Comic Shop Musings 7/30/2005

This post will rescue my blog. I have written a lot on this blog about education, my professional interest, which was bound to happen as that's where my head has been these last few weeks. I refuse to let my loyal blog audience (who do I think I am?) be victimized by my recent narrow mental focus though. I have diverse interests and I can expound on many of them for great length. Of course to bring you the many facets of my mind, I need to occasionally take a deliberate break and steak out a new topic. I have written a little about my personal interests on this blog before, and I have some more ideas to share. However it seems like I'm crowding the landscape with only stuff on professional basketball, so I will spend a some of my lovely webspace on one of my lifelong passions: comic books.

I have read comic books since I was a small child, and have always had a place in my heart for the cape and tights crowd. Superheroes are often criticized for being overly broad or simplistic. While at the same time many complain that it's hard to read comic books because there's too much history involved. I trace this apparent paradox back to the basic nature of the genre. Superheroes are in my mind the descendant of ancient mythologies. This naturally results in archetypical characters engaged in epic quests. Every culture at all points in history has had a use for this kind of story told through one kind of art form or another. Still, some detract from comic books in general because they feel the fail to achieve the greatness appropriate of Art. I take great offense at such judgments. We've created figures of unreal dimensions and characteristics not as a failure to achieve some higher art, but as an exact expression of certain needs the human mind and spirit can't find elsewhere.

I am obligated by my union rules (Comic Book Fans, Trekkies and Role Playing Gamers Amalgamated Local Chapter #513) to remind everyone that there is great diversity at the comic racks. Any decent comic book vendor will point you to any number of genres, art styles, and formats that might please your particular artistic aesthetics. As I have grown and matured as a reader my tastes and interests in comic books have also become more sophisticated and diversified -though I have been missing out on certain genres since, Crossgen Comics went under, but that's nothing you really care about. I urge everyone to buy some comic books RIGHT FREAKIN' NOW! All you have to do is think of your favorite movie of the last five years or so, and then go into a comic book shop and ask them to recommend something like that. I say all of this because I will now go on to discuss superhero comics at great length. If anyone wants to check out of this column now feel free to do so. I'll write something soon about drum and bugle corps, which come to think of it I'm pretty sure the general audience care slightly more about comic books than drum corps (or as my brothers call it dork corps) But I will be writing some more about basketball in a few days and that should appease you lot.

I've recently been forced to find a new comic shop. Not only has this made me reconsider my choices for what I purchase on a month to month basis, but has also introduced me to some new characters and got me started thinking about a few major events going on in comic books right now. I have begun to think about events in comic books less in terms of how the relate to the artists who work on the titles, or the characters, or even the plots, and much more about how they reflect corporate policy.

At this point you'll need a little information about the current state of the comic industry, so you can either skip ahead or be patient with me. To summarize recent history in comic books for the uninformed (or as you apparently prefer to be called "normal") in the early 1990's comic books became a hot speculative item for investors with more money then brains who were waiting for Reaganomics to finally start paying out (funny how they never did until there was a Democrat in office). This meant the market for comics jumped tremendously. The problem with that was that the market didn't really want good comic books. No, it wanted comics that had that sheen of being $HIGHLY COLLECTIBLE$. Naturally the capitalist system forced the comic companies to pursue these profits by doing things like launching "events" or redundant title just to produce more issues with that supposedly collectible #1 on their cover. They also tended to put more thought into creating new "special edition features" like foil-embossed covers, holograms, and other gimmicks than they did thinking about how to tell good stories and use the artform of comics effectively. Then tech stocks got hot, so everyone sold back their comic books and the industry went through its own private recession. Over several years the major comic companies started focusing on quality again, and there has been something of a creative renaissance across all comic books, thankfully including superhero titles. Now the major comics companies Marvel (think Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four) and DC (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) are finally healthy again, and they are both out to make some serious mullah as their readership begins to grow, which has them positioning to try duking it out.

Now, I was talking to an employee at my new comic shop and he was pointing out that Crossgen Comics recent rise and fall was due to the company ownership's certainty that what they had to do to succeed was claim as much market share as possible. This lead to them releasing many, many titles in a brief span of time. They also tried to add a special incentive to readers to buy all their titles, by making them connected in a larger story. This story was so large that each title could effectively exist alone beneath it as a stand alone story in itself, but it was also so involved that after more than four years it only began to crack the surface when the whole company collapsed. Their idea was daring and it certainly shook up the landscape of comics, but it ultimately failed. Meanwhile DC and Marvel were fattening themselves back up by cutting down on the number of titles and focusing on self-contained stories under the eyes of focused artists. There was an undeniable nugget of truth in what he said with which I had to agree. Yet, something in the back of my mind bothered me about this. Then a few days ago it dawned on me. Marvel and DC have slipped back into the dangerous habit of title proliferation, big events, and intra-company crossovers.

