"Late" Sunday Post - What Really Grind My Gears..

...about comics.

There are a couple but I'm going to go with the one that is the most on my mind: overexposure of certain characters while great characters go under or unused.  Now, I know that many of my recent posts have bashed Marvel, and unfortunately, while I love many Marvel characters and teams and stories, one of my biggest gripes for the last few years is that too many of their most popular characters are overused.  Wolverine has at least two solo books, as well as being two Avengers teams, X-Force and at least one X-Men book.  Spider-Man also in his own titles published twice every month, a team-up book, two Avengers teams, and two Fantastic Four books.  Recently, Hawkeye was in Avengers, Secret Avengers and Avengers Academy.  Storm was in two X-Men books and the Avengers.  And it doesn't look like much will change with MarvelNOW!

Now, do I understand the want to put the most popular characters in many titles.  I think when Bendis put Wolverine and Spider-Man on the New Avengers it was ballsy and interesting.  I think putting Spider-Man onto the solo FF titles when Johnny Storm 'died' it was cool and made sense.  With Schism, the X-books allied into two camps, where four X books took place in the Utopia/San Francisco area and two other X books took place in Westchester, NY.  Again, it made sense to me that characters that live in the same area or work for the same school could cross into each other.  I am even ok with characters being on two Avengers squads when both squads are based from Avengers Mansion crossed over as well.

But it's too much.  Does DC do it too?  Yes. Three Batman solo books, with Batman & Robin, and Batman in two teams in the beginning of the New 52. But he's the only one.  Marvel has so many great Avengers, X-Men and Fantastic Four characters related and connected to those teams and at one time have been members.  While characters like Black Knight, Photon/Pulsar, Hercules and Black Panther are unused, Spider-Man, Wolverine and the cast of the Avengers movie are in everything and everywhere.  And it sucks.  And it's hard to make sense how so many characters are in so many places. And mostly it's frustrating.

I'm ok with a character having two solo books.  I'm ok with a character having a 'team-up book' - such as Avenging Spider-Man, Captain America and _____, and Batman & Robin.  I'm ok with a character being on more than one team and even regularly guest-starring in a book that is integrally linked with one of the other, such Captain America showing up semi-regularly in other Avengers books or Wolverine showing up in X books that are linked by the Jean Grey School.  What drives me crazy is Storm being part of the X-Men on the West Coast and being with the Avengers in New York City.  What drives me crazy is Wolverine being everywhere at once and on every team and Spider-Man who has a job and seems to be everywhere in NYC and on four teams?  What drives me crazy is the same the ten or twelve characters being used everywhere in everything and great characters never being used.

At the end of the day, Marvel and DC often are very conservative in how they use characters.  Unless they are supremely confident in their writer, they usually have at least one or two of those two or twelve characters in their teams.  I think it would be ballsy and great for Marvel and DC to take more chances on less known but fan/cult favorite characters that just might reach out to knew audiences.  You want to get more readership- well the female market is largely untapped.  You're telling my a Bat book with one or two female leads might be great.  If you have four Avengers teams with MarvelNow! why not populate one with unused characters who are mostly female.  It's really two bad that so many great characters are waiting on 'top' writers to give them a shot.