Posted: 12 August 2018 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | 7
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"Hate Tigra??" Cheese and crackers! You should know, John, that she always speaks very highly of you whenever your name comes up...
Rob, I appreciate your point of view, but something is still lost in the transaction whenever a character is definitively altered in the fashion discussed here; the possibility of a next issue.
As much as I like Moore's re-interpretation of Swamp Thing and what he did with the character afterwards, we did lose that shambling, muck-encrusted mockery of the man who was once Alec Holland in the deal. Wein and Wrightson's issues still exist, but we really can't have a "next issue" featuring the character that doesn't somehow touch upon notions of godhood or Earth Elementals. Those smaller scale horror stories featuring a vagabond Alec Holland who only seeks to restore his humanity are more or less relegated to the past. While creators can play with the idea of bringing the character back, the imprint left by the Parliament of Trees and Swamp Thing's vast ecological powers still comes up again and again, regardless.
One of the best things about finding a cool character like Dr. Fate as a kid was the promise that next summer, when the JSA meet the JLA again, you'd see more of him. That's not the case so much anymore.
What's more, if you really liked that period of time when Fate was split between a mom and her disabled son, then you're almost certainly never getting that version again. Comics seem very comfortable these days with offering disparate, almost random, versions of characters and then yanking them back again, either in favor of a forced return to form or some other flavor-of-the-month approach which casts the series and characters into a bizarre new paradigm. At that point, "regular" readers are pretty much just fans of the logo and the name.
Even those get mangled pretty severely in some of these switch-ups and changeovers. "Kymaera," anyone?
Revisiting the past by re-reading past favorites is fun, without question, but there's also something to be said for that anticipatory thrill that comes from wanting to see more of a given character.
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