DC Comics embarks on its most ambitious project yet:
a company-wide deconstruction of the last 20 years of superhero comics

There are a handful of pop-culture figures so burned into the collective consciousness of the world that you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t recognize them. It’s a club that includes cartoon luminaries like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, mascots like Uncle Sam, and comic book heroes like Superman, Batman and, to an extent, Wonder Woman—the “holy trinity” of DC Comics. You don’t even need to read comics or watch TV to know that Superman fights for truth, justice and the American way; Batman kicks the snot out of criminals; and Wonder Woman, well, she has a golden lasso and an invisible jet. At their heart, the three are pure archetypes, iconic characters that can be used in countless stories with no background required.

But to anyone who’s been reading comics in the last few years, things are anything but simple these days. DC’s line of superhero comics have gotten much grittier and much more realistic. In 2004’s “Identity Crisis,” penned by mystery novelist Brad Meltzer, it turns out some members of the Justice League basically lobotomized a bunch of super-villains to make them harmless and more controllable. From there, Batman became so paranoid he built a spy satellite to keep track of the Earth’s superheroes; Superman became an easily controlled dupe and Wonder Woman murdered a super-villain. Talk about dark.

This was a lead-in to “Infinite Crisis,” DC’s mega-event of 2005 that is a direct sequel to 1985’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” storyline. The goal of the 1985 “Crisis” was to boil the characters down to their essential elements, return them to greatness and make them accessible to new readers. But there was a more sociological side-effect—the pre-Crisis DC was a more innocent and lighthearted place. The post-Crisis DC was a more realistic world, one where questions of death and morality often weighed heavily on heroes’ minds.

Did it work? It depends on whom you ask, but it seems like DC doesn’t think so. The second issue of “Infinite Crisis” shipped last week, and the bulk of the issue was a harsh, though not necessarily undeserved, indictment of DC’s output over the last two decades.
Some of the heroes whose existence was rendered moot in the first Crisis have returned. Their goal: to get rid of the darkness (that is, realism) they think is corrupting heroism and return to a happier, simpler time.

The protagonist of “Infinite Crisis” is Earth-2 Superman, who represents the original, 1940s version of the hero sent packing in “Crisis.” Recapping the last 20 years, E2 Superman says, “The potential was there, and it started off so well, so full of hope. I felt confident Earth was in good hands. But soon after, we learned there was something inherently wrong … a darkness seemed to spread, warping the heroes’ lives.”

Superman is referring to the period of “grim and gritty” comics that followed “Crisis.” In those two decades, Superman died, Batman was paralyzed and Green Lantern went insane and tried to destroy the universe, not once, but twice. And these were just the most well-known stories. By the time “Infinite Crisis” rolled around in September, the wife of second-string hero Elongated Man was raped and murdered, the Blue Beatle took two shots in the head and Wonder Woman was a convicted murderer.
OK, so the minutiae may not be important to non-comics readers, but the message that DC is sending—that, essentially, they’ve been screwing up superhero comics since about 1990—is very important. It’s a gutsy move when you think about it. Has there ever been another medium in which even a single artist, never mind a whole company, essentially apologized to fans for the work he or she produced? Not really.

And it’s about time. Many of the terrible DC moments E2 Superman cites as corrupting the universe were actually just terrible stories. Story arcs like the death and return of Superman were, at best, needless marketing ploys. At worst, they helped fuel the collector’s-market mentality that encouraged publishers to print hundreds of new, low-quality titles to satisfy speculators, a move that led to the near-collapse of the industry in the late ’90s. 

It’s a conflict between the old DC and the new DC, between an era when kids bought comics on newsstands and when 30-year-olds buy comics at comic shops. Mostly, it’s a question of what we want—in terms of realism, morality and tone—from our pop culture.

DC is particularly positioned to respond because of the iconic nature of their characters. But it’s unclear if this wholesale scrapping of storylines is necessary—DC is currently hyping “Justice,” a 12-issue series by Jim Krueger and Alex Ross. “Justice” is a throwback to the DC stories of the 1950s and ’60s, an era most people remember because of its portrayal on the kitschy “Super Friends” cartoon in the 1970s. In the next few months, DC will also release “All Star Superman,” a new series of continuity-free, all-ages-friendly Superman stories by Grant Morrison. “Justice” and “All Star Superman” are everything “Infinite Crisis” should be, but isn’t—at once modern and retro, easily accessible to readers, and unapologetically fun.

But where does that leave fans? If you bother reading the message boards on the Inter-web, there’s a contingent out there that wants to see a return to the carefree stories of the Silver Age (the comics produced between the late 1950s and early ’70s). And Geoff Johns, the scribe behind “IC,” has repeatedly expressed his affinity for the good old days of Superman and company. But if that’s what people really wanted, then why did “Identity Crisis” sell so well that some of the issues went into third, fourth and even fifth printings? If fans want both—and it seems as though they do—it seems like an unwise strategy to effectively sugarcoat an entire line of comics.

And this is where the larger cultural implications arise. Entertainment now is certainly darker and more violent than it was 20 years ago, but the world itself is a much darker place now. It’s also important to remember that in their original incarnations in the 1940s, Batman and Superman killed villains routinely, much like their pulp magazine forerunners. There’s always going to be a desire and nostalgia among some comics fans for simpler times that may not actually have existed. But if Johns and his fellow writers at DC give into this, it may wind up backfiring and alienating modern audiences from superhero comics even more than they already are.