MichaelDoran
11-05-2002, 05:11 PM
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<font face="Arial, Verdana"><div align="center">
A THOUSAND FLOWERS
Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside
Installment 2
by Stuart Moore</div>
2. Open Your Eyes, Baby Bird: Comics’ Early Years
Sure, there are a lot of Internet columns around, and even more “blogs” where you can read the first hungover thoughts of some idiot every morning, like clockwork. But how many columns give you - in their very second installment! - an epic like:
<blockquote><div align="center">THE REAL, TRUE (MYTHIC) ORIGIN OF COMIC BOOKS
A Screenplay</div>
INT. DINGY BAR
Afternoon in the dark heart of the Great Depression. A portly bartender pours beers for eight or ten regulars, all seated at the bar. Everybody’s dressed in period clothes, pretty raggy. Sunlight streams in the single window, creating a harsh contrast with the low lighting.
Letters fade up onscreen:
<div align="center">CHICAGO
1933</div>
Angle on a BEEFY GUY in a work shirt, late 30s. He’s a little bent over the bar -- he’s had a few. His nose is slightly bent, and he looks like a bruiser who’s been through the mill a few times. He looks pretty depressed.
A WIRY GUY, hard as nails and probably close to 50, walks in muttering to himself. He’s got chiseled features, and like Beefy Guy, he might have been in a few scrapes. He takes the stool next to Beefy Guy. He’s jittery, off in his own world.
<BLOCKQUOTE><DIV ALIGN="CENTER">WIRY GUY</DIV> (mutters)
GoddamnnogooddonnowhyIbother…
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">BEEFY GUY</DIV>Anthony.
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHONY</DIV>Uh?
(looks at him)
Oh, hey Eddie.
(to bartender)
WHISKEY!
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">EDDIE</DIV>What’s new? What’s the word?</BLOCKQUOTE>
Anthony doesn’t answer. He fidgets, fumbles for a cigarette as the bartender pours his whiskey. He offers a smoke to Eddie, who shrugs and accepts. Anthony takes a long drag, drinks a big gulp of whiskey, then seems to relax. He turns to face Eddie directly.
<BLOCKQUOTE><DIV ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHONY</DIV> (resigned)
What’s new. I’ll tell ya…I got eight trucks and NOTHIN’ to do with ‘em. I dropped my rates, but still nobody’s got any money!
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">EDDIE</DIV>‘s gotta be SOMEBODY needs trucks…
<div align="center">ANTHONY</div>Aaaaahh…you’d think with Capone gone, things’d open up. But it’s just the opposite. His guys that are left are desperate to keep all the business, and this ain’t exactly a booming economy.
<div align="center">EDDIE</div>Ouch. I know what ya mean. We put all this dough into color printing presses -- y’know, to print those Sunday funnies? An’ that works fine -- it’s good money. But the other six days of the week, I got nothing to print. I ain’t never gonna pay those presses off, an’ i’m in to Maldonado for some serious bank notes.
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHONY</DIV> (grimaces)
You don’t wanna screw around with Maldonado.
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">EDDIE</DIV>Tell me about it.
(looks into his beer)
I wish I had something else to print on those damn presses!
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHONY</DIV> (looks into his whiskey)
I wish I had something to deliver in those damn trucks!</blockquote>
Slowly their heads rise, and they turn to stare at each other.
ROLL CREDITS</blockquote>
**
Ahem…of course, all characters, locations, and dialogue in the above are fictional, and the basic situation has been fictionalized. But the point is this: The comic book’s origins were not artistic in nature. The 64-page, 10-cent format was born of desperate men in hard times. They had material (newspaper strips, reprints of which made up most of the early comics) and presses, and they needed to pay the landlord -- or the loan shark. Voila: the comic book.
There were a few stabs at proto-comics in the early 1930s, but the first regular comic is generally acknowledged as FAMOUS FUNNIES#1, which debuted in 1934 and consisted of reprints of newspaper strips, including Mutt & Jeff. FAMOUS FUNNIES was, in many real senses, a stab in the dark. But from the moment of its publication, it was a competitor in the real, cutthroat, pop-culture entertainment world of the Great Depression. The readers of those early comics didn’t have a lot of spare cash to throw around. Every penny counted.
The comic book’s major competition in those days was:
</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> movies</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> radio (including dramas and comedies)</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> live theatre (sporadic, unless you lived in a big city)</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> public libraries</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> magazines (especially the genre pulps)
A pretty short list. It’ll grow as we move through the decades.
