You did a good job of articulating what fans might mean by "fun."

Irony often does ruin things. Irony can be brilliant when done well, but it seems like since 1994 it's been beaten to death.

Our childhood entertainment is sometimes revealed to be darker than we remember it, but I think that part of what makes us remember it as innocent is that in childhood, our view of the adult world is much more innocent. The world of adults seems like a much more sane and deal-with-able place before we get out of school and have to live there; when we look back at our childhood, even the art was dark and cynical seems like it comes from a simpler, more innocent place. Even /Watchmen/ (which comes from my childhood, and which I read as a child and re-read about once a year) is tasteful and restrained in its deconstruction; it doesn't nudge you and wink at you to make sure you /get/ that it's deconstructing superheroes.

My mileage varies from yours, though. My earliest childhood comics were Archies and Whitman/Gold Key, which of course really /were/ more innocent in tone than whatever superhero comics were doing in the 1970s. When I got older, I started reading /Transformers/ comics because I already liked the TV series, and through /Transformers/ discovered other Marvel titles like /Rom/. I got started on DC via /Star Trek/ and discovered that DC also published /Electric Warrior/, Chaykin's /Blackhawk/, /Slash Maraud/, and /Watchmen/. Come to think of it, when I first started reading more comics than just Archie, I had pretty eclectic tastes.

I like your point that the Silver Age is to comics fans what the 1950s are to Republicans.

You and I are opposites re.: Jack Kirby and Neal Adams. I love Kirby; there's a powerful construction to his art, particularly his Bronze Age art, when he was even more confident than in the early-sixties Marvel stuff. OTOH, Adams is one of the artists I don't get the appeal of. His art seems filled with wrong lines. His anatomy is stiff and awkward. There's no consistency or 3d-ness to his people.

I also like your list of "fun" elements. That's the kind of clarity and reduction that makes for good satire.

The two are
Young Justice (easily agreed on as fun by most...stupid by some)
and
James Robinsons Starman.

Of course I also love other stuff like Sandman, Fables, The Crow, From Hell, and so forth and so on.

I think one of the biggest problems in comics (and really, humanity as a whole) is we tend to get this idea you can't like two different things.
If you like Metal, you can't like Classical.
If you like Bill Hicks, you can't like Larry the Cable Guy.
If you like Planetary, you must hate Young Justice.

Personally, as (IIRC) Voltaire said

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes"

Thing is, I don't much like the way most comics are now, nor have I ever.Most comics suck. Most comics have always sucked. Good stuff is usually a small handful of books where all the necessary elements of a good comic happen to come together in just the right way: pleasing art, pleasing writing, interesting themes/setting/characters. It doesn't matter what the book is about, whether it's sad or gritty or about joyful ninjas punching monkeys. It just needs to be good.

The problem is variety. The American comics industry has always trended toward a me-too publishing model, so that when something seems to be selling big, everyone starts publishing stuff in that vein. Marvel's approach in the 60's lead to DC's approach in the 70's. Watchmen and Dark Knight lead to both the repackaging of comics and the grittification of the content.

A trend toward appealing to older readers lead to more blatant violence and sexualization. For years the industry presumed they could only catch boys from roughly the ages of 13 to perhaps 22, and so all of the commercial material got slanted toward that demographic in an increasingly narrow way. As the youth audience dried up and the number of regular buys over 30 increased, then the material further transformed.

But the problem has always been that the major publishers pursue exactly one demographic, with most writers trying to fit their work into operating as shades of one editorially mandated voice. The original comix movement and some indy books try to break out of this, but even the bulk of what the indies produce now is intended for that same narrow audience. At some point comics gave up on pursuing other demographics en masse, and with it other genres died. For the most part, everyones tarted trying to write all of their books the same way, and tried to sell everything to more or less the exact same kinds of people.

Now, manga is not without its reliance on formula. Show me any given Shounen Jump story (yes, even Death Note), and I can rifle through and point out what elements are traditional genre formula, what elements are quirks of that particular writer, what the Jump editors likely forced in, and what story elements were likely the direct result of audience feedback via character popularity polls. But manga is generally produced and localized for a much wider variety of demographics and niches, so there's simply more different types of things to read in greater quantity (if not necessarily greater quality).

