Tendo City

So I hear in the news, because this is apparently important, that Captain America is dead. Wow, that's a twist. Civil War and everything huh? Neato. Then, a few days ago, I hear that he's going to "get better" because people who actually read further in that comic say there's something about him recovering "in secret".

You see people, THIS is why no one takes comics seriously. They have these valuable intellectual properties and are totally convinced they can't make money without them (which may be true, but then again...) so they never actually kill any of these guys off! Even the bad guys are kept around, and they often just "let them go" at the end of some battle, even if the bad guy just KILLED A 3RD OF THE PLANET, because killing them "would make me no better than that guy", or some idiotic philosophy like that, and well philosophy is all well and good but you know that they are coming back to kill again and wouldn't you say it's wrong to allow those future deaths just to maintain some childish sense of super hero innocense? Look, either you grow up and don't worry about marketting, or you stop complaining when people say comic books can't be taken seriously as good narrative. Now, I've actually seen some interesting comics, some weird Japanese black and white affairs my friends have, which do something the big publishers would never consider doing. They END! They actually have an overarching plot that sees the characters wandering into the sunset and people actually die or retire FOREVER, major changes happen! Stuff! None of this eternal "lessons learned" then forgotten INSTANTLY as everything returns to the status quo.

You want to kill off a hero or villian? Do it, and don't bring them back! If you want to get me to ever actually read your comics, here's a thought. Try something NEW! Slowly retire your old heroes, one by one, as major changes happen, and bring brand new stuff into your worlds! I mean, HOW old is Batman at this point? Am I to believe this geriatric is still fighting crime? Bring in a new guy, like in Batman Beyond. They had a good idea there. In fact, go beyond THAT. I'm sick of the "universes" of heroes. Entire storylines that are so convoluted that they really can't do very much at all anyway. How about retiring the whole darned universe at some date in the future, and then creating brand new property after property, planning out a storyline, and retiring those in good time. I might see a constant supply of heroes going in and out on the shelves in stores, instead of "oh, look who's being dramatically wreslted to the ground by Superman this time".

What I'm saying is this. There's a reason no one cares about comic books. Kill off your old characters and start doing something new!

There's also the fact that a person like me can't possibly take more than ten minutes to read one of the damn things.

I thought this was going to be about the crossover between Marvel and Guiding Light.

Oh, fantastic. Hey, I know, let's substitute real storyline change with answering "who would win?" questions instead!

Killing Captain America? It's a publicity stunt, simply. Superheroes (or major supervillains) are almost never actually killed off... I mean, they have long histories. Their fans don't want them killed off! So they "die" and then come back every so often, and get some press in the process. That's just how it works.

I guess you're right that that stuff is probably part of why people don't take comics seriously, but... well, I've never been a big comic-books fan, so I'm not the best one to judge it...

Neither have I, but I am a nerd, so I get roughly aquainted with super hero lore in cartoons and stuff, and also the sorts of people who get upset that comic books aren't being taken seriously as an art form (they like to call them "graphic novels" or sometimes just plain "books" like they are fooling anybody but themselves). I basically just respond "well when's the last time anything really ever changed?". Thing is, a lot of the time the response I get is a description of "huge events that shook everything up" like infinite crisis event Earth 0 or something like that. Then, when I actually get a rough description of what happened, turns out the status quo is maintained completely by the end of it and pretty much no one died, or the only thing that happened is the time line "shifted" in a way to clean up all those ridiculous plot holes that develop because they refuse to ever move on or even just create an alternate reality. I mean, look at Gundum. They could end hte story and recreate it imagined in a totally different way and end THAT story. In that way, Batman could go on forever reinvented. There are a lot of ways they could do this that don't involve some "story thread" that remains level and stretches to infinity. Where is the denoument?