi. British Film Institute, 1985.
———. ―The MTM Style.‖ In Television: The Critical View, edited by Horace Newcomb, 52–
84. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Fisk, Catherine L. ―Knowledge Work: New Metaphors for the New Economy.‖ Chicago Kent
Law Review 80 (2005): 839.
———. Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual
Property, 1800-1930. The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Fitzpatrick, Shanon. ―Pulp Empire: Macfadden Publications, Transnational America, and the
Global Popular.‖ Ph.D. Dissertation, Univeristy of California, Irvine, 2013.
Foege, Alec. ―All the Young Dudes.‖ Mediaweek 15, no. 31 (September 5, 2005): 16–20.
306

Ford, Sam. ―Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics: An Interview with Henry Jenkins.‖ In
Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, edited by Pat Harrigan and
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 303–12. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Four Star Comics Corp v. Kable News Company, 224 F. Supp. 108 (US Southern District of
New York 1963).
―Franchise Index.‖ Financial / Entertainment. Box Office Mojo, August 8, 2014.
http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/?view=Brand&sort=sumgross&order=DESC&p=.ht
m.
Frazer, Samuel. ―Superman to the Rescue.‖ New York Times, December 1, 1975, sec. Letters to
the Editor.
―Fredric Wertham- Douchebags of Comics | A Waste of Time.‖ Accessed January 23, 2014.
http://www.rickworley.com/2012/06/22/fredric-wertham-douchebags-of-comics/.
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books.
Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2009.
Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1988.
Gaines, Bill. Spa Fon #5. Fanzine, 1969.
Gaines, Jane. Contested Culture: The Image,the Voice,and the Law. University of North Carolina
Press, 1991.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Geissmann, Grant. Foul Play! The Art and Artists of the 1950s EC Comics. New York: Harper
Design International, 2005.
Gelman, Morrie. ―Radio-Television: Meters & VCRs Shaping P‘time Ploys.‖ Variety, May 20,
1987.
Gilbert, James Burkhart. A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in
the 1950s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Gold, Anita. ―Pow! Awk! Shazam! Superman Flies Once Again.‖ Chicago Tribune. February 25,
1973, sec. W.
307

Goldstein, Paul. Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. Revised.
Stanford Law and Politics, 2003.
Gordon, Ian. ―Comics, Creators, and Copyright: On the Onwership of Serial Narratives by
Multiple Authors.‖ In A Companion to Media Authorship, edited by Jonathan Gray and
Johnson, Derek. Malden, Massachussets: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Gordon, Ian, and Matthew P. McAllister, eds. Film and Comic Books. 1st edition. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Gorman, Bill. ―Where Did Primtime Broadcast Audiences Go?‖ Entertainment. TV by the
Numbers, April 12, 2010. http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/04/12/where-did-the-
primetime-broadcast-tv-audience-go/47976/.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated by Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
Graser, Marc. ―Young & Restless.‖ Variety, June 18, 2012.
Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. New York: Collins Design, 2005.
Greenberg, Clement. ―Avant-Garde and Kitsch.‖ Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939).
Greenberg, Clement. ―Steig‘s Cartoon.‖ The Nation, March 3, 1945.
Grieveson, Lee. Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Gutis, Phillip. ―Turning Superheroes into Super Sales.‖ New York Times, January 6, 1985.
Hadju, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed
America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Haggins, Bambi, and Amanda Lotz. ―Comedy Overview: At Home on the Cutting Edge.‖ In The
Essential HBO Reader, edited by Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, 151–71.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.
Hall, Jane. ―HBO Chief Fuchs Sees Diversity as Key to the Future Cable.‖ Los Angeles Times.
November 4, 1992, sec. Calendar.
Harris, Franklin. ―The Long, Gory Life of EC Comics.‖ Reason 37, no. 2 (June 2005): 64–65.
Haslem, Wendy, Angela Ndalianis, and Chris Mackie, eds. Super/Heroes: From Hercules to
Superman. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2005.
308

