Following up on Tom Spurgeon’s list of things that need fixing and my interview with Tucker Stone, Dick Hyacinth puts his finger on the problem:
Comics readers seem to love the mediocre. I don’t think the problem with comics criticism (in a broad, broad, very inclusive sense) isn’t that it rewards terrible, bottom-of-the-barrell work; it’s that it rewards second-rate work. Any stab at respectability, no matter how modest, is too-often greeted with hosannas. I’ve seen people laud Kingdom Come because it used foreshadowing–which I’m sure we all remember is an actual, honest-to-god literary technique! I guess that’s a step up from those who think crying superheroes holding the charred remains of less-famous superheroes connotes respectability.
Along similar lines, Laura Hudson is starting to wonder whether she should quit the Wednesday crowd scene:
Coming directly off of my weekend at SPX, as well as recently reading a string of excellent, engrossing graphic novels like Skim, Swallow Me Whole, and Alan’s War, picking up a comic book like Nightwing #149 feels a lot like shutting my hand in a car door. And I’m thinking — I’m thinking I should stop doing that.
I like well-crafted mainstream entertainment as much as the next fellow, but it does seem to me like we overpraise the “meh” to often at the expense of the “very good,” something that encourages people to abandon, rather than stick with, comics. But what do you think?
October 7th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I’m gonna reference sonething someone on the Comics Should be Good blog said I think this last week, that comics is the “comfort food” of literature. Of course, he was applying it to the pertual state of comic storylines and situations never really changing, but I think the analogy fits quite well with its criticism from its readers too. people just seem to easy to be please with even the most mediocre comics as long as it follows a familiar path and doesn’t completel fail as a story. Most comic fans don’t become fans by being interested in the higher level of story some of the medium’s better works can offer but because they like their men in spandex and as long as said men continue to do what these readers have seen and enjoyed for so long, that’s fine with them. Don’t get me wrong, the mainstream stuff is pretty much my favorite too, but the problem is most fans don’t develop as fans of the medium but rather just stick to what what conforts them. That’s why indy books always struggle to find a foothold in the market while Nightwing is still being published, the market isn’t full of literature minded scholars but just fanboys.
October 7th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
i don’t think that superhero comic book readers favor the mediocre. i think that they favor stories that advance the characters they care about, sometimes at the disregard of storytelling quality.
and it’s not unusual for an audience to heavily praise the more average offerings of any given medium. look at TV, film, music, and fiction — the biggest hits are never the best thing out. but those big hits often get way more attention and compliments than they deserve because they provide something that people want to see, even if it’s not the pinnacle of the medium.
October 7th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
These pieces start with what I think are two incorrect assumptions: 1) that comics are (universally) mediocre and 2) the readers don’t care. I don’t believe number one is true, there’s a great deal of good Superhero stuff being done. And if number two were true, then every comic book would sell the same number of issues. But sales rise and fall based on the plotlines, the creative staff, any number of things. There’s a reaction by the market to changes in the books. It’s certinly true that books you or I don’t like don’t sell, or books we hate sell far more than we feel they should, but that’s just a case of differing tastes, and can’t be hellped. (I’d mention American Idol again, but I got spanked for using it in an analogy elsewhere)
It’s an endless cycle – the producers believe customers are happy with what they make, so there’s little impetus to make something different. It’s same reason Hollywood will make one type of film to death, flitting from one hot trend to the next like rowboats full of fisherman in a sparsely-stocked lake. Then when one differnt type of book/comic/film succeeds, the industry says “Well why didn’t you SAY so?” and starts grinding out lookalikes to that.
Yes, the comics medium is as able to create masterpieces as any other medium. But comics are a profit-based business, and if there’s no market for said thing, it won’t get done, or at least not to the level that most people can see it.
“That’s why indy books always struggle to find a foothold in the market while Nightwing is still being published, the market isn’t full of literature minded scholars but just fanboys.”
And the solution, as I’ve said endlessly, is do whatever can be done to draw new eyes into the industry. San Diego gets a lot of press, but very little of it rises above “Look at the geeks in costumes”. Get people into stores that would be interested in more than spandex-clad people and the books will be done.
And don’t just limit yourselves to the comic shops. Where have more copies of Bone been sold – in comic shops, or in Scholastic Books-sponsored book fairs held all over the United States? I’ll lay odds it’s a horse race. If Archie Comics STOPPED selling in comics shops, I’ll bet their sales in digests on supermarket checkout lines alone would support them. Disney Adventures sold a million copies an issue, and it was cancelled for having too SMALL a circulation. If DC had a book that sold a million issues, they’d never be able to walk in public again for fear of getting arrested on indecency charges.
Somebody has to close that Wal-Mart deal. Even if it’s just bags of reprints like the Whitman comics of old, the general public needs the books to be within arm’s reach, not as a destination purchase.
It is far easier to find a viable market from a pool of several million people than it is in a pool of 100,000. It’s simple math. If the current market will not buy your product, your only option (other than give up) is to find one that will.
There’s too many Lucy van Pelts in the industry screaming “YOU STUPID DARKNESS!!!”
October 7th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I think Nick hit it right on the head. If the blogger gets more enjoyment from reading Skim et al than from Nightwing then more power to her. But I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would liken reading Skim to slamming their hand in a car door, and that’s fine too. Mediocrity and excellence is up to each individual to judge, and as others have pointed out comics is in no way the only medium where this argument is waged (we live in a world where Beverly Hills Chihuahua will handily outgross Appaloosa).
October 7th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Keep digging that hole, Tucker.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Nick: I was trying to say that the medium favors mediocrity at all, I’m just saying it doesn’t punish it as much. Also, I basically agree with everything you said.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
opps, i meant “wasn’t”
October 7th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
INNARNETS COMMUNITY WILL BRING REVOLUTION…or at least a lot of people JUST talking it. Cynicism aside, these discussion seem to be more frequent, and that makes me quite happy.
October 7th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
NEWSFLASH: BIFF! BAM! POW? NOT EVERYONE LIKES SUPERHERO COMICS!
Are people still having this conversation?
October 7th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I was about to post a lengthy rant but then I realized I was criticizing critics for their criticism of criticism.
Sometimes you’ve just got to turn the damned internet off.
October 8th, 2008 at 7:36 am
The assumption that mediocrity = Marvel and DC hardly stands up. Plenty of mediocre uninteresting art-comix get respectful reviews from that scene’s adherents. In fact art-comix quite often become actively offensive because they’re mediocrity which seems to consider itself something superior.
Re that Nightwing comic, the really shocking thing is that nobody corrected the anatomy on the credits page.
October 9th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Part of the challenge is that the act of reviewing itself tends to over-praise mediocrity. When one is in the habit of reviewing comics, one is faced with the grim truth that the overwhelming majority, both four color and arty, are not good enough to be truly admired, but also not inept enough to rip to shreds. So the small differences between the vast libraries of mediocrity are blown out of proportion in an effort to say something.
Check out Orwell’s essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer.” It’s not entirely apt, since he wrote about professional, rather than amateur reviewers, but it’s awfully dang close.
“…the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash…but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally interested in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, there are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about…. The rest of his work, however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug….
“It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless’, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be ‘This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.’ But the public will not pay to read that kind of thing. Why should they?”