Mark Waid is one of the writers I don't generally like, but who in interviews - despite my best instincts - I nod my head vigorously and say, "hey, you PREACH it, Mark!" I admire his energy and I almost never disagree with his point of view as expressed in this form.
Grant Morrison's interviews generally make him sound like a pompous twit, and I've never agreed with a single thing that Warren Ellis has ever said in his entire career, almost to the point where when he says "Hello, my name is Warren Ellis" I find myself doubting this on general principle. John Byrne's points sound reasonable on a light reading until one thinks it over and the hideous flaws and lack of logic come to the fore. Mark Waid, though, interviews well.
MW: Let me interrupt you for a second and go on my rant about this. Not that YOU think like this, but speaking of people who do think this way. People who complain “aw, they’re bring that back! They’re bringing this back!” It makes me nuts when that’s said with such disdain. We’re not just old fanboys! Bringing back the bottle city of Kandor and complaining about it is, to me, like saying “You’re using the Batcave? AGAIN?!” This is not an unfailing litmus test, but I think if it’s an element from the series that some people who DON’T read comics know, like Commissioner Gordon, don’t really screw that up. Am I making any sense?
You TELL it, Mark! People that say that the love of the Silver Age is based on nostalgia haven't read a Silver Age comic. We love the Silver Age because of the imaginative power of the concepts and the talent of writers and artists that worked in that period.
MW: The good new is, and I garauntee you this, when we’re on the other side of the CRISIS, those days are GONE. Just gone. We’re sick to death of heroes who are not heroes, we’re sick to death of darkness. Not that there’s no room, not that Batman should act like Adam West, but that won’t be the overall feeling. After all this stuff, after everything shakes down, we’re done with heroes being dicks. No more we screwed each other and now we must pay the consequences. No, we’re super-heroes and that’s what we do. Batman’s broken. Through no ONE person’s fault, but he’s a dick now. And we’ve been told we can fix that.
Well, I'm glad SOMEBODY's telling it like it is about the jerkish Batman we've seen since Morrison's League. It's an unintentionally funny act of titanic hypocrisy, though, that it should be Mark Waid, whose Batman characterization in JLA was easily the low nadir watermark for paranoid, "jerk" Batman: plotting, making traps and games to KILL HIS FRIENDS. Wow. Mark Waid coming out against "jerk" Batman is sort of like Stalin saying, "you know, I'm really against genocide."
As to his larger point, my instinct is to agree with the point Mark is making here. But I think Mark is confusing a tree for a forest, a train car for a whole train.
I've never bought the concept of the "dark/light" duality that fans talk about, with the 80s being a "dark" time and the 50s-70s being "light." The problem with things like (and let's get specific here) the Miller Batman, cyberpunk dystopia HAWKWORLD, and cyberpunk dystopia Giffen Legion, is not that it is "dark" or dealing with themes of fear and corruption. It's because they're wildly off the mark with what the comic is supposed to be about. The Legion isn't about rebel fighters using their real names in a 1984-esque totalitarian regime. The DC Heroes are not sleazy sex friends, as they were made out to be in Howard Chaykin's miniseries. Green Arrow uses those boxing glove arrows - period, Grell, so quit whining. The problem with these stories is not that they were "dark," but that they were stories done in a dark style wildly at odds with what the comic is supposed to be about.The problem with Superman killing is not that such a story is dark. The problem with such a story is that a concept like that is so totally divorced from who Superman is supposed to be.
If someone did a story where James Bond became a pacifist and refused to commit murder, I would be equally outraged. Sure, it would be more "moral" than just using his Walther PPK to blow the bad guys to Kingdom Come, but it just wouldn't be our mayhem-loving macho man, Bond.
So saying "the darkness is over" is missing the point of what it was that was really wrong with comics in the first place.
And also, it's probably totally not true - what they call "darkness," I call "out of character behavior and concepts divorced from what the comic is supposed to be about." And last time I checked, these are still present in abundance in Modern Age comics, we're not going to see an end to the Modern Age anytime soon.
I really, really hate to play Cassandra here, especially in the face of such optimism, but INFINITE CRISIS will not ignite a new age of
anything, simply because the "talent" involved in its production isn't that talented - or at least they're competent and uninspired. We can't expect them to provide a vision. There are certainly enough examples in comics history - indeed, the history of creativity in general - to say that "Committee thinking" is an oxymoron.
The Sliver Age can't come back, it is only a time period from the late 1950's to late 1960's, so unless DC has invented a time machine, it will never happen. Hopefully, the Iron Age will finally come to an end, allowing a new age that is worth reading to be born.
Different people place the Silver Age at different times. I for one, think the Silver Age only really BEGAN in 1971-1974, when we had Englehart writing all those brilliant Marvel titles and Schwartz brought in two genius kids to write Superman: Maggin and Bates.
