Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The Forsaken Fangirls of the Direct Market Era

PART 1:

When my mother was growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she wasn't ashamed of, or secretive about, her love of reading comic books. Superheroes were seemingly an early-40s flash-in-the-pan, and it appeared unlikely they would ever dominate again as they had for a far briefer period than most people realize today -- Superman's adventures had been the product of a committee of interchangeable journeymen creators since even before Siegel & Shuster were pushed aside by the publisher, while Wonder Woman and Batman had long ago lost their respective edges, the latter within less than 5 years after his 1939 debut!

In the superheroes' place, there then existed a virtual mix & match four-color cornucopia of genres -- funny animals on epic adventures to exotic locales; beautifully drawn adaptations of other media, ranging from literary classics to cinematic spectacles to the Bible; horror stories that were as funny as they were gross; crime dramas which refused to flinch from the sordid side of life even as their condemnation of it was utterly sincere; war tales which were surprisingly thoughtful, and never descended into black-and-white jingoism, as they often had during the 2nd World War. And above all, lots & lots of comic book stories of kids just being kids and teenagers just being teenagers. Girls & boys, and precocious pet animals, and clueless parents, and authority figures ranging from scary to clownish.

But nothing lasts forever. And by the middle of the 50s, a cabal of the most misguided sort of liberals, made up mainly of politicians and social workers, surprisingly found themselves sharing common ground with their supposed polar opposites, the fear-mongering, hate-mongering reactionaries who had been out to eradicate comic books from the very beginning. All of which goes to show, IMHO, that extremism is the very worst enemy of basic human freedoms, no matter what the surface presentations of either side's public images may appear to be.

The repercussions for comic books were dire. The Comics Code wreaked damage all across the spectrum of comic book genres which would take decades to repair. Make no mistake, even Dell Comics, publishers of the medium's least objectionable product, had their stories micro-managed by self-appointed censors into flavorless mush.

Over the course of the 2nd half of the 50s, the salvation of comic books appeared to have arrived in the suprising form of a superhero revival. Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, each and every one an imaginatively scripted, pristinely rendered exercise in what today we would term the "re-imagining" of past-their-sell-by-date early-40s superheroes, sharing little more than the same code names. Boy readers, mostly of grade-school age, found this all engaging and exciting. But what of girl readers? Well, as it happened, new superhero comics were coming out, from the same publisher, which appealed as much as, if not even more than, to girls as to boys -- under the umbrella of the Superman franchise, of all things!! There was Superman's distaff younger cousin Supergirl, headlining Action Comics; Lois Lane in her own solo series, constantly engaged in equally fantastic and comedic misadventures; and the jewel in the crown, the Legion of Superheroes, a superhero team with...GASP...more than one girl in it, and which owed less to worn-out superhero tropes than to evergreen teenage tomfoolery and dazzling space opera epics of the kind which had previous only been showcased in prose magazines & novels. The rough-and-tumble type of boys who found the more progressive aspects of the Legion off-putting had their own team, the Justice League of America, whose membership was a seemingly random grouping of the old perennials with the aforementioned re-imaginings. And, oh so predictably, the ratio of female JLA members to male ones was 1 to 6. Pity poor Wonder Woman, the one-time battle-of-the-sexes rabble-rouser turned token female.

In hindsight, it all looks like a nice enough balance, even if it was still lopsided in the boys' favor, and even if the portrayals of the female characters, particularly Lois Lane, appear suspect to many pairs of modern-day eyes (it might be argued that, in the Superman franchise of the late 50s through the late 60s, the male and female characters were on equal footing as objects of sly social satire.)

And then, it all began to slowly but surely unravel, thanks, ironically enough, to one of the most imaginative and innovative notions ever introduced into superhero comics:

"Flash of Earth-1, meet Flash of Earth-2."

TO BE CONTINUED

Very interesting piece, Fanfie. Your introduction reminds me that there was a great deal of thoughtful variety in the early comics industry, and that this variety was largely stamped out by declining post-WWII popularity of comics and the Comics Code.

However, your thesis intrigues me: "The Flash of Two Worlds," that seminal work of super-hero comics as we know them, "unraveled" the balance of male and female characters, and, by extension (I suppose), the balance of girl and boy readers?

I'm looking forward to reading more.

Thank you kindly, He Who. Much appreciated.

And just to clarify my rather sloppy wording in parts of the opening post (it was almost 12 midnight EST when I finished that post, and I was nodding off), it's not that I think the introduction of infinite parallel worlds upset the balance of male & female characters -- after all, Earth-2 went on to give us such awesome super-heroines as Power Girl, Huntress (pre-CoIE), Jade, and Fury (pre-Sandman) -- but rather, it was the event which spawned the T-crossing/I-dotting continuity obsessions which eventually devolved into the dreaded "Continuity Porn" of the late 80s through the mid-2010s, and which has been traditionally considered to be more the province of fanboys than fangirls.

