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Don't Call It A Comeback by Josh Dahl

On The Shoulders Of Giant Man, Ant Man, Goliath, Goliath II, Yellow Jacket, Black Goliath, and Atlas.

Normally, in this column I discuss my own experiences in the comics field, and how that field has changed over the years. And, most weeks I focus on a time called “Back In The Day” as compared to a time called “Now”. For me, Back In The Day usually means the years in which I first tried to break in to the comics game. The mid 90s.

For this one, though, I am going to have to throw a little further back than that. For this one I am going to have to touch briefly on an era known as “Way Back In The Day”. In common terms, the Golden and Silver ages of comics.

Comics are really good right now. Current styles and trends may not suit every reader's tastes, but it is hard to deny that quality and professionalism have really grown by leaps and bounds. This is possible because this current generation of creators is standing on the shoulders of gamma-irradiated giants and showering the populace with mutagenic spiders via the world wide web.

I am going to generalize a little bit here. Way Back In The Day, comics were written largely by editorial edict. It was decreed that detective books old well, so writers were instructed to write more detective books. And so forth. Good editors had a keen sense for what worked, and what would sell. Not surprisingly, what “worked” was usually what touched some deep resonance with the readership. It could be observed that flawed heroes sold better than perfect heroes, so the order goes out to give your heroes flaws.

This Darwinian method of market analysis and response resulted in decades of comic books which were very appealing

Most of writers currently dominating the field of comics developed an affection for super-heroes in the ate 70s, 80s, and early 90s. By this time, the editorial mandates of Way Back In The Day had become as deeply ingrained in the minds of readers and writers as the socio-psychological images that strengthened them to begin with.

It was no longer a surprise to find that Spider Man was actually Puny Parker and that had some problems other than super villain attacks. It was a given that super-heroes had real problems. This was the new standard. With this as the new basic clay from which to shape heroes, some writers and artists began to really explore the depths of these problems. Watchmen, MiracleMan, The Dark Knight Returns and others gave these deeply resonant stories the respect that they desreved.

Which brings us to Back In The Day. A generation of young creators riding the end of that big wave. To those of us scraping out our place in comics in the mid 90s, hip, well written, comic books were pretty common. And so, like those scientists in Jurassic Park we stepped right up to table, completely ignoring the generations of evolution that created the stories which looked so effortless to us and said “I can do that!”

The complexities which made those classic comics so appealing were now so elegantly and intrinsically interwoven into us and our comics that we barely noticed them. It was just assumed that these deep, mythic, resonances would be there. We took them for granted.

Well, you know what happens when you assume.

You make some bad comics.

In the 90s, we focused on the details and the surface dressings. It wasn't really our fault. We were young. The deep structure which made us love the comics we loved was so deep that we couldn't even really see it. Those Way Back In The Day writers and editors made it that way. We took the surface details, which were all we could perceive, shuffled them all up, and built them into sprawling, grotesquely intricate, houses of cards. Grabbing from eachother's decks, the whole thing collapsed in on itself in a meticulously cross-hatched mess.

This is an needlessly negative view of the 90s comics scene. There was a lot of good stuff going on. But, the weakness were pretty obviously the results of forgetting our strong roots, and cannibalizing and regurgitating the fruit that those roots had borne. That good stuff that I mentioned was going on down near those roots.

People were staring at the comics that we had then, and something wasn't quite adding up. They looked right, they had the details, but they weren't working. Why? So, while some were just butting their heads against poorly constructed walls, others were digging for answers.

Which brings us to Now.

While the prevailing impulse of the 90s was ignore the foundation and rearrange the surface dressings, not everyone was so easily distracted. Some accepted that gift from the previous generations and cherished it. The micro-boom of mature comics told us that it was ok to think about comic books. I mean really think about them. However, the accompanying style-boom didn't give us much to think about.

But, there was thinking going on.

It happened in a lot of different ways and in a lot of different places. Smart folks took those brilliant kernels that had been passed down from the previous generations and went off to their secret thinky caves, wherever they might be.

Good time in good brains has been spent thinking about good comics, and about what makes them good. Now these thinkers are returning to comics to share the boon of their diverse studies. From academia, Hollywood, fine art, web design, TV, journalism, fandom, and (probably literally) caves, they come back to share what they have learned.

The dominant thinking is no longer “how make a comic repeat a success?”, nor is it “How do we make a comic new and different?”. Though it certainly retains elements of both of these, the new thinking seems to be “How do we take what we have learned from repeatable success, and from different styles, to make a comic good?”

Oh, I was also going to talk about how technology has raised the creative bar by creating a more savvy and cynical fan base. Guess I'll get to that next week..

 

Visit Josh Dahl at his website www.monolithllc.com