So Amy’s out of town, and in order to entertain myself I’m watching movies with the two V’s (violence and vomit) that I couldn’t otherwise watch. So far I’ve gone through Femme Fatale, Road to Perdition and Near Dark (very good, pretty good, disappointing), with Gangs of New York and a revisit of Body Double (Clive Barker’s personal Brian DePalma Film Recommendation to me!) on the way.
A good session of snuggles’d blow ’em all away at this point.
President Bush met today with Abu Mazen Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Prime Minister and Holocaust expert. Why “Holocaust expert”? Because anyone who asserts, as Mazen Abbas does, that the Jewish body count was exaggerated, and indeed that Jewish Zionists encouraged and covertly aided what “Holocaust” there was so as to shore up sympathy for the creation of a Jewish state upon the war’s end, is obviously privy to information I’ve never come across. (Link courtesy of LGF.)
I certainly support the cessation and dismantling of Israeli settelements on Palestinian land–the settlers seem like precisely the kind of religious fanatics we’d all be better off without. I wouldn’t mind seeing Ariel Sharon get the boot, as he seems to be a clumsy idiot unable to formulate any kind of coherent policy towards the Palestinians. And I also support the eventual creation of a sovereign Palestinian state, provided the society living in said state emerges from its current nightmarish murderous anti-Semitic death-cult theocratic fascist configuration. And I wholeheartedly support putting the kibosh on the loathsome, ineffectual, corrupt liar and murderer Yassir Arafat. But just because Abbas isn’t quite as bad as Arafat doesn’t mean he isn’t also a scumbag of the first order. The fact that he has yet to renounce his ludicrous attempt to blame Jews for the Holocaust (I’m sorry, “Holocaust”) shows that maybe he isn’t quite the Partner In Peace we’re all hoping for.
Bill Sherman offers another thoughtful take on Gary Groth’s call for more rigorous comics criticism, emphasizing the actual need for service-journalism style “reviews” as opposed to criticism proper. He also points out that the comics blogosphere is more willing to dole out negatives, and do so fairly eloquently, than perhaps Gary gives us credit for. Although in fairness to Gary, comics blogs are still a relatively rarer content model than webzines, news sites, fan sites, and message boards, all of which seem to be more of what Gary was talking about in his “they’re sometimes good, but” dismissal of online criticism. (Also, even the non-“fannish” sites Bill lists, this one included, take superhero comics seriously, so in Gary-Land, how good could we be? 😉 )
Mark my words, Bill: Next year’s San Diego Comic Con will have a panel on comics blogging.
Hey, he said it, not me! According to Newsarama, Marvel has announced that it’s gotten over its reservations about having next year’s Free Comic Book Day take place in May, as it has the past two years, despite the lack of a comic-themed movie to coincide with the event.
For those who don’t know, Free Comic Book Day is an industry-wide attempt to drum up new readership by giving away free copies of (ostensibly) their most new-reader-friendly or mainstream-appealing comic books on a particular Saturday in comic shops nationwide. No one seems to be certain whether or not this has actually been effective: Usually there’s anecdotal evidence of new faces, particularly children’s, in the shops on FCBD, but as far as I know there’s little proof that this has created repeat business aside from the general rise in direct-market comics sales over the past few years, which could be attributable to any number of things.
Personally, I think Quesada is right to want to hold out until a comic-book movie can do most of the event’s publicity for it. Actually, I’m not sure he was even wrong about this year’s FCBD, which he wanted to be held in June to coincide with the release of The Hulk, rather than in May to go along with the release of X-Men 2. In retrospect everyone’s mocking the idea, since X2 did much better in its own terms than Hulk did, but I think it’s important to remember several things:
1) Everyone knows that the Hulk is a comic-book character. The amount of people aware of the funnybook versions of the X-Men is much smaller. In terms of comic-book awareness, the Hulk wins.
2) More kids have off school in June than in May. I know the event’s held on a Saturday, but I think that “summer fever” that kids and teens feel is more likely to get them wanting to experiment with the funnybooks than a mere weekend off might do.
