People seem to forget that they have tried making new original super heroes many, many times.
They tend to fail so badly that they end up forgotten, their books dropped and replaced with rebooted versions of characters people actually liked.
At the heart of it, it helps to remember that they have made a shit ton of super heroes over the years, and only a tiny fraction of those have actually succeeded in connecting with people and becoming popular.
The comic book industry was never particularly good with coming up with compelling characters, they were just well positioned to take a shotgun strategy, blasting out a bunch and making more of what worked.
The first 10 years of comics had well over 300 different heroes introduced. How many of those could you name now?
Familiarity is a powerful force. This is where ancient myth comes from. Fresh and new is great, but even reconfigured familiar things work better than new things.
There certainly is a demand for age old super heros but I would argue the rise of Japanese Manga in popularity proves that most people are fed up with characters from before the 1980's.
I doubt it. Even in Japanese Manga/Anime, you're still looking at a dozen powerhouse names among a sea of plebs. One Piece and Naruto and Inuyasha are going to have many, many retellings in the next 50 years.
People demand sugar in all their food, tastes good. People say it's unhealthy, and that eating too much will raise societal stress, particularly on health care. "Who cares?" the people will say, "I want my candy!". The capitalist comes in and delivers cheap mass-produced candy.
The people respond: "I love capitalism. Why shouldn't he be allowed to profit on my desires and provide me with them? The health care failing is the liberal gay immigrant transistors fault."
31
u/Daedalus_Machina 8h ago
You realize that the only reason they do that is the insane level of demand, right?