From Mass to Niche

We’re happy to report that we have a new article out today, “From Mass Medium to Niche Medium: Advertising in American Comic Books, 1934-2014”. This piece appears in a special issue of Comicalités edited by Jean-Paul Gabilliet and Nicolas Labarre, and it collects several articles from the conference on Bédéphilie that was held in Angoulême in June 2019 (in one of the most severe heatwaves France had ever seen - it was almost impossible to set foot outside the museum in the noon day sun!)

This contribution has been a long time coming. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about paratexts in the WWC corpus because they were the easiest thing to count, and, thus, the first thing we counted. Some initial thoughts on the topic were presented at the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics conference at the University of British Columbia in 2019, then refined for Angoulême, and then refined again for the essay that you can find here (on the journal site) or here (on ours).

This essay really sprung from the ad pages like the one I’ve included up top. Working through a count of all of the ads in the earliest comics in our corpus was pretty straightforward as there were generally only four or five per issue, but the rise of these Yellow Pages-style collections of mini-ads in the 1970s (primarily in comics from Marvel and DC) really threw our calculations for a loop - suddenly we had books with dozens and dozens ads that had to be recorded. And, of course, not very costly ads either. What did we make of this shift? Well, we lay all that out in the article.

There are a couple of additional things we’d love to write about when it comes to advertising in comic books. We’ve moved on from a simple count of the number and kind of ads to an analysis of the content - are the ads themselves comics? Do they contain comics intellectual property? We are curious to see if graphing that type of data undermines or reinforces our observations about the sheer number of ads in comic books over time.

One other area that I’m particularly eager to explore is the presence of ads for comic book dealers in comics - the image above has three of them. The development of the direct market that Dan Gearino talks about in his book figures prominently in our current article, but I would like to come back to the way figures like Robert Bell (advertising near the top left here) shaped the field by the advertising of comics in comics.

That’s for later. Until then, Gearino has some interesting things to say about Robert Bell on his blog and you can dive down a rabbit hole of looking at Bell’s old price guides on sites like the CGC messsage boards (below is one from 1977, the same year as this ad, which is taken from Brave and the Bold #132, or, as we like to call it, Comic Book #1424).