DC Smacks Fan On Head
In a thread titled "
Upset
with DC's Focus Line" over on Broken Frontier's DC board, poster
Kristopher states his displeasure with DC's new line of books:
I almost feel sorry to say this, as I'm sure there
are people that enjoy these books, but I'm put off by all these Focus
books that DC is putting out.
I feel they have some great characters that aren't even being used
that, with the right effort behind them, could make some great books
and/or series.
When I go through the solicitations and start to see all these Focus
books, it feels like DC is smacking me on the back of the head.
Not sure why I feel that way. I just do. Am I alone?
DC is smacking him on the head by publishing the Focus books?
What does that even mean? Kristopher attempts to explicate his
feelings further in a later post:
I guess I'd just rather see DC dig into their huge
pile of DCU characters and produce some titles that way, rather than
put out all these books.
Oh, I get it: DC is neglecting long-time readers by putting out
comics focused on new characters instead of
endlessly
recycling
pre-existing
characters.
Several other posters respond to this Demand For (Devotion To?) The
Old, including Broken Frontier's Review Editor,
Mike
Bullock:
I think both Marvel and DC need to put more effort
into creating new characters. Who knows, trhey may actually get another
hit that rivals Superman or Spider-Man. I don't know if it'll happen,
but we'll never know if all they do is dust off the same old characters
again and again...
If all anyone ever did was rely on old characters (like they seem to do
nowadays), we'd never have seen Wolverine, Punisher, Firestorm or
several other fan favorites.
Makes me want to travel back in time and see how fans reacted when
those characters were first introduced. ("Who is this lame new
character 'The Punisher'? What kind of threat is a guy WITH A GUN
to Spider-Man?? Instead of creating boring bad guys like this,
Marvel needs to bring back classic villains like Doctor Octopus, who we
haven't seen fight Spidey for over a year!") The obvious
disanalogy for two of those examples is that they were introduced as
throwaway characters in ongoing series and were only given their own
books later on as their popularity grew, but
Firestorm
debuted in his own book back in 1978 and now he's a "fan-favorite"
character whose comic is perennially
relaunched
and
cancelled.
