Comics

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Comics

Comic strips and comic books have been two mainstays of American culture during the entire twentieth century. Comic strips rapidly became a defining feature of modern American culture after their introduction to newspapers across the nation in the first ten years of the twentieth century. Likewise comic books captured the imagination of many Americans in the late 1930s and early 1940s, particularly after the appearance of costumed heroes such as Superman, Batman, and Captain Marvel. From the beginning, comics produced distinct, easily recognized characters whose images could be licensed for other uses. Comic characters united entertainment and commerce in ways that became ubiquitous in American culture.

Although the origin of comic strips is generally traced to the first appearance of the Yellow Kid—so named because the printers chose his nightshirt to experiment with yellow ink—in the New York World in 1895, the antecedents of comics are somewhat more complex. When the World began a Sunday humor supplement in 1889, it did so to attract the audience of American illustrated humor magazines such as Puck, Judge, and Life. These magazines had drawn on European traditions of broadsheets, satirical prints, comic albums, and journals such as Fliegende Blätter, Charivari, and Punch to create a sharp-edged American style of satirical visual humor. The appearance of the Yellow Kid—in the Hogan's Alley series—was not a particularly startling moment but rather grew out of an international and local tradition of illustrated humor. What set the Yellow Kid apart from previous versions of the city urchin genre of illustrated humor were his distinct features and regular appearance in large-scale comic panels.

In October 1896 William Randolph Hearst launched a humor supplement to the Sunday edition of his New York Journal and contracted the services of Richard Outcault, the Yellow Kid's creator. In addition, the Journal employed Rudolph Dirks and Frederick Opper. Although the Yellow Kid established the importance in comic art of a regularly appearing, distinctive character, Outcault did not use with any regularity two other important features of modern comics—sequential panels and word balloons, both of which had been used for centuries in European and American graphic art. Dirks and Opper introduced and developed these features in the pages of the Journal. Between December 1897 and March 1901 Dirks's Katzenjammer Kids and Opper's Happy Hooligan brought together the essential features of modern comics: a regular, distinctive character or cast of characters appearing in a mass medium, the use of sequential panels to establish narrative, and the use of word balloons to convey dialogue. More often than not Dirks's and Opper's strips used twelve panels on a broadsheet page to deliver a gag.

Between 1900-03 newspaper owners and syndicates licensed comic strips and supplements to newspapers across the country. This expansion was tied to broader developments in American culture including the establishment of national markets and ongoing developments in communication and transportation. Comic supplements were circulation builders for newspapers, and by 1908 some 75 percent of newspapers with Sunday editions had a comics supplement. For most newspapers the introduction of a comic supplement saw a rise in sales. The development of daily comic strips, which started with Bud Fischer's Mutt and Jeff, first published in November 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle, added another dimension to the medium. In 1908 only five papers ran daily comic strips; five years later at least ninety-four papers across the country ran daily strips. By 1913 newspapers had also begun to group their daily strips on a single page. In a relatively short space of time comic strips moved from being something new to being a cultural artifact. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 quotes surveys showing that by 1924 at least 55 percent and as high as 82 percent of all children regularly read comic strips. Likewise it showed that surveys by George Gallup and others in the 1930s revealed that the mean average adult readership of comic strips was 75 percent.

The daily comic strip's four or five panels and black-and-white format as opposed to the Sunday comics' twelve color panels was the first of many thematic and aesthetic innovations that fed the popularity of strips. An important development in this process was the blossoming of the continuity strip. Comics historian Robert Harvey has argued that Joseph Patterson, the proprietor of the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, was instrumental in establishing continuing story lines in comic strips through his development and promotion of Sidney Smith's The Gumps, a comic strip equivalent of a soap opera with more than a hint of satire. The continuity strip gave rise to adventure strips such as Wash Tubbs and Little Orphan Annie, which in turn led to the emergence of science fiction strips like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Even gag strips such as the working girl strip Winnie Winkle adopted continuous story lines for extended periods. The continuity strips led to comic art styles less caricatured in appearance, which for want of a better expression might be dubbed realistic strips, although the story content remained fanciful. No one style of strip ever came to dominate the comics pages, where gags strips, adventure strips, and realistic strips still appear side by side.

From the start, the existence of distinctive characters in comics had offered commercial possibilities beyond the pages of newspapers. The image of the Yellow Kid was used to sell cigars, crackers, and ladies' fans, to name but a few of his appearances. Theater producer Gus Hill staged a musical around the Kid in 1898 and continued to produce comic-strip-themed musicals into the 1920s. Doll manufacturers likewise produced comic strip character dolls. Buster Brown gave his name to shoes, clothing, and a host of other products including pianos and bread. The Yellow Kid's adventures had been reprinted in book form as early as 1897, and throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century publishers such as Cupples and Leon, and F. A. Stokes issued book compilations of popular comic strips. In the early 1930s the commercial dimensions of comic strips were expanded further when advertising executives realized that the mass readership of strips meant that the art form could be used in advertising to draw consumers to a product through entertainment. In 1933, following this strategy, the Eastern Color Printing Company sold a number of companies on the idea of reprinting comic strips in "books" and giving them away as advertising premiums.

