Fordham Comics isn’t easy to find. To get there, you have to trundle up three flights of rickety stairs, past a generic electronics shop, up over Red Dragon Tattoos. There are no signs at street level or in the store’s windows. You have to hope that Google Maps has delivered you to the right place and that you’re not going to stumble into a backroom drug deal or gambling den.
The fear of possibly being mugged—or worse—is worth it if it’s a truly old-school, dyed-in-four-colors comic-book store experience you’re looking for. Fordham Comics spreads across the third floor of this building on the corner of East Fordham Road and Webster Avenue. At street level, honking gridlock, throngs of quickly moving shoppers and hawkers punctuate this as the bustling heart of an increasingly trendy area in a rapidly gentrifying Bronx. Best Buy is across the street, Old Navy is a few doors down.
The comic shop’s organization, or lack thereof, is controlled chaos at its best. A pile of boxes marked Diamond Distributors sits stacked to the right of the entrance. Shelves crammed with Dragon Ball Z action figures and Magic: The Gathering cards line the wall on the left. A clothesline draped with Joker, Spider-Man and Wolverine T-shirts hangs just in front of the doorway. Beyond it, a metal rack props up an assortment of random Marvel action figures in plastic boxes: Doctor Strange, Lady Deadpool and, for some reason, Thor’s sometime sweetheart, Jane Foster. A shelf with the week’s latest comics faces the door; back-issue bins form a perimeter around the store. Several tables sit farther in, closer to the windows looking down upon the busy shopping frenzy below. A foursome of pimply teenagers is there playing Magic: The Gathering. There’s an odor to the place that’s hard to place—like wet cardboard, but with a hint of cat pee. As one customer puts it in his Google review, the place smells like the nineties.
At the center of it all sits Phil Hui, the proprietor who has been running Fordham Comics since Ronald Reagan was president. Hui is in his fifties, but we should all be as lucky to age so well. He’s not your stereotypical comic-shop owner: He has all his hair, which falls a little past his ears with only a trace of grey. There’s also no paunch on him—he’s trim, wearing a pristine white T-shirt under a black hoodie. His desk, however, is another story: hand sanitizer, a calculator, a stack of Magic cards, a jar of rubber bands and, oddly, a rice cooker. Piles of comic books are strewn everywhere in between.
Hui greets customers with a thick Bronx accent. A Goodfellas-esque “How ya doin’?” gives him an air of toughness that you don’t generally associate with comic-shop owners. Still, he is genuinely welcoming to everyone who makes the effort to find his out-of-the-way shop. We sit down to chat about the state of the comics industry and he gets right to the point. “Business isn’t that great, you know what I mean?” he says matter-of-factly. “It used to be a lot better. But it could be worse.” As if on cue, a young man in his twenties enters and asks where the Venom comics are. The movie opened in theatres a few days ago, so the Spider-Man villain-cum-antihero is the superhero property du jour. Hui directs the customer then gets back to explaining his store’s status. “The movies definitely help, you know what I mean?” (He says that last part a lot.) “But it’s not like it was.”1
Indeed, it isn’t, at least not compared to the early nineties when Hui’s shop smelled, well, current. Fueled by the mega-success of the 1989 Batman movie and a corresponding wave of exciting new artists, the comic-book business was scorching at the time. Top titles were selling millions of copies each. Stores were packed, the unofficial gathering places for fans of the medium, a far cry from the small handful of patrons at Fordham Comics right now. But, like Hui says, it could be worse. According to conventional wisdom, comic-book shops should have followed their record shop and bookstore cousins into some degree of obsolescence. An explosion of entertainment options, the fragmenting of consumer attention across many different media and the encroachment of digitalization should have meant the end, or at least the significant decline, of comic shops.
They’ve held out longer and better than expected. The number of brick-and-mortar stores in North America held steady or even grew slightly over the second decade of the new millennium to around three thousand.2 Comic-book sales in the United States, meanwhile, hit a billion dollars in 2016, up dramatically from just two hundred million in 2000. Comic retailers purchased nearly nine million comics in June 2016, the best monthly result since December 1997.3 That was on top of digital sales, which also continued to grow. Downloaded comics hit ninety million dollars in revenue in 2017, taking a bite out of physical sales with them. Still, that represented just a small chunk of the overall total. It’s a growing segment that could prove problematic to Fordham Comics and other old-school physical retailers. Gentrification and rising property prices aren’t helping. As we head into the 2020s, the storm clouds are growing more ominous with dozens of store closings reported in the United States, the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries. There’s no question comic-book stores, such as they are, have been held aloft by the multibillion-dollar superhero movie cultural juggernaut, which raked in more than eight billion dollars at the global box office in 2018 alone. The movies have held the line by spurring some degree of new readers into the fold and bringing lapsed ones back, maintaining sales and therefore livelihoods for old-timers like Hui, even in the face of diminishing prospects.
The movies are also one of the two main factors behind why superheroes are becoming a participatory phenomenon rather than just a consumer one. Hui played an integral role in the latter, but we’ll get back to him shortly. First, it’s important to understand how superheroes—through comic book shops—came to dominate pop culture and, in doing so, how they came to inspire real people to don costumes and fight crime.
Pinpointing the origin of comics depends largely on how the medium is defined. If comics are considered to be merely a sequence of pictures that tell a story, then cave paintings or Egyptian hieroglyphs can be considered the first comics. The first superheroes, meanwhile, could be mythological figures such as the ancient Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who battled monsters thousands of years ago, or Achilles and Theseus, those muscled he-men who engaged in similar epic action in Greek poems, the ancient world’s version of the summer blockbuster.
