7 Reasons You Should Give Up Superhero Comics In 2017
There's more to comics than capes and tights.
Depending on whom you ask, the superhero comics industry is either thriving like never before or a sinking ship that should be abandoned. Though superhero movies and TV shows are more popular than ever, comic book sales remain decent at best. The current zeitgeist of constant relaunches and renumbering, believed to draw in new readers who would be scared away by a high issue count, seemingly succeed only in driving longtime fans away.
DC’s Rebirth has been very successful, but it’s unclear if that’s due to an increase in quality or the focus on nostalgia. Marvel has resorted to giving away extra copies of books with low orders to inflate their sales numbers after driving away their die hard supporters.
While DC is steering the ship out of the storm, Marvel is right in the middle. Their last two major events have suffered huge delays and had their endings spoiled by the post-event books released before they could finish. All of their iconic, most popular heroes are currently either dead, mind-controlled Nazis, title-less bums, or acting so out of character as to be unrecognizable. New readers aren’t taking the bait of diverse heroes and old readers are fed up with all of the changes - expect a “Rebirth” from them soon.
It’s hard to be a superhero comic fan and it’s hard to be a creator. The genre depends on stagnation but also thrives on change. Too much change and you can risk breaking the formula altogether - not enough change and the book feels boring. At this point, most of the characters we love are over fifty years old, some over seventy. In a lot of ways, all of the possible stories have been told. A good writer can always come up with a fresh idea, but the accumulation of history makes that harder and harder. Most fictional characters don’t need to continue their stories every month, indefinitely. Nobody had to write sixty years of Zorro stories.
It just might be that superheroes were never really meant to endure like this. When they were created, nobody thought they’d last this long. But comic books are so much bigger than superheroes. Ever since the beginning, there have been adventure comics, sci-fi comics, horror comics, romance comics…
They might not ever have achieved the popularity of superhero comics, but the everyday exploits of Archie and the Riverdale Gang have endured since the 1940s. If you’re someone who has limited your reading to books coming from the Big Two, you may be sick of comics, but you can have your passion reignited by migrating toward other publishers with less gimmicky stories. If you’re on the fence, this might be the push you need.
7. Continuity Doesn’t Matter Anymore
A lot of writers hate continuity because it makes their jobs harder. These guys read comics when they were younger and then fell off as they grew up and started their careers. This is why so many of them, as their first order of business, retcon to make everything more similar to how they remember.
It’s also why rebooting is so popular. When the New 52 relaunched, Geoff Johns had Batman and Superman fight each other for the first time - again - in the second issue of Justice League. Having them battle in the pre-Flashpoint stories would’ve been boring; it would’ve been the millionth time we’ve seen that, but because it was a brand new continuity, that meant it would be “fresh” again!
During the Silver and Bronze Age, continuity was a lot tighter. If the Avengers were in space for that month’s issue and the X-Men visited Avengers Mansion in their own book, they’d find it empty; an editorial box would explain the Avengers’ whereabouts. Something like “They’re in space! Find out why in Avengers #128 - on sale now!”
These days, Captain Marvel can have adventures in the multiverse in The Ultimates, her own adventures in her solo title, and involvement in major events like Civil War II all at the same time. People say Batman has no superpowers, but he can clearly transcend space and time with all the different books he manages to appear in at once. For obvious reasons, maintaining that level of order over so many titles is a lot of hard work, so it’s easy to see why current editors have adopted a “who cares?” approach.
And it’s not just keeping track of past events that’s problematic. Some of these characters have died and come back multiple times at this point. When you truncate over fifty years of stories into a timeline of about ten years, you end up with a biography so packed with plots it stretches plausibility.
How can watching Batman fight the Joker for the eightieth time really be that exciting? Sure, if they’re made out of Legos, but on the comic page? At a certain point, the “Why doesn’t Batman kill the Joker already?” question becomes too loud to ignore. You’ve thrown the Joker in Arkham Asylum like five hundred times, Batman - I think the system is broken.