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“Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: You find the present tense and the past perfect”
--Anonymous

I find it entertaining to hear certain readers comment about past comic books. Whether it’s past writers, past stories, or past art there is always someone who will claim that today’s modern comics are not as good as those written 10 or 20 years ago. There’s nothing wrong with reminiscing about past stories but there is a danger in always looking to them as never to be replicated again.

What defines a story as ‘good’ is its ability to survive through the ages. When I say survive I mean that the story is viewed as being ‘good’ through generations of readers. If you look into the past you can see some great stories that have survived through history. We have “Crisis on Infinite Earths” and “Secret Wars” to name a few. Both of these stories are often described as, or referenced as, ‘good’ by those who have read them. If you pay attention to current stories you can see these older stories being reinvented again. Why is that?

Maybe it has to do with trying to reclaim the glory of the older days. “Crisis on Infinite Earths” was very successful to the point that we had “Infinite Crisis” a few years ago. An even better example is the return of multiple earths. From what I can understand, multiple earths were done away with because they were too confusing. Rather than DC learning from their past it seems as though they are just going to keep the earths organized to avoid the same confusion that struck their readers.

This isn’t just a DC problem either, Marvel’s big event “Civil War” returned the Marvel Universe to a place in which heroes don’t, or can’t, trust each other; like in the original days when heroes bumped into each other in New York and didn’t know if they were heroes so they would fight and then save the day in the end. Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief has stated that the mutants in the Marvel Universe were reduced in size to restore them back to their original premise, a minority in terms of population.

I won’t lie, I get nostalgic at times and I will say that I enjoyed “Infinite Crisis” or “Civil War”, but at what point do we need to stop looking back as a guide to the future. Learning from your mistakes is admirable, but going back to the same story-well is just going to run our enthusiasm dry. Also going back to these stories will create the following cycle: the older stories are held in high esteem, the current stories will try to match that, but if the stories fail, the older stories will be held in even higher esteem causing newer stories to try and recapture that, causing them to fail, etc. It’s a vicious cycle. After enough time modern stories will never compare to older stories because modern stories will face a harsher scrutiny than a literary work should. Imagine trying comparing every recent science fiction movie to Star Wars, or recent horror films to Halloween? Is that fair to either film? Doesn’t it presume that newer stuff won’t stand the tests of time before they’ve even had a chance?

There is a way of capturing the essence of the older stories without having to recreate the stories in which they first appeared. It involves the writers having to be creative and playing with the current character/s as they are, and not necessarily always how they were. While looking to the past as a guide can be helpful, it shouldn’t be looked upon as a never ending gold mine of ideas. As readers we should help guide these new writers to new gold mines, otherwise we might just get stuck in a rut and repeat of the same few stories from 20 years ago. We can do that by comparing modern work to other similar work and letting new stories come to fruition. We can still critique modern stories but we must also be charitable in that criticism, we must not always assume older stories are the best benchmarks for current storytelling.