SOURCE: "The Moderns," in Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context, Pluto Press, 1993, pp. 55-66.

In the following essay, McCue and Bloom trace the development of comic books during the 1970s and 1980s, in terms of both their subject matter and marketing strategies.

Comic books in the early 1970s looked surprisingly like those of the early 1950s. The medium was dominated by heroic action books and sales were dropping rapidly. Social relevance had failed as a direction for the medium. Other sources of comic book art were beginning to find a market and underground comic books began making real inroads into the readership, further contributing to the mainstream industry's economic woes. DC was hit harder than Marvel during this time because of personnel problems and the lack of the fiercely loyal readership that Marvel's discursive style had earned them. Nonetheless, both companies were in trouble and they scrambled...