I returned to reading comics in the mid '80s, while I was writing my dissertation on attempts to define race in African American novels addressing the issue of racial passing. In hindsight, I can see how my interest in dual identities led me back to reading comics as a light relief from the scholarship, but I must acknowledge that two major factors were also at work at the time. Alan Moore was writing the mini-series Watchmen, and Frank Miller was offering a dramatically different take on Batman in his mini-series, The Dark Knight Returns. Both of these works were from DC Comics, publishers of the Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Justice League comics. Radically different interpretations of a dystopian America, each prompted by the political inequities of the Reagan administration, Watchmen and DKR appealed to me, emphasizing the necessity for personal responsibility and resilience while also encouraging me to follow writers in a genre I had always loved but had put aside in my high school years.
This new engagement led to my continuing to follow specific writers' works and the works of related authors as I discovered them. Moore was involved in DC's Swamp Thing and Hellblazer, core titles of what would become the DC Comics' imprint, Vertigo, a line of comics intended for grown-up readers who were interested in reading horror, crime, and speculative works in the graphic format. Having been a long-time reader of Heavy Metal, a compilation magazine that at the time offered cutting-edge European comics, I found Vertigo a welcome experiment. When DC made the move of carefully segregating Vertigo characters from the mainstream universe, assuring, for example, that Swamp Thing would have only limited contact with the costumed heroes of the regular DC Universe, that the occult matters addressed in Hellblazer would stay in that title, limiting the aggravating tendency of grand, multi-title crossovers so common in the DC imprint, and that creator-owned, limited-series titles would assure a satisfying story arc in title after title, I became devoted to that imprint. I got to read Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man. I saw the horror and outrage of American culture reflected in Garth Ennis' Preacher. I suffered the serial heartbreak of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Only rarely had the more mainstream comics affected me as these works had. I wrote conference papers about them and even published an article about Hellblazer in a national journal, an unusual but welcome addition to my professional CV.
(Permit me parenthetically to mention that I also followed the DC imprint Piranha Press, whose central title, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, delighted me but exasperated my comics dealer at the time of its publication. Piranha was a writer's imprint that had a more outre feel than Vertigo. I miss it.)
Nevertheless, I find myself with the realization that while I have read and enjoyed Vertigo Comics for a generation now, the comics industry has changed radically in that time. Part of the change has come from its misapplication of its success in the '80s. Many in the industry, seeing the violence in DKR and thinking that it was the most marketable aspect of the work, permitted the ongoing mainstream series to rely more and more on violence as a primary selling point--rather than relying on authorship to complement its art, these comics began to play a game of chicken in seeing who could up the ante further with bloodbaths and ruthlessness, at the cost of character development and story. Entire issues of some comics would wind up being little more than a continued fight scene throughout. The other disturbing element of the industry, the more and more obvious tendency of the corporations to exploit their creators to the point of stealing their creations from them, hurt as well. Creators were dying in near poverty while huge corporations were garnering obscene profits from their work. Even DC, who gained a great deal of critical and commercial success from Watchmen, denied Moore royalties from products they labeled promotional rather than commercial. These issues, in concert with questionable editorial decisions such as forcing Rick Veitch to abandon a Swamp Thing time travel storyline where the title character was to encounter Christ and a telephone survey to determine whether the new Robin, Jason Todd, was to die in a Batman story arc, led to my understanding more and more the distinction between comics as product and comics as a means of expression. Of course, I side with the creators and grow increasingly resistant to overt editorial decisions to move mere product.
In the past year, DC has condensed the Vertigo line considerably, and, next March, DC will have ended the long-running Hellblazer series at #300--a twenty-five year run. Its doing so makes an abrupt shift in policy; earlier, in its relaunching its entire mainstream DC Universe line in 2011, DC took two characters long associated with Vertigo, Animal Man and Swamp Thing, and placed them in the mainstream DC Universe, but these characters did not have titles currently running under the Vertigo imprint at that time. DC's step of cancelling Hellblazer moves its main character, John Constantine, squarely in the DC Universe, no longer half in and half out as he has been since the introduction of DC's Justice League Dark. With Constantine, the title character will find himself set fully in the DC Universe. In diminishing Vertigo, DC Comics has made its choice to reduce the number of titles whose approach I prefer to read, a move intended to beef up its line intended for action-oriented readers. This move, along with its letting go one of Vertigo's most influential editors, Karen Berger, suggests to me that DC no longer considers me a part of the reading demographic worth its vigorous attention. DC is withdrawing from me.
