DBWI: No mafia involvement in the comic-book industry

Like it says on the tin. The American comics industry remains free of mob influence.

And please please PLEASE, can we keep the jokes about Stan Lee's disappearance to a minimum?
 
My limited understanding of the basic history -- in the Golden Age, gangsters were more or less go to bad guys for a number of popular costumed heroes, before they started disappearing from comic book pages entirely starting in the late 40's, early 50's; in the Silver Age, organized crime and street gangs didn't exist as far as the DC Universe, Marvel, and other major titles were concerned; then there was that Spider-Man issue in 1970, Stan Lee gets press for it, disappears to even more press, and by 1972 comic book heroes are "tackling the issue", with what could be called maturity, tact, or what have you... if only compared to "mob-exploitation", the hyper-graphic villainization we started to see in the mid-80's and became infamous in the 90's.

So what would happen if the mafia never got involved in comics in the first place? Well, I suppose we'd have a longer "Golden Age" of comics -- Superman would remain an immigrant who fights slumlords instead of becoming a nonsensical series about antics with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen; Batman would fight mobsters with guns instead of giving us stuff like Bat Monkey or Shark Repellent Spray; and Marvel would be different in their own ways.
 
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as @John Fredrick Parker says maybe that butterfly away the supervillain boom alongside the 'foreing infiltrator' who was popular since 50's and got their zenith thanks to Mccarthy and the HUAC? that is a big butterfly itself.
 
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