Why Does America Love Comic Books?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:40

Comic books are woven into the fabric of American pop culture, evolving from humble newspaper strips to a multi billion dollar industry.

Their stories have inspired hope during wars, reflected societal anxieties during culture shifts, and consistently adapted to embrace new technologies and audiences.

Today, comic book heroes and genres remain vibrant symbols of American imagination and reinvention, their influence reaching well beyond the printed page to movies, fashion, digital art, and fandom communities nationwide. So in this episode, we will explore its origins, cultural impact, and enduring popularity as I ask, why does America love comic books?

Welcome to America, a History Podcast.

I'm Liam Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA what it is today.

To discuss this, I am joined by a professor of English at Michigan State University whose research focuses on race, culture and power in real and imagined spaces, with a particular interest in comic book history. And we'll leave a link to some of his work in the show Notes for you to enjoy after this as well. A superhuman hello to Julian Chambliss.

Julian Chambliss: 00:02:12

Hello. How are you doing?

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:14

I am so good, thank you. How are you?

Julian Chambliss: 00:02:16

I'm good, I'm good.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:18

Good.

I think like most people listening to this podcast, we've probably like watched like a Marvel movie in the cinema or something, and some people may have actually read some comic books.

But I feel like there's so much to unpack with like comic culture in the US that I'm sure we're not going to get through it all in like 30, 40 minutes. But I'm excited to get started.

Julian Chambliss: 00:02:40

Sure, yeah. So happy to talk about.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:43

Yeah. So I just, I wonder if you could first talk us through the early developments of comics in America and how they came to. To be so popular.

Julian Chambliss: 00:02:53

Well, obviously with comic, you have to start with comic strips, which were an integral part of the explosion of print culture in the late 19th century as improvements and print technology allowed newspaper to be printed.

And the competition between newspapers, primarily Hearst and the Pulitzer syndicates, meant that they were trying to find ways to draw people to the newspapers and actually cartoons, these paper comic strips became a really important one. And the first color comic strip is the Yellow Kid, which is Richard Olcott comic strip.

And that became a kind of anchor that drew people to reading the paper. Right.

And so comic strips have always been a part of sort of newspapers first as sort of political cartooning, which is one of the ways that we kind of understand visual culture in the United States.

You know, long history stretching back to the midp 19th century and the work of Someone like Thomas Nast is really definitional in terms of political discourse.

But that kind of popular discourse around the comic strip as a humor publication really comes with the late 19th century and the introduction of things like the Yellow Kid. And then you get characters like Buster Brown, another Olcott creation. And that becomes like a mainstay of the sort of Sunday comic strip. Right?

Something that's read for entertainment, for humor, a really great comic. Historian Ian Gord talks about the newspaper comic strip as a human based response to the transformations associated with modernization.

Americans are dealing with massive immigration in the early 20th century. They're also dealing with massive urbanization.

And they're dealing with these sort of transformations that are fundamentally changing the nature of American society from a very rural defined society to a very urban defined society with immigrants from parts of the world that are very different. Right. They're not the German and English immigrants that sort of dominated earlier periods.

They're Southern European, they're Italian, they're Jewish, they're not Christian. Right. They're white ethnics. And all that creates a lot of anxiety.

And in comics, you often see in the early 20th century, these caricatures, there are a way to create a kind of mediated space where people can work out their anxieties. Right? Caricature is kind of fundamental form in comics.

And often those caricatures, especially in this early period, really rely very heavily on racist tropes. And it can be quite startling to our contemporary eye. But the comic strip is also a place where sort of consumer culture is also being normalized.

Right. You could see things in comic strips that become a kind of mainstay. Right.

If you look at it like a classic comic strip, like Polly and Her Pals, which was a comic strip that I use in my comics class. Part of the reason I use it is because, like, most kids will never see it.

But if you read it, it's really a kind of like contemporary story of like a modern woman and her family. And they're sort of thinking about the transformation happening in society.

