If comics are a serious business, is it as material for Hollywood to adapt?

The Leesburg Daily Commercial wrote about a small publisher called Red Giant Entertainment that's been getting adaptation deals:

Some people may roll their eyes when David Campiti says he’s into comic books. But as a co-owner of Red Giant Entertainment Inc. in Clermont, he and his partner are actually opening the eyes of a lot of television and movie producers who see big bucks in Red Giant books. [...]

Comic book titles include 'Wayward Sons,' produced by Red Giant co-owner Benny Powell, which has a growing following. At Comic Con this year, Powell was approached by Lynn Pictures with an “on-the-spot” movie deal. Producers are currently casting for it. [...]

“You look at a list of the top grossing movies of all time and you will see that the top money makers were all –- with the exception of Avatar -– inspired by a comic book series or characters like Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Avengers, X-Men, Wolverine, the Hulk, Iron Man and so on," he said. "More money has been made off comic book movies over the past 30 years than in every other genre combined.”

That's what he got into the business for? Sure, they've got plenty of writing and artist talent working for them, but discussions like these about movie potential dampen the impact and make me wonder if they're going into this more in hopes of making bigger money out of adapting their output to the silver screen. That doesn't sound much like somebody who wants the medium itself to be recognized as a great form of escapism on its own.

And not every comic book movie's been a big success, nor have they been the only ones to make money. There's also the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, along with the Terminator movies (though the 4th one wasn't successful). And Jaws was surely the movie that got the ball rolling for "blockbusters". Comic movies aren't the only of their kind that made big bucks at the box office.

I really wish the owner of Red Giant would talk more about how good the writing and artwork are for comics, and not lose himself in talking about what movie deals they've been making.

It may be a good time to read comics, but not with superheroes

The Mass Media, the student paper of Boston University, published a fawning item about why now is a great time to read comics, but it's all predictably superficial, and they don't seem very concerned about how crossovers have proven to be the worst thing that could happen to mainstream:

Superheroes are everywhere. Unless you’ve been sitting in a cave recently, you’ve probably seen superheroes on television, in the movie theatre, in a bookstore, plastered on a candy wrapper or soda can in the supermarket, or on some promotional poster in any populated area. Today, America is a land of superheroic media, even if you aren’t reading comic books.

Ever thought about how difficult it is to find comic books, even at bookstores? Comics were largely rejected by bookstores in the mid-90s and relegated to specialty stores. Not only that, the publishers made little or no effort to get back into the major league ball game. The paper doesn't explore that, though.

In this article, I want to try to convince you, if you aren’t already a comic enthusiast, that comic books are something you should be reading, or at least paying more attention to. [...]

I'm afraid he doesn't convince much, as we'll soon deal with below.

We’ve just come off the summer movie blockbuster high, and we got a hefty dose of comics on film: “Man of Steel,” “The Wolverine,” “Iron Man 3,” “Kick Ass 2,” “R.I.P.D.,” “2 Guns,” and probably some I’ve forgotten. Right off the bat, being entertained by any of these movies is a great reason to head to a comic bookstore and pick up something related to any of these movies.

Anybody who liked the movies is going to be sorely disappointed if what they pick up in the comics stores happens to be brand new, and not the classic material. Kick Ass 2 is one adaptation whose source material is most definitely not worth the bother.

Summer is typically also a blockbuster time for comics, but the summer of 2013 was sort of meh for comics. Instead, it was mostly a build up for the fall. Both DC and Marvel used their summer publishing schedule to set up events that will be shaking up their comic book universes, namely the Forever Evil (DC) and Infinity and Battle of the Atom (Marvel) crossover events, which will tell universe-spanning stories across multiple titles.

If this is what they're promoting, they've failed to cite a serious problem: the price. Even alone, most of these titles already cost 4 dollars, a lot of money to pay for something padded out for trades, and thanks to editorial fiat, the writers can't tell a stand-alone tale, even if they wanted to. But even more hilarious is this:

One of the biggest reasons people stay away from comics is the numbering system. Who wants to read “Spawn” #236, “Invincible” #104, or, heaven forbid, “Batman” #698? “Won’t I be missing, like, hundreds of important plot points?!” Luckily, both DC and Marvel recently (within the past two years) rebranded themselves, so that with few exceptions, DC’s comics are now around issue 23 this month and many of Marvel’s comics are below issue 20.

Why would anybody with a brain want to read Spawn at all? One of the crummiest writing efforts from early Image. And since when was anybody worried about the numbers? The relaunches, which they fawn over, were part of a strategy to draw in the speculator market, who think #1 alone guarantees a fortune in the future. But it's already proving a false hope, particularly if the story is badly written.

And if that’s not less intimidating, I can say from experience that many comic books are written to be reader friendly at the start of any new narrative arc (roughly every three to five issues). Marvel’s comics now include an introduction page catching the reader up on recent events! Brian Michael Bendis’ two X-Men series and “Guardians of the Galaxy” are great examples of easily accessible stories.

I'm starting to question the honesty of this writer, since a lot of today's tales are as many as 6 issues en toto, and Bendis precipitated the padded tone for today's approach to writing and publishing, for trades. As if they couldn't just publish several self-contained stories and put them together in one trade. But the biggest problem with his writing is that it's just plain awful. And they're not very easy to access at all.

The pages telling what happened previously aren't new either. Back in 1997-99, Marvel put something like that in their pamphlets, one of the not too many better ideas they had at the time.

This very week, in fact, is a great time to pick up a DC comic. “Forever Evil” is starting, which means for this month only all of the titles are on a sort of hiatus. Why? Because the super- and not-so-super villains have taken over the titles! Now you can pick up “Batman #23.1 The Joker” or “Wonder Woman #23.1 Cheetah” and get an introduction your favorite heroes’ archenemies.

Marvel is doing something similar with two separate events. “Infinity” is an event which has the very foundation of the universe being ripped apart by the Mad Titan, Thanos. Hannah Means-Shannon of BleedingCool.com recently wrote an article about how Marvel’s “Infinity”is tailored to being inclusive to new readers, and I think it’s a great place to hop into the Marvel-verse.

Okay, now I know he's not serious (and neither is the BC site). Why must everybody read crossovers, especially ones whose only purpose seems to be celebrating evil, and aren't built on organic character drama? Crossovers have become the curse of the medium, and aren't helping it one bit. The heroes are no longer recognizable, and the "events" seem like little more than excuses to put them through the wringer, plus indulge in meaningless, badly written nostalgia. And worst, they cost a lot of money.

College students deserve much better than this tripe.

What was the Japanese board of education's real reason for trying to censor Barefoot Gen as reading material?

There was recently a controversy in Japan over the education ministry's proposal to restrict the Barefoot Gen manga from being used as an educational book on the history of Japan's WW2 atrocities. The UK Telegraph said it was because of the graphic depictions of violence. But the Japan Times says it's also because of the political leanings, which condemn the country's past associations with fascism:

The Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, board of education is bent on covering up negative aspects of Japan’s wartime history, as evidenced by its decision to have local elementary and junior high schools curb student access to the longtime iconic anti-war manga “Hadashi no Gen” (“Barefoot Gen”), experts said.

The manga series by the late Keiji Nakazawa depicts a Japanese boy who tries to get by in postwar Japan after surviving the 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima. It also contains graphic drawings of atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army, including the rapes and beheadings of Chinese.

The five-member Matsue board of education discussed the curbs without reaching a decision Thursday, although it said 44 of 49 school principals it polled oppose having the series restricted. [...]

Manga commentator Jun Ishiko, who had been a friend of Nakazawa, said the depictions of cruelty in the series came under fire mainly from parents when the series was first published in 1973.

Ishiko also said there might be “a will to cover up Japan’s war crimes” behind the board’s request, noting the series depicts not only the atomic bombing but acts of aggression carried out by Japan.

While it's understandable if the violence in itself is considered unsuitable for children, it's unclear if the parents were offended by the violence in itself, or by the political standing the manga takes, condemning the Japanese Imperialists for their atrocities against Chinese civilians. I know that in postwar Japan, there have been some people who don't come to terms with the shame the former Imperialists brought upon them, and act like ignoramuses, but luckily, there is also a good number of folks who do recognize reality.

Fortunately, the board reversed its decision to censor access at schools. I will agree that, from a content suitability perspective, the questions of appropriateness for children are legitimate. Nakazawa's widow told the Asahi Shimbun she thinks the manga does have educational value, since he did his research, and:

She added that he was fully aware that he would come under heavy criticism for describing atrocities committed by Imperial Japanese troops. But that did not deter him from shedding light on what actually happened during the war.

"Barefoot Gen" does not dwell on battle scenes. When Nakazawa drew the panels in which the women were victimized, he inked the victims dark to hide their expressions. He decided on this approach after giving much thought on how far he could go with children as readers.

