We Had To Destroy The Character In Order To... Destroy The Character
One of the things that has angered me the most about a good number of comics creators over the past twenty frickin' years is their apparent dislike of the superhero genre, and their determination to make it conform to whatever Brutal Truth We Need To Know happens to be their particular hobby-horse. There's a This Is For Your Own Good You Stupid Fans vibe about a lot of it, a determined effort to make everything so psychologically complex and true to... something or other.
And, in so doing, some of our favorite characters and their stories have become trashed.
In its own way, it's very Seinfeldian -- that is, their business model seems to be making us pay good money for the writer's very public therapy. (I'm not a Seinfeld fan, either.)
Or, perhaps, it's like Syndrome's plan in The Incredibles: Make the supers not so super, and show everyone they're not so good after all, ha ha ha. Unfortunately, this would, what's that phrase, ultimately destroy the market, because, y'see, comics creators, we're not getting comics to read about people just like ourselves. At least in my case. (Unless you guys really are interested in The Adventures Of The Blob If He Were A Folk Rocker.)
One of the reasons I love Alan Moore's work so much is that he can deconstruct superheroes and then put them back together and they're still superheroes. A number of the people working on Batman the past several years... not so much.