How Many Batmans Are There? (Availability Bias in Familiarity)

How Many Batmans Are There?

We often like something simply because it is familiar. A song may not objectively be that good, but we’ve heard the melody so many times that we’re not challenged when we listen to it. We can easily tap our foot and anticipate what is to come. Recognizable melodies make for easy engagement, which is one reason most unknown bands play at least a few cover songs when they perform on Thursdays at the local bar. Even if we don’t recognize the band, and even if the performance has different elements, the familiarity of popular melodies increases the chances we’ll stay and listen.

Many comic book characters are iconic and, over the years, become familiar much the way melodies do. Regardless of whether we like them, most of us have heard of Batman, Wonder Woman, and Iron Man. Although they appear in movies and television, as well as on countless products, these characters all got their start in comics. And whether Spider-Man is played by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, or Tom Holland, you go to each franchise reboot knowing the main storyline. The actors change, MJ gets updated, new villains are fought, but the basic Spider-Man melody is still there.

DC Comics was the first company to dominate the market, with characters like Superman and Batman. These superheroes were the protagonists of comic books, visual stories printed on cheap paper and sold at newsstands. Marvel Comics came along in the 1960s, with characters like Spider-Man and Captain America, and gradually took over the lead in terms of sales of comic books. Yet over time, the demands of the medium have led to an underlying, unchanging refrain in the stories about their iconic characters. Right from the early days, in the 1930s and ’40s, there was an expectation from readers of a new comic book every few weeks. The superheroes would have new adventures, and readers, mostly children, would pay a few cents to follow the characters. But the competition that developed between DC and Marvel drove comic book output to incredible heights. In 1962 alone, DC released 343 individual comics.[12]

The pressure to put out new, visually engaging, and fresh material was intense. Editors were always searching their company’s archives to see which characters they could revive. For example, DC’s the Flash, whose original solo series had been canceled in 1949, came back in 1959 with a new series.[13] In the 1960s, DC also launched its Justice League comic, which was another way to meet output demands. Characters in the Justice League, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, had individual series, and then they would work together in the Justice League series—no new characters required.

Marvel used the same strategy of recycling characters. As journalist Reed Tucker describes in his book Slugfest, when an artist fell behind in his work in 1963, “[Stan] Lee was forced to go to plan B. Taking a page from DC’s playbook, Lee tossed together members of the company’s existing superhero roster into one powerful team, just like the Justice League. Using existing characters saved him and artist Jack Kirby from having to come up with brand-new ones and allowed the issues to be completed more quickly so it made it to the printer in time.”[14]

Publishing deadlines meant that creative teams at both Marvel and DC didn’t always have the space to think up completely new characters. Instead, tight turnarounds could leave an editor succumbing to the availability bias. Tucker tells this story of one attempt at a brand-new character: “Gerber intended Wundarr as an homage to Superman, but in this case the line between homage and simply borrowing everything about Superman to meet your deadline was blurred.”[15]

To compete in the market, comics needed to be released frequently. One possibility was to take the same characters and insert them into major new plotlines. But if you’re going to give Wonder Woman a new series of comics, you have to keep the elements that make her Wonder Woman. The melody must be maintained. In the 1970s, both DC and Marvel stepped up production demand by starting yearly comic book “event” issues. Events were based around a “big important story that was perceived to matter more than the now-pedestrian yarns that filled the books month after month.” Tucker further explains that “in a few years events would become so frequent that they would begin to lose their cachet. After all, when everything is an event, nothing is.”[16]

The events drove the phenomenon of character recycling to new levels. Characters normally appear within a series, and each issue of a series is numbered. Issue #1 marks the start of a series, which may feature an established character. There was not, however, time for many brand-new characters. In 1990 Marvel launched a “new Spider-Man title—Marvel’s fourth starring the webslinger.”[17] There are quite a few “Spider-Man #1s.” Batman, being almost twenty-five years older than Spider-Man, has been revamped so many times that it’s hard to imagine how else his story can be told. Familiar versions retain the costume, Bruce Wayne’s identity, and the troubled inner life he shares with his long-standing servant. Tucker states, “Titles are started so often with a new #1 that the number has basically lost its currency. Wolverine, Marvel’s popular mutant hero, has had his title restarted three times since 2010 alone.”[18]

Once in a while, one of the comics companies produces completely original characters in a brand-new storyline. For example, DC released Watchmen in 1986, and it has remained popular. Tucker writes of this dark comic for an older audience, “DC was playing a longer game, attempting to elevate the medium and have a shelf life longer than four weeks.”[19] However, this is the exception, not the norm. Most comics feature characters that we’ve seen many times and that have been revamped continually in order to sell books to an increasingly smaller hard-core audience.

A recognizable character gives creators something to build on and readers a reason to return. Under a tight deadline, starting with that familiar material can be an attractive choice.