barking_frog
04-10-2007, 04:36 PM
I'm starting a new thread with a quote from an 'old' thread -- I started writing this post and realized that I was not only taking that thread off-topic, but my response was turning into quite a long rant. ^.^ And I realize I'm not the first person who's brought the following subject up before, but I've only been reading comics for about two months now (since returning to the medium where I was a regular reader in the 80's, except for spotty reading over the last two decades), and it just impresses me (in a bad way) how extreme this issue has gotten.
If all of a Publisher's books took place in the same shared universe, then I might only buy books from one publisher.
As it is, I buy 90% DC, just because I like having to only follow one universe.
It seems like this has just gotten worse over time. Back in the 80's (pre Secret Wars, at least) it was possible to just follow Spider-Man by picking up two, maybe three books -- or just follow the X-Men by picking up a different two or three books. But now, if I try to read any ongoing major title (or even many of the minor ones) set in the mainstream Marvel Universe, I can depend on being interrupted every six to nine issues with intrusive events I (generally) have no interest in, that derail whatever it is the creative team would otherwise be doing with the main character(s).
If I want to read New Avengers, for example, I'd better be aware of what's going on in Civil War. If I do decide to go ahead and try to figure out what's going on in Civil War, I'm then told (at least by the advertising) that in order to fully understand what's happening I should be up on events in Avengers Disassembled and Planet Hulk. If I try to follow up on Avengers Disassembled, I find out I'll also need to read House of M (or do I have those backwards?). And now I see a reference in a recent issue of New Avengers that says in order to be filled in on what really planted the seed for Civil War, I'd better go back three years to 2004 and read Nick Fury's Secret War series.
Enough already. And I'm not saying that DC isn't guilty of the same thing to a degree, but speaking as a returning comics reader who's only been back for about two months, I feel I've got a lot better grip on what's going on in the DC titles I'm reading than in those from Marvel. 52 seems to be happening in relative isolation, and the events of Identity Crisis or whatever the last big DCU event was don't seem to be mandatory reading in most of the mainstream DCU titles. Not so much true in Marvel's monthly books, where there seems to be an ongoing editorial effort to get me to spend $20 a week or so on old TPB's just to understand what's going on in this month's issues.
It would be one thing if these successive events that Marvel's started telling us build one on top of the other actually changed anything. That's what makes many novels interesting -- the world around the characters changes and grows as the story goes on. But the Marvel/DCU cannot have real, permanent change. If either does, the world in the comics becomes significantly different from the one outside our windows, and new readers -- which are always the lifeblood of comics if comics are going to survive more than a generation -- find it even more difficult to 'jump on' than they already do.
In the end of course the short answer is to vote with my wallet, which I'm doing -- I bought almost exclusively Marvel in the 80's, but now I find myself buying more and more DC titles and dropping more and more of the Marvel titles I've been sampling over the last eight or nine weeks. And maybe Marvel knows exactly what they're doing here -- maybe having regular readers spending money on old TPB's is more profitable than having potential new readers find it difficult to jump on. Maybe only a handful of us get irritated enough to buy other titles. But I do hope they're at least considering the possibility that in the attempt to encourage their TPB 'event' sales, they might very well be losing new readers who want to be able to feel they understand what's going on in their $30/month hobby without having to make it a $100/month hobby.
If all of a Publisher's books took place in the same shared universe, then I might only buy books from one publisher.
As it is, I buy 90% DC, just because I like having to only follow one universe.
It seems like this has just gotten worse over time. Back in the 80's (pre Secret Wars, at least) it was possible to just follow Spider-Man by picking up two, maybe three books -- or just follow the X-Men by picking up a different two or three books. But now, if I try to read any ongoing major title (or even many of the minor ones) set in the mainstream Marvel Universe, I can depend on being interrupted every six to nine issues with intrusive events I (generally) have no interest in, that derail whatever it is the creative team would otherwise be doing with the main character(s).
If I want to read New Avengers, for example, I'd better be aware of what's going on in Civil War. If I do decide to go ahead and try to figure out what's going on in Civil War, I'm then told (at least by the advertising) that in order to fully understand what's happening I should be up on events in Avengers Disassembled and Planet Hulk. If I try to follow up on Avengers Disassembled, I find out I'll also need to read House of M (or do I have those backwards?). And now I see a reference in a recent issue of New Avengers that says in order to be filled in on what really planted the seed for Civil War, I'd better go back three years to 2004 and read Nick Fury's Secret War series.
Enough already. And I'm not saying that DC isn't guilty of the same thing to a degree, but speaking as a returning comics reader who's only been back for about two months, I feel I've got a lot better grip on what's going on in the DC titles I'm reading than in those from Marvel. 52 seems to be happening in relative isolation, and the events of Identity Crisis or whatever the last big DCU event was don't seem to be mandatory reading in most of the mainstream DCU titles. Not so much true in Marvel's monthly books, where there seems to be an ongoing editorial effort to get me to spend $20 a week or so on old TPB's just to understand what's going on in this month's issues.
It would be one thing if these successive events that Marvel's started telling us build one on top of the other actually changed anything. That's what makes many novels interesting -- the world around the characters changes and grows as the story goes on. But the Marvel/DCU cannot have real, permanent change. If either does, the world in the comics becomes significantly different from the one outside our windows, and new readers -- which are always the lifeblood of comics if comics are going to survive more than a generation -- find it even more difficult to 'jump on' than they already do.
In the end of course the short answer is to vote with my wallet, which I'm doing -- I bought almost exclusively Marvel in the 80's, but now I find myself buying more and more DC titles and dropping more and more of the Marvel titles I've been sampling over the last eight or nine weeks. And maybe Marvel knows exactly what they're doing here -- maybe having regular readers spending money on old TPB's is more profitable than having potential new readers find it difficult to jump on. Maybe only a handful of us get irritated enough to buy other titles. But I do hope they're at least considering the possibility that in the attempt to encourage their TPB 'event' sales, they might very well be losing new readers who want to be able to feel they understand what's going on in their $30/month hobby without having to make it a $100/month hobby.