COMICS CULTURE SHRAPNEL from CBEM 314
I was pleased to discover that The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won a Pulitzer, and am even more pleased that I read it before it did win. That is, I read a distinguished book before it was thought of as any such thing. It's rather refreshing.
Comics are lucky to be the recipient of such attention of late: between this book, movie versions like X-Men and the upcoming Spider-Man, movies about comics like Unbreakable, TV shows up the yin-yang like Static Shock and X-Men Evolution... it's quite a rush. People are being forced to acknowledge the comics industry once more.
Now to see if it stays that way. Because I know we got all this lovely attention in the 80's with the release of Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, the Pulitzer awarded to Maus, the release of the Batman movie.
Now, we quickly ran all that into the ground. It's not the outside world's fault that we can't be respectable. The grim n' gritty thing went way overboard... or how many serious works on the par with Maus have been released since then? Certainly not a noticeable amount. And Batman... well, that's all Joel Schumacher's fault.
We've got big TV and movie people working for us now. Kevin Smith. J. Michael Stracynzski. And more if this whole strike business goes through. The industry is poised for a groundswell, a rebirth, an awakening. And maybe this time we'll know better. Stop complaining and show some support. Because this is our chance.
This Tuesday I went to the Communications department on campus to pick something up, and noticed an announcement posted up on the wall in the front, I assume for the professors in the department. It was a request for essays about comic books, for a book that would hopefully be a textbook for the growing field of comics research and study. That's pretty much what it said. We are worthy of serious academic study. That's really cool.
So let's stay worthy. Show your support. And go read Kavalier and Clay.