REVIEW: End of Month Reviews #96 - December 2011 [spoilers]

[EDMLite]

On Jan 31, 1:48 pm, "Adrian J. McClure" <mrfantast... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Jan 23, 7:16 pm, Saxon Brenton <saxonbren... at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >      The twentieth anniversary of the Legion of Net.Heroes will be in
> > April 2012.
>
> Which is a little over 10 years since I started writing for RACC. Boy
> do I feel old.

Young whippersnapper... =)

> The thesis that it's primarily the accumulation of backstory that
> drives away new readers certainly doesn't match with my own
> experience. I got into X-Men in the mid-90s, at the absolute height of
> its convoluity. For me, the vast and complex backstory didn't turn me
> off, it made me want to know more, creating another world to inhabit.
> Granted, I was never exactly a typical kid, being the child of
> academics who grew up to be a medievalist, but I wasn't the only one.
> This was the peak of the X-Men's popularity. Maybe kids are more
> willing to just roll with the confusion rather than having to have a
> story all figured out before they engage with it, I dont' know.

Heh.  I'm exactly the opposite.  I've always avoided the X-books
like the plague, largely because of their vast and complicated
backstory.  I've tended to gravitate to books like "Daredevil"
and "The Flash," which focused on one super-character,
with a strong supporting cast, and tended to be more-or-less
grounded in the "real world."  (They also tended to produce
a lot of "done-in-one" stories, which I prefer to long arcs).

But I suspect that my comics-reading preferences are not typical...

> It's other problems
> that are making so many contemporary superhero comics feel closed off
> to anyone who's not already involved with the material, and even many
> of those who are: the disappearance of supporting casts in solo books
> and what Mightygodking calls "don't know shit" characters in team
> books; the refusal to draw inspiration from the outside world and even
> from newer forms of popular culture; the rejection of thought
> balloons, which limits opportunities for exposition and
> characterization; the lack of diversity among both creators and
> characters; the refusal to explore what the stories mean in terms of
> lived human experience and evoke any emotional resonance outside of a
> detached sense of "cool."

Very well said.  I couldn't agree more.

> And the thing is, the classic LNH has always been this way even at the
> beginning...

I've appreciated the fact that the LNH universe is big enough
for all kinds of stories: the great big universe-spanning epics
with loads and loads of characters, and the smaller dramas
(and comedies) that allow the reader to watch one or two
characters develop over time.  I have my preferences, but I
like that I generally have a wide range of stories to choose from...

--Rob Rogers
--Thinks of his own work as "epicayune"