* Oh dear: “I asked all I met at WETA when ‘The Hobbit’ starts shooting. Reply? ‘You tell us.'” —Sir Ian McKellen. A far cry from his previous optimism…
* Look, PictureBox got a fancy new website and a fancy new blog!
* Another day, another fantastic interview with Wally Gropius author Tim Hensley, this one conducted by Chris Mautner and focusing on Hensley’s personal life and background, painfully so.
* Bookmarked for when I have half an hour (!) to kill: Anders Nilsen interviewed by Royal Jelly.
* This week I was struck by how two of the best single-issue superhero comics of the year a) came out on the same day, and b) were about their ostensible hero’s arch-enemies. Douglas Wolk takes a look at them, or the writing at least: Action Comics #890 by Paul Cornell and Pete Woods, starring Lex Luthor, and Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 by Matt Fraction and Carmine DiGiandomenico, starring the Mandarin.
* Nitsuh Abebe tackles CocoRosie and the reaction thereto. Apparently I know a lot less about this band than I thought and there are all sorts of obviously controversial issues at work here about which I feel unprepared to speak, but a big part of the column gets at something I was saying about the band a while ago, which is that on a basic level it really isn’t that hard to figure out why their music might not appeal to a lot of people.
* Which point is germane to comics thusly: Lately I’ve talked a bit about how I’m bummed there isn’t more discussion of alternative comics online. Should I really be all that baffled? Perhaps whoever coined the very term was right, and the reason these things are called “alternative comics” is because they represent an alternative to mainstream/popular taste. The bookstore boom, the sudden explosion of coverage of graphic novels in the mainstream press, the manga boom, the webcomics boom, and the parallel rise in critical fortunes of massively popular hip-hop and pop in the music-crit field has, I think, given the impression that quality and popularity automatically overlap more than they do. Fringe culture is exactly that.
Has any comic this year been reviewed more than Wilson has?
Any Batman comic
Batman comics come out every single week, draw from 70+ years of potential, specific self-reference — to say nothing of the wider or associated generic tropes they invoke — and, for the most part, function dually as serialized ‘literary’ objects and windows into a continuous, semi-unified narrative (and, in the ‘Batman family’ of titles, a Batman-focused sub-narrative) implicating dozens of comics weekly, and moreover directly (or indirectly, by a given comic’s mere positioning in the shared universe narrative) encouraging discussion and speculation of future developments in: (1) the particular Batman serial itself; (2) the Batman Family narrative; and (3) the DC Universe narrative, to say nothing of the potential for critiquing the efficacy of the macro-narratives and/or the title-focused serial(s) as they presently unfold, or discussing literary/artistic qualities, which themselves tend to spark unique speculation in that the assembly line process of many shared-universe superhero comics require frequent, sometimes unannounced (sometimes massively hyped) changes in the creative team(s).
All of this is the state of shared-universe superhero comics. Most of it is conductive to a brand of frequent speculation and voluminous citation and fannish one-upsmanship that the instantaneous no-limits chatter online conversation can best facilitate. And the atmosphere created by that discussion itself encourages related (if more specified) forms of discussion/presentation: your off-the-shelf short reviews and online editorials and sneak previews and so on and so on, all of it subtly, imperfectly threaded together. I’m really not convinced it goes one inch deeper than that.
I guess that’s what I’m saying? They’re easier to talk about.
That said, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t go one inch deeper than all the complex metatextual shit going on with a comic that’s up to issue #700 and all that entails–Batman is a popular taste in a way that Wally Gropius isn’t, and that’s going to be reflected in what gets talked about and what doesn’t regardless of all the different ways you can talk about the Grant Morrison issue of the week. No?
Of course, every once in a while a book can come along and be an agreed-upon curvebreaker, Asterios Polyp for example. I’m not convinced Wilson got there–I think it’s too mean and deadpan and surface-ugly vs. Asterios Polyp and I’d be really surprised if someone crunched the google numbers and came up with as many reviews–but at any rate it was Tom who brought that one up in this case. I’d have stacked the deck in my favor more with, like, Weathercraft or something.
But back to whether it’s any deeper than the complexity and fecundity of the decades-long Batman narrative: Like, many many more people are gonna review Avatar, or even The Last Airbender, than, I dunno, Trash Humpers. It’s not a huge mystery why. I don’t know why I’ve acted like it’s some huge mystery why a similar phenomenon prevails in comics. I think you’re right about the way a lot of Bat-stuff lends itself to a variety of ways to discuss it, Joe, but it’s also because Batman is popular and these other things are less so.
Hey, all I’m saying is the superhero genre as it primarily functions today is especially conductive to online conversation, more so than any other comics published in English in North America. Hence, those are the comics most discussed. I’m not just talking about Batman either – I’m talking, like, Rise of Arsenal, which is a weird, small miniseries I’m not convinced has ANY viability whatsoever outside the genre womb, but it benefits from the same mechanisms in place. Crunch the numbers, and that’s probably topping Wilson too. And why shouldn’t it, if its especially facilitative of the effect you describe?
Theoretically, if you remove the state of the genre, sure – Batman is still probably going to attract more attention than Wally Gropius, in the same way Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour will likely attract more attention than Abstract Comics: An Anthology. I mean, that’s obvious. But, you know, the movie industry isn’t so lopsided in a manner that assures a hegemony of volume by a particular genre… that’s the key with comics. That’s the reality.
Good point about Rise of Arsenal. That’s what I was thinking of when I made sure to mention a reviled “big special effects action-fantasy” movie like The Last Airbender in addition to Avatar–it’s not just the hits that dominate, it’s anything in that ballpark. I think you’re dead on to point out that comics is unique in that the big popular action-fantasy stuff is entirely within one genre, and that genre has all its own weird publication and narrative mechanics at work–there’s really nothing like that in any other field. It’s not JUST that A) Batman’s more popular than Alternative Comic X, and it’s not JUST that B) there are all sorts of unique aspects of Batman comics that lend themselves to online discussion vs. Alternative Comic X, it’s a combination of the two, plus the fact that the genre to which Batman belongs is super-duper-dominant, which enhances both A and B.