 |
 |
 |
Quarter 1, 2005 – Vol 1, Num 1 |
 |
I Was Twelve Years Old in 1964
by Mike Tieffenbacher
I was twelve years old in 1964.
That’s only important to you in understanding why I feel the way I do about comics. It explains why I love comics from the sixties and fifties, admire the comics from the forties and the thirties… and tolerate the stuff published since then, the number decreasing with each passing year. What it doesn’t explain is why I continue to collect them, nor does it explain my inexplicable optimism that there exists the possibility that someone, sometime, will start to get it right again. That’s a question that has bewildered me, along with anyone I describe the situation to, and you may not understand my reasons either after reading this. Partly, that's because it’s sometimes difficult to separate rational reason from emotion, and with comics, emotion is an overwhelming factor. I’m going to be doing a regular column here, and you deserve to know where and why I feel the way I do. This introduction will cover what motivates my continued interest in comics, old and (curiously) new.
From a factual standpoint, one reason the sixties still stand up for me is the tenure of the people who worked in the field. In the mid-to-late thirties comics attracted artists from many fields, from failed attempted comic-strip artists, commercial artists, elderly illustrators, and many who evinced little talent but could turn out the work and would accept the peanuts the comics were able to pay then. By 1940, an influx of the first wave of youngsters who’d seen the new field opening up began filling the pages of the burgeoning number of companies publishing comics, and in the next couple of years they were the ones most responsible for the onslaught of golden-age super-heroes which, 65 years later, still loom large over the industry. The war intervened, devastating the talent pool and cutting the number of super-heroes operating by war’s end to about one-fourth of the number around before it. And when the war was over and the enlistees and draftees returned home, many never returned to comics. The third wave of cartoonists entered the field circa 1946-49, young men who infused the comics with a great optimism and energy that, at the time, they weren’t yet able to capitalize on. No one with any objectivity can look at the work of these men, compare it to their later work, and adjudge it as better, and although some peaked earlier than others, for the most part, by the sixties, most of these artists and writers were at the top of their game.
By the time the super-heroes were ready to make a full-scale comeback, everyone from Jack Kirby, Curt Swan and John Buscema, to Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, Murphy Anderson and John Romita had had between fifteen to twenty years of experience under their belts. Stan Lee, Gardner Fox, John Broome and Edmond Hamilton had as much background or more. In fact, the youngest of the professionals turning out comics when I was twelve were in their mid-thirties. There were bad comics then, just as there are now, but the best were not suffused with the self-consciousness the most heralded of today’s comics are. This is partly due to the fact that most of the editors and writers of comics then had not entered the field as fans of comic books; they came from pulps, or radio, or other areas where their points of reference reached beyond what had been published in comic books. From the late sixties through the mid-nineties, that’s about the only source of mainstream comics writers. It's changed a bit since then, but it's rather remarkable that the influx of film directors has only served to provide evidence that comics and film are very different media that don't necessarily translate.
Physically, comic books of the sixties had several advantages over the product of today. First of all, their format nearly always consisted of full stories, complete in one issue. Though it’s true that Stan Lee introduced continuing storylines, even Tales of Suspense, TALES TO ASTONISH and STRANGE TALES managed to give you more story in half an issue than you get today in two full issues of a regular comic. FLASH or BATMAN usually provided two stories, SUPERMAN family titles often offered three, all in one issue, for the outrageous sum of twelve cents per issue as of 1962. Gold Key, Archie and Harvey funnies stretched that to four for each issue. You could pick up any issue of anything and figure out what was going on. Unlike today, you weren’t necessarily investing in one-quarter of a story that could cost you $10.00 to figure out if you liked it or not. And one kid with enough lawns to mow or cars to wash could afford to buy all of the comics published by both DC and Marvel when I was young; today, if you can afford all the Batman titles, you’re doing well.
