I reached a new milestone: my first comment (that I know of) from a professional comics author.
I just finished reading all three parts of your summary. Good write-up. Sounds pretty interesting. I’ve got Mouse Guard in hardback and I really liked it. The storytelling is definitely fundamentally sound. I don’t know if you’d love the comic, but I think you would appreciate it for what it is.
Seems like the event covered quite a bit of ground. I feel like commenting on something, but I am overwhelmed by the variety of possible topics.
Is Gary Scott Beatty the same person as “Scott Beatty,” who often writes superhero comics at DC? In your blog you credited him for the DC Comics encyclopedia books, but I didn’t see anything about that on his website.
You seem kind of harsh in your flippant appraisal of the superhero genre. Not that I don’t understand - it drives me crazy to know that the latest Daniel Way Deadpool bullshit is outselling a Harvey Pekar comic. This part really jumped out at me:
While I do agree to some degree that most superhero books don’t have much depth to them, I am not sure if you are genuinely seeking to begin a dialogue or if you are just snobbily dismissing an entire genre. Personally, I think it’s the approach to superhero comics (especially those from DC and Marvel) that kind of shows the superficiality of the genre. I don’t think there’s anything inherently superficial in superhero fiction (or at least not more so than any other subgenre of fiction, like the hard-boiled detective story or high-fantasy).
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that superheroes as a genre are fundamentally superficial, but many of the characters have an inherently two-dimensional (or even one-dimensional) design that manifests itself as limitations in storytelling. Reed Richards, in spite of all the monumental experiences he’s had in his years as a superhero, hasn’t changed a whole lot in terms of who he is or what his concerns are. You could probably do some really great stories with him, but you’d have to do some tweaking of who he is as a character, and drop some of the conventions of storytelling that he’s been saddled with in the past.
My real gripe with subjecting superheroes to scholarly review isn’t necessarily that I think they’re too shallow for it. I just have to question the merits of doing the vast majority of comics-related studies on the superhero genre. It may make up the largest quantity of comics, but it hardly has a monopoly on quality. I’d liken it to limiting film scholarship mainly to the study of James Bond and Ma ‘n’ Pa Kettle.
I realize that the public at large still thinks of comics and superheroes as one and the same, but that’s precisely the problem. Why should anyone be bothered to recognize the difference between form and content if the Really Smart Guys can’t even be bothered?
The way corporate-owned superhero characters don’t age much or seem to change probably can, at this point, be considered to be a convention of the genre. It can be a limitation, yes, but clever writers can still use these characters to tell interesting stories. Most comic strip characters don’t age or change much, either. The Spirit, The Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, what have you. I think the creators of those strips were able to create great stories despite that the characters didn’t change a whole lot over the years because the creators themselves were immensely talented.
(Of course, then we got crap like Garfield and Dennis the Menace. I can’t muster any defense for those. Garfield is actually funny when it’s Garfield Minus Garfield. And I just imagined a Dennis the Menace where he actually grows up… Peeing on Mr. Wilson’s grave as a teenager, throwing mud at his employer, pushing Margaret down some stairs… Someone should age Dennis.)
I’ve always thought of superheroes as today’s version of vintage pulp heroes. Like how people back in the day were into, like, Flash Gordon, the Phantom, the Shadow, or even Conan the Barbarian. I suppose there isn’t a literary scholar or English professor alive who would consider any of the pulps to be “important” literature. Maybe they are shallow, in a way. But they played by their own rules - they weren’t setting out to be 1200 page Russian novels.
And I kinda feel the same way about superhero comics. You aren’t gonna read superheroes and find a Ulysses or Moby Dick or whatever. I really got no problem with that, though. Sometimes entertainment is enough. There’s still a craft to that. It still takes skills to be able to entertain. There are plenty of lousy non-superhero comics out there, too. I think sometimes people place too much import on black and white alternative/indie comics.
