Yesterday it was my birthday

I hung one more year on the line

I should be depressed

My life’s a mess

But I’m havin’ a good time

– Paul Simon

… [O]ther people have birthdays. Why are we treating yours like a funeral?

– Leonard McCoy, M.D.

As my colleague Chris Hunter has already revealed, yesterday (November 1) was indeed my birthday. I am now 37 years old. From what I can tell, that puts me smack in the middle of the modern superhero-comics-reading doughy-guy demographic. However, being born so late in the ‘60s also means I missed out on much of the Beatles, the moon landing, and Woodstock; not to mention most of the shiny happy parts of the Silver Age of Comics. At least Jack Kirby stayed on Fantastic Four well into 1970. 

Maybe that explains my fondness for DC — it started “maturing” closer to when I could appreciate it.  The first Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Batman story was published around the time I was born, in Detective Comics #395 (cover-dated January 1970).  Dick Grayson had already moved out of Wayne Manor a month before, in Batman #217 (December 1969).  Before too long, Kirby would bequeath his Fourth World to DC, Clark Kent would leave the Daily Planet, and O’Neil and Adams would revitalize Green Lantern.

Nevertheless, when I was finally able to pay attention to comics, it felt like everything that was going to happen at DC had already happened, while Marvel remained a blur of motion.  I couldn’t keep up with Marvel, so I settled in with DC, where the biggest events in the mid-’70s were Earth-S’s integration into the Multiverse, Steve Englehart’s runs on Justice League and Detective, Ray “Atom” Palmer’s marriage to Jean Loring, and the eventual “DC Implosion.” 

Looking back, it was a weird time to be introduced to an otherwise familiar slate of characters.  The little changes, like the Teen Titans graduating from high school and Clark Kent anchoring the evening news with Lana Lang, weren’t that hard to assimilate, and again, it wasn’t like there was a whole lot of upheaval.  Even the murder of Iris Allen in 1979, shocking as it was, was still fairly isolated.  Besides, all the little details helped cultivate a certain insider mentality.

And when the ’80s and ’90s brought more frequent changes, they came in force.  I was in high school for Crisis on Infinite Earths and its aftermath, and even six months out from Infinite Crisis it’s hard not to look back on 1985-2005 as a Marvelesque beehive of activity that might well have frightened away Young Tom.  It wasn’t that bad, to be sure; but it definitely wasn’t the laconic status quo maintenance of the 1970s. 

Of course, everything came to a head during Infinite Crisis, with all the flowchart-minded crossover carnage really straining my affection for these old, familiar characters.  In the thick of things, I dreamed of the IC aftermath as being a period of bucolic, benign governance following a seemingly endless campaign season.  As a result, it surprises me a little to view these last six months as relatively uneventful, even boring, by comparison.  Part of that is the erratic schedule of books like Green Lantern and Wonder Woman; and part of it is the disappointment of Flash and (until the current issue) Hawkgirl. 

However, part of it also stems from IC’s repeal of COIE’s decades-old changes.  If writers Geoff Johns, Brad Meltzer, and Allan Heinberg, similarly raised on ’70s DC, had thereby become accustomed to a more reliable illusion of change, when they found themselves able to remake the status quo as they wished, why wouldn’t they have gone back to the period that first sucked them in? 

So now, considering the first half of 52 and its attendant “One Year Later” effects, it feels like a return to the not-so-changed world into which we grade-school-aged DC fans of the 1970s were born.  (Didn’t Heinberg, Johns, and/or Meltzer say as much in an interview?)  The Green Lantern Corps and Red Tornado are back, and there are Sgt. Rock and Jonah Hex comics to make us feel eclectic.  Once again the Teen Titans are nearing the end of their high school careers.  The early ’80s are even creeping around the edges, as shown by the Omega Men miniseries and Marv Wolfman writing Nightwing again (for the first time!).  Now I’m waiting for Grant Morrison or Kurt Busiek to contribute a riff on Anchorman Clark.

Like the baby boomers’ surprise at having elected Bill Clinton, one of their own, as President, it’s a bit unnerving to realize that “my own” are pretty much in charge of DC Comics.  A short while ago, Jim Roeg wrote effusively about what a great time it was to be a DC fan:

[...] especially if you’re a mid-thirties overgrown DC fan, because everything—everything—DC makes is being made just for you. All that Dan Didio and Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison and Gail Simone and Bill Willingham and Mark Waid and Greg Rucka think about when they butter their toast or walk their dogs, or kiss their partners as they turn out the lights is your—by which I mean my—pleasure. They must! Because every new title, every assignment of writers and artists, every revival of some obscure but secretly treasured eighties character, everything is calculated to stir some pleasurable memory or to unveil some new zone of delight, a zone that is nonetheless always, always moored to the dock of our adolescent dreaming. It’s glorious, dizzying, wonderful… Too much…

Jim goes on to make the point that this is almost literally too much of a good thing, such that it dulls the refinement of our tastes.  At the risk of paraphrasing him horribly, if “good” becomes the average, then it’s no longer “good.”

I commented that I didn’t particularly relish the thought of Johns, Meltzer, et al., making comics specifically for guys like me, because (as we constantly remind ourselves) the superhero comics market is dying a slow death by attrition as it is, the children are our future, yadda yadda yadda.  Still, upon further reflection, that theory has to be reconciled with the notion that I, and probably Jim, Geoff Johns, or whoever reading DC in the ’70s, had a similar learning curve. 

The distinction may well be the difference in tone between, say, the murder of Iris Allen and that of Sue Dibny — but if both tragedies are in the past, and the focus now is on One Year Later, I wonder how the DC of November 1, 2006 compares to itself thirty years ago.  (In another happy coincidence, Englehart’s first issue of JLA was published on my seventh birthday.)  I’d like to think there’s not much of a barrier for a seven-year-old to enjoy an average issue of a mainstream DC superhero book, but realistically, I know that they’re not the target anymore.  The thing is, I’m not sure my seven-year-old self was the target audience in 1976 either….

Honestly, I’m not sure I would have expected to still be reading superhero comics thirty years later.  I don’t know how I’ll feel if I’m still reading them three years from now, when the dreaded 4-0 rolls around.  I probably won’t want those comics to be written specifically for 40-year-old guys with three decades of superhero histories in their heads.  That raises all kinds of unhealthy associations with aging rock stars and their similarly aging groupies, and I’d rather not see this hobby as the graphic equivalent of a Beach Boys reunion tour.

Still, for now, I’m havin’ a good time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Comic Books, DC Comics, Grumpy Old Fan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.