Dominic wrote:But, carrying on about how the bad movie is ruining what came before is another. If you are the type (like me) who tends to link one part of a series to another, then you can simply move on. (I have still not quite gotten over "Spider-Man: The Clone Saga". Seriously, I still cannot read a 616 "Spider-Man" comic without having some association with that god-awful two years worth of comics ~20 years ago.)
See, this is just silly. Those comics are by completely different writers with, I presume, a whole other set of editors behind them. That era’s Spider-Man comics and today’s Spider-Man comics are linked by the fact that they have Spider-Man on the cover and little else, it’d be like expecting a football team today to play horribly because the version of the team from twenty years ago (with completely different players and coaching staff) was terrible.
Along this line, I’m currently reading and loving Scarlet Spider, a series starring Kaine. Kaine! One of THE worst characters to come out of the Clone Saga, and endemic of everything wrong with characters created in the 90’s. But Yost takes the few interesting things from Kaine’s past that he can make work for his story (primarily the thing about how he used to be a supervillain) and just kind of disregards all the other stupid convoluted bullshit. And the result is a great book.
But yeah, it only dawned on me this morning that my favorite thing on the shelf stars Kaine. I wonder if this is what Scourge went through when he realized he was reading and enjoying Venom and Punisher books.
Why the hell should I piss away time on comics that are not really going anywhere? Why should I waste time reading a comic that is trying to change so little that it is actively trying to pretend that crudely illustrated and written junk from 30 or more decades ago is still relevant? Hell, even when the old content is good, why should I bother with a comic that is trying to piggy-back on work that was done so long ago rather than doing something new and (just maybe) better?
I have been reading comics for over a quarter century. I would be okay reading them for at least that long again. But, I will be damned if I want to be reading the same comics at that point that I am reading now.
I am not reading for the characters. I am not reading comics because I love the universe or somesuch. I am reading comics because I like comics. Maybe if JSA had actually stuck to some kind of legitimately progressing story (even since the 90s), I would be more upset to see it go. (Seriously, how many times were Garrick, Scott and some of the others de-aged?) Maybe if the guys who were fighting crime the 1940s actually aged, died and were replaced, seeing the book end would matter. But, that is not what JSA has been, ever.
This bit confuses me and almost seems hypocritical to a degree. You say you want to read comics that are ‘going somewhere’, but what do you mean by that? Do you just want changes in the status quo to stick? Because that sort of thing hardly seems important, in my eyes. Honestly, wording it that way makes it sound like you just wanna see ‘stuff happen’. I know you read for ideas, and here you’re claiming that you do not read for characters or universes, but when you say you want to see ‘progression’ and ‘changes sticking’ it sounds like you’re saying you want to invest in watching the progression and development of fictitious characters in a fictitious universe, which is…just as inconsequential as said fictitious characters not making any progress in a universe that never changes. It’s all fiction in the end anyway, and a writer can conceivably make just as good a point or bring just as interesting an idea to the table with a character who was recently rebooted to an earlier spec as one who’s been through lots of Big Changes in the past few years of events. Why should the mounting pretend history driving a storybook world matter, especially to a reader like you?
Honestly, this whole point is kind of tough for me to articulate, but you’re saying you want comics that ‘will matter’ and so forth, but they’re all disposable fiction in the end, so none of them really ‘matter’, so are you basically just wanting a story that ‘lasts longer’ and keeps its elements relevant to its own storytelling for longer? Because that’s actually close to what Anderson, as well as those ‘whiny fans’ we’ve discussed, want to see in their comics, and a reboot would be the opposite of that.
I can still respect Starlin's work, (which tended to be stories with a linear structure), without pretending that something published when I was 4 years old is still relevant to modern Marvel.
