The recent post on who killed rock and roll attracted a lot of notice. It’s taken a while to gain traction, but it seems like every day more people are noticing Cultural Ground Zero.
As this theory’s name implies, the destruction wasn’t limited to popular music. Every form of mass entertainment in the West from movies to television to comics suffered creative collapse circa 1997.
Comic books seem like an outlier in this reckoning. After all, superhero movies so dominate Hollywood that it feels like cape flicks are the only films they make anymore.
But that’s a symptom of the larger issue. Sales of comic books themselves have imploded – and they did so decades ago. The only reasons they’re still published are:
a) Gen Y nerds wallowing in nostalgia
b) To maintain IP rights for big studios whose parent companies also happen to own the publishers.
Contrary to the veneer of popularity bestowed by Hollywood, American comics are dead. Today’s best sellers only move numbers of copies that would have gotten them cancelled back in the 80s. It’s not kids buying the new books, either. It’s Pop Cultists in their 40s.
So how did it come to this point? Who killed American comics?
As with every unsolved crime from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the Kennedy assassination, there are as many theories as there are people.
“It was the 90s speculator bubble,” some say. “When stunt marketing like variant covers couldn’t keep it pumped up, the bubble burst and took down the direct market.”
Others pin the blame on publishers axing veteran writers to let rock star artists helm top titles.
Yet others point the finger at the Woke Cult for subverting the Big Two comic book publishers.
But few notice that none of these theories are mutually exclusive. The American comics industry is like an elephant – a dead one – that fans are groping in the dark for a cause of death. Shedding a little light on the matter is all it takes to solve the mystery.
So here’s who killed American comics …
Longtime readers may remember friend of the blog Research Guy. While rebuilding his childhood comic book collection, he created an index of back issues spanning from the 1950s. He annotated the list, highlighting major events a given issue contained. First appearances of popular characters, introductions of key in-universe concepts, and the start of major storylines got pride of place.
All of that cataloging yielded extraordinary insights. Research Guy noticed patterns present in almost all comic books published within certain time frames. It was like American comics had an industry-wide meta arc that featured these well-defined phases:
- Growth (1960s): Iconic new characters debut regularly. Major concepts that will shape continuity introduced. Universe-defining events frequently take place.
- Maturity (1970-1980s): Introduction of new ideas tapers off as series hit their stride. Eventful individual issues still common.
- Stagnation (late 80s-early 90s): Writing quality declines. Increased reliance on gimmicks to drive sales. This includes replacing beloved icons with diversity doppelgangers and first signs of wokeness.
- Decay (Mid 90s-Mid Aughts): Narrative wasteland in which nothing of consequence happens for years. The worst aspects of sales gimmicks and nascent wokeness combine in the following pattern: Iconic character killed off, series reboot with new issue #1 often replacing venerable lead with diversity character, original numbering and lead character quietly brought back a few months later.
- Death/Shambling zombie status (Now)
It was Combat Frame XSeed concept artist ArtAnon who pointed to the web site of Fantastic Four superfan Chris Tolworthy. Quite independently, Chris gathered supporting evidence for all of Research Guy’s observations.
Check out this chart from Chris’ site:
The events noted on the timeline map almost perfectly to Research Guy’s comics meta arc.
- 1961-1967: Under the guidance of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the story lines in Marvel’s regular titles organically grow into the largest shared continuity in literary history. 1963 stands as the high water mark for the creation of new Marvel characters.
- 1968-1973: End of the Silver Age. Marvel sold to Gordon Gecko prototype Martin S. Ackerman. Number of monthly titles explodes. IRL time replaced with Marvel Time (Reed Richards said to have fought in Korea instead of WWII, Gwen Stacy killed to maintain status quo of Peter being single, Franklin Richards’ age fluctuates wildly, etc.)
- 1988: Lee’s misguided directive to give readers the “illusion of change” instead of real change renders dramatic tension impossible. Readers catch on that the status quo ante will always return. There are no more great universe-wide stories after this point, though great standalone stories are still being published.
