Seriously, WTF, man??? Comics these days! Oy!
(Warning: Angry, expletive-laced fanboy rant ahead. If you’re not a big fan of those, just skip down to the question at the very end.)
I have been a major comic fan since I was a kid and Mom first introduced me to Archie. DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse… At one point, I read and liked ‘em all.
I have a confession to make now. This hurts to say it, but… *sigh*
I fucking hate comics.
It isn’t that I’m burned out on them. Good God, no! Hell, there are times I’d still like to go into the industry as an artist! No, it isn’t the medium itself I’m tired of.
It’s the stories, man, the damn stories!!
(Warning: Major spoilers ahead…)
Over at Marvel, they have this compulsion to kill off and eventually resurrect every damn X-Man in the line-up (when they’re not adding in a gaggle of easily forgetful new teenybopper mutants who will change power sets, codenames and costumes by the week’s end, but it’s okay because we’ll have already forgotten who the hell they were in the first place), killing off major characters (Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, et cetera ad nauseum) at the end of major crossovers (Civil War, Secret Invasion, etc.), then restoring them to life near the end of the next crossover (after their copyright renewal contracts have passed muster, I’m sure) and rearranging their slowly falling-apart universe at every possible moment with some New,
Big, Important Crossover of the Year. (Remember when industry-wide crossovers like Secret War, Fatal Attractions [which was really only a 30th Anniversary X-Men/Avengers crossover] or ONSLAUGHT were rare - done maybe two or three times a decade - and didn’t happen every fucking year? Yeah, I miss those days, too…) First, it’s Civil War, where we outlaw half of Marvel’s characters in some massive “gun control” allegory that has already been done to death in Uncanny X-Men, oh, two decades ago. Good idea, extremely flawed execution, piss-poor editorially-mandated ending. (All the action happened in the monthly books, with the actual six-part Civil War series itself regurgitating massive universe-changing events without rhyme or reason based on an extremely threadbare-to-nonexistent “plot”. This is, of course, when the various series writers - some liberal, some conservative, some libertarian and some anarchist - who had no idea how the fucking thing was supposed to end weren’t undermining each other’s stories and slipping “clever” political references in now and then. ”Killing off” Speedball at a mock trial where he’s paying for a criminal’s obvious and very public attack for no damn reason, making his death look exactly scene-per-scene like Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder in custody, then bringing Speedball back as an S&M self-hating practitioner of extreme self-torture in a black-and-red spiked gimp suit - cool costume, by the way, and I do mean that - called “Penance”? Was all that even necessary, really? It’s not like most comic readers even knew who the hell Speedball was, anyway…) Then it’s Secret Invasion, where we have a Skrull infiltration and invasion… uh, just because… y’know, aliens like to kill us and shit. Whatever. Then it’s Dark Reign, where Obama hands control of all of America’s superheroes over to the Green Goblin. (I am not making that shit up! Read the damn comics yourself if you don’t believe me!) Now, it’s The Heroic Age, where Marvel hits the big cosmic “Reset” button and sets everything back to the late 1970s/early 1980s (while still having heroes killing people at random in graphically bloody and nonsensical ways just to show how “modern” and “edgy” they are; this is, of course, when the characters aren’t fucking every available ass in sight, going way out of character to do so, because all comic book characters are raging sluts now, for some reason). Every comic book character has gone from being an honorable person in a mask to a total psychotic, neurotic, sociopathic, homicidal or narcissistic nutball in a goofy skintight suit. (Except Iron Man; he’s still a power-mad recovering alcoholic skirt-chaser, God bless him. He’s the one character they can write correctly.) To say nothing of having Spider-Man reveal his identity to the public and fight on behalf of The Man, then make a deal with the Devil to get rid of his twenty-year marriage, save Aunt May from death (even though we all know the old bat’s been ready to “move on” for some time now), resurrect Harry Osborne for no reason whatsoever and make everyone forget that he showed them who he was under the mask (I am not making any of that shit up!), then put him in a relationship with some girl who came out of nowhere and just so happens to have the exact same name as the Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief’s daughter, who suddenly everyone in his life loves (can you say “Mary Sue”?) and suddenly thinks he’s perfect for, including his now ex-wife whose marriage was nullified from existence by act of Satan. *deep breath* (Again, I am not making any of that shit up! Comics, ladies and gentlemen!) The reason for all this nonsense, you ask? Because the Editor-in-Chief wants it to be so. Many of these moves have lost Marvel hundreds of readers and made long-time, super-talented, high-paid, wildly popular writers (like Babylon 5 creator and former Amazing Spider-Man scribe J. Michael Straczynski) quit in frustration and swear off working with Marvel Comics.
