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Second-Generation Harvey Comics in Royal Roy

Marvel Comics has, from time to time, attempted to market to multiple audiences with differing tastes, often by creating publication imprints of thematically or stylistically similar material under distinct imprints. Marvel, at the end of the seventies, sought to cater to the tastes served by material like the adult Heavy Metal magazine through its Epic imprint. More recently, Marvel has sought to refurbish commercially-flagging franchises through first-tier execution under the contemporary Marvel Knights imprint.

In the mid-eighties, not long at all before the Luciferian fall of Jim Shooter, Marvel attempted an imprint of comics for younger readers, calling this line of books "Star Comics." From evidence provided by a surviving specimen of one particular title - Royal Roy: A Prince of a Boy - a reader can note, from first impressions, that Star Comics sought strongly to appropriate not just the style but the concepts of Harvey Comics concepts, despite the inevitable extinction of the Harvey line in a market increasingly dominated by superhero monoculture.

The process of genre creation begins with the appearance of a seminal archetype, suitable for duplication, or, even better, for the creation of divergent yet conceptually related creations. From there, the derivative or child concepts begin to populate titles, perhaps together forming a genre (as superheroes did from the seed Superman provided); and, as a third stage, the form itself develops conventions that define it robustly enough that, should the prototype altogether vanish from the storytelling landscape, the rules of the genre might spontaneously generate something similar in short order.

Where a concept does not enjoy a seminal quality, however, it can do little more than invite anecdotal imitation. Perhaps an imitative piece will appear, and perhaps this will occur more than once. However, where the original did not have the ability to inspire the imagination and drive such generation, the duplicated concepts will arrive as non-viable creations, not spawning a form, and, in isolation, eventually suffering cancellation.

Marvel Comics' Royal Roy demonstrated the latter scenario. In the process, it may have served as a warning for creators desiring to dabble in pre-owned concepts: Copies of pieces that themselves fail to demonstrate a commercial viability will probably share in the doom of their archetypes.

The Echoes

Harvey Comics once printed a line of humor books for young readers, including a Casper franchise (which included Wendy the Witch, Spooky the Tough Little Ghost, Hot Stuff, and possibly others adequate to constitute an entire bizarre picture of a four-color afterlife in a magical cosmos), the Baby Huey books, and, on the more realistic end of the spectrum (but not very realistic), the Richie Rich books. All featured a Harvey house style, involving a clean and upbeat feel to the art and characters with disproportionately large heads relative to their bodies, a conventional indicator of prepubescence in comic-book treatments of human anatomy.

Richie Rich stories generally hit on the element of his wealth. Either he had used his money to build some peculiar device, like an electronic guard dog, that provided a kernel for an adventure; or he might face some kind of mercenary goon out to separate him from his wealth (after the fashion of the timeless Scrooge McDuck - Beagle Boys relationship); or the wealth itself might provide window dressing for just about any kind of comics story that could fit in a single comic book. His obscene wealth and the frequent presence of his butler, Cadbury, plus a cast of some friends and secondary characters, provided the center around which his stories might revolve.

Therefore, when we see Royal Roy: A Prince of a Boy, a definite sense of deja vu threatens to undermine the notion that some talent manifested the full blossom of original creative urge within these pages. Roy, after his archetype Richie Rich, indeed does spend considerable page space demonstrating his good fortune, sometimes in the form of material possessions and sometimes in the form of the more abstract perks attaching to his royal bloodline. Roy, after all, enjoyed royalty on top of those attributes borrowed from the Harvey-character template. And the type of adventures besetting Roy fit standard Richie Rich forms as well, including the formula story where Richie's (or Roy's) prosperity proved more of a nuisance than an asset under just the right contrived set of circumstances. For instance, Roy suffered through an outing with the Royal Scouts, a ludicrous version of the Boy Scouts in which manservants, footsoldiers, and valets had to do all the real tasks involved with a camping trip. And, through it all, Roy could count on the services of (on the one hand) Ascott and (on the other hand) Lord Proper, having a larger variety of loyal underlings to play storytelling roles parallel to those of the long-suffering Cadbury.

Without taking a stand for or against Richie Rich, one could note that a fundamental problem exists here with appropriating such a concept. And this problem reflects a kind of logical quandary typified in a historical slander against the Caliph Omar.

