It was a "slaughter"
September 19 - OK, I confess. It's deep into September 21st as I begin this "September 19" entry. What can I say? The best laid plans...are seldom mine. For me, this week has been an exhausting blur of caricature gigs, Fallfire prep, and LOTS of extra time spent at the dread "real" job. Oh, and I tried to draw some stuff amongst all of that. I've sort of been running myself ragged, and something had to give, I guess. I'm sorry that it was The WOMP-Blog, but, well, I just didn't have the "oomph." Now, with a day off from everything except my own projects, I hope to catch up. So, let's get started! Where was I? Oh, yes; I was going to talk about the changing face(s) of Crusty Bunker. Instead, let's first start with a little behind the scenes info. Just before Crusty burst onto the scene, the balance of power in comics had shifted. After decades of domination, DC was faltering while Marvel was rising. In part, this was due to style differences between the two publishers, but, surprisingly, much of that was due to a business gamble rather than an artistic one. Marvel Comics' founder, Martin Goodman, believed that his company, with Stan Lee's guidance, was ready to outsell DC if they could only find a way to break DC's stranglehold on the serpentine wholesaler and distribution network. What he did, then, was trick DC Comics into taking themselves out of the picture! First, with Marvel's 1971 October and November cover-dated comics, Mr. Goodman raised the number of pages in most titles by seventy-five percent (from 32 pages to 48), and raised the price by seventy-five percent as well (from 15 cents to 25 cents). Not to be out-done, DC quickly followed suit by doubling their page counts (from 32 pages to a voluminous 64 pages) for the same price as Marvel's 48-pagers (just a quarter). "Ha ha," they must have thought, "now we will crush puny Marvel once and for all with our massive, double-size dreadnoughts!" But, within a month, sneaky Mr. Goodman scaled back Marvel page counts to 32 (like they'd been before), but only reduced the cover price to 20 cents, which was still twenty-five percent higher than two months before. Marvel could then give those greedy wholesalers fifty percent off the cover price of their comics, while DC could only offer the standard forty percent discount! Mr. Goodman knew his competitors' weaknesses well, but I don't think that even he could have foreseen how successful this guerrilla tactic would prove to be. Not only did DC have to scramble to fill their 64 page monsters with lame reprinted material from the past, but they had to take chances on lots of untested young creators for their future. Worse, DC, to try to save money, had already pre-purchased a year's supply of paper for their titles (undoubtedly also meant to prevent Marvel from getting it). For an entire, agonizing year, DC slogged along with the bloated format, while the more hip, and much cheaper, Marvel comics flew off the racks. It was, as DC's Head Honcho, Carmine Infantino, put it, a "slaughter." By 1972, after almost forty years of domination, DC was looking for some way to just break even. Yep, the stage was set for the "birth" of Crusty Bunker. More in the "September 20" entry. Now, here's the 19th's "Crusty Bunker" of The Day - Berni Wrightson!