Full Description
What makes a successful comics creator? How can storytelling stay exciting and innovative? How can genres be kept vital?
Writers and artists in the highly competitive U.S. comics mainstream have always had to explore these questions but they were especially pressing in the 1980s. As comics readers grew older they started calling for more sophisticated stories. They were also no longer just following the adventures of popular characters--writers and artists with distinctive styles were in demand. DC Comics and Marvel went looking for such mavericks and found them in the United Kingdom. Creators like Alan Moore (Watchmen, Saga of the Swamp Thing), Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo) and Garth Ennis (Preacher) migrated from the anarchical British comics industry to the U.S. mainstream and shook up the status quo yet came to rely on the genius of the American system.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on References viii
Introduction: How to Read This Book
1. U.S. Mainstream Comics of the 1970s and 1980s:
Defining the Mode of Practice
2. The British New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s
3. Alan Moore and the American Mode of Practice
4. "What is there for me to do?" Case Studies in the
Second Wave of the British Invasion
Conclusions: Imagined Readers and the Strange
Afterlives of the British Invasion
Appendix: Interpretation of the Questionnaire
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index
