Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books

447 Pages·2009·3.16 MB·English

by  Jean-Paul Gabilliet

Of Comics and Men
Of Comics and Men
A Cultural History of American Comic Books
Jean-Paul Gabilliet
Translated by
Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American
University Presses.
Originally published in 2005 by Editions du Temps as Des Comics et des
hommes: Histoire culturelle des comic books aux États-Unis. This edition is
published by arrangement with Editions du Temps. Copyright © 2010 Editions
du Temps Translation and introduction copyright © 2010 University Press of
Mississippi All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2010
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabilliet, Jean-Paul.
[Des Comics et des hommes. English]
Of comics and men : a cultural history of American comic books / Jean-Paul
Gabilliet ; translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60473267-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—
United States—History and criticism. I. Beaty, Bart. II. Nguyen, Nick. III. Title.
PN6725.G33 2010
741.5’973—dc22 2009025381
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Translators’ Preface
Introduction
Part One: Seventy Years’ Worth of Images
Chapter 1: From Comics to Comic Books (1842–1936)
Chapter 2: The Beginnings of an Industry: Comics Magazines (1936–1940)
Chapter 3: Comic Books at War (1940–1945)
Chapter 4: Ever More—The Apogee and the Fall (1945–1954)
Chapter 5: Decline and Rebirth (1955–1962)
Chapter 6: The Age of Innovation (1963–1969)
Chapter 7: Research and Development by Trial and Error (1969–1979)
Chapter 8: The Recovery of the 1980s (1980–1993)
Chapter 9: The End of a Century and the Beginning of a New Century (1993– )
Part Two: Producers and Consumers
Chapter 10: Production
Chapter 11: The Business of Comic Books
Chapter 12: The Creators
Chapter 13: The Readers
Part Three: A Difficult Consecration
Chapter 14: Calls for Censorship
Chapter 15: Internal Consecration
Chapter 16: External Consecration
Chapter 17: Conclusion
Appendix: Self-Regulating Codes of the Comic Book Industry
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Acknowledgments
Index
Translators’ Preface
One of the difficulties involved in translating Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics
and Men is that, as a history, it is so very current that even small changes in the
American comic book field frequently called out for new analysis. When one
works, as Gabilliet does here, with history that is so present, the ideal of
comprehensiveness is almost impossible to achieve. It is a great testament to the
author that this work feels as if its pages were just written, and that its
conclusions shed light on the status of comics as they exist at this moment, and
not merely in the past.
Originally published as Des Comics et des hommes: Histoire culturelle des
comic books aux États-Unis by Éditions du temps in 2005, Of Comics and Men
is the type of historical account that has been all too absent from American
comics scholarship. The dominant trend in the historiography of American
comic books, as Gabilliet observes in the bibliographic essay included at the end
of this volume, has been toward books and magazines catering to an audience
predominantly conceptualized as comic book fans. Rigorous scholarly work on
the history of the comic book field has frequently been marginalized within
publishing on the form. Perhaps it is fitting, therefore, that this important
contribution to the history of the comics field has been penned by a scholar who
himself is on the periphery of the world of American comics by virtue of the fact
that he was raised and works in France, a nation with a very different comics
past.
Gabilliet is a professor of North American Civilization at the Université
Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 in Bordeaux, France. His interests are in
cultural history of the United States and Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, with a particular focus on popular culture, including the history and
aesthetics of comic books. As this book attests, he is exceptionally well-versed
in the broad history of comic books, bringing to his scholarship the keen
intensity of the fan and the cool critical interest of the scholar.
Unlike many chronicles of American comic books, Of Comics and Men is a
blend of often disparate methodological strands. The first part is the most
straightforward and familiar of the three sections, offering an overview of the
development of the comic book in the United States. This section is broken
down into nine chapters, each of which examines a span of comics history.
Unlike many American comics scholars, who date the origin of comics from R.
F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid in 1895, or from the development of the comic
book format in the mid-1930s, Gabilliet traces the origins of the American comic
book back much further to 1842. More importantly, he places the evolution of
the comic book in relation to other comparable publishing formats, integrating
the form much more thoroughly into the history of popular publishing in the
United States.
The second section of the book focuses on producers and consumers, and
offers a very different kind of history than can be found in other works on this
