This chapter examines the development and function of the comic industry as ‘the advertising sector’ of a powerful complex of multinational enterprises, which originate in the western capitalist world. The discussion centres on the origin and location of power of the comic industry.
When in 1830 a steam driven printing machine was invented in America, it meant not only the beginning of a mass-produced press, but also a mass produced literature for the developing American nation. Early exchanges of ideas between the various entertainment media soon resulted in comic strips, which gradually overcoming the ‘danger to youth stigma’ (that is, creating criminal attitudes to young readers), set forward the conquest of new home and overseas markets. Comics together with other mass media developed, as a substitute for genuine folklore and culture, into a self-perpetuating institution, an integral part of the American way of life. Certain characteristics of American culture and history are being mirrored most faithfully in all mass media especially the distinctive form of comic magazine.
Comic magazines do not only reflect the American archetypes. The stereotyped figures of the American entertainment myth are there, not only to satisfy the expectations of readers of world over, but to advertise and promote certain economic interests through an ideological manipulation and exploitation of their reader's social attitudes. Comics create predispositions and desires whose satisfactions is to be found in an American oriented economic market. This part of the thesis attempts to exemplify the following observations about the comic industry:
(1) the comic industry is clearly a very profitable economic enterprise well covered behind the myth of entertainment;
(2) ideas prevalent in comics are associated with the development of the comic industry in the American cultural context, and they serve as sales promoting instruments of the American consumer society: and
(3) comic magazines, as a part of the socialization process, must be faced and analyzed as a contributory interrelated influence of the media entertainment network in general, whose origins are rooted in the imperialist desires of Anglo-American economic and cultural form.
These characteristics of the comic industry are investigated through a brief account of the emergence of comic industry in America and its subsequent transitory commercial expansion to Britain and continental Europe. Reasonable connections between the comic and other media industries, as different divisions of concrete and ‘healthy’ multinational enterprises, reveal that the comic industry's interests are anything but the entertainment and recreation of children. Finally a cultural/economic interrelationship is clearly portrayed in the advertising sections and the content of stories of comic magazines, whose forms and effects can be defined as direct and explicit and long-term, implicit and accumulative.
Emergence of the comic industry in America and Britain
America as well as Britain can be considered as the privileged progenitors of the modern comic strip, as they have developed a flourishing juvenile comic industry. The principal strategy has been that if it is to achieve mass readership, the strip must stay within defined limits of taste, so that it can de sold to wide non-specialized audience. Leo Boggart has defined the success of comics as a form of popular art as follows:
The appeal of the popular arts stems from the fact that they express the fantasies, longings and suppressed impulses of people living in a chaotic world. To lives burdened by frustration and monotony they bring a momentary release. Their heroes and heroines do all the things which the reading, listening, or viewing public would like to do (Boggart, 1963:244).
All mass media, however, have one great disadvantage: they cost money, and to make profits worthwhile, a public, as large as possible, has to be attached and given the opportunity to partake in the enjoyment of the mass media at the lowest possible price. Comics, as well, to be commercially viable must be addressed to the general public. Publishers therefore call themselves ‘the servants of public taste’. In the twentieth century a variety of ‘public taste services’, such as radio, television, pulps and comic books, are closely interrelated into a network of vast economic profits.
Comics have their own tradition originating in the United States, Britain and Europe. In America (i.e. the United States), the King Features Syndicate involved in 1913-1914, and from then comics started distributing throughout the American continent and eventually throughout the world. In the early 1970s there were twelve large and roughly two hundred smaller syndicates abroad, as well as branches of the big American firms which guarantee a world-wide distribution. United Features Syndicate and King Comics (later King Features) appeared in 1935, and Action Comics in 1938, featuring Superman, Batman and a number of early American folk heroes; it is these publishing groups that will dominate the comic industry for many years, alongside with Walt Disney's industry vigorous development. From a point of view of historical development, the following stages of American comic industry can be identified:
1900 to 1930 Funnies
1930 to 1940 Adventures
1940 to 1954 Super heroes
Autumn 1954 Comic code
1955 to 1962 Recession
1962 to 1970 New boom in comics
Spring 1971 Change in Comics Code - new content in comics
(Reitberger & Fuchs, 1972:27)
Some of these dates are associated with peculiar historical moments in American history, and as it will be later examined, a socio-economic or political crisis becomes the motive for the comic industry to respond, but this respond quite often involves elements of American cultural forms and exploitative economic interests.
