Comic book geekery, ho!
Jun. 4th, 2011 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunasarielLately, I’ve been starting to get back into comic books. The only comics that I’ve ever really liked are the late, lamented Authority, and the collective work of Alan Moore (with the possible exception of Lost Girls, which wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t to my taste), so I miss the feeling of excitement and anticipation (and, later in the Authority’s run, dread, resignation, and frustration) that comes with each new release.
So I’ve been shopping around, looking for a new series to get into. I find that I’m gravitating more towards series (serieses?) aimed at and/or starring teenagers, which seems a bit weird to me. Even when I was a teenager, I was a bit impatient with YA and “teen” literature. A lot of it seems to have a very juvenile mindset (of course), and I can only read the tale of a young outcast who falls in love, realizes that this first love isn’t The One, finds The One, and slowly matures, discovering his/her identity and subsequent place in the world along the way so many times. Don't get me wrong, I love the archetype of the Hero's Journey. But the Hero's Journey is so malleable; it can be made to fit pretty much any situation or character. What I got impatient with was the preoccupation with the transition from childhood into adulthood, which, for me, somewhat loses its charm after I actually passed that stage. Of course, it was incredibly helpful and comforting, even cathartic, when I was in high school, reading about all these people going through the same things as me. The teenage years are a time when everybody feels just a little bit alone, just a tad like some unlovable loner freak, and reading about people getting through it okay was a major help. "Was" being the key word. These days, I've mostly moved on from teen/YA lit, but lately (and maybe this is just me subconsciously worrying about my upcoming move to Berkeley and step up into real academia), I’ve been looking more and more at teams like the Young Avengers and the Runaways.
Maybe I should have included the Runaways in the list of comic books that I’ve liked, because I did go through a Runaways phase. In high school, I liked me some pint-sized super-heroics. I liked the camraderie, I (usually) liked the art, I liked that the writer(s) actually allowed the characters to sound like human beings, not slang-spewing charicatures of what a single white nerd in his 40s thinks that "kids these days" sound like. One thing I didn't like, though, was feeling lost when a character from another series appeared. I know the basic ideas behind Spider-Man and Wolverine, but once lesser-known faces like Cloak and Dagger started showing up, I got lost.
One thing that’s consistently turned me away from getting into stuff that really interests me, like the X-Men, is the ridiculous amount of history I’d need to work through. I love the whole concept of the X-Men! I love the idea of this tiny, tight-knit cadre of comrades (alliteration FTW!) who know that the rest of the world sees them as monsters, but they can still find it in their hearts to protect the humans, even the humans who would like to see them dead, at all costs. I love the Professor X/Magneto dichotomy: once friends, now enemies, two sides of the same coin. I love that the villains are actually complex characters with sympathetic personalities and valid points of their own; I love that this isn't just a straight-up good-vs-evil smackdown. And of course, I love certain trappings of the verse, like the eeeeeevil omnipresent government, magic school for superheroes, and cool superpowers, that just appeal to the fangirl in me.
But every time I try to really sink my teeth into the X-Men, I get bogged down in that damned continuity again. I don’t like the feeling that things are flying over my head, that my lack of knowledge of this backstory or that plot point will come back to bite me in the butt later. I simply don’t have the time (or the resources) to work through 40-odd years of backlog. And it doesn’t help that it’s not just one series of backlog to work through, either. Take my earlier example of the X-Men. It seems like an interesting idea: good premise, engaging characters, complex villains. But which one do I read? There's X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, X-Force, New Mutants, The New X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, Excalibur, New Excalibur, X-Men Forever, or X-Treme X-Men? And that’s not even counting all the individual spinoffs and crossovers (which, in themselves, require me to bone up on who’s who in the crossover team)! It gets even worse if I want to get into one of the really big names, like Wonder Woman, Batman, the aforementioned Spider-Man, or (god forbid) Superman.
And then, of course, no matter which fandom I choose, there's always the chance that this event or that fact might turn out to be a dream/hallucination/alternate reality. Even if I read every single issue even tangentially related to my character/team of choice, I can't be sure of what will end up being real and what won't. It's all too easy for a writer to take a look at a plot twist that doesn't float his particular boat and then just declare it non-canon. Want an old villain back? It turns out that who the heroes *thought* they killed was only a clone, and the real villain has been alive this whole time! Don't like these two characters as a couple? Have them break up for any nonsensical reason you can pull out of your ass! Hell, don't like a character's personality or worldview? Feel free to write them as OOC as you want; someone will come along next year and reveal that your version of that character was a robot duplicate anyway! To be fair, I can see why some retcons have taken place. The Silver Age especially was a weird time, and if a writer doesn't feel compelled to acknowledge every Bat-Baby or one-off alien species, that's fine by me. Most of that stuff was pretty trippy anyway, and I'd hate to see a good author waste his time trying to make all of it make sense.
