Superhero Comics
used to read comic books. DC exclusively. When I was young, I read an issue of Secret Wars II, got confused, and decided that Marvel wasn't worth bothering with. I mention this because last week we were at the Mattel Outlet and they had packs of Justice League figurines. That used to be my favorite series back during high school. I remember switching to it when Teen Titans tried to explain Donna Troy's origins.
I considered picking up a few of the toys. They had some decent characters. They didn't have my favorite characters, but they had some okay ones. Here's why they didn't have my favorite characters and why I don't read superhero comics anymore.
I remember the second-to-last issue of Justice League that I read. They had introduced a new supervillain.
It went like this:
The bad guy teleports the heros onto his space station. They're trapped in some kind of power-nullifying chairs.
Bad guy: I have a Space Chess set. You heroes are going to be my chess pieces or I'll kill one of you.
Hero: No, bad guy. We refuse to play your game.
Then the bad guy kills Ice, to show everyone that he's serious and for-real. Then the heroes play the game. It was one of the most anticlimactic, pointless deaths this side of Tasha Yar. It'd be as if the microwave really exploded, killing Brisbane and Kimberly, ending You Say it First. I got the next issue in the hopes that it would be a regular comic-book fake death. It wasn't. She is, as I understand it, still dead.
Every few years I get the urge to get back into comics. I poke around a bit on what's happened. Invariably "what's happened" means that a few more of my favorite characters died. It's not just that they died, but that they tended to die pointless deaths in arcs that got very bad reviews. The deaths weren't stories. They were punctuation in other peoples' stories, like putting an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence! in the hopes that it would make the paragraph containing it more exciting.
So right now, if they made a set with The Blue Beetle, Max Lord, The Elongated Man, Sue Dibny, Rocked Red, Ice, Crimson Fox, The Martian Manhunter, and Mr. Miracle and called it "We're sorry about killing these guys, honest", I'd still wait until it went on sale.
I understand that to establish dramatic tension, something needs to be at stake. I understand that superheroics is a dangerous job. I understand that DC isn't selling us a static, unchanging world - they put out hundreds of pages each month. It's just that being a former member of Justice League International puts you at the top of the hit list. I don't intend to start reading comic books again any time soon. If I found a series I liked, it'd end eventually. Then they'd start killing off the characters when other stories needed a bit more drama.
I considered picking up a few of the toys. They had some decent characters. They didn't have my favorite characters, but they had some okay ones. Here's why they didn't have my favorite characters and why I don't read superhero comics anymore.
I remember the second-to-last issue of Justice League that I read. They had introduced a new supervillain.
It went like this:
The bad guy teleports the heros onto his space station. They're trapped in some kind of power-nullifying chairs.
Bad guy: I have a Space Chess set. You heroes are going to be my chess pieces or I'll kill one of you.
Hero: No, bad guy. We refuse to play your game.
Then the bad guy kills Ice, to show everyone that he's serious and for-real. Then the heroes play the game. It was one of the most anticlimactic, pointless deaths this side of Tasha Yar. It'd be as if the microwave really exploded, killing Brisbane and Kimberly, ending You Say it First. I got the next issue in the hopes that it would be a regular comic-book fake death. It wasn't. She is, as I understand it, still dead.
Every few years I get the urge to get back into comics. I poke around a bit on what's happened. Invariably "what's happened" means that a few more of my favorite characters died. It's not just that they died, but that they tended to die pointless deaths in arcs that got very bad reviews. The deaths weren't stories. They were punctuation in other peoples' stories, like putting an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence! in the hopes that it would make the paragraph containing it more exciting.
So right now, if they made a set with The Blue Beetle, Max Lord, The Elongated Man, Sue Dibny, Rocked Red, Ice, Crimson Fox, The Martian Manhunter, and Mr. Miracle and called it "We're sorry about killing these guys, honest", I'd still wait until it went on sale.
I understand that to establish dramatic tension, something needs to be at stake. I understand that superheroics is a dangerous job. I understand that DC isn't selling us a static, unchanging world - they put out hundreds of pages each month. It's just that being a former member of Justice League International puts you at the top of the hit list. I don't intend to start reading comic books again any time soon. If I found a series I liked, it'd end eventually. Then they'd start killing off the characters when other stories needed a bit more drama.