What Went Wrong with the "New Comics?"

The "New Comics" came, outselling the mainstream product, and seemed to portend changes in the medium that rashly tempted Marvel Comics into an ill-considered attempt to redefine its major titles after the conventions of the idiom. It seemed to have everything going for it, including innovative talent and freedom from the editorial straightjackets that had ruined concepts and careers; yet today the lions of the new comics remain in disarray, schismatically fracturing into smaller, more self-indulgent studios or becoming satellites of the very companies from whom they fled. Today, the promise seems to rest not with the new comics at all, which quickly fell into the traps of gimmickry, but a redefinition of the medium brought about by talent working within the confining role of mainstream comics talent.

What happened to the new comics?

What New Comics Had Going for Them

The "New Comics" enjoyed the efforts of young, stylish celebrity talent like the much-reviled Rob Liefeld ("The Most Hated Man in Comics") and Jim Lee, names that once held the ability to sell titles by appearing in a list of credits. To accompany this roster of up-and-comers and kings-of-the-new-hill, one might add the names of other talent with a longer history in the industry that contributed to "new comics" in a variety of capacities: Bob Layton, Jerry Ordway, Keith Giffen, Dick Giordano, Steve Englehart, Barry Windsor-Smith, Dave Gibbons, Alan Moore, Don Simpson, and other distinguished figures whose fame came in an earlier age of comics but whose talent never left them.

Problems with Style

In the aftermath of new comics' collapse, one may note that the form did not follow the opportunities open to it to expand the medium. In spite of anecdotal talent contributing enduring pieces (and these pieces would often owe heavy debts to the Silver Age or attempt to recreate it in its entirety), the new comics seems to have invested its energies in formulae and gimmickry, attempting to sell with style rather than substance. Dime and quarter bins in too many places attest to the enduring legacy of such an approach.

The "Gritty" Pose

Can any of you out there define what "grit" indicates in the new comics medium? I thought I might point to the works of Frank Miller as exemplars, but the "grit" of new comics goes beyond this. In may of the new comics, one may suppose that grittiness represents a cynicism bordering on nihilism; a contempt for the heroic ethos; an obsession with graphic violence; bigger muscles and bigger guns; corruption; and angst. Altogether, this package offers little but a reason to look up Dr. Kevorkian's phone number just in case one reads too many of these glossy bundles of despair and can no longer stand to go on any more.

If "grit" means realism, Will Eisner mixed that into his comics almost sixty years ago, with his urban scenes that almost made gum stick to the readers' shoes. If "grit" means angst, mainstream comics did that to death with the virtuoso self-pity expressed within Marvel's X-books. If "grit" means grimness, Neal Adams did it twenty-three years before the new comics and did not destroy the possibility of optimism in the process. If "grit" means the presence of antiheroes, Marvel had this base covered by 1974. What, then, does the "grit" of the new comics medium mean?

Could it mean a simplified and nihilistic worldview where superbeings casually take human life and a horrible end awaits everyone? Could it, even more likely, represent an easily-imitated pose that proffers style over substance and dispenses with necessary human elements like hope and ethics?

The grittiness of new comics did not represent an addition of anything new; it meant, instead, the locking out of the higher ideals and aspirations that infused nobility into the superheroic concept. Grittiness means the absence, not the presence, of something. Grittiness represents a lack of hope, a loss of humor, and a tendency to take oneself far too seriously.

Big Epaulets, Armor Coating, and Tough Names

The hero of new comics frequently appeared as even more of a parody of hypermasculinity than the conventional superhero. Said hero typically wore a name that seemed the product of an ex-con looking through a thesaurus for a handle to make him sound tough; character examples include names like "Wrath" and team examples include names like "Youngblood" and "Bloodstrike."

The continued exaggeration of already-bloated male traits continued in the visual design of a number of heroes. In some cases, we see the advanced stages of an epaulets arms race that must compete with the breast-size arms race typical of the female characters of the comics sub-form.

