the Death of Superman
and the Fall of American Superhero Comics
In the waning moments of 1989, an unwary Marvel Comics published New Mutants #87. Cover dated March 1990, the issue hit newsstands in late December or early January (comics traditionally carried an on-sale date two or three months after their actual release, to ensure a longer stay on newsstand racks). The issue carries the dubious honour of being the first historically significant comic of the new decade. It symbolises the calendar shift from the 80s to 90s — at least in the inbred jungle of American superhero comics – as accurately as the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency two years later would finally mark the end of the Reagan 80s and the beginning of the shiny, happy globalised 90s. There was something strange and new, not altogether pleasant but nonetheless exciting in the air, and this excitement was exemplified in the figure of Cable.
Cable first appears on the cover of New Mutants #87, brandishing a large pistol and staring menacingly toward the reader, the faces of the titular New Mutants hanging before him like targets in a shooting gallery. The captions read: “WATCH OUT, MUTIES!! HERE COMES THE MAN CALLED CABLE!!” The New Mutants were a team of young mutants, protégés to Marvel’s X-Men, at the time and for a long time afterwards the most popular franchise in comics. As befitting its status as a more youth-oriented spinoff, New Mutants had traditionally been a sleepier title than its parent, the action-packed, fantastically soap-operatic Uncanny X-Men: the characters were younger and less overtly sexualised, the soap-opera elements slightly less sensational, the stories traditionally quirkier. As might be expected of any well-executed spinoff, it was a consistent seller with devoted fans, but as the 90s beckoned there was little in the title’s recent performance to suggest that it would soon become such a singularly important book.
Cable’s first appearance positively dared the reader to pick up the comic: here was a hard man with a big gun, and he looked like he’d been through hell. He appeared literally from nowhere, with no explanation given of his past or origins (questions that would linger unanswered for half a decade), and without any preamble assumed command of the New Mutants. The series’s focus changed almost overnight from high-fantasy adventure (the previous half-year of the title had been spent in the mythical land of Asgard, with the New Mutants battling trolls and evil gods) and into a sequence of paramilitary Soldier of Fortune-lite action sequences, featuring hardass guest stars like Wolverine and Sabretooth. It was a significant tonal shift, to be sure, and all the more so for the fact that the credit for this shift belonged to an extremely young artist named Rob Liefeld.
Liefeld was just twenty-two years old when he became the series’s regular artist in late 1989. For the previous few years, sales for the title had drifted steadily downward, a trend compounded by series writer Louise Simonson’s focus on fantastic adventures at the expense of participation in the ongoing Earth-based soap-opera of the other X-Men titles. Liefeld’s ability to reflect the preoccupations of his age group was the tipping point in a long-building movement toward a new kind of superhero art, which valued flashy action shots and scanty plots in favour of the long-standing, somewhat staid virtues of methodical storytelling and a dedication to solid craft.
This should not be taken to imply that the superhero comics of the 1980s were in any way “great art”. Nonetheless, the average mainstream comic of the time was steeped in a level of basic attention to craft that made it, at the very least, readable and dependably competent, if usually not very original or compelling. But in the late 80s a new generation of artists rose from the ranks — kids like Rob Liefeld, as well as Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee — who partially rejected the then-traditional mode of superhero art in favour of something far more visceral. The most exciting part of a superhero comic is the splash pages, the proverbial “money shots” where big, exciting things happen, people get punched, buildings explode, that kind of thing. These moments are usually wedged between pages and pages of talking heads and establishing shots — you know, the story. Suddenly, these artists were figuring out how to maximise the percentage of splash pages in a given issue, making every page a kind of splash page through the use of extremely forced perspective, exaggerated anatomy (even by the standards of superhero comics!) and hyper-violence born from constant exposure to 80s action movies and video games.
Some fans, and the few comics critics who cared about superheroes, bewailed the fact that comics like Liefeld’s New Mutants were becoming increasingly action-oriented, to the obvious detriment of factors such as plot, character development and pacing. Cable himself, while billed as a “mystery man”, could just as easily have been labelled a cipher, a tabula rasa constructed from equal parts Dirty Harry, Remo Williams and Schwarzenegger’s Terminator — Cable was even a cyborg, with a metal arm and glowing eye. It is telling, in light of these criticisms, that Cable’s actual origin and motivations had to be cobbled together many years after his introduction, long after Liefeld had left the company. At the time the fans didn’t care, because the character caught like wildfire.
In 1991 sales of New Mutants rose so dramatically that the series was cancelled with issue #100, and relaunched the next month under the title X-Force. The new book dropped the last vestiges of the original series’s “Jr. X-Men” vibe in favour of an openly paramilitary obsession with proactive violence and retributive justice. Simonson had been dropped in favor of Fabian Nicieza, who scripted the issues from Liefeld’s plots. The first issue of X-Force sold a reported four million copies in April of 1991. These sales were buoyed by a bald-faced gimmick: the first issue came polybagged with one of five different trading cards. In order to get all five trading cards, fans needed to buy five different copies of the same issue. A remarkable number of people did just that. Due in part to Liefeld’s incompetence as a writer, the issue was almost totally unreadable.
In the early 90s, kids’ and teens’ entertainment was still fairly deracinated, tame stuff – the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, Saved by the Bell, The Little Mermaid. People were already complaining about the vulgarity of family entertainment, but it was all still fairly PG. Events as innocuous as a fart joke in a Disney movie were hopelessly risqué – whereas just a few years later, Disney’s A Bug’s Life could safely incorporate coprophilia gags. Times changed fast, and then the president got a blowjob.
