Comic books in brief

Hey Sup Forums! I don't read comic books. The medium of the newspaper strip and comic book, such a lively thing in the late thirties as a variety of graphic art with unaffectedly surreal narratives, seems to have become bogged down in ever-greater pretension in subsequent decades, with increasingly crass results. It seems like everything done to make comic books more serious has only degraded everything that was once worthwhile in them.

For example, I'm reading the Wikipedia page on Zatara, and it's just this catalog of indignities inflicted on a basically innocent imagination. At the start of his biography, he's just a copy of Mandrake with a simple gimmick, backwards-talk magic spells which kids can have fun puzzling out or trying to say aloud. At the end of his biography, he's a recovering alcoholic who dies as a direct result of not being able to accept his daughter's sexual maturity. So he begins as fun for normal kids, and he ends as weird titillation for malajusted adults. That's the history of comic books in a nutshell.

At some point, this artform lost its historic impetus. It became futile, and it became the playpen of futile people, didn't it? Wouldn't you say this is a fair judgement?

Read up on the rise of the direct market.

>At the start of his biography, he's just a copy of Mandrake with a simple gimmick, backwards-talk magic spells which kids can have fun puzzling out or trying to say aloud. At the end of his biography, he's a recovering alcoholic who dies as a direct result of not being able to accept his daughter's sexual maturity.

How the fuck do you get that from preventing his daughter's death as part of a cabal of sorcerers impeding the original darkness from snuffing out the universe? He was there partly because he didn't want his daughter associating with a slimy Scouser who practiced tantric sex magic (and rightly so, I wouldn't let my children anywhere near Constantine), but he was there mostly to save the world. He died taking his daughter's place.

I know about that, the point is that the artform is now invalid.

The author was pro-slimy Scouser, though. Yes, his death was heroic, but he also represented something that had to be gotten out of the way.

Yeah that's kinda what watchmen was a commentary on, but people completely missed the point.

I think the bigger problem is that comics are bogged down in self referential genre fiction in a way where they don't actually embrace it. There's a similar problem with manga, but the thing is that they usually embrace that they are just genre fiction, so it leaves a clear divide and more importantly room for other more experimental or even classical work to coexist, whereas the uniformity of "adult comics" actually harm it because there's not as much distinction between, say, an adult romance comic that's well grounded, and some shock horror comic that's just adult in content, they still have to fall in the same category of maturity.

I don't think there's an inherent problem with metatextual self referential content made with fanatics in mind, every artform eventually reaches that point, I mean Don Quixote was basically exactly that as far as classical knight stories are concerned, so it's not anything new. But it has to embrace what it is, or else it consumes everything else.

You might just be retarded.

I personally think LoEG does commentary on the decay of literary characters really well, which can somewhat be relevant with comic books. I feel as if Watchmen was moreso about the morality of it all.

No, every artform doesn't reach that point. Most popular or folk art doesn't behave like that, it carries on plowing its furrow, doing its job. Don Quixote was about a social problem of the time rather than a problem of literature - too many people taking those romances seriously.

The essential point is that this is a graphic medium being mistaken for a literary one. Take the pic in my OP - the point is not whatever tenuous reason is given for Tong becoming a flower, the point is to draw a flower with a guy's face having a conversation with another guy. These days, you'd know who planted the flowers, who cultivated them, whose greenhouse it happened in... plot, plot, plot, in the aid of the reader's further mental imprisonment in autistic garbage.

I should also say, thanks for a thoughtful response. Interesting contrast of approaches between Western comics and manga. I still think the category of "adult comic" is a problem all its own - the adult thing to want in a comic is the surrealism of the late 30s stuff, not grit. The grittiness was a symptom of little boys' being raised to be bloodthirsty in that era, not evidence of a mature readership.

I'm glad one of the perpetrators of the problem eventually got wise to it, but I'm not reading that shit, obviously.

You think Alan Moore isn't pro-sleaze and sexualization? OK.

Seems more of a beef with postmodernism than comic books. Just take music for example.

