ITT: Confusing comic shit that scares readers away

Why is Hawkman's backstory so fucking confusing and convoluted? Why do writers keep insisting on changing and retconning it over and over? Metal has made it even worse.
A guy with wings that hits stuff with a mace shouldn't be too hard to understand, but all the
mutually contradictory pharaoh/reincarnation/archeologist/alien/cop/immortal/limbo/Carter Hall Jr./Hawkgod/amnesia crap makes it hard to get into the character, or Hawkgirl.

Because people have a hard on him for being Golden Age Hero, but they don't want to turn him into old guy. Also, He always has this one guy in offices who believes that he finally figured out Hawkman and everybody else is a faggot.

nobody knows what to do with him at this point

They should have just kept them as separate characters just like the Golden and Silver Age versions of the Flash and Green Lantern were.

They kinda did. But then somebody decided 'Nah, you are all wrong and I'm right' and they started retconing.

> Thanagar's champion, Hawkman can talk to birds. He also can't talk to birds. Sometimes, he can't even speak normally at all! Even if he could talk normally, or to birds, there are no birds on Thanagar, because it does not exist. Hawkman was sent here to study Earthly police methods, because Thanagar's own methods suck! That's OK though, because Thanagar still does not exist! Yet it is populated by peaceful barbarians! Who are stupid, and also warlike!

>Like all non-existant Thanagarians, Hawkman has human legs! Which are reincarnated legs! Alien legs! Egyptian legs! Thanagarian legs! Bird legs! God legs! Bird-God legs! This is because he's ... a God! An Earthman! A Thanagarian! An American! An Egyptian! A common human! A reincarnated prince! A hawk! A God! A God-Hawk! A Hawk-God! A God-like Hawk God of Other, Less Godly Hawks!

>In New England, the weather is so prone to change there's an old saying: "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes." To paraphrase this saying: 'If you don't like the current version of Thanagar -- or even its very existence -- wait five minutes."

Good post

These stupid memes do a lot more to keep people away from Hawkman than any actual comic stuff

Nah.If anyone gave enough of a shit they'd just read the fucking comic instead of bitching about it.

I read Hawkman's comics. There's gems, but they are mostly bad. People keep sucking Johns' dick, but his run on Hawkman is fucking terrible. His other books are mostly aimless and the interesting elements they did develop (Gentleman Ghost redemption arc, even reincarnation) are either dropped or abandoned, because Johns or somebody else likes their Golden/Silver Age so much. Either that or he is fucked by DC's 'people liked it, so it's in continuity now' approach.
Even Ostrander's Hawkworld, which was a solid book, kinda lost itself half way through.
There is a reason Hawkman's ass was banned from DC for a while and you guys know it.

I'm not saying he's some great character with incredible comics but he's not worse than any other C-lister with only a handful of good runs, like Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, even Iron Man.

But the problem is at least with those guys, if someone is interested in the character they'll go out and read that material. With Hawkman they go "le ebin hawksnarl!!1" and assume all of his comics must be incomprehensible gibberish despite it only being confusing if you look at all of his comics as a whole instead of individually (like, say, if you were reading a Sup Forums copypasta on reddit)

So it's basically Thundercats. OK.

You know what keeps people away from comics?
The fact that you have to pay so much for so little every month.
With a single issue costing 3+ dollars and the read time being under 10 minutes, that's the shittiest value of any form of entertainment. Even ridiculous 3D IMAX DBOX movie theater tickets have better value than that.

And that's without all the predatory tricks that comic book companies do. There's an event out? Well to get the WHOLE story you need a fucking road map to figure it out.
>Ok, it goes from Issues 431-438 of Team Fuckwad to one issue of Captain Faggot to Shit Event 1-3 then it cuts to Cockman #712 ten back to 439 of Team Fuckwad then I need to read Issue 0 of Shit Event then to Lady Cocksucker, and then....
You have to do all that and the problem of shitty value is still there. You're paying $50+ bucks to have the fucking privilege to be led through a maze with the hopes that you suddenly decide to buy more Lady Cocksucker issues every month. It's cheap and predatory.

There's nothing about comics that makes it easy or even appealing for new readers.
You want to save comics? Cut the crap and increase the value. Keep the same format and go full digital with 99 cent issues. Or change everything and put out ONE (1) book a year per ongoing.

Problem is that they were not different enough to keep the separation.

There are huge differences between golden age and silver age Green Lantern, Atom, and Flash. Their look, their costumes, names, everything.

But Silver age Hawkman had the same name, costume, day job, everything. Only change was that he came from another planet instead of egypt. Most people never saw the need to keep the alien origin if he was 99.99999% the same damn guy.

I never really got the point in making him an alien, but he still wears fake wings and a harness like the golden age guy.

Why not just make him into a bord alien if we are going with the alien thing?

>Confusing comic shit that scares readers away
Pricing, distribution, comic stores, comics in general.

These keep people away way more than recycling the same old posts about Hawkman or Donna Troy being confusing. Which they are, but people weren't going to read them in the first place.

Because aliens were the 'in thing' during the Silver Age, I assume, but having the wings be something that he wears means he can look human in a secret identity or have them just off in a fight for cheap thrills.

There have been some attempts to address some of these, but this.

The problem is that comics are still very much a hobby, and hobbies appeal mainly to enthusiasts, who are willing to invest significant time and pay a premium price.

Which wouldn't be that big a deal if capes being 70% of the market wasn't holding back comics as a medium.

