Why doesn’t comics have its own Jump The Shark?
Let me explain: I don’t mean “Why doesn’t comics, as a medium, have a moment where everything was ruined and could never quite be repaired ever again?” (in part because, well, I remember the 1990s very well, thank you very much), but why doesn’t comics have its own term like Jump The Shark? Think about it: Television came up with the original, when this happened:
and movies came up with its own “Nuking The Fridge” when this happened:
..but what’s the comics equivalent? I can’t believe that there isn’t a comic that has a scene considered so bad that it’s become synonymous with everything going horribly wrong. I can think of some that would come close (The Rise of Arsenal #3 with the dead cat? Avengers #500 with “Not like this”?), but are any good – or bad – enough? So I’m turning to you, dear internet: Use that comments section below to suggest what the best suggestion for the comics version of nuking sharks would be, make your case, and solve the dilemma that the internet didn’t even know that it had. Please. Do it for the kids.
April 8th, 2011 at 10:14 am
Women in refrigerators.
April 8th, 2011 at 10:20 am
My suggestion would be Marvel’s “One More Day” wipe-out of the Peter Parker/Mary Jane marriage. Not so much for the story itself (which was pretty bad, actually), but rather for revealing (or sparking?) an increasingly apathetic and incoherent style of storytelling.
In other words, instead of finding a more artful way out of their “predicament” (a married Spider-Man), Quesada and Co. decided to just retroactively sweep it under the rug in a giant “the Devil did it” shrug of their shoulders. Since that time, it seems that other series are rebooting and renumbering at an increasing rate, revealing an editorial style that’s listless, unfocused, and more than a little desperate. Sure, an industry has to respond to changing market conditions and tastes, but both DC and Marvel seem to have surpassed that…making for some remarkably frantic and bewildering times to be a regular comic book reader.
April 8th, 2011 at 10:21 am
I stopped reading comics in the 90′s after the Clone Saga. It wasn’t until I read Kavalier & Clay in college that I even thought about picking up a comic book again.
April 8th, 2011 at 10:25 am
For me mainstream comics died with Identiy Crisis. So my comic book version of “Jump The Shark” is “Dr Lights on the Satellite”
April 8th, 2011 at 10:38 am
It has to be Superboy Prime’s wall-smashing, which- amongst other things- brought back Jason Todd, and was just generally an excuse to retcon everything, without real justification or narrative plausibility.
So- my suggestion is:
‘Comic A’ has been punching the walls of reality recently…
April 8th, 2011 at 10:50 am
I’ll second Dean about punching reality.
April 8th, 2011 at 11:09 am
Is there an innate ability for comics to survive or reinvent themselves?
I know that I and other X-Fans will agree that we survived Chuck Austen…and that would kill a franchise in any other medium
April 8th, 2011 at 11:12 am
I think Superboy punching reality and One More Day are both an outgrowth of that same trend of lazy, ad hoc storytelling I identified above. We can disagree on where that mentality took root, but since Identity Crisis and One More Day took place a year apart, 2006-07 looks to be when the shark jumping/fridge-nuking really got going.
April 8th, 2011 at 11:44 am
I seem to remember some Marvel book in which the villain gouges out and eats someone’s eyeball. Am I making that up? If not, “Eating the Eyeball” is kind of catchy. If I am making it up, damn, I’m sick.
April 8th, 2011 at 11:46 am
My first thought was Women in Refrigerators, but that’s more localized to violence against women. The Superboy punching reality fits well, but for a long time, the cry of everything is horribly wrong was U-decide!
Honestly, I think comics are special in that they continually come up with ways to screw things up, so you can’t just point to one thing.
April 8th, 2011 at 11:57 am
Comics don’t have a moment like that, really, because they’re like individual TV shows.
You could argue that a single book might have a JTS moment, such as the already mentioned ‘Devil Did It’ in Spiderman, but the nature of the medium is now more creator rather then character driven (admit it, come on), so it’d be more accurate to say Bendis jumped the shark, or Loeb, or Miller, Millar, ect . . .
April 8th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Punching the walls of reality. No debate.
Weren’t there even lines about “continuity waves” changing reality?
April 8th, 2011 at 12:36 pm
Continuity punch.
April 8th, 2011 at 1:00 pm
I would say One More Day and, while I enjoyed the series itself, Barry Allen’s return in Final Crisis. Both are classic examples of comics’ inability to move forward with stories and its desire to constantly go back.
April 8th, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Azazel-ed.
As in ‘He totally Azazel-ed the end of this issue.’
April 8th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Marvel jumped the shark for me starting with Avengers Disambled. So much stupid stuff since then. X-Men by themselves jumped the shark with Grant Morrison’s run but almost got of it with Whedon’s but look at where they are now.
DC jump the shark moment happen a couple of times last few years. Death of Blue Beatle was it to me. They get better then Batman RIP/Final Crisis mess.
April 8th, 2011 at 1:28 pm
Yeah “Punched the Wall” is a good clean one to fall back on.
Though I have used “Xorn’d” before, as well.
April 8th, 2011 at 1:29 pm
Goddamn Batman
April 8th, 2011 at 1:49 pm
I actually have heard some people referring to “the Superboy punch” as a kind of synonym for “then everything just stopped making any kind of sense, but in a way that I couldn’t be bothered to care about.”
