Another comic rant?

Here I am, reading another frustrating review praising the "bold and exciting changes in (long-established character)  This ain't your daddy's (character)!"  

This perpetual hamster wheel of changing what ain't broke leaves me queasy and grumpy.

Then a metaphor hit me.

There are two types of comic book fans.  Give a kid a random bunch of toys including action figures.

Oh…hold on.  I don't have to reinvent the wheel here.  Toy Story (the first one) did it already.

Andy plays with his toys and intends to play with them tomorrow.  His plots are wild and goofy, but the characters stay true. Woody and Buzz are heroes thru out.  The toys are elements that inspire his imagination, and creativity.

Sid, the scritch kid next door, obviously never leaves this world.  His imagination is locked in reality.  His toys are just toys.  He has fun with them, but his joy comes from messing with pieces of plastic and testing them to (literal) destruction.

Andy treasures his toys because he has a strong hope that they'll take him to new worlds of imagination and fun tomorrow and next week and next month and who knows how far?  And when they no longer have the power to lift his growing mind (Toy Story 3), he passes them on to aid the younger generation.

Sid is interested only in the visceral cheap thrills of the moment.  He'll mash them and rebuild them then twist them until they're unrecognizable pieces.  Then, for the grand finale, he shoves a firecracker up their ass and blows them to bits.  He was vastly entertained, but only for a few days.  Now he looks for something else to warp and bend.

And, requiring no great stretch of cognition, there you have in a nutshell the two camps of comic book creators and fans.