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[Thad]

So Alan Moore said some more shit.

Well, mostly he said the same shit again.

I had to quit reading halfway through the thing.  I'm not sure how the interviewer kept mumbling those questions with Moore's cock so far down his throat, and the site design is really and truly awful.  (Would you like the text to be more than 14 pixels high?  Well, fucking tough; if you zoom the text the paragraphs start rendering on top of each other.)

Here's the part where I finally had to quit:

[Kurt Amacker]:  Like I said, I think I have different feelings about contemporary comics to some extent.  I still read Wolverine and that kind of thing.  I mean I agree, though, that nothing has ever topped Watchmen.  I mean Maus is great, but not as good, and the same for The Dark Knight Returns.  Those are the seminal works that have helped elevate the industry.

Look, if you don't think Maus is as good as Watchmen, okay, that's a matter of opinion.  But really, the best fucking defense of contemporary comics you can offer is "I still read Wolverine"?

Dude.

Paying for It, The Love Bunglers, Congress of the Animals, Wilson.  Those were published within THE PAST TWO YEARS.  Would you like me to go back farther?

I mean, as dickish as Moore is with his blanket dismissal of everyone who works for DC or Marvel, he has made it clear in previous interviews that when he rants about "comics" and how nobody has any original ideas, he's ONLY talking about DC and Marvel, not the entire medium.

If the interviewer had left it at Wolverine and DKR, then he could make that same claim -- but he mentioned Maus directly, so he is therefore clearly referring to THE ENTIRE MEDIUM OF COMICS (at least, the American branch of same).  And again, yeah dude, there are more than two books in the past 25 years that have been in the same ballpark as Watchmen.

Anyhow, the subsequent comments threads have been every bit as predictable and nauseating as the article itself.

I like Alan Moore.  I actually tend to agree with him on most of what he's saying.  I also think he takes the hyperbole too far, overinflates himself, and insults some very talented people working on very good books.  And frankly I'm just about sick of hearing it and wish he'd stop talking about fucking Watchmen and just focus on his CURRENT work.

For a long time I thought HE was sick of talking about it and would RATHER just focus on his current work, but at this point I no longer believe that to be the case.  If he didn't want to keep talking about Watchmen, he would have stopped by now.

And I just want to punch the interviewer in the mouth.

If he bites down, well, Moore should have thought of that earlier.  And hey, maybe it'll give him an idea for a sequel to Neonomicon.

[Büge]

“I tried to think about it as if it were me, if there was some young guy making, God forbid, New Frontier motion comics or something, and he was a total fanboy…that would drive me up the wall.”

http://watchmen2creatordarwyncooke.tumblr.com/

[Brentai]

“Both of the Big Two are terrified of the Mass Market for two reasons:

[...]

2. Comic creators, editors and publishers would actually have to do their jobs — sell populist fare by the truckload that appealed to the mass market. They would have to give up this tight little circle where people care more about Bruce’s feelings than they do whether there’s a Batman story actually taking place. They’d have to work all ages with public light cast on the book’s actual content, they’d have to compete with better written and produced entertainment from other media. Books that didn’t sell would die. “Creators” who couldn’t meet a monthly schedule would be restricted to specials and one-shots. Public taste and trends would have to be embraced. The precious superhero would have to share the stage with other more relevant genres like Romance, Crime, Horror, Humour and the like. Dicks like Kevin Smith would have to save their juvenile, oral-sex innuendo for something other than a mainstream DC comic.”

Hey, other than the out-of-the-blue crossjab at Kevin Smith (which may or may not be justified) he makes a pretty good argument for keeping the genre out of the mainstream.  Populism ruins everything, and if you can avoid it and still make money, way the more power to you.

Whether the superhero comic book genre has descended into populism anyway or not is a different concern.

[Bongo Bill]

Can't help but thinking that embracing populism would still be an improvement over your average modern superhero comic.

[Mongrel]

I have to say I'm with Bill (and Darwyn Cooke) on this one. Populism may be bad, but current superhero comic offerings are far worse.

[Brentai]

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

[Mongrel]

That it is.

[Thad]

Well, first of all, I'd be wary of any blog that's completely made up of out-of-context, cherry-picked quotes.

Second: This is Darwyn Cooke.  He worked on Batman: TAS and Beyond.  He is pretty fucking well-qualified to make judgements about what is a good Batman story that also happens to be accessible to a very broad audience.

Without reading the original interview in context, I'm willing to bet that what he's complaining about isn't the examination of Batman as a character, it's the fact that the writers for the Big Two are so far up their own asses and are writing stories for themselves (ie fanboys) instead of for a mainstream audience.  Not only is it impenetrable, but it's usually not very damn good.

And finally, keep in mind that what's "mainstream" for superheroes (which is basically the stuff that's on TV or in the movies) is not what's actually mainstream in comics right now.  The bestselling comics of recent years have been things like Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim, Fables, and Y: The Last Man.  (Half of which, granted, are also on TV or in movies, and the other half people are trying to turn into TV shows or movies.  But that's because they are successful comic books!)  Cooke's own adaptations of the Parker novels have done pretty well too, so I can't imagine he's arguing AGAINST making non-superhero books that sell well at Barnes and Noble.