So while it's still a pretty graphic book, he did go in fully realizing why gore is a very tricky thing to show to children. Not knowing enough about this story, I just hope he didn't say the USA shouldn't have used the atomic bomb. Japan turned to fascism during WW2, so they reaped what they sowed, and the US felt it was the only way they could really deliver the message to the Imperialists to cease fire. I'm certainly glad Nakazawa did make clear that the crimes committed against Chinese during that period were an abomination. That's something all students of history in Japan should learn.

DC turns Superman into a killer in preludes to Forever Evil

Big Shiny Robot did an interview with Geoff Johns and Jeff Lemire about the Forever Evil crossover, and bring up how Johns had the Man of Steel kill Dr. Light in the preludes to their latest time and money waster:

BY: The first part of this came out right before Man of Steel, and there was a lot of controversy about Zach Snyder’s Superman killing someone, and there was sort of this small but loud contingent of people saying the only reason you had Superman killing someone at the beginning of this was in a response to that to show people that yes, it can happen. But I don’t think that’s the case. How did it all happen?

Jeff: When Geoff and I were plotting this it was months before, like January or February, and I had never seen Man of Steel and knew nothing about the plot. I think it was coincidence.

BY: I don’t think it had anything to do with it, but how did you come up with Superman is going to kill somebody in this context?

Geoff: In this context, we wanted the three Justice Leagues to really be taken down, the very first thing you’re going to do, the most powerful thing in my mind that the DC Universe has as a whole is inspiration in Superman. And the inspiration in Superman, the villains behind this really wanted the first casualty has to be facing Superman. And facing Superman means, they planned and took this opportunity to take an already untrusting group of superheroes, and they targeted Superman himself, so when he seemingly kills a fellow hero, this isn’t killing somebody, the heat vision goes off and kills Dr. Light, who’s a member of the JLA, and that, for us, if you’re going to do a story about taking down the Justice Leagues and trust is going to break even further, they’re all going to be focused on one thing “can they rely on Superman,” I think that’s a huge, you take that chip away, and a lot of characters in the Justice League start to collapse and a lot of them stand up for him and say he would never do that, but there’s still that voice in the back of their mind saying “what happened?” And that became a big focal point for us.

Even if Superman was under mind control, this is embarrassing at worst, and it sounds like Johns and Lemire's story is an insult to the very concept of Superman's inspirational image. I recall one reviewer telling a few years ago how a conversation between the heroes in Flash: Rebirth was written to sound like an argument on a message board, and it sounds here like Johns (and Lemire) are trying to pull a dopey stunt like that again. But all that suggests is they're trying to mock the audience for caring about the characters.

BY: I read the first 5, and it doesn’t feel until the end moment of this penultimate issue that this is launching something bigger; it feels so self contained and epic in its own right, that it never once feels like a prelude to something bigger. How did you work on managing that?

Geoff: There is a kind of close ended nature to this story and the mystery of Superman and Dr Light, so there is a nice close ended nature to this mystery, but there’s kind of this epic under current coming, like a tremor that’s going to erupt into an earthquake. By design, it’s almost hidden, like we wanted it to kind of hidden from the Justice League and the readers, and it will ultimately explode at the end of Justice League 23. Just because they solve the mystery doesn’t mean they solved the problem.

Jeff: We were also just trying to make it a Justice League event instead of a DC event, so I think that’s why it feels sort of contained to those books at least for the first 2/3 of it.

Geoff: The central focus is a conflict between the Justice League and the JLA and the Justice League Dark coming in to discover exactly what happened, and it’s very specifically a Justice League story and built on the fundamental distrust between the teams and the differences between the teams. Putting these 3 teams together, you get odd reactions and team ups which are a lot of fun to watch. There are a lot of strange members both in the JLA and Justice League Dark and even Justice League to an extent.

Who cares? It's obviously just another forced and contrived tale of division and distrust between heroes. One of the promo ads I found for this says what Johns said in an earlier interview, that "evil is relative". As part of an advertising campaign, it sounds even more offensive.

They can say they're trying to just make this an "event" for the League, but it's long ceased to be one. And they already sowed seeds of distrust and division in the League after Identity Crisis.

They also intend to change the series title to Justice League of Canada:

CBR News: You and Geoff Johns have been working together on "Trinity War" for most of 2013. Was taking over "Justice League of America," moving the team north and renaming the series "Justice League of Canada" always the plan or did that come about organically?

Jeff Lemire: I knew my "Justice League Dark" run was coming to an end with "Trinity War." I just felt like it was a good place for me to stop. I'm happy with the run that I've done and I knew that the events of "Trinity War" and "Forever Evil" were going to have some pretty dramatic repercussions across the DC Universe but especially with the Justice League franchise. Without spoiling what's coming, this is only one of the changes that will happen in the "Justice League" books after "Forever Evil."

It all came out of those stories and working with Geoff and working with a lot of those characters. At the same time, it's obviously something that's pretty personal to me. It's me taking the reins on a "Justice League" book and making it my own and building something here that I can be proud of.

Lemire can say what he likes, but "organic" has not been a part of their storytelling approach for years. "Repercussions" has been another cliche for a long time too. And he sure sounds like quite a self-indulgent writer since what he and they have offered isn't what others can be proud of.

And, guess who thought to make this move over the border?

Like me, you're Canadian. Did you threaten Geoff and DC Comics by saying that you would only take the book if you could move the team to Canada?

[Laughs] No, not at all. I took it as "Justice League of America." And I was really excited to have that. The actual idea to move the team to Canada wasn't mine. It was [DC Co-Publisher] Dan DiDio's. When we started talking about the book and the direction we were taking it, he actually threw that idea out there. At first, I thought he was just joking but then I realized that he was serious and I embraced it. And really went crazy with it. This "Justice League of Canada" storyline is going to be a lot of fun and I'm really going to try to make something really special for Canadian fans. And it actually leads to something even bigger for the team.

And something smaller for anybody who wastes their money on this pointless joke. This is further confirmation DiDio still has tremendous influence and not Bob Harras, even though he's long proven himself incompetent. I remember when, after his appointment, Harras gave a few interviews, but then dropped off the radar and had very little to say since. If he's not really running the show, what's the point in even hiring him to start with? He wasn't a very good editor during his time at Marvel either.

Update: the Washington Post spoke with these two pedestrian writers, and said:

David Betancourt: One of the first things to kick off the Trinity War was Superman "killing" Doctor Light. Was it important to establish right away that someone else was behind this, given Superman's moral code?

Geoff Johns: I think it was important for us to start the mystery right away. The how and why. By the end of the first chapter, we wanted all those questions being asked.

His retcon of Green Lantern also allegedly established that someone else was behind Hal Jordan's shift to mass slaughter of other heroes in the GLC, but it makes little difference, since Hal was still technically responsible, even if he was possessed, and the whole plot where he wipes out scores of other GLs is still one of the most vulgar ideas ever to litter superhero comics. And "mysteries" have already been cliched into the ground, to the point where even I don't find them particularly appealing. Not when people like Johns are writing them anyway.

When comics turned political

The New Statesman wrote about how modern comics ended up becoming political tools, and some of what they say is pretty dishonest, and pays lip service to propaganda cartoonists too. For example, when they bring up Joe Sacco, they say:

Sacco, creator of Palestine, Safe Area Goražde, and Journalism amongst others, is highly acclaimed for his documentary journalism in the comics medium. The cartoonist was keen to stress to his audience at the second Stripped event the differences between his subjective journalism and so-called objective journalism, saying that the former was far more honest – all reporters and journalists have their own preconceived notions that dictate how and what they report. While journalists reporting only the cold hard facts left gaps in the story, Sacco mused that, “I don’t know if there should be more outrage for the sake of outrage,” and pointed out that their choice of story was often telling enough.

“My sympathies are clear at least by what I’m reporting on,” he said, adding that by portraying himself within his stories he was indicating that this work was filtered through his own viewpoint. Sacco also spoke of the tension between the idea of journalism, representing the facts and the truth, and drawing, which he said was subjective by its very nature, filtered by the artist and the choices they make on the page.

But does his work record history or does it actually influence people? Sacco personally went from the US media created illusion that all Palestinians were terrorists to being able to show the bigger picture. “For whatever it’s worth,” he said, “this is when I can do something about that situation. This is when their voices can have some agency.”

Since when did the US press ever claim that all "palestinians" are terrorists, as the magazine/Sacco claims? Leftist publications - much like UK periodicals like the one that published this article - will say Israel is the evil one, and legitimize the so-called palestinians and other Islamofascists who do commit violent crimes. I suppose there's an irony here, that despite the New Statesman sharing some of the same left-wing biases as the New York Times, is still willing to denounce their leftist counterparts in America no matter how tilted they are in the same direction. Interesting how both they and Sacco say that his hogwash form of "journalism" is great while denouncing objectivity. Clearly, there's no honor among leftists.

