Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia 3031409116, 9783031409110

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Reboot Culture Comics, Film, Transmedia William Proctor

Reboot Culture

William Proctor

Reboot Culture Comics, Film, Transmedia

William Proctor The Media School Bournemouth University The Media School Poole, Dorset, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-40911-0    ISBN 978-3-031-40912-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40912-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Frank Peters / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

Although Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia draws extensively on research conducted for my doctorate on the topic, this book is not a ‘cut-­ and-­paste’ job. Indeed, I would say that my PhD thesis has been considerably retconned as I tried to stay abreast of new developments in popular culture following my viva voce in 2014. As a consequence, this book has been delayed for a number of years, not least because of the academic disease that most scholars suffer from—the inability to focus on one project at a time—and to be able to decline kind invitations to publish in journals and, more pointedly, edited collections. I was finally able, however, to complete this book in 2022, for which I must thank Jim Andrews, Einar Thorsen, and Melanie Gray at Bournemouth University for supporting my application for research leave. This book has benefitted from the many conversations I’ve had over the past fifteen years or so with scholars, fans, and, to a lesser extent, industrial professionals. I am especially grateful to the University of Sunderland for providing a full scholarship so I could embark on a journey that radically changed my life, without the economic pressures that so many people from economically under-privileged backgrounds have to confront when considering higher education (or not, as the case may be). There is no doubt that I would not have been able to continue my studies without the support of John Storey, Steve Cannon, Martin Shingler, Vicky Ball, and Julia Knight. There are no words that can truly express my gratitude. Thanks to each of you for providing enormous bouts of encouragement, energy, and intellectual guidance. v

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Studying at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies (CRMCS) at the University of Sunderland was a formative, stimulating experience, one shared by other PhD candidates at the time. Thanks especially to Mark McKenna, Justin Battin, Evi Karanthanasopoulou, Alessandra Mondin, Eve Forrest, Daniel Kilvington, Tonya Anderson, and Paul Benton. Being able to discuss our respective doctoral subjects in a generous atmosphere of healthy debate and scholarship provided a bedrock that allowed each of us to thrive. Thanks also to Andrew Crisell for facilitating the Research Study Liaison Group (RSLG), a monthly occurrence that afforded us the opportunity to share our research and receive feedback. I miss those days. I have been fortunate enough to receive mentorship from numerous academics, all of whom have helped shape my thinking over the years. Special thanks to Will Brooker, Henry Jenkins, Clarissa Smith, and, most importantly of all, Martin Barker. Sadly, Martin passed away in 2022, but his legacy will undoubtedly live on through his body of work. I am hugely grateful that I got to know Martin relatively well. He never treated me like a junior scholar, always listened to my thoughts and arguments, and, more than most, challenged me to always stay true to empirical evidence. I will never forget you, Martin. To other academics who have helped shape my thinking over the years through many conversations, thanks go to (in no particular order): Richard McCulloch, Bethan Jones, Dan Hassler-Forest, Heather Urbanski, Constantine Verevis, Daniel Herbert, Feona Atwood, Johnny Walker, Steve Jones, Kate Egan, Matthew Freeman, Richard Berger, Julia Round, Jim Pope, Sam Goodman, Matt Hills, Jonathan Gray, Mark Bould, Mark J.P Wolf, Michael Saler, Matt Yockey, Susan Smith, Trish Winters, Jessica Ruth Austen, Tom Phillips, Paul Booth, John Paul Green, Neil Perryman, Rob Jewitt, Andrew Smith, and Djoymi Baker. When I first embarked on this journey, I was not in any way a comic book reader or fan. I had, like most boys growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, read comics as a kid, like The Beano, The Dandy, Hotspur, Victor, Action, Battle, Eagle, 2000 AD, etc. But for me, superhero comics usually came in the form of annuals rather than single-issues, often given as a Christmas or birthday gift. It was therefore extremely challenging to study superhero comics without a PhD in continuity and canon, and I have benefitted immensely from speaking with seasoned comics veterans over the past fifteen years or so, many of whom were more willing to steer me through the arcana of superhero comics. Thanks especially to the staff at

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The Travelling Man and Forbidden Planet in Newcastle, to Andy Hine of Paradox in Poole, and to Matt Clarke, James Randall, and Stewart Ryder from Bournemouth. Special thanks to Robert Greenberger, who worked at DC Comics during the publication of Crisis of Infinite Earths, an important comic series in the history of reboots. Robert was always on hand to answer questions and to help reshape the commonly accepted narrative that has taken hold about Crisis in critical and academic spheres. Thanks, Bob. Thanks also to John Jackson Miller, franchise tie-in author and owner of the website, Comic-Chron. John provided data on sales that I use in this book and provided expertise in relation to the economics of comic book publishing in the 1980s. Thanks for answering my questions, John, and helping me to understand the intricacies of sales data. Lastly, thanks to my partner, Ann Luce. Your beautiful soul has always been there, shining light into the darkest corners of my world when I needed it most. When my dad passed away in 2016; when I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2017; when my friend, Steven Tate, died by suicide in 2019; when my mam was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2020, you were there. You are always there, my rock, my compass, my anchor. I love you dearly and I dedicate this book to you.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 A New Terminology? Discourses, Distinctions, Definitions 39 3 Planet  of the Capes: Archaeology of the Silver Age Comic Book Reboot 65 4 Crisis Management: Archaeology of the Pre-Boot117 5 Superman  Begins: Archaeology of John Byrne’s Man of Steel Reboot155 6 The  Darkest Knight: Archaeology of the Batman in Comics and Film195 7 Conclusion259 Index269

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Since the mid-2000s, there has been a discursive surge in alternate uses of the computer term ‘reboot,’ a surge that has seen the term deployed in new contexts and new signifying practices. Most pronounced in press discourse, the term has taken on a dizzying array of applications, employed for all manner of purposes and topics, including reboot your wardrobe (Garin 2011); the toilet (Associated Press 2012); your life (Aziza 2020); your business (Schachter 2013); your relationship with nature (Gardner and Nabarro 2019); your sex life (Ellwood-Clayton 2012); college football (Ricks 2021); Brexit (McGee 2021); Donald Trump’s reelection campaign (Nuzzi 2020); and so on and so forth. This wealth of variegated uses has become so pronounced that it is safe to say that the term has become a buzzword for the twenty-first century. As it pertains to the topic of this book, ‘reboot’ as a narrative concept remains one of the most widely misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted concepts in recent years. Despite being largely under-developed and under-theorized in academic work, it has nonetheless been solicited as short-hand to describe a broad host of narrative operations and contradictory groupings: from sequels, prequels, adaptations, and revivals to reimaginings, relaunches, generic ‘refreshes,’ and ‘retcons’ (an abbreviation of retroactive continuity). Although each of these frameworks can be said to interface and intersect, much like a Venn diagram, it is necessary to establish conceptual distinctions between them, however porous they may be, in order to better explore and examine the divergent ways in which the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Proctor, Reboot Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40912-7_1

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culture industries reuse, recycle, and regenerate popular entertainment brands. Unlike remakes and adaptations, both of which function as ‘announced and extensive transposition[s] of a previous work’ (Hutcheon 2006, 7), what ‘may be said to identify a reboot is the fact that it initiates a series of texts’ (Gil 2014, 25–26, my italics). Unlike other serial processes, however, each of which extend ‘an already existing narrative sequence’ (Wolf 2012, 381), reboots instead ‘restart an entertainment universe that has already been established, and begin with a new story line and/or timeline that disregards the original writer’s previously established history, thus making it obsolete and void’ (Willits 2009). As a unique mode of production, serialization is perhaps the ideal economic mode for generating continuous audience engagement, enacting an intensive kind of ‘commodity braiding’ (Freeman 2014) whereby episodes, chapters, installments—or ‘micro-narratives’ (Ryan 1992, 373)— operate as ‘endless stepping stones of entertainment’ (Freeman 2014, 17), each augmenting and extending an imaginary world—or ‘macro-structure’ (Ryan 1992, 373)—while simultaneously promoting ‘continued consumption of later episodes of the same serial’ (Hagedorn 1995, 28). As Frank Kelleter emphasizes, serial fictions are ‘evolving narratives,’ their primary purpose being ‘not only to attract but to durably reattract as many readers or viewers as possible’ (2017, 13–14, author’s italics). Reboots not only ‘begin again,’ then, but also seek to spur interest in a new diegetically independent sequence, the objective being to recommercialize defunct or moribund franchise brands as economically viable assets once more. Just as serialization ‘makes excellent sense from an economic point of view’ (Hayward 2009, 2), reboots operate similarly—that is, provided they spark enough interest in a new sequence. Regardless of medium or genre, rebooting functions as a strategy of regeneration. At the same time, serialization is a unique narrative mode, one that has captured the imagination of audiences since the first serialized periodicals and newspapers emerged in the nineteenth century to capitalize on the success of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837). Although ‘piecemeal publishing of books was well established a hundred years before Dickens put pen to paper’ (Wiles 1957, 3), The Pickwick Papers was an unprecedented success, exponentially boosting the readership of fiction and foreshadowing a boom that cut across genres and platforms: from the boy’s weekly story papers to gothic fiction and ghost stories; from the lurid sensationalism of the British penny bloods and the penny dreadfuls

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to the dime novels, pulp magazines, and comics that populated the US market (Murray 2017, 19–56). The political economy of serial fiction is clearly an important factor when considering the production of popular narratives and genres. Indeed, such a view ‘is entirely accurate as far as it goes,’ yet it also ‘silences half the story’ by excluding audience and reception practices, as Jennifer Hayward rightly argues (2009, 2). Serial entertainment has not simply evolved as a key driver of contemporary popular storytelling because audiences are blind to the form’s political economy but because ‘popular series have a special ability to generate affective bonds’ (Kelleter 2017, 13). Like other types of serial fiction, then, reboots exemplify this dialectical tension between story and commodity, a complex synthesis of narrative worldbuilding and commercial profit generation. Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia is the first book to interrogate, map, and historicize the reboot concept as both a narrative and economic strategy mobilized to discard, supplant, or nullify an established serial continuity by beginning again from square one. In this introduction, I want to begin unpacking the term to cut through the buzz and the fuzz, and as such, I begin by outlining the concept’s etymology.

An Origin Story Etymologically, rebooting refers to shutting down a computer system to reset the central processing unit (CPU) and then restarting it, ordinarily to ‘recover a system from failure’ (Tucker 2004, 644). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word is a relatively recent addition to the English language, originating as a noun in 1971 and as a verb in 1980, both of which were attributed solely to computer systems. Early uses of the term in non-computational contexts, although analogous with the idea of restarting and resetting after malfunction, have also been documented by the OED. For instance, on 30 March 1989, the Toronto-based newspaper, The Globe and Mail, printed that ‘computer retailer Canada Lease is still hoping to reboot its operation despite the National Bank of Canada demanding repayment of its debt.’ The OED states that it was not until 1998 that the term was first used to describe serial fiction in Iowa’s The Gazette regarding John Byrne’s comic book mini-series The Man of Steel (1986), ‘the reboot of Superman that wiped away nearly fifty years of continuity.’ This requires updating, however, as evidence proves that usage had already been established in 1994.

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The earliest example I have been able to source comes from an online Usenet group organized by superhero comic fans, within which comics fan and academic, Jerry L.  Franke, is given credit for first employing reboot terminology to mean, in the context of superhero comics, ‘starting continuity over again’ (Rec.arts.comics.dc.Ish 1994). Franke is, however, reluctant to accept credit for being the first to use the term. He explains that it ‘seemed to crop up from several people at about the same time,’ and is ‘not sure it would be proper, in this case, to give credit to just one person’ (Ibid.). Whether or not Franke legitimately employed the term first—and there is evidence in the Usenet group that he did, or at least was the first to do so within the dedicated group—it does appear to be the case that his post, dated 29 June 1994, sparked a debate within the online community following news that DC’s long-running comic book series, Legion of Super-Heroes (1958–), would begin again from scratch in the wake of the ‘event-series,’ Zero Hour: Crisis in Time (1994). Franke’s original post is worth quoting at length: DC is doing this for marketing reasons, plain and simple. They sit and think “Gee, LSH isn’t selling like we want it to. What could be the problem?” Diagnosis: The Legion’s long and winding history is just too much for a new reader to handle and turns off any prospective new buyers. Now, don’t flame me—I don’t say I agree with this … This, of course, is guaranteed to completely piss off all of us long-term fans … “Sure, we’ll lose a few old readers, but just think of how many new ones we’ll bring in!” This will give completely new readers a clean slate to work with, saving them the time and trouble to actually read and learn the history … If this complete “reboot” does happen, I doubt I will drop the titles. [Writer] Mark Waid is enough to make me give this new Legion a try … In my heart, the reboot team will not be the “real” LSH, but I plunk down my $$ every month to be *entertained*, not to keep continuity pure (if I felt that way, I never would have read v4 in the first place), and as long as Waid & Co. can entertain me consistently, I’ll continue paying for it. (Ibid.)

At the core of Franke’s diagnosis is that, for DC Comics, rebooting Legion of Superheroes seeks to address the way in which the series’ continuity—its ‘long and winding history’—prevents new readers from purchasing the comic due to the considerable ‘intertextual dictionaries’ (Eco 1984, 7) required to follow the narrative. As Douglas Wolk explains, contemporary superhero comics are mainly for super-readers—‘readers familiar enough with enormous numbers of old comics that they’ll understand what’s

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really discussed in the story’ (2007, 105). As mastery of continuity ‘confers emotional and diegetic significance’ (Méon 2018, 194) in fans’ life-­ worlds, shoring up social identity and self-narrative through the pursuit of fan cultural capital—‘broadly speaking, fan status that would be recognized as such by fellow fans’ (Hills 2009, 120)—this also creates problems for comic book publishers in that appealing mainly to ‘super-readers’ has since at least the 1970s led to a significant decline in readership numbers. As Bart Beaty explains (2016, 318), superhero titles regularly sold millions of copies per month in the 1940s, and many hundreds of thousands of copies as late as the 1990s, [yet] their economic decline has been precipitous over the course of the past two decades. Reasons for this are varied, but a prime cause has been the ever-increasing complexification of super-hero storytelling that has narrowed the audience to only the most committed readers … Given the vastness of this narrative, it is perhaps unsurprising for publishers to discover that the extensive backstories of their characters are off-putting to new entrants into the field (casual readers).

Franke recognizes that jettisoning continuity by beginning the Legion again from scratch is ‘guaranteed to piss off all us long-term fans,’ yet the engine that fuels the reboot in this context is to strategically address a decline in readership numbers in order to drive sales—‘for marketing reasons, plain and simple,’ as Franke puts it (Rec.arts.comics.dc.Ish 1994). Evidently, there is a tension between servicing long-term fans and attracting new readers who may be enticed to try the comic if there is a ‘clean slate’ with which to jump on-board. That said, other Legion ‘super-readers’ in the discussion believe that rebooting may be necessary: not only does wiping the slate clean function as an appeal to potential new readers, but it also provides an opportunity to purge and resolve narrative anomalies, continuity snarls that have over time led to contradictions in narrative continuity. As Chris W. McGubbin writes in response to Franke: People who talk about “preserving Legion history” at this point are sort of like folks who talk about preserving the historic old mansion on the hill after two wings have already slipped into the river … it’s just too late for anything except a total reconstruction … And look at the bright points. The Legion may be losing a lot of history, but it’s also losing a lot of *baggage* … Putting both quibbles and nostalgia aside, the folks at DC are finally doing

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the right thing by the Legion. Let’s hope they do it *right*. I [am] rooting for them. (Ibid.)

Rather than the reboot being solely for the purpose of profit, as per Franke’s assessment, McGubbin suggests that the strategy of beginning again also provides the opportunity for narrative repair to resolve the way in which the story-system has become inconsistent and incoherent over time. From this perspective, rebooting is not simply anchored to profit generation but also dialectically enmeshed with narrative improvement. McCubbin may be ‘rooting’ for DC to get the Legion reboot ‘right’—and later in the debate he remains optimistic by arguing that the ‘only really honest and effective way to deal with this kind of problem is to reboot’— while Franke is willing to continue purchasing the series primarily because of writer Mark Waid’s involvement—although this won’t be the ‘real’ Legion. James Laughlan, however, is more critical: If I understand DC policy, anytime a series becomes somewhat complex, it’s time to start over again. Everyone was a new reader at some point. Although the Legion’s history and timeline is uncertain, there is definitely enough coherence to keep it going without a total reset. For fuck sake—this is a COMIC! Simply getting some real editorial control to reign in the excessive retconning would be enough … The only positive thing about this is that my steadily declining number of titles collected will increase my savings, ’cause if the LSH gets a total reboot, I’m gone. (Ibid.)

Laughlin’s use of the term ‘retconning’—an abbreviation of retroactive continuity—describes a different concept, one that is ‘explicitly different from a reboot … in that changing continuity is a part of the storyworld’ (Friedenthal 2017, ‘Introduction,’ my italics). First appearing in the letter pages of All-Star Squadron #18 from February 1983, the term ‘retroactive continuity’ was employed to explain a narrative process wherein the creator(s) and/or producer(s) of a fictional narrative/ world … deliberately alter the history of that narrative/world such that, going forward, future stories reflect this new history, completely ignoring the old as if it had never happened. (Ibid.)

In other words, a retcon does not wipe the slate clean but revises extant continuity, often intra-diegetically—that is, as a part of the story itself— whereas a reboot constructs a new narrative sequence, one that is

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diegetically independent from its predecessor. As David Lewis explains, ‘a reboot connotes the entire wiping away or disavowal of a publication history, while retcon implies a change being made while acknowledging history to date’ (Proctor 2013). In other words, reboots ‘cannot be considered retcon, since they make no attempt to connect to the original versions they create’ (Wolf 2012, 216). To complicate matters further, fan-blogger Eric Burns argues that reboots may be viewed as a sub-category of retroactive continuity, but more radical than revisions that occur intradiegetically: Finally, we have the major event. The big one. The big block of cheese in the White House lobby. The retcon that completely starts everything over. This retcon is often called a “reboot,” because that’s what it does. It starts from the very beginning, wiping clean all continuity so new readers can jump right in. Everything’s up in the air because nothing’s happened yet. (2008)

The differences between retcons, reboots, and other strategies of regeneration allow for a more nuanced and focused understanding of the way that these concepts work narratively and industrially. Both terms originated in the context of superhero comics; both share general principles of revision and regeneration; and both have migrated from the comic book fan ghetto into mainstream entertainment criticism. Like reboot, the concept of retroactive continuity has recently appeared in journalism, as evidenced by articles in The Guardian (Flint 2018) and The Express (Geisinger 2018). Intriguingly, concepts such as these illustrate that it is not only fan cultures that have been mainstreamed in recent years but the esoteric concepts associated with fan cultures have also become more quotidian than before. I shall return to the concept of retroactive continuity throughout this book. In academic contexts, early uses of reboot arrived in 1998. In an issue of Serials Journal, Jane K.  Griffin largely eschews fannish vernacular to clearly explain what at this point would almost certainly have been a new concept for non-fans and scholars. For Griffin, a reboot ‘typically occurs when a character’s history has become too complex and self-contradictory, or when a publisher strives to bolster a faltering line by starting from scratch’ (1998, 74), a definition that echoes the debate within the DC UseNet group discussed above. This kind of situation is a common problem for the management of long-running serial fictions as the ‘likelihood of inconsistencies occurring increases as a world grows in size and

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complexity’ (Wolf 2012, 43). These creative challenges are arguably much more prevalent in superhero comic books than other serial phenomena due to the size of scope of what Jason Craft describes as a ‘fiction network’ (2004). To be sure, superhero comics are of a complexity ‘beyond anything the television audience has become accustomed to’ (Reynolds 1992, 38), with their ‘never-ending, intricately linking, periodically reconstructed stories [constituting] a unique form of narrativity’ (Duncan and Smith 2009, 131). It is in no way an exaggeration to state that superhero comics represent ‘the largest narrative constructions in human history (exceeding, for example, the vast body of myth, legend and story that underlies Greek and Latin literature)’ (Lowe quoted in Kaveney 2008, 25). Central to the endurance of superhero comics over the best part of a century has been their capacity for regeneration. Since at least the 1950s, DC Comics have employed various strategies to confront a slow but steady decline in readership, a decline that has witnessed the superhero comic book industry struggling for commercial survival since its heyday in the so-called Golden Age (see Chaps. 3 and 4). Based on this evidence, the reboot as a narrative concept was first used in the context of superhero comic books, and the term was employed first by fans, not, as Jose Alaniz claims, an industrial term ‘characterized by vagueness’ (2016, 68). Rather, the ‘vagueness’ of the term can be attributed to the way in which it has been misinterpreted by entertainment journalists following the theatrical release of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005.

Batman Begins Again Batman Begins was the first film to be described as a reboot in entertainment journalism, one which arguably inspired other producers and creators to follow the conceptual premise. The previous entry in Warner Bros.’ blockbuster franchise, Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin (1997), was almost universally rejected by fans and critics alike, so much so that it effectively forced the franchise into cultural hibernation for the best part of a decade. By tapping into ‘the camp crusader’ of the 1960s TV series, rather than the ‘grim and gritty’ vigilante that fans seemed primed to expect, Schumacher essentially drew from a poisoned well. In critical spheres, Batman and Robin was guilty of ‘creeping irresistibly toward the tone of the 1960s TV show’ (Ebert 1997), ‘an unwatchable camp fest’ (Janaggen 2005), ‘a radioactive turkey dinner … widely regarded as the worst Batman film ever made and indeed reviled by some commentators

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as the most indefensible artifact ever created by a so-called civilization’ (Morrison 2011, 338). The decision to reboot the film series was therefore taken as a kind of ‘anti-viral’ strategy to purge the program ‘error’ introduced into the franchise-­system by Schumacher, an error that ultimately meant that the cinematic Batman had ‘crashed.’ Rather than shift the generic furniture to darker décor and continue the film series, director Christopher Nolan proposed a maneuver to Warner studio executives that would disavow the pre-established film series by beginning again, not as prequel but as if the other films did not exist at all. As Nolan’s co-writer David S. Goyer explained in a pre-release interview with James Greenberg of the L.A Times: After Batman and Robin, it was necessary to do what we call in comic book terms “a reboot” … Say you’ve had 187 issues of The Incredible Hulk and you decide you’re going to introduce a new issue 1. You pretend like those first 187 issues never happened, and you start the story from the beginning and the slate is wiped clean, and no one blinks … So we did the cinematic equivalent of a reboot, and by doing that, setting it at the beginning you’re instantly distancing yourself from anything that’s come before. (Greenberg 2005, 13–14, emphasis added)

Here, Goyer sought to rehabilitate the Batman film series through discursive processes of differentiation and distinction, emphasizing that Batman Begins should not be understood as a continuation of the film series that incorporates Tim Burton’s twin Batman films—Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992)—and Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin, but, instead, emphasizes ‘the creation of a new continuity based on but separate from a previous continuity’ (Gavaler 2018, 290). Conversely, Goyer’s remarks about enforcing distance ‘from anything that’s come before’ relies entirely upon summoning Batman and Robin to construct a rhetoric of distinction, a ‘moral dualism’ between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects (Hills 2002, 20). In other words, rather than ‘wipe the slate clean,’ Batman and Robin was invoked to structure a cultural value system that constructs distinctions between cinematic objects. Essentially, Batman Begins can only become the ‘good’ object if there exists a yardstick, a ‘bad’ object, with which to measure it against. It appears that Goyer sought to legitimize Batman Begins by attempting to ‘unbrand’ (Freeman 2019) Batman and Robin by marking it narratively obsolete and strategically

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neutralizing its status in order ‘to deflect readers from certain texts or to inflect their reading when it occurs’ (Gray 2010, 36). As paratexts, promotional narratives of this sort work as ‘a means of activating and sustaining the discourses of aesthetic value and distinction that provide fan-consumers with officially sanctioned interpretative frameworks for legitimating subcultural investments in a given franchise’ (Tompkins 2014, 382). What should also be evident is that this notion of rebooting, of wiping the slate clean, is impossible to enact, at least if taken literally. On the one hand, each variation of the Batman figure deployed across various media since 1939 constructs ‘quite elaborate intertextual arenas at every stage of their development,’ as Jim Collins argues (1991, 165), ‘presenting different incarnations of the superhero simultaneously, so that the text always comes trailing its intertexts and rearticulations’ (Ibid., 180). This ‘slate,’ therefore, is more akin to a palimpsest than a tabula rasa, and these ‘seemingly endless rearticulations’ (Ibid., 164) cannot be exorcised from ‘the slate’ due to the many transmedia lives of the Batman palimpsestuously bleeding-through. On the other hand, the idea that Batman Begins and Batman and Robin occupy different diegetic compartments functions not literally, but metaphorically. That is, at the level of story, plot and narrative, Batman Begins is meant to be interpreted as ‘the first reading head’ of a new diegetically independent sequence, rather than belonging to an already existing continuity system. In essence, this kind of paratext provides ‘authorial guidance, instructions and injunctions’ (Barker 2017, 240, author’s italics) for fans who perhaps felt betrayed by Batman and Robin. The Batman franchise might very well be an ‘aggregate narrative’ (Collins 1991, 180), a mega-text populated by innumerable levels of character, continuity, and canon, each interfacing within a broader meta-semiotic environment. Yet, simultaneously, each instantiation carries a unique narrative signature that indicates what continuity protocols should be followed when fan audiences approach a text. Fans ‘may consumer multiple versions of the same franchise’ (Jenkins 2009, 20), but they are also ‘expected to know which interpretative frame should be applied to any given title’ (Ford and Jenkins 2009, 303). With that in mind, a dialectical approach to narrative systems is worth exploring, one that recognizes that however much intertextuality ‘destroys the linearity of the text’, this ‘does not mean that the cohesion of the text disappears’ (Jenny 1982, 44–45). With such an approach, it becomes

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important to differentiate between intertextuality and story. As Hywel Dix puts it, intertextuality ‘has become expanded and enlarged to such an extent that it is often used with at best a certain degree of vagueness and at worst a total under-conceptualization of ways it might be applied’ (2018, 45). To redress this ambiguity, Richard Saint-Gelais’ theory of transfictionality offers more terminological precision to describe texts that are meant to be read as occupying a unique diegesis: By transfictionality, I understand the phenomenon by which two texts, of the same author or different ones, relate together to the same fiction, whether by reprising the same characters, continuation of a forgoing plot, or sharing the same fictional universe … The simplest kind of transfictional relationship, and certainly the most frequently encountered, involves the idea of expanding a previous fiction through a transfiction that prolongs it on the temporal or, more broadly, diegetic plane. (Quoted in Marciniak 2015, 81–83, author’s translation)

In other words, individual transfictions should be ‘diegetically equivalent’ (Saint-Gelais 2011, 35), or ‘compossible’ (Doležel 1998), with other transfictions within the same ‘fiction network’ (Craft 2004). Given the poststructural tendency to view intertextuality ‘as no more than a disorganizing discourse,’ ‘an antirhetoric bomb … that is then strung on the ruins of narrative’ (Jenny 1982, 44–45), it should be acknowledged that audiences are more than capable of reading texts across dual narrative axes—an intertextual, paradigmatic axis, and a transfictional, syntagmatic level. Narrative borders are thus both impermeable and porous, watertight and leaky, situated ‘between linearity and non-linearity,’ ‘temporal anchoring and temporal drift, simultaneity and succession, chaos and order’ (Cameron 2008, 170). Rather than strictly linear or chaotically rhizomatic, a dialectical approach understands narrative as neither one nor the other but an oscillating collision of temporalities that are contradictory and trans-linear. I propose that a dialectical approach to dynamic transmedia systems can help observe the (often incommensurate) lessons of structuralism and post-structuralism—an approach we might label ‘dialectical structuralism,’ for want of a better term—to frame and capture the related tensions between serial, transfictional continuity and non-linear, intertextual chaos. Although poststructural thinkers, especially in the Derridean tradition, rightly insist that signs have no ‘pure’ transcendental meaning, each

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utterance ricocheting from signifier to signifier in an eternal chain of slippage and deferment, scholars also argue that meaning is stabilized temporarily ‘when located in a discourse and read in a context’ (Storey 2012, 129). The work of Jacques Lacan is especially helpful in this regard, his concept of the points de capiton—roughly translated as ‘quilting’ or ‘anchoring’ point—describing the moment at which ‘the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement of the signification’ and produces the illusion of fixed meaning (Lacan 1977, 303; Lacan 1993, 268–269). As Rick Rylance (1994, 70) acknowledges, ‘language both creates structure and meaning and radically destabilizes it,’ a dialectical motion oscillating between stability and variability or, as Julia Kristeva puts it, between ‘syntax and nonsentence, normative unicity and disorderly multiplicity’ (Kristeva 1980, 99). In narrative terms, then, a dialectical structuralist approach would view (syntagmatic) continuity not only as intersecting with (paradigmatic) multiplicity, but as distinct axes that always intersect and interface with one another, while also—and paradoxically—providing continuity acolytes with Lacanian anchoring points that momentarily stabilize an imaginary world’s narrative properties so they can be read, causally, as stories—‘for without causality, narrative is lost’ (Wolf 2012, 37). Keeping this in mind, the scholarly reverence for ‘multiplicity’ has in recent years tended to focus more on ‘sprawl, growth, dispersion, and excrescence,’ rather than ‘exclusively relying on associations of linear unraveling, careful design, or microstructural complexity’ (Mayer 2014, ‘Introduction’). The concept of ‘seriality,’ for instance, has often undermined the principle of transfictional continuity given the way in which the term is no longer associated primarily with the idea of chronological sequence, in the sense of a chain of past, present, and future, neatly aligned consecutive episodes or operations … For the last twenty years, scholars have emphasized the “looped” quality of serial phenomena in general and serial narration in particular. (Ibid.)

While this perspective may be philosophically elegant, it is also phenomenologically questionable given that continuity remains ‘the bread and butter of fan immersion’ (Weaver 2013, 167), and one of ‘the great pleasures of serial art’ (Kaveney 2008, 26). Given that the term ‘seriality’ has been used interchangeably to refer to both serialized media and recursive, transtextual operations, a framework that has ultimately trapped

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intertextual processes within the same conceptual haven as general principles of serialization, I employ the term transfictionality as a way to differentiate between a remote gaze, ‘zooming out’ and drinking in the pluralities spiralling across transtextual space, and a localized one that ‘zooms in’ on unique narrative signatures that unfold across the transfictional axis. Throughout this book, I refer to the paradigmatic axis as, following Gerard Genette, ‘transtextual’ (1997), while drawing upon Saint-Gelais’ concept of ‘transfictionality’ to describe the syntagmatic layer where story, narrative, and continuity unfold. In Angela Ndalianis’ analysis of Evil Dead II (1987), for instance, ‘the film’s story (the syntagmatic layer) remains stagnant and cliched,’ but the ‘media literate spectator’ instead ‘quickly shifts to the exciting journey offered on a paradigmatic level, at which he or she must actively engage in the intertextual labyrinthine connections that exist across the axis of meaning production’ (2004, 79). Here, Ndalianis privileges intertextual adventuring (‘the exciting journey’) over (‘stagnant and cliched’) narrative sequence, effectively conjuring a moral dualism between ‘good’ intertextuality and ‘bad’ continuity, a binary that would seem to nullify fannish investment in the ‘militant policing of continuity’ (Dittmer 2013, 144). Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrup-Fruin’s (2009, 8) claim that scholars ‘must move beyond understanding of continuity as a defining element of vast narratives’ further illustrates the widespread scholarly veneration of multiplicity over continuity. Accordingly, it is best not to think of this situation in binary terms as ‘continuity versus multiplicity,’ as Jenkins puts it (2010), but rather, a dialectical movement that oscillates between continuity and multiplicity, a kinetic process that is always ‘on the move.’ As such, Matt Hills’ concept of the ‘hyperdiegesis’ as ‘the creation of a vast and detailed space … which … appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension’ (2002, 137) would require a conceptual upgrade for the purpose of exploring imaginary worlds comprised of multiple transfictional sub-worlds that are distinct from one another at the level of story and narrative. In other words, there is no such thing as a coherently hyperdiegetic Batman ‘world’ that appears ‘to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension’ but, rather, an imaginary network populated by an apparatus of unique Batmen that ‘exist simultaneously in multiple forms in different contexts that do not logically cohere with one another’ (Wandtke 2007, 12). For example, the Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995) is not transfictionally compossible with the 1960s Batman

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TV series, neither of which are commensurate with the Batman comics nor Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight Trilogy’ (and so on and so forth). Ultimately, Batman does not exist within a narratively logical and coherent hyperdiegesis, but a matrix of hyperdiegeses, each of which belong to parallel continuity systems orbiting within a pluralistic imaginary network—or what I term an omni-diegesis. As I use it here, an omni-diegesis refers to the sum contents of an imaginary network, a matrix of multiple hyperdiegetic sub-­ worlds, each occupying unique transfictional co-ordinates that may not be compossible with other continuity expressions. I’d like to be as clear as I can on this matter. I am not for a moment arguing that making distinctions between individual subworlds means that lapses and errors in continuity are resolved. As noted earlier, the longestrunning serial fictions would more than likely introduce intradiegetic anomalies over time. There is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ continuity system characterized by the ontological ‘compossibility’ of micro-narratives coherently aligned across the transfictional axis. The fannish desire for a stable, coherent and consistent diegetic foundation does not mean that this is ever attained in any complete sense as ‘irreducibly contradictory fictional worlds abound in any medium’ (Lessa and Araújo 2018, 91). In many ways, continuity provides ‘the illusion of consistency and singularity to what is ultimately an exponentially expanding set of narrative elements composed by countless authors’ (Dittmer 2013, 144). Neither am I suggesting that an understanding of continuity should be taken to mean that strict linearity is the ruling principle. In serial fiction especially, ‘a given chronological sequence can be told in different orders (can be ordered in different ways),’ yet with radical departures from linear narratives, audiences must ‘engage in a temporal ordering of events’ (Herman 2002, 216) if they are to fully understand the story—story being linear by its very definition (Abbott 2008, 34). Taking these factors into account, then, Goyer’s comments provide reading instructions pertaining to the narrative trajectory of Batman Begins, instructions that emphasize that a new narrative memory is operation, one which symbolically renders the Burton/Schumacher sequence inactive through the process of rebooting—inactive in the sense that further extensions would not be forthcoming (although it is always possible that the diegesis could be extended at some point in future).1 Although reboots cannot delete previous texts from the cultural memory banks— Schumacher’s Batman and Robin still exists as a material object, after all— it is important to re-emphasize that fan audiences treat such strategies not

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literally, but as symbolic enactments. Constantin Verevis (2017, 162) is undoubtedly right that ‘the idea that a new version somehow erases (or over-writes) previous iterations is at odds with a digitally networked culture in which new media do not replace the old but add layers and associations to it,’ but this perspective does not capture the way in which fans interpret, evaluate, and police a media text’s canonical identity. From this perspective, Batman and Robin is excommunicated from active narrative continuity through the reboot process as a response to its perceived failure, taking account of fan criticism to recommercialize the franchise’s economic health via narrative and generic recalibration. Schumacher’s ‘bad’ object may indeed ‘co-exist’ in parallel with the countless texts circulating within the Batman matrix, so rather than ‘erase,’ Batman Begins therefore ‘writes over’ Batman and Robin via symbolic, discursive processes of excommunication and expungement. For fan audiences, this producorial injunction conducts cultural work, a discursive balm that aims to sooth and heal the infected Batman brand by first treating the contagion through paratextual operations. In so doing, Batman Begins’ discursive tissue seeks to perform industrialized surgery by lancing Schumacher’s canker from the franchise, much in the same way that promotional discourses circulating J.J Abrams’ The Force Awakens (2015) sought to rehabilitate the Star Wars film series by summoning the auratic prestige of the Original Trilogy in an attempt to distance Disney’s inaugural film from the maligned Prequel Trilogy (see Hassler-Forest 2019). Analogous with computer processes, then, the critical and commercial disappointment of Batman and Robin introduced a system ‘error’ into the story-program and crashed the ‘narrative processing unit’. As with computer reboots, ‘the system must restart from some correct state,’ one of the solutions being ‘to initialize the entire system by rebooting it’ (Tucker 2004, 654). Shutting down the computer system—or in this case, ‘the narrative content system’—and restarting it ‘from some correct state,’ aims to repair the malfunction by resetting the system and installing a new story-application to restore the system to optimum efficiency. Just as rebooting a computer does not wipe the operating platform (be that Windows for PC or OS for Apple Mac), rebooting the story-program does not delete the entire narrative content system. The Batman operating platform functions as ‘a rigid and consistent template which specifies not just the character’s appearance but his locations, associations, motivations and attributes’ (Brooker 2005, 39).

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Continuing the metaphor, the Batman content system can be understood as a hard-drive containing multiple story-programs, each one an aggregating system in its own right. One might view the Batman film series, from Burton to Schumacher, as a different story-program to Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight Trilogy’—Batman Begins, The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Therefore, the post-Nolan reboot of cinematic Batman, played by Ben Affleck in Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016), and Justice League (2017), can be seen to occupy a unique aggregate story-program, just as Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022) does. In this respect, Batman Begins does not reboot the narrative content system, but only cinematic memory. Put another way, the film does not reboot the Batman comic book, which has been installing new files since Detective Comics #27 first introduced the character in 1939. Even during the film series’ hibernation period, Batman comic books continued to be regularly published by DC Comics (which is owned by parent company, Warner Bros.). In this sense, the Batman content system contains the entire transmedia history of the character, not as a transfictional platform but as an omni-diegesis of story-­ programs, each possessing distinct and unique diegetic memories. Thus, Batman Begins can be viewed as a new installation, a narrative ‘app’ that reprograms series memory, but which does not delete Batman and Robin from the system. Instead, Batman Begins refers to beginning again in a new location, or ‘file folder,’ and as such, the narrative content system comprises a network of transmedia programs and applications that act as file folders on the desktop of the Batman operating platform. Audiences can thus follow a story-program (horizontally and transfictionally), while also tracing across alternate data streams (vertically and transtextually). It therefore follows that an important question to pose when identifying reboots becomes—what, then, is being rebooted? As there must be an initial ‘boot’ that is receiving the re-boot treatment—that is, what is being symbolically rendered inactive and replaced with a new story-program—it is crucial to understand that new iterations of an established franchise brand do not all qualify as reboots. In other words, there must be a predecessor text that is being expunged from active narrative continuity. This is an important point. Eileen Meehan makes the common mistake that all new Batman texts automatically qualify as reboots, but this is not the case. In her essay, tellingly titled ‘The Many Reboots of Batman’ (2020), Meehan confuses adaptations with reboots, such as the (1966–1968) Batman TV series and Tim Burton’s (1989) Batman, texts that cannot be

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considered reboots as they do not supplant and replace a predecessor (or ‘boot’). In other words, there was at that juncture no previous Batman TV series or film franchise to reboot with a new story-program. Incidentally, Meehan also makes the mistake of claiming that ‘Batman has long been an oddity in the DC Universe as the lone superhero without super powers’ (2020, 46). This is a puzzling argument, considering that the Batman Family has long been comprised of superheroes that do not possess superpowers, including Robin, Batgirl, Red Hood, Batwoman, Red Robin, Nightwing, and The Signal, as well as villains from The Joker to Penguin. Other DC characters without superpowers include Green Arrow and his sidekick, Speedy, Black Canary, Deadshot, and Katana. I shall return to the way in which the reboot concept has been misused by critics and academics in Chap. 2.

The Batman Economy In commercial terms, Batman Begins was a modest success rather than overwhelming (and certainly not a record-breaker), taking in $289,275,200 in domestic box office receipts. Indeed, adjusting for inflation, the film’s box office tally did not match the commercial performances of Burton’s Batman ($568,480,200); Batman Returns ($354,306,100); or Schumacher’s Batman Forever ($383,023, 200); and more pointedly, not much more than Batman and Robin ($211,143,000).2 Yet if Batman and Robin’s box office performance is recalculated to include the profit generated through ancillary strategies that accumulated ‘an estimated $125 million from toys, accessories and clothing’ (Weldon 2016, 215), it demonstrates that box office receipts are a vague measurement of a film’s economic health, notwithstanding the fact that sales of home entertainment formats have far outstripped box office dividends since the 1980s (Balio 2012, 2; Benson-Allott 2013, 1; Caldwell 2008, 195).3 Contrary to popular belief, then, Batman and Robin was arguably more economically successful overall than Batman Begins; although I accept that for one reason or another, studio executives are still fixated on opening weekend returns despite the major Hollywood studios playing ‘a relatively minor role in the bottom lines of their conglomerate parents in terms of revenue’ (Balio 2012, 3). In critical terms, however, Batman and Robin was disastrous, indicating to Warner studio executives that their prized asset was no longer in rude health. More than this, however, is the way in which the film’s

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theatrical release was shadowed by digitally emergent fan cultures migrating from marginal status into mainstream visibility during the period, spurred by the affordances of new media platforms and portals—chat-­ rooms, blogs, and various digital fora—prior to the ascendancy of Web 2.0 with its profound increases in bandwidth and traffic speeds that we’ve become accustomed to in the twenty-first century. As Liam Burke (2015, 163) remarks, ‘Batman and Robin was perhaps the first film to fully incur the wrath of this digitally connected fan-base,’ indicating that fan audiences played at least some part in shipwrecking the franchise. In this light, Batman and Robin proved to be a valuable case study that demonstrated that unruly audiences could now generate negative publicity widely across the networked world. Moreover, industrial agents also recognized that tapping into the affective economies of fandom could also help generate positive buzz as a form of ‘immaterial labor’ (Hassler-Forest 2016). As John Caldwell puts it: Once derisively dismissed as a mob, users today are welcomed by film/ TV corporations in their effort to harvest productive work from audiences … [to] actively attempt to harvest the power of the online audience or “hive” through strategies of “crowd-sourcing” or “hive-sourcing” … The collapse of traditional distinctions between entertainment content and marketing … now spurs corporations to go with the flow of the audience, rather than to fight it; to tap into the audience hive as source for production not just consumption. (2008, 334)

The online backlash against Batman and Robin spotlighted fan expectations regarding a perceived fidelity to the character as ‘grim and gritty,’ as opposed to the ‘queered vision’ (Winstead 2015, 578) adopted by Schumacher. Yet while it may be accurate to claim that fans ‘got what they wanted’ with the return of the ‘grim and gritty’ iteration of the character in Batman Begins, this would be ‘only the beginning of a much more complex situation’ given that fan discourses are often ‘rapidly recuperated within discourses and practices of marketing’ (Hills 2002, 36). Taken together, user-generated discourses circulate within a kind of online feedback factory, ready for executives (or, much more likely, lower paid workers) to plunder and pillage at their discretion. From this perspective, the affective hostilities geared towards Batman and Robin benefitted the studio as well as audiences, ultimately providing Warners’ with a set of substantive instructions by ensnaring fan critique ‘within marketing

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rationalizations’ (Ibid.). As such, the principle of rebooting is underwritten by the enhancement and extension of an intellectual property’s brand-­ life, feeding into the aspirational ‘profit principle of narrative immortality and/or resurrection’ (Harrington 2012, 584). At an elemental level, a reboot not only intends to begin again but to also produce new instalments in a new, diegetically independent sequence. I propose therefore that the relationship between production and reception practices can be understood as interlocked within processes of hegemony in the Gramscian sense (Gramsci 1978). Despite falling out of favour of late, especially in Media and Cultural Studies, I join Matt Hills in proposing that hegemony theory ‘should not be consigned to the dustbin of disciplinary history’ (2005, 36). There has been a historic tendency to construct fan audiences as ‘resistant’ to dominant industrial practices, primarily because they participate in cultural production through the creation of fan fiction and amateur film-making, playing with, reappropriating, and reshaping texts as if they were ‘silly putty’ (Jenkins 1992, 156). However, the participatory characteristics of fan audiences as ‘sovereign consumers’ (Davies 2013, 36) is far too romantic an ideal and often does not address that dialogue between production and consumption is largely asymmetrical (Wayne 2005, 6). A certain ‘compromise equilibrium’ may be formed, as Gramsci puts it (1978), but that should not be recognized as balanced or egalitarian. As David Morley argues, ‘[t]he power of audiences to reinterpret meanings is hardly equivalent to the discursive power of centralized media institutions’ (1992, 341), that such a vantage point is ‘limited, “over-romanticized” and easily absorbed by evolving modes of capitalism’ (Davies 2013, 49), and as a result, ‘should not be confused with “resistance”’ (Miller 1991, 175). This is not to return to an understanding of audiences as passive automatons either but to recognize that the relationship between production and consumption is one of complex dialectical tension that cannot be neatly separated into firm binaries between industrial dominance and audience subjugation, but intensely ‘messy,’ a Gordian knot of agency and structure that indicates the potential of ‘locating cultural “power” or cultural “resistance” in any one group extremely difficult’ (Hills 2002, 27). In the words of Karl Marx: Production, then, is also immediately consumption, consumption is also immediately production. Each immediately is its opposite. But at the same time a mediating movement takes place between the two. Production mediates consumption, it creates the latter’s material; without it, consumption

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would lack an object. But consumption also mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the subjects for who they are products … Without production, no consumption; but, also, without consumption, no production; since production would then be purposeless. (1973, 91)

The online criticism that discursively enveloped Batman and Robin may have played some part in advancing an ideal vision of Batman, but this was then ‘absorbed and reterritorialized as a valuable new form of immaterial labor’ (Hassler-Forest 2016, 25). Industrial agents might very well prefer to harness ‘the “right,” i.e predictable and commodifiable, response from fans’ (Kohnen 2018, 337), but the case of Batman and Robin indicates that unpredictable, emotively charged forms of ‘fantagonism’ (Johnson 2007) may also be potentially ‘commodifiable,’ suggesting that displays of fannish symbolic capital (‘use-value’) can be converted into profit (‘exchange value’). Hence, the maxim that ‘geek is now chic’ has in recent years created the seductive illusion that fans have graduated from consumerism to full participation in media production … The reterritorialization that is taking place is propelled by powerful media producers’ frantic and increasingly canny efforts to direct the energy that has been unleashed in directions that will maintain the existing balance of power … incorporated within global capitalism’s mechanism of commodity circulation and capital accumulation. (Hassler-Forest 2016, 17)

Most scholars by now recognize that fan cultures are not homogeneous ‘hives’ but composed of heterogeneous actors, fractured and fragmented across lines of race, class, sexuality, gender, politics, and so on, just as the term ‘industry’ should also not be taken to refer to a dominant monolith either, as rehearsed by John Caldwell (2008), Mark Deuze (2007) and Derek Johnson (2013), among others. Production cultures are highly complex infrastructures comprised of variegated media labor ‘carried out in a bewildering variety of contexts’ (Deuze 2007, ‘Preface’), including abovethe-­line workers (producers, directors, artists, writers, etc.) and below-theline craft-laborers (set-builders, model-makers, costume designers, camera operators, and so on.). Along these lines, Batman Begins was arguably the result of this production/consumption dialectic, a culmination of complex exchanges between cultural and industrial agents that cut across and interrupt hegemonic, top-down processes. In a sense, fan audiences are always-­ already ‘ideal consumers,’ and are ‘implicated in these very economic and

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cultural processes’ (Hills 2002, 28). Accordingly, this book does not champion or castigate production cultures (nor its audiences) but seeks to understand the forces and factors that underpin the complex relationships that produce and reproduce cultural objects within networks of global capitalism.

From Author-Function to Brand-Function Perhaps surprisingly, Batman Begins was rarely described as a reboot in press reviews and features. An analysis of thirty-eight entertainment reviews shows that Batman Begins was referred to as a reboot only once in an article for the BBC, wherein Nev Pierce states that the film ‘reboots the franchise [by] going back to the birth of the bat’ (2005). Elsewhere, Batman Begins is described as ‘revived’ (Clarke 2005) and ‘gloriously reborn’ (Otto 2005); a ‘retelling’ (Bradshaw 2005), a ‘stripped down prequel’ (Travers 2005), one ‘radically different from the series inaugurated by Tim Burton in 1989 and trashed by Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin in 1997’ (Newman 2005). Although reboot terminology had not gathered much purchase at this juncture, we can see vocabularies of regeneration being deployed by entertainment critics, as well as producers involved with the film. Indeed, ‘the critical response to Batman Begins defines it in opposition to those earlier films’ (Sutton 2010, 140), illustrating that entertainment journalists essentially reproduced the cultural distinctions that formed part of the promotional agenda that surrounded the film, and later continued across ‘in media res paratexts,’ such as DVD/Blu-ray materials (Gray 2010). I shall return to this line of argument in Chap. 6. It is striking that the success of Nolan’s Batman films led other producers and creators to discursively summon the director’s brand-name as a promotional tool for projects that he had no hand in creating whatsoever. In Hunting the Dark Knight (2012), Will Brooker tracks and maps Nolan’s directorial signature as it evolved over a period of five years or so; from obscure indie director into a fully fledged auteur, or more accurately, an ‘author function,’ that is, ‘a means of classification [that is] strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its author’ (Foucault 1969, 127). We can extend Brooker’s argument further by understanding Nolan’s directorial capital as both an author-function appended discursively to his film oeuvre, and what I have termed elsewhere as a ‘brand-function’ (Proctor

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2020)—by which I mean the way in which Nolan’s ‘powerful, unambiguous stamp of quality and a guarantor of values’ (Brooker 2012, 34) has been called upon as a discursive tool in the service of promotional rhetorics attached to other films. In 2006, reboot terminology and regeneration discourse gathered further momentum, an increase in usage attributed to Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale (2006), a film which rebooted the James Bond film series with an origin story, not as a prequel to the long-running film series but as a beginning again temporally situated in the twenty-first century. The decision to reboot Bond after the previous instalment, Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day (2002), is an interesting case considering that the film was a box office triumph. Critics were less than kind, however, and producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson believed that Die Another Day showed that the franchise had descended into pantomime and parody— although this was certainly not the first time the series had dabbled in comedy over earnestness. In professional entertainment reviews, Casino Royale was ‘new from the get-go’ (Ebert 2007), and ‘reinvigorates a fagged-out franchise’ (Travers 2006); ‘a 1,000-watt jolt to the heart of a flagging franchise’ (Arendt 2006) marking ‘a break with the contemporary iterations’ (Dargis 2006) by making ‘007 cool, relevant and real again’ (Stax 2006). More pointedly, Casino Royale was ‘widely described as a “reboot” [which] suggests at least some awareness by the producers that the franchise had crashed’ (Orr 2007). As such, the film has been understood as ‘the Batman Begins of the Bond franchise’ (Holtreman 2006), a sentiment echoed in Empire magazine, which positioned Daniel Craig on the front cover centred within 007-style rifle sight, accompanied by the tagline ‘Bond Begins’. In a feature within the same issue, Damon Wise writes: ‘[w]ith Casino Royale James Bond doesn’t so much “return” as start all over again’ (2006, 72), and ‘like Batman Begins … is about the origins of a legend, [and] the donning of the uniform is crucial (Bond earns his tux) and, like the Dark Knight, his relationships with the opposite sex aren’t exactly the norm’ (Ibid., 80). In Total Film, Jonathan Crocker interviewed Daniel Craig and, within the first paragraph, Craig conjured associations between Casino Royale and Batman Begins: “You’ve got to put the suit on and get it right. Christian [Bale] did it in Batman Begins. He went, ‘That’s Batman.’ And that’s really key here.” He frowns for a second. “Not that they’ll think I’m Batman. That’d be the

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wrong fucker!” Craig knows it: Casino Royale is a multi-million-dollar gamble—and he’s the wild card. Like Bale’s 21st-century Dark Knight, he has to be the right fucker. (Crocker 2006, 54)

Elsewhere within the same issue, Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Bond villain Le Chiffre in the film, reemphasized the connection: ‘This is the beginning … as they did with Batman Begins’ (Mottram 2006, 59). What can be seen here is the way in which Batman Begins is called upon in promotional rhetorics to cultivate a ‘paratextual bond’ between films (Proctor 2020), attempting to append distinct brand-markers onto another in order to cast discursive bids for validation and authenticity. Similarly, Samuel Bayer repeatedly activated Nolan’s brand-function across promotional materials attached to Platinum Dunes’ A Nightmare on Elm Street remake (2010). In several interviews, Bayer marshalled Nolan, Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight, as paratextual appendages that sought to establish prestigious ‘discursive regimes of cultural value’ around the Elm Street remake (Tompkins 2014). I like what Christopher Nolan did with Batman. I think Tim Burton is an amazing director, but I think that Christopher Nolan reinvented, to a certain degree, the superhero genre. Heath Ledger’s portrayal made people forget about Jack Nicholson. The new Batmobile made me forget about the old Batmobile … that’s the way we’re approaching Nightmare. (McCabe 2010, 36) In fact, I told all my cast and crew that we must do with Freddy what Christopher Nolan did with Batman. I’m trying to make a dark and serious film, and I hope I’m achieving that. One of the most extraordinary aspects of Dark Knight is the way it integrates Batman into a believable world, and I want to do the same with Freddy. That doesn’t mean the classic elements of the mythology will be absent from our Nightmare on Elm Street. (Rosales and Sucasa 2010)

Essentially, these kinds of promotional discourses aim to ‘append aura, author, and authenticity to a text’ (Gray 2010, 83) by navigating the power of original Elm Street director Wes Craven’s cultish author-­function through the invocation of Nolan’s ‘brand-function’ (Proctor 2020) to hitch his auratic prestige onto the film. Without much of an author-­ function of his own to call upon, Bayer effectively conjured associations

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between Batman and Freddy Krueger. (I shall return to the distinctions between remakes and reboots in Chap. 2.) Likewise, Nolan’s brand-function was employed to promote Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), a film that also sought to reboot the Halloween film series from the beginning again. As Ryan Stam frames it, ‘it makes sense that Dimension and Zombie chose to approach Halloween as a Batman Begins-style reboot’ (2015, 63), with an origin story for the Michael Myers character situated in a state of becoming. Marketing materials ‘were visibly modelled after those that Warner Bros. had released for Batman Begins’ (Ibid., 68), including the theatrical poster, as well as the teaser trailers sharing ‘some overt similarities’ (Ibid., 69). For Tompkins, Batman Begins was frequently mobilized in promotional paratexts, with Zombie stating he wants to ensure that the film is different from its predecessors but retain classic elements. The best way I can describe [the Halloween reboot] is that it’s like Batman Begins. You’re keeping Wayne Manor. You’re keeping Batman. You want the Bat suit. You’re going to probably have Alfred as the butler. You’re going to keep some of the classic things. But the way you want to represent it is completely different. (Tompkins 2014, 385)

Zombie and other producers made several bids for the comparison to take hold in various places. ‘Batman Begins would be one of the best ways to describe it,’ explained Zombie. ‘It’s still the story of Batman. But the way it unfolds and in the story leading up to it, there’s so much more than you’ve been given before’ (Orange County Register 2007). Producer Andy Gould explained that Zombie’s Halloween is ‘more like Batman Begins in the way they really told the back-story’ (Ibid.). This comparison has also been reproduced in entertainment reviews and academic literature, as ‘the Batman Begins of slasher movies’ (Smith 2007), or much ‘like Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, the film returns its (anti) hero to origins’ (Greven 2016, 182). These are not isolated examples, either. Prior to the theatrical release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Chenin Entertainment production head, Dylan Clark, explained: I thought the idea was a smart one to do. I felt very much like what “Batman” had done, where you can come in and choose to tell what part of

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the story you want within the mythology that exists … we are rebooting it. (Sciretta 2011)

Director Rupert Wyatt further established the Batman connection by claiming that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not a continuation of those other films; it’s an original story … The point of the film is to achieve that and to bring that fan base into this film exactly like ‘Batman.’ It’s a total reimagining with regards to certain characters and certain story points and the facts of the original film … we are looking to create an origin story and recreate the mythology and, I suppose, start it again. (Ibid.)

What should be clear from these select examples is that reboots had not yet become associated with discourses hinging on ‘Hollywood’s unbearable obsession with reboots’ (Hans 2019), that ‘reboot culture limits creativity, stifles new voices’ (Zhu 2019) or that ‘reboot culture is bad for the entertainment industry’ (Leitner 2019). When news began surfacing in 2012 that the Spider-Man franchise would be rebooted a mere five years after Sam Raimi’s swansong, Spider-Man 3 (2007), the positive associations attached to the reboot concept began to sour. At the time of this writing, film reboots have been frequently seen as little more than scurrilous tokens of whimsical nostalgia, as signifiers of creative bankruptcy and ‘unoriginality.’ As we shall see in Chap. 3, comic book reboots produced by DC Comics in the 1950s were for many fans ‘good objects,’ triggering a generic resurrection that was largely supported by emergent grassroots fan networks. The research that informs this book indicates that mainstream, critical uses of reboot terminology emerged out of discourses that surrounded Batman Begins and the James Bond reboot Casino Royale (2006). By the time Nolan was readying his sequel, The Dark Knight (2008), entertainment critics drew upon reboot terminology in overwhelming numbers, an increase that accelerated enormously during the latter half of the 2000s. This uptick in critical applications was paralleled by notable misuses and misinterpretations that were often aggressively critiqued by fan audiences. I explore this further in Chap. 2. It may be tempting to view Batman Begins as the progenitor of a new film cycle, which usually ‘occur when a successful film produces a burst of

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imitations’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2001, 98). As Amanda Ann Klein observes, a film cycle will form only if its originary film … is financially or critically successful. That is, an originary film must either draw a large audience or become a subject of discussion in the media. The buzz (financial or critical) surrounding the originary film convinces other filmmakers to make films that replicate the successful elements of that film, thus forming a cycle. (2011, 4)

Although Batman Begins meets many of Klein’s criteria here, there are notable problems with understanding contemporary film reboots as part of a genre cycle. First, cycles ‘can only court the audience for so long,’ and are generally finite and short-lived (Ibid., 14). And second, rebooting is not a discrete genre, but an inter-generic concept that cuts across media forms and narratives. Batman Begins did not birth a genre nor a cycle, then, but rather, a phenomenon.

Structure of the Book My approach in this book draws from a broad theoretical canvas, but, in general terms, I would describe it as a fusion of media archaeology and cultural studies. Media archaeological approaches seek to understand the present by excavating the past to explore what Erikki Huhtamo (1997) describes as ‘commonplaces,’ recurring motifs and themes that ‘elaborate our current situation,’ achieved by ‘digging into the background reasons why a certain object, statement, discourse or, for instance in our case, media apparatus or use habit is able to be born and be picked up and sustain itself in a cultural situation’ (Parikka 2012, 6). An archaeology of reboots, as I employ the framework in this book, aims to cast a wide net to examine not only texts but to highlight the various contexts and contingencies that can support an exegesis that includes industry, audience, history, and the socio-economic factors that underpin reboots and associated strategies of regeneration. As such, I adopt a holistic approach to the topic throughout this book to capture the fluid relationships between discourse, between production and reception, and between text, industry, and audience(s). Although as it applies to storytelling and serial fiction, reboot terminology only emerged in 1994, as explored above, the concept has more recently been used to retroactively describe texts, especially superhero

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comics, that were published decades before the term was first employed. Just as Avi Santos argues that the concept of transmedia storytelling and media convergence ‘find their generative precursors in the tactical work done by character licensors many decades earlier’ (2015, 9), that ‘it would be a mistake to think that such concepts do not find their genealogical roots in earlier moments’ (Ibid., 10), this book is similarly more concerned with codes, conventions, and ‘common-places’ that have characterized the reboot concept avant la lettre. My approach here also follows other useful precedents, such as Matthew Freeman’s (2017) archaeological examination of transmedia storytelling in the early twentieth century. Although this book’s central topic is reboots, it must be about more than this. To differentiate between unique strategies of regeneration, it is unavoidable that other concepts need to be included as well. My focus on reboots is therefore by way of other conceptual frames, each of which are undergirded by the topic of regeneration, such as retcons, relaunches, spin-offs, generic refreshes, and so on. This approach allows for a broader understanding not only of superhero comics and popular film franchises but of transmedia culture more generally. Although strategies of regeneration and forms of ‘repetition without replication’ (Hutcheon 2006, 7–8) are generally viewed as symptoms of a cultural crisis, a commonly repeated charge going back at least to the serial fiction of Dickens and his contemporaries (Hayward 2009, 27), a study of reboots and their conceptual siblings teaches us that regeneration, remediation, and revisionism are not alien phenomena but the very muscles and veins that structure all cultural forms and genres whether described as ‘high art’ or low, popular culture. As Ralph Waldo Emerson stated over a century ago: ‘one would say that there is no such thing as pure originality … Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands’ (1909, 66). Given that reboots have not been well defined in academic work, nor been subjected to rigorous critical interrogation, Chap. 2 explores the multiple, contradictory ways that the concept has been misunderstood and misapplied by entertainment critics and academics alike. As the term has been used to describe not only reboots that begin again, but, also, narrative extensions, continuations and spin-offs, prequels and sequels, this chapter teases out the fine distinctions between concepts. Unlike terms such as ‘film noir,’ which, as James Naremore emphasizes, ‘has no essential characteristics’ (2008 ‘Introduction’), I argue that it is certainly possible to identify conceptual borders pertaining to the reboot concept, and that

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academics have unfortunately (and perhaps unwittingly) ended up embracing and reproducing entertainment discourses in lieu of conducting archaeological work that properly excavates the ways that the concept operates narratively, economically, and historically. The term ‘reboot’ may have recently grown into a ‘baggy concept,’ to borrow Naremore’s phrase, but it is important that this ‘baggage’ be unpacked to enable a more precise and, dare I say, accurate viewpoint regarding the way in which long-­ running series and franchises have been strategically regenerated in order to begin again. As an understanding of the superhero comic is essential to a study of reboots, Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 engage with the way in which the genre has been undergirded by regeneration almost from inception through periodic generic refreshes, retcons, alternative world stories, and reboots. As DC Comics pioneered rebooting continuity and character during the mid-­1950s and early-1960s, my main focus remains on them, although Marvel Comics also feature throughout as well. Chapter 3 begins with the so-called Golden Age of Comics (1938–1949), and the emergence of Superman in Action Comics #1, considering the character’s various transmedia expressions and their discursive, regenerative feedback loops that complicate our understanding of the Superman comic book as ur-text. I then move onto the Silver Age (1956–1975), focusing on DC Comics’ various reboots of characters such as The Flash and Green Lantern. I also address both the rise of organized superhero comics fandom and the emergence of Marvel Comics during the 1960s. While the temporal demarcation of discrete ages may seem arbitrary—and in many ways, they are, the ages being more anchored to the figure of the superhero than the broader medium of comics—this allows for at least some historical structuration (which is not to say that such contexts are strictly linear, either). Chapter 4 moves into the 1970s and ’80s, a period that saw a series of market-forces threatening the cultural and economic viability of the genre once more. As Marvel Comics became market-leader for the first time since their emergence in 1961, DC Comics found themselves struggling for survival. Confronted by a severe decline in sales for a multitude of reasons, DC’s Marv Wolfman proposed a radical project called Crisis on Infinite Earths, a twelve-part series that set out to wipe the slate clean of almost fifty years of (dis)continuity to provide an entry-point for new or lapsed readers. In this chapter, I want to first challenge the idea that Crisis on Infinite Earths was a reboot, as commonly described, given that the series works as an ‘endpoint’ rather than a beginning again. Instead, I

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employ the term ‘pre-boot’ to describe the story as a metafictional threshold that advances the destruction of DC continuity as part of the story itself, an intradiegetic mode that provides readers with a narrative that metafictionally rationalizes the jettisoning of half-a-century of comic book history. To address a significant gap in academic studies, I also examine reader responses to Crisis on Infinite Earths and consider the editorial conflicts that undermined the objective of the series, conflicts that meant that DC’s continuity was not completely rebooted following the conclusion of the ‘event-series.’ Chapter 5 continues where the previous one left off, examining John Byrne’s ‘post-Crisis’ reboot of Superman. Here, I focus on the comic itself, Byrne’s creative process, reader responses, and journalistic discourses that share common motifs and patterns with discourses that wreathed the Coca Cola Company’s New Coke soft drink during the same period, illustrating the ways in which The Man of Steel became imbricated in discourses of nation and nationality, fidelity and authenticity, masculinity and emasculation. Batman is the subject of Chap. 6. Beginning in the 1980s, I explore the way in which the figure of Batman has been embroiled within a specific ‘regime of truth,’ a discursive matrix that constructs binary oppositions between the ‘real,’ ‘grim and gritty’ Dark Knight and his inauthentic ‘Other,’ the counterfeit Bright Knight from the 1960s TV series, as played by Adam West. Through a whistle stop tour of Batman’s various regenerations, this chapter complicates the idea that the early Batman comics can be viewed as source material for the Batman film series or franchise, from Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher through to Nolan, Zak Snyder, and Matt Reeves. I then move onto the Batman film series specifically, considering the ways that the regime of truth became underpinned by notions of authorship and authenticity. In the book’s conclusion, I return once more to the thorny question of concept and definition, illustrating that popular and imprecise uses of reboot terminology, currently in vogue in academic and journalistic spheres, obfuscate and distort how we understand the corporate strategies of the culture industries and the way in which branded media properties are regenerated within frameworks of twenty-first century neoliberal capitalism. To that end, I explore the differences between strategies of regeneration employed by both DC and Marvel Comics in the 2010s to demonstrate the efficacy and utility of distinguishing reboots from relaunches in the context of academic study. I conclude by returning to

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the ‘taxonomy versus discourse’ argument to reassess the contributions of this book to ongoing debates across academia and beyond.

Notes 1. In April 2021, news surfaced that Michael Keaton will return as Batman in the forthcoming DC Universe film, The Flash. Moreover, DC Comics published a new comic book series in summer 2021 titled Batman ’89, which returns to the Burton iteration of the character. 2. Box office figures from Box Office Mojo (boxofficemojo.com). 3. Although the sale of home entertainment formats (DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K) have more recently decreased due to the impact of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Now TV, etc.

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Sutton, Paul. 2010. Prequel: The ‘Afterwardness’ of the Sequel. In Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel, ed. Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantin Verevis, 139–152. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tompkins, Joe. 2014. ‘Re-imagining’ the Canon: Examining the Discourse of Contemporary Horror Film Reboots. New Review of Film and Television Studies 12 (4): 380–399. Travers, Peter. 2005. Batman Begins: Review. Rolling Stone, June 15. https:// www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-­reviews/batman-­begins-­250884/ ———. 2006. Casino Royale. Rolling Stone, November 17. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-­reviews/casino-­royale-­117120/ Tucker, Allen B. 2004. Computer Science Handbook. Boca Raton: CRC Press. Verevis, Constantine. 2017. New Millennial Remakes. In Media of Serial Narrative, ed. Frank Kelleter, 148–169. Columbus: The Ohio State University. Wandtke, Terrence R. 2007. Introduction: Once Upon a Time, Once Again. In The Amazing Transforming Superhero, ed. Terrence R.  Wandtke, 5–33. Jefferson: McFarland. Wayne, Mike. 2005. (ed.) Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives. London: Pluto. Weaver, Tyler. 2013. Comics for Film, Games, and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld. London: Focal Press. Weldon, Glen. 2016. The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wiles, R.M. 1957. Serial Publication in England Before 1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willits, Thomas R. 2009. To Reboot or Not to Reboot: What Is the Solution. Bewildering Stories. http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue344/ reboot1.html Winstead, Nick. 2015. “As a Symbol I Can Be Incorruptible”: How Christopher Nolan De-Queered the Batman of Joel Schumacher. The Journal of Popular Culture 48 (3): 572–585. Wise, Damon. 2006. No More Mr Nice Spy. Empire, No. 210 (December): 72–84. Wolf, Mark J.P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London: Routledge. Wolk, Douglas. 2007. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press. Zhu, Caroline. 2019. Reboot Culture Limits Creativity, Stifles New Voices. The Case Western Reserve Observer, April 19. https://observer.case.edu/zhu-­ reboot-­culture-­limits-­creativity-­stifles-­new-­voices

CHAPTER 2

A New Terminology? Discourses, Distinctions, Definitions

“When I use a word, “Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The Question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” (Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, 1934, p.205).

