       |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Why I Don't Like Modern Comics by Kurt Mitchel (AKA "Cei-U" of Jonah Weiland's Message) Our friend Rob Imes (aka ‘Rimes’) has asked me several times to explain why I don’t like modern comics. I’ve finally found the time to formulate my answer. But first, a couple of disclaimers:
So why do I say that I’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Modern Age? Let’s start with the easy answers. First, there’s the art. Bad art is endemic throughout the industry these days. For every Jerry Ordway or Steve Rude or Brent Anderson who have mastered the basics of anatomy, perspective and composition and understand how to use these elements to tell a story, there are ten times as many Tod McFarlanes and Rob Liefelds and Erik Larsens who eschew such subtleties as identifiable backgrounds and the careful portrayal of characterization through facial expression or body language and sacrifice comprehensibility for effect. They know only how to draw poses; they couldn’t draw from real life convincingly if you held one of the Punisher’s big-ass guns to their heads. The consummate craftsmanship of a Curt Swan or a Russ Manning has become as passé as zoot suits and "23 skidoo." Where once art existed to serve a story, now story exists only as an afterthought, a justification for 23 pages of posters. Second, it’s nearly impossible to follow a storyline at the mainstream companies. Sure, Superman (or Superboy) starred or appeared in seven comics a month when I was a kid but each story stood on its own. I didn’t have to read Action to understand Jimmy Olsen or World’s Finest to understand Justice League. Recently, while researching a writing project, I sat down and read for the first time the last six years’ worth of Superman titles. Individually, each was much better than I expected. But I refuse to buy five comics a month to follow a single story. And that’s only one character! I bought the new Avengers #1 last week out of respect for Kurt Busiek and George Perez but found it absolutely incomprehensible, even with the explanatory gatefold. I’m not interested in the Marvel or DC universe, only in individual components of them. And I hate it when the forward momentum of one of my favorite titles is arrested for the sake of yet another company-wide crossover. I like heroes. I like heroes who behave heroically, who aspire to a higher moral standard than the mass of men. I even like silly heroes: platinum robots who fall in love with their creators, laughing daredevils who keep laughing even after transforming into grotesque chemical men, adolescents who find time for practical jokes on their newspaper publisher tormentors. I don’t like psychotic vigilantes who act as judge, jury and executioners. I don’t like characters who derive their power from demons. I don’t like "heroes" who cheat on their wives or succumb to their addictions or abandon their responsibilities. I don't like it when the kind of hero I like is transformed into the kind I don't like by some cynical, nihilistic, flavor-of-the-month creative team. And I especially don’t like to read about my heroes aging into enfeeblement and senility and an unnoble, undignified death. Now I’ll get to the heart of my problem with modern comics. The super-hero genre is inherently unrealistic. It is based on a ludicrous premise: that sane men and women, many possessing physically impossible superhuman abilities, will assume colorful pseudonyms and don capes and tights in the name of vigilante justice. Unlike cowboys or soldiers or middle class high school students (to name a few other popular comic book genres), there simply is no real world counterpart to the super-hero. Yet we accept that ludicrous premise because (mostly subconsciously) we recognize that these characters are the contemporary equivalent of the gods and heroes of classical mythology reinterpreted in terms of our own urban culture and, as such, fill a universal need for heroic fantasy. That’s the key word: fantasy. Super-heroes, despite their science fiction trappings, are creatures of fantasy. No being with a humanoid configuration can do what Superman does, no matter where he originated or what color our sun is. No one can accrue or shed mass like Henry Pym or the Atom and wouldn’t function normally even if they could. Bruce Wayne would either have been placed in intensive counseling as a youth or else institutionalized at the first manifestation of his caped-and-cowled alter-ego. Fantasy. And a rather childish fantasy at that. People have referred to Superman as "an adolescent empowerment fantasy" so often, it’s become a cliché… but that doesn’t make it any less true. It isn’t the presence of superpowers that make the super-hero genre immature, however. It’s those code names and costumes and teams and super-villains. The creative team on the Silver Age Flash (Schwartz, Broome, Fox, Infantino), having lived through the genre’s infancy and contributed to the crystallization of its conventions, understood perfectly what the genre is at its roots: a ritualized series of competitions between adult children playing roles as eccentric and stylized as those in Italian commedia del’arte or Japanese kabuki theater. Stan Lee added a veneer of verisimilitude over at Marvel with his "heroes with problems" approach and the scope of the ritual grew increasingly more cosmic thanks to Jack Kirby but, ultimately, the premise continued inviolate throughout the Silver Age. When Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons produced Watchmen and Frank Miller The Dark Knight Returns in the mid 1980s, they were rightly hailed as fresh and innovative takes on the super-hero genre, iconoclastic and long overdue. They were intended to be exclamation points in a field of commas: they made an impact because they provided a counterpart to the genre’s conventions, just as at the time Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch provided an effective counterpart to fifty plus years of Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers banality in the Western genre. But, as with the Western, the exception became the norm. Suddenly, every major character was reinterpreted in the new "grim ‘n’ gritty" mode, particularly at DC. Heroes and heroines who had once represented humanity’s best became drug addicts and alcoholics, adulterers and unwed parents, psychotics and murderers. And they began to die in droves, sometimes heroically and with dignity, usually for no good reason except shock value. All this was done in the name of "realism." I’m not ashamed of being a super-hero fan, anymore than I’m ashamed of liking fairy tales, Dr. Suess books, Disney movies, Looney Tunes cartoons or other relics of childhood. Nor does my interest in these things preclude my interest in history, literature, politics or philosophy. I can embrace the child and the adult in me simultaneously. Frankly, I think deep down most adult fans and many modern comics creators (who, almost without exception, began as fans) are ashamed of their affinity for these fantasy characters and that the inclusion of sex, violence and other trappings of the "adult" world is an attempt to overcompensate for that shame. And that, ultimately, is my objection to modern super-hero comics: they are created by fans for fans, using a language understood in full only by the chosen, the dogma of a cult that paradoxically bemoans their diminishing ranks yet keeps its would-be initiates at arms length. Modern Age comics are a distortion, if not perversion, of a genre I love and I choose not to encourage these trends with my patronage. So there you have it, Rob. It’s pompous, pedantic and as honest a declaration of my opinion as I can muster. |