Are endings possible for classic cape comics or is having an ending antithetical to the nature of cape comics themselves?
How would you feel about character like Superman or Captain America having a definitive ending?
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Why would they kill the goose that lays golden eggs?
DC and Marvel comics stopped being profitable a long time ago
>muh endings
This goes away once you actually do the impossible and read comics.
>This goes away once you actually do the impossible and read comics.
It goes away in the sense that eventually you get bored and stop reading them.
golden age superman got an ending done by alan moore OP
I thought that was Silver Age Supes.
It was. That anon’s mistaken.
True. Golden Age Superman got an ending in Infinite Crisis. He ended up getting murdered.
Silver Age > Golden Age as usual.
It's not antithetical. Back in the 80s and 90s there was still an actual feasible chance for all the popular cape heroes to eventually get an ending. But at this point they've been going on for far too long and had far too many people who really don't give a shit about continuity involved, so it's all just a bunch of different visions of the same character connected by a vague chronology.
I feel many people dislike the lack of closure for most runs and heroes.
By the 70's and 80's there were already a few "Last ___ story" at DC, they just don't ever intend to stick except for whatever permutation of the character it's based on.
Earth-Two Batman is still dead though.
I don't even understand why Earth-2 Batman is even a thing since Batman has been ongoing since 1939 and never had his book canceled or a relaunch, Batman's continuity has remained pretty linear as far as superheroes are concerned. DC doesn't even know where and when Earth-2 Batman even starts.
It's more because Earth 2 had a JSA with a Batman, WonderWoman, and Superman so it stands to reason they'd also have one even if those books didn't relaunch like GL/Flash, etc.
Besides that, E2 was a reason to do things like tell the last Batman story or give Batman a kid.
>Krypton was Earth all along.
The only Superman ending that makes sense.
Did the rocket just lopped around and fall again?
That'd be the "Planet of the Apes" ending, where the rocket carrying the baby Kal-El somehow goes back in time to Krypton's distant past when its sun was still yellow. The infant Kryptonian grows up to become Superman, and so inspires the primitive inhabitants of this young Krypton, aka Earth, that they go on to become the mighty people known as Kryptonians.
Or, if you don't like time-travel shenanigans, it's an endless series--Earth grows old, becomes Krypton, one of its inhabitants is rocketed off to a new world before the old one dies, sets the new "Earth" on the path to becoming a new "Krypton", and the cycle repeats itself.
A lot of characters have various endings although they're not considered canon. Johns ended his Green Lantern run on a noncanon ending but if you read his whole run from start to finish then you'd have a satisfying end to it. There's some edgy ends and some wholesome ones. But comics can't stop and characters, with some exception, can't have endings. So in a lot of cases you have options. Pic related came from the issue where God told Peter to have faith and appreciate what he did. That issue came out right before OMD.
Does Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes have endings? No they were just silly little characters that some writers made in the past without putting much thought behind. Why have a definitive ending that makes impossible for someone to do anything with the character again. Beside runs are just one writers take on the character. Most of the time they have finale like endings the wrap up the story the writer wanted to tell. Setting the stage open for someone new to have their own try at it.
>Does Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes have endings?
Yes
Robin Hood dies at the end. Sherlock Homes falls to his death while fighting his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, over the Reichenbach Falls.
Holmes retired and became a beekeeper.
Wait...those are real books and not just Fairy tale shit
You're gonna get ripped on but with robin hood you at least do have a bit of a point, while the character does have a death I wouldn't be surprised if it took a few hundred years to accept which death he should have and that become accepted as the common one.
I think in a hundred+ years we'll slowly develop an accepted "canon" for how these characters would end. Like DKR would be considered Batman's ending, All-Staror Kingdom come as superman's even if everything doens't quite line up.
Conan Doyle INTENDED to kill Holmes because he was sick and tired of the series.
Fans wouldn't let him. They wrote and nagged until he brought his character back to life.
But he owned Holmes and was able to make that decision. When a corporation has the rights, they'll never wrap things up so long as they're making at least a modest profit. The readers know that. Superman, Human Torch, and Ms Marvel have all "died" and their editors all swear they're gone for good. No kidding this time. It's permanent! You know anyone who believes that crap anymore? Only Professor X is that stupid!!
It may be different in Europe. Take Melusine. The writer quit. The artist continued the series for awhile but eventually opted to bring it to an end.
But the creators of Axterix and Spirou are dead. They just hired new staff and the strips live on.
This seems like a thing people accuse of being exclusive to capeshit but as time goes on you will absolutely see more companies ride out IPs after their creator's deaths. You think Dragon ball dies with Toriyama?
