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You're right. Probably my knee jerk rejection of superhero work comes from my own staggering ignorance of the genre. I really don't know what's what in superhero comics, and they've never really held a great interest for me (aside from the odd outbreaking title like Watchmen). Viewing them and the surrounding culture as an outsider, I'm often left with an aftertaste similar to the way a lot of the gaming community presents itself to me: that this is an exclusive club, and that as a nonmember I'm not welcome, or I'm tolerated, or I'm held up as a symbol of Other People Reading Comics, Too. Many of the "big" titles at whatever times I've decided to take a peek into the genre were at best confusing to me. The genre's almost mad emphasis on continuity is a big turn off to me. As someone who never grew up reading superhero comics, who began reading comics from an altogether different angle, I don't know who these people are and I don't know why what is happening to them is significant and the little notes recommending I take a look back at issue #567 come off as poor storytelling to me.
That's one example, and I don't even know how many modern books it affects. Thinking about it, most of my criticisms of the genre are of the genre's culture--the fans and their attitudes and expectations toward the genre and other comics and other readers. Going back to games, Jonathan Blow did a talk recently where he yakked about how games can have natural rewards (the game is fun to play, in itself; the mechanics are inherently fun without any sort of goal) and artificial rewards (level grinding, point accumulating, trying to reach ever expanding, increasingly abstract goals). One of the feelings I get from superhero comic reading culture is that for a lot of readers, superhero comics were once inherently fun and exciting in themselves, but as they grow older become more about continuity and the preservation of the good experiences they remember having with the books. A criticism much smaller than others I could aim for (misogyny, obsessiveness, self referential to the point of being exclusive) but one that I almost never see mentioned, that interests me, and that is more or less totally free from affecting Barbelith. Pretty vague though, I know. It's more of a brain itch I get in the back of my head sometimes than a fully fledged thought. I get the same feeling from JRPG fans; there's this idea there of an "Old School RPG" where the plot is a piece of Swiss cheese paper and the characters are painfully cute and totally vapid and the gameplay seems intentionally designed to make you break down and cry from sheer frustration. I don't know where this idea came from, because actual old school JRPGs weren't really like that (aside from teary meltdown gameplay), and I think the idea comes more from the half-but-fondly remembered idea of old school RPGs that game players have developed than anything else. In other words, it's a recent sub-genre. The very few superhero titles I've picked up gave me a similar feeling, but I don't really have the history with them to tell if I'm not just haughty or something.
You're definitely right to call me on my assumption that work for hire = crap. Especially since I compare comics and games as mediums, the majority of the latter being work for hire, some of it brilliant. Work for hire can really spark the creativity of some creators by the inherent limitations of such a setup. "How can I tell this story in a way that my publisher wants it told and my audience wants to read without losing any of the impact?" is probably a good question to ask, especially considering that many of the major writers and artists I read in English language comics produce fairly experimental work that could possibly be borderline incoherent tosh if written and published independently without any creative control.
And to be fair, I'd probably describe narcissistic indie comics as being a smaller black hole draining the industry of love and light. In fact, I have this little fantasy sometimes, where indie comickers (many of whom I see as exceedingly talented artists but wretched storytellers) and biggie superhero writers (many of whom I see as outstanding storytellers creatively stifled by their publishers and reader expectations) kiss and make up and do beautiful, marvelous things together, superhero and otherwise. It's a silly dream, I know.
So, maybe it is me, and I should gather courage and leap back into the superhero genre. I am sure there are plenty of good titles that I'd like, but simply don't know enough to know how to discover. Or maybe my personal tastes will simply not allow me to enjoy most of them, and I should just see that as Not A Big Deal. What I'm really getting at, I think, is that superhero comics seem to be the central pillar of English comic books, but I'm not entirely sure if they're really relevant to anyone who doesn't already read them. Y'know? |
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