Secret Origins: The Story of D.C. Comics Film Review

Comic book characters have taken over the world as we know. In my opinion to a ridiculous degree but we all loved comics growing up and this very nice documentary tells us how we got here - with a focus on DC comics (originally called Detective Comics) but also about the comic book industry. It is pretty interesting how they have gone up and down over the decades. You have to wonder when or if this phase we are in now will ever dissipate. Will people finally just have too much of it. I have to some degree and there are a bunch of the super-hero movies I have zero interest in seeing with Thor, Doctor Strange, The Eternals and Venom leading the pack - though I still have an appetite for another Wonder Woman film if some one fixes it, Shang-chi, The Black Widow if they can bring her back to life and of course Zebraman from Japan.

When Superman first came out in comic form in the late 1930s it was gangbusters and tons of other superheroes were soon on the shelves of America. In WW2 they fought along with the boys but then came the 1950s. What a decade. They just wanted to take all the fun away. The McCarthy hearings, the Red Scare and going after Hollywood, Eisenhower and Nixon, hiding under our desks for when the bomb came - and they came down on comics and almost put them out of business. They actually had Congressional hearings about how they were corrupting the morals of minors and parents were up in arms. The comic book industry had to go along with the mood and started producing all these Archie type comics, the super hero vanished or were domesticated. Super Man was running errands for Lois Lane who was home cooking. Wonder Woman was called a terrible role model for females and domesticated.

Then in 1961 DC comics came out with a new version of the Flash and then Green Lantern and they were huge - Marvel followed with the Fantastic Four and comics were back, That is when I started collecting them. I loved being sick back then because my mother would go to the store and bring back every comic on the rack. 10 cents back then. She also of course threw them all out when we moved. Comics went through other slow periods but the writers and artists kept adapting to the times. Graphic comics made their appearance and gave the super heroes a dark ambiguous personality - that still is with us to some degree. But the big money is movies and TV and that may never end. This tells the story well with a less than critical eye. Most of the talking heads are in or were in the biz. They love comic books.. Just seeing the photos of the old comic books - of super heroes long gone was very cool. I still have that boy lying in bed with a load of comics on the floor to choose from inside me.