Four-color Marvels: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the development of comic-book fandom

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Content FOUR-COLOR MARVELS:
STAN LEE, JACK KIRBY, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
COMIC-BOOK FANDOM
by
Jordan Raphael
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)
August 2007
Copyright 2007 Jordan Raphael
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iii
Introduction: Why We Study Comic Books 1
Chapter 1: A Review of Comics Scholarship 13
Chapter 2: Stan Lee and the Transformation of the American 48
Comic Book
Chapter 3: Consuming Comics: An Examination of Comic-Book 124
Fandom
Chapter 4: “Give Jack His Art Back”: Discourse in the Age of 171
Fandom
Conclusion: Comic Books Today 210
Bibliography 215
iii
ABSTRACT
Over the last four decades, American comic books have evolved from a mass
medium to a niche medium. They have also given rise to one of the most
sophisticated and enduring forms of media fandom. To document and analyze this
evolution, this study employs historiography, political economy, literary analysis,
and sociology. The dominant narrative is the story of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, co-
creators of the Marvel Universe and the key figures in the rise of comic-book
fandom. Chapter One examines the history of comics scholarship, arguing that this
scholarship has become more intelligent and sweeping in its topical purview as a
result of the increasing sophistication of the comic-book form. Intellectually driven
criticism about comic books has also caused comics creators to think more creatively
and to push the boundaries of the medium in new directions. Chapter Two presents a
history of comic books using the career of Stan Lee as a lens. Lee was not only
pivotal in the so-called Marvel Comics revolution of the 1960s but he also played a
crucial role in the development of comic-book fandom by nurturing the interests of
early collectors and aficionados. The articulation of production and consumption in
the early-1960s era of Marvel Comics resulted in new ways of conceptualizing the
comic-book medium on the part of both producers and consumers. Chapter Three
focuses on consumption, tracing the development of comics fandom from a small
network of distant correspondents to a large, organized community with its own
shared set of codes, rituals, and meanings. In particular, the strong links between
iv
comics and creators distinguish comic-book fandom from the fandoms that form
around television programs or other media products. Chapter Four analyzes the links
between production and consumption in comics culture through a case study of the
discourse surrounding the Jack Kirby original art dispute of the 1980s. The Kirby
dispute, which forced a rethinking of both the creation narrative of Marvel Comics
and Stan Lee’s accomplishments, illustrates how a subculture deals with internal
conflict and realigns its perceptions. This study concludes with a snapshot of comic
books today.
1
INTRODUCTION
WHY WE STUDY COMIC BOOKS
There is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty
English paper [comic book] and the threepenny Yank Mag. In the Yank Mags
you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-the-
testicles style of fighting, written in a jargon that has been perfected by
people who brood endlessly on violence. A paper like Fight Stories, for
instance, would have very little appeal except to sadists and masochists.
-- George Orwell (quoted in Muhlen, 1949, p. 81)
Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication, to the innermost ears of the
wishful self. (Marston, 1944, p. 36)
For most of their short history, American comic books were a medium in search of
cultural legitimization, suffering from a lack of serious attention by universities,
museums, and the media. Thierry Groensteen (2000) argues that this dearth of
interest was because: a) comics are a hybrid medium of text and image; b) the
storytelling ambitions of most comic books have remained on the level of sub-
literature; c) comics are connected to caricature, a branch of visual art that is
traditionally thought of as inferior; and d) despite the increasing number of comic
books aimed at adults, the medium proposes “nothing other than a return to
childhood” (p. 35). In the United States, in particular, comic books have struggled
for respectability in the aftermath of a public crusade launched against them in the
1950s, and later a superhero revival that boosted their financial fortunes but also kept
them consigned in the public mind to the bottom rungs of popular culture.
Over the last 25 years, however, comics have evolved considerably both as
an art form and as a business. Although the current circulation of comic books is a
2
small percentage of what it was during their heyday in the 1950s, the medium is
currently experiencing a surge of critical popularity. Book-length works of comic
art, such as Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories and Chris
Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, are reviewed regularly, with
little reflexive fanfare, by major newspapers and magazines. Jimmy Corrigan, which
Brad Prager (2003) describes as having “more in common with the high modernism
of Kafka than with Beetle Bailey or The X-Men” (p. 195), won a 2001 American
Book Award. Underground cartoonists such as Kim Deitch and Robert Crumb are
regular contributors to The New Yorker. Movies based on comic-book characters
continue to proliferate in Hollywood, generating billions of dollars for multinational
conglomerates, including Sony and AOL Time Warner. The 2002 film Spider-Man,
for example, earned more than $400,000,000 in U.S. theaters, and more than
$800,000,000 worldwide (Business Data for Spider-Man), with an equally
significant impact on licensing related to the character.
Academics, too, are giving increased attention to this previously neglected
area of popular culture. During the 1940s and 1950s, the majority of scholarly
material about comic books was disparaging and condescending in tone, written “by
critics who recognized the broad appeal but also viewed them as subversive threats
to highbrow culture and social stability” (Inge, 2001, p. 217). More recently,
however, there have been dozens of comics-related dissertations (e.g., Dean, 2000;
Hatfield, 2000; Lunning, 2000), several academic books about the medium (e.g.,
Brown, 1997; Gordon, 1998; Puszt, 1999), and the foundation of a scholarly journal
3
about comic books, the International Journal of Comic Art. Scholars from a wide
range of disciplines—from cultural studies to sociology to art history to ethnic
studies—are finding in American comic books what had been there all along: the
yearnings, values, and meanings of a culture reflected in an entertainment form that
was once written off as a hollow diversion for young minds.
Even if we consider comic books only as a trivial medium, Reinhold
Reitberger and Wolfgang Fuchs (1971) argue that they are worthy of study by virtue
of their triviality:
Comics, together with the other mass media, are a substitute for genuine
folklore and culture and have developed into a self-perpetuating institution,
an integral part of the American Way of Life. Of all the mass media, comics
mirror the American Collective Subconscious most faithfully, and we know,
without McLuhan having to tell us, that comics in turn manipulate and
exploit the subconscious. (p. 7)
M. Thomas Inge (1990) goes further, writing that many comics have a serious
purpose and storylines that draw on the “patterns, themes and symbols of Western
culture” (p. xiv). Captain Marvel and the Fantastic Four, for example, are the heroic
archetype descendants of Hercules, Beowulf, and Davy Crockett. In addition,
comics are one of the few art forms that was defined and expanded aesthetically by
Americans. They have long served as one of the United States's primary cultural
exports, and were particularly important in transferring values and brand-name
awareness of American entertainment companies to devastated European countries
after World War II. Comic books, Inge contends, are “one of our best known and
internationally influential forms of popular culture”; furthermore, they have
4
“instructed several generations of beginning readers in the themes of Western
literature” (p. 131).
Other scholars point to the comics medium itself—the mix of text and
image—as sufficient reason for its importance as a site of academic inquiry. For
Ronald Schmitt (1992), comic books are hardly an inferior substitute for “high” art,
but instead an important “deconstructive and revolutionary medium” that played a
key role in the 20th-century transformation from a text-based culture to one that
incorporates various forms of audio-visual literacy. The simplicity of the comics
form is what allows it to capture basic human truths and to present them in
undemanding ways. As Fredrik Strömberg (2003) writes:
Comics are a medium of extremes. They often simplify and stereotype their
subjects, partly in an attempt to make our complex world understandable,
partly as a means of efficient short-form communication. In the process, they
also highlight their surrounding societies' trends and attitudes, making them
easily available for observation and study. (p. 23)
Comic books are what Russel Nye (1970) terms a “popular art,” and true to his
conception, they are neither complete nor fully mature. They are, on the other hand,
deserving of serious scholarly attention.
American comics no longer reach what could be called a “mass” audience,
like television or radio. In the mid-1940s, 60 million comic books were sold per
month, primarily to children but also to adults (Muhlen, 1949). According to a study
conducted in Ohio, 43 percent of men and 51 percent of women ages 21 to 30 said
they read comics regularly (cited in Muhlen, 1949). Zorbaugh (1944) reported that
95 percent of boys and 91 percent of girls ages 6 to 11 bought comic books. During
5
World War II, sales of comic books exceeded the combined sales of Life, Reader's
Digest and Saturday Evening Post by a ratio of 10 to 1. The circulation of best-
selling titles, such as Captain Marvel Adventures and Superman, easily topped
1,000,000 copies (Goulart, 1991). Nowadays comic books are purchased primarily
by avid fans and collectors in specialty stores that cater to an older clientele. The top
titles struggle to sell 100,000 copies (Top 300 Comics Actual—April 2004), and the
majority of top titles exist in a range between 2500 and 50,000 copies sold, interest
levels that would have killed the medium outright before more efficient systems of
distribution were established in the mid-1970s. Mila Bongco (2000) estimates that
there are roughly 100,000 regular readers of comic books, with an average age
between 18 and 20 years old. Other estimates range as high as 500,000 readers.
What makes comic books of particular interest is the way they have evolved
from a mass medium to a niche medium around which has developed a distinctive
species of fandom. Comics are both consumables and collectibles, and to the
majority of their fans, they embody the characteristics of both. Comic-book fans are
concerned not only with buying comics and storing them in acid-free bags until some
undefinable future when they may have appreciated in value, but also with reading
comics, sharing knowledge about them, discussing them in comic-book shops and in
fanzines and on Internet bulletin boards and at conventions—in short, consuming
them in every sense of the word. In all these various forms of consumption, comics
fans reveal basic truths about how people relate to popular-culture artifacts in late-
modern society. As Jeffrey Brown (1997) points out, “Comic fandom, and the
6
practice of comic-book collecting in particular, is evidence of the complex and
structured way in which avid participants of popular culture construct a meaningful
sense of self” (p. 13). On the long-running satirical television show The Simpsons,
the embodiment of obsessive, cloistered and pettily mercenary behavior is the Comic
Book Guy; even when his interests spill over into different media like movies and
toys it's the love for the comic book that remains the signifier.
In this dissertation, I focus on the transformation of American comic books
from a mass medium to a niche medium. I am not overly concerned with
definitional issues that address the aesthetics of comics; those have been dealt with
ably by other scholars (e.g., Carrier, 2000; Kannenberg, 2001). For the purpose of
this study, I use Scott McCloud’s (1993) relatively simple definition of comics:
“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey
information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the reader” (p. 9). This includes
traditional pamphlet-sized comic books, which may be printed on cheap newsprint
and range in size from 21 pages to several dozen pages (e.g., Spider-Man, Cerebus),
as well as perfect-bound book-length comics works, or “graphic novels,” found in
bookstores (e.g., Blankets, Safe Area Gorazde). Comic strips, which appear in
newspapers, are not part of this discussion. Although they share a common narrative
vocabulary and grammar with comic books, as Joseph Witek (1989) points out, “they
diverge so fundamentally as to constitute a different literary form” (p. 6). Comic
strips differ from comic books in how they are presented, to whom, and their cultural
acceptance. The strip format is not burdened by the stigma that still attaches to
7
comic books, and it tends to focus on short gags that are easily digestible. Comic
books, as I will show, have become something far more complex. As the reader may
have noticed, I use the terms “comic books” and “comics” interchangeably.
To fully document and analyze the evolution of comic books from a mass
medium to a niche medium, I employ several methodologies: historiography,
political economy, literary analysis, and sociology. The dominant narrative in my
study is the story of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, co-creators of the Marvel Universe,
and, as I will show, the key players in the rise of comic-book fandom. During the
1960s, Lee was the writer and editor of Marvel Comics, and Kirby was his main
artist and collaborator. Together they created the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the
Avengers, and dozens of other characters. Eventually, Kirby left Marvel under
acrimonious circumstances and his departure created a schism in comics fandom and
a historical narrative of the creation of Marvel Comics distinct from the one that the
company has circulated in the mainstream media. This alternative narrative has
become one of the driving discourses of comics fandom, and the Stan Lee-Jack
Kirby debate demonstrates how a subculture is able to simultaneously divide and
cohere around an important issue.
This dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter One examines the history
of comics scholarship, beginning with the effects-driven studies and moralistic works
of the 1940s and 1950s (e.g., Witty, 1941; Muhlen, 1949; Wertham, 1954), leading
up to the recent explosion of academic inquiries into everything from the ideological
underpinnings of the British horror comics campaign (Barker, 1984), to the aesthetic
8
characteristics of Chris Ware’s work (Kannenberg, 2001), to the effects of ownership
concentration on the comics industry (McAllister, 2001). In this literature review, I
will argue that to a great extent comic-book scholarship has become more
sophisticated and sweeping in its topical purview as a result of the increasing
sophistication of the comic-book form. Additionally, the rise of a body of intelligent
criticism about comic books—first in fanzines and magazines such as The Comics
Journal, and later in academic journals—has caused comics creators to think more
creatively, inspiring them to push the form and content of the medium in uncharted
directions.
As Henry Jenkins (2000) argues with respect to video games, an emerging art
form requires the nurturing of a critical corps in order to reach its full potential. He
writes: “We need critics who know games the way Pauline Kael knew movies and
who write about them with an equal degree of wit and wisdom… Thoughtful
criticism can marshal support for innovation and experimentation in the industry,
much as good film criticism helps focus attention on neglected independent films.”
In a sense, then, the evolutionary trajectories of comic-book creation and comic-book
criticism have fed into each other, to the mutual advantage of both.
In Chapter Two, I present a history of comic books filtered through the career
of Stan Lee. An active writer and editor for more than 30 years, and arguably the
most famous person ever to be associated with American comics, Lee’s career began
shortly after the invention of comic books in the 1930s and spanned a period during
which they lost their perch as a mass medium and were reinvented as a niche
9
medium. In his role as the co-creator of Marvel Comics during the 1960s, Lee
supplied the characters and the source material that would sustain comics fandom for
decades to come. He also played a crucial role in the development of fandom by
nurturing the interests of early collectors and aficionados, for example, by
responding to their letters, creating a space for them to correspond, and appearing at
fan gatherings and conventions.
This chapter pays close attention to the production of comic books, and of
Marvel Comics in particular. In approaching Marvel’s production history, it’s
important to understand the personalities and internal dynamics that contributed to
the company’s creative output and marketing. Additionally, I will show how the
articulation of production and consumption in the early-1960s era of Marvel Comics
resulted in a new way of conceptualizing the comic-book medium on the part of both
producers and consumers.
Chapter Three takes a different tack and focuses more heavily on
consumption. Specifically, I detail the beginnings of comics fandom and trace its
development from a small network of distant postal correspondents to a large,
organized community complete with its own shared set of codes, rituals, and
meanings. This chapter draws on previous works about other types of fandom,
including Fine’s (1983) analysis of role-playing gamers, Tulloch’s (1995)
ethnography of Doctor Who fans, and Jenkins’s (1992b) studies of “textual
poachers” of television shows.
10
Comic-book fans make up what Fish (1980) calls “interpretive communities,”
groups that “share interpretive strategies not reading (in the convention sense) but for
writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their attentions” (p. 171).
I argue that comics fandom differs from the fandoms that have formed around
television programs by virtue of the nature of comic-book consumption and the
strong links between comics fans and creators. Many of today’s comic-book artists
and writers started out as fans, and many fans aspire to work in the comics industry.
In this way, production and consumption are closely connected in the comics world.
As the average age of comics readers continues to rise, and comics culture becomes
increasingly insular, this connection will only tighten, possibly to the long-term
detriment of the medium.
Chapter Four continues the discussion of the links between production and
consumption in comics culture through a case study of the discourse surrounding the
Jack Kirby original art dispute of the 1980s. The dispute stemmed from the
unwillingness of Marvel Comics to return original art pages to Kirby unless he
signed an onerous contract renouncing all claim to the characters he had co-created
for the company decades earlier. Since Kirby hadn’t worked for Marvel in several
years, and it was already generally understood that he had worked on those
characters on a work-for-hire basis (i.e., he had no ownership claim), the company’s
demands were galling to him and to many of his fellow professionals and fans. The
Kirby dispute forced a rethinking both of the creation narrative of Marvel Comics
and of Stan Lee’s accomplishments. More generally, it illustrates how a subculture
11
deals with internal conflict and realigns its perceptions. One of the most interesting
outcomes of the Kirby debate is that while Stan Lee may be the most famous comic-
book personality to the world at large, within comics culture Jack Kirby is by far the
more revered figure.
I should point out here, at the beginning, that I arrived at the study of comics
(like most of my fellow comic-book academics) as a fan. To a certain extent, that
may bias me toward certain aesthetic judgments and prevent me from achieving the
necessary critical distance. On the other hand, as Mark Rogers (2001) points out,
comic books are a closed system of meaning. He writes:
They tend to be endlessly self-referential and rely heavily on intertextual
readings. Nearly everyone has the ability to read them, so they are often
approached as uncomplicated texts. When academics read comics, they are
often unaware of the place of events and characters in continuity, so they
often make mistakes and misreadings. To be less judgmental, they make
readings that would not occur to dedicated readers of comics. (p. 103)
Comics fans turned academics make mistakes, too, but I contend that my extensive
background as a comic-book reader has provided me a solid base to understand and
explain the context of the issues I will be addressing in this dissertation.
Finally, I am fortunate to have tackled a similar range of material as a
journalist—in articles for a comics-industry trade magazine and for mainstream
newspapers and magazines, as well as in a biography of Stan Lee. In the course of
researching that biography, I conducted several interviews with Lee and at least a
dozen other comics creators. Drawing on my interviews and original research, I aim
12
to provide a definitive historical account of the production side of American comic
books.
13
CHAPTER ONE
A REVIEW OF COMICS SCHOLARSHIP
How this tremendous use of comic books will be developed remains to be
ticked out on history's teletype, but that it will, seems so certain that when
you pick up one of these ugly little books you may be sure you are looking at
the crude ancestor of something great. (Waugh, 1947/1991, p. 347)
What is the social meaning of these supermen, superwomen, super-lovers,
superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice, super-magicians, super-
safecrackers? How did Nietzsche get into the nursery? (Wertham, 1954, p.
15)
The majority of existing discourse about comic books can divided into two opposing
types: hostile discourses about their negative moral and social effects, such as those
that circulated during the anti-comics crusade of the 1950s, and appreciative fan
discourses produced by and for comics fandom, which has been growing since the
1960s. Recent decades have produced other, more nuanced types of discourses.
Witek (1999) identifies them as having resulted from three phases:
1) a formative comics-appreciation phase in which basic ideas about genre
and authorship in comics were established
2) a second phase growing out of the first in which comics were used as data
points in a reflection-theory analysis of American society
3) a more recent movement which reconceptualizes comics as a narrative
medium in itself (p. 4)
There has been a strong association between discourses in the fan, professional, and
academic communities, with influence moving easily among all three camps. For
example, many current comic-books scholars are also comics fans, equally
comfortable writing for journals and for fan magazines. Cartoonist Scott McCloud’s
book Understanding Comics (1993), an analysis of the medium, has had a
14
tremendous influence on formal studies of comics that followed. Indeed, as Witek
(1999) points out, less than a decade after Understanding Comics' publication,
“McCloud’s specific terms for narrative techniques, and terms such as ‘closure’ (for
the process of filling in gaps between panels) and ‘subject-to-subject transition’ have
begun to appear in comics discourse with no mention of McCloud at all” (p. 15).
McCloud's rapid ascendancy to the forefront of critical discourse on comics can be
credited to his non-confrontational tone, the novelty factor of having made his
arguments in comics form, and his ability to carve out a place for discussion of
formal practices when most sophisticated discussion on comics was centered on
notions of literary value.
It took comic books a long time to achieve the level of respect that made
them worthy of serious inquiry both from the mass media and from academia. In
part, this stemmed from comics’ associations with low culture and early labeling as a
cultural product suitable only for young minds. Comic books followed in the
tradition of dime novels and pulp magazines, and appropriated the language of
newspaper comic strips, which made them easy to dismiss almost from the start.
When comics first appeared in the late 1930s, the economics did not favor works of
lasting artistic value. The vast majority of artists and writers were paid based on
their ability to produce pages and whether or not their work sold. Any aesthetic
judgment of the work by the publishers or other company officials may have helped
in indirect fashion to secure a higher page rate, but the creators still received pay for
pages. The fact that comics attracted a large audience of children didn’t help their
15
cultural standing. Under the wary eye of teachers and parents, the early comics
creators—at least the few who had serious artistic aspirations—were limited in how
far they could push the medium to appeal to an older audience.
When comic-book publishers went too far in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
unleashing an orgy of violent and gruesome imagery in crime and horror titles, there
was a sharp and widespread social outcry, which resulted in comic-book burnings,
protests, Senate subcommittee hearings, and eventually the adoption of the Comics
Code, a set of self-imposed content regulations that the industry pledged to abide by
in order to appease parents and legislators. The code’s legacy, Amy Nyberg (1998)
argues, “has been the comic book industry’s acquiescence to defining the comic
book as a form of entertainment solely for children and the reinforcement of that
perception in the minds of the public” (p. 157-158). Most fans and scholars believe
that the code set back the development of the comic book by decades.
In the 1960s and 1970s, cultural critics began to pay more attention to the
products of popular culture. Nye (1970) staked out this position in his book The
Unembarrased Muse:
Whatever its manner of expression, popular culture and the arts included in
that culture can no longer be treated with contempt or dismissed as unworthy
of study. Instead of the rigid divisions (despite disclaimers, obviously based
on politically and economically drawn lines) among high-, mid-, and low-
class art established by the elitist critics over the past forty years, it has
become more reasonable to view the arts as one long continuum, to consider
all levels of artistic accomplishment as related rather than disparate…
To erase the boundaries, created by snobbery and cultism, that have so long
divided the arts means, in the long run, greater understanding of them. Thus
involved with the vast, unknown terrain of popular culture, critics and public
16
alike may explore and discover patterns of the American experience which
will help to expand our knowledge and control of it. (p. 420)
Yet, even amid this intellectual rush to study “low” culture, it wasn’t until the 1990s
that comic books became the subject of sustained academic inquiry, with dozens of
committed scholars, an annual comic arts conference, and a journal. On its face, the
emergence of a comics-centered academic movement may seem surprising, given
that the comic-book industry has long been in decline. With a few minor exceptions,
comics sales have been shrinking since the 1950s.
A recurring pattern of print distribution developments had a severe if not
outright crippling effect on comic book sales. In the late 1950s, the consolidation of
magazine distributors periodically left companies without access to the national
marketplace until new contracts could be signed. This brought with it a hangover
effect in the 1960s of comics operating under practices that limited sales despite
increased consumer interest—Marvel was distributed by rival DC Comics, which
overtly restricted the number of titles the growing company could release in a month.
In the 1970s, the low price of comics made them particularly susceptible to "rip and
return" practices at the warehouse level. Comics brought the least amount of profit
per publication; that many retailers returned them for credit without attempting to
sell them was widespread industry knowledge. In the 1980s, an alternative method
of direct distribution to a growing network of comics shops based on non-returnable
product stabilized the market, but frequent abuse by publishers maximizing initial,
ironclad orders took their toll and by the mid-1990s that system began to collapse in
17
on itself as well. As recently as 1995, the industry faced a distribution crisis that put
thousands of comic-book stores out of business.
While its business prospects have been dwindling, however, the comic book
has flourished as an art form. In this respect, comics are unique among the mass
media of the industrial and post-industrial ages. Unlike dime novels and pulp
magazines, which died off soon after their cultural heyday, or radio, which
reconfigured its content to serve a nation of automobile commuters, comic books
experienced their most pronounced artistic growth only after they had been written
off as a mass medium—in other words, when no one was paying attention. The
1980s saw a proliferation of works—such as Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark
Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and Art Spiegelman’s
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale—that applied sophisticated cartooning techniques to well-
known character and genres in a way that established comics as a medium with
serious literary ambitions. These comics subverted the expectation many had for
comics as simple content directed at children, and used that subversion as a hook to
attract attention to comics that were stridently working in the opposite direction.
This evolution was, in part, a response to increased critical attention from the fan
press, mainstream media and academia, and in part a strategy that fed this interest.
As comic books became “smarter” and more sophisticated, critics and academics
became increasingly interested in, for example, their readers (e.g., Brown, 2001),
symbolic representations (e.g., Bukatman, 2003), and ideological concerns (e.g.,
Smith, 2001). Indeed, the comic-book medium and comic-book scholarship formed
18
a type of virtuous circle, in which growth in the former triggered growth in the latter,
and vice versa.
Early Comics Critics and Readership Studies
The first comic books appeared on American newsstands in 1934. Like comic strips
two decades earlier, they soon aroused the ire of teachers, librarians and parents.
These groups were concerned about the potential detrimental effects on reading skills
and educational standards of a medium that mixed images with text. In their view,
comic books were an ugly, debased aesthetic form that wallowed in sensationalistic
storytelling which distracted young readers from “good” literature (Lent, 1999).
This perspective received its greatest voice in an editorial by Sterling North, a
popular newspaper writer and playwright, published May 8, 1940, in the Chicago
Daily News. Calling comics “a poisonous mushroom growth,” North dismissed them
as lurid, sensationalist junk. He wrote: “Ten million copies of these sex-horror
serials are sold every month. One million dollars are taken from the pockets of
America’s children in exchange for graphic insanity” (p. 56). According to North,
reading comics kept the average youth from developing healthier tastes in children’s
literature, a literature that would by decade's end include the nature-oriented, Disney-
ready works of author Sterling North.
Comic-book publishers were providing a curriculum of cheap thrills, simply-
constructed sentences, and gaudy pictures that would ruin the vocabularies and stunt
the imaginations of an entire generation. North blamed parents who were unaware
19
of or inattentive to what their children were reading, and teachers who forced dull
fare down their throats, as well as “the completely immoral publishers of the
‘comics’—guilty of a cultural slaughter of the innocents” (p. 56). The antidote to the
comic books’ “hypodermic injection of sex and murder,” he suggested, could be
found in any library or good bookstore.
North’s article, with its basis in educational concerns, framed the cultural
debate about comic books for the next decade. The social anxiety about comics was
similar to what had arisen against dime novels in the 19th century, newspaper comic
strips in the early 20th century, and radio and film in their early years (Lent, 1999).
As with those other media, much of the anxiety was premised on the protection of
children. North’s editorial inspired some parent-teacher organizations to ban comic
books outright in their districts. In at least one district where this prohibition
occurred, children created rental libraries to feed the habit of their fellow comics fans
(Witty, 1941).
A few academics attempted to dispute North’s assertions with scientific data.
Witty (1941) conducted a study of 334 elementary students in Evanston, Chicago, in
which he examined the nature and extent of their interest in comics. He found that
among his respondents, comics reading was the most popular of all reading
activities. The children he studied read a lot of comic books, with only a slight
difference between boys and girls: The mean number of comic books read per month
by female fourth graders was 11.08 compared with 14.97 for males (p. 101). Some
of their favorite titles were Superman, Batman, Famous Funnies and True Comics (p.
20
102). Further, Witty found that far from having pernicious effects, comic books
seemed to satisfy children’s “desire and need for experiences that are adventurous
and exciting” (p. 104). He concluded that comics were no different from film, radio,
or other forms of reading, and that rather than banning them, parents and teachers
needed to deal with them realistically.
In December 1944, the Journal of Educational Sociology published a section
of articles about the comic-book phenomenon. Zorbaugh (1944) introduced the
section with an entreaty for level-headedness: “Somewhere between vituperation and
complacency must be found a road to the understanding and use of this great new
medium of communication and social influence. For the comics are here to stay” (p.
194). Zorbaugh’s study yielded some of the most complete statistics about the
comics readership of that era. He found that among children ages 6 to 11, 95 percent
of boys and 91 percent of girls read comic books. For older children, ages 12-17, the
numbers declined a bit, with 87 percent of boys and 81 percent of girls classified as
comic-book readers. Interestingly, Zorbaugh discovered a contingent of adult
comic-book readers: For ages 18 to 30, 41 percent of men and 28 percent of women,
while for ages 31 and older, 16 percent of men and 12 percent of women. Zorbaugh
also lauded comics for enriching American language, playing an active role in World
War II (for example, by promoting war bonds), and providing catharsis. He
concluded: “We are but beginning to feel their social impact” (p. 203).
Gruenberg (1944) recognized the importance of comics as social artifacts and
argued that they shouldn’t be subjected to arguments about “taste.” Instead,
21
Gruenberg suggested that comic books were potent as a social force because they
penetrate “the thoughts and sentiments of multitudes” (p. 208). Gruenberg
contended further that comics are useful for education purposes, writing: “There is
hardly a subject that does not lend itself to presentation through this medium” (p.
213).
Rejecting the criticism of comics as “junk literature,” Frank (1944) suggested
that comic books could serve a practical function by acting as a preliminary reading
stage through which a child might pass before moving on to other interests. She also
drew a distinction between “good” comic books and “bad” comic books, and advised
parents to steer their children toward the former. Bender (1944) found positive
psychological qualities in comics, contending that they stimulated a child’s fantasy
life and helped him or her solve problems. She wrote: “Great adaptability and
fluidity in dealing with social and cultural problems, continuity through characters
who deal with the individual's essential-psychological involvement with these
problems, an experimental attitude and technique—these are the positive qualities of
the comics” (p. 231).
Marston (1944), a consulting psychologist retained by National Comics (also
known as DC Comics) to help raise the educational standards of the company’s
titles, approached comic books from a literary perspective. He condemned critics
who suggested that comics were anti-literature that appealed to “the most moronic of
minds” (p. 36). Image-based storytelling has been part of human culture for
22
thousands of years, he argued. Marston celebrated superheroes and compared them
to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses of Homeric tradition:
Superman and his innumerable followers satisfy the universal human longing
to be stronger than all opposing obstacles and the equally universal desire to
see good overcome evil, to see wrongs righted, underdogs nip the pants of
their oppressors, and, withal, to experience vicariously the supreme
gratification of deus ex machina who accomplishes these monthly miracles of
right triumphing over not-so-mighty might. (p. 36)
As a psychologist, Marston felt that comics could be blamed only for their “blood-
curdling masculinity,” a problem that he tried to rectify by co-creating a female
character “with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and
beautiful woman” (p. 36)—Wonder Woman.
Lent (1999) counts more than 60 citations about comic books in academic
journals and popular periodicals before 1947. The articles cited above
notwithstanding, the majority of writing about comic books addressed their shoddy
artistic qualities and their harmful effects on educational standards. Eventually,
critics accused comic books of contributing to a host of social ills, most notably
juvenile delinquency.
Legman (1949/1963) decried the death of reading and the atmosphere of
violence that pervaded all of the mass media. In his view, comic-book villains—
witches, ogres, pirates, criminals, spies, saboteurs, mad scientists—were symbolic
stand-ins for authority that children were being taught to reject. Superhero comics
were filled with “objectionable power fantasies, dangerous vigilante justice, anti-
semitism, an undercurrent of homosexuality and sado-masochism” (p. 42). The
23
popularity of violence, he argued, was a substitute for a “censored sexuality,”
designed to siphon off “the aggression felt by children and adults against the social
and economic structure by which and to which they allow themselves to be
distorted” (p. 53). In later writings, he advocated that more sexuality be displayed in
comics, presumably as a way to offset their aggressive nature.
Only a small number of social-scientific studies were carried out on the
effects of comic books that could have been used to dispute the rising tide of
criticism. Heisler (1947) found no significant correlation between comics reading
and scholastic achievement (or lack thereof). Sterner failed to find a relationship
between children’s intelligence and their interest in comic books, radio and movies
(cited in Muhlen, 1949). In a longitudinal study, Lewin concluded that comics did
not lead to anti-social behavior (cited in Lent, 1999).
In one of the first ethnographic studies of comic-book readers, Wolf & Fiske
(1949) interviewed 104 children, ages 7 to 17, in New York and Connnecticut. Their
study was an early example of uses-and-gratifications analysis. For normal children,
they found that comic books functioned as a source of amusement and “healthful
ego-strengthening.” For other kids, presumably the abnormal ones, comics were
helpful, too, providing “an authority and power which settles the more difficult or
ultimate issues” and enabling them “to perform their daily tasks without too much
anxiety” (p. 34). The only children for whom comics could be dangerous, they
concluded, were those who were already maladjusted.
24
Academic researchers tended to be tolerant of comic-book reading, but
despite evidence showing minimal to no effects, the general public continued to hate
comics. The American comic book, having been painted so effectively as a
children’s medium by its critics, offended adult sensibilities. Adults didn’t want
children wasting time with leisurely pursuits that were so clearly devoid of artistic or
literary value. Perhaps because it was too new, the burgeoning field of
communication research (as exemplified by the Wolf & Fiske study) didn’t hold
much sway in the debate. The critics had common sense on their side—e.g., that
depictions of graphic cruelty and horror could have only deleterious effects on
developing minds—and in the postwar years public sentiment continued to turn
against comic books. Fueled by the writings of a child psychiatrist named Fredric
Wertham, that sentiment would reach a crescendo.
Fredric Wertham and the Comic-Book Menace
Dr. Fredric Wertham, a New York-based psychiatrist who railed against the dangers
of comic books during the 1940s and 1950s, is the most misunderstood figure in
comics history. In the narrative that comics culture has constructed to understand its
own roots, Wertham is a Savanarola figure—a malevolent, moralizing crusader who
twisted public opinion and single-handedly tore apart the comic-book industry in the
1950s. As Yronwode states: “In truth, many of us were children when Wertham
destroyed comics, and even the younger of us know the legend well, for it is repeated
among us like some tribal myth” (quoted in Reibman, 1990, p. 18).
25
The truth about Wertham is a lot more complicated. As Nyberg (1998)
points out, traditional accounts of Wertham’s role in the comic-book crusade of the
1950s are incomplete because they ignore the context of his beliefs about violence,
psychiatry, and social reform. Wertham was popular and well regarded in his field,
particularly among social reformers. In his studies, he examined the impact of social
factors on the psyche. He provided testimony on the effects of segregation in the
landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case. He was also a senior
psychiatrist for the Department of Hospitals in New York City from 1932 to 1952,
where he spent a lot of time dealing with poor and abused children. He
complemented his fieldwork with magazine articles and books that campaigned for
social reforms. Politically, he was an outspoken liberal and an opponent of
censorship (Beaty, 2001).
Wertham’s views on culture were consistent with the mass-culture critiques
of the Frankfurt School and other mass-culture theorists of the 1950s. He shared the
school’s cultural elitism and rejected the contention that comic books were a form of
folk literature (Nyberg, 1998). He also approached comics from an early, albeit
overblown, cultural studies perspective, addressing race and gender representations
in comics, and engaging in a type of ethnographic research (Nyberg, 1998). What
galled his critics, particularly social scientists, was that his conclusions about the
pernicious effects of comic books on children were not supported by his research
methods.
26
Wertham began writing about comic books in 1948, at a time when experts
were warning that familial disruption caused by the war would lead to a rise in
juvenile delinquency. As authorities focused more attention on juvenile offenders,
they reinforced the public’s perception that society was in the clutches of a juvenile
crime wave (Nyberg, 1999). Shifting the blame from the family, cultural critics
looked to the mass media for causes. Because comic books were tremendously
popular with children and virtually unregulated, they were extremely vulnerable to
criticism (Nyberg, 1999).
Over the next six years, Wertham wrote and lectured on the dangers of
comics, culminating in 1954 with the publication of his book Seduction of the
Innocent. In the book, Wertham laid out his case for why comic books were a major
contributing factor to the delinquency of juveniles. With intense, dramatic prose, he
recounted dozens of alarmist anecdotes about disturbed children under the four-color
influence: a young comics fan who threatened his teacher with a knife; a 10-year-old
boy (“a voracious comic-book reader”) who drowned a younger boy; a 6-year-old
boy who made himself a flying cape and jumped off a cliff; kids pouring lighter fluid
on other kids and lighting them on fire, à la the Human Torch; a 19-year-old man
who attributed his high-heel fetish to masochistic scenes that he had witnessed in
comic books; a 10-year-old prostitute who read 20 comic books a day. Child drug
addicts and children who became messengers to drug dealers were inveterate comic-
book readers. Wertham argued from a strict “magic-bullet theory” perspective:
“Crime comics do their part in the education of these children, in softening them up
27
for the temptation of taking drugs and letting themselves be drawn into participation
in the illegal drug traffic” (p. 26). As Warshow (1954) later commented: “I suspect
it would be a dull child indeed who could go to Dr. Wertham's clinic and not
discover very quickly that most of his problematical behavior can be explained in
terms of comic books” (p. 601).
Wertham was especially concerned about crime comics, but to him, every
comic book was a crime comic book, even those featuring Superman and Batman.
In Wonder Woman, he saw a “horror type”: “She is physically very powerful,
tortures men, has her own female following, is the cruel, ‘phallic’ woman. While
she is a frightening figure for boys, she is an undesirable ideal for girls, being the
exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be” (p. 34). There were
essentially no comics of which he approved, including adaptations of classic books.
He viewed them as poorly drawn and badly printed texts that emasculated the
classics, leaving out the positive elements of “good literature.” Romance comics, he
asserted, taught young girls how to steal. Comic books were a drug that dragged
young readers into a vicious circle of criminality: “[They] lead the child into
temptation to commit delinquencies and stimulate him sexually. Then this is
followed by fears and worries—as a result of which he reads even more comics to
forget them” (p. 80).
