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Universe Wreckers

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KevinP:
Just curious ... Is anyone else as bored as I am that just about every super hero team book from JLA to Avengers is about saving the universe, the timestream or reality itself?  Not only in the big summer crossover events, but routinely?  The first arc in the current AVENGERS was about the timestream coming undone, then the very next one was about an artifact that controls reality. This makes a great plot if used sparingly.  I think the first one i read was the first Kronos story in GREEN LANTERN, and it was an awesome idea.  But it destroys all suspension of disbelief when saving the whole entire universe is just another day on the job.

Yoc:
I agree and I'm not even reading them.
Personally I enjoyed the smaller character development stories.
I recall 'filler' books like the Avengers one where Beast and WonderMan were featured.

KevinP:
That's why the only DCs I read (until the September restart) are Batgirl annd Zatanna.  I like AVENGERS ACADEMY at Marvel for the characters, but even they, a team of young Avengers interns, were guilty of saving the universe recently.

kevin

OtherEric:
Hmm, trying to recall what team books I've read recently.  Legion of Super-Heroes, but that's not a title I can rationally discuss.  (It's my one epic complete run.)  Birds of Prey tends to be a bit more street-level, I can't recall them ever saving the universe in the book itself.  (Although many of the cast members have helped in other books at other times.)  Agents of Atlas, which I still miss, was never on that level either.

John C:
I guess I find it more acceptable than most, at least in theory.  I mean, you already have most of the big-name heroes saving entire worlds regularly, because that's what they do.  So when you put them on a team together, the implication is that they need to do something bigger, and reality is reasonably big.

On a less meta-fictional level, you also have a lot of obsessive reality-destroying godlings wandering around the universe pissed off at their last defeat.  The surprise in-story should be that this doesn't happen continuously and there's rarely more than one threat to time-space at a time.

So, in theory, I'm OK with it.  In practice, the stories tend to be pretty thin (Marvel's go-to is still to defeat the villain through the power of the scavenger hunt, I believe, while DC's is to mess with the timeline even more to prevent the adventure from happening) and the results are really the star, the stories just being excuses for a new status quo the latest writers decided they want because they can't be bothered to continue someone else's story.

To be fair, most of the stories I loved as a kid were on that scale, so I see the potential in it.  And if I want a story about people in uniforms beating the crap out of petty criminals, I can talk to cops, so I don't have much interest in reading comics about that sort of thing.  It's when it's used as a tool to write out unpopular stories, institutionalizing the idea that history is whatever the writer says it is without just saying it, that it gets on my nerves.

The stories that piss ME off are the "board room of doom" stories that were in fashion for about ten years.  You know, where the villains (or, increasingly, the heroes) spent most of an issue following Robert's Rules of Order discussing how brilliant this plan is.  You know what?  I have meetings at work.  They're not fun.  Reading about other people being at meetings?  Unsurprisingly, LESS fun.

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