Superman Through the Ages! Forum

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.)

At one point in history, comics were giant magazines written for children. They were ten cents (modern equivalent $1.29) Today most superhero comics are written with young adults in mind, cost twice as much after adjusting for inflation, and are only 24 pages. The exception is the DC Kids line, based mostly on cartoons....which brings me to my next point.

American superhero comics have been replaced by cartoons.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....

and movies, you forgot movies.

When I worked at a pre-school, all the kids knew who Robin was, Batman was, Spiderman, Daredevil, Hulk, and Superman. Clearly these kids were not reading comics... since they couldn't even read, LOL. They knew them for cartoons and movies.

That said I do wish that people would read more rather than watch TV.

I had watched the Superman TV show as a child and wanted more. I learned to read by reading Superman comics my mother had bought and read to me.

Not many 2nd graders could spell, much less know what 'disintergrate' means. I did becaused mauaders from the bottle city attempted to enlarge Kandor with a imperfect ray.

Hah = take THAT Frederic Wertham!

Klar, to be fair, were you reading pre-Comics Code Superman?
 :D

what abour re-runs of superFreinds?

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.



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.

I have to disagree about comics and the sense of movement, time, and weight they convey.  As you note, Gil Kane is a good example where a great artist can interpret a character's movements in a believable way in comics.  But Kubert's Hawkman, Infantino's Flash, Kirby's Mr. Fantastic and a million others all succeed better than any film I've seen.  And where film trumps or equals comics, it often borrows from them (ie, the Flash).  You are right to note that when comics ape films (some decompression, approximations of Hong Kong aerial balletics, etc) it often fails.  But comics have invented entire vocabularies of seeing that film has never touched.

And I can't help but think that anything written by Mark Waid for comics would fail because of the artists he is usually paired with (even Alex Ross's "falling statues" are artistic failures for me).  You have to write to your artists' strengths.

Of course, it just doesn't seem logical to put the blame on the writer for the artist's limitations.

It doesn't --but comics are a visual medium.  So if the editor or writer is not thinking in terms of how the story can best be told visually, they are not doing their jobs.  Of course, traditionally writers have tended to overwrite to make up for the loss of control they experience when an artist translates their story (in terms of text boxes, expository dialogue and though balloons).  They don't always have this option in film.  In both mediums (more obvious in comics) the mangling of a script by a director/artist is not always easy to detect.  

Has anyone seen that French comic that adapts Raymond Chandler's last unfilmed screenplay?

Do you mean Playback? It's adapted by Ted Benoit, with art by some guy I'd never heard of. I picked it up last summer and really enjoyed it -- it was a bit like watching a film that never got made. At first I was a bit disappointed that Benoit himself hadn't done the artwork, but realised that his fine Belgian line wouldn't have carried the story as well as the heavy strokes the plot required. Good stuff.

I certainly agree that comics and film are completely separate media, and I deplore the fact that children seem to learn all they know from television. My own nephews, who are very young, say they like Spider-Man, but I know for a fact they've never seen a Spidey comic; in fact, I rather suspect they only know him from T-shirts and toys, as a sort of decontextualised notion.

While comics actually don't convey the same sense of weight and speed that animation does (I'd actually love to see someone make a Hawkman video game so I could swoop down from the skies wielding my mace -- whoooosh pow!), animated cartoons aren't very strong on characterisation. When I was a kid, many of my favourite Superman moments involved Clark hanging out in the office chatting with people, Josh Coyle taking his ulcer pills, that sort of thing.

There's another thing: videogames.

Rob Liefeld, that idiot savant, occasionally says some wise things: the reason comics sold so well in his day but not now is because the center of community and conversation that the comic book store provided in his day has now been usurped by video games and the video game stores, which offer interactivity, something that comic books do not offer.

The kids that in 1993 would pick up a comic book are now picking up video games.



True, although some things can become exciting and visual depending on the artist himself. A panel drawn by one artist can be boring while the exact same thing drawn by another can be more three-dimensional and give more a sense of power.



