David Fiore, God bless ‘im, has been breathing some rareified air of late: In a couple of posts, he essentially argues that the best art is like big-company supercomics–never-ending, closure-free, static characters, obsessively concerned with minute variations on a very limited number of themes, and without an author to speak of. I wholeheartedly agree, which is why I’ve advanced my theory that General Hospital is the finest narrative work of the 20th century.
I kid!
I appreciate what Dave’s saying on some level–formally, at least, “normal” mainstream genre-comic storytelling is interesting, insofar as it’s so goddamn bizarre. But the assertion that it’s superior to narrative art as we know it in virtually every other form (aside from soap operas, and perhaps professional wrestling) is so transparently ludicrous to me that I wonder if I’m missing something. Hey, I like superhero comics as much, if not more, than the next guy, but I like superhero comics by certain people, and when those certain people stop working on a given superhero comic, I tend to not like that comic anymore. As characters/concepts, some of the superheroes are pretty fascinating–which is, I suppose, why I tried out works featuring them and subsequently discovered good authors in the first place–but privileging them over the people who write and draw them? That way lies madness! I mean, we’re basically talking about favoring run-of-the-mill post-Lee/Kirby/Ditko Marvel fare (it’s got to be “run of the mill,” since we’re rejecting the influence of the author, so those cries of “what about XXX’s run on XXX” will be unheeded, thanks!) over, say, Chris Ware (or Alan Moore or Frank Miller or Grant Morrison, by the way). I understand that it’s difficult to reach an objective standpoint in art criticism, but, uh, c’mon.
Moreover, despite what Dave suggests, when freed from the constraints of the product-producing mainstream machine, creators do have godlike control over their creations. They can’t control viewer reactions, obviously, but viewer reactions change what’s on the page not one whit. What’s there is what’s there is what’s there.
John Jakala has some further thoughts on this, focusing on David’s rejection of endings. Listen, we’ve all been burned by a lousy ending, but we’ve all been burned by lousy beginnings, too. Should we just give up writing, then? Dave, I’m glad you’re enjoying the trees and all, but there’s a whole forest out there!