Remember the ending of Busiek and Ross' MARVELS, where Phil Sheldon realizes he's essentially fallen out of love with superheroes because he's been around them too long?

http://ift.tt/2D6FtSq

It's something that's brought up surprisingly sparingly when people talk about the mini-series. Everyone goes on about how the book was a love letter to Marvel superheroes, but I'd argue it's also very clearly depicting that love as having a natural and unavoidable expiration date. (I know there's a lot more to the book and to Phil's retirement than that, but it's definitely at least a part of it.)

Superhero stories, more so than most genres, draw so much of their appeal from spectacle and sense of wonder. But that's the kind of stuff that depends on fresh eyes to perceive. For example, the first time you see one of those Crisis-style 'dozens of heroes charging at once' scene, your breath is taken away. But then you keep seeing it, again and again in new iterations, and by now it doesn't even raise an eyebrow because, well, you've seen its like a hundred times already. And the nature of the industry, with characters who've been published monthly going back decades, means many of us have read literally hundreds of stories about some of them. How many times can you thrill to Superman's super strength before it stops being at all thrilling?

With a lot of today's superhero comics, I honestly get the sense the creative team is infected by this kind of jadedness. The spectacle stuff, characters using their powers and fight scenes and that sort of thing -- the "cool stuff" basically, that's theoretically a big part of the genre's appeal -- gets treated in an utterly perfunctory way, like the writer's just hitting a beat because genre convention expects them to but they can't muster any real enthusiasm. So they hit that beat in as cursory a manner as possible and then move on to the stuff that does interest them, the character work, interactions, internal drama, and so forth. Or am I just projecting?

Speaking for myself, I know there have been many instances where I'd reach the end of a superhero comic and find that I didn't enjoy it, yet not be able to pinpoint anything particularly bad about it. Instead, I come away with the nagging feeling that if I'd read the exact same story a few years ago, I'd have eaten it up. (And I'm not talking the difference between reading something as a child and reading it as an adult. I mean the difference between reading it as an adult who's read a hundred Avengers stories and one who's read two hundred.) Only now I'm like Phil Sheldon, and everything that happened in the story only reminds of other stories I've already read. Is anyone else in this boat?

(As an aside, I think a large reason superhero movies do work for me is because they don't suffer from this. Even with the ones I like, I suspect if I saw the exact same plotline in a comic, it'd do little for me. But because it's a film, it's different. One, the change to live action makes the spectacle seem fresh again. Two, you see it with an audience that isn't jaded like you, so for a brief time, you can imagine it from their fresh perspective, in which the sight of a guy suddenly sprouting to dozens of feet in size is still awesome instead of 'been there, done that.')

Thoughts?