In light of the medium's almost century-long existence, it is only natural that a decent number of modern comic book flaws complained about nowadays first planted their roots much earlier on.
For examples pertaining to Batman, go here.
- Crisis on Infinite Earths: While cleaning up the Continuity Snarl that was the multiverse was a good idea, bringing Retcon to whole new levels and bringing about The Dark Age of Comic Books did not help things.
- And you can't accuse Crisis on Infinite Earths without also pointing the finger at the fateful "Flash of Two Worlds" story from The Flash #123 (September, 1961), establishing the idea of Golden and Silver Age versions of the same heroes coexisting in separate universes and traveling between them. If the Crisis was Original Sin, "Flash of Two Worlds" was its corresponding Fall of Lucifer.
- COIE firmly established that Anyone Can Die by having Killed Off for Real two dozen pre-established characters, the most famous being The Flash and Supergirl who each had a whole issue devoted to their deaths culminating in a Heroic Sacrifice. None of the other deaths were handled that well. For the rest, they simply dropped on bridge on them. This reached its apex in the final issue (#12), where 7 characters were quickly dispatched in a 2 page spread, including two popular pre-Crisis Multiverse characters, the Earth-2 Robin and Huntress... and these 7 characters weren't the only pre-established characters to be so easily killed that issue. As the years went by, and more promoted fanboys began Running the Asylum, there were more and more deaths like this, invariably newer characters the writers and editors hadn't grown up reading, creating the C-List Fodder trope and causing the Too Bleak, Stopped Caring effect that readers now have for newer characters.
- Speaking of, COIE was also the first event comic to really use Tonight, Someone Dies as a selling point with the above two characters of Flash and Supergirl. Their deaths are still held up as classic moments in comic history, and a major reason behind this is that their deaths stuck (only being undone two decades later), and the writers knew that they would probably stick. Both franchises had been in a major slump, and in Supergirl's case, editorial edict was not favorable to her existing, and so their deaths were more or less the writers letting them go out on a high note. But as Comic Book Death became codified, it became almost obligatory for event comics to off at least one A-lister (and for said A-lister to return inside of a few years), causing the deaths to lose all impact. Readers stopped caring about the deaths of major characters when it often wouldn't even lead to their book being cancelled.
- Going back even further, when DC first introduced the concept of Earth-Two in 1961, establishing forever that the universe had gone through a Continuity Reboot behind the scenes, they didn't make the reboot in question a "clean" one. While The Flash, Green Lantern, and many others could all be clearly divided, the handful of really popular characters that had survived through the Golden Age, like Superman or Batman, simply continued on as normal, with the only clear demarcations being Soft Reboots like the introduction of the Fortress of Solitude or the "New Look" era. Consequently, there was a very real question, to readers, of which stories happened on Earth-One and which happened on Earth-Two—for instance, Superboy was explicitly an element exclusive to Earth-One's Superman, yet made his initial appearance in 1949, when many Earth-Two characters were still seeing publication. However, at the time, continuity in comics was not really a going consideration and most stories were simple one-off tales, so the question of whether mid-50s Superman stories were still canon was mostly a case of trivia. And while there hadn't been any clear points of "this is when he stops being the Earth-Two version", there had been a lot of cases of Early-Installment Weirdness that Earth-Two provided a handy explanation for, such as alternate origins or vastly out-of-character behavior. And it's hard to argue that it would have been a good idea to announce to the millions of Superman readers at the time that the comics would be starring a different-but-near-identical character from Action Comics #241 onward.
However, when Crisis on Infinite Earths took a similarly ragged approach (some characters kept on trucking as if nothing had changed, some had significant alterations, some were fully rebooted), it created some massive issues. By the time Crisis had happened, the DCU had become a far more interconnected place, and it meant that one character getting a hard reboot while another stayed essentially the same would create problems: for instance, Superman was fully rebooted, but the Legion of Super-Heroes, which spun out of him, stayed the same, necessitating a Continuity Snarl of pocket universes and Time Trapper schemes that the franchise has never really recovered from. Much of the issues of the Post-Crisis era's continuity arose in some form from it being genuinely questionable what stories had and hadn't happened, which characters had long histories and which ones were completely new.
This tendency towards half-measure reboots hit its zenith in The New 52, which kept the histories of the post-Crisis Batman and Green Lantern the same (said histories had been referencing events that went as far back as the 60s), but attempted to pull a hard reboot on nearly everything else. Consequently, now nobody knew what was supposed to be canon anymore, and even the writers struggled to reconcile things like the four distinct Green Lanterns and Robins or references to events like Blackest Night or Final Crisis in a universe where those things simply could not fit. When combined with the fact that the New 52 had general issues with lacking a wider direction beyond simply purging things the top brass didn't like, an initiative that was meant to straighten out DC's wider continuity instead made it completely impenetrable, placing the DC Universe and its history as a whole in a state of flux that it arguably hasn't left since then. - Some of the worst excesses of the Dark Age can trace its roots to the legacies of the best works of Alan Moore and Frank Miller, both whom were praised in their day for their realism, their creativity, and for bringing comics Out of the Ghetto:
- Watchmen and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns are still recognized as among the greatest graphic novels in the medium's history. Both comics won enormous praise and commercial success for their elevation of the medium to new levels of artistic credibility with Watchmen even being recognized by Time in 2005 as among the 100 greatest novels ever reviewed by the magazine (the only graphic novel on the list). They also contained levels of violence and sex that were, at the time, unheard of in comics. However, both works were intended for mature audiences and clearly divorced from the regular comics continuity and the point and subtext of both comics is that superheroes or crimefighting and the adult world (i.e. real-life politics, history, economics, sex) don't actually mix, and the respective endings of both stories adequately emphasize this fact; with Bruce Wayne being forced underground at the end of The Dark Knight Returns, while in Watchmen, the only character with the classic Black-and-White Morality of superhero comics, Rorschach, ends up dead while a similarly heroics embracing character, Ozymandias, ends up forced to compromise his principals and commit actions that are morally questionable at best and no better than the very evil and chaos he wishes to permanently save the world from at worst in order to achieve his utopian end goal. Writers and editors who didn't get the fine print or read too deeply assumed that those were the reasons why the comics were successful or great works leading to a slew of comics that desperately aimed to be 'mature' yet reveled in the most immature sort of shock value.
- Other comics by the same writers, such as The Killing Joke also had a lot of dark and edgy material that was widely misinterpreted. Moore's Killing Joke had Barbara Gordon assaulted and crippled by the Joker in a ploy to humiliate her father, while trying to prove to him and Batman that everyone's "one bad day" from being him, when the actual story is about Joker's Multiple-Choice Past and a possible reinterpretation of his origin that opens up the brief, but doomed, possibility that Joker could be cured should he be able to choose to. Instead the story codified the Joker as an ultra-violent malingerer and an embodiment of Insane Equals Violent, while making many of Batman's supporting-cast open season for him to hunt down to hurt Batman and up his cool cred, leading to gratuitous stunts such as the deaths of Jason Todd and Sarah Essen Gordon, while also having Joker, once seen as a one-dimensional silly gimmick villain, into now being an equally one-dimensional murder-happy villain, leading in time to stories like Death of the Family and Joker that verge on Torture Porn.
- The New 52 was frequently criticized for its True Art Is Angsty and Darker and Edgier tendencies, but it started earlier than that. Starting in 2004 with the success of Identity Crisis (2004), DC took the success of that book as tacit permission to indulge in being darker and edgier, bringing The Dark Age of Comic Books back and pushing it to even higher levels of excess. After a decade and a half, the release and fan and critical thrashing of Heroes in Crisis, along with a big case of Condemned by History led to Identity Crisis being seen as the starting point for a lot of what went wrong with DC comics in the '00s and '10s.
- Superman:
- The comics in general have an original sin in that Superman's powers were not only extraordinary but also never really well defined. "Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound!" still leaves a lot of leeway regarding Superman's speed and strength. Not only that, but before The Golden Age of Comic Books was over, extra powers such as super-hearing, flying and x-ray sight were added to Supes' power roster. This led straight into the Silver Age and its penchant for piling up Superman's over-the-top powers such as super-ventriloquism, which in turn ended in power downgrades for Superman whenever reboots occurred. As a result, Superman's level of strength is notorious for fluctuating ridiculously depending on whether the writers want him to be an upper-mid-tier hero or a nascent deity.
