Take it easy, man! It was nothin’ personal!
In all seriousness, the above-linked pieces are Chris Butcher’s responses to the somewhat, uh, spirited defense of superheroes offered up by me and Steven Berg yesterday. Right off the bat I want to apologize to Chris for getting personal–he seems pretty upset about some of the things that I said about him, and while I didn’t intend to or even think that I did get personal, clearly that was my bad. I don’t think Chris is an idiot, or that “he’s wrong because I say so,” or that he’s a poseur trying to sound smart, or that he’s an asshole whose philosophy prevents him from ever taking a clear look at a book, or that my post was so great that all discussion about the topic must now end, or anything like that; nor was I mad at him, even a little bit. Can I see how it would seem that I do think those things, and that I was mad at him personally? Oh, absolutely. That’s my fault for being a lousy writer (couldn’t resist “‘Nuff said,” could you, Collins?–ed)–not Chris’s fault for having a position I disagree with. Again, I’m sorry.
I do disagree with a lof of what he says about superhero comics, though. Still do, actually, despite his long and impassioned explanation of how he came to his current conclusions about the relative merit of the spandex set, corporate or no.
For example, I don’t think it was clear that, when he said Powers will be remembered ten years from now and Bendis’s Marvel work will not, he was talking about things like whether or not the books will still be in print, or how many collections will be available, or whether previous creators’ runs on those characters will be remembered foremost–it seemed to me he was talking about the quality of Bendis’s actual work on the titles, pure and simple.
I also don’t think that the fact that Bendis’s Marvel character Jessica Jones swears in one book and doesn’t swear in other books affects the quality of any of those books at all–certainly not to the point where the “integrity” of Bendis’s work at Marvel is threatened by the company’s diktats as to whether and when she can say “fuck.”
I also think superhero comics are a lot more amenable to “realism” than Chris does–this is something I’ve gone on at length about before–though I certainly agree that this approach can be done badly very easily indeed, and should be handled with care. (I’ve talked about that before, too.) But the fact that corporate comics try and fail to go this route so routinely doesn’t influence me when I read books that succeed, or books that try something else entirely.
On a specific note, I don’t know whether or not New X-Men is, in fact, just “a book for smart 14-year-olds,” but this particular 25-year-old of what I guess I can say is reasonable intelligence thinks it’s one of the best comics he’s ever read, for whatever that’s worth.
I understand that Bendis has complete control over Powers and varying degrees of “much less so” over his Marvel books, but my reading of them doesn’t see this as being responsible for a drop-off in quality or integrity of the work. Long story short, if a particular comic is good, I don’t think much about where it comes from, certainly not to the point where I talk a lot about how corporate comics are “the most egregious offenders” about this or that, as Chris does. It’s a very different outlook than the one I have. I’ve seen Chris employ this outlook in talking about corporate superhero comics–that’s where I (and I’m assuming Steve Berg and others) were coming from when we said that Chris draws a qualitative distinction between corporate superheroes and creator-owned superheroes that I/we feel is an arbitrary one that isn’t related to the text itself.
And while I fully agree that the odds are stacked against a creator when he toils in the trademark mines in terms of digging up something worthwhile and meaningful, it does happen, quite often, regardless of whether or not characters can curse or disemobwel each other or rape monkeys or murder the Pope in the process. When a book is good, it doesn’t make sense to me to hold its origin against it; nor, when I initially evaluate a book, is its origin something I give much consideration to (unless, of course, something’s in there that just screams “corporate watering-down!”. A book like Daredevil is so compelling that the fact that the characters can