Lower Decks

Superheroes have a big problem, and it has nothing to do with archnemeses. While they’ve gotten better and better at attracting large audiences at the movies, they’re growing increasingly irrelevant in their home medium, comic books. The readership bubble popped in the 1990s, and these days, the format has been hijacked both in terms of popularity and young readers by manga. Will fans still be able to find Batman and Iron Man in the pages of a series in thirty years, when comics hit their mere century mark?

Superhero comics are among the biggest forums around in terms of generating fans. If you read Marvel, you know why it’s possible to trace most character arcs back to how they originally began, or why at DC, the names Hal Jordan and Barry Allen, even though introduced more than a few generations ago now, will always produce more interest than any that have tried to follow in their legacies. Like sports teams, comic books have developed a certain aura of loyalty, and while the past thirty years have done a fair amount of work updating the original appeal of almost every basic tenet of the medium, it’s still easy to distinguish between what’s popular now with what is considered cherished by fans, who have become almost as well known as collectors as readers. The first appearance of any vintage character will cost thousands of dollars to acquire, and the worth of a new comic increases almost exclusively with variant covers, limited stock, and the quality of condition, none of which has anything to do with the value of the actual experience inside the book.

The problem is, while there’s a large pool of fans now, they’re getting older. Continued efforts at revamping the appeal and simplifying decades of adventures have been going on for so long, those stories have generated their own successors. Frank Miller’s vision of an aged Batman and Alan Moore’s critical examination of superhero legacy, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, respectively, are so ingrained in the culture that they’re revered and endlessly imitated so blatantly that sometimes it seems as if their impact has been lost, their greater meaning. Creators were making superheroes grow up long before they came along, but with that final push comic books began to grow so grim, a backlash came within the industry itself, the adventures such a serious pursuit that an entire company was born from a mass rebellion that forever altered the landscape, diluting it and forming a harbinger of the eventual fate for pop culture in general. It became so easy to take everything for granted that everyone eventually stopped trying to share experiences and made every interest a niche interest, unless you went to the movies, because that’s the last place to go with only a limited, constantly cycling selection, and unless theaters are one day universally shuttered, will remain the last bastion.

But to comics, the problem is pretty simple. People don’t understand what’s going on, and it’s that basic ignorance that will either doom the medium or keep it stuck in purgatory, where it’s fallen since the last time everyone cared when, hey, Superman died. Since then, fans have glommed onto whatever feels comfortable, and more often than not, it’s been what feels familiar, whether devotion to one name creator (the increasingly backward-looking Moore, the cults of Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis, who deserve Tom Cruise’s derided term glib) or one party line (a DC fanatic or Marvel zombie, or whatever independent venue is kewl at the moment). It’s never about the quality. Quality is something to talk about, but never really appreciate, not anymore (actually, that’s a plague that extends beyond comics, a problem the twentieth century created), because it threatens our appreciation of the past, our cherished memories.

It’s not that young readers can’t find anything worth having a look at, it’s just that they’re growing up in a world that treats the present as immediately inferior to a past that grows more and more inconsequential to them. We always crave firsthand experience, not something we’re told we should love from some distant past. If trade paperbacks of comics are easy to find in a bookstore these days, they’re almost too late. Who will care except those who already know what’s inside them?

You will hear constant complaints about the latest crossover event, the one that demands wider attention than over the one or two characters a fan may be interested in; one company will successfully spin its importance while the other will try and let the book speak for itself, and the result will be obvious before you even known which one is more popular, the sales all but already tallied. Who’s buying? Who cares? In comics as a medium were to die tomorrow, would anyone even care in thirty years? That Superman will be around to mark a century of existence is a foregone conclusion. Someone will do something to mark the occasion. Will it matter how his creators originally envisioned him, or where? Regardless of whether or not their interests are respected on the whole, fans who care whether or not his costume is dated will still be around, and would be willing to read new exploits, but in a culture that deems graphic novels that relate more realistic stories more acceptable, can they survive much longer? Does the world need comic books?

The hard work isn’t in keeping them published but keeping them relevant. The fans will always be there, but fans alone do not sustain a medium. Simply making inconsequential surrogates for young readers isn’t the answer. If a culture doesn’t care anymore, a comic book won’t be worth more than the cost of recycling it. Finding some actual respect, that’s the key. Fans love and hate unconditionally. A reader finds only quality. If they can’t find that, then they won’t find new comics for much longer. Quality exists now, and it’s not hard to find. But if no one talks about it, it will be, and that’ll be the end of it.