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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

The traditional comics industry has done such a disservice to consumers by painting comics as toothless drivel. This is due to the fact having actual consequences in the plots would interfere with their ability to milk characters and stories until the end of time. There is no drama in a Batman comic because nothing that happens in Batman comic matters since it will all be reset and overwritten eventually. Single-run comics that begin and end can tell truly incredible stories and you owe it to yourself to check them out.

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> The traditional comics industry has done such a disservice to consumers by painting comics as toothless drivel. > > There is no drama in a Batman comic because nothing that happens in Batman comic matters since it will all be reset and overwritten eventually.

You're conflating a feature of a genre with a medium or format. The phenomenon that you're referring to (retconning) is a feature of a genre, one which enables the creation of rich and intricate stories that couldn't emerge any other way.

Batman is a particularly bad example to choose for this, because it's actually been exempted from several of DC's hard resets (see: New 52). Although DC in general does this less well than Marvel anyway.

If you don't like them, that's fine, but they're not the only comics around, even if you're only buying stuff from the Big Two. Dismissing comics as "toothless drivel" because you don't like the narrative vocabulary of one genre is like dismissing cinema because you don't like Avengers movies.

GP agrees with you? DC and marvel are what most americans think all comics are (despite being like 25% at most of modern US comics sales)

> GP agrees with you? DC and marvel are what most americans think all comics are

And I'm saying that's not even an accurate description of DC or Marvel.

Batman is a particularly good example to choose for this since he's died twenty-three times between 1952 and 2023.

If you don't like them, that's fine, but they're not the only comics around, even if you're only buying stuff from the Big Two. Dismissing comics as "toothless drivel"

That was my point. Superhero comics have created a mainstream perception that all comics are like that, that the entire medium is too lazy and greedy to commit to a narrative.

Non-superhero comics have been outselling superhero comics in the US for many years. DC and Marvel have been trying to maintain their traditional model, including comic book shops, for decades now; it doesn't work.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Americans see animation and comics as something for children while the US entertainment industry pumps out unsophisticated drivel. There are countless anime series and movies that are more emotionally and intellectually complex than most live action entertainment produced in the US.

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