I See Posts Before My Eyes

Anonymous asked: Tom, I kinda hate the Falcon as Cap just because we all know its going to be undone. Same thing with female Thor, Doc Ock as Spider-Man, Wolverine dying, Cyclops or Iron Man or whomever as a villain. They're cool twists on characters but they're stupid when they last maybe a year and then just get switched back. MAKE ACTUAL CHANGE IN YOUR BOOKS.

brevoortformspring:

Given all of the things that you listed, what would you consider actual change? It seems like you’ve eliminated all possibilities from consideration (not to mention made assumptions about dozens of storylines.)

Comics are based on what The Original Writer referred to as “The Illusion of Change”

Example - Irreverent playboy Tony Stark is Iron Man.  Someone may take over the armor for a while, he may lose the ability to walk, he may have a relapse of alcoholism, he may even die.  But let enough time pass and he will get better and take over the armor again.  So too for almost every hero.

Aunt May will never die.  Too big a change.  You may have a whole passel of Hulks, but Bruce Banner will always be the green one.

The mindset is simple - they sell well, why would me make a permanent change to that?  And that makes perfect sense.  

So when a story comes along where a hero dies, or a new person takes over the suit, the readers know it’s temporary, and will either follow the story of the new person, or drop the book until the story is over and we return to First Position again.

Superior Spider-Man was magnificent.  I have no idea how good Thor and Cap’s story will be.I fear they will contain a lot of “But you cannot be them because you are a …” stuff, which rarely comes off as anything other than preachy.  but we shall see.

So perhaps when he says Actual Change" he means “Permanent Change” which is far harder to get, because of the reasons above.

There’s the remote chance that the Nick Fury plot in Original Sin might be an example of Actual Change.  We may not see him return, presuming my guess as to where it’s going (based on things I’ve seen) are true.  But the rumored plotline for the new character is so different from the norm that I don’t think it’ll last terribly long.  So we’ll see that snap back to the norm, but not the first story.  It ends with you getting a Nick Fury more similar to the one on the movies, which benefits you.

Over at DC, the switch from Barry Allen to Wally West as the Flash was as close to a permanent change as we’ve seen yet.  It took nearly thirty years to change that one back, and by the time it did, there were possibly more people who saw Wally as the norm and Barry was the change.  

Right now I’d say the only “Actual (Permanent) Change” Marvel has made was keeping your original Captain Marvel dead.  And that change came because the character wasn’t selling like gangbusters, so it was okay to have him die, and it gave you a story so good you’ve been loath to change it. That’s about the only one I can think of.  Every other “bold new direction” has been nothing but a left or right turn of varying sharpness that eventually returned to the Mother Road.

That’s not a complaint, merely a statement of fact.