- The Death of Superman is the Trope Codifier for the modern overuse of Death Is Cheap in comic books: a story in which the major superhero of the DC universe dies and is brought back over the course of a major storyline. However, back then, killing Superman was actually shocking to the audience because it hadn't been done to death yetnote , created immense Emotional Torque, and the Reign of the Supermen was a brilliant takedown of the '90s Anti-Hero. It's still a classic of comic book storytelling and a point of light in The Dark Age of Comic Books, but it also set such a trend for future Character Deaths that the comic book afterlife had to have a revolving door installed.
- The tendency for covers to make it seem like Superman suddenly turned heel has been the subject of mockery for decades. This actually dates back to the Man of Steel's very first appearance, which had a cover featuring a man destroying a car while people fled in terror; unless you'd already read the comic or knew someone who had, you'd have no way of knowing this man was stopping criminals from escaping. However, because this was the world's introduction to Superman, this was really all that was needed; since nobody had any idea of what he was like, having him act blatantly OOC was unnecessary, meaning it came off as far less contrived and dishonest.
- Batman:
- Batman has always been called "the world's greatest detective", but to prevent his crossovers with superhuman heroes becoming Story Breaker Team Ups, the writers inflated his intelligence and preparation abilities to help keep up. While it was odd for essentially a street vigilante to take on Persons Of Mass Destruction, the idea that a Badass Normal could take on much more powerful opponents was very appealing to read plus helped justify Batman's place in the Justice League of America despite his low level of power. However, these match ups became common enough to reach memetic levels, making it seem like he can defeat anyone because "I'm the goddamned Batman". Now what is odd is why he ever has trouble on his home turf, which has supervillains low on the power scale at worst, let alone why his preparation abilities have not taken Gotham City out of being a Wretched Hive with repeat offenders.
- The Joker becoming more bloodthirsty in The '70s was a refreshing change of pace and justified how one who was once written as a goofy prankster could be Batman's Arch-Enemy. It did leave a question of Batman's (and Gotham's law enforcement in general) inability to permanently deal with the threatening clown, but this could also be raised about the rest of Batman's Rogues Gallery, and moments where he did something genuinely monstrous were mostly outnumbered by times where he was a capering loon, which made the genuinely horrible stuff all the more surprising. However, the Joker's bloodthirsty side started to stand out a bit too much, with the actions of brutally murdering Jason Todd and crippling Barbara Gordon. Worse, stories involving him murdering people for no reason, sometimes to his own detriment, working in the shadows of the above two, increasingly became the norm for him, causing him to lose the Wild Card excuse and a lot of his charm. Compare "The Laughing Fish", often seen as a pivotal 70s Joker story, which shows him start out with a completely absurd plan (attempting to copyright poisoned fish) and only killing people when he's angry that they don't take him seriously, with many modern stories where his entire modus operandi seems random murder from square one. As a result, a character whose gimmick was meant to be unpredictability has become notorious for his predictable stories, and a lot of fans believe that making him an exception to Batman's strict refusal to kill would be the more heroic stance for the Dark Knight to take (and even then, DC Rebirth retconned in a Voodoo Shark explanation, in the form of a poison that corrupts whomever kills Joker, which had already been done to create a notable Joker-like alternate Batman, for why Batman shouldn't kill him to justify his decisions).
- Batman's Woobie tendencies were there almost from the get-go. He eyewitnessed his parents' murder which scarred him for life. Then the Joker was given a Jerkass Woobie background in The Killing Joke (although, given his Multiple-Choice Past, it's questionable how much sympathy, if any, he really deserves). Then The Penguin got one, and then Mr Freeze, and then... until nowadays even third-string characters such as the Kite Man (!!!) must have a sob-story to justify their descent into evil.
- Batman's tendency to lash-out at the rest of the Bat-Family whenever he suffered a personal loss. Starting from Jason Todd's death (which was over thirty years ago), whenever someone close to him dies, his reactions are usually lashing out at whoever is near him, from Dick Grayson to even Superman. His actions are always understandable and sympathetic, but in no way depicted as in the right. Yet every time he's faced with this dilemma in modern comics, his actions get worse to the point it borders abusenote , which fans and the Bat-Family themselves have definitely noticed on several occasions, decreasing the sympathy factor to the point that he eventually becomes a Designated Hero. This became especially bad during Batman (Tom King), where Bruce's abusive tendencies increased for a rather disproportionate reasonnote , and was the point when fans began to really notice this flaw.
- Bruce's emotional constipation and Control Freak tendencies have fallen into this in recent years. This interpretation of him has been around since the 80s and has entered the public consciousness and become his primary portrayal; the issue, however, is that writers never allow him to actually grow beyond it. This and his inability to communicate and show that he actually cares for his family has been an ongoing issue for decades that no writer has tried to resolve and has made him more unsympathetic as the years go by as his militaristic treatment of them almost borders on cruelty. Thus, many fans are disillusioned with the entire concept now and believe that Bruce should just ditch the cowl, get actual therapy, and let someone else take up the mantlenote instead.
- The Dark Knight Returns was the first comic to ever show Superman and Batman really come to blows, and it fits a lot of the critiques that would mark later Superman/Batman brawls. Both characters undergo some Flanderization to make the fight happen in the first place, Batman has everything weighted in his favor, Superman comes off as a lot dumber than he should, and the actual fight features a lecture on Batman's part about how much better than Superman he is. All these things were forgivable because of what a massive upset it was, how well it underpinned the themes of the comic, and how bizarre it was to see a man who could tug a planet be held to a standstill by a Badass Normal (and the fact that it was an alternate timeline helped the character issues go down). Nowadays, Superman/Batman fights have happened so much that they've become a borderline loathed cliche, with the shock wearing off to Fridge Logic, the idea of Batman winning becoming downright expected, the character issues much less forgivable in a mainline comic, and the morality and themes devolving into "Batman is soooooo much better than Superman, you guys."
- Kingdom Come
- It was the first major comic to pair Superman and Wonder Woman together, a trend that would crop up a lot in Elseworld comics and eventually becoming briefly canon during the New 52. It worked there because there was lots of time spent explaining their relationship and crafting realistic circumstances for the two to be together. It's heavily implied, even then, to start off as a tragic, even loveless relationship — two grieving people latching onto each other for a source of stability, regardless of whether they actually have anything going on. Later adaptations that would see them together tend to ride off the popularity of the pairing without giving it the needed justification beyond "strongest guy and girl hook up". It also started the trend of such stories killing off or derailing Lois Lane, but it didn't start the trend of Superman getting over it almost immediately.
- Wonder Woman using lethal force. See the Wonder Woman section below.
- Kingdom Come was the first major story to really combine a gritty narrative where Anyone Can Die and most characters are morally gray at best with a retrograde sensibility and cast rooted almost entirely in the early '70snote . However, it also wrapped those elements in a self-consciously "mythic" style that lent the whole thing enough grandeur to not come across as edgy, and given the time of its release, felt like a reminder that those old-school stories and characters still had some value. By the 2000s, though, many stories seemed purpose-built to drag the status quo backward to that era while pushing the tone further into darkness and death, resulting in very incongruous narratives that appealed to neither Silver/Bronze Age nor Dark Age fans. Additionally, the mythic tone of Kingdom Come proved much harder to sustain outside of an alternate-universe limited series, resulting in stories that read as more pretentious and insecure.
- Kingdom Come's story included the idea that the new heroes were, with few exceptions, shallow, violent, unsympathetic jerks who were an insult to prior generations and barely distinguishable from the villains they fought. However, it also avoided actually making those judgments about real, existing heroes in favor of an Original Generation (barring Magog being a Cable Expy), making it clear it was speaking of a broad-brush trend instead of attacking specific characters who had fanbases of their own. Later writers, though, would take that message to heart, murdering 1990s characters en masse or casting them as pretenders to the throne, regardless of how well those labels actually fit them.
