Comic Books--Past and Future

 I spent half of my adult life as a writer, writing on a variety of topics, from office supplies and equipment to jewelry to comics and film/TV. That last was my real passion.

Oddly enough, some of that passion has waned in the past 20 years, as the nature of those two media has radically shifted--especially comics. When I first got interested in comics, as a teenager, they were truly a part of the "mass media". You could find them sold in the same stores as newspapers and general interest magazines like Life and Time and Newsweek--often on the same racks as those publications. Around the time I began writing about them professionally, that all changed: Comic books became a "specialty" product, sold (for the most part) in "boutique" environments to fans. They had moved from an impulse, casual product to a "destination" product; you no longer picked them up while you were doing other shopping, you went to a specific place to make a specific purchase.

At the same time, comics reached the culmination of a trend that had begun two decades earlier. In the 1960s, comic books were written, drawn, edited and published by people who largely had been doing that for 15 or 20 years. It was a job; for many a job they loved, but they had no real emotional attachment to it...they were journeyman craftsmen. Beginning around 1970, that changed, as people a bit older than I was, who had grown up as comics fans started to find work in the business. By a decade later, they were virtually running the business, as their predecessors retired or found that their work was no longer desired by the changing audience. It had become a medium in which fans were creating for fans.

From the beginning of my time writing professionally about comics, I found that kind of comics lacking....precisely because it was all aimed at the same target. Humorous comic books no longer sold well. Even superheroes with a "light touch" were outsold by their grim and violent counterparts. Comics were becoming "adult," it was said. I disagreed--they were becoming, to my mind, adolescent...the print equivalent of the explosion- and chase-filled movies of the same period.

I kept thinking it couldn't be sustained...that other media told such kinds of stories better. Turns out I was right. More on that another time.