>starts off pretty basic and melodic, lots of poetry, entire songs usually dedicated to one clear subject or mood, very understandable and easy to appreciate, yet hard to master

>fast forward

>modern music is schizophrenic as fuck using intentionally erratic sounds to off put an expectation about music, overtly referential to other artists and musical concepts instead of any clear message, gotten to the point where a previously existing song just slowed down is now considered enough to be a new genre of music, and despite the growing complexity for enjoyment leading to simpler music becoming more popular, the actual barrier of entry on music has lowered to the point where anyone who isn't trained or even aware of music theory can just throw stuff together on a computer and call themselves a musician

we need a neomodernist movement and we need it fast

You know what, fair point, not everything gets to that point, and maybe my interpretation of Quixote doesn't line up perfectly with that narrative. Still, I think it's an element of it, and it's a perfectly logical one. If something exists long enough, eventually it's gonna be large enough for people to comment on it and be aware of it enough to "change the rules", so to speak.

I agree with you on the latter point, too many comic authors treat comics as prose heavy picture books. I have a fondness for those, wizard of oz type stuff, but it's simply not the same medium as comics, which should be a heavily visual medium without so much intricacy that it becomes redundant, there's a graceful simplicity to images, and I think instead of literature comic authors should look at classic illustration for inspiration, pictures that told an entire story just through visual implication, thus enhancing what could be a barebones plot with something besides bad prose and lore.

Sadly, the opposite seems to be in vogue, with "indie" cartoonists making more abstract, minimalist work with an utter lack of nuance, only exemplifying how the comic reader needs to be baby fed an overly simplistic presentation to even be interested in what usually turn out to be the shallow ravings or boring people in boring situations. Comics about young adults living day to day don't have a reason to exist as comics except to comfort those with arrested development.

I'll agree to this as well, and the real downside is that it's a feigned grittyness that's all show. Very rarely do authors do any grim subject matter with actual thoughtfulness, or exploration of a taboo subject, it's just for superficial show.

But it's so much easier to just take old Garfield comics and change the words in the balloons.

I'm not sure I see the connection with what I'm talking about. I'm also not sure whether what you're talking about *is* postmodernism - it seems like more of a problem with modernism. I agree with you, though. Modernism has never gone away, and has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, whereas postmodernism is recognized increasingly as just an advertising-friendly mainstreaming of stuff that already existed in modernism, and it's mostly discredited now. It remains meaningful where it first entered the arts, in architecture, but it's already a term that's part of history. To design a postmodern building in 2017 would be passe.

My beef is with the way that a visual medium whose narrative elements were mostly functional, combining pulp standbys, surrealism and childlike improvisation in a charming way, has turned into a sub-literature of immature attempts at maturity for an audience who... may need help. I mean, people want to see what the next month's releases will say about politics, racism, etc... this is not anything they can address responsibly or well.

>Comics about young adults living day to day don't have a reason to exist as comics except to comfort those with arrested development.
Could you elaborate?

>My beef is with the way that a visual medium whose narrative elements were mostly functional, combining pulp standbys, surrealism and childlike improvisation in a charming way, has turned into a sub-literature of immature attempts at maturity for an audience who... may need help. I mean, people want to see what the next month's releases will say about politics, racism, etc... this is not anything they can address responsibly or well.
These are problems with creators, not the medium. Why does a comic just have to be 'charming' nonsense?

Indeed, but if only the rules changed had been graphic ones, or self-aware uses of the fun rules of the game.

Agreed, comic authors should look at illustration and the history of graphic arts, oil painting, posters etc.

Agree also on the indie stuff. Although bizarrely ambitious projects with kids' book style illustration is almost worse - I saw a biographical "graphic novel" recently of Josephine Baker. So it's something that looks like a book for readers maybe 8 and under, but the drawings are of Josephine Baker dancing nude in a nightclub and fucking. Who is it for?

Sure.

You see, it's not about trying to pidgeonhole comics as just an escapist fantasy, you can have realistically grounded stories in any medium. The thing is they have to be that, stories, with a reason and message for existing that can be communicated, and be of value. There's a ton of film that's basically a completely normal ocurrence, but framed and heightened and told in a way to get a point across. It can be universal, it can be specific, it can be political, it can be fantastical, it can be ironic. But the best films have a POINT to them.

