Seven Deadly Sins of Comics, Part III - Cannibalism

The "Comics Recycling Bin" points out how comics tend to reuse concepts. Sometimes this involves failing to credit the real originator of an idea, sometimes it constitutes a tribute or homage to an admired creator or creation, and sometimes it simply reflects the need to piece something together without having to try too hard.

Comics sometimes repeat themselves without worrying about whether anyone had listened the first time. For instance, newsgroup rumor suggests that Marvel now plans on creating a new "Spider-Woman" character, the third in a series of characters who failed to support their own titles and do not appear in the titles of others. The Spider-Woman concept has two strikes against it; why has Marvel opted for the third?

Something in comics compels its talent to reuse and reuse again, even in the service of no particular commercial or aesthetic cause.

Recycling's Early Successes

While Marvel Comics just began to enter the waters of the superhero title, DC had weathered through nearly a generation of ups and downs in the marketplace, essentially surviving with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman intact, most of its other Golden Agers dead in the marketplace, and occasional hang-ons in support roles (such as Aquaman and Green Arrow).

In 1956, after the tomb doors had closed on almost every superhero ever created to date, Julius Schwartz decided to experiment with recreating a Golden Age character, and thus made over the Roosevelt-era Flash for the days of Eisenhower. This proved such a surprising success that DC reworked Green Lantern, the Atom, and Hawkman in fairly short order, and, realizing the possiblities inherent in a newly repopulated superhero universe, joined old and new characters as the Justice League of America that would soon appear in a title by the same name.

In a bold series of strokes, DC had proven that a recreated character could succeed in ways that the comics market would feel. Such success may have given the wrong idea about refurbished characters, in the long run; the long-absence of many of these characters contributed to their novelty, as did the clever reworkings, but pre-owned goods would not, in the long run, sell themselves automatically.

By 1972, DC would no longer publish The Atom, Green Lantern, or Hawkman. Poor sales had killed these titles.

Marvel's Revivals

Marvel managed to revive Captain America and the Sub-Mariner, but had painted itself into a corner with Lee-Kirby's Human Torch, and thus allowed that character to appear for a token Fantastic Four story before resigning him to a limbo that involved one recreation as the body of another character (the Silver Age Vision) and a reversal of that very claim in the eighties, where he turned out an altogether separate creation. However, although Marvel had considerable numbers of defunct superheroes to rework, a different editorial vision about such things and, almost certainly, a lost opportunity brought on by waiting too long to try it kept them from revising any Golden Age characters but the Vision with any real degree of success.

Marvel knew that it didn't need to revive old characters to succeed, as much mileage as DC had demonstrated they could make with such an approach, and continued to create swarms of new superheroes well into the 1990s, until it seemed that Manhattan must surely overflow with costumes.

Missed Shots

Without a context, one might assume that packaging an old name in a new body with a more contemporary costume would sell anything. After all, DC got away with Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, Hawkman, and a few others during the sixties. However, the fate that awaited them by 1985 suggested something: by the mid-eighties, all of these derivative characters enjoyed at least one cancellation of his title, the Flash holding out most gallantly through a run that lasted almost 30 years.

In general, though, by 1972, the recreated superheroes had mostly failed in their own titles, which, in some cases, only sold for about five years. Atom and Hawkman staved off cancellation for a time by appearing in a single dual title, resembling in reverse Marvel's sixties double books that spawned multiple titles (such as Hulk and Captain America).

Creators now can expect a new title to fail. Such titles often serve as exploratory ventures into a market, such as the miniseries that occasionally spawn a long-lived title (such as Green Arrow). However, a number of forces move them towards recreating characters anyway. These include:

1. A desire to maintain copyrights. A comics company that lets its properties vanish from print altogether risks losing these materials to the public domain.
2. A reverence for the original sources. Golden Age materials, when handled by the right hands, can sometimes produce some remarkably robust material. For instance, for a period DC's main superhero title, Justice League of America, suffered from slumps while Golden-Age derived works like All-Star Comics and All-Star Squadron enjoyed a thriving vigor. Sometimes this vigor derives from the material itself, but the respect the talent employ in handling these concepts doubtless plays a larger role.
3. An exhaustion of ideas. As superhero comics engage and copyright more and more names, the remainder become increasingly artificial and stunted things. By the 1990s, characters routinely took the names of concepts rather than things ("Rampage," "Rage," "Damage") or technical terms that may have had a sound that impressed someone ("Parallax"). Recreating a Golden Age or abandoned Silver Age character allowed talent to begin with a rough idea of a concept, a name that had a pedigree, and the freedom to reinterpret these elements in the light of whatever old or new superheroic idiom it cared to employ.

