Comics, as an episodic storytelling medium stretched over decades and created by dozens of people, rely heavily on tropes and repeated plot beats for characterisation and maintaining the core of a character as recognisable over those many decades and creators.
Storytelling wise, Charlie Brown is always going to fall for Lucy promising she’ll hold the football.
This also holds as true for superhero comics as it does for newspaper cartoons.
I will never understand the push to try to keep comic characters away from their regular story beats.
We're talking about characters that span decades of comics, not a few-season tv show that gets repetitive if you do the same story and don't keep moving characters forward.
If all people did in comics was stories no one had ever told something like with each character, they would become something unrecognizable.
Maybe you can change a character enough to have that happen, but should you? Why bother using that character at all if you're going to tell a story that's so unlike them instead of using them as the storytelling tool they are meant to be?
I also think with how overwhelming the amount of comics out there is, telling "the usual story" every once in a while is helpful for onboarding new people, so they understand how a character functions without having to have read everything.
And if people find that too "unoriginal" idk, find a new hero to read. Not every story ever has to be told with the same ones.
It’s why there’s the jokes about the 6 Basic Batman Plots or the 10 Basic X-Men Plots.
The repetition and the basic beats are why people choose to read a specific title. If that’s not what you’re interested in, you go somewhere else.
Fundamentally, the way comics as long running stories work is ‘see Character in Scenario’.
And while I do love me continuity and decades long story arcs of growth and change, the reason those work is that they’re STILL putting Character in Scenario; character may now be showcasing a slightly different response.
If I want to read about ‘Bruce’s conflict over whether he’s Bruce Wayne or Batman’, I’ll read Bat comics. Sometimes they’ll fall one way, sometimes they’ll fall the other, but they keep interrogating that point over the years and adaptions.
If I want to read about ‘what drives a hero to kill’ I am not going to be trying to read Bat books! I’ll be off reading someone who does kill, whether that’s The Punisher or someone more moderate like various Manhunters.
Sometimes characters are going to struggle and backslide because this argument and tension is the centre of why people read that character.
There's 10 X Men plots? I thought there were 3.
This is why a red flag in a recommendation for me is "I don't normally like [book], but this run I enjoyed". If you don't usually like that book, chances are it's usually doing something you don't enjoy, and if it is doing something you enjoy, that means it's probably bad at being that book. The exceptions are typically when you can be very specific about why it's working for you in a way that other runs didn't.