The mass market paperback book hadn’t yet emerged, so cheap prose fiction for the masses was pretty much confined to the pulps - the closest ancestors of comics. Some were anthologies (ASTOUNDING, WEIRD TALES) and some were single-character series titles, often with unrelated backup stories (DOC SAVAGE, THE SPIDER, CAPTAIN FUTURE). Early comics characters were clearly pulp-derived; Batman owed a lot to the Shadow, and Superman to the early science-fiction magazines. A few characters, like Ka-Zar, actually moved from the pulps directly to comics -- which, increasingly, were displayed in a lot of the same newsstand slots as the pulps themselves.
(One digression: Big Little Books provided an early competitor for comics. These illustrated books for children, published at a very small size, followed a simple format: one page of text (big type, few words) facing a full-page illustration. They were initially popular as adventure stories for young kids and survived into the 1970s, by which time they were almost exclusively devoted to licensed characters from TV, movies, and toys. But unlike comics, Big Little Books weren’t inherently a medium unto themselves. As pleasing as they were to hold and to read, when you boiled them down they were really just illustrated prose fiction. An ambitious Big Little Book for adults would just be a curiosity -- why not publish it as a novel? -- whereas a long-form comic book with adult sensibilities is its own, fascinating creature.)
Writers like Jules Feiffer, Don Thompson, Ted White, and Jim Steranko have chronicled comics’ emergence onto the scene in the ‘30s. As with most popular entertainment of the time, those early comics’ primary mission was to provide light distraction in the midst of a national economic wasteland. People went to Three Stooges films to laugh, to forget the fact that they were likely to be evicted tomorrow and that their kids were hungry. The same went for NEW FUN COMICS, MICKEY MOUSE MAGAZINE, and the slew of books that followed.
It was also true of SUPERMAN, who burst on the scene in 1938. The Man of Steel’s earliest adventures, as seen in DC Comics’ phenomenal SUPERMAN: THE ACTION COMICS ARCHIVES VOL. 1, show a wish-fulfillment character with a decidedly pro-Labor, anti-authoritarian, politically liberal bent, prone to take matters into his own hands outside the law. Mark Waid’s excellent introduction to that volume describes the character’s beginnings in the minds of two liberal, Depression-era teenagers, and proceeds to explain how the character changed, becoming the more familiar authority figure we now know, during and following World War II.
Just as the rest of the culture did. Just as the nation did.
Comics do not exist in a cultural vacuum. They were born out of raw, flukish economics, and once they opened their little birdlike eyes, they immediately began dealing with the larger culture. To the extent that they acknowledge this culture, they’re a thriving, growing art form. When they seal themselves off and become insular, they eat away at their own audience and begin to die.
Next [10/22]: World War II. Find out who really won!
Last Installment : <a href=http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=000003>It’s Scary Out There: An Introduction </a>
<blockquote>[Stuart Moore’s A THOUSAND FLOWERS is co-sponsored by <a href=http://www.crossgen.com target=”_blank”>CrossGen Comics</a> , <a href=http://www.ait-planetlar.com/ target=”_blank”>AiT/Planet Lar</a> & <a href=http://www.pfpress.com/ target=”_blank”>Penny Farthing Press</a> . Click on the links to visit their websites. To inquire about future sponsorship opportunities with this column, please email <a href=mailto:newsarama@aol.com>newsarama@aol.com</a> ]</blockquote>
<u>Bibliography</u>
Jules Feiffer, THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES. Dial Press, 1965; new edition forthcoming from Fantagraphics Books, 2003.
Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, eds., ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME. Krause Publications, 1970, 1997.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, SUPERMAN: THE ACTION COMICS ARCHIVES, VOLUME 1. DC Comics, 1997.
Jim Steranko, THE STERANKO HISTORY OF COMICS. Supergraphics, 1970.
**
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Creators/stuartwizphoto_f.jpg" width="110" height="113" align="right" alt="Stuart Moore">Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999. Sadly, there's no going back to Woolworth's -- but that hasn’t been a problem yet. His fingers are crossed.
Currently Stuart freelances as a writer of comic books and nonfiction; he’d like you all to go out and buy ZENDRA, his epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press. Issue #3 of the second series, ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, is on sale now, and the trade paperback ZENDRA 1.0: COLLOCATION collects the first series. Then you can go to Stuart’s brand-new message board, at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com," target="_blank">www.joequesada.com,</a> and discuss ZENDRA, this column, or anything else on your nasty little mind...
