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Most people understand the concept of inflation fairly well. Put simply, when it requires two dollars to purchase what one dollar took yesterday, inflation exists.
Comics, in their sixty-plus years of history, have become grossly inflated. Consider, for instance, Superman in the late thirties: He could, with a straight face, deal with robbers and local megalomaniacal scientists and psychopaths.
Move forward a generation, from 1939 to 1969. Where is our gangster-bashing hero? If he bothered with gangsters, it was only on the way off the earth to play a game of galactic billiards with entire solar systems somewhere.
Sixteen years after that, in 1985, Superman (with the entirety of those of his peers then controlled by DC Comics) found himself amid a catastrophe likely to destroy not just his city, country, continent, world, or universe; he found himself in a multiversal dilemma that might destroy everything that could be.
Was this increase in scale an improvement? Did moving from the personal scale to municipal, to national, to global, to interplanetary and beyond, make the stories better?
Well . . . not really. So what happened?
![[Captain Atom attempts to parley.]](../img/op0101.jpg)
We couldn't realistically expect writers to make a superhero interesting if his adventures involved nothing but busting up bank robbers issue after issue. So, therefore, we should expect some latitude in how comics writers make their stories interesting.
Tools exist to improve stories. Plot twists, character conflicts, seemingly unresolvable complications all serve as venerable institutions of detective and adventure stories.
A constant temptation exists to "improve" a character. How, for instance, could Superman catch a spy plane if he can only leap tall buildings? Therefore, he needs to fly. How can he get information hidden in a safe across town? He needs the power to see through solid matter.
Probably no character possesses an original concept so elegant and perfect that revision can never improve him. However, one- sided changes, such as the steady increase in power Superman enjoyed between 1939 and 1970, hit a wall of diminishing returns fairly quickly.
Let us consider a theoretical construct we could call the Bell Curve of Heroic Adventures. On the low end, this bell curve would deal with the fantastically trivial. For example, imagine a superhero story where the big crisis involved getting out of a parking space with the Heromobile when someone had blocked it in by double parking. On the high end, this bell curve would deal with superhuman (or even superdivine, if we keep "divine" in lower-case letters) deeds, things that affect human beings in the same way that a tsunami affects the water molecules involved.
The low end of the Bell Curve of Heroic Adventures offers possiblities for valid stories, mostly humorous, but would require a great deal of writers to keep things interesting if they never went beyond this scale. Not surprisingly, humorous comics do frequently deal in trivial situations (for instance, Archie frequently deals with fights between himself and his female significant others, but stories where he saves the world remain rare).
A character will find a new territory of possible adventures as he moves up the power spectrum, especially if his original domain focuses on the mundane. However, the Bell Curve of Heroic Adventures tapers at both ends. This means that the possible interesting stories tend to rarify toward the extremes.
Once a character reaches the far end of the power spectrum, into the godlike and beyond, he's hit the far end of the Bell Curve. How many truly different adventures where superheroes save the universe(s) can remain interesting or unique? Not many, really, it seems.
DC/Warner's Superman offers a textbook case of the consequences of a long, long career of power growth. Before his twentieth birthday, he had already accumulated so much power that it had warped the stories. For instance, instead of punching out bank robbers and shaking them out of their cars, Superman stories with gangsters might involve some weird twist like Superman taking an oath to serve the criminals for a weekend (as a raffle prize), yet having to thwart their criminal designs. The very concept of thwarting a bank robbery was something Superman would dispose of in one or two panels on his way to do something else, like reproach himself for forgetting someone's birthday.
After a while, Superman reached the point where he spent more and more time away from the earth altogether. If he didn't have a secret identity to protect, he might have been able to avoid the mortal scale at all.
Writers, however, had demonstrated a heroism of their own in being able to craft stories around the constraint of a hero with no real challenges in a universe of mere matter. They afflicted Superman with strange weaknesses (odd allergies to matter from his home planet; a susceptibility to magic) and twisted their brains into pretzels to find situations to challenge him.
However, the brightest among them knew there was a problem. Superman was in a terrible rut by 1970. How many new worlds could he discover? How many times could Superman protect his secret identity? How many times could he get stranded on red sun planets? So the editors of DC wisely tapped Dennis O'Neil, that gem of the Silver and modern ages of comics, to solve the problem.
It was a shame they didn't back him up. He recognized the problem, and created a catastrophe to substantially depower Superman. But, too soon, the powers that were at DC had the blue marvel moving planets around again.
