According to Gerard Jones in The Comic Book Heroes, it was DC that first opened its pages to reader response through the letter columns of Superman and Justice Society of America, edited respectively by Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz.3 The year was 1960. That September, “at a Pittsburgh science fiction convention … two young couples simultaneously conceived fanzines that devoted regular attention to comics.” The editors of Xero and Comic Art “were far removed from Weisinger’s young letter-writers”:
the new fanzine publishers were adults looking back, with little emotional investment in the present, while Weisinger’s kids were the opposite, all waiting for the next issue of Superman with no sense of comics history. Before fandom could have any real effect on the field, the gap between them would have to be bridged. And who else could engineer that bridge but Mort’s old partner in fandom, Julius Schwartz?
Jones has the journalistic tendency of turning comics history into a comfortable yarn, eliding ambiguity for the sake of a good story teleologically told. It is hard to know, as was the case with his account of William Dozier’s epiphany over the Batman title, whether the scheme of events was really this simple: but as he relates it, the two fields of fanzine culture and comic book “letterhacks” were brought together as Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox invited one of their JSA fans, Jerry Bails, into the National Periodicals office in New York. Over lunch, “Schwartz explained the ins and outs of ‘fanzines’ and fan networking.” The date was now February 1961. That month, a new edition of Hawkman comic hit the stands, its letter column bearing—for the first time—the street addresses of every correspondent. Jerry Bails, fired up from his lunch meeting wrote to every fan whose letter appeared in that issue, explaining his vision of “comics fandom … I know now (for sure) … that I want to bring out a ‘fanzine’ dedicated to the Great Revival of the costumed heroes.” Within a few months, Bails was publishing Alter-Ego with Roy Thomas, a fellow letter-writer.
Other fanzines popped up like mushrooms all across the country: Komix Illustrated, The Rocket’s Blast, The Comic Reader, Batmania, and scores more. Most were done by adults, but some came from precocious kids just discovering comics. … Bails even added two more fanzines to his little home publishing business: Capa-Alpha, a sort of communal fanzine called an “amateur press alliance” or “apa” and The Comicollector, “the companion to Alter Ego,” featuring ads for people selling, buying, and swapping old comics.4
The network expanded rapidly, mapping out links between publishing and self-publishing, readers and writers, buyers and sellers; and the relationship between editors and fans was for this time a happy, mutually beneficial one. Bails paid for that lunch in kind by forming an Academy of Comic Arts and Sciences whose fan panel awarded every prize to Julius Schwartz and his crew; Schwartz promoted Alter-Ego in the pages of his own comics. Prominent fans, writes Jones, “drove cross-country to visit each other, tally votes, and plan conventions.”5 A community had been established. “For years, fans had nurtured their obsessions alone in silence. Now, suddenly, they’d found their lost race.”6
The lettercols had made this fan-network possible; and while Jones neglects to mention it, the slippery concept of the comic book “author” clearly evolved through the same columns and the same process. Julius Schwartz, Jones notes, “encouraged … the controversy over whether Joe Kubert was the right artist for Hawkman, criticism over Mystery in Space… and the fight about whether superheroes were better suited for science fiction or human interest stories in Green Lantern.’7 Through the discourse between fan and editor, then, comics “authorship” was created and debated. The inverted commas are needed here because, as I will suggest, the “creator” of a comic book—that construction of words, pencils, plots, inks, colors, letters, and editing—is especially hard to pin down, and comics fandom, unlike film scholarship, rarely takes the easier option of singling out a single individual from the creative team for sole praise or blame. Even at this early stage, we can see that the responsibility is being jointly attributed to artists as well as writers; and we might also note that Schwartz, as editor, is also responsible in a very real way for the “creation”—the commission or cancelling, at least—of the stories under discussion. Schwartz’s crucial role in the cultivation of the “authorship” discourse is comparable to the part he played in fandom; for instance, when artist Carmine Infantino made the unprecedented demand in 1964 that the signature “Bob Kane” be left off his work, it was Schwartz who came through for him.8
The culture of the comic fan and accompanying discourse around the comic author went from strength to strength during the 1960s. Fans organized the first New York Comicon in 1964—a whole convention devoted to comics, rather than just a corner of a sci-fi meet. As Jones reports, most of the professionals invited declined to attend, but Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko’s arrival highlighted an important function of the comic book convention: not only did it unite fans from across the country, it brought fans together with producers. Ditko had set a precedent; the second New York Con guest-starred, among others, Mort Weisinger, Gardner Fox, and Bill Finger, and the massive annual gatherings of the San Diego Con or Britain’s UKCAC today are still built around author signings, sketch sessions from visiting artists, and discussion panels where professionals sit alongside fanzine editors and field questions from an active audience.
