As a kid, I was an avid comic book collector (mostly Spider-Man), but over the last couple of years, I've become disillusioned with the industry (at least the big names such as Marvel and DC). There are several reasons:
1. Comic book titles now tend to read like long-running soap operas. Every story leans heavily on the last three to five years of the character's history, so any newcomers to the title will feel lost. Sometimes a storyline runs for a year or more, and they're often just continuations of stories that have come before it. I tend to feel like I'm reading stories that are neverending, and that's just not very satisfying.
2. Comic book publishers are continuously trying to shake up their fictional universes. Take Marvel, for instance. Over the last ten years, we've had Avengers Disassembled, House of M, Civil War and Dark Reign, not to mention smaller changes such as Spider-Man: Other, Brand New Day and the assassination of Captain America. Not only do these changes get tiresome, but the publisher crosses the central plot over with a lot of their popular titles, making you feel that you have to collect a lot of different titles just to get the full story.
3. Whenever publishers do shake up their universes, it's either never permanent or an atrocity to the character. Who couldn't guess that Captain America or Batman wouldn't stay dead? On the flip side, I don't need to go into detail about what Brand New Day did to Spider-Man. It's not really worth the emotional investment in an event this big if everything just gets reset in the long run.
4. On top of all this, the price of the comic book has far exceeded the rate of inflation. When I started collecting, they were $1.25 apiece (and even that's high considering they started at 5 - 10 cents once upon a time). Now they're $3-$4 at best.
I'm a strong advocate for seeing comics return to their roots. I think the price of the book could drop without much loss in quality, and the stories could be more self-contained without the risk of losing any readership. This is why I'm a big fan of Marvel's Ultimate line: it's only a handful of titles that, so far, has only had one major shake-up in the last ten years (Ultimatum). Most of the characters that die stay dead. You can absorb most stories in one sitting (an Ultimate Spider-Man story never takes more than 6 - 7 issues), and most stories can be understood fairly well without having read previous issues (what little you do need to know is usually filled in by the "Previously" section on the first page). Why can't the entire industry be like this?
Ideally, I'd love to see Marvel and DC wrap up and shut down every one of their major titles. Let all of the heroes ride off into the sunset, and start each title over at issue #1 with an updated account of their origins. Repeat this process every 10 - 15 years, and let each of these "blocks" be its own fictional universe unrelated to the ones that came before or after it. Have no more than one or two universe-wide shake-ups during each block, and otherwise tell self-contained stories that never span more than 12 issues. Not only would you make these heroes feel more accessible to newcomers, you'd give people the ability to absorb the entire mythology of a character in a matter of days or weeks.
I would love, for instance, to trace every adventure Spider-Man has had since 1962, but that would take years. Fans of Superman or Batman have it even worse. It's very overwhelming. On the other hand, if Spider-Man had started over with a new "block" back in the 90s, I could read that entire block and get a complete picture of Spider-Man's history without feeling like I'm missing anything.
(Publishers would also avoid the inevitable canonical violations that occur when a title is "updated" to reflect modern technology or interests or when a new writer comes in, drops still-unresolved story threads and tries to take the character in a new direction.)
I was hoping that people more in the know than me could offer some insights into publishers like Marvel and DC these days. I don't understand why the price is so high now, why there are so many shake-ups and why the titles tell on-going stories that last years. It seems to me to be a very poor business model and a disrespectful treatment of the mythology.
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