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When you think about writing comic books, what is the first thing that comes in to your mind?
Maybe its an image of an overweight, middle aged man writing vaguely homoerotic teenage power fantasies, and probably not writing it all that well.
Oh no!!1 it was homoerotic. You probably don't mean to make it sound negative but you do.
Maybe this isn’t your image but, honestly, I would bet that your image isn’t much better. Your image is probably of something that you wouldn’t consider working in, being the serious artist that you are.
No-one likes essays that try and second guess their opinion. How do you know that your audience doesn't want to write comics? Have you heard enough people slag the form off to come to this conclusion? If so, use that evidence. Quote them.
Even better, before you came round to comics, you probably felt like the notional comics-hater you're describing- that's where you're getting the trope from. So use that. Talk about your own prejudice, and how you overcame it, rather than identifying it (quite possibly falsely) in other people.
I hope to change all of that. In this essay, I hope to show you the diverse works and the potential of the sequential medium (comic books and manga). By the end of this essay, I hope that some of you will give working in this medium an increased degree of consideration, or, at the very least, that you will have an increased appreciation of the sequential medium...
Okay, I think this is a good paragraph. You're talking about the good points of a particular medium, cool. I'm not quite sure about this use of the phrase "sequential medium", though. Is that a technical/recognized term? And aren't novels and just about everything else sequential?
And then we get on to this:
as one for both serious art and serious literature.
See, you're not breaking down the "literary writer"'s prejudice here, you're massaging it. Allow me to explain how this bit comes across. So far, you're saying, "Hey, po-faced elitist writer types (because of everyone who's interested in literature is po-faced and elitist, right?), I bet you hate comics, right? Wrong! Comics can be po-faced and elitist too!"
the other members of the team made jokes all the time about how comic books weren’t real literature. I dedicate this essay to all of you, I’m going to show you how wrong you were.
They were wrong. But were they wrong because they weren't allowing a genre you happen to like to be labelled as "literature" (i.e. better than average, in a special palace made out of golden Froers), or were they wrong because they assumed that there's a hard, discernable and natural difference between "literature" and, say, "entertainment"?
Methinks the latter.
Before I go any further, I would like to give credit to some of the books I am deeply indebted to.
Stick these in a bibliography at the end. That way you can include full details of where to get them and you don't break up the flow of the essay.
Name three movies or television shows adapted from comic books.
So what are they? Superman? Batman? Spider-Man? I bet that Road to Peridition, Sin City, American Splendor, A History of Violence, From Hell, Ghost World, Art School Confidential, Men in Black and V For Vendetta didn’t make the list.
Teach me how I may learn the skill of reading minds, o master.
And actually, is it just me or wasn't the fact that these films come from comic books mentioned ad nauseum in every single sodding review and every bit of promotional fluff ever?
But all of those films were adapted from comics.
So what? If I didn't like any of those films (perhaps because they were po-faced and elitist, say, though we're being hypothetical) and you tell me they came from comics it'll probably just reinforce my prejudice.
A good six or seven of those movies are about blowing up things and killing people of various kinds, and the rest are about white people being angsty. They're problematic, in other words, and you can't just hold them up as a "so there". Likewise, a film I liked might be made out of a comic book I didn't.
If you said, "look at Specific Good/Interesting/Cool Point A of this film, this actually comes from a comic book" I think it would be a lot more convincing.
Superheroes are not comics and comics are not superheroes. The superhero genre is but one genre within the larger medium of comics (the largest one in American comics but by no means the only one), the same way that romantic comedies are but one genre of film or horror is but one genre in the medium of prose.
Again, you start off well by explaining that there's more to comics than superheroes. There are lots and lots of superhero comics, they have the best publicity, and I suppose it would be fairly reasonable for someone who wasn't into the medium to assume that comics were mostly about superheroes. Like, I assumed that the Greek stuff was all about boring people standing around doing long cheesy monologues. It's not. It's is about violence and buggery and ships or whatever you fancy really.
But then, we get what appears to be a snipe against romantic comedies and horror stories. You see the problem here? You're telling people not to be prejudiced against a particular medium but implying that it's okay to be prejudiced against certain genres. Like those romantic comedies, eh? Chick flicks with no real substance. Let's watch a proper film like Sin City.
Now, I like what you do between The superhero genre is but one genre and If you’re still reading at this point. You give an eclectic but easy-to-track-down list of books, and you talk about Hernandez, Perseopolis etc as opposed to saying "And for anyone who thinks comics don't tackle serious social issues, just look at X men which shows us that black people are a bit like mutants".
But your next question is
I'm gonna have to get me one o'them thar tinfoil hats.
From there, now that I've worked through some of the prejudices of readers
I like the basic shape of what you're doing. You're talking about a medium and advertising it's good points. That's fine. I think, though, that in trying to do this you've slipped into the traps I've mentioned.
You've touched on a bit of a bug bear for me, actually. The thing I have a real problem with is this idea that people who like writing and reading have some sort of innate prejudice against comic books that Must Be Fought.
Maybe they don't. Could it be, perhaps, that the potential readers are turned off by the fact that in comics world it is often quite acceptable to beat the living shit out of/shoot/butcher one's enemies with minimal consequences, and that often the villain is not a human being at all, and etcetera, and though I'm sure there are many comic books that refute that, proportianally, those sorts of things are still there? Or that, although there are lots of cool lefty comics writers, a lot of them seem to be, shall we say, wingnuts? Or that, though there's some great feminist stuff and female fans, the comics audience is still resolutely male-dominated and unfriendly to women?
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made about comics, like any medium or genre, and something that irritates me is when comics fans or genre fans, when presented with such a criticism (Why are there no female fighter pilots in Star Wars? Why is PK Dick such a misogynist?) react, not by accepting those problems, but by getting angry and telling me I'm being elitist and "not appreciating it on purpose".
An unfair bargain is asked. Of course one should not write off comics because of the fact that they're comics- but you can't ask someone to take something seriously and then bar them from making any criticisms of it, or write off those criticisms as prejudice.
Also- your average American or British may not know as much as you about the medium of comics, but I bet they know a lot more about comics than they do about Ghazals or Kodo drumming or Maori hut carvings, or, say, Hip-hop. There are many things that are either unknown, or known of but labelled as "low" and ignored that deserve a lot more respect and appreciation than they get currently, and comics may be on that list somewhere, but they don't strike me as the most pressing case. |
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