Comic Book Resources

Annotating superhero comics in literary style is useful because it keeps frightening nerds who produce them (like me!) and frightening nerds who read them (like me!) from reproducing. More seriously, there’s good annotation and bad annotation, both for writing and reading purposes. Good annotation can incorporate commentary, or simply extend the entertainment value of the work by dipping into just what goes in to constructing and operating a shared universe fiction. Bad annotation tends to reduce comics to some impenetrable geek code of references, and annotating itself to a farcically pathetic competition to see who’s got the greatest mastery of trivia. I think nearly every criticism you rehearse in your post could be leveled at Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated or the work of folks like B.C. Southam on Eliot. Neither Gifford nor Southam is really giving you a literary analysis of the work, or even a reading method. They are, however, clearing up what might be impenetrable, puzzling, or simply overlooked by a casual reading audience.

This isn’t double-spaced, and it’s over the word limit, but screw it: I’m only auditing the course anyway.

I think that superhero comic annotations rise or fall depending on what the ” scholar ” focuses on. If he focuses on explaining a million little continuity references within a George Perez team shot, he’s doing nothing that a Wiki couldn’t do more effectively. But if he focuses on the extra-textual references, the way the comic relates to art, politics, culture, and life in general outside of guys in tights, he deserves praise.

Unfortunately, most superhero comics do not relate to art, politics, culture, and life in general outside of guys in tights. As polarizing as his individual works may be, Grant Morrison remains in my good graces at the end of the day for writing comics about more than just comics.

And you can send my paper through a filter if you want proof that I didn’t just copy it from SparkNotes then spend the weekend smoking weed and playing Super Smash Bros.

From Hell’s annotations really worked for me.

In general though I’m more excited by fictional annotations, like in Infinite Jest; 1,100 pages of fiction, followed by 150 pages of fictional endnotes, some of which were just as entertaining as the novel itself. And it casts the delightful illusion that there’s a factual reality to the story beyond the text itself. I really dig that, and I’d like to see it more in comics. Actually have we ever seen it in comics? I’m sure we have, but I can’t think of examples. Probably something from America’s Best.

Bravo for him. These days seeming “anti-Morrison” is almost like an invitation to be a whipping boy. It takes guts to do it.

It’s extremely rewarding to read the commentary on The Invisibles that extends across the blogosphere, not just on Barbelith but all over the place. And yet sometimes I still don’t think we talk about what Morrison’s doing enough. Of course everybody should enjoy their comics in the way that gives them personal satisfaction, but that Invisibles material goes pretty deep, and thank goodness for those of us who, as Nitz said, appreciate comics writers who write about more than just comics. And not to mention, artists who want to do more than show Guy X punching out Guy Y…!

But on the other hand, in the “want to yell at me anyway” category…

WTF, Brad, you talked shit about other bloggers? What in the hell is wrong with you? Jesus, man. If you’re gonna pull that kind of thing, you think you could do it from a smaller forum, so it doesn’t make you look like a damn bully? At least Scipio and Mike are relatively big fish, Holy Hannah I don’t know what I would have to say if you’d picked on some small-fry dude who gets fifteen hits a day from a little room under the stairs in his grandmother’s house because he has no friends, and foolishly likes X-Force a lot…

And I don’t know who Jim Treacher is, but I hope to hell he’s a big fish too. And cripes, where is the make-up post that says “look, I know I can be a bit of a dick, but at least give me that I don’t pick on the little guy, come on I’m not a monster, I’m not one of the jocks from high school”…where is that post, Brad? I don’t mind if you stand by your dickery, but I do want to know you’re not gonna start slagging off the newbies, for God’s sake…!

Sorry, I guess that should’ve gone in an e-mail. Whoops.