2) The Hulk may have been a disappointment in the long run, but the hype for it that first weekend was completely inescapable, and people forget that the initial reviews from many big critics were laudatory. It wouldn’t have been like attaching a Free Comic Book Day to Howard the Duck by any means.
3) The same weekend Hulk came out, Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix was released. I guess there’s an argument to be made that families with kids and teens already earmarked their entertainment dollars for that big huge hardcover that weekend (indeed, some said the Harry Potter hysteria adversely affected The Hulk’s box office), but I think it’s just as persuasive to argue that the Hulk movie plus the Harry Potter book plus free comic books could have equalled a huge pop-culture bonanza. At any rate, it was Free Comic Book Day, so it’s not like people would have to blow a lot more cash at the event if they didn’t want to. Moreover, most comic shops also sold the Harry Potter book. Had they advertised that fact in addition to hyping FCBD while simultaneously riding the Hulk-hype coattails, they might have had a real blowout on their hands.
In the end, I hope FCBD3 goes well, and that publishers avoid Nick “Call to Arms” Barucci’s advice to limit their free offerings to the big-name superheroes. Even though he encourages the big companies to release three or four free books apiece, he wants them all to be the big name-brand spandex books! People, everyone on Earth knows that if they want, they can go get a Spider-Man, Batman, Hulk, or Superman comic book in a comic book store. Why not take this opportunity to show them what the hell else is available?
Just came across this fascinating round-table discussion featuring Rutgers professor James Turner Johnson, reporter/activist (and Seanieblog favorite) Christopher Hitchens, and about a dozen other prominent columnists and journalists about just war theory, jihad, the UN, terrorism, international law, Catholic pacifism, Iraq, and the difference between acquiring information on a topic and becoming educated about it. Long, but well worth your time.
To paraphrase the Fresh Prince’s mother, if they think your government murdered 3,000 of its own citizens and destroyed a major hub of its own economy in downtown Manhattan, you don’t need ’em, ’cause they’re not your real friends.
Via Instapundit, here’s an article on a disturbingly egregious violation of journalistic ethics in which the Reuters news agency substantially rewrote a bylined reporter’s article in order to insert thoroughly biased and roundly discredited accusations about the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. The article is written by the reporter herself, who finds herself wrongfully accused of the offending and baseless slant of the article. Gosh, I sure am grateful the news media is impartial–could you imagine what it’d be like if they weren’t?
Actually, I do–I just couldn’t resist paraphrasing John Lennon.
A post on this Comics Journal messboard thread praising Craig Thompson’s book Blankets for exposing the “pap” and “hypocrisy” of modern-day American Christianity led me to post the following:
I think the book is far less judgemental than Juliette’s making it sound. I myself am a thoroughly lapsed Catholic who has a hard time believing in a personafied God with an active will at all, yet I always find the vitriol heaped on Christians by artsy-fartsy types–“Those goddamn Christians are so judgemental! Fucking assholes, I hope they burn in hell!”–to be extremely off-putting. I thought Craig did a tremendous job of showing exactly what he found unpleasant and stultifying about his fundamentalist upbringing and the Christians he came in contact with while growing up without leaping to broad generalizations about “pap” or “hypocrisy.” After speaking about it with Craig personally, I came away with the feeling that his big problem with Christianity as an organized religion was the judgement passed on non-Christians and the overemphasis on heaven as opposed to the divine within everyone, not that he thought Jesus was bullshit or that he felt that everyone was molesting children the second they got home from Bible camp. (I’m pretty sure that not once does he show a Christian preaching against something, then doing it himself–so so much for exposing hypocrisy or whatever.)
Anyone could write a book full of ad hominems and stereotypes about the big bad Christians, but Craig took the time to throughly explore the doctrine that caused him to reexamine his faith and come to a new belief on his own. Good for him for not taking the easy way out.