Since the completion of The Dark Knight Trilogy in 2012, Christopher Nolan has, in various places, discussed the origins of the reboot concept by explicitly linking its emergence to Batman Begins, which in Nolan’s account represents the ‘first time the term was ever applied’ (Shone 2020, 146). ‘I don’t even know who was first banging around the term “reboot” or whatever,’ said Nolan, ‘so we didn’t have any kind of reference for that idea of resetting a franchise’ (Mooney 2018, 41) because ‘there was no such thing as a reboot conceptually speaking. That’s new terminology’ (Foundas 2012. 13, 1, emphasis added). Nolan admitted that he was not ‘a particularly knowledgeable fan,’ and did not have an ‘in-depth appreciation of the character’s history and continuity’ (Mooney 2018, 41–42); therefore, it is hardly surprising that he would be unaware of the history of the reboot concept as it originated from superhero comics fandom. More intriguingly, Nolan appeared to be unaware that it was his co-writer, David S. Goyer, who ‘was first banging around the term’ in 2005 to describe Batman Begins as ‘the cinematic equivalent’ of a comic book reboot, as quoted in Chap. 1 (Greenberg 2005), where we also saw that

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the concept emerged over a decade prior to the theatrical release of the Batman reboot. With that said, Nolan’s comments are accurate insofar as Batman Begins was the first film to be defined as a reboot. This, however, should serve as a caution to scholars not to embrace authorship discourses as factual, or, for that matter, discourses in general. For example, Constantine Verevis begins his essay, ‘Post-Millennial Remakes,’ by quoting Nolan’s claims about the concept being ‘new terminology’ (2017, 148). Privileging and centring solely on film, as opposed to conducting foundational research that would highlight the term’s meaning, has led to a situation whereby scholars have reproduced and recirculated the way in which reboot has been misinterpreted by entertainment journalists. Claiming the term’s origins for film means that scholars, by and large, are beginning their analyses midway through the story. Daniel Herbert and Verevis’ edited collection, Film Reboots (2020), is a case in point, containing chapters on films that do not fulfil the criteria for reboots, including Top Gun: Maverick (Grainge 2020), Jurassic World (Loock 2020), Blade Runner 2049 (Verevis 2020), Ocean’s Eight (Forrest 2020), Twin Peaks (Hills 2020), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Johnson 2020), the Rocky sequel/ spin-off, Creed (Tryon 2020), and the Alien prequels, Prometheus and Covenant (Fleury 2020). Although these films have been described as reboots in entertainment journalism, they are each of them narrative continuations, and therefore should not be considered reboots. This chapter therefore aims to cut through the buzz (and the fuzz) by drawing categorical distinctions between a range of concepts, including not only reboots but also sequels, prequels, spin-offs, adaptations, remakes, and retcons. As stated in Chap. 1, these frameworks may share conceptual fluids, but distinctions can, and should, be made between them to enable scholars to examine more precisely the ‘relentless devotion of the media industry to discover and promote a “new” that is always in some sense “old”’ (Klein and Palmer 2016, 4), thus underscoring the different ways that popular franchise brands are recycled, remediated, and regenerated, de novo. There are several observable patterns and underlying assumptions circulating entertainment and academic discourse regarding popular uses of reboot terminology, being invoked commonly in three ways. First, as interchangeable with processes of film remaking. Second, to describe serial continuations that have been ‘revived’ after a previous cancellation, either when a series returns when thought to have been completed or following a period in the cultural wilderness (most often in film, television, and comic

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books). And third, as synonymous with processes of retroactive continuity. I am also interested in the way in which audiences have on several occasions pushed back against erroneous uses of the term, such as Stephen Wise (2011), who goes as far as to argue that the term’s extended use to refer to ‘every instance of a new version of a product,’ means that the concept has outlived its usefulness and should be retired.

Sequels, Prequels, Revivals, Spin-Offs In The Science Fiction Reboot, the sole academic monograph focused on the topic thus far, Heather Urbanski typifies the way in which miscellaneous concepts are treated interchangeably in entertainment journalism and academia. In Urbanski’s account, reboots ‘are re-imagined versions of beloved franchises’ (2013, 5), an accurate if rather perfunctory definition. Yet the following excerpt epitomizes the widespread concatenation of what should be recognized as distinct interpretative frames: Reboots have been around, in many different types, for quite literally centuries … Reboots, or re-imaginings, are in many ways, nothing new to popular culture. Well-known examples include the many remakes of the Arthurian legends, A Christmas Carol, Jane Austen novels, Shakespeare plays (many of which could be considered re-imaginings themselves) (2013, 4).

Here, Urbanski seems to claim that reboots, reimaginings, remakes and adaptations are indistinct categories. The multiple versions of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, for instance, can be recognized through the lens of adaptation in that reinterpretations of the novella tend to cross media platforms. I am not aware of A Christmas Carol being ‘remade’ within the literary medium, which is what distinguishes (intramedial) remakes from (intermedial) adaptations—although Linda Hutcheon argues that the principle is similar if not the same (2006, 170). Jane Austen’s novels also tend to be adapted, although there have been a few contemporary updates published as part of ‘The Austen Project’—essentially four classic Austen novels (re)written by contemporary authors (Val McDermid, Joanne Trollope, Alexander McCall Smith, and Curtis Sittenfeld). Although in this instance, ‘remake’ may suffice, this term is ordinarily reserved for either film-to-film or television-to-television remediations rather than novel-to-­novel—Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma (2014), for instance, is described as a ‘retelling’ on the novel’s cover. Further, Shakespeare’s plays

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are indeed perennially ‘re-adapted’ (Leitch 2002, 45), reperformed and reimagined in stage productions and cinema, but ‘re-imagining’ a play does not constitute rebooting. Ultimately, neither of Urbanki’s examples here qualify as reboots, effectively constructing a conceptual hubbub where terminologies clash and contradict. To some extent, all reboots ‘revive,’ ‘remake,’ ‘adapt,’ and ‘reimagine’ objects from the cultural past. But this does not mean that all revivals, remakes, adaptations or reimaginings qualify as reboots. Moreover, for Urbanski, reboots form a continuum of increasing separation from their inspiration franchises. At one extreme is the Star Wars saga; while many may not consider the prequels to be reboots at all since the action and characters exist within the same timeline and universe ... the release of Episode III changes ... the story level in that viewers can now experience the story of Anakin Skywalker’s rise, fall, and redemption in chronological order, or experience the story of Luke ... as ... we discover their true family history (2013, 10).

This is surely a radical redefinition of the reboot concept. Certainly, the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy—Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)—may be seen as orchestrating a shift in perspective, a shift which revises the narrative’s interpretative grid and ‘changes the story level in that viewers can now experience the story of Anakin Skywalker’s rise, fall and redemption in chronological order’ (ibid). But this does not mean that the Original Trilogy—Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), Episode V: Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)— has been rebooted in the process. The prequel trilogy can perhaps be better understood conceptually as a ‘refocalization,’ the shift in perspective constructing a revised point-of-view—or more accurately, a ‘point of review’ (Dynkowska 2016, 67)—thus encouraging the ‘double-vision’ of which Urbanski speaks. For if we can view the Original Trilogy as a ‘hypotext’ (Genette 1997) focalized around the story of Luke Skywalker, then it makes logical sense to see the Prequel Trilogy as a ‘hypertext’ (Ibid.) that refocalizes the story by narrativizing Anakin Skywalker’s ‘true family history,’ as part of the Skywalker Saga. Inarguably, then, the Star Wars prequel films are connected with other films in the sequence, telegraphed clearly by numbered chronological instalments (Episode I, II, etc.). As a result, they should not be defined as reboots given that ‘there is no

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numerical identity between pre- and post-rebooted states or worlds’ (Gavaler and Goldberg 2020, 309). Like sequels, the defining characteristic of the prequel is an ‘acknowledgement of a chronological relationship with a prior installment’ (Henderson 2014, 3), a relationship that is severed through the reboot process. Although Frank Keller and Katherine Loock maintain that ‘what counts as a “sequel” changes throughout the [film] medium’s history’ (2017, 125), Henderson argues that although the sequel category ‘will always be highly porous,’ there are ‘boundaries, nonetheless; working definitions which producers and audiences jointly recognize and which have changed very little in the past century’ (2014, 3–5). Both sequels and prequels extend ‘the scope of the protoworld by filling its gaps, constructing a prehistory or posthistory, and so on’ (Doležel 1998, 207). Prequels, sequels, and other derivations, ‘take place in the “same” diegetic universe as their pretexts,’ the prefixes indicating the temporal location of the narrative (Parey 2019, ‘Introduction’). We might also ask pointed epistemological and methodological questions. How does Urbanski claim to know what she knows? This is tough to answer given that there is no clear insight provided in the book insofar as definition goes or where evidence is drawn from. Urbanski opts to exclude comic books from her analysis ‘not only for the sake of manageability, in that reboots of such narratives as Batman and Superman have been occurring for decades, but also out of deference to the in-depth and impressive scholarship that has already been conducted’ (2013, 11). It is difficult to ascertain precisely what ‘in-depth and impressive scholarship’ Urbanski is referring to given that there are no sources included to support this statement. The fact of the matter is that superhero comic reboots have not been addressed in much depth at all. Although Roz Kaveney (2008), Will Brooker (2012), Mark J.P Wolf (2012), and Andrew Friedenthal (2019) have to some extent explored reboots, there has hitherto been little attempt to historicize the phenomenon in superhero comics. Stating that reboots of Batman and Superman ‘have been occurring for decades’ also misses the mark somewhat. There are very few times that these superhero characters have been rebooted, although they have certainly been regenerated, retconned, and revised periodically across the past eight decades or so. Taking all this into account, Urbanksi reproduces the common error articulated in entertainment discourses—that retcons, remakes, adaptations, re-adaptations, and reimaginings amount to the same thing. By failing to define the term, as well as side-lining superhero

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comic book history from her account, Urbanski essentially begins from a faulty premise. We should also consider the relaunch of the Star Wars film series (Proctor and Freeman 2016). Following the news that Disney had acquired Lucasfilm and its various intellectual property holdings in 2012, the franchise’s new corporate masters wasted no time in announcing the continuation of the Skywalker Saga in cinema, with the production of a new sequel trilogy continuing where Return of the Jedi left off. In the three-year build-up to the theatrical release of the seventh instalment— what would become later known as Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)—the idea that the film would be a reboot gathered significant traction in critical territories. Although some cultural commentators later suggested that director J.J Abrams essentially produced a remake of the first Star Wars film, Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)—a lazy comparison according to Jonathan Gray (2019)—The Force Awakens clearly functions as a continuation like the prequels before them, signified by the subtitle, Episode VII. As fan-blogger Amanda Ward states in response to entertainment discourses that characterized The Force Awakens as a reboot: Star Wars journalism is kicking into high gear right now, and so is my extreme annoyance with loose semantics. Star Wars have never been rebooted … it seems obvious to me [that] none of these films are reboots, reimaginings or remakes of any other Star Wars film, but apparently it is not that clear for others. Star Wars is now one big nine-part saga, at least when talking about The Skywalker Saga (2013).

Although the film certainly resurrects an intellectual property that was thought by many to be complete, not least by George Lucas himself (Proctor and McCulloch 2019), The Force Awakens has also been defined as a ‘legacy sequel,’ or, as coined by Screen Crush’s Matt Singer, ‘legacyquel,’ a term which describes ‘a very specific kind of sequel … in which beloved aging stars reprise classic roles and pass the torch to younger successors’ (Loock 2020, 177). Other examples of legacy sequels include Terminator: Genisys (2015), the Rocky spin-off continuation, Creed (2015), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). In Loock’s assessment, the legacy sequel represents a redefining of the reboot—from wiping the slate clean of pre-established continuity to ‘more explicitly serialized, nostalgia-driven reboots that restart their franchise while also reveling in its past’ (Ibid., 174). Although Loock is correct that

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film studios are perhaps changing tack, I do not agree that legacy sequels are a type of reboot. Instead, I would argue that they unambiguously function as continuations, regardless of the belatedness between instalments, and therefore should not be viewed as reboots at all. Like Urbanski, Rebecca Williams treats the reboot concept as axiomatic in Post-Object Fandom (2015), failing to define the concept at all, but nonetheless using it throughout the book. Williams’ valuable research ambit is centred on the way in which fan audiences respond to the death of TV series which are, at times, relaunched after a period in cultural limbo. In the introduction to Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings and Resurrections in Fan Cultures (2018), Williams changes conceptual frames within a single paragraph: In some cases, fandoms may face the possibility that a dormant fan object is returning. This is common across different forms of media, since television shows such as The X-Files, Doctor Who, and Twin Peaks have all been revived after several years off-air; movie franchises such as Star Trek (which includes various films made between 1979 and the present), Star Wars (which includes an original trilogy made between 1977 and 1983, a second trilogy released between 1999 and 2005, and a new trilogy which began in 2015 with The Force Awakens), and Jurassic Park (originally released in 1993 and spawning two original sequels) have been rebooted (2018, 12, my emphasis).

Williams describes The X-Files, Doctor Who, and Twin Peaks as ‘revived,’ suggesting that each are transfictionally compossible with their earlier incarnations (which they are, unquestionably). Yet, as she moves onto film franchises, she falls into the same hermeneutic trap as Urbanski. Neither Star Wars nor Jurassic Park have had their respective film series rebooted. The recent Jurassic World films function in the same vein as the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi (2017), and The Rise of Skywalker (2019)—in that they can each be identified as legitimate, canonical extensions that are temporally aligned with pre-existing transfictional continuity. The fact that the Jurassic World films shift generic course does not constitute the act of rebooting but is indicative of the genre dialectic between standardization and variation in action, a process that I describe in this book as ‘refreshing.’ The most recent films may resituate the original trilogy’s narrative co-ordinates from ‘Park’ to ‘World,’ but they are each firmly located within the pre-existing continuity system (although to be fair, the first Jurassic World film takes place within a park as well,

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although one that is now open to the public). Therefore, the latest trilogy—Jurassic World, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)—work as transfictions in that they are diegetically aligned with the first film trilogy—Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), and Jurassic Park III (2001). The first Jurassic World film may relaunch and regenerate an inactive film series, but I do not agree that the film ‘definitely operates as a franchise reboot,’ that it is ‘having it both ways as a reboot and a sequel’ (Loock 2020, 177, emphasis in original). Indeed, the core of the reboot concept is that it does not continue, illustrating that conflating sequels with reboots establishes a contradiction-­in-­terms, between distinct narrative temporalities, between continuity and discontinuity. The principal rationale for characterizing sequels and prequels as reboots seems to be related to the fact that there exists a substantial gap between the release of instalments (for example, ten years between Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens, fourteen years for Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World). Yet it is highly unlikely that Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather III (1990) would be seen as a reboot despite the sixteen-year gap since The Godfather II (1974) was first released theatrically. It follows, therefore, that reboot status could be retroactively applied to almost every film in the Terminator franchise given that there have often been lengthy gaps between new instalments—seven years between The Terminator (1984) and Terminator II: Judgement Day (1991), twelve years between the latter and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003). The fourth instalment, Terminator: Salvation (2009), was described as a reboot in entertainment and production discourses (Proctor 2012, 11), as well as Terminator Genysis and the most recent episode, Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). Although both Genysis and Dark Fate play around with the series’ well-worn time-travel tropes to ignore and disavow the third and fourth instalments—an example of retroactive continuity—while privileging the first two films, both of which were directed by original creator, James Cameron, they nonetheless function as continuations even as the temporal revisions occur intradiegetically (which is common in comic book retcons). At the time of this writing, it has also been twelve years since Cameron’s Avatar (2009), but Avatar: Way of the Water (2022) has not (yet) been defined as a reboot. I would argue that prequels and sequels do not indicate the process of rebooting regardless of the belatedness between instalments. I do not agree that the ‘long interval between Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick and the reprising of original characters blurs the

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distinctions between sequel and a semi-reboot in a strict definitional sense’ (Grainge 2020, 208). Spin-offs are also different from reboots. In broad strokes, a spin-off is an extension of an already-existing narrative sequence, whether situated before or after. Historically, ‘spin-off’ is a corporate term, signifying ‘a business, organization, etc., developed out of or by (former) members of another larger business,’ as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary. But in narrative contexts, spin-offs refer to a media object ‘derived from an existing one, usually through the appropriation of characters’ (Brown 1977, 407). For example, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94) has been described as a reboot in academic literature (Booth 2012, 132), but the series exists within the same transfictional continuity as its sister programs, Star Trek: The Original Series (1966–69), Deep Space Nine (1993–99), Voyager (1995–2001), Enterprise (2001–05), Discovery (2017–), and Picard (2020–), including the film series from The Motion Picture (1979) to Nemesis (2002). Each of these are what we might term ‘spin-off continuations,’ not reboots. The term ‘revival’ is also pervasive in entertainment discourse, most frequently associated with television or film series that are resuscitated from an industrially mandated coma, either following cancellation or when purported to have been ‘completed.’ Although Elana Levine and Lisa Parks argue that ‘the industrial structure of commercial television lends itself to the constant recovery of used, terminated, canceled, expired material for maximum return’ (2007, 5), I would extend this statement to cover media production in general, whether in film, TV, comics, video-­ games and so on, each of which are underwritten by strategies of regeneration as a symptom or ‘by-product of capitalism’ (Ibid., 6). Series such as Twin Peaks (1990–91; 2017) may have ‘died’ in 1992 after its axing by network ABC, but that did not stop the series from accruing a cult following over the next decade or so, evinced by fan conventions and calls to bring the series back to finish it ‘properly.’ And Twin Peaks did in fact rise from the cultural morgue in 2017. As news surfaced in 2014 that David Lynch and Mark Frost would finally be returning to Twin Peaks, that small American town famous for its ‘damn fine coffee,’ ‘fine cherry pie,’ and those magnificent Douglas fir trees, the use of reboot to describe the series after twenty-five years in hibernation was invoked by many critics. This was rejected first by Frost— ‘the story continues, the seeds of where we go were planted where we’ve been’ (Durham 2015, 11)—and second, by fans. Responding to an article

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on Inquisitr titled ‘Twin Peaks’ Fans Ask: Is it a Reboot, Remake, Or Continuation?’, one fan complains about a lack of conceptual distinctions between remake, reboot, and continuation: How do you profess to be a “huge fan” [of Twin Peaks] while continuing calling this a ‘remake’? It’s not a remake or a reboot or a reimagining. It’s a continuation. There’s a big difference. It’s really frustrating reading countless articles with people referring to this project as a remake of the original series which *is* a terrible idea (Louis 2015).

Writing for The Conversation (2017), Siobhan Lyons describes Twin Peaks as a reboot, as well as other television revivals, including The X-Files (1993–2002; 2016–18), Fuller House (2016–20), Gilmore Girls (2000–07; 2016), and Will and Grace (1998–2006; 2017–20), all of which are, inarguably, narrative continuations. Lyons claims that reboots ‘must therefore be seen for what they are—a somewhat disconnected extension of an original’ (how a relaunched series is both disconnection and extension is never explained). In below-the-line comments, the use of reboot terminology is contested, with one commenter insisting that ‘Twin Peaks is not a reboot, it is a continuation of the series by the shows [sic] creators after many years of planning and discussion around continuation. As such shouldn’t be included in this article.’ This perspective is rebuffed: ‘Reboots and continuations are indistinct … It’s just terminology which industry practices have blurred together.’ I would argue, however, that the nebulous definitions circulating and recirculating within academic discourse suggests that scholars have reproduced entertainment critics’ spurious understandings of the concept by failing to fully examine the historic foundations that underpin it. As Jason Bainbridge explains, ‘[r]ather than a reboot, this would be a continuation of the well-remembered 1990s series, actually tying into a plot point in the original series that referenced a 25-year delay, the period of time lead character Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) is trapped in the Black Lodge’ (2018, 365). One of Twin Peaks’ direct descendants, Chris Carter’s The X-Files, also entered contested terrain as to the state of its narrative trajectory following news that the series would return in 2016 for a special five-part series (which was later officially relabelled as Season 10). As Bethan Jones explains, fans reacted negatively to the idea that the return of The X-Files would indeed wipe the slate clean and remove David Duchovny and Gillian Andersen as Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, respectively (2018, 347). The canonical prestige afforded to these characters as

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played in the original series meant that any attempt by producers to reboot The X-Files would set the grounds for backlash. As it happens, Chris Carter did not intend to reboot the series but to revive and relaunch it, extending the story that many believed had come to an end with I Want to Believe (2008), a film that failed to drum up enough box office receipts to launch a post-series film franchise (Williams 2015, 166). Yet ‘as more information became available, the language used by fans and the press shifted from discussions of a reboot to talking about the forthcoming series as a revival,’ thus repositioning the 2016 X-Files as part of the series canon, stemming from the original series premiere in 1993. It also worked to assuage (some) fans’ fears, confirming that the original cast would return and that the episodes would deal with a mixture of monster of the week and storylines dealing with the X-Files overarching mythology, continuing some of the show’s earlier themes. (Jones 2018, 347)

Jones, however, does seem to be confused about the conceptual distinctions between revival and reboot, signified by the chapter’s title and topic on ‘cult reboots’ (and within the chapter’s main body) by claiming that ‘The X-Files reboot [will be used] as a case study’ (2018, 348). The X-Files might indeed be ‘cult,’ a nebulous term itself, but certainly not a reboot. The 2005 television relaunch of Doctor Who (1963–89; 2005–) has also been defined as a reboot in both press and academic discourse (Booth and Burnham 2014; Selznick 2010; Kurtz 2017, 112). Urbanski argues that each time ‘The Doctor’ undergoes regeneration to encompass the periodic shift in leading actors within the narrative ‘could be considered a reboot in and of itself’ (2013, 11). On the contrary, the Doctor’s ability to regenerate is a characteristic of the series’ generic rules, each incarnation perhaps shifting tone and tenor to better accommodate the skills of different actors, but each being also intrinsically bound to pre-existing continuity and canon. This is illustrated many times throughout the revival. For example, in Eleventh incarnation Matt Smith’s inaugural episode, ‘The Eleventh Hour,’ the Doctor allows alien antagonists, the Atraxi, to scan his memory, portraying his multiple confrontations with enemy combatants over the series’ fifty-plus year history. Here, we see the many faces of the Doctor from William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, and Jon Pertwee through to Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and, most notably, ‘New Who’ personas, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.

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Likewise, the Doctor Who/Children in Need special episode, ‘Time Crash’ (2007), further exemplified continuity between old and new by having David Tennant meet Peter Davison, the tenth and fifth Doctors, respectively. This was ‘the first solid piece of proof that there was no division between the old and the new’ (Hills 2014, 105). Other episodes construct a ‘substantive bridge’ between past and present (Ibid., 106), such as the reintroduction of Sarah Jane Smith in the spin-off series, The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007–11), and in the episode, ‘Journey’s End’ (2008) from season four of Doctor Who. As Shawn Shimpach explains, the revived series is not a reboot or a remake of the earlier series, not another set of stories simply set in the same fictional universe, but instead an updated continuation of the previous program featuring the familiar box-shaped TARDIS, familiar antagonists (animated mannequin Autons, last seen in 1971, later Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, the Master, etc.), and young, female companions from early twenty-first century Earth … This program was the same program—same histories, same memories—but with a new form and new traits. Doctor Who had regenerated. (2010, 155)

To accommodate changes in acting personnel that occur every so often— changes that happen within continuity—we can understand this not as rebooting but as recasting. In the same respect, the shift from Michael Keaton to Val Kilmer in the Batman film series operates similarly as does the James Bond film series; except, of course, for the obvious—neither Batman nor Bond regenerate intradiegetically. Shimpach’s rejection of Doctor Who as reboot is one which is shared by online fans. In below-the-line comments in an article on fannish website i09—titled ‘So, what’s the difference between a retcon and a reboot, anyway?’ (Misra 2014)—fans debated the writer’s (mis)understanding of terms. One commenter wrote that: Doctor Who is NOT a reboot. It’s a continuation, or a relaunch. A reboot, pretty much by definition, has a brand-new continuity. Battlestar Galactica is a reboot. Batman [Begins] is a reboot. The Amazing Spider-Man is a reboot. James Bond is a reboot (even though it shares one common actor with the Brosnan ones). That is NOT the case in Doctor Who. Eccleston, Tennant, Smith, and Capaldi are playing the exact same Doctor as Hartnell, therefore Doctor Who is unambiguously NOT a reboot.

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The examples drawn upon in this section demonstrate that the reboot concept remains a contested term. My argument here is that reboots can be distinguished by the fact that they do not act as continuations, regardless of the time lag between newer instalments. Therefore, sequels, prequels, revivals, and spin-offs, all extend and augment an already-existing narrative sequence, whereas reboots wipe the slate clean and begin again with a new diegetically independent sequence. In this way, reboots may be seen as the antithesis of continuation, as discontinuations that bracket off a pre-existing continuity from a new one. As explored in Chap. 1, this should not be taken to mean that reboots are not in dialogue with other texts circulating the intertextual array (Collins 1992), but that this relationship should be viewed as occurring across a different, transfictional axis. Moving on from continuations, I outline the conceptual distinctions between remakes, reboots, and (re)adaptations in the next section.

Remakes, (re)Adaptations, and Retcons As noted earlier, reboots differ from both remakes and adaptations in key ways although they share common hallmarks in that they both ‘repeat recognizable narrative units’ (Verevis 2006, 1), but ‘without any intimations of narrative continuity between the two’ (Knöppler 2017, 47). Both remakes and (re)adaptations are ‘based on a common diegetic foundation,’ yet unlike sequels, prequels, and other transfictional extensions, they are each incompatible with the profoundly transfictional actions of extrapolation and expansion: adaptations [and remakes] do not intend to continue the story, much less suggest new adventures for the protagonists … one should keep in mind the somewhat particular nature of these transfictional operations that few readers or viewers will see as diegetic developments of the original, [but rather as] (fortunate or unfortunate) deviations from this principle [of equivalence] than as a contribution to the original fiction. (Saint-Gelais, quoted in Wells-Lassagne 2017, ‘Chapter One,’ author’s translation)

Whereas reboots begin a new transfictional layer, remakes and adaptations tend to reproduce stories as opposed to beginning again. The main difference between remakes and reboots, however, is in the distinction between the single-unit narrative and serial fiction. More simply, ‘a “remake”

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typically constitutes a one-to-one relationship with a source film, while a “reboot” is a new film that reimagines an entire franchise’s narrative, characters, motifs, themes, and so forth with the intent of being the first instalment in a new version of that franchise’ (Ochonicky 2020, 336). Consider Andy Muschietti’s It: Chapter One (2017), for instance, a ‘re-­ adaptation’ of the (1986) novel by Stephen King, after the 1990 TV mini-­ series. Although widely described as a reboot in entertainment discourse (see for example Terror 2017; East 2017), Muschietti’s It: Chapter One operates doubly as both remake and re-adaptation, but not a reboot. It is also worth noting that the transmedia journey of IT from novel-to-­ television-­to-cinema introduces a further complication regarding distinctions, a complication fostered by the closely knit intersection between various strategies of regeneration and replication. Indeed, Muschietti’s IT: Chapter One—and IT: Chapter Two (2019), for that matter—may ‘re-adapt’ the King novel but is also inescapably in dialogue with the (1990) TV mini-series. We might better recognize Muchetti’s It: Chapter One and Chapter Two as a conceptual portmanteau, as both remake and re-adaptation (although each designation signifies different properties). By the same token, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rise) has been described variably as remake, reboot, and prequel. Oliver Lindner (2015) tackles the topic by arguing that Rise can be viewed as a remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1968) (Conquest), the fifth and final instalment of the original series, and that this designation was circumnavigated by the film’s producers to avoid the negative connotations attributed to remakes. The complexity and contradiction formulated here, however, lies with continuity: for if Rise is indeed a remake of Conquest—and Lindner’s argument certainly has merits—then how might we understand Rise as part of the original series timeline? I would argue that Rise may be a remake of Conquest, but it also reboots the series as a diegetically independent story. The narrative temporality of Rise does not permit its sequential attachment to original series continuity—unless of course Rise ‘retcons’ Conquest out-of-continuity altogether, operating as a prequel rather than being diegetically independent, but there is no evidence within the text of that occurring. The producers, however, discursively promoted Rise as a reboot, and ‘not a continuation of those other films,’ as quoted in Chap. 1. That does not necessarily mean, however, that there is evidence within the text itself to prescribe reboot status incontestably. In fact, this might very well be communicated not within the text itself, but in surrounding paratexts, such as Hasbro’s announcement that spin-off film Bumblebee (2018) ‘serves as an official

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reboot of the Transformers franchise,’ a message that was appended to paratexts after the film’s theatrical run was completed (Faherty 2019). As it stands, the latest Apes trilogy—Rise, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)—tells a different story than Conquest does, and cannot be affixed to the already existing narrative sequence as prequel. In short, Rise and Conquest are not transfictionally compossible texts, effectively meaning that a text can be both a remake and a reboot simultaneously (but not interchangebly). If we accept Lindner’s proposition that Rise is a remake of Conquest, then it is also a reboot of series continuity rather than a prequel. The film therefore performs a dual function as both remake and reboot, with each descriptor describing different narrative operations. In other words, the terms remake and reboot are not synonyms. As explored in Chap. 1, Rob Zombie’s Halloween works similarly, as both a remake (of John Carpenter’s 1978 film) and a reboot of series continuity, effectively discontinuing the story told across seven instalments released between 1978 and 2003—excluding the stand-alone ‘out-of-­ continuity’ film, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)—and (symbolically) replacing it with a newly active diegetically independent sequence. Zombie’s (2009) sequel, Halloween II, however, did not fare as well, especially in critical terms (although the film performed well at the box office). Plans for a third film in the rebooted continuity were scuppered when Zombie decided not to return to the series as director, effectively forcing the Halloween franchise into mothballs for nine years. In 2018, Blumhouse released David Gordon-Green’s Halloween, not as a sequel to Zombie’s Halloween II, but as a ‘proper’ sequel to Carpenter’s original film, a strategy that sought to repair the raft of discontinuities that had plagued the film series across two decades or so, discontinuities that manifested through the enactment of multiple retcons. Writing on the Halloween franchise, Adam Ochonicky explains that nostalgia ‘clearly informs all three categories of retcon, remake, and reboot, [but] retconning exceeds the other two practices due to its preservation of some continuity, however limited, with an earlier instalment or incarnation of a franchise’ (2020, 340, emphasis in original). From this perspective, David Gordon-Green’s Halloween actively retcons the original series timeline to ‘sweep aside incoherent instalments or narrative developments that supposedly damage the integrity of the original text or more “authentic” versions of the franchise’ (Ibid.). Announcing that the films from Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II (1981) through to Halloween

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Resurrection (2003) no longer ‘count’ as part of official continuity means that Gordon-Green’s Halloween stands narratively in closer proximity to the canonical prestige and ‘authenticity’ of Carpenter’s original, a strategy supported by Carpenter’s role as producer on the film (see Leeder 2021). In doing so, Gordon-Green’s Halloween enacts multiple functions simultaneously: the film deboots the Zombie duopoly from active narrative continuity insofar as it returns to the original timeline; it retcons transfictional continuity by rendering Halloween II through to Halloween Resurrection null and void; and it serves as a sequel to Carpenter’s original Halloween. It follows therefore that Gordon-Green’s Halloween is not a reboot, as it has been widely described in press discourse, but a ‘new’ sequel, the second instalment in the retconned series continuity. This act of retconning has significantly contracted the official parameters of the franchise’s narrative trajectory, allowing for the expulsion of what is perceived to be narrative detritus. With two more sequels—Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022)—the official Halloween continuity now consists of four films (until, of course, Michael Myers is resurrected once more). Like Zombie’s Halloween, Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street functions doubly as a remake (of Wes Craven’s 1984 franchise-launcher) and a reboot of transfictional continuity. Although the intention was that the film would provide a launch-pad for a new, diegetically independent sequence of the Elm Street story, as rehearsed in Blu-ray paratexts, Bayer’s reboot did not lead to a new sequence ‘despite becoming Platinum Dunes’ highest-grossing film at that point’ (Proctor 2020, 220–21). Intriguingly, this teaches us that box office success does not automatically lead to the production of future instalments because, as in this case, the fan backlash was so fierce. Rather than a reboot, then, Bayer’s Elm Street can be viewed as a remake and a ‘failed reboot’ (Verevis 2017). Moving from film into television, a similar trend can be seen where relaunches, revivals, remakes, adaptations, and retcons are treated as interchangeable concepts in entertainment and academic discourse. Consider Jessica Ford’s discussion of television revivals, in which she describes revivals as bringing back ‘an existing property in the form of a continuation with the same cast and/ or setting,’ which is an accurate assessment. Yet Ford writes that [w]hether continuations or remakes, reboots are invested in the audiences’ desire to see familiar characters … Some reboots, such as the Charmed remake attempt to recuperate the whiteness of the original series, whereas others such

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as Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year (2018) set out to fix the ending of the original series by giving audiences a new “official” conclusion (2018).

Ford then moves onto undermine her own definition of television revivals by identifying the return of Roseanne (1988–97; 2018) as a reboot. Perhaps Ford is thinking of the way in which the 2017 tenth season ‘redacts and erases most of the events of season nine’ (Ibid.). In season eight, Dan Goodman’s character, Dan Conner, suffered a heart attack and survived, and in the final season, the Conner family win $105 million on the state lottery. Yet the two-part finale performs a significant (some might say ludicrous) volte-­face—it turns out that the entirety of season nine was a fabrication—Dan had actually died of a heart attack in the previous season, and Roseanne the series was an autobiographical account written by Roseanne Conner, the character. Moreover, the final season was a ‘fictional’ narrative told by Roseanne to help her come to terms with Dan’s ‘betrayal,’ which wasn’t an extramarital affair after all, but that he had died. Not only does this information operate as a form of partial narrative erasure—a retcon— when the series was relaunched in 2017, Dan is alive and well, consequently retconning season nine out-of-continuity as well as Dan’s cardiac arrest! This tactic should certainly strike a chord with 1980s audiences who tuned into Dallas (1978–91; 2012–14) every week. In the show’s sixth season, one of Dallas’ fan-­favourite characters, Bobby Ewing, was killed in a car accident. The following season dealt with the emotional trauma of Bobby’s death, but in that season’s finale, Bobby is found in the shower by his wife, Pam Ewing, before the scene fades to black, the ultimate cliff-hanger. Season eight rationalized the return of Bobby by explaining that the previous season, in its entirety, was Pam’s dream and therefore none of the episodes actually ‘happened’ (season seven is often termed ‘the dream season’). As a result of confusing vocabularies, Ford ends up collapsing terms into an interchangeable hodge-podge. Ford is right that the term reboot ‘is often used as a catchall for different kinds of remakes and revivals,’ but they should be seen as distinct concepts. Providing conceptual borders helps to shine a light on industrial processes and reception practices. As such, distinguishing between reboots, retcons, relaunches, remakes, sequels, prequels and so forth, illustrates that there are not as many reboots as popular accounts would have it. TV revivals, such as Magnum P.I (2018–23), Hawaii 5.0 (2010–20), MacGyver (2016–21), etc., all begin again from scratch and should be viewed as reboots, while other revivals, including Roseanne, Will and Grace, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, or Gilmore Girls, can be differentiated

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by the relaunch concept given that each of them exist within the same diegetic universe and thus function as canonical extensions of pre-existing texts. But how might we view TV series like Bates Motel? (2013–17) Andrew Scahill (2016) argues that Bates Motel works as both a reboot and a prequel, not only violently redefining what constitutes a reboot, but also the formal (and temporal) characteristics of a prequel. Scahill’s contention that Bates Motel ‘is a prequel to Psycho set in contemporary America’ defies the temporality of the prequel. Scahill also fails to grasp the meaning of the reboot concept considering that most begin again with a new origin story, where protagonists are situated in a state of becoming (as with Batman Begins, Casino Royale, and Rob Zombie’s Halloween, etc.). For Bates Motel to function as prequel, narratively sutured before the Hitchcock adaptation (of Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name), the series simply could not be set in contemporary America, with characters possessing mobile phones and so forth, but, rather, should be located in 1960s America. In many ways, prequels and sequels are temporal signifiers, instructing audiences where the text is situated in the sequence. More than this, however, is that a prequel to Psycho already exists, that being the fourth franchise instalment, Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990). Is Bates Motel therefore a reboot? This is an important point to consider given that new incarnations of an entertainment property do not automatically qualify as reboots, as discussed in Chap. 1. Traditionally, the movement of texts from one platform to another have been either described as adaptations or spin-offs, as with television versions of Planet of the Apes (1974) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–09) (see Telotte 2012). Scholars in adaptation studies have often been reluctant to define the terms of the field, as argued by Leitch (2012), but it is also evident that adaptation does not invariably refer to a one-to-one relationship between source and target texts. To complicate matters further, some spin-off continuations have been defined as adaptations, suggesting that the latter term refers to an intellectual property’s journey from an originating platform to another, regardless of content. In this context, the continuation of the original TV series of Star Trek in film, beginning with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), has been described as an adaptation (Hark 2001), yet transfictions that cross platforms are neither adaptations nor reboots as they extend and augment existing, canonical story-systems. As such, the Star Trek story-system chimes with Henry Jenkins’ model of transmedia storytelling, meaning stories that are extended across platforms, that diegetically expand and

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annotate the fictional world (Jenkins 2009). As Elizabeth Evans explains, transmedia storytelling does ‘not involve the telling of the same events on different platforms; they involve the telling of new events from the same storyworld’ (2011, 27, emphasis in original). What is crucial to Jenkins’ model, however, is that it does not mean that all cross-media franchise expressions fulfil the criteria for transmedia storytelling. The official Star Trek canon, for instance, consists of the various film and television series whereas tie-in material—novels, comics, video games, and so forth—are characterized as apocryphal stories, ‘fictional fictions’ that do not ‘count’ as authentically canonical (Hyman 2017, 15). As with transfictionality, the concept of transmedia storytelling is undergirded by the organizing principle of continuity and canon. On the one hand, what lies at the heart of both concepts is the notion of canonical narrative extension while, on the other, adaptations traditionally re-present existing stories, whether directly or indirectly, the main point here being that they do not function to extend and expand pre-existing stories. With these complications in mind, Bates Motel may not be an adaptation in the strictest sense of the term, yet the concept of adaptation does not specifically refer to faithfulness with a source text, but, rather, ‘describes its relationship to its new reception context’ (Elliott 2020, 36). Bates Motel does, however, recycle elements from Hitchcock’s (and Bloch’s) Psycho. As explained in Chap. 1, the idea that all new iterations of a media franchise qualify as reboots is misleading. Remember, there must be a precursor text—a ‘boot’—that has introduced an ‘error’ into the story system that a reboot seeks to reset and repair. Can a franchise therefore be rebooted across platforms? I would say not, unless the continuity system is transmedia in design. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the transposition of J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) from book-to-film would be considered a reboot, even though Peter Jackson serialized a stand-alone work by distributing the story across three lengthy instalments, also drawing from other sources, such as the appendices published in Tolkien’s The Return of the King (1955) and inventing new situations and characters, too. Perhaps more pointedly, I sincerely doubt that the film versions of Silence of the Lambs (1991) or Hannibal (2001) would be identified as reboots of Thomas Harris’ novels—Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon (2002) standing apart as a remake of Manhunter (1986) and a re-adaptation of Harris’ novel. I would argue that Bates Motel may be viewed as a reboot, but not of the film series. In 1987, Universal pushed forward with a TV spin-off with the

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same title, but the pilot was rejected. Although the original Bates Motel pilot ended up airing as a TV feature film, it failed to launch a television series as the studio planned, so the more recent Bates Motel can be seen as a reboot of that failed attempt rather than the film franchise (just as Batman Begins, for example, does not reboot the Batman comic book or TV series, etc.). To summarize, then, a reboot is neither continuation nor adaptation, neither remake nor spin-off, neither retcon nor revival. A reboot responds to a failure in the story-program by wiping the slate clean and beginning again from scratch, the idea being to restore the system to maximum functionality (be that in commercial, narrative, and/ or critical terms). A text may, however, occupy multiple designations simultaneously, but not for interchangeable reasons, as explored above. In conclusion to this chapter, I want to consider the reasons why it matters that concepts are defined clearly in academic contexts.

Conclusion Treating the term’s meaning as requiring little or no explanation, in a definitional sense, has constructed a conceptual cacophony, one that I argue runs counter to academic purposes. This is not to suggest that words cannot take on new meanings over time, but that the proliferation of multivalent usages has freighted the term with so much conflicted and contradictory meaning that it runs the risk of becoming ultimately meaningless as a conceptual framework, especially in relation to academic study. As Roberta Pearson argues in a different context, an ‘all-inclusive definition … lacks analytic utility, making impossible the fine distinctions to rigorous scholarly analysis,’ that ‘a term that means everything means nothing’ (2010, 7, my emphasis). This is arguably more pronounced where concepts such as reboot are concerned: first and foremost, it did not originate as an academic concept, but within superhero comic fandom (see Chap. 1), thus requiring epistemological and etymological analysis prior to testing its usefulness in academic contexts. It is neither proper nor plausible to coherently examine the function of narrative reboots prior to foundational work being conducted academically, work which this book aims to provide. I recognize this approach may be pejoratively labelled taxonomical, but before venturing down the post-structural rabbit-hole chasing signifiers that melt into thin air, taxonomies provide foundational theoretical and empirical work to capture the mechanics of the concept as it emerged

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historically. As Martin Barker explains (2017, 236), ‘there is nothing wrong with taking over words and giving them new meanings or using them for new purposes,’ but ‘there are risks attached to doing this without some consideration of the trail of implications that they might carry—or, if dropping these, taking care to consider and elaborate what consequences might follow from a new construction of the concept.’ For the term reboot ‘is a “concept”: that is, a way of drawing together under one term a range of diverse objects and processes, and claiming that some features in common are thereby being captured and given significance’ (Ibid.) Consider Derek Johnson writing for Flow, in which he recognizes that the television landscape is experiencing a spike in reviving series that originated in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s, shows such as The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Roseanne, Gilmore Girls, and Fuller House, all of which have been described as reboots in entertainment discourse. Johnson wonders if this activity ‘represents a move away from the logic of the rebooted reinvention [as] the industry is going back to the well in a familiar way but instead of reboots, we are seeing revivals’ (2015, my emphasis). Without these lines of conceptual demarcation, then, Johnson would not be able to examine a noticeable shift in industrial practices, therefore emphasizing what is at stake when scholars embrace specious interpretations first articulated in entertainment discourse (the same idea could equally be applied to distinctions between reboot and legacy sequels, as explored earlier). What this ultimately means, then, is that the various strategies of regeneration adopted and employed by the culture industries have been commonly seen as conceptually interchangeable, the consequences of which have constructed an image of the production landscape as uniform, thus problematically blurring scholarly insights into industrial conditions, contingencies, and contexts. In this light, it is not only important to recognize the different ways that popular entertainment franchises are periodically revived and regenerated to better understand the various strategies involved, but it has become urgently necessary. At present, we are looking through a glass darkly. There is no question that Batman Begins popularized the reboot concept in Hollywood, yet the concept is not specifically new terminology, as explored in Chap. 1. As Joe Tompkins puts it, reboots are as much ‘a discursive format as … an industrial category’ (2014, 382)—and reboot discourse is nothing if not bloated and messy, a tangled web of uses and unorthodox applications. Taking account of these manifold uses, it is little wonder that working definitions of the reboot concept have become lost

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amidst the semantic maelstrom, especially considering the ‘buzziness’ of the term and its widespread application across multiple discursive sites, as also illustrated in Chap. 1. The next three chapters of this book present an archaeology of comic book reboots and pre-boots to provide foundational research for the field. Throughout, I will continue to examine not only reboots but also retcons, relaunches, refreshes, imaginary stories, and so on, the aim being to develop a critical vocabulary comprised of working definitions that hopefully will stimulate debate related to the concepts that we use, as academics, and the various ways in which entertainment franchises are made ‘new’ again through strategies of regeneration.

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Louis, Maryam. 2015. Twin Peaks’ Fans Ask: Is It a Reboot, Remake, Or Continuation? Inquisitr, May 16. https://www.inquisitr.com/2094126/ twin-­peaks-­fans-­ask-­is-­it-­a-­reboot-­remake-­or-­continuation/. Lyons, Siobhan. 2017. It’s Happening Again…Our Love Affair with TV Reboots. The Conversation, May 31. https://theconversation.com/its-­happening-­again-­ our-­love-­affair-­with-­tv-­reboots-­78454. Misra, Ria. 2014. So, What’s the Difference Between a Retcon and a Reboot, Anyway? I09, January 30. https://io9.gizmodo.com/so-­whats-­the-­difference-­ between-­a-­retcon-­and-­a-­reboot-­1512651097. Mooney, Darren. 2018. Christopher Nolan: A Critical Study of the Films. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarlane & Company, Inc.. Ochonicky, Adam. 2020. Nostalgia and Retcons: The Many Returns, Homecomings, and Revisions of the Halloween Franchise (1978-2018). Adaptation 13 (3): 334–357. Parey, Armelle, ed. 2019. Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (Kindle). New York: Routledge. Pearson, Roberta. 2010. Observations on Cult Television. In The Cult TV Book, ed. Stacey Abbott, 7–19. London: I.B. Taurus. Proctor, William. 2012. Regeneration and Rebirth: Anatomy of the Franchise Reboot. Scope: An Online Journal of Film & Television Studies, Issue 22 (February). https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2012/february-­2012/proctor.pdf. ———. 2020. A Dark Knight on Elm Street: Discursive Regimes of (Sub) Cultural Value, Paratextual Bonding, and the Perils of Remaking and Rebooting Canonical Horror Cinema. In Film Reboots, ed. Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, 219–232. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Proctor, William, and Matthew Freeman. 2016. The First Step into a Smaller World: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars. In Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology, ed. Mark J.P.  Wolf, 221–244. London: Routledge. Proctor, William, and Richard McCulloch. 2019. From the House That George Built to the House of Mouse. In Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception, ed. William Proctor and Richard McCulloch, 1–19. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Scahill, Andrew. 2016. Serialized Killers: Prebooting Horror in Bates Motel and Hannibal. In Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes and Reboots, ed. Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer, 316–335. Austin: University of Texas Press. Selznick, Barbara. 2010. Rebooting and Re-Branding: The Changing Brands of Doctor Who’s Britishness. In Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who, ed. Chris Hansen, 68–84. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

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Shimpach, Shawn. 2010. Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Hero. Chichester: Willey-Blackwell. Shone, Tom. 2020. The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan. London: Faber and Faber. Smith, Alexander McCall. 2014. Emma: A Modern Retelling. London: HarperCollins. Telotte, J.P. 2012. Introduction: Across the Screens: Adaptation, Boundaries, and Science Fiction Film and Television. In Science Fiction Film, Television, and Adaptation: Across the Screens, ed. J.P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay, xiii–xxix. London: Routledge. Terror, Jude. 2017. Stephen King Wasn’t Prepared for the ‘It’ Reboot to be Good. Bleeding Cool, August 30. https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/08/30/ stephen-­king-­wasnt-­prepared-­good/. Tompkins, Joe. 2014. Re-imagining’ the Canon: Examining the Discourse of Contemporary Horror Film Reboots. New Review of Film and Television Studies 12 (4): 380–399. Tryon, Chuck. 2020. Rebooting the Politics of the Sports Melodrama: Creed Vs Rocky. In Film Reboots, ed. Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, 143–156. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Urbanski, Heather. 2013. The Science Fiction Reboot: Canon, Innovation and Fandom in Refashioned Franchises. London: McFarland. Verevis, Constantine. 2006. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2017. New Millennial Remakes. In Media of Serial Narrative, ed. Frank Kelleter, 148–169. Columbus: The Ohio State University. ———. 2020. The Edge of Reality: Replicating Blade Runner. In Film Reboots, ed. Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, 65–80. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ward, Amanda. 2013. Hey Internet Journalists, Star Wars Episode VII is Not a Reboot. Making Star Wars, April 21. http://makingstarwars.net/2013/09/ star-­wars-­journalists-­upcoming-­episodes-­vii-­viii-­ix-­neither-­reboots-­remakes-­ reimaginings/. Wells-Lassagne, Shannon. 2017. Television and Serial Adaptation. Kindle. New York: Routledge. Williams, Rebecca. 2015. Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-­ Narrative. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2018. Introduction: Starting at the End. In Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures, ed. Rebecca Williams, 1–19. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Wise, Stephen. 2011. Movie Terms that Should Be Retired. FilmVerse, November30.https://filmverse.com/2011/11/30/movie-­terms-­that-­should-­be-­ retired/. Wolf, Mark J.P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Planet of the Capes: Archaeology of the Silver Age Comic Book Reboot

“I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most” —Charles Darwin

Emerging from the close-knit relationships between pulp magazines, dime novels, boys’ weekly story papers, and newspaper comic strips, the comic book—or rather, the comic ‘magazine,’ as it was called until after World War II (Welky 2008, 239)—was born in the early 1930s.1 This newer format started by first compiling old newspaper strips before publishing original content in the latter half of the decade. In June 1938, the first issue of a new anthology comic was published, the cover depicting a costumed figure dressed like a circus strongman with a red cape attached to his shoulders, an automobile hoisted above his head in mid-throw. That publication was Action Comics #1, and the figure emblazoned on the cover would rapidly become ‘the archetypal superhero’ (Darius 2007, 220). The Superman had arrived. The commercial and cultural success of Superman should not be understated. Action Comics #1 was a watershed moment, its success sparking ‘a gold rush’ (Jones 2004, 167) that transformed the nascent comic book into ‘a financially viable medium that could stand on its own’ (Kidman © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Proctor, Reboot Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40912-7_3

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2019, 25). Spurred by the popularity of Superman, DC editor Vin Sullivan started ‘asking all his contributors to bring in ideas for costumed superheroes’ in late 1938 (Jones 2004, 149), the first of which would eventually become as recognizable as the Man of Steel. In March 1939, Detective Comics #27 featured the debut of Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s ‘The Bat-­ Man,’ a character that, alongside Superman, evolved into one of the twin pillars of DC’s superhero empire, generating ‘a pattern of genre fads that would dictate the creative development of the medium for the next thirty years’ or so (Kidman 2019, 25). Between 1939 and 1941, a growing catalogue of superhero comics and characters was launched by a wave of publishers, most of whom sought to capitalize on the success of Superman with their own thinly veiled analogues and imitations. Most of these superheroes are little remembered today, but had been moderately successful at the time; characters with flamboyant names like Captain Courageous, The Flag, The American Crusader, The Flame, Captain Triumph, Rockman, Silver Streak, Airboy, Skywolf, and countless others. By 1941, comic books were selling 10 million copies per month, and by 1945, circulation had tripled, with over 150 superhero titles produced during the late 1930s and early 40s by over two dozen publishing houses (Duncan and Smith 2009, 33; Maslon and Kantor 2013, 40). It was during this so-called Golden Age that DC created many of the superheroes that have since become well known in contemporary film and television media, such as The Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Green Arrow. The same year as Batman’s debut, Action Comics was joined by the Man of Steel’s first solo outing with the eponymous Superman comic, the first title dedicated to a single superhero. ‘Sales of Action Comics climbed month by month,’ explains Reed Tucker, ‘and by 1940 DC was moving 1.3 million an issue, with companion title Superman selling 1.4 million’ (2017, 6). At this time, Superman comics were regularly selling almost three million copies per month, buttressed by ‘a comic strip carried by 230 newspapers to a combined circulation of twenty-five million readers’ (Gordon 2017, 4). The popularity of Superman encouraged DC’s co-­ owners Harry Donenfeld and Jack S. Liebowitz to exploit the character further through licensing agreements that included the production of spin-off merchandise and the expansion of Superman’s adventures into other media. In order to manage the license, Superman Inc. was founded, ‘an interlocking subsidiary corporation of DC comics, one devoted to

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managing all licensing agreements to stem from Superman’ (Freeman 2015, 218). Less than two years after the publication of Action Comics #1, then, Superman had become both a licensing phenomenon and a franchise brand. In this chapter, I begin with Superman to trace the way in which the character was underpinned by revision and regeneration almost from inception. This includes attending to the character’s dialogic relationships with other transmedia expressions, relationships that significantly complicate the notion that the character’s comic book origins should be viewed as source material for the many transmedia lives of Superman. Following this, I move into the Silver Age (1956–1975), with a focus on the revival of superheroes that followed the market crash of the late 1940s when DC pioneered the superhero comic reboot, with new versions of The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom, and Hawkman supporting a second wave of superhero comics during the late 1950s and early 1960s as the medium became a cultural and economically viable asset once more. This also includes the rise of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, and the worldbuilding attributes provided by the shared universe conceit—the idea that a company’s character population inhabits the same transfictional space—which also galvanized the heightened and intense continuity that contemporary superhero comics are well known for today. We shall also see how the rise of organized fandom and authorship discourses were informed by DC’s reboots, the rise of Marvel, and the close dialogue between the so-called Big Two. With that established, a few caveats are most certainly in order. Firstly, the history of superhero comics is a lengthy, detailed, and complex story, and there is no way that this chapter, nor the ones that follow, can hope to capture each and every generic expression. As such, my focus is mainly underpinned by the topic of revisionism and regeneration. Secondly, I understand that DC Comics has gone through multiple name changes and corporate owners since its emergence as National Allied Publications in 1934. As the publisher was often referred to as DC-Superman from 1940 onwards, I refer to the publisher as DC Comics throughout to avoid confusion. Finally, I recognize that separating comic book history into ‘ages,’ such as the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Dark Age, and so on is contentious and ‘an unfruitful way of writing history,’ as explored by Benjamin Woo (2008, 268), so I use them throughout this book for reasons of structure.

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Revising and Regenerating Superman According to Matthew Freeman (2015), the extension of Superman across media platforms represents an early example of transmedia storytelling of the sort defined by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture (2006), where a story unfolds across media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole … a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. (2008, 98)

At the heart of Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling concept is the idea of narrative continuity. The key distinction between transmedia storytelling and transfictional storytelling is that the former is related to extensions that travel across platforms whereas the latter would be within the same medium. Both concepts are similar in kind in that they are each anchored to sequential extension (and not adaptation in the traditional sense). Transmedia storytelling is always-also transfictional storytelling, but not vice versa. Keeping this in mind, then, there are several problems with Freeman’s argument. While he is undoubtedly right that Superman Inc. fortified the brand significantly through close management and corporate authorship, with each new iteration serving as ‘entertainment stepping stones’ that encourage the consumption of other transmedia expressions, the idea that Superman’s journey across platforms were in any way ‘stylistically coherent and narratively interlinked’ (2015, 219) or ‘constructed as coherent with the others’ (Ibid., 218) requires adjusting. To begin with, Freeman conflates Superman #1 with Action Comics #1, most notably regarding the character’s origin story. In Freeman’s account, Action Comics #1 presents ‘the first reading head’ of the Superman origin story, which he argues is expanded coherently the following year in Superman #1. Here, Freeman errs by claiming that the infant Man of Steel was discovered by the Kents in both iterations of the origin story. In Action Comics #1, however, Superman is found by an unnamed ‘passing motorist,’ not the Kents, who then ‘turned the child over to an orphanage’ (Siegel and Shuster 2006, 4). Essentially, this means that the origin story as presented in Action Comics #1 had already been retconned less than a year later in Superman #1. In

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the radio series, The Adventures of Superman (1940–1951), the origin story is revised once again: Superman left Krypton as a baby, but arrives on Earth as a full-grown adult. There is no mention of a passing motorist, nor the Kents. Additionally, the names of Superman’s foster parents were (transmedially and transfictionally) inconsistent for some time. In Superman #1, for instance, Mrs. Kent’s first name is Mary, while Mr. Kent remains unnamed. In George Lowther’s (1942) children’s novel, The Adventures of Superman, a transmedia expression excluded from Freeman’s account, the Kents are named Eben and Sarah. (Incidentally, it was in Lowther’s novel that Clark’s Kryptonian birth name Kal-L was changed to Kal-El, and Superman’s father Jor-L was revised to Jor-El.) In the first major retcon of Superman’s origin story in Superman #53 from 1948, Mr. Kent is referred to as John, but the following year in Action Comics #49, he is called Silas (De Haven 2010, 160). It was not until Adventure Comics #1 from 1950 that Pa Kent was given the name, Jonathan, as he is known today, while Ma Kent was not named Martha until 1951 in Superboy #12. It wouldn’t be until 1971 that Pa Kent was ‘definitely and forever after referred to as Jonathan’ (Ibid., 161). Freeman also states that Clark Kent worked at the Daily Planet in both Action Comics #1 and Superman #1. Again, this is inaccurate. Although the Daily Planet was first introduced in the McClure syndicate’s comic strip in January 1939, it was not until Action Comics #23 from April 1940 that it replaced the Daily Star as Clark’s place of work. Hence, Clark continued to work at the Daily Star for two years after his debut in comics, which meant that the comics and the comic strip were at odds with each other for eighteen months or so. This is not to suggest that DC’s comics and the McClure syndicate’s comic strip shared transmedia continuity from then on, however, and certainly not the stylistic and narratively interlocked venture that Freeman claims. In a story serialized between September 1949 to February 1950 in the McClure comic strip, Superman married Lois Lane, an event that lasted several years until it was later revealed to have been a dream, nothing but ‘an imaginary story’ (more of which later in this chapter). As such, Freeman’s suggestion that Action Comics and the Superman solo title ‘became extensions of the same story,’ and ‘thus intertwining both publications together as threads of a larger narrative tapestry’ (2015, 217), is problematic, as is the notion that the character’s early transmedia expeditions involved ‘the strategy of building, extending or expanding,

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rather than contradicting, replacing or repeating’ (Ibid.). Indeed, the origin story told in Superman #1 contradicts and replaces the one articulated in Action Comics #1 (contra Freeman 2015). More than this, however, is that the bulk of contents in Superman #1 are actually reprints lifted (or ‘repeated’) from Action Comics #1. In essence, the comic books, comic strips, radio series, and other transmedia satellites produced during the period, were not transfictionally compossible, nor ‘diegetically equivalent’ (Saint-Gelais 2011), with other Superman texts. As Phil Bevin argues, the idea that the Man of Steel developed a coherent and consistent brand during the period ends up homogenizing ‘the deep, rich, and varied history’ of the character ‘who is not always the sunny, benevolent, and seemingly inevitable ideal with whom we have become familiar’ (2018, 10). Richard Berger explores the way in which Superman comics began as source texts for adaptations, but over time, ended up in ‘a dialogic sphere of influence’ whereby the distinction between ‘source’ and ‘target’ text  became opaque (2008, 87). The multitude of texts oscillating and interfacing within the Superman omni-diegesis ‘are not adaptations in the accepted definition of the term,’ explains Berger, but instead are ‘heteroglossic in that they are “shot through” with the voices of many artists, writers and adapters of the comic books’ (Ibid., 90). Superman is therefore the product of multiple voices and utterances rather than the univocal intention of a singular author (or in Superman’s case, the authorial doublet of Siegel and Shuster). Indeed, many of the characteristics later associated with Superman were not present in Siegel and Shuster’s original incarnation but were introduced by other creators working in other media. This would factor into a court decision in March 2008 that, although later overturned, awarded the Superman rights to Siegel and Shuster, but only the elements that the pair originated themselves. Elements that were invented by other authors would remain the property of DC Comics (Kidman 2019, 125). The first incarnation of Superman was not the optimistic ‘big blue boy scout’ that he is well known for nowadays. As Martin Lund explains, Siegel and Shuster’s Superman was a tough guy who gleefully dished out his own rough brand of justice. He was stronger than the average man by far, and could famously outrun a speeding train and leap tall buildings, but he was not a godlike character able to move entire planets … He had neither X-ray vision nor super-hearing at first. This was a Superman who could not fly [and] had no Kansas c­ hildhood;

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until the name Metropolis was introduced in Action Comics #16 (September 1939) … Superman would live in Cleveland. The elder Kents did not at first play a marked role in his life, and he initially worked at the Daily Star … and not now the culturally ingrained Daily Planet. There was no Kryptonite and no Fortress of Solitude. Almost everything is different from today’s character, and much of what is known about him now was introduced by others than Siegel and Shuster, facts that any study must acknowledge. (2016, 5)

Indeed, Siegel and Shuster’s incarnation of Superman had not been the direct source for adaptations and spin-offs since the latter half of 1940 (Gordon 2017, 18). In 1949, Bill Finger and Wayne Boring provided a revised and more detailed origin story in the aforementioned Action Comics #53 to mark the ten-year anniversary of the character’s debut. As each iteration of the origin story retcons and supplants its predecessor ‘as the new “truth”’ (Kidder 2010, 79), Finger and Boring’s ‘The Origin of Superman’ signified the further ‘cleaving of ties to Siegel and Shuster,’ arguably a punitive measure tied to the creators suing DC Comics in 1948 for $5 million and the rights to Superman (Weldon 2013, 75). Although Siegel and Shuster lost the case, resulting in DC refusing to renew their contracts the following year, this would be the first of many legislative actions that the creators mobilized against DC Comics regarding the Superman copyright. And as Lund points out, many of Superman’s well-known characteristics were introduced in other media expressions first before being ‘rewired,’ to use Berger’s term, back into the comic book ‘source,’ thus complicating the relationship between the source/target text dyad. Siegel and Shuster’s Superman could not fly, for instance, probably the character’s most recognizable trait, but could only ‘leap 1/8th of a mile’ (Siegel and Shuster 2006, 4). It was in the radio series, The Adventures of Superman, that flight was introduced in its second episode, ‘Clark Kent, Reporter’ (first broadcast in February 1940), not, as Freeman claims, the Fleischer cartoons, the first instalment of which came eighteen months later in October 1941 (although Superman could fly in the Fleischer adaptations as well). While both the radio and cartoon series had Superman take to the skies, it was not for another three-and-a-half years that the comic books followed suit in Action Comics #55 (1943). More remarkably perhaps is that Superman seemed able to fly in comics before the radio series aired, but not in America. In August 1939, the British anthology comic, Triumph, started reprinting the Superman syndicated newspaper strips, representing the first appearance of the Man of

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Steel outside of the United States (Murray 2017, 63). Superman made his debut in Triumph #772, and on the cover, drawn by Jock McCail, Superman is depicted soaring into space, ‘the Earth far below, with the Moon and various planets in the background, at once demonstrating Superman’s incredible powers while also indicating the science-fiction elements of his background’ (Ibid.). It is also worth noting that it was in Triumph that Superman’s complete origin story was published in comic book form for the first time anywhere in the world, achieved by re-cutting the daily newspaper comic strips into a single story (Ibid., 64). Other common Superman tropes that were introduced first in the radio series before being ‘rewired’ in the comics include Kryptonite, the character’s famous Achilles heel first introduced in the episode ‘The Meteor from Krypton,’ broadcast in June 1943, but was not ‘rewired’ into comics until over six years later in Superman #61 from November 1949; and the introduction of now-canonical characters, newspaper editor Perry White and cub reporter Jimmy Olsen. Although Perry White was ‘rewired’ into the comics in Superman #7 from 1940, he would not be fully named until the following year, yet in the McClure syndicate comic strip, the editor remained George Taylor of the Daily Star until August 1941. In many ways, it was neither the comic books nor the newspaper strips that catapulted Superman into the popular consciousness, but the radio series, which arguably prompted the success of the Fleischer cartoons, the movie serials, the television show, animated series, video-games, and of course, the blockbuster film franchise(s), all intersecting within the dialogic sphere that Berger (2008) conceptualizes. According to Michael J. Hyde, it was The Adventures of Superman radio series that would eventually do more for the Man of Steel than any Action Comic … at their peak, comic magazines never reached an audience equal to the lowest-­ rated radio series. Had Superman on radio failed to capture a mass audience, there would have been no Superman cartoons, no Superman movie serials, no novels, no TV series, no feature film franchise … and the Superman comic books would probably have perished. (Hyde 2013, ‘Prologue’)

With that said, it was the Fleischer cartoons that introduced the phone booth as Clark Kent’s urban changing room, while the introduction of Superboy in More Fun Comics #101 from 1945 provided a new backstory for Clark’s upbringing in an unnamed ‘suburb of Metropolis’ (Weldon 2013, 67). It would not be until Superboy #2 from 1949 that Smallville

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became the location for Clark’s formative years, although it would be decades before it became situated in Kansas in John Byrne’s (1986) Superman reboot, The Man of Steel (see Chap. 5). The construction of Superman, then, has always been ‘a process, rather than a fixed, static phenomenon’ (Gordon 2017, 3), one developed and transformed through dialogic processes, soaking up the overspill of textual fluids from the character’s various and inconsistent transmedia adventures. Like other superhero comics produced during the Golden Age, Superman comics were largely episodic and self-contained, yet the Man of Steel evolved and regenerated almost constantly during the period, supported by the character’s transmedia activities that have fortified Superman’s cultural longevity and brand-life throughout the eighty-plus years since his first appearance in Action Comics #1. As Berger puts it, ‘Superman has been a “revisionist” narrative—constantly revisited and updated—from its early days’ (2008, 93; see also Bevin 2018). For these reasons, Geoff Klock’s (2002, 25) contention that the mid-­1980s saw ‘the first instances of a new kind of literature’ that he identifies as ‘the revisionist superhero narrative’ is puzzling, considering that ‘such revisions have been present almost since generic inception’ (Hyman 2017, 10). As Jenkins argues, describing works like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986) as ‘revisionist makes no sense because there is not a moment in the history of the genre that the superhero is not under active revision’ (2009, 29). Although all genres dance the dialectic between formula and innovation, the superhero comic is unique in that for as long as the genre has been in existence, ‘it has been “in the making,” working through a series of revisions’ (Wandtke 2007, 5). It is worth making a final point here about Siegel and Shuster’s ‘champion of the oppressed’ iteration of Superman as a clear indication of progressive and rebellious politics—as a ‘reformist liberal’ or ‘anarchist’ Man of Steel (Gordon 2017, 18)—and his shift to a ‘vapid establishmentarian’ (Andrae 1987, 132) as a marker of ideological surrender. Indeed, this shift has often been viewed through ‘reflectionist’ readings, a causal symptom of ‘the avuncular, reassuring values espoused by the Eisenhower era’ (Maslon and Kantor, 2013, 57) that transformed Superman into a ‘super-­ republican’ (DeHaven 2010, 89). Yet as Phil Bevin convincingly argues in his Superman and Comic Book Brand Continuity, reading the early Superman stories ‘as a more or less direct manifestation of the national psyche,’ as unproblematically left-wing before being forced to the right, is

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more complicated than many critical ‘reflectionist’ accounts have permitted (2018, 14). In Bevin’s reading, even in his champion of the oppressed mode, ‘Superman’s actions protect the integrity of the system of law enforcement as it already exists’ (Ibid., 16), and that these stories don’t, when taken together, amount to a specific worldview of either left or right; it seems unlikely that they capture a singular prevailing public sentiment about the state of the nation but rather a casual and sometime even self-contradictory reproduction of some of the concerns and preoccupations of the era … the politics of these early stories do not necessarily correspond to any political project or the prevailing social mood. (Ibid., 17)

