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davidmariottecomics · 5 months

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Why is it so Hard to Launch a Superhero Universe?

Face front, true believers!

We're talking superhero comics! In particular, we're going to be talking a little more history this time and then, y'know, time for a bit of updates on the world and what you can maybe do to help things not totally fall apart.

I was talking with someone this week about superhero comics and it made me think about what the new superhero universe of the 2020s is going to be. Now, I hope that the person I was talking to about it is the one who cracks it because they've got a lot of good ideas, but I wanted to do a quick rundown of just how hard it is to make a new superhero universe that lands in the market and has a real staying power. Looking at the history, I think since the 1990s, there's been one major front-runner each decade, and then some other notable accomplishments. So, let's walk through 'em and see if there's anything we can discover from that.

2020s: ??? Maybe the Massive-Verse? We're still pretty early in the 2020s and I don't want to make a definite call at this point, but I will say, I think the Massive-Verse, the Image comics spinning out of Radiant Black by Kyle Higgins and cohorts is a strong front-runner. And as we move backwards in time to talk about this all, I think it'll increasingly make sense why. But, to put a brief pin in this, let me say that I think Kyle's got a good pedigree in the Direct Market, a strong and largely focused concept that allows for a fair amount of different folks to work on very complimentary stories that feel of a shared creative vision, and a history of Image superhero books doing well.

2010s: My Hero Academia

Okay, so, now with the benefit of hindsight, I think it's fair to say that the biggest new superhero universe globally in the 2010s was My Hero Academia. It was this kinda crazy crossover hit that blends a lot of tropes of shonen action/school manga with American superheroes. But what made it a success?

First and foremost, I think a lot of what would be it's competition in a US comics-based market was in a weird place. That's not to discount MHA in any way, just to say that it was able to step into a niche that had kinda been forgotten. The most direct American superhero comics comparisons to it would probably be X-Men and Legion of Superheroes (with sort of Teen Titans/Young Justice as more strained comparsions). Both X-Men and Legion focus on a large team of heroes, often told through a couple key focal characters, who have generally unique powers from each other and the rest of the world with some minor concerns about being young and having school or the responsibilities of youth, but that was almost always backburnered for the action. Both have, at various points, had their characters wrestle with being empowered in a world where not everyone is and the various sorts of prejudices therein. And both, for a while, were largely read by a younger audience, but by the 2010s, Legion was for old fogeys (like me, a huge LSH stan) and X-Men was... were they on an island? I know they were fighting the Avengers a lot (and/or joining them as one bigger superteam). And with that shift away from being for younger readers and being more continuity heavy, and without sort of other young superhero books doing a lot to replace it (Young Avengers vol. 2, a great book, was already on it's way out when the first volume of MHA came out stateside). So, there were a lot of young people who had grown up with superhero media and with anime and manga and had an option to get both in one book that was easily accessible to new readers.

Of course, it also has a pretty compelling story and visual style. MHA was swiftly bolstered by an anime adaptation and spin-off titles and anime-original stories in the movies. All of that added to make the world--the universe--feel bigger, but simulatenously, managed to remain ancillary. If you wanted to get deeper, know more, here are your options! Have at! But if you just want to read MHA or just want to watch the anime, you don't need the rest of it. It isn't tied too closely to the story. It builds, but not so structurally that you can't still see the shape of the room without it. As I've addressed here before, I get that some readers are really looking for that. Whether I personally think it's accurate or not (and, as covered, I think most American superhero comics are as easy to get into as a sitcom--though I acknowledge that maintaining a readership can be very difficult for all sorts of reasons tied to price and access), there are people who believe that superhero comics have a high barrier of entry and were really entranced by this not having that. And so, it blew up and Volume 35 is still in the top 10 manga charts as of last month and I can buy MHA stuff at Target. It's huge.

Now, I also want to give some special mentions to other big initiatives of the era. The thing I'll say about all of these is up front is even if they had hit as big as MHA ultimately has, none of them are new universes. They're building on something existing. Keep that in the back of your mind too as we talk about the 2000s.