I’ve never read J.M DeMatteis’s for-grown-ups comics, like the Moonshadow book I always hear about; nor am I part of the DeMatteis/Giffen Justice League cult. But I’ll always have a soft spot for the guy, because his Kraven’s Last Hunt is the best Spider-Man story I’ve ever read. (With the possible exception of Brian Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man series, of course. But until that book came along Kraven was my favorite webhead tale by a very, very substantial margin, and at any rate I prefer Mike Zeck’s art on Kraven to Mike Bagley’s on Ultimate (even though Bagley has improved as the series has gone on, and it has a weird vibrant energy to it that’s much greater than the sum of its seemingly pedestrian parts), and at any rate I don’t think Bendis has yet told his definitive Ultimate Spider-Man story. Phew.)
So I was intrigued when I heard that DeMatteis will be writing a children’s/young-adult fantasy title for CrossGen’s creator-owned imprint called Abadazad. The concept, and especially the title, sound a lot closer to Clive Barker’s kid-fantasy epic Abarat than they do to the classics DeMatteis cites as influences; the fact that Abadazad will be a comic and Barker’s book is prodigiously illustrated only enhances the comparison. But even if we dock points for originality, I’ll be excited to see artist Mike Ploog back in action. Ploog worked on the early years of Marvel’s Ghost Rider, and his art had this freaky sloppy melty pop vibe that was an undeniable joy to look at. I’m very interested to see where he’s at today.
Every night I try to watch the news, and the only news channel I get at this point is MSNBC. Normally this isn’t so bad, but Chris Matthews is in his own freaking world at this point, spending hour after hour after hour saying things like “what did the president know, and when did he know it?” about the goddamn Nigerian uranium story. I know many people have said what I’m about to say many times in ways far more eloquent and persuasive than I’m about to, but for the love of fucking Mike, Democrats, give the goddamn uranium story a rest. Nobody else cares. Nobody. You may think this is the worst thing that any government has ever done ever, but you are in the goddamn minority, and the more you shreik about it, the more you start to look like the Republicans who kept the equally idiotic Lewinsky blood-feud going long past its sell-by date. I know, I know, war is more serious than blowjobs, blah blah blah, but Clinton lied under oath, and Bush read a line that had been vetted by several dozen other people and is still supported by the British intelligence to whom he attributed the claim right there in the speech. I know you hate Bush. I know the sound of his voice and the sight of his face makes you want to vomit. But Democrats, here’s a news flash: most people don’t feel this way. Most people don’t believe he’s lying to them every time he opens his mouth, most people didn’t make up their mind on the war over the Nigerian uranium claim and therefore feel bamboozled, and most people are not going to all of a sudden reverse their support for a popular war that we already won. And win it we did, despite all the “quagmire” and “the Iraqi people want us out” nonsense that anyone who’s honestly paying attention and has ever done some research into military history can see right through. You may want all the above to be true, but most people don’t. Whether or not you’re in the right, change your goddamn tactics and change them now, because they’re appealing only to people who enjoy saying things like “Bush stole the election” and “it’s all about oil,” or to German kids who think the CIA flew the planes into the World Trade Center, or to British leftists who think that Tony and Me by Georg Bush book is funny, and that’s not enough to get you into the White House. So please, please, please, please, please, shut up about the stupid Nigerian uranium story. Even if you’re 100% in the right about it, shutting up about it will actually give you much more of a chance to fix the underlying problems of which it is symptomatic than continuously screeching about it night after night will. Consider dropping the story to be, as you believe Saddam Hussein was compared to Dubya, the lesser of two evils.
Another glimpse into Matthews’s psyche was afforded by a comment he made in an earlier segment of the show about Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. As you might now, in a move roughly tantamount to tipping over the coffins of 9/11 victims (the ones of whom enough pieces were found to put in coffins, of course) and giving the bodies the finger, the government has kept sealed 27 pages of the 9/11 report, and it’s believed those 27 pages are a damning indictment of the Saudi government’s role in failing to thwart, if not tacitly or not-so-tacitly encouraging or even directly funding, the attacks. Matthews’s guests, including relentless terrorism expert Stephen Emerson, denounced the Saudi government over and over again, and denounced the administration for seemingly bending over backward to avoid any unpleasantness with these murderous douchebags, who use their fluke-of-geography oil money to spread their poisonous death-cult ideology, Wahabbism, into mosques and schools all over the world. Matthews, who agreed with the guests, closed the segment by saying “This is something we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives.”
