I agree, but that's not what I was saying. I was saying that in franchises, especially generational ones, change is undesirable. Consider LAW & ORDER which had a continually shifting cast but was essentially the same, but if they had kept rejigging the entire structure of the show every season it would not have lasted twenty years; the audience gives up after a few years and the characters are eventually exhausted. Not that there's anything wrong with progressive narratives like THE WIRE or AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER in which characters are exhausted throughout the length of the series. I'm saying that change in one of them is a desired convention while change in the other is not.
In the case of superhero comics, the problem is not that they want to change the status quo or that they can't, but rather, you can't continually hype a big event as mattering if you continually do it and never truly change much if anything. Batman is still Batman. Grant Morrison's run is perfectly fine for the most part, but it's still Batman. Being Batman. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is a problem, however, in saying that "Batman won't be Batman anymore!" every year. NO MAN'S LAND was a great idea (if not a great actuality) but you can't have that every year, otherwise it just becomes background noise. If one person is shouting in a room, he's loud. If hundreds of people are all shouting, it's called a "party" and you can block it all out, and there's no such thing as 'loud' or 'quiet'. This is what this scheduling is like, and it's particularly problematic in that Marvel and DC don't consider that the other guy's big events are hurting their big events because they all fill the same space.
In the case of FEAR ITSELF, THE SIEGE just ended not long ago, and it was an anti-climactic resolution to ten years of events. The idea that they're now going to start another one is completely repellent - no matter who's doing it.
What's interesting, is at the moment over on FANTASTIC FOUR they are building up to a huge event that will change the book forever; one of the main four will die.
This is as old as the ****ing title and it just happened already. But you know what? People are digging Hickman's work and they're excited to see where this series is going. But, every time someone at Marvel goes on about "How it will change everything" and "Someone will really properly die this time" and it's getting a new #1 and black polybag, everyone rolls their eyes and goes, "Shut the **** up. Let us be."
People are totally fine with a big event that changes the Marvel universe completely provided the new world is better than the old one. What they are not okay with is that it comes out six months after the last big event and they are told how big an event this big event will be, and then very little happens and most of the characters they like are now alien to them.
