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black friday turkey
Nov. 25th, 2011 12:56 pmOstensibly this is an African-American themed superhero - the hero is clearly a black guy, even though the comic is set in the future on an artificial entertainment planet filled with high tech diversions and amusements. And drug dealers in flying cars.
It's one of those comics you kinda feel bad for making fun of, and then you get to the end and there's a big one page pitch for all the merchandise they were planning on selling the world based on their nonexistent characters, and then you don't feel so bad. Though as a real-world example of wishful thinking it is without peer.
We poke fun at the terrible self-produced adventure/superhero comics of the 90s, but really, these terrible comics are all made by people who had spent their childhoods reading terrible corporate adventure/superhero comics. They hadn't been reading Carl Barks or Tintin or Kirby anything, they hadn't been reading Jesse Marsh Tarzan or Prince Valiant or the Spirit or the Neal Adams/Denny O'Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow or anything by Steranko. They don't know who Wallace Wood was or that John Severin ever drew anything other than covers for "Cracked". They hadn't been exposed to anything but terrible meaningless drivel filled with third rate copies of third rate copies, filled with "homages" and "references" and "swipes" of the talented people that had worked years before, edited by barely literate drones hoping for a piece of Hollywood action when the bubble burst.
Garbage in, garbage out.
So it's not their fault that their whole worldview is informed by subliterate trash. I don't know that it's anybody's fault. It's not like they were raised in a Skinner box filled with issues of X-FACTOR and YOUNGBLOOD, not deliberately, anyways. The reprints that we take for granted now weren't available in the 80s and 90s, you couldn't spend hours in the library reading nothing but world-class sequential art the way you can today. I think we're raising a generation now that is vastly more literate, visually - young people are exposed to more artwork in more styles and at more skill levels than ever before, and I think you can see the results anywhere young people are expressing themselves with artwork. So this week's Stupid Comics isn't a prophecy; mercifully, it's a dead end.
It's one of those comics you kinda feel bad for making fun of, and then you get to the end and there's a big one page pitch for all the merchandise they were planning on selling the world based on their nonexistent characters, and then you don't feel so bad. Though as a real-world example of wishful thinking it is without peer.
We poke fun at the terrible self-produced adventure/superhero comics of the 90s, but really, these terrible comics are all made by people who had spent their childhoods reading terrible corporate adventure/superhero comics. They hadn't been reading Carl Barks or Tintin or Kirby anything, they hadn't been reading Jesse Marsh Tarzan or Prince Valiant or the Spirit or the Neal Adams/Denny O'Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow or anything by Steranko. They don't know who Wallace Wood was or that John Severin ever drew anything other than covers for "Cracked". They hadn't been exposed to anything but terrible meaningless drivel filled with third rate copies of third rate copies, filled with "homages" and "references" and "swipes" of the talented people that had worked years before, edited by barely literate drones hoping for a piece of Hollywood action when the bubble burst.
Garbage in, garbage out.
So it's not their fault that their whole worldview is informed by subliterate trash. I don't know that it's anybody's fault. It's not like they were raised in a Skinner box filled with issues of X-FACTOR and YOUNGBLOOD, not deliberately, anyways. The reprints that we take for granted now weren't available in the 80s and 90s, you couldn't spend hours in the library reading nothing but world-class sequential art the way you can today. I think we're raising a generation now that is vastly more literate, visually - young people are exposed to more artwork in more styles and at more skill levels than ever before, and I think you can see the results anywhere young people are expressing themselves with artwork. So this week's Stupid Comics isn't a prophecy; mercifully, it's a dead end.
