“As children, we all grew up and played together. Sometimes we even shared our toys, our bicycles, and our skateboards. But the cardinal rule was to take care of the toys or bicycle that you borrowed. Woe unto the kid in the neighborhood who returned that toy broken or the bicycle with a flat tire. You didn’t want to be the one who couldn’t borrow any more.”

By BOB FREEMAN – Paint Monk’s Library Writer

I have long referred to a comic creator’s role on an established property as that of a child being invited to play in someone else’s sandbox. While there, their imagination can flourish. They get to have fun — real fun, but while playing with someone else’s toys. And when playtime is over? Well, a good child leaves the toys where he found them. Unbroken. Largely unchanged, save for a little more wear and tear.

More and more, creators are losing that perspective. Why? Because editors are letting them. Change, not just for change’s sake, but splashy, over-the-top changes to long established characters, hoping for a bit of press to spike a sale here or there. Deaths. Power creep. Gender/Race swapping. Good guys go bad. Bad guys turn good. Or worse, everything’s morally ambiguous or filtered through flavor-of-the-month social awareness.

I don’t want to sound like an old curmudgeon, but let’s face it, the comic industry that many of us have been fans of for decades, is faltering. The slow rot has reached the roots, and I’m afraid what little life remains cannot be revived…

Here’s where I show my age…

When I was a kid, growing up in rural Indiana, I used to pick up pop bottles as I walked toward the nearest town and cash them in at Cain’s Sundries, an old school soda shop that had a magazine rack filled with comic books.

The comics were 15¢ then. I usually could snatch up anywhere from 6-10 comics every week (along with a fountain drink and a pack of bubble gum cards). The thing that was interesting, and that I really didn’t wrap my head around until later, is that many of those comics were reprint issues. Stuff like Marvel’s Greatest Comics, or Marvel Tales, or any of the anthology books DC was spitting out. All reprints. And yet, they all seemed right in line with the current books.

Why? Because Batman was Batman. He looked and acted liked the Caped Crusader. Always. Same for Spider-Man, the FF, and all the rest. Even when artists changed, the new guys were expected to stay on model.

All that eventually changed. And the characters began to change stylistically, they also began to change internally. Everything started to turn dark. Everything got grim and gritty. The heroes weren’t as heroic as they had been before. Sales fell off. Kids found other interests…

The hobby was now made up of adults who had been reading comics since they were kids. An industry that used to rely on fresh blood coming in every year was suddenly saddled with people like me who continued to read comics into college and beyond.

Well, those comic fans became writers and artists and editors, and the shift began. The stories became more adult. All those bad ideas that editors used to curb were now filtering into the books. Heroes began to age. Become bitter.

Creators began to break the toys in the sandbox.

New readers became fewer and fewer. Speculation gave way to gimmick after gimmick until we’re where we’re at now: an industry in crisis.

How do we correct this? Fix the toys. Give them a fresh coat of paint. Clean up the sandbox. Make comics that are timeless. Make comics about heroes again. And when it’s time to move on, creators, please, leave the sandbox like you found it.