Havens, Timothy, and Amanda Lotz. Understanding Media Industries. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
Healey, Karen. ―When Fangirls Perform: The Gendered Fan Identity in Superhero Comics
Fandom.‖ In The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the
Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 1954.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.
Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester, eds. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Hills, Matt. The Cult TV Book: From Star Trek to Dexter, New Approaches to TV Outside the
Box. Edited by Stacey Abbott. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010.
Hilmes, Michele. Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States. 2nd ed.
Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning, 2007.
―History.‖ Corporate Website. Kable Media Services, Inc. Accessed January 11, 2014.
http://www.kable.com/about/history.aspx.
Hollows, Joanne. ―The Masculinity of Cult.‖ In Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of
Oppositional Tastes. Manchester: Manchester University, 2003.
Holt, Jennifer. Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation
1980-1996. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.
Hornaday, Ann. ―Everywhere You Look, Crypt and More Crypt.‖ New York Times, September 4,
1994, sec. Arts.
———. ―Programming For Reputation. And Profits.‖ New York Times. November 7, 1993, sec.
Arts & Leisure.
Houpt, Simon. ―He Earns Little Money...So Why Do Advertisers Love Him?‖ The Globe and
Mail, March 9, 2002.
―‗Howard the Duck‘: Reviewers Still Quacking.‖ Chicago Tribune, August 10, 1986, sec. 13.
Howe, Desson. ―Comic Strips Bad Image Off.‖ Washington Post, August 18, 1989.
―How Marvel Became the Envy (and Scourge) of Hollywood.‖ The Hollywood Reporter, August
1, 2014.
Hoyt, Eric. ―Writer in the Hole: Desny v. Wilder, Copyright Law, and the Battle over Ideas.‖
Cinema Journal 50, no. 2 (2011): 21–40.
309

Huettig, Mae D. ―Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry.‖ In American Film Industry,
edited by Tino Balio, 285–310. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Huyssen, Andreas. ―The Vanishing Other: Mass Culture.‖ In After the Great Divide: Modernism,
Mass Culture, Postmodernism, 3–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Ilg, Frances, and Louise Ames. ―Wertham View on Comics Is Questioned by Warshow.‖ Daily
Boston Globe. November 8, 1954.
Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
Inglis, Ruth A. ―Self-Regulation in Operation.‖ In The American Film Industry, edited by Tino
Balio, 377–400. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Interborough News Company v. The Curtis Publishing Company, 127 F. Supp. 286 (US
Southern District of New York 1954).
Interim Report of the Committee on the Judiciary: Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency. S.
Rep, March 14, 1955.
―It Works!‖ The Christian Science Monitor. September 16, 1954, sec. Editorials/Features.
Itzkoff, Dave. ―Flaws Found in Fredric Wertham‘s Comic-Book Studies.‖ The New York Times,
February 19, 2013, sec. Books.
Jacobs, Frank. The Mad World of William M. Gaines. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1972.
Jameson, Fredric. ―Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.‖ New Left Review,
no. 146 (August 1984): 53–92.
Jancovich, Mark, and Nathan Hunt. ―The Mainstream, Distinction, and Cult TV.‖ In Cult
Television, edited by Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta E. Pearson. University of
Minnesota Press, 2004.
Jancovich, Mark, and James Lyons. ―Introduction.‖ In Quality Popular Television, edited by
Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, 1–8. London: British Film Institute, 2003.
Jaramillo, Deborah. ―The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the
Construction of a Quality Brand.‖ Journal of Communication Inquiry 26, no. 1 (January
2002): 59–75.
Jaszi, Peter. ―On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity.‖ In The
Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, edited by
Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, 29–56. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
310

