The caped Crusader
Back in the mid 1980’s I had a brief career as a comic book writer working mostly for small independent publishers, while simultaneously owning a comic book specialty store. Inevitably a local newspaper or cable outlet would do a story about one or both unusual(for such a small city) endeavors. Without fail, the headline of the article would be much like what I used above, no doubt as a result of the overall perception that the general public had regarding comic books. Most likely this perception was created in no small part by the 1966 Batman T.V. series which was high on camp. This tendency to trivialize the medium, both in the articles related to myself and the many others that would show up in the national news, used to annoy me greatly.
In all fairness and in retrospect, those perceptions were not totally inaccurate, but it still stung a little. As comic books became more sophisticated with the onset of such classics as The Dark Knight by Frank Miller and the mostly undisputed high point in comics publishing, The Watchmen by Alan Moore, the articles tended to be a little more respectful in their approach to covering the industry. That is not to say that many still could not resist the temptation to use a “Bam!” or a “Zap!” in the heading.
Watchmen
If you get right down to it, even as well written as Watchmen was, at its core it was really no different than the Batman show or the comics of the 60’s that tended to be a little silly. Take away the actual brilliant scripting of Alan Moore and simply describe the story out loud to someone. See, all the super hero based concepts, at their core, sound like they were invented by twelve year old boys.
I’m not so sure that is such a bad thing after all. I think, too often in the aftermath of the more skillfully executed comics, that the pure escapist approach has been totally abandoned and comics aren’t nearly as fun. I would much rather see a balance between the two approaches.
Even in my own writing I was constantly trying to create the perfect epic full of angst and turmoil. I still have a few of those in my files, but a couple of years ago I started to work in a looser more humorous style. Here is a sample from one of my, still unpublished, recent projects. This was illustrated by Anthony Tan with colors by MAEHAO and lettered by Zach Methaney. The silly little words and concept are by me. It is called “Mrs. Hero”. This post was a rather long convoluted attempt at self promotion, wasn’t it?