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I still have a monthly shipment but its down from about 20 to 8 and I waver a lot on whether to keep those. I enjoy reading them when they come in, but I'm not sure that the cover price justifies the 5-10 minutes of reading pleasure that I get. I keep thinking that trades are the way to go but it's hard (for me anyway) to keep up with those. Plus, while the odds are much better now, there's no guarantee that what I want to read will be collected.
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>Oh please, that's a weak argument.
It’s not actually an argument.... it’s a legit question. I’m trying to gauge the audience.
>I lament the fact that other comic creators insisted on trying to emulate them to the point of parody, and then the influence just soaked into every series.
I’ve always felt the worst thing any entertainment medium can do is get intellectually inbred. And that’s what I saw happen to sueperheroes in the 80's. I read both when they first came out, but not being a superhero fan I wasn’t real impressed. (“So.... according to Watchmen, all superheroes are neurotic attention seekers? Duh.”) Years later, when I worked at a comic shop and had read more superhero stuff I got more out of them.
The problem with both these books was that they were written for superhero fans almost exclusively. (Something I realized on later readings.) And it wasn’t that they adulted up superheroes; they tried to make them PERTINENT. “No; Batman isn’t just about a guy in a mask who runs around tying people up in the night.... it’s a psychological analysis of the fear people have of the world juxtaposed against the blah blah blah.” And that attitude permeated a lot of books; more as time passed. So you got the beginnings of comics written for those already in the know, to the exclusion of newer fans. As time went on you got more adulted up books, because those were the only fans still hanging on.
It kinda changed in the 90's, when Image hit. New fans could get in on the ground floor. However; I think a LOT of those fans were speculators more than readers, and those that WERE readers lost interest after a few years because EVERYTHING was an Image book. So things shifted back to the old, still lingering audience; and we got a lot of “grownup” books.
>I feel super hero comics had really reached a good middle-ground in the late 70s/early 80s. Most were written in a way that an adult could enjoy them, with character development and situations that didn't insult anyone's intelligence.
I’d sort of agree; but I’d put the time earlier. Marvel really came into their own in the early 70's, and you could see little bits of more grownup comics poking through. I suspect it’s ‘cos their audience was aging and they were growing up with them. By the late 70's the new superhero boom was a MARKETING boom, and superheroes kinda got kiddied up again.
>But there was little that was inappropriate for children.
Well.... I think you were STARTING to see it from Marvel and DC. (Hence Marvel’s magazine comics.) But I think it was still tempered by a READING audience. (A lot of those Son of Satan stories dealt with stuff that’d be kinda heavy for a kid, and Savage Sword of Conan had a fair amount of kid-unfriendly material. But it all made sense given the content of the stories.) Many contemporary publishers had gone the adult route earlier.
A lot of the newer books seem to swing heavy on the titillation side of things (I’m looking at YOU; Mr. Cho.) without the story context we saw starting in the early 70's. (I think that comes from the current focus on marketing over product that Marvel and DC suffer from.) And a lot of it feels really.... disingenuous is the only word I can think of. It’s too adult for kids, but not engaging enough for adults. And to an adult, it doesn’t ring true. (“KEWELLLL!!!! That guy’s arm got chopped off!” “But.... he’s not really bleeding, and he’s still standing....”) Violence (no matter how realistically drawn) is watered down to cartoony levels, sex is almost non-existant (except for poses that manage to squeeze butt AND boob shots into the same pose) or glossed over, (like Dark Knight and Watchmen) and nobody does real adult-themed stories. (Would the second story here: Comic Book Legends Revealed #181 | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources be done today?)
For myself, that’s why I can’t object to the CONTENT of these newer books. It’s the CONTEXT that bothers me. Horrible stuff happens to a character ‘cos they know it can just be retconned later on; removing any meaning from the tragedy and the character’s dealing with it. Again, it feels like they want the titillation without the accountability. THAT”S what bothers me. I’m okay with “not for kids” stories as long as they ARE for adults.
