The Four Color Media Monitor

The Comics Journal interviewed Ram V, a comics writer from India who's worked on at least a few series for DC, and here's what he says about the career of comics production:

RITESH BABU: So I think this is a momentous occasion in that it’s been 10 years since you’ve gotten into this thing, comics. And y’know, people talk a lot about breaking into comics, like it’s a prison. And you’ve been in this for over 10 years now, and if you’re in that long, surely it’s a life sentence? So what’s it been like 10 years into this thing?

RAM V: To go back to the prison sentence analogy, it really only feels that way if you’re doing work that you’re not necessarily into.

Yeah.

It doesn’t feel like a sentence if you’re actually enjoying what you do. And I think part of the whole point behind quitting Chemical Engineering and telling stories, working as a writer, was I hated anything feeling like work. And so it’s been 10 years of willful labor. [Laughs]

Honestly, I think in one of our early conversations, I mentioned it, and I know I’ve certainly talked about it with other creators. I said "Every 10 years, you either reinvent yourself or you become obsolete." And of course, there are writers whose careers have spanned decades but if you really look at the work, if the work is any good, past the entire decades of writing, then you can see the writer kind of evolving and changing with the times.

Some veteran writers, if you know where to look, have made themselves into pure jokes, since they de facto "reinvented" themselves into yes-men for a PC mandate at the Big Two. That's why, if they go into independent comics at this point and write up a narrative that avoids serious PC, then they're getting somewhere, but even the creator-owned scene is obviously not immune to wokery, so let's not think that hasn't suffered from any of the saddest staples in the modern world. They then turn to the subject of artists:

I look at a number of artists, when they first come in and break out, "Oh you have a really cool and standout style." Sometimes they’ll even be coloring themselves and inking themselves, doing it all, making all the key decisions and choices. And you go, "Wow, this is striking." Cut to a few years later and they’re doing a Marvel/DC book or two books in that IP realm, and suddenly the layouts are much more flat, much less interesting, because they have to grind out a page faster and faster. And even the coloring, somebody else is doing it, it’s all much more "standardized," much less "them." Far less idiosyncratic or attuned to their distinct sensibilities. It’s like, "Yeah, I suppose it’s functional. It does its job, it comes out on time too," but it lacks the flavor that actually made them special to begin with.

Right. And look, I think a lot of that is because there is a necessity to be part of that industry that creates those monthly comics. I wouldn’t hold it against anyone. There are plenty of artists whose work you can look at and you can tell, wherein they clearly have two lines of work. One is, "Oh I’m doing a monthly comic? This is what my pages are gonna look like," and then another is "Oh I’ve got time to do these? This is what it’ll look like then."

It’s great that some people can compartmentalize like that. But there should also be a space for people who don’t want to work in that sort of framework. And I think certainly, pulling the conversation back to writing for a bit, certainly I have no need, outside of my own excitement, to constantly be working within that framework. And as time has gone on, I have other opportunities that take up my time and interest. And if it ever came down to the choice of "Okay, are you gonna let go of your creator-owned project or let go of the superhero stuff?" Then nine times out of ten, it’s gonna fall on "I’m gonna step away from the superhero stuff."

This seems to sugarcoat that today, there's only so many artists in mainstream whose designs are sadly PC, because they capitulated to editorial mandates dictating such paths, and adhere to censorious standards without question or challenge. And when that's the case, so it's shameful the interviewer and interviewee won't acknowledge it can happen. And then Ram V won't even question whether the monthly pamphlet format's long become more a crutch than a source of creativity. Do we really, truly, absolutely, positively still need to adhere to that kind of format? What's so wrong with paperback/hardcover stories that could come out fewer times a year, be at least 50 pages or so in length, and for all we know, be a much better, simpler way of telling a story, long or short? Why won't any creators address such queries? They continue on the topic of sales:

It is very funny isn’t it? People obsess over the sales, oh where is this thing ranking in these sales, who’s on top and who’s below whom, it’s this very strange thing.

It really is. And also, thankfully everything I’ve done has done well in terms of sales. But then obviously in a monthly cadence, because you’re at X or Y number of issues companies are built to look at that and deal with that and be concerned by it.

