This page explains my relationship with Marvel and DC better than any rant ever could. It lays bare the machinery: clones, resets, copies, retcons, āmystery fixes,ā brand preservation over character growth. Not storytelling - asset management. Not evolution - maintenance.
I donāt 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. Thatās why I read more comics than ever ā just less and less from the Big Two.
Whatās interesting is that this page doesnāt actually push me toward some simple ācorporate IP bad, indie goodā conclusion, because the comics Iām actually reading right now donāt line up that cleanly.
Iām reading all the Gargoyles comics, and yes, thatās 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 doesnāt 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. Itās 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. Thatās all Hasbro IP. Transformers. GI Joe. The most corporate-branded toyetic franchises imaginable. And yet theyāre being allowed to tell an actual story. Characters change. Events matter. Continuity builds instead of erasing itself. Now, itās still early. Theyāre only a few years in, and corporate interference hasnāt had time to calcify yet. That could still happen. But right now, it feels like storytelling, not brand maintenance.
And then thereās creator-owned work like Kieron Gillenās 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 isnāt corporate versus indie. It isnāt IP versus creator-owned. It isnāt franchise versus original.
Itās 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.
Thatās 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 thatās allowed to remember itself, or is it a machine designed to forget itself on command?
