CSotD: How They Killed Comic Books
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There's a thing going around — oh, sorry — got to start over …
There's a meme – which is much more important than "a thing going around" — that exists under a few different names, but which can be tracked down by Googling "Superman is kind of a dick." It consists of covers of old DC comics showing Superman being kind of a dick.
For example:
Get it? Yeah, Superman is being kind of a dick.
The thing has apparently been around a couple of years, but like most Internet stuff, it resurfaces from time to time, and somehow I missed it until yesterday when it popped up on Facebook.
My instant reaction was "You just don't get it, do you?" because, while I don't happen to remember any of the covers in the array, I certainly remember back when DC would get you to buy a comic by showing Superman being a dick.
You'd pony up your dime, you'd run off to wherever your comic-reading place was and you'd settle in to find out what the deal was, and it would be some elaborate trap for a criminal that required Superman to act like a dick to throw him off so he'd reveal himself.
Sometimes Jimmy and Lois were in on the con, sometimes it was necessary that they be fooled along with everyone else. In those cases, the superhero would apologize and the last shot would be of Lois with her finger on her chin thinking "Still, I wonder …"
Towards the end of my DC-reading days, the explanation might be red kryptonite or androids, both of which became cure-all explanations when the DC guys had painted themselves into a corner and had started slowly strangling the medium to death.
Part of the "Superman Is Kind Of A Dick" meme is based on the inability of some people to understand when they are being pranked. A depressingly significant percentage of Internet snark can be answered by "It was a joke, dumbass."
In this situation, it's not a joke in the sense of being humorous, but it's also not serious. It's supposed to arouse your curiosity because Superman is most emphatically not a dick. It is a marketing ploy, a sort of instant cliffhanger to draw you in.
But let me define who "you" is in that. "You" is a 10 or 11 year old kid, not some 20-something slacker genius.
When these comics came out, there were little people called "kids" and there were big people called "grownups" and, while there was a lot of fun stuff you could do as a kid, every kid's goal was to become a grownup.
Maybe — maybe — Lumpy Rutherford would have still been reading Superman comics, but he'd never let Wally or (especially not) Eddie know it. Even Beaver and Gilbert would have given Lumpy the business if they'd caught him reading a Superman comic.
I've always felt it was nice timing that the Beatles happened to parallel my life so seamlessly — the British Invasion and "yeah yeah yeah" were in my early teens, and about the time Sgt. Pepper came out, I was ready for those cellophane flowers of yellow and gold, and then, about the time they broke up, I was nearly out of school and ready to move on myself.
Similarly, the Marvel revolution hit at just the right time. I remember the first Spiderman and what a game-changer it was for me — it was the summer of 1962 and I was part way through eight weeks of television-free summer camp, in which comic books were a vital source of entertainment.
I was also 12 years old, and as a reasonably bright 12-year-old, I was just beginning to look at Superman with a discerning eye, and to think things like "Wait a minute. If he's invulnerable, by now he should either have the never-changing scalp of the toddler Kal-el, or he should have uncuttable hair hanging down past his ankles."
Kids would write to DC and ask about Superman's hair and nails. Now, the correct response might have been "Good question. What do you think?" or the more direct MST answer of "It's only a comic book. You should really just relax."
Because the correct answer was "Aren't you a little old to be reading Superman?"
Instead, they came up with some ridiculous story about him flying to a planet with a red sun and giving himself a trim with his heat vision. Yeah, right.
Even a 12-year-old recognized that as a load of hooey. But here was Spiderman who freely acknowledged the weirdness of his situation and was about as freaked out by it as we would have been, and that was the next developmental level.
Superman and Spiderman were like Goofus and Gallant. Superman would do everything exactly as he ought to, and wrapped up the villains in a neat bundle, while Spiderman was making wise-ass comments to the Green Goblin while they kicked each other's asses all around the city, busting up the place and pissing people off in the process.
We were now at an age where we'd rather be Goofus.
Then, as we outgrew Spiderman, along came Zap and its sisters and its cousins and its aunts. I was 18 and the newspaper taxis had appeared on the scene, dying to take me away to visit Fritz the Cat and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and even Peter Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates.
Somebody should have told DC that it was okay for Superman to be written for 10 and 11 year olds, because we keep making them. And it's good for the industry that older kids progress to Spiderman and FF, and then through to adult titles like the Sixth Gun.
If you want those older niche audiences, don't screw up your successful kids' titles — come up with new titles for a different demographic.
Instead, the comic book companies have advanced their concepts to try to maintain the same audience indefinitely, which not only means adding layers of complexity that make them inpenetrable to little kids, but requires a freshening because indefinitely holding the same audience means not repeating the same themes over and over again.
Jay Leno used to be able to do the same great routine to different audiences in different cities for a year at a clip. Then he got the Tonight Show gig and needed new gags every night. And now his name has become a byword for lame, formulaic, mainstream crap.
Comic books, by playing to the same audience over and over and over have worked themselves into the same creative trap — so Superman dies and then he comes back and now Spiderman is married only now he isn't anymore and now he's black and then he's gonna be dead …
Comic books are becoming like poetry: An incestuous little medium created solely for the pleasure of its own shrinking circle of aficianados and of increasing irrelevance to the rest of the world.
I can not imagine a 10-year-old with either the budget, the intellect or the patience to become truly involved in today's comic books, the way we were involved first with Superman, then with Spiderman, then with Gilbert Sheldon and R. Crumb and eventually Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel.
They're choking off the entry points. They're killing the medium.
All because they thought they could hold their audience just a little longer with some half-assed explanation of Superman's hair.
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