Naturally, the above paragraph is only the Cliffs Notes version of my thesis, and I'll elaborate in future installments.

I want to give some info on the Marvel/Atlas/Timely side of things. By the 50s, they published niche Romance/Fashion comics aimed at girls (I think other publishes did too, most notably Archie). However, girls and women could get similar stories in the new paperback novels (which were the death of the pulps). So I think the market suffered a bit from competition.

Yes. Thanks so much, Emily. We certainly can't ignore Patsy Walker, Hedy Wolfe, and Millie the Model. Especially Patsy, who, thanks to Steve Englehart's building on her throwaway cameo at the wedding of Reed Richards and Susan Storm, went on to be fully incorporated into the Marvel Universe, first in the Beast's solo series, then the Avengers, and, finally, a long stint in the Defenders. Through all of her ups and downs, and in spite all the appalling retcons and ill-judged matchmaking of writers who never should have been allowed to include her in their scripts...Patsy still endures today. She's a rare gem.

All the more intriguing!

I always loved the careful attention to continuity, though it could become anal at times. I never thought of it as something which could drive off female readers.

The Sixties and Seventies gave us Archie for girls, of course. But I preferred the British comics my buddy from England used to bring over. There were romantic subplots in some of them, but most were straight-up humor, suspense, or adventure. The art was crisp and easy to follow. Production ranged from newsprint in B&W to actual hardback glossies with (in my memory at least) some really pleasing production values.

In my mind, these stories had more in common with children's lit that I loved around the same age. Rather than being kin to the superhero stuff I wouldn't really get into until around the age of 16.

Awesome stuff, folks. Thank you all. I'm planning to get Part 2 ready to post right after dinner.

He Who, in my observation it took something like four generations for superhero fangirls to be out & proud and to embrace the genre in all its inherent contradictions and complexity. First-generation superhero fangirls (born roughly between 1940 and 1955, give or take a couple of years on either side) tended to give little importance to continuity, preferring the symbolic and thematic implications of the genre. Second-generation superhero fangirls (born roughly between 1956 and 1971) had fewer hang-ups about being fangirls, but tended to move on to other genres (or non-genre indie commix) as they became grown women; some eventually came back to the genre, others never did. Tellingly, many notable female editors and/or creators of the second generation, i.e. Karen Berger, Ann Nocenti, June Brigman, Mary Wilshire, among others, had preferred romance and teen comics as kids, if they even read them at all. Notable exceptions would be Jo Duffy (whom I wrote an impassioned plea for proper credit from her spiritual daughters and granddaughters in another Gy'mll's thread which I'll bump up later), and Colleen Doran -- by the time Colleen was in her teens, there were far more female-friendly superhero comics such as Uncanny X-Men, New Teen Titans, and the Legion of Super-Heroes (most notably during the years it was edited by Berger.) This would probably be around the same time Cleome got into the genre, as she noted in her post above, and I hope she'll elaborate further as this thread continues. The third generation (born roughly 1972-1987 -- this is where I came in...and dear sweet LW-er Cali as well), had the decidedly mixed blessing of finding ourselves caught in a transitional era for comic books and fandom alike, the aforementioned onset of Continuity Porn (most egregiously practiced by DC in the 10 years between the end of CoIE and the symbolic Armageddon of Kingdom Come. My gateway for DC was 1991's "Armageddon 2001" event, which, in hindsight, was surprisingly accessible for that kind of story, redolent more of a state-of-the-art update of the Silver Age "Imaginary Stories" than of Continuity Porn. My gateway for Marvel was Les Daniels' 50th Anniversary Marvel coffee-table book, also published in 1991. As a Marvel primer, it was a nice, easily navigated road-map to their Universe, but it was also less helpful in hindsight than it initially appeared, because it outright ignored significant Marvel creators who happened to be on Marvel's sh*t-list at the time: Roger Stern, Bob Layton, and Steve Englehart being the most egregious examples. And the fourth generation, born roughly 1987-2002...well, I think I should step aside now, let Emily speak for herself and her own spiritual sisters.

(Jeez Louise, this post started out as quick and short one, and just SNOWBALLED!!)

Anyhow, Part 2 to follow around 8 o'clock. Stay tuned...

I cannot speak for many or all fangirls (and yes there are many, they just may not read the physical comic books), but I can give my perspective. My father owned a comic book store in the '80s (it didn't last long) so I had Wizard magazine in the house in the '90s. I also had access to lots of unwanted comic books, which I eagerly read.