But back to the annotations…I don’t know, I got a lot of the references Moore was making in Black Dossier (at least enough to realize the probable scope of his referencing), but I know a lot of Americans (for example) didn’t, so I think that kind of online annotation serves a social good. BD may be not worth much as a story (although I rather liked it), but if you’re gonna blow the cash, at least you should have a decent shot at seeing what Moore was trying to do there, so if you hated it you can really know how much you hated it. Similarly, you know, finding out what was going through Warren Ellis’, Steve Englehart’s, Brian Bendis’, Eddie Campbell’s mind when they were crafting their stories…for myself, I’m thrilled to know that stuff, whether it comes out in a list of annotations, or in a blog, or in twitter, or whatever.

And weirdly, I’d forgotten all about From Hell’s annotations until Stefan mentioned them: yes, wow. I mean I actually found out a thing to say about Colin Wilson that I didn’t know before (is that stuff actually true?), and actually if I was going to give someone a big double-feature highbrow-reading comics assignment, I think I’d pair The Invisibles with From Hell — doesn’t that sound good? — but I’d be doing it, I’d be making that connection, on the back of both the in-book From Hell annotations, and the crazy world of Barbelith etc. online.

One of my favourite moments reading blogs before I got one myself was when I was looking at an online discussion of Vimanarama, and most people in that conversation found it baffling in the Morrison-FREAKOUT way Brad so economically describes above…but then one guy came in and said: “I dug Vimanarama. HEAVILY.” And then he laid some stuff out, that opened my eyes. I did not know much about Bollywood at that time, for example: I was blind to the whole “Andrew Lloyd Webber And Steven Spielberg Team Up To Do A Bollywood Chariots Of The Gods” thing that Morrison had going on there. Wild. I mean I didn’t need to know that stuff to enjoy the book…but man, isn’t that sort of thing what the blogosphere is for?

Now, having said all that…I think Jeff Lester’s got ahold of something in his Morrison-criticism. And I wish Brad had engaged with Jeff’s post a bit more. I mean, for heaven’s sake, all that buildup of this post’s title! I was expecting more in the nature of a critical analysis or rebuttal.

Sadly, it was not to be.

But so far this comment thread’s been very interesting regardless.

Hope I didn’t just kill it.

I’ve never been a Morrison fan. Not because I think there is anything wrong with what he writes, it’s just not what I come to superhero comics for.

Grant Morrison is such a polarizing figure in comics that I almost expect any review or commentary on his work to be more about the reviewer’s/commenter’s biases (whether justified or not) about the man’s work than any intelligent or reasonable critical assessment. There’s a huge segment of the comics-reading population that adores Morrison’s work regardless of any critical merits or faults it may or may not have because of Morrison’s cachet and there’s an equally huge population that dismisses it for the same reason.

One side argues that people who don’t “get” Morrison are too stupid or ignorant to understand what he’s going for, while the other side argues that Morrison-ites are engaged in an “Emperor’s new clothes”-style farce (in that very few or maybe none of his fans really understand what Morrison is going for, but none of them is willing to admit to it).

Of course, I think the majority of comic book readers actually enjoy (or don’t enjoy, as the case may be) Morrison’s work based on how they perceive its actual literary and artistic merits and not on some irrational blanket acceptance/dismissal of his work. It just seems like the most vocal readers are the ones on the extreme ends of the spectrum.

” Bravo for him. These days seeming “anti-Morrison” is almost like an invitation to be a whipping boy. It takes guts to do it. ”

It’s an act of Herculean courage to complain on the internet about a comic book writer?

What I like about Morrison (and it’s a very CSBG sentiment, I think), is that all of his stories are Elseworlds, only he doesn’t degrade them by giving them that designation (because, aren’t they all). That’s basically why I always thought Hypertime sucked, because it gave some kind of didactic reason for why the events of Morrison books counted as “real”. Or unreal. Or somewhere — wherever! — in between. And yet this kind of ass-covering seems unnecessary, when you’re actually reading a Morrison book. What happens in those books happens; it’s good; it’s fun. But the one thing it isn’t is continuity, even Hypertemporal continuity — they’re just comic books you buy and read in the back seat of the car. I’ve said before that I think Morrison’s the ultimate superhero-traditionalist of our time — for me, reading one of his stories is like going back in time to read some Brave And The Bold story with Batman and Aquaman, that doesn’t have any impact on anything except my young brain (”Aquaman is cool! Buy Aquaman comics and merchandise!”), nor is it intended to.

