Not to mention the 500 Supermen, the 500 Hulks...
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I think this is really the reason I was never into comic books as a kid. It was all this. What happens when I'm not interested in superheroes?
I would have liked manga I'm sure, but I don't remember it being all that common at the time in the US. The story lines and characters are totally different.
Well to be fair, american comics uses to be hugely diverse with things like horror comics, war comics , science fiction and fantasy or 'two fisted tales' in the wild north or the jungles. Unfortunately the censorious shits of the day killed the market for everyone but capes and a few niches like archie.
God, thinking about how badly American culture has been crippled by control freaks on both sides is rage inducing. We could have been a real country right now, instead of swinging back and forth between corporate blandness and clown world
Yeah having a single story written by a single author, maybe with one doing the writing and another doing the art with assistants, makes a so much more cohesive story.
As opposed to having writers and artists passing things off to one another all the time, without a clear plan. Some manga do go on forever, but you can still tell it's the same creators working on it, as opposed to a totally new team every few years.
I may be a pretty big comic buff, but there’s usually something superhero related for everyone to enjoy. My wife didn’t care for them until I introduced her to the teen titans tv show I grew up with. She loved it so much that we now own the box set AND now she personally owns a nice pile of teen titans comics and perhaps a few of my own copies of classics like Batman: year one and All Star Superman.
Keep in mind that my wife has a doctorate in English literature and a lot of the books she reads makes my head hurt. Never thought I’d get her to read a graphic novel, let alone enjoy it. If you’re not into it now I bet there’s still something for you to enjoy somewhere
I'm sure there's some niche if I were more interested. I really haven't tried in years. I have gone through a small amount of manga.
There's so much to read more than time I invest in it, so I'll really never run out of content.
You turn to Archie comics and pick up a sweet Sonic comic, or in my little sister's case Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Hell if you were around at the right time you could pick up the Ninendo Comics System from Valiant. I distinctly remember one panel being the first time I was reading on my own, with Lemmy bludgeoning Bowser over the head with a pipe wrench cackling "oh boy, this is fun" as he played the role of sidekick to Mario's alter ego Dirk Drainhead. There was so much good stuff out there and still is, even with the sea of woke garbage. It's just...not from DC or Marvel and that's all most people know or are ever exposed to.
I guess I was around at the right time, but to be fair at that age I never really pushed my way into the world of comics. I really don't remember any of my peers at that time in the American South being interested in any comics really. So, I don't know if it was just past it's time already, or it was a regional thing.
I see, anything but European comics.
Funnily enough, most of these are not even from alternative universes. Add multiverses to the equation and it goes even more full retard.
Multiverses have their place. Elseworlds stories and alternative incarnations of long running series, like Ninja Turtles or Sonic create a natural ecosystem of stories that build off of and influence each other. They're either new interpretations that stand on their own merits, for better or worse, or little "What if" tales that aren't meant to be more than a fun curiosity.
The problems come when writers get too cute and meta with the concept, using "Infinite Possibilities" to asspull whatever they currently want to exist into the main canon. It's just another flavor of deus ex machina at that point.
Glad we can agree, then.
I liked the Critical Drinker's take on multiverses in his video where he compared Multiverse of Madness with Everything Everywhere All At Once. It can be used in telling a good story, or it can be a device that ruins the story because it takes away risk and finality (and good luck getting the human brain to comprehend the stakes of destroying a multiverse).
It also reminds me of time travel. I started watching End Game wondering "How will the universe get fixed? Maybe the Celestials will get involved? Maybe a magical mcguffin or a trip to where the infinity gems originated from?" When the movie made it clear that the answer could be time travel, my reaction was "Damn it. I guess I don't need to see the rest of the movie to know what happens next."
The concept is a lot of fun I think, but like many things it gets beaten to death and then beaten into paste and then shit all over by corporations and dogshit writers.
It was a mistake because we can't have nice things but I do think the idea is good at its core.
Batman Beyond was genuinely one of the best superhero cartoons, though. It had no right to be any good, and if a cartoon with that exact premise was made today it'd be trash, but it was excellent.
I agree with u/AnimeAnon about most of the rest, though. Multiverses were a mistake.
The thing that made Beyond so strong that most of these fail is that it was a genuine torch pass. Like, it was way in the future with things changed and the original couldn't just "come back" to reclaim his costume.
It was a sequel instead of a multiverse counterpart.
I love how in the episode with Ra's Al Ghoul and the Lazarus pit, when the possibility of Bruce getting young and being Batman again is brought up, Terry preemptively insists he's not going to be Robin.
Or in Shriek's intro episode, when Terry realizes Bruce still calls himself Batman in his own head. "That's my name now." And Bruce actually has a hint of a smile.
Tell that to my subconscious.
You know what else it did? It treated the predecessor with the respect he fucking deserved! Being far enough in the future that Bruce was a frail old man that couldn't possibly keep up with crime-fighting, he was still an absolute beast that could strike fear in the hearts of men!
