Comment by UnpossibleJim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UnpossibleJim | Hacker News Reader

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I remember comics in the 1980's and they weren't pure escapist fantasy written for children. They tackled very adult subjects like reparations and slavery through the Genotia series in the X-Men and how the mutants were the stand-ins for the African Americans, where Genotia (a fictitious nation) enslaved them and America stripped their rights away, using the force of the Sentinels to do so. I was maybe 12 during this story line and it was foundational on how I treat and view people.

Then there are the comics written by Alan Moore, including The Watchmen. Again, I read these during my formative years but they are most certainly not aimed at children. They do show that these heroes of men, stand ins for the adults of children, are fallible. It was door opening in its literary literary narrative, not just its illustration (which is not the best, as far as comics go - I say to much disapproval).

Many of these comics, which often get maligned as literature for children, are very much written for adults by adults, tackling adult themes and adult sensibilities. Well, they were. Modern comics have lost me, chasing an audience is not a way to sell to the audience, I'm afraid. If you want to capture an audience, it isn't with focus groups and charts and data, it's with story and vision... if you have a real story to tell, you hope there's an audience for it. It's an artistic process, not one grown in a lab =(

Yes, everything the author describes started in earnest with 80s comics.

The trouble is that after Moore completely deconstructed super hero comics with Watchmen (and Miracle Man, and Miller with Dark Knight, etc.), a new generation thought that's how comics were supposed to be.

But Moore demonstrated that if you extrapolate how super humans would operate in "the real world", it would quickly devolve into a nightmare no one would want to live in.

So "dark" "gritty" "realistic" comics post-Watchmen are really kind of pointless. Watchmen did it better than any of the current authors, and reading them just leads to getting depressed about the depravity of our fantasy worlds, on top of all the things to be depressed about the real one. It's simultaneously indulgent and self defeating.

I have been ruined for most "cape" films for the last decade or so by reading a brilliant reconstruction of, well, the vast majority of cape concepts, tropes, settings, powers and such in a web serial called Worm, which is an enormous work set in an Earth where "powers" began to appear in certain people, called parahumans, around 1982. The sequel, Ward tackles even the more abstract concepts, like identity against the Revolving Door of Death in comics.

Probably the best cape thing I have come across since Watchmen.

How's it compare to Planetary?

Worm starts as the story of a bullied girl in high school. Some people in the world of worm have the latent 'capability' to 'trigger' and get powers when placed in extremely stressful situations. The main character suffers a prolonged bullying campaign and is stuffed into a locker with used feminine hygiene products by her bullies.

She triggers, not with super-strength or flying or lasers, but with the ability to control all bugs in a large radius around herself.

The world is darker than in planetary in that society is trying to cope with supervillains (people who trigger are often in bad situations that don't lead them to becoming superheros) as well as the Endbringers, three seemingly unstoppable monsters who alternate attacking a city every ~3 months and thus society needs supervillains to help combat them.

It's a long read, and I haven't read it in recent years so I can't remember how good the writing was. I enjoyed it. Never read the sequel since its about a different character that I didn't really care about.

Planetary is not really in the same vein of story.

Link? it's not an easy google.

https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

The deconstruction era didn't last forever. There was also reconstruction, with the likes of Astro City, Marvels, Kingdom Come, etc. That was certainly more upbeat and had a sense of wonder.

>on top of all the things to be depressed about the real one. It's simultaneously indulgent and self defeating.

That's one take. When I got into comics as a young adult, it wasnt depressing, indulgent, or defeating. It was a window look at some of the darker aspects of reality and explore and form opinions on them. I could have conversations with friends about the totalitarian state depicted in V for Vendetta or zero-sum politics and fascism in transmetropolitan.

It let me experience exaggerated possible worlds that I would not want to live in and that I was sheltered from in real life. It helped me form ideals and ideas about what I don't want in life.

Probably the only comic that I had a negative impact on me that I wasn't over able to overcome reframe as a cautionary tale was cerebus the aardvark. It certainly colored the world view of several of my friends, sending some into levels of mild depression. It contained some seriously unsettling takes on life, relationships, and women that were hard to shake, and I'm still not sure I have 15 years later.

"So "dark" "gritty" "realistic" comics post-Watchmen are really kind of pointless."

Reminds me of the sheer number of times I've seen "clever" people give a dark, gritty take on Alice in Wonderland. The weird thing to do with that material is give it an unironically bright, sunny, upbeat interpretation. If the surface of the original material isn't "dark", it sure isn't hiding very deeply under the surface.

