 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotch tank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States. It's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Jeremy Dauber about his new book, American Comics, A History. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs on our YouTube channel. This Wednesday, December 15th, at 1 p.m., we'll present a program entitled Anti-Federalists and the Bill of Rights. Professors Mary Sarah Builder and Woody Holton will discuss the arguments of the Anti-Federalists and present a controversies over how we teach the Bill of Rights. And on Thursday, January 6th, at 1 p.m., award-winning historian and biographer Kate Clifford Larson will tell us about her new book, Walk With Me, a biography of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. Cartoons and comic books might not be the first thing to come to mind when thinking about what one can find in the National Archives. However, you can find records relating to 19th century Thomas Nast, creator of the Democrats donkey and the Republicans elephant, original drawings by 20th century political cartoonist Clifford Berryman, creator of the teddy bear, and even storyboards for Superman comic to promote President Kennedy's Council on Physical Fitness. The largest concentration of comic books is in our Center for Legislative Archives. In the 1950s, the Senate subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency collected a number of comic books as evidence, including Mad Magazine number one. Elsewhere in the National Archives, you can even find Batman in a copyright infringement case and Superman in special issues created for the U.S. Navy. Today, author Jeremy Dobber will tell us about the history of the American comics over the last 150 years. In a review in the New York Times, Michael Tisserrand praised Dobber's book American Comics as an entertaining and richly detailed new history of comics, a scholarly survey that is both opinionated and frequently funny. And Michael Saylor, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says Dobber's perceptive critical overview is enlivened by a jaunty style that bops from the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in the 1860s to the devise of an equally influential gadfly Mad Magazine in 2018. Jeremy Dobber teaches American Studies at Columbia University as Director of Columbia's Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies. His books include Jewish comedy, A Serious History, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Now let's hear from Jeremy Dobber. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much to, Ferio, thank you to the National Archives. It's a real honor to be here, getting a chance to talk to all of you and to talk about my new book American Comics of History. And you know, one of the, what I tried to do in this book was to say, I'm going to take this 150 years of this medium, which was really central in the history of American culture, this American art form. It tells the whole story of American politics and culture in its own different way and has hundreds and hundreds of mass pieces. I'm going to try and tell this within sort of the body of a single book. And I wanted to try and sum all of it down in a certain way for the people who came to the National Archives to listen, you know, in less than an hour. And obviously that would be impossible to do. And even if I did it, you know, I wouldn't leave you wanting more. What I've decided to do is to narrow it down and tell the story of American comics in a very comic book way. And I decided to do that through 10 battles, right? What are comic books, if not full of huge, post-founding, amazing battles? I thought I would tell 10 different stories of comics, the history, through 10 different stories of battles. And in order to do that, I'm going to go back close to the very beginning. Not quite, as Mr. Ferriero said, with Thomas Nast, although he's a hugely important part of the story of American comics, really getting it in the minds of all kinds of American citizens in the Civil War era, in the immediate post-war era, but really with the start of American comics as even more of a mass medium. And that comes with the rise of the mass-produced, mass-circulated American newspaper chain. And in doing that, I want to introduce you to two figures who are the protagonists of our first comics battle. And can I have the next slide, please? These two figures are the people who shaped the American newspaper history, as we have it, in the late 19th century. And they are on the left, Joseph Pulitzer, and on the right, William Randolph Purst. So these names are probably familiar to many of you who are interested in American history and American culture. Joseph Pulitzer in 1883 bought the newspaper known as The New York World from Jay Gould by two years later. He had, he was selling 200,000 copies a day, right? So just this remarkable kind of growth. And he did it in a way which was a little bit surprising for those of us who are familiar with the Pulitzer name, really for the Pulitzer Prize is in kind of the most elevated kind of journalism. He practiced what we would now kind of more call a kind of tabloid journalism, if it bleeds, if it leads, and was always interested in more ways of increasing circulation. And as a result, he saw this new technological development, these rapid high-speed rotary color presses. And he said, look, at first he thought, I'm going to use these to reproduce great works of Western art. But subsequently, he realized, you know what, I really want to sell these comics, these newspapers, excuse me, to a new wave of people who are flooding into the cities to immigrants. To, you know, a backbone of American society, right? But immigrants obviously coming from different countries. English is not often their first language. A newspaper which is composed primarily of words, not going to be the best product for them, right? And as a result, comics became a natural kind of possible circulation booster. And starting in 1895, one character who was called Mickey Dugan, but nobody knew him as Mickey Dugan. Everybody called him the yellow kid, became prominently featured and became sort of a national merchandising character. And the yellow