Our Gods Wear Spandex Read Free

the interest of older readers who, in the past, usually abandoned comics as they left their teens. Publishers retained the services of talented artists and writers, who might otherwise have left the field for more lucrative work. And royalty and profit-sharing programs allowed top creators to actually get rich. As a result, the 1980s saw a renaissance in American comics.
    All this money, however, became the root cause of comics' near-death experience in the 1990s. Titles like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen not only earned big sales, but they also attracted the interest of the mainstream media. A new breed of creator arose, motivated almost entirely by the money. Many of them were talented and sincere; many were not. But too many of the talentless quickly learned the art of making a sale. At the same time, publishers abandoned long-held standards intended to prevent comic characters from being overexposed or misrepresented. Combine these trends with the artificially inflated sale of back issues, and the floodgates were open.
    By the early 1990s, publishers like Image, Acclaim, and Malibu were pushing a sort of crack-cocaine version of superheroes. The model was created by former Marvel artist Rob Liefeld, who developed a garish vocabulary of visual gimmicks calculated to excite gullible fans. Instead of sleek, idealized athletes with colorful-yet-tasteful outfits, superheroes became a riot of bulging veins and ballooned muscles, absurd punk-influenced costumes, cybernetic limbs, and grotesque automatic weapons. Their faces were invariably frozen in grimacing expressions of hate, and they all seemed bent on death and mayhem for its own sake. Stories became nothing but incomprehensible jumbles of action poses, poorly choreographed fight scenes, and explosions. The trend spread, until even the august heroes of Marvel and DC Comics were being done Liefeld style, and the entire market became saturated with promotional gimmicks—variant covers, chromium covers, diecut covers—whose only purpose was to move product.
    The turning point came in 1993 with DC Comics' “Death of Superman” stunt in Superman #75, which sold millions and brought thousands of new customers into comic stores. The ill-fated marketing ploy left a sour aftertaste, however. True fans knew DC would never leave their signature character dead, and finally realized they were being ripped off. By the middle of the decade, thousands of retailers found themselves buried under piles of unsold product; many stores simply went under. Yet, publishers simply continued spewing out more of the same garbage.
    Things went from bad to worse. Batman and Robin , the nearly unwatchable 1997 film directed by Joel Schumacher, brought the Batman franchise to its knees and nearly took the Warner Brothers empire down with it. This was followed by a string of superhero flops like Judge Dredd, Tank Girl , and The Phantom that threatened the future of the entire “comic-book movie” genre. There is an ironic symmetry to this, for it was the success of the first Batman film in 1989 that launched one of the most feverish booms in the comic-book industry's fifty-year history, just as the success of the Batman TV series had done in 1966.

CHAPTER 2
KINGDOM COME

    In 1996, two creators decided they had had enough. One was Alex Ross, an astonishingly talented painter and preacher's son from Texas. Ross grew up obsessing over the work of classic illustrators like Andrew Loomis and Norman Rockwell, and the music of the classically trained rock band Queen. His great passion, however, was for the noble, self-sacrificing superheroes of the so-called Silver Age of comic books (1957–1970). Ross burst onto the comic-book scene in 1994 with a series entitled Marvels , in which he presented Marvel Comics' most popular heroes in his graceful and impressionistic, yet photorealistic, style. Ross' noble characters had an immediate effect, making all the other superhero comics look ugly