Hey, K-Box! Can you list all the ways comics have gone wrong?
I can boil it down to ONE reason — most superhero comics are being produced BY and FOR an ever-narrowing circle of die-hards who are at once both a) non-ironically and non-self-reflexively in love with their own nostalgia for eras past, to the point that they're blind to the casual and unintentional but nonetheless very real racism and sexism of recreating status quos that, in many cases, existed back when things like Jim Crow laws were still in effect, and yet are also b) so ashamed and insecure about being grown-ups who are still fans of "children's characters" that they go out of their way to make them more "adult," via simplistic expedients such as rape, murder and intentionally unpleasant portrayals of characters whom they themselves loved as kids for being the exact opposite of all that crap, with the upshot being that we now have stories that are childish without actually being fit for consumption by children, and "adult" without being worthy of intellectual consideration by truly mature adults, all at the same time. It's literally the worst of all possible worlds.
If the children's storybook genre was being run by folks like DiDio and Quesada, we'd find out that Thomas the Tank Engine's motivation for signing on with the North Western Railway was to find the Conductor from The Polar Express, so that he could avenge Dora the Explorer, who was raped and murdered by the Conductor one Christmas for nearly exposing the same holiday child sex slavery ring that had claimed Diego's life. Also? Bob the Builder would start spouting Dick Cheney quotes, to show that he'd become an exploitative oppressor of the working class, and Miss Frizzle — who learned of the Conductor's exploitation of children on a Magic School Bus trip, before her memory was rebooted by the Jumanji board game — would lead the children in a Civil War against Bob and his forces, until Barney persuaded her to surrender by telling her that all the years she's spent educating children are meaningless, because she doesn't listen to Hannah Montana. And the only way ANY of these books would make any sense would be if you read ALL of them.
I can boil it down to ONE reason — most superhero comics are being produced BY and FOR an ever-narrowing circle of die-hards who are at once both a) non-ironically and non-self-reflexively in love with their own nostalgia for eras past, to the point that they're blind to the casual and unintentional but nonetheless very real racism and sexism of recreating status quos that, in many cases, existed back when things like Jim Crow laws were still in effect, and yet are also b) so ashamed and insecure about being grown-ups who are still fans of "children's characters" that they go out of their way to make them more "adult," via simplistic expedients such as rape, murder and intentionally unpleasant portrayals of characters whom they themselves loved as kids for being the exact opposite of all that crap, with the upshot being that we now have stories that are childish without actually being fit for consumption by children, and "adult" without being worthy of intellectual consideration by truly mature adults, all at the same time. It's literally the worst of all possible worlds.
If the children's storybook genre was being run by folks like DiDio and Quesada, we'd find out that Thomas the Tank Engine's motivation for signing on with the North Western Railway was to find the Conductor from The Polar Express, so that he could avenge Dora the Explorer, who was raped and murdered by the Conductor one Christmas for nearly exposing the same holiday child sex slavery ring that had claimed Diego's life. Also? Bob the Builder would start spouting Dick Cheney quotes, to show that he'd become an exploitative oppressor of the working class, and Miss Frizzle — who learned of the Conductor's exploitation of children on a Magic School Bus trip, before her memory was rebooted by the Jumanji board game — would lead the children in a Civil War against Bob and his forces, until Barney persuaded her to surrender by telling her that all the years she's spent educating children are meaningless, because she doesn't listen to Hannah Montana. And the only way ANY of these books would make any sense would be if you read ALL of them.
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Comments
This post recieves the Epic Win Award for the day. Simply awesome. ^.^
......................i'll get back to you when i can formulate a response.
Wow, well put.
Comics seem obsessed with three act storytelling. Set up, Confrontation, and Resolution are the basis for almost every story I've ever encountered. But with ongoing comics there can never really be a final act, never a resolution. Individual threats or villains may be overcome but there is always something that immediately takes it's place. This leads to writers trying to out do each other in terms of what the next trauma for the character is. Also because the story must continue it's become a joke that those who die will come back and the prisons are no more than a brief layover for the villains. Follow a character long enough and with a few exceptions nothing will ever get better for him/her. But they will get worse.
I'm sure somewhere in the very deepest darkest parts of the internet lurks fan fic very close to your second paragraph. Part of me wants to look for it. Another part is afraid of finding it.
I'm sure somewhere in the very deepest darkest parts of the internet lurks fan fic very close to your second paragraph. Part of me wants to look for it. Another part is afraid of finding it.
I have found pornographic fan art of Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus online, and I have masturbated to it.
"Don't cry for me ... I'm already dead."
The Wikipedia article on the Direct Market is a pretty good overview of how comics publishers gave up on the mass market in favor of the niche market, because the latter was easier and (in the short term) more profitable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_mar
It's a perfect way to be embarrassingly outsold by a few stupid small-press outfits that can't even advertise properly. The manga importers figured this out a long time ago.
Think back to when they brought Black Canary out of mothballs. This was a Golden Age character who adventured in the years just after the second world war. After the Silver Age split the older heroes onto Earth 2, Canary made the transition over to Earth 1, completely ignoring that she should have been roughly the same age as the parents of her new teammates on the JLA.
If there wasn't this huge push to make the books "more realistic" there would be no need to discard perfectly useable characters in favor of newer versions, nor would there be any backlash against the newer characters. Just bill the stories about the older characters as "previously untold" from their early days/prime/whatever and sell those right alongside the stories featuring the newer characters.
I personally think long, sweeping story arcs and massive crossover events have played a big part in damaging the comic industry as well. Gone are the one- or two-shot stories that made it easier for new readers to jump in without having to track down years of back issues just to figure out WTH is going on. And crossovers with multiple tie-ins ought to be banned. I know it seems like good business to lure your readers to buy books they normally wouldn't by labelling a couple of issues as tie-ins, but unless you pay off the promise with actual information vital to understanding the Big Event, you're just going to piss them off.
More than anything, the exclusive way comics are sold is killing the industry. Having comics only available at specialty stores places them firmly as fringe or niche literature. To give you a personal example, I grew up buying my comics at a newsstand. I had no idea I was part of such a small minority of readers that were female. All sorts of people shopped at the newsstand. Any of them, male, female, young or old might have been in there to buy comics. For all they knew, I was in there to get penny candy. No funny looks, no feeling out of place. Skip forward to the late eighties. I walked into a comic shop and got the same sorts of looks that a woman gets when she walks into an adult bookstore. I still feel weird walking into a comic shop. Some of them more than others, and it gets better each time I go back, but it takes nerves of steel to walk into a new shop that first time.
How does one make reading comics normal?