The US Graphic Novel 9781474423359

Provides a history of US graphic novels from the 1910s to the present Emphasises the relationship between comics and oth

134 14 13MB

English Pages 256 [272] Year 2022

Report DMCA / Copyright

DOWNLOAD PDF FILE

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Preface
Series Editors’ Preface
Introduction
1. Precursors and Woodcut Novels: 14 September 1842 to the 1930s
2. Comics, Comics Everywhere at Mid-century
3. In Search of Adult Comics Readers: 1961–72
4. Declaration of Independents: 1973–9
5. ‘The Comic Book Grows Up’: 1979–91
6. Boom and Bust, Mainstream and Alternative: The 1990s
7. Twenty-first-century Graphic Novels
Conclusion
Index
Recommend Papers

The US Graphic Novel
 9781474423359

  • 0 0 0
  • Like this paper and download? You can publish your own PDF file online for free in a few minutes! Sign Up
File loading please wait...
Citation preview

The US Graphic Novel

7632_Williams.indd 1

28/06/22 16:55

Critical Insights in American Studies Series editors: Martin Halliwell and Joe Street Recent books in the series: The US Graphic Novel Paul Williams Forthcoming American Detective Fiction Ruth Hawthorn Staging Transatlantic Relations, 1776–1917 Theresa Saxon American Poetry since 1900 Nick Selby The Canada US Border: Culture and Theory Jeffrey Orr and David Stirrup

7632_Williams.indd 2

28/06/22 16:55

The US Graphic Novel

Paul Williams

7632_Williams.indd 3

28/06/22 16:55

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Paul Williams 2022 Cover image: Detail from SPINNING by Tillie Walden Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2334 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2337 3 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2335 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2336 6 (epub)

The right of Paul Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

7632_Williams.indd iv

08/10/22 14:48

Contents

List of Figures Preface Series Preface Introduction

vi viii x 1

1. Precursors and Woodcut Novels: 14 September 1842 to the 1930s

19

2. Comics, Comics Everywhere at Mid-century

51

3. In Search of Adult Comics Readers: 1961–72

76

4. Declaration of Independents: 1973–9

107

5. ‘The Comic Book Grows Up’: 1979–91

136

6. Boom and Bust, Mainstream and Alternative: The 1990s

167

7. Twenty-first-century Graphic Novels

190

Conclusion

236

Index

238

7632_Williams.indd 5

28/06/22 16:55

Figures

1.1 Richard F. Outcault, Buster Brown and His Dog Tige and Their Jolly Times (New York: Cupples & Leon, 1906), front cover. 1.2 Eadweard Muybridge, ‘Horse at Full Gallop’, photograph, undated, Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, Item Number 61975. 1.3 A. B. Frost, Carlo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913), pp. 99–100. 1.4 Lynd Ward, Gods’ Man (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929), p. [187]. 1.5 Ward, Gods’ Man, pp. [149–53]. 1.6 Ward, Gods’ Man, p. [155]. 2.1 Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1946] 2014), p. 10. 3.1 Ed Badajos, Filipino Food (New York: Olympia Press, 1972), p. [19]. 4.1 Steranko, Chandler: Red Tide (New York: Pyramid, 1976), p. 112. 4.2 Samuel R. Delany, writer, and Howard V. Chaykin, artist, Empire (New York: Berkley Windhover, 1978), p. 7. 5.1 Frank Miller, script, Dave Gibbons, pencils and inks, and Robin Smith, colour, Give Me Liberty, in The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2017), p. 61. 5.2 Reordering American Splendor for the 1986 Doubleday Edition 5.3 Art Spiegelman, Maus (London: Penguin, 1992), vol. 2, p. 50.

7632_Williams.indd 6

22 27 29 42 43 44 63 96 126 128

150 156 161

28/06/22 16:55

figures vii 7.1 Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), pp. 3–4. 7.2 Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 100–1. 7.3 Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 220. 7.4 Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 232. 7.5 Tee Franklin, writer, Jenn St-Onge, art, and Joy San, colours, Bingo Love (Portland, OR: Image, 2018), p. [69]. 7.6 Jeremy Love, story and art, and Patrick Morgan, colour, Bayou (New York: DC Comics, 2011), vol. 2, p. [103].

7632_Williams.indd 7

209 210 212 213 219 224

28/06/22 16:55

Preface

To begin, a few notes on terminology and references. Although they have had different titles during their existence, for consistency there are times where I refer to the publishers now known as DC and Marvel by those names even when context makes this anachronistic. Ascribing publication dates to periodical comics is an invidious business because industry practice is to put advance dates on covers to extend an issue’s shelf-life: a comic cover-dated March 1963, for instance, was probably printed, distributed, and sold at the end of 1962. Nonetheless, unless stated otherwise, publication dates refer to the date printed on a comic, not its date of release. Many of the following sources have no pagination. I allocated page numbers for these publications by counting the front cover as [1] and numbering the following pages accordingly. I counted recto and verso sides regardless of whether they contained printed matter. Page numbers derived from this method are presented in square brackets. Enormous thanks to editor Michelle Houston at Edinburgh University Press and series editors Martin Halliwell and Emily West, and then Joe Street: I am grateful indeed that you encouraged me to pitch this book and sustained me with support (and, when needed, criticism) throughout. You made writing this book enjoyable and – as far as it can be – stress free. Thanks also to Edinburgh University Press’s Caitlin Murphy for her design expertise. I am very grateful to Jules Feiffer and Samuel R. Delany for permission to quote from their unpublished materials and to Tillie Walden for allowing us to reproduce such a great image from Spinning (2017) on the cover. Many thanks to the University of Exeter for the research leave that enabled me to complete this book. At Exeter I have benefited from teaching students who are smart and passionate about comics, and I’m grateful to the participants on my comics modules for our rewarding conversations. The ideas in The US Graphic Novel have viii

7632_Williams.indd 8

28/06/22 16:55

preface ix been formed out of three overlapping intellectual constituencies: American Studies, Comics Studies, and my colleagues in the Department of English and Film at the University of Exeter. My thanks to the interlocutors whose comments have strengthened my understanding of comics history and particular thanks to Maaheen Ahmed and Shiamin Kwa for their advice and suggestions. I have so many friends and intellectual influences at Exeter I can’t go through them all individually (seriously – it’s a big department). But I would like to name five scholars of North American literature alongside whom I have taught over the last thirteen years: Jo Gill, Siân Harris, Ellen McWilliams, Sinéad Moynihan, and Peter Riley. The commitment, intelligence, and humour with which you go about your teaching and research (and even admin) inspires me; I only work this hard because I’m trying to keep up. Some members of this circle of friends have moved on to pastures new, but The US Graphic Novel is dedicated to them all. As always, my thanks to Helen Cowie for absolutely everything, and to our tabby Daisy. I could have finished this book more quickly without Daisy’s input, but that wouldn’t have been any fun.

7632_Williams.indd 9

28/06/22 16:55

Series Editors’ Preface

Marking 25 years since Edinburgh University Press published the first titles in the BAAS Paperbacks series, we are extremely pleased to relaunch the series as Critical Insights in American Studies, in conjunction with the British Association for American Studies. Over the last quarter century, American Studies, as an interdisciplinary field of research and teaching, has undergone multiple transformations. Not only have we witnessed the study of the history, literature, politics and culture of the United States being expanded through transatlantic, transpacific and transnational perspectives, but scholars have probed deeper into critical interpretations of micro-histories, regional literatures, grassroots politics, and cultural industries. As we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century, we see American Studies being again reinvigorated by crucial debates on race and diversity, war and memorialization, the environment and the economy, and digital and social media, among many other directions in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Predicated on the belief that an interdisciplinary approach offers surprising, challenging, and thought-provoking insights, this series introduces readers to leading-edge inquiries into all aspects of the Americas, reaching back to the colonial period and stretching forward to tackle present-day concerns in and beyond the United States. Each book in the series is designed both to offer a rigorous examination of its topic that will satisfy the most demanding reader within an accessible and readable narrative, ideal for undergraduates and postgraduates seeking imaginative American Studies approaches to important and intersecting topics. We are very privileged to launch this new chapter in collaborations between Edinburgh University Press and the British Association

x

7632_Williams.indd 10

28/06/22 16:55



series editors’ preface

xi

for American Studies. It is also our privilege to work with the talented authors who will propel the Critical Insights in American Studies series into the next quarter century of debate and analysis. Martin Halliwell and Joe Street University of Leicester and Northumbria University

7632_Williams.indd 11

28/06/22 16:55

7632_Williams.indd 12

28/06/22 16:55

Introduction

At the end of the 2010s the cultural valence of comics and graphic novels was hard to ignore. Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler and based on the Marvel superhero character, was the biggest film at the US box office in 2018,1 and soon reached third on the list of highest-grossing films in US cinema history.2 It was also the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards held in February 2019. Later that year Avengers: Endgame (dir. Joe Russo and Anthony Russo), another comics adaptation, became the highest-grossing film ever at the global box office (a title held until March 2021).3 And cinema screens are not the only sign of the ubiquity of US comics: in July 2018 the graphic novel Sabrina (2018) by Chicago-based creator Nick Drnaso was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the most prestigious and publicised of the UK’s literary awards. The judges commented that Sabrina, an account of online hysteria surrounding a young woman’s disappearance, was a standard-bearer for the new visibility of long-form comics: ‘given the changing shape of fiction, it was only a matter of time before a graphic novel was included on the Man Booker longlist’.4 In 2006 graphic novels became the pre-eminent means of selling comics in the United States. That year, sales of comics in book form ($330 million) exceeded sales of periodical comics ($310 million).5 Where the number of consumers is concerned, the US ‘comic book’ industry has been in overall decline since the 1950s, but there has been a revival this century due to sales of hard- or soft-cover books, commonly referred to as ‘graphic novels’. The financial health of US comics is evident when surveying estimated sales for 2020, with graphic novels at $835 million, periodicals at $285 million, and digital comics at $160 million.6 Beyond these figures, graphic novels have become a notable component of US reading habits; in a 2010 Harris Poll 11 per cent of Americans reported reading a graphic novel in the preceding year.7 1

7632_Williams.indd 1

28/06/22 16:55

2

the us graphic novel

There are reasons to tread carefully, however, when proclaiming the pre-eminence of the book-format graphic novel in the twentyfirst century. Books might generate more revenue than periodicals, but those 2018 figures are misleading as a representation of how Americans are reading comics. Those sales of digital comics do not include subscription services or the tens of thousands of webcomics freely available online. It may well be that more graphic novels in the United States are consumed digitally than in hard copy. And the contemporary success of graphic novels doesn’t mean they haven’t been popular or critically acclaimed before: the term ‘graphic novel’ is an invention of the 1960s but labelling a comic a ‘novel’ – or publishing it as a book – is much older, going back to the nineteenth century. In The US Graphic Novel we will see how the publication of long comics narratives runs throughout the twentieth century and up to the present, a fascinating and complicated history filled with beguiling experiments and forgotten classics.

What is a Graphic Novel? When pressed in casual conversation about this book, I say it’s a history of the US graphic novel that emphasises the institutional factors informing production, distribution and reception. This usually works as a holding pattern, but risks the follow-up question, ‘what is a graphic novel?’ From multiple sources we could cobble together the answer that a graphic novel is a self-contained comics narrative of extended length (I see approximately forty-eight pages or more as significant) published in book form.8 And yet many texts trouble this thumbnail definition: what about long narratives serialised across multiple periodicals? Or a book of short comics based on a single theme or character or place? Is any text selfcontained and how resolved does a narrative have to be to qualify as a graphic novel? In the late 1980s, adult content (nudity, sex, brutal violence) was held up in the press as a sign of what made graphic novels different from common or garden comics, but many long comics narratives are aimed at children, so the age of assumed readers won’t help us construct a universal definition either.9 Shadowing the question ‘what is a graphic novel?’ is the disavowal of the term by many creators and scholars, preferred alternatives including ‘graphic narrative’10 and ‘graphic literature’.11 In response to the extensive academic rejection of ‘graphic novel’,

7632_Williams.indd 2

28/06/22 16:55

introduction

3

the comics scholars Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey mounted a defence of the term’s utility in 2015, noting its prevalence in non-university contexts such as retail outlets, public libraries, and newspapers, all places where those ‘sometimes unloved’ words circulate without qualification. ‘Graphic novel’, then, is the obvious choice if one wants to address the broadest possible audience.12 In addition, I am unconvinced by a preference for ‘graphic narrative’ on the grounds that many long-form comics ‘aren’t novels at all: they are rich works of nonfiction’.13 I’m at ease calling a documentary comic a ‘graphic novel’ because throughout the prose novel’s lifetime the texts called novels have been poor respecters of the fiction/non-fiction divide. The history of the novel is punctuated by fictional narratives masquerading as autobiography and non-fiction narratives shaped by novelistic frames, not to mention other profane mixtures.14 All this demonstrates that the ‘novel’ in ‘graphic novel’ is a treacherous place to rest one’s weight and we’re hardly getting closer to a solid definition. Readers, alas, will have to suffer this indeterminacy for the next 200 pages. It is not my intention to boil the graphic novel down to its essential characteristics and then sift through the decades to find texts that fit that definition. In fact, as well as showing how long comics narratives in the United States have been published as books and assumed an adult readership, The US Graphic Novel demonstrates what a multidirectional and provisional process this has been. Graphic novels have never decisively muscled out other material forms of comics and at no point can we satisfactorily separate the graphic novel from other visual media. In this I am influenced by media historian Siegfried Zelinski, for whom media ‘are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated’.15 Tentatively, partially, comics have been published as books, narratives have increased in length, and adults have paid money to read them, but these processes rarely come into frictionless alignment and they never reach some perfect apotheosis. Working against a naïve view of media as moving inexorably from primitive forms to complexity, where the ‘current state of the art’ is always ‘the best possible state’, like Zelinski I hope to make archaeological ‘cuts’ that expose the history buried beneath the narrative of a ‘continual march of progress’. Once we start thinking about a discontinuous history of the graphic novel, where all kinds of leads and affiliations shoot off at any one moment, many ‘discarded or forgotten’ texts hover into view.16

7632_Williams.indd 3

28/06/22 16:55

4

the us graphic novel

In 2011 Jan Baetens observed a ‘sanitized version of the graphic novel’ defined by single-person authorship, ‘seriousness’ of content, and ‘bookishness’, going on to argue that Art Spiegelman’s 9/11 memoir In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) works against this orthodoxy, ushering the graphic novel back into the ephemeral print forms (notably newspaper strips) from which it derived. I take seriously Baetens’s argument that Spiegelman’s text ‘may prove a landmark in the renewed blurring of the graphic novel and the comic book’.17 As ‘renewed’ implies, this blurring didn’t start in the twenty-first century. The difficulty of allocating texts to a specific medium runs throughout The US Graphic Novel. Each chapter provides examples of how graphic novels occupy an indeterminate place between comics, books, and other kinds of media. The nature of this indeterminacy changes over time, as the writers and artists who make graphic novels have competed against, paid homage to, and borrowed from filmmakers, Pop Artists, poster designers, and computer programmers. To tell the story of the US graphic novel is to give an account of the historical relationships between comics and adjacent cultural forms.

The Intermediality of the Graphic Novel The analysis of ‘transmedia relations’ has become a regular feature of the study of comics; for example, in the Comics & Media special issue of the academic journal Critical Inquiry, Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda describe their key principle as ‘attending to intersections and differences instead of investing in sharp demarcations among discrete media’.18 The US Graphic Novel historicises the relationship between graphic novels and other forms of culture, which means analysing where they overlap with film and fine art (for example), but also the fluctuating, osmotic transactions between graphic novels and the other material formats in which comics are encountered: newspapers, magazines, periodical ‘comic books’, minicomics, and the World Wide Web. The concept of a comic that is also a novel is a fundamentally ‘unstable’19 one: even when instantiated as a print book, the graphic novel registers the proximity of other visual media. This goes the other way, too: under the influence of what Baetens calls ‘bookishness’ we will see that online and periodical comics mimic novelistic features such as contents pages and the division of stories into chapters. I refer to

7632_Williams.indd 4

28/06/22 16:55

introduction

5

this cross-pollination as the ‘intermediality’ of the graphic novel – its situation at the meeting place of comics and other media. The term ‘intermediality’ has become widespread amongst scholars as a reflection of the ‘fact that media do not exist disconnected from one another; rather, they have existed forever in complex media configurations and have therefore always been based on other media.’20 Where comics are concerned, the ‘issue of intermediality’ is most evident in the form’s combination of words and pictures.21 Commentators have interpreted the juxtaposition of visual and verbal material in comics in several ways: as a convention of the comics medium, as an ‘exercise’ in readers’ ‘interpretive skills’, and as the ‘vital’ element that gives comics their life.22 A useful concept is ‘remediation’, the title of a 1999 book by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin which argues that new media present ‘themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media. Digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print.’ Remediation: Understanding New Media focuses on contemporary digital media but the ‘constant dialectic’ between ‘digital media’ and ‘earlier media’ that Bolter and Grusin describe has existed throughout history.23 For Bolter and Grusin, a medium is not defined by what it does that no other medium can do, but by how it refashions characteristics from other media in a specific configuration. A ‘medium is that which remediates. [. . .] A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media.’24 Nonetheless, the study of remediation does not bind us into ‘a linear history’ where each new medium absorbs and replaces its predecessors in ‘a historical progression’; ‘older media can also remediate newer ones’ for all sorts of aesthetic, social, and economic purposes. The US Graphic Novel outlines how, via the graphic novel form, the medium of comics ‘responds to, redeploys, competes with, and reforms other media’.25 Those other media might be older than mechanical type or might have only existed for a few decades. Several scholars have written histories placing comics in dialogue with other media. Thierry Smolderen’s The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay (2014) begins with the engravings produced by eighteenth-century British artist William Hogarth. Starting with the six-plate A Harlot’s Progress

7632_Williams.indd 5

28/06/22 16:55

6

the us graphic novel

(1732), Smolderen argues that Hogarth produced ‘five novels in prints’ that evoked representational forms such as the illustrated novel, the historical painting, and the silent mime show. Through these references, the artist ‘opened a major avenue in the history of comics: a dialogue with other media, both ancient and emergent, that would occupy all the great [comics] creators’ that worked in Hogarth’s wake. Smolderen uses the term ‘polygraphy’ to refer to Hogarth’s ‘ironic hybridizing of graphic registers’ – in other words, how the artist self-consciously quoted the look of other forms of visual culture. For Smolderen, this ‘polygraphic play’ characterises nineteenth-century comics, when the successors to Hogarth ‘cultivated productive exchanges with practically all the emerging medias of the nineteenth century (photography, chronophotography, the cinema, etc.)’.26 Indeed, exchanges with other media have left their mark on the graphic novel right up to the present. Intermedial critiques often examine graphic novels as a nexus between comics and literature, investigating what happens when contemporary comics win book prizes, are reprinted in literary anthologies, and get taught in universities. What kind of issues emerge when comics – long denied entry to the realm of legitimate culture – start to be treated as literature? Various scholars point to a deep ambivalence manifested in page layouts, plots, characters, and iconography, and David M. Ball identifies a lingering status anxiety expressed in the ‘continued desire’ of ‘recent graphic narratives’ to ‘disassociate themselves’ from the periodical comics industry. This ‘determined resistance to the generic conventions and mass media associations of conventional comics artistry’ is a phenomenon he calls ‘comics against themselves’.27 Ball’s position is extended in Marc Singer’s analysis of Chris Ware’s graphic novel Building Stories (2012) and the comics anthologies that Ware has edited; Singer’s Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies (2019) draws out Ware’s conflicted relationship with American comics while also considering the creator’s ambivalence towards the bastions of high art and literature. Singer argues that Ware – one of the most feted graphic novelists of all time – feints to assert the limitations and pretentiousness of established cultural institutions, while at the same time his comics declare their membership of ‘literary culture by virtue of’ overlapping subject matter such as ‘alienation, trauma, memory’, and everyday ennui. In this reading,

7632_Williams.indd 6

28/06/22 16:55

introduction

7

For all that Ware positions himself [. . .] against art instructors, book reviewers, and other cultural gatekeepers, his comics and anthologies are less interested in exploding the gatekeepers’ hierarchies of taste than they are in ascending within them, both by duplicating the conventions of more legitimized art forms and by distancing themselves from the kinds of comics that once earned the highbrows’ scorn.28 From a different angle, Christopher Pizzino’s Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (2016) declares that certain comics creators are reluctant for their work to be read as literature because of the compromised cultural position bound up with such qualified acceptance. Pizzino thinks the legitimisation of comics as literary texts remains incomplete: ‘contemporary US comics creators [. . .] keep a watchful eye on the stigmatizing discourse that has never ceased to fix its gaze on them.’ Prominent graphic novelists focus their ‘creative energies’ on ‘bearing witness’ to this precarious cultural position, resulting in the tendency of contemporary comics to interrupt, cancel, or censor themselves. Pizzino calls this ‘autoclasm’ and he thinks creators reach for ‘self-breaking’ formal strategies in order to articulate ‘the medium’s conditions’ while illustrating at the same time how their capacity for ‘articulation is limited by those very conditions’.29 The US Graphic Novel connects these analyses of the relationship between comics and literature to Smolderen’s study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dialogues between comics and visual culture. Beginning in the early twentieth century, I show that long comics narratives have sized up against verbal literature and visual media forms. Further, looking at the history of the graphic novel in the United States, we will see that being located within and across different media doesn’t necessarily produce status anxiety or selfshattering defiance. The graphic novels I discuss are constantly posing as comics, and as something else too, but this can be the source of curiosity, creative opportunity, and readerly pleasure.

Studying US Comics and Graphic Novels A great deal of scholarship has been published on North American comics and graphic novels, and hopefully The US Graphic Novel will direct readers to this rich and varied work, such as Jared Gardner’s

7632_Williams.indd 7

28/06/22 16:55

8

the us graphic novel

Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (2012), an exploration of the evolving narrative practices demanded by serialisation and the materiality of texts.30 Of the other books that offer long histories of US comics, I have found the following particularly useful: Trina Robbins’s From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Comics from Teens to Zines (1999) provides a focus on women as creators and readers, Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (2010) contains a rigorous study of the industry, and Bradford W. Wright’s Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (2003) narrates how periodical comics have functioned as a barometer of social change.31 A number of publications track how US comics gained legitimacy in wider cultural spheres by becoming graphic novels. This is the subplot of Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005), though the author consciously decided against the title The Rise of the Graphic Novel, and the book does not follow a chronological structure as a whole.32 A longer narrative is provided in Baetens and Frey’s The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (2015), which devotes three chapters to the history of the graphic novel from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.33 One of the largest projects explaining how the graphic novel contributed to comics’ ‘shift in status [. . .] from a low, minor cultural form to a very respectable one’ is The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (2018), an essay collection edited by Baetens, Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick.34 Thirty-six chapters, spanning several continents and centuries, tell the story of the graphic novel, paying close attention to US texts. Probably the longest single-authored chronology of legitimisation is Paul Lopes’s Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (2009). Lopes adheres closely to Pierre Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art (1993), an analysis of nineteenth-century French literature, and as a consequence Demanding Respect is organised around the movement from industrial to heroic periods of production, an assumed trajectory that smooths over the spikiness of actual comics history and elides the graphic novel’s uneven implementation and mixed welcome.35 Santiago García’s On the Graphic Novel (trans. 2015) ‘aims to understand how we have arrived at the present day graphic novel, to understand its origins and its history’,36 ranging across global iterations of comics for adults and going back to the nineteenth

7632_Williams.indd 8

28/06/22 16:55

introduction

9

century. There is clear overlap between On the Graphic Novel and the material covered here, so let me clarify the key differences between García’s approach and my own. On the Graphic Novel also inserts the history of the graphic novel into the institutional contexts of comics publishing, but García does so to ascertain ‘whether the graphic novel is really a new art’.37 Quoting the comics scholar Ana Merino, García defines his historiographical method as ‘canonical appropriation’: ‘we will have to re-write the history of comics from the point of view of the graphic novel’,38 evaluating how far earlier texts represent stepping-stones towards the graphic novel in its current form. In García’s telling, the tradition of the graphic novel is not better than the tradition of comics, it is ‘just different’ – a claim somewhat diminished by his repeated celebration of the contemporary graphic novel as a medium in which, ‘at long last’, the comics creator can function as ‘an independent and adult author’ enjoying artistic ‘freedom’.39 In contrast, I hope to attend to the historical conjunctions of economic, social, and cultural forces in which creators produced long-form comics, rather than analysing whether certain texts or creators made the appearance of the contemporary graphic novel more or less likely. The final chapter of On the Graphic Novel stresses the significance of audience reception but the book does not actually devote a great deal of space to how reviewers, critics, and fans have conceptualised the graphic novel. Instead, readers are invited to see how the creators of the past laid the ground for their successors, with nine ‘masters of the graphic novel’ named at the end of the book, including Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Daniel Clowes. Taking inspiration from Clowes’s words, García describes these masters setting out to ‘explore and conquer’ a ‘vast artistic territory’, or (switching metaphors) leaving a ‘trail’ for others to follow ‘while they are walking in mid air’.40 García posits that in recent decades comics have been successfully ‘liberated from the thralldom of the traditional industry’ by making common cause with literature, and the next step on this ‘formal quest’ will be when creators ‘break free from the new shackles imposed by the imitation of literary models’ and ‘finally find their own voice’. Precisely because the ‘masters of the graphic novel are very young’ García anticipates they have time left in their careers to ‘establish an identity [for comics] that will be ultimately as removed from the literary model as from the comicsindustry tradition’.41

7632_Williams.indd 9

28/06/22 16:55

10

the us graphic novel

The US Graphic Novel does not offer a historical narrative whereby comics journey towards an autonomous state ‘free’ from industrial production or literary gatekeeping. I insist upon intermediality as an indelible aspect of long-form comics and argue that twenty-first-century creators toil within institutional frameworks that may not be obviously coercive but nonetheless set parameters on what can and can’t be attempted in the graphic novel form. Against García’s formulation that in recent decades the graphic novel has grown out of, but ‘managed to break away from[,] the mass medium of comics’,42 I will show that throughout history the graphic novel has been a mass cultural form, selling in the tens or hundreds of thousands and occasionally in the millions. And finally, though I want to recognise notable texts and creators and send my readers off to enjoy some of the graphic novels mentioned in this book, I am keen to avoid a lexicon of lone trailblazers and ‘masters’. The ideological implications of these terms compel us to handle them with care, and methodologically speaking, resting the future of comics ‘on the talent and commitment of a few individual authors’43 runs against the impetus of my own history-telling, which emphasises the changing institutional structures through which graphic novels have been created, published, and read. My approach is inspired by the sociological turn in Comics Studies over the last decade, which positions creators within a matrix of collective activity informed by audience expectations, terms of employment, distribution systems, and technological constraints. Important research to this end has been conducted by Casey Brienza, Paddy Johnston, Benjamin Woo, and Bart Beaty,44 Beaty’s Comics Versus Art (2012) adapting sociologist Howard Becker’s notion of ‘art worlds’ in order to theorise a ‘comics world’ in which people collaborate to produce the texts, practices, and definitions understood as ‘comics’. Beaty sees the comics world as ‘the collection of individuals necessary for the production of works that the world defines as comics’, though not every individual has an equal say in this process.45 Power is vested in agents who accrue the symbolic, financial, and cultural capital necessary to impose their judgements on the rest of the comics world. Beyond industry professionals, the agents wielding particular power also include retailers, distributors, owners of comics companies, convention organisers, original art dealers, and so-called Big Name Fans. All these agents shape the history of the graphic novel by verbalising

7632_Williams.indd 10

28/06/22 16:55

introduction

11

their conception of what the graphic novel was and might be. The US Graphic Novel extends this scholarship by showing the historical conversations amongst creators, readers, journalists, and reviewers about what might make a long comics narrative a novel – or what barred a comic from making such a claim.

The Structure of the Book Chapter 1 starts in the 1840s, when the first book-format comic was published in the United States, but the focus is on the period from the 1910s to the 1930s. After discussing a handful of attempts at producing long comics narratives, this chapter contemplates the first discernible and sustained movement to publish US graphic novels: the woodcut novels. These inclined towards expressionism, socialism, and pacifism, were published by Random House and other major trade presses, and were so well-known they inspired book-length parodies and later generations of comics creators. Chapter 2 takes us from the late 1930s up to the 1960s. During this period, the success of superhero comics in the first half of the 1940s was superseded by a boom in crime, horror, and romance comics during the late 1940s and 1950s. This came to an end in the mid-1950s as publishers responded to public and political pressure and established a regulatory body to censor their comics. Although historians disagree about whether the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) and its 1954 Comics Code decimated a thriving industry, comics sales markedly contracted after the Code’s implementation. Nonetheless, before the CMAA was founded, companies such as St John Publications and Fawcett Publications released a small number of crime comics as paperback books. We will also see that most book-length comics of the period came from writers and artists working askew to the comics industry, specifically the cartoonists who produced art for advertising agencies, animation studios, publishing houses, and newspaper syndicates. Chapter 3 works through the 1960s up to 1972, the period when the financial fortunes of Marvel Comics were resuscitated under editor and writer Stan Lee and artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Marvel forged a new style of superhero comic characterised by continuous narratives and fractious, self-questioning heroes. National news outlets zoomed in on Marvel’s popularity with college students and the supposed realism and social relevance

7632_Williams.indd 11

28/06/22 16:55

12

the us graphic novel

of superhero comics. Taking Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four (first serialised 1961–96) as a case study, I discuss how readers understood this comic as a series of novels. The term ‘graphic novel’ was coined in 1964 by Richard Kyle, a fan-critic who led the debate as to what such a text should look like. Creators closely followed these discussions, and one of them – Gil Kane – was responsible for two graphic novels published in this period: His Name Is. . . Savage! (1968) and Blackmark (1971). Long-form comics were also produced in the 1960s by underground comix creators, whose work was published in campus magazines, national satire publications, and underground newspapers, and from 1968 onwards in dedicated periodicals. The relationship between underground comix and book publishing houses was a fruitful one and book-format comix appeared as early as 1967. Chapter 4 focuses on 1973–9, a pivotal moment of industrial restructuring when the mainstream industry came to be further dominated by the so-called ‘Big Two’ (Marvel and DC). The Big Two began re-centring their products towards the direct market, a distribution system which funnelled comics to specialist stores (and thus compensated for falling sales on America’s newsstands). The comic shops also provided retail outlets for underground comix, though their numbers never recovered after the comix crash of 1973–4. Somewhere between the mainstream and underground were ‘ground-level’ comics, which offered the underground’s artistic autonomy to creators working in popular genres, and Mike Friedrich’s anthology Star*Reach (1974–9) was a crucible for experiments in long-form comics. In the 1970s ‘graphic novel’ became common parlance within the comics world and veteran creators, maverick industry professionals, and underground cartoonists all vied to produce narratives that would live up to the concept’s grand promise. In 1978 a plethora of contenders appeared, ranging from obscure titles put out by small presses to Marvel’s first original graphic novel, The Silver Surfer (1978), which sold tens of thousands of copies. Chapter 5 explores the 1980s, the decade when print and broadcast journalists proclaimed that comics had ‘grown up’, a narrative repeated by publishers’ marketing departments. The direct market became the dominant mode of selling comics, and the Big Two doubled down on the superhero genre, the most popular genre with existing comics fans. Compared to the broader comics-buying public

7632_Williams.indd 12

28/06/22 16:55

introduction

13

of the 1960s and 1970s, the fans were typically older, more knowledgeable about the medium’s history, and willing to spend large sums of money on their beloved medium. Rather than significantly break with superheroes, new companies – the independents – tried to entice these readers as well, flattering their knowledge of comics with parodic and revisionist superheroes. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, published by Mirage 1984–93, was one such series. The success of bloodily violent, sexually frank, and self-referential independent comics provided a template that the Big Two tentatively followed, taking advantage of the fact that titles distributed on the direct market were not bound by the Comics Code. Frank Miller’s run on the Marvel comic Daredevil (1979–83 in the first instance) saw the series become more death-filled and offered reflections on the ethics of superheroic violence. This trend led to DC publishing Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986–7), texts indelibly associated with the supposed maturation of comics, and both miniseries were quickly reprinted in book form. The 1980s graphic novel boom was never exclusively about superhero comics and the direct market also made it financially viable for small companies publishing alternative genres (autobiography, reportage, satire) to continue the experimentation of the underground. Two prominent graphic novels had close connections to the underground, namely Art Spiegelman’s Maus (serialised 1980–91) and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (published from 1976–93 and sporadically afterwards). Book editions of Maus and American Splendor published in 1986 joined Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen as foci for the media hubbub that erroneously proclaimed the dawn of the graphic novel in the 1980s. Chapter 6 outlines the erratic 1990s, which began with comics selling in their multimillions, but by mid-decade the mainstream industry was crashing and Marvel declared bankruptcy. Sales never recovered those artificially inflated highs, but during the boom there were signs of institutional change that would underpin graphic novel production in years to come. Popular writers and artists parlayed their reputational capital into personal, innovative, adult-oriented projects, which might be released by imprints at the Big Two, by independent publishers, or by companies established by superstar creators themselves. Given the marketing hype at the start of the decade, the sense of an alternative comics movement defined against

7632_Williams.indd 13

28/06/22 16:55

14

the us graphic novel

a superhero-oriented mainstream hardened, and alternative creators sought common ground with fanzine-makers. Fanzines were thriving in the 1990s thanks to DTP software and cheap and easy access to photocopying, and alternative creators frequently self-identified as artisanal labourers holding out against the mass-produced commodities of multinational corporations. Chapter 7 surveys the second graphic novel boom of the twentyfirst century. Various factors lie behind the increase in sales: the decreasing stigma surrounding comics reading, the acclamation of graphic novels by cultural gatekeepers, the popularity of film adaptations, and the role of manga. The latter is crucial, since translated Japanese comics made it lucrative for bookstores to have distinctive sections dedicated to graphic novels. This final chapter also considers the significance of the internet for making, distributing, and selling long comics narratives. Far from replacing physical graphic novels, print and digital editions exist in symbiotic relationship, and new funding models have enabled a more diverse US comics scene than ever before. When Sabrina was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The New York Times called the nomination ‘a major breakthrough for the format’ and many journalists hailed the newsworthiness of this event.46 No doubt if a graphic novel makes it onto the shortlist or wins the Booker, there will be even louder expressions of surprise and more extended pronunciations on the format’s acceptance within literary circles. But the acclamation surrounding Sabrina, constructing the graphic novel as a dazzlingly successful debutante embraced by its peers, should not distract us from the fact that long comics narratives published in book form have an extensive history, stretching back into the nineteenth century. Let’s go back, then, to New York City on the day of 14 September 1842.

Notes  1. ‘Black Panther (2018)’, The Numbers, (last accessed 20 November 2021).  2. This figure is not adjusted for inflation. Scott Mendelson, ‘“Black Panther” Box Office: Records And Milestones From Its First Two Months’, Forbes, 16 April 2018, (last accessed 20 November 2021). Rebecca Rubin, ‘It’s 2021 and “Avatar” Just Overtook “Avengers: Endgame” as Highest-Grossing Movie of All Time’, Variety, 12 March 2021, (last accessed 20 November 2021). ‘The Man Booker Prize 2018 Longlist Announced’, The Man Booker Prize, 23 July 2018, (last accessed 2 February 2019). Calvin Reid, ‘Graphic Novel Market Hits $330 Million’, Publishers Weekly, 23 February 2007, (last accessed 20 November 2021). Milton Griepp and John Jackson Miller, ‘Comics and Graphic Novel Sales Hit New High in Pandemic Year’, Comichron, 2021, (last accessed 1 February 2022). It is impossible to know the full extent of online comics publishing but in 2007 there were close to 40,000 webcomics available on just five major platforms. Paul Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), p. 219 n. 109. ‘Harris Poll Finds Mysteries, Thrillers Edge Out Romance Novels’, Publishers Weekly, 7 October 2010, (last accessed 20 November 2021). Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, rev. edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 291; Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), pp. 152–3; Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 1–23; Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz, The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture, 2nd edn. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 87; Paul Williams, Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), p. 108. Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 112. Hillary Chute, ‘Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative’, PMLA 123.2 (2008): p. 453.

7632_Williams.indd 15

28/06/22 16:55

16

the us graphic novel

11. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest, eds, The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010). See also ‘Graphic Literature’, a special issue of World Literature Today (March–April 2007). 12. Baetens and Frey, Graphic Novel, pp. 1–4, 19. 13. Chute, ‘Comics as Literature?’, p. 453. 14. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 33. See also Ian Gordon, ‘Making Comics Respectable: How Maus Helped Redefine a Medium’, in Paul Williams and James Lyons, eds, The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), p. 180. 15. Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 7. 16. Ibid. pp. 2–7. 17. Jan Baetens, ‘Graphic Novels’, in Leonard Cassuto, gen. ed., The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 1151–2. 18. Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda, ‘Comics & Media’, Critical Inquiry 40.3 (Spring 2014): p. 2. 19. Similarly, scholar Christopher Pizzino remarks on the ‘conflicted and unstable’ nature of the graphic novel’s ‘legitimacy’. Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), p. 32. 20. Jens Schröter, ‘Four Models of Intermediality’, in Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), p. 15. 21. Jan Baetens, ‘Words and Images in the Contemporary American Graphic Novel’, in Herzogenrath, Travels in Intermedia[lity], p. 93. 22. Respectively, these definitions can be found in Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 43; Will Eisner, Comics & Sequential Art (Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, [1985] 2000), p. 8; R. C. Harvey, ‘Defining Comics Again: Another in the Long List of Unnecessarily Complicated Definitions’, The Comics Journal, 20 December 2010, (last accessed 3 July 2019). This is a necessarily selective list: the importance of word-image combinations runs throughout Comics Studies. 23. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), pp. 14–15, 50. 24. Ibid. p. 65.

7632_Williams.indd 16

28/06/22 16:55

introduction

17

25. Ibid. p. 55. 26. Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, [2000] 2014), pp. 3–15, 50–1. 27. David M. Ball, ‘Comics Against Themselves: Chris Ware’s Graphic Narratives as Literature’, in Williams and Lyons, Rise of the American Comics Artist, p. 106. 28. Marc Singer, Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), pp. 147, 152. 29. Pizzino, Arresting Development, pp. 48–9, 60. 30. Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-FirstCentury Storytelling (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 31. Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999); Wright, Comic Book Nation; Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). Covering a shorter period of time, I also recommend Michael Goodrum’s Superheroes and American Self Image: From War to Watergate (London: Routledge, 2016), a combination of political and cultural history focusing on superhero comics and their readers between the 1940s and 1970s. 32. Hatfield, Alternative Comics, p. 153. 33. Baetens and Frey, Graphic Novel, Chapters 2–4. 34. Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, ‘Introduction’, in Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, eds, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 1. 35. Lopes, Demanding Respect. 36. Santiago García, On the Graphic Novel, trans. Bruce Campbell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), p. 24. 37. Ibid. p. 23. 38. Ibid. p. 24. 39. Ibid. pp. 184–5. 40. Ibid. pp. 188–9. 41. Ibid. pp. xiii, 188–9. 42. Ibid. p. 184. 43. Ibid. p. 189. 44. Beaty, Comics Versus Art; Benjamin Woo, ‘Erasing the Lines between Leisure and Labor: Creative Work in the Comics World’, Spectator 35.2 (Fall 2015): pp. 57–64; Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Casey Brienza, Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing

7632_Williams.indd 17

28/06/22 16:55

18

the us graphic novel

and the Domestication of Japanese Comics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston, eds, Cultures of Comics Work (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 45. Beaty, Comics Versus Art, p. 37. 46. Alex Marshall, ‘Graphic Novel in Running for Man Booker Prize for First Time’, The New York Times, 23 July 2018, (last accessed 2 February 2019). See also David Canfield, ‘Graphic Novel Sabrina among Man Booker Prize Nominees: See the Full List’, Entertainment Weekly, 23 July 2018, (last accessed 20 November 2021); Alison Flood, ‘Man Booker Prize 2018 Longlist Includes Graphic Novel for the First Time’, The Guardian, 24 July 2018, (last accessed 20 November 2021); Roisin O’Connor, ‘Man Booker Prize Longlist 2018: Graphic Novel Features for First Time’, The Independent, 24 July 2018, (last accessed 20 November 2021); Anita Singh, ‘Man Booker Prize 2018: How a Graphic Novel Earned Its Place on the Longlist’, Telegraph, 24 July 2018, (last accessed 2 February 2019).

7632_Williams.indd 18

28/06/22 16:55

chapter 1

Precursors and Woodcut Novels: 14 September 1842 to the 1930s

Introduction There are many dates we could use to start the history of the US graphic novel, but I have chosen 14 September 1842, when The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck was reprinted in New York by Wilson & Company, a translated, pirated version of a long comics narrative by Rodolphe Töpffer that first appeared in French. It was republished, again without paying fealty to copyright, in 1849.1 The writer and illustrator was a Genevan educator whose importance to comics history is encapsulated in the title of historian David Kunzle’s book Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (2007). The prolific Töpffer wrote essays, reviews, and short novels, but is primarily remembered for his eight books of ‘longish (serio-) comic strip stories’; Töpffer’s earliest manuscript for these narratives is dated to 1827, though the first to be published – Histoire de Monsieur Jabot – was in 1833. Originally in French, these were soon translated into German, Dutch, and English, and they came with the seal of approval from the eminent German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who saw them in 1831, when he offered commendation and encouragement: from the outset, book-format comics were in dialogue with esteemed literary culture. Töpffer described his ‘invention’ as a ‘histoire en estampes (story in prints, picture story)’2 but a critic in 1846 observed ‘he draws novels’.3 In the 1830s Töpffer wrote that each of his books was ‘a kind of novel, all the more unique in that it is no more like a novel than it is like anything else’.4 Töpffer’s popularity spurred a generation of European imitators. Parisian publisher Maison Aubert sold unauthorised editions of Töpffer’s books from 1837 onwards, also publishing nine original 19

7632_Williams.indd 19

28/06/22 16:55

20

the us graphic novel

albums known as ‘les Jabots’, drawn by artists such as Cham (Amédée de Noé) and Gustave Doré. The latter’s L’histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie en caricatures (1854) was his ‘last and most ambitious novel in prints’. In England, longform comics from the period included illustrator George Cruikshank’s The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman (1839) and Mr. Lambkin (1844) and Alfred Crowquill’s (Alfred Henry Forrester) Pantomime: To Be Played As It Was, Is, and Will Be, at Home (1849).5 The rush to imitate Töpffer was not so pronounced in the United States, but Journey to the Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags (1849), a topical Gold Rush adventure comedy by James A. Read and Donald F. Read, seems derived from the Genevan’s books.6 Of all the nineteenth-century homages, Cham’s adaptation of Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Cryptogame may be the most significant because it was published in the French periodical L’Illustration in 1845. It was within newspapers and magazines that comics percolated for the rest of the century.7 In the United States humorous or satirical cartoons were a familiar part of American print culture, and nineteenth-century periodicals such as Puck, Judge, and Life included illustrations that we now call comics; by the 1890s features in newspapers that resemble comic strips were being published. Although twenty-first-century scholars dial down the exalted claims once made for Richard F. Outcault’s comic strip Hogan’s Alley (also known as The Yellow Kid in reference to its main character), its publication in the Sunday edition of the New York World newspaper in 1895 was part of a distinctive reshaping of US comics, and it was one of the first strips to be nationally syndicated.8 Outcault’s phenomenally popular strip was seen as the reason why the circulation of the World at the end of 1895 was twice what it had been in 1891, and William Randolph Hearst hired Outcault to draw his Hogan’s Alley characters for Hearst’s New York Journal. Hogan’s Alley appeared at a moment when strips were adopting conventions such as word balloons, and rather than sporadic appearances by anonymous characters we start to see characters returning every day or week under a regular title.9 Strips were syndicated to newspapers around the country and by 1908 comics represented a national mass culture, with almost 75 per cent of Sunday newspapers including comic strips. A further innovation was colour reproduction: Sunday newspapers began carrying full-colour comics supplements from 1900 onwards. The

7632_Williams.indd 20

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

21

almost universal experience of editors was that newspaper strips boosted circulation and they prized the strips’ recurring characters as a means of cultivating habitual consumers. This was not just about selling newspapers, as demonstrated by Outcault’s follow-up character to the Yellow Kid, Buster Brown. Brown was used to market an exhausting range of products spanning toys, games, dolls, blouses, apples, pianos, shoes, flour, coffee, hosiery . . . Outcault’s advertising agency lodged over 10,000 Brown-related registrations with the US Copyright Office. As comics historian Ian Gordon argues in Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (1998), ‘commercial uses came to define comic art to such a degree that comic strip and comic book characters at times seemed less storytelling devices and more ciphers, or business trademarks, that sold a range of products, which incidentally included comic strips and comic books’.10

Books and Comic Strips One form of licensing was selling the rights to reprint newspaper strips in book form. As early as 1897, Yellow Kid comics were republished as cardboard-bound texts sold in bookshops and toy stores.11 Hearst’s publishing empire was quick to exploit its strips, reprinting popular characters in November 1902 to target the Christmas market for gift books, and strips featuring Buster Brown were reprinted in books from 1903 onwards. Two of the main publishing houses to enter this field were Frederick A. Stokes in 1904 and Cupples & Leon in 1906. A major success was the Foxy Grandpa newspaper strip by Bunny (Carl E. Schultze), continually reprinted in book form between 1900 and 1916.12 Like the 1897 Yellow Kid book, the intended target readership for these short volumes (each Foxy Grandpa volume contained around twenty-eight strips) seems to have been children, since the books had thick, cheap, durable cardboard covers and pages approximately 10 x 14 inches in size. Frederick Burr Opper’s The Travels of Happy Hooligan (1906) reprinted strips originally published in 1905. It contained a skeletal overarching narrative following the hooligans’ world tour through Britain, France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Egypt, India, and finally, Happy Hooligan’s return to the United States, though there was little continuity across the book beyond the gradual succession of locations. As comics historian Jared Gardner notes, this early

7632_Williams.indd 21

28/06/22 16:55

22

the us graphic novel

‘experiment with long-form narrative’ was not so revolutionary: ‘the round-the-world adventures [. . .] primarily served to provide new backdrops for the familiar routines of Hooligan and his companions’.13 In fact, ever since January 1897, when the Yellow Kid began an international tour within the New York Journal, other comics characters had been embarking on ‘serialized graphic travel narratives’ inside their strips.14 By the time Stokes ceased reprinting newspaper comics in 1916, their share of the market was overshadowed by Cupples & Leon, who specialised in cheap children’s books. The latter’s reprint activities began with Buster Brown, His Dog Tige, and Their Jolly Times in 1906 (Figure 1.1) and substantially grew in the mid-teens when, in 1914, Cupples & Leon innovated by reprinting four-panel daily strips as two-by-two grids, giving a distinct square look to their series ‘Famous Comics in Book Form’. By agreeing deals with multiple syndicates, Cupples & Leon reprinted the best-known strips of the early twentieth century: Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, Bud

Figure 1.1  Richard F. Outcault, Buster Brown and His Dog Tige and Their Jolly Times (New York: Cupples & Leon, 1906), front cover. © 1905, New York Herald Co., © 1906, Cupples & Leon.

7632_Williams.indd 22

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

23

Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, George McManus’s Bringing Up Father, and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. The firm’s last tranche of newspaper strip books appeared in 1933; by this point it was clear that the new 10¢ periodical ‘comic books’ represented a more economical way of republishing newspaper strips than books.15 Between the 1910s and 1930s a few creators experimented with publishing original comics narratives in book form. The influence of newspaper strips was clear in Manga Yonin Shosei (1931), written, drawn, and published by Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, a Japanese artist based in San Francisco during the early twentieth century.16 Based on Kiyama’s experiences, the book follows the lives of four Japanese shosei (student-apprentices) from their arrival in the United States in 1904 to the return of two of the friends to Japan in 1924. Kiyama studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and in February 1927 the fifty-two strips that became his 1931 book were exhibited at the Kinmon Gakuen (Golden Gate Institute). Manga Yonin Shosei was translated and republished in 1998 as The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 and scholar Mayumi Takada describes it as a ‘proto-graphic novel’ that merges ‘the comic strip [. . .] with the conventions of a novelistic narrative’. The sense that these strips are a unified whole is confirmed by the last strip, which mirrors the first in several ways: it is set in the same restaurant, characters assume the same positions, and the final dialogue in each strip offers a celebration of Japan (in the first strip, the Japanese Empire, in the second, ‘a pre-modern Japan’).17 Manga Yonin Shosei was a transnational product, printed in Japan but bound in the United States and combining Japanese and English. Takada explains the complex racial-temporal politics that the text works through: coming from an industrialising, militarily formidable empire, many Japanese saw their country ‘as a modern nation on par with’ the Euro-American superpowers, but in Manga Yonin Shosei the immigrants are met with hostility and treated as backward. In America the protagonists are forced to negotiate the ‘move from a self-consciously “modern” subject to an alien, implicitly raced, un-modern subject’, and, as Takada notes, the concept of ‘home’ is the site of conflicted meanings and temporalities. In the book ‘home’ is Japan, an ancient past of ancestral belonging and a modern present of Western-styled military might and consumption. ‘Home’ is also the middle-class American household, in which the protagonists perform demeaning tasks as domestic labourers, but

7632_Williams.indd 23

28/06/22 16:55

24

the us graphic novel

where the wages compare favourably to respectable clerical jobs in Japan, a source of shame and ‘national emasculation’. Further, ‘home’ is part of the xenophobic curse ‘go home’ that closes many of Kiyama’s strips, hailing the protagonists as racialised subjects. Finally, in the desire of the character Charlie to ‘buy some land, marry a white woman and build a home’, ‘home’ represents an American future that is heavily gendered, racialised, and propertied. After fighting for the United States in the Great War, Charlie applies for citizenship, but is turned down by a judge on racial grounds: ‘Not for Orientals yet’. Takada concludes, ‘The failure of Charlie’s emphatic attempts to re-signify the language of “home” signals not only American rejection of the Japanese immigrants from the concept of nation, but also the text’s inability to articulate Japan and the United States in simultaneous temporalities’. At the start of Manga Yonin Shosei Charlie is the voice of Japan’s democratic modernisation, but the terms of his staying in America at the book’s end are accepting non-citizenship and abandoning his desire to be a ‘modern Japanese American subject’.18 Takada sees the perpetual deferment of Japanese immigrants’ citizenship (as the judge puts it, not ‘yet’) expressed in ‘the repetitive form and content’ of the comic strips constituting the text. The strips – a mode of comics associated with brief, day-to-day reading practices – depict glimpses of the characters’ quotidian existence, but these ‘scraps of their daily lives’ never accumulate in meaning ‘to articulate the emergence of a modern Japanese America’: the strips ceaselessly repeat the ‘recurring abjections and injuries’ of Japanese immigrants. The two characters who stay in the United States, turning away from modern Japan but choosing to live in a country whose ‘exclusionary laws reinforced their alien status’, occupy ‘an unarticulatable national space’, and the trajectory of Manga Yonin Shosei, repeating but never breaking out of that cycle of exclusion and injustice, ‘reflects the unhomeliness of people at the temporal and spatial margins, struggling to emerge’.19

Comics, Chronophotography, and Cinema: A. B. Frost’s Carlo Another book-length narrative in dialogue with short-form comics was Arthur Burdett Frost’s 105-page Carlo, published in 1913 and serialised in the American press the following year. Frost’s artistic

7632_Williams.indd 24

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

25

career took off when his illustrations were included in Out of the Hurly Burly (1874) by Max Adeler (Charles Clark), which sold more than a million copies. In the aftermath of its success Frost became an in-demand illustrator who frequently depicted sporting scenes and country life. Initially, he made pen-and-ink drawings transferred to wood blocks, but he turned to watercolour and gouache and eventually oil painting. In the 1870s he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, one of the most important US painters of the nineteenth century.20 Befitting an artist who illustrated the writings of Mark Twain and Joel Chandler Harris, the setting and characters in Carlo fit the literary movement of regionalism that began in the nineteenth century. Carlo is set on a middle-class family smallholding and begins with the arrival of the eponymous hound. The energetic Carlo causes various incidents of disorder, though by the book’s end he is accepted as an indispensable member of the household and has taken revenge on Tony, the itinerant worker who abused Carlo earlier in the plot. In line with regionalist tropes, the dialogue in Carlo is characterised by dialect forms; as Gavin Jones shows, this ‘cult of the vernacular’ was a widespread feature of postbellum US literature.21 The use of dialect marks the ethnicity of various members of the dramatis personae in Carlo, evident in the gardener and handyman Patrick, who pronounces ‘fine garden’ as ‘foine gyardin’.22 The projection of Patrick’s ethnicity is extended by his jutting chin, a physiognomic signifier of atavism common in nineteenth-century caricatures of the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic.23 The use of bodily stereotypes and dialect was a well-travelled facet of contemporaneous newspaper strips, as seen in the Yellow Kid comics of the 1890s,24 though scholar of humour Jean Lee Cole notes how complicated responses might be: ‘Caricature and dialect could simultaneously elicit reactions of alienation and identification; they could even produce identification with alienation.’25 Thinking about the stereotypes used to depict children in newspaper strips, comics scholar Lara Saguisag remarks that early ‘comics became spaces in which children’s citizenship was defined and debated and in which notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class were used to sort and re-sort children into categories of “future citizen” and “noncitizen”’.26 Carlo enforces a sense of difference and hierarchy among ethnic groups as the plot works through who has the right to be a citizen: though Patrick is quick to violence, his

7632_Williams.indd 25

28/06/22 16:55

26

the us graphic novel

accommodation with the dog at the book’s end settles the right of this Irish American character to belong. The mechanism by which this takes place is the final, decisive expulsion of the threat to the household represented by the unshaven, stiletto-wielding, moustached Tony, whose dialogue includes ‘nica littla dog’ and who is coded as Italian American. Significantly, black characters appear briefly, existing at the edge of the plot and denied names or speech; on one page, an unnamed African American character is dehumanised in a visual analogy that juxtaposes his oversized lips with those of a horse.27 Combined with the slack posture and baggy clothes, 1910s readers would have recognised this derogatory stereotype from the blackface minstrel tradition.28 Denied even the agency and presence in the narrative that Tony is afforded, Carlo refuses to visualise African American characters as fully human, let alone meaningful participants in the national family. Carlo is a sequence of uniformly sized large panels, one to a page, recto and verso, with most panels accompanied by dialogue or verbal narration running underneath. How did 1910s reviewers classify Carlo and its audience? The New York Times called it ‘a picture book’, though not necessarily one for children: ‘Anybody who has owned a dog will greatly enjoy “Carlo”.’29 When the Louisville Courier-Journal ran Carlo as a serial, they promoted it as ‘the last word in high-class comics’.30 In its ‘Latest Publications’ column, the NYT abstained from putting Carlo in ‘Literature’, ‘Fiction’, ‘Juvenile’, or ‘Gift Books’, placing it instead in the ‘Miscellaneous’ category with The Knapp Method of Growing Cotton.31 The Bookman was less equivocal, positioning Carlo in a November 1913 roundup of juvenile literature.32 Indisputably, it is a picture book – there are no speech balloons, frequently used in newspaper strips by this point – but we see Frost utilising the same approach to panel sequences and composition that he had developed around 1880. Frost’s collection Stuff and Nonsense (1884) displays his technique of placing multiple panels on a single page, crucial in shaping the development of comics; this is muted in Carlo, but if we read each page as a panel we see how Frost pressed his short-form experiments into the service of a much longer sequential art narrative. Thierry Smolderen’s The Origins of Comics documents the comics that Frost produced around 1879–80 in Harper’s New Monthly and later in Harper’s Bazar. Smolderen argues that, via Thomas Eakins’s interest in the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge

7632_Williams.indd 26

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

27

Figure 1.2  Eadweard Muybridge, ‘Horse at Full Gallop’, photograph, undated, Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, Item Number 61975. Courtesy of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. (Figure 1.2), Frost responded to Muybridge’s meticulous photographic sequences of animals in motion by stylising bodily movements to look more ‘expressive and dynamic’ than those previously attempted. Frost absorbed the look of chronophotography in the late 1870s by drawing comics using uniformly sized panels placed into a grid pattern, adopting ‘strictly identical framings, and precisely timed intervals’.33 For comics scholar Scott Bukatman, ‘the medium does change fundamentally in the wake of Muybridge [. . .]. Comics display a more evident interest in temporality, depicting precise moments arranged in a legible sequence, juggling a sense of both the instantaneous and the causal.’34 Contrasting the work of Frost (and Töpffer) against printed image sequences from the eighteenth century, Santiago García writes that ‘[w]hile Hogarth’s series present a selection of scenes that can be interpreted as a narrative continuity, the comics of [. . .] Frost present a selection of moments that are unavoidably read as continuous’.35 Frost understood that, at this moment in media history, a grid of identically sized and framed panels would be read as snapshots succeeding one another in time, and he manipulated that expectation for comic effect. Frost’s panel grids became a commonplace of the comics page, but Smolderen notes that he ‘refused to jump on the bandwagon’ he set in motion himself, abandoning the multi-panel page in his ‘book-length comic’ Carlo. Nonetheless, Frost still pursued the

7632_Williams.indd 27

28/06/22 16:55

28

the us graphic novel

‘dynamic timing that he had invented twenty years before’,36 even more noticeable when Carlo was serialised in newspapers and each page became a panel in a strip.37 García’s contention that Frost’s one-panel-to-a-page books demonstrate his ‘lack of interest in [. . .] the development of panel-by-panel, frame-by-frame movement’ is false, though García is right to note that Frost’s work was ‘located at the intersection of the multiple and sequential image from which film and animation would both arise’,38 and I will show in the rest of this section how Frost’s play with panelling and temporality was conducted in dialogue with the visual language of early cinema. The book’s penultimate chapter ‘Carlo Has a Dream’ starts on page 99, with Patrick smoking his pipe after raking grass in the garden. At that moment a travelling musician arrives at the house: on page 100 the musician’s unexpected noise alarms the dozing Carlo, who surges forward and bowls Patrick over (Figure 1.3). On page 101 the musician clutches his face and the cook encourages Patrick to strike him again (the sudden noise caused her to scald her hand in the kitchen), and on the last page of the chapter Carlo hides in his doghouse and thinks out loud ‘I dreamt those awful things were tied to my tail again.’39 This references an earlier incident when Tony and another itinerant worker abused the dog by attaching cans, kettles, and other metal objects to his tail.40 The first two pages of ‘Carlo Has a Dream’ evidence the comics storytelling that Frost honed in the 1880s. Both panels are uniformly sized and identically framed, with Patrick and Carlo in the foreground, oblivious at first to the musician at the back steps who has put down his collection bowl. In isolation, these pages function as a two-panel gag, one in which the reader conspires by correlating initially unlinked foreground and background details, reading off from the arrival of the musician the disruption of bucolic tranquillity about to occur. In the following moment – the beat it takes the reader to turn the page – the scene’s core elements are united in a causal chain and the reader completes the joke. Frost’s Stuff and Nonsense contains many two-panel gags, one of which depicts a well-dressed man holding a hose, who is suddenly soaked when a figure in the background turns on the hose’s water supply.41 A similar visual joke has passed into Cinema Studies lore in the shape of the Lumière Brothers’ L’Arroseur arosé (1895), one of the first films projected to a public audience. In L’Arroseur arosé a gardener is spraying his plants, when a mischievous adolescent

7632_Williams.indd 28

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

29

Figure 1.3  A. B. Frost, Carlo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913), pp. 99-100. © 1913, Doubleday, Page & Company.

7632_Williams.indd 29

28/06/22 16:55

30

the us graphic novel

enters behind him and steps on the hose. With the flow of water blocked, the gardener looks into the nozzle, the cue for the rascal to lift his foot and thus soak the gardener; the film ends with the lad’s spanking. The premise of L’Arroseur arosé was not original, its basic plot existing as an 1886 comic strip in the German magazine Fliegende Blätter, with many other iterations too – this scenario was a staple of the era’s popular culture.42 L’Arroseur arosé was the founding text in the genre of short, single-shot gag films that dominated fiction filmmaking before c. 1906. Many were indirectly influenced by newspaper strips and some were direct adaptations (starring Foxy Grandpa or Buster Brown, for example).43 Carlo evokes this cross-media tradition and we gain a stronger understanding of how ‘Carlo Has a Dream’ functions in relation to the overall narrative of Carlo by studying gag film scholarship. Early twentieth-century filmmakers were developing longer narratives incorporating the various pleasures single-reel cinema had to offer, and cinema scholar Donald Crafton notes that, even after feature-length films were developed in the 1910s, Hollywood retained a place for gags in silent comedies. In Crafton’s schema, the purpose of gags in feature-length silent comedies is that they are ‘ephemeral’ and ‘atemporal’: gags don’t advance the plot, they confound it and render it temporarily ‘incoherent’. While ‘films generally are not all-or-nothing, spectacle-versus-narrative propositions, there are certain cases that encourage the viewer to see them in just this binary fashion’.44 So is ‘Carlo Has a Dream’ like a mischief gag film and does it provide a humorous distraction while the overarching narrative of Carlo is suspended? I would reply ‘yes’ to the first question but ‘no’ to the second. While there is minor deviation (the chaos is not deliberately planned), this chapter closely follows the gag plot as schematised by film historian Tom Gunning: there is a preparatory action (the musician readying to play) which allows observers to anticipate the consequences of that action, and a second phase in which the action’s effect is shown. There is even an ‘optional concluding action’ in which punishment is meted out ‘by the victim or some figure of authority’, when Patrick punches the busker for disturbing the peace of the domestic sphere.45 Further, Frost’s continuity of framing across pages 99–100 speaks to the formal parameters of the gag film. Generally restricted to a single shot, gag films maximised the space of the frame, allocating separate areas to rascal and victim.

