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Sorry in advance if my HTML thingies aren't working...
No. That's just not right. There are elements of all of the comics we're talking about, from the most high brow to the most lowbrow, throughout contemporary pop culture. You're so wrong that it's off the fucking scales.
Then it shouldn't be hard to offer examples, should it?
People mostly don't read comics because they don't really know about them.
Bullshit. Everybody knows about comics. People just don't give a shit. Those people who dropped $350 million on the Spider-Man film know he's from the comics. They still don't want to read them. To put it another way, comics used to sell MILLIONS of copies. The DC average today is 25,000. It's not that comics became hard to find. It's that comics stopped offering stories that most people want to read. Anyway, you're refuting an argument that I'm not making.
When he had a chance for mainstream exposure with the Ghost World film, people stayed away in droves.
Um, not really. It was a pretty big success commercially for what it was - an 'art house' flick
I rest my case. Art house = movie geeks. Ghost World is a fucking geek story for geeks. In any medium. You know what? We're talking about comics on the Internet. We're fucking geeks. Of course we think Ghost World is great. In perspective, it's for a niche audience, which is my entire point. I'm not sure why you're attacking me as some sort of snob, considering I said from the outset that I don't see a problem with niche markets, and I consider myself to be one of the geek demographic.
Can you accept the notion that though some things don't represent the interests of a huge audience, it doesn't mean that the audience that presently is paying might only be a small fraction of what it could be if better exposed?
Sure, but I don't think the "small fraction" in most cases is really all that small. I think most people who would like The Filth are already reading it. It's just not really the sort of thing that's going to entice most of the people planning to watch ER tonight.
People who listen to Britney Spears will not be interested in David Boring. People who listen to Britney Spears are the mainstream.
My very existence refutes this moronic claim.
Dude, I bought Spice Girls records. I'm not claiming any higher ground. There are tiny exceptions to every statement. What's moronic is not reading the Britney comment as a generalization. Of course there will be Britney fans with copies of David Boring on their shelf. I imagine they number in the single digits.
They will be saved by craptacular shit that current readers hate and are embarrassed to seek on racks, in much the same way Belle & Sebastian fans cringe at the N'Sync display in their local record shop or film fans watch In The Mood For Love in an empty theater while next door it's standing room only for Men In Black.
Um, not really. This Transformers thing is a quick fix, facillitated by two of the only popular news/marketing tools of the industry: Wizard and Newsarama. This will not last
Nothing lasts. This is pop culture. The length of the trend is utterly irrelevant. The fact is that hundreds of thousands of people wanted Transformers comics, and less than 20,000 wanted Transmet. And those Transformer figures are actual sales, not retail sales. The first issue is on something like its third printing. There are people out there who do not want what the critical cream of the comics industry is offering. This is what I said several posts ago. The cream of the industry talent is not producing work that interests more than a small niche market of geeks.
Comics culture has very little to do with mainstream culture, there's barely an analogy to be made.
Again, this is one of the things I'm saying. This is also why it shouldn't be difficult to grasp the notion that what interests the comics culture doesn't interest the mainstream culture. Because they're not the same. Because the former is by, for and largely about geeks, and the latter isn't.
The gall! The wrong-headed elitism! The total lack of optimism! The unwillingness to introduce "our" stuff to more people! It's sickening.
Perhaps the most critically lauded comics work ever is Watchmen. Do you HONESTLY think it has mainstream appeal? Do you? Because if you don't, it's time to shut the fuck up. I'm not being elitist because I don't think the comics readership is anything special. I don't think it's any better or worse than any other demographic. But the fact remains that it is a niche group, reading stories made by people largely aware of this fact and catering to it - thereby closing the door even further to a mainstream audience. Yes, there are exceptions. I bet Murder Me Dead would succeed in the mainstream in any other medium. But those exceptions are pitifully few and far between. I am not "unwilling" to introduce "our" stuff to more people. It's just that there's precious little I can actually show the average person! The number of works published by major companies that might appeal to the Friends demographic could probably be counted on two hands. No Watchmen. No Dark Knight. No Kingdom Come or Marvels or Swamp Thing or any of the other huge critical favorites. What exactly are you going to give that sorority girl you sit next to in class? The woman the next cubicle over? Your mechanic?
I enjoy pure pop music. Britney is a shit example of it. I think most people would agree that in any medium, the most popular stuff is crap. There are exceptions, such as the state of UK pop music circa 1996, or Star Wars in 1977, or X-Men circa Byrne/Quitely.
That's such a fucked view of pop culture, I can't even begin to argue with you. It's just dripping with smug self-satisfaction, hate, and ignorance.
It's not smug. I know the difference between liking something and knowing it's actually good. I enjoyed Attack of the Clones. It's a crap film. There's no self-satisfaction there. I wish more of the bands, comics and films I think are critically superior had more mainstream success. I don't begrudge the people who like mainstream culture, and I don't hate them. It's as though you're so pre-disposed to seeing a dissenter in a certain way that you can't actually read and process what I've written. I truly think the bulk of the popular works in any given medium are generally very different than the bulk of the critically acclaimed works in any given medium. We can discuss the 25 most popular comics, books, films, albums etc. and I imagine most of them will have received critical drubbings and reveal themselve to not actually be very good. I don't understand why you think this is a controversial viewpoint. |
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