Some of the early comic book heroes are closely connected with the promotion of a certain consuming product, and can be characterized as sales promoting strip figures. Popeye the Sailor in 1930s made spinach desirable, and since a statue of him stands in Crystal City, Texas, heart of spinach; even his friend J. Wellington Wimpy (mad about hamburgers) has become immortalized in a chain of European hamburger houses (Figure 2.1.). But most often and as early as 1930s comic book heroes become symbols of patriotic faith. Such was Superman who rapidly became one of the most popular characters of modern American mythology. His own magazine achieved a circulation of 1.400.000, also put on the radio or animated cartoon for the movies.
The vast comic book industry of the early forties was called by some people of the time the purveyor of opium to a nation of addicts. Fifteen million copies were sold each month, giving a total readership of over fifty million. Soon the first kind of female Superman, Wonder Woman appeared in 1942. The modern myth of superman originating in 1940s introduces a new series of hero to the comic book world - the man of steel, helper of all those in distress, defender of the weak and oppressed, strongest of all men, in short a man superior to any other human being. No matter this is the core of fascism, as it is argued elsewhere, this is clearly a traditional American ideal. Nevertheless, super heroes fighting crime undoubtedly provided a wide field for social criticism especially by Wertham (1954), which resulted to the introduction of the Comic Code in 1954.
... comic publishers created their own moral code to advert the danger threatening the industry and appease public opinion. In the United States self-censorship and control are always brought when pressure becomes too strong. In such cases self-censorship becomes self-defence in order to allow the affected medium to continue as a commercially viable part of the entertainments industry... it is a kind of barrier society erects to protect the status quo... (Reitberger & Fuchs, 1972:137-8).
In Britain, the first attempts to establish a comic industry emerged in the years immediately before the Second World War when the Dundee firm D.C. Thompson launched three comics, Dandy, Beano and Magic. The new type of comic, powerful in gag humor and slapstick, that Thompson papers provided, offered a satisfying escapist dream to appeal children.
After the war, in 1950, Hulton Press and Amalgated Press (later Fleetway Press, a division of the giant I.P.C.) enter the comic market, and along with D.C. Thompson will dominate the British comic production. The exploitative economic interests behind children's comic magazines are once more clearly illustrated here in a great reprint case of British comics.
British comic publishers found a neat way around the Copyright Act. Freelance artists working for the firms mentioned, did not normally sign any kind of contract with comic publishers. As a result hundreds of already published material is being reprinted and published over and over again, adding vast profits to the publishers' money silos. But it also creates certain socio-political implications, since the repeating themes of comics reflect the political and ideological beliefs of past times, so in a sense, they become anachronistic images of undesirable authoritarian disciplines of social control. As Baxendale (1978), one of the most successful Britain cartoonists of Beano, states about his work: I reflected that we live in a society that screws people up and screws people down. One section of the populace are selected to be a competitive ambitions elite, screwed up to go careering through life demented clockwork toys. A large section are screwed down to the floor, demoralized into acceptance of lives and jobs below their potential and hopes... this screwing of people's lives must lead to frustration, resentments, anger and feeling of inadequacy boiling away inside... I reflected my own working life... I am by nature placid, liking a tranquil life... it is very funny... but then, the comic industry is a very funny business (Baxendale, 1978:136).
