The Comic Book History of Comics (3 points)

    I personally found this book a fairly enjoyable read. I don't have the best attention span, and I managed to get through this book pretty quickly, which means it was doing something right. As I was reading, though, one thing stuck out to me about a lot of the early history regarding the American comic book industry, and it's that it was a powerfully capitalistic system. When I was reading, it seemed like the only way to "make it" in the industry was to get lucky with some big name company that would eventually be bought by someone with more money than them. It almost seemed like the buying and selling of sports players onto certain teams, except in this case, it was comic book syndicates buying out artists and paying the less "important" artists miserably low wages. It's interesting to see how systems like that were in place and what laws have been put in place to protect the artists who were poorly treated and didn't have the guts to stick up for themselves. After all, they, as the comics said, were working those jobs and using their meager wages to support their family. Speaking out against it had a chance of threatening that wage, as they could easily be fired, so it was safer to just suck it up and deal with it.

    It was also interesting to see that there were pretty much only three brands or companies that ended up being "big names", holding a near monopoly on the entire industry and setting trends, those companies being Disney, Marvel, and DC (or Detective Comics, as mentioned in the book). The beginning to the history of comics was like a bloody free-for-all with only the most diligent of workers surviving to make a name for themselves as artists.