Even though it doesn’t seem like that long ago, the early 90s was an entirely different world from the one we know today. On its release The Simpsons was seen as a strange, counter-cultural, anti-family perversity – The Simpsons! Is it even possible to imagine, nowadays, a more universally beloved cultural touchstone — for all intents and purposes a cornerstone of modern American society, and a symbol of American entertainment across the globe? I distinctly recall a trip to Disneyland in the spring of 1990 where I proudly wore a Simpsons shirt — it seemed like the last true frontier of taboo. It was a time when unimaginative politicians like vice-president Dan Quayle could still get away with name-checking The Waltons in an unironic fashion. People vehemently cared about things like Candace Bergan’s Murphy Brown having a baby out of wedlock – how bizarre is that to anyone born after 1990, for whom Juno is considered heart-warming family fare? Yeah, there was still schlock and there was also transgression — the 1980s was a high-water mark for gory horror films, as well as David Lynch and David Cronenberg. But it was still a remarkably kid-friendly world, with clear distinctions between “kids” media and “grown-up” media.
Things like the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the Thirteenth movies were popular with little kids precisely because they were taboo in a way that doesn’t really exist in today’s culture (plus, plainly cartoony and ghoulish in a formulaic manner that undoubtedly appealed to the young, just like Joe Camel). Those who lived through the period should know what I’m talking about: things were different, and for anyone under the age of about sixteen, access to racy or violent media was extremely curtailed. There was no 24-hour pornography machine in the living room, and mom and dad would probably think real hard before taking Jr. to see Terminator 2 (maybe even — gasp! — go see the movie themselves beforehand). The 1980s was also a time of violent action films, but they fit the milieu of the Reagan 80s quite well: sex itself was demonised, good old-fashioned violence with a heaping subtext of xenophobic vigilantism encouraged strongly. It was OK to have mega-violent blockbusters in the Cineplex, as long as the ideal of a soft, media-free morally-upright family zone was maintained. Movies like Red Dawn and Cobra and Raw Deal weren’t exactly aimed at kids, but it’s hard to imagine — in hindsight — anyone but a child getting excited about such buffoonish entertainment. Is it any wonder, then, that in this context kids would want something more than The Little Mermaid, or even the bowdlerised sublimated jingoism of G.I. Joe?
Imagine, then, being a kid in this environment. Imagine becoming hep to a form of entertainment that – for the most part – existed below the radar of most parents, and featured increasingly frank depictions of sexual titillation, extreme violence and borderline sociopathy. Is it any wonder that X-Force hit the nation’s youth like a ton of bricks? For God’s sake, it was like Marvel Comics was taking a hypodermic needle full of adrenaline and jabbing it straight into the libido of every twelve-year-old boy in America. Back when porn and sexualised media were still fairly well-guarded, it was pretty amazing to be able to pick up an issue of Uncanny X-Men and read Chris Claremont’s sexed-up stories — so steeped in S&M and fetish conventions that the creators themselves probably didn’t even realise it at that point. Special attention was paid to Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee’s X-Men babes, and of course Todd McFarlane’s ungodly pneumatic Mary Jane, as seen in Amazing Spider-Man. Kirsten Dunst’s tentative, waif-like Mary Jane in the popular films is no match for the fantastically buxom Mary Jane of the late 80s and early 90s, a figure which haunted the not-so-innocent fantasies of many pre-pubescent American boys.
Chris Claremont stands out for special consideration as perhaps the most significant creator of the 1980s. Beginning in 1975 he shepherded the X-Men franchise through its formative years, from a tertiary title resurrected from the brink of cancellation to the most successful comics franchise of its era, and arguably of any era. The series built its success on a commitment to the craft of solid soap-opera, building long-term storylines that enabled a large ensemble of characters plenty of opportunities to shine. At the beginning Wolverine had been the least popular of all the X-Men, and it was Claremont who, with the aid of artist John Byrne, created Wolverine’s enormous and enduring popularity almost from scratch. Claremont stuck with the title for sixteen years, established the state of the art for comics for an entire decade, and helped launch the careers of half-a-dozen of comics’ biggest artists — Byrne, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr., and the aforementioned Silvestri and Lee.
It was only due to the hard work of Claremont and his collaborators that Uncanny X-Men became the industry pacesetter it remains to this day. The success of X-Men spawned a few spinoffs, books like New Mutants and X-Factor, related to the parent title but not dependent on it. Claremont was smart to keep his baby fairly well removed from the pressures of the franchise: as a writer – not editor, not publisher and certainly not owner — his recourse was limited, but inasmuch as he was considered indispensable to the franchise he jealously guarded his limited control. It was feasible to keep an eye on the series when there were only three moving parts, plus the occasional miniseries. It was easier for things to hang together — for characters to maintain consistency, plotlines to make sense, and general quality to remain high — if the books resisted further expansion. Also, the more the franchise grew, the more precarious Claremont’s position became. The artists who drew the X-Men franchise became more popular, and their power over the franchise’s direction grew proportionately. (And when just a couple years later these incredibly popular artists left the company to form their own company – Image Comics – the titles suffered immediately from having become dependent on such capricious talent.)
Claremont’s X-Men were insanely popular because they were “cool” in a way that no other comic of the time could really match, save for other Marvel franchises like Spider-Man and the Punisher. Content had become increasingly extreme — still tame by today’s standards, but positively pornographic in the context of the late 80s. No one was pulling any punches in these fight scenes, and the hint of sex bubbling just below the surface gradually rose to the level of far more than a mere hint. Claremont’s genius was his understanding of the importance of the lurid as a necessary element in the appeal of mass entertainment designed for pre-teens and teens.
What exactly is “lurid”? Well, in the context of juvenile entertainment it can usually be summed up as the intimation of something just outside the grasp of the target audience. Most superhero comics are pretty juvenile by any standards, but there’s a constant stream of signifiers pointing at something under the hood – sub rosa significance hanging there like a red flag for young minds. Be it the intimation of sex, the intimation of violence, the intimation of love or the intimation of fear, the strange grand guignol world of mainstream comics hooks kids because even if the stories are usually only an inch deep, an inch is still just out of reach for those kids who get hooked young. Spider-Man and the X-Men are pretty simple mechanisms for older readers to take apart. As the average age of superhero comics readers got older and older (with more and more readers refusing to let go of their childhood obsessions), the metaphoric machinery underlining these simple morality fables was strained. This explains why later incarnations of the properties have become gradually far more elaborate and baroque in complexity – think about that the next time you wonder why Christian Bale’s Dark Knight is so damn violent and unaccountably Nietzschean compared the Adam West version. But if you’re twelve, the idea of a fantastically stylised world filled with concrete representations of all those confusing emotions and sensations which remain tantalisingly far-off in the adult world is irresistible. When you reach your twenties, there isn’t a lot in the basic concept of those types of characters that remains alien to your life experience (or, leastways, there shouldn’t be), but when you’re ten you don’t always understand a whole hell of a lot.