I would say a good chunk of my peers viewed reading as a chore, as something they did for school. I think this is why reading comics became viewed as something nerds did. The Batman, Superman, JLA, etc cartoons of the 90s were probably their primary exposure to DC. Marvel was mostly unknown with the exception of the X-Men, who had successful movies and TV shoes. Video game adaptations were whole-heartrendingly embraced as graphics became better and internet was introduced. Even most of the outsider cliches were playing video games and reading anime/manga and not reading comics (at least they would not admit to those activities in public).

Thanks to lack of access to new comics and peers unfamiliar with them, I turned to the Internet for the fandom. The few women I have spoken to in college or at the library about comics said they are put off by outfits or specific stories, but I think these are minor details compared to other things (as many other forms of media contain those problems). I think there are three key reasons for the current state of comic book fandom.

One which is lack of distribution, which is rectified in part by digital comics. Someone I knew in college downloaded 40+ years of Avengers comics because he liked the movies, so there is some hope. The second is public exposure of the stories, which is probably at it's highest level since at least the 1980s. The third is the fandom...which is really something that will be the slowest to change. I remember when I first joining a comic book forum about 10 years ago (it is either defunct or changed names), and another member said there was four women on the website.

I don't have much insight to add here, but I love reading this retrospective. Keep it coming, ladies!

Thank you for the "snowball," Fanfie. I learned a lot about the different generations of female comics fans.

I wonder how the generations of male comics fans would break down.

Thanks, Kappa. And welcome aboard. We're just getting warmed up, the best is yet to come!!



Oh my Gods, that sounds so awesome!! Part of the reason I got into superheroes so late was because my parents & I didn't move back to the States 'til I was 16. Where we lived in South America, there were no Marvels whatsoever, and only a scattered handful of DCs. And, then, from 1984 on, there weren't even DCs anymore, because of a severe cutback on imports.



The decline of literacy across the last few generations is sad indeed. I thank the Gods every day for communities like Legion World where those of us who still enjoy reading can gather, and I thank the Gods even more that young people like you and Sarky and Kappa are helping to keep traditional forms of reading alive. I would be lying if I denied that the various Super Friends iterations and the two different flavors of 80s Spider-Man cartoons didn't point me in the right direction, but they barely scratched the surface of the potential of superhero adaptations, and whether or not Batman: TAS, and the original X-Men cartoon, and everything that has followed after them (animated and live action alike) has really been as much of a boon for their original source material as some people claim...hmmm...I'd say that's actually a topic for whole other thread.



The only video game adaptation I remember enjoying was the first Mortal Kombat movie, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson back when he still showed a lot of potential. I imagine the success of Mortal Kombat made his underrated sci-fi/horror Magnum Opus, Event Horizon, possible. Gods, I just realized it'll be 20 years this coming summer since EH was in theatres!! But I digress.



I do have vague memories of a kind of snobbish attitude towards comics and cartoons as opposed to manga and anime from some teens & tweens I waited on back when I worked at a library in the early 2000s. I also remember fandom in my own late teens and early twenties, with all the pro-Image/anti-Marvel B.S., and the elitist snobbery of far too many Vertigo fans, and the tourists drawn in by the speculator market, and the events which pandered to said market. For a while, it seemed like almost every publisher was launching its own superhero universe. Wow, with 20/20 hindsight, I'm no longer surprised that the handful of well-written superhero comic book ongoing series published from 1992 to 1996 tended to get overlooked at the time.



Maybe it's my deep-rooted kitsch/camp sensibilities, but the outfits have rarely bothered me, and those that do, I usually just laugh at. Even the exaggerated cleavage...I still remember how much hostility there was toward Jim Balent at the peak of his fame/infamy, but I loved his art at the time, because unlike the Image founders' clones, Balent's women had reasonably plausible hairdos, generally convincing anatomy and body language, and faces which were pretty and expressive.

As for specific stories, yeah, despite the best efforts of the more conscientious, less cynical female editors, writers, and executives, the overall ratio of genuine empowerment fantasy to near-pornographic exploitation is a sorry one indeed. What really bothers me is that those few comics-industry women who have spoken up -- Valerie D'Orazio is the first one who comes to my mind -- end up having their statements all but wiped off the web, like something out of "1984"!! And then there's the likes of Gail Simone, who, for all the good intentions she started out with, could ultimately be considered to have ended up almost like the Madonna of the industry (that's not a compliment), and seems to me -- though I could be wrong -- to be in this vicious circle of going back again and again to DC for more abuse, with all the darkest and ugliest things that implies.





That kind of anecdote does my heart a world of good. Thanks.



