THE GREATEST BLOG POST EVER WRITTEN! AN ANALYSIS FOR THE AGES!

Mere moments ago I finished an article for MonkeyTossTV that was a broader, more common sense version of all those silly “Why don’t girls read comics?” articles. Short answer: SHUT UP, THEY ALREADY DO, MANGA COUNTS.

However, in my modicum of research I came across a quote from writer Sean McKeever about how such little promotion goes into a new comic book.

“We put out these new series with new creations and do little more than hype the first issue in the catalogs, show a preview online and do a few interviews. Really, to me, a big part of the reason new characters tend not to 'stick' in comics is because there's no excitement built around them.”

This is what we must do in the modern age with our Internets and skywriting technology. Good thing we’re trying to save the trees. More objects to staple fliers to.

Still, we can learn from the past here -- back when comics were available in all sorts of stores and mostly read by kids and college kids on drugs.

Reading McKeever’s quote my mind immediately went to the old cavalier pop art 1960s Marvel Comics, where Stan Lee came up with a million half-baked ideas in the span of a month and a cabal of artists like Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Steranko, and Everett would fully bake the ideas before Stan the Man came back to slather on icing in the form of dialogue.

But I’m not looking at the Marvel Age of Comics as a lesson in efficient comic production. I just want to look at the covers.

I dunno what happened in the last decade, but comics stopped having words on the covers. For a while, if you checked Marvel’s submission page under “Cover Artists,” you’d see that they favored generic, iconic depictions of their characters as opposed to any plot detail. This sadly missing element might be the key to why comics sell less these days. When comic book covers were terse, it meant shit was SERIOUS.


Let’s start with Fantastic Four #41:


Look at that. Better yet, read it: “Possibly the Most Daringly Dramatic Development in the Field of Contemporary Literature!”

Oh my god, this must be the important issue of Fantastic Four EVER. I immediately want to read this not only because I want -- nay, NEED to find out why Ben Grimm has betrayed Marvel’s First Family, but also because the comic claims to revolutionize modern literature.

Try #32:


“NEVER BEFORE SUCH DARING DRAMA… SUCH RAW REALISM!” It praises itself!

Enough Fantastic Four. Let’s look at Amazing Spider-Man #16:


Amazing Spider-Man #16 REFUSES TO BE YOUR FRIEND if you don’t like it. It dares you to dislike it. It spits in your general direction because it knows it’s brilliant.

I don’t care if we’re talking superhero comics or Drawn & Quarterly self-flagellating autobio bullshit about buying records. Let’s forget that comics are neither irrelevant power fantasy pap nor legitimate, introspective literature and just TELL people that these stories are going to permanently damage your senses (“Senses Shattering FIRST ISSUE!”). In the good way, of course.

Because that’s what POP does. It insists on itself.

And let’s not forget, for a brief period in 1965 Marvel Comics rebranded itself as “Marvel Pop Art Productions.”