Keith: I think the future is, or should be, in good writing. Not to engage in too much hero worship, but when asked this question I always point back to yesterday's interview subject, Brian Michael Bendis. His Ultimate Spider-Man is a briskly written (and beautifully drawn, lest we leave the artist end of the equation) superhero book that's friendly to new and younger readers. It hits all the classic superhero notes while making them feel fresh. His noirish take on Daredevil is another favorite, and one that's tied to Ultimate Spider-Man only by a crisp command of dialogue and a powerful use of long, silent passages. What Bendis does—and he shares this with the best writers out there—is to find a way to work within the conventions of superhero comics in unexpected ways.
Usually when shopping I look at writers first. Anything from Grant Morrison, Kurt Busiek, Brian K. Vaughan (who's essentially left the superhero field), Warren Ellis, Darwyn Cooke, Geoff Johns, Joss Whedon (assuming he keeps up his comics sojourn), Ed Brubaker, Dan Slott, Paul Dini, Mark Waid, or Greg Rucka gets at least a look. Those are just names, however. Some of them do write for titles that call on the minutiae you mention above. And while I think that can be off-putting, I don't know that it's necessarily prohibitive. If a story—the story at hand, that is—is told well enough and compelling enough on its own terms, readers shouldn't mind finding a way to fill in the blanks.
Here's a bigger problem: The titles I like best tend to be the ones least dependent on these company-wide meta-narratives, ones that let the writers breathe a bit. I'm as much a sucker for crossovers as the next guy, but the trouble with weaving all your little stories into one big story is that if the big story tanks you're in real trouble. I think DC is running into this trouble a bit these days for some of the reasons you mentioned. (Not to mention shipping delays and relaunches that kind of fizzle out when they should spark.) Marvel's won back some of the good will it lost with the anti-climax of Civil War thanks to the good-and-getting-even-better World War Hulk. But if the tide turns they're in trouble. And if I were an outsider looking in, I'm not sure why I'd care that Hulk was so mad in the first place.
You know what I think the secret source of a lot of the better superhero comics these days is? Alan Moore's America's Best line. Launched in the late-'90s, the line included titles like Tom Strong, Promethea, and Top 10 that, initially at least, brought a knowing, grown-up sensibility to superhero archetypes while presenting them without any irony. Moore has said that it was his attempt to bring what he felt superhero comics needed at the time and maybe, though he didn't say this, repair some of the damage done by all the grim and gritty comics trying to emulate certain elements of Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. There was still an obvious interest in demonstrating about how his iconic characters worked, but that was no longer an end to itself. Moore let them keep working even after he took them apart. (They branched out beyond this, too especially in a long trip through the afterworld-as-it-might-have-been-imagined-by-Alesteir Crowley in Promethea.) The titles didn't really sell that well, but I see their influence everywhere in titles that find ways to bring the biggest, most absurd, and most heroic elements of comics' past into a jaded present that may not already know it still needs them around.
Am I being too optimistic about the form, Noel?
Noel: Not necessarily, but I think it's telling that you bring up Moore's recent superhero work, which started out as kind of a quasi-philosophical experiment in exploring the lighter literary roots of the genre, and became something far more profound—some of Moore's best books, I'd say. And he did it by bypassing DC and Marvel's iconic characters (more or less… Promethea's obviously a special case) and starting over at ground zero with Victorian and early 20th century hero types. If the superhero genre is going to survive in comic books, as opposed to movies and TV, Moore's kind of bottom-up approach would seem to be the way to go. They may not have sold in blockbuster numbers at the time, but those trade collections of Top Ten, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea especially are going to stay in print and appeal to new readers for decades to come.
As for those iconic characters—the ones that Morrison and Bendis and company have been gamely trying to keep interesting over the last half-decade or so—I think they're forever going to be undone by what I once dubbed "the perils of serialization." No matter how much novelty good writers inject into creaky old concepts, eventually they're going to run out of ways to maintain the freshness as their run extends. Give them a few years, and they go back to the old standbys: kill-offs, resurrections, and "game-changing" crossover events.
My feeling is that Batman, Superman, Spider-Man etc. have all had good runs, and those runs either have been or will be collected, and made available for new readers whenever they want them. If Detective Comics and Action were cancelled outright tomorrow, that might be the best thing that ever happened to the titles and to the characters in them. Focus on the reprints. They're cheaper to produce, since the creative work has already been paid for; and the quality of the material is generally better.
But that doesn't mean that DC and Marvel need to retire their chief moneymakers. (For one thing, they kind of have to keep publishing stories about them or they'll lose the copyright.) Instead, they should set the good writers loose on a series of graphic novels. Ditch continuity altogether, and let them brainstorm the kinds of Superman and Avengers stories they've always longed to tell. Some can be traditional, like Kurt Busiek's Avengers Forever, and some can be left-field homages, like Busiek's Superman: Secret Identity. Some can be for mature audiences, and some for kids. A shift in focus will also give the top artists in the industry the chance to do their best work without the pressure of a monthly deadline. Both of the big two already do this to an extent, but maintaining monthly titles as well has overextended the creative teams and the characters.
A year ago, when I was engrossed by DC's 52 project, I thought weekly comics—and treating superheroes like TV characters, to be dropped in on casually—was the future of the industry. But 52 ended badly, and the follow-up Countdown has been pretty much a bore so far. Instead, what's working best with superhero comics today is what was working best years ago, when mini-series like Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Batman: The Long Halloween and Superman For All Seasons were kicking the ass of their regular monthly counterparts. Today it's Jeff Smith's Shazam: Monster Society Of Evil and Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman that are at the peak of the genre, and calling down to the lead-footed comics below to catch up or fall away.
Keith: Well, I'm with you on all those titles—and as long as we're just throwing out required reading let me again pimp Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier—but how realistic is the only-classics-please model? It's a bit like asking for Arrested Development without the many more conventional sitcoms that give it context. Any genre is kept alive as much by its everyday, placeholder entries has by its stellar examples. And, flaws and all, I think it's a genre that will remain relevant and alive as long a new batch of creators comes along every generation to reexamine what we want from our heroes, and what those wants say about us. (And to find new ways to make fight scenes interesting, of course.)
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