If you haven’t read Tim Marchman’s review of book-about-comic-creators Leaping Tall Buildings from the Wall Street Journal yet, you really should:
If no cultural barrier prevents a public that clearly loves its superheroes from picking up a new “Avengers” comic, why don’t more people do so? The main reasons are obvious: It is for sale not in a real bookstore but in a specialty shop, and it is clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology.
In a much hyped series from Marvel Comics this summer, for example, the Avengers fight the X-Men for inscrutable reasons having to do with a mysterious planet-devouring cosmic force, a plot that makes no sense to anyone not familiar with ancient Marvel epics like “The Dark Phoenix Saga.” The story is told in two titles, one called “Avengers vs. X-Men,” with a big “AvX” logo on the front, and the other called “AvX,” with a big “Avengers vs. X-Men” logo on the front, presumably so you can keep them straight.
The people who produce superhero comics have given up on the mass audience, and it in turn has given up on them. Meanwhile, the ablest creators have abandoned mainline superhero comics to mediocrity.
Oh, that’s not all:
The first issues of “Before Watchmen” will be published next month. Among the writers working on it is former He-Man scripter J. Michael Straczynski, who once penned a comic in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil. (This is the rough equivalent of having Z-movie director Uwe Boll film a studio-funded prequel to Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”) DC is promoting the project with a “Watchmen” toaster, which will allow you to burn the image of Ayn Rand-inspired vigilante Rorschach into your sourdough.
And!
For an industry that feeds on its own past to go 20 years without fresh characters or concepts is death. The most telling sections in “Leaping Tall Buildings” are thus those written about industry powers like Brian Michael Bendis, Joe Quesada, Grant Morrison and Dan DiDio. These are the men most responsible for the failure of the big publishers to take advantage of the public’s obvious fascination with men in capes.
Really? Really? Bendis and Morrison are two of the four men most responsible for industry’s inability to work outside of its Direct Market cocoon? I’ll give you – grudgingly – Didio and Quesada because they’re senior executives at their publishers, but BENDIS AND MORRISON? Here’s the thing: I can understand not liking either man’s work, or thinking that they prop up systems that regurgitate old ideas and familiar characters at the cost of something new. But “most responsible the failure of the big publishers to take advantage of the public’s obvious fascination with men in capes”? That’s just a lazy, nonsensical criticism that ignores how the industry works and vastly inflates either man’s importance or power at their respective companies, making what was a smart, snarky piece in a serious mainstream publication about the decline of superhero comics sound more like a message board post by someone who really doesn’t like New Avengers and thinks that Morrison has really ruined Batman, man.
Of course, maybe I’m wrong, and superhero comics were still going gangbusters in 1999, before Bendis started at Marvel.
Either way, go read the WSJ piece. It’s not perfect, but it’s interesting to see this counter-narrative to Marvel and DC’s “everything is great and comics are breaking new ground, look we have a gay X-Men and a black Spider-Man and, oh, Batman!” PR appear in such a high-profile organ…
May 30th, 2012 at 11:09 am
I wish he would tell us why those telling sections were so telling and what, exactly, they told.
And I don’t have any strong feelings about JMS one way or the other, but that Uwe Boll comparison is bonkers.
Finally: “clumsily drawn?” I wish he’d given us some idea what book he means here. Walt Simonson? Romita Jr.?
I have a theory that this reviewer just got dumped by his girlfriend and his girlfriend was a superhero comic book.
May 30th, 2012 at 11:10 am
He compares JMS to Uwe Boll for something that Joe Q. ghost wrote? I guess He-man was more important than Babylon 5….Sniff, Sniff, I smell a troll on WSJ payroll.
That being said, the AvX covers taking up the whole page are pretty annoying.
May 30th, 2012 at 11:28 am
It’s hard, but if you can distance yourself from the odd attacks on specific creators, the rest of the piece is dead on.
It’s unfortunate, though, that he does make those comments about JMS, Bendis, Morrison, etc. It really undermines his credibility.
May 30th, 2012 at 11:52 am
It’s also worth noting that he doesn’t talk much about the book he’s reviewing.
May 30th, 2012 at 12:18 pm
“This is the rough equivalent of having Z-movie director Uwe Boll film a studio-funded prequel to Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.””
Or maybe it’s much like some burnt out British comic book writer penning further adventures of characters created by literary greats like Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson…
So sick of Uncle Alan’s hypocrisy….
May 30th, 2012 at 1:04 pm
His facts are a little off.
