I think that, for the most part, they're boring. I want my fiction to be as escapist as possible, and most superhero comics are not escapism. I'll take a pop at Spider-Man, Marvel's flagship character. Spider-Man, or his alter-ego, Peter Parker, is a young man. He's poor, struggles to pay his bills and look after his family. As a freelancer, his job is constantly uncertain, and he never knows if his next paycheck is going to be his last.
This is not escapism. This is my life. And I don't want to be reminded of that in comic book or movie form. I don't want to pay money, hard-earned money, to be reminded that I don't have much money.
Now, add to that the fact that Parker is a whiny bitch. He spends a good chunk of his comics complaining about how his life sucks and it isn't fair that bad things keep happening to him. Whilst swinging around a huge city like most folks (even in his universe) would love to be able to do.
What makes this more galling is that he had joined the Avengers recently, (I don't know if the memberships still stands) so his money worries have pretty much gone, but still he finds reasons to complain.
Peter Parker is the living embodiment of White Guy Problems. He's an excuse for immature white guys to vicariously complain about how hard they have it. And it sucks. And more to the point, it's boring.
Spider-Man is the extreme of this, and lord knows I don't want to go back to the EXTREME style of the nineties. But he's the template. Make the protagonist relatable by giving them problems the reader can relate to. Which is fine, but Parker just complains about stuff that he shouldn't really be complaining about. He's an immature idiot who never learns from his mistakes and whines about it.
Which is why I don't care about it being Parker in the new Marvel films. Hell, I want it to be the new kid from the Ultimate books.
Parker should have been retired during the Clone Saga after May died the first time. Then Reilly should have had a few years in a soft reboot, and see if he's any better. Anyway...
I used to like X-Men. Back in the late eighties- early nineties, when Chris Claremont was coming off and Jim Lee and Joe Madureira were starting on the books, they were enjoyable. Going into space, the Legacy Virus, the madness that was Psylocke (which I'm not even going to start to try and explain here), X-Babies, the Phalanx and Generation X, yellow and blue teams,... even Onslaught. It was big, bold, fun stuff. But then, after Onslaught, something changed. It wasn't as fun anymore. And around the time of the movies it all started getting... "gritty". Serious. Nope, you lost me.
Now, serious is something that comics, and X-Men comics in particular (given the real world parallels with LGBT issues), should be able to do, and again, Lord knows "God Loves, Man Kills" is an excellent book, but in changing the dynamic of the team, and in some cases the characters themselves (Cyclops, I'm looking at you) any interest I once had is gone.
It's not all bad. I enjoy Guardians Of The Galaxy, because it's bonkers and none of the protagonists have to worry about paying the bills. (as an aside, I understand that the Peter Parkers marriage was written out of continuity in "One More Day" because the editor, Joe Quesada, thought that having Parker be married made him less relatable. And yet, we seem to have no trouble relating to a gun-toting space raccoon...) When Batman is written well, the stories are top-drawer. Transformers is going through a patch of such high quality we couldn't have imagined five years ago. Hell, I even like the Sonic The Hedgehog comics. I guess I just want my escapism to have more escapism and less real-world stuff in it. Hell, the madder the better. Throw me Gods and monsters, epic space threats, teams of outlandish characters coming together to thwart a universe eating threat. But make it fun.