I don’t see why a story needs to be seen as ‘relevant’ to impact your enjoyment or impression of it. As long as the story works in and of itself, its canonicity in current context should be irrelevant. Look at Dreamwave’s G1-based TF comics: Not only is that entire line dead, buried, and completely non-relevant to TF stories today, a lot of it was pretty mediocre or just plain awful. But I still really like War Within! It’s one of the last decent TF stories Furman turned in for a while and it has absolutely magnificent art. It’s about as non-canon as possible these days (with stuff like Optimus’s pre-Prime form being ‘Optronix’ and the Oracle Chamber and weird stuff) but it’s still a solid story with some decent points about growing into leadership and the extent of acceptable losses and so forth. Just because it’s not relatable to modern content, just because it doesn’t ‘matter’ to the current canon, doesn’t diminish the story, it can stand on its own.
Onslaught Six wrote:If DC announced today that they were officially rebooting the Batman film franchise again, I'd be fine with it, because the last movie was a well-done send-off. Likewise with the Spiderman franchise--which wasn't as well-done but at least had a kind of "ending" where a lot of its overarching plotlines coalesced into a thing.
Also worth noting that when they rebooted Spider-Man, they didn’t have to have some stupid thing at the beginning of Amazing Spider-Man showing the universe exploding and being reformed or whatever to explain why the rebooted film existed in the first place. They understood that viewers could grasp that the previous iteration of the story was over, finished, and this other one was starting anew with its own take on things. Why the hell can’t comics just do this?
If all the comics DC was publishing two years ago had actually reached denouements and climaxed and resolved and actually ended and gotten a proper send-off, and THEN they’d rolled out the New 52, I guarantee you there would have been less bitching. There would still be some bitching, because these are comic fans we’re talking about here, but there would have been less of it.
If Marvel announced, however, that they were rebooting the Iron Man franchise after IM3? That'd enrage me, because it makes no sense to do so at this juncture--there's still a lot of life left in there, and this universe has a lot of room for Tony Stark and Iron Man in it.
As a side-note on this, this is actually something I’m worried about regarding the Marvel Cinematic Universe or whatever it’s called. Sure, you’ve got this big, awesome, cohesive, linked-together movie-verse now, but as actors age out and move on from roles and new content gets piled on it’s going to become more of an unmanageable clusterfuck of revisions and reworkings. I truly think what they’ve pulled off here is impressive, but they should plan to just end the whole shebang with like Avengers 3 if they want to leave it standing with any degree of integrity.
I don't mind reboots when they make sense. Transmetropolitan is one of my favourite books, but it had a beginning, middle and end--and boy did it end, a long-ass time ago, too. If they chose to reboot it, or somehow integrate its main character into the mainstream DC universe, I wouldn't mind at all. (I might be apprehensive, depending on creative team, but I wouldn't immediately reject the idea.) Likewise with Valiant's new Shadowman--I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but the last new Shadowman comics were around 2002 or so. I have no problem with that guy getting rebooted.
I can be more apprehensive about this sort of thing, depending. You give Back to the Future as an example below, that’s one of my all-time favorite sets of movies. I live in perpetual fear of it getting a horrible remake sometime in my lifetime. Granted, I know that the original BttF films would still be there, and I could still easily go back and enjoy them, I think it’s more a case of not wanting to see the good name of a film series I enjoy so much tarnished. I dunno, it’s weird. (Of course, I similarly tease a friend of mine who loves Jurassic Park by warning him that some douchebags WILL remake JP within our lifetime, so)
Honestly, the fact that they don't have an honest-to-God set of Movie Universe comics astounds me. Marvel and Disney know enough about the future of their movie universes that they could easily write some "inbetweener" comics that could be take-it-or-leave-it in terms of continuity bits.
The same could arguably be said about DC. After I saw The Dark Knight, the first thing I did was run to a bookstore to buy some comics based on it. I didn't find any, and walked out with The Killing Joke instead. (Kind of regret it, too, if only because I paid $18 for The Killing Joke.)
This is such a good point! Why *don’t* Marvel and DC do this? Friggin’ IDW can do it for TF with the Movie comics (and they got some pretty good comics out of it!), but the Big Two can’t have ongoing titles based on the most successful iterations of their flagship properties? It’s especially weird, since DC puts out comics based on their video games or stupid daytime dramas (not to mention a lot of their cartoons), but Dark Knight comics are apparently too hard to do? What gives?
