A Wizard of Goatse posted:

I was looking at an X-Man comic a couple weeks back and it sort of stuck out to me that, like, Wolverine is the dirty guy who says bub sometimes, Cyclops is the bossy aryan ubermensch who is sad about being able to shoot death rays out of his face, and that's really the whole of the consistent thread of who they are in any of these things. It just feels like that'd get pretty boring to read about after a few issues, let alone identify with them deeply like a lot of people seem to. There was a guy at work who was really into The Flash and owned a Flash costume he liked to dress up in, but even talking to him every day I got no idea of what made the Flash interesting except he presumably saved the universe a whole bunch, just like every other superhero. I think he thinks I'm wierd now because I called Spiderman one of the angsty heroes (from the movie) instead of one of the ones who makes lots of jokes (from the comic books I guess? But not the newspaper ones). But they're all Spiderman and they call them all Spiderman without any distinctions and they're supposed to be the same guy, and there's like comic books based on the movie where Spiderman is really mopy and doesn't make jokes too. It sort of seems to me like the fortieth time Superman saves the world from ultimate annihilation, or dies but not really because it was a clone or they went back in time, you could write a much more interesting story about the things he saw going down to the corner store to get a gallon of milk, but then it's not really a story about Superman anymore. Which maybe is the point. Does it matter if you save the universe if there's a dozen parallel people saving the universe three times a week, and also they all seem to have crossovers so you have to buy dozens of comic books to have any clear idea what's going on for like a twenty-page stretch? What if the world got destroyed and they just left it that way and never changed it back, I think that'd be kinda cool, give actual weight to everything being superhumanly powerful and bigger than a city. Like someone was trying to explain to me why Darkseid was supposed to be a really big deal because he's always almost beating all the heroes and taking over everything, but he's a goof in a bad suit who seems less menacing than any kid with his dad's gun because the kid can shoot someone and they'll stay dead forever, and nobody they know will ever be able to bring them back, and that person probably had a life that was more than a design doc of vocal quirks and a CV of times they saved the universe anyway. IDK if there's something I'm missing where it's only the comic books I read that suck or if I just missed the boat because I didn't get into the habit of buying them all at age 8, I know I was really into lego then and a lot of people don't really 'get it' when I get all excited about spring steel now, am I the comic books guy of buggy frames and robot parts and I just don't know it, I just wanted to have a fun conversation with that dude at work