The social relevance of comicbooks - part 1

Een tijdje terug ben ik begonnen aan een essay voor het vak Amerikanistiek. Het viel me op dat we in een tijd leven waarin geen gebrek is aan stripverfilmingen. The Dark Knight, Iron Man, 300, Kick Ass, allemaal enorme blockbusters die ook nog eens goed werden ontvangen. Dit zette me aan het denken. De Amerikaanse entertainment industrie heeft nogal een oppervlakkig imago en het medium stripboeken met al haar in spandex geklede protagonisten komt nou niet echt volwassen over. Toch zijn veel stripverfilmingen vrij populair, en niet alleen bij kids. Hier en daar kwam ik volwassen onderwerpen tegen. Vandaag een intro van mijn essay over de sociaal maatschappelijke thema's in Amerikaanse comics.

‘I am lying in bed counting sheep when all of a sudden it hits me. I conceive a character like Samson, Hercules, and all the strong men I have ever heard tell of rolled into one. Only more so. I hop right out of bed and write this down, and then I go back and think some more for about two hours and get up again and write that down. This goes on all night at two-hour intervals, until in the morning I have a complete script.’               -              Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman

What started out as a simple combination of words and graphics on the back of a newspaper back in the twenties is now a multi-million dollar business. Money generated out of comics, related movies and merchandising has given the comic industry new life and new opportunities.

Not only did the business model change, the content changed drastically. To keep comic books interesting, especially superhero comic books, readers had to relate to the stories. For example, we now have Spiderman whose secret identity consists of being a nerdy teenager (no coincidence, those same nerdy teenagers are a big target audience). 

This essay will try to answer the question, can we learn from comic books in regard to the American society?

To find an adequate answer we must break down the main question into separate questions:

•          What kind of comic books are there? 
•          What relevant themes are integrated into comic books? 
•          Do comic book writers choose sides and do they reflect the opinion of the masses?

 

'Commercial fiction panders to low tastes and traffics in scandal, violence and sentimentality; the art novel appeals to cultivated tastes and traffics in the same commodities, but in a more genteel way.’  
Thomas M. Disch, The dreams our stuff is made of

 

What kind of comic books are out there?

This essay will focus on the teachings of comic books on the American society. Hence the reason to ignore the big comic business of Europe(Flemish and French) and Japan (Manga). The comic book industry in the United States started off in the early thirties. As a relief to the ‘great depression’ and to sell more, newspapers started to add a half page of small comics. Child friendly, funny comics.

The first American comic book, Funnies on Parade, was a giveaway anthology reprinting comic strips from the newspapers. Wanting to get rid of undistributed copies, the story goes, someone slapped a 10 cent tag on them and dropped them off at a few newsstands. They sold out in a flash and thus, in 1934, the comics industry was born.

The first stand-alone comic books were made of reprinted newspaper comics. Within a few years, though, these were replaced with original content. It was cheaper for the publishers to purchase new material from aspiring cartoonists, suffering from the effects of the Depression and desperate for any kind of work, than to buy reprint rights from the syndicates. Many early comic-book creators had no love for the medium. The pay was meager, the work grueling and usually uncredited. They worked in comic books in the hope that one day they'd "make it" and "graduate" to newspaper comic strips.[ii]

One of those newspaper comics became very popular. Ironically, the first big comic-book hit was a feature that had been turned down for years by the comic-strip syndicates: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman.

Superman paved the way for a new group of superhero comic book adaptations. During the second world war the likes of Captain America, Plastic Man, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, Wonder Woman and many others.[iii]

Before the 1960s the comic-book format featured many genres including humor, Westerns, romance, horror, military fiction, crime fiction, biography, and adaptations of classic literature. Nowadays non-superhero comics have continued to exist as a niche publishing also known as the independent and alternative genre.

The two biggest players who shape the American comic book landscape are DC comics and Marvel comics.

What started out as an innocent small extra for newspaper readers quickly became a multimillion business. The industry became so big that experts used heavy American rhetoric to dub different ages. 

The Golden Age generally thought of as lasting from the late 1930s until the late 1940s or early 1950s. During this time, modern comic books were first published and enjoyed a surge of popularity; the archetype of the superhero was created and defined. The period saw the arrival of the comic book as a mainstream art form, and the defining of the medium's artistic vocabulary and creative conventions by its first generation of writers, artists, and editors.

The Silver Age of Comic Books was a period of artistic advancement and commercial success in mainstream American comic books, predominantly those in the superhero genre. Following the Golden Age of Comic Books and an interregnum in the early to mid-1950s, the Silver Age is considered to cover the period from 1956 to circa 1970. The popularity and circulation of comic books about superheroes declined following the Second World War, and comic books about horror, crime and romance took larger shares of the market. However, controversy arose over alleged links between comic books and juvenile delinquency, focusing in particular on crime and horror titles. In 1954, publishers implemented the Comics Code Authority to regulate comic content. In the wake of these changes, publishers began introducing superhero stories again.

The Bronze Age of Comic Books is an informal name for a period in the history of mainstream American comic books usually said to run from 1971 to 1985. The Bronze Age retained many of the conventions of the Silver Age, with brightly colored superhero titles remaining the mainstay of the industry. However darker plot elements and more mature storylines featuring real-world issues, such as drug use, began to appear during the period. The Magnum Opus of the Bronze Age of Comic Books is Watchmen, a super hero story that deals with the daily threats of a nuclear war between the USSR and the USA.

The Modern Age of Comic Books is an informal name for the period in the history of mainstream American comic books generally considered to last from the mid-1980s until present day. In this period, comic book characters generally became darker and more psychologically complex, creators became better-known and active in changing the industry, independent comics flourished, and larger publishing houses became more commercialized.

As said before, DC and Marvel are the two biggest players in the comic book industry. Together they publish more than 90 percent of all superhero related comics in the States[iv]. DC also bought a couple independent studios such as Vertigo[v], which doesn’t necessarily focus on superheroes. Hence they now own the rights to the DMZ series. DMZ will be featured a lot in the coming pages. 

Deel twee komt volgende week

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[i] Cartoon history of the united states, by Larry Gonnick

[ii] The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, by David Nasaw

[iii] The golden age of comic books, 1937-1945, by Richard O’Brien

[iv] http://www.comicsbulletin.com/soapbox/12264262354837.htm, marvels and dc’s marketshare

[v] http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2982260, a brief history of the comic book industry

Other sources:

Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, by David Fingeroth and Stan lee

Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society, by David Fingeroth

The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels, by David Fingeroth

The Blackwell Philosophy, by William Irwin

Watchmen, a Rorschach test, by Mark D. White

DMZ saga, by Brian Wood
Watchmen saga, by Alan Moore
Marvel online library