Prepare yourself for a Grandpa Simpson good old fashion tirade ;)
I am going to make a provocative statement. I enjoy the work of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee but I have had my fill. Same goes for the work of Gardner Fox, Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegal, Bob Kane and the list goes on.
Don’t get me wrong. I have the greatest respect for the ideas and the work these guys put in to what they did. The concepts and the great stories but I think the industry has suffered in the long run because so many are unwilling to look beyond their work. One of the major factors in Jack and Stan’s run on Fantastic Four run was the fact that things were changing. In the first 100 issues you had (and I am not even going to get in to new villains here) the creation of the group, the team “monster” gets the girl, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl get married, Johnny gets a girlfriend who becomes part of the team when the Invisible Girl gets pregnant and this is just in the first ONE HUNDRED ISSUES! Add to this the fact that it seems that every second issue had a new villain is icing on the cake. Again I appreciate the talent involved with that creative process but then we move on a bit later and the changes are a bit slower in coming and finally we get to the all powerful reset button where we end up on a mobius strip where each issue comes back to the start when it reaches the end.
Just to let you know, it is not just the FF. Pretty much all the SA series ended up the same. In some cases it was the set of villains that just seemed to click like in the Justice League you had Doctor Destiny, Amazon, The Key, and Doctor Light to name a few.
In part, I know it is marketing involved. The bigger the draw on the cover, the better the sales and people love what they know but because of this, I feel, the medium stagnated. Now, even the big names only get a new villain about once a year or based on the need of the packaging of then next TPB. I think Gardner Fox only repeated about three during his over sixty issue run. Everyone went “back to basics” and bowed at the temple of Stan and Jack and this, on occasion was done by the writer and artist retelling the stories with their own spin on things (Yeah! I’m looking at you “Heroes Reborn”. It seemed that origins were reviewed almost every six months and you saw battles over and over with the same big draw bad guys. Hey, I love Doctor Doom and Galactus but getting their asses kicked by Dazzler does not much for their street cred. This is why the industry in part, again, IMHO, has become jaded. If there is a change, it will be reversed at the first possible opportunity up to and including death. Of course, the fans don’t really help this. Just a quick glance back, does anyone remember the stink made over the removal of the big ol’ A on Captain America’s forehead. Doesn’t change the character (well, the writing of the series wasn’t A-1 gold star but it was passable) but it is things like that that make you wonder how Robin ever got out of wearing short pants. The visual is what sells the toys and posters etc. but it does become excessive at times.
It is with this sort of thing in mind that I am NOT cancelling every DC title that is out there and I will be looking at the ones that interest me based on the promotional material. There is the optimist in me that is hoping for the one thing that has really been missing since the original Silver Age (well, for me, almost up until the end of the Seventies. The years, not my age) ;) . The idea that anything can happen and anything can change and there will be a great story spin out of it.
Replies
...I've always tended to think that FF , especially , tends to suffer from a certain " ancestor worship " towards the Stan'n'Jack years , and the whole concept was so perfect for the " Go-Go "/space program/NASA Sixties , it's been hard to update and , yepper , subsequent creators - And , pretty likely , editoral and management voices above them !!!!!!!!!!! - have maybe kept it too much repeating in the same groove...
Of course , what was that about " the illusion of change " ???...
Remember when John Byrne himself declared that , as far as he was concerned , his first issue of FF could've been #103 , with every subsequent issue between the end of S'n'J and his beginning ignored ?????????
Of course , that ignores that one " leftover unfinished Kirby story " that FF filled in with a few issues later that , furthermore , got reissued inn a " full " , modernized version...with the original version in back of the book?? a few years ago...Does anybody remember what I'm speaking of ? The folks at the Comics Journal board ( R. I. P. ) were excited about it at the time ! I never got it , or the original version...
There are a number of reasons for those factors you cite. Gardner Fox wasn't worried that a creation he gave to DC might be sold to a movie company for big bucks that he could have had a bigger stake in if he'd kept it to himself. I think that's a big reason so many creators keep bringing back names or characters that the publisher already owns. Companies, meanwhile, like reviving trademarks that have been dormant.
There's also the problem that many of these characters were created in the Silver Age, and that was a long, long time ago. Even the new X-Men are 25 years old now, and that's a long time to keep characters fresh. The GA characters disappeared after 13 years or so, and the SA characters kind of petered out in the early 1970s.
Since then, the same guys have just been adding to their baggage, unless they get rebooted, which is DC's style. They essentially rebooted in 1956, they rebooted again in 1985 and now they're "relaunching" in 2011. It cleans up all those darn barnacles.