<font face="Arial, Verdana"><div align="center">
A THOUSAND FLOWERS
Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside
Installment 2
by Stuart Moore</div>
2. Open Your Eyes, Baby Bird: Comics’ Early Years
Sure, there are a lot of Internet columns around, and even more “blogs” where you can read the first hungover thoughts of some idiot every morning, like clockwork. But how many columns give you - in their very second installment! - an epic like:
<blockquote><div align="center">THE REAL, TRUE (MYTHIC) ORIGIN OF COMIC BOOKS
A Screenplay</div>
INT. DINGY BAR
Afternoon in the dark heart of the Great Depression. A portly bartender pours beers for eight or ten regulars, all seated at the bar. Everybody’s dressed in period clothes, pretty raggy. Sunlight streams in the single window, creating a harsh contrast with the low lighting.
Letters fade up onscreen:
<div align="center">CHICAGO
1933</div>
Angle on a BEEFY GUY in a work shirt, late 30s. He’s a little bent over the bar -- he’s had a few. His nose is slightly bent, and he looks like a bruiser who’s been through the mill a few times. He looks pretty depressed.
A WIRY GUY, hard as nails and probably close to 50, walks in muttering to himself. He’s got chiseled features, and like Beefy Guy, he might have been in a few scrapes. He takes the stool next to Beefy Guy. He’s jittery, off in his own world.
<BLOCKQUOTE><DIV ALIGN="CENTER">WIRY GUY</DIV> (mutters)
GoddamnnogooddonnowhyIbother…
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">BEEFY GUY</DIV>Anthony.
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHONY</DIV>Uh?
(looks at him)
Oh, hey Eddie.
(to bartender)
WHISKEY!
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">EDDIE</DIV>What’s new? What’s the word?</BLOCKQUOTE>
Anthony doesn’t answer. He fidgets, fumbles for a cigarette as the bartender pours his whiskey. He offers a smoke to Eddie, who shrugs and accepts. Anthony takes a long drag, drinks a big gulp of whiskey, then seems to relax. He turns to face Eddie directly.
<BLOCKQUOTE><DIV ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHONY</DIV> (resigned)
What’s new. I’ll tell ya…I got eight trucks and NOTHIN’ to do with ‘em. I dropped my rates, but still nobody’s got any money!
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">EDDIE</DIV>‘s gotta be SOMEBODY needs trucks…
<div align="center">ANTHONY</div>Aaaaahh…you’d think with Capone gone, things’d open up. But it’s just the opposite. His guys that are left are desperate to keep all the business, and this ain’t exactly a booming economy.
<div align="center">EDDIE</div>Ouch. I know what ya mean. We put all this dough into color printing presses -- y’know, to print those Sunday funnies? An’ that works fine -- it’s good money. But the other six days of the week, I got nothing to print. I ain’t never gonna pay those presses off, an’ i’m in to Maldonado for some serious bank notes.
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHONY</DIV> (grimaces)
You don’t wanna screw around with Maldonado.
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">EDDIE</DIV>Tell me about it.
(looks into his beer)
I wish I had something else to print on those damn presses!
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHONY</DIV> (looks into his whiskey)
I wish I had something to deliver in those damn trucks!</blockquote>
Slowly their heads rise, and they turn to stare at each other.
ROLL CREDITS</blockquote>
**
Ahem…of course, all characters, locations, and dialogue in the above are fictional, and the basic situation has been fictionalized. But the point is this: The comic book’s origins were not artistic in nature. The 64-page, 10-cent format was born of desperate men in hard times. They had material (newspaper strips, reprints of which made up most of the early comics) and presses, and they needed to pay the landlord -- or the loan shark. Voila: the comic book.
There were a few stabs at proto-comics in the early 1930s, but the first regular comic is generally acknowledged as FAMOUS FUNNIES#1, which debuted in 1934 and consisted of reprints of newspaper strips, including Mutt & Jeff. FAMOUS FUNNIES was, in many real senses, a stab in the dark. But from the moment of its publication, it was a competitor in the real, cutthroat, pop-culture entertainment world of the Great Depression. The readers of those early comics didn’t have a lot of spare cash to throw around. Every penny counted.
The comic book’s major competition in those days was:
</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> movies</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> radio (including dramas and comedies)</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> live theatre (sporadic, unless you lived in a big city)</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> public libraries</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> magazines (especially the genre pulps)
A pretty short list. It’ll grow as we move through the decades.