kid really in some ways combined a lot of the features that we now think about as commercial comics. It was an ongoing regular character. It combined word balloons and pictures and text and pictures in these sort of fascinating kind of ways. So, Pulitzer was doing quite well. And then in that same year that the yellow kid appeared in the New York world, we have a new player into the market, sort of the son of a mining, a new mining fortune out west named William Randolph Hearst. Hearst buys The Morning Journal, another newspaper in 1895. And he and Pulitzer start going at it by producing competing slates of comic strips in these newspapers that would then grow to buy other newspapers and other markets, which would publish their own comics that belong to these empires of Pulitzer and Hearst. Those groups were called syndicates, probably a name that's familiar to most of you, and many of the comics were either Pulitzer papers or they were Hearst papers. Hearst would later be known as King Features papers. And Hearst would gather talent kind of the old fashioned way, which is that he would steal it, right? So, many of you may be familiar with the movie Citizen Kane, that wonderful movie which is a thinly autobiographical lead, autobiographical picture of William Randolph Hearst and his successes. And you may remember a scene in which he poaches a lot of different people in that movie. That is basically among those people in the real life version of this, where all of the comics creators and editors from Pulitzer's papers, right? So Hearst sort of insta starts, so to speak, his own kind of comics empire. So there was really a lot of competition going back and forth. And in the process of that, and then other syndicates got into it, a syndicate from the Midwest by Joseph Middle Patterson, the Chicago Tributes Syndicate, created a lot of the indelible comics characters of the first great wave of American comics. And these are names which, while they may not have the quite the purchase and the luster as they once did, names like Dick Tracy and Popeye and Little Orphan Annie and Al Cap, all of these names that sound very familiar. I think to many of us, this was one of the central lingua franca of American culture. And this was something really that transcended class, presidents and working class people all wanted to know the next adventures of Little Orphan Annie or the gumps or what have you, right? It transcended age, right? This was not just a juvenile thing, kids and adults, and it really was nationwide. A number of anthropologists, cultural observers would say, look, you know what? If you really want to understand American culture, you really have to understand the comic strips. The left, as I say, is Pulitzer. On the right, as I say, is William Randolph Hearst. So those were the two guys, okay? And the comic strips were the essential basis of American comics and American culture, right? This battle that comes out between them and then grows to envelop all sorts of these newspaper slides. Now can I move to the next slide, please? Thank you. So what we have here, right, really is, of course, the next great wave in the history of American comics. And this battle that I would like to call it is Superman versus the bad guys, right? This starts in the late 1930s. You can see the cover date of Action Comics number one right there, June 1938. And what we have here is the brainchild of two Jewish teenage kids from Cleveland who really want to break into that comic strip business. They don't want to make comic books. Comic books in the mid 1930s really is a very sort of kind of second rate operation. You're putting together, mostly speaking, chopped up and collected collections of comic strips because after all, yesterday's newspaper is today's fish wrapper. Nobody kept those things particularly. So there was a kind of business in sort of gathering these things together. But that was really kind of a second rate status. So you're going to just really, really wanted to break into the comic strip syndicate business. It was quite lucrative, or at least it could be. And they said, you know what, we want to do this. But nobody was taking Superman. All these newspaper strips passed. All these newspaper syndicates passed on Superman. And so eventually they had to go to this company, National Comics, which was basically putting together what was considered a fairly new idea now in this comic book business, these Book of Comics business. Which was a all new collection of material sort of inside these pamphlets. And originally I should say these pamphlets weren't even, no one even had the idea of paying for them. They were going to be given away with buying sort of a new fill up at your gas station or something like that. But according to the story, one of the creators of this medium, a guy named Max Gaines had a couple of these sort of giveaways that were hanging around and he said, you know, he tried an experiment, which was he stuck a 10 cent sticker on them. He put them on some new stands and they sold out over the next weekend. And the new stand dealers were asking for more. And so these, these, these comic books began to come and sort of develop with them. What ended and what really sort of drove that was eventually this character by Siegel and Schuster. Now I do want to point out that if you look at the cover, this is such a famous cover, it's very hard to kind of peel away all of our understandings of Superman. But it's worth pointing out that if you just look at the cover by itself, as you see on the screen, it's hard to tell whether or not Superman is a good guy or a bad guy. Right. Here's this random guy. We don't know who Superman is, right? This random guy. He's crashing a car into a rock. People are running away. It looks like out of fear. We have no idea. Maybe they're good guys. Maybe they're bad guys. We don't really know. And that's not surprising because many of Superman's origin started including from an earlier short story by Siegel as a kind of bad guy. And, and he was also supping of a lot of characters from the pulps and other kinds of things whose moralities were somewhat ambiguous. And it's certainly the case that Superman, although from the beginning in the service of a kind of Rooseveltian