Is it me, or are cape comics in a weiird, nebulous phase right now? They've more or less decided that they want to stop appealing to men in terms of fanservice and conventionally attractive female characters/art, but, at the same time, most of their attempts to be transgressive and distance themselves from their traditional audience are met with lukewarm commercial response.

As a result, they constantly reinvent characters, shift things up, brand and rebrand and reassign creative teams in the hopes that something sticks but without simply going back to hitting their old audience, which has remained somewhat loyal and constant despite all attempts to extricate them from the medium.

And yet, every now and then you get the Big Two throwing their older audience a bone quietly from the back entrance, as if juggling their desire for financial lucrativeness with their desperation not to be caught doing anything that flies in the face of their attempts to cater to the near nonexistent new market.

So what is it going to be? Are they going to stay in this weird semi-woke semi-familiar state where they want to have their cake and eat it too, or will there be a gradual shift towards one of the two extremes in the next five years?