I'm over stimulated.

I think if i have to see one more "changes the status quo forever, never seen anything like it, people will die be brought back to life so we can kill them again before bringing them back to life in a way you've never seen before so we can kill them to take them back to their roots because we never should have messed with them in the first place" epics i think my arse is going to explode.

Don't get me wrong, i have loved some of the stories that have come out of these fantasmagorical epic. Civil War was great, Blackest night, Sinestro Corps War, Legion Of Three Worlds and even Fear Itself seems pretty interesting so far, but please... enough.

I fear that in comics desperate attempt to bring in more readers that they are alienating the ones they already have. I fear that the plot pool is being emptied and if an idea can only be sustained a matter of months before being scrapped for the sake of something new, then how long can comics sustain themselves? An example that comes to my mind as i'm writing this is J. Micheal Straczynski's run on Thor. Straczynski attempted to relaunch Thor in a new and interesting, which manner which was in using the tried and true method of returning him to his roots. As we now know, the twist on this was placing Asgard in Oklahoma and allowing the Gods a more asserted sense of humanity as a result. I was not a huge fan of the series, but i did respect and admire the freshness it brought to Thor, who had always been a difficult character to write and a difficult hero to relate to.

The problem i have with such notions is how quickly the modern major comic companies will change the playing field. After only two years of playing with this idea, Asgard was knocked from the sky in yet another major epic, Siege.

"HEY!", you may be saying, "TWO YEARS IS A LONG TIME, FOUR EYES!" And in that you may be right.

But that's only around twenty four issues (if they're shipped on time which they NEVER are but i shall rant about that later).

I feel that maybe ideas are maybe changed purely for the sake of change when there may be more life in them.

I wonder how many years a writer like Peter David, or Chris Claremont in his prime could have gotten from the Asgard/Oklahoma scenario. I wonder how many up and coming talents could have been given the chance to take the idea deeper and into more interesting elements. We will never know now as the Gods have left and Oklahoma has been abandoned.

Overkill is a very great danger in the comic publishing world. Always has been. But what i worry about is how long the industry can sustain fresh and interesting stories for its readers when it burns through ideas so quickly.

Can the well run dry? Are there an infinite number of Superman stories to draw from? Can we reboot every ten years, every five years, every year and hope the wheels don't fall off? I don't know.

What i do know is that i miss the smaller strokes. I miss reading a spider man comic and wanting to read the next issue, not because his life is going to change FOREVER or because he's going to die or his whole life be made to be a dream, but just because i care about the character himself, because it was well written. Well written these days seems to mean how much you can screw with the history of the character or what interesting way you can find to kill someone.

I don't want to see my heroes die anymore. I don't want to see their homes burned or revamped or retconned or whatever the hell it is they do with them in the back rooms of the majors.

I just want to read good stories. I think we're missing them, a heart, a backbone to the comic book world which has gone astray. I don't mean to sound old fashioned or that i don't think comics should progress, i just think that we shouldn't throw out the craft with the bath water, if you know what i mean.

If you don't then i hope you enjoy the seven hundreth epic tussle between Doomsday and Superman, where Doomsday absolutely THRASHES Superman in a game of Pong.