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...

Hal Jordan quits or is fired from the Green Lantern Corps Look, this does happen in every superhero book to one extent or another. Spider-Man has quit a bunch of times, Superman "killed" Clark Kent for a while at one point and on and on. Still, nobody comes close to Green Lantern Hal Jordan, for whom the revolving door of interstellar peacekeeper employment hasn't stopped moving since about 1985. This has been a staple of Green Lantern comics for some time now, and partially, it makes sense. One of the big sources of conflict in the books ever since the Denny O'Neill years is that Hal and the Guardians of the Galaxy don't really see eye to eye on policy. Whenever you fight with your boss that much, you run the risk of getting fired. But this guy had been fired, promoted or demoted more times than George Jetson.

At some point, you just have to wonder why he doesn't take a more stable gig as a Darkstar or something, like John Stewart briefly did (and then we all forgot about because Geoff Johns didn't like it and quietly retconned it at the start of Green Lantern: Rebirth). In any event, by the time the New 52 came around and Hal was one of the only characters to retain his history more or less intact, the fact that he started the newly-reborn universe stripped of his ring and suspended from the Corps really had almost no suspense to it at all since...well, you know.

Wealthy hero(es) lose his (or their) fortune, company or swanky headquarters Yeah, we get it: wealthy is a great super-power. But as we see Oliver Queen losing control of his company again on Arrow this season and the Fantastic Four about to break up and be "evicted" from the Baxter Building, we have to ask: how do these people not see the signs at this point? Well, okay. Maybe that's not so fair in the case of Arrow, which is adapting comics, not creating new ones, and which is dealing with the problem for (as far as much of the audience knows) the first time...but losing the company, or the threat of losing the company, has loomed over Oliver a couple of times during the New 52 as well. The Fantastic Four have been evicted so many times it's just comical when it's announced. As you can see at left, it's hardly a new or novel idea. Whether it's that their experiments are "unsafe for the community" (which, let's face it -- they are. The FF lives in New York City and frequently opens up holes in time and space. It's a bit like how the pencil-neck EPA guy in Ghostbusters has a point that gets lost in the fact that he's William Atherton and so we know we're supposed to hate him) or that a villain or other nemesis has somehow orchestrated it, it's been done. Batman gets it less -- probably just because most writers spend so little time on Bruce Wayne. Still, it's happened a few times in the comics and most recently happened in The Dark Knight Rises (in a story that's not entirely dissimilar to the one they're doing with Arrow right now).

It gets dark, Superman (or other solar-powered heroes) loses his powers Throughout the Post-Crisis era, Superman's physiology was described as "a living solar battery," but over the years, it's become one with about as much storage capacity as the one on your solar-powered calculator. This is a pet peeve of mine as it pertains to Superman, but generally speaking the premise remains the same: this is a silly contrivance. It's a bit like Kryptonite, or the Green Lantern ring's 24-hour limit, or exposing any super-powered character to something that instantaneously renders them powerless. There's a school of thought that it will force the writer to think outside the box, but except in very rare cases, it seems to be just a gimmick to create artificial stakes where there really are none, or to write a Batman story with Superman or Green Lantern. In the Final Night storyline, pictured at right, Superman lost his powers as the result of a sustained period of time where the sun was being attacked and consumed by a cosmic entity called the Sun-Eater. Basically, it was a traveling, semi-sentient black hole that bounced from sun to sun chowing down on them until they went nova, propelling the entity to the next galaxy for its next meal. It made some sense for Superman to run out of juice, so to speak, because this wasn't long after he had died fighting Doomsday, and after that, he had to jumpstart his powers, and found them to be somewhat unpredictable. He also went through a period of having a major event every six months or so, giving him little time to restore the (supposedly) 30 years or so worth of energy he had stored up before the Doomsday fight. Ever since this story, though, and especially after Geoff Johns's status quo-changing run with Richard Donner, it's seemed as though about five minutes out of the sun turns Superman into an old Birdman cartoon. Thank God he has eye powers and never thinks to wear sunglasses, or we would just lose the Man of Steel forever. He's not the only one for whom this is an issue, but because the rules were laid out in the '90s and then ignored from about 2000 until the New 52 reboot, Superman sticks with me.  Each new time he would find himself powerless because of a cloud passing overhead or something, it was a source of frustration...not least of all becuase telling a Superman story where he's less than super should be an exception, not a rule. That is, in fact, true more or less across the board. Despite their long histories, most superhero characters are at their best and most interesting when you can go to their roots, and deal with what made them interesting to start with.

Your heroes...HAVE A SECRET! Look, Identity Crisis was a neat trick. I get it. But do we really need this poor man's version revolving around the Death of the Watcher? Back when it was going to be a cosmic-scale murder mystery, it was one of the stories I was most excited for in 2014. But as the promotional campaign has turned to laying bare the "secrets" of the Marvel superheroes' past by inserting "original sins" into their backstories, This isn't the first time this has happened, either, and at some point it's diminishing returns. There's also the matter of internal consistency; when you make a story about how Batman turned against the Justice League because they mindwiped a bunch of supervillains -- and then Batman -- without consulting him, you really shouldn't have a story shortly thereafter where you learn Batman and Martian Manhunter made the decision to mindwipe another villain because...reasons. And that's the problem, here: if you're trying to insert events into the backstory of these characters with long and detailed histories, perhaps it's best to accept that it's difficult to pull off well if those events are character-defining, without totally screwing up everything that has happened in the timeline since.

I can fix it...but I won't! Recently, an old quote by Grant Morrison started circulating on social media. You can see it at right, but the upside is that fans and writers over-think things in superhero stories, to the detriment of the stories themselves. One of the more egregious places that this applies is when a story calls for a character in a superhero universe to suffer from permanent injury or illness. Do we really need to hear some wacky, tin-eared excuse for why Barbara Gordon can utilize super-billionaire-Batman technology to make herself walk again, but won't? Or why the only people in the Marvel Universe suffering from incurable conditions are Ben Grimm, Bruce Banner and Hank McCoy, while everybody else benefits from super-science cures developed by Ben's best friend? The more somebody tries to explain things like this, the dumber the explanation -- and in turn the problem itself -- sounds. Ultimately writers need to remember that whatever they say and do will remain canon for years or decades, and sometimes it's better to take the approach that they did for years with Iron Man's shrapnel: sometimes, things are just broken in a way that can't be fixed. No need to over-explain, no need for some oddball explanation that the hero feels obliged to live in a situation they know could be fixed.