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Topic: The Changing Face of Comics Post ReplyPost New Topic
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 7:11am | IP Logged | 1 post reply

The death of Stan Lee has served to underscore how much comics--and, more importantly, public perceptions of comics--have changed in the past several decades.

During my early years in the Biz, it was most frustrating. People had a vague awareness of comic books ("Are those still being published?*) but when I was asked what I did I would draw blank stares when I said X-MEN. Even when I was working on FANTASTIC FOUR, only a few had even the most fleeting awareness, via the animated series. ("Oh, right. Rubber Man, and Flame Man, and... Rock Guy...?")

Even TV exposure didn't really do much. Spider-Man and the Hulk were more or less successful--less in the case of Spider-Man--but in forms quite different from what was to be found in the comics. Anyone inspired by the show to pick up a copy of THE INCREDIBLE HULK would find themselves in terra incognita.

When Jack Kirby died, there was barely a whisper in the popular press. Even in fandom it had been only a few years since he'd been elevated from "Jack the Hack" status.† But that was only in fandom. The real world neither knew nor cared. The idea that comics were somehow "created" was not really considered. Didn't they spring fully grown from Zeus' head?

And, of course, comics, especially superhero comics, were still used as shorthand for diminished mental capacity. In the movie LAWNMOWER MAN, the titular character has in intelligence greatly increase, and indicated this by giving away his comicbooks. In A FEW GOOD MEN the low IQ of one of the soldiers on trial is emphasized when his parents send him his comicbooks.

But that began to change a while back--tho, again, not really for the comics. A string of successful movies widened awareness and appeal. Could we imagine late nite talk show hosts making comic character jokes in their monologs thirty years ago? They do now. And quite casually, with an assumption of knowledge in the audience? With Stan's death, he is being referred to as a "comicbook genius" in various headlines. Thirty and forty years ago, he was a joke, compelled to wear a Captain America costume when appearing on talk shows, being drowned out by George Carlin taking about the EC Comics of his youth.

So, Stan dies, and it's news. Steve Ditko dies, and it's lesser news, but still news. We've come a long way, baby!

But occasionally, people still ask me "Are those still being published?" (Now, tho, they seem to think they have been supplanted by "graphic novels". Often horrified when I say "Those are comic books, too!")

____________________

* Most who had read comics as children seemed to think they'd stopped because the comics themselves had gone away, not because other interests had captured their attention.

† One of the few worthwhile things accomplished by the Image boys, as they adopted him as their mascot. ("Look, we're being ripped off by Marvel, just like Jack!")

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Doug Centers
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 7:58am | IP Logged | 2 post reply

When I started reading it seemed comics were predominately in the hands of kids. Most "grown ups" that were aware of them were the parents of those kids. That blip of college kids that got into Silver Surfer had ended so it seemed the majority was firmly back with the youngins .

My oh my has it changed.
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Michael Penn
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 8:05am | IP Logged | 3 post reply

What's happened over the past, maybe at most twenty years, would have been simply unfathomable to me as a kid forty-five years ago. 

I think that two non-comicbook influences significantly helped drive this change, but with regrettably mixed results. First, the Star Wars prequels created a media frenzy, and the "you killed my childhood" backlash fed the nostalgic mania even more (perhaps) than if Lucas had been successful. Now, not a few so-called loser-geek-pitiful adults were claiming to still be fans of what they'd loved as kids, but millions of people openly professed how much the Star Wars movies continued to mean to them. Second, the Peter Jackson Lord Of The Rings movies came out, to both critical and commercial acclaim, unleashing another (Oscar-nominated-and-even-winning!) wave of newfound grownup respectability for fantasy, what used to be the Dungeons & Dragons province of so-called loser-geek-pitiful adults.

Unfortunately, because Lucas and Jackson were not committed in any way to the original vision of the works they either continued or adapted, that too was a major influence. Changing what is only necessary was ignored in favor of changing anything for any "reason." The X-Men and Spider-Man movies, massively successful, showed that in spades. Worse, the old embarrassment about the comicbook hobby endured, as upright characters, names, and costumes were all gleefully mocked.

Perhaps today, finally, there might be at long last the beginnings of a broad cultural divestment of campy ka-pow! disparaging of comicbooks...?
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Doug Centers
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 8:16am | IP Logged | 4 post reply

"...as upright characters, names, and costumes were all gleefully mocked."

...

That's the one that gets my goat in films. The smirk or snarky remark when a "code name" that ends in "Man" is given or the disgust when a Bruce Banner is shown a pair of purple pants.
Yet I still watch, so I guess I'm part of the problem!
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John Byrne
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 8:24am | IP Logged | 5 post reply

The smirk or snarky remark when a "code name" that ends in "Man" is given or the disgust when a Bruce Banner is shown a pair of purple pants.