- 1991: Character development rolled back and further character development forbidden by editorial fiat.
- 1996: The Heroes Reborn and Amalgam events kill Marvel’s 30+ years of continuity. Marvel goes bankrupt. New owners cement the shift in focus from publishing single floppies to movie licensing.
It’s rather eerie how two separate comics historians’ timelines jibe, no?
The one line of data Research Guy lacked was sales figures over the period in question, which Chris helpfully provided. As shown in the chart above, the overall downward trend is pronounced.
Comic book fans used to read Marvel books for their sense of continuity, high-stakes conflict, and relatable characters. The Marvel Universe was like a neighborhood bar where they could drop in and catch up with the regulars. They watched those characters’ lives unfold for decades. Then the building was torn down to make room for a corporate chain bar. Prices rose while quality dropped.
The downward slide was temporarily reversed during the reign of maverick editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. But Marvel’s recovery on his watch just proves Chris and Research Guy’s point. Shooter revived Marvel by sticking to continuity and shipping quality books on time. Who’d have thought?
Marvel began its transition from a comic book publisher to a brand management company in 1968. That shift in focus was cemented in 1996 and made irreversible upon the company’s absorption by Disney.
As for DC, they’ve operated as a brand management firm since the 1950s. Marvel just became their later-decanted clone.
That’s our culprit. The Big Two abandoned the comic book publishing business for the brand management business. The editors checked out, and good writing got thrown under the bus. Flashy art and sales gimmicks replaced big ideas and deep characters. Speculators drawn by the stunt marketing replaced readers. The subsequent bubble popped, and woke megacorps swooped in to pick the carcass clean.
Restoring the culture will take a new breed of creators committed to telling high-stakes stories about relatable characters engaging with big ideas. Not the type to expect from others what I’m unwilling to do myself, I’ve been working at just those kinds of projects for years.
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It went from everyone reading comics in the early 90s, to almost no one reading them by the end of the decade. I was one of the few still reading them, but it was mostly non-cape stuff I was reading.
This is hard for anyone younger than Gen Y to process, but comics were very much mainstream for decades. The scene they grew up in during the ’00s and 10s was an already dead climate that normal people already abandoned ages ago.
And it also happened to book publishing and the music industry, and is currently happening to video games right now. All the more reason to set up an alternative ASAP. We’re going to need them.
That 35-year-old rando arguing with Crisova about early 90s normies not having been into comics comes to mind. He’d have been a toddler at the height of the bubble, but because he didn’t see jocks reading X-Men a decade later, it never happened.
The memory hole is real.
This is where a lot of the “geek persecution” narrative is stewing among a lot of the anti-woke crowd. They weren’t there but they were sold the Hollywood narrative that “geeks” built everything and normal people swooped in and stole it from them before and then twisted them with fringe Current Year politics.
In essence, they’re swallowing tripe from the very people they purport to hate and are making enemies where there are none.
There was never any “geek culture” at any point in time. It was always a corporate invention to get audiences to turn their interests into lifestyle brands, which is something we now 100% know they wanted to do. It was a weapon meant to split audience lines, and those that weren’t on the right side left. Sound familiar? Because that’s what they’re doing right now. They’re simply trying to filter out the non-believers yet again, and those that fell for the lie the first time are clinging to the illusion made by people who hate them.
I’m getting a bit tired of geek cultists telling me I lived in some alternate timeline or dimension when I state how things actually were back in the day. No, that’s really what it was like. You’re the one that was sold a lie, and it’s time to face it. You’re not going back to the ’00s. That era is over.
Michael K. Vaughan made a video a while back in which he made the case for why, in the long-term, continuity-heavy comics (or the “Stan Lee Virus” as he calls it) can create a situation that will eventually result in sales declines.
