A Brief Write-Up on Movements in the Comic Industry entering the Modern Age
Hello! I just wanted to supply a brief bit of context for this write-up. This was written as I was just chatting with some friends the other night. This isn’t something that will hold up to academic scrutiny, nor have I done the work of truly citing any sources properly. But I have done a fair bit of reading and listening to comic book historians before this so this is me synthesizing from ideas that I’ve heard before rather than completely coming to these conclusions on my own.
I was just talking to some friends about how comic ages are imprecise and affected each book individually - that you can’t simply say x book had y traits because it was after the z age started. It might therefore be more helpful to discuss things in the context of art movements. The Romantic and Realist art movement existed at the same time as each other despite the latter being a response to the former (I’m citing my friend Morgie Storylover for that comparison). So if we view comics in terms of trends and influences and creative directions, it may be more helpful than viewing things purely as an age that spans decades. Another friend who’s newer to comics asked for an explanation when I proposed the subject matter of this write-up, so that’s what this is.
That said, from the title you can see that I’m using “ages” to an extent for this. That is entering the Modern Age, which started roughly in the mid-eighties. This is largely a short-hand as the start of the modern age is usually attributed to two works: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. I am looking at these specifically for what specific influences they provided to these art movements, but I will be discussing what other influences these movements had.
One last disclaimer is that I am extremely DC brained. I will absolutely be doing Marvel a disservice in this discussion but I will be doing my best to discuss them when relevant. If you read this I encourage you to build on or argue with what I’m saying because I will be missing certain things.
The Comics Code Authority (CCA) was formed in 1954 in order to enforce moral guidelines on the comic industry to make it appropriate material for children to read. This ended up heavily limiting the types of stories being told and even acted as a form of censorship. However, in the late 60s subject matter in comics began to push the boundaries more and more, testing the limits and eventually breaking them. From then on, the comic industry tended towards more and more mature themes. This period is largely considered the Bronze Age.
So coming out of the Early eighties, Comics trended towards breaking the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority to the point of obsolescence, allowing for more mature storylines. The Bronze age had injected a lot of character and complexity into the problems each hero would face. We even started to see anti-heroes such as The Punisher start to pop up. This increase in maturity kinda came to a head in the mid-eighties thanks to a few titles but I'll focus on three, Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and X-Men. The increase of maturity and influence of these three books led to two different movements that characterized many works entering into the 90s. These movements were the Literature-Focused “Vertigo” direction and the X-Treme direction. These are not all encompassing movements but they do represent a trend artistic direction in this period.
The Dark Knight Returns reframed the DC universe as a future yet depressingly modern corporate hellscape with heavy cynicism and focus on politics, while using extreme proportions and caricature and poses to convey emotions. Batman had to go to more extreme measures that really tested his morals.
Watchmen DEFINED the Graphic novel. They certainly existed before it but Watchmen did a lot to show off the full capabilities of a comic that sought to be literature with a defined beginning and end. Additionally it riffed on certain characters to serve as a deconstruction of superheroes and the power they wield. Letting their soap opera drama and their strong philosophical views go to frightening lengths.
The third title I really want to focus on is X-Men, and all titles that fall into that franchise. X-men held some political themes from the start but with Claremont in the 70s they REALLY became foundational to the book. Additionally, during Claremont’s tenure, we got Wolverine who was a hero that leaned anti-hero, while Magneto was a villain that leaned more and more into an anti-hero role from the other end. It was WILDLY successful and went from a dying book in the late 70s to Marvel's biggest franchise save for perhaps Spider-man. This was massively influential writing-wise across the entire industry, but you also had a lot of influential artists on the book. Artists that used big dramatic poses with lots of exaggeration starting with Dave Cockrum and going to John Byrne to Marc Silvestri and then extremely talented Jim Lee. The trend was to get bigger, bolder, and filled with lots of cross-hatching that made each panel busy and as dynamic as possible. This art trend did not entirely originate in X-Men, nor was it exclusive to it, but due in part to the wild success of X-men it in turn became wildly popular.