Marvel aren't wrong for trying to expand the market but as we know they're going about it all wrong, whereas DC understands kids aren't going to go into a comic book store and wisely made DC Superhero Girls books right there in the toy aisle, promoted by a toyline and cartoon.

>Because aliens were the 'in thing' during the Silver Age
You're 100% correct. Schwartz and Kanigher were big scifi fans and part of their initiative to bring back superheroes was to combine them with scifi which were popular comics at the time.

You didn't see people really trying to bring back all the Golden Age elements until the late 60's when Golden Age fans started to write the comics.

One of those heads looks like Hank Hill in the thumbnail

We could have avoided all this bullshit if someone with sense just said Carter was fucking tripping on LSD and thought he was an alien when he wasn't (and Hawkgirl too cuz fuck it). Keep the Thanagarians and shit, whatever, just say they thought Carter was one of them and his doped up brain went "yeah ok".

Better than all this other shit they tried.

>There's gems, but they are mostly bad.
Oh thank fuck, I thought it was just me.

"It was all a dream" is much more stupid. The merged version added a lot to his mythos.

I mean "archaeologist who found some wings" is all fine and good for a Golden Age character where it's just cool adventures with no continuity, but by the Silver Age they were trying to build a world around these characters. Superman had Krypton, Wonder Woman had Paradise Island, Green Lantern had the corps. And they couldn't really expand the Egyptian angle much more because that was already Dr. Fate's gimmick.

The problem came with Crisis where they now had to explain how the fuck Golden Age and Silver Age Hawkman could be the same person, and Hawkman was far, FAR from the only victim of the merged reality and Zero Hour's "fixes".

Is it a meme if it's 100% true?

Someone should do an epic Hawkman origins and retcons storytime one of these days. Every issue that either built upon or reconed who he is.

I am reminded of how Jeph Loeb pointed out to DC that Supergirl's Post-Crisis origin involving Matrix and angels was too damn confusing and he thankfully brought back the classic and much more straightforward "Superman's cousin who survived Krypton's destruction".

>and Hawkman was far, FAR from the only victim of the merged reality and Zero Hour's "fixes".
Other than Donna Troy whose continuity is arguably worse than Hawkman's, what else did Zero Hour ruin?

Somebody post Mantis' backstory.

JSA/Infinity Inc/Young All-Stars, Legion of Super-Heroes

IMO Donna's history isn't worse because unlike Hawkman she just kept getting retconned instead of literally having disparate versions fused together

Imagine if magical doppleganger playmate Donna, rescued orphan Donna, and titan of myth Donna all got combined into a fucking amorphous blob like Hawkman did

Same with Power Girl just going back to being an Earth-Two refugee. Around that time a bunch of characters got fixed, thankfully.

Shame his actual writing of Supergirl was fucking awful and set the model for like 5 years of Supergirl being completely worthless.

I challenge you on Archie Legion being confusing.

The post-Crisis Legion was hurt a lot by losing their connection to Superboy and Supergirl, and the 5YL Legion book was not kind to the Legion's popularity.

I can agree that it wasn't confusing (and Legion already had more than its fair share of confusing shit by that time) but I think that era killed a lot of the series appeal and was unnecessarily revisionist when they could have just fixed the problems with 5YL or made tweaks instead of the wholesale reboot.

Granted I wasn't around back then so this is the perspective of someone who read it almost 20 years after the fact.

Everything having to do with continuity.

Renumbering every other year, even when the book doesn't need it.

This is why manga sold so much better than comics.

Manga is extremely continuity heavy, wtf are you talking about
You literally cannot read any volume of a manga series if you haven't read all of the previous volumes

If you want to start reading Batman, you go fucking buy the book literally called "Batman vol. 1" and go from there, just like you would Naruto or whatever

Every attempt to go back to the alien versions have sucked ass too.

Pretty much every example I see in this thread is about DC. Does Marvel have anything this bad?

>Manga is extremely continuity heavy, wtf are you talking about
That really depends on the book.

It was a straight shot from the 60's through the 90's. Every time things got fucky at Marvel it meant shit stories that are often ignored, retconned immediately or ruined a character. They don't really have situations like at DC where Spider-Man was a robot for two decades and an alien for another two.

Donna Troy

People like to cite Cable, but "Cyclops' son who was sent to the future and became a badass cyborg soldier" isn't really that complicated. The only convoluted thing about it is explaining that his mother is actually a clone of Jean Grey who later became a Demon Queen, but that almost never comes up in stories anyway.

Marvel in the 70's and 80's were a pretty tight ship continuity-wise since Jim Shooter kept a close eye on things to ensure nothing contradicted one-another. There was a lot of stupid shit (like Jean Grey being revealed to have never been the Phoenix at all through doppelganger shenanigans), but it all made sense.

DC was comparatively much more fast and loose with continuity, especially in regards to B and C-list characters, for whom writers were given a lot of leeway to do what they wanted and ignore prior continuity. COIE was supposed to fix it, but shit like Zero Hour arguably made things even worse. Donna Troy is probably the other poster child for "Characters who's origin story is a complete jumbled mess" category of DC characters.

All you need to understand.

There's multiple Batman vol 1s.

Only two, the New 52 one and the Rebirth one. All of the New 52 ones say New 52 on them and all of the Rebirth ones say Rebirth on them.

I don't understand why people still meme about Donna being confusing. 52 already explained that she's a living anomaly, and all her back stories happened all at once. It's simple, and potentially opens up story possibilities, yet everyone inexplicably refuses to just roll with that. I don't get it.

Maybe there´s more than one, but everyboby mistakes them because they have the same face.