Agreed - with comics in general, the long history involved is one of the most fascinating things about it. I mean, I've been into them for a long time now, not all my life like some people, but at least since I was, say, twelve or fourteen or so (not counting my fascination with Tintin and the like, which dates back much earlier) - and you know what? I've been collecting and browsing and checking out comics all that time, and I still discover new things about them damn near every day. And that, I think, is part of the draw to new readers, especially with DC comics, since it does owe so much to its Golden Age - it's very much a Golden Age-rooted universe (as opposed to, say, Marvel, which is more Silver Age). There is so much stuff to discover and root out and talk about, even if you stick within a certain era, and I think a lot of people's reactions to that is not 'aww, man, look at all this stuff I gotta read', but 'look at all this great stuff!' This is why I get irritated with this 'we've got to hook in new readers' stuff they keep talking about, which birthed the DCnU in the first place, because the end result of most of it seems to be 'pay attention to all the old jokes that the stupid people make'. That's not 'hooking in the new readers', that's 'pandering to a certain subsection of the old readers who we really shouldn't be paying attention to'. That's why we currently have Superman wearing armor, and in a costume that, let's face it, is never going to be one tenth as iconic as the old tights-and-trunks look. It's why we've got an Aquaman about whom people make Aquaman jokes in-universe (yeah, you know when the last time they did that was? NEVER). It's why, in a nutshell, we've got a comics universe being steered by people who seem to have forgotten that these things are meant to be fun - sure, make 'em dark and sad and epic and all that other stuff, but still fun.
This is why I get irritated with this 'we've got to hook in new readers' stuff they keep talking about, which birthed the DCnU in the first place, because the end result of most of it seems to be 'pay attention to all the old jokes that the stupid people make'. That's not 'hooking in the new readers', that's 'pandering to a certain subsection of the old readers who we really shouldn't be paying attention to'. That's why we currently have Superman wearing armor, and in a costume that, let's face it, is never going to be one tenth as iconic as the old tights-and-trunks look. It's why we've got an Aquaman about whom people make Aquaman jokes in-universe (yeah, you know when the last time they did that was? NEVER). It's why, in a nutshell, we've got a comics universe being steered by people who seem to have forgotten that these things are meant to be fun - sure, make 'em dark and sad and epic and all that other stuff, but still fun.
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