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Is Frank Miller overrated? I'm of the opinion that all his recent work has been trash.

Frank Miller coasted way too long on his success with Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns. I appreciate the quality of his work on those titles, but I am not a big fan of the grim and gritty wave that copycats attempted with every single comic book character imaginable in the wake of his success. I am more in the Mark Waid school of thought on comics--more hero, less angst vigilante. In that regard, I have some lingering resentments

I could take or leave Sim City, but I liked 300. it boils down to me not enjoying his take on super heroes, but every now and then he does a good job with other genres. The only criteria I can go by with his latest Batman stuff is that critics and fans have ravaged him for it. I cannot see well enough to read comic book anymore.

I think his scripts for Robocop 2, Robocop 3, and The Spirit wwre lackluster.

The big news in the world of comic books is that Dc Comics is planning to reboot its entire universe in the fall. every comic will begin with a new 1st issue regardless of how long the comic has been running. Some new titles will be added, as well. The comics will be handed over to some of the hottest artists and writers to update characters for a younger, hipper audience. This is not the first time DC Comics has done such a thing. The project sounds much like the Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot from the mid-’80’s. I am skeptical of how well the new reboot will work.

Like the recent bruhaha over Superman renouncing his American citizenship, this is a big stunt in order to earn some immediate attention. Comic book have been on a downward spiral for well over a decade now as older fans got burned speculating on collector’s items with far more supply than demand, while potential young fans have discovered Pokemon and Harry Potter instead. DC Comics probably feels safe regrouping because there are not a whole lot of people around to care anymore. As an old school panelolgist, I have two trepidations. I cannot see well enough to read comic books anymore, but what the heck. I can still gripe over them.

First, the money. DC Comics is planning to launch a new, shared universe with 52 titles. Back when Crisis on Infinite Earths brought about the first reboot, you could read every comic book you wanted for $20-25 a month, and that meant buying a few new titles every now and then to see if you would like them. Today, comic books have increased their cover prices far beyond the inflation rate. You should be able to buy a comic book for about a $1.25 or so, but one will run you at least $ 3 these days. Even at $1.25 per issues, $ 65 per month is a ridiculous expectation, but $156 per month is out of the question. No one is going to follow the shared universe like they did back in my younger days of collecting comics. It is too darn expensive.

Second, marvel Comics rebooted its numbering system back in 1998 after an event not unlike what SC Comics is planning. All their major characters started over with 1st issues. Fans hated it, so within a few years, Marvel Comics switched the numbering back to what it should have been. While that sounds trivial, collectors, who are, let us face it--weird, were irritated about how to organize their collections with all the number changes. DC Comics fans are going to be even worse. Action Comics and Detective Comics, just to name two, have been published regularly since the 1930’s. They are closing in on a thousand issues. Fans want that issue #1,000. They do not want a new #1. They will be anal about this, I guarantee. Comics fans are my brethren. I know them.

I will concede that the older comics fans felt the same way when Crisis on Infinite Earths was announced 26 years ago. They did not want a younger, hipper DC universe created by artists and writers they never heard of before. Maybe it is because I was not much of a DC Comics fan before, or my young age, but I developed a taste for the post-Crisis reboot that I did not have for the pre-Crisis. In that sense, maybe I am being an old fart about all this. Young fans may like it as much as I did way back then. But I am thinking the dwindling popularity of comics books, combined with their high costs, and alienation of older fans will make this reboot a failure. Probably one that will hasten the death of comic books as much as the faux gold rush in the early ’90’s.

Non-comics fans now have a reason to be happy when the costumes are translated perfectly from the page to the stage.

Mercy, mercy me.

As the resident comic book guy, I should comment on the recent revelation superman is about to renounce his American citizenship because he is tired of his actions being associated with American policy. In other words, truth and justice are now separate from the American way as far as he is concerned.

First and foremost, this is a stunt to boost sales. A tasteless stunt, but a stunt nevertheless. Sales for comic books have taken a huge dive in recent years. They sell half as much as they did a decade ago. There are a lot of reasons for this--cover prices rising much higher than inflation, the popularity of Pokemon cards, and kids reading Harry Potter instead. But what you can really trace the problem back to is collector speculation over stunts like this. In other words, comics publishers never learn.

I was at my peak as a comics fan back in 1990 when it became an industry driven more by superstar artists than characters. There were a handful of artists who were able to sell just about any comic by drawing the issue. Marvel Comics, the company who was fortunate enough to employ most of these artists, got the idea to give each of these artists a new title featuring a major, popular character to both draw and write for themselves.

To make the launch of these new titles special, each one had a gimmick. There were multiple covers, trading cards included, hog rams on the covers--all sorts of peculiar variations. Collectors brought up multiple copies of these issues in all variations tas speculation on their value. To illustrate, the Amazing Spider-Man was the best selling title featuring the character, selling 400,000 copies per month in 1990. When Todd McFarlane, arguably the hottest artist in comics at the time, launched the adjective free Spider-Man #1 in the summer of 1990, it was sold with three different covers: a black, a silver, and a scarce platinum cover. Marvel sold five million copies. A years later, their were six variations of Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 for which marvel sold eight million.

The problem is that the same 400,00 regular readers were buying up all the millions of copies expecting to eventually make a mint off them. Anyone who understood supply and demand knew that was foolhardy, but comic publishers do not care about the secondary market like fans do. They kept pumping out comics with all sorts of special gimmicks while creating ’events” to justify them. Remember that Superman has been dead? Batman had his back broken? Captain America was murdered? Spider-man revealed his secret identity to the world? Now Superman is renouncing his citizenship. After being dead, for a while, no less.

The gravy train did not last for publishers. By about 1994 oor so, collectors started seeing those millions of copies of comics they had boxes of in the closet flooding the market. Comics stores could not give them away because everyone had at least ten copies they wre trying to unload themselves. Including me, in all honest. Fans left the hobby in droves even as publishers attempted to adjust to their misjudgment. Even a publisher of new comics needs to watch what is happening in the secondary market.

These days comics have been relegated to maintaining the copyrights in order to license characters out for movies, toys, and fast food premiums. The only reason Disney bought Marvel comics was to produce film projects and have Spider-Man appear at Disneyland. The content of comics is pretty much irrelevant beyond keeping characters in the public’s awareness. Hence, we are back to stunts in order to do so.

If history is any indication, two things will happen. One, Superman will return to status quo once interest in his citizenship renunciation dies down. Two, publishers making so much money off licensing fees they can consider publishing comics a loss leader can ignore how fans feel about these gimmicks. There is nothing anyone can do about it other than lament the rapid death of the comic book industry.