Pre-Thinking About Credits

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working to catch up on some data entry for the 400 or so new comic books that we added to the WWC corpus in March. One of those tasks involves recording the presence or absence of titles for stories, as well as where that title appears in the story, and then also the presence and absence of credits on the stories.

Since WWC addresses itself to a randomized corpus of works, our interest in story credits was, initially, fairly limited - a series of simple yes/no toggles indicating, for example, whether or not a particular story credits an inker. We are not especially interested in writing biographies of creative personnel so much as attempting to grapple with the broad shifts in the industry over time. Across the history of the American comic book industry the practice of crediting on stories has been - shall we say? - sporadic and we are interested in tracking those changes.

For example, as you can see in the spreadsheet image above for some books published in 2015, few books credit an inker. This is, of course, due to the shifting nature of the division of labour in the industry. We have been interested in mapping precisely those kinds of shifts.

Two weeks ago, the wonderfully astute comics scholar Rebecca Wanzo spoke to the RoCCET Lab at Carleton University. Dr. Wanzo was discussing her path-breaking 2020 book, The Content of Our Caricature, and spoke about how she conceptualizes her work as part of the scholarly process of ‘recovery’ - that is, of going back into the history of American comics to locate and shed light on the contributions of creators who have too often been marginalized by comics studies. Her project focuses specifically on Black comics creators. Her approach is well established within representation studies for equity-deserving groups, and results in fascinating studies that can totally upend the accepted history of a medium. Methodologically, it is the exact opposite of our work. Hers is a deliberate seeking of neglected works, while we are scooping up everything with a net. It is our hope that with the launch of Phase II, we can establish a supportive infrastructure for scholars like Wanzo to bring that focussed lens onto more subjects, transforming how we understand the comics industry and comic book history.

During the first phase of data collection on creator credits, we did not collect any data on individuals. We may know, as comics scholars and fans, that Carl Barks created many of the best loved Uncle Scrooge stories, or that Frank Doyle and Harry Lucey wrote and drew some of the best Archie stories, but they did so - initially at least - anonymously. When we record whether or not credits are present on a story - and what specific creative and editorial roles are credited over time - we can make observations about the role of authorship in comics generally. Indeed, the WWC corpus includes Barks work from the 1940s and 1950s where he is not credited, but it also includes reprints of Barks work from the 1990s where he is not just credited, but also some where he is celebrated (the Carl Barks Library reprints, for example).

With the new project, and the addition of Dr. Rebecca Sullivan, who specializes in recovery research, we’ll commence with systematically building a middle layer between WWC and Dr. Wanzo’s approach. We will go back through the corpus to record not only what roles were credited on stories, but specifically who was credited. Of course, this raises a whole host of intriguing rabbit holes and even a few Easter eggs. Let’s look at one.

This is the first page of the story we affectionally know as B108S006 - the sixth story of the 108th book in the WWC corpus. This is the sixth story in Wings Comics #36 (Fiction House, 1943).

In our initial coding, this is tagged as having credits (a simple yes/no), and then is tagged as containing an Author credit. By including “By F. E. Lincoln”, Fiction House means to imply that someone named F. E. Lincoln produced this entire work - wrote it, drew it, inked it, lettered it, and so on. While we might presume (correctly) that this was not the case, the story presents itself in a way that is akin to a “By Milton Caniff” or “By Charles Schulz”. This is (deliberately) misleading, but, for our purposes, misleading at least in an interesting way.

In our second round of coding, however, we are now interested in teasing out what information we can get. Who was F. E. Lincoln? I don’t know. The GCD lists ninety stories to someone with that name (mostly from Wings Comics, but not exclusively), and Who’s Who of American Comic Books has no biographical information about this person. It’s likely a pseudonym and may wind up being a dead-end.

But look more closely at this page, to the leaf below the caption at the bottom of the first panel. Here is written “L. Renée”. For our purposes in the first pass at coding this is not a credit. There is no “by”, there is no role affixed. It is an example of an artist signing their work but not being credited for that work, if we are splitting hairs.

As we move forward, however, this is the much more useful piece of information. We know that “L. Renée” was Lily Renée, one of a small number of female artists working in the comic book industry in the early-1940s, and someone who has extensive credits at Fiction House (primarily) on the Jane Martin stories. The GCD has extraordinarily complete information about her comics contributions, and Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons produced a biographical graphic novel about her in 2011. Last week she was also profiled in Newsweek by Jo Ann Toy, in a piece that is well worth reading, and yesterday she was announced as a 2021 inductee into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame.

The story that is told by Robbins and Timmons is a fascinating one, and stems from the same impulse for recovery that drives Dr. Wanzo’s scholarship. The work shines a spotlight on important contributions that might be overlooked. Indeed, were we to have left our own analysis at our first stage of inquiry, we too would have overlooked it, since our coding protocol had no space to negotiate the multiple and often conflicting strategies used to credit comic book stories - anonymity, pseudonymity, deliberate misrepresentation (“Walt Disney presents”), and selective crediting (pencils but not inks…). As we move forward over the next few years, one of our key tasks will be to close these sorts of gaps.