FROM SUPERMAN TO SUPERSALES:
Doug Adams Helps Explain the Social and Financial
Impact of Comic Books

by Adam Watson
(1997)

    There was a time, not long ago, that collecting and reading comic books was something akin to wetting your bed past the age of three--something best left secret and unspoken, a childish pursuit that with any luck would soon end and be forgotten by the passage into adulthood. Comic books, and their fans, were probably only second to Trekkies (the passionate aficionados of Star Trek) in public ridicule. Worse, the artists and writers of these multi-panel picture pages were often viewed as the bottom of the creative professional barrel. Few gave comics the respect to be judged with the same criticism that other "art" is critiqued.
    But times, they are a-changin'. Over the course of three decades Star Trek has become a multiverse of several television series, a movie franchise, and a publishing empire;  it has outlasted most of its critics and outsold most of its competition.  Likewise, comic books have recently exploded into the popular culture of America. Although they have always been a pervasive element in the pop scene, the difference in the last few years has been the general acceptance of legitimacy by the elite who used to claim that comics were just for kids. The wealth and influence that the comics industry now has delights some and worries others. What is the history of this unique storytelling, mostly full of men in colored underwear? And how is the present state of comics better, the same, or worse than the past? In order to help answer both questions, especially for current reflection on the phenomena, I chose to interview Doug Adams, manager of the aptly-named store Comic Book World.

    Before I begin, it would be helpful to briefly summarize the origin of this relatively modern and American literary invention. Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, defined comics as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer"; more simply put, he called comics "sequential art"(9). It is important to note that this definition also covers comic strips as well. In fact, the first comic "book," The Yellow Kid in Mcfadden Flats (published in 1897), was just a reprint of previous newspaper comic strips in a book format. However, the first comic published in the standard seven inches by ten inches size and format was Funnies on Parade, in 1933, as part of a giveaway promotion by Proctor and Gamble (McLauchlin 12). Like The Yellow Kid, it also contained reprint material. When publishers realized that people were willing to pay for these comic books, publishers complied, and books containing original comics soon followed. But there were still no caped crusaders; as hard as it might be to believe, no one felt that guys in tights, with superhuman or alien powers, had appeal. No one, that is, until Superman, an alien from Krypton created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, first seen in Action Comics #1 and published by DC Comics in 1938 (Daniels 22). It was his name that gave birth to the idea of super heroes. But Superman's pious perfection needed a counterbalance; in 1939, DC Comics struck lightning again with Batman (created by Bob Kane), a "dark knight" vigilante, first seen in Detective Comics #27 (Daniels 22). Thus, in the course of a year, DC began the legacy of the costumed crimefighter, and the Golden Age of comics was born.

    Appropriately enough, Batman's bat symbol and Superman's famous "S" were on the window signs for Comic Book World, one of the first things I noticed as I drove up to it. Off Old Shepherdsville Road, the store stands in contrast to the rest of the strip mall it is connected to, sharing the lot with a laundry, hair salon and bar. White and shiny from the outside, the store seems to call out to strangers to come in and stay for a while.
    I walked in. Although I haven't bought comics in a long time, I had been inside Comic Book World before with friends, and it was as I remembered: quiet inside, like a library, with a few customers--all twentysomething boys--silently perusing the inventory. To the left of the entrance were role-playing games, trading cards, models, fantasy and sci-fi novels and toys, but dominating the store were the comic books. Against three walls, on newsstand-like vertical shelves, were the current comics. Long horizontal boxes on tables in the middle held back issues.
    Doug Adams was behind the counter and greeted me with a smile as I introduced myself. He had an approachability with no pretensions that I instantly liked. His grey, thinning hair and mustache made him look a little older than the late-fortyish years he might otherwise appear. He wore eyeglasses, a black satin baseball-style jacket (buttoned all the way up), and blue jeans. Adams apparently did not need a nametag: everyone who comes in knows him. But it was his voice that gave away his management skills and his friendliness--it was clear, deep, and confident. He seemed eager and prepared to be interviewed. "We'll go back here in the stock room," Adams said. We went to the back, where an old desk and two chairs fought space with boxes and office supplies, and began.
Adams has been actively involved in comics on the retail level for twenty years. He had worked as a manager and foreman at a corporate job for fifteen years, while part-timing as a collector/retailer--he helped open up The Great Escape, an older comic shop that is Comic Book World's only local competition in the direct market. Then, the corporate company planned to move. Adams could have moved to any one of seventy warehouses across the country, but he chose to do something different, and became the manager of Comic Book World when it opened in 1991. Besides Adams, the store has one part-time and three full-time employees. He works at least fifty hours a week, off on Sundays and Mondays. Adams says that the busiest day is Wednesday, the day of the week when new comic books come out.
    Getting more personal, I told him I supposed he read comics a lot when he was younger.
    "I can never remember a time when I didn't have a comic book in my hand," Adams remarked. "There were always comics around. Just kind of passed down from one person to the other. And since everybody knew that I liked comics, I got all the older kids' comics from the 50's on, so [as] I grew up . . . it was like there was always a comic there."