Yeah DragonBall seems the closest to the "Western" system at this point, since Toriyama doesn't even write or draw any DB manga anymore. I'm surprised Tezuka's characters haven't been treated in a similar way, but any stories that feature his characters (like Pluto) are done in a unique way or way that brings a new perspective for a specific story.
You guys really don't know much about Japanese properties if you think dragon Ball is the only, or first, JP property to keep running after their creator stopped working on it.
Plenty of JP creations that exist like cape comics to be vehicles for endless stories.
But you forgot 2 important things.
1.they are rare and they are mostly for kids. If you could name 100 of them, which you couldn't, they would barely make for 1% of all manga
2.they are hated by the communities because they suffer from the same problem as capeshit, most of the entries are mediocre while only a few ones are great, ask any lupin fan if you don't believe me.
>You think Dragon ball dies with Toriyama?
Kami, I hope so.
The day the monkeys finally bite the dust is the day that Shonen manga will be free of their shadow.
Yeah, it seems like even 30-odd years later, Shonen manga still keeps taking too many queues from Dragon Ball.
There's storytelling beats in manga you can probably track down to old kamishibai stories. good luck getting rid of trace elements of that. Their whole way of telling stories is basically retelling and reworking stories, then the new elements that get added influencing future things.
I do find it interesting how Sherlock Holmes was the first modern fandom, complete with obsessive fans
>Sherlock Homes falls to his death while fighting his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, over the Reichenbach Falls.
You know full well that's not where it ends. The collection I had as a kid placed the story where Holmes is revealed to be alive immediately after the one where he "dies" and then had a shitton more stories after that.
People tend to forget that Moriarty, Holmes' Arch Enemy, only appeared in that ONE story!
Holmes went into hiding because he feared Moran, deadliest shot with an air gun ever.
But Moriarty himself was truly dead and gone.
At least so far as Conan Doyle was concerned.
Other writers have used him, of course.
And then he gets resurrected in the 22nd Century and joins forces with a robot Watson and the female descendant of Inspector Lestrade to fight Clone Dr. Moriarty!
>Are endings possible for classic cape comics or is having an ending antithetical to the nature of cape comics themselves?
Geoff Johns' last issue of his Green Lantern run ended with the main characters getting endings. And to make things better those endings are the end of their characters' careers, meaning no matter how dogshit every subsequent GL writer that comes after Geoff is, Hal and Pals will always have a happy ending.
Johns also gave a nice ending for Prime
That reminds me, was rebirth superman superman from earth 2 or something? Did the superman get switched back? I remember it was briefly mentioned in the beginning of the run and then ignored after that
If I recall the Pre-Flashpoint? (or one of the reboots) Superman and Lois survived all that bullshit without being affected and went into hiding.
Then when the current version of Superman died, the other Lois became super women and then died, and he re-assumed the mantel, so only the older Clark and Lois remain and had Jon.
Nah, this will be retconned away at some point lmao
It's already not possible because Sinestro disappears and is never seen again, only to be the mysterious and cloaked lorekeeper for the GL. But being canon isn't the point. It's just there as an ending for anyone that wants to see how Johns would end it all.
The problem is these characters have so many different fans that you'll never find a singular pleasing ending.
Look how many people were upset that TDKR ended with Bruce retiring with Selina and leaving Gotham to a successor. People cried "Batman would NEVER retire!"...but Earth 2(i.e., the original) Batman did retire to marry Catwoman.
TDKR, as noteworthy as it is, was written by an unhinged guy with specific views on the characters. It being a "definitive" ending for the character is a narrative adopted by the early 2000s comic reviewers high off their own farts whose line of thinking was "EDGY = GOOD"
>EDGY = GOOD
no lie there
Do you like Ultimatum and Crossed too?
>Ultimatum
Yes.
>Crossed
Nah, that's shock for its own sake.
But it's edgy, so it must be good?
Not when the edge doesn't go anywhere.
>you'll never find a singular pleasing ending.
You should not play for The Gallery
They are possible and many people have asked for them.
The problem is that super comics are soap operas for 11 year olds. Endings go against what the property owners see as being part of the format.
Older heroes like Superman and Batman by their design could basically run forever.
Heroes which has a sense of story progression, popularized by Heroes like Spider-man, cannot. Either they have to finish or restart.
As long as there's an audience for something, it will never truly have an ending. A reboot at best.
It's more that the idea of ending a comic in a shared universe just isn't viable since a later author can easily pick up wherever the previous run left off and set about dragging it through the mud.