The New 52 - DC's first big initiative of the 2010s. This was a way to reset the universe and, to what was appealing about MHA, try to build in a lot of accessibility to new readers as well as to diversify the DC line. Lots of folks have taken stock of the successes and failures of the New 52, but I will say, I personally am kinda bummed that some of the efforts to really build a universe were pretty quickly lost (though not entirely and these things have re-come-and-gone since). I would love to see superhero publishers dig deep into the non-superhero elements of their history again: War, Horror, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Western, Romance, Humor, etc. And I'd love to see them in a way that feels of a piece with a world with superheroes, but not like superheroes applied to those genres, necessarily. Also, just noting here, one of the New 52 launch writers? Kyle Higgins on Nightwing.

Valiant (2010s) - Valiant had a shot in the arm in the 2010s when, about a year after the New 52, they did their own relaunch. Again, I'm not here to measure the exact successes and failures of that though you can surely find plenty of folks who have done that deep dive, but I do want to note it because they did aggressively position themselves as a player. After a decade of being pretty quiet, the 2010s saw some real success critically and commercially for Valiant and things like, yeah, the Bloodshot movie, but also Faith: Taking Flight , the YA novel by Julie Murphy (author of Dumplin'). In a time and space where the Big 2 were undergoing a lot of reinvention and extension into other markets/media, Valiant made a point of also diversifying in that way too.

Power Rangers - Boom's Power Rangers obviously also kinda blew up in the latter half of the 2010s and has inflated as a comics universe unto itself that is obviously borrowing from the source material, but also really expanding upon it. And, notably, it kicked off with Kyle Higgins at the helm. You can pretty directly track the success of Power Rangers (and Nightwing before it) and the way it took a licensed property and really built it out into a little universe to the later success of the Massive-Verse.

2000s: Invincible

Somehow the big superhero universe of the 2000s is also big again in the 2020s, and that's Invincible. Much like MHA, it tapped into the right vein at the right time. It came hot on the heels of Marvel's Ultimate universe and The Authority and really just combined the sensibities of Image's superhero universe, Classic Marvel, and nu-Marvel. It was a book that lived on surprising upsets and a story that felt like it was maybe aiming a little younger because it was about a young hero that then went full-bore into being for ADULTS. Like the later Massive-Verse, Invincible kind of slowly expanded, sometimes retroactively adding other Robert Kirkman books, sometimes having more tangential spin-offs, but even when other creators entered the mix, it felt like part of a unified vision.

The weird thing with Invincible, and the reason it *almost* didn't count, is that it is built off of like... a jillion other universes. Like, obviously, Invincible is in many ways a reflection of other superhero tropes. He's Superboy and Spider-Man wrapped into one and plenty of major and minor Invincible characters are pretty clearly meant to be riffs on existing characters with other publishers. But in a more literal way, Invincible is piggy-backing on and joining various other company and creator-owned superheroes. Over the course of the series, he met Spider-Man (in an issue of Marvel Team-Up), joined The Pact (with ShadowHawk, Firebreather, and Zephyr of Noble Causes), and Savage Dragon and various other Image superheroes. A lot of it did manage to be self-contained and as the series continued, it did really parse down to only Kirkman-original characters, but it was a series that got some of it's esteem from being in a pre-existing shared universe too. The Massive-Verse is, to my understanding, in a similar place where they've got like... a Spawn appearance. There is something to the even casual and official early crossovers that really helps a universe get a hold and seem more likely to both last and, I think, have an air of legitimacy.

It's a very interesting contrast to MHA in that the universe is bolstered by a sense of larger continuity, while still being presented as something that has a lot of accessibility and both are, in my opinion, actually probably best enjoyed with an understanding of the tropes they're riffing on.