The European follow-up to the American comic production
Baxendale's ‘very funny business’ also emerged in other European countries namely France and Belgium. The fact that home-made cartoon series cost seven times more than imported ones, is part of explaining the delayed European development of comic industry, which at the same time, served the exportation of American comic strips in the form of European reprints. Not many new comic strips were produced in Europe because the Second World War produced a shortage of newsprint, resulting in less space being available for comic strips.
France enters the market competition in 1929 with Tin Tin by Herge while in 1946 the Belgian Leblaue publishes the youth magazine Tin Tin taken from Herge's comic figure and reaching a weekly circulation of 650.000 copies sold in various parts of the world. In 1947 the Belgian Morris invents in Spirou his western Lucky Luke and later starts his cooperation with Rene Goscinny, the creator of Asterix the Gaul. In 1960 a European Federation for Youth Periodicals, as a respond to strong criticism against American strips started in late 1940s, was set up. It led directives similar to those of the American Code Authority. The Moral Code issued by Europress Junior places ever greater emphasis on protecting the young than the American Code.
Comic strips in Germany were published since 1948 in German translation, with Ehapa Verlag issuing Superman, the German publications of Kauka Verlag, and Bastei Verlag bringing out Felix the Cat in the 1960s. It should be noted that in the German Democratic Republic comic strips were banned as vehicles of imperialistic propaganda in 1968. In West Germany though, twelve million books were sold monthly in early 1970s:
Ehapa Verlag 3.5 million books monthly
Kauka Verlag 2.8 million books monthly
Bastei Verlag 2.6 million books monthly
Bildschriftenverlag barely one million
(Reitberger & Fuchs, 1972:181)
The network of comic industry in Germany is supplied from United Press International (U.P.I.) contributions, by United Features Syndicate, and by Register and Tribune Syndicate. Bulls Pressedienst, still, represents King Features, English, Scandinavian and German syndicates.
In Italy, the American strip (accepted earlier in 1932) is banned by the fascist regime in 1938, and returns after the Second World War. Home products include Akim, El Carnera, Pecos Bill, Il Piccolo Sceriffo or Il Piccolo Ranger, but the main comic industry is concentrated in Milan, the headquarters of Arnoldo Mondatori Editore. Edizioni Araldo supplies in the field of Westerns. Il Commondante Mark, Zagor. Il Piccolo Ranger, Tex, Storia del West and Ranger Kendall, all of which have been imported in Greece during the past years.
Intermedia dependencies and multinational control over comic industries
Comic books, as a part of mass communication industries, provide accounts of the contemporary world and images of the ‘good life’. In this way they play an important role in shaping social consciousness. It is this ‘special relationship’ between economic and cultural power that has made the issue of their control a continuing focus of academic and political concern (Murdock, 1982). One of Marx's classical arguments has been that ‘the class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production’ and hence regards ownership on the media (generally economic control) as the critical factor in determining control over media messages. The ‘managerialist’ thesis argues similarly, that in analyzing the structure of control in media organizations, a distinction should be made between control over long-term policies and control over day-to-day operation of the production of media products.
As it was argued earlier, there is a close interrelationship of all the media, creating a multinational network of information and social appeal which partly demonstrates the special relationship between economic and cultural control. Success of one of media forms is often translated into another medium. It was the film industry that turned to well-known strips on many occasions. Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Batman, Superman, spider Man and other heroes have become successful commercial films. Alongside, television turned to a series of animated cartoons, juxtaposing the dual media tradition.
Film and comic strip did influence each other. In 1952 C.B.S. introduced the first of sixty-five half-hour shows dedicated to the adventures of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. Western stories heroes first and super heroes later became film and radio stars, introduced in 1941 by Paramount Pictures. But the most direct relationship exists between comic and cartoon films. In 1930 Mickey Mouse began his career in comics and Donald Duck in 1938. With the publication of Disney's films, other series also developed such as: Paul Terry's Mighty Mouse; Walter Lanz's Woody Woodpecker cartoons; Loew's Tom and Jerry and Warner Bros' series Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Beep Beep the Roadrunner and Tweety and Sylvester; or even the most recent Hanna and Barber's cartoon. The puppet film is also associated with the animated cartoon; Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's series of fantastic adventures, Super Car, Stingray, Fireball X-15 and Thunderbirds, also appeared on children's strips.
