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<< Jason Grote: Thoughts On Douglas Wolks' "Reading Comics" | Front Page | Doug Wolk Wins! >>
Friday, July 25, 2008
Jim Henley on Some of Origins of Marvel (and Other Comics)
Posted by John Holbo on 07/25/08 at 07:23 AM
Jim Henley’s contribution to our Doug Wolk event is up. He writes up a nice, thumbnail history, aiming to debunk a certain ‘myth of the fall’:
Once upon a time, the comic-book industry offered a stupefying variety of material. From the late 1930s through the late 1960s you could buy monster comics, romance comics, humor comics, crime comics, horror comics, and, yes, superhero comics. Alas, as the 1970s turned to the 1980s, the two major corporate publishers, Marvel and DC, turned their backs on the general audience - especially children - to saturate the emerging (adult) fan market flocking to comics specialty stores, and since the fan market wanted superheroes and more superheroes, that’s what the Big Two, and a remora-school of wannabes, gave them. As a result, circulations plummeted ...
This, he points out, is backwards. I think he’s probably right. The following interesting and true observation follows in due course. Why did the superhero pamphlet-sized comic die more slowly than other genres?
I think it’s because superheroes really did remain comic books’ competitive advantage: they were the kind of genre story that comics could tell effectively that other media couldn’t. Romance readers enjoyed the rise of Harlequin and Silhouette. Milporn enthusiasts could buy Mac Bolan paperbacks, at least until they stopped reading. Horror fans had numerous low-budget movies that delivered the various kinds of fright kicks more effectively than could drawings on newsprint. If you wanted war stories, you could get them from movies, books or TV. But until recently, other media couldn’t or wouldn’t provide superhero entertainment as well as the comic-book medium could. It’s not that there were no TV shows, no cartoons or no movies. It’s just that, for the aficionado of superheroes, there weren’t enough of them, and many of the ones that did exist didn’t measure up.
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