Remember racists being pissed that they cast a black guy as a Norse god?
Maybe they were right and Thor is really pro-Hitler!
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You should read ODY-C, the psychedelic sci-fi reimaging of Homerâs Odyssey features an all female cast.
https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/ody-c
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Did the Waynes get resurrected in a Shyamalan twist yet?
The âreboot maniaâ is actually a recent trend, driven mostly by movies. Smart marketeers observed, around the time the original Batman movies were released, that mainstream readers the movie had captured struggled with catching up on continuity backstories, and basically didnât hang around after a few months. So what happens now is that, when a âcomic movieâ comes out, continuity will be âflattenedâ to make it easier to onboard casual readers, at least for a few months.
Before this strategy was perfected, fundamental reboots of title characters were few and far between, at least in Marvel land. Yes, they would die and be reborn / redesigned / tweaked (e.g. Marvel has tried for decades to get rid of SpiderManâs blue-red-webbed costume, because itâs expensive to paint on toys etc etc), but usually not with something as fundamental as completely negating the past, which is what happens more and more carelessly these days.
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Oooh shiny! I love reimagining of classic stories! (seriously. no irony or sarcasm)
I donât read comics (not for lack of interest, but for lack of time), but Iâve seen the movies. Doesnât Captain America do more damage to Hydra over a longer period of time than almost any one else in the Marvel universe?
In the immortal pastiche of Comic Book Guy: Worst. Double agent. Ever.
Right? It doesnât even make sense. Unless itâs all about Hydra factions fighting each other. Maybe the Nazi Hydras were pretenders to the throne and the millennia-old Hydra made Rogers to fight them. But at that point Hydra is pretty much behind everyone. Theyâre basically the fucking Illuminati. [Yeah, yeah, I know thereâs a cabal of superhumans that call themselves the Illuminati in the Marvel universe. But you know what I mean.]
ETA: It also occurs to me that just maybe the motive isnât shock value to boost readership. Cap is supposed to be a anthropomorphized metaphor for America, yes? Maybe someone at Marvel basically decided that America has become the new face of facism and he or she wanted to rub our faces in it.
Are decisions like this made by one editor or do multiple people have veto power on major shifts like this?
Yup, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Cap isnât a Hydra agent, Marvelâs Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso is a Hydra agent out to defame Cap.
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I know some people didnât like it, but I still kind of miss the spikey version of Ben Grimm:
This included the Sharon Ventura / Ms. Marvel âShe-Thingâ variation, but luckily she was usually called Ms. Marvel or Sharon, although I can see how the hero title could be a bit confusing over time.
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The problem is that this plot twist is obvious bullshit. Perhaps the writers can play this off as mind-fuck city, but it honestly sounds like a Frank Miller-on-a-cocaine bender thing. It doesnât make business sense, or human sense, or whatever, but things can get screwed up when worthless libertarians get their mitts on the steering wheel.
So long as Chris Evans still has a contract, weâll see the experiment play out: All American Boy played straight or played for a fool. I guess it depends on what happens with the election.
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Jesus, that is one bad drawing. Iâd guess Liefeld except he always proudly signed his shitty work. And there are no pouches.
I want my heroes to able to:
- Stop a bank robbery
- Stop a mugging
- Save a human
- Stop bemoaning their self-important lives.
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And shoulder pads, unnecessary headgear, and so much flexing.
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Technically that already happened a few years ago due to Flashpoint (Barry Allen traveled back in time to save his mom thus changing the time stream. Thomas and Martha didnât die but witnessed their son being murdered. Spoiler:
Thomas became Batman and Martha ended up as the Joker)
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DC and Marvel are different cases.
DC is much older, being pretty much the sole survivor of the Golden Age of comics. As other comics companies from that era â such as Charlton Comics, Fawcett Comics, and Quality Comics â eventually went under, DC bought a lot of their properties. Marvel, or Atlas as it was known then was selling comics, and a few characters trace their origins back to that period, but Captain America is pretty much the only character widely remembered.
In the Golden Age of comics, comics were 100% avowedly for kids. You had major reader turn over, with readers in a very narrow window of childhood. There was no such thing as universe or character continuity, because most readers would not remember what happened a year or two earlier. A lot of stories got told multiple times (new art, new writing, but same premise). Marvel largely ignored their golden age characters and recycled concepts â the Destroyer, the Vision, the Human Torch â later with no reference to the earlier characters.
The Silver Age was for the Baby Boomer generation, and a lot of the tone was driven by Marvel, which was the first to really push the notion of a single living, breathing universe with all of their characters. (So much so that it can be easy to forget some titles like the Eternals had deliberate âoutsâ so they could claim it was an un-connected universe if fans didnât care for it.)
DC jumped on this bandwagon, and eventually settled on the notion of two parallel universes. All the goofy golden age stuff was on Earth Two. Earth One is where the stuff is happening now. So that was less an explicit reboot than âletâs just forget about all this stuff back here.â Over the years, DC has had a few reboots, but theyâve been accelerating. Ages ago you had Crisis on Two Earths; more recently you had Crisis on Infinite Earths/the new 52.
But DC also had a lot more TV/movie presence, and a lot of those introduced original ideas that made their way back to the comics (such as the character of Jokerâs moll, Harley Quinn). All of them had very different markets, writers, and times. Some versions of Superman and Batman are campy. Some are dark.
