Over on my other blog, I've been chronicling the week-by-week offerings of DC Comics from January 1980 cover dates to the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in December, 1985 (cover date March 1988). I thought it would be interesting to compare the titles being published at the beginning of that period and those published at the end as an indicator of the change DC experienced over this period.
So here are the DC publications in January of 1980 (cover dare April 1980):
In lists to follow, ongoing titles are in black, new ongoings are in green, limited series in blue, and series that were cancelled from one list to the next are in red.
Here are the publications in July of 1983 (cover date October 1983), halfway between my chosen start and end points:
Ten of the 1980 titles are no more, and 7 of those cancelled titles were non-superhero books. Only House of Mystery remains of the old horror line. Still, it isn't a complete shift to superheroes. Of the new titles we have Sword & Sorcery (Arak) and high fantasy (Amethyst and Arion), war (Blackhawk), and horror (Saga of the Swamp Thing). I suppose Omega Men could be considered a science fiction or at least space opera book of a sort, too. What is definitely disappearing is anthology books, though. G.I. Combat and House of Mystery are the only two left.
Limited series, a relatively new phenomenon, account for 4 of the current series (I miscolored Ronin).
Now, let's take a look at the comics being published in December of 1985 (cover date March 1986):
Sixteen of the series in 1980 are now gone, and those include Wonder Woman and World's Finest with runs back to the Golden Age, and Flash, that ushered in the Silver Age. Teen Titans, the Outsiders, and the Legion of Super-Heroes join Batman and Superman in the ranks of heroes with multiple books, though theirs exist to capitalize on the different tastes of the direct market. The Tales of books are also both reprint series.
Of the new titles in the '83 list, only the superhero or superhero adjacent titles (Swamp Thing and Omega Men) are still around. Of 31 ongoing titles, only 7 are non-superhero books (not counting the genre-straddling Omega Men).
Limited series are even more common than in '83 as are licensed books. There are two ongoing series (Star Trek and V) of licensed properties.
This is great! Love your insight that this might not be a clean pivot away from anything non-superhero but more of a shift toward single-character series continuity . . . now that you've pointed it out, it's pretty clear that war and horror and western weren't exactly going away but the anthology format that supported them was. Weird Western Tales, for example, doesn't make it. They keep publishing Jonah Hex longer than I would've thought possible. Blackhawk and his team even get their own title, although they're positioned as quasi-superheroes and it's interesting that G.I. Combat keeps uh soldiering on. Meanwhile Adventure struggles and Showcase, the true "anthology" superhero title, didn't even make it to the start of your survey period.
ReplyDeleteThe new genres are also pretty strongly represented. I would definitely call the Omega Men an sf book to capture some of the Star Wars afterglow: superhero adjacent but really closer to Star Trek or over at the competition a Micronauts type of experience. Granted, Timewarp failed to recover the Mystery in Space / Strange Adventures formula but anthologies are hard and the market might've been telling them that ongoing character continuity was how you build a Wednesday warrior audience. If we squint right, they kept trying to retrofit Green Lantern into this bucket with uneven results.
I also think this makes Sword of the Atom make sense as an effort to retrofit that once-ultra-scientific character into a fantasy bucket but that's more of a squint without evidence. There is a whole lot of fantasy like you point out, probably efforts to compete with licensed Conan and utilize Roy The Boy. Unfortunately much of it gets blown out by the more horrific stuff that emerges from Swamp Thing but now I wonder if it also helped pave the way for the licensed D&D books.
Anyhow the miniseries emerges as the new tryout book, a way to test a concept or character relaunch without the hassle of getting people to buy an ongoing anthology. It's perversely more expensive than commissioning an 8-page origin but I get the feeling they weren't getting a lot of great new character pitches (if you're Bill Willingham, why not just go straight to Comico instead of paying dues in the anthologies?) so maybe the goal was to take fewer and better shots renovating known property. In a way this points us back at Ronin, which is almost a serialized original graphic novel as they understood it back then: arty, expensive, weird, self-contained, off-genre.
I think that's right. I would add those replacing anthologies with consistent protagonist books are also all firmly centered in a "universe" that is only going to become more important as Crisis rolls in.
ReplyDeleteOh, and regarding G.I. Combat, it increasingly focuses on specific, serial characters, too: Haunted Tank, Kana, and the Mercenaries.
ReplyDeleteWhat a fantastic and weird thing we have, thank you for all of this. But one way or another, the Losers, for example, are "dead." The Creature Commandos roll on.
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