History of Graphic Novels: 1980's
The 1980s marked a transformative period in the history of graphic novels, characterized by a significant shift in both the content and perception of comics. During this decade, graphic novels began to enter mainstream bookstores and libraries, emerging as a legitimate format for storytelling that could encompass complex narratives and artistic styles. Notable works like Frank Miller's *Batman: The Dark Knight Returns* and Art Spiegelman's *Maus* debuted in 1986, garnering both critical acclaim and commercial success, and illustrating the changing landscape of comics from simple entertainment to serious literature.
As publishers such as RAW, Fantagraphics, and Eclipse Comics explored edgier themes and diverse voices, the graphic novel became a platform for cultural expression and political commentary. This era also witnessed the rise of alternative comics, which challenged traditional superhero narratives and embraced a variety of genres and aesthetics. Major publishers like Marvel and DC began to acknowledge the potential of graphic novels, launching their own lines that featured innovative storytelling and higher production values.
The decade's willingness to experiment with form and content not only expanded the audience for graphic novels but also laid the groundwork for future developments in the medium, establishing it as a respected art form capable of tackling profound themes and resonating with a broad spectrum of readers. Overall, the 1980s were pivotal in redefining graphic novels, cementing their place in both popular culture and literary discourse.
History of Graphic Novels: 1980's
Definition
In the 1980’s, graphic novels gradually arrived in bookstores, specialty shops, and some libraries. As popular auteurs developed ambitious stories, their burgeoning readership welcomed a new format that could better accommodate demanding works from mainstream and alternative publishers.
Introduction
By the beginning of the 1980’s, the term “graphic novel” had become a convenient euphemism that helped creators and publishers legitimize the unique aesthetics of comics art and facilitated the merchandising of relatively long and expensive texts. The 1980’s became a watershed decade, with many publishers realizing that the new format could generate both substantive sales and positive press. It is telling that Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus both appeared in 1986 to enormous critical acclaim and financial success. The public’s appreciation of comics, from superhero comic books to avant-garde works, was changing by mid-decade as readers, creators, and publishers paid more attention to long-term continuity and intricate storytelling. Old forms and genres were enthusiastically deconstructed, while bold new systems of comics syntax that could sustain more elaboration and complexity than before arose. The graphic novel market provided such texts with convenient, respectable frameworks through which the public could appreciate them.
Alternative Comics at the Forefront of the Industry
As publishers such as RAW Books, Fantagraphics Books, Aardvark-Vanaheim, Eclipse Comics, First Comics, and Comico Comics turned toward edgier subject matter than had been published previously, the nascent graphic novel market instigated a vehement campaign for cultural legitimization. The most important text to benefit from this trend is undoubtedly Spiegelman’s Maus. As an avant-garde homage to Spiegelman’s family, underground comics, and the “funny animal” milieu, the story fuses fiction, history, and design in graphic novel form, consolidating and amplifying its impact beyond the original miniature pull-out pamphlets from RAW magazine.
Throughout the 1980’s, RAW’s graphic novels increased the medium’s immediate impact as well as its legacy. RAW’s series of one-shots showcased innovative works such as Gary Panter’s Jimbo (1982), Ben Katchor’s Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (collected in 1991), Charles Burns’s Big Baby (1989-1991), and Sue Coe and Holly Metz’s How to Commit Suicide in South Africa (1983). Coe and Metz’s novel remains one of the most affecting and nightmarish sequential exercises of any period. More frenetic and ruthlessly uncompromising in its imagery than Coe’s biography of Malcolm X or her later work focusing on animal rights (Dead Meat, 1995; Sheep of Fools, 2005), How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, a composite of radical political awareness, experimental art publishing, and comic book mediation, stands as an extreme example of how completely graphic novels changed the perception of comics as “funny books.”
Fantagraphics Books pioneered multicultural comics with its collections of Love and Rockets (first published 1982-1996), created by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez. The original magazine borrowed extensively from experiments in the 1960’s underground, the 1980’s punk and new wave movements, and even Magical Realism. As fairly expensive and obscure black-and-white comics, Love and Rockets could not gain serious attention beyond local, limited fan bases. Collected as graphic novels, however, the series was able to reach a wider audience.
Similar compilation strategies informed the first collections of Dave Sim’s unique Cerebus (1977-2004) project from Aardvark-Vanaheim. The graphic novel also served as a useful form for collecting Dave Stevens’s on-again, off-again TheRocketeer back-up stories and one-shots, which were published as a collected volume in 1991. Matt Wagner’s Grendel (1983- ) and Mage: The Hero Discovered (1982-1984) received similar treatment by Comico, as did Howard Chaykin’s sexy science-fiction farce American Flagg! (1983-1988), published by First Comics.
