SECRET ORIGINS OF SUPERHERO DECADENCE

In this post Curt Purcell dispels the misconception that Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Moore's WATCHMEN started superhero comics down the road to "decadence." He argues that "market forces and pressures internal to the genre" would have led superhero comics to that path in due time anyway, and demonstrates that two direct-market features, OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE, did descend into decadence a good three years before Miller and Moore produced their aforesaid works. It must be added that both creators had been working in comics regularly for some years, although Moore wasn't significantly known to American readers until he debuted on SWAMP THING in the same year OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE appeared.

In "Aiming the Canon" I presented a mini-history as to how the changes to the comic-book market in the early 1970s led Marvel and DC to inject "adult concerns" into some of their product, though their intended market was almost certainly older adolescents rather than the thirty-to-fifty-somethings who support the current incarnation of the Direct Market. Since the DM was barely getting started in the 1970s, older adolescents were pretty much the only new market that comic books could have pursued with the resources available to them in those days. For this reason, even though the newstand-distributed color comics did become more daring in terms of content, I still regard them most of them as "juvenile pulp." There was at that time no paradigm for tapping into adult readers who made popular such paperback serials as THE EXECUTIONER-- not even when Marvel Comics unveiled their own copycat version of same.


I specified "color comics" above in order to single out those periodicals markted primarily to the less-than-adolescent audience, which category logically cannot include either underground comics or the Warren black-and-white magazines. Both of the latter did contain higher levels of verboten material than the color mags, and certainly both had some effect on the ways Bronze Age creators chose to push the envelope. But I can't speculate on that effect here, as my intent is mainly to touch on the flashpoints that led from "juvenile decadence" to its adult manifestations.

One such flashpoint that precedes the Bronze Age as such was Neal Adams. Technically speaking, Adams' work for the color comics was "clean" insofar as it didn't generally show decapitated heads or spewing blood. Nevertheless, Adams was instrumental in cultivating in some fans a taste for the "grim and gritty," and much of his appeal lay in his ability to suggest violence. In STRANGE ADVENTURES #208 (Jan 68) the hero Deadman (not yet a discarnate spirit) threatens to break the arm of his enemy Eagle. No ruptured flesh or broken bone is seen. But the reader feels the real possibility of the bone being snapped. This was heady stuff to a generation growing up on Batman-and-Robin fisticuffs, or even antiseptic Jack Kirby brawls.

As mentioned before CONAN THE BARBARIAN #1 (Oct 70) set a new standard for the depiction of both sex and violence in color comics. I'm still impressed that CONAN got away with as much "dirty" violence as it did in its first year-- noses bloodied, men devoured alive by monsters, the hero punching an enemy in the testicles. This is pure speculation, but perhaps Marvel got the feature past the Comics Code as a sort of test-case, to see if the market justified getting down-and-dirty again. CONAN's financial success may've paved the way for the 1971 revisions to the Code that, among other things, made possible the widespread marketing of horror and monster titles once more.

Interestingly, one of the first monsters to anticipate the wave of color-comics bogies was not a traditional Hollywood type like Dracula, but Marvel's Man-Thing, appearing just once in the b&w SAVAGE TALES #1 (May 71) before being transferred to color comics shortly thereafter. As SAVAGE TALES was an incursion on the non-Code market dominated by the Warren books, perhaps it's no accident that one of Conan's co-features in the first issue starred a monster intended for a continuing feature, in contrast to the slightly-earlier appearance of Swamp Thing in a non-continuing horror-tale. In any case, with the revision of the Code Marvel and DC were at last willing to unleash a new world of monsters to counter the world of superheroic gods they'd unleashed in the previous decade.

One narrative advantage of having monsters as stars was that, like the barbaric Conan, they could get away with greater levels of violence than the average superhero could. That said, superheroes too began to lose a lot of their Silver Age innocence, and probably no event of the early 70s captures that slow progress toward increased violence than The Death of Gwen Stacy in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #121 (Feb 1973). And even though the event itself was approved by SPIDER-MAN's two previous scripters, editors Lee and Thomas, the execution, as carried out by writer Gerry Conway and artist Ross Andru, exemplified a darker, more disruptive approach to the Marvel Universe. The subsequent introduction of that aforementioned Executioner imitator added yet more fuel to the shadow (so to speak).

The Punisher wouldn't become a superstar for several years, but the Marvel-DC superhero universe grew darker from yet other incursions. The burgeoning monster-stars began to cross over into the superhero worlds, but a more significant effect may've arisen from "straight" superheroes who incorporated far more grotesquerie and violence than, say, the generally-sanitized adventures of Marvel's Incredible Hulk. ADVENTURE COMICS #431 (Jan-Feb 74) exhumed a Spectre who outstripped the juvenile ghoulishness of his Golden Age template, while GIANT-SIZED X-MEN #1 (May 75) provided a certain claw-handed hero with a regular berth for mayhem-to-come. It may be argued, though, that Wolverine does not reach his true potential as a "savage hero" until X-MEN #98 (April 76) revealed that the character's deadly claws were part of his anatomy, which gave him a little more gravitas than just another costumed schmoe with blades attached to his hands.

Arguably DC Comics, though providing a home to the Spectre (in one incarnation) and Swamp Thing (in two), reveled a little less in "juvenile decadence" than Marvel did. Still, the die was cast right up against the handwriting on the wall, as is best seen by the way the Death of Gwen Stacy begat the Death of Iris Allen. Ross Andru, perhaps bringing with him lessons learned alongside Gerry Conway at Marvel, took over the editorship of the FLASH feature with issue #270 (Feb 79), and by July of the same year Iris was dead under quite grotesque circumstances that anticipated the death of Sue Dibny in 2004's IDENTITY CRISIS. And though Andru didn't remain editor for an exceedingly long period, allegedly sales on THE FLASH did go up during its "grim and gritty" period, which factor may well have contributed to DC's increasing investment in "decadent" material, such as the two 1983 features Curt Purcell references, OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE. Though I liked neither of them, both were significant marketing breakthroughs as they were designed to appeal to the burgeoning Direct Market, and so are ancestors to the "superhero decadence" of current days.

I would not categorize either OMEGA MEN or VIGILANTE as "adult pulp," though, for their narratives are still adolescent in tone, as is Andru's FLASH. But in the same year Andru revised DC's stalwart speedster, Frank Miller became the resident artist on one of Marvel's not-so-stalwart mainstays, beginning with DAREDEVIL #158 (May 79). Neither he nor Moore is "to blame" for any increase in decadence, adult or juvenile, but Miller has the distinction of bringing forth the Adult Pulp paradigm to comic books four years before most Americans knew Alan Moore from a hole in Blackburn, Lancaster.

Whatever one thinks of Frank Miller, no one can argue that, historically, Miller began to influence American comics before Moore. The linkage of these two creators in the public mind through their 1986 projects does have some interesting repercussions I won't address here, just as I won't deal with the question of why Miller's DAREDEVIL does qualify as adult pulp but Wolfman's VIGILANTE does not. As to whether either of those topics will be the next I address-- that too remains a secret, even to me.