Dave Cockrum introduced costuming innovations that allowed for a more generous epaulet (consider his costume for Chameleon Boy and his design of Colossus). Walt Simonson brought the epaulet into its own in its extreme form in his depiction of Manhunter. The new comics, however, passed the absurd long ago and continued on, gaining speed; and the new-comics styled Manhunter of the mid-nineties may have broken records for size of epaulets and presense of completely gratuitous spiky ornamentation.

Cockrum's example in Colossus' case seems to have also provided a springboard for designers of the new comics idiom; Liefeld's Cable and Die-Hard both display segmented skin-tight armor that seems to owe Cockrum's design. These traits, however, boil down to gimmickry through convention; they render some of the characters uglier and more grotesque than good design prescribes, in a way that does an injustice to Dave Cockrum's elegant character design of a quarter century ago.

Perhaps this puts the justice in DC's parody of new comics characters in Kingdom Come, where the villainous Magog displays scars and armor that strongly suggest Liefeld's Cable design. To advocates of the older schools, these costuming gimmicks get to stand accused as the whole of new comics itself.

Guns, Explosions, and Blood

To this day, I grant no comic artist a peerage with Will Eisner in depicting a fistfight. You felt the knuckles crunch into jaws, saw the flesh give way, reeled with the victim as he staggered and fell, and bled with him. His one-time employee and Father of Comics Jack Kirby, approaching the subject with an entirely different idiom, earned a close second ranking in the ability to make a fistfight (or gun battle, thrown shield, ray gun, or generic zap ray) into a compelling series of panels of mayhem portrayed in four colors of ink.

Superhero comics lose their soul without the bang, zap, and ka-pow component. A non- violent superhero comic would become some bizarre parody of those European movies where two characters sit at a table talking and chain-smoking.

This said, and a necessary minimum content of mayhem established, I propose that an upper limit exists also for the portrayal of violence. In another column, I detailed how truly horrible a comic resulted from hyperrealistic depictions of violence with bones and organs blasting out of the bodies of the victims of a superheroic rampage (click here to enjoy a recap of it).

Funny animal cartoons established the humor in violence, but their depiction involved a consistent distortion free of splattering blood, outflung entrails, dismembered cadavers, and the other forensic elements that belong in a criminal investigation file more than in popular entertainments. If Tom the cat had his brains squish out of his ears when Jerry hit him with a big mallet, the humor would leave with his central nervous system.

Too much comic book violence, portrayed in too much loving detail, becomes something sadistic and akin to necrophilia. If the Comics Code Authority erred in prohibiting the depiction of bodies and bleeding wounds, so the new comics erred in lovingly dwelling on densely-depicted superheroic abbatoirs.

Thongs, Breasts, and Butts

In a sillier day, Wonder Woman traipsed around in a pair of blue star-spangled shorts that resembled nothing so much as a girdle cut from an American flag. While comics censors had no problem with skin tight costumes (such as Batgirl's), they did have a problem with the female form displaying too much leg. By the era of the new comics, Wonder Woman would sometimes appear in a thong that revealed enough to allow readers to recognize that Amazons have, after all, discovered bikini wax.

Seeing this unfortunate change in the aforementioned example (and others, including the unfortunate and awful Frederick's of Hollywood Fantastic Four uniform Sue Richards wore for a while) brings to mind a question: Must comics portray a thinly-veiled cheesecake element that deals less with the concept of heroism and more with the titillation inherent in a Victoria's Secret catalog?

The example to the right invites adolescent smirking, speculation about the physical impossiblities of containment as expressed in this panel, curiosity about how much of a breast an artist can expose before reality compels him to complete it with the balance of lacteal tackle it bears on its outer surface, and the comment: "Good Lord, woman, get those breasts under control."

