In 1980, the crisis of the traditional distribution system hit Gold Key head-on: sales had fallen so much that Western ceased to distribute its titles at newsstands and instead began to group comics in lots of three and package them in sealed plastic bags bearing the Whitman label for sale in large stores and neighborhood drugstores. Later on, they sold reprints of the most popular Marvel titles in a similar fashion. Marvel benefited from this supplementary distribution of their publications, which carried little cost to them, but the profits achieved by Whitman for these recycled products were minimal. This redeployment did not provide any important results and Western closed its comic book branch in 1984. After the closure of Charlton publications in the fall of 1985, only Harvey (after a hiatus in 1982 to 1986), Archie, DC, and Marvel remained to embody the continuity of the industry that had existed since the 1940s.1
The Whitman example is an extreme but symptomatic signifier of the crisis of identity and stagnation that plagued the industry at the start of the 1980s. The preceding decade had seen the underground stream cede its place to alternative publishers who abandoned the initial spirit of protest in order to grant a greater creative freedom to its artists. If the divide between the large publishers and the alternatives had been reduced at the level of content, as witnessed by the example of the launch of Epic Illustrated by Marvel in the spring of 1980 as a competitor to Heavy Metal—the competition between these glossy color magazines put an end to the career of James Warren’s black-and-white magazines in 1983 after almost twenty years in print—it was widened with regard to the situation of the creators: the small publishers offered better financial conditions and a greater freedom of expression. To give a schematic image of the situation at the time, Marvel and DC survived thanks to the derivative products that were based on their comic book characters while the small publishers experienced a growing success thanks not only to the quality of the content on offer, but also thanks to a new visibility derived from the growing network of specialized comic book stores. The latter owed its growth to the direct sales distribution system launched by Phil Seuling in 1973, which was destined to supplant the traditional distribution system which had marginalized comic books with respect to the rest of the periodical press. For the comic book industry, the Reagan decade thus began under the aegis of its most important mutation since its readjustment in the mid-1950s, with the move toward specialized bookstores and away from neighborhood magazine dealers. With the exception of Archie and Harvey, who continued to distribute their titles using the traditional system, only the publishers who correctly negotiated this turning point reaped the benefits of the industry’s recovery during the 1980s. The principal factors that contributed to this situation were the evolution of the readership, the adaptation by the industry to the multiplication of specialized bookstores, and the increasingly important role given to creators.
The success of the specialty stores explains the growing importance taken by collectible comic books in the second half of the 1970s, thanks to the speculation about upcoming works. This phenomenon was a classic case of demand stimulated by supply: in minimizing financial risks and allowing the rationalization of sales management, direct sales distribution favored the multiplication of comic book specialty stores offering both older comic books as well as recent ones. This growth increased the density of the collector’s market, from which emerged at the start of the 1970s the speculators that counted on the future popularity of new releases, like the Green Lantern/Green Arrow (DC) drawn by Neal Adams or the first issues of Conan the Barbarian (Marvel) drawn by Barry Smith. In contrast with bookstores, publishers derived no direct benefit from the soaring prices of their comic books in the collector’s market. The clientele of comic book specialty stores was made up of fans, collectors, and speculators who bought comic books because they constituted a passion on which they were ready to spend considerable sums of money or because they hoped to draw a substantial profit. This motivation thus stemmed from the hope that the volume of expenditures could increase, if attractive products were offered that would satisfy both the collector and the speculator.
Though DC was the first of the Big Two to announce its participation in direct distribution in November 1973, it was Marvel that, starting in 1979, positioned itself at the vanguard of possibilities offered by the new system (see chapter 11). It was between 1981 and 1982 that the sales of Marvel comics in specialized bookstores effectively surpassed the 50 percent bar.2 Nineteen eighty-three was characterized by an expansion of titles that recalled, to a lesser degree, the war during the 1970s to gain supremacy at the newsstands. The battlefield had shifted to the comic book specialty stores but the one-upmanship in seeking to dominate the market nevertheless resulted in a mini-crash in September 1983, where the comic book stores found themselves inundated with over a hundred titles that all sold poorly.3
The 1980s were characterized by a desire of publishers to maximize their revenues in the two distribution systems, all the while expanding the direct sales system in which they saw the future of the industry. This deliberate mutation explains the growth of two types of products starting in 1982 that had previously been marginal: the limited series, titles published over a predefined number of issues to test the viability of new concepts and/or artists, and the graphic novel, which was the industry term for books that offered new stories in the style of the European album.
