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

[goattoucher]

The fact that the most exciting comics are not coming from the big two is a problem because these companies lack the budgets to adequately market these books, so, unless you are already in the hobby, you are unlikely to know that they exist.

As for old characters, I like them well enough, but I find more than a few of them dull, and I find the fetishization of the 80's that Johns and Quesada engage in to be -maddening-: taking what little progress has been made for these characters and completely negating them.

One of my least favorite popular characters is Batman. He suffers from three important problems:

1: Due to his iconic status, many fans will not tolerate change. Batman must continue to be Batman the way he has always been Batman. Batman Inc.? -Great- idea. Fans hated it and it went away.

2: Due to his popularity, any unpopular moves will result in loss of revenue. Batman cannot change. The classic elements of his rogues gallery cannot change. The editors are paralyzed by the fact that any move they make away from the status quo would likely have -profound- negative revenue results, so everything must remain the same.

3: Because he is popular, he must be -everywhere-, which results in him regularly moving away from the street level heroism he was created for, into cosmic level adventures (where he must not only participate, but be a key element of success), and then back to the street level. He fights Two Face one day, is key to the defeat of Darkseid the next, and is back to being legitimately threatened by the Scarecrow the next.

The creative gymnastics necessary to make this happen are mind-boggling, and stretch the suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point. The most common (and most aggravating), method is to turn everyone into jobbers compared to Batman. Heroes like Green Lantern and the Flash save the world and cosmos regularly in their own books, but are bumbling half-wits when they are the same room as Batman. If I had a nickel for every time Batman just pulled a GL's ring off their finger in the last fifteen years... I'd have a lot of nickels.

This enforced status quo is -terrible-. It makes for by stories and a static universe. Batman stories regularly call back to twenty year old or older stories that would leave new readers scratching their heads.

But these characters are necessary to the industry. They are hugely popular, and form the fiscal backbone of the publishing companies. The problem is that they aren't for new readers: they are for established readers. Further, because a comic with a bat on the cover is a sure-fire money maker, the company is more likely to create another Bat-Book to satisfy the current audience than risk it on a new book to attract a new audience.