Citation Needed

Newsflash: I’m into comics. Or, rather, I was seriously into superhero comics, specifically, for quite a long time. Then DC’s Vertigo imprint came along, which gave readers something quite a bit different from costumed heroes and villains, and that drove my love of superheroes into stark contrast.

Much later, my favorite superteam, the X-men, started to go down a radical path. It veered away from why I loved them in the first place: they were the underdogs. The new direction saw them with a strong power base, every mutant seemingly united as one, and even having conquered death itself. Every issue’s cover had nothing but finely-rendered posing and posturing characters, completely devoid of the backs-against-the-wall heroics that I loved. I left and haven’t been back.

These days I’ve mostly given up on superheroes, which is funny because they’re more popular than ever. But not because the comics themselves are good. Rather, supes are the darlings of the big and small screens instead. And there are some good things out there, The Boys and the more recent Gen V among them. But when I occasionally dip back into superhero comics to see what’s going on, I find them stuck in an ouroboric cycle of mindlessly refuting the classic storylines to no great effect, while at the same time gambling on reader nostalgia for those very same great stories. Nothing interesting or new is being said, which justifies my continued absence.

How did this happen to the comics I loved? There are a few things to blame. Comics writer Brian Michael Bendis is credited with pioneering the ‘decompressed’ style of writing, which involves lengthening a scene over the course of pages, rather than panels. This is combined with a more naturalistic type of dialogue rather than the previously declamatory way people used to speak.

Obviously, he wasn’t the first to ‘write the way people talk’, but his method of really drawing out a scene took it to an extreme. Where characters used to speak IN ALL CAPS! AND WITH EXCLAMATION POINTS AFTER EVERY SENTENCE!, we then saw the standard sentence-format, complete with lowercase letters. You might not think at first that this was such a big deal, but it is, especially for a genre that used to concern itself mostly with action.

With this new, relaxed writing style came a concomitant step away from detailed action scenes. Superheroes always talked while they fought, but where the dialogue used to be things like “I MUST FOCUS MY OPTIC BLASTS ON THAT DOOR!”, combined with showing the character doing just that, now superheroes would just expound on whatever they were thinking of and make jokes while generic action happened around them, almost as an aside. The trouble was, this was not an improvement and further distanced me from feeling any kind of excitement.

I’ll grant you that the simplistic good vs evil superhero milieu might not have accurately represented reality, but that’s why I loved it. I can have reality whenever I want; what I desired was the escape afforded by superhero comics.

And let’s be clear: ‘gritty’ and ‘realistic’ are two different things. Frank Miller proved that you could write gritty superhero comics with his run on Daredevil. That didn’t mean it was realistic. It was more a heightening of certain narrative elements, and it was wonderful. This new ‘realistic’ style everyone does just leaves me cold. Because if you really examine it, there’s no way anyone would put on costumes and give themselves code names in the name of realism. It breaks apart the second you ask questions like “How do they go to the bathroom in those costumes?”, or “How does every single superhero and supervillain have such ridiculously defined bodies?”, or even “Why is there a police force at all?”

I maintain that superhero comics were the modern, graphical equivalent of myths. People used to tell each other stories of gods and monsters battling it out as a way to explain the world to themselves. Superhero comics continued that tradition, with the focus turning to morality instead. But we now live in an age where that kind of story isn’t well served by colorful costumes and code names. That stuff just seems silly. Maybe it’s time to let it go by. When you look at the kinds of comics being produced these days, we can easily let go of superheroes and supervillains in favor of nearly every other kind of storytelling. And we probably should.

In other news, I’m getting closer and closer to finally having my tv show idea planned out. It’s not a matter of ‘I don’t know the story’, it’s more that there are a million ideas coursing through my neural pathways and it’s been difficult to settle on just one. The right one. But I’m getting there. Thanks for sticking with me on this. I’ll see you next week.

And now, your reality check: Randy Writes A Novel.