Note: Sean Collins raised some question about my use of the term "superhero decadence." I respond there in comments--just scroll down. But then here's Dirk Deppey, who coined the term, ruling in Sean's favor. Well, live and learn, I guess! I don't pretend to any authority here; I'm just trying to think this stuff through, and welcome correction when I'm mistaken.Okay, so I left off talking about how superhero comics have gone meta in the years between Great Darkness Saga and Blackest Night. Now let's talk about how they've gone MEGA!!! They've done this in two related ways, that I can see. First, stories have grown to encompass whole universes (by which I mean vast swathes of the main superheroes, and sometimes all the superheroes, period, at a given point of continuity at either Marvel or DC). And second, the number of crossover/tie-in titles and sheer quantity of issues devoted to such stories has dramatically ballooned.
Universe-wide stories seem like an inevitable development when a shared-universe is established through things like villains recurring across different superhero titles, occasional guest-appearances and small-scale crossovers, JLA- and Avengers-style team titles, titles like Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-in-One devoted to pairing up one superhero with others, etc. Shared universes don't just prompt questions like, "Why doesn't Batman get a Green Lantern ring?", but, as Kurt Busiek notes in his response:
Used to be, things sold better when they didn't tie in too much, and nobody asked why the Avengers didn't show up to help out with Galactus or where Spider-Man was that day. Nowadays, it seems like you can't do a big story without it sprawling over most of the other books in the line, and that's selling well...for now.The X-Men's Dark Phoenix Saga was one of those events that, logically, should have had some universe-wide implications. And in fact, it did. Here's what that sort of thing looked like in 1980, just a couple of years before the Great Darkness Saga--a sidebar in issue 135 depicting various heavy-hitters taking notice of the rise of Dark Phoenix:
In issue 136, President Jimmy Carter demands to know why the hell the Avengers aren't on the case:
An in-story answer to that question has already been set up, back in issue 134:
Finally, the climactic issue 137 opens with a splash-page introduction by the Watcher, putting the ultimate seal on this as a Big Deal in the Marvel universe:
In 1982, the idea of a universe-wide superhero crossover event was just beginning to take shape at Marvel with Contest of Champions, a wholly self-contained three-issue limited series. It would be several more years before DC advanced the idea in its own massive way with Crisis on Infinite Earths, but Legion of Super-Heroes is a peculiar title--it takes place in a supposed DC future, and is meant to encompass all the superhero action of that future. Any story that involved all or most of its characters and locations, then, would be de facto universe-wide. The upshot of this is that, before the whole universe-wide idea caught on, just by pulling out all of this title's own stops, Levitz and Giffen were able to make a story arc of merely five issues feel absolutely HUUUUGE on a universe-wide scale, without the need (and for that matter without the possibility) of crossing over or tying in with other titles.Meeting or exceeding that kind of truly epic feel in a superhero universe's normal present is something else entirely, and it's not surprising that crossover events have grown to sprawling proportions. By the time I bailed on superhero comics in the nineties, crossover events that weren't even universe-wide, but just concerned certain families of titles (X-Cutioner's Song, Maximum Carnage, Knightfall), were running upward of a dozen issues each.
What about Blackest Night? The official checklist that takes us up to BN #4 (halfway through the eight issues of the event series proper) already stands at a whopping 24 issues, crossing over with Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps, and no fewer than four tie-in miniseries.
Then, in November, we get this, along with the expectation that a whole new round of tie-in miniseries will kick off in December, along with the continuation of all three core titles, for a grand total of issues that may amount to ten times that of the Great Darkness Saga.Just to be clear--I'm not complaining, and in fact I relish the idea of a huge, complex, engrossing story that really needs that many issues to tell. But that's the question, isn't it? Maximum Carnage got tiresomely repetitive. X-Cutioner's Song often seemed artificially convoluted just for the sake of keeping so many characters in play. My (purely circumstantial) impression of both those crossovers at the time was that they were Marvel's desperate attempt to staunch a likely hemorrhage of readers after all those superstar artists went their own way to found Image.
This brings me to one last big change I'll mention between GDS and BN. When I got out of superhero comics, artists like McFarlane, Lee, and Liefeld were such ginormous celebrities and cash-cows that they made writers seem positively irrelevant to a popular title's appeal. Since I've been gone, it looks like writers have come back in a huge way, and are now ginormous superstars in their own right. It makes sense. As superhero comics have gone meta, gone mega, grown more continuity-heavy, and come to presuppose a readership's longer-term emotional investment, the bar for writers would seem to have risen to a point that it's amazing and impressive when they actually deliver on all that.
Well, that concludes my survey of the major sea-changes I see between GDS and BN. On balance, I'd call most of those changes progress. And yet, GDS delivers the goods in a way that BN might not. GDS solidly makes the grade as the kind of space-operatic superhero horror story BN apparently aspires to be. BN would seem to have a lot more going for it, but sometimes "a lot more" just results in a trainwreck. In the next post of this series (and hopefully the last!), I'll try to look at how GDS accomplishes what it does without the flashy art Image ushered in, the meta, the mega, the ultra-violence or gore, or any of the other changes in superhero comics that could work so much to BN's advantage.
3 comments:
Curt,
As one who enjoyed GDS more than most current mega-events, I look forward to seeing your summing-up on the LEGION tale. I think I've already given up on BLACKEST NIGHT.
Even if Deppey had not chimed in, I would think that Collins was correct in his estimation of what Deppey intended by the term. HOWEVER, I don't think that means that your use of it was wrong, because I think Deppey's formulation is flawed. It doesn't take into account a lot of the factors I mentioned in my "decadence" essays, like the fact that a lot of the works that used to be regarded as essentially "clean"-- the Golden Age CAPTAIN AMERICA, say-- sometimes included enough gore to have merited, if not an "R," certainly a "PG-13."
Further, if Sean & Dirk want to use "decadence" exclusively as a term signifying the self-referentiality of comics, why doesn't the phrase "art primarily concerned with itself" apply just as well to "clean" comics like Silver Age JUSTICE LEAGUE, which started the whole thing of multiple mirror-worlds (tail-eating solipsism or what)? Or the many reiterations of Roy Thomas' continuity games?
The answer is that while Deppey COULD have made his version of "decadence" apply to those comics as well, he didn't do so: he concentrated purely on works suggestive of extreme (if extremely ridiculous) sex 'n' violence.
That's why he's wrong, and you're not.
Finally got caught-up with BN except for the latest releases. Feeling kind of exhausted by the whole thing.
Like GP above, I think I might be done. I enjoyed myself but, like a heavy meal, I feel stuffed and in need of simpler fare with fewer courses.
Back to Image for me.
Great scans
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