Harlock Sholmes

A lot of current superhero comics feel pulled between insubstantial fluff designed to please the online fanbase and Shocking Twists and big events designed to please the speculators, and end up not really appealing to anyone.

There are a few creators who can really thread the needle between that "hanging out with characters you like" feeling, headline-grabbing conceits and actual meaningful storytelling–well, mainly it's Al Ewing. But there's not nearly enough of them and the comics publishing environment which underpays and undersupports people and which doesn't invest in marginalized creators/editors in any meaningful sense isn't helping.

A lot of current superhero comics feel pulled between insubstantial fluff designed to please the online fanbase and Shocking Twists and big events designed to please the speculators, and end up not really appealing to anyone.

1960s comic ad

One of the reasons I don't interact as much with comics fandom is that there's this real undercurrent of resentment toward not being in control of the stories and characters that matter to them, which can spill out in some very nasty ways. Like the recent thing where some comics stan twitter guy made a fake account to accuse a writer they didn't like of sexual harassment. And there are a lot of real problems with how superhero comics are now and how many characters are handled, but the way this plays out a lot of the time is like people yelling at servers instead of dealing with systems of capitalist exploitation. I can't say I've never felt that kind of frustration, but I'm happy in the end to be working on the margins in my own space.

AND FURTHERMORE, a thing I really hate about comics stan culture is that people want their faves to be perfect and never flawed or wrong about anything. Like that's why I love Arthurian literature so much, you can be the world's greatest hero and still mess up or hurt people or be made a complete fool of, that's just life.