Link stolen from Dana: Essay on Superman's behaviour in JLU, with some refs to Identity Crisis.

I was wondering if they ever showed Captain Marvel using that maneuver before.

BTW, here's Evan Dorkin's rant about Identity Crisis and Countdown.

Where does it go from here? It's like a rabid fan of pornography who can't get his kicks from depictions of straight intercourse anymore, so he moves on to more hardcore stuff, then into the crazy shit that even guys at frat parties won't watch together out of embarrassment. The thrills need to be amped, the bullshit revved up, the stunts multiplied, the violence ramped, the childhood characters must be put through even harsher predicaments and fates, saddled with traits and failings they were never designed to carry on their threadbare personalities.

This seems like a relevant question. Escalation of the grim. If you keep chipping away at the characters and compromising them, it gets reductive. Is there a point in Batman getting darker? How about Superman? Don't you need to be able to contrast them against their adversaries to make their missions meaningful?

It all brings to mind the Spinal Tappian "None more black" endpoint.

I feel like superhero comics have been in a mannerist era since Dark Knight and Watchmen. There's more and more meta commentary on the core subject, while the core subject itself shrinks in significance.

Fundamentally Meta: Starman, The Incredibles, Venture Brothers, Powers, Tom Strong, The Tick, Kingdom Come, Marvels, Astro City...

Don't you need to be able to contrast them against their adversaries to make their missions meaningful?

Not for me, no. Now, I don't think everyone should be dark, but the continuum of similarity between a hero and a villain, the distinction between means, ends, and motives fascinates me.

There's no need to shuffle all the stories to either end of that continuum, nor balance them all at the middle.

It's the homogeneity that bothers me, not the existence. There isn't a way that superhero comics have to be for me. I couldn't really even define the term conclusively.

Fundamentally Meta: Starman, The Incredibles, Venture Brothers, Powers, Tom Strong, The Tick, Kingdom Come, Marvels, Astro City...

I dunno, do the blatantly humorous items in there count as true meta? What differentiates meta from parody? Or is parody inherently meta?

Dorian weighs in: [link]

(There are reasons that's the only comics blog for which I read the feed.)

Or is parody inherently meta?

I specifically noted examples where the parodic element is only an element in a deeper delving into the superhero mythos. The Tick and Miracleman (the comic) both depend on acknowledging the absurdity of so many of the superhero conventions, but spin off in different directions from that point. The Tick uses it to do a lot of character based comedy and contrasting the mundane and the bizarre. Miracleman sees those false myths as being a means of control over a powerful weapon (at least in the earliest Alan Moore conception).

That's pretty different from a one-dimension (though funny) parody like Kurtzman's Superduperman, or the way Dave Sims used The Roach.

The Incredibles actually has a fairly Ayn Randian undertone decrying mediocrity and the cultural pressure to quell or diminish the exceptional.

Is Marvels meta for acknowledging canon, but spinning it with reality? I mean, the stories I suppose can stand on their own, but are highly enhanced if you know the source material.

Remind me of the meta in Kingdom Come, will you?

Geoff Johns becomes, essentially, a continuity editor for DC. I'm sure the usual suspects will waste no time complaining about how this is a bad thing, but in general I'm failing to see a strong down side to this.

This is pretty much what you were advocating for, wasn't it, Ple?

Would it be possible for a moratorium to be declared on complaints about the "darkening" of super-hero comics? The arguments I've been seeing have now come full circle and the new "dark" comics being published because comic companies have abandoned the children's audience. Well, I'm not quite sure that it was comics that abandoned kids so much as it was kids that abandoned super-hero comics. We still get plenty of kids coming into the store, and the only super-hero comics they show the slightest interest in are Spider-Man, Teen Titans and JLA. In other words, a perennial children's character and two properties with other media tie-ins. What the kids who come into the store mostly want is manga, Archie comics, and maybe some of the better all-ages independent comics. Oh, and for some reason, Asterix and Tintin lately. But the point is kids, by and large, don't want super-hero comics, and why should they? I wasn't interested in the same media properties that my parents or grand-parents were interested in when they were kids, why should today's kids be any different? I think a lot of this concern over super-hero comics being made appropriate for children so that kids will read them again is misplaced anxiety on the parts of aging comics fans who feel that kids should want to read super-hero comics.

I guess I'm late to the argument. I do think he's right that kids have abandoned the medium. Emmett is only interested in Teen Titans Go and the Star Wars tie-in comic. Comics (for him) exist primarily as an extension of other media he already likes.

Remind me of the meta in Kingdom Come, will you?

I just don't see the story as possible without viewing it as a commentary on superheros themselves. I guess at this stage every superhero comic has a degree of self-consciousness (which is why I think it's a mannerist era), but Kingdom Come struck me as particularly invested in being the last word on superheroes, a culmination.

In contrast, the batfamily titles of the last ten-fifteen years seem to be burrowing down into the mythos opened up by Batman: Year One. That rebooted the mythos, fixed certain elements of Batman's and Jim Gordon's characters that made a range of other stories interesting and possible.

The comparison I would make would be the development of Bebop as a an approach to jazz. Other musicians played in that new stylistic space for a good 20 years afterward without doing it in a mannered, or self-conscious way.