••

As the ennui-enhorged fanboys in the audience whoop and cheer.

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Peter Martin
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 8:39am | IP Logged | 6 post reply

I remember discovering about Jack Kirby's death by reading a smallpiece of text at the end of a comic I picked up while at university. Went into town for my very occasional visit to Forbidden Planet (in Nottingham), picked up a few issues and then discovered the death of one of the founding fathers of Marvel, printed in a tiny font without any hoopla. Don't recall it being recounted in any other media I consumed at the time.

I think the internet contributes. The speed by which news disseminates is incredible, but comics have definitely entered the mainstream consciousness in a big way, thanks to the success of TV and movie versions.


Edited by Peter Martin on 13 November 2018 at 8:40am
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Bill Collins
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 9:05am | IP Logged | 7 post reply

The huge success of the MCU and the Toby Maguire Spider-
man movies has a lot to do with it (All those cameos
didn`t hurt either!), i wonder if Stan died in the 90`s
(Or even pre 2008 and Iron Man?), if the reporting in
the mass media would be so widespread?
Either way, it`s nice he`s been recognised.
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Trevor Thompson
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 10:28am | IP Logged | 8 post reply

There are people now who have heard of Dardevil, Black Panther, Ghost Rider, Iron Fist and Power Man who have never read any of the books in their lives and only know them through movies and TV shows.

I was actually thinking about the most popular super-heroes and I think probably Spider-Man, Batman and Superman are the ones that most people would know off the bat back when I read comics. A mention of Daredevil or Iron Fist would be met with a blank look.
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John Byrne
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 10:42am | IP Logged | 9 post reply

That Other Media supply the masses with their views of these characters is one of the reasons I grumble so much about lacking fidelity.
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Brian Hague
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 11:02am | IP Logged | 10 post reply

When Jack Kirby died, Norm McDonald made a joke on Weekend Update that no memorial service was to be held since they intended to bring him back in a future issue. 

Every now and again, a character would crop up on screen somewhere who was a comics artist. It somehow made the character seem hapless, child-like in some ways, and out of joint with the world. Sometimes they'd protest that it was a real job, but those around them wouldn't quite buy it, and the comics artist character didn't have time to argue since he was under a deadline. It was not a staple character in the Hollywood lexicon, but it was within their wheelhouse nonetheless.

The characters themselves were portrayed on screen as being more ordinary than they were in comics. As mentioned in Robbie's thread about serials, the tendency was always to include as few fantastical elements as possible. The Hulk could fight a bear, but he could not fight a robot bear, even if Steve Austin was on another channel fighting an alien robot Sasquatch. That was all right because Steve Austin was a secret agent with a few medical enhancements. David Banner was still a transforming comic book monster. That was the one gimme that show was generally allowed. 

Fred Hembeck once said that Spidey's trips to the television screen all played like cop shows, which was something Hollywood already knew how to do. For the most part, comics were regarded as too far-out or worse, too childish for general audiences. Each time a comic property succeeded on screen it was seen as freakish and almost certainly due to any contributing factor than it's source of origin. Really, who could ever believe something so... out there? 

Plus, they were consciously ridiculous. I mean, from the general public's standpoint, the people making these things, whoever they were, they had to know how silly rubber people and rock men were, right? Because, hoo boy, if they didn't... well, at least they're confining their nuttiness to the comics page and not hurting anyone. Part of growing up for most of our lives was abandoning outre' fantasies and accepting life for what it is. We could put these things on screen for entertainment purposes, but only if we winked at them along the way just so no one thought we hadn't properly figured this stuff out ourselves.

That has changed somewhat in the past few decades. The prequels and LOTR films played a part, I think, but the biggest contributing factors I believe are twofold; the rise of anime and the cultural saturation of video games. 

Anime allowed adherents to speak of the comics medium in terms heretofore considered silly or lunatic. Their existence as a cultural staple in the daily lives of the Japanese, acceptable on trains or otherwise in public, made fans of anime insist that they were exploring a world that was not inherently childish. It was exotic. And no less complex and intricate in its way than any other art form. 

Fans of anime were not among us in vast numbers, but they did change the dialogue about the comics form, even if many insisted they were only talking about those made in Japan and other Asian countries. Their growing insistence that there was something to these products besides the "Biff, Pow, Sock" world of American four-color blood and thunder allowed for publishers to argue that they too were capable of producing "prestige" level versions of their product. Batman could be written at a high enough level to become The Dark Knight. Defunct comic lines such as Charlton could be re-imagined to operate at an acceptable literary level to appear on Recommended Reading lists and receive awards. Oh, it didn't happen often, heavens, no, but the public did regard these products in a new light, one that their parents' generation would merely shake their heads at. 

