The Man of the day After Tomorrow, by John Ostrander
And every fair from fair sometime declines / By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d
Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
The Superman of today is not the Superman of the Thirties, nor of the Eighties, nor the Superman that will be. At some point the Man of Tomorrow becomes the Man of the Day After Tomorrow. He will evolve and change as he has since his creation. Everything changes, everything evolves. The alternative is death and extinction.
The principal problem (IMO) with the most recent Superman film, Superman Returns, is that director Brian Singer wanted to go back and make the Superman 3 film that he felt should have been made. However, that interpretation of Superman belonged to the era in which the original Christopher Reeve Superman was created. Say what you want about Smallville, it at least re-interpreted Superman as if he had come to Earth recently and was a young man today. Sure, at the start it was a little Superman 90210, but so what? It translated the mythos into something recognizable for our era. In fact, in this its supposedly last season, after losing two of the lead supporting cast members, I think the show has gotten better. It borrows heavily from the comic book mythos that spawned it but has consistently thrown a new spin on that mythos. Superman Returns didn’t.
It’s not just Superman; comics as a medium needs to re-invent itself, to adapt to changing times. I love, honor, and respect the comic book retailers but they are in hard times and its going to get harder. Comics are a niche market and the retailers are part of that niche. There’s x amount of fans buying the books and they have y amount of cash to spend on them. DC and Marvel play the same games from the Eighties with continuity heavy crossovers and attempts to crowd one another off the shelves. None of this grows the market.
One of the things I like about ComicMix and other sites like it is that we are where the eyeballs are, where the future of comics is going to lie – here on the Internet. This is where you can grow the market. It’s cheaper to produce stories on the Internet – no cost for printing or shipping, no distribution or retailer percentages – and you can still package the material for trade paperbacks which is where the real money is in comics anyway. Most of all, it has the potential to reach people who don’t go to comic book stores.