The article also brings up the UK writer Paul Cornell, and says:

One writer who openly embraces political issues in his mainstream work is Paul Cornell, writer for DC, Marvel and Doctor Who, as well as numerous novels including London Falling (Tor, 2013). Cornell is known not only for including great women characters in his comics, but also for spotlighting issues including LGBT and immigration as almost a byproduct of his plots.

Does that include characters like Faiza Hussein, the British Muslim in Captain Britain and MI13 whose religion is presented in an otherwise normalized light? As for LGBT issues, he's already made clear he has no respect for concerned mothers.

“I think there's a lot more resistance from certain elements in the fandoms than there is inside the companies,” Cornell answered. “Certainly, Marvel have got behind Panel Parity, putting my wonderful Wolverine editor, Jeanine Schaefer, on their Comic Con panel (editors appearing on panels is a surprisingly rare thing), and emphasising their female-led books and female talent.

“In the past, comics companies have tended to suggest diversity should 'happen naturally', as if when you leave a comic book open overnight gay men might grow in the pages like mustard and cress, so it's great that Marvel are now championing it, doing it deliberately. Because that's the only way it can be done. Jeanine's a force for change. And there are a number of prominent female editors now who are altering the face of pro comics culture pretty swiftly.

“Online comics fandom, meanwhile, if you judge solely by the comics message boards, remains conservative and behind the times. The action is to be found on Tumblr, where the Carol Corps lives."

Tumblr is indeed the place to be for many younger comics fans who have been horrified at those same conservative internet forums. Here burgeoning communities of like-minded souls can be found, with a sense of real enthusiasm in the air.

What conservative forums are we talking about? It couldn't be CBR, since last time I looked, they had quite a bit of ultra-liberalism going about there, much like their own staff. Many of the readers still hanging on are liberals too, and in Cornell's case, way behind the times, judging from his selective approach that whitewashes Islamisogyny even as he allegedly complains about the lack of women at various comic panels. And why would Tumblr be just a liberal platform? All major blog hosts have their share of writers from both sides of the political spectrum.

And pretty silly of the New Statesman to be calling fandom conservative, when many of the hardcore readers for the mainstream today are anything but that.

7 Bat-movies that didn't get greenlighted

Wall Street Cheat Sheet lists several Batman movie projects that never made it off the drawing board. The article also brings up the proposed movie based on the Justice League, whose working subtitle was "Mortal", and was supposed to be directed by George Miller, but was shelved in 2010.

Maybe DC's "big news" about Nightwing shouldn't be

For DC's Forever Evil crossover, they've said they have major news about Dick Grayson coming in September.

But even if it's not bad news, should the internet go haywire as their marketing manager John Cunningham and company are hoping? I think it's better if fans don't give it any attention. They say here:

Because Nightwing was the original Robin, he–or rather, his secret identity, Dick Grayson–has more penetration into mainstream media than most non-A-list superheroes. If something happens with Dick, it’s fairly likely that outlets who rarely cover comics would take an interest, likely pursuing the Robin angle.

And that's what DC is counting on, not on whether they think the story's any good (and the mainstream outlets are unlikely to take an objective view of it either). It makes me think of something they've probably never done: never tried to send review copies of a particular story to news outlets asking them to do a writeup about it, and tell what they think, which would be a much more legitimate way to appeal to wider audiences.

I don't know what plans DC has in store for Nightwing. All I know is that whatever they do plan, it's not worth making a fuss over since it's not something done on its own organic, self-contained terms. Greeting it with a wall of silence and no money shelled out to buy it would do a lot more good.

WB's choice of Ben Affleck for playing Batman infuriarates fandom

Warner Brothers announced that Ben Affleck, whose career as an actor faltered several years ago, would play Batman in a Superman sequel where the twosome would combat each other. The announcement made quite a few people unhappy:

The casting of Hollywood A-lister Ben Affleck as the new Batman sparked fan outrage, with petitions calling for the coveted role to be recast and widespread howling on Twitter.

Warner Bros. announced Thursday that Affleck -- who earlier this year was the darling of Tinseltown when his "Argo" took home the Oscar for best picture -- would next don the Dark Knight's cape.

Affleck's debut as the savior of Gotham will come in a film slated for release in 2015, and also to feature Henry Cavill as Superman. Zack Snyder is to direct.

While I get why Affleck is an unpopular choice - his take on Daredevil a decade ago was abortive - I'm a little bothered that the backlash has been turned into tabloid fodder, including this:

On Twitter, the hashtag #BetterBatmanThanBenAffleck was trending. Many Internet users proposed other actors, from Josh Brolin to Affleck pal Matt Damon to -- bizarrely -- Meryl Streep.

Yeah, Meryl's a weird pick alright, but a pity the press has taken to sensationalizing all the objections being made. Personally, I'm skeptical a movie that could emphasize a clash between the Man of Steel and the Masked Manhunter will be anything other than a cheesy popcorn tale aimed more at what the wider public perceives as "insular fanboys." It also sounds more like they're using this as their plan for setting up a Justice League movie.

And seriously, if the fans are so bothered about the choices made for casting a movie, why don't they make demands along the same lines for DC to get rid of Dan DiDio along with Geoff Johns and several other hack writers who've desecrated their properties? Yeah, I wonder why it's just so easy for them to petition WB to change the casting but not to promote a boycott of DC for keeping such awful people in charge? If Bat-fans are really so mad about WB's casting choice, they should also be furious about whom the studio allows to run the scene back where it all began.

When are the editors more troubling than the writers?

A writer for CBR spoke about his addiction to buying/collecting, and how he was allegedly turned off by the drop in quality of the X-books in the 1990s. He says:

How I've forgiven myself for not letting me drop all the X-Men spin-offs as they one-by-one took a nosedive in the late '90s, I'll never know. I do think, though, that the rage I felt towards books like "Generation X" and "X-Factor" as they drifted further away from the characters, status quos, and creators that I loved has given me a little bit of insight into why we keep reading books we hate. Every month after a new issue of one of those books sent me into a hissy fit, I would think about how much better they would be if I was writing them. Yes, I believe that reading bad comics back then boosted my ego without me having to do anything to prove it. I thought I could write better than that, and feeling arrogant and smug about a comic I didn't like gave me a weird validation, one that was much easier to achieve than actually writing down something creative. While I don't think that all critique stems from this desire to have one's ego boosted, I think it definitely plays a part in why we keep coming back to bad books month after month. There's really no other reason to keep reading something you actively hate, right?


Well there is a legitimate point that it's weird why anybody would want to read a book just because they hate the poor level of storytelling it's fallen victim to. That's the problem with some readers, that they don't like the story, yet they keep buying the book out of collector's addiction, presumably because they feel they simply must be completists, on the one hand, and on the other, because they think they'll have monetary value someday despite the bad story at hand. Yes, that is a very serious crisis.

But anyone who thinks that if they get into the writing career and will be allowed to write certain books at ease, just the way a sizable audience would like, is deluding themselves. For, did/has he considered the influence the editors have over the output, right down to the crossover stories? Yes, that's just the tip of a very bleak iceberg to give some idea of how near impossible it could be to write a stand-alone story unhampered by crossovers, with authentic character drama to boost it better. Marvel and DC alike have become closed shops today, with even some of the better veterans all but banished from their list of acceptable contributors. Only writers who conform to their pedestrian visions are de riguer now, and that includes some of the writers who'd worked on X-Men in the 90s too. And if the article writer wants to write something respectable of what made the superhero titles work to start with, he's going to have to ponder how the modern editors don't share his view.

That is, if he's really true to his word. But, he said something that makes me less certain:

Well, there are, actually, and now that I'm in the position where I like 40 titles a month -- despite my memory problems -- it's become harder and harder to cut the bad ones loose. I have to choose between truly great comics and truly good comics, and that gets tough. I'm thankful that I no longer suffer true trash, but those lower-tier yet still solid books keep me sticking around for all the old reasons. I'm convinced they'll get great, or a new creative team is just around the corner, or it's about to tie into a crossover that I'm interested in, or it's going to be canceled in a few issues anyway. All of these reasons are keeping me reading numerous books right now. They're books I enjoy, but now I'm wondering if I shouldn't be devoting that brain space to my absolute favorite books -- or, you know, things that aren't comics.

So despite his opinion that the X-books took a nosedive in the 90s, due in part to the largely pointless crossovers they became saddled with, he still likes the crossovers, which hit bottom with Avengers: Disassembled, House of M and Civil War, and probably also dug Avengers vs. X-Men? (And he says earlier he reads Jonathan Hickman's take on the Avengers.) If those 40 books he likes include quite a few from the big two, and worst, if he can't bring himself to just drop some of them, digital output included, then I'm not sure why he's making this argument. How is the latest output from Marvel any better than the 90s material? I managed to drop just about all coming from the big two in the past decade because they'd become so awful. Since then, whenever I buy comics, what I buy is mainly trades collecting older material, and rarely do I buy pamphlets now, because they're very expensive at 4 dollars.

