Today's heroes only fight themselves
3 Comments Published by Avi Green on Friday, March 09, 2012 at 12:10 AM.
CBS NY writes about 10 things we should know about today's comics. And one of those is that:
If the people in charge of the big two wanted to, I think they could conceive more than enough stories with real meat that depict heroes vs. villains and all without resorting to crossovers. But alas, they don't.
3. Heroes Don’t Fight Villains Anymore, Just HeroesYep, that's exactly what storytelling's plummeted down to these days, certainly in the crossovers like the soon to be released Avengers vs. X-Men. But even if they do fight supercrooks, what they write is mostly dumbed down into grudge matches, and there's hardly any stories today about bank and jewel store robberies, or even heists from laboratories and weapons armories which the villains would then threaten to unleash upon the planet unless all control were ceded to them.
Used to be back in the day that super-heroes spent a lot of their time fighting super-villains. Not so anymore! In the modern era, superheroes mostly ignore crime, and pummel each other into a pulp. That’s called “character-driven storytelling.”
If the people in charge of the big two wanted to, I think they could conceive more than enough stories with real meat that depict heroes vs. villains and all without resorting to crossovers. But alas, they don't.
Labels: dc comics, marvel comics
Sad but true... ever since Civil War especially that's all they've been able to focus on, heroes vs. heroes. And even the comics where they fought supervillains often opened with the heroes foiling a bank robbery of some sort, by ordinary non-powered criminals... I haven't seen anything like that in a mainstream comic for years....
Carl
Yes, sadly for Marvel Comics the eighties was their overall zenith and it has been downhill since then. The nineties ushered in big boobs and steriod freak musculature, and since before Civil War we got the navel gazing era. I don't collect DC, so no comment there.
I am a fan of both Marvel and DC. Being born in the 1990s I grew up in the era of dark and grim characters and awful artists like Rob Liefeld but eventually I discovered the original comics and enjoyed them more than the current stuff, even back then. In high school I kind of went along with what was trendy, namely the dark and grim comics, but after I graduated I realized just how bad the current crop of comics really is... I lost a lot of friends because of my views on how far the medium has fallen due to left-wing politics and shock value tactics/publicity stunts, apparently because they thought someon my age was supposed to just go along and not question how things were run.
Carl