American comic book

• 1. Introduction

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  American comic books are thin, stapled periodicals that launched one of the most influential popular art forms of the twentieth century. In June 1938, a character named Superman appeared on the cover of Action Comics #1, and within a few years the superhero would reshape entertainment, commerce, and culture in ways no one had fully anticipated. How did a promotional giveaway printed for Procter and Gamble soap coupons become the seed of a billion-dollar medium? And what does it mean that, at the peak of the industry in 1952, roughly one billion individual comic books were printed in a single year? Those questions run through the history of the American comic book, from its origins in newspaper reprints to its transformation into a contested art form. Along the way, a psychiatrist published a book that triggered Senate hearings. Publishers burned their own product to survive. And two creators named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster quietly introduced Superman years before anyone knew what to do with him.

• 2. Newspapers to Newsstands

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  The G. W. Dillingham Company published the first known proto-comic-book magazine in the United States in 1897. That publication, The Yellow Kid in McFadden's Flats, reprinted Richard F. Outcault's newspaper strip Hogan's Alley and ran to 196 square-bound black-and-white pages, selling for 50 cents. Notably, the neologism "comic book" appears on its back cover, suggesting the term was already in circulation before the medium it named had fully taken shape.

  The more direct ancestor of the modern comic book arrived in 1933. Maxwell Gaines, Harry I. Wildenberg, and George Janosik of Eastern Color Printing in Waterbury, Connecticut, needed a way to keep their presses running during slow periods. They produced Funnies on Parade, a free promotional item mailed to consumers who clipped coupons from Procter and Gamble products. The 10,000-copy initial run reprinted licensed comic strips, including Al Smith's Mutt and Jeff and Percy Crosby's Skippy. The promotion worked well enough that Eastern Color quickly produced similar items for Canada Dry, Kinney Shoes, and Wheatena cereal, with print runs climbing to between 100,000 and 250,000 copies.

  Later that same year, Gaines and Wildenberg collaborated with Dell to publish Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, a 36-page collection distributed through the Woolworth's department-store chain. Historians consider it the first true American comic book. When Dell declined to continue, Eastern Color published Famous Funnies #1 with a cover date of July 1934, pricing it at 10 cents and printing 200,000 copies. It sold 90 percent of that run during the depths of the Great Depression, though at first it put Eastern Color more than $4,000 in the red. By issue 12, the title was turning a $30,000 profit per issue. Famous Funnies would eventually run 218 issues and inspire a wave of imitators across the country.

• 3. Superman and the Golden Age

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  Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster first appeared in a comic book not as Superman's creators but under pseudonyms. In New Fun #6, published in October 1935, the two used the names "Leger and Reuths" to write and draw Doctor Occult, a supernatural-crimefighter adventure. They had already contributed "Henri Duval", a musketeer swashbuckler, in the earlier issues of that same title. Their alien hero with the cape and colorful tights was still waiting in a slush pile.

  In 1938, National Allied editor Vin Sullivan pulled the Superman feature from that pile and used it as the cover feature of Action Comics #1, dated June 1938. Superman's costume drew on Flash Gordon's attire from 1934 and evoked circus aerial performers and strongmen. The character became an immediate sensation and prompted editors at National Comics Publications to request more superheroes. Bob Kane and Bill Finger answered that request with Batman, debuting in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939.

  The era that followed, from the late 1930s through roughly the end of the 1940s, is called the Golden Age of comic books. Action Comics and Captain Marvel each sold over half a million copies a month. In the early 1940s, over 90 percent of children between the ages of seven and seventeen read comic books. In 1941, H. G. Peter and William Moulton Marston introduced Wonder Woman, who debuted in All Star Comics #8 in December 1941. A genre anthology called Pep Comics introduced a teen-humor feature called Archie in 1942, and the character's popularity eventually led the publisher to rename itself Archie Comics. By 1952, the peak year for the industry, 3,161 individual issues were published with a combined circulation of roughly one billion copies.

• 4. The Comics Code

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  Public burnings of comic books took place in Spencer, West Virginia and Binghamton, New York in 1948, drawing national attention and triggering similar events at schools and parent groups across the country. The content that provoked those reactions was horror and true-crime comics from the late 1940s and early 1950s, which contained graphic violence and gore. Moral crusaders blamed comic books for poor grades, juvenile delinquency, and drug abuse among young readers.

  In 1954, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, singling out EC Comics as a prime offender and arguing that horror comics carried sadistic undertones while superhero comics carried homosexual ones. That same year, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on comic book indecency running from April to June. In response, a group of publishers led by National and Archie founded the Comics Code Authority and drafted the Comics Code, described at the time as "the most stringent code in existence for any communications media". A Comics Code Seal of Approval soon appeared on virtually every newsstand comic.

