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Independents and the Mainstream Umbilicus

Ask the question "Why independents?" and a number of answers come to mind. For the reader, independents theoretically offer something different and outside of the control of the monopolistic (or duopolistic, or tripolistic) machine of big publishers who seem to control what can go into a comic book at the expense of appeal.

To the people who make comics, the independent comic offers far more. Independents can offer an escape from non-renumerative relationships with publishers; they can offer creator ownership; and, best of all, they can offer the opportunity to step out of a comics editorial model that frequently commits creators and readers to a shared-universe superheroic monoculture.

With these advantages in mind - and, therefore, the Jubilee on the horizon - one might wonder why independents sometimes return to mainstream origins, becoming reinforcing agents to existing comics culture rather than vectors traveling out into new places where conventional comics dare not go. As particular examples, consider Sim's Cerebus, from Aardvark-Vanaheim; Valentino's Normalman, also from Aardvark-Vanaheim; and Edlund's The Tick, from Marlowe and Company.

Cerebus

Cerebus, in its earliest days, began owing a great deal not only to a particular genre but to a specific title within that genre. In a variety of places, Cerebus implicated the Roy Thomas / Barry Smith Conan as its progenitor, even though that particular piece of comics canon would not necessarily receive the homage due it until the comics reprint market, driven by pieces like the Essentials line, would help bring a set of Silver Age (and immediately post-Silver Age) classics to the reader unable to afford back issue prices that sometimes elevate into the ozone.

Cerebus borrowed both stylistically and conceptually from the Thomas / Smith Conan. Characters, albeit in mangled form, stepped from one piece into the other, even where their own origins lay somewhere besides the Robert E. Howard stories that originally inspired the Conan comic book.

Consider, for instance, the annoying "Elrod," a combination of the Thomas / Smith interpretation of Moorcock's Elric and, if one gauge properly from the demonstrated speech patterns Sim gave him, Warner Brothers' Foghorn Leghorn. As well, Sim appropriated perhaps the silliest component of the Howard-derived fantasy comics, the annoying Red Sonja (reinterpreted here, with a little, but not a lot, of additional stupidity, as "Red Sophia.").

Cerebus would, in its first twenty or so issues, continue to draw from mainstream comics, even introducing a kind of superhero called "The Roach," who seemed (perhaps) to owe to darker interpretations of the pre-Frank Miller Batman. The Roach would go on, later, to further compromise genres by appropriation of the trappings of Marvel's Captain America; and, indeed, as "Captain Cockroach," he would re-enact the melodrama surrounding the revisionist death of Bucky Barnes through the loss of his own sidekick (the annoying Elrod, improbably attired in a Bucky-like outfit).

For a piece with purported aims to represent an independent comics form, Cerebus invested considerable attention in playing a derivative role to mainstream comics, even if its main strength drew from an isolated genre.

Normalman

Normalman owed a great deal to the Marvel Comics of the late seventies for targets of parody. However, the work as a whole deserves credit for a) inverting the essential superhero equation (the hero, Norm, arrives on the planet Levram as the only non-superpowered being on a world cram-packed with ludicrous superheroes) and b) carrying the parody across several genres through piece-specific satires of mainstream and independent comics of its day.

Valentino, in this very early phase of his fame, created comics about comics, meaning that rather than offer the reader pieces that owed less to the conventions of the big sellers, readers really got more of the distilled essence of shared superhero comics culture.

Normalman viewed the essential superhero premise in a backwards way, exploring the specialness of a non-super human being thrust into a world he never made, a planet where only superheroes and supervillains lived. From this platform, he made light of a number of the cliches of the day (and of elements that had not yet passed into cliche), as well as the annoying, the overblown, the pretentious, and the ludicrous in the comics of the early eighties. In general, though, this piece did not speak a great deal to the shared experiences of Everyman (the likely reader of Normalman), but tended to present material in some ways ahead of its time: comics about comics. While occasional stories in comic books took an approach that branded them as metacomics, only a few series ultimately earned the designation on that scale - Normalman, Megaton Man, Supreme, and only occasional others.

The Tick

The Tick, as previous pieces, would wade into the world of independent comics grasping a life preserver made of appropriated and readily recognizable elements from the conventional comics known even to those who do not read comics.

Particularly the parody of Superman (or, more correctly, of Clark Kent concealing his Superman identity) shows the use of the mainstream superhero comics safety net.

We might note that, although The Tick approaches the superhero concept derisively and ironically, it need not rely on overly derivative concepts to support itself. The Tick's companion Arthur, for example, doesn't particularly owe to any of the best-known superheroes more likely to provide material for caricature; instead, he represents a subversion of the idea, lacking even a superheroic name or origin (he came into the superheroic role after purchasing a moth suit at an auction, said suit giving him the power of flight).

The Tick really gained most of its momentum after discarding specific homages and caricatures of particular and well-worn superheroes, though the title never grew too far from such origins to deride the fundamental precepts that define the superhero, whether the absurd conventions of naming or dress, or overdone storytelling shortcuts (for instance, the tiresome urban soliloquy).

Moving Beyond Dependency

Superhero comics originated among creators who (logically enough) predated the form, but very few of that generation of talents remain among the living. With the Silver Age, comics gained a new vitality through the maturing of first-generation talents combined with an influx of second-generation talents, even then retaining some perspective of a time about comics that therefore kept the medium from dwelling on itself too much.

By 2000 and beyond, however, comics had very much become an inward-looking thing, created by fans, for fans, and often about little more than other comics (as opposed to, say, notions of the heroic ideal or the human condition in general). In this light, we might observe, with concern, a tendency to self-reference that frequently condemns the mainstream to a kind of navel-gazing which makes much material inaccessible to new readers and often incomprehensible to outsiders.

Cultural self-reference, by itself, does not necessarily demonstrate a vicious or morbid tendency. Not until it begins to exclude contact with the world beyond itself do we reach for the Thesaurus of Pejorative Terms and produce terms like "navel-gazing," "mutual admiration society," and "self-absorbed." And while pieces like Cerebus, Normalman, and The Tick have much to offer, in a sense, all these pieces somewhat represent an opportunity lost, in that they present the familiar and the known (albeit with a generally divergent slant from their mainstream prototypes) when their creators could, instead, have tried to travel further from the comfort of their own fannish affinities to create.

In this, we see the tragic aspect of the independent comic that offers an echo rather than a choice.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 220. Completed 06-FEB-2001.