OK, so it's 1989. All of the X-Men are dead, except they're not dead, they're just living the in the Australian Outback. Wolverine, Storm, Rogue, and Colossus are there, but the rest of the team is kinda b-roll. There's Psylocke, a boring frumpy English chick; Dazzler, the I-kid-you-not disco superhero, and some other equally pointless characters. There's some business with an aborigine dude who teleports them places, a teenager who was living at the mall and now hides in their basement, and then some robot clone of Storm dies and then...
Yeah. At this point (and not before, somehow), the audience starts to suffer what TVTropes.org refers to as Arc Fatigue, meaning they got really sick of this story arc and wanted it to go away now. This happens every now and then - the writers paint themselves into a corner, the fans are complaining loudly from their folks' basements, and things are looking bleak.
This is no problem in the world of comics, all they've got to do is invoke the Reboot. Comic books get special dispensation to use this tool - they come up with an absurd plot device - in this case some giant chrystal gateway thing - that levels the playing field. Reboot happens, and Dazzler the disco superhero moves to another planet, Storm's not dead anymore, and Psylocke is inexplicably Asian and slutty.
And somehow this was better than the dead X-Men in the Outback arc. Ah comics.
Recemtly, this has been going on with movies - the Batman movie franchise rebooted with mad success. We went from the unberably campy mess of Batman and Robin, to the new, dark Batman, which actually got an Oscar nod (albeit with the help of a drug overdose). Star Trek recently rebooted with some success. Lost, IMO, played the reboot card one too many times.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we could just reboot our lives at will? What would you reboot if you could?
1 comment:
Whatever happened to Illiana Rasputin? I had a crush-ola on her when I was... what? 14?? (shoulda kept the first edition too, now that I thinks about it).
Actually, considering I'm totally out o' th' loop on this sort of thing-- the Bedazzler?? Wha??-- where WOULD you even BEGIN to bring ones-self up to even about 3/4 of the way UP the arc??
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