Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Testing a Theory

Just mentioning "One More Day" will bring about a deluge of comments from people who are angry over the story, and looking for a place to vent said anger.

Watch this space...

6 comments:

darknessatnoon said...

I KNOW, right?! It's crazy.

Mark Clapham said...

One More Day?

Raaaaaagggge!

Anonymous said...

I feel that Booster Gold is a REALLY good comic.

A REALLY, REALLY good comic.

That is all.

Anonymous said...

SPIDER-MAN NO MAKE DEALS WITH DEVIL!! ME ANGRY!!!

Anonymous said...

Here's something else that you might be able to talk about:

Quoting Eric Teall:

"No kids are going to start reading comics because of a story decision. You know what's gotten people into comics in the last fifteen years? Three things: NOT-SPANDEX, TRADES, and MANGA. In other words, massively different stories and formats. Rearranging the story elements in Spider-Man to what they were twenty-five years ago will not bring today's kids in off the street, and one can't change the actual story engine/genre of Spider-Man without making him not-Spidey."

I just started reading Mark Millar's "Wolverine: Enemy of the State", and was immediately confronted with the deaths of the Spot and Slyde, and a text box that mentions what happened to guys like Knickknack and the Leapfrog.

Along with Spider-Man being unmasked, does Eric's quote about "Not Spandex" mean that masked superheroes are increasingly irrelevant/dated? That characters like Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, Daredevil, or the Fantastic Four, and their attendant rogues galleries, would be considered ridiculous and absurd if they were introduced today, in 2008, without any of the impact on popular culture that they've had for the last several decades?

It truly saddens me to think that's the case, and I'm only twenty-five years old.

Go figure.

Granted, you know more about these things than I do, so maybe you can write more about this subject than I can, and know whether it's actually the case.

Eric Qel-Droma said...

No, Spandex itself is not dead. The Spidey movies prove that pretty conclusively, I think. The point I was trying to make is that the reasons why new readers aren't reading Spider-Man are NOT the ones that One More Day changed.

Comics have diversified again after twenty years of nothing but superheroes. Making Spidey single again is just rearranging a deck chair on the Titanic. Writing Spidey better, changing the format (to a thick Manga book, for example)--those things might bring in new readers.

Eric