Why so many people complain about comic books they don't read?

[veti]

In this case, I don't care about the changes, because I basically have stopped reading Marvel comics several years ago.

Besides, I had no initial problem with Thor's change.

HOWEVER: With the risk of looking like an old fart, the combination of a female Thor and a black Captain do reek of "desperation to be relevant", which both Marvel and DCC has suffered from over and over again.

Anyway, the true haters make me giggle. It was real fun reading the responses to Fem!Thor in a "Boy at least I'm not even half as annoying as these guys" kind of way.

The thing that gets me the most though, at least with Fem!Thor is that Marvel, yet again, goes public and PROMISES this will be PERMANENT (Yeah, right, I believe you soo much right now). So that means it will last less than 12 months.

So much this. These things don't matter in the slightest to me - yet I still find I have an opinion (which I'm going to keep to myself right now), because I grew up with them.

I've come to the conclusion that "continuity" in comic-books is just not a good idea. And "different continuities" for different media is a worse one. It's not an ongoing story, it's a series of episodes of life that really should be self-contained and in any old order. The idea that "character development" necessitates making permanent changes in the character's life - or that making such changes will somehow lead to "character development" - is just silly.

Edit: I will say that Marvel themselves have gone out of their way to stir up the controversy. Why else would they announce the change in advance? A more transparent attempt to increase sales (temporarily) would be hard to imagine. And how long the change lasts will depend solely on the sales figures; if they rapidly dip back to below their pre-announcement level, then expect it to be reversed very quickly; if they remain higher (I dunno, perhaps they're right in their cynical assessment that this is the way to attract more girls to read comics - it seems unlikely, but I assume they know more about their business than I do) - then it will last.