A stakeholder is a member of the social system formed around an object. They are invested in the material definition of that object as that which facilitates the system and the culture it produces. With a social- commercial object like comic books, stakeholders are also invested in the sustained profitability of the object as the system can depend on this. In this
STAKEHOLDERS
CATEGORY: SUMMARY: EXAMPLE:
HIGH
INFLUENCE Can precipitate a large scale of change over a short span of time. They have more power in constructing generic images and the medium image at large.
Publishers and industry professionals.
LOW INFLUENCE Little power to ring change on an individual level. Require longer spans of time or collective action. Respond to narrative, generic, and medium images as interventionists or enthusiasts.
Retailers and average consumers.
INTERLOCUTORY Type of high influence stakeholder who is ephemerally active in the discourse. Characterised by brief or sporadic interruptions that have significant impacts. Originate outside or adjacent to the social system.
Government or parent
companies. A collective of low- influence stakeholder that organise as a movement could also be included under this category.
RECONDITE Type of high influence stakeholder who is not immediately obvious and does not directly precipitate an outcome but whose presence and unseen influence may indirectly condition it.
Independent News could be seen as a recondite stakeholder in the Merry Marvel approach taken by Lee, Kirby, and others. See body of chapter. The market writ large can also be seen to operate in this mode.
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regard, the social system resembles a market from certain vantages. Competing interests can form over the rate at which innovations diffuse across the system. Stakeholders who do not prioritise the financial viability and profitability of the object may be resistant to the adoption of
innovations based on their impact on the culture produced by the object’s material definition. This creates the tension between centralised and de- centralised systems that fuels dialogic consumption and may also speak to how various digital comics forms are adopted. Often, this tension manifests in Jenkins’ top-down, bottom-up flow between producers and consumers; between ‘the bullpen’ and ‘the void’ or what can be predominantly seen as the dialogue between high influence and low influence stakeholders.
High influence stakeholders are most often professionals working directly within the industry. Comics’ high influence stakeholders tend to include its publishers and chief creative officers, group and book editors, writers and artists (whose capital increases with longevity and acclaim), and distributors. However, it should be noted that not all of comics’ high
influence stakeholders work directly in the industry. Indeed, some of its highest influence stakeholders gain power precisely from being outside of the industry (or at least adjacent to it). This is possible due to the trends of media concentration that Jenkins outlines (ibid.). Here Jenkins refers to the structures of horizontal integration in which large multinational
conglomerates consolidate an array of interests in cognate media (film, television, video games, etc) in order to create transmedia economies of scope.8 Warner Media, for example, owns Warner Bros Studios (film),
Cartoon Network (television), DC Comics (comic books), and NetherRealm Studios (video games) to name but a few. It thus owns interests in a number of related media rather than a vertical model which essentially involves monopolising a chain of production (now illegal). It can create economies of scope by diversifying content and properties it already owns into these other related channels. Thus, Warner Media can spin its DC characters and worlds
8 Economies of scope refer to efficiencies and profits made by increased variety. It often
involves diversifying existing properties into cognate markets and cross-selling. It can be contrasted with economies of scale in which efficiencies are made as production increases.
