An American comic book is a thin periodical containing primarily comics content.
Since the later 20th century, comic books have gained note as collectable items. Comic shops cater to fans, and particularly valuable issues have fetched in excess of a million dollars. Systems of grading comic books have emerged, and plastic bags and backing boards are available to maintain the comic books' condition.
History Proto-comic books and the Platinum Age The Yellow Kid in McFadden's Flats
The G. W. Dillingham Company published the first known proto-comic-book magazine in the U.S., The Yellow Kid in McFadden's Flats, in 1897. A hardcover book, it reprinted material — primarily the October 18, 1896 to January 10, 1897 sequence titled "McFadden's Row of Flats" — from cartoonist Richard F. Outcault's newspaper comic strip Hogan's Alley, starring the Yellow Kid. The 196-page, square-bound, black-and-white publication, which also includes introductory text by E. W. Townsend, measured 5×7 inches and sold for 50 cents. The neologism "comic book" appears on the back cover. Despite the publication of a series of related Hearst comics soon afterward, the first monthly proto-comic book, Embee Distributing Company's Comic Monthly, did not appear until 1922. Produced in an 8½-by-9-inch format, it reprinted black-and-white newspaper comic strips and lasted a year.
Comic Monthly #1 The Funnies and Funnies on Parade
In 1933, salesperson Maxwell Gaines, sales manager Harry I. Wildenberg, and owner George Janosik of the Waterbury, Connecticut company Eastern Color Printing – which printed, among other things, Sunday-paper comic-strip sections – produced Funnies on Parade as a way to keep their presses running. Like The Funnies, but only eight pages, this appeared as a newsprint magazine. Rather than using original material, however, it reprinted in color several comic strips licensed from the McNaught Syndicate and the McClure Syndicate. These included such popular strips as cartoonist Al Smith's Mutt and Jeff, Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka, and Percy Crosby's Skippy. Eastern Color neither sold this periodical nor made it available on newsstands, but rather sent it out free as a promotional item to consumers who mailed in coupons clipped from Procter & Gamble soap and toiletries products. The company printed 10,000 copies. The promotion proved a success, and Eastern Color that year produced similar periodicals for Canada Dry soft drinks, Kinney Shoes, Wheatena cereal and others, with print runs of from 100,000 to 250,000.
Famous Funnies and New Fun Eastern Color Press' Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics .
When Delacorte declined to continue with Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, Eastern Color on its own published Famous Funnies #1 , a 68-page giant selling for 10¢. Distributed to newsstands by the mammoth American News Company, it proved a hit with readers during the cash-strapped Great Depression, selling 90 percent of its 200,000 print, although putting Eastern Color more than $4,000 in the red. That quickly changed, with the book turning a $30,000 profit each issue starting with #12. Famous Funnies would eventually run 218 issues, inspire imitators, and largely launch a new mass medium.
Famous Funnies #1 . Cover art by Jon Mayes.
In 1938, after Wheeler-Nicholson's partner Harry Donenfeld had ousted him, National Allied editor Vin Sullivan pulled a Siegel/Shuster creation from the slush pile and used it as the cover feature in Action Comics #1 . The duo's alien hero, Superman, dressed in colorful tights and a cape evoking costumed circus daredevil performers, became the archetype of the "superheroes" that would follow. Action would become the American comic book with the second-largest number of issues, next to Dell Comics' Four Color, with over 860 issues published as of 2008.
Action Comics #1 . The debut of Superman. Cover art by Joe Shuster.
Aficionados know the period from the late 1930s through roughly the end of the 1940s as the Golden Age of comic books. It featured extremely large print-runs, with Action Comics and Captain Marvel selling over half a million copies a month each; comics provided very popular cheap entertainment during World War II especially among soldiers, but with erratic quality in stories, art, and printing. Unusually, the comics industry provided jobs to an ethnic cross-section of Americans , albeit often at low wages and in sweatshop working-conditions. In the early 1940s over 90 percent of girls and boys from seven to seventeen read comic books.
Following the end of World War II, the popularity of superheroes greatly diminished, while the comic-book industry itself expanded. A few well-established characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman continued to sell, but DC cancelled series starring the Flash and Green Lantern and converted All-American Comics and All-Star Comics to Western titles, and Star Spangled Comics to a war title. The publisher also launched such science-fiction titles as Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space. Timely Comics cancelled its Captain America, Human Torch and Sub-Mariner series, briefly reviving the characters in 1954 only to cancel them shortly thereafter and to focus on horror, science fiction, teen humor, romance and Western, genres. Romance comics became established with Prize Comics' Young Romance and Young Love, produced by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; those titles' popularity lead to an explosion of romance comics form many publishers.