The reasons underscoring Superman’s regeneration from ‘tough, cynical wise guy, similar to the hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade’ to a ‘rather stiff and morally upright character’ (Wright 2001, 9) were corporate and editorial rather than purely ideological. Most of this had to do with an ascendant moral discourse that framed comic books as instruction manuals for juvenile delinquency—or as Sterling North wrote in 1940 for the Daily Chicago News, ‘a hypodermic injection of sex and murder’ —with publishers accused of authoring ‘a cultural slaughter of the innocents’ (1940, 56). North’s polemic is usually viewed as the first warning shots fired across the bow of the nascent industry, but moral anxieties of this kind began in fact much earlier. As Jared Gardner documents, newspaper comic strips were seen to be ‘arbiters of morality and increasingly set their sights on the control of these forces invading our newspapers and our Sunday homes’ as early as 1908, with ‘one particularly hysterical critic’ claiming comic strips to be a ‘“hypnotic moral poison,” a “national peril” that “students of juvenile crime can no longer ignore”’ (2012, 17). Recognizing a public relations crisis in the making, DC’s editorial director, Whitney Ellsworth, wrote to Jerry Siegel in January 1940 to explain the reasons that were driving a new editorial policy that would enforce creators to tone down ‘violent,’ rather than political, content as ‘the first glimmers of comics censorship were rearing’: I must inform you that at the present time there seems to be a concerted drive against movies and comic books which parent-teacher groups and women’s clubs claim are harmful for children. I know there is definite objection to the Dick Tracy serial in the movies. We must point out our editorial policy with a viewpoint of obtaining the approval of parents, while still not

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sacrificing the adventure, the thrill Superman has always brought to children. (Murray 2010, 9; see also Gordon 2017, 20)

Consequently, Ellsworth imposed stricter editorial guidelines to reign in Siegel and Shuster, ‘enforcing on the Man of Steel a no-killing edict in order to protect the increasingly valuable property’ (Murray 2010, 9). When Shuster submitted the cover art for Action Comics #24  in early 1940, which portrayed a swooning female character held at gunpoint by a gangster figure, Ellsworth returned it with suggestions to revise the image so that the firearm was removed entirely (the final cover had the crook grasping at the women’s necklace instead). ‘We’re trying to get away a little from the extreme use of firearms and knives,’ explained Ellsworth, ‘on the covers, at least’ (Murray 2010, 9). It is possible that Ellsworth’s thoughts about the open display of weapons on comic book covers were at least partially informed by an avalanche of protest movements in the 1930s, especially regarding the gangster film cycle that prompted an array of women’s clubs, civic organizations and American church leaders, as well as a flood of articles from leading newspapers and magazines, accusing Hollywood of ‘poisoning the minds of the youth of this country’ (Springhall 1998, 109). In this context, perhaps Ellsworth’s editorial manoeuvres successfully managed to pre-empt the comic book scare of the 1950s, considering that DC’s comics line was not nearly as impacted as other publishers (more on this in the next section). Superman’s character profile was thus reconstituted not by creators Siegel and Shuster nor other artists and writers, but by editorial fiat, with DC explaining that ‘a deep respect for our obligation to the young people of America and their parents and our responsibility as parents ourselves combine to set our standards for wholesome entertainment’ (Gordon 2017, 21). While it is certainly true that Superman would become more closely aligned with traditional American morals and values, it was not his signature as an anti-­ establishment ‘champion of the oppressed’ that was regenerated to ideologically ‘de-politicize,’ and thus neuter, the character’s progressive values, but instead, to shore up wholesome entertainment rhetorics, a pre-emptive strategy adopted as a way of monitoring and enhancing the publisher’s brand values to confront the anxieties of parents, teachers, civic groups, and moral campaigners (the same happened to Batman, which is discussed in Chap. 6). Hence, Ellsworth introduced new editorial guidelines that sought to demonstrate that the company was taking the concerns and anxieties of moral campaigners seriously, forming also an advisory board

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comprised of educators and psychologists to create an in-house code of ethics (Kidman 2019, 51). As explained by DC editor Jack Schiff, Ellsworth supervised every aspect of the many magazines that were published, paying particular attention to the fact that readers (in those days) were quite young. As a result, there was a great deal of action, excitement, and drama in the stories, but very little of the crude violence and killings prevalent in the field. (Murray 2010, 9)

From Boom to Bust Between 1938 and 1944, the superhero industry went from emergent medium to cultural and commercial giant. Although superhero comics are very much a niche genre nowadays, certainly not the mass medium it once was despite the platoon of blockbuster superhero films and TV series proliferating the cultural landscape, sales were more than extravagant during the Golden Age when superhero comics became ‘one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America’ (Kidman 2019, 1). As the USA entered World War II following the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour in 1941, sales of comic books sky-rocketed among infantrymen, bolstered by DC and other publishers’ propagandist enterprises. Superman became an instrument of propaganda for the American war effort, most often portrayed on comic book covers tying gun barrels in knots, sinking battleships, and sitting astride missiles launched at the ‘Japanazis’ (a xenophobic portmanteau of Japanese and Nazi). The cover of Superman #17 from 1942 depicts the Man of Steel grabbing Hitler and Japanese Emperor Hirohito by the scruff of the neck, while Superman and Batman teamed­up on the cover of World’s Finest Comics #8 from 1942 to promote the sale of war bonds and stamps ‘to help sink the Japanazis.’ Within the pages of the comics themselves, however, Superman largely remained out of the war (see Murray 2011 for more on superhero comics and propaganda). Once the war ended, however, superhero comics were faced with a sharp and dramatic decline in sales. As infantrymen were avid purchasers of the unabashedly patriotic superhero comics during the war, readership began to decline significantly once hostilities ceased. DC responded by shifting towards new generic pastures by replacing superhero content with western and war stories. Other superhero titles, such as The Flash and Green Lantern, had been cancelled altogether by 1949, and between 1950

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and 1952, ‘all attempts at publishing superhero material had failed’ (Gabilliet 2010, 51). Mark Minett and Bradley Schauer’s (2017)  claim that ‘DC had cancelled or changed the genre of all its superhero comics’ by 1952, however, is inaccurate: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman comics continued to be published throughout the period in seven titles (with Superman and Batman comics being continually published on at least a monthly basis from their inception until today).2 Although most other superheroes began to fall out of favour with audiences between the late 1940s and early 1950s, the comics medium continued to flourish as other genres raced into pole position (romance, crime, funny animals, etc.). The best-selling comic during the period was Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, with sales figures reaching three million copies in August of 1951 (Munsey 1974, 151), a record that would remain in place until 1993 when Jim Lee’s X-Men sold in excess of eight million copies. The moral discourse surrounding comics that worried Whitney Ellsworth reached an apogee in 1954, with the publication of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth and the Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency, the results of which led to the industry adopting the Comics Code, a self-regulatory mechanism employed to police violent, salacious, and lurid content. Although Wertham’s focus was mainly on horror, crime, and the so-called jungle comics, superheroes did not emerge entirely unscathed. In Wertham’s account, Superman was a ‘symbol of violent race authority,’ undermining ‘the authority and dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children,’ and Wonder Woman was ‘a veritable lesbian recruitment poster.’ Wertham’s contention that Batman and Robin represented ‘a wish dream of two homosexuals living together’ (1954, 190) had an unmistakable impact, casting a discursive shadow over the property that lasts until this day (see Chap. 6). The majority of DC’s superhero comics had, by that point, already been cancelled for reasons unrelated to Wertham and the moral crusaders. As noted earlier, it is perhaps testament to Ellsworth’s foresight that DC’s line of comics was not impacted as much by the industry’s enactment of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 because, as editorial director, he established an advisory board that monitored and policed the publisher’s comics for content that might have been perceived as morally reprehensible. The impact of the comic book scare did have repercussions for the industry as a whole, however. With the implementation of the Comics Code sales nosedived by more than fifty percent, and twenty-four

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publishers out of twenty-nine permanently shut up shop, effectively marking ‘the end of comics’ reign as the most popular print medium among children in history’ (Tilley 2012, 385). One of the consequences of the Comics Code would be to entrench the belief that the medium dealt in nothing but kid’s stuff, ‘mass-production entertainment for children’ (Williams 2020, 17), an association that would hound the medium for decades to come. Intriguingly, the Comics Code worked out rather well for the larger publishers as it eliminated smaller companies in one fell swoop, thereby increasingly the market share of the big players (Kidman 2019, 71). EC Comics certainly fared worse than most, with their horror and crime comics being the centre of the Senate Subcommittee hearings; the rules articulated in the Comics Code forced the publisher to cancel most of their popular titles like Haunt of Fears and Tales from the Crypt. Although EC would continue publishing the enormously successful satirical magazine, Mad, which was founded in 1952, the Comics Code sounded the death knell for most horror and crime comics until the genre’s resurgence in the 1970s following relaxation of the Code (see Wandtke 2018). In essence, EC Comics became a scape-goat for the larger companies as the Comics Code provided a firm obstacle that the publisher’s focus on ‘unwholesome’ genres like horror and crime would not be permitted (especially as most wholesalers refused to stock titles that did not carry the Comics Code seal of approval). Shawna Kidman argues that it was neither Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent nor the Senate subcommittee hearings that sparked a market recession, however, a widely embraced narrative that lends itself to accounts of the comics medium being rooted in a ‘subversive cultural tradition,’ but was in fact ‘the product of a well-established industry that operated in constructive collaboration with a pro-business government’ (2019, 50). While Wertham was not at all satisfied with the Comics Code, the Senate Subcommittee certainly welcomed the industry’s response, but there were no legislative enforcements: it was an agreement entered into willingly by most publishers, a self-regulatory and self-censoring mechanism. In Kidman’s view, the collapse of the comic book market was less about moral anxieties as it was about distribution problems caused by oversupply, a problem that would haunt the medium until the emergence of the Direct Market in the 1970s (see Chap. 4). As publishers new and old sought to capitalize on the medium’s proven profit potential during the boom years, the market became strained by too much content that

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newsstands simply did not have the space to display. The market may have seemed very healthy indeed, publishing over five hundred different comic titles every month, but newsstands did not have the shelf space to carry all these books, not by a long chalk (the average being sixty-five in Kidman’s account) (Ibid., 75). During the hearings, senators learned that the industry’s infrastructure was buckling, that there ‘was an oversupply problem with physical and financial repercussions, reports of entrenched anticompetitive practices, and souring relationships between distributors and retailers along delivery routes. Demand was also in critical decline’ (Ibid., 49). What is often left out of critical accounts regarding the post-war ‘comic book scare’ is that Wertham’s moral crusade was not exactly a new campaign but was embroiled within post-war discourses and practices that resonated with rampant Cold War hysteria and other associated censorship campaigns. As Paul Lopez explains: Following World War II, censorship became a major public issue as various forms of print, ranging from serious fiction to textbooks to comic books, confronted growing attempts at censorship. The specific crusade against comic books, therefore, is linked to a Cold War hysteria that generated fears of a morally, socially, and politically vulnerable America threatened by oppositional voices and deviant culture. While the crusade against comic books had its own specific critiques of this popular medium, the resonance of this crusade with the American public, clergy, politicians, educators, and public officials was strengthened by the general Cold War hysteria at the time. (2009, 37)

Underpinning the general censorship movement was the charge of ‘anti-­ Americanism’ that chimed with the cult of McCarthyism, a charge levelled at various cultural objects that were seen as monuments to seditious, left-­ wing politics infused with communist propaganda. In this heightened post-war atmosphere, there was an acceleration of anxieties about the way in which ‘cultural ideas were transmitted, perhaps subconsciously, to act on the most vulnerable minds,’ supported by Cold War fears regarding ‘brainwashing,’ which ‘often resonated with concerns about the manipulation of mass media and advertising, especially when directed at growing numbers of youth consumers’ (Whitted 2019, 46). Although, as mentioned, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman featured in titles throughout the superhero purge of the late 1940s and early

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1950s, it would not be long before the DC Trinity was joined by a new wave of superheroes. Beginning in 1956, anthology comic Showcase #4 featured a new version of DC’s The Flash, the first in a line of comic book reboots that marked the beginning of the Silver Age. The superhero was regenerating once more.

From Bust to Reboot It is quite common to credit the emergence of Marvel Comics in the early 1960s with regenerating the superhero comic book genre, but in many accounts, ‘the industry would not have survived were it not for Julius Schwartz’ (Carter 2010). Beginning his career in science fiction circles, Schwartz was an instrumental figure in early science fiction fandom, producing one of the first fanzines in 1932 with The Time Traveller in collaboration with future Superman editor, Mort Weisinger, and Forrest J. Ackerman, future publisher of the cult magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. In 1944, Schwartz became an editor at DC Comics, and grew into a towering figure at the company that oversaw numerous reboots, relaunches, and generic refreshes of several superheroes between the 1950s and 1970s. Following the cancellation of many superhero titles in the late 1940s/ early 50s, Schwartz sought to revive the genre by rebooting The Flash in 1956, a pivotal moment in the history of superhero comics that ‘jump-­ started the whole superhero business again, and went a long way in saving the comic book business from extinction’ (Infantino 2001, 54). At Schwartz’s behest, DC employed new anthology comic, Showcase, as a proving ground for the superhero’s re-emergence. ‘Our idea on Showcase was simple,’ explained Schwartz. ‘We would use it to put out a single issue showcasing a new character or concept, then wait to see how it sold before we turned it into a regular monthly title. Showcase could function as a sort of one-shot comic trial balloon’ (Schwartz with Thompsen 2000, 87). And so, in Showcase #4, Schwartz devised a way to resurrect The Flash— not as a continuation of the Golden Age character but from the beginning again. As the term reboot was not yet in operation at the time, the 1950s superhero renaissance was described as a ‘revival’ in promotional paratexts, although in Schwartz’s biography, he referred to the project as a ‘revamp’ (2000, 97). The Golden Age incarnation of the character is Jay Garrick, who gained his lightning speed powers through the inhalation of ‘hard water.’ Schwartz

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rebuilt the series ‘from the ground up, keeping only the name and the superspeed powers’ (Morrison 2011, 82) while shifting the Flash’s generic co-ordinates to tap into the era’s political, scientific, and sociocultural currents. As comic book writer Denny O’Neil explains, Schwartz embraced the basic idea of the Flash—he’s the “fastest man alive”—and [left] that intact and everything else got changed: the costume, the back-story, the secret identity, why he did what he did … all of that reflected contemporary reality, what was outside the window … Julius Schwartz gave [the Flash] a science fiction rationale. (Smith 2014)

In the story, ‘Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt,’ written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Carmine Infantino, the new Flash is Barry Allen, a police scientist who, in his updated origin story, is accidentally doused in chemicals and struck by lightning, transforming him into ‘the scarlet speedster.’ On the one hand, this was the first major overhaul of a superhero character since Action Comics #1, as DC’s Paul Levitz argues: From a 21st Century perspective, with the word “reboot” now in common language, it’s hard to consider how radical the changes in Schwartz’s revival were, as he chose to keep the name, emblem and essential powers of the original and tossed the rest away. (2013, 18)

On the other hand, the Flash reboot was, as Jason Craft explains, ‘not only the beginning of a new narrative but a continuation of the history of the fiction network’ (2004, 3). As we are introduced to Barry Allen, he is depicted reading an old comic book, Flash Comics, which was indeed a real comic published during the Golden Age featuring the original Flash, Jay Garrick. ‘What a character Flash was,’ reads a word balloon, ‘battling crime and injustice everywhere! And what a unique weapon he had against the arsenal of crime! Speed! Supersonic speed! Undreamed-of speed!’ (Kanigher & Infantino 2012, 76). Allen wonders ‘what it would be really like — to be the fastest man on earth! Well … I’ll never know — The Flash was just a character some writer dreamed up!’ (77). As Craft argues: The story of the Silver Age Flash is, then, at its outset a dialogue between a narrative space—the fictional world of Barry Allen—and a text, Flash Comics, which occurs in both that space and the reader’s reality: an emblem of the universe not as a simple continuing narrative but a serial dialogue involving both things represented and their representations. (2004, 4)

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At the same time, however, the Golden Age Flash is not a part of Allen’s world except as a comic book—not at this juncture anyway—functioning as a reflexive, metafictional representation that spotlights the character’s ancestry while drawing attention to the fictional nature of the superhero narrative. In a sense, the debut of this new Flash suggests that a double logic is in play. Firstly, the intradiegetic representation of Flash Comics would appeal to older readers who perhaps grew up reading about Jay Garrick and enjoyed seeing an intertextual bridge between old and new iterations. Secondly, due to the nature of the comics industry at the time, DC conducted research that indicated that readers, ‘mainly the 8–10 year-­ old boys, only read comics for five years’ before moving onto other things, ‘so since half a decade had passed since The Flash had appeared in a comic, the new generation of readers would see the revived character as something completely new’ (Kingman 2008, 35). As Terrence Wandtke states, ‘only the minority of readers were fully aware of the adventures of the Golden Age superheroes’ at the time (2007, 144). Due to the metafictional aspects of ‘Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt,’ then, the new Flash existed at the time within a liminal state between continuation and reboot, each mode servicing different interpretative communities. In other words, fans who did not cease their consumption of superhero comics could view the latest incarnation of the character as ‘a continuation of the history of the fiction network,’ whereas newer readers saw it as ‘the beginning of a new narrative’ (Craft 2004, 4), what I would describe as a reflexive reboot. That is, a text that aims to bridge different generations of audiences by targeting new readers and fans simultaneously, by wiping the slate clean and beginning again for newcomers, while maintaining diegetic and mnemonic threads that preserve the primary continuity.3 Of course, all reboots are, to some extent, ‘reflexive,’ as audiences read across the transtextual axis to compare and contrast the ‘old’ with the ‘new’ (among other activities). Yet the way in which ‘Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt’ aims to transfictionally bridge both old and new continuities within the imaginary world relies upon a heightened degree of ‘reflexivity’ that becomes part and parcel of official comic book canon and continuity (i.e., it really happened). On the one hand, a film reboot like Batman Begins, for example, is less ‘reflexive’ in this context because it does not attempt to begin again and narratively intersect with earlier Batman films to promote the idea that each text exists within the same transfictional plane (see Chap. 1). In other words, Batman Begins may

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indeed ‘reflexively’ generate transtextual readings whereby audiences bring to mind their experiences of Batman texts to evaluate patterns, motifs, and differences, while being able to follow and understand the story being told transfictionally. On the other hand, however, I would describe J.J Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) as a ‘reflexive reboot,’ as a film that exists both within, and outside of, established continuity. Abrams’ Star Trek begins with the Romulan spaceship, the Narada, punching through time and space, before laying waste to an army of Starfleet vessels (one of which includes James T. Kirk’s father). As viewers learn later in the film, the Romulans arrived from the twenty-fourth century, almost two hundred years in the text’s future, when a catastrophic accident created a quantum rift that pulled the Narada into the past, creating an alternative, diegetic universe wherein the film’s narrative is situated. As observed by the newest incarnation of Spock (played by Zachary Quinto), the arrival of the Narada ‘has altered the flow of history beginning with the attack on the USS Kelvin culminating in the events of today, thereby creating an entire new chain of events that cannot be anticipated by either party … Whatever our lives might have been, if the time-­ continuum was not disrupted, our destinies have changed.’ By mobilizing the parallel world conceit in this way, Abrams and his co-writers, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, sought to bracket off this ‘new’ universe from established Star Trek continuity to appeal to audiences who would not know the difference between a tribble or a Klingon; or as Michael Hemmingson succinctly put it, ‘one not need be a fan or know canonical facts to watch it’ (2009, 114). For non-fan audiences, then, Abrams’ Star Trek functions as a clean entry-point, as a reboot. For seasoned Trekkers, however, the film works as ‘a continuation of the fiction network’ rather than a beginning again, the construction of a parallel universe within the story itself functioning doubly as a new continuity branch that does not ‘invalidate events in the … already established “primary” Star Trek timeline’ (Clark 2013, 395). Like superhero comics, the Star Trek imaginary world is therefore structured as a multiverse, a canonical nexus of alternative realities as opposed to a single universe. In this way, Abrams’ Star Trek sought to capture a coalition audience constituted by ‘an amalgamation of micro-cultural groups’ (Collins 1992, 342), a prophylactic strategy that aimed to confront the potential for fannish discord and dispute even before the film was released. Rather than specifically targeting the fan ghetto, then, and thus run the risk of commercial disaster, ‘Abrams intended the movie to attract a general audience’ in

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order to spike interest among fans and non-fans to stimulate box office receipts (Hemmingson 2009, 114). Returning to The Flash, Schwartz’s reboot proved to be popular with readers, although he nevertheless remained cautious about doing the same with other Golden Age characters. Over the next few years, Schwartz would continue to use the Showcase anthology to experiment with other character regenerations, indicating that the superhero revival project was not an overnight sensation but ‘a slow process in all respects’ (Gabilliet 2010, 52). The Flash would return three times in Showcase before his solo title was finally relaunched in 1959, the same year that the Green Lantern would return from his Golden Age slumber. First appearing in All-American Comics #16 (1940), Martin Nodell’s Golden Age Green Lantern is Alan Scott, who draws his powers from an ancient magic lantern (more akin to a fantasy character than a superhero cut from the same cloth as Superman). Debuting in Showcase #22 in 1959, John Broome’s Silver Age Green Lantern is Hal Jordan, an air-force test pilot who is handed a power ring by Abin Sur, a dying alien who accidentally crashes his spaceship on Earth and urgently needs someone to take over the role in his stead. Jordan becomes the new Green Lantern, but unlike Alan Scott, he is a kind of space-cop, a member of the Green Lantern Corps of intergalactic law enforcement officers. For the time being, Alan Scott is expunged from DC’s memory banks, erased and rebooted with a new incarnation. Similarly, the Golden Age iteration of ‘The Mighty Atom’ was introduced in All-American #19 from 1941, with his final appearance in All-­ Star #57 from 1951. Written by Gardner Fox and pencilled by Gil Kane, the Silver Age reboot of The Atom debuted a decade later in Showcase #34 from 1961. In some respects, The Atom reboot went even further than The Flash and Green Lantern, as Roy Thomas explains: The Silver Age versions of Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman, for all the science-fictional trappings which set them apart from their 1940s forebears, were still basically “revivals,” as DC editors and fans alike called them back then. However, the star of Showcase #34 was destined to have virtually nothing in common with the old Atom except his name. The new hero’s schtick would be that he fought crime while shrunk to a height of six inches. For the first time, DC would take one its “revivals” off in a radically different direction from the original, making him in effect a totally new character. (1999, 93)

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Indeed, the original Atom (Al Pratt) did not have the ability to shrink his size and, in fact, the character ‘had no super-powers, just a rather odd, leather-girdled outfit with a full-face mask’ (Ibid.). It would not be until 1948 that DC bestowed superpowers onto the character without explanation: ‘he gained “atomic strength” and, soon afterward, a new costume with a stylized atom emblazoned on its tunic’ (Ibid.). The new Atom received his own eponymous title in 1962. Next, Schwartz turned to reboot Hawkman, who first debuted in the pages of Flash Comics #1 in 1940 (incidentally, the same issue that would introduce Jay Garrick). Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Dennis Neville, the Golden Age Hawkman is Carter Hall, ‘a wealthy weapons collector and research scientist’ who opens a package sent from Egypt by Jim Rock, which contains an ancient sacrificial ‘glass knife’ (Fox and Neville 1940, 1). Upon opening the package, the weapon begins to glow, causing Hall to black-out as ‘a weird, strange dream unfolds’ (Ibid., 2), in which he is hurled backwards in time to Ancient Egypt to occupy the body of Prince Khufu. He fights two men, exclaiming: ‘I’ll never tell you of Shiera, betrayed by the Hawk-God Anubis! I love her—and yet hate your evil ways! I shall yet win!’ Hall escapes, and rushes off to find Shiera on a ‘fast-­ moving chariot through the spaces of the desert’ (Ibid.). He finds her, yet he is shot with an arrow before he confronts his nemesis, Hath-Set, who kills him with the same sacrificial knife that triggered the dream. Hall manages to utter his final words: ‘I die—but I shall live again—as shall you Hath-Set. And then I shall be the victor!’ (Ibid., 4). Waking up in the twentieth century once more, Hall realizes that he is in fact the Egyptian Prince Khufu reincarnated (Ibid., 5). He then decides to go for a walk to clear his head, but is confronted by people rushing from a subway station, shouting that the train has caught on fire. As Carter runs to investigate, he bumps into a woman, immediately recognizing her as the reincarnation of Shiera (Ibid., 6). It transpires that the woman has had the same dreams, and after telling her to rest for a while, Carter Hall goes to his laboratory—tunes in on his dynamo-detector and emerges shortly from his weapons room clad, as a grim jest, in the guise of the ancient Hawk-God Anubis … The Hawkman—Peril of the Night— whose extraordinarily powers are derived from Carter Hall’s discovery of the secret of the ages—the Ninth Metal—which defies the pull of the Earth’s gravity—and the Hawkman goes forth! (Ibid.)

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In the following issue, Flash Comics #2, Carter and Shiera are shown to be lovers, and the following year in All-Star Comics #5 from 1941, Shiera Saunders would take on the mantle of Hawkgirl, joining her partner in the superhero ensemble team, the Justice Society of America. Although neither character would receive their own solo title during the Golden Age, they would frequently appear as back-up strips in Flash Comics and All-­ Star Comics until both titles were cancelled during the superhero purge in 1949 and 1951, respectively. As with Schwartz’s other superhero revivals, the Hawkman reboot was road-tested first, although on this occasion, not in Showcase, but in The Brave and The Bold, a title which began as an anthology comic featuring historic figures (gladiators, knights, Vikings, and so forth) before experimenting with superheroes from #25 onwards (which included the first appearance of the Suicide Squad). Although the new Hawkman generated much praise from older fans, his reappearance failed to generate much interest from the bulk of DC’s young readers at the time (Jones and Jacob 1997, 37). Schwartz, however, remained confident that Hawkman had wings, so he continued to include him in five issues of The Brave and The Bold between 1961 and 1962 before giving the character a side-strip in DC’s science fiction anthology Mystery in Space in 1963. The Silver Age Hawkman eventually received his own solo title in 1964. Once more, Schwartz turned to writer Gardner Fox, who had co-­ created the original incarnation of Hawkman, providing an authorial bridge between Golden and Silver Ages, as well as proving that Fox was at least as instrumental as Schwartz during the superhero revival. For the Hawkman reboot, Fox drew upon his own (and Schwartz’s) love of science fiction, ridding the character of his roots in Egyptian mythology in order follow the Comics Code—the supernatural elements of the original Hawkman being too risky, Fox believed (DeRoss 2019, ‘Chapter Ten’)— and recalibrating Carter Hall as (the phonetically similar) Katar Hol and Shiera Saunders as his wife, Shayera Hol, both of whom were alien cops from the planet Thanagar. Hawkman and Hawkgirl debuted in the story ‘Creature of a Thousand Shapes!’ in The Brave and The Bold #34 from 1961 where they chase the criminal Blythe to Earth. Like The Flash, Green Lantern, and The Atom, then, Hawkman and Hawkgirl were rebooted and resuited to chime with DC’s science fiction impulse. Although not a reboot, Schwartz also returned to the concept of the superhero ensemble, commissioning writer Gardner Fox to introduce a Silver Age spin on the Golden Age team, the Justice Society of America,

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with the new Justice League of America. First appearing in The Brave and the Bold #28 from 1960, before their own eponymous title launched later that year, the Justice League of America featured Wonder Woman, Aquaman, new character Martian Manhunter, the rebooted Green Lantern and The Flash, with twin pillars Superman and Batman joining soon afterwards due to readership demand.

From Universe to Multiverse As editor, Schwartz continued to regenerate DC’s superheroes throughout his career, including generically refreshing Batman twice in the 1960s: firstly, to rescue the character from the madcap science fiction romps of the Jack Schiff editorial era of the late 1940s and early 1950s; and secondly, in the wake of the 1960s television series that propelled the image of the ‘camp crusader’ into public awareness, much to the chagrin of comics fans (see Chap. 6). He also took over editorial duties on Superman in the 1970s, dialling down the character’s awesome power-set, and moving Clark Kent from his position as Daily Planet journalist to television reporter (see Chap. 4). As an arch-revisionist, Schwartz understood that strategies of regeneration were essential narrative tools that could be employed to keep the genre healthy and contemporaneous, informing his famous aphorism: ‘Every ten years or so, the DC universe needs an enema’ (Kaveney 2008, 191–92). With Gardner Fox, Schwartz also co-created the DC ‘multiverse,’ a nexus of parallel storyworlds that permitted multiple, diverse iterations of the publisher’s character marquee to co-exist within a shared universe.4 The first DC comic to feature parallel worlds came with Wonder Woman #59 from 1953 in the story ‘Wonder Woman’s Invisible Twin.’ It would be the landmark DC story, ‘The Flash of Two Worlds,’ however, that developed the idea further, and provided an intradiegetic logic for the shift from universe to multiverse. Written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Carmine Infantino, ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ portrays the Silver Age Flash meeting his Golden Age ancestor, a meeting that is justified through the parallel world conceit, with each said to inhabit unique narrative (sub)worlds that co-exist within the same hyperdiegetic space. The cover of The Flash #123 (Fox and Infantino 1961) depicts a man shouting, ‘Flash! Help Me!’, with Jay Garrick and Barry Allen, divided by a wall down the centre of the page, racing towards him. ‘I’m Coming!’, exclaims Allen, echoed by Garrick:

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‘I’m Coming’ (italics on original cover). According to Jennifer DeRoss, Schwartz proposed the idea that Allen and Garrick should meet in a crossover story, ‘but Fox thought up the parallel worlds part after seeing the cover,’ Fox having toyed with the idea of multiple Earths in his first short story, ‘Weirds of the Woodcarver’ from 1944 (2019, ‘Chapter Ten’). This ‘twin worlds’ motif is of course a typical science fiction novum, a well-­ known example being an episode of the original series of Star Trek titled ‘Mirror, Mirror,’ but the conceit had been adopted earlier by authors such as H.G. Wells, Murray Leinster, and Jorges Luis Borges. Fox admitted that the parallel worlds novum was ‘an old science fiction gimmick,’ and shared credit with Schwartz: ‘as both Julie and I was aficionados of that genre … it just sprang into our minds’ (Zawisza 2008, 68). On the first page of ‘The Flash of Two Worlds,’ Garrick faces Allen, asking: ‘How can you possibly claim to be The Flash, Barry Allen—when I—Jay Garrick—am The Flash!—and have been so for more than 20 years’ (Fox and Infantino 1961, 1, bold text in original). An omniscient narrator continues the questioning: How many Flashes are there? One? Two? Is Barry Allen the real Flash? Or is Jay Garrick? Does The Flash live in Central City? Or in Keystone City? Only one thing seems certain! Both live on the Planet Earth! And only by travelling to that “other” Earth can The Flash discover his alter ego and become the … FLASH OF TWO WORLDS. (Ibid.)

The main story begins with Allen, who finds himself in a strange environment. ‘I could have vibrated so swiftly through some sort of space-warp,’ he theorizes (Ibid., 3), before investigating further and learning that he is no longer in Central City but in Keystone City, a place he recognizes from Flash Comics. He then searches for Garrick’s home address in a telephone book, and having found it, heads off to 5252 78th Street, where he comes face-to-face with his Golden Age predecessor (who of course does not recognize him). Allen recounts Garrick’s origin story that, like Golden Age readers, he learned from Flash Comics. ‘How could he possibly know all that?’ puzzles Garrick, and in response, Allen dons his uniform, stating: ‘You see, on my Earth, I am also—THE FLASH! Just as you are—on yours!’ (Ibid., 8). Garrick is confused: ‘Two Earths? What are you talking about? (Ibid.). Allen explains, offering a scientific explanation for Garrick, and simultaneously, an intradiegetic rationale for readers:

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The way I see it, I vibrated so fast—I tore a gap in the vibratory shields separating our worlds! As you know—two objects can occupy the same space and time—if they vibrate at different speeds! My theory is, both Earths were created at the same time in two quite similar universes! They vibrate differently—which keeps them apart! Life, customs—even languages—evolved on your Earth almost exactly as they did on my Earth! Destiny must have decreed there’d be a Flash—on each Earth! (8–9)

As with ‘Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt,’ the story can be read metafictionally. As Allen explains to Garrick: You were once well-known in my world—as a fictional character appearing in a magazine called Flash Comics! When I was a youngster—you were my favorite hero! A writer named Gardner Fox wrote about your adventures— which he claimed came to him in dreams! Obviously, when Fox was asleep, his mind “tuned in” on your vibratory Earth! He explains how he “dreamed up” The Flash! The magazine was discontinued in 1949! (Fox and Infantino 1961, 10)

Garrick explains that 1949 was ‘the very year I—The Flash—retired,’ which also provides an intradiegetic reasoning for the cancellation of the comic book during the superhero purge (Ibid.). In the story’s final panel, Allen looks out at the reader, explaining that the only ones who’d really believe it would be the readers of Flash Comics! That’s why I’m going to look up Gardner Fox who wrote the original Flash stories and tell it to him! He can write the whole thing up—in a comic book! (25)

‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ introduced the novum of alternative worlds into superhero comics that has accelerated profoundly over the decades since, a trend that employs a heightened degree of self-reflexive devices that provide intradiegetic logics to the ever-shifting ontological status of superhero comics. Metafictional gestures of this kind would reoccur in later stories featuring the character, such as ‘The Flash—Fact or Fiction?’ from The Flash #179 (May 1968), in which Barry Allen travels to our world and meets Julius Schwartz himself. As we shall see in Chap. 4, Crisis on Infinite Earths took these metafictional gestures to orgiastic heights through the conceit that the DC Universe had over time been increasingly destabilized by temporal

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anomalies instigated by increasingly rampant multiplicities. Although the roots of Crisis of Infinite Earths began with ‘The Flash of Two Worlds,’ the success of that story encouraged Schwartz and Fox to develop the idea even further, and the multiverse would become the central motif in a sequence of annual crossover stories featuring the Justice League of America working alongside the Justice Society of America. The first of these ‘crisis’ events came in a two-part crossover story, published in Justice League of America #21 and #22. In ‘Crisis on Earth-One!’, readers were informed that the Golden Age ensemble team had indeed returned to action after retirement: After a decade of inactivity, the old Justice Society of America are meeting once again! True, there are a few grey hairs showing—and their faces are lined with the passage of time—but their mighty powers are only slightly dimmed… (Fox and Sekowski 1963, 3)

We see several headshots of the returning superheroes displayed, including Golden Age iterations of The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and The Atom, all of whom had been rebooted during Schwartz’s revival project. From this point onwards—or more accurately, until the next regeneration—the Golden Age characters inhabited Earth-Two, whereas the Silver Age incarnations lived on Earth-One. Accordingly, the Golden Age characters are narratively ‘re-remembered,’ recalled from the regions of textual amnesia and sutured back into DC continuity via the hyperdiegetic resources offered by the shared multiverse conceit. Through this process, then, I would argue that The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and Atom reboots were debooted; by which I mean, reboots that have been pulled back into an already-existing narrative sequence after they were thought to have been symbolically erased and supplanted altogether. Much in the same way that ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ united the Garrick and Allen iterations of The Flash into the same (hyper)diegetic space, the ‘Crisis’ stories further  symbolized a  fusion of Golden and Silver Age subworlds, with the parallel world conceit utilized as a narrative mode that established transfictional bridges. Mark J.P. Wolf describes this process through his concept of ‘retroactive linkages,’ which are more commonly found in the work of authors who have created two or more imaginary [sub]worlds and wish to bring them together into one larger creation, so they can be considered as a form of worldbuilding … the

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term “multiverse” is sometimes used, which describes the overall structure resulting from the connection of two or more universes. (2012, 216)

Between the 1960s and early 1980s, DC would publish annual crossovers featuring the Justice Society and the Justice League on an annual basis. These ‘summer “crises” were a guaranteed sales event,’ explains comic book writer Mark Waid (2002), often involving the creation of newer alternate realities. For example, Earth-Three is introduced in Justice League #29 from 1964, a mirror universe inhabited by the Crime Syndicate of America, analogues of the Justice League but with a twist: the superheroes are actually super-villains, and vice versa. And in 1973, Justice League #107–108 depicted Earth-X, an alternate world where the Nazis had won World War II, and the superheroes crossover to help the Freedom Fighters, led by none other than Uncle Sam. The DC Trinity had continued to feature in comics during the post-war inter-regnum period, which meant that the emergent distinction between the Silver Age Earth-One and Golden Age Earth-Two alternate subworlds established a bifurcation of these characters as well. In other words, there would from this point onwards be two canonical versions of comic book Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in DC continuity, with each incarnation representing the Golden and Silver Ages, respectively. Unlike ‘The Flash of Two Worlds,’ however, there would be no narrative explanation provided for the DC Trinity. Consequently, it is difficult to ascertain precisely when this splintering occurred—there is no evidence provided in Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman comics in the months following ‘The Flash of Two Worlds.’ This difficulty, however, has not stopped fans from attempting to find the dividing line through close examination of superhero comics from the period (for example, see ‘The Dividing Line Between Earth-1 and Earth-2’ on Mike’s Amazing World of Comics).5 Over the years, however, numerous stories would support the Earth-­ One/Earth-Two division, such as ‘The Super-Crisis that Struck Earth-­ Two!’ from Justice League #55 (Fox and Sekowsky 1967), in which an adult Robin—‘No Longer the “Boy Wonder”’—is welcomed into the Justice Society (Ibid., 5). ‘First of all, I want to convey Batman’s best wishes!’ states Robin. ‘Though he’s in semi-retirement, he still goes out on special cases—which is what’s keeping him from attending this meeting!’ (Ibid.). As superheroes generally do not age, a generic convention that readers embrace without question, the labelling of the Silver Age characters as belonging to Earth-One—which would have made more

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sense the other way around given that the Golden Age originals came first—suggests that the multiverse is a hierarchical structure, with Earth-­ One being the central canonical core of DC continuity, or ‘master-­ narrative.’ What this means is that creators have more freedom to experiment with alternate reality stories by toying with the standard codes and conventions in ways that would not be permitted in the master-­ narrative. For example, superheroes from other subworlds would be allowed to age (‘there are a few grey hairs showing’). As Schwartz explained: ‘With the tremendous success of “The Flash of Two Worlds” we soon had crossovers galore where Silver Age characters met their Golden Age predecessors or perhaps just did things that couldn’t be done in normal continuity (like dying)’ (Schwartz with Thomsen 2000, 92). Indeed, the Golden Age Superman from Earth-Two would eventually sport a few grey hairs of his own, and in Action Comics #484 from 1978, he married Lois Lane, an event that would not occur for the ‘master’ Superman until 1996  in Superman: The Wedding Album. In Adventure Comics #462 from 1972, the Golden Age/Earth-Two Batman did actually die, meaning that the character who debuted in Detective Comics #27 ostensibly no longer existed in DC continuity. Although Karin Kukkonen (2010, 156) argues that these alternative worlds ‘are mutually incompatible realities’ that are ‘unrelated’ to what occurs in master-narrative continuity, there are many examples where these subworlds ‘crossover’ with one another in DC comics history (see Chaps. 4 and 5). Generally speaking, then, ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ and the ‘Crisis’ crossovers triggered the first phase of the DC multiverse, as Andrew Friedenthal describes it, a period of expansion and exploration, a combination of new characters and worlds welded together with older ideas to create one overarching imaginary world out of what had been several independent publishers’ line-ups of heroes and villains. It was also a widely disconnected process, one that evolved haphazardly without any kind of overarching creative or editorial stewardship. Each new addition to the multiverse came independently, rather than as part of a larger plan heading towards some kind of narrative goal, and instead focused on the new concept or idea that was being introduced in each individual story. (Friedenthal 2019, 37)

Although the multiverse conceit gave creators an expansive canvas with which to test-run new ideas, or to simply play narrative games with staple

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characters that would not impact the DC master-narrative, the acceleration of diversity and multiplicity would be one of the ways that superhero comic books gradually became less accessible to casual readers.

Continuity, Fandom, Authorship Throughout the Golden Age, DC’s approach to transfictional continuity had been slapdash at best, their comics ‘dominated by relatively self-­ contained issues’ (Jenkins 2009, 20). Much of this had to do with the industrial logics of the period where speed of production and quantity of product were the main drivers of pulp entertainment, rather than quality and consistency. As Paul Lopez argues, ‘the new comic book field … replicated the structures and logics found in the popular culture industries of its time,’ possessing ‘a singular industrial logic’ that involved ‘a commercial entertainment product produced in an assembly-line fashion for a mass market’ (2008, 1, author’s italics). For both the pulps and the comics, ‘quality definitely played second fiddle to quantity’ (Ibid., 7), and ‘editors and publishers were not looking for literary writers expressing their authentic selves in some muse-inspired moment, just craftsmen who could produce good product on a regular basis, under any name—unless the name has market value’ (Ibid., 8). Comics, like the pulps before them, were thought to be little more than disposable, juvenile trash, to be discarded once finished with (or at best, exchanged amongst friends). Nonetheless, there were certainly intimations of continuity and the shared universe motif in DC’s Golden Age comics. Beginning in 1940, DC’s All-Star Comics #3 introduced the first superhero ensemble team, the aforementioned Justice Society of America, which included Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Green Lantern, among others. In June 1952, Superman and Batman appeared in a story together for the first time in Superman #76, although they had previously shared covers on a few occasions, the first being a 1940 souvenir comic published to occasion the New York World’s Fair. In the 1950s, the various ‘Superman Family’ titles began generating a more coherent mythos at editor Mort Weisinger’s bidding, many elements of which have since become essential components of the Superman canon not authored by Siegel and Shuster (the Fortress of Solitude, the Bottled City of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, and Supergirl, for example). To complicate matters further, DC experimented with ‘Imaginary Stories’ during the Silver Age, counter-factual fables featuring marquee

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characters that are not meant to be read as transfictionally compossible with canonical continuity but as ‘fictional fictions’ (Hyman 2017, 15), an insightful way of determining what does and does not constitute canon. In broad strokes, canon refers to texts that are ‘factual fictions’ meant to be understood as having ‘really happened,’ while non-compossible texts are apocryphal stories that ‘pose hypothetical possibilities rather than canonical certainties’ (Mittell 2015, 315). As Keith Booker explains: The imaginary Story is a storytelling approach commonly associated with stories published by DC Comics from 1960 to 1970. Imaginary Stories took established characters briefly outside established histories and restrictive continuity guidelines. They allowed surprising events to take place, plotlines to be explored, and heroes to act out of character without concern for consequences in future issues of a series. (2014, 639)

Although the ‘Imaginary Story’ as a discrete brand would not emerge until the 1960s, there had been a few prototypes for these types of ‘out of continuity’ alternate histories published during the Golden Age, the earliest of which appeared not in a comic but in a magazine titled Look. Scripted by Siegel and drawn by Shuster, ‘How Superman Would End the War’ was a simple two-page story that had Superman dash off to Germany, grab Hitler by the scruff of the neck, then rush off to Moscow to capture Joseph Stalin, taking both to the League of Nations’ World Court in Geneva, Switzerland for trial (Darius 2013). Other stories included Lois Lane attending a theatrical screening of one of the Fleisher Superman cartoons and learning that Clark Kent is really the Man of Steel in Superman #19 from 1942. It would be in the early 1960s, however, that these alternate fables were awarded a brand name by Superman editor Mort Weisinger, who recognized the potential in toying with canonical violations; that is, as long as they were clearly signalled to readers from the outset. The first ‘Imaginary Story’ to be labelled as such was ‘Mr. and Mrs. Clark (Superman) Kent,’ first published in Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane #19 from 1960. Indeed, most of DC’s Imaginary Stories would appear in ‘Superman Family’ comics during the Silver Age, some of which were rather bizarre affairs, such as ‘Claire Kent, Alias Super-Sister’ in Superboy #78 from 1960. In the story, the Boy of Steel saves an alien female, Shar-La, from crash-landing her spaceship, but after ridiculing her for being a girl, she hypnotizes him into believing he has had a sex-change,

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the result of which forces Superboy to mend his chauvinistic ways due to the treatment he received by others. The practice became so regular in the 1960s that DC ensured that readers would know when stories were imaginary or canonical, often with interpretative guidelines printed on covers, like: ‘Not a Dream! Not an Imaginary Story!’ As Ed Catto states, readers ‘would see the “imaginary story” blurb and instantly understand that the ground rules (and characters, situations, and settings) had changed’ (2019, 46). Although the final story published under the ‘Imaginary Story’ banner came in 1986 with Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s ‘Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow,’ which was at the time a last hoorah for the Earth-Two Superman, DC launched the Elseworlds imprint in 1989, all of which posited ‘what if?’ questions underscored by new histories and new conceptualizations of Superman, Batman, and others (see Chap. 5). In essence, these Imaginary Stories are ‘playful “continuity violations,” which do not risk upsetting fans ‘since they rework textual conventions without threatening them’ (Hills 2002, 196, italics added). In transfictional terms, there ‘is no contradiction between these various versions of characters because they are not considered, among DC readers or creators, to be “in the same universe”’ (Harrigan and Wardrup-Fruin 2009, 6). In other words, because these stories are announced as non-canonical, ‘they do not contradict the fans’ accumulated knowledge of the mythology or violate their emotional investment in the characters’ (Duncan and Smith 2009, 192). Because of this multiplicity, as noted in Chap. 1, readers are expected to know which interpretative frame to apply to any given title. Fans and editors habitually use the terms ‘in-continuity’ or ‘outside-of-continuity’ to describe the truth-conditions of superhero comics. Over time, however, DC’s multiverse would lead to some imaginary stories reframed as ‘in continuity,’ with a numerical planetary designation retroactively applied to support their canonical elevation. The shift towards a more intensive and careful approach to continuity arrived with the emergence of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, beginning with the publication of Fantastic Four #1 from 1961. Written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four #1 presented ‘a significant departure from superhero conventions’ (Wright 2001, 214), a departure that portrayed the characters—Reed Richards (Mr Fantastic), Sue Storm (The Invisible Woman), her brother Johnny Storm (The Human Torch), and Ben Grimm (The Thing)—as a squabbling unit, frequently arguing and fighting amongst themselves in ways that often impeded their ability to work together (Ibid.). Between 1961 and 1964, Marvel introduced

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Spider-Man (1962), the Hulk (1962), Thor (1962), Ant-Man (1962), Iron Man (1963), Doctor Strange (1963), The Avengers (1963), The X-Men (1963), and Black Widow (1964), most of whom have become as instantly recognizable to twenty-first century audiences as DC’s character population, in some cases perhaps more so due to an armada of film and television adaptations and series produced over the past two decades or so. As editor, Stan Lee wasted no time establishing transfictional bridges between discrete titles, developing the shared universe conceit with a heightened approach to continuity that has since become both an industry standard and a fannish demand. In Amazing Spider-Man #1 from 1963, for example, Spider-Man meets and tries to join the Fantastic Four. As more new titles were published, Lee oversaw the development of a compossible transfictional firmament, vigilantly maintaining a consistent continuity between all the titles, so that, for instance, when the Hulk was captured in Tales to Astonish, Reed Richards wondered about his whereabouts in a Fantastic Four Annual. If Tony Stark went missing from Tales of Suspense, he was also AWOL in the next issue of the Avengers. One issue of the World War II-set Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos, which had previously been isolated from the superhero characters, featured a crossover appearance from Captain America. (Howe 2012, 56)

This turn to more intensive continuity across titles was revolutionary at the time, although Marvel was not strictly a ‘new’ publishing house, having gone through two name changes since their formation in 1939—first as Timely Comics until they were rebranded Atlas News Company in 1951. Owned by Martin Goodman, Timely sought to tap into the superhero zeitgeist during the Golden Age, creating a wave of characters that were cancelled just as swiftly if they failed to catch on with readers, such as Marvex the Super Robot, Dynaman, Stuporman, the Blonde Phantom, Jap-Buster Johnson, the Phantom Bullet, Phantom Reporter, Red Raven, and many more. Like many publishers at the time, Timely were largely opportunistic, more ‘a company of copy cats’ than innovators (Lee with Mair 2002, 64), always quick to ditch genres and characters in order to exploit whatever found solid footing with audiences at the time (Tucker 2017, 18). True to form, Marvel Comics continued Timely’s imitation game by jumping on the latest bandwagon and hoping for success. As the legend goes, Marvel owner Martin Goodman asked Stan Lee to come up with a spin on the superhero ensemble team after learning about the

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commercial success of Justice League of America from DC’s Jack Liebowitz, with Fantastic Four being the result (Ro 2004, 71). Whether apocryphal or not, Stan Lee nevertheless created something new and original out of DC’s ensemble blueprint, with the Fantastic Four becoming Marvel’s ‘first family.’ Timely did enjoy success with a few superhero characters during the Golden Age. Bill Everett’s Prince Namor (the Sub-Mariner) and Carl Burgos’ Jim Hammond (the Human Torch) both debuted in Marvel Comics #1 from 1939.6 But the most successful was Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America. Debuting in Captain America Comics #1 from 1941, the character became ‘the archetype of the nationalist superhero,’ a symbolically embodied patriot ‘clad in a star-spangled uniform with a shield [originally] shaped like a police badge’ (Dittmer 2013, 8–9), the comic managing to achieve an average circulation of one million copies at the height of his popularity to compete with Golden Age heavyweights like Superman and Captain Marvel (Howe 2012, 25). Unlike DC’s superheroes, however, Captain America began fighting Nazis before the US entered World War II—on the cover of Captain America Comics #1, he is depicted punching Hitler in the face, for instance. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, stories with titles like ‘Trapped in the Nazi Stronghold,’ ‘Blitzkrieg to Berlin,’ and ‘Tojo’s Terror Masters,’ almost guaranteed that jingoist Captain America Comics sold excessively to US troops on the frontline (Ibid.). Timely experimented with, and perhaps pioneered, the shared universe conceit as early as 1939, establishing ‘transfictional bridges’ (Proctor 2018) between stories and characters that suggests that the Marvel Universe was born only a year after Superman’s introduction. In Marvel Mystery Comics #7, for instance, policewoman Betty Dean acted as a go-between for Timely’s more popular characters. And so it was that in Marvel Mystery Comics #7, a seemingly throwaway moment—in which Betty Dean warns Namor that the Torch is now on the police force and looking for him—carried the seeds of something revolutionary: the fictional universes of two characters, conceived by two different imaginations, were in fact one and the same. (Howe 2012, 15)

In Marvel Mystery Comics #8 from 1939, the Torch and the Sub-Mariner engage in battle, which continued in the next two issues. This would be further developed in The All-Winners Squad #19 from 1946, which

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involved Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, and the Torch teaming up with other lesser-known characters, such as Toro, the Whizzer, and Miss America. As with DC, Timely’s superhero titles were either cancelled outright or renamed to tap into newer generic trends that ascended after the end of World War II, enjoying a flurry of success with ‘funny animal’ comics in the vein of Dell’s Disney spin-offs, as well as creating more female-­oriented titles, such as Tessie the Typist, Nellie the Nurse, and ‘the Blonde Bombshell,’ Millie the Model (which ran from 1945 to 1973). The Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, and Captain America, however, soon went the way of The Flash and Green Lantern: both Sub-Mariner Comics and Human Torch Comics were cancelled in 1949, while Captain America Comics hung on for another year, being retitled Captain America’s Weird Tales for two issues in 1950—although oddly, the character did not feature at all— before departing to superhero limbo until the next regeneration three years later. In 1954, Goodman attempted to tap into the enormous success of The Adventures of Superman TV series (1952–58) by resuscitating Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, and the Hammond incarnation of the Human Torch, beginning with #24 of anthology comic Young Men. Although the revival preceded Schwartz’s Flash reboot by two years, the difference was that the Atlas characters were explicit continuations of their Golden Age adventures (although generically refreshed to shifting ideological co-­ ordinates). Indeed, as the war had been over for almost a decade, new villains were needed for Captain America to fight, and so his stories moved to the Cold War, with the character now billed as ‘Captain America … Commie Smasher!’ The Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch were also enlisted in propagandist narratives that underscored the message that ‘Communists were evil, overweight, and poor dressers’ (Wright 2001, 123). Although the revival was short-lived, the Timely triumvirate reappeared in Young Men #24–28, and Men’s Adventures #27–28 from 1954, each receiving relaunches, rather than reboots, of their respective solo series, until they were cancelled once again in 1955. Regardless of the revival’s commercial failure, however, here we can already see the publisher make the decision to establish continuity between this new range of comics and those that had come before: the numbering of each character’s eponymous title carried directly on from the last pre-cancellation issue. The Torch and Namor also made cameo appear-

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ances in the Captain America strip in Young Men 24, implying that these characters shared a world, even when they did not appear in each other’s titles. (Sweeney 2013, 1)

The Sub-Mariner would later return in Fantastic Four #4 from 1961, while the Hammond incarnation of the Human Torch confronts Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four Annual #4 from 1966. Unlike the intradiegetic splintering provided by DC’s ‘The Flash of Two Worlds,’ however, Marvel’s Silver Age continuity anchors dragged Timely’s comics into the publisher’s master-narrative (although they would follow DC by introducing their own multiverse in the 1970s). Just as Schwarz used the Showcase anthology to test-drive readers’ appetites for returning characters, Stan Lee conducted a similar experiment with Captain America. On the cover of Strange Tales #114 from 1963, the Silver Age Human Torch is shown throwing fireballs at Captain America, with a caption reading: ‘From out of the Golden Age of comics into the Marvel Age, Captain America returns to challenge the Human Torch.’ In the story itself, Captain America is revealed to be an imposter, yet in the final panel, the Human Torch is depicted reading a pile of old Captain America comics, and wonders what happened to the star-spangled hero. Stan Lee’s final caption reads: ‘You guessed it! This story was really a test! To see if you too would like Captain America to return. As usual, your letters will give us the answer!’ (Lee and Kirby 1963, bold in original). Reader support was overwhelming, and so Captain America returned in The Avengers #4 from 1964 in a story that brought the character into the 1960s through retroactive continuity. As Roni Ro explains: Steve Rogers didn’t become a high school teacher at Lee High School. Bucky didn’t die of a gunshot wound in 1946 … and Cap was never the 1953 “Commie Smasher.” Instead, they showed Cap and Bucky on a final mission right before the war ended. They leaped off motorbikes and onto a huge missile heading for a major city. Cap realized his couldn’t deactivate it and told Bucky to let go. Bucky thought he could push a nearby button. Cap fell, and the missile blew up and killed Bucky. The twist would be that Cap was frozen in suspended animation and emerged with survivor’s guilt and an inability to adapt to a changing, youth-driven society. (2004, 82)

So, then, in order to furnish intradiegetic logics for Captain America’s return, he was thawed from his suspended animation in The Avengers #4,

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and thereafter reinserted into master-narrative continuity. Although the ‘Commie Smasher’ revival was discarded simply by being ignored and supplanted through retroactive continuity, it was later revealed to have actually ‘happened,’ but given a twist in Captain America #153–156 from 1972: the 1953 ‘Commie Smasher’ was not Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, but William Burnside, who had injected himself and his partner Jack Monroe, the ‘fake’ Bucky Barnes, with a batch of his own super-serum, which drove them both insane. Burnside even had plastic surgery to make himself look like Steve Rogers! For DC, Marvel’s ordering principle of tightly knit continuity and the shared universe conceit led DC’s editors to aim for the same structuration over time. Yet the fact that DC’s approach to continuity was haphazard for twenty years or so before ‘the Marvel turn’ meant that their universe—or by this time, multiverse—was bound to be besieged by continuity snarls, narrative incongruities that arose between individual comic book issues. As Grant Morrison explains: ‘The DC universe was a series of islands separated for years, suddenly discovering one another and setting up trade routes. And there was Marvel’s beautifully orchestrated growth and development’ (2011, 117). As a result, the DC fiction network was already beset by ‘chronic ontological subsidence’ (Fisher 2016, 58) as they chased Marvel’s newfound popularity by emulating the continuity principle. This would be one of the principal reasons—or at least the industrial rationale—for DC’s reboots that followed Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986. As we shall see in the next chapter, one of the reasons that DC employed reboots on several occasions—reboots that have not truly wiped the slate clean of previous memories in any case—has been to strategically recalibrate and repair continuity for dedicated super-readers and, more pointedly, to provide access points for new readers. Conversely, Marvel have not yet resorted to such drastic measures, choosing instead to retcon and relaunch, rather than reboot, ‘making Marvel Comics the longest ongoing comic book universe in history’ (Friedenthal 2022, 3). This is not to imply that Marvel ran such a tight ship that, compared with DC, their continuity was ‘perfect’ (we have already seen how Captain America’s continuity has been retconned multiple times). As such, Stan Lee would turn continuity into a kind of game for avid readers, with the so-called No-Prize, ‘literally, an empty envelope’ (Sweeney 2013, 143) marked with the words: ‘CONGRATULATIONS! THIS ENVELOPE CONTAINS A GENUINE COMICS NO-PRIZE WHICH YOU HAVE JUST WON!’ The No-Prize was awarded to the most forensic of fans who

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would write into the comic having spotted a continuity error and suggest a coherent explanation for the mishap. Lee’s continuity games, however, had precedent elsewhere. For instance, Superman #145 from 1961 ‘contained a story full of deliberate mistakes and a challenge to readers to spot them’ (Gordon 2017, 37). In fact, Superman readers would often write into the comic to criticize ‘goofs’ and ‘boo-boos’, gleefully challenging editor Mort Weisinger to resolve them (Jones and Jacobs 1997, 17). Contemporary superhero comic fans may be famous for militantly policing continuity, but readers have been engaging in continuity sports since at least the 1960s. In the digital era, it is quite common for fans to turn to online territories to conduct ‘indexical labour’ (Proctor 2020), by which I refer to the fannish project of scrutinizing, policing, and cataloguing an imaginary world’s narrative architecture, highlighting continuity snarls as they go. This will to taxonomize is displayed across many websites. Consider ‘The Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe,’7 for instance, which includes indexes, histories, and chronological maps that go as far back as the 1930s. Although this archiving is incomplete despite launching in 1996, the website rightly explains that it is ‘an ongoing project to provide a complete index to every DC comic set in the DC universe,’ a project that will in fact never be completed as new titles are published every week. Take also Keith Callbeck’s ‘History of the DC Universe 3.0’ on Comicosity, which maps DC continuity from Crisis on Infinite Earths to the present day, including many articles on regenerative, diachronic shifts in DC canon.8 Similarly, Collin Colsher’s ‘The Real Batman Continuity Project’9 offers detailed chronologies of the Dark Knight across comics history, whereas Jason Hamilton’s ‘DC Comics Timeline’10 presents an extensive transmedia catalogue that covers not only superhero comics, but also film, television, games, books, and includes an app. Unlike the ‘DC Universe Online Wiki,’ which is constructed from the online pool of collective knowledge (Jenkins 2006), many indexical labourers have embarked on projects as individuals, demonstrating that expertise is not invariably collaborative (see Hills 2015). The complexity, size, and scope of massive fiction networks suggest that these types of activities are largely the dominion of super-readers (Wolk 2007, 105). Superhero comics should therefore be viewed as ‘a cluster of overlapping serials, with dozens running in parallel at any given time’ that have ‘a different relationship with time and sequence than most kinds of narrative art’ (Wolk 2021, 4). In academic terms, superhero comics are

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especially ‘polychronic’ in that they exploit a ‘fuzzy temporality,’ a ‘strategically inexact mode of narration that makes sequential (re)organization tasking (but not impossible)’ (Herman 2003, 211–12). Yet it is precisely this complexity that informs fannish bids for (sub)cultural capital through invocations of expertise to shore up their status as experts (see Brown 2004). It is worth noting that it is not only Batmen, Wonder Women, and Supermen that audiences have focused their attentions on regarding transfictional continuity. Fans of other genres have also turned to the affordances of online portals and platforms to analyse, critique, and catalogue the contents of imaginary worlds, many of which organize ‘polychronic’ chaos into chronological order. Indeed, there are similar indexical practices associated with soap operas, crime series, firefighter and hospital dramas. For example, the long-running TV series Grey’s Anatomy (2005–) has its own dedicated fandom wiki, ‘The Grey’s Anatomy Universe,’11 which includes episode synopses and crossovers between its spin-off continuation shows, Private Practice (2007–2013) and Station 19 (2018–). In fact, crossovers between various TV series are quite common in contemporary media nowadays, further emphasizing the impact of superhero comics and corresponding pulp traditions on mainstream entertainment genres and forms. By the same token, fans of the UK soap opera Coronation Street have pooled their resources in associated online fora to conduct indexical labor on websites such as Corriepedia and the fan-generated Coronation Street Blog.12 As with comic book super-readers, some ‘Corrie’ fans also police the narrative logics of the show, focusing attention on snarls and snags in continuity. On the Coronation Street Past and Present Wiki,13 for example, there is a page dedicated to indexing the numerous continuity errors that have occurred across the series’ sixty-year programming history, including enactments of retroactive continuity that revised the backstories of characters. As one Corrie fan writes: Rewriting history annoys us long time viewers of Coronation Street and it's only a recent occurrence, within the last six or eight years or so. Long-time viewers or viewers that have seen old videos and read many of the books out there that have detailed history of Coronation Street's past remember what happened, especially if it was something momentous or something that made a particular impression. They never used to play fast and loose with the history. (Tyvor 2007)

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Christine Geraghty has emphasized that Coronation Street viewers do remember a serial’s past very clearly and expect any references to it to be accurate, down to the last detail. This accumulation of knowledge by the committed audience is recognized by those working on the programme, who boast about the detailed attention to minutiae which their audience give the serial. (1981, 16)

Although Geraghty notes that ‘the Coronation Street production team includes a programme historian who ensures that any references to the past are correct,’ that the serial ‘operates in a situation in which it must be accessible to all viewers while, at the same time, be accurate about its own accumulated past,’ it is clear from the activities of indexical labourers that this is not always the case (Ibid.). Although the affordances of digital media lend themselves to the encyclopaedic impulses of continuity acolytes, readers during the 1960s would make do with more analogue modes of engagement, such as the letters pages contained within superhero comics, and later, in grassroot fanzines. Mike Ashley traces the origins of letter columns historically to early science fiction pulp magazines, especially Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, the first to focus entirely on science fiction content (1926). Although ‘letter columns were not new in magazines, not even in specialist ones,’ the letters page in Amazing Stories ‘became something different, and this was due to the nature of the science fiction fan’ (Ashley 2000, 52), the affective energy of whom precipitated an emergent community of dedicated sci-fi readers. Amazing Stories thus rapidly became a close friend, and the letter column the only avenue for these fans to talk about their wild imaginings which were otherwise known as crackpot by friends or family. This was the real secret of Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and is the cause of the popularity of science fiction. He had tapped into the secret dreams of the nation, and mostly the young, and allowed them a channel for expression. This was to lead to both an explosion in the interest in and writing of science fiction, and the birth of science fiction fandom. (Ibid.)

As noted earlier, many of the key players in superhero comics during both the Golden and Silver Ages were highly active participants in science fiction fandom, including editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, so that one could certainly make the argument that the superhero industry

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was mostly built out of the collaboration between early sci-fi fans (which would imply that the producer/consumer binary was more than blurry to begin with). In fact, it was Schwartz who provided earnest comic fan, Jerry Bails, a university professor often described as the founding father of comics fandom, and Roy Thomas, who would go on to become editor for both Marvel and DC, with copies of the science fiction fanzine, Xero (pronounced ‘zero’), which they employed as a template for their own fan enterprises. That Xero featured a page dedicated solely to comics, titled ‘All in Color for a Dime,’ encouraged Bails and Thomas to produce their own fanzine, Alter-Ego, which in many ways spearheaded organized comic book fandom. Bails and Thomas’ efforts paid off, with the first New York Comic-Con and Detroit Triple Fan Fair in 1964 being a direct result (Jones and Jacobs 1997, 67), followed by a wave of fanzines also focused explicitly on superhero comics. At the time, there were no reference books, archives, or indexes that fans could consult to learn about the granularities of comic book culture, their publication histories, or contents therein. Bails especially was instrumental in orchestrating a grassroots movement dedicated to providing histories of the superhero comic. Indeed, as fan historian and chronicler Bill Schelly points out, Jerry Bails ‘was a leading indexer,’ his first efforts being ‘an All-Star Index and a DC Index,’ and in 1964, he published Who’s Who in Comic Fandom with Larry Lattanzi, which included the names and addresses of 1600 readers that had been captured in DC’s letters pages (Schelly 2018, 51). In 1965, The Guidebook to Comics Fandom was published, within which Bails provided the opening essay, ‘America’s Four-Color Pastime,’ a truncated index of Golden Age comics, and a grading system for comics that remains in use today (Schelly 2003, 7). Throughout the mid-to-late 1960s, a bevy of newer fanzines appeared, and by the end of the decade, Bails had published his Collector’s Guide: The First Heroic Age, ‘a very substantial achievement’ according to Schelly (Ibid.). With all this activity, Jerry Bails provided many of the grassroots building blocks that advanced and fortified superhero fan networks. Bails would not be alone for long; soon, there were newer fanzines which began to emerge, many of them tapping into Bails’ existing networks. Historically, the first letters pages in comics arrived in 1940 with Novelty Press’ Target Comics #6, although this was not a regular feature, neither was the first DC comic to include readers’ correspondence in Real Fact Comics #3 from 1946. Instead, it was EC Comic’s titles that began printing readers’ letters on a regular basis in the early 1950s before falling

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afoul of Wertham and the moral crusaders. The first superhero comic to regularly include a letters page was Superman, beginning with #124 from 1958, before other titles followed suit. At Schwartz’s instruction, DC started printing the full addresses of letter-writers—or ‘letter-hacks,’ if they were known to write in regularly—allowing fans to contact one another and build fan networks, much like the early science fiction fans did. Jerry Bails would write to every fan who had their street addresses printed in Hawkman, sharing plans about a fanzine dedicated to the ‘great revival of the costumed heroes’ (Brooker 2005, 251). Following the path laid by Weisinger and Schwartz, Marvel’s Stan Lee launched letters pages in Marvel’s comics and encouraged parasocial relationships between fans and creators. Decades before the internet, then, fans conversed in these letter columns, this ‘public sphere of the imagination’ (Saler 2012, 18), that gave readers the opportunity ‘to read the commentary of their fellow readers, creating an interaction that allowed fans to bring about comics fandom in the early part of the 1960s’ (Pustz 1999, 163). Central to Marvel’s rhetoric, most often espoused through Stan Lee’s promotional ballyhoo, was the notion that ‘fans and professionals were creating the comics together.’ As Lee claimed, ‘I began to feel that I wasn’t even an editor; I was just following orders—orders which came in the mail’ (Pustz 1999, 163). On the one hand, this should be taken with a pinch of salt, more comparable with public (fan) relations than legitimate co-creation. Clearly, readers were beginning to participate in comic book culture, but the idea that they were co-producers was largely disingenuous hyperbole (Darius 2007, 166), more ‘a rhetoric of cooperation between its fans and creators’ (Putsz 1999, 163) than genuine collaboration. Many letters were overtly celebratory, some of which were ghost-­ written by professional staff, others which were not selected for print at all. Yet on the other hand, letters pages may be viewed as an analogue form of participatory culture, having played such a significant role in the emergence of organized fandom. There is evidence that readers have influenced editorial decisions through letter-writing campaigns, at least to some degree. As recounted by Jacobs and Jones (1997, 17), for instance, the creation of writer Otto Binder’s Supergirl came about because of a flood of fan mail from female readers: When one story featured a super-powered woman [in Superman #123 from August 1958], hundreds of girls wrote to demand a female counterpart for Superman. Weisinger’s letters pages [‘the Metropolis Mailbag’] revealed a

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higher proportion of female readers than was typical of superhero comics, and he steadily strengthened his distaff readership base with an attention to female characters … Weisinger and [Otto] Binder met the girl’s demands with Supergirl, a teenage Kryptonian with powers nearly equal to her cousin Superman’s. She was promptly awarded a series of her own in the back of Action Comics [#252 from May 1959].