Modern comics properly originated in New York at the turn of the twentieth century as an outgrowth of periodicals experimenting with color printing. The World was the first newspaper to successfully print in color, with yellow ink coloring a nightgown worn by a child in a cartoon drawn by Richard Outcault. Appearing in February 1896, this “Yellow Kid” was immediately popular with readers, leading to a collection of reprinted strips in The Yellow Kid magazine. Other publishers followed suit with cartoon reprints bound in hardcover format, giving them the appearance of proper books. In 1917, the Saalfield Publishing Company released a collection of humor strips with a title that reflected precisely what the new phenomenon had come to be known as: Comic Book.
It wasn’t until 1933 that the comic book, as we know it, was born. Publishers had by this point figured how to print in four colors and had learned through trial and error that readers preferred thinner, smaller books with soft covers. Funnies on Parade, published by the Eastern Color Printing Company in the spring of 1933, was an eight-page newsprint tabloid offered by Procter & Gamble as a promotion: customers could receive it in exchange for mailing in a coupon found on the back of the company’s soap products. The initial print run of ten thousand copies was gone in a week, which suggested there might be a market for the medium. It was soon followed by the thirty-six-page one-shot Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, considered by historians to be the first true American comic book. Seven more publications followed in 1934, then nineteen in 1935. When publishers began experimenting with genres beyond humor, the boom began.
Detective Comics #1, an anthology of private-eye stories, hit newsstands in March 1937, sparking a movement that would see more than 170 titles published by year’s end, more than twice as many as the previous year. Among the stories in that first issue was “The Streets of Chinatown,” starring Slam Bradley, a hard-boiled detective assigned with the task of guarding a prize dog named Mimi. Bradley sprang from the minds of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a pair of aspiring writers in their early twenties who a year earlier had created Doctor Occult, a detective with supernatural powers who is considered to be the first comic-book superhero. Doctor Occult was soon to be wildly overshadowed by another Siegel and Shuster creation.
Siegel had come up with the idea for Superman one summer night back in 1933 while he was trying to fall asleep. He was picturing the moonlit clouds over his home in Cleveland, wondering what it might be like to fly among them.4 Piece by piece, a superpowered character emerged in his mind. “I hop right out of bed and write this down, and then I go back and think some more and get up again and write that down,” he later recalled. “This goes on all night at two-hour intervals, until in the morning I have a complete script.”5 As soon as the sun was up, he raced to Shuster’s house where he breathlessly explained his idea to his friend. Shuster loved it and the two teenagers—both just seventeen years old—spent the day bouncing ideas and sketches off each other. They came up with the now-familiar basics: Superman was strong, he could fly and he came from another planet.
Their initial pitches to comic-strip syndicates landed with a thud. “We are in the market only for strips likely to have the most extraordinary appeal and we do not feel Superman gets into that category,” read the Bell syndicate’s rejection. Superman was “a rather immature piece of work,” United Features told them. “Pay a little attention to actual drawing… Yours seems crude and hurried,” said Esquire Features.6 The character sat on the shelf for five years until Harry Donnenfield, recently minted publisher of Detective Comics, decided to try him out. For 130 dollars he commissioned thirteen pages from Siegel and Shuster, which he released in spring 1938 as part of Action Comics #1. The cover featured Superman in redesigned threads, his now-iconic red-and-blue costume with a flowing cape, lifting a car over his head as criminals fled in terror.
It wasn’t an immediate, obvious success, which made Donnenfield second-guess his initial enthusiasm. He took Superman off the cover for the next five issues, but sales rose anyway. Most contemporary comics were selling around two hundred thousand copies, but Action Comics was heading toward half a million. Unable to explain the bump, the publisher ordered a newsstand survey. The results were surprising—kids weren’t asking for Action Comics, but rather the book “with Superman.”7 From then on, the Man of Steel was permanently affixed to the cover and every issue sold out. Superman got a second, eponymously titled book the next year and that sold out too. By the end of 1939, Superman had inspired dozens of clones and other superpowered characters, including the Arrow, the Crimson Avenger, Sandman, the Fantom of the Fair, the Masked Marvel, the Flame and Wonder Man. The superhero phenomenon was officially underway.
Superman’s quick success was the product of the medium’s novelty and the universality his creators brought to the character. Siegel and Shuster were both sons of Jewish immigrants from Europe who faced anti-Semitism in their previous and adopted homes. To them, Superman represented their experiences—that of an alien in a new land, hopeful of the promise offered by America. He also provided an escapist fantasy and a means of revenge. Siegel and Shuster made the Man of Steel everything they weren’t: big, strong, confident and handsome. “They were, in their own way, striking back at a world of bullies that had threatened, bruised and beaten them,” wrote comic artist and historian Jim Steranko. “No small measure of Superman’s success can be attributed to their explicit tenacity for acting out their juvenile fantasies of swift justice against their persecutors.”8
While Superman himself was the escapist draw, Steranko saw—like Alvin Schwartz did—that his mild-mannered alter ego, Clark Kent, was the real-world attraction that readers truly identified with. Superman was the representation of a childhood fantasy but Clark Kent “existed so that we might lock into that part of him in our own fantasies, hoping that a superman lived inside us until the right moment came for him to emerge.” Comics writer Grant Morrison, in his book Supergods, suggests that in the relatable Clark Kent, Siegel and Shuster “had struck a primal mother lode.”9 The world didn’t have to wait long for an even more primal mother lode to arrive.