And you think about other comic strips like Gasoline Alley, which is a really early comic strip where the characters age and they're really sort of inspired by the coming of the automobile, like the Model T and the Model A and Model T and the creation of a kind of automobile culture. All those things are being documented in comic strips. And so they become, at some level, like Al F and say, an archive of the American experience.

They are telling the story of how the United States is changing. And those changes are rapidly happening in the early 20th century.

students, if you were born in: 1880

You've gone from technology that arguably you could look at and understand what it is, to people discovering things like the x ray and the internal combustion engine and radio waves and Nikola Tesla and all manner of, like, scientific transformations that people just don't understand.

we would live on Mars by the: 1990

Liam Heffernan: 00:07:34

It's interesting because, you know, we still see those, you know, satirical, like, strips in the newspaper. Like, there's. There's still a thing.

So at what point did that sort of divergence happen where it kind of evolved from these sort of just satirical, silly sort of pieces in the newspaper to entities in their own. Right.

Julian Chambliss: 00:07:55

Right.

In the: 1930

They were bundling together comic strips that had appeared in newspapers, but putting them into a format that could be sold, presumably, at the newsstand. Right. Like at a economically advant form. And so that creates the comic book form.

But the genre that really kind of makes that form super successful is the superhero. Right. It's not to say that they were not comic books before the superhero comics there were. Right. You have those compilation comics.

You have humor comics, western comics and things like that. But with the superhero, you get a kind of phenomenon because it's a new genre Borrowing very heavily from previous genres.

ng in the form of Superman in: 1938

n age of comics, which is the: 1930

Liam Heffernan: 00:09:27

And you mentioned a couple of minutes ago about how the social media reflection that's inherent within sort of the early comic Strips. And it strikes me that actually there's a.

There's a real strong parallel there between, you know, the superhero science fiction comic books and those so still, you know, perhaps quite silly, satirical, you know, strips in the newspaper in that they're both kind of used to present and reflect social anxieties and. And fears in perhaps more. More palatable and entertaining ways.

Julian Chambliss: 00:10:00

Yeah, without question.

I think when we think about the superhero genre, especially in the context of the United States, I often write about it as a way to understand how Americans are coping with the fact that they are in a world that's changing.

The characters that emerge as the sort of superhero character are characters that take up a lot of the traits that you would have found in, like the cowboy character, which is a very important character in American pop culture and the publications and adventure stories that were published before.

They also have elements of the kind of inventiveness that you would see with, like, the boy inventor characters, like, I think like a Tom Swift, for instance. These are characters that existed in print before and, you know, they get sort of translated into the comic book form.

But I often talk about the comic book as a very particular interpretation of American sense of the world. Right. Because the world is actually quite big.

I think United States had previously, much of the 19th century thought of itself, since its founding, as sort of separated from the rest of the world in a weird way. But there's just been a. There was a general sort of move towards greater engagement first within its own hemisphere.

Like think of something like the Monroe Doctrine, but in the 20th century, global affairs. And the United States engagement in global affairs really rations it up.

And like, the United States becomes a part of a kind of global community, which. But that is something that doesn't necessarily easily understood by every person. Right. So there's anxiety associated with that.

And arguably, I would say one of the things that our contemporary politics is sort of reflecting is an old anxiety about globalization. Right. And the other.

And what superheroes do and what those superhero stories kind of do is they create characters that can answer any kind of challenge related to culture. Right. They. They represent the values of Americans in very sort of, like, stark ways. And they have the power to sort of like, stabilize society.

Often superhero characters are thought of as kind of like status quo characters. There's something going wrong. They swoop in and make things right again. Right. With air quotes. Right. What does right mean? But they, you know, they.

They stop things from happening, which is obviously one of the things that makes them appealing to the readership at the very beginning.

Because, of course, the reader thinks of the country, the United States, as the good guy, thinks of the values of the United States as good values, and thinks about these characters sort of reiterating and supporting and amplifying those ideas.

So you get this sort of, like, funhouse, mirror version of the United States, where, like, you have the power to do incredible things and maintain and promote the status quo.

