Superheroes, unite!
Been reading more of those comics I’m getting… it’s interesting, since I’ve been reading mostly graphic novels and not the superhero stuff, to see how dark the superhero stuff has gotten. It’s like every story is trying to be Watchmen.
I mean, to someone who grew up back when the Justice League mostly fought giant starfish that perched on the Empire State Building, to see everyone at each others’ throats, to see long-standing characters
In fact, some of the characters in the comics I’m reading are actually saying the same thing! There’s a scene in one of them where the older Superman from one of the alternate universes they destroyed in the last crisis basically utters an indictment of the dark and unhappy milieu of the current DC universe. It’s a metafictional moment that reminds you that superhero comics have always been into metafiction, from She-Hulk breaking out of the borders of her panels, to Animal Man staring directly out of the page at the reader and screaming “I can see you!”
Something like the current “Infinite Crisis” storyline is also a bit like watching a soap opera with 500 characters (in brightly colored tights or power armor), with the episodes in random order. Did the Flash get tricked by this weird fake church cult before or after Athena took over from Zeus? If 9/10ths of the magic in the universe got destroyed, does that have anything to do with the kidnapped Thanagarian hawk? The compilation graphic novels that carry you through the storyline spend four pages on explaining the backstory so that you feel competent to read the new material. You end up piecing the story toghether like a mosaic, and there’s an intellectual thrill in that, even if you kind of wished for a concordance. Other than the chronology, it’s not unlike keeping track of the relationships in the Greco-Roman pantheon.
What’s interesting is that I know many of these writers from other work. For example, Greg Rucka did the rather good Whiteout, a spare murder mystery thriller set in Antarctica. That was perforce an intimate story — there aren’t too many folks at the South Pole stations — so it’s an interesting contrast to see him juggle the cast of thousands in “Infinite Crisis.”
In reading some of these, I am reminded that even the graphic novels are really working at short story length usually, when you boil them down to words (not to denigrate theart, of course). In comparing the sort of comics I tend to like, I’m reminded of Stephen King’s old statement that goes something like “Novels are like a long love affair, but short stories are like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.” Reading Dave Gibbons’ The Originals hammers that home. As a story, it’s mostly a solid short tale of the arrogance of youth, the perils of infatuation with violence and belonging that are so central to a young man… but in this case, with artist and writer the same person (Gibbons did the art on Watchmen, but the style here is slightly more cartoony, albeit just as cinematic), and with a clearcut story to tell, it’s more impactful than the deaths of hundreds of magic-wielding superheroes at the hands of
Similarly, I recommend Chiaroscuro : The Private Lives of Leonardo da Vinci, a fascinating biographical tale speculating on the loves and life of the artist, which is written marvelously well, capturing real human foibles and emotion. Plus all the research into Renaissance clothing and hairstyles makes for a richly drawn comic as well.
Next on the stack is Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, which is apparently a sister project to a forthcoming movie about which I know nothing. It’ll be interesting to see what such a visual director (he did Pi, which I guess I should spell π) will do with a comic.
Every once in a while I think I’d really like to write a comic.
Hmm, it occurs to me that I may be maxing out my geek cred meter with this post. I’ll stop now.
10 Responses to “Superheroes, unite!”
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We did two comics based on our online games last summer, one for Castle Marrach and one for Lovecraft Country. We contracted the artwork out for about $500, and made it available online as open content and available printed through Cafe Press.
It was a lot of fun — you should do one.
totally off topic here raph:
Did the MUD-Dev mailing list die? I quit getting posts to the list in early december. I checked my account and everything seemed fine. I even changed my mailto addy for the list and still nothing. I did get an email from JC on the first day of Jan announcing a new mod.
Am i missing something?
regards
I think it’s just hit a big snag as regards moderation, which then resulted in no posts showing up. I’ll ask JC.
DC proper is fairly barren of truly engaging material outside of Infinite Crisis, which in itself is about killing off all the bits of its universe that it doesn’t like. It’s done this twice before, once every 20 years, so it’s that time again.
Not to spoiler anything, but between comments by Rucka, Geoff Johnsn and Mark Waid, who along with Grant Morrison are going to be the arbiters of the post-IC DCverse, the aftermath is going to be about superheroes actually being -heroic- again. That is to say, throwing off all the anti-heroism that Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns heralded. It was a great hook at the time, but it’s been overdone.
