"Jumping the shark" as you recall, is a term applied to a piece of entertainment (typically a television program) to pinpoint a point in time or story when the concept lost credibility and lost its momentum. The concept originated in a discussion of the series Happy Days, when Fonzie literally jumped a shark while water skiing. From thereon out the series continued to flounder. It had reached its apex and was on its way downhill.
So if and when your favorite book lost your attention because of a credibility issue, please share that with us. Obviously, we are dealing with superheroes, and cosmic events, and extraordinary happenings, so something that strained your credibility must have been quite fantastic... or perhaps painfully mundane.
For me, I quickly lost interest in the Avengers around the time that the premier team and their West Coast counterparts started playing softball in their summertime Annuals. I was in a phase that I considered comics were maybe kids' stuff (I was wrong) and this part of the Avengers' story line unfortunately supported that perspective despite the book being a favorite for years. That simple plot point in the Annuals was so goofy in my opinion that I started to back off collecting. Take a look at some of the action across those issues from the late '80s...
Now I know that Marvel staffers at the time very much enjoyed playing softball, and I believe they even had a rivalry with their crosstown competition at DC, and I tend to enjoy the way that real life intrudes into comics... but this felt so juvenile and mishandled to my teenage eyes. Thor batting with his hammer! Mockingbird using her battle staves! Hank Pym catching for Wonder Man! Iron Man playing in his armor! Captain America talking about Bruce Springsteen and throwing his "Yankee Doodle Special!" Not playing deep for the Thunder God! Ugh!
I always liked a certain amount of gravitas in the Avengers. There could be lighthearted and humorous moments between characters, like in the adventures of Wonder Man and the Beast, but it had to be characterized correctly. This seemed like a Spidey Super Stories version of the Avengers or something from a coloring book. It seemed childish, ill conceived, and not particularly funny. For me, my favorite book jumped the shark. I apologize to any of you who see this as the high point of your collecting. Although I now have a certain fondness for this debacle, I cannot totally forgive its off notes.
So what about you and your favorite comics? Can you think of a story line, action, characterization, or event that really had you questioning your hobby? Let's discuss it!
17 comments:
Well, I hope I do not sound like a broken record...
I tend to agree with Marti in that some percent of "JTS" is due to maturation or changing of tastes, not the quality of the work.
That being said:
1) To me, Spidey and FF JTSd b/c Conway killed Gwenn and had Sue filed for divorce. I didn't need that in my comics. Clones in Spidey just opened a wound.
2) Luke Cage became Power Man around issue 15, but I dug Luke b/c he was a "ghetto" street fighter, not a super hero. I started getting nervous when he fought Dr. Doom initially, around issue 7,that Marvel might have him becoming a super hero.
3) D.C. never really JTSd for me b.c. they always stayed in their fish bowl.
Great question Marti! Cheers.
Ohh yes... Marvel started JSSing for me when mainline characters started appearing in more than one book regularly. E.g., when Marvel Team Up and Two in One appeared, it really wrecked my 12 year old's notion of continuity! It also smelled like greed!
I could deal with the occasional cross over but not additional monthly books!
Little did I know of things to come, LOL!
I lost all interest in Spider-Man the moment Peter Parker graduated from ESU. It just didn't feel right for him not to be a student.
On the subject of super-heroes playing baseball, it used to drive me up the wall when the X-Men did it. One of them was Russian, one of them was Kenyan, one of them was German, one of them was Irish. I couldn't understand why they weren't all stood around complaining that they didn't know the rules.
A few moments come to mind...
When Wolverine started to become part of nearly everyone's book/backstory...Power Pack and their good buddy Wolverine!
The X-Men when they started cannibalizing the great "Days of Future Past" storyline...one or two revisits were ok, but then nearly everything was an offshoot of that story...
Cap-wolf, anyone?
Adam
Comics JTS'd once I stopped reading in 1982.
Everything before that was sheer encapsulated magic for a pre-High School boy.
Everything after that was crap for a teenager.
Seriously though...didn't care for much of Byrne's solo FF run, but loved him just as the artist on those Galactus vs Sphinx issues.
