Blah, Blah, Blah...

I love comic books. I’m a confessed, established, confirmed comic book dork.

And I’m getting sick of the mainstream. Because they are hammering home that nothing lasts. Period.

Bucky? Captain America’s once long-deceased sidekick? Back from the dead. Jason Todd? Batman’s 2nd Robin blown to smithereens by the Joker (and beaten about the head with a crowbar): Back amongst the living. Sheesh.

Spider-Man just died. He had the bejeezus beaten out of him by also-recently-dead villain (Morlun), and flat-lined. Before this paragraph, if this were any frickin’ genre but comics, I might feel inclined to put a warning about a spoiler. Spider-Man is dead.

For about a week.

Nothing lasts in comics. At all. Nothing lasts. I can’t help feeling that in contemporary comics, they’re not telling stories so much as spreading rumors. The difference? Whatever they’re selling this month won’t matter four weeks from now. That’s the damn difference.

He’ll be back. Superman died. He got better. Batman’s spine was broken. He was back on his feet in less than a year. Green Lantern went crazy, murdered half his teammates before also dying (threw himself into the sun), and what a shocker, he’s back in the pink of condition.

I’m just sick of all these bloody wastes of time in print. What’s the point of picking up the issue if the story is not going to affect a damn thing? Stories are primarily about change. The characters are not quite the same at the finish, as when they started. That’s the effing point. Look at any title in Marvel or DC, and trust in the knowledge that anything you read this month isn’t going to matter a damn in a month.

There are exceptions. Thank goodness there are exceptions. Fables. Constantine. Y, The Last Man. All three are Vertigo titles. The characters in these have things happen to them (good and bad) that resonate. That have staying power.

I tried to publish a comic. I wrote it, produced it, tried to get it published. Didn’t work. That’s okay. Regardless, I made a promise to myself that if and when characters kicked the bucket were going to stay dead.

Eurgh. Whatever. Have a good ‘un.