616s biggest issue is that it's stories must always return to an aggressive status quo rather than having an evolving narrative?
So why doesn't marvel do hard reboots more often?
Have consistently rebooted and short lived Ultimate style universes that can showcase the franchises status quo, while 616 can be used to finally keep a story going without everything eventually "going back to normal"?
Then the writers can have their cake and eat it too. Spidey gets to stay in highschool and college in the reboot universes, and can finally get fricking married in 616
Cause Marvel's selling point is having an ongoing continuity, even if writers and editors in the last two decades fricked it up
Take that away and you'll still have the same problem (see: Ultimate Universe, which got more convoluted than 616 in a shorter amount of time)
But the benefit of universes like Ultimate is that they are disposable. Once things get crazy, pull the plug and peter is back to getting bitten by a spider
Again though, that's only when rebooting the main universe. Why not do both a universe that gets rebooted over and over again, AND a 616 that now doesn't need to be restrained by the status quo
Personally I agree that the Big Two should allow for independent universes that aren't attached to the main one. Spidy and Batman get multiple series, and they are solo heroes. Why not have one or two that are AUs of other writers?
The answer is that the big two uses events to push sales, and such AUs wouldn't be able to partake in them.
DC does plenty of AU limited series and graphic novels. Marvel's just a stick-in-the-mud about it.
>So why doesn't marvel do hard reboots more often?
Hard Reboots are difficult to do because you risk Alienating your core audience in favor of attracting new readers. New 52 was about as hard of a Reboot as we'll see in the modern era for some time, and that caused a mess that has taken DC the past 12 years to clean up and they still haven't fully undone the damage.
Works just fine for TMNT and Transformers.
Those are just 1 book with an occasional companion book, Marvel prints what 70ish books a month not counting Licensed stuff like Star Wars.
Then begins the massive undertaking of deciding what canon and what's not, who gets a book and who doesn't, reader fatigue of revisiting crucial events again, Do you really want to read the Death of Gwen Stacy or the Dark Phoenix Saga every 5 years.
Frick the books, I’m talking about the shows and toy line accompanying it. Fred Wolff TMNT and G1 Transformers. 2003 TMNT and Transformers Armada. 2012 TMNT and Transformers: Prime. Shit like that. These properties would reinvent themselves like every five years as the kids who liked the previous series would age out and the new series gets made to appeal to the new kids.
See
>The problem isn't status quo. The problem is nobody can fricking write.
Spider-Man gets rebooted in cartoon form.
The USM cartoon and 2017 are fricking shit
The problem with that is they're not appealing to new kids. Not really. Most of the time you get shit that's dedicated to wanking off old man nostalgia. You can't even have a new TMNT show without people flipping out about WHERE"S BEBOP AND ROCKSTEADY!
If you think you'd spend money on the Disconnected Alternate Universe version of Literally Who Pushed Character Of The Year, you're lying. That's why Miles Morales hopped out of Ultimate..
I would before trying to get back into 616. I think most new readers would too.
But anon. That's exactly what happened. Miles tanked ultimate sales. Before that little nog the universe used to occasionally surpass amazing Spiderman.
What exactly did Ultimate Spider-man "evolve" into?
Peter, one of the only super-related people with any kind of moral fibre in the ultimate universe, saves Ultimate Cap, a fricking terrible person, his identity gets co-opted by a writers pet, and then his corpse gets dragged out of the grave to give the impostor a thumbs up.
Be careful what you wish for.
Wow.
The fact that Peter was Spider-Man for no more than one year before dying is dumb.
It's even dumber considering everything else that happened in his universe. Several alien invasions, everything involving mutants, including New York getting flooded. All happening under a year.
Yes you would expect him to at least be finishing high school or entering college. Even dumber as Miles is not much younger than Peter, and that it wouldn't take him long to outlast Peter's time as SM.
Bendis supposedly didn't want him out of high school. Which I think held back the other titles in numerous ways.
>creates a new universe free of the main canon's restrictions and with total creative liberty
>falls back on them again
Several massive time skips happen in USM too, like two different birthday issues and the whole movie issue, plus Ultimatum
All you can do is pretend time progresses really slowly in the ultimate universe.
that's Bendis decompression for you
I think it would be really interesting if after a while if they wanted to they just brought a continuity to an end.
Maybe that's something decisive like "the heroes lose and everyone dies" or maybe it's just "not enough exciting is going on now that all of the big bads have been taken care of but maybe we'll come back every now and then for a one shot".
It would even let you play around with some interesting minor permanent consequences like killing off major or minor characters safely with the knowledge that they'll come back which would present new opportunities for stories and even mean that heroes can sometimes totally lose because you know that in 5-10 years there will be another spider man or captain america in a different universe (if someone from this one doesn't take up the mantle).
>I think it would be really interesting if after a while if they wanted to they just brought a continuity to an end.
That's basically what Ultimate did.
Nah I mean like it should be a regular thing and they shouldn't try to do anything moronic like maintain continuity between separate continuities.
Like maybe you have a broad skeleton of what the main event of each continuity should be and a team of people who know that direction who review comics that come out to see if they maintain consistency/continuity with that direction or do something more interesting than what they had originally planned.
>616s biggest issue is that it's stories must always return to an aggressive status quo rather than having an evolving narrative?
That is not the problem. That has never been the problem. It has not been the problem between the 1960s to the early 2000s. The status quo has always been gradually changing. GRADUALLY. The problem isn't the status quo. Morons like you don't know what that even means and can't pay attention to any development unless it's a massive earth shattering event or major character death or whatever. The problem isn't status quo. The problem is nobody can fricking write. This is a non comic reader argument from some manga only homosexual.
Just read Life Story
I'd argue a bigger problem is that there never even seems to be a solid status quo. There's a massive event or shake up every year or less that completely CHANGES EVERYTHING FOREVER but there's no real time for any of that to mean anything. There's no years of time spent with characters or stories to where the shake ups matter. There's not a solid foundation that's being challenged by these events. There's no relationships. No sense of normalcy. You may joke about Peter Park always being down on his lucky or struggling to keep a relationship going but they do show us those attempts to make things work which is why it matters when they don't or are challenged. We just jump from new status quo to knew status quo with no rhyme or reason. It takes a book half a year these days to establish the premise before the next event comes along and destroys that.
>I'd argue a bigger problem is that there never even seems to be a solid status quo.
This is true, and it started really becoming a problem in the 00s.
they should do hard reboot similar to kamen rider, each where every 10 to 15 years it rebbots and each era has it's own distinct timeline
At this point, there's not much reason to reboot anymore. The only people reading comics are oldgays. Reboots generally exist for newcomers, to make them more accessible to people with no previous exposure to the series, but comic books will never get enough newcomers in enough bulk to justify doing this anymore.