Scans_Daily

I'd argue that, for better or worse, there actually is a certain degree of objective judgement in the idea of "usability" -- or, perhaps more accurately, something which comes close to "objective" as possible when discussing any creative artistic pursuit -- when it comes to long-running shared universes like mainstream superhero comics, simply because it is a shared universe. It's not solely one person's property to do with as they and they alone please, damn the consequences, it's a shared entity that will be passed on to different creators with different ideas and which is being communicated to an audience which, for better or worse, has certain expectations regarding the universe and its characters. Any lasting changes or developments will therefore by necessity be those which achieve some kind of shared consensus with regards to their value and how much they facilitate continued stories using these characters. Those which allow other people to keep reading and creating stories once the latest creative team are finished are "usable", those which don't, aren't. And, much as I kind of dig what Tom King does, there's little denying that his work can be divisive and that he tends to blow up the characters he uses in ways that leave other creators to pick up the pieces if they want to use them as well. His work has creative merit, but it's arguably not always best-suited for the restraints of a long-running shared universe.

Now, maybe this doesn't necessarily always lead to works of exciting and innovative artistic genius and merit, but it also kind of is what it is when it comes to the Marvel and DC Comics universes. Frankly, if you're looking for genuinely radical and groundbreaking storytelling that engages in bold and fearless deconstruction and subversion of expectations in order to utterly upend the story in a lasting and permanent fashion, then you're probably only going to find it very infrequently within a corporate mainstream superhero universe.