New Brevoort Formspring

>Seems to me comics are following the same trajectory as the American daytime soap opera. Long, long stories where dramatic change is promised, but things usually go back to status quo before too long, character death and rebirth are somewhat perfunctory, rapid aging so that kids can become teen heroes or conversely keeping the kid at a really young age (I think Franklin Richards was the same age as Cassie Lang at one point…), and like those soap operas that grow ever smaller every year, the comics industry has stagnated, and only reaches a small core audience that comes and goes. I think this mindset, more than anything else you think about the audience is what keeps the comics in this box. The thriving Latin American telenovela and Korean period dramas all tend to be stronger than the American model and while that may be as much cultural as anything, these shows are much stronger in terms of packing their emotional punch and actually following through with their promise of change and character development and finishing strong within two to three years with resonance. I just think if you going to copy a model, you should copy the one that still works instead of the one that’s hopelessly outdated.>

We don’t copy any model, we take the best from every idea that comes down the pike. And we certainly aren’t looking to transition to a world in which Spider-Man wrapped up publishing next year and we had to come up with some other equally-good idea–creators have been trying to do that since 1962, with few successes. These things that you’re complaining about, it seems to me, are a symptom of perhaps having read the books for too long and not having accepted them for what they are and how they operate. It’s like complaining that the Simpsons are still the same ages after all these seasons and nobody has learned anything. Yes, they are–that’s part of your buy-in.