After producing several of these advertising premium comic books, Eastern published Famous Funnies in 1934, a sixty-four-page comic book of reprinted strips priced at ten cents. Although the company lost money on the first issue, it soon showed a profit by selling advertising space in the comic book. Pulp writer Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson saw an opportunity and joined the fledgling industry with his all-original New Fun comic book in February 1935. Wheeler-Nicholson's limited financial resources necessitated a partnership with his distributor, the Independent News Company, run by Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, and the three formed a partnership to launch Detective Comics in 1937. By 1938 Donenfeld and Liebowitz had eased Wheeler-Nicholson out of the company. Shortly thereafter the two decided to publish a new title, Action Comics, and obtained a strip for the first issue that M. C. Gaines at the McClure Syndicate had rejected. Superman by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster appeared on the cover of the first issue dated June 1938. The initial print run was two hundred thousand copies. By 1941, Action Comics sold on average nine hundred thousand copies. The company followed this success with the first appearance of Batman in Detective Comics in May 1939.

The success of Superman and DC Comics, as the company was now known, led other comic book companies to introduce costumed heroes in the late 1930s and early 1940s including All American's (DC's sister company) Wonder Woman and The Flash; Timely's (later Marvel) Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Submariner; and Fawcett's Captain Marvel. Comic book sales increased dramatically and, according to Coulton Waugh, by 1942 12.5 million were sold monthly. Historians such as Ron Goulart have attributed the boom in superhero comic books to Depression-era searches for strong leadership and quick solutions, and the cultural and social disruption brought on by World War II. Moreover, comic books often served as a symbol of America for servicemen overseas who read and amassed them in large numbers.

America's entry into the war also derailed a campaign against comics begun by Sterling North, the literary editor of the Chicago Daily News. In 1947 the sales of comic books reached sixty million a month, and they seemed beyond attempts at censorship and curtailing their spread. But in 1948 a New York psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, began a campaign that led eventually to a Senate investigation on the nature of comic books and the industry's establishing a Comics Code in a successful attempt to avoid formal regulation through self-censorship. Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent was the culmination of his attempts to mobilize public sentiment against the danger that he believed comic books posed to children's mental health. Wertham's ideas were picked up by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency and its prime mover Senator Estes Kefauver. A prime target of the subcommittee's hearings was William M. Gaines, the publisher of EC Comics, which had begun a line of horror comics in 1950. Wertham's attack and the introduction of the Comics Code are often blamed for the demise of a "Golden Age" of comics, but historian Amy Nyberg argues that only EC suffered directly, and other factors such as changes in distribution and the impact of television account for the downturn in comic book publishing.

Whatever the impact of Wertham, the comic book industry shrugged it off relatively quickly. In 1956 DC relaunched its character The Flash, which began a resurrection of superhero comic books. In 1960 DC published the Justice League of America, featuring a team of superheroes. According to Les Daniels, the good sales of this book prompted DC's competitor to develop its own team of heroes, and in 1961 Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four appeared under the Marvel imprint. The resulting boom in superhero comics, which saw the debut of Spiderman and the Uncanny X-Men, is referred to by fans as the Silver Age of comics. In the late 1950s and 1960s these fans were particularly important in shaping the direction of comic books and comics history. These fans were interested in comic art and story construction rather than simply the entertainment value of the comic books. That many of these fans were young adults had important ramifications for the future direction of comic books. Likewise, their focus on superheroes meant that these comic books have been accorded the most attention, and books from publishers such as Harvey, Dell, and Archie Comics figure little in many discussions of comic book history because their content is held to be insignificant, at least to young adults.

Perhaps the first publisher to recognize that comic books directed specifically at an older audience would sell was William M. Gaines. When Wertham's campaign put an end to his horror line of comics, Gaines focused his attention on converting the satirical comic book Mad into a magazine. Mad's parodies of American culture influenced many young would-be artists. In the late 1960s a number of these artists, including Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and Gilbert Shelton, began publishing underground comics, or comix, which, as the x designated, transgressed every notion of social normality. Nonetheless, the artists demonstrated a close familiarity with the graphic and narrative conventions of comic art. Discussing these comix, Joseph Witek has suggested that they should be seen as part of the mainstream of American comic history not least of all because comix helped transform comic book content and the structure of the industry.

A major shift in the industry occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s when entrepreneurs following the example of the undergrounds set up specialist comic shops, comic book distribution companies, and their own comic book publishing companies in which artists retained ownership of their characters. These changes led to more adult-oriented comics at the smaller companies and at the two industry giants, DC and Marvel, which between them accounted for about 75 percent of the market in 1993. DC and Marvel also responded to changes in the industry by giving their artists more leeway on certain projects and a share in profits from characters they created. These changes took place during a boom time for the industry with the trade paper Comic Buyer's Guide estimating increases in comic book sales from approximately $125 million in 1986 to $400 million in 1992.

This comic book boom was related to the synergies created by the media corporations that owned the major comic book companies. DC had been acquired by Warner in the 1960s for its licensing potential. In 1989 Warner's Batman movie heated up the market for comic books and comic-book-related merchandise. DC, Marvel, the comic book stores, and distributors promoted comics as collectibles, and many people bought comics as an investment. When the collectibility bubble burst in the mid 1990s the industry encountered a downturn in which Marvel wound up bankrupt. Marvel's difficulties point to the necessity of large comic book companies diversifying their characters appearances along the lines of the DC-Warner endeavor. On August 29, 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported in some detail the frustrations Marvel had experienced over thirteen years in trying to bring Spiderman to the screen.

As the century draws to a close the art form remains strong in both its comic strip and comic book incarnations. The development of the Internet-based World Wide Web has seen the art delivered in a new fashion where strips can be read and related merchandise ordered on-line. At the close of the twentieth century, then, the essential feature of comics remains its distinctive characters who unite entertainment and commerce.

—Ian Gordon