I'm not sure comics are geared to that "anything goes" approach any more. They're written for TPBs rather than the periodicals, so they're stretched or compressed to fit six issues, and they interconnect with a lot of other titles. Writers get constrained by all the marketing ploys, and "fun" is not a word companies like to hear said about their comics. It implies they're not "serious" or "sophisticated" enough.
A lot happened to the FF, but very little of it was permanent. Reed and Sue got married and had a kid, but he seldom appeared and they were essentially married any way. Crystal showed up for awhile, but then she left again. The goal was always turmoil, but it usually righted itself within a year or so.
More amazing was Ditko's run on Spidey. He graduated from high school and went off to college, getting all kinds of new supporting cast members. And,needless to say, ASM #121 was the biggest change in any comic possibly ever.
The problem with those changes is that it's tough to go back. I wonder how much different things would've looked by ASM #100 if Ditko had stayed around. Parker probably would have been a professor with three kids.
-- MSA
Mr. Silver Age said:
Mark S. Ogilvie said:
There's a difference between "shocking" change and "exciting" change. No one, with few exceptions, wants to create anything that they don't have some fiscal stake in so it's back to the Golden, Silver and Bronze Vaults of Characters to see who they can revive or revamp for their story needs. If they must do so, just use the character, don't retell their adventures. Innovative is always better than regurgitated.
This may surprise some people but I want the DCnU to be a success, no matter what it does to past continuities. Just tell great stories and that will take care of the doubters!
Sounds like you are starting to see the light, Philip.
DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT!!!???
Oh, I see the light. I always did. A great story is a great story.
Now I just reread New Avengers: Breakout, let me tell you what this Bendis guy got wrong......
Wait-- do I go INTO the light, or AWAY from the light? Poltergeist was never very clear about that.
Anyway, John, I'm an old Silver Ager and I agree with you. What has kept me a reader for more than 40 years is always looking forward to next month. If next month is just like last month -- or last year, or last decade -- I'm not pleased. I even dropped Fantastic Four for a while, because I thought it had grown too stale and refused to grow beyond what was established by FF #101. I have now started buying it again, specifically because it changed, and I want to see what happens next.
That's the hook: I just want to see what happens next. So I'd really like for something to happen.
Mr. Silver Age said: "I wonder how much different things would've looked by ASM #100 if Ditko had stayed around. Parker probably would have been a professor with three kids."
Well, Stan Lee had something to do with the book, too. Even though Ditko was credited with plotting most of the issues in '65 and '66, I assume that Stan, as editor, had veto power over his plot developments. Which may have led to Ditko's departure.
Anyway, I have to wonder: if Lee and Ditko had known Spidey would still be around in 2011, would they have been in such a hurry to have him grow up? They could have kept Peter Parker in high school for another decade -- or two or three. (It appears that movie producers are fixated on Peter as a high school kid, because they're going back to that in next year's reboot.) Would Conway, Kane and Romita have upended the status quo as they did with Gwen's death? That happened in 1973, when the series had been around for only 11 years.
But I'm glad Stan & Co. DIDN'T know Spidey would last so long. For the first decade or so, Peter grew and matured more or less as a real person would have. That gave the book a sense of realism that has rarely been matched.
This may surprise some people but I want the DCnU to be a success, no matter what it does to past continuities. Just tell great stories and that will take care of the doubters!
This is always the rallying cry, but the devil is in the details. Is it a problem if the mystery hero who saves the Legion turns out to be Ferro Lad? If I want to tell a great story about Peter and MJ not being married, can I tell it, or do I have to find a way to get them unmarried first? And I have this great idea for a story in which Gwen gives birth to Norman's twins.
We need to know what happened and what didn't; we need to know if a story is part of a character's on-going saga or is "just a story" that won't be referred to ever again; and we need to know what they consider a great story.
Great stories take care of a lot of screw-ups and misjudgments and historical ignorances. But I don't see a lot of great stories being produced that justify forgetting what I thought was true. I remember when they eliminated Supergirl from our memories and brought her back as a less repetitive, more original concept.
Introducing an older brother for Bruce Wayne, having Black Zero destroy Krypton, creating a Superboy clone that grows up alongside of him doing evil every day. I don't care HOW great those stories were --and none of them were great, even if the writers thought so--they weren't worth doing because of what they did to continuity.
Continuity is not as evil as everyone likes to think.
I would say that reviving Bucky wasn't good, either, but some people say those stories are so great it was worth it. Even so, given that Sharon was brought back to life and that Bucky was no longer Bucky-dead, how much could we care when Captain America died? And how long did that last, proving the point?
I *could* have accepted that Cap was dead and cried big tears over never seeing him again, but I can't read each story separately with no connection to others. They don't want me to--but they don't want me remembering everyone else who was dead and now isn't, either.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go mourn Johnny Storm, who I will never see again.
-- MSA