And quite simply, a good chunk of indie comics, the clowes, chris ware, simon hannselman types (and this isnt to say those types of comics can't be well crafted or interesting in their own right) are simply pointless. They meander and serve as nothing but a receptacle of half hearted ideas too weak to stand on their own. They may occasionally have have something to say here and there, and maybe deeply impactful, but the presentation just creates such vast amounts of noise and such a waste of time for a reader that it's almost negligible whenever they do, and the real problem is the matter of factness of the art. It's the utter minimalist banality of it that detracts from something that could be made into a greater canvas to build upon and actually make value for anyone who bothers to read. Quite simply, it doesn't matter if your story is dostoevsky's lost masterpiece, if you draw it to be intentionally simple and ordinary, it's going to actively detract from the work. And I think most comic authors do this out of some kind of ego trip where they believe themselves good enough to get away with sheer minimalism because the boundless depth of their vision is enough.

This isn't where the part about arrested development comes in, though, let me ellaborate on that in the next post

Oh, and agreed also on the grittyness. The implications about how sheltered the audience is are pretty damning, too.

ITT: someone who doesn't read comics whines about comics

Isn't that every Sup Forums thread?

It's a problem with the culture.

To me, it's like you're asking why a fresco has to show varied and interesting figures and actions, or why a film has to be cinematically interesting when it could be inert. The nonsense has more sense in it than the attempts to say serious stuff of recent decades. It's related to the stuff its readers already know to expect from other kinds of fiction, mutated by the desire to draw cool stuff and an understanding of the turnover of fantasy concepts in a kid's mind. Or you can have people taking smack, depressed, in a darkened room. Thinking fun is somehow "beneath" it has made recent comic books far less of an influence on wider culture, including high culture, than their aesthetics once did.

once *had, that is

The real culprits are those authors like meredith gran, jeph jacques, and others who draw "slice of life" comics. Relatable blog style comics as well.

Those kinds of comics have pointless plots, but they serve a purpose for their main audience, which is to excuse and comfort and shelter a readerbase of uninitiated young people, or worse, older maladjusted people, and tell them that whatever lifestyle they've chosen to live is sacristan. It tells them, oh, don't worry or better yourself, there's nothing to be learned in the world! Your world isn't to be challenged, just enjoy the flights of fancy of these utterly unremarkable and "relatable" characters who accomplish nothing and waste your time beyond the ethically responsable for any kind of artist. And worse, it's sold as an alternative to human friendship at times, with people sold on the personality of an author as a friendly face, a place of comfort. It's an entire business now, with lets players as well, to sell artificial friendship to the sheltered.

I think there's nothing worse you can do to a weak person than to shelter them, tell them everything is fine and to not change, and to let them loose on a world that will tear them apart if they're not ready for it.

Not every work has to be some great revelatory challenge that transforms perceptions, but at the very least when you take up people's times, you educate them on something. You inform them of an aspect of life, you impart wisdom of some kind, you provide some kind of beneficial service that leaves the reader a more wordly person than when they came in, if only fractionally. Yet these kinds of works are the antithesis of that, they're intentionally just noise to be thrown away without even the modicum of fantastical fancy that would entertain children, because that's "not mature".

And this genre has seeped itself even into fantastical fiction like superhero comics, turning the fantastical into the mundane.

It's the death of imagination.

Great post, and I'd just add that so much of indie music is also like this, the music's just this carrier for the guy's journal of his depression. Your presumed reasons to listen are 1. the emotional blackmail exerted by his sincerity, and 2. the self-insert factor of how easily you could record an album just like this yourself.

Also of note is that it's not just cape comics that suffer this, it happens to a lot of supposed "fantastical" webcomics where instead of accepting the flight of fancy, become bogged down with trite mundanities and fanbase centered metatext. It derails what has the potential to be a transcendent story that prevails above reality into something people can take something away from, into objective wastes of time that are a detriment to those who put their time into it, yet attract the weak and deficient as a form of pollutive comfort. Like a candy salesman selling strawberry flavored jelly to a crowd of starving children who need wholesome food the most, yet are handed an empty comfort.