subject. Gabilliet has not contented himself with merely enumerating various
“great men” and “great moments” in the history of comic books, but has taken a
much larger view that incorporates the structuring social and economic
relationships that have largely defined the development of the field. By
incorporating these important structuring elements, our understanding of the
complex forces of social and aesthetic change within the field is greatly
enhanced.
The final section of the book takes an important turn toward the sociological,
deftly transitioning from the discussion of comics as a professional field toward
the context of comics as a field of cultural production. Drawing on the influential
work of Pierre Bourdieu, Gabilliet wonders why comics have attained so little
legitimacy within the broader cultural domain. Here he turns his eye toward
complex social relations. Using the lens of censorship debates from the 1940s
through to the current period, he traces the development of public thinking about
the comic book form. He also offers a compelling examination of the
development of organized comics fandom, demonstrating better than any work
to date the important structuring relationship that has existed between fans and
the comics that they read, collect, and valorize.
Although he deals with ideas that are often complex, Gabilliet’s writing style
is very approachable, and we hope that we have done some justice to it with our
translation here. The most important issue facing us as translators of a volume
such as this one was not the introduction of new concepts or terminology, but the
fact that the book addresses itself to a moving target. Even as we were working
on this book, for example, dramatic changes have influenced the comic book
industry in the United States. The evolution toward a bookstore model of
publishing and the important rise in popularity of manga have significantly
impacted the shape of the industry in the past five years since the book was
originally completed. The author has worked to address these issues in this
edition of the book, updating it where appropriate and necessary. To this end, the
book is not strictly faithful to the original edition of the text, but has been refined
in light of more recent evidence and developments.
It is perhaps both ironic and fitting that a Frenchman should pen the first
major scholarly overview of the development of the American comic book
industry. We would suggest, however, that the author’s status as an outsider
within the often cliquish world of comic books is precisely the reason that this
book makes such an important contribution to the burgeoning field of comics
studies. Of Comics and Men is a timely book about the passage of time in this
field, and one that will surely be consulted for years to come.
—BART BEATY AND NICK NGUYEN
January 2009
Introduction
A Second-Rate Medium
Picking up the conclusions of an article published two months earlier in
Harper’s by its editor-in-chief Russell Lynes, the April 11, 1949, issue of the
popular weekly Life offered its readers a large double-page “chart” representing
cultural hierarchies in the United States. The chart was divided into eleven
columns classifying individual preferences in areas such as clothes, furniture,
entertainment, games, and even dietary habits, and it presented four levels of
cultural consumption in American society, from the most elite to the most
popular.1 The column devoted to reading preferences was laid out as follows:
avant-garde literature and criticism was found at the highest level; just below,
“solid nonfiction, the better novels, quality magazines”; the third echelon was
for literature of the “book club” type and mass distribution magazines. At the
bottom level there were two types of popular literature magazines printed on
cheap paper: pulps and comic books.
The present work is an attempt to fashion the cultural history of a type of
publication perennially situated at the lowest level of the cultural hierarchy in the
United States. At its center is the permanent—albeit never finalized—divorce
between two forms of comic art, the newspaper comic strip and the periodical
comic book. After it was imported from Europe during the 1840s in the form of
bootleg editions of the picture narratives by the Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer,
graphic narration in cartoons developed primarily in humorous periodicals
disseminated in the United States after the Civil War. The main originators of
those publications were German immigrants who transposed the formulas that
had proved successful in the satirical weekly Fliegende Blätter and the
“Bilderbogen” broadsheets (German counterparts to the French “Images
d’Épinal”) in their native country from the middle of the nineteenth century on.
Starting in the 1880s comics moved from humor magazines to the daily press via
editorial cartoons. From the beginning of the following decade, the development
of linotype color printing allowed the progressive appearance in Sunday
newspapers of humorous supplements printed in four colors, soon referred to as
funnies or comics. The large single illustrations surrounded by text that were at
first featured in those supplements gradually turned into series of smaller panels,