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I honestly think that if you're trying to come up with something fresh about anything that's more than, say, 20 years old, your time is much better spent taking the core ideas and making something new. (thread) https://twitter.com/xtop/status/1294451142559072256
If you're a good enough creator that you can think of something that hasn't been done yet with 60+ year old legacy characters, you can come up with a new character. I believe in you.
[yes, I acknowledge that creating something new requires a great deal of faith from publishers, doesn't pay very well out of the gate (which makes it hard to attract collaborators), and requires a great deal of what ends up being unpaid design prep time]
But from a creative point of view, you are either a. dragging a whole bunch of outdated junk from the era a character was created into the future to be re-analyzed...
...or b. stripping all that old junk out and risk losing a lot of the project's uniqueness and charm (or at the very least, having a lot of chuds complain that you are).
Even if we look at the MCU as essentially being a successful reboot of a bunch of mostly 60s era comics, and agree that it's been well-adapted for the times we live in, we still end up with a heavily male and white cast because that's what was happening in the Silver Age.
And a lot of what is baked into these legacy characters has fallen out of favor: the fact that Batman is a billionaire, for example. Rather than having to grapple with that from the handwringing POV of a billionaire with a conscience, why not create your own working class hero?
Why not look at the things that inspired Batman -- Robin Hood, Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel -- find the common threads, look for modern analogues, and tell your own story from your own philosophical perspective?
[Again, I do know why. Sometimes you just want to dash off a thriller for a page rate for you and a collaborator and editorial needs something flashy in order to greenlight it. This is speaking from a solely creative perspective]
As a personal example, a number of people who like Kaijumax have urged me to pitch some stuff for the Godzilla or Ultraman comic series. That's good marketing for me, I will allow you that. And I certainly know the characters backwards and forwards...
...but every irreverant, surprising, or counterintuitive philosophical take I might summon up would either infuriate fans, contradict some nugget of buried lore, or, quite honestly, be something that would be purer and better in my own little off-brand kaiju universe.
It is to my eternal financial sorrow that I feel this way, so again, go get paid those page rates, but when in the act of creation, please look more to the future than the past. /end
