From “Talk from the Darkside”;
Big Daddy wrote;
You really should drop Marvel. Any creator that’s worth anything is now at DC. Jim Lee’s doing Superman, Grant Morrision maybe doing Superman.. What more do you want? Really Marvels erratic moves of late smack of personal egotism and not of a company with any direction. The dark, rebellious tone of the Marvel comics of yore has been replaced by pablum and simple stories that are at best rehashed and worst not properly thought out and executed. Step into the light my son.. DC shall be your salvation.
The problem is…
Superman still sucks. Same goes for Batman. Hell, same goes for Spider-Man, and pretty much any “top tier” comic.
The corporations require the status quo to be maintained so that they can sell ***-man underroos, cartoons, TV shows, etc. Nothing really changes in comics anymore, but they try to sell us the “illusion of change”, even though Hush has been successful (which by the way, I’m currently reading in Hard Cover trades for almost twice what the single issues would cost me), the status quo has been entirely maintained, and at the end, nothing will have changed.
Of all the comics I read currently, I’d say that only The Flash, Legion, and Exiles offer any “real” surprises. Flash mostly because I’m always wondering how Johns will return things to status quo, Legion because the future is totally unwritten since DnA took over, and Exiles because since it’s an alternate timeline, literally anything can (and does) happen. It’s the only comic on the stands right now which has changed over half it’s roster in the last year, and still managed to keep my interest.
The stuff that is really interesting me is stuff I only collect in trade. I’m reading Fables, Y: The Last Man, 100 Bullets, Planetary (which is a terrific analogue for the Marvel and DC universes, and does a terrific job of both parodying, and exploring said universes), and Powers. They’re all gold, but because they’re written in 5-6 issue “arcs” I find I get more out of them when collected than I do individually. It’s mainly because I have a hard time following a dozen or more stories for 6 months, and that’s the way comics are largely being written these days.
With that said, I do love Marvel’s trade program. I’ve bought several of their hard covers lately mainly because they’re so awesome to look at. That’s how I’m collecting Ultimate X-Men, and it’s how I wish I had collected Ultimate Spidey back in the day.