[The first part of our conversation can be read at Tim's blog...]
Chad Nevett: I agree. Something is missing. I don't know what. One thing that I think it may be, and this is just my personal feelings, is that I'm kind of sick of the weekly grind of comics. Every single week, there's more. There's always more. TV seasons aren't year-round every week affairs. Movies are always coming out, but whether or not there's one you want to see is debatable. As well, there isn't that constant need/pressure to keep up -- and, movies aren't serial. Seeing a new movie or two each week doesn't get stale, because it's always something new. With comics, it's the same thing over and over again. Going to the shop becomes a habit, not a joy. Some weeks, it is a joy because of a book or two that's special, but, for the most part, it's habit. I've actually been looking forward to the December 30th skip week, because it means there is one week out of the year where I don't have to care about comics. I love comics, but sometimes it feels a bit much. This ties to the event stuff, I'd argue, where companies have tried to make it more and more like everything they release is important and you must know right away and, as I said, Secret Invasion and Final Crisis both left people unsatisfied and killed that mood, made people less willing to buy that idea.
The quality of the books aside... I'm not sure the quality is less. I genuinely think Bendis and company did great jobs with the Dark Avengers annual and Siege: The Cabal (although my personal feelings towards the treatment of Noh-Varr were kept out of my review as much as possible since that's one of my big biases). Would they have gotten the same reviews a year ago? I can't say, but I think so. I know that it's a sliding scale and is very much of the moment, star ratings not being an exact science, but I think they would have got the same reviews from me.
You bring up Iron Fist, Captain Britain & MI:13, and Ghost Rider, and maybe those are missing: where are the critically acclaimed books that no one is buying except for us? Looking through my box of comics that I'm currently buying, there are the Vertigo books, the Marvel top-sellers, the two Bat-books, some mini-series, and... Secret Warriors. Is Secret Warriors all that's left of the cult books? I know people talk up Incredible Hercules, but I tried it and didn't love it... is what's missing the third-tier books that we point to when people say superhero books from the big two are crap to say "But they publish this!"? Or am I just missing out on these books somehow?
Tim Callahan: I stuck with Incredible Hercules for a while, but I've grown tired of that as well. The art started to become hammy sometime this year, and it's like hitting every joke with a rimshot, which is neither funny nor un-annoying. (Speaking of that, and I don't remember to exact review or message board post, but someone on the CBR forum complained about one of my reviews because I complained about the art tonally matching the comedy of some story, and the poster said something like, "oh my gosh, imagine the art matching the story!" But, yeah, it is stupid when the characters are exaggerated to add exclamation points to the comedy sometimes. Unless you think that the epitome of comedy is watching Jim Carrey ham it up, then you know that sometime -- usually -- it's funnier when the humor comes with the straight-faced delivery.)
Secret Warriors is good, true, though last issue was more of a connect-the-seemingly-unwoven-continuity-threads issue than a real Hickman romp. Speaking of Hickman, his Fantastic Four is damn good. So that's a glimmer of hope in the superhero landscape.
I don't think the weekly grind is the problem -- for me at least. I love looking forward to Wednesdays, still, after how ever many years. Let me calculate this. I've been a regular Wednesday comic shopper since at least 1986. That's 1,196 Wednesdays. I've missed a couple during that time, but I bet I've missed no more than a dozen total in all those years. But it is true that my normal Wednesday visits used to contain more diversity. Now it's pretty much all Marvel and DC, and I get the independent stuff in trades from Amazon or at conventions. Comics may have more diversity than ever right now, but you wouldn't know it from the Wednesday doses.
So, to answer your question about underappreciated third-tier books, the stuff that we can point to as highlights of superhero comics beyond the big-name stuff, well, there's...I don't know. Agents of Atlas is basically done, right? Looking at the stuff that's selling less than Secret Warriors just goes to show how much junk is being published right now. Teen Titans. New Mutants. Brave and the Bold. Magog. Power Girl looks great, but the stories are weak. X-Men Forever. War Machine. Black Panther 2.
The Outsiders. Good thing the dynamic duo of DiDio and Tan are coming in to save the day on that one.
Man, these are some bad comics. We should review more of these bottom-of-the-barrel just to see if they're as bad as they were last time I read them. Maybe they've improved?
