Red Star showed up in DC and didn't he die in the same story along with Pantha and Baby Wildebeest?
Red Star showed up in DC and didn't he die in the same story along with Pantha and Baby Wildebeest?
Oh, that fight. Bushido shows up and gets sword-visioned* in half by Prime. Ugh.
*I say sword-visioned because it was supposed to be heat vision, and yet it cut him in half and didn't cauterize the wound, so that there was blood everywhere. Nothing at all like what a beam hot enough to burn through a person would do. It wasn't just egregiously tacky, but wrong!
And he backhands Pantha's head off after murdering a baby, and complains that *she's* ruining him, because he's supposed to be a big hero, and why did her head have to come off just to make him look bad? Yes, twerp, that's totally why she died, to spitefully wreck your self-delusion that you're the big hero...
The meta-narrative was funny, if dark, a character upset that the writing was 'ruining his character.' But still, ugh.
I think Didio agreed with you, because that's pretty much what he did. Twice, in fact - Infinite Crisis, and Flashpoint. And he was about to do something like that again until WB fired him - possibly because they didn't want another reboot thingy with more replacements in their main line.
I don't know if I agree with this, although I'm also one who feels that Dick Grayson should still be Robin so perhaps I'm not the best one to comment because I know that's a minority - even unpopular - opinion. However, I think aging characters with their audience winds up creating entitlement over the characters by their fans. Peter Parker was aged up because fans who started reading the character as children or young teenagers were entering their college years and began asking Stan Lee why Spider-Man couldn't age with them. Stan Lee, IMO, wound up obliging those fans in error. What Lee and fans should have realized was that if the fans were no longer relating to Peter Parker because he seemed too young, then it was probably time for them to move on to other things.
I think enduring characters such as Superman, Batman, Wonder-Woman, Spider-Man, etc. should more or less remain status quo in terms of age and basic character structure. It just makes things so much easier for the writer and reader IMO. And as we've witnessed time and time again, reboots don't work (at least, not long-term).
The thing is, Peter's most engaging stories happened because he was able to age into an adult; don't get me wrong, Ultimate Spider-Man (Comic) proved that his high school years could be focused on without any negative effect on the icon. But the thing is, for a hero who's been around as long as Spider-Man, people want him to be experienced as a hero, the fact he was able to age is what helps him be relatable as we know he started out young and grew from there. Same with Dick Grayson.
I don't even think they'd need to reboot (nor should they) because, honestly, this status quo is more than enough to sustain the franchise going forward. In other words, Bruce, Dick, etc. are all at the right age where they have this rich history built up behind them that can be mined for stories. Meanwhile, they are all still "young enough" to believably fight bad guys. I'm not saying we shouldn't introduce new characters or new developments, but we just don't really need to address their ages again. I mean, nobody ever cards Tony Stark or Reed Richards, despite both having been around since Peter Parker was still a child and Reed being the father of literal teenagers himself. Why should it be an issue for Bruce Wayne who is arguably in much, much better shape than either Tony or Reed?
Uh, I mean, do you see this giant push for people to "de-age" Peter?? I sure don't. In fact, Peter is probably better for being a young adult. I mean, if Peter's relatability stems from dealing with real-world problems, why would we keep him in an environment where those problems were seemingly trivial (at the time when Peter was a teenager)? Peter struggling to pay rent on his apartment and maintain his job while also being a superhero is much more compelling than him finding a date to prom in my humble opinion.
Plus, the issue with keeping Peter in high school is just the fact that high school and adolescence has a series of recognizable "landmarks" that every teenager goes through on their way to adulthood. As I jokingly suggested earlier, prom is one of those, so are the SATs, looking for colleges, first dates, etc. Eventually, graduation comes, and then, what? Should they reboot Spider-Man as soon as he graduates high school leading to a time loop where poor Peter has to relive those same four years of his life every decade in the real world? By contrast, (young) adults don't really have a set path that everyone goes through. Everyone's path is different once they reach a certain age and there aren't goalposts that mark their advancement in life. So, by aging Peter up to his late 20s, early 30s, they essentially made him ageless.
Last edited by Green Goblin of Sector 2814; 06-30-2020 at 08:32 AM.
So what happens to guys like Tim Drake? Along with Miles Morales?
Dick's success did not come as Robin-it came as Nightwing-who could hold a solo and got out from under Batman's shadow.
You want high school spider-man stories-that is Miles Morales territory now.
Peter and Dick had to grow in order to get better stories.
This not the Archie universe.
A beam hot enough to burn through a person would not cauterize a wound: it would make the person's body explode. All the liquid in it, from blood to cytoplasm would instantly boil, turn into gas and inflate at breakneck speed, bursting out of the solid membranes that previously contained it. Another reason why applying real world science to superpowers is always a bad idea.
And remember, children:
Meta-comics
not even once!
I think the same argument that can be applied towards a married Peter Parker can be applied the other direction. You could have told more or less the same exact stories with a high school Peter Parker that you could have with an aged Peter Parker. Ultimate more or less showed that.
Except that allowing characters to explicitly grow adds a dimension to that formula that neither just an older character nor just a younger character can do, and in the case of the DC characters involved here, it allows for more characters to enter the story and for the entire brand to grow and interact in ways it can’t if held static.
I’d also say that DC has maybe shown itself more reliably a bale of publishing “flash-back” titles for people who doggedly refuse to male with the times.
You don’t need to burn the present and the future to turn and chase some ideal past... especially if you can be in all three eras at once, and can field several spinoff characters as well.
Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?
I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP
Again, comics weren't designed for people in their 40's and 50's. It morphed into that certainly, and now the industry is dependent on us. But what made Peter so popular was that kids and teenagers related to him, because he endured similar problems that they encountered. When the kids started to grow up, Peter grew up with them.
And there certainly is a giant push to make Peter much younger to mainstream audiences. That's undeniable.