Right now, DC is still rolling out it’s New 52 line of comics, after scrapping their old titles for a full reboot. Many favourite titles of mine were cancelled, like the Stephanie Brown version of Batgirl, Red Robin, Booster Gold, Power Girl, and the Justice Society of America to name a few, in favour of a fresher Jim Lee “high-collar” feel. I haven’t read enough of the new series to fully comment of whether this was a good thing, or bad thing, but I do know that it’s largely killed my interest in comics. If comic books are driven by a soap opera-esque, “What comes next?” feel to the stories, and those stories are wiped off the board, what am I left with? The suspense is completely gone. Bear in mind, that in many cases the suspense has been building over dozens of issues and decades of writing and development. It’s a lot to throw away. This is a special medium where a month will pass between the cliff-hanger and the continuation of the story. Plots can be strung along for years because of this.
This isn’t the first reboot, and it won’t be the last, but it had me thinking about ones I’ve lived through before, which made me start hating comics in general.
The worst offender was the Onslaught Saga the Marvel did back in the 90’s. It was their attempt at rebooting the Fantastic Four and Avengers comics, along with their subsidiary heroes like Captain America. It was as if the X-Men titles had grown so vast that they literally pushed the other titles into an abyss from which they would not emerge for several years. This was a time when there were no less than four Spider-Man titles in a month, and the X-men had the X-Men, the Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, Wolverine, Generation X, X-Men Legacy, Deadpool and many, many more. At the comic shop I went to, I couldn’t even find new issues of the Avengers on the racks, because there was no local demand. I had to settle for West Coast Avengers. There were X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons, toys, and everything else you could want. Marvel couldn’t sell enough of the rest of their titles, so they tried reinventing them.
The Onslaught Saga was about a psychic entity that formed during a battle between Professor X and Magneto. I guess the moral of the story is to always wear your helmet. The origin story sounded suspiciously like Fan-Fic to me. These two old dudes were the father of this uber-90’s armour thing, which called itself Onslaught.
Onslaught was really into making people feel uncomfortable. Since he was half-Professor X, he had a confrontation with Jean Grey and revealed that he’s always had a sexual infatuation with her. This dated back to when she first started attending his school, when she was red headed jail bait.
Also, they’re kind of related in a Theodore Roosevelt/FDR way. So there’s this whole old pedophile/hillbilly incest thing going on. It was like if Dumbledorf told Hermione to check out his wizard staff, combined with Darth Vader telling Luke that Leia is his daughter, plus she was totally bangable. The pedo aspect of this continued as Onslaught became obsessed with Franlkin Richards, Mr.Fantastic and Invisible Woman’s son, who’s secretly the most powerful being in the world. And ten.
The story was largely nonsensical, and was dragged out across every issue of every comic they could print, at sky-high prices. Comics had never cost more than they did then. The average price of a comic was usually around $1.25, but that kept going up. The publishers said the prices were due to new inking techniques, etc., but it was a bunch of horseshit. They’d slap a gimmick on the cover like a hologram, or have a embossed foil cover, and jack the price up anywhere from $5.99 to $15.99. You could buy a hardback novel for less than a 60-page giant special comic. The comics themselves were full of ads, which should have offset the price, but it didn’t. Now, DC and Marvel are both owned by multi-billion dollar corporations and raking in millions in royalties from movies and merchandise, but the lowest cost you can get on a comic with 22 pages of print and 9 pages of ads is $2.99. That’s their bargain price.
After Onslaught, the whole comic landscape changed for Marvel. I couldn’t pick up a title for at least ten years and have the faintest clue what was going on. I know almost nothing about that time, except for this:
Everyone was given an XXX-TREME reboot, and characters were shoe-horned into an imaginary 90’s subculture point of reference. This was largely due to Image Comics being a third wheel in the Cola Wars of comics. Publisher looked at what was selling, and took things a step further than what could be considered tasteful.
TBC.
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