CN: I'm always up for reviewing crap comics. Those are the fun reviews to write. But, it seems that a lot of the recently-launched series that aren't selling well aren't getting good reviews either, which is odd. Those books always exist, but there's usually a good mixture of very good comics thrown in for everyone to point to as examples, but recent launches like Magog, Doom Patrol, New Mutants... they've all gotten, what, three stars at best? Even a book like SWORD, which seems ripe for 'cult hit' status didn't really knock either of us over with its first issue. We went through a long period of rather good superhero books going all the way back to 1999 or so with the altered Wildstorm line of books and then right on through to Quesada/Jemas at Marvel and... well, the ride had to end at some point, right? Or maybe it's just a lull. A six months to a year where we all just take a breather before things pick up again. In the past year, Marvel switched their focus to a lot of mini-series (specially the Dark Reign variety) and only one or two of them have been anything more than decent; DC continues to flounder as books come out to sounds of silence as no one cares. I'm kind of curious to see what happens after both of their events are over. That could be the turning point...
I honestly don't know what the problem is. Of course, people will tell us that we're just reading the wrong comics or are wrong to not appreciate the brilliance of Magog, but, come on, this general sense of 'who gives a fuck' isn't isolated to us. The only time people seem to get excited is when it's time to trash a horrible comic like Cry for Justice. Otherwise, it's mostly 'Read some decent books, nothing to say about them really, what else is new?'
I don't know...
TC: I guess the only thing to do now is put out the Callahan/Nevett Creator Challenge, open to all comic book writers and artists. Here it is: "Make really great comics.You know you want to. Enough with the mediocre. We've been through that already."
Um, that's really the extent of the challenge. Winner gets our undying love. Losers get, well, I guess they just keep getting work.
CN: That challenge wasn't in effect already? Why the hell not?
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17 comments:
Tim's lying. If he's been buying comics since 1986, he wasn't doing it on Wednesdays for several years ...
I know you're talking about superhero comics, but why? I get really excited about Wednesdays mainly because I don't buy too many superhero comics. I know you guys like trades for more indy stuff, as you pointed out in the discussion, but if that's true, don't worry about going to the comics store if it's just crap. I tend to agree with you about the lack of buzz on superhero comics (of couse, I still love Hercules, so my taste may be suspect), but I still love going to the comics store because I simply don't want to wait for something like Phonogram, which comes out this week. I love reading that in installments, because it's so good.
I know both of you guys read other things than superhero comics, so why worry about the lack of buzz? I mean, you can challenge creators to make great stuff all you want, but why do the creators have to do it on superhero books? Look at Fraction. How can he write X-Men so very poorly (sorry, Tim) when he's such a good writer? I'd rather get more Casanova from him than even a great run on X-Men. Wouldn't you?
Honestly, our gigs with CBR kind of demand that we go to the shops each week AND keep up with the superhero books. That's something I allude to, but, honestly, that's a big driving point (which of course makes the CBR gig sound like a chore, which it isn't).
And I also buy plenty of non-superhero books (as does Tim), which I mention. Even there, though, I haven't been as excited lately. No idea why.
I don't agree with you. I finally transformed my pull list so that I really look forward to each single comic I buy. I cancelled both Fraction comics and got Punisher and Fantastic Four instead. Aaron's Wolverine has suddenly gone from okay to great and the mediocre to good Ghost Rider is to be replaced by his Punisher. Kick-Ass and Old Man Logan are finally over, Incognito has morphed back to the much better Criminal + LaFuente on Spiderman is a real treat.
But I don't read as much weekly comics as you guys do and at the moment 'less good stuff' equals 'more money for some essentials' like 4th World Omnibus and New X-Men and stuff.
But the Morrison-low is tragic, but by January it will have an end.
Wait, comics didn't used to come out on Wednesdays? Is that true? Because even before I could drive, my grandfather used to bring TV's Ryan Callahan and I to the shop every Wednesday. I guess the comics were left over from the previous week, then?
Zarg, your pull list sounds tight. I need to adopt that philosophy.
Outside of the mainstream superhero stuff (and a few Vertigo titles), what really comes out regularly, though?
THAT is a problem.
Yeah, I forgot about your gigs with CBR. Whoops!
When I started buying comics in 1988, they came out on Friday. That lasted a few years, then they came out on Thursday. Sometime around the mid- to late-1990s they switched to Wednesday.
The lack of regular scheduling of the non-Big Two books is REALLY annoying. My retailer was pointing out the slowdown in Image titles coming out, with the exception of Kirkman's work. I don't know if it's a problem with Image or with the creators, but it's a shame.
It's kind of the pamphlet format as a whole that's dying, as the industry continues to move toward graphic novels, or so it seems. That's where most of my interest is these days, along with manga and the occasional European import. I've got tons to be excited about there, and there's a huge pile of books that I need to read waiting for me at home, so really, I could not go to the comics store for months and still have plenty to read. In fact, I kind of did that in the first half of 2009, only going every few weeks, since there just wasn't anything coming out that I had to have immediately. Wednesday Comics got me back to the weekly habit, but I still take weeks off here and there, and I rarely end up buying more than three or four pamphlets. It's all about the collections and such for me these days.
