The Major Problem No One Wants To Admit With Superhero Comics
2. Why Does The 'Big Two' Love The Status Quo?
If you'd only been reading Spider-Man for the last ten or so years, and had no knowledge of Peter Parker's life beforehand, you'd probably find talk of him having a wife and nearly a child kind of bonkers.
How so? Well in 2007 Marvel decided that Spider-Man had deviated too much from his most recognisable self. The Ultimate Comics, which had been focusing on a younger Peter in a new canon, were outperforming the publisher's mainstream offerings both critically and in terms of popularity, and so editorial resolved to bring the mainstream Peter more in line with how he used to be; young, single, and without the ostensible burden posed by forty years of continuity.
The resulting story was One More Day, a comic that endeavoured to restore Peter's secret identity (Civil War had seen the character unmask himself at a press conference), break up his marriage with Mary Jane and make him more 'relatable' to their readership. The motivating factor behind this change? The elderly Aunt May is moved closer to death's door by an assassin's bullet, and so Pete decides to make a deal with Mephisto to save her life - at the cost of his marriage, his future, and the fallout from Civil War.
In plenty of ways, One More Day exemplifies modern comics' obsession with the status quo. Aunt May could've been killed off - and briefly was - at any point in the previous few decades, but Marvel convinced themselves that she was now an immovable aspect of Spidey's comics; a status seemingly reiterated by the character's various forays into mainstream media.
From then on in, it was rinse and repeat for Marvel in terms of reversing some of the more seismic changes in the company's recent history. Steve Rogers was resurrected in 2009, and would move in and out of the Captain America identity sporadically over the course of the next decade, and even one of the most lauded shifts of the Modern Age found itself put out to pasture in 2015, when All-New, All-Different Daredevil put Matt Murdock's identity back in the bottle, thereby pegging his relationship with the public and his allies back about a decade as a consequence.
This wasn't just a problem exclusive to the House of Ideas however. DC found themselves heading backwards the same decade as well, partially out of nostalgia for the Silver Age of comics, as figures like Barry Allen and Hal Jordan returned to oust the then present day Flash and Green Lantern respectively, Wally West and Kyle Rayner. Even the New 52, a 2011 reboot designed to divest from the established continuity, managed to set DC back years by erasing decades of character development - all to make their characters more 'modern', and in the process, way less interesting.
The New 52 committed a whole host of offences, particularly when it came to Batman. Barbara Gordon regained the ability to walk after spending years as Oracle - one of DC's few heroes with a disability - while the Dark Knight himself saw his most expressive and transformative period in years fudged by the publisher's desire to essentially bring the character back to basics.
Corrective measures have been taken in the years since, with DC Rebirth striving to regain the tonal uniqueness of DC's old continuity, but even then the spectre of the status-quo lingers, particularly when it comes to Batman. Writer Tom King found himself pushing the character in a new direction when it came to his romance with Catwoman, and while King is set to conclude his story next year, it won't be on the main Batman comic. Judging from reports, it seems as though editorial got cold feet regarding any prospective changes that could've been made, and it's predictably disappointing...
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