Book Review: 'Slugfest' by Reed Tucker
'Slugfest' (276 pp.) was published in October, 2017 by De Capo Press. Author Tucker is a New York City-based author who has written hundreds of articles for print media outlets such as Esquire and USA Today.
'Slugfest' was made into a documentary, available on the Roku Channel.
'Slugfest' is a history of comic books from the 1950s up to the late twenty-teens, as seen through the competition between the two biggest publishers, Marvel and DC.
I first began reading and collecting comics around 1967, when I was 7 years old. In my small town in upstate New York, there were two drugstores that had comics, displayed on spinner racks. One drugstore sold DC, the other, Marvel. I learned early on that I much preferred Marvel. Indeed, I didn't pay much attention to any DC titles until the early 70s when I took a liking to their science fiction comics, such as Strange Adventures. I also took in the Neil Adams Batman comics, and then Jack Kirby's stuff like Kammandi and The Demon and OMAC.
So by the time I began discontinuing my interest in comic books by the mid-70s I was a fan of Marvel, but not to an exclusive degree.
'Slugfest' doesn't take sides, but brings a humorous attitude to the topic, and as a result is an easy and entertaining read. While author Tucker necessarily covers some of the same ground about Marvel comics as did author Sean Howe with his Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, 'Slugfest' has lots of observations and anecdotes about the staff, artists, and writers of DC, a subject with which I was much less familiar.
For example, I didn't know that DC editors Mort Weisinger, Robert Kanigher, and Julius Schwartz were utter pricks, who screamed abuse at their employees on a daily basis. I also didn't know about the shenanigans of the illimitable Bill Jemas, who during his time as the Marvel president went out of his way to insult the competition (the 2002 series Marville, written by Jemas, was one long rude and mocking jibe at DC). Nor did I know that in 2011, Marvel tried to blunt the sales of DC's 'Flashpoint' crossover by offering retailers a 'special variant cover edition' of the Marvel title 'Fear Itself' issue No. 6, in exchange for the submission of 50 covers ripped off of 'Flashpoint' comics.
The closing chapters of 'Slugfest' deal with the transition of both DC and Marvel to corporate properties, a transition that has major implications for the future of the medium. Nowadays the competition between the companies has moved from print media, where it is increasingly an afterthought, to the movie and television realms.
It's also clear that as of May 2022, graphic novels are driving consumption of comics by the public, according to this essay by comics retailer Brian Hibbs. And here, things are not looking promising for either DC or Marvel.
Can the competition between the companies still have relevance when the top 5 best-selling graphic novels of 2021 are 'Dog Man' (1,295,470 copies of 'Dog Man: Mothering Heights') and 'Cat Kid' titles from Dev Pilkey ?
'Dog Man: Mothering Heights' sold 1,295,470 copies, while the top-selling graphic novel (48,000 copies) for DC was Teen Titans: Beast Boy, a Young Adult title. And the only graphic novel from Marvel that sold over 10,000 copies (10,066 to be exact) was The Infinity Gauntlet, by Jim Starlin and the late George Perez, a compilation of comics first printed in 1991.............
Whether or not the competition between DC and Marvel continues, 'Slugfest' is a recommended read for comic book fans, and fans of American pop culture of the postwar era.
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