If you had the fortune of being a kid back when we still had a coherent society, and if you’d developed a taste for comic books, odds were that at least one adult in your life warned you against the habit. If the warning went unheeded, the common wisdom held that you’re grow out of it when you graduated middle school and discovered girls.
In those long-vanished days, the comics industry wasn’t just an IP farm for rootless megacorps. If you want a picture of the business today, imagine a spandex-clad superhero lying under heavy guard in a medically induced coma, kept on life support only to harvest his blood.
Take a quick look around the pop culture landscape, and you’ll see that many members of generations Y, X, Jones—and even quite a few Boomers—bucked the received wisdom. They never grew out of comics. Instead, they turned the hobby into a a religion.
And that religion evangelizes. The biggest movie universe of the past three decades was based on comic book IPs. It’s a testament to our cultural dysfunction that liking comics back when they were good made you a social pariah, but it’s hip to like comics now that they’re garbage.
Related: A Tale of Two Cults
The Big Two comic book publishers’ turn from producing entertaining stories to perpetrating wholesale vandalism on their own product, all at the behest of woke scolds, has drawn a lot of attention. But look past the hype, and you’ll see that Marvel and DC are out of ideas. They have been for a long time.
Case in point: Bane, a Batman villain created thirty years ago, was the last comic book character to break onto the A list. Marvel especially just trades in reskinned knockoffs of their past glory. The common fan response is to cite characters like Miles Morales or Kamala Khan as counterexamples. But as author David V. Stewart has pointed out, those are just palette swapped versions of the classic Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel IPs.
Related: The Corporate IP Death Cycle
That’s not so much the House of Ideas as a tomb for IPs. Yet these decades-old characters keep crawling from their graves like zombies.
People in the new counterculture make facing reality a key part of our identity. We know that the bitterest truth beats the sweetest lie every day of the week. Maybe it’s time to face the unpleasant reality that comics aren’t coming back. While Sad Puppies alums have gone on to bigger and better things, and GamerGate is back for round 2, ComicsGate quickly fell to internal personality conflicts and has stayed mired in e-drama ever since. Despite its faults, GG took down Gawker. Meanwhile, DC and Marvel still remain. When the Big Two collapse, it will be under the weight of their own incompetence.
Comics as we knew them were products of a specific time and place. Now that the cultural conditions prevalent in mid-twentieth century America have disappeared, the whole concept of an IP with universal appeal isn’t just ridiculous, but meaningless. Whatever the future holds for comics, it won’t look like their heyday under Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.
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Comic books have to crawl out of the ghetto they built for themselves if the artform is to ever receive mass appeal again. Just yesterday a member of the shrinking elitists in the dying whisper network committed suicide because he thought his career was over after his allies turned on him. The note he left named prominent people in the industry that have positions in it they probably shouldn’t yet to this day continue to hold. Much like OldPub, they only care about being king of the sandbox.
And to think the decline became irreversible after a bunch of Gen Xers got in the industry specifically to aim comics away from kids and general audiences into their own empty house of mirrors.
There isn’t anything like this in Belgium or Japan, places where their industry is not only alive but thriving with ideas and in sales. It just goes to show you way gatekeeping is important to keep subversives out and goals on track. Because the industry over here is just a giant mess that it has no reason to be.
I should also add that our grandparents were right about these things, though not in the way they probably expected. It wasn’t that reading comics, listening to rock music, or watching violent movies, would turn you into a media zombie, but that worshiping them untethered to any greater purpose or without any ultimate meaning, was doomed to turn both the art and yourself into a mockery of what you could be.
Much like the “Satanic Panic” was, there was truth in their words, but it was not aimed in right place or communicated very well.
It’s almost as if whenever normie gets wind that something’s amiss, somebody steps in to divert that concern in the wrong direction.
JD,
Excellent analysis. I’ll simply reiterate what I posted at Twitter in response to your blog articles. Outside of North America, comic books were regarded as a legitimate art form; in regarded as the 8th art. So it’s attracted, and still does, talented artists and savvy businessmen.
By contrast, American comic arose at the time, the American cultural elites graduating from the Prussian/Prussian modelled universities, combined with Puritanism launched a Kulturkampf against pulps, comics and other culture naif in favour Literatur and ‘high culture’ as they defined it. So American comics have had to struggle for cultural legitimacy.
xavier
Manga is slowly starting to show cracks in its own way. Back in highschool (15 years ago), you could walk into the manga section and you’d have a variety of good stories to choose from, not just the popular ones which had an anime adaptation running. Now, everything on the shelves has an anime adaptation and follows the same kind of story; usually isekai harem or whatever trope appeals to the horny teenage boy demographic. It’s boring.
