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SEQUENTIAL CULTURE #13 16 Sept 03 |
Attention Versus Quality (or Fuck the Market) |
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JULIAN DARIUS |
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Everyone in American comics seems to
want another boom -- as if the last one was good for us. |
People fucking love to complain about
it. I hear it all the time. Everyone in American comics seems to want
another boom -- as if the last one was good for us. Well, I don’t. Not particularly. Let
me try to explain. I love literature. Hell, I write it. Copiously. Novels, poetry, plays, movie scripts. The works. I’ve also
had more classes on literature than most Ph.D.s in it. But I challenge you to show me a novel
published in the last five years that’s as challenging to convention, as
revolutionary, and as just plain fun to boot as Mark Millar’s The
Authority. |
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We can do
things other media can’t simple because no one’s looking. |
So let’s have none of this second cousin
shit. Yes, comics are a second cousin
to literature, to film -- and often to the likes of baseball cards -- in the
popular press in America.
Absolutely. We’re in a fucking
ghetto of popular attention, and it sucks.
No one likes it. But we can do
things that they can’t simply because no one’s looking. Haven’t you ever noticed that comic book
titles and TV series often become the most revolutionary when they’re on the
verge of cancellation and are so desperate for readers, or viewers, that they
actually try to do something new and exciting? Yes, sometimes that same instinct takes the form of gimmicks, of
killing off the main character only to bring him back in two months, or of
bringing in Pamela Lee Anderson, that stalwart bulwark of intellectualism. But sometimes they hire Alan Moore, like
on Swamp Thing in the early ‘80s, and let him go to town. It doesn’t work if the people running the
show aren’t smart. Leave Billy-Joe
Jim Bob to do whatever he wants because, frankly, there’s little hope of
surviving economically anyway, and he’s more likely to mix zombies with
aliens than come up with a new style of writing an entire genre. But it sometimes happens that you have
smart people at the helm and that they do great shit because no one’s looking
over their shoulder with lawyers and promotional schemes that have budgets in
the multi-million-dollar range. |
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Film saw a lot of the same shit that comics do now in the 1960s. |
Film saw a lot of the same shit that
comics do now in the 1960s. TV had
made a serious dent in the film market:
why go pay for a movie in the theatre when you can watch moving images
on the telly, right? And film tried
gimmicks: hundreds of different widescreen formats premiered, desperate to
give film something unique over TV.
People worried about the death of the medium. The major studios, for a while, were
producing only a tiny, tiny fraction of the output of the majors today. And there was, according to many experts,
a real renaissance in terms of the types of films, in terms of the quality,
and in terms of experimentation. You
see, no one was looking. Comics are in a similar spot. No one’s looking. And, comparatively, we can go crazy. |
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Do I want greater attention paid in America to comics? Yes.
But I’d rather the comics were good. |
Do I want greater attention paid in
America to comics? Yes. But I’d rather the comics were good. And I’d rather the attention wasn’t of the
“Crash! Bam! Boom!
Comics Grow Up!” variety. The comics being produced today in America
are to my mind among the best America has ever seen. Even much of our drek is better. Marvel, for God’s sake, is doing good
stuff. We have Garth Ennis on Punisher
and Nick Fury. We have a new Neil
Gaiman mini-series for fucking Marvel, of all places, and an anthology of his
work featuring the Endless -- that looks to be fantastic because of its
artwork, if nothing else -- coming out later this year from Vertigo in
hardcover, like a real book. We have
Grant Morrison doing New X-Men, still drek, but far better drek than
the X-Men have seen in generations, with perhaps rare exceptions. And he’s doing The Filth in the
style of his brilliant The Invisibles. We have Mark Millar doing drek with Ultimate X-Men and
brilliant work with The Ultimates.
We have Brian Michael Bendis, a fucking independent, black-and-white,
crime comic book writer and artist doing major work at Marvel, most of it
shit, but some of it, like Daredevil, quite exceptional. We have Alan Moore doing super-hero work
at America’s Best Comics, quality distractions if nothing else. We have Warren Ellis doing mini-series
that hit hard and fast like intellectual guerilla warfare. We have Vertigo doing drek for the
over-eighteen mental age crowd, but also good stuff like Brian Azzarello’s 100
Bullets. Hell, even Hulk
features brilliant covers by Kaare Andrews if nothing else. This doesn’t even include the growth of
independent work, like Seth and Adrian Tomine, that anyone can pick up and
read and enjoy but that doesn’t get nearly as much attention. We’ve got Dave Sim on Cerebus,
Warren Ellis at Avatar, and an upstart company in Florida named CrossGen that
makes pedestrian comics but that’s thinking of new ways to produce and market
comics. Not to mention Image Comics
publishing independent work along with the drek. And, of course, we’re getting trade
paperbacks of important past work and new work, from the moderately decent to
the actually good, all the time. Do
you understand how long we went without Miller’s original Daredevil
run in print? Just think about it,
about the sheer insanity of it, the willful severing of history implicit in
that. |
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Make no mistake: it’s a
good fucking time to be in comics, from the perspective of quality. |
Let’s make no mistake: it’s a good fucking time to be in comics, from
the perspective of quality. Yes, that’s not saying much based on our
past. Yes, I’d like more diversity of material,
less outright super-heroics and more crime, more straight fiction, more
experimental work in terms of genre.
But it has gotten better. Yes, the vast majority of comics are still
unreadably bad, but so are the vast majority of novels and poetry. |
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Yes, we’d all like to get a little
more respect. But tell me you’d
rather be reading in a boom of popular attention -- but be trapped reading
the comics of the early 1980s... or the 1960s... or the 1940s... |
Yes, we’d all like to get a little more
respect. But tell me you’d rather be
reading in a boom of popular attention -- but be trapped reading the comics
of the early 1980s... or the 1960s... or the 1940s... . I rest my case. |
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