At least he admits he's got a problem with addiction. But the argument about dropping books you don't enjoy can't be considered a convincing one if he doesn't prove the courage to abandon more, and avoid giving legitimacy to the editors and publishers now in charge. Indeed, that's the biggest problem with collecting addiction - it only bolsters Quesada, DiDio, Alonso and others who don't deserve the jobs they still have.

Letter page from X-Factor 81

Here's a letter page I scanned from an old issue of X-Factor 81 from March 1992, featuring at least 3 replies pertaining to the 76th issue, which was part of a story told in that series and the Incredible Hulk written by Peter David as a metaphor for the Iraq war, and the 76th issue had a storyline that alluded to Islamic honor killings:

The story, whose synopsis you can find on Leader's Lair (and which is compiled in X-Factor Visionaries - Peter David Vol. 2, which I own a copy of), was set in a fictionalized country called Trans-Sabal, and in this particular issue, Wolfsbane had been struck across some distance by an explosion. She was found by a brother and sister named Jolel and Sandah who were loyalists to the dictator named Farnaq Dahn. They drive her back in their car to their home in one of the country's slums, where the brother tells Wolfsbane what he thinks of America. Later, when Quicksilver comes around to find her, as the brother is thinking of stabbing Rahne Sinclair with a knife, the sister, who's inclined to help her, stuns him with a bottle, then cuts her loose from the ropes she was tied with. But then, Sandah gets stabbed to death by her brother, in the allusion to Muslim honor murders, which enrages Wolfsbane so much she unleashes all hell upon the brother and mauls him to death for his crime. The story also gives an idea what some Islamists think of the USA.

In the subsequent reader correspondence, we see two different takes given. Interestingly, the first one does acknowledge that Jolel "was also influenced by a religious leader" (and in the issue, when Rahne tells him she's a God-fearing Christian, he says, "Even if you were what you say, well...here's proof of our superiority: where do you go to worship your pathetic little Judeo-Christian god?"), but seems to fall back on an argument of "let's not fall into the destructive trap of stereotyping whole races because of the actions of a few". I don't think David was doing that, but it would still be a lot easier to make an argument like that if it weren't for the fact that in regimes where the population is raised under socialist-like mindsets - religious or otherwise - they can follow a very destructive thinking path. The sad truth is, it's not easy to expect them to take a more positive view of life and outsiders when totalitarian ideologies are all they know, or want to. Only if we figure out what they've been raised on and how to offer them some new food for thought can we change it for the better.

The second letter also alludes to Islamic honor murders, and how in Michigan, the problem has surfaced too, as he alludes to a case where "a young man turned himself in to the police after killing his sister because she had attended a party at late hours." And, "the issue of cultural norms was raised; he was from a society where brothers or fathers can dictate how the women of the family should behave."

But the disappointing part is that neither of these letters explicitly mentions Islam as the motivating belief system. We can only wonder: did the writers chicken out? Or, did the company editors omit and alter the letters so they wouldn't mention anything thought-provoking? If the latter is the answer, it highlights the cowardice of the editors for not having the courage even then to identify certain belief systems. Even prior to 2001, it's not like Hollywood and other mediums didn't shy away from serious focus on Islamofascism, or paint false, superficial and misleading pictures.

The X-Factor/Hulk tale by David is a pretty good one, but too bad there was political correctness lurking in the background in some way or other. It's also, lest I forget, the kind of story you may not see being written today.

Superhero identities are "negative" and "hip" to explore from that POV?

That's what the AV Club might have us think, as they wrote about 14 notable comics published back in 1983, with one being Alpha Flight, and they say the following about Aurora:

Aurora suffers from acute dissociative identity disorder, viewing her civilian identity as a completely different person, and her mental issues allow Byrne to look at the negative effect of a superhero’s secret identity before it was the hip thing to do. A team of Canadian stereotypes may sound like a joke, but John Byrne’s work helped make Alpha Flight the fan-favorite it is today.

If it's become a popular thing today, that's exactly the problem now, and could have been even back then. As far as its early years go, while there were some interesting tales to be told by Byrne and even Bill Mantlo, I sometimes got the feeling Byrne didn't have much affection for the series cast, if he was going to heap that kind of mental mishmash on Aurora, since it looked like part of the problem with some of his storytelling: questionable depictions of women, and Aurora's background was pretty harsh. (On top of all that, seemed really strange to me that she'd be depicted as unable to find herself a life outside the orphanage where she'd grown up, if the Catholic nun in charge had been so nasty to her when she was a child. Once graduated, she took up a teacher's job right at the same place.)

And telling that a secret identity has negative sides mentally might be okay for exploring once or twice, but when it starts becoming a fad for focus, that's when it becomes unbearable. This is exactly how superhero comics become ruined, and another reason why the comics aren't selling well today.

They also bring up Lobo, who first debuted in the Omega Men at the time, and say:

A caricature of aggressive heroes like Punisher and Wolverine, Lobo was eventually embraced by the public for the very qualities his creators were criticizing, becoming one of the poster boys for hyper-violent, overly sexualized superhero comics. His character in Omega Men is more restrained, but still a scumbag, wondering mid-battle if his glowing opponent Kalista had the same radiance when she lost her virginity. He would become far more crass in the future, but Lobo is a total bastich from the very beginning.

You wouldn't know it from this superficial piece, but not only did Lobo never gain the same following as Punisher and Wolverine (while his ongoing series at the time lasted 6 years, he's not exactly big discussion stuff today), when his origins were retconned in the mid-90s, circa Zero Hour, this is what was established:

The last Czarnian (he killed everyone else on the planet), Lobo is the baddest bastich in the entire galaxy.

Why are we supposed to root for a character originally introduced as a villain, and for whom this later revelation would only be a negative, repulsive action? Killing vile criminals like what Punisher and Wolverine were known for doing is one thing, but wiping out an entire planet where there could be tons of innocents living? What planet is the AV Club living on? This reminds me that, during 1983, in Action Comics #544, Lex Luthor tried to lure Superman to the sanctuary planet he'd lived on occasionally called Lexor with the intent of killing him. During the ensuing battle, Lex accidentally destroyed the whole planet, sending the wife and child he had living there with it. Being a crazed man with no ability to recognize his own faults, he naturally blamed the Man of Steel for this. Obviously, this wasn't considered an admirable act, and if it wasn't right of him to hatemonger to the point where he'd lead a whole planet to oblivion, then it wasn't right for Lobo to wipe out his entire race either. If he's a bad "bastich", it's for all the wrong reasons.

DC's 1994 retcon of Lobo, IMHO, was a most ill-advised step, and did more harm than good.

Yahoo asks if comic moviemakers should care about comic readers

Yahoo's UK site asked if filmmakers adapting comics should care about the comics audiences. Of course they should, but that doesn't mean they have to pander to us with something moviegoers might not understand. This even goes vice versa. When a comic is adapted to screen, it's to be expected that there will be some changes and differences in store, as was the case with the 2002 Spider-Man movie using organic web shooting instead of gadget-based.

But when the comics start taking elements from the movies and sticking them back into the comics, that's where a serious risk comes into play. There are some ideas seen in the movies that could serve the comic well, but only if the writers and editors choose carefully. If they take only so many ideas and stuff them in artificially, then they're going the wrong way, and even the moviegoers aren't bound to find it appealing. Mainly because many of them too realize that differences from the movies are to be expected, just like with a novel.

The weaknesses of both the big two's business tactics

While writing about who would win in a Marvel vs DC battle, Slate noted some of the weaknesses in the modern business models of the companies:

...they used to be more cooperative rivals. After a string of parodic storylines in the '60s and '70s (in which Marvel's Avengers fought the Squadron Sinister—a thinly disguised version of DC's Justice League—and the Justice League returned the favor by battling the Champions of Angor, who were the Avengers in all but name), the two publishers reached a sort of détente. Between 1976 and 2003, there were a string of co-published DC/Marvel crossover comics, in which Superman would meet Spider-Man, or the X-Men would fight the New Teen Titans; Iron Man and Batman even encountered one another in JLA/Avengers. These days, each company makes a great show of pretending the other doesn't exist, aside from the occasional sideswipe. Once DC got into the habit of referring to its fictional universe as the DCU, for instance, Marvel named its all-you-can-read digital initiative Digital Comics Unlimited.

As you'd expect from colorful characters, both publishers have weaknesses that can be turned against them. Marvel publishes more iterations of its biggest titles than Iron Man has built models of his armor, which can make it nearly impossible for casual fans to figure out what to read. So, wait, if I want to check out the series of books where Spider-Man is an African-American/Latino kid named Miles Morales, is that Amazing Spider-Man, Superior Spider-Man, Essential Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2099?

