Corporatization and the Decadence of the Superhero Comic

America's long superhero-oriented comics industry affords a spectacle in many ways familiar to those at all attentive to the business behind pop culture. It has become more thoroughly corporatized and concentrated, with creatives overshadowed by company management obsessed with control, and keeping the artists on a short leash, as they focus on the ruthless exploitation of old--often exhausted--franchises rather than creating anything new, with an eye to holding onto old fans rather than winning new ones, and scoring multimedia success rather than producing for their own humble medium per se, the more in as this aligns with the concerns of the new owners. Thus compared with a few decades ago the smaller imprint, the star talent, that helped keep the field interesting are scarce on the ground, with the likes of Wildstorm and Malibu Comics not only long since swallowed up by the giants that are DC and Marvel on the way to their being swallowed up themselves by the Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery empires, but not all that much being done with them, certainly to go by those broader media profiles by which company managements set such great store. (Consider how back in the '90s Malibu Comics saw its series' adapted to offer a Men In Black feature film that launched movie and TV series', a Gary Larson-produced Night Man live-action TV series, an Ultraforce cartoon, all as we had major feature films based on comics from other labels ranging from the now-defunct Mirage's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Dark Horse's Barb Wire to Image Comics' Spawn. What can anyone compare to that today? Meanwhile in this generation of comics what creator has the standing of an Alan Moore? Or even a Rob Liefeld?

The comics business' path to this point admittedly had its idiosyncratic features. There was the bubble in comic book collecting and its bursting, the decline of the specialty comic book store, the extreme direct competition that superhero comics faced from the superabundance of superhero fare in other media the twenty-first century brought--and from Japanese manga that, bringing a distinctive visual and narrative style and a far greater range of theme made many a fan of people who never looked at an old-fashioned American comic book. Comicsgate may have played a part as well. Yet in the end the forces of corporatization and consolidation, of overweening Suits keeping the power in their hands as they favor old ideas over new with the spin-off, the tie-in, the adaptation much in mind ultimately led to the same corporatized, concentrated, old success-exploiting, innovation-averse pattern we have seen in film, and television, and book publishing, and even gaming. Indeed, even the seemingly novel features of the situation in comics seem to fit the old pattern, with the comics collecting bubble arguably part of the speculative mania that became the driver of the American economy in the '80s; the decline of specialty stores part of the crisis of retail; the competition of print with electronic media all too familiar in book publishing, and of media of every kind finding it harder to make its products stand out in an ever-more crowded and cacophonous scene; and the "graying of fandom" so many have observed that may be suggestive of intensely attentive fandoms themselves becoming a thing of the past in a scene where, with so much on offer, slighter attention to more enthusiasms is the norm. And of course, the way the culture wars color everything these days hardly needs expansion here . . .

Considering all that it seems fair to acknowledge that by the time all this was happening comics was already an aging, even decadent, medium, well into the late treasured family story-inside joke-virtuosity displaying phase of its life cycle. (It seems symbolic of this that Moore's Watchmen, which, brilliant as that work is, is also the kind of thing that can only appear in that late stage of a genre's life cycle, and that not as a source of renewal but as a portent of its ending, is now four decades old.) In even the most favorable circumstances the genre's age, telling decades ago, would have been that much more evident now. Still, especially given what the trend of corporatized franchise-exploiting has meant elsewhere it is hard to picture it having been a positive factor in the situation. Indeed, the fact that the superhero comics genre was so old and weary may have made it the more vulnerable to the damage that the kind of short term-minded, play-it-safe mentality of the executives can do to a field with what they flatter themselves is their brilliant "leadership."