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off into films, cartoons, video games, and the like for increased revenue. This alone confers high influence on Warner Media as DC’s parent company. However, as with the other properties listed above, DC Comics remains its own corporate entity in which Warner Media is minimally involved in the day-to-day running of. Warner Media could thus be seen as a stakeholder who exists at the edge of the social system. These kinds of high influence stakeholders who are adjacent to, on the fringes of, or notionally outside the social system, perhaps best correspond to the
interlocutory or recondite categories. I would suggest that parent companies
or conglomerates like Warner Media and Disney (in the case of Marvel), often function as interlocutory stakeholders who intrude ephemerally in the discourse with a very high degree of influence.9
A prominent example that outlines the interlocutory stakeholder particularly well was psychiatrist and comics critic, Fredric Wertham. Wertham’s polemic Seduction of the Innocent (1954) was an influential text that fanned anxieties around comic books as a root of juvenile delinquency. The book helped to condition the Kefauver Senate Hearings (1954) on comics as part of an ongoing congressional inquiry into the issue. (The subcommittee themselves are also interlocutory stakeholders in this instance). The intrusion of Wertham and the Kefauver Hearings originated from outside the comic book’s social system and was a response to, what I have termed, comics’ medium image. I derive this term from John Ellis’ and Steve Neale’s work on the narrative image (1982; 2000). This term will be unpacked more in the sections below, but in sum it can be considered the general social perception of what comics are as a medium based on an example bias with the bias obviously changing depending on the relationship to the system. (It should be noted that the development and calcification of the medium image will naturally impact upon the ability of digital comics to function recognisably in a comics tradition). At the time of Wertham’s writing, he had formed the view of the medium that it was pernicious; that it was violent and graphic, that it encouraged the disrespect of authority, and that it promoted homosexuality. Wertham was largely 9 Here, I mean ‘interlocutory’ in terms of its Latin roots as to interrupt in speaking.
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drawing on the generic images of horror comic books produced by publishers like EC Comics and taking them as reflective of the medium more broadly.10 As a result of the hearings and the publicity garnered by
Wertham’s book, the comics industry adopted a self-regulatory code and formed the body known as The Comics Code Authority (CCA).
The CCA, as ostensible censor, played a critical role in shaping comics’ conventional-institutional mediality (CIM) during its active years (1954-2011).11 EC Comics, a top publisher of horror titles, was a casualty of
the code with most of its books being cancelled. In an attempt to circumvent the Code, EC editor William Gaines would reprint classic stories in
magazine size, a shift Matthew J. Putz points out had already occurred with
Mad [magazine] (42). The reprints were marketed as ‘picto-fiction’ in a
swerve away from the troubled medium image of comic books, but its impact on flouting the effects of Wertham and the hearings amounted to nothing (ibid.). As Roger Sabin points out, ‘in 1952, before the Code, 630 different comic book titles were published. After the Code, in 1956, there were only 250 titles’ (163). The Code thus radically impacted the CIM of the medium, restricting the forms it could take and limiting the ability of less influential stakeholders to materially define the comics object. The CCA can best be classified as a normal high influence stakeholder rather than an interlocutory one like Wertham. This is because it had an active and continual stake in the medium over a prolonged period. Thus, the defining characteristic of an interlocutory stakeholder is that of brief or sporadic interruption that has an explosive impact on the medium’s CIM and the process of dialogic consumption. Parent companies like Warner Media and Disney straddle this line because their stake is continuous even if their interventions are limited by being tangential to the social system.
10 In addition to his criticism of horror comic books, Frederic Wertham also denounced
superhero comic books.
11 The influence of the Comics Code Authority waned over time. Notably, Marvel Comics
would release an anti-drugs story without CCA approval in 1971. Marvel would ignore the code completely from 2001 onwards. DC and Archie Comics, the last two major publishers still following the code, would abandon it ten years after Marvel, making the CCA
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The sporadic nature of the interlocutory stakeholder also provides a useful reminder that influence is a phenomenon of particular fluctuation. The concept of the comic book creator as high influence stakeholder illustrates this well. Creators are quite literally involved in the material shaping of the comics object. This gives them the ability to affect a
proportionately large scale of change over a short span of time (versus, say, a run-of-the-mill fan). But their position as industry insider does not
immediately confer this ability on them. A creator’s relatively high-level influence is tempered by their capital. Channelling Pierre Bourdieu, Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo have looked at how comics’ symbolic capital is distributed in the formation of a canon. They define symbolic capital as ‘an overall index of social status’ (4). Building on this, it can be proposed that capital consists in recognisable contributions to the material definition of the object which are positively received within the social system. As visible shapers of comics’ material definition, creators are poised to gain influence as they gain capital. A novice creator, for example, might lack capital and visibility within the system. In this instance, the span of time over which they can make large changes goes up, suggesting they are in fact low influence stakeholders. Consider Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman. They were, in layman’s terms, ‘nobodies’ in the realm of publishing. As a consequence, it took Superman seven years from its inception to finally land on the cover of Action Comics #1 (1938). This character, however, would go on to catalyse the birth of the superhero genre, helping to kickstart the comic book and profoundly shaping its medium image through a synonymity that is still resonant to this day. Superman, the archetypal, promethean superhero of the comic book medium, was created by low influence stakeholders.
