Byron Cary Preiss (1953–2005) was one of the most controversial figures in US comics in the second half of the 1970s. His company, Byron Preiss Visual Publications (BPVP), produced nine comics-related books between 1976 and 1979, published and distributed via the book trade and marketed (and priced) for adult readers. Most of these were advertised as “graphic novels.”Footnote 1 The narratives in BPVP's books juxtaposed verbal and visual material in differing ratios depending on the particular text, but several contained long comics narratives written and drawn by established comics creators. BPVP claimed to be bidding to win cultural legitimacy for the comics form, a theme scholars have examined and advanced themselves over the last thirty years,Footnote 2 but in the 1970s Preiss was pilloried as a self-important arriviste. His books jettisoned various comics conventions (e.g. speech balloons) and he was criticized for betraying the very medium he professed to uplift; in 1978 one reader called him the “greatest enemy” that comics faced.Footnote 3 Despite committing himself to creators’ rights, Preiss insisted on formal restraints and on intrusively editing his books, something that rankled fans and professionals alike. BPVP was well known in the 1970s comics world – as with Marvel and DC, comics fanzine Comic Reader dedicated a column to the company's latest releases – but Preiss's publications have received scant attention from academics and, indeed, anyone else.Footnote 4
Despite being virtually invisible in existing scholarship, there are good reasons to look again at BPVP's working practices and reception, since the strange case of Byron Preiss underlines how complex and contested the attempt to turn comics into graphic novels was during the 1970s. The protests against Preiss contradict the dominant narrative in comics historiography, where the relative legitimacy, visibility, and broad readership of comics in the twenty-first century can be attributed to the increased publication of comics in soft- and hardcover formats, what comics scholar Jan Baetens calls the graphic novel's “bookishness.”Footnote 5 Trade publishing brings comics narratives closer to the material dimensions of literary classics, at least as those classics have been physically reprinted for most of the twentieth century (i.e. in book form):
It became the conventional wisdom [in the late 1990s] that the physical format of graphic novels enabled comics to reach a wider range of readers. The familiarity of the “book” format seemed to make comics a more comfortable purchase, or more respectable reading material. The graphic novel format also generally meant that readers could be assured that they were buying an experience that had a beginning, middle, and end …Footnote 6
In conjunction with this ideology of completeness, the single-book format facilitated the study of comics in schools, colleges, and universities, as well as reviews in broadsheet newspapers and literary journals.Footnote 7
I would not reject this narrative entirely, but it is inadequate in its current incarnation and the reception of BPVP underlines that the transformation of comics into graphic novels was a fraught and contested process. Comics scholars have constructed the 1960s and 1970s as a period when stakeholders in the comics industry imported various mechanisms (canon formation, the identification of auteurs) from other cultural forms into comics in order to cultivate the sensibility that their preferred medium was a valuable art form; in Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (2009) the comics scholar Paul Lopes argues that this sensibility was then exported out to US culture more generally.Footnote 8 The hostile response to Byron Preiss's graphic novels indicates there was no concerted, uniform will amongst fans, creators, and publishers to change the status of comics in American society. Attempts to do so were greeted with the suspicion that something integral to comics was being abandoned by BPVP's efforts to elevate the medium through book publication.
The 1970s fans whose responses are recorded in this article prefigure the argument made in Christopher Pizzino's Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (2016). Pizzino questions the historical narrative that the respect accorded to comics by creators and fans was gradually taken up by US culture at large; he warns, “this model can ignore the degree to which ‘internal’ legitimation of a medium actually means applying external standards that have been used to devalue it.”Footnote 9 This was the substance of many of Preiss's critics: BPVP's books were trying to deracinate themselves from the implication that they might be comics. They were right, since Preiss and some of his collaborators (specifically James Steranko) acknowledged that they didn't want their graphic novels to use certain formal conventions indelibly associated with comics, such as handwritten lettering, speech balloons, or panel layouts. In order to convince publishing houses to put out graphic novels, Preiss sacrificed the most visible markers of their comic-ness, earning the ire of fans and creators, who complained that the texts he edited weren't comics at all.
In Arresting Development Pizzino critiques the journalistic and scholarly claims that US comics have “grown up” or “come of age,” maturing “from a despised medium … to a respectable kind of reading.” Pizzino calls this comics’ Bildungsroman discourse, personifying the medium as a human being progressing through childhood and troubled adolescence to an adulthood where social status is secured in the world. In other words, comics recapitulate ontogeny, a teleological narrative culminating in “an earned measure of cultural legitimacy.” Pizzino rejects this metaphor for rendering the history of comics as inevitably and organically developing across the decades, obscuring comics’ societal besiegement during the twentieth century (burnings and allegations of stoking delinquency) and ignoring the ongoing devaluation of this cultural form.Footnote 10
Pizzino extrapolates broader claims from the status anxiety of American comics culture, contending that a quality of autoclasm or self-shattering is immanent in comics’ very form. This claim seems somewhat indiscriminate given the sheer variety of contexts in which comics are and have been made, but it seems fair to identify this autoclastic tension in specific texts. As we will see when we consider the production history of Empire (1978), a text written by SF luminary Samuel R. Delany, illustrated by Howard Chaykin, and edited by Preiss, it was indeed possible for a graphic novel to be the site of clashes over what was disreputable or undesirable in a comic, embodied in the scarred version of Empire published to the dismay of the writer and the artist. Pizzino puts graphic novels at the heart of Bildungsroman discourse, arguing that journalistic accounts constructing these privileged texts as exceptional outliers confirm the prejudice that comics as a whole are “naturally inferior and immature.” The “legitimacy the graphic novel possesses,” Pizzino elaborates, “is conflicted and unstable.”Footnote 11 This article extends Pizzino's insights into an older period of graphic-novel production (Arresting Development’s case studies are drawn from the 1980s and after) and shows that the tensions he sees immanent to the form of comics were the subject of vivid debates in the 1970s comics world too.