7632_Williams.indd 30

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

31

The victim’s attention is distracted ‘away from the mischief being prepared behind their backs or over their heads’; the rascal often remains visible in the background and/or upper part of the frame so they can admire their efforts. Not only do these formal characteristics map onto ‘Carlo Has a Dream’, but they were an established part of Frost’s visual bag of tricks, as the hose gag in Stuff and Nonsense demonstrates. Gunning even connects the gag films’ ‘economical use of the space of the frame’ to the compositional economy of ‘the turn-of-the-century comic strips that were their inspiration’.46 However, the function of this chapter’s pandemonium differs from that of the gag films since ‘Carlo Has a Dream’ is not a selfcontained text. It ends with Carlo peeping out of his kennel, when we learn the dog wasn’t merely startled by the busker’s noise but remains traumatised by the abuse he suffered at the hands of the itinerant workers. ‘Carlo Has a Dream’ activates readers’ memories of that previous episode while gesturing forwards to the book’s concluding chapter, which starts immediately afterwards. In the book’s last chapter, Carlo sees Tony skulking outside, so the dog chases him into Patrick’s room, and when Patrick returns he sends Tony packing. Carlo leaps with joy and the gardener compliments him: ‘You’re the foine dawg, that’s what you are! Thim sneak thieves an’ tramps hev no show at all while you’re aroun’.’47 On the final page Carlo sits in front of his kennel in a side-on view, a perspective used several times before in the narrative, notably on the title page. The repetition of the title page’s framing at the very end affords a sense of narrative closure and, in case the reader missed the arc traced across the book, Carlo verbalises his thoughts, ‘This is the first time I’ve come out ahead.’48 Even when serialised in newspapers around the country, readers were told the discrete chapters should be understood as part of one integral text. To facilitate the consumption of Carlo in a single sitting, the Louisville Courier-Journal instructed its readers to ‘begin saving the series to-morrow’ so they can ‘[s]titch’ together ‘a book of unending joy’.49 Carlo began the narrative disrupting the peace of the middle-class home, beaten and threatened with permanent banishment, but at the book’s end the dog is accepted by the head of the household and by Patrick and has taken retribution on his erstwhile persecutor Tony. Gunning’s thoughts on the one-reel gag film’s integration into feature films help us understand how and why Frost strung together so many spectacular episodes (chases, firework displays, fights with cats

7632_Williams.indd 31

28/06/22 16:55

32

the us graphic novel

and chickens) in Carlo. Noting a repeated plot model in ‘commercial narrative films’ – ‘disruption of an original stasis and a consequent process of containment that seeks to limit the violence of disruption and regain the original equilibrium’ – Gunning reminds us this model requires ‘forces that disrupt’ and ‘forces that contain’ and therefore ‘the forces of disruption are essential to even the most conventional narrative’.50 ‘Narrative’, as he puts it, ‘acts as a system of regulation which ultimately absorbs nonnarrative elements into its pendulum sways.’ Short gag films were not displaced by feature-length comedies but slotted into their menu of pleasures, functioning as the ‘excess [. . .] necessary to the film’s process of containment’. Carlo is a patchwork of comedic scenes that do disrupt, that fill panels with explosive clouds and diving poodles, but far from betraying the poverty of the plot or the impossibility of sustaining a comics narrative across a whole book, the concatenation of brief, funny episodes withholds the establishment of Carlo’s place in the family so its eventual occurrence is all the more earned and satisfying. ‘Carlo Has a Dream’ confirms Gunning’s definition of narrative as ‘a process of integration in which smaller units are absorbed into a larger overarching pattern and process of containment’.51 The spectacular incidents in Carlo contribute to the integral long narrative, even when momentarily delaying its fruition. And, as a reminder of Carlo’s cruel treatment at Tony’s hands, the spectacle of ‘Carlo Has a Dream’ seeks to validate the ethnically coded justice and closure that takes place at the book’s end, in which certain versions of whiteness are confirmed as acceptably American while other racial groups are excluded. As a book and a newspaper serial, Carlo had national impact, a key text if we are to understand graphic novel history, since it represented a long sequence of images underpinned by Frost’s previous experiments in shorter comics. Before the 1910s were over, artists on the other side of the Atlantic would also sustain a comics narrative across a whole book, catalysing the first significant graphic novel movement in the United States: the woodcut novels of the 1930s.

Woodcut Books in Europe Published in the United States from 1929 onwards, the woodcut novels were typically released by major New York trade presses, and some sold tens of thousands of copies. Despite the name, they were made by a variety of techniques, not only with woodcuts but

7632_Williams.indd 32

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

33

also linocuts, wood engraving, and lead engraving. Woodcut novels were popular at the same time mass-produced posters played a vibrant role in urban visual culture, prompting us to consider how these books affirmed their status as novels (hardcover publication, division into chapters, contents pages) while simultaneously allowing readers to discern a kinship between individual panels and the posters in the streets advertising the latest commodities, political parties, and motion pictures. Block-books printed from woodcuts flourished in Northern Europe in the late fifteenth century, intended as religious guides for the middle class. Starting in the late eighteenth century, the Englishman Thomas Bewick made woodblocks by cutting hard wood across the grain, which meant the grains stood perpendicular to the surface; this allowed Bewick to use copper-engraving tools to produce finer lines than earlier woodprint makers, and his technique was labelled wood engraving. When artists returned to woodblocks in the late nineteenth century, they deliberately went back to woodcuts, using a knife to slice along the grain and a gouge to remove chunks of wood; for artist Paul Gauguin, the labour of felling trees and carving blocks was meant to be an act of purification, freeing the self from (in his words) the trappings of European ‘civilization’.52 In the early twentieth century, private presses issued lavish woodcut books in small print runs, aimed at a moneyed consumer desirous to buy products that came with the artisanal sheen of the handmade.53 British artist Paul Nash fits into this, producing both woodcut prints and woodcut books such as Places (1922) and Genesis (1924), and to give an idea how niche this market was, only 200 copies of Places went on sale.54 Writer and curator David A. Beronä identifies three main influences on the emergence of the woodcut novel. First, the revival of woodcuts that began in the late nineteenth century; by the interwar period, this was often associated with German expressionism and combined with a social critique of technological change, as seen in book illustrations by artists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Second, the appearance of silent feature films starring global celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin. Third, the political cartoons in magazines and newspapers, which represented ‘a powerful visual medium that entertained and satirized a growing industrialized society’.55 The compression of these forces into the woodcut novel was led by Belgian artist Frans Masereel.

7632_Williams.indd 33

28/06/22 16:55

34

the us graphic novel

During the Great War, Masereel worked for the International Red Cross and the International Pacifist Movement in Geneva, where his career as a political cartoonist took off. In 1917 his first portfolios of woodcut prints were released, their stylised, agonised tableaux addressing the mechanised war claiming millions of lives. Masereel’s first woodcut novel, 25 Images de la Passion d’un Homme (1918), contrasted the wealth and power of industrialists against the abject conditions of the urban poor; when the protagonist tries to organise his fellow workers, he is sentenced to death in a trial that evokes the judgement of Christ.56 Masereel’s most popular woodcut novel was 167 images long, but its small page dimensions (3½ x 2¾ inches) encouraged portability; in this book – now known as Passionate Journey (1919) – a male protagonist travelling through a city experiences a series of sad, bawdy, and impetuous events. The German edition bore an introduction from novelist Thomas Mann, who compared reading the woodcut novel to seeing a motion picture, and Mann accordingly instructed Masereel’s readers to proceed through the images at a swift pace.57 What one critic in 1930 described as a ‘flood’58 of woodcut novels followed: Childhood (1931) and Kristus (1944) by Helena BochořákováDittrichová; István Szegedi Szüts’s My War (1931), a narrative of over 200 drawings done in brush and ink that shared Masereel’s revulsion against modern war; and Otto Nückel’s Destiny (1926), a lead-engraving novel reiterating key themes from 25 Images de la Passion d’un Homme, such as working-class squalor, the assumed disposability of impoverished life, and the abandonment of pregnant women by irresponsible men.

‘The Picture Novel Arrives in America’ Szüts’s and Nückel’s books were republished by major New York presses (Destiny: A Novel in Pictures by Farrar and Rinehart in 1930, My War by William Morrow in 1932), and a 1930 article in Publishers Weekly by art historian Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt proclaimed ‘The Picture Novel Arrives in America’. LehmannHaupt saw in these ‘picture novels’ an artistic experience like the cinema, with one crucial difference: the reader ‘can make the story run quickly, we can even skip, but we can also stop altogether. Then suddenly it is not so much a piece out of a story that counts, but an individual picture with its own particular qualities.’59

7632_Williams.indd 34

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

35

Lehmann-Haupt hailed the superiority of this mode of reception, where readers are enabled to pause and contemplate single pages. Categorising media based on control over the duration of reception is an old idea, but it continues to be important. Media scholars André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, for example, differentiate between ‘heterochrone’ and ‘homochrone’ contexts of reception: in heterochrone contexts (such as reading a comic or a poem) the reader is free to set the time of a text’s reception for themselves, but in homochrone contexts (watching a film or listening to a concert) an intended temporality is determined by the medium in advance. Gaudreault and Marion comment that with ‘graphic novels [. . .] readers remain in control of the speed at which they read and where they stop and look at an image’.60 Lehmann-Haupt was responding both to the republication of European works and to the first woodcut novel crafted on US soil. Lynd Ward graduated from Columbia University in 1926 and then studied in Germany, where he encountered Masereel’s books. After returning to New York, Ward attempted similar long narratives, the first of which was Gods’ Man (1929). Ward worked with woodengraving, and, with no small measure of pride, saw this method as ‘harshly out of tune with the modern world’.61 What other technology could be better suited to critiquing urban industrial society? This dissonance was why Ward thought artists turned to wood-printing during the Depression; its sense of being out-oftime was the visual correlate of ‘the violence those experiences [of the 1930s] did to our sense of the world [. . .] how far it seemed from what we had been taught to believe it was supposed to be’.62 Furthermore, Ward saw an epistemological principle in his artistic technique: The woodblock [. . .] develops its image by bringing details out of darkness into the light. [. . .] [W]hat is happening is already there in the darkness, and cutting the block involves letting only enough light into the field of vision to reveal what is going on. In addition, the interplay between cutting tool and the reluctant wood imposes a degree of arbitrariness of rendering[.]63 An imperfect rendering of that which, without the artist’s hand, would be indistinguishable because of the darkness that surrounds it. This goes straight to the activist politics of so many woodcut novels,

7632_Williams.indd 35

28/06/22 16:55

36

the us graphic novel

letting in light on the injustices and inequalities of American capitalism, the dirty secrets kept out of sight and hidden in the shadows. Like Lehmann-Haupt, Ward also reached for a cinematic analogy. He wrote that ‘my generation is the one that grew up with the silent motion picture’ and that he gravitated towards woodprinting because, like film, ‘so much was communicated in visual terms alone’.64 Describing the process of constructing a woodcut novel, Ward began by imagining the action as a film and then breaking it up ‘into static images’. The tricky bit is getting the intervals between ‘visual units’ right.65 The panels in Ward’s novels were always on the recto of each page, reinforcing the filmic sense of one instant succeeded by another projected onto the same space (Ward, though, varied the size of his images). In early 1929 Ward had the outline of Gods’ Man, though his days were spent ‘trudging from one publisher’s office to another’ in search of work designing frontispieces and book jackets. One of the editors he met, Harrison Smith, who was in partnership with the UK publisher Jonathan Cape, responded encouragingly to Ward’s portfolio and the artist pitched a whole woodcut novel to him. It was eventually published in October 1929, the same week of the New York Stock Exchange crash. Despite this, Gods’ Man was an immediate success and quickly reprinted.66 It went into six printings and sold 20,000 copies over the next four years.67 Ward produced longer, multi-layered narratives in the 1930s: Madman’s Drum (1930) works through the inherited guilt of the slave trade in a cross-generational saga that ends in madness; Wild Pilgrimage (1932) was printed in two colours to distinguish the public actions and private fantasies of the protagonist as he wanders a Depressionera society riven by industrial disputes and racist murders; Prelude to a Million Years (1933) depicted an America of authoritarian nationalism, strikes, and misogyny, a parable about the difficulty of realising beautiful art in the face of social trauma (though what stands out is how the female form bears the weight of the male artist’s anxieties); the bluntly allegorical Song Without Words (1936) examines a pregnant woman’s dilemma of whether to bring a child into a hopeless world. Although most of Ward’s woodcut novels were issued by large publishing houses such as Cape or Random House, Prelude to a Million Years was a limited edition by Equinox Cooperative Press, co-founded by Ward to publish hand-bound, non-commercial texts.68

7632_Williams.indd 36

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

37

Vertigo (1937) is Ward’s longest woodcut novel, divided into three sections that follow the intersecting lives of a ‘Girl’, an ‘Elderly Gentleman’, and a ‘Boy’, across the space of five years, twelve months, and seven days respectively. Another Depression-era saga, the Elderly Gentleman runs the Eagle Corporation of America, which employs the Girl’s father (the lack of precise names underscores the characters’ allegorical roles). The old man’s detached contemplation of nature and art are in stark contrast to the ruthless, murderous means by which he breaks the strikes affecting his corporation. The Girl’s father is laid off and unsuccessfully attempts suicide in 1932, the family are evicted from their home in 1934, and the final image of the Girl’s narrative is joining the back of a breadline in 1935. Near the start of the Girl’s section we see her engaged to the Boy, but in 1930 he heads west and (one infers) travels across the country looking for work. In 1935 he returns to the city, searching for his fiancée and enough money to climb out of poverty, but the Boy’s quest is stymied by his morality, such as refusing to cross a picket line. He eventually makes money by donating blood to save the Elderly Gentleman, a blatant metaphor for how the bourgeoisie sucks the life out of the proletariat. The Boy and Girl are reconciled, but the book’s final image of them clinging tightly together on a plunging rollercoaster signifies the fear and uncertainty with which working-class Americans lived during the 1930s. Ward never produced another woodcut novel after Vertigo but enjoyed a long career as a book illustrator, especially limited editions and children’s books.69 More US woodcut novels followed the publication of Gods’ Man. Narratives could be religious (1930’s The Life of Christ in Woodcuts by James Reid) or biographical (1933’s Abraham Lincoln: A Biography in Woodcuts and 1935’s Benjamin Franklin: A Biography in Woodcuts, both by Charles Turzak), though the woodcut novel was regularly conceived as a call-to-arms in the face of murderous racism, nationalism, and anticommunism. This political commitment was manifest in a linocut novel that went unpublished for years: Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez’s Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts (1935), a bound volume only discovered much later amongst the papers of Joseph North, editor at the journal New Masses.70 William Gropper’s Alay-Oop (1930) was made with crayon, pen, and brush, but it seems appropriate to include it here, since Gropper was known for his left-wing cartoons and he contributed to progressive periodicals such as the

7632_Williams.indd 37

28/06/22 16:55

38

the us graphic novel

New Masses.71 In Alay-Oop a male and female acrobatic team split up when the woman marries a rotund singer promising an affluent future, and the book shares the themes of woodcut novels going back to Masereel: violent male jealousy and possessiveness towards women, the drudgery of working-class labour, and the selfpoisoning effect of investing hope in capitalism’s promise of material advancement, what critical theorist Lauren Berlant (writing about contemporary America) describes as its ‘cruel optimism’.72 A sign of the woodcut novels’ recognisability was the publication of He Done Her Wrong (1930), a book-length satire by newspaper cartoonist Milt Gross. During the 1920s he was a writer and artist on many fantastical, slapstick strips, producing up to twelve at a time.73 The success of Nize Baby (1926), a book collection of his newspaper columns, saw Gross move to California to adapt it into a screenplay. Around the same time, he came up with the idea for ‘a novel without words – one that would capture all the melodrama of a silent adventure film’. But if the original idea for He Done Her Wrong preceded Ward’s woodcut novels, by the time the book was published, Gods’ Man was one of Gross’s satirical targets: critics saw Gross’s wordless novel as entertaining without the pretentious overtones, ambiguous plots, or obscure symbolism in Ward’s woodcut novels. For example, the handsome artist in Gods’ Man [. . .] braves a storm with threatening waves in a small sailboat before he arrives safely and confidently on shore. In contrast, Gross’s bumpkin is anything but handsome and paddles on a log into New York harbour.74 Despite the favourable critical reception, He Done Her Wrong was not as successful as Gross’s other books, and historian Paul Buhle speculates that Gross’s parody would have done better before the advent of sound film, since the silent melodramas Gross lampooned were fast disappearing from cinema screens.75 The political, economic, and social crises of the 1930s continued to shadow the stories that woodcut artists told in the 1940s and 1950s. A contributor to left-wing publications and the San Francisco Chronicle, the Italian-born, California-based artist Giacomo Patri produced White Collar: A Novel in Linocuts in 1940, the tale of a middle-class family’s suffering during the Depression. The father loses both his advertising job and his confidence in the prospects

7632_Williams.indd 38

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

39

offered by unregulated capitalism, and throws his lot in with a union. In 1951 the English-born Laurence Hyde, a printmaker and illustrator based in Canada, completed Southern Cross: A Novel of the South Seas told in Wood Engravings, which narrated the terrible human and ecological damage of atomic-bomb testing in the Pacific. Southern Cross was published in Los Angeles by Ward Ritchie Press in a small edition, a sign that the fashion for woodcut novels had significantly diminished since the 1930s. Books of woodcuts were beautiful objects devised for a limited audience of wealthy consumers once more.76 The apparent contradiction between making art for a mass audience and producing luxury goods for a small coterie of readers was a major theme of the book that started the movement in the United States, Ward’s Gods’ Man.

Branding Art in Gods’ Man For design scholar Steven Heller, Ward’s woodcut novels were a bridge ‘between mass comics and the more rarefied illustrated book’.77 The most detailed account of this tension is provided by David M. Ball, who notes that Ward’s books were published by trade presses in their tens of thousands, and he made wood engravings in unlimited editions so they could be available to as many people as possible . . . yet Ward also illustrated expensive tomes ‘produced solely’ for members of the Limited Editions Club. Attempting to negotiate ‘between high and popular culture’ on a quest for an art that was democratically available but unsullied by mass commercialism, Ward’s concerns were the same as many modernists who came to prominence in the early twentieth century.78 In Gods’ Man we see the compromises bound up with making art for the market, and the allure of the brand as an immediate and unspoken way of promising fullness through consumption, which Ward rendered in problematically gendered terms. Ward’s 1930s woodcut novels were much harder to decode than his 1929 debut and critics complained the later books were incomprehensible. For Ball this indecipherability is a deliberate strategy, not the artist ‘losing control of his narratives’ but ‘conspicuously relinquishing’ his grip on meaning. Drawing on the comics creator Scott McCloud’s widely used definition of comics as a medium of sequential art, Ball suggests that in Ward’s books readers are forced to work particularly hard in bringing ‘closure’ to the panels, in understanding how juxtaposed images collaborate in the storytelling process. The

7632_Williams.indd 39

28/06/22 16:55

40

the us graphic novel

plural deities invoked by the title of Gods’ Man might be ‘the novel’s various readers’, each of whom vivifies ‘Ward’s unnamed protagonist’ by imagining how the succession of images constitutes a narrative.79 Exploring the power ceded to the reader entails looking closely at individual panels within Gods’ Man. Ward’s preoccupation with art’s relationship to commerce runs throughout the book, which narrates the story of a young man who signs a Faustian contract to become a great artist, before fleeing city life and fame in search of artistic autonomy and a new family in the mountains. Alas, the artist’s satanic master catches up with him at the end. Gods’ Man has been read as ‘the most symbolically straightforward of Ward’s narratives, equating commercial success with compromised artistic values’, and because of this supposed simplicity, Gods’ Man ‘has often proved an embarrassment to the few scholars who have acknowledged Ward’s work’. But against the book’s notional straightforwardness, Ball argues Ward’s storytelling is in a state of ‘revolt’ that makes it difficult for readers to turn the succession of individual panels into a coherent narrative.80 This takes us back to that quality of the woodcut novels identified by Lehmann-Haupt, the contrary demands of powering through to the end of the plot versus contemplating panels in isolation. As contemporary woodcut artist Peter Kuper observes, images in a woodcut novel have an ‘iconic’ quality, ‘as though the art were announcing a rally and needed to be read as easily on a lamp post as seen in a book’.81 Gods’ Man is a mode of art operating in two dimensions at once. The first: a book-length narrative where the meaning of each panel depends upon its relation to the overall ensemble of images, affording the reader multiple interpretations. The second: an amalgam of big, public, one-off statements meant to convey a symbolic truth quickly and vividly. Appropriately enough, Ward worked for the Federal Art Project’s New York Chapter as supervisor of the Graphic Arts Division,82 the FAP producing at least 2,000 posters between 1936 and 1943.83 The era in which Gods’ Man was published was an important time for billboard advertising and the street dramaturgy of mass political movements. Poster art was changing in the interwar period, having ‘to appeal to motorists as well as the more leisurely passerby in the street’. Artist John Barnicoat comments that, in the early twentieth century, poster ‘designers reduced the image to a single element – often exaggerated – that could be retained by the memory at a glance’.84 Woodcut novels sit between the poster and the comic:

7632_Williams.indd 40

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

41

the meanings that Ward’s panels offer seem bluntly allegorical on their own, and yet readers had the freedom to make sense of how each page fitted into the whole sequence (and, though it is not my focus here, obviously single panels in isolation can be interpreted in numerous different ways). One scene in Gods’ Man thematises the idea that an image might function as a piece of public art; newly arrived in the city, the protagonist sets up his easel in a thoroughfare and begins painting the square in front of him. An excited multitude gathers behind the artist to observe him at work, but befitting Ward’s anxieties about commercialism, an art dealer appears and auctions the painting off to the highest bidder in the crowd. The protagonist is given a small portion of the total sale, and what is momentarily the art of the people, of the street, is co-opted and becomes one person’s private property. In a double sense, the artist is alienated from his art, physically separated from it and reimbursed only a fraction of what his labour was financially worth.85 To take an example of a panel having meaning on its own but also in the overall context of Gods’ Man, observe the page in which the protagonist is sentenced to imprisonment (Figure 1.4). As a single image, it can quickly be decoded as an allegory about corrupt authority: a prisoner is thrown to the courtroom floor, his body positioned in the gap between two law enforcement officers, symbolising his encirclement by the power of the state. The judge adjudicates with his arm around a female companion, implying his thoughts are not focused on the legal proceedings in front of him, rendering ironic the balanced scales depicted on the judge’s dais (a religious allegory may be deduced since the scales resemble a Celtic cross). Read as a single image, this panel conveys a negligent judiciary giving retrospective approval to state brutality, broadly confirmed when the panel is considered in concert with other images in Gods’ Man: the judge and the woman next to him are the final iteration of a series of couples seen in lascivious abandon, the implication being that physical love is bought and sold and that the men doing the buying are neglecting their community (one of them is the policeman who brought the artist to court). To give a different example, consider the scene that launches the protagonist into the street to rail against the sexual immorality on public display. The prompt for the young artist’s despair is on page [151], when his mistress (provided, along with the apartment, by the dealer who sells his paintings) reveals the dollar sign branded

7632_Williams.indd 41

28/06/22 16:55

42

the us graphic novel

Figure 1.4  Lynd Ward, God’s Man (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929), p. [187]. © 1929, Lynd Ward. on her shoulder. The mistress laughs at this revelation on the subsequent page, a composition that douses her eye sockets in shadow (Figure 1.5). This is too much for the protagonist to take, naked evidence of his compromised position and a sign that even romantic

7632_Williams.indd 42

28/06/22 16:55

7632_Williams.indd 43

28/06/22 16:55

Figure 1.5  Ward, God’s Man, pp. [149–53]. © 1929 Lynd Ward.

44

the us graphic novel

relations are enmeshed within the city’s web of financial transactions. The branded mistress symbolises the commercial art market, and, in fleeing from her, the protagonist eventually escapes the city and the production of art for someone else’s profit.86 On its own, page [151] could be a critique of an economy in which women are treated as commodities exchanged between men for capital, to be looked upon by men but not bearers of the gaze themselves. In this interpretation, nakedness means the vulnerability and victimhood of women. Considered in relation to the other panels, an opposing interpretation is afforded to the reader. Given the laughing, eyeless character we see on page [153] and the image on page [149] – an embrace in which the mistress wraps her arm over the artist’s neck, her eye looking out at the reader – the meaning of page [151] does not settle upon the idea of victimised womanhood. Instead, readers are invited to see the naked female as threateningly assertive, not (just) a commodity but a wielder of the gaze, a temptress bewitching the artist. On page [149] her look is introspective and calculating, and her laughter at the protagonist’s shock on page [153] suggests his revulsion is preposterous. Further, her erect nipple suggests she has usurped a phallic power that should belong to the male. The next page (Figure 1.6) offers an intriguing visual rhyme with a classic comics character: by

Figure 1.6  Ward, God’s Man, p. [155]. © 1929, Lynd Ward

7632_Williams.indd 44

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

45

positioning his head as bowed with hair flopping down, the artist is given the appearance of long, shoulder-length hair, and together with the drooping neckerchief, the protagonist of Gods’ Man looks like a deflated, adult-sized Buster Brown.87 As master symbol of commercialised comics, evoking Outcault’s character cannot help but render the mistress as representative of an art market where image-making for profit leads to bland, indistinguishable art, emasculating the male artist by robbing him of a noble vocation. If we are swayed by the resemblance to Buster Brown, the artist is reduced to the status of brand himself. No wonder the revelation of the dollar sign deranges the protagonist. It holds up a mirror to his debased situation and drives him towards more traditional – and in the logic of the plot, more wholesome and moral – relations of both heterosexual love and artistic production.

Conclusion Smolderen’s The Origins of Comics summarises the ‘laboratory of humoristic illustration in the second half of the nineteenth century’ as ‘short, focused picture stories’ whose ‘core tools were the witty allusion to older visual forms of storytelling, the stylization (and hybridization) of existing visual languages, and the diagrammatic reference to the new “ways of seeing” brought about by technology’.88 Though published in 1913 and significantly longer than the nineteenth-century cartoons Smolderen has in mind, Frost’s Carlo fits this description, though on occasion it has not been seen as a comic at all. Gunning observes that modern comics ‘staged a confrontation between succession and simultaneity’ where ‘two forms of reading collide’: reading each panel one after the other or contemplating the page in its entirety.89 When a text has one panel to a page, readers can take in a two-page diptych (two plates joined by a hinge), but that’s about as much ‘simultaneity’ as Carlo affords. Most woodcut novels did not even offer this to readers, displaying one panel on each recto page. With Ward’s books, for example, unless you bought multiple copies of the same text and performed some gymnastic book holding, you would struggle to cast your eyes over multiple panels at once. But as we have seen, the meaning of a single panel in Gods’ Man remained up for grabs depending on how each reader understood that panel’s relation to others in the overall narrative.

7632_Williams.indd 45

28/06/22 16:55

46

the us graphic novel

This chapter has explored a series of intermedial relationships between comics and other media – posters, chronophotography, and picture books – but film has come up repeatedly, whether in terms of generic borrowing (the influence of the gag reel on Carlo) or silent film’s prominence in how creators (Ward) and critics (Lehmann-Haupt) conceptualised the woodcut novels. This isn’t surprising, since comics informed early cinema and newspaper strip artists such as Winsor McCay were also filmmakers. At the start of the twentieth century, cultural producers in both comics and film were contemplating the aesthetic and economic advantages of longer narratives, and where long-form comics were concerned, the novel was a ready point of reference. But should readers linger on what they are seeing or be pulled along by ‘the motive force of the narrative’? With comics, that ‘confrontation’ between styles of reading has never gone away and remains one of the reasons why graphic novels are so compulsive for readers and compelling as an area of study.90

Notes  1. Rodolphe Töpffer, The Complete Comic Strips, ed. and trans. David Kunzle (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 633–4.  2. David Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 3, xi. See also Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, [2000] 2014), Chapters 2–3.  3. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, ‘Töpffer’s Comic Picture-Novels’, 1846, in Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip, p. 187.  4. Qtd and translated in Philippe Willems, ‘“This Strangest of Narrative Forms”: Rodolphe Töpffer’s Sequential Art’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41.2 (June 2008): p. 139.  5. Smolderen, Origins of Comics, pp. 53–69.  6. Robert Beerbohm and Doug Wheeler, ‘Töpffer in America’, NouvièmeArt2.0, January 2001, (last accessed 20 November 2021).  7. Smolderen, Origins of Comics, p. 75.  8. Christina Meyer, Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019), p. 1.  9. Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), pp. 7–15, 24–36.

7632_Williams.indd 46

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

47

10. Ibid. pp. 11–58. An excellent account of Buster Brown is given in the chapter ‘Family Amusements’ from Lara Saguisag, Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), pp. 84–113. 11. Meyer, Producing Mass Entertainment, pp. 42–3; Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, p. 129. 12. Denis Gifford, The International Book of Comics (London: Hamlyn Publishing, 1988), pp. 30–3. 13. Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-FirstCentury Storytelling (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 40. 14. Meyer, Producing Mass Entertainment, p. 156. 15. Gifford, International Book of Comics, pp. 32–3. 16. Frederik L. Schodt, ‘Henry Kiyama and The Four Immigrants Manga’, in Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, [1931] 1998), p. 13. 17. Mayumi Takada, ‘The Four Immigrants Manga and the Making of Japanese Americans’, Genre 39.4 (Winter 2006): pp. 128, 137–8. 18. Ibid. pp. 126–37. 19. Ibid. pp. 127, 137–8. 20. Constance Koppelman, ‘Frost, Arthur Burdett’, American National Biography, [1999] February 2000, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 21. Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 1–2. 22. A. B. Frost, Carlo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913), p. 6. 23. L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. edn. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Kerry Soper, ‘From Swarthy Ape to Sympathetic Everyman and Subversive Trickster: The Development of Irish Caricature in American Comic Strips between 1890 and 1920’, Journal of American Studies 39.2 (2005): pp. 263–9. 24. Meyer, Producing Mass Entertainment, pp. 78–82. 25. Jean Lee Cole, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895–1920 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), p. 24. 26. Saguisag, Incorrigibles and Innocents, p. 5. 27. Frost, Carlo, pp. 24, 38. 28. Stephen Johnson, ‘Introduction: The Persistence of Blackface and the Minstrel Tradition’, in Stephen Johnson, ed., Burnt Cork: Traditions

7632_Williams.indd 47

28/06/22 16:55

48

the us graphic novel

and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), p. 8. 29. ‘Topics of the Week’, The New York Times, 26 October 1913, p. BR580. 30. Advert for the Feature Section of the Sunday Courier-Journal, CourierJournal [Louisville], 7 February 1914, p. 12. 31. ‘Latest Publications’, The New York Times, 19 October 1913, p. BR570. 32. Margaret C. Anderson, ‘A Child’s Garden of Books: Juvenile Literature for 1913 – in Two Parts – Part I’, The Bookman, November 1913, p. 322. 33. Smolderen, Origins of Comics, pp. 119–35. Other scholars also note early comics creators’ consciousness of Muybridge’s chronophotography. Tom Gunning, ‘The Art of Succession: Reading, Writing, and Watching Comics’, Critical Inquiry 40.3 (Spring 2014): p. 45. 34. Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 34. 35. Santiago García, On the Graphic Novel, trans. Bruce Campbell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), p. 40. 36. Smolderen, Origins of Comics, pp. 132–4. 37. A. B. Frost, ‘The Adventures of Carlo’, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 15 February 1914, Magazine Section, p. 51. 38. García, On the Graphic Novel, p. 41. 39. Frost, Carlo, pp. 99–102. 40. Ibid. p. 27. 41. A. B. Frost, Stuff and Nonsense (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), rpt. in Smolderen, Origins of Comics, p. 122. This comic is not in the 1889 John C. Nimmo edition of Stuff and Nonsense, the only edition which I have been able to access. As a consequence, I am not in a position to analyse it thoroughly. 42. Tom Gunning, ‘Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and The Origins of American Film Comedy’, in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins, eds, Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 87–9. See Smolderen, Origins of Comics, pp. 114–17, for further discussion of the hose gag in 1880s comics and mischief gags on film. 43. Gunning, ‘Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths’ pp. 89–96. 44. Donald Crafton, ‘Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy’, in Karnick and Jenkins, Classical Hollywood Comedy, pp. 107–19. 45. Gunning, ‘Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths’, pp. 90–1. 46. Ibid. p. 92. 47. Frost, Carlo, p. 108. 48. Ibid. p. 109.

7632_Williams.indd 48

28/06/22 16:55



precursors and woodcut novels

49

49. Advert for the Feature Section of the Sunday Courier-Journal, p. 12. 50. Tom Gunning, ‘Response to “Pie and Chase”’, in Karnick and Jenkins, Classical Hollywood Comedy, p. 120. 51. Ibid. p. 121. 52. Margaret M. Smith, ‘Woodcut Illustration’, in Michael F. Suarez, S. J. and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds, The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), vol. 2, p. 1266. Additional information and the quotation from Gauguin from Martin S. Cohen, ‘The Novel in Woodcuts: A Handbook’, Journal of Modern Literature 6.2 (April 1977): pp. 172–9. 53. Smith, ‘Woodcut Illustration’, p. 1266. 54. Paul Nash, Places (London: William Heinemann, 1922). 55. David A. Beronä, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (New York: Abrams, 2008), pp. 10–13. 56. Ibid. pp. 15–16. 57. Ibid. pp. 21–4. 58. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, ‘The Picture Novel Arrives in America’, Publishers Weekly, 1 February 1930, p. 609. 59. Ibid. p. 612. 60. André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 78–9. 61. Lynd Ward, Storyteller Without Words: The Wood Engravings of Lynd Ward with Text by the Artist (New York: Abrams, 1974), pp. 10–12, 20. 62. Ward qtd in Cohen, ‘The Novel in Woodcuts’, p. 194. 63. Ward, Storyteller Without Words, p. 22. 64. Ibid. pp. 21–2. 65. Ibid. p. 22. 66. Ibid. pp. 20–4. 67. Steven L. Herb, ‘The Graphic World of Lynd Ward’, Archives of American Art Journal 52.3–4 (Fall 2013): p. 13. 68. Ward, Storyteller Without Words, p. 178. 69. Lynd Ward, Vertigo (New York: Random House, 1937). 70. Andrew H. Lee, ‘Introduction’, in Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez, Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 1–2. 71. Beronä, Wordless Books, pp. 135–6. 72. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). 73. Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 97–8. 74. Beronä, Wordless Books, p. 156. 75. Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood, pp. 97–8.

7632_Williams.indd 49

28/06/22 16:55

50

the us graphic novel

76. Beronä, Wordless Books, p. 214. 77. Steven Heller, ‘Silent Pictures’, The New York Times, 10 October 2010, p. BR16. 78. David M. Ball, ‘Lynd Ward’s Modernist “Novels in Woodcuts”: Graphic Narratives Lost Between Art History and Literature’, Journal of Modern Literature 39.2 (Winter 2016): p. 140. 79. Ibid. pp. 130–4. 80. Ibid. p. 130. 81. Peter Kuper, ‘Speechless’, in Beronä, Wordless Books, pp. 8–9. 82. Ball, ‘Lynd Ward’s Modernist “Novels in Woodcuts”’, p. 130. 83. Jan Grenci, and Elena Millie, et al., ‘WPA Posters’, Library of Congress, 10 July 2000, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 84. John Barnicoat, A Concise History of Posters (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), pp. 193–8. 85. Lynd Ward, Gods’ Man (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929), pp. [89–107]. 86. Ball offers an intriguing reading of this scene where the windows in the background evoke ‘blank canvasses’ and thus the painter’s artistically empty, commercialised artworld. Ball, ‘Lynd Ward’s Modernist “Novels in Woodcuts”’, p. 137. 87. Ward, Gods’ Man, p. [155]. 88. Smolderen, Origins of Comics, p. 129. 89. Gunning, ‘Art of Succession’, p. 42. 90. Ibid. pp. 42, 45.

7632_Williams.indd 50

28/06/22 16:55

chapter 2

Comics, Comics Everywhere at Mid-century

Introduction Tabloid-style comics papers had been published in Europe since the nineteenth century but, as a periodical with glossy covers, colour newsprint interiors, and a page size of approximately 7 x 10 inches, the ‘comic book’ first appeared in the United States around 1933–4. These were intended for young children and filled with the comedic exploits of anthropomorphic animals (the ‘funny animal’ genre), though from 1938 onwards the diversity of genres and readers expanded and sales exploded. Sales went into decline in the mid-1950s, primarily due to a glutted market and competition from other media, though helped along by blunt industry self-regulation. In the 1950s comics companies occasionally experimented with book-format products, and the publisher EC tried to capture an adult market for comics with its New Directions line. These titles were soon cancelled after being launched, though the creative heart of EC – Mad magazine’s Harvey Kurtzman – wrote and drew Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book (1959), a short story sequence published as a paperback by Ballantine. This indicates the geography of graphic novel production in mid-century America: New York-based trade presses publishing long comics narratives by commercial illustrators and cartoonists. Some were lavish hardcovers indebted to the woodcut novels, others paperback reprints of newspaper strips, and many were major commercial successes.

The Comics Industry in the 1930s In 1933 Harry Wildenberg, an employee of the Eastern Color Printing Company which produced comics sections for Sunday newspapers, convinced Gulf Oil to publish a comics tabloid reprinting 51

7632_Williams.indd 51

28/06/22 16:55

52

the us graphic novel

popular newspaper strips. This was a free promotional gift for customers visiting Gulf Oil petrol stations. Wildenberg conducted further trials with Eastern’s printing presses, creating the now-standard dimensions of the comic book. Wildenberg and his colleague Maxwell C. Gaines persuaded Proctor & Gamble to commission Funnies on Parade using the new page dimensions. This was another reprint of popular newspaper strips devised as part of a marketing campaign, and Eastern went on to print comics for other brands, such as Milk-O-Malt and Canada Dry. The promotions functioned as follows: advertisements in newspaper comics sections contained a coupon that children were meant to cut out, fill in, and mail off, together with the top of a packet. The company then sent them a free comic featuring their favourite characters. To get the packet top in the first place, young readers were to pressurise parents to buy the requisite product. Eastern’s promotional comics had print runs up to 250,000 copies and were called Famous Funnies.1 After an unsuccessful collaboration with the Dell Publishing Company, Eastern decided to print its own comic book, appearing on newsstands in May 1934. Initial losses turned to profit and in 1936 several major newspaper strip syndicates started their own comics.2 In late 1934 Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson saw that the periodical format invented by Wildenberg could be used for original comics. By 1938, Wheeler-Nicholson had been ‘eased out’ of comics publishing by his business partner Harry Donenfeld, though the legacy of their partnership was Detective Comics, Inc. (which provided the name that the company trades under today, DC Comics) and its ‘flagship title’ Detective Comics (March 1937). An early promoter of superhero comics, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman first appeared in the company’s Action Comics 1 (June 1938), and in 1939 Detective Comics, Inc. launched a series devoted to this popular character’s adventures. By September 1940, Superman had a print run of 1,250,000 copies. Action Comics alone had a circulation of 900,000, close to 10 per cent of the monthly sales of all periodical comics. A boom was underway and total comics sales rose even further, from ten million to twenty million copies a month between 1941 and 1944.3 There is a close correlation between the comics boom, the superhero genre, and the start of World War Two. The conflict provided the occasion for super-powered beings to engage in great set-piece battles, the apotheosis of which were Alex Schomburg’s detailed

7632_Williams.indd 52

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

53

covers for the publisher Timely (later Marvel Comics). Timely’s superheroes entered the war before the United States, and the cover of the company’s Captain America Comics 1 (March 1941) showed the titular hero socking Adolf Hitler on the chin. After the United States officially went to war against the Axis, the portability and patriotism of superhero comics made them desirable reading material for American military personnel, a 1944 survey finding that 44 per cent of men on military training camps read comics regularly.4 As this indicates, while periodical comics were never universally read across US society, they commanded a large audience of readers, including significant numbers of adults. Sales of superhero comics dwindled after 1945 but the demographic diversity of readers increased, especially where gender was concerned.

Adult Readers of Postwar Comics After World War Two other genres came to the fore, romance first and foremost. Spearheaded by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s trailblazing series Young Romance (1947–75), the genre attracted an audience of women in their teens and twenties. The romance boom peaked in 1952 when Young Romance sold more than a million copies per issue. It attempted to capture the popularity of the ‘love pulps’ and ‘slick’ confession magazines, and romance comics borrowed their plot template of ‘girl finds love through boy’s wisdom after girl makes serious mistake and nearly loses boy’.5 Another echo of the confession magazines was that romance comics were typically narrated by a female protagonist looking back on past events.6 The first issue of Young Romance was emblazoned with the promise that these tales were ‘designed for the more ADULT readers of COMICS’; Santiago García observes this wasn’t completely true, but the ‘goal of appealing to an adult audience’ was something that had ‘never been asserted by a Mickey Mouse comic’.7 There was a degree of sexual frankness in the romance comics, though they were not visually explicit and warned against pre-marital sex. America’s guardians of moral propriety were worried about romance comics, but far more concerning were the crime and horror comics. Crime comics began modestly, when Charles Biro and Robert Wood created Crime Does Not Pay (1942–55) for publisher Leverett Gleason, a ‘true crime’ series about murderers and gangsters that contained shocking images of violence. The stories in Crime Does

7632_Williams.indd 53

28/06/22 16:55

54

the us graphic novel

Not Pay often ended with the criminal’s demise, but only after an orgy of lawbreaking and depravity. Sales were modest during the war, but after 1945 the quality of the series decidedly improved as Gleason brought in more accomplished artists whose talents were better suited to the grim subject matter. The popularity of Crime Does Not Pay increased and other publishers introduced their own crime titles, such as Justice Traps the Guilty (1947–58), Gangsters Can’t Win (1948–9), Lawbreakers Always Lose (1948–9), and Crime Must Pay the Penalty (1948–55). By 1948 Crime Does Not Pay sold more than a million copies a month and, as comics historian Bradford W. Wright notes, the ‘advertising in Gleason’s [. . .] crime comic books suggested a diverse audience, broad enough to encompass a market for kitchen knives, medical insurance, and “Dick Tracy” toy Tommy guns’.8 The popularity of crime comics encouraged three intriguing experiments with graphic novel publishing. These long narratives borrowed from film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction and were published as paperbacks in 1950. The books in question were populated by murderous modern artists, courageous journalists, virtuous blonde daughters, and duplicitous flame-haired stepmothers; plots revolved around kidnapping, organised crime, and quests for valuable statues. St John Publications brought out It Rhymes with Lust, written by Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller (identified as ‘Drake Waller’) and drawn by Matt Baker, and The Case of the Winking Buddha by Manning Lee Stokes and Charles Raab. Fawcett Publications published a similar paperback the same year, Joseph Millard’s Mansion of Evil. It Rhymes with Lust and Mansion of Evil were identified as novels on their front covers, the former labelled a ‘Picture Novel’,9 the latter a ‘complete novel in words and pictures’.10 Like many others, these two comics publishers did not survive the decade, with Fawcett ceasing to publish comics in 1953 and St John folding in 1958.11 The surge of horror titles in the 1950s was the result of innovations that William Gaines instituted at Educational Comics (EC), the company his father Maxwell C. Gaines founded in 1944. Maxwell Gaines died in a boating accident in 1947 and his son inherited a company $100,000 in debt and specialising in children’s fare such as Tiny Tot Comics (1946–7). William changed the genres that EC published, adding romance, crime, and western titles and renaming the company Entertaining Comics. Styled as a ‘New Trend’, in the

7632_Williams.indd 54

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

55

early 1950s EC branched off into genres including parodic humour, war, SF, pirates, and horror, launching series such as The Haunt of Fear (1950–4) and Tales from the Crypt (1950–5).12 EC’s horror comics sold well and other companies followed suit, so that by 1954 over forty horror titles were published each month.13 The adult themes of the romance, crime, and horror comics were the source of considerable opprobrium in US society, where the assumption reigned that comics were the preserve of children. From 1947 onwards, anti-comics activism took place around the country: periodicals were publicly burned, city councils passed local ordinances banning certain genres, and journalists, academics, and politicians inveighed against the cultural form.14 These activities coalesced in 1954 around a handful of high-profile events, leading to most publishers agreeing to establish an internal censorship regime.

The Campaign against Comics and the Formation of the CMAA The figurehead of the anti-comics crusade was Fredric Wertham, a German psychiatrist working in the United States since 1922. Wertham did not promote the simplistic notion that lurid comics corrupted young readers, arguing that the comics industry was part of a wider social context that led children into criminality. Nonetheless, his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954) tendentiously reproduced dialogue and panels to present comics as racist and sexist, hindering advanced reading skills, and habituating children to violence. As comics historian Amy Kiste Nyberg outlines, Wertham advocated a ‘ban on the sale of comic books to children’,15 and legislation to protect young comics readers had already been passed in France in 1949, while a similar bill became UK law in 1955.16 Amplifying fears that comics would be censored by the state, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency conducted three days of hearings in New York City in April and June 1954. The mandate of the ‘Kefauver Committee’ (so-called because of Senator Estes Kefauver’s presence) was to investigate the comics industry and its influence on youth crime. Senator Robert Hendrickson’s opening remarks were that the hearings ‘would be concerned only with crime and horror comic books’ and twenty-two witnesses were called, including politicians, publishers, psychiatrists, distributors, and retailers. One of those witnesses was William Gaines, who

7632_Williams.indd 55

28/06/22 16:55

56

the us graphic novel

maintained that his comics advanced progressive politics and that he would not publish material beyond the ‘bounds of good taste’. Senator Kefauver brandished the cover of EC’s Crime SuspenStories 22 (April–May 1954), featuring a woman’s severed head, and asked its publisher, ‘Do you think that is in good taste?’ Gaines replied that it was, for the cover of a horror comic. His remarks were reported in the press as confirmation that ‘comic book publishers were a decadent group out to make a profit at the expense of children’.17 Cognisant his testimony had been a PR disaster, Gaines wrote to other publishers to choreograph a united defence of the comics industry. This led to thirty-eight industry professionals meeting in August 1954 at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, the first meeting of what would become incorporated the following month as the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). Its goal was ‘to establish and enforce a code governing the industry in both editorial and advertising content’, following the example of the Hollywood studios that issued the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 in the hope that self-regulation would preclude government censorship and alleviate pressure from decency campaigners.18 The CMAA’s Comics Code was enforced by the Comics Code Authority (CCA), to which periodicals were submitted before publication. At the CCA a five-person team of reviewers examined the contents, returning unsuitable pages to the publisher with a list of corrections. Comics completing this process were permitted to bear the CCA seal on the cover. In theory, comics could only be distributed to newsstands if they bore the CCA seal, and to an extent this held firm in practice: distributors refused to carry EC’s comics until Gaines became a member of the CMAA. Yet a double standard was in place, because no problems were experienced by two other companies who refused to join.19 Despite instigating the new organisation, Gaines’s publications directly suffered from the Comics Code, which prohibited scenes of gore, undead characters, and the words ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ in comics titles. Further, figures of established authority had to be respected, no sympathy could be extended to criminals, and, ‘In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.’ Nudity and salacious illustrations were not to be seen, ‘Illicit sex relations’ and ‘sexual abnormalities’ not to be ‘hinted at’.20 Periodical comics were to be rendered wholesome entertainment suitable for the youngest of readers, inoculated

7632_Williams.indd 56

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

57

against moral ambiguity or social criticism. This was not the direction EC had been taking, and Gaines reached breaking point when he experienced resistance from the CCA for a comic depicting an astronaut as a black man. The Comics Code was antithetical to the progressive, challenging work that Gaines wanted to produce, and at the end of 1955 EC effectively ceased publishing comics.21 Ironically, the EC comic that shaped the most pointed barbs against social hypocrisy, state authority, and the economic order has had the longest lifespan, albeit in an altered guise: Mad began in 1952 as a full-colour humour comic edited and written by Harvey Kurtzman, later mutating into a black-and-white magazine in 1955. Mad was one of EC’s bestsellers and Kurtzman (who left EC shortly after Mad changed format) is acclaimed for using the comic as a forum for self-conscious play with mass media forms and genres. Its formal self-reflexivity and sophistication would be extended by generations of graphic novel creators working in its wake, Kurtzman’s own 1959 Jungle Book paperback one such example.22 The comics industry demonstrably shrunk in the second half of the 1950s. Comics historian Jean-Paul Gabilliet cautions against ascribing too much economic significance to the imposition of the Comics Code, arguing the industry had already peaked in 1952, when the total annual number of comics sold was around one billion. In the following year those circulation figures fell by 30–40 per cent, and in the summer of 1954, fifteen comics publishers (out of forty-two) ceased operating. Gabilliet suggests the market reached its limit as readers lost interest, coinciding with the number of homes owning television sets. Furthermore, Gabilliet traces a 1956 collapse in the supply of periodical comics to a 1955 law passed in New York State that proscribed particular types of comic, prohibiting (for example) publications with ‘crime’, ‘sex’, ‘horror’, or ‘terror’ in the title. This was no slight piece of legislation for an industry based in New York City. Finally, the Senate hearings shone a light on the immoral practices operating in comics distribution, such as sales being artificially elevated by wholesalers forcing retailers to carry comics in order to access more profitable publications.23 Nonetheless, if the economic impact of the Comics Code should not be exaggerated, the CCA determined what could be written and drawn in a mainstream comic for decades to come, reproducing the idea that newsstand comics were childish fare.

7632_Williams.indd 57

28/06/22 16:55

58

the us graphic novel

New York, New York In the 1940s and 1950s the production of book-format comics mostly took place outside the comics industry, though it was also concentrated in New York. Mid-century graphic novelists usually made a living producing art for advertising, theatres, newspapers, magazines, and books, and their work espoused liberal political positions in visual modes that could be allegorical, satirical, or polemical. These mid-century graphic novels were typically blackand-white, lacking speech balloons, with one panel on each page, demonstrating the influence of the woodcut novelists. Book collections of single cartoons or very short comics in themed sequences were common in the mid-twentieth century, such as those by the Romanian-born cartoonist Saul Steinberg, whose first book All in Line was published in 1945. Steinberg popularised a freeform pen-and-ink mode of illustration, which broke from the fully painted style that previously dominated commercial art. In breaking from this Norman Rockwell school of illustration, Steinberg should be considered alongside James Thurber, both associated with The New Yorker magazine.24 Talented commercial artists found ready employment in the 1940s–50s as booming magazine sales sustained the market for cartoons and spot illustrations. Artists were also in demand for the advertisements printed in magazines. To take The New Yorker as an example, by 1946 it ‘claimed close to a quarter of a million subscribers [. . .] and enjoyed skyrocketing advertising revenues’. The number of subscriptions doubled between 1939 and 1949, and The New Yorker was not alone, as general interest magazines such as Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Time, and Newsweek saw massive surges in circulation as America’s professional urban middle class expanded.25 Although the heyday of the illustrated novel had passed, trade presses still required artists to design covers and dustjackets and to illustrate children’s books. Some of the most important graphic artists of the era worked for the young persons’ departments of large publishing houses such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Doubleday, Harper & Brothers, and Random House.26 Artists who specialised in narrative drawing benefited from a steady supply of paid work outside the comics industry and commercial illustration gave creators the financial stability to try one-off experiments with graphic novels. Further, children’s books were an entrée into the major

7632_Williams.indd 58

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

59

publishing houses, making it easier for artists to pitch book-length comics to editors. Many mid-century artists were comfortable with overtly political subject matter because they already contributed acerbic editorial cartoons to newspapers and magazines; consumers expected nothing less from Jules Feiffer and Tomi Ungerer. James Thurber’s The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures (1939) was the first graphic novel to come out of this cluster of texts, and Thurber’s sketchbook style can be read across the generation of visual humourists that followed him. Last Flower was printed in landscape format, with a verbal narrative on the verso of each page commenting on the black-and-white image on the facing recto. The narrative is set after a twelfth world war and concerns the cyclic nature of civilisation-building and cataclysmic destruction. We might associate Last Flower’s simple language and caricatures with an illustrated children’s book, but the plot and lavishness of the production runs against that assumption. Despite its subtitle, it is hard to discern a moral in this parable. The survival of a man, a woman, and a flower at the end imply that civilisation will be rebuilt and there will be yet another world war, before civilisation rebuilds itself, destroys itself, and so on. Running contrary to this is an anti-war message outlining the desirability of pacifism: World War Thirteen, for example, is fuelled by demagogues, when the simple answer for the warring sides is to swap where they are living peacefully. Despite protesting against conflict, Last Flower’s circular narrative implies that war is inevitable. Because of this ambivalent message and the scenes of destruction, this physically luxurious text is aimed squarely at adults. Thurber’s The White Deer (1945) included images by children’s book illustrator Don Freeman, who also drew theatrical sketches for The New York Times and Herald Tribune. Freeman was busy in 1945, the same year he created It Shouldn’t Happen. This hardcover narrative was approximately 200 pages long, composed of one panel per page, without speech balloons (verbal commentary runs underneath some panels). It Shouldn’t Happen narrates Private Albert C. Bedlington, Jr’s metamorphosis into a dog after joining the army, the satire stretching in multiple directions; on one level the book draws attention to the demeaning treatment of soldiers, and how, whether a dog or not, Bedlington is ordered around on allfours. Freeman also alludes to racial segregation, because outside the base Bedlington is forced to sit at the back of a bus, and there is

7632_Williams.indd 59

28/06/22 16:55

60

the us graphic novel

a scandal when he occupies a top berth in a sleeping carriage. One reading of the book’s title is that no American should be treated as a second-class citizen, their human dignity insulted. It is significant that Bedlington changes into a canine because of his experiences in the army, and he returns to being human when he is shipped off to fight overseas: his occupation of the position of the non-human is imposed by the institutions of the US state and domestic prejudice. In 1955 Freeman self-published Skitzy: The Story of Floyd W. Skitzafroid, a sequence of unframed panels, one to a page, drawn in a seemingly rough, dashed-off style. Floyd W. Skitzafroid is a commuter bifurcated on the train into Manhattan, his surname playing on the misconception that schizophrenia is a synonym for multiplepersonality syndrome. ‘Skitzy’ becomes two people: an artist who sets up a studio in Greenwich Village and a frustrated, worn-down office worker. The two Skitzafroids merge together on the return commute, and when the now-singular Skitzy re-enters his house, romance between husband and wife is rekindled. He sleeps badly because he sold a painting for $100 that his wife bought for $800. Skitzafroid finds calm, though, when he dreams of becoming two separate selves again – a painter and an art dealer.

Eve: Love for Sale? Brooklyn-born Myron Waldman worked at Max Fleischer’s animation studio in Times Square in the 1930s, relocating with the studio to Miami in 1938. In 1942 Waldman joined the military, where he drew most of the book-length narrative Eve (1943), ‘conceived in the lonely after-work hours of Waldman’s final Florida days’ and published by small New York press Stephen Daye.27 Eve is a larger young woman who works as a secretary and seems to live with her parents. She dreams of a handsome Hollywood star while resisting the advances of a porter in her building, whose face we never see. These scenes may be intended to poke fun at the porter’s unsuccessful attempts at wooing, but his unsolicited physical attention (tickling Eve under the chin) is clearly workplace harassment. The text insists upon the isolation of urban experience and a repeated motif is Eve’s loneliness on the subway; another theme is the homogenising routine of work, with rows of office workers released into the street every day at 6pm precisely. Eve bears out sociologist Georg Simmel’s description of early twentieth-century city life, that ‘one

7632_Williams.indd 60

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

61

never feels as lonely and as deserted as in this metropolitan crush of persons’.28 We see Eve trudging past Central Park zoo alone, where even the caged animals are coupled up, and at one point Eve theatrically falls over in the hope of being picked up by a sturdy young man, but the ruse fails.29 Searching for love in sunnier climes, Eve books a vacation to Miami. She gains a boyfriend and scenes of euphoric abandon proceed before Eve returns home. She shows her family his photo and ‘talks’ (there are picture balloons in place of speech balloons) of marriage and children, tearing up the photograph of the Hollywood star. She displays the photo of her new man to strangers, animals, and fellow office workers, but the porter in her building has not given up his approaches, and when he strokes Eve under the chin again, she hits him – only to find it is her Florida amour. After a brief period of despair, the last page shows them in love again. Though Eve is not a political satire, the book’s cover shows Eve toying with a pile of apples and the title implies an allegory, albeit an ironic one (Eve is singularly poor at seduction). In its depiction of trudging office work, Eve silently condemns unfulfilling bureaucratic labour and authenticates the desire to transcend it. In an enigmatic image, when Eve and her suitor go dancing in a Miami nightclub, the walls are painted with dollar signs.30 No obvious explanation is provided. Is this meant to signify that access to the club, and to love, is based on wealth? Is Eve only in Miami, figured as a space of leisure and play, because of the money she stored in her mattress? The dollar signs on the wall are jaunty but also intrusive, and their presence may most usefully be understood in contrast to the brand in Ward’s Gods’ Man: what was figured as portentous, disturbing, dehumanising in the woodcut novel is now ever-present and normalised, not a distortion of heteronormative romance but its lubricant.

Visions of War It is impossible to imagine the contemporary graphic novel without its milestone autobiographical texts, but almost none of the longform comics from mid-century utilised this genre. Citizen 13660 (1946) by Miné Okubo is an exception, a memoir by a Japanese American detailing her experience of internment by the US government during World War Two. In 1942 over 100,000 Japanese

7632_Williams.indd 61

28/06/22 16:55

62

the us graphic novel

Americans were detained in camps – in Okubo’s case, in Tanforan Assembly Center outside San Francisco and Topaz Camp in Utah – because of racialised fears these citizens’ loyalties lay with the land of their ancestors. Born in Riverside, California, and having studied art at the University of California, Berkeley, Okubo was working as an artist in the Bay Area when the United States entered World War Two. She was arts editor for Topaz Camp’s literary magazine Trek and Okubo’s striking cover designs were seen by staff at Fortune magazine, who recruited her in 1944 and helped her move to Greenwich Village. For the rest of the 1940s Okubo worked as a commercial illustrator producing art for newspapers, magazines, novels, children’s books, and scientific texts.31 Throughout Okubo’s internment she penned the hundreds of ink sketches that formed the basis of Citizen 13660. The artist later asserted that the book had been published too soon after the end of the war to interest a US readership in the surveillance and human rights violations of Japanese Americans, but literary scholar Christine Hong’s archival research shows that both white liberal intellectuals and the federal agency in charge of internment encouraged Okubo to record her experiences visually. By September 1943 the artist thought of her sketches as a book project.32 Published by Columbia University Press, the book was not republished until the 1980s, and even now it is not firmly placed in histories of the graphic novel. This is partly because Citizen 13660 is a sequence of black-and-white images with prose running underneath, so it is formally poised between a comic and an annotated sketchbook. Nonetheless, the book’s early reception saw it compared to comics and political cartoons.33 As cultural historian Kimberley L. Phillips asserts, Citizen 13660 ‘demands that our understandings of the history of comic books, their audiences, and their producers be rethought and rewritten’.34 At several points newspaper strips are invoked, such as when Okubo goes to register her brother and herself at a Civil Control Station in April 1942. At the end of the registration interview, Okubo’s surname is replaced by the serial number 13660 and she signs the forms that see her household property taken into government custody. In Okubo’s depiction of herself waiting to go through this demeaning process, she is virtually sitting underneath the barrel of the gun carried by a soldier on guard and reading ‘the “funnies”’.35 Phillips reads the whole book project in light of this

7632_Williams.indd 62

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

63

panel, where Okubo’s ‘seemingly calm perusal of the comic pages floats as her silent rebellion against the aggressive martial response to Japanese Americans’ presence in the United States’.36 For Phillips, the visual language of comics is deployed as an act of resistance to the dehumanising processes of relocation and internment, with the caricature, ironic composition, and slapstick of Citizen 13660 a counterpoint to the impersonal bureaucracy and militarisation of internee life. Okubo also draws against the racist stereotypes of the Japanese and Japanese Americans that proliferated in comics, newspaper strips, and political cartoons. In one image Okubo depicts herself looking up from a newspaper – quite possibly the San Francisco Chronicle, which supported the internment (Figure 2.1).37 In the background are graffiti-like scrawls offering an anthology of phrases used in the press, namely anti-Japanese propaganda and slurs against the loyalty of Japanese Americans (‘Send them back to Tojo’; ‘A Jap is a Jap’).38 Significantly, in the upper-right-hand part of the panel is

Figure 2.1  Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1946] 2014), p. 10. © 1946, 1973, 1983, Miné Okubo.

7632_Williams.indd 63

28/06/22 16:55

64

the us graphic novel

a racist caricature with the caption ‘A Jap looks like this’. The juxtaposition of Okubo’s self-portrait and the slant-eyed, bucktoothed stereotype underlines the verisimilitude of her own art in contrast to the grotesque distortions rife in 1940s visual culture.39 Another artist whose long-form comics were shaped by World War Two is Si Lewen, who joined the US Army in 1942 and fought in Europe. Born in Poland in 1918, Lewen had moved to New York in 1935 to escape antisemitism and Nazism.40 A successful artist like Okubo, Lewen had work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His book The Parade, a sequence of fifty-five drawings, was published by New York’s H. Bittner & Company in 1957. Lewen started many long image sequences in the early 1960s, including The Procession (eventually exceeding 1,800 panels in length) and Centipede (renamed Millipede as it grew longer and longer). One later sequence was published as the book A Journey: 72 Drawings (1980).41 In The Parade, Lewen depicted the cyclic horrors of war and the empty promises of militarism with extremely varied techniques: pencils, charcoal, crayon, tusche, and paint. Using gesso boards, Lewen scratched away at painted surfaces to achieve different shades, a self-conscious departure from the woodcut novelists that means when one flips through The Parade one sees its pages gradually darkening. As Lewen said in 2007, to ‘tell the story of The Parade, I needed to sequence light pencil drawings that would progress into pictures with areas of intense tonality, only to light again’.42 At the opening of The Parade, the succession of images brings the reader gradually closer to soldiers marching in uniform lines; the troops are so tightly organised, they cease to resemble humans, appearing instead as the abstract components of a geometric pattern. These panels are suffused with black paint to the point that Lewen has to carve figures out of the morass, defined negatively against the background.43 In one apocalyptic sequence later in the book, a victorious army presides over the display of severed heads, followed by a plague of rats, a famine, multiple amputees travelling in a funeral procession, and internees behind barbed wire. The Parade ends with a victory march but the final panel, the barking dog seen at the start, implies the cycle of killing and suffering will soon recommence.44 Anti-war sentiment is an enduring element of Jules Feiffer’s work. Dramatist, novelist, and screenwriter, Feiffer served an apprenticeship under comics creator Will Eisner between 1946 and 1951, when

7632_Williams.indd 64

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

65

he was drafted into the US military. Later he contributed cartoons to publications such as Playboy, The New York Times, and starting in 1956, Feiffer’s comics appeared weekly in the Village Voice. The strip’s original title was used for his first book collection, Sick Sick Sick (1959). Feiffer’s reprint collections usually have strong unifying principles, such as depictions of particular US presidents. In Pictures at a Prosecution: Drawings & Texts from the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1971), Feiffer created a book-length narrative by interspersing transcripts from the trial of the Chicago Seven with the sketches he made while observing events inside the courtroom. However, it would not be until Tantrum (1979) that Feiffer published his first significantly long graphic novel (183 pages). Feiffer referred to Tantrum as a ‘graphic novel’ in a 1979 public address; the dustjacket had it as a ‘novel-in-cartoons’.45 He recently produced the graphic novel trilogy Kill My Mother (2014), Cousin Joseph (2016), and The Ghost Script (2018). Feiffer sees the short stories in his collection Passionella and Other Stories (1959) as ‘cartoon narratives’,46 though their subject matter aligns them with the graphic novels discussed elsewhere in this chapter. ‘Boom!’ lampoons the nuclear arms race, whereas the fifty-twopage ‘Munro’ satirises life in the US military. Feiffer has spoken of Thurber’s influence on his cartooning,47 but in ‘Munro’ a whimsical line in the style of Thurber was the vehicle for a graphic fury inspired by American political cartoonists such as Robert Osborn and Art Young. In his own words, Feiffer’s time in the army ‘unmasked my rage, and “Munro” was my first [. . .] effort to try to overthrow the government, by use of a style that didn’t threaten the reader, but charmed and seduced, so that what I was saying, though radical for its time, could be heard, and change perceptions’.48 The eponymous protagonist of the story is a small boy who doesn’t speak up when he is drafted because he doesn’t want to be accused of being ‘unpatriotic’.49 Even when Munro’s age is pointed out, the army refuses to release him because (according to their logic) a four-year-old private would never have been drafted in the first place. This close attention to the absurdity of mid-century America – its social codes, binds, self-evasions, and paradoxes – is a hallmark of Feiffer’s comics. The allegorical tales in Passionella and Other Stories were not conceived as graphic novels, but like the other texts discussed in this chapter they condemn the jejune existence of urban Americans, the existential poverty of material luxury, and the futility of war.