That represents the sort of, like, truly singular contribution represented by the United States as a country, as a place with an ideology that embraces democracy, as a place where people can move forward in a very particular way. And those are all very important ideas to Americans.

Liam Heffernan: 00:13:17

You know, when you look at characters like Captain America, which is like, the least, like, discreet kind of name, this sense of, like, you know, America and American ideals are going to, like, save the world.

And particularly at the time, you know, these characters were created and when comic books were becoming really popular, you know, you had World wars, there was an awful lot of tension around the world. I mean, it almost serves as propaganda, right?

Julian Chambliss: 00:13:43

Oh, for sure. It's one of the things that is interesting to consider. In the political cartooning era, often countries were presented in a form, right?

Uncle Sam represents the United States. Like, the British have their version of this sort of cartoon representation of the country.

What the superhero comic book character does is it really sort of amplifies the value statements associated with the country. Right.

The idea that their propaganda is perfectly reasonable, but it's a very particular kind of propaganda because they're not always directly supported by the state. Right. Like, when we think about propaganda, we think like, well, propaganda is something that's produced by the state.

This is people who are citizens imagining America in a very particular way. Like, Captain America is a great example. His first appearance, he's punching Hitler in the face. But the United States has not yet joined the war.

So that's a couple of Jewish creators who know what's going on in Germany. Right? And there are plenty of Nazis walking around the United States. They had a rally at Massacre of God for Christ. Right? They know what's going on.

They understand what's going on. So they create a character. What's he doing? He punches Hitler in the face.

So they have a very particular vision of what they think American policy should be based on American values. They are Americans, right? They are second generation, right? They are citizens of the United States. They believe in the United States.

Like, this is a place where their immigrant parents came and they were able to have a better life. And so they're like, this is what the United States should do. They should punt Hitler in the face.

And of course, eventually the United States does punch Hitler in the face. But it is a kind of collective narrative that's very particular.

That is people interpreting the vision and interpreting the value of the United States in a very, very particular way.

Liam Heffernan: 00:15:49

Although I'm completely on board with that. At the time, it wasn't like there's this creator culture like there is today where anyone could create work and put it out there.

So who was actually funding and publishing and distributing this content?

Julian Chambliss: 00:16:05

Well, the publishers in the comic book publishing are very much connected to publishing industry in New York. Right. They are very much associated with magazine publishing. A lot of them had started out in publications. So they written for adventure magazines.

They had published, you know, where they're writing as writers. They're writing, you know, for pennies on the, on the word.

And they are hired by companies like National Publication, which is the company that becomes DC Comics. Right. And they're publishing in that vein. So they are a for profit enterprise and they're in a really competitive publication space. Right.

d in the United states in the: 1920

Is really interesting because one of the things that in the history that really sort of stands out when they, when the editor first saw it, it's like, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Because in the COVID you know, you have this man with a car over his head and he's smashing it.

And like, if you think about that up until that point, you do not necessarily see human characters doing stuff like that, right? So it does stand out as like a kind of visual moniker. Right.

So from a print standpoint though, if you're looking across a row of things in print and you know, okay, okay, okay, wait, this guy has a car over his head. Okay, okay, you're going to go back to. Wait, what's going on with this guy with a car over his head? Right, with the cape? What is this? Right.

And so there's a way, like, you know, it grabs attention.

So these are companies that are looking for readers in a very competitive publishing market, lower end, really cheap publications for entertainment purposes, right. Really building off of a long history of like, you know, action adventure magazines, story magazines, and they're in that space.

And so that's why you have this sort of brutal competition. And once something starts to sell, people get in there and go like, we need to sell. We need them to start making comics like this.

We need to emulate these stories. Which is why you have such a proliferation of comics after Superman.

Liam Heffernan: 00:19:35

And so when all of these publishers are competing for readers and there surely has to be questions in the same way that there is today around appropriateness, around depictions of violence, for instance, and you know, these same editorial questions that are being asked today. So what sort of regulations were in place to protect everyone in that sense?