How awesome, then, to find a source of unbelievably, deliciously lurid adventure stories, filled with all the sex and violence and monsters in those R-rated movies you aren’t allowed to see, free (for the most part) from the hypocritical moralising of Saturday morning cartoons, depicting scantily-clad ladies of the kind you might find in those great magazines hidden under Dad’s toolbox in the garage — oh, kids today don’t know how good they have it.
The artists who rose to prominence as a function of their ability to tap into the pent-up demand for transgressive material aimed squarely at a pre-teen market became instant superstars. Todd McFarlane, unhappy with having to draw other people’s scripts, demanded his own Spider-Man title, which launched in 1990 and sold a then-unprecedented 2.5 million copies — a record that remained unbroken for a single year, with the publication of X-Force #1. Soon after that Jim Lee took the reins of the X-Men franchise, forcing Claremont off the title he had nursed for sixteen years. Marvel used the occasion to launch yet another #1, this time an adjectiveless X-Men book, the first issue of which sold seven or eight million copies (depending on your source). This book was buoyed by a different gimmick from X-Force: instead of coming with a trading card, the issue shipped with five different covers. Obviously, real X-Men fans had to own all five.
Marvel’s problem was that this first crop of superstar artists became far too powerful far too fast. In the space of two and a half years, McFarlane went from being a weird, awkwardly cartoony artist on the low-selling Incredible Hulk to being the number one commercial draw in all of comics. Now, if you worked at Marvel at the time, you may just have been able to lie to yourself as to why these comics were selling so well. You may have been able to believe that these artists were just another interchangeable element in the same old factory that had been churning out Spider-Man comics for close to thirty years. There was reason to be comforted in this assumption: in the past, periodic attempts of “superstar” artists to branch out on their own had resulted in a whole lot of not much. Marvel hadn’t lost many sales to Neal Adams’s Continuity Comics or Jack Kirby’s Captain Victory, and I doubt even the relative success of small independent companies like Pacific and Eclipse (neither of which remain in business today) affected Marvel too much. These were essentially small-press outfits that sold their comics primarily through the burgeoning direct market — that is, eschewing the dominant newsstand market of supermarkets, drug stores and gas stations in favour of dedicated distribution channels directly to comic book shops. They were small mammals who managed to survive in the shadow of large reptiles. Marvel probably worried more about losing star talent to DC, as they had lost Frank Miller in the 80s. Miller subsequently went on to arguably his career-best for DC, revamping Batman not once but twice in the pages of revisionist superhero stories The Dark Knight Returns and Year One. But as much as Miller’s post-Marvel success must have galled the company, that was part of the expected churn of industry turnover, and had been since Kirby left for DC in 1970. The turnover of creators moving between the two giants did little more than reinforce the idea that the people who made the comics were replaceable, and even that the people who made the comics should be periodically replaced.
Of course, they were wrong, and their miscalculation wasn’t just a little miscalculation, it was massive. Because when the “Image Seven” — McFarlane, Liefeld, Lee, Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino and Wilce Portacio – left the company, not only did they go into direct competition with Marvel (and DC), but they also left the company’s flagship titles in utter disarray. Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Force, Wolverine, Spider-Man and even steady mid-list mainstay Guardians of the Galaxy were all suddenly rudderless. (Marvel’s arguable flagship title Amazing Spider-Man was safe because Erik Larsen — who had followed McFarlane on the title — had recently quit Amazing for a run on the adjectiveless Spider-Man, following McFarlane’s absence. Mark Bagley had become regular penciller on Amazing with issue #351, and would remain at Marvel until 2007.)
Image’s loose anti-corporate structure was the perfect antidote to Marvel and DC’s straitened business model. Image was structured as a co-op, with the actual company split evenly between the founding members, and all creators retaining ownership of their own properties. Furthermore, all subsequent creators who chose to publish through Image — as many would do — would retain ownership of their properties as well. The advantages were obvious for any self-respecting creator who wanted to reap the potential rewards of their effort themselves. But the disadvantages were also obvious from the first, stemming from the fact that with no corporate overlords to run the show, the creators were free to do everything they possibly could to screw themselves and, eventually, one another.
X-Men was the #1 franchise in comics and the loss of the creators who had enabled its explosive growth cut the books off at the knees – but, more important in the long run was the fact that Chris Claremont had been forced off the books after the artists seized control. Without Claremont, who had very carefully controlled the direction of Marvel’s flagship franchise for almost twenty years, there was nothing left but for the eventual, inevitable metastasising. The books remained popular, but suddenly the future was full of doubt. And, perhaps more important to the company’s long-term success, the creative churn had an immediate consequence: the books were suddenly terrible.
In the midst of this churn, the early 90s was an era of almost unprecedented success for the mainstream American comics industry. Hot titles were typically selling half a million copies per month and special “event” comics such as the aforementioned X-Men and X-Force debuts were regularly selling in multiples of millions. It was a pretty heady time. And, for historical perspective, these weren’t 10-cent issues of Dell Four Color, the perennial million-selling showcase for Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge that ran from 1942 through the early 1960s. By the early 90s comics cost at least $1.25, and some series with higher production values (nice paper, offset printing) cost as much as $2. I remember, at the time, that it seemed almost criminal to charge $1.95 for a regular 32-page comic – just a year or so prior, Marvel’s and DC’s super-sized “Annuals” had cost $2, and those were three times the size of a regular issue.
