The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past

In one of Greg Hatcher’s reprint columns he commented about how much comics material at the time he was writing seemed to be borrowing or homaging older material, targeting older fans with a nostalgic itch. I think there’s a lot of truth to that but I don’t think it’s just a comic-book thing.

I first started thinking about the topic after reading a 2012 Vanity Fair article by Kurt Anderson arguing that the pace of cultural change had slowed since the millennium began. Take any 20 years in the 20th century and you see radical changes in fashion, movies and music; the change between the early 1990s and the time of the article was minimal.

While Anderson wasn’t writing about genre fiction,  I think it holds true there too. Consider the shift from Hugo Gernsback’s “scientifiction” in the 1920s to the John Campbell-influenced science fiction pulps of the 1940s to the New Wave of the 1960s to cyberpunk in the 1980s. In comics, the difference between 1945 —1965—And 1985 —— is just as striking.

Like Anderson, I don’t think the changes from 1992 to 2012 were anywhere near as radical (which is not, of course, to say comics got worse). I’m not sure they’re even that radically different now, though I don’t know that I read enough current comics to be a good judge.

If change is showing down, why? Anderson suggests one reason is that corporate America is increasingly risk averse which makes staying with what worked in the past a safer bet. It’s also a safe CYA move for individual executives or editors: “Okay, the remake tanked, but everyone loved the original! You gotta admit greenlighting a remake was a smart move!” The exec may sincerely believe it’s a good move because they saw the movie when they were kids and loved it, much as so many comics creators are convinced resetting Flash or Spider-Man or whoever to the status quo of the creator’s childhood will instantly make the hero more popular.

This may also explain why we see so many movies remaking older material even though the originals are all readily available on streaming or DVD. It’s true that Hollywood has always done remakes but as I say at the link, nobody watching John Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon could compare it with the two previous versions. That’s not the case any more.

Anderson suggests the availability of all that old material may itself be a drag on change. Simon Reynolds makes the same point about music in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. Writing in 2011, Reynolds ponders why it’s been so long since music went through a radical break compared to early rock-and-roll, punk, or the birth of hip-hop (“The first 10 years of this century may be the first decade in my lifetime that didn’t produce any distinctive musical styles of its own.”) and why nobody is rejecting the older generation’s classics as “dad music.” He concludes part of this is indeed that with music from everywhen available nothing feels old any more. Plus bands have a vested interest in reviving their past glories as reunion tours can make more money than the band earned the first go-round.

I think the presence of old material does indeed have an impact. Suppose I decide to binge the best fantasy fiction of the 21st century. Assuming the same amount of great fiction comes out every year only 4 percent of my reading list would come from 2023; almost half would come from the 2010s. And unlike the days when I haunted used-book stores for gems, it’s easy to find anything now. Likewise if I wanted to immerse myself in 1930s pulp fiction I don’t need to settle for contemporary retro pulp homages — I can find the Spider, the Shadow, Doc Savage, the Phantom Detective and so many others in reprints

Are Reynolds, Anderson and me right about that there’s a cultural stasis? Or are we blind to the changes taking place? Let me know what you think.

#SFWApro. Covers top to bottom by Paul Reinman, Steve Ditko and Steve Lightle.