liberal goodness, right, is very uninterested in what we might call due process. Right. He's not bringing everybody to the police for arrest and trial. Right. And he's certainly more interested in what we might call justice rather than fairness. Right. And finally, right, his answer to everything is through force. Right. And some of these points were things that would be very interesting to critics of comic books because this new superhero craze, which developed, which became immediately massively popular among the juvenile set. Right. This was something that educational sociologists and people who were worried about kids, we became very interested in, you know, which was again not surprising because very soon the money spent on comic books eclipsed all the money that was being spent on books for kids in schools and public libraries. Right. So we're talking about a lot, a lot of sales, not just of Superman, but of all of these other superheroes or costume characters that were being developed at the time. Now, I will say I pointed out that Siegel and Schuster were Jewish and this first wave of superheroes, the vast majority of people who were involved as creators in the industry, not all of them, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority were Jewish. And as a professor of Jewish literature, I'm often asked, you know, what is the connection between Jews and comic books? And I think this is really is in many ways, it's an American story, right? It's a story of a minority group at that time suffering a great deal of social discrimination, not being able to be allowed into certain kinds of elite professions. And so they went to kind of low status professions, like as comic books were at the time, and then they hired their friends and relatives as often these communities tend to do because again, nobody really cared so much about the quality of many of these comics. That's one way in which these comics were very Jewish. But another way, and now please let's move to the next slide. Another way is that in a period, thank you, in a period of still a decent amount of isolationism. Remember that 1938 on the last cover, right? Jews who had a lot of relatives in Europe at this point, many of them were either immigrants themselves or they were first generation, right? They were very, very well aware of Hitler's rise to power and what that meant for the Jews, or what that might have meant, what that might mean for the Jews. And so they were very pro war, right? They were very pro getting into World War II, fighting the Nazis before, unfortunately, a lot of Americans were. This was before Pearl Harbor and two other Jewish men, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby came together and they created Captain America who premiered in Captain America comics, premiered his own comic right away. This is before Pearl Harbor. And of course, as you can see, he's giving Adolf Hitler a good right hand socked at the jaw, right? Which is, you know, making no bones about where this comic book stood. And it is fair to say that not everybody was all right with this. Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor of New York at the time, had to send police to the offices of Simon and Kirby because they received threats after this kind of material was being published. So that said, once Pearl Harbor happened, America and its superheroes, its costumed heroes came into the war with both booted feet, right? Very, very, very active. All sorts of American heroes fighting in the war, many new characters coming up. And as you can see on the bottom of the screen, you see that from the very beginning of Captain America, you can see his young ally, Bucky, right? One of the audiences for these, in fact, one of the large audiences for these superhero comics, young people by definition were too young to go and actually fight and actually serve in the war. But the comics in some ways served as a wish fulfillment for the kids to get involved through these kind of young characters who could serve as sidekicks. And later on, there would be a lot of issues about what exactly, what role these sidekicks had in all this. But at the time, this was one way of getting the kids involved rather than in the case of Superman or Batman or some of these other characters, a kind of metaphorical wish fulfillment of saying, boy, I wish I could be like Superman. It was easier to imagine yourself as a young kid being a young ally, a boy commando, you know, some of these other kind of boy groups that were in the comic books actually taking the war and being a part of this great enterprise. There were other ways that comic characters got involved too. Characters helped sell war bonds. They helped encourage people to have victory gardens, to recycle paper, all of these kind of things that went on. Comics in many ways, certainly from 1941 to 1945, really became, in many sort of fundamental ways, very much a part of the American patriotic war effort. You did not see really in any sort of meaningful way a kind of anti-war movement sort of playing itself out within the comics. I really just did not have it. So after the war, there is this real process of trying to come back. Back is a kind of complicated word here. But trying to achieve a certain kind of post-war, I'm putting this in quotes, normalcy, right? There were all sorts of social stresses, all sorts of social shifts. Obviously the fact that so many men went abroad to serve in the armed forces had women taking in that kind of Rosie the Riveter mode that we all know, certain kinds of steps into the workforce, steps that now we're going to be rolled back to a certain extent. This led and other kinds of things led to a great deal of social stresses. Not everyone came home from the foreign theaters of operation. There were stresses on families. There were stresses on the children of those families. And many of those stresses were playing themselves out, not explicitly but implicitly, in the rise of a series of genres of comics, that gestured at these issues. The most famous of these are three types. The first being romance comics, which were also in some sense created by Simon and Kirby, which kind of had this wish fulfillment of a certain kind of heterosexual white picket fence marriage