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Title : Guest Post - Barry Pearl's Tales Of The Marvel Age: Epilogue...
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Guest Post - Barry Pearl's Tales Of The Marvel Age: Epilogue...

 

Copyright MARVEL COMICS

 

The End Of An Age!

 

This isn't my final entry or post on Crivens, but it's the last of this series.  This is my personal perspective.  I previously wrote about the events that happened which made me give up collecting and reading comics in 1977 or so here, but I didn't write about why this happened.  I'll address that now. 

Simply, the Silver Age and the Marvel Age ended in the mid-1970s.  Why?  The corporations took over.  Creativity comes from individuals.  As corporations took over, the individuality of the creative process was greatly diminished.  It was Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko who created the Marvel age.  Now they were gone.  They had answered to Martin Goodman who had a good sense of what would sell.  Taken over by Perfect Film and Chemical, editors now answered to bookkeepers and other personnel who knew nothing about comics, publishing, or fans.  They knew and cared only about profits.

I wasn't the only who saw the absence of originality, Jack Kirby saw it too:  

"We need new, fresh views.  The wrong men have been in charge of innovation in this business.  We need to go beyond barbarian fantasies.  And I'm hopeful of a comic renaissance.  No longer is one man the entire product.  There are writers, illustrators, printers, editors, managers and more managers.  And the dollar sign that drives them to put out too much too fast, so the quality suffers."  (Oakland Tribune, 1976.)

Marvel's new 1970s publishers slowly reduced the page count from 20-22 to 17 pages.  To pay the artists less, often there were double page centerfolds, where the artist got paid just for one page.  Marvel adopted the DC Comics publication model which included half pages that hurt the stories' continuity.  At DC that was mandatory, almost all superheroes appeared in two or more comics, written and drawn by different people.  Stan Lee, when removing Iron Man and Thor from The Avengers in issue #16, said that he didn't want to have two different continuities for each character.  In the early 1970s Marvel adopted the DC plan with Team-Up, Two-In-One, Defenders, Avengers and Champions.  It also seemed that storylines had to be stretched over many issues.  Merchandizing, with toys such as the Spider-Mobile (issue #127), had to be worked into the stories even though they didn't fit.

Goodman knew and cared something about fans, his readers.  When the line expanded in 1969 he made sure that his comics continued their continuity, so we got the one-shot Iron Man and Sub-Mariner issue to finish up their storylines.  A decade later, Jim Shooter had to fight with the bookkeepers to have the conclusion of Tomb of Dracula finished.  Three already-penciled issues had to be condensed into one giant-size one.  So it goes.

The bookkeepers at Perfect Film and Chemical let Jack Kirby leave because they didn't view him as an asset, just another artist who could easily be replaced.  Martin Goodman had known better (though he got it wrong by not giving Kirby a better contract before selling the company).  The same thing was happening at DC when they were bought by Time/Warner.  It's only profits that drive these companies, not creativity.

"The main man who writes Spider-Man (Marv Wolfman) has quit.  He will soon join the competition, to do Superman.  The editor in charge of The Hulk has been discharged.  Some other key staff members are thinking  of leaving.  There is talk around the office that the editor in chief is power-thirsty and that the top people are more interested in coining money from licensing deals than they are in the superheroes." 

"Although Marvel maintains that its comics are profitable, the industry, which is dominated by Marvel  and DC, has for years been tumbling downhill.  DC comics drastically shrank its line last year and Marvel has cut its list of titles to 32 from some 45.  Licensing monies have ballooned ... They prompt one Marvel writer to grouse, 'Marvel seems to be becoming a toy company'."  (NY Times, October 13 1979.)

"When I quit in 1976, in the same three week period, when Conway was the editor, Gerber quit, Starlin quit, Gulacy quit.  It wasn't just me - a lot of people went out during that time.  It had gotten to the point where a lot of people just didn't feel that it was what they'd signed on for."  (Steve Englehart, Comic Journal, 1981.)

Look at the big budget blockbuster movies of the last few years.  Almost all the characters are over fifty years old, very little new.  Sal Buscema recently stated that comics sell only 20% of what they used to sell.  Gerry Conway has issued similar comments.

Perhaps comics always seem better when you're young, and the era in which you came aboard will always be the best.  The corporate structure ended the Silver Age.  My Marvel Age ended in 1977.  The foundations that Lee, Kirby, Ditko (along with Dick Ayers and Don Heck) laid in the early 1960s are still strong enough to support and build interest from new generations of readers (as well as moviegoers) - all that's required are the right creative people, with vision, for the job.

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