From Overheard in the Newsroom: a conversation about the demise of pay phones.

Editor: “Where would Superman change nowadays?”

Reporter: “Change? Where would he work?”

You might’ve read that Peter Parker recently lost his job as a newspaper photographer. Don’t worry: it’s hardly the first time in Marvel Comics’ history that Spider-Man’s infamous no-good-deed-goes-unpunished luck has cost him his job – and it wasn’t just your typical downsizing, either. (Poor Parker lost his job for doctoring a photo to prove the innocence of his long-time journalistic enemy – and current Mayor of Marvel’s New York City – J. Jonah Jameson.)

But with the growing numbers of doomsayers claiming the real-world newspaper industry is failing, I wondered: can superheroes live without them?

Superheroes and newspapers share some mutual strands of DNA. Newspapers still contain comic strips, of course, and it’s common knowledge that even the term ‘yellow journalism’ was named after a comic that ran in the last years of the 1800s. And superhero comics and newspapers were sold side-by-side for decades, too, until the former became the domain of specialised comic book stores instead.

Peter Parker and the Daily Bugle; Clark Kent and the Daily Planet. The journalistic careers of Spider-Man and Superman’s alter-egos are almost as much a part of their core identities as radioactive spiders and last-minute rockets from other worlds. Heroic reporters aren’t just limited to handy secret identities.

DC Comics has Lois Lane, of course, but she’s never gotten the respect she deserves. It’s partly because she’s always existed first and foremost as a love interest for Superman, but it certainly didn’t help that she was forced to fail to notice that Clark Kent’s real identity for so long.

Marvel has Ben Urich, a reporter who first appeared in 1978. He’s an investigative journalist of the hardboiled school – incessantly smoking, rumpled trenchcoat, code of honour – made more famous in Frank Miller’s legendary run on Daredevil. He’s now the hero of his own occasional series that  offers a behind-the-scenes look at Marvel’s crossover events, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meets All The President’s Men.

What about a tabloid-sponsored superhero? One of the interlocking series that formed DC Comics’ Seven Soldiers ‘mega-series’ in 2005 was The Manhattan Guardian. Taking his superhero identity directly from the newspaper that employs him, ex-cop Jake Jordan agrees to become publicly what others are only in secret: a superheroic reporter. He’s a revamped version of the original 1940’s Guardian, a vigilante who was aided by a group of orphans called – adorably – the Newsboy Legion.

The Manhattan Guardian works because its hero makes obvious the same logic that links superheroes and newspapers. Lois Lane always wondered how Clark got the best Superman stories; cruel irony meant that Peter was providing the photographs used to defame Spider-Man in the Daily Bugle. Superheroes are, almost by definition, where the action is – so who’s better to bring home the scoop?

While writing about superheroes and their relationships to the cities in which they live, theorist Scott Bukatman discusses the connection between Superman’s never-ending battle and Clark’s work at the Daily Planet:

“In a way, then, Superman and his alter-ego, crusading journalist Clark Kent, are fighting the same fight using the same methods: ubiquity, speed, enhanced powers of vision and perception, and incorruptibility.” In fact, Bukatman continues, “in a strong sense, Superman is the mighty newspaper.”

One of my favourite details in DC’s epic Final Crisis series from 2008 was that Superman has an emergency printing press in his Fortress of Solitude. Here, interdimensional villains use electronic media to spread the deadly “anti-life equation” that removes all traces of humanity’s free will. How will superheroes get the news out to the resistance? They become heroic newsboys, spreading the good word one paper at a time.