    "How big is your comic book collection?" I asked.

    "Well . . . I'd rather people not know, to tell you the truth."

    "But . . . it's big?" I pressed.

Adams smiled cryptically. "It's huge."

    When Adams was a child, huge was not a word to describe the burgeoning comics industry, but it was growing. The comics he read were also much tamer and simpler. In the 1940's, World War II gave rise to patriotic super heroes like Marvel Comics's Captain America; everyone with a costume was beating up Nazis and "Japs." But the popularity of super heroes waned with the end of World War II, and for a brief time romance, western, horror and funny animal comics dominated. The Korean War gave rise to war comics, and super heroes briefly returned to the forefront (Daniels 55-71). In the 1950's, however, McCarthyism and anti-Communist propaganda created a fearful social climate where Cold War Americans looked for simplistic solutions to complex problems. It was in this environment that Dr. Frederick Wertham became the new, deadly enemy to super heroes everywhere.
    Dr. Wertham, a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of disturbed children and juvenile delinquency, wrote Seduction of the Innocent in 1954. In the book, and the series of lectures and articles that followed, Wertham claimed comics encouraged children to commit crimes and immoral acts (Daniels 71). His "scientific proof" was ambiguous at best, laughable at worst. He claimed that Batman and his teenage sidekick Robin promoted homosexuality and pedophilia, and that certain comics had hidden pictures of genitalia: "There are pictures within pictures for children who know how to look (qtd. in Daniels 72)." Nevertheless, Wertham started a furor that created a Senate subcommittee with public hearings decrying the "evil" of comics. Faced with the possibility of government regulation, comic book publishers created the Comics Code Authority in 1955 to self-censor themselves. The result was almost a decade of unimaginative and unoriginal stories, bland to avoid controversy (Daniels 73-74).
    It was Marvel Comics that trailblazed a new path and started the so-called Silver Age. In 1961, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Marvel's The Fantastic Four. The Fantastic Four was a super hero team, which had been done before, but what was unique was that they had distinct personalities, and talked, acted, and even bickered like real people (Daniels 84-85). But the most popular and endearing Marvel character was Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man, first seen in Amazing Fantasy #15, published in August, 1962 (Daniels 94). Peter Parker, the teenage boy bit by a radioactive spider, was "neurotic, compulsive and profoundly skeptical . . . of becoming a costumed savior" (Daniels 95). He sometimes doubted himself and had a self-depreciating sense of humor. Peter Parker had a life besides being Spider-Man. This sense of realism was radical at the time, but started a style of characterization in comics which continues to the present day.

    Spider-Man's skepticism and sense of humor may have prepared Adams in his youth for the roller-coaster retail world of comic books. Adams certainly chose to work in an industry that has had its highs and lows. The estimated total retail sale of comic books in 1996 was $450 million, compared to $350 million in 1991 and $850 million in 1993 (Pearson 12). Direct market stores, like Comic Book World, account for approximately seventy-five to eighty percent of the sales; there are more than 4,500 comic book stores in the country (Pearson 20). Although Adams feels that "you [can't] put a typical customer to it anymore. . . . I have people who come in . . . from seven years old to seventy years old," one statistic puts the average age at 26 (Pearson 10). The gender makeup of customers--ninety-four percent male, six percent female (Pearson 10)--does match Adams's personal observation that his regulars are "unfortunately ninety percent male." When asked if the eccentric "fanboys" (fanatical readers of comics--male and "geeky"-- who retain a knowledge of characters and plot twists with almost soap-operish devotion) are a fair stereotype of all comic readers, Adams explained that they are the minority, and only noticed because of their outgoingness. I tried to press for any specific examples or anecdotes about fanboy customers, but admiringly, he said although he had his share, "I'm not going to talk about it. My deal is . . . just to sell comic books, not put anybody down."
As a creative and financial force to be reckoned with, comics today are en vogue. Adams believes that:

"[C]omics are [now] considered a form of entertainment . . . if something happens in comics, you see it on CNN. You see it on Entertainment Tonight. You read about it in USA Today. You read about it in People magazine. You read about it in Entertainment Weekly. Because it's entertainment. . . . when Superman gets married. When Superman changes his costume. When Batman breaks his back, etc., etc., etc. . . . [Comic book] companies would send out press releases in the past and they were always ignored. But now when they send out a press release it actually gets reported on the news."

