It’s 1975 All Over Again
By Dan Brown There’s a calendar from 1975 on my wall. Each month has a Marvel superhero on it like Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor and Captain America. With this apparent antique pinned to the wall,, it’s easy for me to imagine I’ve travelled back in time to the era of Gerald Ford, Archie Bunker, bell-bottom jeans, and the fall of Saigon. To be clear, the calendar I’m talking about is actually a re-issue of the Mighty Marvel Calendar from 1975. As it turns out, some marketing genius figured out that 2025 and 1975 share the same calendar dates. I'm guessing the question then became, “Why not just put out the old one again?” The resulting calendar is a slick piece of work, fashioned from sturdy cardstock and bound with a plastic spiral. (Yes, I do have a calendar fetish, I always buy several different ones for home and office.)I say it’s brilliant marketing because it represents a huge potential return on a minimal investment. Marvel already owns all the art, plus the characters featured each month have only become more popular in the intervening decades. As well, 1970s nostalgia is all the rage these days. Aided by the Mighty Marvel Calendar for 1975/2025, let’s imagine it is January 50 years ago, shall we? So what was going on back then? Here in the Forest City, Jane Bigelow was the first female mayor of London. Our nation’s economy was reeling from an ongoing energy crisis.Nicknamed “gas guzzlers,” cars were the size of boats. Compact, fuel-efficient vehicles looked to be a growth industry, yet these Japanese imports were still the subject of ridicule. In the early months of 1975, there was talk of how the motion-picture adaptation of Peter Benchley’s best-selling Jaws paperback had turned into a troubled production. Besides, who went to movies in the summer anyways? Speaking of pulpy sensations, people could still not believe that a crime family had been portrayed on the silver screen as people with regular personalities in The Godfather and its 1974 sequel. It was almost like these movies were saying criminals have a lot in common with ordinary human beings, a shocking concept. A string of dystopian sci-fi flicks mirrored the zeitgeist – when people in 1975 looked into the future, it wasn’t a pretty picture. The Star Trek animated Saturday-morning cartoon from the early 1970s hadn’t done much to spread Gene Roddenberry’s idea of a utopian future society. On the radio in early 1975, you didn’t hear Elvis Presley much anymore. The airwaves belonged to acts like Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, the born-again Bob Dylan and an upstart by the name of Bruce Springsteen. Could he be the future of rock and roll? As for comics, well, they were for kids – though creators like Will Eisner insisted comic books should be taken seriously as a form of literature, even with their cheap paper and splotchy colours. About this time in January of 1975, DC jacked the price of individual comic books up to a quarter from 20 cents. That summer, Marvel would offer a new team of Uncanny X-Men to readers, including a short Canadian mutant with metal for bones who had originally been the villain in a Hulk storyline. In the letters columns of those bygone Marvel comics, readers made their desire known: Somehow, sometime, someway, Marvel heroes had to make the jump to the big screen.Why, one correspondent even argued, Charlton Heston would make a perfect Magneto.Do you miss the 1970s? Do you wish you had been alive back then? Let me know in the comment box below! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Comics vs. Graphic Novels
By Dan BrownWhen is a comic book not a comic book? When it’s a graphic novel.And what the heck is a graphic novel? Your guess is as good as mine.Comic lore has it the term was invented by legendary creator Will Eisner. I get the impression Eisner – known for the Spirit newspaper strip – couldn’t sell illustrated stories to a legitimate publisher as comics, so he came up with the “graphic novel” label solely as a way to sell them.So it was a marketing gimmick from the get-go.I am old enough to remember comics before the advent of the graphic novel. Eisner’s A Contract With God came out in 1978, the irony-in-hindsight being that it isn’t a novel, but a collection of four short stories.But as a graphic novel, it has some kind of heft it didn’t carry as a comic – even though it’s a sequential story told with pictures, panels and text. Isn’t that the definition of a comic? It landed differently owing to the elevated subject matter – just dig that title.Current editions of A Contract With God proclaim its place in comic history. Does that mean anyone who cracks the book reads it in a different way than a “mere” comic? I don’t think so.What maybe shouldn’t surprise anyone is how Marvel got on board with the term fairly quickly. By 1982 Stan Lee and friends were trumpeting The Death of Captain Marvel as one of Marvel’s first forays into graphic-novel territory. It had a unified storyline and was bigger and more expensive than the monthly mags of the time, but used characters from the company’s superhero line.Meanwhile, another important thing was happening in the background. Harvey Pekar had started publishing the comic series American Splendor in 1976. His appearances in the 1980s on David Letterman’s show may have been how he caught my attention.Pekar is important because he was using comics in a revolutionary way: To tell everyday stories, rather than put a spotlight on costumed do-gooders. It was all about the mundane, a staggering departure at the time.I read stories like The Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns in serial form. They are now known as landmark graphic novels, but when I was experiencing them one month at a time I never predicted they would eventually be collected in anthology form. Pretty much all comics are now published with an eye to the eventual graphic novel.So somewhere along the line Pekar’s innovative insight – comics can be used to tell any kind of story – got grafted onto the emerging use of graphic novels to tell more “serious” superhero tales.And a genre was born. I’ll grant that I may be the only person who cares about questions like this. Maybe I’m the only individual demented enough to care. And I guess as long as graphic novels and comics are experienced as a printed or online product meant to be read, the distinction doesn’t matter.I originally started writing a weekly column about graphic novels because the industry had reached a saturation point – there were enough graphic novels coming out, I could potentially review a new one every week. We’re now at the point in the history of the medium where I tell graphic-novel newbies, “If there is a topic or issue that interests you, there is a graphic novel out there for you.”Oh, and I know I left out a bunch of other definitions. What is a cartoon? What is a newspaper comic strip? What is a Sunday funny? A web comic?All fodder for future columns.Until then, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment box below.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 31 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
