Ever since I read Tim Callahan’s chat with Joe Casey – ostensibly about Casey’s new Marvel series, Vengeance, although as with all Casey interviews, it goes way beyond that – earlier this week, one line in particular has stuck in my brain:
What [Vengeance artist Nick] Dragotta and I are striving for is a story and a series that has the feel and the scope of an “event” book without the Marketing and Publishing Ass-Rape that tends to occur — beyond anyone’s control, I should add — when these things happen, with all the obvious hype and the endless spinoff series and the checklists and all that goofy shit. Besides, these event books don’t really have a “concept,” do they? I mean, aside from ripping off other event books.
When I first read that, I thought YEAH and didn’t think too much about it beyond “Way to go, Joe!” but… He’s wrong, isn’t he? One of the things that separates today’s event books from the ones I grew up with is that they do always have a “concept,” even if the concept is something that doesn’t really work in the context of the book itself. I mean, you could argue that DC aren’t as guilty of this as Marvel (Blackest Night is, at a stretch, about embracing life instead of a nihilistic attitude, as in its own way is Final Crisis, but Infinite Crisis? Flashpoint? Pretty much just straightforward comic book adventures), but think of Civil War or Fear Itself: These are events that desperately want to be more than just a comic book story, things that are supposed to “resonate” with larger themes that we happen to meet in everyday life. Even something like House of M is about the value of the road less taken, in its own way, same as Secret Invasion is as much about paranoia and religious extremism as it is about aliens invading the planet (Siege, though? Yeah, you got me there. “Keep watching the skies because a mythical floating city might be falling any minute”?).
I’m not sure if this relevance is a good thing or not – I tend to think that it can be, but only when it’s not the selling point of the whole enterprise, as I feel was the case in Civil War and a lot of the pre-release hype surrounding Fear Itself – but I do think it’s a little unfair to say that all event books have no concept beyond ripping off other event books: The whole ripping off thing is just an added benefit.
May 25th, 2011 at 2:57 pm
I think it’s more than a little premature to characterize Flashpoint as “Pretty much just straightforward comic book adventures” considering only one of five issues is out.
May 25th, 2011 at 2:57 pm
I think Siege was about hubris: Thor thinking he could move Asgard over OK without consequences, Loki thinking he could “stick it to the Man” (Thor and Osborn) and get away with it, Osborn thinking he really was the Man, and Osborn thinking he could play something as scary as the Sentry/Void was supposed to be. Lots of hubris crashed together to make a big mess….
May 25th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Fear Itself definitely pretends to be about something, but all that real world relevance is sand in the eyes. Once you start reading it, you realize that it actually goes to incredible lengths to avoid actually saying anything relevant.
Marvel is way more guilty of this than DC. DC is just kind of unabashedly telling crazy super-hero adventures. Some of them are good and some of them are not. But they don’t seem to spend a lot of time trying to convince their readers that it’s all connected to reality. It’s more purely escapist.
May 25th, 2011 at 7:31 pm
Heck, all the real world relevance was smoke and mirrors for all of them.
I think Casey’s point isn’t that these events don’t have ideas — they are obviously full of them. It’s that they don’t have any real, unifying concept that comes about organically. Breevort has said that Fear Itself is an expanded pitch for a Thor/Captain America crossover to take advantage of the movies. Did Barry Allen come back for any reason other than to get people to buy Final Crisis?
And look at all the various titles that spin out of these books. How many of them are actually vital? Or even really connect with whatever the main book is supposed to be about?
May 26th, 2011 at 7:18 am
I think that the Joe Q Marvel desperately wants to create their own Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns. They want to deconstruct their heroes to the point that the reader (and the media) has a reaction that resonates like Watchmen and DKR.
I think that DC uses their events as a launchpad to start new comics.
May 26th, 2011 at 11:13 am
I always thought Infinite Crisis was about a utopia being neither worth the means used to achieve it, nor technically achievable at all. It was also about how being locked in a room with the same three people for ten years will make you very pissy.
So it resonated with me, although I’m pretty sure this was on accident.
Anyway, Joe Casey interviews are always the tops.