Any reason why? "Well, I think the whole industry has grown up as a whole. And I think with the advent of the super hero movies--when they did the Batman and Superman stuff--it did make everyone more aware--that comics are basically no longer aimed at a younger audience as they were in the past. . . . So comics are very diverse nowadays."
    Comic characters nowadays are also everywhere you turn. Many people that have never read or would never read a comic book have probably seen one of the Batman movies; the X-men is one of the most popular Saturday morning cartoon shows; comics-inspired toys and merchandising abound. Some fear a glut of product and presence. When asked about if he was anxious about this possible overexposure, Adams said no. "I think it can only be good for the industry. What do some actors say? Any news about them is good--"

    "Bad publicity is better than no publicity at all." I offered.

    "Yeah. I mean, at least their name is out there. I feel the same way. You know, as long as the name of the X-men, Spider-Man, Batman is out there--how can it hurt? It can't."

    The current popularity of comics has created a collector's market, with speculators buying comics not for their readability and skilled artwork, but for their net worth and investment potential. One of the things publishers did to meet this demand was create the "gimmick cover": covers made of foil, alternative artwork covers, holographic covers, ad nauseam. Even though Adams stands to gain from the possibility of more sold product, he frowns on the idea. When it first happened, it was "neat," Adams said, but it soon became common and lost its uniqueness. It ended up turning people off. Comic Book World uses the "variant cover" comic as a sales tool to sell all of the various cover versions together in one package, for one price. "Where most places, when they get this special cover, take it and turn around and sell it for more than the cover price . . . well," Adams noted proudly, "we don't do that here."
    The craze of current collectibility may have started from one of the greatest media events of 1992--the Death of Superman. DC Comics received unprecedented news coverage--and death threats themselves--for "killing off" the American icon, who (of course) came back to life the following year. I asked Adams to describe the day it went on sale at Comic Book World.

"We had a line outside the door. Everybody couldn't get in at one time. . . .We couldn't get enough of [the issue] even though we tried ordering enough.. . . DC couldn't produce enough of . . . the black bag issue [packaged with a black armband] . . . so you couldn't get everything that you had ordered. So it was a madhouse in here--people were just literally almost knocking each other over trying to get stuff. . . . We heard [people] on the news later say, '[I'm] going to put my kids through medical school with the books I bought today.'"

    For the record, the "black bag" version is now worth about $25.00 in mint condition. Hardly
enough for a Harvard education.
    There were many fans who felt cynical about the money-driven merchandising plot by DC. Adams agreed, stressing he tried to make sure his regular customers weren't "screwed" out of getting the "Death" issue by zealous collectors. In response to those who felt betrayed at the plot twist, and are angry about the current marketing gimmick, Superman's change of costume, Adams expressed that they are taking the storylines too seriously. "I look at it no matter what [creators] do in comics it's all short term . . . [I know] that they make more money off of licensing Superman's image as opposed to making money off the comics--there is no way in hell that they are going to change [the costume permanently]. They can't."

    But change is inevitable in the themes and material of comic book stories. As the industry entered the Modern Age of the late 1960's and the 1970's, the artists of the day began pushing the envelope of the "kiddie" tales comics were supposedly meant to tell. Slowly (and against the "rules" set by the Comic Code Authority), graphic violence, profanity, drug use, sexuality and even nudity became more common in comics, mirroring the acceptance of the same in society. Marvel and DC began pushing the envelope of the Comic Code Authority, and independent publishers, rising in popularity and influence, ignored the CCA altogether (Daniels 152-154).
    In 1974, a new Marvel character called the Punisher debuted. This character did not have any special powers; he only owned a multitude of guns and knew martial arts. The Punisher was different because he did not reason with criminals, or bring them to the police--he simply killed them. By 1987, he had his own comic book, and the violent (and often criticized) "big-gun" anti-hero became the popular norm (Daniels 164). Only recently have the abundance of these type of characters abated somewhat, but there are many fans and non-fans alike who still argue which is better: the vigilante who kills the villain to stop him from ever harming others, or the "old school" hero that takes the bad guy to the cops--knowing there is a chance the villain will kill or harm again.
    These so-called realistic characters and stories are a source of concern for some. The debate between the powers-that-be over what is politically correct, or what is possibly harmful to children's "family values," extends not only to comics, but music, movies, television, and video games as well. I was curious about Adams's views on the social impact of comics. In terms of comics meant for mature audiences, what does Comic Book World do to protect children? Do they card someone to prove their age, just like you would for cigarettes and alcohol?
    "Definitely. You better believe it. Absolutely." Adams assured. "We check every book that comes into the store. We check for nudity [and] inappropriate language. We bag it, we tag it with adult tags. And, if I don't know you, if you look young--I don't care if you're 30 years old and you look 16--I'm going to ask for an I.D. Because somebody will lose their job here if they don't." Unlike television, Adams feels that a ratings system would not work for comics: "I think that would actually draw attention to it more than what it is already." The adult comics are also put on the top shelf, which is over six feet tall. "So a kid that comes in here that is six, seven, ten, twelve years old is not going to be able to reach those books. And if we catch them trying, we stop them."
    I asked what Adams would say to a parent who wanted to argue that comics glorify violence or increase the stereotypes of male chauvinism. Adams countered:

"I'd say that they don't read a lot of comics. I'd say they see whatever their kid brings in, but that's not true in comics. Because of their diversity now. You have a lot of women in comics that are positive role models. You know, Storm is a black woman in the X-Men. . . . Sure there are violent comics. Comics are violent. Comics reflect the times. Turn on the TV. Watch the news. What do you see on the news? Comics are nothing more than what's going on in society today. And they've always been like that."