Agreed, but I find it frustrating how random the selection of which stories to reprint seems to be. I can understand the royalty issues and the copyright issues and the ownership issues, but I just cannot...the way that some of my favorite runs continue to be denied collections just because some idiot member of the publisher's executive board has a grudge against the creators of those runs.



Oh, sister...the stories I could tell you about my off-and-on involvement from early 2005 to autumn 2010 at a now-defunct Avengers forum which shall go unnamed...the condescension; the freeze-outs with little or no provocation; the main administrator's mood swings and his tendency to sabotage his own community*; the revolving door of moderators who ranged from gentlemanly to Neanderthal and everywhere in between; the passive-aggressiveness (one of the handful of female members, a real "guys' girl" who was about 45 at the time, actually treated me worse than a lot of the male members, but in a passive-aggressive way which made it even more painful.) And here I just wanted to talk about how much I love the Avengers!! Well, in the end, I'm still close friends with a couple of those guys, and exchange occasional e-mails with several others, so it wasn't a total loss...but, Jeez Louise, at the time it was, all too often, simply excruciating.









*To his credit, he was never less than civil with me, and I freely admit I could be quite a handful back then, certainly a lot more of one than I am today. He also supported and shepherded my first effort at superhero fanfics.

My pleasure, He Who.

And there's always room at Gymll's for a history-of-fanboys thread to complement this one. Any takers?

PART 2:

I love a lot of things about Roy Thomas and the stories he's written, but in hindsight I think he's also got a lot to answer for. In fairness, I also feel more-or-less that way about Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman, and the late Mark Gruenwald, among some other members of early superhero fandom whose names escape me at the moment.

Born around 1940, Roy Thomas found, by the end of his first decade of life, that he far preferred the Golden Age comics which had been published just before he learned how to read. There was something about that chaotic stew of luminous creativity unbound, blatant World War II jingoism, purplish pulp-progeny scripting, larger-than-life melodramatic camp, jarring extremes of artwork quality (or lack thereof), and bone-shattering physical violence (usually between two grown men) which greatly appealed to Thomas, and presumably has continued to appeal to him over the decades. That's fair enough, and IMO he's certainly not entirely to blame for his (mostly male) spiritual younger siblings' & children's obsessions with making actual sense out of comic book stories that had originally been written against brutal deadlines, printed on the cheapest paper by the least refined facilities available, and intended to be disposed of, via trash cans, after just a few weeks, once the next issue reached the stands.

The whole trash-versus-treasure aesthetic is something I now consider to be a very, very mixed blessing for popular culture. Sure, I admit that back in my late teens and early 20s, I was constantly, earnestly (and obnoxiously) stating my less-than-educated case for comic-books-as-art, and specifically superhero-comic-books-as-art. And I hate to paraphrase a writer I don't like, but I think Kelly Sue DeConnick was dead on target when she compared herself to Smurfette among the mostly male writers at Marvel. In hindsight, that was, deep down, exactly how I felt at the time, an outsider among supposed outsiders. Oh, I tried to convert women my own age, girls younger than I, and even women a generation older than I, but it came to seem all in vain, and in the end, I surrendered and shuffled away in defeat -- temporarily, as it turned out, but it didn't feel that way at the old-before-my-time age of 23 (told you my point of view was less-than-educated.) And that, IMHO, is the true legacy of the original (again, mostly male) incarnation of superhero fandom.

When Roy Thomas broke into the comics industry in his early-mid 20s, a traumatic 2-week stint as the super-savvy-but-savagely-sadistic DC editor Mort Weisinger's assistant sent him running over to the venerable publisher's main competition, a third-rate purveyor of every kind of cheap publication from comic books to pornography, founded back at the very end of the 1930s by the worst kind of cynical, opportunistic, creativity-be-damned publisher, one Martin Goodman, whose much younger cousin, the puppyish, eager-to-please editor/scripter Stanley Lieber had, more by luck than judgement, stumbled in late 1961 upon a rich vein of creative potential inherent in the superhero genre, which had already been given an adrenaline shot by DC comics. That's pretty much how Lieber was able to sell to Goodman the first of what proved to be several oddball superhero concepts, brainstormed in collaboration with Steve Ditko and Jacob "Jack Kirby" Kurtzberg, two amazingly imaginative industry veterans who could design like nobody's business, and drew just fine, but who came up way short as writers, even by superhero comic book standards.

So it was that, by the middle of the 1960s, Lieber had reinvented himself as the rechristened Marvel Comics' ingratiating public face, Smilin' Stan Lee (derived from a pen name he'd coined as a teenage staffer at Martin Goodman's publishing operation, back when he still dreamed of writing the proverbial Great American Novel, and saving his real name for that special event.) Marvel's specialty -- equal parts adolescent angst, collegiate self-awareness, genially clubby secret-code-speak, second-childhood exuberance, and, most importantly, Lee's flair for witty, snappy dialogue which ranged from pungent Noo-Yawk street-talk to a bombastic semi-parody of Shakespeare-speak, the latter which would have been cringe-inducing without Lee's reasonable literacy and his natural gift for making the most overblown gobbledygook flow like a babbling brook -- was the first iteration of the superhero to appeal far more to high-schoolers and college students than to pre-teens.