Wertham accused comic books of causing a litany of other anti-social harms.
Comics, he wrote, are anti-educational and morally disarming; they cause nightmares
and other sleep disorders; they have contributed to an increase in reading problems;
28
they traffic in words that are not words at all, such as “Oww,” “Arghh,” “Ooohh”
and “Kapow”; they inspire sado-masochistic masturbatory fantasies and a sadistic
interpretation of sex. He viewed the relationship between Batman and Robin as
particularly dangerous, capable of stimulating homosexual fantasies in children:
It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they
are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket
off, collar open, and his hand on his friend's arm. Like the girls in other
stories, Robin is sometimes held captive by the villains and Batman has to
give in or “Robin gets killed.” Robin is a handsome ephebic boy, usually
shown in his uniform with bare legs. He is buoyant with energy and devoted
to nothing on earth or in interplanetary space as much as to Bruce Wayne. He
often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident. (p.
190)
Given the tenor of the times, Wertham’s fixation on the homoerotic elements of the
superhero genre was politically expedient. The 1950s were characterized by a
general hysteria about homosexuality and sexual perversion (Whitfield, 1996).
Linking them to arguments for social reform of youth crime, a subject of almost
equal florid press treatment, if only through innuendo, amplified Wertham’s voice in
the public commons.
To be sure, comic-book publishers had given Wertham a lot of material to
work with. During that era of comics history (which I explore in greater detail in
Chapter Two), crime and horror comic books were tremendously popular. The
standard-bearer of both these genres was EC Comics, whose publisher William
Gaines had hired some of the field’s most talented artists and writers, including
Harvey Kurtzman, Johnny Craig, Wally Wood and Graham Ingels. EC was not only
recognized as a leading publisher from the perspective of its industry peers and avid
29
comics readers, but it also enjoyed a sales boost by moving into an exploration of
genres other publishers had given short shrift, such as science fiction. Many EC
stories contained elements of social commentary or satire, and even their horror
stories—gory though they were—were pulled off with wit. Competing publishers
scrambled to produce horror and crime comics of their own, but most of them
managed only to imitate the surface qualities of EC’s books. The end result was a
comic-book newsstand awash in blood, gore, and muck. When Wertham went
looking for lurid comic-book panels to reprint in his book—a woman being stabbed
in the eye, a scantily clad moll reclining in lingerie, a close-up shot of a vampire
sinking her teeth into a victim’s neck—he didn’t have much trouble finding them.
Yet, one of the biggest weaknesses in Wertham’s argument was his excessive
attention to extreme examples, and his failure to show that they were typical.
Additionally, as Thrasher (1949) wrote, Wertham’s position was not supported by
any valid research data: “[N]o acceptable evidence has been produced by Wertham
or anyone else for the conclusion that the reading of comic magazines has, or has not
a significant relation to delinquent behavior” (p. 205). Thrasher criticized Wertham
further for failing to acknowledge any themes or “messages” that could be deemed
worthwhile in the comic books under attack, such as those about racism and
tolerance in the EC titles, and for making comic books a “whipping boy” for the
inability of parents and society to provide children with a healthy developmental
experience.
30
Despite his infamy in the comics community, Wertham’s work has been
recognized by academics as an early, if imperfect, example of media effects research
(Nyberg, 1998). To Lowery and DeFleur, Seduction of the Innocent was a
qualitative content analysis backed up by case studies that posited direct and uniform
effects (cited in Nyberg, 1998). Parsons (1991) describes Wertham’s critique as “a
rather crude social learning model” accompanied by “an equally simple Freudian
interpretation of comic content” (p. 82). Schmitt (1992) suggests that Wertham read
the signs correctly: “Comics were a threat to the status quo’s façade of order and
proper conduct. Wertham was reaching into the skeleton-filled closets of a
repressive, paranoid culture when he explored the comic book in depth. It is no
wonder he got scared” (p. 156).
The biggest criticisms leveled against Wertham center on the weakness of his
methodology and his purported motives in targeting the comic-book menace (i.e., to
achieve personal recognition). But, as Nyberg (1998) argues, a dismissal of
Wertham on those grounds is a misinterpretation of his work. Nyberg points out that
Wertham was keenly interested in how mass media shaped society, but not from a
social science perspective: “His argument was much more complex. His project was
to explore the relationship between culture and individuals, and his belief was that
the social and cultural matrix in which individuals existed had been largely ignored
by psychiatry in its efforts to understand individual behavior” (p. 86).
From a communication studies standpoint, it’s interesting to note how
Wertham’s work prefigured some of the key points of violence theory generally and
31
comics scholarship in particular. Although he saw comic books through a dark lens,
he was one of the first scholars to ask about the social meaning of what was
represented in their stories and artwork. Also, like George Gerbner, Wertham felt
that the mass media created a “culture of violence” through its overwhelming
emphasis on violent interactions. While Gerbner studied how television depicted
violence in a way that desensitized heavy viewers, producing the “mean world
syndrome,” Wertham looked at the most pervasive children’s medium of his day and
found a similar effect. Wertham wrote:
The atmosphere of crime comic books is unparalleled in the history of
children’s literature of any time or any nation. It is a distillation of
viciousness. The world of the comic book is the world of the strong, the
ruthless, the bluffer, the shrewd deceiver, the torturer and the thief. All the
emphasis is on exploits where somebody takes advantage of somebody else,
violently, sexually or threateningly. It is no more the world of braves and
squaws, but one of punks and molls. Force and violence in any conceivable
form are romanticized. Constructive and creative forces in children are
channeled by comic books into destructive avenues. Trust, loyalty,
confidence, solidarity, sympathy, charity, compassion are ridiculed. Hostility
and hate set the pace of almost every story. (p. 94)
If Wertham hadn’t been so strident in his assertions and so specious in his reasoning,
he might have achieved greater renown as an early communication scholar. He
returned to the study of violence in a subsequent book, A Sign For Cain, which
presented a sociological inquiry into the ways that media violence legitimizes legal
forms of violence (Reibman, 1990). Muhlen (1949), who disagreed with the force of
Wertham’s conclusions, nevertheless expanded on his Gerbner-esque notions about
the effects of mass-mediated (and comic-book) violence on the public mind. While
acknowledging that there was insufficient clinical evidence to support Wertham’s
32
position, Muhlen believed that the main problem with violence in mass
entertainment was not that it would induce children to commit violence, but rather
that it would cause them to accept violence as normal. From there, it was only a
short leap to the acceptance of the use of brute force and terror in society. Muhlen
concluded: “If that is the case, the comic books may be helping to educate a whole
generation for an authoritarian rather than democratic society” (p. 87).
Wertham’s effectiveness as a social activist was enhanced by his ability to
attract wide public attention to his causes. During his tenure as an activist against
comic books, anti-comics campaigns erupted in at least 20 countries on four
continents (Lent, 1999). Crime comic books were banned in Canada in 1948, and
horror comics were banned in Britain in 1954 (Barker, 1984). The British ban
threatened fines and up to four months imprisonment for selling, printing or
publishing horror comics. As in the United States, the British comics campaign
wasn’t so much about the comic books as it was about a conception of society and
the place of children in it (Barker, 1984).
Parents groups picketed newsstands and pressured grocery store managers to
remove comic-book displays. Retailers and distributors returned unopened bundles
of comic books to publishers. Many comics publishers went bankrupt (Thompson,
1973). In April 1954, a United States Senate subcommittee convened to investigate
the threat of comic books. Directed by Estes Kefauver, the subcommittee called
Wertham and several other anti-comics advocates to testify, as well as EC publisher
William Gaines. Rather than an objective dialogue on the effects of comic books, it
33
soon became clear that the hearing was conceived as a publicity ploy to frighten
comic-book publishers into controlling their own excesses (Nyberg, 1998). In its
report released on March 5, 1955, the subcommittee urged the comic-book industry
to take steps to better regulate itself, even though no causal relationship between
comic books and juvenile delinquency had been established. By then, however, the
comic-book industry had already formed a trade organization, the Comics Magazine
Association of America, and established the Comics Code Authority, a self-
regulating body that banned any subject matter that could be construed as unsuitable
for children. The Comics Code, among other things, prohibited the use of words
such as “Weird,” “Horror” and “Terror” in titles. (I will return to the effects of the
Code in Chapter Two).
The publishers tried to hire Wertham as the CCA’s chairman, but he refused
on the grounds that such a self-patrolling effort didn’t go far enough and would in
the long run prove ineffective. Although it ran contrary to his liberal leanings,
Wertham seemed to be advocating a limited censorship of comic books to keep them
out of the hands of children, whom he felt were deserving of special protection. He
pushed, unsuccessfully, for legislation against crime comic books, the publication of
which he felt was an abuse of freedom of the press. He wrote:
I am convinced that in some way or other the democratic process will assert
itself and crime comic books will go, and with them all they stand for and all
that sustains them. But before they can tackle Superman, Dr. Payn, and all
their myriad incarnations, people will have to learn that it is a distorted idea
to think that democracy means giving good and evil an equal chance at
expression. We must learn that freedom is not something that one can have,
but is something that one must do. (p. 395)
34
Later in life, Wertham was pained by the animosity directed toward him by comics
fans, creators and scholars, and he bristled at being labeled a censor (Reibman,
1990). An odd postcript to his career was a largely positive book that he wrote in
1973 about fanzines. The World of Fanzines was one of the earliest looks at the
culture of amateur publishing, and significant portions of it were given over to
comic-book fanzines. Starting in the early 1960s with publications like Alter-Ego,
comic-book fanzines had assumed a place of significant importance in the industry
and among adult fans. They were the places for discussion of current plotlines, the
only avenues for industry news, a springboard for early historical work and
comparisons, and a multiple platform marketplace for trading and selling older
comics. Both Stan Lee at Marvel and the editorial teams working at DC Comics
spent time between 1960 and 1975 soliciting the attention of the most popular
fanzines, using them as a platform to sell their comics to comics’ most passionate
fans and tastemakers. Over the years, fanzine editors had sent their publications to
Wertham, along with letters debating his views on mass media and violence.
Eventually Wertham began studying them as a social phenomenon, and he found
them to be a largely positive development. He appreciated their freedom and
independence, and the ways that they fostered relationships. Wertham saw in
fanzines a space for unfettered dialogue, free of the “hidden censorship” of the
mainstream media. He concluded that fanzines “are a successful way to
35
communicate not to the mass but to small groups. In a way they are the opposite of
mass communications” (p. 129).
Some critics have claimed that Wertham’s fanzine book was an apologia of
sorts to comics fans for the harm that he had caused their medium decades earlier.
What’s clear from the book is that in contrast to his strident, alarmist tone during the
1950s, Wertham held a more measured opinion of American comic-book art,
sometimes bordering on appreciation. To him, the fact that comic-book readers
communicated among themselves was evidence that individuals could reshape
violent content in a socially useful way (Barker, 1999). The irony he didn’t address
was the degree to which comics fanzines depended on nostalgia for comic books that
Wertham had attacked. Indeed, the earliest fanzines were about EC Comics, perhaps
the worst offenders in the crime and horror genres. The postscript to this postscript
is that Wertham could never bring himself to fully accept even those comic books
that he had once excoriated and brought to heel. In a 1981 BBC interview about the
Superman films, Wertham stuck to his conviction that the Man of Steel represented a
fascist mentality (Barker, 1984).
1960s and 1970s: Beyond Morality and Effects
By the 1960s, only a relatively small amount of comics scholarship had been
conducted, and even that was limited in scope, dealing with issues of morality and
media effects. As television displaced comics as both a source of entertainment and
a source of social concern, public discussion of comic books dwindled (Beaty, 2001).
36
In the decade after Seduction of the Innocent, virtually no scholars attempted to
either prove or disprove Wertham’s assertions, and so they went largely
unchallenged for a long time outside of avid comics readers and professionals
resentful that Wertham's crusade had cost them a job.
As a result of the Comics Code, comic-book publishers were constrained in
the material they could put out. Rather than work around restrictions and hammer out
a new way to reach a non-traditional reader, most publishers returned to areas of
market strength. Many of the creative devices by which comics narratives could be
made more interesting to older readers were prohibited, and comics had suffered
years of persecution and negative publicity based on the underlying assumption that
they were children's entertainment. There was nothing inherent in the comic-book
medium that made them appropriate only for children. But due to their persecution
on such grounds, they were neutered to the point where they could only tell stories
that appealed to childish interests. In a way, the limited scholarly interest in morality
and effects reflected a snobbish belief among academics that comics were a kiddie
medium. Bongco (2000) argues that this traditionalist approach to the study of
comics was regrettable because it steered attention away from other, more profitable
areas of inquiry.
In the early 1960s, Marvel Comics revitalized the comics medium artistically
with a collection of titles, including The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, that
appealed to an older readership of high-school and college-aged teens in addition to a
younger audience. They arrived in the footsteps of an earlier move by DC Comics to
37
re-establish core properties like The Flash with science-fiction underpinnings. The
appearance of these new superhero comics was accompanied by the rise of an
organized fandom based around comic books, and the creation of fanzine
publications. Some of the fanzines were amateurish and poorly written, but others
were of a professional quality. Fanzines attempted to reclaim for comic books—and
comics culture—a sense of identity by cataloging the medium’s history. The
majority of articles were nostalgic in nature, and they ranged from appreciations of
extinct genres and superheroes to bibliographies of favorite titles. But comics
fanzines also established a critical language by which comic-book stories and
artwork could be evaluated, initially from a fan-critic perspective and later by
academics.
In the academy, Nye (1970) and others argued that popular art wasn’t
necessarily bad art and that scholars needed to pay greater attention to the culture
being consumed by the general population. In his overview of American popular
culture, Nye included a historical account of the rise of comic strips and comic
books. Following Nye’s lead, Reitberger & Fuchs (1971) dissected comics as a mass
medium, presenting for the first time in a scholarly text a detailed description of the
comics-making process, the appeals of different genres, and so on. They described
superheroes as modern myths, the gods of our age. Superman, they wrote, was a
symbol of courage and determination during World War II who gave soldiers hope.
Inspired by the then recent maturation of comic-book storytelling (e.g., in Marvel
Comics), they argued that the “message” of comics had deepened: “The innocent
38
naivety of the Golden Age of comics has been lost and the concept of the super-hero
is being questioned; comics are drawing ever closer to reality and the great problems
of our day” (p. 118).
Dorfman and Mattelart (1971/1984) published an ideological indictment of
Disney comics that became a model of Marxist cultural criticism. In their book, they
analyzed the “messages” that Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, and the other Disney
characters taught to children in Latin American countries. The Disney stories, they
argued, replicate the hegemonic relations that capitalist nations like the United States
maintain with the Third World. In this way, Disney comics serve as the vehicle
through which rich nations enact a type of “cultural imperialism” on developing
nations. Dorfman and Mattelart wrote: “In a society where one class controls the
means of economic production, that class also controls the means of intellectual
production; ideas, feelings, institutions, in short—the very meaning of life” (p. 94).
Disney comics weren’t just entertainment, but the ”everyday stuff of social
oppression” (p. 98).
As influential as Dorfman and Mattelart’s analysis was on the field of
cultural studies, it has been criticized by comics scholars for its lack of a material
production history (e.g., Barker, 1989). For example, the majority of the Disney
comics in question were written and drawn anonymously by Carl Barks, a comics
creator who rejected the factory-like atmosphere of the Disney animation studio and
who was regarded as a social critic. Barker (1989) notes that a comprehensive
39
ideological assessment of Disney comics must incorporate an understanding of the
inner workings of the Disney empire, especially its processes of production.
In his essay “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco (1972) introduced
semiotic analysis to the study of comic books. He viewed Superman as a
mythological, superpowered creature who was nevertheless tied to the conditions of
everyday life and death. Superman’s immersion in the “real world” gave him
narrative potency; without it, he would become a god with whom reader
identification was impossible. Eco suggested that Superman exemplified civic
consciousness: “Here is a being who would effect massive change on a global scale,
end hunger, free the oppressed from tyrants, etc. Instead, he sticks around Smallville
and battles bank robbers and mail truck robbers and occasionally weird aliens” (p.
22). Since the writers and artists at DC Comics had to keep Superman trapped in
static plots, his virtue could only be demonstrated in the accomplishment of “partial
acts.” His godlike nature, therefore, is in narrative stasis.
Berger (1974) probed Superman from a psychological standpoint, and
suggested that the Man of Steel represents a diminished and humanized version of
the superego. Superman’s appeal rests in the fact that despite his superhuman
abilities, he is still an everyman. Taking note of the “relevance” trend in comics of
the 1970s—in which comic-book creators, following the Marvel trend of a decade
earlier, sought to address real-world issues, such as drug abuse and racism, in
superhero settings—Berger argued that superheroes were displaying “a sociological
conception of man, closely tied to liberal political views” (p. 171). Berger’s
40
discussion of comic books made up only a few chapters in a book that was mainly
about comic strips. But it paved the way for future studies that were focused
exclusively on comic books.
The Last 25 Years: A Medium Grows Up With Its Critics
Several magazines that had begun as fanzines established themselves in the 1980s as
professional publications for the discussion of comic-book business and art, most
notably The Comics Journal. While its relationship to the comics industry has long
been contentious, the Journal has published some of the most sophisticated articles
about the medium, addressing, for example, the ideological content of particular
storylines or the inherent limitations of the comic-book form. As the sole agent
seeking both investigative news about the various comic book companies and
rigorous examinations of the art form, its biases and formulations came to dominate
a significant portion of the dialogue about comics, even outside of its pages. Several
current comic-book academics have written for the Journal at some point. Many
comic-book fans and scholars who get bored with traditional superhero narratives
find their way to more literate fare through reviews in the magazine’s pages.
The Journal came along at a time when the comics industry was undergoing
a shift in its distribution methods—away from mainstream outlets such as
newsstands, and toward specialty comic-book shops. As a result of that shift, comics
that published material outside of the boundaries of superhero and other action-
adventure genres favored by these companies were ostracized from the bulk of fans.
Underground commix and newsstand horror magazines began to fade, both in terms
41
of sales and in their legitimacy and importance among devoted readers of the form.
This new marketplace developed its own comics for adults. Independent publishers
entered the field, and a plethora of new genres (e.g., autobiography, fantasy, magical
realism) became viable. Comic books became more experimental, as creators,
readers and critics developed a deeper appreciation for the medium’s potential to
express a wide range of ideas and emotions. Comics, in other words, grew up. The
Journal’s critical stance and constant, focused attention through reviews and
interviews played an important role in that growth, helping creators better understand
the vocabulary and methods of the medium, and providing a discursive “commons”
in which literary analysis of comic books could flourish.
As the field of cultural studies expanded in the same period, and other
disciplines lost their aversion to the products of “low culture,” many academics took
another look at comics. Barker (1984) wrote a history of the British comics
campaign, and used comics as a case study to investigate the ways that theories of
ideology address mass-media persuasion (1989). Inge (1990) studied the culture of
comics, and found that they were rich with purpose and meaning. Although they
were a few decades too late to score points against Dr. Fredric Wertham, Tan and
Scruggs (1980) used Bandura’s social learning theory to test if exposure to comic-
book violence caused aggression in children. The findings of their study did not
show any such link, although they cautioned that their single-exposure experiment
was unable to detect any possible long-term or cumulative effects.
42
In his book, Comic Books and America, 1945-1954, Savage Jr. (1990)
utilized a historical method to show how comics of the postwar decade, in which
superheroes went out of vogue, fashioned a worldview for American children and
adults during a time of intense social stress. Americans of that era were dealing with
Communists, the Korean War, a spiraling divorce rate, juvenile delinquency and
homosexuality, and so had little use for Superman. Savage Jr. writes: “[I]n the wake
of the atomic bomb, we had all become supermen.” As opposed to the comics of
World War II, the storylines of the early 1950s portrayed the Korean War with
ambiguity. American soldiers died, and not always with honor. Even the rampant
goriness and titillation of the crime and horror comics that invoked Fredric
Wertham’s anger was evidence of a shifting society “for whom mere escapism was
no longer a satisfying indulgence” (p. 43).
Wright (2001) expands on Savage Jr.’s area of consideration with a broad
historical analysis of comic-book history. To Wright, comic books—which have
been associated mainly with “junk” culture—exemplify the disposable nature of
modern consumer society, although he is careful to point out that their status as
“junk” does not make them any less interesting. He writes: “On the contrary, their
perennial lowbrow status has allowed them to develop and thrive outside of the
critical, aesthetic, and commercial criteria expected of more ‘mature’ media” (p.
xiv). In comic books, Wright finds a reflected view of life “as young people have
paid to see it,” and he likens their cultural impact to that of rock-and-roll music.
43
Some historical approaches have introduced economic aspects to the study of
comic books. Gordon (1998), for example, links comics to the process of
modernization in the early 20th century to investigate how the commodification of
comic art closely mirrored the commodification of American society. McAllister
(2001) uses a political economy method to examine the effects of increased
ownership concentration on the comics industry’s economic stability and ideological
diversity. He argues that the dominance of Marvel Comics and DC Comics, and
their emphasis on superheroes, threatens the future of comics by turning away new
readers and obscuring other genres.
Witek’s (1989) literary analysis of reality-based comic books, such as Art
Spiegelman’s Maus, was a milestone of sorts, because it wasted little effort trying to
justify the objects of its attention. Instead, it set out from the beginning that comic
books “as narratives and as cultural productions” deserve seriously critical attention.
Witek writes: “Though comics have been unsophisticated in their subject matter, in
form they display a highly developed narrative grammar and vocabulary based on an
inextricable combination of verbal and visual elements” (p. 3).
Other scholars have carried this point forward and examined the interplay of
text and image in the comic-book form. Abbott (1986) recognized early on that
comic art possessed the potential for serious literary and artistic expression, and
attempted to formulate a conceptual framework through which the medium could be
evaluated. Schmitt (1992) suggests that the comic book “is a form of self-influcted
‘double-writing,’ collapsing traditional strategies for reading word and picture texts”
44
(p. 157). He continues: “The relationship between the words and pictures in a comic
book is akin to Derrida’s concept of ‘difference,’ the presence of one necessitates the
absence of the other, creating a continual unresolvable play of difference between the
two textual forms” (p. 157).
In his semiotic analysis of Chris Ware’s oeuvre, Kannenberg (2001) argues
that Ware’s comics work on several levels: as text, in guiding the reader’s gaze;
meta-narratively, in self-reflexive comments on the stories; and extra-narratively,
through the use of text to fashion a distinctive visual identity. Carrier (2000), an
analytic philosopher, posits a space for comics between paintings and motion
pictures. He argues further that comics problematize traditional aesthetic readings
because without the presence of a reader to connect them, they are simply a
collection of disconnected images.
Many cultural studies scholars (e.g., Barker, 1989; Prager, 2003; Bukatman,
2003) have addressed comics-related topics, concentrating to a large extent on
themes of ideology and recuperation (i.e., to gain a more complex idea of the nature
of comics) (Rogers, 2001). Most of these studies emphasize the need to understand
the production processes and the historical context within which comics have been
published. Fischer (2003) asks if Jack Kirby’s superhero comic books function as
fascist propaganda. Through a close reading of Kirby’s work, particularly post-
Marvel, he defends the artist from those charges. Smith (2001) analyzes the various
representations of Wonder Woman over the past five decades to show how her
struggle to maintain an ethnic identity while trying to adapt to a new culture has been
45
portrayed by different writers and artists. Taking on female characters of the
postmodern age, Titus (2000) explores the vagina dentata motif in so-called “Bad
Girl” comics, in particular the ways such comic books exploit male libidos and
resentments about sex and contemporary gender roles.
Creator-oriented analyses date back to at least the 1970s, when Sanders
(1975) explored the phenomenon surrounding the underground comix movement of
the 1960s, which included artists such as Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman.
Tracing the underground influence back to the Tijuana bibles of the 1920s—eight-
page, pocket-sized pornographic comics—Sanders argues that underground comix
functioned as a cohesive force for artists who felt alienated from the dominant
culture. In this respect, the underground comix scene predicted the social and
cultural pattern of comics fandom. Sanders wrote: “[T]he comix sustain the
alienated group and play an important role in the affiliation process by which new
members are socialized and become a part of the counter-cultural community” (p.
849).
Reader-response studies have expanded their purview beyond demographic
surveys, and many of them have yielded interesting insights about comics fandom.
Maton (2000) combed through the letters pages of Marvel Comics’ The ‘Nam to
understand how readers connect and appropriate the text for their own use. Ito
(2003) conducted a content analysis of Japanese ladies’ manga—or redikomi—and
demonstrated how they operate as agents of socialization.
46
Examining the system of meanings in comics culture, Brown (1997) argues
that fans—generally individuals who are disempowered in traditional culture—use
various discursive methods (e.g., collecting, reading fanzines) to amass cultural
capital and enhance their standing within the comics community. Brown also
suggests that the discriminatory skills that comics fans employ has created a specific
canon of comic-book works—for example, Detective Comics #27 (the first
appearance of Batman) or The Amazing Spider-Man #298 (the first Spider-Man
artwork by artist Todd McFarlane). This process of canonization contradicts
traditional notions that canons can only belong to “elite” art, and alters the comic-
book production process, for example, by granting popular writers and artists greater
bargaining power.
Pustz (1999) delves deeper into the workings of comics fandom and
demonstrates how it functions as a separate culture that comprises a number of
distinct cultures within it. He draws a distinction between readers of mainstream
comic books (e.g., Spider-Man, The X-Men) and alternative comic books (e.g.,
Eightball, Acme Novelty Library), and outlines their different goals, preferences and
practices. At the same, Pustz argues that all comics fans, regardless of their buying
habits, form a broader culture unified by their devotion to the medium and expertise
in comics literacy. Pustz writes: “Strong boundaries separate mainstream and
alternative comic book fans, but these barriers are not as strong as the border
between readers and nonreaders, between fans and those in the ordinary world” (p.
22).
47
In the following chapters, I draw upon the methods and observations of
several of the works described above. Like Witek, I begin with the notion that comic
books are worthy of study both as social artifacts and as works of art. I am interested
in the processes of production and consumption, and in connecting these with issues
of content. Like Wright, Gordon, Brown and Pustz, I maintain that the historical
method holds the key to illuminating both the production and consumption ends of
comics culture. Unlike them, however, I focus mainly on the works of two
creators—Stan Lee, the writer and editor of Marvel Comics, and Jack Kirby, Lee’s
collaborator and one of the formal pioneers of the comic art form.
My approach deepens the historical works that have come before, and
demonstrates how a creator-oriented analysis can round out the contextual
understanding of comic-book production. Since the history of comic-book
production has been inextricably linked with the business and public perception of
comics, I will also touch on the economic and social factors that influenced the
evolution of comics. At the same time, since production does not occur in a vacuum,
I will make use of literary and ideological methods to analyze how the comics of Lee
and Kirby operated on readers and hastened the formation of an organized fan
community.
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CHAPTER TWO
STAN LEE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE
AMERICAN COMIC BOOK
Shucks. I just wanted to be entertaining.
-- Stan Lee (Wolfman, 1978, p. 42)
Stan Lee is one of the most important figures in 20th-century American popular
culture. To the general public, Lee is the face of Marvel Comics, the creator of
Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and hundreds of other colorful heroes.
To comic book fans and scholars, he is a notable player in the history of comics
whose artistic legacy is the subject of a furious and long-running debate. Lee is
renowned variously as a dazzling writer, a skilled editor, a prodigious talent, a
relentless self-promoter, a credit hog, and a huckster—a man equal parts P.T.
Barnum and Walt Disney.
The truth about Stan Lee is that he didn't create Spider-Man or the Fantastic
Four, or any of Marvel’s most famous characters. He co-created them. The
distinction matters, because in that distinction lies the essence of his considerable
accomplishments. Contrary to his media-created image, Lee's greatest achievement
wasn't in superhero invention but in his clever reworking of an outdated genre.
Working with a team of virtuoso illustrators, many of them idiosyncratic square pegs
in the round holes of a staid children’s entertainment medium, Lee unleashed a
legion of characters that rank among the most enduring fantasy icons of our time.
Three generations of young people read Marvel comics under bedroom cover, traded
49
them with friends, and stored them in plastic. Now four decades removed from its
humble beginnings, Marvel is hitting its stride as a wellspring for motion pictures,
TV shows, and major licensing efforts. Big-budget movies from Lee's co-creations
crowd the cineplexes; 2003 alone saw the release of X-Men 2, The Hulk, and
Daredevil. The sequel to the box-office smash Spider-Man was released in 2004.
Stan Lee is one of the central figures in the history of the American comic
book. Lee was there near the beginning, when comics exploded onto newsstands in a
burst of garish costumes and crudely drawn supermen and women. He worked with
them in the postwar boom years when they reached their zenith as a mass medium.
In the 1960s, Lee edited and co-created the Marvel Universe, which revitalized the
comics medium after it had grown stale. As the outspoken impresario of Marvel,
Lee also played a key role in the transformation of comic books from a mass medium
to a specialized medium. By catering to a cluster of what Fish (1980) calls
“interpretive communities,” Lee attracted a fan following for Marvel Comics that
altered how comic books were produced and consumed from then on.
In their cultural analysis of the Sony Walkman, Du Gay et al. (1997) sketch
out a model for analyzing the relationships involved in cultural processes. The
model is based on the articulation of five distinct processes: representation, identity,
production, consumption, and regulation. To understand the Walkman’s place in
Western culture, the authors do not privilege any single phenomenon, but instead
look at how these disparate elements work together to form a temporary unity. Over
the course of the next three chapters, I will address all of these processes with respect
50
to comic books: their production history, how they have been and are consumed, the
regulatory mechanisms that shaped production and consumption, and how they have
been represented and perceived by the general public.
In this chapter, I am concerned mainly with the processes of production, and
to this end, I analyze the structure, strategies and culture of comics since their
inception in the 1930s. What follows is the story of comic books in America, and of
Stan Lee’s part in that story. In approaching the production of Stan Lee’s Marvel
Comics, I will explore how it came to be constituted as an idea, and produced and
marketed in a specific way. Many previous accounts of Marvel Comics (including
the company’s corporate history) privilege the story of Stan Lee. But most of these
portrayals of Marvel’s success and influence on comics and popular culture have
been simplistic and fragmentary. My goal is to place Stan Lee’s activities and
accomplishments in a wider context of comic-book production processes to present a
more nuanced and more complete picture of the role he played in the evolution of
both the comics medium and comics culture.
The Birth of the American Comic Book
Like most lively arts, the American comic book began as a hybrid of previous
cultural forms. The early comic books, with their simple illustrated storylines and
garish, titillating cover art, borrowed heavily from the form, content, and economics
of at least two older commercialized creative endeavors: newspaper comic strips and
pulp magazines (Daniels, 1993).
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Cartoon art dates back to at least 3000 BC, when the Ancient Egyptians made
drawings of animals and circulated them on limestone flakes and papyrus (Kinnaird,
1959/1963). These drawings, like many of the primary examples throughout history
of comics and proto-comics, were uniformly simplified in a way that distinguishes
cartoon drawing from caricature or representational art. Over the centuries,
representations in the cartoon-art style reappeared in, for example, Roman tabulae,
18th-century woodcut illustrations, and 19th-century editorial cartoons (Kinnaird,
1959/1963). The American comic strip is generally recognized to have started with
the 1895 debut of Richard F. Outcault's "The Yellow Kid" in Joseph Pulitzer's New
York World. Outcault's character—a bald, obnoxious slum kid whose immense
popularity earned him a slot in the paper's Sunday color supplement—was the
original cartoon-licensing franchise (Gordon, 1998). Eighty years before Garfield
became a billion-dollar merchandising behemoth, the Kid appeared in plays and his
image adorned key chains and collectible cards. The Yellow Kid's success inspired
dozens of strips, among them Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids, James
Swinnerton’s Little Jimmy, and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. And
later, Boob McNutt, Barney Google, Toonerville Folks—oddly titled features
rendered in stark black and white on weekdays and in glorious full color in the
weekend edition (Horn, 1996). Comics began during the last great years of the
golden age of newspaper illustration, with color technology in place to support the
new art form. Many of the early cartoonists such as George Herriman (Krazy Kat)
held multiple staff positions providing visuals to the rest of the newspaper,
52
attempting dozens of features before finding one that hit with audiences and editors.
By the First World War, cartoonists, editorial cartoonists, and sports cartoonists
began to move into their separate vocational realms, with the greatest artistic growth
coming in the less-tethered comics section.
Fresh genres soon invaded the comics page, with jungle stories butting up
against topical yarns and tales of science fiction. In the pre-television, pre-radio age,
newspaper strips were a cheap, accessible form of visual entertainment that inspired
large followings. For example, Wash Tubbs, an adventure strip by Roy Crane about
a pair of itinerant swashbucklers, hooked readers with a fast-moving plot that was
worthy of the best serial movies. By the early 1940s Milton Caniff's Terry and the
Pirates held readers in thrall as effectively as the more popular radio soap operas.
The most popular cartoonists became minor celebrities. Some, like George
Herriman of Krazy Kat, flirted with modern art movements, such as Dadaism and
Surrealism. The critic Gilbert Seldes, for example, called Krazy Kat “the most
amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today”
(1924/1963, p. 131). A system of syndication whereby multiple newspapers could
carry the same strip made the comic strip's second generation rich; they no longer
held staff positions. In 1922 Sidney Smith of The Gumps signed a contract for 10
years at $100,000 per year, a staggering sum back then.
Art Spiegelman once described comics as “the bastard offspring of art and
commerce” (1994, p. 106). For the early newspaper strips, this characterization was
apt. The Yellow Kid and his contemporaries were conceived mainly as marketing
53
devices during the fierce newspaper circulation wars of the late 19th century.
Gordon (1998) points out that as comic strips grew in popularity, comic art became a
widely consumed commodity and also a medium through which other commodities
could be marketed and consumed. The strip Buster Brown, for example, started in
1902 and almost immediately its main character was licensed to sell shoes, dolls,
clothing, and thousands of other products. The Buster Brown image came to
symbolize particular qualities that advertisers wanted associated with their products.
In this way, “Buster Brown was a protean type of the form advertising assumed in
twentieth-century America’s mass culture of consumption. He transcended the
comic art form to become a cultural icon” (Gordon, 1998, p. 38). Gordon argues
further:
Comic strips not only transformed comic art, by stretching its commodity value
but also transformed the culture. The simple, repeatable, easily recognizable form
of comic strips made a Modernist aesthetic generally available. By the mid-1910s
Americans across the country could open their newspapers and see the same
strips. They could also buy an array of products branded with the image of one of
the most popular comic strip characters. Ill at ease and hesitant, Americans began
to recognize these comic strips and their characters as part of their daily lives.
Around such recognitions America became a national culture of consumption. (p.
58)
When comic books joined the scene, they would enjoy a similar, and perhaps even
more expanded, relationship to consumer culture. They became on the one hand
distinct consumer commodities in their own right, and on the other the source
material for an expanded set of inter-media cultural products, including television
shows, movies, and video games.
54
As newspaper comic strips infiltrated American culture, pulp magazines
made their own inroads with racy tales of crime, fantasy, and romance. In the years
after World War I, hundreds of titles poured forth onto newsstands—cheap
throwaway magazines chronicling the rapid-paced adventures of Tarzan of the Apes,
The Shadow, The Spider, Buck Rogers, and numerous other prototypes of comic-
book superheroes. From the pulps, comic books inherited a sensational storytelling
style and, perhaps more important, a ready-made distribution network (Daniels,
1993).
Publishers had been issuing reprint collections of newspaper cartoons as far
back as 1897, but the sales potential for most of them was limited by a lack of color
and original material, and a high cover price. There was, however, a definite and
underexploited market for strip reprints. After all, the comics supplement was the
most popular section of many metropolitan newspapers. What publishers lacked was
a cost-effective package they could sell to the masses. Finally, in 1933, Harry
Wildenberg and Max C. Gaines, two salesmen with the Eastern Color Printing
Company in Waterbury, Connecticut, devised a new format: a booklet measuring 8
inches by 11 inches, roughly the size of a folded-over tabloid page (Waugh,
1947/1991). Their first effort was Funnies on Parade, a 32-page magazine
reprinting Sunday strips in color, which they sold to Procter & Gamble for use as a
giveaway. When that proved successful, Gaines sold the Wheatena Corporation on
the idea, and on October 1, 1933, the Chicago Sunday Tribune published the
following advertisement for Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics:
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Free! Famous Funnies! A book of popular comics. Boys and Girls—here’s
a book you’ll all like. 32 pages including Mutt and Jeff, Hairbreadth Harry,
Joe Palooka, Reg’lar Fellers and a lot more. It’s full of puzzles, jokes, magic
tricks—all sorts of things. You can get a copy of this book free. Just fill out
the coupon and mail it to us with the top cut from a package of Wheatena. If
you haven’t a Wheatena package in your home, ask your mother to get you
one from her grocer the first thing tomorrow morning! (quoted in Gifford,
1984, p. 42)
Gaines’s packaging of comic strips as advertising premiums was in line with the
general use of cartoon art up to that point (i.e., to sell consumer goods). But after
several other well-received ventures for sponsors such as Kinney Shoe Stores, Milk-
O-Malt, and Canada Dry, Gaines was struck by an idea. Since people seemed to
enjoy the comic-strip collections, maybe they would be willing to pay for them as
discrete products. A trial issue of a title called Famous Funnies appeared in early
1934 with a 35,000-copy print run and a cover price of 10 cents (Gifford, 1984). The
magazines sold out. In May, a sequel, Famous Funnies #1, hit newsstands and the
monthly comic book was born. Although it lost money initially, by issue #12,
Famous Funnies was earning $30,000 a month (Goulart, 1991).
