Damn You Comics, Damn You to Hell!

If you’ve never listened to Just BS, the podcast that Scott and I host but rarely ever post the audio file for, you know that I am a comic book fan.  Ever since I was a kid, I would find a way to read comics even though I could never afford them.  Usually that meant that I was reading as many comics as fast as I could in the Walden’s bookstore in the local mall before one of the clerks would chase me off.  As I grew older and started driving myself, I found a comic book shop and started purchasing them legitimately.  I’d never be able to wait until I got home to read the comics and would usually park my truck in the parking lot of a nearby town park or even in the comic book shop’s lot to read my most recent purchases.  Growing up, I was a Marvel fan as their stories were more interesting to me.  I remember when that changed, though.  In the world of comics, much like with soap operas, there are big events that “will shape the future of the universe forever” or some jazz like that until the next big event.  The event that ended my blind love affair with Marvel was their Civil War, pitting superheroes against other superheroes.  Best friends fought as well as husbands and wives and siblings against one another.  In principle, it was a neat idea but it ended badly.  I won’t go into it here, but trust me that it was anticlimactic. 

                After my disappointment, I left the comic realm for a number of years until it was DC Comics, with their Green Lantern-based world even, drew me back in.  It was a fresh story for me and the writing was good.  I’d always been interested in the Green Lantern as a character and the power ring as an idea and it was a perfect jump in point as the whole universe was in upheaval and knowing all the backstories wasn’t that critical.  I was pleased and kept buying them.  Since I was buying comics from the DC section, I noticed how there was a great storyline unfolding in the Batman world while Bruce Wayne was apparently dead so I started reading that, too.  Things were going great.  I had a few comics that I was reading again and all was well.  I still wasn’t reading anything Marvel because their world events were just getting dumber and dumber, in my mind, but I was happy with DC.  That is, until DC went and blew everything up.

                Not literately blowing everything up, but DC Comic decided to restart all their comics from scratch.  Everything you had ever known from the DC Universe was now no longer a definitive thing.  The origin story for all the characters had changed and old characters once dead were no longer so, etc.  At first, I thought this was an interesting thing, however, as time has gone on I now find it to be incredibly annoying.  I was never incredibly invested in the DC Universe but I did have a basic understanding of the characters and where they had come from in their origins and their attitudes based on the events in their lives up until everything changed.  I know feel a sense of discontinuity between myself and the characters to the point where I and down to only buying one DC comic, The Justice League and frankly, I’m going to quick buying that one in the next week or so.  Why?  Because I can’t relate to these characters.  They are all flat and two-dimensional which is part of the reason I never bought DC as a youth, besides never having the money.

                I noticed recently that Marvel’s newest “OMG this is the biggest thing since sliced bread!” event, The Avengers vs. The X-men, is on sale and I bought the first issue.  Immediately, the characters were more multidimensional than The Justice League and a lot of that has to do with the fact that these characters have a storied, rich history and one that I know.  I may have been out of the loop for a few years, but I can tell the severity of an issue based on Cyclops’s actions and this event is very severe.  Does this mean that I’ll start back toward the Marvel camp?  Probably not.  I’ll finish this new event and reevaluate, but if I had to guess I am about to be done with comics for a few years.  There just isn’t anything out there that I want to read, not from Marvel or DC at least.  With comics like The Walking Dead and Incredible getting their own shows and fantastic works like Battle Pope, one of my all-time favorites, perhaps this is the time to start looking at independent or indie comics.  All I do know is that for the time being, I will not be making mine Marvel and DC may as well stand for “Don’t Care.”