(For better and for (much) worse. IMHO.)

And while "Spider-Man" and "Doctor Strange" -- the two Marvel features creatively dominated by Steve Ditko's spooky, sinister sensibilities between 1962 and 1966 -- both hold up far better than expected all these decades hence, the remainder of Marvel's early Silver Age superhero output (the respective first few years of "Fantastic Four", "Hulk", "Iron Man", "Thor", "X-Men", "Avengers", and the revived Golden Age propaganda icon, "Captain America") seems appallingly dated to me -- and I say that as someone whose very favorite superhero comics were published by Marvel between 1987 and 1994!! All of the aforementioned features were either conceived or co-conceived by Jack Kirby (to what extent Jack Kirby and Stan Lee collaborated creatively shall forever remain a contentious subject -- and one which I shall not abide any further discussion of in this thread, thank you very much), whose highly personal aesthetic was one of brutally violent, disenfranchised, desperation-born-of-poverty, dog-eat-dog survival, bred by the mean NYC streets he'd grown up on. As a personal artistic statement in an industry which discouraged self-expression, Kirby's vision was perfectly acceptable, but as the blueprint for the next half-century of the superhero genre, I would charitably label it...questionable.

Into this heady hothouse of equally halcyon and horrific visions now stepped Roy Thomas and his fellow young Midwesterner Denny O'Neil, both also sharing the common ground of hungry ambition, a way with words, and the need to make a living, preferably at something they actually enjoyed doing. But there the similarities ended. Whereas O'Neil had an earthy, street-smart, plain-spoken sensibility, and wore his fiery New Left political convictions on his sleeve, Thomas was moderately conservative, held great affection for disposable industrial-age escapist culture, and possessed the potential to outdo Stan Lee at his own lyrical largesse with the English language. It was Thomas rather than O'Neil who would click with Lee, and while O'Neil would eventually end up as DC's liaison to the street culture of those times, Thomas would virtually reinvent the superhero genre into something far more dense, complex, self-referential, and, ultimately, hermetic.

(For better and for (much, much) worse. IMHO.)

TO BE CONTINUED

I want to clarify some of my terms because I think I was being a bit vague.

By video game adaptations, I meant video game adaptations of comic based movies or games based directly off the comics. The best example in the 90s was the Batman games, and the best current example in my opinion are the Lego games (surprisingly canonical, at least character wise).

By exposure to the stories, I'm also referring to those adapted for TV/movies/video games. They may not directly follow story arcs (though some often do, such as Teen Titans Terra arc) but they are based in the lore. This ties into the fandom as many people of my generation and younger are first exposed via cartoons, not the physical/digital comics.

Ah, OK. Thanks for clarifying, Emily, much appreciated.

I just realized, you probably hadn't even started kindergarten when the Mortal Kombat movie came out. Gods, I feel old...

...but that just makes me more determined than ever to meet old age headlong, on my own terms, or I'd rather drop dead right then.

Back on topic, Part 3 will most likely be posted tomorrow, as I have some Re-Reads reviews to post right now, and hopefully I'll also still get a chance to read and review Kappa's GL fic tonight.

Roy Thomas was born 11/22/40. It's no coincidence that he later retconned the JSA's origin story as taking place in November 1940.

You go, Fanfie! I'm enjoying your take on this, your way with words, and your scholarly understanding of the comics industry. I'd never thought of Thomas as moderately conservative or O'Neil as leftist, but, in hindsight, these descriptions fit.

I also like how you focused on Thomas as being the seminal influence which transformed comics into "dense, complex, self-referential, and . . . hermetic" universes. (Great word choices!) That description certainly fits as it was his work on Avengers, among other series, which shaped the foundation for Marvel comics as we understand them (and which, in turn, shaped DC's eventual evolution).

I'm loving where you're going with this.

Very infomative. Marvel history is something with which I'm very unfamiliar. Certainly my view of Jack Kirby is very different from yours, because it's based exclusively on New Gods. Your future posts are awaited with great anticipation!

On the failure of converting other women to comic books: I dunno, maybe we have a rare comic-loving gene that most women lack. Too bad for them.

He Who, Cramer, love you both lots!!

Random thoughts on both of your wonderful replies:

- It means a lot to me that you'd praise my word choices, He Who, being as you are a published author and a writing teacher. Thanks loads.

