Joe Kubert Tarzan #214

Published by DC Comics, Nov 1972 Cover Date

Comic Book marketing with comic book covers, then and now

Reviewing old comics from the newsstand days of comic book distribution presents a whole world of graphic design that has been mostly left behind by today's industry. The hermetically-sealed direct-market makes comic books compete only against themselves instead of a wide range of other publications.

Notice the big black wing of the vulture highlighting the Tarzan logo. With the newsstands of yore, the way publications were racked, often just the price, company logo, and the title logo is all that was seen from a flurry of other comics all around. The goal was to get a possible purchaser to slide the whole cover into view, and then either decide then and there to buy, or at least leaf through it and buy it after absorbing some of the art and story.

Kubert's drawing works this challenge directly: it reinforces the logo, and when you look at the cover entire, you've got a monster-sized bird, a snakeman and Tarzan's muscles and knife. There is a story inferred, especially with the story title shoved into the lower corner with monster-movie letters ("The Nightmare," turns out the tale is about Mr. Graystoke eating some bad meat filched from the Gomangan tribe. Tarzan promptly enters into a sick delirium. Distorted reality from either a high fever wrought of botulism or just a drugged state, for it is hinted the Gomangan don't just cook their food, they add hallucinative agents to it).

The direct market is a linear world different than the old newsstands. In the comic book specialty shops full covers are usually displayed for inspection, like a wall of paintings in a museum. Books are alphabetically stacked one after another in groups like the way a collector might sort things in a white stock box. A frequent buyer may simply never see other books because all he is subscribed to for his "pull box" are all grouped together. Physically walking from their personal pool of DC or Marvel books to a display of indie books (if there are any besides Dark Horse and Image) may simply never happen.

The deadly drawback for this is that competition between the companies and their respective creative people is all bent toward already accepted and recognized "intellectual properties." Instead of fighting for attention against racks of other magazines and subjects, comics are book-ended into only the allowed and protected subjects of the direct-market world. I guess the crux is that by isolating comic books into the direct market they were guaranteed to survive via the devoted patronage of we aficionados, but the marketing and retail effort of the big companies in conjunction with the specialty shops are all traveling along a path of least resistance.

My question is: If you remove the licensing money from movies and paraphernalia, can comic books survive?