The Slander Against Caliph Omar

Omar, one in a line of successors to Mahomet, founder of Islam, frequently finds his name appearing in an old historical slander about the destruction of the library of Alexandria. According to this slander, Omar had this library torched based on a theory of literature that divided all written works into two essentially unnecessary categories. The blasphemous disagreed with the contents of the Koran, and therefore deserved consignment to the flames for their viciousness and power to corrupt, so the story goes; and the pious agreed with the Koran, and therefore deserved consignment to the flames for a redundancy that made them useless. Never mind the introduction of facts such as the library's destruction predating Omar's birth by centuries and, furthermore, happening as the result of a civil war in Alexandria between rival Christian sects.

How, one might wonder, does this relate to the comics? Well, the Omar slander, by dividing all works into two completely unnecessary categories, comes to mind when considering derivative works of this kind. In some ways, after all, comics that appropriate a style can fall into one of two completely unnecessary categories: Comics that imitate successful pieces can expect not to sell because consumers, offered a choice between an item and an item, will pick an item (and generally the original item); and comics that imitate unsuccessful pieces will tend to appropriate the very traits that made the original books fail. Thus, either approach can demonstrate its own unnecessary character. Readers who want Richie Rich comics will look for Richie Rich comics - we can suggest an axiom to this effect - and readers who don't want Richie Rich comics will, quite probably, pass on material obviously derived therefrom.

What Makes an Homage?

Having noted the incriminating similarities to Harvey concepts and furthermore observed the self-defeating character of some types of imitation (particularly of material which the comics market ultimately couldn't support any longer), we might ask ourselves whether Marvel Comics' Star line of books, through this specimen, intended something more along the lines of an homage. We can examine this question by identifying certain common traits of an homage and seeing if they apply.

Homages tend to have the following attributes:

• Acknowledging Parentage.
  The creators of an homage want the reader to recognize the source of the material. Rather than concealing anything, talent engaged in delivering homages may rub the point into the readers' faces to make sure no one misses the point. Where pilferage occurs, however, we can expect the guilty parties to downplay the point.
• Introduction of Parody.
  Homages often explore the sillier aspects of the illogic of the parent concept in ways that the source can't or hasn't. For instance, Superman homages often make light of various aspects of the secret identity fetish typical of the first fifty years of the concept, including the unlikely fact that no one notes the physical similarities between Clark Kent and Superman. Since satire requires recognition of the source, appropriated material will tend less to make fun of the concept. Parody could not appear in Supreme until (under Alan Moore's hand) the book acknowledged its origins.
• Fawning over Creators Past.
  Someone who opened a late-nineties Kesel-Grummett copy of Superboy from the late 1990s might notice, before getting too far into the book, a kind of hagiographic view of comics godfather Jack Kirby. For an amusing run, Superboy revolved around Kirby's DC concepts, including but not limited to material he had worked on during his short tenure as writer and artist on Jimmy Olsen. Superboy during this period went out of its way to strip-mine Kirby concepts to include or observe; and indeed credited the man with the writers and artists who actually put the material on the page. Kirby, sad to say, had passed on a few years before Superboy would attempt to resonate with stylistic and thematic elements he had brought to DC. All of this implicates tribute, not theft. The concept thief would prefer that the reader not look too closely into the origins of his material. The endless parade of lame Punisher and Wolverine clones to erupt over the years generally hoped to come off as original works, and putting creators' names on imitative material would impose an acknowledgment of authorship.

In context, the lack of normal signals indicating tributes in this material point the other way, towards appropriation of an imitated house style plus some of the conceptual baggage generally expressed in this style. As one mitigating circumstance, however, we have the general failure of Harvey Comics as a publisher in an imploding industry, a condition that makes such intellectual five-finger discounting more akin to picking a dead man's pocket than a holdup. On the other hand, Marvel seems to have taken it upon themselves to attempt to cater to an orphaned comics market, this meaning such readers as would have found themselves without their favorite material once Harvey gave up the four-color ghost. In the latter sense, the Star Comics line looks like an effort to oblige an isolated and dwindling cluster of readers, much in the way that Big Bang Comics sometimes caters to specific fans of specific material that we can expect no one to produce again (for instance, Dick Sprang-styled Batman material).

An earlier Recycle Bin column (here) deals with how a derivative piece can display the defining features of a genre. In this case, we have another situation: Royal Roy and like pieces intended to sustain a genre through treating Harvey pieces as archetypes and spawning titles which strongly echoed these. Had the experiment succeeded, Shooter and other central players at Marvel Comics would have to their credit the achievement of anchoring a stable genre, one that both remained outside the shared-universe superhero comics monoculture and catered to a market outside the aging body of fandom often viewed as the undertakers of comics as an art form. So we might see this piece less as an attempt to make out of the shop with another's merchandise (bellowing "WAHOO!" while running out the door) and more as an unsuccessful administration of the publishers' equivalent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation to dying material.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 249. Completed 06-May-2001.