Energized by Schwartz’s superhero reboots, Bails and Thomas were indiscriminate letter-hacks, penning a forest-worth of missives to Schwartz, some of which sought to convince the editor to resuscitate other Golden Age superheroes. Bails would go to extreme lengths to disguise where these letters came from; firstly, by writing under a raft of pseudonyms, and secondly, by mailing the letters from various locations to further mask his identity so that it appeared that an army of readers were demanding further superhero regenerations rather than a lone wolf. In point of fact, Bails claims that he and Thomas were instrumental in encouraging Schwartz to revive other Golden Age superheroes after the success of The Flash and Green Lantern proved that there was life in the old capes and cowls yet. As remembered by Bails, they both ‘bombarded DC with scores of letters,’ with requests for a letters page in the Justice League comic (which Schwartz duly provided) and suggestions about which superhero should next receive the reboot treatment (Schelly 2018, ‘Chapter two’). Unlike contemporary film reboots, which have more recently been constructed as ‘bad’ objects by entertainment journalists and fans as discussed in Chap. 1, what is certainly interesting here is that organized superhero comic fandom was, to a degree, initiated by an affective, positive response to DC’s reboots of The Flash and Green Lantern. By the same token, the revival of the superhero ensemble team with the Justice League of America ‘thoroughly energized older readers who had grown up reading the Justice Society’s adventures in All-Star Comics’ (Pustz 1999, 44). It was largely thanks to DC’s reboots that a new phase of superhero comic book culture was spearheaded in this Silver Age. I don’t want to pretend that fans like Bails and Thomas were essentially co-authors and co-creators. As rehearsed in Chap. 1, fans who tap into discursive networks to offer feedback and creative ideas—ideas that are then heeded, repurposed, and channelled back into official production cultures—is but the beginning of a more complex situation (Hills 2002), one that demonstrates that the production/consumption binary is more dialectical, ‘one of continuing interaction and change’ (Parsons 1991,

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82), rather than being reducible to an omnipotent corporate entity dictating the flow of culture without challenge or discrimination. Although we certainly must not forget ‘the impact or influence of the material on readers’, there is also ‘the influence of readers on the production of content’ to consider (Ibid.), which is not to claim that the relationship is symmetrical and co-equal (see Chap. 1). If we consider the example above of fangirls writing into ‘The Metropolis Mailbag’ to demand a female counterpart for Superman, we can see a dialectical, discursive exchange taking place between spheres of production and consumption. In other words, fans request a supergirl of some kind, and then receive it (indicating ‘fan-­ power’ in action, some might say). Yet this affective triumph, if we can describe it as such, also means that invested readers have essentially provided immaterial labour for producers to repurpose into a material object that can be purchased and profited from. Simultaneously, however, to view the creation of Supergirl as an example and celebration of fannish ‘resistance’ is to promote a romantic idealism that disguises the means and relations of production in the capitalist economy. What is more, there is also a political-ideological dimension that should be recognized: if nothing else, these fans were also critiquing the lack of female superheroes in the DC universe of the time. As fan objects are ‘intrinsically interwoven with our sense of self’ (Sandvoss 2005, 96), the immaterial labour practices of these letter writers became important parts of their lived experiences and lifeworlds, and as such, they can be seen to possess social functions as modes of engagement that strengthen fannish identity and self-narrative, as well as developing social relationships between readers. As fan historian Bill Schelly writes: No doubt about it: the rise of comic fandom was a genuine American grassroots movement. Entirely unplanned, it took hold in whatever fertile soil it could find. Fans emerged like so many wild mushrooms, popping up from sea to shining sea, from Peoria to Portland, from Nome to Norfolk. Linked by nothing faster than the plodding U.S mail (in an era before long-distance telephoning was commonplace and the internet was science fiction), fans who were hungry for camaraderie spread the word quickly. (2018, 59)

Although there are many caveats to be applied to this early example of participatory culture, letters pages became ‘at the least rudimentary social networks’ or ‘discursive community of sorts’, as Gordon puts it, ‘embedded in social practices of reading in which writing letters played a large

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role’ in the emergence of comic book fandom (2012, 121). As David Sweeney observes (2013, 143), the importance of letter writing to the development of both comic book fandom and the superhero genre cannot be overstated  ... readers’ letters were an inexpensive form of market research while for fans they provided not only a forum for discussion but, once editors began to print readers’ full postal addresses … a means by which to contact each other and form a “virtual community” (which could be “actualised” by the conventions that followed).

While the tools and platforms of the digital era have meant that the comic book letters page is an endangered species nowadays, it would be a mistake to embrace the idea that there are vast differences between analogue and digital participatory cultures, at least in principle. To be sure, the provisions and affordances supplied by the internet and computer technologies have led to an enormous upsurge in user-generated content, be that in blogs, across social media platforms, and so forth. By the same token, the production and publication of user-generated content online does not usually need to go through a selection process: for better or worse, anyone can publish their thoughts and opinions without confronting an editorial filter (unless comments and posts are policed for offensive language). As Cornel Sandvoss stresses, ‘these forms of fan productivity precede the proliferation of the Internet into a widely available house-hold communications technology’ (2011, 51). It is also important to consider the way in which these grassroots fan networks played a major role in the emergence of authorship discourses. Most superhero comics in the USA are created on ‘work-for-hire’ contracts, freelancers who do not retain ownership rights of characters that they create or co-create, and in many cases, do not receive royalties from merchandise and other extra-textual expressions. During the Golden Age, creators were generally not allowed to sign their work, although some managed to sneak their signatures in somewhere, as Joe Shuster often did, and Batman artist Bob Kane enjoyed ‘a rare cult of authorship’ (Brooker 2005, 250) in the Golden Age (see Chap. 6). In the early 1960s, Jerry Bails sought as much information as possible about writers and artists that worked uncredited during the Golden Age, usually by badgering Schwartz for details, and it is largely thanks to his efforts that fans learned the

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identities of many of these creators through the diligent indexes and fanzines created by Bails. It was generally accepted that artists, writers, letterers, and inkers would not be awarded authorial credit in the comics they created. This practice continued into the Silver Age, but the activities of letter writers and the emergence of dedicated fanzines prompted key shifts in this area. Fans would often exchange information pertaining to the identities of creators by drawing on their own expertise as super-readers to recognize artists by style, yet they also marshalled theories about writers, inkers, and letterers. For a time, exchanges between fans and editors unfolded in letters pages during the 1960s with regard to authorship, becoming a kind of ‘sophisticated parlour-game’ (Ibid., 257) involving authorial riddles that fans took it upon themselves to solve. Although ‘it was the fans who created the cult of authorship around recognizable styles and creative traits,’ editors responded by playing as well by providing new challenges (Ibid., 256). Indeed, there could be ‘no puzzle if writer, inker and penciller were given full, explicit credit’ (Ibid., 257). Once full credits started to become more typical in the mid-to-late 1960s, however, this element of the game came to an end, but the provision of authorial identities would open up a space for other exchanges between fans and editors, exchanges focused on favourite creators, differences in style, narrative and character (Ibid., 258). In doing so, the way in which fans analyse texts, comparing and contrasting them with other creators to determine themes, issues and motifs, ‘media that outsiders may still perceive as lowbrow begin to acquire the marks of [so-called] high culture’ (Kidman 2019, 108). As Brooker explains, ‘discourses of comic fandom and comic authorship were born as twins and have grown up together over the last few decades, siblings locked into a relationship of debate and mutual dependence’ (2005, 250).

Conclusion We head into the ’80s in the next chapter, a decade that saw the genre threatened once more by a range of factors, including market-forces, competition from other media, and a serious decline in reader demographics, even as the cash nexus received a boost from new licensing agreements. For DC, the solution was thought to lie in what has become known nowadays as the ‘event-series,’ a massive multi-part crossover narrative that would service continuity acolytes and long-term readers by encouraging

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them to purchase more comic books so they could fully understand the ramifications wrought on the fiction network. DC were also fully aware that they needed to attract new readers if superhero comics were going to remain economically viable, so they embarked on a monumental project called Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985–1986), a twelve-part series that included over thirty tie-in stories published across other DC titles. Written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez, DC decided that in order to address their commercial woes, they needed to destroy their universe, wipe the slate clean of continuity, and begin again.

Notes 1. Eastern Colour Printing’s anthology Famous Funnies #1 is typically viewed as the first American comic book proper. 2. Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Batman, Detective Comics, Superboy, Superman, Wonder Woman, and World’s Finest Comics. 3. I am indebted to Matt Hills for the term ‘reflexive reboot.’ 4. The term ‘multiverse’ was coined to describe parallel worlds by fantasy/ science fiction author, Michael Moorcock in his 1963 novella The Sundered Worlds. Moorcock’s multiverse would become an integral part of his ‘Eternal Champion’ cycle. 5. http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/index.php?page=fanboy&a rticleid=1 6. The comic would be retitled Marvel Mystery Comics from #2 onwards. 7. http://dcuguide.com/w/Main_Page 8. http://www.comicosity.com/read-­between-­the-­lines-­history-­of-­the-­dc-­ universe-­3-­0/ 9. https://therealbatmanchronologyproject.com/ 10. https://comicbookreadingorders.com/dc/event-­timeline/ 11. https://greysanatomy.fandom.com/wiki/Grey%27s_Anatomy_ Universe_Wiki 12. https://coronationstreetupdates.blogspot.com 13. https://coronation-­s treet-­p ast-­a nd-­p resent.fandom.com/wiki/ Continuity_Errors

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CHAPTER 4

Crisis Management: Archaeology of the Pre-Boot

“These days, even if you followed the comics all growing up, you can pick up a comic book and read it four times and there is a strong possibility that you will still have no idea what happened in the book because of how convoluted the continuity has become … If you don’t understand this scene already, then it would take the equivalent of 12 college credits to explain it to you” —James Cisell, Comic Book Reader

As Marvel rose in stature in the 1960s, both commercially and culturally, DC’s superheroes appeared comparatively conservative, outmoded, and outdated. Although Julius Schwartz’s revival project and the rise of Marvel injected new life into the genre by refreshing and regenerating superhero comics, the medium’s economic performance began to decline once more from 1969 onwards (Williams 2020, 27; Gabilliet 2010, 73), a decade that would prove especially challenging for not only the Big Two as ‘all publishers would find it one of the tougher decades in the history of comics’ (Comichron n.d). To curb the decline, DC and Marvel both increased their cover prices by 25%, but the strategy mostly backfired, the results of which hit DC the hardest: Painful declines hit Superman and Batman, and even mid-range titles like Green Lantern were off 20%. Marvel, meanwhile, switched its prices later in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Proctor, Reboot Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40912-7_4

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the year and saw less dramatic drops. Amazing Spider-Man sales were nearly flat, but in this market that still allowed it to reach the Top 10 for the first time. Spidey’s own cartoon show was on its second (and last) season on ABC. (Ibid.)

DC nonetheless managed to maintain commercial pole position with seven titles in the top ten compared with Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man at number seven, but the number one spot in 1969 was taken by Archie with sales upwards of 500,000, supported by the debut of The Archie Show (1968) TV series on ABC the previous year (Ibid.). In 1971, however, the unthinkable happened: Marvel Comics raced into the lead for the first time, more than likely due to the publisher’s expansion of their product line that would award them the largest share of the market. Much of this had to do with the fact that Marvel’s comics were distributed by the DC-owned Independent News Company, a deal that had been agreed by Martin Goodman in 1956 when the publisher was still Atlas Comics. Part of the agreement stipulated that Atlas were able to distribute only eight titles, with Goodman deciding it would be better to publish sixteen bimonthly comics, which effectively meant that DC limited the publisher’s competitive threat in the years ahead (Duncan and Smith 2009, 44; Kidman 2019, 81; Wright 2001, 201). Once Goodman sold Marvel to Perfect Film & Chemical in 1969, however—the same year that his contract with Independent News Company expired—their distribution division took over, which gave the publisher free reign to publish as many titles as they liked (Howe 2012, 101). As a result, Marvel started to aggressively expand its product line. This strategy, however, had the opposite effect, saturating the market with too much content that saw problems associated with the newsstand distribution system rise once again— although they had never truly been addressed in any case—leading directly to the creation of what was largely known as the ‘collector’ or ‘fan’ market at the time, and what is known nowadays as the Direct Market. Established in 1974 by comic-con organizer, Phil Seuling, this new system would largely do away with newsstand distribution, triggering the rise of specialty comic bookstores that continue to dominate the market today. In the 1970s and ’80s, the American comic landscape changed dramatically ‘primarily because of two factors: first, the creation of the “direct market,” a system where publishers sold comic books directly to specialty bookstores, and second, challenges to the Comics Code Authority that regulated the news stand comic industry’ (Weiner 2010, 3).

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The way the distribution system had traditionally operated was no longer viable as a business model, having been a problem since at least the 1950s (see Chap. 3). Prior to the Direct Market, publishers sold their fleet of titles to newsstands and newsagents on a ‘sale or return’ basis whereby publishers agreed to buy back unsold items. This worked very well during the boom years of the 1940s when over 70% of print runs were purchased, yet by the 1970s, the system was not only buckling but was also confronted by corrupt business practices. Bypassing the newsstands, a tactic first employed by the underground ‘comix’ publishers, meant that the draconian restrictions of the Comics Code could effectively be side-­ stepped. Although the Comics Code Authority would not be fully disbanded until 2011, it soon became clear that the body was swiftly losing its iron-fisted grip on the industry, made possible because of the shift in the distribution model that had lasted since the medium’s genesis. This is not to suggest that the Direct Market solved all industry woes. By circumventing newsstand distribution entirely, publishers would ensure that comics reached a certain audience made up of super-readers, collectors, and speculators, rather than the childhood audiences that had been their primary consumer market for decades. With regard to sales, however, the move to this newer mode of distribution was a gradual process that grew incrementally over the next two decades or so before it almost fully replaced the older model. Although there was the beginning of a surge in Direct Market sales by the end of the decade (Williams 2020, 63), the 1970s would be exemplified by transition and transformation as most publishers sought to confront anxieties pertaining to the medium’s commercial difficulties. In 1971, DC sought to regenerate some of its titles through more socially relevant stories that captured the attention of mainstream media outlets. Writing for The New York Times Magazine, for instance, Saul Braun highlighted DC’s new ‘socially relevant’ approach, referencing Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow that Braun describes as ‘the first of [DC’s] relevance books,’ a series underscored by its striking storylines that tapped into a variety of contemporary issues, such as racism, poverty, overpopulation, and drug abuse (Braun 1971, 31). DC’s newest editor, Carmine Infantino, claimed that the comics medium was experiencing a ‘renaissance’ at the time, a claim tempered by Marvel’s Martin Goodman who argued that

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[i]ndustrywide … the volume [of sales] is not going up. I think the comic-­ book field suffers from the same thing TV does. After a few years, an erosion sets in. You still maintain loyal readers, but you lose a lot more readers than you’re picking up. (Ibid.)

Indeed, for all Infantino’s talk of a ‘renaissance,’ the socially relevant approach failed to stimulate DC’s bottom line, and publishers turned to other genres, just as their Golden Age forerunners did during the late 1940s and early 50s. Marvel relaunched Conan the Barbarian, for example, a character originally from the 1930s, which established a regularly imitated blueprint ‘of sword-and-sorcery fantasy with an emphasis on raw-­ mannered, peripatetic blade-swingers’ (Williams 2020, 68). For DC, sales on many of their marquee titles suffered enormously. In 1975, Superman fell below 300,000 for the first time in over three decades of continuous publication, ‘some 150,000 fewer than five years prior’ (Tucker 2017, 100). And in 1976, the price of superhero comics went up to 35 cents, and ‘that’s when the readership really dropped off’ (112). As Paul Williams explains: Even at the most successful end of the market, sales dropped: Archie’s monthly sales went from 483,000 in 1970 to 155,000 in 1977 to 70,000 in 1983. Average sales of Superman, DCs biggest seller, dropped from 447,000 at the start of the decade to 246,000 at its end. The overall picture was of plunging sales and rising production costs. (Williams 2020, 36)

Beginning in 1975, DC’s new editor Jenette Kahn sought to treat the economic health of the publisher by aggressively increasing their number of titles over a three-year period and lengthened the page count to justify a significant price increase. In 1978, Kahn oversaw an ambitious project labelled ‘the DC Explosion,’ the failure of which has come to be known as the DC Implosion in fan and industry circles (Dallas and Wells 2018). In the late 1970s, the revenue from licensing agreements outstripped publishing for the first time. As discussed in Chap. 3, DC had been highly active in pursuing inter-industry franchise agreements, beginning in 1940 with the formation of Superman Inc., which resulted in multiple transmedia expressions, adaptations, and spin-offs. In 1943, Batman joined the party with the character’s first film ‘adaptation,’ a black-and-white fifteen-­ part ‘super serial’ that was released weekly in theatres. The Man of Steel flew onto television screens in The Adventures of Superman (1952–1958)

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starring George Reeves, and Batman received his own live-action TV series in 1966. In the 1970s, several more television adaptations sought to further enhance and extend the profits of the ‘big two’ publishers through licensing agreements, including DC’s long-running animated series Super Friends (1973–85), and the live-action Wonder Woman (1975–79), while Marvel produced The Incredible Hulk (1978–82) and The Amazing Spider-Man (1977–79). But the most successful superhero adaptation in the 1970s was certainly Superman: The Movie (1978), a film that managed to tap into audiences’ appetite for large-scale blockbusters of the kind instigated by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1974) and George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). It may be tempting to view the box office success of Superman: The Movie as a sign that superhero properties were as healthy as ever, yet by the end of 1978, DC had cancelled thirty-one titles because of Kahn’s ‘DC Explosion’ initiative, and thus ended the decade clinging to the ropes. DC’s newest corporate parents, Warner Communications Inc., had seriously considered closing the publishing arm of the business altogether before Kahn was hired as a replacement for Carmine Infantino (Kidman 2019, 115; Wright 2001, 251). For Warner’s executives, superhero comics were valuable inasmuch as they served as source material for more profitable media, most notably in film and television. As such, comic books became ‘a loss leader for Warner’s other entertainment subsidiaries,’ and domestic publishing started losing money (Kidman 2019, 115). Although The Adventures of Superman TV series boosted sales of comic books (and merchandise) in the 1950s, Superman: The Movie did not provide, as DC expected, ‘a direct boost to the comics industry’ (Perren and Steirer 2021, 22). On 13 October 1979, The New York Times published an article that emphasized the profit margins of comics ‘has for years been tumbling downhill,’ resulting from ‘the influence of TV, the diminishing number of distribution points and rising prices’ (Kleiner 1979, 25). Further, licensing monies have ballooned to the extent that they now contribute more revenues than the comics. These revenues stem from some 300 items—such as superhero bath towels, sheets, drinking cups, and toys—as well as TV shows and movies. They prompt one Marvel writer to grouse, “Marvel seems to be becoming a toy company rather than a publisher” … DC Comics drastically shrank its line last year, and Marvel has cut its list of titles to 32 from 45. (Ibid.)

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The fates seemed to be stacked against both publishers during the Bronze Age, but it was DC that bore the brunt of market forces, ‘the combination of unsold stock, a general downturn in the US economy … the poor quality of some of the new titles,’ as well as distribution headaches instigated by horrendous winter storms along the East Coast meant that many comics did not even make it to retailers (Duncan and Smith 2009, 62). In June 1979, the sales chart published in the Comic Reader demonstrated that Marvel was not only maintaining pole position, but dominating the market, and overwhelmingly so. By 1984, Marvel was outselling DC by a margin of ten-to-one in the new Direct Market. As Jason Sacks explains, this sales disparity was due to the wide-spread reader perception that much of the DC Universe was too stodgy … Parts of DC’s line were truly moribund. Sales on The Flash, for instance, had dropped from a monthly average of 102, 297 copies in 1980 to 67,881 in 1985, a disastrous 33% decline in five years, and a shocking 80% drop from the title’s late 1960s high. (2013, 128)

For DC’s executives and editors, the situation could not be clearer: the publisher’s complex and complicated continuity was to blame for deterring new readers from purchasing comics. As Kidman explains, from the 1960s onwards, ‘the editors at DC embarked on an effective audience strategy that did not spread to other media for decades: they began marketing their product to fans’ (2019, 106). As a strategy, this would be both a blessing and a curse. By mainly servicing fans, publishers focused on a pool of loyal super-readers who had supported the genre’s rebirth throughout the 1960s, meaning that the shift to intensive continuity would end up ‘limiting audience growth by frustrating comprehensibility’ (Beaty 2016, 320). As discussed in Chap. 1, continuity may possess an in-­ built commodity logic, each issue serving as ‘entertainment stepping stones’ (Freeman 2014, 17) that encouraged readers to follow the narrative footprints across as many titles as possible. Yet, simultaneously, this strategy would lead to a decline in readership demographics. In essence, the DC Universe was not only wracked by continuity snarls but editors believed that the multiverse functioned to disincentivize new readers from purchasing their superhero comics. As DC writer Marv Wolfman claimed, he had

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received a letter from a fan asking about a mix-up in DC continuity. In my reply, I said, “One day we (meaning the DC editorial we) will probably straighten out what is in the DC universe … and what is outside.” At this point in its history DC Comics has Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-3, Earth-B, etc. There were superheroes on each Earth and though old-time readers had no problem understanding DC continuity, it proved off-putting to new readers who suddenly discovered there was not one but three Supermans, Wonder Womans, Batmans, etc. (Wolfman and Perez 2000, 1)

Whether apocryphal or not, Wolfman pitched a series proposal to DC editorial in 1981, originally titled The History of the DC Universe, which was intended to ‘take DC’s jumbled continuity and create a single, clean timeline in its place’ (Tucker 2017, 148). Wolfman was given the greenlight the same year, announcing the project for publication in 1982, but due to the size and scope of the venture, DC decided to schedule the series to coincide with the company’s fiftieth anniversary in 1985 (Ibid.). Tapping seasoned veteran, George Perez, to serve as artist, the name of the project was changed to Crisis on Infinite Earths (henceforth Crisis). First published between April 1985 and May 1986, Crisis was a twelve-­ part maxiseries, branded with the (now famous) slogan: ‘worlds will live, worlds will die, and the universe will never be the same again.’ It was both a marketing exercise employed to attract new readers and a narrative strategy that ‘sought to revise and recalibrate the entire fictional universe in which DC superhero comics took place, streamlining the company’s previously confusing parallel universes and multiple earths’ (Booker 2010, 127). Ultimately, Crisis was meant to conduct a cleansing operation, a narrative enema that set out to purge the hyperdiegesis of impurities by washing away fifty years of backstory and continuity in one fell swoop. As a commercial exercise, it was a seminal project. As a continuity operation, it failed massively. Roz Kaveney argues that Crisis is ‘the grand original of reboots’ (2008, 191), but I want to challenge this notion. Firstly, we have already seen that the reboot concept has a longer history, as explored in Chap. 3, so Crisis is not an ‘original’ in that sense. Secondly, Crisis was not specifically a reboot—it was not a new ‘first reading head’, but an ending, ‘a death ritual performed within the space of the fiction network’ (Craft 2004, 7). As reboots function to provide entry points for new readers by wiping the slate clean, Crisis in no way offers access of this kind. Rather, it is a complex, complicated, and convoluted narrative designed for super-readers

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only, those who would require substantial transfictional dictionaries to fully grasp the particulars of the story, and certainly not a gateway for new readers (or ‘jumping-on point’ in fan vernacular). As Charles Hatfield explains, Crisis wasn’t so much about bringing new readers on board—that would have to be accomplished by other comics with less of a continuity geek-quotient—as about saying goodbye to a lot of stuff, on the understanding that stuff needed to be whittled away for the sale of the commercial bottom line. (Kazcynski 2020)

Contrarily, the ‘jumping-on point’ for new readers would arrive with the reboots that came in the wake of the event’s conclusion, including John Byrne’s six-part mini-series The Man of Steel (1986), which I examine in Chap. 5, and George Perez’s Wonder Woman (1987). It is also important to understand that a ‘jumping-on point’ can just as easily be a ‘jumpingoff point’ for seasoned readers that decry the fact that the comics they have purchased—and, in many cases, collected for several years—no longer ‘count’ as part of official continuity. Of course, fans understand that their comic book collection still exists as material objects, but textual conservationism (Hills 2002) is an affective, metaphorical performance by which editorial injunctions of the sort that Crisis enacts are viewed as nothing less than assaults on continuity and canon—and thus assaults on ‘trajectories of the self,’ as Anthony Giddens might put it (1984). Put differently, Crisis announced that fans’ comic book collections up until that point no longer ‘count’ as part of history, as part of narrative memory. It’s not that those comics have been stolen; it’s that they have been declared symbolically null and void. For fans, this not only disrespects the time they have spent engaging with the DC Universe but also the economic costs of doing so. To be informed that one’s collection has been ousted from continuity sets the grounds for criticism and dissent from the DC core readership, a risky endeavour indeed given that adult super-readers formed the core consumer base by the mid-eighties. Strategically, then, Crisis provided metafictional gestures to super-readers so that they could understand the changes being wrought on the fiction network intradiegetically (i.e., as part of the story itself), much in the same way that ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ did by unifying the Golden and Silver Age iterations of the Flash (although taken to radical extremes in order to vindicate the erasure of almost fifty years of story).

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Although I argue that Crisis is not a reboot, event-series of this nature often work as metafictional preludes that narratively enact the concept of retroactive continuity to revise continuity and clear a space for reboots to follow in the aftermath. This strategy would be employed with other DC event-series, such as Zero Hour: Crisis in Time (1994), Infinite Crisis (2005), Flashpoint (2011), and Dark Knights: Death Metal (2020). As these kinds of ‘events’ are often tethered to the reboot concept in comic books as prelude, providing narrative logics that furnish readers with an intradiegetic thesis that underscore strategies of regeneration, I would argue that it is perhaps best to understand Crisis and its successors as ineluctably interlocked with the reboot process. As ‘event-series’ like Crisis are not reboots, I define them instead as pre-boots. To complicate matters further, Crisis did not, as many scholars have argued, result in the entire DC Universe being rebooted from the beginning again. Although this is certainly what chief architect and writer Marv Wolfman intended, he was challenged by DC’s Managing Editor Dick Giordano, who grew concerned that wiping the slate clean would lead to protests from fans. The idea therefore that Crisis ‘rewrote DC’s entire continuity in such a way that every book had to reboot itself afterwards’ (Sandifer 2013, 175), or that it ‘did make DC’s narrative universe more accessible to new readers’ (Brooker 2011, 26), is problematic. I will show in this chapter (and the next) how post-Crisis continuity was much more complicated than traditional accounts have hitherto provided as many characters retained memories of the continuity that was supposed to have been erased by the event. To redress this oversight, this chapter explores not only Crisis itself, but the editorial complications that left the DC Universe ‘even more chaotic than before’ (Klock 2002, 31), and certainly not a dominion that new readers could enter without experiencing interpretative difficulties. Unlike most academic studies, I want to also consider what is known as the post-­ Crisis DC Universe to demonstrate that editorial decisions led to further discontinuities across the transfictional axis, discontinuities that occurred, at least in part, because of editorial anxieties anchored to the very real potential for fannish backlash. In what follows, I begin by discussing the narrative attributes of the ‘event-series’ before engaging with the story presented in Crisis. This leads into a section on post-Crisis (dis)continuity to show that the DC universe had not been rebooted cleanly after the event-series’ conclusion. The final section looks at the letter pages in professional fanzine, Amazing Heroes, to assess how fans originally responded

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to Crisis. In Chap. 5, I continue this case study by exploring John Byrne’s post-Crisis Superman reboot, The Man of Steel.

Introducing the ‘Event-Series’ Although the ‘event-series’ is a common staple of superhero comics publishing these days, the idea was ground-breaking in the 1980s. In broad strokes, an event-series can be described as a limited series, typically six to twelve issues, that narrate fictional-universe-­ spanning conflicts between superpowered beings, the effects of which often crossover into ongoing comic-book series as title characters deal with the fallout from the event. Events are often used by mainstream comic-book companies, notably Marvel and DC, to boost sales and to act as catalysts for rebooting, re-organizing, and renumbering a company’s publishing slate. (Guynes 2019, 172)

Although crossovers had been part and parcel of superhero comic storytelling since the Golden Age (see Chap. 3), the event-series would develop the idea much further by incorporating multiple comic book series into grand unified narrative tapestries. So, a main story may be told in a miniseries—ordinarily six-to-twelve issues in length, as Guynes explains above—with tie-in material fortifying and supplementing the narrative, the goal being to encourage readers to purchase comics outside of their regular orders (commonly referred to as a ‘pull-list’). Although the scale and magnitude of Crisis was unprecedented at the time, it was not the first large-scale superhero crossover. Indeed, Marvel pipped DC to the post a year earlier with Secret Wars, which was, like Crisis, a twelve-part maxiseries, published from May 1984 to April 1985, and featuring most of the company’s character population—or at least the big hitters—crossing over from their various titles to combat the Beyonder (Shooter et al., 1984–85). Secret Wars also involved tie-ins with various ongoing titles, such as The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, Captain America, and The Incredible Hulk, amongst others. As with contemporary event-series, the story played out within a core of series titles—Secret Wars #1–12—but also involved a raft of individual titles that ‘tied in’ with the series to encourage readers to purchase comics that they may not have bought otherwise. Economically, the central ambition of the event-series is to attract enough interest and investment to stimulate sales.

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The idea underpinning Secret Wars was largely orientated around licensing, especially the sale of toys—action figures, weapons, vehicles, locations, and other merchandising expressions. In the introduction to the 30th Anniversary trade paperback collection, Marvel editor and writer Jim Shooter openly shared his views about the series and its original ambition as an extended advertisement for a new toy-line in partnership with Mattel (who had, at the time, successfully launched a franchise based on fantasy character He-Man, with the Masters of the Universe animated TV series serving as a savvy hybrid of text and paratext.) Secret Wars introduced new elements that were later subsumed into Marvel continuity, including the introduction of Spider-Man’s black costume, which, in Shooter’s account, ‘caused quite a stir, got huge publicity and spawned characters and storylines that continue to this day’ (2014, 3). Secret Wars was certainly ‘the first mega-crossover’ (Ibid.), but Crisis went much further in its objectives. As such, Crisis was ‘a watershed moment in the history of superhero comics’ and provided a template for ‘the endless series of “events” and “crossovers” in the decades since’ (Friedenthal 2011, 1). That said, however, Crisis had its roots in the Earth-One/Earth-Two crossovers that began in the 1960s, as explored in Chap. 3, with titles such as ‘Crisis on Earth-One’ and ‘Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two’ serving as diachronic and diegetic foundations for the event-series.

Crisis Storytelling In story terms, Crisis is an ambitious, dense, and baroque paean to DC’s superhero mythology, a story that is impossible to comprehend if one is not already a committed super-reader. Even then, it is not always coherent, the plot being ‘meandering, complicated and not particularly easy to recount’ (Friedenthal 2011, 3). Providing a synopsis is therefore quite challenging for the uninitiated, but for those unfamiliar with the series, a brief description is worth undertaking. At the outset of the story, we learn that the multiverse was born from a quantum anomaly, a cosmological side-effect that should not have been. Thus, ‘a multiverse that should have been one, became many’ (Wolfman and Perez 2000, 11). In a sense, this functions as a rhetorical, metafictional device mobilized narratively to explain away the continuity snarls that have plagued the DC Universe since inception, an error that began at the dawn of time (in story terms). In rejecting the parallel worlds motif,

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Wolfman and Perez can also be viewed as critiquing Julius Schwartz’s editorial sleight-of-hand that gave birth to Silver Age, especially ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ storyline that introduced the multiverse (as explored in Chap. 3). ‘Writers like to confuse matters,’ stated Wolfman in an editorial column in the first issue of Crisis, and what began as a dream of a story—“Flash of Two Worlds”—had turned into a nightmare. DC continuity was so confusing, no new reader could easily understand it, while older readers had to keep miles-long lists to set things straight. And the writers … well, we were always stumbling over each other trying to figure out simple answers to difficult questions. (1986, 32)

In Crisis, the multiverse is framed diegetically as a ‘bad’ object, one which needed to be rectified by a new, ‘good’ object, a streamlined, cohesive, solo universe that does away with the orgy of multiplicity that had created ‘an alphabet soup of letters and concepts that required readers to keep an encyclopedic amount of information in their heads’ (Sacks 2013, 129). Whether intentional or not, Crisis expunged Schwartz’s Silver Age revival project as, like the multiverse within the story, an editorial anomaly that needed to be revised first, and then regenerated, to serve the gatekeepers of order, continuity, and cohesion. So, then, if the first phase of the multiverse can be defined omnivorously as ‘one of expansion and exploration,’ as illustrated in Chap. 3, then Crisis established the second phase, ‘a period of contraction and limitation’ (Friedenthal 2019, 36). This did not, however, limit DC from publishing alternate reality tales in other diegetic locations, such as the Elseworlds imprint, nor did the events of Crisis manage to contain the unrestrained multiplicity that Wolfman felt had barred new readers from accessing DC’s comics. In a nutshell, Crisis revolves around a massive ontological conflict between the binary forces of matter and anti-matter, represented in the story by the Monitor and his antithesis, the Anti-Monitor. Born in the temporal havoc precipitated by DC’s equivalent of the Big Bang, the Anti-­ Monitor travels the multiverse, destroying parallel worlds and their denizens as he goes. In response, the Monitor and Harbinger gather the DC superheroes from across the multiverse to unify against this existential threat, and the battle to save the multiverse begins. In the pages of the series, entire universes are extinguished by the encroaching blank page. The yin and yang of the story—the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor—are like celestial editors, battling one another for the right to exist, narratively

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speaking. The Monitor represents the page itself, the characters rendered in pencil and ink, while the Anti-Monitor is his binary opposite, a representation of anti-matter who spewed into existence with the multiverse as a quantum accident. The two characters function as metaphorical and metafictional constructs, signifying the duality between universe and multiverse, order and chaos, singularity and multiplicity. The war within Crisis is nothing less than a war for existence within the story and, by extension, the DC memory banks. By the end of the series, the multiverse is purged from continuity, and the universe is (supposed to be) revised into a single, hybrid unit. Supergirl has been killed and removed from continuity, perhaps because of the 1984 film adaptation starting Helen Slater, a film that failed to capitalize on the box office success of Superman: The Movie and Superman II (1980)—although DC claimed that Superman’s extended family had to be deleted to return the character to his position as the ‘Last Son of Krypton’ (more of which in Chap. 5). More importantly, the Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen, is annihilated, which might be read as editorial punishment for discovering the multiverse in ‘The Flash of Two Worlds,’ a further disavowal of Schwartz’s revival project that reintroduced, regenerated, and rebooted the character in Showcase #4 (see Chap. 3). Supergirl and the Flash weren’t just dead, however—‘they never existed in the first place’ (Klock 2002, 221). As many comics fans understand intimately, death is rarely a permanent affair in superhero universes, and both the Silver Age iterations of Supergirl and the Flash would be resurrected in time. As the revisions take effect by series’ end, the memories of the remaining characters are ostensibly wiped clean, and DC continuity is reset, awaiting the construction of a new transfictional layer. Echoing the opening of the series quoted earlier—‘a multiverse that should have been one, became many’—the DC universe has now been cleansed of impurities, at least that was the intention, and the multiverse is gone, replaced by a new, streamlined imaginary world. This new history, articulated in the final issue of Crisis, saw the universe ‘reborn at the dawn of time,’ and ‘what had been many, had become one’ (Wolfman and Perez 2000, 297). Wonder Woman is returned ‘to her original state of creation, and is born anew,’ thus cancelling out her previous narrative history (Ibid., 361), a blank canvas awaiting new continuity programming (which would eventually occur in 1987 with the first issue of George Perez’s reboot). Accordingly, Crisis employed metafictional gestures that ‘are developed to give a fictional explanation to continuity-erasing or continuity-simplifying

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decisions and for new narrative and editorial beginnings, setting the stage for a new continuity’ (Méon 2018, 201). On the final page, however, the character Psycho Pirate is depicted as the only one who remembers the old history and, as the story concludes, he is pictured in an asylum crying out for those lost amidst the temporal wreckage: ‘I’m the only one who remembers the infinite earths. You see, I know the truth! I remember all that happened, and I’m not going to forget. Worlds lived, worlds died. Nothing will ever be the same’ (Wolfman and Perez 2000, 364). Tom Kaczynski argues that in this moment, Psycho Pirate is revealed to be the real stand-in for the readers. We still remember those old universes. This is the trick DC wanted to pull-off. How to destroy 50 years of legacy content, without alienating the loyal audience that made all the content popular and relevant in the first place. (2020)

Just as Psycho Pirate’s memories remain intact, Superman, Superboy, and Lois Lane from Earth-Two, home of the Golden Age originals, survive the Crisis and depart to new diasporic terrain, hidden from continuity but nevertheless establishing an anachronistic link between old and new, between pre- and post-Crisis continuities. These final scenes demonstrate that Crisis did not result in a total wipe of the transfictional axis, as planned by Wolfman, but instead, introduced several anomalies that would need a new panacea in the future (which did in fact occur with DC’s next attempt at a reset in the 1994 event-series, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time).

Post-Crisis Crisis According to Friedenthal, Crisis was the ultimate retcon. It completely rewrote the entire history of the DC Universe, making it so that those stories, which occurred Pre-Crisis, had, for the characters, never actually happened … The massive retcon of Crisis erased their original history and replaced it, rewrote it, with a new one. (Friedenthal 2011, 9)

Theoretically, DC’s parallel worlds and fifty-year narrative history should have been jettisoned, and the universe would have splintered into pre- and post-Crisis continuities, the latter being newly canonical with the former

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erased from continuity. This was indeed Wolfman’s original plan, to cancel all DC titles and reboot them from the beginning with new first issues, but most of DC’s line of superhero comics did not begin again and reboot after the end of the series (contra Friedenthal 2011). Although this did happen to some extent, with Superman in John Byrne’s The Man of Steel mini-­series and Perez’s new Wonder Woman series, this did not occur across the entire line of DC titles. Batman, for instance, received an updated origin story in 1987 with Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, but the core series titles, Detective Comics and Batman, were not rebooted from the beginning again. As Glen Weldon explains, DC Editor Denny O’Neil advised Miller to restart Batman from scratch, with a brand-new issue #1, as DC had decided to do with Superman and Wonder Woman, [but] Miller objected. “I don’t need to slash through continuity with as sharp a blade as I thought,” he said … “I didn’t feel that fleshing out an unknown part of Batman’s history justified wiping out 50 years of [adventures]”. (2016, 141)

As such, once Year One was finished—originally published in Batman #404 to #407—the retitled Batman: The New Adventures #410 presented a new, retconned origin story for Jason Todd, the second incarnation of Robin the Boy Wonder, wherein Jason recalls hearing ‘plenty of war stories’ from the first Robin, Dick Grayson, about how they ‘made suckers outta these would-be masterminds’ (Collins et al. 1987, 4). Todd’s comment is illustrated by Batman and Robin fighting the Penguin, a memory that should no longer exist in Post-Crisis/Post-Year One continuity, at least not if the series had been rebooted (Collins et al. 1987, 4). Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile Miller’s Year One with Max Collins’ New Adventures, especially in terms of tone. As Greenberger explained in a personal interview: ‘One of the biggest creative gaffes of the era had to be [Batman editor] Denny O’Neill following Year One with Max Collins and Dave Cockrum’s abortive run. Tonally and creatively, it was out of step with audience expectation’ (2020). What’s more, Wolfman wanted DC editorial to agree that, at the very least, the Trinity (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) would have had their respective new series ready for publication by January 1986, as Robert Greenberger explained, ‘and Marv [Wolfman] could have his desire: all new #1s and a true new universe’ (2018). DC’s main editor at the time, Dick Giordano, rejected Wolfman’s plan to reboot the universe because, in his account, there wasn’t enough

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staff or preparation time to seriously consider Wolfman’s proposal. According to Michael Eury, Giordano ‘decided against proposing this radical concept to Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz, admitting, in retrospect, “That’s one of the few decisions I made that I really regret”’ (2003, 122). As stated, Wolfman’s original plan involved cancelling all ongoing titles and rebooting the entire DC Universe from the beginning again, which would have occurred immediately after the Crisis series had concluded. Said Wolfman: Nobody would have remembered a thing. I sent them all back in time with the idea of starting it all over with the January 1986 books. I insisted upon it repeatedly. The best compromise I could get is only the heroes remembered. I didn’t want anyone to remember. If nobody has remembered the Crisis, if it had, in effect, never happened, only the results that happened, it would have been a lot clearer. There would never have been a mention of the Crisis again … in fact, one of the things that I asked for, and was flatly turned down, was that every DC comic be renumbered with an issue 1, as if they had just started for the first time. If that had happened, you could have approached the company as a new company and not worried about all the crap that existed before. But because all the characters had to remember, which I thought was immensely stupid, you have all the problems plaguing DC now for two years, and I think making the company more incomprehensible than before it happened. (1988, 33)

Because Giordano essentially vetoed the idea meant that there was poor editorial co-ordination, and the DC Universe more or less carried on with the ‘Pre-Crisis’ continuity system for a time. As explained by DC Historian John Wells: In most sectors of the DC superhero-line, life continued after Crisis #12. The Batman and Catwoman embraced the romance they’d begun at the dawn of the red skies. Superman, despite an initial effort to label his adventures “pre-Crisis,” was clearly operating in the here and now … For the most part, it was as if Earth-One still existed, albeit now peppered with immigrants from Earth-Two. And even this wasn’t clear cut. The 1940s incarnations of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, icons who were purportedly erased from DC’s streamlined history, continued to appear in Roy Thomas’s All-Star Squadron. (Wells 2005, 87)

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Indeed, in All-Star Squadron #60 from August 1986, the final issue of the ‘Pre-Crisis’ era, readers are given an intradiegetic explanation that aimed to apply narrative logic in order to rationalize the delay between the end of Crisis and the beginning of a new DC continuity. As explained by the robot character Mekanique (who incidentally bears a striking resemblance to the Maria android from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis): I have single-handedly held back the effects of a recent phenomenon code-­ named The Crisis on Infinite Earths from finalizing in this time period. Now that my mission is successfully completed, however, I can at last allow the effects of the Crisis to take hold—with all the Earth’s history forever altered—and no one, either in past, present, or future, aware of it. (Thomas et al. 1986, 20, bold in original)

The idea that ‘the effects of the Crisis’ would alter Earth’s history forever—that history being an analogy for DC continuity—and that no one ‘either in past, present, or future’ would remember what had occurred, as Wolfman originally intended, is contentious. For example, in issue 1 of The Flash relaunch, Wally West takes over the mantle of the scarlet speedster from Barry Allen, who died in Crisis. Within the first few pages, however, readers learn that Wally remembers the past: “Reminds me of Barry. Police Scientist Barry Allen was the previous Flash. He died to save the world. I’m wearing his costume. Makes me feel like I’m wearing his skin” (1987, 6). The fact that Wally West not only remembers his predecessor but recalls that he ‘died to save the world,’ exemplifies that the post-Crisis iteration of The Flash is a continuation of the ‘fiction network,’ as Craft (2004) might describe it, rather than a reboot. More pointedly, the new Flash series did not arrive until June 1987 following the conclusion of the six-part event series, Legends, which also incorporated over twenty tie-in crossovers with other DC titles, suggesting that it would be more accurate to identify post-Crisis continuity as post-Legends, instead. Perhaps the most famous (and certainly the most referenced) example arrived three years after Crisis with Grant Morrison’s Animal Man (reflexive) reboot, a series well known for its metafictional gestures, or, as Morrison put it himself, ‘trippy metatextual stuff’ (in Zani 2009, 233). Running for twenty-six issues between 1988 and 1990, Animal Man saw Morrison take a lesser known, second-rate superhero, and regenerate the character for the post-Crisis DC Universe (although whether Animal Man existed within official DC continuity is a matter of debate). Across

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several issues, characters and motifs from pre-Crisis continuity appear, as if Morrison is playing an intertextual game with committed super-readers. In issue 18 (‘At Play in The Fields of the Lord’), Buddy Baker/Animal Man, under the influence of peyote and ‘plunged into a hallucinatory ritual ordeal’ (Morrison et al. 2003, 31), is guided to Prophecy Rock by an anthropomorphic fox and shown a diorama of cave paintings that depict the interlocking spheres of the infinite worlds, together with stick figurations (the lightning bolt insignia representing The Flash’s sacrifice) (Ibid., 23). ‘Look!’ exclaims Animal Man. ‘Some kind of catastrophe. The ending of time and space. The death of history. And the birth of something new. The Crisis. This is the Crisis!’ (ibid, emphasis in original). Animal Man asks the fox about the meaning of these cave paintings and is told to look again. ‘My God. A Second Crisis … A second Crisis is coming’ (23–24). As the story continues in issue 19 (‘A New Science of Life’), Buddy Baker comes face-to-face with his pre-Crisis incarnation, who first appeared in Strange Adventures #180 from 1965. After sharing his origin story—‘I was almost 30 when I got my powers. A spaceship blew up in my face and weird radiation gave me animal powers. I fought crime. Aliens. Simple’ (Morrison et al. 2003, 39)—the Silver Age/pre-Crisis Animal Man asks: What happens when the continuity changes? What happens to all those lives? Who’s responsible? They twist us and torture us. They kill us in our billions. For what? For entertainment … Our lives are not our own. It’s not fair. Wasn’t I good enough? (Ibid., emphasis in original)

Here, Morrison provides a metafictional commentary on superhero continuity, raising the stakes by suggesting that comic book reboots not only wipe the slate clean of pre-existing story, but that they also commit mass genocide by murdering whole character populations for the purpose of entertainment. ‘You’ve taken my place!’ says an anxious Animal Man to his post-Crisis replacement. ‘I’m not real anymore. I’m afraid’ (Ibid.,40). As Buddy Baker wonders who is responsible for all this death and destruction—‘who are “they”?’—pre-Crisis Animal Man asks if he really wants to know the truth, moving onto a splash page that shows Baker breaking the fourth wall and looking directly at the reader, exclaiming: ‘I CAN SEE YOU!’ (Ibid., 41). It is, in fact, the comic book reader who is responsible for events like the Crisis, guilty by association because of their demand for drama and tragedy, for entertainment.

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Of course, Morrison is not suggesting that superhero characters are real, although he is perhaps indicating, rather playfully, that characters are ‘alive,’ in the sense that readers engage with their adventures and treat them as meaningful. Yet Morrison’s Animal Man is not trying to make a case that superhero characters are real per se, but that he instead utilizes the comic book form to problematize the very notion of continuity through metafiction, toying with the boundaries between story and reality to ask readers ‘to at least momentarily imagine the impossible: that its world contains a rift through which characters might access their world’ (Thoss 2011, 201). It is in issue 23 of Animal Man (tellingly titled ‘Crisis’) that Morrison’s jester-like playfulness approaches its acme. Featuring the return of the Psycho Pirate who, as discussed earlier, is meant to be the only character who remembers the infinite earths, the issue focuses on a new ‘crisis.’ At the beginning of the issue, Psycho Pirate is shown in full costume along with a selection of cultural artefacts from across the multiverse, including Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; a wanted poster for Abraham Lincoln and one for Ultraman (a twisted Superman analogue from Earth-Three); a poster of Adolf Hitler above the words ‘One Nation Under God’ (a reference to Earth-X where the Nazi’s won World War II); and several DC comics, including a copy of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen (1986), a Green Lantern comic, and, most pointedly, The Flash #123, which contains the story ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ that introduced the multiverse to DC readers (see Chap. 3). We begin to learn that the alternative realities that were expunged by the Crisis are bleeding over into current continuity, functioning much like a computer virus that destabilizes the ontological programming of the latest iteration of the DC system. Joined by a group of alternate versions of heroes and villains from the pre-Crisis DC multiverse—Ultraman, Johnny Quick, and Power Ring from the Crime Syndicate of Earth-Three, the Spectre, Uberman, the Bat-Man and Robin, Sunshine Superman, Speed Freak, and Magic Lantern—the Psycho Pirate is overjoyed at their return: ‘You’re all so wonderful. Why did they ever have to be removed from continuity? You’d have made for marvelous stories. You will make marvelous stories. And the first story of the new world will be a story of revenge!’ (Morrison et al. 2003, 144). Over this issue and the next, Psycho Pirate and his gang of continuity rebels aim to breach the comic book panels and enact their vengeance on those who rebooted them out of existence (namely, the creators and readers).

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Morrison—or more likely DC’s editorial masters—does not permit these characters to triumph in the end. As reality begins to unravel, a duo of yellow-skinned humanoids, agents of cohesion and order that perhaps represent DC’s editorial forces, survey the havoc, calling upon the latest (post-Crisis) iteration of Animal Man to enter the fray. As he traps Superman analogue Overman to a single comic book panel, the size of it shrinking until he is no more, James Hightower informs the remaining avatars of discontinuity that they are ‘just memories. Memories of old-­ fashioned characters who don’t fit the continuity anymore’ (Ibid., 171). Ultraman pleads existentially that ‘we have a right to live. We could fit in. Why couldn’t we fit in? What’s wrong with us that we had to be killed?’ (Ibid.). Hightower holds aloft a comic book, arguing that you can all still be seen … our lives are replayed every time someone reads us. We can never die. We outlive our creators. We outlive our gods! If we could move outside our world, outside our spacetime continuum, this is what it would be like. Like a comic book. Like drawings on a page. Every time someone reads our stories, we live again! (Ibid.)

In resurrecting these characters from continuity limbo, Morrison employs them to ‘defy the rules of the new order,’ that ‘it is not so easy to write characters out of existence’ because they exist not only in Psycho Pirate’s memory but also ‘in the memories of readers and the actual texts of the comics themselves that were produced prior to the Crisis’ (Zani 2009, 240). As Psycho Pirate says, ‘collectors always make sure their comics will survive’ (Morrison et al. 2003, 166). As the characters begin to disappear in a cloud of colourful paper ribbons, Animal Man vanquishes Psycho Pirate from the pages and, as spoken by one of the agents, ‘the continuum is purged at last of all inconsistencies’ (Ibid., 174). Morrison has the last laugh, however, as a butterfly from Earth-14 flutters onto one of the agent’s fingers, suggesting that inconsistencies will always remain present within continuity because past stories cannot be deleted from readers’ memories (and from their collections). Morrison’s metafictional interventions throughout this arc of Animal Man questions and queries the fannish proclivity for textual conservationism, especially through the way in which he draws attention to the fact that rebooting cannot truly wipe the slate clean of previous narrative history nor banish unbridled multiplicity to the realms of ‘non-­ memory’ (Harvey 2015). As Steven Zani argues, ‘DC may produce one

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universe as the locus of its meaning, but the collective texts of Animal Man reveal that no text can be purged of multiplicity and counternarrative’ (2009, 243). At the same time, however, Zani seems to misunderstand the role that continuity plays in the lives of dedicated super-readers and the negative impact that rebooting can have on fans’ life-worlds (as explored in the next section). Despite the jocular appearance of the butterfly from Earth-14, Morrison largely returns the DC Universe to its post-Crisis status quo by the story’s conclusion, and therefore constrains the wild multiplicity he has unleashed back into a core singularity. Although Morrison’s run on Animal Man has been framed by scholars as ‘an innovative moment, a milestone in the progress of the comics universe’ (Craft 2004, 12), largely because of the ‘meta’ attributes of the series, we have already seen in Chap. 3 how Silver Age writers in the 1960s toyed with collisions between the comics world and ‘reality.’ Buddy Baker may break the fourth wall and spy the reader looking in on his world, eventually coming faceto-­face with the author, with Grant Morrison himself, but remember that the Flash met DC editor Julius Schwartz in the pages of his solo title in the 1960s, while The Flash #123 metaleptically fused previously non-diegetic levels to create a hyperdiegetic multiverse. Like The Flash’s 1956 reboot, Morrison’s Animal Man operates as both a reboot and, with the appearance of the pre-Crisis incarnation of the character, a continuation of the fiction network, thus being better described as a reflexive reboot (as explored in Chap. 3). Ultimately, what Morrison achieved with Animal Man was therefore nothing new, even for its time. By the end of the 1980s, DC were still introducing revisions caused by Crisis. As written by super-reader Thomas Galloway on the rec-arts comic board in 1991, new changes are still being made in titles today, more than half a decade later. For example, the “old” Hawkman appeared in the “new” Justice League. Then Timothy Truman began writing HAWKWORLD [1989], which retconned Hawkman’s character; among other changes, Hawkman “now” arrived on Earth much later. *So*, the Hawkman who appeared in the new Justice League comic (call him the Silver Age Hawkman, or the pre-Crisis Hawkman) “now” (in real world time) “no longer exists, and never has” (within current DC continuity). Then the creators realized the problem, so they said that most of the Silver Age Hawkman appearances in JLA were actually by the Golden Age Hawkman, and a new Hawkman was

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created whose purpose was to satisfy those few JLA appearances made after the GA [Golden Age] Hawkman was known to have been MIA [Missing in Action]. Confused yet? Suffice it to say, the way DC handled the Crisis and its aftermath confuses *lots* of readers and provides a perennial topic of discussion on [the Internet]. (‘Zero Hour FAQ,’ 2006)

With these examples in mind, it should hopefully be evident that DC continued to permit the use of characters and concepts—and memories—that should no longer exist in the new, rebooted universe. Rather than reboot the entire DC universe from the beginning again, then, DC instead ended up confusing matters significantly by juggling different and distinct strategies of regeneration, including relaunches (e.g., The Flash, Shazam!), retcons (Batman: Year One, Legion of Superheroes), continuations (Hawkman, Detective Comics, Green Lantern, Aquaman), and reboots (Superman, Wonder Woman). As Geoff Klock explains, the irony of Crisis was that its methodology, in simplifying continuity, was used to make superhero comics all the more complex, convoluted, and rich: any attempt at simplifying continuity into something streamlined, clear, and direct … only results in another layer of continuity. To a large degree, the changes imposed by Crisis did not stick, and the DC universe was left even more chaotic than before. (Klock 2002, 21, emphasis added)

The fact that DC published several official guidebooks, annotations, and indexes to explain their continuity following the conclusion of Crisis— such as Wolfman and Perez’s History of the DC Universe (1986) and Lou Mougin and Mark Waid’s ‘unashamedly scholarly resources’ (Creekmur 2010, 129), The Official Crisis on Infinite Earths Index and The Official Crisis on Infinite Earths Crossover Index (both 1986)—indicates that the publisher had failed to streamline and recalibrate DC continuity given that detailed explanations were necessary. As Brian Hughes put it at the time, we were promised a new cleaned-up continuity which would be faithfully followed by all future DC editors and writers, one that would be simple and comprehensible to fans that did not have Ph.Ds in Silver Age comicology. On that promise, I don’t think DC has delivered. (1987, 31)

Given the editorial conflicts that dashed Wolfman’s original plan to reboot the DC universe entirely from scratch, and the impact that this would have

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on continuity, the next section explores the reception of Crisis among dedicated super-readers.

Crisis Readers As explored throughout this book, continuity is one of the ways that, in general, fans seek ‘to gain status within their own community … by accumulating cultural capital that is derived from knowledge of the comic’s world’ (Brown 2004, 28). Engagement with, and expertise in, continuity therefore provides a locus through which super-readers amass subcultural profits through communal exercises that work to shore up one’s status amongst other fans. By acting as continuity cops, super-readers not only navigate the imaginary worlds of superhero comics but also police and catalogue violations in continuity through indexical labour and other discursive activities, such as contributing to debates in online fora or, prior to the internet, through letters pages in comic books and related publications (Gordon 2012; Pustz 1999). Given that Crisis sought to delete almost fifty years of backstory, it stands to reason that this exercise ran the risk of alienating long-time super-readers for whom continuity is ‘an essential prerequisite to a fully-­ engaging reading of superhero comics,’ and ‘an integral part of the pleasure of the superhero narrative’ (Reynolds 1992, 38). Although fans understand that ‘no one’s coming into your house and stealing your comics’ (Weaver 2013, 169), it is important to recognize the fannish proclivity for textual conservationism and conservatism; that super-readers ‘expect adherence to established tenets, characterizations, and narrative “back stories,” which production teams thus revise at their peril, disrupting the trust which is placed in the continuity of a detailed narrative world’ (Hills 2002, 28, emphasis added). From this viewpoint, jettisoning pre-existing continuity suggests that the idealized fan object is threatened and thus sets grounds for dissent and discord. In an interview I conducted with Robert Greenberger, who worked as a DC editor in the 1980s, he explained that Crisis was originally received negatively by loyal super-readers, that old time fans were horrified. The depth of affection fans have towards the characters and stories cannot be under-emphasized. DC’s librarian at the time, long-time fan turned pro, Mark Hannerfeld, was so upset by the changes being discussed in the halls, that it was affecting his health. His

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­ octor told him to quit rather than get worse and so ended a staff job that d ran from circa 1969 to 1984. (2018)

Greenberger’s comments here are supported by fan letters in specialist superhero comic magazine Amazing Heroes from the period. Although these letters provide a small sample, and therefore a limited snapshot, there are themes and motifs that exemplify the way in which fans perform social and cultural identities as stakeholders by criticizing editorial decisions that led to Crisis. Between December 1985 and July 1987, there were over 20 letters published in Amazing Heroes, the majority of which were overwhelmingly negative (and in some cases, enraged) at the core principle of Crisis. The first letter, written by Jeff Melton, goes as far as labelling Wolfman a ‘mass murderer,’ not only for destroying countless imaginary worlds but for killing The Flash, who, with the 1956 reboot, ‘single-handedly launched the Silver Age’ of superhero comics (Melton 1985, 64–65). ‘Of course, in his endless stupidity,’ continues Melton, Wolfman destroys the Earths an infinite number of times—past, present and future—thereby screwing up DC’s continuity. Soon, we’ll be told that the stories between ’35 and ’85 never happened … Obviously, I’m very displeased with Crisis and the way DC has decided to treat the opinions of long-time collectors. Rest assured Wolfman, that there are an infinite number of us out there [and] we are severely displeased. (65)

Wolfman’s argument that the DC multiverse was little more than an editorial headache, and that ‘older readers had to keep miles-long lists to set things straight’ (Wolfman 1986, 2), is countered by Melton who complains that the ‘end purpose, having all the heroes on one earth, is as pointless and absurd as the series itself,’ identifying the multiverse as ‘the thing that set DC apart from other companies,’ especially Marvel (1985, 64–65). As Greenberger explains, ‘most [fans] argued the universe was not that complicated and destroying the parallel worlds was destroying what set DC apart from others (and that’s true, Marvel didn’t really play with their multiverse until much later)’ (2018). As we saw in Chap. 3, both the ‘big two’ had started marketing directly to fans in the early 1970s, and the parallel world conceit was indeed what separated DC from Marvel at that point. Super-readers seem to have relished DC’s multiplicity, although that may have proved to be off-putting to Marvel fans, or new readers, who felt that the universe was too complex. By comparison,

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Marvel’s continuity was deemed to be much more manageable (Klock 2002, 21). Tapping into the idea that DC alienated long-time super-readers, self-­ confessed ‘continuity freak,’ Phil M. Botwinick, claims that this ‘new retroactive history’ is nothing less an assault on his social identity, that by ‘wip[ing]out all the stories that I [have] read throughout my life has negated everything I have made a part of the person I am’ (1986, 64). Although Botwinick recognizes that ‘these are fictional characters,’ he is ‘a little taken aback that a decision to wipe out years of history was done with little regard for the respect of fans who have supported this media for so long. I feel there is a general disregard for the feelings of fans’ (Ibid.). This sense of genuine betrayal is also echoed by Robert Plunkett, who argues that Crisis may have accumulated ‘short-term profits,’ but they ‘will be purchased dearly, at the cost of alienating the long-term readers, and potential readers, and of inflicting havoc on a once-strong cosmic mythos’ (1986, 110). Paul R. Wilson agrees, claiming that ‘DC alienated me with the ridiculous and self-contradictory way it handled the Crisis’ (1987, 75) while Fred Grandinetti is unsure if he is ‘going to be reading the events that take place in the “New” DC Universe’ as the publisher has ‘done too much to push me away’ (1985, 65). These types of affective, fannish performances are intrinsically anchored to self-narrative and identity. For these super-readers, rebooting DC continuity is flagrantly disrespectful, an act of betrayal that can estrange long-­ term fans (or as Melton stresses, ‘has negated everything I have made a part of the person I am’). Just as contemporary fans turn to the affordances of cyberspace to work ‘through potential threats to textual authenticity’ (Hills 2012,115), comic book super-readers utilized the space provided by letters pages, as documented in Chap. 3, exemplifying that ‘fans’ sense of self-identity … is so firmly enmeshed with the narratives of their beloved [texts]’ that ‘[t]hreats to diegetic narrative can thus be felt as threats to these fans’ self-narratives’ (Ibid., 114). Proving that comic book readership is not a homogeneous ‘community,’ other letter-writers scorn Crisis objectors for being ‘immature and unthinking,’ as Kevin Mazyck does in response to Melton (1985, 61). Underpinning this denouncement of Melton’s fan identity (‘your explanation of psychological trauma is ill-fitting as well as ill-conceived’), Mazyck enacts what fan studies scholars describe as ‘intra-fandom Othering,’ a mode of engagement that constructs a moral dualism (Hills 2002) between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fan practices (‘if Jeff Melton was a true fan,’ ‘if Jeff did

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his research,’ etc.). Similarly, Thomas J. Wellman worries that ‘comic creators actually beliefe [sic] that they’re creating “classics” and “epics” rather than diverting little works of entertainment,’ that he doesn’t think he’s read anything, out of the ‘thousands of comics’ he’s engaged with ‘that could be considered neat works of literature’ (1987, 76). Julian Furfie is equally dismissive of fans who believe comics to be an art form, that they ‘are a form of entertainment and they are made to be enjoyed’ (1987, 78). Nothing more, nothing less. In these cases, readers like Mazyck, Wellman, and Furfie engage in stereotyping textual conservationists and continuity fans for being childish, for treating the fan object too seriously as literature rather than mere entertainment. In these cases, fannish bids for subcultural capital—within the letters pages of Amazing Heroes and elsewhere—may involve displays of continuity expertise but, at times, also involve constructing binary oppositions between literature and entertainment, art and junk, seriousness and frivolity, emotion and rationality. As Paul Williams notes in Dreaming the Graphic Novel, these kinds of debates began occurring regularly in the 1970s. During the decade, discourses circulating around the comics medium were especially doom-laden in their prophecies about an industrial apocalypse looming on the horizon, perhaps with good reason given the economic situation at the time (as discussed at the beginning of this chapter). In response to these dystopian forecasts about the imminent death of the medium came much talk about elevating the cultural prestige of comics by borrowing from the European tradition, especially in countries like France and Belgium where comics, or bande dessinée (drawn strips), had been viewed as an art form since at least the 1960s, as ‘the ninth art’ (or le Neuvième Art). As Williams argues, the ‘vast majority of stakeholders in the comics world wanted to get North American comics to the level of varied subject matter, adult readership and legitimacy that was perceived to have been reached in France and Belgium already’ (Ibid., 42). For fans and readers in the US, Franco-Belgian comics ‘were the apex of the world’s comics’ (Ibid., 44); not only for their varied range of subject matter (i.e., not dominated by capes and cowls) but also for the way that comics were published as material objects, as ‘albums’ that fans in the US would routinely fetishize because of their luxurious qualities, ‘including their hard covers, thick paper stock, and subtlety of color reproduction’ (Ibid., 52). The fact that Franco-Belgian albums (including now popular titles like Asterix and Tintin) proved difficult to obtain in the US served to further enshrine them within an aura of aesthetic and authorial

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prestige. Thus, the album format ‘was celebrated as the physical totem of the progressive comics world lying across the Atlantic and in America’s future,’ the idea being that ‘if North America could adopt the album format, then a canon of class texts could be made accessible, the quality of comics would improve, new (adult) readers would start buying them, and the industry would return to economic health’ (Ibid., 51). These discourses prepared the ground for the rise of the so-called graphic novel in the mid-1980s, whereby titles such as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns (1986) did, for a time at least, successfully attract a lion’s share of mainstream media attention. Within these debates, however, other readers were less than impressed. For some, the very idea of elevating the public image of comics from low disposable trash to the high dominion of literature would effectively strip the medium of ‘the identity that came with subcultural marginality’ (Ibid., 14–15). I would argue therefore that Amazing Heroes letter writers such as Kevin Mazyck share striking resemblances with fans from the 1970s who dismissed the idea that comics could be literature and ‘maligned those who did as aloof critics or as failing some test of manhood’ (Ibid., 3). This illustrates, I think, that it is not only entertainment journalists that pathologize and stigmatize fans for their practices and behaviours, but that these conflicts occur within fan cultures themselves (Guerrero & Establés 2018; Jones 2018; Stanfill 2013; Goor 2015; Williams 2013). What is also intriguing is that Amazing Heroes editors often reply to anti-Crisis letters by mocking fans for treating superhero comics as literature: ‘Jeff, don’t you think you’re taking this sort of thing too seriously? This is the world of comics we’re talking about here, not a cast of characters along the lines of those in War and Peace!’ (Melton 1985, 65). This sentiment is perhaps best captured by a simple illustration in Amazing Heroes #91 (1986, 110), which depicts a comic book reader looking alarmed as his ‘1950s Batman comic … it’s fading like it never existed!’ (Ibid.) In this context, intra-fandom othering is enacted from multiple quarters, from fans and editors, lending weight to the idea that editorial othering is also at play (although editors are also fans, of course). Kristina Busse argues that ‘intra-fandom policing’ is a common gendered practice where female fans especially are regarded as ‘too obsessive, too fanatic, and too invested’ (2013, 73). For example, Twilight fans were roundly dismissed by male fans at San Diego Comic-Con in 2009 and, in Busse’s account, ‘at every level of dismissal gender plays a central part’ as Twilight fans ‘are ridiculed in ways fans of more male oriented series are

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not’ (Ibid., 74). Although there is certainly plenty of evidence to support the idea that male fans routinely adopt well-worn gendered stereotypes of what it means to be ‘a good-enough fan’—with terms like ‘fake geek girl’ reifying the distinctions between ‘good’ fanboys and ‘bad’ fangirls—it is evident from the discursive rivalry in Amazing Heroes that border policing of the kind that Busse explores is not invariably nor inevitably a gendered activity but one that also occurs between and amongst male readers too (see also Scott 2017). The letters pages in Amazing Heroes, however, seem to be explicitly gendered in that it is occupied almost exclusively by males, skewering and stereotyping the portrait of comic book fandom as primarily a masculine enterprise. Correspondingly, Crisis appears to have sparked a broader debate around continuity in the pages of Amazing Heroes, a topic that is addressed by Bennet Marks in a letter titled ‘The Continuity Inquisition,’ in which he claims that there ‘seems to be a war going on in comic-book fandom— between those readers who are interested in continuity and consistency across inter-related comics—“the continuity buffs”—and those readers who find this interest offensive’ (1987, 80). In response to fans who argue that ‘continuity buffs’ are ‘immature, [and] have difficulty distinguishing fact from fantasy,’ Marks offers a canny analogy: When my friends and I went to see Aliens, if one of them had exclaimed “It scared the hell out of me when that alien Queen Mother grabbed at Ripley! I’m still shaking,” it would not occur to me to belittle his reaction by saying … “Remember, it’s all light on screens!” Telling all the theater-goers that “it’s nothing but lies about non-existent people and places” would also seem a bit inappropriate. (Ibid.)

