Anyways, I stopped following comics around then but the biggest problem for me was that, because boomer audiences wouldn't accept or buy all new characters, creators gave up and decided to make them knockoffs instead. Idea for a female hero? She's a Green Lantern. Idea for an asshole kid? He's Robin. No idea for Spiderman? Kill him and slot in a black guy with nearly identical backstory. It was so lazy and unrewarding. And because nobody is allowed to stay dead you end up with six GLs, four Flashes, three Robins, two Spidermen and Krypto being canon again. Just pure shit.
There is too many capeshitters in general. Every universe seems to have multiple of the same power sets repeated and a lot of the same archetypes. It is a fundamental flaw of combining an entire company’s lineup into a singular universe. You cannot make break out characters in a space where they will get bogged by guy from 70 years ago with same powers and/or characteristics.
Absolutely. Modern witers can only write enough personality for about 2 1/2 characters. When you add more than that, they have to spread that personality thin between the cast. That's why adding infinity characters with the multiverse is so stupid and everyone intrinsically understands this but them.
I agree entirely with you all on this. Modern superhero universes are
far too bloated, and doubly so remembering that there's 1) only a small core of solo heroes and teams people actually care about long-term and 2) most of them were made in the 30s-40s and reinvented in the 60s (DC) and 60s to 70s (Marvel).
Of course new characters have to be made to see if you can always strike lightning again, after all, the X-Men truly came into their own in 1975 with the All-New All-Different team, or even DC's Silver Age making new heroes wearing the Flash/Lantern monikers and Supes, Bats, Wondy, and Aquaman getting serious new spins on their origins and/or worlds. Everyone gets
that. But there's been such a ridiculous focus on new characters, and thus gradual buildup to "somebody's favorite", it's spread not just those powersets and personalities too thin but
storylines and plots. Like, surely we can all agree perhaps some awesome bad guy would work better against an A-list hero than the C-lister he started out fighting against, or say, that Dick Grayson had most of his character traits stripped away to give relevancy to others (he was a
detective nearly as good as Batman once upon a time before they strip-mined it to give to Tim as the "smart one).
Imagine a world where new heroes and villains were much more sparingly created and thus the "illusion of change" or at least comic book time thus felt a lot more natural since it'd feel much more in the moment, timeless, with how few capes there are. So many more plots could be given to the A-listers who could REALLY make them work (and a lot of "A-listers" need all the good classic stories they can get). Heck, the fewer capes the better to keep the idea that like Marvel claims it's merely "the world outside your window". Like fifty superpowered individuals tops (good or bad) versus the hundreds to like a thousand we have today, means everything from a lower power level in general for the heroes themselves (which makes it easier to construct threats for them to struggle against), to in turn the less of them are able to affect the wider world (which means less Crisis and event-level stuff as the new norm). You'd even have the original civilian supporting casts keep their prominence in order to have the hero have people to bounce off of instead them being gradually replaced by fellow capes.
I've always been a fan of keeping a superhero universe fairly small and streamlined, can you tell?
