Top 10 most Influential and Historically Important GA Books 2 2

[Bookery]

19 hours ago, OtherEric said:

Well, it's still running, give or take a restarted numbering, 67 years later.  There were a huge number of Mad-inspired comics and magazines, some of which, such as Cracked, had very long runs of their own.  It went on to directly inspire many of the underground cartoonists, which beyond their own creations led to independent publishers, creator owned title, and influenced the direct market.  It inspired the National Lampoon, which led to Saturday Night Live, which had a huge impact on popular culture.  It had its own long running TV show.  And that's just off the top of my head.

The original question specifically included the culture at large.  If you're specifically looking at books that still directly impact the content of the current comic scene, I'll grant that it's less important.  But in terms of how we got to both the current comic market and the culture at large, Mad remains huge.

Precisely.  Not to mention, Mad found a way around the Comics Code... a profound innovation in and of itself.  It can be reasonably argued that Mad was more influential than any super-hero character after Action #1.  To build on the above... it's hard to imagine the underground comix movement would have existed at all without Mad... many early UGs were just Mad-style social parodies with porn added.  It also provided continuing work for top artists who otherwise would have been out of work due to the Code.

[Bookery]

19 hours ago, Robot Man said:

Other than the obvious, and maybe Adventure and Detective, what a boring newstand. I wonder how long any of these would have lasted. What would the future of comic books have been like without Action #1? Top of the list all day long and twice on Sundays. All superheroes to follow were wannabees. It was the first.

It's only boring by TODAY'S standards... not by 1938 standards.  Again... it's BECAUSE of the popularity of those "boring" comics that DC decided to add more titles.  Superman was simply one of many characters in a new anthology title.  And he got lucky.  If the DC editors had decided to tuck his story in the back and not give him the cover... would he be as famous?  Unlikely.  And to their credit... S&S were brilliant in creating his look... Superman was designed for the four-color medium with his bright primary-colored costume in a way that wasn't the same for Mandrake or The Phantom.  Frankly, the book that changed history more I think was Superman #1, not Action #1.  DC took a chance and showed the world that a comic title could sell that was driven by a single character.  The newsstand looks boring because it's crowded with multi-panel covers.  It turns out there was a demand for stories that ran longer than 8-pages, and it changed the way comics looked and were marketed from that point on.

[Bookery]

20 hours ago, adamstrange said:

Mjr Nicholson lost his company because he couldn't make a go of things when paying $5 a page for art.

Mickey Mouse Magazine folded after two or three attempts in 1930s.

This is the newsstand when Action 1 appeared in mid 1938.  If you look at what titles appeared in the next couple years they are overwhelmingly superhero and their circulation numbers made everyone take notice of the comics. 

I'm not sure that's entirely true... but sure, for awhile there was a bandwagon effect.  But to be fair... most of those titles came from just a few companies that specialized in super-heroes.  That was the bulk of DC and Timely's output.  Add a few from Quality, Fox, MLJ, and Nedor.  But Dell, far and away the largest and most successful publisher of the golden-age, gave them only a few half-hearted attempts before abandoning the genre altogether.  If you don't count jungle heroes, which existed long before Superman, Fiction House didn't do them either.  Nor did Lev Gleason, or E.C. (other than a few Moongirls), nor Hillman, nor Avon, nor Pines, and on and on.  Were these companies just throwing money away?  No.  They understood that super-heroes were a niche market already saturated by the few companies that specialized in them.  Remember-- super-heroes were targeted almost exclusively at children... children a little older than the funny animal market, but younger than the market for westerns, crime stories, sexualized jungle queens, adult adventure yarns like Terry and the Pirates, The Spirit, etc.  

Golden-age super-heroes biggest influence was on silver-age super-heroes.  And that's when the market really took off.  GA heroes were hot only for a very short period... approx. 1938-1945... by 1949, most were cancelled, and that's well before the Code put many companies out of business.  Even a title like Little Lulu probably outsold any hero title of the period.  If you want to truly understand their cultural influence... beyond just the adolescent male comic book market... look at the greatest pop-culture entertainment medium of the age... movies.  Super-heroes were relegated to just a few low-budget serials... the basement-level of movie-making.  Meanwhile Tarzan (pulp creation) and the Lone Ranger (radio creation) produced dozens of larger-budget movies, as did Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan (literature), Zorro (pulps), Philip Marlowe (pulps), etc.  It's not as if they couldn't have done big-budget super-hero movies if they thought they'd be popular.  Sure, they might look creaky by today's standards, but any studio that could produce Metropolis, Frankenstein, King Kong, The Invisible Man, or Things to Come, could have made a slick serviceable super-hero film.  They didn't, because, as popular as super-heroes were, they weren't THAT popular... not beyond their core niche... until much much later.

