The League of Regrettable Superheroes by Jon Morris

Which isn’t to say that they don’t create regrettable characters (or storylines, for that matter), but they have all the time in the world to eventually tweak them towards respectability. It’s a different type of storytelling for a different era. Modern creators tend to be more controlled, and focused on refining and developing existing characters. Those older creators had the benefit of there being very few rules about what would and wouldn’t work. When they do create a weird or bizarre character, they’re usually doing it intentionally, and with an end goal in mind.īy and large, the Big Two don’t tend to create new characters with the same boundless liberty and exciting, throw-it-against-the-wall mentality as the creators in the Golden Age. And while they may introduce a few hundred new superheroes and supervillains a year, they’ve got the math down pretty well they generally know what they’re aiming for, what will (or at least “might”) sell books, and who their audience is. DC and Marvel own the vast majority of the superhero footprint in comics (and in the public imagination). MORRIS: It definitely was more difficult, if only because the amount of room in modern superhero comics for untested ideas has become so small, and heavily-curated. Was it hard to find modern heroes and villains who were regrettable?

We tend to the think of the Golden Age as the time of the most bizarre characters, and “modern” comics as more grown up and serious. THE BEAT: I was also impressed with how you moved both books into the modern era. Villains are more disposable, I suppose, which makes the really prominent ones even more amazing. I don’t know, this is actually just a guess, but villains seem to get weirder because there’s a safety net in place for them if you have Batman fight an evil chauffeur and a man with all the power of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, and those characters fail to gel with the readership, you can always bring the Joker back in the next issue. Villains can be tried, tested and tossed out, on the other hand, so I think creators tend to experiment more wildly on the bad guys, as a whole.

After all, it is their name on the masthead, and they’re expected to come back in the next issue, which means they sometimes have to move more slowly or more carefully.

JON MORRIS: You’re right that superheroes have the better staying power and, for that matter, I think are more subject to the common tropes about what constitutes a superhero with staying power. THE BEAT: Now that you’ve assembled both the most regrettable superheroes and their villainous counterparts, is either group MORE regrettable? I’ve often noticed that a hero has to have a little bit of staying power but creators like to throw their most bizarre ideas into villains who come and go.

The League of Regrettable Superheroes by Jon Morris