- Emperor Joker and Joker's Last Laugh were the first stories where Joker has "gone all out" and caused Crisis Crossover levels of mayhem, single-handedly putting everybody in the superhero community against the wall. They, however, at least have the benefits that the Joker scammed Mr. Mxyzptlk, and thus had a lot of power in the former, and the fact that Joker (and everybody else, probably the audience included) believes he is doing The Last Dance in the latter. By the time the New 52 Batman arcs Death of the Family and Batman: Endgame came along, however, audiences were starting to grind their teeth because "Joker decides to up his game, makes everybody in the DC Universe tremble, even the Physical God-types" was not only pile-driven into the ground, but the newest arcs had him as a full-blown Invincible Villain that even (sort-of) won in the end (and one of the biggest complaints about Endgame was that it was a near-perfect rehash of Death of the Family's story beats). Heck, technically this was even the inspiration to create the backstory of Injustice: Gods Among Us, a story where his attack on everything Superman cared about caused the hero (and many later ones) to pull a Face–Heel Turn and become the totalitarian dictator of Earth (as well as being a homage to Joker's role in the backstory of Kingdom Come, another story involving the death of Lois Lane and the destruction of the Daily Planet, the difference being, in addition to Superman not going over the edge in Kingdom Come, that the scale and aftereffects were far larger, Metropolis was destroyed in Injustice). With his post-Rebirth appearances being only major crossover arcs like "The War of Jokes and Riddles", "Joker War",note "The Three Jokers" and even being around in spirit (if not in body), alternate universe-wise, as The Batman Who Laughs, it's now obvious that the writers can only think of using the Joker for arcs that are marketed as "The Joker comes to wreck everything and nothing will ever be the same, pinky swear with a cherry on top!"
- Grant Morrison's Animal Man is still widely regarded as a classic, but it also has most of the controversial hallmarks of Morrison's Signature Style that would ultimately make them the polarizing writer that they are today. Even in the 1980s, they had a tendency to insert themself and their personal beliefs into their comics, they sometimes used their stories as a platform for editorializing about the state of the comics business, and their over-the-top reverence for the whimsical Silver Age was quite evident. In some ways, those things were even more overt in Animal Man, which outright ends with Morrison appearing in the story as a character, and even getting the last word of the series. It was just easier to tolerate in a series that was anchored by a relatable and very human story about an affable family man trying to make it as a superhero; even Morrison's cameo was accompanied by a truly heartfelt monologue about the power of stories. It also helped that the comic's more trippy moments were ultimately explained by The Reveal that the protagonist was a fictional character being manipulated by his author, so the story remained perfectly coherent and comprehensible in spite of its experimental nature note . The same can't necessarily be said of Morrison's later works (e.g. The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, New X-Men, Final Crisis, etc.), which, though still acclaimed, are considerably more divisive.
- The single most-criticized aspect of the Tom Taylor run of Earth 2 was the introduction en masse of Superman and Batman characters in a setting that was founded on being mostly free of them. Despite this, most of them had actually been introduced in the earlier and much better-regarded Robinson run — it was only in Taylor's run that they started to actively push out the other characters.
- Many highly-criticized elements of Heroes in Crisis are also present in writer Tom King's other, critically-acclaimed works:
- The book's attempt to use mainstream superheroes as a metaphor for soldiers dealing with PTSD (Tom King being a former CIA operative himself) is similar to themes explored in King's run on Mister Miracle (2017) and Omega Men. However, while Mister Miracle and Omega Men were self-contained stories set during an actual war, which allowed King to convey his feelings more directly, Heroes in Crisis was a large-scale story involving a large contingent of the DCU that doesn't involve war in any way whatsoever and largely relegates the characters' trauma to background flavoring, which raises some serious Fridge Logic concerning the allegory's accuracy.
- Furthermore, King's interest in characters with PTSD or other mental traumas is a common thread throughout many of his works. However, Heroes in Crisis attempts to paint nearly all of DC's superheroes in this light. While some of them (e.g. Batman or Roy Harper) work in this light, many others do not (a particularly egregious example being Booster Gold, one of the main characters of the comic) and had to have trauma retconned into their lives by Tom King in order to suit his narrative. In addition, while his previous works explored PTSD in the case of soldiers at war, and had the characters' trauma and struggles be a key part of their development, Heroes in Crisis is a murder mystery where most of the characters' trauma is irrelevant.
- The story's dialogue has also been heavily criticized. King tends to use a somewhat strange and repetitive style of dialogue, sometimes described as lyrical or poetic, to convey simple ideas in an elegant manner. However, Heroes in Crisis has a much larger cast containing more well-known characters than many of King's other works (the main exception being his run on Batman (Tom King), which has also received criticism for its dialogue). This leads to many characters speaking in an identical manner, making the issues harder to ignore, which is not helped by characters like Harley Quinn having their normal voices overwritten for King's style. In addition, the heavily stylized dialogue is still used to explain complex situations, making it come off as even more stilted.
- The Flash:
- The focus on the newest Flash and the emphasis of Barry Allen's importance to the mythos. This has always been a thing, with the current Flash always being the fastest to sell their title of "the fastest man alive" and it always felt like the Flashes were getting faster and thus improving, from Jay to Barry to Wally to even Bart's short-lived tenure, where the current Flash is always said to be faster than the previous. There's also Barry's importance, which came about after his acclaimed death in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and made sense given that his successors were Wally West and Bart Allen, his former sidekick and grandson, respectively, who had this tie into their characters as hurdles they had to overcome — Wally needed to accept that he was faster than Barry and not replacing him and Bart with his heroic family legacy. However, once Barry returned in the mid-2000s, this all went bad. Barry was now not only the current Flash, ruining the forward momentum of the franchise, but everybody else was rebooted out of existence or turned into a completely different character when a Flash-centric storyline rebooted the DCU, leading to exclusive focus on Barry. His importance went from personal significance and a Heroic Sacrifice to literally being the reason any speedsters exist at all, as it was retconned that he creates the Speed Force, and his importance as a person is retconned so that Barry is the one who made his predecessor Jay come out of retirement and was always Wally's hero even before Wally knew he was the Flash, the result coming off more like Character Shilling than ever before.
- The Speed Force's importance and use as a storytelling engine. Initially, it was used to explain where speedsters got their powers from despite their varying origins, and was an other-dimensional energy that also ran across time, allowing time-travel, and a speedster running too fast has them enter the Speed Force and merge with it, with only a deep and true love being able to pull them out sometimes. It was important, but more of a plot device than anything, and even the name was an afterthought by creator Mark Waid's own admission, and existed mostly to add stakes, scale and to drive emotional moments between characters and their loved ones. However, later writers emphasized the Speed Force more and more and gave it new powers, muddling the clear use to the point where it has been given more and more stories about it and more and more powers, moving from something used to encourage character interaction to outright Deus ex Machina usage, such as Barry's sudden reappearance in Infinite Crisis and then hitting its peak with the introduction of many, many other Forces (Still, Strength, Sage, etc.) that take focus away from the Flashes themselves. Even the risk of falling into the Speed Force has lost all meaning because it's gone from a true, strong everlasting love to "somewhat strong friendship," such as how the Rebirth era had characters falling into the Speed Force more frequently than the entirety of the rest of the franchise combined, removing the threat and importance of leaving it entirely.note
- Upon his return, Barry Allen acquired a new, somewhat divisive Backstory in The Flash: Rebirth — his mother was murdered by Eobard Thawne, and his father framed for the crime. Many view it as unnecessarily Darker and Edgier, noting that Barry being inspired by Jay Garrick (at the time of his creation, a seemingly-fictional comic book character on Earth-1, and post-Crisis, an established hero) to become a hero out of altruism was already a reasonable origin, in tandem with his powers being the result of an accident that doused him with chemicals. Wally West underwent a similar treatment after becoming the Flash — his parents, once portrayed as overly strict but well-meaning, were retconned into being abusive. However, that was done as an attempt to reconcile the Values Dissonance of the Wests' Silver Age portrayals, and was used to flesh out his bond with Barry and Iris more, making his previous stories Heartwarming in Hindsight (and it helped that reliance on the retconned backstory was kept in check). Barry's new backstory, on the other hand, does not have any retroactive heartwarming elements to it, and grew to overshadow Barry's entire character — even his famous costume ring ties back to Nora's death.