Elsewhere I refer to this transformation of comics into graphic novels as the novelization of comics.Footnote 12 I am attracted to this formulation because it underlines that the emergence of graphic novels was not a one-off event but a bundle of interconnected processes driven – and resisted – by actors wielding divergent forms of institutional power and positioned at every stage of the communications circuit.Footnote 13 The novelization of comics was propelled by the people who wrote and drew graphic novels, but also by editors who prepared pages for production, technicians who printed them, and publishing houses investing capital in the hope of commercial success. Consumers and readers were also crucial for paying money that might underwrite future books and for acclaiming long comics narratives as novels. Although these consumers and readers wielded less power individually than the creative workers who brought graphic novels to market, there can be no question of their importance in influencing which comics got published. Especially relevant for this project, fans were crucial in determining which books of comics labelled “graphic novels” were accepted as such.Footnote 14
The cohort of readers who self-identify as comics fans (collectively referred to as “fandom”) occupy a unique position in the comics world. Fans are consumers whose heightened affective investment in the comics form is marked by collecting comics, attending conventions, writing to creators and editors, setting up and joining fan clubs, and contributing to “fanzines” (fan magazines). Underpinning these acts is the desire to share an appreciation of comics and affirm their deserved status as objects of passion. From the point of view of the comics industry in the 1970s, fans were a minority of consumers, but their importance was significant and growing. Fans represented a potential source of labour, and it was common for them to become workers in the industry.Footnote 15 Fans were also content providers, offering suggestions for future stories.Footnote 16 Most importantly, fans were key consumers, and their will-to-completism made them relatively dependable purchasers of every issue in an ongoing series (or a new title featuring a favoured character or by a feted creator).Footnote 17
In the 1970s a distribution system emerged that saw comics sold through specialist shops, venues frequented almost exclusively by fans of comics and related media. The growth of this “direct market” underscored what many stakeholders in the North American comics world already knew, that fans would spend more money on comics than the average purchaser (fans were older and hence had more disposable income). This made them a lucrative group for comics companies to target, especially given the industry's “shrinking” overall sales; the symbolic nadir of this period was the “DC implosion” of 1978 that saw DC Comics cancel 40 percent of its titles and announce layoffs of its creative staff. Historian Bradford W. Wright notes that as “comic books lost much of their mass audience, they increasingly became the preserve of a fan subculture.”Footnote 18 Publishers eavesdropped on conversations between fans and responded accordingly, even if a few professionals dismissed the fans’ importance to the industry as a whole.Footnote 19 The fractiousness of such exchanges was partly a result of the intense intimacy between the makers of comics and their consumers: fandom had always created opportunities for these two groups to interact and in the 1970s new fanzines (Buyer's Guide for Comic Fandom, Comics Journal) and events (the San Diego Comic-Con) commanded the attention of greater numbers of fans than ever before.Footnote 20 Where the comics world was concerned, fandom was not a marginalized, esoteric irrelevance but a deep repository of critique and collective memory – which is not to say that dialogue between fans was always constructive, measured, and relevant, as Byron Preiss learnt to his cost.
Preiss had the power and opportunity to act as a “producer” of graphic novels because of the full flowering of “blockbuster” practices in the book trade. In the 1970s cross-media licensing became an industry norm and a new breed of literary agent wielded sizable creative and legal power. So what was blockbuster publishing and how did it arise?
BLOCKBUSTER PUBLISHING AND BOOK PACKAGERS
Starting in 1960 the US book trade entered a period of mergers and acquisitions as presses were bought up “by huge conglomerates involved in activities other than publishing.”Footnote 21 Thomas Whiteside's The Blockbuster Complex (1981) provides a useful contemporary perspective, albeit one fixed on the conglomeration of the book trade to the exclusion of older, surviving publishing models. Whiteside notes that once multinationals invested unprecedented sums of money they expected more “financially rational structures” and “long-range financial-planning programs.”Footnote 22 By the 1970s, conglomerated publishing houses wanted to maximize profit at the moment of a book's release, a state of affairs forced by the severe decline of independent bookstores and the rapid growth of chains such as B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. These chains sold their stock quickly and at high volume, taking advantage of computerized sales and inventory tracking so that information on titles selling well in one region was swiftly communicated to stores nationwide.Footnote 23 Mediocre sellers were quickly removed to create space for faster-selling stock. New books were typically “dead in days or weeks.” Publishers saturated the market with new titles in the hope that the next “big book” (with sales in the region of 300,000 copies) would outweigh the average performance of new titles (1,200 copies a year).Footnote 24 The release of a new book was turned into a media event via advertising and placing authors on talk shows.Footnote 25 New titles were meant to be as attention-grabbing as possible and the chain stores attracted a wider range of customers than the smaller independent bookstores: in this climate, the mass appeal and novelty value of book-format comics made them a tantalizing prospect for publishers, and East Coast trade presses ventured into the market with various titles, including Burne Hogarth's Tarzan of the Apes (1972) and Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1976), Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's The Silver Surfer (1978), and Jules Feiffer's Tantrum (1979).
