The Funnies Business

Publishers Weekly had a piece on "Big-Cross Over Events and the Barrier Method" that sums up the situation pretty nicely. The writer Todd Allen puts most of the blame on the business end, on a need for steady sales because these are publicly traded companies. That must be true to some degree though as outsiders we will never know. Certainly the editorial people at both companies claim there's no such pressure but the amount of cancellations, relaunches, reboots and yes cross-overs shows that something other than purely creative considerations are at work.

Many writers and artists complain about cross-overs but they tend to be the less powerful ones, people like Peter David or Christopher Priest. (Grant Morrison did at one time but he's top of the heap at the moment.) The ones like Johns or Bendis that drive these events rarely say anything negative about them. In fact it was while reading Morrrison's run on Animal Man that I first really saw the problem. When going through that series, the spots where it tied in to big events at the time no longer matter and in fact only hurt the story. Morrison talks about that briefly in one of the tpbs but it's easy to see in many places.

Of course nearly all these people learn to be follow company lines pretty early in their career and we generally have little idea what they're really thinking unless something comes out later. But it looks like many creators get caught up in the idea of a Big Event and are able to convince themselves that this is actually good storytelling. And I can't entirely blame them - if DC came to me and said, hey want to write a huge story that can use any character we've ever published and make any changes you want, then heck I'd likely do it too.

(I have to add one example that also ties back to an earlier post came in a recent issue of Siege. Now this should have been a good event. The idea is simple - Osborn and his government-sanctioned supervillains-pretending-to-be-good-guys invade Asgard and everybody else tries to stop them. Four issues, potentially tight & restricted story, big cast, big stakes - easy right? Well Marvel first started advertising that "an Avenger will die!" as if that matters at all, though considering that there are now four separate Avengers teams running around maybe a little thinning of the herd can't hurt. But the death (Ares in case anybody cares but really nobody does) was a two-page spread of him being literally torn apart in very graphic detail. At some point it's hard not to think these creators really are stuck at age 12.)

One solution is what Alan Moore proposed in the never-realized "Twilight of the Superheroes" where there's a main story in a separate series and then everybody else can tie-in if they think it's worth doing. He wrote then that such an event "would have a sensible and logical reason for crossing over with other titles, so that the readers who were prompted to try a new title as a result of the crossover or vice versa didn't feel cheated by some tenuous linkage of storylines that was at best spurious and at worst nonexistent." That nails the problem we're seeing today and Moore wrote that a quarter of a century ago.

The Big Two at times appear to trying something like this by putting the event into its own mini-series and then adding other minis rather than using ongoing series. Final Crisis possibly came closest to this idea though considering the links between the minis and then to Batman: RIP in those regular books it was hardly a streamlined approach.

Another solution frequently proposed (and that even the editorial people say they're doing but never really follow through, as Allen's article points out) is to just put a moratorium on cross-overs. This seems unlikely considering that the business has adopted this blockbuster mentality - it's pretty easy to mark the decline of American film back to studio reactions to Star Wars and there's a chance we're seeing the same thing in comics.

Because what I'm really getting at isn't the events or that they might cause problems for retrospective reading - it's that so many mainstream comics creators are producing inferior work and appear to not care about stories or characters or ideas, in short to not care about all the things that drive people to create art. And the real problem is that very few of them seem to realize that.

Girl Comics #1

Apparently inspired by their indie anthology Strange Tales (which was of course "inspired" by DC's Bizarro), Marvel decided to spotlight the "Women of Marvel" as pointed out on the cover. There have been some complaints about the title Girl Comics but that's mostly from people who don't really understand feminism - the contents are a bigger issue.

The cheesy opening ("We don't do it for the sake of power or glory though we are powerful and glorious") is as bland as most introductions are but at least indicates the point of the series. A point that's completely contradicted by the very first story where a woman in trouble is rescued by Nightcrawler. True she does help by bonking the baddie on the head with a high-heeled shoe but it's hard to imagine how having a weak damsel saved by a strong man gets across any kind of positive message (and since it's not a story, barely even an anecdote, the message would be the only point).

Another story has a guy online setting up to meet a girl at a park, only the "girl" is the Punisher. Then it's revealed that the guy is preparing to abduct the girl. He arrives at the park and is promptly murdered by the Punisher. Again not even really a story and you have to wonder why the creators thought this was a good idea (though a likely guess is that they've heard too many scare stories from TV and magazines - the rate of such crimes is much lower than most people have been led to believe). The guy as far as we know hasn't even committed a crime. A similar story in Deadpool #900 at least gave the background and oddly enough had more a feeling of reality. Here the Punisher comes across just as creepy as the would-be abductor.

The rest of the issue is at least decent. The highlight is Robin Furth & Agnes Garbowska's evocation of classic children's lit using Franklin and Valeria Richards. A few years back Devin Grayson was one of the best writers in comics but she faded out - she has an ok but not any better X-Men story here. Jill Thompson's Venus looks great but feels just a tad too clunky.

