When Bad Comics Happen to Good People

What is the value of a bad comic? Not the market value, of course--plenty of terrible comics have become collector's items for one reason or another.  Rather, is there anything that can be learned from talking at length about a bad comic? And if so, how much?

As openers for a book on comics go, this does not sound particularly encouraging.  But I started my previous book on Marvel Comics in the 1970s with an extended discussion of a DC miniseries from the 1990s, so, if anyone is keeping score, I am building a solid track record for perverse introductions.  In any case, comics readers know that there can be a great deal of pleasure in dissecting (or trashing) a bad comic, and that there are plenty of reviewers online who scratch that particular itch.  This book's goals are different.

The question of bad comics is essential when considering Marvel's 1980s publications, thought not because the company's output was overwhelming or unusually bad. The decade saw numerous artistic and commercial hits (X-Men, Daredevil, Walt Simonson's run on Thor), against a backdrop of, if not necessarily badness, then concerted mediocrity. Marvel in the 1980s inadvertently asked and answered a number of questions about the comics industry: what makes a good comic, or a bad comic? What are comics for?  And how can they be produced more consistently, and with greater efficiency?

In Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, I focused exclusively on those few creators who managed to produce work that pushed the boundaries of the possible and the permissible, even if the results did not always age well. If there is an overall drama to the book, it is about the struggle of a few artists and writers to take advantage of weaknesses in the Marvel corporate structure that might allow them to tell stories that were personal, inventive, or absurd.   

Marvel's Eighties output was largely the result of a push in the opposite direction, and, like most generalizations about decades, its beginning did not coincide with the change in the calendar.  The Eighties began with the appointment of Marvel's ninth editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, in the early days of 1978. Shooter's ouster in 1987, one year short of a decade after he took the job, was an end of an era in itself.  But his replacement by Tom DeFalco, while welcomed by Shooter's many enemies, did not immediately result in a drastically different Marvel landscape. So while this book focuses primarily on the Shooter years, it does not use 1987 as hard stop.

What, me? Imperious?

It would be easy to cast Shooter as the villain of this volume. Fired, pushed out, or simply fed up, nearly all the creators who managed to produce innovative comics at Marvel in the 1970s left not long after Shooter took over, along with a host of other longtime Marvel stalwarts: Steve Gerber, Steve Engelhart, Marv Wolfman, Don McGregor, George Perez, and eventually Doug Moench, John Byrne, Gerry Conway, Gene Colan, Denny O'Neil, Roy Thomas and Mike Ploog. Never one to shy away from a fight, The Comics Journal editor Gary Groth published an essay in 1994 called "Jim Shooter, Our Nixon," which not only listed many of his affronts against creators' rights, but also asserts that "Jim Shooter was everyone's favorite villain" (The Comics Journal 171, September 1994: 17-21).

I bring in Groth not to dispute his assessment, but as a stimulus to reframe what Shooter's approach did to Marvel. Anyone interested in the corporate and office politics at the company during this period can get the details from Sean Howe in his excellent Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Howe's remit is historical, while mine is interpretive. I do not wish to rehash or relitigate Shooter's interactions with the writers and artists who left Marvel, but rather to think about Shooter's editorship as an answer to the questions with which I began: what makes for a bad (or good) comic? And what are comics for?  Shooter's answers changed the course of Marvel Comics, if not the entire industry.

When Shooter came to power, he put an end to Marvel's free-wheeling (some would say chaotic) editorial structure. Gone were the days of the writer/editor, an institution that, while facilitating such excellent books as Gerber and Colan's Howard the Duck, was also tantamount to an almost total absence of editing as such. In the 1970s, Marvel was plagued by deadline failures and produced a line of books whose quality was shockingly inconsistent.  The system that gave Don McGregor the freedom he needed to redefine the Black Panther also facilitated the production of a vast array of mediocre comics.  For every Tomb of Dracula there were three Marvel Team-Ups, Incredible Hulks (not a high point for Marvel at that time), or Ghost Riders.

One of the easiest labels to lob at Shooter's approach to the editor-in-chief (EIC) job is "corporate."  No doubt it is also accurate:  Shooter replaced a largely horizontal set of relationships and relatively flat org chart with a hierarchal system of bosses and rules. In an industry that runs on the efforts and imagination of what present-day corporate types now refer to as "creatives,"  "corporate" is an inherently negative term.   We have all seen this movie before (especially in the Seventies): the corporate stooge vs. the  gonzo radio station that doesn't want to have its playlist homogenized (FM, WKRP in Cincinnati); the military brass vs. the anarchic but top-notch field surgeons who will not play by the rules (M*A*S*H*); the slacker enlisted men who become heroes despite their disdain for military protocol (Stripes).  Even Shooter, who wrote his share of Marvel books during his time as editor-in-chief, gestured in the direction of these tropes in The Avengers 168,  with National Security Council  Official Henry Peter Gyrich objecting to the Avengers' lax security and chaotic procedures.  In Shooter's hands, Gyrich was an annoyance, but he was not entirely wrong. When David Micheline took over the book and, following Shooter's directive, was obliged to reduce the team's roster to seven, he had Gyrich issue the edict in a manner that showed Gyrich (and, by extension, Shooter, who created him) to be officious and unreasonable. 

But what if, at least as a thought experiment, we concede that a corporation publishing comics might benefit from being a bit corporate?  That is, we can object to any number of Shooter's policies and decisions, and lament the death of the creative spirit found in the best of Seventies Marvel.  But it is also difficult to imagine a scenario in which Marvel would survive and prosper as a profit-making company without some form of inevitably alienating overhaul. Shooter's approach to the comics business was precisely the sort of thing that was anathema to Steve Gerber:  comics were to be seen as the company's product. 

Next: Under New Management