At this point, it is still withdrawal. There are still great Vertigo titles, most notably Fables, a consideration of how iconic figures of legend continue to interact in the current world. Vertigo will also soon offer a mini-series written by Neil Gaiman that offers more background stories about Morpheus, the lead figure of Sandman. Grant Morrison is currently writing solid Superman and Batman stories, although his involvement with Superman ends in early spring 2013. Further, as a life-long Batman fan, I cannot help but continue to pick up Detective and Batman (Scott Snyder's writing on the latter title engages me). I have also found that Dark Horse Comics offers some titles that have the feel that Vertigo has maintained, so I am also following Mike Mignola's work involving Hellboy and BPRD. I am not quitting comics cold turkey, but I see my pull list dwindling, down to a third of its former length, and I cannot help but sense that the comics industry is cycling me out.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Monday, December 17, 2012
Newtown and News
My heart goes out to the community of Newtown.
I wrote this material in reply to an e-mail I received Saturday morning, as my colleagues and I were closing a semester and coping with the news from Newtown. My comments about gun violence, weapons fetishism, and the like are elsewhere, not hard to find. I write here about the media. I have made a few editorial changes from my original e-mail.
Good morning, everyone. I am on campus—I got here early, thinking I would get some writing in before attending the convocation, where I will be editing an article while the names get called out. I will be in DJ mode there, the way I used to work in my hometown country station, listening just enough to catch the cue for the next action. In this case, rather than waiting for a song’s end before starting the next track, I will kind of wait for student’s names I recognize to see them walk with the empty diploma holder in hand.
Last night, Middlekid took a field trip to Knoxville to hear a symphony concert of Christmas music. His band teacher made the arrangements. At home, Firstkid took over one of the couches and stayed online while Dotter watched a newly-released director’s cut of Little Shop of Horrors. In this original version of the musical, not widely released because it tested poorly with contemporary audiences, the heroes die near the end, before the giant alien carnivorous plants take over the entire world to doo-wop-influenced eighties synth. Betterhalf worked until 8:00, because her company installed new programming, and she along with two other women were getting all the files straight so doctors and health providers in the area could get paid as they should.
This morning, while on campus, I checked. Our Department of Communication does offer a course in journalistic ethics. It is a sophomore-level class.
Over the past day, I have seen nationally renowned networks place seven-year-olds on television to discuss hearing shots. I have read how the networks got the name of a suspect wrong, sending the misinformation out globally before getting the information right, and completely misrepresenting the shooter's first victim, his mother, and her relationship to the attacked elementary school. At least one journalist started approaching relatives of victims through direct messaging them on Twitter; someone called the grandmother of the shooter to ask her what she thought before she had gotten official word of the incident; the estranged father of the shooter was ambushed with a microphone, completely oblivious to the reason why until the “reporter” shoved the microphone on his face. Opinions of people on the street are everywhere, and, of course, to preserve themes, some of them are even saying that somehow the shootings are more horrible because they have occurred during a holiday season, as if it would be better had it occurred in August.
These are the networks who, in their rush to be first, told us that in the Sago Mine disaster, only one person had died and the rest of the trapped miners had survived, when it was the other way around. These were the networks who prematurely reported that the Supreme Court had determined that the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, when the findings were the exact opposite. These are the networks who declared George W. Bush the winner of the 2000 election, networks that accepted the notion of “embedded” reporters without fully considering that embedding reporters means that someone is controlling their access to events, networks that were considered heroic when they were doing their jobs by showing the neglected atrocities of Katrina’s aftermath, night after night for almost a month. These are the networks that devote hour upon hour to pundits and commentators because, even when a newsworthy event occurs, the rush to get footage on the air conflicts directly with the need to digest the information, check it for accuracy, and explain what has happened. They apparently feel pressured to rush content, because anyone with a webcam can offer opinion, too, ranging from the distressed call for everyone to love everyone else to the declaration that we should put concealed weapons on kindergarten teachers to prevent situations like yesterday’s from happening in the future. The internet makes it possible to find someone in agreement with just about every opinion imaginable.
And, to top it off, yesterday Rupert Murdoch was communicating his dismay. Since he owns Fox News, perhaps he could exercise some editorial direction and influence that network’s take on the events. Because, after all, in a world where we are quick to blame a couple of Australian shock jocks for causing a British nurse’s suicide with a telephone prank, perhaps even a global media magnate could consider that airing inflammatory viewpoints for profit and political sway could contribute to a climate where horrors become a part of the new normal.
