Yet again, I have something to say, and I am using Superman Through the Ages space to say it. Last time, I ranted about how many people would like for characters to have a history, and Crisis essentially did away with that (not in the case of The Flash, for example, but Superman) This time, I would simply like to point out that superhero comics have a modern equivalent.
The focus and goals of this site, as well as the views of its members, seem to be partly paradoxical. As far as I know, we are all adults who would like to enjoy comics. On the other hand, we think that superhero comics belong to the kids, or at least kids should be able to read them (All-Ages comics.)
I can't speak for the other members of the site, but I don't really care if kids read comics or not, to be perfectly honest. I also don't care if adults read comics or not either; the industry is a sick old man, and nobody can take my back issues, Archive Editions and Essentials away from me.
American superhero comics have been replaced by cartoons. If you buy a Justice League comic, it costs (I think) $2.50. If you watch Justice League Unlimited, it costs nothing, or very little. Similarly, if you buy a DVD set of Superfriends or Superman: The Animated Series, you pay about $1.00 per episode, if that much. Thanks to capitalism, most people will watch the cartoons instead, especially kids.
My point is, it has become less expensive to serve children with a 30-minute weekly/daily cartoon episode than to buy them a monthly comic book. While writers have struggled to redefine superheroes for adults, children are still getting a pretty good dose of them, at prices affordable to children. Cartoons are the new comic books.
And now I'm going to sit down and watch Superman: The Animated Series vol. 2....
This point is something that is so simple I'm astonished that it feels new to anybody.
Often we wonder about why it is kids don't read comics. It's not because of John Byrne or Crisis or whatever. It's not because of continuity. It's not because the caliber of writing talent has decreased.
The reason is because unfortunately, kids don't read anything, and for that matter, neither do adults. Why look at scribbles on a page when you can rent the video?
I for one, wish I read more. Books are a much more mentally active means of spending time than television, where you just sort of turn your brain off.
This is ALSO true of comic books to a lesser extent. All comics show you are still pictures, not unlike photographs. It requires imagination to envision the gaps between these pictures, just like it requires imagination to translate words into a story.
What is truly tragic is that a lot of writers aren't using the peculiar strengths of the comic book medium. These include thought bubbles: comics are the only visual medium that can take a person into a character's inner world without awkward devices like voice-overs. These also include caption boxes; as writers get less and less liberal with their word counts, a strength of comics is lost: the ability to combine words with pictures, and further, the ability of comics to show what is going on in all five senses, not just sight and sound.
Even worse, some writers think of writing comics as if they were movies, which they are not and cannot be, and their attempts to duplicate the movie and teleivision medium fail. One example of this is in Mark Waid's JLA: YEAR ONE, in the first issue, where Hal Jordan is piloting a plane to safety. This sequence probably was much more exciting in Mark Waid's head than it was on the page. The reason is, all that Han Solo type pilot stuff featuring an onrushing plane falling to earth is only exciting when there is the presence of MOVEMENT, something comics can only clumsily convey. The pictures of the plane as they are in the comic feel stiff and frozen.
Dennis O'Neil once pointed out that something that can never be done well in comics form is a car chase.
Another example of mixing mediums with the result being something boring, is in Warren Ellis's PLANETARY #3. A person flipping over a car and shooting everything inside may be interesting in a Hong Kong Kung Fu picture where there is choreography, stuntmen and the advantage of motion, but dedicating several pages to it is downright wasteful and dull in comics form. In comics, there is no sense of weight; this is why Hawkman always looks cooler in cartoons than when he just lies there on a page, for example. When in that issue, a person jumps over a car, it feels frozen and stiff, and the acrobatics are unimpressive because in a medium like comics, drawings and people just "float."
This is an advantage with characters like, for example, Green Lantern, whose aerial agility is made all the more astonishing because there is a degree of effortlessness about it, a case of Gil Kane using the STRENGTHS of the comic medium.