300 Word Rant – Missed opportunites with relaunches`

Let me just say that, generally, I don’t mind relaunches, reboots, retcons, etc.  It may be because I don’t have a good mind for continuity anyways, so I don’t exactly remember what they’re getting rid of and replacing.  So when things like the New 52 or Marvel Now happen, I don’t really mind.  I may poke fun at the marketing and hype behind it, but really, I don’t care.  You keep me entertained with your stories, and I will continue to give you my money.  But there is one thing about relaunches/reboots/alternate timelines that bugs the hell out of me, and that is missed opportunities.

For the best example I have, let me take you back many years.  I read friends’ copies of Ultimate Spider-man up until they stopped getting it.  Somewhere in the 120s, I think.  And the book entertained me, but there’s something that kept bugging me about it.  There was nothing that was really new about the book.  Sure, it claimed to have it’s own continuity, but it really didn’t.  It was still tied greatly to the Marvel-616 universe.  With the Ultimate line, we simply go a different version of characters and stories that had happened before.  That is until Spider-man started dating Kitty Pryde.

You have no idea how happy this made me.  Happier than a person should be about a fictional relationship between fictional characters.  It wasn’t just that Spider-man was specifically dating Kitty Pryde, it was that he/Peter Parker wasn’t dating Mary Jane.  I don’t have any problems with Mary Jane, but you can already find where that’s been done before.  This is a different universe that you are creating.  You don’t have to include Mary Jane in the damn thing, because you can do whatever the hell you want to.  Unfortunately, that didn’t last long.

And yes, the Superman/Wonder Woman kiss is what brought this up.  I am not sad that we may not have a Superman/Lois Lane relationship because if I want that, I can go read back issues.

New Youngblood…or Rob Liefeld Tries Again

Once upon a time, I wrote a comic book.  It’s true.  I invented a character, gave him an origin, gave him a villain, and had him fight that villain.  He wasn’t particularly interesting or original – hell, I pretty much ripped off a story my brother had written a few weeks before – but in my defense, I was 10.  Over the next year or so, I wrote and drew several other comics with this character, but I always started a story arc without completing it or following up on anything else I had written.  No one really cared about the comic since it was sub-par at best and filled with characters that had little beyond a name, a costume, and a power set, but I loved it so I kept cranking them out whenever I was bored.

In a completely unrelated story, Rob Liefeld is bringing back Youngblood.