Yeah, the second thing there is really what drives me crazy man. I think if I had a dollar for every comic that's been put out that seems to "reform" or "change" Red Hood and his violent tendencies, only for it to be reset like a month later, I'd have more money the WB lost on their games division. I'm still kinda mad that nothing from the Blue Hood storyline in Batman: Urban Legends just didn't stick like at all outside of the new costume.
It's the true nemesis of any comic book character; editorial department mandates where nothing can actually change for more than a month before getting reverted so the next writer can still use the character. Sad. Was the Urban Legends where he had the sub-zero costume?
Okay, back home with my funny books. (Now, to download everything I didn't buy, sorry Ghost of Stan Lee!) Wrote this out in that JFK thread initially, but really it belongs here.
This kind of dynamic is exactly what made Kieron Gillen's
Journey Into Mystery run centered on the "new" Loki so good back in...I want to say 2012? They have Loki scheme a way to avoid dying for real, he comes back as a child and gets a fresh start. There isn't *really* an evil agenda, he's just desperate to do something new; "What good is a trickster god when everyone already knows you're a liar?", that sort of thing. In the meta sense, the whole run is asking if such an established character can genuinely change, or if the status quo reset is inevitable, for "lore" and "market expectations".
It helps that the whole thing is a lot funnier than it sounds, Gillen is such a fun writer. Loki is still a trickster, but even when he lies for good reasons, they keep blowing up on him. Eventually, he's closed in by all the deceptions and con's he ran throughout the series, and it wraps up with the kid forced to die if he wants to save everyone he's come to give a shit about. Not a physical death, but the death of this version of himself; it's the death of a point of view, as they said at the end of
The Sandman.
The final page is a glaring accusation at the reader/audience for demanding the status quo, and it was such a bittersweet goodbye at the time.....buuuuuuut it was also SO FUCKING GOOD, and influenced Tom Hiddleston's character in the movies and the comics going forward, that Loki has *genuinely* changed in the canon of Marvel Comics. The next writer of an ongoing for the character and that narrative, Al Ewing, has an issue where Loki and Dr. Doom agree that magic is "telling a story SO good, the universe believes it." I'd like to think he was referencing the previous run when he wrote that, because Gillen accomplished that oh-so-rare achievement of changing established comics. For the better, I think!
I know I've already praised this one before, but I haven't written anything on here in awhile and I didn't want to suppress the urge while it was there, you know?
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