Comics Should Be Good! is doing a meta-poll about “your favorite characters“, which should be amusing, especially if people manage to actually do their favorites and not just pick Batman and Superman because they’re Important Comic Characters. However, this is very telling:
Regarding Legion of Superheroes characters, please specify which version you mean (pre-Zero Hour, Post-Zero Hour, Current series), but seriously, is anyone going to pick one other than the pre-Zero Hour ones?
Because they can’t seriously entertain the notion of people having started to read the Legion seriously other than the versions which are, at this point, nearly fourteen years out of print. Remember how people will always tell you that the comic audience is aging itself into irrelevance? This is what they’re talking about.
(For those not understanding the lingo – “Zero Hour” happened in 1994. It sucked, you didn’t miss anything.)
Related Articles
12 users responded in this post
I slightly remember Zero Hour from when I was a kid.
I only picked up that one Superman comic because there were a ton of Batmen (Batmans?) on the cover, different eras and all that, and it looked like they were going to beat him up.
Imagine my disspointment.
Also, this is when I learned COMIC COVERS LIE.
I’m gonna go over and say current era Braniac 5. Out of spite.
My first ever DC reading was the collected Zero Hour trade.
Is it any wonder I went off them until earlier this year?
I know I say this all the time, but if comics are too expensive for ME to buy and I make decent money and I LIKE comics, then how are any children going to get into them? I consider this a bad thing, what with all my investment in the younger generation and whatnot and blah blah blahwait, where was I? Oh yeah, ‘aging into irrelevance’.
I am saddened that it seems there will be virtually no sharing of the comics experience with the younger generation.
And god help them if they touch my action figures!
And yet, MDK, even with soaring prices putting comics out of the younger generation’s hands, Marvel consistently fails to let any of their major characters grow up or evolve beyond standard archetype to satisfy the more mature tastes of the only people who are going to be able to afford them.
I only like the real oddball characters (Fightman, Ghost Rider 2099, Lobo) so its not worth the time to compile a list, let alone send it in next to a bunch of toads who are only going to flood the contest by picking Wolverine and Batman.
On the one hand, yes I see your point, on the other hand, when Mork MARRIES Mindy, it all comes crashing down. Archetype is the word that counts for me here. These characters are popular BECAUSE they don’t change, I think. I’m sure there’s an arts major out there who can back me up on this in all his grad thesis glory.
I think the answer to ‘the audience is dwindling’ isn’t ‘cater more exclusively to a tiny subset of our intended audience’, but more along the lines of ‘get the comics into grubby little paws NOW’. My reasoning is that people like you (and me) would be essentially strip mining the entire industry by changing the major characters. Sucking out all the goodness at the bottom will destroy it all. You need a large base for a pyramid, in particular when you’re sitting on the pointy bit.
As one of the oft-mentioned younger readers (relatively speaking, since I’m *gasp* 20), the whole “surely, nobody would like anything that was created after the late 80s” sentiment that seems to be accepted as conventional wisdom in a significant portion of online fandom annoys me to no end. It doesn’t help that stories that make up current DCU seem to be geared toward that subset of fandom and the expense of all the younger fans it acquired. The latest JLA relaunch is one of the more obnoxious examples of this trend. While older fans gushed at the JLA/JSA/Legion team-up, I found myself asking what the hell was going on and why the hell should I even begin to give a fuck.
*sigh*
That said, I’m terrified of the possibility that 10-20 years from now, we’re going to get writers from my generation remaking DCU into an echo of 90s-early 00s stories, because younger fans would find themselves in the same shoes as we are now, and that would be disheartening.
Strannik, you’re not alone in your sentiment. I’m 31, my entry years into comics when I was six to ten were during the early 80s, and most of my favorite all-time comics are mid-to-late 90s books – Astro City, Hitman, Starman, the Morrison JLA, Deadpool, et cetera.
And the Meltzer JLA is… yeah, I can see where there’s a good comic in there somewhere, but I don’t think that good comic has friggin’ Geo-Force in it.