Another key transformation in North American publishing was the rise of softcover houses. The established presses earned relatively little income from hardback books; they made much more money selling the reprint rights for popular hardcovers to softcover publishers.Footnote 26 To circumvent these high licensing fees, paperback houses moved further into original book publication.Footnote 27 Gil Kane's 121-page Blackmark, published by Bantam Books in 1971, represents an early example of how original graphic novels were attractive to softcover publishers; in 1979 Bantam published Byron Preiss's heavily illustrated fantasy novel Dragonworld.Footnote 28 Nonetheless, most book-format comics published by paperback houses were reprint editions, such as the two volumes of Green Lantern Co-starring Green Arrow written by Denny O'Neil with art by Neal Adams.Footnote 29 The first was published in January 1972 and the second in June the same year, both from the Paperback Library and stating they contained “two complete novels” on their covers.Footnote 30 The Green Lantern Co-starring Green Arrow comic was at the leading edge of the “relevancy” movement that saw mainstream superhero comics grappling with social issues such as racism, drugs, poverty, and labour unrest, a trend reported in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.Footnote 31 The Green Lantern paperbacks were conceived by Preiss and aimed at “the college market,”Footnote 32 as confirmed by DC editor Carmine Infantino in 1970:
A paperback house is going to do up the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series, the whole series. They feel that strongly about what [O'Neil] has done here. They're going to take it and develop it for colleges. Berkeley has asked us for twenty thousand copies of the first print on this thing. Unfortunately our plates were finished and we couldn't give them to them. There's been a big demand for these books.Footnote 33
Reality proved somewhat different: Preiss conceded that “they did not sell very well.”Footnote 34
Publishing house Simon and Schuster was at the leading edge of conglomeration; in 1975 it was bought by Gulf & Western, a corporation with interests in mining, automobile parts, and filmmaking. It was run by Richard Snyder, a proselytizer for blockbuster publishing trends who lauded the chain stores for making the book trade less aloof and elitist.Footnote 35 Under their young-adult imprint Fireside, Simon and Schuster brought out a line of books reprinting Marvel comics; between 1974 and 1979 eleven of these “Origins books” were published, so-called because the first volume was Origins of Marvel Comics.Footnote 36 In 1978 Preiss expressed his gratitude that the Origins books netted sales of 90,000 copies because this compelled major publishers to “acknowledge that there is an audience for comics in book form.”Footnote 37 Publishers could make huge sums selling the movie rights for their titles, in terms of both licensing fees and extra sales from added publicity, and Snyder boasted that Simon and Schuster generated “the software of the television and movie media.” Many publishing houses established offices in California to get “in on the ground floor of movie tie-ins,” such as the West Coast imprint Simon and Schuster Productions.Footnote 38 Fireside's publication of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original graphic novel The Silver Surfer in 1978 may well be attributable to the search for synergy with the film industry. Rumours of a Silver Surfer film went back to 1972,Footnote 39 and in 1979 it actually seemed to be happening:
Stan has finally put together a deal to make a feature film of THE SILVER SURFER. Lee Kramer of L-K Productions, in a 50–50 partnership with Marvel Comics Group, has managed to find half the backing for the film's proposed $25,000,000 among British financiers and expects no trouble in finding the rest. Stan has written the first draft of the film … The film should begin production next year …Footnote 40
The film was reportedly an adaptation of the Silver Surfer graphic novel.Footnote 41 Given the book's length and self-contained narrative, it is reasonable to think that the writer and Simon and Schuster had this endpoint in mind during its gestation. The book certainly fitted the blockbuster logic of publishing media-savvy authors, since Lee was “an increasingly regular sight on television talk shows and in newspapers.”Footnote 42 The Silver Surfer motion picture never materialized but Snyder's enthusiasm for comics-based Hollywood tie-ins was undiminished: Ridley Scott's film Alien (1979) and Steven Spielberg's madcap comedy 1941 (1979) were adapted into book-format comics either published or distributed by Simon and Schuster.Footnote 43
The conglomeration of the book trade did not lead to the establishment of internally borderless corporate empires where intellectual properties passed seamlessly from publishers to film studios owned by the same multinational. This is partially due to the creative control wielded by a new kind of agent moving into the book trade from the film industry and/or legal practice. These agents ensured they got the best possible deals across corporations, not within them. Further, with in-house editors spending decreasing amounts of time actually editing books, agents came to exercise unprecedented creative authority. These agents, known as “book packagers,” would generate ideas for authors and bring writers, studios, and fashionable subjects into conversation. Packagers could have a book's licensing rights finalized before the first draft was finished – in some cases, before writing had begun.Footnote 44 The term was another migrant from Hollywood cinema, where, in the 1960s, executive producers orchestrating similar contractual complexes were described as “packaging a deal.”Footnote 45 This was the role played by Byron Preiss, styled as a “graphic story producer”Footnote 46 or “visual producer,”Footnote 47 akin to “the producer of motion pictures.”Footnote 48
“THE ADVENT OF THE PRODUCER IN THE FIELD OF GRAPHIC-STORYTELLING”
Byron Preiss, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford Graduate School of Communication, had been an intern at DC when he proposed the paperback edition of Green Lantern Co-starring Green Arrow.Footnote 49 DC had made Preiss “director of … a comics education program” called Edugraphics and he collaborated with creator James Steranko on a comic about drug addiction published in tabloid form and distributed to children in Philadelphia.Footnote 50 Preiss briefly wrote comics for other publishers; in the mid-1970s National Lampoon serialized his comic strip One Year Affair, a fifty-two-episode musing on modern dating etiquette. The strip, drawn by Ralph Reese, mined incongruous material (including alcoholism and miscarriage) to deliver a gag at the end of every instalment.Footnote 51 One Year Affair began in 1973 and by the time the strips were collected as a small landscape book in September 1976 Preiss had written two titles in BPVP's Fiction Illustrated series. The biography at the back of the One Year Affair book asserts that Preiss's “adult graphic novels … had been acclaimed as an important step forward for the comics medium,” rather ignoring the internecine battles that Fiction Illustrated triggered within the comics world.Footnote 52
BPVP brought comics creators together to deliver books to publishing houses as finished packages. Preiss sometimes wrote these books himself, or he paired up writers and artists, or he bought the rights to creative properties that other creators developed under his editorial control.Footnote 53 Preiss operated as a book packager and not a self-publisher on the basis that if you only published a few books at a time, the resources invested were not likely to recoup adequate profit; he pursued multiple projects simultaneously, which, as we will see, stretched the time he was able to devote to each book. Preiss had reputational reasons for working with established publishing houses too:
To say that Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has published comics is a step forward for the medium, because that is saying that a major publishing house will commit themselves to doing comics. But to publish myself would mean, well, here's this guy who loves comics just like all the other guys who love comics …Footnote 54