Offering an assortment of previously published newspaper strips, such as Joe
Palooka and Mutt & Jeff, Famous Funnies didn’t look much like the comic book of
today. The funnybook concept needed refinement. That task fell to Major Malcolm
Wheeler-Nicholson, a retired U.S. cavalry officer and former pulp writer. In 1935,
Wheeler-Nicholson published New Fun Comics, the first title to feature original
stories written and drawn expressly for the comic-book format (Benton, 1989). The
magazine—an anthology of adventure, western, and humor tales starring knock-off
56
characters like “Buckskin Jim” and “Don Drake of the Planet Saro”—didn’t break
any sales records, but it set a precedent. Comic book publishers no longer had to pay
the exorbitant reprint fees demanded by newspaper strip syndicates. In that
Depression-ravaged time, there were plenty of young and unemployed artists who
would leap at the opportunity to create brand-new stories for a meager page rate.
Many of those artists found work in the comic art shop set up in 1936 by
Harry “A” Chesler, a former ad man from Chicago. Chesler figured out early that
comic book publishers would need a steady stream of cheap material. To fill that
need, he rented a small office on lower Fifth Avenue and hired an assembly line of
writers and artists. The Chesler Shop became a comic book factory, with the artists
seated at desks arranged in rows, and the writers in a room down the hall (Harvey,
1996). In the beginning, they packaged entire magazines, covers included, for
Wheeler-Nicholson and a competitor, and later for other publishers, such as Centaur,
Fawcett and MLJ. Many of the pioneers from that golden age of comics passed
through Chesler’s doors, including Sandman artist Creig Flessel and 1940s
trendsetter Charles Biro.
Gradually, and despite the adverse working conditions, the creators of
original-material comic books managed to distinguish their products from that of
their reprint rivals (Goulart, 1991). As an artistic medium, the comic book began to
diverge from its comic strip predecessor: comic books featured complete stories,
fewer panels per page, and even narratives that ran across multiple pages. Recurring
characters also became useful devices for building reader loyalty (Goulart, 1991). It
57
would take a few years before comics publishers extended that concept to a single-
character title.
Outside the frantic action of the comic-art shop, two high school friends from
Cleveland named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were trying, unsuccessfully, to break
into the newspaper-strip business. They found an eager customer in Wheeler-
Nicholson. He published Dr. Occult, one of their strips about a mystic detective, in
New Fun Comics #6 (Harvey, 1996). With Siegel writing and Shuster drawing, they
produced several more comic-book stories, but nothing with any staying power.
Wheeler-Nicholson eventually took on two business partners, Harry Donenfeld and
Jack Liebowitz, and together they formed Detective Comics, Inc., the company that
came to be known as DC Comics. When the Major’s finances fell apart in 1937, his
partners bought him out (Harvey, 1996).
Soon after, DC editor Vincent Sullivan was casting about for a feature to
showcase in a forthcoming title called Action Comics. Max Gaines, who was then
working at the press that printed the company’s comics, suggested a strip that Siegel
and Shuster were shopping around about a hero who had super-strength, a near-
invulnerable body, and the ability to fly. Sullivan saw that the character, though
somewhat outlandish, had potential. He bought the feature, and Action Comics #1,
cover-dated June 1938, arrived on stands with a cover that sported a figure in a red-
and-blue costume hoisting a car high above his head (Harvey, 1996). Superman had
landed on Earth. And in his wake, the budding comic-book industry was changed
forever.
58
With Superman leading the way, Action’s circulation climbed to 500,000
copies per month. In 1939, another Superman title appeared; it was selling
1,250,000 monthly copies within a year (Harvey, 1996). Dozens of entrepreneurs
piled into the industry, many from the flagging pulp-magazine business. More than a
few were shady entrepreneurs who had earned significant sums of money during
Prohibition and were now looking for a legitimate business into which they could
invest their ill-gotten gains (White, 1970). In 1939, there were 60 different comic
book titles; by 1941, that number had increased to 168 (Waugh, 1947/1991). In
1938, combined monthly sales of comic books were roughly 2,500,000 copies
(Goulart, 1991). By 1942, sales exceeded 12,000,000 copies per month (Nye, 1970).
For their part in creating the character who sparked an industry stampede,
Siegel and Shuster received $130 (Goulart, 1991). When publishers Donenfeld and
Liebowitz paid out the standard $10 page rate for the first 13-page Superman story,
they made the creators sign over their rights to the Man of Steel, establishing a
pattern of abusive work-for-hire practices that persisted for decades and that became
a rallying point for comics fandom during the 1970s and 1980s. Although Siegel and
Shuster enjoyed a few lucrative years of continuing work on Superman, they
eventually left the company amid a lawsuit—which they settled for a significant
amount that still failed to touch the tiniest percentage of monies made by their
creation—over ownership of their work. While the owners of DC Comics raked in
millions of dollars from their flagship superhero, Siegel and Shuster faded out of the
limelight. Having turned on their former publisher, they found it increasingly hard to
59
land assignments. Shuster spent much of his remaining life in near-poverty. Siegel
became an office worker at rival Marvel for a period. Due to the agitation of
prominent, sympathetic, and financially secure professionals like Jerry Robinson and
Neal Adams, the plight of Superman’s creators drew media attention in the mid-
1970s, when Superman: The Movie was in pre-production. In the face of that
attention and widespread fan condemnation, DC Comics, then owned by Warner
Communications, granted Siegel and Shuster an annual pension and a restoration of
their creative credit (Duin & Richardson, 1998).
The character of Superman is worth reflecting on, because he had such a
profound impact on nearly every aspect of American comics thereafter. Like most
creators, Siegel and Shuster were influenced by previous narratives, most notably
Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator, and pulp heroes Zorro, the Shadow, and Doc
Savage (Goulart, 1991). But their fusion of these characters, added to the
burgeoning appeal of the comic-book medium, resulted in an escapist fantasy that
resonated much more strongly than these previous narratives with an American
populace struggling through the Depression. Many theories have been offered for
Superman’s enduring appeal. Engle (1987) views him as the great American hero,
mythic in stature, whose status as an immigrant connects him to readers. Engle
writes: “The myth of Superman asserts with total confidence and a childlike
innocence the value of the immigrant in American culture” (p. 81). In the simple
dichotomy of Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent, Berger (1974) sees a
representation of the superego who is diminished and humanized—“an everyman
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with superhuman capacities” (p. 151). Delving deeper into the Man of Steel’s
psyche, Bukatman (2003) suggests that Superman does not represent the Nietzschean
ideal of the übermensch, as some have argued, but rather “the overman domesticated,
muzzled, and neutered” (p. 218).
Much of Superman’s articulation as a cultural symbol has taken place outside
of comic books. He was the first superhero to conquer comics, and also the first
superhero to cross over into other media. The Superman newspaper strip began in
January 1939 (Waugh, 1947/1991). The character was spun off into radio series,
movie serials, dolls, toy ray guns, wristwatches, trading cards, and hundreds of other
products (Gordon, 1998). The 1940 Superman radio program introduced the phrases
“Up, up and away!” and “This is a job for… Superman!” (Goulart, 1991). The early
Superman storylines were not adverse to product placement. At one point, in early
1941, Action Comics was used to advertise a Daisy toy gun in a story wherein
Superman invents a krypto-ray gun that displays pictures on a wall (Gordon, 1998).
Within the comic-book industry, Superman’s most lasting contribution was the
formulation of a superhero type that was endlessly copied and that continues to
dominate the industry to this day.
After Superman came Batman, a different breed of superhero. Springing to
life in Detective Comics #27, Batman lacked alien powers and had to rely on his
shrewdness, unlimited wealth, and Olympic-level physical training to trounce the
criminal element. Batman's acknowledged creator Bob Kane was less talented
artistically than Joe Shuster but had an eye for talent. He brought in such young,
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talented pulp writers and cartoonists as Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson to work on
the new title. Kane's team created a comic book doppelganger to the extraordinarily
popular strip Dick Tracy: stylish art, basic colors, and a man of means fighting an
army of grotesques. In Batman's wake came a litany of superhero copycats: The
Flame, Hawkman, Ultra Man, Cat Man, Blue Beetle, Plastic Man, Flash, the
Sandman, and dozens more. In vibrant hues, they chased their arch-villains across
the page and brought justice to a tilted four-color world.
To keep pace with the voracious demand for fresh material, comic art shops
swelled and multiplied. No two operations produced comics the same way. At Jack
Binder’s shop, a half dozen artists worked on a single story, the tasks broken down
into layout, main character pencils, secondary character pencils, main character inks,
secondary character inks, and so on, with the result that Binder productions
developed a common visual look. Lloyd Jacquet, by contrast, gave his artists their
own characters and features, and they produced comics that were stylistically distinct
(Harvey, 1996).
The shops, staffed mainly with beginners and out-of-work illustrators,
produced a lot of schlock but also some work of genuine quality, remarkable given
the conditions that many artists labored under. In his memoir about that era in
comic-book history, Jules Feiffer (1965) paints a vivid picture of the shop
atmosphere:
Artists sat lumped in crowded rooms, knocking it out for the page rate.
Penciling, inking, lettering in the balloons for $10.00 a page, sometimes less;
working from yellow type scripts which on the left described the action, on
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the right gave the dialogue… The “editor,” who’d be in one office that week,
another the next, working for companies that changed names as often as he
changed jobs, sat at a desk or a drawing table—an always beefy man who, if
he drew, did not do it well, making it that much more galling when he
corrected your work and you knew he was right. His job was to check copy,
check art, hand out assignments, pay the artists money when he had it,
promise the artists money when he didn’t. Everyone got paid if he didn’t
mind going back week after week. Everyone got paid if he didn’t mind
occasionally pleading…
Eighteen hours a day of work. Sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
An occasional beer, but not too often. And nothing any stronger. One dare
not slow up. (pp. 50-51)
Young cartoonists gathered to talk about their art, comparing swipes and conceiving
new worlds, heroes, and villains. Sometimes, they would team up and create shops
of their own. Feiffer’s description brings to mind Cook’s (1996) account of the early
days of the cinema (before the advent of the feature-length film), when “the rigors
and banalities of the production system itself forced these people to take a workaday
attitude toward their craft, which—with notable exceptions—inhibited stylistic
innovation and the free exchange of ideas” (p. 33). This was indeed the case with
the so-called Golden Age of Comics, where the perpetual need to churn out pages
dissuaded many creators from innovating too much with their craft.
The Pre-Pre-Marvel Age of Comics
Around the time that Superman started taking off, Frank Torpey, a salesman for a
comics-packaging studio, persuaded a pulp magazine publisher named Martin
Goodman to try his hand at comic books. Goodman had already made a small
fortune catering to the lurid interests of pulp readers. In 1932, when he was 22 years
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old, Goodman began his career producing cowboy-themed titles like Complete
Western Book, Best Western, and Quick Trigger Western Novel (Daniels, 1993).
Whenever new genres became popular, he released a spate of hastily assembled
imitations, hoping to cash in before the market faded. His often-quoted credo was
simple: “If you get a title that catches on, then add a few more, you’re in for a nice
profit” (quoted in Gifford, 1992). By the time Torpey approached him, Goodman
was publishing 27 pulp titles under several different imprints, having divided his
publishing interests into separate companies in order to spread out the financial risk
and lower his overall tax bill.
Goodman contracted Torpey’s studio, Funnies, Inc., to create a new line of
comic books. For their first title, the Funnies artists produced an anthology of
features designed to capitalize on the current superhero vogue. Borrowing a titular
theme from one of his old pulps, Goodman published the stories in 1939 as Marvel
Comics #1, introducing two new characters who would go on to enjoy long
funnybook careers. The Human Torch, created by Carl Burgos, was a fire-engulfed
android who wreaked havoc with the searing heat produced by his unstable metallic
body. Later, the Torch learned how to put his powers to positive use, dispensing
evildoers with tightly packed fireballs and slender sheets of flame. The Sub-Mariner
served almost as a counterpoint to the Torch; he wore swimming trunks for a
costume and had powers derived from the sea. Invented by Bill Everett, the elfin-
looking Sub-Mariner was originally a villain who waged a war of vengeance on
humans for the destruction they had caused to his undersea kingdom. As time went
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on, however, he joined up with the Torch to battle far more pressing evils, like Nazis
and Fifth Column saboteurs.
When the first issue of Marvel Comics sold well, Goodman saw that he was
on to something (Daniels, 1993). After changing the book’s name to Marvel Mystery
Comics, he published more issues. He expanded his line to include Daring Mystery
Comics and Mystic Comics, featuring such forgettable heroes as Dynaman, The Fin,
The Human Top, and Flexo the Rubber Man. The Human Torch and the Sub-
Mariner were also given their own magazines. Goodman gathered all of his comics
titles under one banner: Timely Publications. Although he employed dozens of other
company labels in subsequent years, Goodman’s comics-publishing ventures during
the 1940s are generally referred to as Timely comics.
Goodman lured Joe Simon, a 24-year-old artist, away from Funnies, Inc. and
paid him $12 per page to draw comics directly for Timely. Simon had worked as a
newspaper illustrator and photo retoucher before hopping on the comics bandwagon
in 1938 (Simon, 1990). While freelancing for Goodman, Simon also became the
editor in chief of Fox Publications, earning a salary of $85 per week (Simon, 1990).
Simon was doing as well as anyone then hacking it out in the comic book industry,
except perhaps the publishers.
In the Fox bullpen, Simon met his future collaborator Jacob Kurtzberg, a
gifted young artist who signed his work with a variety of pen names, including “Ted
Grey,” “Jack Curtiss,” and, most famously, “Jack Kirby.” At the tender age of 21,
Kirby had amassed a modestly impressive resume as an animator at Fleischer
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Studios and a strip cartoonist for small newspaper syndicates. The son of Austrian-
Jewish immigrants, Kirby had grown up poor on Suffolk St. in New York’s Lower
East Side (Harvey, 1996). As a child, he ran with a gang and brawled with kids from
nearby neighborhoods. He escaped into the dream worlds of fantasy and science
fiction books, leaving behind the cruelties of the ghetto. In comic strips, he found a
career ambition to lead him out of poverty.
Kirby’s art work, with its raw kineticism and explosive vibrancy, reflected an
upbringing steeped in urban and ethnic violence. He was tremendously talented, and
he was fast. In an industry that typically paid by the page, Simon could hardly have
found a better partner. Kirby, for his part, got along well with editors and publishers,
but he lacked a strong business sense. While at Fox, Kirby had been pulling down
$15 a week, which he used to help support his parents. Within two years of teaming
with Simon, he was making nearly 20 times that amount (Simon, 1990).
Simon soon found that his freelance career was more lucrative than his
daytime job, and he quit Fox Publications. Kirby joined him some months later. The
pair worked out of a small one-room office, producing features for a number of
publishers, including Goodman’s Timely. Initially, Simon and Kirby shared the
creative responsibilities more or less evenly. Simon wrote the script on the
illustration boards and sketched in rough layouts of the figures, and then Kirby drew
the story in pencil. Simon would letter the balloons and ink Kirby’s drawings with a
brush. When deadlines were tight, they brought in other artists to lend a hand. In
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later years, Simon became the team’s business manager, leaving most of the plotting
and art chores to Kirby (Simon, 1990).
One of Simon and Kirby’s earliest efforts for Timely, Red Raven Comics,
failed on the newsstands and was cancelled after just one issue (Daniels, 1993).
Despite that failure, Goodman continued to sense a potential goldmine in comic
books, and he employed Simon to edit the Timely line. For the thirteenth issue of
Marvel Mystery Comics, Simon and Kirby turned out the Vision, a supernatural
being who traveled in wisps of smoke. Then, in late 1940, Simon proposed a new
costumed character who embodied many of the swirling patriotic themes of the day
(Simon, 1990). The United States had not yet entered World War II, but there was
widespread concern about Hitler’s campaign in Europe and its potential to spill over
to domestic shores. In the pages of some comic books, heroes were already taking
on the Axis powers and other enemies of America. Simon’s super-champion, which
he called Captain America, carried a liberty shield and was clad in red, white and
blue, neatly symbolizing the country’s pre-War sentiment. In Captain America's
comics the action was so severe it often broke out of the panels themselves. The
cover of Captain America Comics #1 depicted the star-spangled avenger exploding
into a German stronghold, his body in mid-leap, as he lands a haymaker on the
crumpled jaw of Adolf Hitler.
Captain America was an immediate hit, with sales rivaling industry
heavyweights Superman and Batman (Daniels, 1993). Goodman put the book on a
monthly schedule, turning up the pressure on the already overworked Simon and
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Kirby. Before long, they asked for an assistant. Simon hired the cousin of Martin
Goodman’s wife, Jean—a 17-year-old kid named Stanley Lieber.
Aka Stan Lee
Stanley Martin Lieber was born December 28, 1922, too late to catch the comic-book
medium’s formative years but in time to help steer it through puberty. Like many of
the second-generation immigrant kids who grew up to form comics’ pioneering
vanguard, including his future collaborator Jack Kirby, Stanley’s early life was
marked by grinding poverty. His parents, Jack and Celia Lieber, were Jewish-
Romanian immigrants who lived in New York City. Jack Lieber worked as a dress
cutter in the city’s garment district until the Great Depression left him jobless. Celia
tended the home (Lee & Mair, 2002).
With money scarce, Stanley’s parents quarreled constantly, and he sought
refuge in pulp novels and the books of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice
Burroughs, and Mark Twain. He frequented the movies as often as he could afford
the 25-cent admission, wrapping himself in the celluloid adventures of Charlie Chan,
Roy Rogers, Errol Flynn, and other swashbucklers of the day (Lee & Mair, 2002).
He took particular interest in the works of William Shakespeare, which he started
reading before the age of 10. His passion for Shakespeare would resurface in his
1960s work at Marvel Comics, from the ponderous philosophical pronouncements of
the Silver Surfer to the exaggerated Elizabethan dialogue of the Mighty Thor.
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Stanley also read newspaper comic strips, although not with the dedicated
interest of someone who hoped to one day write them. Among his favorites were
George Herriman’s surrealist comic drama Krazy Kat and Jimmy Hatlo’s quirky one-
panel feature They’ll Do It Every Time. He was a voracious reader of books,
magazines, pulps, cereal boxes—whatever he could lay his hands on. Comic strips
were just something else to read. One of his early role models was Walt Disney
(Raphael, 2000).
Jack Lieber’s chronic unemployment persisted through Stanley’s teens.
Demand for dress cutters was low and Jack spent most of his time reading the want
ads or trolling the city for jobs, trying to earn enough money to keep his family
nourished and off the streets. In high school, Stanley pitched in by taking on a
number of part-time jobs. He delivered sandwiches to office workers and ushered at
the Rivoli Theater on Broadway. His father’s bleak resume taught him the
importance of bringing home a regular paycheck (Raphael, 2000). Throughout most
of his career as a writer and editor, Lee would hold staff positions, eschewing the
freelance arrangements that were common in the comics industry.
Eventually, Stanley Lieber landed a few novice writing gigs. His first stop
was a news service, where he compiled advance obituaries of famous people in
anticipation of their demise. He also wrote publicity material for a Jewish hospital in
Denver. At one point, he joined a local company of the WPA Federal Theater, the
national public-works project founded to provide work for unemployed theater
professionals. After working on a few plays, he left to seek more profitable climes
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(Raphael, 2000). But that experience instilled in him a love for acting, and in later
years he would return to performing of sorts, on the college lecture circuit and in
Hollywood cameos. In the 1960s, his lively, dramatic persona would prove
irresistible to a generation of Marvel addicts.
Stanley attended DeWitt Clinton High School, an overcrowded Bronx
institution that housed 10,000 students from all parts of the city. The school
comprised Irish kids, Italian kids, Jewish kids, even some African-American kids—
many of them children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. Stanley’s
contemporaries included future author James Baldwin and eventual TV and film
writer Sidney “Paddy” Chayefsky. The all-boys school had previously graduated
two other New York Jews destined for comic-book stardom—Batman co-creators
Bob Kane (class of 1934) and Bill Finger (class of 1932).
In 1939, Stanley graduated high school. Because he had to help support his
family, he couldn’t attend university—a fact that he later viewed with regret
(Raphael, 2000). The following year, when he was 17 years old, he was hired at
Timely Publications, a publishing company owned by his relative Martin Goodman.
He started as an assistant to editor Joe Simon and was paid eight dollars a week (Lee
& Mair, 2002). Stanley swept floors, refilled inkwells, and topped up the coffee can.
When Jack Kirby finished a page, Stanley would erase the penciled drawings that lay
under the inks, prepping the art work before it was sent to the engraver (Simon,
1990).
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Timely had roughly a dozen employees at the time and, except for Simon,
Kirby, and a few others, relied on freelance artists for material. The company was
staffed mainly by relatives of owner Martin Goodman. His brother Abe ran
bookkeeping while Dave, another brother, shot photos for the magazine division.
Artie Goodman, the youngest sibling, handled comic-book color guides. Martin’s
brother-in-law, Robbie Solomon, performed odd jobs (Simon, 1990; Lee & Mair,
2002).
Although he was working a job that was the 1940s equivalent of a corporate
internship, Stanley Lieber soon made it clear that he wanted to move up in the
company. At the time, most comic books included two-page text pieces in order to
qualify for cheaper mailing rates. These stories were typically slapdash efforts that
readers skipped over on their way to the next illustrated adventure. Simon assigned
one to Stanley, and a few days later, the fledgling writer turned in “Captain America
Foils the Traitor’s Revenge,” 26 paragraphs of warmed-over pulp prose pitting the
star-spangled avenger and his “gallant lad,” Bucky, against three would-be assassins
in a U.S. Army camp.
It would be unfair to hold up the tentative scribblings of a 17-year-old kid as
somehow emblematic of the work he would produce as a more mature writer.
Nevertheless, some of Stan Lee’s favorite motifs were evident in that ancient piece.
At one point, Captain America, displaying comic-bookish panache, picks up Bucky
by his arms and swings him at two thugs, knocking away their guns. Written
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straight, all words and no images, the passage is comically bad, falling short of camp
even in retrospect. But it also presages the vigorous physical action that would
characterize many of the early-1960s Marvel comics by Lee and his collaborators
Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Spider-Man, for example, didn’t just lay into bad guys
with his fists; he bounced over them, under them, flipped them head-over-heels like
flapjacks, with the spirited verve of the heroes in the Douglas Fairbanks movies that
Lee once thrilled to as a child.
Stanley’s debut story ended with Private Steve Rogers, Captain America’s
alter ego, receiving a tongue-lashing from the camp Colonel for having slept through
the previous night’s excitement. “Captain America and Bucky mopped up three
armed men by themselves and saved my life—and YOU were asleep!” yells the
Colonel . “Oh, why can’t I have some soldiers like Captain America in this army—
instead of YOU!” Steve Rogers smiles to himself. If the Colonel only knew . . .
Here, Stanley has identified the secret identity conundrum, already a cliche in
1940: the superhero hogs the glory while his alter ego can’t catch a break. Clark
Kent has no chance of scoring with Lois Lane until he ties on a cape. One of Lee’s
principal achievements at Marvel 20 years later would be to tweak that cliche,
sending some characters to the poorhouse, others to the therapist, and forcing the
spandex-costumed set to deal with quote-unquote real life.
“The Traitor’s Revenge” ran in the third issue of Captain America Comics,
with a byline that read “Stan Lee.” Stanley Lieber had entered the comic-book field,
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but he checked his real name at the door. Back then, comic book stories did not
typically include credits, but when they did appear, aliases were common. Some
artists, such as Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) and Batman co-creator Bob Kane
(Robert Kahn), chose to Americanize their names in order to disguise their ethnic
roots. Others wanted a cover identity while they slummed in the field, so that their
reputations would emerge untarnished when they moved on to better jobs in
commercial illustration or advertising. Even artists who were unembarrassed to sign
their given names used aliases to escape detection when they freelanced for
competing publishers. So there was already an established tradition when Stanley
Lieber split his first name, swapping the “y” for a second “e,” to come up with the
nom de plume that would eventually bring him fame.
Meanwhile at Timely, Simon and Kirby were blazing a trail within the pages
of the million-selling Captain America Comics. Kirby’s art work had become more
assured, displaying a solid command of human anatomy and an energetic sense of
action. While most of his peers were still mired in the Dark Ages, limply depicting
characters in awkward poses from standard, unimaginative angles, Kirby had style
(Harvey, 1996). Unleashed by his furious pencil work, Captain America danced
from panel to panel, dispensing right hooks, sending the villains reeling in all
directions—sometimes right out of the panel. Kirby’s fight scenes unfolded
smoothly, like a ballet, with such clarity that they required no explanatory captions.
Simon and Kirby also innovated with page layouts, separating panels with jagged
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lines, framing dramatic moments with round backdrops, and effectively making the
comics page a storytelling unit unto itself (Harvey, 1996).
There were other great artists then working in comics—for example, Creig
Flessel (Sandman) and Lou Fine (Black Condor). But none of them drew a book that
could boast the sales figures of Captain America Comics. Kirby’s work was the
most visible of the early masters, and it set the standard for superhero comics well
into the late 1940s. A slew of Captain America imitators soon followed: American
Crusader, Commando Yank, Yank and Doodle, Yankee Boy, the Liberator, the
Scarlet Sentry, Captain Freedom, Captain Valiant, and dozens more. Timely even
tried to duplicate its success with characters like the Patriot, the Defender, and Major
Liberty. They all failed to match the appeal of Simon and Kirby’s original
superpatriot.
Stan Lee’s first comic-book work, “Headline Hunter, Foreign
Correspondent,” appeared in Captain America Comics #5 and ran for eight issues.
Concurrently, he wrote a series called “Father Time,” about a costumed character
who dispensed justice at the business end of a scythe. The first installment of
“Headline Hunter” opened with a large splash panel that read “Story by Stan Lee,”
which was unusual for the time. Either by personal choice or editorial decree,
comics writers rarely received credit for their work. Most writers turned out stories
by the pound, at 50 cents or a dollar per page, with little concern for portfolio
enhancement. Comics were just something to get them through lean times. To Stan
Lee, though, the fake name notwithstanding, they were clearly something more. The
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signature “Stan Lee” appears in hundreds of stories from the 1940s and 1950s, many
of which weren’t even signed by the collaborating artists. Sometimes, Lee invented
additional pseudonyms—“Neel Nats,” “S.T. Anley” and “Stan Martin,” among
others—in order to make the company staff appear bigger than it was.
Propelled by the ever-climbing sales of Captain America, Timely’s fortunes
continued to rise. Martin Goodman was getting rich—or richer. Simon and Kirby,
who had negotiated a profit-sharing arrangement with Goodman, were also making a
decent sum, although, as it turned out, they should have been making more. As
Simon recalled in his memoir, he found out from Goodman’s accountant that the
publisher was using slippery accounting practices to shortchange Simon and Kirby
on their cut of the profits (Simon, 1990). Disgruntled, the creative duo headed over
to Jack Liebowitz at DC Comics and signed a year-long contract at $500 per week
(Simon, 1990). Their plan was to create new projects for DC on the side, while
keeping up their day jobs at Timely. In a small hotel room near the Timely offices,
Simon and Kirby set up desks and drawing boards, converging there on evenings and
weekends to hack out pages for Timely’s rival. The competition for talent was fierce
during the gold rush days of comic book publishing, and companies commonly
poached artists from one another. But that made it no less of a sin if you were
discovered to be working for the enemy. Simon and Kirby’s extramural activities
were eventually discovered and Martin Goodman fired them (Simon, 1990).
The departure of Simon and Kirby gave Stan Lee a terrific career boost. With
Timely’s editor and art director both gone, the bulk of the comic-book line’s editorial
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duties fell into his eager lap. Goodman installed Lee as the editorial director on a
temporary basis, with the intention of eventually finding someone else. At some
point, Goodman must have stopped looking, because, except for a three-year hiatus
during World War II, Lee stayed on as head editor for more than three decades (Lee
& Mair, 2002). When Stan Lee took over, the Timely line, with Captain America
Comics leading in sales, boasted nearly a dozen titles, including Young Allies, USA
Comics, Mystic Comics, Marvel Mystery Comics, and All Winners Comics, which
featured Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner all in one book.
The sixth issue of Mystic Comics featured the debut of “The Destroyer,” a series that
Stan co-created and wrote for several years across a range of Timely books (Daniels,
1993).
Goodman hired a roster of staff artists to churn out an ever-growing amount
of material. Crowded into a tiny room in the Timely offices, with a single window
linking them to the outside world, the staffers sat hunched over their drawing tables,
penciling figures into panels, inking each other’s work, and filling letters into
captions and speech balloons. There were so many titles that needed stories that
staffers often took freelance work home (Amash, 2001). A typical page rate was
$15—$8 for pencils and $7 for inks. With a quick hand, an artist could add a lot to
his annual income with freelancing.
In the early days of Stan Lee’s tenure, publisher Martin Goodman kept a tight
grip on the reins. In addition to Timely, Goodman’s publishing empire encompassed
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magazines and pulps (Daniels, 1993). Gradually, as Stan learned the comic book
business, he asserted more control over the Timely division and sought his
employer’s counsel less often. Goodman mostly stayed in his office, poring over
sales figures, trying to identify trends, sometimes napping. But whatever else was on
his plate, he always insisted on approving covers (S. Lee, personal communication,
July 24, 2002). Back then, when few artists had any following to speak of, and
comics heroes lived and died at the whimsy of millions of dime-carrying kids, covers
were the key marketing element of a comic-book package. The sales of a comic
book soared or tanked on the quality of its cover. A snappy cover could even
salvage the business prospects of a 64-page tome of muddy-colored art work and
hackneyed writing—a fairly common scenario in those days.
Lee also wrote quickly. Goodman paid him by the page for script work, in
addition to his editorial wages, so the more stories he churned out, the more money
he took home. Lee wrote two to three stories a week, sometimes more. Because the
medium was so young, there was no formal training for comic book scripters. Stan
learned on the fly, picking up dialogue tips and storytelling cues from the work of
more accomplished writers, like Charlie Biro at Lev Gleason Productions and Bill
Finger on Batman (S. Lee, personal communication, July 17, 2002).
By the end of 1943, comic books had cemented their place in American pop
culture, approaching mass-media numbers with an estimated monthly circulation of
25,000,000 copies (Escapist Pay Dirt, 1943). Some public discussion had arisen
about the increasing luridness of comics and their noxious effect on children. North
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(1940) described comic books as “a poisonous mushroom growth” and called for
parents and teachers to keep children away from them. To ease the public’s fears,
many publishers formed advisory boards composed of clergymen, educators, and
mental-health professionals to set content standards for their publications (Escapist
Pay Dirt, 1943). In the 1940s, however, the critics had minimal effect on the comics
business, and the money kept rolling in. It would be at least another decade before
the anti-comics movement gained traction.
Over at DC Comics, Superman and Batman were still pulling the ship, while
other companies found success with characters like Captain Marvel and Plastic Man.
Some publishers ventured into uncharted waters, testing out genres ranging from
teenage titles (Pep Comics) to literary adaptations (Classic Comics). Artists like
Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Mac Raboy, Reed Crandall, and Lou Fine stretched the art
form in new directions, incorporating bold cinematic techniques, exploding and
reassembling the grammar and syntax of comics, reinvigorating the field’s sense of
purpose. Through an informal system of swiping and homage, experimentation and
refinement, the comic book medium evolved.
Dozens of publishers littered the landscape. Many of them were small-time
operators who printed their comics on credit, finagled their way onto newsstands,
and then were swept away in a tidal wave of red ink. It was relatively easy to enter
the comic-book business, but as with most booming industries, very difficult to
establish a going concern. Still, amid the clamor and chaos of those early days, some
firms emerged as industry leaders. These included DC Comics, Quality Comics, Lev
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Gleason Publications, Fawcett Publications, Dell Publishing and Martin Goodman’s
Timely Publications.
The secret to Goodman’s success was the same as it had been when he was
minting money with pulp magazines: Find a hot trend, milk it for all its profit, and
move on (Daniels, 1993). When superhero comics were selling, Goodman put out
10 of them. The quality of the books barely mattered, so long as Timely raked in its
share at the newsstand. It was in this spirit that Goodman charted a new course for
his company in early 1942. The year before, Dell had done well with licensed titles
based on Walt Disney and Looney Tunes characters, as well as a funny-animal book
called Animal Comics. Sensing rich prospects in these genres, Goodman instructed
Lee to create some titles in the same vein. Lee inaugurated Timely’s humor
campaign with Joker Comics #1, which featured “Snoopy and Dr. Nutzy,” “Eustice
Hayseed,” and “Stuporman,” as well as the debut of “Powerhouse Pepper,” by
legendary big-foot cartoonist Basil Wolverton. Krazy Komics, which focused on
Disney-esque funny animals, came next, followed by Terry-Toons, a licensed title
that starred Mighty Mouse.
For Lee, the humor comics were an opportunity to try out fresh material,
drawing on the radio and movie comedies he enjoyed as a child. While still keeping
a hand in the superhero universe, Lee began scripting features like “Little Lester”
and “Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal,” working with such artists as Vince Fago, a former
animator, and Al Jaffee, the future Mad magazine cartoonist. Those efforts
represented Lee’s first tentative stabs at humorous writing, a style that he would
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refine in the coming decades, culminating in the irreverent, semi-ironic tone of the
1960s Marvel comic books.
In due time, World War II caught up with the comics industry. Art shops and
publishing houses emptied as writers and artists were drafted into service. At Timely
and elsewhere, older artists, women and others who were exempt from fighting duty
came on board to pick up the slack. Comic books had long since led the charge
against the “evil Japs” and Hitler’s Third Reich. Now, the business enjoyed a
circulation boost from the millions of young men on military bases who were
tackling those menaces for real. When paper shortages hit, publishers like Goodman
and DC’s Jack Liebowitz managed to secure generous allocations, and their
companies thrived. Out of 189 periodicals approved by the United States Army for
distribution to troops, 50 were comic books (Zorbaugh, 1944).
Comic books were a mass medium not only in terms of numbers but also
with respect to the public attention paid to them. The Captain Marvel club, for
example, boasted more than 573,000 members and received 30,000 letters a year
(Zorbaugh, 1944). Because they were portable, inexpensive, and accessible to
readers of all levels, comics were ideal for servicemen. Savage, Jr. (1990) reports
that between 1941 and 1945, American soldiers bought more comic books than any
other type of reading material. In a 1944 study, 41 percent of men ages 18 to 30 said
they read more than six comic books per month (Savage, Jr., 1990). Superman and
his super-ilk—escapist-fantasy concepts born during the Depression era—now took
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on added significance as propagandist tools, trouncing the enemy on American soil
while inspiring America’s fighting men abroad. Savage, Jr. writes:
Comic books brought much to the American cause. In addition to lending
support to such necessary activities as bond drives and paper drives, comic
books became an integral part of the Allied propaganda machine,
emphasizing the need for a maximum war effort by portraying the enemy as
the inhuman offspring of a vast and pernicious evil. Writers coined epithets
like “ratzi” and “Japanazi,” and artists drew rodentlike Japanese and bloated,
sneering Germans. Japanese troops wore thick glasses and displayed
prominent teeth, while German officers possessed monocles and dueling
scars, much as they did in the wartime renditions of Hollywood
filmmakers—although comic-book illustrators took greater liberties than
Hollywood could, and to greater effect, given the nature of caricature. (p. 10)
In the pages of their comic books, Superman and Batman sold the war effort. A
1943 issue of Action Comics featured Superman and the slogan “Slap a Jap with War
Bonds and Stamps,” while on one of his comics covers, Batman implored readers to
“Keep Those Bullets Flying! Keep on Buying War Bonds & Stamps!” (Gordon,
1998).
Due to the increased attention from adult males, comic books also became
racier, with covers featuring scantily clad women, sometimes tied with ropes or
chains. A publisher named Fiction House, whose titles included Planet, Wings,
Jungle and Jumbo, specialized in titillating comics featuring half-naked women with
jutting breasts and buttocks. The Fiction House line came to be known as “headlight
comics” (Goulart, 1991). The cross-pollination of comics with other media
continued apace, with several movies and radio serials turned into comics (e.g.,
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Green Hornet, Gang Busters, Tom Mix), and vice versa (e.g., Batman, Captain
Marvel).