A five-minute walk north from Fordham Comics in the Bronx, on the corner of East Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse, a quaint white cottage sits at the head of a small park. The building, believed to have been built in 1797, is notable as the final home of legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Known for his macabre mystery stories and poems, Poe moved into the cottage in 1846 with his wife, Virginia, and mother, Maria. During his time there, he wrote spooky poetry while caring for his wife as she battled tuberculosis. Virginia died in the cottage in 1847, while Poe himself passed away on a trip to Baltimore two years later. Maria moved out shortly thereafter. In 1913 New York City officials designated the building and its environs as Poe Cottage and Poe Park, respectively. Today, the cottage is open to the public as a museum dedicated to the writer’s life and works.
In 1939, Poe Park became the location for a different type of dark creation: it’s where Bob Kane and Bill Finger met to brainstorm ideas for a new superhero they were developing—a character intended to be the opposite of Superman. Whereas the Man of Steel had fantastical powers and lived in a bright, modern Metropolis, this new hero was to be a real-world creature of darkness operating in a corrupt, crime-ridden city, relying only on his wits and physical aptitude to foil bad guys. While Superman inspired hope, this character would live to induce fear. He sounded very much like something out of a Poe story, which was why Kane and Finger chose this particular spot to meet. They were hoping to channel some of the writer’s dark mojo into their creation. Their character, of course, was Batman.
Donnenfield and his editor Vin Sullivan knew they were onto something with the growing success of Superman. Sullivan told Kane, one of his artists, to think up ideas for new superheroes. Kane went home and spent the weekend sketching, coming up with a character that looked a lot like the Man of Steel, albeit with a few differences. He wore a red-and-blue costume with a black domino mask and a pair of outstretched bat wings affixed to his back. Kane figured he needed help fleshing out the concept, so he rushed over to Finger’s apartment. Kane had recently met Finger—a voracious reader of literature and pulp detective novels—at a party, and the two had already collaborated on several comic-book stories. He thought his writer friend might have some suggestions on how to improve the character he had dubbed “The Bat-Man.” Boy, did he.
Finger pointed out the obvious—that the character was too much like Superman. To solve that problem, he recommended darkening his costume to make him more menacing. He also suggested replacing the domino mask with a cowl, complete with pointy ears, to cover most of his face. The bat wings had to go as well, substituted with a scalloped cape instead. “It would flow out behind him when he runs and look like bat wings,” he told Kane. Perhaps most importantly, Finger thought Bat-Man should be a human being without powers. He would be a detective who outwitted criminals with his deduction abilities and who could throw down physically when necessary. Finger put it all together into a kind of character readers hadn’t seen before—a hero who resembled a villain, but also a vigilante-slash-detective.10
Sullivan loved Bat-Man and made him the lead story in Detective Comics #27, published in April 1939. In “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate,” Bat-Man investigates the murder of a prominent industrialist. He’s a hard-boiled vigilante at this point—he pushes a villain over a railing into a tank of acid, then coldly remarks that it’s “a fitting end for his kind.” Indeed, in Bat-Man’s first year of stories he routinely wielded a gun, and racked up a body count of two dozen men. It wasn’t till he got his own eponymously named series in 1940 (and dropped the hyphen from his name) that editors banned him from using lethal weaponry. The addition of young sidekick Robin also took some of the edge off, but still, Batman was darker and grittier than any other comic-book character yet—and he was a huge success as a result. By 1943, he was starring in three comic series, selling a collective three million copies each month. An estimated twenty-four million Americans read his stories monthly, enough to prompt interest from other media—Columbia Pictures got the ball rolling with a fifteen-part Batman movie serial complete with fight scenes, bad guys and cliff-hangers.
With Superman and Batman as its twin engines, the newly christened National Comics Publications charged headlong into superheroes. The Flash, Hawkman, Green Lantern and the Atom all made their debuts in 1940, making it the most auspicious year yet for comics—approximately 150 new titles were published, sixteen new publishers entered the field and total revenue hit twenty million dollars.11 The following year was big, too, with Timely Comics—the company that would eventually become Marvel—launching Captain America to join its other superheroes, the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch. National Comics, meanwhile, debuted Wonder Woman—but, contrary to popular belief, she wasn’t the first female superhero. That distinction goes to Ma Hunkel, a regular, powerless working mother in New York who dons long johns and puts a cooking pot on her head to become the Red Tornado. Debuting in All-American Comics #3 in 1939, the meta-character might technically be considered the first real-life superhero.
With rapidly multiplying superheroes fueling a sales boom, the Golden Age of Comics was in full swing.
Fictional superheroes obviously weren’t able to solve real-world problems, but their collective genesis was certainly a response to one. Many of the superheroes who dominate pop culture today never would have existed were it not for widespread anti-Semitism in Europe and especially in the United States in the thirties.