But then we get the cosmic reboots that just screw with everything. Here, I'd like to reference one of my favorite parody fics, The Justice Authority: When Non-Ideologically Threatening Enemies Attack! It was written when the larger DC multiverse absorbed the WildStorm verse, home to my dear old Authority, prompting many fans to worry about what would happen continuity-wise. Anyway, in Justice Authority, our favorite freaks and geeks know that they're in a comic book, and that their "contracts" have been rewritten by DC in order to retool them into safer, more mainstream versions of themselves. The characters suddenly "remember" alternate backstories that radially alter both their circumstances and the world they live in. Controversial elements of their lives are removed, and they're no longer allowed to swear, kill people, or challenge the status quo. Suffice to say, not everyone takes this well. The Midnighter, who is barred from using his destructive powers, taken away from his husband, and made to date the girl who was previously his adoptive daughter, is hit especially hard. This leads to a looooot of existential angst from Mids, who says: "We're dealing with people who can accidentally remake the universe just because they forgot to read one @#$%ing back issue. Who can undo twenty years of your life just because it's no longer polling well with the audience...What's the point of specifics if next month they will never have existed?" For a parody fanfic that contains lines like "It's not gay if you're holding a beer" and where the universe is saved by fanservice, it has some surprisingly good, and poignant, points. Good, because this says what I'm trying to get across, and poignant, because I've seen this happen way too many times.
Buuuut getting back on track now! Like I said, Runaways isn't free from crossovers, walk-ons, and other potentially disastrous crap but most guest stars are either iconic enough for me to recognize them, or the writers are nice enough to explain them to us. Their biggest crossover to date, though, was with the Young Avengers. This was a fairly large event in the Runaways' storyline, so I felt duty-bound to give it a shot. But once I started, I realized that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I'm not too familiar with the Avengers to start with, so that didn't help. Who are these people? Why are they working together in the first place? What's their story? Do they have any history with the Runaways? It was obvious that there was an entire level of the story, even an entire story in itself, that I was missing. I got mired down a few issues in, and eventually just skipped it and went back to Runaways proper. But now that I'm going for a re-read of Runaways, I'm looking to track down Young Avengers as well (although this is proving to be unusually difficult to do), for completeness' sake.
Of course, it's for more than completeness' sake. The Avengers proper seems like a fairly interesting team, but their revolving-door roster, incomprehensible history, and the loads and loads of backstory that I mentioned earlier aren't exactly points in their favor. Given this, I thought I'd check out the Young Avengers instead, who I'm already mildly familiar with due to Runaways, and who don't have such a tangled publication history. Their roster looks less scattered and tighter-knit (I'm a sucker for superhero teams that function like families, even dysfunctional ones), and I'm genuinely interested to get to know the characters better than as the bunch of lunatics who stand around yelling at each other in their crossover with Runaways.
While Young Avengers looks interesting, I'm not expecting perfection. It is aimed at teenagers, after all, although I know that Marvel knows that it won't be just teens who are reading this, so I can expect a certain level of maturity. There will still be the age-old problem of other characters walking on and off, but from what I can tell (thank you, Wikipedia!), these cameos aren't vital to the story.
This resurgence of interest in comics is due to two people: Joss Whedon and Linkara. Joss Whedon is a name that you all are (hopefully) familiar with; Linkara, almost certainly less so. Linkara is one of the reviewers in the stable headed by That Guy With the Glasses (better known as the Nostalgia Critic). The Nostalgia Critic reviews movies, and occasionally TV shows, from the 1980s and 1990s. He eventually spawned a whole host of affiliates and satellite shows, my favorites of which are Nostalgia Chick (who reviews stuff in the same medium/media and from the same era, only she generally focuses on movies/shows targeted at girls) and the aforementioned Linkara (who reviews hilariously bad comic books from the Golden Age up to today), and all of which frequently cross over and interact with each other.
Every reviewer has their own biases, and Linkara is no exception. He particularly hates the grim'n'gritty Liefeld-esque style of the late 90s, particularly the bulky, unrealistic musculature and violent antiheroes so anti- they can more or less drop the "hero" entirely. I'm okay with some antiheroes being more anti than hero, but I agree with him about the musculature thing. Seriously, some of these people shouldn't be able to raise their arms, and some should have already snapped in half! ...Aaaaaand that's a rant for another day, but this thing is getting ridiculously long, so bottom line: you can blame Linkara (as well as the recent deluge of superhero movies) for my re-entry into comic book geekdom!
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 07:44 am (UTC)I'm a reformed comic book fan. I still have a rather large collection of all the stuff I was able to convince my mom NOT to give away to thrift shops when I was far away and unable to physically defend my comic collection. But in the interests of compromise, some had to go. My husband complains about the boxes and boxes full of comics that I still have, though.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 06:43 pm (UTC)lol, sounds like there should be a 12-step program for comic geeks that want to kick the habit. Congrats for hanging onto the majority of your collection, though! Just out of curiosity, what's your poison?
no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 11:17 pm (UTC)Conan the Barbarian follows Conan's life from when he is a teenager and follows his life and adventures until he's around thirty or so. I would say start with that one and occasionally dip into Savage Sword. By the way, Conan Saga comics are reprints of Conan the Barbarian, so you could read that one instead if it's cheaper or more available.
I don't know if there are any newer Conan comics because I haven't set foot in a comic shop for years (except Amazon!) due to the fact that I can never enter a comic shop without spending money and then coming home with more comics that need to be granted space in my life.
I know there are a few holes in my collection. The last time I read the whole thing through, I didn't have access to back issues through the Internet the way I do now. One of these days I'll read my collection from start to finish again and take breaks to order the missing issues!
no subject
Date: 2011-06-07 06:35 pm (UTC)