Don C.Comment
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Batman: Year One is as dark as I want the characters to be in the monthly. Batman is an obsessed bad-arse, but Miller remembered, back then at least, that Batman was a compassionate, complex person. He tried to save a cat for pete's sake while he had the entire Gotham swat team after him. Unfortunately, others that followed him and Moore couldn't seem to walk that fine line between mature and adult-only. Moore ended up leaving super heroes behind, and then just doing his own take on Silver Age archetypes, and Miller got so wrapped up in Sin City he forgot to leave it at the door when DC wrote him a check.
ChrisComment
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Those works and kid friendly comics are two different things to me, yet not mutually exclusive when it applies to comics. There is room for both.
You can have, and appreciate, those works....but, do they (or even the pale reflections of the works that have drawn on them) have to now be pervasive in comics?
Having read your posts, I know you get it. I agree, the genre got weighted down and inbred. But, in bringing the bus from being mired in right ditch, they have steered into the left.
For me, I can look around and see several writers and artists who can pull off the seemingly tall-order I would like to see fulfilled in comics. There are commercially successful folks who just seem to get it....Timm, Dini, Cooke, Baltazar......they seem to succeed despite the mold. Make the mold be what these folks are doing and there are any number of artists and writers who could do great things to swing the pendulum back.
It doesn't have to be only one way OR the other. Just try to include everyone in most things. They are comics fer crying out loud. For the most part, though there can be regular exceptions, they should be all inclusive (and I would apply that to price.........I could easily buy five comics a week with my kid allowance. Even as an Adult, I am reluctant to lay down $90 per month for comics at the same rate. Inflation does not equalize that. Expand the audience, so you can drop the price, though you would necessarily have to drop the price to expand the audience.)
Comics are expensive because they got lazy. Oh, well....we can only sell X amount and in order to get our money out of i,t we must charge $3.00.
Write something worth a **** and you could sell ten times as many, yet while charging only half as much, make five times more than you are already making.
Seriously, how do they not get this and go for it???Last edited by saildog; Dec 26, '09, 7:41 PM.Comment
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>Batman was a compassionate, complex person.
Yeah. A lot of the complexity was lost over the years.... not just with Bats but with superheroes in general I think. I liked the 80's Justice League a lot ‘cos they got into the characters of the group; not just the beating people up stuff. Same with the Strong Guy version of X-Factor. Some folks grate against the “funny” stuff; but it provides some really important character bits. Stuff that makes the fight scenes more meaningful. By the 90's it was all about impact; and you got a lot of really, REALLY shallow books. (A friend pointed out that EVERY LINE OF DIALOGUE in one book was a permutation of “I’m ANGRY!” EVERY LINE!) Which works, as long as you can keep the escalation going. Which is what I think led to the shock books of the last decade. Although, like I said; there’s an apprehensiveness against actually taking the plunge and making “grownup” books WITHOUT the “plausible deniability..”
>There is room for both.
Oh, I think so too; and I think there SHOULD be both. But most marketing departments see an “all or nothing” kind of world.
>Make the mold be what these folks are doing and there are any number of artists and writers who could do great things to swing the pendulum back.
It’ll swing back eventually: there are only SO MANY permutations you can do, and novelty insists on new. (And if you ‘aint seen it, it’s new to you!) But for now, the superheroes are gonna have a helluva time breaking new ground. Part of it is practicality; they HAVE to keep the book coming out as long as it’s profitable, so you can’t do stuff like ACTUALLY kill characters off. And kids who’ve grown up on Japanese comics aren’t gonna buy it. (Unless you’re a Dragonball character dead is dead.)
....and THAT’S a big part of the problem: the audience. Right now there’s a core group of fans who’ll keep buying the superheroes out of inertia. So there’s still a tendency to cater to THEM. (Most of these big 500 issue mini-series would be pretty meaningless to a non fan. “Fish-Man is a zombie now? So what?”)
>Comics are expensive because they got lazy.
