The Four Color Media Monitor

9-News NBC interviewed R. Alan Brooks, a comics creator in Denver who's now developing some of his own stories, and had what to say about building a career in the medium:

If you ask comic book creator R. Alan Brooks, it's never too late to achieve your dream. Brooks is an accomplished and award-winning author, professor and artist living in Denver, and he's doing just that.

Which means that, even if you're over 50, you can still have potential to deliver. An excellent message indeed.

Brooks is living out a dream that he says didn't ever seem realistic. "A lot of my teachers when I was a kid were condescending about me liking comic books," he said.

That doesn't mean, however, that things have changed for the better, as I've noted before. A lot of leftists today view the medium as acceptable only in the sense it can serve as a tool for producing extreme propaganda more hurtful than helpful to society. And while the guy's got some important points to make, the article's oblivious to the present reality.

Brooks said the lesson for the naysayers: there is more to comic books than meets the eye. They play an important role in bringing social issues into the spotlight, like many other art forms in society.

"A big influence for me is the original Twilight Zone. What people don't know, the guy who created it, was not a fan of fantasy or sci-fi. He wrote about racism, sexism, war, and he would get censored," Brooks explained.

"X-Men, during the 80s especially, drew really strongly off the civil rights struggle."

Brooks didn't build this dream alone. He credits his father for helping him find love in a medium that was otherwise shunned by mainstream culture when he was a child.

Yet today, censorship's made comebacks, and it's hard to say today's educators are honoring the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s anymore, seeing how Minnesota's public school system excised important figures like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks from their curriculum. And this was less than a decade after the latter passed away. If you're looking for a story with valid social issues, you definitely won't find it in mainstream today. And again, mainstream culture, however you define it, doesn't really embrace comicdom today anymore than it did yesterday.

Mr. Brooks certainly deserves appreciation and congratulations for some of his points. But it's a terrible shame nobody's willing to make clear that the present is no better for comicdom than the past was, or that the MSM won't acknowledge it.

Labels: censorship issues, history, indie publishers, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, museums, politics