The late 80s was a high-water mark for mainstream superhero comics in general, and the sudden cultural relevancy of stuff like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986-87) and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns (1986) inspired a number of people to return to the field who hadn’t bothered to think about comics since they were kids. (Last year’s top-selling Dark Knight film and this year’s Watchmen are both ultimately products of the changing attitudes of the 1980s, Hollywood having caught up twenty years after the fact.) There was a time when a comic being mentioned in Rolling Stone was cause to inspire industry-wide euphoria – and these things actually had measurable impact on sales, back when media coverage for nerd-friendly properties was slim to nonexistent.
This renewed bid for relevancy climaxed in the release of the 1989 Batman movie, which either kick-started the boom of the early 90s collectors’ market or lit the fuse for the eventual disastrous implosion thereof, depending on how generous you’re feeling. This was also the period when newspapers around the country began a saturation of local-interest stories revolving around people who had found old stacks of comics in their attic and sold them for thousands of dollars. I specifically recall an episode of The New Leave It To Beaver (a cultural touchstone of the Reagan 80s if ever there was one, a good indicator of exactly what was meant by the constant harkening back to the putrid days of yore in politics and entertainment) wherein one of the Cleaver grandkids found a near-mint copy of Fantastic Four #1 in the attic. The family subsequently received an offer of $3,000 for the issue — Gee, a whole $3,000! Pow! Zam! Comics were serious business!
Comics were cool again. Tim Burton’s Batman film succeeded in attracting new readers, finally dispelling the campy atmosphere of the 1960s television series, which had lingered in the public imagination due to constant repeats. (The camp was dispelled, that is, for everyone but newspaper headline writers, still to this day fond of those deathless “Pow! Zam!” headlines.) Batman was certifiably badass. Furthermore, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman came out of nowhere and became an overnight cause célèbre for literary stars across the world. (Despite its rapturous reception — receiving real-world plaudits from Norman Mailer and Stephen King, to name but two — Sandman was ultimately not that far removed from Batman, in that they are both the property of DC Comics and Warner Brothers.) But parallel to these momentous events, the aforementioned group of up and coming artists began racking up serious sales numbers over at Marvel, DC’s only significant competition in the American superhero comic book marketplace.
(Quick recap: Marvel owns Spider-Man, the X-Men and Iron Man; DC owns Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. This is an important distinction, because the characters’ personalities are pretty neatly tied to the companies’ corporate philosophies – which, in practice, is about as juvenile as it sounds.)
So: Despite the critical plaudits DC reaped throughout the late 80s and early 90s as a result of Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and Sandman, and despite Batman’s peaking popularity in the same period, in terms of actual comic book sales the revolution in increasingly sexualised and violent content that Marvel was riding all the way to the bank had left DC behind entirely. Batman the movie may have sold millions of tickets, but aside from a brief but measurable spike in Batman sales around the time of the film’s release, DC’s overall comics sales remained somnolent. It is not without significance that of the original seven Image founders, three of them had begun their careers as journeyman artists on obscure midlist DC titles — Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane, on Hawk & Dove, Doom Patrol and Infinity, Inc., respectively. So, not only did DC not have anything near the fanatically popular artists Marvel (and later Image) had, but they were seen — with good reason at the time — as being merely the “farm team” for major-league talent, a place where hot artists got their start before moving on to bigger and better things. DC was, for lack of a better word, staid. There was a brief period after the advent of Image in 1992 when DC moved from being the rock-solid #2 in the American industry, to a distant #3. At the time it was impossible to predict just how quickly Image’s initial market push would fall apart, so it was not inconceivable that the publisher of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman — the three most important superheroes in history – might be permanently eclipsed by the publisher of such deathless properties as Spawn, Brigade and Cybernary.
Take a look, for comparison’s sake, at the state of the industry circa summer 1991, the high-water mark of Marvel’s early 90s market dominance. Liefeld’s X-Force #1 is a catalogue of grotesqueries, cyborg super-soldiers grimacing at the reader while brandishing incredibly huge pieces of sci-fi weaponry. Women with minuscule waists and balloon-like breasts — which appear to be perfect spheres of water stapled to a department store’s small boy mannequin — appear in similarly threatening albeit absurdly statuesque positions. It’s crude in every conceivable fashion, an obvious appeal to adolescent males’ tastes through the pointed exaggeration of those elements designed most cynically to appeal to adolescent males — breasts, guns, and muscles.
By contrast, the characters and situations in an average issue of, say, Superman couldn’t be more dissimilar from Liefeld’s gruesome inhumans. Although both male and female physiques are still exaggerated, they are nonetheless exaggerated to recognisably human proportions, with recognisable anatomy and faces. Most women don’t look like, say, Angelina Jolie, but her proportions and features are nevertheless within the realm of probability. As absurd as it may seem, Angelina Jolie would have seemed homely next to the impossibly-proportioned superwomen of Marvel Comics circa 1991. (Literally impossible, as the drawings often left no room for luxuries such as spines or functioning abdomens.) Superman has always had an idealised physique, but in the early 1990s he was still no more muscular than your average quarterback — well-toned and taut, certainly, but no steroid-enhanced monstrosity. Compare that to Cable, who was regularly depicted with hips the size of another man’s torso, and a torso the size of another man entirely. He wasn’t just massively muscular, his muscles had muscles on top of his muscles.
If you were ten years old in 1991, would you have given those DC books a second look? They aren’t bad, by any means. But still — DC’s superhero books at the onset of the 1990s were the product of a corporate culture left totally flat-footed by a sudden change in the marketplace, and scrambling to catch up left them looking even worse.
In 1991 the Tim Drake Robin — the third iteration of Batman’s perennial sidekick, slightly older and more independent than either than his predecessors – was probably the closest thing DC had to a truly “hot” character, but he was still stuck in some resolutely square stories. His earliest stories saw him learning to be a ninja in France, fighting Gotham City gang wars, that kind of thing, and all under the imprimatur of his mentor. Marvel’s books were resolutely about defiance of parental authority. This was true both in the broader real-world context of the marketplace, where books like X-Force were perceived as edgy and hip next to their peers, as well as the stories themselves. X-Force were created to be a tougher, meaner version of the X-Men, proactive and aggressive instead of reactive and ideological. Although they were a spinoff from the X-Men, they fought against a parent team who didn’t approve of either their motivations or their methods. Even Spider-Man, now almost as hoary a cultural institution as Superman or Batman, is still at heart the story of a rebel, an outlaw superhero who goes against society in order to follow his inner code of right and wrong. (Certainly, it can be argued that Batman does that, too, but the means by which millionaire Bruce Wayne is able to ingratiate Batman into the good graces of Gotham City law enforcement, acting with tacit and at times even overt approval, is a far-cry from the ways in which perpetual sad-sack Peter Parker is constantly hounded by the police.)
