Burying Dead Media

An exchange on X the other day caught my eye:

Richard’s comment went beyond a hot take. It cut straight to the heart of the cultural malaise afflicting our age.

The superhero industrial complex is out of gas, and no amount of reboots, heel turns, or multiverse retcons will refill the tank.

But the problem is broader than cape flicks. The comic book, the television show, and the feature film were all products of the twentieth century. They emerged from a unique set of technological and cultural circumstances that no longer exist.

We live in a new world, but the West’s cultural gatekeepers are still trying to wring blood from the fossilized corpse of last-century media.

Superhero comics once thrived as cheap entertainment for kids who could grab them from drugstore spinner racks. That retail model went out with the rack jobbers. The direct market that replaced it in the 1980s collapsed decades later under the weight of gimmicks and predatory publishing. Marvel and DC, rather than facing reality, hitched their wagons to Hollywood. That Faustian deal marked the end of comics as a living medium and the start of their unlife as IP farms.

Television met a similar fate. The network triumvirate that had reigned since the 1950s shattered in the 80s under the lash of cable, which was itself dethroned by streaming. Now even Netflix and Disney+ are faltering. The TV medium can no longer sustain the costs of production; not because the old ad-driven model stopped working, but because it never did, and digital technology exposed the con.

Cinema fared no better. The old studio system had already collapsed by the 1970s. Sure, the blockbuster arms race launched by Jaws and Star Wars produced hits for decades, but it also created the conditions for Hollywood’s current implosion. When every film has to be a billion-dollar tentpole, the whole medium becomes a fire sale to the lowest common denominator. The result is gray slop no one can relate to.

We’re watching the twilight of the big three media that defined twentieth-century mass entertainment. They now exist only as grotesque parodies of their former glory.

The best evidence of collapse is the Pop Cult’s obsession with reanimation. Look at Marvel Studios. The Infinity Saga ended in 2019. Every project since then has been an attempt to recapture the magic. It hasn’t worked. Each new MCU product has been dead on arrival.

DC has fared even worse. Its endless attempts to build a shared universe have all collapsed into incoherence. James Gunn’s promise to fix it with yet another reboot was either a deliberate insult or gross ignorance of the fact that audiences have seen Superman’s origin story a dozen times.

Hollywood as a whole is addicted to necromancy. The nostalgia treadmill never stops. Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings; the past is strip-mined until they break through the roof of Hell.

This IP necromancy is to pop culture what inflation is to currency. You can only keep printing nostalgia for so long before the audience realizes the product is worthless.

But if last-century media are dead, what replaces them?

The temptation to try and salvage the wreckage runs strong. But resuscitating comics, television, and cinema is a fool’s errand. Those forms are dependent on long-obsolete technological and cultural paradigms.

The proper response is not to patch the old but to build the new.

We stand at a technological turning point as significant as the printing press or the telegraph. Digital distribution has demolished the gatekeepers’ monopoly. The big houses and studios no longer own the channels of communication. Authors, artists, and musicians can reach audiences directly, worldwide, in an instant. The possibilities are staggering.

Here are just a few examples:

• Serialization via Royal Road: Pulp stories thrived in the early twentieth century through serialized magazines. The update of that model has migrated online. Platforms like Royal Road let writers publish episodic fiction directly to readers in real time. Authors can refine their craft while building audiences without middlemen.

• Visual Novels: Once a niche Japanese format, visual novels have gone worldwide thanks to digital storefronts. They merge the strengths of prose, art, and interactivity in a way no comic or film can. The result isn’t just a new format; it’s a new medium.

• Audiobooks on YouTube: Some authors now release entire novels as videos with ambient sound, music, and visual accompaniment. YouTube, dismissed as a distraction platform, is becoming a literary distribution channel.

Each of these new media represents not just a new way to deliver old stories, but the possibility of telling stories that could never have existed in print or on film. Interactivity, real-time reader engagement, and hybridization of text and multimedia are all new additions to twenty-first century creators’ toolkits.

The hardest step for creators and audiences alike will be breaking our addiction to nostalgia. It’s comforting to think that if we just get one more good Batman story, one more decent Star Wars movie, one more faithful Lord of the Rings adaptation, our problems will be over. But those franchises are spent. Their cultural moment has passed.

The cure for nostalgia inflation is not to exhume the dead but to birth the new. That means daring to tell stories that have never been told in forms that haven’t yet been tried. It means making peace with the death of twentieth-century pop culture and looking forward instead of backward.

We don’t need another cape franchise reboot. We need the next great myth that could only exist in the digital age.

No more nostalgia-inflated blockbusters. No more Netflix desecrations of classic literature. We need formats that blend text, image, and interactivity in ways we’ve barely begun to explore.

The verdict has already been rendered. Comic books, television, and movies as the West knew them in the last century are dead media. They may twitch and rattle for a while, propped up by nostalgia inflation and corporate inertia, but their time has passed.

The good news is that the creative horizon is wide open. Technologies that killed the old forms have given rise to new ones. Serialization platforms, interactive novels, and multimedia storytelling are the frontiers where the next generation of myths will be wrought.

The only question left is whether artists will have the courage to stop playing Weekend at Bernie’s with Batman and instead risk everything to create art no one has seen before.

Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.

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