Why Aren't Comics Better?

 

Well, of course I don't really have an answer to that. To do so would require knowing inside baseball like costs, publication periods, working with creatives including writers, artists, inkers, colorists, even editors. It would require knowing about readership and buying habits and brand loyalty and other important and necessary stuff. And I don't know any of that.

But I do think I know what's good and what makes for good stories and, frankly, there aren't enough of them available. Every few months I go out and sit to look at the latest offerings (and I'll be the first to admit that skews what I see because I read graphic novels, which necessarily take sometimes years to accumulate enough story to be printed), so what I am looking at is not technically the latest offering. But what I see leaves me depressed.

So I suppose what I really mean is, why aren't comics as good as I wish they were? It's true, don't damn a story for what it's not. But there's so much else they can be. What I think disturbs me most is the tendency in so many stories to kill minor characters or passersby easily. I applaud where this has come from as a response against the unrealistic ability of everyone to save everyone. 

But there's too great the temptation, I guess, to whack people willy nilly to show how irredeemable a character is, how little human life means to them, all that. Is it necessary to show a character slaughtering, sometimes people on his own side, and joking while doing so? The recent Mr Miracle series was offensive in the killing of members of Scott and Barda's own forces while they argued about renovation. There aren't any noble ways to die but it's certainly insulting to be slain by the leaders of your own community while they banter about who puts their closet to better use.

I have, of course, other issues, mostly about the hypocrisy of fine tuning the reality of a series which continues to feature the same cast of a half century or a century ago. But there's something instructive too about looking backwards at those old series. What sets art, even middlebrow art, apart from the sniggering of porn and nihilistic jokes is that it presents a world a reader wants to work for or against. Here's where the optimism of space opera and the pessimism of dystopian stories come in. At their worst, they leave the reader with the sense that "this is a future I want to see/avoid." The Ronin/Hawkeye vignette in Avengers: Endgame, which might seem counter to my point, is instead an excellent example. Ronin's indiscriminate killing of drug dealers while cosmic forces are at play elsewhere is perfectly at home with his (and maybe the viewer's) belief that a world in which people who profit off other people's pain are punished as resolutely as a multiple world destroyer is a future worth working toward.

I just like it

I've enjoyed comic books since I was a child. Hardly a revolutionary or unique statement, you can find any number of blogs and websites devoted to reading and appreciating them. You probably grew up with them too. But I have a special set of memories for the comics of the 60s and 70s, when I was most impressionable. They say the music you loved when you were 14 (David Bowie, in my case) is the music you'll love the rest of your life.

Because I read not just the comics of that period but reprints of earlier comics, strips, pulps, I enjoy the mystery around the Alan Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. The mystery comes from the sense I get reading a panel and trying to work out who is being referred to, who is being depicted, what situation is being faced. It's a little harder (and thus more thrilling) to me because most of his references are from British comics and media, which I'm not always familiar with. When I was a tween, I bought a stack of Punch magazines from the 70s, and tried understanding the references and satires of political figures. It was the progenitor of what Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson wanted to make Spy for 80s and 90s America (and to a large degree succeeded). But what I mostly understood from Punch were the comics.

A compendium like this is wonderful for figuring out who is who, what image is being suggested, how an otherwise dissociative series of events (say, the voyages of Gulliver and the fascism of Big Brother) might lead to one another. It's as if Moore took The Avenger from the pulps, images from New Yorker cartoons, Major Hoople, Egghead, Angio Maggio, Dorothy Gale, Richard Diamond, Percy Dovetonsils, and slammed them all together in William Burroughs' Freeland. (Here too, I loved Philip Jose Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life whose family tree of the Wold Newton universe was an early example I devoured with pleasure.)

All told, I'm sorry to see that the series is ending, but all good things of course. And this essay is a good wrap-up of the wrap-up.

Octopus Pie still exists!

Unrelated to the project I've been publishing, I had thought one of the online comics I used to read regularly had finished last summer. But it turns out it was only the storyline that had finished and the author and artist took a break. I've only discovered today that it's still publishing. It makes me happy.

goodbye, village voice

I don't remember when I first read the Village Voice, let alone when I first saw it. But growing up in New York it was ubiquitous. I remember buying copies when I could find them upstate from the mid-70s through the 80s, and for a time when I lived in New Paltz, I had a subscription that, I remember, promised--and made good on--delivery by Saturday after new issues came out on Tuesday.