So it seems funny to me to plunge him into the world of “this officially counts”. And I think anyone can see it’s not his perfect storytelling environment, regardless of how he (no doubt) means to tell the best story he can anyway, and therefore will talk it up like mad, as we know professionals must do.

I’m aware that’s probably not a popular view around here. In that sense it’s very un-CSBG. But I think Morrison lives so much in comics dreamtime, it does him a disservice to put him into comics clock-time. Me, I’d rather have another SSoV, than an FC. I’d rather see him employ the Big Event Comics bullshit for his own ends in, I don’t know, Metal Men or something, than see him be the boss of it.

I’m sorry, Zuludelta, I meant this comment to spin off what you said, but it got away from me. Whoops! However, would you care to weigh in? Be it resolved: I’d rather see Morrison adapt to Big Events Comics made by somebody else, because he’d spin gold from that straw, than see him be the Big Event Comics boss himself. I’d rather see him subvert and complicate somebody else’s stupid line-driving high-concept ideas, than see him instantiate line-driving high-concept ideas himself.

Whaddaya think?

Come on, Nitz: Morrison’s way more beloved than someone named “Spiffy” on the Internet. And CSBG’s sure a locus of unseemly Morrison-love.

And not to be controversial, but Lester’s post was not “complaining”, was it? Doing the critical thing out of love, I would’ve called it.

Man, suddenly I’m on here way too much, right? Who appointed me camp counsellor? I am even bugging myself.

Okay, gone for a while.

Plok,

I wasn’t insulting Lester, or insinuating that Morrison should be worshipped. I was saying that a post on a message board that shows a minority opinion is not inherently an act of courage. Especially for that someone named ” spiffy “, who is virtually anonymous and does not suffer any reprecussions for his actions other than other anonymous internet folk bitching at him.

The cult-like worship Morrison gets at times can be annoying. But even more annoying are the people who believe that, by disliking his work and voicing it on a forum where most people like it, they’re doing something brave. It’s not martyrdom, it’s just fandom….

Wait, Brad, you don’t read my annotations? What the hell am I writing them for????

Actually, on a more serious note, I do have a problem when anyone talks about the “literal” meaning of a comic book. What is the literal meaning? The act of reading a comic and synthesizing the words and the pictures is an inherent act of interpretation, so I’m not sure where the literal part comes in.

Except when Red Hulk punches Thor. I take that literally.

” Except when Red Hulk punches Thor. I take that literally. ”

Dude, how can you be so dense? When Jeph Loeb writes a page where Red Hulk clobbers Thor, he’s clearly referencing the harsh, inhumane reality of the USSR conquering the noble ideals Lenin started out with.

Or not.

“What is the literal meaning? The act of reading a comic and synthesizing the words and the pictures is an inherent act of interpretation, so I’m not sure where the literal part comes in.”

That’s splitting hairs, Tim. He means reading the comic at the surface level.

Anyway, to the post, I love Morrison. I love his work a lot and have read practically everything I can get my hot little hands on, but I’m not going to say he’s perfect. He’s done some subpar work (most of his Batman run). I don’t think naysayers of his work are stupid or ignorant. It’s all a matter of taste.

Also, Brian, adding annotations isn’t an attempt to legitimize the comics. Adding annotations does not automatically do that to any work, no matter the medium. However, it does add context to a layered work, if the annotations are of good quality.

The analogy of annotations to “blood, guts, rape, etc” is terrible. Annotating a work is rarely done haphazardly (notice the single “z”). You also say you have nothing against annotations but a couple paragraphs later you remark that they are “sad”. Well, which is it?