The initial struggle of the mass media to develop into industries, created secondary industries, to supply the incredible paraphernalia that backs up the success of a film, a radio series or a comic strip or comic book. The location of control over these mass communication systems of the advanced western societies may partly demonstrate the reasons of this economic and cultural relationship of the mass media. Murdock (1982) argues that the increasing reach and power of the leading communications corporations is now greater than ever and due to two interlinked movements in the structure of communication industries: concentration and conglomeration. Murdock notes that, media markets have became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few large companies. In central sectors such as daily and Sunday newspapers, paperback books, records and commercial television programming two-thirds or more of the total audience are hearing, reading or looking at material produced by the top firms (Murdock, 1982:118).
These communications conglomerates operate mainly or solely within the media and leisure industries, using the profits for their original operating to buy into other sectors. The British International Publishing Corporation Ltd (I.P.C.), Warner Bros and National Periodical Publications, C.B.S. and Walt Disney Productions best illustrate Murdock's point and in relation to the comic industry.
The International Publishing Corporation Ltd (I.P.C.), dominating the British and some overseas markets, is a publishing group subsidiary of Reed Publishing Holdings Ltd. The latter group is engaged in printing, publishing newspaper, consumer and business magazines, book and business directories, and with a nominal capital of 50.000.000 pounds. But the holding company is Reed International Ltd with principal investments in U.K., North America and Europe, and principal activities in paper and packaging, publishing and printing, and building and home improvement products. Reed International Ltd holds an authorized capital of 150.000.000 pounds (Dun & Bradstreet, 1982). Among its subsidiaries are I.P.C., I.P.C. Business Press Ltd and I.P.C. Magazines, as well as 50% of Kauka Verlag in West Germany (Stopford, et al, 1980).
Finally, C.B.C. provides an illustrative example of the structure of this multinational network of entertainment and its intermedia dependencies. C.B.C.'s consumer bands include: five T.V. stations, four radio stations, five record companies, eight musical instruments manufacturers, two stereo companies, twelve toy companies, eight magazine publications and four book publishers. Their sales in 1978 reached $3.7 billion with a profitable of $201 million (Moscowitz, et al, 1980:366). It is clear than that the successful development of such multinational enterprises, whose main concern is control over production, do apply instruments available to implement their aims.
As Robertson (1971) argues, a multinational producing enterprise (M.P.E.) exercising control over overseas subsidiaries can have substantial effects on trade flows, as well as that, it may create certain socio-political implications on problems of development of nationalism. ‘Multinational operation’, he argues, ‘does involve international planning of production, of purchasing policies for materials and components and of marketing strategy in order that the enterprise operating as an entity is able to optimize its objective function’ (Robertson, 1971:327).
It has also been indicated by Johnson (1969) and others, that nationalistic goals can be included in an assessment of trade policy. For example, subsidiaries of multinational enterprises working overseas may effect local production and economy in favour of the multinational parent's production policies. Johnson (1969:351) argues, ‘some aspects of the activities of M.P.E.s are primarily political... and fall outside the field altogether. Problems of extra-territoriality, for example, are clearly a political issue. In this case, policy decisions made by one national government may be insidiously imposed on another country through the commercial links between a parent and its overseas subsidiaries’.
