23rd March 2007, 1:59 PM
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?
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)