If you had the fortune of being a kid back when we still had a coherent society, and if you’d developed a taste for comic books, odds were that at least one adult in your life warned you against the habit. If the warning went unheeded, the common wisdom held that you’re grow out of it when you graduated middle school and discovered girls.
In those long-vanished days, the comics industry wasn’t just an IP farm for rootless megacorps. If you want a picture of the business today, imagine a spandex-clad superhero lying under heavy guard in a medically induced coma, kept on life support only to harvest his blood.
Take a quick look around the pop culture landscape, and you’ll see that many members of generations Y, X, Jones—and even quite a few Boomers—bucked the received wisdom. They never grew out of comics. Instead, they turned the hobby into a a religion.
And that religion evangelizes. The biggest movie universe of the past three decades was based on comic book IPs. It’s a testament to our cultural dysfunction that liking comics back when they were good made you a social pariah, but it’s hip to like comics now that they’re garbage.
Related: A Tale of Two Cults
The Big Two comic book publishers’ turn from producing entertaining stories to perpetrating wholesale vandalism on their own product, all at the behest of woke scolds, has drawn a lot of attention. But look past the hype, and you’ll see that Marvel and DC are out of ideas. They have been for a long time.
Case in point: Bane, a Batman villain created thirty years ago, was the last comic book character to break onto the A list. Marvel especially just trades in reskinned knockoffs of their past glory. The common fan response is to cite characters like Miles Morales or Kamala Khan as counterexamples. But as author David V. Stewart has pointed out, those are just palette swapped versions of the classic Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel IPs.
Related: The Corporate IP Death Cycle
That’s not so much the House of Ideas as a tomb for IPs. Yet these decades-old characters keep crawling from their graves like zombies.
People in the new counterculture make facing reality a key part of our identity. We know that the bitterest truth beats the sweetest lie every day of the week. Maybe it’s time to face the unpleasant reality that comics aren’t coming back. While Sad Puppies alums have gone on to bigger and better things, and GamerGate is back for round 2, ComicsGate quickly fell to internal personality conflicts and has stayed mired in e-drama ever since. Despite its faults, GG took down Gawker. Meanwhile, DC and Marvel still remain. When the Big Two collapse, it will be under the weight of their own incompetence.
Comics as we knew them were products of a specific time and place. Now that the cultural conditions prevalent in mid-twentieth century America have disappeared, the whole concept of an IP with universal appeal isn’t just ridiculous, but meaningless. Whatever the future holds for comics, it won’t look like their heyday under Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.
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