Virtually every major character, starting with Siegel and Shuster’s Superman, was created by Jewish writers and artists. As was often the case with Jewish immigrants and their children, many had to change or anglicize their names to avoid persecution: Bob Kane (Robert Kahn), Bill Finger (Milton Finger), Captain America creators Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) and Joe Simon (Hymie Simon), and later, Marvel impresario Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber), among many others. Rejected by “serious” media because of rampant anti-Semitism at the time, these creators had little choice but to manufacture their own creative outlets. “I don’t think that the central role played by Jews in film and comics from the outset was due to special abilities or talents in these areas,” Dr. Ben Baruch Blich, a senior lecturer in the department of history and theory at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, told Haaretz in 2016. “What caused it was the open and latent anti-Semitism that prevailed in the United States at the time. Since daily newspapers refused to accept illustrations or comic books made by Jews, they had no other choice…. The same was true for cinema. This was a restriction that forced Jews to develop a new approach.”12
Some of the characters and stories were transparent revenge fantasies. Captain America, for example, is depicted punching Hitler on the cover of his 1941 debut. Superman, Siegel and Shuster’s allegorical attempt to fight back against both low-level and geopolitical bullies, was banned in Germany after he smashed the country’s defenses on the French border in a 1940 story. “Superman is Jewish,” Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels declared.13
Danny Fingeroth, an editor at Marvel in the eighties and nineties, saw a great deal of the Jewish experience reflected in superheroes:
I think the idea of a being who wields great power wisely and justly would be very appealing to people whose history involves frequently being the victim of power wielded brutally and unjustly. In retrospect, we can see coded, disguised content that could be interpreted as Jewish in the stories of the superheroes. For instance, Superman, Batman and Spider-Man’s origins are about sudden, traumatic, violent loss—which could be seen to echo the loss of stability that Eastern European Jews had regularly experienced…. These are major themes, as is the secret (or dual) identity—also of interest to all immigrants, but especially attractive to Jews who, in that era, felt that they could succeed in America only if they disguised their identities as Jews. One might speak Yiddish at home, but that was the language of your embarrassing immigrant parents and grandparents. You speak English in public so you can fit in with your friends at school. But which is the real you? So just as Superman would disguise himself as Clark Kent in order to fit in with non-super people, so would Jews change their names or “fix” their noses to assimilate.14
Superheroes also appealed to a broader, non-Jewish audience on several levels. They represented fantastical escapism, but also universally aspirational virtues: hope, charity, the triumph of good over evil, an incorruptible spirit. Steranko summarized Captain America, a superhero created during World War II for the singular purpose of fighting Nazis, as a “pure” idea: “He was not a man, but all men; not a being, but a cumulative god that symbolized the inner reality of man. He was the American truth. [His] shield was a visual metaphor for two hundred years of democratic freedom.” The character was an American manifestation of an American art form.15 He represented everything that everyone hoped America would and should be.
Captain America, like Superman and Batman before him, was a hit with both Jews and Gentiles as a result. (That Hitler-punching issue sold a million copies and has a minimum value today of fourteen thousand dollars.) Over all, 143 monthly comic-book titles were read by fifty million Americans in 1942—no small feat, given the population of the country at the time was only about 130 million.16 Superheroes continued to migrate into other media as a result, including the Superman cartoons of the early forties and the Captain America serial films from Republic Pictures in 1944. By the end of World War II, superheroes were an established part of Americana.
Like most phenomena that suddenly explode out of nowhere, superheroes’ immense popularity eventually began to wane. Despite the lofty heights attained during the Golden Age, it would take several more decades to achieve cultural domination, with fits and starts along the way.
Readers began showing superhero fatigue soon after World War II ended. In response, publishers diversified into other genres, including western, crime, teen, humor and war comics. EC Comics emerged to serve up horror stories that pushed the envelope in terms of how much blood and gore could be depicted in the medium. Television’s arrival also fragmented readers’ attention. By 1953, the craze was over. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were the only superheroes left standing with their own titles.17
EC Comics’ horror stories also became the figurative lightning rod for the wrong kind of attention, mainly from psychiatrist and long-time industry critic Dr. Fredric Wertham. In his 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham posited that comic-book publishers were perverting children’s minds with a constant flood of images depicting crime, sex and violence. The US government was listening and charged the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency with finding answers. In response, publishers established a self-regulating Comics Code Authority, which instituted a strict set of rules for what could and could not be depicted in their pages. By today’s standards, the rules were unabashedly draconian. A sampling: “Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals…. No comic magazine shall use the word horror or terror in its title…. All characters shall be depicted in dress reasonably acceptable to society.… The treatment of live-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.”
Not surprisingly, the industry tanked. Publishers closed down as creators fled for different occupations. By the end of 1955, there were only 250 comic titles left—a precipitous drop from 650 a year earlier.18 Those publishers who were still afloat had to get creative to stay within the rules, so they pivoted into science-fiction and humor comics. Titles starring talking animals became a thing.
The remaining superheroes got pretty silly. Batman spent much of the fifties battling super apes and aliens or being transformed into a robot, genie, mummy or any other inoffensive goofiness writers could dream up. A mischievous baby-like imp named Bat-Mite showed up. Superman, meanwhile, got a dog named Krypto and spent his time concocting elaborate ruses to avoid marrying Lois Lane. The once exciting Man of Tomorrow became the über-dull Man of Mundanity.
At about the same time, the US government was on a science kick. The space race with the Soviet Union was heating up and politicians wanted more kids studying science, which they felt was the best weapon to counter the growing communist threat. They entreated comics publishers to get on board, and the industry complied.
National got it rolling in 1956 by dusting off one of its old heroes, the Flash, and recasting him as Barry Allen, a scientist working for the police who gained super speed after being splashed with chemicals and hit by lightning. Opposing him was a horde of science-based villains, from Captain Cold to Doctor Alchemy. The Flash was a hit, leading National to reimagine a number of its Golden Age heroes with science-based origins and stories, including Green Lantern, Aquaman and the Atom. It worked—public interest in superheroes rekindled into what became known as the Silver Age of Comics. Then Marvel Comics joined the party in a big way.
Like many of his contemporaries, Stanley Lieber was a Jewish kid who grew up in New York. He was a strong writer in high school who dreamed of penning the Great American Novel. His uncle Robbie thought he might benefit from being around professional writers, so he used his connections to finagle young Stan a job as an assistant at Timely Comics in 1939. Lieber was stuck with lowly tasks at first, such as refilling inkwells and getting lunch for the artists. If he was lucky, he got to erase pencil lines from finished pages. His writing debut came two years later in Captain America Comics #3, in which he wrote text filler under the pseudonym “Stan Lee.” He later explained in his autobiography that he was too embarrassed to use his real name because comics were seen as lowbrow entertainment and he didn’t want to hurt his chances of becoming a respectable novelist later on.
