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Thursday, June 16, 2005
Rambling Thoughts
Geoff Johns becomes, essentially, a continuity editor for DC. I'm sure the usual suspects will waste no time complaining about how this is a bad thing, but in general I'm failing to see a strong down side to this. If you're going to publish super-hero comics and want to maintain the illusion of a shared, cohesive universe in those comics, you really do need to have a person running, essentially, traffic control with your characters. And Johns, regardless of anyone's opinion of his talents as a writer, has proven to be a money-maker for DC. And one of his strengths as a writer has proven to be exploiting and building on past stories about the characters he writes.
Now, granted, the actual impetus for this seems to be the realization that the end result of Infinite Crisis is shaping up to be Just Imagine Geoff Johns Creating the DC Universe, so that may be cause for slight concern.
Would it be possible for a moratorium to be declared on complaints about the "darkening" of super-hero comics? The arguments I've been seeing have now come full circle and the new "dark" comics being published because comic companies have abandoned the children's audience. Well, I'm not quite sure that it was comics that abandoned kids so much as it was kids that abandoned super-hero comics. We still get plenty of kids coming into the store, and the only super-hero comics they show the slightest interest in are Spider-Man, Teen Titans and JLA. In other words, a perennial children's character and two properties with other media tie-ins. What the kids who come into the store mostly want is manga, Archie comics, and maybe some of the better all-ages independent comics. Oh, and for some reason, Asterix and Tintin lately. But the point is kids, by and large, don't want super-hero comics, and why should they? I wasn't interested in the same media properties that my parents or grand-parents were interested in when they were kids, why should today's kids be any different? I think a lot of this concern over super-hero comics being made appropriate for children so that kids will read them again is misplaced anxiety on the parts of aging comics fans who feel that kids should want to read super-hero comics.