AHC: Give America a Comics Culture like Japan's

ennobee said:
snip snip

I dunno, there were French television shows, both native and translated. Not that many, I grant you that but they existed, things like Fantomas, Vidock, les Brigades du Tigre. That's at least enough to show there was a market and it could have gone that way.

Maybe it's just because of the creators? In France (sorry I'll say France to refer to Franco-belgian comics, please don't hit me) it produced a lasting legacy because there were so many geniuses.

For example, you had a pre-WWI genre with stuff like Bécassine, really for kids. Then it moved to the more "classic" stuff like Tintin, which defined a lot of the codes, both graphically and narratively. We can see the huge impact of Hergé on this. Post-war you had a continuation of that, touching on more mature themes in the constraints of the kid oriented genre, with Buck Danny or Rahan.
I would think a big turning point would be with Franquin, where he put forward adult oriented comics with his Idées Noires (1977) which was not adult because it was sexual or violent but because, well, if you're giving the Idées Noires to your kids, you're a sick, sick man.

So, thanks to Hergé, Franquin, and the team at les Humanoïdes Associés later, you have your turning points.

Again, I'm by no mean a comics historian and I probably missed a shitload of stuff. Do correct me if needed!
 
Agreed. Without the Comics Code Authority, the mainstream medium would have more diversity, and appeal to older as well as younger audiences, much like Manga.

I would like to point out that Western Publishing (partners with Dell Comics and creator of Gold Key Comics in 1962) and Gilberton (Classics Illustrated) basically told the authors of Comics Code Authority to pound sand and had the clout to effectively ignore is.

As much as we like to blame the Comics Code Authority for the industry going down the tubes it was only part of the problem. Another factor was Leader News Co (the weakest of national publishers) and American News Company (the biggest publisher in the country) going out of business within a year of each other. And American News Company throwing in the towel was due to the Justice Department finding they were effectively a monopoly (the process had begun in 1952) and various publishers leaving them thanks to their business practices.

Furthermore, the market was over saturated from the get go. DC was doing Strange Adventures (August-September 1950) which went on for 244 issues. Flash Gordon was being done by Harvey productions and Dell. 1951 saw DC's Mystery in Spacewhich would go on for 117 issues. Fawcett Comics printed comic versions of the wildly popular Captain Video TV series. In 1952 Dell printed comics of rival show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Ziff-Davis did Space Patrol as a comic in 1952

Imagine the bloat that was the 1990s and Diamond going belly up ala American News Company (according to SFdebris' Rise and Fall of the Comic Empire series this nearly happened). This is effectively what happened in 1957.

Personally I think that Gaines efforts to do Picto-Fiction titles (effectively light novels) which only saw two issues before Leader News Co went bankrupt is part of the puzzle. Another factor would be Action comics and the like continue to be anthology books rather then be one character books. Heck, Big Little Book had been doing a format where one page as was a picture while the other was text from 1932 to the mid 1960s and had done well and it would be well suited for the anime boom of the mid 1980s and manga boom of the 1990s (Anime like Record of Lodoss war and Slayers began life as light novels).
 
Last edited:
I would like to point out that Western Publishing (partners with Dell Comics and creator of Gold Key Comics in 1962) and Gilberton (Classics Illustrated) basically told Comics Code Authority to pound sand and had the clout to effectively ignore them.
Why are you quoting a post I made months ago?
 
There are other ways of doing that that don't involve reviving threads a full 9 months since the discussion ended.
But now that it's done and before the thread is closed (and also because I clearly missed this the first
time around)...

Seduction of the Innocent and the Comics Code Authority did not make the people think
comic books are for kids - they came about because people already did, and thus found the
content of some of them inappropriate.

Also, regarding the comics code - it did not apply to magazines, which famously is why Mad changed
format and presumably how Creepy and Eerie got away with their stuff (to the extent they actually did
do stuff they got away with in the early years - not my field of expertise).

I think one factor - one that is deceptively easy to solve - is that the comic book business/industry
(especially if one leave the newspaper comic strips out) appears to have been pretty small and
kind of insular. I think it was on this very board that somebody mentioned that it was pretty much
the same people in the business in the late forties as in the sixties.

Remember, shoujou manga became what it is today roughly because a group of young women who
wanted to draw and write comics went to the publishers and said "We want to make comics, and also,
we might be better at writing for girls than the middle-aged men who currently do so are" and an
editor said "OK".
 
Top