7632_Williams.indd 65

28/06/22 16:55

66

the us graphic novel

The Party of Ungerer Tomi Ungerer, one of Feiffer’s friends, was also impressed by Thurber’s The Last Flower, and its anti-militarist message recurs across his work.50 Ungerer grew up in German-occupied Alsace and lived in New York from 1956–71, where he produced children’s books, political cartoons, posters, and illustrations for magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Esquire. His book collections include Horrible: An Account of the Sad Achievements of Progress (1960) and Underground Sketchbook (1964), both of which noted the dehumanising effects of industrial society. This was expressed through one of his signature visual moves, disassembling humans into automatons, with body parts absent or replaced by machinery. Underground Sketchbook depicted internecine relationships between the genders and monstrous human figures, a motif restaged in his collections Fornicon (1969) and Compromises (1970). The cartoons in these books were one or two panels long and gathered into themed runs (food or cars, for example). Ungerer’s The Party (1966), published by an imprint of Grossman Publishers called Paragraphic Books, is another sequence of grotesque caricatures, but differs from Ungerer’s other works because of its greater coherence. The Party narrates a social gathering in the Hamptons attended by New York City’s elite, and the present-tense verbal narration parodies the captions that accompany photo features in society magazines (for example, ‘Miss Gladie Pollen listening in rapture to Mr Algon Fosshill, old time friend of her father Dwight Pollen who was unable to attend the soirée’).51 The reader is introduced to various ‘[p]illars of society’: partners in law firms, ambassadors, Hollywood moguls, and eminent businessmen.52 Host Mrs Julia Van Flooze, ‘Known for her charity works’,53 is depicted in an unflattering though unremarkable manner, but as the evening progresses the caricatures become misshapen and inhuman. Ungerer subjects high society to physical transformations that include elongated body parts, exposed internal organs, and bodily appendages replaced by tools. Guests take on vampiric, parasitical, and reptilian aspects as The Party implies their lives of privilege are the products of terrible oppression taking place out of sight of their Long Island mansions. Ungerer sets up dissonance between the verbal and visual narration to highlight the immorality lying beneath the façade of virtue, so the caption ‘Mr & Mrs Jade Periton and

7632_Williams.indd 66

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

67

Miss Pinna Snothill (midl.) who acquainted last year in Cannes are surprised to meet again’ accompanies a drawing of Mrs Periton discovering Miss Snothill and Mr Periton in a state of intimacy (Miss Snothill’s intestines trail out from under her ball gown).54 While both genders are rendered grotesque in the book, the bodily transformations of the women frequently involve their bottoms, vaginas, and especially breasts; in The Party monstrous women far more than men symbolise a decadent, hypocritical, and cossetted elite – hardly a revolutionary change in the oft-gendered language of class critique.55 Published in 1966, The Party is one of the later books discussed in this chapter, but it fits the mid-century graphic novel cycle, drawn in a loose-line style with one unframed panel per page (or doublepage spread) and jettisoning speech balloons. In addition, Ungerer’s narrative is set in New York (Long Island, in this instance) and satirises social inequality and hypocrisy. The castigating depictions of inherited wealth, capitalism, and the horrors of war seen in these books would have been impossible in a mainstream comic, where explicit depictions of sexual intercourse and challenges to established authority were forbidden by the Comics Code. By creating books for large publishing houses, Ungerer and his peers could produce adultfacing works, and within circumscribed limits the cartoons printed in national-circulation magazines and newspapers could also aim for an adult audience, as with Walt Kelly’s strip Pogo.

Going Pogo Books reprinting newspaper strips have been published for almost as long as strips themselves have existed. Where graphic novel publishing is concerned, newspaper strip collections performed an important function by (1) shaping a market of consumers who would buy comics in book form, (2) encouraging publishers to meet that demand, and (3) motivating bookstores to create shelf space for book-format comics. Hugo Frey and Jan Baetens assert that reprint books by single authors ‘no doubt assisted in the legitimization of the longer form comic’, with the standout example being Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, which began serialisation in October 1950. The first of many Peanuts reprint collections was published in 1952 and Schulz’s Happiness is a Warm Puppy (1962) (a book that paired comforting aphorisms with pictures of the Peanuts gang) sold millions of copies.56

7632_Williams.indd 67

28/06/22 16:55

68

the us graphic novel

Whether reading such books (or encountering newspaper strips on a daily basis) constitutes reading a novel is a matter of scholarly debate.57 What is unquestionable is that engagement with strips is substantially structured by the context of reception. Chapter Two of Jared Gardner’s monograph Projections elaborates the ‘strange investments’ and ‘serial pleasures’ surrounding daily newspaper strips, postulating that spaces between episodes permit all kinds of individual and collective speculation about a narrative’s future development.58 The rest of this chapter focuses on one of the most popular strips in mid-century America, and shows how the ongoing dialogue Pogo fostered with readers as a daily serial was minimised when chunks of narrative were reprinted in book form and given a very definite ending. To begin with, let us examine how, during the 1952 presidential election, Pogo went ‘from merely interacting with the news to actually being the news’ (to borrow Gardner’s comments on Bud Fisher’s newspaper strip Mutt and Jeff).59 Kelly worked as an animator at Disney Studios but left in 1941 to work in the comics industry, creating funny animal characters such as Pogo the Possum, Albert the Alligator, Howland Owl, and a turtle called Churchy LaFemme, all residents of the fictional Okefenokee Swamp. In 1948 Kelly moved into newspaper comics and by the mid-1950s his daily Pogo strip was a huge success.60 Editors across America bought the rights to publish it, giving Pogo over fifty million potential readers and earning Kelly over $150,000 a year;61 the first reprint edition of Pogo (1951) sold 200,000 copies.62 Kelly was awarded Cartoonist of the Year for 1951 by the National Cartoonists Society, and Life magazine commissioned him to draw a doublepage map of Okefenokee Swamp, published in May 1952.63 One of the characters on Life’s map is P. T. Bridgeport, a Barnumesque bear who once ran a circus but is now ‘booming Pogo for President’.64 Throughout 1952 Pogo was filled with political satire about mechanical voters, back-room deals, and throwing hats into the ring (literally) as Bridgeport tried to get Pogo elected to the White House, the strip’s narrative interwoven with the actual contest between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson to become President of the United States. Kelly fed the election-year calendar into the strip’s daily episodes, and in the summer of 1952 the inhabitants of Okefenokee Swamp set off for Chicago, where both Republicans and Democrats were holding their party conventions. Pogo’s election campaign began in February 1952 with the arrival

7632_Williams.indd 68

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

69

of Tammananny the Tiger, who searches in vain for a suitable candidate, so the swamp animals force Pogo to be their nominee. As Pogo’s campaign unfolded in the newspaper strip, Kelly toured the country drumming up support. Eisenhower supporters wore metal badges proclaiming ‘I Like Ike’, which Kelly adapted for Pogo’s slogan, ‘I Go Pogo’. Intended to raise his strip’s profile, Kelly’s public appearances – a mixture of knowingly ridiculous stump speeches and serious lectures about art and politics – were usually held on university campuses. By the end of the campaign 150 colleges and universities had endorsed Pogo as their candidate. Campus newspapers and student governments were sent packs of material to help promote Pogo’s bid for the presidency, including mock news releases and one-off illustrations that Kelly drew for specific university newspapers.65 The latter were name-checked in the Pogo strip: the barge on which the characters travel to Chicago changes its title several times, including The Crimson and The Orange, presumably references to the Harvard Crimson and Syracuse’s The Daily Orange. The campaign got out of hand when Kelly visited Harvard University on 15 May 1952, when (according to The New York Times) ‘a satirical political rally called to boom ‘Pogo-for-President’ erupted into a bottle and beer can fight with club-swinging police’.66 Kelly biographer Kerry Soper writes that 1,600 Pogo supporters became restless waiting for Kelly to appear, and when the police tried to disperse the crowd, a skirmish ensued, leaving three officers injured and twenty-eight students arrested.67 The interaction between Kelly, his strip, and its readers shows how a narrative delivered across the country in daily instalments was able to respond to the election schedule, not only incorporating political events but actually becoming the headlines. That sense of openness, often commented upon by comics scholars and theorists of serial fiction, is something that made topical newspaper strips like Pogo so compelling: we know that we are not getting a preformed story delivered on an instalment plan, but something yet to be finalised and thus essentially protean, just as the news reported on the front page has the potential to look radically, unexpectedly different from one day to the next.68 An I Go Pogo reprint book was released in August 1952, suggesting that Kelly and his publisher Simon and Schuster were keen to cash in before the election reached its climax.69 Between midSeptember and the end of November, I Go Pogo was never out

7632_Williams.indd 69

28/06/22 16:55

70

the us graphic novel

of the top fifteen titles on the General List of the NYT Best Seller Lists.70 Various paratexts emphasised the campaign trail: the cover showed animals in silhouette marching with banners, the blurb on page one promised that the book ‘contains the reasons why several hundred thousand I Go Pogo buttons are already being worn on undergraduate lapels throughout the country’, and the campaign badges appeared as illustrations dotted around the book’s front matter. And yet the election occupies less than half of I Go Pogo. Out of fifteen chapters, the election only becomes a noticeable underlying theme in Chapter Ten. The strips in I Go Pogo are not reprinted in their original form. The predominantly four-panel strips have been rearranged to fit the pages in a paperback – in most cases, two panels per row, three rows to a page – and are organised into chapters. Some strips have been dropped, some strips reordered, some panels redrawn (15 May 1952, for example), all presumably to allow more logical transitions between episodes. The final chapter is entirely new, extending Kelly’s political satire but providing an alternative to the narrative that the daily strip was following up to Election Day. In this last chapter, Pogo dreams of a badminton game between an elephant and a donkey – representing the Republican and Democratic parties – that degenerates into name-calling, petty squabbling, and the animals repeating each other’s words (even sharing a speech balloon at one point). Pogo is woken from this nightmare by a young racoon, who wonders why the possum hasn’t gone to Chicago with the others: ‘Isn’t you gone go an’ git elected President?’ While the Pogo election campaign would continue in the strip up to November 1952, in the final panel of the August 1952 book Pogo decides – after witnessing the purposeless bickering of the elephant and the donkey – that a human will make a better president than an animal. To which the racoon says, ‘you got no call to be talkin’ cranky jes’ ‘cause you is fresh woke’.71 The new chapter caps the idea that I Go Pogo is a single, complete narrative intended to satisfy fans of Kelly’s political satire. The book fits Kelly’s strips into a different format, uprooting them from the newspapers in which their relationship to the day’s news seemed more intimate and immediate. Appearing a few months (or more) after their original publication, the strips in I Go Pogo are no longer responses to daily events or daily events in themselves, but constituent parts of an overarching narrative that is evidently complete, the book format assuring readers they ‘were buying an experience that

7632_Williams.indd 70

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

71

had a beginning, middle, and end’.72 One could imagine the final page blaring, ‘Will our hero get to the White House? You’ll have to follow Pogo in your local newspaper to find out!’, but instead Kelly chose to bring the campaign to an end at the close of the book.

Conclusion Mid-century US graphic novelists were not a homogenous group and they hailed from across the United States and Europe. Nonetheless, at some point they all made New York their home and their booklength comics were published by trade presses based in the city. They bear the influence of woodcut novels in terms of form (one panel to a page, downplaying or eliminating verbal elements), themes (pacifism, existentially moribund office work), and genre (political allegory and satire). Although each narrative was written and drawn by one person, the artists weren’t working entirely separately, connected by friendship, common publishers, and shared knowledge of each other’s endeavours. The mid-century graphic novels show that publishing houses were willing to release long-form comics that condemned US society as enervating, racist, and dangerously militaristic, a corpus with limited points of comparison with the mainstream comics industry of that era, though EC was one exception and some comics publishers did attempt book-format stories for adult readers. Newspaper strips were a place where, via national syndication, creators could write and draw long narratives with a broad adult readership. This didn’t mean writers and artists could do as they pleased, and newspaper editors might drop strips or put pressure on syndicate managers to change future content. Though some strips were divided into narrative arcs with clearly demarcated beginnings and endings, deliberately bringing a strip to a carefully planned conclusion was rarely an option (syndicates usually owned strips and brought in new creators to continue popular series, or unceremoniously cancelled less popular ones). Nonetheless, whether as an artistic statement, political message, or form of revenue, newspaper strips were taken far more seriously than periodical comics in the 1950s. Paperback publication expunged some of the things that made Pogo compelling to readers – its open-endedness, its ability to respond relatively swiftly to headline news – but the 1952 I Go Pogo collection availed itself of the strip’s topicality while providing the narrative resolution promised by the materiality of a book edition.

7632_Williams.indd 71

28/06/22 16:55

72

the us graphic novel

Notes  1. Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), pp. 129–31.  2. Ibid. pp. 130–2.  3. Ibid. pp. 131–2, 139; Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 125.  4. Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, p. 129.  5. Michelle Nolan, Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), pp. 3–42, 50, 102.  6. Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999), p. 50.  7. Santiago García, On the Graphic Novel, trans. Bruce Campbell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), p. 75.  8. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, rev. edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 77–85.  9. Drake Waller [Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller], writer, and Matt Baker, art, It Rhymes with Lust (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, [1950] 2007), front cover. 10. Joseph Millard, Mansion of Evil (N.p.: Fawcett Publications, 1950), front cover. 11. Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 44–6. Fawcett ceased publishing comics in 1953 but some of their last issues had January 1954 cover dates. 12. Qiana Whitted, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), pp. 9–13. 13. Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 118. 14. Wright, Comic Book Nation, pp. 86–108. 15. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, pp. 87–93. 16. Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: Pluto Press, 1984); Ann Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), p. 19. 17. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, pp. 53–84. 18. Ibid. pp. 108–10. 19. Ibid. pp. 110–28. 20. Comics Magazine Association of America Comics Code of 1954, rpt. in Nyberg, Seal of Approval, pp. 166–9.

7632_Williams.indd 72

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

73

21. Whitted, EC Comics, pp. 23, 104–7. 22. Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 94–7; Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 114–5. 23. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, pp. 42–50. 24. Joel Smith, Steinberg at The New Yorker (New York: Abrams, 2005), pp. 20–6. 25. Mary F. Corey, The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. x, 6. 26. Bénédicte Mathey and Thérèse Willer, ‘Graphisme et illustration à New York’, in Tomi Ungerer et New York (Strasbourg: Musées de Strasbourg et Editions La Nuée Bleue, 2001), p. 80. 27. Mark Newgarden, ‘Myron Waldman and Eve’, The Comics Journal 299 (August 2009): pp. 134–5. 28. Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 1903, trans. Edward A. Shils, in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 334. 29. Myron Waldman, Eve (New York: Stephen Daye, 1943), pp. [32–3, 20]. 30. Ibid. p. [67]. 31. Elena Tajima Creef, ‘Following Her Own Road: The Achievement of Miné Okubo’, in Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef, eds, Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 4–7. 32. Christine Hong, ‘Introduction’, in Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1946] 2014), pp. ix–xi, xxii n. 29. 33. Christine Hong, ‘Citizen 13660 (book)’, Densho Encyclopedia, 15 June 2020, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 34. Kimberley L. Phillips, ‘To Keep a Record of Life: Miné Okubo’s Autographic Manga and Wartime History’, in Robinson and Creef, Miné Okubo, p. 108. 35. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660, p. 19. 36. Phillips, ‘To Keep a Record of Life’, p. 100. 37. Ibid. p. 105. 38. Okubo, Citizen 13660, p. 10. 39. Hong, ‘Citizen 13660 (book)’; Hong, Introduction, pp. xvi–xvii. 40. Art Spiegelman, ‘A Sigh and a Salute for Si Lewen and His Parade’, in Art Spiegelman, ed., Si Lewen’s Parade: An Artist’s Odyssey (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2016), pp. 5–7.

7632_Williams.indd 73

28/06/22 16:55

74

the us graphic novel

41. ‘Si Lewen’s Odyssey: A Chronology’, in Spiegelman, Si Lewen’s Parade, pp. 70–1; Spiegelman, ‘A Sigh and a Salute’, p. 17. 42. ‘Si Lewen in Conversation’, in Spiegelman, Si Lewen’s Parade, p. 6. 43. Si Lewen, The Parade, 1957, in Spiegelman, Si Lewen’s Parade, pp. 15–22. 44. Ibid. pp. 48–60, 74. 45. Jules Feiffer, Notes for a public speech in 1979, Folder 56.2, Jules Feiffer Papers, Manuscripts Room, Library of Congress (‘Feiffer Papers’ hereafter); Jules Feiffer, Tantrum (New York: Knopf, 1979), dustjacket. 46. Jules Feiffer, Email to the Author, 5 August 2021. 47. Jules Feiffer, Notes for a speech on ‘VV’ [Village Voice], 1995, Folder 58.1, Feiffer Papers. 48. Jules Feiffer, Email to the Author, 8 August 2021. 49. Jules Feiffer, Passionella and Other Stories (London: Collins, [1959] 1960), p. [65]. 50. Sophie Van Der Linden, ‘Livres pour L’Enfant, Livres sur L’Enfant: Les Albums pour la Jeunesse de Tomi Ungerer entre 1957 et 1971’, in Tomi Ungerer et New York, p. 94. 51. Tomi Ungerer, The Party (New York: Paragraphic, 1966), p. [22]. 52. Ibid. p. [123]. 53. Ibid. pp. [10–11]. 54. Ibid. pp. [66–7]. 55. K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 20. 56. Baetens and Frey, Graphic Novel, p. 66. 57. Philosopher of art David Carrier does not think that following a newspaper strip is the equivalent of reading a novel. See David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 62–3. Less dismissively, Daniel Stein and Lukas Etter also outline many factors that differentiate ‘Golden Age strips from the graphic novel’. Daniel Stein and Lukas Etter, ‘LongLength Serials in the Golden Age of Comic Strips: Production and Reception’, in Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, eds, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 39–40. 58. Gardner, Projections, pp. 29–67. 59. Ibid. p. 43. 60. Mark Evanier, ‘About Walt Kelly’, in Walt Kelly, Pogo (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012), vol. 2, p. 335. 61. Kerry D. Soper, We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), p. 36. 62. Walt Kelly, I Go Pogo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), p. 1.

7632_Williams.indd 74

28/06/22 16:55



comics, comics everywhere at mid-century

75

63. ‘Speaking of Pictures’, Life, 12 May 1952, pp. 12–13. 64. Ibid. p. 13. 65. Soper, We Go Pogo, pp. 34–6, 117, 200. 66. ‘5,000 Riot at Harvard’, The New York Times, 16 May 1952, p. 14. 67. Soper, We Go Pogo, pp. 3, 203–4. 68. Gardner, Projections, p. 46. 69. ‘Books Published Today’, The New York Times, 21 August 1952, p. 17. 70. ‘Best Seller List’, The New York Times, 30 November 1952, p. BR8. 71. Kelly, I Go Pogo, p. 190. 72. Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz, The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture, 2nd edn. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 87. A summary of what gets ‘lost’ when newspaper strips are reprinted in book form can be found in Stein and Etter, ‘Long-Length Serials in the Golden Age of Comic Strips’, p. 55.

7632_Williams.indd 75

28/06/22 16:55

chapter 3

In Search of Adult Comics Readers: 1961–72

Introduction In the mid-1960s, periodical comics once again seemed to be a nationally significant form of popular culture. Oriented around the superhero genre, and particularly the innovations at Marvel, comics were hailed as enjoying a close relationship with young adults: journalists proclaimed that universities were full of readers whose unease with society was mirrored in Marvel’s insecure superheroes. Capitalising on this media attention, writer and editor Stan Lee publicised the modishness of his company and heralded the ‘Marvel Age of Comics’.1 By the end of the decade the Big Two inserted the New Left and counterculture into their comics, a ‘relevancy’ movement that saw superheroes confronting drug use, labour unrest, Native American land rights, and environmentalism. Once more, the press latched onto the newsworthiness of this trend, though the comics themselves – sometimes shrill, sometimes touchingly sincere – rarely called for absolute structural change in the liberal capitalist order. A more unruly tryst between comics and the counterculture was underway in underground comix. The comix appeared as part of early 1960s campus culture and enjoyed a boom between 1968 and 1972, with production centred on the San Francisco Bay Area and benefiting from the region’s critical mass of countercultural consumers. Despite the underground label, comix were serious business: popular titles sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The work of superstar artists such as Robert Crumb was widely visible across the country, not only in comics but also on T-shirts, posters, and record sleeves (Crumb drew the cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s 1968 platinum-selling album Cheap Thrills). 76

7632_Williams.indd 76

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

77

Ranging across political positions that included Marxism, anarchism, and libertarianism, the comix depicted nudity, sex, drugtaking, and violence in ways unthinkable in a newsstand comic. A variety of trade press editions were published before the 1960s were over, sidestepping the most outré material but nonetheless assuming a consumer base continuous with the publishing houses’ existing adult readership. Many characteristics associated with the graphic novel were apparent in mainstream comics between 1961 and 1972: adult readers, controversial social issues, and long plots shuttling between multiple narrative tracks. Despite this, not many texts were published that would now be labelled ‘graphic novels’. More relevant for the history of the US graphic novel is that (1) the idea of a comic that was also a novel became increasingly articulated between fans and creators, and (2) long, complete comics narratives appeared in genres such as autobiography, espionage, post-apocalyptic fantasy, and existentialist psychedelia. These genres were either new to comics or hadn’t been attempted at such length before. Both trends intimated a sustainable audience for book-length comics that became more apparent in later decades.

The Mighty Marvel Media Machine The renewal of superhero comics began when DC editor Julius Schwartz revived the Flash in Showcase 4 (September–October 1956). Schwartz and fellow editor Mort Weisinger further innovated in 1958 by publishing letters with correspondents’ full addresses; other publishers followed DC’s lead.2 This was a key moment in the formation of comics fandom, since the ability of fans to write to each other, and thus imagine themselves as members of an overarching community, made possible the production of fanzines, the organisation of conventions, and the rise of specialist comics dealers. Exactly why Marvel returned to superheroes in the early 1960s is unclear. Stan Lee recollected Martin Goodman (president of Magazine Management Company, Marvel’s publisher) noting the success of DC’s Justice League of America (1960–87) and instructing Lee to create a superhero team for Marvel, which he did, passing character descriptions of the Fantastic Four to artist Jack Kirby. Conversely, Kirby stated that he came up with a new superhero team to save the company from going out of business.3 However

7632_Williams.indd 77

28/06/22 16:55

78

the us graphic novel

the Fantastic Four came into existence, their popularity – and the superheroes that followed them – turned Marvel’s financial fortunes around. The Fantastic Four was comprised of Reed Richards, Sue Richards (née Storm), Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm – or, to give their superhero monikers, Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Girl (later Woman), the Human Torch, and the Thing. They gained enhanced abilities after being bombarded with atomic rays during a space flight and the team was launched into the world in Fantastic Four 1 (November 1961). Following its success Marvel introduced one new superhero after another: Kirby and Lee devised the Hulk (first appearance cover-dated May 1962), Thor (August 1962), and the X-Men (September 1963); with artist Steve Ditko, Lee created SpiderMan (September 1962)4 and Doctor Strange (July 1963); Kirby also provided character designs for Iron Man, whose first appearance was pencilled by Don Heck (March 1963), and Daredevil, whose first issue was drawn by Bill Everett (April 1964). A cluster of Marvel superheroes joined forces as The Avengers in September 1963, led by a revived version of Captain America.5 Marvel’s characters appeared in new titles or incorporated within existing series. Due to a distribution arrangement with Independent News (part of the company that owned DC) limiting Marvel to eight titles per month, only a few of the new superheroes appeared on a monthly basis. Fantastic Four, though, was the company’s flagship title and published regularly, and the ‘Fantastic 4 Fan Page’ provided a forum to comment on any Marvel series.6 The Fantastic Four was the paradigm for the company’s superheroes, uneasy with themselves and each other. This was manifested in incessant bickering and self-questioning, the latter vocalised in spoken monologues or within thought balloons, bearing out ‘the lasting influence of romance comics (of which Kirby and Lee had done quite a few)’7 and perhaps existentialist literature and philosophy. Comics scholar Charles Hatfield notes that in 1960 the superhero genre was defined by the ‘civic moralism’ of ‘DC’s upstanding, unquestioning, and brightly optimistic superheroes, as rendered by such clean and elegant, if sometimes aseptic, visual stylists as Carmine Infantino (The Flash), Gil Kane (Green Lantern), and Curt Swan (Superman)’.8 A far cry from those virtuous do-gooders, each member of the Fantastic Four was human, all too human, something that characterised Marvel’s roster of superheroes whether technically human or not.

7632_Williams.indd 78

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

79

Marvel fostered an easy intimacy between company and audience. As Bradford W. Wright has it, the voice with which publishers like Dell, Charlton, and DC addressed their readers was that of an adult authority figure. Lee, on the other hand, cultivated an image of Marvel Comics as a maverick within the comic book field, much like the outsider superheroes themselves. His cover blurbs, house editorials, answers to reader letters, and script writing all established a distinctive ‘Marvel style.’ Willfully outrageous sales pitches (‘One of the most eagerly-awaited action dramas of all time!’), self-deprecating humor, cross-references between titles, and recurring in-jokes all defined what it meant to be involved in this ‘hip happening’ that was Marvel Comics.9 Marvel’s stories alluded to issues in 1960s youth culture such as the popularity of The Beatles and readers were encouraged to see the company as an informal, savvy club, evidenced in its jovially named fan club the Merry Marvel Marching Society (MMMS). Letters published on the ‘Fantastic 4 Fan Page’ were colloquially worded, hyperbolic with praise (and, less often, criticism), and packed with knowingly outrageous visions – a reflection of Lee’s own prose style. Correspondence selected for publication was regularly from university students and Wright records that 225 American campuses had chapters of the MMMS, giving a total membership of 50,000 students; furthermore, Lee was becoming a fixture on the college lecture circuit.10 Because of this popularity, the national media started to run articles on Marvel’s superheroes and comics more generally. The Sunday Herald Tribune’s magazine supplement called Amazing Spider-Man (1963–98) Stan Lee’s ‘masterpiece’ and the character a leading contender to win ‘the Neurotic Hipster Championship of our time’.11 Esquire reported a 1965 poll where ‘student radicals ranked Spider-Man and the Hulk alongside the likes of Bob Dylan and Che Guevara as their favorite revolutionary icons’.12 Lee told journalists he had tried to change comics to meet the tastes of ‘hipper’ readers and was confident he’d succeeded.13 Indeed, a 1964 letter from a student at the University of Chicago ‘perceived intimations of hipness on the part of [Marvel’s] staff’.14

7632_Williams.indd 79

28/06/22 16:55

80

the us graphic novel

Pop Art, the Batman TV Series, and the Relevancy Movement Another reason why national attention fell on comics in the mid1960s is because their imagery was redeployed by Pop Artists, Roy Lichtenstein most famously. This cultural move was then re-signified in comics themselves, a ‘feedback loop’ elaborated by Frey and Baetens in their article ‘Comics Culture and Roy Lichtenstein Revisited’ (2019). Frey and Baetens show how the comics world responded to Pop Art in several ways: publishers adopted Pop styles and rhetoric, Pop-inspired books reprinted comics by isolating individual panels, and artists on the Big Two’s superhero titles alluded to Lichtenstein’s paintings through panel composition. In the case of countercultural publisher Grove Press, discussed below, Pop Art branding was deployed for graphic novels translated from their original French. This ‘alignment of comics with pop fashion [. . .] invited the engagement’ of older readers whose ‘cultural capital’ was such that they had ‘an awareness of pop, a sense of interest in and knowledge of cultural trends, and an open mind about the ironic stance on comics that pop art recurrently advanced’.15 Lichtenstein based many paintings on panels from war and romance comics, omitting details considered extraneous while stylising the remaining elements; penciller Irv Novick saw his art on DC’s All-American Men of War 89 (January–February 1962) reworked in Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (1963) without any financial reimbursement or acknowledgement. Where distrust towards Pop Art is concerned, comics scholar Bart Beaty notes a gendered polarity that mapped onto the distinct locations of comics and fine art in the hierarchy of US culture. The attention critics gave to Lichtenstein, all the while ignoring the people who produced his source material, reminded creators and fans of the contempt with which comics were regarded by cultural gatekeepers. Beaty points to Novick’s memories from World War Two as an example of the gendering of resentment. Recollecting his wartime friendship with Lichtenstein, in Novick’s telling the effete Pop Artist only survived through the protective intervention of the comics creator, reversing the disdain of cultural hierarchies by recasting the penciller as the potent, heroic figure in their relationship.16 Even now comics creators express animosity towards Lichtenstein, though there had been a degree of dialogue and appreciation between Pop Artist and comics world in the

7632_Williams.indd 80

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

81

mid-1960s, and the National Cartoonists Society invited Lichtenstein to attend their 1965 awards dinner and design a promotional poster for the event.17 Extending Pop Art back into popular culture, the ABC television series Batman premiered in January 1966 with Adam West in the title role, and with this raised profile the Batman (1940–2011) comic was now selling, per issue, more than 98 per cent of a print run of a million copies.18 The television show luxuriated in the bombastic qualities of the source material; sound effects, for example, were isolated from accompanying images and over-exaggerated. Both Pop Art and the Batman television series prompt a consideration of comics and campness, a concept theorised just a few years earlier by cultural critic Susan Sontag. In ‘Notes on Camp’ (1964) Sontag defined Camp as a ‘way of looking at things’ that ‘converts the serious into the frivolous’, a ‘sensibility’ that values extravagance, artifice, and bad taste (Camp is also a ‘quality discoverable in objects’, marked by the adjective ‘campy’). Using Sontag’s terms, the Batman television show is a compromised form of campiness, since ‘Camp which knows itself to be Camp (“camping”) is usually less satisfying’ than the ‘naïve’ kind. Is Pop Art another form of Camp? Yes, sometimes. But for Sontag, Pop Art that is tonally ‘flat’, ‘dry’, ‘more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic’ is no longer Camp because it has lost that tenderness towards the object that also defines ‘Camp taste’.19 In 1991 the comics scholar Andy Medhurst returned to what made the Batman television series campy in his essay ‘Batman, Deviance and Camp’: ‘What was acceptable on the page, in speech balloons, stands revealed as ridiculous once given audible voice. The famous visualized sound effects (URKKK! KA-SPLOOSH!) [. . .] work along similar lines.’ The straight-faced probity of Adam West’s Batman became the vehicle for mischievous double meanings, especially where sexuality was concerned: ‘given the long associations of camp with the homosexual male subculture, Batman was a particular gift on the grounds of his relationship with Robin.’20 For Medhurst, there was more to the backlash against ABC’s Batman than fans’ aggrievement at disrespect towards the source text. The ‘unreconstructed devotee of the Batman’ was angry to see a paragon of heterosexual masculine power undermined and the superhero genre’s normative gendered and sexual identities reversed. West’s version of Batman was damned as ‘a tricksy travesty, an effeminizing of the cowled avenger’.21

7632_Williams.indd 81

28/06/22 16:55

82

the us graphic novel

Editors at Marvel ran towards the potential cultural cachet bound up with Pop Art. The September 1965 issue of Fantastic Four had ‘Marvel Pop Art Productions’ on the cover and announced within its pages: So many of you frantic fans have objected to calling our Marvel mags ‘comics’ that we felt we just had to come up with a better name! And so, from now on, you are no longer reading ‘Comic Books’ when you read our little masterpieces! Instead, you’re reading a ‘Pop Art book’! Remember, from now on, Brand X, Y, and Z are comic books, but when you buy a Marvel mag, you ask for a Marvel Pop Art book!22 It was unusual to see an editorial message from Marvel disavowing the appellation ‘comic book’ since Stan Lee previously committed to the term, stating he wanted to gain recognition for comics as comics. A special announcement in Fantastic Four 24 (March 1964) reported that it was Marvel’s intention ‘to produce comics which are so well-written and well-drawn, that they’ll elevate the entire field in the minds of the public!’23 What changed Lee’s mind? Perhaps he saw in Pop Art a kindred creative impulse. Baetens and Frey see a Pop Art sensibility to Marvel’s comics in two ways. First, dualism, or the art of double entendre: there is a straightforward surface reading to Marvel Comics, but also drug references or jokes about sex which – while encoded within fantastical plots – are nonetheless available to readers looking for illicit meanings. The second overlap is the appropriation of existing images, and Jack Kirby was a virtuoso of photo collage, taking ‘found’ photographs and incorporating them into his panels.24 In the 1960s the newspaper strip artist Stan Drake used Xeroxed photographs of city buildings as panels, adding captions or speech balloons as appropriate. This was done to establish location and mood and was quicker than drawing an entire city block.25 Kirby, however, was not recontextualising photographs as a shortcut but gesturing towards terrifying and wondrous states that could not be seen by the naked eye, from undersea worlds to subspace. By the end of the decade Marvel was addressing a range of topical issues, notably student radicalism in Amazing Spider-Man 68 (January 1969) and drug addiction in Amazing Spider-Man 97 (June 1971), and in Captain America 117 (September 1969) launching a

7632_Williams.indd 82

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

83

black superhero called the Falcon (his civilian identity was a Harlem social worker). It was DC, though, whose comics were usually cited as emblematic of the ‘relevance’ or ‘relevancy’ movement, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, Ms., Newsweek, and The New York Times.26 In May 1971 the latter published an article with the title, ‘Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant’.27 In Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane 106 (November 1970), the eponymous protagonist temporarily became black in order to experience racism first-hand;28 in Batman 230 (March 1971) and 231 (May 1971) the New Left and forces of violent reaction clashed on campus. Comics scholar Ramzi Fawaz locates an implicit radicalism in superhero comics from the early 1960s onwards, with characters such as the Fantastic Four and the X-Men facing social ostracism, experimenting with new bodies, and navigating youthful desires under the pressure of the atomic age. As such, Marvel’s superheroes embodied ‘the oppositional spirit of an emergent counterculture in the 1960s’ before representatives of the counterculture were explicitly depicted within these comics.29 The tent-pole title of the relevancy movement in the early 1970s was Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow, written by Dennis O’Neil with art by Neal Adams.30 Riffing on itinerant countercultural road-trip narratives such as the film Easy Rider (1969), the titular characters set out to gauge the state of the nation, from Native American rights activists to striking workers, from the dangers posed by cult leaders to that of over-population. During the journey Green Lantern is wracked by guilt that his superpowers cannot effectively solve social tensions, while Green Arrow becomes further radicalised. The stories themselves were not exactly advocating violent revolution or deviating too far from the superhero genre: local villains were regularly brought to justice by the protagonists and the relevancy movement comics were often couched within the anti-communist liberalism apparent in earlier 1960s mainstream comics.31 Still, the provocative cover of issue 86 (August–September 1971) showed Green Arrow’s ward Roy Harper (aka Speedy) in the process of injecting himself with heroin, needle and all. Robin never did that.

The Narrative Logic of the Soap Opera Most crucially out of all the changes in the 1960s, Marvel adopted a new approach to narrative. This took a few years to develop, and initially each issue of Fantastic Four offered what was effectively a

7632_Williams.indd 83

28/06/22 16:55

84

the us graphic novel

self-contained story. Apart from the four protagonists, other characters returned for one-off episodes, but not frequently, and barely a handful of stories stretched across issues. In 1965 the series started to resemble the typical late-twentieth-century superhero comic: each issue of Fantastic Four contained multiple, interwoven narrative tracks that took up antecedent themes and glanced forward to future instalments. In the mid-1960s individual episodes of Fantastic Four started to be bunched together as multi-issue stories organised around a core narrative coming to a provisional resolution. The first of these arcs ran from 38 (May 1965) to 43 (October 1965), the second from 44 (November 1965) to 50 (May 1966). This approach to writing comics percolated to other series at Marvel and then to DC. Contributing to these elaborate relations, superheroes and villains popped up in each other’s comics, so if you wanted to follow what was happening to the Fantastic Four you would have to buy an issue of Amazing Spider-Man from time to time.32 Hatfield links this to the influence of ancient mythology on Jack Kirby, and specifically Kirby’s conception of Marvel’s superheroes and supervillains as a pantheon. This is defined by Hatfield as a network of characters whose relationships with each other map onto paired and opposed archetypes. In addition, characters’ origin stories are often intertwined (characters acquiring superpowers because of the same event) or repeated (characters becoming superpowered because of the same type of event, such as nuclear accidents). Kirby’s pantheon-like imagination of the superhero genre demanded an epic and sprawling narrative canvas, thus stories told over multiple issues, though this was not necessarily a grand plan that the artist put into action. Hatfield insists that, in accordance with the breakneck demands of monthly comic publication (at a company whose future looked uncertain in the early 1960s, to say the least), the experimentation at Marvel took place in an improvised and gradual fashion. What worked, stuck; what failed, fell by the wayside. The arbiter was the sales figures registered every month.33 Marvel informed readers about plot development taking place in other titles or earlier issues by embedding prompts within the comics page itself. When characters mentioned a significant event in another comic, their words were asterisked, referring the reader down to a caption box with details of where those events occurred. Readers worked in multiple directions, progressing through a series

7632_Williams.indd 84

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

85

but periodically reminded about earlier episodes or sent to other comics. By Fantastic Four 60 (March 1967), Stan Lee was sufficiently confident in his readers’ willingness to check caption boxes that they became another toy for his knowingly flamboyant style. A speech balloon from Doctor Doom asserts, ‘for you are about to pay in full for the injury you once inflicted upon my hand!*’ and the caption below reads, ‘*It happened about a zillion ishes ago when we were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, remember? Script-Happy Stan.’34 Marvel Comics were infused with the logic of the soap opera: a seemingly unlimited teasing out of narrative line, the melodrama of the interior self, and investment in characters’ romantic pursuits.35 With Marvel’s trademark self-consciousness, Fantastic Four 38 made this very comparison. As their lives are threatened and Reed consoles Sue, the Human Torch leaves the room and mutters, ‘Anything to get away from that livin’ soap opera!’36 The letters in Fantastic Four indicate Marvel’s readers were not universally happy with serial narratives incorporating multiple plotlines. One fan wrote that the stories were ‘too crowded’,37 though others initially sceptical expressed their conversion to ‘the world’s first comic magazine soap opera’.38 It is pernicious to take published letters as any kind of representative sample of mail received, but Lee found plenty of correspondents who welcomed ‘continuing stories’. Correspondent Charles Hutler wrote that ‘if new readers [. . .] stop reading’ Fantastic Four ‘because they have been tossed right into the middle of the plot’ then the fault lies with the newcomers: ‘F.F. is too good for them.’39 In other words, this new type of comics narrative taught basically competent readers how to navigate its complexity, though Marvel’s own publisher didn’t have the same level of confidence. In May 1971 Martin Goodman told The New York Times that the trick was to ‘keep a balance’ between the ‘college kids’ and the ‘very young kids who just can’t follow the whole damn thing’. Goodman confessed even he couldn’t follow some of the series that Marvel was printing.40 Many readers of Fantastic Four understood each story arc as a novel, evidenced in a letter from Donald Jackson published in November 1966: In the continued story bracket, the foursome’s fateful fights rank right alongside Thor’s never-ending novel. Novel? Zowie! Another great idea! If and when your FF and THOR tales end – I

7632_Williams.indd 85

28/06/22 16:55

86

the us graphic novel kinda hope never – how about putting the whole blamed serial in hardback or paperback novel form?41

Don McGregor, later a graphic novelist himself, wrote that the December 1965 issue of Fantastic Four was ‘the second chapter in what seems to be another full-length novel’.42 In August 1966 the ‘Fantastic Four Fan Page’ described what Lee was writing as ‘novellength, full-color spectaculars’.43 When Kirby moved to DC in 1970 he used the phrase ‘continuing novel’ to describe the series he was creating.44 By the end of the 1960s novelistic rhetoric was contagious across US comics. Starting in 1966, Lancer produced black-and-white books reprinting Marvel’s superhero comics, and Simon and Schuster – via its young adult arm Fireside and paperback imprint Pocket Books – published full-colour reprint volumes in the 1970s.45 Drawing together book publication, the relevancy movement, and the concept of the novel, two paperbacks of O’Neil and Adams’s Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow were published in 1972 by the Paperback Library. The covers stated they contained ‘two complete novels’, and, claiming an affinity with the underground, the title pages asserted these were ‘comix that give a damn’.46 In 1970 DC editor Carmine Infantino went on the radio to say that a ‘paperback house’ was going to republish all of Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow ‘for colleges. Berkeley has asked us for twenty thousand copies of the first print on this thing. [. . .] There’s been a big demand for these books.’47 Not big enough, it would seem. Byron Preiss, the intern at DC who came up with the idea of the paperback editions, confessed ‘they did not sell very well’48 and only the first four issues of Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow were republished in this manner.

Fans and Creators Debate the Graphic Novel Before the 1960s, comics fans did interact with each other, notably fans of EC’s titles, but comics fandom mostly existed as a subset of SF fandom. From 1961 onwards, fans organised a commons of information and opinion centred on comics, connecting in person (at conventions and regional meetings) and across long distances (via correspondence, fanzines, and amateur press associations). Fans built comics collections by buying, selling, and swapping second-hand

7632_Williams.indd 86

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

87

issues, and mail-order businesses catered to this demand. Fanzines often featured amateur comics, but amateur only in the sense of unpaid: fandom was a testing ground for creators who would have great success in the comics industry (Roy Thomas, Wendy Pini, and Frank Miller) and underground comix (Vaughn Bodē and George Metzger). Crucially, fandom facilitated debate about the past, present, and future of comics, and starting in 1964, musings on the possibility of a novel enunciated in comics form. The initial source of ‘graphic novel’ was Richard Kyle’s ‘Wonderworld’ newsletter, included as part of the November 1964 CAPAalpha mailing. CAPA-alpha was the first amateur press association for comics fans, through which members shared regular newsletters, typically every month. In the second half of the 1960s, extended dialogue about the graphic novel took place amongst CAPAalphans and inside the pages of the fanzines edited by Bill Spicer. Spicer was an advocate for Kyle’s theories, publishing Kyle’s column ‘Graphic Story Review’ in his fanzine Fantasy Illustrated, renaming it Graphic Story Magazine in 1967. That change of name was a response to another coinage of Kyle’s, ‘graphic story’, an alternative term for intelligently executed comics. ‘Graphic story’ was much more common than ‘graphic novel’ in the 1960s and 1970s and the widespread uptake of ‘graphic story’ laid the ground for the eventual dominance of ‘graphic novel’.49 The two terms came into the world as twins, in 1964, when Kyle hypothesised that the future of comics lay in dedicated periodicals, not newspaper strips, because the former offered a physically larger canvas and the possibility for much longer stories.50 Kyle wrote that periodical comics had already played host to significant achievements by creators such as Charles Biro, Bernie Krigstein, and Harvey Kurtzman, and their stories ‘would have electrified many intelligent adults’ had they managed to reach such an audience.51 This was the Holy Grail as far as Kyle was concerned, a US comics market where more expensive periodicals were bought by adults. As it was, Kyle thought terms like ‘comic book’ were ‘prevent[ing] the early acceptance of the medium by the literary world’. He was determined to use ‘“graphic story” and “graphic novel” to describe the artistically serious “comic book strip”’, a step towards comics taking their ‘place in the literary spectrum’.52 For Kyle, size mattered. Revisiting Kurtzman’s EC war stories, Kyle praised the expressionist use of colour and the creator’s refusal

7632_Williams.indd 87

28/06/22 16:55

88

the us graphic novel

to sensationalise the material, but he commented that the stories’ brevity worked against their lasting artistic merit. ‘No graphic story lasts long enough, no complex of emotion is examined long enough, no mood is sustained long enough to reach into the heart and mind of any but the uncommon reader’.53 Kyle mooted that Kurtzman should attempt a long narrative, a ‘novel-length’ version of his earlier graphic stories. Kyle measured the graphic novel quantitatively, writing in 1966 that it should run to 75–100 pages or longer.54 The following year Kyle expressed its length in terms of time, imagining that a graphic novel should take approximately 60–90 minutes to read.55 The realisation of this ‘new artistic medium’ was, for Kyle, inevitable, and Kurtzman had the talent to ‘write and draw the graphic novel that would put his name in the history books’.56 One could argue that Jungle Book in 1959 represented Kurtzman’s best stab at an extended, book-format comic, albeit a short story sequence. These proposals overlooked the existing tradition of long comics narratives and the fan Albert Kuhfeld reminded readers of Fantasy Illustrated that Gross’s He Done Her Wrong had appeared ‘way back in 1930’.57 Not every reader of Fantasy Illustrated was convinced by Kyle’s propositions. John Benson thought that ‘graphic story’ was ‘just the type of term’ that ‘elite’ critics will use once comics become legitimate culture.58 Mike Barrier wrote that the only benefit of longer comics would be the increased ‘attention on the strip as an art form [. . .] which is long overdue’.59 But some fans were curious and encouraging, and Henry Steele’s letter to Fantasy Illustrated 5 (Spring 1966) indicates how, despite many historical precedents, the concept of the graphic novel raised all sorts of questions and opportunities: I’m impressed by the suggestion that very long graphic stories would better exploit the artistic possibilities of the medium. Do you envisage the publication of hard-cover ‘graphic novels’ of several hundred pages, not on a periodical basis, but as individual publishing ventures like conventional novels? Will these be by a single artist, or a staff? Will ink drawings in color remain the basis, or will we have stories told in a series of oil paintings, water colors, pastels, etc.? And how great is the reader’s capacity to absorb all the stimuli from several hundred pages of a graphic story at a sitting?60

7632_Williams.indd 88

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

89

Despite his doubts, Benson too was sympathetic, writing in Fantasy Illustrated 6 (Summer–Fall 1966) that Kyle’s columns had ‘opened up the whole subject of comics as art’, something ‘completely unknown in comics fandom [and] practically unknown in the comics industry, too’. Benson hoped ‘Kyle’s lead will be followed with further discussion’.61 It certainly was. Kyle catalysed a debate about the future of comics that echoes down to the present. Creators within the mainstream industry conversed with fans about the possibility of realising longer and more ambitious projects. For instance, Benson interviewed Gil Kane in 1967, when the artist was ‘freelancing steadily’62 for Marvel; ten years later, Kane would acknowledge the influence of Benson on his work.63 In the 1960s Kane connected falling sales to the exclusion of adult readers and suggested publishers conceive of two different markets for comics, one made up of children buying 15¢ periodicals, another constituted of ‘more demanding [older] readers’ buying ‘elaborate books’. Kane imagined a time when comics narratives would be written with ‘literary structure’, and creators not ‘regimented and tyrannized’ nor paid the ‘wages of a factory hand’.64 Adventure House released Kane’s His Name Is. . . Savage! in June 1968, a magazine labelled as the first of ‘A NEW COMICS TRADITION’.65 Savage! contained a forty-one-page espionage plot redolent of the adventures of James Bond. Its ultraviolence made it adult-oriented fare, but some readers thought it tasteless and excessive.66 An additional reason for its poor sales was that, according to Kane, only 10 per cent of copies were distributed to newsstands.67 In 1971, paperback publisher Bantam experimented with another long-form comic by Kane, the post-apocalyptic sword-and-sorcery adventure Blackmark (co-written by Archie Goodwin). Fan-historian Bill Blackbeard thought the book’s ‘muddled graphic layouts [were] too busy and detailed for the small pb pages’ but conceded Blackmark ‘has the technical and historic interest of falling into the definitive classification of that comic rara avis, the graphic novel’.68 Kane also condemned the book for being ‘too damn small [and] hard to read’.69 He reported: [The publisher] tested it in about 15 cities, and we had about a sixty percent sale but Bantam had invested very heavily in the thing, taken out radio ads. [. . .] In New York it sold out three

7632_Williams.indd 89

28/06/22 16:55

90

the us graphic novel different editions of the book. In the smaller towns, though, we absolutely died.70

Nonetheless, Blackmark was highly prized amongst fans, and when Marvel printed unseen pages from the second volume in 1979, Blackmark was hailed a ‘Graphic Novel Masterpiece’.71 John Benson interviewed another creator, Will Eisner, in September 1968, and they discussed the possibility of Eisner ‘doing a novel in comic form’. Although he had written and drawn periodical comics, Eisner was held in esteem for the technical innovations shown on his detective strip The Spirit, the lead comic in a nationally syndicated newspaper supplement. Eisner told Benson he read Graphic Story Magazine and wished he had time to pursue some of the ideas in it. Eisner thought Kane’s Savage was ‘the right idea’ but ‘people haven’t the patience to [. . .] devote that much time or that much attention to a lengthy thing’.72 In the late 1970s, Eisner began creating graphic novels, and his first, A Contract with God (1978), was a short story cycle about New York tenement life in the interwar period. Contract is the first recorded instance of a book featuring ‘graphic novel’ on its front cover and is regularly accorded a primal status in histories of the US graphic novel.73 Since the late 1960s Eisner communicated with fan-journalists (Benson), other industry veterans (Jack Katz), and underground publishers (Denis Kitchen) about the adult market for long-form comics. He first met Kitchen at the 1971 Comic Art Convention in New York, which Eisner attended to see how underground comix had transcended the commercial logic of the mainstream industry. Comics scholar Andrew J. Kunka notes the ‘underground publishing model appealed to Eisner because the comix remained on store shelves longer than newsstand comics, and they underwent multiple printings’. Given that creators also got royalties and retained ‘their own copyrights’, the underground operated more like book publishing than the mainstream industry, and Eisner had a long, productive relationship with Kitchen’s company Kitchen Sink Press, which later published many graphic novels by Eisner including Life on Another Planet (serialised 1978–80; first book edition 1983 as Signal from Space), A Life Force (serialised 1983–5; first book edition 1988, The Dreamer (1986)), To the Heart of the Storm (1991), and Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood (1995).74

7632_Williams.indd 90

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

91

Going Underground: Sex, Gender, and Politics Between 1961 and 1972, underground comix went through a meteoric rise. They first appeared in campus publications, national satire magazines, and underground newspapers, but from 1968 onwards they were printed in dedicated periodicals approximating mainstream comic books, though most had black-and-white interiors. There was a strong relationship between underground comix and US universities, with the first comix created by students or recent graduates and published in campus humour magazines such as Texas Ranger. The early 1960s saw a handful of periodicals dedicated to comix, one-off titles with small print runs such as The Adventures of Jesus (1962) by Foolbert Sturgeon (Frank Stack) and God Nose (1964) by Jaxon (Jack Jackson). After leaving EC, Harvey Kurtzman helmed a series of humour magazines, and underground artists Gilbert Shelton, Jay Lynch, and Robert Crumb had some of their work printed in Kurtzman’s Help! (1960–5). In the middle of the 1960s the first countercultural newspapers appeared, based on campuses or nearby, and they included comix exceeding the boundaries of middle-class taste. Syndicated across the country to other underground newspapers, certain artists gained national recognition, and established publishing houses brought out books reprinting their comix. The most prominent was Crumb’s Head Comix, published by Viking Press in 1968. Wonder Wart-Hog, Captain Crud and other Superstuff (1967) was one of the first reprint books, an anthology of superhero parodies from college magazines, including Shelton’s character Wonder Wart-Hog (the obvious target of Wonder Wart-Hog was Superman, but the allusions to Amazing Spider-Man suggest Shelton read Marvel’s comics too). Book collections reprinting comix were being published during 1967–8 when, ironically, only a handful of ‘distinct komix books’ (in other words, periodicals) had appeared.75 The boom in periodicals devoted to comix began with Crumb’s Zap 1 (1968), which, like many titles that followed, was written and drawn, printed, and initially distributed in San Francisco. Why the Bay Area? Partly because there was already a critical mass of artists producing posters for rock concerts: artists and poster publishers saw comix as another product to sell to the region’s growing body of countercultural consumers. Released by presses such as The Print Mint, Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, and Rip Off Press, comix were rarely

7632_Williams.indd 91

28/06/22 16:55

92

the us graphic novel

sold on America’s newsstands but distributed via informal channels such as mail order, record shops, alternative bookstores, and the so-called ‘headshops’ selling incense sticks, psychedelic posters, and drug paraphernalia. Other cities had comix publishers too, such as Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York.76 Because they did not use the national system of magazine distribution, the comix were not obliged to abide by the Comics Code. Freed from its restrictions, underground comix offered political satire, explicit sexual imagery, autobiography, and psychedelic experimentation. Comix creators were either self-publishers or had an extraordinary amount of leeway in what they could draw, and they revelled in this autonomy, avowing that the only cap on what they could produce was their own imagination. As well as attacking conservative American values, the comix frustrated liberal readers by casually depicting racist stereotypes and misogynistic acts of violence. The covers of Bizarre Sex (1972–82) subjected America’s cities to attack from gigantic genitalia, and inside an underground comic one might be confronted by characters having sex with family members, aliens, or vulture demons. Sex comix were commercially successful and Jean-Paul Gabilliet records that more pornographic comix were published than any other genre, though not all sexually explicit content was intended as pornography since some obscene material was used for political satire or bawdy humour.77 Another reason for the prevalence of sex was that drawing fellatio, orgies, and fetishes was a signifier that comix were the uncensored outpourings of their creators’ imaginations.78 Want to show how uninhibited you are? Why not draw a comic where a pirate cuts off another pirate’s penis (as S. Clay Wilson did). This did not go unnoticed by the authorities and comix retailers could face criminal charges for selling obscene material. These representations should be seen in the context of the counterculture’s welcoming of open displays of nudity and sex as a sign of personal liberation. But as was the case with the counterculture more broadly, the representation of sex in the comix was glaringly heteronormative and left ‘unexamined received ideas of the role of women’,79 frequently combining sexual scenarios with violence and murder. Members of the New Left and counterculture pointed out that visualising the rape and murder of women was not a joyous outpouring of free expression but expressly misogynistic.80 In the underground newspaper RAT, the journalist Jeff Shero told Shelton that ‘a

7632_Williams.indd 92

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

93

whole lot of political people don’t like Crumb because he deals with sex fantasies’.81 In the East Village Other, Crumb recounted that fellow artist Trina Robbins objected to the Vulture Demoness character in his Big Ass Comics (June 1969) as a sign of hostility towards women. Far from accepting such criticism, Crumb mocked people who called his comix perverse or sexist, and while Zap (1968–2016) became a multi-creator anthology comic from the second issue, it remained an all-male affair for decades.82 Female creators responded to being effectively shut out of the male-dominated underground by starting their own companies, collectives, and comix, such as the Wimmen’s Comix Collective and Nanny Goat Productions. The first women’s title was It Ain’t Me Babe (1970), published by a feminist collective that already produced an underground newspaper of the same name. Two ongoing series started in 1972: Tits and Clits (1972–87) and Wimmen’s Comix (1972–92). Women’s comix often advocated feminist agendas, and Abortion Eve (1973) by Chin Lyvely (Lyn Chevli) and Joyce Sutton (Joyce Farmer) and Mama! Dramas (1978) were dedicated to reproductive rights and motherhood respectively. A gay and lesbian comix movement gained visibility with the publication of Mary Wings’s Come Out Comix (1973) and Dyke Shorts (1978), Roberta Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels (1976), and Larry Fuller’s Gay Heart Throbs (1976–81).83 In 1974 the underground journalist Mary McKenney wrote that these new developments represented a desirable counterpoint to the ‘machismo of R. Crumb, the sadism of S. Clay Wilson’.84 Underground creator Richard Corben’s work was more in line with mainstream horror, SF, and fantasy, though Marvel and DC would not have countenanced the nudity and violence in his airbrushed art. Corben and a handful of other underground creators were segueing into long narratives and his Bloodstar (1976), Neverwhere (1978), and (with Jan Strnad) New Tales of the Arabian Nights (1979) were all released as books (the latter two serialised before book publication). On 13 April 1973, the San Francisco Phoenix printed comix creator Bill Griffith’s attack on the male sex fantasies and thoughtless violence taking over the underground comix, and though Griffith was ‘not interested in naming names or titles’, when creator Tom Veitch wrote to the Phoenix to refute Griffith’s charges, he noted ‘Bill is against the whole violent tradition in the undergrounds, and he’s really down on the work of Richard Corben’. Veitch’s position was that comix should be kept free of

7632_Williams.indd 93

28/06/22 16:55

94

the us graphic novel

commercial and political restrictions: if readers were offended, that showed the underground comix were still above censorship.85 These debates about the comix as unfettered expression have influenced twenty-first-century comics scholarship, notably Charles Hatfield’s observation that by taking a publishing format ‘widely associated with faceless industrial entertainment’ and turning it into a means of expressing intensely personal and iconoclastic visions, the ‘underground comix ironized the comic book medium’. Hatfield thinks that, at first, the comix creators’ re-appropriation of the periodical comic ‘package’ – subverting styles, advertisements, and genres from mainstream comics and newspaper strips – had a political edge, turning ‘spoof into a vehicle for cultural argument’. Unfortunately, as the comix migrated out of underground newspapers and into dedicated periodicals, creators disengaged from ‘larger political issues’. Acknowledging that political comix never completely disappeared, Hatfield argues that, as the 1970s progressed, the comix became preoccupied with the history and formal possibilities of the medium at the expense of ‘broader social concerns’.86

What Were Underground Graphic Novels? Another comix reprint collection from an East Coast publishing house (Ballantine) was Crumb’s 1969 Fritz the Cat, containing three stories from earlier in the 1960s: ‘Fritz Bugs Out’, ‘Secret Agent for the C.I.A.’, and ‘Fritz the No-Good’. In 1972 Paul Buhle noted these Fritz stories ‘are the comic equivalent of novel length’.87 Buhle was a member of the New Left organisation Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and his essays on comix began appearing in underground newspapers in October 1968.88 In a 1969 review he thought the stories in the Fritz the Cat book were too obvious, populated as they were by heavily stereotyped spies, foreign communists, and beatniks. Buhle recommended reading the book ‘drunk or high, then the weakness of the story line and the shallowness of the drawing doesn’t hit you so hard’. The tediousness of the elongated narratives in Fritz the Cat made Buhle ‘wonder about the great notions of comix novels, aired a year or so ago among graphics artists’, a sign that graphic novels were a shared point of reference between fans of underground and mainstream comics.89 Away from reprint collections, in the early 1970s original books of underground comix were published by presses specialising in poetry,

7632_Williams.indd 94

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

95

translated literature, and avant-garde writing. Print runs on these small press books were typically in the low thousands. Bill Bergeron’s Prairie State Blues: Comic Strips and Graphic Tales appeared in 1973; this was the same year its publisher, the Chicago Review Press, was established by Curt and Linda Matthews, English instructors at Northwestern University. Like many early Chicago Review Press books, the short comix in Prairie State Blues were themed around the Midwest.90 Some of the pieces (the excerpts from historical documents, for example) had few parallels in the underground, though the oblique dreams and tales of deadbeat anthropomorphic critters were conceptually and tonally similar to other comix. Ed Badajos, political cartoonist in the underground press, created a seventy-page comic entitled Filipino Food in 1972. Does it have a story? There are recurring characters: a messiah figure, a man wearing a $ sweater, two Catholic penitents, and stereotypically exaggerated versions of a cop and a bandit. Yet this surreal, oneiric text sits at a distance from the ‘conditions of narrativity’ (that which makes a text more likely to be considered a narrative) proposed by narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan. In Filipino Food, panel transitions appear to show a succession of moments in time, but there is no ‘causal chain’; events are not linked as the result of ‘purposeful actions’ by ‘intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world’.91 Rather, scenarios proceed via a lateral logic based on repetitions of shade, texture, or tone, or by the psychedelic concerns of the counterculture. For example, in one section the messiah splits in two, and the pair visit a music festival, but they are the only ones dancing and the audience members are all cops. The end of the book brings no resolution: the messiah is buried, urinated on, a flower grows and encloses a bee, and the final page shows a square shrinking and disappearing.92 Other unorthodox elements include characters breaking frames and decorative elements winding around the perimeter of panels (Figure 3.1). Filipino Food was published by New York’s Olympia Press, and erotica was one of Olympia’s specialities, so the sexual organs depicted in Badajos’s book were not out of context; canonical novels in Olympia’s back catalogue, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), had already courted charges for obscenity. Outside the United States, Canadian-based artist Martin VaughnJames produced four books in the first half of the 1970s: Elephant (1970), The Projector (1971), The Park: A Mystery (1972), and

7632_Williams.indd 95

28/06/22 16:55

7632_Williams.indd 96

28/06/22 16:55

Figure 3.1  Ed Badajos, Filipino Food (New York: Olympia Press, 1972), p. [19]. © 1972, David Dawdy.