DC superhero comics are generational sagas, with older heroes establishing mantles and traditions for younger characters to respectfully adopt in turn. Marvel comics were all about stealing dad’s car and totally trashing it. DC fans and Marvel fans — fans who are one at the expense of the other — champion their company’s respective philosophies and avatars like head coaches and quarterbacks for sports teams. Marvel perversely maintained its air of roguish menace even after they had been for many decades the dominant force in American comic books. Superman was your dad, and his adventures were written and drawn by your dad; X-Force was the cool guy who sat behind you in sophomore World History with the bitchin’ Camero who had a different girlfriend every fortnight. Nothing DC had done in over two decades had managed to shake these biases. Despite DC’s significant success in the literary high-end of the market, these biases were never more entrenched in the minds of the rank-and-file comic fan than during this period.
So, in light of this longstanding and exacerbated schism, what exactly did DC have? Well, the one real and undisputed asset it had in a crowded market – filled with flashy, new-fangled hyper-violent super-soldiers with impossibly round plastic breasts and razor-ship knives growing out of their nipples – was the characters themselves, the Crown Jewels of super-hero comics. Superman was still Superman, and Batman was still Batman, and no amount of mediocre or boring stories has ever been able to strip them of their premium, blue-chip status. To put it another way: Cable may have been the hottest character in comics back in 1991, but no one who didn’t already read comics had any idea who he was — or even Wolverine, Cyclops or Professor X. (This was a decade before the X-Men movie, even a couple years before the Saturday morning cartoon.) On the other hand, your dad knew who Superman was. Your granddad knew who Superman was.
DC had the characters that everyone knew, and along with that it had the then-fifty-five-odd-years of accumulated continuity that went with them. In addition to Superman, DC had Lois Lane and Perry White and Jimmy Olsen and Lana Lang and Lex Luthor and all that jazz — maybe the trimmings had changed a bit from, say, 1955 or 1975, but the shape remained the same. Given that, is it any wonder that DCís corporate culture had become far more conservative, static and editorially driven than even Marvel?
Marvel had become so dramatically successful because it lucked onto a crop of young artists with an intuitive feel for what would appeal to kids — some of them, as with Rob Liefeld, weren’t that far from the demographic themselves. Marvel was smart enough — or, given what happened, dumb enough — to realise that it could reap incredible rewards by essentially letting the madmen run the asylum: allowing the artists to follow their eccentricities to their logical conclusions, with all the requisite problems that entailed. No more sending shoddy anatomy and horrid foreshortening down to the Marvel Bullpen to be tweaked – that kind of sloppy shit was what the kids wanted. No more time spent building long-term plots and subplots and supporting characters – let’s just introduce a bunch of violent cyborgs covered with mysterious pouches and multicolored biker jackets, who all hate each other for unrevealed reasons that probably will never actually be revealed. It got the pulse racing in eight-to-fourteen year-olds across the country, is what it did.
DC couldn’t do that. The Superman books didn’t have a superstar creator among them, and the company’s editorial culture actively discouraged that type of star-system (writer-artist Dan Jurgens would be very briefly elevated to the status of superstar by virtue of having actually killed Superman). The “stars” at DC were the folks who had been there for years and come up through the ranks by being team players. Ironically, DC had a better record for cultivating top-shelf talent in the form of writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, but that has more to do with the fact that DC felt comfortable stretching the limits, content-wise, of what they allowed their marginal-selling tertiary books to get away with, in addition to the historical accident that they just happened to be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of a historically gifted group of up-and-coming British writers.
DC in the early 80s felt comfortable taking the chance of giving an almost-cancelled revival of 70s creature feature Swamp Thing to Alan Moore. Moore not only saved the book but totally revamped it, and in the process, gave the company an entirely new category of success — upwardly-mobile genre fiction with an intellectual pedigree. There was a market for it, which was proven by the success of Moore’s horrifying Swamp Thing, Moore and Gibbons’s sui generis deconstructionist classic Watchmen, Gaiman’s proto-goth dark fantasy Sandman, and Morrison’s dada-influenced run on Doom Patrol. (Frank Miller wasn’t British, but his Ayn Rand-influenced ultra-violent Dark Knight Returns was similarly successful and similarly enduring.) It’s worth noting that for all their blockbuster sales, Marvel at the time of their greatest successes produced nothing of any serious critical import or staying power, certainly nothing like the evergreen Watchmen or the influential Sandman. Although it’s hard to imagine they would have traded million-selling books like X-Force for positive notices in the New York Times culture pages, it’s nonetheless interesting to see just how ephemeral Marvel’s most popular books have proven to be.
All of which only reinforces the assertion that a superstar writer is a different breed from a superstar artist. A writers, even the most prima-donna “artiste” imaginable, by definition has to be a team-player, at least to some extent, or his comics never move past script stage. An artist on the other hand can exercise a disproportionate (or, as the Image founders would have said, long-overdue) influence over the finished product. A popular artist can force out the writer who had almost single-handedly defined the company’s number one title for sixteen years. A popular artist can have an entirely new series created strictly as a spotlight for his own talents. Most importantly, a popular artist can leave when he realises he could be making all that money by himself.
DC didn’t have to worry about that – and in any event, even when DC did piss off Alan Moore in the late 80s, he didn’t drop everything and immediately go into direct competition with Superman. He had no interest in producing million-selling superhero books, and was perfectly content to make his own path through prickly, difficult and creator-owned non-genre material such as the labyrinthine From Hell. (Although it must be noted, very soon after Image started Moore began producing comics for the company.) But by the early 90s Marvel’s problems were DC’s problems too, because while the advent of Image meant that the overall pie got a lot bigger, DC’s piece of the pie got smaller. The long-term mismanagement of Marvel’s star system — the mismanagement that resulted in the creation of Image – probably created just as many headaches for DC as for Marvel. Suddenly, there was a new arms race in the comics world, and DC was stuck between two nuclear-armed superpowers with only a handful of muskets and horse cavalry with which to protect its territory.
