I've never heard that one. If Mort was really jealous of a fictional character, I hope he sought mental counseling after his retirement. But then, if he had a problem with Superman's powers, he was the one man on Earth who could have done something about it, so I doubt that's the way it went down. Superman may have been the strongest character in comics, but he still had to answer to Mort, so tell me again who was most powerful.
You've really never heard that? Yeah, he actually was really stressed out all the time. It was realizing that the stress was due to his jealousy of Superman that he retired from his editorial position. He
did seek help, though I'm not sure if he did it leading up to or after his retirement. Probably both.
And he did tone Superman's powers down, but not the way we usually think of that concept. It's my theory that it just didn't occur to him to let Superman keep his powers, but weaker. He made stories where Superman lost his powers entirely all the time, to bring him down to our level. He always got him back up to full, sun extinguishing Silver Age power.
But yeah, he was often verbally abusive to his writers and everything. Someone (I forget who) actually switched to Marvel after less than a week because Weisinger made him so mad. I'm surprised you hadn't heard of it. Sad but true. He did give us a bunch of pretty great additions to the mythos, but by most accounts I've ever heard, he was not a very good boss.
Writers today are just as creative. In fact, they have to be more creative, because we expect constantly high quality stories. They don't always deliver. But sometimes they do. And on those occasions, it is VERY unfair to hold them up as inferior, just because it's not the sixties anymore.
Part of the problem is how you define "high quality stories." Fans of modern comics ask for -- or at least accept -- standards fans of earlier periods would not have tolerated. And yes, vice-versa. If you look closely at arguments made on the Web, the bottom line is people are saying the old way or new way of telling stories is wrong, not the stories themselves but the approaches taken. If a modern fan is opposed to the Silver Age approach, it doesn't matter how "good" the story is, they still won't like it, and the same with Silver Age fans reading modern tales (One side: "How can it be a good story when it has a dog in a freaking cape?" Other side: "How can it be a good story when the 'hero' rips people's arms off?"). Similarly, I've heard people criticize TV shows of the 60s and 70s -- which I love -- as "too slow" to watch for an hour, and while I don't agree with them, I know where they're coming from when I watch modern shows, which are certainly faster-paced. Not better, but faster, even too fast for those of us who grew up on something different.
So...for me a "high quality story" has a beginning, middle and end, preferably confined to one or two issues, and something interesting happens along the way that makes it worth my time. Modern "decompressed" story-telling techniques make today's comics a hard sell for me, since extremely little happens in the course of an average issue, a full story may take six months to a year to unfold (longer when the creators can't meet deadlines) and I often get the impression no one went in with a plan. The only way it really works for me is to "wait for the trade" and read the whole thing in one go, but even then I usually lose interest after 20 or 30 pages of story that, in the past, would have fit onto four or five.
Of course the other thing that lets me out is that 3 or 4 dollars for 22 pages of story -- decompressed story, at that -- is way more than I'm comfortable spending on something I get so little out of.[/quote] Now, I've never had much respect for the type of 90s anti-hero who rips off his enemies arms, and I hold up Superman as the best of all heroes because he never kills, never really even hurts his enemies. And I've never had too much trouble with flying dogs in capes.
If I'm opposed at all to the Silver Age way of telling stories, I'm opposed to the dumbing-down it created to make it easy for kids to swallow without raising too many moral questions. Sometimes they ended up with a good story anyway. Not always. I am biased against the comics code, largely because I feel it knocked Superman down from being a more interesting character in the Golden Age into his pro-authority Boy Scout incarnation of the Silver Age. Sometimes they added great stuff into the mythos, sometimes they told good stories. Not always at the same time. It was still fun. I just prefer my Superman not to be Silver Age, compared to the Golden and Bronze age versions.
Funnily enough, I also prefer my stories to have a beginning, middle and end, and extend one to three issues. I don't always like the decompression fad either- I think it makes it harder to write, always having to extend every arc to be twelve issues. When it works, I think it works great, but that's not half as often as it should. I can read decompressed comics without any problem, but it's no coincidence that Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man, with it's one-shots on top of relationships that change over longer periods of time, is my favorite comic that I get regularly right now. I think we've got more in common than we do differences.
I hope you're right, for your sake and that of the kids of tomorrow, who deserve heroes, too.
But I have to say based on the pages that we've gotten a peek at so far, I don't share your optimism.
THIS seems to be our main difference, though...
I may not hate the pages we've seen so far, but I do think that Superman can be better than that.
And I hope he becomes better than that.
I appreciate that you hope I'm right, and I thank you.
Dilber MC Theme by HarzeM