Archive for January, 2009

BRUTAL!

One of the great things about the medium of comics, which has been stated many times before, is that it’s an inter­ac­tive medium. It reaches right into your brain and builds a story there, and you fill in the blanks between the pan­els. For this rea­son it is a per­sonal medium, an inter­per­sonal medium, and a basis for com­mu­nity inter­ac­tion. One of the won­ders of the indus­try of comics is the poten­tial for just about any­thing to hap­pen. Almost any­one can make comics, lots do, and I respect the right of every­one to try. I’ve always con­sid­ered sequen­tial art a “punk” medium for this rea­son. It’s really DIY, and even if you hit the big-time, it still doesn’t make you as a cre­ator too much of a big stink in so-called “main­stream” cul­ture. Sure, your char­ac­ters or sto­ries may have movies or songs about them, maybe you’ll get a tv show based on your ideas, but it doesn’t change or affect the work you do IN comics. If you decide to have a hand in these other media, then we cease talk­ing about comics, and we start talk­ing about your work as a screen­writer or sto­ry­board artist or pro­ducer or what­ever.
I think that most peo­ple get involved in comics out of a love for the medium itself, and for the amaz­ing poten­tial of the art­form as well as the industry.

Part of being a mem­ber of the comics com­mu­nity is find­ing other peo­ple “like me.” Because comics are so per­sonal, and the indus­try itself a rather tiny inces­tu­ous com­mu­nity, it’s easy to assume that if some­one also likes comics, then you share other beliefs as well. Maybe polit­i­cal, maybe reli­gious, maybe some other sub­cul­tural behav­ior. But that’s just an assump­tion. Hav­ing worked at New Eng­land Comics for the bet­ter part of my teenage years and early adult­hood I would have told you even as a teenager, that all kinds of peo­ple read comics. Every Wednes­day the same reg­u­lars would come into the store, hang out for a few hours, and chat. It’s the same any­where you go. Wednes­day is the nerd’s Sun­day. But unlike going to church, we’re not com­ing together to get right­eous, or revel in our def­er­ence to the same belief sys­tem. We’re get­ting together to argue, to inspire, to laugh. We’re com­ing together over comic books.
While I’ve known that comics can be a great tool for pro­pa­ganda (Chick tracts, for exam­ple), I believe that comics are big­ger than just a bat­tle­ground for ideas, or a tool for express­ing a sin­gle belief sys­tem.
Every­one has an opin­ion on super­hero comics. Those who don’t read them, well they typ­i­cally assume it’s mostly imma­ture pos­ing, pos­tur­ing, ado­les­cent power-fantasy dri­ven crap that’s bring­ing down the medium. Those who do read them, typ­i­cally have an opin­ion as to which cos­tume Cyclops should wear, or which incar­na­tion of the Jus­tice League is the best (It’s clearly Grant Morrison’s run, but I do have a soft spot for the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire era as well). But they also have an opin­ion on what comic books should be about. Most fans with whom I inter­act seem to think super­hero comics ARE Comics, and the other stuff is indy. I don’t agree with that, as it’s all funny books to me, but I have always been of the opin­ion that super­hero comics are extremely impor­tant as a barom­e­ter of the Amer­i­can cul­tural zeit­geist. Super­heroes shouldn’t be ignored, and they are for now, the core of the medium.
Dur­ing World War 2 right through the Cold War, we needed our heroes to be some­thing spe­cific. We needed Amer­i­cans (U.S. Amer­i­cans, mind you) to be will­ing to do the right thing, stop the bad­dies, and plant Old Glory on top of the (albeit min­i­mal) car­nage. Young peo­ple of a still young nation needed an iden­tity. Heroes gave a sense of iden­tity. Recently it has come to my atten­tion that the cur­rent state of super­hero comics is one of deca­dence. That the heroes no longer stand for “Truth, Jus­tice and the Amer­i­can Way” and that some­how this is a prob­lem.
I couldn’t dis­agree more.