April 8th, 2011 at 2:03 pm
1-800-kill-robin
April 8th, 2011 at 4:31 pm
The Superboy punch, and bringing back Jason Todd as a result. Hands down.
April 8th, 2011 at 7:13 pm
It’s definitely a toss up between Superboy punch and White Lanterns. One “I want to reset continuity without resetting continuity” plot move vs “I can’t believe he seriously did that 80s cartoon” plot move.
April 8th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Hal Jordan going mad killing off the entire GL Corps is the biggest.
But every time they kill off a character for a year (Superman, Batman) they jump the shark. Fortunately time and writers clever cosmic reset buttons (ie Darkest Night) make forgiveness a little easier when the storylines go awry.
April 8th, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Superboy’s Punch and the Mindwipe(s) in Identity Crisis would be mine.
And probably “Bees My God” from Amazons Attack.
April 8th, 2011 at 11:37 pm
The moment that comics became exclusively sold in comic shops and disappeared from news stands, drug stores, convenient stores, etc…
This allowed comic companies to continually raise the prices (far exceeding inflation) and laid the foundation to cater only to the aging fanboy and reject, ignore and eventually lose the next generation of readers.
April 9th, 2011 at 2:56 am
http://delsignore.livejournal.com/
April 9th, 2011 at 4:49 am
Arguably Marvel jumped the shark some time in 1967, when Jack Kirby decided he wasn’t going to see his prime ideas taken from him and screwed around any more.
April 9th, 2011 at 12:12 pm
For Cerebus, many readers abandoned the series around issue #186 with Dave Sim’s Reads tract whose verbose narrative were outcrowding what little illustrations there were.
In For Better or for Worse, many long-time readers grew increasingly disastified with how much attention was being paid to Anthony.
April 9th, 2011 at 12:53 pm
I think the comics equivalent is Disassemble the Avengers.
April 9th, 2011 at 3:18 pm
The complete bastardization of the DCU by Dan Dio & Geoff Johns. Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, rainbow colored lanterns, etc.
April 9th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
I’d say at least the “punching the wall” made made kooky sense in the hyper-reality of DC, and that DC hasn’t been the trainwreck of conflicting stories and narrative mismanagement that it was prior to Infinite Crisis. In a way, it was kind of cute and made as much sense as some alien or super scientific device explaining continuity glitches IN CONTINUITY.
If DC had a “oh, Jesus, wow…” moment for me during the recent era, the “let’s bring back Jason Todd, but we’ll worry later about how he’s alive and if this is useful to the narrative” approach employed fell far more flat.
For me, I quit reading X-Men so long ago, but I think “Bishop’s Mullet” marked the beginning of the end for me, if we’re looking for where a series took a turn from which the thing about the series that I liked fundamentally changed for the worse. In other ways, it also marked the beginning of the 1990′s-era of comics for me. But the nonsensical arrival of Bishop, the “M” tattoos, pockets, scarves?, huge guns, etc… who had ill defined powers, a back story that read like fan-fiction…
Anyway, that changed the tone, and that’s when they lost me.
More recently, I’d say the cynically calculated Roy Harper stuff lost me, and I’m surprised DC is continuing to follow that path through a portion of their output. But the absolutely awful “weaponizing the cat” is the most recent and egregious example of a stupid stunt that marks creative bankruptcy for a team of creators.
April 9th, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Fans ask about a possible new Cloak & Dagger series all the time at conventions, and Marvel usually has the same answer each time: not opposed to the idea, but waiting for the right pitch to come along. Apparently, they’ve found it: as reported on sources including the blog Comics Vanguard, writer Nick Spencer (Morning Glories, Iron Man 2.0, and, as of this past Thursday, a four-time Eisner nominee) and artist Emma Rios (Osborn) are working on a three-issue Cloak & Dagger miniseries, starring the titular cult faves and tying in to the upcoming Spider-Island story in Spinach Artichoke Dip | French Onion Soup Recipe | Onion Soup Recipe Amazing Spider-Man. The news was announced at this weekend’s currently ongoing Kapow convention in London, and was confirmed by Spencer on his Twitter account.
Cloak & Dagger have deep connections to Spider-Man, starting with their debut in 1982’s Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #64, and their supporting roles in the ’90s “Maximum Carnage” crossover. They starred in three different series in their ’80s heyday, the longest one running 19 issues. Most recently, they were the subject of a March 2010 one-shot by writer Stuart Moore and artist Mark Brooks.
April 9th, 2011 at 10:35 pm
I have to agree with the guy who said the introduction of the White Lantern Corps. It was like the perfect storm of cliche writing. Bringing back all those dead characters in and of itself was a lazy reset button on par with OMD or the Superboy wall punching. Additionally, it was such a brutally obvious plot develpment that most of the message boards had predicted it over a year ahead of time. Anybody who thinks the comics industry hit its Nadir in the 90s needs to look at the panel where all those reanimated characters stand around posing in their white underwear while Hal Jordan shouts “If anyone deserves to be called a *GREEN LANTERN CORPS* It’s us!”
April 10th, 2011 at 12:18 am
Hmmm, the end of “Battle for the Cowl”?
April 10th, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Nipples on the Batsuit
April 10th, 2011 at 6:34 pm
I’m the Goddamn Batman!!!!
April 10th, 2011 at 10:42 pm
Pulled a “Brand New Day”.