Here's what I remember best about it. There was a sense that, by cracking open the pages, you were plugging into a source, if not of Truth, then of Questing. I learned about new things, new outrages, new music, new movies, new books, new ideas that I couldn't locate anywhere else. It's the reason why if I'm in any new town I look for the local cultural weekly. And while I couldn't always take part in them--rarely did films like The Little Theif make it upstate--sometimes I could. I took the trip down to The City (and reading the Voice you always thought of it as The City) to see that Truffaut, and somehow Stranger Than Paradise made it up there. When it did I knew I was seeing a movie by a new talent with absolutely new ideas about filmmaking and what constituted a story. By age 24 I'd seen enough explosions and guns going off. I was ready for nuance.

I read all the greats in the Voice: Mailer, Christgau, Sarris, Hentoff, Bastone, Feiffer, Stamaty, Mack, Willis, Goldstein, Johnson, Plachy (okay, I looked at her stuff, but I drank it in like it was written), Barry, Rall, Barrett, Hoberman, Brown, Indiana. Listen how those names trip off my tongue! I knew I was part of a special constituency. I read Ellen Frankfort's histrionic The Voice and Kevin McAuliffe's Great American Newspaper (which was already sounding the Voice's death knell in 78). I stuck with it through the Murdoch years and when it was funded by the sales of flea collars. I stuck with it through the disgraceful firings of Eddy, Christgau, Goldstein, Hentoff, Feingold and Musto. I even stuck with it through the painful constrictions online as it became a watered-down spacewaster where, at best, one could mine it for little nuggets of tough observation.

But no more. The final sole reason I've continued to read it online, Roy Edroso's weekly Exploring the Right Wing Blogosphere, has departed, vanished, disincorporated. It is a late column. Runnin' Scared, the blog where Edroso's column appeared, is still there, and one can read archived columns. But it's not the same. I'll continue to occasionally skim Runnin' Scared, because I like seeing what the miscreants back in The City are doing. But as a regular weekly destination, as a place where I will wait up til 10 on a Sunday night because 11 east is when he updated, it will no longer exist for me. Village Voice, I shake the dust of you from my shoes.

at the mall

I know my wife doesn't understand, but I like malls. I'm not much of a shopper--with the exception of books I tend to walk into a store knowing what I want and leave as soon as I locate it--but I enjoy being in a place where I can be comfortable and see people moving around aimlessly. I like it in short doses I should explain. I don't care for the recycled air or the omnipresent mutter of music over the PA systems or the lights from stores. But give me a comfy chair and an atrium or just a skylight and locals wandering and chattering and I can spend the day there. There is, of course, the added attraction on a day like today of a warm, indoor walk. I know I can live without malls. Most of my life they were too far away or didn't exist. But like comic books and movies and drinking they add something to my life that I can celebrate.

it's the little, safe things

I have caught myself, despite my better intentions, falling quite in like with a little-known television series that my local public station plays in the 20 minute spot between other series. It's called The Cafe and the premise is that...well, you can just as easily read this Wikipedia post about it. And perhaps understand what it is that attracts me by this short scene:

I enjoy it, but what's more important to me is the small, homely (in the sense of something that is comforting and small as one's experience of home) artistic endeavors I come to appreciate especially during the winter.

These run the gamut from comic strips


to recent music

to music from my childhood

to very, very stupid TV shows.


I think what it is is that they're little things. Small examples of tameness that manuever under my defenses and tickle something that, otherwise, I'm loathe to admit: I like consistency and safety. And wailing harmonicas.

"then we saw that guy in the american flag coat with the monkey"

About two summers ago I picked up a remaindered graphic novel at one of the B&Ns in the hub.  Today, being Independence Day, seemed like a good day to read something titled The Star-Spangled Adventures of Captain Freebird by a pair known as The Fillbach (with an umlaut above the "a") Brothers.

These fellas have become pretty well-known in the comics world for their artwork on a Star Wars offshoot for Dark Horse but this was their first book, and it appears to be a collection of what were probably five and six page comics that they produced in the mid to late 90s.  The blurb on the back name-checks Vaughn Bode, Hunter Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, and David Lynch, and certainly all of them are in there.  But their art also showed a lot of influence by Rick Geary and Bill Sienkiewicz, as well as some straight-up homages to R. Crumb and Gene Colan.  The story bursts with references to song lyrics, Beat writers, oaters, Carlos Castenada-flavored shamanism and the work of Ed McGaa, the Grateful Dead, everything from the 60s and early 70s, Watergate, Vietnam, the self-help movement, The Lone Ranger, and too many others to list. 