One of the most explicit cases of a multinational cultural enterprise's direct involvement in another country's cultural affairs, is that of Walt Disney's ‘tour’ in Latin America in early 1940s. Nelson Rockefeller, the State Department's Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, asked Disney to tour South America as a ‘good-will ambassador’. As Miller (1957:185) states, Walt Disney was told: ‘your pictures are quite popular down there... and there is a Nazi influence you can help offset if you would go down and meet people... the Government is willing to underwrite all expanses...’ So Disney went off to South America to shoot whatever he found and ‘he wanted it to be especially good because this one was for Uncle Sam’. Walt Disney came up with, Platis (1978) argues, were films of strong anti-communist or of military content, or comic books whose purpose was to celebrate the ‘friendly relations’ to be developed between the United States and Latin America countries.
Economic interests in comics advertising
The commercial character of comic magazines is also illustrated by the numerous advertisements which quite often occupy a large amount of a comic magazine's pages. Advertising brings the comic book industry an enormous revenue, which have been defined here as being either direct and explicit (Figure 2.6.) or indirect and implicit (through the content of comic stories).
Charles Schultz, designer of the Peanuts strip, notes that, ‘the secret of a successful series is to develop the personality of comic book heroes, in such a way, that the readers feel these heroes exist in real, and they (the readers) just cannot wait meeting them...’ (Magazine, 1986:59). Comic book heroes, then, instill wishes and the advertisements promise to supply the means that will fulfill the wishes. The ‘cultural industry’ conditions readers in a consumer society, which the ‘consumer industry’ can then exploit. Mass media, advertising and publicity combined make sure that public demand is currently created and expanded and the wheels that drive the economy of capitalist system are kept running smoothly. As it is argued elsewhere in this thesis, an important aspect of the function of any form of commercial literature derives from ‘discourse theory’ which seeks to explain the organization of emotions in conjunction with the organization of social and political consciousness. It is a specialty of all fiction that it continually offers ways of combining social attitudes with feelings.
Direct advertising through the comic magazines is mainly concerned in advertising other related sectors of the comic industry, such as films (Figure 2.6.), video games, toys, music, and so on. It is an old relationship - that of comic figures associated with the promotion of goods: from Popeye and Little Lulu advertising spinach and Kleenex, to the more recent Peanuts and Blondie advertising Ford and Kodak products respectively. Even the Greek version of Lucky Luck has lent his title to a children's baby shampoo brand (Figure 2.7.).
Still, it may be the case that other, than those of the comic industry's economic interests may occur and develop as a result of the wide field of economic exploitation comic magazines offer. Girls' comics to portray heroines as having a super-figure, teaching this way their young readers that as they grow up they should have to be beautiful. It is through the advertisements of popular press, such as women's magazines, that girls find the ways to became beautiful. A large network of ‘beauty institute’ enterprises promises that it will make them look just as those heroines in the comic stories look like (Figure 2.8). Girls' emotional problems with husbands or boyfriends, or even ‘existential’ occupation worries about their future (themes often met in human interest/girls' comics) provide the ‘professional’ stamp to a number of ‘prestige’ offices of mediums, astrologists or police detectives, working in an ‘underground’ dimension of the economic system's structure (Figures 2.9 & 2.10). Women's magazines offer a great number of their advertising sections to occupational groups of this kind.
Animals, especially dogs, often accompany a comic strip figure. The favorite comic book character who owns an animal is probably to instill wishes to children to have little pets. As Figure 2.11 shows dogs are very popular (as well as other animals) and make a very profitable trade through the advertising pages of popular press. Quite often a famous and convenient media image, such as that of the T.V. dog, Lassie, occupies the role of the sales promotion figure.
These are some of the numerous examples that could be seen as consistent cases of an unconscious and implicit advertising process, of the comic industry's interests. Moreover, these interests are expressive of the general interests of the network of capitalist enterprises. Quite often the core of comic stories involves different forms of entertainment based on the operation of different industries in the capitalist economic system. Human interest comics, for example, do stress more on fashion, dance and hobbies, pop music, expensive fast cars or luxurious houses. Magazines directed to boys are mainly preoccupied with any popular sports, stressing on soccer matches, car racing or fighting arts (Figures 2.12 & 2.13).
