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I was reading Peter Milligan's INFINITY INC yesterday right after finishing THE QUESTION trade and it suddenly hit me: comics aren't written very well anymore. To qualify: comics from DC and Marvel use far fewer literary devices now than they used to and in the process they're all starting to read like oatmeal.
Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Frank Miller, Dennis O'Neil (on THE QUESTION, at least) and Neil Gaiman all used to use first person POV and thematic unity to make a small, monthly, floppy comic book feel like a full meal. Take Alan Moore's first SWAMP THING issue "Anatomy Lesson" (that was the title, right?). It was told from Jason Woodrue's POV, it was able to get deep inside his brain and consequently make Swamp Thing look all the more powerful and terrifying because from Woodrue's worshipful point of view the Swamp Thing was powerful and terrifying. It was a nice trick to take a relatively goofy character and give them some desperately-needed gravitas. It advanced the plot and filled in some backstory but it used repeated description to give a portentous, inevitabilty to the story.
Neil Gaiman did this constantly in SANDMAN, turning each issue into a short story told from some particular character's POV (a cat, Metamorpho-lady) and he pulled the DRACULA trick of making Morpheus seem that much more awe-inspiring because he used him so little but had his characters spend so much time talking about him.
Grunt Ungerson likes the omniscient narrator a lot more than these other two guys, and he doesn't seem to revel as much as they do in writerly tricks and tools. But he makes sure his narrator has some kind of voice, especially in a series like DOOM PATROL. Milligan will write a transitional caption that reads "John Henry Steel's Laboratory. The Steelworks" whereas Morrison will write "Later! Now! Always!"
But this kind of literary bent to comic book writing seems to be dying out. Maybe I'm too old to appreciate what the kinds are getting out of modern day comic books, but there's very little character and it's mostly all plot mechanics. Character is revealed where it advances or moves the plot along or kicks it in a new direction, but rarely more than that. Comics stories seem to follow the same format: a resolution of the previous month's cliffhanger, people make phone calls and talk in apartments for the next few pages, a fight scene leading to a big character reveal (My God! It's Doctor Destination!) on the last page setting up a cliffhanger for the next issue to spend 5 pages resolving.
There's nothing wrong with this kind of thing - after all, the engines run on coal, not diamonds - but it's missing a certain literary bent that made some of the best comics fun to read, and worth re-reading.
Has anyone else noticed this? Is it just me? Am I of an age where someone should drive a stake in my heart and cut off my head because I've outlived my usefulness? |
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