- Thanks, too for the heads-up about Thomas's birthday and the amusing observation of his writerly self-indulgence.

- Cramer, your mention of Kirby and the New Gods was just the indirect inspiration I needed to finally resume work on the next installment of the Steve Bissette/Rick Veitch/Alan Moore essay. Thank you. Also appreciate your very civil way of disagreeing with me on Kirby. I do give him credit for trying to expand his thematic and emotional palettes with the New Gods...and if that does raise the question of how much he succeeded in the execution, well, as I've become fond of saying, diversity of opinions makes the whole world go 'round.

- I take great pleasure & pride in educating Legion World's more DC-centric fans on Marvel. They've got a ton of worthy stuff that I think might even appeal to non-Marvel fans, but far too much of it has yet to be collected. At the top of my list of Marvel treasures to be unearthed for reassessment and new discovery: "Killraven", the mid-70s serial by Don McGregor & P. Craig Russell (yes, the same artist who's done all that arty stuff over the past 30 years; he was already a blazing up-and-coming talent as early as Killraven, his first ongoing gig.)

- And thanks for the kind words about our mutual comic-loving gene. I've got to tell that to my mom the next time I see her. She'll be well-chuffed!!

Part 3 is coming tonight for sure.

Off topic, but your mention of Roy Thomas reminded me of something:

I had the pleasure of meeting Roy at a convention in my hometown a few years back. When I brought him my Legion issues he wrote, he took a moment to look them over and laughed before saying "The Legion? I'm surprised people remember my work on that!".

What a great guy!

No worries, Kappa. I do, for the most part, like Thomas as both a person and a writer, and, like I said earlier in my essay, I don't entirely blame him, nor Wein, nor Wolfman, nor the others, for the rise of Continuity Porn.

Also, I like Roy's secret-origin of Wildfire issue of LSH (#283.) I think all Drake-haters should give that one a go, it might at least change their hate to tolerance.

The rise of continuity porn was not a one-sided thing nor was it inherently bad until the 80's. Rich continuity gave readers something to invest in as it meant each issue mattered from month to month and they weren't simply reading about a rebooted version of the characters in each new story. I think this mentality was reflected in the kinds of fan mail you saw in old comics where readers asked "What happened to ____?" or "How did ____ happen if this happens in _____"?

The writers, like Thomas, Shooter, or Levitz who had started as young fanboys and eventually professionals in the industry, obliged this nascent fanboy/fangirl mentality by building soft continuity into their stories. It became, in my opinion, a cyclical relationship in which each fed into the other, fuelling a more hardcore fandom and an ever more expansive fictional universe for both Marvel and DC.

However, the "porn" aspect of continuity only really became an issue in the 80s at which point stories began to become more complex and decompressed. Whether or not this was actually the case, DC perceived there to be a lack of new reader friendliness in their books and continuity was their sacrificial lamb (or scapegoat if you prefer) for both bolstering sales. Unfortunately, as Crisis on Infinite Earths proves, they only shot themselves in the foot and made things more complicated...

I'm pretty much on the same page with you as that goes, Kappa. In theory, continuity is a wonderful thing, and I do think that for a few years (I'd say about 1967 through 1974), it really did work.



IIRC, DC Cosmic Teams guy Mike Kooiman (sp?) has said that the primary reason was actually that DC's overall quality had been steadily climbing for the past few years, but sales still weren't that good, so DC's braintrust at the time came up with CoIE as a grand publicity stunt. Where I think it went wrong is exactly where things had gone wrong for Marvel towards the middle of the 70s -- Dick Giordano gave the writers of the flagship titles too much power by making them writer/editors. Now, Giordano was *undeniably* a class act and a good person, but, in my observations, he had a tendency to be a bit hazy on company policies and a bit soft on creators, the other extreme of his then-Marvel-counterpart Jim Shooter's approach, who gradually became more controlling and more brutal over the course of the 80s, until by 1987, most of the Marvel editors and creators (some of whom had once been staunch supporters of his, i.e. John Byrne) turned against him, and Shooter was infamously burned in effigy once he was gone from Marvel.

I don't know for sure whether it was Giordano, Jenette Kahn, or Paul Levitz who carried out the notorious staff firings of Mike Barr & Marv Wolfman after the DC execs felt that both writer/editors had gotten out of line by airing some of the publisher's dirty laundry to the fan press, but with Levitz's bad-cop reputation, I'm guessing it was probably him. Anyhow, it's my belief that the Good Ship DC clearly lacked a firm guiding hand as the 80s moved into their second half, with the result that, between bruised egos, personal vendettas, and a massive breakdown in communication, the post-CoIE DCU continuity quickly fragmented, and all the king's horses and all the king's men...et cetera.

