We've Got Relevance

Recently a Marvel executive at a big sales summit caused a stir in the fan press when he said that their declining sales was the result of the company's push to add diversity to their comics. Well, that's not exactly what he said. He noted that sales were down, and specifically that sales of some of their more “diverse” titles were down, and that according to the feedback the company has been receiving from their retailers, that diversity is to blame for it.

In the past few years, Marvel has been making some drastic changes to some of it's iconic heroes. We've seen Captain America replaced by his black former partner Falcon; Thor, Iron Man and Wolverine replaced by women; Spider-Man by a black-Hispanic teen from an alternate universe and the Hulk by a Korean-American brainiac. And some fans have complained that this is all just Politically-Correct Social Justice Affirmative Reverse-Discrimination and want to go back to the Good Ol' Days when the Avengers line-up was whiter than the Moon Knight's underwear.

Personally, I can't say any of this bothers me much. I suppose I don't have that much emotional investment in the classic Marvel heroes. I'm sure the iconic characters will come back eventually – indeed, some of them already have – because that's the nature of the Comic Book Industry. To me the important thing is if the new versions are good characters and if they will have good stories. I was somewhat annoyed when DC killed of Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle several years ago, and dubious about his replacement, a Hispanic kid in an alien battle suit. But the new Beetle proved to be a likable, engaging character and a worthy successor to Ted, so I don't begrudge him taking on the venerable Beetle legacy.

But thinking about Diversity and Super-Heroes reminded me about another time when the comics tackled Big Social Issues. I'm talking about the legendary Relevance Era in DC Comics.

The late '60s and early '70s were a turbulent time in American culture, and comic books no less. Audience tastes were changing, and DC's solid, reliable heroes like Superman and Batman were looking bland and unexciting next to the comparatively complex and more sophisticated characters coming out of Marvel. In addition, a new generation of creators was coming into the comics industry that was more willing to challenge the old formulas and gimmicks. Overall, there was a sense that instead of simply punching out super-villains, super-heroes ought to be addressing real-world social problems.

Editor Julie Schwartz was an important mover behind the push for “relevance”. He had served as the godfather of the Silver Age back in the late 1950s, re-tooling characters like the Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman into science-based heroes. In the mid-'60s he had been charged with updating Batman and was instrumental in creating the “New Look” Batman and refocusing the comic on mysteries and crime.

By 1970, the Green Lantern he had re-envisioned as an interplanetary lawman over a decade earlier was showing his age, so Schwartz brought in a new team to shake things up. Denny O'Neil was one of the new blood writers. A couple years earlier, O'Neil and Mike Sekowsky had done a controversial re-vamp of Wonder Woman, changing her iconic star-spangled costume into a more contemporary pants suit and making her a martial arts hero. The intent was to make her like Emma Peel from the TV series THE AVENGERS, although she wound up looking more like Kung Fu Mary Tyler Moore. Neal Adams was soon to become the superstar artist of the '70s.

They added Green Arrow to the title. Previously, Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, had always been kind of a Batman knock-off, only with arrows as his gimmick instead of bats. He was secretly a millionaire playboy, he had a sidekick who was also an archer; he drove around in an Arrow-car and had an Arrow-plane; and he operated out of an Arrow-cave. O'Neil saw the character as a modern day Robin Hood and made him passionate about helping the poor and needy. This set up a character dynamic of the iconoclastic hippie liberal Oliver vs. the law 'n' order space cop Hal Jordan.

In GREEN LANTERN #76 “No Evil Will Escape My Sight”, Green Lantern rescues a guy being attacked on a city street, but is shocked when the bystanders take the attacker's side. Hal's fellow Justice League member Green Arrow shows up and explains that the guy Hal saved is a slum landlord and the people attacking him were tenants whom he was evicting so he could raze their homes.

As Ollie and Hal debate Law vs. Justice, a poor, elderly black man comes up and confronts Hal. There follows a striking three-panel sequence which has been often reprinted and sometimes parodied. It can be regarded as the start of the Relevance Era.

