There's A Reason I Created This Userpic

Sep 06, 2013 18:12

Ahhh, DC Comics. Always with the maturity and good clean fun.

I don't think it's any secret that I've had it up to HERE with what the writers and editors at Marvel and especially DC Comics consider to be cutting-edge material, mostly because their material tends to include lots of cutting edges. But this is just frickin' nuts.

And I see the stuff in the comments on that page about the potential meta and meta-meta context. Nope, sorry, no biscuit. DC's animated wing is doing just fine without this crap; Marvel's animation is nearly as good, and of course the movies are great. No, the people in charge at DC Comics these days are the sad, repressed damaged goods people used to think were caused by comics.

I can certainly deal with violence in comics (said the guy who loved Frank Miller at the beginning of his career, long before most people had heard of him). Absolutely sexuality (said the proud owner of the three-volume hardcover Lost Girls, every issue of XXXenophile, and lots of other smutty goodness). But there are... not limits. Standards. There's an old adage about rules, and how they're made to be broken... but sometimes they're made to be followed, because they work.

Every once in awhile, someone posts an old page from the earliest days of Spider-Man or Fantastic Four, or even Superman during the Curt Swan heyday. And it's wonderful how much story and characterization Stan and Steve or Julie and Curt crammed into six or nine panels... and how there actually was story and characterization going on.

Remember the chest-burster scene in Alien? Ridley Scott famously didn't tell the cast what was going to happen, to make sure that their reactions were all believable... to force everybody in the film, and thus everybody watching the film, into a new and unknown realm of horror.

Sometimes I feel as if modern comic creators are trying to do that all the time.

It ain't the medium -- it's the people who have forgotten, or never learned, storytelling... and, possibly, how to have fun.

Thoughts?

This entry was originally posted at http://filkertom.dreamwidth.org/1638494.html. You may comment there or here, although LJ tends to have a livelier conversation at this time.

wtf, comics

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