Rotwang
Sr Member
I think comics painted themselves into a corner. There was a time where you could pick up an issue and get one or more self-contained stories. It didn't matter that you didn't read issues for half a year because the characters hardly changed at all. These days most comics are permanently ongoing stories, often tied to several other titles. Every few months there is a cross title event that means you have to collect anything from 10-100 issues to just make sure you got everything covered. If you read an issue of a certain comic and pick it up six months later you get the feeling you are stuck with two pieces of a very large puzzle.
In order to get in new reader most titles are rebooted on a regular basis by introducing a new creative team.
So the end result with most comics is that the long term reader doesn't get a real continuity in the series because it is regularly interrupted by other book's events or rebooted on a regular basis. And the new reader has to jump while the train is still running or hope there is a title reboot soon.
And then there are the company wide events and reboots. These reboots are skewered because they invariably are a confusing mix of the old and new, not daring to actually reboot a character, but merely retell the old story with a few contemporary embelishments (Oh, Captain Slaughter had gay parents or the Grand Wizard is black now ...) cherry picking the old continuity as they go along, usually reverting to status quo after a certain period. It doesn't help that because of the mixed continuity you don't have a clue to what events/defining moments really happened or not.
Comics are pretty much damned if you do, damned if you don't. I get suckered into reading them for a while until I remember why I stopped last time.
In order to get in new reader most titles are rebooted on a regular basis by introducing a new creative team.
So the end result with most comics is that the long term reader doesn't get a real continuity in the series because it is regularly interrupted by other book's events or rebooted on a regular basis. And the new reader has to jump while the train is still running or hope there is a title reboot soon.
And then there are the company wide events and reboots. These reboots are skewered because they invariably are a confusing mix of the old and new, not daring to actually reboot a character, but merely retell the old story with a few contemporary embelishments (Oh, Captain Slaughter had gay parents or the Grand Wizard is black now ...) cherry picking the old continuity as they go along, usually reverting to status quo after a certain period. It doesn't help that because of the mixed continuity you don't have a clue to what events/defining moments really happened or not.
Comics are pretty much damned if you do, damned if you don't. I get suckered into reading them for a while until I remember why I stopped last time.