This summer I ♥ Comics returns to Blog@Newsarama. Each Wednesday comics bloggers and creators will discuss the things they love about the medium.
This week our guest contributor is blogger David Brothers, who you can find blogging regularly over at The 4th Letter.
by David Brothers
As far as superhero comics go, the middle tier is where it’s at.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. Spidey is still essentially the perfect superhero. But, pound for pound, most of my favorite comics tend to come from the middle tier characters.
Think about it. Superman, Batman, the X-Men, and Spider-Man make megabucks for their companies. Therefore, they’re kept under close watch. They become properties, and properties must be protected. That makes it a little harder to introduce sweeping changes to the character without the heavy hand of editorial control swatting down anything that deviates too far from the status quo.
The middle tier is where the fun happens. This is where classics like Frank Miller’s Daredevil, the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne X-Men, James Robinson and Tony Harris’s Starman, Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s Hitman and John Rogers’s Blue Beetle began. You could make a convincing case that even Jack Kirby’s New Gods sprang from the middle tier, despite the A-list status of Superman.
Frank Miller took a relatively generic, swashbuckling Marvel hero and spun him off in an entirely new direction. He put his mark on the character in such a way that his run is still used as the benchmark for Daredevil stories today. X-Men was practically canceled before Claremont, Cockrum and Byrne rescued it from obscurity. Nowadays, X-Men is one of the powerhouse comics franchises.
Nine times out of ten, writers enjoy greater creative freedom on these middle tier books. The editors don’t have to keep the characters quite as close to their original form or gimmick, so they can afford to grant the creative team more leeway. If you want to take Spider-Man out of his costume for six months, you probably won’t get away with it. At least, not without a tie-in stunt banner like “AMAZING SPIDER-MAN NO MORE” or “THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN PETER PARKER?!”
DC has had a certain amount of success with these books in the past few years. Blue Beetle sprang out of the aftermath of Infinite Crisis. John Rogers and Keith Giffen created a character and story that ended up being 25 issues of high-class superhero family comedy. One of Jaime Reyes’s first moves after accidentally discovering his powers was to tell his family his secret.
Jaime’s move was a refreshing change from the usual comic book trope of a hero who has to constantly lie to his family. Instead, we get a fairly realistic portrayal of how to juggle family life and superheroics. Jaime realizes that it’s tough to make time for arch-nemeses and homework. He walks through the hazards of dating a girl with magical powers. At the same time, his father bonds with his mentor, his mother punks Guy Gardner, and his best friends cope with suddenly being thrust into pretty much constant danger due to Jaime’s new occupation.
In short, Rogers and Giffen had a chance to build a real supporting cast of people with and without powers due in no small part because they weren’t working on a Superman or Batman. Rogers and Giffen could get away with doing smaller scale stories. Compare this to, say, Spider-Man, where, up until recently, the supporting cast consisted of pretty much just Mary Jane and Aunt May, full stop. In Superman, we had Lois Lane sometimes, occasionally Batman, and mmmmmaybe Krypto or Supergirl if we were lucky.
In another way, middle tier books can push the genre or medium forward. Y2K-era Wildstorm gave us Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s Authority, Joe Casey’s two runs on Wildcats (with art by Sean Phillips and Dustin Nguyen), and Adam Warren’s Gen13. Each of these series brought something new to superhero comics. The Authority pretty much defined widescreen action and spawned a legion of imitators. Wildcats gave us both superheroes without a war and business-oriented superheroics. Gen13 gave us an X-Men for the modern age and a manga-inspired look at teenagers with powers.
Wildcats volume 2 and Wildcats 3.0 are personal favorites of mine. It took characters that I was already familiar with and put them into a brand new context not once, but twice. Wildcats gave us superheroes without a rudder. Their war is over, their enemies are largely gone, and the team has splintered. What’s next?
The answer, apparently, is “experiment.” There’s a bit of corporate intrigue, there is some action, there is sabotage, and there are, most of all, interesting stories. Watching Hadrian go from a stoic robot to Jack Marlowe, business mogul, is fascinating. He goes from trying to save the world to trying to save it from itself, whether it wants to be saved or not.
Can you imagine a Superman comic where Clark Kent hangs up the cape and simply decides to chill out on the farm in Smallville for a few months and do nothing? Or a Batman comic where Bruce Wayne pours his Batmobile budget into the Martha Wayne Foundation? What if Tony Stark hung up his armor and we got twelve issues of Tony Stark brokering business deals, picking out thousand dollar suits, and trying to appease his stockholders– how about that?
Those books would feel weird. We’re used to getting a certain kind of story out of the top tier comics. Superman’s gotta punch people, Batman’s gotta scare people, and Spidey’s gotta make bad jokes. The stories usually need to have some kind of attention paid to continuity or something to do with shake-ups or lasting changes. If you’re writing a character who doesn’t have these expectations, though, you can get away with a lot more.
Do you want Batgirl to spend an issue chasing down a guy who killed a man she met once? Do it! Did you ever wonder whatever happened to Iceman’s ex-girlfriend Opal? Write a miniseries about it! Do you have the greatest idea for a Moses Magnum one-shot? The middle tier is where you want to be.
I’m primarily a superhero fan, but I love non-cape comics, too. One of the things I love the most about them is that they tend to be the work of one cartoonist or creative team. You get the feeling that the work is the result of one creative vision. The best books that come out of the middle tier feel the same way. John Rogers’s Blue Beetle feels different from everyone else’s. Frank Miller’s Daredevil was one-of-a-kind, as well.
So, in the end, give me the middle tier almost every time. I like seeing people push comics to their limit. When you tell someone that the only limit they have is “Don’t get canceled,” you’re gonna be in for a fun ride. Of course, on the flip side, these middle tier books don’t usually last very long, simply by their very nature. They tend to teeter-totter on the edge of cancellation, which means that we can easily lose these books.
Superman and Batman will always be there. Give some of these other characters a chance. I love the middle tier, and I’m willing to bet that you do, too.
Besides, could you get away with a scene like this in a top tier book?