The Ultimate Universe - As a special mention, again, Marvel's Ultimate Universe is not it's own unique universe, but as an experiment in rebooting an existing project and making new easier access to it, the Ultimate Universe's existence is a key influence to most attempts at shared superhero universes, both existing and "new", that followed.

IDW's Transformers - While a shared universe with TF wasn't really a thing until the 2010s and the Hasbro Shared Universe, I will note that IDW's TF run had a lot of elements of superhero comics (including also meeting Spider-Man in the New Avengers crossover) and is ultimately notable as the first attempt to take an existing property and build it into a universe of it's own. Like, earlier Marvel TF, even as it became increasingly it's own thing, did have some core DNA in the Marvel universe (same for Godzilla, Micronauts, G.I. Joe, and all the others). And a lot of the other licensed comics of the time, like the early Dark Horse Buffy and Aliens or IDW's Angel were trying to either tie to the franchise's source material or exist in sort of limited, unconnected runs. Not to say there weren't others doing it at various points before, but I do think IDW's TF really became a blueprint for how to take an existing franchise and make it into a unique comics universe that you can see in things like IDW's TMNT or Boom's Power Rangers even today.

1990s: Image

Okay, people who were not into comics in the '90s... do you know that Image started out as a third superhero publisher? Like, when you think of modern Image, which just has a couple of superhero titles, do you know that superhero comics made up the majority of early Image? Like Spawn, Savage Dragon, and a lot of the stuff coming out of Top Cow and Extreme Studios and (in my personal estimation, the best one) Wildstorm? Because superheroes are where Image started and made their first big (jeans) money. It came out of artists from the big two deciding to do their own thing with their own characters and loosely building a shared universe for their ideas. I'd personally say Wildstorm was the stand-out for superheroes in the Image Revolution--they spun-off to be their own independant thing before getting bought up by DC and while they published a variety of titles, superheroes remained core to Wildstorm's publishing. They also published consistenty. Like, no crack to Youngblood or Cyber Force or whatever, but those books released less regularly than most of the Wildstorm titles--with Youngblood's schedule being... what it was and Cyber Force, even after being pretty regular for a while, becoming less central to Top Cow's identity.

So, of the stand-outs I've mentioned, Image technically makes up 3 of them (Massive, Invincible, Image) and the exact overlapping nature of these things with each other is a bit strange, but I think speaks to the central philosophy of what has made these universes appealing. They exist at a crucial intersection of recognizability out of the Big 2 (writers and artists who had been Big 2 guys taking the central vision, even if many subsequent members of the teams were starting in the "indie" space) with this sort of loose interconnectivity of other creator-owned superhero comics and a sense of some sort of reactive commentary on the other superhero properties of the time. While full mythos have been formed, something you can't really say about any of the superhero universes that've found success after the 1970s is that they featured a wholly unique take on superheroes, rather than digging into the tropes that had already been long established.

The other big thing behind early Image is because the founders were a bunch of Big 2 movers-and-shakers, even in the early days, they had a fair amount of room for crossovers (and $$$ for the BIG TALENT). But if you look at Wildstorm, you can see Gen13 team up with Superman, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Monkeyman and O'Brien, Generation X, etc. Add in the return of a bunch of the Image heavy-hitters for Heroes Reborn over at Marvel and there's a complicated web of connections that really elevated the legitimacy of the superhero titles.

Astro City & America's Best Comics - In a truly bizarre move, two of the other major superhero universes that came out of the '90s were... also by Wildstorm! Kinda. Astro City came out of Homage and America's Best Comics was it's own imprint, both through Wildstorm. And both have weird histories that ultimately end up kinda under DC (except for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which ends up at Top Shelf, but that isn't really a superhero book). And like a lot of what has already been mentioned, these things thrive from an incredibly strong vision from the original writer (Kurt Busiek and Alan Moore, respectively) and, as Becca mentioned when I was talking with them a bit when I took a break in writing, like a lot of the above, part of the way that they are engaging with the existing superhero universes is a sleek design sensibility. I have felt bad talking about the importance of the writers in all these successes and not giving enough credit to the artists, so let this be a chance to correct that. Something all of these have in common is when they're succeeding, they've got top notch artistic talent--Brent Anderson, Alex Ross, Kevin O'Neill, Chris Sprouse, J.H. Williams III, Gene Ha, and all the ABC gang--who are creating art that pushes the medium forward. Like, here and in pretty much every other example, we're talking about people who are capturing a sense of classicism--the looks are often clean and iconic and noteworthy--but are doing so with a style that shows where comics are going to be going in the next decade. It's a really fine balance to strike, but a notable one.