Just about the only comics truly safe from this are things like Milestone or Robinson's Starman, which were under specific contracts that made them poison to the idea of franchising.
That being said there do exist a lot of definitive "last stories", particularly in the DC canon, that are either futureproofed or just so absolutely definitive in giving closure that people reject any continuation. All Star Superman, Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader, DC One Million, Batman Beyond 2012, Hitman's final issue are all strong contenders for "last stories". I'd say Doom Patrol is a good example of a series that manages to have multiple "last stories" and keep trucking along just fine.
>which were under specific contracts that made them poison to the idea of franchising.
What was this magic?
>, what is the ending of things like Zorro and Shadow which inspired Batman?
I don't think there are any. The thing about Zorro, The Shadow, Batman, Superman-- all those were created to basically keep giving their creators work. They didn't plan on ending them because once they stopped the meal ticket was over. They're not arc based stories, they existed to be episodic adventures.
The Dark Knight Returns
It's possible and should happen but won't do to market forces. It's one of a few reasons why capes are inherently shit and flawed stories.
manga (and anime) is also controlled by the companies, there are many examples of authors wanting to end a series and the editorial department forcing them to continue or the opposite, it's also shitty just in a different way than in the west
it's not like manga authors have total control over their work, only a few very very well known ones get those kind of deals, and the same thing happens over here sometimes like gaiman having a lot of control over sandman
Dragon Ball didn't start it. Japan has a lot of series that never end. US companies just didn't license them in the 80s and 90s because obviously it would have been more expensive to licences a huge show. It was more profitable to licences an ova and change 30 for a vhs of it
the only real ending is "the adventure continues"
It’s more the nature of the stories than the industry. The Odyssey is specific adventure that ends. Sherlock Holmes “ ends” with every adventure. Doyle didn’t end the stories because he wanted a proper ending, he ended them because he was tired of the character
I think there's lots of endings on the way in that sense and you choose the one you actually enjoy most. Superhero characters imo are larger then their character, because they usually represent so bigger ideal or idea. And you can't really kill an idea, it "does" when people stopping mind to it, but near universal ideas and ideals kind of have a way of sticking around, so people always circle back to them.
Tldr: I don't think cape comics not having definitive endings is bad. Whats bad is not have longer self contained and self coherent stories, or shorter ones that are written well, where those endings then become satisfying, instead of being stop gaps in a publishing and entertainment company trying to profit off the character over telling a story.
*Dies*
Blegh can't spell today
Forget capeshit for a second. Endings are what make a story a story. You need an ending to wind up the plots and cap off character arcs and, most of all, give a sense of satisfaction to the reader. That the story has had a real impact within the world and, if it's a good story, an impact on the reader, too.
Capeshit shouldn't be allergic to endings, but unfortunately that's just how it's all shaped out. Some of the best comics out there are the ones where they do actually have a final conclusion, and I don't just mean one-and-done graphic novels, yet for some reason the Big Two haven't really gotten their heads around that fact. The best they can do are out-of-canon stories like TDKR or Marvel's little The End books, and even something like that is pretty rare for them. Long running series absolutely can and should have a conclusion. Despite what most creators seem to believe right now, these things are definitely not gonna just go on forever, and it's far better to end things on your own terms. I think books like Sandman and Invincible have arguably had greater staying power due to the fact they're full, complete stories. Even a bad ending would be better than no ending at all.
>this post
This is why Geoff Green Lantern is DC's best run.
Your moronation is that you assume endings can only mean 100% everyone is retired forever which is fricking stupid. Almost every single cape story has an ending because it wraps everything in that little arc up.
Best thing that could happen at this point would be for WB & Disney to fall apart and the DC/Marvel characters get sold off piecemeal as a result, the big names like Batman/Spider-Man will get snatched quickly but I'd bet most of the lesser knowns will go unwanted and will finally be put to rest.
The only problem I see is something ridiculous like the Sony/Marvel deal with Spider-Man where Batman gets sold to one company, but then his major villains and supporting characters like Joker, Catwoman or Robin get sold to another.
That just means they'll have to come up with own-brand favourites, then
>Ah, my arch-nemesis Jack is back again with another diabolical yet legally non-distinct clown-themed crime!
>Come on Wren, to the Batmobile!
Still feel like Dark Knight Returns is a perfectly good and appropriate Batman ending: Bruce Wayne is "dead", but Batman lives.
Also Kingdom Come is a perfectly fine ending for modern Supes, it's his 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?'
>Kingdom Come is a perfectly fine ending for modern Supes
Ehhhh gonna be honest, I was never a fan of it.