Not if the hawks can help it.
If you actually read what the policymakers behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are on record as saying, the wars are more than just an effort at direct punitive retaliation for 9/11, or to enforce scads of UN resolutions and regulations on Iraq, or (heaven help us) to acquire more oil. It’s an ideological campaign against the sexist nationalist luddite homophobic Jew-hating war-crime-committing murder-suicide pact known as radical Islam, which as practiced by thousands and supported by millions is the root cause of this war just as the radical Christianity embraced by millions in medieval Europe was the root cause of that society’s ills. Among the many purposes for the Iraq War was the fact that it’d enable us to pull our troops out of Saudi bases and put them into Iraqi ones (at least for the time being), to modernize and open up an enormous amount of oil fields that would be operated by a friendly democratic government and whose revenue would go to the country’s people, not some UN-sanctioned grift that fed Baathist apparatchiks and their miserable genocidal writing-Korans-in-his-own-blood boss. In other words, as many hawk policymakers and thinkers would gladly tell you, it was a war to divorce ourselves from our odious gender-apartheid suicide-murder-exporting client regime, the House of Saud. The antiwar people yelling “What about the Saudis?” seem to have failed en masse to do any research on the subject, as the road to Riyadh runs through Baghdad.
And if this policy continues, which I sincerely hope it will, by the time I get old I won’t have to talk about Saudi support of terrorism, except in the past tense.
Maybe this makes me sound regionalist or sexist, but when you’re calling technical or customer support and you get a woman with a Southern or Midwestern accent on the line, don’t you just say “Thank you, God”? They are invariably the friendliest, most helpful, most knowledgeable people working in any given support department. Men, people who sound like they’re from a big city or the East Coast, and people with foreign accents–you might as well hang the hell up. But talk to some woman who sounds like she might have been in a Wal-Mart commercial and not only will your problem get fixed, but you’ll probably end up paying less money for more service and maybe even get a free hat or something. It’s uncanny. It’s to the point where if I get through, I’m just going to ask to be transferred to the person who sounds the most like Dolly Parton.
Speaking of accents, my in-laws are from West Virginia. This means that very early on in my relationship with The Missus, a lot of inbreeding & redneck jokes were employed. This also means that only slightly less early on in my relationship with The Missus, I spent some time in the local hospital traction unit. I’m glad I learned that lesson the hard way, though, because (though maybe the last paragraph runs counter to this, but what the hell! I contain multitudes) nothing makes you sound like more of an asshole than making fun of someone because they sound different–particularly if they sound Southern or country or Noo Yawk/Noo Jurzey. Time and time again my somewhat unreconstructed “liberal” coworkers say things to the effect that they hate Bush because they don’t like listening to him talk, and they were absolutely merciless to Jessica Lynch (Private First Class Lynch to them, thank you very much) basically because she’s an Appalachian who never took a course on public speaking. All those much-vaunted egalitarian ideals of so much of the Left seem to disappear when confronted with a voice that twangs (or, on the flip side, says things like “whaddayagon’do”).
Maybe it’s the comics equivalent of feeling ashamed of yourself (and also a bit chafed) after a four-day orgy, but it seems like there’s a lot of gloom going around today.
Dirk Deppey (perennial gloom purveyor that he is) offers the latest in his Movie Doomsday Theory series, insisting that a downturn in the comic-book-movie blockbuster market could actually spell the downfall of the entire Direct Market if it causes Marvel to go under. I think what we’re seeing this summer (i.e. movie after movie fails to live up to its blockbuster potential–gee, do you think maybe that’s because a new “blockbuster” is released every week?) is as much a Movie Movie Doomsday Theory as it is a Marvel Movie Doomsday Theory. Hollywood’s in trouble just as Marvel is if they’re relying on this obviously faulty business model.