Don’t get me wrong! Some of those stories had awesome ideas behind them! BUT, as former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Tom DeFalco put it, “A good idea does not a story make (emphasis mine).” A story is made when a good idea gives birth to a great plot and emerges from the fertile mind of a talented writer who brings the story about in logical progression, gives it a spectacular ending and is paired with a bloody awesome artist. That’s how you make a good comic.
Good comics haven’t been made since 2000. :( (Don’t argue with me! It’s science, dammit!) The new writers (Mark Miller and Brian Michael Bendis, for example) do have talent, but they work on several books at once and are so rushed to put out their work on deadline that their creativity is aborted before it’s born. You have good ideas with piss-poor executions, when they’re even executed - as in “done properly” - at all (as opposed to “executed” as in “you killed your fucking story, you brainless twit!”). Worse, Marvel will hire incredibly talented writers - hell, they’ll hire fucking movie or television writers (Kevin “Silent Bob” Smith, Back To the Future scribe Bob Gale, the aforementioned J. Michael Straczynski - all three of those bad-asses have worked on Amazing Spider-Man or some variation thereof in the past decade - and Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Firefly creator Joss Whedon) - and either the deadlines will kill the story (like Kevin Smith’s Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do, though much of that was largely his own damn fault) or editorially-mandated changes or endings will fuck the story over. (Straczynski was forced to erase the popular Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson marriage from existence at the end of One More Day, and after Straczynski fled the chicken coop as fans’ anger mounted, Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, hired poor Bob Gale to take the fans’ heat and write the continuity-rebooting sequel Brand New Day. Only Gale’s talented writing kept the book going… but c’mon, making J. Jonah Jameson mayor of New York, then having Peter catch Jameson’s father fucking Aunt May?? Who the hell thought any of that shit was a good idea?!? And you can tell the character of Carlie Cooper - again, a character named after Joe Quesada’s daughter - was forced into the story by Quesada because she’s written like a Mary Sue, and seeing such fetid fecal fiction forced from the plundered pen of a skilled scribe such as Bob Gale by editorial edict is damned disgraceful.) Of course, let’s not forget the mean-spirited fan-taunting (using puzzle-piece covers all year long to make fans think the EIC actually gives a damn what the fans think and is actually going to bring back the Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson marriage, then taking an unholy shit right on their hopes and expectations by releasing the one-shot story One Moment In Time [get it? OMIT? as in “omit the marriage from continuity”?], which only solidified the continuity-fuck) or the truly bizarre (Spider-Man’s guest appearance by Jay Fucking Leno on a motorcycle, a “jump the shark” moment if I ever saw one) or the outright unnecessary and astoundingly stupid (the 2006 Marvel Comics/Guiding Light crossover; again, I am so not making this shit up!)… You think the 2009 buyout of Marvel Comics by the Walt Disney Company would make things better, right? More editorial oversight? Kid-friendly comics? Nope! It actually made things worse, because now Marvel’s EIC can draw from the nigh-limitless Disney funds and doesn’t have to actually listen to the fans anymore at all.
(Look, I know I harped on the whole Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson marriage thing a lot there, but look at it through the eyes of a fan who is passionate about these characters for a moment. Peter Parker’s defining attribute - aside from his snarky humor - is responsibility. Having him make a deal with the Devil to erase the most important responsibility he could ever willingly take on - the bond of matrimony [not to mention the only thing that’s ever gone right in his miserable life] - for the least developed, least plausible so-called “reason” possible just so he can go back to being the “younger”, “play-the-field” Parker is just so against his nature that it doesn’t even seem like I’m reading the same damn character anymore. That really is the official reason behind Quesada ditching the marriage, too! Because, in Quesada’s own words, marriage “ages” the character too much (guess Quesada didn’t know as many teenage couples as I did). That’s the big reason. He even went on to state in interviews that he wants Peter Parker to play the field more and get into annoying love triangle situations left and right, like Archie with the Betty/Veronica nonsense (question: how badly have Archie Comics’ sales been slipping again?). That, dear readers, is why I harp on it so.)
On the other hand, DC Comics (the “DC” means “Detective Comics”, so their official company name is really “Detective Comics Comics”) - which hasn’t had a well-written, sell-out, high-profile story since The Death and Return of Superman (I realize the whole “Superman Blue” story was high-profile, but it definitely wasn’t well-written) - has really surprised me lately! They’ve actually put out a few dozen high-profile stories that were really, really good! (Not company-wide crossovers, either, though they - like Marvel - have been whoring those out like Heidi Fleiss lately.) President Luthor (which is exactly what the name suggests; back in 2000, people were so frustrated with both Gore and Dubya that DC offered a third candidate - Lex Luthor - and allowed their readers to choose which of the three they wanted as president; the readers unanimously voted Luthor in as President of the United States in the DC Universe), Up, Up and Away, the recent Braniac saga, the New Krypton and War of the Supermen stories (all of those Superman stories, and Superman needed some good stories, because his sales had gone to shit before the year 2000), Hush, War Games, War Crimes, Batman & Son, Batman R.I.P., Battle for the Cowl and Batman, Incorporated (all of them Batman stories, as the titles suggested)… All of these have been fan favorites, and all of them (with the exception of the ending to War of the Supermen) have been damn impressive.
