Count me in as well.
My passion was slightly re-ignited when Snyder and Capullo started on Batman, it detiorated quickly after the first issue. On top of this Marvel dropped the X-Men, Quesada slipped as EiC. Image was ok in-between.
The rest I can‘t mention as the post would be censored.
I hope he doesn’t take this to mean anything. A room of people at a convention is to small a stampede size to make any conclusions.
When I was reading comics in the 70’s & 80’s, I read a lot of books. The Superman titles, Batman titles, Legion, JLA, Flash, All Star Comics, Green Lantern.... I felt such a connection to the entire universe of books because I bought so many. By the time I’d stopped reading comics, I was only getting maybe 4 books a month.
When I stopped buying comics, I remember thinking everything was just too serious. The villains were more murderous. The decompressed stories bored me. Comics had stopped being fun for me. I can still buy old books and they’re lighter.
Well, I do think Court of Owls is awesome. At least, I thought so last time I read it. I think that's one of the very few new-ish DC Comics stories that will be thought of as a classic years down the line. But after that story, I lost interest. I don't think anything from King's run on Batman will be looked at very fondly, and Detective Comics hasn't done anything of real note in quite some time.
I think there's a bit of a difference between what I meant and how you took it. I'll try to clarify.
1. I was referring to the heroes taking partial to total heel turns and the villains taking partial to total face turns as a whole. I didn't discuss either separately in the part you quoted.
2. I wrote with quantity in mind more than frequency. My modifier was "far too many". Your modifier was "often". To my mind, at least, those two modifiers have somewhat different connotations. "Far too many" is more about quantity, "Often" is more about time/frequency. I know it is splitting hairs a bit. Sorry.
3. If it weren't being done in the same universe in which heroes are written as less and less heroic, then I'd agree that face turns for villains would not be cynical. Heroes ARE being written to be less and less heroic. Combine this with moving too many villains towards an anti-hero or anti-villain status, and you've got increasingly blurred lines between the heroes and the villains. The blurring of those lines is, to my estimation, very cynical.
Your mileage may vary regarding comics as inspirational versus comics as a reflection of the real world. I'd rather have the former.
Well, I enjoyed CoO at the beginning, but, if I recall it correctly, at issue 10 or so the whole fiasco with Bruce‘s brother began. Plus the absurd fight on the plane later on.
Then again I kept following the run because of Capullo, but even he couldn‘t draw me into the Bat-Bunny story, something with Gordon becoming Batman, but I forgot it already, and I suffered through 100 issues of Spawn just for his art.
I think we can't deny a shift in tone over the decades.Now we have bad stories and good stories. I will agree lots of bad ones.
But back then it was the same. It's just that we only remember the good ones. The bad ones are forgotten, unreprinted.
I do agree that we had bad and good stories then, too. But if you go back 20 ...er, maybe 30 years, the nice thing is the stories were shorter. So if a story was bad, it only lasted a month or four instead of all year. Same goes for good stories, of course.
I do want to preface this with acknowledging that comic pricing and decompression are undoubtedly factors as well. There are other factors beyond them as well. Nevertheless...
I neither said nor implied that there were no bad stories in the past or good stories in the present. To have said either would have been ridiculously inaccurate. I'd add the following:
Good stories can be cynical.
Bad stories can be optimistic.
I'm certainly not advocating for all optimism all the time. Stories skewed towards cynicism have value. Nevertheless, I do believe we were better off when the rape/murder of Sue Dibney and the sheer character assassination of Wally West in HinC would never have been printed. I also believe we were better off when the bad guys losing and going to jail was much more the norm.
I am definitely enjoying Pre-Crisis/Bronze Age DC over the current stuff. I'm simply not the desired demographic for DC, and I'm cool with that.