Have you noticed lately that it seems that nearly everything that happens in comics these days is perceived as insulting to someone? DC is angering women right and left and Mark Millar is downplaying extreme violence and rape — and those are just two of the most prominent examples.
In the PC world of today, what’s a creator going to do? Everything from Lois Lane’s hair color to the alteration of the previous history of a rebooted universe could be perceived as anything from frustrating to sacrilegious by a litany of fans and critics alike.
I can tell you what I think of it: I’m sick of it, and I can’t be the only one.
I take a look at the controversy controversy (you read that right) after the jump.
Where are we headed if every creator out there has to watch what he or she does or says in a comic for fear of offending his or her rapidly diminishing clientele? What does the future hold for these creators? If someone like the famous (infamous?) Batgirl of San Diego Comic Con can potentially alter the roadmap of one of the Big Two publishers, what hope does a lower tier writer in their employ have if they want to tell a tale how they see fit?
Really, there are two answers for that: they can either kowtow to the company line, telling the type of inoffensive drivel that either pushes fans away or creates comic book deadites who couldn’t muster enough energy to say “meh” after finishing the book, or you create someone like the modern day Alan Moore, complete with the homeless disposition and the comics filled with Cthulhu mega penises and the ladies that love them. You either go along or you rebel, and either of those isn’t what we’re looking for as fans.
 |
| How would the Internet have responded to this? |
Reading through Grant Morrison’s sprawling Supergods, you hear about the exciting, avant garde voices that pushed the medium in the directions it needed to be. People like Jack Kirby didn’t care that his New Gods work was different. Others like Denny O’Neill and Neal Adams didn’t care that putting Speedy on drugs was perhaps “too real” for readers to handle. And back then, those books weren’t huge, but they earned respect for trying something new and pushing the medium in ways that were beneficial to all.
These days though, would they have survived? How long would Jack Kirby have lasted even as long as he did at DC telling — at the time — weird as hell stories that were unlike anything that was being told? How long would O’Neill and Adams been able to, in theory, ruin the character of Roy Harper if JT Krul was essentially destroyed from the ground up for doing the very same thing?
I’m not saying that the infamous “Arsenal doing drugs and petting dead cats” deal or the current hubbub about “Catfire Gate” (as you may feel free to call what is going on with Catwoman and Starfire) are anything like those books in terms of quality (good god they are not). But when you are getting creators telling stories like they think they should, you get the bad with the good. Why spend all of your time and, perhaps more importantly, your money on complaining about the books that you hate?
It’s not fixing anything — it just removes a little bit of the creative power the little guy has in his actions on our favorite characters, and pushes us further and further towards a limited future in which Judd Winick and Scott Lobdell are stuck in internment camps with huge killer robots eyeing their every movement.
Or something like that.
If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. That’s the most powerful message you can give publishers.
Continued belowBut instead, the controversy laden Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws finished at 33rd and 39th in sales for the month of September.
That just continues to prove that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
A Quick Aside
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.“ ~ Anton Ego, Ratatouille
What’s our status?
I can say that I am as guilty as anyone about admonishing the quality of a book. There are books I’ve had to review for this site that I’ve genuinely not enjoyed. There are things that I’ve found offensive. But amidst of all of that, I try my best to find positive things to say because, let’s face it, as much as I cannot stand someone like Rob Liefeld’s art, the dude can draw me under the table any day of the week and has a legion of fans that vehemently say I’m not as right as I might think I am.
But why tear things down when we can say something good instead?
 |
| The unfortunate title in question from Green Lantern Corps #1 |
People looked at the first issue of Green Lantern Corps by Peter Tomasi and Fernando Pasarin, and they saw a title that reminded them of one of the worst times for humanity. “Triumph of the Will” offended people, and people were confused and upset about what it meant. I read more negative comments about that on one article from Comics Alliance that simply noted this happened than I did positive comments about the book itself in all of the reviews I looked at on the Internet (and there were many). And it wasn’t close.
That book was a quality one, with Tomasi proving that he still has a great handle on the characters he’s been writing for years now while Pasarin proves himself as someone who is good now and with potential to be great later. But instead, some people remember it for the four simple words that led off the book.
There are plenty of examples out there of great looks at both good and bad comics that don’t dwell on either aspect. They’re balanced, they’re fair and they are well written, regardless of what the perspective on the book itself is. But we prefer the more savory tasting controversy pieces any day of the week.
On the 29th of September, we rolled out an article that looked about the offensive nature of Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass 2 #4, tearing that book down for the violence and rape it depicted. The next day, I wrote a lengthy review singing the praises of All-Star Western #1 from Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti and Moritat, calling it a book that was easy for new readers to get into and just an all-around great comic.
The former article had more than 9 times the hits than the latter had.
I’m not going to say that we shouldn’t call out books that are offensive strictly to be offensive, or even ones that are simply bad. But do we really want to get to the point where all we look for anymore in comics is how they fail us as readers?
Why not something else?
 |
| Great comic with a strong female lead here |
So much time is spent looking at the ways that DC fails female readers, we basically ignore how strong the female leads are in Batwoman, Wonder Woman and Birds of Prey.
Continued belowIf we spent half as much time talking about how great books like Craig Thompson’s Habibi are as we do debating how offensive Catwoman’s wardrobe choices are, the medium and industry would likely be in a far better place.
After all, isn’t one of the primary topics of discussion lately “how can comics gain new fans?” If those on the outside look into comic book media and see those who already do read them constantly lamenting the misogynistic and overly violent crap being produced these days, I find it hard to believe that we’ll be able to convince them to join the squad.
Amidst the dreck and the controversial, in many ways, the creative world of comics is at the healthiest place it’s ever been. We have people like Robert Kirkman, Jeff Lemire, Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque, Fiona Staples, Jonathan Hickman, Jason Aaron, JH Williams III, Kagan McLeod, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Francesco Francavilla, Josh Fialkov, RM Guera, Chris Samnee, Faith Erin Hicks, Mike Mignola and god only knows how many more creators churning out incredible content constantly. We should be celebrating them and their work.
But where is the fun in that? As Anton Ego said, it’s far more fun to read and write negative criticism than to muster out the slightest bit of positivity towards a piece of creative fiction that we couldn’t create if we had three Crises worth of time to do so. We’d rather sit around and complain about how confusing it is that Dan Didio said on Facebook that Superboy Prime didn’t really punch through a wall of space-time.
And how confusing is that?