DC would not relent until the great housecleaning of the mid-1980s, where they discarded their continuity (a good idea) and attempted to start another (not a good idea). John Byrne would have to do what they should have allowed O'Neil to do over a decade previously.
If one looks at Superman since Byrne's revision, it's hard not to admit that the character, a superhuman yet (semi)mortal figure with a very human side, has improved. Why, after all, is anyone even interested in seeing that Superman can toss planets around like flour sacks?
Superman's case represents a tendency throughout the industry. Consider, if you will, the cosmic characters of whatever comics company. How many of these universe shaping figures are really interesting? (Hint: Look for issue #1 of In-Betweener Comics, The Adventures of Eternity, or specific titles focusing on any of these comics uberbeings. Take a lot of food, and be prepared to train your grandchildren to watch the newsstands. It's not going to happen, because these characters simply aren't interesting. The closest thing to a use they possess would be a roll of narrator, like the Watcher's).
This suggests Inflationary Axiom #1: Superheroes become less interesting when they reach a scale where an old lady getting shot in a bank robbery is no longer relevant to the domains in which they operate. Why so? Possibly because human beings are better characters than forces of nature, possibly owing to a bias of the reader, who is more typically human than a cosmic force.
![[Thanos threatens to destroy everything (again)....]](../img/op0102.jpg)
Power inflation must invariably travel with its cojoined twin, stakes inflation. Godlike beings do not deal with trivial matters.
Once a character has become too powerful, it's rather like currency inflation; the tendency tends to operate in one direction, and become very intractible. For instance, once a cosmic cowboy becomes a cosmic messiah, the simple stellar shootout becomes little more than a footnote in the arena.
Stakes inflation has occurred, partially as an inevitable complement to the empowerment of superheroes, but other forces, including the "small world" phenomenon, push stakes to increase as well.
The first superhero comic books developed in an isolationist America, where the fears of everyman derived from the scale of his life. The man in the street remembered (or had witnessed) the crime wars of Prohibition (which ended only a few years before Superman first appeared in print). People with guns, saboteurs, and the war overseas offered real-world scares that meant something.
When America entered the war, it provided a new source of stories as the scope moved from local crises to a global one; the great patriotic heroes, represented by their archetype, Captain America, began in this period. Now the stakes of superheroes had to compete with the real concerns of the readers; great master plans shifted from the destruction of Gotham City (or Metropolis; or whatever real or fictional setting) to threats against the liberty of the world.
After the war, there were different things to scare us. The very real prospect of globe-swallowing totalitarian powers (represented by the late Stalin and Mao) loomed large next to superheroes. The technological advances making the end of all higher life forms intruded into the general awareness; who, really, wouldn't pick a simple bank robbery over nuclear annihilation?
Superhero comics entered a postwar decline, and the new generation of threats helped make them considerably less relevant to the lives of likely readers. It would take the Stan Lee editorial model, which emphasized the human face of the characters, to recreate interest and relevance.
However, once again, aging of the comics readership, a glut of the comics market, and rising concerns about the viability of the global political establishments (especially in the interrelation of America and the communist powers) helped make the comics less relevant. Each time comics sales dropped, editorial pressures resulted in experimentation. Things like "relevant" comics (that is, comics that proselytized for the sixties leftist ethos) resulted from this experimentalism.
Stakes inflation also came out of these pressures. In the early 1960s the Fantastic Four could plausibly worry about the events of the isolated kingdom of Doom's Latveria; by the early 1970s, the major elements of the Marvel Comics stable were involved in an intergalactic war. While this period was a plateau worthy of emulation, it pushed the stakes up from stories about Sue Richards having a child; by the mid-seventies, universal crises were perennial and predictable.
By the 1990s, one could expect one company-crossing universal catastrophe per year. In the meantime, a real threat had appeared: no one was buying any more. Titles that sold 500,000 copies in 1968 struggled to sell 70,000 in 1998.
Stan Lee recently iterated his sixties editorial philosphy, which we could abbreviate as "It's the characters, stupid." But the companies have backed themselves into a corner, partially through the stakes inflation of stories. Does anyone who read in 1970 even care about the Infinity Crisis (or whatever Marvel called it)?
![[The representative from the S*p*rm*n's Union speaks.]](../img/op0103.jpg)
Once upon a time, Superman could act in a playing field where he never need see another costumed being, powered or not. Batman dealt with gun-toting goons with dark shirts and light ties and poor language skills. The Spirit found his greatest threats in adversaries clad, not in garish costumes, but in clingy silken dresses (and these opponents were formidable indeed!).