Contrast the Superman story with the foundation of Image Comics as a publisher in 1992. The formation of Image came about due to a number of high-influence creators becoming disaffected with the work-for-hire practices of major publishers (such as DC and Marvel). This model of corporate authorship meant creators could not own the characters or
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go on to further use in other media. In response, these stakeholders saw fit to use the capital they had accumulated as star creators to carve a space for creator-owned work.12 Magazines like Wizard, which Beaty and Woo
describe as a ‘hype machine’ deeply entrenched in the ‘economic transformation of the field’ (74-5), had conferred status and visibility on these creators, giving them large amounts of capital and influence. Duncan and Smith encapsulate the moment of Image’s formation nicely, referring to it as ‘the flashpoint in the development of the comics star system’ (121). Thus, when Jim Lee, Eric Larson, Rob Liefield, and others broke away to form individual studios under Image, they took 10% of the North American comics’ market with them (‘Newswatch’). It remains a share of the market that Image holds onto, even as the company transitioned away from superhero fare to its current set-up as a destination for ‘alternative’ genres. The capital and visibility of the creator within the social system is thus essential to their ability to exert high degrees of influence. Influence can therefore be seen to fluctuate according to these parameters and comic book creators can be seen to model this particularly well.
The activity of high influence stakeholders in the processes of dialogic consumption, then, can be marked by strategies for the
manifestation of capital. The stories of Superman and Image Comics gesture to two primary strategies for this capital-building: genre legitimation (as Superman catalysed) and auteurist star personas (as Image highlighted). In outlining these strategies, I will offer the example of Marvel Comics’
development during the 1960s (to which the Stan Lee quote at the beginning of this section refers). In particular, I will offer the example of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as stakeholders who achieved high levels of influence by
manifesting capital through auteurist practices and the reorientation of the superhero genre. Comics historian Peter Sanderson analogises that Lee’s and Kirby’s revitalisation (and in a sense, launch) of Marvel Comics was the comic book equivalent of French cinema’s Nouvelle Vague. Marvel,
Sanderson says, ‘were pioneering new methods of comics storytelling and 12 The departure of a number of Image founders from Marvel was nicknamed the ‘X-odus’
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characterization, addressing more serious themes, and in the process keeping and attracting more readers in their teens and beyond’ (‘Comics in Context’). These innovations were made in terms of genre and the auteurism of Lee and Kirby as creators. The launch of The Fantastic Four #1, based in part on Kirby’s earlier DC title Challengers of the Unknown, exhibited many of the auteur traits that would inflect not only Marvel Comics but the superhero genre at large and the broad CIM of the medium.