The writing, which is not always up to par with most of the artwork (sometimes literally, with odd British spellings like "flavour" and multiple instances of the misuse of contraction "it's" for the possessive), reminds me most of the glorious Apaloosa Rising by Gino Sky.  There was a time in my life, just two decades ago, when I also tried writing free-form hippie-inflected narrative and I can't say I was successful, but the story the Brothers Fillbach tell lends itself to that style, and so I forgive the misspellings and such, the way one might an older relative's occasional wearing mismatched shoes.

I loved this sucker.  It ends with a hell of a lot of loose ends, and it's obvious the bros intended to follow up with a longer narrative called Broken Heroes: A Fantasy.  That never appeared.  As recently as 2010 they announced they were planning a return to Freebird, but that's also never appeared.  The Freebird saga may be best left as one of those unfinished masterpieces.

I just like it

Most of my life I'm a pretty amiable, happy-go-lucky, almost brainless individual, and that's the way most people know me.  But I've come to realize that when I write on this blog I tend only to write about big, deep things.  Even when I write about something fun I enjoy I can get pretty analytic about it.

As a result I've decided to make a semi-regular feature of things I enjoy just because I enjoy them.  There really are a lot of these, because there are a lot of things I like, and I won't articulate anything big about them or justify my liking them.  I just like them.  I'd like to make more people aware of them.

Today:  the comic series The American Way.

I think I've figured it out

I cut my teeth on late 60s and early 70s comics and I still like to settle in for a while in a bookstore and read several graphic novels covertocover when I have the time. but I've come to be more and more disturbed lately by what I see, and today I think I've come to realize what the cause of that disillusionment is.

they simply are no longer realistic.

many people have noted the incredible violence being perpetrated in comics in the past decade--rapes, beheadings, fists through faces, cannibalism, that sort of thing--and that isn't so much the realistic punch that many of us readers back in what they've come to call the bronze age of comics were hoping for when we cried out that comics lacked realism. after all, we had characters who quit, who were strung out on horse, who killed villains. it was often done as if it was the only way to deal honestly with these issues, but also with an air of trepidation and sometimes coyness, almost in a sweet way.

but now we are given hyperrealistic deaths of tens, dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people at a time. and almost no one is punished for it.

I'm not arguing for a return to the comic code sort of justice in which the evildoer must come to bad ends. but consider: we've told creators and companies that we want realism and grittiness and dark, dark stories where the bad guys win at least as often as the good guys. and that's not what I'm arguing against because frankly I like that. it strikes me that kickass is a more realistic comic story than batman.

but if comic stories reflected the world that we live in no murderous villain would appear more than 2ce, 3 times tops. in a conceit where the joker kills dozens of civilians and cops each time he escapes or where an ultimate (intended specifically to be a more realistic universe) green goblin slaughters multiple dozens of highly trained secret agents, both of these characters in any reality we would recognize would be executed formally or secretly shortly after being taken into custody.

we live in a reality in which a 3 strikes law requires that a person stealing a slice of pizza is given a life sentence; in which 34 states have death penalties and there are 41 separate federal crimes for which someone can be executed; in which the only ways that people like slobodon milosovich or augusto pinochet (in many ways our realities supervillains) can escape life sentences are by playing out the length of judicial rope they are allowed until they die of natural causes; or in which people like jeffrey dahmer are themselves murdered by other prisoners. that the batman would put the joker back in prison or a psychward each time (after he murdered his own partner!) without himself taking vengeance or the state stepping in and putting him to death obviates the refusal by comic writers to take their own concepts seriously. there is no reason readers ought to either.

broader but shallower

last night on my drive home from class I stopped in at a buns & noodles to read the copy of century: 1969 I'd spotted there about a week before. I've really enjoyed the league of extraordinary gentlemen stories alan moore has written over the past decade, and maybe what I enjoy even more is the little visual and verbal contemporary memes he and his artists smuggle into each story, sometimes jampacked into each panel. in the most recent I twigged onto most of the big ones, like the semimajor figure of jerry cornelius who I'd expected as he's a moorcock invention of that time period (and moorcock's kane of old mars had appeared in the 2nd volume), but also the major characters of turner and pherber and jack who I hadn't expected because, unlike moore's other pilferings, they aren't literary. (I've also something to say about the uproar over moore's complaints that dc comics are pilfering from him by releasing new before watchmen comics based on his seminal work, which is this: moore is a braggart and a bully and a genius and he is right.)

