MichaelDoran
11-05-2002, 05:09 PM
<center><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/flowers_banner.jpg" width="475" height="75"></center>
<font face="Arial, Verdana"><div align="center">
A THOUSAND FLOWERS
Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside
Installment 1
by Stuart Moore</div>
1. It’s Scary Out There: An Introduction
This is a two-part question. Please have your pencils sharpened and your minds open.
Part One: Do you like comic books?
Presumably most of you do, because you're reading this on a comics-themed website. If you're a regular Newsarama reader and you don't like comics, you might want to think about why you're here. If it's just to hear yourself complain, I’ll gently suggest you do us all a favor and go somewhere else. I'm not going to either deify or vilify Jim Shooter, Paul Levitz, Todd McFarlane, Bill Jemas, Peter David, Rob Liefeld, or Mark Alessi in this column, so the odds are you won't have much fun.
If, on the other hand, you're not a regular comics reader but have stumbled across this somehow - it flew in the window tied to a bat, maybe, or your gorgeous girlfriend gave it to you, or that strange guy in I.T. tacked it up on the office bulletin board - then welcome. Comics have never deliberately tried to exclude you, they just get a little caught up in their own world from time to time. I'm sure you can relate - we all have days like that.
Which brings us to Part Two of the question. This part is aimed only at the comics fans:
Do you like comics despite the fact that the world at large often doesn't appreciate them - or because of that?
It's a tricky question to answer. After all, we all like to feel we're part of a special club, an elite group of connoisseurs whose taste far outstrips that of the drooling masses. Golden Age science fiction fans, whom I'll deal with much more in the weeks to come, referred to themselves as "slans" after the A.E. van Vogt novel of that title, about superior telepathic mutants who were hunted and feared by outsiders. (Sound familiar?) The same fans called non-fans "mundanes" - though not usually to their physically-fit, football-helmeted faces.
So there's a natural attraction to being one of the best and the brightest, whether that’s a group of opera buffs, X-Men roleplay gamers, or Sandman readers. And the comics business owes a lot to its hardcore fans, who've kept the flame burning through some pretty tough times.
There’s another factor in all this, too: As the number of entertainment options has mushroomed over the past ten to twenty years, the pop culture world in general has fragmented. Consequently, a lot of mass media - not just comics - has embraced niche markets, out of necessity. Could you have imagined a Golf Channel on your TV in 1970? Or a mass-market magazine about Star Trek?
The hardcore fans are crucial - but there's a danger in letting them run your business. By nature and choice, they're cut off from the mainstream of pop culture, and part of the appeal of a subculture, for them, is in knowing things that outsiders don’t. Tailoring your books too much to them can make it difficult to rope in a wider readership. One example of this in comics is DC’s Legion Of Superheroes comics of the early ‘90s, which dealt in great detail with the personal lives, home planets, and minutiae of the world that had grown up around the book’s huge cast of characters. Those books were beloved by a small group - but to outsiders, they were impenetrable.
(I faced a similar problem as editor of Swamp Thing around the same time. Did you deal with the big, fascinating mythology that the book had accumulated, and risk alienating new readers? Or did you ignore all that, and risk losing old ones? I’m proud of the books, but I’m not sure we ever found quite the right balance.)
In the beginning, comics were part of the big pop culture landscape. They competed for kids', pulp fans', and servicemen's attention along with Time, Argosy, and Duffy’s Tavern on the radio. In the weeks to come, we'll look at the ups and downs of the comics industry over the past 70 years, with particular emphasis on how it's fared when it's acknowledged and related to the outside world - and when it's dug in and hid its head in the sand.
And because the thesis of this column is that comics don’t exist in a pop-culture vacuum, we'll also look at the enormous number and variety of new popular entertainment outlets - computer games, cable TV, various internet activities, and much more - that have arisen to challenge comics for its audience. As noted above, the increase in options has led to a fragmenting of the audience in general. What does this mean for the industry, and for the art form?
In 1957, Chairman Mao gave a speech kicking off China’s Cultural Revolution. The ideological justification for the Cultural Revolution - as opposed to the political motivations, which were very different - was that the established, upper-class masters of art and literature had no greater claim to an audience than their plebeian counterparts. In fact, the argument went, the upper classes knew less about life and the stuff of art, and had been given a free ride for too long; it was time to let other voices be heard. Mao’s stated goal was to “let a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.”
In the media-soaked world of the 21st century, we’ve had no such deliberate call to revolution (nor, thankfully, the hideous cultural and human costs of Mao’s plan). But technological advancements have led to a world where a thousand flowers do bloom, and anyone with a school of thought can air it freely in public debate. Does that mean we’re living in a cultural utopia? Or does it just mean, as so often happens on Internet message boards, that the noise drowns out the meaningful signal?
Big topics - but hey, it beats bitching about Marvel’s no-overprint policy. (Or, god help me, defending it.)