His life plans took a detour later that year when Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left Timely. Publisher Martin Goodman installed Lieber, who later legally changed his name to Lee, as interim editor. He was only nineteen, but he had quickly graduated to writing full stories. He had also impressed Goodman with his business acumen and his ability to direct artists. Lee was named permanent editor before long, though a stint in the army forced him to take a break. He returned to Timely after the war and continued writing and editing, but by the late fifties he was considering leaving the comics field to get back to his plan of writing novels. National’s launch of the Silver Age, however, got him thinking.
Lee had an affinity for superheroes, but he felt they were out of touch with their audience. Many of the kids who had read comics in the thirties, forties and fifties were by now teenagers or adults who wanted more sophisticated stories. If superheroes were to survive over the long term, he believed they had to grow up along with their readers and become more real. The Fantastic Four was his first effort in that vein.
Published in 1961, Fantastic Four #1 starred a family of superheroes who fought amongst themselves almost more than they did with the bad guys. In keeping with the zeitgeist, the foursome came by their powers through scientific means: they boarded a rocket to “beat the commies” into space, only to be bombarded by mysterious cosmic rays that ultimately gave them powers. Reed Richards; Susan Storm; her brother, Johnny; and Ben Grimm were unlike anything seen in comics before: they could be arrogant, hotheaded and outright mean, and they didn’t even wear costumes for the first few issues of the series. Their instant success confirmed the direction Lee was taking with Timely, which rebranded itself as Marvel Comics. The Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man and Spider-Man followed in 1962, each marked by some sort of relatable internal conflict: Bruce Banner was as frightened of his monstrous Hulk alter ego as the military forces that hunted him; Thor was struggling with the loss of his godhood, a punishment for his arrogance from his father Odin; Ant-Man was on a mission of redemption to atone for allowing his wife to be murdered; Spider-Man was similarly trying to make amends for indirectly causing the death of his uncle Ben. By infusing anxiety, doubt and self-loathing into the characters, Lee and his staff of artists and writers made them more real. It was a direct appeal to readers to invest in superheroes emotionally and to see them as distinctly human, rather than as the mythological god types they resembled during the Golden Age.
Spider-Man in particular resonated with people. In his Peter Parker alter ego, he was badly bullied by jocks at school on top of being plagued with guilt over his uncle’s demise. He also had girl problems and had to deal with an overbearing boss at work. Unlike other superheroes at the time, he also sported a mask that fully covered his face—an intentional touch that allowed readers to imagine themselves in the role. His first appearance, in Amazing Fantasy #15, ended with the words “He could be you.”
Lee took the keeping-it-real approach even further with an editorial at the back of each comic. Under the title of “Stan’s Soapbox,” he opined on the issues of the day and how he and his staff were approaching them. In one notable missive, published in Avengers #74 in 1970, Lee addressed criticisms from some readers that there was too much moralizing in Marvel comics. His response:
It seems to me that a story without a message, however subliminal, is like a man without a soul. In fact, even the most escapist literature of all—old-time fairy tales and heroic legends—contained moral and philosophical points of view. At every college campus where I may speak, there’s as much discussion of war and peace, civil rights, and the so-called youth rebellion as there is of our Marvel mags per se. None of us lives in a vacuum—none of us is untouched by the everyday events about us—events which shape our stories just as they shape our lives. Sure our tales can be called escapist—but just because something’s for fun, doesn’t mean we have to blanket our brains while we read it!
Marvel kept pumping out new angsty characters, including the X-Men in 1963 and Daredevil the following year. Along with a revitalized National, the company pushed the Silver Age to respectable results. Of the hundred titles published in 1967, a third starred superheroes, many of which pulled in per-issue sales of a couple hundred thousand copies each.19 The results were again good enough to draw attention from other media. Spider-Man got his own television cartoon in 1967. National’s Batman, meanwhile, got his own live-action television show on ABC in 1966. Premiering on January 12, it was a phenomenon right out of the gate. Half of all American households tuned in to the first episode, climbing to a now inconceivable 60 per cent the next night to see whether Batman could save Robin from a seemingly inescapable death trap set by the Riddler. (Holy spoilers, Batman: he did!)20
Reinventing the Dark Knight as colorful sixties camp, the show kicked off a veritable Batmania. Ratings in the first season were huge, prompting monthly sales of Batman comics to surge into million-copy territory, a level not seen since the forties. ABC and National, meanwhile, soaked up the spoils of seventy million dollars in Bat-merchandise sold. Not bad, considering Marvel’s more grounded direction. The Batman TV show—with its “Zap!” and “Pow!” visualized sound effects, cheesy dialogue and disco-dancing Caped Crusader—was as unrealistic as you could get, a point of consternation among old-school fans who remembered him as a pulp noir vigilante. But its success was key in bringing superheroes further into the mainstream. Comic books had arrived at a point where they could successfully parody and satirize themselves, which broadened the medium’s appeal. It was simultaneously okay to take superheroes seriously, but also not seriously at all.
This first wave of Batmania was ultimately short-lived, as was the Silver Age of Comics. Ratings fell in the second and third seasons and took comic-book sales with them. ABC canceled the show in 1968 and supermarkets stopped stocking low–profit margin comic books before the decade was through. The future looked bleak as the industry headed back in the direction of the dark Wertham era.
It wasn’t all gloom, though, as the Silver Age and the Batman TV show both sowed seeds that would ultimately bear fruit. The TV show tantalized the entertainment industry with a taste of what these characters could do when transposed from the printed page into larger visual media. Meanwhile, by shifting the superhero genre toward realism, Marvel encouraged readers to put themselves in characters’ shoes.