at any rate, much of the little sidling things that kevin o'neill put in, like the patrick troughton dr who of that period and andy capp, were really good. but the thing I most appreciated about the book and the thing that I wanted to comment on was the nostalgia I felt reading it for an era when there were secret pockets of information and experiences that were hidden from most people (and mostly found through selfselection). some were right on the surface and freely available, like the village voice of that time and the carlos castenada books. for others, like times square and woodstock and be-ins and dope, you had to seek them out and in some cases you had to know someone who knew someone.

today it seems different, as if every experience is available at any time in some way through the internet as a repository of other people's experiences. those experiences were available, in some form, back then too, but it took time and effort and just plain luck and dogged pursuit to tease them out. I suppose I'm bemoaning the loss of a kind of elite adventurer, of which I was only modestly ever one, a person who knew the codes and where to find things and if he didn't knew someone who did and might be willing to give them out in trade.

I'm not sure I'm complaining about this change entirely--I think it's good that formerly cult tastes like occult kung fu movies or lovecraft's cthulu stories or gutbucket music can be easily found by anyone with a search engine--but there's something different in it, a patina of knowledge that can be laid over a broader but shallower knowledge. I miss the days when I could only find a gang of four album by spending time in a holeinthewall shop on a new york sidestreet and only knew about gang of four because I'd read about them in spin--in its early days, the punker rolling stone made a little more punk by its relation to penthouse--and heard a single tune on erik erikson's latenight overnight show on wdst, long after the squares had shut down for an early day tomorrow. back then I needed weeks or months to make those circuitous and accidental connections. now I can do it all, even the listening, in a half hour.

did jesus die for klingons too?

this fascinates me and I've started a conversation about it in the past which I will doubtless talk about again.

immoral graphic behavior

comic books were a very big part of my early life. I still have several boxes of them from the early and mid-70s, my prime comic-reading period. and I like to catch up with them every once in a while when I have some free time because they can still be cracking good reads, maybe more so now that I'm more nuanced in my understanding of the way the world works than when I was younger.

which is why a comic book story I read this afternoon has weighed on me. it was one of 5 or 6 stories collected in a graphic novel called marvel .1 and it was, I think, an attempt to provide some overview of the direction the company is taking. I'm relying on several-hours-old memory for this story, so forgive me if some of the details are wrong.

the conceit--whose title I don't know but it was written by nick spencer--is that the secret avengers, a splitoff from the regular avengers franchise devoted to covert operations, is going to extract a genetics expert who works for a.i.m., or advanced idea mechanics, a scientific crime organization I remember well from my comics-reading heyday. this scientist has worked for the organization for 15 years and had passed secret information to the government that helped it to avoid a chemical disaster along the lines of the release of sarin in the japanese aubway a decade ago. his cover has been blown and they are responsible for extracting him and his wife and 2 children safely.

they discover in which secret facility the genetics expert works. the superheroes split up and one group attacks the facility. there is a scene in which 2 of the secret avengers, war machine and ant-man, are on their way to the secret lab and are discussing how they'll gain access. another member of the team, valkyrie, will have arrived there before them and neutralized the guards. what this means, we understand from the action we see under their conversation and what they say (ant-man actually says, "you mean when we get there they'll all be dead?"), is that she will kill about a dozen people on entering the facility. this is confirmed when they arrive and valkyrie is standing over their bodies.

when they get there, however, on finding the person they've come to extract, they discover from the man that he is actually a cover and it's his wife who is the genetics expert who has been working in a home lab. she had sent the information under his name for reasons that aren't specified.

another member of the team, moon knight, races to the couple's home, but it's too late. in a panel shown immediately after his fight with the 2 a.i.m. operatives he finds there, we see a woman's arm and hand, both dripping blood, at the top landing of a set of stairs, and his response to steve rogers, the original captain america, who is in communication with the rest of the team, is that the operatives have killed her. we don't hear anything about the couple's 2 children.

the composition of the shot of the victim's arm and hand suggests we should feel badly that the team was too late to save her, and the panel is effective. I had an "oh, no" moment myself. how mature of comics to present the fact that not all stories have happy endings.