Julian Chambliss: 00:20:00

You know, early on, you're exactly right. Once comic books became popular, they immediately started to draw the ire of cultural critics.

Like one of the earliest cultural critics of comics is a guy named Sterling north, who was a critic, but he thought about comics is almost like a disease. This is not good reading material for kids. And the violence and the sort of fascistic elements of these characters.

It's quite notable very early on what the publishers do and national publication, DC Comics is one of the first people to do this is they actually bring in experts and people with like good reputations to be on a kind of editorial review board and saying like, hey, these comic, you know, these famous people say these comics are good for you. But there's not like a kind of overt governmental regulation. Right, because it's not pornography. It's not, you know, it's print material.

It doesn't show. It shows violence, but it's cartoonish violence.

So we don't get the kind of regulatory, centralized, regulatory control that we understand associated with the comic code until scare of the post war period that gives rise to the comic co authority.

But during the golden age, yeah, people are critical of it and consumer critiques are there, but the publishers really emphasize, hey, this is good values.

These characters represent really strong moral stances and they rely on these sort of public outreach through, like I say, DCs read a review board to support this. But it does not prevent people from criticizing. It doesn't at all.

And people are always criticizing comics, but they make so much money and so many people are reading them that it's like today we all know social media is not necessarily good for you, but no one's stopping it.

Liam Heffernan: 00:22:04

Yeah, well, yeah. So am I right to think then comic book audience even back then was typically younger?

Julian Chambliss: 00:22:14

No, no. Actually, while it's true kids read comics, it's also true that a lot of adults read comics.

ized after the war and in the: 1950

The rest of the world, if you think about comic culture in Asia, you think about comic culture in Europe, there are plenty of adults who read comics, right? They're not. They're comics for kids, but also comics for adults right there.

But in the United States, the Golden Age, you have plenty of adults that are reading comics and plenty of kids that are reading comics. And that partly because there are so many genre, right.

Even as the superhero becomes like, you know, this very important fast selling job, the other genres don't go away. Right. There are still media tie in comics, right. There are Disney comics, there are cowboy comics, there are pirate stories in comics.

All those things still exist, but the best selling thing isn't superhero.

Liam Heffernan: 00:23:32

Yeah.

I guess in the same way that, you know, when you think about video games like Grand Theft Auto, it's, it's, it's the more controversial comics, at least for their time, that get the most attention because they cause the most public debate.

Julian Chambliss: 00:23:46

Right, right. That's a good way to think about it. Yeah.

Liam Heffernan: 00:23:49

And what point did comic books start to get more sophisticated in terms of, you know, content and narrative, you know, where today we're so used to this really like complex universe of, you know, crossovers and obviously multimedia franchises. When did the seeds of that start to sort of sow in America?

Julian Chambliss: 00:24:11

That's a great question. And you know, I think we tend to think about comics sort of taking on these really complicated narratives in the 60s. And there's great truth to that.

lication of a Marvel comic in: 1961

You get a kind of shared universe of characters with Fantastic Four, then the Avengers, all those characters being created by Jack Kirby, Steve Daco alongside Stan Lee, they are churning out stories and you get these crossovers and you start to get this very sort of built out universe. The work that happened in D.C. in the Golden Age gets rebooted in the Silver Age, where you get the second iteration of a lot of characters.

So there's a Golden Age Green Lantern, there's a Silver Age Green Lantern. Right. Silver Age gangrene is Hal Jordan.

And you get New Flash, you get all these characters, you get the Justice League as opposed to earlier version of Justice Society.

And so you start to see these sort of like built out interconnected storytelling worlds that are building off of the legacy of the first generation of comics, but also more sophisticated storytelling, in part because the people who are writing those comics have been reading the previous generation of clowns, right? So they have some familiarity with the genre.

And so this is where the sort of, like, intersection between fandom in comics and this sort of growth of the Silver age comic book culture becomes really sort of integrated in a way that always been fandom in science fiction, for instance.

And many of those early writers that were writing science fiction, like I look at Alfred Bester, for instance, those people also write comic books, right? Because some of the early editors who are writing or editing science fiction started to edit comic books.

And so they bring some of those writers over. But the letter page in comic books becomes a kind of way for fans to connect to each other.

And then by the time you get to the end of the 60s, you start to see the emergence of the convention where people come together and they started trading and doing all these things.

And so there's a way where the sort of sophistication of the Silver Age, where people who have been reading golden age comics, but now they're adults and they're starting to write and started thinking like, well, this could happen in a comic book, because I remember this and that, that sort of starts to drive, and that really becomes like a pattern that you have this sort of cyclical transformation as the genre sort of references itself and becomes more sophisticated in its own storytelling style and its history. The question of continuity, the ability for people to look back on the stories that have been told and reimagine and do what we call retcons. Right.

Or tell stories in between issues and things like this, all that becomes a very sophisticated meta narrative that's attractive to readership and to the fandom.

Liam Heffernan: 00:27:24

Yeah, I'm really fascinated by the sort of the fandom that surrounds comic books because you just don't really see it in with, you know, other mediums or other types of content to the same sort of impassioned degree that you care around. Around comic books. And I just. I wonder why you think that. That it was comic books that managed to stir up such a kind of fervent fan base.

Julian Chambliss: 00:27:48

Well, I think the most obvious answer is the penetration of the medium. Right. I would argue if you think about the patterns of fandom that you see in comics, they exist in other fields.

It's just not as many people involved in the field because there's usually some financial or structural limitation. I don't know if you've ever known anyone who collects stamps, but I have.

And believe me, those people are quite adamant about stamps and stamp culture and, like, what a stamp is and blah, blah, blah. And in fact, you know, one of the things about comics, it borrows from stamps is the grading system. And baseball cards, that's another one, right?

You know, you think about how people think about baseball cards, but comics are traditionally a very cheap medium. Like they, you know, I am an old man now. When I was a young man, comics were really cheap. They're not cheap like they used to be.

When I was a kid, you get a comic 50 cents. You can't get a comic 50 cents anymore. But think about being a kid and your allowance. And your allowance might be $2.

Well, that's four comic books, right? I mean, you can get a lot with just a little bit of money.

So that means that there are a lot of people who are participating in that same medium with you, right?

They're reading the same stories, they're participating in the same story world, they are experiencing the same sort of story kind of emotional roller coaster. So there's a conversation point where large numbers of people can be involved. And it is a medium that works both textually and visually.

So if you are someone who's drawn to visual components, there's ample material there. If you're someone drawn to textual investigation or textual reflection, there's much ample material there.

There is, on the part of the editors and writers, a recognition that people are reading and outreach very famously, Marvel Comics. Stan Lee has Stan Soapbox, and they give out the no prize awards, which are essentially awards for when people recognize something, right?

Recognize a mistake, you get a prize. Recognize that you did something good, you get a prize, right? But it's a way for them to engage.

So those elements come together to create massive opportunity for fans to be engaged.

And we see that all the time now because we have much more media that is fast and systematized, that immediately creates that kind of culture around it. But comics were early version of that on the newsstands. Very cheap, can be acquired, come out every week, right?

So there's always something new for you to pick up. And so those things together create this sort of massive. This massive fandom ongoing conversation.

Liam Heffernan: 00:31:00

And that makes a lot of sense in terms of how that fandom has sort of organically kind of grown and evolved.

But the point that comic books started to be taken over and exploited for all the profit that they're worth by, you know, the likes of Disney and whoever else at that point, you know, this sort of community driven engagement that you're talking about, it kind of gets taken over by the corporations at the top.

And I'm thinking, you know, when you think about things like the little Easter eggs and these little, these little sort of things that people used to spot and get rewarded for.

Well actually that's almost become a deliberate, like, almost like gamifying the, you know, the experience for people who are watching the films, like can you spot the Easter eggs? Can you spot spoilers or et cetera. Just how much does, does that kind of.

