The Other 1980s

Reframing Comics' Crucial Decade

Brannon Costello, Brian Cremins, Brannon Costello, Brian Cremins

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807175514
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the United States, but most critical discussions of the period still focus on books from prominent creators such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Art Spiegelman, eclipsing the work of others who also played a key role in shaping comics as we know them today. The Other 1980s offers a more complicated and multivalent picture of this robust era of ambitious comics publishing. The twenty essays in The Other 1980s illuminate many works hailed as innovative in their day that have nonetheless fallen from critical view, partly because they challenge the contours of conventional comics studies scholarship: open-ended serials that eschew the graphic-novel format beloved by literature departments; sprawling superhero narratives with no connection to corporate universes; offbeat and abandoned experiments by major publishers, including Marvel and DC; idiosyncratic and experimental independent comics; unusual genre exercises filtered through deeply personal sensibilities; and oft-neglected offshoots of the classic "underground" comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The collection also offers original examinations of the ways in which the fans and critics of the day engaged with creators and publishers, establishing the groundwork for much of the contemporary critical and academic discourse on comics. By uncovering creators and works long ignored by scholars, The Other 1980s revises standard histories of this major period and offers a more nuanced understanding of the context from which the iconic comics of the 1980s emerged.

PART I

THE NEW WAVE

CRUCIAL WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND TITLES

In the summer of 1986, writer Mindy Newell was stuck. Her series The New Wave, written with Sean Demming and drawn by Lee Weeks and Ty Templeton, appeared on a biweekly schedule, an experiment for her publisher, Eclipse Comics. Each issue, about half the length of a regular newsstand comic, was priced at fifty cents. By the fifth issue, Demming explained, they had plenty of fan letters, but they still needed a “text page” to fill out the comic: “The letters are coming in,” he said, “but the deadline is coming faster” (Newell 15).

After describing the things she’d rather be doing than writing a personal essay for “High Tide,” the page that would become the letter column for the series, Newell asks her readers, “Would you like to know where I am going with The New Wave?” Having recently quit a full-time job to become a freelance writer, she admits, she’s both elated and a little nervous: What will come next? “Oh, I have plots aplenty in my head,” she writes, but where they will take her and her characters, for now, “is a mystery,” one that leads to anxiety and to self-doubt. “And so perhaps I am not as good a writer as I should be, or could be, or can be,” she confesses, after revealing her inspirations, including Star Wars, Dune, and 1960s-era Ford Mustangs. She then offers insight into her craft. The writing process is “something strange (sometimes wonderful, sometimes horrible),” especially “when a continuing series is attempted.” Just before concluding the essay, she anticipates Colleen Doran’s reflections in the afterword to A Distant Soil: Immigrant Song, published by Starblaze just a year later: “I cannot even promise a steady course, or a smooth one. For I am still learning these waters” (Newell).

In this first section, our writers will explore a few of the creators who, like Newell, got their start in these promising but often uncertain waters. In her essay on Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest, Isabelle Licari-Guillaume builds on previous work she’s done on the series to emphasize the tremendous role that the Pinis played in the direct market of the period and to explore the impact they continue to have on artists and readers today. Maaheen Ahmed argues, in her study of Neil the Horse, that, much like the Pinis, writer and artist Katherine Collins and her collaborators drew on other popular forms—in Neil’s case, vaudeville and musical theater—to challenge heteronormative conventions that continue to limit the medium’s full potential. In Doug Moench’s work, Andrew Kunka finds a writer pushing against the limits placed upon him by publishers like Marvel and DC. To do so, Moench sought greater freedom with Eclipse, which published his ambitious but still incomplete time travel series Aztec Ace. In her analysis of P. Craig Russell’s comics adaptations of Oscar Wilde and Maurice Maeterlinck, Shiamin Kwa draws comparisons between the anxieties that brought to a close both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries—anxieties that, as she reminds us, are still with us today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Newell, Mindy. “High Tide.” The New Wave #5, 19 Aug. 1986, Eclipse Comics, p. 15.

DELAYED RECOGNITION

Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest

ISABELLE LICARI-GUILLAUME

Elfquest, Wendy and Richard Pini’s influential fantasy series, reached its conclusion on February 20, 2018, after exactly forty years of publication. While its importance in the development of the U.S. comics industry is frequently mentioned in passing by cultural historians (Weiner 26; Gabilliet, Des Comics 125), it has seldom been the object of more in-depth analysis. In fact, Elfquest’s minor role in comics scholarship echoes the reception of the series at the time of its publication.

Because the Pinis’ work did not conform to the unspoken standards of independent comics, it may have seemed incomprehensible to some gatekeepers, leading to its marginalization in the dominant narrative of comics history. The fantasy world of Elfquest was straightforward, not ironic and parodic like the one in Dave Sim’s Cerebus; it was character driven and explored human relationships but, unlike Love and Rockets, it foregrounded generic conventions¹ and remained child-friendly; it problematized violence, but not within a Frank Milleresque, grim and gritty framework of masculine antiheroes; and, unlike the comics of the so-called British Invasion, it was wholly uninterested in playing the game of cultural legitimation.

However, in recent years, aided perhaps by the Pinis’ donation of their archive to Columbia University (2013), more research has begun to shed light on the importance of the series, both as an artistic achievement and as a pivotal text in the history of 1980s independent comics (Kaipanen; Saunders; Guillaume). In retrospect, it has become clear that the Pinis were ahead of the curve in their ability to recognize the tastes of new readerships. Many of Elfquest’s innovations, in terms of format, art style, and themes, have in fact become staples of the contemporary market. And although the series was not attuned to the implicit demands of the comics scene at the time, it has anticipated some of the broader trends of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century popular culture, such as the advent of manga, the increasing mainstream popularity of the fantasy genre, and the growing visibility of female audiences in the field.

Pioneer, Best Seller, Maverick: Elfquest’s Art and Publication History

The Pinis self-published the initial series (usually dubbed “The Original Quest”) between 1978 and 1984 and sold it through the direct market under the guidance of distributors Bud Plant and Phil Seuling. With its black-and-white graphics, its one-dollar price tag, its magazine size, and a deliberate four-month gap between successive issues, Elfquest fit no existing publication model. Its format and price were similar to those of other magazines, but its page count, at thirty-two, was closer to the traditional monthly comic book.² Unsurprisingly, the title that it resembled most was Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach, which the Pinis had used as a model for their publishing venture.

Under this triannual schedule, Wendy Pini was able to pencil, ink, and letter each page of the story herself, developing a graphic style that combined many different influences yet was unmistakably her own. Her character...