This mornings study was to look for the recent history of comic books.
You know you read them. Be it the overly trite heroics of Superman, the angst ridden Spiderman (aka Peter Parker), some of the more anatomically incorrect women in comics (Top Cow may have pioneered the artform…), humouros yet homicidal JTHM (produce, Vasquez, produce!), or the no-holds-barred often adult Heavy Metal that’s kept comics from slipping in times like the 80s.
Sounds kind of weird. And it didn’t start there. So I’ll begin at the beginning to provide some perspective.
Saturday mornings are perfect for a quick bit of relaxation (at least state-side). With no official work to do for pay (I never schedule my own stuff for Saturday morning) and the requisite time out from doing anything pressing looming, I n
eeded some entertainment.
This hearkens back to when I was quite young and would catch a couple of Saturday morning cartoons. The cartoons are largely gone (ditto the youth) but Saturday is still a good time for a quick breather from the tumultuous work week.
Looking around on the ‘net for said entertainment, I figured it might be fun to see what comic books were being published these days. It’s not that I haven’t seen the occasional rag or graphic novel flit by on some publishing shelf or other. It’s just that I haven’t taken the time to stand back and view the collected mass of comic-dom, as it were.
Which leads right in to needing an overview of who owns what these days. Having been out of actually reading the weekly pulpers for roughly 16 years (Japanese influences were just starting to work there way in then) I figured I’d find out who’s who in the publishing area for a start, as it’s interesting in a business perspective who-owns-what-now kind of way.
Basically I was intent on figuring out how things shook out from when I actually last read comics. Needless to say, I’m pretty surprised at the lack of any recent comic book history.
The only pages that reference the 90s say that they’re going to have a history up real soon now as of 6 years ago. To wit, they suck. I’m all for procrastination, but 6 years is a wee bit too long to simply put off your writeup.
Now I know things have happened. Marvel, started by his cousin back some 70 years, is no longer run (or owned, I think) by Stan Lee. Looks like he merged it off with Toy Biz after Marvel went bankrupt in 1996.
DC has long since passed into the hands of a mega corporation and is little more than a brand now, though they continue to produce the excellent Vertigo line. They were purchased by Warner Brothers, although from the fans perspective you’d never realize that they’re no longer a home grown Corp.
And what happened to all the independents like Image, Valiant, and the like? Who knows. As far as I can tell no current cronologer so much as acknowledges their one-time existance, never mind the current state. If you want to find some kind of esotera like the former Apple Press runs from the late 80s don’t bother.
And why do people associate comics with some kind of stigma? I don’t think it’s the pulps themselves so much as the people on this message board frequenting the places we buy them at. That didn’t end where I thought it would, but it ended up being a bit more interesting.
Till next time.
