I’ve been terribly remiss in linking to Tom Spurgeon’s awe-inspiring series of holiday interviews. I blame society.
I can’t ignore his latest one, however, as it’s a lengthy sit-down with our very own Graeme McMillan on the state of mainstream superhero comics in 2007:
SPURGEON: Who in comics do you suppose is the most happy to see 2007 go away and who is the most sad? Why?
McMILLAN: Dan Didio’s got to be pretty happy to see 2007 go away, if only because 2008 has the promise of Final Crisis, which people seem to be generally excited about, as opposed to the unpopularityfest that Countdown became, not to mention other unpopular moves like Amazons Attack and delays meaning that the resolution of high-profile stories get bumped months down the line into annuals instead of where they were originally supposed to go. There seemed to be this weird kind of “Hey, let’s not talk about 2007, we’ve learned from our mistakes and wasn’t Sinestro Corps War great anyway? Look! Grant Morrison is doing Final Crisis next year! It’s shiny!” vibe from DC at the end of the year.
On the other hand, Joe Quesada’s got to be missing 2007 already. With Civil War, World War Hulk, and killing Captain America, the majority of Marvel’s 2007 was pretty successful, but I think that the overreaction to the Spider-Man reboot shows that there’s a vocal backlash brewing for them this year, and you can only kill Captain America to get on CNN so many times.
Of course I can’t link to Graeme’s interview without mentioning Tom’s talk with former Wizard employee Sean Collins about many of the same topics:
SPURGEON: Did you notice things about those kinds of comics that you may not have noticed before, simply by virtue of having so many pass through the offices?
COLLINS: Definitely. I think it helped me figure out what superhero comics do well, and then note how to do them well. So for example, everyone knows that superhero comics are full of fights, but I really grokked how important it is to root combat in a described physical space, and give each stage of that combat palpable physical consequences. It’s the difference between the big throw down with Bullseye at the end of Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Daredevil run and any given X-Men comic from the ’90s where a bunch of squinty-eyed people with poorly defined energy powers in purple and blue costumes shoot lasers out of their bodies in random directions. Example number two: Superhero comics use costumes and powers as an exciting metaphor for the liberation of your secret self, so having costumes and powers that make a visual and mental impact on the reader aren’t just gravy, they’re part of why a character works or doesn’t work, and there’s no shame in that game. To use Bendis as an example again, his work on Ultimate Spider-Man suffered once he’d cycled through the major Lee/Ditko/Romita bad guys plus Venom and Carnage, all of whom are really marvels of concept and design, and then tried to build story arcs around the likes of Silver Sable and Deadpool. And I’m more sure than I ever was that superhero comics are like operas where the fighting takes the place of the singing — an ecstatic, spectacular representation of dangerously powerful emotions. Most of the dreary superhero comics that the internet makes fun of these days have superheroes shouting or crying where they should be punching, and that’s where they go wrong.
Oh what the hey. Here’s the rest in no particular order: Daily Cartoonist blogger Alan Gardner; Francoise Mouly; Karen Berger; retailer Vito Delsante; Frank Santoro; Eric Reynolds; and Chris Pitzer.
