No Happy Marriages for DC Heroes

[Diddy_Mao]

I'll play devil's advocate to an extent and agree that the Bat family and Superman should not be in happy stable relationships. (Largely because the Bat Family are not happy stable people and Superman being married or even in a stable relationship undermines a lot of the "Superman belongs to humanity" angle that they frequently like to play up.)

As far as I'm concerned the rest of the DC universe is fair game.

 

[Winnosh]

I'll play devil's advocate to an extent and agree that the Bat family and Superman should not be in happy stable relationships. (Largely because the Bat Family are not happy stable people and Superman being married or even in a stable relationship undermines a lot of the "Superman belongs to humanity" angle that they frequently like to play up.)

As far as I'm concerned the rest of the DC universe is fair game.

You see this is where I disagree most strongly. Superman Needs to be married. Strength of family is one of the driving forces of the character. And since DC saw fit to kill off his parents in new 52 he needs it from another source.

To me Superman is best when he's the hero to the world but just Clark to his friends and parents this is what grounds him and keeps him from losing perspective. New 52 strips him of that.

 

[Scrythe]

Dear character development,

[HEADING=2]Fuck you.[/HEADING]

Signed, DC.

 

[StriderShinryu]

"We want surprises! That's why we're sticking with the cliches of angst and failed relationships."

Yep, for sure. Let's keep things surprising.. by completely writing out an entire branching storyline possibility for everyone in the entire universe!

 

[immortalfrieza]

"The new 52, we want surprises. We want things to happen that may be unexpected with romances, relationships"
Never mind that when you do that all the fucking time, it stops being unexpected.

It doesn't help when they outright tell everybody that there's no point in the reader getting invested in the heroes' relationships because the writers are going to f**k them up regardless.

It seems that these days both DC and Marvel are going out of their way to piss off as many of their fans as possible in the most retarded ways possible.

Oh I believe it. I shouldn't say I've never read "any" of the old books. I prefer the one shots, like The Killing Joke, or some of Frank Millers' stuff. The ones that only really rely on the reader knowing the jist of who the characters are. I know who Batman is, I know who the Joker is, and I know who Barbara Gordon is. That's all I needed to enjoy that one, and I enjoyed it a great deal. When I read the first issue of Batman in the New 52, I felt pretty much lost because a lot of what was going on was dependant on having prior knowledge of more recent material. That and there being like, three batman comics at once kinda threw me too (Do they take place at the same time? If not which do I read first? stuff like that).

I think that the reason why I never really get into comics especially DC all that much is because unless you happened to be born in the 60's or something or are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money to get everything you're going to be missing out on a lot, since unless you're willing to pirate you probably can't get the hundreds of comics just following a SINGLE superhero for a reasonable price anywhere, which should never be the case. It doesn't help that the comics tend to call back to or directly reference comics that came before it or of other superheroes.

Most of the comics I tend to read are Marvel because of this, since they've been selling CD collections of their comics.

 

[immortalfrieza]

it's like people don't want to see characters who overcome obstacles and have changes in their lives because that shit is boring as fuck. nothing relatable about that, it's not like the only constant in life is that everything always changes and you need to learn to adapt to that.

sry, thinking about editorial bullshit in comics makes me angry.

But how can we relate to a guy who has marriage and responsibili...Oh crap, this is the guy who says with great power comes great responsibilities...HAND WAVE!

The thing is, as much as people CLAIM they want their characters to change and grow and so forth, they really don't. Every time the writers try to do exactly that everybody screams bloody murder until they put it back the way it was. As a result it's pretty hard to get these kinda things to stick for any real length of time. Sometimes with the outright stupid stuff this attitude is justified (I'm looking at you "Superior" Spider-Man) but most of the time it's just whining.

 

[VikingKing]

'...rushing into stable relationships.'

I can't recall this ever being said before. Are we looking at a first?

