AIMING THE CANON

In this essay I mentioned that the transformation of mass-market juvenile-pulp funnybooks into a niche of adult-pulp funnybooks would be worth it to me even if the work that most contributed to the transformation, Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, were the only worthwhile work to have come out of it.

Of course, that's not the case. Both before and after TDKR, there have been a good number of works that deserve praise for melding adult tone with fantastic/escapist subject matter. They're not all superheroes, and some of the ones that have the necessary adult tone are not "pulp" in the sense that I used it earlier: being fairly simple in thematic and dramatic terms. For instance, WATCHMEN would not be an example of "adult pulp."

However, some temporal limitations seem applicable. The EC horror-titles can be seen as fairly adult in content compared to much of their competition in that genre, but they debuted at a time when comics were still dominantly seen as a juvenile medium.

The "Bronze Age" doesn't change this dominant POV. By my reckoning it starts around 1970, when CONAN THE BARBARIAN and GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW debuted. The latter, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempted to retrofit the ongoing GREEN LANTERN in order to explore social problems in terms of relevance melodramas, which marked it as addressing "adult concerns" in terms of ethical development. Adult concerns in CONAN, were in the context of "stuff that you have a license to see because you're an adult." Admittedly most of the adult material appears only in the magazine's early run (like an early issue-- #8, perhaps?-- where for one story young Conan becomes a gigolo to a wealthy queen).

The first major works of adult pulp come into being right around the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s. The rollcall is well-known: Miller's DAREDEVIL, Moore's SWAMP THING, Chaykin's AMERICAN FLAGG. Indeed, very nearly the entire lineup of First Comics (1983-1991) was devoted to works with an "adult pulp" flavor. I would include the first three of these in my hypothetical canon, which brings the number up to four.

Still, only after 1986 (end of Bronze Age and beginning of "Iron Age" for me), do the twin towers of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and WATCHMEN facillitate any sort of progress toward the goal of wooing an older audience. A lot of that progress had to be trailblazed by dopey "Comics aren't for kids anymore" articles, but maybe it was all worth it. So if I actually make progress in coming up with an adult pulp canon, most of the works selected will be post-1986.

I think I can probably come up with a representative sampling, though I don't plan to make one huge post as I've done for "best serial comics" and "best mythopoeic comics." Instead, I favor giving one post to each selection, and maybe counting down from 100 to one, just to encourage myself to keep going.

More to come.