Comic Books to Believe In

The four-color medium has been suffering lately, and when I say "lately" I mean close to two and half decades. Part of the problem was kids of the 1970s growing up to become slavish money-grabbing speculators (collectors who tend to not only drive up the cost of back issues for personal gain, but force comics companies to pander to them with incentive-heavy issues the speculators can make money off of), and the other part is the "fan turned pro" who entered the comic book field and decided these mythological super-beings needed to reflect adult concerns, adult worries, and adult conflicts.


I've already gone on record to say this has destroyed both of the "Big Two" companies' properties, among them Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. Those characters are the spearhead for all superhero comics produced, but if you're only producing comics read by an increasingly shrinking, middle-aged audience, then you're saying comic books have no future, the characters have no future, the imagination-spurring adventure story has no future. You can throw in Wolverine as an icon if you want, but I'll stick with the superheroes who that supercede their status as "toons" and have become cultural legends. The point is, comic book companies shit the bed and expect you, the consumer, to lie in it.

I'm a reader of good stories and great characters, always have been. However, I don't get the steaming underwear for Spider-Man or Batman. I can take them or leave them in most cases. My interest has been drawn by other, more obscure factors. I did have "my" artists, my favorites like Kirby and George Perez. Batman as a character didn't move me like the Hulk did, as a character, and I didn't read a Batman comic until the early 1980s, when Gene Colan was drawing the strip. Gene Colan had already become an underappreciated legend at Marvel in the 1960s and 1970s, and was put on what was then a "struggling" Batman series after returning to DC (where he'd begun his career in the 1950s.) With writer Gerry Conway, Colan produced the prototype Batman, a brilliant crimefighter/detective who had vulnerabilities and human emotions. Back then, Batman couldn't take out Superman in a fight...it was ludicrous to consider, and the readers then weren't fans so detached from character integrity that they couldn't see that. The 1990s changed the character integrity for Batman, turning him finally and completely into "the Dark Knight." This Batman had no vulnerable traits, except for his unbalanced psychological state. He was invariably a shadowy, all-knowing antagonist, undefeatable and unaffordable suddenly in back issues. You can reckon I didn't read a lot of Batman through those decades, and still don't.


But without Colan, I wouldn't have bothered with Batman at all. Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS notwithstanding, since again we're talking about a legend producing a legendary story around an icon, I needed the compulsion of the talent behind the character to invest. Only in recent years have I understood the overarching beauty of a character like Batman is in his simplicity, or at least it was. You didn't have to read a couple years worth of Batman stories back in Conway/Colan's days on BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS. There was some crossover stories between those two titles, but generally the stories were "one and done." A single story with a beginning-middle-end that ran about 18-22 pages long.

Additionally, another character more associated with the movies and television more than his starring comics, Superman and the John Byrne "reboot" of 1985. I had never spent my hard-earned dolla on a Superman comic until Byrne came aboard. Superman comics seemed uninvolving and ridiculous, and there wasn't enough Super-Breath in the world to slap his four-color adventures into my hot little hands. But all that changed with John Byrne. At that time, John Byrne was Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams and Joe Kubert rolled into one dude. He could do no wrong. Where Byrne went, so did I. And justifiably, I think. Today, John Byrne will point out how difficult it was doing SUPERMAN and ACTION COMICS, with interference from editors and the fans complaints. I think it colored his experience in a sad way, because this was the first indication that the fan was more important than the talent, or the characters. John Byrne wanted to simplify Superman, clean up his history and his world to make it accessible to the new reader, preferably kids...the future. DC Comics desired that too...as long as things weren't changed too much. Far cry from what came later, with the "Death of Superman" and Superman's status today. "Change" in comics has become the catch-phrase for the corruption of the icons, and the form.


The thing is, I realize superhero comics are meant to be studied by kids, kids seeking moral/ethical analogies, kids seeking adventure, kids dealing with their fears, their inadequacies, through the fantasy constructs of the Fantastic Four or Hawkman. Superheroes were specifically designed as escape, while still allowing kids (primarily) to possess a rough field guide for what they will enjoy later in life, be it love, excitement, good storytelling, fine art, wishes, dreams.


We, and I mean adults who grew up with comics that taught us those things, have taken that away from the kids. We appropriated their icons so we could hang on to what made us feel good. We committed a treasonous heist, not only against the kids but against the characters themselves. The talented men and women who created comic icons deserve more respect, because they didn't design Batman and Superman for adults. If you want to be adult and read comics, you should expect them to read, to your aged eyes, like the Tarzan strip in the newspaper. It seems exactly the same way it read 20, 30, 40 years ago...it is immortal in a way we will never be.






And god damn it, I'm okay with that.