With so much attention being spent on the ongoing Marvel/Image conflict, DC was effectively ignored. In 1991 DC initiated a new numbering system for its Superman family of titles: on each cover appeared a small triangle indicating the order in which the three titles — Superman, Adventures of Superman, Action Comics and soon afterwards, Man of Steel — should be read in relation to one another. These triangles were symbolic of the company’s drastically old-fashioned approach to publishing. You could be assured that if you bought a Superman title you would receive a consistent, competent reading experience, built on the same solid soap-opera foundations that Marvel had pioneered in the 60s and perfected in the 80s with Claremont’s X-Men. And, of course, this consistency was exactly why the titles sold so poorly. Consistency was anathematic to the popularity of Image: for some odd reason, seven creators who had (more or less) produced comics on a monthly schedule for years suddenly fell into a black hole of incessant delays when left to their own devices. One of the founding books of the Image launch, Wilce Portacio’s Wetworks, didn’t even premiere until 1994, by which time personal problems had forced Portacio to abdicate his co-founder status in the company. Consistency didn’t matter – still doesn’t really matter. It was a question of mass appeal. The kids would forgive late books if the content was hot. (Until, of course, they didn’t – and when that happened retailers who had ordered books which they could have sold had they arrived six months ago received unsellable books six months late and went out of business as a result.)
Valiant, another upstart independent company founded in the early 90s, had met with great success parallel to Image by doing the exact opposite of everything Image did. The company, founded by former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, prided itself on the machine-like consistency of its titles and an overarching editorial vision. These had been the virtues of Shooter’s tenure at Marvel, a tenure during which the man had been instrumental in the success of — among others – Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men and Miller’s Daredevil. Valiant’s output was, truth be told, some of the squarest comics that had ever been published. The line was based around two obscure 60s superheroes, Magnus Robot Fighter and Solar: Man of the Atom, properties originally published by the defunct company Gold Key in the 1960s. There was hardly any pent-up demand for the return of these properties, properties that hadn’t been regularly published since the Nixon administration, and yet Shooter nevertheless managed to build his entire line around them.
A lot of effort was put into making the comics both good – by the degraded standards of the time Magnus Robot Fighter reads like Proust – and on-time. The company also just happened to be in the right place at the right time to capitalise on the growing interest in comics as collectibles. Early issues of Magnus, Solar, Rai and Harbinger (the latter two titles were two of the first to be spun-off following the early successes of Magnus and Solar) had absurdly low print runs, even by contemporary standards – the first half-dozen or so issues of each title had print runs in the low thousands. There was genuine scarcity, and furthermore the consistency of the company defied the conventional wisdom regarding the necessity of hot artists. People who read the Valiant books liked them – they could never have become hot solely by virtue of Art Nichols or David Lapham’s art (two dedicated if resolutely bland craftsmen who worked on the early Valiant launch). When the scarcity of the early issues became known a feeding frenzy in the secondary collectors’ market commenced. There was a long period in the early 90s when Harbinger #1 vied with New Mutants #87 for the title of most-wanted comic on the planet. Few people today remember Harbinger at all — it was a good-natured X-Men variant, featuring a group of misfit teen superheroes on the run from a shadowy corporation who wanted to exploit their powers. Hardly groundbreaking, but amiable enough to achieve considerable success in its time.
The moment Jim Shooter left the company, however, all the careful, methodical growth of Valiant’s first year-and-a-half was forgotten. Shooter was forced out in 1992, and Valiant aggressively pursued market saturation to put the company on par with Marvel and DC — and for a moment it succeeded, making Valiant briefly the #3 publisher in the United States. Much of this success was predicated on the promotion of million-selling “collectors’ items” like Bloodshot #1 and Turok #1 – but given that these comics weren’t rare, and that the company’s quality grew spottier the faster it expanded, it’s not hard to see why it didn’t survive the subsequent bloodbath. If there are only 10,000 copies of Harbinger #1 in existence but 50,000 people want to own the comic, you’ve got a hit on your hands. If, however, you’ve printed up 1.75 million copies of Turok #1, sold these copies to stores who’d predicted heavy sales, and are subsequently unable to sell large percentages of these orders, you’ve got a flop, and the non-returnable structure of direct-market ordering means that the retailers take the brunt of the damage for your flop.
DC’s problem was very simple: it wasn’t hot. It didn’t have anything that could remotely be considered hot in the same way Image or Marvel or even Valiant did. As I mentioned before, they had the Tim Drake Robin, and his first two mini-series were very popular – though DC went overboard on the variant editions and “collectors’ item” promotions. Even for its time, promotional gimmicks for the Robin II series were criticised by fans as excessive — multiple hologram covers for every issue, with special collector’s sets for those who purchased every copy. The character Lobo was briefly popular, but considering that the ultra-violent intergalactic bounty-hunter was conceived as a satirical response to the excesses of characters like Wolverine and Cable, his popularity was naturally (and blessedly) hamstrung. Superman and Batman may have been mired in inextricable squareness, but they were icons – in a way that no one had really realised until that moment. The idea was simple: if they could learn to capitalise on the characters in this capacity – cultural icons whose appeals reached far beyond the sales of their comics – they could maybe appeal to a broader base than those who already tuned in for the ongoing continuity, the folks who followed the numbered triangles on a weekly basis.