 

[adamstrange]

32 minutes ago, Bookery said:

It's only boring by TODAY'S standards... not by 1938 standards.

It was boring.  Only Centaur and DC were producing new material in any quantity and not for any great profit.  Centaur collapsed after several troubles and DC's founder was forced out because of all of his unpaid debts.  The other titles relied on newspaper reprints.

Gerber in his Photojournal indicated that Superheros went from nothing in 1938 to almost 50% of titles by 1941 of a much, much bigger market.  That probably understates the impact of superheros since even the some of the newspaper reprint strip titles started offering some new material with a superhero and would usually feature that on the cover.  It also understates it since the big sellers were superhero books, achieving numbers far beyond what was previously thought possible.

[adamstrange]

I'm not and never have been a superhero-centric collector.  I specialize in the Atomic Age when superheros were not the big dog.

But when I looked at how comics became a big market, viable for new material, I have to give credit where it's due.  Up through mid 1938 comics were limping along despite being around for about 5 years.  Comics were big deal by 1941 and I can't make a case for any other reason than superheros.  I can't credit stories the success due stories being longer than 8 pages because in the GA 8 pages was pretty typical, often being slightly longer and slight shorter.  I also think publishers would have frequently touted story length on their covers if they thought that would impact purchasing.

The comics market didn't stop with superheros but having something profitable allows you to branch out.  Having a pool of artists "experienced" allows you to see examples to copy from and who can be poached to start your company.  Having something be wildly popular/profitable gives confidence to companies to dip their toes in the water.

[Bookery]

14 minutes ago, adamstrange said:

I'm not and never have been a superhero-centric collector.  I specialize in the Atomic Age when superheros were not the big dog.

But when I looked at how comics became a big market, viable for new material, I have to give credit where it's due.  Up through mid 1938 comics were limping along despite being around for about 5 years.  Comics were big deal by 1941 and I can't make a case for any other reason than superheros.  I can't credit stories the success due stories being longer than 8 pages because in the GA 8 pages was pretty typical, often being slightly longer and slight shorter.  I also think publishers would have frequently touted story length on their covers if they thought that would impact purchasing.

The comics market didn't stop with superheros but having something profitable allows you to branch out.  Having a pool of artists "experienced" allows you to see examples to copy from and who can be poached to start your company.  Having something be wildly popular/profitable gives confidence to companies to dip their toes in the water.

Super-heroes were huge, and that can't be argued.  What they did was fill an entire age-niche that for some reason had been unfilled prior... let's say young males 8-13, give or take.  For whatever reason, pre-1938 comics were geared primarily to older family readers of newspaper comics.  And pulps were not designed for that age group either, with Doc Savage and The Shadow skewing to older teens, and the crime and spicy pulps pretty much adults-only.  So there were millions of readers hungry for something that fit their tastes... and super-heroes filled the bill perfectly.  But for whatever reason, their original explosion ended up being a fad, and they lost their following big-time post WW2.  If DC had not persisted with their half-dozen or so titles 1949-1955, and then attempted to reinvigorate the genre in 1956, they might have died out altogether.  The company that invented them was also the last stand for keeping them alive.  And super-heroes got a big boost from television in the late '50s and early '60s.  Free television killed the market for westerns, romance, comedy, animal-comics, humor, etc.  But weekly-TV couldn't mount impressive super-hero and far-flung sci-fi adventures, so those genres began to flourish once again in the only medium that would support them.  They dominated comics in the '60s and beyond, and now dominate all pop-culture.  

[IngelsFan]

4 minutes ago, Bookery said:

But for whatever reason, their original explosion ended up being a fad, and they lost their following big-time post WW2.  

Which begs the interesting question: how soon would the genre of superheroes have collapsed without the advent of WW2 and its ripe story fodder?  

[Bookery]

2 minutes ago, IngelsFan said:

Which begs the interesting question: how soon would the genre of superheroes have collapsed without the advent of WW2 and its ripe story fodder?  

Others will be more versed on this era than I.  I do know that the larger cultural landscape grew much darker after WW2.  Film Noir pretty much began in the post-war era... dark tales in which the hero is set on a path of destruction in which there can be no escape.  Comics certainly got darker... crime, horror.  Audiences became more cynical after years of war and the new terrors of the atomic age... I think flying folks in tights began to seem silly by comparison.  If the writers of super-heroes had thought to mature the medium, as happened in the 60s and beyond, then super-heroes would have continued to thrive.  But publishers could only see them as juvenile adventure tales, and I think the very publishers that saw a niche and exploited it to great effect with an all-new genre, were themselves responsible for its collapse, with their refusal to adapt the medium.  Compare that with even science-fiction... the difference between Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers of the 1930s, with stories like The Thing and Day the Earth Stood Still after WW2 is immense.  The great super-hero innovators of 1938 had lost their touch and become stagnant by the late '40s.

