A bit of alternate history

carcharion

Greetings.

Alright, today I'm going to post a quite serious open question that may require a pinch of knowledge and 60-30 second to sit down and think. Shall we proceed? Here it is:

Imagine an alternate world where World Wars and the the atrocities, the Cold War and the conspiracies, and the terror insurgences in the Middle East never happened. How will such alternative effect the comic industry, especially the superhero one? What idea of conflict and villainy might be used if the "villains"of the World Wars, Cold War, and modern terrorism never had a chance to shine?

nweathington

I think I know what you’re getting at, but let’s put all the other stuff aside and just remove World Wars I and II. Without World War I and the global economic havoc it resulted in (leading to the disastrous trade war started by the US in 1929, which led to the Great Depression), there would not have been the mass migrations from country to country, particularly the migrations to the US. The comic book industry was primarily built on the backs of immigrants who, for the most part, couldn't get more “legitimate” work because of their ethnicity—that is to say largely first- or second-generation Jewish and Italian immigrants. Joe Kubert, Harry “A” Chesler, Jack Binder—each was a Jewish immigrant whose family fled Europe just before or during World War I. Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Harvey Kurtzman, Otto Binder, Mort Weisinger, Julie Schwartz, John and Sal Buscema, Shelly Mayer, Jerry Iger—all sons of Jewish or Italian immigrants who fled Europe just before, during, or immediately following World War I. If only half of those men’s family’s had stayed in Europe, what an impact that would have made on the success of the comic book industry.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that WWI happened and somehow WWII did not, and that those previously mentioned men (and the many less significant pros who were almost literally in the same boat) all immigrated to the US as they really did. Comics have never sold as well as they did during WWII, in large part because the US government bought thousands of them to send to the troops overseas. Without that boost of sales to fully embed comics in the pop culture psyche, I don't how much of the industry would have been strong enough to survive the combined might of the distribution bust and the congressional juvenile delinquency hearings of the ’50s.

Without that boost in sales, would Superman have still been popular enough to get a radio show and TV show and keep DC alive during the lean years? Probably, but it's hard to say. Superhero book sales dropped dramatically after the war, and may have dropped much sooner if the war had never happened. Would Fawcett have kept fighting the DC lawsuit as long as they did? Probably not. Charlton probably would have stuck around because they treated comics simply as a way to keep the presses rolling, and because, like DC, they also had their own distribution arm. Dell, Harvey, and Archie would likely have kept going as well, since they mainly targeted a younger, more “wholesome” audience. And Mad magazine would have survived (assuming Gaines had still founded EC after being bought out of All-American by DC).

But Quality would have been without their bestselling title, Blackhawk (and no Uncle Sam in National Comics and Uncle Sam Quarterly either). They likely would have gone under a few years earlier than they did without it. And without Blackhawk, DC wouldn’t have bothered with buying the rights to the Quality characters (no offense, Plastic Man). Without the sales boom of World War II, there probably would have been far fewer publishers jumping into the fray in the first place. Who knows how that would have affected things?

Most importantly, though, I don’t think Marvel would have lasted past 1958. Obviously they wouldn’t have had their early success with Captain America, because he wouldn’t have been created, and they wouldn't have had their numerous war titles in the ’40s and ’50s either. And no World War II means no atomic bomb and the resulting fear of radiation or a nuclear war, which means no atomic-radiated giant monster movies, which means Atlas doesn't see giant monster comics as a viable genre—the genre that kept them alive during the late ’50s. They would likely have run out of gas a bit earlier than they did, and Kirby would have been busy elsewhere and not around to save them.

And speaking of Kirby—and this is highly speculative on my part—Jack Kirby very likely would have ended up a very different artist. His experiences in the war fueled so much of his work, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s. He still would have had that amazing imagination, but without that extra spark, maybe he never would have hit that next level, assuming Marvel had stuck around to the early ’60s.

Again, this probably wasn’t the type of answer you were looking for, but it’s what interested me when I started thinking about it.

Vertighost

Nweathington, that may be the best answer I've ever read to a big question

nweathington

Vertighost said:

Nweathington, that may be the best answer I've ever read to a big question

Thank you. I rewrote a few times as I thought of other possibilities. It's an interesting question to consider. People tend to focus on World War II—mainly because of the clear villains and black-&-white nature of it, I think—to the point where World War I gets rather shamefully neglected (at least here in the US). But soooo much changed because of WWI.