My Frustration With Modern Comics

Ah comics, once a medium jumping with creativity and passion, the heroes that lept from it's pages became larger than life, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Iron Man. They all have left their mark on pop culture, especially with the past 10 years of film. But the worst kept secret amongst nerd and fans of superheroes is that the comic industry, is fucked. Sales keep sinking lower and lower as time goes on and industry standards keep dropping in terms of those sales.

Now I'm not here to speak about that, there are people far more qualified than me who can tell you about the clusterfuck that has pervaded comic books for decades. I want to talk about why I can't read comics, not that I dislike them, far from it, it's just that comics have been plagued by one consistent issue, one thing that has been, at least for me, ruining comic books. In my opinion this is a plague on the comics industry and the sooner it goes away the happier I'll be; event comics.

The event comic is a comic in which the universe is shaken up, all comics grind to a halt, and the entire status quo is changed affecting stories for years to come. And it has ruined the industry and made newer comics basically unreadable for me. This trend started in the 80's with Marvel's Secret Wars and DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, they were large stories with major ramifications for those who took part. DC's entire universe was rebooted with Crisis in order to streamline the clusterfuck of the Silver Age. While Secret Wars gave us Spider-Man's black outfit, the Thing leaving the Fantastic 4, and whole new characters being introduced. And even other events like Infinity Gauntlet and JLA/Avengers were fantastic stories and only happened every few years or so.

But in recent years it's become too much too handle, every year brings on an earth shattering event that makes you stop reading the comic you wanted to read for three months. My story is like this; I wanted to read Spider-Man so I hopped on with the 2014 relaunch of Amazing Spider-Man and I enjoyed the stories in them. Then Spider-Verse came around and I basically checked that whole event out in it's entirety. Nothing too bad so far, even the Original Sin tie in wasn't too bad; and then Secret Wars (2015) came around and suddenly the status quo for Spidey was changed which was odd but I followed as well as I could. And then Civil War II came around the next year and changed up the entire universe and I threw up my hands and went, "fuck this, I'm done." I even tried to get into Iron Man and Captain America's more modern titles as well around this time but then Civil War II and the Hail Hydra moment made me go "Fuck this" just like with Spider Man.

I don't want to read about how some stupid Thor villain or some cosmic entity is trying to destroy the universe, I just wanted to read fucking Spider-Man. Marvel cannot keep a consistent story for a year before changing the entire universe. Don't believe me? Well, 2010 gave us Siege, 2011 us Fear Itself and Spider-Island, 2012 gave us Avengers vs X-Men, 2013 gave us Age of Ultron, 2014 gave us Original Sin and AXIS, 2015 gave us Secret Wars (2015), 2016 gave us Civil War II, 2017 gave us Secret Empire, 2018 gave us Infinity Wars, and 2019 will give us War of the Realms; for fucks sake that's a universe changing event every year. how is anyone not die hard devoted to the industry meant to keep up? I sure as hell can't, I'm perfectly content reading the older 60's-80's era stuff, (Demon in a Bottle and Marvels being latest strand outs). All of this stuff about universe's ending or cosmic events requiring every hero to pitch in is just fucking tiring.

I'm even willing to bet that this is why Marvel's newest heroes, Miles Morales' Spider Man, Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel, Ironheart, and Spider-Gwen have failed to take off after their debut. They just haven't been given the time to breathe that the OG Spider-Man, Captain America, and Iron Man were given before being hurled into universe ending events. The first run of Spider Gwen went 5 issues, got sucked into Secret Wars, and then I gave up on trying to keep up after that. Imagine if the Infinity War movie happened every year and you basically got what the problem was, no time to let the characters develop their own world and mythos before hurling it all into a smoothie blender. Just let a status quo grow for at least three years before the next event. Hell, the guy who runs the Marvel movies, Kevin Feige, said that Endgame is the end of big event movies like Avengers for now and the focus will be on individual stories. Proving that he should clearly be in charge of the comics if that was his call.

Now I have been throwing Marvel in the fire but DC has made plenty of mistakes it's just that the thing, outside of Tomasi's excellent Superman Rebirth run (sidenote: get fucked Bendis you know what you did), I'm more of a Marvel fan than DC. With that said DC is just as bad and the entire New 52 was a trainwreck with every hero becoming essentially some variation of Batman ad ruinign year of continuity and world building. On a related note, if they canceled every Batman comic for the next 10 years I would not weep in the slightest, I'm sick of hearing about Batman, he's become overrated. All I really need to say about that is Dark Knight's Metal, that's it, that's all I need to say. DKM sums up my problems with DC lately and we'll leave it at that.

I believe that if comics swore off event comics, improved the marketing of their current comics, and focused more on individual stories. Then the industry in 5-10 years could see an uptick back to where it was in the 80's, but until then I just won't care. Though let me know when Spider-Man: One More Day is reversed, that I do care about a bit.