I hate how modern cartoons are so fucking braindead compared to what we used to have. A ton of cartoons treated the audience with respect, look at stuff like Static Shock, Clone Wars, Teen Titans, etc. they tackled hard topics and challenged the audience with moral dilemmas and provided well-produced action.
Hell, Teen Titans and Static Shock are some of the best portrayals of racism I’ve ever seen period. They treated the racist characters with respect and allowed them to look past surface-level observations and grow as a character instead of immediately writing them off as deplorable and making them the butt of every possible joke.
Nowadays we have teen titans Go doing an episode about thick thighs and butts or something stupid like that.
The Teen Titans episode where Cyborg accidentally uses a racial slur on Starfire and they have a calm discussion of it and everybody involved grows as a person would be completely impossible to make today, nobody involved in Western animation could possibly do it.
I'll be honest that actually sounds pretty gay.
It was, as another person who liked the show. It very much was.
I liked the characterization displayed between them on it though, with afterwards him trying to awkwardly empathize with her noting that people say mean things because of how he looks too, and she's just 100% not getting the idea of humans hating humans, intra-race discrimination just isn't in her understanding, so he throws her an out with "because I'm half-robot."
It was very 90's "Very Special Episode" energy, but the characters didn't grandstand on it, and the fact the guest protagonist of the episode was a racist actually didn't impact the overall arc of the character. He was a racist. He still solved the problem, still was useful, still helpful, Robin politely asks him to leave Earth after the problem was solved if he's going to be a racist little shit, and he does, noting Starfire is "one of the good ones" from working alongside her but to watch out for any others of her kind, as parting words of wisdom.
The episode basically ends with a "whelp, we saved Earth again, thanks to that guy... Man that guy was a racist bastard though, wasn't he? Oh well. Who wants dinner?"
Hahahahahah. I'll give it a go one day. I actually just watched JLU and BTAS.
Even Avatar which was fairly recent relatively speaking was incredible.
Agreed. The entire DCAU/Timm verse was great. Except Static Shock.
I have a soft spot for Static Shock for one specific scene: when Virgil and Riche meet Clark Kent after they'd met Superman as Static and Gear while fighting a giant robot monkey (it's a superhero cartoon, I'm willing to go with it).
To summarize if you don't want to watch (fair enough): hearing that a big-shot reporter is going to be writing a story about them, they naturally wanted to brag about how well Static and Gear did...and then Clark got a notebook out and innocently asked:
Virgil and Riche hadn't thought through any sort of cover story and have no idea what to say to keep their identities secret; Richie ends up saying that the answer depends on the definitions of 'it' and 'is', while Virgil tells Clark that asking hard-hitting questions like that is what makes him a good reporter. And Clark laughs with them.
It's a great scene because it's the exact opposite of the typical crossover "figure out some contrived reason to make the two heroes fight each other" plotline. Clark gives them a hard time and reminds them that keeping a secret identity is hard work, but is clearly on their side and rooting for them. Virgil and Richie are a bit too full of themselves, but it's clearly the normal exuberance of youth and something they'll get better at.
A thirty-second character interaction develops all three characters and is reasonably funny to boot. The writing was good in a lot of places in that show.
Batman Beyond was cool tbh.
Yea Batman beyond was great. Problem starts when the oversaturate with so many Batman variants
Actually, Batman Beyond is Spider-man but Batman
Yeah, Terry McGinnis acts a lot like a Peter Parker.
That's okay though. I like Terry.
During the Cold War you had Superhero regular and the Communist counterpart.
Multiverses ruined everything. It's always the last effort of a dying story that painted itself into a corner. That and time travel.
X-Men movie franchise, time travel
MCU, time travel and multiverse
Sony Spiderman, multiverse
Dragon Ball Super also got fucked by multiverse
DC every twenty years when they do another crisis/flashpoint story. Mega gay
FF7 remake/rebirth was also messed up by multiverse AND time travel bullshit.
Last year I went to a convention(not comic centric) and stumbled across a guy who had self published a comic about werewolves in...it was Sumeria or Mesopotamia. Completely unique origins, completely unexpected setting and character arc. Really interesting stuff honestly, if a bit rough around the edges.
Creative stuff is out there, but it's not coming out of the two largest publishers who are dragging down the whole American comic industry.
What was it called?
Lycan: Solomon's Odyssey
I'm a sucker for werewolf media though, so take my rave reviews with a grain of salt.
So was it a werewolf convention then?
Music and Gaming festival.
"X, but he's a faggot"
But it's literally what people wanted (back when they were popular) and why comics were so successful in the first place. If people like batman then they will like any iteration of him as long as his core principles are the same.
Same with Spiderman.
Japan isn't better with manga, there are 1,000 of Manga isekais that are just slight variations of the same story.
They still have something to stand out, even if it is little. The comic book industry is just recycling the same characters and then creating "new" ones which are just a change in gender or race, they have been doing this for decades.
Spider-Man is spelled with a hyphen, you fucking tourist.
Peter-Parker
No, it's Sir Peter Parker-Bowles. The hyphen is on the surname.