| Posted: 12 December 2012 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | 2
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As to being overwritten, I'd disagree strongly and point out the
importance of keeping historical perspective here. Most comics were
significantly more meaty during that time as far as both narrative and
dialogue.
I have historical perspective, as I prefer the "meaty" comics of the Bronze Age over any other era.
But the soap opera aspect of Titans--and X-Men--played well when I was a teenager, for the most part. However, reading Claremont and Wolfman's team stories now, they're overwritten like soap operas, layering meaning and relevance through a narrowing scope; what began for the X-Men and Titans as stories about characters swiftly became stories about the built-in mythology of their worlds.
All well and good, and we all bought in, but historical perspective now that the insular mode of those comics and their soap opera continuity actually damaged superhero story-telling.
Spider-Man, to me, was always melodramatic and overwrought, but in general (at least pre-Peter marriage) pretty honest in the storytelling. Over time, as we've seen, the soap opera aspects gradually engulfed the title. Daredevil suffered the same fate after Frank Miller--storytelling struggling to reach the emotional peaks of Miller, of Claremont, of Wolfman's best stories.
Comics became insular even more, with more convoluted reflection on past stories and continuity, while readership grew older and tastes more provocative. Today, the soap opera is pure titillation and overt expectancy of nothing but emotional peaks.
And I'm fairly certain this stems from a couple of primary sources of superhero entertainment, the two biggest-selling books of their era, in the Titans and X-Men.
And I'll clarify: there's nothing inherently wrong with either book, but they were fertile with a kind of grotesque cyclical expectation that many comics had never had before them--they engaged a post-teen audience hungry for their own experience, removed from their father's Fantastic Four and Justice League of America. A ripe environment for steadily-declining emotional returns from the story-telling. And a couple of corporations ready to feed a nostalgic horde the same knock-off X-titles and Titan-titles while crowding out new titles, new genres, new anything except more knock-off hubris-filled team books. A quicksand of dreary hackwork in the fading light of "Death of Phoenix" and "Judas Contract."
Edited by Chad Carter on 12 December 2012 at 10:18pm
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