The Four Color Media Monitor

While there are some novelists with good taste and sincerity who've had what to do with comics, and Harlan Ellison may be one of them, today's batch is very iffy at best. And the ones spoken about in this item from AP Wire on the Arizona Republic's website (via the Newsarama blog) simply don't impress that much upon me, or, as in the case of Brad Meltzer and Stephen King, two of the novelists mentioned here, don't impress me at all. And I can't help but find this bit by Meltzer familar:

Meltzer and his publishers also put excerpts of "Justice League" into the paperback edition of "Book of Fate," the first time a comic book has appeared in a novel, he says.
He believes the medium shouldn't matter, as long as the story is good.

"There has just been so much snobbery that has existed with comic books," he said. "We've got to prove that these things are equal."

Seeing this, I thought I'd seen the above in some form before. And, as it turned out, Meltzer once said something like this in an article featured on Publisher's Weekly that I took apart a year ago. As a result, I can't help but wonder if the AP, in all their dishonest fawning, might've semi-recycled something Meltzer said once before. They certainly do whitewash all connected with Identity Crisis.

And to hint at what's really driving this quest to employ novelists, a part that comes after what Stephen King says:

"I'm a big fan of the medium," King said of comic books. "A different way to tell stories is always exciting. It's like being a kid with a chemistry set."

And comic book publishers are fans of authors with a loyal audience.

"The fan base helps grow the market," [Dan] Buckley said. "It's an important initiative, bringing the best talent you can to the table and also seeing what new readers you can attract."

It should be pretty obvious from this that what's really driving this is the ability to draw in at least some of these novelists' own fanbases and their wallets with them. That explains very well just why Justice League of America has sold well enough, because some of the overrated Meltzer's own audience may be contributing to it. It's got little to do with good storytelling.

And I'm not impressed with what Dan Buckley says towards the end here either:

...Buckley says there's plenty of space in the comic books to go around, so regular comic book writers and writer-artists shouldn't worry that their jobs are being taken away.

"We're publishing more than 70 or 80 titles a month. There's plenty of room for comic writers, TV writers, novelists, you name it," Buckley said. "The other creators are excited - yeah it's competition - but they understand it's great for us to get our name out there into the mainstream."

While it's not like regulars are having their jobs taken away, the problem is that they're being passed over on certain titles in favor of either inexplicably popular(?) writers like Brian Bendis (who may be a novelist himself, but I cannot remember clearly if I ever read any info to confirm that), or the novelists themselves. Mark Waid, for example, may have once been thought to acquire the role of writing the Avengers, but then, thanks to TPTB at Marvel, Brian Bendis ultimately ended up receiving the job, clearly because he agrees with the mess they want to make out of Marvel ever since Disassembled, and also because he wants to do something to only please either his own personal fanbase, or himself, seeing how far removed from the original structure he's made the Avengers now. Even veterans like Steve Englehart and Roger Stern are being shunned in favor of all these overrated types. Writers like them are just what Avengers and even the Justice League could use right now, but they'd rather hire ones like Meltzer instead, partly because of the extra dollars they see in them.

If they really wanted to make really big money, they'd stop with all the trendiness, excessive violence, political overtones, and even sexism that have befallen comics lately, and write some decent adventure stories instead. If they have to make anything involving politicized storylines, they could at least be fairer and not write one-sided left-liberal nonsense that's dumbed down and offers nothing genuinely positive for thought.

It's also hard to be sure if comics are really rising up again as a success story, seeing that even the most successful sell barely more than 200,000 copies and a few hundred thousand dollars. That's a far cry from many movies, which sell at levels of millions of dollars by comparison, and whose audience is much larger than that of comics today.

Labels: msm propaganda