Joey Manley, founder of various and sundry online comics sites, has a pretty depressing take on this year’s Con. I think he’s altogether too hard on pop-culture geeks–guys in stormtrooper outfits are harmless at worst and hella entertaining at best; it was certainly heartening to watch the snobs get smacked down on this Comics Journal messboard thread on the subject–but I’ve often wondered myself about the health of a medium in which such a large percentage of its consumers are “hardcore” fans, if not would-be creators themselves. (Guilty on both counts!)
Me? It’s tough to be pessimisstic about an industry that yielded Blankets, Diary of a Teenage Girl, The Frank Book, Quimby the Mouse, and The Dark Knight Strikes Again in the last year.
The BBC seems almost as upset about the deaths of Uday & Qusay Hussein as, one would imagine, Uday & Qusay Hussein were. LGF has a rundown of how the Beeb has carpet-bombed the story with scare quotes. Or the “story,” as they’d want you to believe.
Wouldn’t “The Widowmaker” be a great name for a really huge bong?
In other news, Amy has been posting a lot. You should go read it.
Before I get to the San Diego goodness, here’s another comics-related post.
Recently I was asked by All Too Flat extended family member Dov to recommend comics to him. He’s a complete newbie who got hooked on Bruce Jones’s current (excellent) Incredible Hulk run due to the 25-cent promotional issue Marvel offered during the release of the film, and wanted to know what else he might dig. I wrote him a long message, just recommending a whole bunch of my favorites, and it occurred to me that this is the sort of thing I should put up on the old blog, too. Hopefully the choices will illustrate that there really is something for everyone in comics today. And I’m not doing this as Team Comix boosterism, honestly–I just feel like otherwise media-savvy people who don’t read comics are driving down the art highway on only three wheels.
Here, then, are some of my favorites, all of which should be available at Amazon. Any one of them is a great way to start your comics-reading career.
We’ll begin with some of the current crop of ongoing superhero monthlies:
NEW X-MEN w: Grant Morrison a: various–This is the best ongoing superhero series around, and maybe even ever. The hardcover collection of the first 12 issues or so is fantastic, but it’s also available in smaller softcover editions (the first of which is called E is for Extinction). Morrison is a real visionary, very Burroughs or Pynchon or Dick. His ideas are just huge.
DAREDEVIL w: Brian Bendis a: Alex Maleev–another fantastic superhero comic, close in spirit and execution to the current Hulk series. Very pulp stories, with beautiful art; Bendis probably has the best ear for dialogue in comics today. Lots of collections of this creative team’s run are available; the first is called Underboss.
ALIAS w: Brian Bendis a: Michael Gaydos–Bendis also writes this very dark look at the underbelly of the Marvel superheroes. It’s a mature-readers book that’s actually mature, which is saying something. Gaydos’s art hooks you like nobody’s business. It’s about a private detective who used to be a superhero before some unnamed incident traumatized her. Again, you can find collections of this, the first one of which is I think just called Alias Volume 1.
THE ULTIMATES w: Mark Millar a: Bryan Hitch–an ultra-modern take on the superteam that consists of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk, this has probably the best art of any superhero book out there and is really unpredictable and large in scope. There’s only one collection to date, but it’s a killer.
Now moving on to altcomix and classic graphic novels:
JIMMY CORRIGAN w/a: Chris Ware–This is the best comic ever made, bar none. It’s about this sad middle-aged man’s journey to meet his father, which runs parallel to his grandfather’s recounting of his own trouble childhood. The art, especially the incredibly complex layouts, is just unbelievable. The Citizen Kane of comics.
DAVID BORING w/a: Dan Clowes–Close in tone to the Coen Bros’ darker movies, or David Lynch’s less over-the-top, this is a strange noir tale about a man’s sexual obsession with a woman during a tense period of terrorist attacks. Clowes’s art has this creepy 1950s feel that works perfectly for the story.