Jenkins, Henry. ―Comics and Convergence Part One.‖ Blog. Confessions of an Aca-Fan, August
18, 2008. http://henryjenkins.org/2006/08/comics_and_convergence.html.
———. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press,
2008.
———. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York
University Press, 2006.
———. ―Performing Our ‗Collective Dreams‘: The Many Worlds of San Diego Comic-Con.‖
Weblog. Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 15, 2012.
http://henryjenkins.org/2012/07/performing_our_collective_drea.html.
Jenkins, Henry. ―The Guiding Spirit and the Powers That Be: A Response to Suzanne Scott.‖ In
The Participatory Cultures Handbook, edited by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs
Henderson, 53–58. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning
in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
―Jerry Siegel Obituary.‖ Economist, February 17, 1996.
Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture
Industries. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
Johnson, Derek. ―Will the Real Wolverine Please Stand Up?‖ In Film and Comic Books, edited
by Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich, and Matthew McAllister. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2007.
Johnson, Ted. ―Caped Fear: Will Copyright Crunch Put Squeeze on Hollywood Franchises?‖
Variety, July 12, 2010.
———. ―Time Warner Cable Lawsuit: Another Attack on Channel Bundling.‖ Variety, June 19,
2003. http://variety.com/2013/tv/news/time-warner-cable-lawsuit-another-attack-on-
channel-bundling-1200499130/.
Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. Basic
Books, 2005.
Joyrich, Lynne. ―All That Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer
Culture.‖ Camera Obscura 6 (1988): 128–53.
Judge, Mark Gauvreau. ―Holy Censorship, Batman! Guess Who‘s Banning Comic Books.‖ The
Washington Post. June 9, 1996.
311

―Judge: Superboy Flies for DC Comics.‖ Variety, April 16, 2013.
Kael, Pauline. ―Circles and Squares.‖ Film Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1963): 12–26.
Kaltenbach, Chris. ―A Comic Book Kingdom: ‗Up, Up and AWAYYYY.‘‖ The Sun. December
4, 1983.
Kapur, Jyotsna. ―New Economy / Old Labor: Creativity, Flatness, and Other Neo-Liberal
Myths.‖ In Knowledge Workers in the Information Society, edited by Catherine
McKercher and Vincent Mosco, 163–76. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
Kehr, Dave. ―Unlovable Duck Makes ‗Howard‘ an Unlovable Film.‖ Chicago Tribune, August
1, 1986, sec. N.
Kihss, Peter. ―No Harm in Horror, Comics Issuer Says: Comics Publisher Sees No Harm In
Horror, Discounts ‗Good Taste.‘‖ New York Times, April 22, 1954.
Kim, L.S. ―Sex and the Single Girl in Postfeminism: The F Word on Television.‖ Television &
New Media 2, no. 4 (November 2001): 319–34.
Kinney National Service, Incorporated Annual Reports. Kinney, 1971 1967. ProQuest Historical
Annual Reports.
Kitson, John William. ―Profile of a Growth Industry: American Book Publishing at Mid-
Century, with an Emphasis on the Integration and Consolidation Activity Between 1959
and 1965.‖ Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1968.
Kleinfield, N.R. ―Superheroes‘ Creators Wrangle.‖ New York Times, October 13, 1979.
Kligfeld, Stanley. ―Comic Magazines: Crime, Superman, Love Help Them Set Records For
Sales.‖ Wall Street Journal. January 12, 1953.
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/132066521/abstract/494677F191CF
4550PQ/11?accountid=14749.
Knight News Wire. ―Comic Book Popularity Growing By Leaps and Bounds!‖ Hartford
Courant, December 10, 1978.
Knutzen, Erik. ―Man of Steel Splinters an American Dream.‖ Los Angeles Times, February 25,
1979.
Kogan, Rick. ―Frightless: HBO‘s Tales from the Crypt‘ Are More Stereotyped than Scary.‖
Chicago Tribune. June 9, 1989.
Kravsow, Irving. ―Senate Comic Book Probers Learn Publisher Attempt At Cleanup Failed.‖ The
Hartford Courant. April 22, 1954.
312

