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This panel...
is the beginning of the end.
The end of what? The end of innocence -- or at least, or genre blindness -- in comic books.
Genre blindness, as any fan of the TV tropes wiki knows, is the obliviousness that characters have toward the conventions of their own genre of fiction. Horror characters always head toward suspicious noises instead of away from them, rom-com characters deem endearing the kinds of stalker behavior that a real person would get a restraining order against, and DeGrassi students never notice that every time they say "whatever it takes", they are doomed to some horrible fate, failure, or embarrassment.
DeGrassi's "Drew"
I'm guessing that in this case "whatever it takes" would be
about three pomegranate cosmos
and a promise not to tell anyone the morning after.
As the flux capacitor is to time travel, so is genre blindness to genre fiction.
For decades, comic books pretty faithfully inked between the lines of their own genre blindness. Villains created death-traps rather than just sniping a hero, supporting characters saw nothing odd about middle-school kids spending their nights fighting gun-toting gangsters on rooftops, and heroes just assumed the villain must have drowned when he fell in the Nearby Natural Body of Water.
Yup. That's right, Robin;
we'll never see that pesky "Joker" fellow, again.
Genre blindness was nearly absolute in comics. Until...
a police detective decided to act like a real police detective.
Barry Allen, forensics expert, decides
to follow a line of supply to locate a suspect.
Oh, everyone makes fun of Barry. Lord knows I do. He's a milquetoast, he's a geek, he's totally whipped by the ultimate shrew, Iris "Just Plain Mean" Allen.
And yet, Barry Allen is the DC man who sets trends, breaks boundaries, and flouts all rules.
Who led the return of superheroes to the front of comicdom and started the Silver Age? Who actually crossed the line and killed his archenemy? Who routinely flouted all laws of physics, even beyond the normal "accepting the superpower as real" rule, in nearly every story? Barry Allen.
Sorry, folks. We all love the Big Three, but on the whole they don't set trends, they just reflect them.
You never saw Barry Allen going in for this sort of pop-culture folderol;
Superman simply does not know shame.
As far as the medium goes, "the Trinity" simply aren't leaders. Conceptual innovation usually starts with edgier, less valuable properties, and spreads upward. That's a thesis we may very well explore later.
Certainly, the Trinity didn't blaze any trails away from Genre Blindness. Heck, they embraced Genre Blindness like a warm blanky. Genre blindness requires them to ignore the fact that, hey, those purple suits, and cat-shaped planes, and killer umbrellas.? The villains must get them somewhere; if we can figure that out we'd have a lead on finding them.
What would the Big Three do to find their enemies? Batman would have put a fake notice in the newspaper about the priceless Van Landorpf emerald being on public display as a way to lure the Joker/Penguin/Catwoman out into the open. Superman would have left Lois or Jimmy find the foe, probably by getting attacked. Wonder Woman -- oh, heck, she would have been off marching with the Holliday Girls, don't fool yourself. Nazis can't resist attacking all-girl college marching bands. A lot of guys are like that, actually.
It was Barry "the Flash" Allen who decided to take a more 'real-word' approach to finding his foes. Barry Allen just asked the same kind of question the police might ask in the real world: where did the crook get that wacky one-of-a-kind outfit? They must have bought them somewhere and if we can find out where, we can trace our way to the perp.
What do you think?