WATCHMEN w: Alan Moore a: Dave Gibbons–Supercomplex, realistic, and incredibly involving story of a group of superheroes whose time is almost at an end. Conspiracies, mysteries, politics, sex–it’s the highwater mark of the genre in many, many ways. Probably my third-favorite comic ever (after Jimmy Corrigan and…)
THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS w/a: Frank Miller–My favorite comic. Batman returns from retirement to a world that doesn’t want him anymore but needs him more than ever. Incredible art, searing satire, heroism on the grandest scale. This book is a juggernaut. The old saw is that if Watchmen performed the autopsy on the superhero genre, Dark Knight is its brass-band funeral. It’s awesome.
FROM HELL w: Alan Moore a: Eddie Campbell–The movie version was okay, but it was the equivalent of making a movie of Hamlet that consisted of Hamlet and Laertes training for the duel at the end. The book, on the other hand, is this hugely complex examination of the Jack the Ripper killings, Victorian England, Freemasonry, patriarchy vs. feminism, the occult, and god knows what else. This will really challenge you.
SIN CITY w/a: Frank Miller–beautiful black-and-white comic noir about a huge loser’s quest to avenge his lost love. Miller’s art is rarely better than it is in this, and the story’s got an almost primal momentum. Another favorite.
ARKHAM ASYLUM w: Grant Morrison a: Dave McKean–another genuinely beautiful book, this one is painted and uses remarkable collage techniques. It’s a psychological horror story about Batman entering into the insane asylum where most of his big villains are kept. A really chilling examination of abnormal psychology, again rife with the kind of huge occult-influenced symbolism that Morrison specializes in.
HEY, WAIT… w/a: Jason–Translated from Norwegian, this book uses cute-animal characters to tell a really painful story about loss, grief, and regret. This guy’s one of the best on the scene, and this story will haunt you.
THE FRANK BOOK w/a: Jim Woodring–Essentially they’re the creepiest, scariest cute-animal stories ever. Frank is this sort of cross between a cat and a beaver and a mouse and a bear, who wanders around this hallucinogenic dreamscape getting into adventures and being pursued by various miscreants. If you like twisted children’s stuff like Willy Wonka, this will appeal to you. Woodring’s a hell of a cartoonist and has imagined his whole own cosmology with this book. Some of the material is available in much cheaper (but smaller) softcover editions.
BLANKETS w/a: Craig Thompson–I talk about this all the time on the blog, but to recap, it’s a coming-of-age autobiography involving the parallel finding and losing of first love and religious faith. Elegantly illustrated and stirringly told. Damn, it’s good. And sweet.
DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL w/a: Phoebe Gloeckner–Another one I talk about a lot. This is a combination thinly-veiled autobiography written in journal form with autobio comix and illustrations, telling the story of the brilliant but deeply troubled teenager Minnie Goetze as she navigates the free-wheeling San Franciscan 70’s. I challenge you not to be deeply moved by this book.
Each gets my full recommendation. Happy reading!
Note to Jim Henley: Yes, Brian Bendis will be creating “a whole new cast of supervillains.” In his Marvel panel at San Diego he said this will happen after he comes back on the book following David Mack’s fill-in arc (issues 51-56). So get psyched!
Note to Bill Sherman: No, Brian Bendis won’t be ditching comicsville for Hollywood. In that same panel (and, actually, in the interview I conducted with him some months ago for the A&F Quarterly), he said that after writing the pilot for MTV’s Spider-Man series (doing which got his name on every single episode), he hasn’t spent a single second working on the skein since. He’s instead chosen to work on a project closer to his heart, namely his newborn kid. So he’s still all ours!
More like this coming soon…
Still playing catch-up with work and email. But you can expect recaps, reviews, reminiscences, revelations, and reprimands of the events of the San Diego Comic-Con all coming in the next few days. I’ll probably even talk about some non-comics stuff at some point. ADDTF Fever–catch it!