The mass market paperback book hadn’t yet emerged, so cheap prose fiction for the masses was pretty much confined to the pulps - the closest ancestors of comics. Some were anthologies (ASTOUNDING, WEIRD TALES) and some were single-character series titles, often with unrelated backup stories (DOC SAVAGE, THE SPIDER, CAPTAIN FUTURE). Early comics characters were clearly pulp-derived; Batman owed a lot to the Shadow, and Superman to the early science-fiction magazines. A few characters, like Ka-Zar, actually moved from the pulps directly to comics -- which, increasingly, were displayed in a lot of the same newsstand slots as the pulps themselves.
(One digression: Big Little Books provided an early competitor for comics. These illustrated books for children, published at a very small size, followed a simple format: one page of text (big type, few words) facing a full-page illustration. They were initially popular as adventure stories for young kids and survived into the 1970s, by which time they were almost exclusively devoted to licensed characters from TV, movies, and toys. But unlike comics, Big Little Books weren’t inherently a medium unto themselves. As pleasing as they were to hold and to read, when you boiled them down they were really just illustrated prose fiction. An ambitious Big Little Book for adults would just be a curiosity -- why not publish it as a novel? -- whereas a long-form comic book with adult sensibilities is its own, fascinating creature.)
Writers like Jules Feiffer, Don Thompson, Ted White, and Jim Steranko have chronicled comics’ emergence onto the scene in the ‘30s. As with most popular entertainment of the time, those early comics’ primary mission was to provide light distraction in the midst of a national economic wasteland. People went to Three Stooges films to laugh, to forget the fact that they were likely to be evicted tomorrow and that their kids were hungry. The same went for NEW FUN COMICS, MICKEY MOUSE MAGAZINE, and the slew of books that followed.
It was also true of SUPERMAN, who burst on the scene in 1938. The Man of Steel’s earliest adventures, as seen in DC Comics’ phenomenal SUPERMAN: THE ACTION COMICS ARCHIVES VOL. 1, show a wish-fulfillment character with a decidedly pro-Labor, anti-authoritarian, politically liberal bent, prone to take matters into his own hands outside the law. Mark Waid’s excellent introduction to that volume describes the character’s beginnings in the minds of two liberal, Depression-era teenagers, and proceeds to explain how the character changed, becoming the more familiar authority figure we now know, during and following World War II.
Just as the rest of the culture did. Just as the nation did.
Comics do not exist in a cultural vacuum. They were born out of raw, flukish economics, and once they opened their little birdlike eyes, they immediately began dealing with the larger culture. To the extent that they acknowledge this culture, they’re a thriving, growing art form. When they seal themselves off and become insular, they eat away at their own audience and begin to die.
Next [10/22]: World War II. Find out who really won!
Last Installment : <a href=http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=000003>It’s Scary Out There: An Introduction </a>
<blockquote>[Stuart Moore’s A THOUSAND FLOWERS is co-sponsored by <a href=http://www.crossgen.com target=”_blank”>CrossGen Comics</a> , <a href=http://www.ait-planetlar.com/ target=”_blank”>AiT/Planet Lar</a> & <a href=http://www.pfpress.com/ target=”_blank”>Penny Farthing Press</a> . Click on the links to visit their websites. To inquire about future sponsorship opportunities with this column, please email <a href=mailto:newsarama@aol.com>newsarama@aol.com</a> ]</blockquote>
<u>Bibliography</u>
Jules Feiffer, THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES. Dial Press, 1965; new edition forthcoming from Fantagraphics Books, 2003.
Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, eds., ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME. Krause Publications, 1970, 1997.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, SUPERMAN: THE ACTION COMICS ARCHIVES, VOLUME 1. DC Comics, 1997.
Jim Steranko, THE STERANKO HISTORY OF COMICS. Supergraphics, 1970.
**
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Creators/stuartwizphoto_f.jpg" width="110" height="113" align="right" alt="Stuart Moore">Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999. Sadly, there's no going back to Woolworth's -- but that hasn’t been a problem yet. His fingers are crossed.
Currently Stuart freelances as a writer of comic books and nonfiction; he’d like you all to go out and buy ZENDRA, his epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press. Issue #3 of the second series, ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, is on sale now, and the trade paperback ZENDRA 1.0: COLLOCATION collects the first series. Then you can go to Stuart’s brand-new message board, at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com," target="_blank">www.joequesada.com,</a> and discuss ZENDRA, this column, or anything else on your nasty little mind...