But it shouldn’t matter to the creator. There’s always been this existential struggle at the heart of the creative endeavor. Don’t get me wrong, you’re not gonna get an opportunity to continue being a successful creator if your books aren’t being picked up and read by people. But there’s a line between "enough people pick up my books and read them for them to be successful" versus "I want the most number of people to pick up my books/I want to write for the broadest possible sales-base." If you cross that line, you risk paying more attention to selling stuff and less attention to making stuff.

And this is laughable because it completely omits how shoddy sales figures today can be for pamphlets, if they sell below a million copies, and Ram V says nothing clear about what sales figures his comics publications get. So who do they think they're kidding? That said, it's interesting how he does allude to the monumentally stupid notion of trying to sell to virtually everyone, no matter their specific background, which could include PC advocates and "diversity pandering". That silly concern is precisely why even readers of different racial background now find the Big Two's comics unreadable. But Ram V's failure to acknowledge such problems more specifically is why said problem won't be solved. They proceed, curiously enough, to a topic that's certainly eyebrow raising:

Yeah. It’s interesting, contemporary American comics publishing is so built around Hollywood money. And because of that reality, there’s thus the prevalence of the "X meets Y" comics.

Look, there’s always been money from other industries interested in niche mediums. Michelangelo was getting money to paint the ceiling of a church. So it’s always been the case. I don’t think that in particular is to blame. I think the X meets Y pitches are popular because that is the easiest and lowest hanging fruit. And so I would be pointing at creators and going "Don’t do the X meets Y, do the interesting thing." Honestly, I don’t think anyone in Hollywood says "I want the X meets Y." Sure, they might have a hard time understanding a pitch that’s more complex sometimes. But the great benefit of making comics is you don’t need the X meets Y pitch if you can just hand someone a comic and go "Here, read this." And more often than not, reading the thing is more impactful than pitching. So I’m someone who is a great believer in creators and artists and people who make stuff in any medium, they should have every avenue of sustainably earning a living off of doing that thing. And if that means Hollywood is going to come in and give you a bunch of money to turn it into a film or ask you to be involved in writing the film or art directing the film, great. But that has nothing to do with a mediocre pitch, a mediocre film, or a mediocre comic, in an ideal world. But of course, we don’t live in an ideal world, and it’s easy to pick the low-hanging fruit right?

Fascinating. It could quite possibly explain comicdom's descent into multiple mediocrities, and maybe even how the Big Two come to base their marketing entirely on character recognition instead of story merit. Yet Ram V doesn't exactly address that, does he? I think there's plenty of reasons why mainstream comics, if anything, became more mediocre, and now movie adaptations are following suit. Originally, it was that the comics writers nearly a quarter century ago were trying to make the comics visuals look more like what may have been seen in the movies, with the change in X-Men outfits in the early 2000s a notable example. Even now, there's comics writers who're trying to make their stories look like movies, and that's dragged down the quality ever more. The historian Sean Howe once tried to make the point why this is ill-advised, and nobody listened. Next:

Certainly. And looking at the tail end of your work, like I see your Swamp Thing, that to me reads like you’re getting all the Alan Moore out of your system. I look at your Detective, that feels like you getting all the Grant Morrison out of your system.

[Laughs] You’re not wrong.

And with The New Gods, it’s all of that Jack Kirby out of your system. Just like Resurrection Man or Laila Starr which you mentioned before, there’s a sense of exorcising these things you’ve had in your head for so long in some measure. And now having done so, you’re like, "Okay, now I can come up with new things based on the me of now and my current preoccupations at this precise moment, as opposed to what’s been haunting me for ages."

And I think you need to give yourself the time to be haunted by something for the next decade, if you will. I’m lucky to be able to do that, and so I really should just take advantage of it rather than going "What’s my next gig?" Not to say I intend to disappear and go learn how to craft Italian footwear. [Laughs]. I’m certainly gonna be doing a lot of work that is not in comics. And so it’s nice to be able to take that time and noodle away at comics ideas that I intend to pick up on and work on.

