How much does the "mainstream" version of a character really matter anymore?

[Vakanai]

Hey, I came into this fandom thanks to the old cartoons (DCAU!) and live action movies, and most of the books I get are the out of continuity books like the old Elseworlds, new Black Label, and the new YA/Kid lines (just bought that Mera book, can't wait to read it), so I think this is all pretty good. As long as the characters stay true to the spirit of who they are (save in radically different re-imaginings where being different is the point) what does it matter? Mainstream is important, and always will be, but I think ultimately it doesn't matter if it's mainstream comic book, out of continuity book, live action film, or an animated series. At the end of the day, Batman is Batman, Superman is Superman, Wonder Woman is Wonder Woman, and it's a great time to be a fan.

[Agent Z]

True to a degree. YJ cartoon was my first exposure to a lot of the characters (watched B:TAS, Justice League, sixties Batman, 70s WW, but all but B:TAS were in reruns). After going to comics later, I really love Hawaii-Kon and hate what YJ did with Kon and Superman (making Superman the bad dad to Kon, especially when they have good!Dad Bruce, who I miss, but is less than reflective of contemporary comics). Hate YJ Nightwing, but like 80s and 90s Nightwing (YJ Nightwing is similar to later variations on the character, though). Bart and Jaime were likable enough (though I like season 1 better), but 90s Bart and 2006 Jaime are so very much more awesome.

Mind you, it wasn't exactly/directly YJ that got me to read DC comics (I'd read Marvel years before, but quit). It made me read fanfic (as I did some back when B:TAS was on). Stephanie Brown mentioned in fanfic and I looked her up and really wanted to know her better. I really liked that she worked in Gotham, but not for Batman, indeed, directly against what he wanted. The pregnancy storyline sounded interesting, too. So I started with her first appearance, then read the '90S Robin. Pregnancy story turned out to be kinda disappointing with too many after-school-special moments. But I liked the character. Knowing War Games was coming, I quit reading back issues. Then I read Nightwing, the Dixon run. Then Birds of Prey. My sister read Impulse, Superboy, and YJ, so recommended them to me, and I read them. Read assorted Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman from Golden through Post Crisis eras, but no solid runs, really. Then I read the New Teen Titans from 1980 to about 1990. Tried original Teen Titans but it was quite silver age. I actually read until they started getting more bronze with the writing, but plots were kind of silver. Silver age Flash was fun, and Barry, that Barry, is my Flash. Read the '80s Blue Beetle, and some of the '80s and late preboot Booster. Got recommended the 2006 Blue Beetle, and the first 25 issues were fantastic. And so forth and so on. But I am definitely one who gets attached to certain versions, then doesn't like change.

Calling YJ Superman the "Bad Dad" is an oversimplification. Not to mention inaccurate since Conner isn't even his son.

[kjn]

As some here have hinted at, I don't really think the mainstream of superheroes can be found in comics anymore, and it's not really influenced by them either. The last superhero comic that can be said to have a real impact on the popular perception of a character was probably Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.

Nowadays TV adaptations, cartoons, and movies reach a mass market that the comics don't. Characters like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Spiderman also still to some degree talk like us on a mythological level, and their iconography still carries meaning, but I think a lot of the comics published today has lost their ability to influence that other than through secondary effects, or they are too removed from the popular understanding of the characters that they simply fail to connect.

[married guy]

Not much at all to anyone in the general public.
So long as Batman looks like Batman and Superman looks like Superman DC can keep selling kids' undies.

Comic book fans of course are a different breed entirely......

[Vampire Savior]

Comics are mostly irrelevant these days. DC and Marvel comics are often bad and inaccessible in just about every way. Around when I first got into comics, I found I hated them. This was around the mid 2000s when ridiculous events were happening nonstop. I was just a kid who loved the Justice League cartoon, and I felt that what I was seeing in the comics was absurd and basically unintelligible. It didn't seem like the focus was on telling good stories like the cartoons I loved, but rather on cramming a bunch of disparate characters together to do something that wasn't even fun to read, which usually had something to do with retconning continuity, or just doing something "shocking" like Identity Crisis. All shock no substance. The big event stories were dumb. All of them. It wasn't until I dived into back issues primarily from the 80s and 90s that I started to really love comics.

DC Comics will remain irrelevant until they...

greatly improve their products:
The stories are mostly terrible. By DC's standards, they're doing pretty good when they make a blandly mediocre comic. Comics have to compete with games, streaming, movies, and so on. Comics CAN compete with those things. But they have to be good. The tripe DC usually publishes doesn't cut it. The stories and art need to be better. Nowadays I even look at comics I thought were good and I think to myself, "I would never put something like this out. Not good enough." Recently, I've been amazed to fully grasp that my own standards these days seem to be quite a bit higher than DC's. A lot of the stuff they give the okay on in both story and art would never fly with me. That really changes my perspective on DC quite a bit. They put out a lot of subpar content, and it's no wonder people mostly ignore it or aren't impressed with it.

Get their priorities straight:
Telling great stories with great art needs to be the priority. Not retconning your continuity in stupid overblown events that aren't even goodand destroying your characters for shock value. It's real simple.


And improve their visibility:
They have to find a better way to get their products seen. The direct market doesn't cut it.

[Jim Kelly]

Isn't this a bit of navel-gazing. Here we are on a forum dedicated to comic books, a bunch of people who buy comic books, talking about the relevance of comic books. It's relevant to us.

Comic books have depended for the last thirty years on fandom for their consumer base. It's not a new thing that we are the only ones who really care about what goes on in the comic books. If anything, it's only because comic book characters have gone mainstream with the movies, that any of what we think matters now. For a long time, we were crying in the wilderness. Now non-comic book buying people can hear our faint cries. But they probably aren't actually going to come to the wilderness to check out if we're okay.

So the whole deal about what's the mainstream version of the character is only something our incestuous little lot are going to even bother thinking about. Because we buy the comics, we think about these picky little things, trying to decide which comics we should buy because "they matter" and which comics we should buy because "they're just a bit of fun."

DC and Marvel then try to figure out what is the version of the character, at this time, that the fanboys want and they make that the mainstream line. But it's only for us that they do these things, because they need our money. If they ever learn to live without us, then we're screwed.

[Falcon16]

TTG Cyborg is the most known version of Cyborg. So no.

[Buried Alien]

There's always a default version of each character associated with a name...a version that most people think of when the name is mentioned, and is widely regarded as the no-adjective version of that character. Decades ago, when these characters were closer to their point of origin and fewer interpretations/variations existed, they weren't difficult to identify. As time goes on and the characters become subject to more interpretations, the idea of the default becomes less clear.

For me, personally, the default versions of the characters will always be as they were depicted during the late Bronze Age, circa 1977-1983. Someone who started reading comic books during the Golden Age or 1990s, however, might find my idea of the default versions at odds with theirs.

Jose Luis Garcia's depiction of the core DC characters below represents my default view of the DC Universe. It hasn't looked that way in a long while, and probably never will again.



Buried Alien The Fastest Post Alive!)

[kingaliencracker]

I don't need my favorite characters to be mainstream at all, and in fact it can work against him/her sometimes (i.e. Harley Quinn).

[superduperman]

Having "your" version of a character be an obscure one most people have never heard of can be both exciting and lonely. On the one hand, you have something that's all yours. On the other, it's hard to find other stuff, and other fans, who share that same interest. And if the "mainstream" version deviates too much from that one, it can make it hard to enjoy it.