He believes that the best way forward is to make comics that are closer to Golden Age comics in terms of continuity, with more standalone stories and less major changes to the status quo.
I’ve long thought along similar lines. It used to be that anyone could pick up a random comic book at the newsstand and jump in at that point, without having to worry about becoming familiar with decades worth of lore. When that went away, comics became less approachable. They made up for it for a while with some interesting ongoing storylines that kept readers hooked, but that can only work for so long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvjvd47dCuk
That theory ties in with our serialized vs episodic storytelling discussion from January’s Neopatron AMA. All the praise that, say, DS9 gets for pioneering series continuity carries a whiff of bugmanism.
Both types of storytelling have their strengths and weaknesses, but my gut cautions against the hot take that continuity is strictly better in all cases.
Western comics wanted both at the same time, which is impossible. You either take the old episodic comic strip approach, or you take the serialized adventure approach (which means it must eventually lead to something and end), you cannot split the difference.
I’m also fairly certain if you ask anyone older than a zoomer why they stopped reading comics (especially if it was for manga) they will say it is because nothing ever mattered and there was no ending in sight. And most of them realized this back in the ’90s when X-Men didn’t end with Scott and Jean’s wedding or Superman came back from the dead. They wanted to pretend those weren’t natural endpoints, but they were. Everything since then has just been repeating the same thing indefinitely and using the tired crutch of alternate dimensions/timelines and heroes and villains swapping sides endlessly in dumb soap opera drama.
If comics are to survive, it will have to be ditching the mainstream cape method. It is a proven failure.
It’s doubly a shame in X-Men’s case. The writers had had a solid final arc set up with the Days of Future Past storyline. Its natural ending should have been Cable defeating Apocalypse, with Scott and Jean marrying as a foreshadowing of their raising him to close the circle.
It’s such an obvious endpoint, too, because after the marriage is a miniseries of their honeymoon where we learn Cable’s origins which basically tells you what will happen next in the future. It was such an obvious place for an epilogue to the story. Everything after that feels superglued on, in contrast.
That’s the thing about a lot of those comics. They actually did end, but the publishers couldn’t admit it and have spent the last quarter century mixing and matching soap opera parts to keep the illusion alive.
They really did take their audience for granted, and that’s why they left.
Comics are an interesting subject for me. I was familiar with various superhero characters as a kid in the 90s, but I had almost no exposure to comic books at all. All the comics in my house were book collections of newspaper comics like Calvin And Hobbes, Garfield, Foxtrot, and so on. I can’t remember even handling an actual Marvel or DC comic book when I was a kid at any point, nor do I remember any of my friends reading them. Maybe it’s just a particularity of my time and place, but it’s remarkable how little comic book presence there was in my otherwise nerdy childhood.
Most of my exposure was through the cartoon adaptations like Superman, X-Men, and especially the excellent Batman: The Animated Series. It’s interesting that as the actual comics were stagnating, the adaptations like Batman TAS were well-written and animated.
However, even back then, I think I had this notion of comic books and American superhero stories in general as essentially static and repetitive, where nothing ever really changes more than in… a newspaper comic, incidentally enough. When I encountered anime in middle school, in the heyday of Toonami, one aspect that blew my mind was how dynamic everything was. The concept of characters or other aspects of the world/story that could undergo permanent changes felt completely revolutionary. Something like Dragon Ball is an archetypal example of this, not just in the characters attaining more power and abilities, but also in terms of personal development; it’s why, say, Vegeta is such a compelling and beloved character from that franchise.
This all felt dramatically different from how American superhero stories seemed to work – it didn’t seem to me like Batman ever really changed much, for example. Maybe that’s not *really* the case, at least for Golden/Silver Age comics, but that was my general perception. It’s interesting reading this post and getting some perspective that things were not always this way with American comics and their derivatives.
Fun fact: Vegeta was originally intended to just be the big bad of the Saiyan Saga, with no future appearances planned. But he proved so popular that Toriyama brought him back.