He says, “Take writer Robert Kirkman … During a brief stint at Marvel—he now avoids the big houses—he rewrote old “X-Men” comics and zombified the Marvel heroes rather than doing something new. This made good sense: Why sign over the rights to original ideas when he could keep them for himself?”
He forgets (or doesn’t know) that Kirkman introduced original characters in both MARVEL TEAM-UP and ULTIMATE X-MEN, not to mention gave the Marvel Universe a brand-new Ant-man that’s been featured as recently as three months ago.
May 30th, 2012 at 3:17 pm
I think what he might be getting at is that morrison and bendis, in their mainstream comics are pretty continuity heavy, delving in the distant past while building their own continuity that’s also pretty impenetrable to most people. plus, final crisis wasn’t that long ago and was the big thing before the latest big thing and that was all him, and bendis guides the overall marvel u.
finally, at least in the analogy alan moore is scorsese, and he must have gotten that right since no one’s even mentioned it.
May 30th, 2012 at 3:27 pm
Can’t really argue against anything he said.
As for JMS’s Babylon 5. I love it, but let’s face it, season one was dreadful. Season two was better. Only seasons three and four were good, but season five was worse that season one. Crusade and that Rangers movie from Syfy made even that look like Scorsese. He-man and captain Power is where JMS started.
May 30th, 2012 at 4:02 pm
Bendis i can understand to some degree. He is after all the guy who took 5 issues to cover what ditko/lee did in one. While he may not have originated it, he sure as hell popularized it. Decrompressed storytelling spread like a virus and is now the norm. Tell me comics aren’t worse for this development. That alone would put him on my crap list.
May 30th, 2012 at 5:44 pm
The general conclusions Tim Marchman reaches are generally correct, but he has a factual error in almost every paragraph, which really undercuts the whole thing.
@Tom”So sick of Uncle Alan’s hypocrisy….”
And the rest of the world is sick of people who don’t understand, calling Moore a hypocrite.
May 30th, 2012 at 7:16 pm
It’s fortunate for Alan Moore’s reputation that not many people remember the howling shit he used to write/draw under the name “Curt Vile”.
May 30th, 2012 at 10:42 pm
in reality none of those men have the power to completely suck all the life out of the comic book industry and the fun that it has like a blog column from Graeme Slacker
May 31st, 2012 at 8:28 am
“former He-Man scripter J. Michael Straczynski”
…and BAFTA nominated screenwriter of the Clint Eastwod directed, Changling.
It’s hard to ignore the obviously snobby creator specific slams.
May 31st, 2012 at 8:36 am
I just remembered, Robert Kirkman wrote (pretty good) He-man comic books, so I guess we should refer to him as “former He-Man writer Robert Kirkman”, because obviously working on He-Man is more important than anything else any writer has ever done.
May 31st, 2012 at 9:04 am
It is possible to understand Alan Moore’s point and STILL think that he’s a hypocrite about a great many things. I’d still like to see ANY journalist from any site or outlet press him on why there must be so much rape in his work. It’s positively suffused with rape. The attack in Watchmen had a point. The Invisible Man raping Pollyana, and so on and so forth? I’d like to see him really explain that.
May 31st, 2012 at 1:52 pm
@Ben Lipman
@Tom”So sick of Uncle Alan’s hypocrisy….”
“And the rest of the world is sick of people who don’t understand, calling Moore a hypocrite.”
Please explain to me what I don’t understand? I really do want to learn.
Alan Moore uses other people’s characters (as I allude to in my above comment) like Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Alice in Wonderland for HIS profit… but he doesn’t want DC to use characters that … hey… DC OWNS… for their own profit…
Seriously… how is that not hypocrisy? Profiting off of someone else’s characters and not wanting DC to use their own characters for profit…
Please educate me…
May 31st, 2012 at 10:34 pm
“And the rest of the world is sick of people who don’t understand, calling Moore a hypocrite.”
I hate to say it, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit. Otherwise, things would be a lot better.
June 1st, 2012 at 3:17 am
Marchman hit the nail on the head.
If these “superstars of the comics industry” actually had any talent of their own then they would actually be ~creating~ memorable characters of their own rather than tearing down and “re-inventing” the iconic creations of the people who came before them.
It’s the only way they’ll be remembered because they certainly haven’t done anything on their own to stand up to the legacies left them by the likes of Kirby, Lee, Kane, Siegel and Shuster.
June 1st, 2012 at 9:05 am
@luclin999
I think that Morrison has done a number of worthwhile things outside of his super-hero work. Consider “We3″ or “The Invisibles” (shamelessly swiped by The Matrix folks) or “The Filth” or “18 Days”.