[adamstrange]

15 minutes ago, IngelsFan said:

Which begs the interesting question: how soon would the genre of superheroes have collapsed without the advent of WW2 and its ripe story fodder?  

Superheros were like the advent of color in film or special effects.  Those brought people into the theater for a while but eventually you have to have stories of the sort that people of that time want.  I don't think WWII made too much of a difference and, if it did, it was probably to extend their life.

[sfcityduck]

36 minutes ago, IngelsFan said:

Which begs the interesting question: how soon would the genre of superheroes have collapsed without the advent of WW2 and its ripe story fodder?  

A lot of superhero comics did not focus on WWII.  In fact, I think WWII stories were eventually banned at DC.  And DC did much better than the publishers who went all in on WWII, like Timely, whose superheros could not survive in the post-war market.

[sfcityduck]

26 minutes ago, Bookery said:

 The great super-hero innovators of 1938 had lost their touch and become stagnant by the late '40s.

Personally, I think the later 1940s to early 1950s DC superhero comics are some of the funnest and most enjoyable around.  Especially, Batman and Robin stories.  They were definitely still innovating, the art was good, the stories well written.  Detective 168 is a great example.  It gave us a new and interesting twist on the Joker story that is truly iconic.  It was anything but stagnant when compared to prior Joker stories.  

[Scrooge]

1 hour ago, adamstrange said:

It also understates it since the big sellers were superhero books, achieving numbers far beyond what was previously thought possible.

Just picking this one quote to repost some material relevant to the conversation.

If you look at Goodman's output, it's the Super-Heroes that launched his comic empire since he never dabbled in strip reprints. We see the gradual decline of super-heroes %-wise in the Timely comic lines from 100% to almost nothing in the span of 10 years. But, the # published overall was still increasing when the super-heroes receded -

 

[Scrooge]

It's also undeniable that Superman and Batman were top dogs - 1941 survey -

Boys like Wings, girls like Famous Funnies

[Scrooge]

Comics take over the newsstands! with Superman leading the way.

[adamstrange]

 

49 minutes ago, Scrooge said:

Comics take over the newsstands! with Superman leading the way.

The evidence for the critical part played by superheros is overwhelming but not something I paid any attention to until someone on the Boards created that Action 1 newsstand.

Do you when this article was written?

[Robot Man]

3 hours ago, Bookery said:

It's only boring by TODAY'S standards... not by 1938 standards.  Again... it's BECAUSE of the popularity of those "boring" comics that DC decided to add more titles.  Superman was simply one of many characters in a new anthology title.  And he got lucky.  If the DC editors had decided to tuck his story in the back and not give him the cover... would he be as famous?  Unlikely.  And to their credit... S&S were brilliant in creating his look... Superman was designed for the four-color medium with his bright primary-colored costume in a way that wasn't the same for Mandrake or The Phantom.  Frankly, the book that changed history more I think was Superman #1, not Action #1.  DC took a chance and showed the world that a comic title could sell that was driven by a single character.  The newsstand looks boring because it's crowded with multi-panel covers.  It turns out there was a demand for stories that ran longer than 8-pages, and it changed the way comics looked and were marketed from that point on.

Action #1 introduced the superhero right on the cover front and center. Clean, intriguing and right in your face. So much different than the usual newsstand fare. Without Action #1 there would not have been a Superman #1. Created a whole genre that quickly rolled over most of those other books like a steam roller. 

Although they were not the first to do rock ‘n roll, The Beatles came on Ed Sullivan and music was never the same again. They redefined popular music and spawned hundreds of other similar bands. 

There are just innovators who sway the status quo and change everything forever.

[telerites]

23 minutes ago, adamstrange said:

 

The evidence for the critical part played by superheros is overwhelming but not something I paid any attention to until someone on the Boards created that Action 1 newsstand.

Do you when this article was written?

September 10, 1940

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/28844328/the_amarillo_globetimes/

[Scrooge]

5 minutes ago, telerites said:

September 10, 1940

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/28844328/the_amarillo_globetimes/

Thanks. I had forgotten to note it.

[Scrooge]

If you want to know how many comics kids read in 1946 for each grade … - Readership peaked in 6th grade or circa 11 year-old.

[Scrooge]

That remains true in 1951. 6th grade is the peak. Purchases and reads drop from there on -