The seventies saw the comics industry shrink inward. With overall circulation and the number of titles contracting, publishers reoriented their efforts toward pleasing hard-core fans—those who fondly remembered Batman throwing villains into tubs of acid. Seeing Marvel’s characters succeeding on the basis of their individual personality disorders, DC’s editors—the company formerly known as National Allied Publications finally officially became DC Comics in 1977—followed suit.21 Batman, they decided, wasn’t motivated by altruism, but rather by obsession. His stories and opponents grew more psychologically complex to reflect the new approach. Robin, that element of upbeat color introduced in 1940 to soften Batman’s harder edges, was shipped off to college and banished from the newer, darker Dark Knight’s pages.
Society had also changed. The sixties had washed the country with a wave of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, loosening up pop culture in the process. Publishers increasingly looked at the Wertham-inspired Comics Code as an anachronism at best, or censorship at worst. As it had done the previous decade with its anti-communism efforts, the US government again wanted to enlist publishers’ pipelines to young readers for its nascent war on drugs. Lee relayed a request from the Nixon administration to publish an anti-drug story in one of his books to the lawyers running the Comics Code Authority, but got a rejection in response. The request sparked debate among the organization’s members, who ultimately decided to update the code later in 1971. Lee didn’t want to wait, so in May 1971 he published Amazing Spider-Man #96 without the authority’s seal of approval. The issue saw Spider-Man save a teenager, who was high on drugs, from killing himself. The next instalment had Peter Parker’s friend Harry Osborn overdose on illegal pills. DC followed a few months later with Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85, where it was revealed that Green Arrow’s sidekick, Speedy, was a heroin addict. In both cases, the storylines treated drugs as a villainous scourge: “DC attacks youth’s greatest problem… drugs!” read the cover of Green Lantern/Green Arrow. The Comics Code Authority finally lifted many of the more restrictive terms later that year: criminals could again be depicted sympathetically on occasion and drugs could be incorporated into storylines as long as they weren’t glorified. The code would continue to be loosened over the years, mirroring the larger growing tolerance in pop culture, until it was essentially abandoned in the 2000s.
With supermarkets ditching comic books, a wave of stores dedicated to the medium sprung up and took over as the primary mode of distribution. These were stores much like Fordham Comics in the Bronx—hidden away from the mainstream public or unwelcoming to it, where hard-core fans could gather to buy their weekly stash and discuss the finer points of characters and stories: Was the Silver Age Flash superior to the Golden Age version, and how did Superman shave, anyway? Superheroes subsisted in mainstream media through the seventies and early eighties largely through Saturday morning cartoons such as DC’s Super Friends and Marvel’s Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and decently received but not blockbuster shows such as Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. During this era, superheroes were either nerd stuff or kids’ stuff. They were far away from pop-culture domination.
Warner Bros., which had acquired DC in 1967, wasn’t content with that fact. In 1978, Superman became the first live-action blockbuster superhero movie of the modern age. Directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve, the film grossed three hundred million dollars worldwide and netted a trio of Oscar nominations. Its tagline was “You’ll believe a man can fly,” but it also proved that superhero movies could too. As critic Roger Ebert later wrote, the movie succeeded on the basis of the filmmakers pulling off a fine balance of satire, action and rom-com: “The film came in an era of Disaster Movies that took themselves with dreadful earnestness, and they knew the essential element of Superman was fun.”22
As with the genesis of superhero comic books forty years earlier, Batman followed Superman into the film pipeline. The Caped Crusader got caught in development limbo, however, as internal debate raged over how to portray the character. Some executives within Warner wanted a continuation of the campy approach of the sixties TV show while another faction pulled for the darker tone reestablished in the comics of the time. The latter won out, but not before Warner pumped out another trio of Superman movies, to diminishing returns. The long-awaited Batman movie finally hit theatres in 1989, launching a second wave of Batmania.
Directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton, Batman became something of a Star Wars–level phenomenon. Critics praised Burton’s dark tone and visuals and gushed over Jack Nicholson’s over-the-top performance as the maniacal Joker. The film dominated the box office, with more than four hundred million dollars grossed globally, and won an Oscar for art direction. Perhaps more importantly, it moved more than 1.5 billion dollars in merchandise: toys, games, memorabilia, lunch boxes and anything else you could slap a Batman logo on. The simple black T-shirt with said logo became trendy. Prince’s soundtrack for the movie sat at number one on the Billboard charts for six weeks; MTV played that god-awful “Batdance” video in heavy rotation. Batman: The Animated Series followed in 1992 and became the top-rated cartoon in America. Warner also churned out a trio of sequels, with the four movies grossing an overall 1.2 billion dollars in global box office.23 All told, the 1989 film kickstarted what would become one of the richest pop culture franchises in history, with an estimated value of twenty-five billion dollars as of 2019.
Batman’s post-1989 popularity and ubiquity was as much a reflection of the times as anything else. The end of the Cold War, the beginning of the Gulf War and the corresponding economic recession injected uncertainty and turmoil into the public zeitgeist, at least as far as American audiences were concerned. The color and excesses of eighties pop culture gave way to darker sensibilities; hence the rise of grunge and alternative music. Movie theaters, meanwhile, said goodbye to the Goonies and Marty McFly and hello to the Terminator and Hannibal Lecter. Batman was the perfect, well-timed tonic for the average movie-goer—his problems, such as the Joker, could be solved through the simple application of technology, scowling and fisticuffs. There were no patriotic chants of “U-S-A!” in that first Batman movie, but there might as well have been. The bat logo that everyone was wearing on their T-shirts and lunch boxes bore no aesthetic resemblance to the American flag, but symbolically they were one and the same.
