Past Superhero Trends That Now Look Nuts

Meanwhile, Captain America's creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby bailed the superhero genre altogether and found success in an unexpected place: teen romance comics. Their Young Romance series immediately sold a million copies, so they started churning out spin-offs like Young Love and the slightly creepy-sounding Young Brides. Within seven years, romance comics sold a combined one billion copies.

Prize GroupWe had no idea 16 and Pregnant was a comic book adaptation.

Comics were playing the role TV does today, in that a lot of it was trash, but you also had more sophisticated (and even progressive) stuff like EC Comics' sci-fi and satire series. And although no one gave a shit about superheroes anymore, readers could still get their dose of mindless action through western and war comics. The greater diversity in topics also brought more diversity in readers: at various points, there were more women reading comics than men. So what happened? Congress butted in and ruined everything.

The moral panic against horror and crime comics convinced America that these stories were turning kids into horny little commies, and resulted in the creation of a self-censoring organism, the Comics Code Authority. Since the most popular genres were now dead, the industry decided to give Superman's pals another shot and never looked back. Now, this isn't to say that superhero comics didn't get weird over the years ...

Sometimes, superheroes returned the favor and visited celebs in real life. Superman guest-starred in I Love Lucy while Adam West's Batman hosted an episode of Milton Berle's Hollywood Palace. It's hard to imagine Robert Downey Jr. doing a corny musical number as Iron Man on a variety show, then staying in character for the interviews (unless he has a relapse and this is all unprompted).

So why did the comics/celebrities love affair end? Part of it is that comics simply don't sell like they used to, so publishers don't have as many Hollywood agents calling their offices (or it's just to ask the number of a movie studio). But this is also part of a larger trend ...

There was a sense that the Superman telling kids "Let's rap!" in the ads and subscription slips was the same character from the stories. Decades before Deadpool, Green Lantern villain Black Hand would constantly talk to the reader and explain his plans, sometimes aided by an easel he pulled out of nowhere. He couldn't do that today, because Green Lantern is a "serious" comic and such silliness would be frowned up. Instead, they made him a necrophiliac. (Good thing he never went up against Bowtie-Wearing-Skull Man.)

DC Comics"Step one: Break into the morgue ..."

It was pretty common for comics creators to show up in their own stories, sometimes as quick cameos and sometimes as the villain of a two-part story. Didn't silly stuff like that wreck the readers' suspension of disbelief? Not really, and that speaks to the fact that the entire way we interact with comics has changed on a deep level. People used to read Superman or Batman like you'd read a newspaper's comics page -- it was, literally, disposable entertainment. Most copies of Action Comics #1 probably ended up in the trash, or somewhere even nastier, considering comics have always been read in the toilet.

But as comics fandom began to emerge, readers started caring more about stuff like "storylines" or "a bare minimum of character consistency." And, as they became more invested in the stories themselves (rather than the simple act of being entertained by them), the now older comic book fans stopped accepting elements that broke the inner logic of a world where, uh, people can fly and shoot fire from their eyes. We can't put it better than writer Grant Morrison, who said:

a comic book character, so he'd know." width="350" height="189" class="lazy" data-src="https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/2/4/4/732244_v2.jpg" />Random HouseAnd he's also technically a comic book character, so he'd know.

All of that changed thanks to one man: a schoolteacher/convention organizer (read: filthy mega-nerd) named Phil Seuling.

In the early '70s, just as the newsstand comics market was starting to decline, Seuling walked up to the major publishers and offered them a better deal: selling comics directly to the fans! And by "directly to the fans," of course, he meant to himself, and then he'd sell them to specialized stores, and the stores would sell them to the fans. The important part was that, in exchange for getting a special price, Seuling would take the comics on a non-returnable basis, which his clients didn't mind that much -- what newsvendors considered unsellable trash, the comics stores called "the back issue section."

The publishers embraced this new "direct market" model, which was a big win for everyone. And by "everyone," once again, we mean for Seuling. He ended up with a massive monopoly on comics distribution just for being the guy who came up with the idea ... until a lawsuit forced him to share some of the pie with smaller distributors. The problem is that one of those tiny upstarts, Diamond Comics, helped itself to most of that pie. In the '90s, Marvel tried to compete with Diamond and distribute their own comics, but they failed so spectacularly that they crashed the entire distribution business. The only survivor was Diamond, which now controls everything, and is able to get away with some pretty gross shit as a consequence.

But what about digital distributors? Now that Diamond is quarantining all of their orders, isn't it digital comics' time to shine? Sure, but that market is also cornered by one company: ComiXology, which is owned by Amazon. In short, we've gone from monopoly to monopoly to monopoly ever since one guy had the bright idea to ditch newsstands. Hey, maybe the time is right to explore the "comics in hospitals" option again?

So how many have they published after 2003? Exactly zero. They've even stopped reprinting the older ones, despite the creators themselves requesting it. The prevailing rumor is that the companies had a falling out when Marvel EiC Joe Quesada compared running DC to "being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can't get it up," and DC President Paul Levitz somehow took issue with that. But Levitz is long gone by now while Quesada seems to have less influence at Marvel, yet the crossover embargo continues. And it's definitely not from lack of enthusiasm from the creators themselves: back in 2010, Green Lantern writer Geoff Johns and Iron Man writer Matt Fraction improvised a crossover plot on Twitter.

The writers for Justice League and Avengers publicly geeked out about a team up in 2018. More recently, numerous comics pros used their quarantine time to beg the companies for new crossovers under the #PleaseMarvelDC hashtag.

But, like most Twitter activism, this has resulted in nothing. From the looks of it, the reasons are bigger and more complex than Superman's giant limp dong. As Marvel's Senior VP of Publishing Tom Brevoort admits, the fact that both publishers are now owned by corporate giants (Disney and AT&T/Warner Bros.) complicates things legally and logistically. Not only is there a mess of paperwork involved in these things, but you have to justify the existence of an expensive comic that can likely never be adapted into other media -- and if so, what's the point of it existing?

Basically, Disney and WB don't understand why their little IP farms would go through so much trouble just to let their writers geek out with each other like they did in the '70s-'90s. (The biggest intercompany crossover to date, 1996's DC vs. Marvel, was one big fanboy wet dream that happened entirely because the top editors were best friends.) Also, why bother going to another company when you can just use the ones controlled by the same corporate giant? For DC, that means a shitload of Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera crossovers, from nonsensical ones like Joker/Daffy Duck to somehow even more nonsensical ones like Suicide Squad/Banana Splits.

DC Comics

DC ComicsThese are made for executives that like to yell "Synergy!" and no one else.

Will we ever see a DC/Marvel crossover again? Well, a recent Watchmen sequel, of all things, teased one for 2030 (along with like fifty other future events), but there's no evidence that it's anything more than wishful thinking. That, or they're just assuming all media companies will be owned by Disney or Apple by then.

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com.

Top Image: DC Comics, Marvel Comics