A letter to the Comics Journal fanzine latched onto BPVP as a pioneering model for comics “aimed at the adult market.” Fan Tony Robertson admired how BPVP joined creative talents together and agreed profit-sharing deals with publishers, calling Preiss “the first producer … in graphic stories”Footnote 55 (the latter phrase a common synonym for comics in the period). Preiss would have approved of the analogy, aspiring as he did for comics to operate on the same level as films and books, a sentiment he shared at the 1977 San Diego Comic-Con on a panel about the “Future of Comics.” The graphic-story producer asserted that most stories combining images and words “to date – with a few notable exceptions – have been unsophisticated.” He told the Comic-Con audience that future releases would draw “upon sophisticated concepts which are ordinarily filtered out or watered down in the more usual comic media”; Preiss added that his next book would extend the “graphic language” developed in Fiction Illustrated.Footnote 56
Preiss's example of publishing with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ) was an indirect allusion to his own “entrepreneurial packaging ability” in striking a deal with HBJ-owned Pyramid Publications.Footnote 57 Pyramid's senior vice president Norman Goldfind was a supporter of Preiss's efforts and Pyramid published two series of BPVP's books in the mid-1970s. The first, Weird Heroes, was a mixture of original prose novels and short stories in the style of early twentieth-century pulp fiction, illustrated by artists working in comics. Correspondence between Preiss and veteran creator Will Eisner evidences that the packager initially conceived of Weird Heroes as a series of comics narratives rather than illustrated prose. Contributors had reportedly committed to Weird Heroes in spite of the fact that any financial rewards would be slight or nonexistent, which Preiss explained to Eisner as a necessary compromise to ensure that the books were published.Footnote 58 On other BPVP projects, though, creators comment that it was hard to get paid and they went into “extraordinary debt.”Footnote 59
The second Preiss-produced series at Pyramid was Fiction Illustrated, “America's First Adult Graphic Novel Revue.”Footnote 60 The Fiction Illustrated books were referred to as “graphic novels” by fans and retailers,Footnote 61 and Preiss claimed that because one of them had been reviewed in the New York Times “on an equal footing with other books” his “new format” was recognized by the “straight periodicals … on an equal level with regular books”; further, the audience for them was “growing.”Footnote 62 Schlomo Raven (1976), the first Fiction Illustrated volume, was written by Preiss with art by Tom Sutton.Footnote 63 Preiss's introduction contended that the series was important because it constituted novel-length graphic stories that a “major publishing house” was marketing to “adults not adolescents.”Footnote 64 Preiss also wrote the second volume, the SF odyssey Starfawn (1976), with art by Stephen Fabian. Preiss's introduction to Starfawn inserted Fiction Illustrated into the debates over creators’ rights pulsing away in the 1970s comics world, drawing attention to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's legal struggle for recognition and financial recompense for creating Superman. Preiss hailed Fiction Illustrated's relations of production as evidence of the victory of creators’ rights: what “Siegal [sic] and Shuster had to fight for is what FICTION ILLUSTRATED has rightfully obtained from the start. … Credit for the writer and artist, profit-sharing and valuable promotion are all part of the effort behind America's first adult graphic novel revue.”Footnote 65 BPVP trumpeted Fiction Illustrated as “important proof” that “the comic book is being considered as a commercially viable and intellectually respectable form of adult literature.”Footnote 66
The Fiction Illustrated books made extensive use of first-person verbal narration. Schlomo Raven contained two parodies of hard-boiled crime fiction, specifically Chandler's and Hammett's Hollywood adaptations. The two stories are infused with wisecracks, one-liners, and surreal interjections, but while they read like comics, the prose narration between panels is substantial; the second story in Schlomo Raven starts with six pages of verbal preamble. At the beginning of Starfawn the starship Destiny heads out to search for alien life and to study cosmic rays; official record keeper Daystar Stern introduces the mission and crew members with a verbal narration outside the panels that comments on the events shown within them. In this instance, Fiction Illustrated's predilection for prose-heavy first-person narration is made legible as the reader listening to Stern's report. The “Captain's Log” from the television series Star Trek is the obvious point of reference, just as in the first and third Fiction Illustrated books the first-person narration was rendered comprehensible as a convention of hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir.
The third Fiction Illustrated book was Steranko's Chandler: Red Tide (1976),Footnote 67 and the fourth and final instalment was Preiss and Ralph Reese's Son of Sherlock Holmes, published in January 1977.Footnote 68 The digest-sized Schlomo Raven and Starfawn, distributed to bookstores and newsstands, seemed to lose sales because of their dimensions, “lost in a sea of larger and better produced magazines.”Footnote 69 A reviewer noted that “newsdealers persist in displaying [Schlomo Raven] with the Archie digests.”Footnote 70 To rectify this situation, Chandler was released as a one-dollar digest-sized softcover, a “deluxe edition” large paperback ($4.95), and a signed, numbered bookplate edition ($7.50). The revenue on the larger books proved greater than on the digests and Son of Sherlock Holmes was only published as a large softcover retailing at $4.95.Footnote 71 As well as being described as a graphic novel, Chandler’s cover proclaimed that it was a “visual novel”; this was how Steranko referred to it and the term “visual novel” became closely associated with Preiss's prose-heavy books.Footnote 72
Norman Goldfind had been instrumental in ensuring that Pyramid took on Fiction Illustrated and when he left to found the Baronet Publishing Company BPVP began packaging books for Goldfind's new enterprise.Footnote 73 Three books appeared, The Illustrated Roger Zelazny (February 1978), The Illustrated Harlan Ellison (December 1978), and the first volume of The Stars My Destination (March 1979).Footnote 74 The first two were adaptations of stories by noted SF authors, some of which adopted comics conventions, and some of which added illustrations to the words, but both books were advertised as collections of “graphic stories”Footnote 75 nonetheless. The Illustrated Roger Zelazny was issued as a $9.95 softcover and as a signed, numbered edition of 2,500 copies ($14.95 each), and The Illustrated Harlan Ellison was released as an $8.95 softcover and a signed, numbered edition of 3,000 copies retailing at $14.95.Footnote 76 The Illustrated Roger Zelazny was BPVP's biggest success with graphic-story publishing, reissued as a Science Fiction Book Club edition (July 1978) and a mass-market paperback from Ace Books in April 1979. That month BPVP announced that the hardcover edition of The Illustrated Roger Zelazny had sold out and 20,000 softcover copies had been printed.Footnote 77 The Stars My Destination adapted the first part of Alfred Bester's 1956 novel, with popular comics artist Howard Chaykin providing the art and Preiss organizing the page layouts and words. In 1978 Preiss also produced two “graphic novels” for other publishers;Footnote 78 the first was Empire, written by celebrated SF author Samuel R. Delany and illustrated by Chaykin.Footnote 79 Advertisements boasted that the print run for the $9.95 paperback would be 50,000 copies, with 1,500 signed, numbered hardcovers retailing at twenty-four dollars each.Footnote 80 The second was an adaption of Theodore Sturgeon's SF novel More Than Human (1953) by writer Doug Moench and artist Alex Nino, published by Heavy Metal and distributed by Simon and Schuster.Footnote 81
A second volume of The Stars My Destination was printed but never released. Baronet suspended publishing activities in 1980 because of “financial setbacks” but this was “nothing to do” with sales on the first volume (60 percent of 12,500 softcovers sold).Footnote 82 Fan Kevin C. McConnell tried to rouse his peers in a show of solidarity with the publisher who had “done much to advance the graphic novel form by showcasing the fine productions of Byron Preiss, as well as such unprecedented works as Will Eisner's [1978 graphic novel] A Contract with God.” McConnell entreated his peers “to obtain a copy of Volume One [of The Stars My Destination] and savor it.” He even printed Baronet's address so readers could express their interest in buying a second volume.Footnote 83 Marvel eventually published a complete edition of The Stars My Destination graphic novel in 1992.
