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As president, publisher, and chief creative officer of DC, Jim Lee oversees a huge line of titles featuring a variety of characters, though Lee himself says that, in some ways, there can be too many options for fans to dig into.

While speaking to the Masterplan podcast, Lee reminisces on his days as an early superhero fan in the '60s and '70s, when it was harder to keep up with comics and movie and TV adaptations were scarce at best. Though he doesn't call for any kind of reduction in superhero media, he does state his opinion that the large amount of available material makes fans more willing to dismiss material that creators truly cared about making.

"I think when you have fewer choices, you value each choice more. If you are starved of food, when you finally have a meal, it's gonna taste the best that it ever could. When you have a buffet of endless food, you eat something and go 'Meh, that's OK,' and you move onto the next thing. I think that's kind of where we're at with pop culture," Lee explains. "People put their hearts and souls into telling stories, whether it's a comic book, or a big feature film, and people just consume it and move onto the next thing, cause there's so much. In some ways there's almost too much, in my opinion."

It does seem like there has been something of a cultural shift in the attitude of fans about what they see as the waxing and waning of the relative quality of the superhero stories being told in film and TV in particular. From the perspective of someone who has covered the comic industry for nearly 20 years, that seems like the natural course of comic based media and even comic books themselves. We've all had times when we couldn't get enough of a certain character or story, and when we've felt disconnected from most of what we're reading.

"Back then there was more scarcity, but you loved everything you got," Lee says. "You were appreciative of it, cause you don't know when the next thing would come out or when you might have another opportunity to see yet another cool science fiction movie, or TV show, or comic book."

Even growing up in the '80s and '90s during the fabled speculation boom, it was still something of a tight community, meeting at local comic shops to share their favorite books, trade knowledge, and enjoy some friendly debate about whether the Hulk could beat up Superman. 

2026 is set to be one of the biggest years for superhero movies in quite some time with Supergirl and Spider-Man both hitting theaters this summer followed by Avengers: Doomsday in December.

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