User:Curly Turkey/Comic book

American comic books
Generally considered to be the first American comic book, Famous Funnies was first released in 1934. It contained reprints of comic strips.

Golden Age
The comic book form took on mass culture status after the 1938 publication of Action Comics #1, a popular hit which featured the debut of Superman.

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Following the end of War World II, the popularity of superheroes greatly diminished, while the comic book industry itself expanded. A few standard characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman continued to sell, but superheroes as a genre became relegated to the status of a subgenre of adventure comics, a genre which itself was not amongst the popular genres at the time. Between 1950 and 1952 all attempts at publishing new superhero somic books were in vain.

Dell's comic books accounted for a third of all North American sales in the early 1950s. Its 90 titles averaged a circulation of 800,000 copies each issue, with [[Walt Disney's Comics and Stories peaking with a circulation of three million in 1953. Eleven of the top 25 best-selling comic books at the time were Dell titles.  Out of forty publishers active in 1954, Dell, Atlas (Marvel), DC and Archie were the major players sales-wise.  By this time, former big-time players Fawcett and Fiction house had ceased publishing.

Circulation peaked out in 1952, when 3161 issues of various comics were published with total circulation at about one billion. After 1952, the number of indivual releases dropped every year for the rest of the decade, with the biggest losses coming in 1955–56. These rapid losses followed the introduction of laws that curbed the sales of comic books that were seen as being harmful to children, as well as a crackdown on press wholesalers by the U.S. Senate, which freed retailers from tie-ins. While there was only a 9% drop in the number of releases between 1952 and 1953, circulation plummeted by an estimated 30–40%. The cause of the decrease is not entirely certain. Television had come to provide competition with comic books, or the rise of conservative values that came with the election of Dwight Eisenhower. The Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring body founded to curb juvenile delinquency believed to be influenced by crime and horror comics, has been targeted as the culprit, though sales had begun to drop the year before it was founded. The major publishers were largely unaffected by the drop, but smaller publishers like EC (the prime target of the CCA) were wiped out. By the 1960s, output stabilized at about 1500 releases per year.

The dominant comic book genres of the post-CCA 1950s were funny animals, humor, romance, television properties and Westerns. Detective, fantasy, teen and war comics were also popular, while adventure, science fiction, superheroes and comic strip reprints were in decline, with Famous Funnies seeing its last issue in 1955.

Silver Age
DC started a revival in superhero comics in 1956 with the October 1956 revival of The Flash in Showcase #4. Many comics historians peg this as the beginning of the Silver Age of American comic books, although Marvel had started reviving some of its old superheroes as early as 1954. The new Flash is taken symbolically as the beginning of a new era, although his success was not immediate. It took two years for the Flash to receive his own title, and Showcase itself was only a bimonthly title, though one that was to introduce a large number of enduring characters. By 1959, the slowly building superhero revival had become clear to DC's competitors. Archie jumped on board that year, and Charlton joined the bandwagon in 1960.

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While the creators of comics had been given credit in comic books' early days, this had all but vanished throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Comic books were produced by comic book companies rather than individual creators (EC being a notable exception, a company that not only credited its creative teams, but also featured creators' biographies). Even comic books by revered and collectable artists like Carl Barks were not known by their creators' names—Disney comics like Barks' were signed "Walt Disney". In the 1960s, DC, and then Marvel, began including writer and artist credits on the comics they published.

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Sex, drugs and rock 'n roll were featured as the anti-authoritarian underground comix saw made waves in 1968 following the publication of Robert Crumb's irregularly-published Zap Comix. Frank Stack had published The Adventures of Jesus as far back as 1962, and there had been a trickle of such publications until Crumb's success. What had started as a self-publishing scene soon grew into a minor industry, with Print Mint, Kitchen Sink, Last Gasp and Apex Novelties among the more well-known publishers. These comix were often extremely graphic, and largely distributed in head shops that flourished in the countercultural era.

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Legal issues and paper shortages led to a decline in underground comix output from its 1972 peak. The death knell was sounded in 1974, when the passage of anti-paraphernalia laws led to the closing of most head shops, which throttled underground comix' distribution. Its readership also dried up as the hippie movement itself petered out around the mid-1970s.