A longtime comics iconoclast, Chaykin also embraced the new format with his Time2 graphic novels (1986, 1987), which stand among his most revealing projects. Wagner’s Mage was compiled in a number of editions, but his lesser-known work Grendel: Devil by the Deed (1986) stands as an especially elegant treatment of his signature antihero. Ironically, Wagner and Chaykin also discovered the first limitations of the graphic novel format. When smaller companies such as Eclipse Comics, Comico, and First Comics eventually failed, many of the original processing materials for American Flagg!, Time2, Grendel, and Mage were lost or put at risk. The early graphic novels that first collected these independent works had limited printings and eventually drifted into obscurity.
Years later, Chaykin’s American Flagg! and Wagner’s original Grendel stories did receive scrupulous graphic novel treatments, but neither artist enjoyed the sustained attention lavished on more mainstream practitioners such as Miller and John Byrne. Similarly, Coe’s books, like many of the RAW one-shots, remain scarce and difficult to appreciate as virtuoso relics of their times. Equally compelling is the problem of Richard and Wendy Pini’s self-published ElfQuest (1978-1985), a rollicking fantasy that garnered a cultish fan base almost from its first publication. By the early 1990’s, the series had been so overcollected and recompiled that it experienced something of a repackaging burnout.
Graphic Novels Go Mainstream
Before the 1980’s, annuals, treasuries, digests, and trade collections of superhero comics, funny animals material, and comic-strip reprints were quite familiar. Though such collections were hardly graphic novels by modern definitions, their booklike design, high page count, and generally reverential attitude toward the reprisal of previously ephemeral material lent credence to the concept of more comprehensive products.
Before the publication of Miller’s and Alan Moore’s deconstructions of the Cold War superhero in the mid-1980’s, both Marvel and DC had already initiated graphic novel imprints to test the capacities of the direct-market system. In fact, the Marvel Graphic Novel line of high-priced, slickly bound books began in 1982 with Jim Starlin’s popular Death of Captain Marvel. Soon after, Chris Claremont and Brent Anderson produced X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills (1982), a story that would influence X-Men media for decades. Marvel Comics also released graphic novels through its Epic Comics imprint.
DC Comics, on the other hand, avoided the use of high-profile characters in graphic novels until mid-decade. In 1983, it initiated a line of fantasy and science-fiction graphic novels that featured lavish stand-alone tales and avant-garde story forms. Notable installments included Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Metalzoic (1986) and Jack Kirby’s long-delayed Fourth World reprisal, The Hunger Dogs (1985). The seven-volume DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel series followed, running from 1985 to 1987, with adaptations of works by Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Frederik Pohl.
DC Comics also experimented with a compromise between traditional pamphlet comics and full-blown graphic novels: a square-bound prestige format that was longer, higher quality, and, at almost three dollars, more expensive than the average seventy-five-cent comic book. The results proved fruitful for several miniseries, especially for Miller’s four-part Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s two-part History of the DC Universe (1986), and Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke (1988). However, it was the compilation of Miller’s complete Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (1987) that cemented graphic novels as a legitimate medium. DC continued its experiments with Batman books such as Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham’s Batman: Son of the Demon (1987) and Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Batman: Arkham Asylum (1989) as well as extensions of the prestige square-bound formats in series such as Chaykin’s Blackhawk (1987) and Mike Grell’s Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters (1989).
Both major publishers developed four- and six-issue miniseries and twelve-issue maxiseries throughout the 1980’s, planning to repurpose them as graphic novels eventually. Works that were reformatted from limited series include Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta (1982-1985; 1988-1989), Wolfman and Pérez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986), and Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck’s Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars (1984-1985).
Impact
The 1980’s was a decade of immense variety and experimentation with comic book forms. At the same time, the long-term castration of the traditional superhero was underway as part of a much larger expression of popular resentment about the declining state of inner cities and American industry during the period. Even Spider-Man’s switch to a macabre and parasitic black costume in Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars suggests a darkening of the generally idealistic ethics of superhero conflict. Add to this the ascendance of morally ambiguous vigilantes such as the Punisher and Grendel and skeptical everyday heroes such as Locas’s Maggie and Hopey, Mage’s Kevin Matchstick, American Splendor’s Harvey Pekar, and the protagonist from Reid Fleming, the World’s Toughest Milkman, and the comics landscape of the 1980’s seems to search resiliently for strength, heroism, and understanding. In many ways, the decade became the quintessential era of furious exploration across the comics medium. Much of this discovery and diversity helped to foster stronger industry commitment to the developing graphic novel.
Bibliography
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Provides a history of comic books as cultural phenomena and aesthetic signifiers and a survey of the medium conversant with French theories of comic book semiotics.
Weiner, Stephen. Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. New York: NBM, 2003. Includes a concise history of the medium as well as a guide to the most influential graphic novels of the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Studies comic books and superheroes as American cultural icons and includes a chapter on the evolution of comic books and graphic novels in the 1980’s and 1990’s.