Astro City #45 - "Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes"

[laughing_tree]

We always need new superheroes. But actual new ones, reflecting the modern day, rather than reflecting yesterday. Unless reflecting yesterday is the point of the story. But the idea that we don’t need new superheroes is like not needing new romances or new detectives. The moment you don’t need new characters in genre stories, the genre is as dead as Latin. It’s not a crime that superheroes don’t age, but it’s a problem that superhero series don’t more often age and die and get replaced. Imagine if Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski and other modern (well, relatively) PIs couldn’t get an audience because Sam Spade and Race Williams were taking up all the shelf space. If you’re writing X-Men and your metaphors are about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, that’s not all that much more modern than if your metaphors are about the Red Scare and McCarthyism. Ask yourself new questions, and put the results in your stories. Steve Englehart juiced up Captain America by asking what Captain America meant to the early 1970s. What does he mean now? What does Superman represent to the world? How does that, whatever it is, fit into the world today? Same for Batman, same for Wonder Woman. Tell stories you couldn’t tell ten, twenty, fifty years ago. -- Kurt Busiek

Comments

[jlbarnett]

think about the state of the UU at it's end vs the state of the MCU.

[goattoucher]

As I have pointed out in other parts of the thread, the problem there was that editorial stopped caring. They gave the third Ultimates series to Jeph Loeb without making sure that he read any of the previous material and had any idea about how the characterization of Ult. characters differed from their 616 counterparts. They stopped caring about the Ultimate U. and turned it into the Avengers and the X-Men, but with more blood.

Plus, many of the Ultimate U characters were just simulacra of 616 characters, so they were not exactly "new stories" the way the "New Universe" from the 80s was telling new stories.