The important thing that comics fans need to learn is also that just because those runs of comics are no longer "relevant," or may not have "happened," doesn't mean that those comics actually physically blink out of existence! In fact, Marvel will probably continue to reprint them for as long as they continue to sell. (I can go out right now and buy a fresh copy of Crisis On Infinite Earths, which is arguably the least relevant reboot ever at this point.)
I think you and I try to make this point every time this discussion comes up. More people need to learn to enjoy things in a vacuum, context often only leads to annoyance with the technicalities of it all.
In all seriousness, read the new Scarlet Spider. It almost redeems that entire thing.
Seconded! This thing makes me want a Scarlet Spider movie, or cartoon series. Kaine exemplifies the Spider-Man core concept of ‘Guy tries his best to a be a super hero despite life shitting all over him’ better than Spider-Man himself ever has. This book *works*.
ShockTrek wrote:I get why Anderson is little miffed. Example: I like Baskin Robins Dacquiri Ice. A few years ago they changed the flavor of it and it was terrible. And I was miffed that I would no longer be able to enjoy my favorite ice cream. Fortunately the next summer they changed it back and it's been back to the same ever since.
Honestly, this example doesn’t really jibe with me, since while the ice cream flavor is gone and you can never taste it again since food only works once (most of the time), comics that get cancelled or overwritten are still *there* and you can still go back and read and experience them whenever you want.
It's like with Beast Hunters and me, right now! I'm not really interested in Beast Hunters, or Prime in general. So I just...don't really buy it. I buy Generations when it's good, and the rest of the time, I either don't buy anything, or I find a different toyline I'm interested in. (GI Joe is usually great for this. When TF is boring or bad, Joe is usually kickass.) I don't sit around bitching that Beast Hunters is terrible and they should "change it back" or anything. (Well, okay--I do sort of do that a little bit, but that's because this is a TF discussion board, and it keeps coming up.)
I was largely dissatisfied with TFPrime too, but I didn’t even want them to ‘change it back’, I just wanted them to ‘change it to something else that I might like better’. Then they did, and we got Beast Hunters, and these toys (the Predacons at least) are great. The show I’m still ambivalent about, but it’s ending within like three months, and then I can get excited to be disappointed by whatever Hasbro does afterwards.
I mean, sure, some things can get sequels and have the stories continue on, but it's got to make sense. Batman Beyond didn't have a Bruce Wayne in the future who had been fighting crime since 1992 or whatever--it had an old-ass Bruce Wayne who got fucking old, because that's what people do. They get old and they, eventually, die. And if the events of Batman Beyond hadn't happened, that's probably exactly what would happen to Bruce Wayne. He would get old and die, uneventfully. Rather than come up with some convoluted reason for why he's suddenly young again, or why time hasn't continued, or whatever, they just do what makes sense for reality--unlike comic books.
I continue to maintain that the next Batman film franchise should be a live-action Batman Beyond, with Kevin Conroy playing old Bruce.
I get the feeling that Dom sees fans who don't like the major changes as crybabies, stamping their feet and saying "I want what I"ve always had!" And yeah, that would be childish, but I doubt that's the way it plays out, most of the time.
You don't know any other comics fans, do you?
Some of these guys should really check out /co/ sometime, just to put things in perspective.
andersonh1 wrote:If Marvel reboots, I think I'll be a bit disappointed, but since I'm only reading one book it won't be that big a deal. I have to say that despite having only read Daredevil for 24 issues, I quite enjoy the fact that the character has a long history behind him. I'm not sure I really want to read about a young Matt Murdock just learning the ropes and meeting all his villains for the "first" time. I like the sense of history that's there, even if I don't have a clue what most of it is!
This is an interesting point, in that you enjoy the ‘sense’ of history, despite not knowing what a lot of it is. That sort of thing, that ‘sense of history’ can be conveyed in a story without the story needing to physically have decades of previous material told about it. Watchmen is a fantastic example of this, one of the main concepts of that book was that there were decades of stories with full ‘Golden Age’ and ‘Silver Age’ eras passing as the characters lived in them, and we were just now coming in at the end of the story.
Because they were good, and the characters still had mileage in them as they were, at least from my point of view.
