5 Reasons Why Comics Are Better Than Ever Right Now

Comics fans yearn for the past, ignoring the positives of the present. It's time that changed.

Superman Reading Watchmen
DC Comics

It's easy to look back on the previous decades of the comic book industry and see nothing but positives, especially when compared to today. And sure, there were a lot of things that previous generations of comic fandom didn't have to worry about.

For one, the speculator bubble bursting in the nineties was basically the worst thing to happen to this industry in the long run, being blamed for every negative but necessary-to-keep-afloat business practice that comic companies have had to employ since.

However, despite that rabbit hole of problems, there have also been massive improvements in recent years - to the point where now we feel utterly confident in saying that comic books are better now than they've ever been before. Sure there will always be crappy comics, and bad business practices that get in the way, that's the nature of industry as a whole. But it's still important to look at the positive strives we've made since then, to make sure we remember why this industry deserves to survive and thrive.

It's tempting to only see the positives of the past, but these examples prove that the industry, and comics as a medium, are better now than ever before.

5. We're Finally Getting Past Grimdark Storytelling

Superman Reading Watchmen
DC Comics

The competition for which era of comics were the darkest is most heated between the early to mid-nineties and noughties, to the point where people just kinda lump those two eras of comics together into one almost 20 year cycle of some of the darkest and bleakest material the big two ever put out.

It got so bad that even Infinite Crisis, an event comic whose sole purpose was to critique and tear down the current heroes for letting things get so dark, more often than not revelled in the very brutality it sought to criticise.

Fortunately, with recent initiatives like DC rebirth, we seem to be slowly moving away from that toxic place the industry found itself in. Sure, we still have very dark material, but event comics like Heroes In Crisis - for all of its faults - at least set out with the intent of analyzing what effect such events can have on the characters they happen to; which is definitely a stronger thematic throughline than "Superboy Prime tore off Pantha's arms... because EDGE".

Hard to say how long this will last, but with luck - and a lot of time - we won't see quite as much as we did during those dark times.

Contributor
Contributor

John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?