Different characters might recycle a name (if not an entire concept) for a copyright; Marvel created its "Captain Marvel" with just such an end in mind. Generally, recreated Golden Age characters revived in the 1960s (and sometimes later) represented a tribute to the originals; figures like the Vision, the Sandman of the 1970s, and the recent Black Condor involve this kind of respect. In other cases, one must suspect a lack of inspiration (for instance, the Silver Age Human Torch; the Starman of the 70s; the Starman of the 80s; and a few others that, if they fail to come to mind, at least fail to annoy.

Marvel's Marvels

During the height of his popularity, when Fawcett's Captain Marvel outsold even Superman (a success which led DC to sue Fawcett out of the comic book business forever), Captain Marvel moved in a universe infested with other "Marvel" heroes. He could view as his peers "Mary Marvel," "Captain Marvel, Junior", the "Lieutenant Marvels," an "Uncle Marvel," and perhaps even a rabbit tied to him by a common costume and source of powers. We look to that far-gone age of innocent comics with some embarassment, recognizing the silliness inherent in investing so many characters with the same costume and name.

Marvel Comics had moved well beyond this point when it began recycling its own Marvel-named characters. Though its own "Captain Marvel" did not originally owe more than his name to the Fawcett prototype, he would later acquire certain dubious bits of baggage that hinted at the original. Most damning, at one point Marvel's Captain Marvel took to changing places with a young man in order to fight crime, similar in some ways to Billy Batson's change of form by saying "Shazam!" Flagging interest eventually killed this character off, perhaps because the character generally did not appear in titles outside his own except as a short-term guest; long-term membership in a superhero team would not sustain reader interest as it could in characters like Marvel's Hawkeye, who did not appear in his own title until the 1980s.

Marvel Comics decided to allow Jim Starlin, the Jack Kevorkian of superheroes, to dispense with him in a well-written tale about his death from cancer. After the ink dried on this story (but, perhaps, sometime before the body actually cooled off), Marvel thrust a new "Captain Marvel" into the pages of the Avengers title, probably as a means to offset a preponderance of Teutonic blondes in that group (Thor; Captain America; Yellowjacket; Hawkeye). Marvel recreated Captain Marvel as a woman of color with some law enforcement (customs?) background and powers centering around electromagnetic phenomena. Some fourteen years later, she would appear with the more likely name of "Photon." However, in similar form, Marvel only stripped her of the borrowed title by introducing a character supposedly sired by the previous bearer of that title; a son or clone of Mar-Vell appeared, demanding the name as his birthright. Currently, so far as Web research attests, this character wears another name (perhaps "Legacy.")

We need not enter a discussion of the convoluted histories of Marvel's two "Ms. Marvel" characters beyond mentioning that this dysphonious name also passed on almost as soon as one character abandoned it. In neither case did anyone seem to care much that the previous character had very recently failed in another title, that no time had passed, and that no reason existed to create a new version of an older character no one seemed to care about.

DC's Later Revivals

DC, over perhaps twenty years, tried to recreate Starman (the second version), Air Wave, Starman (the third version), Sandman, Starman (the fourth version), Black Condor, and Green Arrow. These works enjoyed differing degrees of success, but generally failed to show adequate momentum to keep their titles in print. The charcters either disappeared (Air Wave, the second and third Starmen and the Black Condor), retained a place as no more than a footnote in current DC continuity (Sandman) or even had to step down to allow their prototype to return to comics (Green Arrow).

