That's not to say that all change is good or that change is inherently a good thing. Michael Straczynski's oft-criticized but undeniably bold run on Spider-Man was so jarring to readers, writers, and publisher accustomed to only the illusion of, and never the actuality of, change, not only ended with an event designed solely to undo one of the character's biggest actual changes, One More Day, but also was immediately followed up by Brand New Day, a nearly year-long initiative involving multiple creators working together to put Spider-Man back in the essential state he was in during the 1980s. "I appreciated that House of X resonated with them to the extent that they didn't want it to end," said Hickman in discussing his departure, "but the reality was that I knew I would be leaving the line early."Īnd it isn't just the X-Men that suffer from this predicament. Grant Morrison's X-Men run, which turned mutants from a feared and hated minority to the inevitable triumph of evolution with some serious sex kink, was followed up by Astonishing X-Men and the House of M, which reset things back to normal. One could argue that every period of substantial change in comics is immediately met with an equal reaction of anti-change to restore things to that "iconic" state. full of potential and ideas that, thanks to comically long delays, prevented them from coming to fruition until long after everyone stopped caring.īut that may be too harsh an assessment for Hickman, who, other than the fact that he ought to have known better, isn't really to blame for any of this. What nobody saw coming was that Hickman's X-Men reboot would be more like his run on S.H.I.E.L.D.
Others, like myself, worried that it would be an overly long, meandering mess like Hickman's Avengers run that ended with the chronically-delayed Secret Wars super-mega-crossover event. Many fans optimistically believed that HoXPoX would kick off an epic story akin to Hickman's run on Fantastic Four.
It is also, in my opinion, one of the most specious and retarded theories that it has ever been my misfortune to come across."Ī lot could be said about Hickman's X-Men reboot and whether or not it was doomed from the start. Readers only want the illusion of change.' As I said, it sounds perceptive and well-reasoned on first listening. In a 1983 essay lamenting the state of Marvel comics, esteemed comics creator Alan Moore wrote, "You see, somewhere along the line, one of the newer breed of Marvel editors … had come up with one of those incredibly snappy sounding and utterly stupid little pieces of folk-wisdom that some editors seem to like pulling out of the hat from time to time… 'Readers don't want change.
0 kommentar(er)
