Comic book characters are a funny thing.
Specially, the characters populating the "Cape" genre of comics are, at least to me, funny, strange, a little odd.
It has nothing to do with the illogical choice of fabrics for the heroic/villanious (and taxing) deeds they're required to perform, nor does it have anything to do with the strange powers and monikers that get further and further away from plausible as the years go on...no the strange thing goes deeper than that
here,i'll attempt to expand the thought. but i'll need to go off-point for a while to illustrate the oddity inherent of our caped crusaders.
See, comic book heroes and villains follow a sense of development you rarely find in other mediums. in film a franchise can carry on and on if there's a demand for it, but that demand tends to come from constant re-invention. a franchise can get stale, sales will dip, and behind the scenes the studios will meet and attempt to inject life into their characters and stories by following current trends.this is how we get things like the bond saga, horror franchises, and the infamous reboot model. the formula isint perfect, but it's there because a films audience isn't a stable thing. the "general audience" phenomenon is what sells these stories and as the years pass that audience gets older, generations loose touch with the story in between the year long gaps it takes to produce new entertainment and so the studios take the characters that work, examine them, and try to adapt what that thing, that little idea of a fictional persons life, purpose, and narrative might mean to a modern viewer.
Books are nearly the opposite, they're subject to re-invention yes, but they more often than not come from one creator, their influences, and the ongoing ideas that creator might have about the characters ongoing adventures. in the few continuing sagas that do feature one character over the course of many,many books, the audience is following because they have a love for what these characters bring to the table, as well as what the author might come up with next. bookworms are inherently more loyal than filmgoers. Film does feature it's purists, but they tend to understand the nature of the medium enough to embrace or forgive drastic change. If things are bad enough these fans will just drop the new product, pick up the old one and ignore the existence of a continuing story until someone new "gets it right".
Not bookworms. The fan of a literary saga has two roads they can go down- ascending excitement, or sudden disappointment. if you follow an ongoing narrative book after book it is often because the first experience was intoxicating enough to persuade you back, you, the reader, had experenced an overwhelming cocktail of wild experiences through the lives of the characters between the text, and coming back for more is no question. Either that feeling continues indefinitely with each work, or sometimes, something changes on you. You journey with these characters and then midway, near the end or sometimes even on the last page of the latest work something shifts, and loses a part of what you love about the work.
The problem with change is it does not mix well with expectation. In film, the audience changes, the creators wonder what doesn't work when it use too, and they strive to adjust. in Literature, the author is working based on what they feel the story must be and that stays the course until something influences change the mind of the author, like an editor, a life partner, a sudden change in the authors own life, or sometimes it's just a need to shock/pacify/reward/screw with/ the fanbase. Whatever the reason, an author captains a ship and as readers we can only hope the trip is everything we've wanted, it isn't up to us.
That, in a nutshell is the difference between these mediums, and comic books. if you're a fan of a character in film or in literature you are constantly at the mercy of the general audiences instability, or the inevitable shake ups of the authors need to express the changes of their environments through their characters. these are not necessarily bad places to be as a fan... but they do differ.
In comic books, or at least the ones that last decades, everything is cyclical.
Everything.is.cyclical.
If you began to follow a character when you were ten that character will be the same through and through by the time you are 30. no exceptions, no debate. there ARE changes and they occur quite frequently but the formula of that character and what makes them tick will always come back. This is brilliant and damaging depending on how you look at it. Superman will always stand for truth and justice (and sometimes, when bold enough even the American way) batman will always be protecting Gotham from those who would feed on it's wealth, spider-man will always be the guilt ridden and quick witted underdog who's sense of responsibility has the proportionate power of a spider, and so on.
It's like this because the fans want it to be like this. it's like this because we, the readership are a strange mix of filmgoers and bookworms. we want the stability of an authors vision but, unlike literature, these stories never end. not only do they not end, but they come out far more frequently than any other medium. bond fans have to wait years for a new book or movie to appear and calm their 007 itch. a fan of spider-man needs only wait from month to month, sometimes less, for as long as they live. this means that the creators involved eventually need to move on, and some of them just outright die before they can complete the work. but the medium sells on the backbone of only a handful of franchises, and the deaths of those franchises could mean the death of the medium, and as a result the studios hire a new team, look for a new direction, throw their characters into cross overs and events, anything to keep business running and us paying attention
This cycle wouldn't be so bad if it just stuck to the central characters...but it doesn't. any time something sticks with a book it is required that the idea stick forever. Introduce a villain that works, that villain is now a central part of that narrative. kill someone off, and that death is important enough that it needs to be a permanent part of a characters personality, so much so that eventually it becomes easier to tell more stories about it by just bringing the dead back to life.