Even before Baronet's financial problems, Preiss made a direct address to fandom to buy his products. This was in a piece he wrote for the Comic Reader in September 1978, which framed BPVP's books as “an important step forward” for comics, an evolutionary leap that included other pioneering texts such as Art Spiegelman's experimental collection Breakdowns (printed in 1977, distributed in 1978). Preiss wrote that fans must support “expensive books of comic art,” whose costs made them risks for their publishers, if “comics are to grow”:
If we are to reshape the nature of the economic systems of the medium – pay royalty fees, subsidiary rights – and reasonable sums of money to the people who make the comics, then we must look in a direction other than the constantly escalating 50¢ newsprint comic book. The technologies of color web offset printing these days are such that the quality control is minimal or non-existant [sic] … With the high-priced illustrated books, we are able to preserve the artistic work and compensate the artist in relation to actual sales.Footnote 84
It seems odd that Preiss saw his books as comparable to the self-conscious modernist experiments in Breakdowns, but for Preiss what he shared with Spiegelman was a refusal to take the language of comics for granted:
along with the medium come certain conventions which people have learned in order to interpret the stories they read. The question is how can these conventions be restructured or redeveloped, how can you teach people to relearn the visual responses they have towards comics. These are extremely important things to take into account if you want to talk about the medium going anywhere …Footnote 85
Precisely because of his desire to reach non-comics readers by redeveloping the conventions of comics, fans gave Preiss a vicious reception.
“DOWN WITH BYRON PREISS!”
As cultural studies scholar John Fiske notes, fans “discriminate fiercely” about whom and what belongs within the remit of their collectively constructed fandom. A major “criterion of discrimination” is authenticity.Footnote 86 The way that the words in Preiss's graphic novels occupied more space than the images, the way he minimized or eliminated speech balloons and handwritten lettering, these were all seized upon as evidence of the books’ – and therefore his personal – inauthenticity. One of the few comics critics to write about BPVP's texts, R. C. Harvey, argues that Steranko's Chandler (1976) should not be considered a “graphic novel” because “the pace of the story is controlled by the prose that runs in uniform columns under the pictures.” While the “pictures create the story's mood … they add no new information to the story.”Footnote 87 In fact, Steranko told the fan press in 1977 that his intention was to move away from comics and exploit a “new format” in “adult books.”Footnote 88 Nonetheless Harvey's point was shared by a multitude of fans and creators who called the Fiction Illustrated books “phoney-comics”Footnote 89 and criticized the series on the ground that it “hardly qualifies as comics”Footnote 90 and that by claiming them as such BPVP was going to “set comics back forty years.”Footnote 91 One fan objected, “When the adult graphic novel is produced, it won't be in this fashion.”Footnote 92 BPVP became a byword amongst fans for transgressive word–image combinations.Footnote 93
Samuel Delany recollected Preiss telling him that Empire would have no speech balloons because “they made things look too comicy.”Footnote 94 This was the substance of what Preiss told convention-goers in 1977, that “separate, typeset text was necessary for commercial reasons, namely to impress publishers and get a foot in the door.”Footnote 95 Steranko concurred that this was required to appeal to an older audience.Footnote 96 Yet it caused other professionals to wonder if the company was “sort of embarrassed” about the medium:Footnote 97 if BPVP was committed to comics, why did it compromise one of its core formal principles? Fan Ron Harris was a vocal antagonist of BPVP in the monthly mailings of the amateur press association CAPA-alpha, calling Preiss a “snob” because he “simply couldn't convince himself that it was ‘classy’ to publish comic books.”Footnote 98 Harris pointed out that the packager “consistently misspells Siegel's name,”Footnote 99 implying that Preiss had blown his audition to be considered an authentic member of fandom. Fiske reminds us that boundary policing within fan communities requires getting such details right: the display of knowledge “helps to distinguish a particular fan community (those who possess it) from others (those who do not).”Footnote 100 Systematic studies of comics fans bear this out, that the exercise of “‘true’ expertise” is the mark of a “proper” fan.Footnote 101 Matthew J. Pustz's Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (1999), an ethnographic study of fandom, notes that due to the lack of wider social esteem accredited to comics, a “kind of siege mentality” operates amongst fans. As a consequence, newcomers are likely to face challenges designed to gauge the extent of their comics knowledge. These challenges work “as a kind of secret handshake, allowing a new person with the requisite expertise into a group where fannish experiences are openly shared.”Footnote 102
Ron Harris asserted that Preiss's presence in the comics world was unearned, alleging that he only “got into mainstream comics through the back door … by virtue of some educational work he did with Jim Steranko,” and that BPVP's books were not “real graphic stories.”Footnote 103 In a letter to the Comics Journal Dan Recchia sardonically proclaimed that “the Byron Preiss Golden Books for Adults … deny being comic books, as if they were before the HUAC committee,”Footnote 104 a lurid example of the accusations thrown at Preiss. Calling them “Golden Books for Adults” suggested that BPVP was publishing children's illustrated books and ludicrously calling them adult reading matter. More perniciously, Recchia framed Preiss's books as witnesses brought before Senator Joseph McCarthy, disavowing a forbidden past (as comics) and betraying former allies in order to buy grace in the eyes of a hostile society. In 1980 one of Preiss's defenders, SF writer Harlan Ellison, ventriloquized BPVP's critics thus: “This schmuck Preiss … has wandered into our holy and sanctified grove and is pissing on the trees.”Footnote 105 Here Ellison encapsulates the attempt by fans to render Preiss a trespasser who lacks the respect and knowledge necessary to enter the “sanctified” vale of fandom.
