Article 10: The Revivalist Movement

On the back of ALPHA FLIGHT and INVADERS, another Marvel team book is getting a relaunch - with a completely different concept. But do these makeovers for previously cancelled books ever really work?
27 September 2004

Good news, everyone! They're bringing back NEW WARRIORS!

This will be the third version of the title, and writer Zeb Wells describes it like this:

"The premise is that the New Warriors have trouble getting work, and they hook up with a TV show, like 'Extreme Home Makeover', and when people around the country get menaced by a Z-grade villain, the Warriors zip off in their van and save the day."

Hmm. Actually, I quite like Zeb Wells' work, and this isn't a completely horrible idea. But it does beg the obvious question: why on earth revive a twice-cancelled property like NEW WARRIORS only to nail a completely new idea onto the side? Isn't this, in substance, a completely different premise?

This sort of revival isn't uncommon these days. It's a sign of the ambivalent relationship Marvel and DC have with their back catalogues. Both publishers, although particularly Marvel, seem convinced that they have a back catalogue of cancelled properties of tremendous value. This, after all, is Marvel's standard pitch to investors - look how many characters we have. Since the characters have been deemed to be so very valuable, it follows that there must be ways of exploiting them. Cue bizarre relaunches that try to retool old ideas in a new fashion and, as a general rule, end up as a crumpled heap on the floor.

The problem is that most of the original concepts aren't really all that great to start with. Chances are that's why they got cancelled in the first place. In order to try and turn them into something a little more exciting, the concept ends up being retooled to such an extent that its remaining fans - the only people who gave a toss about the revived brand name in the first place - don't recognise it and reject it.

Marvel churns out books of this kind - STARJAMMERS, with all the X-references removed. VENOM, reinvented as a black puddle of goo that gets involved in slasher stories in the Arctic (very, very slowly). ALPHA FLIGHT, as an almost completely different bunch of characters in a makeshift team appearing in comedy stories. INVADERS, whose entire concept was period superheroics in World War II, reinvented as right-wing superheroes in the war on terror. WARLOCK as... well, god only knows, really. You know, if the concept has to be changed that much in order to make it worth publishing, perhaps it wasn't worth digging up in the first place?

DC's approach tends to be a little different - revivals are either deeply loyal to the original concept, or complete reinventions by Vertigo that seem to take the initial character as little more than a vague inspiration. BEWARE THE CREEPER was a decent enough comic, but god knows what it had to do with the Creeper other than a vaguely similar character design. Since these books tend to sell to Vertigo fans who weren't all that interested in the original character to start with, I've always wondered quite what the point is. Of all the various Vertigo revamps, only SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE was really an updated version of the book it was supposedly based on. (HUMAN TARGET plays off the original concept, but with its oddball plots and identity crises, it's a different book in substance.)

Having said all that, though, from time to time one of these heavily revised titles does turn out to be more successful than the original version. The most obvious example is X-MEN, brought back from five years of reprints in 1975 with an almost completely different cast. Then again, the underlying concept of the book wasn't altered all that much. The basic idea remained intact. Similarly, the late-eighties revival of GHOST RIDER, which proved enormously successful for a few years before burning out, didn't change very much at all; it was just an idea that seemed to have drifted back into synch with the tastes of the day.

For more drastic changes in style, there's always Keith Giffen's JUSTICE LEAGUE, which changed the tone of that book entirely by reinventing it as a comedy title. Of course, by the time that happened, the book had long since drifted from the 'big guns' concept, and recent stories hadn't been up to much. Expectations for the property were no longer high, and the original superhero team concept was still clearly visible; the changes to tone were far more drastic than the changes to concept. SHE-HULK has been far more successful in her 'party girl' incarnation, but then that change was carried out when she was a supporting character in other titles - besides which, the original concept was so weak that it could scarcely get any worse.

There's SANDMAN, I suppose, which nominally originated as a rethink of the original Sandman character. But that book's so far removed from the original that almost everyone treats it as what it really is - a completely new concept.

But these titles are the exception. Presumably publishers like to fall back on old ideas because of the enormous difficulty they seem to find in launching anything new. But that ignores the fact that most of the revived titles crash and burn in equally short order. The only completely new launches that can be relied upon to sell are those with big name creators or enormous quantities of publicity or both.

As with so much that goes on in the North American industry, revivals like this seem to be an attempt to straddle two audiences at once - to offer something new while simultaneously appealing to the mythical core audience of the character. (And if that audience was all that big, the title probably wouldn't have been axed in the first place.) The result is usually an uncomfortable hybrid that pleases nobody. And the frustrating thing is that not only do the revived characters get lost in a mess of new ideas, but often some perfectly good new ideas are being wasted by nailing them onto an old character where they don't fit.

I actually kind of like Wells' idea for down-at-heel superheroes in a reality TV show. But I suspect I'd like it more if it was being done with new characters, rather than dumped onto the New Warriors' entirely separate idea.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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