Yep! Marvel did the same thing a few years ago with mixed results. And mainstream titles from the 90s are viewed as a low point by many fans.

If I thought this was anything more than a cynical cashgrab, I'd be up for it. I've long resented the sliding timeline/illusion of change model, and believe it's only organic and natural for older heroes to pass the torch to next generations. But the Big Two are artless and fickle. I can see this lasting for a couple years at the very most; once enough bucks have been raked in and the fanboy backlash reaches its crescendo, the status quo will be restored.

I agree. The reason Jane as Thor worked was she was a supporting character since the beginning. Riri as Iron Man? A new character introduced and becomes a superhero in a few months? There is no investment in the character. It's why Wally worked as the Flash for years but someone like Artemis wasn't accepted as Wonder Woman.

Because the publishers like DC and Marvel have been purchased by giant multi-media conglomerations that wanted the IP and character rights to make money in other media formats. Those entities don't care about a bunch of aging white guys making a weekly or monthly trip to the LCS to pick up their comic books featuring the same characters they've been reading since they were six, because those middle-aged folks aren't a growing or desired demographic.

I talk to my daughters' friends and none of them has ever read a comic book nor desires to do so, but they have seen all of the MCU films, have watched The Flash, etc, and while those entities are happy they love the characters in those formats, the bigger piece for them is that the kids BUY THE MERCH! My younger daughter wore her Captain America t-shirt to school today, and my older daughter proudly sports her Star Labs hoodie whenever she can, but the younger one has never read a comic that isn't "My Little Pony" and my older one, while having an entire shelf of Marvel Essentials of old Silver and Bronze Age stories, has never picked up a Flash comic.


I'm going to focus on the word I bolded: We. "We", being aging white (mostly straight) guys, don't matter in a world where Raina Telgemeier sells an ungodly number of graphic novels to a bunch of tween girls, as do other artists. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making the prior statement in a political "white guys are victims" way, but more in a "our days of spending money on things is drawing shorter, not to mention we have mortgages and student loans and car payments and spouses who like to shop and kids who want to buy Raina Telgemeier books, so our buying power is diminished" manner, and those entities, the ones that own the DC and Marvel characters, know it. They make precious little money off the Wednesday Warrior crowd, and while we can pretend that our wants and whims are important to them, we're only deluding ourselves.

So, if they can create "new" heroes to replace the original (or second or third or etc.) heroes, and then use those characters in their other media outlets while continuing to sop up a little revenue from those of us who will still buy the monthly books because we are obsessive completionists or can't envision a world where we don't go to the LCS on Wednesday and buy books, then all the better for them.

If these companies were smart, they would change their model entirely. They would put out two books a year featuring these new characters, using Scholastic Books to help market and distribute them in schools, and each would tell a self-contained story. No complex continuity, no needing to know what happened in Batman's book to understand what is going on in Superman's book, and the ability to miss an installment and not be completely lost. We have to consider that not everyone can afford to pick up every issue of a book, so if they miss one or two because their parents had their hours cut or lost their jobs and needed to put food on the table instead of buying funny books, then they are hopelessly lost in the story and will likely stop even trying to buy them because it will be frustrating to fill in the gaps. Produce a complete story, one with a beginning, middle, and end, unencumbered by the weight of 50 or more years of continuity, and sales will follow.

The last DC Comics book that I read is the Terrifics and I stopped reading them because it's makes no sense driving 35 minutes to a LCS to get the monthly copy. I stopped and haven't bought any Terrifics since issue #11. Same with my dear friend Jeff keeps telling me exactly what hondobrode said in his post here.

It isn't that they don't like the interconnectedness of the Marvel comics, it's that they have no interest in the comics to begin with. The movies have a definitive starting point (Iron Man) and as long as you see the movies, you are completely in the loop. There's no obscure reference in Thor #327 or Captain America #195 that can be called back to and leave people feeling lost because they've never read it.


The Big Two have to do the following to achieve this:
1. Write, draw, and produce self-contained stories that do not require prior reading or vast knowledge of a shared universe. Part of the joy of buying comics as a kid was usually that I could pick up an issue of Amazing Spider-Man without having to read 5 other books, either in that series or some other series, to fully understand it.
2. Get away from the direct sales model and put the books they produce in #1 into the hands of people through other sources. Scholastic Books, Walmart, Target, etc., would all be ways to put these stories in front of the masses, which is important because...
3. The LCS can be a scary place. They are usually full of middle-aged men possessing varying levels of both hygiene and maturity, and they sometimes aren't particularly welcoming to kids, women, or the LGBTQ community, at least in my experience. For some, while I know that having other products such as Magic: The Gathering can be profitable, it also invites foul-mouthed, ill-behaved males to sit around for hours on end swilling Mountain Dew, making crude sexual references, and acting as though they were in their own basement instead of a public place. Even my own LCS, which is pretty tame, is not a place I would take either of my daughters on a Wednesday afternoon between 4 and 8, because there are usually a bunch of men, some of whom I graduated high school with, standing around discussing movies, TV, and comics in an adult manner, which raises the question of whether they do so because there are no kids present or are there no kids present because they do so? As long as the primary place to buy comics greatly resembles a frat house for Peter Pans, it will be difficult for the industry to expand into non-traditional demographics.