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

97

finally The Cage (1975). Like Filipino Food these offered a sequence of images succeeding one another based on continuities of place, shape, or theme. Across these books Vaughn-James gradually discarded speech balloons and multi-panel pages, culminating in his audacious experiment The Cage, a series of single- or double-page spreads depicting a cage in a desolate desert landscape, a new and ruined Mayan-looking temple, a bedroom filling up with sand, and a 1906 pumping station. There are no people or animals in The Cage, though some objects are animated in a way resembling personality and agency; a knotted sheet lashed to a bedspread, for example, evokes a scene of crucifixion.93 Foreshadowing these graphic novels, New York’s Grove Press serialised three long narratives in the mid-1960s in its house magazine Evergreen Review, subsequently releasing them as collected editions: Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella (1966), writer Pierre Bartier and artist Guy Peellaert’s The Adventures of Jodelle (1967), and writer Michael O’Donoghue and artist Frank Springer’s The Adventures of Phoebe (1968). Grove specialised in world literature, including translated film and drama scripts, and fiction with erotic elements; of these comics narratives, the first two were originally published in French, and they contain highly sexualised material. Matching the interest shown by Evergreen Review in New York’s art scene, these books drew on the visual language of Pop Art (Jodelle was printed in bright, flat colours). The covers of all three reproduced details from the narratives inside, isolating panels (or elements from panels) in a Pop style; on Barbarella’s cover an image of the main character was enlarged and recoloured ‘to display classic Lichtenstein shades of blonde yellow hair, orange-red lips, pink skin, edged by clear line thick black contours’ and replete with ‘Benday dot motifs’.94 As Hugo Frey reveals, by the middle of 1970 only 4,222 copies of the US edition of Barbarella had been sold. Frey comments of the three books that, while it was ‘radical for a comic to figure a woman character as the prime subject and active personality [. . .] this was mitigated and mediated through every effort being made by Forest and the others to please a male heterosexual reader with raunchy titillation’. A US graphic novel modelled on the Barbarella template, James McQuade’s Misty (1972) also flattered the heterosexual male gaze and the eponymous character struggles to remain clothed during her adventures. Grove recommenced publishing translated graphic novels in 1978 with Guido

7632_Williams.indd 97

28/06/22 16:55

98

the us graphic novel

Crepax’s adaptation of Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, which, again, did not skimp on erotic content.95 In the early 1970s a small number of comix creators plunged into long narratives printed as one-off periodicals or serialised across multiple issues. The most famous is Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), running to forty pages plus frontispiece (‘A Confession to My Readers’) and afterword (‘Labyrinth?!’). While not the first autobiographical comic, Binky Brown was an epochal ‘autobiographical graphic novel’96 (as described by the underground newspaper Berkeley Barb in 1974) that has inspired generations of comics life-writers.97 What is striking about extended underground comix is the variety of genres, styles, and subject matter; serialised across two issues, Ted Richards’s forty-two-page The Story of Uncle Sam’s Cabin from Dopin’ Dan 2–3 (1973) concerns the last six months of the protagonist’s military service, while Tom Veitch and Greg Irons’s The Legion of Charlies (1971) is a mash-up of zombie apocalypse and political satire that juxtaposed the Manson Family murders against atrocities committed by US troops in Vietnam. Comix critic Clay Geerdes, early adopter of the phrase ‘graphic novel’, used it in 1973 to describe Legion, despite the narrative only being twenty-eight pages long.98 As was sometimes the case with mainstream comics, calling a text a novel was a way of announcing that the narrative occupied the whole periodical, hence the cover of P. Serniuk’s thirty-three-page underground comic Mutants of the Metropolis (1972) boasted it was ‘a complete science fiction novel in full[-]length comic book form!’99

Countercultural Malaise in the Cartoon Novel Dan O’Neill is best known in comics history as the figurehead of the Air Pirates comix collective, taken to court in the 1970s for depicting Disney characters in lewd, drug-taking scenarios. During the 1960s O’Neill was a prominent artist, writing and drawing the Odd Bodkins newspaper strip for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1968 Odd Bodkins characters appeared in television commercials and, at the end of the decade, the strip was syndicated to eleven daily newspapers and up to sixty college publications. Odd Bodkins had once been even more popular: it was dropped by many newspapers around 1967 when O’Neill took a stand against liberalism, later telling Rolling Stone magazine ‘I found out being a liberal was a

7632_Williams.indd 98

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

99

dirty thing – a half-way step’. O’Neill’s strip did not share the sexualised violence of the most extreme comix, yet the surrealism and absurdist questing of Odd Bodkins went well beyond the norms of 1960s newspaper strips. Peanuts had its fair share of existential angst, but O’Neill took comic-strip cynicism into untapped planes of psychedelic vision and despair. Pointing to his million-plus readership, in September 1970 Rolling Stone hailed him as ‘America’s foremost overground underground cartoonist’.100 This was not to last. O’Neill ignored warnings over missed deadlines and anti-liberal content and in November 1970 the Chronicle dropped Odd Bodkins for a second and final time.101 The Odd Bodkins strip was reprinted in book form twice in the 1960s and once in the 1970s, the latter as The Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins (1973), which had unusually large pages (approximately 12 x 9 inches), using the same large physical dimensions as O’Neill’s earlier graphic novel Hear the Sound of my Feet Walking.. Drown the Sound of my Voice Talking.. (1969). Hear the Sound has an atypical production history, published by the Glide Urban Center, an outreach organisation based in a Methodist church in San Francisco providing assistance to the poor, sex workers, and other marginalised groups. Hear the Sound was an entirely new story and Collective Unconscience referred to it as a ‘metaphysical cartoon novel’.102 Hear the Sound takes the two main characters from Odd Bodkins (Fred Bird and Hugh) and subjects them to a series of funny, fantastical episodes over 122 pages. Yet while Hear the Sound has the vestige of a narrative, it doesn’t move a great deal, and at the book’s conclusion the protagonists are in the same state they occupied when the reader entered the storyworld. This is the default position they assume throughout the text, walking along a road musing on philosophical conundrums. Hear the Sound is constituted from largely self-contained chapters, and their order is irrelevant: it would make no difference if the characters’ discussions occurred at different points in the plot (since they lead nowhere) or if new characters entered the narrative at earlier or later moments (the essential relationship between the main characters and their environment never changes). For all its larger pages and greater length, Hear the Sound is not so far away from the narrative temporality of a daily newspaper strip, where the final panel usually elicits laughter and withdrawal before continuing the following

7632_Williams.indd 99

28/06/22 16:55

100

the us graphic novel

day. The last page of Hear the Sound is where the comic ceases but not where it concludes, and the ‘lack of any coherent sequence’ or ‘restitution’ in the plot of Hear the Sound chimes with scholar Arthur W. Frank’s concept of the ‘chaos narrative’, anti-narratives which reflect ‘only an incessant present with no memorable past and no future worth anticipating’.103 This narrative atemporality is of a piece with O’Neill’s disaffection towards the counterculture and the possibility of revolutionary change.104 Frank defines the chaos narrative as subject to ‘life’s fundamental contingency’, where subjects have lost their sense of agency, and the lack of sequence or conclusion in Hear the Sound should not be seen as a failure to make use of the book’s extended length but as an emblem of O’Neill’s disbelief in social transformation, in the ability to make the country’s future look different from its present.105

Conclusion The Power of Comics (2nd edn. 2015) by Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz contends Marvel and the underground comix were different faces of the same phenomenon, the moment when comics became hip youth culture, and that the popularity of angst-ridden superheroes helped create an audience for the comix on campus. Interpreted this way, Deadman’s otherworldly forays in DC’s Strange Adventures (1950–73) and the ethereal realms explored by Dr Strange in Strange Tales (1951–68) seem not so distant from the psychedelia of comix creators such as Willy Mendes or Rick Griffin.106 Marvel undeniably exerted an imaginative purchase over countercultural youth, but allowing for a slight expansion in comics readership, it is hard to argue that Marvel’s series were consumed by adults of all ages. Young people in their teens and twenties may have bought comics more often, but comics were hardly showing up on the radar of legitimate culture unless filtered through cultural forms that were more esteemed (Pop Art) or widely watched (network television). Nonetheless, changes underway in this period would reconfigure the graphic novel and the comics industry more broadly. In the early 1970s, underground comix creators were starting to work with genres such as autobiography, which had enjoyed scant presence in US comics before, and the audience for comix texts was clearly an adult one. Within mainstream comics, the lengthening of narratives and

7632_Williams.indd 100

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

101

the multiple, interwoven plotlines inside each issue were signs that creators were willing to make greater demands on readers’ patience and concentration (and that such comics could still sell). And finally, while the term ‘graphic novel’ was not common parlance outside the comics world until the late 1980s (and arguably not until the 2000s), the phrase started to spread amongst fans, publishers, editors, and creators from 1964 onwards. The aspirations bound up with the concept would inspire veterans of the comics industry and new creators alike, as we will see in the next chapter, when new institutional structures were better able to expedite that ambition.

Notes  1. Stan Lee, script, and Jack Kirby, pencils, ‘Enter. . . Dr. Doom!’, Fantastic Four 57 (December 1966), in The Fantastic Four Omnibus (New York: Marvel Worldwide, 2013), vol. 2, p. 709.  2. Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 51–5; Charles Hatfield, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), p. 119.  3. Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), pp. 1–2.  4. Amazing Fantasy 15, in which Spider-Man first appeared, bore the month of August on the cover. This was an error and should have read September, as per the indicia inside the comic. Of course, due to the nature of comics printing and distribution, the issue was on sale in June 1962.  5. A fuller account is given in Hatfield, Hand of Fire, pp. 83–4, 104–5.  6. Ibid. p. 99.  7. Ibid. pp. 22, 121, 145.  8. Ibid. p. 115.  9. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation, rev. edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 199, 217. 10. Ibid. p. 223; Nat Freedland, ‘Super Heroes with Super Problems’, Sunday Herald Tribune, 9 January 1966, pp. 14–15 [New York magazine supplement]. 11. Freedland, ‘Super Heroes with Super Problems’, p. 14. 12. Wright, Comic Book Nation, p. 223. 13. Freedland, ‘Super Heroes with Super Problems’, p. 14. 14. William Rowe, Letter, Fantastic Four 33 (December 1964), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 127.

7632_Williams.indd 101

28/06/22 16:55

102

the us graphic novel

15. Hugo Frey and Jan Baetens, ‘Comics Culture and Roy Lichtenstein Revisited: Analysing a Forgotten “Feedback Loop”’, Art History 42.1 (February 2019): pp. 131–41. 16. Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 57. 17. Frey and Baetens, ‘Comics Culture and Roy Lichtenstein Revisited’, pp. 142–5. 18. Robert L. Beerbohm, ‘Secret Origins of the Direct Market, Part One: “Affidavit Returns” – The Scourge of Distribution’, Comic Book Artist 6 (Fall 1999): p. 82. 19. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, Partisan Review 31.4 (Fall 1964): pp. 515–30. 20. Andy Medhurst, ‘Batman, Deviance and Camp’, in Roberta Pearson and William Urrichio, eds, The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media (London: British Film Institute, 1991), pp. 155–8. 21. Ibid. p. 159. 22. ‘Fantastic 4 Fan Page’, Fantastic Four 42 (September 1965), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 339. 23. ‘Special Announcements Section’ on the ‘Fantastic 4 Fan Page’, Fantastic Four 24 (March 1964), in The Fantastic Four Omnibus (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2007), vol. 1, p. 683. 24. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 45–51. 25. Cullen Murphy, Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), pp. 184–5. 26. Wright, Comic Book Nation, pp. 227–34; Ramzi Fawaz, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (New York and London: New York University Press, 2016), pp. 125–6, 164–99. 27. Saul Braun, ‘Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant’, The New York Times, 2 May 1971, pp. SM32+. 28. This story should be seen in dialogue with the African American woman Anne Moody’s autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) and Black Like Me (1961) by John Howard Griffin, a white man who disguised himself as black and travelled through the US South so he could experience segregation. See Robert Bonazzi, Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). 29. Fawaz, New Mutants, p. 72. 30. Green Lantern (1960–86) was renamed Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow during O’Neil and Adams’s run on the series (April

7632_Williams.indd 102

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

103

1970 to April–May 1972). It continued after 1986 under the title Green Lantern Corps. 31. The anti-communist liberalism of Fantastic Four is discussed in Fawaz, New Mutants, pp. 109–13. 32. Marvel’s slow edging towards unending narratives and a ‘vast, intricately knotted’ fictional universe is discussed in Hatfield, Hand of Fire, pp. 103–4, 116–24. 33. Hatfield, Hand of Fire, pp. 124–37. 34. Stan Lee, script, and Jack Kirby, pencils, ‘The Peril and the Power’, Fantastic Four 60 (March 1967), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 787. 35. Hatfield, Hand of Fire, p. 145. 36. Stan Lee, script, and Jack Kirby, pencils, ‘Defeated by the Frightful Four!’, Fantastic Four 38 (May 1965) in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 242. 37. Brian Oatley, Letter, Fantastic Four 60 (March 1967), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 798. 38. Mike Malson, Letter, Fantastic Four 60 (March 1967), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 799. 39. Charles Hutler, Letter, Fantastic Four 53 (August 1966), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 617. 40. Qtd in Braun, ‘Shazam!’, p. SM36. 41. Donald Jackson, Letter, Fantastic Four 56 (November 1966), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 687. 42. Don McGregor, Letter, Fantastic Four 48 (March 1966), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 500. 43. Charles Hutler, Letter, and Stan Lee, Response, Fantastic Four 53 (August 1966), in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, p. 617; bold removed from Lee’s response. 44. Qtd in Braun, ‘Shazam!’, p. SM55. 45. Robert G. Weiner, Marvel Graphic Novels and Related Publications: An Annotated Guide to Comics, Prose Novels, Children’s Books, Articles, Criticism and Reference Works, 1965–2008 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008). 46. Dennis O’Neil, writer, Neal Adams, Frank Giacola, and Dan Adkins, artists, Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow, 2 vols (New York: Paperback Library, 1972). Volume 1 begins with an origin story written by John Broome with art by Gil Kane and Joe Giella, ‘SOS Green Lantern!’ (1959). 47. Transcript of The Alex Bennett Show, broadcast on WMCA on 23 November 1970, reproduced in John Nyman, ‘Mutha Load’, CAPAalpha 76 (February 1971): p. [6] [Insert]. 48. Byron Preiss, Interview by George Olshevsky, Collector’s Dream 1.5 (Summer 1978): p. 99.

7632_Williams.indd 103

28/06/22 16:55

104

the us graphic novel

49. Paul Williams, Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), pp. 101–6, 118–9. 50. Richard Kyle, ‘Wonderworld’, CAPA-alpha 2 (November 1964): pp. [29–32]. 51. Ibid. pp. [31–2]. 52. Ibid. p. [32]. 53. Richard Kyle, ‘Graphic Story Review’, Fantasy Illustrated 5 (Spring 1966): pp. 41–2. 54. Ibid. p. 42. 55. Richard Kyle, Letter, Fantasy Illustrated 7 (Spring 1967): pp. 35–6. 56. Kyle, ‘Graphic Story Review’, Spring 1966, p. 42. 57. Albert Kuhfeld, Letter, Fantasy Illustrated 6 (Summer/Fall 1966): p. 22. 58. John Benson, Letter, Fantasy Illustrated 6 (Summer/Fall 1966): p. 18. 59. Mike Barrier, Letter, Fantasy Illustrated 5 (Spring 1966): p. 38. 60. Henry Steele, Letter, Fantasy Illustrated 5 (Spring 1966): p. 5. 61. Benson, Letter, Summer/Fall 1966, p. 19. 62. Hatfield, Hand of Fire, p. 106. 63. Gil Kane, Interview by Gary Groth, The Comics Journal 38 (February 1978): p. 38. 64. Gil Kane, Interview by John Benson, 1967, Alter Ego 1.10 (1969): pp. 17–18. 65. Gil Kane, art and story, Robert Franklin, story, ‘The Return of the Half-Man!’, His Name Is. . . Savage! 1 (June 1968): cover. 66. Jon Ingersoll, ‘SQUIDGIT’, CAPA-alpha 43 (May 1968): p. [48]; Bill Blackbeard, ‘Journal of the V.F.B.M. [Vigilant Fraternity of Bonded Mousehood]’, CAPA-alpha 43 (May 1968): p. [7] [Insert]; Frank McGinty, ‘Constant Critic’, CAPA-alpha 185 (March 1980): p. [143]. 67. Kane, Interview by G. Groth, p. 35. 68. Bill Blackbeard, ‘Journal of the V.F.B.M.’, CAPA-alpha 80 (June 1971): p. [24] [Insert]. See also ‘[Marvel] News’, The Comic Reader 96 (April 1973): p. 3. 69. Qtd in Ward Batty, ‘Smiling in the Dark’, CAPA-alpha 187 (May 1980): p. [25] [Insert]. 70. Ibid. p. [25]. 71. Gil Kane, story and art, ‘The Mind Demons’, Marvel Preview 17 (Winter 1979): cover. 72. Will Eisner, Interview by John Benson, Witzend 6 (Spring 1969): p. [15]. 73. Will Eisner, A Contract with God and other Tenement Stories (New York: Baronet, 1978), front cover of softcover edition. 74. Andrew J. Kunka, ‘A Contract with God, The First Kingdom, and the “Graphic Novel”: The Will Eisner / Jack Katz Letters’, Inks 1.1 (Spring 2017): p. 31.

7632_Williams.indd 104

28/06/22 16:55



in search of adult comics readers: 1961–72

105

75. Paul Buhle, ‘Komix Kountermedia’, Leviathan, July–August 1969, p. 15. 76. Patrick Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963–1975, 2nd edn. (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2008). 77. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, p. 81. 78. Joe Sutliff Sanders, ‘Theorizing Sexuality in Comics’, in Paul Williams and James Lyons, eds, The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 156–7. 79. Ibid. p. 157. 80. Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999), p. 85. 81. Gilbert Shelton, Interview by Jeff Shero, The Rag, 24 November 1969, p. 7. 82. Dean Latimer, ‘Corpa Delecti’, EVO, 29 October 1969, p. 20. 83. Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz, pp. 83–100. 84. Mary McKenney, ‘MIND CANDY for the Ms’s’, Booklegger Magazine, September–October 1974, p. 17. 85. Qtd in Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions, pp. 186–8. 86. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), pp. 6–20. 87. Paul Buhle, ‘The New Comics and American Culture’, in George Abbott White and Charles Newman, eds, Literature in Revolution (New York: Triquarterly Book-Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 382. 88. Paul Buhle, ‘Radical Comics Zap the Mind’, Guardian, 12 October 1968, p. 18. 89. Paul Buhle, ‘Funny Bizness’, Madison Kaleidoscope, 1 November 1969, p. 14. 90. ‘History of Chicago Review Press’, Chicago Review Press, undated, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 91. Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 8. 92. Ed Badajos, Filipino Food (New York: Olympia Press, 1972), pp. [70–1]. 93. Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1975), p. 127. 94. Frey and Baetens, ‘Comics Culture and Roy Lichtenstein Revisited’, p. 148. 95. Hugo Frey, ‘Beat-Era Literature and the Graphic Novel’, in Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, eds, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 124–38. 96. Clay Geerdes, ‘Comix World’, Berkeley Barb, 5–11 July 1974, p. 17.

7632_Williams.indd 105

28/06/22 16:55

106

the us graphic novel

 97. Andrew J. Kunka, Autobiographical Comics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 32.  98. Clay Geerdes, ‘Comix World’, LA Free Press, 17–27 August 1973, p. 31.  99. P. Serniuk, Mutants of the Metropolis (1972), front cover. 100. Thomas Albright, ‘Visuals: Underground Cartoonist Dan O’Neill’, Rolling Stone, 3 September 1970, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 101. Bob Levin, The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Counterculture (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003), pp. 23–5. 102. Dan O’Neill, The Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins (San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1973), back cover. 103. Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 97–9. 104. Albright, ‘Visuals’. 105. Frank, Wounded Storyteller, pp. 102–3. 106. Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz, The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture, 2nd edn. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 42.

7632_Williams.indd 106

28/06/22 16:55

chapter 4

Declaration of Independents: 1973–9

Introduction The 1970s were turbulent years for US comics, though by the end of the decade the institutional conditions were set to allow a few mainstream publishers to survive by re-centring the industry on older fans. Restructuring was triggered by a new system of distribution that began in 1973 and leapt forward in importance in 1979: the direct market. The direct market encouraged independent comics companies into existence, many of which produced material along the lines of the Big Two, augmented by an adults-only tone and greater creative autonomy. Positioned between popular mainstream genres and the underground’s unrestrained play, at first these were called ‘ground-level’ comics. The profitability of soliciting older readers was underscored by the success of the magazine Heavy Metal (1977–present), an anthology of fantasy and SF comics based on Franco-Belgian material. The numbers of new underground comix plummeted from 1973 onwards, though a handful of companies remained active, and despite low sales figures the comix were at their most diverse in the late 1970s in terms of creators and genres. Forced by straitened economic and political circumstances to make new kinds of product, many underground publishers tried book editions, some of which contained long, finite narratives and were labelled ‘graphic novels’.

The Direct Market Begins The direct market spurred the publication of texts that assumed a different kind of consumer compared to the younger audience buying comics from newsstand venders. This new consumer was the comics fan: typically male, late teens or older, and willing and able to spend large sums of money on comics and related products. 107

7632_Williams.indd 107

28/06/22 16:55

108

the us graphic novel

These products included books containing long comics narratives, leading Charles Hatfield to assert that the graphic novel ‘owes its life to the direct market’s specialized conditions’.1 In the middle of the twentieth century, mainstream comics were distributed by national magazine distributors via the sale-or-return system. This meant that comics arrived at newsstands and drugstores in mixed bundles; retailers had no control over the titles they received. If any comics went unsold, then retailers and distributors could return them to the publisher for credit. Over time, comics publishers gave up physically taking back unsold copies: the transportation costs didn’t seem worth it. By the end of the 1960s, the sale-or-return system operated by distributors simply declaring how many copies had been sold, with publishers taking them at their word. Known as the ‘affidavit returns’ system, distributors signed an affidavit stating unsold copies had been destroyed.2 Sale-or-return had two major flaws. First, it was financially inefficient because publishers were forced to print many more comics than they expected to sell. During the 1940s–50s, when most comics sold 70 per cent of their print run, publishers could still make a decent profit. This situation didn’t last. DC’s Carmine Infantino stated that, at the start of the 1970s, a mainstream publisher had to sell around 50 per cent of a print run of 275,000 copies to start making a profit; no money could be made from a smaller print run.3 Most comics were only selling 30–40 per cent of their print run and just breaking even, and the cost of paper shot up in the early 1970s: mainstream publishers were printing three comics to sell one and the cost of printing was increasing all the time.4 The other problem with sale-or-return was corruption. This is difficult to prove but there is extensive anecdotal evidence that the US magazine industry was infiltrated by organised crime. Many comics industry professionals believed that distributors were receiving comics from publishers, selling them to fans and dealers, then declaring them unsold to claim the credit. Comics dealer Robert Beerbohm asserts that the sales figures reported by magazine distributors were meaningless: in the early 1970s a comics dealer might go to their local distributor, buy every issue of a popular title, and the distributor would claim to the publisher that, having failed to sell any copies, they had shredded them all.5 Because the profit margin on periodical comics was so low, some distributors destroyed comics upon arrival to save the time and labour of distributing them.

7632_Williams.indd 108

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

109

Eager comics dealers aimed to be at distribution centres as close as possible to the delivery of new comics, to beat their competitors to the precious cargo (Beerbohm tells of dealers fighting in car parks to get hold of the most desirable new arrivals). With the sale-or-return system, some areas of the country did not receive a single copy of specific titles, a phenomenon known as ‘regional scarcity’.6 Even within the same region, comics reached retailers at different times because local distributors serviced the outlets they owned first, up to two weeks in advance of the competition.7 During the 1960s, fanzines, conventions, and shops dedicated to comics (Beerbohm estimates twenty-two stores in 1972, most of which only sold back issues) all provided ways in which fans could meet and share their passion and expertise.8 Fandom also provided a means of swapping or buying titles, as fans tried to acquire desirable old comics, but many wanted something more modest than a complete collection of Archie or Fantastic Four: they simply wanted to be able to buy an undamaged copy of their favourite comic every month, which couldn’t be guaranteed with sale-or-return. Fans were the foundation of the success of the direct market, a mode of distribution that began in 1973 when a New York comics dealer called Phil Seuling started buying issues from Marvel, DC, Warren, Harvey, and Archie outright. Seuling did not buy and sell comics in mixed bundles, but took specific orders from comics dealers and specialist stores three months in advance of publication. To get the mainstream companies to use his new system, Seuling sacrificed his entitlement to return unsold comics to the publisher, and the retailers to whom he sold these comics couldn’t return unsold stock to him either. In theory, because they were now able to place specific orders, comic shop owners could accurately predict what would be popular and sell everything they ordered, but even if they didn’t, they could keep unsold comics in the hope of selling them as back issues. Why would a retailer use Seuling’s service? He promised an exact number of exact titles, received sooner than from magazine distributors, and at greater discount – Seuling offered retailers 40 per cent discount off the cover price, whereas the newsstand distributors gave 30 per cent (he bought them at 60 per cent discount).9 Selling this way suited Marvel and DC as it reduced the financial hit they took when their comics went unsold. At first Seuling was the centre of the direct market, using his company Sea Gate to distribute comics to other retailers as well

7632_Williams.indd 109

28/06/22 16:55

110

the us graphic novel

as his own shops, but as Jean-Paul Gabilliet observes, Sea Gate’s ‘larger clients found the new system to be so efficient that they signed similar contracts with the large publishers themselves’.10 However, Maryland-based distributor Irjax Enterprises objected to the size of discount that Sea Gate exclusively enjoyed from the major publishers, as well as the unique transportation arrangements that Seuling had negotiated (Sea Gate’s orders were shipped directly from the printers to its customers, whereas other distributors had to move and store the comics they ordered themselves). In November 1978 Irjax filed an antitrust suit against Seuling and various publishers. A series of suits and counter-suits were filed, and though the original dispute ‘dissolved into a series of settlements, as one defendant after another reached private agreements with Irjax’, other disgruntled competitors sensed that Sea Gate could be successfully challenged.11 Colorado-based retailer and Sea Gate subdistributor Chuck Rozanski wrote an open letter to Marvel in May 1979 to protest that sales were being stifled by Seuling’s stranglehold. Over 100 recipients affirmed their support of Rozanski’s recommendations and Marvel redrafted its terms of trade as a result. Seuling no longer enjoyed preferential treatment and direct market distributors fiercely competed to offer significant discounts (in 1979 Glenwood Distribution offered 55 per cent off cover price for orders of 10,000 copies).12 The Big Two directed more and more of their energies into the direct market and the dedicated fans to whom it catered. Although comics historians now refer to it as the ‘direct market’, it was more commonly called the ‘fan market’ or ‘collectors’ market’ during the 1970s, and in July 1979 Marvel advertised in the fan press for an expert ‘in the Collector market [who was] thoroughly familiar with existing collector shop sales and operations’. This employee would liaise with specialist stores, design new products and promotions, and attendance ‘at all major Comic conventions will be required’. This specialist ‘sales manager’ role was filled by Mike Friedrich, whose importance to fan-oriented comics publishing is parsed below.13 The Big Two devised comics specifically for the new system, such as Marvel’s Dazzler, distributed in December 1980. According to a 1980 news report in The Comics Journal, the direct market generated $300,000 in revenue for Marvel in 1974, rising to $6 million in 1979, when it accounted for 20 per cent of the company’s overall sales (a 1981 source gives $3.5 million for 1979 sales).14 Following

7632_Williams.indd 110

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

111

the 1979 reform of the direct market, it grew in importance, and by the second half of the 1980s it had become the dominant way in which comics were distributed in the United States.

Independents’ Days The sale-or-return system deterred smaller publishers because they had to manufacture comics in enormous quantities, but the direct market allowed companies to publish in tiny print runs and still make a profit. Smaller print runs required less capital investment, so new companies – the ‘independents’ – could enter the market with modest financial backing. Independent comics were rarely massive commercial successes, but they didn’t have to be, since the independents didn’t usually expect colossal sales, just enough profit to reinvest in future titles. There were different varieties of independent publisher, but they tended to self-identify as devotees whose reason for entering publishing was their love of comics. Comics exclusively sold via specialist shops did not have to abide by the CCA’s prohibitions (though obscenity legislation still pertained), and the independents took advantage of this freedom to target older fans with comics that contained more sex and violence than newsstand comics and/or were printed in more expensive formats. Some of the most expensive products were dust-jacketed hardcovers with painted art, thick paper, and stitched bindings, and though the majority of independent comics were not produced to those standards, companies commonly avowed their superior production values and charged consumers more for the privilege. Fans did complain about higher-priced formats but, in the main, they wanted lavish books because they believed they lent respect to the medium. Stakeholders across the comics world felt that periodicals connoted disposable entertainment, so book publication was the best (or only) option if a creator was to make, in the words of DC editor Jack C. Harris in 1980, a ‘great literary work’. The introduction to newspaper strip artist Burne Hogarth’s graphic novel Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1976) asked, ‘How could an artist concentrate all his talents [. . .] on cheap paper [. . .] intended for one-time pleasure?’ Hogarth, it was claimed, was challenging this by producing ‘hardcover books of serious pictorial fiction’.15 This should not create a misleading picture of independent comics. To quote comics journalist Cat Yronwode, while some ‘flashy

7632_Williams.indd 111

28/06/22 16:55

112

the us graphic novel

alternative press graphic novels’ were published in the 1970s, the independents lacked the financial clout of the Big Two and their comics were nearly always published in black-and-white with colour covers.16 Nonetheless, the independents intrigued creators at Marvel and DC because they paid royalties, allowed unprecedented creative freedom, and creators retained ownership of their characters, none of which was customary in the mainstream. Unsurprisingly, star creators at the Big Two began working concurrently or exclusively for the independents. In the 1970s the majority of creators at Eclipse Enterprises previously (or still) worked at Marvel or DC, and they were responsible for some of the direct market’s earliest graphic novels: writer Don McGregor and artist Paul Gulacy’s Sabre (1978), Detectives, Inc: A Remembrance of Threatening Green (1980) by McGregor and artist Marshall Rogers, and Stewart the Rat (1980) by writer Steve Gerber, penciller Gene Colan, and inker Tom Palmer. Eclipse represents one type of independent company, the small publisher established by fans. During the 1970s its output was sporadic and marketing largely conducted via the conduits of organised fandom, such as promotional mailings, fanzines, and conventions.17 Another type of independent was the creator or creative team publishing their own work, as writer and artist Wendy Pini and plotter Richard Pini did, self-publishing their ElfQuest comic (volume 1: 1978–84) through their company WaRPGraphics. Like the comix artists, self-publishing creators were their own editors. This had been the idea behind witzend, the periodical founded in 1966 by industry veteran Wally Wood for creators to publish comics without editorial interference. Wood self-published his graphic novel The Wizard King as a black-and-white hardcover in 1978 and it was unusual to see a creator publishing their own work in such an expensive format. Some independents grew out of retail chains and allied distributors and Sea Gate was peripherally involved in comics production, publishing a full-colour, paperback edition of The Wizard King as The King of the World in 1978. As those examples indicate, the fantasy genre dominated independent comics publishing in the 1970s, and far from being autarkic zones of production there was some overlap between the independents, the mainstream, and the underground. Indeed, the idea that the independents occupied the space between underground comix and the Big Two manifested itself as ground-level comics.

7632_Williams.indd 112

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

113

The View from Ground Level Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach Productions was the first publisher labelled ‘ground level’. Friedrich edited the company’s flagship anthology Star*Reach (1974–9) and knew several of its creators (Jim Starlin and Howard Chaykin, for example) from his time as a writer at DC and Marvel. Star*Reach was launched at a oneday comics show in Berkeley and Friedrich envisaged his anthology attracting creators who wanted to produce fantasy and SF comics but felt restricted writing or drawing superheroes at the Big Two.18 He grabbed onto ‘ground level’ as a way of differentiating Star*Reach’s comics, writing in 1975: [W]e’ve been asked, quite seriously, ‘You’re not an underground, you’re not an overground, what are you?’ Well, artist Larry Todd has been quoted [. . .] as describing us as ‘ground-level comics’, a term which suits us fine.19 Star*Reach did not follow a regular production schedule, so contributors could spend as much time as they wanted reworking material until they were happy with it.20 Friedrich refused to make Star*Reach even a quarterly publication because, in words that reflect the spirit of the counterculture, ‘part of taking off on this independent trip is to avoid the dehabilitating [sic] effects of deadlines on the creative process’.21 In an interview published in 2013, Friedrich explains that he intended the narratives in Star*Reach as an alternative to Marvel’s ‘basically unending stories’.22 Where the history of the graphic novel is concerned, Star*Reach is significant because its serialised narratives sometimes stretched to over fifty pages. Comics journalist Bill Sherman’s essay ‘Sympathy for the Groundlevel’ (1979) offered a retrospective appraisal of Star*Reach Productions and Sherman felt the stories were most successful when ‘the greater length [gave] writers/artists room to explore character as well as idea’. He identified writer Dean Motter and artist Ken Steacy’s The Sacred and the Profane (1977–8) as Star*Reach’s most impressive achievement and other commentators hailed it as the fullest realisation of the graphic novel concept to date.23 A slow-burning meditation on religious belief and obsession, The Sacred and the Profane centres on the St Catherine, an interstellar missionary expedition launched towards

7632_Williams.indd 113

28/06/22 16:55

114

the us graphic novel

the Andromeda Galaxy in 2047 by the Catholic Church. The missionaries encounter an unknown object in outer space; through a series of blunders, they attack each other, and a swarm of automatons infiltrate the St Catherine and cut down the humans on board. The humans’ faith and composure are put under extreme pressure and pre-existing love affairs, jealousies, doubts, and over-confidence crystalize into violence, recrimination, and murder. In 1977 Friedrich wanted to move on to ‘graphic-story books’ containing ‘full-length’ narratives24 and he wrote in 1979 that the writer Steve Englehart was ‘scripting a graphic novel in 1980 for Star*Reach Productions’.25 This was going to be an original Batman graphic novel licensed to Star*Reach; DC retained the right to approve the script but otherwise gave Friedrich the freedom to edit the project as he saw fit.26 The project never reached fruition because Friedrich could not afford to print it in colour and the ‘creators refused to allow it to be done in black-and-white’ but that it was even mooted was a consequence of increasing property farming in the comics industry.27 In 1979 DC announced it was licensing ‘its properties, both characters and published material, to publishers active in the alternative comics field’28 and former editor and writer Roger Slifer founded Excalibur Enterprises to republish ‘DC’s finest and most respected comic book stories in a series of limited-edition, high-quality books, books designed specifically [. . .] for the hardcore comic book fan’.29 With writer Archie Goodwin and artist Walt Simonson’s Manhunter (1973–4), an award-winning back-up story from Detective Comics, Slifer tested whether fans would pay for a collected edition of material they had read before, plus backup features such as preliminary character designs. Excalibur went out of business after Manhunter: The Complete Saga! was released in 1979, but this republication practice became common. Another ground-level anthology was Hot Stuf’, first published in 1974 by Sal Quartuccio, which devoted a few issues to single long narratives. The final issue of Hot Stuf’ came out in 1978 and Star*Reach Productions effectively ceased production in 1979. For Sherman the discontinuation of these titles heralded the end of ground-level comics, and he mooted several explanations, such as the rising cost of paper and the ‘ascendance of Heavy Metal and its imitators’.30 Heavy Metal lured creators away from ground-level comics by offering the same creative autonomy but with added incentives, namely more readers and a glossy magazine format. Gray

7632_Williams.indd 114

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

115

Morrow’s sword-and-sorcery graphic novel Orion moved from Hot Stuf’ to Heavy Metal, where it was serialised in its entirety during 1978. Some contributors to Star*Reach and Hot Stuf’ pursued long-form comics at Warren Publishing, such as Alex Toth, whose Bravo for Adventure was serialised from June–August 1980 in The Rook, and the Warren magazine 1984 hosted Richard Corben’s Mutant World (June 1978–September 1979) and Frank Thorne’s Ghita of Alizarr (August 1979–August 1980).

Translating Franco-Belgian Albums into US Graphic Novels Heavy Metal was an SF and fantasy anthology magazine and its comics exhibited the kind of nudity, unsparing violence, and plotsuspending visual pyrotechnics that hadn’t been seen since the late 1960s underground. Indeed, the French magazine on which Heavy Metal was based – Métal Hurlant – was founded in 1975 by creators inspired by US underground comix. Heavy Metal was launched in 1977 under the editorship of Sean Kelly, a writer and editor at the satire magazine National Lampoon, whose publisher Leonard Mogel bought the rights to publish an American periodical based on translated material from Métal Hurlant.31 Heavy Metal was one of the biggest successes in US comics in the 1970s, selling around 270,000– 300,000 copies per issue to a readership primarily aged between eighteen and twenty-eight,32 and, just as Mogel had capitalised on the popularity of National Lampoon with a ‘mushrooming ancillary product line’ that included records, posters, and T-shirts, there was a stream of Heavy Metal-related products, including books.33 The ‘Heavy Metal presents’ series published by Heavy Metal (HM) Communications adopted the paperback album format used in France and Belgium.34 At first, these books republished comics in translation by European creators, a mixture of miscellaneous short story collections, themed short story sequences, and long narratives; the Heavy Metal magazine itself contained comics ranging in length from a single page to almost 100 pages. Writer-adaptor Lob and artist Georges Pichard’s Ulysses (1978), Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella: The Moon Child (1978), and Lob and Pichard’s Candice at Sea (1977) were all ‘Heavy Metal presents’ books containing a single, long narrative; with the exception of the latter, a parody of Victorian melodrama, HM Communications’ books were all SF and fantasy.

7632_Williams.indd 115

28/06/22 16:55

116

the us graphic novel

From 1977 onwards other companies produced albums of translated Franco-Belgian comics for the Anglophone market. These companies included established publishers (Grove Press) and newcomers (Flying Buttress Publications). The Canadian branch of French publisher Dargaud brought out an English-language version of writer Christian Godard and artist Julio Ribera’s album The Vagabond of Limbo: What is Reality, Papa? shortly after its serialisation in Heavy Metal (December 1980–April 1981). New York-based Dargaud International Publishing followed Vagabond of Limbo with a forty-six-page original English-language album entitled Kelly Green: The Go-Between (1982), a detective drama by writer Leonard Starr and artist Stan Drake, both long-standing creators of newspaper strips. The same shift from translated French comics to original English-language material occurred at Flying Buttress Publications (which later became NBM). HM Communications followed this path too, though Heavy Metal featured comics originally produced in English from the outset, underground comix with strong fantasy elements by creators such as Vaughn Bodē. In 1979 HM Communications brought out five books not previously published in French. Two had been serialised in Heavy Metal: British creator Angus McKie’s postmodern SF narrative So Beautiful and So Dangerous (serialised October 1978– June 1979) and writer Jan Strnad and artist Richard Corben’s fantasy adventure New Tales of the Arabian Nights (June 1978–July 1979). The third was The Swords of Heaven, The Flowers of Hell by comics artist Howard Chaykin, based on a concept by British fantasy author Michael Moorcock. The fourth and fifth were graphic novelisations of films released in 1979: Alien: The Illustrated Story, written by Archie Goodwin with art by Walter Simonson, and 1941: The Illustrated Story, adapted by Allan Asherman with art by Stephen Bissette and Rick Veitch. Those last two were distributed by Simon and Schuster, evidencing the deals that HM Communications struck with trade presses. HM Communications’ relationship with Simon and Schuster started in 1978 when the latter distributed the ‘graphic story version’ of Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 novel More than Human, adapted by writer Doug Moench and artist Alex Nino. The result of multiple collaborations, More than Human was published by HM Communications and produced by Byron Preiss Visual Publications. HM Communications did not pursue original English-language albums for much longer, but Heavy Metal triggered a response from

7632_Williams.indd 116

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

117

the Big Two. Marvel’s Epic Illustrated (1980–6) was launched in spring 1980, a glossy magazine tagged as ‘a new experience in adult fantasy and science-fiction adventure’ on the cover. Together with Marvel’s Epic publishing imprint it looked very much like the company’s attempt to mimic Heavy Metal’s success. This was evident in Epic Illustrated’s materiality, age of intended reader, and new relations of production where writers and artists retained ownership of their creations,35 and in the 1980s the Big Two started lines of graphic novels with physical dimensions akin to European-style albums.

Crisis in the Underground After peaking in 1972, when 233 new comix titles were published, output dropped to 121 new titles in 1974.36 Retail was an obvious issue: headshop managers had never been reliable people with whom to do business and in 1973 they became even more reluctant to buy new comix. This was partly because so many new titles came out in 1972: the market was glutted and headshops wanted to shift existing stock before buying more. Headshop managers were also responding to a 1973 Supreme Court decision that ceded definitions of obscenity to local communities; comix dealers had been arrested for obscenity before and retailers were left more vulnerable to prosecution by this ruling.37 The War on Drugs was a further source of concern, since President Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973 and headshops were in the frontline. Headshop owners defended the sale of rolling papers, bongs, and hookahs on the grounds they were intended for legal tobacco use, but this argument held little sway when the headshops also sold comix depicting the same products being used to smoke marijuana. Headshops were inclined to drop the comix and concentrate on more profitable drug-related paraphernalia.38 Retail opportunities were dwindling just as paper became scarcer and more expensive, and consumer spending in the United States more broadly was straitened by rocketing inflation. Comix publishers rethought their business model and printed fewer comix titles in smaller print runs, concentrating on bankable creators such as Crumb and Shelton. Publishers also diversified their range of products; Last Gasp Eco-Funnies led this development and had sold board games (the Dealer McDope Dealing Game) and activity books (Kids’ Liberation Coloring Book) since the early 1970s.39 By

7632_Williams.indd 117

28/06/22 16:55

118

the us graphic novel

1982 Last Gasp only published twelve comix titles a year but it also sold ‘several dozen different T shirts, postcards, Zippy calendars, buttons and stationery’.40 The diversification effort included paperback reprint collections. Compared to headshops, alternative bookstores were more reliable retailers, and during 1973–5 Rip Off Press, Apex, Bijou Publishing Empire, and Last Gasp Eco-Funnies all published softcover anthologies. Later in the decade, London-based Hassle Free Press published a women’s comix collection. For Rip Off Press this was more than a passing trend and it published book collections every year (except 1975) between 1973 and 1980. These anthologies regularly featured Shelton’s creations the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (even Fat Freddy’s Cat got his own book) as well as Sturgeon’s The New Adventures of Jesus (1979). Though a composite of shorter comix, the episodes strung together in New Adventures of Jesus read as an overarching story of the Messiah, first in the Holy Land and then navigating mid-century American life. Sturgeon’s book was the third in The Best of the Rip Off Press series and these anthologies became more unified with each iteration. The apotheosis of this reproductive logic was Shelton’s Wonder Wart-Hog and the Nurds of November (1980), which featured the black-and-red stripes that branded the Best of books. A narrative arc is sustained by stringing together pre-published chapters interspersed with new episodes, together with an original introduction: across Nurds of November, the protagonist searches for a new job, culminating in running for US President. The new material attempted to suture the gaps in coherence between reprinted chapters, and, though not everyone agreed with the ‘Cartoon Novel’ label on the cover,41 The Comics Journal hailed Nurds of November as a new ‘graphic novel’.42 As we saw in Chapter 3, a single periodical such as Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary might contain a long, self-contained narrative, and this continued in comix such as Trina Robbins’s thirty-two-page Scarlett Pilgrim (November 1977) and Sharon Rudahl’s thirty-four-page dystopian vision Adventures of Crystal Night (November 1980). One of the most ambitious was Lee Marrs’s The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, running over 100 pages, though serialisation was only completed by Star*Reach Productions. As such, it shows how the independents could provide a more stable place for underground graphic novelists to ply their trade. Pudge, Girl Blimp is the tale of

7632_Williams.indd 118

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

119

one woman’s encounters with San Francisco’s counterculture as she quests to lose her virginity and enjoy a satisfactory orgasm. The first issue came out with Last Gasp in 1973, which was then reprinted by Star*Reach in 1974 together with two new issues (1976–7) and a revised first issue (1978). Friedrich’s company wasn’t just where long comix narrative could be brought to fruition, it was also where underground creators could write and draw material in commercial genres that didn’t fit neatly alongside the psychedelia, political commentary, and doper comedy dominating the underground. Marrs’s SF serial Stark’s Quest (1977–9) was one such example from Star*Reach, at sixty-two pages the second-longest narrative printed in the magazine. Some underground graphic novels didn’t fit into the circuits of comix or ground-level publishing. George Metzger’s Beyond Time and Again (1976) is set in the future and starts when the magician Seth of Comstock sets out to discover whether the spells of the Ancients still exist. It originally appeared from 1967–72 in various underground publications and its serial origin is manifested in the highly linear plot, the retelling of the story so far on page 14, and the ending of each chapter offering a threat to be resolved or an enigma to be revealed. Beyond Time and Again was first advertised in 1973 and meant to be published by the Graphic Story Press established by Richard Kyle and Fred Patten, but by 1976 they were pursuing separate projects and Beyond Time and Again was published by Kyle & Wheary. Within hours of printing the book was rushed from the bindery to the San Diego Comics Convention; many 1970s graphic novels were published to coincide with big conventions because of the large number of potential customers, from individual purchasers to distributors and retailers. Kyle recollects, ‘Between advance sales and wholesale purchases by [dealers] Bud Plant and Bob Sidebottom at the convention we had our money back that first day.’ But Kyle’s rationale was not to make money: ‘we’d published the book solely because we believed in it.’43 Looking at the 1973 advert, that belief in the book tilted into grandiosity, claiming ‘George Metzger’s almost legendary BEYOND TIME AND AGAIN becomes America’s first graphic novel [and] is destined to become one of the most important books in any medium in the 1970’s’44 (the book did sport ‘graphic novel’ on its title page but was hardly the first US graphic novel).45 Reviews were only slightly less bombastic and journalist David Miles said it was the ‘first true

7632_Williams.indd 119

28/06/22 16:55

120

the us graphic novel

graphic novel in America – and one of the most important books of the last twenty years’.46 Miles was writing in Cobblestone, a free arts newspaper started in 1975 by Phil Yeh, who – like Kyle and Metzger – was based in the Long Beach area of California. Cobblestone was produced by Yeh’s publishing company Fragments West and included strips featuring Yeh’s character Cazco, a diminutive free thinker who crosses between the world we live in and a fairytale realm of fantastical beasts and ethereal, itinerant characters. Cazco was the eponymous protagonist of Fragments West’s first periodical comic in 1976 and he resurfaced in the long comics narratives that Fragments West published in paperback form, starting with Yeh’s Even Cazco Gets the Blues (1977). Yeh called his contemporary fables ‘graphic novels’ and in the fifty-eight-page Godiva: A Non-Sexist Adult Fantasy (1979) and eighty-page Cazco in China (1980), Yeh warned against the dangers of racism, environmental damage, and commercialism.47

Revisionist History in the Underground Graphic Novel One of the graphic novel genres from the 1970s that has proven particularly enduring, both as a subject of study and a genre in which creators produce powerful and award-winning work, is history, especially left-wing revisionist history. Jaxon wrote and drew a plethora of long-form comics about Texan history, exploring the lives of people marginalised by existing celebratory accounts that emphasised the heroism of white English-speaking settlers. Instead, Jaxon narrated the nineteenth-century lives of Native Americans and Mexican Americans. He had produced shorter revisionist history comix such as ‘Nits Make Lice’ (1976), but his first extended narrative was Comanche Moon, a biography of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah Parker, leader of the Comanche nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Serialised 1977–8, the first book edition of Comanche Moon in 1979 stressed the extensive research that Jaxon conducted, reproducing the photographs used for reference and detailing, via maps, the changing geopolitical situation in Texas. Jaxon hoped this alternative way of envisaging history would be read in schools and inform the public memory of the region’s history and he tried to get Comanche Moon stocked at historic tourist attractions.48 Jaxon followed Comanche Moon with Los Tejanos (1979–80; first book edition 1982), a graphic novel

7632_Williams.indd 120

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

121

detailing Juan Seguin’s contribution to Texan independence and the betrayal of the Mexican Texans who fought for the republic. He continued to create histories of the Lone Star State, graphic and otherwise, until his death in 2006. The Comanche Moon book was a coproduction between Last Gasp and Rip Off Press and the latter also published a paperback edition of Gilbert Shelton and Ted Richards’s (with Gary Hallgren and Willy Murphy) forty-eight-page Give Me Liberty: A Revised History of the American Revolution (1976). This was an account of the War of Independence from a pacifist perspective released for the nation’s bicentennial celebrations, a commercially opportune time to release a comic about the Revolution. Other underground titles mocked the paratexts of mainstream comics with subversive versions of cut-out toys, advertisements, and public information features, but the multiple-choice quiz on the back cover of Give Me Liberty seems sincere (whether readers who sent in their answers with 25¢ received a diploma I can’t say). Another way in which Give Me Liberty ameliorated the taboo-busting impulse of the underground was by $!*#@ing out profane language, rendering the book safe for young readers. A similar example of a revisionist history that adopted the underground’s iconoclasm and self-consciousness – but not the gratuitous sex and violence – is Rip Off’s The Cartoon History of the Universe (serialised 1978–92, first book edition 1980) by Larry Gonick. Cartoon History of the Universe told the story of life since the Big Bang, pausing at key moments to elaborate scientific theories such as the evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction. In a classic comix move, Gonick used a self-deprecating caricature of himself to personify the ‘reciter’, the generator of the ‘recitative’ (the verbal narration or ‘voice-over’); in comics theory, the term with which ‘reciter’ is paired is ‘monstrator’, that which narrates the ‘monstration’ (the image track).49 Mixing essay and historical storytelling, Gonick was influenced by Mexican cartoonist Rius (Eduardo del Rio), whose Marx for Beginners was officially published in the United States by Pantheon in 1976 and has been a fixture of campus bookstores ever since.50 An earlier text by Rius was popular with students too: Cuba for Beginners, available since the start of the 1970s in unofficial translations and as an official edition from Pathfinder Press, a publishing house associated with the Socialist Workers Party and home to the writings of Malcolm X and Fidel Castro. The sixty-four-page

7632_Williams.indd 121

28/06/22 16:55

122

the us graphic novel

Underhanded History of the USA (1973) by Nick Thorkelson and Jim O’Brien bears comparison to Rius’s work in terms of theme (left-wing revisionist critique of US imperialism) and form (looseline style, appropriated photographs and logos, swiped images from other comics). Underhanded History constituted the May–June 1973 issue of Radical America magazine, the bimonthly journal associated with the SDS and founded by Paul Buhle. Starting with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so-called New World, Thorkelson and O’Brien countered triumphalist histories of American conquest and the birth of democracy (represented in the text by Professor Divine’s authorised version of events) with the repressed history of groups who have suffered at the hands of the United States. These counter-narratives come from an unnamed horse, a character performing a dual symbolic role as the voice of anonymous, unrewarded labour (horses have been ‘supporting Western civilization [. . .] for several centuries’) and the proverbial source of direct truth (straight from ‘the horse’s mouth’).51 This tradition of the graphic novel continues up to the present in writer Ilan Stevens and artist Lalo Alcaraz’s Latino USA (2000; rev. ed. 2012) and A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States (2014). Buhle himself has collaborated on a slew of revisionist graphic histories, recently co-editing (with Lawrence Ware) Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson (2020) by Sharon Rudahl. Founder member of the Wimmen’s Comix Collective, Rudahl is a good example of a creator producing politicized comix throughout her career, since her art first appeared in the form of political cartoons in underground newspapers such as Take Over and San Francisco Good Times.52

Blockbuster Publishing in the Era of Conglomeration If the idea of a respectable publishing house releasing left-wing essay comix sounds weird, trade presses experimented with all kinds of books in the 1970s to see if a bestseller would emerge, graphic novels included: More than Human: The Graphic Story Version (1978), 1941: The Illustrated Story (1979), and Alien: The Illustrated Story (1979) were all published or distributed by Simon and Schuster (or its imprints), as was Jack Katz’s The First Kingdom (1978) and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Silver Surfer (1978); Alfred A. Knopf published Jules Feiffer’s Tantrum (1979); Baronet Publishing were

7632_Williams.indd 122

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

123

responsible for Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978) and The Stars My Destination (1979), a text-heavy adaptation of Alfred Bester’s SF novel illustrated by Howard Chaykin using Byron Preiss’s page layouts. Burne Hogarth produced two adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fiction, Tarzan of the Apes (1972) and Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1976), both from Watson-Guptill Publications, known for their coffee-table art books. Why did these trade press graphic novels appear in the late 1970s? The answer lies in the restructuring of US publishing. Starting in 1960, the book trade entered a period of mergers and acquisitions as presses were bought up ‘by huge conglomerates involved in activities other than publishing’.53 This brought unprecedented investment, but the corporate owners also wanted to see publishers run along the same lines as other businesses, notably looking to maximise profit on new products as quickly as possible. Economic restructuring was also forced by the decline of independent bookshops and the growth of chains such as B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. These chains tried to sell stock quickly and at high volume. Computerised sales tracking meant that information about what was selling well in one store could be immediately communicated to others, so chains could make fast decisions at a national level about which stock to prioritise and which slow-selling books should be withdrawn from the shelves. Publishers saturated the market with new titles in the hope that one or two blockbuster successes would outweigh poor performances elsewhere (45 per cent of new releases did not sell a single copy six months after publication).54 The novelty value of long comics narratives made them a tantalising prospect for trade presses desperate for attention-grabbing new books. As indicated above, Simon and Schuster were disproportionately involved in graphic novel publishing in the 1970s. Headed by Richard ‘Dick’ Snyder, who praised the book chains for making publishing less elitist, Simon and Schuster claimed to offer the highest advances in the industry as it chased the next blockbuster. ‘Synergy’ (developing properties in conjunction with film and television studios) was another buzzword from the era, and Snyder boasted that Simon and Schuster generated ‘the software of the television and movie media’. Like other publishers, the company established offices in California to get ‘in on the ground floor of movie tieins’. Selling movie rights to popular novels was highly lucrative for publishers, both in terms of initial licensing fees and regenerating

7632_Williams.indd 123

28/06/22 16:55

124

the us graphic novel

book sales when adaptations were released.55 As can be seen in the graphic novels Simon and Schuster published or distributed, none of its projects were generated in-house from entirely new material, they were either adaptations or used pre-existing characters under licence. The publisher began a line of Marvel reprint editions in 1974 and in 1979–80 released three book collections of DC’s war, romance, and SF comics. Lee and Kirby’s Silver Surfer, an original graphic novel, seems to be the result of synergy between Simon and Schuster, Marvel, and the film industry. Since the early 1970s, there had been rumours of a film featuring the Silver Surfer character from Fantastic Four,56 and in 1979 the fan press announced that a motion picture co-funded by L-K Productions and Marvel Comics Group would begin production in 1980.57 The Lee-scripted Silver Surfer film was going to adapt the 1978 graphic novel, and, given the book’s length and self-contained narrative, it is reasonable to think Lee had this endpoint in mind while writing it. Having ‘next to nothing to do with the original comics’,58 one reviewer noted that the graphic novel’s plot ‘may keep the more rabid continuity freaks (of which I’m one) from fully enjoying the book’.59 This did not stop the graphic novel’s commercial success, reportedly selling out its first print run of 60,000 copies.60 No film came to pass, but the scent of Hollywood was in the air as advertisements called it ‘a movie-length epic’61 and Kirby referred to it as ‘the full-length feature presentation hardcover SILVER SURFER book’.62 Licensing deals were orchestrated by book ‘packagers’, a new type of literary agent moving into publishing from Hollywood or legal practice. Packagers did more than negotiate contracts, they generated ideas for authors while seeking out multiple licensing agreements; the most vigorous book packagers had a novel’s licensing rights finalised before the first draft was finished.63 Over the course of his career Byron Preiss packaged an eclectic variety of books, but in the 1970s his company Byron Preiss Visual Publications (BPVP) specialised in bringing comics creators together on projects that Preiss devised or where he had purchased the rights to adapt existing prose fiction. Preiss delivered those projects to publishing houses as finished packages that could go straight to the printers, and publishers paid for these packages outright or entered into profit-sharing agreements with BPVP. During 1976–9 BPVP was responsible for nine comics-related books, all of which tessellated with the prominence of SF, fantasy,

7632_Williams.indd 124

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

125

and detective fiction in the company’s output more broadly (the focus on genres associated with interwar pulp fiction may have been an attempt to capitalise on the 1970s nostalgia boom). The first four books were part of the series Fiction Illustrated, or as the promotional tagline had it, ‘America’s First Adult Graphic Novel Revue’.64 Preiss wrote three of the titles: hard-boiled crime fiction parody Schlomo Raven (1976), with art by Tom Sutton; Star Trek homage Starfawn (1976), in collaboration with artist Stephen Fabian; and, with Ralph Reese, Son of Sherlock Holmes, a globetrotting detective story eventually published in January 1977. The latter was meant to be the third release from Fiction Illustrated but, as Son of Sherlock Holmes was progressing slowly, Preiss asked James Steranko to produce a book to fill the gap in the schedule.65 That book was Chandler: Red Tide (1976), the cover of which proclaimed it was a ‘Visual Novel’, which was also how Steranko referred to it.66 Son of Sherlock Holmes carried the same label and ‘visual novel’ became closely associated with Preiss’s productions. After Fiction Illustrated came five more books from BPVP: Moench and Nino’s More than Human: The Graphic Story Version (1978); Empire (1978), written by Samuel R. Delany and illustrated by Chaykin; Preiss and Chaykin’s The Stars My Destination (1979); and two 1978 collections of short stories adapted from notable SF authors, The Illustrated Roger Zelazny and The Illustrated Harlan Ellison. In order to get these titles into bookstores – which, to Preiss’s mind, meant making them as accessible as possible to people who did not usually read comics – various comics conventions were eliminated or attenuated, such as speech balloons and handwritten lettering. As Delany put it, Preiss recoiled from speech balloons because they ‘made things look too comicy’.67 BPVP’s books featured large chunks of writing, so much so that some of them resembled illustrated prose novels. Preiss justified this in 1977, when he told convention-goers (in the words of one observer) that ‘separate, type-set text was necessary for commercial reasons, namely to impress publishers and get a foot in the door’.68 The most extreme instance of BPVP’s prose-heavy approach was Steranko’s Chandler (Figure 4.1), which comics scholar R. C. Harvey argues should not be considered a ‘graphic novel’ because ‘the pace of the story is controlled by the prose that runs in uniform columns under the pictures’. The art has the function of setting the mood but adds ‘no new information to the story’.69 This was deliberate on Steranko’s

7632_Williams.indd 125

28/06/22 16:55

126

the us graphic novel

Figure 4.1  Steranko, Chandler: Red Tide (New York: Pyramid, 1976), p. 112. Entire contents © 1976 Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc., Chandler character © James Steranko.

7632_Williams.indd 126

28/06/22 16:55



declaration of independents: 1973–9

127

behalf, an attempt to reach ‘adult’ readers by exploiting a ‘new format’, but it earned BPVP the enmity of many commentators in the comics world who questioned whether the company was truly interested in developing the medium of comics.70 Empire was meant to appeal to comics fans and bookstore audiences alike. Award-winning SF author Delany had written an action-packed script in which a band of rebels try to overthrow the draconian Kūndūke Empire that controls the universe; over the course of the book, the rebels piece together the fragments of a mysterious technology that collapses the Kūndūke’s information system at the narrative’s climax, drawing on Delany’s interest in catastrophe theory. Chaykin agreed to provide the multimedia art for Empire because he was an old friend of Preiss’s; as the first penciller on the Marvel comic based on Star Wars (1977), when that series began selling in the millions, it seemed a good augur for Chaykin’s existing association with Empire. Empire was promoted to comics fans in several ways: an extract was published in Heavy Metal and Chaykin previewed the art (which was well received) at conventions.71 Empire was published in hardcover and softback editions by Berkley Windhover, and editor David Hartwell was so confident that this ‘novel in graphic story form’ would be a hit, that the print run was planned for 50,000 copies.72 In November 1976 Preiss announced Empire would be ‘what people have been asking for [and] it’s in the comic medium’,73 and the following year he asked fans whether they wanted Empire to feature speech balloons, implying he was aware of the anger at their absence in his earlier books.74 Empire looked more like a comic than any other BPVP release, but Preiss had not quite embraced the form’s common conventions, eschewing balloons filled with handwritten speech and preferring instead dialogue and captions set in type. More significant, though, was the ‘floating-axis’ design that Preiss imposed: almost every page of Empire was divided into three uniform vertical or horizontal panels (Figure 4.2). This was only a template and the book had many polyptychs, single- and double-page spreads, as well as pages where the three panels were subdivided or amalgamated. Delany thought ‘Byron’s insistence on the verticalhorizontal thing was a mistake’, as was the abandonment of speech balloons, since they restricted the visual ‘language’ of comics. The writer surmised that Preiss was attracted to the floating-axis design because of a fallacious ‘commercial’ logic that assumed ‘the simpler

7632_Williams.indd 127

28/06/22 16:55

128

the us graphic novel

Figure 4.2  Samuel R. Delany, writer, and Howard V. Chaykin, artist, Empire (New York: Berkley Windhover, 1978), p. 7. © 1978 Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

7632_Williams.indd 128

28/06/22 16:56



declaration of independents: 1973–9

129

the panel layout, the more [copies will] sell’. For Delany, this was ‘ass-backwards [. . .] thinking’, the page design wasn’t simple, it was just ‘affected’, and the final book was damaged by Preiss’s sloppy editing, which saw panels being unnecessarily trimmed, pages incorrectly transposed, and dialogue confusingly rewritten.75 Despite editing Empire based on assumptions about what noncomics readers wanted to buy, Preiss also envisaged the direct market as a source of revenue; this can be seen in the marketing surrounding the book. Empire represented the convergence of several commodities aimed at comics fans, most obviously the book-format graphic novel, but also the print portfolio. Numbered, limited-edition portfolios of prints proliferated in the 1970s, usually by popular comics artists and commercial illustrators (Richard Corben and Frank Frazetta both drew print portfolios) in the SF, horror, and fantasy genres. A four-print set called Starspawn (1977) by mainstream comics artist Mike Nasser was advertised as ‘a novel told in images’.76 In 1978 Steve Schanes of distributor and retailer Pacific Comics told The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom that the market for ‘limited portfolios of prints’ and $12 posters was ‘thriving’.77 BPVP sold a $10 set of six prints based on the 3-D art that Steranko contributed to The Illustrated Harlan Ellison in a limited edition of 1,500.78 A BPVP advertisement described Empire as Chaykin in poster and print mode: ‘A graphic novel; a science fiction novel; an incredible full-color adventure across six worlds. Over 100 pages of neverbefore-seen full-color art. Chaykin in fantastic posters, panels and continuity art.’79 The somewhat mangled syntax positions Empire as a collection of both ‘poster’ art (presumably a synonym for single- and double-page spreads) and ‘panels’ assembled to enunciate a continuous narrative. Numbering the full-colour pages that readers got for their money was a common method of advertising graphic novels in the late 1970s and one retailer’s catalogue even promoted Empire by counting individual panels (‘first all-color visual novel published in America! [. . .] 300 illustrations, 9x12’).80 Turning graphic novels into a quantifiable number of separate illustrations looks like an attempt to outbid the portfolios, positioning books as a more financially efficient way of owning larger pieces of comics art, since at $9.95 Empire was cheaper than most sets of prints. Empire had a mixed reception and the creators who worked on the book expressed their discontent with the production process and the finished text. Preiss edited Empire to maximise its appeal

7632_Williams.indd 129

28/06/22 16:56

130

the us graphic novel

to multiple constituencies of readers, whether they were encountering it in comic shops or bookstores, but the final product was not a commercial triumph and BPVP published no more graphic novels after the end of the 1970s.

Conclusion At the start of the decade the future of the mainstream comics industry looked bleak and by 1973–4 the underground was similarly put on notice. Comics and comix were affected by the rising cost of newsprint and both were hamstrung by distribution systems and retail outlets that weren’t fit for purpose. Books of comics were mooted as a way out of this economic malaise and maverick industry professionals and underground cartoonists tried their hands at graphic novels. In the context of conglomeration, synergy, and book packaging, the conditions were ripe for trade presses to publish these experiments, though the emphasis was on exploiting properties or creators already recognisable with readers outside comics fandom. The direct market was never conceived as the solution to the unprofitability of sale-or-return, nor was it meant to address fans’ frustrations at getting hold of their favourite comics, and neither was it intended to open up the comics marketplace to new companies. Yet it did all those things. When Seuling announced his service early in 1974 it was framed as a means of selling comics to ‘interested bookstores’, but the direct market enabled the growth of specialist comic shops as locations for fans to congregate with likeminded peers.81 The new method of distribution corralled a roughbut-tangible audience for long-form comics and in the 1980s more graphic novels would be published than ever before.

Notes  1. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p. 30.  2. Robert L. Beerbohm, ‘Secret Origins of the Direct Market, Part One: “Affidavit Returns” – The Scourge of Distribution’, Comic Book Artist 6 (Fall 1999): p. 81.  3. Ibid. p. 82.  4. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, rev. edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 258, 261.

7632_Williams.indd 130

28/06/22 16:56



declaration of independents: 1973–9

131

 5. Beerbohm, ‘Direct Market, Part One’, pp. 84–5, 88.  6. Robert L. Beerbohm, ‘Secret Origins of the Direct Market, Part Two: Phil Seuling and the Undergrounds Emerge’, Comic Book Artist 7 (February 2000): p. 125.  7. Michael Dean, ‘Fine Young Cannibals: How Phil Seuling and a Generation of Teenage Entrepreneurs Created the Direct Market and Changed the Face of Comics’, The Comics Journal 277 (July 2006): p. 50.  8. Beerbohm, ‘Direct Market, Part Two’, p. 119.  9. Dean, ‘Fine Young Cannibals’, p. 51; Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 143–4. 10. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, pp. 144–5. 11. Dean, ‘Fine Young Cannibals’, pp. 51–3. 12. The information in this paragraph is synthesised from Dean, ‘Fine Young Cannibals’, pp. 50–3; Keith Dallas, ‘1978: DC’s Explosive Implosion’, in Jason Sacks, ed., American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1970s, 1970–1979 (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2014), p. 242; Jason Sacks, ‘1979: Post-Implosion Malaise’, in Sacks, American Comic Book Chronicles, pp. 267–8; Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz, The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture, 2nd edn. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 288–90. 13. Advert for Sales Manager at Marvel, The Comic Reader 171 (July 1979): p. 56. 14. ‘Newswatch’, The Comics Journal 54 (March 1980): p. 9; Kim Thompson, ‘Newswatch’, The Comics Journal 64 (June 1981): p. 7. 15. Jack C. Harris, Interview with Margaret O’Connell, The Comics Journal 55 (April 1980): p. 39; Walter James Miller, ‘Burne Hogarth and the Art of Pictorial Fiction’, in Burne Hogarth, Jungle Tales of Tarzan (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1976), p. 28. A summary of these views can be found in Paul Williams, Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), pp. 124–5. 16. Cat Yronwode, ‘Fit to Print’, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 375 (23 January 1981): p. 30. 17. Williams, Dreaming the Graphic Novel, pp. 63–4. 18. Mike Friedrich, Interview by Richard Arndt, in Richard Arndt, ed., Star*Reach Companion (Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2013), pp. 21–5. 19. Mike Friedrich, Editorial, Star*Reach 3 (September 1975): p. [2]. 20. Mike Vosburg, Interview by Richard Arndt, in Arndt, Star*Reach Companion, p. 75.

