Green Lantern: Rebirth restored the Silver Age Green Lantern Hal Jordan to prominence, taking over from his replacement, Kyle Rayner. We can argue all day if this is a cause of or a result of a shrinking and ageing audience, but there’s a big trend towards classic status quos, especially those dating from the Silver Age. In recent years we’ve seen nostalgia dominate the comic book industry. Either way, I’d argue that Marvels had the same sort of impact. That said, there’s no doubting that the companies somewhat missed what the audience was responding to in those stories: the audience was looking for well-told stories with new and original concepts, rather than mindless brutality and violence. It’s frequently argued that The Dark Knight Returnsand Watchmen inspired the “dark and edgy” period of comic books we got into the nineties (a period which saw the Punisher hold down three simultaneous titles). Marvels showed that there was an audience for this. So Marvel and DC started to tap into that nostalgia of older fans, who remembered when comics were really awesome (as you all know, everything was the BEST when you were 12 – I of course agree with that, because that’s when MOTHER%^&*ING MANIMAL was on!!!!!) and wanted to relive those bygone days without actually re-reading the comics they already had. This coincided with the slow graying of the audience over the past 20 years – comics audiences in the past famously turned over every four years, so the companies didn’t care about repeating themselves, but that’s no longer true, as fans stick with comics as they get older and older and remember precisely which nipple Ogre-Man lost in his fight with The Tabloid! in 1977.
And people who grew up with the characters would love that. They could fill in the blanks, in other words. In the years since Marvels, DC and Marvel realized that they could tell stories about their characters that would fit into their already-established histories. As others have pointed out, the comic book really shaped the way that the two major comic book companies looked at their major properties, and especially what they assumed that comic fans were looking for. However, the impact of the series was far greater than that. Similarly, it seems that Kurt Busiek has become the go-to guy for comic book continuity, scripting a long Avengers run and being trusted by both major companies to handle the Avengers/JLA crossover from a few years back. You can’t pick up any issue for any major comic book issue without an inevitable “Alex Ross variant.” He is literally everywhere, and has developed from an artist into a creative talent (co-plotting series like Kingdom Come and Justice at DC Comics).
The most obvious effect of the series was to make Alex Ross an iconic talent. It’s hard to overstate the impact that the series has had since its initial publication.
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