There was another way in which BPVP was adjudged to have transgressed the rules and codes governing the comics world: one could take comics seriously, but self-importance was to be guarded against. Proclaiming that one's publications were going to cause a revolution in the status of comics was a sure way to earn enmity. One fan articulated this rule out loud: “comics projects … that vigorously insist they be given due recognition are very rarely those which truly deserve it.”Footnote 106 Fandom lambasted Preiss for being “pompous”Footnote 107 and having “delusions of grandeur.”Footnote 108 Just as BPVP was associated with abandoning comics conventions, the company became synonymous with self-promotion.Footnote 109 Even sympathetic readers complained that Preiss “spends so much time talking about concepts and credits and people and editorializing” when he should “let us judge it for ourselves.”Footnote 110 Preiss responded to criticisms with greater hyperbole, taking out a five-page advertisement claiming that BPVP was the culmination of ten years of hoping and dreaming:
1968
We had Steranko on S.H.I.E.L.D, Adams on Deadman, Kirby at Marvel [sic] and a dream – comics for adults, sophisticated graphic stories on high-quality paper by the best writers and artists in the field.
1978
Dreams come true. Visual Publications and a dozen talented artists change the face of the graphic story medium.Footnote 111
Unfortunately, by italicizing “Marvel” and making it out to be a series and not a company, Preiss's knowledge of comics – the password needed for him to be accepted within fandom – was erroneously expressed once more.
Preiss's status as persona non grata was evident in the rules of a competition that ran in the Comics Journal: “Anyone [is] eligible to enter: Stan [Lee], Jenette [Kahn] – heck, even Byron Preiss. Really!”Footnote 112 Hostility towards BPVP's books was so widespread in the Comics Journal that a fan noted of issue 57, “For once someone didn't put down The Stars My Destination.”Footnote 113 Noting it was “trendy to pin Byron to the wall,” Harlan Ellison was enraged by “the shit I read that's directed toward this guy.” Ellison explained it had “hurt” Preiss, and that the visual producer “gets very defensive and very crazy and he tries to fight back” by responding to the criticisms.Footnote 114
Preiss had other defenders and Harvey Kurtzman's foreword to Schlomo Raven praised its “format” as “a paperback comic book,” though Kurtzman did not refer to its content.Footnote 115 He was a judicious choice to offer prefatory words, since his work as a writer and artist at 1950s publisher EC was valorized by fans as some of the most significant comics ever produced. As comics historian Amy Kiste Nyberg put it in 1998, “If there is a ‘canon’ of comic books, E.C. Comics may be found at the head of the list.”Footnote 116 Ever since they were published, Kurtzman's war stories have been praised for combining “careful attention to historical detail, thoughtful and ironic writing, and a sense of moral outrage,”Footnote 117 and EC was also known for provocative and thought-provoking crime, horror, and SF comics. EC's reputation with later generations of fans was undoubtedly enhanced by its fate: in 1954 most of the major publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and implemented a censorship board to stave off the threat of government regulation. EC had achieved strong sales but, with the horror genre prohibited and others profoundly restricted, the company struggled in an industry whose products were limited “to a supervised, puerile level.” EC essentially withdrew from the periodical comic market and its later attempts to reach beyond comics (“picto-fiction” magazines that combined images and text with the emphasis on the latter) sold “dismally” and were soon cancelled.Footnote 118 Interestingly, EC's “picto-fiction” broadly resembled BPVP's books in the 1970s; more significantly, Kurtzman represented a perceived golden age when US periodical comics could be disrespectful towards authority, could imply sexual intercourse, and entertain moral ambiguity – in other words, when American comics could be adult reading material.
Like Kurtzman, many readers of BPVP's publications responded favourably to their book-like qualities, though not all felt that Preiss exploited them successfully.Footnote 119 Preiss, nonetheless, was given credit for realizing projects most fans and creators just talked about,Footnote 120 and for representing the kind of direction comics needed to go in.Footnote 121 One fan thought that with More Than Human BPVP had produced its “closest [effort] to traditional comics” and, taken with other 1970s novelization projects, was ushering in an era when comics would break out “into the big wide world outside our little ghetto.”Footnote 122
THE EMPIRE OF BYRON PREISS
Conversations about Empire began in the winter of 1976 when Preiss, Chaykin, and Delany sat down to devise a visual novel.Footnote 123 Delany and Chaykin had looked to collaborate since the late 1960s and the artist and Preiss were old school friends.Footnote 124 Around this time Chaykin was enjoying the success of the Star Wars comic based on George Lucas's 1977 film. The licence was awarded to Marvel without a fee, but Lucas had two stipulations: to maximize publicity the comic had to appear before the film's release and the artist had to be Chaykin. Initially the comic sold 57 percent of its print run, solid but not spectacular. Once the film was released sales of the comic rocketed and the first issue eventually sold over a million copies.Footnote 125 By the time of Empire’s publication in October 1978 Chaykin had bowed out of monthly work commitments at Marvel and DC in order to pursue independent projects.Footnote 126 The mixed-media art from Empire which Chaykin previewed on the convention circuit was greeted with palpable enthusiasm.Footnote 127 Fans and reviewers had taken umbrage at Preiss writing three of the Fiction Illustrated books but now scripting duties were turned over to an award-winning SF author acclaimed in the New York Times Book Review.Footnote 128 At the 1977 San Diego Comic-Con, Preiss asked how many people wanted the forthcoming Empire to use speech balloons, suggesting that he was sensitive to the fans’ anger at the lack of balloons in BPVP's previous offerings.Footnote 129 Preiss told the Comic Reader this new project was “what people have been asking for and that it's in the comic medium.”Footnote 130 Empire should have been BPVP's finest hour, yet Preiss was accused of ruining a good idea by being an obtrusive presence in the construction of the text. This time the accusation came from his collaborators as well as the fans.
The book's narrative involves a band of rebels jumping from one action-packed episode to the next, searching for the fragments of a mysterious technology that, when pieced together, will collapse the information control system that the draconian Kūndūke empire uses to rule the universe. Into this story Delany interwove elements of catastrophe theory; from mathematicians to Star Wars fans, Empire had the potential to appeal to multiple audiences, and it was published in hardcover and softback editions by Berkley Windhover. Before publication Mediascene reported that David Hartwell, Berkley's SF editor, was so confident that this “breakthrough novel in graphic story form” would be a hit the print run was planned for 50,000 copies.Footnote 131 Preiss extended the marketing tactics he adopted with Fiction Illustrated. Advertisements, posters, and convention publicity identified Empire as a sophisticated reading experience in terms of appearance (Chaykin's painted art, typeset lettering, large pages, and square-bound format) and subject matter (Delany's use of catastrophe theory). BPVP claimed to have achieved another leap forward in the history of comics and Preiss promoted it with techniques he hadn't tried with Fiction Illustrated, such as previewing Empire in the popular comics anthology magazine Heavy Metal.