At Marvel the story line is called "House of M" and it essentially transports the Marvel heroes to a world where Magneto, the X-Men villain, has risen to global domination. It has a lot of interesting takes on how the lives of our beloved heroes would be different. It is being overseen by a writer many argue is the best currently in the business, Brian Michael Bendis. Aside from a central mini-series the "House of M" story line is also being touched upon in some of the regular titles and covered to a larger degree in several special miniseries that relate the tales of this alternative reality. It's been selling great and it all seems interesting on the surface. Except for anyone who's been a fan of Marvel comics for more than ten years, this all seems oddly familiar. To paraphrase David Spade's Hollywood Minute, "I liked 'House of M'. I liked it even more when they called it 'Age of Apocalypse'." That's right. Marvel has traveled this road before. They got a major sales boost and a lot of buzz out of it, but this is still old hat. Repeating a tale of the universe being drastically altered because of some change in the timeline that brings a major X-Men villain to power wouldn't even be so bad, if Marvel weren't still CELEBRATING THE LAST TIME THEY DID IT! Because this year marks the tenth anniversary of the "Age of Apocalypse" event Marvel has been releasing ample amounts of comics that revisit the old territory. We might have forgotten the old story long enough to enjoy the new one if Marvel could have just let the past be the past instead of digging it up in the hopes of a little sales boost. Worse still the hype the company generated for this book is undermining their credibility. The publicity keeps saying this will "change the Marvel universe forever". How? The whole story takes place in some other reality, where everything is different anyway. So they can try any stunt they want to pull, and then just wipe the slate clean whenever they return the timeline to normal. I ask you, who cares? At least during "Age of Apocalypse" the company had the guts to replace the regular titles with new ones that only existed in the alternative world. With "House of M" all the regular titles still continue with the alternative world shunted into various mini-series. If the reader can choose to ignore an entire storyline, then how much impact can it really have on whichever series it is she's reading.

Let me tell you where this really hurts Marvel as a company. Let's say an uninitiated potential customer enters a comic book shop. She thinks "I liked that X-Men movie, maybe I'll try those comic books." She then finds the comic rack so stuffed with comics with X in the title that she begins to suspect, she may have mistakenly entered a porn store (while we're on that topic, I'm worried the number of comic shops that also vend pornography of some kind or another, is doing very little to help improve the image of the industry in the mind of the public). Looking over to the store's employee she see's an all too real example of that Comic Book Guy stereotype from the Simpsons, he's probably too involved in a conversation about the comparative merits of both the old and the new Battlestar Galactica shows to notice her, or just too nervous to talk to girls. Trust me if you were in the avergae comic book shop you would feel uncomfortable talking to the man behind the register too. She then does the only thing she can do, which is randomly select four comic books about the X-Men. If any thought goes into these selections it is limited to price, cover art, and how quickly she can grab them and run. When she gets home to read them she finds she's grabbed four books that occur in four different timelines (regular, Ultimate, "House of M", and "Age of Apocalypse" redux). She can't make sense of anything and decides to never try comic books again. Well done, Marvel. You've scared away another one due to a poor corporate policy of printing whatever seems most likely to sell to the same fans you've had for the last fifteen years.

DC on the other hand is taking the smart approach to their company's major event. They have been building up to it with a number of smaller events. There's a good reason for this. It's because the story they want to tell is so big it needs this kind of buildup. They can't just arbitrarily release a flashy mini-series over the summer to spike the sales. Instead they're trying something more natural. If you want to follow the story, there are many titles that are tied into it. If you don't want to get involved, you don't have to, there are many titles still telling stand alone stories. Of course DC plans for this event to be so grand and encompass so much, that you may well have to get involved at some point. They're just providing the oppurtunity for you to have as much lead in time as possible.

The major event from DC is called "Infinite Crisis" and it has been created by a company wide conference of writers, artists, and editors, who are all trying to tell one big story using all of the DC universe. It draws its name and at least some of its inspiration from the 1980's opus "Crisis on Infinite Earths", wherein DC spent twelve issues telling a story of the most epic scope to streamline and simplify a universe of stories and characters that had become overcrowded over the preceding 50 or so years. That series delivered action and drama on both the highest levels of operatic granduer and the most human stories of personal triumph and tragedy. I find the current effort by DC to recreate such a work totally engaging. They promise that the stakes will be as high as ever, and that the series will show "the worst day in the history of the DC Universe". I am in high anticipation of the event, and believe that so far DC has done a much better job of creating a readable story than Marvel has.

I say so far, because I am now hearing of their plans for the follow up, and I'm a little concerned. Apparently after this one really,really, really, bad day for all the DC superheroes, the company plans to take every title and jump the story ahead one year into the future. I guess they kind of have to make up some ground for how much time they're devoting to this one event, so I could almost see this working. Then I heard about how they plan to recount that year, releasing a new comic title that will come out once a week for the 52 weeks of the following year. This is an ambitious idea sure, but no artist, and no writer currently in the biz could keep up that pace to any standard of quality. So you have to deal with a constantly shifting creative team, which is always a risky proposition. On top of that since this title will be released concurrently with stories coming one year after it's completion, you run into the problem of fan confusion. Which is to say nothing of the potential reader who walks into a comic shop, picks up an issue of Batman, asks the man behind the counter what's going on in Batman's world, hears "we don't know, they haven't explained that yet", puts the comic back down and walks out on the street, never to return again.