People paid attention when things happened to Superman. People may have been aware of Image’s founding – I remember the event made a lot of mainstream news coverage. DC had also achieved a spot of notoriety in the late 1980s by killing the second Robin, Jason Todd (Tim Drake’s predecessor), following the results of a ghoulish national telephone poll. But when DC said it was going to kill Superman, well, that was different. People didn’t know who the fuck Todd McFarlane’s Spawn was going to be, and the intra-industry politics behind the Image exodus was mainly a business story. But people knew Superman. Everyone knew Superman. People lined up around the block to buy the memorial edition of Superman #75 with the black armband. (The number is so low because the book had been “rebooted” back in the 1980s. Don’t feel too bad for tradition, however: Action Comics, the series where Superman first appeared, is still on its original monthly numbering, and up to issue #877 as of this writing.) In retaliation to the escalating stakes of the Marvel/Image/Valiant conflict, DC had dropped the hydrogen bomb, bringing a wave of fresh customers to the store who would never have been attracted by anything so mundane as Cyberforce or the X-Men. The problem was, these readers were expecting some kind of return on their investment, and were unprepared for the eventual revelation (so intuitive that it didn’t even merit articulation to anyone in the comics industry) that this was just a temporary stunt, and not really the death of one of the most beloved fictional characters in the world. He would be back within a year, by next summer at the latest.
But it wasn’t just a stunt – though, obviously, it was. The Death of Superman was structured differently to most similar stunts, such as the aforementioned gimmick behind the dramatic sales of X-Force and X-Men. Using the organisational advantages of its brand to good effect, DC was able to capitalise on the singular event with far more alacrity than Image, which was essentially composed of seven (six, once Wilce Portacio dropped out) disparate and often feuding personalities. This provided DC with a tactical advantage in a cutthroat climate: with Marvel scrambling and Image beginning to sag under the weight of sudden success (and a chronic inability to meet deadlines), there was an opening through which a third party could catch both companies flat-footed, at least for a time.
The problem was that DC wasn’t the only company that saw an opening, and in the summer of 1993 many, many other companies did as well. These companies hoped to appeal to the mass of new readers who had supposedly decamped for good on the industry’s front lawn. But who of these hypothetical new readers really wanted to insulate their garage with crates of unsold Turok, Dinosaur Hunter #1s? The runaway success of Image and Valiant had created the appearance of opportunity for a horde of interlopers from across the comics industry — companies such as Malibu, Dark Horse, Defiant (Shooter’s second post-Marvel start-up) — all of whom tried to exploit Marvel’s temporary weakness by launching brand-new superhero publishing initiatives. But readers — sensing perhaps that the winds had shifted – were already leaving in droves, and retailers, already stretched to breaking point by a number of factors, were understandably wary of investing in so many new publishers. Marvel, in the face of creative attrition, continued to pump titles into the marketplace, attempting to choke off rivals by dominating rack space. Retailers who ordered incautiously were stuck with shelves full of unsellable merchandise for which they had already paid. And comic book stores began to disappear.
In 1992 all the elements were in place for the Death of Superman to be a monster hit. The market had been primed to accept event comics that regularly sold in multiples of millions. The beating DC took in 1990 and 1991 made the company hungry for a hit and willing to do anything possible to get attention. The instability of both Marvel and Image in the immediate wake of the latter’s success made both companies far more vulnerable than their sales dominance might have led observers to believe. To put it bluntly, Marvel had the hot characters but in the wake of the Image exodus they had to scramble to fill the pages of all the new books they had created specifically for their absent superstars. (The post-Image runs of X-Force, X-Men and Uncanny X-Men remain some of the very worst comics ever published by either of the “big two”, although as the 90s continued and the companies became more and more stretched, the content would get a lot worse.)
Image had the hot creators but, it bears repeating, the company was pathologically unable to keep to promised shipping dates. Also, the lack of lasting properties – while certainly a factor in many fans’ rejection of the creators’ post-Marvel output – would prove to be more deleterious to the company’s long term health than their short-term fortunes. The people buying up hundreds of thousands of copies of Youngblood and Cyberforce undoubtedly believed those characters would be the next X-Men, or at least the next Teen Titans. If the creators had been smarter and more consistent, the characters may well have been; but they weren’t and – with the possible exceptions of Spawn and the Savage Dragon – they aren’t. Most of Image’s early books were awful, transparent attempts to replicate the slow-burn success of Claremont’s X-Men by creating crowded, confused books that attempted to communicate in twenty-two pages stories of the size and scope that Claremont had taken decades to develop. The slyly lurid subtext of Marvel’s best disposable pop had become a meaningless, wrathful leer in the hands of lesser craftsmen. (To their credit McFarlane and Larsen had a smarter approach, because Spawn and Savage Dragon have both stood the test of time better than any of their peers from the founding days of Image, and have never ceased publication. Furthermore, over the last decade Larsen’s book has actually become a critical favorite, something almost inconceivable in the company’s early days.)
But many of DC’s demerits in the “cool” department were actually credits in the logistical realm. The cover triangles were a promise that the Superman books would not merely offer an ongoing, serial continuity, but that it would be consistent in both form and content. Considering how many superhero comics and superhero comic companies were floundering for want of these basic ingredients, it’s something of a wonder they were ever so thoroughly disregarded as they were in the 1990s. It wasn’t simply that a story begun in Superman would continue in Adventures of Superman. The situation was essentially such that the three, then four, monthly books became a single weekly series. This had its problems: as the 90s progressed the straitjacket continuity lost its appeal. The stories became less endearing and the titles’ lack of individuality became more glaring. But at the time, it was positively fresh. Jim Lee could take two or three months to put out WildC.A.Ts #2, but if you bought Superman #74 the week it came out then by crikey Adventures of Superman #497 was going to be in the store next week. There was no “or your money back” promise – but there might as well have been.
Doomsday killed Superman in Superman #75, shipping November 1992. Doomsday was created specifically for the event, a lumbering monster with no mind and scant motivation besides an overwhelming desire to destroy Metropolis. Rather than have the death-blow delivered by an established arch-nemesis such as Lex Luthor or Brainiac, Doomsday’s seeming randomness highlighted Superman’s heroism through his defiance of impossible odds, the unaccounted-for chaos of unexpected tragedy. In any event, the death of Superman was less a great story in and of itself than a means for DC to reassert themselves in the marketplace. Superman #75 was comprised entirely of splash pages of hyper-kinetic action — a bald attempt at an Image comic. The story was criticised for its lack of substance — a legitimate criticism at the time, but essentially beside the point. Superman #75 was intended not as the finish line but the starting gun.