Likewise, Bendis did “Jinx”, “aka Goldfish”, “Torso” and “Fortune & Glory” even before “Powers”.
The argument that they don’t do anything of their own doesn’t hold up.
June 1st, 2012 at 10:21 am
@Steve
Seems you agree with Ben… to a point…
“I hate to say it, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit. Otherwise, things would be a lot better.”
Seriously, how would the word be “better” if they cared more about big bad DC using prperties they own to make money.
1.) Alan Moore signed a contract. Fair or not, he signed a contract. From all accounts, DC has more than honored the contract.
2.) While the story is genius… and I love it… the characters aren’t even wholly original. They are analogues to the Charlton heroes.
I’m all for creator’s rights.
I just don’t understand the sympathy in this scenario.
June 1st, 2012 at 3:22 pm
@ned.
Actually it does.
B-list productions and publications such as those you listed are utterly trivial when compared to the truly iconic creations such as Superman, Batman, Spider-man, etc.
Show a person anywhere in the western world a picture of Jinx (hell, a full book of pictures from it and Goldfish) and he’ll look at you and shrug. Show them a picture of the Superman, Batman, Spider-man emblems (just the emblems mind you) and almost every single one will know who the character it represents is.
Those are icons, Jinx is a sad footnote overshadowed by Apache Chief from the Super Friends.
The people currently in charge of the characters in question have NEVER created a single piece of work which can even remotely compare to the world-wide appeal of the creations of Kirby, Lee, Kane, Siegel and Shuster et al. and for second stringers like these people to think that their wildly divergent, “re-envisioned” versions of such characters are somehow “improvements” of the base structures of the characters which made them legendary to begin with is simply narcissistic hubris upon their parts and nothing more.
June 1st, 2012 at 7:21 pm
@Ned
“shamelessly swiped by The Matrix folks”
Uh… no. Morrison is a bitter hack who whines about people “stealing his ideas” because he doesn’t have the talent to create anything as successful as ‘The Matrix’. He’s frustrated that the Wachowskis were more successful in their first attempt than anything he’s done in his decades-long career. ‘The Invisibles’ wasn’t that original in the first place. It was basically a competent pastiche of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius books. In fact, I think Morrison is even more hypocritical than Alan Moore in terms of whining about people using “his” ideas.
June 1st, 2012 at 7:34 pm
@luclin999
More people have heard of Optimus Prime than Fyodor Karamazov. That doesn’t mean that some guy working at Hasbro in the 80′s is a better writer than Dostoyevsky.
June 3rd, 2012 at 7:17 am
Are you guys SURE that Superman is more popular than Jinx? Because I mean, I know Superman’s pretty popular but is he like JINX POPULAR?
June 4th, 2012 at 5:28 am
Tom – The two examples you cite of Moore using other people’s characters are characters whose creators are dead and are in the public domain, meaning we all own them and can exploit them for profit – no need to tell the author he is signing a contract that will give him ownership of the characters, when he isn’t, required!
It’s also worth noting that Moore is using other people’s creations to examine those creations and their affect on the literary world and on us. LoEG is specifically about ALL fictional characters existing in the one world – it’s not pretending to be an extension of the creators original tales in the slightest.
Oh, and the Watchmen characters are completely original. It initially started with a different group of heroes – the Archie one’s I believe – then it switched to Charltan characters, and then he decided to create his own.
The similarities between Watchmen characters and Charltan characters are much fewer than the differences – I dare say we’re it not for Rosarch embodying Ditko’s personal philosophies, people wouldn’t have picked it without being told.
Creating a knock-off character is an original character. Through-out the history of fiction this has held true, so it’s a weird mark to hold against Moore. I would argue they aren’t even really analogues – Nothing in Watchmen relied on knowledge of the originals, nor did it reference them in anyway. It defined their physical look, and The Questions creators views made Rorsarch, but other than that?
And as for why Moore doesn’t want DC to profit from Watchmen? The people he worked with at DC told him if he signed the contract he would own the characters, but that wasn’t true. He feels betrayed by them, and doesn’t like them.
How is that a hypocritical stance to take because he’s used characters that are in the public domain?
Seriously Tom, go read a blog or two – people who are much better with words have covered how Moore isn’t a hypocrite in the slightest.
Go read an interview with Moore – he’s explained it all from his POV, and how he’d much rather never have to talk about it again.
@Tenenrous – Morrison was told by production designers that The Invisbles was on people’s desks, and cited as a source of inspiration for them to draw on. Rant all you want about how shit he is, but that’s what happened.
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