Why So Serious? Comics Trend Toward becoming Darker in the Last Five Years.
In 2010, Disney purchased Marvel Entertainment LLC for around five billion dollars. Fans around the globe feared that this acquisition would lead to horrible decisions that would water down and “cartoonify” favorite characters. Marvel assured them that the stories would continue to be edgy and realistic.
Around the same time as the buyout, Marvel released a banner for its next big theme: Heroic Age. The characters were shinier, prouder. Old friends stood together again in what was sure to represent the classic American ideals of truth, justice, and… well, you know the rest. Fans groaned that this was just the beginning of the glossy, kid-friendly polish that Disney was applying to Marvel comics. But were they right?
Fast forward to the present day. Daredevil now leads the Hand, a band of ninja assassins. The X-men have had a feud that has led to a continental split between mutant factions who both maintain the X-men name despite vastly different ideals. In their Ultimate line, Peter Parker was shot and subsequently beaten to death in front of his friends and family only to be replaced by another Spider-man. And Marvel’s biggest seller is currently the Avengers vs. X-men storyline that pits the two leading teams against each other over the fate of Hope, the mutant messiah who will hopefully restore mutants to a thriving species once more.
There doesn’t seem to be much candy coating on these stories.
But Marvel is not alone in the dark turn to comic book stories. Image Studios is most in the limelight due to their The Walking Dead title. This may be as much to do with the popular AMC series as Robert Kirkman’s success creating the book (he is also executive Producer for the show, so it very well could be both). The comic follows a small band of people trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world. What makes this comic so disturbing (and appealing), is not the ample zombie gore – it’s the human drama between the survivors. The show and comic together bring up issues of racism, infidelity, trust, spousal abuse, family disintegration, and rape are dealt with in carefully crafted detail. It’s dark not because of the setting but because of the characters trapped therein.
Comics mainstay DC is famous for its darker storylines dating back to the 80s and 90s with titles like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman or Garth Ennis’s Preacher, both from the publisher’s Vertigo line. Yet somehow, the superhero comics from DC are also becoming bleaker. Shortly after the death (and baffling return of Batman), DC has launched its “New 52” movement, essentially axing all but 52 core titles that the publisher will maintain from a new origin line. Trust me when I say, “It’s complicated.” The messy restructuring of the entire DC Universe (usually done via a publisher-wide Crisis) has essentially killed off unnecessary fan favorites. It’s an existential crisis that points towards a future that many aren’t sure is worth venturing toward at this point.
So what do we make of this trend towards the shadows? It would be easy to say that the comics industry is reflecting an emotional uncertainty resulting from the current global economic downturn. It would be fair to assert that the darker stories are a side effect of attempts at realism. Take a step back and you can even theorize that since the target demographic for comics has aged without an influx of younger readers, the stories are simply becoming more “adult.” Whatever the cause, the evidence is staring us in the face: the future of comics is looking to be a scary place.
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