Anybody else growing tired of apocalyptic crisis every week!

[Jon Clark]

Can anyone think of a great DC event followed up by something smaller scale, but no less engaging and interesting? Even if it's contained in one title?

Infinite Crisis in the whole DCU followed up by Superman: One Year Later and the JLA relaunch with Red Tornado

[Vordan]

I remember plenty of people hating on Priest’s short JL run when it was literally all about the stuff people claimed to want. The Earth wasn’t in danger of dying, it was just the JL struggling with what was the right thing to do. You guys wouldn’t care about JL if it didn’t have the big bombastic threats.

[kjn]

I remember plenty of people hating on Priest’s short JL run when it was literally all about the stuff people claimed to want. The Earth wasn’t in danger of dying, it was just the JL struggling with what was the right thing to do. You guys wouldn’t care about JL if it didn’t have the big bombastic threats.

You can't please all of the fans all of the time… This is especially apparent when you're trying to do a big shift in tone or story type. Some will like the big shift just because it is different, some will dislike it because it is different.

Note also that just because a story is ostensibly what is demanded by many (e.g. more about small group drama or moral conflicts), it need not be well told or fit with the characters.

[married guy]

The late Dwayne McDuffie was probably the best Modern Age JUSTICE LEAGUE writer who understood how to handle characterization and story dynamics.

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

I was underwhelmed with his run on JLA.
It was no fault of his either. I think it had more to do with crossovers interfering every second month making it virtually impossible to have a clear run at it.

[Doctor Bifrost]

I remember plenty of people hating on Priest’s short JL run when it was literally all about the stuff people claimed to want. The Earth wasn’t in danger of dying, it was just the JL struggling with what was the right thing to do. You guys wouldn’t care about JL if it didn’t have the big bombastic threats.

"You guys"? Which guys did you have in mind? Some fans, of course, like big bombastic threats. Some don't. And some like them, but not too often.

The people criticizing big bombastic threats here and now may not be the same people who were "hating on Priest's short JL run." Or some of them may be the same, but disliked Priests' run for some other reason.

If you think you've found some major hypocrisy because some people didn't like Priest's run, which was short on big bombastic threats (and, of course, some people did like it), but some people (maybe different people) are saying that they don't like big bombastic threats, maybe you've erred in conflating all fans into one big homogeneous group called "you guys," when in fact we're not all the same.

[mortymantis]

I remember plenty of people hating on Priest’s short JL run when it was literally all about the stuff people claimed to want. The Earth wasn’t in danger of dying, it was just the JL struggling with what was the right thing to do. You guys wouldn’t care about JL if it didn’t have the big bombastic threats.

I’m not against then justice league fighting big cosmic threats. The solo books do deal with more minor stuff

I guess after thinking about it I’m talking about the frequency of apocalyptic stuff. I mean it’s over the top. Just too much one after another.

[kjn]

I’m not against then justice league fighting big cosmic threats. The solo books do deal with more minor stuff

I guess after thinking about it I’m talking about the frequency of apocalyptic stuff. I mean it’s over the top. Just too much one after another.

Yep. Another factor here is that the inflation of big threats to some degree is a reaction to the lack of emotional investment in the heroes and their interaction from both writers and readers. If the readers care about one or more of the characters or their relations, then you can scale back the threat level a lot while still maintaining the narrative tension.

Take "No Man's Land" in the Wonder Woman movie. There are simply no stakes there but Diana's own sense of self, but it's the by far and away the most powerful scene in the movie. Granted, movies have different tools at their disposals than comics, but the principle's the same. Make the readers care about the characters, and they will feel with the characters.

That's also why I think the long-going movie trend towards presenting heroes as pure badassery is fundamentally shortsighted, because it feeds into the apocalyptic inflation as well. The characters become simply unrelatable: more machines than human, leaving writers no choice to constantly ramp up the threat level.

[Sutekh]

At least all this apocalyptic crap keeps happening on Earth, where all the heroes who can stop it live.

Can you imagine if the universe-threatening quarterly event kicked off on some podunk world nobody has ever heard of, forty-seven light-years away from Earth?

Superman would be all, "I thought I heard someth..."
<The universe ends, everybody dies.>

[mortymantis]

At least all this apocalyptic crap keeps happening on Earth, where all the heroes who can stop it live.

Can you imagine if the universe-threatening quarterly event kicked off on some podunk world nobody has ever heard of, forty-seven light-years away from Earth?

Superman would be all, "I thought I heard someth..."
<The universe ends, everybody dies.>

Yeah but they stunk it up on colu

[Kevin Street]

Yep. Another factor here is that the inflation of big threats to some degree is a reaction to the lack of emotional investment in the heroes and their interaction from both writers and readers. If the readers care about one or more of the characters or their relations, then you can scale back the threat level a lot while still maintaining the narrative tension.

Take "No Man's Land" in the Wonder Woman movie. There are simply no stakes there but Diana's own sense of self, but it's the by far and away the most powerful scene in the movie. Granted, movies have different tools at their disposals than comics, but the principle's the same. Make the readers care about the characters, and they will feel with the characters.

That's also why I think the long-going movie trend towards presenting heroes as pure badassery is fundamentally shortsighted, because it feeds into the apocalyptic inflation as well. The characters become simply unrelatable: more machines than human, leaving writers no choice to constantly ramp up the threat level.

Yes, that's it exactly! That's the problem. And one reason readers (or audiences) care less about the characters is because their personalities and character traits are becoming more and more exaggerated as well. I believe TVTropes calls it Flanderization. The act of taking a single trait of a character and exaggerating it until it comes to define them. The only change I'd make to their definition is that in comics it doesn't have to be a single trait, but can be the way popular creators defined the character in the past. Frank Miller Batman is supremely capable and a dick, so then we got twenty years of Batman getting better and better at handling every problem himself and becoming more and more of a dick.

[DrNewGod]

Much has been made of The Writer One-Upsmanship driving this vast queue of Cosmos-Cracking Threats.

I have to wonder tho, if there's any tendency of creators to write with film adaptation in mind? What, an aspiring associate producer/comic creator probably thinks, is the use of sending Batman after some middling drug-dealers, when you've got Parademons to throw at him?