What were their MySpace like?
all three were edgy and gay.
Just barley, the Sigel and Schuster prototype to superman the super-man would appear in a prose story they'd pen just two years later and there where already pulp heroes and scifi tales published in pulp mags at the same time. Huxley was right in naming his book brave new world, the world of the 1930s was changing almost as fast as our own. Like our own people were abandoning traditional faith and values in favor of mass media and consumerism. The rejection of the traditional finally collapsing in on itself once it inflated too much to support itself.
Ironically within the next 20 years the superhero would lose favor, become rejected once people moved on and wanted something more. We saw a rise in every genre of comics in everything but superheroes. Maybe Hegelian dialects will come into play again once these MCU properties start to bomb and even the normies get tired of trying to follow the marvel movies. let alone deal with the bs wokeness getting pushed in them. who knows?
thats another bit, comics were a lot more like managa, a different one for every taste, it was censorship that really forced only the bland superheros onto the scene, FFS Superman wasn't even the most popular superhero of his day, that was Captain Marvel, and the only reason it didn't stay that way was because the publisher decided to drop the character and superheros altogether because they weren't selling well as comics.
planning on superheroes ruling the entertainment field would be like planning on dogecoin becoming huge back in 2015, even if you were into crypto back then, that certainly wouldn't have been the flavor you'd expect to make it, horror and detective comics were doing much better in the 1950s.
it was only after the batman tv show in the 1960s that superhero comics and superheros as a money making and influential ideal became realized.
I've been wondering that for a while now what will the post-MCU trend look like? Will we go back to westerns? I don't see the MCU going anytime soon, since even if they bomb like Eternals Disney will just say "No they didn't" and put out another one, maybe if WWIII where to break out we will see a decline in superhero movies and an increase in films in the style of Rambo portraying le badass american soldier killing the filthy *insert enemy here* but then again you can do war propaganda with superheroes.
So how long until Biden announces "The Dimensional Merge is On!" ?
I think it won't die a notable death like you're expecting, the MCU and superheros will just transition to tv, there won't be a dominant trend because the money won't be there for such a thing. the DC films have budgets much lower than they did ever before. i can see Marvel doing the same, it will be like how the 2000s had crime shows and reality shows, they'll still be around and popular enough to still be a thing they just won't be the zeitgeist.
i think we'll just have more slice of life stuff, you have to remember movies are basically dead because the studios have normalized the concept that anything they release in theaters will be on streaming for free in 6 weeks. and the lack of reliance on international and china means they literally won't have the budget to pull off videogames or anime, unless they do it with jap-tier special effects.
it also makes sense, during the 1970s stagflation high budget films were replaced with lower budget new hollywood crap. so i'm sure we'll see a return to that only because of diversity. the films we watch will just look like higher budget BET films. superhero films will still be on top but they won't make 3 billion dollars, but under 1 billion, and it will cost $100 to see them in theaters.
