“The comics industry-- the commercial comics industry," says Mr. X, "is dying. You're seeing its last legs. Comics have become like poetry; those of us to do them, frankly, are the ones most interested. I think at this rate we may only have a few more years."

Mr. X is not a crackpot, nor a fanboy who chooses to be cranky about his hobby now that he's gotten older and doesn’t like the latest offerings. Rather, Mr. X is an industry insider who's been around long enough to know lingering death when he sees it. And it’s a death that could have been avoided, and may still be: “the fault of the industry is that it has married itself to the direct market and has utterly forgotten how many consumers are out there and what it has to compete with. And the direct market will continue to shrink until it is gone."

But why have I begun this way? I'm here this week to talk about a trade paperback that I just read, The Greatest Stories of the 1950s. So why do I begin here, at the edge of the millennium, half a century after the earliest material in this work? Just to illustrate, I suppose, just to show how far we've come and gone.

Long before direct market comic book stores, readers bought comics the way most of us did when we bought our first: at the newsstand. In his introduction, Joe Kubert says that there were something like twenty-three decently sized publishers of mass market comic books in the 1950s, and this was a time when comics for under vicious attack from the United States Congress. For a moment, our comics industry looked less like the one we know today, and more like that of Japan. There were mass-market comic books about almost every conceivable topic, from cowboys to romance, from super-heroes to children's stories.

I keep punching the importance of the mass market, the newsstand, because as I read through the selections in this trade paperback and think about the other comics of 1950s, one thing that keeps coming back to me is their accessibility to somebody who has never picked up a comic book before, and may now be only picking one up because they have some money left over after buying the newspaper. Very rarely was a story continued over more than one issue. Comics may have had character arcs -- if any character changed at all -- and any individual story was completely self-contained. Recognize it? It's the sitcom model.

But we like our sophisticated comics, and we confuse sophistication with length. Increasingly sophisticated stories have led us toward longer and longer continued stories and increasingly self-referential narratives that require almost extreme comics literacy. And to drive sales, publishers have relied more and more on continued narratives that stretch between different titles, titles both available at the newsstand and available only at the direct market.

In DC’s The Greatest 1950s Ever Told, I read 300 pages of comic stories. Some of them are god-awful. Some of them are fairly gripping; all of them could be read with absolutely no awareness of the industry whatsoever.

There are some gems here: I love the two Batman stories, both of which feature ridiculous giant props. In one, Batman and Robin bust into a crooked industrialist’s lair and discover that he's such a pool fan that he has a giant-sized pool table in his gymnasium-sized foyer, complete with seven-foot-tall billiard balls. In another, for some reason, Two-Face straps Batman and Robin to a giant coin and mechanically flips it towards a platform of giant spikes. (Luckily, Batman and Robin manage to use the tiny radios on their utility belts to create magnetic repulsors, I think, and affect the way the coin will flip. Or something.)

There’s the beefy, fatherly 1950s Superman, he of the barrel chest and squinky eyes. (Here's a question for comics fans: when did heroes get abs?)

There's a grim, gritty sergeant rock story that's full of World War II machismo and a very strange sort of suicidal, patriotic nihilism.

A lot of these stories, like Japan's manga today, were written to be cheap entertainment, bought, read, and tossed away. If a story were transcendent, it often as not happened by luck. But that very sense of desperation leads to a sort of zany adventurousness in the stories sampled here.

I'm not suggesting that a return to the 1950s would save the comics industry. This is certainly a different time. This industry does, in fact, have to compete with other forms of entertainment, such as computer games and cable TV. But I am suggesting that if the industry wants to have anything to look forward to, it may do well to look back.