Comic Inside

In the 1950s, television filled the void left by the Senate inquiries and the imposition of the comics code. A new resurgence in the 60s, comic books were exciting again, carrying into the 70s spurred by superhero AND horror/mystery comics. Bottoming out again in the eighties, this time the culprit- video games.

Today the enemies, television and gaming, are still with us vieing for our time. Comics are not truly accessable to the buying public. They’ve become the property of an exclusive club that seems to revel mostly in some artist’s wet dreams. How nice to know they can excercise his or her artistic rights and freedom. But no one is buying it! It’s dead for all intents and purposes. Comic shops have to fill their shelves with collectible toys to make it.

The comics I buy are at liest more than 30 years old. The new ones just are not interesting and even with all of this self-examination and navel probing, the quality just isn’t there. It’s my opinion that it doesn’t have to read like Shakespear and look like Rembrant to be a good comic. But it must entertain.

The effort has been underway for years to leave the lowly comic book in the dust, replaced by the Graphic Novel. All in the name of impoving (the perception anyway) of the comic book market! Even HBOs Tales From the Crypt” opening credits state ‘Adapted from the comic MAGAZINE…’

The internet will not save comic books. It isn’t a ‘book’ in the first place. Illegal downloading will kill it. Scanning comic books is already a problem. The salvation of the medium is in the hands of something that is not real? If you cannot hold it and carress it in your hands like a lover then it will not satisfy (oops, better watch my own dreaming!). I do have a love affair with comic books.

The only salvation I believe are two things:

1) Comic books must be put back into the public eye through stores or what have you. Recruitment to comic books through casual ‘walk by’ customers who are not necessarily seeking out comics, they just happen upon them out in public stores. Yes, the great unwashed and ‘unenlightend’ masses parting with their three bucks is the only thing that will help save the comicbooks!

2) The superhero must die! And artists and writers must excercise self control or face the imposition of a new comics code!
Rating: 1 / 5

On the whole, _Reinventing Comics_ is not as good as his previous book, _Understand Comics_. The device of using comics to convey his ideas isn’t nearly so effective as it was before. One place where it is quite effective is in making points about the economics of comics distribution, a theme he spends a lot of time on.

There is one major flaw I have to warn you about. The first half of the chapter _Big World, The Battle For Diversity_ is politically correct junk. (The second half is non-political, about diversity of genre, eg sci-fi, superheros, westerns etc) On the whole, Scott McCloud obviously knows a great deal about comics, but for this section, he appears to forget facts that are obvious to even the very casual reader of comics.

For instance, anyone who’s even glimpsed comics in passing, even just in the checkout line at the supermarket, has seen female heroines such as Wonder Woman created expressly to feminize comics, to lure female readers with a female image. Yet McCloud simply ignores this relentless feminization of comics and won’t acknowledge that it undercuts his arguments. Rebutting this half-chapter point-by-point is beyond the scope of this review, so suffice it to say, it is dishonest stuff and really lowers the quality of the book.

The book is otherwise OK. I don’t entirely regret buying it, but I wish I’d been warned about the political correctness.
Rating: 3 / 5