DC Comics

In 1961, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby published Fantastic Four #1 at Marvel Comics. The book was different in ways that seem obvious now but were genuinely unusual then: the characters bickered. They had personal problems that followed them from issue to issue. The Thing was miserable about being the Thing. Their adventures had consequences that the next issue had to acknowledge. Marvel was building something serialized in a way DC's relatively self-contained stories were not.

DC noticed, but its response was measured. The company ran its own team book, the Justice League of America, which had launched in 1960 and featured its major heroes cooperating efficiently without the friction Marvel was selling. Editors believed not unreasonably, given their sales figures that readers wanted aspiration, not identification. Superman was not supposed to have a bad day. That was the point of Superman.

In 1986, DC released two projects that seemed to announce a new direction. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns imagined a fifty-year-old Bruce Wayne coming out of retirement in a decaying Gotham, brutal and obsessive. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen deconstructed the superhero concept entirely, asking what a world with costumed vigilantes would actually look like. Both sold beyond expectations. Both won awards. Both were later cited as the most important superhero comics ever published.

The same year, DC published Crisis on Infinite Earths, a twelve-issue series designed to simplify its continuity. Decades of publishing had produced multiple parallel universes, contradictory histories, and characters with origin stories that no longer made sense. Crisis killed several major characters, collapsed the multiverse into a single timeline, and reset the universe's history. It was an enormous editorial operation, and it worked for a while. Within a few years, new contradictions had accumulated, and DC began planning the next continuity reset.

DC's difficulty is sometimes described as a brand problem or a management problem or a creative problem. It is all of these, but underneath them is something more structural: the company built an identity around characters whose cultural weight made them hard to develop. Superman works as a symbol precisely because he is stable. The instability that makes for compelling serialized fiction characters who change, fail, grow is exactly what undermines the iconographic function these characters serve outside comics.

Marvel solved a version of this problem by introducing new characters alongside its legacy ones, and by building a shared universe in which the interaction between characters generated narrative energy even when individual characters were static. The Marvel Cinematic Universe's achievement was not that it made great individual films some are and some are not but that it made the relationships between films feel earned. Audiences came to care about the architecture as much as the individual rooms.

In that 1938 comic book, Superman lifts the car because he can. There is no ambiguity, no backstory in the first issue, no explanation of where the power comes from. He is simply there, and he is stronger than anything in his way. The image worked then because it was new. It still works now, eighty-plus years later, because it has been seen so many times that it has become the template against which all subsequent images are measured. That is DC's inheritance: the thing so original it became the definition.