Woodclaw wrote: ↑Wed Oct 17, 2018 10:13 am
So they got Namor to murder one of the only three people he ever considered a friend in the surface world (the others being Steve Rogers and Jim Hammond) just to showcase how far he would go... I can't even comment. What's going to be next for thwe Sub-Mariner? Drugging and raping Sue Richards?
RUSCHE wrote: ↑Wed Oct 17, 2018 1:34 pm
I have the book, it diminishes what they ate trying to do with him, Namor works best as a no nonsense Anti Hero, not a straight up murderer. I like Namor, I want him to shine..not like this. Stingrays treatment was horrible and with his long history takes away some great story potential. Comics nowadays suck....THE PAIN...THE PAIN....( in my Dr Smith voice).
Glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I know I'm very . . . peculiar at times with the kind of rants I go on, but I'm against casually killing off characters as a rule, especially not for stuff like this.
I've said it before, but I view fictional settings with large casts of characters as essentially a giant toybox, with each character being a toy inside of it. A writers job is to essentially be a little kid and play with whatever toy he has so well, have so much fun with it and tell such great stories with it, that everyone else is going to want to play with that toy too.
Now some toys are more popular than others. There are usually several Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, Hulk, Wonder Woman and Iron Man toys that are near the top of the toybox, and pretty much everyone wants to play with them. Just below them you get the single action figures that are still popular, your Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkeye, Teen Titans and X-Men figures basically. Then you dig a little deeper and you get the single figures that are less popular but still have their fans, and who have the potential to be super popular with the right people; ie your Captain Marvel, Iron Fist and Luke Cage figures. And below them you get the figures that don't get played with very often at all, but can get brought out on occasion by their small number of fans, and who like to use them for certain stuff. Guys like Stingray, Speedball, etc.
Now, sometimes a toy can get played with so well that it's popularity skyrockets (Christopher Priest's Black Panther, Bendis' Luke Cage), and you get more versions of it and it sits higher up in the toybox pile. Sometimes some kid plays with a toy the wrong way (often times by trying to use markers to make the toy cooler, ie "to put his own mark on the character"), and the toy winds up disfigured or broken, and actually loses popularity (The Spider-Clone Saga, Electro-Superman, Hydra-Cap, 95% of the Nu-52). And sometimes it takes someone to come in and clean up/fix a broken toy to make them popular again (85% of Rebirth, The Immortal Iron Fist, JMS Spider-Man). And sometimes a toy can just be broken so badly that it's taken out of the toybox altogether (Mongul, Angar the Screamer, and now Stingray).
Generally speaking, I'm against taking a toy out of the toybox outside of very specific circumstances. Generally speaking, the removal should be an amazing story and/or make some other toy with potential into something great. Angar the Screamer is a good example, since while his removal deprives us of a goofy 70s throwback badguy, it also turned Screaming Mimi into Songbird, which is a fair trade in my book. Whereas killing off characters like the New Bloods, the Global Guardians, the New Warriors, the Titans, and the like just to pump up a threat or out of sheer spite is completely wasteful. Because then if someone wants to try and have their own Immortal Iron Fist series that makes an old character super popular, they have to go through some process of bringing them back, which leads to the whole "Revolving Door Afterlife" stigma comics has.
It seemed like writers before the 2000s were more concerned about taking care of the toys they played with, making sure they were in as good condition as they left them and making sure things were nice and orderly for the next kids that would come in and play with them. Writers today seem all too eager to break the toys they find, to modify them in weird ways (putting a female toy's head on Thor's body for instance, or painting Capt. America in Hydra colors), essentially putting their signature on the toy and letting everyone know they did this, rather than just making sure the toy is in good condition for the next kids. And they're all too happy to break the less popular toys to make a point.
Just keep these characters alive and in the background. You never know, someone might surprise you with what they come up with.