But the truth is, a lot of those are just as bad as your typical, middle-of-the-road Marvel or DC. I’ve read a lot of comics in my day and I feel comfortable saying that I don’t need to read every single pretentious semi-autobiographical black & white indie comic about some dude’s masturbation habits. Just like how I don’t need to read everybody’s diary, or how I don’t need to read every single redundant Marvel and DC superhero comic.
I’m not really aware of too many scholarly reviews on comics, period. [Tangent: when I was at university, there weren’t any classes that were about comics. The closest I ever got to a comic book class was this one pretentious English class I had to take about critical theory. I had a cool T.A. who once brought a crate full of TRADES, BABY to our discussion section so we could have fun by analyzing comics with all the pretentious critical theories we’d been learning about in lecture. A couple years back, my former T.A. had his first comic book published by AiT/PlanetLar.]
But you’re right, of course, with your second paragraph. It would be stupid to do scholarly reviews only on superheroes, unless that’s the point of the entire study. But if someone wants to do a scholarly review on comics in general, superheroes would only be part of it. I really don’t want to read a scholarly analysis of The Dark Phoenix Saga, or any Christopher Claremont comic.
Well, that’s just the thing. Regardless of the value you do or don’t place on superheroes as a genre, it is a bad thing that they are commonly viewed as synonymous with comics. For as long as the public at large holds this view (and that includes academia), progress will continue at its glacial pace, because a massive chunk of the potential audience is cut off. Maybe some scholarly reviews about the autobiographical masturbatory comics are just what the doctor ordered. At least that would bring in a few more people who would otherwise get into comics, but don’t enjoy the tights ‘n’ flights.
In the case of The Spirit, two-dimensionality never became a limitation, because Eisner wasn’t doing a whole lot of character exploration. He was more interested in exploring the possibilities of the medium itself, and that’s what elevated the title. Calvin & Hobbes was an ingenious (and shamelessly transparent) vehicle for Watterson to discuss society, politics, and philosophy in a form that you can read while sitting on the crapper.
And say what you will about masturbatory semi-autobiographical comics, but that’s basically what Peanuts is.
Cross-posting in both my blog thread and the Superman thread, because this is relevant to both. Today is the first half of a two week long Superman review retrospective.
I feel this renews my nerd credentials, in case anybody feels I’ve been slacking lately. If my math is correct, I reviewed no less than 14 titles for today, with an even larger number coming next week.
The second half of the Superman retrospective. This is pretty much all you could possibly care about. Seriously.
I am just bewildered, flabbergasted, and, dare I say it, completely flummoxed by the fact that you gave Superman/Batman: Public Enemies a “FAVORABLE FACTOR” while giving Birthright a straight -. I’ve been completely blindsided by this.
Believe me, it was painful giving Public Enemies anything other than “-” and the finger, but I had to concede that those Tim Sale pages were good. And since they’re collected in the same volume as the bewilderingly bad Loeb/McGuinness issues, I had to acknowledge it.
Like…every other Superman story ever told?
“Daring to hurt the invulnerable man” in an emotional sense, I think… Not in the “Doomsday punches him to death, and that really hurts” sense.
Also, the two Tim Sale pages in the Public Enemies TRADE, BABY really make the entire thing worth reading? I still can’t get over it. I haven’t been able to get any restful sleep for the past three days.
Read over it again. The “favorable factor” rating is essentially a “-” with reservations. It’s for titles that are as bad as any that would earn a “-” except for a feature or two that I find noteworthy.
At long last, the big finale of my Superman movie pitch. See how it all ends!
(Cross-posted to the Superman thread and movie thread.)
Not 100% about comics, but this post concerns storytelling, and makes use of Swamp Thing as an example.
very interesting blog you have there. i should get into comics again.
The Comics Forum is returning to MSU, and I am returning to live-blog it once more.
If anyone–FurryCurry–can be in town for the event, it’s going to be a good time.
FurryCurry.