I loved the Zero Hour Legion story. A fantastic mishmash of Legion concepts from across its entire history. Just try to tell me you didn’t cheer when Superboy showed up to rally everyone and anyone who didn’t shed a tear as all that history came to an end in such a touching way must have a heart of stone.
Also for some reason the current LSH storyline is really working for me. I think it must be Tenzil’s fault. Everything good about the Legion stems from Tenzil and Chuck. Any comic can be made instantly better by the inclusion of a bouncing fat man and a man who can eat *anything*. Both concepts I embody fully I might add.
To a real creative mind, Mork marrying Mindy should have had no effect other than to explore new ways to incorporate new competitions into the storyline. Mork and Mindy forever chasing each other in an endless cycle is FAR worse. To have an endless competition towards a relatively simple goal is just boring. Ever read Waiting for Godot? Could you imagine someone making a 10 year comic book based on that storyline? Or worse, an animated series?
The only real question a writer should ask is whether the goal is worth achieving. For example, Peter Parker revealing his true identity to the world was a VERY good thing. There was no point to his secret identity in the first place. Why did he have it? To protect his loved ones. His loved ones were already getting their asses handed to them. If anything, the secret identity thing would have meant that his friends and loved ones would have been in that much more trouble just because Peter would have to waste time looking for a place to change so he could save them. Honestly, how could any serious team ever respect a team member with a secret identity? Someone who would be risking the lives of their teammates by taking precious time to change into their underoos.
On the other hand, other goals were not as good. Like Sue Storm marrying Reed Richards. I never understood this relationship. Reed is far too much of a dork to ever use his abilities to please a woman in bed. If Marvel had a brain in their amalgamated heads, they’d break up the marriage and do something interesting with these two for once. Or if they wanted to do something interesting with the Thing, they should take the Thing and make him a low level enforcer for a mob boss. Here’s a guy who, after all the crap he gets from people judging the way he looks, should be genuinely desperate for respect and thus open to the possibility of working for an organized crime ring.. if not running the organization, and by doing so funding and supplying Reed’s experiments.
Goals change in real life. Its only fair that in good comic book characters be allowed to change their goals in life too.
Heh. Now, I realize that your closing admission that ZERO HOUR sucked (which I was grateful for, as much of the post previous was making me reach for a power sander) should not be read as a sweeping condemnation of everything DC has done post ZERO HOUR. Still, it seems like it’s at least a nod in that direction, and up until DC hired Geoff Johns a few years back to salvage all the post ZH crap they’d heaped on the shattered smoking remnants of their conceptual continuity that still existed after the first CRISIS, that would have very much been my position… that the entire DC Universe reeked like Lobo’s armpits, and had since the first CRISIS, much less that horrifying ZERO HOUR thing.
Anyway, I think it’s interesting. You apparently feel comics fans my age (or even somewhat younger) are irrelevant (and annoying, I gather), and yet, at the same time, you directly state ZERO HOUR blew big chunks and in so doing not so subtly imply that everything post ZH must be all wet, too. Which, again, pre-Johns, I’d agree with wholeheartedly.
So, essentially, anyone who likes anything that came out pre-1994 is irrelevent, but everything post-1994 sucks. Is this correct?
Now, I admit, I am completely irrelevent; I will never ever again see a Legion of Superheroes I like, since the last LSH I liked occurred with Cary Bates scripts and Dave Cockrum art. Still, I was charmed to see a version of the Legion extremely close to that Legion in the recent JLA/JSA crossover, and must say, the folks currently crafting DC’s most recent post-CRISIS continuity seem to be fond of the same old, ‘irrelevant’ bits of pre-CRISIS (Hypertime? feh!) continuity that I am.
So I have hope. But hey, I’ll be irrelevant if you insist.
So, essentially, anyone who likes anything that came out pre-1994 is irrelevent, but everything post-1994 sucks. Is this correct?
No.
(That was easy!)