DC has also had a very strong âElseworldsâ trend-cum-imprint since the late 80s or so. They were very liberal with printing limited, standalone stories about Batman vs. Predator, and Superman vs. Godzilla, and cowboy Batman, and Soviet Superman, and so on.
Batman, Superman, Flash⌠these are all just general concepts on which you can hang certain flavors and variations. Fans accept it, and donât worry too much about the details. Some jokingly refer to DC as âDisregard Continuityâ
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Now Marvel, Marvel is different. Marvel deliberately resisted reboots for a long time, because the single universe was their schtick, they didnât have a lot of success in other mediums to dilute the characters, and they werenât beholden to older characters.
(small correction: I just remembered Marvel was called âTimely Comicsâ during the war years, then changed itâs name to Atlas.)
After the war âCaptain America, Commie Smasherâ made a go of it, but eventually yhe Timely-age superhero characters were largely forgotten. Now as Atlas comics, they mostly focused on romance comics. The silver age of comics kicked off in earnest when Marvel released the first issue of Fantastic Four. That book even recycled the character concept of the Human Torch â the original being a Nazi-fighting robot on fire, while the new one is just some guy who can catch fire â totally without any reference to the original character. The wartime characters started to slowly roll back in starting with Cap in Avengers #4 (frozen in ice during WWII, completely ignoring the Commie Smasher era).
But as Marvel rolled on, it kept continuity (or retro-actively established a continuity, a âretconâ). They explained the Commie Smasher years (that was some other guy⌠heâs crazy now), the made a game of letting readers âexplainâ little art or story inconsistencies in the letter pages (âGood job! You win an official No-Prize!â). They gave histories to characters that disappeared and came back years later. As I said, it was their schtick.
But that wears on. When DC just said âletâs forget the past on Earth Twoâ (with an option to keep doing that in the future), Marvel was left explaining as necessary how Cap was still alive (frozen in ice) or Nick Fury still an active spy (stolen Nazi anti-aging serum). Marvel still invented other universes for different reasons⌠time travel stories, visits to the [strike]Justice League[/strike] Squadron Supreme, etc⌠but they always insisted most comics took place in the same, major universe. Eventually they said that time itself was stretching.
I could write a slightly outdated thesis about time stretching, the multiverse, cosmic abstract entities, and the Marvel universe, but suffice it to say that they â in their goofy, comic-booky way â took great pains to give a pretense of consistency without reboots.
And eventually, that too breaks down. Because readers got every bit as worn out as you probably got reading this. So Spider-Man passes his mantle to a clone (didnât last, story is longer now), and Cap passes his to U.S.Agent (didnât last, character roster is longer now), and so on.
Eventually, even Marvel had to admit that its readership was limited by the sheer weight of ridiculous âmaybe it will matter later, maybe it wonâtâ history its characters had. So it rebooted five flagship titles, basically the Fantastic Four + Avengers. It bombed, they went back.
They later created a comics line specifically as a place for new readers to jump on (Ultimate Spider-Man, the Ultimates, etc.), that was in a separate, unrelated universe. That did well. New readers on some comics, older readers happy in ridiculous-history verseâŚ
And then the movies come along. Which is a much bigger, better business. But those end up syncing up with the much more streamlined and accessible Ultimate line than anything else. At this point, the comics are an atavistic business. The characters and old stories have value â on merchandise, as nostalgia, as source material for the movies â but not the new stories. So Marvel finally hit a big olâ reset button. Will it last? Probably not.
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So DC had one line of thought: letâs forget about it⌠okay, different universes⌠look, do you even really care?
And Marvel had another: Yes, thereâs continuity. Through superscience. And magic. And alternate realities. Or sometimes partially-overwritten timelines. And a sliding timescale where âCap punched the Presidentâ could mean Eisenhower, Nixon, or Clinton as necessary. But only as needed on a case-by-cases basis. So, do you want to start read⌠hey, where are you going? Fine, so long as you see the movie.
The question is, âisnât that expectedâ? And the answer is ânot reallyâ. The stories most people like, the ones that are now being made into movies, really didnât depend on any of that.
When Claremont took the X-Men and said, âtheyâre a lot more interesting if thereâs some fear and racism toward these charactersâ it propelled the story forward and opened up possibilities without retcons. It saw what was there, added to it, and in such a way that none of the existing characters were damaged. I would argue the same could have been true (but largely wasnât) with Spider-Manâs marriage. Similarly with Cap and the Secret Empire storyline. Civil War was nonsensical, but it at least had a fresh basis in todayâs world that took things in a new direction without fundamentally disrespecting the characters, or the fans whoâve invested themselves in their stories.
Not everything has to be grandiose, epic arcs here either. Some of Thorâs best stories are when he was temporarily turned into a frog, or even just trying to explain to new age-ers, âwell, I am a god, but I donât actually expect worship anymoreâŚâ
And even horribly planned and executed story lines like the Spider-Man clone saga didnât need to be magic-ed away. They could take a back seat as a thing that happened but can now mostly be forgotten about, without needing a magic reset button.
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I sort of feel like you should take those three extended comments and write it up in a new topic⌠I like this âslightly outdated thesisâ you have going here. It could probably generate some good conversation on the topic of the history of comicsâŚ
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Haha. Fair enough!
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