Marvel tried to get in on Batman’s runaway success with its own films, but lacking the heft and expertise of a major film studio parent, its attempts were… less successful. The Punisher and Captain America were bad enough to warrant straight-to-video releases in 1989 and 1992, respectively, which was more than can be said for The Fantastic Four, an awful 1994 effort that never even saw the light of day. Mismanagement and questionable creative decisions were partly responsible, but there was also the inescapable fact that special effects were not yet good enough to convincingly translate some of the more fantastical superheroes to the screen. Marvel did have better luck with kids’ TV, though, with X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons both delivering solid ratings.
The Batman movie was a big factor in the doubling of comic-book stores in the US, pushing the total from just four thousand in 1986 to ten thousand by 1993, which by that point were collectively selling forty-eight million comics a month.24 DC pumped out new Batman titles to take advantage of these heightened sales. Marvel jumped in with a wave of hot new artists including Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. Taking the reins of Spider-Man, the X-Men and New Mutants, the newcomers transformed the brooding, introspective stories of the seventies and eighties into eye-popping action-packed spectacles. Male characters wore costumes sporting dozens of pouches of questionable usefulness and toted implausibly giant guns. The women, meanwhile, thrust their impossibly large breasts toward readers in ridiculous cheesecake poses. But hey, sales exploded. Spider-Man #1, written and drawn by McFarlane and published in 1991, sold 2.6 million copies, followed a few months later by Liefeld’s X-Force #1, which sold 3.9 million. They were both left in the dust by Lee’s X-Men #1, released in August, which sold eight million copies, making it the best selling comic book of all time.
There was just one problem: many of those sales weren’t exactly organic. Unlike the massive results they had posted in the Golden Age, publishers were depending on gimmicks to pad the numbers, including number-one issues and multiple covers embossed with metallic foil and holograms. X-Men #1, for example, was released with five different covers, which encouraged buyers to snap up multiple copies. It was all geared toward speculators, who saw that older comics from previous decades were worth lots of money. Figuring that all these special issues would eventually become similar gold mines because of their supposed rarity, they piled in. Buyers and publishers didn’t reckon with the obvious paradox of plentiful rarity: when there is too much of anything, its value drops precipitously.
That’s exactly what happened to the comic-book business as the Batman sequels ran out of steam. Speculators drifted away and hard-core readers were put off by the gimmicks and the focus on style over substance. Sales plummeted and stores went out of business at a brisk pace—a thousand closed in January 1994 alone.25 Marvel, the worst offender of the speculator-driven frenzy, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 1996. DC’s sales also nosedived as Warner’s film efforts fell into disarray.
The road to domination had to wait until both companies got their houses in order. That started to happen with Blade, a 1998 film starring Wesley Snipes as Marvel’s half-vampire vampire hunter, and then accelerated in earnest in 2000 and 2002 with the X-Men and Spider-Man movies, respectively. Both were box-office hits, thanks in no small part to advances in special effects that finally allowed for convincing translations. Like Batman before them, both became tentpole franchises that compiled massive value through sequels, merchandizing and promotional partnerships. Marvel, which had been rescued from bankruptcy in 1997 by toy maker Toy Biz, was acquired by Disney in 2009 for 4.2 billion dollars. Disney, seeing mega-value in the comic publisher’s intellectual property, set to reacquiring many of the character rights that Marvel had previously doled out in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. The so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe, a reality shared by characters across different films that mirrored the comic books, kicked off with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in 2008, accelerated with Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011, and culminated with The Avengers mega–team up in 2012. Broadcast television shows including Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Runaways, Legion and The Gifted followed, as did a host of Netflix series such as Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and others. All told, Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe had grossed more than twenty-two billion dollars by 2019; the Spider-Man franchise, largely controlled by Sony, had grossed seven billion dollars; and the X-Men franchise, held by 20th Century Fox, had grossed just under six billion dollars.26
Warner also powered ahead, led by a Dark Knight reboot that started with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005. More so than any other superhero films, Nolan’s trilogy proved to be hugely influential to real-life superheroes, depicting Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman in gritty, realistic detail. Out with Bat-Mite, disco dancing and bright colors; in with military gadgets and vehicles, scars and injuries, and righteous, angry vengeance. If any series of films can be pointed to as the blueprint for how an ordinary person might become a vigilante crime fighter, the Dark Knight Trilogy is surely it. Following Batman’s reestablishment, Warner also launched its own shared universe with new movies starring Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and others. DC’s TV shows—Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl and more—multiplied, all posting solid ratings.
Superheroes accounted for six of the top twenty-five grossing movies in 2016, seven in 2017 and eight in 2018. They also became moneymakers in video games, with successful franchises from Batman and Spider-Man. Spidey even hit Broadway as a musical in 2011, complete with songs composed by Bono and Edge of U2. In 2019, Black Panther—starring the king of the fictional African country Wakanda who gets superpowers by taking mystical herbs, and created by Lee and Kirby in 1966—marked a new milestone as the first superhero movie nominated for a best picture Oscar. The same year, Avengers: Endgame topped Avatar to become the highest grossing movie of all time. Superheroes’ domination of pop culture was now complete. At the conclusion of the second decade of the new millennium, there was no shortage of superhero content supply and no evidence of public demand for it waning.
We now know how this happened, but why did it happen?
Nostalgia is one big factor. Superheroes are escapist fantasy at the best of times, but they become even more so when the real world darkens or becomes more complex. For many people who flock to theaters and watch the TV shows, superheroes evoke the simpler times of youth, a time when rising political tensions and worsening economic situations weren’t daily concerns.
