I think I’m one of the ones to blame here. I spent the late eighties and nineties wanting the characters to change and “get real.” It wasn’t until they had, and had so much as to be unrecognizable to me, that I realized how much I no longer derived any joy in reading their stories.

For me, changes in the window dressing wasn't the problem. Superman could be Superman regardless of what Krypton looked like or if the Kents were dead or alive. Peter Parker’s girl problems didn’t change whether it was Gwen, MJ, or Betty Brant. Bruce Banner could have a tragic relationship with Betty whether she was his wife or girlfriend.

None of these things changed the mythos or the character.

But having Hank Pym slap his wife certainly did. As did having Peter Parker marry a supermodel and put out a successful book of his own. Or having Bruce Banner suffer from a split personality due to childhood abuse (a storyline I very much enjoyed at the time as I had outgrown the Hulk as I had originally met him). The most outrageous of all, the storyline that finally made me walk away from a hobby I rarely enjoyed anymore, was Civil War. Cap versus Iron Man…are you kidding me?

As for JB, the only character that I can think of that I would say he “changed” is Susan Storm Richards. I’m not referring to the superficial name change, but to the power boost and distinctive personality JB gave her. She went from a helpless victim and emotionally unstable female to being a powerful teammate, mother, sister and wife. Not a radical, abrupt overhaul, but a gradual (and, honestly, necessary) evolution.

All this to say, I agree with Eric White’s point above. Marvel and DC lost me when it became about doing things to the characters and not writing stories about the characters. But I have only myself to blame, I spent years shelling out money for any story that “made it real” and only encouraged them to warp the characters I once loved. Mea Culpa.

(images are big so im linking)

http://i.imgur.com/L65rraf.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/BjypprE.jpg

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There is a certain fish-in-a-barrel aspect to parodies of Marvel, these days. They're doing such a fine job of parodying themselves!

(Also, Worst Balloon Placement EVER!)

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If memory serves, it was Howard Chaykin who invoked (coined?) the phrase "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." That pretty much sums it up, I think.

During this period -- roughly a quarter century -- altho comics experienced steadily diminishing sales, that decline had little or nothing to do with the characters. A series of bad business decisions had been made (among them, reducing the page count in order to keep the 10¢ cover price), and comics as a medium suffered for them. But the characters remained the same. The talent was largely anonymous -- we recognized artists by their styles, not their names -- and all focus was on the characters. Characters who were kept "on model," so that the constantly changing audience would find the same product, "generation" to "generation". The notion that these characters would (or should) "change and grow" was not even considered. Superman was always Superman. Batman was always Batman. Et cetera.

This was accomplished, to a large extent, by mostly ignoring the readers. Sure, they wrote in, and if their (heavily edited) letters had some comment that was of use to the editor, they would get printed. But there was no thought that these readers were participating.* Not until the Sixties when, after a long interregnum, new talent started to filter in -- talent drawn mostly from the pool of fans that had been created by the quarter century and more comics had been in their present form.

At first, the influx of fans-turned-pro presented no real problems, since the Old Guard was still steering the ship, and the idea of artists and writers bringing their own "vision" to characters was largely unheard of. But it couldn't last. The Old Guard were dwindling as the New Kids became more and more prominent. For a while, this had no major effect beyond everybody trying to draw like Neal Adams. These New Kids had been trained by the Old Guard, and they understood how it worked. They understood that those ideas that had been bouncing around fandom were very, very short-term thinking, and such fan-think should be checked at the door.

But steadily, more and more, the fan-think started to take over. By the time I joined the industry, circa 1975, there were writers, artists and editors who seemed to exist solely to "fix" things. Some who seemed unable to even start thinking about a story unless it was soaked in "continuity."

The talent split into two uneven camps. There were those who thought "continuity" was the all-important driving force, and those who, as Paul Levitz expressed it, thought that "continuity" meant that Superman was from Krypton, and would always be from Krypton. Sixties Marvel leaned much in the direction of the former, more and more as the f-t-ps flowed in. Julie Schwartz, the longest survivor of the Old Guard, called these writers and artists "archeologists." Eventually the balanced tipped, and they were pretty much all there was.

And, yes, it was great fun to play with the old toys. To dig down into a character's "history" to find nuggets that had not previously been examined. Went there quite often myself. But after what seemed like not a very long time, this "archeology" began to make the books more and more impenetrable. The latest issue could not be read without having read ten or twelve issues before it. Things became dense and clubbish, and moves were made to clean house and get things on track.

Unfortunately, it was the people who'd created the problem who were largely put in charge of cleaning up -- rather like Congress voting itself a pay raise. The "house cleanings" were done from the viewpoint of those who had been immersed in these characters and stories for decades, much longer than a typical fan/reader -- altho increasingly, such longtime devotion was becoming common among the fans.

Now, again and again, we see the companies "rebooting," but each time the "new" material is heavily dependent upon a deep knowledge of what went before. After all, there's no big deal in Peter Parker becoming "Tony Stark" if the readers don't know how things used to be.

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* The exception was Mort Weisinger, who asked neighborhood kids what they would like to see Superman doing.

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Another forty years? Optimistic!

•••

This is something for which a good deal of blame can be laid at the feet of Wolverine. As that character became more and more popular, more and more "creative" types wanted their character to be Wolverine.