The one exception I’ve found recently is Colorless. No anime adaptation, interesting story concept and the art style is really cool.
Big comic names from the 2010’s are now leaving/not primarily working with the Big 2 to make their own stories. Geoff Johns and Gary Frank are pushing Ghost Machine heavily, because they want to write and make their own stories (and have the image comic funds from it).
From comics to music to novels, that is the future.
We are better served with the Big Two and Irrelevant Five dying. The hope to reconstitute the 90s by CG is attempting to reanimate the most deleterious and decayed portion of the comics timeline and will very likely fail. Mainstream comics lost their way about five years after they were first sold to corporations — mark that as 1968. It’s been downhill from there. You have to regress harder than 1968, and into the still breathing Pulp Era to understand what was lost by comics. Even then, they only captured a sliver of it.
Indie Books surfaced in the late 70s with WARP Graphics as a breath of fresh air, along with the thing that would help kill the new audiences for comics: Direct Sales. Local Comic Stores became the graveyard of comics between 1987 (Jim Shooter loses the ‘AND’ battle with Marvel) and 1999 (LCS owners badger DC into dropping subscription sales.) Pr0n helped finish off the Indie Market about the time of Heroes World bankrupting Marvel, and killing all but one comic distributor with HW’s fall. 1997.
It’s been Zombieland pretty much ever since. Dave Sim recognized the problem in 1993 when he wrote an issue of Spawn (#10), highlighting the problem in panel below. The story behind the story is in the link following.
https://ibb.co/Z8byzmX
https://popcultureaffidavit.com/2012/02/08/superman-and-the-image-problem/
Let these characters die. They made good memories, but let them rest. Stop trying to drag their corpses into the living world.
New skins for new wine. Neopatronage for independent creators holds the future of American comics, if there is to be one.
The Death & Return of Superman was the end of the story. The reason it fell off afterwards is because the readers new that and they wanted something new. Instead, comics fled into specialized stores, ignored normal people, and focused on never-ending soap opera storylines with no meaningful progression. That is what they were unknowingly doing in the 90s with their gimmick events–they were setting up climaxes, delivering on them, and then got puzzled why readers didn’t come back again. They had finally given readers the off-ramp they were waiting for. Unfortunately, they never got that hint and just continuing eating themselves afterwards.
CG and other indie creators trying to emulate the ’90s are missing the point. The ’90s were the dead end point. There isn’t anything to build off from there, and most audiences don’t want more ’90s comics. They got sick of them the first time around for a good reason.
The success of other markets show people want series that have stakes and that will build into something that matters. The recent surprise success of Kagurabachi in Shonen Jump from a guy who just wanted to see if he could write a revenge story in a shonen magazine shows that there are plenty of ways to have new ways to do familiar things.
None of that mentality will really grow over here until a lot changes in the wider market.
You could write a book about this topic and all the subsequent tangents related to it.
What I take away from this is how I crave to be a fan of something again. I crave to passionately nerd out about a piece of media like I did when I was young. People can say what they will, but I bonded with many cool people over our mutual love of cartoons, manga, anime, games, etc. Good entertainment media is a great social bonding tool.
As an artist, the lack of anything fresh (with few exceptions) in the past 30 years is troubling for me because my pool of things to consume, reference, and be inspired by is nonexistent. This is a relevant crisis because it’s easy to say “study the classics”, but many of the classics are from time eras modern audiences can’t relate to. There are cultural queues which go over modern audiences heads when consumed. If we want to modernize entertainment, we need contemporary culture queues people can relate to. Instead I look around and all I can see is PC browbeating and dumb stuff. At best, you can use this as a subject of mockery or criticism, but people need more than parody – as explored by a mutual of mine recently.
Props to many indie artists out there making stuff, but if I’m going to be honest, there’s has been little to nothing that has interested me or enthralled me like the IPS of old. Granted, lots of circumstances have led me to this point of disinterest and I accept this is a barrier to me enjoying new entertainment or seeking it out, but how big a factor this barrier is, I don’t know.
This problem is something I have to address at a later date. I’m too busy trying to learn the skills to create that needing to consume something relevant isn’t a need for now.
On a final note: I’m sure in a way, the titans of comics will fall, but if we remove the love goggles we have for the indie scene, will there be anything or even enough there to fill that void in the market?
You really do need a shared culture with shared values in order for there to be a uniting piece of art that connects with a wide swath of people. Unfortunately, creating art like that is harder than ever because not only is there a large chunk of people willingly talking themselves into believing destructive lies made by people who hate them, the younger generations are coming up in this mess and has no bearing on what any of it means on any level. It’s like having a new neighbor that speaks Swahili and only ever calls to scream at you about something you can’t understand. How are you supposed to communicate without anything to link you?
