Comic-book shows ride wave of popularity

NEW YORK — When “The Punisher” made its debut last month on Netflix, it was greeted with a lot of interest and anticipation.

But it arrived to a multitude of similar adaptations — a combined 28 shows across nine broadcast, cable and streaming platforms.

And there’s no end in sight.

Granted, all comic-book shows aren’t created equal. AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” beset by zombies, differs markedly from the teen adventures of Archie Andrews on the CW’s “Riverdale” and from the Amazon superhero spoof “The Tick.”

But most of the shows exist within one of two expansive brands.

One is DC, which, with the midseason arrival of “Black Lightning” on the CW, will be represented by nine shows on three networks. The other is Marvel,

with 13 shows on six outlets — chiefly Netflix, which also hosts a half-dozen of its own.

Combined, the shows yield more spandex outfits than those found in an aerobics class. But before concluding that superheroes have taken over the small screen, a few things are worth noting.

Television has always chased trends: cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows. In fall 1959, more than two dozen Westerns were airing on just three broadcast networks. That would dwarf the current slate of comic-book shows as a percentage of the 500 or so scripted original prime-time series being screened in 2017.

“Comics-related television series have always been a mainstay of television,” said Paul Levinson, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University in New York. “Now it may seem like they’re all over the place. But that’s because there’s television all over the place.”

Even so, an upsurge of comics-based shows in recent years is unmistakable.

Consider the CW, where, without “Smallville” after a decadelong run, no such shows were in its lineup in fall 2011. After a subsequent year-by-year buildup, though, it will boast seven this season.

Along the way, comics-related movies proliferated; and, in October 2010, “The Walking Dead” made clear that a comic-book property could be a TV smash.

By then, the computer-graphics imagery that any superhero show requires had become more sophisticated but was sufficiently affordable for weekly TV productions.

Meanwhile, the launch of more channels, especially streaming platforms with limitless capacity, signaled an ever-escalating need for content.

“With this extraordinary appetite for source material, decades of comic books offered material just waiting to be plucked,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York.

Even better, comic books are perfectly formatted for television.

“A comic book is like a TV storyboard — visual dialogue in frames,” Thompson said. “It’s so perfectly transferable.”

But none of this accounts for audiences’ apparently insatiable hunger for such shows.

“All of it, on some level, is escapism,” said Brett Rogers, classics professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. “If I’m watching ‘Jessica Jones’ for an hour, I’m not dealing with some real thing in my life. But the flip side is that comic-bookinspired shows can be spaces for thinking through some serious questions: ‘Jessica Jones’ is an opportunity to explore sexual violence and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Such shows, like the comics that spawned them, can offer welcome moral clarity in world that’s ever more confounding.

“It’s much easier to identify the heroes and villains, the good guys vs. the bad guys, than it is on other television shows,” Levinson said. “And, by and large, the good characters and heroes endure and triumph over adversity.”

Glen Weldon, a panelist on NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour” podcast, agrees.

“These characters were created as morality tales. They have a primal appeal, a simple appeal,” said Weldon, author of “Superman: The Unauthorized Biography.”

“They represent our best selves. We are meant to look at them and strive to be more like them.”

How long the craze might last is unclear.

“It may ebb as well as flow,” Thompson said, “but I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that this genre will exhaust itself, as others have done, or that viewers will get tired of it. It’s such a versatile genre.