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From grim n gritty to light n brighty? Are super hero comics changing tone again?

As promised, we’ll look at Marvel’s coming Heroic Age and now DC’s announced Brightest Day. It’s getting a lot of press and certainly looks like the culmination of a slowly percolating campaign to move from “grim n gritty” comics back to “light n brighty” (as Rich Johnston called it, spread the word, he wants us to) comics. Now that’s all well and good but I have to ask the fundamental question: Why does this always seem to need to be an A or B discussion?

I’m not the first one to ask the question though, Steven Grant asked it before me in Permanent Damage, and already expounded on the issue pretty well. It’s just another example of the enforced and rigid way super hero comics are done and to be honest? I’m tired of it. I’m long past tired of it. This is a genre that has been in existence since 1938. Yet the industry couldn’t figure out an alternate way to do super heroes after the great sanitizing of the early 40’s (not familiar with what I’m talking about? Go check out early Superman and Batman stories and look at the body counts those two would occasionally wrack up) until Alan Moore in the early 80’s. Even then the alternative was “let’s do the exact opposite of light and bright…do dark and grit”. Now this is not me railing against that attitude as many have and did. In certain instances it was a great way to go. It brought us Batman work that brought the character back closer to his roots. It gave us Watchmen. The thought process has ultimately lead us to the excellent Dark Reign at Marvel, and the very good Blackest Night at DC. But hey, I get it. Dark Reign is the story of a villain (Norman “The Green Goblin” Osborn) getting Nick Fury like power and running roughshod over the heroes with his pack of villainous Dark Avengers and his deals with criminals like The Hood. There are moments though I think of some genuine complexity in that Norman isn’t necessarily doing evil for the sake of doing evil. He’s doing evil for the sake of the greater good. Blackest Night is digging up every dead DC hero and turning them on their friends and loved ones in an effort to eradicate all life in the universe. It’s literally life vs. death, and even the bastion of all that is good and right, the Superman of the 1940’s has been claimed by the villains. You just can’t find grimmer or grittier then this. It’s played out past this point as an overarching “way of doing business”.