Comic book authors had remained, for the most part, unknown and unheralded until the 1960s. Julius Schwartz first allowed Gardner Fox and the artists of The Atom credit in 1961:9 readers and writers alike were therefore seeing their names in print for the first time, at the same time. It is perhaps for this reason that comic book fandom has always had a particularly close relationship with the text’s creators. The boundaries between comic author and fan, writer and reader, have always been thin and often dissolve entirely.10
Even by publishing a mimeographed fanzine for ten people, of course, a fan like Jerry Bails or Roy Thomas, was becoming a comic book “writer”; and often a comic book artist too, as the pages of comic zines were and continue to be filled out with amateur art. The crossovers occasionally became even more dramatic, though, as “elite” fans actually began to work for the major companies. Roy Thomas was hired to work for Mort Weisinger. F. Nelson Bridwell had already been taken on by Weisinger as an editorial assistant. Both had come to the editor’s attention through their letters to Superman.11 “The signal had been sent,” Jones notes. “Fans could become pros. They could actually shape the comics.”
• • •
In this brief case study I want to step aside from the historical overview for a moment and examine the actual nature of fan discourse within the letter columns of Detective Comics during 1965. This was a significant cultural moment in terms of fandom’s evolution; readers had only recently been given the chance of a public voice, of having their discourse on Batman validated by publication, and of joining in debate not just with editors, but with fellow aficionados. One enthuses that “I seem to be becoming a ‘regular’ in the Detective and Batman letters pages, and I like it!,”12 and others report that their published comments have led to pen-pal relationships with other fans. It was also a moment of transition in terms of comic book authorship, for Bob Kane’s signature was still appearing on some stories with which he had no connection, while at the same time the names of other artists and writers were beginning to be credited for the first time. This inconsistency led fans into a pleasurable to-and-fro with the editors as they attempted to deduce the identity of unnamed writers and artists, and so effectively shaped the concept of the comic book “author”—an individual who, whatever his role in the creative process, contributes a recognizable, personal style—at the same time as they were building their own fan-networks.
Readers had already been invited to play guessing-games with the editors on issues of plot and long-term narrative, as in the “Outsider” story where letterhacks attempted to identify the mysterious villain—“is he the American Hydra-Head, as per Ba
tman #167, out for revenge?”13—until he was revealed as Alfred the Butler. This puzzling over deliberately created narrative enigmas was just part of an extended discourse which dominated the lettercols of the mid-to-late Batman titles; it is tempting to wonder whether this relationship between reader and editor was in any way an unconscious reflection and enactment of the Batman’s own role as “darknight detective,” musing over the riddles posed by his trickster enemies. It doesn’t seem entirely farfetched to suppose that part of the readers’ pleasure in pitting their skills of observation against the comic text came from an identification with Batman and his costars, the “ductile detective” Ralph Dibney, and detective J’onn J’onn, the Martian Manhunter. In this sense, the title Detective Comics referred not just to its featured characters, but to the role of the reader; and it was largely the readers who created this role for themselves.