So if you don't like the one thing that most American comics happen to be doing at the moment, you're kind of screwed if you don't want to spend hours and hours just trying to find books that will be interesting to read (and will probably have to be special-ordered). With manga most readers can find one genre that easily pleases them well-stocked in the average bookstore, and with a significant amount of material in it being steadily released. That is not something you can say about comics, and it's largely the fault of the fans. Something becomes trendy, everyone buys it, so the publishers all slant their publishing schedule toward publishing lots of the thing that sells, and that people say they want. We have the comics Marvel, DC, and other publishers think we want to buy, so perhaps we should wonder why they think that.

(Total aside, but: I find it hilarious to see artists as blatantly diverse as Eichiro Oda and Kenichi Obata being painted with the broad brush of "looking manga". No rational person or even small child could look at art by those two creators and find much similar about them, but whatever. I'm sure someday someone who isn't much of a superhero comics fan will confuse Ditko for Kirby and make you want to explode, too.)

But really, fun comics have minimal continuity that needs to be followed and are generally self contained stories where nothing seriously bad happens to the characters.

Or they are stories that still follow the basic premise of the character when it was created without delving too far into realms that are not accessible by the casual reader.

The Spirit for example.

Because they're reminiscent of the Silver Age in a good way. The manga I mentioned are all aimed at kids (yes, even Death Note), but use much more natural dialogue and more sophisticated storytelling techniques, besides not being afraid to deal with serious themes.

One reason the string of unfortunate events befalling former JLI members was annoying was because those characters had previously represented a corner of lightheartedness in what itself had been a fairly dark period, so it felt like they were specifically trying to get rid of such anomalies (even if that wasn't the case.)

This isn't a desire for instant resolution or the return of the CCA, and that really is almost a strawman.

Okay.

That's not really what I'm talking about.

They were being made for children, and I don’t fault them for it. But why would I want to read something, as an adult, that resembles that?

Actually, I think the writing and art in manga are much more suited for adults than in American superhero fare. Nothing in American superhero comics comes remotely close to challenging me the way my favorite action manga do.

Just curious, is this a sincere inquiry or are you just being you? I really can’t tell.

I'm always being me. Who else would I be?

It's both, actually. I mean, I hear people complaining about how American comics readers have this unfair bias towards manga all the time. And, I think it's time to point out the obvious reason it's not unfair.

To some folks, like myself, the majority of manga is ugly. Many of the tics of most manga are aesthetically unappealing and enough so to turn us off the book completely.

And then you factor in the fact that most of the early Marvel books weren't good, per se. They had good ideas, yes, and often the art was very nice. But a lot of the writing was pretty pedestrian and redundant. I understand why, of course. They were being made for children, and I don't fault them for it. But why would I want to read something, as an adult, that resembles that?

Really? The art resembles Kirby or Ditko? How about Buscema? Byrne? Romita?

Or does it look like manga?

Just curious, is this a sincere inquiry or are you just being you? I really can't tell.

On the chance that it is a sincere inquiry: It looks like manga, but like I said, it reminds me more of Silver Age Marvel than today's Marvel and DC comics do. The artists have more in common with Kirby, Ditko, Buscema and company than people like Cassaday, Hitch, Gary Frank and Pacheco have in common with those Silver Age Marvel guys. The storytelling fundamentals, the panel grids, the dynamic kinetic expression and exaggerated foreshortening, the detailed panel-to-panel fight choreography...modern American art superstars don't have this. Their primary focus, to me, is to be hyper-realistic. Cassaday can be detailed as hell and nail some realistic anatomy, but the page is flat and the action is dull dull DULL. And Ditko and Kirby would put in a lot of work meticulously thinking out the fight choreography so that each panel logically led directly into the action of the next. Each movement, punch, block, kick is accounted for, you could film the fight scene just with what is on the page. Today's fight scenes are just a series of panels with unrelated "clash" poses. The choreography is not thought out on a Ditko or Kirby level by today's artists, but manga artists do think choreography out as meticulously though.

It’s a shame such a bias exists against manga among American superhero fans, because those manga titles remind me more of the Marvel comics of my youth than today’s Marvel and DC comics do.

Really? The art resembles Kirby or Ditko? How about Buscema? Byrne? Romita?

Or does it look like manga?

"A: Should movies? Should novels? C’mon already. Next question."