For one thing, DC has at least attempted to listen to their fans. When they kill off a character that the fans liked - specifically Martian Manhunter, Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen - they found relatively reasonable ways to bring them back from the dead. (I’ll get to the unreasonable ways in a minute.) For the most part, the DC Comics EIC meddles in storylines very little (except for the stupid Crises, which I’ll address soon enough) and prefers to let their incredibly talented writers - guys who can take books that haven’t been selling at all and transform them into top sellers seemingly overnight - actually tell the stories they want to tell. They work with their writers, not against them. (When health issues and pressing deadlines on another project forced J. Michael Straczynski to leave his current Superman and Wonder Woman story arcs after only four issues on each, DC Comics didn’t try to pressure him into staying on and allowed him to leave, and even allowed him to choose who would take over the stories after he left using his story notes. I won’t even go into the free reign they’ve given Grant Morrison; we’d be here all night if I went into that.)
Moreover, they hire writers who have good ideas and actually let them take those ideas to fruition. Kevin Smith went to DC Comics, told them he could triple the sales of the Green Arrow series if the editors let him bring Oliver Queen back from the dead. They did, and Smith made goon on his promise; sales of Green Arrow soared. Since then, Smith has penned two Batman mini-series - Cacophony and The Widening Gyre - and DC has allowed him free reign. Both series have turned out fairly well and have been selling like mad. During his time with the Batman books, Grant Morrison has come up with some off-the-wall ideas - giving Batman a son, “killing off” Bruce Wayne, replacing him with his former sidekick, bringing him back as a new second Batman and having him start a franchise by hiring various heroes in major cities worldwide to be their country’s Batman - and those off-beat ideas have paid off, thanks to Morrison’s stellar writing.
For starters, they tend to copy Marvel way too much, and Marvel responds by copying DC. Marvel hires Kevin Smith and J. Michael Straczynski; DC hired Kevin Smith and J. Michael Straczynski. (Um, guys? How about you quit dicking around with comics and go back to writing TV and movies for a while, huh? You can still get writing jobs in Hollywood, right?) Marvel Comics does a zombie story (Marvel Zombies) or two (all the fucking spin-offs and their crossover with Army of Darkness), DC Comics does their own (Blackest Night, where tons of old dead superheroes are resurrected and turned into corpsified villains; not to be outdone, Marvel did another zombie story - the Necrosha X-Men saga written by Joss Whedon). Marvel does a poorly-written universe-shattering industry-wide crossover (Civil War); DC does a poorly-written universe-shattering industry-wide crossover (Final Crisis). DC dramatically alters a character’s continuity for no reason (Superman); Marvel dramatically alters a character’s continuity for no reason (Spider-Man). DC gives one of their characters a son (first they gave Superman a biological son in the movie Superman Returns, then they gave him and Lois an adopted Kryptonian son in the comic story Up, Up and Away; they would later give Batman a test tube kid in Batman & Son); Marvel gives one of their characters a son (they gave Wolverine a cloned daughter named X-23 and a “long lost” biological son named Dakken). On and on and on…
Another thing: all the damn Crises. It started back in 1985-1986 with Crisis on Infinite Earths. From 1932 (first issue of Action Comics featuring Superman) to 1985, DC Comics didn’t really care much for that killjoy concept called “continuity” and published stories that didn’t really jive with each other. One decade, Superman’s human parents would be dead, he wouldn’t start his superhero “career” until he was an adult and he was essentially Dirty Harry with a cape who was more than willing to toss rapists out of really high-up windows. (That was the Superman of the 1930s and 1940s: a bulletproof flying vigilante in a Metropolis that was a lot more like Gotham City; understandable, as both fictional cities were based on Chicago.) The next decade, Superman began his career as a little boy (hence “Superboy”), his parents were still alive and he refused to kill bad guys. As each decade passed, he seemingly gained a new super-power (flight, heat-vision, the ability to turn back time by flying backwards around the planet) and another relative/pet refugee from Krypton (Supergirl, Mon-El, Krypto the Superdog, Beppo the Superchimp, I only wish I was making these names up) until the phrase “Last Son of Krypton” no longer had any meaning. And this is what DC did to one character out of the thirty or so characters they had. To clear up all the confusion, they rebooted the entire fucking universe with a massive story called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The story: All of the conflicting stories of every super-hero were “true” because they took place in alternate realities. A big, universe-destroying bad guy given the unimaginative and easily-forgettable name “Anti-Monitor” destroyed all the other alternate universes and combined them into one coherent universe. This is why comic geeks divide DC Comics history into “Pre-Crisis” and “Post-Crisis”. This allowed DC Comics to “reboot” all their characters and start over from Day One. All in all, mission accomplished. Well-written story, lots of drama, lots of suspense, lots of action, it accomplished all of the Editor-in-Chief’s goals and sold more books than anything DC Comics had done before then.