While the marketing announced “Delany delivers a true graphic novel,”Footnote 132 the writer protested in a 1979 interview with the Comics Journal that “I never thought of it as such … I think of it as a comic book.”Footnote 133 Bob Toomey's Comics Journal review sneered, “it is not a novel. It's an expensive comic book, and a pretty bad one at that.” Toomey hated Empire, writing that the plot was predictable and illogical and the dialogue was “terrible.” What bewildered Toomey was Preiss's page layouts and Chaykin's acquiescence: every page of Empire was divided into three uniform vertical panels or three uniform horizontal panels.Footnote 134 This was only a template, so there were full-page spreads as well as pages where the three panels were subdivided or amalgamated. The fan-oriented periodical Mediascene rhapsodized about these formal parameters as a “departure from accepted comic line art standards,” but then Mediascene was owned by Preiss's friend Steranko. Reading Empire was supposedly a cleaner and more holistic experience than reading other comics because it was “uncluttered by word balloons or crude hand-lettering … utilizing a special floating-axis page structure, designed by Byron Preiss, to integrate art and type into a totally original unified form.”Footnote 135 Toomey's position was that varied page layouts were an essential component of comics storytelling: panels of different shapes and sizes accelerate and decelerate the pace of the narrative as appropriate, whereas Empire’s page layouts were a “definite step backward,” “a straitjacket on the artwork” that produced a monotonous reading experience. The monotony was worsened by the use of uniform type instead of hand-drawn lettering. A lot of the type was placed outside the panels, and dialogue might start above one panel and end beneath another, leading Toomey to complain it was “difficult to tell who's speaking.”Footnote 136 Conversely, the few newspaper reviews that Empire received understood it as a coherent, thrilling reading experience. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it “a visual tour de force” and thought the “three column vertical or horizontal grid” layout “more dramatic and flexible” than the “box panels” of periodical comics.Footnote 137 Empire was reviewed elsewhere as “an experiment to be applauded,”Footnote 138 suggesting that Preiss's aim of making comics more legible for non-comics readers had been, at the very least, partially successful.
In his interview in the Comics Journal Delany remarked that “Byron's insistence on the vertical–horizontal thing was a mistake,” as was the proscription on speech balloons, since they unnecessarily restricted the visual “language” of comics available to the creators.Footnote 139 By 1979 Preiss had, apparently, realized that the floating-axis design was “not too good an idea.”Footnote 140 Surprisingly, the Comics Journal did not publish Delany's most strident thoughts:
[The] particular restrictions Byron, as packager, was coming up with seemed geared to sabotage the whole enterprise. All the iconic rhetoric of the medium that made it flexible, incisive, and articulate he wanted to cut out, and for what pretty much struck me as vague, pretentious, and ill-thought-through reasons. A lot of it, I think, came from that innate inferiority complex so many people in the administrative side of the comics industry walk around with daily. Their ideal is to do comics that look like anything but comics. That was the basic reason, I suppose, Byron had began [sic] by bringing me in, as a hot-shot writer from another, more respectable medium, in hopes I'd somehow magically turn the lowly comics form into something wondrous and new – and, above all, respectable.Footnote 141
Delany reported that half the script had been rewritten and the verbal text was frequently positioned in the wrong place. “Byron had a lot of projects going at the same time, and although he paid as much attention as he could to each individual one, I think things just slipped up.” As a result, the reader does not navigate the published pages in the way Delany intended, and some dialogue is attributed to the wrong characters. Preiss and Delany disagreed on where words should be positioned on the page and the two “had a battle royal” over the first page. Preiss eventually deferred to Delany but the top of one panel was inexplicably severed.Footnote 142 Pages [20] and [21] are the wrong way round, some dialogue is in quotation marks but not all, and Delany was forced to change his captions from the past tense to the present tense because of Preiss's selective rewriting.Footnote 143
After seeing his interview in print, Delany wrote to the Comics Journal to ameliorate his criticisms, admitting that responsibility for the layouts was spread among many people and that collaborative work always brings a degree of confusion. Delany had returned to his script and on random sampling discovered 39 percent of his lines had been rewritten. Further, he praised Preiss for going about his projects without the cynicism dogging the big “commercial outlets.”Footnote 144 And Delany had already stated in the summer 1979 interview that he was broadly happy with Empire and, “for all the things that were done with it, I feel very much that it's still basically mine and Howie's story.”Footnote 145
Having consulted a 1978 manuscript of Delany's script, on most occasions Preiss's changes to the dialogue did not make it less understandable, though Preiss sometimes mangled the poetry of Delany's sentence construction. For example, in the 1978 script the characters Qrelon and the Nizerine Eleyn jump into a pool to escape a Kūndūke massacre, and Delany had written, “Down the Nizerine swam, and down. And down Qrelon followed, into the side passage where a cold current tugs them along.” Preiss simplified this to “Qrelon followed the Nizerine down, down, into a side passage where a cold current caught them” [82].
In other places Preiss's editing tore holes in narrative logic. Page [58] of Empire is markedly different from Delany's script. This is the moment that the protagonists Wryn and Qrelon have alone on Qrelon's spacecraft Proteus after a succession of action-packed incidents. Both versions have the characters exchange lustful looks that change the relationship between them. In Delany's script, rebel fighter Qrelon encourages archaeology student Wryn to touch her, but after an ellipsis in the action during which the characters are physically intimate, neither is fully satisfied and Qrelon concludes, “Never mind, boy. Let's just split the blame and stay friends.”Footnote 146 The published version has Wryn profess, “Qrelon, you know I really like you a lot,” and Qrelon returns his affection but decides that “there's no time for things such as this” until their mission is complete. Preiss's editing, then, tried to maintain the sexual tension between the main characters, tension dispensed with by Delany's script. This jarred with Chaykin's art, since the panel showing the outside of the asteroid pirates’ base was rendered superfluous: the purpose of this panel was to signify the plot jumping forwards in time during the characters’ sexual intercourse. In the final, published version it is unclear why Qrelon is suddenly missing her clothes and looking rueful.
