Superhero stories were supposed to represent an escape from the old, adult-focused form of entertainment. Where they ended up was of course just another form of it.
The money quote is: "Wallowing in death isn’t a sophisticated leap beyond the superhero concept; it’s the failure to imagine what it means not to die."
You can liken this to the sitcom. Storytellers had to envision a platform upon which an endless number of stories could be told in a particular format, without getting boring. The setting, including the characters, have to remain static. Breaking the sitcom mold doesn't make for an evolved sitcom, it makes for a devolved one. One that brought back all the problems that the sitcom format resolved.
Superhero comic books had to appeal to seven year-olds, while still retaining enough in there to keep the teens and then adults they grew up into entertained. You need a story that can live forever, and still remain interesting. The bad guys have to get handled with a minimum of fuss, and understated magic, such as Batman never killing anyone, is an appropriate storytelling device. The morality play, good beating evil, and all the whimsy and silliness that conjuring it entailed, is just part of the superhero format.
Without all that, they're not superheroes, they're just story protagonists with special powers that are sometimes heroic. That's the argument the author's making.
And I think the latter point is fair but it's just the cyclical nature of the medium. In the late '80s comic books grew up and got all serious with Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and other works that deconstructed the genre. And the early '90s had an unrelated trend where heroes had to be all gritty and edgy, overly-muscular and toting tons of ammunition pouches and automatic weapons. But the genre swung back from the excesses to more optimistic and child-friendly versions.
So maybe we're at a moment in history where superhero comics are a certain way. But it's just a trend that will change.
To your point about the comic book medium, I think it's worth separating the superhero concept from the format it was presented in. I don't think it would have been impossible to bring superheroes into the 80s and 90s, same as we had incorruptible heroes like Robocop. What makes them kid-friendly isn't the artistry or the goriness of the setting, as author pointed out, both Spider-Man and Batman were borne out of death, it's the undying nature of their commitment to fight evil. When you start messing with that you get outside of the capacity of a seven year-old to follow, relate with, and fall in love with it. Has nothing to do with cutesy graphics.
I know every generation feels like things are on the decline, but I can't help but think some of them had a point. There's some incredibly trashy, low-brow, and downright racy entertainment being consumed today that never would have been acceptable decades ago. Or at the very least, it was still being produced back then but you had to go looking for it and it wasn't mainstream.
It's easy for us to look back at the moral panic elders had about Elvis and the Beatles but part of me wonders if they were on to something because we went from "I wanna hold your hand" to Cardi-B's WAP. (It's vulgar, looking it up is an exercise for the reader).
You must not have been around for what the 80's/early 90's had churned out. Any number of songs from 2 Live Crew and Too Short make WAP seem tame by comparison.
Despite the moral panic at the time surrounding those groups/artists, we still managed to survive and grow as a country, and especially with regards to free speech.
1. 2 Live Crew and Too Short weren't Billboard #1 artists, they were (perfectly fine) marginal hip hop artists who helped knock down the door on profanity in lyrics.
2. Almost every pop song in the 80s and 90s had no profanity, the ratio was probably 99/1 or higher.
3. As a dad of 4 I can attest that profanity in the top 40 pop charts is waaaaaaaaay up, WAP style songs are mainstream, and I've had to teach my 5 year old to say "radio edit" to Alexa.
I did an informal study, at the end of last year Amazon Music had a "top 100 songs of 2021" playlist, I listened to them all and 44 of them had lyrics I would consider inappropriate for a 5 year old.
I'm not a prude and I'm not making value judgments, but the floodgates have opened on profanity and explicit lyrics, at least in part because of the decline of radio's monopoly, the rise of streaming, the overall fracturing of the monoculture, and the Internet's rewarding of clickbait / extreme behavior.
Over time, the code lost its value and as of ten years ago, no comic company is following it anymore. Good riddance.
Y'all are a bunch of prudes and artists and the leading edge of culture are using that shock people experience in their art and have been for a long damn time. There's this burned in mythos that sex is bad which was brought in by Christianity and despite the goalposts of what is vulgar and what is acceptable there continues to be the undercurrent of "this is awful because it's too explicitly sexual" even though what was too much has shifted from exposed ankles to whatever people are offended by today. Hopefully we're close to running out of things to be offended by and people will just be comfortable with people expressing their sexuality as normal... but I doubt it.
I think the difference here is that it's easy to imagine what is more vulgar than The Simpsons, or more vulgar than Elvis dancing.
I'm struggling to come up with what is more vulgar than some of the stuff that is produced for the mainstream today, without being just pornography.
And the Simpsons stopped getting heat once Bevis and Butthead went on the air and became the new target.
I refer you to Jimmy Swaggart in 1986
>he views rock as “pornography and degenerative filth which denigrates all the values we hold sacred and is destructive to youth.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-03-ca-1235-s...
This is where The New Pornographers got their name
That has nothing to do with infantilization in our culture. The fact that they also had fart and dick jokes in the past has no bearing on this.
The fact that adults in our culture form their identity around low quality super hero movies in a desperate attempt to recapture their youth and seem fun and then run off to buy the little toys from the ads is the infantilization.
Also, while the franchises have moved away from being for young kids anymore I can tell you that my friends who have kids in the teenage bracket certainly bond with them over their shared interest in such movies.
Disclaimer, I don't really sort humor into high brow and low brow per se, and probably listen to a whole lot more than 20 bawdy or indecent jokes in a single day. There are plenty of comedians who are too mean-spirited for my taste though.
I want to stop you right here, this is a terrible argument with a false premise.
Those two men produced works of contemporary genius that have lasted the test of time.
They are not well known now or in their day because they were lowbrow or made the (occasional!) childish joke. They are well known now and in their day for their transcendence of their respective art form.
They were never viewed as "entertainment for children" like comic books, Pokemon, Lego, etc.
Nobody would look at a 40 year old man in 1820, 1920, or 2020 collecting Mozart sheet music or Shakespeare playbills as being an infantilized man-child.
They are qualitatively different.
The fundamental story structures are quite similar. The scope of the tales told is quite similar. The behaviour of the protagonists and antagonists is quite similar.
We know about the Iliad and the Odyssey because they were relatively well preserved. We don’t know about Homer’s less popular poems, or of any particularly trashy verse that he wrote…because it didn’t survive.
The Iliad survived not because it is transcendent, but because it was popular (which meant that there were more copies made to survive over time). The "transcendence" was added later as a (probably wrong) reason for its popularity.
Some 3,000 years from now there will probably be someone calling the Saga of the Boy Wizard transcendent just the way that people call the Iliad transcendent. They, like many others, will confuse its widespread popularity and many copies with a judgement on quality. There are other similar stories better written that don’t have the popularity of HP. But they won’t survive over time because there weren’t as many copies.
I actually have no information as to the popularity of Homer's work relative to other works at that time. I suppose I have fairly strong intuitions as to its popularity after antiquity, but its popularity at that point seems to cut against your argument somewhat. There were certainly stories that dominated Homer's societal saturation after the fall of the Greek empire, and some of those survived, some not.
What you have is a value judgement of the golden age conservatism nonsense imagining the past as so much higher quality. The truth is that superhero movies are the latest incarnation of a type of entertainment which is as old as the oldest human culture we know about. The Iliad is the same kind of entertainment in a different format. Commentators said the same about gladiators chariot races in the Colosseum. There are dick jokes scrawled on the walls of Pompeii.
The childish attitude is making a dichotomy between childish and adult things and criticizing the childish things pretending the latest incarnation is somehow a new kind of thing.