SomeBritishDude post=18.74083.825214 said:
Western Comics are so, so much better. I don't know why Anima sells better. Just proves how many morons there are. This is something I feel really strongly about, and it really makes me feel sad when a kid rather read Naruto than Spider-Man
Depends what you mean by "Western Comics". Some western comics are significantly better than any anime I've seen, but they're few and far between (Sandman, Pride of Baghdad, Transmetropolitan, Watchmen), and if you'd used one of those as an example, or even comics which are possibly less completely awesome but still fantastic and just as good as the best of anime or manga like Preacher, The Invisibles, Top Ten, LXG, or Runaways (whilst Brian Vaughan was writing it), you'd have had a point. But you didn't. You used Spider-Man.
Spider-Man is quite possibly the single greatest example of what is
wrong with western comics in existence*, coming to a head with One More Day, which is so
utterly bad that
I feel personally offended by the wholesale rape of the character and last twenty years of storyline of Spider-Man
and I have never even read a Spider-Man comic. Seriously, it would
mystify me as to why Joe Quesada wasn't hung from a lamppost after it, except that I know that franchise comic** fans in general and Spider-Man fans in particular have had their brains replaced with woodchips, any fanbase which would accept Secret Wars, Gwen Stacys secret pregnancy, and the everlasting undeath of Aunt May, who apparently her only living relative (who has superpowered senses not given to ordinary men)
can not tell was replaced by an actress for around a year, is clearly operating at the intellectual level of the
walking dead.
Spider-Man embodies everything that is bad about the two big comic universes. The character has to be kept in perfect stasis to reflect the common public image of him (for Spidey, this means he has been a nerdy loser for the last
forty-six years), and when the editorial staff actually realised that this was not the case, they retconned it back into place in the most ham-fisted way imaginable (Spidey makes a literal deal with the devil to erase his marriage from history, making it never have happened, to save the life of his octagenarian aunt), even overshadowing their main competitor's yearly mid-life crisis, where they used a whole summer crossover event to explain all the broken continuity of the last twenty years of comics and the best they could come up with was "Superboy punched reality" (note: This was not nearly as awesome as it sounds). The other main issue is the stubborn refusal to die of Aunt May, who has been eighty years old since
1962, and will
never be allowed to go to the eternal peace which she has surely by now earned. Even the one serious attempt to do her in resulted in that actress retcon debacle aforementioned, a plot revelation that outdoes the "we're all orphans who grew up together" twist of Final Fantasy VIII on the contrived bullshit scale by
an order of magnitude and spidey fans
bent over and took it.
And sadly, if the point of One More Day
hadn't been to retcon Peter's marriage away, the basic setup of this powerful individual saved from a sniper's bullet by the willing sacrifice of someone so inherently powerless could have made for a really
good examination of what these superpowers and costumes mean,
and been a really good driving point for the character. But no. Spider-Man upholds it's reputation for being "how not to write comics".
* Superman might have it worse, but that's largely because of the massive power disparity between him and most of the universe's villains. Superman shouldn't have to get out of
bed unless the earth's going to blow up in literally the next five minutes, but they have to find something for him to do every month, hence drek. There are literally two interesting Superman comic stories ever, and they're both long since non-canon (and both by Alan Moore). The animated Superman was hugely powered down for exactly that reason, and so was a much more interesting version of the character.
** Franchise comics are the two big universes, the Marvel and DC products that fit into their ongoing continuities. The fact that they have to fit into an ongoing continuity, and that the major reason for the publishers keeping them on the shelves is to keep the franchise alive so they can sell the movie rights to it, means that they are doomed to the same kind of unchanging mediocrity as illustrated by Spider-Man, no interesting stories can
ever be told with these characters, the most heroic of sacrifices or tragic of deaths means precisely nothing because it'll last maybe a year, tops.
Still, to get back on topic:
