Multiversity’s history column returns with another article on comic history themed around the month of February. Enjoy!
By the mid 1960s, comics were on their way to restoring the dignity stolen from them by the Senate hearings, Bill Gaines’ testimony, and the CCA. Marvel had made inroads into college campuses. Older fans were finding each other in letter columns. Jules Feiffer was about to publish “The Great Comic Book Heroes,” the first nostalgic history of the medium.
That’s not to say there weren’t setbacks. “Newsweek” ran an article on comic book fans in its February 15, 1965 issue based on interviews with adult readers. Titled “Superfans and Batmaniacs,” the piece was condescending from the start and wasn’t concerned with factual accuracy. It also perpetuated through innuendo the idea that a majority of older comic readers were homosexuals excited by the homoerotic undertones of Batman and Robin. The fans who had been interviewed for it were not pleased.
The “Newsweek” piece was followed by similar articles in other magazines, and somewhere along the line they began to include the unsubstantiated claim that pornographers were using the addresses printed in letter columns to solicit new customers. Despite there being zero evidence for this claim, the cautious Comics Code Authority limited its members to a writer’s name, city, and state. This move put the brakes on the growing fandom movement which had been borne through pen pal letters that were often sent unsolicited.
Speaking of fans in the letter columns, have you ever wondered where we got “Golden Age” nomenclature for the historical period from 1938 to… whenever you think it ended? The first known use of the term was in the letter column of “Justice League of America” #42 in February 1966. A fan from Connecticut, Scott Taylor, described DC’s reprints as being from the “Golden Age” and posited that readers in the 1980s might call stories from the 1960s the “Silver Age”. The name was much easier than the other competing descriptor, “the first heroic age of comics.”
The term grew in popularity until Robert Overstreet cemented its use in the first “Overstreet Price Guide” in 1970. Dealers and fans have continued the theme with labels like “Bronze Age,” “Copper Age,” and the less common “Chromium Age”. There’s also the shoehorned gap-fillers like “Atomic Age” and “Platinum Age.” I personally find this topic to be navel gazing, but your mileage may vary.
The debut of She-Hulk in February 1980 was a complicated affair. On the one hand, the character was created along with Spider-Woman as part of a deliberate attempt to attract a more diverse audience of comic readers (ie, females). On the other hand, it was also a convenient way to capitalize on the Bill Bixby-led TV show “The Incredible Hulk,” which was working on its third season. On yet another hand, it was a preemptive effort to ensure Marvel would own the rights to a female Hulk – just I case the producers of the show got any ideas.
The new title got a big push when Stan Lee, who had spent the last eight years working on Marvel television shows and films, returned to write the first issue with John Buscema on pencils. She-Hulk was an instant success with orders around 250,000.
Marvel’s cowboy vigilante Rawhide Kid dates back to the 1940s, but the pre-release promotion for the 2003 miniseries “Slap Leather” by Ron Zimmerman and John Severin drew a lot of attention for making the character gay (or confirming he always had been, depending on whether you believe the hype). As usually happens with this kind of thing, the press got excited. Stan Lee appeared on CNN’s Crossfire with Tucker Carlson on December 12, 2002 to debate the move opposite Andrea Lafferty from the Traditional Values Coalition. You can read the full transcript here, but Lee does his best to stress that this was part of the MAX imprint (not for kids) and that Marvel does its best to depict the real world, which happens to include gay people.
When the dust settled and the four issue miniseries wrapped, it turned out to be all for naught. The book was full of innuendos and figurative winks to the reader, but there was no actual outing of the character.
