What happens when your never-ending battle… Ends? While Marvel Studios is still making some very entertaining films and TV shows, no one could credibly argue that they are in the same dominant position they held from 2012 until 2020. Their 2019 peak was spectacular, their subsequent decline less so… And a familiar pattern seen here suggests that the biggest movie studio of the last decade might have a few things to learn from 1990s superhero comics. Yes, really.
The average Marvel movie — even ones featuring unproven or marginal properties like Guardians of the Galaxy or Ant-Man — was earning around $1 billion back before 2019. Whereas these days, bigger names like Captain America will barely net $500 million globally. A handful of duds like Thor: Love and Thunder and The Eternals haven’t helped, but the inherent problem feels… Bigger than a few flops.
One could argue that the real problem isn’t about how good (or not) the current crop of Marvel content is, but the fact that it felt like Marvel was over at some point, not too long ago. And to understand this perspective, it’s actually helpful to go all the way back to 1993, 15 years before Iron Man hit theaters, and visit the “Triangle Era” of Superman comics.
The “Triangle Era” is a loosely-defined period between the mid-1980s crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths and the 2005 crossover Infinite Crisis. During that time, DC’s continuity — and particularly Superman’s — was especially tight, owing in part to a reboot after the first Crisis and the end of the DC multiverse. Called “The Triangle Era” due to the numbered triangles that provided fans with a reading order starting in 1991, the period is often broadened to include comics as far back as John Byrne’s 1986 reboot The Man of Steel. The triangles (later pentagons, like Superman’s shield) actually ended in 2002, but the era is also often colloquially extended out until Infinite Crisis a few years later.
The biggest, best-selling story of the Triangle Era is “The Death and Return of Superman” saga — actually a trilogy of widescreen events starting in late 1992 — and that’s where the similarities to the MCU begin to be evident.
Beginning in 1986, DC had a very clear vision for Superman. The creative teams working on the three (later four) monthly Superman comics worked closer than maybe any other collaborative group of writers and artists over such a long period of time, and the results were often great. With some job security and a lot of big ideas, creators including John Byrne, Marv Wolfman, Jerry Ordway, Dan Jurgens, and more were setting up premises to work with down the line… Right up until 1992, when everything started to come together.
There’s no clearer demonstration of how the Superman titles built up a narrative between 1986 and 1993 than Roger Stern’s excellent novel, The Death and Life of Superman. Originally released on August 1, 1993, the book adapts the wildly popular Doomsday!: The Death of Superman story, as well as its follow-ups, Funeral For a Friend and Reign of the Supermen!.
But it also does more than that.
In an easily digestible format, Stern’s novel deftly guides the reader through virtually every key story to take place in the Superman family of comic book titles between 1986’s The Man of Steel and the start of the “Death and Return of Superman” saga. The book touches on the introductions of characters like The Eradicator and Hank Henshaw, explains what Cadmus is, and its relationship to Superman. And it reminds audiences of the deep love between Lois Lane and Clark Kent, which resulted in their engagement not long before Doomsday arrived on the scene.
The Death and Life of Superman even emphasizes the importance of characters like Bibbo Bibbowski, Gangbuster, Cat Grant, and Keith White, key players in that era of the comics who were largely unknown to fans of the Superman movies and TV shows.
For casual readers, Stern’s novel is a godsend, providing valuable context for story beats that would pay off throughout the “Death and Return” stories. Byrne’s Krypton, for instance, was no longer a world of “supermen,” but a cold, science-fiction commentary on the hubris of mankind. The Eradicator, a character introduced a few years before Doomsday, gets a backstory dump in the book, as does Hank Henshaw, an astronaut who lost his mind after the death of his wife (and his physical body).
For everyone else, it’s equally instructive, showing just how well-constructed the three-part mega-arc really was: those characters and many others have standout moments, stories set in place months or years before The Death of Superman are paid off in the main story. And even relatively minor bits of worldbuilding are rewarded when characters like the Matrix Supergirl and Paul Westfield step up to become major players.
In hindsight, the novel also sheds some light on why the “Triangle Era” of the Superman titles, which continued on for another decade or so after Reign of the Supermen!, was never quite the same again.
The obvious parallel point, when it comes to the MCU movies, is Avengers: Endgame. Executive Kevin Feige and a murderer’s row of creatives managed to put together a ten-year run that felt like it was all building to something. They delivered that “something” in the form of the one-two punch of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and even gave a kind of heartfelt epilogue in the form of Spider-Man: Far From Home.
In the thirty-plus years since Superman’s death and return, tens or hundreds of thousands of words have been written about how DC editorial continued to chase the high of Doomsday!’s unprecedented success for most of a decade. Any sufficiently big story featuring the Man of Steel would be accused of trying to emulate the success of “The Death of Superman,” and the accusation was often pretty well-founded. None, though, would ever reach that height again.