There won’t be anything to fill the void of those IPs, because pop culture is dead and nothing can really take its place in a world like the above. That is where we are now. Things have to change on a wider and deeper scale before the industry can.
When Gygax and crew were creating Dungeons and Dragons, they were certainly influenced by then contemporary fiction like the works of Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber. But they were also influenced by things like Greek and Norse myths, the Arthurian Romances, and the story of Robin Hood, each of which came from a culture more removed from their own than the culture of the 70s is removed from ours.
What I mean to say is that of course new fiction is essential, but every era before ours created their stories by remaining firmly in touch with the stories of their forefathers. To create something great, you need to start from a foundation that has withstood the test of time. And of course, sometimes things endure because there really isn’t much way to top it. If you want to learn basic geometry Euclid’s Elements is still the best way to go, and if you want to learn basic logic you can start from Aristotle’s Organon.
Now this doesn’t mean that you have to stay with the classics and not innovate. There is quite a lot of math beyond Euclid and Aristotle. However without a firm starting point at best you are reinventing things from scratch, and face such an uphill challenge that only a genius could succeed. In a worse case, you base things on the debased works from the modern age, which starts you lower than nothing.
This is a big reason why normie-con fiction falls flat (well, when the whole thing isn’t just a huge scam). It’s just modern garbage but with the names rearranged to have Christians and Republicans as the good guys. The core still is based on modernist assumptions, so the work as a whole goes no where. The reason things like the pulp revolution hit so much harder is that they are based on classics that work. And yet they are still generally accessible to a modern audience.
To put things another way, Michelangelo could surpass the Roman and Greek masters. And later artists could do great by working from the foundation that Michelangelo set. But Michelangelo would not have been able to surpass the old masters if he was not familiar with them. In the same way, in the current stage we need people learning from the greats and applying their lessons to create new fiction. When we have enough of our own masterworks, then others can build upon it.
To add, current audiences are showing that they are interested in period pieces from even the more recent past and are also showing that they want authentic representations of such periods in their fiction.
It’s weird to complain about needing a touchstone with modern audiences when the same modern audiences are looking to the past with awe, wonder, and glee. It’s why retro as a scene became big enough to start businesses over. There nowhere near enough Gen Y whales to make that happen.
Yes, there are.
But we’re also moving away from an era where a near monolithic idea of pop culture exists. Largely as a result of the tail end of atomization on one end, and the proliferation of sub-cultures that the internet aided in doing.
In a lot of ways, the situation we’re finding ourselves in culturally, socially, and politically is very much the same as the one that the Pulp Writers of Old found themselves in and grew exponentially in as well.
Mass media may soon be a thing of the past, but that isn’t a bad thing, and cross-pollinating/connecting our niches for growth and exposure sounds like the way to go.
When your industry (and many others folks rightfully complain about in the modern era) started out life as a means for Mobsters to Launder their racketeering and bootlegger money, or developed as a criminal enterprise in the case of films, it becomes rather difficult for me to see our current situation as anything but the end result of these people being effectively given a free pass to make garbage for a period of about 40 years (Between Mob money and making war propaganda for the US Government) and then promptly not investing into the future of the business when they basically used the courts and various other methods to ensure no one could get into their turf until very recently.
I don’t know what comes next, as it seems like everything is starting to come apart at the seams, but I don’t see any of these industries not undergoing major shake ups in the next 10-20 years, at the latest.
The organized crime angle, as well as Hollywood’s whole reason for existing being to violate Edison’s IP, is seldom brought up. But it sure is welcome.
As someone who has studied a bit of the history of the format wars, the failure of Laserdisc and RCA’s attempt at a video format, and many, many other things, I have a much different take on Edison’s actions.
Rather than creating Hollywood by itself, what it really did was snuff out any other place such an industry could’ve gotten a foothold in, due to the fact that he was better able to enforce his patents on film tech the further east you were, thus ensuring that Hollywood would win by virtue of being the last man standing and in a very lucrative position with no real competition when Edison’s stuff failed in court. In addition, we do have the example where he tried similar things with regards to Vinyl discs and his Cylinder format, which shows how utterly short sighted his attempts at control truly were in that regard.
This is also why the Hays Code was the most misguided attempt to fix the issue that was Hollywood, as it basically undermined local and state efforts to force Hollywood to bend the knee.
Thanks for writing this out, Brian, and everyone in the comments! I’ve been circulating around the indie comics and comicsgate people for about a year now, watching them eat each other. I’ve formed opinions that are unpopular, and lo and behold, I come here and see you guys articulating them for me. Thank you so much! I feel validated. I shall continue working on my own little graphic novel adapt of my own superhero book.