- When fans complain about Silver Age nostalgia derailing a franchise, it is common for them to point to The Flash as the prime example of this. But the resurrection of Barry Allen didn't kickstart that trend: Hal Jordan had been resurrected before Barry, displacing his successor Kyle as the face of the franchise. But, overall, fans were less irritated by Hal's resurrection. Green Lantern: Rebirth certainly wasn't immune from criticism, especially from certain factions within Kyle's fanbase, but the circumstances of Hal's death had always been more controversial than Barry's, and many fans were eager to see them retconned away even if the actual method was a bit clumsy. What was more, DC editorial didn't have the same grudge against Kyle Rayner as they did against Wally West. Kyle was an active and integral figure in Green Lantern: Rebirth (which clearly explained the mechanisms behind Hal's resurrection: unlike Final Crisis, which never elaborated upon the logic behind Barry's return from the dead), and he continued to star in stories after Hal came back. This went a long way to quell hostilities between the rivaling fanbases, especially after Ron Marz was brought back to write a maxi-series establishing Kyle's status quo within the reformed Corps. It also helped that Hal wasn't shilled by the members of his franchise to the extent that Barry was. John, Guy, and Kyle treated Hal like a valued brother-in-arms — but they didn't fawn over him, and they certainly didn't credit him with all of their successes (unlike Jay and Wally with Barry). Instead of merely telling readers that Hal was important to the other characters, Geoff Johns wrote stories that actually showed Hal building strong bonds with his fellow Lanterns, which helped convince skeptical fans that the character had something to offer.
- Another example relating to Hal and Barry's respective resurrections was Barry's aforementioned tragic backstory introduced in Flash Rebirth, which was very similar to another revised origin in Johns' Green Lantern run. There, it was revealed that Hal had witnessed his test-pilot father die in an accident when he was young, and had then run away from home as a teenager when his mother forbade him from following in his father's footsteps, an act which strained Hal's relationship with his family through to his mother's death from cancer, while Hal's fearless attitude had ironically gotten him demoted to maintenance. The crucial difference is that this revised backstory came in the middle of the run, and had very little direct impact on the narrative, instead primarily serving as a way of framing Hal's character and the larger themes of the series, while Barry's new origin was revealed at the start of Johns second run and was the entire drive behind Flashpoint, making it far more central to the narrative. It was also not entirely retconned in, as Hal's deceased test-pilot father and his brothers had been established in prior runs. Most crucially, this revised backstory was part of an entire Whole Episode Flashback retelling Hal's early days as Green Lantern and gave him substantial development, while Barry's new backstory did little to counter the fact that he was otherwise effectively The Generic Guy.
- Tom King's Batman run was divisive, but it had an infamous moment where Ship Sinking is pulled on the iconic Batman/Catwoman romance, due to Batman's rogues gallery (specifically Bane, who was trying to break Batman again, this time mentally) convincing her friend Holly Robinson to tell Catwoman that marrying Batman would be bad because his happiness would dull his heroics. But despite the controversy it started, this wasn't the first time pairings featuring Bat-Family members were stopped before they could tie the knot. The first was when Nightwing and Starfire's wedding was crashed by a corrupted Raven, and even when the situation was resolved, Starfire felt it was too soon to get married and gradually would end the relationship with Nightwing. The second time would be when Nightwing and Barbara became engaged shortly before Infinite Crisis, which again came to an abrupt end as part of a Trauma Conga Line to make Dick a Darker and Edgier hero. The third was Batwoman and Maggie Sawyer also attempting to get married, only for Sawyer to turn her down. What made the case with Batman and Catwoman more notorious was that, in addition to it being related more to the flaws from Tom King's works above (such as it being an integral step in breaking Batman mentally, just as the other books focused on other mental traumas), the earlier three instances reeked highly of Executive Meddling note , whereas Tom King apparently didn't have any executives forcing him to write the results.note In addition, those weddings were usually confined to somewhat larger issues at best, while the Bat/Cat wedding was heavily promoted, even getting an entire miniseries devoted to the Batfamily's thoughts on it, to extensive variants and even making mainstream news. Meaning it was a lot worse when the wedding didn't happen, because it now felt like people were cheated out of money as well as time.
- Wonder Woman:
- In Kingdom Come, Diana being shown as a sword-wielding warrior willing to kill was rather clearly written as a component of the Bad Future: the Wonder Woman of this timeline had been banished from her homeland, seen most of her friends die, and lost hope in her own morals, with her dropping the lasso in favor of a sword was a symptom of that. It would be up there with doing a story where Batman routinely carries a gun. Unfortunately, between Kingdom Come's iconic status and Wonder Woman's comparative Mainstream Obscurity, it ended up becoming many readers' first impression of Wonder Woman, and many readers found the "warrior" imagery of a sword-wielding Wonder Woman credible — despite the entire purpose to Wonder Woman's character being that she's a warrior from a world where stabbing people with a sword is not the solution (there's a reason her actual signature weapon is a lasso). One of the first stories to use this as a major plot point was Infinite Crisis, where Wonder Woman is forced to kill the now-villainous Maxwell Lord because it was the only way to free Superman from his mind control ... and the hacked satellite Brother Eye showed the world this act, meaning she had to deal with the backlash for this action from everyone because of the most defining rule of heroes being broken. It was the first time she had killed a human, having killed other nonhuman monsters before previously, and the consequences she faced in the story motivated her to convince Batman to spare the story's Big Bad Alexander Luthor Jr. when the hero had considered killing him for putting his surrogate son Nightwing in a coma (in his intended death scene). Instead, many later writers had Wonder Woman go from being one of the most loving and forgiving heroes on the Justice League to one of the most willing to use lethal force, and eventually Flanderized into stabbing people whenever possible. The likely culmination point was her role in Injustice: Gods Among Us, where she came across as so nakedly cruel, corruptive, and psychotic that even Tom Taylor, who wrote the comic adaptation, called her "barely recognizable" and treated her as if she were a full-on Evil Counterpart rather than a simple Bad Future version.
- Kingdom Come wasn't the first time Wonder Woman had used lethal force. The George Perez reboot did away with Wonder Woman's rule against killing and had at least two instances where Diana killed a villain, with subsequent writers in mainstream continuity occasionally having Diana use lethal force as well. However, the moments where Diana used lethal force were actually few and far between, and it was made clear that she only killed as a last resort. Many remember Diana killing Max Lord, but ignore everything else Diana did before she resorted to that option, including trying to talk Max out of going through with his plans. Post-Crisis Diana was a hero who valued life but not to a point where she prioritized the well being of a remorseless, implacable foe over the innocent. Post-Flashpoint Diana (at least in her appearances outside her main book), tended to be depicted as a Blood Knight who looked for any excuse to stab someone.
- Wonder Woman (1987):
- The Bana-Mighdall have been criticized for being a more brutal and militaristic Foil to the Themysciran Amazons while being a tribe of
mostly black and brown women. While the Bana were certainly supposed to be seen as more vicious than the Themyscirans (who were also not without flaws themselves) when they debuted under Perez's pen, they were still depicted with a great deal of nuance, sympathy and complexity to them. Unfortunately, later writers ignored these complexities in favor of writing them as one-dimensional, evil misandrists. - Perez's run also removed the Amazons' advanced, futuristic technology and depicted them as having never evolved past the Hellenistic Era. Many fans cite this as the genesis of depicting the Themyscirans as one-dimensional savages with nothing to teach the rest of the world, a depiction that was most prominent in the New 52 and the first live-action Wonder Woman film. However, Perez also showed that besides being fighters and soldiers, the Amazons included artisans, poets, musicians, philosophers and doctors, making the Amazons a much more complex society. Later Post-Crisis runs would also restore the Amazons' advanced technology.