After Korvac, what could possibly happen in the Avengers to top it? Oh, yeah: Ms Marvel got raped...
Once Spidey found the burglar who killed Uncle Ben, where could the story go after that downbeat offering?
And my beloved X-Men post-Dark Phoenix saga? Other than DoFP, lots of bad art and silly mysticism.
The 1980s saw comics get mainstreamed, the 1990s saw comics get too huge, and it has never been the same since.
Yoyo
It's easy for me. Uncanny X-men was my favorite series until issue #175. In the middle of the double-sized issue, John Romita Jr. took over for Paul Smith and stayed on the book for a few years. Romita is good and I enjoyed his work on Amazing Spider-Man around the same time. But he wasn't ready to do a team-book in 1983 and it showed. Claremont's plots also became less interesting and more convoluted around this time.
Some shark jumping comments from our twitter feed include the suggestions:
The use of alternate universes.
The use of clones.
The use of clones from alternate universes.
And specifically Madeline Pryor being an exact doppelgänger for Jean Grey.
Some folks like Wolverine and Power Pack.
Some acknowledge that CapWolf was horrendous though I kind of like it.
More to come...
Keep the shark jumping discussion going!
It's kind of hard to pin this down sometimes, because ongoing comics series have their ups and downs. Avengers is a good example: I'd say it had a definite shark-jumping moment in #200, as noted above, and with the exception of the Ultron story in #s 201-202 (which was an adaptation of a prose story written a few years earlier by Shooter), it really kind of spiraled around the drain for about 2 years until Roger Stern became the main writer and brought it back to greatness.
Amazing Spider-man had a similar kind of mediocre period post-issue 200 (when I think Denny O'Neil was the main writer), but then Roger Stern took over and it really picked up (and I'm beginning to see a pattern here).
Thor was meandering while quite a while somewhere after issue #300, but then Simonson came and turned it into magic. FF was coming dangerously close to jumping the shark (or perhaps it did) during that odd, largely uninteresting but thankfully brief run by Moench and Sienkiewicz, but then Byrne came along and I was hooked for the next few years...
For X-men, though, I would agree with J.A. Morris about #175 (or maybe 176 - the Scott and Maddy honeymoon story) being a good cut-off. Yeah, the whole Maddy as Jean Grey look-alike thing was a pretty questionable idea, and I wasn't happy with some of the directions Claremont explored (like the Dracula stories and all of that Belasco/Limbo crap), but up until that point the title still held my interest. After that, i.e., Scott's wedding, I started to actively hate it - but it took a while for me to admit that to myself as I kept on reading it for the next 2 or so years.
For me, Daredevil jumped the shark after Frank Miller left the title (the first time). Same with Iron Man after Michelinie and Layton departed.
Okay, for me, Spider-Man jumped the shark with the Ben Reilly/ Clone returns storyline. Yes, I stuck with the book longer than many, but that killed it for me.
X-Men- J.A. nailed it; that shark jumped in issue 175. Nothing after Paul Smith held my interest.
Avengers- issue 200 got that shark jumping. There were good issues some years later, but I missed them all (until now, as I pick them up belatedly).
Batman jumped his shark with the death of Jason Todd.
Fantastic Four jumped their sharks when Byrne left.
That's it for now. All this talk about shark jumping has me hungry. Maybe I'll go have a fish sandwich...
A twitter commentator mentioned when Spider-Woman became a bounty hunter in her book.
For me, the jumping the shark moment on Spidey (my favourite) was Maximum Carnage. I agree with Redartz that the Clone Saga was stupid, and never should've happened, but at least there were some quality stories in that mess (if you look at them in isolation); with Maximum Carnage, it was just garbage from beginning to end. There was no real plot, just a bunch of guest stars showing up for no reason, then disappearing again so Spidey and Venom could fight Carnage at the end. I hated it.
JA Morris and Adam both took my potential X-Men shark jumping points. When John Rojmita jr. took over the art (#176) was probably the jumping point for me, but I could also very easily say that the first appearance of Rachel Summers (#184) which started the ridiculous and convoluted ripping off of Days of Future Past (not to mention that madness that is the Summers family tree) is another point that I could easily call the X-Men's shark jumping point.