The second element that favored the specialized comic book stores was the success of restricted distribution. In 1980, only WaRP Graphics (publisher of Elfquest) and the Canadian publisher Aardvark-Vanaheim (Cerebus) were distributed exclusively in comic book specialty stores. That same year, the distributor Fantaco published two comics specifically for this market by the comedic illustrator Fred Hembeck at six thousand and ten thousand copies, while Elfquest #8 reached a record thirty thousand copies, an enormous number for an independent black-and-white title. In the spring of 1981, events came to a head after the success of Dazzler #1. When DC published Madame Xanadu in April, Eclipse produced fifteen thousand copies of Eclipse Magazine #1. The following month, the California distributor Pacific announced its publication of full-color editions comics reserved for the direct sales market featuring original material whose ownership remained with their creators. Its first title, Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #1 (November 1981) by Jack Kirby, sold ninety thousand copies during that summer despite its elevated cover price of one dollar.4 Sustained by a network of comic book specialty stores and a vigorous distribution sector, Pacific comics represented one-third of the industry’s annual revenue in 1982.
It was in response to this competition that Marvel created the Epic label in December 1981. Sharing its name with the magazine that had been launched a year and a half prior, the Epic line had the same goal as Pacific Comics: publishing comics destined for comic book specialty stores that were more luxurious and pricey than typical comic books, but which also allowed the popular artists of the day to freely express themselves while retaining ownership of their work (which was already the case for the collaborators of Epic Illustrated). The first Epic title was Marvel Fanfare, followed in the summer by Dreadstar, written and illustrated by Jim Starlin. Other titles followed suit but their initial elitist ambitions were poorly aligned with the uneven quality of the published pages. In 1984, Marvel offered a golden opportunity to Sergio Aragonés, the renowned Mad collaborator, to bring to Epic the continuing adventures of his character Groo the Wanderer, the screwball caricature of Conan the Barbarian (which had up to that point been published by the recently defunct Pacific Comics). The goal of this maneuver was to make the Epic label profitable by publishing a title that would also be distributed in the traditional circuits: sold at the same price as a regular comic book, Sergio Aragonés’ Groo the Wanderer #1 (March 1985) thus became the first Epic comic that was distributed to newsstands and one of Marvel’s best sellers.
Eclipse, Epic, and Pacific were at the forefront of a subindustry where they were notably followed by Comico, Fantagraphics, and Vortex (a Toronto-based publisher) in 1982, and First, Americomics, Capital (which failed the following year), Eagle, and Red Circle in 1983. With the exception of Fantagraphics, who from the beginning chose an “avant-garde” approach in publishing the Los Bros. Hernandez series Love and Rockets, the other publishers sought to capture a part of the clientele of the Big Two by offering titles that fit into the same market (superheroes, science fiction, fantasy). By the variety and frequent originality of their production, this cloud of small publishers helped to consolidate the market for direct sales distribution and at the same time, it promoted the status of writers and illustrators as artists, in the eyes of both publishers and buyers.5
At the moment where a growing number of comic book specialty stores were widening the pool for speculators, the success met by the Marvel series X-Men took an unexpected turn. Created in 1963 and lingering in the second tier of the Marvel catalog since the end of the 1960s, this title experienced an immediate boost in popularity after a relaunch in 1975, thanks to the contribution of Chris Claremont, who was one of the first writers to convincingly mix action stories with melodramatic intrigue. The craze reached a new height at the end of 1977, when artist Dave Cockrum was replaced by John Byrne. With the help of inker Terry Austin, Byrne deployed a very fluid visual style that was the most notable revelation in comic books since the arrival of Neal Adams ten years earlier. From 1978 onward, the back issues and new issues of X-Men took off in the collector’s market. This led to a snowball effect: in three years, the perpetually increasing sales of X-Men carried in its wake a number of new titles that were particularly appreciated by readers, such as the issues of Daredevil written and drawn by Frank Miller in a raw and somber vein that contrasted radically with the Claremont-Byrne tandem.
