Borked Planet

Menachem Luchins is not a Comic Book Historian, nor does he claim to be 100% accurate about any statement portrayed as factual herein. If you notice an error or an omission he made about a verifiable fact, please let us know in the comments section.

 

Making an Ass Out of You and Me

Or; What Comics Is or Isn’t

 

Part 1. Assumptions Central

or; Everyone Else is Doing It…

 

When I sat down to write this I found myself thinking, “Won’t it seem strange to people to see an article by a twenty-something religious English teacher from New York on the blog of a thirty-something lesbian comic creator in Oregon?”

 

No, really, I did. Of course, people who know me are aware that interacting with other people is what I’m all about, no matter what their age, religion, orientation or profession is. But what I was really thinking about were the people who don’t know me; there are a lot of them, after all. The people who don’t know me will, as most people on the internet do, probably just look for some small blob about “who I am.” Maybe they’ll google me or find me on twitter, but all they’re really going to see is what I listed above; religious, 20s, English teacher, New York.  All of those descriptions (if you’d go so far as to call them that) have a limiting nature because they all create assumptions about who I am and what my interests are. And that’s why assumptions are bad.

 

Right, you know this. We all know this. We all know it makes and ASS out of U and ME. Sure. Yet we all do it. Someone decides to throw a label on some singer or describe a writer’s work with a genre and we all agree. Someone says, “Well, you know, he’s… religious.” And we do, of course, all know. It’s nice to think that we don’t allow ourselves these little harmful shortcuts but, if we’re honest, we know we do. Sure you can work on it, go right ahead. That’s really not what I’m here to discuss, anyway. What I am here to discuss is Comics (or Comix or Graphic Fiction or Funny Books or Cartoons or whatever) and it is in the world of Comics that assumption is not only a virulent plague of epic proportion but one that most of us don’t even see anymore.

 

Right about now there all sorts of “Best of 2011” lists on the web, many of them Comics-oriented and a few that are even “fiction”-oriented and (finally!) include some Comics. If you breeze through these lists you will think that the world of Comics is great, we’ve got Superman up there with Hope Larson and R. Crumb rubbing shoulders with Fred van Lente. “All is right with the Comics World,” you will say, “look how diverse and multi-faceted the industry is!”

 

And that would be your first mistake. Comics is not an “Industry.” This is a term popularized in the 60s by a company cranking out super-hero books so as to lend itself the “glamour” of the movie industry. Comics is a medium, it is a way of conveying information. Scott McCloud used the much debated definition of “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” to describe what exactly that medium is, but that’s really beside the point I’m trying to make.Simply put: Comics is not a genre of fiction or a style of art, you can’t rank it up there with “horror” or “neo-impressionism,” but a storytelling device, to be considered with Film or Painting, Sculpture or Prose. When you think of comics as a “children’s playground” or a boy’s club that is “finally coming of age” you are not only showcasing your ignorance but damaging the very cause you hope to champion.

 

That was mistake number one, I said. A relatively minor one, actually. You see, with the internet at it’s current speed and breadth, people with common interests can connect in seconds, share in moments and can debate the finer points of their interests endlessly. Which is great, of course. What happens, though, is that some of us sometimes forget that there is an outside world that is not “hip” to comics. Sure, we’ve noticed more people smiling when they see our Green Lantern tee or actually had a friend borrow our copy of Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, so it seems that progress is being made. And it is! The world is certainly more aware of comics and the diversity within it that it was 10 years ago. That just doesn’t actually mean much, given the state of things 10 years ago. To make the connection that since you know a 16 year old who loves Paul Pope or Penny Arcade and since you see that the Comics is becoming more aware of it’s diversity (as seen from those “best of” lists) and to then make the assumption that Comics are now popular, accepted and seen for what they are and what they have the potential to be, well… that’s mistake number two, and it’s a doozy.

 

The average person on the street, even the average comic book reader (and by average, I mean figure it out based on numbers of copies sold: if Super-Hero Mini Series of Epic Proportion sold, say 500,000 copies and Really Wonderful, Meaningful and Insightful Work of Fiction that Happens to be a Comic sold 100,000… well, you do the math) is aware that comics can tell all sort of stories but mainly thinks of Super-Heroes, Humor and, often times, Autobiographical works. The glut of Super-Hero movies has paved the way for more “intellectual” work to be made into films, to be sure. This means that Joe Public knows, “Smash! Pow! Biff! Comic Books Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!” but that’s about all he knows. Some book won a big award, some fantasy thing caused a mistake at some weirdo fantasy awards. To these people, to most people, the fact that the “nerd” (or “geek”) thing is in right now or acceptable just means that he has certain facts he has to know. Like how he’d have to know the rules of football, if he lived in a certain town, or how to ski in a different one. We “nerds” (or “geeks”) like to see ourselves as having finally conquered popular culture, we like to think we have become not only accepted but ubiquitous. With these assumptions and short-sightedness we have just become another market to exploit, another demographic to be played to.

 

Take the fight over what a comic is. A while back I partook of a conversation on Twitter™ about what defines a webcomic as a comic. I honestly don’t remember who it was with, only that it was through the official Twitter account of my wife’s webcomic which has a column tagged for the word “webcomic” that I like to peruse now and then. Now, in the mid-90s Scott McCloud and a few others (but mainly Scott) were hailing the accessibility of content and creative skills that computers and the internet were providing and, therefore, predicting all sorts of wild Golden Age SF-style ideas for Comics in the digital medium. McCloud was especially excited by the concept of comics on the web and in his Reinventing Comics (2000) went into detail of all the technical and artistic options the modern creator had, greatest of which was the new way to get content out there.

Finally, 10 years later, the world has caught up to the vision McCloud had and he, of course, has moved beyond that vision. While the Paid-for, App-Based, Produced by Multi-Million Dollar Companies digital comics are flinging wirelessly onto iThings around the world, McCloud is tweeting discoveries, lecturing and experimenting with the digital medium (even taking time to design the  about page for Google’s new browser, Chrome). He has done micro-payments, he has created intense digital experiences that use the web to create a whole new experience in viewing comics, he is so far ahead of the curve it hurts. Meanwhile, some dude on twitter wants to know if something counts as a webcomic if it later gets published as a book. People chime in that it depends on if the author really wanted to publish on the web or if he was looking to get his art seen by a  big company. Some moron (this one) says that it doesn’t matter; if it’s new content, on the web first, made for display on the web, it is a webcomic, whether the creator’s intent was “pure” or not. And this is what passes for intellectual debate about the medium. Why not just ask; “who would win in a fight, Nate Powell or Craig Thompson?” It’s immaterial! All you’re doing is discussing petty little details with other obsessives about a format that is only read by a few (yes, a few. I know more people than ever are reading comics but, guess what, there are more people than ever, period).

 

A lot has been made, in argument with my above point, that Comics are now “hip” and artsy, understood by the Alternative Press and suchlike. In defense, I say: 1. That such claims are nothing new and 2. Well… read part two of this article

 

and don’t forget to check out Menachem on the web! You can find him on Twitter as @NukeLuchins and don’t forget to check out his wife Sarahs comic “Funny Shorts” you can follow her comic on Twitter as @FunnyShorts.