I wouldn't mind so much, but people are still harping on characters who've been around and recycling plots for nearly a century. The best comics are series like Watchmen, Sandman, or Walking dead -- certainly because of the writing, but that sort of story-telling is only possible when there's an ending. The characters can die, the world can blow up, things have meaning because they're going to have a conclusion.
If you look at how insanely inflated Superman has become (I was read a list of his abilities earlier today) you get an impression of a hot mess which has been festering over decades. That's because no one lets anything die here, not when it's profitable or nostalgic. Rich story-telling is replaced by needless complexity and melodrama, giving the image of things happening while everything remains in a perpetual stasis.
It makes me feel such fondness for manga and manwha. While repetitive in certain tropes, are not without innovation -- not everything is shonen battle manga -- and they're certainly able to end (although one can debate the timing of such an ending).
"Perpetual stasis" is a good way to put it. I first became aware of comics as serious media in the mid-90s, before the big crash that nearly killed the industry, and certain titles & characters were new then (Image had just launched, for instance) or were at the height of their popularity. And it was pretty exciting for a while, until I started to realize the endless recycling of characters and stories. DC and Marvel had figured out one of the keys to success was to write a monthly series for a while, and when interest waned, they would end the series and shelf it for a while. And eventually, months or years later, they'd relaunch the series, possibly with new artists & writers, and with a new look, new stories, new direction, to shake things up a bit. It was a pretty smart move, kept interest going, and gave artists & writers some new opportunities. Some of the relaunched series were even pretty good (series 3 of The Spectre was one of my favorites).
The problem, of course, is that you can only do so much with an overexposed, iconic character before it falls into melodrama and ridiculous gimmicks. Many popular characters grow to the point where the public owns them more than the writers, so nobody's ever going to permanently change the nature of Batman, Spiderman, Superman, etc. Some of the Golden Age / Silver Age stuff with Superman, for example, is absolutely hysterical, it's so ridiculous.
As far as Hollywood movies go -- well, find a winning formula to make money, and Hollywood will beat it into the ground six ways to Sunday. Watchmen, some of the X-Men, some of the Spiderman, Iron Man 1, The Avengers, Thor, etc all made for entertaining movies, but personally I've grown weary of the formula. I feel like I've seen everything interesting that I'm going to see in the genre -- I feel the same way about werewolves and vampires, too.
Iron Man 2 rocked simply because of the AC/DC soundtrack.
Don't make me smack you.
