MARVEL MAGAZINES…THE MISSED FUTURE OF COMICS

Comic books have had their ups and downs through the years.  Distribution and formats have changed and evolved ever since the very beginning.  And the fortunes of publishers and individual comic book characters have risen and fallen since the beginning as well.  Sales of a million copies of a given issue happened during World War II, when the STAR WARS comic first came out, and when speculators drove relaunches of SPIDER-MAN and THE X-MEN in the short-lived boom of the 90’s.  But now, sales of 5,000 or 10,000 are enough to keep a comic in production and 100,000 is a big hit.

The talent has also changed through the years.  From the 30’s and 40’s when plucky teenagers who couldn’t get a job drawing newspaper comic strips settled for the wide open new world of comic books (which were really magazines), to the 50’s and 60’s when competent journeymen did their jobs and (while sometimes staid or even dull) their people looked like people and cars looked like cars, to the 70’s when Neal Adams made the industry jump a light year with his extraordinary illustrative and dynamic art style.  After Adams, anything could happen, and for a while there, it did.

Stan Lee is sometimes seen as a god among men to some and as something of a huckster to others.  What he was was a talented, quick, and inventive writer who grew up in and alongside the comics industry and by the 60’s surrounded himself with incredibly talented, quick, and inventive artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and injected new life into a fading industry.  And he became the biggest cheerleader and spokesman comics had ever seen.  And he knew what worked and he knew what was coming next.

In the mid 70’s, Marvel under, Stan Lee’s leadership, started producing comic book magazines.  THE FANTASTIC FOUR by Lee and Kirby had long boasted the masthead “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!”  But, really, it was—for good or ill—a comic.  A comic book is its own thing.  It can be called a magazine (albeit a small, thin one), or a booklet, or a pamphlet (not sure if that was ever really accurate), but, really, it’s its own thing.  Its own magical thing.  But Stan Lee thought it could be something else.  Something bigger.

In 1971, Marvel launched SAVAGE TALES, a black & white, magazine-size (about 8 x 11 inches) 64-pager that starred the likes of Ka-Zar and Conan the Barbarian.  It also had its humor magazine CRAZY, trying to take some of MAD’s audience—MAD, a very popular comic book magazine that had begun its life as a comic book in 1952 at EC Comics and switched to magazine format in 1955 and saw its sales eventually increase to 1.5 million or more, and continues to be published to this day.  Marvel increased its magazine output with PLANET OF THE APES, DRACULA, DOC SAVAGE, kung fu titles, and a CONAN magazine in 1974, which continued for more than 20 years.

This was all spawned perhaps by Lee’s desire to present more adult material and be taken seriously in the world of publishing.  (Little did he know that he was destined for icon status for his work in regular comics—the very industry he was once ashamed to mention he was part of at parties.)

When Marvel added color to THE HULK magazine and gave us the incredible full-color MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL, everything changed.  And I saw what the future could be.

Great painted covers by Neal Adams, Joe Jusko, Earl Norem, Bob Larkin, and others only added to the quality of the material and broadened the reach to the general public, adults who might feel dumb buying the latest super-hero brightly colored (and often lesser quality) monthly comics but who might be more emboldened to carry a thick magazine with a beautifully painted cover up to the grocery store or newsstand checkout.

MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL often featured some movie adaptations.  While movie adaptations seem to be the most throwaway comics these days, Marvel put some of their best talent on these and a lot of them are quite good.  But when I saw the full-color STAR-LORD story in MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL #10, maturely written by Doug Moench and beautifully illustrated by the realistic (but not TOO realistic) Gene Colan, and with rich hand-done colors better than a purely painted book, I knew the game had changed.  When Doug Moench and the Neal Adams-esque Bill Sienkiewicz gave us their masterwork MOON KNIGHT in the back of the HULK magazine, I knew what comics could and SHOULD become!  But…

It didn’t happen.

Moench and Sienkiewicz brought their MOON KNIGHT to the pages of a regular comic book (albeit it was, I believe, the first mainstream Marvel comic offered only through the direct sales market of comic shops and bypassed the Comics Code and offered somewhat more adult material than your average super-hero comic at the time).  It was good, but not as good as the magazine version.  The format was limited, the coloring flat and ordinary, and it settled into the ghetto of comic shops instead of reaching for the wide open expanses where magazines spread their wings.