Viewing the performance of revised characters since 1968 (when Marvel's Vision character appeared, to succeed in comics for over 30 years in group titles), one might easily proclaim the experiments almost universally unsuccessful, in spite of the critical acclaim or easily recognized quality of the works. And, it seems, that the old "Big Two" companies have become somewhat more cautious about such experiments now that the entire market crosses a small community of readers.

Where These Designs Fail

No single reason makes recycled characters fail, but several tendencies do help recreated heroes move from the shelf to the dustbin.

Poor Execution

Indifferent presentation or weak design will kill a revised character, especially where the previous version already lacked appeal. The commercial failure of Mar-Vell as Captain Marvel suggested that the market would not support the character; and the replacement Captain Marvel had considerably less going for her to interest a reader. The overall blandness, superfluity, and disposability of the character suggest that even the luminaries of comics writing would find it difficult to get any mileage from her concept.

Lack of a Market

Often, titles that die do so because no one really cares about the storylines or the characters any more. Sometimes this should tell creators something, like the weakness of the concept. The Golden Age superheroes vanished because of a loss in interest in superheroes per se more than the particular characters themselves, so a revived interest in superhero comics would, as a rising tide, lift all boats. Characters that failed in more flush times, however, provide less sure matter for recreating a successful hero.

Bumper to Bumper Recycling

If a recreation of a superhero occurs without any clear period in which no hero bore the name or concept, this seems to help fordoom the new creation to obscurity. For instance, Marvel's second Captain Marvel, herself failing to create any interest, still peopled the pages of team books when Marvel attempted to create its third Captain Marvel. The aftermath may have left neither character using the name and no one interested in either "Photon" or "Legacy."

The rapid succession of Green Arrows and Starmen may have helped undermine interest in the characters as well.

Dwindling Stature

Recreated characters will not generally succeed if their originals play much greater roles in the comics mythos than the later versions. If Superman or Batman died and DC replaced the character with minor supporting character in a second-tier book, readers would resent the new version. This probably killed the second Green Arrow, who turned off many readers by the smaller role he seemed to play in his book than had the original back during his days with the Justice League.

This stature problem even besets commercially viable retreads like the Kyle Raynor Green Lantern, since the role of a Green Lantern enjoyed considerable reduction after the destruction of the Green Lantern Corps. Kyle might have annoyed considerably less if he had replaced the alpha Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, rather than replacing the entire Green Lantern mythos.

Fool Bad Luck

Sometimes the market just won't let something in, and this killed the likes of the new Black Condor and the seventies' Kirby Sandman.

Some medium critics may describe bad luck as bad karma, in that the imaginations of would-be creators have not yet so exhausted possible concepts that anyone yet must recreate rather than create. For instance, fans of Kirby's broader creations who dislike later interpretations and sequels to such work as his Fourth World project sometimes mention that comics would do better to create anew than to regurgitate, recycle, and prop up sagging concepts.

Reader Cynicism

Lastly, a number of readers may find themselves put off by the very notion of recycling. Consider the first example mentioned early in this page. Would you, seeing the new Spider-Woman on the cover of a book, dismiss it summarily with the obvious question: Do we need another Spider-Woman? This attitude can kill even exceptional works if such resistence holds more influence than the lure of the quality of the product.

Where Cannibalism Hurts Comics

Given enough time, the volume of recycled superheroes presents to possible new readers the notion that no originality exists within the medium. To the long-term reader, recycled superheroes present the threat of abandoning favorite characters to replace them with new models with go-faster stripes and no substance; the process smacks of planned obsolescence and faddishness.

Also, looking more broadly, recycled characters suggest that the medium has become self-absorbed and obsessed with its origins rather than looking towards its future, even though, when done well, individual revisions suggest precisely the opposite.

That such revisions do not always reflect sound design or much quality control also argues for the notion that editors use the reworked concept as a substitute for imagination and originality; and that by repainting some old wreck that never sold issues before, companies seek to fool readers into wasting their money on preowned goods. Sadly, this actually happens, and the cynicism that this viewpoint demonstrates rests on at least a kernel of real events.