Amid all the critical buzz about Joker, I caught this piece on The Verge the other week, and it crystallized some of my thinking about the differences between Marvel and DC, and about the effects on the source material of all this success for comic book movies just at the moment.
Between the furore about whether or not to make a movie about Miles Morales, whether or not to have Peter Parker be black, and so on, it occurred to me at some point that the people pushing for those more inclusive types of casting are fighting an uphill battle. Because the wider movie-going public (as distinct from the comic-buying public) knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman, Clark Kent is Superman and Peter Parker is Spider-Man, you'll have trouble attracting them to a movie featuring someone else in one of those roles, at least at first.
Even Into the Spider-Verse, which as I've said before was a damn delight, had to spend a lot of its running time explaining why Miles became Spider-Man, and even then it required a big starring role from Peter Parker (plus a minor role from another Peter Parker). On the other hand, witness the Spider-Man origin fatigue that greeted Andrew Garfield's Amazing Spider-Man movies, and the fact that Marvel/Sony felt that the Tom Holland entries could dispense with the origin story totally - not only do we all know the characters, we all know their origins too.
The Verge article suggests that this is a peculiar drawback of Marvel, as its characters and stories have essentially been designed to run forever with relatively little change in the status quo. And indeed, other than Peter Parker graduating from high school and then getting married (something that was eventually walked back in Marvel's first big, egregious retcon), Spider-Man remains the same character as he was back in 1962.
It's the same for Captain America, Iron Man and to perhaps a lesser extent the X-Men. I say a lesser extent for the X-Men, because the general idea of mutants fighting against bigotry is the same as when they launched in 1963, but being a team book has meant they could change the cast of characters around a whole lot more, including on more than one occasion jettisoning every character and just building a completely new team.
Even there, though, Marvel hasn't really ever experimented with its books as much as DC. Sure, the Punisher may have been rebooted as an occult demon-hunter at one point, which is generally remembered (if at all) as an embarrassment, but DC used to reboot its characters every few years, as the continuity grew too complex or as new creators decided they wanted to look at the books from different angles.
One good case in point is the Flash. The protagonist of the current CW show is, of course, Barry Allen, who's been "the" Flash for the longest time (1956-1985, and again more recently). When I first encountered the character, he was Barry Allen, and it was only years later that I learned that there'd been Jay Garrick before him, and that he'd died and been replaced by Wally West after the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
By the time I started reading Flash comics, Wally West was the guy in the suit, and so technically I consider him "my" Flash, even more than Barry (few of whose adventures I ever read). But ironically Wally was the star of the comics when the original Flash TV show came out in 1990, which had Barry Allen as the character. This meant that TV viewers who wanted to check out the comics were stuck with some other guy who was always feeling inadequate compared to Barry Allen.
That show disappeared fairly quickly, without troubling the ratings overly much, so the comic was able to continue on its own path unmolested by TV or movie considerations for a couple of decades. Indeed, the Flash was a prominent character in the Bruce Timm Justice League cartoon, and while he physically resembled Wally West, they never delved very far into his backstory or the relationship to Barry.
But of course now that there's a TV show on the CW and a movie in the works (bizarrely not connected to the show), Barry Allen appears to be the main character once again, and Wally's been consigned to some sort of limbo.
The Verge piece also mentions the reboots and retcons that authors like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman made to characters like Swamp Thing and Sandman, and how they related (or didn't) to previous versions of the characters. One of my favorite runs of any comic ever is Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man, where he retconned the main character's origin, then turned him into an environmental crusader and ended his run with a long metafictional storyline that culminated in Animal Man meeting Grant Morrison.
Of course, the reason that DC could do this stuff with its characters, or turn its flagship super-team, the Justice League, into a slapstick comedy, is because nobody was really reading the books at the time. If you can rely on your readership not changing, then you can reward them by letting the characters progress - much like Keith Giffen did when he rebooted the Legion of Superheroes in 1989.
But now that the comics are hot property, you have to keep them in a sort of stasis, so that you can then also sell the comics to the potential fans who've been attracted by the movie or TV show. The Verge article suggests that there's wiggle room there, as you can make a movie like Joker as a standalone, without worrying about continuity; I'd argue that's mostly true, but only because Warner/DC needed a Hail Mary pass after Zach Snyder's Superman and Justice League movies sucked so badly.
On the other hand, being able to reinvent the characters and approach them from different angles might be the best option for the movies, just as it was for the comics 20-30 years ago. Fun as the MCU movies have been, you're now basically working with 22 movies' worth of continuity, and at some point it might become too confusing for folks who just want to watch a movie with explosions and other fun stuff.
Unlikely as it sounds, maybe in a few years Marvel will be revisiting its characters in quirkier, more standalone settings too.
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