This page explains my relationship with Marvel and DC better than any rant ever could. It lays bare the machinery: clones, resets, copies, retcons, “mystery fixes,” brand preservation over character growth. Not storytelling - asset management. Not evolution - maintenance.
I don’t need clean endings. I need consequence. I need change that sticks. Growth that accumulates. Choices that remain binding. When everything is reversible, modular, and resettable, nothing has weight. That’s why I read more comics than ever — just less and less from the Big Two.
What’s interesting is that this page doesn’t actually push me toward some simple “corporate IP bad, indie good” conclusion, because the comics I’m actually reading right now don’t line up that cleanly.
I’m reading all the Gargoyles comics, and yes, that’s corporate IP, but it still functions like an auteur project. It has a guiding voice. It has narrative memory. It has consequence. It has accumulated meaning. The story doesn’t reset itself to preserve a brand shape. It grows. It carries its past forward. It treats continuity as weight, not as a problem to engineer around. It’s a corporate property that still behaves like a long-form novel instead of a content stream.
Same thing with the Energon Universe books at Skybound. That’s all Hasbro IP. Transformers. GI Joe. The most corporate-branded toyetic franchises imaginable. And yet they’re being allowed to tell an actual story. Characters change. Events matter. Continuity builds instead of erasing itself. Now, it’s still early. They’re only a few years in, and corporate interference hasn’t had time to calcify yet. That could still happen. But right now, it feels like storytelling, not brand maintenance.
And then there’s creator-owned work like Kieron Gillen’s comics, where consequence is structurally protected because the creators own the meaning. There is no reset button. No brand preservation mandate. No evergreen status. Stories end because stories are supposed to end, and when they continue, they continue forward, not sideways.
So the real fault line isn’t corporate versus indie. It isn’t IP versus creator-owned. It isn’t franchise versus original.
It’s whether a story is allowed to transform.
Some systems treat stories as living narratives that accumulate memory, consequence, and change. Others treat stories as immortal brands that must remain recognizable forever. And when immortality becomes the priority, storytelling turns into maintenance. Growth becomes reversible. Meaning becomes temporary. Not because writers are bad, but because the system cannot allow permanent change.
That’s the difference between a story world and a brand loop.
Once you start reading through that lens, you stop caring who owns the IP and start caring about something much simpler: is this a story that’s allowed to remember itself, or is it a machine designed to forget itself on command?