Finally, there is what Wertham (1954) has described as a scientific promotion of comic magazines. the direct effect of comic books on children through their pictures, text and advertisements is reinforced by an indirect influence: endorsements and writings of experts. In their actual effect the experts for the defense represent a team as their way of reasoning, their apologetic attitude for the industry and its products, their conclusions are much alike. Of course they contradict one another occasionally, or contradict themselves between one paper and another.
Morris, for example, the creator of Lucky Luck, believes that ‘someone can make good humor being politically neutral’ and that is why he dislikes the cartoonists of the Left (Zoc, 1986:95). Charles Schultz though, sees that this neutral style is a ‘very easy made humor’, and still, cartoonists following this strategy, ‘end up giving a simplified aspect of life, although the case is that they are implicitly making meaningful conclusions about life, politics or the social structure’ (Magazine, 1986:58).
The expert for the defense do not tell you what children get out of the stories, either, what they actually say, what is reflected from comic books in their minds. Moreover, in trying to deny the harm done by comic books the experts make it appear that the comic books have no influence at all and represent merely ‘casual contact with ideas’ on a printed page. Rene Goscinny, who declares to be a ‘super-chauvinist’ and ‘nationalist’ says about his Asterix the Gaul: ‘I have never looked at the color, the race or the religion of people, I never said that I do not like the blacks, the reds, or the yellows. I only see people... what I am interested is just a parody of every country's stereotypes...’ (Five To, 1985:51). Though, when they pronounce on the effects of ‘good’ comic books they suddenly forget anything and write that comic books ‘exert tremendous influence’.
So far, this chapter has tried to point out some of the facts that reveal the origins and location of power of the comic industries in a historical, socio-political and economic context:
(1) America and Britain are the progenitors of a flourishing juvenile comic industry;
(2) the development of comics as a form of popular press is clearly associated with the more general economic and cultural expansion of the free enterprise market of America. The traditional imperialist origins of this market, have been always aiming at the conquest of overseas, and especially European markets;
(3) comic magazines to be commercially viable are interrelated into a network of mass media entertainment;
(4) comic book characters are used as sales promoting figures of American products and are often used as symbols of patriotic faith;
(5) censorship on comics, whenever it involves, is directed by the comic industry itself, and takes the form of self-defense. It represents the various attempts of the industry to adapt to new public demands of the consuming market. The C.M.A.A. Code and its European version are dominant considerations in the decision making policies of comic production.
(6) European comic industry, though it develops at a later stage, its structure and organization, as well as the actual comic productions, are closely associated, and in a sense, under American multinational control through an extensive world wide entertainment network.
(7) this international multinational operation of ideological and economic manipulation of overseas markets, through the mass media, has certain economic and social-political implications, on the autonomous development of those markets, and on issues of development of national identity;
(8) inter-media dependencies between industries of mass entertainment illustrate at its best the interests of the controlling enterprises, which products are promoted in the most innocent and ‘funny’ way through comic magazines;
(9) advertisements, too, justify the commercial character of comics, being of direct and indirect form; and
(10) a number of economic interest groups are operating outside the multinational network of comic industries, though inside a free capitalist market, and their operation promotes and justifies to a certain extent operating principles of comic magazines. Scientific promotion of comics is also in operation through a group of experts, as an indirect influence.
Through the next chapters a descriptive and both qualitative and quantitative content analysis of fifty comic magazines published in Greece is presented. The prototypical forms of these magazines originated inside the gigantic comic industries that have just been outlined. The aim of the analysis is to point out the cultural forms expressed through the themes of these magazines and to provide the links which would suggest that, those themes, are congruent and recognizable elements of Anglo-American imperialist values and attitudes. As such, these comics constitute an ideological system of foreign cultural invasion, strongly influential when operating inside the boundaries of the general cultural context of any overseas country, such as Greece.
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