  EC Comics, the prime target of the new code, stopped publishing crime and horror titles entirely, since those genres were its entire business. The company pivoted to magazine publishing, converting its satirical title Mad to a magazine format specifically to sidestep the Code's reach. The broader industry contracted sharply: while there was only a 9 percent drop in releases between 1952 and 1953, circulation fell by an estimated 30-40 percent. By 1960, output had stabilized at around 1,500 releases per year, representing more than a 50 percent decline from the 1952 peak. Of the 40 publishers active in 1954, only Dell, Atlas (later Marvel), DC, and Archie remained major players in volume of sales.

• 5. Marvel, Realism, and the Silver Age

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  DC launched the Silver Age in October 1956 by reviving The Flash in Showcase #4. That Flash did not succeed immediately. It took two years for the character to receive his own title, and Showcase itself was published only bimonthly. By 1959, competitors had noticed the slowly building superhero revival. Archie entered the superhero market that year, and Charlton joined in 1960.

  The sharper shift came from Atlas, which renamed itself Marvel Comics. In 1961, publisher Martin Goodman, reacting to strong sales of DC's Justice League of America title, instructed writer and editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby to create a superhero team. The result was Fantastic Four #1, which introduced heroes with human failings, anxieties, and personal conflicts. Characters argued with each other and worried about paying rent. Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four were all part of this new style, which found a strong audience among teenagers and college students.

  Marvel's creative constraints during this period were, paradoxically, an advantage. From 1957 until 1968, Marvel distributed its books through its rival National, which restricted Marvel to publishing only eight titles a month. That limitation forced the company to concentrate its best talent on a small number of books at a time when DC was spreading creative resources thinly across many titles. The quality gap contributed directly to Marvel's sales growth. Dynamic artwork from Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Don Heck complemented Lee's prose style in a way that proved difficult for rivals to match. In the 1960s, DC and then Marvel also restored the practice of crediting individual writers and artists in their books, a custom that had all but disappeared during the 1940s and 1950s.

• 6. Underground and Independent Voices

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  Frank Stack published The Adventures of Jesus in 1962, years before the underground comix movement had a name. His work represented a trickle that became a wave when Robert Crumb's Zap Comix appeared in 1968. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were recurring subjects, and the work was largely distributed through the head shops that proliferated in the countercultural era. Publishers including Print Mint, Kitchen Sink, Last Gasp, and Apex Novelties brought multiple creators into print.

  Legal and material pressures curtailed the movement relatively quickly. Underground comix output peaked in 1972. Anti-paraphernalia laws passed in 1974 led to the closing of most head shops, which cut off the primary distribution channel. As the hippie movement faded through the mid-1970s, so did the readership that had sustained the scene.

  The growth of comic specialty stores opened a different path for independent work. Beginning in the mid-1970s, these stores enabled several waves of independently produced comics. Early examples such as Big Apple Comix continued in the tradition of the underground scene, while others, such as Star Reach, resembled mainstream publishers in format but were produced by smaller artist-owned ventures. In the 1980s, a "minicomics" form of informal self-publishing developed and grew through the 1990s. Diamond Comic Distributors, the largest wholesale distributor in the United States, served as the main channel between publishers and the specialty retail stores that had become the industry's primary commercial venue.

• 7. Darkness, the Direct Market, and Legacy

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  Two DC series published in the mid-to-late 1980s altered the direction of mainstream American comics. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen drew mainstream media attention and critical acclaim, and their popularity combined with shifting social tastes to push the industry toward a considerably darker tone through the 1990s, a period fans nicknamed the "grim-and-gritty" era. Antiheroes like Wolverine and the Punisher became emblematic of that shift. DC's heavily promoted story "A Death in the Family" had the Joker murder Batman's sidekick Robin; Marvel's X-Men books took on storylines about the genocide of superpowered mutants, framed as allegories for religious and ethnic persecution.

  Image Comics, founded in the 1990s, joined First Comics and Dark Horse Comics as independent publishers that pushed the darker aesthetic further. At the same time, the graphic novel and the trade paperback gave comic books a format that gained acceptance in mainstream book retail and in the collections of public libraries across the United States.

  The American comic book sits alongside Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian comics as one of three major global comic book industries. Some individual issues have sold at auction for more than one million dollars, a figure that reflects how deeply collectors value the earliest entries in the medium. The specialty stores that sell those back issues, alongside plastic sleeves and cardboard backing boards for preservation, are the direct descendants of the distribution shift that began in the 1970s with the rise of the direct market, a system that first made room for the independent and alternative voices that now shape the medium alongside the superhero titles that started it all.