Heroes can no longer stand for some­thing like “The Amer­i­can Way” when most Amer­i­cans can’t agree on what that way is. I’m hard pressed to come up with a def­i­n­i­tion that has any mean­ing, namely because of the way our coun­try is per­ceived in the world, but also because of the way we behave in the world. It’s being argued that a return to the same ideals held dur­ing days of yore would strengthen those val­ues in comics read­ers today. But that’s not what we need. The world has changed, Amer­ica has changed, and the indus­try and medium of comics have changed. Those ideals are ideals of yes­ter­day, and the United States can­not act the way it did fifty or even fif­teen years ago.
Some of those who are argu­ing for this reac­tionary approach have put the “blame” on those work­ing as writ­ers in main­stream comics today. The exam­ples they cite are comics which were writ­ten pri­mar­ily by British cre­ators.
Hmmm.
The sup­posed “lib­er­al­iza­tion” of the comic medium is due to the actions of Euro­peans?
Could it be that Super­man, the Jus­tice League, the Avengers, etc. have come to mean MORE than just the Amer­i­can Way? That the world has seen these char­ac­ters and been affected by them? That Super­man no longer NEEDS to stand for an Amer­i­can way, because Truth and Jus­tice are uni­ver­sal? That Cap­tain Amer­ica can be a hero to any­one: con­ser­v­a­tive, lib­eral or oth­er­wise, because he’s always look­ing out for human­ity? These are the Amer­i­can virtues that we need to real­ize suc­ceeded, those aspects of the Amer­i­can Way which were clearly defined: The rights of all peo­ple to be treated equally, the abil­ity to pur­sue life, lib­erty and hap­pi­ness. You can stand for these things and not have a polit­i­cal agenda. You *gasp* don’t even need to be an Amer­i­can! Most of the civ­i­lized world feels this way now, believe it or not.
The actions of Cap­tain Amer­ica may be “patri­otic” to us in the States, when his actions could be inter­preted else­where in the world as facist, or at the least, a bit nation­al­is­tic.
If super­hero comics ARE a barom­e­ter of the cul­tural zeit­geist, then per­haps the influ­ence of Euro­pean cre­ators is a symp­tom of the “flat­ten­ing” of the world, as they say. Our heroes are ready to lead us INTO the global com­mu­nity. Maybe we should let comics be what they need to be, let our heroes stand for ideals that are big­ger than our own. Push OURSELVES to real­ize that our opin­ions and biases shouldn’t tar­nish the heroes. There are plenty of gray areas, and we’ve got Bat­man or the X-Men for explor­ing that.
I do have a cou­ple of spe­cific points to address.
On the so called lib­eral bias of Spider-Man and his pres­i­den­tial ’spect knuck­les:
Barack Obama will be the Pres­i­dent of the United States. He’s also a comic reader. I don’t think a comic book cover depict­ing the polit­i­cal leader of a coun­try is any kind of par­ti­san bias. I do how­ever know it is an attempt to sell more comics.
The won­der­ful thing about comics is that you can have right or left sto­ries. You can have anar­chist comics too, and com­mu­nist comics, and social­ist comics, and lib­er­tar­ian comics. There’s room for every­one.
Or you could show all sides of the story, have com­plex char­ac­ters who aren’t either right or left, who have depth. That’s not deca­dence. It’s called writ­ing. You can write about what­ever the hell you want in comics. It’s not tele­vi­sion. Granted, if you’re writ­ing for an all-ages, main­stream, top-selling title, you may want to can the agenda and just tell a good story. Of course Mar­vel or DC won’t let you tell your crazy right wing con­spir­acy story or tout your anar­chist man­i­festo in the pages of its best­selling books! If you really need to tell that story, there are many out­lets for that in comics, out­lets which will pro­vide you with a bit more free­dom. There are exam­ples of both “left” and “right” sto­ry­lines being shit­canned by both pub­lish­ers, by the way.
And in ref­er­ence to the Bill Will­ing­ham arti­cle, while I may dis­agree with him, I don’t read his arti­cle as any kind of call to arms, just a writer pub­licly declar­ing his intent to change the way he works. He even says at the begin­ning of the arti­cle that there are all kinds of comics, and closes call­ing it HIS mis­sion state­ment. Some of the com­ments on the other hand are fright­en­ing. Comics belong to everyone.

via: http://www.sloshspot.com/blog/12 – 31-2008/Hunter-S-Thompson-Motivational-Posters-98