I wouldn't see them stopping, but I could certainly see production diminish for some of the reasons he listed. I wouldn't think they'd commit as many resources to a project that could help the profitability of others, so they'd likely focus elsewhere but who can say for sure and further who's to say that even with a diminished out put only hacks would want to work on that title?

So what if there isn't a new Superman story every week?
Seriously, I'd RATHER a GOOD Superman story once a year than 12 issues of filler churned out on a conveyor belt by a corporation that's more concerned with maintaining the viability of their IP rather than telling good stories.
And you know, if some of those Superman stories weren't good... I just wouldn't read them. There's LOTS to read and not having Superman continually 'on-tap' wouldn't be a huge loss.

Let's take an example. I really like Doug Wildey's Jonny Quest.
The series lasted one season back in the 60's, Comico did a comics run during the 80's which was excellent, and there was a revamped 'New Adventures' thing which I didn't like at all, so I didn't watch. The fact that nobody's produced a Jonny Quest cartoon that I like since the 60's doesn't take away from the fact that I can still go back, re-watch and enjoy those cartoons.
Superman isn't oxygen. If you don't get a regular 'fix', you won't die.
And hell, between 75 years or so of comics, the Kirk Alyn serial, The George Reeves series, the Chris Reeve movies, the Salkinds' Superboy cartoon, The Fleisher Animation, the Bruce Timm animated series, the animated movies, the Filmation series, Dean Cain, Brandon Routh, Eliot S! Maggin's 'Last Son of Krypton', and hundreds of other things, it's not like you're lacking in stuff to keep you busy while you wait for more.

Or... you know, you could read something else. It's not like you're cheating on Superman if you read something else while you're waiting for them to do something with the character that you like.

I've felt like this a long time, but was never able to put it this succinctly. Well said.

This made me think of the fact that Dick Giordano had Moore create the Watchmen as "new" characters instead of using the Charlton characters as he intended, so they wouldn't be... I don't remember the term used at the time, but the idea was Giordano liked the Charlton characters and didn't want them to "disappear."

It's fine to tell the superhero story you want, but that doesn't mean you always get to use the "real" Superman or Batman.

(1) You're about to. In great detail.

(2) "What I think you miss is that everyone in the audience doesn't necessarily accept those conventions just because they're intended to make Batman comics safe for kids."
Certainly, there are always people who aren't going to be fans of certain genres. And those people will find elements and conventions of those genres 'unrealistic', 'absurd' or 'laughable'. So what? If someone hates fantasy fiction because they think that elves, wizards and dragons are unrealistic, do we take those elements out, or suggest that the guy maybe needs to read something else?
Seriously, a certain degree of absurdism is inevitable in the superhero genre. By attempting to remove these elements to placate people who hate comics, we're spiting the people who love comics just as they are, in all their absurd, silly, unrealistic glory.

"Even if Kurtzman had never written a Batman parody, you would have got attempts to make Batman more "realistic" as audiences got tired of
the convention and wanted something new. I might not like particular manifestations of the quest for greater violence, but the Joker as a serious menace is a logical reaction against the image of the Joker as a harmless clown."
Here's that dichotomy I was talking about in Point 1 - "buttrape or gummi bears".
You're positing that the Joker can only be a 'serious menace' or a 'harmless clown'. That's not true. I regard 'The Joker's 5 Way Revenge' and 'The Laughing Fish' as all-ages suitable stories. I certainly read both as a VERY young kid. Some of the stuff presented in there is pretty intense, but it's not Exclusionary. The problem with the Joker as he's presented today isn't that he's presented as a 'serious menace', but that he's presented as an insecure teenager's idea of a 'serious menace'. 
In 'The Joker's Five-Way Revenge', the Joker is presented as intelligent, cunning, vicious and cruel. He kills four people, often in ironic ways.
In 'Death of the Family', the Joker is presented as a cartoonish 1980's slasher villain delivering leftover Hannibal Lecter dialogue with his own face stapled to his bleeding skull.
One of these is a serious menace. It's also the all-ages appropriate story.
The other is a preposterous, cartoonish joke, presented in such a way as to make it completely inaccessible to younger readers. It's the sort of laughable attempts at maturity and seriousness you'd get from a surly 13 year old who wants to look grown-up. In trying to push the envelope, they've ended up on the other side of it, and instead of producing mature, serious work, they're producing a parody of it. 
In trying to avoid Harvey Kurtzman mocking their heroes, they've done his job for him.

