DC is against anything that progresses a relationship past third base. [...] Ugh. Oof. Excuse me, I think I'm coming down with a case of Didio.
You say this like they're not just following Marvel and Joe Q's lead.
Granted, DC/National invented this shit, when they nixed
The K-Metal from Krypton in 1940.
I often wonder about just how different American comics would be if that story had been published. I think that was a critical moment, when the guys who invented this shit really wanted to shake things up and the publisher refused to mess with a good thing. The last 73 years of American superhero comics have been iterations on that single moment, I think.
(And of course an entirely different critical moment occurred in the 1950's and decimated every other American comics genre.)
I just realized the other day that fighting and stuff, in videogames as much as comics, is a substitute for actual change. You have a lot of shit flying and people punching each other to disguise the fact that, at the end of the issue, everything returns to the status quo because that's simpler in the long run.
I just finished reading The Untold Story of Marvel Comics, and one of the recurring themes is Stan Lee's mandate that stories only provide "the illusion of change", and not ACTUAL change.
(Stan, ironically, is responsible for the MJ marriage mandate which was later, messily, overturned for a reversion to status quo. Now, that marriage actually WAS a terrible idea, but that's precisely BECAUSE it was an editorial/marketing mandate that made absolutely no sense in the context of the then-current Spider-Man comics -- MJ hadn't even been a major character for years.)
Futurama nailed it pretty hard, too, all the way back in (production) season 1:
Fry: Married? Jenny can't get married.
Leela: Why not? It's clever, it's unexpected.
Fry: But that's not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.
...it occurs to me that Futurama just ended with [spoiler]Fry and Leela getting married and growing old together and then everything being reset at the end of the episode[/spoiler]. That seems appropriate.