Kreig, Andrew. ―Craving for Comics a Funny Business.‖ Hartford Courant, September 22,
1975.
Kunz, William. Culture Conglomerates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and Television
Industries. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
Kurtz, Leslie A. ―The Independent Legal Lives of Fictional Characters.‖ Wisconsin Law Review,
1986, 429.
Lang, Brent. ―Time Warner Unveils $5 Billion Stock Buyback, Earnings Rise Thanks to HBO.‖
Variety, August 6, 2014. http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/time-warner-earnings-rise-
thanks-to-hbo-1201276632/.
———. ―Why Google Likely Won‘t Buy Time Warner.‖ Variety, August 5, 2014.
Laura Siegel Larson v. Warner Bros. Entertainment, (Central District of California 2013).
Leaf, Munro. ―Lollipops or Dynamite? Millions of Comic Books Devoured With Gusto by
Children. With What Effect?‖ The Christian Science Monitor. November 13, 1948, sec.
Weekly Magazine.
Leavis, F.R. ―Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture.‖ In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture:
A Reader, edited by Storey, John, Fourth. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009.
Leff, Leonard J, and Jerold Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship , and
the Production Code. Revised. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.
Lefton, Terry. ―Ups and Downs: 18-49 Men.‖ Brandweek 40, no. 19 (May 10, 1999): S12–14.
―Legislatures Of 12 States Enact Comic Book Curbs.‖ The Hartford Courant (1923-1987). July
11, 1955.
Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Lipsitz, George. ―The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network
Television Programs.‖ Cultural Anthropology 1, no. 4 (November 1986): 355–87.
Lopes, Paul. Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2009.
Lotz, Amanda. ―If It‘s Not TV, What Is It? The Case of US Subscription Television.‖ In Cable
Visions, edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, 85–102.
New York: New York University Press, 2007.
313

Lowery, Shearon, and Melvin L. De Fleur. Milestones in Mass Communication Research: Media
Effects. New York: Longman, 1983.
Lupoff, Dick, and Don Thompson. All in Color for a Dime. First Ed. New York: Ace Books,
1970.
MacDonald, Dwight. ―A Theory Of Mass Culture.‖ In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957.
Mackenzie, Catherine. ―Movies--and Superman.‖ New York Times, October 12, 1941, sec. Parent
and Child.
Mair, George. Inside HBO: The Billion Dollar War Between HBO, Hollywood, and the Home
Video Revolution. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1988.
Maltby, Richard. ―The Production Code and the Hays Office.‖ In Grand Design: Hollywood as a
Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939, edited by Tino Balio, 5:37–72. History of the
American Cinema. New York: Scribner, 1993.
Marsh, Jerry. ―Stealing ‗Man of Steel.‘‖ Cleveland Jewish News, March 17, 2000.
Marvel Worldwide Inc. v. Kirby, 777 F. Supp. 2d 720 (2nd Cir. 2011).
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. ―Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas.‖ In Cultural Theory and
Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by Storey, John, Fourth. Harlow: Pearson Education
Limited, 2009.
Mathews, Jack. ―‗Crypt‘ Disinterred for HBO.‖ Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1989.
McAllister, Matthew P. ―Ownership Concentration in the US Comic Book Industry.‖ In Comics
and Ideology, 15–28, 2001. http://www.personal.psu.edu/mpm15/C%26IChapter2.pdf.
McAllister, Matthew P., and Ian Gordon, eds. Comics and Ideology. New York: Peter Lang,
2001.
McAnelly, Jason. ―Jack Kirby ‗Avengers‘ Credit Controversy Finally Over?.‖ Nerd Bastards,
April 25, 2012. http://nerdbastards.com/2012/04/25/jack-kirby-avengers-credit-
controversy-finally-over/.
McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass. ―It‘s Not TV, It‘s HBO‘s Original Programming: Producing
Quality TV.‖ In It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era, edited by Marc
Leverette, Brian Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, 83–93. New York: Routledge, 2008.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Reprint. William Morrow
Paperbacks, 1994.
314