"(3) They're not driving away your precious young fans. Young potential fans wouldn't be caught dead reading the sort of vanilla comic books that you're talking about."
There's that false either/or again. I grew up reading a wide array of comics from the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's, and there was a wide range of flavours. Some were lighthearted and silly, like the pre-new look sci-fi Batman stories. Some took themselves pretty seriously, like Jim Starlin's Adam Warlock. Some jumped around a lot, covering a wide range of tones and genres, like Haney and Aparo on Brave and the Bold. Hell, you even had some pretty grim stuff like Fleisher's Spectre.
As a wee nipper, I felt that some of it was too scary, or grim, or whatever for me... like Man-Thing or Jonah Hex... or just about stuff I didn't care about, like Sergeant Rock or Tomb of Dracula. There were even some comics which I could TELL weren't for me - like Heavy Metal or Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers - but as far as mainstream superhero stuff, pretty much all of it was all ages appropriate, and not just vanilla-flavoured.

"...comics are no longer cheap enough for them to afford buying in great quantities. So if they pursue comics at all, they have to do so selectively, and that means going after whatever has a good rep as "cool.""
Here's another way the perpetual teenagers have driven comics away from kids. If, as you say, kids have to buy comics selectively and can't afford to buy high piles of stuff, why are both publishers almost exclusively publishing stories as multi-part story arcs, frequently building on dozens of issues of continuity? That is, when they're not churning out line-wide crossover 'events'?
Surely, presenting stories as one or two-part, largely self-contained adventures would be a great way to draw in younger readers. 
So, presenting every $3 or $4 issue as one tiny, almost inconsequential part of a giant, intricate, inaccessible jigsaw puzzle is, exactly as I say, a method of driving away young fans.
That said, the teenagers love it. If an issue is part of a Big Story. That means that the story is Important. And Serious. And those are things that teenagers find essential - that things be important and serious.

"Even if anyone could prove that there was a distinct set of fanboys that liked only the "grim and gritty" type of superhero action, saying that they're "selfish" for liking for what they like is absurd."
They're not selfish for liking what they like. They're selfish for insisting that EVERYTHING reflect the kinds of things they like. DC is currently publishing how many separate Batman titles? And of that number, how many are suitable for kids?
One. 'Batman 66'. The bullies have Batman, Batman: The Dark Knight, Batman and Robin, Detective Comics all to themselves, but it's okay, because they threw the kids a bone they didn't really want in the first place. That's selfish.

"I can't believe that anyone who ever liked any sort of fantasy-fiction would use the old "you must put away childish things" argument, so often used by pundits who just wanted to discourage genres they didn't like. But that's what your "swingset" metaphor amounts to."
I LOVE Fantasy Fiction. I LOVE it. And I'm not saying "you must put away childish things". I'm saying that if the childish things annoy you and frustrate you, you should let children play with them instead of painting them black and covering them in spikes and razor blades so you don't have to feel insecure about playing with a kids' toy. I'm saying share your toys, and if you don't like them, don't break them so that nobody can play with them.
And then, later, if and when you get over your teenage insecurity, come back and play with them again. If they haven't been broken, they'll still be there. Because one thing that's great about being a PROPER grown-up is that you don't give a crap if someone sees you playing with your toys, because Toys Are Fun! And if they can't see that, that's their loss.

"(4) It's not about insecurity. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies,""
Don't you see the inherent contradiction here? I'm not afraid of people who'll laugh at me for liking comics, but People WILL Laugh At Me For Reading Comics!

"and there's no question that there have always been cultural gatekeepers who like to sneer at all types of popular fiction."
As I said above... so what? 
Some people will never like Westerns. You don't see fans of Westerns crawling after them going, "Come on, we can change!" No, Westerns just spit their chaw in the dust, adjust their hats and say, "Don't let th' door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya, ya damn cayuse!" and go back to gunning down owlhoots and circling the wagons.

"...if the "teenagers" were the only ones to object to the show, it may be not just that they were over-serious. Maybe they understood that the satire was at the expense of their genre-- though ironically, the series' popularity was instrumental in the later growth of the superhero feature film."

And the survival of the comics. Batman and Detective Comics were both on the verge of cancellation before the one-two punch (BIFF! BAM!) of the TV series and the New Look Murphy Anderson stuff.