But on the whole yeah I think he's exactly right even if the out-of-context quote doesn't sound very good: we need more accessible books and less bullshit, and that won't just be good for making more money, it'll make for better comics too.

[Büge]

http://4thletter.net/2012/03/brothers-x-witzke-on-how-we-talk-about-watchmen/

Here’s the real thing that Watchmen did though, and I didn’t realize it until Abhay pointed it out for me. Watchmen said that you could take this material (superheroes, alternate reality stories) and tell a finite, complete story with it. There could be intertextuality and generational narratives and have legitimate minor characters, and actual consequences and politics. Stories, stories that matter, they have ends. And Watchmen is the first story that was taken to the real world (whether or not it was the first really doesn’t matter, the revolution starts when people notice fires in the street not when the plans are drafted) and said “oh yeah this stuff can actually work as a novel, it’s not just endless soap opera/pulp/sitcom that you can walk in and out of at any time because its an endless middle”. Making more Watchmen comics, as Abhay said, actually say that people were always right its just a garbage dump of endless dudes punching dudes, there’s no finite quality to anything.

[Zaratustra]

That's a good point. There has never been another Watchmen because there has never been another closed superhero story (aside from Warren Ellis' independent work, specially the great triad of Black Summer / No Hero / Supergod)

[Mongrel]

Shit, I was saying that a decade ago.

It's not quite true though; that's just one side of a two-sided coin. The real problem is that regular funnybooks lack a proper anchor.

You can do that by writing a contained story with a beginning, middle, and end, but you can ALSO do it by keeping the same creator/creative staff for a book's life - either one will give you the bedrock of consistency that you need to have some kind of decent story.

It's only when you have neither than you get these endless rambing things where creator after creator feels the need to put their stamp on the book/offer tribute to the past/bring back lost fan favourites/chart new ground/go back to familiar territory/etc. etc. etc. 

Now that's a little disingenuous of course - you can't run a book forever with one guy. He or she is going to die or retire eventually. But you can have far far longer runs. A great example there is the way very long-running newspaper strips used to be (and often still are) created.

[Bongo Bill]

If the creator grooms their own successor (Prince Valiant, Donald Duck) then you can have that kind of consistency indefinitely.

[Thad]

I hadn't brought up the "Watchmen is self-contained and has a beginning, middle, and end" point because I thought it was obvious.  But yes, it's pretty important here (and I think if Moore HAD gone through with making prequels himself, it still would have been a dumb idea).

That said, all this nonsense about how this was the FIRST COMIC EVER to have an ending instead of just going on forever is kind of undercut by the fact that a great big fucking chunk of it is taken up with homages to the old EC Comics stories that did exactly fucking that.

That shit was not new in the 1980's.  It was not POPULARIZED in the 1980's -- for fuck's sake, the horror and crime comics of the 1950's positively DWARFED the sales of absolutely any modern comic.

At best, Watchmen REINTRODUCED a new generation of readers to an idea that people used to take for granted.

[Büge]

It's not quite true though; that's just one side of a two-sided coin. The real problem is that regular funnybooks lack a proper anchor.

Not to mention there's money to make and a status quo to maintain. I'm mainly reminded of Grant Morrison's run on X-Men. He had a style he was stamping on the series, sure, but it was also shaping up to be a fairly self-contained run. The stories seemed to exist in their own world and explored themes of prejudice, genocide and cultural appropriation as well as punching sentinels and crazy psychic bald ladies. But it really became unraveled in the end because it was deviating too much from the status quo.

[Mongrel]

Not to mention there's money to make and a status quo to maintain.

A small, ever-dwindling amount of money and a comforting status quo demanded by an ever-hardening band of core survivors, yes.

[Büge]

The comics industry really needs to get out of the direct market ghetto if it wants to survive.

[Thad]

I'm mainly reminded of Grant Morrison's run on X-Men. [...] But it really became unraveled in the end because it was deviating too much from the status quo.

I don't think that's why it unraveled in the end; it felt like the end was totally rushed and tried to cram another two years' worth of storylines into the last 3 issues.

Regrettably, most of what Grant brought to the table was immediately abandoned, ignored, or straight-up retconned.  The bits that stayed were Beast and Frost's secondary mutations (though the idea that anybody else was ever going to have one just went out the window), the idea of Xavier's as a full-on school with a faculty and student body (largely cribbed from the movie but with Grant's own stamp on it), Xavier's retirement/Cyclops taking over as headmaster, a few stray characters, and, most surprisingly, Jean's death and Cyclops's relationship with Emma, which you would think would be the first thing somebody would come in and "fix".  (Seriously.  Jean Grey has managed to actually stay dead for EIGHT YEARS.  That's got to be some kind of record.)

The comics industry really needs to get out of the direct market ghetto if it wants to survive.

Yes and no.