Well, we all know who would be "Exhibit A" here: Roy Thomas, who so troweled on the purple prose it felt like he was trying to compete with the writer. On the other hand, I vastly prefer Roy Thomas-esque over-writing to Ellis-esque underwriting; words and pictures together are a strength of comics. And sometimes Thomas could be really, really dramatic and his words helping to set the stage, language becoming a "special effect" in and of itself, as Thomas did describing the 41st Century of Kang the Conqueror in INCREDIBLE HULK #135:

"THE 41ST CENTURY! No longer is the earth a green-bedecked jewel - its once bright face is pockmarked with bomb-blasted craters. Yet on this world ONE MAN raises his voice in joyful TRIUMPH..."

As for movement in comics: movement for the Flash (the default effect being whooshy red TRON walls, which only show where he has BEEN, not that he moved). The other ways used to express the Flash's superspeed have been much more effective because they are NOT depending on movement: for instance, the effect in the early Flash stories of everything being absolutely frozen and still in time next to the Flash, or the rotoscoping multi-images first used by Johnny Quick.

I have just become fond of this Denny O'Neil quote myself.


(http://www.fantagraphics.com/blog/uploaded_images/TCJL6_theWriters-703357.jpg)




Permanus, thanks for the book title.  Glad to read another endorsement.

I always feel slightly embarassed by the fact that, at the age of 38, I am actually very fond of video games (as I said, I'd love someone to make a Hawkman game), but at the risk of sounding moralistic, I can't think of anything worse for children. Believe me, if these things had been around when I was a boy, I'd be about three foot tall now, pale as a ghost, with eyes like bowls of jelly.

Ah, kids nowadays... It's as if some hideous moral cancer is rotting our very souls!

That's a good point, about many video games being interactive...though video games have been around my whole life and I'm not pale and 3 ft. tall  :)

In my case, though, the problem has never been that video games are more interactive than comic shops. The problem is that the comic shop doesn't exist. I've lived in 3 states, never in a town with a comic shop. If comics aren't available in drug stores or grocery stores, there will always be low sales, even with the direct market. Availability is a bigger problem than interactivity...people have more opportunities for interactivity (this forum, for example) than they do to actually buy comics.

Video Games have been around for a very long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcade_game

It's true, although I was in a shop 15 minutes outside of my town last week and interacted in an amaing fashion.  People were talking about King Kong, Narnia, movies in general (I heard a unique perspective in my experience --King Kong is too long to make as much money as it needs to --only 2 shows a night instead of 3).  People talked about Peanuts and the history of comic strips; punk rock; tv.  I bought some comics, including a very lame issue of Superboy (he is captured during a prison riot --the best part was a Dial H for hero story).  Some great graphic novels and Kevin Huzienga's 'Or Else'.

I often have dreams that are set in comic shops and conventions that are very similar to video games and involve comics that don't exist.

OTOH, some comic shps are like moral cancers that eat my soul.

I just watched Justice League: Starcrossed the Movie. I bought it for $2.99, (mini-disc) and it was awesome. While it isn't always the case, cartoons are just better, for a lower price.

Maybe Dini & co. have just spoiled us, though...because I wouldn't have said that in the 80s, while Alan Moore was writing Swamp Thing and the failed X-men pilot cartoon was being passed around...

Awww...  c'mon!  You mean you didn't like Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the Fantastic Four without its inspiration to pyromaniacs, and the Super-Friends era where Darkseid had a sicko desire to marry Wonder Woman?  For shame!

And yes, the Dini+Timm Batman is truly glorious stuff.  Heck, even their Superman stuff that doesn't involve him wearing dorky spacesuits has some good moments, though the best serious Superman either involves Batman (World's Finest), or has a darker Batman feel to it (The Late Mr. Kent).  

The ultimate argument against continuity is that, with a continuous and realistically portrayed Superman, the world we'd live in would be almost unrecognizable in the Superman comics over time.  One of the things that makes the cartoon and video game formats work is the relative lack of continuity.  You don't need complex backstory to appreciate your minutes devoted to the character.  I was trying to explain Loeb's first few issues of Superman/Batman (the first TPB) and it was downright torturous.

I quite enjoyed a bit where I saw a knock-down, drag-out fight between Superman and Capt. Marvel.  A glorious slugfest in the best Marvel style between Earth's mightiest mortals that destroyed a bunch of buildings.

Fans of the JLU show often complain very loudly about the inconsistent treatment of Superman's powers and his also-ran status.  That and the fact he is often beaten up by second-rate villains and acts like a dumb jock.  The fan-favourite on the show is Hawkgirl.  Go figure.