Stan Lee stated more than once that if the actual threat of death does not exist for a character what is the point? Where are the heroics and "death defying acts" and apparent willingness to sacrifice his/her life if that threat does not exist?
Continuity in comics died with Crisis on Infinite Earths from DC comics. They got bitten by the greed bug and found that "crossover" added to a title increased sales and that was in the 1980s and people are still chasing each crossover -basically the sky looking pinky-red WAS the crossover. Marvel saw how that worked so they joined in.
How many reboots have the DC and Marvel universes had since the 1980s? Each time the characters become less interesting and you know that at some point the next crisis will occur and then the characters will change again.
The Avengers hardly features a full team any more and a story what would have fitted into one issue up to the early 1990s now gets spread over 3-4 issues and I don't think that there is one character any more that can get readers invested. Mini series such as Uncanny Avengers (and others) are all dead enders ending on issue 5 and you sit back and realise you spent money following a series that went nowhere. There was no end point to the story except for the occasional "look out for ---"
With The Fantastic Four I have to say I am just hanging on hoping for better. I have followed the Avengers since the 1960s and FF and even X-Men since that time (I gave up on X-Men altogether).
TV shows and movies should not be changing the comics since the people watching those rarely buy a comic and jumping on to every trend going thinking it will bring in more sales does not work. I think that the Black Panther movies such as Wakanda Forever and what turned out to be "Gay Pride Namor" -not my naming and what they did to characters such as Adam Warlock shows that movies have no idea about comics just how to exploit characters and let's not forget the amount of racism the Black Panther movies were allowed to get away with.
Comics should be fun and escapism and not trash booklets to accompany movies -such as the announcement of Dr Doom in the MCU meaning Marvel Comics is ramming Dr Doom into every little crevice they can without the aid of baby oil.
The aim of a comic creator ought to be to produce a comic that sells and makes them a living and anything extra is just that. Creator after creator jumping into comics since the late 1990s all say the same thing; they aim for the lucrative TV or movie deal for their character. I've met 12 such people who described their creations as "shit hot" and heading for the big screen ("TV is nothing these days") and where are they now? Not working in comics.
Fantasy should always remain on the page and not in what you like to think reality is. I've signed contracts with companies who went against those contracts and even openly allowed internet piracy of books I worked on because they got what they wanted and, as with most publishers, they knew that I was too far away to pay them a visit and too poor to afford US lawyers.
How many Spidermen are there now? How many Robins? How many Batmen? How many Hulks? How many creators have comic companies ripped off, never paid and even blocked from getting other work (and here is a true sign of the "comic creator community") and how many comic writers and artists have stabbed fellow creators in the back, libelled them and told outright provable lies about but have never met their "targets"?
The concept of "comic book paranoia" is far from fantasy.
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