My friend Morgie pointed out that Frank Miller’s Daredevil also took place from the mid-to-late-eighties. This was also very influential but I have yet to read this so I won’t speak on this myself.
Based on the success of Watchmen and other work from Moore, as well as some of his contemporaries from the British Invasion (DC editor Karen Berger recruited a ton of British talent in the early eighties) DC decided to create Vertigo as a place for their mature stories. And again it was Karen Berger who edited and cultivated Vertigo as a place for a unique type of comic book. These stories often placed a lot of focus on being philosophical, heady, having dark themes and character exploration that was brutal but with much intention. They leaned much more into controversial topics and didn’t shy away from politics. Hellblazer #3 featured a story about Hell manipulating the British Elections of 1986 in real life politician Margaret Thatcher’s favor because it had better yields for their infernal dollar.
I can’t make a broad statement that these are all uniformly good (nor that I’ve read all of them), but they all carry a vibe that feels distinctly artistic and grounded in real life in the same way that indie comix did because they were very creator driven. However these titles had the budget and reach that only major companies could provide. Marvel tried something pretty similar with Epic Comics with less success as I understand.
Ironically I think another Frank Miller title, Batman Year One falls more into this category as it really focuses on grounding itself as it was written but not drawn by Frank Miller. It probably helps that this was to be the foundation of the Main Canon Batman after Crisis on Infinite Earth reset the canon so he had to start smaller and more restrained.
Following the trend of heavy stylization in art and brutal storytelling that could be seen in Dark Knight Returns, combined with Marvel's successful uses of anti-heroes and X-Men's success with all of the above, we got Rob Liefeld who started on doing art on spin-off X-Men books. His understanding of anatomy is infamously dubious. But he understood that big extreme muscles were selling and so were anti-heroes. Others were doing this (see Extreme Justice below) but if I'm describing the trend as a whole it's Liefeld who embodied it. He took all of this mean spirited tough guy anti-hero BS and the insane art and costumes (how many belt buckles and utility belts and guns do you have? Not enough!) to… well. an EXTREME!
My Friend Lyra pointed out here that Captain Atom’s Thighs here are absolutely insane so let’s take a moment to appreciate that, yes?
So going into the Nineties these were two types of books that were definitely indicative of trends. They weren't the ONLY types of books but they have distinctive markers and are certainly extremely prominent to that moment in comic history.
I may be a bit harsh on the X-Treme movement as that's not to my taste. There was plenty of cool stuff that came out of it and its success is ultimately what got Image to take off as a haven for creator owned comics. But it always struck me as funny that people talked about comic books in the nineties as if everything was belt buckles and machine guns, but my first exposure to nineties comics was The Sandman and Vertigo comics.
My arguments thus far is largely that these movements existed and were prominent for a time. They would evolve from those early nineties debut but similar how Realist art was a reaction to Romantic art - these movements had their own criticisms and counter-art. The Knightfall storyline, when broken down to its simplest parts, is about an extremely muscled man breaking Bruce's back and then Batman's replacement being someone who wore insanely sharp and edgy armor that was more brutal than Bruce - closer to an ANTI-HERO. And then at the end of the storyline it's about Bruce reclaiming the mantle and reestablishing the less brutal methods are the way of the Batman (I’ll give credit to Salazar Knight the Youtuber for helping me connect the dots on this particular story).
I don’t have a proper conclusion for this. My main hope is that I’ve convinced you to reframe how you view comics at the start of the modern age. Not just as one large trend, but as something containing multiple artistic movements. Did I skip over a lot of history and context for this? Probably. Is applying labels helpful? I think so. People will always try to label and categorize things, and then others will use those labels to simplify and reduce things down from there. So I hope this exercise in thought provides you with more descriptive and accurate labels. If this made you want to argue with me or build on what I was saying I heavily encourage you to do so. You can find my on LOCG @Koalee. Farewell you lovely nerds.