Fair enough that you disagree with Lester, but you haven’t really argued against his main point, of the model-kit analogy (which is quite elegant in my opinion). For Lester, that detracts from his enjoyment, but for me, the model-kit style is Morrison’s strength rather than a weakness.

to plok:

I don’t know if Morrison would be better at just being a writer working within some grand “event,” as opposed to being the one who is orchestrating everything in some quasi-editorial/creative director capacity as he’s doing now with DC’s Final Crisis of Everything You Must Infinitely Buy.

A lot of my misgivings about DC’s execution of their last few events can be traced to a lack of editorial coordination and foresight as well as poor inter-office communication (if the numerous interviews and articles on the subject are to be believed), so I don’t know if Morrison (and Dini and Johns before him) is any more accountable than the editors for the somewhat lackluster comics that have been spawned by DC’s Event Machine.

I’m probably the wrong person to ask about Morrison’s 52 and Final Crisis work, though, as I’ve always been lukewarm to the ideas at their core. The shared-universe spanning event thing has never been my cup of tea… I’m too cheap, I guess.

Yeah, I wish everyone stopped trying to use proper grammar and usage and didn’t care so much about comics when they blogged and talked about comics too.

Seems like a waste!

Nitz and Zuludelta:: sorry, guys, if I misinterpreted your remarks. I just mean to say, I’m really quite angry with Brad. He’s a fuckhead. Really bad. Some kinda jerk. Idiot.

Sorry, that was not on point, and also I just came back from a reasonably horrible family disaster, So I was in a bad mood, and I beg your indulgence for my not-so-appropriate typing.

This could turn out to be an awesome thread.

I rather enjoy reading the annotations of various works. Sometimes, the writer will catch something or reveal a nuance that I have missed, and I’m able to go back to the work in question, and look at it with new eyes.

What really makes me pause, is your insistance on not being interested in works of literature. I suppose that this is fine, in and of itself, but really, what you’re doing is bragging about it.

Grant Morrison remains in my good graces at the end of the day for writing comics about more than just comics.

It’s funny, because at the end of the day my main problem with Grant Morrison lately is that all he DOES in my eyes is write comes about comics. I mean sure he does a lot of lofty metacommentary, allegory, metaphor and symbolism, but it all boils down to sharing his views on the current state of superhero comics, where they’ve been and places they can go. He used to be able to write about the world outside of superhero comics, especially his JLA in the 90s and parts of his X-Men books, which had a lot of good social commentary that reflected the world outside our windows, but since going back to DC his stuff has just been all self-reflexive musings on superhero comics, pure intellectual masturbation. Even the stuff like his New Gods stories which may seem like genuine social commentary to me really aren’t. As created by Jack Kirby they were, but for Grant Morrison he tackles the New Gods not as genuine social commentary but as comics commentary, in this case he’s commenting on what the best way is to pay homage to Kirby’s original vision is in today’s modern comics market and aesthetic.

“comes about comics” should read “comics about comics”

” What really makes me pause, is your insistance on not being interested in works of literature. I suppose that this is fine, in and of itself, but really, what you’re doing is bragging about it. ”

Reading this comment and looking back at Brad’s post, this made me pause too. Not everyone has the personality required for a lit major ( though I personally do, hence why I acquired a BA in English despite Avenue Q’s advice to the contrary ), but parading the fact that you don’t have that temperament around is troubling.

What’s more, this sort of anti-snobbery isn’t an improvement over the problems of snobbery, merely an inversion of it. It’s still bragging about oneself, just bragging in terms of being an expert in pop/”low ” culture instead of high culture. At least the people who are elitist about Charlotte Bronte and Jean-Luc Goddard actually worked to decipher their texts of choice, an admirable quality that fans of Christopher Paolini and Michael Bay can’t exactly claim.

And while I don’t want to insult Brad, I have to say that anti-snobbery is the exact thing that put Bush Jr. in office, and should be avoided at all costs…

I don’t think Brad is bragging about not reading annotations, merely stating that he likes Morrison’s recent DC work on a surface level, and that’s good enough for him. The post-script is a joke. He called reading annotations tedious, but did not say anything about how ignoring annotations made him superior.

