Since I published Cool Characters in 2016, I’ve been extremely indecisive about what I want my next academic book project to be.
As anyone who has run into me at a conference knows, I seem to very confidently claim to be writing a different book every few months. Meanwhile, I wrote a shortish book on The Last Samurai that came out in 2022. I spent this semester really wrestling with what I wanted to write next, and looking back at what I’ve done over the last few years, and I’ve decided finally to commit to writing a book on creator-owned comics in the 1980s and 1990s. My original title was Neoliberal Comics, but I am worried that “neoliberal” might seem pejorative (as if I didn’t like the comics I was writing about). We’ve also sort of reached a point of no return w/r/t using “neoliberal” in academic titles. So I’m tentatively calling the new project “Creator-Owned Comics.” I wonder if I can get away without having a subtitle.
Here’s my current working description of the project:
Creator-Owned Comics is about the rise of an idea and practice of creator ownership in the world of periodical comics in the 1980s and 1990s. There will be chapters on Dark Horse, Image, Vertigo, Milestone, and others.
Pieces of this project have appeared, in early forms, in various places. There is an essay I wrote called “The Cartoonist as Entrepreneur: Rob Liefeld, Image Comics, and the Art of the Creator-Owner” as well as a chapter called “The Metamodernist Epiphanies of Daytripper” in the forthcoming collection American Studies after Postmodernism. I also have related pieces on Vertigo in progress for The Comics of Karen Berger and the Routledge Companion to Metafiction.
Comics Studies seems to me, in many ways, divided between the legacies of a kind of auteurist/modernist vision of the autonomy of comics as an art form and a cultural studies approach to comics. We either treat comics an interpretable object or as an emblem/symptom of larger cultural trends. In contrast to these approaches, I want to bring a Comics Industries/sociology-of-comics perspective to the interpretation of important comics published by major creator-owned imprints. These are comics imprints and publishers that are, as David Brothers said of Image, “independent but not indie.”
I argue that transformations in market conditions and corporate structure allowed a peculiar conception of comics as an art-commodity to take root in the very heart of the mainstream industry. These transformations had important consequences for the books themselves. As a result, many important “mainstream” comics published in the 1980s and 1990s lend themselves to the kind of allegorical reading pioneered by scholars in film studies, most notably Jerome Christensen and others who are engaged in what I’d characterize as an interpretive practice of industrial formalism.