Zephy and Carpet I completely agree with your points, I personally still think
Story >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Continuity in a media where people fly and have claws come popping out of their hands.
I also think Plot >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Character Development as someone (G00dy I think stated it best that character development is anathema to characters who are supposed to go on perpetually as opposed to an anime where they have an end)
But therse days as comics are trying to survive they have to resort to marketing methods of playing on people’s Collectiveness and Continuity-obsessed nature because they know that’s how the cash-flow keeps on going and makes a profit and people still get happy, but to fans of creativity and not just flash with great presentation, they know better
I have also detested on the refrain of thought baloons and a continous effort to make comics “feel” cinematic like it was trying toi be a TV show or Movie (a tad little more prevalent in Marvel) because it undermines what the comic media can actually do, and add to the fact that an average comic takes like about five minutes to read nowadays it keeps me thinking how much money we’re wasting.
This is why as unpopular as it sounds I really prefer the Silver-Age Weisinger era storytelling (pre Lee and Kirby) you know they are comics and Hokey, but in the end it was all fun, you had NO PROBLEMS suspending disbelief and no whining about which character came in first or if backstory A led to backstory B. In their own hokey presentations they have solid characterization (again not development) and does the best of it TO SERVE THE STORY not the other way around, I always loved that stupid plot about Superman’s head being turned into that of a Bug as it unfolded a masterful plot as opposed to like a gazzillion recreations of a scenario like Gwen Falling or Finding a past in a government facility.
WTF who cares… there WILL ALWAYS BE A CINDERELLA FALLACY in a comic based story no matter how realistic anyone makes it (I can name more than a dozen even in Heroes but I won’t waste time nitpicking)
It’s like when they made John Stewart the Green Lantern in the JL TV show instead of Kyle Rayner who appeared in Superman TAS, they didn’t think of it first as they thought Stewart had more storytelling potential and just thought about the backstory later.
I would have to disagree about anything against character development, in most of the comics I’ve read they’ve been a good part of them, and at times made me like characters that I otherwise wouldn’t care about.
Nothing against character development… as long as it’s kept as an ingredient, that maybe privy to your tastes and that’s fine…
however in the long term they are STILL anathema in a medium that’s supposed to go on forever… (NO ONE HAS ABSOLUTELEY DISPUTED THIS CLAIM successfully outside of something related to personal taste, as it is Rock solid)
Characters in a perpetual medium either have to have strong characterization that can stand on it’s own even without development…
or as if marketing purposes at least characters if they’re evolving would have to reach a point in which it’s the culmination of what they are.
Eventually even if Character development (again something more apporporiate for characters in a FINITE medium or storytelling) is important the Story should still encompass them.
My thoughts on character development: I like seeing things happen to characters that have long term effects. If everything goes back to normal, its like a sitcom, in a sense. There’s room for both.
Man, DC is fucking UP. I know everybody else does it, but this shit gets worse and worse every year. It seems like every “event” just gets more and more bloated with tie in bullshit. Why can’t I just buy the main event series, like blackest night, and have that be it? Instead there’s 15 other tie ins, some of which might be cool, but I can’t help but feeling like it’s all an attempt to cash in on one guy’s good idea.
Don’t even get me started on Batman. He’s been “dead” for god knows how long, and we gotta go through 15 different books just to figure out that we still don’t know what the fuck is going on or who the fuck Batman is.
They had a billion dollar grossing movie and what do they do? Get Batman involved in some psuedo science-fiction plot that throws his ass back to the begining of man. WTF.
And I LIKE Grant Morrison’s stuff. But seriously, what the fuck.
And R.I.P. didn’t end in R.I.P., it ended in Final Crisis. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?
Thank god for Geoff Johns, he’s one of the only good writers over there but even he’s getting tie-ins that connect other tie-ins to the other tie-ins that tied in to the main story.
Half the time, the damn tie-ins are only tangentially related to the actual main story. It’s like they are just trying to lure continuity fans into buying comics they don’t usually buy. It’s an insulting marketing gimmick. And yeah, I am pretty sure most of us realize we don’t have to buy them, but it doesn’t mean this is a good thing.
For a regular reader of a series to see his comic get sucked into some editorially-mandated shit the writer doesn’t even give a damn about is just a shame. It’s a taint. Look back at how Batgirl ended circa Infinite Crisis. Wasn’t she tracking down Lady Shiva in order to have the fight of their lives? Then all of a sudden you turn the page and she coincidentally runs into a random OMAC and fights Brother Eye’s minion for like 12 pages. What a waste.
For a more current example of DC’s idiocy, just look at JLofA. Dwayne McDuffie’s doing his best but he’s very open about the editorial process. He’s had a lot of comments about how he’s constantly forced to alter his storylines to accommodate “the bigger picture” so to speak. There’s just no other reasonable explanation as to why the writer of Justice League Unlimited could churn out such a mediocre series based on a similar concept.