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Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood
Comic Books Incorporated tells the story of the US comic book business, reframing the history of the medium through an industrial and transmedial lens. Comic books wielded their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business for half a century before moving to the center of mainstream film and television production. This extraordinary history begins at the medium’s origin in the 1930s, when comics were a reviled, disorganized, and lowbrow mass medium, and surveys critical moments along the way—market crashes, corporate takeovers, upheavals in distribution, and financial transformations. Shawna Kidman concludes this revisionist history in the early 2000s, when Hollywood had fully incorporated comic book properties and strategies into its business models and transformed the medium into the heavily exploited, exceedingly corporate, and yet highly esteemed niche art form we know so well today.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryComics
328 pages, Paperback
Published April 30, 2019
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 1, 2019
I briefly knew Shawna Kidman when she worked for Gregory Noveck, as the two tried to sell DC properties to anyone in Hollywood. She has since gone on to become Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of California, San Diego. Along the way, she has methodically researched her book, and it’s a good companion piece to the growing library of books about comics history. It does not, however, work as a stand-alone book and requires a great deal more context to her analysis.
Subtitled “How the business of omics became the business of Hollywood”, Kidman tries to navigate how comics went from the bastard stepchild of publishing to the media darling we know today. The book is roughly chronological and is tightly focused on four areas: how comics weathered the Wertham era of the 1950s; the rise of comic book fandom and auteurism; the changing distribution networks; and finally, comics proliferate mainstream media.
There are 50 pages of footnotes so you can see how thoroughly researched the work was, but Kidman needed to spend a bit more time placing things in context. Some vital elements of comic book history are conflated or omitted so reading it, I was mentally filling in the gaps, but most readers of this academic work will be able to do this. Additionally, she name drops without always identifying who this person is, weakening the value of their contribution to the narrative.
Where the book excels is in exploring factors many other histories gloss over. While the Kefauver senate hearings and Dr. Wertham’s contributions are better known, she adds in more about its impact on all publishers, not just Bill Gaines’ disastrous testimony.
To me, one of the strongest contributions is the chapter on distribution, explaining how American News grew and fell, nearly taking Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics down in the process. The shifting fortunes of distribution in the late 1950s, as comic sales were declining thanks to bad publicity and the rising impact of television, proved more of a death knell to marginal publishers than Wertham. She also nicely acknowledges how the head ships and Underground Comix actually bridged traditional newsstand distribution and the direct market (with Phil Seuling once again not getting near enough credit for the latter).
Her chapter on media is interesting because she follows the morning and shows how private equity helped make Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Marvel’s cinematic universe possible. The slow-awakening of Hollywood to comics’ potential is nicely traced from the success of Superman the Movie, considered a one-time thing to today’s blockbusters. She addresses how the movies released between Richard Donner’s Superman and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man largely suffered from insufficient budgets but never addresses how so many were wretchedly conceived and written. (For those who missed the Sean Howe and Dan Raviv books on Marvel, she nicely recaps their fall and rise here.)
There’s an appendix that charts all television and film adaptations of comics from the Superman radio series through, oddly 2010. Why nearly a decade’s worth of product is omitted is serious error for a business book.
Overall, it’s an interesting read but for a rather limited market. How dense academic prose robs the subject matter of its vitality but it’s thoroughness makes it worth the effort.
Subtitled “How the business of omics became the business of Hollywood”, Kidman tries to navigate how comics went from the bastard stepchild of publishing to the media darling we know today. The book is roughly chronological and is tightly focused on four areas: how comics weathered the Wertham era of the 1950s; the rise of comic book fandom and auteurism; the changing distribution networks; and finally, comics proliferate mainstream media.
There are 50 pages of footnotes so you can see how thoroughly researched the work was, but Kidman needed to spend a bit more time placing things in context. Some vital elements of comic book history are conflated or omitted so reading it, I was mentally filling in the gaps, but most readers of this academic work will be able to do this. Additionally, she name drops without always identifying who this person is, weakening the value of their contribution to the narrative.
Where the book excels is in exploring factors many other histories gloss over. While the Kefauver senate hearings and Dr. Wertham’s contributions are better known, she adds in more about its impact on all publishers, not just Bill Gaines’ disastrous testimony.
To me, one of the strongest contributions is the chapter on distribution, explaining how American News grew and fell, nearly taking Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics down in the process. The shifting fortunes of distribution in the late 1950s, as comic sales were declining thanks to bad publicity and the rising impact of television, proved more of a death knell to marginal publishers than Wertham. She also nicely acknowledges how the head ships and Underground Comix actually bridged traditional newsstand distribution and the direct market (with Phil Seuling once again not getting near enough credit for the latter).
Her chapter on media is interesting because she follows the morning and shows how private equity helped make Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Marvel’s cinematic universe possible. The slow-awakening of Hollywood to comics’ potential is nicely traced from the success of Superman the Movie, considered a one-time thing to today’s blockbusters. She addresses how the movies released between Richard Donner’s Superman and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man largely suffered from insufficient budgets but never addresses how so many were wretchedly conceived and written. (For those who missed the Sean Howe and Dan Raviv books on Marvel, she nicely recaps their fall and rise here.)
There’s an appendix that charts all television and film adaptations of comics from the Superman radio series through, oddly 2010. Why nearly a decade’s worth of product is omitted is serious error for a business book.
Overall, it’s an interesting read but for a rather limited market. How dense academic prose robs the subject matter of its vitality but it’s thoroughness makes it worth the effort.
Displaying 1 of 1 review