DC began meddling with continuity again later in the 2000s, so this necessitated another Crisis (DC’s official term for a universe-shattering event) - Identity Crisis (which revealed that the DC superheroes have been using magic to erase the memories of villains who have committed horrible atrocities and heroes who have been victimized by said atrocities; villains and regular people who accidentally learn the secret identities of superheroes; and Batman [the Chuck Norris of the DC Universe], because he would probably have objected to either of the former, and because everyone knows Batman’s bad-ass enough to bitch-slap Superman around, so nobody wants Batman to remember anything that might piss him off). Would’ve been fine after that… until the writers (remember, DC Comics generally allows their writers free reign, so this is bound to cause conflicts!) started dicking around with established continuity again. This necessitated Infinite Crisis. This story brought the idea of alternate universes back; this was a much needed move after DC Comics - partially by editorial decree due to the alarming success of Smallville and particularly due to the whims of Superman: Birthright author Mark Waid - changed Superman’s history three fucking times in a span of two years. I forgot all the details because the story of Infinite Crisis was infinitely dull, but it somehow involved an alternate universe Superboy gone evil literally punching the barriers of reality, which caused several changes to the timeline, like giving Superman three fucking origin stories and bringing Jason Todd - Batman’s second Robin, who had stayed dead up ‘till then (fortunately) - back from the dead at random (“Superboy punching the boundaries of reality” is now the DC Comics version of “a wizard did it”, when it comes to lazy half-assed explanations for stupid shit). Again, not making any of this shit up. Since that story caused enough chaos to give the entire editorial staff migraines, another damn Crisis was needed: Final Crisis (yeah, right). That story was crapped out so fast (by Grant Fucking Morrison, no less!) that I won’t even comment on how bad it was.
This brings up another grievous sin of DC’s: fucking endless industry-wide crossovers every damn year. Are they not learning anything from Marvel? (I guess they’re learning how much people will pay through the nose for bad writing.) Identity Crisis, Countdown to Infinite Crisis, Infinite Crisis, 52, Final Crisis, Blackest Night, Brightest Day… fucking stop it already!! That’s bad enough, but remember the shoddy, rushed-out writing I mentioned as one of Marvel’s sins? Taking old, tried-and-true heroes and making them uncharacteristically hyper-violent? Guess who’s doing it, too!
Ultimately, I have sworn off comics. Aside from Image’s The Walking Dead, Grant Morrison’s run on the Batman books (the only good story DC’s telling right now), IDW’s Star Trek comics (I know, someone’s actually putting out good Trek comics for once! it shocked the shit out of me, too!) and the occasional indie horror story, I don’t read them anymore. I don’t ever buy them anymore. (I’m buying the entire six-issue mini-series crossover The X-Files/30 Days of Night - which has received rave reviews - this weekend; this is probably the first time I’ve actually bought comics since 2007.) I can’t even stand to see anything with the Marvel logo on it at Hasting’s anymore. (I’ve literally boycotted any and all Spider-Man comics published after 2007.) Like I said, I still like comics; I just can’t put up with the shit stories, the primadonna editors and the hack writing anymore.
Remember when comics used to be fun? When they used to have interesting stories? (That was, what, 1995?) When the artwork wasn’t the only reason to pick up a comic and read it? When you didn’t read a comic because so-and-so wrote it, but because the story was good? When you didn’t feel obligated to read a comic because it was part of some ultra-mega-super-crossover and you just had to have the next issue so you could find out who died (which didn’t matter, ‘cause they’ll be coming back from the dead a few months later, anyway)? When a good plot mattered, when characters died and stayed dead (unless they were a villain; there’s an old storyteller’s rule: “you can’t kill the Devil”)? Do you remember when comics were enjoyable?
My question to you is this:
Are you as fucking fed up with the direction comics have been taking lately? All “sparkle & style” and no substance? Have you given up on ‘em, too? Do you still read any? If so, which ones? Do you still read Marvel or DC? Why? Do you think comics will ever be fun again?
(This post has been re-posted from the forums at Goth.net.)