but that we are manipulated to feel badly for this woman's murder and not for the deaths of the dozen men (and possibly women since we understand that a.i.m. obviously has women working for it too) that valkyrie kills on her entrance, many of whom are also probably fathers and mothers, is staggeringly immoral. true, valkyrie is presumably operating in self-defense, but from the conversation between her teammates it's obvious she was going there with the intent to kill any opposition she met. the way they talk about it, it's even made light of, as ant-man bemoans his lost opportunity to impress anyone with his superheroics since they'll all be dead.

it's possible that we're meant to sympathize with the murdered genetics expert because when she leaked the salvific information to the government it was, as her husband reports later, "the right thing to do." but so what? she had worked for 15 years for this criminal organization--what did she imagine they were doing with that genetics information she provided for nearly 2 decades? winning science fairs? and who's to say that none of the dozen dead cannonfodder may have also leaked important lifesaving information to some government branch that simply hadn't been made known to the secret avengers? and even if we can assume that none had, isn't that just a byproduct of not being in a position to have damaging information in your hands (possibly that you, as the genetics expert, might have yourself developed)? and, let's face it, in the economy of the past decade, if someone offers us a job, say to guard a facility or a courthouse, that presumably pays good wages and benefits, wouldn't we take it, without being evil or even malicious ourselves? (after all, are we responsible for what the corportation we work for does?)

but so what? it's just a comic book. do I really expect a moral tale from a comic book? yes, I do. by the 1st decade of the 21st century, comics have become an art form that comments as much on realworld dilemmas and events as they do on the madeup problems of superpeople and for better and worse comics have become a method by which some people communicate how they think the world ought to be, and to make light of the deaths of a dozen people and then expect us to shed a tear for a single person who is at the least complicit in research that may have led to the deaths of many more, is an immoral act.

e.m. forster was correct

I spent last friday afternoon at the library at uw-river falls, reading newspapers and doing crosswords--I love to think of someone reading the nytimes or the chronicle of higher education and coming across a puzzle I've penned out and marveling that someone takes the time in these days to do crosswords in public papers, and without benefit of google--and while there I flipped idly through a graphic novel I'd heard of called daytripper, an interesting take on possibilities in an individual's life. I came across a bit of dialogue something like this: 1 character is speaking to another via longdistance call, "well, I have the money and the great job and the girls but I feel like I'm not really having an effect on anyone, like I'm not really enhancing anyone's life." (my approximation) and I didn't have anything like an epiphany, cuz I've known this for quite some time, but it left me reflecting on how my life, especially the past couple decades, has led me to recognize that while I don't have any of the external things (although I did have the great job until recently--que sera sera) I have had tremendous impact on other people. students have not been shy about the impact I've made on their lives, and I was surprised recently when someone reappeared in my life after nearly 30 years and the 1st thing she relayed was how appreciative she'd always been for a kindness I'd genuinely forgotten about. e.m. forster, it seems, was correct: what we need do is "only connect."

teach naked

I'm sitting in the coudersport public library where I have a solid wireless signal. reading last sunday's nytimes I came across this essay in the "week in review" section and was absolutely charmed by it. what does it mean for author tim kreider to say, "I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things"? it means that there is some only partly acknowledged thrill to being the only one on your block--or in your county--to know of, let alone appreciate, the wizardry of devo or david bowie (to my knowledge there was only 1 other bowie afficienado in my high school and we argued fervently which was better, early ziggy stardust bowie [my position] or later thin white duke bowie [his]). when I was a student of secondary education I was told by a professor that the 3 most important words a teacher could say were, "I don't know," followed years later in grad school by the advice of my mentor that the 2nd most important words were, "you should find out." the years between are probably the important ones.

busted buddha

earlier this year I was introduced to a webcomic called darwin carmichael is going to hell. the titular hero lives in a polytheistic universe where mythical creatures like minotaurs and muses exist and karma is a regulated essence. he's damned because he's responsible, through his inattention, for the mental retardation of the current dalai lama. in the most recent storyline, he comes face-to-face with his victim and is, if not exactly forgiven, given reason to hope for his redemption.

