Yesterday David linked to this CNN article about the Jerry Robinson-curated Golden Age comics art exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in LA. It sure sounds like a great show, and the article is fairly well-written.

Except for the headline, and the premise it’s based on.

The headline is “Superheroes rise in tough times.” Not rose from, in the past tense, but rise in, present tense. The lead seeks to draw a parallel between the end of the Great Depression/beginning of World War II dawn of the comic book superhero with today’s Hollywood interest in the superhero:

America faces an economic calamity. Trouble brews in faraway lands.

Sound familiar?

Vaguely, I suppose. Although was there a point in American history where you couldn’t say that trouble was brewing in faraway lands? As for the particular brands of trouble though, how is the rise of German and Italian fascism and the beginnings of second world war equivalent to the U.S. campaigns against insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan?

While equating the two time periods has become a popular pastime for the mainstream media due to the severity of our current financial crisis, it strikes me as a pretty big stretch here. While the headline and lead suggest that’s what the piece is about, writer Douglas Hyde only returns to that aspect in the article for a few sentences toward the end:

In our own times, the public is turning to costumed heroes again in record numbers. Movies based on comic books are box office leaders; comic books themselves remain a strong and growing industry.

There’s definitely a resurgence of interest in movie superheroes, but there’s a lot to unpack in those two sentences.

I don’t know how to argue with a statement like “the public is turning to costumed heroes again in record numbers,” beyond asking, “Oh, really? How so?” Hyde provides no details, but it’s simply not true that more people are reading superhero comics than ever were before.

So perhaps he means at the movies. But does that have anything at all to do with the economic crisis? Let’s look at the timing, shall we?

Blade was a surprise hit in 1998, kicking off the Marvel film boom, which began in earnest with 2000’s X-Men and 2002’s Spider-Man. Looong before the current financial hard times (with Spider-Man, at least, the argument could be made that post-9/11 politics colored certain aspects of the film and, to some extent, any superhero films that followed, as we’ve been at war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq since).

Even The Dark Knight had already opened and made a tone of the money it would go on to make by the time the financial crisis became a big story at the end of last summer.

As for “comic books themselves remain a strong and growing industry,” that seems less apparent to me than a statement like “they still publish comic books.” Certainly there is a greater interest in the graphic novel format among non-comics, book publishers than ever before, and a greater acceptance in book stores, libraries and among the general public, but is that the same thing as the comic book industry? And if you removed all of the non-superhero comics from the equation, would it still be true?

Hyde then quotes Skirball curator Erin Clancy:

“I think the comic book superhero came out of a context in which the political, social and economic realties were a little tough,” Clancy says, “and we can certainly relate to those realities now in our own day. I think the resurgence of popularity of superheroes can be attributed to that.”

Last year, audiences made “The Dark Knight” the second-highest grossing film of all time.

Maybe, but, again, it’s not like superheroes suddenly became popular in mid-2008. The things you can look to as signs of their mass popularity occurred over the past ten years or so. Dark Knight sure made a lot of money, and yes, Heath Ledger got an Oscar for it, but it was a sequel to a 2005 movie, and that movie, Batman Begins, wasn’t made until Spider-Man made its big, fat pile of cash a few years earlier.

In the time sine the economy became the number one new story in America, superhero movies haven’t fared as well as Dark Knight or Iron Man, or as well as might have been expected.

Punisher War Zone and The Spirit were mostly ignored, and while lots of people can and will argue about how Watchmen performed, performs and will perform, critics mostly lined up against it and the first few weeks of box office weren’t anything to be too excited about, given how much it cost to make and promote the film.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Movies. 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.