Erosion

[Gary Leach]

Cord:

> In some way Disney comics are frozen in time. Let's make another 
> thought
> experiment: Take any comic from today's newsstand (Spider-Man, 
> Superman,
> even The Simpsons) and move it back with a time machine to the 
> Sixties. How
> would people back then react to this comic? I think they would be 
> thrilled.
> They would not necessarily like it, but they would notice that it is 
> very
> different from their comics.
> Now move back any current Disney  comic back
> to the Sixties. Would people even notice that it is different? Even 
> Don Rosa
> (who IMO always kept a slightly subversive (in a good way!) 
> Underground's
> style) would probably be taken as a contemporary comics creator.

Perhaps. I still remember, though, the response we got to Don's early 
stories, and how so much of it centered on his unique style of doing 
Disney ducks. And this was long after readers had absorbed the 
stylistic changes in comics over the previous twenty years. I just 
don't think the readers in the 1960s - such as myself - would have 
found Don's work quite as unremarkable as you suppose.

It must be said, too, that the changes in the style, attitude, and 
presentation of such characters as Spider-Man and Superman has not, in 
the long run, prevented the erosion of their mass market sales over the 
last few decades. Whether it's these, Batman or Bartman, X-Men or Uncle 
Scrooge, comics in the US have been hit by severe sales declines in the 
mass market that should have doomed them. It is not an exaggeration to 
say that without the non-returnable comics retail market spawned in the 
early 1970s, comics in the US would have gasped their last years ago. 
It is also a fact that this retail market was intended at the start to 
serve the needs of the readers of super-hero fare, by far the dominant 
and most vocal market segment even then.

The very nature of the comics we read in the US today is the direct 
result of that super-hero oriented retail market, with the publishers 
catering to a special, focused, and readily identifiable super-hero 
audience. Archie and Western, both largely unwelcome to the party, had 
to find other ways to survive. Archie managed it; Western, in the long 
run, didn't.

And Archie did not get by through revamping their style of storytelling 
or their character designs - these haven't materially changed since the 
1950s - but by securing a unique niche for themselves in the mass 
market, and shifting much of their production to a format that 
accommodated it - the pocket book, or digest. Western had digests too, 
but as the 1970s progressed they simply lost interest in comics, 
running out their string until they basically just said "screw it" and 
threw in the towel.

Net effect: while DC and Marvel enjoyed the solicitude of the direct 
retail market, and Archie made hay with their digest pockets at 
checkout registers, Disney comics sank from sight for several years. 
This, I believe, did the very worst damage to Disney comics as a viable 
line in the US that could have been done, and this damage has still not 
been repaired.

Gary