SPECIALLY not as an ending for modern Supes, Lois gets killed by Joker? A villain that isn't even his? And then he just fricks off? Nah, it's fine as an Elseworld, but not my ideal interpretation of Superman, and definitely not my favorite "ending" for him.
I am really interested in what made comics go primarily in this direction of shared universes and constant rebooting instead of one story for the characters culminating in an end.
Now I am not 100% well versed in comic history, I am a complete pleb when it comes to this specific topic, but does each universe from say DC or Marvel have an "end" story? The story that brings together the shared universe in last hoorah before life continues on?
The nature of serialized adventures, think funny comics, there's no end to Garfield or Casper, so is the same for Superman, he gets into new shenanigans every week.
The cape comics were largely created by broke ass kids who needed a constant meal ticket. None of them were designed to end because the idea that they'd willingly stop the steady paycheck was insane. Shared universes began very early on because all these creators worked in close proximity and the set up for all these stories were all fairly similar, contemporary worlds.
As for an "end" story, Marvel really doesn't have one besides various alternate universe stories, DC's old continuities ended with crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, then again in 2011 with flashpoint, but the stories that continue onward don't entirely discount the past stories.
>direction of shared universes
Shitty way to make you buy more comics
>superman is popular
>DC makes a bunch of other superheroes
>other publisher do the same
>Sometimes they crossover, why not, the writters work in the same office, you own both characters and it probably makes kids more likely to buy your comic
And then in the silver age, since all the marvel book were at least co created by Stan Lee for a good while, it was easy to make connections between the titles.
All 3 of the classic versions of superman, batman and wonder woman got endings so its Kinda possible.
What part of "serialized fiction" do you not understand?
Trying to trace a direct line of “canon” from, say, Action Comics #1 to the present day Superman comics is folly. I think a lot of comic fans assign a false physicality to canon. You can disregard it if you want. The idea of there being a “last” Superman story, which definitively finishes the character’s adventures, is only possible with this false importance. People still write stories about heroes of ancient myth, Hercules, Achilles, Ajax etc. Does that mean these characters “refuse to die”?
At this point in time, the most popular and enduring Superheroes are essentially public domain. Marvel and DC may legally own them (but for how long) but in reality they belong to the public. Comic writers license them to tell stories about these existing characters, some of them being finite and some being perpetual.
These characters are only as real as you make them.
Why does he have a bulge in the final image.
It became aceptable to draw bulges around the 2000s
The realism is uncanny.
Reminder that Alex Ross drew Kingdom Come at age 25.
After Alex Ross basically showed what classic C.C. Beck Captain Marvel/Shazam! should look like in the "real world" it bummed me out the Shazam! movie didn't even try.
The 70s Shazam show didn't do a bad job for the time, but I get what you're saying.
DC, especially Vertigo had some satisfying endings.
It's been mentioned earlier in the thread, but it deserves to be mentioned again.
Endings no, ending states yes. Comics and other ongoing media have a tendency to show possible futures and outcomes that allow people to experience and ending without actually ending the story.
There are plenty of jumping off points you can use as your ideal ending. Pick the one you like or one you think works best and there you go.
Yes, it's called "the issue where the creator(s) stopped working on the character(s)"
There's no Superman without Siegel, Shuster a little less so.
No Fourth World without Kirby.
No Hitman without Ennis and McCrea.
Once you realize everything else is just fan fiction, it's very freeing.
Not really thinking of a definitive ending like TDKR here, but is there a point that you like to use as the cutoff for a character/group/whole universe even? Specifically I seem to recall this one site where the author made a case for the whole Marvel Universe wrapping up not too long after Shooter left and went into detail on where that would leave each character. I kinda like the idea of both DC & Marvel ending (even if just in a "and the adventure continues" sense) with JLA/Avengers since it's a good summation of what came before that point right before the worst excesses of the 00s occurred.
>Specifically I seem to recall this one site where the author made a case for the whole Marvel Universe wrapping up not too long after Shooter left and went into detail on where that would leave each character.
Can you elaborate on that? It sounds interesting.
NTA but I think he's referring to this: http://originalmarveluniverse.blogspot.com/2009/06/omu-end.html
Is it the same guy as the "fantastic four is a great american novel"
Amazing Spider-Man #498-500 is my cut-off for Spider-Man currently, it wraps up Peter's story and gives it closure in a satisfying way. I haven't regularly read Spider-Man since and frankly I don't know if I need to.
unlike mangashit and eurotrash, capes are bigger than their medium and thus can't die.
there are "ending" stories but that's all they are, another story to tell and the characters will be back to their everchanging status quo, it's what's beautiful about this genre.
