COMICS CULTURE SHRAPNEL from CBEM 283
But looking at what interests me now, I find that in terms of super heroism, I'm most strongly drawn to the Powerpuff Girls and Dragonball Z. Of course I'm talking about the animation in both cases, even though the DBZ manga came first, and the Powerpuff comic is pretty good as well. These two shows present a different slant on the traditional superhero concepts while playing off the strengths of animation. Superheroes don't need to be in the pages of a comic book to be enjoyable, and animation is certainly a viable and expressive medium for them.
Come to think of it, I started reading X-Men comics because of the cartoon.
I watched it from the beginning, partly because I would give almost any action cartoon a try. (I was less picky in those days.) The other reason I watched it was because I actually was, to some degree, familiar with the characters. I had seen them on trading cards and bookbags, and my father would bring home the occasional issue. But it wasn't until the show debuted that I became interested in something deeper, into knowing what these characters were meant to be like and what kind of stories they were in. Sure, it sounds corny, but when you compare the show to its source material, there was a serious gap in depth and quality between the two. I became an addict, an "x-junkie" or whatever you may call it. This interest eventually matured and snowballed into other titles, especially the DC superhero stuff. Now I don't even read that. Right now I'm in a transitional stage. The only titles I buy regularly are Transmetropolitan, Starman, and JLA. In a year I might stop reading comics all-together, an idea that depresses me a bit. My interests have started to lean toward other media, including movies and television. It's an old story, we've heard it many times and lamented the comic readers lost to those more accepted and popular forms of entertainment.
So why are we so happy whenever a comic-related movie comes out? Well, we all like movies and comic books, so it seems natural that we would enjoy the combination of the two. We like to nitpick the movies, comparing it to the visions we each have of what these characters should be like. That's purely a geek thing. And there's the validation we seem to feel from seeing something from our little comics subculture thrown into the harsh glare of mass-culture.
Why do we need this validation? By celebrating and glorifying the movie version of our favorite titles, aren't we saying to the world that comics failed as a viable medium for that story? Do we say that comics couldn't do the job? By embracing movies and television as the medium of choice, we undermine their source material, the comic page.
There are those who feel that these movie and television deals create awareness of the characters, inducing people to buy the merchandise. Many assume that this includes the original comics as well. It certainly worked in my case with the X-Men cartoon. But from what I've observed in the aftermath of the X-Men movie, nothing has changed. The title sold well for the summer, but then, X-Men *always* sells well, at least for a comic book. Marvel placed a blurb on the cover of recent issues, proclaiming "the comic the movie is based on!" Even with all the X-Titles on the market, there are still only two "X-Men" titles, both of which carry the blurb. The question here is whether it's the same title anymore. I wonder how many people might have actually opened up the book and then wondered where Cyclops was? For those alien to the title, Marvel released special prequel stories which were mediocre at best, and these were what was sold in major bookstores. Maybe what was needed was special comic collections of the best X-Men stories, small digests that could be placed alongside the novelization on racks. From my personal observations as a cashier, we sold a lot more of the novelizations than the prequel books. I don't actually remember selling the prequels at all, though we did carry them. But then, the novelization has the advantage of being small enough to fit in a counter display. It's all in the marketing.
Recently, other comic-related movies have been released which did nothing for the industry. An example that comes to mind is Men in Black. Sure, it was based on a comic, but did it sell comics at all? Not really, because for all the money the movie made, the character were never icons themselves. Batman is an icon. Superman is an icon. Even the X-Men are icons. These are all superheroes, of course. Superheroes are a mythology most Americans are somewhat familiar with, a familiarity movie studios count on when adapting comic stories for the screen. Even if they don't know the characters very well, the public knows the ideals and principles that superheroism is based on.
The comics industry has been struggling for years to break its tight connection with superheroes, in many cases twisting and subverting the ideals that these heroes are based on. Initially this produced good stories, but even these variations have their shelf-life. Thus companies are finally looking outside the genre, and the list of titles available becomes more diverse every month. But the lingering shadow of superheroes remains.
The public identifies comics with superheroes, and those heroes are what sell movies. Yet superheroes stifle the medium, muscling out diversity and creating an overwhelming sense of sameness. In a sense, the reliance on movie deals hurts the medium in itself, because as the saying says, you can't have your cake and eat it too. For comic publishers, the decision comes down to this: do you want to make movies or comics?
Little hint: the answer is not "C."