Let's Do it Different...Just Like Them....
Believe it or not, I'm gonna talk comics.

I wait until Thursday to pick up my new books. As I'm only regularly reading two titles, I don't go to the shop much. Of course, that isn't the only reason that I don't go.

For one, I don't need to read nor collect the umpteen billion Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, or X-men titles. That's half the reason I had initially dumped comics oh so long ago. It was about the time of Inferno, when you had to buy all this crap you don't normally read just to follow a story. No dice. I don't mind the occasional spin-off or limited series. In fact, sometimes I really like them. But I'm not buying Speedball #5 just to keep up a story. (Someone out there reading this is so nodding his/her head right now.)

Now when it was just Batman and Detective Comics, I could dig that (much like Superman and Action Comics...though I never liked Supes' books). Amazing Spiderman and Spectacular Spiderman, I read them both. Web of... was a bit much. Once the McFarlane solo-line came out, they were pushing it, really pushing it. And as for the X-books...(This needs a new paragraph.)

When it was X-men, X-factor, and the New Mutants, I could follow along. It was essentially three different generations. X-factor was mostly the original team. X-men was sort of a blend of the second generation and whoever they picked up along the way. New Mutants were the students, the newbies. That was all fine and good. They croseed over fairly regularly, but you didn't have to read more than you wanted to. Then that damned X-force came along. Then Jim Lee gets his own X-book. The story line of X-men went all over the place, and never has recovered. Now it seems like every character, team, villain, and alternate time-line gets its own book. Well, I, for one (who used to like it), couldn't care less now.

(Part of that is the fact that of those half-billion characters new and old that litter the series...they all talk like Wolverine now, who is, in and of himself, way overexposed as it is.)

Much of the rest of the titles, I just don't generally care for. As for the indies and such, well, every once in a while there's a good 'un. Thing is, I've just got this thing for the classics (ie. Marvel and DC). So sue me. Problem is, the characters I like have either mostly vanished, or get their own books only to be canceled within the year. (I'm still lamenting the death of the last Captain Marvel comic...good work Peter David...I did what I could to keep it going every month.)

Sure I just ranted on that for half a page, but that isn't what I came for.

Truth is, there's one overlying reason why I won't pick up most stuff, why I hate even flipping through, why I'm disgusted with comics in general....

(Drumroll, please.)

It's the artwork. The most important part.

Now, obviously, I'm writing this, and it ain't some namby-pamby "Me and Jessica went to the mall today. I'm so bored. I want a fudgesicle," kind of blog. I write it like an article or essay...albeit a half-ass one...but still something of an investment. I also write on the side, and I've always been a big reader. I like stories. I like good writing. With a comic book...it doesn't always have to be the best, and even if it is....it's still only half the job.

It's like that Derek Jarman flick, Blue. Basically it's a blue screen for an hour and a half (and I mean that literally...not in a Matrix/Star Wars blue screen way) while you hear a story go on. Now that's an interesting experiment, but not much of a movie. It's visuals. You gotta see something. Imagine if the Godfather had been made on a Troma scale instead of Francis Ford at Paramount. Sure the story might've been good, but I don't think you'd remember it as well or as fondly.

Hold on though, I'm not saying that the art is cheap or necessarily bad. Certainly it is in some cases (Is it just me or does Rob Liefield's stuff still look like the sh!t wannabe artists scribble in the corners of their notebooks with heavy metal logos around it?), but not in all. No, the problem I have with it is that it's generic...but in a very specific way.

You're waiting for me to elaborate, right?

Jumping back to when I was a kid buying comics in the 80's, me and a bunch of my friends were wowed and impressed when we got our first look at an issue of Lone Wolf and Cub. Sure we had seen Robotech on TV and what have you, but that wasn't the same as the artwork on the printed page. Lone Wolf was our first exposure to the manga style, and being something different and totally stylish it stood out. Then Marvels' Epic arm put out Otomo's Akira and we saw a newer and sci-fi version of that art. We didn't have the internet yet, and animé hadn't taken off, so we got it in slow doses.

Well, what happened since then?

We got flooded with it. Japanese-style comics are all over the place. Funny thing is, just like American comics of say the 80's, if you see enough of them, you realize how similar it all looks. There are always a few standouts, but most of it can get pretty pedestrian. As popular as it is, it's not surprising that the American companies might pick up a similar look for some of their titles. However, you wouldn't think it would spread over into nearly all of them.

What's more there's a whole mess of indy titles that are the exact same way.

I can understand why people like it. It's simple and often direct. The more cartoony it gets, the more it becomes like a visual arts shorthand. In that sense it's like an abstraction of sorts...well, boys and girls...do you know what the problem with that is?

If you don't know how to get to the really simple abstracted form from the complex form...if you just skip ahead to the simplified version...well, chances are you don't do it right...and chances are it looks either a) blandly generic or b) like crap.

Take a moment to surf the net, and you'll find hundreds if not thousands of examples of what I'm talking about. Lots of folks who don't understand things like anatomy doing crappy drawings of would-be animated forms. It's a copy of a copy. They're copying some manga they like while that original manga artist is bringing together years of a specific Asian drawing style onto his page.

Not to mention that any general anglicizing of things is bad. For instance, do you like Jackie Chan's Hong Kong efforts or his more Hollywood efforts? (And I assume you know which are which...Operation Condor was not a Hollywood project.) Ever seen The Big Brawl (aka. Battle Creek Brawl)? I still shudder. It's not that Hollywood can't do it...It's more that they shouldn't.

For me, it's the same with the comics. Sure some of them don't look half-bad...but they all look the same. I like diversity. I like being able to turn to something new. You don't get that if the two biggest comic producing countries in the world look more or less the same. Right?

Maybe, it's all just another sign that it's all on its way out the door, or while I wasn't looking it got away from me somehow.

Like that realization you get when you realize that MTV isn't aiming at you as a demographic anymore because you're too old for them.

That kind of thing.

In some ways, maybe it's good.

Cheers.