How have comics changed?
Back in the thirties when comics started they were mostly done by teenagers, drunkards and moonlighters. I’m serious. Eisner, Kubert, Kirby and Lee all GREW UP in comics. Nobody cared much until the late sixties what went on in the books. In the fifties the ssmall publishers were killed by a book called Seduction of the Innocents by a nutcase named Frederick Wertham. My parents read it and I had a hard time reading any comic book till I grew up and left home in the seventies. From the seventies onward editing has become more and more tightly controlled, and the work is more carefully marketed. This means, for example, the bizarre things that Lee and Kirby did in Thor where they borrowed from old movies like Thief of Baghdad whether it was appropriate or not (and they were geniuses so even patterning Loki after the traditional portraits of the poet Dante Allighieri was appropriate) are NOT encouraged and you can almost say the grown up books we have today are not as creative because the