I think Brad’s given us enough reasons to complain without inventing new ones.

“It’s funny, because at the end of the day my main problem with Grant Morrison lately is that all he DOES in my eyes is write comics about comics. I mean sure he does a lot of lofty metacommentary, allegory, metaphor and symbolism, but it all boils down to sharing his views on the current state of superhero comics, where they’ve been and places they can go. He used to be able to write about the world outside of superhero comics, especially his JLA in the 90s and parts of his X-Men books, which had a lot of good social commentary that reflected the world outside our windows, but since going back to DC his stuff has just been all self-reflexive musings on superhero comics, pure intellectual masturbation.”

I don’t really mind if Morrison doesn’t use his DC work as a forum for his metatextual social commentary. I’ve always felt that superhero comics are a clumsy tool with which to intelligently express social and political insight, owing to the medium’s rootedness in classic melodrama, overt physical conflict, and the exaggeration of physical and psychological types. It’s a genre given to distortions, and it’s a very rare writer who can inject any social commentary that rises above the level of caricature in tales featuring superpowered and musclebound archetypes punching each other.

My problem with Morrison’s recent work (outside of his All-Star Superman) is that I just don’t find them as enjoyable and as engaging as much of his previous material. Partly because I have no interest in the main conceit of the recent string of DC events but also because I find his attempts at Italo Calvino-esque post-modern narrative structure to be ham-fisted and ineffective, and more importantly, I don’t find them entertaining. It’s all a matter of taste, of course, as there are a lot of people who derive more enjoyment from his recent DC work than I do. Just doesn’t work for me, I guess. The good thing is that there’s no shortage of Morrison material that I do enjoy, so it’s all good.

” I don’t really mind if Morrison doesn’t use his DC work as a forum for his metatextual social commentary. I’ve always felt that superhero comics are a clumsy tool with which to intelligently express social and political insight, owing to the medium’s rootedness in classic melodrama, overt physical conflict, and the exaggeration of physical and psychological types. It’s a genre given to distortions, and it’s a very rare writer who can inject any social commentary that rises above the level of caricature in tales featuring superpowered and musclebound archetypes punching each other. ”

Grant Morrison has always used superhero comics to express sociopolitical insight. The thing is, he can do it in a much more subtle and obscure manner than 95% of his colleagues in the genre. In terms of location, he had Animal Man in apartheid-era South Africa in the early 90’s, the X-Men in various parts of the world ( including Beijing, Mumbai, and Afghanistan ), and the Seven Soldiers in an impressively developed version of New York. In terms of themes, he’s dealt with animal rights ( We3 and Animal Man ), emergent youth culture ( New X-Men ), and rampant commercialism ( Seaguy ). In terms of artistic influences, he’s even more diverse; seriously, a guy who did a Doom Patrol story arc with ” the Brotherhood of Dada ” as the villains, and wrote that silent issue X-Men script for Frank Quitely with directions very clearly invoking Salvador Dali isn’t a ” comics about comics ” guy.

Compare this to all the other authors who believe that being socially relevant means making a connection from Adolf Hitler to George Bush to Tony Stark. Morrison’s skill is in realizing that ripping story ideas from the headlines doesn’t tell the whole story of the human condition.

Oh yeah, and before I forget….Morrison’s JLA arc ( recently reprinted in the first of hopefully many hardcovers ) in which Zauriel appears, the forces of Heaven descend upon Earth, and Superman fights a frickin’ angel. The following JLA writers who have tried to keep up the momentum Morrison restored to the League ( and largely failed at it ) forget that he was writing them more as a biblical pantheon than a bunch of guys in tights.