The “end” of the MCU also aimed for a new beginning, and it had that, with projects like No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness setting the stage for the studio’s next mega-story. Each new Multiverse Saga movie, though, has felt more like a stand-alone gimmick or mini-event than something building to a greater whole. Deadpool & Wolverine feels less like the missing piece in a puzzle, and more like the Electric Blue Superman era. It’s flashy, it’s fun on its own, but everyone sees it as a transparent attempt to recapture lost glory.
Don’t misunderstand: The Superman titles in the 1990s certainly benefited from “The Death and Return of Superman.” Anecdotal evidence suggests that huge numbers of readers came aboard in 1992, and stayed for much longer than the conclusion of the initial “trilogy.” The books also continued to have some great stories, since they were stacked with top-tier talent like Roger Stern, Louise Simonson, Dan Jurgens, Karl Kesel, Jon Bogdanove, and the late Jackson Guice. But things were never quite the same.
Like Endgame, “The Death and Return of Superman” did such a great job of delivering on various threads left dangling in the years prior, that it felt like the end of an era for its title character. The commercial needs of the books meant that the “end” wasn’t the end, though, and the creative teams had to soldier on.
The nature of comics being what they are, many of the changes introduced by the end of Reign of the Supermen! were eventually undone in the service of later stories. The Eradicator nearly died, and then became an antihero, only to eventually shed any pretense of heroism and return to his villainous roots. The Cyborg Superman has been revived so many times that his canon motivation is now to find a way to die and have peace. Hell, for a while, DC even tried insisting that Superman never really died, but instead entered a kind of Kryptonian stasis.
Live-action movies have to struggle with certain of those elements that the comic books don’t. Steve Rogers can’t tell Marvel Comics, “Hey, I think I’m good with this as a stopping point, boss. Have a nice life.” Chris Evans can. Even if you contrive to bring back the character, replacing a beloved actor is fraught. Sometimes — as in the case of Robert Downey, Jr. and the Russo Brothers — you can lure people back with enough money and promises, but not always. Some of the MC stories that have been wrapped up will be very hard to “unwrap” in order for Marvel’s movies to return to a comfortable status quo.
Further, any attempts to rewrite history will be probably viewed cynically by casual audiences. Since the expectation of the average movie franchise is that dead means dead and over means over, it’s easy to imagine fans saying “Oh, you’re replacing Spider-Man again? Well, how long until we get the next throwback team-up and Tom Holland is back in the saddle?”
Comic book fans are accustomed to retcons and revivals; movie fans are less so. They are probably less likely to invest emotionally in the next X-Men movie when they know the last “new” X-Men franchise was chewed up and spit out, and Patrick Stewart continued to be wheeled out — literally! — decade after decade, in spite of his character having died more than once.
But is there something a little more…positive…that the MCU can take from the Triangle Era?
When the Triangle Era of Superman came to its end, there was a whole new generation of star writers and artists ready to retool Superman and his world for the next generation. It happens so often in comics that many fans see it as an organic process. Even if some fans are sad to see their favorite era go, it is not as jarring as it can be in the movies. Think about how fans have struggled with the reality that they will one day never again see Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine or Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man. MCU fans bought billboards to bring back Robert Downey, Jr. less than a year after Endgame gave him his swan song.
While earlier eras of Superman — and DC more broadly — were loosely defined at best, the post-Crisis DC Universe started something new. The John Byrne years evolved into the “Triangle Era” (or “From Crisis to Crisis” era), and that was probably the longest sustained period of tight continuity that the character will ever see. For somewhere between 10 and 20 years (depending on what you count), Superman had a single, coherent narrative. After it climaxed with “The Death and Return,” it languished for a while, drawing constant criticism. Every big story was unfavorably compared to that inimitable, unique event.
Since then, DC seems to have learned that you can’t keep trying to top yourself in that way. Every new “era” of Superman has been shorter than the Triangle Era. And while singular events might be “bigger” than the Death of Superman in terms of framing from DC, they are sold on their own terms.
That is the lesson Marvel needs to take from this: focus on clear storytelling, character, and stakes… And don’t try to go as big — or bigger — than The Infinity Saga, because that was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 worked not only because of their ties to the “old MCU,” but because James Gunn and company focused on making that one movie all it could be. The scope wasn’t small, per se, but it was as small as you can get when you’re still dealing with a $200 million sci-fi blockbuster. And it seems like that might be where the MCU is heading with smaller, more focused stories like Thunderbolts* and the retro-future quirk of Fantastic Four: First Steps. At least until the next two Avengers sagas hit, starting next year.
So maybe Marvel can learn something from the original superhero: once your “saga” ends (or, if you prefer, “era”), it’s not time to go bigger — it’s time to go smaller, punchier, shorter, and less bloated. You’re not going to top what you previously did. But bringing on new visions and voices (like the writers and artists on comics) will help the MCU thrive for years to come. Up, up, and away.
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