And this is going to sound really like maybe cynical, but this corporate takeover of the comic book fandom, how much has that affected the fandom itself?

Julian Chambliss: 00:32:03

That's a good question. I would make a, a couple distinctions. Obviously, corporatization in comics actually starts a long time ago.

If you think about who owns the comic book company, right? Like Marvel gets acquired by corporation, I think it's called the Caden corporation in the 70s. DC obviously gets acquired by Warner Brothers.

But they're part of massive corporation and they're not immediately media vehicles. Right? They're not. Their intellectual property is not automatically exploited.

Although we can talk about in the 70s the efforts on both of the sort of major publishers, D.C. with their efforts with a character like, you know, in the 60s they had Batman. In the 70s they had Wonder Woman. And then, and then the 50s they have Superman and television.

And it was very important in terms of like those characters and their cultural permutation. Right. A lot of people know those characters because of television. In the 70s they have wonder Woman, Lynn Carr's Wonder Woman.

Marvel had a much more complicated pathway. The Incredible Hulk television series, the Spider man television series, some TV movies with Captain America, Doctor Strange, so on and so forth.

And famously, obviously Stan Lee spent a lot of time trying to promote comics in television and in film with those varying degrees of success.

It's not until the, I think the late 80s, early 90s that the corporate landscape starts to align in a way to allow for the exploitation of these characters in a massive way. And the irony has a lot to do with, I would say, broader transformation of corporate media culture in the United States, right?

ful television program of the: 1980

But there are a lot of syndicated shows that sort of take up the idea of like a high tech vehicle with a mysterious hero who drives it or, or flies it or dives, whatever. And all those are essentially taking on superhero tropes, right? They're episodic, they fight against bad guys, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Marvel and DC become valuable to their corporate parents because people recognize, oh, there's a generation of people who know these characters. And the difference here is important.

When I say there's a generation of people who know these characters, there's actually different levels of fandom that they're manipulating when they turn to a character, right? So most students, I teach classes about comics, most students don't know most comic book characters. They don't like.

If you say Superman, they know who Superman is. You say Lois Lane, they know who Lois Lane is. Say Jimmy Olsen, 30% of them don't know who Jimmy Olsen is.

Like, and I'm not joking, like, they will not know who Jimmy Olsen is.

Liam Heffernan: 00:35:28

Right?

Julian Chambliss: 00:35:28

But they know who Superman is. They know who Batman is.

They may never have read a Batman comic, but they paid up a lot of Batman video games, Arkham Games, or they've watched a cartoon, Batman, animated series, right? They've seen it other places, but they haven't read a comic.

There are whole swaths of people who've never read a Marvel comic but know characters like Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, because they've seen them in cartoons, but they haven't read the comics, right?

They've seen them in video games, but haven't read the comments like, and so, so there's a way where because the characters have some cultural currency, the corporation goes like, well, we can leverage that to sell this. We can leverage to sell a game, we can leverage it to pull people to a movie.

And part of the reason the format of most superhero movies for many years were origin stories was because they assumed that, oh, there are people that are fans of this character. But the reason we're making the movie is because like that fan, the fans who are fans of the character are the baseline of the movie.

But we want other people to come.

film going experience in the: 1980

And that's why IP becomes so important because there's a built in knowledge base that will help you make sure you get essentially a huge percent of the money that you put out to create the thing. But then because there's so many people that are excited about the thing that gets other people to go along.

How many girlfriends or boyfriends have gone along to something because they're part of like, I have to see this and you have to come with me.

Liam Heffernan: 00:37:27

Yeah.

Julian Chambliss: 00:37:28

That sort of emotional manipulation is marketing 101. But comic books have the value of more than 80 years at this point of story that different generations of people have seen across multiple platforms.

Which is why, given the cost of creating something, most major media corporations are willing, especially for the sort of flagship companies like Marvel and dc, they're willing to spend money on it. Right? They're always willing to spend a little bit of money on it.

