House Styles

Back when I started reading comics in 2nd grade, the art contained within was all pretty similar. Even though the gap between Dan Jurgens and Neil Adams is admittedly gigantic, you would be hard-pressed to deny that there isn't at least a little commonality there. From the golden age onward, that was just how you drew superheroes. A “house style” one might call it. If you wanted a unique visual take on things, you had to turn to the independent books like Madman, Love & Rockets and Mage. And then there was the Image Comics revolution.

Though founded by mainstream artists working in the conventional style, Image’s emphasis on “creator owned” books lead to them embracing a lot of the more unconventional voices out there in comics. Thanks to their open submission policy, you suddenly had manga and indie inflected art turning up in books that got shelf space right next to “the big two” of Marvel and DC. Of course it was only a matter of time before these unorthodox voices found their way into the mainstream as well. Now when I walk around my local comic shop, I see all sorts of styles ranging from the deliberately paced David Aja on Hawkeye, to the pop art inflected Mike Allred on Silver Surfer, to the street-art stylings of Ron Wimberly in the pages of She-Hulk. Today a superhero book can look like ANYTHING! Yet sadly, the same cannot be said for superhero movies.

Rather than embracing the visual diversity inherent in their comics, Marvel and DC have both opted to hold true to that old-fashioned “house style” mentality for their cinematic universes. DC is dark and brooding, Marvel is bright and playful. I assure you that if Jeremy Renner ever gets to star in a Hawkeye movie, you will not find any of the ground-level, every-day simplicity that made the Hawkeye comic a hit. And even though the “New 52” incarnation of Batman has embraced a bright color pallet (complete with healthy doses of pink and purple) you will find those colors sadly absent from the monochrome Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I get that both companies are spending billions on large interconnected universes where characters from one film can pop up in another, but do they think we just won’t “get it” unless all the films look the same? I don’t know about you, but I’m perfectly capable of accepting the fact that Captain America looks one way in his own book, and slightly different when he pops up in someone else’s book. No cognitive dissonance here. Give your fans a little bit more credit. If a firmly entrenched institution like super hero comics can change its aesthetics to more accurately reflect the full range of the human experience, why can't our super hero movies do the same?