- Vanessa Kapatelis' Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome into the third Silver Swan in the Jiminez run was contentious even back then and it's adaptation in James Robinson's Wonder Woman (Rebirth) run and Wonder Woman: Bloodlines haven't done the concept any favors. However, the shock of seeing Vanessa as a villain worked when Jiminez did it because Vanessa had a long history spanning 60+ issues as a beloved supporting character. Rebirth has Vanessa's friendship with Diana and subsequent Face–Heel Turn occur in the space of one issue and Bloodlines completely inverts their relationship by making Vanessa hostile towards and jealous of Diana, removing the tragedy of the arc.
- The Bana-Mighdall have been criticized for being a more brutal and militaristic Foil to the Themysciran Amazons while being a tribe of
- In Kingdom Come, Diana being shown as a sword-wielding warrior willing to kill was rather clearly written as a component of the Bad Future: the Wonder Woman of this timeline had been banished from her homeland, seen most of her friends die, and lost hope in her own morals, with her dropping the lasso in favor of a sword was a symptom of that. It would be up there with doing a story where Batman routinely carries a gun. Unfortunately, between Kingdom Come's iconic status and Wonder Woman's comparative Mainstream Obscurity, it ended up becoming many readers' first impression of Wonder Woman, and many readers found the "warrior" imagery of a sword-wielding Wonder Woman credible — despite the entire purpose to Wonder Woman's character being that she's a warrior from a world where stabbing people with a sword is not the solution (there's a reason her actual signature weapon is a lasso). One of the first stories to use this as a major plot point was Infinite Crisis, where Wonder Woman is forced to kill the now-villainous Maxwell Lord because it was the only way to free Superman from his mind control ... and the hacked satellite Brother Eye showed the world this act, meaning she had to deal with the backlash for this action from everyone because of the most defining rule of heroes being broken. It was the first time she had killed a human, having killed other nonhuman monsters before previously, and the consequences she faced in the story motivated her to convince Batman to spare the story's Big Bad Alexander Luthor Jr. when the hero had considered killing him for putting his surrogate son Nightwing in a coma (in his intended death scene). Instead, many later writers had Wonder Woman go from being one of the most loving and forgiving heroes on the Justice League to one of the most willing to use lethal force, and eventually Flanderized into stabbing people whenever possible. The likely culmination point was her role in Injustice: Gods Among Us, where she came across as so nakedly cruel, corruptive, and psychotic that even Tom Taylor, who wrote the comic adaptation, called her "barely recognizable" and treated her as if she were a full-on Evil Counterpart rather than a simple Bad Future version.
- X-Men:
- A lot of the series' problems started with Chris Claremont doing too many things on the fly and not often planning ahead. But at least he didn't force those Running the Asylum now to take his older plots as canon gospel. That is their own fault. Claremont himself became notorious for his writing quirks: Talking Is a Free Action, dialogue switching back and forth between stiff exposition and attempted naturalism, fetishizing "empowered women", getting way too invested in elements only he cared about, and diving into soap opera to the point of plots and themes taking a backseat. In his early years, he got away with this partly because his style was new and innovative, and he had artists willing to tell him to tone it down. When he came back years later with the same old problems and Protection from Editors, people were much less forgiving, and thus X-Men Forever became his Creator Killer.
- "The Dark Phoenix Saga" is still regularly cited as one of the greatest comic book stories of all time, but it was also effectively "ground zero" for nearly everything that fans complain about in X-Men's later years. Most of its big moments still hold up today, but many of them started to lose their luster when later writers tried to replicate the magic of a classic story by copying its most superficial beats. The death of Jean Grey? An emotional gut-punch at the time, but not so impressive when later writers got into the habit of killing and resurrecting major characters so often that it became cliche. Turning the moral center of the X-Men into a genocidal supervillain? Shocking and unexpected then—but you can only turn a superhero into a supervillain (or vice versa) so many times before it becomes predictable and trite. Wolverine taking on the entire Hellfire Club singlehandedly? An awesome action sequence at the time, but not so awesome when later writers turned the character into an unkillable death-machine who regularly hogged the spotlight from other beloved characters. Putting the X-Men in the center of an epic Space Opera? A great climax at the time, but not so great when later stories tried to top it with increasingly bombastic set-pieces that prioritized cosmic spectacle over story and characterization.
- There is an old meme/saying amongst the Marvel fandom from the Usenet days: "Jean Grey is dead on the moon". Referring to a thesis that Jean Grey's original resurrection for X-Factor was the Original Sin for the entire Marvel Universe. While never without controversy and criticism, X-Factor was generally regarded as a pretty decent series for the most part… except in how it was the genesis for some of Marvel's worst stories and most devastating narrative problems, either directly through the knock-on effects it had or indirectly through the doors it opened for similar decisions. From undermining the meaning of death by retconning Jean's fate (revealing that rather than merging with the Phoenix Force, it left her in a psychic cocoon and stole her identity, in turn absolving Jean of the crimes it committed in her form), to derailing characters by having Cyclops abandon his wife and child to join X-Factor, to toxic nostalgia for an "evergreen" version of the characters that never existed with the desperate reinstatement of the Silver Age X-Men (despite them being vastly less popular than the Claremont-era team), to creating ridiculous continuity complications by making Madelyne Pryor an insane clone to justify getting rid of her and sending her son to the future to become Cable, to undoing progress/changes in the name of forcing an editorially-favored status quo by dragging Cyclops out of his retirement, it's really not that unreasonable to argue that nearly all of Marvel's bad spots in the 90s onwards can be traced back to this single resurrection opening floodgates that should have stayed closed.
- In recent years, people have criticized the X-Men franchise for its apparent inability to imagine a future for the characters that isn't a dystopia. This tendency started with the widely acclaimed Days of Future Past, with a story that was centered around time travelers from a Bad Future where Sentinels have taken over North America and killed or imprisoned most of its mutant population. However, because this was merely one possible future, rather than an overwhelming number of them, things didn't feel quite so bleak and hopeless.
- The 2019 death of Wolfsbane in an anti-mutant hate crime attracted controversy and criticism for the way it rather Anviliciously and unsubtly drew on the spate of high profile attacks on trans women that were in the news at the timenote . The X-Men have always been an imperfect metaphor for real world minority groups, and the co-opting of sensitive issues facing those groups in question could be seen all the way back in the beloved Claremont run. At the time, the reactions to questionable things like Kitty Pryde using the N-word in God Loves, Man Kills or Scott Lobdell and other writers crafting a blatant AIDS allegory in the Legacy Virus story-line in the 90s were far less negative, as it was still seen as daring for a superhero comic to broach those subjects at all. However, as time has gone on and explicit politics (as opposed to the allegorical kind) in cape comics have become far more normalized, the X-Men's habit of equating Fantastic Racism to real world oppression has increasingly been criticized as seeming trite and inappropriate.
- Nick Spencer's run on Captain America was criticized for its very unsubtle use of politics driving its plot. However, Captain America has always been political, from its inaugural issue featuring the lead punching Hitler to even more recent comics such as the acclaimed Ed Brubaker run. The difference is that the Golden Age was, well, never subtle about anything and standards for writing have changed, while Brubaker's run wasn't directly about politics. While politics were certainly involved — the Patriot Act and post-9/11 America are a theme throughout as Bucky Barnes struggles with the modern day, and the housing crisis was something the Red Skull fanned the flames of — the difference was that the threats were almost always framed as some nebulous conspiracy group that showed only the barest resemblance to real-life. Spencer's Captain America, however, tried to tackle real world politics head on, including systemic everyday racism and fascism, at a time where America itself was extremely divided on such issues. However, it also failed to handle these issues very well and further shot itself in the foot by having Steve himself become the face of what it condemned while Sam Wilson spent a lot of time making empty speeches. As a result, the reaction was mostly negative, but the negativity was split into two camps: one which rejected and hated the political message wholesale, and another which technically agreed with the message in spirit but felt that it was handled so poorly that nothing positive could be salvaged from it.
