10 Most Harmful Trends In Comics Today
3. Reboots...
Reboots, reboots everywhere, so lets all have a...
'What!? Who are you? We must meet for the first time and fight!
Ah, thats better. I remember you now.
What!? Who are you? We must meet for the first time and fight!'
How utterly condescending is a reboot? How much more insulting to our collective intelligence as fans do they need to be?
The consensus reality among comic book publishers seems to be this: people wont know who Superman is. 'Wed better tell the fans that he came from Krypton, or else how would they know? I mean, It isnt like there have been 75 FN YEARS OF COMICS, RADIO SHOWS, MOVIES, CARTOONS, VIDEO GAMES and EVERYTHING ELSE!!!'
...Besides, if you genuinely think that new readers will only start reading books that have Issue 1 written on the front, then surely youll only get one month of new readers per reboot, right?
By the by, everyone who started reading in the 90s was between reboots anyway, which shoots that particular theory to s**t.
Reboots merely serve to highlight that comics arent being written right anymore. As Stan Lee always said, every comic book is somebodys first comic book. All a comic story needs to do is open with the wreckage of a car and Spidey rubbing his head saying, I cant believe Venom threw this car at me. Id better get up there and kick his ass! and were right along with the story.
Besides, in the era of the Internet and the absolute edition, is there anybody out there who is so dumb that they dont know how to find out what Crisis on Infinite Earths was? Or what happened in Cosmic Odyssey? If there are, it is likely that theyll have enough trouble dressing themselves, much less reading a comic book.
Simply write each comic as a self-contained story. In the 90s, even long, drawn out events were made up of stories that ran for two, or three issues that then formed part of a larger story arc. TV shows routinely do this today AND THEY FRICKIN LEARNED IT FROM COMIC BOOKS!!!
All these trendy reboots do is alienate the existing fans, many of whom have spent their entire lives following storylines and characters that are now redundant.
What do you mean the dude never existed?
Wally!? Wally!? It can actually be quite emotionally distressing to watch your childhood heroes simply faze out of existence like a McFly family photo.
With too many reboots, the fans simply refuse to stay invested in the story. They know that itll all be rebooted again in five minutes time anyway and then...
What!? Who are you? We must meet for the first time and fight!