Byrne left the series that had made his name in 1980 but its commercial success did not suffer. By contrast, when Frank Miller left Daredevil in 1982, its sales dropped in a marked fashion over several months. While Chris Claremont continued to write stories for The Uncanny X-Men, the departure of Miller left Daredevil without a name writer and artist. It became clear that the increase in the number of collectors had brought a new logic to the comic book market and that this was closely linked to the quality and personality of the creators associated with a particular title.
The publishers had a rough time negotiating the difficult passage through the 1970s as they had believed that they could maintain the commercial logic of the 1960s where a single genre (superheroes) had succeeded in resuscitating the entire industry. They attempted in vain to find the substitute genre that would assure a new source of stable revenues, all the while refusing to face the consequences of the increasing disgruntlement of their creators, which had become endemic since the end of the 1960s. Thus, the start of the 1980s proved that it was no longer feasible to conceive of profitability solely in terms of characters, and publishers needed to think in terms of the creators that breathed life into them. Thus, while the names of the majority of comic book writers and artists were largely unknown during the 1950s, the 1980s demonstrated that they had become a quasi-certain indicator of a title’s chances of finding success, concluding the process that began with the ascension of Neal Adams at the end of the 1960s. In the 1980s, the comic book industry took on the logic of “auteur”-driven creation: certain titles dominated the market over a particular time period because their auteurs, at that precise moment, stood out from the pack. A certain number of titles, over a period of several months, drew the attention of comic book buyers: among the titles that can be cited are the Alan Moore stories in Saga of the Swamp Thing (DC) from 182 to 1986; the Walter Simonson run on Thor (Marvel) from 1983 to 1986; Bill Sienkiewicz’s stint on New Mutants (Marvel) between 1984 and 1985; and Todd McFarlane’s illustration on The Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel) in 1988 and 1989.
In according a greater creative freedom than in the past, a certain number of creators found themselves emancipated from the norms instituted by the CMAA in 1954. In the mid-1980s, publisher membership in the CMAA was limited to Archie, DC, and Marvel: there had never been a membership renewal to replace those companies that had disappeared, and the new arrivals from the 1970s onward had made it a point of honor to reject all affiliation with the Comics Code Authority (CCA). When the direct sales distribution network had begun to develop, creators and publishers agreed that their work would not be submitted to any form of censorship. In parallel, the beginning of the 1970s saw a considerable retreat in the control exerted by the CCA. From the beginning of the following decade, there was an escalation, even among the comics bearing the CCA approval seal, in the representation of violence. At Marvel, the first examples were the last issues of Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the increasing popularity of characters such as Wolverine and the Punisher, whereas DC profited from the era’s conservative sensibilities by publishing titles (Thriller, Vigilante) that took up the “film noir” inspiration that Frank Miller had brought back into fashion.6 In an entirely different ideological and aesthetic register, the British writer Alan Moore, who worked on Saga of the Swamp Thing from 1982 to 1986, introduced a neo-gothic ambience to the title that recalled H. P. Love-craft. In total, the first half of the 1980s was characterized by the manifest will of creators to overcome the inherited inhibitions of the Comics Code by pushing even further than had the black-and-white Warren magazines (which ceased publication in 1984).