Technically, of course, the printing and paper quality could not compare with today’s comics, with their enameled thirty-pound stock and offset printing, but several aspects were superior. The original artwork was done at 200% of the printed version, meaning far more detail, more ability to include more information in each panel without looking overcrowded, and a more attractive ink line, on white newsprint. There was a limited palette, but far more clarity in storytelling because the color never overwhelmed the artwork. Today’s black-and-white art is remarkably similar in terms of basic technique and detail, though with even more extraneous detail in terms of feathering and shading — yet today’s computer-done, modeled coloring tends to obfuscate most of it, and overwhelms the senses. Pages turn into a mass of brown or grey. It’s the difference in watercolor vs. oil, with today’s art model being less the four colors of Sunday comics than the shadowy photo-realism of Alex Ross. The problem is that many of today’s cartoonists have a basic inability to draw characters similarly enough from panel to panel to enable the reader to recognize them immediately. The reason comic-book characters had costumes to begin with is because of this very reason; their design and coloring were shorthand which precluded the necessity to stop and study the art to figure out who was talking. When the color turns everything into muted tones of grey, or costumes are eschewed completely in favor of the ubiquitous black leather, I’m lost. It’s like watching radio.
Comics then had huge gutters and borders between panels, which were laid out grid-like, size and shape varying from artist to artist, but with clarity the most important aspect. Today’s comics are often a mélange of only vaguely separated blocks which require intricate roadmaps to follow in correct order. The lettering, much of which is no longer done by human hand (and stuffed into perfect geometric shapes) can also often be difficult to absorb consecutively. The full-bleed page is nice for the artist, but is harder to read because there is no negative white space for the eye to rest upon. A contemporary issue takes less time to read for me, but I find myself more weary after reading it. The absence of the life shown in computer lettering, the lack of economy of detail and the numbing similarity of style choices is probably more contributory to my headaches. For some reason, today’s artists are much more likely to have been influenced by Japanese anime than any American cartoonists.
Storywise, of course, in the sixties I had no frame of reference; everything was new. While I learned early on that the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and Atom I was reading about were different characters from the characters from the forties, by this time it had been established that the older ones still existed, so I never felt cheated that I was reading a pale shadow of the originals.
Today, we’ve got a bizarre situation at DC and Marvel in which the backbone characters of each company range in age from 40 to 65 years old, each of whom comes with huge amounts of continuity (now called “backstory”). In order to make it seem less daunting for new readers, every year or so each attempts to jettison that continuity in one form or another, either by blowing it all up (as DC did with CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, or in smaller increments many times since) or by simply starting over from scratch (Marvel’s ULTIMATES) while leaving the originals sort of intact. Besides the sheer number of times the same readership will fall for this being questionable, this policy of repetition creates wariness for anyone who’s old enough to remember the previous time it was done: how long will this incarnation last? And each time they do it, the result is inevitably the same: nobody can remember which version is in play, and all of it eventually tends to revert to an earlier version, creating a more complicated history instead of less.
Worse than that, every time a ’60s hero is replaced by a newer version, instead of welcoming it, a large part of the existent readership whines and moans and crosses their fingers that Hal Jordan or the “real” Doom Patrol will pop up again, as they eventually do, while continuing to buy the new, less satisfactory version. Masochism aside, it’s remarkable what fans will put up with, though as the total readership dwindles, it‘s evident that there‘s a serious flaw in the system.
I was puzzled by why that system continues, since I had assumed that the rationale for the constant recycling of names and concepts was being done in order to appeal to the nostalgia of comics buyers. It didn’t of course; any excitement evoked in an older reader by the imminent return of a beloved favorite is almost immediately mitigated by the realization that this hero was nothing like the one popular enough to be revived. I realized some time ago that this was an erroneous assumption. The constant recycling has resulted instead from a basic change in the ownership of comic-book characters.
Sometime after Batman was created in 1939, comics companies claimed full ownership of the characters they published. It’s safe to say that this full ownership created the basis of comics fandom, since without it super-heroes would have had less of an opportunity to cross over into strips owned by varying cartoonists, and the super-teams and crossovers which create the illusion of a unified universe upon which DC and Marvel’s popularity was established might never have happened. After all, fandom was not built around the comic-strip world, or science-fiction or horror comics or funny animals. And it didn’t happen with comic books until they began to meet each other with regularity in the sixties.