One last example of how Preiss “imposed” his “ideas about how a plot achieves a certain kind of suspense” can be found on pages [102–3].Footnote 147 At this point in the story Wryn is wandering inside the Kūndūke's frozen information system, called “Ice,” searching for a means of uploading the Meta-Max demon into the heart of the system. When the Meta-Max reaches the centre of Ice it will sabotage the Kūndūke's rigid control of information throughout the universe. At the same time Qrelon has been captured and sadistic intelligence officer Loiptix tries to force her to pull a lever that will drop a section of crystal onto Wryn, thus ending the rebellion. The writer and artist originally conceived of a full-page spread and three vertical panels for this culmination of the narrative, but “Byron ended up cutting off the bottom of the full page thing and dividing up the three panel sequence into whole lots of little panels.” He created new panels out of the bottom of the full-page spread and got Chaykin to paint three more, so in the published version the action takes place over eight panels and not four.Footnote 148 Preiss made these changes at the galley stage and, according to Delany, the alterations stem from a fundamental disagreement about the suspense generated by this scene. In the original, Wryn does not know about Loiptix's evil designs but Preiss thought this dramatic irony – where the reader knows the character has to hurry but Wryn doesn't – wasn't suspenseful enough. For it to be exciting, Wryn had to know his life was in danger. Delany recollected Preiss insisting, “you have to put some of my kind of suspense in it”; at such a late stage of production, “anything that Byron ‘tried’ now would be in the finished book.”Footnote 149 Chaykin's new panel on [103] (the bottom left-hand corner) shows the information flow within Ice but with no regard for the events taking place – it seems to stand outside the narrative. Another new panel on [102], on the bottom right, depicts an empty chamber within Ice. These panels invite detached contemplation of Ice's interior corridors, not excitement. Delany confessed to the Comics Journal, “From this page to the next page I really don't know what's going on – I really don't!”Footnote 150 Delany's tale of Preiss changing these pages immediately before production is supported by the fact that page [102] is the only one in the book violating the floating-axis template.
Fans had already complained that BPVP's artists were “strait-jacketed,”Footnote 151 and in the wake of Delany's Comics Journal interview Steven Rowe wondered “what will happen when the creative people will be allowed to create.”Footnote 152 News of Preiss's revisions confirmed Rowe's prejudice that the graphic-story producer's main contribution to BPVP's publications was to spoil them. The year before, Rowe wrote in CAPA-alpha, “Down with Byron Preiss! I read the except [sic] of EMPIRE in HM, and … [the] figuration of the words was barbaric – blame it on editor Preiss – he's an easy target.”Footnote 153 Ron Harris complained of More Than Human that artist Alex Niño's “creativity” was so limited that the artist was “hardly necessary at all.”Footnote 154 Chaykin defended Preiss on the ground that he worked hard, made things happen, and explored “technical avenues” that no one else would. But when the artist described his working relationship with Preiss on The Stars My Destination it became clear that, against Chaykin's preference to lay out his own pages, Preiss gave Chaykin boards with the panels drawn in. Chaykin said he “had nothing to do with the layout … The book is Byron's. I illustrated the book.”Footnote 155 Preiss's editing was criticized in Jim Dawson's review of The Illustrated Roger Zelazny, which Dawson described as a “blatantly offensive” book omitting essential characterization from the original stories. Preiss had not so much adapted Zelazny's prose as he had “eviscerated” it, deleting parts without thinking of continuity or legibility.Footnote 156 Even in the late 1970s atmosphere of the Comics Journal this was shrill language and Heavy Metal editor Julie Simmons complained that Dawson's review was “a one-sided, unwarranted, negligent piece of reporting … more like a personal vendetta toward Preiss & co., than a factually based comment.”Footnote 157
The reception of BPVP's books was, as Simmons commented, clouded in the atmosphere of vendetta and the perceived need to avenge Preiss's betrayal of comics. Reviewer Pierce Askegren called The Illustrated Harlan Ellison an “uneven melange” and wondered “how much of the finished product Ellison saw prior to publication.”Footnote 158 Ellison defended Preiss's editorial changes on the grounds that the packager was torn between “publishers and printers and artists and writers and his own artistic sensibility.” In this figuration Preiss was not the artful book packager but a creative worker pulled in several directions at once.Footnote 159 On another occasion Ellison defended Preiss by stating that he was “a producer” and producers “have to get the product out.” The SF writer lampooned the fans’ formulation of Preiss as a monster who “locks Howie Chaykin into a dark closet and beats him with a cat-o’-nine tails until he does shitty layouts,” stating that if Delany or Chaykin had refused to compromise on Empire then Preiss would have backed down.Footnote 160 This misses the point that Preiss had the final say because the pages were entrusted to him on their journey to the publisher.
CONCLUSION
BPVP's status as purveyor of “the latest graphic novels”Footnote 161 was made possible by the era of blockbuster books and the power that packagers possessed in trade publishing during the 1970s. In October 1978 the Comics Journal reported that the commercial and critical success of The Illustrated Roger Zelazny prompted Norman Goldfind, “publisher of Baronet Books, to give the go-ahead for additional titles. Most of them will undoubtedly follow the path set by previous releases of that type.” One of the planned books was Will Eisner's “A Covenant [sic] with God and Other Tenement Stories …”.Footnote 162 What success BPVP enjoyed, then, was a fillip for the publication of the most famous graphic novel of the decade. But Preiss's working practices did not cohere with his avowed commitment to comics and to creators’ rights, since he devised his company's projects and had the final edit. Because BPVP offered the relatively rare opportunity to create book-format comics, major creators took the chance to work with Preiss, but – though they did collaborate with him after Empire – Delany and Chaykin felt he was more interested in profit than in comics and neither continued their relationship with BPVP for much longer.Footnote 163
In the 1970s Preiss was treated as an overenthusiastic outsider whose desire to bring comics into trade publishing stemmed from anxiety about his own position in relation to those spheres: he was judged guilty of paying insufficient fealty to the comics world and of failing to live up to his enormous claims. Would Preiss have had greater success in the 1980s if Baronet had not collapsed? Delany thinks that he had “learned that you don't take something interesting and force [it] into a completely artificial form that is determined by being [as] little like comics as possible.”Footnote 164 In the 1980s Preiss sold comics properties to Marvel's Epic imprint,Footnote 165 and BPVP produced a few comics-related books such as Harvey Kurtzman's From Aargh! to Zap! Harvey Kurtzman's Visual History of the Comics (1991), but he would never again play such a prominent role in the novelization of this cultural form.