There was, it seems, no initial editorial invitation to identify the writer or artist on each uncredited story: but this is the task Detective’s fans set themselves, performing it with diligence, shrewdness, and a substantial background knowledge of the creators’ distinctive styles.
The artwork was noteworthy in that you’ve put another inker to work on Carmine Infantino’s pencils. I’m not exactly sure, but my guess is that Sid Greene handled the job.14
I am somewhat mystified about the inker. I think it’s Infantino himself, with a slightly modified style, Yet certain parts looks like the work of Murphy Anderson, or even John Giunta.15
Infantino’s art-job? Great! It could have been super-great if the great Carmine had inked his own pencils, which leads to an interesting suggestion. How about teaming up Bob Kane and Carmine Infantino as a pencil-ink combo on a Batman story? It should be superb!16
Note that, in these early days of fan discourse, the concept of “author,” or at least “creator,” is already taken to include the artist as a vital contributor to the construction of the Batman story, and that this role is recognized as comprising the two distinct tasks of pencils and inks. Writers receive an approximately equal attention, again with a sometimes astonishing attention to detail.
The inside story was written with a touch of genius by … John Broome?17
I think the author of this story was John Broome, because of the way the Gotham Gladiator stopped in the middle of his sentence in panel one of page five.18
Guy H. Lillian, singled out by editor Julie Schwartz as “our favorite Guy correspondent,” receives a lengthy answer to his venture that a particular story “was written by Gardner Fox, I’ll wager.” The reply emphasizes the spirit of competition that had emerged in Detective, suggests the role of editors in keeping their fans guessing, and indicates the relative complexity that the lettercol discourse of authorship had attained by 1965.
It wasn’t hard for you to tag Gardner Fox as the writer of the Elongated Man yarn … especially as he’s written all the Elongated Man stories that have appeared so far in Detective Comics. Strangely enough, the Elongated Man stories that appeared in The Flash were written by John Broome. One of these issues, we’re going to give Broome a crack at his original character … and then let’s see who can tell the difference between a “Fox” and a “Broome.”19
Note, though, that it was the fans who created the cult of authorship around recognizable styles and creative traits, and the editors who seem to follow, taking up the game and providing new challenges. Clearly, there would be no puzzle if writer, inker, and penciller were given full, explicit credit in the pages of Detective; and in this regard DC seems markedly different from its rivals, Marvel, who gave enthusiastic billing to everyone from star artist “Jolly Jack” Kirby down to the secretary “Fabulous Flo” Steinberg.20 Although Gerard Jones claims that Schwartz had credited Gardner Fox and his team in The Atom from 1960 onwards, my own research suggests that Bob Kane’s signature continued to dominate Batman up until the mid-1960s, and inconsistencies remain even once his monopoly seems to be broken. Credits for Gardner Fox, Sid Greene, and Carmine Infantino begin to appear in Detective #357 of November 1966, but the next issue, while correctly attributing the Elongated Man story to Fox and Greene, has Kane’s signature returning to Batman artwork which is clearly by another hand. It was presumably this ambiguity, which led to comments like the following, as the variable art style of “Bob Kane” defied the guessing game:
I’m writing this because of Bob Kane’s magnificent artwork. I can really say I didn’t think Bob Kane was much of an artist, with his square-jawed, stiff-looking characters, but in the October Detective he really did a good job.21
I must congratulate Bob Kane on his ever-improving artwork. However, in some panels, too much of Batman’s nose shows below his mask.22
Ultimately, though, the discourse around authorship in these columns goes no further than a sophisticated parlor game of identifying writers, pencillers, and inkers. While it constructs each for the first time as a creative individual, vital to the completed work, and associates them with an “individual stamp”—Broome’s unfinished sentences, Kane’s square chins—the identification is enough; there is no real discussion of what these distinct creative traits contribute to mood, theme, or characterization. The lack of printed credits in Detective of the early to mid-1960s creates a mystery, and the fans take pleasure in solving it. It is as though Cahiers du Cinema in the 1960s had been made up of letters guessing that “Gregg Toland is the cinematographer on Citizen Kane, I’ll wager—his deep focus on the snowstorm scene is unmistakable,” or that “the music in Psycho sounds like Bernard Herrmann. I never enjoyed his repetitive string motifs before, but this theme is more to my taste.” The analysis is in many ways informed and intelligent, but it clearly has its limits; and it was only once the guessing-game was made redundant that lettercolumn fans were able to ask more searching questions of the comic text.