By the eighties, the independent publishers pretty much forced DC and Marvel into accepting the idea that they were going to have to give ownership to new creations to the creators, or they’d lose those properties to publishers who would. Once it began, it was inevitable that anything purchased from an outside source was not going to become mainstream universe material. Over the last fifteen years, you can count the number of titles from either company which were not revivals of old characters, new super-groups of old characters, or spin-offs from old strips, on your fingers and toes. And when a creator-owned concept is shoe-horned into the company universe, they are usually never seen again after the comic’s original run. (Anyone seen the Sovereign Seven recently?) About the only new concepts carrying either companies’ copyrights these days are those created in-house by paid editorial staff.
When I was a kid, there was really no desperate effort on any publisher’s part to dispense with their own past to make readers believe they were getting something new and exciting. (“The Marvel Age” publicized itself as the anti-DC, but once they’d established themselves, there was no rush to dump their own foundation.) As each new relaunch promising “a new, darker version” of your old favorites appears today, the original “rebirth” concept created when the new Flash debuted in 1956, becomes more and more obscured and twisted. Formerly altruistic and heroic characters are suddenly brought back as merciless, murderous mercenaries, turning expectations on their ear. But if the entire idea is to attract new readers, they wouldn’t know what the new concept was supposed to be in contrast with. It all reminds me of the plight of the TV western. When there were 40 of them on the prime-time schedule in the early sixties, each new western introduced had to be slightly different and break format. So in ensuing years, in order to not seem old hat, you had westerns with amnesiacs, accused cowards, pardoned crooks, kung-fu westerns, detective westerns, science-fiction westerns… but no straight-concept westerns about gun-fighters or champions of what was good and right, even though none had been seen in over two decades. The western eventually devolved so far that, as a format, it is pretty much dead. Though unlikely to go that far, something similar is happening to the super-hero comic book as well.
All of this, however, might be more palatable if the stories were still suitable reading for children. My own stylistic preferences aside, even with the high cost of a single issue and the tendency to pad out storylines that don’t deserve it to the length necessary to fill a trade paperback, I could live with them — if the comics themselves weren’t reflections of most other current media, which is to say, calculatedly profane and crude. By the early eighties, blood and violence had become commonplace as the readership median aged, but the strategic move comic books made in the mid-eighties to gradually phase in adult language and situations wasn’t as distressing as the decision to use the likes of Green Arrow in their attempts to capture that older teen audience. As a product of my generation, I don’t feel that there’s much of a need to infuse something as clearly unrealistic as super-heroes with the verisimilitude of four-letter words and sexual themes. My mother bought me and my brothers subscriptions for Christmas in 1964. Today there are virtually no current titles that aren’t TV-cartoon adaptations that I would allow a pre-teen of mine to read, much less give them a subscription to. (And even that may not hold when the new SPACE GHOST mini-series appears.) It makes it difficult to pass on the comics-buying habit to the younger generation when you find a shocking lack of sensitivity on the part of the publishers. (Which of course makes me wonder where the new readers come from, though clearly, there must be parents with more liberal attitudes about such matters out there — or people who simply assume that comics are as benign as they were when they were children.)
So, why am I still here? Why do I still buy new comics at all, when I’m so sour on what’s been done to the field, and especially since I long ago ran out of room to store them? (True, I don’t buy them new, preferring to wait till they hit the clearance boxes, but I still buy them.) That’s the real question, and one I’ve pondered and labored over since I was asked to write this. As I said before, that may not be something I can explain.
I think emotion does explain most of it. I’ve spent nearly forty years reading and loving the likes of Superman, Batman, Captain America and Spider-Man, and the simple sight of their colorful costumes is enough to engage me. (Okay, Batman not so much anymore, especially since he dumped the trunks.) I’ve got the PVC figures, the mini-busts, the action figures, the bobbleheads, and when I look at them I can forget all the mallet-headed, moronic or repulsive missteps committed in their names over the years. And every once in a while I run into issues of the actual comics that combine one of the many artists I still admire with a fine, readable and in-character story. Yes, they’re few and far between, and I will confess that there aren’t any titles I can depend on with any regularity, but something about the characters and the concepts causes me to hope that there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, and that sometime, someway, the spirit, if not the actual characters I loved, will return.
I’ll be twelve in 2004. And 2014… and 2024…
|
|
|
