I have long had a post in my memory banks concerning comic books, and as I've thought about different things to add to it, it kinda morphed into a series of posts, and those seemed to balloon into a a project of a different kind. Like, I may desire to write a kind of history of the form, or catalog the mid-'90s implosion or the new renaissance that's occurring currently.
There are so many angles and subjects that I want to discuss, and that really to do it like I want may turn it from a series of posts into a series of "post-chapters" that could be collected. Like any of us have the time for that.
I have plenty to do otherwise...
One of the resources I used to collect the images I'll be using here today is Comic Book Realm. They have an immense database of comic book covers.
There are many genres that were highlighted in the thirties, forties, and fifties that were blotted out by the hysteria over the "Seduction of the Innocent" era. Those same genres were kept alive in the form in Japan, and are part of the current landscape back here in the States. Superheroes were the meat of the medium here for the bulk of the publication history over the last sixty years.
The purpose of this post is to 1) serve as an intro; 2) show myself I can consolidate rambling rootless ideas into something more; 3) highlight the varying levels of publisher in the comic book industry that all too often focuses on DC and Marvel a little too narrowly.
One of the reasons this (series of) post(s) has taken so long to get going is the wide-angle lens needed to look at everything...so I'm trying to narrow the focus here as an exercise.
***
Superhero comics have a wide array of types of characters, and besides character's abilities or powers, I'd like to momentarily highlight "popularity to the consumer" as a necessary element. Superman, Batman, Spiderman...these characters are all quite popular and will continue to have various monthly titles being published until...well, until they're no longer iconic members of a collected mass-media identity. Who knows when that may be...
But other characters who may not enjoy such lofty popularity levels get cancelled...and then brought back later, possibly altered, and put back out to a find a new audience. Sometimes they get cancelled again...and brought out again later...and cancelled again...you get the idea.
What I plan on doing now are looking at two specific characters and their mottled publishing history and how the character changed over those years. One character exists in one single comic book universe, both company-wise and fictional-universe-wise. The other character represents the extraordinary makeup of the publishing universe.
The first character is the Spectre, the white-skinned and green-cloaked apparition from the early DC universe. The Spectre started out as James Corrigan, a detective killed by gangsters who has his spirit fused with god's Wrath. He uses his powers to end bad guys, in creative ways, but after a while the talent behind the title lost interest, and the Spectre was relegated to help-out duty as a member of the Justice Society, the fore-runner of the Justice League.
In 1967 the Spectre returned with his own title, but lasted only until 1969:
On the shelf until 1987, the Spectre may have been used occasionally throughout the seventies and early eighties, but my own knowledge doesn't have that filled in so well. But in 1987, he was back with his own title. This time the Spectre was sort of a boss-like character, head of the section of the DC universe that deals with the occult and magic. Other characters with wizardly powers occupied this space.
Only they didn't really know what to do with the character. It only lasted until 1989. In 1992, John Ostrander came to DC with an idea for reviving Spectre...in truth it had to have been before, probably near the end of the Volume 2 series, seeing as how the Volume 3 series debuted in 1992.
One of the reasons I chose the Spectre for this discussion was primarily because of this Volume 3 and the following Volume 4 editions of this title. I read the John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake title for a few years. These guys had a plan...
Lasting until 1997, the title examined the internal battle between the dead Jimmy Corrigan and the nearly all-powerful Wrath. Many stories dealt with the Spectre being summoned to mete out vengeance upon some lowly subjects who had misbehaved (often committing acts far more socially acceptable-while-being-wrong rather than capital offenses), and the ensuing battle between the remaining humanity within Corrigan and the need for blind violent justice.
The stories were compelling and they gave the character some teeth. During a rather successful decade, the Spectre turned up in many titles, usually as a motivating character or uninvolved messenger (see the house-cleaning "Zero Hour" crossover or the fully painted collection of fine art "Kingdom Come").
Near the end, the readership skewed more mature, and with the speculative bubble-busting, the title was scrapped.
Within a few years, though, it was decided that Hal Jordan, former Green Lantern turned bad-guy named Parallax (again, see "Zero Hour"), was just too important to be gone forever. He was brought back, but not as a Green Lantern, but rather as the ghost tied to Wrath.
This was between 2001 and 2003, and soon enough Hal was back to being the young, non-white-templed Green Lantern everyone loved, but for a while he acted as the Spectre. I'm not quite sure what happened during the title's run, and I'll look into it later.
I find it interesting how upon each cover of each iteration, the Spectre's doing something magical with its hand(s).
Now the second character was brought back a few times, but has as many companies publishing him as there are editions. This character is Solar, Man of the Atom, but occasionally called Doctor Solar. He was one of three Gold Key characters from the fifties and sixties that Jim Shooter purchased the rights to to launch his own fully consistent and inclusive fictional universe in the nineties in Valiant. This was right after Shooter failed in his bid to purchase Marvel; he left and formed his own company, but that's the subject for a different day.
Solar debuted in 1962 for Gold Key Comics, and arrived at his "iconic" outfit by issue 3. Here's a neat cover from issue 7:
Gold Key was neat because they had oversized comics and didn't follow the Comics Code Authority. The other two characters who's rights were purchased were Magnus, a robot fighter from the 40th century, and Turok, a dinosaur hunting native American. This iteration ran through 27 issues to 1969, and was brought back in 1981 with issue #28:
The Valiant universe from the nineties was created inadvertently by Solar, and while I wasn't a reader of Solar specifically, I was/am a fan of the Valiant line of reading material. Here, is issue #7's cover, because I thought I'd do my part to follow the thread:
This title ran from 1991 until 1996, when Valiant stopped publishing under the Valiant banner and the video game company Acclaim revamped the universe it had bought at the height of the bubble in '94, finally using their own banner.
As the following cover states, indeed, "Look what we've done":
The Acclaim folks had a few one-shots and this miniseries (from 1998), and they were relatively well received, but the industry was in a changing mood, and by late '98, Acclaim was shuttering the comic book part of their company.
The jumped in at a tough time, strangled their titles, decided to revamp them to make them more video-game-showcasing friendly, and by the end took a bath on the whole enchilada.
Years later, the mega-independent publisher Dark Horse, the first label to find a steady life on the Marvel and DC margins, approached Jim Shooter with an idea to revamp Solar once again. Here is that series' cover for issue #7, this time from 2011:
That series was well received enough to garner the attentions of one of the newest companies that had carved out a niche on licensed material. Both IDW and the company here, Dynamite, have made a very successful business out of producing high-quality licensed material: stuff from movies, television cartoons, and old comic properties.
Here's one of the variant covers from issue #1 from just last year, in 2014.
***
I enjoy specifically how both of these titles can, when properly informed, trace out so much of the industry's history over the past 80 years. Purpose and popularity cycle greatly over the years, and both the Spectre and Solar can attest to that.
With the Spectre one can watch one of the comic book blue bloods---DC---flail about and try to milk a lucrative idea out of a misunderstood property and find varying levels of success.
With Solar, one can see how much of an industry isn't controlled by the blue bloods, and how only two major current publishers have been left out of the story (Image and IDW).
***
Going about some research for my students about the comics I'd be "selling" for Sherbux, I stumbled upon some reporting of the reemergence of the Valiant comic book universe. That was the impetus for the return to researching ideas for and about comics.
While I'm not fully convinced I did what I wanted to do with this post, I started the ball rolling on an idea I've been scratching notes on for a while now.
No comments:
Post a Comment