Anghus Houvouras on how Marvel and DC fan the flames to sell comics…

The classic age of comics were called ‘The Golden Age’. Pretty much from the moment Superman showed up hurling an Edsel at criminals. The Silver Age was ushered in when DC created a brand new Flash passing the mantle to Barry Allen. Classic characters were being reformatted for more modern times. The Bronze Age was when the medium matured and stakes were raised for our heroes. Speedy was a drug addict. Tony Stark was a drunk. Spider-Man didn’t save the day and poor Gwen Stacy paid the price. The Modern Age was signified by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns; stories that brought a darker, grittier type of hero to the medium. A trend that has continued very much to this new day.

However, I think the modern age has ended, and a new era has begun. In all the years I’ve been reading comics, the truth is that there were very few tangible differences that separated Marvel and DC. The most widely established is that Marvel has a stable of more grounded, realistic, and relatable crime fighters while DC has a more iconic brand of serious superheroes.

Both publishers have struggled the past few years with rebranding their popular titles. DC went through a five-year span of creative triage that was the New 52 while Marvel continues to throw the words ‘All New All Different’ in front of well established properties in the hopes of changing things up. 2016 has been interesting for both publishers, both of who have taken their titles into new directions by playing to their strengths. DC Rebirth has been a success in no small part due to reverting a lot of characters back to their New 52 state and giving themselves a reset button in the form of Doctor Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Marvel has decided that doing comic book versions of their wildly popular movie franchises has become creatively uninteresting. Over the last few years they’ve begun swapping out their most iconic characters with alternate alter egos. It began as far back as Bucky Barnes taking over for a supposedly dead Captain America during Ed Brubaker’s amazing run on the title. Now, the hood swapping has gone into overdrive. Captain America is now Sam Wilson aka The Falcon while Steve Rogers has had his history hacked to bits by the Red Skull and a living cosmic cube making him an agent of Hydra. Bruce Banner is temporarily dead leaving Amadeus Cho as the Hulk. Thor’s longtime lady friend Jane Foster is now the God of Thunder. Most recently Marvel announced that Tony Stark would no longer be Iron Man, replaced by the younger more diverse Riri Williams.

Calling it a trend feels too slight. A trend implies a series of events happening in tandem that form something larger. What’s happening in comics right now feels like a mandate: cause a stir, get people talking, make bold choices even if it makes people uncomfortable.

On paper, I’m down. I’m the guy who’s been saying that the number one detriment about the two mainstream comic book publishers is a lack of anything new. However, it doesn’t feel like Marvel’s plan is just to do anything new.

It feels like Marvel and DC’s plan is to make intentionally controversial choices in order to get people talking. By now we’re all aware how important it is to be a conversation piece. You can’t just be good in this perpetually moving online world. Readers have a limited attention span. You have to do something that not only challenges the status quo but may potentially alienate a portion of the fan base in order to generate buzz.

This is why I believe we’re in a new age of comics: The Age of Ire.

The model isn’t new, but it’s certainly becoming more frequent. Fifteen years ago it was writers like Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar who were having a lot of fun deconstructing the genre. Bendis played fast and loose with characterizations and created wide sweeping events for Marvel that became talking points not only for the story being told but for the controversy of the choices he was making. Sayings like ‘No More Mutants’ became story points and conversation points by fans who watched as their favorite comic book characters were dragged through frequent changes with little consideration for history or continuity. Millar took a similar route as he worked his way through every major comic icon asking questions like ‘What if Superman’s rocket landed in the Soviet Union’. The success of these titles seemed to trip a switch in Millar’s head as he spent the next decade creating non-copyright infringing doppelgängers to tell his own stories deconstructing the superhero mythos. Wanted and Kick-Ass were extreme deep dives into fandom. Kingsman: The Secret Service was a lowbrow look at the highbrow Bond franchise. Nemesis took the idea of Batman as a super villain and ran with it all the way to the blood bank. Superior was Shazam through the Millar lens.

Both Bendis and Millar were successful in not only creating interesting variations on well established icons, but also showing publishers the advantage of rearranging the toys in the toy box… or even swapping them out. Bendis was given chunks of the Ultimate Universe to create his own version of Spider-Man and even conceive Spider-Man 2.0 aka Miles Morales. The success of these deviations has led to characters like Ultimate Spider-Man joining the regular Marvel 616 Universe.