Milestone - While Wildstorm started as part of Image, went independent, and then was acquired by DC, Milestone was an independent publisher that had their material published through DC from the beginning, and in later years would actually be folded into the larger DC universe. Milestone fits the same model we've been talking about--a strong unified vision by the founders who created the Dakotaverse, a motivation both behind-the-scenes and on the page to respond to the current state of comics, art that felt classic and iconic while also being a vision of what future comics would look like. And, similar to Invincible in some ways, or Wildstorm, it also benefitted from a bit of loose connection to a larger established universe. It took a while for Milestone to officially cross over with DC, but the marketing and distribution relationship really helped it gain legitimacy within the market.

Valiant - I'll also give a brief shout-out to the original Valiant line. To the point of later Valiant, there was a fair amount of competition in the late '80s/into the '90s of publishers trying to enter the market and disappearing. Like, bless 'em, but Eclipse, Pacific, Malibu, etc all came and went and while some of those stories and characters are still around in various capacities, none of them have had quite the revival of Valiant which is notable to the strength of those core concepts.

1980s: The Non-Superhero Okay, so, no offense to anyone: Malibu or Capital or First or any of the other publishers that brought in new superheroes. But in my estimation, the big "superhero universe" of the 1980s was the '80s not really having a new superhero universe. Like, and I'll make this quick because I'm already going long--there are a ton of comics that came out that we can debate if they're superhero narratives, we can dig deep into the creators' intentions vs. their ultimate executions, but that ultimately don't feel like they're trying to build a superhero universe. TMNT is awesome and, obviously, has in latter years crossed over with a bajillion things. Usagi Yojimbo and Concrete and Mage which is part of a universe with Grendel and The Crow and whatever else you want to throw in this pot--superhero or not--feels primarily like the later association it may have with a larger world is largely accidental or in some way in spite of it's early siloing. Again, not to say this stuff wasn't ambitious or didn't crossover with it's peers or didn't have grand designs, just that in comparison to, say Marvel's New Universe, it feels much more disconnected and organic in the growth of these things.

I'm going to make one last special mention, and that is DC Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths. And the reason I bring Post-Crisis up is that it is the prime example of (what I'd also contend is DC's ultimate strength) not making a new universe, but trying to do something about already long-legacies, heavy continuities, and various acquisitions. Like, we could chart the other superhero comics competitors pre-'80s, but so many of them before (and clearly, even some since) have been purchased or otherwise acquired by the big 2 powerhouses and folded into their worlds. And Crisis was a buckwild way of being like "okay, now Fawcett and Charleton and whatever else is also just DC forever" and making a point of it.

So, why is it hard to make a new superhero universe that sticks? Well... it takes a lot of planning and a lot of money and a bold vision of what superhero comics could be. So, to all those trying to make their new universe, best of luck! A Note for the Weekend

And, as usual, I've run long and this is going out later than expected. Uhh... well, the long and short of what I wanted to get to here is if you haven't already, continue not spending money for big corps for Black Friday and all weekend long. There're certain businesses that've been specifically targeted by the Palestinian National BDS Committee. You can see those here and learn more about BDS on their site and in this article. Obviously, boycotts can be complicated because there are some that're being called for by folks who don't represent the BNC that are sort of up to how you feel about them and the legitimacy of what you can do within the confines of your community. And this year in particular, there's extra weirdness around the idea of shopping because there are plenty of other reasons to boycott various businesses (solidarity with striking workers, stands against capitalism, stands against artificial and crushing inflation that has made the "Black Friday Deals" not good, literally so many reasons to not buy shit from big corporations) BUT ALSO because costs are rising all over, it's a lot harder for small businesses. Like... man, postage is out of control. It costs so much to ship stuff. I literally can't afford to ship things internationally and to all my international folks, I'm so sorry! It'd just cost a stupid amount to do and it already costs a stupid amount to ship just within the continguous 48.

