Seinfeld Is Unfunny/Comic Books


 * The Adventures of Tintin are liable to come across as cliché to younger modern readers who've read other adventure comics. Furthermore, Hergé was one of the first comic book artists to pioneer the use of speech bubbles rather than captions, and we all know how widespread they are these days.
 * Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen. Between the two of them began a whole sub-genre of "grim and gritty" US superhero comics and basically changed everything. Nowadays they don't seem half as revolutionary. Alan Moore has more than once apologized for the negative influence that Watchmen had when bad writers who didn't understand it tried to imitate its most superficial aspects.
 * Donald Clarke, a film critic for the Irish Times, and other critics cited this as a flaw with the Watchmen film adaptation: twenty years after the original graphic novel started the trend, deconstructing superheroes and showing them acting like real people with real personalities no longer seems like anything new. He used the example of the Parr family in The Incredibles by means of comparison.
 * Throw in Squadron Supreme as well. It actually beat Watchmen to the superhero deconstruction idea.
 * The Authority was revolutionary for its violence and political themes. Today, it fits right in with most modern comics.
 * Batman: The Killing Joke, also from Alan Moore. Nowadays it probably seems like a typical Batman vs. Joker story (aside from the infamous fridging of Barbara Gordon) but that's largely because the adaptations as well as numerous later comics reused some of the more famous themes from it such as Joker's Multiple Choice Past or Batman being tempted to break the One Rule.
 * The Dark Phoenix Saga. Before Jean Grey's death was retconned a dozen different ways and the concept of "dead is not dead in comics" became a punchline for critics and comedians, a story where a main character becomes a morally-grey antihero who sacrifices herself to save the life of her team was virtually unheard of in comics. It's become almost commonplace to kill off superheroes in "event" storylines these days (to the point that some comic fans take bets to see how long the character will stay dead). To today's average reader, Jean's death isn't all that shocking.
 * Deathlok. The comic book character debuted in 1974. In 1974, the idea of a man who has been turned into a cyborg and struggles to keep his humanity while fighting against those who transformed him was relatively fresh and original. Nowadays it seems clichéd, and like a ripoff of Robo Cop and many other sources.
 * Doom Patrol. Very shortly after Fantastic Four debuted, Detective Comics tried their hand at "superhero angst". It was also the first title to pull a Kill Them All ending for the entire team. Now, it's more or less known for the youngest (surviving) member, who went into the Teen Titans.
 * The Fantastic Four are considered by some to be the lamest Marvel superheroes out there. But, they were also the characters who introduced the concepts that revolutionized the genre in the early sixties. It was unimaginable for readers back then to have a superhero with a monstrous appearance like the Thing, or dysfunctional team dynamics (that became so popular, the FF looks normal in comparison with most other groups). That's not to mention the villains, which included a dangerous leader of a foreign country and a Cosmic Horror entity bound to destroy the universe. And they didn't have secret identities, which were a staple for all superheroes then (and are still common even today).
 * Legion of Super-Heroes. The Great Darkness Saga is considered one of the all-time best Legion stories. The villain is Darkseid--a plot element that seems trite nowadays because of Darkseid's overexposure. But the story is from 1982, when that was a new idea.
 * Spider-Man was a unique deconstruction of supeheroes when he was first created. The idea of a superhero who was a normal teenager like the readers and who had a normal life hadn't been done before. Nowadays, this is nothing special.
 * "The Night Gwen Stacy Died". Today, especially with The Dark Age of Comic Books, it's not uncommon for characters to be killed off left and right, but back then, the thought killing off such a beloved and popular character was unfathomable. It's often credited with ushering comics into the Bronze Age.
 * The series, along with X-Men, also first popularized the idea of superheroes who weren't wholeheartedly embraced by the public, and often faced fear and suspicion from the people they were protecting. The idea soon spread to the rest of the Marvel Universe, and even to DC.
 * Superman. Many people complain that he is too generic or boring compared to recent superheroes, forgetting or not caring that he was the Trope Codifier for many Superhero tropes. The complaints usually revolve around the ridiculous amount of powers he has had over the years (Silver Age Superman was practically a God Mode Sue), his perceived lack of relatibility due to his supposed lack of personal flaws or personality despite that being a clear case of Depending On the Writer. Not to mention the predictability of someone ALWAYS using kryptonite on him. This still creates problems for marketing the character today -- despite the fact that everyone knows who Superman is, many still don't like him as much as Batman and Spider-Man, or some flavor-of-the-month. As a result, some people forget that it's still possible to read a Superman comic because it's fun to see him fly around and beat up bad guys, and ignore attempts (successful and unsuccessful) to depower him or make him more relatable.
 * The Disney Ducks Comic Universe comics of Carl Barks. He invented most of the characters and concepts, most notably Scrooge himself, and is regarded as a classic by people old enough to have the right kind of perspective, but these days some may think his comics aren't really that different from those not very high quality same-old-same-old stories the average Duck artist produces easily and constantly (except maybe slightly dated compared even to them), and the few modern innovators, particularly Keno Don Rosa who himself adores Barks, have moved on to somewhere quite different. (Well, Don Rosa builds a lot on Barks's ideas, but his comics look much more impressive on a technical level, and the themes are treated in a way that allows them to be taken more seriously.)
 * Back in the 1980s, Crisis On Infinite Earths and Secret Wars were big stuff -- while characters had crossed over with each other before, earth-and-universe shattering perils so huge that not just one or two, but every single superhero (and/or villains!) within a given publisher's universe had to combine forces to defeat them was novel and exciting, completely unheard of. Nowadays, the Crisis Crossover is a standard part of the superhero comic book publishing schedule, with at least one big event (sometimes more) happening every year, with the result that going back to the originals can be an underwhelming experience.