The Four Color Media Monitor

The Chicago Tribune interviewed the pretentious James Tynion, and are making a big deal out of the horror genre he's specialized in writing:

One of my favorite contemporary writers is this guy from Milwaukee named James Tynion IV. It’s a haughty name, except he writes horror comics. He writes other things, too, nothing that would suggest gravitas: Batman comics, Batman meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics. That is, unless you know the finest monthly comic books these days are far from indifferently written, or as hilariously overwritten as they once were, full of characters delivering tsunamis of exposition.

Naturally, it's never explained why horror is such a great genre compared to comedy or optimistic adventure. And if Tynion's written any Ninja Turtles comics, that's bad news too. And what's that supposed to mean past comics were "overwritten" or even indifferent? Sounds like something somebody who's not a fan of comics would say, IMO. Here's more, including allusions to his politics:

Q: Did Wisconsin shape your writing voice? Speaking of paranoia and conspiracy, it is the home of the John Birch Society now.

A: It’s in so many of my books. Where you spend your teen years is burned deeper than anywhere else, I think. Now that I’m in my mid to late 30s, my view is tipping toward my time in New York. But being from Milwaukee, there’s a feeling of being on the outskirts of culture. I was growing up as a young queer person during the Bush II years, and Wisconsin was a very purple state. Both sides were loud, so feeling caught in the midst of all that was formative. I was figuring out if I wanted to go to Pride Fest, for instance, even as I had classmates arguing whether or not there should be a Pride Fest. There was also a primal feeling from big dense woods. I had a ravine behind my dad’s house. Seeing it now: OK, there are houses there, and it’s not that huge. But as a child, it felt like staring into another world, and things were happening in the darkness.

Q: Conspiracy, as a theme, became your thing.

A: Yes, since horror reflects society. There’s a fear now that we are living in all these broken systems no longer intending to save us. Yet we have to use those systems. You ask yourself: What do I have to become to survive this? What am I willing to let myself become? I realized I could come at that theme from so many different angles. Right now I am doing a book called “Spectregraph,” and it’s a ghost story, and yet ghost stories are always about a fear of death. Instead, I wanted this one to be about a fear of life, partly told through the decay of capitalism. There is so much tension now in the fear of tomorrow and persisting, and I wanted to dig into that feeling, while using this genre.

So what's so inherently wrong with capitalism, as he implies? Or, what's so wrong with capitalism that isn't so wrong with socialism? Russia, not exactly a big supporter of the LGBT ideologies Tynion follows and upholds, led to millions of deaths over the past century, and China's one-child policy made things worse, many Islamic countries hurt women badly to boot, so why does he not consider those destructive as he does capitalism? As for Dubya, if he's complaining, were there bad things he did in his time? Sure, and the way they handled Afghanistan after the raid in the early 2000s was bizarre and defeatist, but if Tynion sees nothing wrong with anything built on left-wing ideologies, that's got to be speaking volumes. As a result, how can we believe he's not employing horror themes for the wrong reasons like sensationalism, or just plain failing to offer any better alternatives? That's why what they tell here falls flat.

Q: Starting out, did you look to classic horror comics for inspiration?

A: Honestly, I didn’t even know this was a lane to pursue. My way into comics was very much through Superheroland, but then I kept discovering the full potential of what comics could be. Neil Gaiman and “Sandman” made me want to pursue writing as a career, period. I also can’t deny the giants of pop lit. Lately, I’ve been rereading Stephen King and Agatha Christie, and what comes across is how effortlessly good they can be.

Seriously, none of the above 3 "inspirations" impress me much from a modern viewpoint, even though I do find it appalling how Christie's novels have undergone unfortunate censorship in recent years. That aside, King's decidedly one of the most overrated authors of horror thrillers, and very few of his stories interest me. I do admit, as somebody who once watched Cujo, that it was well made for its time in 1983 as a film adaptation, but there's only so much else King authored that's just plain appalling, mainly because the horror genre is all guys like him seem to care about. And as I once noted before, Gaiman's Sandman run insulted my intellect, based on how he handled Lyta Hall, and there were crude moments that turned me off too.

Q: The funny thing is, as a young writer out of the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, you were not only going into comics — historically known for bad writing — but horror, a maligned niche of a maligned medium.

A: Absolutely, though I love that older schlockier stuff tremendously. And yet, to try to write in that voice is me trying to wear my dad’s old coat. It’s not how I write, and it doesn’t pull from my influences, and besides, there is a contemporary storytelling pace that you must work with now. And you can do that without leaning into nostalgia or the tropes of classic comic books, but I can see why older comics writers approached this material the way they did, and I can still take pointers. Especially with horror, which was always short stories, about the economy of storytelling. I still have to figure out how to squeeze something unsettling out of, say, only four or five pages. So you lean into that density. Horror is playing with tension. Yesterday and now, that’s what it is.

Pardon me? Comicdom is known historically for "bad" writing?!? What makes them conclude that, and how is the horror genre "maligned", yet not capable of seeing any bad writing in its own way come about? Not to mention there have been much longer stories published in the horror genre, including some of King's own novels. This sure sounds like the writing of somebody who's not really a comics fan, if at all, because what kind of entertainment writer would say such a thing, obscuring any and all good moments from past storytelling? Also, the part about "contemporary pacing" is another that smells of political correctness.

Let's also not forget Tynion was one of the writers who've kept up the sad status quo of Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott as gay, and further suggests he's plying his writing trade more for virtue-signaling than any real interest in storytelling that can provide something positive for the world. It's very sad how, not only has the comics medium fallen victim to leftists only interested in agendas, there's also newspaper writers who seem to love putting down the medium's past achievements while making it sound as though today's writings and art are superior in every way to the past's. And that's just plain insulting. Especially whenever comics with more optimistic themes are ignored in favor of the bleaker ones.

Labels: golden calf of LGBT, history, indie publishers, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, violence