Meanwhile, Marvel not only repeated one of their worst mistakes of the early-mid 70s -- flooding the market with new ongoing series while lacking enough decent creators to maintain quality control -- they compounded Giordano's writer/editor error at DC by giving their most popular *artists* more power than the writers had, and the editors even more power than either the artists or the writers. Thus, the ongoing speculator craze became entwined with the continuity going awry at both of the Big Two (tellingly, Walt Simonson's last Fantastic Four arc, published in early 1991, was a deceptively good-natured jab at Marvel's official continuity cop, high-ranking editor Mark Gruenwald, whose physical appearance became the template for a bunch of identical corporate clones ruling over the time-space continuum, which the FF destroy in the process of escaping back to their home dimension. Not surprisingly, Simonson wouldn't work for Marvel again for a LONG time after that (and it certainly didn't help his relationship with Marvel that his wife, Weezie, had been treated appallingly by the X-Men office towards the end of her runs on New Mutants & X-Factor. Ironically enough, Simonson got along fine with his FF editor, Ralph Macchio, who had also overseen Ann Nocenti's gutsy, controversy-courting run as writer of Daredevil. Go figure.)

PART 3:

As one of the world's most socially turbulent decades of all time reached fever pitch in 1968, both DC and Marvel were chugging along fairly smoothly with their respective offerings, especially the latter.

DC had recently acquired the welcome services of the infectiously dynamic Dick Giordano, previously an editor at C-List publisher Charlton Comics, where Steve Ditko and Denny O'Neil had both landed after exiting Marvel; now they both followed Giordano to DC. Along with a handful of other young, youngish, and young-at-heart creators -- most notably the innovative and extroverted artist Neal Adams -- they set about giving DC a much-needed kick in the pants to shake them out of the chickens-with-their-heads-cut-off mentality that had prevailed during the middle of the decade, as DC cluelessly and heavy-handedly imitated Marvel without understanding the essence of Marvel's best qualities.

And though Giordano's first editorial stint at DC proved to be a short one after the titles he shepherded failed to achieve mass appeal, the galvanazing effect he'd had on DC would reverberate well into the early-mid 70s. The most perceptive of his veteran colleagues, Mort Weisinger, had already begun mentoring a small number of young writers -- Martin Pasko, Cary Bates, and teenage prodigy Jim Shooter, the last of whom made a striking impact on the Legion of Super-Heroes feature in Adventure Comics. When Shooter was tapped to replace the Legion's rotating middle-aged writers, Edmond Hamilton and Jerry Siegel (the former's flair for intelligent space opera and the latter's keen understanding of the adolescent mindset having already made the feature one of DC's most consistently good), there was no reason to expect much. Instead, under Shooter's byline, the Legion feature arguably got even better, as a cornucopia of fresh and exciting ideas (some entirely Shooter's own, others brainstormed with Weisinger, and still others inspired by Legion fans, among the most devoted and loyal of all superhero fanbases.) Meanwhile, Julius Schwartz, arguably the second-sharpest operator among DC editors after Weisinger, took Denny O'Neil under his wing after Giordano's departure, and by the start of the next decade, they would make magic together, often in tandem with Neal Adams and Dick Giordano himself, the latter having returned to being one of the industry's best inkers.

But, realistically, this was a hectic and bittersweet time for DC, as former Flash and Adam Strange artist Carmine Infantino was promoted to the publisher's executive editor position, and then proceeded to make a brutal reality out of what some of DC's veteran creators had already seen coming for the past couple of years -- mass firings, partly due to the aforementioned difficulties in adapting to changing times and to a new and highly self-possessed generation of readers, but mainly due to the creators' demands for benefits, better working conditions, ownership stakes, and better pay (these demands were, in hindsight, entirely reasonable, but then the comics industry has always been a strange animal whose ongoing evolution can charitably be described as erratic, even by showbiz standards.)