While I want to support anything different that the Big Two try, at this point I don't know whether the next issue will be worth picking up.

Book covers

Amazon's Omnivoracious blog compares covers of US and UK editions of some titles, an idea the writer picked up from another blog called The Millions which did 2010 and 2009 versions. So now I'm disappointed that we didn't get the British cover for Netherland which is so much better than the American. It also makes me wonder about the decisions behind some of them. The US cover for Stockett's The Help is so bland that I didn't realize until recently it had been getting good reviews - it just looked like more quasi-romantic churn. Moore's A Gate at the Stairs is almost as bad in the US version and while I don't think the UK's is too much better it at least looks like something you wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen hauling around.

I get a daily newsletter called Shelf Awareness of bookstore news and every week they quiz some author with a set of standard questions. One is "Book you've bought for the cover" and surprisingly most respondents say they don't buy books based on the cover, almost as if they'd been asked to divulge some slightly disgusting fleshly proclivity. Not a huge majority answer this way but perhaps a bit over half and the thing is that I think they're lying. Now I can imagine "normal" folk not buying based on a cover but writers? Book people? This is our STUFF and pretty much every writer and remotely dedicated reader connects to the physical book in a way that I assume those normals do to cars and clothes. Why even pretend that the cover had no influence in a decision?

I'll have to admit that I rarely buy books purely for the cover alone, at least not since a high school binge where Frazetta covers in the used store meant an instant purchase. Partly this is because I already have too much. There have been a few recently that tempted me, especially those Penguins with the comic artists covers - Ware, Sacco, Jason, Millionare. And the recent cover for Under the Volcano with its Day of the Dead skull though the temptation is at least partly because I was thinking of re-reading it and that would be a good excuse.

But there are also covers that work against books, not merely bad covers to forgettable books (of which there is an endless stream) but ones for books worth reading. Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean is a wonderful, sharply written novel but the cover made it look like the most generic heroic fantasy and a reissue as The Incompleat Nifft was possibly even worse. A friend was reading one of the Flashman novels while riding the bus to work and said she had to wrap it in brown paper because she was afraid somebody seeing just the cover would think it was racist (which you'll know isn't true if you've read any of the books). An entire post could go to textbook covers because they frequently look like somebody just grabbed an image from the stock library. In fact I know for sure that happened in at least one case where our store had a sociology book where the cover was a group of multi-ethnic young people having a grand old time on what looked like a beach. A few months later we got flyers advertising some kind of travel service that used the exact same photograph.

And I might as well mention my all-time favorite textbook cover: the geek joke for John Taylor's Classical Mechanics.

Two lists

The AV Club made a list of 35 odds 'n' sods albums as essential as official releases and the first surprise is that they found that many worthy ones. The writers certainly admit that all aren't perfect but that's not the point - the point is that these are up to the standards of the other albums and by the ones I'm familiar with (about half) that's true. I would have added Joy Division's Still and The Great Lost Kinks Album and maybe even the Sex Pistols' Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle which has always seemed more a stray tracks collection than a soundtrack (especially since it doesn't have much to do with the film).

A different note is IO9's 75 Books You Should Own for DC Comics' 75 Anniversary. The whole "own" bit makes this too aggressive, especially considering that several selections are Absolute/Omnibus editions that are too much (too much money, too much size) for even many fans. There's one real slip - Mad and The Spirit are now owned by DC but aren't in any sense part of its history. Some of the selections really shouldn't have been (Golden Age, 52, Blackest Night) but more importantly the emphasis on what can currently be bought means large chunks of DC is missing - nearly all of the Western, SF, horror and war comics, completely all of the romance, comedy and teen (nobody really wants a Binky or Scooter revival but trust me that some of the Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope issues still hold up), and genuine but unreprinted treasures such as Sugar & Spike. Otherwise, the list is pretty decent and it's nice to see recognition for often overlooked titles like WE3 (one of the best works in any medium I've encountered in the past decade), Doctor 13: Architecture and Morality, Sleeper and the finale to Grant Morrison's Animal Man.

Worst rock films?

The headline says Jim DeRogatis Picks the Worst Rock Movies Ever but in fact he's really picking movies often claimed to be the best where he doesn't agree. Normally this would be a big "so what" but DeRogatis is a decent critic (I worked with him briefly years ago on a newspaper Elvis tribute) and also because I mostly agree with him. The Last Waltz always seemed far more boring than its rep suggests and mainly because it feels too staged. Woodstock as a movie isn't quite so tedious (or maybe it is but in a different way) but as he points out the myth is and while you'd think that punk would have punctured that, well I guess that too was a bit too much myth. DeRogatis nails the problem with Heavy Metal Parking Lot and if you've seen any of director Jeff Krulik's other films you'd know he's full of hipster scorn masquerading as an appreciation for trash culture. (Oddly enough I used to work with somebody who might have been in the film except for an accident - she had tickets and was ready to go but did something that resulted in her mother grounding her so she never made the show.) Now I'll admit HMPL does have a kind of mean, voyeuristic fun in watching rednecks be rednecks but then again have you ever been tailgating before a college football game? As DeRogatis points out, the vast majority of the people in either case are perfectly fine but it's the small percentage of jerks that are amusing or annoying.