According to Marks, fans understand that ‘comic book stories aren’t real; superheroes don’t exist; [and] the world portrayed in comic books is not our actual world,’ but the pleasure comes from play, from pretending that ‘the people and events in it are “real”’, an ‘innocent pleasure, childlike but not necessarily childish, that most readers (and movie-watchers and the like) engage in’ (Ibid., 80). Marks continues: Making use of an established continuity and consistency is a literary technique which can enhance a reader’s experience of a story. It adds to verisimilitude, which can make a story more convincing (which is slightly different

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from “realistic” or “authentic”…). These effects are not meaningless trivia; they’re part of what can make a comic entertaining. (81–82)

Conversely, a minority of readers challenge this view. For instance, Plunkett claims that the DC multiverse was not confusing to ‘proper’ fans, and that ditching the parallel world conceit means that ‘the DC line has lost its escape-hatch from the tyranny of single-line continuity,’ a comment that references the way that DC used the multiverse to rationalize the insertion of alternate versions of staple characters within the same transfictional system (1986, 110). By extension, this also means that more than one version of, say, Superman or Wonder Woman can be canonical simultaneously. Intriguingly, Plunkett does not seem to be a staunch continuity acolyte, arguing that the powers that be at DC decided that their continuity needed ‘cleaning up’ because they are in thrall to those who believe that every comic produced by a single comic company should be just one part of a single grand epic. Novel publishers don’t require that every book with their trademark be consistent with every other book. We don’t have “Crisis on Infinite Detectives” because of confusion over the fictional worlds of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, or Lewis A. Archer … the idea of forced universal continuity which is now in vogue at DC (and far worse at Marvel) is absurd. (Ibid., 111)

Although letters from pro-continuity readers significantly outweigh those from anti-continuity fans, this ‘discursive community of sorts’ (Gordon 2012, 121) indicates that textual conservationism is not necessarily a characteristic that can be applied to comic books readers (or fan cultures more generally) without question or qualification. As such, this anti-continuity faction significantly undermines a range of assumptions commonly articulated in academic discourse, especially in fan studies and comic studies, that all comic book fans demand adherence to continuity protocols, which suggests that scholars may have unwittingly played a part in homogenizing fan cultures through over-generalizaions about textual conservationism as a sine non qua of the fan experience (contra Hills 2002). There is also potential to challenge further assumptions in fan studies in the context of ‘affirmational’ versus ‘transformational’ fandom. In broad strokes, affirmational fans, or ‘sanctioned fans,’ as Suzanne Scott puts it (2013, 442), are described as such ‘because they privilege authorial interpretations, and can more easily be incorporated by the industry as

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promotional agents’ (ibid). Conversely, transformational fans, or ‘non-­ sanctioned fans,’ have been ‘historically associated with feminist counter-­ readings of the text’ (ibid), yet the ‘continuity buffs’ in Amazing Heroes, all of whom are discursively sign-posted as male, may be viewed also as ‘transformational’ as they disrupt authorial intention by lamenting DC’s editorial forces for destabilizing the imaginary world through the process of rebooting and, in the process, dishonouring fannish investments in continuity and canon. Anti-Crisis readers may therefore be enacting a kind of transformational fandom by decrying the reboot and seeking to ‘transform’ the imaginary world back to the way it was through textual conservationist discourses. As fan studies has typically valued transformational fandom as creative, critical, and progressive, anti-reboot protests suggest that ‘transformation’ may also be conservationist and conservative, destructive and counter-hegemonic. In this context, affirmational fans would be, generally speaking, readers who enjoy rebooted content like Crisis, therefore shoring up, or ‘affirming,’ the corporate practices of DC editorial. If nothing else, this evidence ultimately deconstructs, in the Derridean sense, the binary between affirmation and transformation as gendered masculine and feminine, respectively. It is likely, however, that anti-continuity fans understand continuity to some extent, or else they would certainly struggle to navigate the complex network of narrative, character, and canon. On this front, anti-continuity (affirmational) fans in these letters pages are more invested in what they perceive as ‘good’ storytelling. Should continuity get in the way of this, then these readers are less concerned about narrative anomalies and more focused on whether the story stands up to scrutiny. As Wellman recognizes, his ‘anti-continuity stance is unpopular among fandom,’ but he is ‘against it [continuity] when it gets in the way of a good story’ (1987, 76). In sum, the discursive community portrayed in Amazing Heroes demonstrates several things simultaneously: that Crisis was initially received negatively by most letter writers, and that DC’s editors have significantly betrayed the time and investment they have spent engaging with the genre. Debates about whether superhero comics are deemed art or entertainment occur within the same pages, usually in ways that ‘Other’ continuity acolytes as immature, unsophisticated, and delusional (stereotypes that traditionally emanate from ‘outside’ of fan cultures). In many ways, it was responses to Crisis that provided a springboard for a range of debates and discussions about the ‘right’ (and ‘wrong’) ways of being a superhero reader and fan. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the letters pages

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in Amazing Heroes, this discursive community of sorts, are representative of superhero comics fandom more generally. We should be enormously cautious about extrapolating and projecting onto superhero comic book fandom at large. I would argue that these select examples illustrate that superhero comic readership is complex and heterogeneous, comprised of divergences as well as general motifs, themes, and patterns. The fact that some fans push back against the principle of continuity demonstrates that more research is needed in this area to ascertain whether all super-readers (and fans of other media forms) share the same beliefs and philosophies about narrative order, cohesion, and continuity. Perhaps scholars writing on the superhero comic and its readers, including myself, have taken it for granted that continuity is a sine qua non of the fan experience, or at least not an assumption that can be projected onto every reader, super or otherwise. It is all too easy to dismiss the idea that continuity breaches, nostalgic attachments, and so on, are nonsensical by ridiculing those fans who express emotional upheaval (and even trauma, as Melton does). As I have argued elsewhere (Proctor 2017), fans who claim that childhoods have been ruined or that their lives have been up-ended by reboots, or other continuity cleansing rituals, are not being literal. Just as rebooting does not actually wipe the slate clean, these readers express themselves performatively to shore up their status as ‘real’ and ‘legitimate’ fans. Rather than mock fans of this type, scholars should be more willing to delve deeper to learn and understand more precisely what is being articulated within these narratives of the self.

Conclusion So, then, what did Crisis achieve? We have seen in this chapter how the event-series did not trigger a universe-wide reboot of DC continuity, nor did it offer a jumping-on-point for new readers. From a corporate/economic perspective, however, Crisis succeeded too well. It did not usher in a new consistent continuity — a new normal  — but the exact opposite: the ongoing addiction to continuity-­ shattering, multi-issue crossover events. A permanent Crisis if you will. The massive crossover is now the new normal. When was the last time there was a year free from one of these endless continuity disrupting events? (Kaczynski 2020)

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Indeed, DC’s sales did begin to rise once more in the wake of Crisis, although whether the series managed to attract new comic book readers is impossible to ascertain. It is perhaps more likely that Wolfman achieved his goal in enticing Marvel fans to purchase DC comics or brought lapsed super-readers back rather than people who had never picked up a comic book before. It is also telling that Wolfman admitted that bringing readers to DC Comics was ‘of course, its purpose’ (Klock 2002, 21). This is an important point, one that lends considerable weight to Duncan and Smith’s argument that ‘editorial decisions are often driven by commerce’ (2009, 130). As fan Kirk Kimball explained in a personal interview: ‘BTW, you might want to mention the REASON for these reboots. It’s money!’ (2014). Given Wolfman’s argument about Crisis being an urgent intervention, an exercise that sought to cleanse the DC universe of discontinuity by streamlining its narrative framework through the excision of the multiverse, it does appear that Crisis was first and foremost an economic strategy employed to attract new readers (and therefore attract new capital). Because of the challenges that Wolfman had in proposing that the entire line of DC Comics titles would reboot with new first issues once Crisis had concluded, it certainly seems that the apparent objective of the series as a continuity reset and reboot had not only failed but had not been properly attempted due to editorial anxieties concerning loyal readers and how they might collectively respond. Thus, the idea that Wolfman wanted to repair and rebuild the DC imaginary world seems largely disingenuous given that the series’ primary purpose was to bring new readers on-board and spur profits. In any case, Crisis was not designed to attract new readers but to service fans for whom continuity is a key aspect of their dedication and loyalty. Wolfman’s claim that veteran readers needed to ‘keep miles-long lists to set things straight’ seems more applicable to DC’s creators and editors than to fans. In the digital age, however, fans take it upon themselves to index and catalogue continuity across a broad range of media platforms and genres, as explored in the previous chapter, indicating that ‘super-­ reading’ is often a significant aspect of fannish pleasure and play. I don’t doubt that Wolfman pushed for Crisis to wipe the slate clean—or in his words, ‘the way we’re rebuilding everything, is that it’s all gone … it’s corrective history’ (Wolfman and Perez 2000, 25)—but commerce was the central reason for the event-series from the start, an editorial strategy to confront the decline in sales, and a corporate response to the market hegemony of Marvel. It is plausible that the idea underpinning Crisis as a

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way to repair and regenerate the DC Universe’s complex transfictional continuity was to discursively bury the editorial rationale, that being to generate enough interest to spur the cash nexus, ‘a marketing gimmick, forcing readers to buy all twelve issues to understand the changes being imposed on all their favourite characters and the universe they inhabited’ (Klock 2002, 21). In many ways, then, the fact that Crisis was created to attract as many readers as possible to DC Comics to resolve the publisher’s commercial malaise suggests that ‘the real-world corporates crisis becomes the fictional Crisis of the Multiverse’ (Kaczynski 2020). In a recent article on SyFy Wire, Paul Levitz argues that Crisis was itself not responsible for a marked sales increase. ‘Marv’s entitled to his opinion,’ explains Levitz, but ‘DC was on an up curve at the time, helped by his work with George Perez on Teen Titans, and titles that were effectively catering to the newly growing direct market of comic shops’ (Forsythe 2019). Levitz’s argument certainly has merit as the mid-to-late 1980s comic boom was very much attributable to the direct market. Although it was first introduced in the 1970s, it wouldn’t be until the 1990s that the new system fully replaced newsstands to ‘become the primary channel of distribution for all comics, with many titles from even the traditional publishers having no editions carried in the traditional magazine distribution system’ (Allen 2014, ‘Chapter Two’). Just as targeting their publications at a core fan-base, the logic and function of the Direct Market would leave the industry in a double-bind by enforcing the superhero comic into even more of a subcultural ghetto. Although Wolfman claims that ‘Crisis brought readers to DC Comics, and that was, of course, its purpose’ (2000, ii), sales figures from the time tell a rather different story; that it was not Crisis that managed to attract new readers but John Byrne’s Superman reboot, The Man of Steel. As we shall see in the next chapter, sales figures for The Man of Steel significantly dwarfed those of Crisis to become the first comic book in the Direct Market era to amass over one million sales of the title’s first print run.

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Booker, Keith M. 2010. The Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Oxford: Greenwood. Botwinick, Phil M. 1986. A Crisis Crisis. Amazing Heroes 92: 64–66. Braun, Saul. 1971. Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant. New York Times Magazine, May 2: 32–55. Brooker, Will. 2011. Hero of the Beach: Flex Mentallo at the End of Worlds. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 2 (1): 25–37. Brown, Jeffrey A. 2004. Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital. The Journal of Popular Culture 30 (4): 13–22. Busse, Kristin. 2013. Geek Hierarchies, Boundary Policing, and the Gendering of the Good Fan. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 10 (1): 73–91. Collins, Max, Dave Cockrum, and Mike DeCarlo. 1987. Batman. Vol. 410. New York: DC Comics. Comicchron. n.d. Comic Book Sales Figures for 1969. https://www.comichron. com/yearlycomicssales/postaldata/1969.html Craft, Jason. 2004. Comics Universes as Fiction Networks. https://jasoncraft. org/files/pca_print.pdf. Creekmur, Cory. 2010. Crisis on Infinite Earths. In Encyclopedia of Comics and Graphic Novels (Volume One), ed. M.  Keith Booker, 127–129. California: Greenwood. Dallas, Keith, and John Wells. 2018. Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978. North Carolina: TwoMorrows Publishing. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. 2009. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. London: Continuum. Eury, Michael. 2003. Dick Giordano: Changing Comics, One Day at a Time. North Carolina: Twomorrows Publishing. ———. 2009. When Worlds Collided: Behind the Scenes of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Back Issue 34 (June): 34–39. Forsythe, Dana. 2019. Crisis on Infinite Earths Creators Reflect on the Internal Battles and Major Moments in the Landmark DC Event. SyFy Wire, 22 January 2019. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/crisis-­on-­infinite-­earths-­creators-­reflect-­ on-­the-­internal-­battles-­and-­major-­moments-­in-­the. Freeman, Matthew. 2014. The Wonderful Game of Oz and Tarzan Jigsaws: Commodifying Transmedia in Early Twentieth Century Consumer Culture. Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 7: 44–54. Friedenthal, Andrew. 2011. Monitoring the Past: DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths and the Narrativization of Comic Book History. ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies 6 (2). https://imagetextjournal.com/ monitoring-­t he-­p ast-­d c-­c omics-­c risis-­o n-­i nfinite-­e ar ths-­a nd-­t he-­ narrativization-­of-­comic-­book-­history/. ———. 2019. World of DC Comics. New York: Routledge.

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CHAPTER 5

Superman Begins: Archaeology of John Byrne’s Man of Steel Reboot

As explored in Chap. 4, Crisis on Infinite Earths did not lead to a reboot of the entire DC universe, but instead employed numerous strategies of regeneration—reboots, retcons, refreshes, and relaunches—that meant that DC continuity was neither streamlined nor recalibrated in ways that aligned with Marv Wolfman’s original plans. Yet within this maelstrom of activity, two major titles did receive the reboot treatment in the aftermath of Crisis, those being Wonder Woman and, the topic of this chapter, Superman. Even then, however, there was a delay between the final issue of Crisis and the first issues of these reboots, as also explored in the previous chapter, which effectively signalled to readers that there was no clear division between pre- and post-Crisis continuities. Unlike DC’s 2011 venture, ‘The New 52,’ which began after they cancelled all ongoing series and relaunched fifty-two all-new number one issues over a four-week period, the first post-Crisis reboot arrived five months after the conclusion of the Crisis pre-boot, issue one of John Byrne’s The Man of Steel six-part mini-series (1986) being the first. This chapter picks up where the previous one left off, focusing specifically on the post-Crisis Superman and Byrne’s The Man of Steel as a case study. The first section provides an overview of The Man of Steel, considering Byrne’s creative approach and the ways in which his Superman differs from previous incarnations. I also explore the continuity issues that arose almost immediately as Byrne’s new Superman conflicted with other superhero comics, most notably the Legion of Superheroes. I then explore how © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Proctor, Reboot Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40912-7_5

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The Man of Steel was originally received by journalists and fans whereby discourses turned on issues pertaining to authenticity and fidelity. Here, I also illustrate the way in which Man of Steel discourses shared key patterns and motifs with discourses that circulated the New Coke during the period, both of which were undergirded by similar themes of nation and nationalism, fidelity and inauthenticity, masculinity and feminization.

The Man of Steel and the ‘Superman Ripple Effect’ As detailed in Chap. 4, DC’s economic woes accelerated considerably during the 1970s, leading many commenters to worry that the superhero genre, and the comics medium itself, was living on borrowed time (Williams 2020). Although DC’s line of comics all experienced downward economic mobility during the decade, their first superhero creation and flagship character-brand, Superman, also struggled for survival. One of the reasons that Superman had managed to weather earlier storms, commercial or otherwise, was due to the character’s malleability, being periodically updated, revised, and regenerated to respond to key shifts in the media marketplace, as outlined in Chap. 3. Although both DC and Marvel experienced significant challenges in the 1970s, for a variety of reasons, the fact that Superman had been brought to his knees by the kryptonite of market forces emblematized a legitimate crisis for all comics publishers (pun very much intended). As DC Editor Dick Giordano explained, The sales of the “Superman” title had deteriorated so much that we had to take action … he is our flag-ship title, the best-known super-hero in the world … We decided to update the character … Superman was created more than 40 years ago, for [a] younger audience … We had to change him in response to a new market. (Futty 1986)

For DC, Superman clearly required a new, bolder regeneration, one re-adapted and re-moulded for the 1980s, a decade that saw the ascendancy and entrenchment of neoliberalism in the US. To achieve this, DC hired Marvel’s John Byrne to author The Man of Steel as both writer and illustrator, the first time the character had had his continuity completely erased and rebooted from the beginning again in comics. Byrne’s star has risen considerably during his time at Marvel where he reinvigorated sales on The X-Men (1977–1981) and The Fantastic Four (1981–86). As Byrne’s contract with Marvel was coming to an end, DC

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enticed Byrne with the attractive proposition that he would be central to rebooting Superman for the post-Crisis universe. Byrne’s first task was to provide a new origin story for the character that would revise elements that have become well-known aspects of the mythos, most notably in the Mort Weisinger era (see Chap. 3). To ensure that readers would not be distracted by a range of Superman comics, especially considering that post-Crisis continuity was confusing, DC agreed to halt publication of all Superman-related titles for three months while The Man of Steel was released on a bi-monthly schedule (six issues across three months). Once the series was completed, Byrne would continue to expand his new status quo in the renumbered Superman #1. In doing so, Byrne’s tenure on the rebooted and relaunched Superman titles aligned with Wolfman’s intention for the entire DC Universe, at least for the most part (the six months or so between the end of Crisis and the first issue of The Man of Steel being contrary to Wolfman’s grand scheme). Byrne spent considerable time researching the character for his back-to-­ basics approach, sifting through the mythos and identifying aspects that could be either recalibrated for a contemporary audience or cast aside entirely: Part of the homework I did preparing to take on Superman was to study up on as much material as I could find. First the comics, of course, and there I sifted through almost fifty years of often very contradictory material. I looked at the serials, the George Reeves TV series, the Fleischer cartoons and, of course, the Christopher Reeve movies. I also checked out how the character had been handled in his Superboy adventures. With all that percolating in my brain, I took the parts that seemed to be the most consistent thru-out and then added a few modernizations. (Byrne 2005)

As discussed in Chap. 3, Superman had evolved from leaping tall buildings in a single bound and outrunning speeding trains to gaining the power of flight, travelling through time, and easily moving planets (with additional powers being added on a regular basis). It was during Mort Weisinger’s lengthy editorial tenure that the Superman mythos expanded considerably, awarding the character with so many superpowers that he became omnipotent, more God-like than Siegel and Shuster’s incarnation. This would have an impact on writers as they found it difficult to create eventful stories that had at least some dramatic risk for the character. When Weisinger departed, Julius Schwartz took the role on the Superman solo

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title and hired O’Neil to dial down Superman’s almighty power set in 1970 (among other regenerations, such as Clark Kent leaving the Daily Planet to become a television journalist). In O’Neil’s hands, Superman was depowered, ‘almost back to where he started—not quite because the 1938 Superman couldn’t fly’ (Eury 2019, 6). However, O’Neil’s Superman stories did not fully embrace the back-to-basics direction that he originally envisioned, but, instead, pitted him against relics out of the Silver Age playbook: monsters, sand clones, Pan and his devil’s harp, the Quarm demon, and so forth. O’Neil found the experience to be unsatisfying and asked to be taken off the title, mainly because ‘there was no internal continuity or management at DC enforcing that his not-as-super Superman be the house style Superman’ (Eury 2019, 7). DC’s various editorial teams worked more or less without engaging in dialogue, so while Schwartz became the editor on Superman, Murray Boltinoff ‘was assigned Action Comics and Superboy in the post-Weisinger reshuffle’ (Ibid.). This meant that Superman was as incohesive and contradictory as he had ever been, at least as far as inter-title continuity went. Without the central organizational hub that Stan Lee had provided for Marvel, DC continued to lack editorial scrutiny and structural diligence across the line (and continues in much the same way contemporaneously, as we shall see in this book’s conclusion). Byrne may hardly have been the first creator to consider depowering Superman, yet, to a large extent, his approach would better realize the back-to-basics strategy than O’Neil managed to do, aiming to reconstruct Superman ‘more like a human and less like an alien’ (Weldon 2013, 225). This idea of stripping out the narrative and generic detritus, cleaning the transfictional axis of pre-existing continuity in order to begin again with a ground-zero origin story, is central to the reboot concept. A back-to-­ basics philosophy appears to be the core creative mantra underpinning many reboots, regardless of medium. As noted in Chap. 1, Nolan’s approach to Batman Begins (2005) was articulated in similar terms, as was Martin Campbell’s James Bond reboot, Casino Royale (2006), and Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007). In preparing to write The Man of Steel, Byrne was led to some degree by DC editorial, with instructions to cast aside the more childish aspects of the mythos, a strategy that sought to ‘de-infantilize’ the comic to respond to the fact that the fan base consisted mainly of adults by the 1980s. One of the ways to achieve this was to abolish Superman’s extended family, which had expanded considerably under Weisinger during the

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Silver Age, the idea being to return the Man of Steel to his status as the sole survivor of Krypton. Editor Dick Giordano drove the idea that Supergirl should be killed in Crisis, describing the character controversially as little more than ‘Superman with boobs’: Supergirl was created initially to take advantage of the high Superman sales and not much thought was put into her creation. She was created essentially as a female Superman … but she never did really add anything to the Superman mythos—at least not for me. (Eury 2019, 34)

Wolfman went further and explained that Superman’s extended family required culling to restore the character to his position as the last survivor of Krypton: Before Crisis, it seemed that half of Krypton had survived the explosion. We had Superman, Supergirl, Krypto, the Phantom Zone criminals, the bottle city of Kandor, and many others. Our goal was to make Superman unique. We went back to his origin and made Kal-El the only survivor of Krypton. That, sadly, was why Supergirl had to die. (Weldon 2013, 217)

As explored in Chap. 3, Supergirl arrived in 1959, with Superman’s origin being retconned to illustrate that she had always been there, existing in the shadows. Another retcon told readers that the infant Kal-El was not alone in his rocket ship as it departed Krypton after all, but included a stow-­ away, Beppo the Super-Monkey, who debuted in Superboy #76  from October 1959. Also, Krypto the Superdog, Kal-El’s domestic pet on Krypton, ended up becoming a test subject for Jor-El’s prototype rocket, but was lost in space for years before it was knocked off course, and coincidentally, found its way to Earth in Adventure Comics #210 from 1955. Similarly, Supergirl had two pets: Streaky the Super Cat (first appearing in Action Comics #261  in February 1960) and Comet the Super Horse (Action Comics #292, February 1962) who could shape-shift into human form with the name ‘Bill Starr’ (who was also briefly Supergirl and Lois Lane’s boyfriend!). Clearly, these characters were created for younger readers at the time, but by the mid-1980s, they had become too childish for the adult fan base and were put to rest. As we have already seen in the previous chapter, Crisis purged Supergirl from history (and by default, Streaky and Comet), while Byrne excluded Beppo and Krypto from Superman’s new status quo altogether. As Glen Weldon explains, the ‘goal

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was to make the heroes more contemporary, more colorful  — and to appeal to the more sophisticated (read: older) readers’ (2013, 214). In this context, cute animals just wouldn’t cut it for the sophisticated superreader in the adult-­oriented fan market. One of the more pronounced revisions in The Man of Steel showed that Superman did not debut as a costumed hero as a teenager—as Superboy, the Boy of Steel—but as an adult. Byrne explained that it was Superman: The Movie that provided a couple of important insights, for me, into the character of Superman. One was the absence of Superboy. So much of Superman’s personality and history made much more sense if, as originally presented by Siegel and Shuster, he made his debut as an adult. (Trumbull 2018, 56)

The diegetic erasure of Superboy, however, would have major implications for DC’s post-Crisis continuity. In essence, The Man of Steel signified that there had never existed a Superboy in the new post-Crisis history, or, for that matter a ‘Superbaby’ (literally, Clark as a toddler, dressed in full cape and unitard who appeared more than 150 times during the Silver Age). The problem here is that Superboy had been instrumental in the history of the ensemble team from the thirtieth century, the Legion of Superheroes. And as the Legion was not rebooted after Crisis, it would only be a matter of time before continuity snarls required a band-aid, or continuity patch, one that sought to untangle the discontinuity that existed between Byrne’s Superman and the now ‘out of continuity’ Superboy. As fan blogger and online indexer Aaron Severson explains, this change represented a serious problem for the Legion of Superheroes: they had shared countless adventures with the Boy of Steel over the years and it was he who inspired them in the first place. How could the Legion, and its extensive complicated history, still exist in a continuity without Superboy? (2020)

How, indeed. The simple answer is that Superboy should not exist alongside Superman in the post-Crisis universe as he should have been eliminated from history and narrative memory. As Greenberger recounts, by the spring of 1986, ‘it was clear that there was this nagging issue about how the reboot impacted Superboy and the Legion … After several heated dinners, it became clear something had to be done, and … would be

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addressed in the first year of the reboot’ (Ciemcioch 2013, 71). Byrne, however, remembers it differently, claiming that the problems with the Legion were discussed in advance of his work on The Man of Steel. He was aware that this would have a rather profound effect on the Legion, whose history was tied directly to Superboy, and at several editorial meetings, I brought this up often, suggesting different ways in which it could be dealt with … I was told, basically “don’t worry, we have it all figured out!” Then about six months into the project I got a panicked call from the Superman editor: “This reboot messes up the Legion!” “Yes, I thought we all understood this?” “No! My god! We have to do something!!”. (Byrne 2005)

In order to patch over the continuity snarls between the post-Crisis Superman and the Legion, DC editorial took the controversial decision to retcon the Legion’s history by introducing the concept of the ‘pocket universe.’ So, Byrne and Paul Levitz designed a four-part crossover to repair the discrepancies, an intradiegetic solution that amended the preCrisis Superboy as the result of temporal mischief concocted by the Time Trapper, in which the Boy of Steel is said to come from a ‘pocket universe’—essentially, an alternative reality that sought to bracket-off preand post-Crisis histories (although as with Crisis, the story really occurs within continuity, not outside of it). By the story’s end, Superboy perishes, and the continuity wounds are (allegedly) patched over until the next regeneration. Legion super-readers were less than satisfied with this continuity patch as they ‘loved the series’ long continuity,’ and ‘resented the change’ being imposed on the titles, accusing Byrne of messing with ‘the Legion’s carefully-­ managed continuity that suffered’ because of Crisis and the Superman reboot, with the Legion being revised ‘to restore consistency with the rest of DC’s output,’ even if it didn’t require retconning in and of itself (Darius 2011a, 178). According to Jim Ford, Legion fans still complain today that Byrne was responsible for destroying the ensemble team’s history and continuity (2013, 34). To add insult to fannish injury, it would not be long before this band-aid was torn away and replaced with a new retcon, one which removed Superboy from the Legion’s history altogether. Writer Mark Waid described this as ‘The Superman Ripple Effect,’ which

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killed us, killed our momentum, and killed any chance … that might have actually brought readers in … Because of inter-office politics and machinations that make no sense to me to this day, it was decided that not only was there no Superboy, but we weren’t even allowed to reference him at all. We were not allowed to make a reference to the Pocket Universe that he came from and we were ordered to rewrite Legion history to eliminate his presence from it altogether. (Ford 2013, 68)

Other characters central to the Superman mythos were included in Byrne’s reboot, although ‘modernized’ for the 1980s (Byrne 2005). Clark Kent’s on-and-off again paramour Lois Lane no longer spends her days romantically pining for Superman but is reconfigured as a hard-hitting Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, no more ‘distressed damsel or columnist to the lovelorn’ (Tye 2012, 228). Likewise, Superman’s constant nemesis, Lex Luthor, is given a neoliberal, Reaganite makeover for the 1980s, a corporate billionaire fashioned in the image of Donald Trump as opposed to the cackling mad genius of lore. Clark himself shifts from a bumbling wall-­ flower and ‘mild-mannered reporter,’ to ‘a strikingly handsome, confident, muscular athlete—a football star in point of fact’ (Weldon 2013, 115). In doing so, Byrne made the relationship between Superman and his secret, human identity less discrete, and thus, less believable. Unlike most superheroes, it is not Superman that is the disguise, but his human persona (incidentally, a point of discussion in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2 from 2004). In a departure from Superman: The Movie, Byrne’s Clark was less of a disguise (if sporting glasses could ever truly be a disguise anyway), being arguably more charming and ‘cool’ than at any time in the character’s (at that point) fifty-year history. Byrne also drew upon the image of Christopher Reeve for his impression of the character and, as pointed out above, once Julius Schwartz had taken on the editorship on the solo Superman title in 1970, he changed Clark’s day job from Daily Planet reporter to TV news anchor for the fictional WGBS. After Superman: The Movie, Clark resumed his role with the Daily Planet in Action Comics #493 from March 1979. Although he would split his duties between the newspaper and WGBS, the Daily Planet was restored as Clark’s main place-of-work and this was, according to writer Cary Bates, in deference to Superman: The Movie (Trumbull 2018, 59). In The Man of Steel, there is no mention of Clark being a news anchor—he’s in his familiar role at the Daily Planet, although he also writes novels on the side. (In Mario Puzo’s early draft of the script, Clark

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was initially a news anchor-man as well, but audience research conducted at the time encouraged Warner’s to abandon the idea as, in the imaginations of the general non-comic-reading public, the Daily Planet is an essential feature of the Superman mythos.) This pinballing between film and comic, and other transmedia expressions, recalls Ricard Berger’s argument that an adaptation can sometimes ‘act as a source text’ (2008, 87), complicating the relationship between source and target, with Superman: The Movie ‘rewiring’ the comic book, much like the 1940s radio series had influenced the comics, and vice versa (see Chap. 3). Although Byrne’s The Man of Steel arrived almost a decade after Superman: The Movie was originally released, the image of Christopher Reeve rapidly became the dominant version of the character, further consolidating the idea that ‘there is a singular “timeless,” “quintessential” Superman’ (Bevin 2019, 86). Remarkably, the influence of the first Superman blockbuster film is still felt today, with artistic impressions of the character in comics often resembling Christopher Reeve (as in Geoff John’s and Gary Frank’s Secret Origin from 2009). As Chris Franklin argues: Forty years after Superman: The Movie was first projected in theaters, its unique influence continues to permeate, and sometimes even dominate, the ongoing legend of the Man of Steel, in both the comics … and in other media. From animation to further live-action adaptations on both large and small screens, the mark of Superman: The Movie has been readily apparent since shortly after it ended its theatrical run. (2018, 64)

This should not be taken to mean that Superman: The Movie and Byrne’s The Man of Steel share the same continuity. These and other associations occur along the transtextual axis, with the film and comic occupying different transfictional levels. The axes may feed into and reverberate off each other, echoing within the Superman omni-diegesis, as explained in Chap. 1, but both texts occupy discrete hyperdiegetic locations that oscillate across the broader omni-diegetic macro-structure. While it is accurate that Byrne was in some ways inspired by Donner’s Superman, there are also examples of departure. Byrne radically revised the look of Superman’s home world, Krypton, but he claimed later that he was not inspired by Donner in that regard because he was not permitted to draw from Superman: The Movie directly. In the Silver Age, Krypton was represented in a range of different ways by different artists, ‘a lot of them over the years, one for practically every artist who ever drew

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Superman’ (Kupperberg 2008, 7). Conversely, Byrne’s Krypton is a barren, frozen wasteland, symbolically echoing Jor-El’s words in the prologue to The Man of Steel—that Krypton may have been an advanced society in the past but had now grown into ‘a cold and heartless society, stripped of all human feeling, all passion and life’ (Byrne 1986, 4). Byrne’s Krypton, therefore, stands in stark contrast with Silver Age artist Wayne Boring’s ‘sleek and delicate’ design that boasted ‘gleaming, graceful minarets towering over spotless streets filled with streamlined art deco vehicles’ (Kupperberg 2008, 7). Generic modifications of this type are not strictly related to the reboot concept but are more illustrative of the genre dialectic between formula and invention, between stasis and difference (although one could certainly argue that rebooting implies that generic shifts will occur). In this light, The Man of Steel performs multiple functions simultaneously: it reboots Superman’s continuity from the beginning again, but it also retcons the origin story, refreshes the narrative and generic attributes of the mythos, leading into a relaunch of the main Superman title with a new issue #1 (which would also be written and pencilled by Byrne). Without these shifts—or as Matt Hills might put it, ‘makeover modalities’ (2014, 1)—The Man of Steel would still be a reboot because it begins again with a new continuity. Therefore, Superman no longer emerged in the 1930s as Siegel and Shuster’s ‘Champion of the Oppressed,’ nor did he become the avuncular father figure of the Eisenhower era. Also, he would not be sent from Krypton as a child but was born when the rocket ship crashed on Earth from the ‘birthing matrix’ (essentially a technological womb) that had been installed by his father. Instead, Superman’s origin and history are now situated in the 1980s, not the 1930s. So, then, how did The Man of Steel perform in the comic book market? Did it bring new readers to DC? How did journalists respond to the reboot? And what was the reaction from seasoned super-readers? The next two sections will address these questions.

Truth, Justice, and the Real Thing In the months prior to The Man of Steel’s first issue, DC enjoyed widespread attention from mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and Time magazine. Journalistic ‘entryway paratexts’ (Gray 2010) of this kind would be employed to filter and promote the coming miniseries without the need for extensive advertising revenues, indicating to comics

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publishers that rebooting legacy characters can capture the attention of mainstream critics and commentators. As defender of ‘Truth, Justice and the American way,’ Superman is often viewed as a synecdoche for American values, a star-spangled superhero who works as a metaphor for the American Dream and Manifest Destiny. By 1986, Superman had been not only instantly recognizable across multiple generations of comics readers but also to people who had never read a comic book, courtesy of Superman: The Movie. Superman’s transmedia presence thus ‘afforded the character a permanent place in the popular consciousness,’ and many Americans could have witnessed the character’s adventures across media platforms, from newspaper strips and radio to cinema and television (Teiwes 2012). As with textual conservationist discourses (Hills 2002), numerous mainstream journalists rebuked the idea that the character would undergo any sort of transformation, viewing Superman as static and unchangeable rather than mobile and almost constantly in flux (Teiwes 2012). Many of these detractors projected their assumptions based on a DC press announcement, released three months or so before the first issue of The Man of Steel was published (Ibid.). Nevertheless, we can see how important Superman had become for many Americans, not only as a national symbol but perhaps a nationalist figure, one that struck a nerve in the fevered patriotic climate of Reagan’s America. Journalists and entertainment critics worried that DC would turn Superman into a ‘Superwimp’ (Haroldson 1987), a ‘quiche-eating yuppie’ (Tiewes 2012), ‘like other New Men of the ’80s’ (Gates 1985, 6), ‘open about their feelings,’ (The Gazette 1985), ‘just as we need symbols of patient, self-assured masculinity’ (Nyhan 1986, 12). ‘They may as well have turned him into a hairdresser, or an interior dresser’ (Ibid.); or as Andy Smith put it in the Lansing State Journal, ‘[t]hat’s akin to painting a mustache on the Statue of Liberty’ (1986). Nickie McWhirter (1986), at the Detroit Free Press, censured DC editor Paul Levitz ‘and his band of mischief makers’ for vandalizing Superman’s patriotic spirit and values: ‘Truth, justice and the American way are at risk if all these changes are made in Superman comics. That’s what I say, and I vote “no” on everything’ (Tiewes 2012). This idea of Superman as explicitly an American symbol (and a conservative one at that) is reproduced across numerous articles, such as The Boston Globe’s David Nyhan. who ridicules John Byrne for his national pedigree: Byrne was born in England and raised in Canada, so ‘obviously he knows all there is to know about an American as Superman, right?’ (1986, 12).

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Across the discursive field exists a brand of journalistic fidelity criticism, anchored to notions of authenticity of traditional stereotypes of masculinity intermixed with anxieties regarding a perceived emasculation of the character. Ultimately, Superman is positioned firmly as an American creation that in no way should be meddled with. All of this from a short press release by DC Comics. As Tiewes rightly explains, ‘virtually none of these attributes reflect anything said in any of DC’s statements to the press’ (2012). Furthermore, these critics did not seem to be aware that Superman had been reconceptualized and regenerated almost since his debut in Action Comics #1, nor that he had been given life by two Jewish creators. ‘To the geniuses at DC,’ cautioned The Philadelphia Enquirer, ‘four words of caution: Remember the New Coke’ (Teiwes 2012). Referencing the failure of New Coke provides an interesting parallel with these discourses of tradition and formula, fidelity and authenticity. The Coca-Cola Company’s market share of the soft drink economy had been declining for decades, from 60% in 1945 to 24% in 1983, and their main rival, Pepsi, was rapidly gaining ground. To prevent the ascendancy of Pepsi, and the likelihood that they could reasonably take pole position in the market, the Coca-Cola Company created a new recipe, and in April 1985, launched the New Coke—or as later described by Tim Murphy, ‘a fizzy reboot’ (2019). The response from the public was swift and devastating, to say the least, resulting in the company removing the drink from circulation within three months despite a massive advertising campaign starring ‘America’s Dad,’ Bill Cosby. In For God, Country and Coca-Cola (2013), Mark Pendergrast captures the mood at the time: Within a week over a thousand calls a day were jamming the company’s 800 line, almost all of them expressing shock and outrage at New Coke. The media loved the hot story, which pierced the American heart. “Next week, they’ll be chiseling Teddy Roosevelt off the side of Mount Rushmore,” a Washington Times Columnist groaned … Newsweek’s headline declared, “Coke Tampers with Success,” identifying the old soft drink as “the American character in a can”. (Ibid.)

New Coke was ‘like spitting on the flag,’ ‘violat[ing] my freedom of choice [and] the Declaration of Independence’ (Demott 1985), ‘just like breaking the American Dream, like not selling hot dogs at a ball game’, the equivalent of rewriting the Constitution (Pendergrast 2013). Or as ‘one

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husband and father of two complained: ‘I couldn’t have been more surprised if someone had told me that I was gay’ (Oliver 1985, 8). In Seattle, real estate entrepreneur Gay Mullins set up a group called ‘Old Cola Drinkers of America,’ and created a hotline for people to call in to vocalize their objections. As Mullins told Tom Shale of the Chicago Tribune at the time: I’m mad. This makes me angry. I’m angry, and I’m mad. I feel injured. Betrayed. Like a sacred trust has been violated. I know people who are going through withdrawal without their Coca-Cola. People are having anxiety headaches. They’ve been placed in a distressed state. It’s the post-Coke syndrome. People are so shocked by this, they worry that maybe the whole country is falling apart. They don’t even trust themselves anymore. (Shales 1985)

Also writing for the Chicago Tribune, Michael Hirsley (1985) included a quote from University of Mississippi scholar, William Ferris, who argued that: ‘Changing Coca-Cola is an intrusion on tradition, and a lot of Southerners won’t like it, regardless of how it tastes.’ Thomas Oliver addresses this in The Real Coke, The Real Story (1986), emphasizing that for Southern Americans, New Coke was an extension of the Civil War. Here was Coca-Cola, a southern company, laying down its arms in deference to its Yankee counterpart … Coke, the quintessential southern drink, was changing its image and content to conform with the rivals in the North [Pepsi’s headquarters being in New York].

On 11 July 1985, just 79 days after the release of New Coke, the company changed tack and announced the relaunch of what would now be called ‘Coca-Cola Classic,’ a name that would remain on cans and bottles until 2009. The news seemed so important that Peter Jennings from ABC News interrupted the long-running US soap opera General Hospital to let everyone know that the old formula was back, while David Pryor, a senator from Arkansas, ceremoniously declared that this was nothing less than ‘a meaningful moment in American history’ (Pendergast 2013). On the one hand, the New Coke was a failure, a nonpareil marketing fiasco in most accounts. The Coca-Cola Company’s President Donald Keough admitted that he didn’t consider the ‘deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people’ (Cobb 2015),

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perhaps indicating that soft drinks have their own fan cultures, too. For all the media brouhaha generated around fans who expressed dissatisfaction with, say, the Ghostbusters reboot (see Proctor 2017), with the associated cries of ‘childhood ruination’ that have been roundly mocked by journalists, fans, and other commentators, the firestorm produced by New Coke demonstrates, convincingly I think, that ‘geek’ culture’s penchant for textual conservationism (and conservatism) may be mirrored to a degree by responses to other consumer products. Perhaps a case can be made for enactments of conservationism beyond the realm of entertainment. Whether attached to geek-oriented texts or the soft drink market, both ‘cultures’ seem to be driven by a platonic ideal tied up with perceptions of authenticity. As explained by Gilmore and Pine II, Coca-Cola’s brand positioning has centered around being the real thing since 1969 — a motif the company comes back to time and again in its advertising … Coke proclaims itself —and consumers generally regard it as — authentic because it is the original soft drink … Remember New Coke? It failed not because it tasted worse than the old version; no, it tasted better, sweeter — more like Pepsi — but because it was completely fake. It wasn’t the original real thing. (2007, 57–58, italics in original)

From this perspective, then, New Coke was hated primarily because it was ‘new’ Coke, not because of taste but because of the very idea, an unreal thing that simply couldn’t be authentic. In blind taste-tests, however, the New Coke consistently triumphed (Mikkelson 1999). On the other hand, however, the fact that the relaunch and rebranding of ‘Coca-Cola Classic’ was met with an outpouring of media and consumer celebration may have actually helped the company in the end. Subsequently, the Coca-Cola Company witnessed its profits swiftly sky-­ rocket, increasing their lead over Pepsi considerably. Sergio Zyman, the marketing guru behind New Coke, claimed that ‘it infuriated the public and lasted only 77 days before we reintroduced Coca-Cola Classic [but] New Coke was a success because it revitalized the brand and reattached the public to Coke’ (Hamilton 1999). Before the end of 1985, the Coca-­ Cola Company’s sales had increased at twice the rate of Pepsi’s, although Oliver argues that the introduction of Cherry Coke was also a factor as it was released around the same time (1986). It is worth noting that New Coke remained on shelves, mostly in North America, although the Coca-Cola Company didn’t actively promote it. It

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was renamed Coke II in 1990 and was retired altogether twelve years later. In 2019, New Coke appeared on the Netflix show, Stranger Things (2016–) and, in partnership with the streaming giant, the Coca-Cola Company relaunched a limited run of New Coke (500,000 cans). This time around, however, demand was so high that a burst of online traffic reportedly crashed the website (see Moslander 2019). In response, cans were auctioned on eBay, attracting three times the retail price. It seems that the power of nostalgia overthrew questions of authenticity in the twenty-first century, although Meagan Fredette suggests that ‘New Coke is finding immense popularity among folks who likely weren’t even born when it was initially released’ (2019). Perhaps these New Coke acolytes were more fans of Stranger Things than the soft drink itself, supping the diegetic beverage in concert with the show’s characters. The correlations between New Coke and The Man of Steel discourses are hopefully evident. Both were centred around the notion of authenticity and platonic ideals of ‘the real thing,’ and both included the mobilization of masculinist/emasculation discourses, as well as traditional, (neo)conservative American values and patriotism. Where the two differ is that the response to The Man of Steel did not lead to DC Comics’ restoring the pre-­Crisis Superman, but they did in fact respond with public relations rhetoric of their own, with Byrne especially confronting discursive criticisms by associating the Superman reboot explicitly with Reagan’s America, patriotism, and hegemonic masculinity. Peggy May, Director of Publicity for DC Comics at the time, rejected journalists’ anxieties about the reboot, saying that: ‘Let me make one thing perfectly clear … no matter what you’ve read, Superman is not going to become a yuppie’ (Evans 1985, 17). Byrne claimed he wanted to ‘make Superman less super, more mortal, but meaner on the job, like the heroes of the new “Rambo generation.” Let’s have him wave the flag, in step with the Reagan era’ (Capuzzo 1985). In The Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote: ‘Stop the presses at the Daily Planet—they’re retooling the Man of Steel. He’ll be less of a wimp, more like Reagan and Rambo’ (1985). In Kempley’s article, Byrne is quoted saying that his Superman won’t be a Republican, but a ‘Super-Republican,’ going on to reference Reagan and the American flag directly: ‘If Reagan has done nothing else, he’s gotten us to wave the flag again. Superman practically waves the flag. I’ll be shamelessly exploiting that’ (Ibid.). Byrne continues similarly in The Times-Tribune, claiming that Superman ‘will be a super-Republican who practically wears the flag’ (Evans 1985, 17); while in The Baltimore Sun, he denied saying anything of the sort: ‘I’m not a

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Republican … I’m a Canadian, a Progressive Conservative’ (Rothman 1985, 82). Rothman assumes that ‘the comic moguls are trying to sanitize the outrageous remarks given to the Washington Post’s Rita Kempley,’ an assumption that has at least some credence given that Byrne reportedly used the ‘Super-Republican’ description in multiple interviews for reputable newspapers (Ibid.). It is possible, though, that Byrne and DC shifted rhetorical stances depending on the political leanings of each publication as they sought to relate to different audiences and different ideological communities. As Bradford Wright argues: Byrne’s own approach to comic books was well suited to the culture of the Reagan years. In a 1989 interview with the New York Times, Byrne explained that he had always tried to write with a “Middle American Bible Belt mentality” … Byrne’s back-to-basics approach meshed nicely with the cultural politics of President Ronald Reagan and the ascendant New Right. (2001, 265–66)

From this perspective, Reagan’s ‘nostalgic brand of patriotic values’ were ideologically projected on both the New Coke and The Man of Steel discourses, suggesting a broader ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1961) permeating North America during the neoliberal 1980s. Although, as noted, Byrne was born in Britain and raised in Canada, critics that worried about the national iconicity of Superman being tampered with would possibly be more than happy with the final image in The Man of Steel. In a departure from the Superman mythos, Kal-El was not born on Krypton, but gestated in a birthing matrix aboard the departing ship, meaning that he ‘was born when the rocket opened, on Earth, in America’ (1986, emphasis in original). More recently, right-wing commentators expressed their fury in 2011 at a non-canonical nine-page story included within the 900th commemorative issue of Action Comics. Written by David S. Goyer, the story, titled ‘The Incident,’ depicts Superman renouncing his American citizenship, stating baldly: ‘I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy … “Truth, Justice, and the American way!”—It’s not enough anymore’ (Goyer et al. 2011, 77). Like the reaction to Byrne’s The Man of Steel, similar discourses circulated Goyer’s short story that aligned Superman ideologically with conservative America, conveniently excluding the fact that the character, as he confronts directly in ‘The Incident,’ is an alien ‘born on another world’ (Ibid., 78).

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In response, Mike Huckbee, former Governor of Arkansas, argued that ‘it is disturbing that Superman who has always been an American icon is now saying I’m not going to be a citizen’ (Reblin et al. 2014, 67), while a Fox News commenter wrote: ‘This is absolutely sickening. We are now down to destroying all American Icons. How are we going to survive as a Nation?’ (Jenkins and Shresthova 2012). Writing for The Wall Street Journal, comic book writer Chuck Dixon and artist Paul Rivoche claimed that ‘The Incident’ enacts a worrying and increasingly popular form of moral relativism, being ‘perhaps the most dramatic example of modern comics’ descent into political correctness, moral ambiguity and leftist ideology’ (2014). On the other hand, immigrant rights activists queried Superman’s American citizenry or whether he even possessed a green card, given that he entered the country without permission and, we must presume, without documentation, a refugee from a society in turmoil who has sought to hide his origins and identity from outside scrutiny ever since. (Jenkins and Shresthova 2012)

Although the famous mission statement, ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way,’ originated in the Superman radio series rather than comics, it is perhaps an inalienable motif in the public imagination, yet it has also been revised several times both within comics and across media platforms. In the 1948 Superman film serial, for example, it is ‘Truth, Tolerance, and Justice,’ while in the popular 1960s children’s animation, The New Adventures of Superman (1966–1970), it becomes ‘Truth, Justice, and Freedom.’ For the live-action 1990s TV series, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–1997), the Dean Cain version of the character uses ‘truth and justice,’ the exclusion of ‘America’ perhaps signifying an ideological shift that was captured by writer Joe Kelly in Action Comics #775 from 2001. Titled ‘What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way,’ Superman is confronted by vigilante Manchester Black, who rehearses the idea that the catchphrase is a reactionary form of jingoism, of ‘Truth, justice, and the American military-commercial-right-wing way’ (Kelly et  al. 2001, n.p). More recently, the mission statement has been revised once again, but, unlike Goyer’s ‘imaginary story,’ it would be officially within DC continuity (not an imaginary story! Not a hoax!). On 16 October 2021, DC Comics announced that ‘Truth, Justice, and the American Way’ will now be officially replaced with ‘Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow,’ a shift that, according to artist and DC’s Chief Creative

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Officer Jim Lee, ‘better reflect[s] the storylines that we are telling across DC and to honor Superman’s legacy of over 80 years of building a better world’ (Ortiz and Lincoln 2021). True to form, Raymond Arroyo criticized the change on Fox News in an ‘America is Watching’ segment, subtitled ‘When Wokeness Comes for Your Comics,’ claiming that the removal of Superman’s motto—which he incorrectly states was ‘Fight for the American Way’—is ‘clearly a distortion and a disservice to anyone that read the comic books and watched those movies’ (Nelson 2021). Arroyo continues: Now you have a multinational corporation, D.C.  Comics, that decided it would rather politically grandstand and build foreign markets than respect their character and the audience that built him. You don’t need Kryptonite to kill Superman when you have D.C Comics doing a great job … I’m waiting for Superman to turn up in a red costume and we will just call him Super Person … Lex Luthor should send DC Comics a thank you card for sidelining and killing Superman. (Ibid.)

In the Fox News opinion show, ‘Outnumbered,’ lead anchor Harris Faulkner claimed that DC’s decision illustrates just how anti-American they are. ‘Look, I don’t think there’s any confusion here,’ argued Faulkner. ‘We’re being told not to love our country’ (Baragona 2021). In response, comedian and talk show host Stephen Colbert said that ‘it makes sense to change it. If Superman really followed the current American way, he would fly to school board meetings to scream about how the [COVID] vaccine gave him heat vision’ (Horton 2021). Such responses, argue Jenkins and Shresthova, ‘suggest a widespread recognition that popular mythologies may provide the frames through which the public makes sense of its national identity’ (2012), an argument that could equally be applied onto The Man of Steel discourses (and to popular culture more generally). It is also worth noting that fidelity criticism also (re)emerged in discourses that surrounded the theatrical release of the Superman film reboot, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013). As Phil Bevin explores in his Superman and Comic Book Brand Continuity, negative criticisms of the film often pivoted on comparisons with Superman: The Movie, which, as discussed earlier in this chapter, had successfully popularized Christopher Reeve as the primary version of the character, with the film itself representing the ‘true’ essence of the comic book source material. This is not to imply, however, that Superman: The Movie can be viewed as an adaptation of a

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specific comic book, but that the mythologization of the film as a faithful rendering of Superman has become ossified through discourse by repeatedly projecting Donner’s interpretation as gospel, a ‘true portrayal’ with which to evaluate later interpretations (Bevin 2019, 95). Donner’s claim to be “faithful” to the “truth” of a singular, identifiable Superman “legend”—“a great American myth”—applies a similar conception of the mythical character: a hero who has one definitive story, which conveys upon him and his actions specific and limited meanings and a story that requires faithful reproduction if it’s [sic] meaning is to be successfully conveyed. If his claim that Superman and his story present a singular Myth were true, however, the character would have one single story and not be such a versatile figure who—even in his relatively early days—was depicted in a number of different representations which, in some cases, were only loosely related. (Ibid., 91)

The next section explores the ways that Byrne’s The Man of Steel was received by comic book readers, many of whom also consolidate the idea that Superman is fixed and secure.

Hallowed Trademarks and Untouchable Histories Like most comic book reboots, dictating that Superman’s previous adventures—his mythos and character, his history and continuity—are null and void by editorial fiat comes with significant risks. Numerous fans raged against the very idea of rebooting Superman, some expressing hostility before the comic was even released (Byrne 2005). Tampering with the archetypal superhero is perhaps more hazardous than with other characters, perilously running the risk of a priori rejections even before The Man of Steel was published. Indeed, many fans at the time joined in with the discursive chorus of newspaper critics discussed above, some of whom hinged their anxieties onto the perceived damage being wrought onto the ‘real’ Superman. Like Crisis, letters published in Amazing Heroes offered a range of views on the Superman reboot, most of them negative (although there was at least a modicum of support for Byrne’s endeavours). In response to a previous feature in Amazing Heroes focused on Byrne’s plans for The Man of Steel, Jim Jackson describes Byrne as ‘obnoxious toward and ignorant of a history which spans over 40 years,’ going on to complain that

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Superman can be regenerated effectively without torpedoing DC continuity so thoroughly: how can he believe he has the right to ignore 40 years? Is DC deciding to say “to hell with continuity and history, let’s get Superman to pass X-Men and Teen-Titans in sales?” … My gripe is that Byrne plans just to ignore and reinterpret the history. What does he plan to do concerning the Justice League and Superman’s relationship with other heroes? God help them all. (Jackson 1986a, 57)

Billy Ford doesn’t seem as concerned about continuity as Jackson, but he does argue that there are certain elements of Superman’s mythos that should remain intact. ‘I don’t support Byrne’s decision of not reinstating the defunct romance between Lois Lane and Superman,’ writes Ford. ‘Their romance is as imprinted on the public’s conscience as the eons-old romance between Popeye and Olive Oyl. Some things are not meant to be changed …’ (1986, 61). Ford then moves to criticise Byrne’s plans to reduce Superman’s powers considerably, arguing that his ability to time travel is ‘one of his hallowed trademarks’ (Ibid.). In conclusion, Ford conveys the core risks that come with strategies of regeneration—that it is ‘dangerous to change a character that is the epitome of American mythology’ (Ibid.). It is important to recognize that readers like Jackson and Ford are not responding to The Man of Steel itself (it had not yet been published at the time). Like journalistic discourses explored in the previous section, these negative letters are therefore affective forecasts based upon prefigurative, paratextual discourses that sought to promote the series ahead of its release. Even though Jackson and Ford’s critiques are largely based on assumption and conjecture—or at least based on a reading of prefigurative materials—it is nevertheless intriguing to examine discursive chatter of this type to better understand what is at stake for comic book readers when rebooting threatens to undermine their investment in the fan object. For readers like Jackson and Ford, there are significant perils associated with rebooting a long-running comic and meddling with ‘the epitome of American mythology’ (Ford 1986, 61). Interesting, Jackson writes a follow-up letter in Amazing Heroes #101 and offers an apology to Byrne. Jackson admits that he ‘attacked Mr Byrne for disregarding the “untouchable” history of Superman’ (Jackson 1986b, 62), but had revised his opinion after reading a feature article in Amazing

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Heroes #96 that showed that Superman’s ‘untouchable’ history was nothing of the sort, that the character had undergone multiple regenerations since his first appearance in Action Comics #1  in 1938, as explored in Chap. 3. Rather than bidding for subcultural capital through invocations of expertise, Jackson’s mea culpa functions antithetically. That is, by openly admitting that his knowledge of Superman and the character’s ‘untouchable’ history indicated that he lacked expertise, Jackson effectively withdraws symbolic funds from the bank of subcultural capital. Following the publication of The Man of Steel #1 in July 1986, other letter writers condemned the issue as ‘trash’ (Uecker 1987, 71), ‘a seminal example of how not to write’ (Peschel 1986, 70), ‘an embarrassment, a disappointment and something to be ashamed of’ (Jones 1986, 61), that Byrne’s Superman ‘will never replace the real “Man of Steel”’ (Simcox 1986, 76). For letter writer B.M.O.C, the main problem is not with continuity, ‘artistic integrity’ nor ‘lame explanations,’ but with Superman’s curl. ‘Alright, maybe this doesn’t make a difference to everyone else,’ admits B.M.O.C, but to me, part of what made Superman recognizable was his famous Superman curl … Maybe the curl doesn’t take precedence over the other changes evoked, but as a fan it is important for me to know that this is still basically the same legend. (1986, 77)

Although B.M.O.C’s letter may appear to be frivolous pedantry or even a joke, it does at least imply that fidelity to a generic template of Superman (‘basically the same legend’) is expected by comic book fans. Yet, like Jackson, the notion that there is a singular platonic ideal—‘the real thing’—that constitutes the character is myopic and ahistorical. In this context, it is difficult to fully understand which of the many lives of Superman would be accepted as authentic, as ‘the real thing,’ by fans: it certainly could not be the first incarnation of the character (who could not fly, who did not work at The Daily Planet, and who could not travel through time or play intergalactic football with planets, as detailed in Chap. 3). Perhaps most fans embrace the image and attributes of the cinematic Superman as the most authentic iteration, but there is no evidence in Amazing Heroes’ letters to empirically support that argument. If nothing else, the readers who complain about ‘dangerous’ changes to ‘the real thing,’ whether centred on narrative or character, imply that most of these

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readers remain unaware that, historically, Superman has neither been ‘untouchable’ nor inviolable, but flexible and mobile. Letter writer T.M. Maple explains that comic book readers ‘know it is all just make-believe and that they’re “only” comic books but there can be a strong and emotional attachment’ (1987, 79). It is through the protection of memory that explains why comic book fans are so reluctant to see their favourite characters change. The comics of our childhood are gone. They are not easily available like the movies or TV shows or whatever. Sure, we can try to collect these lost treasures (at a hefty price increase!) but rare is the person that can collect even a sizable portion of the original. Memories are what we have intact. And we have the “unchanged” character of the present as a link to the past. So when a character disappears or is substantially changed, we feel that we have lost a vital link to our special favorite … I hope that the “new” Superman does very well. But I don’t think he will ever quite be “my” Superman—the “real” one … But then today’s version will be “real” to a new generation of readers. (1987, 79, italics in original)

Maple’s use of quotations marks around the words ‘real’ and ‘my’ are revealing, in that he recognizes that fidelity is a subjective perception aligned with one’s personal and emotional attachments projected onto a specific version of the character. In this light, Maple’s letter is a hymn to childhood memory, to a form of self-narrative that conducts social identity work built upon a bedrock of ‘totemic nostalgia,’ a kind of protectionism that seeks to protect a treasured fan object (or totem) from symbolic attack (Proctor 2017). As Matt Hills explains, ‘“fans” sense of self-identity is so firmly enmeshed’ with the fan object that they may lionize it, as a totem, to such an extent that ‘potential threats to textual authenticity’ can become sites of contestation and defensive bulwarking (2012, 115). Perceived threats to totemic objects ‘can thus be felt as threats to these fans’ self-narratives’ (Ibid., 114). In other words, comic book readers are ‘reluctant to see their favourite characters change’ because doing so would threaten the shape and contours of the totem, which, in this context, represents ‘the affective power of primary identification’ (Jenkins 2004, 7), a resource for self-identity and meaning-making in fans’ life-worlds. The act of rebooting, then, becomes nothing less than a wen on the face of the totemic object [whereby] wiping the slate clean in order to begin again threatens the integrity of the primary

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and primal textual experience, thus setting the stage for backlash and defensive posturing. (Proctor 2017, 1121)

As a corollary, it is worth pointing out that fans in the 1980s did not have the same kind of access to old comics and back-issues as twenty-first century readers do. Indeed, there are more comics available nowadays than ever before because of the technological shifts that arrived with the internet, shifts that provided opportunities for digitizing and archiving popular culture texts and histories. Prior to digitalization, older comics could only be consumed by scavenging through back-issues at newsstands, but even then, it is highly unlikely that Golden or Silver Age superhero titles would be available at all, especially as these comics, these ‘lost treasures’ in Maple’s words, tend to be cultural relics that command high prices on the collector’s market (the first issue of Captain America Comics recently sold for $3.12 million in 2022). As a consequence, the idea of fan expertise has also shifted considerably since the digitization of comics as readers can more easily access a publisher’s archive, whether through official channels and portals (such as DC Universe Infinite or Marvel Unlimited Comics) or via illegal online repositories (like Get Comics). Although from the mid-­1980s onwards, DC and Marvel began publishing compendiums that included full runs of classic material (see Round 2010), it would be the affordances offered by digitization that would accelerate the availability and accessibility of a publisher’s vast archive, thereby allowing comic book readers to develop their expertise along more historic lines of enquiry. The fact that readers in the 1980s did not possess the degree of expert knowledge as today’s fans should not be taken to mean that they were any less invested or passionate—they simply did not have the same level of access to the cultural memory banks. To return to The Man of Steel, the majority of letters published in Amazing Heroes found fault with Byrne’s reboot. Yet, there were also positive accounts from readers, most of whom responded to R.A. Jones’ official review of the first issue, which, in his assessment, ‘is one of the most poorly conceived, poorly written, and poorly executed pieces of pulp garbage it has ever been my misfortune to read’ (Jones 1986, 73, italics in original). Although some readers agree wholeheartedly with Jones (e.g., Peschel 1986; Sangiacomo 1986), others thought he had been unnecessarily savage, such as Theodore Miller (1986, 71), who said that his opinion was almost directly opposite and that Byrne ‘kept the basic elements of the past versions of Superman, while introducing a number of fascinating new

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concepts.’ Likewise, Danny DeAngelo says that Jones’ review was ‘far too harsh’, yet he also adds that Byrne’s Superman ‘is far from perfect, in my opinion, [but] it’s hardly as bad a R.A makes it out to be’ (1986, 78). Although DeAngelo may be damning with faint praise here, these more positive accounts imply that The Man of Steel was at least a contentious exercise. This should of course be taken with a pinch of salt and certainly not an indication of the wider readership—there is no way to know the precise ratio of positive/negative letters received by Amazing Heroes’ editors. Perhaps the more scathing reviews were selected because they would stimulate further debate and thus offer more letters to publish, but this is nothing but conjecture on my part. I would say, however, that the prefigurative and post-release discourses that circulated around The Man of Steel explored in this chapter illustrate that the comic was controversial, setting in motion arguments regarding authenticity and fidelity, ‘the real thing’ versus Byrne’s facsimile. By comparison, Schwartz’s superhero revival in the 1950s was a less contentious exercise. As explored in Chap. 3, the superhero was almost extinct before reboots of The Flash and Green Lantern pumped new blood into the genre’s veins and muscles, reawakening and reinvigorating the capes and cowls for the Silver Age. Yet despite the negative buzz, The Man of Steel did enormously well in sales, so much so in fact that it became the biggest selling comic since the Direct Market began in the 1970s (see Chap. 4). Just as the successful relaunch of Coca-Cola Classic proved, negative discourses may not necessarily lead automatically to failure, implying that the old adage, ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ might still have some merit. Three months prior to the publication of The Man of Steel #1, Capital City Distribution’s monthly trade magazine, Internal Correspondence, ran a report on preorders of the title in May 1986, under the headline, ‘Man of Steel Numbers Super-Huge!’: Orders received by Capital City as of this writing on Man of Steel #1 are nothing short of amazing. The book will almost certainly have the largest print run of any title in Direct Sales history. DC is planning an aggressive marketing campaign to get coverage in mass market media for the book, which will be the “Bible” of Superman’s life for many years to come. Hopefully, this mass media coverage will encourage many consumers that have not looked at a comic in years to buy copies of this new version of Superman’s early life. (Capital City 1986a, 4)

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Two months later, in August 1986, it appeared that consumers were indeed encouraged to buy copies of the Superman reboot, as illustrated by the following: Total print run on #1 (both covers) was close to a million copies, which makes it the biggest selling comic in many years, certainly in the history of the direct sales market. Orders on issues #5 and #6 are running almost double what comparative issues of Crisis were. By any estimate a huge hit. (Capital City 1986b, 1)

What is also interesting here is the comparison with sales for Crisis #5 and #6, with The Man of Steel ‘running almost double,’ which would amount to sales of 500,000 or so. Clearly, then, The Man of Steel succeeded in attracting new readers, which is also supported by the title landing the top five spots in end of the year sales charts (Comichron, ‘1986 Comics Sales to Comics Shops’). Crisis, however, is nowhere to be seen (at least in the Top Ten). In fact, according to Capital City Distribution, the fourth issue of Crisis amassed 44,450 in pre-orders (Comichron, ‘1985 Comics Sales to Comics Shops’), which stands in stark contrast to The Man of Steel’s ‘nothing short of amazing’ pre-orders, as quoted above. I am not suggesting that Crisis was not a financial success, however, only that The Man of Steel’s sales figures lends considerable weight to the notion that Crisis was not for new readers and was therefore not as successful as The Man of Steel, primarily because it rebooted Superman from the beginning again, and thus would appeal to people without continuity expertise. Whether or not The Man of Steel managed to attract brand-new readers, appealed to older fans that hadn’t picked up a comic for a while, or successfully enticed those Marvel readers that Wolfman hoped to capture, is impossible to determine. Greenberger claims that ‘newer fans were excited, and in the end, sales did the most talking’ (2018). What is certain, however, is that people were buying Superman comics in droves once again, more than at any point since the 1960s. What’s more, the success of The Man of Steel sparked a sales increase across all the Superman titles once the series was finished (as noted, DC decided that Byrne’s mini-series would be the only Superman comic available during its three-month run). In August 1986, a month after the final issue of The Man of Steel was released, DC wasted little time in moving forward with three inter-related monthly Superman titles but confused readers with their numbering. The first appeared to be a relaunch of the

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character’s original eponymous title from 1939, with a new number one issue, but it turned out that Adventures of Superman would be the continuation of the Superman comic as it included the ‘Legacy’ numbering, the first of which would be #429  in the post-Byrne continuity. For all intents and purposes, Superman #1 was a different series. Action Comics, the longest-running superhero title that sparked the Golden Age, would also continue with its Legacy numbering with issue #584. While Superman #1 clearly signified where new readers should begin, both Action Comics and Adventures of Superman did not sell as well, despite Byrne’s involvement in the former (Marv Wolfman would write the latter before Byrne took over in September 1987). This is not to suggest that Action and Adventures were failures, however, as both sold exceedingly well: the average issue of Superman in 1986 had sales of 98,443 copies, while the average issue in 1987 sold 161,859 copies (Miller 2020). The latter figure included the larger-selling issues #424, ending the original Superman run, and #425, launching the Adventures of Superman era. Continuity between the three Superman titles, however, lacked transfictional braiding, with Adventures providing most of the problems (Byrne was not involved until later when Wolfman departed the title). As Julian Darius explains, inter-title continuity was almost absent, and even when discontinuity occurred more by omission that error, it is difficult to reconcile Byrne’s Superman with Wolfman’s (2011b). Byrne later claimed that Wolfman’s ‘contract was not renewed’ after ‘a most unsatisfactory first year of “collaboration”’ (Byrne 2005). Although Byrne had successfully rescued Superman in much the same way that the way he had for Marvel’s The X-Men, his Superman reboot would remain canonical until it was eventually supplanted in 2003 by Mark Waid’s Birthright (which in turn was supplanted by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s Superman: Secret Origin in 2006). Despite its official canonical erasure, The Man of Steel is considered seminal nowadays, and an influence on later writers and artists, as well as impacting other transmedia Supermen, lending the title to Zak Snyder’s film reboot in 2013, and Brian Michael Bendis six-part mini-series of the same name from 2018. In later years, Byrne expressed his dissatisfaction with the experience, citing a lack of support from DC, as well as complaining about the fact that Warner Bros., DC’s corporate parent, continued to license Superman in his pre-Crisis incarnation.