Around the same time, HOWARD THE DUCK, by writer Steve Gerber and artist Gene Colan, and TOMB OF DRACULA, by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan, had both enjoyed long runs as regular comics that pushed the boundaries of regular comics and the decision was made to end both as comics and relaunch as B&W magazines—but too late.  While the great, realistic, and moody Gene Colan art still graced both, their longtime writers had moved on and the magic was gone.

With supremely talented artists like John Buscema on CONAN, Bill Sienkiewicz on MOON KNIGHT, and Gene Colan on HOWARD THE DUCK or DRACULA (or whatever came next), comics could have taken the next great step forward.  Instead they petered out.  (And comics like MASTER OF KUNG FU by Moench and great artists like Paul Gulacy and Mike Zeck might have been much better served by the magazine format as well.)  Even CONAN faltered and ended its run, probably due to the absence of John Buscema art on a lot of the later issues as well as increasingly weird or “comic-booky” covers.

The hand-done coloring and wider/larger format of the HULK magazine (and especially its MOON KNIGHT back-up feature) and MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL were a big part of the draw.  They were more in line with the European graphic novels, where these things are taken more seriously and have a broader audience.  EPIC ILLUSTRATED was also very European and maybe a little classier than its inspiration HEAVY METAL.  Some reprints of Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT also sported hand coloring and they looked great!

Comics in the 1970’s and earlier had flat colors and were printed on cheap newsprint paper.  An upgrade was inevitable.  But instead of the beautiful hand-done colors of these magazines, American comics went the computer route.  Though vastly superior to the flat colors they replaced, they’re sometimes just a bit too slick, too full of effects, and a little too soulless for my tastes.  Coupled with super-slick paper, a lot of modern comics have a distinct garish look. And people should have learned by now—a comic with bad story and bad artwork is not saved by excessive computer coloring and effects on slick paper; it's still a bad comic…an expensive bad comic.

Marvel and DC still produce magazines these days, but they’re usually kid-oriented, with cartoonish/animation-style art and storylines that have no bearing on the characters’ lives or histories.  They are not “The World’s Best Comic Magazines”—they are throwaway.

But now might be the time to try again.  There are some incredible artists that have really entered the spotlight the last few years (mostly at Marvel).  Greg Land, Frank Cho, Leinil Francis Yu, Patrick Zircher, Esad Ribic, Steve McNiven, and a lot of others are all doing great work on old favorites and older pros like Alan Davis, Alex Ross, Butch Guice, and Bryan Hitch are better than they ever were—all of these artists would be great in the magazine format!  And legends like Neal Adams, John Byrne, George Perez, Jim Starlin, and some others should not still be toiling away on monthlies—they should have “graduated” now to doing true graphic novels.  (Like Will Eisner did.)  The other thing that has changed is the popularity and acceptance of “graphic novels” in book stores everywhere.  I put quotes around that because most of these are not really graphic novels—they are collected reprint editions of old or recent comic books (technically known as “trade paperbacks”).

I guess the format I’m hoping for doesn’t HAVE to be a 64-page, 8x11, hand-colored, stapled magazine with self-contained stories, it COULD be a 64-page, 8x11, hand-colored, perfect-bound GRAPHIC NOVEL with self-contained stories—I’m not picky!  That should cost about $10 or less and not scare off any new readers.  Unfortunately, the big companies prefer their collections of 200 or 300 pages of reprint material with a price tag of $24.99 or $34.99 (or $59.95 for hard covers!), which no one is going to spend unless they’re already familiar with the material.  When I was in France not that many years ago, I saw that their graphic novels were usually 48-64 pages with a price tag that translated to maybe $8—and they were hard cover to boot!

In a different world though (a parallel world perhaps), it was STAR-LORD and MOON KNIGHT that led the way to a new future, instead of the class-less and aggravating “New 52” and a weekly SPIDER-MAN (with hundreds of stories that don’t really matter), and beside the HULK magazine, perhaps THE FANTASTIC FOUR, SPIDER-MAN, THE BATMAN, and a few others could have also “graduated” to the more special format, with fewer stories that meant more and had a wider audience.  I’d like to visit that world one day.