(The answer, by the way, is Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, starting with Volume 1. Naturally, Marvel has recently published two different books called Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, Volume 1. Miles is in one of them and not the other.)

DC, likewise, has a Batman-ish tendency to alienate its allies and collaborators. Artists and writers have complained of constant editorial second-guessing over the past few years, as sales of most of its superhero titles have spiraled downward. The company burned some bridges with Before Watchmen—a set of prequels to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' perennially best-selling graphic novel Watchmen, produced over Moore's vociferous objections. And the adventurous, creator-driven DC imprint Vertigo was gutted with the departure of its executive editor Karen Berger early this year.

The part about Vertigo being canceled isn't accurate; they're still using it, though maybe not much longer. But they did get it right that DC's editorial has successfully driven away many potentially good contributors for the sake of their aimless, editorially mandated tactics.

And not only would it be difficult for new audience to decide which Spider-books to read, why would they want to spend nearly 4 dollars on even one? In fact, so long as Peter Parker isn't Spidey, who cares to read "Superior" either? Another reason why new audience won't be interested for long is the inherent relaunches at number one, which only appeal to the most naive speculators, and won't have much value down the road.

It's an interesting observation how the partnerships both companies once had fell apart in recent years. Bill Jemas was partly responsible for that, and yet his rivals at DC turned out to be no better. Since that time, team-ups between heroes from different universes stopped, and may never be seen again.

And in the end, it's all a lose-lose situation, as the publishers from both companies are people with terrible judgement, morale and reputation.

Mainstream comics used to make for great escapism, but today, less so

The Jamaica Observer wrote about the history of comics (mostly westerns) and how they were a great form of escapism in their time. And towards the end, they fall back on classically superficial lines like:

Comic book sales declined in the late 1970s from competition from television. The answer was to turn to licensing out characters to television for revenue, and DC and Marvel enjoyed soaring profits from Saturday cartoons such as Super Friends as well as the Wonder Woman series, while Marvel licensed out the Incredible Hulk.

The downward trend was broken in the 1990s when the book industry began marketing new issues of comic books such as Spider-Man and the X-Men as future collector items.

With the roaring successes of Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman as box-office runaways, the comic heroes have been re-energised and books have once again emerged as a major force in a computerised culture.

Here we go again with the hilariously superficial, easy-peasy propaganda that merchandise and commercialism instantly saved comics. Yet not a word here about the quality of storytelling. Some folks want to know just how well the comics were being written and drawn, and all they can think to say is that these 1990s books made for collector's items? They didn't, and are worth very little today, mainly because they weren't very well written to start with. Nor have the movies and TV productions made a difference for declining sales. Too bad a foreign paper can't be bothered to do better research any more than a local one.

New store manager tells what's wrong with marketing

The Columbia Star spoke with a guy opening up a new comics store in Forest Acres, who said:

Blevins says his business goal for Punk Monkey Comics is to be a family friendly store where his wife and two children would enjoy shopping, and Columbia area families can find music, games, and movies for all ages. He says the comic book industry is still mainly for men ages 16-50 who are interested in new comics and those who are avid comic book col-lectors. Punk Monkey Comics has the newest releases in all genres.

It's more like 30-50; not many teens read comics these days either, even if some people assume they could.

I'd just add that it wasn't always this way - until the end of the 1980s, there were plenty of youngsters, but even that began to vanish as the industry lost their understandings of how to market to them, and stopped caring.

Jimmy Palmiotti references an important crime case

Palmiotti's pointed to the history of one of the most notorious cases of rape and murder that took place in the USA:

The Torture Murders of Channon Christian and Chris Newsom http://t.co/ZkmtmeU3HB via @crimelibrary
— Jimmy Palmiotti (@jpalmiotti) August 15, 2013

The case of the murders of Christian/Newsom was one of the most horrific black-vs-white hate crimes ever recorded in history, and something a lot of leftists ignored in 2007. If it had been a case of white-vs-black, the story would be different.

Palmiotti is one leftist who's done the right thing by reminding everybody of this terrible crime, and we'll certainly have to give him credit for that.

PC Mag reviews Android's comic app

PC Magazine took a look at the new Comixology app for Android. They say there's plenty of advantages coming with it, but also a minus:

The free Comics makes the buying and reading experience a simple and inviting endeavor, even though the library is missing quite a few older books (and Dark Horse Comics' catalog).

The newer products from the big two since the turn of the century certainly don't give much reason to try it out, so if the bulk of their library is newer books and too little older ones, I don't see how this is something to write home about. At the end, they say:

...if you prefer reading All-New X-Men without worrying about mylar bags and backing boards, Comics is the way to go.

Now why should I want to waste money reading Brian Bendis' embarrassments? He's done nothing to suggest he's changed from the time he accelerated Marvel into disaster with Avengers: Disassembled, and his writing is not worth the software it's published on any more than the paper. That's not what I would want to read comics on Android for.

MarketWatch thinks comics are best investment for money

Another argument being made that comics are a great investment, all at the expense of reading pleasure. I think the riskiest argument MarketWatch is making would have to be this:

Comic books are recession-proof. The only time business growth slowed for Zurzolo was right after the dot.com bust, but it soon rose from its plateau. “When the economy is doing poorly, people are looking for alternative forms of investment,” Zurzolo said. “When the economy is doing great they have more discretionary income and they buy comic books.”

I don't think this makes much sense. They've already reached 4 dollars in price, some employees of the companies were let go, and the mainstream tales are faring the worst from a storytelling POV. And then there's that collapse brought on by the speculator market in the mid-90s. Tons of newer comics that aren't bound to have much value in the future because there's far more of them than there are of classic pamphlets whose sums are smaller, so they have more monetary value. The premiere issue of the sans-adjective X-Men series from 1991 would only be worth $20 if it was still kept in the mylar plastic. And if the story's bad, few will want to invest in that.

Comic-book valuations have yet to decline. (Yes, I know, they used to say this about real estate.) “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve dealt with who are ecstatic about their comic-book investments,” Zurzolo said. In the bleak aftermath of the financial crisis, Zurzolo sold an Action Comics No. 1 for $317,200 — which was then the record. “There were a lot of people with money who did not want to buy real estate and were terrified of the stock market,” Zurzolo recalls.

But are there newer comics other than Action Comics they'd want to invest in? Probably not. I'll bet he can't say how many because truthfully, there aren't really that many looking to invest in comics that aren't making much money today, and probably won't hold much value tomorrow. And when you do invest in comics for money, that's one place I figure playing it safe really would make sense, because lesser known comics like Red Hood and the Outlaws aren't making much in sales now, and aren't bound to interest anybody later on.

Comic-book investments are often more liquid than real estate. [...]

Of course they'd be more liquid. Save for the classics, who'd want to pay with cheques and bonds for something brand new that might not earn the value they hope? It would have to take another 50 years before a lot of this stuff might be worth something, and again, if the story's bad, not many who believe in common sense are going to want to invest.

The most interesting statement would have to be this:

It’s more fun to research a comic book than a bond or a company. Instead of keeping track of CEOs with bad hair, you keep tabs on what comic-book characters are emerging in the movies and the hot starlets playing beside them. “I could tell you more about what’s going on with Spider-Man than I could about a Fortune 500 company with 10,000 employees, where if one of them does one stupid thing, the stock price drops $5 in a day.” Zurzolo said. “There’s nothing you’re going to tell me that’s going to make me not love Superman, Spider-Man and Batman.”

While it's great to love the Man of Steel, Wall-Crawler and Masked Manhunter, among other characters both major and minor, nobody sensible is going to love any of the newest stories they've been stuffed into, and no true Spider-fan wants to read a story where Dr. Octopus takes over the hero's body and Peter Parker is almost completely omitted. Unless, for the retailer they've interviewed, only the costume matters and not the flesh-and-blood beings wearing them. Which brings to mind how much of today's writers care far more about the costume than the character, and demand that the audience do the same. This is not how to form good writing and stories.

And why should we care about the movies and actresses co-starring than the comics? There's little or nothing in this article to suggest they care about the comics per se from an entertainment perspective. That's why it falls flat.

Why Brian Hibbs pulled out of a group called ComicsPRO

San Francisco-based retailer Brian Hibbs wrote about the staggering fiasco that is now DC Entertainment, citing examples like the "Villain Month", which will get its own share of multiple variant covers in 3-D. He boldly makes a point by stating:

Let me be clear here: I loath speculators, I think that collecting comics for value alone is the work of both the moron and the devil, I think that multiple covers on single stories is purely a way to trick and exploit you the consumer, and to prey upon the lowest and basest instincts and compulsions of the customer base. I think it shows contempt for you.

Agreed. Luckily, I've always known better than to buy multiple copies of the same issue with different covers. Now, Hibbs has left a group he co-founded called ComicsPRO because:

“The org that I formed was intended to look out for the little guy; the current Board seems much more interested in keeping the big guys big. Democracy in action, I suppose, so I vote with my dollars.”