Speaking of Claremont mining previous classic X-Men stories (which he's done more than a little), I've always felt that X-Men #147, was a bit of a Dark Phoenix ripoff with the "Dark Storm" though then again Byrne also sort of ripped off Dark Phoenix with Sue Storm becoming Malice.
This is a fun topic.
First, I want to acknowledge that that 2nd Avengers/WCA annual crossover was hilarious. Not for the softball, but for the plot point where the villain (was it Collector?) convinces the West Coast team that in order to retrieve their fellow Avengers from the underworld, they must kill themselves in order to access the land of the dead. And they do it!
Who knew destroying your enemies would be so simple as the old "kill yourselves" suggestion?! Lucky for the WCA it turned out to be a fluke occasion where their enemy happened to be telling the truth (although with no guarantees they'd get back from being dead).
As far as my own jump the shark moments, it rarely boils down to one big gaffe, and is more a gradual decline in quality and, therefore, my interest. Like other readers, I also consider X-Men #175 a key issue where what came before was "great" and what came after was "what the heck, stick with it", but nothing about the issue actually screams "Shark jump!" (the wedding of Scott and Maddie, and the artist change, are both momentous changes, but I never thought the book suffered directly from those events...it just kind of petered out on its own...)
Although...one moment where I distinctly remember, "Ok, enough is enough..." was in X-Men #219. I was already less than thrilled with the current status quo post-Mutant Massacre, and the grim n' gritty aspect was getting played up to overkill. Then in that issue, Havok is seeking the X-Men's help, and Psylocke and Storm discover him after he stumbles onto their current hide-out, and they actually consider killing him. "Former X-Man, Cyclops' brother, but sure, let's take him out, we're that bad-ass!" That, as much as anything, was a "This book has gone off the rails" moment for me.
I'll also mention Alpha Flight. Loved it under John Byrne, then Bill Mantlo took over and it took a nose-dive. I kept with it for over a year, then they decided that Northstar was a fairy.(as in, an actual magical creature...seriously?) Honestly, I was going to drop it at the milestone issue #50 anyway, but that little plot development made it easy to walk away and never look back..!
-david p.
dbutler - that is a great call on the Storm issue. I always felt that was a retread in a bad way.
Mike Wilson - the Maximim Carnage issues were overblown and padded. No doubt.
A lot of folks are commenting on when Spider-Man and X-Men jumped the shark; over at twitter it had been mentioned that anytime Arcade showed up there was a shark jump. And when Dr. Doom was hitting on Storm, that was out of character and misguided
One commentator noted that when Alex became a horse faced boy, Power Pack jumped the shark.
I think Edo made a great point - in comics there are ups and downs - so it is possible to return from a shark jump. (Thanks mainly to Roger Stern it seems).
Great comments and examples thus far... keep ‘em coming. Can’t wait to read more. Cheers!
David P. That is hilarious. I forgot about that plot point in the WCA annual. Not only a shark jump - but maybe they should have let it all end there! Ha. I’d like to see a villain try that again since it worked the first time.
And yes, that Northstar plotline was horrible.
Over at twitter, a commenter mentioned the Detroit Justice League, particularly the stereotypical characterization of Vibe, was a shark jump.
More to come...
David P makes a great point about Alpha Flight. It was a truly fantastic series under John Byrne. The moment he left the series, this comic fell off a cliff faster than any comic in history.
I like when superheroes play baseball, but ESPECIALLY when the X-Men do it.
For me it was the crossover events that expected you to buy issues of other comics that were not so good just to complete the story.
Mostly, though, looking back - it was not the stories so much as my changing tastes that led me away from comics in my late teens. Later, a change in how I read comics made me able to go back and appreciate a lot of what I rejected right out the first time - though I will never accept the Spider-Man clone saga or the creation of Venom, etc. . .
I wrote some about my history with reading X-Men in my 5th anniversary post over on The Middle Spaces.
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