In the Batman comics, then—which, probably because of Kane’s sustained monopoly over “authorship,” differ from DC’s other titles in that they lack accurate credits until the mid-to-late 1960s—the cult around writers and artists as joint authors was born from the combination of fan curiosity and editorial teasing. When full credits began to appear around 1966, fans had the opportunity to direct their discussion around authorship further, beyond mere identification for the sake of it. The guessing game was over, on one level; but with the identities of writer and artist provided, readers could begin to theorize and conject about the ways in which these authors interpreted the Batman formula, and the differences between them in a wider sense. Consider, just as a brief indication of what followed, these extracts from a Detective lettercol of 1980, typical of the contemporary discourse in their discussion of character, narrative, the relation between writing and art, and the relative merits of different individual contributions.
Don [Newton] and Dan [Adkins] are hanging in there, creating page after page of truly beautiful, moody, exciting storytelling artwork. Denny O’Neil’s story this time was a little SILLY—a group of assassins killing a nobody on the slim chance that he MIGHT know something about them …23
Now the writing. Jack C. Harris is steadily improving, although he still has a way to go to match Bob Rozakis’s work. But Jack is doing great things with the Barbara Gordon character, fleshing her out and giving her substance. I am especially delighted with the warm and believable relationship Jack has established between Babs and her father. He also has attained a perfect ratio of action to characterization in his stories. But it is in the plotting that Mr. Harris falls down.24
Don Newton and Dan Adkins’ artistic rendition of the tale by Denny O’Neil shows just how important the artist is in comics. The splash page conveyed the entire feeling of the story in one glance. Throughout the 17 pages the art never faltered even once to convey the storyline and enhance the plot and dialogue. I must also compliment Adrienne Roy for her outstanding coloring, especially the movie theater scene with the shadows playing off of the main figures.25
It should be obvious tha
t these letters represent a progression from the spot-the-artist games of the mid-1960s, and show fan discourse engaging with some of the complex issues arising from the nature of comic book storytelling. We can see that the readers are no longer concerned with the identity of the creators, but with what the distinctive talents that those creators bring to the story under discussion, and with the struggle to express the dynamic between several different contributors in terms of the final result.
Leaping forward again, just to show that debate around authorship was still a going concern in the lettercolumns of the late 1990s despite the instant accessibility of Internet boards, here is a comment on Grant Morrison’s writing of Batman, published in the Justice League of America comic dated July 1998,
Morrison writes the Dark Knight as a double paradox: a sullen misanthrope devoted to protecting others and a resolutely human figure who nevertheless can perform the impossible. Crucially, Morrison understands that Batman is never a single character, but rather a host of Batmen: a wealth of possibilities existing behind that costume, cowl, and symbol.26
I’m still quite proud of that letter.
* * *
As Alan Moore wrote, in his introduction to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, “Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it’s all totally different.”
I wrote this essay in 1998, some fourteen years ago, before I had a PhD—indeed, it was my PhD thesis, published in 2000. In 1960, as I discuss above, DC Comics introduced letters columns for fan response and correspondence. In 2002, it phased them out, clearly feeling that the immediacy and near-infinite space of Internet discussion had made a monthly mailbag redundant. In 2011, DC announced that it was reinstating letters pages, though with a shift of focus to digital comics sales through tablet and phone formats—and with the fan correspondence centered around a website, www.dcletterspage.com, rather than a printed forum, things were never going to be quite the same.
The Superhero Reader Page 11