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.