The Four Color Media Monitor

Wisconsin native Seeley was interviewed by Wisconsin Public Radio to promote yet another superhero comic he wrote called Local Man, whose premise is honestly built on way too obvious themes:

In a new comic book series, the main character returns to his small Wisconsin hometown as a failure, mirroring the actual nightmare of co-author and Wisconsin native Tim Seeley. [...]

On "The Morning Show," Seeley discussed setting his latest story in Wisconsin, the genre of rural crime noir and 1990s superheroes. The new comic series, "Local Man," involves a disgraced former superhero returning home and investigating a murder.

I just don't understand why we have to keep hearing even the premise of a former superhero as the main spotlight. Or why we have to keep hearing that the tale is centered around a murder investigation. That's one of the biggest problems with a lot of prime time TV shows aired at 10 in the evening in past decades too; many would have stories centered almost entirely around murders, or even rapes, not carjackings and store robberies sans the aforementioned forms of violence. Building around murders/rapes has long been an awfully stale approach.

What Seeley tells in the following exchange, however, is interesting:

Kate Archer Kent: Why did you make the story in a fictional town but include so many references to real parts of Wisconsin?

Tim Seeley: I felt like I had not seen a superhero story set in rural Wisconsin before. It's obviously something I have a lot of experience with. I've always noticed that we put in details that relate to people. They just sound more honest. The characters inhabit a world that seems more real.

But we made it fictional because the town is kind of terrible in a lot of ways. It's a town in which all the major industry (has) fled. It's just holding on by a string. It's somewhat corrupt, as well. We didn't want to call out a real place, so we made up a fake place that is a combination of a bunch of different ideas that feels like a town, but it's also worse than any real town.

In fairness, one could wonder if he's alluding the sad situation now plaguing multiple Democrat-run cities across the USA, including - and not limited to - my native Philadelphia, where crime's gone off the charts and has led to business closures. There's also San Francisco and LA's Beverly Hills district, to name at least 2 other examples. But then, why doesn't Seeley actually name such cities and how they've gone down the drain in just a few years flat? If he did, the story he's producing might have more meaning and speak to the times for real. Seeley also brought up what he thinks of the 1990s:

KAK: What is a day in the life like for these superheroes in "Local Man"?

TS: In the early 1990s, they started making superhero comics pretty much exclusively for 13-year-old boys. Those comics tend to have this very distinct aesthetic in which they're really aggressive, they're really brightly colored and they're often like sexy — but only for 13-year-old boys and for no one else. But they were full of creative energy, and they were full of life. I like them, but I also hate them.

I wanted to tell the story with these kinds of characters. One of my things that we observe in the book is that 1990s superheroes were not that concerned with saving the day. They were more concerned with beating stuff up or looking cool. That was the main motivation for that era of superhero comics. So, we make fun of it. Our character comes from a team of which most of the time he had no idea what it was they were doing. He was just running around beating up bad guys and not really understanding how this helped anyone. But all of them just went through it because it was a way to be powerful, cool and famous.

Seriously? I realize that 1990s mainstream was on the decline, but that doesn't mean none of the writers at the time were writing tales about fighting and defeating evil, and saving innocent lives. And a story about a superhero doing nothing more than attacking baddies - and presumably not turning them in to the police - is no substitute for a story where saving innocent lives is more of an emphasis. Honestly, Local Hero sounds laughable, and a waste of a chance to do something more challenging, like clearly addressing modern issues such Islamic terrorism, and even Russia's neo-communist situation that resulted in the current war against Ukraine. The story Seeley's produced is an example of taking a way too easy approach, and marks another sad example of how modern creators don't seem to know what they're doing, or if they're telling something with meaning anymore.

Labels: history, indie publishers, msm propaganda