Posted: 10 August 2018 at 2:54pm | IP Logged | 11
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I agree that at this point, there are no right answers anymore as to who any given character is and what characteristics define them. Going back to the original was once the fallback, but we're far from those starting points now and many things have been ladled into the mix in the interim.
For a large number of fans, Wally West is the Flash. They're somewhat tolerant of the TV show calling the character "Barry Allen" as a sop to older fans, but in the comics, the Flash is Wally and Wally is the Flash. No other applicants need apply.
There is not now and has never been a "Captain Marvel" character to a great many readers. His name is "Shazam!" It's always been "Shazam!" And he has always been a little boy who grows up fast into a super-powerful badass and gets away with none of the other heroes realizing his true age 'cause everyone's so stupid, right? Just like it seemed when you were fifteen. Up high! Adults suck.
He's been this way since 1986 at least. That's 32 years of continuous publication. The original Captain Marvel, which left the exact relationship between Billy and Cap more ambiguous but consistently portrayed them with different personalities, existed from 1939 to 1954. He was brought back in the 70's for another 12 years or so. That's only 27 years during which the character was done "right." He's now literally been done wrong for a longer period of time, and for many, that is exactly how it should be.
"Back to the Basics" doesn't work anymore for fans who prefer the interim changes and have little interest in comic-book history. As far as most readers are concerned, the characters were great when they came in. Their personal Golden Age is that period of time wherein they were learning how things stood. Anything that alters that paradigm is damaging, including taking the character back to the way he or she was before the reader came in.
I know someone who feels the X-Men were never better or more interesting than they were during the crossover "X-Cutioner's Song." I don't like him, but I know him. This guy still reads the X-Men, sure, but they're not as good as they were then. Stuff from before that, sure, they're classics, but they're nowhere near as labyrinthine and complex; the motivations and characterizations are so... vanilla. The art was so basic. Back when you had to, absolutely had to, track all six books that came out that month in order to follow the plot, wow... Now that was comics!! Even if you bought every issue, you might not get all the answers! And why should you? These guys were f*ckin' geniuses putting out the books then! They couldn't be bothered to slow down for readers who couldn't keep up or cover every little plot point and detail! Figure it out yourself! That was exciting!
I work with someone who came back to comics during Morrison's X-Men run. It was the best run of the book ever by his reckoning. The diversity, the themes, the complications, the pain... Morrison spun straw into gold with that run, and my co-worker has little or no patience for anyone or anything that detracts from what was accomplished during that time. Everything since takes away from rather than adds to what he loves about the X-Men.
I had to watch as DC took the books and characters I loved as a kid and beat them to death in the parking lot, foisting a bunch of shallow wannabes on the readership in their stead. Grinning, self-satisfied dunderheads who'd never known a bad day in their lives instead of heroes. Violent "realists" who fought giggling serial killers where their forebears once fought bank robbers. Psychos in micrometer-thick armor who hated to have to do it, but gee, the guy didn't talk so we have to break his leg... You know. The good guys.
At some point, you have to let go.
Today's Hulk is not Lee and Kirby's or Lee and Ditko's. He may reference them as justification for growing a second head or turning pink, but he will never again be that clear and direct a character. We have no hope of ever retrieving the Len Wein version either unless we're bring him out to laugh at him. We're so-o-o-o-o much cooler than that now. That we can mock things proves it.
A brief article in a recent DC promo mag laid out the rationale for why Wally is a much faster Flash than Barry. Once upon a time, Barry was off the scale for speed, to the point where it was stated he clearly wasn't human. Somehow, that bolt of lightning had eliminated his body from existence and recombined him with the living essence of the Speed Force itself. Barry was Speed personified.
But we're not publishing that guy right now, and we are doing a Wally book, so... No. None of that. Wally's the fastest and bestest. He has to be, right? I mean, he's the one we're doing now.
Never mind that when Wally became the Flash, the whole point of the character was that he was nowhere near as fast as his uncle. Barry was an electrical inter-dimensional being. Wally was a human joe who needed to eat another dozen hot dogs before going out to take on Captain Cold. A dozen hot dogs doesn't actually metabolize into enough energy to run at those speeds, but whatever... he's probably interacting with the food molecules on a sub-quantum level or something...
The point was, they were going to do super-speed right, and to that end, Wally was going to be Quicksilver-fast, not Barry-fast. But that's not how he stayed. Writers gonna write and all that. So, now, to most Wally readers, he SHOULD be faster than Barry. That's how they found him.
We can't even go back to the basics on the altered versions that co-opted the original characters. A Wally that could have survived the Anti-Monitor's anti-matter cannon because, pshaw, he'd just run faster than Barry did, would have been completely antithetical to the intent laid down for the character when he was first given the role. But that is what we have now, with issue after issue apparently to back up the new writer's assertion that Wally is badass and Barry is just ass.
No one writes on-model. No one believes in on-model. There is no model. Characters are whatever we say they are. Injustice Flash, Nu-52 Flash, Pre-Crisis Flash, Post-Crisis Flash, Infinite Crisis Flash, Rebirth-Flash, JLA Movie Flash, TV Flash One and TV Flash Two could all be put in a room together and find nothing to talk about. But hey, as long as someone buys each version, DC isn't going to see anything wrong with it. It's fine.
And I have a whole stack of well-written "actual" books that I can spend my time catching up on now instead of these comics. It all works out.
Edited by Brian Hague on 10 August 2018 at 3:11pm
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