Home > Letters to CR

Shaenon Garrity on the ‘70s—Not a Great Decade, the Greatest Decade
posted March 23, 2007
 

I've long argued that the 1970s was actually the greatest decade of comics (although the current decade might end up kicking its ass). Consider:

-- The final, most sophisticated phase of underground comics, featuring the Air Pirates and the mature Robert Crumb, and setting the stage for "Raw."

-- The rise of self-published and small-press comics, dominated by weird, offbeat work until the 1980s self-publishing boom and glut. The launch of Fantagraphics and Last Gasp.

-- Prototypical efforts at graphic novels, with the decade ending with the publication of "A Contract with God."

-- Awesome cartoons in the National Lampoon (there's a Gahan Wilson "Nuts" strip about Christmas morning that Andrew believes is one of the greatest short stories ever written).

-- Jack Kirby snaps his tether and stampedes, kicking up one acid trip of a comic after another as editors quake in terror. Kamandi fights giant screaming man-bats.

-- Best decade of Peanuts strips.

-- The debuts of "Doonesbury" and "For Better or for Worse," now arguably the last great newspaper strips.

-- Damn good decade for political cartooning, for all the obvious reasons.

-- FANTASTIC decade for manga, including the rise of the gekiga (literary comics) movement, a lot of interesting countercultural comics reflecting the youth movement in Japan at the time, tons of insane kiddie action comics, and, most crucially, a flood of gifted young female creators into the field of shojo manga. At this point in history, the manga industry was big enough to attract top-notch work, but not yet big enough to squelch original, iconoclastic voices. And it doesn't get better than 1970s shojo manga.

-- They probably painted some nice naked chicks screwing robots over in France.

-- Chick Tracts.

On the flip side, it was indeed the second-worst decade of superhero comics, after the '90s. Pretty much everything about superhero comics that sucks--the emphasis on established properties over original creations, the endlessly meandering and ever-more-impenetrable soap-opera plots, fan/creators who grew up reading nothing but comic books and have no interest in anything else, hamfisted efforts at "serious" and "socially relevant" material, humorless hyper-realistic art, terminal nostalgia--started in the '70s. Way to ruin a good time, '70s!