When I say social commentary, I’m not talking about anything exceedingly deep or pretentious, I mean “pop” social commentary, something that touches on the world outside without going overboard in trying to be profound, and most of all remembers to still be entertaining and action packed. Like to me, even if it’s unintentional, Lee/Ditko Spider-Man is great social commentary on being a teenager and a man in the 1960s. Between the blockbuster action sequences Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four is often a great commentary on being a family, manhood, teenagers and being a leader without beating you over the head with pretentious themes. That’s what I mean by “pop” social commentary, just the demand that the work somehow reflect people’s lives outside of comics once in a while. I’m not talking about the heavyhandedness of a Denny O neil or Judd winick though, that’s a little too much commentary and falls to the problem you mention of superhero comics being a clumsy tool for the task at hand.

I don’t mind metacommentary, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to read comic after comic devoted to the writer working out his feelings about superhero comics. It just becomes self-indulgent after a while.

Nitz, i actually agree with you about New x-Men and JLA, I held them up as examples of Morrison using superhero comics to relate to the real world rather well if you reread my original comment. I totally agree that he’s done some great work in the past, I just think he’s stuck in a rut currently since returning to DC. And I should rephrase my statement as being specific to superhero comics: Morrison’s nowadays seems to only be able to write superhero comics that are about his views on superhero comics specifically, or art in general and the place of comics in the broader world of art.

But even if you go back further, i think there were always roots of the problem lurking. Most of his social commentary in those old issues you mentioned were just scattershot mentions of some decent concepts that related to current headlines without much in terms of deeper exploration or provocative execution. He introduces intriguing concepts well but doesn’t do much in terms of following up on them. But give him a chance to make an allegory about superhero comics specifically or art in general and that he’ll beat to death and explore the hell out of. ” the Brotherhood of Dada ” are was just more art about art dedicated to showing how knowledgable he is about great art, the silent issue of New x-Men is about salvador dalo, so even if he isn’t strictly a ” comics about comics ” guy, he at least has a tendency to fall into the broader “art about art” trap.

To Nitz the Bloody:

Ah, we seem to be talking a bit past each other here (my fault for not making my position clearer). I didn’t say that Morrison is unable to inject subtlety in his work when he tries to invest his superhero comics with social relevance, all I’m saying is that it’s a difficult thing to do for most any comics writer because of the conventions, real or perceived, of “superhero storytelling.”

My main criticism of his work largely focuses on his attempts to co-opt the “magic realism” narrative techniques pioneered by Calvino, Borges, Donoso, and other postmodern authors and apply them to superhero comics. At times, it works, such as in his “Animal Man” run. Other times, though, it simply makes his work dense and somewhat impenetrable, leading some readers to accuse him of pretension or of being intentionally and deliberately obscure. The problem, I suspect, is that the superhero setting is already so far removed from the context of our reality that illogic and narrative non-linearity simply don’t pack the same punch as they would in a non-superhero setting. Alternatively, their use sometimes has the net effect of simply piling the absurdity of postmodern writing on top of the absurdity inherent in superhero stories, leading to the scratching of many heads and the furrowing of many brows in comics shops all over the world.

Zuludelta, I’m sorry if you assumed that I was disagreeing with your statement. All I wanted to do was help expand on it. ( But you should note the difference between superhero setting and superhero genre; one is using a specific character archetype to a larger end, and the other is an entire storytelling form associated mostly with melodrama and continuity porn. I’d put stuff like Morrison’s Doom Patrol in the former category…).

T., I realize that you did enjoy JLA and New X-Men and do not deny that, I just added them to the larger context to prove my point. And I also think that being ” art about art ” is a hell of a lot better than being ” comics about comics “. Art is so entrenched in human culture that even by doing a story about the form specifically, you do relate back to humanity at large; Dada’s postmodern tendrils reached much further than a few jag-offs smoking clove cigarettes.

Animal Man’s descent into metatextuality did not derail the animal rights story line, so much as it tied it into a larger human framework. Since the whole story seems more about Grant Morrison’s avatar than Buddy Baker, Animal Man’s anger at environmental abuse was avatar-Morrison trying to work through his issues, then trying even harder by murdering Buddy’s family and sending him into the Darker and Edgier phase. Buddy may have gotten his life back, but Morrison didn’t…

“I mean sure he does a lot of lofty metacommentary”

Which, to me, gets boring after a while…I do find myself agreeing with Jeff more than the author. To each their own.