Liam Heffernan: 00:38:04

Do you think, though, that there's a risk that as this all becomes more and more commoditized and mainstream, that actually you could easily alienate those who consider themselves, you know, the hardcore comic fans? Because actually the real mainstream stuff almost becomes, you know, not cool anymore?

As you mentioned, you've got these sort of tiers of fans that exists now, the surface level.

People like me, I admit I love watching a Marvel film at the cinema, but I wouldn't be able to tell you an issue number and tell you where the origins of a superhero, you know.

But then you've got this like, this, this sort of culture of like die hard fans and sort of finding that balance to please both must be incredibly difficult.

Julian Chambliss: 00:38:49

I think it is. And I think it has become more difficult as the nature of online conversations become more polarized. Right.

I always say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is his own universe and that's not that shocking in comics. Right.

Multiverses are like, they have been a part of comics since the 50s, but when the Marvel Cinematic Universe offers is a simplified version of the print version of Marvel.

So if you know that print version, when you see the Marvel stuff and you're a huge fan, the print version go, oh, that's really, you know, it's nice what they did there.

But it's also true that because they're creating a simplified version, as a marketer and as someone who wants to make more money, they often want to make changes that are going to encourage more people to participate. Right? Yeah.

And you allow the sort of like fractious dialogue that you see online are usually about changes that from a kind of marketing, growing audience standpoint, make perfect sense. But from a kind of like, I'm a die hard and I wanted to be exactly like this other thing. Don't make sense.

And the most common example is, like, gender bending or race bending. A character which gets attached to a broader question of, like, representation and inclusion in a very fraction of politics in the United States.

But honestly, if you just think about, like, how many women there are and they have money, no corporations ever gonna go, like, I don't want money. That's just not what they do. They always go like, I want money. Right. So if you say to them, can you get more money?

They'll be like, how do I get more money? Women. They'll be like, oh, what do we need to do? More women. Oh, okay. They're gonna do it right.

Like, as long as they can keep the coherence there, they're gonna do it right. Like, you know, and also, it's a global audience. Right.

Their baseline is domestic, but then they have to think about what about the rest of the world. Why are. Why is Hydra so important in the MCU when comics. They're Nazis, right? Right.

But you can't show Nazi things in a lot of media markets in Europe. Literally illegal, Right? It's literally illegal. You can't do it. Right. You can't show it.

So Hydra, basically Nazis, but they don't use the Nazi, you know, so it gets around the thing.

And so, yeah, I'm always mindful of the ways that fans are weaponized by broader cultural conversations, and the comics become a venue for those conversations to happen that has been very prominent over the last few years in the United States, especially in mediated versions of these characters and also in print, where you have fans that are always concerned that, oh, this is too much to this or too much of that.

The idea that comics are apolitical, though, of course, is ridiculous, because remember was the first thing that Captain America ever did, he punched Hitler in the face. So.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:07

Absolutely. But there is a diversity issue in comics. Isn't that, like.

Julian Chambliss: 00:42:12

Yeah.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:13

nly really since, like, what,: 2020

Julian Chambliss: 00:42:31

Right.

haracters are created between: 1961

st Black Superhero Character,: 1966

Liam Heffernan: 00:43:12

Again, the political tie in there being right around the civil rights period.

Julian Chambliss: 00:43:16

rst black character after the: 1964

Right. And they're all.

lack superhero character? And: 1969

And then you get Luke Cage. And that character is really reflecting the rise of black power and blaxploitation sort of tropes and things like that.

You know, characters like Misty Knight and things like that. D.C. doesn't get like, you know, a really sort of, like, prominent superhero character. They have Bumblebee, but then really it's Black Lightning.

That's not till: 1977

In the origin story, the characters are always white and they're always male. And then they have female versions of the characters that are sidekicks or supplemental characters.

ics have been published since: 1938

years in: 2028

But in the early part of that century, the most notable characters, they're male, they're white. And so that's part of the challenge.