In 1942, Stan Lee enlisted and was assigned to the Signal Corps, the Army’s
communication division. Stationed in Astoria, Queens, and later at posts in North
Carolina and Indiana, he wrote and illustrated training manuals using many of the
skills he had acquired as a comic book writer (Lee & Mair, 2002). After the war,
Lee returned to New York City, and resumed his editorship at Timely. In the post-
war years, the comics industry continued to prosper. Demand was high for funny-
animal and educational comics; returning soldiers were willing to experiment in
different types of comics pulp. Charles Biro of Crime Does Not Pay claimed a
million readers for his non-superhero title. Superheroes sold well until the end of the
1940s, and then experienced a prolonged fadeout.
Unlike the superhero-dominated comics industry of the last four decades,
dozens of genres flourished in the late 1940s—women’s comics, romance comics,
crime comics, western comics. The purveyors of four-color wonder threw
everything they had at the newsstands, hoping a few ideas might find favor with their
increasingly fickle audience. Lee and the Timely staff rarely initiated trends, but
they were always quick to produce a slew of imitations. When Lev Gleason’s Crime
Does Not Pay began posting good numbers, Timely responded with Crimefighters,
Crime Exposed, and Lawbreakers Always Lose. On the heels of Joe Simon and Jack
Kirby’s Young Romance came Timely’s My Romance, Love Tales, Best Love, and
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many others. Indeed, romance comics were the most popular genre in 1949, with
100 titles on newsstands. They even stole circulation from true confession
magazines and romance pulps, the progenitors of the love-comics genre (Goulart,
1991).
In 1947, Stan Lee wrote and self-published a short book, titled Secrets
Behind the Comics, that stood out for its brashness and, in retrospect, for its
prescience. Secrets, which Stan sold out of his apartment for a dollar a copy, was
laid out in comic-book format, with illustrations by Ken Bald and other Timely
mainstays. In a raw but entertaining fashion, it provided a behind-the-scenes look at
the comic-book production process—a rare enterprise for those times. In later years,
comics fans would dissect every detail of their chosen hobby and, but back then, few
people cared how the sausages were made.
In his book, Lee revealed such secrets as how to recognize an artist’s style
and the proper formatting for a script. He also included several blank pages that
comic-book wannabes could use to draw their own stories. Lee counseled aspiring
writers to spend about an hour penning each page, although on days when ideas
aren’t flowing, more time might be needed. And, he wrote, here’s a startling fact:
The artist and writer of a comic book don’t necessarily live together! In Secrets,
Lee’s writing style, a tad unpolished, nevertheless resonates with the jazzy, pitchman
style that would permeate the covers of 1960s-era comics like The Fantastic Four
and The Amazing Spider-Man. For example: “Are you beginning to realize now why
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‘The Secrets Behind The Comics’ has been called the most complete book about
comic magazines ever published . . . as well as the most exciting?” (p. 52) It’s worth
noting that Lee’s self-published book, a clear attempt to reach out to comic-book
fans, was issued several years before comic-book fanzines became popular and
decades before the appearance of comics fandom.
Back at Timely, the offices were swelling with more artists, writers,
production workers and business staff. Lee oversaw a team of editors who handled
the different comic-book lines. He acted as a “supreme editor” of sorts, reporting
only to Martin Goodman. During that time, Lee could hardly be said to have
flourished creatively. Though an efficient editor, his imitative strategy was driven
more by greed than any notions of artistic flattery. Stan Lee approached comics with
a workmanlike attitude, focused primarily on how many of these disposable four-
color tomes he could publish and get on to newsstands. In the same way that Marvel
Comics in the 1960s would come to represent American comics from then onward,
the Martin Goodman comic-book lines of the 1940s and 1950s were emblematic of
the American comic book’s shoddy and exploitative teenage years. Lee pumped out
genre stories concerned only with meeting deadlines and making a paycheck. As an
editor, he encouraged similar content from his writers and artists.
About that era in his career, Lee commented: “I was just doing what my
publisher asked me to do. Being young, I enjoyed the feeling of importance of being
editor and art director and head writer. It never occurred to me that what I was doing
wasn’t all that great” (Pitts Jr., Unpublished interview with Stan Lee).
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The 1950s: Boom and Bust
In 1948, the anti-comic book movement in America gained momentum. During
World War II, the comic-book industry had enjoyed a respite from the attacks of its
detractors, but now the criticism resumed in earnest. That year, Dr. Fredric
Wertham’s first missive about comics appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. On a
national radio program, the drama critic John Mason Brown called comics “the
marijuana of the nursery; the bane of the bassinet; the horror of the house; the curse
of the kids; and a threat to the future” (quoted in Nyberg, 1998, p. 31). In her
“ringing challenge to join the struggle against stories that are damaging American
youth,” Jean Gray Harker (1948), a former children’s librarian, excoriated comic
books for being anti-educational and for contributing to an increase in juvenile
delinquency. Harker wrote:
I’m going to fight them! I will buy all the good books we can afford. I will
encourage my children to go to the library, and I will discuss their reading
with them. I’m going to talk to groups of parents in our local P.T.A.s. I shall
ask conscientious parents and other citizens to urge swift passage of a state
crime comic censorship law. (p. 1707)
The postwar comic books were different from the ones that had littered newsstands
even five years before. The crime and horror genres dominated newsstands. Crime
titles, such as Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay, presented grim morality tales that
were notable for their attention to lurid detail. EC Comics published a line of horror
and crime titles that thrilled children and revolted parents with vivid depictions of
criminality and mayhem. Despite the goriness of their stories, the EC titles were the
most innovative in the field, in part due to the editing style of publisher William
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Gaines. Unlike other editors, Gaines was a fan of the genres his company published.
When EC moved into science fiction, it was books and pulps from Gaines personal
collection that his writers and editors took home to study. Other companies may
have been more successful commercially, but EC had the top writers and artists.
Indeed, some comics historians and critics point to the brief EC period as the first
flowering of a truly adult sensibility in the American comic book.
For Stan Lee, EC held additional fascination for the way that publisher
Gaines fashioned an identity for a line that spanned multiple genres and catered to
fan interest. The EC line attracted an enormous fan following, which publisher
William Gaines encouraged by founding a company fan club and newsletter. Gaines
ran informal, clubby letters in the pages of EC comic books that sometimes featured
artwork by readers. EC was one of the first publishers to include creator credits on
stories, and it regularly profiled writers and artists to give readers a look at the
people behind the stories (Pustz, 1999). Fans would go so far as to seek out the
company at their New York address.
The difference in creative atmospheres between a commercial outfit like Stan
Lee’s pre-Marvel comics company and EC was most evident in the work of Harvey
Kurtzman. Kurtzman had spent several years drawing single-page gag strips for Lee
that were creatively interesting but that were never showcased in a manner that gave
them an opportunity to find an appreciative audience. At EC, Kurtzman became one
of the company’s primary editors, spearheading the morally complex war titles Two-
Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, and the satirical Mad magazine. While Stan Lee
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merely kept Kurtzman busy, Gaines offered him the opportunity to pursue his artistic
vision in comics form. Gaines would later offer him a considerable financial stake at
Mad to stay on board and continue helming that magazine; Kurtzman declined,
determined for even greater creative control. At 1960s Marvel, Stan Lee would
apply the general lessons he had gleaned from William Gaines’s EC Comics by
paying closer attention to fans, loosening up the letters pages, and giving his best
artists more creative leeway.
As public outrage against comic books grew, a loose confederacy of parents,
teachers, and educators applied pressure on the comics business at a local level,
targeting newsstand dealers and grocery store managers. Anti-comics crusaders
waged their war on two fronts: community decency crusades that damaged
publishers economically through, for example, boycotts; and legislative action,
which sought the enactment of ordinances and statutes preventing the sale of comics
(Nyberg, 1998). In several communities, groups of parents and children gathered to
burn comic books (Nyberg, 1998).
The anti-comics movement succeeded in defining the battle in terms of
children’s welfare rather than censorship, but repeated attempts to legislate against
the sale of comic books (and crime comics, in particular) were struck down at
various judicial levels (Nyberg, 1998). In 1949, for example, a Los Angeles County
ordinance outlawing crime comics was declared unconstitutional by the California
Supreme Court (Barclay, 1950). Legislating violence proved difficult because,
unlike with the case of sexual material, there wasn’t much legal precedent for
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outlawing violent content. In addition, lawmakers were stymied in their attempts to
define comic books narrowly enough so that their proposed laws wouldn’t be
interpreted as also covering magazines or other printed material (Nyberg, 1998). In
other countries, such as Canada and Britain, legislators were successful in banning
certain types of comic books. But in the United States, they had to resort to a Senate
subcommittee hearing to scare comics publishers straight.
Martin Goodman’s Timely, which by the 1950s was publishing lightweight
horror titles modeled after EC’s Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, hired a
children’s psychiatrist to advise on comics content. Stan Lee editorialized against
comic-book censorship in the pages of Suspense, and even wrote a short story in the
April 1953 issue, “The Raving Maniac,” that parodied Dr. Fredric Wertham.
Although the public backlash against comic books was not specifically directed at
Timely, it proved to be an industry-wide event that altered the way every comic-
book professional thought about his or her profession.
In April 1954, a United States Senate subcommittee convened to investigate
the comic-book threat. Dr. Fredric Wertham appeared as a witness; although his
arguments that comics were instructional manuals for juvenile delinquency and
repositories of aberrant, unhealthy social meanings did not hold up to social-
scientific scrutiny, they contained a commonsensical rationality that tipped public
opinion in his favor. EC publisher Gaines also testified, telling committee members
that “it would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a
Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid”
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(Kihss, 1954, p. 34). The most memorable exchange occurred between Gaines and
Senator Estes Kefauver, a Democrat from Tennessee. Kefauver asked Gaines if he
thought that the cover of an issue of Crime SuspenStories depicting an axe-wielding
murderer holding up a severed head was in good taste. Gaines replied: “Yes I do—
for the cover of a horror comic. I think it would be bad taste if he were holding the
head a little higher so the neck would show with the blood dripping from it” (Kihss,
1954, p. 1).
Gaines, who later asserted that he was suffering from extreme fatigue during
his testimony, quickly became the target of public anger as television and print news
outlets quoted his comments (Nyberg, 1998). The New York Times reported the
Kefauver-Gaines exchange on its front page under the headline “No Harm in Horror,
Comics Issuer Says.” Anti-comics advocates took Gaines’s testimony as proof that
comic-book publishers were only out to make a buck, heedless of the negative
consequences their products were having on young minds. Even though the
subcommittee admitted that there was no evidence linking comic books to juvenile
delinquency, its report issued the following year urged comics publishers to regulate
their content.
By that time, the industry had already taken steps to regulate itself. Comics
publishers had previously tried to enact a content code, but that effort failed due to
lack of participation. This time, however, the public pressure was much more
intense and immediate. In September 1954, at the urging of William Gaines, comics
publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America. Gaines’s vision
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was for the group to lobby on behalf of the comics industry and to combat public
outcries with research and legal actions (Nyberg, 1998). Instead, the larger comics
publishers pushed for and won the establishment of a Comics Code Authority to
regulate content. The CCA was formed to screen comic books pre-publication and
to award a stamp of approval that signaled to distributors, retailers, and the public
that CCA-approved comics were suitable for children.
The comics code adopted by the CMAA in 1954 had an enormous impact on
the comic-book medium and industry for decades to come. Modeled on the Hays
film code, the comics code consisted of 41 regulations that dealt mainly with crime
and horror, but also with sexuality. As Nyberg (1998) points out, the comics code
was “the most severe set of restrictions of any mass media form” (p. 112). It went
even further than the film code, for example, banning slang words since there was a
public feeling that comic books should feature good grammar so that the medium
could have some educational value (Nyberg, 1998).
The code dictated that criminals always be portrayed in a negative light. In
all instances, good must triumph over evil. Details and methods of criminal activity
were never to be shown. Scenes of brutal torture, physical pain, sadism, lust, and
gore were also not allowed. The code forbade the use of the words “horror” or
“terror” in the title of a comic book. Supernatural creatures, such as vampires,
ghouls and werewolves, were prohibited. In a section on marriage and sex, the code
dictated that divorce should not be portrayed as humorous or desirable, and that
scenes of romance should not stimulate “the lower and baser emotions” (quoted in
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Nyberg, 1998, p. 168). The code also stipulated regulations for comic-book
advertisements, banning notices for liquor, tobacco, sex instruction books, weapons,
and fireworks.
The framers of the comics code were clearly working from the assumption
that comic books were first and foremost a children’s medium. (Notably, most of the
participants supporting the code made the vast majority of their money by selling
comics to kids.) The code’s regulations eliminated any material that offended a
1950s American sense of what was appropriate for young readers, and in so doing, it
constrained writers and artists of the period from pushing the comics medium in a
direction that might appeal to mature readers.
While comics in the postwar period reflected a society trying to adjust to
profound changes, the post-code comic books lost their reflective edge (Savage, Jr.,
1990). Although American society was still plagued by problems, after 1954, comic
books stopped portraying and analyzing them. Comics did not, for example, deal
with the Vietnam War with the same amount of attention they paid to the Korean
War or World War II. With a few exceptions, mostly in black and white magazines
away from the mainstream of American comic book production such as those
produced by Jim Warren, most of the wars fought in 1960s comic books were fought
against Adolf Hitler. Comic books lost the social and political insight that had
previously made them such useful mirrors of American culture (Savage, Jr., 1990).
McAllister, Sewell, Jr., & Gordon (2001) suggest that the comics code “constrained
comics in their potential role as oppositional culture” (p. 6). It would take at least
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another decade for the underground comix to appear, and those black-and-white
tomes of social and cultural criticism would be produced and distributed largely
outside the channels of mainstream comics, and therefore outside the code’s control.
In the wake of the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings and the comics code,
American comics suffered creatively and financially. Many comics professionals
felt ashamed about their vocation and left the business; one artist who stayed in
comics began telling people that he drew children’s books (Spurlock, 2001). With
crime and horror comics all but banned, romance, teen and funny animal comics
dominated newsstands. After a frustrating attempt to work within the confines of the
code, William Gaines cancelled the entire EC line except Mad magazine. The big
companies, such as DC Comics, also changed their approach. Batman, for example,
toned down his vigilante image and cooperated more with the police. He also chilled
relations with Robin and added several new acquaintances, including Batwoman,
Batgirl, and Bathound (York, 2000). He traveled to the moon and acquired an imp-
like fellow traveler named Bat-Mite. Batman no longer tossed criminals off of
rooftops.
Many comic-book companies went bankrupt and the number of comics titles
declined sharply. In 1952, there were 500 comic book titles on stands; in 1955, there
were 300 (Goulart, 1991). For the first year since the invention of the modern comic
book in 1934, no new publishers joined the field (Nyberg, 1998). Readership figures
went into freefall. At the industry’s zenith, in 1952, the estimated monthly
circulation of comic books was 59,800,000 copies. By 1956, that number had fallen
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to 34,600,000. The slide continued until 1979 when 18,500,000 comic books sold
per month (Parsons, 1991).
To be sure, there were other factors working against comic books. As
Parsons (1991) points out, “The ‘comic scare’ of the mid-1950s undoubtedly
damaged the trade by stigmatizing the comics and reducing availability.
Nevertheless, the industry probably could have recovered if underlying consumer
demand had remained steady. It did not.” (p. 72). Television played an equal, if not
bigger, role in the decline of the comics-reading audience. Barclay (1950) cited
studies that showed children preferred watching television to reading comics.
Indeed, comic book circulation during the 1950s declined in nearly inverse
proportion to the number of television sets in American households. In 1950, when
monthly comics circulation was 45,600,000 copies, there were 3,100,000 TV sets in
American homes (Whitfield, 1996). In 1960, comics circulation had dropped to
roughly 34,000,000 copies per month, and there were 56,900,000 TV sets in use
(Parsons, 1991). The rise of television affected other media, for example, cutting
weekly movie-theater attendance in half and weakening sales of general-interest
magazines, such as Saturday Evening Post and Life (Whitfield, 1996). But the
widespread adoption of television, coming at a time when comic-book content was
constricted, had a more profound effect on the comics medium. The American
comic book would never regain its footing as a mass medium that reached a broad
set of reading audiences. Also, it would take a decade, and the revitalizing works of
Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics, for comics to develop creatively once more. In what was
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perhaps an apt augury of the American comic book’s coming decline, the final issue
of Famous Funnies (the first modern comic book) was published July 1955, with the
image of a television set depicted prominently on its cover (Goulart, 1991).
The Timely comic-book line suffered in the 1950s along with the rest of the
industry. Although its content had largely been inoffensive from the start, the code
added layers of bureaucracy to the production process. The company’s distribution
channel also suffered in 1956, after Martin Goodman closed his distribution
company and signed up with American News, the largest comic-book distributor at
the time. The timing of that deal was unfortunate; American News had been badly
hurt by the comics scare and it stopped carrying comic books in early 1957.
Goodman was forced to sign a repressive deal with a distributor owned by rival DC
Comics that limited the Timely line to eight titles per month (Daniels, 1993).
Stan Lee had spent the 1950s running one of the biggest (in terms of titles)
comic-book companies, with 82 monthly titles at one point. Now he found himself
with a shadow of his former company. Goodman and Lee cancelled dozens of titles
in all genres, and refocused their line on 16 bimonthly western and romance books.
Artists and writers were fired, and those who remained were forced to work at
substantially reduced wages. Lee spent the late 1950s working out of a small, two-
room office in Martin Goodman’s magazine company. Eventually, he hired back
some artists on a freelance basis, among them veteran Jack Kirby and a relative
newcomer named Steve Ditko.
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With Lee writing, Kirby and Ditko anchored Martin Goodman’s comic-book
line for several years, producing a slate of lighthearted science-fiction titles, such as
Strange Worlds, Tales of Suspense, and Tales to Astonish, that contained early traces
of the Marvel comics to come. A typical story in those titles featured a giant
rampaging Godzilla-like monster with a name like “Taboo,” “Vandoom,” “Zzutak,”
or “Fin Fang Foom.” As kitschy as they appear to modern audiences, the pre-Marvel
science-fiction titles were remarkable for their visual sophistication, in large part
because Stan Lee gave his artists creative free reign. Traditionally, comic-book
writers would lay out stories in a full-script format—which the artist was expected to
follow closely—that described action page by page and panel by panel. Faced with a
budget reduction at Martin Goodman’s scaled-down comics company, Stan Lee had
to modify this style of creating comics and provide only story outlines—sometimes
consisting of a sentence or two—to his artists. The artists would then lay out and
draw the comics stories, and return the finished artwork to Lee, who would fill in the
text boxes and dialogue.
In later years, this method of working would come to be known as the Marvel
Method, but Lee originally came up with it for reasons of expediency. By providing
his artists with as little creative direction as necessary, Lee was able to “write” more
comics stories and thereby to cut down on the expense of hiring freelance writers. He
was also paid separately as a writer based on the final result, not on the number of
scripts turned in. This method enjoyed varying degrees of success with Lee’s
traditional artists, but with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, both of whom were
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enormously talented on their own, it worked phenomenally well. In the process,
Stan Lee set in motion a creative upheaval that lead to the freewheeling, offbeat
storylines and artwork that made the early Marvel titles so appealing. With Kirby,
Lee would co-create the majority of the Marvel superheroes, including the Fantastic
Four and the X-Men. With Ditko, Lee brought to life one of the most popular pop-
culture properties of the latter half of the 20th century, Spider-Man. Both Kirby and
Ditko brought as much to the table as Lee did.
During the 1940s and 1950s, when comic books were at the height of their
mainstream appeal, Stan Lee was one of the industry’s most efficient and productive
managers. As comics began their decline, through a combination of luck and clever
writing and editing, he helped reinvent the comic book by focusing on the single
element that had until then been largely ignored—the content.
The Marvel Age and Comics Fandom
In his pre-Marvel career, Stan Lee had never really succeeded with or enjoyed the
superhero genre. In fact, the 1950s were a bad time for superheroes across the
comics industry. By the end of the decade, most publishers specialized in one or two
genres and were hanging on through what they hoped was a temporary recession.
Dell published the Disney licenses. Harvey comic books featured friendly ghosts
and Richie Rich. Martin Goodman’s comic-book line comprised westerns and
science-fiction monster tales. DC Comics was the only company still in the
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superhero business; they had never stopped publishing Superman, Batman, and
Wonder Woman despite industry shake-ups or the waning popularity of the genre.
In the mid-1950s, DC launched several new superhero series that met with a
degree of success. In 1956, the company published Showcase #4, featuring a fresh
take on the Golden Age superhero The Flash. The new Flash stories had a soap-
opera edge and humor—although he was the fastest man alive, the Flash was late for
everything. Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics would tweak the superhero genre much
further, but the Flash was the first character since World War II to demonstrate that
the genre could be popular again. The Flash was also a harbinger of the shape that
comic books would eventually take, by appealing to two distinct audiences: young
readers who enjoyed him on his own merits, and older readers who took pleasure in
the nostalgic reminder that he provided of the comic books of their youth. Flash was
spun off into his own title, and DC followed up with a revived version of the Green
Lantern. Then, in 1960, the company launched a group book, Justice League of
America, which teamed the newcomers with Superman, Batman and Wonder
Woman. When Stan Lee introduced his distinct brand of superhero comics in 1961,
he was following in the footsteps of DC Comics.
In his memoir and media interviews, Lee generally credits his wife with
providing the crucial inspiration to take on superheroes. As Lee tells it, he was at a
crossroads in his career, creatively blocked and unhappy that he was stuck producing
schlock in a kiddie medium. He had tried on numerous occasions to write newspaper
comic strips and radio scripts, but none of those efforts had been lucrative enough for
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him to quit comics. Then, one day when he was ready to give up, his wife told him
to try again, and this time to write comic books the way he wanted, and never mind
the consequences. That advice, Lee says, gave him the jumpstart needed to go back
to work and create a new breed of comic-book characters—the Marvel Universe.
But Marvel Comics did not spring whole from the imagination of Stan Lee, or
anyone else. A close look at the publishing record shows that it was the product of a
slow and deliberate experimentation with already established genres that through a
confluence of timing and luck proved to be successful.
The impetus to give superheroes another try came from publisher Martin
Goodman, who had heard that DC’s superhero titles were experiencing a growth in
sales (Daniels, 1993). Throughout most of his company’s history, Goodman was
content to chase trends. His typical strategy was to flood the market with shoddy
imitations that yielded a profit by overwhelming the competition on newsstands.
Goodman directed Lee to come up with a new superhero team in the same way that
he had always set Lee loose onto genres that he felt were underexploited. This time,
however, Goodman’s comic-book line was limited by its distribution deal to eight
monthly titles, and so Stan Lee’s foray into superheroes was more measured and
precise.
The first comic-book title of the so-called Marvel Age of Comics was The
Fantastic Four, cover-dated November 1961. Rather than a full-fledged
commitment to the superhero genre, The Fantastic Four was more of an experiment:
its earliest issues were published alongside other, more traditional titles in the
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Goodman line, including Amazing Adult Fantasy and Linda Carter, Student Nurse.
But almost from the start, it was clear that the Fantastic Four characters were
different. They weren’t as invincible as Superman or as crafty as Batman. They
didn’t even wear costumes until their third outing. They had superpowers, but they
were defined as much by their weaknesses as their strengths. Mr. Fantastic, the
Invisible Girl, the Human Torch and the Thing squabbled, resented one another and
got depressed. In short, they were human. Or they were at least closer to possessing
human qualities than any of their spandex-clad predecessors. They may not have
been three-dimensional characters, but two dimensions was twice as many as had
been typical in superhero comics to that point. They also created an interesting
dichotomy, as if these heroes' secondary characteristics were a running commentary
on their primary ones. As Woody Allen would later become a genre-expanding
romantic comedy hero, Spider-Man and his rooftop soliloquies did the same for the
costumed adventure hero.
On a stylistic level, Lee’s witty, playful dialogue served as the ideal
counterpoint to Kirby’s dynamic artwork. As comics historian R.C. Harvey
commented, “If Jack Kirby wrote the music for the Marvel revolution, then Stan Lee
wrote the lyrics. Lee wrote with his tongue in his cheek and he established a rapport
with his readers.” (R.C. Harvey, personal communication, June 2000). In the pages
of The Fantastic Four, Lee and Kirby ignored the traditional way of depicting
superheroes, and drew on elements from other genres. They set stories against
pedestrian backdrops, milking the juxtaposition for humorous and dramatic effect.
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In issue #9, for example, the superheroes were evicted from their headquarters for
falling behind on the rent. Romance played a key role in plotlines: the Thing gained
a girlfriend, and Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl were an on-again, off-again
item.
By 1962, Stan Lee could tell that the superhero experiment had struck a
chord with certain readers. The overwhelmingly positive tone of the fan mail
pouring into his office prompted him to reshape the Goodman comic-book line to
incorporate more superheroes. Working again with Jack Kirby, Lee followed up
with The Incredible Hulk, featuring a radioactive monster who rampaged his way
into superhero-style adventures. Then he converted Journey Into Mystery into a
superhero title starring The Mighty Thor. Another Lee-Kirby creation, Thor was a
Norse god who wielded a mystic hammer as he battled his adopted brother Loki and
an assortment of other mythological villains. Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense
underwent similar conversions to introduce Ant-Man and Iron Man, respectively. In
the pages of Strange Tales, Lee and Steve Ditko introduced Dr. Strange, a master
magician who was the most elegantly bizarre character from that era. The final issue
of Amazing Fantasy, a summer 1962 release, contained an 11-page origin story for
an arachnid-like, red-and-blue figure named Spider-Man.
In these early Marvel efforts, Lee wasn’t drawing on a lifetime of superhero
experience, but rather applying his strengths—character-driven romances and
humorous dialogue—to a genre that typically had relied only on action-adventure
tropes. In effect, he blended the romance, science-fiction monster, and superhero
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genres to expand the comic-book field’s perception of what could be done with such
stories. Indeed, many of the early issues of The Fantastic Four featured storylines in
which the team battled monsters that would not have been out of place in the
company’s late-1950s science-fiction books. Lee was also fortunate to have artists
like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko available. With the so-called Marvel Method of
comics production, he maximized their strengths as artists and storytellers. Kirby,
for example, grounded Lee’s stories with a visual authority that few others in the
comic-book field could match.
In September 1963, Martin Goodman’s comic-book company, now officially
known as Marvel Comics, launched The Avengers, a team book to compete with
DC’s Justice League of America. Soon after, The X-Men and Daredevil appeared.
Lee’s writing became sharper and more assured, and the overt influence of the
science fiction and romance titles receded in favor of a standardized version of the
new Marvel style—tongue-in-cheek depictions of superheroes with problems. To a
large extent, the production climate predetermined the course that comic books had
to take in order to reach an older readership. Because of the comics code, horror and
crime comics were still forbidden, as was content that was even remotely sexual in
nature. The code’s regulations presupposed that comic books were for kids, and the
strict manner in which the Comics Code Authority interpreted the code kept comics
at a child-like level for several years. Stan Lee figured out a way to subvert the code
without violating any of its tenets, by taking an ostensibly preposterous genre that
seemed to have run its course and grounding it in a semblance of reality.
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Adult readers responded favorably to the Marvel line. Many of them were
rediscovering comics again after having abandoned them as teenagers, but others
were new to the fold. On dozens of American college campuses, Marvel clubs were
formed, and characters such as the Hulk and Dr. Strange became dorm mascots. On
one level, this older readership was drawn in by Marvel’s clever take on a narrative
form that still held nostalgic value. But on another level, the increased sophistication
of Marvel comic books lent them a heightened polysemic quality that endeared them
to a mature audience.
O’Brien (2002) writes: “Marvel’s creations were grist for any kind of
rumination, high or low. They provided a shorthand for categorizing personalities
and situations (an analogy for almost anything could be found somewhere within the
rapidly expanding Marvel Universe), and, most satisfying of all, could be taken as
frivolously or as seriously as you wanted.” For example, the X-Men, who
throughout their 40-year history were portrayed as outcast mutants hounded and
persecuted by “normal society,” could be read from many different angles. Seizing
on the theme of xenophobia, Strömberg (2003) interprets them as an allegory of the
African American struggle for civil rights, with the two mutant leaders, Professor X
and Magneto, standing in for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively.
Like Luther King, Jr., Professor X argues for coexistence, while his nemesis
Magneto seeks to overthrow the status quo (Strömberg, 2003). Kaplan (2003)
suggests that those early X-Men storylines, conceived by two Jewish creators,
evinces more of a “Jew as outsider” metaphor, a connection that was later made
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more explicit when Magneto was revealed to be a survivor of a Nazi concentration
camp.
Savage, Jr. (1990) argues that comic books after 1954 were less reflective of
American society because they didn’t tackle Vietnam or issues of crime and morality
directly. But this view discounts the interpretive faculties of the comics-reading
audience, and the ways that Marvel addressed social issues through metaphorical
representation. To be sure, by turning the superhero narrative in on itself, Stan Lee’s
Marvel comic books were more inward looking and self-referential. This did not,
however, translate to narratives that were devoid of meaning. If anything, the
Marvel books achieved an intensified relevance for their audience. In particular, the
theme of alienation that ran thick in so many Marvel characters—from Spider-Man
to the X-Men to the Hulk—resonated strongly with readers who felt similarly
isolated from peer and social groups. As Berger (1974) points out, Marvel
superheroes were still driven by the fundamental impulse to fight crime and evil, but
“they now have a sociological conception of man, closely tied to liberal political
views” (p. 171). Stan Lee’s words gave Marvel a radical thrust, while Jack Kirby’s
monsters and hulking machines typified an ugliness that signaled a rift in the social
order (Berger, 1974).
From a production perspective, Marvel was different from any of the comic-
book publishers that came before. With limited resources at his disposal, Lee
pioneered a fluid back-and-forth system between him and his artists that worked to
the line’s lasting benefit. Spider-Man, for example, did not spring wholly formed
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from Lee’s imagination. Rather, he was the product of a general idea initially put to
paper by Jack Kirby. Unhappy with Kirby’s bombastic take, Lee turned the idea
over to Steve Ditko, who refashioned Peter Parker as a frail teenager with slumped
shoulders, bottle-thick glasses, and a homemade costume (Lee & Mair, 2002). In
later years, this muddled system of creation would cause tension among all three
men insofar as creative credit was concerned, but at the time, it worked exceptionally
well on the comic-book page.
The Amazing Spider-Man was the clearest illustration of the dramatic
accomplishment of the Marvel approach. Steve Ditko’s moody and atmospheric
linework took Spider-Man away from the teen-hero model that Stan Lee had
originally wanted, and the title became an emotionally brutal yet humorous
examination of the frustrations of teenage life. Ditko’s art emphasized the tortured
quality of Peter Parker’s high school existence. Parker did not find humor in the
schoolyard injustices he was forced to endure or the endless string of girls who shot
him down. He was twisted with pain and anger and insult, and, as Ditko took over
more of the plot duties with Lee's permission, Peter Parker fell deeper and deeper
into a world where the adult role models were craven, distrustful, and self-interested.
Stan Lee leavened Ditko’s intensity with humorous dialogue that lightened the
mood, and would later with former romance artist John Romita emphasize the wish-
fulfillment aspects of the Spider-Man character. But the heart of the Spider-Man
concept remains the scorched earth of Ditko's worldview, his moody art and specific
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take on the "people are just no darn good" attitude that has always been a popular
American culture counter-rhythm.
In the process of establishing the early Marvel line, Stan Lee demonstrated as
much editorial savvy as writing skill. After the initial success of The Fantastic Four,
he found a way to replicate that success across a majority of his line. He developed a
method of working with his best artists that maximized their talents. With less-
talented artists, he taught them to work in the style—namely Jack Kirby’s and Steve
Ditko’s—that was moving comics off newsstands. Lee also began crossing
characters into one another’s titles to emphasize the coherence of the line and to
create a brand identity. All of these efforts worked. By 1965, although overall
comic-book industry sales were stagnant, Marvel’s share of the market had increased
substantially (Daniels, 1993).
In the latter half of the 1960s, Marvel entrenched its position by adding more
artists and titles. Steve Ditko eventually left Marvel amid creative differences with
Lee, but Jack Kirby stayed on until 1970. A few DC artists who had previously
worked freelance for Marvel using false names ditched their pseudonyms and joined
up for real. Others, like Don Heck and Werner Roth, who had drawn work in other
genres for Lee, were put to work on the lower-tier superhero books. Recognizing that
the Kirby art style was driving the company’s success, Lee encouraged his artists to
provide work that was visually similar. Some, like John Romita, took to the
approach quickly (Romita eventually taught new artists some of the tricks) while
others, like Heck and EC veteran Johnny Craig, suffered for having to take on an
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approach ill-suited to their skills. DC Comics, Marvel’s main rival, still enjoyed
greater market share, but it quickly tried to emulate the Marvel style with a title
called Doom Patrol and Marvel’s appeal to youth with a title called Teen Titans,
whose heroes lived in the basement of a discotheque. The DC writer Bob Haney
would say in a 1997 interview that DC interpreted Marvel's growing success as
having something to do with paeans to youth and ugly comic book covers. DC had
shown that superheroes could be viable again, but Stan Lee made them fashionable
and DC would spend decades trying to emulate his achievement. The few
companies that remained in the industry, such as Archie, Tower and Charlton, all
launched superhero titles of their own that were imitative of the Marvel style. Stan
Lee had gone from being a bottom-feeding trend-follower to an industry trendsetter.
Around the time that Marvel Comics was getting off the ground, a movement
of comic-book aficionados and collectors was forming through interpersonal and
postal networks. The movement, which came to be known as comics fandom,
developed slowly, and it was to a large extent an offshoot of science-fiction fandom,
which had been around since at least the 1930s. The primary communication
medium for the early comics fans were fanzines, homemade amateur publications of
varying quality about everything from the Golden Age superheroes to EC Comics.
The first fanzine that focused exclusively on comic books and strips was Comic
Collector’s News, published in 1947 with the slogan “Your Comics are Valuable.
Don’t throw them away” (Schelly, 1995). Along with articles, the fanzine offered a
venue for collectors to communicate with one another and to post advertisements for
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back issues. It was also the only known fanzine about comics to be published in the
1940s.
In 1952, Ted White published The Story of Superman, a 22-page
mimeographed booklet that presaged the interests of early fandom—namely,
superheroes. With the support of William Gaines, EC Comics’s large following also
produced a host of fanzines, including The EC Fan Journal, EC Scoop, The EC
World Press and Hoohah (Goulart, 1991). Despite its energy, the EC fan movement
did not survive long after the company’s titles were cancelled. But, as Goulart
(1991) notes, EC’s fandom contained the basic elements of the comic-book fandom
that would develop in the 1960s. The EC and superhero fanzines of the 1950s
emphasized comic-book history and the indexing of favorite titles (Pustz, 1999).
Eventually, they expanded their focus to include news about current comics, gossip,
reviews, creator interviews, parodies of popular characters, and even some original
comic-book stories by aspiring writers and artists (Pustz, 1999).
Some of the earliest fan interactions were facilitated by comic-book
professionals. In 1960, Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, who would work together on
the fanzine Alter Ego, began corresponding through the mail after being referred to
each other by DC editor Julius Schwartz. Bails wrote to Thomas: “I can’t tell you
how happy I am to find another All-Star enthusiast after all these years” (quoted in
Schelly, 1995, p. 23). Schwartz, who had been active in science-fiction fandom in
the early 1930s, began publishing the full addresses of letter writers in the letters
pages of DC titles. That seemingly simple move accelerated the growth of comic-
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book fandom, giving comics fans the ability to reach other by mail, and to exchange
fanzines and back issues. In 1964, Jerry Bails published Who’s Who in Comics
Fandom, which listed the names and addresses of 1,600 active fans. In October
1966, there were an estimated 90 fanzines being published (Schelly, 1995).
Circulations ranged from a few dozen copies to several thousand copies for popular
fanzines such as Alter Ego.
In his memoir about his early days in fandom, Bill Schelly (2001) recounts
the delight he felt when he was 13 years old and discovered that there were hundreds
of other people in the country who were as interested in comics books as he was: “I
was at first surprised, then thrilled that (supposedly) sober and intelligent adults
openly expressed their enthusiasm for comics. It gave me a strong message of
validation. For the first time, I envisioned myself reading comics for the rest of my
life” (p. 49). For Schelly, who published his own fanzines, fandom satisfied his
pent-up need to share information, to trade and sell old comic books, and to express
opinions about comic books. Comics fanzines helped him and his fellow fans
connect and achieve a sense of history about their hobby. In their role as historical
records, fanzines also championed the proper assignment of credit for many writers
and artists who had labored anonymously for decades in the comic-book industry.
Comic Art, for example, was the first publication to publicly credit Carl Barks as the
writer and artist on Disney’s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics (Goulart,
1991).
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Many of the early comic-book fans were avid collectors, and through their
informal networks of exchange, certain key comics issues increased in value.
Schelly (2001) recalls his disbelief at seeing an advertisement that offered Captain
America #1 for 15 dollars. But the conversion of comic books from texts to
consumables was one of the motive forces of comic-book fandom. Robert M.