and sort of a nuclear family as a kind of, again, restoration is not the right word, but a kind of creation in the anxieties of these social stresses. The other two were roughly speaking crime comics and horror comics, which in their own ways both suggested, and I don't have time to go into this in great detail. You can see this in great detail in the book that I wrote about the underlying discomfort and trauma and dislocation that was under this sort of pretend normalcy. That really, if you scratched sort of those white picket fences, you would find all of these noir type criminals and you would find these murderers would be horribly punished in these kind of horrific ways. And the person who is the most associated with that is one of the subjects of our next battle, battle number four. So can we have our next slide, please? Okay, that person, although he looked a little different in the 1950s on our left, the son of that 10 cent sticker guy, this guy's name is Bill Gaines, and he was the one of the main he was the head of the company that at first was known as educational comics under his father, but was then turned into entertaining comics or EC as everyone knew it. Okay? So EC was really a specialist in these kind of horror comics. It put together some of these famous ones, these names sometimes still have some resonance now, names like Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and Gaines was one of these these these figures sort of responsible for a huge, huge wave in these crime and horror comics. Now I want to remind you, if you were a 10 year old reading Superman in 1938, by the time it's 1952, it's been 14 years have passed, right? So you're in your mid-20s. Some of people absolutely said, you know what? I'm tired of comics. I'm not going to read comic books anymore. But a lot of people weren't. They just wanted comics that were a little bit wilder, that were a little bit more suitable to their kinds of interests. This was true of soldiers who were carrying comics at the front. This was true of people who came back. This was true of people who had been on the home front the entire time. And so they're reading these kind of comics. But of course these comics are available on newsstands. They're available for kids to read. Kids certainly were reading them. Adults were reading them. The kids were certainly reading them too. They were passing them around. And they began to become a kind of moral concern. And it was led in the popular press by a psychologist named Frederick Wortham. But that led itself in a kind of moral panic to these references, these concerns, I should say, that were being taken up by the United States government. And in no small part, by the man on our right, a senator named Estes Kefauver, who was, as David Ferriot suggested in the introduction, responsible for a subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, and the role of comic books in perpetuating, in causing, in creating juvenile delinquency. Now, for Wortham, that psychologist and Kefauver, the hope really was not to outlaw these comics via legal fiat. That would fall afoul of constitutional grounds. And they knew that. But the hope really was to create some kind of very strong incentive for the comic book industry to censor itself along the lines of motion picture ratings codes. And this came to a head very famously in the senatorial hearing where Bill Gaines, that character on left, testified. And his testimony went extremely badly. This was in 1954. And part of this, there were all sorts of reasons for that. Part of it had to do with the fact that Gaines had taken, this was legal at the time, but he had taken amphetamines to kind of help get himself ready for his testimony. And then the hearing was delayed and the amphetamines were off. And he was kind of crashing. But nonetheless, the hearing went very badly. And distributors and consumers really left EC in droves. And a lot of the other comics companies seeing the writing on the wall based on this kind of battle, they also abandoned this kind of model of comics that were a little bit more for adults. They were a little bit more mature. And they agreed to be regulated by a kind of comics code, which essentially speaking, stunted, I think it's fair to say, the growth of mainstream American comic books kind of kept them in a way that was sort of suitable for newsstands for anybody and everybody to read, which meant even sort of the littlest kids, which meant that they essentially were a juvenile medium. Now, in some sense, Bill Gaines really did have the last laugh. If this idea was to prevent a certain kind of juvenile delinquency, Gaines went on to take one of his comic books, a humor comic book, and recast it as a magazine, which was not subject to this kind of code authority. That magazine, of course, went on to become Mad Magazine, which then created more juvenile delinquents and anti-authoritarians and counter-cultural forces than anything I think any of those crime and horror comics would have done combined. So I really do think ultimately that Gaines had the last laugh and a very lucrative laugh it was. But comics for quite a number of years for most of the decade of the 50s maintained really a very juvenile status until the subjects of our next battle came. So next slide, please. This is number five. And these characters, maybe some are more or less familiar to you. This is in around the 1961, these two in much younger forms, Stan Lee on the left and Jack Kirby essentially put their heads together and started to say, you know what, we can create comics still under the ages of this code authority but in some sense that instead of looking to really appeal to kind of little kids are going a little bit more to kind of an adolescent or a college kind of audience that starts and those characters become between the two of them, the, and also Steve Ditko and a couple of other artists, the architects of the Marvel Universe that is still appearing very, very prominently on our television and movie screens to literally yesterday to today, yesterday and today. Now the reason that this is a battle is because as people who are familiar with the history of comics know, and maybe it's sort of even people who are not, there is a tremendous amount of