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DC hired me to revamp Superman, and then immediately chickened out. They backed off at the first whiff of fan disapproval, which came months before anyone had actually seen the work. During the whole two years I was on the project, although nothing happened that was not approved by DC editorial, there was no conscious support. They even continued to license the “previous” Superman. At one point, Dick Giordano said “you have to realize there are now two Supermen—the one you do and the one we license.” After two years of this nonsense, I was just worn down. The fun was gone. (Byrne 2005)

Here, Byrne could be referencing the third film in the film franchise, Superman IV: Quest for Peace (1987), or perhaps the live-action Superboy TV series that aired its first episode in 1988 and lasted for four consecutive seasons (both of which were produced by Ilya and Alexander Salkind, who had also produced Superman: The Movie, Superman II, Supergirl and Superman III, before Warner Bros. reacquired the license in 1993). Maybe worst of all, at least for Byrne, is that DC published a new Superboy comic to tie-in with the TV series, a situation that was unlikely to confuse continuity acolytes given their experience in juggling multiple worlds and timelines, but Byrne seemed to expect his Superman to be the one and only Superman. Dick Giordano remembers it differently. ‘My major complaint with what John Byrne did to Superman,’ explained Giordano, was that he didn’t go far enough. What I was authorizing was, “Look, we can’t give this thing away [can’t sell Superman comics anymore] let’s make some real changes.” I think he wanted to at first but I think he was caught by the rich history and he started turning around and he started to try to explain all of the stuff that had happened in the past. He kept bringing up characters that he said no longer existed when he first started. Somehow, they found their way into the strip … We’ve doubled our readership, even without Byrne. (in McCue with Bloom. 1993, 124–125)

Giordano’s claims here regarding Byrne’s lackadaisical approach to the reboot are supported by fan letters in Amazing Heroes, such as Brian Uecker, who writes that ‘a lot of the “silly” continuity that Byrne was to supposedly eliminate is simply being rehashed — in the form of tributes. Why the hell bother remaking the character in the first place?’ (1987, 71). Such a ‘tribute’ can be seen in Byrne’s final arc, ‘The Supergirl Saga,’ a story that includes the return of the Maid of Might, but with a twist: as it

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turned out, she wasn’t from Krypton, but a protoplasmic matrix that contained the memories of Clark Kent’s Kansas sweetheart, Lana Lang. Still, having a character named Supergirl at all implies that pre-Crisis history continued to bleed through in some form, as with the case of ‘Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot,’ a Deadman story featured in Christmas with the Superheroes #2 from 1988. Written by Alan Brennert and drawn by Giordano, the ‘soul’ of Supergirl/Kara appears in the story and castigates Boston ‘Deadman’ Brand for being hungry for glory: We don’t do it for the glory. We don’t do it for the recognition … We do it because it needs to be done. Because if we don’t, no-one else will. And we do it even if no-one knows what we’ve done. Even if no-one knows we exist. Even if no-one remembers we ever existed’. (Brennert et al. 1988, 9, emphasis in original)

The irony here, of course, is that readers not only remembered Supergirl but that her appearance in the story means she still exists within continuity, regardless of her form. ‘Who are you?’, asks Deadman as the story ends. ‘I … I don’t even know your name …’ The woman turns: ‘My name is Kara. Though I doubt that’ll mean anything to you’ (Ibid.). Given the continuity snarls that entangled Superboy with the Legion of Superheroes, and the retconning that sought to patch over the issues—not forgetting that Superman retained more than a few memories of the continuity that was meant to have been deleted—Byrne claimed that DC ‘wanted Superman rebooted without him actually being, you know, rebooted. Odd, indeed, since I had said from the start I was perfectly prepared to work from within continuity, and the reboot was their idea’ (2005). Taking Byrne’s comments here in tandem with Giordano’s above and the history becomes rather murky. Yet as editor, Giordano would certainly have had the authority to veto Byrne’s (dis)continuity escapades, perhaps indicating that editors do not (or cannot) oversee every aspect of the production process. Above, Giordano clearly signals the observable divide between the spheres of licensing and publishing with his ‘two Supermen’ comment, but he also underestimates the character’s pervasive multiplicities that had been part of Superman’s cultural biography almost since genesis. By the 1980s, Superman had more or less travelled across most media platforms, a journey that had been ongoing for almost half-a-century at this point. Since inception, Superman splintered into multiple forms and variations,

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not as an example of transmedia storytelling—and certainly not transfictional storytelling enacted within comic book continuity—but a discontinuous brand with multiple faces and many lives. Paradoxically, Superman also retains the core essentials of what make him who is he, and how he came to be. His origin story may have been retconned and regenerated over the decades, but the ‘essence’ of Superman remains similar if not the same. As Superman fan and blogger Nathaniel Morgan explains, ‘[t]he Golden Age Superman, the Silver Age Superman, and the Bronze Age Superman are all very different characters with different powers, different continuities, and different costumes—but they are all Superman’ (1997, my emphasis). Superman’s story is familiar to many, and he has often been mobilized as ‘a representative of significant American values’ (Bevin 2019), as a metonym for the national psyche, as a morality figure, the ultimate ‘good guy’ who fights for what is right, for ‘truth, justice, and the American way,’ or ‘a better tomorrow.’ To comic book fans, his origin story is so well-trod (and some might say, well-worn) that Grant Morrison captured it in only four panels and eight words at the beginning of his celebrated, Silver Age paean, All-Star Superman: ‘Doomed Planet. Desperate Scientists. Last Hope. Kindly Couple’ (Morrison and Quietly 2006, 11). Just as Superman becomes ‘silly putty’ in the hands of fans, however (Jenkins 1992,156), so he does with official production cultures, too. In DC’s Elseworlds series, for instance—which is more or less a continuation of the imaginary stories from the 1950s onwards (see Chap. 3)— Superman’s ‘essence’ is radically remoulded, such as in Mark Millar’s Red Son (2003) where the infant Kal-El crashlands not in rural Kansas, as per the canonical origin story, but in Soviet Russia, where the motto ‘truth, justice and the American way’ becomes ‘Stalin, socialism and the expansion of the Warsaw pact.’ Likewise, in John Byrne and John Cleese’s parody, True Brit (2004), Kal-El lands in Weston Super-Mare, England. In The Dark Side (Moore 1998), the rocket crashes on the planet Apokolips where the Man of Steel is raised by the popular villain, Darkseid; or in Kal, the origin story is given a medieval facelift (Gibbons et  al. 1995). The origin story is turned on its head once more in Last Son on Earth: Superman escapes from a dying Earth, only to crash on Krypton instead (Gerber et  al. 2000). In another revisionist take, Lex Luthor discovers the alien rocket-ship, only to find that the space-faring infant has perished, leading Luthor to resurrect the child in The Superman Monster (Abnett et  al. 1999), a pastiche of Superman and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although

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the multiverse was not meant to exist in this post-Crisis universe, DC continued to commission ‘imaginary stories’ that would not impact mainline continuity, a point that is complicated by the fact that most of these novel experiments ended up being subsumed into continuity in the twenty-first century following the introduction of a new multiverse in Infinite Crisis (Johns et al. 2005). As explored in Chap. 3, readers are more than willing to accept these playfully brazen continuity violations as long as they are sign-posted as such. So, just as the ‘imaginary stories’ of the Golden and Silver Ages informed readers that they were not to be interpreted as part of DC’s master continuity, the Elseworlds imprint includes the following disclaimer: In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places—some that have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist. The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow. (Johnston 2010, 53)

As Henry Jenkins acknowledges, ‘these stories are understood by readers and writers alike as romps in imaginary universes. Much like Vegas, what happens in an imaginary story stays in the imaginary story and doesn’t impact the continuity’ (Ford and Jenkins 2009, 307). It is important to emphasize, however, that Elseworld’s ‘imaginary stories,’ and other apocryphal, non-canonical tales, should not be equated with reboots. Jenkins argues that another of DC’s non-canonical imprints, in this case the ‘All-­ Star’ titles, and Marvel’s ‘Ultimate’ alternate universe both ‘reboot the continuity to allow points of entry for new readers’ (Ibid., 304). Although these imaginary locations are definitely alternate realities, this does not mean that they qualify as reboots. As explained throughout this book, a reboot wipes the slate clean of pre-existing continuity to begin again from scratch, yet neither DC’s ‘All-Star’ titles nor Marvel’s ‘Ultimate’ universe wipe the slate clean of continuity—indeed, both DC and Marvel’s master-­ narrative continuities remained intact and unaffected by these adventures in imaginary (sub)worlds (contra Ford and Jenkins 2009). In other words, they each may begin a new continuity in an alternative narrative location, but they should not be seen as reboots because they do not discard and replace an existing narrative sequence. At the time of writing, Superman has perished in the DC comics universe, along with other members of the Justice League (including Batman and Wonder Woman). Although it is surely only a matter of time before

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the Justice League is resurrected once more, the Superman mantle has passed to Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s non-binary son, Jon. There is also Kong Kenan, the Superman of China, as well as Calvin Ellis, the first Black incarnation of the character who was created by Grant Morrison in 2009 as a tribute to President Barack Obama (Ellis is also President of the United States, albeit on Earth-23). In 2014, writer Tom Taylor and artist Nicola Scott introduced Val Zod, a second Black version of Superman, in the pages of the Earth 2 comic series (since cancelled). And in 2021, news surfaced that celebrated writer Ta-Nehisi Coates had been hired by DC to write a film script that would focus on bringing a Black Superman to the silver screen. Of course, fans may argue that these variations are ‘aberrations,’ that they do not represent the ‘real thing,’ and therefore ‘do not count,’ as authentic, canonical Supermen. As Jeffrey A.  Brown notes, alternative variations, counterfactual spins, and imaginary stories work by leveraging dominant (or ‘prime’) iterations as ‘semiotic grounding points,’ allowing these modifications ‘to explore a variety of themes without jeopardizing the central image of the character’ (2019, 20). Rather than complicate the figure of the ‘Prime’ Superman, this army of alternate Supermen function as ‘secondary’ incarnations that ‘reaffirm the baseline status of the canonical universe’ (Ibid., 32). As illustrated in this chapter, however, appeals to authenticity, framed by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ evaluations, carry with them connotations that could easily be interpreted as ideologically reactionary should fans, audiences, or critics position the racially ‘white’ Superman as dominant, and therefore, ‘pure,’ the implication being that Black incarnations of the character end up being uncomfortably constructed as ‘secondary.’ To view Superman as static, as an exemplar of the monomyth, is to strip the character of the very malleability that has fortified his longevity for the best part of a century. As Bevin emphasizes, ‘the sheer variety of prior permutations of the character suggests that the notion that there is an essential, true, or “quintessential” Superman who represents intrinsic value is not actually an objective fact but a constructed Myth’ (2019, 86).

Conclusion According to Peter Sanderson, 1986 was an annus miribilis for comics, a year that saw the publication of three titles that are recognized as milestones in the medium: Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ Watchmen; Frank Miller and Lyn Varley’s futuristic Batman tale, The Dark Knight Returns;

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and Art Spiegelman’s anthropomorphic holocaust story, Maus. Plenty of critical ink has been spilled fawning over these titles in academic and mainstream spheres over the years since, but what is important about two of these comics—The Dark Knight Returns (henceforth DKR) and Watchmen—is that they were published by DC Comics. In terms of production and presentation, both stood apart from the usual superhero fare. With the first issue released in February 1986, DKR was published in ‘prestige format,’ a square-bound volume printed on high-quality paper that was streets ahead of the standard ‘floppy’ superhero comic. It was, as Reed Tucker explains, ‘a quality of production never before seen in American superhero comics’ (2017, 156), prompting DC to price the comic at £2.95, which was a substantial increase of 293% compared with the average price of a standard comic at that time. Although Crisis, as an event-series, was priced at $1.25, the average price at the time for a standard ‘floppy’ was $0.75 (which is how The Man of Steel was priced). By tapping into newer production processes, including ‘digital production and computerized printing, expensive and permanent binding’ (Round 2010, 15), DC ensured that DKR stood apart from the pack. The twelve-issue Watchmen also benefitted from the prestige-format, priced at $2.50 per issue. More importantly, both DKR and Watchmen were republished in 1987 as trade paperbacks that gathered individual issues together in book format, commonly (and wrongly, I would say) referred to as ‘graphic novels.’ As explored in Chap. 4, debates about the imminent death of the comics medium in the 1970s were met with appeals to look to the Franco-Belgian ‘album’ format for inspiration to culturally consecrate comics in the North American market as more than disposable juvenilia (Williams 2020). Although neither Watchmen nor DKR are graphic novels per se—both were first released as individual issues before being collected in ‘album’ format—they nevertheless played a significant role in the ascendancy of the graphic novel by ‘invoking notions of permanence, literariness, and artistry’ (Round 2010, 14). As Kathryn Frank observes: Although Watchmen [and DKR] [are] commonly referred to as a graphic novel, including on the cover of the 1995 trade paperback edition, the circumstances of its publications are distinct from those of most texts referred to as graphic novels. Watchmen was conceived as a complete story by one author and one artist … however, it was not envisioned or published as a

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single-volume trade paperback. Rather, Watchmen [and DKR] [were] ­originally published in single-issue volumes, and then collected into a trade paperback. (Frank 2017, 142)

Another signifier of this new-found ‘prestige’ came in the form of authorship. As noted in Chap. 3, authorship discourses began to emerge in the 1960s, much of which could be attributed to the activities of comic readers. In the 1980s, however, there was a marked acceleration of discourses that anointed a new breed of writers with the glowing halo of authorship, including Frank Miller and Alan Moore. DKR and Watchmen (and Spiegelman’s Maus) were feted and celebrated by mainstream media outlets, contributing significantly to discourses at the time that claimed that comics had finally ‘grown up.’ Yet just as the so-called graphic novel did not emerge fully formed in the 1980s, as Williams documents (2020), the comics medium included a fair share of adult material from as early as the nineteenth century (Sabin 1993). As such, the idea that comics ‘grew up’ in the 1980s was part and parcel of an evolutionary myth, a ‘Bildungsroman discourse’ advanced by mainstream media outlets (Pizzino 2016). As Roger Sabin explains: The media called it a ‘revolution.’ The press, and to a lesser extent radio and TV, have all made much of the story that comics ‘grew up’ in the mid-to-late 1980s and are no longer ‘kid’s stuff.’ From being the preserve of 8- to 15-year-olds, we are told that suddenly comics are respectable reading matter for post-adolescents. It was, and is, a seductive interpretation of events, and has become one of the recurring cliches of arts journalism. (1993, 1)

Comics publishers, of course, were heavily invested in this ‘seductive interpretation,’ which had a very specific function: ‘to remake comics in prose literature’s image’ (Ibid., 247), to ‘add prestige to the form and thus to sell more product’ (Ibid., 235; Singer 2018; Pizzino 2016). Despite the fact that these maturation discourses were essentially ahistorical, DC benefited enormously (more so than Marvel). Indeed, by August of 1987, DC’s sales had been boosted significantly, by 22% in Tucker’s reckoning (2017, 157), outselling Marvel that same year (Gabilliet 2010, 261), the first time that had happened since the introduction of the Direct Market. Evidently, DC’s activities had more than paid off (although it would only be a matter of time before Marvel would race back into pole position as market leader).

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With these shifts in mind, it is difficult to claim that Crisis and the Superman reboot The Man of Steel were solely responsible for attracting new readers or if, as is more likely, an accumulation of activities that serviced the publisher very well during the period. Indeed, Miller’s DKR and Moore’s Watchmen both eclipsed Crisis and The Man of Steel in terms of cultural capital and prestige. What’s more is that DKR and Watchmen were not part of DC’s master-narrative continuity, at least initially, which indicates that Crisis did not foreclose on DC’s penchant for multiplicity. Although DKR was repackaged as an Elseworlds ‘imaginary story’ in the early 1990s, and Watchmen was set in its own diegesis (despite its main characters being analogues or remixes of well-known superheroes), both would end up incorporated into DC continuity in the twenty-first century (Brooker 2023). Notwithstanding Watchmen’s milestone status in comics history—or more accurately, superhero comics history—Miller’s DKR successfully rescued Batman from the caped, camp crusader of the 1960s TV series and regenerated the character ‘according to the more “serious,” “adult” ethos of the mid-1980s’ (Brooker 2011, 34), as Dark Detective and Dark Knight. Set in an alternate future, DKR focuses on a grizzled, retired, and pensionable Bruce Wayne, who comes out of retirement to tackle a new criminal threat amidst a Gotham in moral ruins. Miller’s interpretation of the Batman is, as Will Brooker explains, a ‘macho jackboot on the mythos,’ embodying the genre’s tightening up into a masculine, muscular form, perfect for the key market of heterosexual teenage boys and young men who wanted superheroes they could finally be proud to admire … it was a heavy-duty mother of a vehicle itself, crushing the old jokes about caped crusaders and Boy Wonders, powering itself through expectations and prejudices, and planting a reinforced new Batman in the ruins, staring down anyone who dared mention Adam West. (2007, 40)

According to Eileen Meehan, it was Miller’s DKR that effectively served as a litmus test for ‘a dark reinterpretation of Batman with an adult readership’ (1991, 53), providing DC’s corporate parent Warner Bros. with the chutzpah to begin developing a Batman film, a blockbuster tent-pole movie more in keeping with Superman: The Movie than the camp antics of Adam West and Burt Ward. It is to the Batman film franchise and related media that the next chapter turns.

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References Abnett, Dan, Andy Lanning, et  al. 1999. The Superman Monster. New  York: DC Comics. B.M.O.C. 1986. Where’s the Curl? Amazing Heroes 109: 77. Baragoda, Justin. 2021. Fox News Loses It Over ‘Woke’ Superman Motto: They’re Telling Us ‘Not to Love Our Country! The Daily Beast, August 18. https:// www.thedailybeast.com/fox-­news-­loses-­it-­over-­woke-­superman-­motto-­theyre-­ telling-­us-­not-­to-­love-­our-­country Berger, Richard. 2008. ‘Are There Any More at Home Like You?’: Rewiring Superman. Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 1 (2): 87–101. Bevin, Phillip. 2019. Superman and Comic Book Brand Continuity. New  York: Routledge. Brennert, Alan, Dick Giordarno, et  al. 1988. Christmas with the Superheroes. Vol. 2. New York: DC Comics. Brooker, Will. 2007. The Best Batman Story: Dark Knight Returns. In Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, ed. Alan McKee, 33–48. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2011. Hero of the Beach: Flex-Mentallo at the End of Worlds. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 1(2): 25–37. ———. 2023. Never-Ending Watchmen: Adaptations, Sequels, Prequels, and Remixes. London: Bloomsbury. Brown, Jeffrey A. 2019. Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity: The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero as Cultural Nexus. London: Routledge. Byrne, John. 1986. The Man of Steel. Vol. 1, July–September. New  York: DC Comics. ———. 2005. Questions about Comic Book Projects. Byrne Robotics. http:// www.byrnerobotics.com/FAQ/listing.asp?ID=2&T1=Questions+about+Com ic+Book+Projects#30. Byrne, John, and John Cleese. 2004. True Brit. New York: DC Comics. Capital City. 1986a. Man of Steel Numbers Superhuge! Internal Correspondence, May 4. ———. 1986b. Internal Correspondence, August: 1. Capuzzo, Mike. 1985. Superman Out of Date, Gets Facelift. The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida), November 1: 14A. Ciemcioch, Clem. 2013. Beyond Capes: Cosmic Boy. Back Issue #68: 71–76. Cobb, James C. 2015. What we Can Learn from Coca-Cola’s Biggest Blunder. Time, July 10. https://time.com/3950205/new-­coke-­history-­america/. Comichron. 1985 Comics Sales to Comics Shops. https://www.comichron.com/ monthlycomicssales/1985/1985-­03Capital.html ———. 1986 Comics Sales to Comics Shops. https://www.comichron.com/ monthlycomicssales/1986.html

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Darius, Julian. 2011a. Post-Crisis Superman: John Byrne Era (1986-88). Sequart Organization. http://sequart.org/continuity-­pages/dc-­universe/superman/ post-­crisis-­superman/john-­byrne-­era/. ———. 2011b. Revisionism, Radical Experimentation, and Dystopia in Giffen’s Legion. In Teenagers from the Future: Essays on the Legions of Superheroes, ed. Timothy Callahan, 175–226. Sequart Research & Literacy Organization: Edwardsville, Illinois. DeAngelo, Danny. 1986. Critical Vulture’s Glee. Amazing Heroes 103: 78–79. Demott, John S. 1985. All Afizz over the New Coke. Time, June 28. http:// content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,959449,00.html Dixon, Chuck, and Paul Rivoche. 2014. How Liberalism Became Kryptonite for Superman. The Wall Street Journal, June 8. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ dixon-­a nd-­r ivoche-­h ow-­l iberalism-­b ecame-­k r yptonite-­f or-­s uperman-­ 1402265792. Eury, Michael. 2019. Superman Versus Monsters in the Bronze Age. Back Issue 116: 2–14. Evans, Lance. 1985. Man of Steel to Get Image Polished as Comic-Book Industry Goes Mod. The Times-Tribune (Scranton, Pennsylvania), November 22: 17. Ford, Billy. 1986. Has Byrne Bitten off More than He Can Chew? Amazing Heroes 90: 61. Ford, Jim. 2013. Too Much Time on my Hands: The History of the Time Trapper. Back Issue 68: 64–71. Ford, Sam, and Henry Jenkins. 2009. Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics: An Interview with Henry Jenkins. In Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, 303–312. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Frank, Kathryn M. 2017. ‘Who Makes the World?’: “Before Watchmen,” Nostalgia and Franchising. The Cinema Journal 56 (2): 138–144. Franklin, Chris. 2018. We’re All Part of the Same Team: Superman the Movie’s Impact on Other Media. Back Issue 109: 64–75. Fredette, Meagan. 2019. Stranger Things Brought Back New Coke and Broke the Internet. Refinery29. https://www.refinery29.com/en-­ us/2019/05/233769/stranger-­things-­3-­new-­coke Futty, John. 1986. Superman Changes Style in Looking to Melt Hearts. News-­ Journal (Mansfield, Ohio), November 6: 27. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2010. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. (trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Gates, David. 1985. The Once and Future Superhero. Newsweek, November 25: 6. Gerber, Steve, and Doug Wheatley. 2000. Last Son on Earth. New  York: DC Comics. Gibbons, David et al. 1995. Superman: Kal. New York: DC Comics.

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Gilmore, James H., B. Pine II, and Joseph. 2007. Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press. Goyer, David, et al. 2011. The Incident. Action Comics 900: 70–78. Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Greenberger, Robert. 2018. Personal Interview with William Proctor. Conducted by Email, 15th March 2018. Hamilton, Kendall. 1999. Last Run: Sergio Zyman. Ski, September 30. https:// www.skimag.com/adventure/last-­run-­sergio-­zyman Haroldson, Tom. 1987. Superwimp: Flying High 50 Years, a Great Hero Belly-­ flops. Kalamazoo Gazette (Michigan), June 17: D1–D2. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. ———. 2012. Psychoanalysis and Digital Fandom: Theorizing Spoilers and Fans’ Self Narratives. In Produsing Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind, 105–122. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. ———. 2014. Rebranding Doctor Who and Reimagining Sherlock: Quality Television as Makeover TV Drama. International Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (3): 1–15. Hirsley, Michael. 1985. To Southerners, New Coke Just Isn’t It. Chicago Tribune, April 28. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-­xpm-­1985-­04-­28-­ 8501250712-­story.html Horton, Adrian. 2021. Colbert Says New Superman Motto Got People Angry — ‘it’s the American Way.’ The Guardian, October 19. https://www.theguardian. com/culture/2021/oct/19/stephen-­colbert-­superman-­trump-­steele-­dossier. Jackson, Jim. 1986a. Byrne Obnoxious. Amazing Heroes 87: 57. ———. 1986b. Apology to Byrne. Amazing Heroes 101: 62–63. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Richard. 2004. Social Identity. London: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry, and Sangita Shresthova. 2012. Up, Up and Away! The Power and Potential of Fan Activism. Transformative Works and Cultures 10. https:// journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/435/305. Johnston, Keith M. 2010. The Encyclopaedia of Comics and Graphic Novels. Oxford: Greenwood. Johns, Geoff et al. 2005. Infinite Crisis. New York: DC Comics. Jones, Garry R. 1986. Steely Embarrassment. Amazing Heroes 101: 62. Jones, R.A. 1986. Man of Straw: Man of Steel Review. Amazing Heroes 99: 73–75. Kelly, Joe, Doug Mahnke, and Lee Bermejo. 2001. Action Comics. Vol. 775. New York: DC Comics. Kempley, Rita. 1985. Publisher Presses Superman into New Mold. The Washington Post, November 5: 17.

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Kupperberg, Paul. 2008. Introduction. Superman: The World of Krypton, by John Byrne, Mike Mignola, and Rick Bryant, 7–10. New York: DC Comics. Maple, T. M. 1987. Protecting our Memories. Amazing Heroes 109: 79. McCue, Greg S. with Clive Bloom. 1993. Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context. London: Pluto Press. McWhirter, Nickie. 1986. This New Image Stuff Is Deadlier than Kryptonite. Detroit Free Press, 16 June 1986. Meehan, Eileen. 1991. ‘Holy Commodity Fetish Batman!’: The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext. In The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, ed. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, 47–66. London: Routledge. Mikkelson, Barbara. 1999. Was the ‘New Coke’ Just a Clever Marketing Ploy? Snopes, May 2. https://www.snopes.com/fact-­check/new-­coke-­fiasco/ Miller, Theodore. 1986. Works for him. Amazing Heroes 102: 71–72. Miller, Mark. 2003. Red Son. New York: DC Comics. Miller, John Jackson. 2020. Personal Interview with William Proctor. Conducted by email, 21st April 2020. Miller, Frank, and Lyn Varley. 1987. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics. Moore, John Francis. 1998. The Dark Side. New York: DC Comics. Moore, Alan, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins. 1986. Watchmen. New  York: DC Comics. Morgan, Nathaniel. 1997. The Baby with the Bathwater. Fortress. http://www. fortress.net.nu/Fans/morgan.php Morrison, Grant, and Frank Quietly. 2006. All-Star Superman. New  York: DC Comics. Moslander, James. 2019. New Coke + Relaunch. Jamesmosslander.com. https:// www.jamesmoslander.com/new-­coke-­2 Murray, Tim. 2019. New Coke Didn’t Fail. It Was Murdered. Mother Jones, July 9. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/07/what-­if-­weve-­all-­been-­ wrong-­about-­what-­killed-­new-­coke/. Nelson, Joshua Q. 2021. DC Comics blasted for changing Superman’s ‘American Way’ motto: ‘A distortion and a disservice to fans’. Fox News, October 18. https://www.foxnews.com/media/superman-­m otto-­a merican-­w ay-­ dc-­comics-­arroyo-­terrell. Nyhan, David. 1986. Superman’s New Image. The Boston Globe June 12: 19. Oliver, Thomas. 1985. The Real Coke, the Real Story. New York: Random House. Ortiz, Andi, and Ross A. Lincoln. 2021. Superman’s Catchphrase Is No Longer Truth, Justice and the American Way. The Wrap, August 16. https://www. thewrap.com/superman-­c atchphrase-­c hanged-­t r uth-­j ustice-­b etter-­ tomorrow/. Pendergast, Mark. 2013. For God, Country and Coca-Cola. New York: Basic Books. Peschel, Bill. 1986. Clark Kent, Doofus. Amazing Heroes 102: 70–71.

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Pizzono, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Proctor, William. 2017. ‘Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt no Ghosts’: Totemic Nostalgia, Toxic Fandom and the Ghostbusters Platonic. Palabra Clave 20 (4): 1105–1141. Reblin, Iuri Andréas, Kathlen Luana, and de Oliveira. 2014. Superman Without Borders: The Controversial Renunciation of U.S. Citizenship and its Political Implications for U.S. “Soft Power”. In Issues in International Politics, Economy, and Governance, ed. Yannis A.  Stivachtis and Christopher Price, 59–71. Athens: Atiner. Rothman, David H. 1985. Superman II: THE REPUBLICAN. The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, Maryland), November 17: 82. Round, Julia. 2010. Is this a Book? DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s. In The Rise of the American Comics Artists: Creators and Contexts, ed. Paul Williams and James Lyon, 14–30. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Sabin, Roger. 1993. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Sangiacomo, Michael. 1986. Treated Like a Dog. Amazing Heroes 103: 77. Severson, Aaron. 2020. Pocket Universe Primer. Cosmic Teams. https://www.cosmicteams.com/legion/PocketUniversePrimer/intro.htm Shales, Tom. 1985. New Coke Hater Crusades for the Real Thing. Chicago Tribune, June 14. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-­xpm-­1985-­06-­14-­ 8502070939-­story.html. Simcox, Martin. 1986. The Real Steel. Amazing Heroes 103: 76. Singer, Marc. 2018. Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies. Austin: University of Texas Press. Smith, Andy. 1986. Egad! DC Comics Scaling Back Powers of Superman. Lansing State Journal (Michigan), August. Teiwes, Jack. 2012. The New ‘Man of Steel’ Is a Quiche-Eating Wimp! In The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times (Kindle), ed. Joseph Darowski. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Trumbull, John. 2018. Caped Wonder Sways Comics: Superman: The Movie’s Influence on DC Comics. Back Issue 109: 47–63. Tucker, Reed. 2017. Slugfest: Inside the 50-Year Battle between Marvel and DC. London: Sphere. Tye, Larry. 2012. Superman: A High-Flying History. New York: Random House. Uecker, Brian. 1987. How Lucky He Is. Amazing Heroes 130: 71–72. Weldon, Glen. 2013. Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons. Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto. Williams, Paul. 2020. Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics. London: Rutgers University Press. Wright, Bradford W. 2001. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Darkest Knight: Archaeology of the Batman in Comics and Film

Inspired by Richard Donner’s respectful treatment of the Man of Steel in Superman: The Movie (1978), comics writer and aspirational film producer, Michael Uslan, sought to do the same for Batman, envisioning an adult ‘dark and serious’ project that he hoped would put ‘the pot-bellied funny Batman from the TV show’ to rest for good (Scivally 2011, 147). Recalling a conversation that he had in 1979, Uslan explained that DC Vice-President Sol Harrison advised against the idea. ‘Don’t waste your money!’ said Harrison. ‘Since he went off the air on TV, Batman is as dead as a dodo! Nobody’s interested in Batman!’ (Uslan 2019, 167). Despite Harrison’s friendly advice, Uslan soldiered on regardless, scoring a meeting with MGM Vice-President Benjamin Melniker to whom he would pitch his idea. Hoping to slaughter the elephant in the room—the 1960s Batman TV series—Uslan explained that Batman made his debut on TV and made ratings history. The country … the whole world … went Bat-Crazy! There was tons of merchandising, hit cartoon shows, and a movie version in 1967 of the TV series … But the world outside true comic book fans has never really seen The Batman as created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in 1939 … the creature of the night … the darkknight detective … stalking criminals from the shadows. Every true comic book fan knows that inserting the word ‘The’ in front of the name Batman indicates the version that is dark. (Ibid., 172)

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To illustrate the point, Uslan showed Melniker a selection of Batman comics, including a ‘1939 pre-Robin drawing of The Batman as compared to a 1967 pop version … comics from the ’70s by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams reverting Batman to The Batman, and stylish issues of Detective Comics by Steve Engelhart and Marshall Rogers’ (Ibid.). Uslan also unveiled a completed script that he had written with Indiana University friend Michael Bourne, titled Return of the Batman, a script that bore more than a few resemblances to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns from 1986. Return of the Batman was ‘grounded much more in reality,’ and showed off the darkknight detective to be just that … a DETECTIVE. It showed The Batman without Robin, but with Alfred being his closest confidante. But it also showed something unparalleled. It featured the Batman in his fifties, forced to come out of retirement to deal with the first appearance of terrorism on America’s shores. (Ibid., 173)

On 3 October 1979, Uslan and Meniker formed BatFilm Productions, Inc., and purchased the film rights from Warner Bros. (Ibid., 174). Although Warner’s, as copyright owners, had the first right of negotiation, they insisted that they were not interested in a Batman film, serious or not, so much so that they declined to meet with Uslan to hear his pitch. ‘I thought Hollywood was going to line up at my door,’ said Uslan, ‘and what then happened was I was turned down by every single studio in Hollywood’ (Scivally 2011, 147). Regardless of his intentions, Uslan understood that the Camp Crusader from the 1960s TV series—the ‘Bright Knight,’ as played by Adam West—remained the dominant image of Batman in the public imagination. Adapting Batman for the silver screen, therefore, meant that ‘the campy Batman from TV’ required erasing and replacing with ‘the original Bob Kane-Bill Finger concept of Batman as creature of the night’ (Uslan 2019, 176). By ascribing the authentic ideal of the character as ‘dark and serious,’ a moral dualism (Hills 2002) is set in play between ‘good and ‘bad,’ ‘serious’ and ‘camp,’ masculinity and queerness—between Dark Detective and Bright Knight. This binary relationship would structure and organize discourses that circulated Batman in the mid- to late 1980s, accelerating significantly in the run-up to Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), but similar motifs had also surrounded different incarnations of the character since at least the early 1960s. Informing DC’s strategy of regeneration across the

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decades was this idea of returning to the source, of reclaiming Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s debut iteration of the character as he appeared in Detective Comics #27 as a way to frame Batman as ‘authentic,’ ‘good’ and—like Superman and New Coke—‘the real thing.’ In many ways, the idea that The Batman (note the definite article) is the dominant iteration of the character—or the canonically ‘Prime’ version, as in Jeffrey Brown’s analysis (2019)—is produced discursively, effectively shoring up a ‘regime of truth’ that may or may not be accurate but is nevertheless caused ‘to function as true’ (Foucault 1977, 13, my emphasis). In order to protect and reify the idealized vision of Dark Detective and Dark Knight as the Prime Batman, it is customary that an ‘author-function’ is activated, a discursive ‘projection’ that governs ‘our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we exact as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.’ Author-functions, as observed in Chap. 1, are a ‘means of classification … strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of the author’ (Foucault 1969, 127). The ‘holiness’ attributed to Bob Kane’s author-function, for instance, contributes significantly to the notion that authenticity can be located at the point of origin, with Batman’s early appearances in Detective Comics serving as a holy sacrament, as ‘gospel’ and therefore ‘pure.’ As a form of ‘critical industrial practice’ (Caldwell 2008), discourses of this kind seek to wreath an ‘aura’ around the definitive ‘good’ object, an ‘original’ that has been steadily corrupted by an accumulation of missteps and misinterpretations over the decades since. In comparison, the 1960s Batman TV series is consistently summoned as blasphemy, as ‘anti-Christ, a deadly sin’ (Proctor and McKenna 2022, 18). As Pierre Bourdieu argues, binary oppositions between ‘the sacred and the profane’ are habitual within ‘the market of symbolic goods’ (1993, 129–130). Kane is unique in the history of superhero comic books in that ‘paratextual projections of Batman’s authorship’ appeared as early as 1940 (Stein 2013, 162). In a one-page biography in Batman #1, titled ‘Meet the Artist!,’ Kane is constructed as the sole ‘creator of THE BATMAN!,’ a biographical anointment that functions as an origin story, not for the character, but for the author; an origin story that erased writer Bill Finger’s contributions. As explained in Chap. 3, writers and artists were not permitted to sign their work nor were they given creator by-lines until the 1960s, but Kane received authorial recognition early on, enjoying ‘a rare cult of authorship’ in the Golden Age (Brooker 2005, 250). This notion

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of origins and roots, of genesis and source, may be a popular motif across ‘regimes of truth’ fed by intersecting discourses (journalistic, fannish, producorial), but just as Siegel and Shuster’s Superman should not be seen as a direct source for adaptations in radio, cinema and television, as explored in Chap. 3, Kane and Finger’s ‘original’ Batman cannot be easily mapped onto film adaptations. Beginning in the 1980s, the decade that saw the ascendancy of ‘grim and gritty’ comic books and associated discourses, this chapter offers an archaeology of Batman media, including comics, film, and other transmedia expressions, focusing primarily on strategies of regeneration employed across the character’s eight-decade life-span. Throughout this chapter, I explore the Foucauldian ‘regime of truth’ that has underpinned debates circulating the character since at least the 1960s, discourses that construct binary oppositions around Batman as either ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘faithful’ or ‘deviant,’ ‘dark’ or ‘light,’ heterosexual or homoerotic. In the second section, I shift to the Batman film series, beginning in 1989 with Tim Burton’s Batman to consider the way in which the franchise has been governed historically and discursively by these moral dualisms, binaries informed by intersectional relationships between industrial, journalistic, and fannish discourses. Although I have already discussed Batman Begins in Chap. 1, as the first film to be described as a reboot, I extend the analysis here by focusing on production discourses that have contributed to the regime of truth. I am less interested in The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) as these are sequels, not reboots. This chapter concludes by looking at the two Batman film reboots of the 2010s and ’20s, Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022).

Regenerating Batman in Comics In the 1980s, key shifts in readership demographics for superhero comics stimulated the move to an ‘adult-ethos’ (Brooker 2011, 34), as explored in Chaps. 4 and 5. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (henceforth DKR) is invariably heralded as the blueprint for the ‘grim and gritty’ Batman that, Kevin Durand (2012, 90) argues, ‘was indirectly responsible (and, perhaps directly so) for both of the film adaptations to follow,’ highlighting Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan’s treatments, specifically. Other Batman comics from the period also offered ‘dark and serious’ interpretations, including Miller’s own Year One (1987), a retcon of

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Batman’s origin story, and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke (1988), which involved the Joker shooting and paralysing Barbara Gordon/Batgirl. But it is DKR that is most often summoned as the core Batman text of this so-called Dark Age of superhero comics (Proctor 2021). It is also worth noting that the argument that Miller’s DKR inaugurated ‘the era of gritty storytelling’ (Frye 2012, 95) has tended to obscure ‘the earlier trends and texts that anticipated the style’s emergence,’ as Jackson Ayers argues (2016), pointing towards writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams ‘ground-breaking’ Batman stories, as well as their ‘social relevance’ run on Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow in the 1970s (see Chap. 4). Ayers also considers Marvel’s anti-hero vigilante, The Punisher, and Wolverine of The X-Men, both of whom sought ‘to appeal to an older audience with more mature content’ (ibid.). Hence, the argument that the era of the grim and the gritty begins in the wake of DKR (and Moore’s Watchmen) is, for Ayers, a pervasive sentiment [that] constructs a sort of prelapsarian moment for superheroes, the jettisoning of whose naïve purity was the price for subsequent artistic achievement and cultural prestige. But this narrative misrepresents the superhero comics of the years, even decades, preceding Miller and Moore’s watershed story arcs. (Ibid.)

While I will not deny the influence and impact of DKR, I believe that the commonly embraced notion that the four-part series, as originally published, represents a ‘grim and gritty’ portrayal of Batman has been exaggerated; that it is not, as many academics and critics have argued, ‘a treatment of Batman that made him more realistic’ (Wandtke 2007, 88, my emphasis). Comics writer Grant Morrison offers an alternative reading that positions DKR as ‘a steadily accumulating myth of Batman,’ a grand operatic Wagnerian saga that has the character evolve over four issues where, in the final chapter, ‘The Dark Knight Falls,’ he rides into battle on a horse, and sports an armoured suit equipped with Kryptonite gloves to pummel Superman. ‘It’s not grim and gritty at all,’ suggests Morrison; rather, it is ‘an epic, apocalyptic Götterdämmerung of a thing’ (Smith 2014). Miller himself rejected the ‘grim and gritty’ label in later years, arguing that his ‘savage narrative was ironic, and that some of the big moments were self-consciously “operatic”’ (Daniels 2004, 151). Comparatively, Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Year One is more down-­ to-­earth, ‘emphasizing a dark and realistic tone’ (Yockey 2014, 124–125),

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a street-level reinterpretation of the Batman origin story that has the character inhabiting a noirish milieu, more crime story than superhero fantasy. We must also consider the influence and impact of Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985–86). While the post-Crisis Batman comics did not reboot the character’s long-running continuity wholesale, as covered in Chap. 4, there were enactments of retroactive continuity, which include rewriting Jason Todd’s origin story—Jason being the second incarnation of Robin following Dick Grayson—and the exclusion of more childish elements, such as Batman’s pet pooch, Ace the Bat-Hound, and the impish Bat-­ Mite. As Brooker emphasizes, whole pockets of history were buried: invariably it was the more embarrassing, campy episodes that were repressed … there was no Ace the Bat-Hound, no science fiction alien adventures … and anyone clinging to that kind of nostalgia was suffering false memory syndrome. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t an imaginary story. It never happened anymore. (2007, 39)

As shown in Chap. 5, DC also erased a menagerie of pets from the Superman mythos: Beppo the Super-Monkey, Krypto the Superdog, Supergirl’s horse, Comet, and Streaky the Supercat. Brooker, however, implies that this revisionary manoeuvre was unique, perhaps even radical, but such an account excludes the fact that this has happened before—and more than once. Between 1943 and 1964, Jack Schiff served as editor on the core Batman titles, overseeing a remarkable quantity of material that amounted to more than four hundred issues over twenty-one years on Batman comics alone.1 Facing intense pressure from Superman editor Mort Weisinger, who, as Chap. 3 explored, generically ‘refreshed’ the Man of Steel by tapping into the science fiction craze of the period, Schiff was instructed to tap into the same vein in the hope that such ‘refreshing,’ as opposed to rebooting or retconning, would perhaps stimulate sales on Batman comics. With reluctance, Schiff conformed and, between 1957 and 1964, began commissioning stories that had ‘an obsessional reliance upon thin, well-worn alien planets, weird alien creatures, and weird alien technologies’ (Smith 2012), stories that would catapult Batman and Robin into space on a regular basis (Barr 2008; Sanderson 2010, 29–31; Farago and McIntyre 2019, 47). Schiff’s quirky tales were foreshadowed by earlier adventures in Batman’s career, most notably in stories featuring Professor Carter Nichols, who sent Batman and Robin back in time to historic

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locales where they encountered Robin Hood,2 the Three Musketeers,3 and King Arthur’s Court,4 among others. Often described as ‘the silly period of Batman comics’ (Sanderson 2010, 29), Schiff also capitulated to Weisinger’s Superman template by introducing an extended family for Batman, including Ace the Bat-Hound in Batman #92 from May 1955, three months after Krypto the Superdog debuted in Adventure Comics #210 from March the same year. Imitating Superman’s extended family also brought the first incarnations of Batwoman/Kathy Kane and her niece Bat-Girl/Betty Kane, both of whom were introduced as ‘heterosexually appropriate love interests’ for Batman and Robin, respectively (Brown 2019, 104). In essence, the introduction of Batwoman and Bat-Girl to the Batman mythos was strategic, a way to respond to Fredric Wertham’s argument, as articulated in Seduction of the Innocent, that ‘a subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism … pervades the adventures of the mature “Batman” and his younger friend “Robin”’ (1954, 189–190), the living arrangements at Wayne Manor being ‘a wish dream of two homosexuals living together’ (Ibid., 190). Although Batwoman and Bat-Girl may have functioned as heterosexual devices, the strategy was largely unsuccessful. In fact, due to the implementation of the Comics Code in 1954, depictions of violence and sexual affection were forbidden, so when Batwoman persisted in her attempts to kiss Batman, he usually made excuses to run off and fight another crime elsewhere, effectively making him ‘look more gay than he had before’ (Wandtke 2007, 23; Brooker 2005, 156–158). Treating Superman and Batman as interchangeable characters did not, in the end, lead to higher sales for Batman comics. While it might make sense for Superman to be generically ‘refreshed’ in the vein of the popular science fiction craze of the period, ‘the square peg of time travel, giant alien monsters, and flying saucers didn’t quite fit into the round hole of Gotham City’ (Greenberger and Manning 2009, 19). Consequently, ‘sales fell on Batman from 492,000 to 410,000 and on Detective Comics 314,000 to 265,000’ between 1960 to 1962 (Sanderson 2010, 32), figures that would be more than covetable in contemporary terms, but, in the 1960s, DC reportedly considered cancelling the Batman comics (Daniels 2004, 95; Sanderson 2010, 32). In 1963, DC Editorial Director, Irwin Donnenfeld, instructed editor Julius Schwartz to regenerate Batman. As detailed in Chap. 3, Schwartz became an instrumental figure in the 1950s, successfully rebooting The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom, and Hawkman, as well as introducing

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the superhero ensemble team, the Justice League of America. Although initially unenthusiastic, Schwartz sought to regenerate Batman not by rebooting the comics from the beginning again, but, like Schiff before him, generically ‘refreshing’ the mythos by purging the ‘silliness’ of the Jack Schiff era, those ‘embarrassing, campy episodes’ that Brooker mentions above. As such, Schwartz’s ‘New Look’ Batman, beginning with Detective Comics #327 from May 1964, jettisoned ‘all references to aliens and outer space, and he unceremoniously banished the dependent members of the “Batman family,” including Bat-Hound, Bat-Mite, and Batwoman. It was as if they never existed’ (Daniels 2004, 97–98). (Note the similarities between Daniels’ and Brooker’s quotations despite commenting on different periods.) At this juncture, the strategy of regeneration that Schwartz administered may have been partly advanced to rescue the figure of Batman from the queer readings identified by Wertham, but it also brought the character, quite literally, back-to-earth in an attempt to salvage the character from the science fiction escapades of the Schiff era. That being said, Schwartz was more than aware of the queer interpretations that Wertham had not only mobilized but popularized, cascading such readings across the public imagination and into cultural memory (Brooker 2005, 159). It is remarkable that the spectre of Wertham continues to haunt Batman’s world almost seventy years after its first publication, though, as Catherine Williamson argues, ‘homosexual discourse is difficult if not impossible to banish’ once invoked, ‘so that superheroes must continue to fight for their heterosexuality as relentlessly as they battle crime’ (1997, 14). As a result, Schwartz killed off Bruce Wayne’s long-serving butler, Alfred, and replaced him with Dick Grayson’s Aunt Harriet to quell the homoerotic energy that charged throughout Wayne Manor. ‘In case you’re wondering,’ explained Schwartz, ‘there were two reasons for killing Alfred. One, I wanted a story with some real sock and second, there had been some muttering about these three men living together’ (Schwartz 1992, 28). Alfred’s death, however, would soon be retconned so he could be used in the Batman TV series. Although these comics are certainly dated today, Schwartz’s ‘New Look’ was, at least in direct comparison with Jack Schiff’s sci-fi adventures and zany capers, a more ‘grounded,’ ‘realistic,’ ‘back-to-basics’ approach that saw Batman and Robin reconceptualized as detectives once more. Schwartz himself, in his autobiography Man of Two Worlds, said that ‘the Batman in the years prior to my tenure had strayed away from the original

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roots of the character. Batman was regarded as the world’s greatest detective, so I decided that he should return to his dark-mystery roots’ (Schwartz with Thompson 2000, 116). Assisting Schwartz was artist Carmine Infantino, who had contributed significantly to the Flash reboot in 1956 that launched the Silver Age at a time when superhero comics had all but perished (see Chap. 3). As one of the most revered artists in the comics industry, Infantino played a substantial role in generically ‘refreshing’ Batman’s storyworld, depicting character and setting ‘in a style that was considerably less cartoonish and more realistic than what had gone before’ (Daniels 2004, 99, my emphasis). Under instruction from Schwartz, Infantino also added the yellow oval design to the insignia on Batman’s chest (which Burton would use in his Batman films) and designed a new, sleek, and sporty Batmobile. Comic book readers appeared to embrace Schwartz’s regeneration. According to a poll in the fourth issue of fanzine Batmania, from April 1965, 90% of readers preferred Schwartz’s ‘New Look’ detective over the 10% who maintained that Jack Schiff’s Batman was superior (Eury and Kronenberg 2009, 33). In commercial terms, the ‘New Look’ strategy certainly paid off as Batman saw a 69% surge in sales, while its sister publication, Detective Comics, approached double-figures (Ibid., 31). Less than two years after the first issue of Schwartz’s ‘New Look,’ however, the Batman TV series (1966–68) debuted on ABC, broadcasting Adam West’s Bright Knight onto television screens with astonishing success. As Batmania gripped North America in 1966, ‘the comic books became a tacit advertisement for the series and vice versa’ (Yockey 2014, 111), a feedback loop fortified by ‘a multiplicity of criss-crossing appropriations and re-­appropriations, borrowings and borrowings back’ (Brooker 2005, 180). (Incidentally, many episodes of the TV series, especially during its first season, were adaptations of Schwartz’s ‘New Look’ comics.5) This ‘complex cycle of mutually advantageous appropriation’ (Ibid., 187) also meant that the ‘New Look’ began to slowly unravel as Schwartz sought to capture the tone and tenor of the TV series, an exercise that may have helped the comics reach double-figures, but by the time the series approached cancellation in 1968, sales started to fall dramatically once more. Batman comics were in trouble again. Beginning in Batman #217 from December 1969, Schwartz once again supervised a further ‘refresh.’ Described as ‘The Big Change,’ Schwartz’s second regeneration in five years positioned Batman closer to the ‘dark and serious’ model that would underscore the regime of truth in

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the 1980s. Unlike ‘The New Look,’ however, Batman #217 captured Schwartz’s statement of intent within the issue’s pages, providing a commentary that works intra-diegetically—as part of the story itself—and as an extra-diegetic propitiation for comic book readers who felt burned by the Camp Crusader’s exploits in the TV series. Written by Frank Robbins with art by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano, the story ‘One Bullet Too Many!’ opens with Bruce Wayne in Dick Grayson’s bedroom as he looks in fond reminiscence at an old athletic trophy and a photograph of Grayson in graduation gown and mortar board. We come to learn that Wayne is upset because Grayson is leaving to attend college: ‘Got to face up to it— no matter how much it hurts! From now on, everything is going to be different’ (Robbins et  al. 1969, 2, bold in original). Although Dick Grayson/Robin has spent much of his career as a young boy, he has finally ‘aged up,’ almost thirty years after his first appearance in Detective Comics #38 from 1940. DC’s ‘New Look’ strategy may have included Grayson as Batman’s side-kick, but for ‘The Big Change,’ the decision to send the adult Grayson to Hudson University can be read as a way to address the ‘subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism’ that permeated Wayne Manor by splitting the Dynamic Duo in two. It isn’t much of a stretch, however, to interpret Wayne’s tears in the story’s opening—‘sniffle,’ ‘snuffle’ (Ibid., 2)—as symbolizing the end of a loving relationship, whether strictly homosocial, paternal, or otherwise. Once Grayson departs, Bruce tells Alfred that things must change: ‘it’s time we all started a new way of life! A new way of everything! … We’re in grave danger of becoming … outmoded! Obsolete dodos of the mod world outside!’ (Ibid., 4). In response to Alfred wondering how they will function from now on, Bruce, speaking like a corporate sales-person, says: ‘By becoming new … Streamlining the operation! By discarding the paraphernalia of the past … By re-­establishing this trademark of the “old” Batman … to strike new fear into the new breed of gangsterism sweeping the world’ (Ibid.,5). And so, Bruce closes Wayne Manor and the Batcave, and moves into a penthouse apartment in Gotham City. ‘Much better bachelor accommodations, sir,’ approves Alfred. These early pages of ‘One Bullet Too Many!’ can be also read as a strategy of regeneration that sought to brush-off the ‘outmoded’ and ‘obsolete’ camp associations of the TV series by ‘re-establishing this trademark of the “old” Batman,’ the creature of the night and Dark Detective, this ‘Bat-platonic ideal of how Batman should really be’ (Medhurst 1991, 161).

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Responding directly to ‘The Big Change’ in Batman #221 from May 1970, Edward Broderick writes that the ‘real’ Batman is ‘a detective,’ ‘a creature of the night,’ and ‘figure of mystery,’ yet ‘over the years, Batman has slipped out of his heritage and into the rank of super-heroes—those characters whose identities are not their human qualities but their super-­ powers’ (1970, 23). Here, ‘we find again [Batman’s] original identity: one man—a fearlessly aggressive individual, but one man none the less.’ Steve Beery is also grateful for a return to the source, ‘the Real Old Look: the one that super-villains wounded in the late ’40s and ’50s and a TV comedy program killed in the 1960s’ (Beery 1970, 23, original emphasis). Some readers were less impressed, such as Donnie Pitchford, who complained that separating the Dynamic Duo is ‘like having Popeye stop eating spinach. Will the Teen Wonder and the Caped Crusader get back together again? Man, I hope so’ (1970, 23). Pitchford need not have worried as Robin would continue to appear in Detective Comics as a solo, back-­up strip. While Robbins’ tale in Batman #127 set out the beginning of Schwartz’s ‘Big Change,’ it would be writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams’ treatment of the character in the 1970s that would establish Batman as a ‘dark and violent vigilante’ (Sanna 2015, 34), a ‘return to his original grim vigilant roots’ with a ‘renewed focus on “realistic” crime stories, and a new stress on Batman’s obsessive quest for justice’ (Wainer 2014, 6). Or so it is claimed. For all the praise lavished on O’Neil and Adams’ 1970s stories, to view that decade as establishing a ‘grounded,’ ‘realistic,’ and ‘dark’ portrayal of the character is to conveniently elide other treatments of Batman during the period. Given that O’Neil and Adams only collaborated on eleven Batman stories, there were many more creators working on Batman comics that are usually ignored entirely. To frame a specific period as illustrative of a monolithic, coherent, and consistent Batman is to privilege what are perceived to be ‘good’ interpretations by repressing other Bat-Men, such as Bob Haney’s treatment of character and imaginary world in The Brave and the Bold, a team-up title that saw Batman partnering with other DC characters, some well-known—Wonder Woman, Robin, Batgirl, The Joker—and other, second-tier figures—Plastic Man, Eclipso, Wildcat, The Atom, and so on. In many ways, Haney’s rather off-beat stories were closer in spirit to Schiff’s zany capers than to O’Neil and Adams’ Dark Knight Detective. According to writer, Denny O’Neil, the idea was to return to the source, ‘to take [Batman] back to where it started,’ leveraging Kane and Finger’s original stories as blueprint, but with the additional benefit of

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‘twenty years of sophistication in storytelling techniques’ (Urrichio and Pearson 1991a, 18). O’Neil, however, later revised this assessment, recognizing that it was ‘a false memory,’ that within a year of the character’s debut, Batman became ‘a father figure, or an uncle or big brother [to Robin] and by 1945, he was a cop’ (McCabe 2014, 19–20). Prior to the introduction of Robin in Detective Comics #38 from 1940, an auspicious debut that lightened the tone of the comics to not only appeal to young readers but to also fall in line with DC’s ‘wholesome entertainment’ policy, as explored in Chap. 3, Batman was a lone avenger. These early solo Batman adventures, however, only lasted for eleven issues before Robin was introduced, less than a year after ‘The Bat-Man’s’ debut. What’s more, Detective Comics was a pulp anthology in those days, a 64-page comic that included several stories, so even though ‘The Bat-­Man’ swiftly became the most popular character, his monthly tales only took up between six- and ten-pages apiece. Nevertheless, most of Uricchio and Pearson’s ‘minimal components’ were present in Batman’s first year: The character is a rich man who dresses in an iconographically specific costume (cape, cowl and bat-logo). Because of the murder of his parents, he obsessively fights crime, using his superb physical abilities in combination with his deductive capacities. He maintains his secret identity of Bruce Wayne, who lives in Wayne Manor in Gotham City. (1991b, 186)

Although Jeffrey Brown maintains that these ‘fundamental conventions are explicitly present in all of the character’s stories’ (2019, 130, author’s emphasis), this is complicated by several factors. Firstly, Wayne Manor was not named explicitly as such until Batman #171 from 1965, which was published during Schwartz’s ‘New Look’ initiative. It is possible that the description of ‘stately Wayne Manor’ in the comic led to the phrase being used consistently in the TV show. Although ‘Wayne Mansion’ was used in Detective Comics #30 from 1939, in a story written by Gardner Fox rather than Batman co-creator Bill Finger, the name of Wayne’s domestic abode remained inconsistent until the 1960s. Prior to that it was either ‘Wayne Mansion,’ ‘Bruce Wayne Home,’ ‘Bruce Wayne’s home,’ ‘home of Bruce Wayne,’ ‘Wayne Residence,’ ‘Wayne Estates,’ or even ‘Bruce Wayne’s apartment,’ but never Wayne Manor (Cronin 2020). Moreover, Batman’s urban location was not Gotham in those early comics, but either ‘Metropolis,’ ‘downtown Manhattan,’ or New  York (Brooker 2005, 47–48). It would not be until Batman #4 from 1940 that New  York

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became Gotham City, but, by this time, the comics already included Robin, so the status of Batman as a lone avenger was no more at any rate. In many ways, it is hardly surprising that Batman and his generic environment was not fully realized at this stage as, like Superman, the character was developed over time, an evolutionary process informed by contributions from multiple artists, writers, and editors other than Kane and Finger. In the pulp market, with its significant degree of turnover, it is highly unlikely that DC believed that Batman would fare any better than other properties like Slam Bradley, Buck Marshall, or The Crimson Avenger, all of whom were regularly featured in Detective Comics. Evidently, creators were ‘working through’ the generic characteristics and core motifs of Batman’s world. As with Superman, other well-known implicit elements (Brown 2019, 130, original emphasis) of the mythos were introduced later, most of which would be written by other creators, thereby challenging the idea of source and authorship considerably. For example, Bruce Wayne’s trusted and loyal servant, Alfred, debuted in Batman #17 from 1943, four years after Batman’s lone avenger phase. Alfred’s surname was not yet the canonical Pennyworth, however—he was Alfred Beagle until 1969 when his name was retconned during the ‘New Look’ in Batman #216. Furthermore, Alfred was originally depicted as a rotund, bumbling amateur sleuth, a comedic foil rather than the ersatz father figure to Wayne that he would become later. It would be the 1943 film serial, Columbia’s Batman, that a stick-thin, moustachioed Alfred, played by William Austin, was featured, a portrayal that was ‘rewired’ (Berger 2008) back into the comics world six months later in Detective Comics #83 from January 1944. ‘I felt I lacked a certain dash and elegance that would enhance my value as your crimefighting assistant,’ explains the ‘new’ Alfred, ‘so I spent my holiday at a health resort cultivatin’ a new figure by hard work’ (Cameron and Burnley 1944, 12). Alfred, at this point, was still framed more or less as a comedic character in Batman history—he slips and falls after his new reveal, his clumsiness providing fits and giggles for Bruce and Dick (and one expects, comic readers). Les Daniels argues that ‘Alfred was [actually] created by the writers of the 1943 Batman serial (Victor McLeod, Leslie Swabacker, and Harry Fraser), and that DC Comics asked Don Cameron to write the first Alfred story to conform to Hollywood’s version of the Wayne household’ (2004, 57). The 1943 Batman film serial also introduced the Batcave—or as originally described, the ‘Bat’s Cave’—which was then used in the Batman syndicated comic strip before being ‘rewired’ into the comic book in

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Detective Comics #83, the same issue that featured the regenerated and reinvigorated Alfred. Although it might be tempting to think that DC Comics pushed for convergence between the comics, the comic strips, and Batman’s first cinematic incarnation to enable a shared diegetic foundation, a ‘transmedia storytelling’ continuity of the kind proposed by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture (2005), this would not be the case. The multiple Bat-Men that existed in the 1940s essentially functioned, like Superman, as diegetically independent variations circulating within a broader Batman omni-diegesis. The idea that Kane and Finger’s original lone avenger comics serve as source material that creators return to when Batman strays too far from his roots is challenged by the fact that many of the character’s well-known generic conventions did not yet exist in the period before Robin was introduced. Batman may have ‘one of the most famous rogue galleries in all of fiction,’ and his ‘roster of villains is almost as recognizable as Batman himself’ (Brown 2019, 158)—The Joker, The Penguin, Scarecrow, Harley Quinn, The Riddler, Poison Ivy, Mr Freeze, and so forth—but none of these characters appeared in Batman comics in the year prior to Robin’s introduction. There was also no Bat-Signal, no Batcave, no Wayne Manor, no Batmobile—although he does drive a red Sedan, which is oddly the same vehicle that Bruce Wayne drives during the day—and no Alfred (be that Beagle or Pennyworth), all elements that would be included in Schiff’s science-fiction escapades, Schwartz’s ‘New Look’ and ‘Big Change,’ the Batman TV series, O’Neil and Adams’ 1970s Batman, Burton’s Batman, and so on. Brown argues that Batman’s ‘rigid moral boundaries,’ especially the character’s firm rules about killing and guns, reinforces ‘the idea that only inauthentic Batmen are willing to kill bad guys’ (2019, 170). Yet in Batman’s early appearances, he kills criminals almost indiscriminately. In his first adventure, ‘The Case of the Chemical Syndicate,’ Batman throws a criminal off a roof, and another into a vat of acid. ‘A fitting end for his kind,’ says Batman remorselessly. He kills another in Detective Comics #28, and, in the following issue, he watches Doctor Death perish in flames. In Detective Comics #31, Batman kills a vampire called The Monk by shooting it in the face with silver bullets, lending considerable weight to Kim Newman’s assessment that the first Batman comics were analogous with ‘the weird, Universal Pictures horror tone’ (Newman 2005, 20). Batman wields a firearm in Detective Comics #33, while in Detective Comics #35, there is a half-page image of Batman brandishing a pistol. Also, in the

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same issue, Batman murders the ‘Yellow Peril’ character, Sin Fang, by throwing him out the window, his dead body shown on the concrete surrounded by a pool of blood. In Detective Comics #37, he throws Count Grutt onto a protruding knife, killing him; and in Batman #1, Hugo Strange returns—Strange being Batman’s first recurring villain, not The Joker, as Brown claims (2019, 158)—and Batman is shown with side-arms mounted on the Bat-plane, firing wildly at a gang of criminals. It was this story in Batman #1, ‘The Giants of Hugo Strange,’ that Bill Finger was accosted by editor Whitney Ellsworth and admonished for depicting Batman at the helm of a machine gun. Ellsworth was aware that comics were beginning to attract controversy from the morality brigade as early as 1940, portending Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent by fourteen years or so, and one of his early solutions was to remove firearms from the covers of DC’s comics to align with the publisher’s ‘wholesome entertainment’ philosophy, and to prophylactically respond to criticism that worried about ‘the dark, menacing atmosphere’ of Batman comics (Tipton 2008, 327). Batman ‘should never carry a gun again,’ said Ellsworth, to which Bill Finger agreed (Murray 2010, 9). Just as Superman’s early adventures were tamed to correspond with Ellsworth’s new editorial guidelines on guns and violence, as discussed in Chap. 3, Batman was reconceptualized as a figure of law and order, meaning that his ‘no killing, no guns’ moral code was not conferred narratively, but by editorial fiat. In this light, Brown frames Kane and Finger’s Batman, perhaps unwittingly, as canonically illegitimate if ‘only inauthentic Batmen are willing to kill bad guys’ (2019, 170, my emphasis). Importantly, it was the introduction of Robin that saw sales double almost overnight (Brooker 2005, 80), emphasizing that the shift from ambiguous vigilante to Dynamic Duo was embraced by readers (should we accept sales figures as an indication of approval). If the lone avenger’s first year ‘of vampires and vigilantism’ (Brooker 2005, 80) is ordinarily constructed as the ‘good’ Batman, as the ‘real thing’ and gospel incarnate, then readers at the time seemed to prefer the tonal shift that arrived with Robin, the Boy Wonder. Whether or not Batman comics would have been as successful without Robin is impossible to know, but, as comics writer Mike W. Barr observes, the Boy Wonder ‘has contributed immeasurably to the longevity of the strip’ (2017, 6). The establishment and reification of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘light’ and ‘dark,’ ‘straight’ and ‘queer’ incarnations of Batman reached an apotheosis in the 1980s, with DKR, Year One, and The Killing Joke providing proof of

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concept for Batman’s corporate parents, Warner Bros. We should also factor in the Batman storyline, ‘A Death in the Family’ (1988–1989), as part of the decade’s ‘adult-ethos,’ a story that saw the second incarnation of Robin, Jason Todd, murdered by The Joker—or murdered by readers themselves as the decision to kill Robin was the result of a telephone poll. First introduced in Batman #357 from 1983, Jason Todd was generally received positively by readers, but Max Collins’ post-Crisis retcon of his origin story in Batman #408–409 from 1987 regenerated the character as psychologically and emotionally unstable, rebellious with a ‘burgeoning propensity for morally opprobrious behaviour’ (Tembo 2021, 197). O’Neil, during his tenure as Batman editor, later remarked that readers’ letters illustrated that Jason was admired by a few, but the majority disliked the character intensely (Ibid., 190). Yet the death of Robin would be highly criticized by some readers for what they saw as cold-blooded murder: ‘there was a nasty backlash,’ explained O’Neil. ‘I got phone calls that ranged from “you bastard” to tearful Grandmothers saying, “My grandchild loved Robin and now I don’t know what to tell him”’ (Urrichio and Pearson 1991a, 22). The results of the poll were almost split down the middle: out of 10,613 votes, 5342 voted to kill Robin while 5271 wanted him to survive. Although the quantity of votes should not be seen as representative of Batman comics readers—not by a long chalk—it does at least tell us that, for these readers, Robin remained an essential character within the Batman mythos, that Batman without Robin may be akin to Sherlock Holmes without Watson or Kirk without Spock. Moreover, those tearful complaints suggest that comic book readers in the 1980s were not strictly adults. While the public execution of this ‘bad’ Robin (i.e., not Dick Grayson) may be seen as a strategic manoeuvre employed to reposition Batman as a lone (heterosexual) figure, Jim Starlin, writer on ‘Death in the Family,’ tells a different story. In Starlin’s account, DC’s licensing department ‘hit the roof’ when the issue was published, complaining that ‘“We’ve got all these pyjamas and lunchboxes [with Robin on them]!” (Greenberg 2009, 38). In 1995, Batman: The Animated Series was temporarily renamed The Adventures of Batman and Robin ‘to reflect Fox’s interest in selling more toys based on Batman’s co-star’ (Sanders 2021, 4). This was a ‘corporate decision, not one prompted by storytelling’ (Ibid., 95), a point supported by series writer, Paul Dini, who said that the Fox Network

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soon began insisting that Robin be prominently featured in every episode. When Fox changed the title from Batman: The Animated Series to The Adventures of Batman and Robin, they laid down the law—no story premise was to be considered unless it was either a Robin story or one in which the Boy Wonder played a key role. (Sanders 2021, 95)

From this perspective, Robin is clearly a key figure within DC’s branded entertainment catalogue, significantly hindering Medhurst’s argument that Robin has always been ‘the biggest stumbling block … if one wants to take Batman as a Real Man’ (1991, 159). Accordingly, Medhurt’s idea that Batman became underpinned by a process of ‘painstaking re-­ heterosexualization’ in the wake of the 1960s TV series is arguably overcooked. While it is undoubtedly true that DC ‘remain fiercely protective of Batman’s image’ (Brooker 2005, 168), it is also true that they have been equally protective of Robin. Despite packing Grayson off to university in 1969; despite Grayson giving up the Robin mantle to become Nightwing in 19846; and despite killing off the second Robin, Jason Todd, in 1988, a third incarnation of the Boy Wonder was introduced in Batman #436 from August 1989, which was published during Batman 89’s original theatrical run. One might wonder, then, why DC would continuously insist on filling Robin’s multicoloured tights with new, often younger flesh? Would it not be easier to kill the character off for good, if they were so concerned about Batman’s heterosexual, hypermasculine image? Consider also DC’s Secret Origins Special #1 from 1989, the year that Burton’s Batman was released, which features a story written by Neil Gaiman that depicts the Riddler pondering the fate of characters from the 1960s Batman TV series. ‘It was fun in the old days,’ explains the Riddler: There was me. There was the old cabal: Catwoman, Penguin, and the Joker. And we had these gangs: two or three thugs each with cute names and delightful little costumes … We hung out together, down at the ‘what a way to go-go.’ It was great! And there were all these guys you never see anymore … King Tut. Egghead. Book Worm. Marsha, Queen of Diamonds. Where did they all go? (Gaiman et al. 1989, 34–35)

Will Brooker cites this story as indicating ‘a gradual, tentative shift of DC’s conception of the Batman “mythos,”’ yet he undermines his argument considerably by claiming that this kind of ‘playfulness and self-reference would have been unthinkable for the “adult” … mentality that dominated

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the Batman stories of the late 1980s’ (2005, 244–245, my emphasis). Brooker’s mistake is in thinking that Gaiman’s tale, ‘an unprecedented move on the part of a comic book writer, reclaiming the TV show as part of the comic book characters’ history’ (Ibid., 245), was first published in 1995, the same year that Batman Forever was released to ‘lighten up’ the franchise. As cited, Brooker must have been consulting a reprint of the 1989 story contained in the Two-Face and The Riddler movie tie-in from 1995. So, while Adam West was legally forbidden to wear his 1960s Batman costume for public appearances in 1988 in case people confused his Bright Knight with Burton’s Batman (Brooker 2005, 176), DC didn’t seem to have a problem with the 1960s TV series being directly summoned in a comic book. Considering the backlash that Starlin and O’Neil faced regarding the death of Jason Todd from DC’s licensing department, it may be that the broader corporate structure of Warner Bros. had no interest in the contents of the comics, otherwise they would have had knowledge of O’Neil’s decision to allow readers to vote to save or to kill Jason Todd. It may be that there is a significant disconnect between the studio’s pursuit of profit and DC’s protectionist approach to its characters, but the lack of a consistent relationship, of which Warner’s, as corporate parent, would be hierarchically dominant, does not fully explain why DC introduced a succession of new Robins after Dick Grayson.7 Even then, Adam West and Burt Ward had already reprised their roles as Batman and Robin, albeit as vocal actors, in The New Adventures of Batman animated series in 1977; and West lent his voice for the final two seasons of Super Friends in 1984. West and Ward, along with Julie Newmar (Catwoman) and Cesar Romero (The Joker) appeared on the US afternoon talk-show, America, in 1985, with the Batmobile in tow. Why, then, would Warner’s permit Camp Crusader and Boy Wonder to reappear across media platforms if incorporated within the ‘painstaking re-heterosexualization’ process that Medhurst claims had been underway since the 1960s? Why would they allow reruns of the 1960s Batman TV show to continue to be broadcast across North America and around the globe, often to great success in ratings? Why would Denny O’Neil write in his Bat-bible, a document that sets out the generic ‘rules’ of Batman’s imaginary world, that Bruce Wayne is ‘celibate,’ rather than insist that he is a red-blooded billionaire playboy with women at his feet? For if DC Comics are meant to be policing the Batman mythos to ensure that the potential for queer readings is banished, they have for many years been doing a terrible job of it.

