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Tuesday, January 11, 2005
News Flash: Big Company Acts Dumb, Fan Complains About It
Tom Spurgeon links to Evan Dorkin writing about the forthcoming Bizarro World getting the G-rated treatment from DC. To me this spotlights better than any other comic what DC's problems are.
I liked a few of the stories in the original Bizarro Comics but there was a distinct "half-in/half-out" feeling to the book. Many pages were devoted to a framing sequences explaining how none of these stories are in continuity, no doubt put in to soothe the fears of obsessive DC fans who would are of course reading a book with Ellen Forney and Brian Ralph in it. Most noticeable is that all but one of the stories feature a separate writer and artist on them (the exception being the Kyle Baker piece "Letitia Lerner, Superman's Babysitter and there's a whole other story to that comic). This is different from how all the alternative cartoonists in the book usually work but is the status quo for the "assembly line" world of monthly corporate comics.
There is precisely where I feel DC overall is. They will put out books that offer more personality and substance to there usual superhero fare but the groupthink of Time Warner's offices will somehow find its way to enter the situation and damage a promising project, if it doesn’t destroy it before altogether before the public has a chance to see it. DC has editors like Karen Berger who, with the Vertigo imprint, publish excellent and interesting work like Paul Pope's 100%, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher as well as the forthcoming Gilbert Hernandez original graphic novel Sloth and The Quitter by Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel. On the other hand if Evan Dorkin and Mike Allred have a Metal Men mini-series in the works it gets rejected, even when they have previously said they have accepted it. Kyle Baker’s Plastic Man is celebrated by seemingly all those who read it but DC doesn’t see any reason to push it in either the direct market or the all-ages market that books like Teen Titans Go fall under. It’s no surprise to any one here on the comics blogosphere but the vast majority of DC’s books are for people old enough to remember buying Crisis on Infinite Earths off of the stands and those who desire something else, even though DC has the resources to give us so much more, are left with a few crumbs of works that are devoted to originality and sophistication.
Books that don’t even have DC’s logo on it are under a type of scrutiny that is strictly “don’t rock the boat.” From Alan Moore’s interview in The Extraordinary Work of Alan Moore, where the writer who has made so much money for DC speaks on the specter of censorship his ABC books face:
I’m mean I’m nearly 50. I really think that I should by this age be allowed to go to bed whenever I want. I should be allowed to leave my dinner if I want. I think I should be allowed to write what I want without getting some parent figure coming and scolding me about it. If that’s the best that American comics industry can offer, then, like I say, it’s not good enough for me.
Cartoonists like Haspiel, Hernandez and Dorkin already have outlets for their work where they are free to create and communicate what they want however they want to do it. But Haspiel publisher Alternative Comics faces severe financial troubles (fellow indy publisher HighWater Books is already gone). Fantagraphics Books was also in dire straights but fortunately books like The Complete Peanuts have remedied that situation. It’s no wonder that so many alternative comics creators make most of their income off of illustration work or other jobs that have nothing to do with comics or creativity at all.
DC offers these talents a chance to create their comics with much more financial security than they would otherwise see. The company just cannot let its pulp roots and go and take the hands-off approach that these creators, and in fact all creators, deserve. At least with Marvel you know you’re getting something that has been through a thousand pairs of eyes before it’s calculated to appear in the stores and there is no effort to appear like a company interested groundbreaking books (granted I am assuming most of the people paying to attention to Marvel’s hyperbolic press statements do not take them seriously). There is a type of honesty there, if nothing else.
If, as there comic book covers trumpeted more than a decade ago, DC comics are not just for kids why don’t they treat their creators like adults?
Permanent Link: 5:25 PM |
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