I am not that old, I feel old, but in terms of years…not
that old. I say this because I did not
have a chance to really experience the golden, silver or even the bronze age of
comics. Sure, I can read back issues and
collections, but that is much different than plopping your dollar on the
counter and getting five (or more) comics in return. My point of reference starts in the
mid-nineties, fifth grade for me. Back
then the price point was still relatively, by today’s standards, cheap $1.50
and so it allowed my father to throw down the $3.00 and buy a comic book from
the local Hallmark Store spinner rack.
It was Uncanny X-Men #310 for me and X-Factor #100 for Nik. From there I did not look back, devouring any
superhero comic I could get my grubby little mitts on. I even broke open the piggy bank (ok, it had
a twist-off top) of pennies that had been collected since my birth to get a
subscription to X-Factor later that year.
Now according to many people, this was the worst time to be
a comic fan, when bad writing and bad art ran rampant. While that is the case in many titles, I
would take your complaints of poor quality art and put them up against the Joe
Madureira/Adam Kubert/Andy Kubert/Jan Duursema/Chris Bachalo X-titles of that
time. Hell, many of the other titles
that I was not reading had excellent artists – many that are now industry
favorites. Were they just starting out
and maybe a little raw, possibly, but it was great to see them develop in front
of us.
“Well what about the Image guys?” you ask. Did the formation of a company based on art
and art alone with a de-emphasis on story for the most part really speak for
the entire industry? Yes, these guys had
free reign to do whatever they wanted for the most part, but look at what it
turned into. Look at Image Comics
nowadays and you will see the kind of quality that actually keeps this industry
going. Everything from Chew to
Skullkickers to anything Kirkman touches seems to be gold for Image. Yet if those guys hadn’t broke off from the
norm twenty years ago we would not have a home for those comics, at least not
one that is able to promote as well as Image does. I am a big fan of all small publishers but
they are often just hard to find.
That diatribe brings me to this one. For everyone that says that that was the
downfall of modern comics, that Image caused story to go out the window and
nowadays creators are just following suit, I want you to look back at the
twenty year history. Back when Image started,
the guys that started it all, Liefeld, Lee, Larson, et. al. were their own
editors. They were the final say on what
got published. And that is fine, there
is nothing wrong with it if they can take a step back and look at their
products objectively. Most writers can’t
and that is where an editor comes into play.
But this is what I am trying to get at.
These guys didn’t have an editor to tell them to take a step back,
introduce their characters and form a cohesive plot. Their mistakes are the kind that you could
definitely see from someone that went from just drawing what someone else wrote
to doing the whole shebang all by themselves without that guiding hand.
Now let’s jump to the modern day of comic books (probably
around 2002/2003 to now). The Bendis
period. This, my friends is where it all
went to hell. As soon as Marvel and DC
decided that their editors really had no say and the writers of the books could
do whatever they wanted, and write however they wanted to write is when the car
started to go off the cliff. I will
admit, I collected comics during much of this time too, and it did not start
out all bad. As I’ve said, Bendis did
not start out as the Sultan of Decompression as he is now, or at least it
wasn’t as bad as it is now. I have been
out of the hardcore comic collecting (especially the big 2’s stuff) for a while
now but I still see references to the “Marvel architects” which, if you don’t
know, is a group of five writers that apparently write most everything in the
Marvel Universe. They are given top
billing and are the engineers of Marvel’s big “events”.
Let me first start out by saying that these Marvel “events”
are crap. They are stories that could be
told in four or five issues that are stretched out to seven or ten and that is
not even counting the numerous spinoffs that you need to read to get a better
understanding of what’s going on. I just
read the Fear Itself cross-over (Nik loaned it to me) and I was thoroughly
unimpressed by it. The story itself was
not bad, but the pacing was horrible. It
was seven issues bookended by two double issues, so basically nine issues, but
the story was so simple it could have been concluded in two or three. Sin wakes up bad guy, bad guy recruits help
with various hammers, heroes fight bad guys, Iron Man gives them super weapons
blessed by Odin, good guys beat bad guys, Thor dies. That’s it in a nutshell. There was a little more fleshing out of Odin
and Thor’s relationship and honestly Stuart Immonen’s art was superb, but come
on, it’s not nine issues worth of material, plus every spin-off in different
books over that time. Big crossovers are
not a new thing to Marvel and long before Bendis set foot in the door they had
Secret Wars, Inferno, Fall of the Mutants, and my personal favorite the Age of
Apocalypse. But these were done so that
you could read your favorite series and still know what was going on. Age of Apocalypse included an Alpha and Omega
issue that bookended the series quite nicely but were not entirely necessary because
each series had its own story and characters.
The worst part is that Marvel and DC actually employ
editors. They pay people to make sure
comics are good. It is easy to see that
many of those editors have no clout when it comes to butting heads with one of
the “architects”. Everything today is
done for the good of the almighty dollar in comic book land, writing for the
trade paperback instead of writing individual issues with compact stories and
then collecting them. Today, writers
write for shock value as well instead of writing for content. Ask Mark Millar about that one. How much sex, violence, cursing, etc. can I
throw into a comic to shock someone? Who
can I kill off or bring back to shock someone (Human Torch, Colossus, Ultimate
Spiderman, etc.)? What can I do to make
mainstream newspaper headlines (kill Captain America , have Superman denounce his
citizenship, create a black Spiderman to replace the recently deceased, gay
comic characters)? No creative decision
holds any value anymore if everything is created to cause a reaction or get
headlines. How about we just write good
stories and pair them with good art?
When did that become the frowned upon practice in comic books? I get it, you want to make people notice your
comics (as if a billion dollar summer blockbuster couldn’t do that) but what
you are doing is making it even harder for the casual fan to pick up a book and
start to read. Don’t tell me that’s what
Marvel’s point one issues are for because the person still has to find a way
into the current storyline after they finish their “intro” issue.
It is time for the editors to take the power back. It is time to install someone as Editor in
Chief of the big two that will uphold high standards of comic making and will
demand a quality product. If you have a
quality product, you can probably charge the outrageous $3.99 that you do now
without any uproar, but when you take pages away while keeping a higher price
point and couple that with a poor story, you just can’t win. This is a dying industry that needs a jump
start and it will never get it as long as the big two continue to tread water.
When you look back at comics over the last twenty years, try
not to judge the nineties without first taking a look at our current state.
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