10 Harsh Truths You Don't Want To Admit About Comic Books‏

7. They're The Geek Equivalent Of Soap Operas

Comic books have all the central tenants of the TV soap opera right there in the original blueprints, and further renovations have only brought the two forms closer together. Superheroes and melodrama go together like peanut butter and jelly, in that Americans seem to love it and nobody else quite gets it. And also because they seem to always go together: nowhere else has the sort of histrionic and wooden dialogue from an episode of Days Of Our Lives appeared than in Chris Claremont's X-Men run, you're unlikely to find "imaginary stories" anywhere other than Silver Age Superman comics or Dallas (where an entire season of the show was written off as a dream), or quite so much attention paid to costume changes. Long-running soap operas and superhero comics also suffer from the same narrative stasis, stuck in a perpetual second act which will never be completed, because to end the story conclusively would mean screwing up the whole thing for everyone. There will never be a "final" Batman story where he finally defeats all crime and deals with those pent-up psychological issues for the same reason Hollyoaks will run forever. These characters and stories aren't supposed to reach any sort of satisfying conclusion. They're designed to run forever and ever. Or so long as they keep making money. Obviously us proud geeks would never willingly admit that our beloved sequential art has anything in common with the common, trashy soap opera, despite each genres love of secret identities and cliffhanger endings, on top of everything else we've already gone through. Embrace it! Soap operas are silly, just as cape comics are too, but we love them because of all that ridiculousness.