The Modern Comic Industry Began in 1986
By Dan Brown I wouldn’t be doing my job as a graphic-novel columnist if I let 2026 pass without noting it was 40 years ago that the modern comics industry was born. I can guess what you’re thinking: “Wait a minute, Dan, don’t comic books have a history that stretches back until at least the 1930s, with some proto-comics appearing even in the late 1800s?” You’re right. You got me. But I’m not talking about the Golden Age or anything like that. I’m talking about what I call the modern era, the four decades following the publication of three landmark comics – a sequential troika that shapes our expectations of what comics will be in 2026. Readers with long memories remember a time before Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. And I can say with confidence that the industry hasn’t been the same since. The industry had been struggling in the 1970s. Some historians even credit a single title, Star Wars, for saving Marvel Comics on its own. Then, in the 1980s, events like Marvel’s Secret Wars and DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths were helping shore up the Big Two Comics Houses. Alternative publishers such as Dark Horse Comics were still embryonic. Drawn and written by Miller, Dark Knight Returns ushered in a dark and gritty form of storytelling that can still be seen on the stands of comic stores today. Its bleak depiction of Gotham was so scary that readers were willing to look past Batman’s fascist tendencies in his bid to bring order to his hometown. Printed on slick paper, its vivid art still excites me 40 years later. Miller famously said in an interview with Rolling Stone at the time he wanted to produce a comic book that a businessman wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen reading on an airplane. Comics weren’t kids’ stuff anymore. Miller followed the miniseries with Batman: Year One, which re-told the character’s origin in a Gotham that existed in a strange, timeless setting. Maus, which Spiegelman wrapped in 1986, told the story of his father’s concentration-camp experiences in the form of a cartoon-animal tale. It demonstrated that comics were a serious medium and could be put to other uses apart from glorifying the exploits of superheroes. Watchmen, meanwhile, is ostensibly a murder mystery answering the question of “Who killed the Comedian?” but is so much more. Set in an alternate 1980s in which Richard Nixon is serving his fourth term, the backdrop is a Cold War about to turn hot. Among other issues, it grapples with the consequences of having a real-life Superman (in the form of Doctor Manhattan) striding the Earth like a giant. How would that make the average person feel? Out of the three, my favourite is likely Dark Knight Returns – it took an existing comic character and tried to square how he would operate in the real world. It is at once a satire of, and a tribute to, the Caped Crusader. Sequels to Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen have failed to live up to the books that spawned them, likely because they set such a high standard for sequential storytelling. Without those three comics, we wouldn’t have comics as they exist today. But who knows – there may be creators out there who are poised to re-shape comics again. It would be entirely cool for some smart artist or writer to revolutionize our thinking about the form once again. If you have any guesses on who that might be, or which comics are changing the industry right now, let me know in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Expansive, Vivid Account of Comix History Worth the Read
By Dan BrownBrian Doherty’s superlative new book Dirty Pictures is not a history of comics, it’s a history of comix. There’s a difference.Comics are the mainstream titles you know, like those produced by DC and Marvel. Think Wonder Woman, Batman, The Amazing Spider-Man, Captain America, all those costumed do-gooders. Comix, on the other hand, is the name given to the underground picture-and-word books made, starting in the late 1960s, in San Francisco and other American cities by rebel publishers who skirted the law, and certainly violated the limits of good taste.Comics publishing was an industry with its own system of censorship, the Comics Code Authority, which was in place until relatively recently. Comix were famously published exactly how their creators drew them, legal consequences be damned.It’s hard to imagine anyone getting hauled into court for selling an issue of, say, The Fantastic Four, but a few individuals did get busted for selling comix. An example of an underground issue that stirred up legal trouble is the one that parodied Walt Disney character Mickey Mouse in lewd detail.I expected to learn a lot about comix before I cracked Dirty Pictures. What I didn’t foresee is how much I would learn about the comics industry as a whole from the 439-page volume, which I recommend to anyone with more than a passing interest in the history of comic-book publishing in North America. Not only is Dirty Pictures informative, but Doherty – by day an editor for Reason, the libertarian magazine – also does a great job of transporting the reader back to a time when “an underground network of nerds, feminists, misfits, geniuses, bikers, potheads, printers, intellectuals and art-school rebels revolutionized art and invented comix,” according to the book’s subtitle. Doherty introduces the reader to Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Robert Williams, and other key figures. Crumb, the leader of the comix movement, is the guy who popularized the phrase “Keep on truckin,'” which appeared on seemingly every car bumper in the 1970s.You may know Spiegelman as the creator of the 1987 graphic novel Maus, an account of his Holocaust-survivor father’s life told using cartoon animals that earned a Pulitzer Prize. Less well-known is how the genesis of Maus began in underground comix years prior to that.Williams is now known as the artist whose racy 1978 painting of a robot and a partially clad woman served as the original cover for the Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction (it would be swapped out for a safer image after an outcry from retailers and the public).Famous comix titles include Snarf, Zap, and Young Lust. They were published by companies with such dodgy monikers as Rip Off Press, Last Gasp Press and Head Imports. They were typically one-offs, with notable exceptions, since they didn’t follow a regular monthly publishing schedule. The cartoonist Bill Griffith, who went on to syndicate his Zippy the Pinhead strip in conventional newspapers, is quoted in Doherty’s book saying, “ For me, when I use the word (comix), I mean work that will wake you up, work that allows you to be able to see more, to become more receptive, more alive” Doherty wisely conducted fresh interviews with many of the artists from the San Francisco scene to bolster his research. Those interviews are just one element that makes this book required reading. And while you might think his account of those heady days would suffer because of the fading memories in the minds of those who were there at the creation, the author peppers each chapter with contemporary records, like the letters they wrote to each other back in the day.Comix publishing was, according to Doherty, a “loose, friendly, strange business.”This exhaustive history draws a direct line from Mad magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman to the underground creators of the 1960s to the autobiographical graphic novelists of today. If you want to understand how we ended up with the comics industry we have in 2023, Dirty Pictures is one of the best places to start.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
