Relevance

“ The O’Neal-Adams collaborations were state-of-the-art for maturing fans who wanted themselves and their passions to be taken seriously. 

Although a great deal of their “criticism” consisted of little more than sarcastic exposés of the logic flaws in stories, much of it had a learned collegiate twang. 

Along with acerbic critiques, fans offered the kind of wildly effusive praise and serious engagement with the work that made creative and editorial staff feel elevated and appreciated. 

These were teenagers who began to insist that comics could and should be for adults, mostly because they didn’t want to let go of childhood and had to find a new way to sell its pleasure back to themselves.

  These older comic-book hobbyists — often collectors of back issues, compilers of price lists, and publishers of DIY fanzines — favored work that was edgy and defensibly mature, distorting the scale of the adult-oriented superhero’s appeal with passionate and clever letters of comment, fan awards, and relentless rubbishing of everything that didn’t fit the strict diktat of a fan culture understandably keen to establish the art credentials of its beloved comics. 

Anxious to escape the mocking echoes of the Batman TV show and the disrepute it had brought upon the “serious” business of collecting and critiquing comics, these adolescent advocates were ready to embrace any development that validated their growing interest in politics, poetry, sex, and expressions of emotional pain. 

They preferred the artfully stressed and heightened photo-realism of Neal Adams’s illustrative technique to the expressionistic gut drawing of Kirby, or the classical power and weight of Curt Swan’s increasingly old-fashioned Superman work, where the figures had come to seem like waxy statues posed and reposed in a stuffy gallery of recycled, reheated Silver Age attitudes. 

They called loudly and relentlessly for superhero stories to be “relevant,” embrace a new realism, a new vocabulary, and a fresh engagement with the headlines; all of which undermined the success of the comics and drastically limited their mass-market appeal. 

Nevertheless, it was this retreat from the mainstream that gave the comics some quiet R & D time in which to hone a far greater sophistication and develop a “grounded” approach to superheroes that would make them perfect for Hollywood mass exploitation in the twenty-first century. 

As Superman himself might say, leading the charge on-screen with 1978’s big-budget Superman: “IRONIC.”

  Prickly and unself-confident, the new “fandom” especially liked its stories about powerful men and women in Day-Glo Lycra to come embellished with extended Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot quotes, and so more of these odd adventures began to appear — lumpen children of Roy Thomas’s grace notes from Shelley, strange chimeras, that were part cape-and-mask workouts, part campus polemic. At best, there might be a powerful recontextualization of familiar lines played against unfamiliar images. 

At worst, which was more often, the writers became ventriloquist dummies who relied on the proven excellence of others to elevate their ill-conceived and aimless efforts. 

Was it a superhero adventure or an English lit student bitching about pollution with Walt Whitman samples running in ironic counterpoint to the action?

  Aside from the gift to Hollywood of believable superheroes, perhaps the best that could be said for relevance was the way it eliminated any need to hide a comic book inside a poetry anthology for a sneak read in class; lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” were just as likely to appear in both. 

As far as I was concerned, the sincere products of the relevance movement helped me justify the excellence of superhero stories to sneering teachers. Although I was clearly well read and articulate, my ever-encouraging tutors regarded the comics reading habit as a warning sign that I was on a collision course with some catastrophic breakdown of literacy that was almost certain to leave me with a fifteen-word “ZAP! KER-POW!” space monkey vocabulary of neuronal pops and frazzles. So these thoughtful and informed comics were powerful ammunition for me, as they were for all the other earnest teenage fans so captivated by the imaginary universes of Marvel and DC that they’d lingered there past the age of twelve and become trapped like Lost Boys. It was easier to be caught reading comics at school if you could smugly direct an infuriated physics master to the award-winning Green Lantern/ Green Arrow no. 86, with its letter of thanks from the mayor of New York for helping to dramatize the scourge of drugs.

    

 

  Thus superhero comics began their slow retreat from the mainstream of popular entertainment to its geek-haunted margins, where their arcane flavors could be distilled and savored by solitary, monkish boys and men — rarely women or teenage girls, who tended to outgrow Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, while their weird brothers were still taking comfort in those pages. 

(Unsurprisingly, given my profession, I do know a disproportionate number of otherwise reasonable women who grew up reading or still read the better superhero comics as part of a general diet of pop culture adrenaline, but as the scorecard element — the collecting crowd — came in, the demographic skewed heavily toward introverted males in their teens and twenties.) 

Color TV, too, played its part in the decline of comics sales, but comics still offered the best, most immersive superhero stories available and showcased the work of some genuinely talented artists. 

By 1970, the field had become flooded with brilliant and restless young innovators like Jim Steranko, Mike Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson, and Barry Smith, and O’Neil opened the door to other “relevant” writers such as Elliot Maggin and Mike Friedrich. Maggin wrote the classic, collegiate “Must There Be a Superman?” in which the Man of Steel’s very role was questioned as if he were real, with no clear resolution.”