The Death of Heroism and the DCnU Rebirth

The Justice Society of America, the first team of superheroes in comic book history, drawn by Alex Ross. (Hat tip: It's a Dan's World.)

I've written before about comic book superheroes as ancient gods that still survive in our culture.  They represent our most enduring grasp of right and wrong, the archetypes that come to us across the ages (see my post on Ur-memory of those ideas here), incredibly across thousands, perhaps even millions of years.  Looking at Green Lantern on a lunchbox or backpack, that seems an absurd assertion.  Perhaps we tolerate this pantheon of pagan deities in an era of mainstream Millennial religions precisely because the ancient gods have dwindled down to figures in comic mythologies that we tell children and youths; and these myths are not taken that seriously.

Yet the archetypes embedded here still have weight.  They also constitute serious commercial interests. That raises the question of why these archetypes over the past twenty years, and especially in the last ten (when DC has been under Dan Didio's leadership), have been undermined?  Why is DC Comics, the original classic superhero comics company, so preoccupied with the breakdown of heroes and heroism?  Why are their heroes dying?  Why are their characters being wiped from existence or rebooted in ways that taint them?  What does it mean when their core values are stripped from them?  Why are they being benched and sidelined?  And why are the Outsiders, classic Titans, Justice Society, and Doom Patrol the key casualties in this reboot?  I've commented on the JLA-centric generational and Bat-commercial aspects of the reboot which left the JSA, Doom Patrol and Titans out in the cold here; and my posts on what the Titans and Doom Patrol signify are here and here.  There's a good series of posts this week on what fans are losing as the DCU dies, over at It's a Dan's World (here).

The classic Titans are the heart of the DCU, challenging the legacy concept by being non-JLA heroes on their own terms; attempts to force them into a JLA legacies vision floundered or were undermined.

Superheroes are big business.  And making them less heroic reflects that spirit of hard-headed enterprise.  It wasn't always so.  The erosion of heroism began seriously with Alan Moore's Watchmen (which I've blogged about here).  A review of Grant Morrison's Supergods includes Morrison's criticism of the Watchmen and similar ambiguous, broken heroes (like V in V for Vendetta?), who killed and broke laws for a higher good that only they, by virtue of their superhuman perspectives, could perceive.  Morrison complains that with the Watchmen, Moore imposed his agenda on his characters:

"I chose to see writers like Alan Moore as missionaries who attempted to impose their own values and preconceptions on cultures they considered inferior—in this case, that of superheroes. Missionaries humiliate the natives by pointing out their gauche customs and colorfully frank traditional dress. They bullied defenseless fantasy characters into leather trench coats and nervous breakdowns and left formerly carefree fictional communities in a state of crushing self-doubt and dereliction. Anthropologists on the other hand, surrendered themselves to foreign cultures. They weren’t afraid to go native or look foolish. They came and they departed with respect and in the interests of mutual understanding. Naturally, I wanted to be an anthropologist."

Morrison has a point: Watchmen's preachiness rests on the characters' neuroses.  And yet, despite all the justifiable criticisms one could level at Moore for his attacks on heroism, perhaps best incarnated in his never-published Twilight of the Superheroes, he still seems to me like Robespierre in the French Revolution: "sea-green incorruptible."   Moore was genuinely concerned with how heroes would act in a world that had lost its moral compass.  That is legitimate.

By comparison, Morrison, with his stint on Batman, turned the character into the company's biggest, bestselling juggernaut.  And with that lucre earned, Morrison is now turning to rebooting a Depression-styled Superman, dressed in jeans and short sleeves, in September.

Superman's Perspective by Keron Grant (Hat tip: It's a Dan's World.)