I just worry that the two major faces of the comic industry aren't doing the best job they can to expand the market. I'm part of the problem since I still buy the books, and what's worse, the superhero books. I know. I know. I'm hurting comics. But so are Marvel and DC. It's like the trench warfare of WWI, the two sides are dug into their little positions and trying so deseperately to knock out the other guy, that they don't realize the damage they are doing to the general landscape.

All righty then. Now that I have my bad mouthing of the industry I love so much out of the way. (I know. I am such a "blame America first" liberal, when it comes to stuff like this. Why can't I just shut my mouth and appreciate what I have? I don't know, but I can't.) I would now like to share what comic books I'm reading and why I would recommend them to others.

In alphabetical order:

Astonishing X-Men- Written by Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this title does a wonderful job of allowing the intimate soap opera of the X-Men to play on a huge action movie stage. This is the first X-Men title I have every bought on a serious month to month basis. Art chores are doen by the incomperable John Cassady

Astro City: The Dark Age (Book One)- The writer of this title, Kurt Busiek, has long been one of my favorites. The world of Astor City is his own private superhero universe, through which he retells stories we've seen before, but from new and intersting perspectives. He turns hokey old cliches and stereotypes into compelling human drama. This new saga tells how superheroes got to be so grim and gritty over the course of the 1970's and 80's.

Batman/Superman- this book combines the two best known superheroes in the world for a massive slam bang adventure that does everything you want the capes and tights crowd to do.

Conan- Another one written by Kurt Busiek. Since, most are familiar with this famous barbarian, I don't need to explain much. Really, I just had to show one example that I'm not all about superheroes.

Daredevil- The above mentioned Brian Michael Bendis has been writing this title for years now and I worry about what will happen when his run on this title is over. Forget everything you might have seen in that dumb Ben Afleck movie. Bendis reinvisions this character as a gritty and realistic street level crime drama. Mixing the rich background of New York City's Hell's Kitchen with a hard-knock hero who has recently had his secret identity revealed to the public. The costume appears so rarely and is of so little consequence, that I don't really think of this as a superhero comic book anymore. Think HBO's The Wire meets The Fugitive, with only occasional glimpes of red tights.

DC All-Stars: Batman & Robin- Written by comic legend Frank Miller, who may have done more for Batman than any other creator, I buy this book for the art. Jim Lee may be the best artist to hit comics in the last twenty years.

Fantastic Four- Again another title that while traditionally thought of as a superhero title it really isn't. The Fantastic Four are first and foremost a family trying to make a living in New York City, something we've all seen time and time before. The fantastic element comes from the fact that their day jobs center around exploring the wildest limits of their universe. Imagine a TV show that took the characters from Arrested Development and put them into Stargate's world. The stories by J. Michae Straczynski (Has it become obvious I pick my books, by the writers?) combine the two elements so well that this series is only limited by his imagination and his heart.

JLA:Classified- An ongoing series that features a rotating set of creative teams who each spend a few issues telling a stand alone story about the characters of the Justice League of America, DC's greatest heroes, including Superman, Batman, The Flash, and Green Latern. You can pick it up whenever a new story comes along and never feel left out. If you like traditional superheo fare this may be the pick of the litter.

Planetary- Written by Warren Ellis and drawn by the great John Cassady -how he carries the art chores for two titles and maintains his quality is completely beyond my ability to comprehend- this title is the flip side of Astro City. It takes a new look at the old superhero stories too, but from a different perspective. Told through the eyes of a team of mystery archaeologists, the series recasts classic comic standards in world of weird science fiction, that makes the stories seem simultaneously more bizzare than the original tales, and more realisticly conceivable to occur in our world. It's a great intellectual read for anyone who enjoys the heady buzz of reading science magazines that are way over your head. It seems that the novel The Historian tells a similar story about a horror classic, so I recommend any fan of one try the other.

The Ultimates 2- Don't let the number at the end worry you. It doesn't indicate that this title is a sequel as much as the second season, of the biggest, baddest, widescreen action on the planet. Every superhero movie should look like The Ultimates as rendered beautifully, by artist Bryan Hitch. (See I can follow artists too). Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, and many others are turned into the larger than life action stars you always knew they were. I don't even buy the DVD's of the latest comic book movies, because I have The Ultimates instead. It's an aderenaline rush every time I read it.

In case none of these titles suit your tastes, I recommend you be patient and keep looking around. I myself am far too fical to stay true to one title for to long, which is why I have never had a pull list with any comic shop. So I'm bound to have new recommendations in the near future. Until then I hope you are appeased with more of my ramblings about education and basketball.