He did the right thing. The organization betrayed its original purpose, and there's no need to prop them up any longer.

It's good to find a store manager who realizes how speculation ruined the market and writing. Just one more reason why comics have to abandon pamphlet format.

Think Progress considers diversity more vital than good storytelling and decent escapism

Think Progress wrote about the PBS interview where Len Wein, Gerry Conway and Todd McFarlane came on, and their opinion has a pretty big flaw: they're oh-so concerned about diversity:

...Conway, McFarlane, and Wein all defaulted to another line of argument: that anyone asking for more diverse superhero comics is effectively asking for an entitlement that won’t produce good storytelling.

But it's true. If they're alluding to topics like race, skin color and sexual orientation, the mainstream has either cliched themselves into the ground, or, it's all they've been able to think of as a point of emphasis.

“There hasn’t really been historically a comic book that has worked that is trying to get across a kind of message, if you will,” McFarlane insisted. “So the female characters that work are the ones that are just strong women that actually it’s good storytelling, and the odd character that is a minority that works is the one that is just a good strong character. They’ve tried to do minority characters and bring that label and that surrounding [debate] into it. You’re aware that you’re reading a minority comic book. I think it’s wrong.”

Wein took the position that the best way to pursue equality in comics was through strict race neutrality.

“I think every time you take a female character, a black character, a Hispanic character, a gay character, and make that the point of the character, you are minimalizing the character,” he said. “I have written anything you can possibly think of. I have created Storm who was the first black female superhero. I created a number of other characters, and it never matters to me what the color of their skin was. I was writing about who they were as human beings, and it wasn’t Black Storm. She was Storm.”

Bingo. Some of the gay/lesbian characters appearing in mainstream have been the most noticeable where their orientation was the whole point of the character (including the new Batwoman, Northstar and even the retcon of Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott), and DC's racial minority replacements for white heroes in recent years were the result of similar thinking. Yet they never come up with heroes or supporting casts with Danish or Romanian ancestry, if racial background is really so important to them, remaining solidly stuck on the same superficial cliches of skin color.

This article also has a fumble:

Eric Jerome Dickey, who wrote a Storm arc in which she married Black Panther and becomes co-ruler of Wakanda, an independent African nation that stands in explicit resistance to Western imperialism, might have a few things to say about the possibilities of acknowledging Storm’s origins while foregrounding her personality had he been present. But it wasn’t a balancing act any of the comics creators on the dias seemed prepared to acknowledge.

Are they referencing the bias in the comics and/or cartoons produced in recent years, or is that their own bias seeping through? I know that in recent times, an anti-white bias showed up in some of the comics, and that's bad. But if Think Progress is defaming the West, that's bad too.

As for the issue of women being underrepresented in comics, I will say that McFarlane probably gave the weakest argument:

...McFarlane suggested that he’d steer his own daughters in a different direction to empower them — not because superhero comics promote damaging images of women, but because they are the natural preserve of men.

“It might not be the right platform,” he said. “I’ve got two daughters, and if I wanted to do something that I thought was emboldened to a female, I probably wouldn’t choose superhero comic books to get that message across. I would do it in either a TV show, a movie, a novel, or a book. It wouldn’t be superheroes because I know that’s heavily testosterone — driven, and it’s a certain kind of group of people. That’s not where I would go get this kind of message, so it might not be the right platform for some of this.”

Superhero comics can and do appeal just as well to girls and I don't think sex appeal in itself comes as a problem to all women. It's only if it becomes seriously pornographic and sensationalized, like the case where Spider-Woman ended up naked in the Avengers that frowns will definitely be justified. Other ways the mainstream have fouled up is when they publish screeds like Identity Crisis, among other books filled with nasty, lurid violence and insulting portrayals of women; that's how they succeeded in alienating plenty of potential female audience. If men find that repellant, women will too. But then, McFarlane's already long authored a very limp comic of his own, Spawn, so I guess it's no surprise if he didn't make a very convincing argument.

Unfortunately, the site fumbles when they bring up a few writers who've since proven themselves a most pretentious lot:

And having two X chromosomes hasn’t actually kept women like Gail Simone from writing wonderful characters of both sexes for decades–nor has possession of a Y chromosome kept men like Dan Slott and Jeff Parker from doing well by characters like She-Hulk and Red She-Hulk. The decision to stay within the narrow lanes of your own fantasies is a choice, not biological determinism.

What a pity they reference Slott, Simone and Parker in such a superficial way. Simone, who hasn't been in her career for that long, may have shown some promise early on, but quickly deteriorated in terms of storytelling quality. And Slott? I don't think his early work was something to write home about either, and it definitely isn't today, after the hack job he did with Spider-Man. Parker is nothing great either.

When the creators weren’t suggesting that comics are in some way biologically determined, they were suggesting that the failure of more diverse representations of superheroes was on readers, not on the companies that decide what kinds of images to promote and what kinds of artists they want to employ.

“I think the bigger question is why are readers not interested in those?” Conway asked.

The answer is because it's not so much about a decent adventure today as it is about massive emphasis on the character's racial background and/or sexual orientation. The writing efforts are very bad as a result too. And if the audience sees the non-negative emphasis on LGBT culture as a bad example, then it should be no surprise they fail to garner a big audience.

What’s a shame about the panel is that it doesn’t represent anything close to the breadth of perspectives in the documentary itself, which as executive producer Michael Kantor pointed out, includes women like Jenette Kahn, who as head of DC Comics was one of the youngest presidents ever of a Fortune 500 company, and in the sections I’ve seen, is thoughtful about why the comics industry has shrunk.

It’s a shame because there are good and nuanced arguments to be had about tokenism in comics. “When Stan Lee introduces Luke Cage and the Black Panther in the ’60s, there’s a level of tokenism to that, but it also reflects the growing Civil Rights movement,” Kantor suggested, drawing out the fact that the desire to reflect a historical moment can coexist with less attractive commercial impulses. But wanting a greater breadth of storytelling, and hoping a medium reaches its full storytelling potential is not the same thing as tokenism.

It's a shame Think Progress considers diversity more vital than good storytelling, and doesn't consider Wein's argument as the best case for adding minorities without making gigantic issues out of it all. Nor do they ponder that even minorities may not be desperate for having heroes of minority backgrounds introduced at all costs, or may not be asking that the heroes, specifically, be the ones to hail from minority status.

I notice Kantor got something wrong: Stan Lee did create Black Panther, but he was not the writer who created Luke Cage. That honor goes to the late Archie Goodwin, who introduced Power Man in 1972, inspired by the blaxploitation movies of the times like Shaft.

I would argue that most superhero comics decades ago were a lot more welcoming for women than today's efforts, since they didn't go miles out of their way to hammer the audience over the head with so much graphic mayhem and questionable politics. Now that this has taken up so much of the medium at the expense of good storytelling, that's why, so long as they continue that way, they'll never get a significant female audience, if at all. And DC may have already hinted they don't want any if 45-year-old men are the only kind of readership they care about.

And yet, the whole panel on TV may still have exhibited a telling weakness: they weren't critical of any of the editors in charge of DC and Marvel for doing exactly what they think is a mistake. If they didn't slam Joe Quesada for erasing the Spider-marriage, that's just one example of the veterans' inability to show the courage to pan bad editors for throwing away some of the best parts of mainstream comics. Too bad.

Darker tales might appeal to Hollywood studios, but what about widespread audiences?

The Motley Fool reported about Neil Gaiman's return to DC to write a prequel to his Sandman series from 1989-96 (how odd that this is one project they're allowing with connections to the previous continuity). But how uninformed they are, and how poor is the information they're giving to their readers in turn:

Vertigo is important for DC because of how much mature material is flowing through the comics channel right now. (Think of Image's The Walking Dead, which AMC has adapted into a top-rated TV show.) Having a separate imprint allows DC to sell to older readers while reassuring kids that its core titles feature the (mostly) idealistic superheroes they've come to know.

Where have they been all these years? They don't sell to children any longer, don't put a high priority on the lines they occasionally published for them (the last one I remember was called "Johnny DC"), and the heroes aren't recognizable anymore either. Even Vertigo doesn't sell very high numbers on the charts.

Darker indie titles have also proved attractive to studios. Later this month, Kick-Ass 2 comes to theaters in what amounts to Comcast's (NASDAQ: CMCSA) third try with a comic-book adaptation this year. R.I.P.D. bombed, while 2 Guns exploded in their respective debuts. Kick-Ass 2 is adapted from the comic book series of the same name, published by an independent imprint of Marvel Comics.

Vertigo and Gaiman can be the same sort of source for Warner Bros. studios, Tim says. That's a good sign for a media company that should be benefiting more from the comic-book renaissance that's sweeping media right now. Do you agree? [...]

