The first Monday of every month, this column looks back at three historical events from the comic industry that are connected to that month. For July, we examine the first splash panel, the first attempt at a comics content code, and an organized attempt to reduce unlicensed sales of manga and anime.
Will Eisner was a pioneer in the comics field. He taught many great artists how to draw, popularizing the Japanese brush along the way. He coined the term “sequential art” and brought the term “graphic novel” into the mainstream. He spent years creating educational comics to train US soldiers on proper rifle care. And, on July 7, 1940, he showed everyone how to set a scene when he used a splash panel for the first time.
Eisner wasn’t first artist to use a big panel. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster cut back on panel counts in their Slam Bradley features to meet deadlines and got down to two per page before editors called them on it and made them reverse course, but their panels remained evenly sized as they shrank in number. Jack Kirby had used a splash page “Captain America Comics” a few months before the strip above was printed, but when a single page has only one panel, it’s hardly an inventive panel layout. No, what made Eisner’s effort extraordinary was how his big panel compared to other panels on the same page.
Eisner didn’t set out to revolutionize page layouts when he made this page. Like many of his other innovations, this one was just a natural solution to a problem he was facing: what’s the most efficient way to set a scene? “The Spirit” was only eight pages in 1940, and later shrank to seven, so every square inch was valuable real estate. The opening splash panel gave him room to show readers what the action was, where the action was happening, and who the characters were. A caption or thought balloon would fill in the why. This first attempt may not be the best example of how it could be done, but it did pave the way for Eisner’s future masterpieces.
The comic industry had been criticized as low-quality, low-brow garbage that was unhealthy for those consuming it pretty much since it became popular in the late 1930s, but it was mostly unorganized grumblings prior to Dr Fredric Wertham’s first attack on comics via an article in Collier’s magazine in March 1947. His terrifying anecdotes galvanized an anti-comics movement in a way hitherto undreamt of. The industry responded swiftly; following the model of the film industry, four publishers (Lev Gleason, EC, Famous Funnies, and Orbit) and two distributors (Irving Manheimer and Frank Armer) formed the Association of Comic Magazine Publishers (ACMP) and adopted a six-point guideline for content as proof they took parents’ concerns seriously. Eight more publishers joined up to ride the wave of good will this brought from the public. The new organization was announced through press release on July 1, 1947.
The official guidelines, which were pretty broad, can be seen here. At its peak, the ACMP ranks included only 40% of the 30-40 publishers active at the time, and the biggest players (DC, Dell) never participated. Those who did could put the ACMP’s seal on their covers, which meant a white rectangle saying “AUTHORIZED A.C.M.P.” above a white star saying “CONFORMS to the COMICS CODE.” However, there was no formal review process to apply this seal and Lev Gleason, publisher of “Crime Does Not Pay”, seems to be the only publisher who bothered to modify his content. It was not unusual for comics with the seal to break every rule it represented. In a futile effort, the ACMP added seven more objectives on December 6, 1948, but still omitted a review process or punishment for violation.
In 1950, Bill Gaines withdrew EC from the ACMP because he felt his new horror comics were intended for adult readers, but he continued to use the ACMP seal on his covers anyway until early 1952. By April 1954, when the Senate was investigating comics as a cause of juvenile delinquency, it was down to just three members: Timely/Atlas, Lev Gleason, and Eastern Color. At the hearings, a representative for the group testified that it was essentially dead. Gleason continued to use the ACMP seal until January 1955, when he replaced it with the new CCA seal.
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Anime and manga boomed in the mid 1990s and fans couldn’t get enough. To satisfy the overwhelming demand for new content, a cottage industry of pirated material blossomed. Some were “raw” copies that were still fully Japanese. Some were fan dubs, where amateurs translated the story themselves with varying degrees of quality. Some were done so skillfully that it could lead to official jobs for the translators by the American publishers who licensed the material. Some were done in such volume that it led to convictions and jail time.
In early 1995, illegal translations were seen as a serious threat to the future of the industry, prompting Central Park Media to recruit distributors and publishers like Ad Vision and Viz for an official response. Together, these individual parties untied to become something stronger: The Japanese Animation Industry Law Enforcement Division!
Their first action came swiftly! On July 21, 1995, J.A.I.L.E.D seized over ten thousand VHS tapes from a single store in New York City. The news excited nearly everyone, and the toll-free tip line held the promise of more large busts in the near future.
Alas, twas not meant to be. Behind the intimidating name, there was only one lawyer connected to the hotline, and he was only on retainer at that. Having made an intentional loophole to protect fan activities (and to avoid costly litigation against individuals who weren’t impacting their business), the group never made another headline-grabbing bust. It maintained a small presence as conventions at least through 2000 before fading away.
Considering the speed of its first action, one can’t help but wonder if the group formed specifically to take down that one NYC store. Or, perhaps, that high-profile action scared others into shutting down? Maybe it bought the publishers time to officially license enough material that fans didn’t feel like they had to use the black market as much. My research hasn’t supported any of these conclusions over another.
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