Action and adventure
Action and adventure |
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Page 2 of 42  Crime Suspenstories (EC Comics, 1953), art: Jack Kamen Commercially, the genre was dominated at first by the same companies that had made humour their own: DC Thomson and IPC (International Publishing Corporation). They now competed as hard for this sector of the market as anywhere else, and were fortunate in that they had virtually no American competition until the 1960s. As we have seen, official distribution of American comics in Britain did not begin until 1959, though some titles did enter the country via airbases and ports, while others were reprinted in black-and-white by small British publishers (particularly active in the adventure field were Thorpe and Porter, Miller and Son and the Arnold Book Company). In the 1960s, however, the two majors found themselves increasingly challenged by the American companies DC Comics (no relation to the Scottish giant) and Marvel. These would eventually come to eclipse the British publishers altogether: a progression which took several decades, and which corresponded with the overall decline in comics circulations. The first of the new British comics built on the heritage of the story papers, and proved that action yarns in pictures could be equally successful as humour. As such, they also perpetuated the essentially male market opened up by the story papers (a trend that was only bucked later with the sudden flowering of a sister comics industry orientated towards girls). These papers in the 1920s and 1930s were dominated by the 'Big 5' of Skipper, The Hotspur, The Wizard, The Rover and Adventure, which were all published by DC Thomson before they transferred their energies to comics per se, and were 'illustrated text' publications, with the same production values as The Beano. They established a formula for the action genre which relied on a clipped, punchy writing style and swashbuckling subject matter. Indeed, war became their single most popular theme: their tone was, perhaps inevitably, xenophobic and imperialist, and fed into a tradition of empire tales, personified by The Boy's Own Paper. As such, they were famously savaged in a press article by George Orwell for perpetuating conservative values.  Spider-Man (Marvel Comics, 1964), art: Steve Ditko. |