In the 1940s heyday of American comic books, a classic advertisement series for weightlifting gadgets showed a skinny kid reading comics while musclebound rivals got all the girls. How times have changed. In the age of the internet, geek culture is on the rise, and in today’s Hollywood, comic books have all the muscle.
Movies based on comic book superheroes have grossed more than $5.2 billion in the US in the past 10 years. Three of the world’s Top 10 grossing films were born as comic book franchises: Marvel’s The Avengers, Avengers Age of Ultron and Iron Man 3.
Hollywood now courts comic books, and their fans, as a coveted golden goose. At Comic-Con, movie and TV studios competed for the attention of 130 000 fans with presentations, previews and star guests.
It’s a stunning reversal for a medium that not long ago “had no place in pop culture”, Gary Groth, of The Comics Journal, said.
“The whole idea that comics could be mass entertainment or even taken seriously was considered ludicrous,” he said.
Comic books were born in the US in the 1930s, as artists and writers built on the popularity of newspaper comic strips to tell stories ranging from romance to crime to comedy to superhero fantasy.
Reading comic books then “wasn’t a terribly niche thing – lots of people did it,” said pop culture historian, Alan Kistler.
But after World War II, social mores moved against adults reading comic books.
Starting in the 1970s, comic book writers and artists pushed back, updating classics like Superman to engage with social topics and creating a vibrant comic book counterculture that persists today.
But comics were and still are a niche market. A best-selling comic today might sell 100 000 copies. By contrast, Avengers’ Age of Ultron earned $191 million in its opening weekend.
Hollywood’s flirtation with super-heroes isn’t new. US film-makers produced a handful of films based on comic book super-heroes every year since the 1970s. But with a few exceptions, like Superman (1978), they remained a niche market.
That changed, Kistler said, with X-Men (2000). The film based on the Marvel comic book series of the same name hit a winning formula, taking on social themes like racism and developing the idea of a superhero beyond a “guy in a costume”.
Its success “pushed superhero films, and gave them new life”, Kistler said.
Last year, Hollywood released at least 18 films based on comics. The genre is now so ubiquitous it’s inspired a backlash, most notably in the darkly comic superhero send-up Birdman, which starred ex-Batman Michael Keaton and won four Oscars.
But if Hollywood has made lucrative use of comic books’ unexpected super powers, critics say for comic books, Hollywood has been more like Kryptonite.
Movies have taken comics’ lowest common denominator and used it to co-opt the genre, Groth said.
“Spectacle, noise, cartoon violence, bombast, hypermelodrama, escapist fantasy,” he said, enumerating Hollywood comics’ “values”.
But Kistler argued that opening comics’ culture to a wider audience can only be a good thing. And to charges that comics have lost their soul to Hollywood, he pointed out, “there’s always been a give and take”. Mass entertainment media have been co-opting, and changing, comics practically since they were born.
Take Superman. The Man of Steel first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938. But he would never have be mistaken for a bird or a plane until a 1939 radio adaptation gave him the ability to fly.
DPA