Erosion
Gary Leach
bangfish at cableone.net
Mon Aug 2 03:56:30 CEST 2004
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
More information about the DCML
mailing list