The characters that you allude to being introduced in the MCU are characters from the 70s, when comics are reflecting the consequences of the civil rights movement.

Liam Heffernan: 00:45:19

So I guess to sort of bring this very rapid historiography of comic books to a close. Why. Why is it fundamentally that you think that comic books have endured?

And in fact, not even just endured, but grown so exponentially in popularity?

Julian Chambliss: 00:45:37

Comic books as a medium are able to tell any kind of story. So one of the things that has really been a major transformation in comic book culture in the United States is the rise of independent comics. Right.

Comics that are not necessarily superhero comics. They're autobiographical comics.

rground comic movement of the: 1970

Who aren't working for marvel and not working for D.C. and not the game. Not thinking. Superhero comics have long advocated that as a form. Comic book storytelling, or comic storytelling, Is a powerful storytelling form.

And a platform to allow creators to do anything.

Even will eisner, right, who was a really fundamental comic book creator, Started in the golden age, Created the spirit, had his own studio, eisner, the eisner iger studio, Created lots of comics, Got out of the comic book publication and started doing other things, but came back in the 70s and started with, essentially, graphic novels, A contract with God, Telling sort of autobiographical stories. Of life in the tenements that he grew up in.

. And the introduction in the: 1980

And so now, when people say comics in the United States, it is true, many people, when you say comics, think about superheroes. But that's really only the tip of the iceberg. In terms of the variety of stories that are being told in comic form.

I always tell people, if there's a story form that you like, you can find it in comic form. You like romance comics. They're romance comics, Romance novel, romance comics. You like science fiction, science fiction. You like western. Western.

mic form, which it did in the: 1940

All that can be told by someone with a pen and paper. Right. And so there is tremendous depth of storytelling in comic form. And now American fans are also consuming the global comic market. Right?

So manga, which is the number one form that most students in the United states that I deal with, they may not have read any kind of superhero comic, but they know manga and they know anime. Like, they read that, right? Webtoons, Right? We have a lot of innovative online.

There are web comics, But a platform like webtoons, it's an incredibly powerful draw for so many readers. Adults, young adults, kids. So there is something for everyone in that form.

And because it's so cheap to make, the question, can you make a living doing it? That's a different question. But can you make the comic? The question is always, yes, I can make a comic. How many people read my comic?

That's a different story. But if I have the passion to make a comic, I can make a comic.

And that is really a transformative reality for medium because that means that there's always something out there. There's always something out there for you. And that's part of the reason why it has so much purchase. There's always a way in.

You can find it in a library, you can find in local shop, you can find it in shows. Right. And you can find something that you love and follow it and find other people who also love that.

Liam Heffernan: 00:50:02

Well, on that note, there's no better words to wrap up this episode, I don't think. Julian, thank you so much for joining me to start the discussion.

There's a lot more to talk about, I think, on all of this, but I appreciate you joining me for this.

Julian Chambliss: 00:50:19

Oh, no, yeah. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

Liam Heffernan: 00:50:22

Yeah, thank you. In fact, if any of our listeners do want to find out more about your work or connect with you, where can they do that?

Julian Chambliss: 00:50:28

Oh, you can check out my website, joinchambliss.com I do a lot with comics and Afrofuturism. So if you're interested in that, you can check out my website around afrofuturism called afrofantastic.com.

i do have a documentary about Afrofuturism called Afro Transformative World of Afrofuturism, which is available through PBS.org and obviously I also run a research workshop on comics here at MSU called the Graphic Possibilities Comics Research Workshop. So if you look up graphic possibilities at MSU that'll take you to our website, you can see a lot of stuff that we do there.

Liam Heffernan: 00:51:06

Amazing. Yeah, we'll put links to all of that in the show notes. So for any of you listening, do check that out.

And if you enjoy this podcast as well, do also leave us a rating and a review wherever you are listening to this and give us a follow as well because then all future episodes will appear in your feed. And additionally, if you really love the show and you want to support us, you can do just. Just follow the links in the show notes.

All the information is in there. Thank you all so much for listening and goodbye.