Well.... I think Marvel and DC priced themselves out of competitiveness when they started using “printed on BAXTER PAPER! WOOO!!!!!” as a marketing gimmick. Then the 90's saw “designer comics;” where fans would buy anything their favourite artist did. (‘Cos comics kinda didn’t have writers then.) So those artists requested more and more money, which they got ‘cos sales warranted it. When the bottom fell out the publishers had set a high standard that the market wasn’t supporting. And the fans were INSISTENT on a certain level of production. I still see people who poo-poo anything black and white. Since the old guard is their main audience they got no choice; even if it means jacked up prices.
Don C.Comment
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I stick by the notion that writers and artists shouldn't have taken the characters into directions they were never intended. The novelists and other media writers that have come into comics seem really fond of this, determined to do Moore and Miller better, since they are comic creators who broke into mainstream media coverage. But the editors and executives should do their job and just say "no".
Think about Harlan Ellison and Star Trek. He's made a lifetime of griping about, and filing lawsuits over "The City on the Edge of Forever". But the fact remains, as he wrote it, it wasn't a suitable Star Trek story, and that's what he was writing it for. It was rewritten to fit into the Star Trek format, and it's still considered the best of the series by most. Ellison is a very talented writer, but he was trying to rewrite outside the established Star Trek canon, and he was called on it. That wouldn't happen in today's comics.
The creators of Gunsmoke would have never accepted a script where Matt Dillion has his arm chopped off, becomes embittered and rapes Miss Kitty. The executors of Ian Flemings estate wouldn't okay a Bond novel where James admits he's gay and has secretly been a double agent for enemy powers for years.
There's a difference between a natural evolution of the material and a wholesale re-imagineing to suit the whims of creators who should have just gone and created their own characters to maul.
ChrisComment
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i know where you are coming from-
That's why i created Capt'n Eli- Commander X and Sea Ghost-
shameless plug----
http://www.captneli.com
go independent- there is some great comics being made if you look harderComment
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>There's a difference between a natural evolution of the material and a wholesale re-imagineing to suit the whims of creators
I think that's a big thing too. But it's not new to superheroes; there's ALWAYS been a tendency to shoehorn 'em into whatever's currently trendy. (Remember when EVERYBODY was a ninja? Stupid 80's....) Sometimes it works, sometimes.... well.... ("Hey! Wasn't Psylocke British a few issues ago?")
>who should have just gone and created their own characters to maul.
Yeah, but they wouldn't sell. I think the current comics are WAY too directed by marketing. NOBODY seems to want to touch a new character. (Publishers OR fans.)
>go independent- there is some great comics being made if you look harder.
I don’t think you have to look that hard! If you’re okay with Japanese, French or Italian books you don’t even have to go independent.
Don C.Comment
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I agree and I can tell you my #1 reason: the sticker price.
Back when comics were still in the .75 - $1.25 each range (yeah, remember when they were REASONABLY priced!?) I used to buy all sorts of "non-mainstream" and new character titles and I ENJOYED many of them. Sure, some were stinkers and yeah, most of them were either limited series or flops but the fact was they were THERE and available whereas that's not so much the case now.
I remember buying series such as Silverblade, Slasher Maraud, Triumph, Blue Devil, Ambush Bug, Wild Dog, Boris the Bear, Primal Force....etc etc etc
but as the prices started creeping up I started laying off trying new titles and now I'm to the point where I don't want to spend the money for anything chancy anymore.
I also agree that we don't need all the "hi-dolla" stuff like premium paper and overpaid creators but once you give something it's very VERY hard to take it away.
RichComment
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True about the new character stuff. The last new one to stick around is probably the Goon at Darkhorse, before that it'd be Hellboy, then I guess Deadpool.You must try to generate happiness within yourself. If you aren't happy in one place, chances are you won't be happy anyplace. -Ernie BanksComment
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>once you give something it's very VERY hard to take it away.
HAW! Yeah. On the upside, the current crop of comic fan is used to black and white, newsprint, and getting 500 pages for less than $5; so there's hope. It may take 5-10 years; but there's hope.
>I agree and I can tell you my #1 reason: the sticker price.
It really IS a catch-22; you need new material to expand (and even maintain) your fan base, but you aren't gonna bring so many folks in if you're priced out of the impulse buy range.
Don C.Comment
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