As for Rock Star I'm not sure what he saw in it - this should have been almost the greatest film ever but mostly fell flat.

Food prejudices

I sometimes go to a place that serves Chicago hot dogs, a bit unusual considering that I live half a continent away. They have a big mass-produced sign saying that they won't put ketchup on hot dogs which for all I know is a national prejudice but one I always associate with Chicago. Maybe that's because the first time I encountered such an idea was in a Straight Dope column which originated from Chicago.

The thing that's so funny is that like so many prejudices the anti-ketchup people have a definite reason (ketchup is too sweet) but a reason that still won't convince anybody, maybe because it's arbitrary. Have you ever had a Chicago dog? Relish and a pickle spear? Peppers? Tomatoes? People that state "ketchup smothers the flavor of the hot dog" but who will eat a Chicago dog that smothers the flavor even more are simply dishonest.

These prejudices can be found in lots of places. I remember a Food Network chef saying that a well-done steak shouldn't even be eaten but really that's not his call. It's easy to start an argument in some places about the "proper" way to make chili or BBQ. Some people clearly enjoy questioning the authenticity of ethnic/international restaurants. I once read somebody who blasted all the supposedly ignorant diners who eat sushi with chopsticks (in Japan it's finger food) or who bite it in two instead of eating all at once, something that stood out to me because I hate eating sushi with my fingers and frequently the pieces are too big to really enjoy unless bitten in half. And people I know who've been to Thailand or Mexico then point out how our Thai and Mexican restaurants aren't quite like what is eaten there? Not news and even if it was nobody cares.

Now I know that much of this is just people creating arguments about something that doesn't matter or can't be resolved just as others will get into cats vs dogs, or DC vs Marvel, or pretty much anything involving sports. The difference with food tends to be that they can pretend to scientific reasons (the too-sweet ketchup approach) or historical ones (whether chili should have beans). In the end none of that matters. To paraphrase Duke Ellington if it tastes good then it is good.

What happened to World of Warcraft

I started WoW a few months after it went online but after about a year went to playing intermittently, usually about one month on then two off. I just noticed that last year I only played two months and a good bit of that is because of the great simplification that's been going on. Summer of 2008 I had figured that would be my last but just a couple of months later Jon at work told me that with a new patch hunters could now tame devilsaurs so of course I was back. (Though as cool as devilsaurs look I found core hounds to be much better.)

A good example is Alterac Valley. When I first reached the level to enter it was fairly complex. Each side tended to break up into teams to gather the materials for flyers or reinforcements, try to summon the big gods, round up wolves, capture mines, etc. There was strategy involved even if getting 40 complete strangers to do it was tough. One result is that matches could last a long time - I was in one that went two hours and there were believable reports of some that lasted up to six. Today, though, that's nearly all gone. AV matches tend to be races to take out the towers then the general and as a result rarely last more than 20-30 minutes. I was even in one that lasted just nine.

There are probably hundreds of other changes designed to simplify and speed up the game that mostly feels like dumbing it down. Some of this was inevitable. Increasing the leveling speed almost had to be done so that enough people would be at the cap for the expansions. The hunter mechanics were so hard to understand correctly that most hunters were played very poorly - that definitely needed to be streamlined. While it does remove some of the concrete feel of a persistent world to allow players to enter a battleground from anywhere I have to admit that I like that. And while allowing the purchase of purple gear through honor points caused an outcry from hardcore players it's the only way non-raiders like me would ever get this stuff.

But I guess what really seems missing is the feeling for about the first couple of years of openness and discovery. Though I rarely join groups and have never been in an instance raid I did participate in several city raids. The impromptu weekend battles around Tarren Mill were a hoot even if there were fairly pointless. There was a lot of crafting discussions and figuring out best approaches to gear or talents. Guilds since then seem to be less friendly though maybe I'm just in the wrong ones. (Being in a large, imploding guild was certainly less than fun even if it had a train-wreck fascination.)

The expansions drained most of that while the daily quests, jousting and world pvp took much of the rest. With players spread out there's less opportunity for ad hoc pvp (or even ad hoc help) and the battlegrounds and dailies absorb attention. In a way I suppose it's better that there's a direction but it still feels like something is missing and I'm certainly not the only person to feel that way. It was fun for a while to level characters in different races or classes but after a while you're playing through the same quest for the sixth or seventh time so yawn. (Blizz has steadfastly refused introducing random factors and events, don't know whether that's from specific design issues or a more abstract sense of purpose.) Admittedly one of the great things about WoW is that it supports numerous types of playing styles and personalities but that can't really help much after a while. Once hitting the cap everything feels more restricted but then lots of hardcore players feel otherwise. Maybe it's just that grinding the same dailies and waiting hours for an instance aren't really for me. I'll admit that the Cataclysm expansion will draw me back by essentially creating a new but still familiar game but that's probably months away.