Comics and Stuff
Feb. 28th, 2007 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayLast weekend, I made it out to the comic book store for the first time in ages. Between the holidays and work hecticness, I estimate it's been 10 weeks. Steve had to give me a short-box to carry it all home in. Good thing I had managed to borrow the car!
The Outer Limits will be moving again soon, just a few doors down. They had been in their current location for many years, but I've been a customer for even longer. This will be the fourth storefront of theirs that I've shopped at.
Having been away so long, I had 3 catalogs to go through. I'm trying to cut back on my buying, but I still want to pan for new gold. It can take a lot of panning these days; a 500 page catalog often produces less than 5 new items I want.
And going through the catalog is depressing in other ways, too. Even though I avoid *buying* the worst excesses, I still become aware of them. And this latest catalog includes a series of items that makes me despair for the satirists of the world, if reality can offer up something like this.
First, some background. Sometime in the 1980s, the term 'Marvel Zombie' gained prominence in the fan community. It referred (in its purest usage) to people who not only bought exclusively Marvel comics, they would buy *all* Marvel comics, regardless of whether or not they enjoyed them. It was *not* meant as a compliment, though some far-gone cases took it as a badge of honor.
Sometime last year, someone at Marvel got the silly idea to do a mini-series that was actually named "Marvel Zombies". It took place in an alternate universe which was suffering from a typical zombie apocalypse, and in which many of the heroes had been turned into flesh-eating undead.
Apparently, this was something of a sleeper hit. Marvel has never been known to let something like that lie fallow until it has been milked completely to death, so now they're coming out with a bunch of spinoffs (by other creators naturally).
In one of these, Spider-Man, who had apparently avoided the zombie plague in the original story, gets infected. The first thing he does is eviscerate his wife, Mary Jane. The cover of the comic is a clever, if incredibly tasteless, homage to the cover of the issue where they got married. In this version, Spider-Man has a fanged, wide open, and bloody mouth, and Mary Jane's wedding dress has a huge bloodstain on it as she hangs dead on his arm.
I guess that the marketing arm really likes that image. Not only is it the cover of the book, they're also selling it as a poster. And a T-shirt. And even a statue which sells for $125!
I have often lamented over the past few years that the American comic book industry has been locked in a death spiral. That they have completely abandoned the *actual* mainstream, focusing instead on drawing ever-increasing amounts of cash from a fan base that gets smaller and more inbred every year. That they are, in fact, cannibalizing their own fan base.
This image encapsulates everything I see as wrong with the industry. It's hyper-violent and misogynistic. It's yet another version of continuity, to make things even more confusing to those not in the know. And Marvel seems to think that its fans will not only spend hundreds of dollars on different versions of this image -- they will even be willing to wear it in public.
This is not an isolated incident. Last month, in another out-of-continuity story, Mary Jane gets cancer because of years of exposure to Spider-Man's radioactive sperm. And then she turns into some sort of monster on her deathbed and attacks him before dying.
And it's not just Spider-Man, or just Marvel. DC has had an increasing incidence of high-profile rapes, mass murders, and mutilations in the last few years. Smaller 'exploitation' publishers, such as Avatar, seem to be having a boom year.
A modern-day Wertham might well find a link between reading superhero comics and antisocial behavior. Not because the comics *cause* that behavior, but because you have to be at least a little sociopathic to enjoy a steady diet of this stuff. Comics fans tend to be maladjusted nerds because the publishers have systematically driven away any sane readers. This has been going on since the advent of the Direct Market, but having continued down that path for 30 years, the conentration level is growing truly toxic.
The Outer Limits will be moving again soon, just a few doors down. They had been in their current location for many years, but I've been a customer for even longer. This will be the fourth storefront of theirs that I've shopped at.
Having been away so long, I had 3 catalogs to go through. I'm trying to cut back on my buying, but I still want to pan for new gold. It can take a lot of panning these days; a 500 page catalog often produces less than 5 new items I want.
And going through the catalog is depressing in other ways, too. Even though I avoid *buying* the worst excesses, I still become aware of them. And this latest catalog includes a series of items that makes me despair for the satirists of the world, if reality can offer up something like this.
First, some background. Sometime in the 1980s, the term 'Marvel Zombie' gained prominence in the fan community. It referred (in its purest usage) to people who not only bought exclusively Marvel comics, they would buy *all* Marvel comics, regardless of whether or not they enjoyed them. It was *not* meant as a compliment, though some far-gone cases took it as a badge of honor.
Sometime last year, someone at Marvel got the silly idea to do a mini-series that was actually named "Marvel Zombies". It took place in an alternate universe which was suffering from a typical zombie apocalypse, and in which many of the heroes had been turned into flesh-eating undead.