Overstreet spelled this out in the introduction to the first edition of the Comic Book
Price Guide:
Everyone connected with the publication of this book advocates the
collecting of comic books for fun and pleasure, as well as nostalgia, art, and
cultural values. Second to this is investment, which if wisely placed in the
best quality books (condition and contents considered), will lead to dividends
over the long term. (quoted in Goulart, 1991, p. 316)
This new relationship of comics consumers to the comic-book form—nostalgia, art
and consumption for profit—played out in the comic-book conventions that were
held around the country, beginning in the 1960s. The anchor of most conventions
was a dealer room full of boxes stuffed with comics, which collectors could troll to
find the back issues they needed to fill out their collections. As Pustz (1999) points
out, the appearance of a comic-book price guide was divisive in the fan community:
those who were interested in buying, selling and trading comics as they would coins
or stamps viewed it as a positive step toward normalizing the market, while longtime
fans felt it detracted from the nostalgic and reading pleasures of comic-book
narratives. Early media reports about fandom emphasized the quirky aspects of
grown men and women collecting this form of disposable literature. But many
comics fans felt marginalized by mainstream culture, and sought to correct the
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broader culture’s misunderstandings about their hobby. Convention organizer Shel
Dorf told a Newsweek reporter in 1965: “We are a group of people who have not had
the right kind of publicity in the past. We’re looked upon as a type of oddballs.
However we are quite serious. We are great appreciators of the creative works of
various artists and writers” (quoted in Schelly, 1995, p. 80).
Comics fandom’s roots were the EC titles and the DC superhero revival, but
it achieved full flower with the arrival of Marvel Comics. The early Marvel titles
attracted large teenage and adult readerships, and inspired numerous company-
specific fanzines, such as Fantastic Fanzine, Marvel Mirror and Irving Forbush
Gazette. Marvel fans, or “Marvel zombies,” viewed themselves as superior to other
comics fans and the company’s creators, especially Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as the
harbingers of a new golden age in comics. The re-emergence of superheroes
energized comics fandom, and Marvel Comics was producing the field’s most
innovative take on the genre.
Stan Lee responded to the growing fan movement with far more enthusiasm
and energy than any comics professional who preceded him. EC’s William Gaines
had encouraged fan participation and a few DC editors kept up regular
correspondence with die-hard readers, but Lee took it to a new level. He maximized
every tool at his disposal to advertise to readers and to forge a deeper connection
between consumer and producer. Marvel Comics published creator credits, which
Lee spiced up with playful nicknames such as “Jack ‘King’ Kirby” and “Jazzy John
Romita.” In contrast to the staid seriousness of DC’s superhero titles, Lee amused
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readers with editorial asides that commented on the absurdity of his storylines.
Some asides were used to clarify plot points, while others were simply narrative
tools that broke up the seriousness of the action. On the splash page of The Fantastic
Four #38, the title characters are standing on a giant photograph of a Kirby-drawn
alien space machine. Lee’s caption read: “No, Jolly Jack Kirby hasn’t finally popped
his cork! There really is an explanation for this scene!” In the opening caption of
The Amazing Spider-Man #5, “Marked for Destruction by Dr. Doom!”, Lee deflated
the gravitas of the narrative premise thusly:
Have you ever noticed, when you start reading a comic mag, the opening
caption tells you that you’re about to read the most exciting story ever
written…with the most dangerous menace, and the most suspenseful plot??
Well, we’re going to try to be more honest! This may not be the greatest
story ever written! You may have read abut more exciting villains! And you
may have thrilled to better plots! But, y’know something? We can’t see how!
Lee solicited readers by speaking to them directly and pointing out various fourth-
world absurdities in his plotlines, thereby adding another layer of enjoyment to the
Marvel titles. Older readers could enjoy Marvel’s genre-bending qualities without
taking the content too seriously. Lee gave some readers permission to read Marvel
Comics far past the point when previous generations might have put them down, and
other readers an opportunity to pick them up as cool, ironic objects.
By 1963, letters from readers were pouring in to the Marvel office at a rate of
hundreds per week. Lee took special care to cater to the burgeoning fan community
by responding personally to letters and questionnaires submitted by fanzine editors.
His attention to fandom was reciprocated in 1963, when he won the “Best Writer”
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and “Best Editor” categories of the fan-based “Alley Awards” (Schelly, 1995). Lee
also appealed to the larger comic book readership that did not necessarily identify
with fandom—readers who didn’t belong to clubs or exchange letters with other
fans. When readers admonished Marvel for not giving the Fantastic Four costumes,
Lee prompted Jack Kirby to outfit the heroes in traditional superhero garb. Fans and
careful readers who wrote in to point out mistakes in storylines were awarded a
Marvel “No-Prize,” a fake prize that nevertheless rewarded reader involvement.
In the pages of Marvel’s titles, Lee flattered his readers and praised them for
their taste and their intimate knowledge of story continuity. In the tone of a kindly,
with-it uncle, he invigorated the letters and commentary pages and made readers feel
connected to a larger Marvel community. Lee devoted space to the company’s
promotional news, selling the company as a producer and a brand in columns labeled
“Bullpen Bulletins” and “Stan’s Soapbox,” which featured a mix of personal gossip,
upcoming issue information, and military-style slogans, such as “Face Front, True
Believers!”, “’Nuff said,” and “Excelsior!” In the June 1966 edition of “Bullpen
Bulletins,” Lee recounted a visit from to the Marvel bullpen by director Federico
Fellini: “He really seems to dig our mags, and we spent a wonderful couple of hours
showing him around and swapping stories! So the next time someone gives you a
disdainful look when you mention being a Marvel Marcher, you might just casually
mention the kinda company you’re in!” In the same column, Lee jokingly took DC
Comics to task for trying to imitate the Marvel style. Lee wrote: “Though the
newsstands grow ever more cluttered with inferior imitations, the mighty Marvel
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magazines will still stand out like shining beacons, guiding you to the finest in
reading entertainment!” The November 1966 “Bullpen Bulletins” spoke directly to
readers:
We figure this is as good a time as any to tell you how proud of you we are.
Proud of the way you supported us when we first started the Marvel Age of
Comics, and the way your support has never faltered thru all the growing
pains we’ve experienced together. Proud of the way you’ve reacted to our
“no-prize” idea—the revolutionary new concept in which we proclaimed that
we never wanted any of our treasured readers to lose a contest—
consequently, we would award nothing but “no-prizes”, because if there were
no winners, then there couldn’t be any losers. Proud of the way you never
made it necessary for us to bribe you in order to win your support—we never
had to talk down to you—never had to compromise our principles, or yours—
never had to try to alibi ourselves out of the many bonehead mistakes we’ve
made over the years…
If our mags are good, it’s because of YOU! And we just wanted you to know
how we feel, and to repeat our credo—We’ll never sell you short, frantic
one—‘cause we’re nothing without you! (Bullpen Bulletins, November
1966)
In 1965, Marvel created its own fan community with the Marvel Marching
Society. For one dollar, members received a membership card, stickers, a
membership button, and a letter of introduction signed by “The Bullpen Gang.” The
club, which had its own theme song, also issued various premiums, including a
record disc featuring various writers and editorial people cracking jokes about comic
books and one other. In his irreverent fashion, Lee treated the club like a goof,
which gave many readers permission to participate without feeling as if they were
joining a kids’ club. As Pustz (1999) notes, Stan Lee’s Marvel sold more than comic
books; it sold “a participatory world for readers, a way of life for its true believers”
(p. 56). When university clubs started their own chapters of the M.M.M.S., a new
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channel of publicity opened for Stan Lee. From the mid-1960s onward, he became a
regular on the college-lecture circuit, talking to students and faculty about the
revitalized field of comics. Lee’s lectures usually consisted of a few jokes and an
extemporaneous speech about the Marvel approach to comic books, followed by
audience questions, but they were always well attended. College students found his
speeches to be a welcome relief from the typical lecture fare to be found on
campuses in the 1960s.
When the media began to take notice of Marvel’s popularity, Stan Lee was
always at the forefront of the newspaper and magazine articles, and radio and
television stories. Through his tireless publicity efforts, Lee became the spokesman
and the symbol for Marvel Comics, transcending his role as principal writer and
editor of the company’s line. He became a minor celebrity and the figure most
associated with Marvel’s success, much to the chagrin of his co-creators Jack Kirby
and Steve Ditko. (I will discuss this conflict at greater length in Chapter Four.) In
an article that was typical, reporter Noah James (1972) described Lee as “a maker of
myths, the father of the superhero. He alone has elevated the comic book to a form
of contemporary literature responsive to the changing modes and interests of a
generation” (p. 3A).
Such hyperbole provided Lee with emotional and financial benefits, but it
also put him at the center of the comic-book reading experience for the majority of
Marvel fans. Even during the 1970s and 1980s, when he stopped writing and editing
the Marvel line, Lee would receive hundreds of letters per month, as if he were still
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directing the fates of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and all the rest. Many letter
writers sought to connect with Lee in a way that suggested their strong parasocial
interactions with Marvel’s characters. Harry Mizutani, an eighth-grader from
Toronto, Canada, wanted Lee to know that when he got depressed, he read comics to
forget his troubles (personal letter, October 10, 1980). High schooler Robert Berkey
wrote to inquire about employment with Marvel (personal letter, August 19, 1980).
Ten-year-old Jason Palter had an idea for a “superheroe” called Norhawk, whose
secret identity is Steve Action. Norhawk has powerful arms and legs, and can fly
and move superfast. His ring gives him “very special powers” like the ability to turn
invisible and speak various space languages. “Would you please let me know when
you have decided if you will make Norhawk famous,” Palter wrote (personal letter,
August 20, 1980). Charlie Hutler (personal letter, August 3, 1980), of Trenton, New
Jersey, had a pressing question for Lee: “Why in a cast of thousands of Marvel
characters that try to parallel real life, is no one gay? Is it because your generation
can’t deal with the topic?” Carol Donovan’s son Nelson, age 10 and a half, had
created a character named “Hot Fudge,” to fill his perceived need for black
superhero women (personal letter, 1979). “Hot Fudge,” who possessed magical
melting powers and an Ermine Boa, had test-marketed well at Nelson’s inner-city
private school. Would Stan be interested in using her at Marvel? Lee’s office
overflowed with entreaties, threats, avowals of admiration, business propositions,
postcards, Bar Mitzvah invitations, requests for old comics, complaints, and
questions.
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In tandem with the growth of comics fandom, Marvel’s sales increased until
it became the market leader—albeit of a stagnant industry—in the early 1970s. By
then, the comics business was a dismal place compared with the vibrant, booming
industry Stan Lee had entered three decades before. Where once there had been
dozens of scrappy firms competing for control of a burgeoning mass medium, now
there were only a few companies scuffling over a dwindling marketplace. In 1952
monthly comic-book sales totaled 59,800,000 copies; in 1979, that number had fallen
to 18,500,000 (Parsons, 1991). Comics were no longer a mass medium. The decline
brought on by television had been exacerbated by the disappearance of traditional
distribution outlets, such as soda shops and “mom and pop” stores, and rising cover
prices, which dissuaded young buyers. Comic books now attracted an audience of
older collectors and nostalgia buffs, but they were losing ground among children and
teenagers, two groups essential to the medium’s long-term survival.
When the comics code’s regulations were relaxed in 1971, Marvel and DC
tried to reinvigorate the market with other genres—horror comics, romance comics,
and kung-fu comics. This stabilized both of the major publishers and minor
publishers like Charlton by allowing a number of moderate selling comics that drew
on classic ideas instead of further diluting the superhero pool and overtaxing the
young group of writers and artists that were replacing those who had been around
since World War II. But superheroes—in part due to the lasting influence of the
initial Marvel Age and the tastes of comics fandom—remained the only consistently
saleable genre. Indeed, the link between comics fandom and the superhero genre has
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meant that superheroes have dominated the comic-book business ever since 1961.
Why was this so? Just as there was nothing inherent in the comic-book form that
determined its function as a children’s medium, there was no obvious reason why the
ever-shifting genres that were popular in the 1940s and 1950s should have given way
so completely to superheroes over the last 40 years. In other countries, such as Japan
and France, there is a multiplicity of genres that sell to audiences of all ages. In the
United States, however, through the union of fan tastes and company interest, Stan
Lee’s Marvel Comics begat a superhero revolution that persists to this day.
McAllister (2001) and others argue that the dominance of Marvel and DC, and their
reliance on superheroes, was ultimately bad for the comic-book industry.
Superheroes turn away potential readers and overshadow other, less creatively
restricted genres. Nevertheless, there have been several comics creators who
managed to develop the comic-book medium, even within the confines of the
superhero genre.
Writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne, for example, turned the
marginal X-Men, which spent five years in the early 1970s running reprints of earlier
adventures, into Marvel’s most consistently engaging title. Their seminal, much-
copied 1980s run set a new standard for superhero soap opera and high adventure
perfectly pitched for the misunderstood, put-upon, and ultimately romantic teenagers
and teenagers-at-heart that made up Marvel’s core audience. Claremont’s noble and
relentlessly verbose mutants evolved into Marvel’s best-loved characters, and he
became the most popular writer since Stan Lee. The Uncanny X-Men, as the book
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was later known, was the industry’s top seller for much of the 1980s. It also became
an attractive licensing property to Hollywood based less on Stan Lee and Jack
Kirby’s original creation than on Claremont’s cagey revamp.
Daredevil, another second-string title, received a boost from a young writer-
artist named Frank Miller, who stripped the blind superhero to his film-noir
essentials and created some of the most visually inventive mainstream comics of the
1980s. “The Man Without Fear,” as Daredevil’s tagline described him, was the 1964
brainchild of Stan Lee and Bill Everett. The character went through several
incarnations, including a long run by comic-book stylist Gene Colan. But it was
Miller’s Daredevil—a dark, brooding crimefighter who metes out street justice with
a seriousness that is more Bruce Lee than Superman—that became the definitive
version and inspired the big-budget 2003 movie starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer
Garner. While the comic-book business stagnated, then, the comics medium became
more sophisticated to serve its increasingly older audience.
The prevalence of fan-collectors among the comic-book readership helped
boost the profile of comics writers and artists. In 1982, Marvel introduced Epic
Comics, a mature-audiences line spun off from its fantasy and science-fiction
newsstand magazine Epic Illustrated. Epic allowed creators to retain the copyright
to their work and to explore more sophisticated thematic and subject matter. On the
regular titles, Marvel began paying royalties to writers and artists who reached
specific sales targets, in effect tying their pay to their popularity. Several marquee
creators, including Miller and Byrne, had become so popular that they could sell a
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book based on their names alone. That drawing power greatly improved their
position in negotiations for projects and page rates. The Marvel incentive plan came
about, in part, as a result of a more enlightened management, which saw the benefits,
both tangible and intangible, of letting the talent share in the rewards of their labors.
But it was also very much a reaction to a changed comic-book marketplace where
buyers hunted down back issues drawn by their favorite artists and fan tastes ruled.
In the 1980s, comic book readers abandoned newsstands and shifted their
dollars to specialty stores that focused more-or-less exclusively on comic books and
related items, such as protective plastic bags and backing boards. These hundreds,
and eventually thousands, of shops constituted a new distribution network for Marvel
and its competitors, one that gave them direct access to their customers. With sales
drying up on newsstands, the direct-sales market was a welcome boon for the
industry. The owners of comic book stores were typically devoted fans, which made
them ideal marketers for the product. And the comic books they ordered were non-
returnable, in exchange for a higher discount than the newsstands received, enabling
publishers to stabilize their print runs and to minimize their losses from returns. By
1982, Marvel was logging half of its sales from comic shops, and it was producing
titles exclusively for them (Daniels, 1993). Today, 80 percent of the company’s
books are sold through the direct market.
Another effect of the direct-sales system was that it lowered the barriers of
entry for new publishers. It was no longer just Marvel and DC duking it out for
dominance of a large, unwieldy newsstand-based market. Anyone with a few
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thousand bucks and some basic writing and drawing skills could gain access to the
burgeoning network of comic-book stores, and perhaps steal a piece of the pie from
the Big Two (Goulart, 1991). At first, there were only a few entrants, among them
Cerebus the Aardvark, by Canadian self-publisher Dave Sim, and Raw, an anthology
of art comics edited by underground comix legend Art Spiegelman and eventual New
Yorker art director Francoise Mouly. Then, in 1981, Pacific Comics published
Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers by Jack Kirby, and a slew of companies
came tumbling in. Eclipse Comics, Comico, Fantagraphics, Dark Horse Comics—
some of these firms mimicked the formula of costumed superchampions and their
arch-nemeses, but others took the opportunity to re-introduce old genres and to test
new ones. Most companies were financed by fans, and although they rarely posted
the sales numbers of a Marvel or DC, some of them managed to make a solid return
and to eventually compete for creators and market share.
When two young, unknown artists named Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird hit
it big with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a self-published black-and-white book
whose greatest virtue was a catchy title, the publishing floodgates swung wide open.
Dozens of tiny companies sprouted into existence to fulfill the seemingly insatiable
demand of comic shop owners for a piece of the Next Big Thing. Collectors rushed
to scoop up the hundreds of titles glutting the market, on the assumption that even
the lousiest of the lot would be worth a premium some day. Unscrupulous publishers
started multiple companies to make dozens of issues with the valuable “#1” in the
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corner. As was inevitable, the bubble burst, in 1987, and most of the small
companies were driven out of business, taking many a comic shop with them.
On the whole, though, the emergence of new independent companies
benefited the medium by bringing in fresh perspectives and demonstrating the
viability of publishing outside the auspices of Marvel and DC. When the dust
cleared, there were still a dozen or so active publishers and comics were in the throes
of a creative renaissance. In 1986, DC released two ambitious, creator-driven works
to tremendous critical acclaim: Miller’s stylish Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,
which radically reinvented the titular hero, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’
Watchmen, a sprawling superhero series that was heavy on narrative and literary
symbolism. That same year, Art Spiegelman published Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, the
story of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust that had been serialized in the
avant-garde RAW magazine, for which he was later awarded a special Pulitzer Prize.
Once more, magazines and academic journals wrote about comics as literature, a
discussion that Stan Lee’s Marvel had been at the center of 20 years before.
Yet even a torrent of press coverage wasn’t sufficient to return comic books
to mass-media status. Throughout the late 1980s, comic-book circulation held steady
at roughly 20,000,000 copies per month. In 1991, Parsons estimated that less than
10 percent of U.S. schoolchildren were regular comic-book readers, compared to
Zorbaugh’s 1944 finding that 95 percent of boys and 91 percent of girls read comic
books. Comic books had evolved from a mass medium to a specialized medium
where the superhero genre was dominant and comics were consumed as collectibles
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and as texts. As Pustz (1999) notes, “the rise of the direct market for comics in the
1980s has helped to remove them from the daily lives of most Americans… As a
result, some Americans are probably only dimly aware that comic books still exist,
let alone continue to represent an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars per
year” (p. 209).
In Chapter Three, I will delve further into the nature of comics fandom. But
for now, let it suffice to point out that the rise of comics fandom drastically changed
the relationship of consumer to producer. Comic-book fans today are more akin to
hobbyists and collectors, organized into various reading communities according to
their tastes. Some read only superhero comics, perhaps exclusively the products of a
particular company, others follow the work of particular creators, while a minority of
comic-book readers eschew superheroes in favor of alternative works in other
genres.
Marvel and DC, who still dominate the industry, have long since recognized
that their assets (i.e., their characters) can be more profitably exploited as licenses for
other products, such as movies, television shows, and merchandise. The 1966
Batman television show, for example, inspired merchandising spinoffs that
collectively sold more than $150,000,000 (Goulart, 1991). This success came only a
few years after DC was considering dropping the Batman titles, due to lackluster
sales (Spurlock, 2001). It was also what prompted Warner to buy DC in the late
1960s. More recently, Marvel earned $20,000,000 from the box-office gross of the
first Spider-Man movie (Zuckerman, Peers, & Song, 2004). In the first fiscal quarter
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of 2004, Marvel Enterprises generated $19,600,000, or 16 percent, of its total
$122,300,000 in revenue from publishing. Licensing revenues, at $50,100,000,
accounted for 41 percent of total revenue, with the remainder generated by the
company’s toy division (Form 10-Q, 2004). The ability of Marvel to license its
characters for motion pictures is in part due to the humanization of the company’s
superheroes that Stan Lee brought about with his artists (Berger, 1996).
But Lee’s role in the transformation of American comics goes much deeper
than that. Nye (1970) argues that the relationship of the popular artist to an audience
is indirect and uncritical, because of the numerous middlemen (e.g., editors,
publishers, advertisers) who stand between them and influence the final product.
The audience depersonalizes the artist and distances her from her art. Arguably, Nye
might not consider the comic book of today to fall within his definition of a popular
art. But what’s clear is that his conception didn’t account for the way that reading
communities (e.g., comic-book fans) could exert such a tremendous influence on a
medium and alter its development both as an industry and an art form.
When comic books were in need of a fresh take in the early 1960s, Stan Lee
and his artists provided it with a breed of superheroes that were attuned to the Pop
Art sensibility of the time. The Fantastic Four weren’t really superheroes at first, but
when comics readers related to them as such, Lee changed the course of his products
and his company. In this way, the articulation of comics production and
consumption resulted in a wholly different way of conceiving of comics on both
sides. By monitoring consumption through letters, newsstand sales, and interaction
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with fans, Lee carried this articulation forward so that Marvel became not just a
place with quirky heroes, but also the starting and end point in the feedback loop
between producer and consumer.
Eventually, Lee converted his entire comics line to the type of superheroes
that comics fans wanted to read. Marvel, in turn, transformed the industry by giving
comics renewed cultural status at a time when they were in danger of fading away.
Part of this status was due to Stan Lee’s relentless promotional efforts on behalf of
both Marvel and himself. But the evolution of comics fandom played an equally
important role: as the comic book’s readership dwindled and skewed older, comics
storylines matured and demanded public attention. Almost from the beginning, Lee
paid special notice to comics fandom. He recognized early on the importance of
catering to the faithful, regardless of how few they were in number. Ultimately,
comics fandom grew to encompass nearly the entirety of the current comic-book
reading audience. A large measure of that growth can be traced to the efforts of Stan
Lee.
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CHAPTER THREE
CONSUMING COMICS: AN EXAMINATION OF COMIC-BOOK FANDOM
Despite our great technological advances, the fetishism of large numbers has
left communication gaps and empty spaces. Fanzines are not part of this
established communication apparatus. They are a successful way to
communicate not to the mass but to small groups. In a way they are the
opposite of mass communications. Although mass media such as movies,
television, radio, comics, and records are extensively discussed in them,
fanzines at their most typical remain essentially unprocessed and on a small
scale. (Wertham, 1973, p. 129)
Fandom does not prove that all audiences are active; it does, however, prove
that not all audiences are passive. (Jenkins, 1992b, p. 286)
Comic books are consumed today in vastly different ways than they were in their
heyday as a mass medium during the 1940s and 1950s. While a few titles still enjoy
strong sales on newsstands, the majority of comic books are sold through the direct
market of specialized comic-book retailers that appeared in the 1980s. These comic
shops account for 70 to 85 percent of the industry’s total sales (Rogers, 1999).
Superheroes continue to dominate the field, having grown out of a genre trend in the
1960s that simultaneously nurtured and developed alongside its fan base. In the
1940s, the comics audience was estimated at several million regular readers; since
the late 1990s, that number has remained steady at a few hundred thousand (Bongco,
2000).
The average comic-book reader is male, age 18 or older, with specific genre
tastes and a strong sense of involvement in the medium’s present and past. This
involvement manifests in fan interactions at comic shops and conventions, in
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fanzines and professional magazines, and on Internet message boards and Web sites.
Comics fans devote considerable time and resources to buying, organizing, studying,
and discussing their favorite titles. Within the comic-book community, popular
creators are revered like famous athletes. To a degree that exceeds other media fan
cultures, comics fandom exerts a strong influence on the ongoing aesthetic and
economic development of comic books, as well as the field’s understanding of itself
and its history.
This chapter explores the phenomenon of comics fandom, beginning with its
roots in the early-1960s through its current incarnation as a geographically dispersed
yet unified set of what Fish (1980) terms “interpretive communities.” Fish argues
that the stability of interpretation among different readers and the multiplicity of
ways that an individual reader interprets different texts suggest that there must be
factors outside the reader and the text that mediate interpretation. He introduces the
notion of interpretive communities, which consist of individuals who share
interpretive strategies for constituting the properties and intentions of texts. Stability
of meaning is slippery and temporary; it strengthens and weakens as interpretive
communities gain and lose members, and realign themselves in the ongoing
discourses. In comics fandom, as in other media subcultures, readers do not respond
in a consistent and uniform manner to the cultural products to which they devote
their attention. Consumption in comics fandom is socially structured and tied closely
to meaning construction.
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As Baudrillard (1998) points out, the traditional analysis of consumption in
economic terms is a naïve approach that unduly favors explanations based on needs
and desires. Needs, Baudrillard argues, are not necessarily centered on objects as
much as on “the desire for social meaning,” from which it follows that needs should
not be defined in a simplified, rationalist fashion. He writes:
As a social logic, the system of consumption is established on the basis of
denial of pleasure. Pleasure no longer appears as an objective, as a rational
end, but as the individual rationalization of a process whose objectives lie
elsewhere. Pleasure would define consumption for itself, as autonomous and
final. But consumption is never thus. Although we experience pleasure for
ourselves, when we consume we never do it on our own (the isolated
consumer is the carefully maintained illusion of the ideological discourse on
consumption). Consumers are mutually implicated, despite themselves, in a
general system of exchange and in the production of coded values.
In this sense, consumption is a system of meaning, like language, or like the
kinship system in primitive societies. (p. 46)
Meaning, then, is revealed in the ways that material culture is used. Cultural objects,
such as comic books, express identity and serve as markers of socio-cultural
differentiation (du Gay et al., 1997).
Comics fandom, based in multiple types of consumption (i.e., comic books as
collectibles and comic books as texts), is best understood as layered systems of
meaning. Scholars of popular culture have long since abandoned the notion that
meaning can be found within cultural artifacts themselves. As Du Gay et al. (1997)
point out, “cultural meanings do not arise in things but as a result of our social
discourses and practices which construct the world meaningfully” (p. 14). To
uncover the “meaning systems” inherent in comics fandom, I will examine how
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comic books are used, or consumed, by their audiences, as well as the associated
discourses that surround the consumption of comics.
At the same time, as de Certeau (1984) argues, consumption is also a type of
production, a hidden “poeisis” that struggles to assert itself against the ever-
expanding systems of production (in the economic sense) that seek to close off a
consumer’s selfhood and process of meaning-making. De Certeau writes:
In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous
production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called
'consumption' and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of the
circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity,
in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products
(where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed on it. (p. 31)
Over the last four decades, comics fans have developed, or produced, their own
shared set of codes, rituals, and meanings that are used, for example, to assign status
within the subculture or simply to understand the historical context of contemporary
comic-book narratives. Additionally, in comics fandom, consumption acts on
production in a variety of ways: through fan-creator interactions, the market power
of the core audience, fan and scholarly criticism, and the tendency of comic-book
companies to hire writers, artists and editors from within the fan community.
In his study of role-playing gamers, Fine (1983) argues that a subculture is
more than just a group of individuals who share common cultural elements and
activity patterns. To constitute a subculture, there must also be: 1) communication
networks through which information is exchanged; 2) a sense of identification
among group members and an awareness of a shared subculture; and 3) an
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identification of the group by outsiders, usually in a manner that draws the group
members closer and reinforces their sense of commonality (Fine, 1983). As I will
demonstrate below, comics fandom fulfills all of these criteria. Like fantasy gaming,
comics fandom is a leisure subculture that provides a sense of community for its
members without necessarily eclipsing the importance of other social ties or
subcultures.
Comics fandom, however, reflects a wide spectrum of aesthetic tastes, and in
this regard it is less easily mapped than other media fan cultures. The largest
contingent of comics fans are focused on the superhero genre, but a smaller subgroup
rejects superheroes in favor of alternative works in other genres (e.g., autobiography,
social satire). As Pustz (1999) notes, mainstream comics fans and alternative comics
fans have different goals, practices, and preferences. For example, many mainstream
fans view comics as investments and take special care to preserve their purchases
with protective bags and boards. Alternative fans, on the other hand, are more
concerned with the literary aspects of comic books than with their potential future
value. Comics fandom encompasses both of these groups; what unites them is their
affection for the comic-book medium and expertise in comics literacy (Pustz, 1999).
The Development of Comics Fandom
The fan movement that coalesced around comic books in the early 1960s grew out of
science-fiction fandom. Since the 1930s, science-fiction aficionados had been
publishing fanzines, buying and selling sci-fi artifacts, and holding conventions. The
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earliest comics fans piggybacked on science-fiction fandom: they bought ads in sci-fi
fanzines and shopped for old comic books at sci-fi gatherings. Science-fiction fans
who also collected comics were known as double-fans, or multi-fans (Schelly, 1995).
The connections between comic books and science-fiction fandom ran deep, no
doubt due to the fantastical subject matter in both forms. Jerry Siegel and Joe
Shuster, the co-creators of Superman, published a mimeographed science-fiction
fanzine in the early 1930s (White, 1970). Julius Schwartz, one of the first comic-
book editors to interact with comics fans, was also involved with science-fiction
fandom. Several science-fiction fanzines of the mid- to late-1950s featured columns
about comic books. Superhero fans were particularly eager to connect with one
another, due to the lack of new superhero comic books being published at the time
(Schelly, 1995).
In 1959, Jerry Bails, one of the founders of modern comics fandom, sent a
letter to DC writer Gardner Fox that communicated some of the urgency that he and
others then felt about collecting comic books and documenting their history. Bails,
who was trying to obtain Fox’s bound volumes of All-Star Comics, wrote:
Dear Mr. Fox,
Please remember that my offer for your two volumes of All-Stars is always
good. I’m trying my best to be patient, but completing my boyhood dream
often gets the best of me. Your letter of last August set me off like a Sputnik.
Another letter from you always serves to brighten my spirits.
I’d like to know so many things that only you could tell me. I wonder if I
sent you a list of questions that you could answer with brief remarks, would
you find the time, or would it just bother you? It would be a priceless
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addition to my records, especially if you didn’t care to part with your
collection… (reprinted in Gilbert, 2001, p. 18)
At the time he wrote this letter, Bails had no particular audience for his research in
mind, beyond a few science-fiction fan correspondents who shared an interest in
comics. He was not driven by any desire for profit or recognition, but rather by a
nostalgic passion for the artifacts of his youth and a yearning to connect with others
who shared that passion.
Eventually, Bails and other comic-book fans found one another through the
networks established by science-fiction fandom and struck out on their own. In early
1961, two comics-focused fanzines were published, Comic Art and Alter Ego.
Comic Art covered the broad spectrum of comics (i.e., comic strips and comic books)
and called for the creation of a “general comics fandom” (cited in Schelly, 1995, p.
21). Alter Ego, edited by Bails, had a more specific objective: to generate support
for the superhero revivals at DC and Marvel (Schelly, 1995).
In both efforts, historicity was extremely important. While there was interest
in what was happening in the current releases, the primary goal of early comics fans
was the construction of a comprehensive history of the medium. Unlike film or
television, whose developments were charted in multiple venues (e.g., newspapers,
the academy) as they happened, no one had documented comic-book history. For
example, when Comic Art editors Don and Maggie Thompson wanted to compile a
list of the main features in Dell’s Four Color Comics, the company had no records
for them to draw on. The Thompsons had to track down the back issues themselves
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(Schelly & Gelb, 2001). Indeed, because comic books have until recently been
ignored in traditional academic circles, most of the historical works about them that
currently exist, such as artist interviews and reviews, have been produced by fans
and published in fan-oriented publications (Buhle, 2003).
Another key mission of the early fanzines was education, not just about
comic-book history but also about comic-book production. Comic-book readers, the
majority of whom were children or teenagers, had no conception of the division of
labor at comics companies, for instance, that one person would write a comic book
while another person drew it (Schelly & Gelb, 2001). Once the curtain was pulled
back on the comics-making process, many readers began to dream about entering the
field themselves. Textual poaching was also part of the mix. The earliest fanzines
contained amateur-drawn parodies of then-current characters, such as “The Bestest
League of America” and “Da Frantic Four.” One fan produced a short Spider-Man
movie for a university class project and wrote about it in a fanzine.
In his memoir about the early days of comic-book fandom, Schelly (2001)
recalls that the major appeal of comics fandom was the way that it transformed him
from a mere spectator to an owner of “a tangible object to read, re-read, refer to and
collect” (p. 88). Meeting writers and artists, dressing up in costumes, attending
conventions, writing and drawing his own stories—all of these transported him to a
place where he felt safe reveling in his fanaticism:
At its best, fandom was a place where all sorts of people could be judged by
their creativity and their minds, rather than their appearance. People with
weight problems, with speech impediments, with chronic illnesses, with bad
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breath and body odor—none were barred from participating. One didn't have
to dress well, or drive a flashy car, or pony up a hefty sum to join. Everyone
was welcome. There was a sort of basic egalitarianism that was one of
fandom's most laudable qualities. (p. 88)
In a sense, comics fandom was like the mid-1990s conception of cyberspace—a
communal space where everyone was accepted. G.B. Love, who edited one of the
most influential early fanzines, had cerebral palsy and struggled with using the
telephone, writing, and typing. As a boy, he was drawn to the Captain Marvel comic
books of the 1940s. He recalled: “You read about super heroes. You fantasize.
They’re super-strong. They’re all powerful. You name it and a super hero has the
power to do it … to achieve all that man has thought of in his wildest moments”
(quoted in Schelly, 1995, p. 35).
Through the letters page in comic books and comics fanzines, fans struck up
correspondences that typically lead to local meetings. Old comic books were
bought, sold, and exchanged through the mail. Two fans might meet in person or by
post and start a fanzine together. Comics-specific conventions started up, first on a
state level and then on a national one. For most of the early comics fans, comic
books weren’t a moneymaking venture, but rather a way to make contacts and to
meet other fans who could help complete a collection and discuss storylines,
concepts and characters. Early comics fans seemed bent on restoring comic books to
some semblance of what they had been in the pre-comics code era. College-age and
adult readers applied their critical faculties to a medium that had become stultified,
and in the process implored comics creators to aim higher. This newfound
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“maturity” was reflected in the following letter from Jerry Bails that was published
in the February 1961 issue of The Brave and the Bold:
In my judgment you’ve struck paydirt with your experimental feature
Hawkman. It is superior in so many ways to other adventure-hero features.
For one thing, the marriage of the hero and the heroine is refreshingly novel;
it is bound to provide many new and interesting situations. For another thing,
the special use that Hawkman makes of ancient weapons marks him as the
most unique hero in a long time.
Without a doubt, author Gardner Fox has created for this new series some of
the most intriguing characters in the history of comics. I hope that he will
continue to weave all of these characters, and especially Mavis Trent, into
future Hawkman stories. I hope too that he will relate some of the adventures
of the Winged Wonders on their home planet of Thanagar.
Also, let me say that there could have been no better selection of an artist for
Hawkman than Joe Kubert. His drawings are superb… (reprinted in Schelly,
1995, p. 25)
In 1960, the DC superhero revivals of the Flash and Green Lantern had piqued the
interest of comics fans. But it was the later Marvel comics that sustained their
interest. (See Chapter Two for a fuller description of the Marvel titles.) Schelly
(1999/2000) writes: “The new characters created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve
Ditko, and others burst on the scene with instant appeal to the older, more articulate
fans. Very likely, the comics fandom rocket would never have reached lift-off
without the F.F., Spider-Man, Iron Man, et al.” (p. 43).
The early comics fans were viewed with a mix of curiosity and disdain by the
outside world, which served only to unite them more. A 1965 article in The New
Yorker described fans as “adults and adolescents—unhip and outside the pop-culture
movement—who rather solemnly treasure vintage issues of Action Comics and
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Detective Comics, in the same way a bibliophile would prize a first edition of
‘Paradise Lost’” (ComiCon, 1965). In media reports, a recurring angle was the
inappropriateness of adults devoting their time and attention to a cultural form that
was widely understood to be the province of children. In 1965, David A. Kaler, a
29-year-old collector, was quoted in a Newsday article about this issue:
Some children don’t like adults in comic fandom. They think comics should
be for kids. But I don’t consider comics as childish things. I’m not saying
they’re Nobel Prize winners. But comic books can suspend reality after a day
of trials and tribulations when you don’t want to get involved in Sartre.
(reprinted in Schelly, 1995, p. 83)
To many young readers, fandom offered a way to engage in a more mature
fashion with a childhood passion and to justify comic-book reading at an age when it
was no longer socially acceptable. Gary Groth, the co-founder of Fantagraphics
Books, started out as a 14-year-old fanzine editor in the 1960s. He recalls attending
comic-book conventions at the time to observe sophisticated conversation about
comics: “The panels were invigorating because the participants didn’t talk down to
you, they were talking to each other and we were listening; cons were a place for
professionals to engage in grown-up conversation” (Merino, 2003, p. 36). There was
also a concerted effort on the part of comics fans to make comic-book publishers
aware that their products weren’t being bought exclusively by children. For
example, when Marvel created the Merry Marvel Marching Society, a Marvel fan
club, some readers protested. In The Yancy Street Journal #5, Cathy Manfredi
wrote: “Marvel seems to be disregarding completely the wishes of their fans. This
will only lead downhill. Marvel, snap out of it! We are intelligent, mature people.