When asked if there are more minorities and women as professionals in the comics industry compared to the white, male dominance of the past, Adams replied that it is better now. There are a few independent publishers with only black artists and writers; manga, a genre of comics created by Japanese talent, is influential; women, like Colleen Doran, have received critical acclaim for their work in comics. But he also added his reflection on the equality of comics:

"A lot of times, you don't know if the creator is a minority--you see a name, but you don't have a picture to go along with that name. You don't know if they are white, black, male, female, red, yellow, green. And who cares? As long as it's well-drawn and well-written--who cares who's it. I don't care. And I don't think people do either as long as they like what they're getting."

    Diversity, like Adams says, seems to be the strength of comics today. Independent publishers compete with Marvel and DC and sometimes outsell them. The subjects of comics range from real-life autobiographies to erotic sexcapades to, yes, costumed crusaders. Yet some long for the simple and naive "good guy" heroes who talked and thought their way out of trouble instead of shooting everyone in sight. When I asked Adams how comics today compared to the Golden and Silver Age adventures of yesteryear, I stumped him for the first time in the interview. Pausing for a moment, he finally answered:

"It just depends on how you feel about them. I know a lot of the older readers who . . . like that nostalgia feeling that they got from the simpler types of comics years ago. Personally, I like the fact that comics are changing. That you can get these great stories, great artists, great writers on stuff and it's almost like watching a movie in the comics. And that's what comics are--comics are just like watching movies."

    With the advent of alternate media, like video games, the Internet, and CD-ROM, what does Adams think about the future of the industry, and of the comic book itself?
    Some predict its doom, Adams notes. For instance, sales are affected by the popularity of video games. But optimistically, he believes that:

"[I]t's a format that's going to stay around . . . [b]ut you'll have a lot of competition with maybe comics on the Net. You know, we're already starting to see some of that. But that's only available to people who are on the Net. . . . [On the other hand,] you can go to any one of 5,000 comic book stores across the country and you don't have to do anything more special than walk in the door [to] be able to get [a comic]."

As Adams also points out, reading a comic book has intrinsic value in the act itself. He believes comics as we know them will continue to exist alongside the new media, and he made an interesting comparison. "Look at the CD as opposed to vinyl. Vinyl is making a comeback. People said vinyl was dead. It almost was. Now, it's actually coming back. They are making more record players last year than in the last five years."

    The half hour interview had passed in what felt like a few minutes. I posed a last question to him.

    "If you had to have one super power, what would that super power be?"

    "Gee!" Adams said sarcastically, laughing.

    "I know it's a cliche, but..."

    "Hell, I don't know." He laughed again. "I never thought about it." Taking a breath, he finally answered, "I would like the super power to have every book that's ever been published. Since I'm a collector. And I get 'em because I like comics. I like collecting the comics. I don't get 'em to sell. Just to turn around and try to make money off them. I've never done that. I get them because I like to get them and read them."

    It was the type of answer I should have expected out of Doug Adams, and one that had a good point. If a manager of a store that earns its livelihood selling comics believes there is more to comics than a profit report, all of us should take heed. The super hero may make publishers money, but he or she can also make political statements, protect the meek, move the reader, and yes, entertain us. Comic art has been part of prestigious expositions in national museums, and comic books have won "serious" literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize (Art Spiegelman's Maus, in 1992). Do not be deceived by the occasional long underwear and cape: the comic book can be for adults and children; drawn with artistic talent and written like a classic novel, or simply be escapist and frivolous fluff; capitalistic, yet for the common man; a search for heroes, hope, and justice amid evil and despair. Comic books deserve to be treated like other forms of great art. They deeply reflect what it means to be human . . . and sometimes, superhuman.

Comic Book World is located at 6905 Shepherdsville Road, in Lousville, Kentucky.  Go to the website, at www.comicbookworld.com.

WORKS CITED

Daniels, Les. Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

McLauchlin, Jim. "Magic Words." Wizard Jan. 1997: 12.

Pearson, Lars and John Jackson Miller. "State of the Industry 1996." Comic Buyer's Guide 1997 Annual. Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1996. 10+.

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