>capes are bigger than their medium and thus can't die.
LOL what dumb American corporate brainwashing. Capeshit is eternal in America because American Puritans killed all the other genres and left it the only game in town for decades, so the only companies left standing had to milk their few properties forever to survive.
nice tangent.
>t's what's beautiful about this genre.
Lol. There is no character in the capeshit medium that is interesting enough to deserve 10+ years of stories. There are 100 pages novels with better written characters that end.
Sometimes the best you can get is when a long time creator wraps up their run on a title. The capeshit never stops grinding on, but it's something of an ending. Denny O'Neil said that the finale of his 70s Batman run in 1979, where Batman seemingly takes down Ra's Al Ghul permanently and walks off into the sunset with Talia, was the end of all he had to say with the character. (He went to Marvel in the 80s, until Jim Shooter pissed him off enough to go back to DC, but that's another story). Some anon posted the end of 1991 X-Men 3 here, where Chris Claremont directly says good bye to the reader in the caption boxes on the final page, along with listing the start and end dates of his run. (He left because Marvel wanted the hot new artists drawing his title to have more editorial say than him. Of course they went on to form Image, and Claremont went to DC for some of the 90s. Again, another story.)
The final issues of some of the DC titles pre-Crisis give closure too, as well as some of the final issues of the comics pre-new 52. (DC editorial is an unending shit show.) When a title gets cancelled, sometimes the creators get b***hy and wreck everything, along with b***hy dialog and captions spelling out how pissed off they are. Will try to remember examples.
DC Comics Presents #97 ended with Steve Gerber wrapping up all his pre-crisis Superman plot threads in one amazingly dark story. The Phantom Zone criminals and Mxy work together to ruin Superman's life, Superman fails to stop any of the carnage, and the villains wind up fused into ine malevolent being that plans to go forth and destroy the 5th Dimension, and any other dimensions they can reach. Superman gets knocked out by a rain of Kryptonite meteors. When he wakes up, Metropolis is mostly past tense including everyone he ever cared for. After getting owned by the bad guys, Superman helplessly watches Mxy fuse all the villians into a giant crystal (that's been floating around all issue) and fly off. The Rick Veitch art helps give it that extra edge of horror. There's no triumph or joy herem it's darker than Alan Moore's Superman send off. Gerber was an unsung genius.
Superman faces his greatest enemies: a Viking, some lady, and a hotel doorman.
There are plenty of elseworld stories that give an ending to capeshit, personally I will always have a fondness for earth X and all its sequel for how it tries to bookend everything about the marvel universe while trying to get a meaningfull story through it.
Episodic story stories aren't inherently unfit to have endings, but in a way, their lack of a conclusion reflect how life is experienced in a way stories with a clear ending can't.
However, the problem with capeshit never endings stories is that they can never change too much from the status quo, how bad this is depends on the franchise. Superman can just keep going forever like that because he's an ideal that's not suppossed to change. Doesn't work as well for Spider-man who is supposed to be a relatable man who grows and changes. Or an ensemble cast like the x-men, where ppassing of the torch cannot apperate when the few popular character always come back. This is especially egretious in the x-men case because the premise of the book implies an ever changing setting, the mutants don't mean anything if attitudes towards them runs in circle forever.
You need to read Steve Gerber's 1980 miniseries "Phantom Zone" 1-4. It's really good, and sets up a lot of the characters in this issue. The lady is a psycho b***h who kills men for pleasure as often as possible. The general there destroyed an inhabited moon of Krypton. And the horn guy killed a rondor, a beautiful immortal animal (like an alien rhino). When you kill the rondor, you become immortal, insane, and cast out. His mental struggles are a main part of the miniseries story, and I'm too sleepy to remenber it clearly. None of this bullshit would have happened if Krypton manned up and brought back the death penalty.
Steve Gerber arbitrarily killed off a team of characters to make a point (that random people given powers and thrown together as a team would frick up massively). The comic was Exiles by Malibu Comics, and ran 4 issues. Issue 5 was solicited to retailers with a fake description to hide the fact that nearly everyone dies in issue 4. At the end, Steve Gerber writes an editorial explaining why they did it. How did everyone die? Well, the Exiles were trying to protect a girl named Amber Hunt, who has newly developed superpowers. They keep blowing it, until Amber's powers go critical and she blows them all up.
https://theunspokendecade.com/tag/steve-gerber/
Link to a review of Exiles 4 with spoliers