In a strange and stodgy essay for PopMatters, Shawn O’Rourke argues that recent “event comics” like Infinite Crisis and Civil War herald the end of the Modern Age and the beginning of the Postmodern Age — instead of, y’know, simply being a continuation of themes that began decades ago.
After spending six paragraphs defining the Modern Age — which, he asserts, began with the release of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns – O’Rourke gets down to business: DC’s Infinite Crisis and Marvel’s Civil War, which, “represent some of the most impressive and dynamic work done in mainstream comics history.”
“Using some of the greatest creators in the medium,” O’Rourke writes, “the two companies have created storylines with spectacular ramifications that have influenced the majority of their books in significant ways. While the stories and issues dealt with are different, the two are linked in that they both thematically rest on the failing of the mainstream superheroes to live up to the requirements established by the previous paradigms. This theme, coupled with the fact that it takes place in the primary continuity of mainstream comics, represents the linguistic and epistemological shift that has ushered in this new age of superhero comics.”
It’s a difficult slog, littered with scholarly terms (“epistemological changes”!) and fannish hyperbole (Superboy Prime’s “murderous rampage is sure to go down in comic book history”). I don’t know, it just feels like a review that grew into a “think piece” before it went completely off the rails.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:33 am
As long as Geoff Johns is a significant creative force in this industry… there is no such thing as post modern superhero comics. EVER.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:57 am
Huh. Straight-up superhero comics were doing the postmodern thing as far back as the 80s. I’d even managed a to convince a couple of professors of it back in the day.
Maybe “the Event Age” or “the Franchise Age” or something else would be more appropriate?
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:03 am
“Civil War” and the subsequent storylines were far less deliberate attempts at postmodern interpretations of superheroes than they were storylines done by writers who didn’t want to have heroes fighting villains. They thought heroes fighting heroes would be cooler, more exciting, etc. In Bendis’s case, specifically, he’s trying to write superheroes as crime fiction characters. There’s nothing deep or revolutionary about that.
SRS
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
What’s so postmodern about stories that are basically Bronze Age fan fiction?
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:07 pm
durn book-larnin’ types an they fiddy cent words. how bout lookin at yor comics like a REAL american! mah granddaddy didn need no words, just the pitchers was good enuff fer him, an theys good enuff fer me! thass why ah like jeff loeb, wizard magazine, an newsarama!
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:57 pm
There’s an argument there about how an approach to characterization (i.e. superheros with significant moral failings) has moved from the penumbra of superhero comics to the core of superhero comics. If you look past the author’s silly critical judgments or horrible, horrible terminology (the author should obviously never be allowed to use the terms “postmodern” or especially “medium” ever again)– you can kind of see what he’s grasping at. But he doesn’t address the why’s of it or even offer a theory to the why’s– so who cares?
P.S. the postmodern cognitive dissonance of the critic’s medium creates a Marxist analytical/empirical discipline that promotes anti-rationality the social dimensions of which justify the deconstruction of a flux capacitor, and also Sinestro Corps. War is the single greatest comic the entire global medium has ever seen.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Critical Theory can lead to rushes of blood to the head. Gives Philosophy a bad reputation.
I dig Geoff Johns but I thought Infinite Crisis was too big and cumbersome to be involving.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Honestly, comic books are not a “medium”–academically, comic books are defined as “paraliterature”.
The amazing thing about comic books is that they are not bound to any specific genre.
I would think that we shouldn’t call comic books modern or post-modern–because when you think about the nature of a genre and how comic books kind of encompass all these styles–Modern, Abstract, Post-Modern, revisionist, surreal, romantic, even Victorian.
Further, because as a species we may have reached a mode of thinking that is considered “post-modern”, one does not tie a style or genre to a mode of thought so casually–that’s like saying apples are oranges.
I think the longevity of the comic book and sequential art is indicative by its nature to absorb all types of written prose (and even poetry) and elevate it to a new level visually.
So–in a way–comic books, because of the way they transcend two ways our brains process information–by comprehension and through the process of movement via pictures–are much larger in scope than an idea that they can be tied to a style of literature timely to our mental evolution and awareness as a species.
Sorry, I’m rambling…
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Big words hurt GX’s head.
Me go color now.
February 23rd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Steve Ekstrom; Interesting comment.
I do think comics are a medium precisely because they can express so many genres.
A medium, to my mind, is partly determined by its physical parameters; how you interact with it materially. A comic might not be much different from a book in terms of gross presentation (pages bound within a cover) but you don’t use the same mode of reading to interpret a comics page as you would for a page of prose (as you noted). I think Scott McCloud adequately demonstrated a homogeneity linking the deployment of Images on a page with the like deployment of Text in his “Understanding Comics” which is intrinsically unique (referring to the pyramid diagram). So I guess if there is a medium (in the most literal sense of the word), then it’s the page on which the ink rests.
But I still think comics are “a medium”, in the colloquial sense of the word; something unique and unto itself in terms of how it connects to an audience. That largeness of scope you mentioned is, I think, exactly what make it a “medium”
I’m not familiar with the term “paraliterature” but would appreciate a definition. Is literature here taken to mean “just text” excluding images? Are comics considered paraliterature because the techniques of comic storytelling are in part an off-shoot of the techniques of film meshed with the techniques of prose?
Just wondering.
February 24th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Paraliterature (as per Answers.com) is defined as “the category of written works relegated to the margins of recognized literature and often dismissed as subliterary despite evident resemblances to the respectable literature of the official canon. Paraliterature thus includes many modern forms of popular fiction and drama: children’s adventure stories, most detective and spy thrillers, most science fiction and fantasy writing, pornography and women’s romances, along with much television and radio drama.”
Wikipedia also states that Paraliterature is “an academic term for genre literature, such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, pulp fiction and comic books, that is not generally considered literary fiction by mainstream literary standards.”
In my mind–because of how are brains respond the to stimulus of sequential art–we’re still looking left to right and top to bottom. It’s really a more sophisticated type of reading where the synthesis of movement of a series of images that is symbolic of information–and there’s that whole pesky “reading” thing when you’re reading speech bubbles and what not
.
I think it’s larger a medium, that’s all.
February 24th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Sorry–typo–that is:
“I think it’s larger than a term like ‘medium’, that’s all.
February 25th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Bring on the Post-Modern Era!!!