The controversy started in earnest in the summer of 1986: Miracleman #9 contained several panels showing the birth of a child. Eclipse received a considerable amount of mail on the subject, more positive than negative. The debate took on graver accents when, on October 23, Steve Geppi, the president of Diamond Comics Distributor (the largest North American distributor of comics), sent a letter to all of his retail clients exhorting them to complain to publishers and demand that they impose rules of censorship, decency, and decorum on their creator: Miracleman #9, as well as two Fanta-graphics comics that were judged to have pornographic scenes (Captain Jack #5 and Love and Rockets #19), seemed to be symptomatic of a perversion of the comic book market that some felt risked renewing the same extreme reactions that had been seen in 1954. In fact, Geppi was interviewed in the framework of Eyewitness News, a news show produced in Washington and whose programs on October 20 and 21 were dedicated to the theme of “sick comics.” Supported in this crusade by Buddy Saunders, the owner of the Lone Star Comics chain of stores that had instituted prohibitions modeled on the film industry, Geppi succeeded in alarming the Big Two. Marvel let it be known that they would impose a strict application of the Comics Code on all of its comics starting in January, while DC announced the creation of guidelines for its creators, ensuring that they did not exceed certain company mandated limits. On December 4, the publication of these guidelines as well as a ratings classification system (Universal, Mature, Adult) gave way to a general outcry among the artists: a petition signed by twenty-four of the most popular creators appeared in The Comics Buyer’s Guide, while Alan Moore and Frank Miller decided to cease working for DC, followed soon after by Howard Chaykin and Marv Wolfman.7
The announcement of the measures taken by DC neatly coincided with the December 10, 1986, arrest of Michael Correa, manager of Friendly Frank’s in Lansing, Illinois, for the sale of pornographic products.8 Throughout 1987, this affair (which would last until November 1989) hovered over the debate within the profession on the necessity of the return of censorship to comic books, as additional cases appeared in the United States and Canada.9 In the months that followed, news articles and television reports on the unhealthy evolution of contemporary comics were echoes of the polemic surrounding government-financed “pornography” through the National Endowment for the Arts, the moralizing campaign of Tipper Gore (the wife of Bill Clinton’s future vice-president), and the accrued attention generated by the National Coalition on Television Violence founded by Dr. Thomas Radecki. On May 18, 1989, this latter organization published a report entitled “Comic Books Now Much More Violent” dedicated to the proposition that comic books were increasingly sliding toward the representation of sex and violence.10 At the conclusion of the Friendly Frank’s affair, in which the accused was acquitted in November 1989, publisher Denis Kitchen decided to found the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a charitable foundation that he created shortly after the arrest of Michael Correa to help pay his legal costs. Established in 1990 as a nonprofit association, the CBLDF have since defended the right of free expression for independent comics creators.11 Denis Kitchen stayed on as president of the organization until July 2004, after which he was succeeded by Chris Staros, the co-owner of Top Shelf.
DC celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1985. This occasion saw the appearance between January and December of Crisis on Infinite Earths, a limited series whose avowed editorial goal was to simplify a universe that had become extremely complex since the end of the 1950s, in order to allow the “DC Universe” to be as accessible to new readers as the “Marvel Universe.” In the meantime, the main effect of this series was to throw away old foundations in order to allow the major DC characters to start a new career.
In the spring of 1986, John Byrne provided a new origin for Superman, which led to a cover story in Time magazine. Meanwhile, this event was eclipsed by the unexpected success of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, the limited series by Frank Miller that was destined to have a lasting effect on the comic book universe. Printed as a prestige format comic book on glossy paper with cardboard covers, this series told the story of how, in the near future, a fifty-year-old Bruce Wayne, who had ended his crime-fighting career several years after the tragic death of Robin, found himself obliged to take up his Batman costume again in order to fight the crime that followed the release of the Joker from the psychiatric asylum that had held him for years. In this baroque story, Frank Miller transgressed the traditional codes of visual narration, the banalities of the DC Universe (Superman had become a CIA agent), and the mythology of superheroes in their entirety. In short all that was possible to subvert in a superhero story. The series was highly original and, despite its high price ($2.95 per issue), became the first best seller of the year thanks to a laudatory review in Rolling Stone that was immediately relayed by the press and on television.
The second bright flash from DC was the summer launch of Watchmen, a twelve-issue series written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons. The series was a metafictional narrative whose seemingly banal story line developed over several levels as a game of mirrors, counterpoints, and a variety of narrative contrivances effectively exploited by Moore. While the narrative richness of Watchmen escaped the majority of its readers, the series experienced a considerable success thanks to the quality of the intrigue of the base story and the advertising campaign that accompanied it. In 1987, DC benefited from the fallout of these two cult titles by launching more high-quality series, one of which was a modernized version of Wonder Woman. In the meantime, Batman became DC’s main economic engine: the print run of Batman surpassed 90,000 copies at the start of 1986 and more than doubled the following year to 190,000 copies, as well as flourishing in graphic novels and limited series in which he was the main star. The most prominent event of 1988, which even the New York Times reported, was the death of Robin (in Batman #428), the result of a decision made by a telephone poll of its readers. Nevertheless, the popularity of the character culminated with the release of the Tim Burton film in July 1989. Sales of DC titles experienced a progression during this period that allowed them to surpass Marvel in February 1990 for the first time in twenty years.12
In December 1987, Marvel found themselves second to DC sales for the first time in twenty years. The great innovative period of Marvel, which began at the end of the 1970s with John Byrne (X-Men) and Frank Miller (Daredevil), and was followed by Walt Simonson (Thor) and Bill Sienkiewicz (New Mutants), ended at the moment when DC reached a new apogee with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. The limited series Elektra: Assassin (1987–1988), whose excessively confusing story by Frank Miller was illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz in a photo-collage-painting-drawing style, was, in comparison, a commercial failure: too esoteric in form and style, it arrived in the wake of the exceptional success of the rewritten Batman myth that Miller had completed several months earlier.