discord and debate among the players, among the characters, among the critics as to who created what, what role did each of them have? You might think or it might have been thought that because Stan Lee's job involved sort of a typewriter and Jack Kirby's involved more of a brush that you have pencils and brushes that you, that you would have sort of some neat division there but that is really not the way that comics worked. It's not the way their relationship worked. For more details, I don't have time to go into this. We can either do it in the Q and A or you can sort of read some of the details in my book but suffice it to say that along with the creation of this new universe came a kind of discord that led to a lot of very bitter, very vitriolic and also very fruitful conversations about what creativity and originality means in the history of comics. The general consensus is that Kirby is who is less known than Stan Lee, who is very much a pitch man for Marvel, Kirby was one of the most, if not the most, fertile and imaginative and creative minds in the history of American comics. So I'm glad to have him as part of the portraiture here along with Lee, whose face is much better known for not least for his cameos sort of in these Marvel movies. Now I should say that this during the 1960s when the Marvel kind of revolution was hitting mainstream comics there was another kind of revolution that was coming out as well and it was growing up on EC Comics, those horror comics on Mad Magazine and who were becoming sort of more and more alienated from what we might call the mainstream of American culture of American politics. They were going to college in some cases as opposed to that first wave of American comics writers they were becoming increasingly alienated, the messages that American mainstream culture was putting out in short, they were of that generation that was interested in joining this sort of counter cultural movement of the late 1960s and they themselves create a kind of new cultural base for the creation of comics that base is on the west coast and particularly in the Bay Area they are a group of people interested in using that counter cultural motto of personal and free and unfettered expression to create a wide range of comic books and many of those comic books take free expression and push it to its limits and beyond in ways that strike us now as pornographic as racist as misogynist but also many of these comics are doing something that is entirely as a means of personal and indeed autobiographical expression and I will show you two examples of this in the next slide, battle number six next slide please so here we have two examples of this the first on the left is arguably one of the most famous products of this sort of counter cultural alternative comics movement this is the first cover number zero comics by Robert Crum and you can see that kind of electric excitement almost like a Tom Wolf thing that is going on here it plugs you in and not surprisingly many of these comics are also about dropping out turning on all of this sex drugs and rock and roll kind of comics that very much focuses on much of the underground they are also in their own ways political but sort of in a broadly speaking mode they are often anti-war very environmentally focused and as I say they sort of support pushing back against the norms of the culture one norm of the culture however that zap comics which would later expand not to just include Robert Crum but another six artists was not interested in expanding sort of egalitarianism women were not invited to be any of the members of the zap seven they were frequently not invited to join many of the kind of collaborative comics efforts they were being excluded in certain ways and so many of them came together in other kinds of collectives one of the earliest and I think one of the most famous is this it ain't me babe comics on your right and you can see what I think is wonderful here you can see comic characters from a number of different periods earlier on in comics history sort of giving sort of a high fist and salute sort of walking out right there's olive oil and little Lulu and Wonder Woman and Mary Marvel and so forth so you have these characters and it ain't me babe comics and some of the other comics one of which is called women's comics you see a lot of very powerful others in the late in the early 1970s autobiographical stories stories about people coming out stories about people having being the victims of sexist behavior in the workplace trying to find their own space for their own personal liberation a lot of these kind of stories that are told with tremendous vigor tremendous talent and ability and that both Zab and it made me babe comics in their own ways would kickstart a whole wave of other kinds of comics that are the seeds of a lot of the graphic novels that we see winning a lot of the awards today one of those comic a younger a slightly younger member of this generation this Bay Area generation was a cartoonist whose name was art Spiegelman a name that I think is probably familiar to quite a number of you Spiegelman would be in the Bay Area he would then go to Europe he would learn something about some of the European comics that were flourishing then he would come back to New York and he would start along with his partner Francois Mouli he would start a magazine called raw magazine which in its own ways like Zab raw right you would have sort of a showcase of some of the artistically ambitious button-pushing comics but even as those comics were being published Spiegelman was working on his own project that would be produced as a separate insert within these raw magazine comics that were coming out in the now we're moving into the very early 1980s a comic book that both used sort of very complicated narrative storytelling techniques artistic techniques but also was a complicated autobiographical techniques it was telling the story not only of Art Spiegelman's father Vladek Spiegelman and his experiences as a Holocaust survivor but also Art Spiegelman's own responses as what we would now call sort of a second generation survivor someone who was the child of Holocaust survivors Art Spiegelman was also in that comic trying to make sense not just of