Making new material just for your existing fans is a losing proposition, as they're going away regardless - some will outgrow the material, others won't have time or money to keep buying, and of course there's always that pesky mortality problem. You'll get some growth as parents pass interest down to their kids, and there will always be some new adopters, but this is below the loss rate.
Not if your fans draw in more fans and your work is actually good, a community that dies tends to die most quickly like now because what it was based on committed suicide lol
Reworking and expanding a character
This is not reworking or expanding, that's what they were doing before; this is not even replacing it with an empty husk or shell of a character it was before
This is outright replacing the character with fanfic and demanding you accept it as the real Lobo, trying to use the popularity of a preexisting character to market their soggy toast
particularly one that is associated with a bad era like Lobo (who is as much a product of the 90s as he is a parody of it) gives you the chance to draw in more fans. It's much like the recent trend of making new versions of a classic character gay, or non-white, or genderswapped in an attempt to draw in people that felt underrepresented among the big heroes.
The problem is that Lobo isn't really interesting enough to carry the story. His new backstory isn't that engaging, and his personality traits don't stand out from other superhero badasses. This Lobo was once the bodyguard and lover of a Czarnian princess, until he had to wipe out the planet's population for an undisclosed reason. Now he uses that reputation to gain headway as an intergalactic bounty hunter.
While he occasionally plays at humor using (bad) witticisms, Lobo still carries guilt from his actions. He even goes so far as to mutilate himself, burning out the part of his brain that allows him to have nightmares, until, that is, his Czarnian physiology makes it grow back. (Lobo, by the way, doesn't exaggerate any of this for humorous effect. It's all presented in a straightforward fashion within the first ten pages.)
Even if DC had gone the extra mile to make Lobo an original character, he'd be a disappointment. We've seen his personality type dozens of times: The ruthless anti-hero with a mysterious past who takes out his aggression on countless enemies. DC Comics already has characters like this. Fiction itself is filled with characters like this. The first issue offers nothing that helps Lobo stand out from the crowd; I mean, the entire reason he kills "Faux-Bo" is because apparently only Lobo has the right to live with his guilt. Give me a break.
What's especially frustrating is that Lobo is a missed opportunity for a new kind of parody. The original Lobo lampooned a hyper-violent character cliche that became the defining trait of 90s comics. The New 52 Lobo could have done this for modern comics, mocking super-serious heroes and their tragic backstories. The New 52 is dying for a series that could take the piss out of itself like that, offering self-aware humor instead of dour character reboots. Unfortunately, DC is playing this one straight, hoping he'll become a hit like Batman or Wolverine.
Instead we get edgyyyyyyyyyyyyy
I do recall there is this one big problem in particular for big execs where they want to do the choices that do not make good story, but make for good marketing. This reeks of that :
P
That's not getting into the disturbing trend to replace classic characters with diverse
tm new
tm heroes, here they don't even have any excuse for political motivation as it's just poor life choices lol, reminds me of the sheer amount of salt people had when the TT show was turned into a soulless comedy that was to TT what George Lucas did to Indiana Jones based off of comedy shows being cheap and profitable running off of the success of comedies, where now it's the same in reverse. Dingusbats need to follow that story-building is not a paint by numbers lego game to pander to your audience, that goes to corporate accessibility and the other extreme, devolving into fanwank. Craft good story, play to its strengths, never lose sight of what makes the characters
them and not just interchangeable with generic scifi figure #45, if shit is out of character it is shit - and you can't get any more symbolic than your insert literally killing and vaporizing the original, leaving in its place edgy self-harming pretty boy anti-hero #9949214 :
P
Also we're not going back to "bad era" moral speak for censoring things others aren't allowed to like lol
Author
Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14853655 times)