For The Love of Comics

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First of all, I highly recommend that you read IGN’s excellent interview with Grant Morrison. It touches on everything from Morrison’s approach to storytelling on previous works as well as current projects like Final Crisis, All-Star Superman, and Batman: RIP to his post-Crisis and RIP plans to his plans to reconcile the discrepancies that came from Death of The New Gods, Countdown, and the beginning of Crisis.

I’d really love to talk about everything in that interview, and maybe I will come back to it another time, but for now I want to focus on Morrison’s take on the whole “Creator-Owned vs Work-for-Hire” kerfluffle that resulted from Robert Kirkman’s call-to-arms video editorial that he posted last week on Comic Book Resources. Morrison perfectly summed up my thoughts on how silly the whole debate really is.

I suppose I’m slightly amused by the reformer’s zeal with which each new generation approaches the problem of ’saving’ comics. It reminds me of humanity’s charming, self-regarding notion that it’s our job to ’save’ a planet which has survived fine without us through several mass extinction events, climactic overhauls and planetary disasters.

I’ve been listening to people talk about ’saving’ the ‘industry’ for over 20 years while comics have continued to be published and have, in fact, become better, to the point where the only conclusion I’ve come to is that comics are best ’saved’ by sealing them in Mylar bags! Everything else is just messianic inflation. Just do good books and stop trying to be the savior of a whole medium that’s been doing okay without you and will continue long after you’re gone.

Yes, I think Kirkman’s right, in that I’d like to see more of our creative community unleashing their wild imaginations onto the page and less of the obvious ‘movie pitch on paper stuff’ that’s come about recently as a result of comic creators chasing the Hollywood dollar but I don’t have a problem with writers and artists working on Marvel and DC properties if they enjoy it. I’d rather read a good Green Lantern story by someone who cares than work my way through a ‘creator-owned’ project that’s been created solely to appeal to lowest-common-denominator movie executives.

To which I say “Fucking DUH!” Beyond their own bank account, which I totally support writers looking out for, what does it matter who you’re writing for as long as you’re writing good stories? If you write well, the readers will come.

Morrison also points out that the vast majority of major comic writers do have their own creator-owned properties that they’re working on, which I knew but hadn’t really thought of, if you get what I mean.

Technorati Tags: Grant Morrison, IGN, Interview, Robert Kirkman, Comic Books, Comic Book Industry

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Due to a combination of being incredibly busy at my day job and trying to keep up with books that have been very very hyped (and very very disappointing), my stack of unread issues of Walking Dead has been growing. Then I overheard some people talking about what happened in the latest issue - just general expressions of shock, no particulars - and it was enough to get me to make sure to read issues 44-49 as soon as I got home.

Now I truly feel that these issues are most effective if you don’t see any of it coming, so I’m going to avoid spoilers or hype beyond saying that when Kirkman said nobody is safe, he meant NOBODY IS SAFE, MOTHERFUCKERS! I believed him when he said that, but I had no idea how far he was willing to take it.

Let me tell you folks, he took it almost as far as it could possibly be taken.

I think that’s about as much as I can say without really getting into spoilers, so I’ll just close this part down by saying if you’re not reading Walking Dead, head to your local comic store or book store or Amazon or wherever you like, pick up the trades, fall in love with these characters like I have, and then prepare to have your heart ripped out of your chest and watch Robert Kirkman eat it in front of you.

I realize that there are alot of people who don’t like horror comics in general or zombie books in particular and thus avoid this stuff like the plague, but the point of Walking Dead is not the zombies at all. The setting could just as easily be post-apocalypse America or any other setting that features the breakdown of our society and allows us to examine how the human race behaves when all the rules are thrown out of the window and we have to - in theory - rely on each-other to survive in a harsh environment.

Seriously, check it out.

On another note, I was thinking about how awesome Walking Dead and a few other relatively low-hype books have been at about the same time as RJP made a post on Between The Staples about his disappointment that Final Crisis hasn’t been nearly as “well”-hyped as Secret Invasion. Thinking about those two ideas made me realize that, as of late, quality has seemingly been inversely proportionate to hype and (in my eyes) bullshitting of the audience in comics.

As evidence, I present the awesomeness of stories like Sinestro Corps War, Annihilation, Annihilation: Conquest, Walking Dead, or Planet Hulk (which I didn’t even really hear about until it was almost over and WWH was being hyped) that were very under-hyped in comparison to disappointments like World War Hulk, House of M, Countdown, Miss Marvel, or the first issue of Secret Invasion.

I realize that many will say that it’s very hard to live up to the hype that some of these “events” received, but who’s responsible for the hype? The publishers! Don’t hype quality that you can’t deliver on. This goes right along with not twisting the truth, outright lying, or bullshitting the public, which also happens way too often.

I’m starting to understand why so many people only read independent comics.

Want to blow me away, publishers? Spend more time on developing these ideas and bringing out quality product and less time hyping crap product.

Technorati Tags: Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman, Comics, eat the rich, Over-hype, events, lying to the fans, quality product, your entire family is made of meat

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