(Sorry for multiple posts; I'm still reading the proposal now.)

...The memory of which is what many political analysts consider was a not-too-minor source of lost votes for Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential elections. Had Tipper minded her own busines and kept her big fat mouth shut, the number of voters who were not of voting age when the "Tipper Tantrums" were being foisted on musicians on Capitol Hill - where Frank Zappa's finest hour was shown live on C-Span - would not have been soured against the idea of Tipper being the First Lady, and there wouldn't have been quite enough chads in Florida to have kept Al Gore from winning.

...The lesson learned was one that candidates have known for the past couple of centuries: the wives should be seen and not heard, especially if they're dumber than a box of rocks.

...The whole idea of Billy becoming a sex dwarf didn't sit well with DC at the time, but when you consider that DC turned SuperBOY-Prime into a psychotic mass-murderer, has a somewhat-closeted lesbian Batwoman, and for a while had Hal Jordan as much a psychotic mass-murderer as Prime...well, let's just say that Twilight would have been a better crossover series than the one they're currently running. And probably would, if Alan Moore wasn't being such a pompous ass towards the Big Two over really petty issues.

Captain Marvel had a TV show in the 70's. I would imagine there'd be people who remember the character by the 80's.

Though I'm still not completely sure that Twilight would result in any real trouble for DC. Comic industry big shots are understandably cautious regarding their icons (Jim Shooter would not let Peter Parker have a bastard child, for instance), but comic books are a very ghettoized media, and were back in the 1980s too, even though they sold a lot more back then.

It's a funny situation in that characters like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man are in blockbuster movies and TV shows, but the comics themselves have a lot less impact than we comic book fans would like.

I dunno, Omar. I think I just have trouble picturing society at large (in the 1980s or now) making such a fuss over any comic books, no matter how outrageous their content.

But we'll never know for sure what effects Twilight might have had.

Also, the quality of the actions the character performs differ in key respects. Superman in DKR is a government stooge, but in the end a decent (if dangerously naive) fellow who lets Batman stay underground with a wink and a smile. He's recognizably a wrong-headed good guy. Incest and tyranny are far harder to spin that way, especially when the story's own solution is to treat the iconic superpeople as irredeemable and kill them off accordingly. There's also that traditionally American mode of double standard, the one in which prolix and grotesque violence is far more permissible than supposedly (and, in the case of incest, actually) deviant sexuality.

We should all recall that the 1980s was a more censorious time than our own memories of Madonna's provocations and Alan Moore's groundbreaking Swamp Thing work would reflect. I namedropped Ed Meese, then-Attorney General of the United States, who commissioned and filed a report on the effect of pornography on society that ran to nearly 2,00 pages...and reached the expected condemnatory conclusions. It wasn't restricted to one side of the political aisle, either -- Tipper Gore helped launch PMRC, a ratings board for popular music with aspirations of outright censorship. The fact that most adults Tipper's age weren't listening to Motley Crue and Public Enemy didn't prevent the RIAA from being pressured into adding warning labels, a move whose effects have been significantly far-reaching. (Ask yourself why Wal-Mart carries censored versions of albums the PMRC-inspired ratings system deems obscene.)

DC at this time was slapping "Mature Readers" labels on material as it was, to the point that Moore got fed up and left. How would one label a newsstand copy Twilight tie-in issue of Action Comics or The Flash? And if the solution is to avoid the newsstand books, then in what way was Twilight suitable as a line-wide crossover? I can see exactly why DC rejected the story, and frankly I tend to think of it as a quite sound and culturally informed business decision, albeit that it's certainly a case of business interests getting in the way of a potentially quite interesting bit of art.

Comics like Watchmen and Dark Knights return did indeed fly under the radar -- they were Direct Market only, they were miniseries, and they were marketed in a fashion that made it clear to whom they were targeted. The problem with a massive crossover is that it ties in with most of the books for sales purposes, or it's not worth doing. Targeted marketing and clear labeling seem at cross purposes to the 1980s crossover format as far as sales purposes go. And let's face it, a crossover is a sales gimmick first and foremost.

