Post by jarddavis on Nov 9, 2008 12:25:51 GMT -8
Kirk
The grim and gritty era at DC (Because with the possible exception of The Ultimates, and Civil War, Marvel's never gotten even close to what DC achieved during the 80's and 90's) began because certain creators recognized a small fact that Marvel never grasped. That the age group of people reading comics had changed. More mature audience, more mature stories. DC has never really stopped changing to meet it's audience's level of interest.
It's kind of interesting to look at as you go through your back issues, by the by. Marvel rode the X wave throughout the late 80's, the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's before Joey Q finally came along and fixed that. Yes, I say fixed that. Because one of the firs things he did was to get Kurt Busiek and George Perez to do a run on Avengers. He beefed up the FF, (And I still want to know what happened to Scott Lobdell on FF, because his three issues of the relaunch were pretty interesting, then Claremont took over and FF rapidly became a Claremont staple.), JMS's Spider-Man which was the best Spidey I'd seen in years... at least until the Gwen Stacey fuckex ruined it.
But suddenly the X wave was over and Marvel started beefing it's other titles up with decent stories and art.... until Bendis, Millar and such came in and everything changed back all of a sudden.
There've been some attempts at Grim and Gritty buuut...They've never really achieved it like DC has.
Now look at DC. Let's not even go into Vertigo for the purposes of this discussion. Let's go start into the late 80's run of comics that DC carried for some time featuring not only grim and gritty characters, but also a reflection of how Super-Heroes could possibly influence a real world arena. Suicide Squad. Checkmate. Captain Atom. Peacemaker. Comics that dealt with the intelligence community. Interesting side note, what other mediums had a sudden influx of techno-thriller interest? Tom Clancy, anyone?
The world changing certainly had something to do with that. The end of the cold war, the Iran/Conta affair and Oliver North, the coming down of the berlin wall. But that was where the audience was leaning towards, and you could almost see the point midway though the Bush administration when that area of interest died out. No one really cared as much about the spy genre anymore and DC shut them all down almost immediately.
Marvel and DC aren't interested in attracting new younger readers. Because younger readers could care less about what we're seeing in comics these days. They're spending their money on manga. My daughter is 17. Dangle a Superman or X-Men comic in front of her and she could care less. Dangle anything by Clamp in front of her, and she's all for it. On a side note, dangle anything that DC gets animated and she's all over it.
The people buying Marvel and DC comics are us. We in our 20's, 30's and 40's. Or even our 50's. And we want more realistic stories. But we also want a degree of realism far beyond what a Bob Springer Batman calling Robin his chum. Not realism necessarily in the real world, but realism in plausability for instance.
An arguement with Micah Wright comes to mind once. He hated Superman as a character because he couldn't identify with a guy who flied and shot laser beams out of his eyes, but he could identify with Ben Santini because Santini carried a gun. Also of interesting note is that afterwords was when Micah was found out to be a bald faced liar who basked in the adoration of people who thought it was neat that he had once "been a member of the US Army Rangers..."
Comics go with the times. Characters come and go based on fads. Pop culture fads. Rocket Racer, The Disco Hustler. Dazzler. Vibe.
And so getting back to the question, will Obama's presidency influence comics? Answer, well yes, because pop culture will and Obama will have an influence on Pop Culture. But will you see an end to Grim and Gritty because there's a more positive mood in the country? And the answer is no, because we are the ones buying comics and we want conflict in our comics and Lex Luthor hating Superman because Superboy caused his hair to fall out as a teenager is stupid and it drives us nuts.
Note carefully by the by, that one of the big goals of Infinite Crisis was for Batman to become essentially not so much of a prick... kinder and gentler as we called it.
Now we have Batman RIP. Which so far has been about as Grim and Gritty as it gets.
The grim and gritty era at DC (Because with the possible exception of The Ultimates, and Civil War, Marvel's never gotten even close to what DC achieved during the 80's and 90's) began because certain creators recognized a small fact that Marvel never grasped. That the age group of people reading comics had changed. More mature audience, more mature stories. DC has never really stopped changing to meet it's audience's level of interest.
It's kind of interesting to look at as you go through your back issues, by the by. Marvel rode the X wave throughout the late 80's, the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's before Joey Q finally came along and fixed that. Yes, I say fixed that. Because one of the firs things he did was to get Kurt Busiek and George Perez to do a run on Avengers. He beefed up the FF, (And I still want to know what happened to Scott Lobdell on FF, because his three issues of the relaunch were pretty interesting, then Claremont took over and FF rapidly became a Claremont staple.), JMS's Spider-Man which was the best Spidey I'd seen in years... at least until the Gwen Stacey fuckex ruined it.
But suddenly the X wave was over and Marvel started beefing it's other titles up with decent stories and art.... until Bendis, Millar and such came in and everything changed back all of a sudden.
There've been some attempts at Grim and Gritty buuut...They've never really achieved it like DC has.
Now look at DC. Let's not even go into Vertigo for the purposes of this discussion. Let's go start into the late 80's run of comics that DC carried for some time featuring not only grim and gritty characters, but also a reflection of how Super-Heroes could possibly influence a real world arena. Suicide Squad. Checkmate. Captain Atom. Peacemaker. Comics that dealt with the intelligence community. Interesting side note, what other mediums had a sudden influx of techno-thriller interest? Tom Clancy, anyone?
The world changing certainly had something to do with that. The end of the cold war, the Iran/Conta affair and Oliver North, the coming down of the berlin wall. But that was where the audience was leaning towards, and you could almost see the point midway though the Bush administration when that area of interest died out. No one really cared as much about the spy genre anymore and DC shut them all down almost immediately.
Marvel and DC aren't interested in attracting new younger readers. Because younger readers could care less about what we're seeing in comics these days. They're spending their money on manga. My daughter is 17. Dangle a Superman or X-Men comic in front of her and she could care less. Dangle anything by Clamp in front of her, and she's all for it. On a side note, dangle anything that DC gets animated and she's all over it.
The people buying Marvel and DC comics are us. We in our 20's, 30's and 40's. Or even our 50's. And we want more realistic stories. But we also want a degree of realism far beyond what a Bob Springer Batman calling Robin his chum. Not realism necessarily in the real world, but realism in plausability for instance.
An arguement with Micah Wright comes to mind once. He hated Superman as a character because he couldn't identify with a guy who flied and shot laser beams out of his eyes, but he could identify with Ben Santini because Santini carried a gun. Also of interesting note is that afterwords was when Micah was found out to be a bald faced liar who basked in the adoration of people who thought it was neat that he had once "been a member of the US Army Rangers..."
Comics go with the times. Characters come and go based on fads. Pop culture fads. Rocket Racer, The Disco Hustler. Dazzler. Vibe.
And so getting back to the question, will Obama's presidency influence comics? Answer, well yes, because pop culture will and Obama will have an influence on Pop Culture. But will you see an end to Grim and Gritty because there's a more positive mood in the country? And the answer is no, because we are the ones buying comics and we want conflict in our comics and Lex Luthor hating Superman because Superboy caused his hair to fall out as a teenager is stupid and it drives us nuts.
Note carefully by the by, that one of the big goals of Infinite Crisis was for Batman to become essentially not so much of a prick... kinder and gentler as we called it.
Now we have Batman RIP. Which so far has been about as Grim and Gritty as it gets.
