Rebuttals and follow-ups are the order of the day in the comicsphere.
As Grant Morrison’s interview is the most entertaining thing to hit the online comics world in quite some time, it’s garnering a lot of attention. Matt O’Rama thinks Grant’s the bees knees for having the balls to put his most outlandish ideas on display; Johnny Bacardi is less than happy with Grant’s Moore-bashing, and offers a cogent explanation as to how the “heavy-handed” tone Morrison dislikes in Watchmen is a feature, not a bug; Graeme McMillan puts together a “can’t we all just get along?” roundup from the messboards; Dirk Deppey takes a “physician, heal thyself” approach; and The Intermittent says we’ve been down this road before with pop provacateurs from John Lennon on. Is it safe to say that if Grant’s goal was to get people talking about himself and his ideas about comics, then mission most definitely accomplished?
(My attitude, unsurprisingly, is that we need more comics creators willing to give interviews like Morrison. I don’t mean we need more idiots like Rall who go around saying how everyone from Crumb to Spiegelman to Herriman to Ware sucks dick, or even more Warren Ellises, who to me reads more or less like a high school sophomore’s idea of what rebels sound like, but people with fascinating, pretension-deflating ideas, packaged in fascinating ways, flexible enough to change them when the dictates of their own passions call for it. In snappy outfits. We need more comic-book Bowies, basically. That being said, Grant’s definitely wrong about Watchmen, though he may well be right about Alan Moore’s career over the last 15 years….)
Mick Martin explains to me why he holds Bruce Jones’s Hulk in the same kind of contempt usually reserved for the Collected Works of Jeph Loeb. Sorry, Mick, but I’m unconvinced. (Why? Off the top of my head, Pratt is shown to be both a rogue agent and insane, so the supposed plot hole in his kidnapping of Banner is no hole at all; ditto for not using the irradiated blood of the Abomination or Doc Samson, since the Hulk has been shown for decades to be the strongest one there is, and presumably unique in the annals of irradiated-blood-dom; etc., etc., etc. At any rate nothing you point out comes close to the gigantic black hole in the plot of that Austen Uncanny X-Men issue we were talking about; moreover, unlike Uncanny, Hulk is a good read above and beyond its plot inconsistencies or lack thereof. But diff’rent strokes, etc., right?)
Franklin Harris shores up his anti-floppy argument against the various counterarguments the blogosphere has offered up. Listen, like Franklin, I still read the things myself, but my sentimental attachment slash insatiable need for a weekly fix doesn’t prevent me from seeing that this format is as attractive to the world at large as a plastic baggie filled with dog poo that someone lobbed at a garbage can but didn’t quite make it in and is now sitting on the sidewalk with a footprint embedded in it. Is it me, or is this inarguably holding the industry back?
In other news, Kevin Melrose wonders who hit the rewind button at the House of Ideas lately. Hey, Kevin, you forgot Marc Silvestri on New X-Men! (I suppose I lose retro-bashing street cred for having enjoyed the first issue of the Millar/Rob Liefeld Youngblood knockoff of Battle Royale, but I never liked Liefeld when he wasn’t retro, so does that even count? [Okay, but you enjoyed those issues G.I. Joe you read… Ed.] Shut up!)
Finally, Jim Henley crunches some numbers and finds out a weird thing about the page and ad counts in Marvel & DC comics. Is there a story here? Paging Dirk Deppey….