While Morrison's a bad lot, and not worth emulating, what's wrong with Moore's work on the Swamp Thing, and perhaps more importantly, what's wrong with Kirby's on New Gods or anything else from his era? Of course those aren't perfect, but while Moore has appalled me of recent, I will say in his favor that his Swamp Thing work was worth the effort, and if interviewer and interviewee are trying to put that all down, it's a shame, but hardly a surprise if modern writers don't think highly of what past creators did for comicdom in their time.

For sure, for sure. And that leads into one of the things I quite like about your work. I look at American mainstream genre comics of the direct market, and there’s a real insularity. There's art inspired by art and there’s art inspired by life. And in the DM, there’s a lot of art inspired by other art, other genre stuff. But when I look at your work, rather than the art obsessed with certain power fantasies or particular insularities, it’s a lot of art that’s really taken with life. Even things like Laila Starr or Rare Flavours, which have these mythic figures of great power — death, demons — what you’re really doing is saying "Let’s take this mythic figure and then use them as a vehicle for this human character story, like a Darius and his entire life growing up or a Mohan and his entire journey as an artist." These ideas are only valuable in that they help contextualize the reality and life of this very human, messy individual that’s really trying and failing. It’s all about these people in all their powerlessness and frailty and all their weakness.

And that’s what I find so engaging. Because so much of American genre comics is about this obsession with power, these power fantasies, but a lot of your work is just about using them instead as frameworks for the actual human shit. Even something like These Savage Shores, there’s Bishan, who’s this powerful Rakshas warrior, but the conclusion is he fails to actually save the one person that he cares about. His human partner Kori. It’s a tragedy built around that, that inability, the futility of power.

If you look at it, my narratives are almost entirely about powerlessness.

Yes! This is the appeal!

Especially when you take the context of power fantasies. Take New Gods for example. The entire narrative is driven by "Yes, you might be a god, but you have a terrible relationship with your brother or you couldn’t save the one kid that was actually loyal to you. Or you have all this tremendous power, but you’re an insecure wreck who can’t even trust his partner to say ‘Hey, I’m in trouble, I need help'."

It’s a very human thing.

It is, and I think if you don’t have that, then the story necessarily and effectively becomes about conflicts outside of that. And they are much less interesting conflicts because the one conflict that is universally true to every human being is anyone who tries to achieve anything is doing it so they don’t have to feel powerless in some form. And the great sort of dismay of the human condition is that no matter how high you get, you’re going to feel powerless at some point in time. And I think giving up part of that ability to be okay with being powerless, if you’re not okay with that, you’re giving up some part of your humanity. And I think I’m much more interested in characters who are capable of being powerless, despite otherwise being very powerful, if that makes sense.

If a writer's going to concentrate so much on powerlessness, as Ram V sounds like he does, and not on how to overcome a dire situation and figure out how to defeat evil even through brainpower as opposed to physical powers, I don't think he's being very creative. Nor do I think it's a "very human thing" to focus only so much on powerlessness if said power could be used for heroic causes. I wouldn't be shocked if, no matter what he says, he's not focusing on the kind of narrative Spider-Man was built upon, where Peter Parker failed to use his power when he had the chance to stop the unnamed burglar who later murdered his uncle Ben, and that's why Peter went on to become a dedicated crimefighter, so he could at least save other innocent lives when possible. And then, here's what they say about one's artistic viewpoints:

It does. And it segues into another question I have. You’ve talked a lot about what you’ve learnt in terms of what to do. But given 10 years is a long time, that sort of longevity also teaches you just as much is what all not to do. So what are Ram V’s non-negotiables, if you will?

Don’t do anything that sacrifices your artistic vision. I know it sounds like a thing you say once you’ve gotten to a point where you can swing that. But try not to. Because every time you do do it or have to do it or feel like you have to do it, that’s a small portion of your soul being chipped away. There are pieces of work that I’ve done, that I look at now — some of them celebrated, others not so much. But even the celebrated ones, when I look at them, all I can see is "If only I had gotten to do the thing I actually wanted to do, it would’ve been so much better!"