"People in the 1960s would have looked upon all comics-fans as "man-children," whether they read kids' comics or undergrounds."
And they did. My question is, why are we so eager to appease these people?
It's because we have this teenage mindset. We are insecure. We CRAVE Approval. We have a Terror of being scorned. Once we get over that nonsense, we realize that it doesn't matter. In the immortal words of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, "F*** 'em if they can't take a joke".

"All you've done, Pol Rua, is to take that same argument and transfer to people whom you think support stuff you don't like."
Nope. Those folks were talking about people who love comics. I'm talking about people who are either afraid to admit that they love comics, or people who hate comics but won't stop reading them. 

"Well, big surprise, but no reader owes it to any other reader to "step aside" and let them enjoy the "swingset.""
And you claim it isn't about selfishness?

"And if adult comics fans had actually done that in a crucial era like the 1980s, we probably wouldn't have a comics medium in the U.S. any more."
The problem with this analogy is that comics isn't mainstream superhero comics.
In the 1980's, you had a lot of really interesting creators doing amazing stuff with the comics medium. Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy's 'Sabre' was groundbreaking, but it wasn't superheroes. Nor was 'Cerebus', 'Grimjack', 'Love and Rockets', 'Mister X', 'From Hell', 'Yummy Fur', 'Eightball', 'Hate', even stuff that was sorta like superheroes was usually all ages appropriate (The Rocketeer, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Flaming Carrot, Nexus).
These were the creators who were sick of the swingset, and got off it to do something else.
Meanwhile in mainstream comics, you had Byrne on 'Fantastic Four', Claremont on 'X-Men', Wolfman and Perez on 'New Teen Titans', all of which were all-ages appropriate, despite the fact that all three liked to sneak in smutty suggestion and innuendo under the editor's radar.
These guys made some modifications to the swingset, but it was still suitable  for kids.

Which brings us to the elephants in the room. 'Watchmen' and 'Dark Knight Returns'. Both of these comics pushed superheroes in unexpected new ways (maybe not so unexpected to those of us who'd read 'Nexus', 'Wonder Warthog' or 'The One', maybe, but still...). 
These guys popularized the crazy, not suitable for kids swingset. 
And contrary to what you may believe, I have no problem with this swingset. I love mature readers takes on superheroes. Brubaker and Phillips' 'Sleeper' is a gas, as just a single f'rinstance. But in Moore's case, he used analogues. And in Miller's case, he wrote an imaginary story (not a dream! not a hoax!). They had their crazy, rocket-powered, no-kids allowed swingset, but they weren't stopping the other kids from playing on theirs.
'Dark Knight Returns' didn't stop the kids from reading Batman or Detective Comics. There was plenty of Batman for everyone.
Unfortunately, in the wake of DKR, the teenagers who enjoyed that particular rocketswing wanted ALL the swingsets. They're crowding the kids off all the rides, drove them out of the playground and put up barbed wire. And that's selfish.

I have no problem with gritty comics. I have no problem with gritty superhero comics. I have no problem with gritty mainstream superhero comics (even though I think that, in execution, they're largely adolescent, dimwitted nonsense).
My problem is the ubiquity of them. 
Even if I loved gritty, mainstream superhero comics, I still wouldn't want them to be everywhere.
Because Comics should be for Everyone, not just for me, and as much as my personal enjoyment is important to me, it's important to the medium that comics be available for everyone to enjoy. And because kids love Batman.

I'm not arguing against absurdist elements in the superhero genre or any other genre. But I think some tropes wear out their welcome for good reason, and the visual trope of Batman and Robin charging into a hail of bullets is something that could only be sustained during a particular historical period and for a specific audience. I don't think that's comparable to getting rid of the elves from fantasy fiction.

I hear you, but I believe that there's been a cultural shift that perceives "all ages" as vanilla entertainment, and I can't see what DC Comics can do to disperse that admittedly false perception.



See, I think the lukewarm response of the younger fan base to nearly everything consciously aimed at them caused the Big Two to drift away from trying to reach the wider audience, to the point where they are largely dependent on the Direct Market. The DM then makes it possible to cater to hardcore fans with involved epics.

Are the epics, in general, good? Probably not, though there's no absolute reason that they could not be. But their goodness or badness is not a consequence of their audience wanting to "feel important."