black friday turkey

[davemerrill]

Ostensibly 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.

Comments

[frustratedpilot]

Not to mention that the current and future generations have it easier with the mechanics of comics creation as well. This fellow had nothing more than supermarket posterboard and pens from the Dollar Store With More. The boom in notebook and tablet computers will put unprecedented creative firepower in the hands of those with the imagination and drive to make their vision happen. Already there are ways to turn HD flat screen TV sets into touchscreen "easels" for artists. I think, if we aren't already living a new Golden Age of comics, we will very soon.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

I don't know that lack of art supplies was this guy's problem. The greatest supercomputer in the world is not going to help you if you think vigilante has a "y" in it, or if you think thrown objects travel at 25 miles an hour. Or you don't know what "bleed" is.

[gallo-de-pelea.livejournal.com]

Yup. I like this post.

It's funny, looking back on how hard it was to access good comics during the early 90's. I had to dig through box after box to find an odd issue of Appleseed here or SIP there, and oh boy if a copy of Instant Piano turned up... I was only able to read Tintin because a friend had some very old hardbacks.

As for output - there are complaints, of course, about self-publishing making it easier to put out crap, but that doesn't bother me -- what's important is that artists and writers and musicians that publishers and record labels wouldn't take a chance on now have the opportunity to be heard on their own terms, making their own material.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

We are kind of in a golden age of access to great material. When I was growing up, the most you could see of Roy Crane's work was a couple months' continuity in one of those Smithsonian books.. now you can buy volumes and volumes of Wash Tubbs or Buz Sawyer. Giant books of Gasoline Alley, big hardback reprints of the best comics from the 1950s, the 60s, the 70s... I know those EC reprints have been around forever but those were hard to find. Now all we're missing are good reprints of the undergrounds.

[warpig1979.livejournal.com]

And you can even get a lot of underground stuff in nice formats these days. Sooner or later I'm going to succumb and get that 600-page Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers collection.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

Yup, those big Freak Brothers books are terrific. Actually they've been really good about keeping the Freak Brothers in print, and a lot of the Crumb stuff is still in print. A lot of other material has vanished however... when am I going to get my big MICKEY RAT book??

[warpig1979.livejournal.com]

Rip Off Press has done yeoman's work with those, yeah, the Gilbert Shelton and the Crumb books. And Fantagraphics with stuff like TRASHMAN LIVES. I wonder how much of the old comix are just lost to history, though, with the originals long since rotted or burned or whatever.

[magic-trashman.livejournal.com]

Dave, I find your Stupid Comic articles to be a regular delight that I look forward to each week. I usually seek out copies of the b/w 80's indy publications after you riff on them.

I feel that your lament about the 80's and 90's lacking for seminal comic material (and influencing subsequent work) has merit but for different reasons. I grew up reading TinTin, Asterix & Obelix in original French. I had access to a variety of old issues of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, horror rags, Mad, Cracked, Crazy that the adults in my family had the foresight to preserve and share. When my appetites branched out I ultimately had little difficulty in tracking down what I wanted, be it through libraries, used book stores or mail order.

In my mind, this is just another spectrum of how kids would rather sit through a cartoon rather than read the literary classics until their high school teacher makes them for an assignment, if at all. Ignorance and laziness left them satisfied with the Garfield compilations in their public school library and the superhero garbage at gas station newsstands. The onus of broadening someone's horizons falls on themselves but also on their parents, family and educational system to some degree.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

I think Mr Kitty is building a market for terrible comics that wasn't there before. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing...

I found in high school that some literary classics actually lived up to their name, but others were really boring. What I really found lacking in my high school was art education - one art teacher for thousands of kids, struggling to provide even the tiniest bit of exposure to visual arts. And of course cartoon art was instantly dismissed. Boy, she hated comics. Not all high school art teachers are like that, but mine was kind of overwhelmed, just trying to get through each day.

I would like to see at least visual arts classes taught alongside math, English, and science from first grade right on through graduation, with some art history, graphic design, and related disciplines thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately at a time when budgets are nonexistent this isn't going to happen. Hell, they cut Driver's Ed at my old high school; that's like playing Russian Roulette with your roads.

I suppose at this point it falls on the parents to ensure their children get some kind of visual education, so that they aren't culturally crippled.