Just to pick one example of a character I really enjoyed reading, look at what's been done to Jay Garrick, the original Flash. He's one of my favorite characters. He was fairly unique in that he was old, still active as a superhero, and had decades of life behind him with experiences to draw stories from or that the character could use to help the younger superheroes, something the modern JSA was all about. All of that is gone now, replaced with a young Jay Garrick in Earth-2. To borrow an analogy from Shockwave, same name, different flavor. Everything I enjoyed about him is gone, and the stories featuring the character I liked have ended. Not in a satisfactory manner, but they've ended.
Yeah, I can go back and read the old stories, and I do from time to time. JSA had a good ten year run in the modern day, and there are a ton of stories from the 40s that I've never read. But I wasn't ready to say goodbye to the character. I didn't particularly want to see his story end. There was room for more, particularly since as a secondary character in DC's roster of characters, he hasn't been in every conceivable situation many times like some of the big name characters have.
Yeah, this is just a foreign viewpoint to me. Maybe I just enjoy endings and resolution too much, but I would never want to see something continue on that long, indefinitely. Hell, a large part of why I just dropped DC during Brightest Day was because I was fed up with Geoff Johns’s complete inability to Finish The Fucking Story (seriously, the guy writes all this setup for big huge events that never actually resolve, they just dovetail into the setup for the NEXT big huge event). I guess your attention span is just stronger than mine, because I could never bring myself to keep following something to that degree. I need an arc, and I need it to complete itself eventually.
The potential for quite a bit more good storytelling was there. Now it's gone. Going back to the Shockwave's ice cream analogy, it's like saying of someone's favorite ice cream flavor: "When are you going to stop enjoying that? Don't you think you should stop at some point?"
Honestly, I get burnt out on flavors, and foods, and stories, all the time. Really, if you have the same thing over and over for any extended period of time, it only makes sense that you’d get sick of it eventually. Stories that end before you get sick of them are the ones that leave the best impression.
I'm reminded of some of my comments to JT in another thread in that I have different expectations for different entertainment mediums. Comic books tell the stories of certain characters for decades, and at this point, short of a character failing or the company shutting down, I expect more stories next month about that character. With Transformers lines, at this point I'm used to them resetting every few years so having one end and another begin just feels like the natural order of things. Maybe if comics had done the same thing, I'd feel the same, but they haven't. There's always a new issue next month, another story about Superman or Spiderman, or whoever, and it's been that way for many decades. People expect that to continue.
One thing though, is that for people like me, that’s something I *hate* about comics, and would love to see it change.
Anyway, I don't go around constantly grumbling about DC or letting the fact that I don't enjoy their current books ruin my life. Honestly, the only time I think about it are when I hit the comic shop for my Transformers fix and see all those DC books I don't buy, or when it comes up in discussion here or elsewhere. And when the topic comes up for discussion in a thread like this, I discuss it. I make my feelings known. This would seem to be the appropriate time and place to do that, right?
Honestly, I don’t mean to lump you in with the ‘whiny’ fans we’ve mentioned before, since like you said, you’re downright civil in how you regard these things (and really can’t fault you for your feelings and expressing them over how badly the New 52 is doing, feeling vindicated is A-OK in that sort of situation!). It’s just that your viewpoints on ongoings and continuity and endings or not are so fundamentally different from how I feel about storytelling in comics that I can’t resist digging into that preference and rooting around in discussion with you to get a little more insight into the ‘why’. And you honestly put your points forward well. I still can’t really see wanting things the way you want things, myself, but you put your preferences forward in a way that makes them sound rational, at least.
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THING THAT I THOUGHT WAS MILDLY INTERESTING AND WORTH MENTIONING/TALKING ABOUT: So I didn't mention it before, but the latest issue of Scarlet Spider has a cover homaging the #1 cover of 'Superior Spider-Man', which I think is probably the fastest turnaround time for an 'homage' cover. Furthermore, it's actually drawn by Stegman, the guy who drew the original cover, and he's signed it crediting *himself* for the original. Seriously, there's his 'Stegman' signature, with 'after Stegman' written below it. I find this more amusing than I probably should.
