090600: FEATURE: Eddies in the Mainstream
By Pindaros.

PART I: COMICS AND THE PULPS

Call it THE COMICS JOURNAL vs. WIZARD; I’m sure you know the argument I mean. A good comics story should be "fun," i.e., just like the other comics stories you’ve read but with new situations for your favorite characters and new characters to fall in love with. On the other side, the Eisner solution: a good comics story is one which can find its place in the canon of great works of art and literature, by which one means the European tradition running from the Renaissance to Picasso and Joyce.

Whichever side you prefer to see yourself on, dear reader, in your heart of hearts you know that you are really stuck in the middle. How did you really think about comics back in the eighties, back when comics were good? You knew that LOVE AND ROCKETS was great in any terms, and you had years of fun putting those classic stories of twentieth-century life into the hands of your more pretentious friends. But you also need that X-fix every month, to know where Chris Claremont was going to take your friends Storm and Wolverine next. The importance of WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS was that you could have your cake and eat it, that superhero comics would become Great Art. As much as a fight over quality, the debate was a product of the ambivalent pleasures of being a comics fan in the mid-eighties.

A look at the comics landscape today suggests that this argument is even less accurate as tool for addressing the current difficulties facing comics. The idea that there are classic qualities that comic books once had that could again make them appealing to a wider audience is plainly a dead end. THE AVENGERS and THUNDERBOLTS are two books that possess the virtues of the great Marvel books of the past: they have characters that possess recognizable personalities, who go through real change, who wrestle with the morality of their actions and their relations with others. The art is clear and engaging. And of course, these books have been selling very well to comics fans. But are there any of you who have given these books to a friend as a way of introducing them to comics?

Clearly, repeating the past is a poor strategy to rejuvenate an art form. Nevertheless, the alternative that is most often offered, that comics adopt the subject matter and techniques of High Art, runs into a problem that is equally obvious at this point. Even outside of comic fandom, the audience for the most sophisticated art, literature and music in the Western tradition is very small. Accordingly, the creators and performers of such work rely heavily on subsidies from governments and universities. Such work deserves praise and support, but should not have the weight of supporting an entire medium put on it. Imagine thinking that the recording industry would fail unless there was a large audience for the latest composition by Philip Glass.

The problem is that great art and classic formulas are not in any way comparable as goals for an art form. The Western tradition long ago severed the issue of quality in art from any connection to popular appeal, and repetition of formulas ignores the fact that the popular concerns change dramatically over time. In the end, while comic books can pursue various goals, both popular and artistic, at the center of the industry we need books that are examples of popular art, books that encourage new readers to seek them out.

Of course you’ve all read that last sentence hundreds of times at this point, in interviews, editorials, message boards, . . . What I want to do is suggest a way to understand the solution from a historical and literary point of view. I believe, as do the "Comics are Literature" partisans, that comics need to look outside themselves to find ways of reaching a larger audience. However, I believe that they need to do so by looking closer to home, not to the canonical works of Western literature, but to the worlds of pulp and genre fiction.

For those not familiar with the term, the pulps were fiction magazines published in the first half of the twentieth century and sold at newstands and corner stores. They got their name from the cheap paper they were printed on, which made it possible to sell them very cheaply. They paid their writers accordingly, between a half and two cents a word. They are fondly remembered for two reasons: first, they generally had attention-grabbing covers with bright and dramatic illustrations printed on slick paper. For collectors of the form, the covers are generally the feature that gives an issue its value. But more importantly in the long run, the cheapness of the pulps meant that they could aim their stories at niche audiences, the readers who wanted to read only westerns, or crime fiction, or stories about the future.

While the market for genre fiction might have been exploited in some other way, the pulps were the form that showed clearly that these markets existed, and allowed the fans of such work to recognize themselves as audiences who could reward writers for fulfilling such focussed fantasies. Pulp stories are often described as "popular fiction," to distinguish them from the "quality" work published in novels and better short story magazines. But if anything, the pulps actually marked the breakdown of the category of the "popular," since readers could now clearly express their preference for stories of one type over another by buying one magazine rather than another. The popular audience liked romance and westerns and crime stories and stories about the future, but no single person within that audience liked all of those kinds of stories.

Comics came out of the world of pulps. In some respects they could be considered successors to the pulps in as much as they held on to the space at newstands that the pulps gradually lost throughout the forties and the fifties. Similarly there was some movement of creative personnel between the pulps, the comics and the paperback novels that replaced the pulps. Frank Frazetta is probably the most famous example, as an artist who worked in comics for a time before making his reputation painting covers for paperback books, including the reprints of Robert E. Howard’s stories from the pulp WEIRD TALES.

Comics also preserved the "milk it till it runs dry" mentality of the pulp publishers. Indeed, Martin Goodman, the publisher of Marvel comics, began his career publishing pulps, and when he directed his cousin-in-law Stan Lee to bring back superheroes to Marvel in the early sixties, it was because he knew that DC had good numbers on its new superhero title JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA. Similarly, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon invented romance comics because they saw that girls were buying romance magazines from local newstands. There is perhaps no better way to assure that people are seeing stories they want to read than to know what is drawing their attention at a newstand or drugstore.

Another way of looking at the relationship between pulps and comics is to consider the covers of the pulps and say that comics aim to deliver what those covers promised. Four-color cartoons on cheap newsprint wasn’t ideal, but it did address the visual desires that the pulp covers stimulated. And of course in the Image-conscious comics world we now inhabit, the panels of comics actually do achieve all the garishness and excitement of the great pulp covers.

Unfortunately, all the color and flesh in the world isn’t enough to communicate with an audience. Comics, like the pulps, have lost the immediate access to an audience that showed creators what fans wanted. As we are already seeing, this could mean the end of popular comic books as sales to a smaller and smaller body of aging fans guides creators more than a sense of what is important to the larger culture.

Of course, as I noted, pulps lost this connection with their audience decades ago, yet a number of genres, most notably romance, science fiction and mysteries, have made the move from newstand to bookstore and survived, even prospered. The short answer to how they accomplished this is that they used basic features of the genre as a template that could both be developed to bring in more contemporary concerns and allow for unique innovation by individual authors.

Comic books need to do something similar to prosper. As these literary genres did it, the task involved decades of work as the communities of fans and writers around these genres wrote and read specific books and stories. Comic creators have an advantage by making this shift later, since they can use the experience of these genres to develop stories that will connect with larger audiences both within and outside the current comic book readership. There is no point, however, in doing this in a casual manner. An individual genre tale may be less complex than a work of Great Literature, but the process through which writers and readers negotiated tastes and fantasies was a detailed one.

The genres that have developed from the pulps are popular genres, in as much as they rely on sales and fan interest rather than institutional support to survive. In this regard they are equivalent to the "mainstream" in comics, those comics put out by the large companies like DC and Image. Nevertheless, in losing the pulp format, they lost their most obvious popular exposure and needed to rely on more specific points of contact to engage with old and new fans. They are, in this sense, "eddies" within the river of popular culture.

Over the next few months I will be writing a series of articles looking at how these eddies have impacted comics in the past and how they can become a resource for comics in the future. In all of this my aim is simple, to develop a perspective from which all of us, as critical fans and creators, can easily recognize the shared aesthetic interests we have with readers who have not yet discovered the pleasures of comics. It is in these shared interests that the true future of comic books lies.

Pindaros is a Staff Writer for PopImage.

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