--Keith Giffen, column on http://www.wizarduniverse.com

On point #3: I think there are people who aren't always good at distinguishing between "the way comics were when I was a kid" and "the way I reacted to comics when I was a kid." (Just as I suspect some people who complain that modern comics read too quickly are forgetting that they have better reading skills than they did when they were 8; it only takes me about 5 minutes to rip through an average Silver Age comic, personally.) The experience of reading changes as we get older and notice more things, and an adult with an adult's concerns and awareness of the world won't necessarily read anything with the uncritical innocence they did when they were younger. (I remember one critic complaining about a scene in Ultimate FF where Reed created a thought projection of Sue's mother in her underwear or something like that, and compared it unfavorably to a scene in classic FF where he did the same thing for Sue in a swimsuit. Reading something unsavory into that scene is an adult reaction, and probably doesn't reflect how an actual kid would read it.)

I've noticed that this sometimes seems to be combined with a childlike need for immediacy of resolution (which Silver Age comics had to provide thanks to the Comics Code, pursuant to point #4). Specifically, the belief that allowing the story to develop over multiple issues, meaning that the villain isn't instantly defeated in Chapter One, means that the comic must be a dark and cynical one in which villainy is triumphant and the hero is useless and woe is us. I'm thinking particularly here about one columnist who complained about the initial storyline in "The Pulse," saying that Norman Osborne had gotten away with murder...when only 4 parts of a 5-part story had been printed, and the story did in fact end with him being arrested. Of course, the Goblin was never arrested back in the Lee/Ditko days, and the insistence that the villain always be arrested led to the ridiculous revolving door prison system typified by SA Lex Luthor--but, well, see comment above about uncritical childhood responses vs. adult responses.

(If we take this thinking to the ultimate conclusion, The Empire Strikes Back--which ends with one hero helpless and en route to his worst enemy, the main character maimed and tempted by darkness, the villain free and not even significantly hindered by the heroes, and a major retcon which casts the beloved mentor figure as a liar--must be a terrible movie, while The Phantom Menace--which ends with the main villain dead, the villains' current scheme foiled, only one good guy dead, and which features a happy-go-lucky comic relief character and a cherubic child hero--must be a much better one. "Fun" (or "possessing the qualities that should make something fun") shouldn't necessarily be all you look for in your entertainment.)

As the quote at the beginning suggests, I don't have much patience for the claim "Comics are supposed to be fun" without any qualifiers. Comics are a medium, not a single genre, and to shackle art based on personal preference is tremendously limiting and short-sighted. After all, taken in isolation, Spider-Man's origin story isn't fun at all: it's a classic ironic morality tale about an outcast who gains something special, misuses it, and suffers a devastating loss as a result. If Lee and Ditko hadn't been willing to create a story with such a serious underpinning (that draws on the horror/dark fantasy style of storytelling much more than superhero storytelling of the time--actually, this is a noticeable trend in a fair amount of early Marvel), we wouldn't have Spider-Man as we know him. The same is true of some other classic superhero stories--taken by themselves, what's "fun" about Krypton exploding, or the Waynes getting shot, or a man who loses control of himself and turns into a monster, or having the whole world hate you for the way you were born? And that doesn't get into other genres at all--EC's war stories alone are proof that limiting comics to a particular mode of entertainment would lose us a large number of stories of real value.

"Fun" comics are bit like TV dramedies. You know the type- funny, but not so funny that it prevents them from being serious. They never really undermine the "reality" of their environment, as would a full-on spoof, but just poke fun at it.

"Fun" comics also seem to involve the characters enjoying themselves to some extent, at least the ones I like. The Superbuddies play jokes on each other and quip nonstop. Jennifer Walters loves being the She-Hulk. There's an emphasis on being a hero as being a positive thing- whereas a lot of the "non fun" superhero books I've found treat their characters as jaded veterans Just Trying To Get Through Another Day.

A good baseline comparison, which I've found myself using a lot, is the new version of DOCTOR WHO. It has a lot of dramatic moments, and danger and death and sadness and outright tragedy- but there is a fundamental sense that the Doctor and his companion are having Adventures, that they're having fun, and that they're generally optimistic about making things better when they go wrong. There's plenty of silly things- burping trash bins, the Face of Boe, farting aliens, Daleks and Cybermen smack-talking each other- but generally the writers balance the darkness and the light very well.

So for me, "fun" comics are sort of a midpoint- not pure "funny" books, but bringing a bit of that lightness and optimism and craziness to a world of danger and death. And I think the reason we long for more of that specifically from DC and Marvel is that we're familiar with these universes, care for the characters, and want them to enjoy themselves once in a while. Indie comics can also be "fun" and often are (GODLAND and THE GOON are two examples which leap instantly to mind), but of course comics netchat in general tends to give indie material the short shrift.