This page lists 22 appearances and I know it’s not exhaustive, because the Doomsday Wars aren’t even on there. I would guess a lot of characters you consider respectable villains don’t get 22 appearances in 15 years. And that’s of course not including his appearances outside of comic books that I’ve already mentioned. He’s also been in at least one video game that I know of.
"If I may… ah… briefly interject in counterpoint to my illustrious confrere, taking into account the archetypal interspecific conventions of extended personal conflict resolution attendant to our respectively embodied sociomoralistic paradigma, as it were… kindly allow me, if you would, to remark in summary: ahem ‘Rrraagghh.’ "
A lot of those appearances on that page are individual chapters of the same stories–the “Death of Superman” story covers like 8 of those issues. A few of them are one-panel flash-back type appearances (a couple of the Infinite Crisis appearances are him standing around in a crowd of thousands of bad-guys) and at least one of those is a collection of other issues already listed.
Regardless, even if Doomsday is a great villain, that’s still only one in the last 15 years or so.
Bravo!
Yes, I’ll surely give you that - - but how many great heroes have been created in the same time, (besides Battle Pope of course)? If you say Invincible we’re done here :).
Superhero comics are still surviving off of Superman and Batman ('30s), Spider-Man and Hulk ('60s), and Wolverine and Punisher ('70s.) I’d be willing to bet that those 6 characters, all 35+ years old, still account for the VAST majority of American superhero comics sales. As soon as a generation comes up that thinks they aren’t cool anymore, the industry is screwed. But what’s to replace them? They’d all get laughed off the shelves if they were created today, with the possible exception of the Punisher. We need new ideas all around, not just new villains.
Disagreement is okay, and saying you think DC is producing flawed comics is okay, too, but what’s not allowed is focusing on what you think of the other posters. Cafe Society is about the thread topic, not about the people participating in it. Please don’t do this again.
Actually, I think we can grant Evil Captor, though he presented it roughly, that some fault may be in the generic “us”, as in, the whole of the audience; that the issues being raised about DC/Marvel product could be addressed by the mechanism of the marketplace, by having the readers patronize some other, better (In His Opinion) product and hope that DCvel get the message.
Thing is, the public may find out that Empowered is absolutely delightful… but they may ALSO ***still ***want to see well-written, creative Flash, or X-Men, stories. and in trying to address that demand, the majors bump against a very real question with their audiences (analogous to what happens to newspapers): do we change things to attract people who are not already our regular readers, and risk ticking off the longtime regular readers, or do we please the longtime regular readers and risk losing new readers? Because, backing off and saying, “OK audience, you did not like this change, we get the message, let’s do something else and pretend this did not happen” will itself tick people off!
Boy am I glad I’m NOT a Marvel/DC exec…
No, he doesn’t. His pants date from 1984. Venom is from '88, when McFarlane was on the book.
Empowered is a parody of superheroes, not much of a thing in itself. So it’s no more a way forward than Watchmen, which was also a parody of superheroes, or Tiny Titans, which is–well, bizarre.
The industry latches onto riffs on what it finds familiar, whether or not they offer any growth in sales.
However, I think that Invincible is one of the best titles being written nowadays, and I believe that is because of the Silver-Age-ish sense of fun I see it displaying.
Ah yes, Venom’s Pants. Now there was a classic villain!
But that was the Bronze Age. Pants were better back then.
I agree that you simply read this wrong. Saying that the fault is with the comic reading audience is not in any way a personal attack.
The vast bulk of the American public thinks that superheroes = comics and superheroes are defined as those published by DC & Marvel.
A small number know that other superhero comics are published and may or may not be superior. These have rarely broken through to the larger public and probably never will since they have what I think is an insurmountable handicap in that they can’t call themselves superheroes for trademark reasons.
An equally small number read comics that are not about superheroes at all. These also rarely break out to the larger public but are given huge critical acclaim when they do.
It’s probably true that whatever is art in the comics world today lies in the latter two groups and rarely if ever in the first. And that doesn’t matter a bit. The public voted long ago that superheroes are DC & Marvel. Life is like that.
I find it hard to imagine that Evil Captor meant anything other than what I’ve said by his statement. It’s a proper thing to say. It’s not even expressed in improper terms.
Do a reboot, Skip. Reverse time and make this never happen. 
I dunno; while I don’t think that EC’s post was intended as a personal attack on the other posters in this thread, I don’t think it was meant to actually contribute anything either. It was just some drive-by snark.
Indie publishers may or may not have more original superheroes, but they’re not really relevant to the thread’s topic (even though the conversation has drifted a bit more to talking about the declining state of the comic industry in general). They don’t have massive shared universes, 40+ years of back issues, or aging readers/editors who won’t accept change.
But saying that we “need to get out of the DC and Marvel ghettos” is.
I’ve been reading indies since the mid '70s. To me it’s precisely the same sort of thread-shitting as popping into a “Hey, let’s talk about things that could be improved about PCs” thread and saying “Hey, if you all would just get Macs and get out of the PC ghetto…”
Especially when the guy’s bragging about reading a soft-core bondage comic with a very funny overlay of super-hero parody and bragging that he reads Image comics. Neither is remotely “outside the ‘ghetto’”
Beanworld is outside the DC/Marvel ghetto.
Zot! is outside it.
Flaming Carrot is outside it.