The DCnU reboot evidently stems from three sources, firstly and above all, a complex, bitter and long-running lawsuit by the heirs of Superman's creators to regain copyrights over that character.  The fight was so ugly that Siegel and Shuster, who sold their billion-dollar creation for $130, famously cursed DC's use of the character.  In 1978, Siegel wrote of the Superman movie:

“I hope it super-bombs. ... I hope loyal Superman fans stay away from it in droves. I hope the whole world, becoming aware of the stench that surrounds Superman, will avoid the movie like the plague. The publishers of Superman comic books, National Periodical Publications Inc., killed my days, murdered my nights, choked my happiness, strangled my career. I consider National's executives economic murderers, money-mad monsters.”

The blog devoted to this matter continues: "Siegel was working as a mail clerk by the time he wrote that press release, earning just $7,000 a year, and Shuster was legally blind."

This is the legacy that Grant Morrison confronts as he joins the creators who are revamping Superman to further separate the character as a property from the claims of the Siegel and Shuster heirs. It's even more strange to see George Perez join these ranks, although he did a great job on the post-COIE Wonder Woman.  If that legacy didn't bother him, one would think Perez would have something to say about what has been done to the Titans - his Titans.

Tiny Titans #17 (Aug. 2009).

The other two reasons for the reboot are the advent of digital publishing as the major platform for pulp fiction; and Co-Publisher Dan Didio's personal dream to revamp the DCU.  Of these three reasons, the publisher's concern over Superman is at least comprehensible (if reprehensible), from a big corporation's point of view. The second is also understandable, and DC can be lauded for facing the fact that the entire publishing industry is undergoing a revolution. But the last, Dan Didio's personal dream, if true, is the most dubious.

The classic Outsiders, depicted by Jim Aparo. (Hat tip: It's a Dan's World.)

Didio's recent run writing Outsiders was contrived and deliberately simplistic.  It made me wonder how on earth this man rose to the top of the company in the first place; why he is given such respect; and how he acquired the power and credibility to be allowed to engineer a huge Millennial reimagining of this fictional universe.  I can see him firing a junior writer who produced the same material he created for the Outsiders, which led to the title's dismal sales, complaints from a dejected fanbase, and cancellation this summer.

Now to be fair, criticism of Dan Didio and co. is running pretty high right now in some circles because of this reboot.  I saw Chuck Dixon quoted on one board, who apparently said that Didio was a "directionless gladhander with a ouija board."  I've also noticed Marvel creators lining up to chide Didio for his misguided attempts to turn DC into a Marvelized universe with Marvelized, gritty, contemporary characters.  This is seemingly being done to lure Marvel's bigger fanbase - all to the detriment of DC's classic vision of heroism. 

DC's creators hit back that DC's entitled fans feel they own the company's characters, yet haven't the faintest idea what they (the fans) really want; nor do they understand what it takes to make the characters evolve into something bigger and better.  The people marshalling this big change evidently take a dim view of their established audience. Yet strangely, they don't give the new audience they wish to attract much credit either, apparently assuming that they are a jolt-seeking videogame generation who can only absorb simplistic sentences, cheesecake females, grimdark drama, and endless pages of wordless battle splash scenes which are easily translated into equally unchallenging action flicks.

I find it difficult to see these classic teams ploughed under, especially the Titans, especially for these reasons.  I take the long view: I think that the new DCU as conceived by Dan Didio, Jim Lee, and (most regrettably) Geoff Johns in DCnU's apocalyptic form can't be anything but a set up for a 2012 crossover event.  Even if it isn't, DCnU is a symptom of how our symbols and core archetypes are under pressure.  Millennial values are in flux: there is no baseline.  Dan Didio and his colleagues will preside over this chaos for awhile longer.  I think they will unwittingly herald something larger that they did not envision.  Their monied understanding of ever-more-fractured heroes (with a side order of war comics, sex, horror, magic and mystery) is not the one that will shape these mythological symbols for decades to come.  Rather, these creators' limited, retro-90s, Marvelized understandings of the DCU will push through the storm to the other side.  When a new generation of comics creators revives the JSA, the Doom Patrol, the New Titans and the Outsiders, DC will have found its soul, consciousness, heart and independent spirit once again.

Doom Patrol in its 1980s' reboot.

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