Well said.

I'm sure I've seen a lot of examples of this fleetingly, but I'd be interested to know some examples you'd give of bogged-down webcomics that started as fantastical.

>Who is it for?
I'm not a conspiracy nut but I believe some people have a vested interests in prolonging the childlike tastes of people that grow into adulthood so as to take advantage of childlike spending habits that actually have a disposeable income. They're perpetually stuck in that teenage phase of rejecting simple childlike stuff in flavor of superficially mature stuff, but instead of growing out of it they become surrounded by media that just emboldens that sentiment. It's quite predatory.
I think this is one reason why manga is more lucrative than comics, because they manage to combine the superficial maturity a lot of people want, with the genuine creativity that ends up interesting people more in the short term as well as the long run.

It's telling that a lot of manga aimed at boys can genuinely be more involved captivating as a piece of fantasy fiction than something aimed at worldly, cultured adults. They have more effort put into the visual storytelling to the point where people are willing to put up with bad translations just to look at the art, and there's a focus on making the impossible tangibly possible, as opposed to bringing down the impossible into the mundane.

Prolly due to changes and advances of other mediums to compete with.
I mean in the 30s you had radio shows and cartoons at the movie theater. Then came television, then video games, the internet, and even more portable versions of those three (smart phones and tablets).
That, and an increase and effort and quality (and increase in how much ya pay people) have brought items that used to be made from paper pulp cause "the story is worth more than the cost" to "get this rare collectable variant cause look how good that art is".

I mean if ya wanted simple stories for kids THEY STILL MAKE THEM. Newspaper strips, scooby doo comics, archie stuff, and plenty other stuff. But a change in how writers and artists want to REALLY make (as well as a demographic that has grown in age) does mean there is plenty more. And really it is foolish to think any medium should limit themselves to what they make, be it for kids or adults.

>I'm not a conspiracy nut but I believe some people have a vested interests in prolonging the childlike tastes of people that grow into adulthood so as to take advantage of childlike spending habits that actually have a disposeable income. They're perpetually stuck in that teenage phase of rejecting simple childlike stuff in flavor of superficially mature stuff, but instead of growing out of it they become surrounded by media that just emboldens that sentiment. It's quite predatory.

This rings true to me, I have wondered about this for a while, especially after seeing the way people will repeat press release hype to each other on tumblr etc. as if they were having a real conversation. Like, people will feel a familial attachment to certain IP if they keep being told that they do, it seems.

Good to know that manga are doing better than comics, "making the impossible tangibly possible" is what it's all about.

off the top of my head, homestuck.

You don't even have to get that deep. You just have to know that early on it has parts exploring existentialism in actually pretty good prose and original art that fits the tone... and that the latest updates involve art made by fans, written by fans, in a method that's literally just shitposting social media posts and memes.

Another problem is that sometimes the comics get so in love with themselves they spend a damaging amount of time on one thing instead of getting on with the story, such as paranatural. It's relevant because you can tell that enamourment comes from someone trained to be a fanatic, and not an author. Authors should be unafraid to go as far as to sacrifice a character for the sake of a good point and plot, they should be unafraid to use fantasy to that end... and yet so many authors fall on the bad habit of falling in love with their own world (spending exorbitant amounts of time detailing frankly unimportant things), their own characters (which usually leads to said characters being written in a hedonistic way that pleases the author and no one else), or the perception they receive from their work (which invariably leads to compromised stories that literally should have nothing holding them back creatively online, yet become subject to the whims of nobodies and a self absorbed metatextual presentation that detracts from any point the webcomic might have had at its gestation)

It also extends a bit into videogames where stuff like undertale is nothing but a play on expectations... but the actual meat and bones of the thing is so poor it can become unenjoyable despite it trying so hard to be likeable.

There's a very real problem with younger artists being discouraged from learning the classic workmanship that took so long to develop, in flavor of fleeting self masturbation cheered on by their peers.

>(as well as a demographic that has grown in age)
There were adults who'd grown up with comic books decades before comic books became this odd-adults-only genre, though.

Thanks for this, I've noticed this habit of self-fandom across a lot of different media.