The distortions of the new comics era represent the net effect of a process underway before most comics readers ever saw the first light; almost fifty years ago, self-appointed public watchdogs worried about the injurious effect of the exaggerated female form depicted in clingy clothing. For a while, editorial standards and discreet censorship kept the female form within some bounds, but the seventies saw periods where exaggeration would set off an arms race for more and more bloating of breasts, more and more revealing costumes, and lewder and lewder depiction.

When the new comics came of age, the overbloated bosoms of a Wally Wood or a Rich Corben would represent the tame end of the scale

Grotesque Conventions of Proportion

Human beings tend to stand about five to seven heads high. This means that the measure of the human head provides a yardstick for the length of the limbs and body and that normal human bodies tend to fall within a certain proportion thereof. Franklin Roosevelt, Andre the Giant, and Mother Theresa all fell within the bell curve on this.

New comics, however, developed in an age when stylish artists tended to contract heads, lengthen limbs, and bloat pectorals, breasts, and buttocks to dimensions that would seem grotesque in three dimensions. For example, Rob Liefeld routinely drew the male human form standing ten or eleven heads high.

New comics readers might have enjoyed this convention more than older readers, especially those more used to portrayals of anatomy that included some reference to actual studies of the human form; for instance, Silver Age icons like Gil Kane, Neal Adams, and John Buscema all had backgrounds that included serious anatomical study, and their work frequently reflects real observation of the dimensions and mechanics of human bodies.

At some point, distortions of the human form become ugly. Liefeld could produce some distortions of the human form that make a reader wince; the much-celebrated Mike Zeck could so inflate musculature that Captain America resembled Wonder-Warthog or Megaton Man; even Jack Kirby could so distort the human frame that he stripped it of much of its natural beauty.

Unfortunately, certain unpleasant distortions became part of the "house style" of a number of "New Comics" publishers. Not all the talent could make these proportions look good; while Frank Miller, Norm Breyfogle, and Jim Lee can get away with some serious liberties with the shape of bodies, the industry does not contain enough talent of their caliber to get away with it everywhere.

So, bluntly put, with the distortions of exaggerated musculature and female secondary sexual characteristics, with the lengthening of limbs suggestive of the elephants in Salvador Dali's Temptation of St. Anthony, with the enlarging of teeth and enhancement of "rage face" until it represented the only available expression, the new comics frequently made the human form very ugly and difficult to look at.

Panel Bloat

"New Comics" and the mainstream product that owes something to the standards set by the upstart branch of the medium suffer frequently from panel bloat. Early in the history of comics, the medium often reprinted newspaper cartoons that would fit eight panels to a page. This typically compressed the art into what remained of the page after captions and word balloons took their places thereon, often resulting in tiny figures.

While the medium relaxed somewhat about panel size as it matured, a standard still existed. The one-page splash introduced a story and sometimes only took up part of a page, and Kirby's four-panel pages in the 1960s seemed to some editors and readers like a cheap contrivance to reduce story length.

Those people had not seen anything yet. New comics stories routinely threw in double-page splashes, punctuated stories with single page panels, and frequently filled pages with two, three, or four-panel pages. In a twenty-page story, this can seriously limit the expository slack available. In a ten-page story, it can reduce it to nil.

Note the specimen full-page panel to the right here. After considerable reduction, the image does not seem to have lost necessary detail; it seems appropriate for a panel that takes 1/4 or 1/6 of a page. This suggests that the original art suffered from "panel bloat," the excessive enlargement of panels on a page relative to the action they contain. A Byrne or Perez or Kirby panel similarly reduced would lose a great deal of necessary detail, while this Liefeld piece seems mainly to find its level in the reduction.

For example, Youngblood #4 contains a Liefeld story 23 pages long. This story has three two-page spreads, two of them consecutive; no page contains more than four panels; Liefeld used another entire page for another splash panel; and the entire story uses 58 panels, making the average per page 2.5. Kirby's four-per-page seems generous by this standard. Picking a mainstream comic for comparision - Justice League Quarterly #2 - I find a work 56 pages long, with a total panel count of 252, including 6 full-page panels, for an overall average of 4.5 panels per page. Exposition and interaction remain much denser throughout the JL Quarterly, encompassing about six or eight times the action from the Youngblood story.