“I been readin' about you... how you work for the BLUE SKINS... and how on a planet somewhere you helped out the ORANGE SKINS...” he says. “...and you done considerable for the PURPLE SKINS ! Only there's SKINS you never bothered with...!”

We get a close-up panel of the old man, his face creased by misfortune but his eyes brimming with rage, looking up fearlessly. “...the black skins! I want to know... HOW COME ?! Answer me THAT, Mr. GREEN LANTERN !”

In the third panel, Hal lowers his head in shame, avoiding the old man's eyes as he admits, “I... can't”.

Hal decides to try to get justice for the landlord's tenants, which isn't easy, partially because the landlord hasn't technically done anything illegal, but mostly because Hal's bosses, the Guardians of the Universe, (the 'Blue Skins”) call him on the carpet to warn him that his job is to patrol his sector of space and not concern himself with piddly little details like Urban Blight on his own backwater planet. Hal defies the Guardians and tells them that they have been locked up in their ivory planet of Oa for too long and that they've been pondering the Big Picture of the Universe so much that they've lost sight of the lives of all those people living on the myriad worlds they oversee. He challenges them to leave Oa and take a look at how things are at ground level.

One of the Guardians, a guy that Hal calls “The Old-Timer”, takes him up on his offer, and together the three of them, Hal, Oliver and the Old-Timer, set out on a road trip to Discover America and face the burning issues of the day: racism, poverty, pollution, drugs...

Ah, drugs.

Probably the most famous, (or infamous), stories from this run, and an issue which some critics have called the start of the “Relevance Era”, was the 1971 two-parter beginning in GREEN LANTERN #85, “Snowbirds Don't Fly”. While rounding up a bunch of street thugs, Green Arrow discovers that they are armed with some familiar-looking technology: weapons from his own personal arsenal. He does some digging and learns that his former sidekick, Speedy has been pilfering gadgets and weapons from the Arrow-cave and selling them on the street. At first Ollie thinks that Speedy is doing this as a ruse to infiltrate a drug gang, but ultimately he must face the truth: Speedy has become addicted to heroin and has been stealing Ollie's stuff to support his habit.

It had only been a year or two earlier when Marvel had challenged the Comics Code Authority by publishing a Spider-Man story with an anti-drug message without their blessing, which had led to changes in the Comics Code. Whereas the Spidey tale had one of Peter Parker's friends with a drug problem, Denny O'Neil reasoned that showing one of the heroes dealing with addiction would pack a greater punch.(Later still, Speedy would father a child out of wedlock – with a villain, no less – making him that era's go-to-guy for questionable life choices).

Green Arrow and Speedy have it out, and Speedy does manage to shake his addiction, but Ollie comes off rather poorly in this story. For all his crusading for social problems, he's been totally oblivious to one right under his nose.

Other comics DC published around this time also tried to tackle social issues, with varying success. Even the best stories tended to be a bit preachy, and at worst they could be ludicrous. Perhaps the most notable example was an issue of SUPERMAN'S GIRLFRIEND, LOIS LANE published in 1970 titled – and I would not make this up – “I Am Curious, Black”. It was pretty obviously inspired by a 1961 book, Black Like Me, about a white reporter who disguises himself as a black man to learn how things look from the other side of the racial divide. In the comic, Lois wants to do a story about racism, but feels stymied because she is an outsider. So Superman helps her out by using a piece of weird Kryptonian technology to make her black for a day or two. He keeps the dangdest stuff in the Fortress of Solitude.

DC's Relevance Era only lasted a few years. Comics historian Ron Goulart recalls dropping in on Julie Schwartz once around 1973 and asking him how relevance was doing. “Relevance is dead,” Julie replied unhappily. Viewed strictly as a gimmick to boost sales, Social Relevance” turned out to be a failure, and the Powers That Be at DC Comics decided to go back to the tried-and-true gimmicks like putting a gorilla on the cover.

