In contemporary comics, the mood had gone in the opposite direction. Older readers were buying edgier and darker stories about original and established characters alike. As well as pulling from Dark Horse and other imprints, there was a swerve away from superheroes in the mid-90s. While a succession of family films was borne out of old-fashioned comics like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich, and Dennis the Menace, the older audience flocked to anti-heroes rather than traditional four-color heroism.

It’s a period in which you get fare as varied as The Crow, an impressively realized film that was somewhat overshadowed by Brandon Lee’s tragic death during filming; Timecop, a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle based on a little-known anthology strip; and Tank Girl, an often-surreal feminist western that meddling studio executives never understood. None of these films are superhero stories.

In other cases, you can still see that same lighter approach that took hold of the Batman sequels being carried out with greater success. As seen in the pages of Dark Horse Comics, The Mask is a properly scuzzy and despicable character, and yet by hitching the property to Jim Carrey’s rising star, New Line turned it into one of the decade’s more fondly remembered comedy vehicles. Different as this crowd-pleasing, Tex Avery-fuelled take was from the source material, it made a really good movie.

But in the following year, Hollywood showed just how little it understood 2000AD with the movie Judge Dredd, a poorly regarded actioner that does just about everything a 1990s Hollywood movie could do to bastardize its source material. In particular, Danny Cannon’s film shows the tendency to lump comic book movies into either the action genre or the comedy genre and then strictly adhere to their textbook conventions. The problem, as Sylvester Stallone saw it, was that when he walked on set wearing Dredd’s iconic uniform and helmet, “nobody laughed.”

But for a darker and yet immeasurably more dreadful adaptation of a comic book, one need only look at 1997’s Spawn, a low point for the genre that seems destined to be repeated with an upcoming “joyless” reboot. Across a range of produced films, studio executives and/or filmmakers struggled with both the darkness and the light of their comic book source material.