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Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Dude! Joe Casey Reads My Stuff!
Reading yesterday's edition of The Basement Tapes by Joe Casey and Matt Fraction, the subject being fun in superhero comics and is it lost or not, filled me with a sense of glee. It's only because Casey writes this:
I've seen some random discussions pop up on the Net in the past few weeks that seem to be struggling with this issue, looking at old comics and either marveling at their sheer audacity (and I mean that in a good way) and wondering exactly why modern comicbooks are so... different. It's not a question of nostalgia. As I said, it's a question of self-consciousness.
I'm pretty sure he's writing about the Giant-Size Avengers #2 thread over at Pop Culture Bored. It's a thread I particapted in along with Dave Fiore, Scott Tipton, Tom Spurgeon and others (the thread starter, Abhay Khosla, no longer writes Title Bout for Movie Poop Shoot but you can usually find him at PCB or the comments section of Fanboy Rampage). It was a rollicking discussion that I enjoyed participating in and helped me a lot with my thoughts on comics. It was great to see The Basement Tapes go over the subject as I enjoy the column and Joe Casey is a writer I happen to like a whole bunch. Knowing he read some stuff I wrote on the internet does make me feel good in a trivial sort of way.
Looking at the column there's some interesting points but they keep coming back to the idea of "fun" coming back to established, corporate-owned properties like The Flash. At this point I really don't care either way about how fun some old superhero like that is, I want to see new properties come out with creators behind them going full blast. It's something Casey and Fraction have proven they can do.
It's something I was trying to get at in this post about creators evolving and trying to improve themselves in their work. That post is really the culmination of all my thinking in the above PCB thread. I really think the pursuit should not necessarily be "fun" as much as it should be "creativity" and "imagination" but I know if we see more of that we'll be seeing more fun comics, superheroes or otherwise.
I still love seeing a fun comic using an old character. I second David Welsh's recommendation of She-Hulk (and I'm sure Slott's Humat Torch book will be similar good reading) and I loved stuff like Batman Adventures, Mark Waid's Flash and Grant Morrison's JLA. It's just I prefer reading something where the creator or creators are coming up with their own stuff and doing whatever they want with it (I listed a few examples in the last post). Of course I'm some kid who read a lot of Comics Journal interviews with Frank Miller and Scott McCloud, so what do I know? Come to think of it, McCloud's Superman Adventures run and Dark Knight Strikes Again were both great fun rides that I really enjoyed. I guess a good pop culture thrill can come from anywhere, even characters created before my parents were born.
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