Cerebus the Aardvark is (mostly) outside it (all the Roach parodies require DC and Marvel knowledge to get, but those were what–15 issues out of 300, maybe?).
Elfquest is outside it.
Star*Reach is outside it
Carl Barks and Don Rosa’s Duck stories are outside it.
John Stanley’s Little Lulu’s were (so were Marge’s Little Lulu’s but they were boring, IMO)
Maus is outside it
Much (if not all) of Eisner’s non-Spirit stuff is outside the super-hero “ghetto”.
Hell, if you want softcore stuff, Omaha the Cat Dancer is outside that “ghetto” and unlike Empowered, doesn’t require you to know, for instance, how super-villian lackeys are generally treated. Or how cosmic bad-guys are stereotypically defeated.
In Empowered, the humor lies in Adam Warren’s subverting those tropes. It’s also dependent on being willing to skip past pages of the main character stripped mostly naked, tied up and having a ball-gag stuck in her mouth over and over and over*.
*Warren created Empowered as a series of sketches for a guy with “specialized tastes” (his phrase) and it grew into a funny strip which will only improve once it gets over the page-after-page of Empowered going “Mmmff!” through her gag and Adam Warren showing off his knowledge of knots (and it slowly IS getting over it–books 3 and 4 feature about 50% less bondage each than the first one)
I disagree—fans don’t get pissed at change as a rule–they get pissed at capricious, arbitrary, out-of-character change.
When Barry (and Supergirl) died, I don’t remember much protesting as both characters went out well and in Barry’s case there was a successor in the wings.
When Barry took over for Jay, granted Roy Thomas, Jerry Bails and others wrote in asking about Jay, but they weren’t upset.
When Spider-Man graduated from college (after like 150 issues!), the letter writers were so happy with the change that all the griping was about a loophole that the writer left (Peter graduated but forgot a gym credit that he had to make up–so that if the new direction bombed, they could still do “Peter in college” stories). Ditto for the Peter/MJ wedding–the griping at the time wasn’t “Peter’s getting married” it was “Peter and MJ haven’t been together in years–you just got 'em back together a few months ago” mixed with some “MJ’s a skank-Peter should marry the Black Cat (or whoever his girlfriend du jour was then)” type letters.
Fans get pissed when Hal Jordan suddenly is written out of character, ignoring years of having a specific personality and becomes not only a bad-guy, but a laughably incompetent one.
Or when a bunch of JSA members are snuffed with the wave of a hand of a bad-guy to prove how bad-ass he is (and who wants old people around anyway?)
Or when Impulse magically grows up overnight and becomes a completely different character–only to be killed off after 12 issues.
Hell, while I’ve heard (and done) my share of bitching about the execution of the “RIP Batman” story, I haven’t heard many complaints about the idea of Bruce dying.
It’s not the change, it’s how it’s done.
Skipmagic, are you kidding?
EC wasn’t insulting me in that remark; he was commenting on my taste. I don’t see how you can possibly think otherwise. I certainly didn’t take it as an insult (other than of the winking, “get off my lawn, whippersnapper!” variety).
I don’t think even that’s true. By that logic, a certain nameless poster who’s fond of exclaiming “Fool of a Took!” when he’s pretendng to be annoyed should have been banned years ago.
My pants are saturnine & volatile. My Pants are Mighty & Fearsome in their Wrath, yet Festive.
I’m sorry but so what? The non-Marvel & DC comic worlds have existed for decades and have struggled for every year of it. To almost everybody except a small contingent of comic geeks superheroes are DC & Marvel. They have histories that go back generations of readers and a level of national awareness that makes them cultural icons. The books you mentioned just are not equivalent much less substitutes.
I don’t understand how listing a bunch of non-superhero comics negates what EC was advocating. Seems to me like you’re proving his point. So he references a parody comic. He did that after recommending Dark Horse and Image. Which have the name recognition of maybe 3% of DC & Marvel with a good head wind.
It’s a mixed bag… while I did love that they brought back the people from the pocket universe from Crisis, I hate hate hate that they got rid of the awesome sci-fi Krypton that had been introduced and brought back the cheesy Flash Gordonesque version from the silver age. Personally I prefer Kyle’s Green Lantern and liked Hal better as the Spectre, although I like the various Blue Beetles about equally.
See, I thought they handled that very interestingly, in that they really DIDN’T get rid of Byrne’s take on Krypton; instead, they established that it’s just one of a variety of cultural styles distinctive to various Kryptonian houses, right alongside the Flash Gordon-style Krypton, the crystal-and-polyester movie Krypton, etc.
Suddenly Krypton is the most stylistically diverse alien culture in the DC universe.
Shame they’re still dicks though.
Frankly, I’m not sure how much I disagree with EC.
DC in particular has dug itself into a self-referential morass that basically consists of retelling the same stories over and over again with more and more pointless gore and soft-core porn artwork layered over them from which I’m not sure they’ll ever really escape.
But every time uber-hack Geoff Johns dusts off some New Titans story from the late 80’s and peppers it with some dismemberment and heads getting punched off, it’s usually enough for DC to maybe take one or two spots of the top ten monthly books away from Marvel, so who can blame them?
A couple years ago I would have said that Marvel was considerably better than DC in this regard. After One More Day and Secret Invasion, I’m not sure I really can.