Here’s a great piece about metafiction in literature. The piece is about Paul Auster, but you can change some of the names and it can easily apply to Morrison and capture many of my feelings about the man currently:

I’m a big fan of Paul Auster, always have been, although for a while I’ve been conscious of the law of diminishing returns. This quote from the New York Times review of his latest novel is interesting:

The intent is not camp, nor is it parody. It is an act of disbelief in traditional fictional values. The trouble is that the disbelief is getting to be as old as the values. With “Man in the Dark,” Mr. Auster’s literary collider has lost its subatomic energies; the result is wan as well as scattered.

I guess this is the problem with anything experimental, as Auster’s metafiction is. Eventually, the experiment has to either lead somewhere or stop. We’ve had metafiction for forty years (and more) from Auster, Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon et al. They’ve broken down the barriers. But is there anything beyond? Or do you, in the end, have to return to traditional storytelling in order to tell a story?

I haven’t read the new Auster yet but I shall. But not, this time, because it’s Auster or because it’s metafiction, but because it is another example of the way post 9/11 fiction appears to be going in the US: there seem to be two camps, either domestic dramas or apocalypse. Auster gives us America at war with itself. What a gloomy bunch American writers have become…

That’s my problem with metafiction in comics, we’ve had classic stories in the pre-Crisis DC Multiverse of metafiction done well in lighthearted stories, a great run of British writers since the 80s doing it in a more literary fashion, and a lot of current American writers doing it in a horrible hamfisted fashion at DC (Superboy Prime, the narration and exposition in Final Crisis, etc.), We have a pair of horribly overrated pieces of metafiction from the late 90s/early 2000s still held up as classics today (Kingdom Come, the Action comics issue where he fights the Authority analogues). British writers currently still doing it (Team 13). The problem is, how long are we going to keep pretending this is novel, groundbreaking or pushing the envelope? It’s become as big a cliche or institution as the storytelling conventions it’s supposedly bucking. How long do you keep breaking down the same barriers? And where is the final destination? Or are you just breaking down the barriers for the sake of breaking them down at this point, just because you’ve gotten lazy and stuck in a habit?

At this point I think it’s more challenging to just tell a traditional story. Abhay discusses the problem with this genre of writing here.

To T:

Excellent points. The thing about reactionary movements in art and literature is that if successful enough and given enough time, they eventually become incorporated into the institutions and conventions they were initially reacting against, and thus they are no longer reactionary and novel, but simply part of the expanding vocabulary of conventional and accepted technique, and so it is with “magic realism,” deconstruction, and metatextual techniques. Not a “good” thing or a “bad” thing, mind you. It’s just the way these things go.

But how many people actually read superhero comics in a sincere search for literary innovation? Superhero comics have traditionally been slow to adopt genuine innovation in art and writing (so it’s hardly surprising to hear comics reviewers rave about Morrison’s deconstruction of the genre as “bold” and “new”).

That reticence is partly because of the genre’s commercial roots (publishers and editors don’t want to mess with a formula if it sells books), and partly because of what I feel to be a large segment of the readership and creator community that are comfortable with reading and creating variations of what’s gone before (Alex Ross has been making “Superfriends” comics for how long now?). Sure, superhero deconstructionists like Moore, Morrison, Ellis, and Ennis break through commercially every now and then but their collective work is hardly representative of a spreading trend in superhero comics writing. And “superhero deconstruction” itself has lost much of its luster, for me, at least. It’s been over 20 years since “Watchmen” and almost as long since Morrison started on “Animal Man,” and I think it’s symptomatic of the genre’s stagnancy that “new” in superhero comics is still measured against the standards those titles set.

Don’t get me wrong… I still enjoy the occasional superhero comic book (what can I say, deep-down inside of me there’s still that 10 year old who was absolutely thrilled at the X-tinction Agenda storyline), but damn if the majority of them out there just leave me feeling indifferent.