"Here they come now! It's going to be okay"...
Published December 23, 2004
I think that NF demonstrates pretty conclusively what happens when you divorce that iconic silver age action art that we all recognize from the ironizing agents (the much-derided Lee/Thomas/Conway/Englehart/Gruenwald-style narrator, the thought balloons/soliloquies, treadmill continuity, letters pages, etc.) that once were consubstantial with it. This is a Jekyll-and-Hyde job, man. Don't people read R.L. Stevenson anymore? You can't cut the gordian knots between "good" and "evil", "innocence" and "experience", the sordid and the appealing, the "ontic" and the "ontological"!!!!
When you try it with superheroes, you get a portrait of a silver age comic as it appeared to a three-year old--with some weird "mature" rhetorical gestures toward some kind of (there's no other way to put it, really) neocon theory of heroism as the glorious moment of the decision to plunge into the battle against monolithic "evil", for the greater good of community. It's a fantasy that relieves human beings of the necessity to confront their inner demons, which are never going away... This is a parody of what critics of the genre usually deride it for... And the amazing thing is that, paradoxically, this is all that many of these same people seem prepared to accept from the genre! Bravo Darwyn Cooke! Pass the ammunition!
Meanwhile, Grant Morrison continues to thread the needle between the poles of stupidity represented by NF and Identity Crisis, and even he has to couch all of his wonderful ideas in terms of a "return to innocence and fun"... That's not really what he's doing, y'know... not in the way it is generally interpreted, at any rate.
- "Here they come now! It's going to be okay"...
- Published: December 23, 2004
- Type:
- Section: Books
- Writer: David Fiore
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Playing devil's advocate here, the esoteric value of confronting your inner demons can be difficult to appreciate fully when your outer senses tell you someone is actively engaged in an earnest and heartfelt effort to kill you. At such times, many people want to see decisive action from heroic figures, real or imagined.
Angsty internal dialogues about the existential ambiguity of moral values may be more popular in societies with perceived enemies who specialize in quiet and subtle maneuvering for advantage, like the Cold War of the comic books' silver age, or the "Great Game" of European colonial geopolitics in Robert Louis Stevenson's day.
In other words, David, the art forms you like are not necessarily higher and better forms of art. They may simply be products of their time and place, just like the art forms you dislike.
This doesn't mean you have to like them. It does mean you might want to learn something from them, and use what you learn to communicate with people who aren't exactly like you, rather than merely insult them as inferior art and their fans as inferior people.
You might find a more respectful approach turns out to be a more persuasive way to promote your own preferred view of the world.
Just a suggestion.
You could, of course, carry on with assuming you are right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong. But then, how would that make you any different, intellectually, from the decisive action heroes who think they can infallibly tell the difference between good and evil?