his father's behaviors his father's history but also his mother's suicide she was also a survivor but then killed herself when Art Spiegelman was a young man so you have this this combination all of this comes together as I'm sure many of you are familiar with in a work which Spiegelman called Maus the first version of which comes out in 1986 we have the next slide please this is battle number seven Art Spiegelman versus the New York Times as you can see Spiegelman produces sort of Maus it's in two parts the first part you see as a picture on the left the second part excuse me if you look on the right in the best seller list it appears as nonfiction in the second volume which comes out in the early 1990s as Maus too and actually Spiegelman gets into a little bit of a battle with the New York Times because obviously on some level this is absolutely a true story this is a true story of Laudek Spiegelman Art Spiegelman interviews extensively, we have the tapes but of course Laudek Spiegelman and Art Spiegelman don't look like this they don't have Maus heads they don't have tails the Nazis are not cats and what have you and so originally the New York Times wanted to put this in fiction and Spiegelman wrote them and said he was very concerned about this because it wasn't fiction the story and he was worried that this would give credence and aid and solace to holocaust deniers and so the Times agreed to put this on the nonfiction best sell on the nonfiction list which is where it ended up and it really gets again to some of these questions which are present in any autobiography but I think are much more visual and therefore evident in comics biographies, autobiographies and whatnot about the level of storytelling of narrativization and fictionalization that goes on. Maus did it first one can argue that it still remains if not the one of very few high watermarks in the history of these sort of aesthetically ambitious kind of nonfiction sort of storytelling. It comes out that first part comes out in 1986 the same year of this sort of miraculous year that a Batman story The Dark Knight Returns and a story called Watchmen come out which also begin to sort of transmogrify these mainstream comics fully and fundamentally away from being thought at as a juvenile medium no one could read Watchmen and think that this was aimed at little kids it also becomes for both Maus and Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen they become really released in these between hard or cloth covers that could be shelved in bookstores they could appear very very beginning in public libraries so you begin to have this real sense of how do I put this this real sense of beginning of a more elite kind of popular acceptance of this elite and popular acceptance among adults of this kind of material so that begins to go on at the same time that many of these audiences for let's call the mainstream comic books they are growing up they're still staying with this material and thanks to the new venues of comic shops and comic stores that are really aimed to sell this stuff at higher prices to people with more disposable income they can buy sort of more grown up versions of this and that receives its kind of culmination in a certain type in the early 90s with the next slide so can we have that please this is this death of Superman that occurs sort of in the early 90s you know as we sort of now kind of know or feel you know characters don't really die to a certain extent they do they come back but this actually felt like a huge event it sold enormously widely it sold in all sorts of versions and part of that was not only for how would I put this the narrative value or the emotional value it did remind adults of that emotional connection that is kid but also the idea that people were buying these as speculative or investment kind of properties and they would sell multiple editions and people would sort of buy these as investment properties and that really develops a kind of sense that hasn't really ever quite gone away from the comics market which also led increasingly to these kind of event driven sagas right everything is huge Superman dies this character dies this universe explodes and with each of these in some ways one of the concerns is that this battle this kind of battle approach makes things a little less special each time with each time there's sort of a multi-versal crisis we take it a little bit less serious so in some ways the comics the mainstream comics business was being concerned in certain ways about this kind of relevancy and purchase even at the moment of one of its biggest victories but at the same time that those kind of things were happening a new revolution was beginning and I'm going to turn to the next slide the battle of what I call black panther or Marvel comics you could say versus conventional wisdom and the conventional wisdom starting about ten years ago was that you could not really make a very 20 years ago I should say was that you could not very make a very successful comic book movie with very very few exceptions the first Superman movie of course that first Batman movie but it was going to be very hard to make an aesthetically successful and commercially successful a movie no one had really cracked that code and they certainly hadn't really been able to do this in the way that gave some real sense of the magic of these mainstream comics which was these sort of grand panoramas with lots of different characters that sort of went back and forth from different things and then Marvel Studios sort of developed as a studio they began to sort of unravel all of these rights questions that they had had they made these terrible deals where they had sold sort of many of their flagship characters the rights to different film studios and they started with Iron Man and continued to sort of build under the leadership of this guy Kevin Feige this sort of Marvel Universe Marvel Cinematic Universe that really sort of had this kind of enchantment in this magic this was aided by in many ways the development of special effects special digital effects to allow for a kind of presentation of that awe on the screen that you hadn't had before and also with that concomitant expansion came the possibility of telling different