Another question about comics : it seems to me that the one great american oddity in this particular industry is the prevalence of super-heroes, with the importance of non-trash (as is the case in Japan) periodic issues being another. Why do you think those two elements came to matter so much and then stay very important?

Not exactly sure what you mean by “non-trash periodic issues,” but I’ll answer the first one.

As with any culture industry, fashions come and go in comics. Prior to 1938, you didn’t really have “superhero” comics per se. Then Superman was introduced in Action Comics #1, sold out a print run of 200,000 copies and in a matter of months was selling almost a million copies a month. Everyone else in the industry scrambled to produce their own superheroes to compete, and you get the Golden Age of superhero comics.

This lasted from 1938 through to the late 40s, especially during WWII when patriotic heroes like Captain America and Wonder Woman were punching Nazis. After the war, however, fashions changed. Superheroes became less popular, and instead romance comics, horror comics, crime comics, westerns, and sci-fi became the dominant trend in the medium.

This gave rise to a moral panic in the 1950s, although more accurately it was part of the larger moral panic over juvenile delinquency. The U.S Senate established a Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee of the Judiciary Comittee in 1953 to investigate the causes of juvenile delinquency and comics became a major target. While Wertham’s book is best known today for its assertions that Batman and Robin were teaching young boys to be gay and Wonder Woman was teaching young girls to be lesbians, the main focus of the Subcommittee was on horror and crime comics for their depiction of sex, violence, and “subversive” attitudes to law and order.

Fearing Federal regulation, the major publishers established the Comics Code Authority, modeled on the Hays Code that Hollywood had adopted following a similar moral panic about the movies in the late 20s. The CCA’s code specifically banned depictions of sex and violence (among other things), and this basically drove horror comics, crime comics, and (to a lesser extent) romance comics out of business…leaving superheroes as the last genre standing.

Thus began the Silver Age of superhero comics, which started with the intrevitalization of D.C through the revamping of the Flash and Green Lantern and the creation of the Justice League, which brought all of D.C’s Big Three on the same book, but really got under way when Marvel introduced the Fantastic Four in 1961, Spiderman, Ant Man, Thor and the Hulk in 1962, the Wasp, Iron Man and the X-Men in 1963, and then brought all of their biggest heroes together in the Avengers in the same year. Just like happened after 1938, this wave of hugely successful superhero comics led other publishers to try to “follow the leader.”

And so it’s gone ever since: there are periods in which superhero comics wane in popularity or other genres become popular – when alternative or underground comics got big in the 60s and 70s, or the runaway success in the 90s of D.C’s Vertigo imprint which heavily featured British creators working in horror, fantasy, and sci-fi – and then periods where superhero comics surge.

Do u think the cycle of characters revived is a product of the system employed to create comics? I am unsure how the author is contracted, but it seems very rare that new stories, like, entirely new ones are created. Unlke Japan manga in which authors would begin new stories once their previous one is finished. It seems comic authors have less agency in creating stories than manga artists, so they just recycle everything to make the story continue ?

That’s a great question! I have to admit, I don’t know the business side of manga at all, but I think you’re on to something.

Historically speaking, U.S comics were created on a “work for hire” basis in which creators are considered employees, and it’s the employer who has the copyright on their product – hence why titans of the field like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (the creators of Superman), Bill Finger (co-creator of Batman), and Jack Kirby (the creator of Marvel, pretty much) got no residuals and had no control over their creations.

This distribution of rights creates a tendency for the employer to avoid permanently getting rid of an intellectual property which they have the rights to as long as the property is still viewed as valuable.

From a quick google search, it seems like the legal situation is very different in Japan, where it seems like the copyright is shared between the creator and the publisher. This obviously would give the creator much more leverage over how the story is structured than in the American context.

As a hardcore fan of comics, what do you feel about the fact that almost every characterseries owned by DC or Marvel keep going on indefinitely? Is there any major super herovillain owned by any of these 2 behemoths that have been killed off permanently? It seems that death is incredibly cheap , & even if one particular incarnation of a character dies, someone else takes up the mantle- so the herovillain lives on. Don’t you feel series should end after some time (through death or otherwise) ?

This is a problem that crept into comics as a serial medium almost from the beginning, albeit very gradually – part of it is that IP is both potentially incredibly valuable and difficult to come up with on a monthly basis with consistent quality. Even for the best artists and writers, “villains of the month” vary enormously, and you can really tell when someone was scrambling to meet deadline and out of ideas so started looking around their desk for inspiration:

So rather than trying to knock it out of the park every month with a new villain, it’s a lot easier to have tried-and-true villains become recurring features, where the artist and writer can elaborate on proven concepts. The same phenomenon also happens on the hero side, especially in team books, where you have a much larger cast of characters. (I do not envy the people working on Legion of Super-Heroes, for ex.)

This intersects with changing trends in comics in weird ways. So first you have the emergence of the Comics Code Authority in the 50s, which among other things tones down on the violence rather substantially (Batman had already stopped killing people before it came into effect) so that killing characters becomes difficult for a long time, which in turn brings up this long-term tension as to why (if recurring villains keep escaping prison) heroes aren’t doing something more final. Then in the 80s and 90s, the aging of the first generation of comics fans and the desire by creators to prove that their medium wasn’t just for kids leads to people reaching for character death as a way to prove maturity…but the underlying dynamic is still there, so there’s inevitable pressure to bring characters back, which eventually gives rise to the revolving door of death, which desensitizes fans, and then you have an arms race towards grimdark as you need to find new sources of shock (DC for some reason went big into arms being cut off for the longest time).

One person who tried like hell to fight this and ultimately lost was Chris Claremont, who believes to this day that you have to let characters age and change and eventually end, because otherwise they’re not real people. Claremont wanted to replace the old model with one in which characters would die permanently (like Jean Grey) or quit being superheroes to start their own families (like Scott Summers). And when the status quo pushed back against what he was doing, you got real damage to the characters.

So yeah, I think it’s a real problem, but not one without solutions.

One solution, which has become more common in the post-Image era where there’s a lot more creator-owned stuff, is to give creators the freedom to write beginnings, middles, and ends, because their control over the rights means that you don’t get IP-thirsty companies like DC and Marvel messing with good stories by doing things like having Watchmen prequels, sequels, and crossovers, or killing off and then resurrecting almost every damn hero out there.

Another solution, and this is one that I haven’t seen used as much, is to step away from strict chronological continuity and adopt instead what I’m going to call the Cimmerian Approach:

“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars – Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyberborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

Pulp magazines, as the direct ancestors of comic books, were also a serial medium in need of constant content that hit the same problem. And I think R.E Howard came up with a rather brilliant solution by telling the stories out of order. Conan’s story has a beginning, middle, and end as the first passage in “The Phoenix on the Sword” above indicates: he starts out as a barbarian who comes to the civilized kingdoms of the Hyborean Age, and he ends up King of Aquilonia as he is in “Phoenix.” But after that first story (actually the first to be published, he wrote “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” at the same time, but it was rejected) and “The Scarlet Citadel,” he went back and wrote “The Tower of the Elephant,” which depicts Conan as a young thief who’s only very recently come to the civilized kingdoms. And thereafter, Howard bounced around all over the place: Conan is in one story as a mercenary general, then a refugee from a different, defeated army, then a pirate captain, then an imprisoned thief, and so on and so forth.

What I like about this approach is that it allows you to do the natural human lifecycle/beginning-middle-end that Claremont tried to establish, while also allowing you to produce infinite content by inserting new incidents into earlier periods of their life.