The answer is decidedly "no". Without saying that some of the darker output in movies is terrible, I'll still say it's ruining entertainment as a whole, and it's a shame if a lot of filmmakers and particularly comic publishers have reached the point where they plain outlaw brightness and optimism.

I'm not even sure WB deserves to benefit from any renaissance taking place, if they have no interest in taking proper care of their DCU publishing arm. I'm also not sure The Sandman would make a great movie either, even if they did make it a suitably R-rated product. Even if a dark-themed movie is well written, it shouldn't set the tone for any and all comic adaptations, nor for other movies. All they're doing is signaling they don't have faith in their ability to shepherd an optimistic adaptation, and they sure haven't hired the right people to do it.

Comparing comics to poetry is risky

The Atlantic argues that making comparisons between comics and poetry has both promise and danger, and it's partly due to the poor quality of modern mainstream:

"Bang! Pow! Comics aren't just for kids anymore!"

Mainstream headlines along those lines have become a running joke among comics fans. The joke remains a bitter one, though. Comics these days are treated as serious art by galleries and museums; they are treated as serious literature by mainstream reviewers. And yet, the bang and the pow linger. Dan Clowes and Alison Bechdel are certainly successful and respected, but when you say "comic book," your average person and/or journalist doesn't think of Maus. They think of superhero movies.

When I see headlines using sound effect words for loud noise, even I sometimes feel depressed, because even if the papers are spotlighting superhero tales, it does turn the whole subject into a farce, and dampen the impact of what could be a straightforward look at the adventure genre, but most often is anything but.

And the writer of this piece acknowledges how the once mighty superhero genre has fallen:

Personally, I'd be happy to see the disappearance of many of the pulp comics that Chute ignores. Mainstream superhero comics at the moment are almost unbelievably awful; if Marvel and DC went out of business tomorrow, I wouldn't shed any tears. But still, I think comics might want to take a moment or two to think before it embraces poetry as the alternative to either pow or bang. Contemporary poetry, after all, has its own problems—not least among them being the fact that virtually no one reads it.

Mainstream comics certainly aren't embracing poetry if the publishers and writers intend to keep being as awful as they are. And that's why virtually no one outside the immediate audience reads them, even if they do watch the movie adaptations. Using publicity stunts, controversy and crude storytelling laced with discrimination and poor political ideas as a means to make short-term gains is not how you turn any genre in comics into poetry.

So it wouldn't make any difference if you began seeing mainstream or independent comics with elements of poetry tossed in coming out; if the story's bad, the use of poetry alone won't compensate for the tastelessness.

The New Republic and the vile violence of Mark Millar's storytelling

The New Republic wrote about Mark Millar and how he became the "sickest mind" in the medium. Which doesn't make his work kosher, of course. Some of the examples given here include a 2010 story called Nemesis:

The execution was as horrifying as the set-up was straightforward. The titular protagonist—a twist on a paradigm beloved by hundreds of millions of moviegoers and comics readers—spent four issues committing crimes that the Marquis de Sade would have been hard-pressed to stomach. Take, for example, what he did to the son and daughter of his rival, a big-city police chief. After Nemesis kidnaps them and releases them as part of a bargain, doctors find out not only did he impregnate the daughter with the son’s sperm but he also, as one doctor explains, “rigged your daughter’s womb to completely collapse if we attempt a termination.”

And tragically, there's an audience for this out there? Sad.

...Millar has done something insanely rare for any medium: He has become its most shocking deconstructionist and its most successful advocate.

I don't think so. If his comics don't sell sky high in the millions - and indeed they don't - then he's obviously no more successful than countless other representatives who've done little to convince moviegoers to try a whole different genre. Mainly because they don't critique how people of Millar's standing are giving the medium a bad name, under the shield of favoratism by Marvel and DC's publishers. But deconstructionist? Yep, they got that right. Just what went wrong with comics this century.

In a phone interview from his home in Glasgow, Millar said his provocative approach stems from a pair of comics he read when he was six: one starring Spider-Man and one starring Superman.

“The Superman comic, the front cover was Clark Kent leaving Superman and walking away like, 'I'm not gonna do this anymore,’ and that was a quite shocking image,” he recalled. “And in the other, Norman Osborn was killed by Spider-Man, and Spider-Man has accidentally killed his girlfriend, and then he goes home and finds his best friend out of his mind on LSD.”

“These are the best first comics you could possibly have!” he said with a laugh. “There's part of me that wants that outrageousness.”

So he's sensationalizing everything and obscuring the lessons from the time about why drugs like LSD are hazardous to one's health. Very poor. He's also inaccurate about Norman being killed by Spidey: the hero backed off, and Norman got killed by his own Goblin glider, which he attempted to kill Spidey with, but Peter got lucky and his Spidey-sense alerted him to dodge.

When Millar left DC and joined Marvel, here's why:

Marvel’s vice president at the time, Bill Jemas, was looking for writers who could do comics “more the way movies are written,” and he had loved Millar’s work on The Authority. “Mark was jaw-droppingly creative on so many levels,” Jemas told me.

Not so, but at least he explains what went wrong with comics, just as Sean Howe was saying. That's just why comics continually lost audience, because moviegoers obviously aren't asking for them to resemble movies in every way.

And it's not just conservatives Millar could offend:

As you might expect, Millar’s take-no-prisoners approach has drawn near-constant criticism. It’s come not just from moral crusaders but also diehard comics fans who say that, instead of deconstructing superhero comics, he’s actually reinforced some of the genre’s worst impulses. Indeed, the criticisms often come from the liberal end of the political spectrum: His work has been called classist, racist, and sexist.

Take some of his portrayals of women, for example. Millar has spoken out against the underrepresentation of female characters in comics, but his depictions of rape have alienated some readers. In Wanted, the sadistic protagonist gleefully commits rape over and over again, at one time bragging that he “raped an A-list celebrity and it didn’t even make the news.” In The Authority, a Captain America analog rapes two unconscious women. In issue four of Kick-Ass 2, a group of bad guys finds the young hero’s love interest, a teenaged girl named Katie, and brutally gang-rapes her.

I'd say it's more a case of reinforcing the worst impulses in fanfiction, where you could find scores of contrived sexual assault with no clear distinctions between good and evil, all depicted in a normalized manner. Millar may have once come to the aid of a couple women who were being harrassed online, and that was doing the right thing. But he has to understand that if he's going to indulge in this kind of fanfiction monstrosity, he could be influencing the very people causing innocents a problem, even if he never intended to. After all, what if those very crackpots happen to be reading his worst work?

He even defended his practices by saying:

“The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know?” he told me. “I don't really think it matters. It's the same as, like, a decapitation. It's just a horrible act to show that somebody's a bad guy.”

He may not think so, but others do. And I don't see why it's so important to show or even prove that somebody's a bad guy, even if he does create his own villains to serve that purpose. I thought the whole purpose of entertainment was to offer escapism, yet all he can think of doing is "proving" something very moot.

Millar is very critical of war and institutional violence. “Europeans tend to be pretty left-wing, and Scotland's always been a left-wing country, so I'm always suspicious of uniforms,” he told me. “I think it's quite interesting to write superheroes from the perspective of someone who's lost an empire, whereas American writers are still very gung-ho about that whole thing.”

That perspective on violence and power was most fully fleshed out in The Ultimates, which Millar wrote for Marvel in the mid-’00s. It was a radical re-imagining of Marvel’s flagship super-team, a private clubhouse of heroes called the Avengers. Millar’s series jettisoned the Avengers’ three-plus decades of continuity, renamed them “the Ultimates,” and made them a wing of the U.S. military. They saluted George W. Bush, forcibly disarmed Iran, and fought to defend neocon imperialism. In one oft-quoted scene, a bad guy demands that Captain America surrender. “Surrender? Surrender??!!” Cap replies, then points to the “A” on his helmet. “You think this letter on my head stands for France?”

As you might expect, the subversion and satire in the series was lost on many. But Millar, despite his political leanings, was only mildly perturbed by right-wing fan appropriation.

If I'd been an avid reader of that series only to learn it wasn't what some people might've originally thought, I'd be embarrassed. In any case, his redo of the Hank Pym-as-wife-abuser storyline from 1981 was reason enough to avoid it, since all it was done for was cheap sensationalism and shock tactics. A puzzling thing about Millar's opposition to institutionalized violence is that, despite his standing, he still opposes defeating the kind of Islamofascist regimes that institutionalize the very things he says he's against.

As most readers with more sense know, Millar's not the only writer to incorporate the worst aspects of fanfiction into his work. There's also Geoff Johns, Brian Bendis, Grant Morrison, and probably a few others I can't remember just now. But they've all since proven themselves some of the worst things that could happen to comics, both mainstream and independent, draining the escapism out of entertainment for the sake of their own self-interested goals and politics.