And creatively, that’s not a great feeling to have. Because say I had gotten to do exactly what I wanted to do, and it turned out to be worse than it is right now. But that "worse" is an objective third-person reading of it. To me, it will never be worse. To me, it will always be the best thing I did because that’s what I set out to do. And the obvious thing to remember then is comics is a collaborative medium. You’re meant to make compromises and accommodate each other’s visions. That’s true, that’s why it’s very important to find a collaborator where you never feel like you’re cutting your artistic vision off to enable that person, and it should be the same for them. They should feel like their vision is shining because they are going to accommodate you. And I think that’s the magic of great collaborative relationships in comics. It’s both collaborators feeling like they’re executing their vision without compromise, or with the sort of compromises they’re willing to make that doesn’t really affect what they set out to do in the first place. The moment you make compromises to what you really sought out to achieve, then the question is "Then why do any of this anyway?" Then you might as well be doing any other job. If you don’t care so intensely about what you want to do here, then why are you in this medium?

That would be my one piece of advice. Persevere to protect artistic vision at least as far as you can.

In that case, is he disappointed with any and all artists who may have sacrificed their visions at the Big Two, if anywhere, and based on the worst, most repellent editorial mandates, only turned out bad stuff that was definitely tainted by even worse ones forced upon their visions by say, terrible crossover events? Let us be clear. The status quos set by the people who turned out atrocious "events" like Identity Crisis and Avengers: Disassembled are not something a responsible creator should be forced to follow. And the "creators" working for the Big Two at the time were definitely not responsible people. They'd do well to consider that the people running the shop at DC/Marvel today are not protecting artistic visions at all. One of those people includes the following:

Oooh.

And it is sometimes just designed illustration. And sometimes it is sequential art. And other times it’s animated. And I have a sense of how to put this together and I know what the story is, and anyone I’ve ever talked to about it has always had this, "You’ve blown my mind!" expression. Including people who are in animation, people who are in filmmaking, people who are in comics. The only thing I can say, very excitedly, is that Al Ewing is doing some voiceover stuff for me for this.

He does have a great voice.

Yes! So hence, exciting stuff. But again, something that I’m not quite sure where or who would be publishing it so I’ll just find a way to do it myself. So there’s a lot I want to do. And then there’s writing a novel, which I’ve always aimed at writing when I started. And I still haven’t done that, so at some point, that will become a thing I focus on as well. And then I’ve been very lucky in that all the creator-owned works I’ve done so far are in various stages of development. And I’m involved with a lot of those things, so it’ll be interesting to see where and how that involvement takes me. And then beyond that, there are creator-owned comics that have been put on the back-burner because I was doing monthly superhero stuff. There are artists I’ve told: "Three years from now, we’ll get together and do a book!" And I intend absolutely on doing all of them, so it’s exciting to be able to go back to that.

Does that make sense?

It does!

Now that I narrate this, in my head, I’m still thinking, "I’m doing too much." [Laughs]

When he cites leftist Ewing as a great source of inspiration, that's when it becomes additionally apparent something's wrong. So his talk about artistic visions is unconvincing, when he doesn't respect past artists like Kirby, or even Stan Lee.

It’s interesting you mention the fatherhood aspect. I look at something like The Swamp Thing, right? And the thing I love about it is, while it is a lot of things, at its heart it’s about a guy and his really messy relationship with his father and how that dovetails into his relationship with his brother. And a lot of it is trying to reckon with his relationship with his father and just his father’s passing. And from there we get to The New Gods, about a young father who’s had all this experience with his own father and is like, "Well, what kind of father am I? And what kind of father do I want to be? And let me think about what my father did to me."

The New Gods is really about a bunch of terrible fathers doing terrible things in the name of fatherhood. [Laughs]

If his work is also about father figures who're almost all bad folk, not just simply Darkseid, that too is very troubling. You could reasonably wonder if he's taking a negative view of "patriarchy". In an era where masculinity was derided as almost entirely "toxic", it's hardly a good example to write about fatherhood as though it's all a bad thing. Mainly because if fatherhood's put down so badly, motherhood will be next.

Reading this and realizing what he doesn't dwell upon, I'm not convinced Ram V is a writer who's really trying to improve the now dire state of the modern mainstream comics industry, and what he's writing about, and his associations with Ewing only compound the feeling he's just not somebody who genuinely cares about the industry, nor does he want to seriously and convincingly fix what went wrong in past decades.

Labels: animation, dc comics, Europe and Asia, history, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, sales