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You know the old soap opera cliches of characters dying, but coming back (he/she wasn't dead after all!), turning evil, turning good, etc.? You take away the superpowers and costumes, and everything DC and Marvel puts out is kind of like that.

I used to read and collect this stuff around middle school, but every few years I get curious and check what's been happening with the DC universe, and it's crazy as hell. Hawkman apparently was killed off or sent into oblivion because the writing staff screwed his character up so bad (alternate universes, etc. stuff too confusing for anyone to care), they needed time to figure out how to straighten him out.

Then Green Lantern (or the one most people know, Hal Jordan) apparently went crazy some years back and tried to destroy the universe.

Then he came back redeemed and died saving the universe.

Then he was resurrected as a new character, the Spectre.

Then it turns out he went crazy because he was possessed by something that apparently is a new, long-winded, complicated, and 'untold' (i.e. something they just cooked up) portion of his origin and the reason why yellow was his weakness. It's also the reason why his temples went grey (as if the fans went mad trying to figure that one out).

Then this thing or whatever that possessed him was banished and he became the Green Lantern again. (That's actually 10 years of Green Lantern in a nutshell.)

Meanwhile, Blue Beetle got shot in the head, in a tired trend of killing off second-tier characters in big, crossover stories, and killing them off in visually brutal fashion (check out wikipedia's entry on Blue Beetle. Shit, they have his brains splattering out of his head. You can tell they really LOVED that character over at DC.)

And Max Lord is the one who killed him. Means nothing to most people, but he was a major character when I was reading comics, and it's weird how he's suddenly evil and homicidal, the guy was basically a comedic version of Donald Trump that funded the Justice League for some odd reason.

The alternate universe/ridiculous convoluted storyline/soap opera-itude is why I stopped reading comics wayyy back when. It's just far, far too much...

Man, those panels can be interpreted in so many ways (especially the first one...heh heh heh).

For me it was trying to comprehend the Spider-Man Clone Crisis insanity. (Where, as I understand it, a clone of Peter Parker that was produced in a storyline back in the 70s and left for dead was suddenly not dead and was for some reason the Real Peter Parker so he took the name of Ben Reilly and became the Scarlet Spider until the Now-Fake Peter Parker got MJ knocked up and retired/lost his powers/moved to Seattle and Ben became Spider-Man FOREVER until the sales numbers went south and they brought back the Now-Fake Peter Parker who suddenly for some reason was the Real Peter Parker again and got his powers back and came out of retirement after Ben got killed by the 273rd Green Goblin and his daughter was abucted by the long-dead-but-suddenly-alive-and-behind-the-whole-clone-crisis Norman Osborn, never to be seen or mentioned again.)

Apparently now he has organic webshooters and everyone knows his secret identity. And Tony Stark built him some Spider-Armor.

Or something.

Ryan

You guys seem to forget what DC comics was like before Crisis on Infinite Earths. Unlike Marvel, DC was basically static, with no changes occurring of significance in the vast majority of titles year after year. I've been reading comics about 35 years now, and while I agree some of the storylines are convoluted to the point of absurdity (X-Men, anyone?), comics over the last 20 years or so are infinitely superior to most comics for the 60 years prior to that.

I'm sort of glad I dropped this a long time ago. My roomie's a bit DC fiend, and he's attempted to explain the recent digressions in continuity to me...to absolutely no avail. Is it the sort of thing one can understand outside of the obsessive level of attention?

Nope. Comics continuity these days is hideously complex. The publishers are coming up with "mega-events" so often now that they feel they have to make major changes to characters on a regular basis just to break through the noise and generate interest. (See my post above re: Spider-Man. He also apparently now has Wolverine-like "stingers.")

I have to wonder if superhero movies are so popular these days because the comics themselves have become so unfriendly to the casual reader.

Ryan

Rspaight wrote:Nope. Comics continuity these days is hideously complex. The publishers are coming up with "mega-events" so often now that they feel they have to make major changes to characters on a regular basis just to break through the noise and generate interest. (See my post above re: Spider-Man. He also apparently now has Wolverine-like "stingers.")

I have to wonder if superhero movies are so popular these days because the comics themselves have become so unfriendly to the casual reader.

Ryan

Spider-Man "jumped the shark" a few years ago when a hack writer decided to make Peter Parker's first love, Gwen Stacy, a whore who slept with Norman Osborne and had his twin children before Osborne a/k/a Green Goblin decided to kill her. IMO, it's a real ugly stain in the official Spider-Man mythology and I'll be happy when some real fan completely guts the story in the same way they wrote out the original Stacy-clone in the 80s.

Spider-Man has been my favorite character since the early 70s but Marvel has shown a real lack of respect for the character in the last few years...