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Why a Comics Boneyard?

Out there on the Internet somewhere one may find a noteworthy set of pages collectively entitled "Cancelled Comics Cavalcade," after a newsletter celebrating works no longer in print. This particular feature deals with the casualties of the event called the "DC Implosion," the mass cancellation in the seventies of a number of sleeper features with listless sales but some considerable long-term appeal.

It struck me that comics, as a medium, deserves something like a Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, not just for mid-seventies DC, but for the life of the medium, and that such a feature could fill a hole developing here in the Quarter Bin.

Months ago, I renamed this web page from "Comics Literature Reviewer" (a concatenation of bombastic and generally overblown verbiage that somehow survived several years in spite of its pretentiousness) to "Quarter Bin," partially to make a more easily-remembered handle, partially to humble the label, and partially because I decided to get out of the business of reviewing comics. But I didn't want to remove the review columns from the Quarter Bin without replacing them with something else; and, finally, it came to me what would justify the creation of a new feature. Hence, the Boneyard comes to the Quarter Bin as a place to examine, relive, and grieve over comics works that came and went too soon, sometimes vanishing before the reader in the street had time to hear of them.

Especially in an era of an imploding business cycle for the conventional-format monthly comic book, one comes to realize, title by title, that a great many remarkable pieces failed to make the cut at the cash register. Sometimes only after time passes do we realize how a piece stood out. And, in spite of an untenable position in an often-cruel marketplace, these works deserve due consideration.

Revisited, often decades later, the gems of the form shine even though the readers of their day hadn't quite caught up with the quality of the material with their disposable income. Great works often die because too few consumers, too slowly, came to realize the magnitude of a piece; or, perhaps, failed to realize (until too late) the way in which market forces can hold books hostage, with no guarantee of their survival.

The Untimely Departures

A concept can pass on for a number of reasons. Simple inability to bring in sufficient revenues to justify the dedication of paid manpower to a task can kill pieces of great artistic merit.

Commercial failure, however tragic, does not approach the apex of sad ends to fine works. A talent can tire of his once-magnificent creation, and either plug onward with decreasing joy (and with symptoms of this indifference afflicting the work increasingly as time goes on) or abandon the task to others (or foreclose it altogether).

And the ends can proceed from even sadder causes. The collapse of an entire publishing concern, despite the excellence of the talent brought to it and the pieces put on the shelves, can end an entire artistic era and, in a worst-case scenario, push the form back from a cutting edge to the dull side of business as usual.

The death of talent, perhaps, makes for an apex of sad ends to fine work. Where the death of Gene Day, in a sense, put an end to a short but brilliant period of Master of Kung Fu, the equally tragic demise of Don Newton may have prevented an excellent period of Infinity, Inc. from ever happening.

Much of the tragic side of a comics Boneyard shows here, in these premature endings, both in the sense of the human cost of seemingly-pointless mortality and in the lesser notion of the wonderful things that might have, but never did, happen.

The Recurring Efforts at Resurrection

A piece that died too soon may show itself through echoes, as a younger generation of talent attempts to bring it back onto shelves that might have failed, in the past, to see it move.

Although a morbid nostalgia frequently betrays itself in certain attempts to revisit a lost theme, time, or concept of comics, often the simple recognition that a comics concept came no where near fulfilling its potential before it ended drives attempts at resurrection.

To mention (but perhaps not really explore) examples that will provide the content of future Boneyard columns: That pieces like Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" titles or Will Eisner's urban hero the Spirit generate often ill-fated attempts to regenerate the original magic of the early, seminal days of the concept implicates an untimely demise of a viable or worthwhile concept. Sometimes the meat of the ideas, sometimes the excellence of delivery, sometimes combinations of the two made the piece something to wear better through the decades and stand well against a medium often known for its ability to deliver endless streams of worthlessness show the pieces that passed on too soon.

The Other Side of the Frontier

An exploration of purpose such as this one can further define intent by negative criteria. So, for clarity's sake, bringing up pieces outside the scope of this feature - with the reasons that render them beyond consideration here - can also pen in the fundamental idea here.

• Completed and resolved pieces do not belong in the Boneyard; if they did, the feature would much resemble a lament over the many coherent, balanced, and closed pieces that never suffered unnecessary sequels. Thus, works of deliberately limited duration, such as Valentino's Normalman, don't belong here. That a piece might have a beginning, a middle, and an end only implicate the completeness of the concept.
• Marvels of collaboration that shone more because of excellence of delivery than of the vitality of the concept also stand beyond what this feature intends to cover. If a concept died of causes typical of a boneyard item, but lacked the seminal quality to (artistically) justify an ongoing work (as judged by this writer), it probably won't appear here. Thus, O'Neil and Adams' Green Lantern / Green Arrow tales, although deserving of a role in a comics canon of classics, nonetheless passed on at a good time. Had the piece continued, it would have ultimately become a tiresome moral-tale-of-the-month piece, perhaps resembling a superheroic version of the "Davy and Goliath" films. In another case, the Lee - Kirby team, though abruptly brought to a conclusion by Kirby's departure to DC Comics, neither caused cancellation of the books he created nor altogether undermined their commercial or artistic viability. Therefore, pieces like "The Lee - Kirby Fantastic Four" will not appear here. An upcoming column in Boneyard about the demise of EC Comics may seem to violate this principle, but perhaps by then a logical escape hatch will have given an excuse to include it.
• Thin but valid concepts will generally also not show up here in the boneyard. For instance, the Harvey Comics properties had a kind of minimal conceptual viability that could conceivably drive stories for the indefinite future, but the simplicity of the core concepts essentially means that none really had the self-driving quality of larger constructs like Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" books. A Harvey piece could theoretically still make for readable books more because of the limitless possibilities open to imagination and talent and not owing to the power of the concepts themselves.
• Stillborn creations that never survived long enough to demonstrate their excellence with an empirical credibility won't appear here either, belonging more in the category of potential greatness than greatness achieved for a too-short moment. Therefore, enjoyable but not-yet-up-to-full-steam creations like the late Gorilla Comics' Section Zero won't appear here. Still, we can recognize the tragedy of such pieces, in that they might have achieved that greatness given a full twelve issues to develop before their opportunity dissolved.
• Celebrations of idiosyncratic creation also stand beyond the scope here. While many fondly remember the marvelous quirkiness of Steve Gerber's work on Defenders or Howard the Duck, the actual concepts there did not drive themselves; rather, the fevered brow of an imaginative talent took these pieces places nothing really implied they should go. There we had an imagination that could work with anything (and work it into a strange place indeed) in such a way as to make the core concept somewhat irrelevant. Comics of the absurd, perhaps, might work better with leaner concepts so as to throw a greater contrast between the exhausted or unimaginative components and the remarkable things talent could do with them.

However, something can enjoy the timeless quality of a classic work and still seem to fit one or more of the above categories - for instance, Will Eisner's Spirit stories certainly did feature the benefit of idiosyncratic (and ultimately imitated) talent, and classic works can involve marvels of collaboration, such as the chemistry between Tom Peyer and Rags Morales on Hourman, a work which seemed to synergize in a way bringing out peak performances from the talent. In the case of the somewhat long-listed catalog immediately above, consider these inadequate, by themselves, as conditions for earning a place in this particular comics Boneyard.

The Question of Canon

In some cases, the works that appear in the Boneyard will have become part of the comics canon, now that the market includes reprint options beyond the hopes of readers a mere 20 years ago. For instance, Gemstone now prints an excellent line of EC Comics reprints quite sufficient to demonstrate why the modern reader should care about material printed some fifty years ago.

It may seem perverse that a comics work worthy of becoming a model for the form failed, somehow, to survive over the decades, but such a view fails to take into account a number of factors that can bring on the demise of a comics work. First, no comic can reliably maintain the highest level of quality for 150 consecutive issues - though a few superhuman efforts attempted as much. Secondly, except for a rare creator-owned piece or two, no works can keep the same talent for an equivalent span (say, 12 1/2 years), and the excellence of a comics concept frequently depends on specific, inspired creators. Thirdly, a shifting marketplace can pull the rug out from under a work of recognized merit; changes in the broader economy can affect where the consumer in the street applies his disposable income, often to the detriment of pieces that seem unquestionably worthy of ongoing recognition and renumerative patronage.

To analogize from music, we need not view the sales of Beatles albums as necessarily indicative of the quality of the material. Their marketability (as reflected in album sales) seemed to tend to increase over time after 1963 or so, but their work suffered ups and downs, and credible arguments could postulate their early work, their late work, or their psychedelic pieces as representative of the artistic peak. Tastes, and these arbitrary, must discern here, and similarly with any form of art that simultaneously serves as a product.

The cancellation of a comic can reflect upon its quality - some truly bad pieces indeed do not make it through a wall of market forces. But badness per se does not guarantee poor sales, just as quality does not guarantee good ones. Nor, either, does the converse apply, though the temptation may always exist to claim that the market punishes good work and rewards bad work. Had the latter claim any truth, no peaks would appear in measures of quality in a medium that declined in a linear fashion over time.

The Lazarus Clause

Note, further, that comics creations as concepts do not suffer from the same kind of mortality that attaches to constructs of flesh, blood, and bone (or whatever biological substance might come to mind). This means that a piece viewed as dead, dead, dead at one time in a market may occasionally make a roaring comeback. Consider Simonson's Orion, for instance, as the most remarkable example in a long series of attempted resurrections of Kirby's "Fourth World" material. Since the source works found themselves foreclosed just as they began to pick up momentum towards whatever resolution Kirby originally envisioned, and, furthermore, since Orion could fail (as did at least two Mister Miracle series after Kirby and as the Conway - Newton New Gods of the seventies), its footprint belongs in the Boneyard - indeed, perhaps the tombstone of the Kirby works stands as one of the foremost monuments to comics that deserved to live.

The Lazarus Clause of Comics (as I choose to name and define it) says that Someone, someday could make it work again, and maybe even make it sell. The efforts of later talents to breathe new life into the patient implicate an understanding that a good concept indeed enjoys the potential benefit of resurrection.

To some extent, furthermore, this potential raises the notion of a Boneyard as a morbid obsession with some imaginary Edenic era of comics to a hopeful prognosis that quality snubbed in the short term can become the standard of a future day. So optimism justifies what could otherwise become an altogether unhealthy regret.

The Credit Due

If we recognize that a comics fan has duties - and we may consider such moral imperatives somewhat dubious by nature, in the sense that exchanges between free human beings might do better to follow lines of mutual self-interest rather than grudging moral compulsion - we might assume that towards the higher end of a scale of duty we should find the notion that a fan should give credit to those who deserve it.

Assuming a communitarian conception of comics fandom rather than a model of isolated human atoms that do not (or should not) interact, we might expect of one another a commitment to recommend pieces of exceptional quality, even in the absence of a consistent aesthetic theory adequate to define a canon of great works in the form. In less bloviated terms, we should tell each other about the good pieces we encounter, perhaps even at the risk of undermining our own credentials as artistically-enlightened individuals.

In essence, we would see such an obligation as driving us to recognize the achievements of a John Byrne even among a crowd that has come to detest him for the cumulative failures that might spot a career almost a generation long. We should admit to the excellence of some Alan Moore work even where, perhaps, we take issue with notions contained therein with which we don't follow. We should admit the impact of an early-seventies Dennis O'Neil Green Lantern / Green Arrow tale even where our own notions run diametrically opposite to the idea he intended to present.

Such a notion of an obligation to give due credit somewhat approaches the kernel concept behind a comics Boneyard. Here we have a place to confess to the artistic successes that perhaps pulled double duty as commercial failures. We acknowledge the sleepers that had things going for them completely unknown to the occasional shallow pieces that might enjoy an incomprehensible runaway success.

Furthermore, should the maudlin or morbid impulse compel us, we can dwell in an unhealthy fashion over a metaphorical array of tombstones representing various titles and publishers long-term observers of the business might have watched go under, one by one, until little but an aesthetic wasteland seemed to remain. However, such an entropy-obsessed view remains beyond the intended mission of this feature; rather than taking the role of the black-clad undertaker at the interment of some unfairly deceased work, we should, instead, pursue a role more akin to that of the Dixieland band at a New Orleans funeral.

Ars longa, vita brevis; and consider that EC Comics remain, to some extent, in reprints almost fifty years after the collapse of that publishing concern. However, try to find a copy of Seduction of the Innocent, and you can expect to spend time and money in transactions probably only possible at all through the connective abilities of cybercommerce.

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Column 265. Completed 22-JUL-2001.