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.

Working on a long, ranty post that may be the start of a series, depending on how many of my readers I want to chase away with obscure hypotheticals.

In the meantime, go to Freerice.com, where you can have fun with a marvelous and educational vocabulary quiz that's good for two reasons. First, it respects your intelligence and doesn't dumb the quiz down unless you force it to. (The maximum vocabulary level is 50, and it's designed so you have to keep re-earning that level and can't just keep it, no matter how clever you are.) Second, and more importantly, every question you get right donates 10 grains of rice to combat world hunger. Sure, doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. Fast.

So yeah, go prove you know what "ogham" and "cuspidor" mean, and feel annoyed that they consider "snickersnee" a valid word. You get to reinforce your sense of superiority, and someone else gets to eat a meal today, and it's all done by the power of the internet. It's like a hypothetical win-win scenario in a class on 21st-century microeconomics.

So, as I’m about the last person to report, Stephen Fry has a blog. And, like most things Mr. Fry does, it’s superb. Well, so far. He’s got two posts up as of this writing. Thing is, the first one’s a long analysis of smartphones, and the second one’s an essay on fame that’s a whisker under nine thousand words long. If you convert that into normal blog-post units, it comes out to twenty or so.

I’ve just checked, and my undergraduate thesis is only slightly longer than Mr. Fry’s rant about fame. Not as well-written, either.

Thing is, for all its length and thoroughness, and for all that he acknowledges that he’s leaving out big parts of the experience, this superb essay betrays a certain myopia. Stephen Fry is deservedly famous in a visual medium, and that’s the perspective he brings. Much of the experience he describes relates to people recognizing one’s face. Thing is, there’s an entire category of fame he’s missed out on due to his curious decision to become famous for his terrific acting instead of his lovely directing or his intimidatingly-good writing.

This occurs to me, of course, because as I was reading his essay, I was asking myself how useful these ideas would be in the event that, knock wood, I achieve fame. I kept stumbling, however, on the fact that nothing I do will ever make me famous in that way. What Mr. Fry does not address is the scenario where one’s face is not famous, but one’s name is. This is the fame I can achieve, the fame achieved by most of the famous and semi-famous people I’ve known. It’s the fame of writers, artists, some directors, all the people too talented to not be famous but too damn homely to go in front of the cameras much.

Mr. Fry beautifully describes the approach, the oh-my-goodness-isn’t-that stare, where total strangers walk up to you, the relationship of luminary to fan already established. That’s its own thing, of course, but name-famous people rarely get it. The faces of the name-famous are safe, rarely attracting attention, but once people learn your name, the entire dynamic shifts. In an instant you go from being a nobody to being a somebody, and both parties have to readjust all their assumptions and behaviors.

I’ve heard about very famous writers who carry far more cash than most folks, just to avoid having to give people their credit card and turn a simple purchase into a whole fanwanking scene. My own father, miffed to find one of his books on a remainder table, was able to surreptitiously autograph the entire stack without being noticed, because while the whole store’s staff knew his name, his face was anonymous.

Even in comics, where certain folks are very famous on a limited scale, there’s an odd disconnect. One of the common things one hears at cons is “Huh, so that’s what Kurt Busiek/Matt Wagner/Joss Whedon looks like.” Every handshake at a con comes with a little flick of the eyes to the nametag, trying to find out whether this person is someone whose ass one should be kissing. Heck, I was once in my local comics shop, bitching about Brian Michael Bendis’s writing to some stranger, only to discover that he was, in fact, Brian Michael Bendis.

With the internet making more and more pictures of more and more people available, this effect is being mitigated a bit, but only a bit. We simply don’t go out of our way to memorize people’s faces unless we have to. We learn what actors and musicians look like because they spend hours in close-up on our screens, but even if we’ve seen photos of our literary heroes, we rarely connect them to the random guy in the supermarket. When one is a famous writer, one’s fame is a separate entity in certain respects. It’s something that arrives by mail, something that one is introduced by, but not necessarily a part of one’s day-to-day experience.

This is the post that should have gone up yesterday, but I was still too exhausted. I spent the weekend at the Stumptown Comics Fest shilling for Girl-Wonder.org, my current fandom hangout and a genuinely great community. I volunteered to help represent the gang at Stumptown, and man, am I glad I did.

(photo by Joshin Yamada)
This is what a feminist looks like: a pasty bald guy with a nice hat. Also two attractive young women named Rachel.

I’ve been to my share of comics conventions. Hell, I even worked a table once before. I thought I knew what to expect. Fellow geeks know the drill: morbidly obese completists, angry-looking trenchcoat guys, inappropriate cosplayers, hot goth girls with an entourage of drooling oglers, a few big-name pros looking like, as Neil Gaiman once put it, “a rotten log at a woodpecker convention”… all the maddening clichés and stereotypes of our beloved subculture.

Sadly, in this I was disappointed. The whole place was jam-packed with classy, tasteful people. Everyone seemed to have showered recently. The female-to-male ratio was pretty dang close to even. The pros were rested, friendly, and in several cases had the time to do detailed drawings for the Girl-Wonder convention sketchbook. (Including a Matt Wagner Wonder Woman that just blew me away… I’ll link to it when we’ve got it scanned.)

Most of all, people were enormously receptive to the message of Girl-Wonder.org, and not just because we were giving away free candy, though that probably helped. Online, in the more mainstream* comics fandom, we’ve found a lot of resistance. Apparently the notion that maybe comics would be better with less blatant sexism is somehow terrifying. At Stumptown, though, most everyone seemed receptive to the basic idea, and we had a lot of folks hang around our table just to chat and kick principles around. Quite a few parents saw our slogan “Because capes aren’t just for boys” and asked where they could find some good age-appropriate material for their daughters. Mostly we just directed them down the aisle to the Oni Press booth. That raises its own set of issues about how Marvel and DC don’t publish much that you can give to kids, but that’s another rant.

The entire thing was exhausting to an extent I couldn’t have expected, but it also felt wonderful. It’s very rare in life (well, my life) that one has an unalloyedly pleasant experience, but Stumptown easily qualified. No screwups, no disasters, no unpleasant surprises of any kind, just the single best time I’ve ever had at a comics convention. I heartily endorse this product or service.

*For those not up on the lingo, in comics “mainstream” means “a single subgenre, but only when produced by one of two publishers and involving one or more of a small number of specific characters”. It’s not the most intuitive definition in the world.