The Silver Age began with a few proven sales-getters in the market and a number of new characters or revised versions of Golden Age figures (Green Lantern; the Flash; the Atom; Hawkman). The Silver Age, therefore, involved a greater superheroic cast, plus the growing stable of costumed, powered villains (a new development, since Golden Age villains seldom had powers beyond those of their own intelligence). The superheroic world was already more crowded after DC began renewing its superhero stable and Marvel began creating a new one. Perhaps one thing that made the Silver Age more easy to understand, however, in comparison to what exists today, is that it included a controllable and understandable cast. Thanks mostly to the prodigal efforts of Jack Kirby, superheroes proliferated; but not in today's numbers. A vigorous editorial staff could keep a reasonably-sized cast under control so that characters remained interesting and unique.
Starting in the 1980s, the "Big Two" companies began attempting to catalog their creations, printing uninteristing and uninspired works listing everyone in alphabetical order. Who needs such works? Continuity specialists?
New characters can add interest to old titles. Over decades, however, when new characters accumulate, and nothing is thrown away (however horrendous), one inevitably ends up with many, many atrocious creations. Imagine, by way of comparison, a trashcan of infinite size into which everything is tossed. Will it contain a savory brew 20 years later?
Meanwhile, while minting new characters, the comics companies also occasionally unearthed old ones. DC was prodigal in this respect. Not only did DC mint new characters, not only did it renew old ones, not only did it create duplicate ones ("Earth-2" produced its own Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and anyone who had been in print prior to 1963 under DC's banner), but it purchased entire stables from defunct companies. The original Fawcett Captain Marvel ended up DC's intellectual property after litigation, with the entirety of Fawcett's characters (such as Bulletman and Bulletgirl); DC acquired Quality and other old companies (providing the characters later grouped as the Freedom Fighters, the Seven Soldiers of Victory, Plastic Man, and too many others to count). Even as DC was attempting to clean its stables, realizing its overcrowded and overconvoluted continuity required a thorough razing, it continued to acquire characters (the Charlton stable, including the Blue Beetle, the Question, and others).
The typical comics city contains more superheroes than government officials. Any of the major companies could dispense with nonsuper beings altogether and not empty out the restaurants during the Sunday brunch rush. Aardvark-Vanaheim could plausibly print the parody Normalman, which dealt with a character who was the only being without superpowers on the world Levram, which housed nothing but superbeings. The density of disposable superheroes made this a workable hook for satire; dedicated comics readers understood the running joke about a superhero group taking roll call for weeks on end.
How did things get so crowded? Several major reasons acted, including those listed immediately below.
Consider that Marvel Comics, when it published Avengers #1, vol. I, the title included essentially all of its real superhero characters who did not already belong to other groups. There wasn't a large pool to pick from. When Marvel published Avengers #1, vol. III, the Avengers line-up included thirty-nine Avengers, plus mentioned about fifteen to twenty others who either were dead and not available at the time, or otherwise engaged, from the ranks of everyone who had been in the Avengers in just over four hundred separate issues through three volumes. And that was by no means every superhero they could have included. For instance, another ninety or so mutant superheroes from the twenty or thirty different spin-offs of the X-Men could easily have been grafted onto the team; and if there still weren't enough, add any Jack Kirby creations that got left out, like, say, the Inhumans.
When you grow from a stable of about one or two dozen superheroes to a hundred or hundreds, it begins to deflate the concept. DC and Marvel simply have too many superheroes. The only comic I've seen that even hinted that this could be a problem was the excellent series Kingdom Come.
I wonder if the solution doesn't lie with an underused editorial strategy that Marvel and DC have both employed. Marvel allowed Jim Starlin to dispose of Adam Warlock and Marvel's Captain Mar-Vell, earning him a reputation as an editorial hit-man. If, like other products, unmarketable, uninteresting characters ceased to appear on the shelves, this might improve the medium before the worlds of DC and Marvel do, indeed, begin to resemble Normalman's adopted world of Revlam.
Inflation is an easy-to-use gimmick that attempts to fan reader interest without actually improving the quality of stories. In the short term, it may sell a few copies; but in the long run, it requires drastic action (the equivalent of currency deflation or severe anti-inflationary measures) to clean up the mess.
Used without caution, it's a cheap trick that cheapens the product.
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