No real Bat-fan would try to turn Bruce Wayne into something he was never intended to be

The UK Independent wrote a sleazy article about an equally sleazy new novel published in Europe that depicts Batman in homosexual relations, along with a few other characters:

There’s always been something more than a little camp about a superhero who sports tights and rubber nipples and enjoys the company of his Boy Wonder sidekick.

It sounds more like they're going by the inaccurate notion that Batman was always written as campy, a perception undoubtably lifted from the 1966-68 TV series. The comics may have taken a slapstick approach during the Silver Age, but I wouldn't say they were solely "campy". They didn't begin that way when Bill Finger and Bob Kane launched the series in 1939, and since 1969, Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams brought it back to a more serious approach.

Now Batman has been “outed” as an ageing homosexual who picks up young men for one-night stands and sits next to Sir Elton John at New York charity dinners – at least for the purposes of a new novel.

The whispers about Gotham City’s masked crime-fighter are confirmed in Erotic Lives of the Superheroes, which depicts Batman and Robin as a bickering gay couple whose sex life has gone flat.

Written by the Italian author Marco Mancassola, the novel imagines the erotic obsessions of Superman, Mister Fantastic and Mystique as their heroic abilities are dulled by the ageing process. Acclaimed upon its publication in Italy, the book, which centres on a murder mystery, arrives in the UK this week.

By portraying Batman as openly gay, Mancassola has made explicit leanings which have been tacit throughout the character’s comic book and screen history.

Oh, I'll bet it was "acclaimed". By the MSM in Europe, no doubt. It would have happened in the USA too if this tommyrot had been published there. And just how have those "leanings" ever been "tacit"? Always exploiting absurd perceptions, some of which were cooked up by Fredric Wertham in his sloppy efforts to criticize what he felt was poor taste. Despite Batman's affairs with babes like Vicky Vale, Silver St. Cloud and even Catwoman, they still want to believe all these contrived perceptions, effectively insulting Kane and Finger, who obviously never intended what they wish was true.

Grant Morrison, who wrote Batman stories for DC Comics, claimed that “he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay”.

George Clooney, who played the crime fighter in the poorly received 1997 film Batman & Robin, said he intended the character to appear gay.

No wonder it was such a financial flop, despite taking in $105 million. Clooney's lost my respect. I don't think he really liked what he was playing.

Homosexuality is just one aspect of Batman’s secret erotic life, according to Mancassola. He told The Independent: “Batman has always had a very dark side. And it shouldn’t be a shock that my version of this character indulges in weird forms of fetishism and extreme sex.

“Narcissism is his inner abyss. He let his only real love story miserably fail because he is in love with the mystery of youth – that inaccessible, fleeting kind of spirit that he sees in the eyes of his young male and female pick-ups.”

The worst part is that, as implied, Batman must be depicted having affairs with underaged youngsters in the novel, making it all the worse. And just how does having a "dark side" make Batman automatically gay? Besides, the dark side is only the tone and angle of the storytelling, not of Bruce's personality, though thanks to unfortunate edicts in the 90s, the writers did bring him to the point of being a control freak, which decidedly spoiled characterization.

And there is shock here: the color of the author's own personality.

DC Comics’ lawyers may not appreciate Mancassola’s reinvention of Batman as a fetishist, but the author said: “There was no intention to shock or offend anybody: Erotic Lives of the Superheroes is just an attempt at exploring the complex humanity of a group of characters.”

The only reason they could have for taking offense at this is because they're worried it'll rub off on any future movie projects and toy lines they want to do, and Batman is too major and important a brand name for them to risk being tarnished with sleaze like this European writer's bad fanfic. Otherwise, as seen with Alan Scott, there's little chance they'd object, because the character isn't major enough to for them to care about, despite being around since the Golden Age.

However, I've got a feeling that one day, any objections the DC lawyers might have to a book like that will cease, since the company's already corrupted their own products enough as it is.

In a nod to diversity, DC Comics has already reinvented Batwoman, as a Jewish lesbian, in a 2006 reboot. The fluid sexuality of Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises has also been the subject of debate.

See, the character of Kathy Kane is pretty minor and not as pivotal to the Bat-lore as Bruce Wayne is, so they feel they can get away with that kind of corruption and inconsistency with the earlier renditions. Their ideas for diversity, however, are extraordinarily narrow.

The author admits that there are some hardcore comics fans who “can’t forgive me for what I’ve done to their beloved characters. This is true especially when it comes to Batman, who comes across as the least nice character of the book – egocentric, ridiculously vain, in some way ‘perverse’. But, actually, I depicted him that way because I love him. He is human. He embodies the tragedy into which contemporary society has transformed the fact of getting older.”

If he really loved Batman, he wouldn't have written something so crass. How is this even human to depict Batman as a pedophile? That aside, I'm not sure it's right to say fans are especially offended by the rendition of Batman more than the other heroes appearing in the novel. I'm equally offended by the renditions of Mr. Fantastic and Superman in the novel, if they're depicted in the same crude way as Batman is. Turning them into the kind of things they were created to combat? That's not human at all.

DC's publisher doesn't want to publish family-friendly books

The artist/writer Paul Pope related a conversation he had with an unnamed DC manager who let it be known he/she is very stupid:

Asked by Yang if he had tried to do an all-ages book with a franchise character, Pope said he did test the waters, only to be knocked back. "Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do 'Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth]', this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch… and he said 'You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don't publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do 'Scooby-Doo.' And I thought, 'I guess we just broke up.'"

Much like the audience did over the years. Too bad he won't identify the clown he spoke with, because everybody has the right to know, and it could deservedly embarrass the publisher. Whoever that was who said such a thing obviously had a very poor upbringing, to say nothing of contempt for his own childhood. And they wonder why they've lost so much audience?

Image's early output wouldn't make a goldmine for Hollywood

Not all of it, anyway. Todd McFarlane told a PBS panel where he was guesting with Len Wein and Gerry Conway that Hollywood should consider Image's products:

“Spawn” creator and Image Comics president Todd McFarlane had a not-so-subtle message for studios and filmmakers on Wednesday: If you’re seeking comic-book-based source material to turn into movies, hey, take a look at us.

With Warner Bros. controlling DC Comics and Disney now owning Marvel and Lucasfilm, McFarlane noted during a panel promoting “Superheroes: The Never-Ending Battle,” a three-part documentary that PBS will air later this year, “there’s a big vacuum for all the other studios” that an independent entity like Image might help fill.

McFarlane and six other comic creators formed Image in the early 1990s — bolting from Marvel — specifically to provide artists and writers greater control and a larger share of profits from their work. [...]

Not a word in this article about how pathetic most of their early output was in terms of storytelling, and, in Rob Liefeld's case, artwork. And any books they published then that were worth the price of admission were obscured by too much attention lavished on the books that didn't need it. A pity McFarlane left Marvel and DC just to create wretchedly written comics like Spawn, because I did think his early art was pretty good, and certainly a lot more competent than the bulk of Liefeld's work. Hollywood already did make a movie (and animated TV program) out of Spawn, but obviously, any interest since then has long been lost to the winds.

Liefeld might even be embarrassed if anybody adapted his Youngblood into a movie, because there'd always be someone who'd research it, and find out just how bad both the rock bottom artwork and the limp stories are. But I've seen enough of Hollywood's MO to know they can dig up even the poorest comics for the sake of soulless moneymaking, and it's always possible they'd do it just to make a quick buck, even as it does no favors for the comics, and there are people who'd be repelled by Liefeld's worst art.

There are some books from Image that could be worth a try, but they'd have to look carefully, and not fall for Liefeld's junk, or McFarlane's.

The panel also focused on the following:

In a sense, the panel itself highlighted some of the challenges superheroes have faced in their leap to the screen. Some of the questions exhibited scant knowledge of the art form, while others were highly specific and trafficked in easy-to-lampoon minutia — indicative of Wein’s observations that comic-book fans come to movie depictions of beloved heroes with fixed, bordering-on-rigid ideas of what they expect, without allowing for the nuance of shifting to another medium.

“You have to be flexible, and a lot of fans lack that capacity,” he said.

Oh, it's perfectly okay with me. I'm just bothered when the comics publishers start working some of the movie elements back into the comics even if it doesn't work, like when Grant Morrison was writing the X-Men for nearly 3 years, and the costumes were changed to look more like the black leather jackets in the movies. It may not have been as bad as the grossness lurking around, but it was still pretty pointless and unappealing, draining a lot of the color from the book.

Which brings us to a depressing flaw: neither Wein nor Conway seemed to have anything to say about how many famous comics have lost their edge thanks to the worst editors in charge. All so they won't fall out of their favor, obviously, but still very weak and doesn't do the comics fans any favors. Wein even said, “The geeks have inherited the Earth. We’ve won.” That's not really true. They may have won in the movie industry, but back in comics medium, they're losing. Nobody cares about the comics, as evidenced by low sales nobody has the courage to acknowledge, because the publishers don't care about them, won't adapt to different formats that could make it happen.