Brand X

[An apology in advance. This post is going to be quite dense in cultural references, many of which are obscure or specialized. Few of them are explicated or linked. If any of my loyal readers can’t keep up, I apologize, and remind you that Google is your friend.]

The other day I was telling one of the various women in my life an old comic-book legend: the sad tale of Bill Gaines’ testimony before Congress.

A little background for those who have no idea who Bill Gaines might have been. His father, Max Gaines, may have invented the comic book, and certainly left his son the business when he croaked. Bill unwillingly found himself the owner and operator of Educational Comics and its line of poorly-selling titles. Changing the name to Entertaining Comics, he proceeded to turn it into the best comics publishing house in the known world. The EC line of horror and crime titles was head and shoulders above everything else being published in terms of pure quality.

I won’t bore my more comics-erudite readers with a full history, but I will take time to just show two images, both from the same era:

DC:


EC:


If you can’t see the difference in quality there, I just don’t know what to tell you.

So yeah, he was publishing the best comics in the world, and they also contained a lot of blood and murder and a searing subtextual critique of 1950s American culture. Towards the end, they started seriously taking on racism and anti-Semitism in angry, intense stories that did not conform to the new American model for dealing with such problems, i.e. pretend they don’t exist.

Everything in the last paragraph got him into big trouble. A wave of anti-comics hysteria swept the country. (How bad was it? PTAs held book burnings. Seriously.) So in 1954, Congress decided to hold hearings on the comic book problem. And Bill Gaines was called to testify. And he sucked. I’ve read the transcripts: when he’s reading his prepared statement at the beginning, he’s good, but then under questioning he becomes vague, confused, and frequently inappropriate.

Thing is, Bill was a fat fella. Not the sort of Hutt-like behemoth we’ve come to know today, but fat for the 50s. Back in the day, that meant they’d prescribe you some “diet pills”. That meant benzedrine, dexedrine… goddamn crystal meth for all I know. Which meant that in the morning, when he was scheduled to testify, Bill Gains was full of piss and vinegar and sweet legal speed. But then his testimony got moved to the afternoon. By which time he was crashing, hard.

Now, it’s a bit of comics-geek fanon that the wicked, oppressive Congress forced the Comics Code on our beloved medium, but it just ain’t so. Congress’s actual conclusion was something like “Maybe there’s a problem here, but it’s not the problem of the U.S. government, go away and stop bothering us.” No, the Code was created by the industry itself, and here’s one point on which I agree with Frank Miller: it was created specifically to drive EC Comics out of business.

I could go into why, but it would be tedious. Suffice to say that a lot of the Code’s provisions were designed specifically to make it impossible to publish EC’s best-selling titles, while preserving the stuff the rest of the industry was selling. That’s not what’s important.

What’s important is that the Comics Code turned an entire medium into shit for thirty years.

That’s one of those statements that’s unfair but not untrue. Yes, it wasn’t an entire medium, and sure, it wasn’t totally shit, and absolutely, it wasn’t really thirty years, and I’ll acknowledge, it wasn’t wholly the fault of the Code. And yet somehow, when you allow for all those points and factor them out, you’re still left with the fact that the Code turned an entire medium into shit for thirty years.

And this, at last, brings me to my point. Like many Americans since November 2000, I’ve thought a lot about alternate universes. Like many comics fans, I wonder what would have happened if the historical accidents that shaped my beloved comics had gone differently.

I’m not quite naïve enough to believe that Bill Gaines testifying in the morning would have somehow stopped the Code from taking hold, but let’s be dramatic. Let’s say that that one moment could have changed everything. It makes a better story that way. So now we’re in a world where there was no Comics Code, where everyone kept publishing whatever the hell they wanted. Dell kept cranking out licensed Disney titles, DC kept doing superheroes and Westerns, and yes, EC kept doing what they were doing. Of course, what they were doing was developing and exploring at high speed…

I was raised to believe, and I still believe, that quality is the only long-term investment. That means that EC Comics would have been the best investment on the comics-publishing scene. Yes, it’s possible they might have just flared and vanished, but then again it’s possible that they might have all turned into space werewolves and banded together to fight crime. Let’s play the odds and assume that good work pays off in the long run.

In our world, you say comics and people think superheroes. Even with the wonderful rise in other genres recently, that’s still what people think, and there’s a lot of justification for that. However, what if the best comics in the country were everything but superheroes? Would we see the single-genre domination of an entire medium that we see today? It seems unlikely, to say the least.

Let’s imagine a 1960s where EC is still publishing. I’m going to contend that comic book companies live and die by their editors; I think the evidence supports this hypothesis. In the 1960s, DC’s most notorious editor was Mort Weisinger, who was legendary for abusing his artists and writers, lying to them, and never letting them forget that what they were doing was disposable, infantile crap. (Stopped them asking for more money, you know.) He got the comics he asked for. Marvel’s editor in the same period was Stan Lee, who had a different plan. He created the Marvel Universe; not only a unified style but a unified, branded, interconnected set of titles. You couldn’t follow the Avengers without knowing what was going on with the X-Men, and vice versa. There were no Fantastic Four fans or Iron Man fans, there were only Marvel fans. It was, from a marketing perspective, genius. In our world, those two editors fought it out over the decade, and Stan Lee and Marvel won handily.

In this posited alternate history, however, there’s a third great editor working: Bill Gaines. And he’s not trying to compete on the same terms; he’s playing a whole different game. Weisinger and Lee were capturing the hearts of children. If you look at Gaines’s development as a publisher and editor, however, he was clearly moving towards capturing the minds of adults just as much, if not more. Not only his EC work, but his later work (more on that later) shows increasing sophistication and complexity. He wanted to make people think, make them question the assumptions they were fed by culture and society. If I suggest that this style might have found fertile ground in the 1960s, I trust no one will call me a madman.