It's because of this cycle that we get into issues that bother the readership. The joker is going to kill people every time he appears, batman is going to throw him in arkham every time the joker gets caught, where he will escape and kill more people
Lex will always screw with the public with the power he has over them to get to superman. never mind the legal and social walls that should be held up to him by now. when needed, he will always have an illogical amount of power at his disposal for the sole purpose of thwarting the golden sun-god he so despises.
spider-mans array of villains are going to keep robbing banks and going to jail only to come back out with a new version of their old gimmick, where they will get slapped around and sent back to jail, only to...no longer be in jail in a years time.
ad infinitum.
The thing is this isnt incompetence causing this...it's us. it's the nature of the fan base. the success of these comics ride on the interest of their readership. The readership can sometimes expand if the characters do too, often into other mediums, the issue is the mediums take the stories of the early adventures these characters undertake, and then the newly interested audience, in their hunger for more, need to find a way to catch up to the books those films/television shows/video games are based on. for some this means a lot of confusion regarding the truth of the story they're attempting to expand upon. is spider-man a teenager or in his thirties? isnt his girlfriend Mary Jane? how many people have been venom? how many robins does batman have? doesn't the joker wear makeup? didint batman die? didn't superman die? how strong is superman exactly? were he and lex childhood friends or not? isint he married to Lois lane?
Everything tweeks and expands upon the central idea, which means beyond that central idea nothing is true. nothing is canon since canon isnt safe, at the drop of a hat something irrelevant will get retconned or omitted completely, rebooted or brought back because we, the fans, want it that way. we accept change only when it's necessary, and then we demand, through our actions that the narrative change things back to the way they were anyway.
The readers who stick around with these characters go through the effort of knowing the answers to nearly all of these questions, and thus become part of the fan base. comic books have no general audience. just varying levels of core-readerships. and in a medium this fickle, with a narrative this long, and an inevitable cycle of varying writers and artists on each book forever and ever, eventually the fans end up the ones behind the wheel, trying to expand upon, but still keep true to what they were in love with regarding the characters as young fans.
cycles. comic books work in cycles. the evolution of the fandom, the development of the characters, the hits and misses of the narrative. every aspect turns back around on itself to produce a medium where the fans desperately want a change they rarely allow, and yet, and are in complete control of...
so what do i find so funny?
This is the funny thing.
In any other medium the victim of a cycle like this is either the creator/s or the fan base. With comic books however, it's the characters. The notion is silly, they're not real, and they're essentially eternal so "suffering" on their part seems ridiculous. but it occured to me that as a fan, if things change, they'll eventually change back and you'll have what you love in your hands again in a short ammount of time. as a creator you get to work on the thing you've loved and attempt to apply the change you've so desperately wanted to apply, you get to answer the questions you feel that characters narrative hasn't yet or design a look that expresses what you feel the character should...until another creative team comes in after you and changes everything back, but you had your time, and made your mark on the infinite wall of something you cherish.
Everyone wins but the characters. they become stale, comedic, they represent things then stop then go back to representing them all over again. they live to tell us the story of the middle of their lives, they will never truly reach a goal, not matter how integral to their lives the reaching of that goal is. Batman will never win his war on crime. Spider-man will be "the next reed Richards" forever, but he'll never get there. Superman will save us over and over and over without impact because the things than threaten us can never be vanquished, they're too important to his story arch.
The lesser characters have it worse. the two bit thugs introduced in the early days are doomed to be in the rogues gallery of that work. Creating villains now is difficult, theres no nostalgia to sell them to the current readership, they don't get enough attention to warrant being featured in other mediums and as a result fade into comic book limbo. but the old villains get remembered, they get re-invented and thrown around by creator after creator, each with the desire to place their stamp on them until they have no real core, no real reason for existing in the narrative beyond brand recondition. why does shocker matter? why does the penguin matter? why does metallo matter?
The core issue here can be summed up in one word: Potential. these characters are stuck, and it means none of them can ever really be what they're meant to be, what we demand of them as an audience and as creators.
With that we reach the point of this blog and of this whole project.
The Potential Project is an attempt to look at these characters without the lens of our nostalgia. to take the characters who initally had no real purpose and fix it. We will tackle the obvious elements in the characters back story, in the perception the fans and exterior audience has of them. we will look at what they do or should represent and recreate them with the intention of being more aware of their place in a never ending medium.
We're going to redesign the heroes and villains who need it, and we're going to do it from the inside out.
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