- Generation X was Dawson's Creek with a cast of mutants. As such, its main failing from the beginning was a general lack of plot direction. The characters did whatever, and in the first two-thirds this was fine because their characters played off each other and the comic climate accommodated its leisurely pace. It helped that, being like a Teen Drama, it dealt with common teen problems. As the series wore on and the '90s gave way to the early '00s, however, the general quality dissolved little by little. The character interactions became strained, and the teenage fans had begun moving on to more meaty stories. This (coupled with lots of changes in creative teams) eroded all the draws that kept readers on the book, and the old aimlessness came out.
- Matt Fraction's run on Hawkeye often featured Clint Barton being comically bruised up and overwhelmed by mooks not obeying Mook Chivalry, playing the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome of being a Badass Normal for humor, with Kate Bishop having to save his life. However, while this was well-received in Hawkeye's book, it was far more divisive in his appearances in other titles, and even more so in Jeff Lemire's following run. Part of this is because Fraction's run was a Deconstructive Parody, and trying to play it seriously just made Clint look inept - and even in his own book, Fraction made sure to show Clint as generally competent, with him saving Kate's life multiple times. Lemire made things even worse by stripping away even more of Clint's competence, while at the same time playing up Kate as a nearly unstoppable One-Woman Army - ignoring that Fraction had shown Kate, as a fellow Badass Normal, suffering from the same problems as Clint (the fact that Kate Took a Level in Jerkass under Lemire's pen did not help). In addition to cementing Clint as a Memetic Loser, Lemire ended up fueling a backlash against Kate, with the one-time Breakout Character of the Young Avengers being lumped in with the divisive Affirmative-Action Legacy characters of The New '10s (more on them below).
- Spider-Man:
- The Night Gwen Stacy Died, the famous Gwen Stacy death plot-line. Behind the scenes, it happened as a way for writer Gerry Conway to resolve the Gwen Stacy romance since she had become too close to Peter and realistically they would eventually marry and settle down which aged up the character considerably. Thing is, Gerry Conway was a decent writer and the storyline worked out pretty well, becoming a stunning Wham Episode that changed the course of the series. When a later editor developed the same fear of aging Peter too much, we got universally reviled storylines and retcons like Sins Past and One More Day.
- The Death of Jean DeWolff as well. While Gwen Stacy's death is the Trope Maker of the Stuffed into the Fridge trope, this was the Trope Codifier. The writer, Peter David, specifically said that this death was included to be shocking, as well as to subvert the Dying Moment of Awesome trope that had become standardized for Character's Deaths. David wanted Jean's death to be undignified, unheroic, and completely out of nowhere. This paved the way for both Marvel and DC to start handing out shock deaths like candy, a trend that continues to this day.
- Several aspects of the comic that have been mocked through the decades, actually started in the iconic Lee/Ditko run that made the character so popular in the first place: Issue #11 had one of Peter's friends turn out to be evil (or, in that case, blackmailed) and suffer Redemption Equals Death — Betty Brant's brother, Bennet. Issue #18 had Spidey's first crisis of faith that lead him to think about abandoning the cowl, and the very well-received "If This Be My Destiny" storyline (issue #31) first made use of the Right Makes Might trope that's so common now. The difference then was the novelty of those storylines: It was surprising that a Love Interest had a secret deal with a villain, and that Spidey could get out of a trap through sheer willpower because he had to save Aunt May's life. Nowadays, readers half-expect that whenever someone joins Spider-Man's supporting character circle, they either have some dark secret, or are headed to the fridge, as the above characters. It is also accepted that Spider-Man can beat an entire army, if he's got righteousness on his side, when early comics made it clear he could exhaust himself if enough enemies were thrown at him (something the Sinister Six did exploit).
- Peter's excessive worry about his Aunt May, to the detriment of other people in his life, had been something of a Yo Yo Plot Point through the decades preceding the controversial One More Day storyline - for instance, his refusal to reveal his identity to the Sinister Six out of fear the shock would kill her, despite the fact that Betty Brant's life was also on the line, or his focus on saving her and a lodger from an attack by the Sin-Eater, which led to an innocent bystander being shot in their stead. It got as bad as feeling like a form of Aesop Amnesia since despite being taught that with great power Comes Great Responsibility, he instead only feels responsible for protecting her, a family member, despite her advancing age meaning she was expected to die soon. But as excessive as it could come across to readers, it could still be argued that it would only make sense for Peter to place somewhat higher priority on protecting her compared to others due to her being essentially the last known biological family member he had left, and some of the aforementioned moments happened in a context where his choosing to prioritize her safety over that of others could easily be interpreted as an act of instinct in a time of crisis. The One More Day story, however, was the last straw because not only was his decision to abandon Mary Jane to save May's life not a matter of instinct during an emergency, but he had confirmation from other characters such as Doctor Strange that her time really had come. To make matters worse, giving up his wife to save a parental figure made the character (and the story's creator) look like a case of arrested development - after all, a wife's also part of the family.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- Long before the Ultimate line definitively Jumped the Shark with the thinly plotted and excessively dark Ultimatum event, many fans felt that the seeds of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring were already evident in Mark Millar's The Ultimates—a Darker and Edgier modern retelling of The Avengers that portrayed many of the characters as borderline-sociopathic Designated Heroes who seemed to openly hate each other at times. In that series, the Hulk became a mass-murdering cannibal, Hank Pym became a domestic abuser, Black Widow became a turncoat who betrayed her teammates and committed high treason, and Captain America had his political views played up (making a remark about the French in reference to their modern stereotype despite that attitude not being present in World War II), while the first two installments featured the team turning on Thor and the Hulk and beating them to a pulp with surprisingly little hesitation. However, all of this was overshadowed by the well written, fresh and at times shockingly realistic examination of the Superhero mythos the storylines provided. Thus initially, these changes were seen as part of the parcel ensuring that the Ultimate versions were more than just shallow clones, capable of being taken in new and interesting directions that their mainstream counterparts never could, establishing the Ultimate universe as standing out on its own merits and being willing to go to darker places than the original. But as the series went on repeatedly portraying beloved heroes as less and less sympathetic, audiences interest began to waver, and the Ultimate Universe acquired a reputation as a place where everyone except Spider-Man was a jerk. A change of hands from Mark Millar to Jeph Loeb (who wrote the third volume of The Ultimates, as well as Ultimatum itself) in the midst of his Creator Breakdown also exacerbated these issues, so by the time the mass deaths began, there simply wasn't anything left to keep their interest.
And even that can be traced back to Millar's much less divisive run on Ultimate X Men, which also portrayed many of the X-Men as decidedly less sympathetic than their original incarnations; Colossus went from a mild-mannered Farm Boy to an arms dealer for the Russian Mob, Storm went from a respected tribal priestess to a delinquent street thief, Wolverine went from a gruff Jerk with a Heart of Gold Shell-Shocked Veteran to a professional assassin who joined the team to kill Professor Xavier, and Magneto notably lost his sympathetic backstory as a Holocaust survivor and became the Big Bad of Ultimatum above, causing most of that story's mass deaths. The difference was that Ultimate X-Men at least remembered to give the characters a decent number of Pet the Dog moments to make them easier to root for, and they had enough triumphs that the story never felt excessively grim.
One could even trace this Darker and Edgier, more combative mindset back to the Silver Age of Marvel itself, which sold itself on more "realistic" characters that could argue, fight, and have problems. The difference was that it was doing this by the standards of other Silver Age books, and "edgier than the Silver Age" still evened out to something your parents couldn't complain about you reading. Doing it in the modern day was another story. - One of the largest overall changes the Ultimate Universe made was tying many previously completely separate characters and groups (e.g. Spider-Man, Ultimates, Hulk, Black Panther and the X-Men and entire mutant race, as well as numerous villains etc.) to a single Meta Origin, namely attempts to recreate Captain America’s Super Serum. At the start, this fit well with the more grounded and higher realism approach to the world and super heroes (such as providing Doing In the Wizard explanations to traditionally mystical or fantastic heroes) that Ultimate aimed for and served as an interesting thorough deconstruction of No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup. However, as the years went on and the Ultimate Universe grew, it began to accept and embrace the more fantastic and science fiction ideas which it initially shunned (Thor really turning out to be a Norse god rather than a mad man with an experimental weapon, the existence of aliens and magic etc.) This caused the origin to lose its unifying status and instead appear more basic and repetitive, with some fans arguing it was confining towards the story-lines and characters. Over time, the sentiment grew that simplifying and sharing the origins of so many characters made the Ultimate Universe feel smaller.