This ties in to another issue. The lack of the Comics Code means that there’s thirty years, two entire generations, where “comic book” didn’t necessarily mean “pre-chewed pablum for children and the illiterate”. That is a significant change. Okay, yes, good work got published between 1954-84. Some of it within the Code, some of it without. The point is, anyone who says any good comics got published because of the Code has too different a definition of the word “good” for any meaningful communication to happen between us, I fear.

In our 1960s, the counterculture embraced comics to some extent. This was, to a large extent, because the page compositions of Steve Ditko and Jim Steranko look even better when you’re on acid. This led to the rise of underground comics, which faltered because Robert Crumb was great and a lot of his contemporaries were, um, not. Then Will Eisner came along after years of exile with A Contract With God and the notion that comics could speak to an adult audience, and from there things started to get really interesting. Successive waves of small independent publishers arose, one after the other, each offering their own interesting ideas. Most foundered on Sturgeon’s Law, but each wave left excellent work behind, like successive high tides leaving an accumulation of lovely driftwood at the dry-sand line. The good work remains, the other stuff is washed away by history.

However, in the alternate 1960s we’re considering, there was an entirely different form of comics to enjoy. There were comics that looked good even when you weren’t tripping, that talked about serious social issues without having to code them behind mutants, monsters, and the Martian Manhunter. Could we imagine that the beatniks who became the counterculture might have embraced these stories? I think we could. Hell, my father was a Merry Prankster; I’d take bets that his old buddies would have enjoyed EC comics, if they’d still been coming out by then. The Baby Boomers would have gotten the comics they wanted as rebellious young adults.

American consumer culture in the second half of the 20th century has been, to a great extent, based on what Baby Boomers wanted. When they were kids who needed driving to Little League, the station wagon was invented. When they were young adults trying to get laid, the muscle car and the make-out van appeared. When they were struggling young professionals, reliable economy cars took off. When they had kids of their own with Little League games, the SUV came into being. Need I point out that the same year Boomer men hit serious middle age, Viagra was developed? I can’t wait until they start dying of old age; I’m looking forward to a cure for death.

So if Baby Boomers were learning that comics were a versatile and powerful form of art, capable of telling stories that spoke to them, what would have happened? How many artists and writers of that generations might have at least flirted with working in the medium? How many would have gotten further, done good work? It’s safe to assume there’d be at least a few. Yes, in our timeline, there were a few. Some came in with the small waves of independent publishers. Some grew up obsessed with the question of whether Green Lantern could defeat Iron Man, and dedicated their adult lives to settling it. But in our alternate history, people who met neither of those prerequisites could have worked in the comic book form. I think we can agree that that’s a larger pool to draw from, and we’ve already established that there would be more stories for these people to write and draw than just Green Arrow.

So, in this hypothetical, we have more comics in more genres being worked on by more people. An educated comics fan would be forgiven for thinking that I’m positing a kind of utopia; to be a comics fan is to love a small, ghettoized, obscure artform in spite of all three adjectives. There’s something I haven’t brought up, though, and it’s something I bet some of you have already thought of. When it became clear that EC Comics was unable to continue publishing, Bill Gaines took one of his titles, a weird little thing created by writer/artist Harvey Kurtzman, and reinvented it as a black-and-white magazine, with magazine formatting and pricing, and Gaines taking editorial control from Kurtzman.

The magazine, of course, was Mad.

For those only familiar with its current, sad, post-Gaines incarnation, a reminder may be in order. It is no exaggeration to say that for two generations, Mad was America’s leading journal of media criticism. At a very early age, American kids learned that ads were bullshit, TV heroes were phonies, and movies were just selling you the same crap the ads were. Show me any influential writer or artist born between 1950 and 1980, and I’ll show you a former Mad reader.

So in our posited alternate universe, that didn’t happen.

I’ll make it worse than that: aside from being brilliantly subversive, Mad was funny as hell. The magazine had a rare and vital quality for a product marketed to children: it didn’t talk down to them, it treated them like smart people. If you were reading it in 1962 and didn’t know who Barry Goldwater was, it didn’t stop to explain it to you. It didn’t explain what the gay rights movement was in 1980, it didn’t explain the causes of the Gulf War in 1991, it just took these things as read; any sensible person would understand them, so keep up or get left behind. This is a common feature of truly great humor; done well, it initiates the audience into a secret Brotherhood of Cool just by virtue of following the references. Done badly, it’s Dennis Miller.

But annoying overanalysis aside, it really was funny. Funny enough, in fact, that it was a major influence on almost every American comedian still alive. To oversimplify it, no Mad means no Saturday Night Live and no The Simpsons. Now sit down for a minute and subtract from current American culture everything taken off, spun off, or ripped off from those two shows. Take your time; it’s a long list. And that’s still just a small subsection of the second- and third-order effects from Mad. The alternate history posited earlier requires deleting all of that, or modifying it beyond recognition.

Bill Gaines was in the right place at the right time twice in his career; doing quality comics in the early 50s, and then doing a marvelous magazine from 1955 until his death. Both times, he gave American culture something it wanted and responded to. It had to be twice, of course, because once he was in the right place at the wrong time: testifying in the afternoon instead of the morning. (Remember, that’s the hypothetical you agreed to 16 paragraphs ago.) Change that one bit of bad timing, and his first great hit could have continued. His work would still have had enormous and far-reaching influence, but not at all the same influence. American culture would not look like it does now, if EC Comics had lived and Mad been stillborn.

This is one of several big fat hypotheticals about comic book history that I frequently ponder, incidentally. The others are neither as big or as fat (they lack Bill Gaines, you know) and I’m not sure if I want to post them. In the meantime, please tell me which parts of this hypothetical you think are bullshit.