So be with us in the weeks to come for the true, untold, totally subjective history of comics, told not-exactly-in-order and with a big dash of dramatic license, and featuring such juicy topics as:
</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> TV, The Creeping Menace</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> American Flagg! and The X-Men: Good Comics, Bad Templates</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> On the Dole, On the Scene: England and the Comics World</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Better to Live Direct than to Die on the Newsstand: Niche Markets and Direct Markets, 1975-1985</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> No Fanboy Is an Island
and my personal favorite:
</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Comics’ Drunken Uncle: Science Fiction
I promise no more quizzes. For a while.
- Stuart Moore
Look for the next bi-weekly installment on Tuesday, October 8th.
<blockquote>[Stuart Moore’s A THOUSAND FLOWERS is co-sponsored by <a href=http://www.crossgen.com target=”_blank”>CrossGen Comics</a> , <a href=http://www.ait-planetlar.com/ target=”_blank”>AiT/Planet Lar</a> & <a href=http://www.pfpress.com/ target=”_blank”>Penny Farthing Press</a> . Click on the links to visit their websites. To inquire about future sponsorship opportunities with this column, please email <a href=mailto:newsarama@aol.com>newsarama@aol.com</a>
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Creators/stuartwizphoto_f.jpg" width="110" height="113" align="right" alt="Stuart Moore">Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. Currently he freelances as a writer of comic books and nonfiction; he’d like you all to go out and buy ZENDRA, his epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press. Issue #3 of the second series, ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, is on sale now, and the trade paperback ZENDRA 1.0: COLLOCATION collects the first series. Then you can go to Stuart’s brand-new message board, at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com" target="_blank">www.joequesada.com</a> and discuss ZENDRA, this column, or anything else on your filthy little mind.
While at St. Martin’s Press, Stuart edited a wide variety of science fiction and pop culture books, including the YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION series and the initial volumes of the bestselling UNCLE JOHN’S BATHROOM READER. At DC Comics, he was a founding editor of the acclaimed Vertigo imprint, where he edited such comics series as PREACHER, THE INVISIBLES, TRANSMETROPOLITAN, SWAMP THING, HELLBLAZER, THE BOOKS OF MAGIC, and many others. From late 2000 through mid-2002 Stuart edited the Marvel Knights comics line and many of the revitalized Marvel’s new MAX titles, including DAREDEVIL, THE PUNISHER, ELEKTRA, ALIAS, WOLVERINE/HULK, HOWARD THE DUCK, BLACK WIDOW, and CAPTAIN AMERICA.
Stuart has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999. Sadly, there's no going back to Woolworth's - but that hasn’t been a problem yet. His fingers are crossed.]</blockquote></font>
<font face="Arial, Verdana"><div align="center">
A THOUSAND FLOWERS
Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside
Installment 1
by Stuart Moore</div>
1. It’s Scary Out There: An Introduction
This is a two-part question. Please have your pencils sharpened and your minds open.
Part One: Do you like comic books?
Presumably most of you do, because you're reading this on a comics-themed website. If you're a regular Newsarama reader and you don't like comics, you might want to think about why you're here. If it's just to hear yourself complain, I’ll gently suggest you do us all a favor and go somewhere else. I'm not going to either deify or vilify Jim Shooter, Paul Levitz, Todd McFarlane, Bill Jemas, Peter David, Rob Liefeld, or Mark Alessi in this column, so the odds are you won't have much fun.
If, on the other hand, you're not a regular comics reader but have stumbled across this somehow - it flew in the window tied to a bat, maybe, or your gorgeous girlfriend gave it to you, or that strange guy in I.T. tacked it up on the office bulletin board - then welcome. Comics have never deliberately tried to exclude you, they just get a little caught up in their own world from time to time. I'm sure you can relate - we all have days like that.
Which brings us to Part Two of the question. This part is aimed only at the comics fans:
Do you like comics despite the fact that the world at large often doesn't appreciate them - or because of that?
It's a tricky question to answer. After all, we all like to feel we're part of a special club, an elite group of connoisseurs whose taste far outstrips that of the drooling masses. Golden Age science fiction fans, whom I'll deal with much more in the weeks to come, referred to themselves as "slans" after the A.E. van Vogt novel of that title, about superior telepathic mutants who were hunted and feared by outsiders. (Sound familiar?) The same fans called non-fans "mundanes" - though not usually to their physically-fit, football-helmeted faces.
So there's a natural attraction to being one of the best and the brightest, whether that’s a group of opera buffs, X-Men roleplay gamers, or Sandman readers. And the comics business owes a lot to its hardcore fans, who've kept the flame burning through some pretty tough times.
There’s another factor in all this, too: As the number of entertainment options has mushroomed over the past ten to twenty years, the pop culture world in general has fragmented. Consequently, a lot of mass media - not just comics - has embraced niche markets, out of necessity. Could you have imagined a Golf Channel on your TV in 1970? Or a mass-market magazine about Star Trek?
