Comic Book Resources

Most people who make this cutting observation do not actually read indie comics. Really, folks, if you’ve got a stack of Infinite Crises and 52s and Civil Shenanigans and New Justice Avengers Of America: Emerald Rebornining moldering in your closet, you shouldn’t be getting on anyone’s case about how their observational autobiographical comic failed to meet your oh-so-discerning standards. The plank in your eye and all that.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m just not able to find this out-of-control plague of people saying this (not that I think saying it is at all clever or cool at all, of course).
Sure, I agree that it’s tedious, and people who make a point of saying it are clearly annoyingly trying to look clever & wank their own egos, but I personally haven’t run across it in recent, well, months at least.
Maybe I automatically skip it if I see anything like that wording, and never commit it to memory, I don’t know.
Is there a specific instance recently in the comics blogosphere that set this off? The only thing I can think of is that I stick pretty much to reading blogs and their comments, and tend to avoid the message board world (unless of course a blog links to one with something interesting…).

Ed-not-Jack

Okay, when I read Joe Rice’s last post, there were only something like two comments. After posting my last comment here I went up to the main CSBG page, noticed the new comment count for Joe’s column, and went to take a look at them…
And saw where this was coming from.
Never mind.
You’ve got to admit, though, if someone just comes here and reads this post without having followed the comments, it might easily seem to have come out of nowhere…

Ed-not-Jack

Do the people who say “most indie comics suck” think “most superhero comics are great”? Heaven help us all

I’m not sure if it’s that binary, but the whole enterprise of qualfiying how much everything sucks has always seemed kind of pointless to me. Not that I think Joe did that. If we’re implying he did. I still hate him for comparing me, the Gregs, and the legion of other post CBSG-schism posters to the Detroit League, but I don’t think he was doing that. Whatever he was supposed to be doing.

I actually agree with you and I promise to never bring it up again. But can we get a moratorium on the “corporate comics suck” stuff too? I would argue that stance is equally as tedious.

I wasn’t actually referring to you, T. Sorry, man! I totally see how it could seem like I was (as the other commenter mentioned, it clearly looks like that IS what I was referring to), but in actuality, I was going off some posts I saw on another comic blog.

My one certainly does.

KG

But can we get a moratorium on the “corporate comics suck” stuff too?

No.

Here’s the thing. You know those indie comics that suck? The people who buy them aren’t buying them to collect them, or out of an obsessive desire to follow the characters, or out of some completist urge to get every comic Harvey Pekar will ever appear in regardless of its quality. They’re buying them because they actually like those comics. What we have is a difference of taste: they like these books and you don’t.

In corporate-owned superhero comics, however, you have the phenomenon of many, many readers buying material they find mediocre to terrible, and continuing to buy it anyway because they just can’t stop buying Avengers or Justice League or whatever. You really don’t find the same thing happening with, say, Seth (“Man, It’s A Good Life sucked ass, and Clyde Fans was pretty weak… but if I don’t get Wimbledon Green, how will I know how it ends!”). The result is a reader base that rewards mediocrity and hackishness, and a corporate culture that actively encourages mediocrity and hackishness.

Whenever you have a creative endeavor where the ownership of resources, personnel and intellectual property is controlled by people uninvolved in the creative process, you’re going to eventually end up with a product that’s indifferent to art. That’s the state of corporate-owned comics: the good stuff is the exception, not the rule. Indie cartoonists, at least, are largely making the comics they want to make, as opposed to the comics Time-Warner thinks would be most profitable. They’re limited by their own talent, and so the field of indie comics produces its share of duds, but corporate cartoonists are limited by both their talent and by the much narrower scope of the stories they’re allowed to tell (or encouraged to tell), meaning that there tends to be more crap coming out of Marvel and DC at any given time than, say, Fantagraphics.

Moose pretty much said most of it for me. I will add that I own a fair number of excruciatingly BAD indie comics, though; the reason is that I bought them at shows like APE from creators who were so overjoyed to be there that their enthusiasm was infectious and after talking to them for 10-15 minutes it seemed rude not to at least buy the $1.00 mini-comic on the table. And when I was doing zines there’s a lot of trading that goes on too. You tend to acquire books like lint if you spend any time in the indie ‘zine world at all.

I think the thing to bear in mind is that, for some reason, fans of anything get a lot more wound up about complaining than they ever do about praise. Everybody has to chime in with their complaint and they get into this one-upmanship thing where people do snark riffs for each other. I don’t know if this is confined to the geek culture of comics / anime / SF / fantasy-type fandom, or if you see it in subcultures like sports fans or antique collectors as well… but I notice that when I give something a bad review it gets a LOT more responses than a good one, and the times that I’ve suggested wallowing in negativity is a dumb thing to do for something that’s supposed to be RECREATION, I get a deluge yelling at me for being mean to the poor fans and that, by God, they have the right to rant all over the internet about how much they hate __________.

Well, of course they have the right. And a snarky review of something that deserves eviscerating can be great fun to read and even to write, once in a while. But a little goes a long way. You confine your commentary to just being pissed off and the net effect is becoming known as That Guy That’s Pissed Off All The Time. No one cares WHAT you have to say any more.