Also, I feel like superheroes are pretty much played out. After 70 years or so, there's just not much that can be done that hasn't already; there are plenty of other good stories out there that don't involve spandex and punching. The occasional Morrison book notwithstanding, or oddball takes on the genre like The Boys or Umbrella Academy, there's not much of anything that I care to pay for. I do read Marvel PDFs for review, but if I had to give that up tomorrow, I don't think I would miss them. If something really good actually comes out (like Batwoman, for instance), I can always get the collection, or, more likely, check it out from the library. It's a whole segment of the industry that has become less and less worth paying attention to, so I've moved on to bigger and better things.
Still, I love comics! I just finished reading The Photographer, and it was excellent. I've got Bryan Talbot's Grandville, Dark Horse's Noir anthology, Jamie Rich and Joelle Jones' You Have Killed Me, Tezuka's Swallowing the Earth, Jason's Low Moon, and tons of others coming up in my queue, and I couldn't be more excited to read them. Fuck superhero comics and their primary purpose of endless trademark extension; I'll pay attention to something worthwhile.
Also, webcomics! Have you been reading the awesome stuff on Act-I-Vate? They've got some mindblowingly good shit going on. Or Kate Beaton! Lucy Knisley! Erika Moen! James Kochalka! Derek Kirk Kim! Lovelace & Babbage! Templar, Arizona! Leon Beyond! Achewood! It never ends; I could not spend any money on comics for like six months and still have plenty of great material to read, with more appearing every day. Damn, we live in an awesome world.
Pluto is also well worth your time. It's been described as doing for Astro Boy what Watchmen did for superheroes. Dunno if I'd go quite THAT far, but it's definitely good stuff.
Matthew's absolutely right on the pamphlet/single-issue format dying, and I think that's why a lot of the weekly diversity is going away. As sales drop on the format, books that already would have been smaller sales face dwindling away to nothing -- so the non-superhero titles are more and more shifting to graphic novels instead as their print form. (With some detours into webcomic and/or a mini-comic first.) Girl Genius has got to be the poster child for that shift: a book that bled money because of poor single issue sales, but now rakes in huge collected sales and is profitable.
I miss going to the store and always having something strange and fun waiting for me; an issue of Dork, perhaps, or Palooka-Ville and Dark Horse Presents. Ah well, changing times.
Ah, the Hercules critical backlash begins...
I am in the same boat as Matthew and Greg.
I haven't been a regular Wednesday shopper for the last 8-9 years, around the time I was Chad's age.
Whether it's just natural boredom from over-familiarity of books or the nature of changing tastes, I don't think I miss out on much. It also helps that I feel I know my tastes pretty well, not to the point that I have tunnel vision, but that my interest comes and goes depending on the creator or the content.
I can look at what shows up in the shops every Wednesday and find trades or ogn's I am interested in. One week Oshinibo, The 'Nam, Alien Legion, Destroyer, Driven by Lemons and Borgia come out and the next is Chew, Wintermen, Incognito, and The Boys newest trade.
From buying stuff, to the library, scans, and just killing time in Barnes & Noble, I find that it's not reading options I'm running out of, it's the time to read them all.
Good discussion. In general, I agree with the premise. 2009 in general has been a very dull year for superheroics. I'm not a Final Crisis hater--absolutely love most things Morrison, by the way--but the end of that series, which was a creative misfire, really seemed to presage the way this entire year has gone. Morrison ended Final Crisis, complete with its derivative quasi-Obama referencing (and no I don't hate that guy either) and the sentiment of "Hey now it's time for HOPE and CHANGE! All that dark stuff is behind us now! HOO-RAY!!! Cool, huh?! It's time for some BRIGHT SHINY HOPEFULNESS! Isn't the Zoo-Crew funny!??? Also: we're ALL superheroes, guys, and superheroes are ALL of us! It's time to go into a wonderful hopeful tomorrow where everything is a buncha pseudo-scientific technicolor FUN! Follow me to the future!" screamed Grant Morrison in an oddly naive way...and no one went for it.
The take-away message of Final Crisis fell flat--I think it came from a misreading of the culture and the artform on Morrison's part--and, as if in consequence, as a reader/critic you really have to be blindly optimistic to think that 2009 wasn't an off-year for comics. Right down to the Watchmen movie, even (the second big misfire of the year).
What you guys said about the "sliding scale" is also very interesting. It's true: If everything has to be rated in comparison with Swamp Thing #21, then 99% of comics are 1- or 2-star affairs, and that evaluative system doesn't serve anyone. On the other hand, I think the current creative dry spell really serves to expose which reviewers are really worth reading...and which ones are just happy-go-lucky fickle souls who basically double-think themselves into ALWAYS believing that several new current offerings MUST BE great books.