Marvel, for their part, had brought in few younger talents other than Roy Thomas, but they'd more than compensated by bringing over several veteran artists with superb drafting skills (some of whom had been cast out of DC, notably Curt Swan's former default inker George Klein, who was teamed up briefly but memorably with the exceptional penciler John Buscema on Avengers.) In addition to raising Marvel's level of visual craftsmanship to previously unimaginable heights, they also lightened the workload of the publisher's creative backbone, Jack Kirby, allowing him and Stan Lee to focus on Thor and Fantastic Four, and to go cosmically wild on both titles for a couple of years, before their always-tenuous relationship was torn apart by jealousy, miscommunication, and egomania (arguably from both creators, even if Lee's was more blatant due to his being Marvel's public face), as well as Martin Goodman's myopic and heavy-handed management style (in recent years, it has gradually come to light that many of the wrongs previously attributed to Lee were actually committed by Goodman.) But just as the Lee/Kirby team's output petered out, another team was on the rise, that of Roy Thomas and John Buscema (the artist soon afterward rotating with Neal Adams -- the first comic book artist to be business-savvy enough to become a self-styled free agent, going back and forth between DC and Marvel -- as Thomas's chief collaborator.) In the space of only one year -- the issues cover-dated December 1967 to December 1968 -- Roy Thomas came fully alive as a comic book writer. With Buscema as the default penciler for both Avengers and for the first 8 issues of the venerable Sub-Mariner's first solo book since the 1940s, Thomas unleashed Marvel's own equivalent to Jim Shooter's very-recent creative mini-tempest on DC's Legion of Superheroes and other books from Weisinger's Superman stable. Though Thomas's greatest loves of the Golden Age would always be the characters which went on to all become grouped under the DC umbrella, he liked a few of the Timely/Atlas/Marvel characters of the 40s and early 50s enough to update them for the now-fully-coalesced Marvel Universe. Thus, an obscure and rather sinister-looking Golden Age Marvel character, the Vision, was reinvented as a sentient artificial intelligence in a wholly synthetic humanoid body. With John Buscema's striking visualizations, an impressive power-set (intangibility, control over his own mass, super-strength, laser-discharging eyes), and an aloof-on-the-outside/burning-with-intensity-under-the-surface personality (one not a million miles removed from a concurrent pop-culture sensation from the television medium, Star Trek's breakout character Mr. Spock), the Vision became, after Lee & Kirby's belligerent-yet-soulful Fantastic Four strongman the Thing, only Marvel's second Silver Age character to begin as an ensemble player before unexpectedly evolving into one of the publisher's greatest icons. The following year, Thomas would transfer most of his creative energies from the Avengers to the X-Men, with Neal Adams providing the pencil art and Tom Palmer, then only in his late 20s, coming seemingly out of nowhere to establish himself as an ink artist to be reckoned with. And although even their best efforts could not save the series from being cancelled after a run of less than 6 years, this creative team's handful of issues would inspire a stoic 19-year-old Marvel fan with an astonishingly vivid inner life to embrace Marvel's perennially under-performing underdog team as his personal favorites and make it a priority to write their adventures himself, if and when they ever returned to having their own series. His name was Chris Claremont.

Last, but certainly not least, were the comics being produced under the mass-media's radar over the second half of that decade. Before the 60s ended amid the majority of the older generation's entrenchment in the worst kind of reactionary attitudes, and the majority of the younger generation increasingly feeling as though their earlier rabble-rousing had ultimately been all for naught, there existed a small but passionate community of people in their 20s and 30s who were too anti-social and/or too ideologically radical for even the supposed refuge-for-outsiders that mass entertainment had been transforming into. Shattering all the taboos that they came across in their turbulent, persecuted everyday life, most of these underground-comics (or, as they preferred, "comix" creators) sneered at the establishment's pop-culture icons, particularly the super-heroes, whom they viciously parodied as maladjusted stooges of the politicians and businessmen they so utterly despised.

There were, of course, a few contrary individuals among the comix-producing iconoclasts, who did not see superheroes and counter-culture attitudes as mutually exclusive, particularly Trina Robbins, a charismatic and proactive woman in her early 30s who still remembered the earliest adventures of Wonder Woman she'd read as a child, in which the Amazon princess had stood for a great number of worthy ideals, some of them explicitly feminist, but most of them simply demanding a universal kind of equality for all human beings. Tellingly, it has come to light in recent years that Wonder Woman's creator and original writer, William Marston (a.k.a. Charles Moulton), had surrounded himself with uncredited female co-writers, all of whom espoused not only their own generation's version of feminism, but the entire pre-World-War-II progressive fringe. More poignantly, it has taken almost as many decades for the progress originally set in motion by Robbins and her tiny pockets of spiritual sisters scattered across the world to gain even the relatively small amount of momentum that it possesses today. And despite my aforementioned leniency towards comics fandom's mostly male continuity buffs, I stand firmly by my belief that the obstacles faced, in slowly (too slowly) decreasing increments, by four successive generations of comic book fangirls are rooted in the initially innocent sensibilities of those same continuity buffs. Because once some of these fans-turned-creators got their first taste of the power to dictate the courses of their favorite fictional characters and be paid for it, well...to say that it went to their heads is an understatement.

TO BE CONTINUED

Buschema is also famous for the Conan comics. According to Frank Millar, he liked drawing Conan because Conan killed people. I think he meant that it was more realistic than the super-hero comics. I have read some of the Conan trades and they are beautiful, even now. Conan existing in mythical history makes it kind of timeless.