- Long before the Ultimate line definitively Jumped the Shark with the thinly plotted and excessively dark Ultimatum event, many fans felt that the seeds of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring were already evident in Mark Millar's The Ultimates—a Darker and Edgier modern retelling of The Avengers that portrayed many of the characters as borderline-sociopathic Designated Heroes who seemed to openly hate each other at times. In that series, the Hulk became a mass-murdering cannibal, Hank Pym became a domestic abuser, Black Widow became a turncoat who betrayed her teammates and committed high treason, and Captain America had his political views played up (making a remark about the French in reference to their modern stereotype despite that attitude not being present in World War II), while the first two installments featured the team turning on Thor and the Hulk and beating them to a pulp with surprisingly little hesitation. However, all of this was overshadowed by the well written, fresh and at times shockingly realistic examination of the Superhero mythos the storylines provided. Thus initially, these changes were seen as part of the parcel ensuring that the Ultimate versions were more than just shallow clones, capable of being taken in new and interesting directions that their mainstream counterparts never could, establishing the Ultimate universe as standing out on its own merits and being willing to go to darker places than the original. But as the series went on repeatedly portraying beloved heroes as less and less sympathetic, audiences interest began to waver, and the Ultimate Universe acquired a reputation as a place where everyone except Spider-Man was a jerk. A change of hands from Mark Millar to Jeph Loeb (who wrote the third volume of The Ultimates, as well as Ultimatum itself) in the midst of his Creator Breakdown also exacerbated these issues, so by the time the mass deaths began, there simply wasn't anything left to keep their interest.
- Marvel 1602:
- The three sequels/spinoffs — 1602: New World, 1602: Fantastick Four, and 1602: Spider-Man — are generally not fondly remembered by most Marvel Comics fans, largely because they focus so heavily on distinctly Silver Age characters who really don't fit the Elizabethan setting (like Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, and Sub-Mariner), and because many of their Alternate Universe versions of characters come across as lazy and unimaginative (like turning most of Spider-Man's Rogues Gallery into pirates). The first part, at least, was also somewhat true in Neil Gaiman's original: that book also featured Peter Parquah as a main character and David Banner as a supporting character, but it didn't give either of them superpowers until the very last pages; for the rest of the book, Peter was just a pageboy for a royal knight, and Banner was just a close advisor to King James. When the followups actually tried to build stories around Peter and Banner as a masked adventurer and a mutated monster, they stuck out even more. And when they also tried to make the King of Atlantis and a nobleman in robotic armor fit in the 17th century, it just made the problem even worse.
- Another major problem was the writers' inability to commit to the time period, leading to the books largely becoming Alternate History stories that only barely resembled the real Elizabethan era. The original was widely acclaimed for fitting in authentic details from a very specific timeframe in the early 17th century—witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, the settlement of Roanoke, the death of Elizabeth I, and the careers of Doctor John Dee and Sir Francis Walsingham—that actually made it all seem somewhat plausible. Then the sequels also threw in the colonies becoming independent and Lord Iron discovering electricity... in 1602. To an extent, this also started with the original: the story also featured Queen Elizabeth being assassinated by Count Otto Von Doom in 1602 instead of dying from natural causes a year later, and a line at the end hints that the Roanoke colonists might declare their independence at some point in the future—suggesting that the early introduction of superheroes already changed the course of history. But these were both trivial compared to the wealth of authentic details about the real Elizabethan period, so neither seemed too distracting.
- Legacy Characters:
- One of the biggest complaints about modern day Marvel Comics was the replacement of older beloved heroes with younger counterparts that lacked the edges their predecessors had, most notably Amadeus Cho taking up the Hulk mantle and Ironheart becoming a successor to Iron Man. This wasn't something new, with the recently beloved Miles Morales taking up Peter Parker's role after his death with more powers than the original, and even earlier in Spider-Girl, who both took up Peter's role and in a much more idealistic story to boot. Within these series however, the characters were still built on the themes of their predecessors (Miles didn't want to have anything to do with his powers and blamed himself for not possibly being there when Peter died, May decided to act against a crime and realized the importance of taking responsibility), with their predecessors going out in ways that honored them (Peter saved everyone from Green Goblin before dying for Miles, while May succeeded him after he had lived a long life of superheroics), thus the progression to them felt organic. These cases also mainly took place in alternate realities, with Miles only making the jump to mainstream canon a few years after his conception. For many cases in modern Marvel, the originals tended to go out in ways that were contrived or insulting (Hulk was killed by an accidental shot by Hawkeyenote , while Tony was put into a coma during the second superhero Civil War) while lacking the flaws that made up the characters' core themes (Cho was in full control of the Hulk form, with no anger required to enter it; Riri doesn't have Tony's self-destructive tendencies), making it feel like they had been abandoned just to move onto someone else that just wouldn't have worked in their shoes.
- Related to this, while many legacy heroes are quite popular, the practice of killing off or otherwise sidelining their predecessors still tends to get flack from readers who feel the practice is predictable and overdone. To give you an idea, Captain America and Iron Man have both been replaced at least three times eachnote , while Thor's had two replacementsnote . This can also make it hard to get invested in the newbies, since Genre Savvy readers who are aware of past replacements often know the original characters will inevitably return soon enough. One of the first extremely notable storylines to make use of this premise was in Mark Gruenwald's iconic Captain America run, which saw a lengthy storyline where Steve Rogers was replaced by John Walker, which even Gruenwald himself admitted was a stunt meant to draw attention to a book that had developed a reputation for being fairly static. Prior to this was an iconic and lengthy storyline where James Rhodes became the new Iron Man after Tony Stark's alcoholism left him unable to don the armor, which was similarly meant to shake things up and draw attention to the book. The thing is, because those two stories were well done and legacy characters were still relatively uncommon at the time, they came off as genuinely fresh and shocking (and even then, both moves were still controversial and had their fair share of detractors). Moreover, they were done in completely different manners than most modern Legacy replacements; Walker was clearly intended as a temporary change from the start, whereas Rhodes kept the title for quite a long time (more than a few classic must-read Iron Man storylines have him in the armor) instead of being very quickly written out once his purpose was served, and both stuck around afterwards as a major supporting characters instead of just disappearing into Comic-Book Limbo like many Legacy heroes seem to nowadays. Walker in particular, reads like an Unbuilt Trope of Legacy characters, as the entire point of his storyline was that he was an Inadequate Inheritor and antagonist that the real Cap had to take down. By the time of Marvel NOW!, however, which saw many popular heroes replaced en masse, the trope had already been repeated numerous times to increasingly diminishing returns in the minds of many readers.
- Miles Morales himself has faced increasing criticism in recent years that the character has no personality or purpose beyond shallow racial representation as "Spider-Man as a black guy". Obviously, Miles' ethnicity was a key part of the character from the very beginning with his introduction in the pages of Ultimate Marvel. But there, Miles had infinitely more to his personality than "is black", having a complex and moving character arc about Survivor's Guilt (he blamed himself for the original Spider-Man's death) and trying to live up to his predecessor's legacy, and he was portrayed with just as many personality quirks and flaws as Peter Parker himself. More to the point, Miles had a reason to exist, as the original Ultimate Spider-Man was dead and Miles was filling shoes nobody else could. That whole purpose and his larger Character Development was lost by shifting the character over to the mainstream Marvel Universe and pairing him up as more or less the original Spider-Man's sidekick. Now, torn from his original context and world, Miles as a character has become aimless and without head-or-tail, with nothing in particular going for him to set him apart from the crowd of Marvel superheroes. And so, writers have zeroed in on the one thing that was still unique about him — "Spider-Man as a black guy" — even though this shallow descriptor is not enough for him to be a truly meaningful and fleshed out character. It also didn't help that popular Spider-Man adaptations like the Marvel's Spider-Man video games and Spider-Man: Spider-Verse animated movies gave Miles a more distinct personality that more clearly contrasts with Peter's, which only makes the original Miles in the comics seem generic in comparison.
