5 Comics Stories That Never Need To Happen Again

There are some superhero stories that have already been done as well as they’re likely to be done.And then done again, and again, and at this point they’re just not…stories. They just seem like a motion you have to go through every so often in order to be true to the character. But in the context of an ongoing soap opera (as most mainstream superhero comics are), you begin to stretch believability when the same things happen to the same people too many times. It feels like nobody grew or learned from last time.Also, you know…Let’s be clear: this story isn’t about stories that are inherently bad. What it’s about, is stories that have been done so many times that they no longer hold any dramatic value. Fans see them coming and just roll their eyes, knowing that of course it doesn’t mean a new status quo or any real character growth; if it did, it would have happened the previous thirty or forty times somebody tried it.At the wonderful pop culture resource TV Tropes, they’ve got what they call “dead horse tropes.” The tropes of storytelling, the site says, aren’t inherently bad. They’re popular for a reason. But sometimes something gets so overused, or is so badly used often enough, that it becomes an unintentional self-parody. Then, if you use it, you do so at your own peril because realistically none of your audience will be able to take you seriously. That’s where a lot of these fall in…