Apparently, this was something of a sleeper hit. Marvel has never been known to let something like that lie fallow until it has been milked completely to death, so now they're coming out with a bunch of spinoffs (by other creators naturally).
In one of these, Spider-Man, who had apparently avoided the zombie plague in the original story, gets infected. The first thing he does is eviscerate his wife, Mary Jane. The cover of the comic is a clever, if incredibly tasteless, homage to the cover of the issue where they got married. In this version, Spider-Man has a fanged, wide open, and bloody mouth, and Mary Jane's wedding dress has a huge bloodstain on it as she hangs dead on his arm.
I guess that the marketing arm really likes that image. Not only is it the cover of the book, they're also selling it as a poster. And a T-shirt. And even a statue which sells for $125!
I have often lamented over the past few years that the American comic book industry has been locked in a death spiral. That they have completely abandoned the *actual* mainstream, focusing instead on drawing ever-increasing amounts of cash from a fan base that gets smaller and more inbred every year. That they are, in fact, cannibalizing their own fan base.
This image encapsulates everything I see as wrong with the industry. It's hyper-violent and misogynistic. It's yet another version of continuity, to make things even more confusing to those not in the know. And Marvel seems to think that its fans will not only spend hundreds of dollars on different versions of this image -- they will even be willing to wear it in public.
This is not an isolated incident. Last month, in another out-of-continuity story, Mary Jane gets cancer because of years of exposure to Spider-Man's radioactive sperm. And then she turns into some sort of monster on her deathbed and attacks him before dying.
And it's not just Spider-Man, or just Marvel. DC has had an increasing incidence of high-profile rapes, mass murders, and mutilations in the last few years. Smaller 'exploitation' publishers, such as Avatar, seem to be having a boom year.
A modern-day Wertham might well find a link between reading superhero comics and antisocial behavior. Not because the comics *cause* that behavior, but because you have to be at least a little sociopathic to enjoy a steady diet of this stuff. Comics fans tend to be maladjusted nerds because the publishers have systematically driven away any sane readers. This has been going on since the advent of the Direct Market, but having continued down that path for 30 years, the conentration level is growing truly toxic.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 02:16 am (UTC)I swear: parodists ought to form a union. I don't generally approve of trade protectionism, but Marvel has gone too far.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 02:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 03:20 am (UTC)???!??!?
Didn't realize it'd gotten that bad. I mean, the only 'recent' Marvel I've read -- the Ultimate serieses -- seemed to be more violent, misogynist, and graphic, but I thought that was just a one-off. Ugh.
Makes me want to find all the aspiring comics artists I knew as a kid, and see if they'd be up for monthly deadlines. Surely there's a market for 'normal' comics...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 05:38 pm (UTC)Nope. It's part of an ongoing trend.
Surely there's a market for 'normal' comics
Absolutely. You just won't find that market in the average comic book store any more.
I should mention here that Boston is unusally blessed in both the quantity and, more importantly, the *quality* of our comic book stores. (Though the quantity helps the quality, by allowing competition.) The shop that Neil Gaiman depicted in the last chapter of A Game of You (Sandman) remains a more typical example.
And there are lots of people making 'normal' comics already. They just aren't the people being promoted by Marvel or DC.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 03:59 pm (UTC)I've never been interested in superhero comics, and there are only a couple print comics I've liked. But I have found a bunch of webcomics worth reading (and they're free!), listed here on my summary of the Webcartoonist's Choice Awards.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 05:26 pm (UTC)There are lots of truly great comics out there, arguably more than ever before. They just don't feature superheroes.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 04:41 pm (UTC)Which leaves the problem that most of the comic stores are either run by, or cater mainly to, Marvel/DC zombies, and therefore they are locked into the same death spiral. And the good stores must now compete with Amazon and B&N for the mainstream audience. So yeah, the 80s are gone and will never come again.
*at first I didn't like the phrase "fed and woo'ed" and was trying to think of alternatives; but then I realized it sort of went with the whole Spiderman zombie image. Whee!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 05:29 pm (UTC)I think that Outer Limits will survive, as it has a broad range of merchandise. Likewise The Million Year Picnic. But the stereotypical grungy, dimly-lit, Simpsons-esque store is well on the path to extinction. It won't be missed.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 06:26 pm (UTC)Hopefully first they would appeal to the community to save them, as Pandemonium and other indy shops have done.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-01 07:03 pm (UTC)There are still plenty of good "normal" super hero comics out there. They are fast becoming the exception, but they are still far from extinct. Daredevil, Ultimate Spider-Man, Justice Society, X-Factor and Astonishing X-Men are all still quite good in my opinion. They are not overly violent or disturbing, again, in my opinion.
That being said, I am no longer carrying comics in my store, because I just couldn't make any money on them.