Normally , your friendly neighborhood Keeper would shy away from re-printing a chunk of a 2-year-old interview with comics god Grant Morrison.
However, these particular comments perfectly summed up the feelings we’ve tried to express regarding modern super-hero comics since this blog was launched. (Particularly Marvel’s desire to turn their universe into a sprawling episode of 24 …)
Hopefully, this won’t come off as old-hat for our five or six regular readers out there.
(Text reprinted from PopImage.)
This creeping unease a lot of fans are feeling isn’t so much about people wanting to get paid for their labour but about a kind of devaluing of comics as a form, which has been going on. As the rush to convert comic books into handy illustrated movie pitches becomes less chaotic and more transparent, I think we’ve all become aware of a kind of betrayal, a public strangling of the exotic strangeness and uniqueness of American comics, as publishers, creators and readers confuse their media and expect comic book stories to conform to Hollywood storytelling conventions.
Wise up: the more comics imitate movies, the less need movies will have for comics as a source of imaginative material; let’s remember that the movie industry is ONLY NOW learning to simulate the technology and imagination Jack Kirby packed in his pencil 40 years ago. As I’ve been saying to the point of boredom for the last couple of years, our creative community owes it to the future to produce today the insane, logic-shattering, side-splitting day-glo stories which will be turned into all-immersive holographic magic theatre experiences in 40 years time.
The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let’s see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let’s make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let’s make artifacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that’s what it is. Let’s see images which come directly from the minds of inspired artists, not from publicity stills.
Superhero comics are way too expensive for the mass market and the brand of garish, violent pulp they were once the only source for is available these days in more attractive media. We should get real about this and stop dumbing down, stop stunting our artists’ creativity and stop trying to attract a completely imaginary ‘mainstream audience’. The best way to consolidate comics as a viable medium is to make them LESS like other media, not more. Let our artists go wild on imaginative page layouts. Let our writers find stories in their dreams and not in the newspaper pages, at least for a little while again. Aim for the cool, literate ‘college’ audience, as Stan Lee did to great success in the 60s.
And let’s also clear something up - people like superhero movies, not because they like superheroes or comics, but because they like movies. At best, they remember Spider-Man and the Hulk and the others from TV shows and cartoon series, not from comic books. There is NO significant crossover market as comics sales figures indicate. We’re dancing like fools for pennies and there’s nobody there who wasn’t there already. How about a return to some pride in our medium and its singular qualities?
How about it true believers?
Do you feel the future of comics lies with the cinematic “reality” of Civil War, or the mind-blowing psychedelia of Gødland?
You know how the Keeper would vote …