And when video games hit, ever one was living their lives in an outre' fantasy world for hours at a time; immersing themselves in whackadoodle premises with robots, spaceships, and fantastical power sets you could get for your character if you unlocked the correct combination code and slayed the radioactive smog monster to get to. Super-powers were something you wanted to have; no, needed if you were to breach that lava-filled expanse on level five. Yes, guns and devastated, death-strewn landscapes filled with zombies were the norm, but comic books played to those sensibilities as well. Suddenly spending all of your free time in fantasy wasn't the waste of time and energy Grandma and Grandpa made it out to be. Your friends were all leveling up. Why weren't you?

As for the changes made to LOTR, well, changes are always made and always have been. Nearly every change in those interminable, unwatchable slogs of CGI muck and mire (sorry, I can not abide them) was geared to turn some literary moment into a film cliche. Seriously, the attack of Gollum where he and Frodo both go over the edge and we (the camera, that is) run up to the edge to find they've both somehow spun around and grabbed onto just the thinnest outcropping of rock... but they can't hold on forever!! Good God in Heaven above, just shoot me now...

And fans of the prequels (of which there are more than there should be) will tell you that they are MORE accurate to the Lucas canon than less since they represent Lucas's own vision of what that era in his story was like. There was a significant validation of nostalgia in the uproar against these CGI walk-and-talks, I agree, but the acceptability of the fantastic in one's daily entertainment diet was already on the rise. 

One of the reasons an FF film was not made until one finally was was that the power set makes no logical sense from the outside. One event cannot give four people (five if you stick Doom into the origin) into a whole different set of biological enhancements. Yeah, you can say their inner selves and self-images were strangely literalized or imprinted upon the radiation signature yadda yadda, but the Hollywood of the 70's and 80's would have told you audiences were never going buy it. Fast forward, and hey, it's just your buy into the movie. Now, is the film itself going to be any good...? Turns out, no. But just the fact that a family of four could wind up stretching, flaming, clobbering, and fading from view meant you could do The Incredibles and get people to show up. Suddenly, all of this keeping the powers and weird stuff on the down-low was in fast retrograde.

Remember how flipping amazing it was seeing Knowhere built inside the skull of a dead Celestial in Guardians and then seeing a live one stride across the Collector's screens? And no one left the theatre going, "Aw, c'mon? Space Giants? Really...?" Audiences were primed for this stuff.

What audiences are still not primed for and likely never will be are the comics themselves. Yes, many many thousands more have picked up graphic novels and trade collections than we would have ever dreamed possible in our youth, but those numbers are still not the majority. Reading itself is dropping off the list of things we want to do today unless it's in the form of text messaging or a short article reinforcing our already extant political view on something. 

It should also be noted that films are experiences and comics are items. Bad writing in a two-hour experience comes and goes. Bad writing in a comic and you're still left holding the thing when you're done. Now what are you going to do with it? It's still there in your fingers, not going away. Yuck. 

And comics are still, by and large, badly written. It's one thing to enjoy a schlockfest of a movie. It's another to have a collection of schlock in a white box in the corner of your house taking up space. People are going to come over and see that thing. Yeah, you can put it in the basement, but now every comic you buy going forward means A.) another chance to be disappointed and B.) another trip downstairs to find a place to put the thing when you're done with it. 

Comic movies are kind of rad. Comics themselves, however much slack we're willing to cut them, kind of aren't. You can have Avengers: Infinity War or even Ant-Man on your DVD shelf when your new girl or guy is coming over. You really can't have a stack of comics out.*

Will that ever change? Maybe. Hey, we didn't think this was going to happen the way it did. Stan had an inkling this stuff could be so much more popular than the Hollywood of the 70's and 80's ever imagined, and even though he was selling something, he was right. That pitch he'd been honing for decades finally fell on the right ears, and the truth of the characters' popular appeal turned out to pure movie-and-money-making magic. 

* Try telling them you got those for a paper you were writing in college and have never gotten around to throwing them out. Then try to laugh it off when she tells you the one on top is from last month.

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John Popa
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 11:26am | IP Logged | 11 post reply

Has anyone here honestly had a significant other/potential suitor lose interest in you because of your comic book collection? Seriously? I don't buy it. No lady has ever given two shits that I have a stack of white boxes in my closet or a pile of new books on the living room table. Not twenty five years ago and not now.

Or maybe I'm just so damn handsome I can get past it :)
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John Byrne
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Posted: 13 November 2018 at 11:42am | IP Logged | 12 post reply

My experience has gone the other way. If the lady doesn’t “get it” I move on.
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