Comics Scene Magazine

Overview

Comics Scene was an American magazine about comics and their adaptations into film and television, published by the Starlog Group in New York. It appeared in three volumes: eleven issues from January 1982 to September 1983; a second, long-running volume of 56 issues from 1987 to early 1996; and a brief third volume, Comics Scene 2000, of three issues in 2000. As a sister magazine to Starlog and Fangoria, it brought the same fan-professional coverage to comics at exactly the moment when comic book properties were becoming central to Hollywood.

The Starlog Group

Comics Scene was issued by the Starlog Group, the New York publishing company built around Starlog, the science fiction media magazine founded in 1976, and Fangoria, its horror counterpart. The group's formula — enthusiastic coverage of film and television production, interviews with creators, and behind-the-scenes reporting for a newsstand audience — was applied across genres. A comics title was a natural extension, since the group's readers already followed the intersection of comics, film and television.

The First Volume, 1982–1983

The first Comics Scene ran for eleven issues, from January 1982 to September 1983. Its premiere issue's cover story, "Building the Marvel Empire", featured interviews with Stan Lee and with Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter — a statement of intent that the magazine would cover the comics industry as an industry, with its executives and business strategies, alongside the creative work. The early 1980s were a transitional period for American comics, with the direct market of comic shops reshaping distribution, and Comics Scene documented it for a general newsstand readership.

Newsstand Reach

Unlike fanzines and trade papers sold through comic shops, Comics Scene was distributed through the Starlog Group's newsstand channels, reaching drugstores and grocery stores. That placement mattered: it put serious comics coverage in front of casual readers and film fans who never entered a comic shop, at a time when the medium's audience was broadening beyond its hobbyist core.

The Second Volume, 1987–1996

After a four-year gap, Comics Scene returned in 1987 with a second volume that ran for 56 issues, first bimonthly and later monthly, until early 1996. The relaunch coincided with the modern era of comic book cinema, beginning with the approach of the 1989 Batman film and continuing through the superhero boom of the 1990s. The magazine's focus — adaptations of comics into film and television, together with coverage of the comics themselves — was perfectly aligned with the decade's entertainment story.

Coverage and Approach

Comics Scene covered production of films and series based on comics, interviewed writers and artists, and reported on the comics industry itself. Its dual beat was its distinction: it treated the comic book and its screen adaptation as one continuing story. Readers who followed a character from the printed page to the screen had, in Comics Scene, a magazine organized around exactly that journey.

Comics Scene 2000

In 2000 the title returned briefly as Comics Scene 2000, a third volume of three bimonthly issues. The revival tested whether the concept still had a market as entertainment coverage migrated to the internet; it did not continue, and the 2000 issues closed the magazine's history.

Relationship to Starlog and Fangoria

Within the Starlog Group, Comics Scene was the junior partner to two famous titles — Starlog defined science fiction media coverage from 1976, and Fangoria became the definitive horror film magazine — but it shared their production values, contributors and newsstand footprint. The group's magazines cross-promoted one another and shared a readership culture that treated genre entertainment as worthy of serious reporting.

Legacy

Comics Scene's three volumes span the period in which comics moved from a niche hobby to the foundation of the film industry's biggest franchises. Its interviews and production reports are now primary sources for that transition, and its "Building the Marvel Empire" first issue reads, in retrospect, as a dispatch from the beginning of an era that has since consumed popular culture.

Comics Scene's three volumes align neatly with the modern history of comics in America. The first volume (eleven issues, January 1982 to September 1983) appeared as the direct market was professionalizing comics retailing, and its premiere cover story — "Building the Marvel Empire", with Stan Lee and Jim Shooter interviewed — announced that the magazine would treat comics as an industry with strategies and executives, not only as stories. The four-year gap before the second volume is itself evidence: the mid-1980s newsstand could not yet sustain the title. The second volume's 56 issues (1987 to early 1996) rode the transformation the magazine had anticipated — the Batman-led superhero cinema era — with a dual beat, comics and their adaptations, that no competitor matched so exactly, distributed not through comic shops but through the Starlog Group's drugstore and grocery channels to the general audience the films were creating. The third volume, Comics Scene 2000, arrived just as the internet was absorbing entertainment journalism whole; its three issues closed a title whose premise — that the journey of a character from page to screen was the central entertainment story — has since become the ordinary assumption of popular culture coverage.

The Starlog Group context explains the magazine's production character. Starlog had proven from 1976 that fans would buy professionally produced coverage of genre entertainment — set visits, effects reporting, creator interviews — and Fangoria had extended the formula to horror from 1979. Comics Scene was the group's application of the same apparatus to the comics-film frontier, with the same glossy production and the same newsstand network that put Starlog titles in drugstores and supermarkets nationwide. The arrangement gave comics coverage a physical presence in American retail that the comic-shop press could not achieve, which mattered in 1982 and mattered more in 1989, when the Batman film made the magazine's dual subject the center of popular entertainment. Its files accordingly record the adaptation business from inside the fan-professional culture that first took it seriously.

The magazine's interviews are its most durable deposit. "Building the Marvel Empire" in the first issue fixed Stan Lee and Jim Shooter on the record at a moment of industry transition, and the second volume's production coverage preserved the working methods of the early superhero cinema in the participants' own words. Entertainment journalism of the fan-professional kind ages into primary evidence faster than almost any other genre, and Comics Scene's files — across three volumes and two decades — are now consulted on exactly that basis.

The magazine's distribution through drugstores and grocery stores, rather than through the direct market's comic shops, gave its coverage a civic function the hobby press could not perform: it explained the comics industry to the general audience the industry was courting, in the places that audience already shopped. When the superhero film became the dominant popular entertainment of the following century, the readership Comics Scene had been training for twenty years was already in place.

Three volumes across eighteen years is an unusual shape for a magazine's life, and it maps exactly onto the stop-start history of comics' conquest of the screen that the magazine existed to chronicle.

Directory Facts

Comics Scene Magazine was published by the Starlog Group in New York, New York, United States, in three volumes: 1982–1983 (11 issues), 1987–1996 (56 issues) and 2000 (3 issues, as Comics Scene 2000). The magazine is defunct.