7632_Williams.indd 131

28/06/22 16:56

132

the us graphic novel

21. Friedrich, Editorial, September 1975, p. [2]. 22. Friedrich, Interview by R. Arndt, p. 21. 23. Bill Sherman, ‘Sympathy for the Groundlevel’, The Comics Journal 51 (November 1979): pp. 73–5. See also L. Bruce Sapp, ‘FutureView’, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 255 (6 October 1978): p. 42; Archie Goodwin, ‘Stalking the Great Graphic Dream’, Epic Illustrated 4 (Winter 1980): p. 40. 24. Mike Friedrich, Editorial, Star*Reach 10 (September 1977): p. [2]. 25. ‘Steve Englehart’, in Mike Friedrich, ed., Star*Reach Greatest Hits (Berkeley: Star*Reach Productions, 1979), p. [120]. 26. ‘Newswatch’, The Comics Journal 50 (October 1979): p. 13. 27. Friedrich, Interview by R. Arndt, p. 36. 28. ‘Newswatch’, October 1979, p. 13. 29. This advert was placed in The Comics Journal 54 (March 1980): p. 26 and The Comic Reader 178 (March 1980): p. 14. 30. Sherman, ‘Sympathy for the Groundlevel’, pp. 70–5. 31. Dave Dykema, ‘1977: A Renewed Hope’, in Sacks, American Comic Book Chronicles, p. 229; Kim Thompson, ‘Philippe Druillet: A Look at Comics’ Most Extraordinary Visionary’, The Comics Journal 57 (Summer 1980): p. 116; Ellin Stein, That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream (New York: Norton, 2013), pp. 274–7. 32. Julie Simmons and John Workman, Interview by Gary Groth, The Comics Journal 49 (September 1979): p. 46. 33. Stein, That’s Not Funny, pp. 94–5. 34. Pascal Lefèvre, ‘The Importance of Being “Published”: A Comparative Study of Different Comics Formats’, in Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds, Comics & Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press–University of Copenhagen, 2000), pp. 92–3, 100. 35. Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 72. 36. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, pp. 81–2. 37. James Danky and Denis Kitchen, ‘Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix, 1963–90’, in James Danky and Denis Kitchen, ed., Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix (New York: Abrams ComicArts / Chazen Museum of Art, 2009), p. 19. 38. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, pp. 81–2. 39. Mark James Estren, A History of Underground Comics (Berkeley: Ronin, 1993), p. 253. 40. Ron Turner, ‘The Art Form that Wouldn’t Die: Never Before Have So Few Belabored So Long for So Little’, in Jay Kennedy, ed., The

7632_Williams.indd 132

28/06/22 16:56



declaration of independents: 1973–9

133

Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide (Cambridge, MA: Boatner Norton, 1982), p. 34. 41. Bill Sherman, ‘Whole Hog’, The Comics Journal 63 (Spring 1981): p. 296. 42. ‘Newswatch’, The Comics Journal 56 (May 1980): p. 16. 43. Richard Kyle, Letter, Comic Book Artist 8 (May 2000): p. 13. 44. Advert for Beyond Time and Again, Wonderworld 3.2 (November 1973): back cover. 45. George Metzger, Beyond Time and Again (Huntington Beach: Kyle & Wheary, 1976), p. [5]. 46. David L. Miles, ‘Geo. Metzger: “Beyond Time” . . .Again!’, Cobblestone (December–January 1976–7): p. 23. 47. Advert for Fragments West, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 230 (14 April 1978): p. 73; advert for Ajanéh: The Wizard was a Woman, Comix World 93 (15 April 1978): p. [2]. 48. Williams, Dreaming the Graphic Novel, pp. 77–8. 49. Thierry Groensteen, Comics and Narration, trans. Ann Miller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), pp. 84–8; italics removed. 50. Robert S. Petersen, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger-ABC-CLIO, 2011), p. 224. 51. Nick Thorkelson and Jim O’Brien, Underhanded History of the USA, in Radical America 7.3 (May–June 1973): p. [2]. 52. Sharon Rudahl, Interview by Henry Chamberlain, Comics Grinder, 21 July 2021, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 53. Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 144–5. 54. This is a synthesis of three contemporary accounts and two more recent studies: from the early 1980s, Thomas Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (New York: Basic Books, 1982), and Leonard Shatzkin, In Cold Type: Overcoming the Book Crisis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982); more recently, see Kilgour, Evolution of the Book and John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 55. See Whiteside, Blockbuster Complex, pp. 3, 19, 52–7, 65, 75, 115–20, 188. 56. ‘Et Al’, The Comic Reader 91 (November 1972): p. 14.

7632_Williams.indd 133

28/06/22 16:56

134

the us graphic novel

57. ‘Media Review’, The Comic Reader 174 (November 1979): p. 5. 58. ‘Newswatch’, The Comics Journal 51 (November 1979): p. 10; ‘Marvel News’, The Comic Reader 183 (September 1980): p. 5. 59. ‘The Silver Surfer Soars Again’, Review of The Silver Surfer, The Comics Journal 44 (February 1979): p. 27. See also Greg Huneryager, ‘“Doomsday”: Nothing Really Novel’, Review of The Fantastic Four: DOOMSDAY, The Comics Journal 50 (October 1979): p. 39. 60. ‘Comixscene’, Mediascene 32 (July–August 1978): p. 32. 61. Advert for The Silver Surfer, Mediascene 31 (May–June 1978): p. 34; advert for Supergraphics, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 240 (23 June 1978): p. 31. 62. Qtd in David Anthony Kraft, ‘Department of inFOOMation’, Foom 17 (March 1977): p. 25; italics added. 63. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, anniversary edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 88; Whiteside, Blockbuster Complex, pp. 66–79, 188–9. 64. This first appears on the back cover of Byron Preiss, writer and editor, and Stephen Fabian, illustrations, Starfawn (New York: Pyramid, 1976). 65. James Steranko, Interview by Greg Huneryager, The Comic Reader 173 (October 1979): p. 18. 66. James Steranko qtd in Martin L. Greim, ‘Crusader Comments’, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 180 (29 April 1977): p. 18. 67. Samuel Delany, ‘Refractions of Empire: The Comics Journal Interview’, part two, p. 29, in Box 50, File 6, Samuel R. Delany Papers, the Howard Gotlieb Memorial Library, Boston University, Boston, MA. 68. Christopher Melchert, ‘Onde de Choc’, CAPA-alpha 155 (September 1977): p. [97] [1st binding]. See also Harvey Kurtzman with Michael Barrier, From Aargh! To Zap! Harvey Kurtzman’s Visual History of the Comics (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991), p. 75. 69. Robert C. Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 109. 70. Steranko qtd in Greim, ‘Crusader Comments’, p. 18; James Steranko, Interview by George Olshevsky, Collector’s Dream 1.5 (Summer 1978): p. 86. 71. Jeff Gelb, Letter, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 255 (6 October 1978): pp. 8–9; Murray Bishoff, ‘A Report on the Chicago Comic Convention’, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 247 (11 August 1978): p. 50. 72. ‘Empire’, Mediascene 29 (January–February 1978): pp. 28–9. 73. ‘Visual Publications’, The Comic Reader 137 (November 1976): p. 9. 74. Melchert, ‘Onde de Choc’, p. [97] [1st binding].

7632_Williams.indd 134

28/06/22 16:56



declaration of independents: 1973–9

135

75. Samuel R. Delany, Interview, The Comics Journal 48 (Summer 1979): pp. 41–3. 76. Advert for Starspawn, Hot Stuf’ 5 (Fall 1977): p. [50]. 77. Steve Schanes, Interview by Shel Dorf, The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 249 (25 August 1978): p. 13. 78. Advert for BPVP, The Comic Reader 163 (December 1978): p. 23. 79. Advert for BPVP, The Comic Reader 159 (August 1978): p. 22. 80. Bud Plant’s Fall–Winter 1978 Catalog, p. 5, printed as a supplement within The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom 258 (27 October 1978). 81. Joe Brancatelli, ‘The Comics Report’, Inside Comics 1.1 (Spring 1974): p. 11.

7632_Williams.indd 135

28/06/22 16:56

chapter 5

‘The Comic Book Grows Up’: 1979–91

Introduction In the late 1980s, DC ran an advertisement that read, ‘You outgrew comics, now they’ve caught up with you!’1 Capitalising on the release of the film Batman (dir. Tim Burton, 1989), this advertisement reused rhetoric that widely circulated in the 1980s, as journalists seized upon the seeming novelty of comics published as books and aimed at adults, especially when they featured superheroes having sex or committing amoral acts of violence. Graphic novels such as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) by writer and penciller Frank Miller, inker Klaus Janson, and colourist Lynn Varley, Watchmen (serialised 1986–7; first book edition 1987) by writer Alan Moore, penciller and inker Dave Gibbons, and colourist John Higgins, and Batman: Arkham Asylum (1989) by writer Grant Morrison and artist Dave McKean generated column inches and notable sales on both sides of the Atlantic. As comics scholar Marc Singer observes, appearing ‘in the wake’ of the Batman film the timing of Arkham Asylum ‘could not have been more perfect’ and the graphic novel was ‘a smash hit’. According to DC editor Karen Berger sales were close to 500,000 copies.2 ‘You outgrew comics . . . ’ was part of a broader publicity campaign as DC placed adverts in general interest magazines assuring the book-buying public that, with graphic novels, they could read comics without the stigma that the medium was child-oriented or artistically bankrupt. Christopher Pizzino’s Arresting Development calls the recurring trope that comics have ‘grown up’ a ‘Bildungsroman discourse’, criticising this formulation for implying that comics have – inevitably, organically – changed ‘from a despised medium [. . .] to a respectable kind of reading with an earned measure of 136

7632_Williams.indd 136

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

137

cultural legitimacy’. He acknowledges the Bildungsroman discourse ‘as a path to better status for specific works’ but denounces it for reinforcing ‘the illegitimacy of comics as a whole’: the special pleading for graphic novels insists they are major artistic achievements despite being comics. Since the 1980s, journalists, academics, and reviewers periodically assert that comics are transitioning ‘from crudely and functionally produced commodities, [. . .] to aesthetically complex work created by self-directed writer-illustrators; from adventure-romance serials to closure-oriented narratives modeled after the novel’. According to this discourse, the graphic novel is the apotheosis of comics’ transformation into a form of culture with a broad base of adult readers.3 Ironically, B:TDKR, Watchmen, and Arkham Asylum came out of an industry contracting around passionate consumers buying their comics from specialist shops. They tended to be older, more knowledgeable about comics than newsstand purchasers, and with greater purchasing power; a survey from the mid-1980s found that ‘the average comic book reader’ was ‘about 20 years old [and] spends more than $10 a week on comics, an amount many children could not afford’.4 Publishers seized this opportunity to release graphic novels, one of which was Miller and Gibbons’s Give Me Liberty (serialised 1990–1; first book edition 1991). In terms of its history of production, and play with genre and form, Give Me Liberty epitomised the kind of text that defined the graphic novel for many commentators as the 1980s turned into the 1990s. The 1980s also saw a burgeoning alternative comics scene characterised by genres that seldom featured in the mainstream, such as autobiography, history, reportage, and satire. Alternative series Love and Rockets (first serialised 1981–96) by Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez morphed from an idiosyncratic SF comic into a multi-layered, cross-border account of Latinx experience. A handful of underground publishers survived into the 1980s, aided by the direct market, and two key texts from the graphic novel boom were by underground creators: Art Spiegelman’s Maus (serialised 1980–91; book editions 1986 and 1991) and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (1976–93; first collected edition 1986). The Doubleday reprinting of Pekar’s comic exemplifies how a long narrative arc was generated out of book publication, invoking a novelistic experience out of disparate elements whose novel-ness had been difficult or impossible to discern during serialisation.

7632_Williams.indd 137

28/06/22 16:56

138

the us graphic novel

The Triumph of Fandom Once the stranglehold enjoyed by Sea Gate was broken in 1979, the direct market offered more favourable terms to comics retailers, and specialist shops grew rapidly. There were approximately 400 comics stores in the United States in 1979 and 2,000 in 1986.5 This made it possible to publish comics in smaller numbers and still make a profit, thus encouraging the creation of new companies, both alternative and independent, the latter targeting the Big Two’s consumers with broadly similar comics.6 A small number of new comics publishers were established in the 1970s, followed by a wave entering the field in the 1980s and early 1990s, such as FantaCo Enterprises (1980), Capital (1981), Fantagraphics (1982), Americomics, Comico, First (all 1983), Mirage (1984), Dark Horse (1986), Malibu (1987), Red Eagle (1989), Valiant, and Tundra (both 1990).7 In 1985 total direct market sales overtook the number of comics sold through the old sale-or-return system.8 Fans were no longer a significant component of US comics buying, they were the core audience, and Paul Levitz, manager of DC’s business affairs, proclaimed the ‘triumph of comics fandom’.9 As comics scholar Matthew J. Pustz explained in 1999: What separates comic books from other U.S. media with fan followings is the much smaller number of nonfan consumers. Most mainstream publishers seem to have ceased trying to expand their audience to nonfans, instead focusing their energies on tapping their current readership even deeper than in the past. As a result, companies such as Marvel and DC do not need to worry about alienating a more casual comic book reading audience because, in many ways, no such audience exists.10 Focusing on dedicated consumers, narratives came to depend on readers’ knowledge of the medium’s past, particularly superhero comics. This was not only true of the Big Two. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird formed Mirage to self-publish Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1984–93 in its first incarnation), a tale of atomically mutated teenagers, ninjas, and vigilantes composed out of the same raw ingredients from which mainstream comics were made. Part of the pleasure of reading TMNT was recognising those allusions,

7632_Williams.indd 138

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

139

which were not restricted to mainstream comics: in one story, we learn that the turtles enjoy reading American Splendor and Love and Rockets when they are not fighting crime.11 Because comics distributed on the direct market were not bound by the Comics Code, publishers beckoned toward older comics fans by introducing more politics, social parody, moral ambiguity, violence, and sex (as much as in an average Hollywood action movie, anyway). This trend was led by independents and reproduced to a lesser extent by Marvel and DC. Frank Miller’s run on the Marvel comic Daredevil (1979–83 in the first instance) saw the series become bloodier and more death-filled, though also indulging in reflections on the ethics of vigilante justice.12 British writer Alan Moore was hired by DC to work on The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1982–96), and starting with issue 20 (January 1984) he turned the ailing series into a gothic comic whose plots pivoted on issues of environmental responsibility, ecological spiritualism, and corporate malfeasance. Now commonly seen as the outriders of a trend for revisionist superheroes, both series were sold on newsstands as well as distributed via the direct market, though DC removed the CCA Seal of Approval from the covers of Saga of the Swamp Thing with issue 29 (October 1984), and beginning with issue 57 (February 1987) the series bore the warning ‘For Mature Readers’.13 In November 1986 First Comics published a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reprint collection, the ninth book released under the First Graphic Novel brand. Book-format graphic novels, together with ‘prestige’ periodicals (stiff covers, good quality paper, no adverts), were two of the ways fans were targeted with more expensive products. The Big Two launched graphic novel lines – Marvel in 1982 and DC in 1983 – and Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey suggest the Marvel Graphic Novels were less predictable than one might expect, such as Sam Glanzman’s A Sailor’s Story (1987), a memoir of the creator’s naval experiences during World War Two. The first Marvel Graphic Novel, Jim Starlin’s The Death of Captain Marvel (1982), narrated the titular character’s last days before dying from cancer. It featured no epic battle and registered in sentimental but unobtrusive terms what it means to confront one’s imminent demise.14 It quickly went through three printings and led to Starlin writing and producing the art for Dreadstar (1982), the third Marvel Graphic Novel. What was different was that Starlin owned the Dreadstar character: the Marvel Graphic Novels were a format where the company was

7632_Williams.indd 139

28/06/22 16:56

140

the us graphic novel

willing to pay royalties to creators and acknowledge their ownership of characters.15 Another example of this was Marvel’s Epic imprint, as shown by the graphic novels linked to the comic Tales from the Heart (1987–94), written by Cindy Goff and Rafael Nieves, with art initially by Seitu Hayden. This series centres on Peace Corps volunteer Cathy Grant’s time in the Central African Republic, beginning as a black-and-white comic published by Entropy Enterprises, before moving to Slave Labor Graphics in 1988. Epic published two fullcolour graphic novels by Goff, Nieves, and Hayden: Tales from the Heart of Africa: The Temporary Natives (1990) and Bloodlines: A Tale from the Heart of Africa (1992). The title Tales from the Heart seems to allude to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899) and risks re-treading an imperialist line where Africa is a homogeneously imagined continent of poverty, violence, and superstition. While these graphic novels frame events through white American experience (including starting each narrative in Minnesota) they also problematise the supposed benevolence of international development. Hayden’s cover to The Temporary Natives shows Jack, an American volunteer, standing amidst a collapsed wall that he egotistically tried to construct against the advice of locals, an image of philanthropy-as-disaster that queries the efficacy of the Peace Corps and the intentions behind their efforts. Elsewhere The Temporary Natives questions the geopolitical machinations of the United States, voicing the idea that the Corps was devised as Cold War soft power. As DC and Marvel liberalised their attitude towards creators’ rights in limited ways, Frank Miller and Alan Moore were two of the creators who benefited most, as did an array of British writers whom DC solicited to work in the US comics industry in the wake of Moore’s prominence, a body of creators known as ‘the British Invasion’.

The British Invasion Critics see Moore’s move to Saga of the Swamp Thing as the first stage of the British Invasion, when a group of UK creators with a shared approach to making comics began working in the United States. It started with Moore and artists Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland in the early 1980s, followed by a late 1980s cohort recruited by Karen Berger, who undertook annual talent-scouting visits to the UK. Berger hired writers such as Neil Gaiman, Grant

7632_Williams.indd 140

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

141

Morrison, Jamie Delano, and Peter Milligan to work at DC, with more UK writers following in the 1990s: Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Mark Millar.16 Comics historian Chris Murray postulates that, because they scrutinised the US superhero genre through the lens of the two countries’ ‘lopsided’ political and cultural relationship, many of the creators associated with ‘the British revisionist trend [. . .] proceeded from a rather more left-wing sensibility’ compared to the American Frank Miller. As a consequence, British revisionist superhero comics ‘critiqued the performance of power and the cultural imperialism’ that superheroes embodied.17 British creators were responsible for one-off DC graphic novels such as Moore and Bolland’s The Killing Joke (1988) and Morrison and McKean’s Arkham Asylum as well as being key contributors to adult-oriented series such as Hellblazer (1988–2013), initially written by Delano, and the Gaiman-scripted The Sandman (1989–96), both of which were republished in book form. For comics scholar Jochen Ecke, the British Invasion was based on transformations that started in the mid-1970s in UK weekly anthologies, a movement he calls the British ‘new wave’. These comics self-reflexively played with genre codes and withheld exposition to generate ambiguity, compelling readers to work harder at interpretation. Ecke hypothesises that readers pored over instalments of serial narratives and that the temptation to infer ‘a genius author whose unique vision unifies the work’ was strong. Ecke suggests a different type of narrative structure was cultivated in British comics, the ‘nexus narrative’ where a large group of characters inhabit the same storyworld and briefly encounter one another but generally follow separate narrative trajectories, with the plot periodically and ultimately returning ‘to a single pre-established protagonist or group of protagonists [. . .] at the center of all intersecting causal lines.’18 These trends could also be discerned in the United States; the British new wave did not develop in isolation but was the result of transatlantic ‘circulation and hybridization’. Ecke identifies Marvelman, written by Alan Moore, as an exemplar of these exchanges and fusions. A revisionist take on a 1950s British superhero comic that itself borrowed from US sources, Marvelman began as a serial in the UK anthology Warrior (1982–4). Following Warrior’s demise, the story was reprinted and completed in the United States by Eclipse under the title Miracleman (1985–93), the name changed for legal reasons. Ecke singles out Marvelman because the tension between

7632_Williams.indd 141

28/06/22 16:56

142

the us graphic novel

geography and genre was underscored as the sign of a more complex readerly experience: The application of the new wave’s strategies to the superhero genre would invite one interpretation above all: [. . .] that these techniques and their effects were somehow particularly British. The creators of the British Invasion fostered this image as much as they could. First and foremost, they filled their works with copious markers of British identity [. . .]. [British Invasion comics] were to be considered other to the American comics mainstream. They were meant to be considered difficult, challenging, and in need of copious annotation – especially for American readers.19 Literary quotations were not new to US comics, but British Invasion writers flattered readers’ sense of a sophisticated reading experience by peppering their work with references to English literature and culture. Starting with the Moore-scripted Saga of the Swamp Thing, which extensively and explicitly alluded to Romantic literature and culture,20 the British Invasion saw graphic novel subtitles quote poet Philip Larkin (Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth) and Shakespeare appearing as a character in The Sandman. In the January 1989 issue of Hellblazer the main character refers to the Grauniad, a deliberate misspelling used by the British satirical magazine Private Eye to draw attention to the poor proofreading standards at The Guardian newspaper.21 As Ecke suggests, ‘Britishness’ was not an inherent quality of these texts but a trait the creators paraded with gusto. British Invasion comics succeeded because they joined the tracks that US mainstream comics were already travelling along, a reorientation towards older readers concurrent with a momentary ‘surge in cultural prestige’. Like US mainstream comics, the texts by British writers assumed that readers had a deep knowledge of comics history and invited them into a culture where comics were the subject of interpretation and intense discussion with fellow fans.22

When the Graphic Novel was in Vogue The relative freedom that DC was starting to afford creators allowed feted writers such as Miller and Moore to devise superhero

7632_Williams.indd 142

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

143

narratives that sat outside the company’s established continuity. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns appeared from February– August 1986 as a prestige format miniseries and Watchmen was serialised from October 1986–September 1987; both were republished as books soon after serialisation. Together with volume one of Spiegelman’s Maus, and to a lesser extent Pekar’s American Splendor, these books were at the epicentre of the media’s late 1980s interest in comics. Writing about the British reception of graphic novels, comics scholar Roger Sabin comments that: ‘Comics Grow Up’ became a regular headline in the arts pages [. . .]. Sometimes the pieces would be general in tone, and take in other titles like Swamp Thing or Raw; sometimes Maus would be treated separately due to the fact it was published by Penguin [. . .]; sometimes Watchmen and Dark Knight were the focus due to the similarity of their subject-matter. Whatever the angle, inevitably the coverage tended to concentrate on the novelty aspect [. . .] (at times, it was almost a case of ‘wow! comics about holocaust victims and psychopathic superheroes!’). [. . .] [It] seemed impossible to pick up a printed publication without some mention of ‘the adult revolution’ in comics.23 US newspapers featured articles entitled ‘Are Comic Books Growing Up?’,24 ‘Grown-Ups Gather at the Comic Book Stand’,25 and the classic, ‘The Comic Book Grows Up’.26 Going back to the advert discussed at the start of this chapter, marketing staff at publishers colluded with the media in cultivating the sense that a monumental leap forward had taken place and a new, adult readership now existed.27 Actual sales of graphic novels did not match those of popular periodical comics or blockbuster paperbacks, but they indicated a significant readership, and graphic novels were notably more expensive to buy than either of those products. By July 1988 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns had sold 85,000 copies and Maus volume one 100,000 copies.28 Trade presses such as Doubleday, Pantheon, and Warner Books began lines of graphic novels, and libraries and bookstore chains started dedicating sections to them. Banking on recognisable authors’ names, graphic novels were adapted from the works of popular writers (James Herbert) and commissioned from major literary figures (Doris Lessing).29 Writing, drawing, and editing new graphic novels could not be done overnight, so reprinted

7632_Williams.indd 143

28/06/22 16:56

144

the us graphic novel

material was essential if publishers were to enter this new market swiftly. As well as being readily available, licensing existing material for book publication was cheaper than commissioning new graphic novels, and you could take advantage of readers’ interest in the back catalogue of popular creators or characters.30 A variation of this took place at DC: based on the success of Watchmen, Moore and British artist David Lloyd returned to V for Vendetta, a political thriller set in a dystopian future London. V for Vendetta was another serial that began in Warrior but was left incomplete when Warrior was cancelled. DC approached Moore and Lloyd to finish the story and serialised the entire narrative between September 1988 and May 1989, republishing it as a book edition in 1990. What was it about the revisionist superhero graphic novels that enabled them to reach an audience beyond the fannish cloisters of the direct market? Moore and Miller had produced innovative work before 1986 – was there something about the specific publication contexts of Watchmen and B:TDKR that brought critical and commercial success? Sabin suggests that, because they were produced as self-contained long narratives, ‘there was more scope for building up tension, generating atmosphere, developing characters and so on’; creators could work out plots without the obligation to conclude in ways that allowed further iterations.31 The interrelated, openended narratives introduced in the 1960s had led to a situation in the 1980s where writers on the Big Two’s ongoing series were multiply constrained: major characters had to be perpetuated in relatively unchanging form to maintain licensing opportunities, and given shared storyworlds, even minor changes in one title had knock-on effects elsewhere. B:TDKR was freed from DC’s main continuity because the action took place in the future; Watchmen adapted a series of characters from the publisher Charlton (the latter had been bought by DC in 1983), with further distance added by setting the narrative in a parallel reality. Stepping outside the continuity that connected DC’s monthly output together, these graphic novels were not only legible to an audience beyond fandom, but the writers had meaningful creative freedom to elaborate and conclude their plots. Another reason for the popularity of revisionist superhero graphic novels was the recognisability of the characters and genre. Batman was ‘extremely well known to the public already’, and in Watchmen the types were certainly familiar, such as the omnipotent being or the agent draped in the American flag.32 This fed into a

7632_Williams.indd 144

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

145

bundle of reading experiences based on assumed knowledge about how superheroes function. The media zoomed in on the ‘novelty value’ of seeing supposedly upstanding figures killing people and behaving in other shocking ways, and this was likely a draw for some of the books’ readers.33 Further, B:TDKR and Watchmen invited readers into an ironic relationship with the superhero genre, acknowledging the reactionary politics of some nationalist superhero characters and the predictability of the genre (subterranean lairs, grandiloquent speeches by villains) and going on to flaunt such tropes, inviting readers to revel in their flaunting. For example, leftliberal readers who did not share the politics of Watchmen characters such as Rorschach and the Comedian might be appeased by the graphic novel’s various nods and winks that the creators were similarly repelled by their anti-democratic ideology. Nonetheless, other readings were available; Moore hypothesised that Rorschach was so popular, not because of the ironic treatment, but because many readers thrilled to his authoritarian violence. That there are multiple ways of reading these characters is built into their representation, and the allusion to Rorschach blots invokes the openness of interpretation, though the text implies that Rorschach is not a lightning rod for multiple reading strategies but rather signifies the end of signification, the locus of existential dread at the absence of meaning. As for the Comedian, the irony of calling a state-sponsored murderer and rapist a source of laughter is not lost on the character himself, a superhero who boorishly proclaims that the complicated challenges facing the world render superheroes irrelevant.34 The serialised and book editions of Watchmen and B:TDKR were more lavish than other comics, another reason for their success outside fandom. Collected volumes avoided the paratextual apparatus common to mainstream periodical comics of the 1980s, such as speech balloons on the covers or advertising aimed at adolescent males. Instead, these graphic novels embraced the publicity practices of trade presses, such as promotional quotations and creator biographies with accompanying photographs. Superhero scholar Richard Reynolds connects the price of Watchmen and B:TDKR to their assumed audience, writing that the cost of each was ‘equal to a mass-market illustrated book, not a down-market news-stand item. At £10 a copy, comics can’t just be for the kids.’35 The idea of selling graphic novels in bookshops to adult readers petered out in the early 1990s. Sabin argues the expense of graphic

7632_Williams.indd 145

28/06/22 16:56

146

the us graphic novel

novels, a persuasive part of their brand in the late 1980s, now contributed to poor sales. Comics fans might pay high prices, since they were confident of enjoying graphic novels and re-reading them several times. Casual purchasers, conversely, didn’t know if they would like the new graphic novels or have the inclination to read them more than once, and consumer spending was affected by the early 1990s economic recession. Libraries and bookstores cut back on shelving devoted to graphic novels, while the publishing houses who joined the boom reduced the number of new titles they published. Some withdrew from graphic novel publishing altogether. Media coverage dwindled, suggesting that the attention bestowed on graphic novels was dominated by surprise at seeing superheroes having sex and killing people. As Sabin evaluates, ‘whatever else the boom represented, it was not the point historically when comics became “respectable”’.36

Revisioning Popular Genres: Give Me Liberty Miller and Gibbons’s Give Me Liberty was serialised as a fourissue limited series by the independent company Dark Horse Comics before being reprinted in book form. In the UK the trade press edition was released by Penguin, signalling the broad audience envisaged for the graphic novel that brought together the artist from Watchmen and the writer and penciller of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Give Me Liberty demonstrates many formal techniques and thematic concerns from those creators’ best-known works, though differs slightly because it is not a revisionist superhero narrative. It does offer a revisionist take on a genre popular with many comics fans: science fiction. The subversion of genre conventions associated with 1980s graphic novels has been linked to postmodernism, a concept attached to texts such as Watchmen and B:TDKR by journalists at the time and academics afterwards.37 Taking Give Me Liberty as a case study enables us to see why 1980s graphic novels were claimed as ‘revisionist’ and ‘postmodern’ and to consider the political criticisms that have been levelled against Miller’s work. Whether it is generals selling guns to gangs in B:TDKR or city fathers sheltering a serial killer in the first volume of Sin City (serialised 1991–2; book edition 1992), the villains in Miller’s graphic novels are usually cowardly, venal figures of authority, and the

7632_Williams.indd 146

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

147

(anti-) heroes are the outcasts fighting this corruption. Faced with hostile representatives of officialdom, Miller’s protagonists are forced to break the law to stop greater evildoing. Give Me Liberty shares the populist attack on elitism and government running through Miller’s comics, primarily set between 2009 and 2011 in a dystopian United States disaggregating into competing regions. The main character is Martha Washington, an African American woman who rises to the rank of lieutenant in the United States Peace Force (known as ‘Pax’). Washington’s struggles in early life – growing up in a public housing unit based on and named after the actual Cabrini-Green project in Chicago, spending time in a mental health facility, living rough – are contrasted against the ease and indolence enjoyed by Stanford Moretti, a white Pax officer from a background of old money (the forename clues readers to his access to elite institutions). Both soldiers are stationed in Brazil during Pax’s defence of the Amazonian rainforest against the Big Boy Burger company, but while Moretti’s time is spent playing tennis, catching butterflies, and sunning himself, Washington risks her life in a series of daring actions against the enemy. Secretly in the pay of Big Boy, Moretti attempts to destroy the rainforest, but is foiled by Washington; nonetheless, he takes credit for her intervention, and Washington – understanding his contacts and influence – keeps quiet. Writing in relation to the racial politics of Washington’s silence, the comics scholar Deborah Elizabeth Whaley comments that Miller illuminates how ‘the dominant culture views blackness as untrustworthy and incompetent, which racist aggressors capitalize on by cashing in on the value of their whiteness’.38 The rest of the book sees Washington prevent a gay white supremacist terrorist organisation from using a laser cannon to destroy the White House, her imprisonment by the Apache nation, and subsequent incarceration in Fortress Health, the Pacific Northwest stronghold of the Surgeon General, not a career physician but a cybernetic lifeform who commands an army of clones and Health Enforcement Troops. Running alongside this is Moretti’s conspiracy to usurp power from President Howard Nissen and kill Washington. Moretti almost succeeds, assassinating Nissen and taking control of the rump United States by declaring martial law. He goes in pursuit of Washington, who escapes from Fortress Health and flees to Brazil with a small band of associates (including the living brain of former President Erwin Rexall). A death squad tracks her down but Washington

7632_Williams.indd 147

28/06/22 16:56

148

the us graphic novel

lays a series of traps that kill or incapacitate Moretti and his men. Washington takes Moretti back to the United States in custody and the brain of Erwin Rexall is restored to the presidency. If these incidents seem derivative or sensationalist, that is deliberate; one of the postmodern flavours of Give Me Liberty is its overt recycling of pop culture elements. Miller and Gibbons borrow from a storehouse of popular genre conventions in marked or exaggerated ways so that readers understand their borrowing is done in full knowledge of those conventions’ clichéd nature. How else to interpret the Pax officer who, after storming Fortress Health, reports that ‘the President’s brain is missing’?39 Another example of this knowing borrowing is Gibbons’s pastiche of Archibald Willard’s 1876 painting Yankee Doodle (later known as The Spirit of ‘76), originally published at the end of the narrative. Gibbons revisions the painting so the three musicians leading their corps into battle are dressed in the futuristic garb of Pax soldiers, continuing a key theme of Give Me Liberty, that the glorification of war covers over its bloody, desperate reality.40 On another level, this pastiche confirms the postmodern sensibility that our lifeworld is so suffused with cultural texts that there is no place where we can get outside of received icons, plots, and language, no place to escape the accumulation of (in this case, nationalist) cultural baggage. Unfortunately, many clichés reused in Give Me Liberty belong to periods when lazy stereotypes were not challenged to the same extent as today. A case in point would be the Surgeon General’s army of clones, foul-mouthed Teutonic ice maidens originally designed as concubines for billionaire Burt Blank. Give Me Liberty parodies a feature in a pornographic magazine detailing their origin story, complete with a painted illustration of the naked clones working out in a gym.41 This is undoubtedly an example of the male gaze and is bluntly presented as such, but whether the male gaze is being criticised is unclear. One of the regions seceding from the United States is the First Sex Confederacy, a highly militarised feminist nation based in the Old South. An extrapolation of the media’s language of ‘militant feminists’, the burning of an Abraham Lincoln effigy (aligning this new feminist state with the slave-owning Confederacy) and closing the border ‘to male U.S. citizens’ implies the movement for women’s rights is undemocratic.42 Give Me Liberty is not a wholly reactionary text and Whaley finds many progressive elements to praise, starting with the

7632_Williams.indd 148

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

149

visualisation of the protagonist. Martha Washington has ‘a fit as opposed to a sexualized physique, dark brown skin, and is bald or has blonde hair drawn in braids, locks, or a Mohawk’, and so avoids looking like a hypersexualised stereotype of black femininity or a white character with darkened skin, an ‘aesthetic that mainstream comics at times produce’. Her enemies are ‘white supremacist organizations, disproportionately deployed healthcare, militarism [. . .], and corporate corruption’ and her success is the product of her ‘intellect and education’ not external forces such as magic or superpowers. For Whaley, the racial politics of Give Me Liberty makes it a ‘unique title’ that imagines ‘an ordinary young Black woman who is capable of transforming the nation’s ills and liberating disenfranchised subjects’.43 However, if reactionary and progressive elements coexist in Give Me Liberty, over time Miller’s populism has slid towards a worldview in which handwringing liberals and bureaucrats try to curb the power of white men, but the latter won’t be stopped from acting unilaterally to defend Western civilisation from its barbaric antagonists. Miller’s 300 (serialised 1998, first book edition 1999) is set in 480 BCE, its heroes the Spartans defending ancient Greece (‘the world’s one hope for reason and justice’) against invading Persians.44 Vastly outnumbered by the despotic Xerxes’s forces, the Spartans also struggle against internal enemies: a lascivious priest caste in the pay of the Persians and a ‘hunchback traitor’ who leads the invaders behind the Greek defences.45 Miller’s graphic novel Holy Terror (2011) is, in the words of comics scholar Paul Young, ‘propagandistic’ support for the War on Terror that dogmatically depicts ‘al-Qaeda as representatives of all Islam and all Muslims and playing on every Arab stereotype [Miller] could scratch onto his Bristol board’.46 In 2018 Miller claimed to oppose ‘white, heterosexual family values’, but many of his comics since the 1990s valorise able-bodied straight white men who forcibly restore order to societies undermined by liberal naivety and self-serving turncoats.47 Give Me Liberty’s pastiches are one of its many echoes of the postmodernist devices found in Watchmen and B:TDKR. In Watchmen texts such as psychiatric evaluations, marketing reports, excerpts from published autobiographies, and celebrity interviews were inserted between chapters, commenting on the preceding episode and adding detail to the storyworld. As Reynolds notes, ‘this multi-textual apparatus is an open invitation to readers to provide their own context for

7632_Williams.indd 149

28/06/22 16:56

150

the us graphic novel

Figure 5.1  Frank Miller, script, Dave Gibbons, pencils and inks, and Robin Smith, colour, Give Me Liberty, in The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2017), p. 61. © 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2017 Dave Gibbons and Frank Miller, Inc. the story’, inviting readers ‘to engage in a self-conscious reading of the graphic novel text’.48 Similarly, Give Me Liberty provides further information about its dystopian future by dedicating full pages to pastiches of magazine covers, articles, and advertisements. In addition, Miller and Gibbons turn comics panels into television screens by rounding off the corners of the frames (Figure 5.1), a well-established technique also used in Chaykin’s series American Flagg!! (1983–8) and B:TDKR; Reynolds comments that through this effect ‘American television is held up to scrutiny and abrasive ridicule centring on its pomposity and grandiloquence’.49 As well as contributing to the reader’s sense of navigating a text assembled from different media, in Give Me Liberty the juxtaposition of narrative in conventional rectangular frames against the reporting in the screen frames reveals biases in the television news, since the broadcasts are shown to misrepresent what readers see in the conventional panels. Scholar Steven Connor identifies a postmodernist ‘culture of interruptions’ characterised by ‘the massively increased frequency of cultural impingements of all kinds, as different cultural forms and media encounter one another’. Postmodernist fiction does not resist this ‘general interruptiveness’ but intensifies it. What Connor says about the hypertext novel is apposite for the postmodern novel more broadly, that it is a novel in fragments offering readers ‘multiple options for following through different aspects of plot and character’, but while there is the ‘possibility of configuring such works in networks of association’ that are ‘wholly unplanned’ the

7632_Williams.indd 150

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

151

text nonetheless ‘remains in the grasp of the author who has devised the pathways and digressions’.50 This is a useful reflection on the interruptions in Give Me Liberty, where the qualified nature of its fragmentation underlines the limits of how far we should call it a postmodern graphic novel. Assembling a single, overarching, unified version of events seems incredibly difficult when one is reading a radically fragmented text, as commented on by postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. He called for ‘a war on totality’ and hinted that the will-to-completeness in art and literature is aligned with totalitarianism’s desire for unvarying consent. Lyotard implies the attempt to impose unity on every element of a text – whether a novel or society – is the same tendency that led to the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.51 Give Me Liberty asks readers to reflect on how their experience of the world is mediated by fragments of (unreliable) cultural texts, but ultimately it provides coherence in the form of a traditional plot where the hero defeats the villain and brings them to justice. Give Me Liberty revels in genre conventions, winking at the reader that ‘we’ all know how silly those conventions are, but it embraces the narrative pleasures of plot resolution where virtue triumphs against adversity and corrupt figures of authority are brought low. Miller and Gibbons’s graphic novel is a populist pulling back from the radical form of postmodernism called for by Lyotard, precisely because the ‘form’ of Give Me Liberty ‘continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure’.52

Love in a Time of Rockets: 1980s Alternative Comics The term ‘alternative comics’ was first used in the 1970s, an unwieldy concept referring to the remnants of the underground comix as well as periodicals printed in tiny runs by small presses, self-published comics, and minicomics (handmade texts assembled with a photocopier and stapler). Fantagraphics, originally based in Los Angeles but relocating to Seattle in the 1980s, is a major alternative comics publisher, and throughout its existence Gary Groth has run the company and served as editor of its fanzine The Comics Journal (TCJ). With fellow fan Michael Catron, Groth took over The Nostalgia Journal in 1976, changing its name to The Comics Journal in 1977. TCJ’s reputation was of being the fanzine with the most cerebral articles, and editors revelled in accusations that they

7632_Williams.indd 151

28/06/22 16:56

152

the us graphic novel

were elitist: the October 1980 issue put that insult on the cover and co-editor Kim Thompson wrote ‘Another Relentlessly Elitist Editorial’ in April 1980.53 The fanzine justified its excoriating reviews on the grounds that comics needed strident criticism to improve standards. In the 1970s that uplift mission was conducted within the pages of TCJ, but in 1982 Fantagraphics began publishing one of the most famous alternative comics of all time, Love and Rockets. Jaime, Mario, and Gilbert Hernandez, three brothers from Oxnard, California, self-published the first issue of the black-and-white Love and Rockets in 1981, printing around 800 copies. They sent a review copy to TCJ and Groth offered to print a sixty-eight-page magazinesized version. Aside from the page size, devised to make the title stand out on the racks, Groth gave Los Bros Hernandez a great deal of creative freedom. As a consequence Love and Rockets did not follow a regular publication schedule, appearing up to four times a year in print runs of approximately 4,000 copies. Mario soon dropped out and Love and Rockets became a forum for Gilbert’s and Jaime’s strips, mostly working independently of each other. Gilbert’s stories are primarily set in the town of Palomar in an unnamed Spanish American country and Jaime’s comics take place in a Latinx community in California, focusing on the mechanic Maggie, her on-off relationship with Hopey, and the 1980s punk scene. The latter were referred to as the ‘Locas’ stories, and their development is symptomatic of how alternative comics negotiated the cultural logic of the direct market. At first the Locas stories exhibited SF tropes as Maggie fixed spacecraft and robots and travelled on a hover bike; an advertisement for the first Fantagraphics issue of Love and Rockets described it as ‘68 Pages of Way-Out Fantasy’. These elements were phased out by the mid1980s, and, at the end of the decade, Los Bros Hernandez strongly committed themselves to alternative comics and shunned the mainstream industry. In a 1989 interview Jaime differentiated Love and Rockets from revisionist superhero comics, observing that no matter how ingeniously the latter deconstructed the superhero genre, their supposed realism was an excuse for yet more fight scenes.54 By 1985 Love and Rockets sold just under 20,000 copies per issue and Fantagraphics started reprinting early stories in album form. Book republication of ongoing narratives shortly after a chapter was completed in serialisation was an established practice in alternative comics by the mid-1980s, though far from common. In the early 1980s, this had taken place with Wendy Pini and Richard

7632_Williams.indd 152

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

153

Pini’s ElfQuest, and at roughly the same time the Canadian comic Cerebus the Aardvark (1977–2004), script by Dave Sim with art by Sim and Gerhard, began being reprinted in book editions too. Although it would be decades before the whole series was available in book form, as early as March 1978 the first six issues of Jack Katz’s long-running graphic novel The First Kingdom (1974–86) were republished in a softcover edition by Wallaby Books. Matthew Pustz argues that in the late twentieth century, ongoing series such as Marvel’s The X-Men (1963–2011, retitled Uncanny X-Men in 1981) had reached a level of narrative density that stopped new readers picking up an issue because plots relied so heavily on knowledge of previous events; for Pustz, this was no less true of Love and Rockets.55 Reprint books were essential to give new readers a meaningful chance of acquainting themselves with long-running series, the material corollary of the sprawling graphic novels that creators attempted in the era of the direct market. As comics scholar Frederick Luis Aldama notes, when book republication became plausible for Love and Rockets, it shaped the comics that Los Bros Hernandez produced. Now Jaime and Gilbert envisaged narratives ‘less with serial single-issue publishing in mind, and more with how these would be collected and published as a book’.56 An explosion, and then implosion, of black-and-white comics took place in the wake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Starting in 1984, the comic’s initial print run was only 3,000 copies, but the characters became startlingly popular.57 Ancillary products – an animated children’s show, a toy range, motion pictures – made the creators into millionaires and over $2 billion worth of TMNT merchandise was sold globally.58 A first printing of the first issue rocketed in value to $150, a hundred times the original price, and companies launched new blackand-white titles in the hope of repeating that success.59 Variants on the TMNT theme abounded, such as Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters (1986–8) or Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils (1986). Over the course of 1986, the number of black-and-white titles jumped from thirty-nine to 170. Conjecturing that some would increase in value, ‘speculator-buyers’ sought out new series as investment items. Groth wrote in 1987, ‘You would’ve had to have been particularly inept to publish black-and-white comics in 1986 and fail.’ But in 1987 the black-and-white boom went bust, and sales of ongoing alternative comics fell by up to 50 per cent. Many series were discontinued. With so much capital tied up in black-and-white stock that couldn’t be

7632_Williams.indd 153

28/06/22 16:56

154

the us graphic novel

sold, retailers went out of business, and even Glenwood Distributors folded.60 Alternative comics would be a minor commercial presence for another decade to come.

Echoes of the Underground: American Splendor A small number of underground publishers were still active in the 1980s, most prominently Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, Rip Off Press, and Kitchen Sink Press; despite the overall shrinkage of comix production, some series continued for years, such as Zap and Wimmen’s Comix. New titles were launched that would themselves have long runs, for example World War Three Illustrated (1979–present), Gay Comix (1980–98), and Weirdo (1981–93). Except for Zap, the copresence of a slightly younger cohort in those anthologies evidences the creative affinities between 1960s artists and the alternative creators who followed them. In 1986, comix from the series American Splendor were reprinted in a book edition by the trade press Doubleday. American Splendor was self-published by writer Harvey Pekar roughly once a year from 1976 to 1991, predominantly in black-and-white, with a seventeenth issue published by Dark Horse in 1993. Further American Splendor periodicals and books, a mix of original and reprinted material, were then sporadically released by different publishers. Random House published American Splendor: Our Movie Year in 2004, a graphic novel in which Pekar and a multitude of artists depicted the making of, and publicity for, the 2003 American Splendor film. American Splendor was unusual for an underground comic because more than one creator worked on each strip. Pekar produced page layouts using stick figures to indicate where characters should be, with dialogue written over the characters’ heads, and these ‘crudely laid-out’ pages were passed on to other creators to be pencilled, inked, and lettered.61 A typical American Splendor story might observe an unremarkable event in Pekar’s life as a working-class Clevelander: a chore at work, an unreliable friend, an unsatisfactory romantic encounter. Anecdotes were often accompanied by Pekar’s verbal narration in captions or thought balloons, drolly or angrily noting his everyday tasks and the people with whom he interacts. Panels sometimes displayed Pekar speaking to the reader in front of a bare wall, framed from the waist or chest up; these direct address panels frequently introduce incidents from Pekar’s past and reoccur between panels

7632_Williams.indd 154

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

155

showing remembered events. On a handful of occasions, entire stories use this mode of direct address, monologues in which panels without speech balloons capture pauses in the current of Pekar’s words. Beyond his own life, American Splendor also records the oral history of Cleveland and its residents. The American Splendor book was successful enough for a second volume the following year, answering the query that Crumb raised in his introduction to the 1986 edition: It’s a sad fact that you can’t sell ‘adult’ comic books to American adults. Comic books are for kids. [. . .] Maybe a ‘real’ book of Pekar’s comics, like this, will sell better than the cheap newsprint comic books. I wonder if Doubleday & Co. knows what they’re getting themselves into here, because, while Pekar’s work is highly respected in certain intellectual circles, it’s definitely not very commercial. . . . But who knows? With distribution in big bookstore chains . . .62 Doubleday packaged American Splendor by following the norms of literary trade publishing: acknowledgements, dedication, title page, and an introduction insisting upon the assumption that great works of art are the product of artists refusing to pander to popular taste and willing to toil in obscurity.63 Crumb extends this ideology by putting distance between Pekar’s work and a newspaper strip often sneered at for its banality and rampant merchandising: American Splendor will ‘never be the next Garfield, that’s certain’.64 The backcover blurb compares Pekar to the writers Theodore Dreiser and Fyodor Dostoevsky and describes American Splendor as ‘the first literary comic book’. Perhaps the most telling act of repackaging the series is in the selection and ordering of material: the short comix in the Doubleday edition were reorganised into a trajectory eschewing the original sequence of publication (see Figure 5.2). Starting with ‘The Harvey Pekar Name Story’, in which an ‘autobiographical avatar’65 recollects how he grappled with an unconventional name as a child, the book opens with Pekar confronting issues of representation and identity at a foundational point in his development. Early chapters explore Pekar’s youth, including meeting the young Crumb, collecting jazz records, then giving that up to self-publish his own comic. After this tranche of stories come the main body of comix, which are concerned

7632_Williams.indd 155

28/06/22 16:56

7632_Williams.indd 156

28/06/22 16:56

Figure 5.2  Reordering American Splendor for the 1986 Doubleday Edition.



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

157

with finding meaning amidst the drudgery of employment and deadening spare time, extensively narrated through the Pekar avatar’s thought balloons. Some strips depict the lightly fictionalised Pekar stand-in Jack the Bellboy as he goes about selling records at work. Pekar’s avatar bemoans being bored or unvalued before conceding the small moments of satisfaction he gains from everyday interactions, frequently concluding he should count his blessings. These stories segue into Pekar’s amorous pursuits, and then a significant chunk of biographical comix focus on the lives of other Clevelanders. The book reaches a crescendo in the last three chapters. Pekar complains that the slight interest shown by filmmakers and the Village Voice in American Splendor has come to nothing. He meets actor Wallace Shawn in the thwarted hope that Shawn’s connections might lead to a breakthrough, but he is just as destitute as Pekar. The final comic (‘Hypothetical Quandary’) depicts Pekar pondering whether, should he become famous and rich, he would still have the prosaic encounters on which his work is based. This has become a classic refrain of autobiographical comics: does respectability render one’s work toothless?66 Pekar concludes – to his and perhaps readers’ relief – that he will always be at odds with the world, so success won’t stop him discovering viable story material. In the final two panels of the whole book, Pekar contentedly smells the fresh bread he has bought, coming through disquiet and self-questioning to a state of mundane satisfaction defined by the visceral experience of a foodstuff that is the proverbial accompaniment to day-to-day existence. Rather than reading the episodes in the American Splendor book as random observations, what emerges from the ordering of short comix is an overarching narrative in which the Pekar avatar learns to balance out his desire for adulation and riches with the understanding that daily routine – even when predictable – has compensatory moments of basic pleasure and reflection. The 1986 Doubleday edition is structured to give the effect of character development and the narrative comes to a minor-key resolution, hardly gestures of avant-gardism and far from being, in Crumb’s words, ‘definitely not very commercial’.

RAW and Maus One of the new anthologies to emerge in the early 1980s was RAW, edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. The couple

7632_Williams.indd 157

28/06/22 16:56

158

the us graphic novel

established RAW Books & Graphics in 1978, based in their loft apartment in the SoHo area of Manhattan, an old industrial district undergoing a process of gentrification led by an influx of artists. The company’s first publication was not a comic at all, but a map and guide (updated annually) of the shops, bars, and galleries springing up in the area. Liaising with local stores and newsstands about selling The Streets of Soho Map and Guide, Mouly developed relations with the retailers that would later stock other RAW Books & Graphics products.67 RAW appeared as a magazine-format anthology (1980–6) before Penguin printed the last three issues in paperback form (1989–91). A series of graphic novels (the ‘RAW One-Shot’s) were also released by RAW Books & Graphics: Gary Panter’s Jimbo (1982), writer Holly Metz and artist Sue Coe’s How to Commit Suicide in South Africa (1983), Jerry Moriarty’s Jack Survives (1984), Panter’s Invasion of the Elvis Zombies (1984), Charles Burns’s Big Baby: Curse of the Molemen (1986), and Coe’s X (1986). RAW published the work of long-standing underground figures (Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Bill Griffith), newer alternative artists (Burns, Ben Katchor, Carol Lay), European creators (Coe, Jacques Tardi, Joost Swarte), reprints of classic US cartoons (Milt Gross, George Herriman, Art Young), and artists better known for their gallery installations (Patricia Caire). Befitting the location of production, RAW was of a piece with the Downtown arts scene’s mixed-media magazines and tabloids, since it was more expensive than other comics anthologies ($3.50 for the first issue) and sold in more diverse places such as galleries and art bookshops. Take RAW 7 (May 1985), for example: a corner was torn off every issue’s cover, the corners were jumbled together, and then randomly stapled back on, making each copy a unique object. There were other gestures to art-savvy readers, as demonstrated by Spiegelman’s booklet Two-Fisted Painters from RAW 1 (1980), a Kirbyesque brawl with aliens mashed up with art history. RAW, then, had one foot in the comics world and one foot in the Downtown scene, and these weren’t entirely separate anyway since Downtown artists riffed upon the history of American comics.68 Above all, the history of the graphic novel – the history of American literature and culture – remembers RAW because it was the periodical in which Art Spiegelman’s Maus was serialised. Pantheon published the first volume as a book in 1986 and a second volume (the remaining episodes from RAW plus a concluding chapter) in 1991. Maus is a biography of Spiegelman’s father Vladek’s experience of the

7632_Williams.indd 158

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

159

Holocaust, interwoven with Art and Vladek’s strained relationship in the present. The second chapter of Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo’s The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (2016), an exploration of why certain comics enjoy cultural prestige, is dedicated to answering the question of why Maus is front and centre of the contemporary comics canon.69 Maus was not the first long comics narrative to engage with historical atrocity, or the politics of life-writing, or familial trauma, but it set the bar for decades to come for graphic novels addressing those issues. According to Spiegelman, by 2011 each volume had sold more than a million copies in the United States, and its recognisability goes well beyond America, with Maus translated into approximately thirty languages.70 What makes Maus such an enduring text? One is immediately struck by Spiegelman’s animal metaphor: Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, and so on. This is visual shorthand for the relations of power between those groups, and how the Holocaust was underpinned by a genocidal ideology that constructed Jews as vermin. That history of representation is well documented in MetaMAUS (2011), a book-length interview with Spiegelman that comes with a DVD of drafts, historical evidence, and recordings of Vladek’s memories.71 One advantage of Spiegelman’s animal metaphor is that it bypasses the difficulty of drawing people whose appearance is not preserved in the historical record; Maus avoids fabricating faces for people for whom no visual depictions survive, with all the ethical problems of misrepresentation that would entail. Furthermore, Spiegelman’s approach encourages empathy by commanding a more universal sense of identification: the characters are Everymouse, as it were. In the graphic novel’s ur-text, the three-page comic ‘Maus’ (1972), the characters were drawn in greater detail, but in Maus animal features are pared back to a handful of pictorial elements such as head shape and the shape of ears, with Spiegelman wringing a vivid expressivity from these basic ingredients. The people styled as felines in Maus eat bread and sausages, not cat food: they are clearly meant to be read as human. Nonetheless, the graphic novel adopts a provocative metaphor, and there were protests in Poland for its depiction of Poles as pigs.72 One potential criticism is that the metaphor risks re-inscribing a sense of essential difference between peoples, naturalising the idea that Jews and

7632_Williams.indd 159

28/06/22 16:56

160

the us graphic novel

Germans belong to different orders of animal, and that some people are born to be predators and others to be their victims. A different charge is levelled by literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels, for whom the decision to depict American Jews as mice but all other Americans as dogs constructs Jewish Americans as the victims of US antisemitism and oppression, and not the beneficiaries of white privilege. Michaels thinks Maus elides atrocities committed in the United States against other groups, arguing the animal metaphor fails to register the history of slavery and continuing state violence against African Americans. Noting that a black hitchhiker is shown as a dog like other Americans, Michaels protests that, in Maus, it’s as if everyone is a full participant in US society except for Jewish Americans. He bluntly asserts, ‘It’s as if not just the Holocaust itself but the racial system that produced it was an American rather than a European phenomenon’.73 However, Maus is careful to show that the separation of humans into different animal orders is an erroneous model, one which Spiegelman knowingly deploys precisely to defuse its destructive power. The animal metaphor has precedents in the dehumanising rhetoric (visual and verbal) of antisemitism, with Jews demonised as rodents in German and US propaganda.74 Spiegelman’s graphic novel uses the formal properties of comics to signify flaws in the very metaphor it adopts, emphasising that the ideology of humans as incompatible beasts is a false system of classification, so ludicrous it cannot be sustained without extreme self-delusion. On a page set in the Auschwitz concentration camp, a prisoner protests to the guards that he doesn’t belong there, that he is a patriot who previously served in the German military under the Kaiser (Figure 5.3).75 In one panel he is a mouse, and in the next a cat, but the fuzzily depicted cat indicates how his identity as German is less tangible under the Nazi regime that condemns Jewish citizens to the realm of the subhuman. In the aftermath of the war, Vladek stays with a family that is ethnically German and Jewish, their offspring – comingling feline and mouse characteristics – undermining the integrity of the metaphor once more: the parents cannot be cats and mice, because different orders of mammals cannot have children together, and they evidently do.76 Spiegelman also draws attention to the performative nature of national-ethnic identity by having characters appear, not as having the faces of certain animals, but wearing the masks of those

7632_Williams.indd 160

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

161

Figure 5.3  Art Spiegelman, Maus (London: Penguin, 1992), vol. 2, p. 50. © Art Spiegelman, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991. animals, depending on the historical period depicted: in the 1940s, Spiegelman’s parents are drawn as mice, but in order to pass as Poles, they wear pig masks. When Spiegelman draws himself in the 1980s, he does so wearing a mouse mask – but his unshaven human face is discernible underneath. Jewishness is revealed as something the artist lives and wears, not an immutable racial essence; at the start of Volume Two, Chapter One, the reader sees Art’s sketchbook as he ponders how to draw Françoise, a Frenchwoman who converted to Judaism. These metafictional elements alert the reader to the motives behind Spiegelman’s visual strategy, adopted as a powerful and instructive way of remembering a history of genocide and not to be misread as a map of discrete, unchanging groups. The metaphor necessarily invokes the spectre of ethnic categorisation because the perpetrators of the Holocaust were in thrall to such crude and false partitions.

Conclusion Although this chapter emphasises how mainstream and alternative publishers were coagulating around a single distribution system (the direct market), type of retailer (specialist comic shops), and consumer (fans), a variety of US comics continued to appear.77 Similarly, the movement of book publishers into the graphic novel market was not exclusively about trade presses exploiting revisionist superheroes, indicated by Maus, American Splendor, and the ‘visual novel’

7632_Williams.indd 161

28/06/22 16:56

162

the us graphic novel

Daddy Cool (1984), adapted by writer Don Glut and artist Alfredo Alcala from a 1974 hard-boiled crime novel by Donald Goines.78 In the early 1990s the graphic novel boom left no clear inheritance: publishing houses that rushed into graphic novel production were pressing pause on new projects, while bookstores and libraries were scaling back their graphic novels and wedging them in with fantasy and SF. In the comics industry, the popularity of revisionist superhero graphic novels was interpreted as the endorsement of more merciless killers and mainstream comics became more ‘grim and gritty’, to use the terminology of the period. Marvel increased the number of its comics that featured The Punisher, a Vietnam veteran conducting a one-man war against organised crime. The comics sold and the guns kept getting bigger. Other aspects of the late 1980s graphic novel boom had a more substantial legacy. The greater leeway that DC gave to creators – especially British writers brought over in the wake of Moore’s success ­­­– led to multi-volume graphic novels being completed in genres such as horror and fantasy. Maus catalysed a plethora of long-form comics, though the time involved in producing a graphic novel meant large-scale work could not appear immediately. In 2008 the comics creator Scott McCloud observed: Comics have often lurched forward in stages. If you look at Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus, I’m sure that Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Art Spiegelman all thought that others would try to be more creative after these works, but what you got were a lot of gritty superhero comics that aped the surface qualities of the first two and didn’t touch the latter. We now know that in fact ideas were being swallowed and metabolized by the next generation. Chris Ware could not turn around and draw Jimmy Corrigan in twelve months after reading Raw [. . .]. There is a certain amount of time it takes for influence to manifest itself. [. . .] We can now see those derivative superhero comics that came after Dark Knight and Watchmen as undigested lumps on the surface of comics while the profound changes were coming underneath.79 As McCloud notes, a broad range of alternative graphic novels inspired by Maus gradually became apparent, as we will see in the next chapter.

7632_Williams.indd 162

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

163

Notes  1. Qtd in Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 176.  2. Marc Singer, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), p. 64.  3. Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), pp. 22, 30–1.  4. Kurt Eichenwald, ‘Grown-Ups Gather at the Comic Book Stand’, The New York Times, 30 September 1987, p. A1.  5. Michael Dean, ‘Fine Young Cannibals: How Phil Seuling and a Generation of Teenage Entrepreneurs Created the Direct Market and Changed the Face of Comics’, The Comics Journal 277 (July 2006): p. 51–5; Sabin, Adult Comics, pp. 68, 175.  6. Sabin, Adult Comics, p. 66.  7. Based on Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 87–8, but adapted using the website Grand Comics Database. Years provided are based on the cover date of the first comic these companies released.  8. Dean, ‘Fine Young Cannibals’, p. 59.  9. Qtd in Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, rev. edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 261. 10. Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. 112. 11. Peter Laird, story and pencils, and Jim Lawson, inks, ‘New Comic Day’, in Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (London: Penguin Books, 1990), book 1, pp. 106–11. 12. Paul Young, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016). 13. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 77. 14. Baetens and Frey, Graphic Novel, pp. 79–80. 15. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, pp. 88, 121; Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), pp. 237, 246. 16. Jochen Ecke, The British Comic Book Invasion: Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the Evolution of the American Style (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019), pp. 201–2. 17. Chris Murray, The British Superhero (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), pp. 197–8. 18. Ecke, British Comic Book Invasion, pp. 156–7, 131. 19. Ibid. pp. 141–2.

7632_Williams.indd 163

28/06/22 16:56

164

the us graphic novel

20. The influence of Romanticism (and not only British Romanticism) on Saga of the Swamp Thing is discussed in Maaheen Ahmed, Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), pp. 54–84. 21. Jamie Delano, writer, and Mark Buckingham and Alfredo Alcala, art, ‘Hate Mail & Love Letters’, Hellblazer 18 (January 1989): p. 16. 22. Ecke, British Comic Book Invasion, pp. 243–4. 23. Sabin, Adult Comics, p. 91. 24. Steve Johnson, ‘Are Comic Books Growing Up?’ Chicago Tribune, 28 August 1986, p. D1. 25. Eichenwald, ‘Grown-Ups Gather at the Comic Book Stand’, p. A1. 26. Charles Solomon, ‘The Comic Book Grows Up’, LA Times, 16 April 1989, p. 315. 27. Sabin, Adult Comics, pp. 92–3, 176. 28. Edwin McDowell, ‘America is Taking Comic Books Seriously’, The New York Times, 31 July 1988, p. E7. 29. Sabin, Adult Comics, pp. 104–6, 177; Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), p. 165–6. 30. Sabin, Adult Comics, p. 104. 31. Sabin, Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels, p. 165. 32. Ibid. p. 165. 33. Sabin, Adult Comics, p. 111. 34. Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), pp. 115–8. 35. Ibid. pp. 96–7. 36. Sabin, Adult Comics, pp. 113–5. 37. Reynolds, Super Heroes, p. 96. 38. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), p. 20. 39. Frank Miller, script, Dave Gibbons, pencils and inks, and Robin Smith, colour, Give Me Liberty, in The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2017), p. 181. 40. Ibid. p. 160. 41. Ibid. p. 124. 42. Ibid. pp. 162, 185. 43. Whaley, Black Women in Sequence, pp. 17–18. 44. Frank Miller, story and art, and Lynn Varley, colour, ‘Glory’, 300 3 (July 1998): p. [23]. 45. Frank Miller, story and art, and Lynn Varley, colour, ‘Victory’, 300 5 (September 1998): p. [12]. 46. Young, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism, p. 225.