The Doctors of Comics and the Father of Comics himself understood the value of a well-placed full-page panel, and recognized that a story need not condense itself to tiny pictures of tiny faces and bodies to try to cram more out of a piece of newsprint, but at some point, we must suspect creators of padding, and the bloated-panel style Liefeld demonstrated for that early Youngblood invites such criticism.

The Cult of the "Creator"

The celebrity system of the sixties, like the writer/singer ethos of music of the same period, did much to free creative talent from editorial restraints that limited the reach of the works produced. However, this celebrity system did more to encourage decadent self-congratulation and self-indulgence by limited talent desperately in need of editorial guidance.

The flaw of the premise that talent should "create" - meaning write and draw the comics without outside input - rests in the obvious but overlooked truth that Not every comics artist can write. Some of the greats of the industry, such as John Buscema, confirm an inability to write stories and lack of interest in the attempt. However, simple egotism encourages second and third-rate talents to imagine themselves the equal of Eisner or Kirby. The pages that make print do not attest to too many truly gifted figures who can start with blank paper and return good, completed stories.

If the critics speak rightly, Jim Lee of new comics fame has such an ability. Some observers similarly credit Todd McFarlane. John Byrne seems to have it; Jim Steranko has it; Neal Adams has it; Alan Davis has it. Not everyone, however, has it. DC and Marvel, once upon a time, imposed editorial policies compelling the division of writing and art chores on the assumption that few artists actually had it, and the premise bears scrutiny. Rob Liefeld, on the other hand, needs an editor. His Captain America with Leob enjoyed considerably more overall balance than his Youngblood work, showing the benefit of writers and editors, applied as needed to talent that requires guidance.

Unfortunately, the comics talent of today well remembers the conflicts between talent and editors that led to catastrophes like the departure of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko from Marvel Comics. Artists desire the editorial freedom inherent in the "creator" status regardless, it seems, of the quality of the result. Such a posture makes sense when one cartoons for one's own enjoyment; it makes rather less sense when a creator attempts to sell substandard stories to readers who may be looking for something better.

Sometimes, however, one artist will do best to specialize. Some individuals seem born to ink, like Terry Austin. Others do well as pencilers but fail as inkers; some can bring art from blank page to camera-ready product. Some talent can write but can't draw. Some few can do all of these things. Vanity may compel an artist to accept the mantle of "creator" in order to join the illuminati of his trade and arrogate to himself abilities he may actually lack altogether.

In the end, the creator system can establish an adversarial relationship between ego and quality, and quality does not always win.

Post Mortem

The whole business of the "New Comics" meant, with its inception, to create a new editorial model where talent need not suffer the whims of corporate shills whose ill-considered innovations compromised quality, alienated writers and artists, and ultimately even hindered the all-important financial returns of the very materials their meddling purported to promote.

High ideals dragged young talent away from the womblike offices of the grayheaded publishers that made such excellent targets for parody. The new order promised an ability to take the comics form to new heights, but the output of the newer, smaller companies never really published material that pushed the medium anywhere but towards a lowering of taste and a dulling of sensitivities.

Readers did not get a new generation of Eisners or Kirbys out of the new comics revolution. It failed to bring about even the limited enduring success of creations of the alternative press movments, like Rocketeer and Nexus; it discovered few celebrities and offered innovation mainly in the printing technology, coloring and lettering processes.

Out here in the trenches, where people read comics instead of create them, we got faddish and disposable material that would show up in quarter bins or bundled in packages at the nearest dollar store. What we got included shallowness, cliches, and pandering to puerile tastes.

And, while the new comics did much in the way of lowering standards, the real talent, which could always cross between the markets of "new" and "mainstream" comics, brought about works of increasing depth, such as the collaborative works of Mark Waid and Alex Ross in pieces like Marvels and Kingdom Come.