McGillivray, David. ―Tales from the Crypt.‖ Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1, 1972.
McMurria, John. ―A Taste of Class: Pay TV and the Commodification of Teleivsion in Postwar
America.‖ In Cable Visions, edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony
Freitas, 44–65. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
———. ―Long-Format TV: Globalization and Network Branding in a Multi-Channel Era.‖ In
Quality Popular Television, edited by Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, 65–87. London:
BFI, 2003.
McRobbie, Angela. ―Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique.‖ Screen
Education 39 (Spring 1980).
McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber. ―Girls and Subculture.‖ In Feminism and Youth Culture.
Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991.
Mekas, Jonas. ―A Call for a New Generation of Film-Makers.‖ In Film Culture Reader, edited
by P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Mekas, Jonas. ―Notes on the New American Cinema 1962.‖ In Film Culture Reader, edited by P.
Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Melrose, Kevin. ―Stan Lee Questioned on Lack of Jack Kirby Credit on Avengers Film.‖ Comic
Book Resources, April 25, 2012. http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2012/04/stan-lee-
questioned-on-lack-of-jack-kirby-credit-on-avengers-film/.
Mendryk, Harry. ―Fredric Wertham‘s ‗Seduction of the Innocent.‘‖ Simon and Kirby, August 1,
2008. http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/archives/1428.
―Metromedia, Columbia in Joint Venture.‖ Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1972.
―Michael Estrow.‖ New York Times, April 15, 1956, sec. Obituaries.
Miller, Darla. ―Heroines of the New Comics Have Character.‖ Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1979.
Miller, John Jackson. ―1991 Comic Book Sales Figures.‖ Comichron: The Comics Chronicles.
Accessed June 7, 2014. http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/1991.html.
———. ―Comicron: The Comics Chronicles.‖ Monthly Sales. Accessed November 21, 2013.
www.comichron.
———. ―Title Spotlights.‖ Resarch Resource. Comichron: The Comics Chronicles. Accessed
June 8, 2014. http://www.comichron.com/titlespotlights.html.
Miller, Jonathan, and Bill Steigerwald. ―Why Is TV So Rotten?‖ Los Angeles Times. December
16, 1984.
315

Miller, Stuart. ―Television: Buyers Give TV Numbers a Different Face.‖ Variety, July 8, 1991.
Mills, Nancy. ―Cable Beckons the ATeam Box-Office Giants.‖ Los Angeles Times. May 26,
1991, Home edition, sec. Calendar.
Milne, Tom. ―Vault of Horror.‖ Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1, 1973.
Mittell, Jason. ―The Great Saturday Morning Exile: Scheduling Cartoons on Television‘s
Perphery in the 1960s.‖ In Prime Time Animation, edited by Carol Stabile and Mark
Harrison, 33–53. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Morton, David. Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006.
Muhlen, Norbert. ―Comic Books and Other Horrors.‖ Commentary 8 (January 1, 1949).
Murphy, Mary. ―Tales First Film for MPC.‖ Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1971.
Ndalianis, Angela. ―Why Study Comics.‖ Cinema Journal, In Focus: Comics Studies Fifty Years
After Film Studies, 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 106–47.
Negra, Diane. ―Quality Postfeminism: Sex and the Single Girl on HBO.‖ Genders, no. 39 (2004).
Newcomb, Horace. ―This Is Not Al Dente: The Sopranos and the New Meaning of Television.‖
In Television: The Critical View, edited by Horace Newcomb, 7th ed. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007.
Newman, Michael, and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural
Status. Kindle. Taylor and Francis, 2012.
―Newsstand Giant Shrinks Away.‖ Business Week, May 25, 1957.
Norworth, Edward. ―Slump in Comics: The Industry Needs More than a Publishing Code.‖
Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly. January 17, 1955.
Nussbaum, Emily. ―Hannah Barbaric.‖ The New Yorker, February 4, 2013.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/11/hannah-barbaric.
Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1998.
———. ―William Gaines and the Battle Over EC Comics.‖ Inks: Cartoon and Comic ArtStudies
3, no. 1 (February 1996): 2–15.
O‘Connor, John J. ―A Summer Cycle of Horror Shows on HBO.‖ New York Times. June 15,
1989.
316

