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May 30, 2005
Comic Book Writers
OK, the semester's over, I'm coming back from my prerequisite end-of-semester illness, and it's time to start consistently blogging again. I hope some of you have stayed with me through the thin weeks - I promise I'll start posting with more consistency now, as I've got a huge backlog of stuff to talk about.
To begin, I'm going to start a new series of posts on my favorite comic book writers. I'll try to cover every writer whose work I read regularly, from Brian Azzarello to Bill Willingham.
I actually organize my comics in a way I've never seen anybody else do it: by author, rather than title, artist, or publisher. Many people would assume the true auteur of a comic is the artist. The cult of Marvel great Jack Kirby, for example, rests on the claim that while Stan Lee may have written the dialogue for those great Silver Age heroes, it was Kirby who not only conceived of their looks, but structured the storytelling panel-by-panel, the way a director crafts a film from the raw material of a screenplay.
But while that may have been how Lee and Kirby worked (although I think that story gives short shrift to Lee's inventiveness), it's not an accurate reflection of how most comics seem to be written today. Alan Moore, author of the epochal Watchmen, is clearly the guy who raised the bar here - he's published some of his comic scripts, and you can see how completely he envisioned the material he handed to artist Dave Gibbons - not simply writing the screenplay, but storyboarding down to the smallest detail of the mise en scene.
The fallacy of the artist-as-creator was driven home by the crash-and-burn of Image Comics in the early 1990s. The Image founders were a bunch of superstar Marvel artists like Todd McFarlance and Rob Leifeld who left to develop properties they could own themselves. After having worked with writers at Marvel, they began writing their own stories. No more chafing against the demands of plot and character - they could stretch out that fight scene for as many pages as they felt like, with nobody to tell them otherwise. The results were some slick-looking characters like Spawn, but pompous, bloated storytelling. Eventually, the fans caught on. Today, for many comics fans, the real heroes are justly celebrated writers like Brian Michael Bendis, Greg Rucka, and Bill Willingham. Art still matters, of course - sludgy art, as on Rucka's Gotham Central, can bog down excellent storytelling, while great art like Cary Nord's work for Kurt Busiek on Conan can transport the prose. But a dull story is a dull story, however beautifully drawn. And if a story is well-written enough, it'll peek through the cracks of the most uninspired artwork (as in Gotham Central.)
I buy a lot of comics these days - many more than I did when I was part of the putative target audience. And I buy more mainstream comics - and fewer underground comix - than ever before. The decline of the underground is a huge disappointment. A generation of brilliant writer/artists like Chester Brown, Seth, Joe Matt, Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes have either slowed their production way down or moved out of the medium altogether, while few new artists have emerged to pick up the slack.
On the other hand, the mainstream is more vibrant than at any time since 1987 - the year of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as well as Maus, and not surprisingly the year that got me excited about comics again after rejecting them in early adolescence. Writers like Bendis and Rucka are exploring not just the psychology of individual characters, but how those characters intersect to create rich mythic universes.
For those of you who've read my previous posts on Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, and the politics of myth, you could see why I'd be interested in these themes, and fascinated by these writers' explorations in these rich, resonant universes of story. In the next few weeks, I'll try to work through my ideas about these storytellers, one writer at a time.
Posted by tedf at May 30, 2005 05:38 PM
Comments
I'll pass the word along to all my comic book friends,
BMN
Posted by: BMN at May 31, 2005 05:56 PM
It's Kevin Smith who turned me around on Stan Lee versus Jack Kirby; we had a bit of an argument about it, but he convinced me on this simple logic:
Lee achieved those heights of greatness not just with Kirby, but with other creators: Simon on Captain America, Ditko on Dr. Strange.
Kirby, on the other hand, had an interesting, checkered career without Lee, but nothing that rivalled what they created together at Marvel.
(Which is not to diminish Kirby's achievements: creating the DNA of modern superhero art is no small thing.)
Posted by: Gavin at June 1, 2005 01:22 AM
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