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More recently, there have also been several comic series that extend the continuity of the 1960s TV series, including Batman ’66 (2013–2016), Batman ’66 Meets Wonder Woman ’77 (2017–2018), and Archie Meets Batman ’66 (2019), as well as two straight-to-DVD animated feature films that feature West and Ward as the Dynamic Duo, those being The Return of the Caped Crusaders (2015) and Batman Vs Two-Face (2017). Also, Michael and Lee Allred’s ‘Batman-A-Go-Go!’ featured the Adam West Batman in Solo #7 from 2005, the same year that Nolan’s Batman Begins was released in cinemas. While these Batman texts are not part of DC’s master-narrative continuity, neither do they fully suggest repression and ‘reheterosexualization.’ The fact that fans have since launched a successful campaign to appeal for the release of the Batman TV series on DVD, it appears that the Camp Crusader is no longer ‘aberrant’ (although he is in no way ‘dominant’ either). As long as Warner’s can continue making money, whether with products related to the 1960s TV series or licensed Robin merchandise, then it appears that profit remains the ultimate guiding principle rather than anxieties about the potential for queer interpretations, at least at the level of capital. As we have seen in this section, keywords employed to construct the ‘good’ Batman included ‘realism,’ ‘grounded,’ ‘serious,’ ‘dark,’ and ‘original,’ creature of the night and lone avenger, Dark Detective and Dark Knight. Comics like Miller’s TKR may have supported and scaffolded this ‘regime of truth’ in the ‘grim and gritty’ 1980s, but the idea that Burton’s Batman would steer the Dark Knight back towards the character’s original conception is to play fast and loose with the many lives of the Batman. For Nick Mamatas, the ‘claim that the Miller Batman is a “return” to the original spirit of the character, in fact, the whole noir pose is what they call in the comic business a “retcon”, an act of myth-making that ‘is essentially a form of reactionary revivalism’ (2008, 50). Brown’s argument that ‘it was not until the mid-1980s that Batman’s status as a brooding avenger of the night was solidified as the only official characterization’ (2019, 22) is accurate, in a sense, but I would say that this dominant framework suggests that the ‘good’ Batman has been the core discursive figure for decades, one routinely trotted out as ‘the real thing’ by conveniently disregarding the cauldron of Bat-Men who, whether in comics or other media, cannot be easily compressed into this limited category. As Daniel Martin argues, ‘[a]ny Batman film that could claim to be faithful to a particular ur-text would invariably violate the spirit of [at least] a dozen others. There is no single, definitive Batman in any media’ (2020, 96). In

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other words, the ‘grim and gritty’ Batman is less ‘creature of the night’ than a creature of discourse. In the year prior to the theatrical release of Burton’s Batman, fans did not respond well to the news that Michael Keaton had been hired to play the lead role. Fearing that the actor’s previous roles in films like Mr. Mom (1983) and Burton’s own Beetlejuice (1988) implied that Burton’s Batman might not be Uslan’s ‘dark and serious’ treatment, after all, but a comedy. Rather than being contained and repressed, then, it was the figure of the 1960s Batman TV series who returned to spoil the party, a discursive signal beaming into the dominion of shadow and shade. As rehearsed by Batman producer Jon Peters, a ‘huge contingent rose up against this picture being made with Michael Keaton. Fifty thousand letters of protest arrived at Warner Bros.’ (Zehme 1989, 2). Warner’s is simply ‘after the money of all the people who only remember Batman as a buffon with a twerp for a sidekick in the campy TV series,’ said J. Alan Bolic, as captured by Kathleen Hughes for The Wall Street Journal (1988, 1). ‘Michael Keaton is no Batman,’ wrote Bill Zehme for Rolling Stone magazine, or so a vast sector of the bat community has vehemently asserted. Upon learning last year that Michael Keaton would, indeed, be Batman—the definitive cinematic Batman, no less—batheads were disconsolate. In Keaton’s hands, they felt, Batman would become a smirky wisenheimer. Mr. Mom in a cowl, they thought. Mr. Mammal. “Treating Batman as a comedy is like The Brady Bunch going porno,” wrote a fretful fan, one of the tens of thousands who swamped comics fanzines with disapproving nerd mail. The common refrain amongst disbelievers: Keaton has no chin, not enough hair; he’s too scrawny, too doughy, too short, too glib, too distracting. (Zehme 1989, 2, original emphasis)

Leaving aside Zehme’s attitude towards fans—‘nerd mail’ especially comes across as pejorative—the ghost of Fredric Wertham is nowhere to be seen (although his presence cannot be denied, either). It is not gay readings of Batman that fans were protesting, but the possibility that the character would be treated as a joke. Perhaps camp and homosexuality are two sides of the same coin, but there is no evidence to support the idea that homophobia drove the protests. It is always plausible that structural homophobia was an unconscious driver, yet I hesitate to lay claim to that

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idea without empirical evidence (it is not within an academic’s gift to guess what fans might be thinking). In response, Warner’s—or more accurately at this juncture, Time Warner—persuaded Bob Kane to attend San Diego Comic-Con to offer his authorial blessing, but fans largely dismissed this as disingenuous because, in their minds, the studio paid him ‘to say nice things about the movie’ (Scivally 2011, 170). Batman’s executive producers then rushed to cut together a teaser trailer in the hope that it would serve as an anxiolytic for protesting fans, which, as Peters explained, ‘basically changed the perception of the movie and really got people on our side’ (Gross 2014, 121). Indeed, fans would pay to see the trailer, then depart from cinemas before the main event. By the time the film opened on 19 June 1989, the Year of the Bat was underway.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly In many ways, Burton’s Batman is a landmark film, a box office and merchandising juggernaut that, as Alison McMahan argues, inaugurated a ‘post-Hollywood’ era of ancillary marketing, of ‘the commercial possibilities of mutually locking commercial ventures,’ ‘tight diversification,’ and ‘total merchandising,’ of vertical integration and synergy (2005, 122). Three months prior to the release of Batman, Warner Communications Inc. and Time Inc. merged into Time Warner to become ‘the largest media merger in history, encompassing divisions in film, television, cable television, publishing, and music and created significant holdings in nearly every form of media and entertainment production, distribution, promotion, and exhibition’ (Owczarski 2008a, 5). Burton’s Batman therefore ‘became a totem for the emerging pattern of corporate synergy governing high-budget studio movies in the 90s’ (Grainge 2007, 109), enabling Time Warner, ‘the first major American conglomerate’ (Owczarski 2008a, 5), to create an ‘industrial blueprint’ that ‘started or cemented several industry trends’ (McMahan 2005, 146). As Eileen Meehan observes, Batman took the United States by storm in the spring and summer of 1989. Tee shirts, posters, keychains, jewellery, buttons, books, watches, magazines, trading cards, audiotaped books, videogames, records, cups, and numerous other items flooded malls across the United States with images of Batman, his new logo, and his old enemy the Joker. (1991, 47)

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As ‘an exemplar of the branded entertainment property’ (Grainge 2007, 109), Burton’s Batman built upon the commercial attributes of the blockbuster film, as spurred in the 1970s by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). Although the film itself amassed $251,188,924 in domestic box office receipts, which, adjusting for inflation, makes it the second highest-grossing Batman film after Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), Time Warner’s ancillary marketing revenues outstripped box office receipts by a significant margin, including ‘a staggering $750 million worth of merchandise’ and $150 million collected in the ascendant video cassette market (Hughes 2007, 49). As ‘an archetype of industrial thinking about how films should earn their investment’ (Grainge 2007, 109), Burton’s Batman revealed to studio executives that blockbusters could be situated as part of a film’s commercial life-span, a lone vessel drifting upon an ocean of profit potential. For Time Warner, the Batman ‘branded entertainment property’ became the prize asset within the company’s portfolio, an asset that required careful management to ensure its cultural longevity. Although Burton’s Batman was generally well received in critical spheres, some fans were not impressed. Comic book readers criticized elements that they saw as particularly unfaithful to core tenets of the mythos, such as Alfred inviting Vicky Vale into the Batcave, a canonical blunder that would be referenced in the sequel, Batman Returns (1992). Moreover, the film’s repositioning of The Joker as the killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents rather than street thug, Joe Chill, was particularly egregious.8 It is important to note that Burton’s Batman is not a reboot, as Eileen Meehan claims (2020), but an adaptation that ‘also began the Batman [film] franchise’ (Page 2007, 89). As explained in Chap. 1, there needs to be an active ‘boot’ in place for a re-boot to supplant and supersede, to wipe the slate clean to begin again with a new transfictional continuity. In other words, there was no cinematic ‘slate’ for Burton’s Batman to ‘write over,’ to erase and supplant as newly active. It may be a ‘new beginning,’ but it is not a ‘beginning again’ as it relates to the reboot concept. Put simply, there was, at the time, no Batman film series to reboot. According to Camille Bacon-Smith and Tyrone Yarborough’s ethnography of Batman audiences, ‘no fans talk about [Burton’s Batman] as part of the repertoire of Batman representations accepted as “real” by the community’ (1991, 112). Batman editor Denny O’Neil sought to placate comic readers through paratextual guidance in which he insisted that ‘the BATMAN movie (as well as the BATMAN MOVIE ADAPTATION), is

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NOT a part of Batman continuity’ (Urrichio and Pearson 1991b, 192, capitals in original). O’Neil’s ‘explicit disavowal of the Warner Bros. film appears even in the comic book adaptation,’ which O’Neil wrote himself, stating that he intended ‘to bracket the adaptation and distinguish it from DC’s continuity’ (Ibid., 193). In essence, O’Neil, as Batman comics editor, ‘declared conclusively’ that Burton’s Batman is ‘non-canonical, indicating that DC staff, at least, believes that the comic books truly define the character,’ that the film is similar to an ‘imaginary story,’ a ‘fictional fiction’ (Hyman 2017, 15) that is not meant to be interpreted as part of official comics continuity (see Chap. 3). Interestingly, O’Neil also claims that Miller’s DKR ‘is also NOT considered to be a part of normal continuity,’ and Moore’s The Killing Joke ‘is NOT the definitive origin of the Joker,’ but ‘simply one of many POSSIBLE origins’ (Urrichio and Pearson 1991b, 192). O’Neil’s editorial interventions supports the argument I make throughout this book that continuity occupies a syntagmatic, transfictional axis, separable from other narrative worlds and continuities that populate a paradigmatic, transtextual layer. Although Brooker is right that none of the Batman films to-date ‘can strictly be called an “adaptation” of the comic book—or whatever period— in anything but the loosest sense’ (2011, 186), the study of adaptation has since the turn of the millennium moved away from restrictive and reductive relationships between ‘source’ and ‘target’ texts to consider each adaptation as occupying ‘the center of a spider’s web of intertextual relations’ (Burke 2015, 129), ‘a “hybrid” construction mingling different media and discourses and collaborations’ (Stam 2005, 9). Ultimately, Batman adaptations tend not to align neatly with a particular source text, but are heteroglossic compounds, remixing not only a variety of sources, but also introducing original elements not found in source materials. As we have already seen, source materials are often invoked through discursive bids that work to consecrate adaptations for audiences and, more specifically, comic book readers who worry that the ‘spirit’ or ‘essence’ of Batman may be under threat. For Batman, Tim Burton highlighted DKR and The Killing Joke consistently as primary inspirations, submitting ‘grim and gritty’ Batman comics from the 1980s as paratextual, promotional gestures that sought to hitch the film onto the dominant ‘regime of truth.’ In fact, Burton would cite The Killing Joke in discussions with potential licensees, saying: ‘This is what I want the movie to look like’ (Page 2007, 89–90). Neither DKR nor The Killing Joke can be viewed seriously, however, as direct ‘sources’ for Burton’s Batman, but they were nevertheless

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discursively mustered as spiritual ancestors. As Jason Rothery and Benjmain Woo note, ‘ideas of faithfulness are discursively constructed in and around [comic book] adaptations’ rather than a literal, slavish adherence to a specific source text (2019, 136). Ironically, some critics believed that Burton’s Batman was too dark for children (Freeman 2014, 44; Terrill 2000, 494; Scivally 2011, 190). Reviewing the film upon its release, Roger Ebert stated that Burton’s Batman ‘is not a film for children—it is an extremely disturbing film’ (Freeman 2014, 44). It is interesting that North American TV stations witnessed skyrocketing ratings for reruns of the 1960s TV show during Batman’s theatrical window (Stein 1989, D.1). But if Burton’s Batman wasn’t kid’s stuff, then its sequel, Batman Returns, was a parent’s nightmare, a neo-gothic fairy tale that is more Burton than Batman (Brooker 2012, 54). An editorial in The New York Times warned that ‘it isn’t a film for young children. In the course of the violent, sexually suggestive movie, kids are abandoned, kidnapped, and threatened with death. The PG-13 rating is a strong caution for parents’ (‘Unhappy Meals’ 1992, A14). To be sure, Batman Returns is awash with sexual undertones and racy oneliners—‘just the pussy I’ve been waiting for,’ ‘I’d like to fill her void’—that had ‘many parents of young children angry over scenes of violence and kinky innuendo,’ as Steve Daly reported for Entertainment Weekly (1992). Critics and Parents’ Groups thought that Batman Returns was in no way suitable for younger viewers, resulting in a backlash that targeted Time Warner and their merchandising partners. Fast food chain McDonalds, for example, provided licensed toys to tie-in with the film, including a Batmobile, a Catmobile, and ‘Batdisc’ soft drink lids that could be used as frisbees, while the Batman logo was stamped on food wrappers and takeout bags (Wasko et  al. 1993, 280; Owczarski 2008b, 63). McDonalds received a raft of complaints, leading to a change in the company’s merchandising practices where, in future, they would demand extended previews of films before authorizing partnership agreements (Ibid.). Consequently, Warner’s hopes that Batman Returns could replicate Batman’s ‘total merchandising’ campaign were significantly dashed as the film failed to attract consumers to the armada of products on offer. As told by J.C. Penney’s Cindy Staude-Boehme, the company had only sold onethird of associated stock and they were ‘getting ready to mark down the merchandise’ (Arar 1992). ‘We did a tenth of what we did in 1989,’ said Steve Klein of Gift Creations, a manufacturer of novelty items. ‘Basically, it’s over’ (Ibid.).

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Although Batman Returns was still an economic success, collecting $162,831.698  in domestic receipts, the film’s earnings were two-thirds less than Burton’s. Moreover, the backlash from parents indicated to Time Warner that Batman Returns had steered the burgeoning film franchise ‘in a direction incompatible with the commercial interests of the company,’ a situation that encouraged company executives to rethink their approach and change tack (Owczarski 2008b, 63). It seemed that Time Warner’s investment in a ‘dark and serious’ Batman had backfired and the future of the franchise, they believed, would be in the youth market, a belief supported by the enormous success of Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1997), a TV series that managed to sit on the fulcrum between adult- and child-oriented material to great effect. This kind of thinking also gained support from Adam West’s Batman and Burt Ward’s Boy Wonder: just as reruns of the show caused a ratings spike during Batman 89’s theatrical window, similar activity would accompany the release of Batman Returns (King 1992). In such a context, then, reruns of the 1960s Batman TV series, as well as Batman: The Animated Series appealing to family viewing, functioned as test-cases for a cinematic Bright Knight, much in the same way that Miller’s DKR and other ‘grim and gritty’ 1980s comics did for Burton (Meehan 1991). If ratings were anything to go by, there already existed a young audience that would embrace a generic ‘refresh’ that repositioned the Batman film franchise as more family-oriented, not the ‘grim and gritty’ incarnation that fans desired (and demanded). What is important to understand here is that capitulating to the fan’s agenda … potentially spells the end of the text which has inspired their very fandom, since the isolation of the fan audience from any wider coalition audience effectively terminates any economic viability for the text beyond its fan ghetto. (Hills 2002, 38)

In other words, fans alone cannot economically support and sustain tent-­ pole feature films—‘tent-pole’ referring to ‘a high-profile film with the economic potential to singlehandedly boost a studio’s financial profile for the year’ (McAllister et al. 2007, 108)—but instead require broader audience pools of non-fans, general consumers, and ‘floating voters’ to ensure commercial viability, and thus survival (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995, 145). As Neil Rae and Jonathan Gray put it, comic book readers may be ‘the most knowledgeable of audiences, [but] they are very much in the minority within the total number of viewers for comic book movies’ (2007, 86)

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To realize this newer vision, Warner’s hired Joel Schumacher to replace Tim Burton as director—Burton having burned his bridges with Warner’s due to the fallout from Batman Returns. Schumacher’s mandate was to ‘reinvent,’ ‘re-energise’ (Nasr 2005) and ‘lighten up the series’ (Owczarski 2008b, 64). One of the ways that Schumacher aimed to regenerate the ailing film franchise would be to introduce Batman’s sidekick, Robin, a strategy that DC Comics employed in 1940 that saw sales figures on Batman comics reach double figures. Underpinning this strategy of regeneration—or degeneration, depending upon one’s viewpoint—was the idea that the film franchise would benefit by specifically targeting children and families as the primary market. Whether intentional or not, Time Warner and Schumacher replicated the moral ‘wholesome entertainment’ philosophy that steered editor Whitney Ellsworth in the late 1930s/early 1940s. Although the plan seemed to work commercially, Schumacher’s Batman Forever received many scathing reviews. The film is ‘a long way from the dark poetry of Tim Burton’s 1989 original,’ said Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, gravitating towards the campy innocence of the Batman TV series of the ‘60s. Schumacher’s method is to use a lighter tough, to stay closer to the cartoon that Bob Kane created for DC Comics in 1939 and to temper Burton’s nightmare world with an accessible, brightly colored TV palette. (1995)

Writing for The Boston Globe, Jay Carr argued that the film is ‘a marketing strategy, designed to purge the franchise of the darkness and weirdness that made the first two films interesting and transform it into something more mainstream friendly’ (1995, 59). Yet despite receiving negative reviews, most of which centred on Schumacher’s ‘candy-coloured’ interpretation, Batman Forever seemed to appeal to audiences. Within its first three days of release, the film raked in $52,784,433, ‘the biggest opening day ever’ (Scivally 2011, 257), going on to accumulate $336,529,144 in global box office receipts to significantly outperform its predecessor, a stellar performance that also saw Time Warner’s stock prices rocket from $2.50 to $43.12 per share (Owczarski 2008b, 64; Scivally 2011, 257). Additionally, Batman Forever’s whirlwind of associated merchandising activities would, as The Wall Street Journal’s John Lippman reported, bring in approximately $300 million to almost double the global box office tally (1995, 4). Batman was serious business once again and the film

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franchise had been successfully regenerated as Time Warner’s ‘biggest synergistic goldmine ever’ (Ibid.). Unlike Burton’s Batman Returns, Schumacher claimed that Batman Forever was not really his film. ‘I don’t think Batman Forever is a Joel Schumacher film … I think it’s a Batman film. What I did was go back to the source’ (Spelling 1995, EN20). Just as other creators had done for decades, Schumacher leveraged Finger and Kane’s original conception as source material, citing the comic books specifically in his plan to create, as he put it, ‘a living breathing comic book,’ closer to the Silver Age comics of Schumacher’s youth than the ‘grim and gritty’ vigilante of the Dark Age (Jennings 2022). Regardless of Schumacher’s intentions, however, it was the 1960s TV Batman that returned to haunt the film franchise, much like it did in 1988 during production on Burton’s Batman. But it would be with Schumacher’s sequel, Batman and Robin, that the Bright Knight would be conjured more fully, a film that treated ‘the Adam West version as gospel,’ as Andrew Johnston wrote in Time Out (1995, 70), or, as The San Francisco Examiner’s Barbara Shulgasser stated, it ‘is as close to the cartoonish Batman television series of the 1960s as any of the movies have come’ (1997). Seeking to capitalize on the windfall that its predecessor had generated at the box office and through merchandising, Batman and Robin was fast-­ tracked into production. ‘There was a real desire at the studio to keep it family friendly, more kid-friendly’ explained Schumacher, ‘and a word I’d never heard before, more “toyetic,” which means that what you create makes toys you can sell’ (Nasr 2005). Toy manufacturers, such as Kenner, were given a hand in the design of sets and costumes so they could plan a merchandising feast, the result of which was a huge range of action figures and tie-in toys that included over fifty variations of Batman, many of them non-diegetic—Wing-Blast Batman, Laser-Cape Batman, Neon Armour Batman, and so on—and large-scale toy sets like the Wayne Manor Batcave and Mr. Freeze’s Ice Fortress. The size and scope of Batman and Robin’s ancillary expressions reportedly dwarfed the quantity of previous Batman movie tie-ins by 600%, with Schumacher describing himself as a ‘total Batman slut’ (Benezra 1997, 8). Time Warner had perfected the journey from comic book icon to ‘corporate emissary’ (Terrill 2000, 504), the film operating as both text and paratext, a large-scale advertisement for a whirlpool of merchandise that generated over $400 million in global retails sales. In comparison with the haul from ancillary material, however, Batman & Robin failed to capitalize on the success of Batman Forever,

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becoming the lowest-grossing Batman film in the franchise to date with a global accumulation of $238,235,719 against a production budget of $125,000. Yet, as noted in Chap. 1, it would be a mistake to describe Batman & Robin as an outright failure. ‘The film did make money,’ explains Bruce Scivally, ‘just not nearly as much as they hoped’ (2011, 304). Although entertainment reviews were generally negative, Warner’s placed the blame squarely at Harry Knowles of internet website, Ain’t It Cool News. ‘Joel Schumacher should be shot and killed,’ raged Knowles, and ‘I will gladly pay a handsome bounty to the man (or woman) who delivers me the head of this Anti-Christ. He has single-handedly destroyed what started out to be a great series of films’ (Owczarski 2008b, 82). Chris Pula, head of publicity for Time Warner, criticized Knowles directly for conjecture, to which Knowles responded by posting fifty-two negative reviews on his website. ‘Buzz is no longer two people at a cocktail party,’ explained Chris Pula. Now everybody with a computer is a newspaper … What’s disturbing is that many times the legitimate press quotes the internet without checking sources. One guy on the internet could start enough of a stir that causes a reactionary shift in the whole marketing program. (1997, 73)

Schumacher rejected fan criticism like Burton before him, describing them as a ‘cult,’ while blaming negative pre-release criticism on an ‘unpoliced internet’ (Burke 2015, 17). ‘This is a disaster,’ explained Cinemascore’s Ed Mintz. ‘It may be a signal that the Batman series is over’ (Karger 1997). In Batman Unmasked, Will Brooker captures a moment in time, providing a snap-shot of general fan discord that enveloped Batman & Robin, online user-generated discourses that not only indicated momentous shifts taking place between spheres of production and reception, but also foreshadowed the ‘toxic fan practices’ of the twenty-first century as some fan criticism promulgated belligerent, often homophobic, sentiment (Proctor and Kies 2018). ‘Batman is not gay but I do wonder about Schumacher,’ wrote one fan, who clearly wasn’t aware that Schumacher had been openly gay for years. ‘All his butt shots and crotch shots tell me that he is a little camp himself’ (Brooker 2005, 301). Various comments compared Batman & Robin with the 1960s TV series—‘you have got to be fucking kidding me … it was like watching the campy ’60s TV show,’ ‘I really prefer the

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darker Batman as opposed to the light campy Batman’ (Ibid., 300)—while others argued that the film ‘defames the good name of Burton and what he represents’ (Owczarski 2008b, 344–345). To see Burton’s Batman films as definitive and quintessential, as fans in Brooker’s analysis confirm, works as a form of discursive retconning, an act of historical revisionism that conveniently forgets that the fan reaction to both the hiring of Keaton and Burton’s Batman itself was not accepted ‘as “real” by the community,’ nor ‘as part of the repertoire of Batman representations’ (BaconSmith with Yarborough 1991, 112), as quoted earlier. Batman fan Jeff Shain perhaps captures the general mood of Schumacher ‘anti-fans’ at the time with an unfiltered, ad hominem rant: Schumacher, you little piss ant! I don’t know what the fuck you were thinking … pick up a Batman comic you asinine fool! Does Gotham City look like Club Expo to you? Do you see any neon? What the fuck? And NIPPLES? This isn’t a fucking joke! Batman isn’t some two-bit circus freak like your bearded lady of a Mother! He is the essence of gothic darkness, a man ripped between insanity with only his partner and his butler and his mission to keep from going crazy! (Ibid., 306)

In many ways, online performances like Shain’s seek to close down the polysemic potential of Batman and Robin by shuttering the door on queer interpretations, or indeed, any interpretation that does not fit with the ‘dark and serious’ regime of truth. The rhetoric that circulated Batman and Robin in 1997, both prior to and during the film’s theatrical exhibition, served to displace homoerotic interpretations as anomalous, deviant, and, more simply, ‘wrong.’ Although fans had previously been viewed as a ‘powerless elite’ (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995)—vocal, passionate, and energetic, yet unable to wield enough strength to make an impact on production cultures’ decision-making processes. In 1997 comic book fans were riding the crest of the digital wave. Eventually, filmmakers adapting cult texts were forced to acknowledge these digitally empowered minorities and acquiesce to their concerns, a process that has resulted in the reshaping of many comic book adaptations. (Burke 2015, 163)

There is no doubt that Batman fans played a part in tanking Warner’s prize-asset. As explored in Chap. 1, the online backlash to Batman and Robin provided Warner’s with a lion’s share of user-generated feedback

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that the studio could draw upon to guide the production of future Batman films. In promotional discourses for Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s co-writer David S. Goyer noted that there was formidable pressure ‘from the fans, from the people that wanted a definitive Batman film’ (Shaw 2005). When David S. Goyer sat down to write the screenplay that would restart the ailing Batman movie franchise, he had a simple goal—create a film that would please the notoriously fickle Batman fans … Batman Begins is the film Goyer believes will bring the fans back. The movie is a complete restart to the franchise and ignores the lineage of the previous four films. (Ibid.)

Although blockbuster films, as argued above, cannot be sustained commercially by fan cultures, requiring a broader coalition audience comprised of as many consumer groupings as possible, it is clear that appealing to fans, and ‘getting them onside’ in order to generate ‘network-enhanced word of mouth’ (Jurveston and Draper 1998) has become key to marketing strategies in the twenty-first century. Batman and Robin’s critical mauling therefore served as a shot across the industrial bow, a cautionary tale that warned of the perils and pitfalls associated with the new affordances provided by online technologies. Entertainment critics and film reviewers also played a role in assassinating Batman and Robin; perhaps even more so. It is doubtful that general film audiences were reading the comments of Batman fans on message boards like ‘Mantle of the Bat,’ but learned about the negative criticism towards Batman and Robin from entertainment presses. It is also doubtful that Batman fans boycotted the film upon its release—if nothing else, the comments and criticisms captured in Brooker’s analysis demonstrate that these fans had at least seen the film. With this in mind, it is more than likely that the film had failed to attract a wider coalition audience, whether due to negative ‘word-of-mouth,’ professional reviews, fan discourses, or, more than likely, a combination of forces and factors. What is certain, however, is that ‘Schumacher’s two films have largely replaced the Adam West series as the dominant, and most recent, example of camp’s supposedly ruinous effect on the character’ (Brooker 2012, 104).

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Narrative Continuity and the Film Franchise There are of course significant qualitative differences between comic book and film reboots, even though the general principle of beginning again from scratch by wiping the slate clean remains the same. Firstly, film reboots, like Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005), Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), or Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022), were not prefaced by massive event-series, ‘pre-boots’ that would metafictionally rationalize the destruction of the imaginary world prior to recreating it anew (see Chap. 4). Although there was certainly a legitimate ‘crisis’ at the heart of Warner’s decision to reboot the film series following Batman and Robin’s lower-than-expected economic performance, notwithstanding the film’s most vociferous critics, there is not a ‘Crisis for Batman and Robin’ film. The reasons for this may be multiple, but in commercial terms—terms that matter most to major film conglomerates—prefacing a film reboot with an event-series on the scale of Crisis on Infinite Earths would certainly mean economic failure. Even for comic book super-readers, witnessing the return of George Clooney in the Bat-Suit to see him deleted from the story-program may indeed sound like fun, but the backlash to Batman and Robin stressed that fans desired a new approach altogether, one more suited to the ‘dark and serious’ model first proposed by Uslan in 1979. While Batman Begins may not have had a Crisis-like pre-boot to guide Nolan’s reboot, I would argue that this work was attempted, and perhaps achieved, through ‘entry-way paratexts’ (Gray 2010) that sought to differentiate Batman and Robin from Batman Begins, as explored in Chap. 1. Secondly, there is the matter of continuity. Stuart Henderson argues that there are three types of film series, each of which are ‘distinguishable primarily by the varying levels of interconnection between their individual episodes’ (2014, 32). These are the ‘conceptual series,’ the ‘series film proper,’ and the ‘series with continuity’ (Ibid.). The first, the ‘conceptual series,’ is the ‘most loosely bound type,’ a body of films that do not share narrative continuity nor exist within the same imaginary world but are more or less self-contained stories that share general themes, such as Warner’s Gold Diggers series (1933–38) and MGM’s Broadway Melody (1935–40). The second of Henderson’s ‘types’ is the ‘series film proper,’ in which ‘characters are carried over, often into similar repetitive situations, but within discrete narrative units … there is little or no specific reference to events in previous episodes and no acknowledgement of a

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chronological narrative relationship between one text and the next’ (Ibid.). The ‘least prevalent type’ is, for Henderson, the ‘series with continuity.’ Defined by ‘an acknowledged chronology,’ the ‘series with continuity’ includes ‘overt reference(s) … to events, relationships or characters from earlier films … Prior events may have little direct bearing on the events of the new episode, but their passing will not be forgotten’ (Ibid.). I have argued elsewhere that it may be more valuable to view the relationship between the ‘series film proper’ and the ‘series with continuity’ as cinematic variations of what Robin Nelson (1997) describes, in the context of contemporary television, as ‘flexi-narratives’—which is to say, a series that functions doubly as ‘episodic’ (i.e., self-contained) ‘at the same time that they offer narrative threads that strengthen continuity bonds across films’ and other texts (Proctor 2022, 39–40). Until recently, film franchises typically worked as ‘flexi-narratives,’ a ‘combination of a self-­ contained episodic structure with continuing narrative strands’ (Loock 2017, 100) that would appeal more to wider coalition audiences who may be discouraged from attending cinemas, or from purchasing home entertainment media, if they believe that an advanced level of knowledge is required to fully understand a film’s story. As Sarah Kozloff acknowledges, ‘the line between the series and serial may have been blurry to begin with [and] the distinction … should be seen more as a continuum than as an either/or situation’ (1992, 92). The first Batman film series, from Burton’s Batman to Schumacher’s Batman and Robin, works in this way, a fusion of Henderson’s ‘series film proper’ and ‘series with continuity,’ with enactments of generic ‘refreshing’ and retconning taking place once Schumacher took over as director (Henderson 2014, 32). Batman Returns, for instance, includes the return of Keaton in the lead role, with Michael Gough’s Alfred and Pat Hingle’s Commissioner Gordon providing continuity through casting. Although Kim Basinger does not return as Vicky Vale, she is referenced when Bruce Wayne scolds Alfred for letting Vale into the Batcave in the first film (perhaps functioning as an intradiegetic apology directed at critical fans). Also, the design of Gotham City, as created by Anton Furst for Batman, provides a degree of aesthetic and stylistic continuity between Burton’s films. When Schumacher entered the frame, however, there were obvious shifts in style and design, which would also occur when the series transitioned from Schumacher to Nolan. Schumacher’s redesign was one of the elements criticized by fans and entertainment journalists, many of whom saw Gotham, in Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, as a gaudy

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carnivalesque travesty, ‘a neon-splashed, amusement park wonderland’ that illustrated the return of Camp aesthetics to the Batman world (Taylor 2008, 10). In terms of casting, both Batman Forever and Batman and Robin provide continuity with Burton’s films, with Gough and Hingle returning as Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, respectively. Yet there are also examples of discontinuity, including exchanging Keaton in the lead role with Val Kilmer for Batman Forever and George Clooney taking on the mantle in Batman and Robin. Recasting, however, does not necessarily complicate narrative continuity, but it does confirm that the role of Batman can be played by different personnel in the same way that James Bond or Doctor Who are not uniquely linked to a single actor. More troublingly is that Harvey Dent was originally played by Black actor Billy Dee Williams in Burton’s Batman but was recast with Tommy Lee Jones for Batman Forever, a retcon that could reasonably be seen as an example of ‘whitewashing,’ whether intentional or not. Aside from a brief reference to Batman’s relationship with Catwoman in Batman Returns—‘Do I need skin-tight vinyl and a whip?’ asks Nicole Kidman’s Chase Meridian—there is a lack of transfictional braiding across the four Batman films, or, most noticeably, between Burton’s and Schumacher’s films. There is certainly a case to be made that Burton’s Batman films are distinct from Schumacher’s, but this does not mean that Batman Forever reboots cinematic continuity from the beginning again. As noted in Chap. 1, the four Batman films that made up the film series at this point have since been packaged collectively in home entertainment media formats as ‘The Batman Anthology 1989–1997,’ which constructs a paratextual perimeter to distinguish the ‘first wave’ of Batman films (Burton and Schumacher’s twin films a-piece) from the ‘second wave’ (Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy). Batman Forever may have advanced strategies of regeneration to mark the transition from Burton and Schumacher—‘refreshing’ the generic co-ordinates of the Batman world, retconning Harvey Dent’s racial identity, recasting Batman—but the film is nevertheless ‘the third instalment of the series begun in 1989, rather than a reboot’ (Brooker 2012, 75). As a fusion of ‘series film proper’ and ‘series with continuity,’ the first wave of the Batman film franchise sought to appeal more to coalition audiences than to comic book readers for whom continuity is a sacred principle. For the second wave, Christopher Nolan would provide a more cohesive film series, ensuring that continuity across the three films within his Dark Knight Trilogy—Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark

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Knight Rises—would be more tightly orchestrated than the first wave. Prior to the release of Batman Begins, Nolan and Goyer needed to clearly distinguish the film from Batman and Robin in order to bracket off the second wave from the first. As noted above, rebooting the Batman film series did not strictly begin with Batman Begins, but through production and entertainment discourses that mobilized bids for cultural distinction, value, and differentiation. Director Christopher Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer would have to reckon with the poisonous legacy of Batman and Robin before Batman Begins could, in fact, begin.

The Dark Knight Reprises In Show Sold Separately, Jonathan Gray argues that production materials, magazines, newspapers, and other paratexts, act ‘like an airlock to acclimatize us to a certain text,’ suggesting certain reading strategies’ that are ‘often meticulously constructed by their producers in order to offer certain meanings and interpretations’ (2010, 25). Paratexts therefore ‘surround texts, audiences and industry [and] fill in the space between them, conditioning passages and trajectories that criss-cross the mediascape, and variously negotiating or determining interactions across the three’ (Ibid.). As discourses, promotional paratexts are usually appended onto specific regimes of truth to give heft and weight to a particular vision—in this case, a vision of Batman as ‘grim and gritty,’ ‘grounded’ and ‘realistic,’ ‘dark and serious.’ Yet regimes of truth are also concomitantly regimes of value, as John Frow might put it (1995), discursive bids that aim to build a cultural value system within which ‘good’ texts gain their status by contrasting them with, and thus distinguishing them from, ‘bad’ ones (Hills 2002). The discursive architecture that has built the figure of Batman for decades is not, however, an objective construction but a field of judgement that enacts a kind of rhetorical splintering, much like the way in which constructions of ‘low’ popular culture and ‘high’ art are produced in the market of symbolic goods (Bourdieu 1993). It could be argued, in fact, that the production of cultural value within Batman’s regime of truth operates similarly, so that we may see certain Batman texts constructed as ‘high’—like DKR and The Killing Joke—and others as ‘low’—such as the 1960s Batman TV series and Batman and Robin. These valuations are discursive projections that are repeated consistently to the point that they become dominant.

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In this chapter so far, we have seen the way that Batman discourses contribute to a particular regime of truth, resulting in a (sub)cultural value system structured by binary oppositions (good/bad, high/low, Camp/ serious, straight/queer, etc.). Where Warner’s had to confront, and attempt to contain, fan anxieties regarding a perceived relationship between Burton’s Batman and the 1960s TV series, Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer sought to distance Batman Begins from Batman and Robin through ‘entry-way paratexts,’ promotional discourses circulated prior to the film’s release within electronic press kits, interviews, and entertainment articles. In The Los Angeles Times, for example, James Greenberg wrote that the ‘challenge for the studio is to overcome the stigma of the last Batman film, the much maligned Batman and Robin’ (2005, 10). Producer Peter Guber explained that Warner’s ‘needed to get the other film out of the marketplace and out of the consciousness of the core audience’ (Ibid.). Supporting the notion that rebranding Batman would be conducted through marketing discourses that preceded the film, Goyer said: ‘We wanted to make sure that ads and teasers and trailers looked nothing like the previous films. We had to re-educate everyone that this is not the same kind of story’ (Ibid.). As part of this narrative of distinction and differentiation, Goyer directly invoked the reboot process. Although I have quoted this in Chap. 1, it is worth reiterating here: After Batman and Robin, it was necessary to do what we call in comic book terms “a reboot” … Say you’ve had 187 issues of The Incredible Hulk and you decide you’re going to introduce a new issue 1. You pretend like those first 187 issues never happened, and you start the story from the beginning and the slate is wiped clean, and no-one blinks … So we did the cinematic equivalent of a reboot, and by doing that, setting it at the beginning, you’re instantly distancing yourself from anything that’s come before. (Greenberg 2005, 13–14)

In soliciting ‘the cinematic equivalent of a reboot,’ Goyer suggests that Batman Begins not only adapts and remixes elements from comic books, but that the film may also be viewed as an adaptation of the reboot process itself; a kind of conceptual adaptation that borrows the core idea of wiping the slate clean from superhero comics and hitching it onto the film series. Notice, however, that to ‘demonstrate the novelty and value of a new approach,’ Batman and Robin is discursively summoned here by Goyer as a ‘bad’ object, so that ‘in the process of cutting ties with the previous

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version, these protestations of difference tend to make the earlier text visible’ (Brooker 2012, 106, 52). As Gray observes, any new Batman film that followed needed to address the ‘already-turbulent intertextual wake’ that threatened the brand-life and economic health of the film series: Audience and critical reception of Batman and Robin had been so near universally caustic that it had to set up a strong paratextual perimeter and a flaming hoop through which any subsequent Batman text would need to pass. Batman Begins and Time Warner needed to apologise for Batman and Robin and to erase any semblance of an intertextual connection: only Batman himself could remain, albeit radically reconfigured. (Gray 2010, 131–132)

While Goyer’s remarks sought to, in Gray’s words, ‘erase any semblance of an intertextual connection’ by introducing reboot terminology as a way to ‘start the story from the beginning’ and ‘instantly distance yourself from anything that’s come before’ (Greenberg 2005, 13–14), it is evident that ‘an intertextual connection’ is set in play even as Goyer attempts to situate Batman Begins as an uncoupling, as a beginning again rather than a continuation of the film series. As argued in Chap. 1, however, intertextual connections are not the same as transfictional ones—Batman and Robin may have been reactivated in paratexts that circulated Batman Begins, yet both texts are not ‘compossible’ at the diegetic level. In other words, the two films may be connected on one level, that is, discursively and transtextually, but they also remain diegetically independent at the transfictional level. Like earlier regenerations of comic book Batman, Nolan and his producers unwittingly drew upon key motifs and binary oppositions that, as illustrated in this chapter, have organized the dominant regime of truth for decades. ‘The world of Batman is that of grounded reality,’ explained Nolan to Variety’s Marc Graser and Cathy Dunkley (2004), so Batman Begins will be a recognizable, contemporary reality against which an extraordinary heroic figure arises … Gotham will seem like this great city in a contemporary world and will be created through various cities … We are trying to avoid a villagey feel for Gotham, as it starts to get claustrophobic. (Ibid.)

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Although Nolan is careful not to defame either Burton’s or Schumacher’s Batman films—all of which remain available for purchase and continue to be repackaged in newer entertainment formats, such as Blu-ray and, most recently, 4K—he constructs them as ‘idiosyncratic and unreal’ (Ibid.). Whereas both Burton and Schumacher mostly filmed their Batman films on set, Nolan ‘shot exteriors in London, New York and Chicago so that Batman’s hometown now intentionally looks like a recognizable place’ (Ibid.). According to production designer Nathan Crowley, ‘Chris has a clear idea about realism and real cities like New York and its history. He was trying to come up with “a New York on steroids” as he put it,’ so that audiences will ‘understand that Gotham City could possibly exist’ (‘Batman Begins International Production Notes’ 2005, 39). We can begin to see here that ‘the idea of “realism” was central to the promotion and reception of Nolan’s [Batman Begins],’ a core discursive motif that sought to distance Burton’s and Schumacher’s ‘idiosyncratic and unreal’ films from the ‘realistic’ reboot (Brooker 2012, 89). Threaded through these discourses of ‘realism’ are discourses of masculinity, as Brooker has shown, of ‘stripped down toughness’ and hard-as-­ nails machismo (2012, 93). Batman is ‘a normal man,’ explained Batman Begins cinematographer, Wally Pfister, ‘whose only special abilities are his intelligence, resourcefulness, fantastic physical condition and fighting abilities’ (Pizzello 2005), traits that reproduce stereotypical ideals of masculinity, that ‘men are independent, self-reliant, strong, robust and tough’ (Courtenay 2000, 1837). ‘What I really wanted to do was make audiences believe in the reality of this character,’ Nolan explains. ‘He really is just a guy that does a lot of push-ups’ (Greenberg 2005, 13). Multiple interviews and entertainment features stressed the gruelling training regimen that Christian Bale undertook in order to physically prepare for Batman Begins (Brooker 2012, 98). Bale is famously known for his commitment to method-acting, often gaining or losing significant amounts of weight prior to the commencement of production when necessary. Prior to Batman Begins, Bale went to extreme lengths to lose weight to play Trevor Reznick in Brad Anderson’s The Machinist (2004), committing to a strict dietary plan that saw him lose sixty-three pounds that had the actor teetering dangerously close to malnutrition. In order to play Batman, Bale immediately shifted course, dedicating himself to a weight-­training regime that has since been circulated widely by men’s magazines and websites, many of which conform with normative masculine stereotypes (Stibbe 2004). ‘This is, obviously, dangerous without the proper medical

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supervision and a knowledgeable trainer, which is why it’s not advised,’ states popular weightlifting website, Steel. ‘But this transformation really drives the point across that Bale must’ve worked like an absolute madman in order to reach his goal of becoming The Bat’ (Steel 2020). Terms such as ‘dangerous,’ ‘madman,’ and ‘transformation’ tell of the extreme and unhealthy lengths that Bale went to in order get into shape for the role, supporting Will H. Courtenay’s argument that men ‘construct masculinities by embracing risk,’ including unhealthy behaviours and beliefs that ‘demonstrate ideal forms of masculinity,’ idealizations that men display ‘like badges of honor’ (2000, 1397). This focus on Bale’s physical transformation works as a signifier of ‘hegemonic masculinity,’ which, according to R.W  Connell, is ‘always thought to proceed from men’s bodies’ (1995, 45) and is ‘reproduced through discourses that make it seem natural, inevitable, and morally right that men behave in particular ways’ (Stibbe 2004, 33). The image that is constructed across production discourses for Batman Begins blurs the distinction between character and actor, between Batman and Bale, which suggests that Bale had to undergo a radical ‘transformation’ in order to not just play the role of Batman, but to literally become Batman (Brooker 2012, 98). There are other ways that realism is marshalled in contradistinction to the camp theatrics of Batman and Robin. ‘Realism was our mantra when we were writing this film,’ explained Goyer. ‘It doesn’t particularly feel like a comic-book film, which is something we strived for’ (Shaw 2005). Notice that ‘realism’ is bracketed off from comic books, which suggests that the common-sense view of comics as merely ‘kid’s stuff,’ situated low down on the cultural hierarchy, threatens to infantilize Batman Begins in similar ways that Schumacher did by appealing to children and families. Instead of comics, then, Nolan called upon a different cinematic pedigree to brand Batman Begins, that he was inspired more by ‘“Lawrence of Arabia” than any comic book’ (Greenberg 2005, 14–15). Elsewhere, however, Nolan specifically cited Superman: The Movie as a direct inspiration: What I loved about Superman was the way New York felt like New York, or rather Metropolis felt like New York. Metropolis felt like a city you could recognize—and then there was this guy flying through the streets. “That’s amazing, so let’s do that for Batman, and let’s start by putting together an amazing cast,” which is what they had done with that film, but which I hadn’t seen before—they had everyone from [Marlon] Brando to Glenn

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Ford, playing Superman’s dad … So we started putting together this amazing cast based around Christian [Bale], who seemed perfect for Batman, but bringing in Sir Michael Caine and Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman and Tom Wilkinson. (Quoted in Davis 2015)

Intriguingly, production discourses for Superman: The Movie also situated the film within a tradition of realism, the tagline, ‘you’ll believe a man can fly,’ reflecting director Richard Donner’s intentions to approach the material earnestly rather than as a comedy, as originally planned. ‘The story had to have a sense of reality,’ explained Donner, ‘and the reality had to be portrayed by the characters and brought to life in their relationships. Superman needed to have reality instead of farce, which is what the original script was’ (Bettinson 2018, 12). Just as Nolan and Goyer’s ‘mantra’ on Batman Begins was ‘realism,’ Donner’s ‘watchword for Superman: The Movie was verisimilitude. Even though the movie depicted fantastical events, everything was shown in as honest and truthful manner as possible’ (Trumbull 2018, 48; see also Bevin 2019, 89). Executive producer Ilya Salkind insisted that the film ‘has to be real; it can’t be campy and play with the jokes, it has to be straight’ (Eury 2018, 7). Mentioning the term ‘campy’ implies that the 1960s TV series cast a shroud over the Man of Steel—perhaps over the superhero genre generally—which reinforces Brooker’s argument that Adam West was, at the time, ‘the predominant image in the mind of the general, non-comics reading public’ (2005, 171). So, Nolan subtly contradicts Goyer by twining Superman: The Movie with David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, but they both would also cite a selection of Batman comics as inspirations, if not direct source materials, for Batman Begins. In doing so, production discourses can operate as branding mechanisms, paratextual consecrations geared towards comic book readers and Batman film fans who might have worried that a reboot would not live up to their ‘grim and gritty’ expectations. Although Batman Begins was promoted as ‘a faithful adaptation of the “comic book original”’ (Brooker 2012, 49), the film, like Burton’s and Schumacher’s, does not draw upon a single comic as source but, instead, borrows from a carefully curated selection of key comics that, in discursive terms, carry an ‘aura’ of respectability that could then be hinged onto paratexts as a way to fortify the (sub)cultural value of the project. Given Goyer’s goal to create a story that would appeal to ardent Batman fans, and thus re-establish the film series as commercially viable once more, the type of comics

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advanced to rebrand the cinematic version of the character is revealing. Rather than ‘distilling an essence of Batman from the vast reservoir of stories’ published between 1939 and 2005, as the production discourses articulated by associating Batman Begins with Finger and Kane’s ‘original,’ Nolan and Goyer were instead ‘spearfishing from within a small pool; and that pool of stories in turn suggests a particular aesthetic, a particular set of authors, and a particular period’ (Brooker 2012, 60). Similar to the way in which Burton consistently cited Frank Miller’s DKR and Moore’s The Killing Joke to paratextually graft his film onto the ‘grim and gritty’ zeitgeist of the 1980s, Nolan and Goyer pointed towards other ‘dark and serious’ comics—Miller’s Year One, Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween from 1996–1997, O’Neil and Adams’ stories featuring Ra’s al Ghul from 1971, and O’Neil’s ‘The Man Who Falls,’ first published in the Secret Origins trade paperback from 1989 (Ibid., 61; Burke 2015, 164–165). Rather than reactivate Bob Kane’s ‘author-function’ as a symbol of authenticity, then, Nolan and Goyer instead summoned a cluster of ‘author-functions’ to bolt onto Batman Begins—Miller, Loeb and Sale, O’Neil and Adams—all of whom can be read as ‘fan favourite’ creators that wear the badge of ‘auteurism’ in the superhero comics world. Tellingly, both Nolan and Goyer wrote an introduction to the trade paperback of Loeb and Sale’s The Long Halloween from 2011, in which they discuss the influence that the story had on them as they were writing the script for Batman Begins and its sequel, The Dark Knight. ‘Well, we co-opted THE LONG HALLOWEEN’S idea of the triumvirate for Batman Begins to some extent,’ said Nolan, while Goyer stated that there are three major comic book influences within the Batman lore. There’s YEAR ONE, the Neal Adams stuff, and there is THE LONG HALLOWEEN. But by the time THE DARK KNIGHT comes out, it will become apparent that LONG HALLOWEEN is the preeminent influence on both movies. (Ibid., 6)

Notice that only Adams’ author-function is directly invoked, absenting Frank Miller and Denny O’Neil’s imprimaturs altogether. More pointedly, Bob Kane has now been excluded as both author and source, paring down the inspirations for Batman Begins even further to three key texts— although The Long Halloween is now placed front and centre as the dominant inspiration, as ‘the preeminent influence’ on both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Here, Nolan and Goyer appear to occupy positions as

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brand ambassadors for this reissue of The Long Halloween in trade paperback form. Yet by also pointing towards Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, this short two-page introduction operates not only as a paratext for The Long Halloween itself but provides a multi-pronged threshold that promotes Year One and ‘the Neal Adams stuff,’ as well as Nolan’s Batman films. We saw in the previous chapter how John Byrne’s The Man of Steel triggered a set of discourses that constructed binaries between ‘good,’ and therefore ‘authentic,’ representations of Superman—‘the real thing’—and ‘bad’ imposters. As this chapter has demonstrated, Batman has likewise been viewed in limited ways, as either ‘dark’ or ‘light,’ ‘serious’ or ‘camp,’ ‘real’ or ‘fake,’ oppositions that efface the fact that Batman is neither one nor the other, but ‘a rich, glorious mess of energies; not just a character but a network of meanings, with a wildly diverse cultural existence’ (Brooker 2012, 215). It is the thorny, nebulous concept of ‘authenticity’ that sits at the heart of industrial, entertainment, and fannish discourses that install Batman within moral dualisms between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ interpretations. As a root metaphor, this apotheosized concept of ‘authenticity’ has been viewed more recently as a key branding strategy in marketing literature. According to Douglas Holt, the marketing of ‘authenticity’ has been employed to confront a counter-cultural surge ‘forming around the idea that the branding efforts of global consumer goods have spawned a societally destructive consumer culture’ whereby ‘standing in opposition to brands is no longer merely an antiestablishment badge for youth,’ but instead represents ‘a fullyfledged social movement,’ a ‘heated competition [that] is raising the bar on what is considered authentic’ (Holt 2002, 70). In so doing, contemporary marketers ‘are engaged in a tooth and nail ideological battle with the antibranding movement over the meaning of authenticity’ (Ibid., 86). Since the turn of the millennium, ‘authenticity’ has become a marketing buzzword, ‘a new strain of consumer desire’ generated within a shifting ‘Experience Economy,’ undergirded by the notion that ‘business offerings must get real’ (Gilmore and Pine 2007, 3, 1). In this scenario, previous corporate watchwords like ‘quality’ have been replaced with ‘authenticity’ as the key engine that pilots consumer marketing strategies, a ‘new business imperative’ where ‘the management of the customer perception of authenticity becomes the primary new source of competitive advantage’ (ibid., emphasis in original).

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While the pursuit of authenticity may have become a core marketing practice in the twenty-first century, comic book readers have been demanding ‘authentic’ superheroes for decades, demands that producers have folded back into promotion and marketing discourses to strongly appeal to the fannish proclivity for ‘the real thing.’ These forces and factors not only govern the promotion of superhero media, however, but have also been key shifts in the marketing and promotion of blockbuster films that, like Batman Begins, employ the key concepts of ‘realism’ and ‘authorship’ as synonyms for ‘authenticity.’ Across production discourses for the James Bond reboot, Casino Royale (2006), for example, ‘realism’ crops up as consistently as it does for Batman Begins. Although the twentieth instalment in the Bond film series, Die Another Day (2002), was an economic triumph, as noted in Chap. 1, executive producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli felt that the film series ‘had virtually become a kind of cartoon,’ and not for the first time (Howards 2009, 33; Chapman 2007, 237; O’Connell 2012, 325). According to Barbara Broccoli, ‘we sat down after Die Another Day to craft the next Bond adventure and we just became very frustrated because we felt that the series had gone in the direction of über-fantasy’ (Cork 2006), that ‘it felt inappropriate for the films to continue down that fantastical path,’ primarily because ‘September 11th happened,’ and so ‘we decided to move to a more serious Bond’ (Day 2010, 70). It ‘was very hard to continue down that fantasy style of film-making,’ explained Wilson, so ‘we really had to reconceive Bond’ (Ibid.) because ‘we were desperately afraid we could go downhill’ (Waxman 2005). Paul Haggis, co-writer on Casino Royale, said that he was given a mandate by Broccoli and Wilson to ‘reinvent Bond,’ to ‘take him back to his roots’ by reconfiguring Bond as the character that ‘Fleming had in mind’ (Cork 2006). Director Martin Campbell claimed that Casino Royale marked ‘a new beginning,’ one that afforded the production team an opportunity to ‘put on screen what Fleming originally intended,’ whereas Wilson said that the ‘only way to take the series forward’ was to ‘wipe the slate clean and start from the beginning’ (Ibid.). Like Batman Begins and Superman: The Movie, the watchword for Casino Royale was ‘realism.’ New Bond, Daniel Craig—who incidentally received criticism for taking on the role from some fan quarters just as Keaton did—stated that the fights in Casino Royale ‘should make you wince’ (Done 2006). ‘I wanted it as gritty and as real as possible,’ commented Craig. ‘It’s bloody. It’s bloody as hell … But that’s what I wanted:

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to show that Bond gets fucked up—that’s reality’ (Crocker 2006, 55). In the mini-documentary, James Bond: For Real, included on the DVD and Blu-ray from 2006, stunt-work on Casino Royale was ‘near to as real as possible … very real,’ with stunt co-ordinator Chris Corbould commenting that he fought ‘tooth and nail to do it for real’ (Done 2006). ‘With this one,’ explained Second Unit director, Alexander Wit, ‘we’re going back to reality … we are trying to be down and dirty’ (Baughan 2006, 54–55). Key words here are ‘gritty,’ ‘real,’ and ‘down and dirty,’ descriptions that not only echo Batman’s regime of truth but also similarly position the Bond reboot within discourses of hardened masculinity. The invocation of ‘realism’ and authorship as organizing principles for Casino Royale was not a new strategy, however. To differentiate Roger Moore’s campy Bond from Timothy Dalton’s interpretation, for instance, the same motifs were generated discursively. Dalton is ‘much more sinister in the sense that he’s very real,’ said John Glen, director on License to Kill (1989), Dalton’s second outing as 007. ‘He’s very much nearer Fleming’s Bond (Christie 2013, 170–171). It is remarkable that Casino Royale was promoted in ways that reproduced and recirculated similar motifs that Batman Begins did, suggesting that production discourses are not merely marketing tools but work as storytelling devices, narratives in and of themselves conforming to a specific generic formula. Just as Bob Kane has been viewed as the central source and author of Batman, Ian Fleming’s author-function was used in similar ways, to ‘take Bond back to his roots.’ Unlike Batman, however, there is no cluster of author-functions from which to draw upon—Fleming is situated clearly as the ‘author-God’ of 007, as Roland Barthes might say. Yet, as James Chapman points out, official publicity for Roger Moore’s debut in Live and Let Die (1974) ‘suggested that Moore was closer to Fleming’s conception of Bond as Connery had been—though as the same claim was also made for both George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton it should perhaps not be taken too seriously’ (2007, 125). Building on Douglas Holt, iconic brands, like Bond and Batman, participate and compete in ‘myth-markets,’ rather than product markets, seeking ‘distinctive and favourable associations’ that ‘generate buzz’ and attract ‘core consumers with deep emotional attachments’ (2004, 35). Given the success of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, the decision to conclude the series after the third instalment, The Dark Knight Rises, is an interesting manoeuvre, one that was arguably driven by the wattage of Nolan’s author-function. Time Warner could have continued

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the film series, perhaps with Joseph Gordon-Levitt taking over the Batman mantle as teased in the film’s final scenes, but they went another route instead. How, then, could the Batman film series be successfully rebooted with only Nolan’s ‘good’ object in close proximity? What ‘sources’ and which ‘author-functions’ would be marshalled to rebrand Batman for the 2010s and ‘20s?

Dark Knight Forever One year after the conclusion of The Dark Knight Trilogy, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel rebooted the Superman film franchise from the beginning again. The previous instalment, Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2007)—the fifth film in the series rather than a reboot, as Dan Hassler-­ Forest (2012, 57) and James Chapman contend (2007, 141)—had failed to generate enough capital to satisfy Warner’s corporate executives. Although the sequel collected $391 million in global box office receipts, plans for a sixth instalment were cancelled. Nolan’s Batman Begins and its sequels, especially The Dark Knight—the first billion-dollar film in history—had demonstrated that rebooting a popular franchise by wiping the slate clean could be a sound business strategy, so the decision was made to do the same for Superman. It would be with Man of Steel’s sequel, however, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) that the Dark Knight would begin again, rather than within a solo film of his own, diegetically fusing the three pillars of DC’s branded entertainment catalogue— Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—in order to rapidly develop a shared cinematic universe to compete with Marvel. Beginning in 2008, the same year that The Dark Knight was released theatrically, Marvel Studios had effectively borrowed the template from superhero comics to ‘do something that had never been done before … create one seamless world that several different film franchises could exist in’ (Philbrick 2010). Saliently, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which is more aptly described as a transmedia universe (Proctor 2014), ‘adapts’ both the comic book model of continuity and the shared universe conceit, an intensive form of serialization that has ushered in pronounced shifts for transmedia franchises in the 2010s and ’20s (Flanagan et al. 2016; McSweeney 2018). For Man of Steel, David S.  Goyer returned as co-screenwriter, while Christopher Nolan served as executive producer, both of whom provide ‘brand functions’ to bless the project as ‘authentic’ (see Chap. 1, and Proctor 2020 on the concept of the brand function). Just in case

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audiences thought that the film would be a continuation of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Goyer sought to erect a perimeter between the two as diegetically independent entities, explaining that the ‘Dark Knight films do not exist in the same universe’ as Man of Steel (Sullivan 2013). At the same time, Nolan’s ‘good’ object was also summoned to provide aesthetic continuity with the Superman reboot by accentuating ‘the same naturalism as the Batman trilogy. Our approach has always been a naturalist, realistic approach. We always try to imagine these stories as if they could happen in the same world in which we live’ (Orange 2012). This should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt considering the criticism the film received for its use of CGI, the final confrontation between Superman and General Zod looking more like a video game than a ‘naturalist, realist approach.’ Treating Man of Steel as the generic child of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy would prove to be controversial for entertainment reviewers and other stakeholders. ‘Grim and gritty’ might be ideal terrain for Batman, but to frame Superman, the optimistic ‘big blue boy scout,’ as ‘a brooding, Dark Knight-like character, who cares more about beating bad guys from saving people’ and ends up snapping Zod’s neck in the film’s final act is, for some fans and critics, too unfaithful to the character’s moral tenets (Moss 2015). ‘“Man of Steel” wasn’t fun,’ said Ilya Salkind, producer of the Christopher Reeve Superman films. ‘It was too dark,’ and ‘felt more like a Batman movie than a Superman flick’ (TMZ 2013). For Superman fan and comic book writer Mark Waid, Man of Steel is ‘utterly joyless. From start to finish. Utterly. Joyless. And I have  no interest in relentless joyless from a guy who can fly’ (ibid). Addressing the Zod controversy, Goyer explained that he thinks of the [Superman and Batman] films almost as Elseworlds stories … To me, the comic books are the comic books and the films that we were involved in are these Elseworlds stories that exist within their own universe … [Superman] was in this terrible position and then afterwards he vowed that he would never [kill anyone] again. It didn’t come out of anger—he was forced into it. (Chitwood 2020)

In describing Man of Steel as analogous with ‘Elseworlds stories,’ those alternate, counterfactual tales discussed in Chap. 5, Goyer describes the film as an ‘imaginary story,’ perhaps to pacify comic book fans and critics who expected a more ‘faithful’ representation of Superman. Ultimately, Goyer’s remarks framed Man of Steel as a non-canonical ‘imaginary story,’

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just like O’Neil did regarding Burton’s Batman, as noted earlier in this chapter. Despite receiving criticism and mixed reviews, Man of Steel was a box office triumph, amassing a global tally of $668,045,518 against a production budget of $225 million. Clearly, a sequel was in the offing, and director Zack Snyder wasted no time in announcing a follow-up at the San Diego Comic-Con in July 2013, less than six weeks after Man of Steel’s theatrical debut. After unveiling a unified logo branded with Superman’s and Batman’s respective insignias to rapturous applause, actor Harry Lennix, who played General Swanick in Man of Steel, joined Snyder on stage and spoke the following words: ‘I want you to remember, Clark … in all the years to come … in your most private moments … I want you to remember … my hand … at your throat … I want you to remember … the one who beat you.’ With these words, coming as they do from The Dark Knight Returns, Lennix and Snyder tantalized Comic-Con audiences by suggesting that the sequel to Man of Steel would draw heavily from Miller’s Batman comic and, as Charlie Jane Anders reported, ‘the crowd lost their shit’ (2013). Although Snyder carefully explained that the sequel—which would be later titled Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice—would not be a direct adaptation of DKR, the fact that it was cited as an inspiration at Comic-Con, and welcomed by hordes of passionate fans, illustrates the symbolic might of both Miller’s author-function and the auratic prestige attached to perhaps the most feted and celebrated Batman comic in history. (Recall that Tim Burton also mustered Miller and DKR for his Batman.) The following month, August 2013, reports began to emerge that Ben Affleck would take over from Christian Bale as Batman, and history began to repeat itself once more. As Variety’s Marc Graser reported, fans complained about the casting on social media platforms, especially Twitter, that Affleck was unsuited for the role: ‘Within the first hour [of the announcement], 96,088 tweets were sent about Affleck as Batman … He has been averaging 39,225 tweets per hour, for a total of 509,922 tweets just over the past two hours’ (2013). Fans launched several petitions through website Change.org, calling for the immediate removal of Affleck. ‘His acting skill is not even close to be being believable as Bruce Wayne and he won’t do the role justice,’ said one petition, while another criticized Affleck for not being ‘built’ nor ‘intimidating enough for the role of Batman’ (Abrams and Graser 2013). Although Warner’s did not attempt to assuage fan criticism by removing Affleck from the film’s cast, it is

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possible that they paid at least some attention given that Batman V Superman introduced a more violent, physically imposing, ‘darker’ Knight than seen before in film (and perhaps even comics). Not only did Affleck ‘bulk up’ for the role by committing to a brutal training regimen that transformed him into ‘a muscle God’ (Acharya 2022), like Bale before him, his depiction of Batman would also develop the brooding, hypermasculine archetype even further than Christian Bale did. As shown in Batman V Superman, Affleck—or ‘Batfleck,’ as critics and fans described him—is an excessively violent character who kills bad guys, uses a gun, and burns a Bat-insignia onto the skin of criminals. If Bale’s Dark Knight stands as a totem of hypermasculinity, then Affleck’s iteration is something different, a vicious, remorseless sociopath who ‘casually snaps the necks, shoots, and runs over dozens of henchmen’ (Brown 2019, 205). Batman V Superman may reboot the Dark Knight as diegetically independent from Nolan’s films, but it does not ‘begin again’ by reproducing the origin story. In fact, Affleck’s Batman has been in operation for some time, yet another reference to Miller’s DKR and its depiction of a grizzled, battle-worn Dark Knight. From this perspective, I would argue that it is a different type of reboot, one that begins a third wave of Batman films midway through the story, or at least midway for Batman as Man of Steel rebooted Superman from ‘year zero.’ For these reasons, I would describe Affleck’s Batman as an in media res reboot, with Batman V Superman enacting a double function as both sequel to Man of Steel and a reboot of Batman. Batman V Superman may have attracted audiences to cinemas, amassing a global haul of $872.7 million, but professional reviews were overwhelmingly negative, receiving comments like, ‘153 minutes of a grown man whacking two dolls together’ (West 2016), or ‘a big, wet glob of fetid bird droppings tumbling down from the sky’ (Schilling 2016). Commenting on the new Batman, Empire’s Nick de Semlyen argued that ‘the addition of Bruce Wayne to the franchise has not lightened the mood any,’ as Affleck’s ‘grey-templed Darkest Knight … is so morally burned out that he not only subdues foes, but tortures and brands them like cattle’ (2016). But it would be with the next film, Justice League (2017), that Warner’s plans for a Marvel-like shared cinematic universe would hit the rocks. Due to circumstances beyond his control, Snyder had to depart production midway through shooting due to a family emergency, with the studio bringing in Joss Whedon, director of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble (2012) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), to complete production,

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resulting in an uneven film that characterized Affleck’s Batman confusingly as both ‘the grittier Bruce Wayne of Batman V Superman,’ and as a lighter Knight, ‘cracking one-liners like he’d wandered into an Avengers movie’ (Moore 2022). Fans turned to social media to demand the release of the so-called Snyder Cut of Justice League, which, as it turns out, was eventually released in 2021 courtesy of an often-toxic online fan campaign that targeted studio executives, actors, and other fans (Romano 2021). At this stage, DC’s Extended Cinematic Universe (DCEU) had failed to replicate Marvel’s critical and commercial successes, placing considerable pressure on Time Warner ‘to get its act together,’ according to Brooke Barnes of The New York Times (2020). Although Affleck was set to write, direct, and star in a new solo Batman film, he would step aside and allow director Matt Reeves to take over, citing his experience on Justice League as the main reason. ‘I had a really nadir experience around Justice League for a lot of different reasons,’ explained Affleck. ‘Not blaming anybody, there’s a lot of things that happened,’ but ‘I wasn’t happy [and] I didn’t like being there. And then some really shitty things, awful things happened,’ so I decided ‘I’m not going to do that anymore’ (Greenblatt 2022). As progress on a new Batman film ground to a halt, a similar fate that has since confronted Superman, it was announced that Matt Reeves’ The Batman would be a stand-alone story, a reboot rather than a new instalment in the DCEU. Like the Affleck incarnation, the latest Batman, played by Robert Pattinson, would not begin again with an origin story, but operates likewise as an in media res reboot, the action in the film taking place at the outset of Batman’s second year of activity rather than covering the character’s origins again. ‘It’s a Year Two story,’ explained Reeves, featuring an inexperienced Batman as he learns the ropes (Jolin 2022, 55). Like Keaton and Affleck before him, the news that Pattinson would play the next Batman saw some fans up in arms. ‘This will ruin my childhood and my dreams,’ wrote a commenter on Twitter, while others highlighted Pattinson’s tenure as Edward Cullen in the Twilight film series to criticize the casting decision (Setoodeh 2019). Just as they did to protest Affleck’s appointment, petitions on Change.org began to appear within hours of the announcement. ‘Don’t make the Batfleck mistake again,’ John Roden wrote. ‘For the love of all that is holy, stop trashing the DC Universe’ (Morona 2019). Some fans, however, seemed satisfied with the news, pointing towards Pattinson’s post-Twilight film career as evidence of his acting chops.

