Thomas Wayne is Proud of His Son

[shakalooloo]

Lots of good stuff in 'Infinite Frontier', from the return of the JSA, Alan Scott and Obsidian kicking ass together, Roy Harper looking for his daughter and a man with invisible poison skin, but here's some stuff from issue 4, where Thomas Wayne gets to regret being written by Tom King. Also, a sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

Comments

[thanekos]

You're talking like " usability " is some objective judgement, and not a subjective one that reflects how much a writer (or reader) is willing to engage with someone else's idea of the character being discussed.

" ..the amount of work that has to go into salvaging a Tom King character is gigantic. " isn't an indictment of the kind of changes King makes - it's an indictment of the kind of writer/reader who can't engage with developments they don't agree with, developments in something they've got some kind of investment in, without annulling the development like they want to annul the effect that it had on them as well.

You're suggesting that a long-running shared universe should be written to please that sort of person and how they look at the world - which is a great way to get stories of exactly that quality.

[laughing_tree]

On top of everything you said, the notion that the Vision or Batman were left unusable will probably come as a surprise to Marvel and DC's writers, who went on using them without a hitch. There are like half a dozen Batman books at any given point, and the Vision kept on being a regular part of the Avengers books both during and after the King/Walta series, without so much as a hiccup.

[deh_tommy]

Normally I’d agree with you, but I’d argue in this case that what Tom King did wasn’t really adding or developing anything so much as taking away. There’s a reason DC doesn’t really use Doctor Light anymore post-Identity Crisis or why Joker immunity is so widely mocked.

[palgrave_goldenrod]

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.