CREEMEDIA
Just in case you didn’t know—and given the media’s continuing saturation of the topic, you’ve only yourself to blame if you don’t—comic books are back. They never completely went away, of course, but by the time Spider-Man teamed up with Boy Howdy! for an all-night jam session on the cover of CREEM’s April 1973 issue, the genre was not only a spent force on the brink of aesthetic bankruptcy, but in dire need of a miracle to pull its comatose body out of the fresh grave it had steadfastly been digging for several years.
CREEMEDIA
KNIGHTS IN BLACK SATIN
by
Jeffrey Morgan
Just in case you didn’t know—and given the media’s continuing saturation of the topic, you’ve only yourself to blame if you don’t—comic books are back.
They never completely went away, of course, but by the time Spider-Man teamed up with Boy Howdy! for an all-night jam session on the cover of CREEM’s April 1973 issue, the genre was not only a spent force on the brink of aesthetic bankruptcy, but in dire need of a miracle to pull its comatose body out of the fresh grave it had steadfastly been digging for several years.
That miracle came in the form of the direct sales market, a system whereby— much in the same way that the introduction of record stores in the ’50s and ’60s superseded 5 & 10s and department stores as the consumers’ primary outlet for singles and albums—the retailing of comic books was taken, for the most part, out of the hands of the traditional mom-and-pop variety store and placed in the new realm of specialty shops expressly created for the sole purpose of selling comic books.