I have more conversations about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark with folks who don’t read comics than with folks inside the hobby and business. Part of that, I suspect, is because I’m not very plugged into the comics world these days. But part of it is also because the show’s talent, spectacle, and travails are intriguing — yet “comics people” already know, in a way others might not stop to realize, that Dark has little to do with comics at all.
Poster © 2011 Marvel Entertainment. Art/Design: Unknown.
Spider-Man comics, as well as the in-revival Spider-Man movie franchise and general merchandising, will be fine no matter what happens on stage. Neither Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film nor the Christopher Nolan takes in 2005 and 2008, all of which were blockbusters, had any appreciable affect on comics readership except in ancillary fashion: The long-running Batman animated series that launched on Fox in 1992, now one of the most definitive and well-respected versions of the Dark Knight mythos, was influenced by — even more to the point, made attractive to Fox and Warner Bros. by — the 1989 film’s success and the 1992 release of Batman Returns. Many of the creative personnel of that series worked on comics set in the animated continuity (yes, it’s art imitating art imitating art) for DC, and Harley Quinn, created as The Joker’s gun moll especially for the show, was eventually introduced into the mainstream Batman comics. In terms of brand awareness through DVD sets and related items like toys, Halloween costumes, and not-quite-comics storybooks, more kids might have been introduced to Batman than would have had Bruce Timm and friends’ string of animated series from the Caped Crusader’s to the action-figure bonanza Justice League Unlimited not been such a success, but the films themselves didn’t drive adult moviegoers to comics shops; a Spider-Man musical is going to interest a larger number of comics readers in Broadway than it will Broadway regulars in comics, and that number will be small.
