Spirit of '86
Ah, nostalgia. The sweet, heady aroma of that which mines our youth in an attempt to sell us what we’ve already tasted. How it drifts on the air like popcorn or cotton candy, or the song of distant carousels. How vulnerable we are to its wiles, as our once-youth begins to sag a little more around the middle, our joints creak and we gradually become more embittered and quite frankly, old.
It’s unfair, unsporting, cheating, even. How can we be expected to resist the siren call of that which entertained us in our youth? We cannot. We must inevitably give in, rush out and buy armfuls of comics based on characters who speak of our youth.
At least that’s what the nostalgia books would have us do. We all know their names, so let’s not repeat them, shall we? Oh, all right. But this once and once only. GI Joe, Thundercats, Battle of the Planets, Micronauts, Transformers and a few others that I’m sure that I’m missing somehow. I know, how could I call myself “geek” and not be able to rattle off all these from the top of my head? I, who came of age during the 80s, from whence all these (okay, Battle of the Planets is 70s, as is Micronauts, technically) franchises were born? “How?” you ask.
Lemme get back to you on that, though I’m sure that some of you suspect the answer already.
When people talk about nostalgia books today, I can’t help but not think of all of those franchises. Most of them were derived from cartoons that weren’t all that good to begin with. Oh, put the knives back. Really. They weren’t that good. Those few that actually had comics based on the shows weren’t all that good either. The Micronauts might be the sole exception in my book, but that’s another column altogether. The above aren’t really nostalgia books, they’re franchises. Different beast.
I’m sure that my idea of 80s books and your idea of 80s books don’t necessarily overlap. That’s okay, we’ll both survive quite well, I’m sure. When someone says they’re nostalgic for the 80s, they tend to mean one of the above properties, maybe even all of them. When I say that I’m nostalgic for the 80s, it’s for stuff like the following. Please hold all comments to the end of the lecture.
More than two companies putting stuff on the stands.
Anyone remember Comico? How about First Comics? Pacific? Eclipse? Dark Horse was a mere fledgling, but the others were putting out entire lines of super-hero and non-super-hero books, a lot of them quite good and still stand up today. Yeah, sure DC and Marvel were responsible for most of the comics out there, but there were a bunch of upstarts that were determined to add to the mix.
A mad Englishman running amok.
That’s right. There was a time when the name “Alan Moore” wasn’t spoken in hushed and reverential tones. It was more like “HOLY CRAP! THIS ALAN MOORE GUY IS INSANE! Did you see what he did in Swamp Thing this month?” Back then, he was simply Alan Moore, guy who writes great comics. You knew that all this work was special, but you didn’t know where it was going to lead to. Absolutely no idea. And those first issues of Watchmen. Now that was a mind-blower. Imagine reading those back before it was known as “Watchmen, the greatest superhero comic of all time.” It was simply Watchmen, that comic with the funny covers that you have to read twice to know what the hell is going on. I actually read the first issue and gave up on it until I was able to sit down with the first three and absorb those. Then it made some sense and I was utterly hooked. And then there’s this superhero strip that he does called “Miracleman,” that very few people cared about back then.
Cheap comics.
Damn cheap. Yeah sure, the paper wasn’t so good. The color was cheap process color with big ‘ol dots in it the size of bloated fleas. The blacks weren’t ever completely black, but often a muddy brown, particularly where they had to overprint color. But you know what? You could buy SIX of them for the cost of one now. Yeah, those days are long gone, folks.
Reprint comics.
Yep. Marvel used to pad their line with titles like Marvel Tales, Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Super Action, Marvel Triple Action, and Amazing Adventures, all of which reprinted various classic Marvel books in full color. There’s a reason why they’re referred to as ‘classic.’ Yeah, sometimes they’re corny and the stories don’t stand up to close scrutiny, but gawd, the storytelling at work on the page was unfreakingbeatable. And where else were you going to get classic Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko or John Romita or John Buscema artwork for the price of a new comic? Reprints, man. Too bad Marvel seems to be afraid of its own (if I might use the overblown term) cultural legacy and the boogeyman of continuity. Those were great stories, and made for a heck of a way to crowd out the competition on the newsstand or spinner rack.
Genre diversity.
True, that by ’86, a lot of the genre diversity had gone from comics, at least the mainstream stuff. Superheroes were truly ascendant, but even back then you still had nods to straight science-fiction and could get a hold of plentiful and cheap horror comics (the quarter bins were your friend.) But really by then, it was tights from the big two.
Now, you say, “Gee, Matt, but aren’t you bitter and hard to please?” I’ll be the first to admit that the above might be true. But I’ll also point out a few things to let you all bask in the sunshine that is my hope for current comics.
We have a bunch of companies putting out books.
And more every day. True, connecting with some of the good stuff is difficult, but not so hard as it used to be. Remember, back then, the direct market was still floundering a little bit and you could only get Big 2 comics in the drugstore/7-11. There’s easily a couple hundred companies publishing comics these days, granted that some of those are small enough to be run out of the trunk of a Volkswagen, but they’re still doing it.
Lots of madmen running amok.
Writers and artists are able to do things that they couldn’t have DREAMED of getting away with back in the day. True, authors like Steve Gerber were able to slip some INCREDIBLY subversive content into their work, but a lot of that was on the sly. Yeah, Jim Starlin blew my mind with the Adam Warlock reprints that I tracked down in the early 80s, but even the cosmic insanity of that pales in comparison to the work of authors like Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Jamie Delano and that Alan Moore guy.
Spendy comics.
Okay, so the prices today aren’t so hot. I can’t argue that point with you. You’re getting paper and color and quality that wasn’t possible back then (with the exception of stuff like Heavy Metal, maybe). Yeah, we’re paying through the nose, but that’s part of getting specialty publications. And make no mistake, comics are a specialty/niche publication these days.
Trades.
No cheap reprint comics, but we do get trades. Sometimes we don’t always get what we want with them. No argument there. The practice of collecting comics is imperfect, but it’s a start. I can hope that one day we’ll all have access to material in trades that would be prohibitively expensive to track down in original form.
Genre diversity.
Which we actually have a lot more of these days than we did, say, ten years ago. It might not be enough to satisfy some folks. But then some people wouldn’t be happy unless every single pair of tights, every single cape had been rounded up and burned in a toxic bonfire. Superheroes still hold the lion’s share of the market, to be sure, but even the biggest companies are realizing that they can’t live on superheroes alone, particularly if they want to move into bookstores or alternate distribution channels.
So, what I’m saying, in an incredibly long and roundabout way, is that we don’t need nostalgia books. Even the things that I’m nostalgic for (and I’m as bitter and curmudgeonly as they come) are things that we can find in comics today. Okay, so we have to pay top dollar for ‘em, but that means you should just be choosy about what you buy, and not buy something just ‘cause you’ve been buying it for the last 200 issues and it hasn’t gotten any better. To hell with nostalgia. Get out there and try something new. Enjoy comics today for what they’re able to do today, and not from mining your childhood for recognizable properties, polishing them up and putting them in slabs.