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Cover image: Adventures of Superman #514 (detail)

Broody heroes? We've been down this road before, and the scenery ain't always pretty.
DC Comics

So Warner Brothers has decided it needs to clean the slate and reboot the Superman film franchise.

Okay, I get that. Sorta.

I mean, yes, sure, Superman Returns got too mired in sticky-sweet nostalgia for the '70s Richard Donner film.

But it banked over $200 million in U.S. theaters, and that's not counting sales of DVDs and Superman Returns Limited Edition Four Cheese Pasta Roni. This is a flop?

Here's the bit I really don't get, though: Now that The Dark Knight has become the highest-grossing film of the year, Warner Pictures President Jeff Robinov says he wants his next pack of superhero movies to be bathed in the same brooding tone. He sees exploring the evil side to characters as the key to unlocking some of Warner Bros.' DC properties.

"We're going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it," Robinov says. That goes for the company's Superman franchise as well.

Hoo boy. Hey, moviegoing public? We comic book geeks have something to tell you, because we've been down this road before.

It was called the '90s. And, trust us, it doesn't end well.

Why you should fear the super-mullet, after the jump.

The year is 1986. Ronald Reagan is President. A musical group called Motörhead has the nation up on its feet and boppin' to a brand new beat.

The Dark Knight Returns lands in comic shops. Written and drawn by Frank Miller, the book places an elderly, fascistic Batman in a dark, dystopian Gotham of the near future.

Soon after, the first issue of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen is published. The series, set in another dystopian future, offers a grim, gimlet-eyed view of superheroes, picking apart the genre's conventions while amassing a huge (spoiler: apocalyptic) body count.

After those, the deluge: In the interest of "relevance," comic companies start going dark with their heroes, upping the violence, muddying the color palettes, and inserting words like "extreme" into waaaaay too many titles.

In both the Marvel and DC Comics universes, there is a 35 percent uptick in brooding.

This trend, which will come to a head in the '90s and even give rise to several comic book companies, will come to be known as the "grim-n-gritty" age of superheroes.

Even the Man of Steel is not immune to the winds of relevance, which chiefly manifest in two ways:

1. Superman's hairdo goes all achy-breaky for a while, after which
2. He dies.

Of course the super-dirtnap is simply a marketing ploy — albeit a hugely successful one that causes thousands of credulous non-comics-readers to snatch up multiple copies. The Superman titles continue on, sans-Supes, by featuring four wannabes vying to wear the red booties: An alien! A cyborg! A clone! And ... um ... a mechanical engineer.

Cough.

Comic-book writers spend the '90s swapping out classic heroes with darker, more violent variants. Batman gets replaced by a sword-wielding assassin. Wonder Woman is shouldered aside by a more touchy (and more prone to stabbing) Amazon. And Spider-Man has a clone who ... never mind. Not important.

It was all a mess; a violent, ugly, depressing mess that today's heroes are still shaking off. Listen, Mr. Warner Brothers Pictures Guy -- an evil/broody Superman does not popcorn-movie fare make. It's also -- small point here -- NOT SUPERMAN.

Write this down: Batman broods. Superman winks.

Another thing: How exactly does Superman Returns -- a movie that, you may recall, depicts the Man of Tomorrow as a deadbeat dad who stalks and super-eavesdrops on his baby-momma -- not already qualify as "dark?"

-- Glen Weldon

categories: Comics, Movies

10:05 - August 27, 2008

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