Circulation peaked out in 1952, when 3161 issues of various comics were published with total circulation at about one billion. After 1952, the number of individual releases dropped every year for the rest of the decade, with the biggest losses coming in 1955–56. These rapid losses followed the introduction of the Comics Code Authority in the wake of Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency. While there was only a 9% drop in the number of releases between 1952 and 1953, circulation plummeted by an estimated 30–40%. The cause of the decrease is not entirely certain. Television had come to provide competition with comic books, or the rise of conservative values that came with the election of Dwight Eisenhower. The Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring body founded to curb juvenile delinquency believed to be influenced by crime and horror comics, has been targeted as the culprit, though sales had begun to drop the year before it was founded. The major publishers were largely unaffected by the drop, but smaller publishers like EC stopped publishing crime and horror titles, and had to focus on other areas. By the 1960s, output stabilized at about 1500 releases per year.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s horror and true-crime comics flourished, many containing graphic violence and gore. EC Comics was a particularly successful publisher of these genres, and was singled out by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent in 1954. The book was concerned with what he perceived as sadistic and homosexual undertones in horror comics and in superhero comics respectively, and it raised public anxiety about comics. Soon moral crusaders blamed comic books as a cause of poor grades, juvenile delinquency, drug use. This led the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to take an interest in comic books . Schools and parent groups held public comic-book burnings, and some cities banned comic books.
DC started a revival in superhero comics in 1956 with the October 1956 revival of The Flash in Showcase #4. Many comics historians peg this as the beginning of the Silver Age of American comic books, although Marvel had started reviving some of its old superheroes as early as 1954. The new Flash is taken symbolically as the beginning of a new era, although his success was not immediate. It took two years for the Flash to receive his own title, and Showcase itself was only a bimonthly title, though one that was to introduce a large number of enduring characters. By 1959, the slowly building superhero revival had become clear to DC's competitors. Archie jumped on board that year, and Charlton joined the bandwagon in 1960.
Other notable companies included the American Comics Group ; the low-budget Charlton, where many professionals such as Dick Giordano got their start; Dell; Gold Key; Harvey Comics, home of the Harvey cartoon-characters and non-animated others " title="Richie Rich ">Richie Rich); and Tower, best known for T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents.
Underground comix Main article: Underground comix
Legal issues and paper shortages led to a decline in underground comix output from its 1972 peak. The death knell was sounded in 1974, when the passage of anti-paraphernalia laws led to the closing of most head shops, which throttled underground comix' distribution. Its readership also dried up as the hippie movement itself petered out around the mid-1970s. Some underground cartoonists stayed in comics, however—Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman would become two of the leading lights of the alternative comics era, and Bill Griffith would take to comic strips.
Bronze Age of Comic Books Main article: Bronze Age of Comic Books The Amazing Spider-man #300 is a key comic book of the Bronze Age of Comic Books. Cover art by Todd McFarlane.
Changes commonly considered to mark the transition between Silver and Bronze ages include:
A reshuffling of popular creators, including the retirement of Mort Weisinger, editor of the Superman books, and the movement of Jack Kirby to DC. A boom in non-superhero and borderline superhero comics such as Conan the Barbarian, Tomb of Dracula, Kamandi, Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, Ghost Rider, and the revived Doctor Strange and Phantom Stranger. "Relevant" comics which attempted to address serious social issues, such as the drug-abuse issues of The Amazing Spider-Man and Green Lantern/Green Arrow. The Comics Code Authority's first update, in 1971 — prompted by Stan Lee's defiance of the code for a story on narcotics at the behest of the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Revamping of several popular characters, including a return to a Batman of a darker nature closer to the original late 1930s conception, a reinvention of Superman for the 1970s with the landmark story "Kryptonite Nevermore", and a temporary non-powered era for Wonder Woman - all initiated by author Denny O'Neil. The death of major characters such as Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy, the Doom Patrol, and several members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. The Modern Age Main article: Modern Age of Comic Books
In the mid-to-late 1980s, two series published by DC Comics, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, had a profound impact upon the American comic-book industry. Their popularity, along with mainstream media attention and critical acclaim, combined with changing social tastes, led to a considerably darker tone in comic books during the 1990s nicknamed by fans as the "grim-and-gritty" era. The growing popularity of antiheroes such as the Punisher and Wolverine underscored this change, as did the darker tone of some independent publishers such as First Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and Image Comics. This tendency towards darkness and nihilism was manifested in DC's production of heavily promoted comic book stories such as "A Death in the Family" in the Batman series " title="Joker ">The Joker brutally murdered Batman's sidekick Robin), while at Marvel the continuing popularity of the various X-Men books led to storylines involving the genocide of superpowered "mutants" in allegorical stories about religious and ethnic persecution.
While the actual publications are no longer as widespread, however, licensing and merchandising have made many comic-book characters, aside from such perennials as Superman and Batman. In particular, several movies and videogames based on comic-book characters have been released, and such heavily promoted events as Spider-Man's wedding, the death of Superman, and the death of Captain America received widespread media coverage.
Standard comics are 6.625 inches × 10.25 inches and about 32 pages long.
Independent and alternative comics Main article: Alternative comics
The "small press" scene continued to grow and diversify, with a number of small publishers in the 1990s changing the format and distribution of their books to more closely resemble non-comics publishing. The "minicomics" form, an extremely informal version of self-publishing, arose in the 1980s and became increasingly popular among artists in the 1990s, despite reaching an even more limited audience than the small presses.
See also United States portal Comics portal Cartoon Comic book archive Comic book therapy Comics studies Comics vocabulary Comparison of image viewers Digital comics History of American comics List of comic book publishing companies List of films based on English-language comics List of years in comics