Man of the Atom returns with the sequel to his previous enlightening post on the history of American comics.
This time, MotA does a deep dive into the comic book generation gap.
“There was a GENERATION GAP in the comic book industry. There were some people in their 50’s and 60’s, there were a lot of people in their twenties and early 30’s, but not enough in between. Because there had been an extended period of decline when relatively few new people came in, we were missing a generation.
“What that meant is that young guys who should have been assistant editors to a forty-something person were instead editors or editors in chief, even though their main qualification was having read 10,000 comics.”
Roll this bit of information back to 1968. The Marvel staff that remained through 1978 would have been in their 40s and 50s in 1968 by Shooter’s estimation. These folks would be Greatest Generation with some very early Silents. The generation gap that Shooter speaks of would be Silents who were generally unable to break into the industry in the late 50s and the 60s due to the downturn in the industry. Greatest Generation creators hung on to the majority of remaining positions. Those new staff at Marvel would have been in their late teens and early 20s in 1968. Those individuals would be Boomers.
In effect, American comics have a lost generation–the aptly named Silents. Their absence caused a rupture in the comic book tradition that prevented the Greats’ way of making comics from behind handed down to the Boomers.
… [T]he reins of Marvel Comics transitioned from Greatest Generation creators and editors, skipping a moderating influence by Silents, to an almost exclusive editorial rule by Boomers from 1972 to at least 1994. Generation Jones and Gen-X only began exerting an editorial influence at Marvel Comics as of about 1995. Boomers finally abandoned the reins of editorial leadership, essentially after the post-1997 cultural collapse.
Boomers don’t deserve all the blame for setting a bomb in the heart of American pop culture on a 30-year timer; economic forces largely benched the Silents. Yet decades of exclusive Boomer curation had a deep and lasting impact on mainstream storytelling.
Stan, Jack, Steve, Don, and other creators from the Greatest Generation Bullpen had a creation process that looked more like the dials we introduced in the last post. The overarching theme for the series was as at least as important as the adventure within the specific issue.
The Boomer Bullpen and their “Me Generation” sensibilities over time generated stories that were more along the lines of this set of dials, typically eschewing the Greatest Generation sensibilities.
The Boomer Bullpen Model. It’s “Hero Punches Villain, forever.” Enjoy.
And stop paying attention to IPs hollowed out and skinned by Boomers.
The shift in the charts is completely true. It ends in Flavor being the A-Plot with how people think “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” are genres, dovetailing in with 20th century Fandom’s desire to start a materialist religion. This is the shift we still haven’t gotten out of and are suffering the negative consequences of to this day.
No wonder comics soon became infested with the same bugmen not long after they infected adventure fiction. Everything needed to conform.
You’ve found the genre-Pop Cult connection.
It strikes me as ironic that the Boomers, who we’ve noted before have held on to power for an inordinately long time, were themselves a generation that took over out of turn, when the silent were skipped and the boomers rose too soon to fill that void.
In hindsight, the baby boomers were all but designed for greed and overconsumption. My current recipe for “baking” a batch of baby boomers requires:
> Absurdly abundant wealth that allows everyone to own a home in the suburbs and an automobile. For best results, give the boomer teenagers their own automobiles to whisk away their girlfriends for private makeout sessions.
> An easygoing life that knows little to no adversity.
> Sociopathic, Protestant war veterans for parents who baptize their kids and teach them traditions without providing any context.*
*If necessary, substitute for greedy and pretentious upper middle class parents who materialistically push their children into university and teach them to laugh at the “shop kids.”
> No concept of moderation. Instead of teaching the Boomers to eat less frequently or to fast, simply stuff them full of canned foods and sugary cereals during their childhoods, then transition them to processed, low-fat, super-calorie-dense diets for their teenage years. Because science!
Combine and bake for two decades or more—and bake as many as possible in one batch.
Plate and serve when half-baked.
Thanks for the boost, Brian!
I think one of the commenters summarized the salient points of the “Greatest vs Boomer writing comparison” much better than I did.
“Contextual realism destroys the pure heroic wonder that gave the Silver Age adventure component its awesome qualities.
“Stan’s realism is in the romance component – the people and their relations ring true. But the adventure is pure fantasy fun. If Ronan the Accuser or Blastaar and the Sandman attack in New York, no time is wasted on what the military or government would do for the most part. And no one cared. The battles then become mythic – or something you could imagine with action figures – while the romance brings the realism.
“Once the Bronze Age started to think about the ‘real world’ implications of Marvel style superheroics, the epic feel of the showdowns faded out. They have to – the genre is intrinsically unrealistic. You actually get years wasted on Henry Gyrich and government control of the Avengers. The Silver Age magic came from combining “realism” in the romance with mythic awesome in the adventure.”
My pleasure!
From the animation side of storytelling, I’d say that Miyazaki and Lee were in agreement about romance. Yet in his early adventure movies—like in CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO, CASTLE IN THE SKY, and PORCO ROSSO—Miyazaki would add just enough contextual realism to compliment the romantic “human realism.”
It seems like the boomers’ mistake was to serve the contextual realism as the main course—and they should have known better. Miyazaki was a Marxist feminist, just like the boomers, yet even he understood that writing broken characters into an autistic story that had no point was not “realistic.”
Man of the atom
What would be fascinating would be a comparative study between the Francophone and American comic book creators. My question: how come the Francophones appear to have avoided this break in cultural transmission?
I grew up reading comics and BD in both languages. I disliked reading the American comics of the late 70s onward. Why bother when the French one were so much better?
Now with the crowdfunding movement, social media word of mouth and contact with some Anglophone creators, I’ve since changed my mind.