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We are not little kids and we do not need [the MMMS]” (quoted in Schelly,
1999/2000, p. 45).
Comic-book storylines also matured, reflecting the tastes of an audience that
was skewing older. There had been previous attempts to create comics for adults
dating back to the late 1940s. For example, EC’s 1955 title Shock Illustrated tried to
introduce an adult form of comic books called “‘Picto-Fiction,’ a careful
combination of two arts, the art of writing and the art of illustration” (quoted in
Gifford, 1984, p. 246). That title lasted just three issues. In the 1960s, however, the
comic-book censorship campaign had receded in memory and the number of
dedicated adult readers was growing steadily.
On the heels of the clever juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane that
Stan Lee and his artists pioneered in the early days of Marvel Comics, comic-book
readers clamored for more realism and relevance. Depictions of social problems in
superhero comics became commonplace, as creators began to use realism as an end
unto itself rather than simply as a means to create narrative friction. Jacobs and
Jones (1985) suggest that in the early 1970s, relevance became an essential
marketing tool for Marvel and DC as they struggled to keep up with the maturation
of their audience. At DC Comics, Green Arrow discovered that his longtime
sidekick Speedy was a heroin addict. Marvel introduced Luke Cage, an African-
American former gang member, and Red Wolf, an American-Indian hero. In the
most famous storyline from that “relevance” period, The Amazing Spider-Man #s 96-
98, Peter Parker’s friend and roommate Harry Osborn became addicted to
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tranquilizers. Osborn was also the son of Spider-Man arch-villain the Green Goblin,
which allowed for a few fight scenes amid the domestic drama. In the final conflict
between hero and villain, the Green Goblin stops fighting when Spider-Man forces
him to confront his hospitalized son. Published without the Comics Code
Authority’s stamp of approval, the Spider-Man anti-drug story was hailed by fans
and the press as a sign that comic books had finally grown up. Spider-Man kept on
tackling “real-world” problems; in the next issue, he was sent to break up a prison
riot.
Comics professionals, some of whom had been science-fiction and comic-
book fans before they entered the field, were generally receptive to the arrival of an
organized comics fandom. Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko, a notoriously press-shy
individual, contributed artwork to fanzines. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Julius Schwartz,
and others attended New York-area fan conventions and participated in panel
discussions about the medium. Struggling, lower-tier artists could return to their
hometown and enjoy guest-of-honor status at their local con. Comics writers and
artists who had labored in obscurity for decades suddenly found that they were the
objects of fannish interest and sought after as primary sources for the historical
mapping of an art form and an industry. Stan Lee recalled:
Until I came up with Marvel, nobody gave a damn about comics… It would
be like doing a radio show and you have no idea if anyone's listening. I was
writing these stories, but who cared? We never got fan mail, nothing. I was
getting good pay, and I enjoyed the work, but it was a little frustrating…
That's when I did the Fantastic Four, and I did it the way I wanted to do it.
Then the sales figures came in and the Fantastic Four did fantastically. We
got letters. So I said, “Well, I'll stick around a little longer.” I did the Hulk.
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Then, before we knew it, we had an audience. Newspapers and magazines
started writing about us. (S. Lee, personal communication, June 14, 2000)
Issues of creative credit became increasingly important to fans and
professionals alike. When Jerry Bails published a fanzine article in 1965 detailing
the contributions that writer Bill Finger had made to the early Batman stories,
Batman creator (or co-creator, depending on one’s point of view) Bob Kane
responded with a six-page letter disputing Finger’s claims. He wrote: “I, Bob Kane,
am the sole creator of ‘Batman’… The truth is that Bill Finger is taking credit for
much more than he deserves, and I refute much of his statements here in print” (The
Bob Kane Letter, 1965/2001, p. 70). Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s creative relationship
was also subjected to careful scrutiny, especially after Kirby left Marvel in 1970.
The debate about the extent of each man’s contribution to the Marvel Universe
(which I will discuss in Chapter Four) is still ongoing.
The driving economic force of comics fandom was the collector’s market,
and this created a tension within the subculture that continues to this day. In the
early 1970s, comic books were gaining recognition at conventions and on college
campuses for their artistic qualities. But, in the minds of some critics, these
gatherings were “soon hijacked by the ‘fanboys’ (a derisive term coined by Robert
Crumb to designate superhero-obsessed, development-arrested adults) whose
fanaticism and intolerance soon drove away those who wanted to take a larger view
of the comics form” (Horn, 2002, p. 16). As discussed in Chapter Two, the
appearance of comic-book price guides also created a rift between fans who wanted
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to buy, sell and trade comic books, and those who were mainly interested in comics
for reading pleasure.
Once superheroes became entrenched as the foundation of comics fandom,
they also came under fire. In fanzines and professional magazines (e.g., The Comics
Journal, Comics Buyer's Guide), some critics argued that the superhero genre was
limited in its artistic potential, and that its dominance of the industry had prevented
the comics medium from developing creatively in the United States to the extent that
it had in other countries, such as France and Japan. In a 1978 review, Comics
Journal editor Gary Groth wrote:
[C]onventional wisdom gave us the optimistic view that comics were finally
maturing, that comic art would finally have the opportunity to aspire to the
same high levels of achievement as those of other, established arts. Alas, the
appalling truth is now evident: The talent of the majority of comics creators is
so scrawny, their vision either nonexistent or so limited as to be
inconsequential, and their interests so infantile, that there has been no major
breakthrough in comic art, nothing that is so beautifully realized and
executed that it would bring about a renaissance in comics. (p. 30)
Once Marvel surpassed DC in sales in the early 1970s, the former underdog became
the “evil empire” to rail against at fan gatherings and in fanzines. There were still
legions of “Marvel zombies,” but also many detractors who resented what they
perceived as the company emphasizing profits over the production of high-quality
comics.
Most comic-book fans have a vested interest in comics, and they are easily
riled when they perceive a misuse of their favorite titles or characters (Pustz, 1999).
For example, in the early 1970s, Marvel killed off Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen
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Stacy in issue #121 of The Amazing Spider-Man. Hundreds of incensed fans wrote
in to complain. One fan wrote: “How DARE you kill Gwendolyn Stacy!? You are a
pack of soulless, mercenary sadists. I am no longer a True Believer” (quoted in
Pustz, 1999, p. 170). Another fan was more strident:
You rattlesnake, you buzzard, you large red insect, you worm, you
cockroach, you lizard, you skunk, you tapeworm in the digestive system of
humanity: why is it when a superhero and his girl finally seem to be getting it
together, you kill off the girl? May you lose every tooth in your head but
one, and in that one may you have a toothache; may someone put arsenic in
your midnight cocoa; may you be struck down by a spirit of justice and be
reincarnated as an amoeba. (quoted in Pustz, 1999, p. 170-171)
When Stan Lee appeared at a speaking engagement a short while later, he was
pummeled with angry questions about Stacy’s demise. Lee replied, truthfully, that it
hadn't been his decision.
Because a reader’s consumption of comics is so closely tied to issues of
identity, comic-book content can provoke strong moral reactions. In 1977, a fan
named Clint Higginbotham wrote Stan Lee a letter of complaint about what he saw
as the vulgarization of comics. Higginbotham wrote:
I have been enjoying Marvel Comics for years and have followed your
superheroes into adventure after adventure but I feel that my following days
may come to a close if something doesn’t change and soon. Why are comic
books, not just yours but DC’s also, going the way of movies? A few years
ago people were screaming for more realism and now we have foul language,
nudity, and more gore than most people can handle…
It seems that your writers can’t write a good adventure story without the
usual DAMN’S, HELL’S, OH-MY-GOD’S, DEAR GOD’S MY-GOD’S and
I’ve even seen BY-GOD in Dracula. Stan, I’m a Christian and you have
written many times that you don’t want to involve religion with your comic
books but then you let your writers go and use my GOD’S name in vain…
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Comic books are supposed to be fun but nowadays there is nothing but
tragedy and constant referrals to sex in them. I suggest that if your writers
can’t write a good adventure story without the above then find some that can.
(personal communication, January 22, 1977)
Lee responded with an apologetic letter, in which he promised to discuss the matter
with his writers and editors. Lee wrote: “My own feeling is that we should avoid
doing anything, even if we are within our legal rights, if it offends a substantial
portion of our readers—or even a small portion of our readers” (personal
communication, January 28, 1977).
Many comics fans during the 1960s and 1970s were also aspiring comic-book
writers, artists, editors, and publishers. Roy Thomas, one of the editors of Alter Ego,
became the editor in chief at Marvel Comics in the mid-1960s. Other fanzine
writers, such as Dean Mullaney, founded their own comics companies in the 1980s
when the direct market enabled new publishers to enter the field. In the early 1980s,
disillusioned with the direction that the industry was taking, Gary Groth and Kim
Thompson of The Comics Journal ramped up their own comic-book line under the
imprint Fantagraphics Books. Thompson commented: “We wanted to publish the
comics we wanted to see that weren't being published” (Merino, 2003, p. 58). In this
way, the consumption of comics reflected back on production in a very direct way,
and the medium developed creatively as a result. Many of the most acclaimed comic
books of the 1990s, such as Acme Novelty Library and Eightball, were published by
Fantagraphics, while independent companies like Eclipse and First had their own
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critical successes and provided a semi-viable alternative to working for Marvel and
DC.
In many more cases, though, fans found that they were unable to break into
the professional ranks of comic books, but they still felt connected through fandom.
Bill Schelly, a fanzine editor during the late 1960s, traveled to New York City in
1973 to audition for DC’s “Junior Bullpen Project” at a comic-book convention.
After a five-minute meeting with DC editor Julius Schwartz in which his work was
summarily rejected, Schelly staggered off in a daze, his hopes for breaking into
comics dashed. After an equally disappointing meeting with an editor at Warren
Publishing, Schelly was miserable. A fellow fan, Howard Siegel, brought Schelly
around by telling him that he was better off being in fandom. Most professional
comics artists are underpaid, unhappy, and anxious to get in to a better field, Siegel
said. He added: “My advice is, if you’re looking for work, go to Seattle or another
city around your part of the country and get into commercial art. Keep comics as
something you do for fun on the side. You’ll be much happier, and it will be
something you can enjoy for the rest of your life” (Schelly, 2001, p. 195).
In the face of rejection by the medium to which he had developed a strong
emotional attachment, Schelly realigned his priorities. Although he abandoned his
dream of actually working in comic books, Schelly wasn’t ready to give up on
comics fandom, which, he wrote, “had helped fill an empty place inside of me, a
place that needed to find somewhere to belong, to be a part of something larger”
(Schelly, 2001, p. 197). By reaffirming his commitment to fandom, he resolved his
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dissonance. Schelly eventually documented the history of comics fandom in
fanzines and several self-published books.
As comics fandom was finding its footing in the 1960s, another comic-book
movement was taking shape outside the purview of the comics code and the
mainstream comics industry. Underground comix appeared in the mid-1960s when
affordable offset printing made small-run publications economically feasible
(Rosenkranz, 2002). The artists of the underground movement, such as Robert
Crumb and Spain Rodriguez, peppered their comics with radical politics, social
satire, and frank depictions of sexuality. Crumb’s hippie philosopher Mr. Natural,
for instance, satirized the American middle class and the hypocrisy of the
counterculture movement (Berger, 1996). The “oppositional culture” that Fredric
Wertham and the Comics Code Authority had chased from the medium returned in
full force in the pages of such titles as Zap, Big Ass Comics, and Yellow Dog.
Underground comix were sold mainly in head shops to the hippie set, but
they were connected to mainstream comics in important ways. Several of the
underground artists began as comic-book fans. Crumb, for example, was active in
the EC fanzine movement of the 1950s (Rosenkranz, 2002). Jay Lynch and Skip
Williamson drew art for fanzines about Mad-style satirical comics. However, the
majority of underground comix artists didn’t grow up as superhero fans, but as
devotees of Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad. Kurtzman was largely driven out
of the field in the 1950s by the creative constraints placed on mainstream comic
books by the Comics Code Authority. He spent the 1960s writing a comic strip for
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Playboy magazine and trying to launch another successful humor magazine, resulting
in the short but fruitful runs of Trump, Humbug and Help!, working with a variety of
talents including old EC cohorts and newer talents like Terry Gilliam and Robert
Crumb. It was the loosely organized channels of comics fandom that appreciated
Kurtzman much more than the newsstand, and through them his influence reached a
new corps of artists who, through the undergrounds, brought the art form to a
different audience.
In what was clearly an attempt to appropriate the cultural cachet of the
underground comix, Marvel Comics in 1974 launched a black-and-white
underground title of its own. Intrigued by rumors of circulation figures for titles like
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Stan Lee hired Denis Kitchen, the publisher of
Robert Crumb’s Home Grown Funnies, to assemble a magazine—not a comic book
per se, but a magazine, which was outside the jurisdiction of the Comics Code
Authority—that mixed the sensibilities of Marvel and the undergrounds. The
magazine’s print run was set at roughly 200,000 copies, 10 times the circulation of
the average underground. Almost immediately, there were conflicts that illustrated
the general tensions between the underground and the mainstream comics scenes.
Some cartoonists, including Crumb and Jay Lynch, refused to work for Marvel.
Crumb hated superheroes and the very notion of producing comics for a big
company (D. Kitchen, personal communication, September 19, 2002). On the other
hand, many more artists found Marvel’s generous page rate—$100 compared with
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the standard $25 per page for undergrounds—to be an effective palliative for
whatever pangs of guilt they felt about selling out.
Stan Lee made it clear early on that as much as he appreciated the unabashed
approach of the underground artists, Marvel’s book was going to be a comparatively
tame enterprise. Denis Kitchen recalled: “It was constantly a battle over which
swear words we could or couldn’t use. Stan said no frontal nudity, and we broke
that. At the same time, we understood if we pushed too far, we’d get slapped down
for good” (personal communication, September 19, 2002). The underground artists
also clashed with Marvel over the issue of ownership of original art and copyrights.
Underground comix creators had always retained control of their work; indeed, the
notion of artists’ rights was an integral part of the underground-comics stance. They
used it to define themselves in opposition to the work-for-hire hacks in corporate
comics. On the other hand, Marvel Comics operated under long-established rules
that gave them ownership of everything, including the drawn pages. Eventually,
Stan Lee allowed the underground artists to keep their original art and full copyright
to their work (personal communication, September 19, 2002).
Comix Book #1 appeared on newsstands nationwide in 1974. The title of
Skip Williamson’s contribution alone—“Super Sammy Smoot Battles to the Death
with the Irrational Shithead”—announced that this was not typical Marvel fare. But
it wasn’t quite underground enough, either. Despite work by underground
luminaries Art Spiegelman, Kim Deitch, and Justin Green, and a host of lesser lights,
the Marvel-meets-the-underground comics came off as watered-down, lacking bite.
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The primary appeal of the undergrounds was their rawness, the impression they gave
of having been written, drawn, printed, and packed by a band of misfit virtuosos in a
run-down warehouse somewhere. Comix Book, by contrast, smacked of corporate
co-optation. Marvel shut down the experiment after the third issue, citing poor sales
figures.
Although the underground comix movement burned out in the mid-1970s, it
created an expectation for social criticism that mainstream creators ranging from
Frank Miller to Alan Moore were able to incorporate into their work. In addition,
many of the more interesting comic-book works of the last two decades—such as
American Splendor and Love and Rockets—are direct descendants of the
undergrounds (McAllister, Sewell, Jr., & Gordon, 2001). The underground creators
themselves continued to make comics, from Art Spiegelman with RAW and Maus, to
Kim Deitch and his explorations of the early 20th Century animation industry, to the
painter Robert Williams and the strip cartoonist Bill Griffith. The underground's
leading anthology, Zap, was published for years after the last headshop closed down.
Perhaps more important, the underground comix notions of creative
ownership seeped into and altered the mainstream industry. In the years following
Marvel’s Comix Book experiment, mainstream artists like Neal Adams continued to
push for expanded rights, eventually winning the return of original art from both
companies. Fanzines and convention panels regularly addressed these issues, and
helped raise the stock of particular creators through fan attention. DC and Marvel
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eventually instituted bonus and royalty plans that rewarded creators when their books
sold well.
In the 1940s and 1950s—when, it should be noted, comic-book sales were
booming—concepts like creators’ rights and royalties were rarely, if ever, discussed.
Even when Stan Lee, as a seasoned pro, co-created Marvel’s most popular
characters, including Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, neither he nor Jack Kirby
nor Steve Ditko received an ounce of ownership. A few artists, like industry veteran
Ross Andru, used their commercial appeal to negotiate a higher standard page rate.
An even smaller number of creators, most notably Will Eisner, negotiated full rights
to characters like The Spirit. But by and large, the old-school comics creators
accepted their page-rate serfdom. The underground comix scene, coupled with the
increased investment in the industry by comics fans, helped bring about substantial
changes in the way comic-book companies dealt with their creators.
Comics Fandom, Examined
There has been and continues to be a tendency to characterize media fans as
hysterical, obsessed, and even deviant individuals. This is particularly true of comic-
book fans, who, despite the maturation of the medium, are still viewed in many
quarters as socially inept and intellectually stunted. In the first three decades of their
existence, comic books acquired a specific meaning as kiddie literature because of
the ways they were bought, sold, produced, and marketed. That view was affirmed
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by the 1950s U.S. Senate subcommittee hearings and the subsequent institution of a
comics code.
In the 1960s, when adult readers began defending the merits of comic-book
narratives, the prevailing “meaning” that had attached to comics created a type of
social anxiety that resulted in the characterization of collectors as outsiders and
misfits. Such characterizations, Jenson (1992) argues, are disrespectful and elitist
attempts to stigmatize fans as “others” who are easily dismissed because they suffer
from an inappropriate psychological attachment to a particular cultural form. Fan
cultures affront dominant cultural hierarchies by placing as much value on popular
texts as on the so-called canonical texts of “high” culture (Jenkins, 1992b). The
early media reports on comics fandom stereotyped fans in a negative way, so that
fannish tastes could not be seen as polluting sanctioned culture. Calling comics fans
“geeks” or “nerds,” then, reassures the members of so-called normal society. They
feel more secure in the knowledge that they are not as obsessed as comic-book fans
(Jenson, 1992).
Within comics culture, alternative fans exhibit some of the same behavior
when they label superhero fans as “fanboys.” A reader of Eightball or Love and
Rockets might feel some of the stigma associated with comic-book reading generally,
but she can ease that feeling with the knowledge that at least she doesn’t read The
Uncanny X-Men or Green Arrow. Although many alternative fans are former
superhero fans, and the two groups have similar reading competencies, they
constitute distinct interpretive communities. The term “fanboy” was originally used
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to describe adolescent and adult readers who followed only so-called hot comic
books (e.g., first issues, special character appearances), and were compulsive about
preserving their comics in pristine condition. More recently, however, mainstream
comics readers have reclaimed the term to describe the broad readership of superhero
comics, as distinct from readers of other comics genres (Pustz, 1999).
In comics fandom, as in other media fan cultures, there is an active and
productive relationship between audience and texts. Comic-book fans are
empowered by their involvement with comics. They invest themselves in texts and
practices that, in turn, provide strategies for gaining control over their affective life
and for the construction of meaning and identity (Grossberg, 1992). Grossberg
(1992) writes: “Fandom is, at least potentially, the site of the optimism, invigoration
and passion which are necessary conditions for any struggle to change the conditions
of one's life” (p. 65). Far from being deviant or powerless individuals, comic-book
fans constitute a subculture in which they are defined and empowered by their
expertise with comic-book literacy, and their shared rituals, understandings, and
affection for the comics medium.
Fiske (1992) argues that fandom is a common feature of industrialized
popular culture, wherein a self-selected subgroup focuses its attention on particular
performers, narratives, or genres. Fans typically gravitate toward “low” culture, that
is, cultural forms (e.g., pop music, romance novels) that are looked down on by
dominant culture. Fans rework these “low” cultural forms into “an intensely
pleasurable, intensely signifying popular culture that is both similar to, yet
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significantly different from, the culture of more 'normal' popular audiences” (Fiske,
1992, p. 30). This reworking links fans as members of a community who share
similar understandings about their texts of choice and the process of reading itself.
Radway (1991) addresses this point in her study of romance-novel readers.
She argues that these readers gravitate toward the romance genre because of their
social situations and the nature of their literacy. In romance novels, they find escape,
but also education about geography, history, and culture. Many of them feel
powerless in their daily lives, and romance novels fulfill a deep-seated need to
witness ideal male-female relationships. Romance novels also provide “affective
and emotional reconstitution” for women who find themselves in a traditional
patriarchal marriage arrangement. Radway (1991) writes: “The nature of their
literacy, therefore—which is to say, the way they choose, understand, and use their
books—is deeply affected by the circumstances of their lives. These, in fact, are
both the very source of their desire to read and the set of conditions that determine
and give meaning to the particular way in which they do” (p. 483).
Like fanzine editor G.B. Love, many comics fans feel similarly
disempowered in their normal lives, and are attracted to comic books—and the
superhero genre, in particular—for escape and empowerment. One poster at
Comicon.com expressed this sentiment in response to a general question about why
people read comics:
One reason, really--The Super-Hero. I spent a lot of time living vicariously
through these images of physical/moral perfection as a child. As I matured, I
was fascinated with the impact they would have on the world if they actually
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existed (Watchmen, Miracleman). When I felt Super-Hero's just weren't
cutting it as "sophisticated" entertainment, I quit reading comics altogether,
missing the whole Image/Big tits and guns multiple cover bullshit (lucky
me!). Then, I picked up The Crow collections. Then the Sandman trades.
Now, while still entertained by the deconstruction of the Super-Hero
(Bratpack, Kindom Come), I think it's the sense of wonder that keeps me
hooked—Supreme/Superman in the 60's, Waid's Flash, Top Ten, Tom Strong
etc... I guess one could say that I've come full circle.
One of the most important aspects of fandom is that it spawns internal
systems of production and distribution that form what Fiske (1992) calls a “shadow
cultural economy,” which mirrors to some degree the economic structure of
mainstream popular culture. Fiske (1992) states: “Fandom, then, is a peculiar mix of
cultural determinations. On the one hand it is an intensification of popular culture
which is formed outside and often against official culture, on the other it expropriates
and reworks certain values and characteristics of that official culture to which it is
opposed” (p. 34).
Comic-book fans, like Bourdieu’s autodidacts, acquire cultural capital within
their subculture in order to compensate for their lack of prestige or standing in
“normal” culture. They do so according to what Brown (2001) calls the “collecting
principle”—wherein cultural capital is gained through knowledge of specific artists
and the ability to select comics issues that will appreciate in value. Canonical texts,
which may be determined by story or creator significance (e.g., the first issue of The
Amazing Spider-Man drawn by Todd McFarlane), achieve elevated status in the
cultural economy of fandom (Brown, 2001).
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Although comic-book dealers certainly profit from their knowledge of comics
history, typically the cultural capital that comics fans acquire does not translate into
economic capital. A deep knowledge of the Incredible Hulk or Aquaman won’t help
a comics fan land a better job or attain a higher class status. Rather, as Fiske (1992)
notes, the “dividends lie in the pleasures and esteem of one’s peers in a community
of taste rather than those of one’s social betters” (p. 34). Comics fandom provides a
sense of belonging, an opportunity to share one’s familiarity with the texts, a
justification for one’s interest in comics, and an interpretive strategy for
understanding the texts (Brown, 2001).
Comics fans appreciate and understand the comic-book form and comic-book
narratives because they have developed the cultural competence necessary to decode
them. Along with this competence comes a set of distinctions, or tastes, that divides
comics fans into separate reading communities. Bourdieu (1984) writes: “Taste
classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their
classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the
beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the
objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (p. 6). Taste distinctions
determine how individuals relate to, interpret, and consume cultural products.
In the same way that cultural consumption legitimates social differences in
the “normal” world, within comics fandom preferences serve as dividers and
identifiers. Mainstream comics fans typically shop every week for the latest
superhero releases, and are completists by nature. They wear T-shirts featuring
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superhero characters, and are unabashed about their devotion to what might appear to
outsiders like an outlandish or silly genre. Alternative comics fans are generally
more concerned with the aesthetic appreciation of comic books, and they purchase
books that are more formally experimental.
Several alternative-friendly conventions have also started, including SPX and
APE, where mainstream comics are not visible at all. Alternative comics fans
criticize fanboys for their poor taste, while fanboys disparage alternative fans for
their snobbishness and elitism. The two groups are divided on many issues
regarding comic-book reading and consumption, but they also have a lot in common.
Pustz (1999) writes: “What they share is a culture, a body of knowledge and
information, an appreciation of a medium that most Americans have dismissed as
hopelessly juvenile and essentially worthless” (p. 22).
Fiske (1992) identifies three major characteristics of fandom in general that
are easily applicable to the specific case of comic-book fandom. The first,
discrimination and distinction, refers to the manner in which fans use textual and
social discrimination to validate their interests and to fashion functional meanings
and identities. Comics fans read and collect comic books, acquire knowledge about
their favorite titles and the medium’s history, attend comics conventions, exchange
opinions and knowledge at comic shops, and read comics-related fanzines,
magazines, and Web sites. Through all this activity, they develop a discriminatory
eye toward comic-book creators, companies, and titles that guides them in their
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future consumption (e.g., buying certain titles and not others) and participation in the
community.
Fiske’s second characteristic, capital accumulation, is rooted in a fan’s
appreciation and knowledge of her field. Fiske notes: “The experts—those who have
accumulated the most knowledge—gain prestige within the group and act as opinion
leaders. Knowledge, like money, is always a source of power” (p. 43). In all the
consumption settings described above, a comics fan’s knowledge and collection can
help or hinder his status among fellow fans (Brown, 1997). The most knowledgeable
fans speak on convention panel discussions and enjoy greater prestige in online
settings. Their deaths are even noted in obituaries published in fan magazines.
The third characteristic concerns the types of productivity and participation
that take place within the fandom. Fiske (1992) divides them into three categories:
semiotic productivity, enunciative productivity, and textual productivity. Comics
fans engage in semiotic productivity when they read comics narratives and construct
social meanings internally using the semiotic resources inherent in the comic books
themselves. Fans, in Fiske’s conception, are “excessive readers” whose semiotic
productions of a text reflect an elaborated version of what “more normal” readers
experience. Comic-book fans, because of their greater knowledge of comics history,
experience semiotic productivity that differs in degree from that of, say, casual
readers.
A fan’s “reading” of a comic book is influenced by his familiarity with the
medium, the genre, the writer or artist, previous storylines, and industry gossip
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(Brown, 2001). Enunciative productivity comes about when comics fans share
meaning through online discussion or in a comic shop, or assert their membership in
the community by, for example, wearing a superhero costume at a convention.
Indeed, because comic books are also consumed as collectibles in group settings,
there are areas of comics fandom wherein Fiske’s distinction between semiotic
productivity and enunciative productivity is difficult to trace. Textual productivity
refers to the ways comics fans participate in the production of original texts, such as
fanzines and Web sites about favorite creators or titles. Comics fandom grew in part
out of the textual productivity of the 1960s fanzines, and that productivity has
remained a constant force in the subculture.
In fact, the popularity of the Internet has brought with it a torrent of fan-
written criticism, history, and commentary that has increased and established new
links among consumers and producers. The Yahoo! Groups timely-atlas mailing list
provides a useful example of how textual productivity in comics fandom operates
online. The timely-atlas description is as follows:
Join the TIMELY / ATLAS mailing list, and put yourself in contact with other
fans of this fabulous era in comic-book history!
This e-mail list focuses on the period between 1939 up to 1960, and these two
companies that would later become Marvel Comics Group. Discuss the
characters, the comics, upcoming reprints of vintage material, but especially the
creators.
People that molded these companies include Bill Everett, Alex Schomburg, Syd
Shores, Stan Lee, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers, Gene Colan,
Paul Reinman, and plenty others! You are more than welcome to not only
discuss their Timely/Atlas works, but also how it may relate to their other works
at other companies.
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More than 300 members have signed up to share everything from gossip about
upcoming reprints of classic material, to information about creative credits on
obscure Timely titles (e.g., who drew the main feature in Adventures Into Terror
#24), to scanned artwork from key issues. The members are involved in a group
effort to index all of the output from Timely comics.
Certain members are recognized as possessing deeper knowledge about the
topic, and in this sense they enjoy greater cultural capital within the community. For
example, Dr. Michael J. Vassallo, who has been a member since September 1999, is
regularly relied on for verification of detailed information, such as the writer, artist,
or cover illustrator of a given issue. Accuracy is extremely important to the list
members. When a Web site published an error-filled biography of deceased 1950s
Timely artist Al Hartley, Vassallo posted an angry response:
I just got a look at the site and all I can say is @#$%%$$##@!
This is exactly what I was talking about last week!!!!!!!! The author of this
bio did a GCD [Grand Comics Database] search on Hartley and obviously
picked up incorrect info from the GCD VENUS index!!!!!!! He lists Hartley
as possibly inking Sekowsky (with Mooney) on VENUS!!! Or better yet, he
could have picked up the info from a web search on Hartley that rang up Joe
Marek's old Venus index TAKEN FROM THE GCD!!!!! This is a PRIME
example of how those incorrect credits get propogated over and over and
once out of the bottle, the genie can't be put back in…
Comic-book creators also play an important role in the online component of
comics fandom. Former Marvel artist Dick Ayers answers questions on the Yahoo!
Groups ayers-l mailing list. Sandman writer Neil Gaiman maintains a blog on which
he provides updates about works in progress, commentary on life in general,
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responses to fan letters, and links to online items of interest. When one of his novels
won an award, Gaiman posted:
American Gods won the Stoker. As I said in my speech, when you're up against
Ray Bradbury, and Stephen King and Peter Straub, and Jack Ketchum, then it
really is an honour to be in that company. Winning is a strange topping on the
cake, and I don't kid myself that I'm a better writer than any of them.
Gaiman’s breezy, ongoing, real-time correspondence enables him to form a
relationship with his readership that is arguably more powerful than what was
possible in the pre-Internet era. Gaiman’s blog affects all three forms of a reader’s
productivity: it informs the reader’s semiotic productivity with additional
background knowledge that plays into the texts; it provides a space for enunciative
productivity where the reader can share opinions with other readers and the text’s
creator; and, finally, it offers an opportunity for textual productivity through the
associated message board or, perhaps, a related Web site.
Comics fans take a keen interest in the business of comic books, to the extent
that many feel as if they are not just fans, but also a part of the industry. For
example, in July 2004, the fan-oriented Web site Comicon.com posted a press
release about the promotion of Stephen Wacker, an editor at DC Comics. Several
fans posted comments on the site. Steve Chung wrote: “Congratulations to Stephen
Wacker. Keep up the good work” (Wacker Made DC Editor). Artist Dean Haspiel
also logged on to post the following message: “I had the good fortune of working for
Wacker [on JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES 32] and the man is a savvy and
hard working saint. He deserves this promotion, big time, and I expect to read a lot
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more good franchise comix” (Wacker Made DC Editor). In few other media fan
cultures are the fans and creators so closely tied in their interests and ability to
interact.
There have been a few cases when comic-book fans exerted very direct
influence on the production side. For example, in 1988 DC Comics gave readers the
opportunity to decide if Robin should be killed in a Batman storyline. The results of
the telephone poll were 5,271 votes to let him live, and 5,343 votes to kill him
(Brown, 2001). After a bludgeoning at the hands of the Joker, Robin’s lifeless body
was pulled from the rubble of a destroyed building in Batman #428.
Jenkins (1992a) argues that scholars should consider fans in terms of
production as well as consumption. He writes: “Media fans are consumers who also
produce, readers who also write, spectators who also participate” (p. 208). Jenkins’s
model of fandom encompasses five elements: a distinctive mode of reception, an
interpretive community, a vibrant and sustaining Art World, an alternative social
community, and a base for consumer activism. Comics fandom fits nicely into this
model.
Fans consciously select texts and seek to translate them into other forms of
cultural and social activity (Jenkins, 1992a). Comic-book fans discuss comics with
one another and exchange letters and e-mail. At conventions, they barter for back
issues, and they compete in costume contests. Interpretations about comic-book
texts are negotiated in fanzines, at conventions, and on the Internet. Fans debate the
significance of storylines and even the practice of comics reading. For example,
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Gregory Cwiklik’s essay “The Inherent Limitations of the Comics Form as a
Narrative Medium,” published in The Comics Journal #184, touched off a long-
running debate that drew in comics fans and creators alike.
Through comics fandom’s informal system of discourse, a canon of works
has formed. Creators such as Frank Miller and Alan Moore, for example, are
recognized by the fan community to be “better” than their peers. As a result, their
comic-book works sell more copies and increase in value. Their seminal works (e.g.,
Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Moore’s Watchmen) acquire canonical
status within comics fandom, becoming textual rites of passage for readers entering
the community.
Fans also draw on the media to create new texts. Like Jenkins’s Star Trek
“filkers,” who write and perform songs about the television show, comics fans
produce fan films, satirical stories, and unauthorized versions of their preferred
superheroes. DC’s Legion of Superheroes, for instance, has inspired a strong fan-
fiction community whose works are compiled on a Web site that runs a standard
disclaimer: “Ah don't own any of the folks heah:):) DC comics does! No
infringement of copyrights is intended! So don't sue moi!” The Legion site includes
several fan-written stories and even some “filk songs,” such as “The Song of Jan
Arrah,” which is sung to the tune of Israel’s national anthem:
I was but a child when I lost my Home
Space pirates killed them, and I was alone.
From world to world, I travelled and I hid.
Knowing they would find me, like they always did.
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So I came to Earth to change my fate
And became the Mystery Legionnaire.
Seemed to be the mission that I to do-oo-oo
To keep their victims to a chosen few.
Somehow I lived and saw their evil end.
I stayed on Earth and my family are my friends.
Because of their love, I can trust again,
They gave me proof my heart could truly mend.
Fan texts can become part of the economic life of comics fandom, offered for sale at
conventions and online. Some fan artists become popular in the fan world for their
creativity in refashioning the original text.
Comics fans are geographically dispersed, but comics fandom draws them
together with a body of common texts that becomes the basis for communication
networks. A comic-book fan in Maine shares a historical knowledge and a sense of
identity with a comic-book fan in California. Many of the more popular features in
comics magazines and on Web sites are about shared experiences, such as the shift
from buying at newsstands and going to one's first comic book store. Comic-book
stores also play an important function in the formation and maintenance of fandom’s
social community. The comic shop is where interactions occur between readers and
publishers, fans and creators; it’s also a space for readers to meet and discuss
common interests (Brown, 2001). Jenkins (1992a) writes:
What fandom offers is a community not defined in traditional terms of race,
religion, gender, region, politics, or profession, but rather a community of
consumers defined through their common relationship with texts. Fans view this
community in conscious opposition to the “mundane” world inhabited by non-
fans, attempting to construct social structures more accepting of individual
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difference, more accommodating of particular interests, and more democratic and
communal in operation. Entering into fandom means abandoning preexisting
social status and seeking acceptance and recognition less in terms of who you are
than in terms of what you contribute to this new community. (p. 213)
Finally, comics fandom constitutes a consumer base that speaks back to the
industry. When Jerry Bails founded Alter Ego in 1961, his primary goal was to rally
comics readers to buy the superhero revivals and thereby to persuade the publishers
to expand their offerings in that genre. The development of fandom was, in part, a
response to the powerlessness that comics fans felt about the direction the industry
was headed. Once comics fandom grew to a sufficient size, comic-book companies
began publishing titles exclusively for the specialized comic shops that were opening
by the thousands around the United States. With sales dwindling on newsstands and
in traditional outlets, the fandom-fueled direct market ultimately saved the comic-
book industry from extinction.
More recently, with the popularity of comics-based movies, comics fandom
has become a testing ground for concepts in other media. As Brown (2001) points
out, the “hard-core fans” make up less than 20% of the overall comics-buying
population, but they hold tremendous sway in the marketplace. Recognizing this,
movie and television production companies send representatives and actors to comic-
book conventions in order to cultivate fans, who they hope will function as opinion
leaders and promote their products online and through word of mouth.
In the mid-1990s, some publishers (e.g., Valiant, Tekno Comics) tried to
harness the power of comics fandom to create new licenses that could be spun off
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into other media. At the time, The Mask, a relatively unknown comics title, had been
turned into a movie that grossed nearly $120,000,000 in U.S. theaters. Other
entertainment companies figured they could duplicate that success by targeting
comics fandom first. Most of these ventures failed. For example, Tekno, whose
titles included Gene Roddenberry’s Lost Universe and Mickey Spillane’s Mike
Danger, lost millions of dollars in the comic-book market. Although it managed to
secure licensing and development deals with Miramax and Warner Books, among
others, Tekno went out of business in 1996 (Rogers, 1999). By the end of the 1990s
it was clear that while obscure comic books could become smash hits—1997's Men
In Black grossed nearly $600 million worldwide—there was no guarantee that
making obscure comic books would lead to a film property bonanza.