One of my colleagues noted that one of his mythology students was dismissive of the course content because those gods are "not real, anyway," while my colleague had attempted to demonstrate that those unexplainable forces still exist, that our human impulse to embody explanations persists. In the wake of this heart-rending incident, many commentators were quick to refer to the shooter as "pure evil," participating in that cycle of attempting to put a face on a combination of factors difficult to weigh, measure, and confront. Sometimes the resonance of a story, especially as it gets repeated in various forms, does not become immediately apparent. Only rarely have I seen immediate effect from whatever I accomplish in a classroom.
I’m heading over to an event filled with hope and relief. It’s time for convocation.
I wrote this material in reply to an e-mail I received Saturday morning, as my colleagues and I were closing a semester and coping with the news from Newtown. My comments about gun violence, weapons fetishism, and the like are elsewhere, not hard to find. I write here about the media. I have made a few editorial changes from my original e-mail.
Good morning, everyone. I am on campus—I got here early, thinking I would get some writing in before attending the convocation, where I will be editing an article while the names get called out. I will be in DJ mode there, the way I used to work in my hometown country station, listening just enough to catch the cue for the next action. In this case, rather than waiting for a song’s end before starting the next track, I will kind of wait for student’s names I recognize to see them walk with the empty diploma holder in hand.
Last night, Middlekid took a field trip to Knoxville to hear a symphony concert of Christmas music. His band teacher made the arrangements. At home, Firstkid took over one of the couches and stayed online while Dotter watched a newly-released director’s cut of Little Shop of Horrors. In this original version of the musical, not widely released because it tested poorly with contemporary audiences, the heroes die near the end, before the giant alien carnivorous plants take over the entire world to doo-wop-influenced eighties synth. Betterhalf worked until 8:00, because her company installed new programming, and she along with two other women were getting all the files straight so doctors and health providers in the area could get paid as they should.
This morning, while on campus, I checked. Our Department of Communication does offer a course in journalistic ethics. It is a sophomore-level class.
Over the past day, I have seen nationally renowned networks place seven-year-olds on television to discuss hearing shots. I have read how the networks got the name of a suspect wrong, sending the misinformation out globally before getting the information right, and completely misrepresenting the shooter's first victim, his mother, and her relationship to the attacked elementary school. At least one journalist started approaching relatives of victims through direct messaging them on Twitter; someone called the grandmother of the shooter to ask her what she thought before she had gotten official word of the incident; the estranged father of the shooter was ambushed with a microphone, completely oblivious to the reason why until the “reporter” shoved the microphone on his face. Opinions of people on the street are everywhere, and, of course, to preserve themes, some of them are even saying that somehow the shootings are more horrible because they have occurred during a holiday season, as if it would be better had it occurred in August.
These are the networks who, in their rush to be first, told us that in the Sago Mine disaster, only one person had died and the rest of the trapped miners had survived, when it was the other way around. These were the networks who prematurely reported that the Supreme Court had determined that the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, when the findings were the exact opposite. These are the networks who declared George W. Bush the winner of the 2000 election, networks that accepted the notion of “embedded” reporters without fully considering that embedding reporters means that someone is controlling their access to events, networks that were considered heroic when they were doing their jobs by showing the neglected atrocities of Katrina’s aftermath, night after night for almost a month. These are the networks that devote hour upon hour to pundits and commentators because, even when a newsworthy event occurs, the rush to get footage on the air conflicts directly with the need to digest the information, check it for accuracy, and explain what has happened. They apparently feel pressured to rush content, because anyone with a webcam can offer opinion, too, ranging from the distressed call for everyone to love everyone else to the declaration that we should put concealed weapons on kindergarten teachers to prevent situations like yesterday’s from happening in the future. The internet makes it possible to find someone in agreement with just about every opinion imaginable.
And, to top it off, yesterday Rupert Murdoch was communicating his dismay. Since he owns Fox News, perhaps he could exercise some editorial direction and influence that network’s take on the events. Because, after all, in a world where we are quick to blame a couple of Australian shock jocks for causing a British nurse’s suicide with a telephone prank, perhaps even a global media magnate could consider that airing inflammatory viewpoints for profit and political sway could contribute to a climate where horrors become a part of the new normal.
One of my colleagues noted that one of his mythology students was dismissive of the course content because those gods are "not real, anyway," while my colleague had attempted to demonstrate that those unexplainable forces still exist, that our human impulse to embody explanations persists. In the wake of this heart-rending incident, many commentators were quick to refer to the shooter as "pure evil," participating in that cycle of attempting to put a face on a combination of factors difficult to weigh, measure, and confront. Sometimes the resonance of a story, especially as it gets repeated in various forms, does not become immediately apparent. Only rarely have I seen immediate effect from whatever I accomplish in a classroom.
I’m heading over to an event filled with hope and relief. It’s time for convocation.
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