I love superhero comics. I wasn?t a big comics reader as a kid or adolescent ? I got into comics after I graduated from college and had a period of brain-mulching unemployment and temp jobs. I started buying lots of old superhero comics from the ?bargain bins? and found them a nice escape from the utterly cruddy life I was having at the time.
Since then, I?ve been into superhero comics, and I occasionally read other comics. I like some ?art? comics and ?indy? comics, especially Evan Dorkin, Adrian Tomine and Ivan Brunetti, plus of course Michael Kupperman, who did the cover for other #1. But I pretty much only read superhero comics ? if I want to read a serious literary story about ordinary people, I?ll read a novel. Or watch an indy movie. I know there are some ways comics can do the ?serious literary story about ordinary people? differently or better than a prose-only narrative, but I find I just prefer prose-only narratives. I went through a Manga phase years ago, but I?m not into Manga any more.
But when I want to consume a superhero narrative, I read comics. I don?t like movies about superheroes, and I?ve read very little prose-only superhero narratives. In other words, I don?t read comics to read comics, I read comics to read about superheroes.
Mostly I still read things from the bargain bin, plus the occasional new issue by a creator I especially like. But lately the new superhero comics seem to have gotten more boring and ?event-driven.? ?Event-driven? is a term of art in the comics industry that refers to comics where, for five months or a year, everything is about The Death of Superman, or the Gotham City Gang War. Plus, most comics are being written so they?ll read well in collected editions, meaning the story moves at a snail?s pace.
Online comics critic Paul O?Brien ripped the Internet in half when he announced he was . He cited creative stagnation at DC and Marvel, and the lack of any interesting new titles lately. And people jumped down his throat. Mostly there was a flood of people suggesting that O?Brien just wasn?t reading good comics. (Good defined as non-superhero comics, natch.) If he?d only stop watching Bruckheimer movies and start watching Aguirre: Wrath of God! Even though O?Brien very carefully included a caveat that said his column only applied to superhero comics, and he?s only interested in superhero comics, everybody assumed he must just be an idiot who didn?t realize that Peter Bagge is God!
What bugs me isn?t the lack of reading comprehension of O?Brien?s column. It?s the silly snobbery, or the assumption that people who read superhero comics ?need to be gently led,? as one person put it, towards better comics. As if I?m too stupid to have noticed the huge wall of indy comics at my local store.
Daniel Clowes? main competition for my time isn?t Spider-Man, it?s Graham Greene and Ursula K. LeGuin, and a bunch of other authors I have unread books by. If I?m in the mood for something escapist and light, then Spider-Man gets to compete with television and movies. (And actually, that?s part of why mainstream superhero comics have gotten so boring: they?re not even fun escapist reading any more, because of the emphasis on some highly dubious sense of ?realism,? and the aforementioned five hundred-part storylines.)