But although the Age of Relevance officially died with the Nixon Administration, the impulse of comics creators to make something Important still recurs from time to time. We saw it again with the creation of Black Lightning, and with the EL DIABLO revival of the late '80s, and the special one-shots both Marvel and DC published in the 80s about African Famine Relief. These comics don't change the world, but at their best they give us some good stories and maybe change a little bit of the comic book universe.

"That Crazy Buck Rogers Stuff" and the Silver Age of Comics

There used to be a kind of enmity between Science Fiction fans and comic books. I suspect a large part of this snobbery was Hard SF purists looking down on pure fantasy of the funnybooks. Perhaps it was because after years of being derided as lowbrow, escapist trash, SF needed something to feel superior to. The rivalry has lessened, I think, since both forms have filtered into the mainstream of popular culture, and these days there's a fair amount of overlap between the two fandoms. Which is appropriate, because comic books owe a great deal to the worlds of Science Fiction. In fact, you could say that we owe the Silver Age of Comics to the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Before comic books even existed in the form we know today, comics brought Science Fiction out of the Pulp Magazines and introduced it to mainstream popular culture in the persona of Buck Rogers. A newspaper syndicate president named John F. Dille read a novella titled “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” by a writer named Philip Francis Nowlan, about a man who finds himself thrust five hundred years into the future. Dille saw potential in the story, and hired Nowlan to adapt it into a comic strip. BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25^th CENTURY didn't necessarily grant respectability to the young genre – for a generation or so afterward Science Fiction was known as “That Crazy Buck Rogers Stuff” – but it did give a taste of other worlds to readers who might never have touched a lurid Pulp magazine.

A number of the writers from the Golden Age of Science Fiction also wrote for comic books. Otto Binder, best known to comics fans as a prolific writer for Fawcett Comics' CAPTAIN MARVEL, started out collaborating with his brother Earl writing for AMAZING STORIES under the name Eando Binder; (“E” and “O”). One of his most notable creations of that period, “Adam Link, Robot” was an inspiration for Isaac Asimov's robot stories and was later adapted as an episode of THE OUTER LIMITS.

DC Comics legend Gardner Fox, whose career stretched from the 1930s to the late 1960s, was also a prolific writer of short stories for magazines like AMAZING, PLANET STORIES, and WEIRD TALES and adventure novels, sometimes under a variety of pseudonymns. Fox created both the Golden Age Flash and the Silver Age version; as well as inventing the concept of Earth One and Earth Two upon which the DC Multiverse was based.

Every GREEN LANTERN fan can recite the Green Lantern Oath: “In brightest day, in blackest night; no evil shall escape my sight. Let all who worship evil's might, beware my power, Green Lantern's light!” This oath was created by SF legend Alfred Bester, perhaps most famous for his novels “The Demolished Man” and “The Stars My Destination”, who for a time wrote the GREEN LANTERN comic book. He also created the Golden Age GL Oath.

But perhaps the nexus of the SF/Comic Book universes would have to be Julius Schwartz, “The Man of Two Worlds”, as he called himself in his autobiography, a reference to the FLASH story “Flash of Two Worlds” which he edited. Julie Schwartz was a member of Science Fiction's First Fandom, publishing one of the first SF fanzines along with Forrest J. Ackerman and later fellow DC editor Mort Weisinger. He formed a literary agency specializing in SF and represented writers such as Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch. He even handled H.P. Lovecraft briefly, and sold Lovecraft's novella “At the Mountains of Madness” to ASTOUNDING STORIES. He also helped organize the first World Science Fiction Convention.

In the 1940s, Schwartz became an editor for All-American Comics, one of the companies which eventually morphed into DC Comics. It was there, during the late '50s and early '60s, that Julie became the midwife of the Silver Age, overseeing a super-hero revival with revamps of The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and others. Schwartz recruited some of his SF contacts, like Alfred Bester, to write for him, and borrowed the name of Ray Palmer, the former editor of AMAZING, for the new version of the Atom.

