I'm kind of in the boat that I enjoy talking about the creative process behind comics, which includes talking about characters and what does or doesn't "make them work". This forum's one of few places where I never think folks are chiming in merely to bitch or criticize, and I have the same discussions in the real world with real people, about comics and movies. But mostly it's related to learning all I can about the process, and the histories of characters/creators that makes it worthwhile.

It's when people start squawking over a character's specific meaning, attributing politics of any kind onto a character, and thus ignoring the adventure/entertainment aspect that used to be paramount when making comics AND movies, as popular entertainment without demeaning the audience, that I realize popular entertainment is as dead as Abraham Lincoln. There was an ART to producing entertainment, at one point, across the board in all media. Not now.

Still, as far as this forum goes, the pleasure of finding someone else who thinks the 3D Man or GI Robot is cool as a moose is somehow, I don't know, verifying that these characters are not dead, culturally. I mean from Superman on down. Somewhere there's a snot-nosed kid tracing Jack Kirby Captain America panels. This is the most hopeful thing I will ever say about anything, but maybe that kid will be the EIC who understands comic book language, the art of entertainment, and coaches it to a culture to be understood the way the culture understands porn and conspiracy and terrorism. Only it'll be good entertaining comics of quality, made by quality people.*

*By the way, that's the secret to any creative endeavor...get quality creators on the project. 97 percent of the time, quality begets quality. That's what Hollywood used to do ALL THE TIME before the Studios collapsed into talentless entropy.

updated for clarity