In sim, I’m curious what happened with French speaking comics in contrast to the American ones.
xavier
I speculate that the BD are more self-contained and must sink or swim based on their content (story and art). By that I mean that BD were and are less geared to a monthly/quarterly/annual schedule as are US comics, and more geared to producing a quality story and getting it right.
Some of the problems you noted are due to the Silver Age to Bronze Age transition that I talked about in this article. Another factor is that of advertising. American comics were much more of an advertising vehicle in the 40s-80s than comic readers realized. American magazine sales are predicated on significant amounts of advertising revenue to keep their prices low, as opposed to European magazines which tend to be much more expensive than their US counterparts, as they rely more on the magazine’s content to make profit.
US comics were an excellent vehicle for small businesses and their advertisers to reach kids, young adults, comic collectors, and other adjacent interest groups with their national sales and high monthly distribution volume (100K-500K/month per title) prior to about 1978, when Direct Distribution began competing with Newsstand sales.
This is why US comics stayed relatively cheap for most of that period — ad revenue paid a chunk of Marvel’s bills. It also speaks to why you had some books in the 1971-1976 period that were just so awful–it was probably more important for some titles to just get the ad space out in front of potential readers instead of worrying as much about story and art quality.
The move to exclusive Direct Market sales killed advertising, other than some inserts by the owners or big dollar players. Who wants to advertise in a comic that will only be viewed by comic store customers? It’s why you have almost no advertising in modern comics and the cover prices have gone up dramatically, even against inflation.
From what I understand, BD books always had to “pay their own way”, so they focused on getting quality art and stories that readers would buy. Even in the 80s, IP products such as figurines, posters, toys, and the like began outselling many US comic titles. By the time that any lessons might have been learned, the mainstream US comic books had been converted to IP farms and were no longer the primary source of revenue for the owners.
Long to short, in my view, the vast majority of US comics never rose to the level of BD because they never had to ‘pay for themselves’ solely based on their story and their art.
Additionally, the lack of lessons learned by the US market is why I think Indie comic creators should NOT follow what US mainstream companies did, and stop trying to foolishly replicate the Direct Market/Local Comic Shop model. It’s one of the reasons that US comics are dead–the model helped kill them.
There are probably many reasons for the lack of a break in BD, but one that appears reasonable to me is that the BD creators were not as dependent upon joining a comic book company as the US creators were in the 1957 to 1968 period. There wasn’t an expectation that you had to join Marvel Comics, National Periodicals (DC), Charlton, or Western Publications to make comics outside of the US. A few independents were making comics in the Sixties, such as Wally Wood’s Witzend, but this was not the norm, and much with Indies today, unless you knew Wood was creating and distributing the book, you’d likely never see it or be in a location where it was sold.
Man of the atom,
Thanks for your detailed response to my question. If I remember right some of the early French comics were serialized. Tintin and Spirou ‘magazines’ (actually hardcover book with about 200-300 pages) come to mind. However, you’re right.
Another factor is that in Europe, comic books were always regarded as a legitimate art form. Thus, adults and kids could enjoy them and attracted outstanding artists, and others to contribute to the genre.
Boy do I remember the cheezy ads in the American comics 🙂 I enjoyed those as much as the comics.
The French ones were more like high end illustrated book. The kind you give for Christmas to kids or to adults as coffee table hoity-toity art book.
So what’s your principal advice to independent comic book creators? What do they need to do to ensure a steady output/revenue stream?
One last observation, I find the European comic book colours much more vibrant. That’s obviously due to the paper quality in both genres but it always struck me how matte the colours were in American comics. I personally was ambivalent, the matte colours didn’t bother me much but still left me with an impression of an ‘impoverished’ esthetic I still don’t enjoy.
Thanks again for your response.
xavier
To address your last question first, I’m not a fan of either glossy inside papers, nor modern full-saturation color in current US comic books (HSB or HSV color models). This is not a plea for a return to the four-color press and newsprint, but many comic book colorists today have demonstrated little ability to enhance the image on the page with color. Colors from foreground to background are often all full-saturation, which muddies the image and hides the foreground action. The color BD and Manga tend to follow the lead of older American colorists, placing higher saturation objects to the foreground and reducing saturation as you move into the panel background, and typically reversing that for nighttime scenes. I enjoy most BD/Manga colorists’ work for this reason.
If the art doesn’t enhance the storytelling of the comic, then the artist (penciller, inker, colorist) is wrong.
As far as recommending what to do to build a revenue stream, I’m probably not the guy you want for the answers, but I’ll take a whack based on my experiences in the the early 90s and recent work on anthologies. The key element is to attract an audience that enjoys your work. That must be done with some online presence and probably at least a bit of social media advertising that you do yourself.
Put your best efforts into your art and story. Purge your mind of the Direct Market/Local Comic Shop Model thinking when marketing and selling your work. That is, don’t try to force scarcity into your book by only printing a fixed number of copies and limiting the availability of ebook/PDF versions. A video from a month or so back from a relatively famous indie comic creator made the asinine suggestion to not provide ebook versions at all. This is not the 80s or 90s–this ‘collector’s issue’ mentality is destructive to the creators and to their readers. It’s small thinking and it did as much to kill US comics as the corporations using the books as IP farms.
You want as much availability for your Issue #1 as your Issue #100. Authors like Brian don’t limit when and where their books can be purchased or in what format. Print-on-Demand and ebook/PDF should be considered for your comics as if you are a novelist, not one of the old, broken LCS hangers-on. Market as though your most recent customer will buy the same series of books as your first one. Everyone who wants to buy your books should be able to obtain your available library with relative ease, not go grubbing through eBay to find a “scarce” copy. You owe your potential customers better treatment than that.