With that all said, if you're saving some money by not spending this Black Friday weekend at big business, might I suggest spending some $$$ on your friendly neighborhood artists! Today (Friday) is an itch.io Creator Day, so all proceeds actually go to the creators. Inprnt's got a sale that a ton of really cool artists are a part of. There are tons and tons and tons of artists who have shops both locally in your community and online that could really benefit from your business. So, please, if you do shop, shop responsibly.

What I enjoyed this week: Blank Check (Podcast), Reverse 1999 (Video Game), Joe Pera Talks with You (TV show - Finished it and I miss it), Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (Anime), Three Rocks (Comic - Finished it and I miss it), Chainsaw Man (Manga), Nancy (Comic), Lego Masters (TV show), Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (Short story collection), the success of Comics for Gaza's Children, the protests made at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (and, yes, the TMNT float at the parade too because I'm a sucker for the parade even as I am critical of it as a celebration of capitalism and a bad holiday), all the money you're going to spend on my Small Business Saturday sale (hint hint)

New Releases this week (11/15/2023): Brynmore #5 (Editor)

Announcements: Do you have $10, want some cool comics, and also want to do good in the world? Adam Szym put together Comics for Gaza's Children on itch.io. When I posted about this less than a week ago in my previous blog, they were about 1/3rd of the way to their intial goal of $10K. Today, that goal has doubled to $20K and they're 98% of the way there! It'll easily meet $20K with your help and could even push to 25-30K before the drive is over. And in return, you get over 100 comics by people like Adam Szym, Reimena Yee, Blue Delliquanti, Emma Houxbois, Cam Marshall, Elaine M. Will, Duke NuCum, Rebecca Ann, and oh yeah, me too! Yeah! Get yourself Rivals and Jimmy Squarefoot and enjoy smut and monsters! And then when you've enjoyed them, buy physical copies from me or Becca!

I believe this is still going too, if you have more money to give, the Cartoonist Cooperative is doing E-Sim cards for Gaza. You can donate a digital sim card so that residents can get access to the internet and have more functional phones and, in exchange, get some comics or a drawing or whatever else is available from the many participating artists.

You can also give more directly. If you don't have money, and I get it, you can call or fax or email or show up at the offices of your representatives. There are a ton of demonstrations happening this weekend and you can see if you can put your actions in on one of those!

Thanks for reading all the way here! You deserve a reward! You can use the code "FREECOMIC" on my webshop and get a 10% discount for Small Business Saturday (11/25) through Cyber Monday (11/27) and I'll send you an extra free comic with your order! Want a bigger discount? My Patrons are getting an even better code exclusively on Patreon! Now's a great time to support so I can buy Becca these Chainsaw Manbunny figures that are on a good discount but that I still don't have $500 for. You can also get some stuff from my Kofi! Becca will be back to streaming soon, so keep an eye on their Twitch! Or if you're really ambitious, looks like some things are on discount on their Throne right now. I think Becca'll be doing something for SBS too, but can't say exactly what. And if you're a fellow hiring pro... maybe give 'em a job. Just have 'em do a comic!

Pic of the Week: Today, our physical copy of Aradia Beat, the magical girl magazine that Becca contributed to, came in, so here's the artist with their spread!

#comics #comics editorial #aradia beat #rebecca ann #superheroes #dc #marvel #idw #image #invincible #valiant #massive verse #my hero academia #buy from artists #small business saturday #comics for gaza's children #charity bundle

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