7632_Williams.indd 164

28/06/22 16:56



‘the comic book grows up’: 1979–91

165

47. Frank Miller, ‘I Wasn’t Thinking Clearly When I Said Those Things’, Interview by Sam Thielman, The Guardian, 27 April 2018, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 48. Reynolds, Super Heroes, p. 109. 49. Ibid. p. 97. 50. Steven Connor, ‘Reading: The Contretemps’, Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): pp. 246–7. 51. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, 1983, trans. Régis Durand, in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 81–2. 52. Ibid. p. 81. This reading is based on Give Me Liberty alone; Martha Washington had further adventures set after the events in that graphic novel, collected in The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century. 53. Kim Thompson, ‘Another Relentlessly Elitist Editorial’, The Comics Journal 55 (April 1980): pp. 6–7. 54. See Todd Hignite, ed., The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2010), esp. pp. 77, 107–12. 55. Pustz, Comic Book Culture, pp. 131–4. 56. Frederick Luis Aldama, ‘US Creators of Color and the Postunderground Graphic Narrative Renaissance’, in Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, eds, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 306. 57. Dean, ‘Fine Young Cannibals’, p. 57. 58. Mark Rogers, ‘Political Economy: Manipulating Demand and “The Death of Superman”’, in Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, eds, Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 147. 59. Eichenwald, ‘Grown-Ups Gather at the Comic Book Stand’, p. D5. 60. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, pp. 147–8; Gary Groth, ‘Black and White and Dead All Over’, The Comics Journal 116 (July 1987): pp. 8–12. 61. R. Crumb, ‘Introduction’, in Harvey Pekar, writer, and various artists, American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (Garden City, NY: Dolphin-Doubleday, 1986), p. [8]. 62. Ibid. pp. [7–8]. 63. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 81–5.

7632_Williams.indd 165

28/06/22 16:56

166

the us graphic novel

64. Crumb, ‘Introduction’, p. [8]. 65. Gillian Whitlock, ‘Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics’, Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): p. 971. 66. Elizabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), pp. 45–7. 67. Jeet Heer, In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2013), pp. 49–52. 68. Mike Kelly, ‘Art Spiegelman and His Circle: New York City Comix and the Downtown Scene’, International Journal of Comic Art 10.1 (Spring 2008): pp. 328–9. 69. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 17–26. 70. Art Spiegelman, MetaMAUS, ed. Hillary Chute (London: VikingPenguin, 2011), p. 152. 71. Ibid. p. 115. 72. Ibid. pp. 122–5. 73. Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism’, American Literary History 18.2 (2006): p. 289. 74. Spiegelman, MetaMAUS, pp. 113–8. 75. Art Spiegelman, Maus (London: Penguin, 1992), vol. 2, p. 50. 76. Ibid. p. 131. 77. Brannon Costello and Brian Cremins, eds, The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics’ Crucial Decade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021). 78. Adapted by a white writer and a Filipino artist from a text by a black writer, scholar Kinohi Nishikawa describes Daddy Cool as ‘the first graphic novel to have appeared under an African American author’s name’, though we should also take account of the Samuel R. Delany-scripted Empire (1978), and another early black graphic novelist is Matt Baker, the penciller on It Rhymes with Lust (1950). Kinohi Nishikawa, ‘Daddy Cool: Donald Goines’s “Visual Novel”’, in Frances Gateward and John Jennings, eds, The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), p. 216. 79. Scott McCloud, Interview, in Paul Williams and James Lyons, eds, The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 236–7.

7632_Williams.indd 166

28/06/22 16:56

chapter 6

Boom and Bust, Mainstream and Alternative: The 1990s

Introduction Given the retrenchment of trade presses from graphic novel lines, the fate of the form seemed knitted ever more closely to mainstream comics. The industry experienced astonishing sales at the start of the decade, but the mid-1990s crash did not presage a hopeful future. Yet despite the bankruptcy (arguably creative, definitely financial) of mainstream comics, initiatives seeded during the boom would eventually lead to the production of key graphic novels, whether at creator-oriented imprints inside established publishers or new companies founded by superstar artists. By the decade’s end, the graphic novels that won literary prizes, were taught in universities, and received reviews in the broadsheets were primarily by creators who worked in alternative comics. In the 1990s, alternative comics were at the nexus of two polarised forms of cultural production: the bloated, commercialised world of mainstream comics, and the grey market in photocopied minicomics and fanzines (or ‘zines’). These were perceived as discrete realms where separate rules, rights, and political allegiances pertained, and the alternative graphic novels’ fraught position between mainstream comics and zines is evident in terms of their characters, iconography, and plots.

Great Expectations At the dawn of the 1990s, the direct market delivered the comics industry to a position where record-breaking numbers of comics were sold. But not graphic novels: sales were outrageously high on periodicals, with Spider-Man 1 (1990) and X-Force 1 (1991) selling more than 167

7632_Williams.indd 167

28/06/22 16:56

168

the us graphic novel

three million copies each.1 The circulation of X-Men 1 (1991) reached eight million copies, the best-selling issue of any comic according to the 2010 Guinness Book of World Records.2 The pencillers on these series – Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefield, and Jim Lee respectively – were adored by fans, one reason for the high sales, but it was also the case that consumers bought multiple copies to sell for profit later. The value of comics as a financial investment was much touted and the media commonly noted the high prices that vintage comics could reach at auction. This brought people into comic shops who had not read a comic in years and perhaps had no intention of ever doing so again: speculators stocked up on large quantities of mint-condition comics in the expectation they would accumulate in value. The accoutrements of comics collecting, such as Mylar bags and moisture-free storage boxes, were a common feature of comics retailers’ advertisements.3 Back issues were particularly prized if they contained notable ‘firsts’: the first appearance of a favourite character, first time an artist was published, or first issue of a series. Marvel and DC launched a plethora of new titles, often using spinoff characters from popular series, and drew attention to noteworthy issues with cover gimmicks such as embossing, holograms, and wraparound covers (a tableau stretching across the front and back). Playing on the desire of fans and speculators to acquire complete sets, the Big Two and some independents published variant editions of the same issue. For instance, the first issue of Spider-Man was published in multiple versions with different-coloured covers; each issue of X-Force 1 was polybagged (sealed in a plastic bag) with one of five different trading cards; X-Men 1 was published under different covers that formed a single panorama when placed alongside each other.4 These signify Marvel’s shamelessness in manipulating consumers, but DC’s decision to kill off Superman seemed equally exploitative. Superman 75 (January 1993) sold more than six million copies and came as a basic periodical comic and a polybagged edition complete with obituary, poster, trading card, and black satin armband.5 Boom turned to bust in the mid-1990s. Comics sales, at $1 billion in 1993, more than halved ($450 million) by 1996, the same year Marvel filed for bankruptcy.6 Why did sales tumble? Where speculators were concerned, they stopped acquiring comics because they no longer represented valuable assets. Buying comics as an investment worked only while demand substantially outstripped

7632_Williams.indd 168

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

169

supply. With millions of people buying and carefully storing heavily promoted issues, comics hardly represented rare commodities likely to increase in capital value.7 Furthermore, drawing on comments made by comics creator and industry professional Larry Marder, the comics journalist Michael Dean argues that the proliferation of new titles eroded the sense of ‘brand loyalty’ that had pertained among fans. Where a fan might once have tried to buy every comic published by a particular company each month, or collect every issue featuring a certain character, the launching of new series and multiple editions reached a saturation point that over-extended the ability of fans to maintain this purchasing practice. Marder suggests this completist impulse was compromised in the early 1990s and contributed to the period’s wildly fluctuating sales – including those staggering bestsellers – but it can also be seen as a factor behind the severity of the crash that followed, because there was now a dwindling consumer base for once-reliable series.8 What both explanations share is that the same reason sales accelerated in the early 1990s is why the boom was unsustainable. For all the profits being made, comics were not acquiring a larger readership but contracting as a source of popular entertainment.

Against the Mainstream Alternative comics grew in the 1980s by working within the direct market. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the dependence of alternative comics on specialist comic shops, alternative creators and publishers lost few opportunities to mock the hermetically sealed comics culture into which the Big Two, the independents who imitated them, and their shrinking readership were locked.9 Alternative comics seized upon ‘fanboy’ as a derogatory term for mainstream fans who obsessively tried to complete their collections and who turned conventions and specialist stores into jousting tournaments fought with trivia (and on their part, mainstream fans transvalued ‘fanboy’ into a badge of pride). Fan studies from the period confirm this picture of a comics world where the cost of entry was initiation-by-interrogation and where a collection of periodicals represented the material embodiment of the owner’s taste and place in fan hierarchies.10 In online discussions, conventions, and comic shops, newcomers were challenged to demonstrate their knowledge about comics as a way of

7632_Williams.indd 169

28/06/22 16:56

170

the us graphic novel

justifying their presence, and as Matthew Pustz explains, these demands upon newcomers may ‘harm the industry by automatically limiting the pool of potential consumers’.11 This testing process is a gendered one and comics scholar Mel Gibson records how, in a British context, female fans were especially challenged to demonstrate their right to belong.12 Alternative creator Evan Dorkin provided an exposition of this milieu in the stories he produced about the all-male members of the Eltingville Comic Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and RolePlaying Club. These appeared sporadically in titles such as Instant Piano (1994–5) and Dork (1993–2006) and were eventually collected in a hardback edition. The characters bicker over back issues and action figures and, as sociologist of comics Benjamin Woo notes, ‘rendered in all their pimply, scabrous glory by [Dorkin’s] scratchy, aggressive line and gift for exaggerated facial expressions and body language, there is something primally repellent about [these characters] and the world they inhabit’.13 Pustz reads such depictions as enforcing a distinction between alternative comics fans with rich and healthy social lives and the socially inept fanboys who collect mainstream comics: alternative creators ‘are telling their readers, “Yes, you read comic books, but you are not like these losers. You can laugh at the people who read Wolverine[.] [. . .] You are different from them and better than they are.”’14 Nonetheless, as Woo observes of Dorkin’s story ‘The Intervention’, when one member of the Club, Bill, is kidnapped by two ex-fans hired by his mother to deprogramme him of fannish vices, Bill makes an impassioned speech about the ‘positive benefits of participating in fandom’, namely the sense of belonging and solidarity.15 He convinces his kidnappers to return to comics fandom and set him free, but the punchline at the end of ‘The Intervention’ contradicts Bill’s invocation of all that’s good about being a fan: the kidnappers abscond with his comics, toys, and memorabilia in order to reboot their own collections.16 Community, what community? Bating mainstream comics fans was a commonplace of alternative graphic novels, as demonstrated by Daniel Clowes’s ‘Young Dan Pussey’ from Eightball 1 (October 1989), reprinted as part of Clowes’s graphic novel Pussey! (1995). This story starts with a young man bothering an alternative comics creator about whether a ‘first edition’ of Bloodmonger (‘He’s like Conan the Barbarian in space’) is ‘worth anything’, an indication of the kind of value

7632_Williams.indd 170

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

171

that fanboys project onto comics.17 The rest of ‘Young Dan Pussey’ concerns the eponymous protagonist and his employment as a penciller at the Infinity Comics Group run by industry veteran Dr Infinity. The latter’s verbosity and boosterism aligns him with Stan Lee, and the way that Infinity Comics operates – editorial intrusion, late payments to staff, demanding uncomplaining loyalty from employees – is meant as an indictment of mainstream working conditions. Despite the lofty rhetoric, Dr Infinity pays for good reviews from fanzine editors, and he lets slip his contempt for comics buyers at the end of a convention, when he crows, ‘We’ve had a good-size herd of FANBOYS grazing around the Infinity table all day long! There was one tragic specimen who was so DULL-WITTED that he bought--’, leaving it to readers to imagine what this obsessive fan wasted his money on.18 Another example is Zoom Comics, a fictional company from Alex Robinson’s graphic novel Box Office Poison (serialised 1996–2000, collected editions 2001 and 2003). In Robinson’s tale of complicated relationships and life on minimum wage, a series of flashbacks detail how comics artist Irving Flavor invented a character called Nightstalker in the 1940s but, until the present, Flavor has never seen any money from Zoom for the products based on his creation. Although alternative comics has not seen the near duopoly that exists in the mainstream, Fantagraphics has dominated the field since the 1980s. Any consideration of alternative comics must reckon with its roster of creators: as well as the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes, other notable 1990s graphic novels published by Fantagraphics include Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (1993–2000; book edition 2000), Charles Burns’s Black Hole (1995–2004; book edition 2005), and Debbie Drechsler’s Daddy’s Girl (1996). With the latter, instalments had been published in 1992–3 by other companies, including Drawn & Quarterly (D&Q), the second most important publisher of US alternative comics. D&Q was founded by Chris Oliveros in Montreal in 1989, with Peggy Burns – who moved from DC Comics in 2003 to take over D&Q’s publicity and marketing – now the company’s publisher. D&Q’s first comic was house anthology Drawn and Quarterly, first appearing in April 1990, and another early title was by Montreal-based Julie Doucet, whose self-published minicomic Dirty Plotte became a D&Q series in January 1991. Other major Canadian graphic novelists published by D&Q include Seth

7632_Williams.indd 171

28/06/22 16:56

172

the us graphic novel

and Chester Brown, but while Oliveros is ‘a champion of past and present Canadian comics’, D&Q is central to North American comics as a whole; a 2009 article in Canadian Business reported that 75 per cent of D&Q’s annual sales (totalling $2 million Canadian) were in the United States. The publisher has always been a destination of choice for US creators: the comics of Peter Bagge, Joe Matt, Mary Fleener, and Carol Tyler were included in early issues of Drawn and Quarterly. Over the last thirty years many more US graphic novelists have published with D&Q, such as Lynda Barry, Adrian Tomine, and Chris Ware. One reason is the high standard of production and design at D&Q; explaining his ‘loyalty’ to the company, Chester Brown pointed to the staff’s desire to create the ‘perfect’ printed text and recollected when Oliveros ordered an entire new printing of Brown’s reissued graphic novel I Never Liked You (1994) after discovering the paper quality on the initial run was substandard.19 Oliveros has also advocated within the book industry on behalf of the graphic novel format, such as printing a free pamphlet ‘Selling Graphic Novels in the Book Trade – A Drawn & Quarterly Manifesto’ that shared advice from retailers who had been successful promoting graphic novels in their own stores,20 and leading a successful campaign to have graphic novels added as a category to the BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) Subject Headings List.21 Ironically, as Fantagraphics and D&Q moved further into graphic novel publication in the 1990s, another form of alternative comics publishing was peaking: minicomics, the antithesis of expensive, deluxe, hardcover books. Rather than choose between minicomics and long-gestating comics narratives released in book form, graphic novelists became amphibious, moving between publishing worlds and incorporating elements from one material form into the other.

Comics and Zines If alternative creators defined their work in opposition to mainstream comics, they frequently claimed a kinship with the ‘zinesters’ who made and distributed their own fanzines. Zines were typically black-and-white publications put together by one person (or a small group) in their free time using a photocopier and stapler. Most zines had a limited readership, since they were not commercially distributed but swapped or sold informally (such as mail order, at music

7632_Williams.indd 172

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

173

gigs, or outside sports grounds). ‘Fanzine’ is a contraction of ‘fan magazine’ and zines celebrated pop stars, actors, football teams, or consumables. But some operated like diaries or letters and the unregulated, intensely personal nature of zines allowed for topics that newsstand or broadcast media would be reluctant to touch: bizarre conspiracy theories, extreme political views, and pornographic stories, for example.22 From 1989–97 zines thrived as DTP software and access to cheap or free photocopying made them easier to produce and the number of titles peaked in the second half of the 1990s. Zine scholar Stephen Duncombe estimates that in 1997 there were approximately 10,000 titles being made in the United States, with a combined readership of up to 7 1/2 million people.23 To summarise points made across Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (2nd ed. 2008), there are six ways in which zines constitute an alternative to an American capitalist system centred on passive consumption. First, zines define satisfying, worthy labour as what you do outside paid work or buying commodities. A fulfilling activity could instead be going through the detritus of consumer capitalism (Notes from the Dump) or inventing histories for unremarkable consumer goods (Beer Frame) or taking fictional characters and making up alternative adventures for them (characters from Star Trek were a popular repertory company in this regard). Second, zinesters celebrate their status as ‘losers’ and reject the terms by which US society judges success, such as possessions, job promotions, or high wages. Third, rather than being alienated from the commodities one manufactures and consumes, zinesters exert control over what they produce (they are wholly responsible for the look of their zines) and the meaning of what they buy. Fourth, zines were often swapped between zinesters for free, increasing the sense that readers and producers stood outside the profit motive. Fifth, the messiness of zines was read as a sign of their authenticity; bent staples and ink that came off on your hands were an index of a zine’s condition of production, remote from the polished, homogeneous products of entertainment conglomerates. And sixth, having to go to inconvenient lengths to track zines down differentiated them from readily available forms of culture such as television broadcasts or magazines sold in newsagents. Because of this effort, readers felt especially invested in zines. With some small circulation zines, the only way to get a copy was writing directly to its maker, and so a zinester might know every

7632_Williams.indd 173

28/06/22 16:56

174

the us graphic novel

purchaser of their zine by name, implying a community of readers, not an anonymous public of consumers. In the 1990s alternative comics and zines closely overlapped, as Roger Sabin and Teal Triggs explain in Below Critical Radar: Fanzines and Alternative Comics from 1976 to Now (2000): [They] share the same sensibility, and – ergo – the same economics [. . .]. Additionally, they share distribution networks. Alternative music and book stores will often carry a spread of zines and comics (specialist comics stores will also occasionally stock zines), while the postal service is used by most zines and small press comics. The Internet, too, is a major shared outlet.24 The proximity of these modes of cultural production was registered in the stories that comics told: Dork and Bob Fingerman’s Minimum Wage (1995–2015) showed fictional characters as part of the zine scene. Doucet’s Dirty Plotte made connections to zines both as a late 1980s minicomic (when the cover bore the words, ‘Fanzine feministe de mauvais gout’, a ‘Feminist fanzine of bad taste’) and as a 1990s periodical, when it contained advertisements for zines.25 Comics creator Peter Bagge produced his own zine and creative collaborations took place such as Daniel Clowes basing comics on dialogue from David Greenberger’s zine Duplex Planet.26 Writer and artist Adrian Tomine, who has won awards for his graphic novels such as Shortcomings (2007) and Living and Dying (2015), started his career self-publishing a minicomic called Optic Nerve (1991–4), which became a Drawn and Quarterly comic of the same name (1995–2015). In 2009 facsimiles of his original minicomics, plus a pamphlet with a new introduction and notes, were published as the deluxe boxset 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics. A project like the 32 Stories boxset re-signifies the ephemeral, easily lost minicomic as part of a suite of material objects that can sit on a bookshop shelf and be sold as a luxury commodity, pointing to the fact that alternative comics, a tiny part of US comics in the 1990s, dominate the graphic novels that publishing houses release in the 2000s. Creators still work in both formats, with Edie Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix existing as a minicomic (2002–present) and a bookformat graphic novel (2010). Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World was serialised 1993–7 in Eightball (1989–2004) and published in a book edition soon

7632_Williams.indd 174

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

175

afterwards. It elaborated one of the most provocative points of connection between alternative comics and zines: certain practitioners revel in offensive material for shock effect, with zines such as Murder Can Be Fun, Answer Me!, and Dead Star: For John Wayne Gacy celebrating serial killers and positing ‘pure evil as the only purity left’.27 In the 1990s, comics creator Mike Diana drew a board game for Answer Me! in which players compete to commit rape, and the sexual violence in Diana’s self-published comics led to him being convicted for obscenity in 1994.28 In 1995 the owner and manager of an independent bookstore were arrested and charged with ‘felony distribution of lewd material for profit’ after selling the latest issue of Answer Me!. Predictably, in the wake of the arrest, Answer Me! saw a rise in sales and public visibility.29 The corollary of this in Ghost World is the odious John Ellis, who works in Zine-o-Phobia, an independent shop that hosts signings by zinesters, humorous performers, and comics creators. Ellis edits Mayhem, a fanzine containing taboo subject matter such as child pornography. Clowes satirises Ellis and his zine as a derivative form of cultural production which leads the character onto brainlessly immoral ground, such as when Ellis goes on the Sunny Summers talk show to defend a former priest who molested altar boys. Enid, one of the main characters, questions how daring Mayhem is, accusing Ellis of being fascinated by things already widely disseminated across the media, such as sex and serial killers: ‘there’s nothing in that stupid magazine of his that he learned about for himself . . .’ Watching television programmes that cover the same topics Ellis writes about (‘our daughters and why they love the men who kill’), Enid comments he ‘thinks he’s so “out there” with that stupid Mayhem magazine of his, but really he’s just interested in the same shit the rest of America is interested in’.30 As Enid, Rebecca, and Josh watch the Sunny Summers show, Josh comments, ‘let me guess . . . this guy is obsessed with serial killers, circus freaks, guns, Nazis . . . / All of his “offensive” opinions are so contrived it’s hard to take him seriously . . . it’s just a cheap, easy way to get attention!’31 Clowes also satirises himself when a ‘famous cartoonist’ called ‘Dan Clowes’ (whom Enid misnames ‘David Clowes’) comes to Zine-o-Phobia for a comics signing and is revealed to be a slight, funny-looking character whom everyone in the shop ignores.32 In Ghost World the producers of alternative culture are either marginal figures for whom no audience exists or loudmouths with nothing new to say.

7632_Williams.indd 175

28/06/22 16:56

176

the us graphic novel

Debates about the individual autonomy of cultural producers, and their right to own and profit from the work they created, also reached into mainstream comics. A group of artists from Marvel made similar demands, and their claims to creative independence would have the long-term effect of enabling graphic novel production in ways that could hardly have been predicted at the time.

An Altered Image The artists behind those hyper-successful new series for Marvel (Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefield, and Jim Lee) joined forces with three others (Jim Valentino, Erik Larsen, and Marc Silvestri; Whilce Portacio was initially involved but stepped back) to form a new company announced to the press in February 1992. Image Comics operated according to two principles: it ‘would never own a creator’s property, and Image would never interfere creatively or financially with any of the creators whose work it published’. Individual creators controlled what happened to their characters and could sign licensing agreements with toy manufacturers, filmmakers, and other interested parties. The only thing Image owned was the ‘i’ logo.33 The impetus behind Image was the huge amount of sales at the start of the 1990s. The artists responsible believed their names on the covers made these comics record-breakers, and they were conscious that they were largely estranged from the revenue generated. They also missed out on future earnings generated by the characters they designed at Marvel. The Image founders were the darlings of Wizard, the magazine Michael Dean called ‘the speculator’s bible’, and had strong reason to believe their new company would capture the incredible sales that Marvel had enjoyed. They weren’t wrong. Of the series launched in 1992, McFarlane’s Spawn (1992–present) sold around two million copies and even the ‘apparent weak link’, Valentino’s Shadowhawk (1992–6; retitled The New Shadowhawk in 1995), sold around 750,000 copies. Beyond the comics world, Image made the national news.34 While McFarlane and Larsen rejected ‘using multiple editions to pander to speculators’, not all of the Image founders were reluctant to festoon their early comics with holograms or use trading cards as promotional devices.35 The comics published in Image’s first year were patently similar to the mutant teams and ostentatiouslyweaponed superheroes at Marvel. Nonetheless, if the initial output

7632_Williams.indd 176

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

177

looked much like mainstream superheroes, the company’s commitment to creative autonomy and intellectual property rights attracted a diverse band of creators in the mid-1990s. Valentino, whose background had been in alternative comics, said in 2000: There was a reason for Image to embrace superheroes in the beginning. It was a matter of: How do we fight the Marvel brand loyalty? [. . .] We did color superhero books, and Image literally broke that [brand loyalty] thing wide open. Fans went lemminglike to the Image line. Doing superheroes laid the foundation for the successful launch of the company.36 By the second half of the 1990s ‘all but one of the founding partners had virtually ceased to draw comics, focusing instead on opportunities promised by Hollywood and the toy market’. Highlighting the relations of production at McFarlane’s studio, TCJ noted that the creator who ‘[a]gitated for unionization at Marvel’ employed artists to work on his own comics ‘without a contract and creator’s rights are subject to his whim’.37 Image came to provide a port for alternative comics, including long serial narratives. This was encouraged by Valentino, who operated as ‘a kind of Image talent scout’ in the mid-1990s, searching out ‘one nongenre, black-and-white project after another and publishing them under the Image banner. [. . .] Image solicited and printed the books, then repaid itself off the top of the books’ sales income, passing any remaining profit on to the creators.’38 One example was Jeff Smith’s humorous fantasy adventure Bone (1991–2004). Responding to the turbulence afflicting the comics market, Smith published Bone through Image 1995–7 to safeguard and extend its reach into comic shops.39 Similarly, Colleen Doran brought her long-running fantasy series A Distant Soil (1991–2013) to Image permanently in 1996. Another creative émigré was Brian Michael Bendis, whose Jinx was originally serialised by the independent Caliber Press in 1996–7. A black-and-white miniseries with art based on photographic sources, Jinx’s chiaroscuro artwork (extensive use of shadow, extreme contrasts of light and dark) represented a signal example of noir comics, a visual homage to film noir that fitted the plot’s setting in Cleveland’s criminal underworld. In the graphic novel, Jinx is a bounty hunter forced to make difficult moral decisions as she falls in love with

7632_Williams.indd 177

28/06/22 16:56

178

the us graphic novel

con man David Gold during their search for $3 million stolen from the mob and hidden somewhere in the city. According to Bendis, Valentino called him halfway through the Caliber serialisation and said, ‘You want to come to image [sic]’, and in 1997 Image published five issues concluding the narrative.40 Bendis’s A.K.A. Goldfish (serialised 1994–5), featuring characters that reappeared in Jinx, was also first published by Caliber and then reprinted by Image as a book edition in 1998. As Bendis’s comics indicate, a resurgence in US crime graphic novels began in the 1990s. It would be false to attribute this to Image alone: this movement is also associated with large publishers such as Dark Horse and DC Vertigo and some self-publishing creators (David Lapham, for example). Nonetheless, Image is a significant publisher of graphic crime fiction, and regular collaborators writer Ed Brubaker and British artist Sean Phillips signed a five-year deal in 2013 to produce work exclusively for the company.41 Writer Brian Azzarello created 100 Bullets (1999–2009) with Argentine artist Eduardo Risso for Vertigo, reprinted as a series of book editions from 2000–9, and while the bulk of Azzarello’s work has been for DC, he and Risso produced the horror-crime comic Moonshine for Image between 2016 and 2021 (book editions republishing the comic began appearing in 2017). At the start of the 2000s Image was the third-largest comics company in the United States, publishing impressively diverse titles, though this variety did not necessarily proceed from moral or aesthetic principles. Liefield attests that to maintain their prominent position in the monthly catalogues sent out by the distributor Diamond, Image had to ‘publish and sell a certain volume of books’, a claim refuted by other Image personnel. Despite phenomenal initial success, at the end of the century Image experienced the same problems endemic to comics production more broadly, namely (in the words of Larry Marder, Image’s Executive Director 1993–9) ‘a dwindling consumer base in conjunction with declining sales outlets. [Surviving comic shops] have the ability to sell less and less new comics. It’s increasingly hard to find people to sell comics to.’42 The sales and consumer base of comics did expand in the 2000s and 2010s, though not in relation to periodicals: expansion was driven by book publication and digital comics. At the time of writing, Image looks like one of the most unpredictable and adventurous US publishers, and its most popular titles need no introduction,

7632_Williams.indd 178

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

179

as they are both best-selling graphic novels and internationally successful screen franchises. Notable outputs this century, many by non-US creators, include Nabiel Kanan’s state-of-the-nation political thriller The Drowners (serialised by Image 2003–4; first book edition 2006); writer Robert Kirkman and artists Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard’s zombie apocalypse in monochrome, The Walking Dead (serialised 2003–19; book editions 2004–19); Kyle Baker’s speechless historical narrative Nat Turner (serialised 2005; book editions 2006–7); Frank Espinosa’s aquatic adventure Rocketo (serialised 2005–6; book editions 2006–7); writer John Layman and artist Rob Guillory’s culinary-themed detective fiction Chew (serialised 2009–16; book editions 2009–17); writer Brian K. Vaughn and artist Fiona Staples’s SF romance epic Saga (serialised 2012– present; book editions 2012–18); writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro’s feminist prison drama in space Bitch Planet (serialised 2014–17; book editions 2015–17); writer Kieron Gillen, artist Jamie McKelvie, and colourist Matthew Wilson’s mythology about twenty-first-century celebrity, The Wicked + The Divine (serialised 2014–19; book editions 2014–19); and writer Marjorie Liu and artist Sana Takeda’s YA fantasy Monstress (serialised 2015–present; book editions 2016–present).43 Looking at the dates these series were reprinted, there is a notable shrinkage of what was once a lag of a few years between original serialisation and book republication. It is now an automatic assumption that a serialised title that finds any kind of audience will be reprinted in book form as the ongoing periodical progresses towards completion. Image does print comics solely as so-called ‘floppies’ but the overwhelming logic is that (1) serial narratives will be republished as a complete set of book editions, and (2) republication begins almost as soon as there are enough issues to reprint. If we are to appreciate how this became normalised, we need to discuss the series The Sandman and the imprint DC Vertigo.

The Sandman, Vertigo, and Legend The previous chapter considered the British Invasion, when several waves of British creators began working in the US industry, often writing and drawing revisionist superhero comics. In 1993 DC set up an imprint called Vertigo and Jochen Ecke describes the technique of writer Alan Moore as ‘likely bordering on [Vertigo’s]

7632_Williams.indd 179

28/06/22 16:56

180

the us graphic novel

house style’.44 Without wanting to conflate the differences between British creators, the comics they made at DC in the late 1980s and 1990s did share certain features. While set in the same storyworld inhabited by most DC characters, these comics tended not to be superhero series but horror stories populated by characters from fantasy, occult, and mythic traditions, and they staged explicit and extended philosophical, moral, and political debates, minimising fistfights and other exhibitions of spectacular violence. They assumed an even older readership than revisionist superhero comics and contained disturbing subject matter: serial killing, animal testing, domestic abuse, and nuclear fallout. DC took six of these series and used them as the basis of a new imprint called Vertigo, whose logo first appeared on the March 1993 covers of The Sandman, Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol (1987–95), Animal Man (1988–95), Hellblazer (1988–2013), and Shade the Changing Man (1990–6). Except for Swamp Thing and Doom Patrol, written by Nancy Collins and Rachel Pollack respectively, the other writers when the Vertigo imprint was launched were British.45 The following year another new DC imprint, Paradox Press, edged towards alternative comics in its subject matter and genres, effectively superseding DC’s Piranha Press, which had had the same remit. Vertigo was a major generator of graphic novels, publishing one-off books and miniseries reprinted in book form, and it drove forward the concept of issuing long-but-finite comics narratives in monthly instalments that were republished in book editions during serialisation. This had many precedents in alternative comics (see Chapter 5) but, as comics scholar Joe Sutliff Sanders explains in his essay ‘Sandman, the Ephemeral, and the Permanent’ (2018), what makes The Sandman a special case is how it signalled to the mainstream industry the commercial possibilities of this publishing practice (trade books have a longer shelf-life than a monthly comic) and it reached a readership more diverse than the insular world of 1990s comics fans. The sheer scale of Sandman, scripted by Neil Gaiman, commanded attention: it began in late 1988 (cover-dated January 1989) and ran until 1996. When the narrative concluded, seventyfive issues and a special had been published, constituting ten book editions (since then, three additional Sandman graphic novels and other spinoffs have been released). Sandman’s republication was triggered by Rolling Stone magazine in 1989, when it identified the series as a ‘hot comic’. DC wanted to buy advertising space in the

7632_Williams.indd 180

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

181

magazine ‘to capitalize on the recommendation [but] what DC had to sell [an ongoing periodical series] was not what the audience of Rolling Stone was likely to be in a position to buy’. A book edition – of the story arc The Doll’s House, then still being serialised – was decided upon as a product that could sit ‘on the shelves of a regular book store’ and ‘sell to an audience who never set foot’ in a comic shop. Successful sales of the 1990 book edition of The Doll’s House and two further Sandman collections in 1991 led to each chapter of the ongoing series being repackaged in book form.46 As Sanders explains, Gaiman’s scripting evolved during the series, initially based on the principle that these stories would only be on sale for a month and then ‘vanish’. As time went by, Gaiman wrote with the knowledge that each issue was an instalment that would be republished. As he noted, writing for a monthly serial means having ‘to remind your readers what was going on in the story they read a month ago. [. . .] You need to give your audience moments and sequences complete in themselves, resolutions that pay off.’ By the penultimate chapter, The Kindly Ones (1994–5; collected edition 1996), Gaiman’s plotting was weighted towards the book edition on the horizon: The Kindly Ones began at a slow pace and made few concessions to bringing readers back every month, but this worked effectively in the context of the collected volume, where the space devoted to building up the drama made the book’s finale, the crescendo of the whole Sandman narrative, more satisfying.47 Novelists have historically exploited the temporality of serialisation for narrative effects, going back to the eighteenth century: the narrator of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (serialised 1759–61) ‘conspicuously fails to get on with the narrated time of his own past life, while equally obviously ageing [and] sickening’. Sterne achieves an ‘ironic (and increasingly plangent) effect by the drawn-out publication of the work, which necessarily involved readers in much the same process of waiting and ageing, while the story stands still or goes backwards’.48 So too have graphic novelists found areas of productive synthesis between serialisation and book republication, as was the case with The Sandman; a shifting roster of artists was necessitated by the demands of a monthly schedule, but artistic teams could be brought in or off the series to match ‘the visual breaks between the major arcs’, changeover points that defined ‘the division between one graphic novel and the next’.49

7632_Williams.indd 181

28/06/22 16:56

182

the us graphic novel

The Sandman’s audience was broader than the contracting readership of mainstream comics, and its sales weathered the mid-1990s crash better than most. As Gaiman told an interviewer in 1999: [D]uring the course of Sandman, the comics industry collapsed. We were selling 100,000 copies a month and we were down at number 70 or so, and the best-selling comic was selling in the millions. And then the bottom fell out of the industry and all of the sudden there we are still doing our 100,000 copies and we’re now at number 25. And by the end of it, we were still doing 100,000 and we were at number one. We were beating Batman and Superman. And that was because we had readers. They weren’t interested in gimmick covers and whatnot, they wanted to find out what happened next in the story.50 A total of 100,000 copies a month might seem paltry compared to millions of copies of X-Men 1, but it shows there was a sizeable adult audience for comics beyond fans and speculators (in 1993 Gaiman railed against comics retailers and distributors for behaving as if they were ‘selling investment items’). As indicated by Rolling Stone’s coverage in 1989, The Sandman had a knack of bringing new readers into comics, especially women. Here was evidence that literary comics with challenging themes could thrive, especially when book republication allowed them to reach beyond the existing demographic on which the comics industry was centred.51 But before we remove The Sandman from 1990s comics culture entirely, it was not above promotional gimmicks, such as the glow-in-thedark cover to 1991’s Sandman Special. Vertigo has published many multi-volume graphic novels, and some of the longest include writer Grant Morrison’s Invisibles (1994–2000), the Garth Ennis-scripted Preacher (1995–2000), Lucifer (2000–6) written by Mike Carey, Fables (2002–15) by writer Bill Willingham and various artists (especially Mark Buckingham), Y: The Last Man (2002–8) written by Brian K. Vaughn with art by Pia Guerra, and writer Jason Aaron and artist R. M. Guéra’s Scalped (2007–12). These demonstrate the ongoing emphasis given to continuity of writer; artistic teams get replaced on Vertigo’s long, finite narratives, but writers either work on a series for its entire run or for long stints. Vertigo came to an end in 2020 as a result of rebranding across the DC range, but during the 1990s its value to DC went

7632_Williams.indd 182

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

183

beyond sales, a ‘publishing niche’ where DC creators were permitted to experiment with controversial projects and where the company could earn awards and critical acclaim.52 The launch of Legend at Dark Horse in 1993 had similarities to Vertigo, an exercise in rebadging existing series and characters under a named imprint and additional logo. It was also a response to the formation of Image, which signalled the large sums of money to be made treating comics creators like authors and not as employees who should draw what they are told. John Byrne’s Next Men (1992–4) was so closely aligned with auteurism that the creator’s name was part of the title. Other Legend series included Mike Allred’s madcap Madman Comics (1994–6, 1999–2000) and Paul Chadwick’s ecological fable Concrete, the first series published 1987–8 and reprinted as The Complete Concrete (1994), with further self-contained miniseries: Killer Smile (1994), Think Like a Mountain (1996), and Strange Armor (1997–8). The Legend imprint went into disuse in the late 1990s, but many of its comics were sales successes for Dark Horse and two franchises were later adapted into Hollywood films. The first Sin City narrative by Frank Miller was serialised in anthology comic Dark Horse Presents (first volume 1986–2000) and reprinted in book form in 1992; later labelled The Hard Goodbye, it was followed by five more graphic novels and a short story collection before the end of the decade. Legend was also where Mike Mignola’s Hellboy was first published, a succession of miniseries and one-off issues that began with Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, a graphic novel serialised in 1994 and reprinted as a book the same year. At the time of writing, there are around twenty books of Hellboy’s exploits.

LGBTQ+ Graphic Novels Graphic novels by creators exploring LGBTQ+ identities had been published before, such as Lee Marrs’s The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (1973–8) and Roberta Gregory’s Winging It (1988 and 1999), but more than ever before were published in the 1990s. During the 1980s, government indifference to the HIV/AIDS crisis underlined the high stakes of visibility; the bestremembered activist group from that era, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), was founded in 1987 and adopted the slogan SILENCE=DEATH to underline this point. If HIV/AIDS was the immediate political context for many queer graphic novels, that

7632_Williams.indd 183

28/06/22 16:56

184

the us graphic novel

imperative meshed with the legacy of Maus: now publishers were more open-minded about graphic novels addressing historical trauma and personal experience, believing a wide audience for these texts could be reached through general bookstores. DC published two graphic novels in the mid-1990s with overt connections to the gay rights movement. DC’s Paradox Press brought out Stuck Rubber Baby (1995) by Howard Cruse, and Vertigo issued Seven Miles a Second (1996) with pencils and inks by James Romberger and script by Romberger and David Wojnarowicz. Underground creator Cruse had been the first editor of Gay Comix, and Stuck Rubber Baby was a fictionalised account of his experiences participating in Civil Rights struggles and coming out in Alabama in the 1960s. Wojnarowicz was a writer and activist who died of an AIDS-related illness before Seven Miles a Second was published, and his graphic novel was part of the cultural front against governmental indifference to the deaths of people with AIDS. Another example of the increasing presence of LGBTQ+ figures in graphic novels can be seen in Pedro & Me: Friendship, Loss, & What I Learned (2000), a graphic novel by the heterosexual male cartoonist Judd Winnick. Starting in February 1994, Winnick took part in the third season of reality television show The Real World, living in San Francisco with strangers for six months while being constantly filmed. Winnick became close friends with Pedro Zamora, a gay man living with HIV, and after Zamora’s death from an AIDS-related illness in November 1994, Winnick took on his friend’s role as a spokesperson for HIV awareness. As part of that activism, and as a memorial to Zamora’s life, Winnick created Pedro & Me, a 180-page account of their intertwined lives published by Henry Holt & Company. Running throughout the 1990s, Donna Barr’s The Desert Peach (print serialisation 1988–2001) centred on Pfirsich Rommel, German army officer and gay younger brother of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; Pfirsich is Desert Peach to his brother’s Desert Fox. Set in North Africa during World War Two, Pfirsich commands the 469th Halftrack, Support and Gravedigging Battalion, a dumping ground for soldiers that the army wants out of the way. Barr plays with historical fact – there was no Pfirsich Rommel – but the comic is built on extensive historical research and engages with topics such as the ethics of warfare and the Holocaust. It may seem unlikely subject matter for a comedy series, but Barr (a US Army veteran herself)

7632_Williams.indd 184

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

185

provokes both laughter and reflection on masculinity, sexuality in the military, the German war machine, and Nazism. The queer comix movement of the 1970s included Come Out Comix and Dyke Shorts by Mary Wings, Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels, and Larry Fuller’s Gay Heart Throbs; some of the very first comix representing gay lives had been published in Wimmen’s Comix, though not without contention.53 With a few exceptions, such as Gay Comix, in the 1980s LGBTQ+ comics mostly developed in newspapers and gay periodicals, at a remove from comics fanzines, conventions, and specialist comic shops. Examples of gay newspaper comics include Alison Bechdel’s strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008), the cartoons by writer Charles Ortleb and artist Richard Fiala in Christopher Street magazine, and Tom Hachtman’s strip Gertrude’s Follies, which began in 1978 in the New York alternative newspaper Soho Weekly News. Starting in the 1990s, LGBTQ+ creators and characters became much more visible in North American comics culture, and the graphic novel form has been key here, often interacting with other forms of queer comics-making, such as newspaper strips. John Blackburn’s Coley, for example, was self-published from 1989–91 and then appeared in various comics for Fantagraphics, including their line of erotic comics Eros. Blackburn’s work was reprinted as the sixteenth Eros Graphic Album, Coley Running Wild, Book One: The Blade and the Whip (1995). Samuel R. Delany, known for his memoirs of gay life in New York as well as being an SF author, wrote Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, with art by Mia Wolff, a graphic novel first published in 1999 by Juno Publishing and reprinted by Fantagraphics in 2013. And LGBTQ+ publisher Cleis Press released Jennifer Camper’s graphic novel SubGURLZ (1999) and a 2002 reprint edition of the strip Curbside Boys (1991–2008) by Robert Kirby, entitled Curbside Boys: The New York Years.54 The acclamation that met Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home (2006) evidences the importance of queer comics to the 2000s graphic novel boom. However, noting that Bechdel drew Pekar-scripted comics for American Splendor and that Fun Home references Charles Addams’s cartoons, Haunt of Fear, and Mad, one is reminded that the texts clustered in this section as LGBTQ+ graphic novels operate in multiple comics traditions at once – autobiography, horror, comedy – and what is significant about the 1990s is the visibility of the queer graphic novel, not the sudden emergence of LGBTQ+

7632_Williams.indd 185

28/06/22 16:56

186

the us graphic novel

creators, who had been making long-form comics throughout the twentieth century.

Conclusion By the mid-1990s the mainstream comics industry was in dire straits. It was unclear whether Marvel, one of the two largest publishers, would survive. Trade presses did release graphic novels that made their way into bookshops, but graphic novels were largely bought and read by existing comics fans. Nonetheless, there was a bigger and broader potential readership, apparent in the people who discovered Delany and Wolff’s Bread & Wine in gay bookshops, in the zinesters buying Ghost World, and in the music fans who read about The Sandman in Rolling Stone and bought the first book via mail order. The diversity and volume of graphic novel publishing would grow exponentially in the 2000s, with the resurgence of comics in bookstores and libraries (and online retail) making it possible for the makers of long-form comics to reach wider and more diverse consumers. The creator-centred relations of production touted at Image, Legend, and other new companies and imprints tilted towards an ideology borrowed from underground and alternative comics: the comics creator as an embattled artist holding out against the assembly-line production model of multinational corporations. This fitted into deeply embedded cultural narratives about the sanctity of authorship and, as we will see in the next chapter, in the twentyfirst century it enabled graphic novels to be celebrated loudly by the people who promote literature (marketing departments, prize givers, and journalists) and the people who study it (students and academics).

Notes  1. Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), pp. 171–2.  2. Mark Rogers, ‘Political Economy: Manipulating Demand and “The Death of Superman”’, in Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, eds, Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 153–4.  3. Ibid. pp. 151–4.

7632_Williams.indd 186

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

187

 4. Ibid. pp. 153–4.  5. Ibid. p. 154.  6. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, rev. edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 282–3.  7. Rogers, ‘Political Economy’, pp. 154–5.  8. Michael Dean, ‘The Image Story, Part Two: The Honeymoon’, The Comics Journal 223 (May 2000): p. 3.  9. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p. 111. 10. Jeffrey A. Brown, ‘Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital’, Journal of Popular Culture 30.4 (1997): pp. 23–9. 11. Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 114, 124. 12. Mel Gibson, Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015), pp. 170–1. 13. Benjamin Woo, Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), p. 191. 14. Pustz, Comic Book Culture, p. 76. 15. Woo, Getting a Life, p. 194. 16. Evan Dorkin, The Eltingville Club (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2016), p. 58. 17. Daniel Clowes, ‘Young Dan Pussey’, Eightball 1 (October 1989): p. 23. 18. Ibid. p. 31. 19. Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, eds, Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), pp. 2–3, 7; Mark Medley, ‘25 Years and Change: Drawn & Quarterly Writes a New Chapter in its Graphic History’, The Globe and Mail, 8 May 2015, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 20. Tom Spurgeon, ‘News: Report from BEA 2003’, The Comics Reporter, 30 June 2003, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 21. Tahneer Oksman, ‘An Aesthetic of Expansiveness: Drawn and Quarterly at 25 Years’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 July 2015, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 22. Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, 2nd edn. (Bloomington, IN: Microcosm, 2008), pp. 15–17.

7632_Williams.indd 187

28/06/22 16:56

188

the us graphic novel

23. Ibid. pp. 17, 45. 24. Roger Sabin and Teal Triggs, ‘Introduction’, in Roger Sabin and Teal Triggs, eds, Below Critical Radar: Fanzines and Alternative Comics from 1976 to Now (Hove: Slab-O-Concrete, 2000), p. 5. 25. Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), p. 32. 26. Sabin and Triggs, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 27. Duncombe, Notes from Underground, p. 158. 28. Sabin and Triggs, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. 29. Duncombe, Notes from Underground, pp. 180–1. 30. Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1998), pp. 13–14; italics added. 31. Ibid. p. 65. 32. Ibid. pp. 26–9. 33. Michael Dean, ‘The Image Story, Part One: Forming an Image’, The Comics Journal 222 (April 2000): p. 14. 34. Dean, ‘Image Story, Part Two: The Honeymoon’, pp. 5–6. 35. Michael Dean, ‘The Image Story, Part Three: What Went Wrong’, The Comics Journal 225 (July 2000): p. 7. 36. Dean, ‘Image Story, Part Two: The Honeymoon’, p. 4. 37. Michael Dean, ‘The Image Story, Part Four: An Accounting’, The Comics Journal 226 (August 2000): pp. 14–15. 38. Ibid. p. 15. 39. Ibid. p. 19. 40. Brian Michael Bendis, Jinx: The Definitive Collection (Berkeley: Image, 2001), p. [481]. 41. Joshua Yehl, ‘Brubaker Talks About His Exclusive Deal with Image Comics’, IGN, 16 January 2014, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 42. Dean, ‘Image Story, Part Four: An Accounting’, pp. 19–20. 43. I have given credit to the creators who launched these comics and/or are most closely associated with them. In most cases other creators contributed to these series too, not least when guest artists take over pencilling and inking duties for one-off issues. 44. Jochen Ecke, The British Comic Book Invasion: Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the Evolution of the American Style (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019), p. 200. 45. Julia Round, ‘“Is This a Book?” DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s’, in Paul Williams and James Lyons, eds, The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 14–30.

7632_Williams.indd 188

28/06/22 16:56



boom and bust, mainstream and alternative

189

46. Joe Sutliff Sanders, ‘Sandman, the Ephemeral, and the Permanent’, in Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, eds, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 338–9. 47. Ibid. pp. 337–52. 48. Tom Keymer, ‘Reading Time in Serial Fiction before Dickens’, Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): p. 44. 49. Sanders, ‘Sandman, the Ephemeral, and the Permanent’, pp. 337–52. 50. Qtd in Marc Savlov, ‘A Sort of Legend: Neil Gaiman, Storyteller’, Austin Chronicle, 10 September 1999, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 51. Sanders, ‘Sandman, the Ephemeral, and the Permanent’, pp. 337–8, 349–52. 52. Ecke, British Comic Book Invasion, pp. 203–4. 53. Leah Misemer, ‘Serial Critique: The Counterpublic of Wimmen’s Comix’, Inks 3.1 (Spring 2019): pp. 6–26. 54. Justin Hall, ‘The Secret Origins of LBGTQ Graphic Novels’, in Baetens, Frey, and Tabachnick, Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, pp. 289–90.

7632_Williams.indd 189

28/06/22 16:56

chapter 7

Twenty-first-century Graphic Novels

Introduction At the start of the twenty-first century, sales of graphic novels grew year on year, sometimes at staggering rates. In 2003 they were up nearly 50 per cent on the year before, and in 2004 that increase was around 35 per cent, taking annual graphic novel sales in the United States to $205–10 million.1 Sales declined slightly as a consequence of the Great Recession that started in 2007–8, but the overall upward trajectory is clear, with the North American graphic novel market estimated at $835 million in 2020.2 And unlike the late 1980s boom, the presence of graphic novels in bookstores, libraries, and in the wider reading consciousness has not subsided. Writing in 2009, comics scholar Paul Lopes offered several explanations for this rise in sales: first, the high visibility of graphic novel properties as a result of successful film adaptations; second, the popularity of Japanese comics in translation; third, academic research indicating that graphic novels assist children’s literacy; and finally, the promotion of graphic novels without embarrassment or qualification by notable taste-making institutions.3 Some of these causes are as much evidence of cultural acceptance as they are drivers of popularity; when the British newspaper The Guardian gave Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth its prestigious First Book Award, this was recognition that the graphic novel was a legitimate object of cultural acclaim as well as a form of publicity generating extra sales. Nonetheless, Lopes’s list provides a useful way of organising the contexts surrounding twenty-firstcentury graphic novels, and we will examine each factor in turn before considering life-writing, the genre that has been especially well-received by cultural gatekeepers. 190

7632_Williams.indd 190

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

191

Lopes also argued the World Wide Web changed comics by ‘providing a new social space’ for fans, but failed to revolutionise ‘the commercial’ side of comics.4 From our vantage point in the 2020s, clearly the internet has substantially transformed the way comics are produced, distributed, and sold. The demographics of comics creators and readers is being transformed too. E-graphic novelists are producing ambitious work that evokes the serial publication of centuries past whilst straining at the very definition of what a graphic novel is and might be.

Graphic Novels on Film It is obvious that characters from comics dominate the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. Eight of the top twenty of the world’s highest-grossing movies this century are superhero films adapted from the Big Two’s intellectual properties (given that Marvel and DC are owned by Disney and Warner Bros respectively, perhaps it is more accurate to say these characters belong to them). As of September 2020, Avengers: Endgame (dir. Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, 2019) made $2.8 billion globally, part of the interlocking network of films and television series constituting the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).5 Other financial behemoths in the franchise include Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2018) and Captain Marvel (dir. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2019), though Marvel’s screen success this century precedes the MCU and began with X-Men (dir. Bryan Singer, 2000) and Spider-Man (dir. Sam Raimi, 2002). The recent cycle of DC adaptations has roots even earlier, going back to Superman (dir. Richard Donner, 1978), Batman (dir. Tim Burton, 1989), and their sequels and reboots. The revenue generated by some DC Extended Universe releases – Wonder Woman (dir. Patty Jenkins, 2017) and Aquaman (dir. James Wan, 2018) stand out – indicates that the DCEU’s most successful films seriously compete with Marvel’s at the global box office. Just don’t mention the first Suicide Squad (dir. David Ayer, 2016). It is almost as obvious to point out that comics provide source material for many films that don’t feature superhero characters and aren’t blockbusters with eye-watering budgets (though most of them aren’t indie films, either). Surveying non-superhero comics adaptations released since 2000, a wide variety of genres are covered: Victorian detective drama From Hell (dir. Allen Hughes

7632_Williams.indd 191

28/06/22 16:56

192

the us graphic novel

and Albert Hughes, 2001), period gangster film Road to Perdition (dir. Sam Mendes, 2002), SF romance epic The Fountain (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2006), animated children’s film Over the Hedge (dir. Tim Johnson, 2006), zombie horror 30 Days of Night (dir. David Slade, 2007), action thriller Wanted (dir. Timur Bekmambetov, 2008), Antarctic suspense Whiteout (dir. Dominic Sena, 2009), and supernatural action-comedy R.I.P.D. (dir. Robert Schwentke, 2013). Several graphic novels mentioned in this book have been made into motion pictures, and again, the subject matter is notably broad, from dystopian SF to historical war epics: Ghost World (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001), American Splendor (dir. Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, 2003), Hellboy (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2004), Sin City (dir. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, 2005), V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, 2006), 300 (dir. Zack Snyder, 2007), and Scott Pilgrim vs the World (dir. Edgar Wright, 2010). Many twenty-first-century superhero films buy into the continuity logic of mainstream comics as it emerged during the 1960s: individual texts pursue a story arc to completion but within a much larger narrative elaborated across different films. Certain movies (notably the Avengers films) act as junctions in which multiple longrunning plots meet and are resolved, at the same time new ones begin. Non-superhero films, on the other hand, tend to be adapted from discrete graphic novels. Take writer John Wagner and artist Vince Locke’s crime thriller A History of Violence, published as a one-off graphic novel by DC’s Paradox Press in 1997 and adapted into a 2005 motion picture directed by David Cronenberg. A complete story in three chapters, the narrative came suitably divided for conversion into a three-part film script. This partition is not firm or fixed, though the exceptions rather prove the rule. There are superhero films adapted from self-contained graphic novels, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (dir. Stephen Norrington, 2003), Watchmen (dir. Zack Snyder, 2009), Kick-Ass (dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2010), and Kick-Ass 2 (dir. Jeff Wadlow, 2013), but in these cases the source texts radically reimagine the parameters of what the superhero genre is and does. Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019) earned over $1 billion, but its profits are one of the few things it has in common with MCU and DCEU films. Putatively inspired by Moore and Bolland’s graphic novel The Killing Joke, Joker is more obviously influenced by Martin Scorsese’s films Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy

7632_Williams.indd 192

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

193

(1983): there is no flaunting of CGI special effects, no spectacularly choreographed set-piece battles, and it lies outside a multi-film narrative trajectory. The makers of Joker framed the film as a character study providing different pleasures to other superhero films, and the mixed – but mostly rhapsodic – critical response suggests they were successful, Joaquin Phoenix winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. The film and comics industries comingle every July at the San Diego Comic-Con, established in 1970 and now attracting over 130,000 attendees each year. The four-day Comic-Con includes more than 1,000 retailers and exhibitors, over 500 film screenings, an academic conference, and almost 1,000 panels delivered by creative industries professionals – not just comics, but television, film, video games, and toys. As explored in Erin Hanna’s Only at Comic-Con: Hollywood, Fans, and the Limits of Exclusivity (2020), companies hope that the fervour of fans will amplify the publicity surrounding new releases, a stage-managed process involving technological spectacle, manufacturing an aura of exclusive access through long queues, and flattering fans with the sense they hold power over the conglomerates.6 In terms of using Comic-Con to generate publicity, take the post-apocalyptic SF film Oblivion (2013), directed by Joseph Kosinski and starring Tom Cruise. To acquire financial backing for the project, Kosinski circulated an extract from the Oblivion graphic novel at the 2008 Comic-Con in the form of ‘an “ashcan,” an opening chapter/preview with eight sample images’. Kosinski later explained, ‘We gave them away at Comic-Con [. . .] and that is what got the attention of Tom Cruise.’ But no graphic novel exists. It was never finished, let alone published. Here a mooted graphic novel was no more than the occasion to turn the head of a powerful patron in the film industry. As Kosinski comments, the ‘ashcan and graphic novel are great ways to pitch a movie’.7 Comic-Con is such a sprawling event it exceeds the San Diego Convention Center’s physical bounds, so films and television series are also launched at ‘activations’ elsewhere in the city, funded by the studios and high-profile advertisers such as Amazon, Nintendo, and Mac Cosmetics.8 During the 2010s a substantial number of scholars mapped out the exchanges between US comics and other media industries, on the terrain of shared narrative practices (metalepsis and retconning, for example),9 as well as in relation to shared source texts, characters, and franchises (including superheroines,

7632_Williams.indd 193

28/06/22 16:56

194

the us graphic novel

black superheroes, Fu Manchu, Shaft, zombies, Ben Hur, Superman, and Beowulf).10 A number of recent monographs analyse more broadly how comics publishers have been bought by multinational entertainment conglomerates, how comics properties are licensed and/or adapted on screen, and how storytelling techniques migrate between these media.11 One example is Push, the story of two psychics and their attempt to stop a secret government agency that wants to use them as weapons. Push exists as a film directed by Paul McGuigan and a graphic novel written by Adam Freeman and Marc Bernardin, pencilled by Bruno Redondo, and inked by Sergio Arino (with a flashback sequence by Aaron Minier). The first issue of Push, published by DC imprint Wildstorm Productions, was on sale November 2008 with the last issue available in stores in February 2009, the same month the film premiered (a collected edition was published later in 2009). Each release was carefully timed: the graphic novel functioned as a prequel, providing extra detail for the storyworld elaborated in the film. Potential moviegoers amongst comics readers were informed in advance about the upcoming motion picture and able to learn the characters’ backstories, supposedly increasing their investment in the narrative (and the likelihood of them paying money to see Push in cinemas). Film and graphic novel were interwoven in terms of Push’s promotion and casting: in July 2008 Push was the subject of a panel at Comic-Con and the film’s male lead, Chris Evans, has performed as various superheroes and villains on screen. The film was promoted with the tagline ‘X-Men meets Trainspotting’. As comics scholar Liam Burke puts it, Push the film was not based on a comic, but it vied ‘to be affiliated with [the comic book movie] genre’ by adopting ‘elements synonymous’ with actual adaptations. Push’s male protagonist fits the mould of ‘an outsider [. . .] with heightened abilities that enable him/her to prevent and/or avenge threats to the community’.12 Aesthetic ‘codes [once] specific to comics [. . .] have become an increasingly prominent part of cinema’s comic aesthetic’, and Burke identifies the ‘rainbow effects’ used in the Push film ‘to convey telekinetic abilities’ as borrowed from the comics medium.13 The imbrication of comics and film is not new, but the extent to which the two industries are now interdependent is unprecedented, and the making of graphic novels – from conceiving projects to their publication schedule – is bound up with intermedial entanglements.

7632_Williams.indd 194

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

195

A popular term used by academics in this context is ‘transmedia storytelling’,14 where narratives sprawl across different cultural forms, from comics to video games to television series, exploiting different modes of storytelling and audiences and demanding attentive consumers willing to cross the boundaries of media. The contemporary US graphic novel scene is not only part of transmedia storytelling, but transnational publishing, and the next section explores another key engine of the 2000s graphic novel boom: manga.

(Not) Flipping Manga Japanese comics in English translation accounted for 43 per cent of the book-format comics published in 2006. That year at least 1,224 Japanese (‘manga’) and Korean (‘manhwa’) titles were released in the United States. The US manga market was worth $100 million in 2003, of which $35 million was attributable to Tokyopop, the market leader. In 2001 Tokyopop published manga for the book trade that read from right to left, as in the original Japanese; up to this point, the convention had been to reverse the pages to allow English-language readers to navigate translated texts from left to right, a process known as ‘flipping’. Tokyopop’s decision not to ‘flip’ source material saved production costs and was successfully marketed as a ‘100% Authentic’ experience.15 US manga sales peaked in 2007 at an estimated $210 million, and though the market fell to $120 million in 2010, this was still approximately twice the value it had been in 2002.16 Manga sales were primarily through bookstores, not comic shops, and manga was extremely popular with female teenagers. This constituency of consumers had not been well-served by the male-dominated world of comics fandom, but the potential female audience for comics was enormous, as demonstrated by Tokyopop’s success.17 Manga was the dynamo that drove the (re)acceptance of graphic novels in bookstores: encouraged by its popularity, graphic novel sections in bookshops and libraries were restored and expanded during the 2000s. Publishers Weekly estimated that sales of all graphic novels in bookshops were worth $140 million in 2004, more than double the sales through comic shops ($67 million).18 By this point the companies translating manga had a strong sense of themselves as part of the book trade, not of other cultural industries.19 With few exceptions, by 2011 US manga publishers were producing their own Original English Language (OEL) manga. This

7632_Williams.indd 195

28/06/22 16:56

196

the us graphic novel

was partly a response to ‘an increasingly competitive licensing environment’ – the rising cost and difficulty of buying the rights to translate popular comics from Japan. As manga scholar Casey Brienza notes, even when US-produced graphic novels are drawn in a Japanese style their publishers are reluctant to label them ‘manga’ for fear of misrepresenting the product, offending Japanese licensors, or being accused of cultural appropriation. Nonetheless, some OEL manga have been extraordinarily successful, such as Svetlana Chmakova’s Dramacon (2005–7) and the first volume of Twilight: The Graphic Novel (2010), the latter with art by Korean artist Young Kim and a first print run of 350,000 copies.20 Another notable success in manga-influenced comics was the Canadian Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim (2004–10), published by the Portlandbased Oni Press. Brienza comments that, in addition to the design of the characters, the materiality of the Scott Pilgrim books was meant to evoke ‘manga. The pages are monochrome, individual volumes are trimmed to approximately the Tokyopop size, and first printings of some volumes included Japanese-style obi [a band wrapped around the cover].’21 Oni Press is a dedicated graphic novel publisher but many trade presses, such as Random House, established manga imprints and publish manga-influenced works too. Brienza highlights Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006), published by First Second Books, an imprint set up by Roaring Brook Press, and Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet (2008–present), serialised by Scholastic. She notes ‘how these books, like the Scott Pilgrim series, (1) have a connection to Asia through the ethnicity of the authors and (2) are targeted to teenagers or children’.22 As this indicates, the contemporary graphic novel boom is only partly based on texts aimed at readers in their twenties or older, and the most spectacular sales have been registered by books intended for children and YA readers. This happened in conjunction with the changing status of comics with teachers and librarians: schools and libraries no longer fear exposing children to comics but are encouraged to do so for the good of their young readers.

