The Bum’s Rush #12

Wow, three months into the All New, All Different Stumblebum Studios. Three months into The Bum’s Rush. It’s hard to believe I’ve managed to keep up with this column for that long. I am extremely proud of this website and of all the guys that have been contributing, whether for three months or a week. I really hope that you guys have been enjoying what we’re doing here as much as we’re enjoying doing it.

This weeks column is a little . . . chaotic and slapdash. Please forgive me. On with the show:

There’s Superheroes, Then There’s Everything Else

When I was a kid and first started reading comics I read superhero comics pretty much exclusively. Like most kids who read comics I suppose. When I started realizing that comics were more than just a hobby, that they were in fact something I wanted to do for a living, I began to create my own superheroes. I drew pictures of them; I plotted out their adventures and started writing scripts for them. And as my tastes were pretty singular at that time the things I created and drew and wrote about were also pretty singular. Always superheroes.

But after a while, as my tastes began to mature, I started branching out. I began reading books like Garth Ennis’ Preacher and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Frank Miller’s Sin City. I read older books like Alan Moore’s The Watchmen and started collecting old runs of Hellblazer. More and more I began to realize the wealth of potential that lay within comics. It didn’t have to be just about, to use the old cliché, guys in tights beating the stuffing out of each other. You could, in fact, do anything. Anything you could imagine.

Over the years I’ve turned away from the idea of drawing comics and have embraced writing as my ultimate form of creative expression. As I developed my talents as a writer I found that I was creating, more and more, stories about magic, science-fiction, horror and adventure and I was becoming less and less interested in creating stories about superheroes. After all, I thought, what could I possibly do with superheroes that hasn’t been done a thousand times before and done better than I could ever hope to do?

Now that doesn’t mean that my love of superheroes is any less than it was. Far from it. I still collect a large number of superhero comics. But I also collect a large number of straight-up action/adventure, crime, western, romance and sci-fi comics. And these are the ones I tend to remember. Because they break from the norm in an industry that is made up of a majority of comics about, yet again, guys in tights beating the stuffing out of each other.

Granted, superhero comics have matured beyond that tired old cliché over the past several years, but it is still there at the core of what superhero comics are all about. Even so, superhero comics these days are becoming less fantasy oriented and are crashing headlong into becoming full fledged science fiction. Still, I find myself gravitating much more toward the other genres in comics, both as a fan and (I hesitate to use this term really) a professional, where it seems there is still so much potential for fresh and new concepts.

If you had approached me about ten years ago and told me that the first real comic I ever wrote would be a western/horror comic I probably would have laughed in your face. But now I can’t see it happening any other way. I’m so much keener on the notion of doing western or crime or war stories than I could ever be on doing superhero comics. That’s not to say that I don’t want to do stories involving superheroes. Like I said, I still love them dearly. I still turn into a complete geek when it comes to the big crossovers and huge, universe spanning superhero stories. I still act like a nerdy little kid every time I hear about and then see another one of my favorite superheroes up on the big screen. Hell, my favorite fictional character of all time is still Superman.

I suppose what I’m really getting at is that I’ve long since realized that comics are a medium in which you can do and say just about anything in the world you could possibly want to, with probably the least amount of restrictions such as budget and directors and producers, etc. And superhero comics are just one possibility in endless sea of available genres. Superhero comics are just one of the types of stories I want to tell successfully before I shuffle off into the unknown. Why in the world would I limit myself?

Quick Bits

• Good on ya, Fantastic Four for being the No. 1 movie this past weekend and breaking Hollywood out of its slump. It certainly wasn’t the best superhero movie ever but it was a hell of a lot of fun and was pretty damn faithful to the spirit of the comic.
• Check it out! It’s the full cover to All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder! And another!
• Haha! Eric Powell is writing and drawing a Devil Dinosaur comic for Marvel. Sweet.
• I don’t know why but I’m really kind of looking forward to Keith Giffen’s Howling Commandos.
• Starting to get excited about this.
• There’s going to be a Jack Kirby Museum . . . God, I can only imagine what a building for the Kirby Museum might look like. Hopefully something like this.

NEXT WEEK: Should be a ton of awesome news from the San Diego Comic-Con, so I’ll probably be talking about that . . . most likely . . .

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