Why Comics Fandom is Different From Other Fandoms
Once an offshoot of another type of fandom, comic-book fandom has grown to
become one of the biggest and most well-known fan cultures in the United States.
The Comic-Con International in San Diego, the biggest annual gathering for fans,
dealers and creators, draws more than 75,000 attendees. Just as science-fiction
conventions once offered a space for comics fans to connect, Comic-Con
International now encompasses a range of fandoms, including Japanese anime, role-
playing games and Star Wars. Yet, even though comics fandom shares many
characteristics with other fan cultures, there are several significant factors that make
it unique.
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Comic-book fandom is focused to a greater degree than other fan cultures on
a material, possess-able text. (Brown, 2001). Other fandoms may be centered around
listening to a band, engaging in shared rituals, or watching a television show or a
movie. But the majority of activity in comics fandom revolves around the
acquisition of comic books. A Star Trek fan might own videotapes, T-shirts,
costumes, and fan fiction, but these methods of affirming fan activity are
substantially different from, say, the primary act of owning the first issue of The
Avengers (Brown, 2001).
The physical condition of comic-book texts is of prime importance—a “mint”
condition copy of Spider-Man #1 is, naturally, more valuable than a copy that is in
“near mint” condition. The most hard-core collectors spend $15 or more to have a
comic book “slabbed”—graded for quality and permanently sealed in plastic—by the
Comics Guaranty, LLC (CGC). Breaking the seal invalidates the CGC’s assigned
condition, and hence the comic-book’s supposed value. The act of slabbing a comic
book eliminates much of its function as a text, since the only parts of it that can be
read are the front and back covers. It also places greater emphasis on the comic book
as commodity, which Pustz (1999) suggests drives prices up and makes it
increasingly difficult for new readers to join the culture, particularly if they want to
do so mainly for reading (and not collecting) purposes.
In his analysis of Doctor Who fandom, Tulloch (1995) argues that fans of the
television series constitute an elite in the context of the show’s wider audience,
empowered by their cultural capital (e.g., specialized knowledge of past episodes).
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However, because the show’s survival depends on a larger, more general viewership,
of which the fans are only a small percentage, they are a powerless elite (Tulloch,
1995).
The same is true of most fandoms that form around television shows.
Despite the dedication of hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions of
viewers, shows such as Freaks and Geeks and Arrested Development were cancelled
because they didn’t achieve high enough ratings among the general population. As
Jenkins (1992b) notes, “[F]ans lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural
production and have only the most limited resources with which to influence
entertainment industy’s decisions. Fans must beg with the networks to keep their
favorite shows on the air…” (p. 26-27). These shows live on in DVD collections,
merchandise and fan fiction, but their cancellations serve to remind fans of just how
weak they are vis-à-vis the production apparatus of mass culture—that they are, in
effect, “peasants, not proprietors” (Jenkins, 1992b, p. 27).
This is not the case with comic books, where small audiences exert
tremendous influence over the industry’s future. Rogers (1997) argues that there are
three types of comic-book readers: casual readers, devoted readers, and active fans.
Casual readers don’t actively seek out comics, but they buy them whenever they run
across them, typically at supermarkets or newsstands. Devoted readers frequent
comic-book stores and buy particular titles every month. They follow their favorite
characters and creators, and save comics for collecting or re-reading purposes.
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Active fans are a heightened version of devoted readers; they engage in fan
activities, discuss their favorite creators or characters in comic shops and online
settings, and meticulously organize their collections (Rogers, 1997). Unlike with the
case of television, casual comic-book readers make up only a small part of the
comics audience (Rogers, 1997). In fact, there are many “barriers to entry” for
casual readers in comic-book culture. A casual reader who walked into a comic-
book store today would find dozens of unfamiliar titles and storylines that are
accessible only to a reader who has been following comics for a significant amount
of time. For example, there are more than 20 different X-Men-related titles. Where
would a novice comics reader begin? The intertextuality of comic-book narratives,
the long-running chronologies, the Marvel and DC universes, the quagmire of
references to previous storylines—all of these provide part of the pleasure for
devoted readers and active fans, but only confusion to casual and non-readers (Pustz,
1999). Rogers (1997) writes: “While fans often hold disproportionate influence on
most mass media products, their influence dominates the comic book industry. The
efficiencies of the direct market have made fans and devoted readers the most
important audience for most comics.” Indeed, most comic-book publishers
recognize that they are preaching to the converted and make only rare attempts to
reach non-fans.
Thus, while in other fan cultures, the relationship between fan and producer
is an uncomfortable one, “often charged with mutual suspicion, if not open conflict”
(Jenkins, 1992b, p. 32), comics fandom is distinguished by close associations
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between fans and creators. These are played out at comic-book conventions, where
fans engage with creators in autograph sessions and on panels, and online. Some
have suggested that the sheer size of comic-book conventions and their co-optation
by movie marketers has created a more distant relationship between comics fans and
producers than what was present during the early days of comic-book fandom. Gary
Groth, a former fanzine editor, commented:
I don’t remember there being long autograph lines; you’d simply find a pro
walking around, walk up to him, have him autograph something, and talk to
him for a few minutes. They were more approachable. Cons were, in a
sense, less professional and more accessible, more human. Now, everything
is strictly organized—more professional in the worst sense, security guards
everywhere, etc. (Merino, 2003, p. 36)
However, I would argue that even as the face-to-face fan-creator interactions have
become more impersonal, the Internet has helped to bridge some of that distance
through blogs, Web sites, mailing lists and message boards.
It’s hard to measure the exact amount of influence that comics fans have on
creators, but as Parsons (1991) suggests, “any individual creator is subject to a
variety of role cues and influences… [G]iven the relatively close nature of the comic
community, it is quite likely that the audience constitutes one of several direct and
significant influences on the creative process” (p. 86). In late 2003, for example,
Marvel announced that they were going to remove popular writer Mark Waid from
The Fantastic Four. After a prolonged fan outcry that was especially vociferous
online, Marvel relented and kept Waid on the title. Movie companies also take pains
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to reassure die-hard fans about casting choices for superhero movies, as they did
when Michael Keaton was chosen to play Batman in the 1989 film.
The most direct manner in which consumption affects production is when
comics fans join the comic-book field as writers, artists, or editors. This has likely
been more prevalent in comics than in other media. A television show—even a
popular one—may last for five to ten years, which is hardly enough time for the
creative turnover that brings fans into the production process. Comic books,
however, have experienced successive waves of fans-turned-creators over their 70-
year history. Roy Thomas started as a fan and fanzine editor, then worked at DC and
Marvel, and finally returned to fandom as an editor of a professionally produced
fanzine. Even when he was a comics pro, Thomas was acknowledged as a fan-
historian; Stan Lee would send him memos and other documents from his files.
Thomas continued to publish his popular fanzine Alter-Ego even after he was well-
established as a Marvel writer and editorial staffer.
In the 1970s, after Stan Lee was promoted to publisher, Marvel Comics was
run primarily by former fans, and this informed the content in significant ways.
Marv Wolfman, a Marvel editor at the time, recalled: “We were experimenting with
comics and the so-called Marvel formula that Stan [Lee] had created in the early
1960s, and we were trying to take it to the next step. The new fans coming in
wanted something stronger and better. This was a new generation and they needed
their own approach while maintaining the things that worked at Marvel” (personal
communication, September 10, 2002).
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Most of the Marvel writers and artists represented a fresh wave of creators
who had been weaned on Lee’s superhero collaborations with Jack Kirby and Steve
Ditko. While Lee and his peers from the Golden Age of Comics were inspired by
everything from pulps to Shakespeare to film noir, the fans-turned-creators claimed
as their influences Lee and Kirby and Ditko. They knew how to write and draw
Marvel comics because they grew up reading Marvel comics. The American comic
book, barely half a century old, had begun to feed on itself.
Gerry Conway’s career was typical. He was a fan who started writing for DC
Comics at age 15. Eventually, after he had developed a more accomplished style, he
moved over to Marvel. As a child, Conway had been a big fan of Stan Lee’s comic
books and he wanted to work with Marvel’s material culture. Conway recalled:
“Stan was the first writer to bring an ironic distance to the material, but he was
unconscious of doing that. His models were the sitcoms and soap operas—their
inherent silliness—rather than an intellectual awareness that what he was doing was
self-referential” (personal communication, September 10, 2002). The next
generation, though, got the joke. And when they took over Marvel, self-reference
became a standard stylistic trope rather than a mere by-product of zany storytelling.
Conway and his peers filtered their imaginations through Lee’s network of ironic
knowingness, yielding a slightly removed, arguably more sophisticated, class of
Marvel comics. Conway observed:
When Lee was Marvel’s head writer in the 1960s, he would have an ongoing
dialogue with Kirby or Ditko about what a comic book should be, and that’s
how it would develop. When I wrote Spider-Man, I was trying to do what
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Stan would have done. His impact was overwhelming. Everybody who
worked at Marvel had Stan on his shoulder. (personal communication,
September 10, 2002)
By drawing on fandom to replenish its professional ranks, comics culture
engages in a style of textual poaching that isn’t evident in other media. Television
shows and movies inevitably cease production, but comics have produced some of
the longest-running serial narratives in American popular culture. Superman is 68
years old, Batman a year younger. The adventures of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk
and the X-Men have been chronicled continuously (sometimes in more than one
title) for more than 40 years. This might explain why among all the textual poaching
activities that comics fans engage in, the actual production of amateur comic books
featuring their favorite characters is not high on the list. Leaving aside copyright
issues, most fan-text creators don’t attempt to make their own Batman or Spider-Man
comics. Comics culture is set up in such a way that if they want to write or draw
these characters badly enough, and they possess the necessary skills, they can
eventually move on to writing or drawing these characters for the publishers.
In this sense, Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which
radically altered the superhero genre, was an example of textual poaching writ large.
Miller was an active fanzine artist during the early 1970s. He later drew comic
books professionally, including an influential run on Marvel’s Daredevil. After he
attained a degree of popularity, he contracted with DC to revitalize the Batman
mythos with a limited series that placed the character in a dystopian future. The
Dark Knight Returns, released in 1986, was a deeply cynical work that reflected the
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maturing demographics of comics readers. Batman displayed a brutal nature in
meting out punishment to criminals, and more than a hint of amorality (Bongco,
2000). In the work, Miller drew on the character’s early conception as a street-smart
vigilante, added elements of detective-noir fiction and political satire, and set him
loose in the modern world. Miller told an interviewer in 1985:
One of the main problems with Batman as he has been treated is that in DC
Comics, like Marvel Comics, the ridiculous number of superheroes creates a
sense of a very benevolent universe. There are lots of good guys, and they
win each time. Superman alone, since they made him able to fly through
suns and survive nuclear explosions, implies that the world’s okay, that he’s
powerful enough to protect all of us. But Batman only works if the world
really sucks. (Thompson, 1985/2003, p. 36)
Comic books, because of their ongoing serial nature, open up the possibility for the
type of reinvention of the medium’s content, style, and characters that Miller
produced. Although DC has retroactively suggested otherwise, Miller's Dark Knight
wasn't in its initial conception a possible ending for Batman; it was suggested that
this is what the serialized Batman would become after the serialized comics ended.
It’s difficult to imagine this kind of poaching occurring in other media forms, with as
much power.
The practice of hiring creative personnel from fandom, while providing
vindication for the fans themselves, presents the danger of making comic-book
culture more insular than it already is. Currently, the acute intertextuality of comic-
book narratives acts as a boundary that keeps non-fans away. As comics fans take
over the production of the narratives with which they are intensely familiar, that
intertextuality becomes more potent and comic books move further away from the
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mainstream. I have already shown how comic books transformed from a mass
medium during the 1940s and 1950s to a specialized medium catering to a set of
targeted reading audiences. In the face of an aging readership and increasing cultural
insularity on both the consumption and production sides, it’s highly likely that
comics will continue to evolve in the direction they’ve been headed for the last 40
years.
In this chapter I outlined several models of fandom and explained how each
of them applies to comic-book fandom. Comics fans actively and productively
interact with comic-book texts, and have developed codes, rituals, and meanings to
guide their consumption. Although comic-book fans may be divided into different
taste audiences, they cohere around their shared reading competencies and
attachment to the medium. Fans build knowledge about the industry, storylines,
characters, and creators to acquire cultural capital. This capital serves to empower
them in the community, and provides justification for the time and resources they
devote to the medium. Comic-book fandom has also played an important role in the
development of the comics medium. Initiated by readers and cultivated by creators,
comics fandom influenced the distribution and production of comics, as well as the
ways that creators are acknowledged for their works. In Chapter Four, I will
illuminate some of the elements touched on here through a case study of the Jack
Kirby original art dispute, which involved one of the defining and longest-running
discourses in comics fandom.
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CHAPTER FOUR
“GIVE JACK HIS ART BACK”: DISCOURSE IN THE AGE OF FANDOM
Kirby claims I begged him to come back, and I was crying when he came in and
I said, “Please save the company.” Kirby lived in a world of his own. I don't
remember how he came back. I may have said, “Gee, I heard he's not doing
anything more at DC, let's call him, maybe he wants to work for us.” Or he might
have called us. You see, in those days, I never knew these things were important
or that anybody would be asking me about it years later. You just went on from
day to day, and I do not have a good memory. But he came back, and I was glad
he came back.
-- Stan Lee (personal communication, July 24, 2002)
Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything!
-- Jack Kirby (Groth, 1990/2002, p. 37)
Jack Kirby was one of the most influential and revered comic-book artists of the 20th
century. In a career that spanned more than five decades, he penciled an estimated
30,000 pages of comic-book art, created hundreds of characters, and played an
important role in the development of the comics medium twice—first, in the 1940s,
with the original Captain America series, and later, in the 1960s, in collaboration
with writer-editor Stan Lee on the original Marvel titles.
Although he had a significant influence on the field’s content and thematic
concerns, Kirby’s biggest contributions were to the visual language of comics
(Harvey, 1994/2002). Kirby arrived at the right moment in the Golden Age of
Comics to turn what was then an undeveloped medium into a dynamic new form.
With Lee at Marvel, he helped revitalize the comics industry at a time when it was
suffering from lagging sales and a dearth of creativity. Kirby’s co-creations include
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the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Captain America, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk,
and the Silver Surfer. His approach to art—a mix of dynamism and stillness, design
and fluid motion—was the house style that dominated comic books from 1961
onward.
Within comics fandom, Jack Kirby is held in higher esteem than nearly all of
his contemporaries, including Stan Lee. There are at least two ongoing fan
magazines dedicated to his oeuvre, several books in which his life story plays a
prominent role, scores of Kirby-related Web sites and online mailing lists, and an
annual Kirby tribute panel at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, where the
artist was the first guest of honor in 1970.
Kirby, who died in 1994, has also inspired a large amount of fan activism
centered on the recognition of his artistic contributions to Marvel Comics in
particular, and to the comic-book medium in general. Partly due to his talent as a
self-promoter, Stan Lee garnered far more of the acclaim for Marvel’s creation
during the 1960s and 1970s. To non-comics fans especially, many of whom saw the
writer as the sole creative force in any group endeavor, Lee was recognized as the
architect of Marvel, and his artists, including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, were seen
as little more than able assistants.
Kirby fans have long fought against this perception of their favorite artist,
through internal correspondence and discussion (e.g., in fanzines, on Internet
message boards), and letter-writing campaigns to mainstream newspapers and
magazines that fail to credit the artist properly in articles mentioning Stan Lee. For
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example, in April 2003, comic-book fans were incensed when it was reported that
Kirby wouldn’t receive a credit on the movie The Hulk. Some fan sentiment is
directed toward Stan Lee, whom many fans believe “stole” credit from Jack Kirby
over the years in order to solidify his own legacy as the sole creator of Marvel. A
poster on the Yahoo! Groups kirby-l mailing list summarized this position:
It's easy to treat a human being like s#*% when they are silently working at a
drawing board 12 hours a day; JK couldn't campaign for himself and promote
his talents as a "man"; THIS is the thing I wish Lee had done post 1970,
despite the rift between them! I understand the animosity that results from a
divorce but in this situation there is a terrible IMBALANCE financially and
in the public arena. Kirby is simply forgotten and invisibole [sic]! I
BELIEVE Lee is partially responsible for this.
The relationship between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby has sparked one of the
longest-running and heated discussions in comics fandom and industry circles. Due
to a lack of documentary evidence, and the loose manner in which the earliest
Marvel comics were produced (i.e., by the Marvel Method), it is difficult to state
with certainty which of the two men played a greater role in the creation of the
Marvel Universe.
Many comic-book historians have come to believe that Jack Kirby and Stan
Lee were more-or-less equal collaborators on their books. Kirby provided the
artwork, Lee the dialogue, and ideas for concepts and characters flowed between
them. Yet even this view doesn’t end the discussion; if anything, it has only raised
more issues. For example: If Lee and Kirby were equal contributors to Marvel, why
do the company’s comic books feature the tag line “Stan Lee Presents”? Why is Lee
far more famous among non-comics fans than Kirby? And, on a deeper level, what
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exactly constitutes “creation” in the process of making comics, a medium that blends
images and text? Is it the initial idea presented by the writer? The first sketch? The
original story plotted by the artist? In comics fandom, much attention has been given
to such questions with little in the way of a resulting consensus.
The dispute over Jack Kirby’s original art in the 1980s presents a useful case
study of how meanings and interpretations are negotiated in fan communities. The
crux of that dispute was a refusal by Marvel Comics to return thousands of original
art pages to Kirby unless he signed an onerous release form that, among other things,
would have prevented him from selling, displaying or profiting in any way from the
pages. This was important because while Kirby did not necessarily have a legal right
to his art pages, it was always his fervent desire that the art be shown and sold in
order to support himself and his wife in their rapidly approaching senior years (Ro,
2004). The symbolic power of the controversy felt significant to many observers as
well. While more complicated issues of credit and remuneration are still being
sorted out and debated, few would deny that Kirby deserved to have his art returned
rather than parceled out by editors to people visiting the Marvel offices, as was long
rumored, or simply lost in the transfer to neglected warehouses.
In 1985, The Comics Journal, a fanzine-turned-trade magazine, took up
Kirby’s cause, and the dispute was the topic of conversation at comics shops and
conventions around the country. Many longtime fans and professionals were
appalled by what they perceived as Marvel’s mistreatment of the artist who had
breathed life into the company’s most profitable properties, while a few felt the
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pages were Marvel’s legal property to do with as it pleased. The Kirby art dispute
was emblematic of a larger controversy over creators’ rights in the comic-book field,
and it set off a debate that encompassed issues of creative credit, and moral and
corporate responsibility. It also caused a rethinking of the creation of Marvel
Comics, and of Jack Kirby’s and Stan Lee’s respective contributions to the Marvel
Universe.
In this chapter, I will use the Kirby art dispute to explore how discourse
operates in comics fandom, and in fan cultures in general. Comic-book fans form an
interpretive community that negotiates aesthetic and historical understandings in
various settings, such as in fanzines, at conventions, and online. The ways that fans
“read” are shaped through their interactions with other fans (Jenkins, 1992b).
Jenkins (1992b) observes: “Organized fandom is perhaps first and foremost an
institution of theory and criticism, a semistructured space where competing
interpretations and evaluations of common texts are proposed, debated, and
negotiated and where readers speculate about the nature of the mass media and their
own relationship to it” (p. 86). The battle between Jack Kirby and Marvel Comics
over his original art pages demonstrates how a fan community can come together in
common cause even as it diverges in its interpretations of common texts and history.
AKA Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, in New York’s Lower
East Side. His parents were Austrian-Jewish immigrants. Growing up in
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Depression-era New York in one of the poorest areas of the city meant a life steeped
in urban and ethnic violence for the young, pint-sized Kurtzberg. He ran with a
neighborhood gang and brawled with kids from rival gangs (Ro, 2004). Those early
experiences later inspired his Newsboy Legion and Boy Commandos series, as well as
his other works in the kid-gang genre from the 1940s.
Violence permeated every one of Kirby’s comics stories, no matter the genre.
Even his romance comics, sketched in his explosive linework, bristled with intense
agony and angst. Some genres accommodated Kirby’s style better than others. In
the romance genre, for instance, which he brought to comics in 1947 with then-
partner Joe Simon, Kirby produced some of his most unconvincing and least
memorable work. The 10-page story “Street Code,” Kirby’s only attempt at
autobiography, was even less successful. Here the simmering subtext in Kirby’s
romance work was turned on its head—“Street Code” may be the only
autobiographical comics story to seethe with the raw power of an Incredible Hulk
tale. On the other hand, Kirby’s “violent” art was perfectly suited to the superhero,
monster, horror, western, and war comic-book genres, for which he is best known.
Kirby’s impoverished upbringing instilled in him a work ethic that continued
well into his golden years. He had the facility to match. From 1958 to 1978, he
drew more than 1,000 comic-book covers and averaged two interior pages per day.
In 1962 alone, 1,158 pages of his work were published (Reynolds, 1994). Kirby’s
industriousness was motivated by economic imperative. As he told an interviewer,
“My purpose was what my father’s purpose was—to make a living and have a
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family. I was going to do the right thing. My dream was to have money to support
[a family] and to live in the kind of house I liked” (Groth, 1990/2002, p. 26).
Kirby’s early poverty also gave him a unique perspective on the weak and the
downtrodden; many of his early stories struck a chord with readers because they
focused on the empowering of the underdog, and the rewarding of noble intentions
and hard work. A good example of this can be found in the origin of Captain
America, the feeble yet patriotic Steve Rogers who is scientifically engineered into a
super-powered soldier so that he can battle America’s wartime enemies. It is notable
that none of Kirby’s best characters fit the classic “rich playboy after dark” mold
popular in the pulp stories about The Shadow or even DC’s Batman comic books. A
Kirby hero was from the streets, like Kirby himself.
Kirby began drawing at age 11. Using books on classical art that he obtained
at the local library, he studied composition, perspective, anatomy, and technique
(Steranko, 1970). When he was 14, Kirby enrolled at the Pratt Institute. Soon after,
his father suddenly became unemployed and he had to withdraw from the art school
in order to help support his family (Reynolds, 1994). Kirby became a street-side
newspaper hawker. This unfortunate turn of events worked out in his favor, though,
as it provided an opportunity to study the great newspaper comic strips of the period.
Philip Nowlan’s Buck Rogers, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Milton Caniff’s
Terry and the Pirates—all gave Kirby the hope that, through his drawing skills, he
would one day escape the Lower East Side. Regarding his interest in the comics
medium, Kirby once commented: “I thought comics was a common form of art and
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strictly American in my estimation because America was the home of the common
man… It’s a democratic art” (Groth, 1990/2002, p. 22).
Kirby’s first employment was not on the comics page—as he had hoped—but
in the semi-related field of animation: in 1935, he landed a job with Fleischer
Studios. Like many Depression-era artists just starting out, Kirby worked as an in-
betweener on Popeye cartoons, drawing the sequences of pictures between “key”
drawings, for example, the action that made up a character’s full step. After two
years, Kirby moved to the Lincoln Features Syndicate where he eventually produced
five different weekly newspaper comic strips, each under a separate pseudonym
(Harvey, 1994/2002). From there, Kirby jumped into the budding field of comic
books. Around this time, he changed his name from “Jacob Kurtzberg” to the less
exotic-sounding “Jack Kirby” as a result of rampant anti-Semitism and a desire to
seem more traditionally American (Groth, 1990/2002).
While freelancing for Victor Fox’s art shop, Kirby met Joe Simon and the
two men decided to collaborate. They worked together on the second issue of Blue
Bolt and a host of other projects, all of which were immediately recognizable for
their distinctive layouts and fast-paced action. Initially, the partners contributed
equally to the creative work: Kirby penciled, Simon inked and lettered, and plotting
was a joint effort. But eventually Kirby assumed control of most of the story
production and Simon became the team’s business manager while continuing to offer
input into character designs (Harvey, 1994/2002). This was the division of labor
under which Simon and Kirby produced the most famous character of their
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partnership, Captain America, for Martin Goodman’s Timely Publications in late
1940.
As comics historian R.C. Harvey observes, “Captain America #1… burst on
the scene like a skyrocket, illuminating possibilities until then scarcely dreamed of”
(Harvey, 1996, p. 4). Kirby’s art style quickly became the one to imitate, and with
good reason. His linework was solid and sure, and he was one of the few early
comic-book artists to display a grasp of anatomy in action. He varied perspective
constantly; the shifts enabled Kirby to keep the eye moving across the page, and they
generated visual excitement all by themselves.
Kirby’s “camera” was never static; it reversed, it shot from below, from
above, from far away, and at close range, all without causing the artist to lose control
of the storytelling. He also took a radically new approach to depicting action scenes,
choreographing them as if they were ballets, and opting for a less realistic yet more
visually exciting depiction of violence (Harvey, 1994/2002). Harvey (1994/2002)
writes: “Kirby deployed the visual resources of the medium for effect; others tried
for photographic fidelity to nature. To persuade us of the reality of their
superheroes, they drew realistically, but in so doing, they failed to convey any sense
of energetic action” (p. 65). Kirby’s characters were delineated with stylistic
shorthand that was both exhilarating and convincing. When his Captain America
landed a punch on an enemy saboteur, the pose may have looked ridiculous, but the
reader felt the blow.
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In his attempt to bring a new kind of energy to the comic-book page, Kirby
invented new uses for “action lines” and an exaggerated style of body movement
(Harvey, 1994/2002). Motion, for Kirby, was the most important element of his
craft. He wanted his characters to move, unconfined by panel borders, and his
artwork to leap off the page. He employed the unique language of comics to achieve
visual effects that were then novel in the burgeoning comic-book form.
Unlike comic strips, which took their visual identity from the stage shows of
the early 20th century, comic books drew on the film medium in a number of
significant ways. From a young age, Kirby had been a movie buff. His cinematic
influences—among them John Ford, Victor Fleming, Howard Hawks, Charlie
Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and William Wyler—were evident even in his early comic-
book work. Kirby viewed his comics as “funny pictures” on paper. He once said
that he felt comics were “sort of a frozen movie. Each artist is producer, director,
and casting director. It’s got to be written like a movie, staged like a movie, and
each character acts as an individual character... at least mine do, and I feel that gives
the comic strip some sort of life and some sort of motion” (Skelly, 1971/2002, p. 16).
In the first decade of their existence, comic books were largely a static medium.
Kirby’s biggest contribution in the first half of his career was to introduce a
cinematic approach to comics, producing a new set of stylistic idioms and
techniques.
With Captain America, Kirby also brought a sense of visual continuity to the
comics page; action flowed continuously from one panel to the next. Fight scenes,
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for instance, were no longer depicted by certain key poses but rather from action to
action, in a choreographed type of “lyric violence.” Kirby enhanced the effect of this
technique by pitting his characters against numerous opponents at once, so that
Captain America and Bucky were literally wading through a pile of bodies, throwing
them every which way, and finally conquering seemingly insurmountable odds
(Harvey, 1994/2002).
These fight scenes, depicted with such vigor, could last for an entire page.
By contrast, the fight scenes drawn by other comics artists of the time were one or
two panels in length, involved one character versus another, and conveyed no sense
of movement. In the comic books of most of Kirby’s contemporaries, readers often
needed verbal narration (e.g., captions) to recognize that a fight was even taking
place. Kirby deployed comics’ visual resources so that the medium became more
visual and less reliant on verbal cues. In doing so, he brought comics closer to the
visual-verbal blend that distinguishes it as a unique medium.
In the years following Captain America, Kirby was tremendously influential,
but he did not remain so indefinitely. In the late 1940s, superheroes fell out of favor
with the reading public, and publishers sought new genres and styles to rekindle
interest in their product. Humor, western, crime, horror, and romance comics all
enjoyed success through the mid-1950s, as the classical, naturalistic styles of Alex
Toth and Wally Wood came to dominate the field. Far from supplanting Kirby’s
style, Toth and Wood built upon his principles of character and page design,
although they opted for a more subtle approach. Toth introduced shading and
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suggestion to the comics page, while Wood pioneered a way of drawing action that
was inspired by animation rather than live-action motion pictures. Both men also
drew attractive human figures, providing eye candy that contrasted with Kirby’s
kinetic motion.
Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, for their part, remained prolific. They produced
everything from crime comics (e.g., Headline Comics) to horror comics (e.g., Black
Magic), developed the kid gang concept (e.g., Boy Commandos), and invented the
romance comic-book genre with 1947’s Young Romance. The Kirby approach to
motion and action sold moderately well for a few years following the war, but
eventually, in order to keep working, he had to adapt. During this period, Kirby
developed what Steranko (1970) described as “a personal formula of composition
and perspective—an ingenious application of black abstract shapes that bisected and
swirled across planes to give a durable illusion of dimension and depth” (p. 80).
Kirby’s use of black shapes was a result of Toth’s influence, and this new
formula, along with the relative calmness of Kirby’s romance work, set him on an
artistic trajectory that would culminate in the 1960s Marvel superhero titles, the work
for which he is most renowned. In the Marvel books, Kirby supplemented the
energy of fight scenes with panels of profound stillness and atmosphere, where the
shapes on the page took on weight and dramatic intensity by their spacing within the
panel rather than simply by their movement (Harvey, 1994/2002). By the 1960s,
Kirby had developed a comic-book style that not only raced forward like the wind or
slowed down to mull over a broken heart; it was a style that felt like both. In effect,
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Kirby created the stop-and-start rhythm that would become the heart of the modern
comic book.
The final notable achievement of Kirby’s partnership with Simon was the
broadly satirical Fighting American, produced for Crestwood in 1954. Fighting
American was the first significant superhero title to feature a purposeful subtext, as
Simon and Kirby used the powerful but simplistic icons of the previous decade’s
patriotic superheroes to overtly satirize and explore the murkier political waters of
the Cold War. The effectiveness of Fighting American was enhanced by the reader’s
knowledge of comic book tropes and of previous storylines, making it one of the first
comics to specifically reward longtime comics readers, a rare feature in a field that
had traditionally viewed complete reader turnover every few years as an unavoidable
reality. Unlike more celebrated comics that came before and after its publication,
Fighting American was very much of its time. The tone of satire in general shifted
by the middle 1960s, when the readership of comic books had become more
specialized and in many cases more defensive about humor achieved at their
expense.
Also in 1954, Simon and Kirby attempted to become comic-book publishers
themselves. Their company, Mainline Comics, published titles including Police
Trap, Fox Hole and In Love. Like most companies, the Mainline strategy was to
cover each of the popular genres of the period with a representative title or two. Of
course, the last thing the comic-book industry needed at that moment was another
publisher. The industry turmoil caused by the Senate subcommittee hearings (see
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Chapters Two and Three), and the growing popularity and affordability of television
were driving even the established companies to near bankruptcy. Many of the
Mainline titles lasted fewer than five issues.
With the failure of Mainline, Simon and Kirby drifted apart. They worked
together only sporadically thereafter, and each man found his primary focus as a solo
act. Simon would continue with romance comics, move back into drawing, and
eventually create the long-running Mad competitor Sick. Kirby returned to the large
publishers. At least one of his efforts from that period presaged the Marvel
superheroes. In DC Comics’ Challengers of the Unknown, Kirby gave comics fans a
precursor to the modern superhero team. Challengers featured four rugged Kirby
“science heroes” who band together for adventure after sharing a near-death
experience. The Challengers had a centrally located headquarters and wore
professional jumpsuits rather than gaudy, decorative costumes. Their adventures
consisted of matching their various skills and personalities against outsized
obstacles. Conceptually, Challengers of the Unknown would not have been out of
place as a Marvel comic book a decade later.
Kirby landed on Stan Lee’s doorstep in 1958. A contract dispute over a
newspaper strip had driven a wedge between the artist and DC Comics, and Kirby’s
raw, dynamic approach to action-adventure comics had fallen out of vogue with the
editors who purchased stories elsewhere (Ro, 2004). Although he wasn’t exactly an
artist at the bottom of the barrel, Kirby was no longer a rising star in a growing
industry.
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Between the hangover of the Senate investigation and a wildly chaotic
magazine distribution market, Kirby himself felt that comic books were dying. But
with a chance at a successful newspaper strip now unlikely and a move into the
world of slick advertising art nearly out of the question, he had no choice but to
throw himself into the comics work in front of him. Kirby’s work for Stan Lee’s
pre-Marvel science-fiction and monster titles reflected that workmanlike approach,
the art stripped down to its bare essentials to allow for the highest number of pages
per month. Even so, Kirby’s monsters had power and incredible visual appeal.
Their presence helped stop Marvel’s sales hemorrhaging, giving other artists time to
develop and keeping the company alive long enough to launch the 1960s superhero
revolution.
By collaborating with Jack Kirby, Stan Lee did not simply engage the talents
of another capable veteran artist. Lee was now working with perhaps the most
important creator in comic-book history, an artist slightly out of favor who
nonetheless remained at the top of his game. Kirby was a formidable industry
presence, possessed a peerless visual imagination, and he was sublimely fast. All of
these factors would come to play in the heady years of 1961 to 1965, when a world
of pop culture was brought to life on Jack Kirby’s drawing table—the Marvel
Comics Universe.
In 1961, Lee and Kirby launched the first Marvel superhero title, The
Fantastic Four. (A fuller description of Marvel’s early years can be found in
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Chapter Two.) Their working relationship reflected their equivalent status as
creative people within the field. On a typical comic-book issue, Lee and Kirby
discussed the plot line, and Kirby penciled the story at home, leaving instructions
about where dialogue should be placed. Once he was done, the artwork was returned
to Marvel’s office, where Lee filled in the dialogue and asked for any changes
necessary for clarity, and then sent the pages off to be inked.
Kirby’s job as primary plotter and penciler was to craft the stories and to
imbue them with visual and conceptual coherence. Whether his contributions were
more significant than Lee’s depends on one’s view of the various aspects of comics
creation. For all the controversy surrounding the origins of the Marvel Universe, the
fact is that Marvel’s titles were the result of a unique collaborative process between
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee that drew on the strengths of both creators, resulting in
work that was superior to what either could have likely produced alone. It is
possible that Kirby’s work would have been successful without Lee’s scripting
talents. It is unlikely, though, that it would have achieved the same level of visual-
verbal coherence and clarity. At the same time, Lee needed Kirby’s imagination and
artistic talents to hold the new imagery of the Marvel books together.
Visually, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, and the other early
Marvel titles featured evolved versions of the trademark Kirby elements—action,
exaggerated movement, and sophisticated page layouts and composition. Kirby’s
artwork had matured. His linework was more accomplished, and his figures
conveyed a greater sense of weight. Kirby’s work also had a greater narrative impact
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due to his ability to vary speeds for greater effect—the breakneck pacing of the
1940s had been supplanted by a start-and-go rhythm that felt epic in nature.
As a result, his art style once again became the one to imitate, and the “house
style” for Marvel for decades to come. By the 1960s, comic books were no longer a
mass medium, but the Kirby-Lee superhero comics were enormously popular.
Although they didn’t sell as many copies as Kirby’s earlier Captain America series,
they were more influential in terms of their industry dominance, outside media
interest, and ability to transform Marvel’s place within comics. Marvel’s new
approach to the superhero genre appealed increasingly to an older audience,
including academics, filmmakers, journalists, and college students. Marvel Comics
came to dominate the comic-book industry both in terms of market share and
creative influence, largely on the strength of the characters invented by Jack Kirby
and Stan Lee.
In 1970, dissatisfied with his working arrangement at Marvel, Jack Kirby
moved to rival DC where publisher Carmine Infantino had promised him artistic and
editorial free rein. Kirby created nearly a dozen titles for the company, including the
acclaimed Fourth World line—The New Gods, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, The
Forever People, and Mister Miracle. Not only was this the first shot of real, fresh
creative power into the world of Superman and Batman since the middle 1950s,
together the books painted a powerful depiction of the costs of war. In Kirby’s new
books, fighting the good fight—fighting at all—could lead to the destruction of good
as surely as succumbing to evil might. It was an interesting statement from Kirby, a
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former grunt soldier of World War II’s European theater, and a theme that took
several years for most fans to comprehend.
Yet, although Kirby’s artistic skill had blossomed after leaving Marvel, his
ability to create skillful, pleasing comic books was now called into question. It soon
became apparent that Kirby, for all his mastery of plots and pencils, needed an
editor, someone to restrain his more outlandish impulses and to clean up his clunky
dialogue. At Marvel, Lee had fulfilled this function in what had been a near-perfect
arrangement for both men until their later difficulties. On their own, neither creator
would ever again match the specific, accessible brilliance of their combined efforts
during the formative years of the Marvel Age. Kirby’s early-1970s DC work—raw,
frenzied, laden with metaphor but occasionally baffling—underscored that point.
Increasingly, DC’s editors meddled with Kirby’s titles, rankling the veteran artist to
the point that when it came time to renew his contract in 1975, he was already
headed back to Marvel.