 

[Something Amyss]

The thing is, as much as people CLAIM they want their characters to change and grow and so forth, they really don't. Every time the writers try to do exactly that everybody screams bloody murder until they put it back the way it was. As a result it's pretty hard to get these kinda things to stick for any real length of time. Sometimes with the outright stupid stuff this attitude is justified (I'm looking at you "Superior" Spider-Man) but most of the time it's just whining.

The thing is, I'm talking about something fairly different. Joe Quesada thinks the only way we as an audience can relate to Spidey is if he's a man-child (-spider) in his aunt's attic. Something he fought the fans on for over 20 years, which seems to validate the notion that not only did they identify with him still, they accepted change.

I reject the notion that you can't effect change, though quite often they shouldn't. I'm struggling to think of an example that wasn't really dumb, but maybe you can think of one.

But Spider-Man did change quite a bit, and they ended up doing to him exactly what it seems nobody wanted, and moved him back decades.

I think the major point here is it can be done, not necessarily that it should be done. DC's already gone for stupid with the new 52, and while I hear there are some good comics the system-wide reboot seemed poorly thought out etc. And their reasoning here seems similarly poorly thought out.

 

[immortalfrieza]

The thing is, I'm talking about something fairly different. Joe Quesada thinks the only way we as an audience can relate to Spidey is if he's a man-child (-spider) in his aunt's attic. Something he fought the fans on for over 20 years, which seems to validate the notion that not only did they identify with him still, they accepted change.

I reject the notion that you can't effect change, though quite often they shouldn't. I'm struggling to think of an example that wasn't really dumb, but maybe you can think of one.

But Spider-Man did change quite a bit, and they ended up doing to him exactly what it seems nobody wanted, and moved him back decades.

I think the major point here is it can be done, not necessarily that it should be done. DC's already gone for stupid with the new 52, and while I hear there are some good comics the system-wide reboot seemed poorly thought out etc. And their reasoning here seems similarly poorly thought out.

I can definitely agree that the higher ups don't seem to know what they're doing. I can't think of an example of something they changed that they shouldn't have that wasn't mindnumbingly stupid either. Change has been good before, hell, the only DC comics I'll bother to try and pick up are the post Crisis ones, before then DC comics were terribly corny and poorly written. However, it's got to be an almost unanimously good change before people will really accept a change for it to stay.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

1- Vocal internet commentators always want their favourite characters to exist unchanging in some sort of perpetually unchanging pop-culture safety zone, so that they can continue to talk about them with other like-minded people without going to the actual effort of purchasing and reading the comics.

2- DC Editorial actually wants to sell some comics.

Yeah, these are pretty much mutually incompatible goals.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

2- DC Editorial actually wants to sell some comics.

Like Marvel in the 90s and look what happened back then, complete success...

They still lose absolutely nothing by not managing to sell their comic books to people who weren't buying their comic books in the first place.

 

[Doclector]

As much as I don't like romantic relationships in my media (because then I end up denying myself from enjoying them when I'm in a bad/lonely mood, as when I'm in such a mood, the mere mention of such things is likely to send me into a rabid rage) this is a crappy decision. When you have that many characters, it sticks out like a sore thumb that none of them ever decided to get married to anyone.

 

[Winnosh]

1- Vocal internet commentators always want their favourite characters to exist unchanging in some sort of perpetually unchanging pop-culture safety zone, so that they can continue to talk about them with other like-minded people without going to the actual effort of purchasing and reading the comics.

2- DC Editorial actually wants to sell some comics.

Yeah, these are pretty much mutually incompatible goals.

I just don't see that. The vocal internet commentors are the people crying most for the characters to change and grow. It's DC Editorial who wants them to stay in some unchanging bubble.

We want marriage we want growth. We want change.

 

[Genocidicles]

Is Iron Man in the new 52?

The new 52 is all the DC stuff. Iron Man is Marvel.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

It has been 1 days since DC has done something stupid.

http://hasdcdonesomethingstupidtoday.com/

I'm glad I'm not invested in the DC universe outside the DCAU.