Written by Rithika T
Sitting in front of your laptop for one more of those online lectures, you can’t begin to understand what the teacher is saying on this particularly boring afternoon. But you know you can’t let yourself fall asleep, because that will be the start of a vicious pattern that will end with you regretting this day while cramming for endsems. So you lift your pen to attempt to take notes and two hours later your page is filled with talking rats, flying grandmas, and dinosaur-mermaid hybrids.
Starting with some doodles, speech bubbles, and adding along with some superpowered characters a comic book is born. Stories are powerful and some can change how we see the world, but there is a special magic that happens when you tell a story with pictures. It can make you laugh, cry, make your heart beat faster and on top of that, it reflects all of these emotions precisely on the page. This is what makes a comic book exhilarating and inspiring.
Comic Book: Origin
In the 90s, the Golden Age of comics, the superheroes were straight-laced do-gooders who fought and defeated corrupt villains. They were just a means of distraction from the worsening war-ridden reality at the time and a source of simple entertainment.
This evolved into the Silver Age where mature and gritty themes became the new popular thing when the idea of invincible heroes became outdated. Afterlife with Archie is the zombie apocalyptic take on the standard Archie comics where Archie and his friends tackle dark magic, gore, and zombie brutality. (Netflix’s Riverdale please put your hand down)
In the Bronze Age, the artwork evolved further and instead of surrealism and grisly art, the urban lifestyle was given the spotlight. To allow the readers an emotional connection with the characters the alter-egos of the superheroes was explored more. This was the age with the shocking murder of Spiderman’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy at the hands of the Green Goblin and Iron Man’s coming to terms with his alcoholism.
Following this came the Dark Age(Modern Age) and this is when comic books really came into their own. The stories got grittier and bolder, and the art was becoming darker and more stylized. In contrast to heroes with purer-than-gold moral standings, neurotic and tormented anti-heroes took the center stage.
Real Heroes
I think even a non-comic enthusiast might know about Batman’s origin and his parents’ repeatedly telecasted murder, or about Snoopy the dog in ‘Peanuts’, but what do we know about Pencilers, Inkers, Colorists, Flatters and Letterers?
No, I didn’t just make these words up. These are real jobs of real people in the comic book industry. Most of the time a hero’s life in a comic book begins with a small plot detail — like receiving a mysterious parcel or meeting a really old bearded man on a rainy day. Then on their journey, they find powerful and smart friends or allies, and battle villains while striving to reach their goal. For a comic book writer or artist, the starting push is some vague idea and a rough sketch.
Have you ever drawn something slightly good while just lazily doodling and now suddenly inspired, stayed up all night thinking up a story and dialogues and your future very own super-awesome-looking artist studio? This actually does come true for some and these are the people that make stories come to life.
The penciller lays down the base art and illustrates the full comic in pencil, the inker takes the rough pencils provided and produces the final lineart of the comic, the colorist adds colors in a way that it doesn’t compete with the lineart but enhance or compliment it, and the letterer draws the dialogue boxes and places all the text. And then we have editors, printers, and distributors to completely finish making the comic book. Just like the Shazam Family consisting of the superpowered alter egos of Billy Batson and his foster siblings, these unusual heroes work together to make one breathtaking story that can defeat evil and save the world.
It might look like a dream job but being a comic writer or artist is not a job that rakes in the money and it won’t guarantee a television series adaptation. Comic book workers in reality are woefully underpaid, underappreciated, and overworked. But despite all the financial instability and long hours, it is a job that most people cannot give up easily. If there is a reason to keep doing this it would be because there are still people who flip through their favorite comic book every night before sleeping just to admire the feel of the pages.
Cultural significance
Is it really possible for a few pages of dizzying multicolor drawings and frivolous characters to make a difference in someone’s life?
In 2012, Marvel created a new character called ‘Blue Ear’ who wore futuristic hearing aids and made superhero-level sound technology. All superheroes are made to inspire and are special in some way, but this hero was particularly so to one 4-year-old kid Antony Smith, who was deaf in his left ear. Antony’s mother wrote an email to the people at Marvel about her son refusing to wear his hearing aid because he thought it was uncool and weird. The result of this was the next issue titled ‘Iron Man: Sound Effects’ which also came with a warning message about loud noises and earplugs.
In the same year 2012, artist and filmmaker, Ram Devineni of India created the story “Priya’s Shakti” after the events of a 23-year-old sexually assaulted and killed in Delhi. The protagonist Priya is a superhero who rides on the back of a flying tiger, a rape survivor who gets blessed by the Goddess and gains the power of persuasion and is able to motivate people to change.
Before 1989 the Comics Code of Authority existed prominently in the USA and it reinforced the idea that comics were juvenile literature. Even the use of words such as ‘horror’ or ‘terror’ in the titles was not allowed until 1971. But a Spider-Man story arc about drug abuse was the first one to trigger a review of the code and eventually now the Seal of Approval doesn’t exist anymore. Since then the representation of queer characters has also progressively increased. Iceman, one of Marvel’s oldest characters and an X-men member came out as gay in 2015’s ‘All-New X-Men’, and other well-known characters such as Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman have been confirmed to be queer.
Future of Comics
There is a science and structure to comic writing, a reason why each character is sketched in a certain way, and the creative usage of even the whitespace on a page and making it connect with the story. Reading becomes almost the same as experiencing and it makes the story exciting and emotionally compelling. But despite all this, comic books are generally considered as silly leisure reading and they are shadowed by the beliefs that they are “not serious” or filled with graphic violence. When someone describes a movie or a show as being “comic book-ish” it usually means childish and frivolous. Recognizing the beauty and nuances behind comic books is definitely overdue.
In the current age, a comic doesn’t stop at paper publications but a hit comic makes way for a hit movie, and a hit video game, then a toys and merchandise line. The popularity of superheroes keeps rising, and so many old ideas and characters are taken apart and then reconstructed and made to appeal to a whole new audience. Comics now have the power to influence people all over the world just as much as any other medium.
“The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.” ― Stan Lee
It would be easy to dismiss them as ‘childish books’ and reduce them to ‘big colorful pictures and dumb words’, but doing so would be ignoring the tremendous impact it could have on the world. Comic Books are an innovative medium with ever-changing structures, design, and plotlines and as long as they continue telling terrific stories with great characters they will live on and keep inspiring people like me all over the world.
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