Others
- Frank Miller:
- Many new readers who take a look at the "heyday" of his work (Wolverine (1982), Born Again, Batman: Year One, and of course, The Dark Knight Returns) have stated that most of the problems associated with his newer works — bigoted themes, overly sexualized female characters, militaristic fascism, sociopathic heroes, and derailing characters whom he doesn't like (such as Superman) — were present in the very beginning. Before Middle Eastern stereotypes, he used Japanese ones, reflecting the cultural fears of the time. His female characters invoked the Madonna-Whore Complex right from the start (Catwoman became a prostitute in Year One, Karen Page became a porn actress), and most of his stories involved heroes abandoning their lighter interpretations for ultraviolent grimdark. The difference (aside from the novelty of this kind of stuff at the time) was that his earlier works usually professed that there was a better way to all this, and acknowledged that his protagonists were part of the problem. In later works, his characters are jerkasses and tautological templars who are still professed to be better than everyone else and a necessary evil.
- Miller's infamously So Bad, It's Good All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder actually has many of the same problems that plagued his classic The Dark Knight Returns (to which it's a Stealth Prequel), just taken to comical extremes. In particular, Returns ran on a hefty dose of Alternative Character Interpretation that's still rather divisive among comic book fans: Batman's loner tendencies are taken to the point of emotional sterility, and his physical strength and discipline comes with a frightening stomach for violence, while Superman's famous idealism and patriotism make him an easy pawn for politicians, Jason Todd is said to have died in the line of dutynote , and the new Robin is called a "good soldier" at one point. Even if you didn't agree with the reinterpretations, the characters were ambiguous enough that you could still find them sympathetic in spite of their flaws. But in All-Star, they're all but impossible to take seriously. Batman is a foul-mouthed psychopath who starves and abuses Dick Grayson and drafts him into crime-fighting against his will, yet he is still supposedly the most sympathetic character of them all — but when you compare him to the moronic simpleton Superman, the angry misandrist Wonder Woman, and the naïve hick Green Lantern, you can see why somebody might draw that conclusion.
- Uderzo's run as writer of the Asterix comics started out very similarly to Goscinny's run, but with a few immediate shifts in character — first, that Uderzo had a more satirical and parodic sense of humour than Goscinny, who was more into absurdity and anarchy; second, that Uderzo liked writing more complicated, cinematic adventure plot-lines, where Goscinny tended to prefer plots that were in the background to the characters's antics; and third, that he pushed fantasy elements further into the foreground, where the setting up until that point had been a Purely Aesthetic Era version of Ancient Rome with one really important fantasy element. This is not considered to detract from the quality of most of the early Uderzo-only books, like The Great Divide, Asterix and Son, and The Black Gold (with a very un-Goscinny James Bond parody subplot), although they are definitely different in tone, but books like The Magic Carpet (where the Dreadful Musician suddenly develops a magic power necessary for the plot to work) and Obelix All At Sea (Obelix gets turned to stone, reverts to childhood, and they all go to Atlantis) are often criticised for being straight fantasy adventures with not much in the way of humour. Then there was Asterix and the Secret Weapon, a book about a Straw Feminist taking over the village and defeating a Roman legion of female soldiers by distracting them with clothes and shoes. Put Genre Shift, Strawman Political, and Cerebus Syndrome all together and you get the series' shark-jumping moment, Asterix and The Falling Sky, a weird, puerile, xenophobic, and poorly-drawn science fiction story involving the village being invaded by aliens representing the Americans and the Japanese, which was intended as an Author Tract about the influence of manga and American comics on Franco-Belgian Comics but too poorly-written to even work on that level (mainly because Uderzo briefly skimmed through one manga before writing it). Fans widely derided it as the worst thing in the world, and Uderzo retired before writing another book celebrating Asterix's 50th anniversary. Both this book and the one made by another duo Uderzo allowed to take over the series found a better reception.
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
- Alan Moore always tried to sell the series on the strength of its central Massively Multiplayer Crossover, with an intricate universe that showed dozens of classic works of literature weaved together into a cohesive whole. In that regard, one element that got some buzz was his use of Broad Strokes to develop once-bland cyphers into interesting characters in their own right. In the first volume, these two elements perfectly complimented and spiced up a genuinely interesting adventure story. However, by the time of Black Dossier and especially Century, they had become a major weakness. For the former, many scenes ended up being devoted to showing off Moore's education instead of advancing the plot, leaving a whole lot of interesting names scattered through a slow and boring narrative. As the series advanced into modern times, Moore also ran out of Public Domain Characters, forcing him to do a whole lot of obvious Writing Around Trademarks. For the latter, Moore attempted to apply his broad-strokes reinvention technique to characters who were far more well-known and fleshed-out to readers than the likes of Allan Quatermain (most infamously James Bond and Harry Potter), leaving the impression that Moore either hadn't done any research or was trying to fulfill some kind of vendetta. Other times, he botched the reinvention; one of his most ambitious creations, Orlando, earned a reputation as a Creator's Pet, and the general opinion of the Golliwog is that he was best left forgotten.
- Moore has used the series as a means of performing mean-spirited hatchet jobs on characters he doesn't like since the beginning. The very first volume featured Griffin raping both Becky Randall and Pollyanna Whittier. But, unlike his treatment of Harry Potter and James Bond, the characters in question were old-tyme enough that they didn't have strong fanbases to be offended at their treatment. And, also unlike them, the hatchet-job was a side-note within the plot rather than a central part of the narrative.
- A major critique of League is its use of sexual assault, which many readers found to be over-the-line. However, sexual assault has been a consistent element of Alan Moore stories since the early days of his career—it's not for no reason that Grant Morrison grumbled that it was hard to find a Moore story that didn't feature it at some point. The difference is that prior Moore efforts used it pretty judiciously: for instance, Watchmen features only one explicit rape, and said rape is given a lot of time in the narrative to dwell on its consequences and how it affected the characters involved, making it clear that Moore thought pretty hard about it. Conversely, League features an attempted rape only five pages into the main story, and doesn't really slow down from there, with two of the original League being rapists and the sole woman being a survivor of a deliberately-eroticized assault. What was more, the sheer frequency of these events meant that a lot of them simply weren't given time to bake, reducing them to Karmic Rape, Black Comedy Rape, and just general cliche—it stopped feeling like Moore was thinking about rape and its effects, and more like he was just throwing it in whenever he needed to establish a male character as evil or a female character as troubled. The fact that Moore was using existing characters whose works generally didn't feature that kind of content didn't help: for instance, Pirate Jenny is already a Revenge Ballad that gives a clear reason for why the titular character betrays her hometown and becomes a pirate, but Moore threw in the idea of her being raped by the townsfolk anyway. In short, while you couldn't remove the rape from Watchmen without seriously altering the story and characters, you could easily do it for most of the rapes in League.
- As argued in this article
by Kevin Wong of Kotaku, the Wolverine Publicity given to Snoopy starting in the '60s foreshadowed how Peanuts transformed from a grounded and fairly dark Slice of Life comic strip into the shallow and saccharine pap that marked its Audience-Alienating Era from the late '70s onward. Originally, Snoopy was written as a normal dog, but as he started to gain an actual personality (for lack of a better term), he and his fantastic adventures became a nice contrast to the rest of the strip. In time, however, the increasing humanization of Snoopy grew out of control, the strip focusing more on putting Snoopy in goofy costumes and crazy situations as opposed to the social commentary on growing up that was the strip's hallmark in its early days. Other characters were pushed Out of Focus, while depth fell by the wayside in favor of gags and cuteness. Eventually, it culminated in the addition of other animal characters, such as Woodstock (who existed pretty much just to be cute) and Snoopy's family, meaning that Snoopy didn't have to interact much with the human characters at all anymore.
