Introduction

The 1970s were turbulent years for US comics, though by the end of the decade the institutional conditions were set to allow a few mainstream publishers to survive by re-centring the industry on older fans. Restructuring was triggered by a new system of distribution that began in 1973 and leapt forward in importance in 1979: the direct market. The direct market encouraged independent comics companies into existence, many of which produced material along the lines of the Big Two, augmented by an adults-only tone and greater creative autonomy. Positioned between popular mainstream genres and the underground’s unrestrained play, at first these were called ‘ground-level’ comics. The profitability of soliciting older readers was underscored by the success of the magazine Heavy Metal (1977–present), an anthology of fantasy and SF comics based on Franco-Belgian material.

The numbers of new underground comix plummeted from 1973 onwards, though a handful of companies remained active, and despite low sales figures the comix were at their most diverse in the late 1970s in terms of creators and genres. Forced by straitened economic and political circumstances to make new kinds of product, many underground publishers tried book editions, some of which contained long, finite narratives and were labelled ‘graphic novels’.

The Direct Market Begins

The direct market spurred the publication of texts that assumed a different kind of consumer compared to the younger audience buying comics from newsstand venders. This new consumer was the comics fan: typically male, late teens or older, and willing and able to spend large sums of money on comics and related products. These products included books containing long comics narratives, leading Charles Hatfield to assert that the graphic novel ‘owes its life to the direct market’s specialized conditions’.

In the middle of the twentieth century, mainstream comics were distributed by national magazine distributors via the sale-or-return system. This meant that comics arrived at newsstands and drug-stores in mixed bundles; retailers had no control over the titles they received. If any comics went unsold, then retailers and distributors could return them to the publisher for credit. Over time, comics publishers gave up physically taking back unsold copies: the transportation costs didn’t seem worth it. By the end of the 1960s, the sale-or-return system operated by distributors simply declaring how many copies had been sold, with publishers taking them at their word.