kinds of stories from different kinds of corners of Marvel Universe and in fact there was an interview with the producer of Black Panther a little bit before it came out and the concern was raised that maybe people would not go to see a movie in which the characters were not looking like so many of the superhero characters that had graced the screen before which was to say white people and this producer who was Black said look you know I think of this as the fast and furious movies the movies which were very successful they have a multi-ethnic cast people did not come to see the multi-ethnic cast they came to see the cars they came to see all the car chases people are going to come to Black Panther for that and they're going to stay for sort of how good a movie it is for the superhero aspects they're going to stay to see how good a movie it is not being quite true that the only reason people came was because of the superheroing thing there was a real appeal to seeing the story being told that looked different from a lot of the stories before but it did not hurt that it was a tremendously accomplished movie on many different grounds of course as probably everyone who is here knows it was enormously commercially aesthetically successful successful sort of on really on every grounds and again really overturned conventional wisdom and really paved the way for a very welcome development of having a lot of corners of the Marvel Universe to be explored, boosted, reinvented restructured in ways that really reflect a very welcome diversity there so that kind of conventional wisdom I think is in the process hopefully of being overturned but there's one last battle that I want to sort of talk about before we get to the questions and answers and for that I will have the next slide which is that if you've noticed the last let's say half of our battles have really been battles that have been fought in the adult audience among the adult audience that adult range of comics and when we started our story it really was a story about kids mostly speaking and juvenile materials and so for a while it might have well been asked are comics still possible for kids? Does the maturation of this medium mean that there aren't comics left for kids? And I am as many of you may know I am here to delightfully inform you and delightedly inform you but that is not the case yes we have comics like Batman's The Dark Knight Returns which are very much dealing with very grim and gritty and dark and adult and psychologized themes but we are also seeing a real renaissance in comics for kids often although not always between sort of hard covers things like daft Pilki's Dog Man and a Telecom Irish Comics so we have just a wide variety of materials for people of all ages and just to end on a quick autobiographical note you know when I was a kid you know you can go to a public library you can look for comics as I did you couldn't find really almost anything any collection of comics now of course they're everywhere you know you would never have found them in school libraries at all even sort of limited collections they are now again they're everywhere and I see my kids I have little kids sort of reading these things loving these things just a new generation sort of being enchanted with different comics in different ways but that same medium and long way to continue so I'm going to stop there with my 10 battles that is the 1010 final battle of I'm sure there are more and to thank you and to that is the book and I'm going to take some of the questions that are being sent over to me from the YouTube chat the first question I think is you know does this book make a great gift for friends or family members in this holiday season maybe I added that one but of course the answer is yes yes it does I think that everybody here as I think you can see has some connection with comics I really hope that it's a sort of fun story of these comics I think it will be fun for everybody but now I'll get to the real ones can you explain the motivation between comics directed towards adults or children is the first question that I have and I think that you know that's a great question because it gets to questions of motivation and it gets to questions of audience so there are different kinds of people who are in the comics who make comics or make certain kinds of comics primarily for the purpose of meeting a market need right and depending on that market right that could be aimed towards children or adults right if you're writing a Walt Disney comic you know the odds are that you're aiming this for kids and you know while you make it in the way that Carl Barks did with the Donald Duck stories appealing for adults as well you know you're very mindful of that audience if you're DaV Pilkey you know adults may have a fun time reading this with their kids but it's really a new kids on the other hand if you are writing a kind of Grim Gritty Batman series you know that there's an adult set of audiences out there who are very interested in hearing sort of a grown up Batman story that would be too terrifying or to whatever for kids I think also that you know those stories can have within themselves in different ways different kinds of aesthetic ambition so there are certain kinds of stories whether they be superhero stories or science fiction stories or romance stories or autobiographical tales that you want to get into issues and want to be told in ways that really are not appropriate for children and I mean that not just in terms of the content but also in sort of the way of storytelling in sort of the way that it's described and that I think really also is now effectuated by really a wide different variety of media and venues in which to tell those stories not least the internet that you can sort of put up on your own and put up comics and no one really is going to stop you or can't stop you from doing that but there are others as well you can produce them in a book and have them publish etc so those two things and I talk about this in the book those two things really have existed in different ways all through kind of comics history all the way back some of those comic strips really were not designed primarily for kids even though they appeared in the same section as others