In the first years after his departure from Marvel, Kirby had been on bad
terms with Stan Lee. Kirby felt that Lee and Marvel had shortchanged him with
respect to creative credit and remuneration. Eventually, there was a reconciliation
that was enough to persuade Kirby to try another stint at Marvel. This time around,
though, there were ground rules: Kirby would write, draw, and edit his own stories,
with no interference from the company. In a way, this was a tactic to guarantee that
no one, Lee included, would be able to diminish or erase Kirby’s credit in the future.
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If Kirby worked alone, there could be no doubt that the characters issuing forth from
his pencil were his and his alone.
From his home in Thousand Oaks, California, Kirby started working again
for Marvel in spring 1975. He returned to Captain America, the character he had co-
created with Joe Simon in the Golden Age of Comics. Kirby also created several
new titles, including The Eternals, which featured superpowered beings inspired by
Greek mythology and that decade’s “Ancient Astronauts” craze, and Machine Man, a
science-fiction series spun off from a comic-book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey
that included popular tropes of the time regarding the hearts and souls of machines.
Kirby’s output from that period contained some of the most evocative art of
his career. Two decades later, critics would write admiringly of Kirby’s second
Marvel run, citing its mix of realism, action, and outright psychedelia. But these
positives were largely lost on readers of the 1970s. For them, some of the new Kirby
books came across like second-rate rehashes of earlier career high points, and others
as the kind of undesirable assignments that typically went to veterans past their
prime. Marvel’s most vocal fans preferred the philosophical musings of writer Steve
Englehart’s Captain America, who gave up his costume as he lost faith in his
country, to the square-jawed kinetic hyperactivity of Jack Kirby’s Cap who fought
the bicentennial flavored bad guys behind the “Mad Bomb.” In the context of the
increasingly slick soap operas and portentous cosmic odysseys favored by Marvel’s
second generation, Kirby’s rough-and-tumble dynamism seemed quaint and out of
touch.
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Kirby quit Marvel again in 1978 to enter the animation industry full time. In
the 1980s and 1990s, he dabbled in comic books, but his best years were behind him.
He was a significant presence on a slightly smaller scale—his decision to work with
Pacific Comics (rather than DC or Marvel) didn’t excite most younger fans, but it
gave the new independent comics movement legitimacy within certain business
circles that it hadn’t previously enjoyed.
His work during the early years of Marvel, however, would continue to exert
an influence on the comic-book field well after his death in 1994. Indeed, many of
today’s mainstream and alternative creators list Kirby as one of their major
inspirations, fondly recalling the excitement, charm, and energy that he brought to
their youthful comics-reading experiences. Kirby’s superhero period at Marvel was
so powerful and influential that his artistic shadow still hangs over the genre.
Although the last decades of his life were marked by bitterness and conflict with the
company that he had helped build, his artistic legacy, and his standing among comic-
book fans and his fellow creators remain undiminished.
Jack Kirby vs. Marvel Comics
The arrival of the direct market in the 1970s and 1980s gave the comic-book industry
a new lease on life, and fundamentally changed how it conducted its business.
Comics were no longer distributed to a wide, general audience through newsstands
and supermarkets, but instead sold directly to collectors and fans at specialized retail
stores. One of the most important outcomes of this shift was the heightened
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recognition of writers and artists in a field where creators had traditionally worked in
anonymity.
Brown (1997) writes that “as comic fandom has established its own shadow
cultural economy, it has raised the status of a comic book creator from a nameless
hack to an ‘artist’” (p. 25). Through an informal process of fan consumption and
discussion, a type of comics “star system” developed, whereby the works of certain
writers and artists were perceived as being more desirable—and hence more
valuable—than those of others. Artists such as Frank Miller, John Byrne, and Neal
Adams became name brands in the comic-book market, creators that could guarantee
a certain level of sales regardless of the titles they worked on.
With this newfound market power, creators began to agitate more effectively
for greater pay and rights. It was a battle that had been brewing since the industry’s
first decade, but it gained special fervor after a public-relations victory on behalf of
Superman’s inventors, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Artist Neal Adams, along with
several fans and professionals, lobbied DC Comics for recognition of the two men
and, using the publicity surrounding the 1978 release of Superman: The Movie to
their advantage, won a pension for Siegel and Shuster and the restoration of their
names to the Man of Steel’s titles (Duin & Richardson, 1998). Thus emboldened,
the fight for creators’ rights continued at the grassroots level, almost on a contract-
by-contract basis. Driven in part by the direct market’s emphasis on competition
between Marvel and DC for “star” talent, publishers eventually conceded reprint
payments, royalties, and in some cases, copyrights. But one of the sticking points
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centered on the return of original art, the drawn pages from which the comic books
were shot and published.
During the first three decades of the comic-book industry’s existence, there
had been no consistent policy regarding original art. Readers, creators and
publishers considered comics to be a disposable art form, and thus the components
used to assemble them were equally disposable. Newspaper strip artists were casual
with their originals as well, often sending them as gifts to fans.
Only artists who made an issue of getting their art pages back were likely to
see them again and then only if they personally retrieved them. Originals were
stored in the worst locations in buildings, and offered to visiting businessmen as
souvenirs or given away as freebies to letter writers. However, as the nostalgia-
fueled market for comic books grew in the late 1960s, original art began to acquire a
significant market value. They were in many ways the ultimate collectible—one of a
kind, and in the margins they offered a possible glimpse into comic book “history,”
such as panels pasted over or dialogue changed. The return of original art to
pencilers and inkers became part of the improving conditions for comic-book
professionals. By 1974 both Marvel and DC had acknowledged a willingness to
return art to creators, and soon afterward both companies instituted policies that
returned current artwork to their creators on a monthly basis (Dean, 2002). The
pages were generally divided up among the artists, with two-thirds going to the
penciler and one-third to the inker. When Jack Kirby penciled titles for Marvel in
the mid-1970s, his art pages were returned (Dean, 2002).
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As befitted the company in second place with the most to prove in order to
attract talent, DC was more aggressive in cataloging and returning original art; the
company’s 1978 freelancer contracts spelled out the artist’s right to his or her pages
as a legal obligation. DC also assumed the role of caretaker for the art while it was
in its custody. The contracts stated that if DC lost any original art, the artist would
be paid for the pages even if they were later discovered and returned (Dean, 2002).
In contrast, Marvel took several years to organize its backlog and did not
immediately return any older art. Marvel’s stock of art stretched all the way back to
the 1960s and included thousands of pages drawn by Jack Kirby in the company’s
formative years. When his second run at Marvel ended in May 1978, Kirby tried to
regain control of his pages. But a new copyright law, passed by the United States
Congress in 1976 and put into effect in January 1978, complicated matters.
The law stipulated that work-for-hire agreements had to be defined in written
contracts. Under work for hire, which had long been the standard business
arrangement in the comic-book industry, both independent contractors working at
home and company employees in an office were considered to have created their
characters for the publisher, who retained all future rights. By requiring work for
hire to be contractually defined, the new copyright law cast into doubt decades of
doing business through handshake deals and the signing of an occasional release
form. With Hollywood deals beckoning, and an increasingly strong business in
licensing both domestically and overseas, proper ownership was a potentially huge
issue.
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In 1979, Marvel issued new contracts that contained work-for-hire language.
At least one artist left Marvel mid-assignment rather than sign one, while artist Neal
Adams advocated for a general refusal to sign the contracts (Dean, 2002). Kirby was
working for animation production houses and small comic-book companies, but he
continued to negotiate with Marvel for the return of his original art. In 1984, Marvel
made a widespread effort to return old art to its creators, sending documents
detailing how much of their art was available and providing them with a one-page
release form to sign (Dean, 2002). By signing the release, an artist acknowledged
that a work-for-hire relationship existed and forfeited all copyrights to characters he
or she might have helped create. It was basically a reiteration of the standards set out
in the 1979 contracts, but now it was applied to all of the older art as well.
Kirby stated publicly that he would have been willing to sign such a
document, but he hadn’t received one. Instead, in August 1984, Kirby was offered a
much longer, four-page document that asked him explicitly to give up more rights
and oblige Marvel more completely than any other artist. In a way, it was the first
time Marvel formally recognized the breadth and depth of Kirby’s creative
contributions. Under the terms of his contract, Kirby’s artwork would be returned to
him, but he would not be allowed to sell the art, display the art, transfer ownership of
the art to a member of his family, or profit in any way through ownership of the art.
Marvel could take the art back at any time for any purpose, and could even have the
art modified if it wished (Dean, 2002).
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It was, in effect, a contract assigning Kirby to act as Marvel’s storage facility.
Further, Marvel claimed to have found only 88 of the approximately 8,000 pages of
art that Kirby had created for the company. Kirby tried to negotiate with Marvel,
even offering to send an assistant to help locate more art (Dean, 2002). Marvel
rebuffed the artist’s entreaties, and Kirby responded with a letter that formally
broached the subject of a copyright challenge to Marvel’s characters. At that point,
the negotiations between Kirby and Marvel broke down.
The comic-book community learned of Kirby’s dispute with Marvel through
news coverage in the July 1985 edition of The Comics Journal. Letters flooded into
the magazine overwhelmingly in support of the artist. In an open letter to Marvel,
the heads of DC Comics wrote: “Jack Kirby is one of our industry’s greatest
innovators and contributors. We are all in his debt. His artwork, like that of all the
hundreds of other artists who have received their pages back from the publishers, is
his morally and by industry practice for the past twelve years” (reprinted in Dean,
2002, p. 92). Although the national media failed to pick up the story, comic-book
fans and creators talked of little else for more than a year.
The imbroglio inspired panel discussions at comics conventions around the
country. These panels functioned as both consciousness-raising efforts and tributes
to Kirby’s legacy, and they engaged fans and creators alike. At a panel held in July
1985 at the Dallas Fantasy Fair, an audience member commented, “I think that in
order to get any real action from Marvel, we’re going to have to boycott Marvel’s
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books. Face it, the almighty dollar is what’s running the organization right now”
(Peer Pressure, 1986/2002, p. 114).
For some fans, particularly collectors and dealers of original art, the Kirby-
Marvel dispute presented a moral dilemma. Some of Kirby’s old art pages had made
it out of Marvel and into general circulation through giveaways and other, less
scrupulous methods. Kirby routinely would see them for sale at comic-book
conventions (Heintjes, 1986/2002). On the one hand, fans wanted to show their
support for the artist who contributed so much to the comic-book form. But on the
other, an original Kirby art page was a highly prized—and valuable—collectible. At
least one fan bought a Kirby page and returned it to the artist as a gift. Most of the
time, however, dealers hid the pages when they saw Kirby approaching (Heintjes,
1986/2002). For his part, Kirby refused to autograph his original art for anyone
except children. As he told an interviewer, “I realize somebody might have sent
them over or something, but I’m not going to refuse a child. They’re not the guilty
ones.” (Heintjes, 1986/2002, p. 107).
After its initial news reports, The Comics Journal continued to crusade on
Kirby’s behalf and devoted its February 1986 issue to the artist, featuring letters
from fans and creators, an interview with Kirby, and anti-Marvel editorials. In an
article titled “God Save the King,” artist Frank Miller (1986/2002) wrote:
In our own backwater industry, Kirby so profoundly shaped the modern
superhero that every contribution to the genre in at least the last 20 years has
been an extension, permutation or outright imitation of Kirby’s work. To say
he is imitated by cartoonists of my generation is, one more time, to fail to
acknowledge the depth of his contribution. Just as D.W. Griffith galvanized
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American film, forcing it to take an evolutionary leap, making it pointless to
analyze modern film without an understanding of his work, it is impossible to
draw a superhero comic today without directly benefiting from Kirby’s talent.
Even the most experimental of us, for all we may bring to the genre from
other sources, for all our personal visions and unique life experiences,
nonetheless play into or against the basic melody that Jack Kirby composed.
Everybody who writes, draws, colors, letters, edits, publishes, distributes,
sells, buys or reads comic books, everyone who in any way makes money or
gains pleasure from comics, owes Jack Kirby a heartfelt debt of gratitude. (p.
97)
Miller went on to chastise Marvel for its shabby treatment of Kirby, arguing that
“Jack Kirby has never been honored by Marvel except with devalued hype. Marvel
has never shown gratitude to Kirby, or acknowledged that, without his talent, the
company could never have flourished” (p. 99). He also criticized those in the
professional community who had refused to sign a Journal-circulated petition that
urged Marvel to return Kirby’s artwork with no conditions attached. These refusals,
Miller suggested, were a sign of the creative community’s self-hatred. Miller
(1986/2002) concluded:
Until a quantum leap is made in the morals and creative ambition of our
industry, comics can only be the product of poisoned soil. We will remain an
embarrassing junk item at the bottom of the heap of American popular
culture. “Comic book,” is, in common language, a euphemism for crude,
tasteless, cheap, overstated, underthought, stupid entertainment. Rather than
sullenly complaining that the world does not understand us, we must confess
to ourselves that they do. We have not yet earned the right to claim a place in
the greater world of human art. We have yet to prove ourselves worthy of the
genius of Jack Kirby. (p. 102)
In the same issue, one fan wrote that he wouldn’t buy a Marvel Christmas
poster or the title Marvel Saga, because they contained Kirby-drawn images. Many
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other fans wrote in to say that they would boycott Marvel’s products as well. Mark
Bernstein (1986), of Ypsilanti, Missouri, wrote:
I am taking the only action available to me. Starting now, and continuing
until this matter is resolved to Mr. Kirby’s satisfaction, I will no longer be
purchasing any Marvel publication that contains story and art done on a
work-made-for-hire basis. I realize that this action has no real practical value
as a way of influencing you. I am merely following the dictates of my
conscience. (p. 32)
The boycott theme ran through many of the letters, even though the Journal’s small
audience of roughly 10,000 readers, some of whom weren’t Marvel fans, couldn’t
exert much influence on the company. Regardless, for many comic-book fans, the
dispute evoked a strong moral reaction that impinged on their sense of identity as a
fan. For example, Martin Crookall (1986) wrote that he was going to stop buying
two Marvel series, though that meant he would never get to read the endings. He
added: “To buy them is to support Marvel against Jack Kirby. How many Journal
readers are prepared to show their feelings in a way that means something?” (p. 34)
One of the main interests of comics fandom since its inception had been the
history of the American comic book. Over the course of researching and sharing that
history in fanzines and magazines, and through letters and convention discussions,
many fans developed a keen interest in the business of comics, and an ethical sense
of how artists and writers should be treated. Kirby’s dispute with Marvel both
crystallized and affronted that sense, and demonstrated the sophistication that fans
now applied to their hobby. For example, Avedon Carol (1986) wrote in a letter to
the Journal:
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In every creative area, we have recently seen a decline in sales, which the
executive end likes to blame on something outside of their own callousness
toward both audience and talent (e.g., tape-pirating in the recording industry),
and I’m sure Marvel has all sorts of nifty excuses based on economics for
their treatment of Jack Kirby—but every major industry has had to learn over
and over that such behavior is not cost-effective, even when you leave the
moral and ethical questions out of it. Ethically, of course, it is obvious that
the sort of blackmail Marvel is using against Kirby cannot be justified. It will
probably take them a lot longer, however, to understand that it won’t do them
any good economically, either. (p. 35)
Comics fandom had formed amid a generalized sense of disempowerment shared by
comic-book readers in the 1960s. Fandom empowered comic-book fans in their
interactions with each other and with publishers. Part of Marvel’s success in
overtaking DC during that decade came from being solicitous of fan communities
and using their fervent attention as a sales point in drawing wider attention to their
comics. Siding with Jack Kirby against Marvel provided fans with an opportunity to
use their “fan power” in a manner that mirrored the dominant themes of the
superhero genre—protecting the weak and defenseless from the villainy of a large,
evil corporation.
In response to The Comics Journal’s Kirby-themed issue, dozens of letters
from fans and creators poured into the magazine, which it published several months
later. Marc Tucker (1986), of Manhattan Beach, California, argued that a full-scale
boycott was unlikely. His letter illustrated one aspect of the divide in comics fandom
between mainstream comic-book fans and alternative comic-book fans. Tucker
(1986) wrote: “The fans are, for the most part, useless. Boycott? They’d rather talk
about it, striking brave and dramatic postures on the convention floor. Miss a few
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issues of Teen-X-New-Little-Fucks? They’d wet their pants. I hate to shift or
appoint responsibility, but at least I know the reality of the situation—fans are
mostly arrested growth cases” (p. 32).
Another fan, Tom Benson, argued that boycotting Marvel was extremist and
philosophically untenable. Benson (1986) asked: “Would you relinquish United
States citizenship because of the atrocities being committed by our nation? This is
the same type of tunnel vision that caused Joe McCarthy to see communists
everywhere, and Fredric Wertham to decide that all comic books were detrimental to
children” (p. 34). At a comics shop near the Michigan State campus, a fan named
Brian Riouway collected signatures for the Journal’s petition. Riouway (1986)
wrote: “Comic collecting, as well as admirers of comics and fantasy art and literature
is a fascinating and exciting field, and we just want to help feel like we’re more of a
part of it than simply through the purchase of monthly titles” (p. 43).
The majority of letters in that issue backed Kirby and criticized Marvel, but
not all of them. Patrick Daniel O’Neill, of Brooklyn, New York, agreed that Marvel
should return Kirby’s artwork, but argued that the company was well within its rights
to ask the artist to sign a copyright agreement. O’Neill (1986) wrote:
Just as the artwork is legally Kirby’s, I hold firm in my belief that the
copyrights and trademarks are legally Marvel’s. And Marvel has an
obligation to guarantee that those rights are not put in jeopardy. The only
way to do that is to get properly signed agreement to that effect from Kirby.
The previous agreement between Kirby and Marvel (circa 1961) is merely a
tacit one—Kirby made no protest when the work was published (and
subsequently reprinted) with Marvel’s copyright on it. It is not immoral, in
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my view, to request a more definitive agreement now, in light of the changes
in the comic-book industry in the last ten years…
As a freelancer, Kirby had every right to accept or reject an assignment. Had
he rejected the FF [Fantastic Four] assignment, Lee would have found
another artist (Ditko, Heck, Lieber) to co-create the series. It might not have
been as successful, but the concept would not have died. (p. 41-42)
The dispute with Jack Kirby was a public relations disaster for Marvel
Comics, both within the professional community and, to a lesser extent, among the
dedicated fan readership that now made up the company’s primary market. DC
would use the moral upper hand gained from Marvel’s malfeasance to recruit
creators and improve its own market position for the next 15 years. While the
controversy did not lead to an immediate sales decrease for the company’s titles, it
forever altered the community’s perception of Marvel, its executives, and Stan Lee,
who endured severe criticism for not fighting publicly for the return of Kirby’s art.
Bill Middleton (1986), a fan in Clovis, New Mexico, wrote: “That Marvel
can treat the man that created at least 50 per cent of the Marvel Universe so unfairly
is truly a sin. And I really don’t know how Stan Lee can sleep at night knowing that
his partner and supposed friend of many years is suffering because of his self-
imposed silence on this very grave matter” (p. 35). Many fans saw a basic unfairness
in the starkly different ways that Lee and Kirby had been rewarded by Marvel. Allen
Smith (1986), of St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote:
If anything, Stan Lee has gotten excessive credit. He has his name
prominently displayed on the six million plus Marvel Comics that are sold
each month; he has a high paying and prestigious job with Marvel’s
animation and film studio; and as publisher of Marvel, he has access to
millions of readers, access that he has used in the past to blow his own horn.
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While Stan has earned some of these things by his contributions to Marvel, I
think that what others, such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, have earned is not
nearly enough in proportion to what they contributed to Marvel Comics. (p.
37)
After a contentious 1986 convention season, Marvel and Kirby agreed to a
settlement. By August, more than 150 creators had signed a petition demanding the
return of Kirby’s art, hastening Marvel’s desire to see the issue put to rest (Dean,
2002). In October 1986, Kirby received a new inventory of his art in Marvel’s
storage that listed nearly 1,900 pages, a vast improvement over the original 88 he
had originally been told existed (Dean, 2002). To have his art returned, Kirby was
required to sign a shortened, two-page document confirming that he had earlier
disclaimed any and all copyrights. He signed it in 1987.
Jack Kirby vs. Stan Lee
The fallout from Jack Kirby’s dispute with Marvel Comics was enormous. Kirby
could claim a practical victory—a sizable amount of artwork that he could pass on to
his heirs or sell for considerable sums of money. Issues of creators’ rights in the
comic-book industry now enjoyed an immediate currency that would bring changes
in publishing contracts and arrangements for the next decade. Also, in the eyes of
many fans and professionals, Marvel had become the evil empire, and not only for its
dominant market share.
But perhaps the biggest effect of the dispute was the way it caused comics
fandom to reassess the origins of Marvel Comics, and the roles played by Jack Kirby
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and Stan Lee in the company’s creation. During the 1960s and 1970s, Marvel had
presented Lee as the primary author of the Marvel Universe, and the media carried
that message forward in newspapers, magazines, TV programs, and fan publications.
Lee became known as “Mr. Marvel,” the mastermind behind Spider-Man, the
Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and all the rest. The contributions of his collaborators,
including Kirby and Steve Ditko, had gone unrecognized by the general public but
also by many comic-book fans. The original-art dispute focused new attention on
Kirby and the other founding Marvel artists. As comic-book critic Robert Fiore
points out, “Up to then, fans had pretty much accepted the Stan Lee version of
history at face value, largely because it went unchallenged and they liked it. That
Kirby played a much larger part than Lee acknowledged makes so much sense that it
seemed obvious in retrospect once you thought about it” (personal communication,
July 19, 2004).
Partly in response to Stan Lee’s exaggerated statements, Jack Kirby for some
time had been making increasingly strong claims to authorship of the Marvel
Universe. The bulk of the debate that ensued between the two men took place in the
comics fandom arena—in the pages of fan-published magazines and on panels at
comic-book conventions. As early as 1970, Kirby had asserted that he was the sole
creator of Marvel. He consistently repeated this assertion throughout the 1980s,
most notably in a 1982 interview with fellow comic-book creator Will Eisner
(1982/2001). In the interview, Kirby described Lee as his conduit to the ear of
publisher Martin Goodman, claimed that he created Spider-Man, and stressed that his
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words on the penciled art constituted the actual scripting of the book, but that Lee
kept him from filling in the word balloons.
Stan Lee denied the claims as strongly as possible. In a 1983 fanzine
interview, he asserted that he had come up with the concept, name, and characters for
the Fantastic Four, and presented them to Kirby in a typed synopsis. Lee added, “I
think that Jack has taken leave of his senses… I think Jack is really—I don’t know
what to say, I don’t want to say anything against him. I think he is beginning to
imagine things” (Salicrup & Kraft, 1983, p. 51).
Kirby, however, kept pressing his claims. In a 1990 interview with Gary
Groth (1990/2002) of The Comics Journal, Kirby declared: “Stan Lee and I never
collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write
the stories just like I always did” (p. 37). Kirby asserted further that Lee was merely
an office functionary whose job was to act an intermediary for Martin Goodman.
Kirby gave his own explanations for the origins of various Marvel characters—a
panicked mother who lifted a car to save a baby was the genesis for the Hulk; his
readings in Norse mythology inspired Thor; and an article in the newspaper about
kids surfing in California coalesced into the Silver Surfer (Groth, 1990/2002). Kirby
described a Marvel pantheon that was created out of artistic and financial necessity
from the same mind that helped create Captain America and the Challengers of the
Unknown before the 1960s, and the Fourth World universe a decade later. About
Stan Lee, Kirby said, “I think Stan has a God complex. Right now, he’s the father of
the Marvel Universe. He’s a guy with a God complex” (Groth, 1990/2002, p. 44).
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Although it was generally recognized that Kirby’s claims to sole creatorship
were too bold, the Comics Journal interview, arriving on the heels of the original-art
dispute, was given wide attention in comics fandom. The art-pages controversy had
turned Kirby into an icon for the mistreated comic-book artist, and the comics
industry had developed a raw nerve when it came to Kirby and Marvel. Kirby’s
insistence on receiving full credit forever cast into doubt where his contributions to
the early Marvel titles stopped and Lee’s began.
Their validity aside, Kirby’s claims also led to a more equitable interpretation
of Marvel’s creation and a greater appreciation for the role of the artist. Additional
evidence surfaced to support the thrust of Kirby’s contention that the artists were
deeply, if not primarily, responsible for the Marvel superhero revolution. Fellow
professionals such as Gil Kane stepped forward to confirm the extreme level of input
and control that Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko enjoyed on their signature books. At the
same time, closer examination yielded more insight on Stan Lee’s role as a writer on
Kirby’s books. Kirby’s original art revealed proposed captions in many of the
margins, but only rarely did the artist’s words match perfectly those found in the
final published comic book (Wells, 1995).
Further testimony from those who worked with Lee and Kirby during
Marvel’s most fertile period indicates that both contributed story ideas during long
verbal arguments, neither man necessarily listening to the other. Through this
reconsideration of Marvel, comic-book fans weighed the contentions put forth by
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and wrestled with questions about authorship and the
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nature of comic-book creation. Comics fandom’s historical perspective on Marvel
was altered, elevating Jack Kirby as a canonical figure and lowering Stan Lee, or at
least opening a debate about his legacy as a creator.
This debate was explored in the October 1995 issue of The Comics Journal,
the magazine that had forcefully made the case against Stan Lee in the Jack Kirby art
imbroglio 10 years earlier. The cover was adorned with an unflattering caricature of
Lee as an aged circus huckster, complete with the headline “Step Right Up!” Inside,
a number of essays and industry tributes took Lee to task on the issues of creator
credit and the image that he portrays on behalf of Marvel Comics. Writer Paul
Wardle (1995) wrote: “I’m not much of a Kirby fan, but it’s pretty clear to me that
[Stan Lee’s] Origins of Marvel Comics and its two sequels are about as accurate a
record of the creation of The Marvel Universe as Hee Haw is an accurate record of
life on a farm” (p. 63). Eric Reynolds (Face Front, True Believers!, 1995) related an
anecdote that illustrated the conflict many fans feel about Stan Lee:
I was at a private party thrown by Marvel Comics a year ago; I felt
completely out of place, but it was an open bar so I went and talked primarily
to the bartender. At one point, Stan slinked right up next to me to order a
drink. I couldn’t decide whether to shake his hand for almost singlehandledly
sparking my interest in reading as a child, or tell him to crawl in a hole and
die for securing his own future with Marvel at the expense of other creators.
Stan was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame this year, and I wonder
how many people noted the irony. I’m sure Jack did. (p. 81)
Yet many of the articles and reminiscences were also complimentary.
Essayist Greg Cwiklik (1995) criticized Lee for taking too much public credit as a
writer when the artists were constructing their own narratives, and for promoting
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house styles over innovation in such texts as How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.
But Cwiklik (1995) also allowed: “Stan Lee’s creative contributions were very real
and substantial during the time he presided as editor, writer, and ringmaster at
Marvel during its heyday in the heady period of the 1960s. In fact his role was
crucial: without him, Marvel Comics would never have achieved either the critical or
commercial success that it did” (p. 58). Many of the contributions from industry
professionals expressed admiration for Lee personally, or at least paid grudging
tribute to his skills as a public presence.
The discourse in comics fandom about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby has
continued uninterrupted since the mid-1980s original-art controversy. Comics fans
and critics argue back and forth about historical details, creator testimony,
documentary evidence, and specific techniques of comic-book writing, plotting, and
drawing. They form research networks, exchanging information and artifacts
through online mailing lists, Web sites, and postal mail.
In a sense, comics fans constitute an informal academic community in which
they discuss not only comic books, but also questions of identity and research
methods. For example, the Yahoo! Groups kirby-l list in July 2004 discussed a
biography about Jack Kirby that recently had been released by a mainstream book
publisher. Some of the discussion addressed the author’s comic-book credentials,
but list members were more concerned about the lack of footnotes, an index and
pictures. One list member wrote: “All those quotes with no footnotes. That really
bugs me. It would be SO unobtrusive to put in a little superscript number, and then a
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bunch of endnotes to explain each.” The member went on to suggest that without
footnotes, it was difficult to ascertain the accuracy of many of the book’s facts and
anecdotes. He concluded: “Rolling the story along with a nice breezy pace seems to
have caused a lot of topics to be dealt with in a very loose and fast manner. The
irony, of course, is that this is what Stan Lee did all his life: sacrifice historical
accuracy for a good fun story.”
Many comics fans approach the Jack Kirby-Stan Lee authorship debate with
a missionary zeal. When newspaper or magazine articles mistakenly credit Stan Lee
as the only creator of Marvel, fans write angry letters demanding corrections.
Shortly after Jack Kirby died in 1994, fans launched a letter-writing campaign asking
Marvel to credit Kirby on the masthead of the titles that he had co-created. (Stan Lee
was already represented in every Marvel book with the tagline “Stan Lee Presents.”)
One fan produced a form letter that thousands of fans copied and sent to the
company. The form letter, which was addressed to Terry Stewart, Marvel’s then
president, read:
Count me among the fans of Marvel Comics who feel that Jack Kirby
deserves a little credit for helping to create the Marvel Universe. Without the
creative teamwork of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby I might never have known a
world filled with the Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, The X-Men, The
Avengers, Thor, Sgt. Fury, or the Hulk. On these titles and with other
characters developed by Stan and Jack, I ask that you place the by-line
"Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby." This would serve as a long overdue
tribute to the genius of their teamwork. Just as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
will always be formally identified as the creators of Superman, I would like
to see Jack Kirby and Stan Lee afforded a similar tribute for their many
contributions to the Marvel Universe.
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Marvel eventually complied with the wishes of its fans, and the shared credit line for
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby remains on many of the company’s titles to this day and has
appeared in Marvel-related films such as The Hulk.
To the world outside comics, most of these issues are unimportant, invisible,
the kind of minutiae that only people with an unhealthy fixation on pop culture
would worry about. Most non-comics fans have never heard of Jack Kirby. Yet, to
comic-book fans, who engage actively and productively with comic-book texts, Jack
Kirby matters a great deal. Through their association with comic books, fans
construct meanings and a sense of identity, and attain intellectual and social
empowerment. They are heightened readers for whom questions of authorship are
intimately linked to their own comic-book experiences and the cultural capital that
they enjoy within the fandom community. The debate about Jack Kirby and Stan
Lee, then, takes on an augmented significance that strikes at the core of what it
means to be a comic-book fan.
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CONCLUSION
COMIC BOOKS TODAY
Comic books are what novels used to be—an accessible, vernacular form
with mass appeal—and if the highbrows are right, they’re a form perfectly
suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.
(McGrath, 2004, p. 24)
The history of the comic book is unique in American popular culture. Once a mass
medium that reached millions of readers per month, it is now a specialized medium
that appeals mainly to a niche audience of collectors and aficionados. Few other
declining mass media of the 20th century have managed to pull off a similar feat.
Nor has any other popular medium or art form been influenced by a single genre to
as large an extent as comic books have by superheroes over the last 40 years.
Superhero comics comprise the bulk of today’s comic-book output,
simultaneously reinforcing the unity of comics culture and isolating it from the
mainstream. The superhero titles of Marvel and DC emphasize continuity and long-
running storylines that are largely inaccessible to new or casual readers. Some
critics suggest that the comic-book business is past the point of decline. Comics'
infrastructure of direct market retailers has at best grown in fits and starts since the
early 1980s. The top industry titles struggle to sell 125,000 copies per month. At
best a correction in sales will double that, or more likely draw readers from lower-
selling titles to the higher-selling ones. Young readers, who are crucial to the
longevity of the medium, are increasingly rare at comic-book shops and conventions,
owing largely to the competition from video games and other media. With the
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average comic book priced at $2.25, it’s not certain that kids can afford to return.
Free downloads of comics on the Internet offer a convenient jumping-on point, but
the comic book companies themselves have been slow in providing a pay model for
that platform that might encourage subsequent purchases. It's not unheard of for a
mainstream comic book to sell fewer copies today than the numbers that used to be
destroyed at the printer or circulated for office use. The superheroes may be just as
big as in the old days, but their sales margins grow smaller.
Nowadays, the comic book’s biggest impact is evident in other media, such
as film and television. Today's most popular television and movie serials draw
heavily on comic book notions of continuity and shared universes, and writers from
Kevin Smith to Joss Whedon work in both industries. The kids that read Stan Lee
and Jack Kirby run Hollywood studios and agencies and have the writer-producers
that were once kids reading Chris Claremont and John Byrne in places of honor on
their rolodexes. While most Hollywood trends have short shelf lives, comics-to-
movie adaptations have steadily generated billions of dollars in sales of theater
tickets, VHS tapes and DVDs, theme-park admissions, and countless merchandise
spin-offs since the late 1980s. Even little-known comic-book properties, such as
Men in Black, Hellboy, and The Mask have proven popular and profitable.
As a sign of the degree to which the movie industry has become enamored of
comic books, the July 19-25, 2004, weekly edition of Variety contained two comics-
related special sections. One advertisement in the magazine publicized the first issue
of an independently published comic book titled “Hydraulic Leg,” and stated that a
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full-length movie screenplay was also available. Several other companies have
published comic books hoping to sell them as movie properties, with little interest in
their performance in the comics market. Comics creators as varied as Dan Clowes
and Frank Miller have significant Hollywood careers.
To a professional or fan of comic books from the 1940s, today’s comic-book
industry would be virtually unrecognizable. Marvel bills itself as a “licensing-based
entertainment company,” and makes only one-sixth of its total revenue from
publishing (Form 10-Q, 2004). DC is a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. A single
video game based on a Marvel character can earn more annually than the company
does publishing comic books.
There was a time when cross-media exposure greatly benefited the comic-
book source material. For example, when the Batman television show appeared in
1966, monthly circulation of DC’s Batman comic book shot up from 453,000 copies
to 898,000 copies. But these kinds of gains are no longer common. Comic-book
sales barely register a blip in the wake of a popular comics-based movie. It wouldn’t
be an exaggeration to say that in the last five years far more people have seen Spider-
Man in the theater than have read a Spider-Man comic book.
Yet there have been signs recently of resurgence for the comic-book form.
Sales of book-length comics works, or graphic novels, in bookstores (as opposed to
comics shops) have been growing steadily. In 2003, translated editions of Japanese
manga sold between $90,000,000 and $110,000,000, primarily to a young audience
(McLean, 2004). McLean writes: “While manga’s presence has grown at the
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specialty stores that are the main outlet for American-style periodical comics, it has
been most successful in bookstores, reaching a young mainstream and female
audience that showed little interest in superhero comics and likes manga’s fast-paced
kinetic storytelling and stylized artwork” (p. A4). Many fans of manga view their
reading of Japanese comics as an experience completely distinct from those of North
American readers, and many North American readers are happy to agree, robbing
comics in general of the shot in the arm those books might supply and creating a
bifurcation where none need exist. While comic-book fandom has in some ways
limited its own development by constantly turning inward, the comics medium is still
finding ways to reach new audiences. It is unlikely that comics ever will again
realize the sales levels of a mass medium, but the medium seems to be in no danger
of dying off anytime soon.
Comic books have also, finally, attained the cultural legitimacy that their
creators and fans long sought. Articles about comics are common in mainstream
newspapers and magazines, as well as more literary-minded publications such as The
New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. Alternative comic-book artists, who
traditionally have worked within a subculture of the comics subculture, have been
awarded prestigious book prizes, and their works sell far better than they ever had
before. For example, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, about the 1979 Islamic
revolution in Iran, has sold 450,000 copies. Chris Ware’s hardcover graphic novel
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth sold more than 100,000 copies, and
won the 2001 Guardian Prize for best first book (McGrath, 2004). Academics also
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have been smitten by comics. There are now dozens of comics-related dissertations,
several scholarly books about comics, and a journal devoted to the study of the
medium.
Comic books also have given rise to one of the most sophisticated and
fascinating forms of media fandom. Comics fans engage with their preferred texts in
a variety of ways—they read them, collect them, store them, trade them, discuss and
analyze them, and, sometimes, reinterpret them by becoming creators themselves.
As Brown (2001) observes, comic-book fandom is “a loosely organized experience
that is capable of affecting how individual readers interpret the fictional narratives”
(p. 91). Over the course of its 40-year history, comics fandom has demonstrated how
fan cultures can influence the production, interpretation, and historical understanding
of popular culture. In the past, comic books mirrored the times and economic
structures in which they were produced. Comic books today are largely a reflection
of the people who read them.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Amash, J. (2001, November). “I Let People Do Their Jobs!”: A Conversation with
Vince Fago. Alter Ego, 3 (11), 8-27.
Avedon, C. (1986, February). Sins Revisited. The Comics Journal, 105, 35.
Barclay, D. (1950, March 5). Comic Books and Television. New York Times
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Comic books incorporated: industrial strategy and the legitimation of lowbrow media

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Creator Raphael, Jordan Philip (author)

Core Title Four-color Marvels: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the development of comic-book fandom

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 06/19/2009

Defense Date 08/30/2004

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comic book,Jack Kirby,OAI-PMH Harvest,Stan Lee

Language English

Advisor Thomas, Douglas (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member)

Creator Email jraphael@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m539

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