I've seen the following scenario play out a lot in the last 6-8 months. A popular (as popular as these things go) comics reviewer will take it upon himself to champion a new mainstream superhero title. It's maybe the second or third issue of the series that the fellow has read...and he's been getting ready to "go for it" for sometime. He's bought the hype; he's about ready to cast his lot. Sadly, in the weeks leading up to this, I as a casual follower of the guy's site/blog can "see the wheels turning" based on tentative posts that the guy makes. In the comments sections you can see it coming. You can sense it. The reviewer is about to trick himself into believing (for a while, at least) that Power Girl or Red Robin or Secret Warriors or Hercules is really a superlative comic series, really worth championing as if it were the NEXT LEVEL, a spiritual descendant of Mark Waid's Flash or Peter David's Hulk or whatever. And then he does it: the latest issue becomes the reviewer's "pick of the week" or whatever, and a 8,000-word essay is written explaining to all of the site's followers that "Yes, you jaded folks out there, you DO need to get excited about this book, godDAMN it--it's PERFECT!!!! It's SO INTERESTING!! It has CHARACTER MOMENTS!! The artwork WORKS!! The STORYTELLING is GOOD!!" Yeah, sure, and then you know what happens? Two or three issues later, this reviewer isn't even reviewing (possibly isn't even reading) the book anymore or talking it up at all. It's just silence, and the reviewer must never speak of his 5-star outburst again. No matter, though, because he's already moved on to thinking that some OTHER newish title is a 5-star masterpiece--probably one of the eight monthly Geoff Johns books (not that I don't *like* them alright, they're just not excellent, not even up to his own standards from a few years ago).
It wasn't this way with titles from a few years ago, like Captain Britain, which were good for a long time.
(cont.)
And I think Blackest Night is a LITTLE more thought-provoking than you guys say...but it just doesn't inspire the intellectual consideration that Final Crisis did, or even the curiosity that Secret Invasion did. On the other hand, by their words you would think that for many people Blackest Night is EVERYTHING that superhero comics can and should possibly be. That's baffling to me. I know that most of the people who act that way have also read Swamp Thing #21 and the like. How can they have forgotten what REALLY innovative comics were?
But this year has shown who you can trust and who you can't. People who think books like The Mighty and Irredeemable are original, or even worth talking about for very long on an issue-by-issue basis--those guys just don't get it. They're not reviewers or critics. They may not even be "good readers". They're consumers, or--if that term is too cruel--they're outright addicts who in their stupor can no longer think rationally. Not that they're "bad"...but during downturns like this you want to avoid taking advice from those people, or even reading their delusional double-think, because it really is sad to see them acting this way and fooling themselves.
On the other hand, 2009 has been a pretty good year for non-superhero indie books...
...And thank God that Cameron Stewart will be on Batman & Robin in early '10, and that Dr. Hurt will return and-and-and ooooooo! Yes!
By the way, I only meant that the Watchmen movie was a "misfire" in a financial/Zeitgeist sort of way. All that marketing...not much cultural shift. BEFORE the movie was released, however, the huge wave of anticipation obviously drove sales of the original graphic novel.
What was so ironic, however, was that Watchmen was selling hundreds of thousands of copies of its "grim and gritty" 1986 story to the mainstream public...at the same time that Morrison was strangely proclaiming the final death of "grim and gritty" in Final Crisis, which only spoke to a very small audience, most of whom didn't even like the final issue of the story. Watchmen and Alan Moore was never reaching more people...during last winter when Morrison was trying (and failing, I believe) to inaugurate a new, happier superhero age.
Superhero comics in 2009 seemed to me to be pretty similar to recent years. Not the most stellar year, I'll give you that, but not a dramatic fall, at least in the titles I bought, but I don't buy anywhere near as many books as either of you do.
Perhaps it's a matter of perception? I mean, I don't look to my superhero comics to blow me away with innovation. There's a certain quality level I look for in terms of things like plot, dialogue, pacing, and other elements of writing, but to me, insisting on great superhero comics all the time is asking too much of genre fiction - any genre fiction. People tend to like genre fiction because it has a particular format to it and for whatever reason that format appeals to them. For me, if I get a superhero comic that breaks the conventions, and the way it does so works, that's great. It will probably be something I reread more than a standard superhero tale, but I didn't come to superhero comics looking for anything groundbreaking. I just want at least a competent superhero story.
Now comics as a medium is another issue. There, I think innovation and great works are imperative, but perhaps the boldest instance of innovation at the big two is the simple act of publishing a non-superhero book. This is an area where I'm both more lenient in giving a creator time to make their point, so to say, but also more harsh if the work just doesn't hold up to the premise. And in 2009, I picked up and enjoyed way more non-superhero books in pamphlet form than 2008, and perhaps any year before.
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