Superheroes aren’t just pure escapism, though, because they also have their own problems, conflicts and drama. As Stan Lee intended, audiences identify with them. Readers and viewers recognize that a superhero’s tribulations might provide new perspectives with which to deal with their own issues. Perhaps Bruce Banner’s recognition of the monster who lives within him, for example, can help the viewer face his own inner demons. Maybe the choices Captain America makes in coping with his alienation from modern society can help a reader adjust to her own aging.
Superheroes are also aspirational, because they generally convey positive messages of good triumphing over evil. They inspire audiences to want to do good, or to imagine that they can. At the very least, they can make viewers feel bad about not doing more good.
The makers of the best of the films also implicitly understand that audiences don’t necessarily want to take superheroes too seriously—that, true to their origins as comic books, they also represent levity, humor and color. Joel Schumacher, the much-maligned director of the last two nineties-era Batman movies, was at least partially right when he said, “They’re called comic books, not tragic books.”27 Amidst all the seriousness, angst and reality, superheroes are supposed to be fun and entertaining.
For good or for ill, these factors add up to a formula that is likely to keep the superhero phenomenon powering ahead for the foreseeable future. Although their popularity has waxed and waned over the decades, there’s no reason to believe they aren’t here to stay.
A mere three hundred people attended the first Golden State Comic Book Convention in San Diego in 1970. Since then, like the industry it was founded to celebrate, the event has mushroomed. A few name changes later, it’s now known as Comic-Con International, an entertainment mega-event that draws more than 160 thousand people each year. Comic-Con’s success, which grew in lockstep with the multimedia superhero phenomenon, has spurred similar conventions across the country. The top five US events by attendance—New York, San Diego, Denver, Phoenix and Seattle—collectively draw nearly seven hundred thousand visitors annually. Similar conventions have popped up and are experiencing growth in virtually every major city around the world, from London and Toronto to Paris and Sydney. Shanghai’s comic convention grew to thirty thousand attendees in 2018 from just fourteen thousand three years earlier. Comic Con Africa, in Johannesburg, had forty-five thousand attendees in 2018.
The phenomenon is closely related to box-office figures. Superhero fans clearly like to congregate—whether it’s in theatres or at conventions, they want to experience their preferred form of entertainment collectively and socially. They’re not unlike sports fans in that way; they aren’t the basement-dwelling loners they’ve been made out to be in other popular media. Convention buildings are like sports arenas; the events held in them are like the Super Bowl or the World Series.
A big part of convention-going is cosplay—a portmanteau from “costume” and “play.” Originating in Japan in the eighties, where attendees of science-fiction conventions dressed up as anime and manga characters, cosplay is a form of role-playing. Attention to detail and fidelity to one’s chosen costume is vital, but cosplayers also score points by staying in character. Cracking jokes as Deadpool, for example, is a plus, as is brooding and looking cranky when dressed as Batman. One survey of frequent convention-goers conducted in 2014 found that about a quarter of men and half of women considered cosplay as one of the top three reasons for their attendance.28
Some commentators see the rise of cosplay and so-called nerd culture, much of it spurred by the superhero phenomenon, as a negative development. A few have pointed out that the rise of cosplay in Japan coincided with that country’s prolonged economic recession. Young people ended up “escaping to virtual worlds of games, animation, and costume play,” said Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, to the Financial Times in 2014. “Here, even the young and poor can feel as though they are a hero.” The same might be happening in the United States. “When you’re disillusioned with the reality of your early adult life, dressing up like Doctor Who starts looking better and better,” writes James Pethokoukis, a commentator for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It’s not to say that all or even most cosplay aficionados are struggling to find work. It’s only to say that any rise in people fleeing reality for fantasy suggests problems with our reality.”29
The flip side of the argument, put forward by American economist Adam Ozimek, is that a cultural shift is underway, especially with young people, whom polls say are less likely to follow sports than people of previous generations. Sports, in their way, were just an early form of nerd culture where people obsessed over key plot points (also known as statistics) and wore costumes (also known as jerseys). “I bet that being a fan of cosplay is less correlated with unemployment than being a fan of hockey,” Ozimek wrote. “I bet being a fan of cosplay is more correlated with higher wages than being a fan of football. I bet that the post-manufacturing towns that have high levels of blue-collar unemployment have way less Final Fantasy cosplaying than fantasy sports playing.”30 Ozimek didn’t back up his assertions with data, and hard numbers comparing employment and income levels between cosplayers and sports fans don’t exist, but his point is valid nonetheless—these are just different flavors of leisure that are unlikely to reflect measurable swings in the greater economy. And to further his point, it’s also worth noting that Japan—at least for all of this century so far—has had a much lower unemployment rate than the United States.
Back at Fordham Comics in the Bronx, where the smell of mildew and cat pee prevents the mind from delving too deeply into economic analysis, Phil Hui has decided he’s hungry. He enlists one of the Magic-playing teens to fetch him a slice of pizza from a shop around the corner. In return, Hui offers to buy the kid a slice for himself.
The conversation in the shop turns to New York Comic Con, which concluded the day before. Hui is a veteran of the event, having been both an exhibitor and an attendee many times. His reasons for going these days are different than they were in the eighties and nineties, though. “You used to be able to sell some comics there, but things have changed, you know what I mean?” he says. “These days it’s more about the cosplay, and there are some fantastic cosplayers there.” He pulls out his phone and shows me pictures of him posing with attendees dressed as Spider-Man, Deadpool and other characters.
The teenager returns bearing limp pizza slices on paper plates almost soaked through with grease. Hui thanks him and digs in. He gets excited as the conversation turns to the real reason I’ve sought him out here in his archaic comic shop. He’s keen to talk about that other pillar of the real-life superhero movement, the one that spurred some small portion of comic-book fans into transposing what they saw on the screen or printed page into the real world. He wants to talk about how he became a vigilante.