Of Literacy and Librarians As Lopes records, since the 1970s many essays argued that comics were an asset in encouraging literacy and that graphic novels

7632_Williams.indd 196

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

197

helped bring male teenagers into the library. There were even articles in library journals advising on the curation of graphic novel collections. So why did graphic novels remain a marginal presence in US libraries until the end of the twentieth century? Up to the 1990s, most graphic novels couldn’t be bought through the book distribution channels on which librarians depended. If a librarian or schoolteacher wanted to stock their shelves with graphic novels, they would have to be familiar with their local comic shop and have a manager willing to let them spend their acquisitions budget there. Neither was very likely before 2000.23 This state of affairs began to shift in the early 2000s, and one of the key organisations propelling change was the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association.24 In August 2002 Evan St Lifer, the editor of the School Library Journal, reported that via meetings and websites YALSA ‘has begun its own proselytizing for the graphic novel’ and that librarians ‘are routinely building graphic novel collections to attract teen readers and their hyper-visual predilections’.25 The 2000s saw many books and websites appearing to help librarians and teachers choose comics as reading material and advising on how best to deploy them.26 School Library Journal and other professional journals devoted their pages to graphic novels and institutional structures changed to enable librarians to build up their collections. For example, School Library Journal reported in 2002: Book Wholesalers Incorporated (BWI), a book distributor to public libraries, has expanded its ‘TitleTales’ online ordering service to help librarians view parts of the titles they might like to order prior to making a purchase. The new graphic novels section displays images of inside pages and covers of the novels. [. . .] BWI also lists graphic novel reviews from up to seven sources. The graphic novel selection tools were added, BWI representatives say, because of high interest on the part of public librarians who requested an easier way to purchase them.27 Other distributors selling to libraries followed suit: ‘Wholesalers and distributors are adjusting their programs to assist booksellers who want to get started but aren’t sure how to begin, with comics section starter kits’ and titles catalogued by age of intended reader. Responding to demand from bookstores, in 2002 the biggest comics

7632_Williams.indd 197

28/06/22 16:56

198

the us graphic novel

distributor Diamond established a book division, adding more than fifty publishers and adapting to the book marketplace by adding ISBNs and – against the founding logic of the direct market – creating a returns policy for books.28 If comics were invading America’s libraries, librarians were invading the world of comics, with 400 librarians attending the New York Comic Con in February 2007. There were four ‘librarycentric panels’ at the convention: Shelving graphic novels poses difficulties, and panelists bemoaned that many fellow librarians still view anything in a graphic format as kid stuff. Jennifer Feigelman, Goshen [Public Library], NY, suggested using stickers to discern between YA-oriented and adult graphic novels to prevent the former [sic] titles from falling into inappropriate hands. Brooklyn PL’s Alison Hendon warned against separating titles by genre. All reported that circulation rises if the materials are clustered rather than shelved individually. The panels were moderated by John Shableski of library services vendor Brodart, who claimed that libraries accounted for 10 per cent of all graphic novel sales.29 Declaring 2002 ‘The Year of the Graphic Novel’, trade journal Publishers Weekly said it was a ‘pleasant surprise’ to see ‘the aggressive support from librarians for comics’.30 YALSA’s efforts did not end in 2002: in May 2006 its President reported the establishment of a Great Graphic Novels committee and the Great Graphic Novels for Teens list premiered in 2007.31 Many of YALSA’s annual awards commend graphic novels and several have won the Nonfiction Award or the Alex Award (‘given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults’). In 2020 two graphic novels won the Alex Award, Gender Queer: A Memoir (2019) by Maia Kobabe and In Waves (2019) by A. J. Dungo, and again in 2021, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (2020) by Derf Backderf and Solutions and Other Problems (2020) by Allie Brosh. YALSA’s Michael L. Printz Award for literary excellence in YA literature has twice been awarded to a graphic novel, to Yang’s American Born Chinese in 2007, and in 2017 to the third volume of March (2016) by writers John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, an autobiographical account of Congressman Lewis’s participation in the Civil Rights movement. March

7632_Williams.indd 198

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

199

won YALSA’s Nonfiction Award that year too.32 Two of Canadian creator Mariko Tamaki’s graphic novels have been recognised as ‘Honor Books’ in the Printz Awards: This One Summer (2014) by Mariko Tamaki with art by her cousin Jillian Tamaki, and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me (2019) by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell. Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki are decorated comics creators, their book Skim (2008) listed as one of the year’s Best Illustrated Children’s Books in the awards given by The New York Times. A succession of imprints dedicated to children’s or YA graphic novels have been established this century: Macmillan’s First Second (founded 2006), Scholastic’s Graphix (2005), and DC introduced the short-lived Minx imprint in 2007 for a female teenage audience, which published writer Derek Kirk Kim and artist Jesse Hamm’s graphic novel Good as Lily (2007). Other children’s and YA publishers include Papercutz (2005), Lion Forge Comics (2011), notably its Roar, Caracal, and Cubhouse imprints, and BOOM! Studios (2005), specifically the imprints KaBOOM! and BOOM! Box. Françoise Mouly, co-editor of RAW, has published comics for children for decades, beginning with RAW Junior in the late 1990s and more recently with her company TOON Books (a 2006 collaboration with Penguin launched as an independent publisher in 2008).33 Papercutz, which in 2016 was publishing fifty to sixty books per year aimed at eight-to-twelve year olds, was founded by Terry Nantier and Jim Salicrup; Salicrup was an editor at Marvel and Nantier has been an independent comics publisher since the 1970s. In 2016 Salicrup remarked that almost all of the established comics companies have ‘either bulked up their kids’ line or [are] offering stuff that 10 years ago they would never have considered being part of their comics mix[.] [. . .] [You] need to have kids’ graphic novels if you want to have a market in the future.’34 Some children’s and YA publishers have used creators with backgrounds in underground and alternative comics, such as Jessica Abel at Papercutz, Jay Lynch at TOON Books, or James Kochalka at First Second. The US comics industry has seen booms, crashes, utopian predictions, and apocalyptic premonitions, and I am reluctant to open the hyperbole box again, but there’s no other way of putting it: children’s and YA graphic novels have rewired the way comics publishing works. Scholastic’s initial print run on Raina Telgemeier’s children’s graphic novel Guts (2019), for example, was a million

7632_Williams.indd 199

28/06/22 16:56

200

the us graphic novel

copies. At the end of the 2010s DC wound up imprints that once led the line on graphic novels (Vertigo, Paradox) but established the DC Books for Young Readers unit. Between the late 1960s and 1990s, Marvel and DC often appointed their editorial staff from fandom, which meant editors already understood the direct market, their peers’ taste, and had a deep knowledge of the Big Two’s back catalogue (essential for maintaining continuity). Conversely, the executive editor of DC Books for Young Readers is Michele Wells, formerly of Penguin Random House and Disney Worldwide Publishing. DC Books for Young Readers are not looking to repurpose mainstream comics writers and artists but recruiting YA prose writers such as Lauren Myracle or established YA comics creators such as Yang and Mariko Tamaki.35 I commented above on some of the awards Yang and Tamaki have received, and in 2016 Yang was presented with the five-year, $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship, colloquially known as the ‘Genius Grant’. Yang was not the first (or even second) comics creator to be awarded this Fellowship, a sign of the extent to which graphic novels have been absorbed into a transatlantic ecosystem of awards and acclaim.

Marks of Distinction This section explores a particularly contested aspect of graphic novel culture in the twenty-first century: the proposition that, beyond traditional cohorts of creators and fans, there has been a broad social acceptance that graphic novels are equal in status to literary novels. In this brave new world, newspaper supplements and literary journals review the latest graphic novels and notable comics are studied in university literature departments, where their intricate construction is teased out through minute analysis. So what’s wrong with this picture? One objection is inaccuracy, and whether the graphic novel is really treated as the equal of other esteemed cultural forms. Christopher Pizzino argues that the graphic novel is part of a ‘Bildungsroman discourse’ that ‘limits the status of comics precisely through the kind of degree of maturity it grants’; Pizzino makes the case that the acceptance of comics as literature in the form of the graphic novel is highly qualified.36 Another objection is undesirability, that comics have thrived when ‘liberated from the stifling opinions of the traditional arbiters of taste’,37 and that Comics Studies should

7632_Williams.indd 200

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

201

resist the hierarchies and exclusions embedded in the discipline of English literature.38 This capsule account of graphic novels and literary prestige is only part of what scholars mean when they talk about comics gaining cultural legitimacy. Another more general meaning is the idea that comics will become a commonplace of adult reading habits, that members of the public will pick ‘up graphic novels as naturally as Ruth Rendell novels’. When Roger Sabin wrote those words in 1993, he was surveying the aftermath of the 1980s, when it was hoped that (in the form of the graphic novel) comics readers and creators would no longer be subject to social ostracism. Comics world stakeholders wanted the medium to be visible in public culture, and not in lurid or derided ways. As Sabin phrases it, the great hope of ‘old-style comics evangelists’ was that the popularity of graphic novels meant an adult could ‘read a comic without embarrassment on the bus’.39 Also in the mix is the idea of coolness, albeit a quality difficult to define. In the twenty-first century, comics have been promoted by groups accredited with special powers of identifying what is fashionable and cool. Comics being on the radar of ‘taste-makers’ is not new, but this does contribute to the contemporary recognition of graphic novels in more formal settings. Along these lines, Scott McCloud implies that the response of ‘hipsters in New York’ helped catalyse the ‘gusto and widespread affection’ for comics in the 2000s: ‘the earthquake that causes the tsunami’.40 Perhaps this is less the case now, but on some level when a graphic novel is shortlisted for a literary prize or reviewed in The New York Times it is in order to signal that the critics involved are aware of modish trends. In a 2005 New Yorker article, art critic Peter Schjeldahl begins by describing the ‘young bodies sprawled around’ the graphic novel section of the Barnes & Noble at Union Square (on the edge of Manhattan’s hip East Village) and goes on to call graphic novels ‘a young person’s art’, even constructing graphic novelists as updated versions of the guitar-wielding ‘poet types’ of the 1960s.41 Returning to the theme of graphic novels being hailed as literature, such a focus comes with methodological risks, notably removing the graphic novel from non-literary contexts: the prevalence of literary scholars, it is often asserted, distorts Comics Studies, so analysis gets dominated by what (some) comics share with (some) literary texts, features like plot, character, and dialogue. In 2017

7632_Williams.indd 201

28/06/22 16:56

202

the us graphic novel

scholars Ylva Sommerland and Margareta Wallin Wictorin called for ‘Writing Comics into Art History and Art History into Comics Research’.42 Many others make similar claims.43 Where cultural legitimisation is concerned, Chris Ware’s art has been displayed in museums and galleries, chosen for the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the subject of exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2006), the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska (2007), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2014–15). On the whole, though, comics have not had the same presence in galleries and fine arts contexts as they have had in literary circles. Commenting on the 2005 Masters of American Comics exhibition launched in Los Angeles, Lopes notes that the show received major attention from journalists, but it ‘was the exception to the rule of the continued outsider status of comic art in the fine art world’.44 It would be a misrepresentation of the twenty-first-century graphic novel to state that legitimacy is solely a matter of being recognised as literature, but the markers of cultural credibility are more palpable in literary contexts than elsewhere. And Ware is extremely successful in literary contexts. In 2001 Jimmy Corrigan won the Guardian First Book Award and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. These acts, and other instances where graphic novels have won book prizes, greatly raise the possibility that the texts in question will be considered major literary achievements. Along with this comes the presence of comics in prestigious spaces of cultural consumption, whether that’s inclusion in a distinguished anthology series or being placed on the syllabus of a university literature course. Being the main subject of an academic conference or scholarly publication would be further examples. Awards and anthologisation do not guarantee a place in the canon – literary history is full of once-esteemed texts that are now obscure – but a graphic novel that receives such accolades is, at the very least, likely to be debated as worthy of sitting next to an already canonical text. Many of the graphic novels released around 2000 were collected editions of serialised comics by 1990s alternative creators such as Ware, Lynda Barry, Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, Ben Katchor, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, and Charles Burns. This is partly the reason why the boom of the 2000s maintained momentum whereas the boom of the 1980s petered out: as the market for graphic novels became apparent, trade presses like Jonathan Cape, Penguin, and

7632_Williams.indd 202

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

203

Faber republished extant narratives in new editions, which, given those publishing houses’ prestigious status, provided creators with a further imprimatur of literary merit. The creators mentioned above are feted by cultural gatekeepers, by which I mean people in positions of institutional power able to facilitate the publication of texts and generate favourable publicity towards them, people such as academics, reviewers, bloggers, editors, and bookstore managers. These figures not only get graphic novels printed but kept in print and actually read. On occasion, comics writers and artists step into gatekeeping roles themselves: since Françoise Mouly was appointed art editor at The New Yorker in 1993, many alternative comics creators (such as those listed at the start of this paragraph) have had their art published inside the magazine or on the cover.45 A 2012 book edited by Mouly showcasing controversial or censored New Yorker covers includes the work of graphic novelists Richard McGuire, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Gary Panter, all published in RAW, and David Mazzucchelli, contributor to the RAW Junior imprint.46 To give further examples of how Mouly uses her gatekeeping positions to promote graphic novelists, R. Kikuo Johnson – creator of the award-winning coming-of-age narrative Night Fisher (2005) – produced The Shark King (2012) for TOON Books and multiple New Yorker covers and Mouly draws on other creators from the TOON Books stable, such as Rutu Modan and Frank Viva, to produce art for the magazine.47 Attuned to his preeminent status, the 27 November 2006 New Yorker was a Thanksgiving special with four variant covers by Ware. Ware’s publishing connections extend to literary writer and editor Dave Eggers, the latter inviting the graphic novelist to edit an issue of Eggers’s acutely fashionable magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in 2004. Ware also edited the anthology Best American Comics 2007 for Houghton Mifflin. A brief overview of prizes given to US-based graphic novelists this century includes the PEN Center USA Award for Graphic Literature, given to Matt Fraction (2010), Clowes (2011), Sacco (2012), Gilbert Hernandez (2013), and Mimi Pond (2014), and the PEN Center USA Graphic Literature Innovator Award, presented to G. Willow Wilson (2015) and Gene Luen Yang (2016).48 In addition to Yang, other graphic novelists to receive MacArthur Fellowships include Katchor (2000), Alison Bechdel (2014), and Barry (2019). Lauren Redniss is another recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (2016) whose illustrated books and newspaper cartoons could be

7632_Williams.indd 203

28/06/22 16:56

204

the us graphic novel

read as comics – they certainly evoke the mid-century comics creators (Thurber, Feiffer) discussed in Chapter 2. In 2006 Ware was made a United States Artists Fellow, the same year as Sacco and Jim Woodring. They were followed by Gilbert Hernandez (2009), Peter Bagge (2014), and Barry (2019). In 2006 Time magazine selected Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as the best book of the year and the graphic novel won in the Memoir/Autobiography category in the National Book Critics Circle Award; various other awards followed in 2007 as Fun Home won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book, the Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fisherman Non-fiction Award, the Publishing Triangle-Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and the Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir and Biography category.49 Bechdel had already won Lambda Literary Awards in 1991, 1993, 1994, 1999, and 2004 for book collections of her comics, and in 2013 the Justin Hall-edited No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics won a Lambda Literary Award in the Anthology category. In 2014 the Lambda Awards began a Graphic Novel category (becoming a Comics category in 2020), though this didn’t stop another comics collection winning best Anthology in 2016: Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comic Anthology edited by Sfé R. Monster. The nomination of a graphic novel for a literary prize still receives comment in the press as an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence, but the number of actual ‘firsts’ has significantly dwindled. An early outrider was the 1992 Pulitzer Prize that Art Spiegelman received for Maus. Spiegelman parlayed the hearing he earned with Maus into an audience for his curation of classic comics, such as his reprint collection of Plastic Man (1943–56) by Jack Cole.50 Other graphic novelists have followed Spiegelman’s curatorial activities, and commenting on the 2009 edition of The Complete Jack Survives by Jerry Moriarty, Santiago García calls Chris Ware’s prologue ‘a kind of seal of guarantee’.51 Gatekeeping activities include editing and designing reprint volumes, with Ware overseeing the hardcover republication of Frank King’s newspaper strip Gasoline Alley, which King wrote and drew from 1918 up to his death in 1969 (the reprint editions were retitled Walt and Skeezix), and Canadian graphic novelist Seth designed The Complete Peanuts (2004–16), a book series reprinting Schulz’s Peanuts strip. Perpetuating the circle, The Complete Peanuts has gone on to win multiple awards for its visual élan and archival excellence.

7632_Williams.indd 204

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

205

History and Life-Writing in the US Graphic Novel The graphic novel genres best represented in the 2000s (superheroes aside) cohere neatly with the contemporary priorities of trade presses: Young Adult fiction, history and historical fiction, and life-writing. As García notes, the genres of autobiography and history were once considered the domain of ‘alternative’ comics, but in bookstores these genres constitute ‘the dominant material for a general and non-specialist reading public’ buying graphic novels.52 Some of the most exciting comics autobiographies experiment with the genre, blending memoir with the cookbook (Lucy Knisley’s 2013 Relish: My Life in the Kitchen) or filtering personal experience through fictionalised graphic diary entries (Emil Ferris’s 2017 My Favourite Thing is Monsters, volume one). Often history and (auto-)biography are blended, using the lives of individuals to illuminate a particular period or make a political argument, such as Jaime Cortez’s Sexile (2004), Ho Che Anderson’s King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (serialised 1993–2003; first book edition 2005), writer Iverna Lockpez and artist Dean Haspiel’s Cuba: My Revolution (2010), writer G. Neri and artist Randy DuBurke’s Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty (2010), G. B. Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010), Wilfred Santiago’s 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente (2011), writer Andrew Helfer and artist Randy DuBurke’s Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography (2006), writer Alissa Torres and artist Sungyoon Choi’s American Widow (2008), Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White (2012), Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017), Alberto Ledesma’s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (2017), and Wilfred Santiago’s Thunderbolt: An American Tale (2019). When one considers some of the publishers of the books just mentioned – Hill & Wang, Penguin, Random House, the University of Alabama Press, and Ohio State University Press – the busy role played by trade and university presses in publishing non-fiction graphic novels is clear. The historical fiction genre spans similarly diverse times and places, from 1980s New York in writer Danny Simmons and artist Floyd Hughes’s ’85 (2008) to the 1930s Deep South in the first volume of Mat Johnson and artist Warren Pleece’s Incognegro (2008) to the American West in the 1890s in Vile: Legends of Thunder Valley (complete edition 2019) by writer Richard Crowsong Davis (also known as Richard Paul Davis) and

7632_Williams.indd 205

28/06/22 16:56

206

the us graphic novel

various artists. Some works dwell on the tensions surrounding knowing the past when many sources compete to narrate and renarrate a historical event, such as writer Derek McCulloch and artist Shepherd Hendrix’s Stagger Lee (2006). This graphic novel engages with the killing of Billy Lyons in St Louis by ‘Stack Lee’ Shelton, the subject of numerous popular musical iterations since the murder in 1895, contextualising the event and its retelling in light of US racial politics during and since the nineteenth century.53 In 2001 life-writing scholar Leigh Gilmore stated ‘memoir has become the genre in the skittish period around the turn of the millennium’. Moreover, ‘trauma’ is ‘central’ to ‘contemporary self-representation’ during this recent ‘memoir boom’.54 Many autobiographical graphic novels narrate painful or traumatic personal experiences such as sexual abuse, dying family members, illness, racism, and homophobia. While this is an international movement, an indicative list of US works includes Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002), Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! (2002), Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003), writer Percy Carey and artist Ronald Wimberly’s Sentences: The Life of M. F. Grimm (2007), David Small’s Stitches (2009), Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits (2010), Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (2012), Cristy R. Road’s Spit and Passion (2012), Nicole Georges’s Calling Dr. Laura (2013), Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014), Tony Sandoval’s Rendez-Vous in Phoenix (2016), and Tillie Walden’s Spinning (2017). Like the verbal memoirs Gilmore discusses, autobiographical graphic novels attempt ‘to tell the story of one’s life’ while struggling against the constraints of autobiography, constraints that include an ‘almost legalistic definition of truth telling, [. . .] anxiety about invention, [and a] preference for the literal and verifiable’.55 There is a large and growing body of comics scholarship devoted to this genre, and in 2006 Gillian Whitlock coined the term ‘autographics’ to ‘draw attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal text in this genre of autobiography, and also to the subject positions that narrators negotiate in and through comics’.56 In the interplay of presence (the hand-drawn line) and absence (gutters and margins), in the ability to juxtapose past-tense recitative with present-tense monstration (not to mention more profane mixtures of temporality, word, and image), autographics is a rich site to unpack the central contention

7632_Williams.indd 206

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

207

of life-writing studies, that visual-verbal discourses do not represent a preformed self but, in the act of enunciation, construct both the subject depicted and the subject doing the depicting.57 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) has proved a magnet for critics of autographics, and in line with one of the common conventions of this scholarship, I refer to the creator of the graphic novel as ‘Bechdel’ and her avatar in the text as ‘Alison’. Fun Home follows Alison’s childhood in rural Pennsylvania, living in a large nineteenth-century house that her father, Bruce, was devoted to restoring. Bruce’s parenting style was at turns cold and violent, the ‘fun home’ of the title ironically referring to both the funeral parlour run by her father and the Bechdel family residence, a place of anger and tension. This was due to Bruce’s obsession with maintaining his physical surroundings and the strain that his double life put on Alison’s mother Helen: shortly after the twenty-year-old Alison comes out as a lesbian, she learns that Bruce has secretly been having sexual liaisons with teenage boys. Helen tells Bruce she wants a divorce and two weeks later he is killed walking in front of a truck. Fun Home explores Alison and Bruce’s relationship in light of his death in 1980, presented as most likely a suicide. A major theme is that of reversed trajectories, with Alison growing into the artist that family duties prevented her parents from becoming (‘I would carry on to live the artist’s life they had each abdicated’) and that she will be open about her sexuality in contrast to her father (‘you could say that my father’s end was my beginning. / Or more precisely, that the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth’).58 Fun Home draws in literature-savvy readers with allusions to canonical works, making comparisons between the Bechdels’ lives and texts such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27). Other novelists from the 1920s, such as Colette, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, are prominent, and as Hillary L. Chute notes, this ‘explicitly “literary”’ move may be ‘one of the reasons that Fun Home [has] been so quickly accepted as serious literature’. Chute gives the number of books that Bruce reads or discusses in Fun Home at twenty-two; Alison is seen reading, or mentions, more than fifty titles. Each chapter in the graphic novel ‘adopts a particular text or figure, and sometimes several, as a thematic and narrative filter’.59 But the cultural referent running throughout is the Ancient Greek myth of Daedalus, the

7632_Williams.indd 207

28/06/22 16:56

208

the us graphic novel

craftsman who worked for King Minos, the ruler of Crete. Minos ordered Daedalus to design an unescapable dungeon to imprison the monstrous Minotaur, but after assisting the Athenian hero Theseus to negotiate the maze and kill the Minotaur, Daedalus himself was locked up with his son Icarus in the labyrinth. Daedalus constructed artificial wings out of feathers, wax and thread as a means of escape, but against his father’s warnings Icarus flew as high as possible, with terrible results: the sun melts the wax, the wings fall apart, and Icarus plummets to his death in the sea. From the outset of the graphic novel this myth frames Alison’s relationship with her father (Figure 7.1). Bruce lifts Alison off the ground in play, but she overbalances and falls to the carpet, at which point he becomes distracted by cleaning the rug and fixing the house. The recitative informs us that, if in this opening scenario it is the child who falls to earth, in Bruce’s life it was the other way round: when the father’s artfulness – the twin façades of opulent house and happy heteronormative family – fails, it is he who dies. Fun Home does not make a one-to-one correlation with the myth, positioning Bruce as Daedalus the artificer as well as Icarus killed by overvaulting ambition . . . and the Minotaur itself, the ferocious beast lurking within an elaborately fabricated edifice designed to befuddle visitors: ‘His shame inhabited our house [. . .]. In fact, the meticulous, period interiors were expressly designed to conceal it. / Mirrors, distracting bronzes, multiple doorways. Visitors often got lost upstairs.’60 Bechdel’s graphic novel uses an array of art styles and calligraphic techniques to capture the vicissitudes of memory. Fun Home takes the form of panels coloured with grey washes where Bechdel’s recitative is delivered in the gutters between panels, in addition to the captions set inside panels. This slows down one’s progress from panel to panel and gives the majority of the narrative a recollected feel, as if there is some distance between the verbal narration and the images that follow. Some pages notably diverge from this, such as the double-page spread reproducing a semi-naked polaroid photograph of Roy, the young handyman and babysitter who accompanies the family on vacation (Figure 7.2). Here the image is printed up to the edge of the page and (as with other photographs reproduced in Fun Home) Roy’s reclining form is depicted with thinner line-work compared to the rest of the images; rather than use grey washes, shading is executed with cross-hatching (multiple thin lines etched

7632_Williams.indd 208

28/06/22 16:56

7632_Williams.indd 209

28/06/22 16:56

Figure 7.1  Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), pp. 3–4. © Alison Bechdel 2006.

210

the us graphic novel

Figure 7.2  Bechdel, Fun Home, pp. 100–1. © Alison Bechdel 2006. close together). Positioned almost at the dead centre of the narrative, this image plays – as comics scholar Julia Watson notes – on the idea of the pornographic ‘double-page [. . .] centrefold’.61 Alison’s lefthand protrudes onto the page, holding the polaroid very much like the reader might be holding Fun Home, effectively positioning the reader with the graphic novelist as she discovers the image in a box of family photos, a device which calls ‘the readers’ attention to our voyeuristic looking at her intimately personal acts of investigating her father’s hidden history and her own identification with it’.62 This moment shows how thoroughly the scaffolding of the Daedalus myth structures Fun Home. As Chute explains, the graphic novel itself is a ‘labyrinth’ and Bechdel has described its structure as ‘labyrinthine’. Denied a ‘linear and chronological plot’, the reader follows jinking paths that go back and forwards in time, working their way up to this double-page spread and its revelation of an illicit affair during a family vacation, and then the reader finds their way out of the book/maze. As in a labyrinth, one has to retrace one’s steps and return to certain junctions before setting off again

7632_Williams.indd 210

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

211

in a different direction, the way Fun Home’s ‘recursive’ narrative ‘returns again and again to picture and repicture central, traumatic events’, such as Helen telling Alison on the phone about Bruce’s affairs.63 Acknowledging her own affinity with the craftsman of Minos and her father’s painstaking restoration of the family home, Bechdel has made a beautiful object – Fun Home itself – and its construction demanded dogged labour and perhaps obsessive endeavour. Chute provides several examples of how the hardback edition of Fun Home ‘constructs itself [. . .] as a house’, such as replicating the wallpaper of the family home as the book’s endpapers.64 Another significant handling of comics form is towards the end of the book, when Alison visits home after coming out to her parents. Alison and Bruce drive to the cinema and, over two pages, the panels are all squarely framed with each page divided into a three-by-four grid. The panels share the same composition, a sideon view of Alison and Bruce in the front of the car; all the words are placed within the panels, either in captions or speech balloons (Figure 7.3). This is probably the longest directly reported dialogue in the graphic novel, and it is a pivotal one. Within the privacy of the car, this is where daughter and father share previously undisclosed details about their pasts. If reading Fun Home often follows a slow drift, the page layout in this scene enables the reader to make much quicker progress from panel to panel and the conversation – uncertain and half-guarded as it is – ticks along at pace. It is as if in bringing this exchange to consciousness, Bechdel does not have to deliberately reconstruct who said what; once re-activated, this memory unfolds as if it was taking place all over again. As the pair leave the cinema, the recitative reads, ‘I would see my father one more time after this. But we would never discuss our shared predilection again.’65 And yet Bruce’s support for Alison’s sexuality in this scene is a sustaining act of paternal affirmation. The final panel of the graphic novel, showing Alison leaping off a diving board into Bruce’s arms, is captioned, ‘But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt’ (Figure 7.4). This is a keen piece of comics-making, what the comics theorist Thierry Groensteen calls ‘diachronic braiding’, when a reader comes across a panel and recognises ‘a recollection or an echo’ of an earlier panel, forging a meeting between the two. A visual ‘echo’ might be the repetition of a motif, panel composition,

7632_Williams.indd 211

28/06/22 16:56

212

the us graphic novel

Figure 7.3  Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 220. © Alison Bechdel 2006.

7632_Williams.indd 212

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

213

Figure 7.4  Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 232. © Alison Bechdel 2006.

7632_Williams.indd 213

28/06/22 16:56

214

the us graphic novel

or the shape and size of a panel.66 The panel on the bottom of the last page of Fun Home is diachronically braided with the panel on the bottom of the first because, in both, the reader is positioned behind Alison in mid-air as she looks down on Bruce. On the first page a disdainful-looking Bruce is about to let Alison topple to the floor: his support is provisional, shaky, and he is quickly bored of playing, choosing instead to tidy the house. Conversely, on the last page Bruce is completely focused on Alison and his hands are raised ready to catch her. The last page circles back to Daedalus and Icarus once more, the top panel verbally reminding the reader that Bruce metaphorically hurtled into the sea; the accompanying image is the front of the truck that killed him. One meaning of ‘tricky reverse narration’ is the different directions that their lives took, Bruce hiding his sexuality and committing suicide, but almost at the same moment he decided his life was unliveable, his daughter was travelling in the opposite direction. For Watson, the last panel ‘recalls – and reverses – the Icarus-Daedalus myth, because Bechdel’s retelling of the story of her father’s life, for all its duplicities and shame, as intertwined with her own, enables her to “fly” as an artist and woman’.67 The final page of Fun Home reworks the visual ingredients presented on first page, reimagining Bruce as a figure who – even as the edifice he engineered came crashing down – was there to ‘catch’ Alison when she ventured her sexuality. It is a complex and unobtrusive testament unmatched in the field of twenty-first-century autographics.

Online Comics and E-Graphic Novels Comics have been transformed since the arrival of the World Wide Web, and every aspect of the US graphic novel – from production to distribution, retail to reading – has been affected. In the 1980s and 1990s, the era of dial-up connections, ‘the short, horizontal newspaper-strip format suited the screen width, offering easy-toread, stand-alone jokes without the need to scroll’, but the advent of highspeed broadband has facilitated grander visions.68 Charley Parker’s Argon Zark! (1995–present) is an early example of a longform comic serialised online; as critic Sean Kleefeld writes, ‘Parker treated each installment as the page of a graphic novel’, and readers ‘had to start at the beginning to understand the story’. Liberated from the expectations that might come with well-established

7632_Williams.indd 214

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

215

print forms, Parker played with bold colours and animation, utilising new technologies as they became available, such as Photoshop, JavaScript, and Flash. Significant for speed and ease of reading, he was an early adopter of the method where users click directly from one page to the next, so no need to keep returning to a central contents list to read multiple pages.69 The technology matters because this is one of the ways Kleefeld differentiates webcomics from digital comics: ‘digital comics are viewed through some proprietary application software, such as Adobe Acrobat in the case of PDFs. Webcomics, by contrast, can be viewed natively in any web browsing software’.70 The Eisner Awards given at the San Diego Comic-Con also separate these categories, effectively using serialisation and online-specific functionality as the way to identify webcomics: ‘Digital comics’ are complete issues of comics or graphic novels that are available for online viewing or for download. ‘Webcomics’ are comics stories that are serialized on line [sic] (such as a daily or weekly) and/or that use formats other than the traditional comic book page and take advantage of being online (horizontal, scrolled, etc.).71 I primarily step over this distinction and refer to any comic exhibited or distributed via the World Wide Web as an ‘online comic’, the long-form version of which I call an ‘e-graphic novel’,72 though I may also refer to ‘digital comics’ and ‘webcomics’ as appropriate. With this in mind, what forms have online comics taken in the twenty-first century? One model is the ‘infinite canvas’ proposed by Scott McCloud in his book-length comics essay Reinventing Comics (2000): an ‘infinite canvas’ comic has panels unfolding in multiple directions, where the monitor acts as ‘a window’ roaming over a network too vast to be read on a single conventional-size computer screen.73 By allowing readers to decide which sequence of panels to follow, infinite canvas texts are a subset of ‘hypercomics’: comics with ‘a multicursal narrative structure’ where readers choose between permutations set by the comics creator.74 With some infinite canvas comics, the reader is guided by trails linking successive panels together. This is the case with Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile (2000): each panel or cluster of panels is connected by ‘a thin tubular vessel’. Sometimes those

7632_Williams.indd 215

28/06/22 16:56

216

the us graphic novel

vessels lead to tabs at the edge of the screen, and clicking on a tab leads to a corresponding tab on another screen, enabling the reader to explore a web of diverging narratives. Originally produced for print, for comics critic Paul Gravett Meanwhile’s ‘ideal format’ is the 2012 iPad version, which ‘orientates readers by displaying the entire intricate layout so they can zoom in and out of it, backtracking easily to try another pathway[,] [. . .] making the hypercomic’s spatial map easily viewable and navigable’.75 Another kind of webcomic is the ‘game comic’, a video game visualised through the apparatus of comics storytelling (panels, caricatured avatars). ‘Readers’ of game comics are also ‘players’, typically guiding a character in and out of panels in order to solve a sequence of puzzles, the completion of which resolves the narrative (game comics are another example of hypercomic). Arguably, the 1986 video game Redhawk was a proto-game comic, an adventure game where the player controls a superhero avatar by writing in verbal commands, in response to which an onscreen comic constantly updates showing the repercussions of the player’s actions.76 A third category of online comic is the ‘motion comic’, turning an existing comic into an animated video with audible sound effects and speech. A motion comic is not a straightforward adaptation into an animated cartoon, since these videos overtly allude to comics conventions; for example, speech balloons are retained, even though the dialogue is voiced by actors, and screens might be arranged as multi-panel pages. Motion comics have their origins in fans wanting to vivify their favourite comics and share them on platforms such as YouTube, but they are also produced by the Big Two and sold via streaming services or on DVD (a Watchmen motion comic was released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2009).77 Many critically acclaimed e-graphic novels utilise recorded sound, moving images, and reader interaction. As Benoît Crucifix and Björn-Olav Dozo note, such texts tend to blend homochronic and heterochronic contexts (see Chapter 1) and ‘rely on the interactive performance of the reader, who “animates” the appearance and disappearance of panels’, but only according to how those interactions have already been ‘coded into the reading process by the creator and/or the interface’.78 With such comics their online existence is a core component of how they operate, and being translated into a different physical medium would cause them to function in drastically different ways, and yet as scholar Aaron Kashtan points out,

7632_Williams.indd 216

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

217

many commercially successful online creators ‘seek to create comics that can cross boundaries between formats and work acceptably well, although not identically, in either print or digital form’. Far from hardening into separate camps, it is now common for comics ‘to exist in both print and digital forms at once’.79 To understand why, we need to look at how e-graphic novels get funded.

Who Pays for Online Comics? Monetising webcomics has historically been a difficult task, since consumers are accustomed to online content being free to access. Early experiments traversed various funding models, and Scott McCloud charged web users 25¢ to read each chapter of his e-graphic novel The Right Number (2003–4). Unfortunately, it cost McCloud more than 25¢ to process each transaction.80 The gaslamp fantasy Girl Genius, by writer Phil Foglio and artist Kaja Foglio, began in 2001 as a periodical comic distributed via the direct market, with a web version of the same comic launched in 2002; also in 2002, book editions started to be released approximately once a year. However, the periodical only broke even, and was discontinued in 2004: Studio Foglio enjoys much greater commercial success operating through a free-to-access webcomic and selling ancillary products such as book editions.81 Since the 2010s other creators have shown they can make a living making free webcomics by tapping into multiple sources of revenue: corporate commissions, selling merchandise and advertising space, and republishing their comics as book editions.82 Book publication allows creators to reach new audiences, but this should not be overstated: print editions often target existing fans of a webcomic. This is an audience who can (and usually do) read the online version for free. So why are they willing to buy a book edition? Kashtan moots the following answers: first, the books offer a ‘physical reading experience’ that readers desire; second, readers want to own the text permanently, without fear of online content degrading or disappearing; third, print editions ‘offer a tangible way to show both emotional and financial support for the creator’; fourth, book editions can be given as gifts; and fifth, book editions often include revised content or material previously unavailable. Clearly, online and print comics exist in symbiosis, with digital distribution allowing creators to trial comics relatively cheaply,

7632_Williams.indd 217

28/06/22 16:56

218

the us graphic novel

testing what kind of readership is available and building an audience through word-of-mouth.83 Crowd-funding websites have also become key, enabling readers to support their favourite e-graphic novelists, either through oneoff contributions for new projects (Kickstarter) or regular donations (Patreon), with specific donations often tied to a physical award, not least a print edition of a graphic novel. To convey the significance of crowdfunding in underwriting and shaping the contemporary graphic novel, let’s examine Bingo Love (2018), written by Tee Franklin with art by Jenn St-Onge. The product of Franklin’s publishing company Inclusive Press, this graphic novel tells the story of Mari and Elle (Hazel), two African American women who meet in their teens in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1963. The first third of the book depicts them falling in love but facing hostility from their families, before they are forcibly separated in 1967. In the following decades they have no contact, getting married and having children and grandchildren. The narrative resumes in Englewood, New Jersey, in 2015, when Elle and Mari unexpectedly meet in a bingo hall, and the rest of the plot concerns their reconnection, their divorces from their husbands, and their subsequent marriage and life together. The project received funding from a Queer Press Grant awarded by Prism Comics in 2017, but the book reached fruition because of Kickstarter: aiming for $19,999 ‘to pay for the creative team, printing, shipping and making these pretty great tiers and stretch goals a reality’, the target was reached five days after the campaign launched in March 2017. Kickstarter records that 1,950 people pledged $57,148 and Bingo Love’s backers received a series of rewards depending on the amount of money (‘tiers’) donated, including copies of the graphic novel, pin badges, postcards, stickers, and, for the largest pledges, Skype calls from famous comics creators. The most popular pledge was twenty-two dollars or more (817 backers), a package that included a PDF and paperback version of Bingo Love, plus digital wallpaper.84 This production context determined the circumference of the published text: originally conceived as an eighty-page comic, by meeting the stretch target of $55,000 the narrative was extended to eightyeight pages.85 By meeting other stretch targets, bonus stories were made electronically available to pledgers. While one can enjoy the original graphic novel as a standalone text, these additions – Bingo Love: Secrets by writer Shawn Pryor and artist Paulina Ganucheau

7632_Williams.indd 218

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

219

and Bingo Love: Honeymoon by writer Marguerite Bennett and artist Beverly Johnson – do depict key events. Without knowledge of Bingo Love: Secrets, which reveals James’s confession to Hazel as he agrees to a divorce, the reader is left in the dark as to why this character has gone from a state of denial about their unhappy marriage to accepting his wife’s decision to leave him (Figure 7.5).86 The first readers of the graphic novel, who hadn’t pledged to the Kickstarter campaign, had to speculate about what was unsaid in the published text, while the 1,950 backers of Bingo Love had to toggle between the published narrative and the digital-only bonus stories to ascertain what triggered this change in James. The meaning of the graphic novel, then, shifts depending on one’s access to pledgers’-eyes-only bonuses, as does the ontological limits of the text: where does Bingo Love end and where does it begin? Franklin thought these stories were significant enough to merit republication and, before the end of 2018, the ‘Jackpot Edition’ saw Bingo Love reissued with those stories and other additional material included. In addition to the aforementioned sources of funding, readers still pay to access digital-only comics that never see print (never printed on paper, that is). ComiXology is a digital distribution company as central to webcomics retail as Amazon is to the book trade.

Figure 7.5  Tee Franklin, writer, Jenn St-Onge, art, and Joy San, colours, Bingo Love (Portland, OR: Image, 2018), p. [69]. © 2018 Tee Franklin

7632_Williams.indd 219

28/06/22 16:56

220

the us graphic novel

In fact, ComiXology was bought by Amazon in 2014. ComiXology was founded in 2007 and in 2009 launched an app for viewing comics on the iPad. It soon established partnerships with DC and Marvel and, by the end of 2010, the ComiXology app had been downloaded over a million times and was the top-grossing nongame app for the iPad in 2013. It remains the market leader in comics apps.87 One reason for ComiXology’s success is its ‘Guided View’ technology, which circumvented the difficulties presented by earlier digital comics viewers, namely fitting a printed comic onto a computer screen using the same shape and size of the original page. With Guided View a single panel is displayed on the screen at any one time, but with a swipe it can be replaced by the following panel, and so on. Tap twice and you exit Guided View to take in the entire page. As Kashtan notes, one frameless panel segueing into another or a splash page depicting a crowd scene create obvious problems, so the app’s programmers make decisions for the reader regarding how the elements on a page should be traversed.88 Comixology’s dominance has been critiqued by comics scholars, for muscling other digital platforms out of the market and reducing the agency of the reader by automating how the ‘eye wander[s] on the page’.89 As well as digitised versions of print comics, ComiXology has distributed digital-only comics since 2013. Publishers can have their comics hosted by the app in exchange for a fifty/fifty split of revenue. If that seems unfavourable for content providers, publishing exclusively through ComiXology does come with financial benefits, since it involves less capital risk at the outset and, if a title proves popular, little additional capital is required to scale up the volume of units. Monkeybrain Comics, founded by Chris Roberson and Allison Baker in 2012, only commissions comics for online distribution through ComiXology, and its creators retain the rights for print editions: writer Paul Tobin and artist Colleen Coover’s Bandette (2012–present) is a Monkeybrain title also published in hardback form by Dark Horse. As Kashtan explains, ComiXology shapes the text, with Coover designing the page layouts so each panel neatly fits a smartphone screen, but print exerts an influence too: each chapter of the Bandette graphic novels comes under a ‘cover’ and runs to twenty-two pages, approximating the classic comic book, though they have never been published as periodicals.90

7632_Williams.indd 220

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

221

Bayou and the Online Diversification of Comics Frederick Luis Aldama notes the most important consequence of these new production models is the greater diversity of graphic novels and the people who make them: ‘They’ve opened doors and windows for creators of color that are arguably the life source of graphic narratives today.’91 Justin Hall similarly writes that ‘many of the next-generation [LGBTQ+] graphic novels are being built one webpage at a time’,92 which is relevant to the production history of one of the best-known graphic novels of the last decade, Nimona (serialised online 2012–14; book edition 2015) by ND Stevenson. There is a clear correlation between the emergence of the Web and the increased diversity of creators in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. Kleefeld attributes the diversity of contemporary webcomics to the ‘lack of gatekeepers. Traditional editors and publishers look at any submissions and have to judge whether or not it will sell enough to be profitable’, using justifications such as ‘the potential audience [is] too small or the topic too sensitive’ to keep perceived minorities out. But the rules of commercial viability look very different when a graphic novel is available online, because ‘geography and physical barriers’ do not pertain.93 Interactive media scholars Derek Lackaff and Michael Sales assert that for black comics creators, the Web ‘can help to level the playing field for marketing and audience access’. A ‘relatively small and dispersed’ group within the US comics world, black creators have benefited from online fora in several ways: sharing advice on getting published, receiving feedback on work in progress, and fostering creative collaborations.94 Black female artist Afua Richardson comments that making contact with peers would be extremely hard if the only spaces available were the traditional physical sites of fandom, since ‘a BIG part of my NOT thinking that I could do comics was not seeing anyone looking like me at conventions’.95 The ‘simple fact’ that the Web affords black creators greater visibility is significant, argue Lackaff and Sales, because this means ‘fans and creators can begin to understand themselves to possess critical mass’, which supports both the making of comics and cultivating an audience. Where economics is concerned, the Web gives creators ‘the ability to reach increasingly larger audiences with lower financial investment’.96 The Jackie Ormes Society, named after the groundbreaking black female comics creator, was one such site for building the ‘critical

7632_Williams.indd 221

28/06/22 16:56

222

the us graphic novel

mass’ that Lackaff and Sales identify. Creator Cheryl Lynn Eaton explains she founded the Ormes Society in 2007 because the comics ‘industry had effectively shut out black women by not addressing issues of either sexism or racism or both’; black female fans and professional creators ‘were operating in a vacuum without emotional support or networking opportunities’.97 The Ormes Society website was a ‘stepping stone or gateway’ where ‘black female comic creators and fans could (1) find each other (2) share our creations (3) talk about topics that are important to us and (4) gain the courage needed to bring those thoughts and creations to the larger comic reading/creating audience’.98 As Deborah Elizabeth Whaley notes of the Ormes Society, ‘building counter-institutions as a response to unequal circumstances within established institutions is not new’, but there were substantial benefits to having an online presence, since the website and associated social media provided a shop window for creators that could be accessed all over the world.99 The premise that webcomics could attract non-traditional comics readers was why African American creator Jeremy Love took his graphic novel Bayou to DC’s imprint Zuda Comics. Zuda was a webcomics experiment intended to audition new ideas and respond directly to public support. Creators submitted short comics to DC, from which an editorial board shortlisted ten every month, and readers voted for their favourite; winners received a contract to produce their comic for the Zuda website. Bayou was the first title chosen, an ‘instant winner’ that Zuda picked up in 2007 without going through the shortlisting process. It was also the first Zuda comic to be republished in book form (volume one was released in 2009, the start of a projected narrative around 500 pages long).100 Shortly before the first book edition appeared, Love averred that starting online had been the right move: ‘I love the “shelf life” of a web comic. “Bayou” wouldn’t be as widely read if it were released traditionally. This story, more than anything, needed time to cultivate a following.’101 Also in 2009 he commented, ‘For a story like mine, which the average comic reader wouldn’t pick up, the web is free and easy’, and that Zuda allows creators to trial ‘unique, off the beaten path comics’ in a way that is ‘low risk’, easily available, but still with the potential to reach large numbers of readers because of ‘the power of [DC’s owner] Time Warner behind you, handling advertising and marketing’.102 Bayou begins in Charon, Mississippi in 1933, a town renamed in honour of General Douglass M. ‘Hellhound’ Bogg, a fictional

7632_Williams.indd 222

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

223

Confederate officer from the Civil War likened to Charon, ferryman of the Ancient Greek underworld. The failure of postbellum Reconstruction to erase the endemic racism of the South is signalled on the second and third pages of Bayou, when we see the Confederate flag emblazoned on the town sign and a crowd staring at a lynched black body: Billy Glass, tortured and murdered for whistling at a white woman. This evokes the murder of fourteen-year-old African American Emmett Till in 1955, who allegedly whistled at a white woman and whose body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River (the character of Billy was originally named ‘Emmet’). Billy’s friend, the African American girl Lee Wagstaff, must dive into the bayou to retrieve his body, and while underwater Lee glimpses Billy’s winged form at the portal to the fantastical realm of Dixie. Shortly afterwards, when Lee and her white friend Lily are searching for the latter’s missing locket in the bayou, Lily is swallowed by the monstrous Cotton-Eyed Joe, who sinks into the swamp with Lily inside him. Lee’s father is consequently accused of murdering Lily and arrested; determined to set her father free and stop him being lynched, Lee enters Dixie on a quest to rescue her friend, assisted by a greenhued, blues-playing giant called Bayou. Dixie has recognisable correlates in the early twentieth-century South – juke joints on the Yazoo river, chain gangs in Natchez, a railroad to New Orleans – but this wonderland is inhabited by the souls of the dead, anthropomorphic animals, and figures from folklore such as Brer Rabbit, the Doodang, Stagger Lee, and the Golliwog. Bayou dramatizes two folk traditions, black vernacular culture and the white imaginary of antebellum life, in a reckoning with plantation slavery and the regimes of segregation and violence that followed. Comics scholar Qiana Whitted calls Bayou a ‘blues comics pastiche’ that signifies Southern history as a ‘microcosm of competing fictions the reader is forced to negotiate’, from road signs to photographs, song lyrics to statues, ancestral myths to newspaper articles.103 The political stakes are high: the nostalgic, ‘idyllic image’ of the antebellum South has often functioned as ‘a screen memory for the reality of violence inflicted on African Americans’.104 Images from the graphic novel play on this nostalgia, offering the reader pristine cotton fields, rural quietude, and polychromatic sunsets (Figure 7.6), but as comics scholar Rebecca Wanzo comments, ‘in Bayou the southern pastoral, aided by the gorgeous work done by colorist Patrick Morgan, hides monsters and ghosts’.105

7632_Williams.indd 223

28/06/22 16:56

224

the us graphic novel

Figure 7.6  Jeremy Love, story and art, and Patrick Morgan, colour, Bayou (New York: DC Comics, 2011), vol. 2, p. [103]. Cover and compilation © 2010 DC Comics, Bayou © Gettosake. As an additional layer of complexity, black and white folkways are not entirely separate, and figures from one tradition get re-signified in another in ways that reflect racialised inequalities of power. The Uncle Remus stories by the white writer Joel Chandler Harris, for example, drew on black folk culture but repackaged the original tales in a derogatory way that undermined their articulation of ‘black resistance and survival’. In Bayou an Uncle Remus character stalks forth as a tool of the plantation owner Bossman, seeking to distract Lee with a bucolic vision of Southern domestic bliss.106 In Bayou, pastoral visions of the South are frequently ruptured by reminders of the inhuman system of chattel slavery. The character of Bayou is initially reluctant to help Lee because Bossman refuses to allow the giant to leave the swamp; later, Bossman threatens that, unless Bayou kills Lee, the giant will never see his children again. These forms of coercion are, in the words of Hershini Bhana Young, scholar of African diasporic culture, reminders ‘of the economy of slavery’, when masters enforced strict rules on freedom of movement and ‘kinship’ was used ‘to control black bodies’.107 Bossman is General Bog, Dixie’s version of General Bogg, and his minions emblematise the mechanisms by which the racial order of the South was policed during slavery and its aftermath. Jubal, the bloodhound that Bossman sends after Bayou and Lee, represents the dogs used

7632_Williams.indd 224

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

225

to track down escaped slaves; the names of Jubal’s hooded henchmen – Nathan and Jefferson – evoke two infamous members of the Confederacy, General Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of the Ku Klux Klan) and Confederate President Jefferson Davis.108 The lexical shift from Bogg to Bog underlines the significance of the physical environment, specifically the bayou, in this graphic novel’s encounter with history. Fleeing from Cotton-Eyed Joe after he swallows Lily, Lee stumbles into a clearing where the air is packed with the bodies of lynching victims hanging from the trees, which Young theorises thus: Love [. . .] wishes to tell forgotten stories via an alternate historical geography [where] space is hierarchically mapped and haunted by brutalized and suffering Africans and their ancestors[.] [. . .] Love shows Lee as being able to see the past in the present, to tangibly see and experience the living histories that erupt all around her. [. . .] [A] house, a swamp, a tree becomes animated or haunted, reflects the complex social relations that make space itself.109 The physical environment holds in its representation a history of racist violence, the accumulation of murdered black bodies a terrible part of the quotidian landscape, and Whitted observes that the feet of one of the victims appear to emerge from the soil, rooted in the terrain like the tree from which they hang.110 It is significant that Lee enters Dixie by diving into the ‘swampy water’ where Billy’s corpse was dumped, another ‘embodiment of a violent, traumatic history of landscape’.111 Bodies of water have a long association with the unnumbered dead of the transatlantic slave trade, specifically the slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage, encapsulated in St Lucian writer Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Sea is History’ (1979), which asks ‘Where is your tribal memory?’ and responds ‘locked’ up ‘in that grey vault. The sea.’112 As well as an archive of physical violence, the swamp in Bayou hosts the stereotypes which dehumanised slaves and their descendants, and which were used to justify murder and structural inequality. This is apparent when Lee is dragged into the bayou’s depths by the Golliwog, the children’s character invented by Florence K. Upton in the 1890s that presented blackness through blackface minstrelsy’s ‘explicitly racist elements’ such as ‘wild hair and large

7632_Williams.indd 225

28/06/22 16:56

226

the us graphic novel

red lips’. In this scene, black life is endangered and terrorised by an enduring racist image that refuses to relinquish its grasp on the present. Here Bayou intervenes into contemporary debates that Golliwog paraphernalia and imagery is ‘harmless’ fun for children; Lee’s struggle for life, as Gothic scholar Maisha Wester notes, ‘puts the child in confrontation with the supposedly “child-like” icon to reveal the absurdity of attempting to dismiss the (ideological) violence implicit in the Golliwog’.113 But marshland is a multivalent symbol and Young’s reading of the graphic novel reminds us that the cultural valence of the swamp is not only the collective memory of lynched bodies but a liminal place in which runaway slaves hid or passed through on their journey to freedom.114 In Bayou another way that the swamp represents a place of respite from segregated society is in the form of the juke joint, home to the vernacular culture of black freedom struggles. A key example is Tarrypin’s, a shack perched on the river where the inhabitants of Dixie go to hear music, dance, drink, and gamble. In a flashback to 1922 we see Bayou and Rabbit adopt human form and go ‘topside’ to play blues in a similar juke joint, a place where Mississippi’s taboos on interracial romance are suspended: ‘anything goes’. The role of black music as a way of articulating collective travails and historical trauma is evident from Rabbit’s introduction to his song ‘Tar Baby Blues’, in which he describes reaching into his ‘bloody insides’ and ‘findin’ the blues’, akin to when your ‘bossman treat ya wrong’ and you feel like a fish being gutted,115 illustrating the point made by critical theorist Paul Gilroy that black vernacular culture offers ‘a continuous commentary on the systematic and pervasive relations of domination that supply its conditions of existence’.116 As part of Love’s interrogation of the cultural construction of the American South, Bayou engages with the history of US comics, including many texts previously mentioned in this book. Qiana Whitted sees echoes of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing in the character of Bayou,117 the blank round eyes of some characters evoke Harold Gray’s newspaper strip Little Orphan Annie, and comics scholar Jonathan W. Gray points out that Bayou ‘challenges derogatory conflations of blackness and animality by upending the comic book motif of “funny animal” characters’. Gray identifies Walt Kelly’s Pogo strip as one of the graphic novel’s stylistic reference points,118 and it bears notice that in volume two Lee and Bayou are almost

7632_Williams.indd 226

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

227

captured by the Golliwog because they are betrayed by a possum who wants to collect Bossman’s reward. When the possum goes to tell the Golliwog their whereabouts, he is summarily eaten. Love’s choice of animal seems telling, given that the character Pogo was also a possum living in a Southern swamp. As analysed by Kelly biographer Kerry Soper, the periodical comic that preceded the Pogo strip included demeaning black stereotypes, notably the character Bumbazine. This character was discarded in the mid-1940s, but what he represented – ‘the trickster figure of popularized folk stories who uses dialect in creatively subversive ways, and the African American types drawn from popular comedic traditions – persisted [. . .] as that role was transferred to the strip’s main character, Pogo’.119 Love’s graphic novel obliquely reminds the reader that the syndicated cast of Kelly’s Okefenokee Swamp shares its origins with an image-world of racist caricature, the latter represented in Bayou by the Golliwog that swallows the unnamed anthropomorphic possum and digests the animal into its being. A second volume of Bayou was published in 2011, but by that point Zuda had folded and no third, final volume has been released in any form. Gray records that Love is waiting for the creative rights to revert to him before completing Bayou and publishing it in its entirety.120 Both serialised webcomics and print comics are vulnerable to the contingencies that interrupt the completion of long narratives, whether those are legal disputes, natural disasters, technological malfunctions, or the pressures of earning an income. As throughout the history of the US graphic novel, projects risk going unfinished or being unexpectedly suspended – even ones as searing as Bayou.

Conclusion The twenty-first century has been good to the graphic novel in the United States. As a result of the manga boom and the subsequent resurgence of graphic novels, sales of the latter are more important than periodicals to the comics industry. Where the Big Two’s profits are concerned, intellectual property licensing is even more lucrative. Contemporary graphic novels do not have the mass readership that comics had in the 1940s–50s, but their role as popular reading material for children and young adults is obvious by glimpsing the bestseller lists, and graphic novels occupy a noticeable niche in

7632_Williams.indd 227

28/06/22 16:56

228

the us graphic novel

literary publishing, reviewing, and prize-giving. The idea of comics in libraries was once perceived as a threat to literacy, but is now embraced by librarians, teachers, and educational psychologists – and, unsurprisingly, graphic novelists and publishers too. The production and distribution of e-graphic novels poses significant challenges to writers and artists who want to make a living from comics, but new funding models mean those hurdles are surmountable, and the variety of creators and range of genres is stunning. It is hard to imagine a moment in the existence of the US graphic novel when writers, pencillers, inkers, colourists, and letterers have been more diverse in terms of gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. There have always been LGBTQ+ creators, female creators, and creators of colour – demonstrated by the long-form comics discussed in previous chapters – but social media and crowdfunding platforms have shaped an economic infrastructure where there is a new sense of the audiences available to the graphic novelist, where subjectivities previously marginalised in the US comics world are more included. The sheer scale of contemporary graphic novel production is staggering; a comics scholar in 2000 could reasonably claim to be able to read every US graphic novel published each month, but that now sounds wonderfully impossible.

Notes  1. Calvin Reid, ‘US Graphic Novel Market Hits $200M’, Publishers Weekly, 18 April 2005, p. 15.  2. Milton Griepp and John Jackson Miller, ‘Comics and Graphic Novel Sales Hit New High in Pandemic Year’, Comichron, 2021, (last accessed 20 November 2021).  3. Paul Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), pp. 151–2.  4. Ibid. p. 152.  5. ‘Avengers: Endgame (2019)’, The Numbers, (last accessed 20 November 2021).  6. Erin Hanna, Only at Comic-Con: Hollywood, Fans, and the Limits of Exclusivity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020).  7. ‘Joseph Kosinski – Oblivion’, ICG Magazine, 3 April 2013, (last accessed 20 November 2021).

7632_Williams.indd 228

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

229

 8. Hanna, Only at Comic-Con, p. 7.  9. Jeff Thoss, When Storyworlds Collide: Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2015); Andrew J. Friedenthal, Retcon Game: Retroactive Continuity and the Hyperlinking of America (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017). 10. Jeffrey A. Brown, Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011); Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Popular Culture and Black Superheroes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013); Jeffrey A. Brown, Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015); Steve Aldous, The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015); Kyle William Bishop, How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking Dead in the 21st Century (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015); Jon Solomon, Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Ian Gordon, Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017); Kathleen Forni, Beowulf’s Popular Afterlife in Literature, Comic Books, and Film (New York: Routledge, 2018). 11. Liam Burke, The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015); Drew Morton, Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books during the Blockbuster Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016); Blair Davis, Movie Comics: Page to Screen/ Screen to Page (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017); Dru Jeffries, Comic Book Film Style: Cinema at 24 Panels per Second (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Shawna Kidman, Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). 12. Burke, Comic Book Film Adaptation, pp. 99, 102, 286 n. 13–14. 13. Ibid. p. 220. 14. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 20. 15. Lopes, Demanding Respect, pp. 154–5. 16. Casey Brienza, Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 61. 17. Calvin Reid, ‘Manga Is Here to Stay’, Publishers Weekly, 20 October 2003, pp. S6, S8.

7632_Williams.indd 229

28/06/22 16:56

230

the us graphic novel

18. Reid, ‘US Graphic Novel Market Hits $200M’, p. 15. 19. Brienza, Manga in America, p. 60. 20. Ibid. pp. 160–3. 21. Ibid. p. 68. 22. Ibid. p. 69. 23. Lopes, Demanding Respect, p. 166. 24. Ibid. p. 166. 25. Evan St. Lifer, ‘Graphic Novels, Seriously’, School Library Journal, August 2002, p. 9. 26. Lopes, Demanding Respect, p. 168. 27. Walter Minkel, ‘TitleTales Helps Librarians Select Graphic Novels’, School Library Journal, August 2002, p. 28. 28. Judith Rosen, ‘Selling Graphic Novels to Retailers’, Publishers Weekly, 20 October 2003, p. S2. 29. Ann Kim and Michael Rogers, ‘Librarians Out Front at Comic Con’, Library Journal, 1 April 2007, p. 15. 30. Heidi MacDonald, ‘The Year of the Graphic Novel’, Publishers Weekly, 23 December 2002, p. 22. 31. Pam Spencer Holley, 2005–2006 Report for YALSA, American Library Association, 16 May 2006, (last accessed 20 November 2021); Judy T. Nelson, 2006–2007 Report for YALSA, American Library Association, 23 May 2007, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 32. Printz Award, American Library Association, 2020, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 33. Jeet Heer, In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2013), pp. 114–5. 34. Brigid Alverson, ‘Catching Up With Graphic Novel Publisher Papercutz’, Publishers Weekly, 24 June 2016, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 35. Calvin Reid, ‘In Her First YA Graphic Novel, Lauren Myracle Takes On Catwoman’, Publishers Weekly, 20 March 2019, (last accessed 20 November 2021); Calvin Reid, ‘BookExpo 2019: Graphic Novels For Everyone’, Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2019, (last accessed 20 November 2021).

7632_Williams.indd 230

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

231

36. Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), p. 29. 37. Roger Sabin and Teal Triggs, ‘Introduction’, in Roger Sabin and Teal Triggs, eds, Below Critical Radar: Fanzines and Alternative Comics from 1976 to Now (Hove: Slab-O-Concrete, 2000), p. 1. 38. Bart Beaty, Twelve-Cent Archie (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), pp. 5–6. 39. Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 114. 40. Scott McCloud, Interview by Paul Williams, in Paul Williams and James Lyons, eds, The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), p. 236. 41. Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age’, The New Yorker, 9 October 2005, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 42. Ylva Sommerland and Margareta Wallin Wictorin, ‘Writing Comics into Art History and Art History into Comics Research’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift / Journal of Art History 86.1 (2017): p. 1. 43. Despite the claimed marginality of art history / fine arts approaches, there are many stellar pieces of Comics Studies from an Art History perspective, such as Katherine Roeder, Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), and Maggie Gray, Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 44. Lopes, Demanding Respect, p. 164. 45. Heer, In Love with Art, p. 103. 46. Françoise Mouly, Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See (New York: Abrams, 2012). 47. Heer, In Love with Art, pp. 115–6. 48. ‘Pen America Literary Awards: Past Winners’, PEN America, 2021, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 49. Rachel R. Martin, ed., Alison Bechdel: Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), p. xxxv. 50. Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to their Limits! (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001). 51. Santiago García, On the Graphic Novel, trans. Bruce Campbell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), p. 170. 52. Ibid. p. 151. 53. Qiana Whitted, ‘The Blues Tragicomic: Constructing the Black Folk Subject in Stagger Lee’, in Frances Gateward and John Jennings, eds,

7632_Williams.indd 231

28/06/22 16:56

232

the us graphic novel

The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2015), pp. 235–43. 54. Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 1–3. 55. Ibid. p. 3. 56. Gillian Whitlock, ‘Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics’, Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): p. 966. 57. Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), p. 9. 58. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), pp. 73, 117. 59. Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 185. 60. Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 20. 61. Julia Watson, ‘Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home’, in Michael A. Chaney, ed., Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), p. 136. 62. Ibid. p. 130. 63. Chute, Graphic Women, p. 183. 64. Ibid. p. 179. 65. Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 222. 66. Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, [1999] 2007), p. 147. 67. Watson, ‘Autographic Disclosures’, p. 147. 68. Paul Gravett, Comics Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2013), p. 122. 69. Sean Kleefeld, Webcomics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 22–3. 70. Ibid. pp. 2–4. 71. ‘Eisner Awards Current Info’, Comic-Con International: San Diego, 2021, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 72. Following Benoît Crucifix and Björn-Olav Dozo’s chapter ‘E-Graphic Novels’, in Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 574–90. 73. Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics (New York: DC Comics, 2000), p. 222. 74. Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, ‘From Comic to Hypercomic’, in Jonathan C. Evans and Thomas Giddens, eds, Cultural Excavation and Formal Expression in the Graphic Novel (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013), p. 291.

7632_Williams.indd 232

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

233

75. Gravett, Comics Art, p. 130. 76. Goodbrey, ‘From Comic to Hypercomic’, p. 292. For those without access to 1980s games consoles, Redhawk can be seen here: ‘Redhawk Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum’, YouTube, 12 May 2018, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 77. Craig Smith, ‘Motion Comics: The Emergence of a Hybrid Medium’, Writing Visual Culture 7 (2015): pp. 1–23. 78. Crucifix and Dozo, ‘E-Graphic Novels’, p. 582. 79. Aaron Kashtan, Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2018), pp. 93–6. 80. Ibid. p. 104. 81. Kleefeld, Webcomics, pp. 115–28. 82. Ibid. pp. 102–13, 130–2. 83. Kashtan, Between Pen and Pixel, pp. 104–7. 84. Tee Franklin, ‘Bingo Love’, Kickstarter, 15 November 2018, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 85. Franklin, ‘Bingo Love’. 86. Tee Franklin, writer, Jenn St-Onge, art, and Joy San, colours, Bingo Love (Portland, OR: Image, 2018), p. [69]. 87. Kashtan, Between Pen and Pixel, p. 115. 88. Ibid. pp. 113–8. 89. Crucifix and Dozo, ‘E-Graphic Novels’, p. 580. 90. Kashtan, Between Pen and Pixel, pp. 129–32. 91. Frederick Luis Aldama, ‘US Creators of Color and the Postunderground Graphic Narrative Renaissance’, in Baetens, Frey, and Tabachnick, Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, p. 308. 92. Justin Hall, ‘The Secret Origins of LBGTQ Graphic Novels’, in Baetens, Frey, and Tabachnick, eds, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, p. 301. 93. Kleefeld, Webcomics, pp. 79–80. 94. Derek Lackaff and Michael Sales, ‘Black Comics and Social Media Economics: New Media, New Production Models’, in Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II, eds, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 74–7. 95. Qtd in Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), p. 153. 96. Lackaff and Sales, ‘Black Comics and Social Media Economics’, pp. 74, 77.