The direct market still serves a purpose for nurturing books that aren't immediate bestsellers -- your Unwrittens and Sweet Tooths (Teeth?), your Rachel Rising and Chew, Orc Stain, even stuff like Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim, Fables, and Y had to start somewhere.  Hell, even mainstream superhero books like Deadpool and Thunderbolts.

The latest issue of Optic Nerve ends with a really great segment where Tomine notes that he's the last one of his class to continue releasing comics in little 24- or 32-page bursts.  He notes that Clowes et al have abandoned that format entirely in favor of OGN's -- and he says that he just doesn't think that's a good fit for his weird little 8- and 12-page stories (nor does he want to save them up until he's got enough to fill a 144-page book and figure out some other way to pay rent in the meantime).

Long-term, eventually digital is going to take over as the distribution medium for periodical comics, for good and/or ill.  It's certainly created some success stories like Beaton and Onstad; I love them and they are great.  But how it's going to work for guys like Tomine, well, that's an open question, and I'd really hate to lose a voice like his.

...oh hey apparently Mark Waid said a bunch of stuff about digital comics this past weekend.  I should go read up.

[Thad]

Somebody in Parish's comments section brought up the question of what the best movie adaptation of an Alan Moore book is.

And I think it's this one, but what's more interesting is WHY I think that.

Really, the biggest place where the movie drops the ball is the over-the-top, pornographic fight scenes.

In other words, of all the problems in all the Moore-based movies, this one's are easiest to fix.

Pull a Phantom Edit on the thing, chop most of the fights down to a couple of seconds, and you've got a movie that's instantly better and far more tonally similar to the original.  Sure, you've still got the problem of the streets at the end being empty instead of piled with corpses, and yeah Ozy and Laurie aren't perfectly cast, but still, it'd be a huge improvement with some pretty minor cuts.


Meanwhile, re: Waid's comments, they really aren't terribly shocking or inflammatory (he's starting a digital comics company and selling his personal comic collection to pay for it), but man some Comic Book Guy sure is horked off about it.

[A²]

Well, comic book store owners are already on the ropes. Their market's been steadily declining due to other media (Unless that New 52 DC thing gave that tremendous jump they were hoping for), and to add insult to injury, this "internet" thing has sprang up and is pulling away potential new customers - "Hey man check out this comic * File send of Avengers 1-350.cbr *

Now one of the writers themselves is, in his eyes, siding with the enemy

I don't think Waid really is doing anything bad, and that the store owner is being a jerkass, but it's not hard to see what led up to this.

[Thad]

I love comic book stores; I probably shouldn't have to tell anybody that.  And I've yet to buy a single digital comic (though I've downloaded quite a few of the public-domain freebies from Digital Comic Museum, and okay pirated some stuff that's out-of-print and unlikely to be reprinted again, like Jack Kirby's 2001 series).

But as always, lashing out at people who acknowledge the existence of the Internet is not the way to save your twentieth-century business model.  And, as always, the only way you're going to get people into a store instead of just having them get their shit on the Internet is to give them something they can't get on the Internet.

Protip: an article where somebody rants about something Mark Waid said and vows to NEVER BUY ANY MARK WAID COMICS AGAIN is something that people can very easily get on the Internet.  And oh hey by the way so is the latest Daredevil trade, dude.  It costs 63% of what you would be charging for it if you weren't refusing to carry it.

Your customers know this.  Because they're not fucking idiots.  (Well, they might in fact be fucking idiots, but they still know that comics are cheaper on Amazon.)  That there are places on the Internet where they can buy comics more cheaply and conveniently than your store is not something they just found out because that loudmouth Mark Waid let it slip.  They know.  And they're still shopping at your store instead of buying everything on Amazon.  This is because you are offering them something that Amazon doesn't.

Your lashing out at digital comics instead of online sales of print comics suggests that you think the major reason people are buying comics from you instead of Amazon is for instant gratification, is because they want to get the issues as soon as they're out and not wait for the trade and then shipping.

And God help you if that's really the only reason people are coming into your store.

Why do I keep going to MY store?  Well, the instant gratification is part of it.  And the collector mentality is part of it too (though my collection's too goddamn big too and I need to start getting rid of some of it, and now that I've finally figured out who might actually WANT a bunch of 1990's X-Men comics, I'm getting closer to actually doing it).  And indeed part of it is because I don't have one of these fancy new retina-display iPads and I still prefer the paper reading experience over the screen one, and let's not even get me fucking started on DRM.

BUT, it's also because the store owner treats me right, and has been for over a decade now.  It's because he knows what I like and gives me good recommendations.  It's because of the banter at the counter and with other customers, and yes that IS more fun than trying to talk to the nitwits in the ComicsAlliance comments section.  And yeah, it's because of a few things that are pretty particular to me, I guess, a strong sense of loyalty and a willingness to support local business even when there are much cheaper alternatives.

That's the kind of shit you need to do to keep your customers, Guy Who I Am Somehow Addressing This Post To Even Though He's Obviously Not Reading It.  Don't blame Mark Waid.  Just do the best you can -- and I know it's rough out there, and I wish you the best.