Where For Art Thou, Comics Are Expensive?
Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.
So a funny thing happened on the way to finishing this week’s Comics Are Expensive: I realized I didn’t want to. The idea was to cover the big three of Marvel’s Ultimate line: Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, and The Ultimates, all books I read regularly when they first appeared but haven’t touched in years. I had a pretty good feeling going in what sort of piece it was going to be - by all accounts, the line has only gone downhill since I stopped following it, the original purity of its intent to offer a continuity-free version of Marvel’s top characters having long been lost to multiple inane story arcs and complicated crossovers serving no purpose but to retell events from forty years ago with an “Ultimate” spin. I expected the books to be bad, and I was going to knock out an easy piece tearing them apart in increasingly clever ways.
And good god, they were. The best of the lot was Ultimate Spider-Man, doing the exact same things with guest stars, teen angst, and riffing off old stories and ideas that bored me off the book five years ago. Ultimate X-Men was an absolute embarrassment, featuring levels of horrible writing that I had no idea the usually good Robert Kirkman was capable of. It’s a masterpiece compared to The Ultimates, though - “Train wreck” doesn’t really cover what Jeph Loeb’s writing has turned in to here, and the less said the better. It was all anybody looking to vent a little vitriol could ask for, really. Three high profile books that once represented the potential for a fresh new approach to comics (or at least, comics about superheroes) and an olive branch to new readers so wrapped up in themselves and unable to grow past new spins on old ideas that they were as impenetrable as the comics they were meant to be an alternative to? It was like shooting really big, slow-moving fish in a barrel.
Which turned out to be the problem. The farther I got into the piece, the less interested I was in finishing it. Just reading the books had made me a little depressed at the sort of dreck being happily shoveled on to the stands (and just as happily eaten up by fans, it must be said), and writing about them, even if just to tear them apart, was only making me feel worse. More and more it began to feel like a waste of the space Val has been so nice to give me - is making easy jokes at the expense of books I don’t care about really what I want to do with Comics Are Expensive? Is pumping more malignancy into the conversation over comics really the best I had to offer?
Thanks to the craziness of the rest of the week and my complete lack of time to work on anything, it was the middle of the night on Thursday when I finally decided that no, it wasn’t, and dropped a line to Val to say I wasn’t going to have this week’s column done in time. It was an interesting moment for me, less of a realization and more of a coming together of the sort of thinking that’s run through the other aspects of my life, including game design: I don’t want to be an asshole for the sake of being an asshole anymore. It’s a small part of personality that comes out from time to time, a vestigial hold out from stupid kid days that I don’t have a use for. The Ultimate line of comics just isn’t important in any real way - the excitement from its initial launch has long since burned out, and its audience has settled down to the sort of readers who are going to buy anything with a spider or X logo on it anyway. At this point, there’s not much in the way of things I could say that would top the joke it’s made of itself. At the risk of sounding all high and mighty, it’s beneath me.
So what next for Comics Are Expensive? More new things, I suppose. I want to spend some more time looking at trades and graphic novels, and maybe play around with my approach to writing reviews. Most importantly, though, I want it to continue being a place where I can be happy about reading comics. I used to worry that the columns done so far were all too positive, and that I’d eventually run out of new ways to say “this is good and you should read it”. After this past week, I’ve decided I don’t care. While it’s highly likely that there will be books I don’t like and use the space to talk about, I’m not going to actively seek out horrible titles for the sake of making fun of them. There are a lot of bad comics, and a lot of people on the internet and elsewhere already spending a lot of time talking about them. Personally, I’d rather spend my time point anybody who’ll listen at the good ones.