———. ―Winning His Heart, Not to Mention His Gallbladder.‖ New York Times. June 26, 1992,
Late edition.
Pagano, Penny. ―Cable TV Official Sees 1987 as Watershed Year.‖ Los Angeles Times. January
20, 1987.
Parsons, Patrick. ―Batman and His Audience: The Dialectic of Culture.‖ In The Many Lives of
the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, edited by Roberta
Pearson and William Uricchio. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Parsons, Patrick, and Robert Frieden. The Cable and Satellite Television Industries. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon, 1998.
Pearson, Roberta, and William Uricchio. ―Notes from the Batcave: An Interview with Dennis
O‘Neil.‖ In The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His
Media. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Periodical Distributors v. American News Co., Union News Co., Pacific News Co., and
Manhattan News Co., 290 F. Supp. 896 (Southern District of New York 1968).
Perren, Alisa. ―Rethinking Distribution for the Future of Media Industry Studies.‖ Cinema
Journal 52, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 165–71.
Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. 2nd Edition. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1964.
Principal and Response Brief of Warner Bros. and DC Comics. Laura Siegel Larson v. Warner
Bros. and DC Comics, 11-55863, 11-56034, (9th Cir. 2012).
―Publisher Market Shares: April 2014.‖ Corporate Website. Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc.
Accessed June 7, 2014.
http://www.diamondcomics.com/Home/1/1/3/597?articleID=148604.
Pustz, Matthew J. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2000.
Raphael, Jordan, and Tom Spurgeon. Stan Lee: And the Rise and Fall of the American Comic
Book. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003.
RB. ―Cable Special Report: Original Cable Programming - HBO.‖ Broadcasting & Cable,
February 19, 1996.
Reilly, Patrick. ―Superheroes Battle It Out in Comic Book Resurgence.‖ Crain’s New York
Business, June 3, 1986.
317

Reinholz, Mary. ―Where the Boys Are.‖ Broadcasting & Cable 130, no. 42 (October 9, 2000):
72–76.
Rhoades, Shirrel. A Complete History of American Comic Books. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
Robbins, Trina. From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Female Comics From Teens to Zines. San
Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.
———. The Great Women Cartoonists. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001.
Rodman, Howard. ―They Shoot Comic Books, Don‘t They?‖ American Film 14, no. 7 (May
1989): 34–39.
Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Harvard University Press, 1995.
Rosenberg, Bernard, and David Manning White, eds. In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, 98–107. New York: The Free Press, 1957.
Rosenberg, Howard. Personal Interview, July 3, 2013.
Ross, Steve. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Rothenberg, Fred. ―Soap Sponsors: Long in the Tooth.‖ Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1982, sec.
Part VI.
Roush, Matt. ―Contrasting HBO Offerings Showcase Beau Bridges.‖ USA Today, June 14, 1991,
sec. Life.
———. ―Crypt Opens with Trademark Creaks and Chills.‖ USA Today, September 30, 1993,
sec. Life.
Rutledge, J. Howard, and Peter Bart. ―Comic Books: Slight Sales Recovery Leaves Volume
Below Pre-Clean-Up Days.‖ Wall Street Journal, October 5, 1955.
Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Saltzman, Barbara. ―Superman: From Phone Booth to Sound Booth.‖ Los Angeles Times,
January 26, 1975.
Santo, Avi. ―Batman Versus The Green Hornet: The Merchandisable TV Text and the Paradox
of Licensing in the Classical Network Era.‖ Cinema Journal 49, no. 2 (2010): 63–85.
———. ―Para-Television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO.‖ In
It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era, edited by Marc Leverette, Brian
Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, 19–45. New York: Routledge, 2008.
318

