Posted: 17 June 2010 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | 1
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a) The British Invasion; b) The Image Wave; c) The Decompressionists; d) Joe Quesada; e) The Direct Market; f) Other:______; g) Nobody. Comics never had it so good! Let me explain: I am a comic book junkie. I cannot live without comics. Yet, over the past twenty years, I've been struggling to find stuff I like among tons of crap. Steadily, the number of "readable" comics have been diminishing as the craft of storytelling becomes a lost art. Personally, I enjoyed the British Invasion comics, because the quirky stories they produced depicted the fringes of the DCU, in stern contrast to mainstream characters like Superman. Then, when saying that "comics had grown up" was all the rage, they were lobotomized. The Image wave arrived. Out with Moore and McKean, in with McFarlane and Liefeld! Suddenly, it was all pin-ups, stories, characters and plot a thing of the past. This lasted several years. Inexplicably, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Story decompression, page after page of talking heads. The thing people forget is: BENDIS CAME UP WITH THIS PACING BECAUSE HE COULDN'T DRAW AND MADE COMICS OUT OF STATS!!!!!!!! The market has shrunk dramatically. So much so, that so-called alternative artists now ALL have to ply the mainstream super-hero trade. Mostly, the results are...doubtful (last week I read BATMAN: ORDER OF THE BEASTS, by Eddie Campbell, an enjoyable book - that was a rare instance in which this worked). I am very saddened to see former heroes like Grant Morrison (yes, you read that right) who made such awesome comics in the past turn out something like Final Crisis and Bruce Wayne Returns. Another consequence of the shrunken audience is the constant effort to raise the shock level, always reaching for the lowest common denominator. This is Joe Quesada's game, which is now played at both sides of the board. Sometimes, I think Quesada and Didio are the same person! Idiotic, revolting story developments result, such as "Superboy- Prime" punching "walls of reality" and the "new Red Hood", two examples I find particularly abhorrent (nuMarvel, I can't even cite examples). Finally, the "it's the singer not the song" syndrome. What sense does it make to spot an ad saying "Bill Willingham is coming" to a casual reader or a civilian? Ah, how I detest the "pull list" mentality...which reminds me, could it be all this is to blame on the direct market system? Hrm. For all these reasons, it is a very, very, very rare occurrence that I pick up a comic produced this decade that I enjoy. I find it very unlikely that anything produced today will last. So, these days, I live in the Land of the Back Issues, slowly making my way through the roster of DC and Marvel titles from the late seventies and eighties. Michael Kaluta or Gil Kane are usually on cover duty, the coloring is pleasant and the newsprint smell and feel is...addictive!
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