Auteurism is a concept that has received much scholarship in film studies, where it is primarily associated with criticism magazine Cahiers du
Cinéma and the politique des auteurs that went hand in hand with the
French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) of the 1950s (Sanderson’s analogy gains an extra layer here). American film critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael also debated a version of auteur theory in a tête-a-tête through their respective magazines in the 1960s. Across all of this, the central governing tenet of auterism persisted as the discernible personal style of a director (creator in our case) over and above sheer technical competence and industrial constraints. Lee and Kirby had personal style in spades. In the case of Kirby’s style, artist Gil Kane described Kirby’s auteurist struggle well in an anecdote about Kirby bringing Challengers of the Unknown to DC after Mainline (Kirby’s venture with Joe Simon) became defunct.13
Kane remarked of the DC production department, ‘they kept demanding Jack strip his work of all the sharp edges and stylistic inventions that gave it its power and energy. Everything that was special about his art prompted the comment, ‘That’s not how we do it here’’ (qtd. in Evanier 103). Challengers
of the Unknown was a modest success for DC, becoming an ongoing bi-
monthly (ibid.). However, when Kirby took the underlying framework of
Challengers to The Fantastic Four without the impositions of DC’s house
style mandates, he and Lee created something that gave them a high level of influence in the reorientation of the superhero genre and the medium image of comics in North America at large. With The Fantastic Four and what would follow, Kirby, as Neil Gaiman summates, would create ‘part of the 13 More precisely, Jack Kirby brought the groundwork of what would eventually become Challengers of the Unknown to DC after the collapse of Mainline.
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language of comics and much of the language of superhero comics’ (Evanier 12).
Lee, for his part, was the key player in building the brand of Marvel as a fan-orientated, interactive community. He did this with an immediately discernible style of bombastic ekphrasis and direct authorial address to the reader. Marvel Comics at this time, particularly Lee, understood comics were not just a commercial object but a social object too. In particular, the era of ‘Merry Marvel’ can be seen as a point at which an understanding developed in relation to consumers as stakeholders responding to the medium image of comics which high influence stakeholders like Lee had
Figure 2. (Lee, Stan and Jack Kirby. The Fantastic Four
#1. New York: Marvel Comics, 1961). The Fantastic Four were initially heroes without costumes. The comic was as much a family melodrama as it was about superheroism. Even the cover flouts convention with most of the
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the power to shape. The medium image, drawn from John Ellis’ and Steve Neale’s work on the narrative image and intertextual relay, suggests that the aggregate processes by which the narrative images of comic book texts are constructed and disseminated across an intertextual relay have a reciprocal macro effect in delineating an image of the medium at large through an example bias. Ellis describes narrative images in relation to film as the ‘industry’s anticipatory reply to the question ‘What is the film like?’ (30). For film, Ellis specifies, the narrative image is its ‘circulation outside its performance in cinemas’ (31). Neale describes this circulation in terms of an ‘intertextual relay’ – a term borrowed from Gregory Lukow and Steven Ricci (Neale 160). Neale goes on to outline that the relay, in combination with the texts themselves, ‘helps to define and circulate […] what one might call ‘generic images,’ providing sets of labels, terms, and expectations that will come to characterize the genre as a whole’ (ibid.). The medium image essentially mirrors this but at an additional level out. The medium image is, therefore, the social understanding of what can be expected of a given medium. These expectations reflect the material status of the medium which stakeholders can respond to strategically. Additionally, the availability of certain generic images within the relay can become calcified in the medium image through an example bias – text and the speech balloon, for example, are explored in this regard in Chapter Three. This form of example bias is outlined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as the ‘availability heuristic’ (207).
In The Fantastic Four #1, Lee and Kirby primed Marvel as a force that would set changes in motion for both the generic image of comic book superheroes and for the medium image of the comics object in North America. The processes by which Lee and Kirby precipitated what Duncan and Smith refer to as the ‘Marvel Mania’ of the 1960s, poignantly illustrates how various levels of stakeholders act through dialogic consumption (179). However, to fully grasp this illustration one must go back to just before The
Fantastic Four hit the stands. Doing this reveals a recondite stakeholder in
Lee’s and Kirby’s reconfiguration of the comic book superhero’s generic image. Recondite stakeholders are those whose influence is not immediately
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obvious. Their interventions may be indirect and function by precipitating the actions of another high influence stakeholder, as is the case here. In 1957, Atlas Comics (a precursor of Marvel) lost its distribution deal.14 As a
result, it was forced to seek an accord with Independent News to distribute its books. Independent News, so as not to undercut its own interests in National (DC, Marvel’s main competitor), placed an upper limit of eight monthly titles on Marvel, and thus Marvel’s output dropped precipitously.