Since 1967, Marvel had maintained its sales lead thanks to the permanent position of its characters on television (mainly in Saturday morning cartoons) that optimized the visibility of its comic books and gave them access to a supplementary segment of potential readers: young children. Engaged with these television programs since the middle of the 1970s, Marvel knew perfectly well the positive effects that a cartoon could have on the sales of a comic book starring the same characters. During this time, Spidey Super Stories (1974–1982) appeared for younger readers, starring Marvel heroes in short stories in a simplified drawing style that recalled the cartoons. The success at the start of the 1980s of GI Joe, attached to the line of Hasbro toys and to an extremely popular cartoon show, encouraged Marvel to exploit the market of young readers by prolonging animated adaptations of its house characters and multiplying the comic book versions of the cartoons that they produced. Nineteen eighty-four saw the launch of Power Pack, starring a team of very young superheroes, as well as the launch of Star Comics, a label concentrating on both cartoon adaptations and original characters that Marvel targeted to a very young readership (hoping to position itself in the gap left vacant by the quasi-disappearance of the Harvey titles). While Power Pack found an audience thanks to the friendly visual style of artist June Brigman, the Star titles sold poorly, with the exception of the adaptations of animated characters (who themselves did not generate considerable sales). Marvel had to face facts: these comics, expressly designed for young children, found the majority of their audience were young girls and thus were not attractive to young boys who, once they reached reading age, sought out Uncanny X-Men like their elder siblings. If GI Joe sold well, it was not only due to the fact that it was an adaptation of a popular cartoon but also because it offered the same type of action and violence found in superhero comics. This is why, after several years of trying to manage a varying catalog, Marvel abandoned the Star label and chose to focus on adaptations of popular television series such as Alf (from 1987 to 1991) or the animated series Count Duckula (from 1988 to 1990).
In 1984, the unexpected success of a black-and-white title named Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sparked an explosion of black-and-white comics whose overproduction, sustained over a two-year period by clients and comic book specialty stores hoping to find a similar success, led to a speculative bubble that burst at the end of 1986. The most fragile comic book specialty stores found themselves with hundreds of unsold comics that represented a colossal investment that they could not recover nor invest into new titles that might save their business. In 1987, this phenomenon, “the black-and-white glut,”13 thinned out the ranks of small publishers, who had formed a galaxy in which numerous minor actors appeared and disappeared over the course of several years. Aircel, Blackthorne, Starblaze/Donning, Renegade, Vortex, and many others did not survive because their titles did not attract speculators or because they experienced endemic management problems. In the meantime, several publishers left their mark on the decade.
Two important players from the old underground movement reappeared in significant editorial ventures. In the spring of 1981, Robert Crumb, whose celebrity had not declined at the end of the 1960s, launched Weirdo (published by Last Gasp), a magazine destined to discover and publish new talent outside of the norm. Over more than twenty issues that appeared across the decade (under the editorial responsibility of Crumb then Peter Bagge then Aline Kominsky-Crumb), this revue constituted a unique form of expression for its atypical creators who produced offbeat and sometimes scathing content, even given the norms of independent publication that flourished at the time. Another important editorial experience originated in 1980 in New York with the annual magazine RAW published by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, who offered American avant-garde comics that were less offbeat than those seen in Weirdo (by Mark Beyer, Gary Panter, Sue Coe, Charles Burns) and pages from contemporary European auteurs (such as Jacques Tardi from France, Joost Swarte from the Netherlands, Mariscal from Spain, among others); due to its oversized format, and atypical presentation and contents, RAW was sold in general bookstores on the same shelves as fine art magazines, thus courting an intellectual clientele who were often aligned with the avant-garde milieu that recognized Spiegelman as one of their own.
