I read Matt LaRock's comments [in last month's Finish Line] with interest, and found myself nodding my head at a lot of what he said -- not just because it made sense vis-a-vis comics, but because it made sense, period. The problems he described are not limited to comics. They are ubiquitous.If I could come up with a single cogent criticism about the art forms that we've developed -- TV, movies, comics, books, what have you -- it's that they're eating their tails. Their entire range of vision has become limited to echoing other shows, other novels, other comics titles. Comics should not be about other comics, if they can help it -- and books shouldn't be about other books. Better to say, maybe, that they shouldn't begin and end where the others begin and end.
This is what we mean by that much-maligned word "creativity." It means bringing things to the page that weren't there, that only existed in that nebulous space between the creator and his world. It takes a certain kind of person -- not just someone who's good with words or pictures, but someone who observes closely and can do something with what he's picked up. You know, a storyteller.
Many of the people who are responsible for creating comics, novels, movies, and other popular entertainments are not storytellers -- they're technicians. They understand a story only as a bunch of mechanical, prepackaged interchanges between stock components. When it comes to drawing on themselves to add something to the mix, they freeze, because that's not what they know. They are paid to put together something that sells, and those products do sell, but only until the initial attention spans of the audiences in question are exhausted. Take the drop-off curve with movies like The Lost World: Jurassic Park, for instance: did you ever talk to anyone who gave a damn about that movie other than as a technical achievement? The same is true of quite a few comics, too.
This is going to sound like elitism, but I'll say it anyway: there's too much product out there, and almost all of it is disposable. I work for a magazine, and we are entirely too aware of how a shift in the wind can whip your readers, and your money, out from under you. So, of course, fear rules ... but my question is, does it have to obliterate taste as well?
Comics publishers need to be more discerning about hiring talent. They need to find people who can write as well as people who can draw. And they need to find people who are skilled and yet have interests outside of the immediate field. I'd be suspicious of a comics artist who never looked at anything except other comics, or a writer who never read anything except other books in his field. I don't think there's nearly enough sense of standards in this department, and certainly not enough work being done to ramp up those standards.
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Finish Line
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