For interesting superhero stuff (outside of small press and DC’s Vertigo and Wildstorm titles), make mine Marvel. Yeah, the House of M stuff and DeciMation is potentially as headache-inducing if not moreso than IC (not just because they put Chris Claremont onto X-titles,) it is bringing back X-Factor written by Peter David.
And don’t forget Nextwave, the Warren Ellis comic so awesome it needs its own soundtrack. And Neil Gaiman is going to write The Eternals sometime.
You’re basically picking up the right vibes beyond the confusion, that DC (and Marvel) both seemed to have numbingly and carelessly gone off into repellant territory that goes very far from the satisfactions of the genre–Watchmen without Moore’s imagination or maturity, kind of the hack writer version of the same geist. It’s promised that Infinite Crisis is DC’s solution to that problem, but we’ll see. The solution isn’t in the narrative or the continuity, it’s in a tight, consistent editorial direction. If they couldn’t hold that line before Infinite Crisis, I have no idea why they think they’ll be able to do so afterwards.
Marvel’s just as much of a mess. I love Bendis on Powers, but he needs to be kept away from most of Marvel’s properties. There’s a meanness to a lot of their titles now. If you want an antidote, a really great series, pick up the trade paperback of the recent She-Hulk series (not the older John Byrne She-Hulk, more recent than that). Total fun and actually pretty smart storytelling.
Your description of the “poetry industry” and the “virtual world industry” here pretty much nails the state of the modern comics industry. Today’s mainstream comic book creator is a lifelong comic book fan writing superhero stories for other lifelong comic book fans, average age somewhere in the mid-20s. When I was a teenager, a mid-range Marvel title had circulation figures somewhere in the 200,000 range — now they’re about a quarter of that. Circulation of non-mainstream, non-superhero books — well, they’re basically text MUDs in the shadow of Everquest and Ultima Online. Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns and Sandman were comics’ World of Warcraft events, but the industry is still a niche of a niche without any current WOW analogues.
I think there are many cautionary lessons for you MMO guys in the comics industry.
My understanding is that the whole graphic novel segment is greatly eclipsing the monthly comics. I haven’t dug into numbers or anything, though. Can you post more details?
One other thing is the huge huge growth in manga on American bookshelves. That clearly seems to be a large growth segment, even though it may do nothing for the superhero audience.
These are the musings of a longtime comics reader and PR professional, not someone with insider knowledge or retail experience.
According to retailer news site ICv2, the top two selling graphic novels in comic shops in November were actually trade paperback collections of previous comics, moving 10.2K and 9.4K units repectively. At the bookstores, a clear majority of the trade paperbacks on the shelves reprint material first published in what’s sometimes derisively called the “pamphlet” format. Comic publishers for the most part do not have the economies of scale to publish original graphic novels without having first made some money on that material in the monthlies. (There are a few exceptions like the indy “Blankets” to that trend.) This has led to fan grousing over the phenomenon of “decompressed” storytelling or “writing for the trade” instead of playing to the strengths of the monthly format.
Here’s a snapshot of what sales are like in the comics specialty market.
As for the manga presence in bookstores, it’s clearly reaching a new, untapped audience (though columnist/curmudgeon Paul O’Brien questions how mainstream that audience is) but the product is pretty impenetrable for a casual reader. I’m concerned that manga is a fad vulnerable to decline — and I was a big manga fan during its previous peak in the ’80s.
Here’s a good article about the growth of the original graphic novel market, but I still think that massive growth isn’t quite as impressive when you think about how tiny the starting point was.
She-Hulk is indeed awesome, for one rising star in the Marvel writing corps, guy by the name of Dan Slott. He’s a fanboy who can write, and succeeded in making a maligned cheesecake character seem like a real person by doing the one thing no one else had tried — make the story be about Jennifer Walters the lawyer. He’s also done great work on Great Lakes Avengers (now GL-X) and just started a mini on The Thing.
I find it far better to just take comic books as they come and watch for my favorite writers and artists’ names on the covers. That’s been a much better gauge of whether I’m going to enjoy the comic.
[…] The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky and Kent Williams. I picked this one to represent the vast array of DC comics I have been reading lately. Why this one? Because it isn’t an Infinite Crisis book. I currently have (I kid you not) two cubic feet of comic book backlog… In any case, I wondered before what a movie director would make of a comic. The answer, apparently, is something that looks nearly unfilmable. It’s visually compelling, and it’s a complex story of yearning and love — more complex, frankly, than the yearning and love in King’s Cell. […]