Comic Book Superheroes in a Post-Comics World

In this day and age I suspect that, recognizable as the great Golden and Silver Age superheroes are, even the middle-aged of today (who grew up in the '80s, or later) know them more from adaptations of the comics than the comics themselves.

After all, there were so many alternative distractions that prior generations did not have, like video games.

There was the way that comics were increasingly accessed in specialty shops, so that you went out of your way to get them rather than happening upon them in a department store the way Frank Miller recounts having done when he was young.

And there was the fact that by that stage of things--the "Dark Age" of Comics--comics were less than ever for kids. The more objectionable "adult" content apart, the more exciting, cutting-edge, stuff was being written for a more hardcore, more literate audience (as with the work of an Alan Moore).

The result was that I encountered pretty much every major comic book character in TV or film form before I ever got around to reading a single page of their comics, and indeed in many a case those adaptations remain the standard by which all others are judged. While I did, for instance, get around to reading the earlier decades of the X-Men in those handy Marvel Essentials volumes, with particular attentiveness to Chris Claremont's justly celebrated run--to say nothing of seeing the million or so X-Men movies made to date--all these years on the FOX X-Men cartoon remains for me definitive, such that, great as Patrick Stewart was as Charles Xavier and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, it is still Cedric Smith and Cal Dodd's voices I hear when I imagine the characters speaking when I am not actually watching their movies.