Action and adventure
Action and adventure |
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Page 14 of 42  Panel from Action Comics (BC comics, 1969). Art: Curt Swan By challenging the notion that strips always had to be funny, these early examples opened the way for more melodramatic fare. In January 1929, the marriage between pulps and comic strips was formalized in spectacular fashion when two characters who had previously been confined to prose fiction appeared in newspaper strips. 'Tarzan', Edgar Rice Burrough's classic story of a primitive jungle hero 'raised by apes', and for many years a staple of the pulps, was transformed into strip form by artist Hal Foster, while Dick Calkins did the same for Philip Nowlan's futuristic 'Buck Rogers', about a twenty-fifth-century warrior and his battles with, among others, 'the ferocious tigermen of Mars' (a character who had debuted in the pulp Amazing Stories). These two were yarns on an epic scale, and ushered newspaper strips into a new era. Indeed, other factors were conspiring to produce a boom in adventure material. As one historian has written: 'The stock market crash of Oct 1929, and the long depression that followed, helped guarantee that the new serious note of comics would not be just a passing fad. Readers wanted more than laughs; they also wanted' images of strong men taking control of their world. The 1930s and 1940s thus saw the greatest expansion of the adventure category, accompanied by stylistic innovations which would shape the future comic industry.  The first-ever edition of Superman (National Periodicals, 1939). Art: Joe Shuster. |