A creator listening to his fans and giving them something they like! What a wild concept. Maybe Toriyama was on to something there.
Something that really sticks with me about Dragon Ball, long after the adrenaline rush of middle school-appeal violence and action has kind of worn off, is Goku’s determination to try to see the good in even the seeming worst of adversaries. There’s something strikingly Christian about that.
I always find it remarkable how these discussions always center on American superhero stuff with a dash of manga, and never mention BD, which exhibits none of the problems described.
Shooter was both good and bad for Marvel. Yes, books shipped on time, but he also ran off a bunch of top talent to DC. Secret Wars I and II were also his ideas, and that (along with Super Powers at DC) was really where the speculator boom began. Secret Wars I and Super Powers were designed explicitly to sell toys. Secret Wars II was the first company-wide crossover that took over every book. Everyone claimed to hate it, but they bought it.
Put those two together and now it looks like you can big money by pumping out empty stories for collectors. And that’s when the sharks moved in, which led to the bubble and bust.
Did American comics die a creative death in 1997? Here are some great comics that have come out since then.
Grant Morrison: JLA, New X-men, Marvel Boy, Seven Soldiers of Victory, All-Star Superman, the epic Batman run, Nameless, Final Crisis, Multiversity, and The Filth.
Chris Ware: Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories, Rusty Brown.
Al Ewing: They Only Find Us When We’re Dead, Immortal Hulk, Mighty Avengers, Ant-Man, Wasp, Avengers Inc, Defenders, Ultimates Vol 1 and 2, U.S. Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and Rocket, Royals, Loki: Agent of Asgard, Immortal Thor, Valkyrie: Jane Foster, Venom, SWORD, X-men: Red, and Empyre.
Kelly Thompson: Captain Marvel, Birds of Prey, West Coast Avengers, Hawkeye, A-Force, Rogue and Gambit, Jessica Jones, Mr and Mrs X, Deadpool, Black Widow, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Mark Waid: Daredevil, Black Widow, Dr Strange, World’s Finest, and Shazam.
Jason Aaron: Wolverine, Thor, and Scalped.
Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda: Monstress and X-23.
Tom Taylor: All-New Wolverine, Nightwing, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Titans.
Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora: Once and Future. Gillen’s Darth Vader and Doctor Aphra were also great.
Greg Rucka and Michael Lark: Lazarus and Gotham Central. Ed Brubaker also wrote some great issues of that book.
Kurtis Wiebe and various: Rat Queens
G. Willow Wilson: Ms. Marvel and Poison Ivy
Jonathan Hickman: The Manhattan Projects, East of West, FF, Fantastic Four, Avengers, various X-books, and Secret Wars.
Ed Brubaker: Secret Avengers, Captain America, Winter Soldier, Uncanny X-men, Detective Comics
Mike Carey: Lucifer, the Unwritten, various X-books
Jen Van Meter: Hopeless Savages
Jason Lutes: Berlin
Chynna Clugston Flores: Blue Monday
Carla Speed McNeil: Finder
Chip Zdarsky: Daredevil, Batman, Howard the Duck, Spider-Man: Life Story
Ryan North: Squirrel Girl, Fantastic Four
James Sturm: The Golem’s Mighty Swing
Ted Naifeh: Courtney Crumrin, Polly and the Pirates, Princess Ugg
Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang: Paper Girls
Jed MacKay: Daughters of the Dragon, Moon Knight, Avengers, Black Cat
Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, 100 Bullets
Brian Azzarello, DK III: The Master Race
Jeremy Whitely, The Unstoppable Wasp
Chuck Dixon, Birds of Prey
Philip Kennedy Johnson, Beta Ray Bill and Action Comics
Kieron Gillen, DIE, The Wicked and the Divine, and Young Avengers
Jeff Lemire, Remnant and Black Hammer
Gail Simone, Killer Princesses, Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Birds of Prey, and Domino