7632_Williams.indd 233

28/06/22 16:56

234

the us graphic novel

 97. Cheryl Lynn Eaton, ‘A Thoroughly Modern Digital Woman’, Interview by Katherine Keller, Sequential Tart, 9 July 2007, (last accessed 20 November 2021).  98. Cheryl Lynn Eaton qtd in Heidi MacDonald, ‘The Ormes Society’, Comics Beat, 15 February 2007, (last accessed 20 November 2021).  99. Whaley, Black Women in Sequence, pp. 152–5. 100. Ada Price, ‘DC Takes Jeremy Love’s Bayou from Web to Print’, Publishers Weekly, 7 April 2009, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 101. Jeremy Love, ‘Jeremy Love Talks “Bayou” Trade Paperback’, Interview by Jeffrey Renaud, CBR.com, 19 February 2009, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 102. Qtd in Price, ‘DC Takes Jeremy Love’s Bayou from Web to Print’. 103. Qiana J. Whitted, ‘Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things: Black Southern History as Comic Book Horror’, in Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted, eds, Comics and the U.S. South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), pp. 204, 208. 104. Kate Polak, Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017), p. 151. 105. Rebecca Wanzo, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2020), p. 65. 106. Maisha Wester, ‘Black Diasporic Gothic’, in Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, eds, Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 298–9. 107. Hershini Bhana Young, ‘Performance Geography: Making Space in Jeremy Love’s Bayou, Volume 1’, in Gateward and Jennings, The Blacker the Ink, p. 282. 108. Taylor Hagood, ‘Nostalgic Realism: Fantasy, History, and Brer Rabbit-Trickster Ambiguity in Jeremy Love’s Bayou’, in Martha J. Cutter and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, eds, Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), p. 57. 109. Young, ‘Performance Geography’, pp. 276–84. 110. Whitted, ‘Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things’, p. 208. 111. Young, ‘Performance Geography’, p. 281. 112. Derek Walcott, ‘The Sea is History’, 1979, in Jonathan Raban, ed., The Oxford Book of the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 500–3.

7632_Williams.indd 234

28/06/22 16:56



twenty-first-century graphic novels

235

113. Wester, ‘Black Diasporic Gothic’, p. 299. 114. Young, ‘Performance Geography’, p. 277. 115. Jeremy Love, story and art, and Patrick Morgan, colour, Bayou (New York: DC Comics, 2011), vol. 2, pp. [104-12]. 116. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 38. 117. Whitted, ‘Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things’, p. 203. 118. Jonathan W. Gray, ‘b.O.s. 7.1 / Bayou’, ASAP/J, 27 August 2018, (last accessed 20 November 2021). 119. Kerry D. Soper, We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), p. 138. 120. Gray, ‘b.O.s. 7.1 / Bayou’, n. 3.

7632_Williams.indd 235

28/06/22 16:56

Conclusion

The US Graphic Novel has shown that complete long comics narratives in book form aimed at adult readers have been published in the United States for over 100 years. One could enter a bookshop in 1930 – or 1960 – or 1990 and pick up a text that would now be recognised as a graphic novel, even if the label was only coined in 1964. The comics fans who debated the concept in the mid-1960s held to three ingredients as defining features of the graphic novel: length, book publication, and adult readers. We have seen, though, how ragged around the edges those principles seem, especially in the twenty-first century, when two of the most proliferating varieties are e-graphic novels and graphic novels for children and young adults. Literary publishing currently frames the graphic novelist as an autonomous artist, a notion powered by the underground comix of the 1960s, which abided by a different commercial logic to mainstream comics. Nonetheless, the majority of graphic novelists remain subject to economic concerns, even if their work is free to access. There has never been a single model for making and selling graphic novels, and because long-form comics have been published by organisations with very different financial imperatives – companies with roots in pulp magazines, charitable institutions, long-established trade presses, creators self-publishing their own comics – it is sometimes difficult to see them as part of the same tradition. By bringing them together, this book has shone a light on their interconnectedness, how ideas, techniques, and personnel have migrated across the different spheres of the US graphic novel and the industries that make them. The history I have told confirms that the graphic novel has never been a discrete medium. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with periodical comics, film, posters, zines, prints, and the computer screen, as well as the literary forms that the word ‘novel’ suggests, with modes of visual storytelling passing back and forth between 236

7632_Williams.indd 236

28/06/22 16:56

conclusion

237

different media. These exchanges will endure and mutate, though I’ll hold back any predictions for the future. Who would have guessed that the graphic novel would have the qualified visibility that it currently possesses, even twenty years ago? We might even get to a point when graphic novels win major literary prizes and the newness of the form won’t be the main point of interest . . . but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

7632_Williams.indd 237

28/06/22 16:56

Index

References to figures are in italics and 1990s, 13, 182, 198, 201 and titles/subtitles, 120, 125 Adventures of Crystal Night (Rudahl), 118 Adventures of Jesus, The (Sturgeon), 91 Adventures of Jodelle, The (Bartier/ Peellaert), 97 Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, The (Töpffer), 19 Adventures of Phoebe, The (O’Donoghue/Springer), 97 advertising, 11, 21; see also poster art Africa, 140 African Americans, 26, 57, 83, 160, 218–19, 221–2 and Bayou, 222–5 and Give Me Liberty, 147, 149 Air Pirates, 98 A.K.A. Goldfish (Bendis), 178 Alay-Oop (Gropper), 37–8 Alcala, Alfredo, 162 Alcaraz, Lalo, 122 Aldama, Frederick Luis, 153, 221 Alien: The Illustrated Story (Goodwin/ Simonson), 116, 122 All-American Men of War (comic), 80 All in Line (Steinberg), 58 allegory, 41, 58, 61, 65 Allred, Mike, 183 alternative bookstores, 118 alternative comics, 137–9, 151–4, 161, 167, 169–75, 177, 205

25 Images de la Passion d’un Homme (Masereel), 34 30 Days of Night (film), 192 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics (Tomine), 174 ’85 (Simmons/Hughes), 205 100 Bullets (Azzarello/Risso), 178 300 (film), 192 300 (Miller), 149 1941: The Illustrated Story (Asherman/ Bissette/Veitch), 116, 122 1984 (magazine), 115 Aaron, Jason, 182 Abel, Jessica, 199 Abortion Eve (underground comic), 93 Abraham Lincoln: A Biography in Woodcuts (Turzak), 37 ACT UP, 183 Action Comics, 52 activity books, 117 Adams, Neal, 83, 86 Addams, Charles, 185 Adeler, Max, 25 Adlard, Charlie, 179 adult readers, 2, 3, 8, 236 and 1930s–1950s, 51, 53–5, 59, 67, 71 and 1960s–70s, 76, 77, 87, 89, 90, 100, 107, 127 and 1980s, 117, 136–7, 141, 143, 145–6, 155

238

7632_Williams.indd 238

28/06/22 16:56

index Amazing Spider-Man (comic), 79, 82 American Born Chinese (Yang), 196, 198 American Civil War, 222–5 American Flagg!! (Chaykin), 150 American Splendor (comic), 13, 137, 139, 143 and reprints, 154–5, 156, 157 American Splendor (film), 192 American Widow (Torres/Choi), 205 Americomics, 138 Amulet (Kibuishi), 196 ancient mythology, 84, 207–8, 210, 214 Anderson, Ho Che, 205 Animal Man (comic), 180 animation see cartoons (animated) Answer Me! (zine), 175 anti-comics activism, 55–7 anti-war sentiment, 59, 64–5 anticommunism, 37, 83 antisemitism, 64, 159–61 Apex Novelties, 118 Aquaman (film), 191 Argon Zark! (Parker), 214–15 Arino, Sergio, 194 Arroseur arosé, L’ (film), 28, 30 art see commercial art; fine art; graphic art; Pop Art; poster art; woodcut novels art galleries, 202 Asherman, Allan, 116 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 58 atomic bombs, 39, 65 authoritarianism, 36, 145 autobiography, 61–4, 77, 92, 100, 205–8 and American Splendor, 154–5, 157 and Fun Home, 207–8, 209, 210–11, 212–13, 214 and Maus, 158–61 Avengers, The (characters), 78 Avengers: Endgame (film), 1, 191

7632_Williams.indd 239

239

Aydin, Andrew, 198 Azzarello, Brian, 178 Backderf, Derf, 198 Badajos, Ed, 95, 96 Baetens, Jan, 3, 4, 8, 67, 80, 82, 139 Bagge, Peter, 172, 174, 204 Baker, Allison, 220 Baker, Kyle, 179 Baker, Matt, 54 Ball, David M., 6, 39, 40 Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson (Rudahl), 122 Bandette (Tobin/Coover), 220 Bantam, 89–90 Barbarella (Forest), 97 Barbarella: The Moon Child (Forest), 115 Barnicoat, John, 40 Baronet Publishing, 122–3 Barr, Donna, 184–5 Barry, Lynda, 172, 202, 203, 204, 206 Bartier, Pierre, 97 Batman (1989 film), 136, 191 Batman (character), 81, 144 Batman (comic), 83 Batman (TV series), 81 Batman: Arkham Asylum (Morrison/ McKean), 136, 137, 141, 142 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Miller), 13, 136, 137, 143, 144–5, 146, 149, 150 Bayou (Love), 222–7 Beatles, The, 79 Beaty, Bart, 10, 80, 159 Bechdel, Alison, 203; see also Fun Home Beerbohm, Robert, 108, 109 Belgian comics see Franco-Belgian albums Bendis, Brian Michael, 177–8 Benjamin Franklin: A Biography in Woodcuts (Turzak), 37 Benson, John, 88–9, 90

28/06/22 16:56

240

the us graphic novel

Berger, Karen, 136, 140–1 Bergeron, Bill, 95 Berlant, Lauren, 38 Bernardin, Marc, 194 Beronä, David A., 33 Best American Comics (anthology), 203 Best We Could Do, The (Bui), 205 Bewick, Thomas, 33 Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comic Anthology, 204 Beyond Time and Again (Metzger), 119–20 Big Ass Comics (Crumb), 93 Big Baby: Curse of the Molemen (Burns), 158 Big Brother and the Holding Company, 76 Big Two see DC Comics; Marvel Comics Bijou Publishing Empire, 118 Bildungsroman discourse, 136–7, 200 Bingo Love (Franklin/St-Onge), 218–19 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (Green), 98, 118 Biro, Charles, 53, 87 Bissette, Stephen, 116 Bitch Planet (DeConnick/De Landro), 179 Bizarre Sex (underground comic), 92 black-and-white comics explosion, 153–4 Black Hole (Burns), 171 Black Panther (film), 1, 191 Blackbeard, Bill, 89 Blackburn, John, 185 blackface minstrelsy, 26, 225–6 Blackmark (Kane/Goodwin), 12, 89–90 Blankets (Thompson), 206 blockbuster publishing, 122–4, 130 Bloodlines: A Tale from the Heart of Africa (Goff/Nieves/ Hayden), 140

7632_Williams.indd 240

Bloodstar (Corben), 93 Bochořáková-Dittrichová, Helena, 34 Bodē, Vaughn, 87, 116 Bolland, Brian, 140 Bolter, Jay David, 5 Bone (Smith), 177 BOOM! Studios, 199 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8 Box Office Poison (Robinson), 171 BPVP (Byron Preiss Visual Publications), 124–5, 127, 129–30 Bravo for Adventure (Toth), 115 Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (Delany/Wolff), 185, 186 Brienza, Casey, 10, 196 Bringing Up Father (McManus), 23 British Invasion, 140–2, 162, 179–80 Brosh, Allie, 198 Brown, Buster (character), 21, 22, 30, 45 Brown, Chester, 172 Brubaker, Ed, 178 Buckingham, Mark, 182 Buhle, Paul, 38, 94, 122 Bui, Thi, 205 Building Stories (Ware), 6 Bukatman, Scott, 27 Bunny (Carl E. Schultze), 21 Burke, Liam, 194 Burns, Charles, 158, 171, 202 Burns, Peggy, 171 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 123 Burroughs, Williams Naked Lunch, 95 Buster Brown, His Dog Tige, and Their Jolly Times (Outcault), 22 Byrne, John, 183 Cage, The (Vaughn-James), 97 Caire, Patricia, 158 Caliber Press, 177, 178 Calling Dr. Laura (Georges), 206 Camper, Jennifer, 185

28/06/22 16:56

index campness, 81 campus culture, 76, 79, 82, 83, 91, 100 Canadian comics, 95, 97, 153, 171–2, 199 Candice at Sea (Lob/Pichard), 115 Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Chast), 206 CAPA-alpha (APA), 87 Cape, Jonathan, 36, 202–3 Capital, 138 Captain America (character), 78 Captain America (comic), 82 Captain America Comics, 53 Captain Marvel (film), 191 caption boxes, 84–5 Carey, Mike, 182 Carey, Percy, 206 caricature, 25 Carlo (Frost), 24–8, 29, 30–2, 45, 46 Cartoon History of the Universe, The (Gonick), 121 cartoons (animated), 11, 60, 68, 153, 192, 216 cartoons (political), 20, 33–4, 58, 59, 65, 68–70, 122 Case of the Winking Buddha, The (Stokes/Raab), 54 Castro, Fidel, 121 Cazco (character), 120 Cazco in China (Yeh), 120 censorship, 11, 55–7, 94 Centipede (Lewen), 64 Cerebus the Aardvark (Sim/Gerhard), 153 Chadwick, Paul, 183 chain bookstores, 123, 143, 155 Cham (Amédée de Noé), 20 Chandler: Red Tide (Steranko), 125, 126, 127 chaos narrative, 100 Chaplin, Charlie, 33 Charlton, 79 Chast, Roz, 206 Chaykin, Howard, 113, 116, 125, 127, 129

7632_Williams.indd 241

241

Chew (Layman/Guillory), 179 Chevli, Lyn, 93 Chicago Review Press, 95 Chicago Seven, 65 Childhood (Bochořáková-Dittrichová), 34 children, 2, 21, 22, 192, 197–200, 227, 236 and anti-comics movement, 55–7 and comics as promotional gifts, 52 and early comic books, 51 and literacy, 190, 196–7, 228 and stereotypes, 25 Chmakova, Svetlana, 196 Choi, Sungyoon, 205 Christopher Street (magazine), 185 chronophotography, 26–7, 46 Chute, Hillary, 4, 207, 210, 211 cinema, 1, 4, 14, 33, 34–5, 36, 46, 123–4, 190, 191–5 and gag films, 28, 30–2 Citizen 13660 (Okubo), 61–4 Cleis Press, 185 Cleveland, 154–5, 177 Clowes, Daniel, 9, 170–1, 174–5, 202, 203 CMAA see Comics Magazine Association of America Cobblestone (free arts newspaper), 120 Coe, Sue, 158 Colan, Gene, 112 Cole, Jack, 204 Cole, Jean Lee, 25 Colette, 207 Coley (Blackburn), 185 Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins, The (O’Neill), 99 Collins, Nancy, 180 Comanche Moon (Jaxon), 120, 121 Come Out Comix (Wings), 93, 185 comic books, creation of standard dimensions, 51–2 Comic-Con see San Diego Comics Convention

28/06/22 16:56

242

the us graphic novel

Comico, 138 comics see alternative comics; anticomics activism; newspaper comic strips; DC Comics; Marvel Comics; underground comix Comics Code (1954), 11, 13, 56–7, 92, 111 Comics Code Authority see Comics Code (1954) Comics Journal, The, 110, 151–2, 177 Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA), 11, 55–6 comix see underground comix ComiXology, 219–20 commercial art, 58 commercialism, 41, 44 communism, 94, 121 Complete Jack Survives, The (Moriarty), 204 Complete Peanuts, The (Schulz), 204 Compromises (Ungerer), 66 computer programmes, 4, 173, 214–17 Concrete (Chadwick), 183 Connor, Steven, 150–1 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 140 Contract with God, A (Eisner), 90, 123 coolness, 201 Coover, Colleen, 220 Corben, Richard, 93, 115, 116 Cortez, Jaime, 205 counterculture, 76, 83, 91, 92, 98–100 Cousin Joseph (Feiffer), 65 Crafton, Donald, 30 Crepax, Guido, 97–8 crime comics, 11, 53–7, 125, 177–8, 192 Crime Does Not Pay (comic), 53–4 Crime Must Pay the Penalty (comic), 54 Crime SuspenStories (comic), 56 crowd-funding, 218, 228

7632_Williams.indd 242

Crowquill, Alfred (Alfred Henry Forrester), 20 Crucifix, Benoît, 216 Cruikshank, George, 20 Crumb, Robert, 76, 91, 93, 94, 155 Cruse, Howard, 184 Cuba for Beginners (Ruis), 121 Cuba: My Revolution (Lockpez/ Haspiel), 205 Cupples & Leon, 21, 22 curation, 204 Curbside Boys (Kirby), 185 Daddy Cool (Glut/Alcala), 162 Daddy’s Girl (Drechsler), 171 Daedalus, 207–8, 210, 214 Daredevil (character), 78, 139 Daredevil (comic), 13 Dargaud, 116 Dark Horse Comics, 138, 146, 178, 183 Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White (Weaver), 205 Davis, Richard Crowsong/Paul, 205 Dazzler (comic), 110 DC Comics, 12–13, 77, 79, 162 and Batman (1989 film), 136 and British writers, 140–1 and children, 199, 200 and continuity, 142–3, 144 and ground-level publishers, 114 and independent publishers, 112, 114 and motion comics, 216 and narrative, 84 and revisionist superheroes, 136, 139, 141, 142–3, 144–5 and Simon and Schuster, 124 and variant editions, 168 and young readers, 199, 200 see also DC Vertigo; Detective Comics, Inc.; Infantino, Carmine; Paradox Press; Piranha Press DC Extended Universe (DCEU), 191, 192

28/06/22 16:56

index DC Vertigo, 178, 179–83, 184 De Landro, Valentine, 179 Dead Star: For John Wayne Gacy (zine), 175 Deadman (character), 100 dealers (comics), 77, 108–9, 119 and underground comix, 117 Dean, Michael, 169, 176 Death of Captain Marvel, The (Starlin), 139 DeConnick, Kelly Sue, 179 Deitch, Kim, 158 Delano, Jamie, 141 Delany, Samuel R., 125, 127, 129, 185 Dell Publishing Company, 52, 79 Depression (1930s), 35, 36, 37, 38–9 Desert Peach, The (Barr), 184–5 Destiny (Nückel), 34 Detective Comics, Inc., 52 Detectives, Inc: A Remembrance of Threatening Green (McGregor/ Rogers), 112 Diamond, 178, 198 Diana, Mike, 175 Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (Ledesma), 205 Diary of a Teenage Girl, The (Gloeckner), 206 direct market see distribution Dirty Plotte (Doucet), 171, 174 Disney, 68, 98, 191 Distant Soil, A (Doran), 177 distribution, 78 and direct market, 12–13, 107–8, 109–11, 130, 138–9, 167–9 and online, 219–20 and sale-or-return system, 57, 130 and underground comix, 91–2, 130 Ditko, Steve, 11, 78 Doctor Strange (character), 78, 100 Donenfeld, Harry, 52 Doom Patrol (comic), 180 Doran, Colleen, 177 Doré, Gustave, 20

7632_Williams.indd 243

243

Dork (Dorkin), 170, 174 Dorkin, Evan, 170 Doubleday, 58, 143, 155, 156 Doucet, Julie, 171, 174, 202 Dozo, Björn-Olav, 216 Drake, Arnold, 54 Drake, Stan, 82, 116 Dramacon (Chmakova), 196 Drawn & Quarterly (D&Q), 171–2, 174 Dreadstar (Starlin), 139 Drechsler, Debbie, 171 Drnaso, Nick, 1, 14 Drowners, The (Kanan), 179 drugs, 76, 82, 117 DuBurke, Randy, 205 Duncombe, Stephen, 173 Dungo, A. J., 198 Duplex Planet (zine), 174 Dyke Shorts (Wings), 93, 185 Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel), 185 Dylan, Bob, 79 Dynamite Damsels (Gregory), 93, 185 e-graphic novels, 214–15, 216–20, 221, 228; see also Bayou (Love) Eakins, Thomas, 25, 26 Eastern Color Printing Company, 51–2 Eastman, Kevin, 13, 138 Easy Rider (film), 83 Eaton, Cheryl Lynn, 222 EC Comics, 51, 54–7 Ecke, Jochen, 141–2, 179–80 Eclipse Enterprises, 112 Eggers, Dave, 203 Eightball (Clowes), 170–1, 174–5 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 68, 69 Eisner, Will, 5, 90, 123 Elephant (Vaughn-James), 95 ElfQuest (Pini/Pini), 112, 152–3 Ellis, Warren, 141 Empire (Delany/Chaykin), 125, 127, 128, 129–30

28/06/22 16:56

244

the us graphic novel

Englehart, Steve, 114 Ennis, Garth, 141, 182 environmentalism, 76, 139, 147 Epic Illustrated (magazine), 117 Epic imprint, 140 Equinox Cooperative Press, 36 erotica, 95, 98 Espinosa, Frank, 179 espionage, 77, 89, 94 ethnicity, 25–6, 32, 61–4, 120, 121, 137, 152; see also African Americans; racism European comics, 19–20, 30, 33–4; see also Franco-Belgian albums; French comics Evans, Chris, 194 Eve (Waldman), 60–1 Even Cazco Gets the Blues (Yeh), 120 Everett, Bill, 78 Evergreen Review (magazine), 97 Excalibur Enterprises, 114 expressionism, 11, 33 Faber, 203 Fabian, Stephen, 125 Fables (comic), 182 Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (characters), 118 Fake, Edie, 174 Falcon (character), 83 Famous Funnies (promotional gift), 52 fans, 77, 86–90, 138–40, 168, 169–71 and Comic-Con, 193 and direct market, 107–8, 109, 110, 111, 112 and Marvel’s innovations with narrative, 85–6 FantaCo Enterprises, 138 Fantagraphics, 138, 151–2, 171, 185 Fantastic Four (characters), 77–8, 79, 83 Fantastic Four (comic), 12, 82, 83–6 fantasy comics, 112, 113, 115, 116

7632_Williams.indd 244

Fantasy Illustrated (fanzine), 87, 88–9 fanzines, 14, 86–7, 172–6 Farmer, Joyce, 93, 206 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 58 Fawaz, Ramzi, 83 Fawcett Publications, 11, 54 Feiffer, Jules, 59, 64–5, 122 feminism, 93, 148 Ferris, Emil, 205 Fiala, Richard, 185 Fiction Illustrated (book series), 125 Filipino Food (Badajos), 95, 96 film see cinema film noir, 54, 177 fine art, 4, 5–6, 202; see also Pop Art Fingerman, Bob, 174 First Comics, 138, 139 First Kingdom, The (Katz), 122, 153 First Second, 196, 199 ‘firsts’, 168 Fisher, Bud, 22–3 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby, 207 Flash (character), 77 Flash, The (comic), 78 Fleener, Mary, 172 Fliegende Blätter (magazine), 30 Flying Buttress Publications, 116 Foglio, Kaja, 217 Foglio, Phil, 217 Forest, Jean-Claude, 97, 115 Forney, Ellen, 206 Fornicon (Ungerer), 66 Fortune (magazine), 62 Fountain, The (film), 192 Foxy Grandpa (Bunny), 21, 30 Fraction, Matt, 203 Fragments West, 120 framing, 30–1, 150; see also panels Franco-Belgian albums, 115–17 Frank, Arthur W., 100 Franklin, Tee, 218, 219 Freeman, Adam, 194 Freeman, Don, 59–60

28/06/22 16:56

index French comics, 55, 80, 115; see also Franco-Belgian albums Frey, Hugo, 3, 8, 67, 80, 82, 97, 139 Friedrich, Mike, 12, 110, 113 Fritz the Cat (Crumb), 94 From Hell (film), 191–2 Frost, Arthur Burdett, 24–8, 29, 30–2, 45 Fuller, Larry, 93, 185 Fun Home (Bechdel), 185, 204 and autographics, 207–8, 209, 210–11, 212–13, 214 Funnies on Parade (comic book), 52 funny animal comics, 51, 68, 70, 159–61, 226 Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, The (Marrs), 118–19, 183 Gabilliet, Jean-Paul, 8, 57, 92, 110 gag films, 28, 30–2 Gaiman, Neil, 140, 141, 180–2 Gaines, Maxwell C., 52, 54 Gaines, William, 54, 55–7 game comics, 216 Gangsters Can’t Win (comic), 54 García, Santiago, 8–9, 10, 27–8, 53, 204, 205 Gardner, Jared, 7–8, 21–2, 68 Gasoline Alley (King), 204 Gaudreault, André, 35 Gauguin, Paul, 33 gay and lesbian comix see LGBTQ+ comics Gay Comix, 154, 185 Gay Heart Throbs (Fuller), 93, 185 Gaylord Phoenix (Fake), 174 Geerdes, Clay, 98 Gender Queer: A Memoir (Kobabe), 198 Genesis (Nash), 33 Georges, Nicole, 206 Gerber, Steve, 112 Gertrude’s Follies (Hachtman), 185 Ghita of Alizarr (Thorne), 115

7632_Williams.indd 245

245

Ghost Script, The (Feiffer), 65 Ghost World (Clowes), 174–5, 186 Ghost World (film), 192 Gibbons, Dave, 13, 136, 140, 146–51 Gibson, Mel, 170 Gillen, Kieron, 179 Gilmore, Leigh, 206 Gilroy, Paul, 226 Girl Genius (Foglio/Foglio), 217 Give Me Liberty (Miller/Gibbons), 146–51 Give Me Liberty: A Revised History of the American Revolution (Shelton/Richards), 121, 137 Glanzman, Sam, 139 Gleason, Leverett, 53, 54 Gloeckner, Phoebe, 206 Glut, Don, 162 God Nose (Jaxon), 91 Godard, Christian, 116 Godiva: A Non-Sexist Adult Fantasy (Yeh), 120 Gods’ Man (Ward), 35, 36, 38, 39–42, 43, 44–5, 61 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19 Goff, Cindy, 140 Gonick, Larry, 121 Good as Lily (Kim/Hamm), 199 Goodman, Martin, 77, 85 Goodwin, Archie, 114, 116 Gordon, Ian, 21 graphic art, 58–9 graphic novel, definitions of, 2–4, 87–8, 191, 236 Graphix, 199 Gravett, Paul, 216 Gray, Harold, 23, 226 Gray, Jonathan W., 226 Great Britain, 20, 55, 140–2 Great War (World War One), 24, 34 Green, Justin, 98, 158 Green Lantern (comic), 78, 83, 86 Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow (O’Neil/Adams) see Green Lantern

28/06/22 16:56

246

the us graphic novel

Greenberger, David, 174 Gregory, Roberta, 93, 183, 185 Griffith, Bill, 93, 158 Groensteen, Thierry, 211 Gropper, William, 37–8 Gross, Milt, 38, 88, 158 Groth, Gary, 151, 152, 153 ground-level publishers, 12, 107, 113–15 Grove Press, 80, 97–8, 116 Grusin, Richard, 5 Guardian, The (newspaper), 142, 190, 202 Guéra, R. M., 182 Guerra, Pia, 182 Guillory, Rob, 179 Gulacy, Paul, 112 Gulf Oil, 51–2 Gunning, Tom, 30, 31–2, 45 Guts (Telgemeier), 199–200 Hachtman, Tom, 185 Hall, Justin, 221 Hallgren, Gary, 121 Hamm, Jesse, 199 Hanna, Erin, 193 Happiness is a Warm Puppy (Schulz), 67 Harper & Brothers, 58 Harper’s Bazar (magazine), 26 Harper’s Magazine (magazine), 58 Harper’s New Monthly (magazine), 26 Harris, Jack C., 111 Harris, Joel Chandler, 25, 224 Harvey, R. C., 125 Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book (Kurtzman), 51, 57, 88 Haspiel, Dean, 205 Hassle Free Press, 118 Hatfield, Charles, 8, 78, 84, 94, 108 Haunt of Fear, The (comic), 55 Hayden, Seitu, 140 He Done Her Wrong (Gross), 38, 88 Head Comix (Crumb), 91 headshops, 92, 117

7632_Williams.indd 246

Hear the Sound of my Feet Walking . . Drown the Sound of my Voice Talking . . (O’Neill), 99–100 Hearst, William Randolph, 20, 21 Heavy Metal (HM) Communications, 115–17 Heavy Metal (magazine), 107, 114–15, 116–17 Heck, Don, 78 Helfer, Andrew, 205 Hellblazer (comic), 141, 142, 180 Hellboy (film), 192 Hellboy (Mignola), 183 Heller, Steven, 39 Help! (magazine), 91 Hendrickson, Robert, 55 Hendrix, Shepherd, 206 Herbert, James, 143 Hernandez, Gilbert, 137, 152–3, 171, 203, 204 Hernandez, Jaime, 137, 152–3, 171 Hernandez, Mario, 151 Herriman, George, 158 heterochrone contexts of reception, 35 Higgins, John, 136 His Name Is . . . Savage! (Kane), 12, 89 Histoire de M. Cryptogame (Töpffer), 20 Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (Töpffer), 19 Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie en caricatures, L’ (Doré), 20 history comics, 120–2, 205–6 History of Violence, A (Wagner/ Locke), 192 HIV/AIDS, 183, 184 Hogan’s Alley (The Yellow Kid) (Outcault), 20, 21 Hogarth, Burne, 111, 123 Hogarth, William, 27 A Harlot’s Progress, 5–6 Holocaust, 143, 158–61; see also Maus (Spiegelman)

28/06/22 16:56

index Holy Terror (Miller), 149 homochrone contexts of reception, 35 Hong, Christine, 62 Hooligan, Happy (character), 21–2 Horrible: An Account of the Sad Achievements of Progress (Ungerer), 66 horror comics, 11, 54–5, 56, 57, 180 Hot Stuf’ (comic), 114–15 How to Commit Suicide in South Africa (Metz/Coe), 158 Hughes, Floyd, 205 Hulk (character), 78, 79 humour magazines, 91 Hyde, Laurence, 39 I Go Pogo (Kelly), 69–71 I Never Liked You (Brown), 172 Illustrated Harlan Ellison, The, 125 Illustrated Roger Zelazny, The, 125 Illustration, L’ (periodical), 20 Image Comics, 176–9, 183, 186 In the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegelman), 4 In Waves (Dungo), 198 Incognegro (Johnson/Pleece), 205 Independent News, 78 independent publishers, emergence of, 111–12 industrialisation, 35–6, 66 Infantino, Carmine, 78, 86, 108 infinite canvas, 215–16 Instant Piano (comic), 170 intermediality, 4–7, 10, 46 internet, 14, 191, 214–20, 221–2, 227, 228 Invasion of the Elvis Zombies (Panter), 158 investments, 168–9 Invisibles (comic), 182 Irish Americans, 25–6 Irjax Enterprises, 110 Iron Man (character), 78 Irons, Greg, 98

7632_Williams.indd 247

247

It Ain’t Me Babe (underground comic), 93 It Rhymes with Lust (Drake/Waller/ Baker), 54 It Shouldn’t Happen (Freeman), 59–60 Italian Americans, 26 ‘Jabots, les,’ 19–20 Jack Survives (Moriarty), 158; see also Complete Jack Survives, The (Moriarty) Jackie Ormes Society, 221–2 Jagoda, Patrick, 4 Janson, Klaus, 136 Japan, 14, 23–4, 190, 195–6 Japanese Americans, 23–4, 61–4 Jaxon (Jack Jackson), 91, 120–1 Jimbo (Panter), 158 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Ware), 162, 171, 190, 202 Jinx (Bendis), 177–8 John Byrne’s Next Men (Byrne), 183 Johnson, Mat, 205 Johnson, R. Kikuo, 203 Johnston, Paddy, 10 Joker (film), 192–3 Jones, Gavin, 25 Journey: 72 Drawings, A (Lewen), 64 Journey to the Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags (Read/ Read), 20 Joyce, James, 207 Judge (periodical), 20 Jungle Tales of Tarzan (Hogarth), 111, 123 Justice League of America (comic), 77 Justice Traps the Guilty (comic), 54 Kanan, Nabiel, 179 Kane, Gil, 12, 78, 89–90 Kashtan, Aaron, 216–17, 220 Katchor, Ben, 158, 202, 203

28/06/22 16:56

248

the us graphic novel

Katz, Jack, 90, 122, 153 ‘Kefauver Committee’ see Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency Kelly, Sean, 115 Kelly, Walt, 67, 68–71, 226–7 Kelly Green: The Go-Between (Starr/Drake), 116 Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (Backderf), 198 Khan, Lin Shi, 37 Kibuishi, Kazu, 196 Kick-Ass (film), 192 Kick-Ass 2 (film), 192 Kill My Mother (Feiffer), 65 Killing Joke, The (Moore/Bolland), 141, 192 Kim, Derek Kirk, 199 Kim, Young, 196 King, Frank, 204 King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Anderson), 205 King of Comedy, The (film), 192–3 Kirby, Jack, 53, 122, 124 and photo collage, 82 and superhero comics, 11, 12, 77, 78, 84, 86 Kirby, Robert, 185 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 33 Kirkman, Robert, 179 Kitchen, Denis, 90 Kiyama, Henry Yoshitaka, 23–4 Kleefeld, Sean, 214, 215, 221 Knisley, Lucy, 205 Knopf, Alfred A., 122 Kobabe, Maia, 198 Kochalka, James, 199 Kokoschka, Oskar, 33 Kosinski, Joseph, 193 Krigstein, Bernie, 87 Kristus (Bochořáková-Dittrichová), 34 Kunka, Andrew J., 90 Kunzle, David, 19 Kuper, Peter, 40

7632_Williams.indd 248

Kurtzman, Harvey, 51, 57, 87–8, 91 Kyle, Richard, 12, 87–9, 119 Lackaff, Derek, 221–2 Laird, Peter, 13, 138 Lancer, 86 Lapham, David, 178 Larkin, Philip, 142 Larsen, Erik, 176 Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures, The (Thurber), 59, 66 Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 117–18, 121 Latino USA (Stevens/Alcaraz), 122 Latinx, 137, 152; see also Mexican Americans Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me (Tamaki/Valero-O’Connell), 199 Lawbreakers Always Lose (comic), 54 Lay, Carol, 158 Layman, John, 179 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The (film), 192 Ledesma, Alberto, 205 Lee, Jim, 168, 176 Lee, Stan, 122, 124 and editorial voice, 79, 85 and narrative, 85 and Pop Art, 82 and superhero comics, 11–12, 76, 77–9 Legend, 183, 186 Legion of Charlies, The (Veitch/ Irons), 98 Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, 34–5, 40, 46 Lessing, Doris, 143 Levitz, Paul, 138 Lewen, Si, 64 Lewis, John, 198–9 LGBTQ+ comics, 93, 183–6, 204, 218, 221, 228 liberalism, 58, 62, 83, 98–9 libraries, 196–200, 228 licensing, 21, 124, 176–7, 227 Lichtenstein, Roy, 80–1, 97

28/06/22 16:56

index Liefield, Rob, 168, 176, 178 Life (magazine), 20, 68 Life of Christ in Woodcuts, The (Reid), 37 life-writing see autobiography limited editions, 39 linocuts, 33, 37, 38–9 Lion Forge Comics, 199 literacy, 55, 190, 196–200, 228 literature, 6–7, 142, 181, 200–4, 207 Little Nemo in Slumberland (McCay), 22 Little Orphan Annie (Gray), 23, 226 Liu, Marjorie, 179 Living and Dying (Tomine), 174 Lloyd, David, 144 Lob, 115 Locke, Vince, 192 Lockpez, Iverna, 205 Lopes, Paul, 8, 190–1, 196–7 Love and Rockets (Los Bros Hernandez), 137, 139, 152–3 Love, Jeremy, 222–7 Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman, The (Cruikshank), 20 Lucifer (comic), 182 Lumière Brothers, 28, 30 Lynch, Jay, 91, 199 Lyotard, Jean-François, 151 Lyvely, Chin see Chevli, Lyn McCay, Winsor, 22, 46 McCloud, Scott, 39, 162, 201, 215, 217 McCulloch, Derek, 206 McFarlane, Todd, 168, 176, 177 McGregor, Don, 86, 112 McGuire, Richard, 203 McKean, Dave, 136, 141 McKelvie, Jamie, 179 McKenney, Mary, 93 McKie, Angus, 116 McManus, George, 23 McQuade, James, 97 McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (magazine), 203

7632_Williams.indd 249

249

Mad (comic and magazine), 51, 57 Madman Comics (Allred), 183 Madman’s Drum (Ward), 36 Maison Aubert, 19–20 Malcolm X, 121 Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography (Helfer/DuBurke), 205 Malibu, 138 Mama! Dramas (underground comic), 93 Man Booker Prize, 1, 14 manga, 14, 195–6, 227 Manga Yonin Shosei (Kiyama), 23–4 Manhunter (Goodwin/Simonson), 114 manhwa, 195 Mann, Thomas, 34 Mansion of Evil (Millard), 54 Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (Forney), 206 March (Lewis/Aydin/Powell), 198–9 Marder, Larry, 169, 178 Marion, Philippe, 35 Marrs, Lee, 118–19, 183 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), 191, 192 Marvel Comics, 11–13, 76–9, 167–9, 200 and counterculture, 79, 82–3, 100 and distribution, 78, 110 and graphic novels, 122, 124, 139–40 and Heavy Metal, 117 and Image artists, 176–7 and independent publishers, 112, 113 and motion comics, 216 and origin stories, 84 and soap opera narrative, 83–6 and superheroes, 76, 100, 162 and topical issues, 82–3 and variant editions, 168 see also Epic Illustrated (magazine); Epic imprint; Lee, Stan; Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU); Timely

28/06/22 16:56

250

the us graphic novel

Marvelman (comic), 141–2 Marx for Beginners (Ruis), 121 Masereel, Frans, 33–4, 35, 38 Matt, Joe, 172 Matthews, Curt, 95 Matthews, Linda, 95 Mattotti, Lorenzo, 203 Maus (Spiegelman), 13, 137, 143, 158–61, 162 and Pulitzer Prize, 204 Mazzucchelli, David, 203 Meanwhile (Shiga), 215–16 Medhurst, Andy, 81 memoir see autobiography merchandise, 21, 117–18, 153 Merino, Ana, 9 Merry Marvel Marching Society (MMMS), 79 Métal Hurlant (magazine), 115 MetaMAUS (Spiegelman), 159 Metz, Holly, 158 Metzger, George, 87, 119–20 Mexican Americans, 120, 121 Michaels, Walter Benn, 160 Mignola, Mike, 183 Miles, David, 119–20 Millar, Mark, 141 Millard, Joseph, 54 Miller, Frank, 13, 87, 136, 139, 140, 142–3, 144 and Give Me Liberty, 146–51 Milligan, Peter, 141 minicomics, 167, 172, 174 Minimum Wage (Fingerman), 174 Mirage, 13, 138 misogyny, 36, 38, 92–3 Misty (McQuade), 97 Modan, Rutu, 203 Moench, Doug, 116, 125 Mogel, Leonard, 115 Monkeybrain Comics, 220 Monstress (Liu/Takeda), 179 Moonshine (Azzarello/Risso), 178 Moorcock, Michael, 116 Moore, Alan, 13, 136, 139, 140–3, 144

7632_Williams.indd 250

and politics, 145 and Vertigo, 179–80 Moore, Tony, 179 More than Human: The Graphic Story (Moench/Nino), 116, 122, 125 Morgan, Patrick, 223 Moriarty, Jerry, 158, 204 Morrison, Grant, 136, 140–1, 182 Morrow, Gray, 114–15 Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States, A (Stevens/Alcaraz), 122 motion comics, 216 Motter, Dean, 113 Mouly, Françoise, 157–8, 199, 203 Mr. Lambkin (Cruickshank), 20 Murder Can Be Fun (zine), 175 Murphy, Willy, 121 Murray, Chris, 141 Mutant World (Corben), 115 Mutants of the Metropolis (Serniuk), 98 Mutt and Jeff (Fisher), 22–3 Muybridge, Eadweard, 26–7 My Favourite Thing is Monsters (Ferris), 205 My War (Szüts), 34 Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita, 95 Nanny Goat Productions, 93 Nantier, Terry, 199 narrative, 8 and British comics, 141 and Carlo, 24–8, 30–2 and chaos, 100 and fans, 85–6, 138 and Marvel in the 1960s, 83–6, 100–1 and revisionist superhero graphic novels, 144 and Thurber, 59 and transmedia, 195 and underground comix, 118–19 and Ward, 39–40

28/06/22 16:56

index Nash, Paul, 33 Nasser, Mike, 129 Nat Turner (Baker), 179 National Lampoon (magazine), 115 nationalism, 36, 37, 145, 148 Native Americans, 76, 120 Neri, G., 205 Neverwhere (Corben), 93 New Adventures of Jesus, The (Sturgeon), 118 New Left, 76, 82–3, 92–3, 94, 122 New Masses (periodical), 37–8 New Tales of the Arabian Nights (Corben/Strnad), 93, 116 New York City, 57, 58–61, 62, 64, 66–7, 71, 83, 158 and New York Comic Con, 198 New York Journal (newspaper), 20, 22 New York Times, The (newspaper), 65 New York World (newspaper), 20 New Yorker, The (magazine), 58, 203 newspaper comic strips, 20–3, 67–71, 98–9 Newsweek (magazine), 58 Nieves, Rafael, 140 Night Fisher (Johnson), 203 Nimona (Stevenson), 221 Nino, Alex, 116, 125 Nixon, Richard, 117 Nize Baby (Gross), 38 No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (anthology), 204 North, Joseph, 37 Novick, Irv, 80 Nückel, Otto, 34 Nyberg, Amy Kiste, 55 Oblivion (film), 193 O’Brien, Jim, 122 obscenity, 117 Odd Bodkins (O’Neill), 98–9 O’Donoghue, Michael, 97 Okubo, Miné, 61–4 Oliveros, Chris, 171, 172

7632_Williams.indd 251

251

Olympia Press, 95 O’Malley, Bryan Lee, 196 One! Hundred! Demons! (Barry), 206 O’Neil, Dennis, 83, 86 O’Neill, Dan, 98–100 Oni Press, 196 online see internet Opper, Frederick Burr, 21 Optic Nerve (Tomine), 174 organised crime, 108 origin stories, 84 Orion (Morrow), 115 Ormes, Jackie, 221–2 Ortleb, Charles, 185 Osborn, Robert, 65 Out of the Hurly Burly (Adeler), 25 Outcault, Richard F., 20, 21, 45 Over the Hedge (film), 192 pacifism, 11, 34, 59, 121 Palmer, Tom, 112 panels, 26, 27–8 and American Splendor, 154–5 and Frost, 26–8, 30–1 and Fun Home, 208, 211, 214 and infinite canvas, 215–16 and Pop Art, 80 and television screens, 150 and Ward, 36, 39–42, 43, 44–5 Panter, Gary, 158, 203 Pantheon, 121, 143, 158 Pantomime To Be Played As It Was, Is and Will Be, at Home (Crowquill), 20 paperback books, 11, 86 Papercutz, 199 Parade, The (Lewen), 64 Paradox Press, 180, 184 Paragraphic Books, 66 Park: A Mystery, The (VaughnJames), 95 Parker, Charley, 214–15 Parker, Cynthia Ann, 120 Parker, Quanah, 120

28/06/22 16:56

252

the us graphic novel

parody, 13, 55, 66, 139 and hard-boiled crime fiction, 125 and pastiche in Give Me Liberty, 148, 149–50 and superheroes, 91, 118 and woodcut novels, 11, 38 Party, The (Ungerer), 66–7 Passionate Journey (Masereel), 34 Passionella and Other Stories (Feiffer), 65 Pathfinder Press, 121 Patri, Giacomo, 38 Peanuts (Schulz), 67, 99, 204 Pedro & Me: Friendship, Loss, & What I Learned (Winnick), 184 Peellaert, Guy, 97 Pekar, Harvey see American Splendor Penguin, 143, 146, 158, 202–3 Perez, Tony, 37 Phillips, Kimberley L., 62–3 Phillips, Sean, 178 photographic collage, 82 Pichard, Georges, 115 ‘picture novel’ (term), 34, 54 Pictures at a Prosecution: Drawings & Texts from the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (Feiffer), 65 Pini, Richard, 112, 152–3 Pini, Wendy, 87, 112, 152–3 Piranha Press, 180 Pizzino, Christopher, 7, 136–7, 200 Places (Nash), 33 Plastic Man (comic), 204 Playboy (magazine), 65 Pleece, Warren, 205 Pogo (Kelly), 67, 68–9, 71, 226–7 politics, 40, 58–60, 139, 205 and anti-war sentiment, 64–5, 66, 71 and critiques of capitalism, 34, 36–9, 44, 66–7, 173–4 and geopolitics, 140 and left-wing revisionist history, 120–2

7632_Williams.indd 252

and LGBTQ+ comics, 183–4 and Miller, 147–9 and poster art, 40 and racial politics, 23–4, 206 and revisionist superheroes, 141, 144–5 and underground comix, 77, 92, 94, 100 and woodcut novels, 35–6, 37–9, 44 and women’s comics, 93 see also anticommunism; authoritarianism; cartoons (political); communism; liberalism; nationalism; New Left; satire; socialism Pollack, Rachel, 180 polygraphy, 6 Pond, Mimi, 203 Pop Art, 4, 80–2, 97, 100 pornography, 92; see also obscenity Portacio, Whilce, 176 post-apocalyptic fantasy comics, 77, 89 poster art, 4, 40–1, 46, 76, 91, 129 postmodernism, 146–51 Powell, Nate, 198 Prairie State Blues: Comic Strips and Graphic Tales (Bergeron), 95 Preacher (comic), 182 Preiss, Byron, 86, 123, 124–5, 127, 129–30 Prelude to a Million Years (Ward), 36 print runs, 91, 95, 108, 117, 124, 196, 199 and alternative comics, 152, 153 and Batman, 81 and independent comics, 111 and promotional comics, 52 and woodcut novels, 33 Private Eye (magazine), 142 prizes, 1, 6, 14, 167, 201, 202, 203–4, 228, 237 Procession, The (Lewen), 64

28/06/22 16:56

index Proctor & Gamble, 52 Projector, The (Vaughn-James), 95 Proust, Marcel In Search of Lost Time, 207 psychedelia, 77, 92, 99, 100 Puck (periodical), 20 Push (comic), 194 Pussey! (Clowes), 170–1 Pustz, Matthew J., 138, 153, 170 Quartuccio, Sal, 114 Raab, Charles, 54 racism, 25–6, 36, 37, 55, 120, 160, 206, 222 and Bayou, 223–7 and It Shouldn’t Happen, 59–60 and Japanese Americans, 23–4, 61–4 and Miller, 147, 149 and underground comix, 92 see also antisemitism; blackface minstrelsy; Holocaust Radical America (magazine), 122 radicalism see New Left Random House, 11, 36, 58, 196 RAT (underground newspaper), 92–3 RAW (anthology), 157–8, 199 Read, Donald F., 20 Read, James A., 20 Réage, Pauline, 98 Real World, The (TV show), 184 Red Eagle, 138 Redhawk (video game), 216 Redniss, Lauren, 203–4 Redondo, Bruno, 194 Reese, Ralph, 125 Reid, James, 37 religion, 37, 41, 113–14 Relish: My Life in the Kitchen (Knisley), 205 remediation, 5 Rendez-Vous in Phoenix (Sandoval), 206

7632_Williams.indd 253

253

reprint editions, 13, 19, 86, 124, 139, 183, 185, 204 and alternative comics, 170, 178, 179 and American Splendor, 137, 154–5, 156, 157 and Love and Rockets, 152–3 and newspaper strips, 21–2, 51, 65, 67–71 and Pop Art, 80 and revisionist superhero comics, 144 and The Sandman, 180–1 and underground comix, 91, 94, 99, 118 revisionist history see history comics Reynolds, Richard, 145 Ribera, Julio, 116 Richards, Ted, 98, 121 Richardson, Afua, 221 Right Number, The (McCloud), 217 Rip Off Press, 118, 121 R.I.P.D. (film), 192 Risso, Eduardo, 178 Rius, 121–2 Road, Cristy R., 206 Road to Perdition (film), 192 Robbins, Trina, 8, 93, 118 Roberson, Chris, 220 Robinson, Alex, 171 Rocketo (Espinosa), 179 Rockwell, Norman, 58 Rogers, Marshall, 112 Rolling Stone (magazine), 180–1, 182, 186 romance comics, 11, 53, 54 Romberger, James, 184 Rozanski, Chuck, 110 Rudahl, Sharon, 118, 122 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 95 Sabin, Roger, 143, 144, 145–6, 174, 201 Sabre (McGregor/Gulacy), 112 Sabrina (Drnaso), 1, 14

28/06/22 16:56

254

the us graphic novel

Sacco, Joe, 202, 203, 204 Sacred and the Profane, The (Motter/Steacy), 113–14 Saga (Vaughn/Staples), 179 Saga of the Swamp Thing, The (comic), 139, 140, 142, 180 Saguisag, Lara, 25 Sailor’s Story, A (Glanzman), 139 St John Publications, 11, 54 St Lifer, Evan, 197 St-Onge, Jenn, 218 sale-or-return system, 108–9, 111 sales of graphic novels (annual), 190 Sales, Michael, 221–2 Salicrup, Jim, 199 San Diego Comics Convention, 119, 193, 194, 215 San Francisco Bay Area, 76, 91 Sanders, Joe Sutliff, 180 Sandman, The (Gaiman), 141, 142, 180–2, 186 Sandoval, Tony, 206 Santiago, Wilfred, 205 satire, 12, 38, 58, 59, 65, 67, 91 and cartoons, 20, 33 and Pogo, 68–71 Scalped (Aaron/Guéra), 182 Scarlett Pilgrim (Robbins), 118 Schanes, Steve, 129 Schjeldahl, Peter, 201 Schlomo Raven (Preiss), 125 Scholastic, 199 Schomburg, Alex, 52–3 School Library Journal, 197 Schulz, Charles, 67, 204 Schwartz, Julius, 77 science fiction comics, 98, 113, 115, 116, 192 and Empire, 127, 129 and Give Me Liberty, 146–51 Scorsese, Martin, 192–3 Scott Pilgrim (O’Malley), 196 Scott Pilgrim vs the World (film), 192 Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts (Khan/Perez), 37

7632_Williams.indd 254

Sea Gate, 109–10, 112, 138 Seguin, Juan, 121 self-publishing, 112, 138, 172–6 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 55–6 Sentences: The Life of M. F. Grimm (Carey/Wimberly), 206 Serniuk, P., 98 Seth, 171, 204 Seuling, Phil, 109–10, 130 Seven Miles a Second (Romberger/ Wojnarowicz), 184 Sexile (Cortez), 205 sexism, 55 sexual content, 13, 92–3, 111, 139 and Ward, 41–2, 43, 44 see also erotica SF see science fiction comics Shableski, John, 198 Shade the Changing Man (comic), 180 Shadowhawk (Valentino), 176 Shakespeare, William, 142 Shark King, The (Johnson), 203 Shelton, Gilbert, 91, 92–3, 118, 121 Shelton, ‘Stack Lee’, 206 Sherman, Bill, 113, 114 Shero, Jeff, 92–3 Shiga, Jason, 215–16 Shortcomings (Tomine), 174 Shuster, Joe, 52 Sick Sick Sick (Feiffer), 65 Siegel, Jerry, 52 Silver Surfer, The (Lee/Kirby), 12, 122, 124 Silvestri, Marc, 176 Sim, Dave, 153 Simmel, Georg, 60–1 Simmons, Danny, 205 Simon and Schuster, 86, 116, 122, 123–4 Simon, Joe, 53 Simonson, Walt, 114, 116 Sin City (film), 192 Sin City (Miller), 146, 183

28/06/22 16:56

index Singer, Marc, 6–7, 136 Skim (Tamaki/Tamaki), 199 Skitzy: The Story of Floyd W. Skitzafroid (Freeman), 60 slavery, 36, 148, 160, 223, 224, 225, 226 Slifer, Roger, 114 Small, David, 206 Smith, Harrison, 36 Smith, Jeff, 177 Smolderen, Thierry, 5–6, 7, 26–7, 45 Snyder, Richard ‘Dick,’ 123 So Beautiful and So Dangerous (McKie), 116 soap opera, 85 socialism, 11 Soho Weekly News (newspaper), 185 Solutions and Other Problems (Brosh), 198 Sommerland, Ylva, 202 Son of Sherlock Holmes (Preiss/ Reese), 125 Song Without Words (Ward), 36 Sontag, Susan, 81 Soper, Kerry, 227 Southern Cross: A Novel of the South Seas told in Wood Engravings (Hyde), 39 Spawn (comic), 176 Special Exits (Farmer), 206 specialist shops, 12, 137, 138, 161, 168, 169, 174 and direct market, 109–10, 130 and Image, 177, 178 and LGBTQ+ comics, 185 and manga, 195 and promotion, 172 speech balloons, 20, 26, 58, 59, 61, 82, 145 and American Splendor, 155 and Batman, 81 and BPVP, 125, 127 and Fun Home, 211 and I Go Pogo, 70

7632_Williams.indd 255

255

and motion comics, 216 and The Party, 67 and underground comix, 95, 97 Spicer, Bill, 87 Spider-Man (character), 78, 79 Spider-Man (comic), 167–8 Spider-Man (film), 191 Spiegelman, Art, 4, 9, 157–8; see also Maus spies see espionage Spinning (Walden), 206 Spirit, The (Eisner), 90 Spit and Passion (Road), 206 Springer, Frank, 97 Stagger Lee (McCulloch/Hendrix), 206 Staples, Fiona, 179 Starfawn (Preiss/Fabian), 125 Stark’s Quest (Marrs), 119 Starlin, Jim, 113, 139 Starr, Leonard, 116 Star*Reach (comic), 12, 113–14, 115, 119 Stars My Destination, The (Chaykin), 123, 125 Starspawn (Nasser), 129 Steacy, Ken, 113 Steinberg, Saul, 58 Steranko, James, 125, 127 stereotypes, 25–6, 92, 94, 148–9, 225–6 Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy, 181 Stevens, Ilan, 122 Stevenson, Adlai, 68 Stevenson, ND, 221 Stewart the Rat (Gerber/Colan/ Palmer), 112 Stitches (Small), 206 Stokes, Frederick A., 21, 22 Stokes, Manning Lee, 54 Story of O, The (Réage), 98 Story of Roberto Clemente, The (Santiago), 205 Story of Uncle Sam’s Cabin, The (Richards), 98

28/06/22 16:56

256

the us graphic novel

storytelling see narrative Strange Adventures (comic), 100 Strange Tales (comic), 100 Strnad, Jan, 116 Stuck Rubber Baby (Cruse), 184 students see campus culture Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 94, 122 Stuff and Nonsense (Frost), 26, 28, 31 Sturgeon, Foolbert (Frank Stack), 91 Sturgeon, Theodore, 116, 118 SubGURLZ (Camper), 185 Suicide Squad (film), 191 superheroes, 11–13, 52–3, 84, 176–7 and alternative comics, 153, 170–1 and British creators, 180 and film, 1, 191, 192–3, 194 and Image, 176, 177 and Marvel in the 1960s, 76, 77–9, 100 and patriotism, 53 and ‘relevance’ movement, 76, 82–3, 86 and revisionist, 136, 139, 141, 144–5, 161–2 and sexuality, 81 and television, 81, 191 and underground parody, 91, 118 Superman (1978 film), 191 Superman (character), 52, 168 Superman (comic), 52, 78 Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane (comic), 83 Sutton, Joyce see Farmer, Joyce Sutton, Tom, 125 Swamp Thing (comic) see Saga of the Swamp Thing, The (comic) Swan, Curt, 78 Swarte, Joost, 158 Swords of Heaven, The Flowers of Hell, The (Chaykin), 116 Szüts, István Szegedi, 34

7632_Williams.indd 256

Takada, Mayumi, 23–4 Takeda, Sana, 179 Tales from the Crypt (comic), 55 Tales from the Heart (comic), 140 Tales from the Heart of Africa: The Temporary Natives (Goff/ Nieves/Hayden), 140 Tamaki, Jillian, 199 Tamaki, Mariko, 199, 200 Tantrum (Feiffer), 65, 122 Tardi, Jacques, 158 Tarzan of the Apes (Hogarth), 123 Taxi Driver (film), 192 technology see internet Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Eastman/Laird), 13, 138–9, 153 Tejanos, Los (Jaxon), 120–1 television, 81, 100, 150 Telgemeier, Raina, 199–200 Texas, 120–1 Texas Ranger (magazine), 91 This One Summer (Tamaki/Tamaki), 199 Thomas, Roy, 87 Thompson, Craig, 206 Thompson, Kim, 152 Thor (character), 78 Thorkelson, Nick, 122 Thorne, Frank, 115 Thunderbolt: An American Tale (Santiago), 205 Thurber, James, 58, 59, 65 Till, Emmett, 223 Time (magazine), 58 Timely, 53 Tiny Tot Comics (comic), 54 Tits and Clits (underground comic), 93 Tobin, Paul, 220 Tokyopop, 195 Tomine, Adrian, 172, 174, 202 TOON Books, 199, 203 Töpffer, Rodolphe, 19, 20, 27 Torres, Alissa, 205

28/06/22 16:56

index Toth, Alex, 115 trade press, 11, 51, 71, 77, 180, 186, 202, 236 and 1980s graphic novels, 143, 145, 146, 154, 155, 161, 167 and Franco-Belgian albums, 116 and history comics, 205 and manga, 195, 196 and New York City, 58 and woodcut novels, 32, 39 see also blockbuster publishing Tran, G. B., 205 trauma, 6, 36, 159, 184, 206, 226 Travels of Happy Hooligan (Opper), 21–2 Triggs, Teal, 174 Tundra, 138 Turzak, Charles, 37 Twain, Mark, 25 Two-Fisted Painters (Spiegelman), 158 Tyler, Carol, 172 Ulysses (Lob/Pichard), 115 underground comix, 12, 13, 76–7, 90, 91–4, 100, 117 and American Splendor, 154–5, 156, 157 and fans, 87, 94 and graphic novels, 94–5, 97–100, 118–22, 137 Underground Sketchbook (Ungerer), 66 Underhanded History of the USA (Thorkelson/O’Brien), 121–2 Ungerer, Tomi, 59, 66–7 United States of America (USA), 20, 23–4, 51, 160 and 1970s trade publishing, 123–4 and Japanese Americans, 23–4, 61–4 and manga, 195–6 and picture novels, 34–9 and revisionist history, 120–2, 205–6 and woodcut novels, 32–3, 35–9

7632_Williams.indd 257

257

see also American Civil War; Cleveland; New York City; San Francisco Bay Area; World War Two Upton, Florence K., 225 V for Vendetta (film), 192 V for Vendetta (Moore/Lloyd), 144 Vagabond of Limbo: What is Reality, Papa?, The (Godard/ Ribera), 116 Valentino, Jim, 176, 177, 178 Valero-O’Connell, Rosemary, 199 Valiant, 138 Varley, Lynn, 136 Vaughn, Brian K., 179, 182 Vaughn-James, Martin, 95, 97 Veitch, Rick, 116 Veitch, Tom, 93–4, 98 Vertigo see DC Vertigo Vertigo (Ward), 37 video games, 193, 195, 216 Vietnam War, 98 Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (Tran), 205 Vile: Legends of Thunder Valley (Davis/various), 205 Village Voice (magazine), 65 villains, 84, 146–7 vintage comics, 168 Viva, Frank, 203 Wagner, John, 192 Walcott, Derek ‘The Sea is History’, 225 Walden, Tillie, 206 Waldman, Myron, 60–1 Walking Dead, The (Kirkman/ Moore/Adlard), 179 Waller, Leslie, 54 Wanted (film), 192 Wanzo, Rebecca, 223 war see anti-war sentiment; Great War; Vietnam War; World War Two

28/06/22 16:56

258

the us graphic novel

War of Independence, 121 Ward, Lynd, 35–6, 39–42, 43, 44–5, 46 Ware, Chris, 6–7, 9, 190, 202, 204 and D&Q, 172 and Fantagraphics, 171 and The New Yorker, 203 Warner Books, 143 Warner Bros, 191 Warren Publishing, 115 Watchmen (film), 192 Watchmen (Moore/Gibbons), 13, 136, 137, 143, 144–5, 149–50 Watson-Guptill Publications, 123 Weaver, Lila Quintero, 205 Weirdo (comic), 154 Weisinger, Mort, 77 Wells, Michele, 200 Wertham, Fredric Seduction of the Innocent, 55 West, Adam, 81 Wester, Maisha, 226 western comics, 54 Whaam! (Lichtenstein), 80 Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth, 147, 148–9, 222 Wheeler-Nicholson, Maj Malcolm, 52 White Collar: A Novel in Linocuts (Patri), 38–9 White Deer, The (Thurber), 59 Whiteout (film), 192 Whitlock, Gillian, 206 Whitted, Qiana, 223, 225 Wicked + The Divine, The (Gillen/ McKelvie/Wilson), 179 Wictorin, Margareta Wallin, 202 Wild Pilgrimage (Ward), 36 Wildenberg, Harry, 51–2 Willard, Archibald Yankee Doodle (The Spirit of ’76), 148 Willingham, Bill, 182 Wilson, G. Willow, 203

7632_Williams.indd 258

Wilson, Matthew, 179 Wilson, S. Clay, 92, 93 Wimberly, Ronald, 206 Wimmen’s Comix Collective, 93, 122, 154, 185 Winging It (Gregory), 183 Wings, Mary, 93, 185 Winnick, Judd, 184 witzend (comic), 112 Wizard (magazine), 176 Wizard King, The (Wood), 112 Wojnarowicz, David, 184 Wolff, Mia, 185 women, 8, 53, 60–1, 67 and black women, 147, 149, 221–2 and fandom, 170 and underground comix, 92–3, 118–19 and Ward, 41–2, 43, 44 see also Wimmen’s Comix Collective Wonder Wart-Hog and the Nurds of November (Shelton), 118 Wonder Wart-Hog, Captain Crud and other Superstuff (anthology), 91 Wonder Woman (film), 191 ‘Wonderworld’ newsletter (Kyle), 87 Woo, Benjamin, 10, 159, 170 Wood, Robert, 53 Wood, Wally, 112 woodcut novels, 11, 32–9, 46 and Ward, 39–42, 43, 44–5 Woodring, Jim, 204 Woolf, Virginia, 207 word balloons see speech balloons World War Three Illustrated (comic), 154 World War Two, 52–3, 54, 59–64, 80, 139, 184–5; see also Holocaust World Wide Web see internet Wright, Bradford W., 8, 54, 79

28/06/22 16:56

index X-Force (comic), 167–8 X-Men (characters), 78, 83 X-Men (comic), 168 X-Men, The (comic), 153 X-Men (film), 191 Y: The Last Man (Vaughn/Guerra), 182 Yang, Gene Luen, 196, 198, 200, 203 Yeh, Phil, 120 Yellow Kid (character), 20, 21, 22, 25 Young, Art, 65, 158 Young, Hershini Bhana, 224, 225, 226 Young, Paul, 149

7632_Williams.indd 259

259

Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), 197, 198–9 Young Romance (comic), 53 youth culture, 8, 79, 100 Yronwode, Cat, 111–12 Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty (Neri/DuBurke), 205 Zamora, Pedro, 184 Zap (Crumb), 91, 93, 154 Zelinski, Siegfried, 3 zines see fanzines Zuda Comics, 222, 227

28/06/22 16:56

7632_Williams.indd 260

28/06/22 16:56