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At the time of writing, The Batman has almost completed its theatrical run, but the film’s production discourses echo, almost to the letter, those that accompanied Nolan’s Batman Begins. Realism appears once more, emphasizing the film’s ‘groundness and authenticity’ (Jolin 2022, 59), a ‘practical and grounded’ approach (Field 2022, 7) that, Pattinson claimed, is ‘very visceral, like it’s not pulling any punches’ (Ibid., 61). Reeves would also invoke some of the same comics as inspiration, namely The Long Halloween and Miller’s Year One. As if cycling back to where this chapter began, Reeves also frames his reboot as returning Batman to his role as a detective, in a similar way that Uslan sought to develop his ‘dark and serious’ interpretation throughout the 1980s by focusing on ‘the darkknight detective,’ as quoted at the beginning of this chapter. As Reeves explained, it was important ‘to lean harder than had ever been done into the idea of Batman being, quote, “The World’s Greatest Detective”—this young guy who was trying to solve a case’ (Scott 2022, 27). Reeves also explains that he ‘was trying to go back to the origins of the Batman story … To go back to that noir tone from … Bob Kane and Bill Finger. I mean the stories began as, really, noir comics’ (Maytum 2022, 41). It certainly seems as if the prefigurative foundations deployed to promote the cinematic Batman—and, like Casino Royale, ‘dark’ reboots more generally—has become formulaic, a form of ‘critical industrial practice’ (Caldwell 2008) that draws heavily upon hegemonic fan discourses to position reboots as ‘authentic’ media texts. Several critics, responding to the full-length trailer for The Batman, read the reboot through the frame of Nolan’s Dark Knight films. ‘Well, this looks like a Batman movie,’ wrote Scott Mendelson (2021) for Forbes. Or, more specifically, this looks like a Chris Nolan Batman movie. We’ve got Robert Pattinson sounding a lot like Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne (close your eyes and they’ll sound identical), Andy Serkis sounding not unlike Michael Caine’s Alfred, and certain moments (Batman shooting upward on the grappling hook, Batman beating up thugs in a dimly-lit nightclub) that aren’t just tropes of the mythology but staged and filmed in a way that can’t help but remind you of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

Although it would be uncharitable to claim that The Batman is merely a Nolan pastiche or homage, the official production and promotional discourses undoubtedly advance similar motifs about ‘realism,’ ­

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‘groundedness,’ and, most pointedly, ‘darkness.’ Indeed, since Nolan’s Batman swan-song, The Dark Knight Rises, both Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson have been framed as ‘darker’ Batmen than Nolan’s in entertainment discourse, the ‘auratic’ power of The Dark Knight Trilogy being continually reckoned and wrestled with in prefigurative contexts due to the power of Nolan’s brand function (see Chap. 1). One of the ways that Matt Reeves set out to establish The Batman as ‘the darkest knight’ of them all was to promote the film as ‘almost a horror movie,’ citing the Zodiac Killer as inspiration for the Riddler—Paul Dano’s performance being closer to Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight than Jim Carrey’s flamboyant performance in Batman Forever—and, as template for the new Batmobile, Stephen King’s Christine (Squires 2021). Critics also described The Batman as a horror film, comparing the film with, for instance, David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), featuring Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter, and Saw (2004) (Ayala 2022; Donato 2022; Levine 2022; Perry 2022; Sherlock 2022). As each new cinematic incarnation will undoubtedly be accompanied by discursive bids for cultural capital through claims about ‘darkness,’ one might reasonably wonder how far this can go in the future before film-makers and producers run out of dark tones with which to promote ‘authenticity’ and ‘aura.’ Perhaps reboot culture is in danger of becoming predictable and programmatic. It will be interesting to see how the next James Bond film will be promoted— the death of 007 in A Time to Die (2022) implies that a new reboot is on the horizon. Economically, The Batman may not have stimulated as much box office capital as Nolan’s The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises—or, for that matter, Snyder’s Batman V Superman—but the film managed to collect a respectable $770 million in global box office receipts. Perhaps more importantly, the film received generally positive reviews, indicating to the studio that the cinematic Batman was in good hands and could be successful in both critical and economic spheres once more, ten years after the conclusion of Nolan’s triptych. Reportedly, Warner’s are planning several spin-off TV shows for their HBO Max streaming platform, including a series based around Colin Farrell’s iteration of The Penguin. While the DCEU appears to be largely in ruins at the time of writing—the critical and commercial disaster of Black Adam (2022), as well as the cancellation of the Batgirl film, perhaps hammering nail into coffin—Warner’s may end up focusing more on expanding Matt Reeve’s Batman into a

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streaming universe, much like Disney have done for Marvel’s superheroes and Lucasfilm’s Star Wars. A few critics, however, grumbled about The Batman for several reasons. For Anthony Borelli of Screen Rant, the franchise’s obsession with realism ‘hurts the Dark Knight’ and ‘reject(s) Batman’s broader comic book nature’ (2021), an argument echoed by the New York Post’s Johnny Oleksinski: ‘Director Matt Reeves’ downer movie embraces the realism of The Dark Knight—the opposite of Tim Burton’s purple-hazed funhouse—only without the payoff of excellent writing and acting’ (2022). Mendelson picks up the Nolan comparisons once more, claiming that the film more or less replicates the Dark Knight films in style, tone, and tenor, so much so that it ‘makes this film relatively pointless’ and tries ‘to sell something old as new’ (2022). It is a ‘brutal and murky world which Christopher Nolan thrillingly pioneered with his Dark Knight trilogy,’ wrote The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (2022). More saliently perhaps, at least for the purposes of this chapter, The Batman has been criticized for being too dark and humourless, ‘hammer[ing] home the realisation that somewhere along the line, someone—probably Christopher Nolan— decided that Batman movies should no longer be fun,’ as The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney put it. ‘I found myself even thinking wistfully of the truly terrible Joel Schumacher ’90s entries,’ continued Rooney, ‘gaudy trash that at least could be relied upon to give you a glitzy Gotham City shindig’ (2022). Pattinson’s Batman is ‘not like the other Batmen,’ says Kristy Puchko for Mashable. ‘He’s a mood, made up of grumbling angsty monologues, hard stares, and grit teeth.’ The film is more ‘grisly pageantry than entertainment,’ as if ‘Reeves forgot superheroes should be fun’ (2022). For The Telegraph’s Alexander Larman, ‘[t]he latest Batman is so unrelentingly grim it makes The Dark Knight look like Adam West’ (2022). As the headline to Larman’s article reads: ‘A plea to Hollywood: make Batman fun again.’

Conclusion Whether or not Reeves will shift the tone in The Batman sequel only time will tell, but I expect that the regime of truth will continue informing future Batman films, if only to avoid a repeat of the Batman and Robin fiasco (unless, of course, bat-fans call for it, a highly unlikely proposition). With that said, Robin has also been given the ‘dark’ treatment in the TV series, Titans (2018–2023). In fact, this version of Robin, the first

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live-action version since Batman and Robin, is more ruthless, more violent, and more psychotic than any of the cinematic Batmen to date (or perhaps of any Batman, regardless of media platform). As Robin, played by Brenton Thwaites, is introduced in the first episode, he violently tackles a bunch of henchmen in an alley, a scene that looks uncannily similar to one in Batman Begins when Bale’s Dark Knight is unleashed for the first time. Although the criminals initially scoff at Robin’s appearance, the scene swiftly becomes a bloodbath as the adult Boy Wonder issues his own brand of rough justice, breaking bones and smashing faces with brutal efficiency. At the end of the scene, Robin utters two words: ‘fuck Batman.’ As the season progresses, viewers learn that Robin’s time with the Dark Knight has been overwhelmingly traumatic, with Batman framed as a reckless child abuser who continually endangered Robin’s life as he mounted his war on crime in Gotham City. Rescuing the live-action Robin from the homophobic jeers and camp crusades of the past is therefore attempted by shifting the light-hearted characteristics of the character towards something more primal and savage, less Boy Wonder and closer to Dark Knight (much like Superman was subject to similar treatment in Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, as mentioned above). I would argue, therefore, that this notion of ‘darkness’—an amorphous description at best—can be understood as synonymous with mature content, or more accurately, with representations of violence. Robin is also scheduled to return to cinemas in the future. Announced as part of DC’s shake-up of their cinematic universe and stewarded by Guardians of the Galaxy writer/director James Gunn, The Brave and The Bold will reportedly draw from Grant Morrison’s celebrated tenure as writer on Batman comics, which featured Bruce Wayne’s son, Damian, as Robin. ‘It’s the opposite of the traditional Batman and Robin,’ explained Morrison in 2010, ‘because in this case, Batman is a little more happy-go-­ lucky, a bit more of a lighthearted, upbeat guy, and Robin’s a little bad-ass, scowling monster. We kind of reversed the dynamic, which makes it quite interesting’ (Marshall 2010). Whether Gunn will tap into Morrison’s ‘reversal’ or his general aesthetic is impossible to determine at this early stage, but it may be that new versions of Robin in live-action media will be, just like Batman, enveloped in ‘darkness’ and violence (if Titans is anything to go by, at any rate). The Brave and the Bold will not, however, be set in the same continuity as The Batman. Beginning with the sequence of TV series situated in the

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so-called Arrowverse, the DC Extended Universe has recently introduced the multiverse concept into live-action media, the alternative world conceit permitting DC’s various films and TV permutations to co-exist within hyperdiegetic continuity. In the TV adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019), the sixth ‘Arrowverse’ crossover event comprising Supergirl (2015–21), Batwoman (2019–22), The Flash (2014–23), Arrow (2012–20), and Legends of Tomorrow (2016–22), several parallel worlds are represented, one of which includes the 1960s Batman TV show. As an elderly Dick Grayson/Robin, played once again by Burt Ward, is walking his dog, the sky shimmers with red light. ‘Holy crimson skies of death,’ exclaims Grayson, before his reality, designated Earth-66, is destroyed (’66 referring to the year that the Batman TV series first aired). Although the 1960s Batman does not appear—Adam West passed away in 2017—the inclusion of Burt Ward as Grayson informs viewers that the world of the TV series no longer exists, a brief, jocular reference that arguably speaks directly to anti-fans of the camp crusader era. Smallville’s Clark Kent (Tom Welling) also features in the crossover, as does Brandon Routh from Superman Returns, the latter indicating that DC’s live-action portfolio is not specifically limited to the various ‘Arrowverse’ TV series, but also cinema. Ultimately, the television adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths announced that all of DC’s live-action media, some of which previously existed in separate alternate realities, should now be seen as occupying a multiverse not dissimilar from the comic books. The MCU has also introduced the multiverse concept into live-action cinema and TV. In 2021, fans were treated to Spider-Man: No Way Home, which featured the return of Tobey MacGuire and Andrew Garfield working alongside the rebooted webslinger, played by Tom Holland. This means that the Sam Raimi trilogy and Marc Webb’s pair of films are ‘debooted’ in the process, establishing a live-action multiverse ‘adapted’ from the canonical continuity of superhero comics. Recent MCU films and TV series have developed the idea further than DC, including Loki (2021), Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, (2022), and, more recently, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023). Yet, just as DC pioneered the parallel worlds motif in the 1960s, with ‘The Flash of Two Worlds’ (see Chap. 3), the Crisis TV adaptation pipped Marvel to the post by several years. In summer 2023, The Flash is set for theatrical release, a DCEU film that reportedly draws from the DC comic book ‘pre-boot,’ Flashpoint, and features both Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck as Batman. At the level

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of canon and continuity, the return of Keaton in cape and cowl, playing the role for the first time in over thirty years, suggests that Tim Burton’s Batman films have also been ‘debooted,’ the implication being that Schumacher’s Batman and Robin also exist somewhere across the multiverse. Perhaps Keaton’s involvement suggests that the ‘dark and serious’ Batman is splintering into multiple live-action variations. Perhaps viewers will be treated in future to a range of diverse incarnations that further trouble the binary oppositions between ‘good,’ ‘dark’ Batman and ‘bad’ Bright Knight, but this will largely depend on the way in which Keaton is represented in The Flash. He may have been a ‘darker’ version of Batman in 1989, especially compared to the 1960s TV series, but when evaluated against the darkest knights of Bale, Affleck, and Pattinson, it may be that Keaton will beam a modicum of light into the shadows of the Batman film franchise in the 2020s.

Notes 1. Schiff’s tenure on Detective Comics began on #71 and lasted until #326, and on Batman from #15 through to #163. 2. Detective Comics #116, October 1946. 3. Batman #27, February 1945. 4. Batman #36, August 1946. 5. See the ‘Index of Batman Comics Adapted to Television’ in Eury and Kroneberg 2012, 69. 6. In Tales of the Teen Titans #34, July 1985. 7. These are: Jason Todd; Tim Drake; Stephanie Brown; and Damian Wayne. At the time of writing, Tim Drake has returned to the role after a period as Red Robin. Miller’s DKR also included Carrie Kelly in the role. 8. Joe Chill as the killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents was introduced in the first version of Batman’s origin story in Detective Comics #33 from November 1939.

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the-­y ear-­i n-­c omics-­w eek-­3 1-­t he-­b atman-­o f-­t hree-­w orlds-­b y-­b ill-­f inger-­ sheldon-­moldoff-­1963/ Smith, Kevin. 2014. Grant Morrison: Bat Bard. Fatman on Batman #28 (Podcast). Spelling, Ian. 1995. Bat to the Past: Director Hopes to Take ‘Batman Forever’ Back to the Source. The Sacramento (CA) Bee, June 11 1995, p. EN 20. Stam, Robert. 2005. Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation. In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 1–53. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Steel. 2020. Christian Bale’s Batman Workout Routine and Diet Plan, August 15. https://steelsupplements.com/blogs/steel-­b log/christian-­bales-­batman-­ workout-­r outine-­and-­d iet-­plan#:~:text=Weighing%20in%20at%20121%20 lbs,took%20place%20directly%20before%20filming Stein, Daniel. 2013. Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Functions of the Comic Book Paratext. In From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noel Thon, 155–191. Berlin: De Gruyter. Stein, Joe. 1989. TV Stations Have Jumped on the Batwagon. The San Diego Tribune, September 7: D.1. Stibbe, Arran. 2004. Health & the Social Construction of Masculinity in Men’s Health Magazine. Men and Masculinities 7 (1): 31–51. Squires, John. 2021. How Stephen King’s ‘Christine’ Helped Inspire His Take on the Batmobile. Bloody Disgusting, December 21. https://bloody-­disgusting. com/movie/3696795/batman-­matt-­reeves-­explains-­stephen-­kings-­christine-­ helped-­inspire-­take-­batmobile/ Sullivan, Kevin. 2013. ‘Man of Steel’ Writer Talks ‘Justice League’ Movie. MTV. com, November 6. http://www.mtv.com/news/1708860/man-­of-­steel-­ writer-­batman-­justice-­league/ Tembo, Kwasu. 2021. 72 Votes: Theorizing the Scapegoat Sidekick in Batman: A Death in the Family. In The Detectives Companion in Crime Fiction: A Study in Sidekicks, ed. Lucy Andrew and Samuel Saunders, 59–81. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Terrill, Robert E. 2000. Spectacular Repression: Sanitizing the Batman. Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (4): 493–509. Tipton, Nathan G. 2008. Gender Trouble: Frank Miller’s Revision of Robin in the Batman: Dark Knight Series. The Journal of Popular Culture 41 (2): 321–336. TMZ. 2013. Original Superman Producer Not a Fan of New ‘Man of Steel’, July 29. https://www.tmz.com/2013/07/29/superman-­producer-­ilya-­salkind-­ new-­movie-­trash-­talks/ Trumbull, John. 2018. Superman the Movie’s Influence on DC Comics. Back Issue, no. 109: 47–63. Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. 1995. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who. London: Routledge.

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Travers, Peter. 1995. Batman Forever: Review. Rolling Stone, June 16. Unhappy Meal. 1992. The New York Times, July 13: A14. Urrichio, William, and Roberta A.  Pearson, eds. 1991a. The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 1991b. ‘I’m Not Fooled by That Cheap Disguise. In The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, 182–211. London/ New York: Routledge. Uslan, Michael E. 2019. The Boy Who Loved Batman: A Memoir. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wainer, Alex M. 2014. Soul of the Dark Knight: Batman as Mythic Figure in Comics and Film. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Wandtke, Terence R., ed. 2007. The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books. Jefferson: McFarlane and Company. Waxman, Sharon. 2005. Bond Franchise Is Shaken and Stirred. The New  York Times, October 15. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/15/movies/ MoviesFeatures/15bond.html?_r=0. Wertham, Fredric. 1954. Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth. New York: Rineheart and Company. Wasko, Janet, Mark Phillips, and Chris Purdey. 1993. Hollywood Meets Madison Avenue: The Commercialization of US Films. Media, Culture and Society 15 (2): 271–293. West, Lindy. 2016. Batman V Superman is 153 Minutes of a Grown Man Whacking Two Dolls Together. The Guardian, April 3. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/apr/03/batman-­v-­superman-­grown-­man-­whacking-­ two-­dolls-­together-­lindy-­west Williamson, Catherine. 1997. ‘Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in ‘The Mark of Zorro’. Cinema Journal 36 (2): 3–16. Yockey, Matt. 2014. Batman (TV Milestones). Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

I will not pretend that this book has resolved the problems with definitions that continue to circulate within press and academic discourse. The fact that the term ‘reboot’ continues to be misapplied and misinterpreted would suggest that a semiotic fracturing of some kind has taken place. Indeed, Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis approach the concept as a ‘discursive category’ in their edited collection Film Reboots (2020), which, in my reading, is less concerned about terminological precision than it is about discourses generated widely by entertainment critics, journalists, and academics. I have no issue with the idea that reboots are ‘discursive categories’—evidently, all concepts are products of discourse, including important topics like class, race, gender, and sexuality—but I also firmly believe that it is a mistake to fully embrace discourses rather than examine and challenge them, especially in the context of entertainment criticism and journalism. I recognize that I have, throughout this book, privileged a taxonomic approach over ‘discursive category’ approaches. I accept that ‘discursive category’ approaches have merit, especially when illustrating the way in which various stakeholders (whether journalistic, critical, fannish, or scholarly) have used terms in contradictory ways. Admittedly, this is the one thing that I have struggled with throughout this research process, seesawing back and forth between distinct poles as I continually re-evaluate my position and perspective on the topic. In the spirit of academic inquiry, however, I remain steadfast in my conviction that, firstly, the reboot © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Proctor, Reboot Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40912-7_7

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concept has been misunderstood, and, secondly, that the manifold uses with which it has been put to work prevents scholars from closely examining the way that media producers, creators, and conglomerates—collectively, the culture industries—regenerate intellectual property catalogues in order to extend the brand lives of popular entertainment franchises. As I have argued throughout this book, regeneration is a sine qua non of long-running entertainment brands, yet the modes and methods harnessed to restore moribund franchises as culturally and commercially healthy entities must surely be distinguished from each other conceptually—at least if different strategies of regeneration like reboot, retcon, relaunch, revival, and generic ‘refreshing’ are to be analytically useful in academic contexts. In this conclusion, I want to briefly explore the way that DC and Marvel comics have each taken different approaches to regenerating their comic books in the 2010s, differences that hopefully exemplify the reasons why conceptual markers remain important if we are to better understand the production cultures that drive media conglomerates, both contemporaneously and archeologically.

DC’s New 52 and Marvel NOW On 31 May 2011, DC announced that they would be cancelling all of their comic books in one fell swoop, an unprecedented decision that brought a wealth of media attention—and free advertising—that would benefit the publisher in the months to come. Following the conclusion of pre-boot, Flashpoint, which, like Crisis on Infinite Earths, culminated with continuity being revised once more, DC launched fifty-two titles with new first issues in September 2011. Branded ‘The New 52,’ these changes would enable ‘new readers’ to ‘jump in and understand what’s going on from the very first issue,’ as DC’s co-publisher and artist Jim Lee explained (Smith 2015, 53). It is about ‘accessibility,’ said Executive Editor Eddie Berganza. ‘We feel like in the past, we’ve created this wall for things with complexity, so we wanted this to be simple. Our goal is to tell stories that are easy to jump into’ (Rogers 2011). Recall that Marv Wolfman said the same for Crisis on Infinite Earths, as explored in Chap. 4. It may be tempting to think that DC had finally put Wolfman’s post-­ Crisis plan in place, but the publisher would repeat history by juggling reboots, retcons, and relaunches once more. Superman, for example, would be rebooted from the beginning again, as would family members Superboy and Supergirl, while Batman would be more or less ‘exempted

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from the simplification process that DC’s wider narrative universe underwent’ (Smith 2015, 53). Put another way, ‘many of the significant events that the Caped Crusader had experienced would remain part of DC’s newly created continuity,’ although Batman writer Scott Snyder ‘ensured that his storytelling approach complimented DC’s newly created continuity,’ electing ‘to avoid obvious references to recent and significant storyworld incidents … so that “new fans” would not “trip over” such potentially confusing material’ (Ibid.). Among comic book super-readers, however, things were indeed confusing. In the pursuit of a more manageable continuity, ‘The New 52’ advanced a temporal, historical regeneration that compressed the timeline significantly, the DC Universe now being only five years old. In the case of Batman, several narrative contradictions and conflicts were presented almost from the off. Preserving the majority of Batman’s history would mean that the Dark Knight had trained four different iterations of the Robin character within the new five-year timespan—the original Robin, Dick Grayson; his successor, Jason Todd; the third Robin, Tim Drake; and the most recent incarnation at the time, Bruce Wayne’s son Damian. This became a matter of debate among comics readers, some of whom expressed their frustration online: As you probably know, Batman did not get the full reboot treatment. Quite the opposite, he apparently kept most of his continuity … Are we supposed to believe that he trained four Robins in SIX years? What about The Long Halloween and Dark Victory? … The timeline is just moronic. (Darthshap 2011)

It seems that the publisher’s editorial executives were doomed to repeat history again, replicating the challenges that came with post-Crisis (dis) continuity by not committing to a full reboot of the DC Universe. Despite the continuity issues that surfaced almost immediately, ‘The New 52’ did result in a marked sales increase for DC, at least initially. Available sales figures and market-share indexes from the period illustrate that DC outperformed Marvel in September 2011, a month after ‘The New 52’ was implemented, with sixteen titles in the top twenty. In October 2011, DC achieved a higher market share than Marvel as well, with 50.97% against 30.29% (Diamond Comics Distributor 2011). In comparison, the year previously shows Marvel dominating in market share, with 40.56% against DC’s 35.81%. Moreover, DC titles occupied seven of the top ten

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spots in October 2011, with six titles at the top of the chart—Geoff Johns’ Justice League (180,709  units), Scott Snyder’s Batman (172,428), Morrison’s Action Comics (153,855), Green Lantern (142,344), The Flash (114,137), and Detective Comics (110,789). According to the industry website Comichron: Records abounded. Retailers ordered comics in the Top 300 worth $25.36 million in October [2011], the highest total for that figure since the Diamond Exclusive Era began in the mid-1990s. The previous record was held by October 2008 with $24.9 million in orders … DC placed more titles in the Top 300 than any publisher since the Diamond Exclusive Era began in 1996: 129. All but one of the “New 52” titles that launched in the previous month reappeared in the Top 300. (Comichron n.d.)

One of the reasons that DC outsold Marvel in October 2011, however, was that the wave of ‘New 52’ titles were all number ones, first issues that typically perform better in the market as collectors and speculators rush to purchase comics that they believe will increase in value over time. Although this is in many ways a common-sense myth: comics usually accumulate value if they are old and in good condition (Golden Age comics, for instance, fetch a hefty price); because of low print runs; or there are not many of them in existence. Nevertheless, first issues generally tend to attract more attention and thus more purchases (although it also depends on the title). As shown in sales figures for November 2011, ‘The New 52’ continued to perform well, but Marvel also published first issues of Dan Slott’s Avenging Spider-Man, a relaunch of Uncanny X-Men, and Marvel Point One, all of which entered the top ten. Although DC remained in pole position in October 2011, Marvel began closing the gap, mainly due to Avenging Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men (Marvel Point One being a one-shot). In December 2011, Marvel published first issues of Avengers X-Sanction and Defenders, both entering the top ten, while Avenging Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men reached number 12 and 13, respectively. By January 2012, DC managed to take the entire top ten. Although these sales figures and market-share indexes indicate that ‘The New 52’ initiative had paid off, it would not be long before sales began to decline, and Marvel raced back into the lead spot. By the end of the year, Marvel had eighteen titles in the top twenty—most of which were issues of the popular series Avengers Vs X-Men—compared to DC managing two— Batman #13 and Justice League #12. While news media declared ‘The

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New 52’ a resounding success story, this turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for DC as Marvel responded with plans of their own. What is interesting is that Marvel took a different approach than DC, choosing not to reboot any titles, but instead, adopting a relaunch strategy that would have long-running series cancelled and restarted with new first issues. The major distinction between ‘The New 52’ and Marvel’s strategy of regeneration—branded ‘Marvel NOW!’—is that the latter would operate as continuations rather than reboots. In essence, Marvel NOW! sought to provide jumping-on points for readers rather than run the risk of backlash by rebooting their universe. Although journalists described ‘Marvel NOW!’ as a reboot, the publisher’s Chief Editor at the time, Axel Alonso, explained that ‘Marvel NOW!’ is not a reboot. We don’t travel back in time, into the future, or to an alternate universe. ‘Marvel NOW!’ respects the investment—emotional and financial—that long-term fans have made in the Marvel Universe, and this story takes place in a Marvel Universe they can recognize, one that grows out of Avengers Vs. X-Men. That said, these stories will be accessible to lapsed readers—the guy who likes, say, Captain American, but doesn’t know where to start. (Morse 2012)

Titles like Fantastic Four, The Avengers, and Captain America all started their respective series anew with first issues, all of which functioned as relaunches rather than reboots. Alonso’s comments positioned Marvel as respectful towards readers, perhaps to assuage reader anxieties about the future of the Marvel comics universe. Like ‘The New 52,’ the month following the publication of relaunched titles, Marvel topped the sales chart with All-New X-Men #1, with other titles taking eight of the top ten spots just as DC had done the year previously. Although ‘The New 52’ was becoming unstable in certain areas due to poor sales on certain titles and cancellations, the publisher did stick with the initiative for a while. Marvel, however, tried a different tack. In 2013–2014, Marvel began ‘All-New Marvel NOW!’ and relaunched a number of titles, many of which had been relaunched the previous year (e.g., Fantastic Four, Daredevil) as well as several new relaunches (e.g., Moon Knight, Iron Fist, Amazing Spider-Man). ‘Avengers NOW!’ came in 2015, with ‘All-New All-Different Marvel’ hot on its heels, both of which together relaunched over sixty titles in total. In 2017, ‘Marvel NOW! 2.0’ arrived, with ‘Marvel Legacy’ running concurrently in 2017–2018, and

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‘Marvel Fresh Start’ took the baton for 2018–2019. At the time of writing, Fantastic Four has been relaunched again, beginning with a new first issue, as has Miles Morales: Spider-Man, Amazing Spider-Man, and Iron Man. Relaunching titles on a regular basis has become a Marvel ritual, with seven initiatives between 2012 and 2018. Although none of Marvel’s titles were rebooted in this period—indeed, Marvel has not yet resorted to rebooting master-narrative continuity, although they have retconned and refreshed many times since inception—each relaunch delivers a spate of number one issues to readers in the hope that appetites can be whetted and thus drive a spike in sales, however temporary this may be. By December 2021, Marvel once again stood at the top in market share— although the almost permanent wave of comic ‘events,’ relaunches, and retcons in the 2010s has seen both the Big Two dominate at different times. Although DC have not (yet) resorted to relaunch initiatives on an annual scale, the publisher has employed reboots, relaunches, and retcons periodically over the past decade or so. In February 2016, DC announced the launch of a new initiative on Twitter by posting a cryptic image consisting of a pair of blue theatre curtains with the word ‘Rebirth’ at the centre. As I have written elsewhere, ‘the image sparked a series of debates across the Internet as fans recoiled at the possibility that DC would reboot their universe only five years after “The New 52”’ (Proctor 2018, 224). Recognizing that the promotional narrative might be upended by angry comics readers, DC’s Jim Lee and Geoff Johns uploaded a second image that stated: ‘It’s not a reboot and it never was’ (Ibid.). Appearing on The Late Show with Seth Meyers, the host asked Johns ‘to explain real quick what you’re doing with the DC Comics Universe [DCU] because it does seem like these days there’s often a sense of starting over. Is that what this is?’ In response, Johns explained: No. Thank God … the comic books, they’re not rebooting … which is a dirty word, it’s a swear word in the comic book world because that means everything that you ever read and bought doesn’t exist anymore. But the relaunch is just approaching it with a new light and bringing back every character that hasn’t been around. (Ibid., emphasis added)

Although Rebirth did not reboot the DC Universe, the eighty-page one-­ shot ‘pre-boot,’ written by Johns, retconned the timeline by fusing

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pre- and post-Flashpoint continuities to lay ‘the groundwork … for the future while celebrating the past and present. It’s not about throwing anything away. It’s quite the opposite’ (Ching 2016). Ultimately, Rebirth enacted multiple strategies of regeneration simultaneously—retconning the timeline; debooting the past by folding history back into extant continuity; and relaunching titles with a wave of new first issues. Despite John’s careful explanations, entertainment critics would define Rebirth as a reboot, with academics following suit (for example, Cogan 2017; Brown 2019; Berglund 2021; Pedler 2019). By exploring the different modes and methods employed by both DC and Marvel over the past decade or so allows for closer scrutiny and a more nuanced understanding of distinct strategies of regeneration rather than imposing reboot terminology upon each and every instantiation. In Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s event-series Death Metal from 2020–2021, continuity is regenerated once more, not through rebooting but by retconning history so that everything that has ever happened is ‘debooted’ and inserted back into extant continuity. As IGN’s Jesse Schedeen observes, ‘DC no longer seems overly concerned about wrangling its vast comic book history into a coherent, streamlined narrative. Heading into 2021, the publisher is celebrating that giant tapestry and encouraging fans to embrace what appeals to them’ (2020). At the time of writing, DC are about to release the final issue of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths (2022), an event-series that has brought back the infinite multiverse that was destroyed in the first Crisis (see Chap. 4). At its core, Dark Crisis will, apparently, depict and explain the workings of the new, debooted (‘everything counts’) DC continuity. Given all of this activity, it is surely only a matter of time before a new regeneration emerges. Returning to this book’s starting point, it is worth briefly recapping what I mean by ‘dialectical structuralism,’ a conceptual framework that addresses, and seeks to resolve, the tensions involved in current debates informed by continuity and multiplicity, by structuralism and post-­ structuralism. Throughout, I have borrowed Richard Saint-Gelais’ (2011) concept of transfictionality to posit a framework that observes the causal nature of narrative—whether stories are told in chronological order or require cognitive re-arrangement by audiences—and drawn upon Gerard Genette’s (1997) theory of transtextuality as a way to recognize that imaginary worlds can be read across multiple axes that do not cancel each other out. The case studies provided in this book illustrate continuity and discontinuity, syntagm and paradigm, transfiction and transtext, each axis

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relating to different reading positions that may be engaged with simultaneously—dialectically—by audiences. There may be many versions of Batman and Superman co-existing in parallel along the horizontal, transtextual axis, but this does not mean that films like The Batman or Man of Steel become unreadable. Generally speaking, media texts might very well be palimpsests carrying the traces of earlier incarnations and associated transtexts, but they are also unique and diegetically independent narratives that can be read, understood, and enjoyed—as stories. As argued throughout this book, massive imaginary worlds are complex, dynamic story-programs, often involving multiple levels of continuity and canon that do not cohere if read as a totality, significantly challenging Matt Hills’ concept of the ‘hyperdiegesis’ as a narrative container that ‘appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension’ (2002, 137). Instead, I employed the term ‘omni-diegesis’ as a way to understand massive imaginary worlds as comprised of multiple hyperdiegetic sub-worlds, rather than a system underscored by homogeneity, by ‘internal logic and extension.’ From this perspective, omni-­ diegetic entertainment franchises operate like multiverses, heterogeneous systems populated by alternative realities and parallel story-programs that may not cohere at the level of transfictionality. Even if not decreed as such either by official production cultures, audiences, or by critics, the multiverse concept can help inform a broader, nuanced, and more incisive reading of imaginary worlds as disaggregated networks, not single entities endowed with univocal continuity. This should not be taken to mean that continuity no longer matters. As explored throughout this book, continuity co-exists with multiplicity, transfiction with transtext, dialectical siblings that vacillate across an imaginary, omni-diegetic network. Recognizing reboots, relaunches, and retcons as distinct, yet overlapping, strategies of regeneration support a more precise understanding of the way in which entertainment franchises are revised, updated, and reconceptualized to become ‘new’ once more.

References Berglund, Alexandre Lampp. 2021. Deconstructing Diana: An Examination of Disability and Gender in Wonder Woman. Image & Text 13 (1): 1–36. Brown, Jeffrey A. 2019. Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity. London/New York: Routledge. Ching, Albert. 2016. EXCLUSIVE: Geoff Johns Details “Rebirth” Plan, Seeks to Restore Legacy to DC Universe. Comic Book Resources, February 18. https://

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www.cbr.com/exclusive-­geoff-­johns-­details-­r ebirth-­plan-­seeks-­to-­r estore-­ legacy-­to-­dc-­universe/ Cogan, Brian. 2017. ‘I’m Batman! Bwah ha ha’: Comedy in the Grim and Gritty Eighties. In The Ages of the Justice League: Essays on America’s Greatest Superheroes in Changing Times, ed. Joseph J.  Darowski, 121–131. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc. Comichron. n.d. Records Abound in October Sales; Reboot Titles Held Sales Levels, November 7. https://comichron.com/blog/2011/11/07/records-­ abound-­in-­october-­sales-­reboot/ Darthshap. 2011. ‘The New 52’ Batman Timeline Makes Absolutely No Sense. Comic Vine, n.d. http://www.comicvine.com/batman/4005-­1699/forums/ the-­new-­52-­batman-­timeline-­makes-­absolutely-­no-­sen-­671432/ Diamond Comics Distributor. 2011. Publisher Market Shares: Year-End 2011. https://www.diamondcomics.com/Article/117032-­P ublisher-­M arket-­ Shares-­Year-­End-­2011 Genette, Gerard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Herbert, Daniel, and Constantine Verevis, eds. 2020. Film Reboots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. Morse, Ben. 2012. Marvel NOW! Marvel.com. http://marvel.com/news/comics/2012/7/5/19008/marvel_now Pedler, Martyn. 2019. ‘I’m Eight Years Old Again’: Batman’s Tragedy, Memory, and Continuity. Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media 32. https:// refractoryjournal.net/im-­eight-­years-­old-­again-­batmans-­tragedy-­memory-­and-­ continuity/ Proctor, William. 2018. Reboots and Retroactive Continuity. In The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds, ed. Mark J.P.  Wolf, 224–235. New  York: Routledge. Rogers, Vaneta. 2011. Harras, Berganza: DCnU Will Keep Much of DC History Intact. Godmera’s Fandom, June 15. http://godmerasfandom.blogspot. com/2011/06/harras-­berganza-­dcnu-­will-­keep-­much-­of.html Saint-Gelais, Richard. 2011. Fictions Transfuges: Transfictionalité et ses enjeux. Paris: Seuil. Schedeen, Jesse. 2021. Dark Nights: Death Metal Ending Explained—The Final Evolution of the DC Multiverse. IGN, January 5. https://www.ign.com/artic le s /da r k -­nig h t s-­d ea t h -­m et a l -­en d i n g-­ex p l a i ne d-­w onde r-­w oma n-­ batman-­dc-­future-­state-­multiverse Smith, Anthony M. 2015. History Left Unsaid: Implied Continuity in Batman’s Contemporary Comic Book Narratives. In Many More Lives of the Batman, ed. Roberta Pearson, William Uricchio, and Will Brooker, 53–69. London: BFI/Palgrave.

Index1

A Abrams, J.J., 15, 44, 83, 240 Ackerman, Forrest. J., 80 Action Comics (comic book), 28, 65–73, 75, 81, 92, 106, 158, 159, 162, 166, 170, 171, 175, 180, 262 Adams, Neal, 119, 196, 199, 205, 208, 234, 235 Adaptation, 1, 2, 16, 40–43, 68, 70, 71, 96, 120, 121, 129, 163, 172, 198, 203, 216–218, 223, 229, 233, 240, 247 ‘Affirmational’ vs. ‘transformational’ fandom, 145 Ain’t it Cool News, 222 Airboy (comic book), 66 Alien (film series), 144 Alien: Covenant (2017), 40 Prometheus (2012), 40 All-American Comics (anthology comic), 84

All-Star Comics (anthology comic), 86, 106 All-Star Squadron (anthology comic), 6, 132, 133 Alonso, Axel, 263 Amazing Heroes (magazine), 125, 140, 142–144, 146, 147, 173–175, 177, 178, 181 Amazing Stories (science fiction anthology), 103 American Crusader, The (comic character), 66 Animal Man (comic), 133, 135–137 Anti-continuity fans, 145, 146 Ant-Man (comic book character), 96 Aquaman (comic character), 87 Archie (comic), 118, 120 Archie Show, The (TV series, 1968-69), 118 Arrowverse (TV), 247 Arroyo, Raymond, 172 Atlas Comics, 118

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Atlas News Company, 96 Atom, The (comic character), 67, 84–86, 90, 201, 205 Austin, William, 207 Authenticity, 23, 29, 54, 141, 156, 166, 168, 169, 176, 178, 185, 197, 234–236, 243, 244 Author function, 21–26, 197, 234, 237, 238, 240 Authorship, 29, 40, 67, 68, 93–109, 187, 197, 207, 236, 237 Avatar (film, 2009), 46 Avengers, The (comic), 96, 126, 263 B Bails, Jerry, 104–106, 108, 109 Bande dessinée, 142 Bates Motel (TV series, 2013-17), 56–58 BatFilm Productions, Inc., 196 Batgirl, 17, 199, 205 Batman Alfred Beagle, 207, 208 Alfred Pennyworth, 207, 208 ‘Batman-A-Go-Go!’ (comic story), 213 Batman and Robin (film, 1997), 8–10, 14–18, 20, 21, 210, 211, 221, 223–230, 232, 245, 246, 248 Batman Begins (film, 2005), 8–10, 15–18, 20–26, 39, 40, 56, 58, 59, 82, 158, 198, 213, 224, 225, 227–238, 243, 246 Batman (film, 1989), 9, 16, 131, 262 Batman Forever (film, 1995), 9, 17, 212, 220, 221, 226, 227, 244 The Batman (2022), 16, 198, 225, 242–246, 266 Batman ’66 (comic, 2013-16), 213

Batman ’66 Meets Wonder Woman ’77 (comic, 2017-18), 213 Batman: The Animated Series (TV series, 1992-95), 13, 210, 211, 219 Batman: The New Adventures (comic), 131 Batman (TV series, 1966-169), 13, 16, 17, 195, 197, 202, 203, 208, 211, 213, 214, 219, 220, 228, 247 Batman Vs Two-Face (animated film, 2017), 213 Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), 198, 225, 238, 240–242, 244 Batman: Year One (comic book mini-series, 1986), 131 Bat-Mite, 200, 202 Batmobile, 23, 203, 208, 212, 218, 244 Bat-plane, 209 Bat-signal, 208 The ‘Big Change,’ 203–205, 208 Columbia’s Batman (film serial, 1943), 207 The Dark Knight (film, 2008), 16, 21, 23, 25, 198, 216, 227, 234, 235, 238, 240, 243, 244 The Dark Knight Returns (comic book mini-series, 1986), 73, 143, 185, 186, 198 The Dark Knight Rises (2012), 16, 198, 227, 237, 244 ‘A Death in the Family’ (comic storyline, 1988-89), 210 The Killing Joke (comic, 1988), 199, 209, 217, 228, 234 The Long Halloween (comic, 1996-97), 234, 235, 243 ‘minimal components,’ 206

 INDEX 

The New Adventures of Batman (animated TV series, 1979), 212 The ‘New Look,’ 203, 207 Return of the Batman (script), 196 The Return of the Caped Crusaders (animated film, 2015), 213 Wayne Manor, 24, 201, 202, 204, 206, 208, 221 Batman (family) Batgirl, 17, 199, 205 Batwoman, 17, 201, 202 Red Hood, 17 Red Robin, 17 Robin, 17, 77, 91, 131, 135, 196, 200–202, 204–213, 220, 225, 230, 245–247, 261 The Signal, 17 Batman (villains) Hugo Strange, 209 The Joker, 17, 199, 205, 208–212, 215–217 Mr Freeze, 208, 221 The Penguin, 131, 208, 244 Poison Ivy, 208 The Riddler, 208, 211, 244 Scarecrow, 208 Sin Fang, 209 Batwoman, 201, 202 Bayer, Samuel, 23, 54 Beetlejuice (film, 1988), 214 Beppo the Super-Monkey, 159, 200 Binder, Otto, 105, 106 Black Adam (film, 2022), 244 Black Widow, 96 Blade Runner 2049 (2017), 40, 44 Blonde Phantom, The, 96 Blumhouse Studios, 53 Bond, James Brosnan, Pierce, 50 Casino Royale (film, 2006), 22, 25, 56, 158, 236, 237, 243 Craig, Daniel, 22, 23, 236

271

Dalton, Tim, 237 Fleming, Ian, 236, 237 License to Kill (film, 1989), 237 Live and Let Die (film, 1974), 237 Moore, Roger, 237 A Time to Die (film, 2022), 244 Borges, Jorges Luis, 88 Boring, Wayne, 71, 164 Box office figures, 30n2 Boy’s weekly story papers, 2 Brand function, 21–26, 238, 244 Branding, 233, 235 Brave and the Bold, The, 86, 87, 205, 246 Broccoli, Barbara, 22, 236 Broome, John, 84 Bumblebee (film, 2018), 52 Burton, Tim, 9, 14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 29, 30n1, 196, 198, 203, 208, 211–223, 226, 227, 229, 231, 233, 234, 240, 245, 248 Byrne, John, 3, 29, 73, 124, 126, 131, 149, 155–188, 235 C Cameron, James, 46, 207 Campbell, Martin, 22, 158, 236 Canon, 10, 49, 57, 82, 93, 94, 101, 124, 143, 146, 248, 266 Captain America Comics, 97–99, 177 Captain America’s Weird Tales, 98 Captain Courageous (comic book character), 66 Captain Triumph (comic book character), 66 Capullo, Greg, 265 Carpenter, John, 24, 53, 54 Carter, Chris, 48, 49, 85 Casino Royale (film, 2006), 22, 25, 56, 158, 236, 237, 243 Causality, 12

272 

INDEX

Chenin Entertainment, 24 Christmas Carol, A, 41 Clark, Dylan, 24 Clooney, George, 225, 227 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 185 Coca Cola (Classic), 166–168, 178 Coca Cola (New Coke), 29, 166–169 Coca Cola Company, 29, 166–169 Comet the Super Horse, 159 Comic book sales figures, 220 Comic-con, 118, 143, 240 Comichron, 179, 262 Comics Code, 77, 78, 86, 119 Conan the Barbarian (comic), 120 Continuity anti-continuity fans, 145, 146 continuity breaches, 147 continuity patch, 160, 161 continuity snarls, 100, 101, 122, 127, 160, 161, 182 discontinuity, 46, 53, 125, 136, 148, 160, 180, 227, 265 film series continuity, 53 Coronation Street (TV series, 1960-), 102, 103 Corbould, Chris, 237 Cox, Brian, 244 Craig, Daniel, 22, 23, 236 Craven, Wes, 23, 54 Creed (film, 2015), 40, 44 Crisis on Infinite Earths (comic book series, 1985-86), 28, 29, 89, 100, 101, 110, 123, 155, 200, 225, 247, 260 Crisis on Infinite Earths (TV, 2019), 247 Critical Industrial Practice, 197, 243 Crossovers, 88, 90–92, 96, 102, 109, 126, 127, 133, 147, 161, 247 Cultural Capital, 5, 102, 139, 188, 244

D Dallas (TV series, 1978-91, 2012-14), 55 Dark Knights: Death Metal (comic series, 2020), 125 DC Comics DC Rebirth, 122, 264, 265 The New 52, 155, 260–264 DC Explosion, The, 120, 121 Deboot, 54 Detective Comics, 16, 66, 92, 131, 138, 197, 201–209, 248n8, 262 Dialectical Structuralism, 11, 265 Dickens, Charles, 2, 27 Dime novels, 3, 65 Direct Marketing, 78, 118, 119, 122, 149, 178 Distribution, 78, 118, 119, 121, 122, 149, 215 Dixon, Chuck, 171 Doctor Strange, 96 Doctor Who (TV series), 45, 49, 50, 227 Donner, Richard, 163, 173, 195, 233 Dynaman (comic book character), 96 E EC Comics, 78, 104 Ellsworth, Whitney, 74–77, 209, 220 Elseworlds, 128, 183, 184, 239 Episodic, 73, 226 Event-series, 4, 29, 109, 125–127, 130, 147, 148, 186, 225, 265 Evil Dead II (1987), 13 F Failed reboot, 54 Fan cultures, 7, 18, 20, 143, 145, 146, 168, 224

 INDEX 

Fandom, 18, 28, 39, 45, 58, 67, 80, 93–109, 144–147, 219 Fantastic Four, The, 96, 97 Fanzines, 80, 103–105, 109, 125, 203, 214 Farrell, Colin, 244 Faulkner, Harris, 172 Feminization, 156 Fiction network, 11, 81–83, 100, 101, 110, 123, 124, 133, 137 Fidelity, 18, 29, 156, 166, 172, 175, 176, 178 Film cycles, 25, 26, 75 Film noir, 27 Fincher, David, 244 Finger, Bill, 66, 71, 195, 197, 198, 205–209, 221, 234, 243 Flag, The (comic book character), 66 Flame, The (comic book character), 66 Flash, The Barry Allen (character), 81, 87–89, 129, 133 The Flash (film, 2023), 247–248 ‘Flash of Two Worlds,’ 87–92, 99, 124, 128, 129, 135, 247 Jay Garrick (character), 80–82, 85, 87, 88 Wally West (character), 133 Flash Comics, 81, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89 Flashpoint (comic series, 2011), 125, 247, 260 Flexi-narrative, 226 Fox, Gardner, 84–91, 206, 210, 211 Fox News, 171, 172 Franco-Belgian comics, 142 Fuller House (TV series, 2016-18), 48, 59 Furst, Anton, 226 G Gernsback, Hugh, 103 Ghostbusters: Afterlife (film, 2021), 44

273

Gibbons, David, 183, 185 Gilmore Girls (TV series, 2000-07; 2016), 48, 55, 59 Giordano, Dick, 125, 131, 132, 156, 159, 181, 182, 204 Glen, John, 237 Godfather II, The (film, 1974), 46 Godfather III, The (film, 1990), 46 Goodman, Martin, 96, 98, 118, 119 Gordon-Green, David, 53, 54 Gothic fiction, 2 Gough, Michael, 226, 227 Goyer, David, 9, 14, 39, 170, 171, 224, 228–230, 232–234, 238, 239 Green Arrow, 66 Greenberger, Robert, 131, 139, 140, 160, 179, 201 Green Lantern Alan Scott (character), 84 Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow (comic), 119, 199 Hal Jordan (character), 84 Grey’s Anatomy (TV franchise) Grey’s Anatomy (2005-), 102 Private Practice (2007-13), 102 Station 19 (2018-), 102 Grim and gritty, 8, 18, 29, 198, 199, 213, 214, 217, 219, 221, 228, 233, 234, 239 Guber, Peter, 229 Gunn, James, 246 H Haggis, Paul, 236 Halloween (film series), 24, 53, 54, 56, 158 Hannibal (film, 2001), 57 Haunt of Fears (anthology comic), 78 Hawkgirl (character), 86 Hawkman (character), 137 Hawkman (comic), 67, 84–86, 90, 137, 201

274 

INDEX

Hegemonic masculinity, 169, 232 Hegemony, 19, 148 Hingle, Pat, 226, 227 Huckbee, Mike, 171 Hulk, The The Incredible Hulk (comic), 9, 229 The Incredible Hulk (TV Series, 1978-82), 121, 126 Human Torch Comics, 98 Hyperdiegesis, 13, 14, 123, 266 I Ideology, 171 Imaginary stories, 60, 69, 93–95, 171, 183–185, 188, 200, 217, 239 Imaginary worlds, 2, 12, 13, 82, 83, 92, 101, 102, 129, 139, 140, 146, 148, 205, 212, 225, 265, 266 Immaterial labour, 107 Inauthenticity, 156 Indexical labour, 101, 103, 139 Infantino, Carmine, 80, 81, 87–89, 119–121, 203 Infinite Crisis (comic series, 2005), 125, 184 Intertextuality, 10, 11, 13 Intra-fandom policing/Othering, 141, 143 Iron Man (comic book character), 96 J Jap-Buster Johnson (comic book character), 96 Jaws (film, 1974), 121, 216 Johns, Geoff, 180, 184, 262, 264 Joker, The (comic book character), 17, 205, 208–212, 215–217, 244 Jones, Tommy Lee, 227

Jumping-on point, 124, 147, 263 Jurassic Park (film franchise), 45, 46 Justice League (2017), 16, 241 Justice League of America, 87, 90, 97, 106, 202 Justice Society of America, 86, 90, 93 K Kahn, Jenette, 120, 121, 132 Kane, Bob, 66, 108, 195–198, 205, 207–209, 215, 220, 221, 234, 237, 243 Kane, Gil, 84 Kanigher, Robert, 81 Keaton, Michael, 30n1, 50, 214, 223, 226, 227, 236, 242, 247, 248 Kidman, Nicole, 227 Kill Bill Volume II (film, 2004), 162 Kilmer, Val, 50, 227 Kirby, Jack, 95, 97, 99 Knowles, Harry, 222 Krypto the Superdog, 159, 200, 201 Kurtzman, Alex, 83 L Lane, Lois, 69, 92, 94, 130, 159, 162, 174, 185 Lang, Fritz, 133 Lee, Jim, 77, 172, 260, 264 Lee, Stan, 95–97, 99–101, 105, 158 Legacy sequel (legacyquel), 44, 45, 59 Legion of Superheroes (comic book, 1958 - ), 4, 138 Letters pages, 103–109, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146 Levitz, Paul, 81, 132, 149, 161, 165 Licensing, 66, 67, 109, 120, 121, 127, 182, 210, 212 Loeb, Jeff, 234

 INDEX 

M MacGyver (TV series), 55 Machinist, The (film, 2004), 231 Magnum P.I (TV series), 55 Manhunter (film, 1986), 57, 244 Martian Manhunter, 87 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (film, 2023), 247 Avengers: Age of Ultron (film, 2015), 241 Avengers Assemble (film, 2012), 241 Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (film, 2022), 247 Loki (TV series, 2021-), 247 Spider-Man: No Way Home (film, 2021), 247 Marvel Comics, 28, 29, 67, 80, 95, 96, 100, 118, 260, 263 Marvel Mystery Comics, 97, 110n6 Marvel NOW! All-New Marvel NOW!, 263 Avengers NOW!, 263 Marvel Fresh Start, 264 Marvel Legacy, 263 Marvel Now 2.0, 263 Marvex the Super Robot (comic character), 96 Masters of the Universe (He-Man), 127 Maus (comic, 1980-91), 186, 187 McCarthyism, 79 Media archaeology, 26 Melniker, Benjamin, 195, 196 Men’s Adventures (comic anthology), 98 Merchandising, 127, 195, 215, 218, 220, 221 Metafiction, 135 Metropolis (film, 1927), 133 Micro-narrative, 2, 14 Mikkelsen, Mads, 23

275

Miller, Frank, 73, 131, 185, 187, 188, 196, 198, 199, 213, 217, 219, 234, 240, 241, 243, 248n7 Millie the Model (comic), 98 Moore, Alan, 73, 95, 135, 185, 187, 188, 199, 217, 234 Moral dualism, 9, 13, 141, 196, 198, 235 More Fun Comics, 72 Morrison, Grant, 9, 81, 100, 133–137, 183, 185, 199, 246, 262 Mr Mom (film, 1983), 214 Multiplicity, 12, 13, 90, 93, 95, 128, 129, 136, 137, 140, 182, 188, 203, 265, 266 Multiverse, 83, 87–93, 95, 99, 100, 110n4, 122, 127–129, 135, 137, 140, 145, 148, 149, 184, 247, 248, 265, 266 Mystery in Space, 86 N Nation, 29, 74, 103, 156, 171 National Allied Publications, 67 Nationalism, 156 Nellie the Nurse, 98 Network-enhanced word of mouth, 224 Neville, Dennis, 85 New Coke, 29, 156, 166–170, 197 New 52, The (comic), 155, 260–266 A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), 23 Nightwing, 17, 211 Nodell, Martin, 84 Nolan, Christopher, 8, 9, 14, 16, 21–25, 29, 39, 40, 158, 198, 213, 216, 224–235, 237–239, 241, 243–245 No-Prize, 100 North, Sterling, 74 Novelty Press, 104

276 

INDEX

O Ocean’s Eight (film, 2018), 40 Omni-diegesis, 14, 70, 208, 266 O’Neil, Denny, 81, 119, 131, 158, 196, 199, 205, 206, 210, 212, 216, 217, 234, 240 Online backlash, 18, 223 Orci, Roberto, 83 P Paratext, 10, 24, 52–54, 80, 127, 221, 228, 230, 233, 235 Paratextual bonding, 23 Penguin, The, 131, 208, 211, 244 Perez, George, 110, 123, 124, 127–131, 138, 148, 149 Perfect Films and Chemical, 118 Pfister, Wally, 231 Phantom Bullet, The, 96 Phantom Reporter, 96 Pickwick Papers, The, 2 Planet of the Apes, The (film series), 24, 25, 52, 53 Planet of the Apes, The (TV series, 1974), 56 Platinum Dunes, 23, 54 Pocket universe, 161, 162 Polychronic, 102 Post-structuralism, 11, 265 Pre-boot, 29, 60, 117–149, 155, 225, 247, 260, 264 Prequel, 1, 9, 21, 22, 27, 40–53, 55, 56 Production cultures, 20, 21, 106, 183, 223, 260, 266 Propaganda, 76, 79 Psycho IV: The Beginning (film, 1990), 56 Psycho Pirate (comic character), 130, 135, 136 Pula, Chris, 222

Pulp entertainment, 93 Puzo, Mario, 162 R Raimi, Sam, 25, 247 Re-adaptation, 51–58 Realism, 213, 231–233, 236, 237, 243, 245 Reboot alternate uses of, 1 as computer term, 1 deboot, 90, 265 definition, 40, 46, 49, 50, 55, 265 etymology, 3, 58 failed reboot, 54, 58 first use in academia, 30, 41 first use in fandom, 80 in media res reboot, 241, 242 pre-boot, 29, 60, 125, 155, 225, 264 reflexive reboot, 82, 83, 110n3, 137 Rebranding, 168, 229 Red Dragon (film, 2002), 57 Red Hood, 17 Red Raven, 96 Red Robin, 17, 248n7 Reeve, Christopher, 157, 162, 163, 172, 239 Reflexive reboot, 82, 83, 110n3, 137 Refocalization, 42 Refreshing, 45, 87, 117, 200, 202, 203, 226, 227, 260 Regimes of truth, 29, 197, 198, 203, 213, 217, 223, 228–230, 237, 245 Re-imagining, 1, 25, 41–44, 48 Relaunch, 1, 27, 29, 44, 46, 49, 50, 54–56, 60, 80, 98, 100, 133, 138, 155, 164, 167, 168, 178, 179, 260, 262–264, 266 Remake, 2, 23, 24, 40–44, 48, 50–58, 187

 INDEX 

Retroactive continuity (retcon), 1, 6, 7, 27, 28, 40, 41, 43, 46, 50–58, 60, 69, 71, 99, 100, 102, 125, 130, 138, 155, 159, 161, 164, 198, 200, 210, 213, 227, 260, 264, 266 Revamp, 80, 181 Revisionist superhero narrative, 73 Revival, 1, 41–51, 54, 55, 58, 59, 67, 80, 81, 84, 86, 90, 98, 100, 105, 106, 117, 128, 129, 178, 260 Rewiring, 71, 72, 163, 207 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), 24, 25, 52 Rivoche, Paul, 171 Robin, the Boy Wonder Dick Grayson, 131, 211 Jason Todd, 211 Rockman (comic book character), 66 Roseanne (TV series), 55, 59 S Sale, Tim, 234 Salkind, Ilya, 233, 239 Saw (film, 2004), 244 Schiff, Jack, 76, 87, 200–203, 205, 208, 248n1 Schumacher, Joel, 8, 9, 14–18, 21, 29, 220–224, 226, 227, 231–233, 245, 248 Schwartz, Julius, 80, 81, 84–90, 92, 98, 103–106, 108, 117, 128, 129, 137, 157, 158, 162, 178, 201–206, 208 Secret Wars (comic series, 1984), 126, 127 Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency, 77 Sequel, 1, 25, 27, 40–51, 53–56, 59, 198, 216, 218, 221, 234, 238, 240, 241, 245

277

Serial entertainment, 3 Seriality, 12 Serialization, 2, 13, 238 Seuling, Phil, 118 Shooter, Jim, 126, 127 Showcase (comic anthology), 80, 84, 86, 99, 129 Shuster, Joe, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75, 93, 94, 108, 157, 160, 164, 198 Siegel, Jerry, 68, 70, 71, 73–75, 93, 94, 157, 160, 164, 198 Silence of the Lambs, The (film), 57 Silver Streak (comic book character), 66 Singer, Bryan, 238 Skywolf (comic book character), 66 Snyder, Scott, 261, 262, 265 Snyder, Zack, 29, 172, 180, 198, 225, 238, 240, 241, 244 Spider-Man Amazing Spider-Man (comic), 96, 118, 126, 263, 264 Amazing Spider-Man (TV series, 1977-1979), 121 Andrew Garfield, 247 Avenging Spider-Man (comic, 2012-2013), 262 introduction of black costume, 127 Spider-Man 3 (film, 2007), 25 Toby Macguire, 247 Tom Holland, 247 Spiegelman, Art, 186, 187 Spin-offs, 27, 40–52, 56–58, 66, 71, 98, 102, 120, 244 Starlin, Jim, 210, 212 Star Trek, 56, 57, 83 Star Wars, 42, 44, 45 Strange Tales (comic anthology), 99 Strategies of regeneration, 7, 26, 27, 29, 47, 52, 59, 60, 87, 125, 138, 155, 174, 198, 227, 260, 265, 266

278 

INDEX

Streaky the Supercat, 159, 200 Structuralism, 11, 265 Structure of feeling, 170 Stuporman (comic character), 96 Sub-Mariner Comics, 98 Sub-Mariner, The (comic character), 97–99 Suicide Squad (film, 2016), 16 Sullivan, Vin, 66 Super Friends (TV series, 1973-1985), 121, 212 Superboy, 72, 95, 130, 157, 160–162, 181, 182, 260 Supergirl Supergirl (comic series), 93, 106, 129 Supergirl (film, 1984), 129, 247 Superman Action Comics (comic book, 1938 —), 28, 65–73, 75, 81, 92, 106, 110n2, 158, 159, 162, 166, 170, 171, 175, 180, 262 The Adventures of Superman (novel by George Lowther), 69 The Adventures of Superman (radio, 1940-1951), 69, 71, 72 The Adventures of Superman (TV series, 1952-1958), 98, 120, 121 All-Star Superman (comic, 2005-2006), 183 as champion of the oppressed, 73–75, 164 Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (film, 2016), 16, 241, 246 Calvin Ellis (first Black Superman), 185 court case, 70 Daily Planet, 69, 87, 158, 162, 163, 175 The Daily Star, 69, 72

Kong Kenan, the Superman of China, 185 Krypton, 69, 106, 159, 163, 170, 183 licensing as Superman, Inc., 66 Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997), 171 Lois Lane, 69, 92, 94, 130, 162, 174, 185 Man of Steel, The (comic book, 1986), 3, 29, 73, 124, 126, 131, 149, 155–188, 235, 238–241, 246, 266 The New Adventures of Superman (animated TV series, 1966-1970), 171 origin story, 68, 69, 72, 164, 183 Smallville (TV series, 2001-2011), 247 Superman (comic book, 1939- ), 28, 72, 91, 173, 175, 239 Superman II (film, 1980), 129, 181 Superman III (film, 1983), 181 Superman IV: Quest for Peace (film, 1987), 181 Superman: Birthright (comic, 2003-04), 180 Superman’s Girl Friend (comic series), 94 Superman: Last Son on Earth (comic, 2000), 183 The Superman Monster (comic, 1999), 183 Superman: Red Son (comic, 2003), 183 Superman Returns (film, 2007), 238, 247 Superman: Secret Origin (comic, 2009), 163, 180, 211, 234 Superman: The Dark Side (comic, 1998), 183

 INDEX 

Superman: The Movie (film, 1978), 121, 129, 160, 162, 163, 165, 172, 181, 188, 195, 232, 233, 236 ‘Superman ripple effect,’ 156–164 Superman: True Brit (comic, 2004), 183 Val Zod (second Black Superman), 185 Super-readers, 4, 5, 100–102, 109, 119, 122–124, 127, 134, 137, 139–141, 147, 148, 160, 161, 164, 225, 261 Swan, Curt, 95 Symbolic capital, 20 T Tales From the Crypt, 78 Tarantino, Quentin, 162 Target Comics, 104 Taxonomy, 30, 58 Terminator, The (film series) The Terminator (film, 1984), 46 Terminator II: Judgement Day (film, 1991), 46 Terminator III: Rise of the Machines (film, 2003), 46 Terminator: Dark Fate (film, 2019), 46 Terminator: Salvation (film, 2009), 46 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TV Series, 2008-09), 56 Textual conservationism, 124, 136, 139, 145, 168 Thomas, Roy, 84, 104, 106, 132, 133 Thwaites, Brenton, 246 Time Warner, 215, 216, 218–222, 230, 237, 242 Timely Comics, 96

279

Titans (TV Series, 2018-23), 245, 246 Top Gun: Maverick (2022), 40, 46 Totemic nostalgia, 176 Transfictional bridges, 90, 96, 97 Transfictionality, 11–14, 16, 45–47, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 67, 69, 70, 82, 83, 93–96, 102, 124, 125, 129, 130, 145, 149, 158, 163, 180, 216, 217, 227, 230, 265, 266 Transfictional storytelling, 68, 183 Transmedia, 10, 11, 16, 27, 28, 52, 57, 67–70, 73, 101, 120, 163, 165, 180, 198, 238 Transmedia storytelling, 27, 56, 57, 68, 183, 208 Transtext, 265, 266 Transtextuality, 265 Triumph (British anthology comic), 71, 72 Twilight (film, 2008), 143, 242 Twin Peaks (TV series, 1990-91, 2017), 40, 45, 47, 48, 55, 59 Types of film series, 225, 233 U Unbranding, 9 Usenet group, 4, 7 Uslan, Michael, 195, 196, 214, 225, 243 W Waid, Mark, 4, 6, 91, 138, 161, 180, 239 Ward, Burt, 188, 212, 213, 219, 247 Warner Bros, 8, 16, 24, 180, 181, 188, 196, 210, 212, 214, 217 See also Time Warner Watchmen (comic book series), 73, 135, 143, 185–188, 199

280 

INDEX

Webb, Marc, 247 Weisinger, Mort, 80, 93, 94, 101, 103, 105, 106, 157, 158, 200, 201 Welling, Tom, 247 Wells, H.G, 88 Wertham, Fredric, 77–79, 105, 201, 202, 209, 214 West, Adam, 29, 188, 196, 203, 212, 213, 219, 221, 224, 233, 245, 247 What if?, 95 Wholesome entertainment, 75, 206, 209, 220 Will and Grace (TV series, 1998-2006; 2017-20), 48, 55 Wilson, Michael, 22, 236 Wolfman, Marv, 28, 110, 122, 123, 125, 127–133, 138, 140, 148, 149, 155, 157, 159, 179, 180, 260 Wonder Woman Wonder Woman (comic), 77, 79, 87, 91, 93, 123, 124, 129, 131,

132, 138, 145, 155, 184, 205, 238 Wonder Woman (TV series, 1975-79), 66, 121 World’s Finest Comics, 76, 110n2 World War II, 65, 76, 79, 97, 98, 135 Wyatt, Rupert, 25 X X-Files, The, 45, 48, 49, 55, 59 X-Men, The, 96, 156, 180, 199 Y Young Men (comic anthology), 98, 99 Z Zero Hour: Crisis in Time (comic book, 1994), 4, 125, 130 Zombie, Rob, 24, 53, 54, 56, 158