Superhero Dials

The eagerly anticipated follow up to part 3 in Man of the Atom’s series on the history and business of comic books has arrived! In this installment, our stalwart chronicler explores the Thor Power Tool case’s impact on the industry, shares more story craft wisdom from Jim Shooter, and introduces the concept of Superhero Dials.

First up, did the Thor Power decision have a detrimental effect on comics?

Thor Power would have impacted any inventory similar to Big Pub’s book warehouses, so once 1979 (retroactive) and 1980 hit, the warehouses became larger liabilities than they were before.

Thor Power was decided in 1980, but was retroactive to 1979. That meant that whether by planning or by accident, the Direct Market established in 1976-1978 would benefit both publishers and distributors by removing large static inventories from their ownership. Those would now be the province of the dealers.

It also meant that there would be no more inventories for the multi-packs of comics being re-marketed by third parties (or for other uses), as the inventories the publishers/distributors typically had due to returns would eventually be eliminated between the mid-60s and when Thor Power came into effect in 1979/1980.

Think ‘no returns’ from Direct Marketing as a means to move excess inventory away from the publisher and distributor into the hands of the local comic store. Thus, there was a tax incentive for using Direct Marketing for the comic companies and the distributors.

Killing the three and four-book multipacks that comics publishers used to sell in dime stores cut off a major source of new readers. The resulting trend that started in the 80s and dominated by the 90s dictated that, if you wanted to buy comics, you had to do it at a direct market specialty store.

But the dime store vs direct market fan divide wasn’t the only generation gap in comics. MotA again cites the prodigious Jim Shooter on the creative side’s lost generation–the Silents.

Because a lot of history gets lost in transitions, and comic books from 1956 to 1976 lost a lot of their own history, mentorship, and training. Again, Jim Shooter is mandatory reading. He helped new writers and artists understand comic books in the mid-to-late 70s and through the 80s. These short pages are worth your time to read: The Jim Shooter Storytelling Lecture.

Here’s how Jim tells it:

The comics business went into a steep decline in the ’50s and early ’60s. During that time a lot of companies folded, a lot of comic book professionals were unemployed, and so, if you were an editor at a surviving comic book company you never had to train anybody, you knew lots of guys who were out of work. The streets were awash with unemployed cartoonists. So what happened is we had a generation gap—relatively few new people came into this business between the mid-’50s and the early-to-mid-’60s.

If you’ve noticed a marked shift in the style and general approach to comic book storytelling between the 50s-60s and the 70s-80s, it’s because a lot of the new talent from the latter period were raised by wolves.

Back to Jim:

I was among the younger guys, but, by virtue of the fact that I’d started at age 13, working with ancient ones – for instance, Sheldon Moldoff, who began drawing comics in the ‘30’s drew my first published story – I had old-guy sensibilities. I often related better to the old guys – Romita, Perlin, John Buscema, Frank Thorne, Win Mortimer, Carmine, Paul Newman, Russ Heath, Stan, Jack, Steve – you can probably fill in the list yourself – than I did the young turks, some of whom had to be reminded which end of the brush to use.

So as editor-in-chief of Marvel I found myself with a lot of talented people around me who needed basic training. What I started doing was working with them and trying to explain some fundamental things. A lot of these guys were brilliant talents. They just hadn’t gone through boot camp like I had. So I developed a series of lectures which I started giving as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. The lectures were designed not to teach style, not to how to make comics Jim Shooter’s way. Just fundamentals. Little tidbits that I learned from the masters, passing on the wisdom of the ancients. Most of it was taught to me by experts.

It was just comics that had a sudden rupture with tradition after the 60s. Hollywood experienced an even more dramatic upheaval, which Devon Stack explored in his Easy Rider review.

It’s evident that American pop culture underwent a revolution in the late 60s and early 70s wherein the new generation of creatives ate their medium’s seed corn. The entertainment industry had enough momentum to keep going for thirty more years, but its cultural capital was exhausted in the late 90s.

Why is that particular point in time familiar?

We can’t know what we lost unless we understand what we had. To fill in the blanks, MotA lays out the composition of the superhero genre.

Literary genres in the present day are exceptionally detailed and often ridiculously refined and compartmentalized, as anyone familiar with Amazon and Kindle are aware. The original genre in literature is Romance. This is not the typical gray-goo bodice ripper book that you find listed or tagged as ‘romance’ on the aforementioned platform. [I refer to the bodice rippers as Emotion-based Porn, rather than Romance.]

Henceforth, I shall call the contemporary Headless Highlander With Chiseled Abs genre emotion porn.

This ‘Romance’ is rather the genre of literature that formed the bedrock of Western Civilization. This includes most literary works which appeared prior to the 15th Century. The Romantic Poets appeared in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. From these poems and writings, emerged the subset genre of the Gothic form, from which the genre of Horror stems. Both Romance and Gothic literature stem from Christian principles, as their roots are within literature such as the Matter of Britain, the Matter of France, and the Matter of Rome, which are themselves linked intrinsically to Christian works. The larger Romance form is often composed of a protagonist on a journey of discovery to complete a task or quest, for his or others’ benefit, often at the direction of God or a representative of the Deity. The Gothic genre in its basic form is a morality play wrapped in an entertaining story. Horror flows from this genre and is also a morality play, this time wrapped in story that features suspense and fear/shock inducing elements.

Sorry, pop cultists. Western horror is a Christian phenomenon. There is no escaping the Christianity that informs the horror genre, and modern attempts to cut it off from the vine have led to its withering.

What is the Superhero other than a Classical Romance story blended with an Adventure story, with flavor elements that provide a compelling world in which to adventure? 

Removed from its grounding in heavily Christian-influenced romance tropes, the superhero genre is the incoherent miasma of ugly images and Death Cult agitprop that has consumed the legacy comics industry.

Appendix N author Jeffro Johnson is right. We must regress harder.

To better understand why, read Man of the Atom’s whole post.

And to take practical action on your heightened understanding, read my #1 best seller.