In The Adventures of Superman #583, Superman happens upon the corpse of Batman nailed to the walls of the Gotham City Police Department. He solemnly buries his fellow crime fighter and flies away only to soon return when he hears a newly resurrected Batman claw his way out of the fresh grave.
Superman learns that the Joker, newly imbued with godlike powers, has been continually summoning an endless army of zombie clowns to battle the Caped Crusader to his death, only to bring him back to life to repeat the same battle over again night after night.
I’m using this plot point in a nearly 23-year-old comic as a sort of device to set up the overall point of this article. And that is to say, the film studios behind the Marvel and DC films have fallen into a rut they should have seen coming. It’s a similar series of mistakes that led to the crash of the comic book industry in the ’90s. But I guess this is a battle we’ll keep waging forever.
As we approached the 1990s, the value of comics that might one day prove collectable became a major point of speculation that drove consumer habits. And the industry followed suit. Rare variant covers and newly printed first issues became all the rage, and publishers were pumping them out in record numbers.
It became clear that publishers could boost sales by simply rebooting a series and starting over with a “special” first issue of a popular title. Similarly, massive “event” comics that shook the landscape of a series became prevalent. This was seen with DC’s successful attempt to boost sagging sales by killing off Superman.
At the time of the “Death of Superman” story arc, there were four separate comic series dedicated to the Kryptonian. After his brief death, Superman was temporarily replaced with four separate variations of the character. This is another example of a popular industry trend at the time. Before the digital marketplace took over, shelf space was a valuable commodity. So big companies would try to take up as much space as possible with their flagship titles in order to edge out the little guys and main competition. It was more an effort to take up space than to contribute to any storytelling effort.
All these factors combined led to convoluted reboots, confounding timelines, and an oversaturation of the market that resulted in a major crash of the comic book industry in the later ’90s. Flash forward to the modern day and, well, does this all sound really familiar?
DC’s The Flash now holds the record as the biggest bomb in recent comic book movie history. I’m talking about losses of around $200 million. Meanwhile, Marvel’s recent finale of the Secret Invasion series on Disney+ has garnered the lowest reviews in the history of the MCU. To me, this feels like history repeating itself.
Starting with the recent failure of The Flash, I acknowledge that the project was severely damaged: Having a complete maniac serve in not one, but two leading roles of your big summer blockbuster is going to affect ticket sales. But also the DC films continue to try to make every film an “event” without building up to it in any justifiable way. They killed Superman in his second appearance. Hell, they resurrected Michael Keaton’s Batman just to kill him multiple times in The Flash. It’s all sound and [Nick] fury, signifying nothing.
Marvel and the MCU were definitely much more measured in building their cinematic universe, but they’ve fallen into the trap of giving audiences too much at the expense of quality. Oh, and at the expense of the workers’ rights of special effects artists.
The introduction of the multiverse into the main MCU storylines was a bold move, but now it just feels like a way to have an endless series of variant characters that serve no purpose other than to appear as random cameos, get killed off, and spur more media coverage.
What led up to the big comic book boom in the early ’90s was an incredible creative span that established the medium as a mainstream respectable art form. We had Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Frank Miller’s overall output before he lost the plot. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. In 1992, Maus became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 2010, Watchmen became the only graphic novel named to Time’s list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
I say all this because I respect and love the art of comics. And I think we’ve reached a point in filmmaking where we can capture the grandeur and beauty of these stories. But, as much as possible, we can’t let business lead to all the same mistakes over again.
