[The Wolf]

We've talked about revamps that are being done to golden age characters.
New "dimensions" are added to the old characters (this includes Frank Miller's "All Star Batman and Robin") but is that necessary?
I like the simplicity of the old stories. It seems like having the 1940s characters being brought to modern day could play with the difference between angsty modern characters and "you do it because it's right" old time characters.

What does everyone else think of how the characters are being treated compared to how they we treated in the 1940s?

The Wolf

[John C]

The way I see it, giving a character depth is fine, and an excellent business move.  You can tell stories motivated by personality only if the character HAS a personality.  However, giving them all the same angsty pseudo-depth isn't any better than where we started.

On average, using primarily DC examples, I like how Roy Thomas handles things, excepting the stories that only exist to fill a slot, which don't really carry a narrative.  I greatly dislike how Robinson writes characters; he picks a clear favorite and everybody else is a deviant or moron.  Geoff Johns hangs out in the middle, trying hard to make the characters interesting, but occasionally slipping into sloppiness or carelessness.

It's understandable why it works the way it does, though:  Melodrama is much easier to write than drama, and the lowest common denominator can't really tell the difference.

(By contrast, the Golden Age stories are simply a matter of structure.  With sometimes only four pages per month, there isn't a lot of room for anything that doesn't advance the plot, and the plot can't be very complicated, if you want people to follow it.)

[Yoc]

JCO hit on an important point.
Today's books seem to be written to extend a plot to a minimum of 5 issues so they can be collected into a TPB.  The GA idea of a self-contained story are mostly in the past. 
That said some stories do deserve a longer page count.  Y: The Last Man and the Fables books are nice examples of mixing long plot lines with self contained stories that I really enjoyed.  Of course these aren't superhero books but they are comics.

-Yoc

[OtherEric]

And, of course, Fables is nothing BUT new twists on old characters.  And quite probably my favorite current comic.

[Yoc]

Yep, I'm loving Fables and Jack of Fables.  Fun and educational learning of new legends, etc.

[Lanfeust]

Necessary? I don't think so. Depends on what you want to read and what the writer wants to write. Personnally, I like All-Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder very much, but I see it as a variation on well-known characters the Miller way. I enjoy this extreme Goddamn Batman because Frank Miller goes as far as he wants to and makes the whole DC Universe his. I like the way Hal Jordan is depicted as a complete moron, Wonder Woman as an extreme Amazon who despises men, etc. I also like Mark Millar's vision in Superman Red Son, which doesn't prevent me from enjoying as well reading the stories of the original characters. The same goes for Ultimates and Captain America.

My answer is gonna be very simple: as long as the stories are really good, I don't care. But I'm not really fond of basic stories.

Aside of this, I'm not particularly supporting certain takes on characters, such as Geoff Johns' Teen Titans - too close to Marv Wolfman's and not as quite as interesting - or Darwyn Cooke's Spirit - very good art, but not so great stories -, but I liked their views on old DC Characters - respectively in Justice Society of America and The New Frontier.

Must add I also like Alex Ross' Project Superpowers concept - received issue 0 today.

New twists are interesting when they make the stories interesting. Otherwise, they're useless.

[The Wolf]

I knew there would be some good responses. I didn't want to bring up "Watchmen" in my opening comment but now I will. I enjoyed "Watchmen" and it was essentially taking simple Charleton characters and making them more complex. In a way I think it opened up the the idea for what has been done to older characters since.
Ironically, it was Alan Moore also re-introduced the simple sort of superhero stories with "Tom Strong". I enjoyed that comic because it had that feeling of fun that the 1940s comics had.
I do enjoy complex characters and stories but I feel that most writers these days feel that the golden age characters are essencially ridiculous and have to be changed to be worth while. The Next Issue Project version of "Fantastic Comics" I thought captured the spirit of the old characters wonderfully.

The Wolf

[John C]

"Watchmen" might not count as much as we usually think.  It's not often mentioned in the reviews, because it wasn't something that DC owned, but (perhaps bringing this full circle among the related "revival" threads) Moore's original treatment used the Archie characters, rather than the Charlton.  The two Shields would have opened the book, I believe (victim and investigator), while I can spot other counterparts (Mr. Justice comes to mind) that would work just as well.

If you can overlay the story on two distinct sets of characters "with tweaking," I think that's it's fair that the Watchmen folks were completely original characters made to look superficially like revivals rather than actual "new spins."

Oh, and to follow up Yoc's followup to me (or something like that), what I really dislike about modern plotting is the vast expanses of nothingness and blind alleys in modern stories.  They're not only long (which isn't necessarily bad), but they're unsatisfying even when they end.  Look at, for example, DC's "Identity Crisis."  Every issue supplies multiple red herrings, and the final revelation undermines the entire concept; the culprit has nothing to do with the story or the premise, except to trigger a bunch of boring, mopey flashbacks.

And again, look at the "new take" on the DCU it produced:  The heroes are sad incompetants who are "playing hero" rather than accomplishing things, and in the final analysis, are just as bad as the villains.  Ooh, I'm so excited, because I haven't seen THAT before...

[misappear]

Good points all.

I like tweaking.  It can take incredibly weak concepts and make them "more believable," which I think is the goal of fiction--sort of a fictional reality.  Look at all the changes that Superman has experienced.  For example, powers under a yellow sun don't hold a lot of credibility to a character routinely flying around in deep space.  The "solar battery" explanation helped bolster fictional reality, don't you think?  I've always marveled at Green Lantern.  Great concept with the warrior of the guardians idea, but the weakness to yellow?  Does that mean totally impervious to red and blue, but partially weak to orange? 

My favorite new twists would be the original Dark Knight, Camelot 3000, Watchmen, and Miller's (and Micheline's) Daredevil.  Character development was fundamental, logical, and profound.  I still get nostalgic for a good Bat-mite story, but context is everything.  As full of holes in logic as was the Fawcett Captain Marvel universe, they never fail to entertain in their contextual wackiness.  God, I love that stuff.

I read the first two offerings of Project Superpowers and found it to be an attempt to write a new story around old characters.  I never read those characters before, so the nostalgia thing doesn't work for me.  The same type of thing happened in Coundown, as I had no clue as to characters (no development) or why they were so radically changed from 20 years ago when I occasionally read about them.  The impact of these stories probably is directly related to when you jumped into the world of comic characters.  I guess Superman has a daughter, there's another Superboy that isn't a young Clark Kent, and Superman himself is/isn't married to Lois Lane?  Might be good tweaking, but I wasn't around to see it happen, so I have no interest.  It's the price I pay for taking a 20 year break from comic reading. 

This site has allowed me to do something that I never thoght I would be able to do:  Judge the quality of comics based solely on the quality of the story telling (which includes the artwork, of course!)  Regardless of whether the book has super-heroes, or is a mystery or a supernatural yarn, I can just weigh how good each piece was without the financial aspect jading my judgement.  In the past, I spent a lot of money on individual issues of books which would set me to artifically elevating their quality based on what I paid (a little self-justification goes a long way.)

If you want to study an artform, this is the place.

--Dave