Industry Veteran Peter Sanderson Launches A New Substack

Tales From Decades In Comics

Comics industry Peter Sanderson, best known as Marvel and DC’s historian and researcher, has just launched a substack where he will talk about his many years in comics…

Welcome! My name is Peter Sanderson, and I have led a career as a comics historian.

It goes all the way back to the 1960s, when I was writing critiques of comic book stories that were frequently published in comics’ letter columns. When I was in graduate school in New York City in the 1970s I began meeting other people my age who liked comics, both professional comics writers and artists and fellow fans who were on their way to turning pro. I started writing for magazines about comics, ranging from doing interviews for Fantagraphics’ “Amazing Heroes” to writing for the late Mark Gruenwald’s “Omniverse.” In the 1980s I became a comics pro myself, with staff jobs at Marvel and becoming a principal writer for Marvel and DC’s encyclopedias of their fictional universes, “The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe” and “Who’s Who in the DC Universe.” In the 1990s I turned to writing and co-writing books about comics, primarily Marvel, for publishing companies such as Abrams and DK. By the early 2000s I was writing a long running online blog, “Comics in Context.” I helped make a documentary about comics, “Sex, Lies and Superheroes,” and appeared as a talking head in others. You can see two of them on Disney +: “Marvel: From Pulp to Pop” and “Marvel: Behind the Mask.” Go to Amazon and look me up and you’ll see my many books listed.

Now I am semi-retired in my 70s, and the time has come for me to start a new weekly column about comics. This Substack column will in part be a memoir of my life reading, studying, critiquing, and working in comics. I am going to go back in time and tell you about the first comic books that I read, the first superhero stories that I saw, the first DC superhero comic that I read, and the first Marvel comic book that made an impression on me. I will explain why these comics attracted me, and how they still hold up for me after over half a century.

Beyond that, I will re-examine comics that made great impressions on me over the course of my life. Some of these comics will be familiar to many of you, but others may be relatively obscure.

In the 21st century comics have become increasingly recognized as a serious artform worthy of study. But the emphasis has tended to be on graphic novels that clearly have literary aspirations, dealing in autobiography or political issues or other conventionally serious subjects. The thesis of this column is that comics have had a long and rich history. Moreover, I believe that “mainstream” genre comics, including superhero comics, can serve as vehicles of personal expression.

I have an academic background, and two areas of criticism have shaped my own approach to analyzing comics stories. One is mythic literary criticism, which I discovered in the works of Northrop Frye when I was in college. Frye illuminated the ” mythological patterns that underlay works of literature, even in popular fiction.

Second, when I started college in 1969, and began my interest in cinema history, a revolution had been taking place in film criticism. A new generation of film critics and scholars were reevaluating Hollywood genre films, recognizing that a John Ford Western or an Alfred Hitchcock thriller could be complex, sophisticated and even profound works of art. I am applying this same approach to comics.

In writing this column I want to identify what I consider to be classic comics stories, especially from Marvel and DC, stories that stand the test of time. I want to try to analyze what makes them work as storytelling craft, what points of view they may convey, and how they fit into the companies’ grand fictional universes. I want to identify who were the important writers and artists who created these works, and why they are important.

But although I will be ranging over more than a hundred years of comics history, I will also from time to time cover the present day. I believe that in the 21st century the main creative energy in the superhero genre is in the movies and television series derived from the comics. So I intend to write about this year’s new Marvel movies — “Captain America: Brave New World,” “Thunderbolts*,” and “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” as well as James Gunn’s highly anticipated “Superman.” It’s the success of superhero films, many of them blockbusters, in the 21st century that has made the superhero genre a bigger part of popular culture than ever before. It used to be when I was growing up that no one I knew knew who Iron Man or Wolverine were.Now everyone knows! Now I even hear references to them in late night talk show monologues!

Occasionally I may delve into other areas of cartoon art besides comic books: comic strips, animation, editorial cartoons, even single panel gag cartoons. I may even look at other media when they deal with comics. For example, this fall the Metropolitan Opera’s new season will open with a new opera based on Michael Chabon’s novel about the early days of the comics business, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.” When I was growing up, I would never Ave imagines that interest in comics would become so mainstream that the Met would stage an opera about them, but here it is and I am going!

I hope that readers will subscribe to this Substack column. Every week I will publish a new essay here that will be free to all readers.

But I also hope that this column will provide me with a source of income now in my senior years. For years I wrote a blog, “Comics in Context,” for free. For years I contributed articles and did interviews for publications about comics for little or no money, because the editors insisted they couldn’t pay much or anything. Enough! As the Joker wisely observes in Christopher Nolan’s great superhero film “The Dark Knight,” “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” If I put effort into writing a weekly column, I hope that I can get some compensation for it to supplement my limited income.

So I am offering paid subscriptions as well, with initial rates of $8 a month or $80 a year, which is what Substack suggests. $8 isn’t much more than a single comic book costs nowadays! Paid subscribers will be able to participate in the column’s commentary section. I also have plans to start republishing my old “Comics in Context” columns with updates for paid subscribers.

Substack also allows for a tier of “Founding Members.” These subscribers would pay $240 per year. I am hoping to provide special benefits for this higher tier. For example, I am considering monthly Zoom sessions for Founding members, once I figure out how to do this. (I’m not good at technology and will have to find someone to help me set this up.) I would also like to do interviews with some of my many friends and acquaintances in the comics business as we go along.

So I hope that many of you come along for the ride as I embark on what I hope to be the equivalent of a book on comics that I will spend my 70s writing. Our first stop in next week’s column: how I first started reading comics in the 1950s

subscribe to his substack here

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