For two months following the death, the Superman titles ran the “Funeral For A Friend” serial, detailing the aftermath and effect of Superman’s passing on his friends, family and foes. And then, for three months, the Superman family of titles simply stopped. The books weren’t published, and aside from a few stopgap specials, the entire franchise merely ceased to be. The effect, at least for those reading the titles, was electric: what the hell was going to happen next? When the titles returned in the spring of 1993, how would Superman return?
In late spring came Adventures of Superman #500, a giant-sized special issue featuring a hologram cover, and the ostensible “return” of the title character, although in actuality it was only the prelude to another storyline that would wend its way through the next five months of Superman stories, the “Reign of the Supermen”. Instead of the one original Superman returning in Adventures #500, four false Supermen appeared and spent the next few months duking it out over who had the right to assume the mantle. Eventually one of the pretenders was revealed to be a villainous ringer (gasp!) and the real Superman returned and aided the remaining three faux Superman — who, as it turned out, weren’t so bad after all – in defeating the murderous imposter.
But in many respects the story itself was a moot point. Where Superman’s death had triggered record sales, his return came just as the entire comics industry was struggling for survival. Adventures #500 and Turok #1 were released within a few weeks of each other. The massive sales anticipated by retailers failed to materialise. Longtime buyers had begun to lose interest, and the new readers attracted by the death of Superman had no interest in, or even awareness of, his resurrection. (To this day, many people are still surprised to find that Superman is still being published, and that he was not actually killed back in 1992.) Those who did know – unfamiliar with the industry practice of death and resurrection on a quarterly schedule – were often incensed.
The summer of 1993 was brutal: retailers across the nation closed their doors, brought low by a perfect storm of unbelievably bad business decisions industry-wide. In January of 1994 alone, 1,100 stores were reportedly forced out of business. One of the most significant factors had to be the dawning awareness among a certain segment of comics buyer — the serial speculator — that the very notion of collectibility in regards to comics printed in the millions and hermetically preserved for posterity was absurd. A collectible can only be valuable if it’s rare: Fantastic Four #1 is legitimately rare, legitimately significant, and therefore legitimately valuable. Superman #75 was bought by millions of people who expected it to rapidly appreciate in value, without pausing to think that maybe everyone who would ever want to own a copy of the issue already did. To this day pristine copies of Superman #75 — not to mention Turok #1, X-Force #1, and the relaunched X-Men #1 — remain fodder for four-for-a-dollar boxes across America. (Early issues of Harbinger have retained at least a fraction of their former value.)
Ultimately, there are few hard-and-fast answers regarding the early 90s implosion — when such a large percentage of the audience simply vanishes, there is no single answer that will satisfy. It must not be overlooked, however, that one of the key factors in so many readers’ defections was the poor quality of many of these books. If Lee’s X-Men had been a fun book, Lee’s WildC.A.T.s. was a turgid mess; if early Valiant had been well-executed science-fiction-flavoured superheroes, later Valiant was just more of the same crappy superheroes everyone else was doing. Things got too big too fast. At the height of the rush, Image and Valiant announced a major crossover, Deathmate, to run throughout the latter half of 1993. As could have been predicted, Valiant’s portion of the crossover shipped like clockwork, but Image’s half was plagued by delays and eventually shipped over half a year later than originally solicited — with the penultimate issue shipping months after the conclusion. Retailers were burned badly, and some never recovered.
The expansion of the market led to an explosion of crappy comics from all parties, with Marvel, DC, Image and Valiant attempting to strangle one another by dominating market share. Valiant was mortally wounded by the subsequent implosion and was soon bought by the video-game manufacturer Acclaim. Acclaim itself suffered in the late 90s and eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2004.
Of the original “Image Seven” who defected from Marvel, all but two — Todd McFarlane and Jim Valentino — have returned to work in some capacity for either Marvel or DC. In 1998 Lee left Image voluntarily and sold his studio — and the rights to all the characters he created while at Image — to DC in exchange for a position as an executive vice president. He continues to pencil the occasional event book for DC, including a year-long run on Superman earlier this decade. In 1996, following a string of disastrous business decisions, Liefeld was forced out of Image, though he was eventually allowed to return in 2007 (not in his former status as co-founder). Of all the original founders, only Larsen continues to produce his own book on a regular basis — writing, drawing and publishing every issue of Savage Dragon for over a decade and a half. (McFarlane’s Spawn is Image’s longest-running title, but after the first few years McFarlane’s involvement grew sporadic as he focused on other enterprises, such as a successful toy company and the forgettable 1997 Spawn film.) Image has, incredibly, managed to salvage much of its early bad reputation, by publishing an eclectic mix of books in a number of genres, from “hot” creators and seasoned veterans. The trade-off for this respectability has been its success: the company has never regained its early 90s market share.
The industry implosion of the early 90s set off a chain of events that led to Marvel filing for bankruptcy protection in 1996. The company reorganised and became one of the entertainment success stories of the 00s, the force behind the incredibly popular X-Men, Spider-Man and Iron Man film franchises. They are once again the dominant force in American superhero comics, a position they never really relinquished despite the rocky 1990s. They enjoy a commanding majority of the direct market seemingly in perpetuity. As of this writing, however, the X-Men books are no longer the most popular franchise in comics, having finally stumbled in the early 00s. That honour has now devolved onto another longtime Marvel franchise, the Avengers. (The X-Men remain a close #2.)
Superman continues to be published, and DC is still essentially where it was twenty years ago: perpetually #2, perpetually square, and yet on any given month still able to temporarily beef their sales with a good gimmick promotion. For the past decade their most consistently effective has been Image-cofounder Jim Lee, whose art remains a surefire guarantor of monumental sales. DC’s backlist remains far deeper than Marvel’s, though the latter company has used the 00s to remedy some of its critical shortcomings with a number of high-profile boutique projects. For both companies, however, their bread and butter is loud, blustering superhero comic books of dubious quality.