(Palmer himself is an interesting guy. He earned the dislike of many Hard SF fans for hyping flying saucers and weird occult conspiracy theories, but his breathless editorials, combining bombastic hype with self-deprecating humor, remind me of yet another comic book editor of that period. I strongly suspect that Stan Lee was a fan of Palmer's).

This new generation of super-heroes had a strong basis in science fiction. The original Hawkman was the reincarnation of an Egyptian pharaoh, but his replacement was a policeman from another planet. Schwartz also created Adam Strange, a space-based hero who had no super-powers but who combined elements of Flash Gordon with John Carter of Mars. He filled in the odd corners of his books with illustrated science factoids for the science geeks in his audience.

Schwartz's re-vamping of the Green Lantern represents perhaps his greatest borrowing from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, got his powers from a magic lamp. (His creator, Martin Nodell, originally wanted to name him “Alan Ladd”, to evoke “Aladdin”). To update the concept for the Space Age, Schwartz and writer John Broome changed the character into a member of an organization of galactic lawmen, the Green Lantern Corps, inspired by the Lensmen series by science fiction patriarch E.E. “Doc” Smith.

Like the members of the Green Lantern Corps, the Lensmen maintained law and order throughout the galaxy using advanced technology given them by a super-advanced alien race. In the Lensmen books, these aliens were the Arisians, an incredibly ancient race with vast mental powers who have been secretly guiding the nascent civilizations of the galaxy and aiding them against the malevolent Boskonians. They recruited the Lensmen from among the most promising civilizations of the galaxy and gave them wrist-mounted devices called Lenses, focusing their native intelligence into incredible psionic abilities, much as the Green Lantern Corps were given rings allowing them to convert their willpower into forms of glowing green energy. DC tacitly admitted the connection between the Lanterns and the Lensmen by introducing a character in the '80s named Arisia.

In these and many other ways the ideas of the Golden Age of SF have become incorporated into the DNA of comics and passed on to readers who may have never heard of Bester and Binder and “Doc Smith”

Mike Grell upon the passing of Dick Giordano

THERE WERE GIANTS IN THOSE DAYS...

DICK GIORDANO 1932-2010

I just learned that legendary comic artist Dick Giordano died of leukemia this morning. I can't tell you saddened I am by the news and how much it meant to me to have known and worked with him. He was one of my heroes, a major influence in my career and an amazing artist whose genuine love of comics showed in every stroke of his brush. A giant among giants.

It was Dick's collaboration with Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil on the ground-breaking series GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW that made me decide to get into the comic business. When I finally met him in New York in 1973, I found him friendly, funny and always willing to take time to show a youngster a few tips. It was Dick who taught me that balloons should be treated as part of the art and that their placement is critical to the readability of the page. He never gave me the impression that I was wasting his time, while I hovered over his shoulder and asked him a million questions... not that he heard them all, anyway. His hearing was already failing, but his talent never did. The work he did in his later years, especially on MODESTY BLAISE, was nothing short of magnificent.

Although we rarely collaborated on art, I had the honor to write many GREEN ARROW stories which Dick inked over Dan Jurgens' pencils. It was Dick's support and influence that made it possible for us to push the envelope and do stories that would otherwise never have made it into print.

When I was asked to return to THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES and draw the Lightning Lad & Saturn Girl wedding sequence, I agreed on one condition - that Dick would be the inker. Dick was happy to oblige and for about ten minutes I was overjoyed. Then it hit me - my drawings were going to be inked by the best in the business. Let me tell you, I sweated bullets over every line I put down, wondering what Dick would think of it.

The truth is Dick was such a terrific artist, anything you handed him turned out looking great. His artistry showed in his ability to turn a wide variety of pencil styles into inks that were dynamic and readable back in the day when paper quality was poor and printing left a lot to be desired. He once told me he actually preferred looser pencils that allowed him more freedom of interpretation. And when he did it all - pencils AND inks - he was matchless.

When the names of the giants are written - Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Steve Ditko and the rest of that great generation who built the comic industry - Dick Giordano's name surely belongs among them.

Mike Grell