On the Strange Afterlife of the Superhero Comic

Over the years I have found John Barnes' theory of the three generation life cycle of a genre has proven useful to me in —looking at science fiction, spy fiction, and I might add, the superhero comic.

Writing about the last I argued that by the 1980s the genre had passed into its third and last generation, where its boundaries are established, its potentials already largely exploited, its canon pretty well completed, whatever contribution it was going to make to the larger culture not just issued but assimilated, and continued activity in it apt to treat the form as an "inside joke . . . treasured family story . . . or a set of exercises in which to display virtuosity." (Consider, for instance, how well-known it has all been for so long, how the list of heroes we would consider really "A-list" has not seen any additions for a long time, how the work that was really interesting in the form tended to be metafictional and subversive--as with Alan Moore's contributions, or Warren Ellis' Planetary, while even at its lightest a good deal of other Wildstorm material squarely fell into the "treasured family story" category, and how in the years since there just has not seemed to be anywhere for the genre to go in their original medium.)

All these decades later it does not seem unreasonable to say (and I did say) that we are past the genre's third generation--that life has passed into what Barnes called "afterlife," with the genre's course pretty much run, even if it has not departed, continuing less as living than "undead." But I think it has appeared to be less undead than it really is, even beyond the fact that few people think in the kinds of terms in which Barnes discussed such things. For explanation of this strange state of things one can look to the way the superhero movie boom emerged in that third generation, making superhero comics look more relevant (and popular) than they have really been--even though this was mainly a matter of superhero stories conveniently fitting in with particular demands of the studios (namely brand name, easily digestable sci-fi spectacle for the big screen). However, related to this fixation has been the lack of new, living, growing genres--genres which, by capturing attention, would allow attention to the undead to fade away, the undead holding the ground for lack of challenge by the living.