the current issue of uu world, the unitarian universalist magazine, carries an essay by meg barnhouse called "the broken buddha" that touches on exactly this theme. when I was in sesshin, buddhist retreat, decades ago--when I first shaved my head--I had gone there because I'd done an uncharacteristic act of violence and wanted to atone for it. the abbot and my fellow sesshinists helped me to understand that atonement wasn't necessary; what was necessary was my acknowledgement of what I'd done and acceptance for its result. I couldn't turn back the clock so it was as if it had never happened and I could never make up for it but I could behave better. no one said it in so many words but I've come to understand this teaching as "we aren't responsible for our situation but we are responsible for how we respond to it." as barnhouse writes, "sometimes agony is appropriate...life is not neat."

for me, the image is not only of a broken buddha but one that's busted by both the state of being broken and by being found out. one day in my second in sesshin I went into dokusan with the abbot to tell him I had acheived enlightenment. his response: "I'm so sorry." enlightenment meant I had begun to notice the effect I had on existence and my responsibilities toward it. the busted buddha reminds us of the imperfection not only of the people we're responsible to but the okayness of our own recognized and accepted flaws. in 80s terms the busted buddha feels the fear and does it anyway.

what if (part 2): superman

if we take as a given the origin story of superman--last survivor of another world dropped surreptitiously and raised the same in our world who makes his appearance as an adult--I think the reaction of most religious institutions to his existence would be denial of it or alternatively deification of him. xianity, especially, would react to superman as a rival to jesus, perhaps even seeing him as the antichrist, although it's just as possible he would be seen as the second coming. but the primary reaction I think would be that he is an affront to god since he would be, at least the way he's presented in original stories, a near-perfect being. for the same reason, I suspect institutional islam would denounce him (tho I also think sufiism would be drawn to him).

judaism might see him differently and might even recognize superman as the messiah. I'm not certain what the reactions of other religions like hinduism or buddhism might be (although this is an interesting take) but I think that the raelians and scientologists as well as other alien-based faiths would welcome him, not as an adherent but as the focus of worship or at least as an emissary.

likewise, I don't think he would be likely to identify exclusively with a single nation or social group like the white americans he's mostly surrounded by in comics. particularly if he were seen as some emissary or agent of god I suspect people would expect him to effect god's will by counteracting disasters that are also seen as "god's will" such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis or other impersonal forces like disease and war. as a result he would have neither the time or need for a secret identity.

why is there no "night of the living dead" for contemporary comics?

>

I'm not the 1st person to make this observation and it's not even the 1st time I've made it. one of the joys I've retained from my childhood is reading comic books, although I'm more likely now to read them in graphic novel or collected form, and I'm likelier to read them for free in libraries and bookstores. that's what I've done with this free rainy afternoon and I've come away feeling depressed.

comic book authors in my youth wrote exciting but meaningless and unrealistic stories about exciting but unrealistic people. today's authors are still writing about unrealistic people but they're behaving more and more like the nastiest people you're likely to meet. whole swathes of bystanders, innocent and villainous, are shredded in each story as if every one was a match in a book and with about as much interest on the part of the writer as a child gives a single match when he has a whole box beside him.

part of the reason I gave up reading comic books in the late 70s-early 80s was that the stories didn't reflect reality as I was coming to know it and as I was coming to experience it in other art forms. comic book writing today strikes me as being at about the same level as the writing of horror films in the early 70s as filmmakers were intoxicated by the idea of lifting the restraint that good was always rewarded and bad always punished, and the idea that death could come to anyone sitting at home as quickly and horrifically as it could to someone carrying a flashlight with burned-out batteries into a dark house. but the impetus has been on finding newer and more personal ways of slicing into one another rather than on new ways of telling those stories.

there are, of course, exceptions, many, many exceptions. and I don't really have much right to complain. I'm not, after all, the audience they're written for. I read them for free, after all, and as a luxury after I've gotten my more important work done. who are they written for? sometimes I think I know--kids for whom the bitterness and hypocrisies of watergate and vietnam, even if they don't know the names, are a given; kids for whom attending an r-rated movie was never a rite of passage but something available on tv after school; kids whose grandparents marched so a black man could be elected president and whose parents march so he'll be impeached.

I don't want to sound like I should be on the edge of my lawn waving a cane--I don't think I really should be taken into consideration by comic writers or readers. but I wonder if for these kids there will ever be a comic they can look back on the way I look back on night of the living dead or phantasm or rabid or the exorcist, as attempts to articulate something for which gore and sudden death was an integral part of the message, which was something about the inexplicability of life and our feeble reactions to it, and not just something to say "kewl!" to and go on to the next page.