moving on to what about comics for minorities is a great question one of the stories that I think is hugely important to tell in the book and I do right is the way that certain groups their stories are not told in comics or they're told in very caricatured ways and the efforts by those groups to reclaim to claim to tell kind of their own stories or and or to be part of these larger franchises these larger kind of companies these are very and this happens in different ways all through comics history from different syndicates which really specialized in comics by women or by black people by different kind of independent comics like the one I talked about in a mid-babe comics by attempts like the milestone universe the Dakota universe sometimes called in the 1990s to try and create a kind of sweet of superhero comics by Hispanic or Latinx individuals and creators sometimes in sort of similar companies I tell a lot of these kind of stories in the book and again thankfully we are also at a time where the pool of people of all kinds of different ethnic backgrounds all kinds of different backgrounds were participating in sort of the grand storytelling machineries of our time really is increasing maybe it's not as increasing as fast as all this would like but it certainly is increasing and we are getting to to hear more of those stories I think which is great I think one other question that's coming up is one about collectible comics and I think that's one of the very very interesting questions about comics as an institution as a business as opposed to an artistic medium right or a storytelling medium is the way that comics have become a kind of business franchise it's fair to say that when you know comics start sort of first in the newspaper strips they start in the early comic book days it's very clear that nobody thought of these as items to be preserved or to be collected one of the things for example that you see in obviously very early comics is you know rip this page out of your comic book and it's suitable for framing if you take the staples out and sort of recycle the paper those kind of things in those early days and of course as time went on you had people continuing to say as they grew up we love these comics we're going to preserve these comics we're going to swap them at early conventions right before the internet the comics conventions really were places for the sort of trade and swap comics you begin to have something like the over street price guide which then sort of makes a market for these comics sort of saying this is actually what these comics are worth that really establishes these things and then as I said with that death of Superman you really begin to have the companies sort of realize how much money they can make on these sort of comics as not just sort of very popular things that might sell a lot of copies to read but investment properties and so they say you know we're going to release six editions of this comic, this special comic you know they're in different covers and it's a fancy stick attached with them and we assume some of them are already bagged right they're already put into bags sort of pre sold that way we don't expect you to be reading this we expect you just to I mean one of the things you see now is that very frequently when comics very old and rare comics come on sale they're already kind of sealed in this kind of like loose side block they really are not nobody thinks that you're going to open them nobody thinks you're going to do anything you're going to have a blast so to speak so that is really a very kind of different thing and the market in these comics the market in original art these are going for prices that none of the creators ever could have imagined and in many many cases and this gets to a very important question many of these artists or those original creators would never be able to afford and so that question of creators' rights that's another story that I tell in the book very important I think I'll end the final question here which is what do you think is the future of comics and I think that's a really important question and maybe it's not surprising but I'm very bullish on the future comics for two particular reasons in two different ways the first as I alluded to before really is the way that the internet has provided a really vast canvas for democratization of the comics so for many many decades if you were really working in mainstream comics even to a certain extent on a less alternative and independent comics you really had to be very geographically located in just a couple of places for a long time for mainstream comics with New York City in order to get the assignments in order to be noticed which is very hard otherwise that is not the case anymore if you draw your comics probably on a digital tablet now if you draw your comics you put them up there you know and you get a million you get 5 million views someone is going to notice someone is going to come calling and it doesn't matter where you live it doesn't matter what you look like it doesn't matter who you are if you've got the goods you are findable and you're valuable in that kind of way that's going to pay I think huge dividends already is for the kinds of talent that the industry gets stories that the industry is willing to tell so that I'm very very excited about I'm very bullish about I think also that in terms of the future of comics growing up as I said you would not have seen comics sort of accepted in schools, in public libraries in bookstores in the way that they are now I don't think that's going away I can't sort of see a story in which that goes away as a medium obviously there are particular titles that might constantly be under question but as a medium I think that's there so I think it is woven inextricably into the life of American culture I mean the fact that I'm here at the August National Archives telling and having the National Archives of the United States talking about comics again that's something that 20 years ago would have been hard to imagine so it's really comics are here to stay I think their future is bright and I want to thank particularly David Ferriero and the National Archives and all of you for your time and your attention thank you all very very much