A third character emerged from anonymity in the 1980s: a modest employee of the archives at a Cleveland hospital. Harvey Pekar self-published an annual black-and-white magazine starting in 1976 titled American Splendor containing stories that were one to two pages long and autobiographical or inspired by street scenes. Pekar was the writer of these stories that were drawn by a variety of artists (Gary Budgett, Gary Dumm, Gerry Shamray), including his longtime friend and fellow Clevelander Robert Crumb, with whom he shared a deep passion for prewar jazz and 78 rpm vinyl records. Pekar represented himself as a foulmouthed, and sometimes appalling, character: it was autobiographical frankness and the epiphanies that were constructed by the author—in short stories whose apparent vacuity often recalled the writings Raymond Carver—were valuable enough for him to benefit from two collections published by Doubleday in 1986 and 1987. Invited several times to David Letterman’s talk show, Pekar demonstrated his impenitent moaning to the great pleasure of the audience. At the start of the 1990s, Our Cancer Year was the tragicomic story of his fight with illness against the backdrop of the first Gulf War.14
Three publishers from the underground era were still active in the 1980s: Kitchen Sink Press (KSP), Last Gasp, and Rip Off Press. The KSP catalog was spread among several new titles and a number of classic American comics reprinted in large volumes (Li’l Abner) or in relatively costly comic books (Spirit). The two other publishers continued to publish underground material both old and new. In the meantime Last Gasp exploited the niche for pornographic publications (Cherry by Larry Welz), which were the only type of black-and-white comic book that sold very well, whereas the continuity of Rip Off Press rested on the permanent reprinting of Gilbert Shelton’s Freak Brothers and Wonder Wart Hog. Appearing at the end of the 1970s, Aardvark-Vanaheim and WaRP Graphics each followed their own course with a single lasting title, Cerebus and Elfquest respectively.
In the middle of the 1980s, the most visible independent publishers were Mirage (driven by the unexpected success of their ninja turtles that, through the interposition of their animated series, toys, and films, made the fortunes of their two creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird), Comico (Grendel by Matt Wagner), First (American Flagg! by Howard Chaykin), and Eclipse (Zot! by Scott McCloud). It was the latter two of these companies that published the first translations of manga in the United States. Parallel to these was the development of Fantagraphics, sustained by the magazine of comics criticism The Comics Journal and the black-and-white magazine Love and Rockets which was produced by brothers Jaime, Mario, and Gilbert Hernandez, three Chicano writer-artists who married a certain visual mastery with an extraordinary storytelling talent.
Two publishing houses founded in 1986 experienced great success. That year, Gladstone began the systematic reprinting of every Walt Disney story published by Dell starting from the 1940s, little by little making known the remarkable writer-artist Don Rosa, who would both perpetuate and renew the heritage of Carl Barks. The popularity of this enterprise led Disney to reclaim this franchise from Gladstone in 1990 in order to launch its own reprints. Walt Disney wanted to regain its place in a niche that the company had practically dominated in the decade following the Second World War, but its initial enthusiasm for the reprint market waned by 1992; in 1993, Walt Disney returned the franchise to Gladstone.
The other notable publisher was Dark Horse, one of the survivors of the black-and-white glut. At the time of its release, the flagship title Dark Horse Presents experienced a strong popularity thanks to Concrete (written and drawn by Paul Chadwick), a concrete colossus whose origins drew from the superhero tradition but whose stories were inscribed in a more realist vein. Compared by many to Cerebus, Concrete received his own title in 1987. This title assured Dark Horse a precarious revenue stream until it landed, in 1989–1990, the comics adaptation rights to the characters of the films Terminator, Predator, and Aliens. Entrusted to artists that were appreciated by fans, the comic books that were produced generated sales that rivaled the Marvel titles of the same price and functioned as “locomotives” that allowed this modest publisher to publish titles that were less popular but more audacious.
At the end of the decade, the independent sector benefited from the general growth of the industry resulting from the renewed creativity at DC thanks to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and to Watchmen, but mostly thanks to the considerable success of the film Batman. Like the television series of 1966–1967, this film would accompany a general renewal of interest in comic books at the dawn of the 1990s, which would produce a new crisis in 1994.