The whole problem of people using DeviantArt feedback instead of real training... and nobody wanting to give criticism because they wouldn't want to receive it or they read a long angsty blogpost from the author... it's destructive, indeed.

The difference is that at one point the people making stories were trained as artists with the backgrounds of artists. Some of those adults ended up becoming the very contributing writers and artists behind some of those properties, and having the backgrounds of fans rather than artists, made decisions that just weren't in line with what genuine artistry ought to be (which is to say, creating something in service of something bigger than yourself, be it a story worth telling or anything more abstract).

It's like this, if you're an artist, there's a curse. Because you see everything in a critical eye for improvement, you'll find it hard to nearly impossible to ever enjoy things in that medium again, at least not as easily as you once did. This self improvement and criticism of peers leads to an environment in which everyone is doing their best for the sake of the art.

If you're a fan, you don't have that background and just want to make something you like and others might like. That might seem benign and most content creators will often state this as the driving force behind their work, but it's become more apparent that that kind of creative process is flawed. Something that pleases isnt inherently something of value or worth or even all that pleasing if you have higher standards. It's a hedonistic approach that only works in the immediacy of its place and time, which is why to a lot of people superhero comics look incomprehensible, but some equally complex long running tv shows can easily find an audience in those same people. Star trek will always be watchable to anyone because of the universal themes of utopian futurism and explorational contemplation. Comics about the metafiction of a past reboot the writer didn't like? not so much.

It's also a basic problem of like, people making something that's supposed to be serious but drawing it like scott pilgrim because they like it and its easy.

That's not good art, it's masturbation.

Another thing is just the genuine threat of stigmatization by your peers, if you speak honestly about flaws your friend's comic has, or the flaws in animation in a show, chances are you wont be met with a genuine desire to improve, but blacklisting for being a nuisance and raining on someone's parade.

I say that as someone who wants to make illustration and comics and cartoons, I know for a fact that if tomorrow I started listing genuine factual problems with this or that webcomic or show, I'd simply be blocked out and, worse, make a bad name for myself as a negative influence. You wouldn't get that in the literary world where people are critical of eachother and try to improve.

It's sad, the environment is hurting the artists that perpetuate it and it's not immediately beneficial to anyone to try and change that, but I hope at some point it happens.

I mean, start up an anonymous blog, critique and discuss with other newbie, wet behind the ears creators, make a place for critique without backlash. I'd read the shit outta that blog.

I fucking hate myself for incidentally contributing a very small part towards this process. You don't even realize it at first. Somebody shows you their work and you want to encourage them because we're taught that everyone has potential, it just needs to be unlocked through work and focus.

I'm not sure an anonymous critique blog would hold the same weight as a peer critiquing other peers, but it might be worth a shot. maybe even a youtube channel dedicated to highly in depth analysis for that kinda thing, as well as some fundamentals.

I'll say this, praise is a decent motivator. But spite and fury and a desire to prove yourself? much better. The person recieving just has to be strong enough to not crumble. But if they're too weak for it, maybe they wouldn't have made art worth existing in the first place. After all, people putting everything into DEMANDING your attention to a work that means something would be more favorable than people making something "because I wanna, like, draw, man"

I couldn't agree more. If people are pleased with how they're doing, in that kind of self-satisfied way, nothing really worthwhile is likely to be going on.

>this thread
>Sup Forums having a well thought out critical conversation on the comic medium for once

>Hey Sup Forums! I don't read comic books
Clearly.

Bump

>Quite simply, it doesn't matter if your story is dostoevsky's lost masterpiece, if you draw it to be intentionally simple and ordinary, it's going to actively detract from the work. And I think most comic authors do this out of some kind of ego trip where they believe themselves good enough to get away with sheer minimalism because the boundless depth of their vision is enough.

I think it's that in part, but also an adolescent reaction to the adventure comics art styles, and sloth.

On the topic of slice of life, is there any genre MORE escapist? SOL escapes from everything.

>I don't read comic books
>I'm here to pretentiously say you like childish shit
>You, each of you are futile.
>That's definitely a proper use of the word 'futile'

Kill yourself faggot.