Again, the key to me seems to be a sort of perfect storm of three elements: the use of characters more popularly known than the relative obscurities in the genuinely rough stuff during the 1980s maturation of the genre; the fact that this would be a line-wide crossover tying into newsstand comics and thus gaining visibility beyond the confines of the ghettoized comic-book shop; and last but not least, the significant difference between Twilight as a prominent pan-DC storyline and publishing initiative and those famous mature readers works exaggerating the traits and qualities the heroes already possess for satiric purposes (DKR) or deconstructing inventions and obscurities (Green Arrow; Watchmen).

Why would Superman the Future Benign Tyrant get people in arms when Superman the Future Pathetic Government Stoogie didn't? Do you think Twilight would get a lot more coverage than Dark Knight Returns did? They're both stories of possible futures.

And while the incestuous marriage of the Marvels is more explosive, I wonder if the world out there would really have cared? Is Captain Marvel such a household name among people who never cracked open a comic book?

I still think people are unconsciously transposing today's attitudes to 1987, and also transposing their own reactions? ("If I find such material repulsive, then the public will do too").

Or maybe I'm wrong, maybe today's attitudes are even more blasé than they were back then. Some comic industry execs and fans are always worrying about such things, but sometimes I think that you could have Superman sodomizing Luthor in a comic, and as long as the scene itself weren't shown graphically, only alluded to, the big world out there that doesn't read comics would only shrug, and there would be a snickering note in some news programs, and we'd have a few concerned mothers, but the big organized family values groups would be too worried about television or videogames.

And that is Superman. If it's Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman they'd care less.

Superman stories get noticed -- the Death of Superman, and before it John Byrne' relaunch got a fair bit of mainstream press coverage. (Byrne's Superman even made the cover of Time Magazine.)

Plus Twilight, unlike Watchmen, was intended to be a line-wide crossover -- the non-direct-market books would be participating as well, titles like Action Comics and Batman. That's going to be noticed in a way a subplot in Teen Titans, a comic most people have never heard of (at least prior to the recent anmated series) wouldn't be.

It has nothing to do with Silver Age retro nostalgia, which we agree post-dates this era. It has much to do with a fairly long and fairly apparent history of public and popular reactions to supposedly "adult" uses of certain widely-known and falsely-recalled characters.

In any case, that's not the only problem that would accrue to Twilight as proposed. I'm not sure entirely how to read your "in this, I disagree" with regard to the other points I made, but as your prior response was quite thought-provoking even if I disagreed with it in the end, I'd be interested to read your thoughts on other aspects of the Twilight proposal and its potential audience reception at the time.

In this, I very much disagree with Omar Karindu. While there was a portion of the readership that could have been called "old-fashioned" in the 1980s, their voices were pretty much drowned out by all those that were eager to see anything Alan Moore or Frank Miller would do to stretch the limits of the genre. Back then, sympathetic gray-haired villain Deathstroke being in a illicit sexual relationship with 16-year old Terra was seen as bold characterization by Wolfman and Perez, today it would have called for Wolfman to be arrested as sympathetic to pedophilia, but back then it was seen as cool, and I don't remember concerned parents or old-fashioned fans calling for Wolfman's head and instuting a new Comics Code because there was pedophilia in DC Comics's best-selling book.

I wouldn't say we are more prudish or conservative today, but I say that today it's accepted for people discussing comics and movies to voice conservative oppinions without being labeled as tragically uncool. It's the retro-movement I talked about earlier, that only gathered steam after the mid-1990s. While protective feelings over the Silver Age were always there, they only became a force to be reckoned with among fandom after the mid-1990s. Back then, they appeared as the lone, unloved letter in a letercol full of other letters praising the boldness and the "comics aren't for kids" aspects of the revolution.

It is disturbing to think that someone could describe a very drear, unflattering future for a team like the Metal Men, and then say something to the effect of getting some "darkly comic stuff out of them"... And this was his proposal for a major crossover event. Wow.

I think if that story ever sees print, especially as a mainstream DCU story, it will be the end of my purchasing comics. That's not the type of characterization I would love to see in ANY story, much less a comic book.