The impact writers like Bendis and Millar had on our current crop of mainstream comic book writers is practically immeasurable. The playbook has been rewritten and the mandate at Marvel is clear: Rework the characters as you see fit as long as it creates a conversation.

Dan Slott has been using the playbook on his Amazing Spider-Man run which has seen a number of controversial choices that have both electrified new fans and alienated existing ones. His Superior Spider-Man run saw Peter Parker supposedly die and have his body taken over by Doctor Octopus. A long running story arc that saw fans polarized and a million conversations created. This is exactly what Marvel wants.

There’s a scene in the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts where two radio station employees talk about his ratings, citing that the average Stern fan listens for an hour and a half because ‘the want to see what he’ll do next’. While the average Stern detractor listens for 2+ hours for the same reason. This logic applies to comic book fans who seem to continue to buy copies of their favorite characters even when they see the creator as taking liberties and emotionally touching them in uncomfortable places.

Nick Spencer is currently engineering a similar play in Captain America with the current story arc seeing everyone’s favorite purveyor of truth, justice, and the American way working for Hydra. The cries of ‘How can you make Captain America a Nazi?’ practically broke the internet in half. Long time fans cried ‘foul’. Younger readers said ‘wait and see where the story goes’. No one seems to particularly love where it’s going, but both the lovers and the haters seem to be along for the ride to see if their favorite jingoistic propaganda spouting pugilist is going to get his proper back story back.

I can certainly see the value of taking characters somewhere new. Frankly, after 30+ years of reading comics I find myself desperate for variation. Marvel’s attempt at swapping out old alter-egos for new ones is something I can’t help but admire. However, the push for shocking stories in order maintain online conversations feels hyperbolic. I admire what Nick Spencer is trying to do with Captain America, but it’s the kind of story arc that feels useless in its lack of permanency. The minute we learned the origin of Cap’s Hydra roots (or tentacles), you could almost hear the sound of a giant finger circling a big red reset button.

Some of our most famous comic book stories are variations on existing themes and stories: Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. Watchmen was a hodgepodge of Charlton Comics dopplegangers to tell a much larger story about Gods and Men. The Dark Knight was Frank Miller asking ‘what happens to Batman when he gets old and the world goes to hell?’ It’s kind of funny that DC is currently using Watchmen to help shape their DC Rebirth line. The comic book that defined a generation of storytelling is being used to engineer a bridge between the old and the new. Watchmen ushered in a more serious era of comic stories launching darker themes into comic books. The idea of ‘women in refrigerators’ seems almost unthinkable if Watchmen hadn’t raised the bar on the kinds of stories comic books could be used to tell.

And the fact that The Dark Knight Returns was once seen as a kind of ‘What If’ story and since helped DC reshape their entire universe to point everything in that direction. As I watched Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice I kept thinking how funny it was that this dark, grim look at the future of our favorite superheroes became the blueprint for how everything else in the DC Universe would unfold.

Tinkering with the status quo is nothing new, and it’s not going anywhere. The deeper, more immediate problem is with the need to create marketable hooks for every single story arc forcing creators to try to carve out their own little controversy to make a comic character like Captain America relevant enough to be part of the online conversation. All they had to do was completely abandon the fundamental core of the character and turn him into a Nazi. I know, he’s not really a Nazi. And it’s the Red Skull’s weirdly plotted machinations that turned him into an unrecognizable cog. But it kind of makes my point.

How much is a story worth if the entire premise is utterly disposable? What separates Nick Spencer’s run with the time when Captain America was turned into a werewolf? Not a lot. Both were short-term strategies to help invigorate a character that lacks relevancy. And let me say, again, that it’s not just that our favorite superhero funnybook publishers are making these decisive choices; it’s the frequency in which they’re making them.

If social media and creating a conversation is going to be the creative compass these publishers use to steer the ship, we all might want to assume crash positions. The idea that every year comic book fans need to be dealt another dish of steaming controversy feels rather pointless. Good storytelling becomes less important than raising the ire of longtime fans. Stoke the fire and fan the flames until it burns out. All you have to do then is start another fire.

Eventually, we’ll all be burnt out.

Anghus Houvouras

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