History Repeating

The realism revolution that has been polluting comic books for at least 20 years now is really nothing new, although it came first in a different form to the older and somewhat more respected - in the sense that pinball games might be slightly more respected than video games - form of the newspaper comic strip.

In a wonderful 1965 essay by Mordecai Richler, "The Great Comic Book Heroes", which was partially a review of Jules Feiffer's book of the same name, Richler first gives a rundown of the sorts of exciting superhero stories that were prevalent in the comics of his youth in the forties, of which Feiffer's book was one of the earliest anthologies. He then reflects on the newspaper comic strips of the sixties:

"How puerile, unimaginative, today's comic strips seem by comparison. Take Rex Morgan, M.D., for instance. In my day, to be a doctor was to be surrounded by hissing test tubes and vile green gases. It was to be either a cackling villain with a secret formula that would reduce Gotham City to the size of a postage stamp or to be a noble genius, creator of behemoths who would bring hope to oppressed multitudes. The best that can be expected of the loquacious Dr. Morgan is that he will lecture us on the hidden dangers of medicare. Or save a student from LSD addiction. There's no magic in him. He's commonplace. A bore."

And I'd rather read Rex Morgan than a dozen "mature" titles that popped up in the last twenty years or so. Of course, Richler was likely thinking that comic strips represented comic books as well, and did not realize that the wonderful Silver Age was then in its full swing. In comic books, the commonplace boredom was still to come. Luckily, there have still been those hidden sources of treasure even during these bad years, and now the mentality seems to be swinging back, with DC Wednesday Comics (which also count as comic strips!), and regular titles such as Power Girl - as people remember that comic books once held it as their sacred duty to provide fun in a world too often deprived of it.