The hardcore fans are crucial - but there's a danger in letting them run your business. By nature and choice, they're cut off from the mainstream of pop culture, and part of the appeal of a subculture, for them, is in knowing things that outsiders don’t. Tailoring your books too much to them can make it difficult to rope in a wider readership. One example of this in comics is DC’s Legion Of Superheroes comics of the early ‘90s, which dealt in great detail with the personal lives, home planets, and minutiae of the world that had grown up around the book’s huge cast of characters. Those books were beloved by a small group - but to outsiders, they were impenetrable.
(I faced a similar problem as editor of Swamp Thing around the same time. Did you deal with the big, fascinating mythology that the book had accumulated, and risk alienating new readers? Or did you ignore all that, and risk losing old ones? I’m proud of the books, but I’m not sure we ever found quite the right balance.)
In the beginning, comics were part of the big pop culture landscape. They competed for kids', pulp fans', and servicemen's attention along with Time, Argosy, and Duffy’s Tavern on the radio. In the weeks to come, we'll look at the ups and downs of the comics industry over the past 70 years, with particular emphasis on how it's fared when it's acknowledged and related to the outside world - and when it's dug in and hid its head in the sand.
And because the thesis of this column is that comics don’t exist in a pop-culture vacuum, we'll also look at the enormous number and variety of new popular entertainment outlets - computer games, cable TV, various internet activities, and much more - that have arisen to challenge comics for its audience. As noted above, the increase in options has led to a fragmenting of the audience in general. What does this mean for the industry, and for the art form?
In 1957, Chairman Mao gave a speech kicking off China’s Cultural Revolution. The ideological justification for the Cultural Revolution - as opposed to the political motivations, which were very different - was that the established, upper-class masters of art and literature had no greater claim to an audience than their plebeian counterparts. In fact, the argument went, the upper classes knew less about life and the stuff of art, and had been given a free ride for too long; it was time to let other voices be heard. Mao’s stated goal was to “let a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.”
In the media-soaked world of the 21st century, we’ve had no such deliberate call to revolution (nor, thankfully, the hideous cultural and human costs of Mao’s plan). But technological advancements have led to a world where a thousand flowers do bloom, and anyone with a school of thought can air it freely in public debate. Does that mean we’re living in a cultural utopia? Or does it just mean, as so often happens on Internet message boards, that the noise drowns out the meaningful signal?
Big topics - but hey, it beats bitching about Marvel’s no-overprint policy. (Or, god help me, defending it.)
So be with us in the weeks to come for the true, untold, totally subjective history of comics, told not-exactly-in-order and with a big dash of dramatic license, and featuring such juicy topics as:
</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> TV, The Creeping Menace</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> American Flagg! and The X-Men: Good Comics, Bad Templates</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> On the Dole, On the Scene: England and the Comics World</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Better to Live Direct than to Die on the Newsstand: Niche Markets and Direct Markets, 1975-1985</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> No Fanboy Is an Island
and my personal favorite:
</font></li> <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Comics’ Drunken Uncle: Science Fiction
I promise no more quizzes. For a while.
- Stuart Moore
Look for the next bi-weekly installment on Tuesday, October 8th.
<blockquote>[Stuart Moore’s A THOUSAND FLOWERS is co-sponsored by <a href=http://www.crossgen.com target=”_blank”>CrossGen Comics</a> , <a href=http://www.ait-planetlar.com/ target=”_blank”>AiT/Planet Lar</a> & <a href=http://www.pfpress.com/ target=”_blank”>Penny Farthing Press</a> . Click on the links to visit their websites. To inquire about future sponsorship opportunities with this column, please email <a href=mailto:newsarama@aol.com>newsarama@aol.com</a>
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Creators/stuartwizphoto_f.jpg" width="110" height="113" align="right" alt="Stuart Moore">Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. Currently he freelances as a writer of comic books and nonfiction; he’d like you all to go out and buy ZENDRA, his epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press. Issue #3 of the second series, ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, is on sale now, and the trade paperback ZENDRA 1.0: COLLOCATION collects the first series. Then you can go to Stuart’s brand-new message board, at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com" target="_blank">www.joequesada.com</a> and discuss ZENDRA, this column, or anything else on your filthy little mind.
While at St. Martin’s Press, Stuart edited a wide variety of science fiction and pop culture books, including the YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION series and the initial volumes of the bestselling UNCLE JOHN’S BATHROOM READER. At DC Comics, he was a founding editor of the acclaimed Vertigo imprint, where he edited such comics series as PREACHER, THE INVISIBLES, TRANSMETROPOLITAN, SWAMP THING, HELLBLAZER, THE BOOKS OF MAGIC, and many others. From late 2000 through mid-2002 Stuart edited the Marvel Knights comics line and many of the revitalized Marvel’s new MAX titles, including DAREDEVIL, THE PUNISHER, ELEKTRA, ALIAS, WOLVERINE/HULK, HOWARD THE DUCK, BLACK WIDOW, and CAPTAIN AMERICA.
Stuart has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999. Sadly, there's no going back to Woolworth's - but that hasn’t been a problem yet. His fingers are crossed.]</blockquote></font>