John Barnes' Three-Generation Life Cycle for Creative Genres and the Superhero Comic

Ever since first encountering John Barnes' theory of the three generation life cycle of a creative genre a decade and a half ago I have found it handy indeed in considering the state of many an aspect of recent cultural life.* Certainly it was much on my mind as I considered the state of science fiction back when I wrote "The End of Science Fiction?"--and it has seemed to me worth citing as well where the genre of spy fiction has been concerned.

To put it very briefly, in the first generation of the genre's life cycle artists discover something new and give us the founding classics that defined the genre, established an audience, produced a conversation and in time a tradition. The second generation finds all this very firmly in place and, maybe sensing that it is in need of a shake-up, and guided by critical reassessment of the old classics, locates and exploits a good many unrealized potentials. The third generation is less concerned with innovation, of which there is less possibility (the law of diminishing returns is most certainly operative here), than "doing it well" as it turns into "inside joke . . . treasured family story . . . or a set of exercises in which to display virtuosity." Afterward the genre passes out of life into "afterlife," in which people may go on enjoying it, and even producing in it, but in which very little new or significant can be expected to appear, the essential ideas and range of the form, the essential "canon" of works pretty much settled and not much added.

This seems to me to apply to the superhero comic just as it does to the histories of those other genres I discussed. I think of the first generation of the genre as that "Golden Age" heyday of DC Comics which gave us such foundational figures as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and other Justice League stalwarts. I think of that "Silver Age" where Marvel really made its mark as thoroughly "second generation"--Stan Lee and Jack Kirby doing what DC had not done in deciding to situate their characters in the real city of New York rather than some analog like Gotham, in giving them "everyday problems" in that way most associated with Spider-Man, in the stress on younger heroes like Peter Parker and the original students at Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and so on. (I think we can see something of this, too, when we consider Green Lantern's trajectory in the 1970s.) And when I look at later figures like the great Alan Moore, in whose works the superhero comic most certainly seems a matter of "inside joke," "treasured family story" and "exercise in which to display virtuosity," I definitely find myself feeling that superhero comics had moved into their third generation by the '80s--four decades ago.

The implication is that at this point super hero comics are well into the "afterlife" phase. This may seem an overly pessimistic assessment, but just think about it-- what have we really seen since the '80s that you would really consider transformative within American superhero comics? I certainly cannot think of a thing--though anyone who can think of something is, as always, welcome to offer their thoughts in the comment thread.

* The theory, which Barnes laid out in his essay "Reading for the Undead" in the defunct Helix magazine, unfortunately does not seem to be available anywhere, only secondary comment about it--like Sean Wilcox's BFS Journal essay "Reading John Barnes' 'Reading for the Undead'" (which ran in 2018), and of course my own uses of Barnes' concept.