Sarris, Andrew. ―Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.‖ In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by
Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 6th ed., 561–64. New York: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Sauter, Van Gordon. ―Tales from the Crypt.‖ Variety, June 22, 1992.
Sawyer, Michael. ―Albert Lewis Kanter and the Classics: The Man Behind the Gilberton
Company.‖ Journal of Popular Culture 20, no. 4 (Spring 1987).
Scardino, Albert. ―Problems Beset Time-Warner Talks.‖ New York Times, March 6, 1989.
Schatz, Thomas. ―Film Industry Studies and Hollywood History.‖ In Media Industries: History,
Theory, and Method, edited by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, 45–56. Wiley-Blackwell,
2009.
Schelly, Bill. Founders of Comic Fandom. McFarland, 2010.
Schickel, Richard. ―Cinema: Overkill.‖ Time, May 24, 1982.
Schiffrin, Andre. The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over
Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. Verso, 2001.
Schiller, Herbert I. Culture Inc: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989.
Sconce, Jeffrey. ―Trashing the Academy: Tase, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic
Style.‖ Screen 36, no. 4 (1995): 371–93.
Scott, Suzanne. ―Dawn of the Undead Author: Fanboy Auteurism and Zack Snyder‘s Vision.‖ In
A Companion to Media Authorship, edited by Jonathan Gray and Johnson, Derek, 440–
62. Malden, Massachussets: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Scott, Suzanne. ―Fangirls in Refrigerators: The Politics of (In)visibility in Comic Book Culture.‖
Transformative Works and Cultures 13 (2013). doi:10.3983/twc.v13i0.460.
―Screamieres Highlight ‗Crypt‘ Campaign.‖ The Independent Film Journal (Archive: 1937-
1979), March 30, 1972.
Seduction of the Innocent.Org. ―Dr. Wertham.‖ Lost SOTI. Accessed January 22, 2014.
www.lostsoti.org.
Seiter, Bill, and Ellen Seiter. The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright, Trademark and
Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production. Yale University Press, 2012.
Selby, Shawn. ―Congress, Culture and Capitalism: Congressional Hearings into Cultural
Regulation, 1953-1967.‖ Ph.D. Diss, Ohio University, 2008.
319

Shales, Tom. ―Barely Horrifying Tales.‖ The Washington Post, March 18, 1972.
———. ―Chills and Chuckles: HBO‘s New Season Of ‗Crypt‘ Creeps.‖ The Washington Post,
June 19, 1991.
———. ―EEK! A Low-Creepie!‖ Washington Post, March 17, 1973.
———. ―TV Preview: Hauntingly Familiar HBO‘s New ‗Crypt.‘‖ The Washington Post. June
10, 1989, sec. Style.
Sharrett, Christopher. ―Batman and the Twilight of the Idols: An Interview with Frank Miller.‖
In The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media,
edited by Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Shiver, Jube. ―VCRs Beckon: Pay-TV Fans Turned Off by Repeats.‖ Los Angeles Times. August
29, 1984.
Siano, Brian. ―The Skeptical Eye: Tales From the Crypt.‖ The Humanist, March 1994.
―Sidelights: S.E.C. Is Fighting Cuts in Staff.‖ New York Times, August 8, 1959, sec. Financial
Business.
Siegel and Siegel v. Warner Bros., 524 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Cal. 2008).
Smith, Greg. ―It Ain‘t Easy Studying Comics.‖ Cinema Journal, In Focus: Comics Studies Fifty
Years After Film Studies, 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 106–47.
———. ―Surveying the World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conversation.‖ Cinema
Journal, In Focus: Comics Studies Fifty Years After Film Studies, 50, no. 3 (Spring
2011): 106–47.
―S.M. News Will Handle Newsstand Distribution Of Time‘s Publications:‖ Wall Street Journal.
June 15, 1955.
Somerville, Don Smith. ―A Study of Local Regulations and Group Actions on the Circulation of
Newsstand Publications.‖ Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1956.
Spigel, Lynn. TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press, 2008.
———. Welcome to the Dreamhouse. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Sragow, Michael. ―The Great Migration.‖ Film Comment, May 2012.
Stark, Larry. ―Elegy.‖ Hoohah!, September 1956.
Sterritt, David. ―On Film: Crypt-Ic Tales.‖ The Christian Science Monitor, June 19, 1972, sec.
Arts/Entertainment.
320

Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 4th ed. Harlow: Pearson
Education Limited, 2009.
―Strike Halts Deliveries By American News to New York Area Stands.‖ Wall Street Journal,
August 12, 1955.
―Superman Leaps to the Big Board.‖ New York Times, May 27, 1965.
―Tales From the Crypt‘s Father.‖ Los Angeles Times. June 3, 1990, Orange County edition, sec.
TV Times; Television Desk.
―‗Tales‘ Of Solid Merchandising Showmanship Unearthed In ‗Crypt‘ Campaign.‖ The
Independent Film Journal, March 30, 1972.
Thompson, Anne. ―Directors Break Barriers Between Big Screen, TV.‖ Chicago Tribune. March
2, 1989, sec. Hollywood Report.
Thompson, E.P. ―Preface from The Making of the English Working Class.‖ In Cultural Theory
and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, Fourth. Harlow: Pearson
Education Limited, 2009.
Thompson, John B. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.
2nd ed. Plume, 2012.
Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. Boston: McGraw-Hill,
2003.
Thompson, Robert J. ―Preface.‖ In Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond,
edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, xvii – xx. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.
Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: Wesleyan,
1996.
Tone. ―Tales from the Crypt.‖ Variety, June 17, 1991.
Transcript, Detective Comics v. Bruns Publications. S.D. N.Y.: National Archives, 1939.
http://thecomicsdetective.blogspot.com/2010/07/dc-vs-victor-fox-testimony-of-will.html.
Trombetta, Jim. The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to
Read!. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2010.
Truffaut, Francois. ―A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.‖ In Movies and Methods, edited
by Bill Nichols, 1:224–37. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Unna, Warren. ―American, Union News Companies Under Anti-Trust Inquiry by FBI.‖ The
Washington Post. February 7, 1956, sec. Sports.
321

Veitch, Andrew. ―How Superartist Won the Dough.‖ The Guardian, June 16, 1979.
Vidal, David. ―Superman‘s Creators Get Lifetime Pay.‖ New York Times, December 24, 1975.
Vinzant, Carol. ―Some Couch Potatoes Are More Equal Than Others: The Dollars and Nonsense
of TV Advertising.‖ On The Issues 6, no. 3 (July 31, 1997): 32.
Von Bernewitz, Fred, and Grant Geissman. Tales of Terror! The EC Companion. Seattle:
Fantagraphics Books, 2000.
Warner Communications Incorporated Annual Reports. WCI, 1986 1971. ProQuest Historical
Annual Reports.
Warshow, Robert. ―Paul, the Horror, and Dr. Wertham.‖ Commentary 17 (1954): 596–604.
Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater, and Other Aspects of
Popular Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Weinberger, Stephen. ―From Censors to Critics: Representing ‗the People.‘‖ Film & History 42,
no. 2 (Fall 2012): 5–22.
Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1954.
White, Ted. ―The Spawn of M.C. Gaines.‖ In All in Color for a Dime, edited by Dick Lupoff and
Don Thompson, 16–39. New York: Ace Books, 1970.
Williams, Raymond. ―Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.‖ New Left Review 82
(1973): 3–16.
———. ―Culture Is Ordinary.‖ In Studies in Culture, edited by Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan.
London: Arnold, 1997.
Williams, Scott. ―HBO‘s Horror Anthology Keeps Its Macabre Tone.‖ The Washington Post.
July 21, 1991.
Willman, Chris. ―Another Batch of ‗Tales from the Crypt‘ on HBO.‖ Los Angeles Times. April
21, 1990, sec. TV Reviews.
———. ―Crypt Tales Subtle as a Sledgehammer.‖ Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1989.
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Reprint. Da
Capo Press, 2008.
Wollen, Peter. ―The Auteur Theory.‖ In Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Indiana University
Press, 1972.
Wood, John B. ―Old Comic Book Store Is No Laughing Matter.‖ Boston Globe, October 26,
1975.
322

Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi. ―Introduction.‖ In The Construction of Authorship:
Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, edited by Martha Woodmansee and Peter
Jaszi. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Wymann, Adrian. ―He Was a Psychiatrist, So People Listened.‖ Panelology: Where Comic
Books Make Sense, February 2, 2013. www.panelology.info.
Zintl, Robert. ―Pow! Bam! Sock! Superwomen Muscle On In.‖ Chicago Tribune, February 26,
1978.
Zorbaugh, Harvey, ed. ―The Comics as an Educational Medium.‖ Journal of Educational
Sociology 18, no. 4 (December 1944): 193–256.
———. , ed. Journal of Educational Sociology 23, no. 4 (December 1949): 193–247.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets