So, I've been thinking lately about why the comics around today aren't as good as the comics of my youth. Or is it just me judging them with rose coloured glasses? This has recently came to a head when reading an interview with current do-no-wrong fan favourite author Mark Millar.
While boasting to the great Alan Davis Doane about the success of his Millarworld series of indie comics, he disingenuously described WANTED as his "little shot at an indie-crime comic". This isn't strictly true. Before this comic debuted, it was being hyped (by Millar) as "WATCHMEN for supervillains". He's basically saying "wow, I'd have been happy if this book had sold in the same ball-park as 100 BULLETS, but gee, it sold X-MEN numbers instead", but clearly the book isn't a little indie-crime story, its a big supervillain story. Its characters are all analogues for classic DC Comics supervillains. Millar is an astute businessman, and a great self-publicist. But, so far, WANTED doesn't stand up to comparisons to either WATCHMEN or even 100 BULLETS artistically. Sure, it's entertaining. But it just doesn't resonate, despite a rather desperate attempt to ape the tone of Chuck Palahniuk's generation-defining FIGHT CLUB.
I don't begrudge Millar his success. The more popular comics are, the happier I am. I love the medium, and wish it was the mainstream artform in the Anglophone world that it is in France and Japan. I enjoy his work tremendously. His best comics (his run on THE AUTHORITY, THE ULTIMATES, and WANTED) are all rollicking thrill park rides. His RED SON was, by default, the best SUPERMAN comic since WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN OF TOMORROW? (mainly because after this last blast of silver-age glory, DC allowed John Byrne to turn Superman into a boring yuppie, and remove all the sci-fi whimsy from his mythos).
The thing is, I enjoy them while realising their inferiority to the comics I was reading as a teenager. This therefore, leaves me feeling a little bit regretful and guilty afterwards. Millar, and others of his generation of comicbook writers, principally Warren Ellis and Brian Bendis, seem to believe writing for comics is essentially the same as writing a screenplay. In doing so, Millar and Ellis have removed everything novelistic from their comics, reducing them to event movie spectacle and bluster. They share the weaknesses of event movies, too, often foregoing characterisation for glib quotable dialogue. They seem embarrassed to use much of the vernacular comics have developed for themselves, such as thought balloons (which, though currently perceived as corny, permit comics to utilize interior monologue) or sound effects (which again, though perceived by some as corny, are visually bold, and instantly publicly recognizable as a fundamental stylistic trait of comics, thanks to the Adam West BATMAN, like it or loathe it).
Ellis and Millar are both smart cookies, though, and have created ideologies to defend their stylistic bent, chucking words like "widescreen" and "decompression" around to explain their storytelling choices. Ellis's theory of decompression was to adapt the elongated pacing of key visual sequences from manga to the American formatted comic. The reason that this pacing works in manga is that one artist can have an entire studio of assistants allowing him to stretch a few meaningful looks over a dozen pages of a hundred page story, as that manga may sell in its millions. Bryan Hitch taking weeks to draw a similar sequence in a twenty two page comic, on his own, that sells less than two hundred thousand copies, just seems wastefully extravagant by comparison. Bendis contents himself with aping certain stylistic tics of David Mamet, and adapting the ouvre of Steven Bochco and David Milch to superheroes - superhero cops, superhero lawyers, superhero journalists. Ellis, Bendis and Millar have all actively courted the internet to create their own little personality cults, initially to promote their works, but all seem to enjoy a rather sadomasochistic relationship with their more sycophantic followers.
Comics are by their very nature, a hybrid medium. To base your work so clearly on just one media as a source of influence seems downright wasteful. Comics spend far too much time and effort looking to the movie industry for validation. Yet every comicbook these days seems to be written in 4-6 issue "arcs" based on formulaic Hollywood three-act story structures. Often it feels like Marvel Comics especially (and Millar and Bendis have become synonomous with Marvel) is trying to spoonfeed their comics as proto-movie pitches directly to movie producers. No-one has ever proven that a good movie adaptation of a comic has ever boosted sales of that comic, but a bad adaptation can surely kill off the buzz of a good comic like a bullet to the head (TANK GIRL, anyone?). Comics' love affair with the movies seems to be borderline abusive, and all the benefits seem to flow all one-way.
And herein lies my problem with modern comicbook creators compared to the ones of my youth. Alan Moore, Howard Chaykin, Frank Miller, Pete Milligan, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman all seemed to want to push the medium, to make it open to other influences, to give their work greater depth and texture. Nobody may actually like the term "graphic novel", but these writers were definitely literary. There's a lot of good comics being published at the moment, and there's a belief that the medium is working its way out of the creative and economic hole it found itself in during the mid-to-late nineties. However, for comics to really boom again, there needs to be a run of outstanding achievements in the field like there was from the mid-eighties to the early nineties.
I just don't think that those currently being feted in the industry are destined to provide that breakthrough.