The 1990s was a period of surprising contrasts. After seven years of uninterrupted growth, the direct sales distribution system faced an extremely grave crisis beginning in 1994: within several years, it decimated the ranks of comic book specialty stores and the most fragile of publishers, and its effects would still be felt into the first years of the twenty-first century (see chapter 11). Simultaneously, comics began to penetrate the book market thanks to the growth of “graphic novels,” that is, books (as opposed to the stapled pamphlets known as comic books) that had found an audience largely among readers that did not frequent comic book specialty stores. Another effect of this tendency was, following the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize Special Award to Maus II by Art Spiegelman in 1992, the discovery by audiences outside of comic book specialty stores of the diversity and richness of work that was far removed from standardized superhero stories. Meanwhile, the Big Two did not hesitate to entrust their titles to a new generation of writers, often of British origin who explored the margins of the superhero genre with occasionally brilliant results.
The 1990s saw the gradual entry of comics work into the general book market, primarily issuing from the comic book industry under the generic term “graphic novels.” For the book market, this category covered three distinct forms: collections of newspaper comic strips, collections of comics that were previously published as comic books (usually starring superheroes or similarly related characters), and books that contained new or previously published complete stories that had no close rapport with the popular genres and were akin to independent productions.
Collections of newspaper comic strips constituted a minor niche held over from reprints of the Peanuts series by Holt and Fawcett from the 1950s through the 1980s. By the 1990s, the global success of Garfield and the best sellers published by Andrews & McMeel (notably Gary Larson’s The Far Side and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes) provided a new commercial value to collections of previously published daily newspaper strips.1 At the same time, single volumes reprinting material previously published as popular comic books were a phenomenon that dated to the beginning of the 1980s. There had been attempts in the two preceding decades to publish pocketbooks of superhero stories but demand for these books was minimal prior to the development of comic book specialty stores. After several largely unsuccessful attempts done in collaboration with Simon & Schuster at the close of the 1970s (The Silver Surfer by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, 1978), Marvel initiated the graphic novel movement by publishing self-contained stories in its line of “Marvel Graphic Novels” in 1982. DC cautiously followed its rival the following year, but did not discover the real potential of collected editions until 1986–1987, the period in which the commercial success of collections reprinting the limited series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen led to a policy of publishing books distributed directly to comic book stores that had not been previously published in comic book form (Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, 1989; Batman: Digital Justice by Pepe Moreno, 1990) alongside “classic” reprints issued in costly bound volumes. In the following years, the two industry leaders, as well as many of the independents that had followed their trail since the middle of the 1980s expanded their original graphic novel publications and their collections reprinting stories originally published in comic book series (trade paperbacks). Their penetration into general bookstores was initially slow but the success of the aforementioned DC volumes modified the perspective of the book trade regarding the profitability of these works. In the fall of 1989, the Waldenbooks chain created important spaces for graphic novels in their stores, which were shortly imitated by Brentano’s and the Barnes & Noble and Dalton chains. In several years, comic books found themselves established on shelves designated for “Graphic Novels” and were no longer exclusively shelved in the “Humor” section, as had been the case since the 1950s.
The growth of the trade paperback format took on an increased importance for publishers who accelerated the multiplication of monthly titles that, instead of telling a new short story each month, wove entire stories structured over six or eight consecutive issues that were formatted for their ultimate publication in trade paperbacks. DC particularly enacted this policy with series such as Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Starman by James Robinson, Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, among others, and these examples can be extended to other publishers. Moreover, subgenres existed that addressed a different set of potential readers. On the one hand there was a large adolescent readership that was directed toward volumes offering conventional superhero stories, adaptations of television series and successful films (X-Files at Topps; Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars at Dark Horse), and reprints of Japanese comics (of which the three principal suppliers since the end of the 1990s were an American company, Dark Horse, and two Japanese publishers, Viz Entertainment and Tokyopop). On the other hand there were works that attracted a readership that was older and frequently female: among these titles were collections that reprinted “sophisticated” series such as Sandman, mangas, and books from what could be qualified as “literary” or “avant-garde” producers, which in all cases escaped the mainstream canon.
The precursors of the trade paperback were the reprints collecting The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, which came on the heels of the positive critical reception that greeted the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus when it was published by Pantheon in September 1986, and which was twice reprinted in the two months following its initial release.2 This success launched a process that was picked up again in 1991–1992 with the appearance of the second volume of Maus, and the growing visibility of DC’s Sandman thanks to its wide distribution in libraries. The rest of the decade saw large and small publishers treat comic books as the prepublication form for books destined for long-term profitability in opposition to the short-term profitability that pamphlets had traditionally represented. Thanks to the growing interest given to their publications by the large chain bookstores, new publishers (such as NBM and Catalan) promoted the album format for fifteen years, as did many small publishers whose sophisticated production for the long-form album format was better suited to the book market than to that of the monthly comic book. Whether they were atypical works that provided the basis for cinematic adaptations—Ghost World (Fantagraphics, 1997) by Daniel Clowes, From Hell (Top Shelf, 1999) by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell—or works which, in the wake of Maus, were celebrated by cultural elites (but necessarily by the general public) for their treatment of topical problems—Stuck Rubber Baby (Paradox Press, 1995) by Howard Cruse on the adolescence of a homosexual in the South during the 1950s, Fax from Sarajevo (Dark Horse, 1996) by Joe Kubert on the war in the former Yugoslavia, and the journalistic strips of Joe Sacco published by Fanta-graphics, Palestine (2000) and Safe Area Gorazde (2002)—or works that were noted for their graphic and narrative inventiveness—Mr. Punch (Orion, 1994) by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Jimmy Corrigan (Pantheon, 2000) by Chris Ware—these comic books expressed a diversity that ruptured with the dominant norms of the mainstream comic book industry.
Sales of graphic novels generated revenues of 75 million dollars in 2001 and 100 million dollars in 2002. Simultaneously, the distribution across sales locations demonstrated a progression in the direction of specialty bookstores, accounting for 42.6 percent of these sales in 2001, and 50 percent in 2002. But these numbers do not signify much since the general book trade today achieves numbers in book sales similar to specialty bookstores. Despite the fact that there are approximately fifteen times more general interest bookstores than there are comic book stores—individual publishers always sell more books in the specialized bookstores than in general interest bookstores.3 Moreover, the role of manga in the contemporary comic book market is simply colossal. Manga sales increased 300 percent between 2000 and 2002, whereas, over the same time period, the accumulated growth of comic book sales and non-manga books was only 8 percent! At the start of the twenty-first century, Japanese comics constituted a publishing and commercial phenomenon that, because it offered a tremendous range of diversity, reached an extremely large readership in terms of gender and age groups, even if their popularity was globally presaged by the overexposure of Japanese animated cartoons on television, of which the mangas were a by-product.
Mainstream production had long rested on the same market structure, dominated by a single genre—superheroes and their closely related concepts—which itself was reliant upon popular and profitable characters. But the superhero paradigm as it had been reconstituted in the 1960s underwent evolutions that could be read equally as signs of exhaustion or, on the contrary, of renewal. During the 1990s, classic superheroes were the object of multiple “rewritings” in a framework that restarted the issue numbering with a new “first issue” of titles that had been published monthly without interruption since the 1960s (a strategy frequently adopted by Marvel from the middle of the 1990s onward) or in limited series or one-shots existing outside of a title’s normal continuity (the tactic preferred by DC). These strategies produced diverse results—often brilliant in the case of limited series written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Tim Sale (Superman For All Seasons, 1998; Batman: Dark Victory, 1999–2000; Daredevil: Yellow, 2001) or series painted in a hyperrealist photographic register by Alex Ross (Marvels, 1994, written by Kurt Busiek; Kingdom Come, 1996, written by Mark Waid)—but their common goal was always to foreground creators who were particularly popular at that moment to launch a title or a character that had run out of steam over the years (as seen at Marvel with the disappointing “Heroes Reborn” line of titles that were produced by the Image stars in 1996–1997 or the “Ultimate” line launched with greater success in the summer of 2000). The return to a “first issue” similarly aimed to arouse the interest of a new generation of young readers living in a culture of instant gratification who were less motivated, in contrast to their parents and grandparents, to become ardent consumers of series that were now more than a quarter of a century old.
Nineteen ninety-three initiated a trend that saw the multiplication of titles featuring heroines that were as shapely as they were dangerous. This tendency, nicknamed “bad girl art” (an allusion to the analogous movement of “good girl art” that took place during and after the Second World War), had precise thematic and graphic sources.4 At the beginning of the 1980s the warrior ninja Elektra, created by Frank Miller after he became the writer-artist on Daredevil, launched a type of formidable heroine rich in moral ambiguity, who lacked a clear relation to the dull crime fighters of the 1970s conceived as feminine versions of earlier superheroes (Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Spider-Woman). The durability of the Elektra character over the decade accompanied new images of “dangerous” women like Lady Shiva who appeared in The Question (DC) in 1987, or the Asian assassin Miho in Frank Miller’s Sin City (Dark Horse) from 1993 onward. In visual terms, “bad girl art” was directly derived from the anatomical exaggerations of the masculine and feminine form that were practiced shamelessly from the end of the 1980s by the future Image artists, notably Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee, and assimilated by followers like Jim Balent, who drew Catwoman (DC) from 1994 to 1999, or Mike Deodato who took over Wonder Woman (DC) in 1994–1995. Among the independents several characters debuted over the years that would find an audience. On the side of eye-catching concepts were the serial killer Razor (London Night Studios, 1992), the big-breasted blonde adventuress Barb Wire (Dark Horse, 1994), and the demonic Lady Death (Chaos! Comics, 1994). Presenting more personal creations were the samurai Shi (Crusade, 1994) by William Tucci and Michael Turner’s super-heroines Witchblade (Image, 1995) and Fathom (Image, 1998), as well as the relaunched of Vampirella at Harris in the early 1990s. The long list of female protagonists in the second half of the 1990s was bolstered by the considerable popularity of television series featuring female action heroes like Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and of video games like Tomb Raider, which made a global celebrity of the adventuress Lara Croft.
“Bad girl art,” with the exception of several very personal productions such as Shi: The Way of the Warrior by William Tucci, was a commercial solicitation pure and simple that illustrated the operation of a genre-driven market featuring publishers aiming for the broadest possible public. A counterexample from the same period was the 1993 launch of titles aimed at an Afro-American readership. It consisted, on the one hand, of the Milestone label distributed by DC and directed by Dwayne McDuffie, whose first four titles were Hardware, The Blood Syndicate, Icon, and Static, and, on the other hand, of the consortium of Afro-American publishers ANIA (“Protect and defend” in Swahili) whose first four titles, launched several weeks after the Milestone titles, were Zwanna, Heru, Purge, and Ebony Warrior. Written and drawn by artists who had left the Big Two, the Milestone comics were largely copies of existing Marvel/DC comics with black protagonists. On the other hand, the ANIA titles, which evinced a sharp afrocentrism verging on antiwhite racism, did not survive past their first issues. Though they were much more normative, the Milestone titles disappeared in 1997 after their creators accepted the evidence that a majority of young black readers were not drawn to the communitarian subtext of the series, which sold very poorly to a white audience.5
At the same time, the 1990s saw the perpetuation of a certain creative independence that contributed to the growth of comic book readership by producing stories that would find an audience outside of specialized bookstores and the logic of the cultural ghetto maintained by the direct sales distribution system. This new tendency went hand in hand with the division of production into two large subsectors: the first, whose most caricatured incarnation was the output of Image comics gave (as its name indicated) priority to visual style to the near total exclusion of the writing; the second, represented by Frank Miller and Alan Moore in the 1980s, placed illustrations in the service of stories drawn from outside the traditional confines of the comic book subculture. Much as American popular music had been renewed by a “British Invasion” during the 1960s, mainstream comic books experienced a phenomenon analogous to the emergence of a sophisticated segment thanks to the tidal wave of British writers arriving in the wake of Alan Moore at DC: Grant Morrison, who wrote DC’s Animal Man (1988–1990), Doom Patrol (1988–1992), and The Invisibles (1994–2000) before taking up New X-Men (Marvel) in 2001; Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman (1988–1996) assured him an international notoriety; Garth Ennis, whose stint on Hellblazer (1991–1994) and his series Preacher (1995–2000) pushed the limits of what mainstream comics could now show; Warren Ellis, who wrote the series Transmetropolitan (1997–2002), JLA (1997–2000), and Stormwatch (1997–1998) before creating The Authority (1999–2000) for DC. Scottish writer Mark Millar took on the last of these titles in 2000–2001 before assuming the writing chores on Ultimate X-Men, The Ultimates, and Ultimate Fantastic Four (launched between 2001 and 2003) at Marvel, and on the remarkable limited series Superman: Red Son (2003), which recounted what would have happened if Superman had arrived on Earth in the U.S.S.R. of Stalin. Alan Moore continued to work on personal projects such as From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell (Tundra, 1991–1998) and, beginning in 1999, in a series of titles that formed the “America’s Best Comics” label published by DC. Among these British writers emerged an American writer who had a particular gift for stories that took up the ambience of film noir. After having debuted at Caliber Comics in the middle of the decade (A.K.A. Goldfish, 1994–1995; Jinx, 1996), Brian Michael Bendis worked for Image (Powers, launched in 2000) and wrote several issues of Daredevil for Marvel. For the general public the resulting focus on writers shifted attention away from the domain of the writer-artist that had been so important in the 1980s, with notable exceptions being Mike Allred, creator of Madman (published by Tundra in 1992), and Mike Mignola, whose character Hellboy (published by Dark Horse beginning in 1994 and adapted with great success to the cinema in 2004) awakened a particular public interest.
At the end of the twentieth century, the greatest source of visibility for comic books was film6 and television. Animated cartoons continued to play a major role in maintaining the public demand for illustrated stories. The ever-increasing supply of Japanese series directly conditioned the demand for mangas, which became the most dynamic segment of the graphic novel market following their introduction in the middle of the 1980s. An example of a very successful complementarity between animated cartoons and comic books was Bongo Comics, founded in 1993 to publish comic book adaptations of The Simpsons, the animated cartoon whose originality permitted it to escape the crisis of the mid-nineties. Another big success in a different sense were the various series conceived around the graphic universe of animator Bruce Timm: Batman (1992–1995), Superman (1996–2000), Batman: Gotham Knights (1997–1999), Batman Beyond (1999–2002), Justice League (created in 2001), as well as several feature films by the same designers, all of which benefited from remarkable production conditions that simultaneously sustained the interest of the audience for the original comic books in addition to the titles that capitalized on Timm’s stylized visuals, which were the polar opposite of the Image style that was the rage at that time (e.g., The Batman Adventures, 1992–1995; The Batman and Robin Adventures, 1995–1997; The Superman Adventures, 1996–2002). On average, these titles found a younger clientele than their original parent series and facilitated the emergence of a visual style at odds with that of Image (defined by Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, or Todd McFarlane) and the manga style that was on the way to becoming the stylistic norm for comic books. The Bruce Timm style gave birth to a “school” whose disciples were Ty Templeton, Mike Parobeck, Rick Burchett, Craig Rousseau, Al Bigley, the veteran Joe Staton, and beginning in 1999, Timm’s old Canadian collaborator Darwyn Cooke.7
An ambiguity persists with regard to the concept of creator-driven production. The term “independent publishers” (indies) designates publishers who allow their creators ownership of their creations, in contrast to the policies of Marvel and DC. But this particularity has no link to the nature of specific creations that adopt the traits of mainstream production (in the case of Image, Dark Horse, or CrossGen, a publisher that experienced a remarkable growth after its launch in 2000) or which could be largely non-commercial in nature. This ambivalence was exemplified by the publisher Oni Press (created in 1997), a publishing house that positioned itself between mainstream production and the avant-garde with a catalog of publications covering a range from the fantastic, such as Scott Morse’s The Complete Soulwind (2003), to the intimate stories of Andi Watson (Breakfast After Noon, 2001; Slow News Day, 2003), without ever falling into avant-gardism in the strictest sense. In the 1990s, auteur production found a place at the large publishers thanks to the influence of the previously cited innovative writers but its favored space remained the small publishers. Auteurism par excellence was represented by self-publishing, whose historical models were Elf-quest by Wendy and Richard Pini (WaRP Graphics) and Cerebus by Dave Sim (Aardvark-Vanaheim).8 Among the creators that took this direction, all of whom were adept in black-and-white comics, was Jeff Smith with his heroic fantasy series Bone (Cartoon Books, 1991–2004), Terry Moore with his “soap opera” Strangers in Paradise (Abstract Studios, since 1994), and David Lapham with his crime series Stray Bullets (El Capitain Books, since 1995).
Without question, the most important independent publishers of the period were Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, and Top Shelf. After taking up the cause of independent production in the 1980s, Fantagraphics emerged as its flag-bearer. In 1990, its owner Gary Groth made the decision to publish a line of pornographic comics, Eros Comix, to finance his less-profitable avant-gardist productions.9 From his diverse catalog emerged creators each associated with a title where they could express themselves from the first page to the last. Following the brothers Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, writer-artists of an extremely original Hispano-American universe (Love and Rockets, 1982–1996; new series starting in 2001), Peter Bagge practiced his semiautobiographical social satire in the vein of Crumb (Hate!, 1990–1998); Daniel Clowes deployed a surrealist sensibility (Eight-ball, created in 1989); Roberta Gregory, principally through her character, the cantankerous forty-year-old Bitchy Bitch, told stories of hetero- and homosexual women with a derisory sensibility (Naughty Bits, starting in 1991); Richard Sala told fantastic stories in the graphic vein of Chas Addams (Evil Eye, created in 1998); Chris Ware delivered painstaking work whose format and presentation were grounded in newspaper typography, before launching in the incredibly complex story of solitude and rootlessness that would become Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (The Acme Novelty Library, created in 1993).10 In the middle of the decade, following in the footsteps of Robert Crumb’s defunct magazine, Weirdo, Zero Zero (1995–1998) emerged as a place where avant-garde creators could express themselves with complete freedom, free from all commercial constraints. Through the quality and volume of its catalog, Fantagraphics was at the head of independent creator-driven production.
Created in 1990 by Montrealer Chris Oliveros, the eponymously published black-and-white magazine Drawn & Quarterly (D&Q) presented itself as an aesthetic heir to Art Spiegelman’s RAW providing a space for the artistic expression of young creators who had no affinity for North American mainstream comics. In the years that followed, other titles associated with individual creators appeared: Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet, Optic Nerve by Adrian Tomine, Berlin by Jason Lutes, Peepshow by Joe Matt, and Palooka-Ville by Seth, all of whom produced remarkable books. Many of the creators published by D&Q were Canadian, including the Quebecois Julie Doucet and Michel Rabagliati, the Ontarians Chester Brown (most notable for Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography, 2003), David Collier, Joe Matt, Seth, and Maurice Vellekoop.11
Top Shelf was born in 1997 from the association of Brett Warnock, whose eponymous magazine provided an outlet for a new generation of independent creators, and Chris Staros, a literary agent for artists (including Eddie Campbell and Gary Spencer Millidge) and well-informed observer of independent production who published an annual guide, The Staros Report. Their publishing house earned renown after publishing the 1999 best seller From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (adapted into film in 2001) and young creators such as Craig Thompson (Blankets, 2003), James Koch-alka (Monkey vs. Robot, 2000), Doug TenNapel (Creature Tech, 2002), Alex Robinson (Box Office Poison, 2001), Ed Brubaker (A Complete Lowlife, 2001), and Scott Morse (The Barefoot Serpent, 2003).
Creator-driven production experienced an unprecedented expansion in the last decade of the century thanks to the growth of the availability of comics work in bookstores, which furnished publishers not only commercial outlets beyond specialized comic book stores dominated by a direct sales distribution system largely controlled by the biggest publishers, but also with a new visibility and an enlarged audience who, a good quarter century after European readers, took note of the versatility of a mode of expression newly liberated from the grip of preformatted superhero stories.