At a panel celebrating 25 years of the graphic novel (the fat book-like format that’s become the preferred way to package “good” comic books), I saw an interesting glimpse into how damn difficult it’s going to be to get comics into the genuine mainstream–i.e. libraries. Colleen Doran (the incredibly cool cartoonist with the splendid Southern accent who writes and draws the immensely readable fantasy series A Distant Soil) spoke of her (pretty selfless) attempts to get comic books into the hands of librarians and library-system buyers at Book Expo, the regular-book publishing industry’s big convention. Speaking of the obstacles to this process, she said the one complaint she hears most often from librarians is that simply not enough information is given to them about a comic book or graphic novel for them to be able to make a decision about buying or shelving it. Often times the publisher just hands them whatever they wrote up for the comic-shop guide Previews, and in the real world, “Corsair makes a startling revelation to Cyclops, but can the Starjammers save either of them from Omega Red?” isn’t very helpful. Also, they don’t put age levels or grade levels or the other standard things that go on books headed for young-adult sections in libraries.
Well, this last bit caused quite a row amongst the participants of the panel. Graphic designer to the stars Chip Kidd angrily snapped “Why don’t they just read the books and decide for themselves what their about and who should read them?” The obvious reply, one which was shouted out by librarians in the audience, was that believe it or not, librarians do not have the time to read every single comic book in the world. They want to stock graphic novels, but without some help from the publishers in terms of explaining what they’re about and who they’re geared toward, it’s hopeless. But Kidd and some of the other panelists, namely Craig Thompson and Will Eisner, continued taking umbrage at the suggestion that age-levels be placed even in the catalog listing or promotional copy let alone on the back of the book (as is done with, oh I don’t know, every young-adult book in the world).
I don’t necessarily fault these important creators for having their positions, at least from some standpoints. They come from a world in which they’re constantly doing battle against a two-headed dragon: One head being the notion that comics are for kids, the other being that we must institute codes and censors and guidelines to make sure that all comics remain for kids, under the threat of hauling people off to jail for selling adult comics to adults. But this simply isn’t the reason why librarians want these things–it’s so they know where to put the books on the shelves, so they know who to recommend it to, and so they know (believe it or not, this isn’t such a bad thing) not to hand an eight year old a copy of The Filth.
My point is not to find fault with Kidd et al, but to point out this enormous blindspot in their ability to accurately and effectively market their books to libraries. A simple difference in trade-dress culture literally prevents comics from getting into libraries.
Comics are climbing, but let there be no doubt that even at their best (i.e. Kidd, Thompson, & Eisner) they’re still climbing uphill.
The most dangerous threat to comics is not the unreconstructed fanboy (i.e. the people who keep writing Pete Milligan and asking him to bring back the original X-Force cast), but the pseudoeducated fanboy, or PEFB. I spoke with one or two in San Diego, and it was a chilling experience, all the more so because they honestly mean well. These are the people who think Udon Studios is manga, that Alex Ross is the best artist in comics history (“I mean, they look like real people!)”), and that Liberty Meadows is an alternative comic. These people are aware enough to understand the “Team Comics” concept of getting comics out to the world at large, but not aware enough to realize that what passes for “different, out of the mainstream” works in their comics cosmology is insipid manipulative middle-of-the-road crapola. People who watch Martin Scorsese and read Kurt Vonnegut will be handed a Chuck Dixon CrossGen book as an example of something similarly great and groundbreaking by the PEFB. I think it’s difficult to underestimate the kind of damage such egregiously bad standards can do if their proponents remain such a vocal part of the comics-proselytizing movement.
That’s why Gary Groth’s recent jeremiad in favor of much more rigorous critical standards is so important. As he and others like him have long argued, it’s impossible to justify holding up, say, the Speedy-does-heroin storyline from the old Green Lantern/Green Arrow book (regardless of how forward-looking it may or may not have been in the context of the superhero comics of the time) as some sort of masterpiece of the form when Robert Crumb was working at the same time. Similarly, I’ve been hard on Mark Millar’s teen-geared Trouble at least in part because, as a professional writer, he should know better than to hold it up as some sort of instant classic in a medium that also produced genuine teenage-oriented masterpieces like Ghost World, I Never Liked You, The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Blankets.
There’s just no excuse for mediocrity in a medium capable of greatness. And there’s even less of an excuse for confusing the former with the latter.