I will agree there were some comics that talked about social issues, but even those tended to not hit you on the head with the message so hard, and they weren't the majority of comics books - they were a small minority of books. Now everyone wants to be Alan Moore, or they don't understand why Alan Moore is important and they want to dress their heroes up for party instead of make interesting stories with cool action.

Comics are alive and well in non-western comic traditions. It's the big two (Marvel,DC) as well some some smaller companies like IDW that can't produce stories people want to read on a regular basis.

I was never a DC fan, so I can't speak to them, but Marvel used to give their writers much more freedom in the 80's and early 90's (coincidentally, when comic sales were doing great) as well as owning smaller "independent" publishers, to let their talent publish small, offbeat, "risky" comics with subversive themes. It was GREAT. That's what Image Comics was (owned by Marvel). It was like how Large movie studios would own small art house film studios in order to entice good directors (like Spielberg and Lucas) to make blockbusters for them.

Besides, good literature isn't supposed to hit you with their message so hard. Good literature isn't a blunt instrument to be wielded like some dullard wielding a sledge hammer in a slaughter house. It's a gentle and subtle poison that changes your mind from the inside. V for Vendetta is a great example. On the outside it just shows how government is corrupt, but it also shows the risks of human experimentation, the problems of corporate and government cooperation, how easily people are swayed by a compliant media, how easily small things in the beginning can have huge consequences far down the line that were never suspected, even in a time of conflict and rage the need for human connection is important... and all of these things are laid out in the sub plot of a comic book. Again, from the 80's /sigh ... it was a freer time, when risks could be taken =)

>That's what Image Comics was (owned by Marvel)

Image comics was never owned by Marvel - it was founded when 7 of the big marvel/DC artists realized they didn't need marvel to publish them and left to do their own thing. Each artist had his own company (like Silvestri's Top Cow, Liefeld's Extreme Studios, Todd Mcfarlane's Todd Mcfarlane Productions, Jim Lee's Wildstorm, etc). Image's job was to act as a publisher that took minimal financial value from the project away from the creators, and didn't own any of the IP.

DC comics did have some smaller publishing houses - Vertigo comics, Wildstorm Comics after they bought it from Jim Lee, etc. Vertigo owned IP so it wasn't creator owned stuff, and I think Wildstorm was a mix. Vertigo imploded after a woke reboot that lasted from 2018-2019, and DC consolidated its adult oriented lines to DC Black Label.

Marvel had Icon Comics with creator owned stuff like Kick Ass (that later got a movie) but it was really about stopping Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar (netflix acquired Millarworld Limited in 2017) from shopping those IPs out to other places.

>good literature isn't supposed

99.99% of comic book writers today don't know how to write good comics, let alone good literature. DC has imploded and gone through multiple rounds of layoffs and there are very few of the people who were involved with the comics you remember left there anymore. Marvel is happy to make garbage if it hires people with the right diversity checkboxes (see Vita Ayala, who somehow keeps getting more work while being completely unable to write stories people want to read).

>V for Vendetta

Originally published in the UK, later put out by Vertigo Comics (DC) in its hayday. But Alan Moore is better writer than almost everyone left at either of the big comics houses these days, and he was writing in a time where it was less culturally acceptable to write blunt propaganda into comic books.

>Again, from the 80's /sigh ... it was a freer time, when risks could be taken

This is because our society has switched. In the 80s the left was fighting right wing christian censorship and largely winning. Today we have inverted.

>>Image comics was never owned by Marvel - it was founded when 7 of the big marvel writers realized they didn't need marvel to publish them and left to do their own thing<<

No kidding! Today I learned. Thanks... I really thought they opened this up to hold on some of these artists (specifically McFarland, who was notoriously hard to work with). =)

Are you sure? The entirety of the comic book genre is almost 100% based in social issues. Even going back to the first superhero, Superman, in the first issue of Action Comics #1, the protagonist rescues a woman about to be executed for a wrongful murder conviction (wrongful convictions and death penalty), rescues another woman being beaten by her husband (domestic abuse), rescues Lois Lane who was kidnapped by a gangster for rebuffing his advances (sexual harassment), and investigates a senator suspected of corruption (political corruption). It also acknowledges topics like media propaganda with the Daily Planet editor wanting to stir up the news. That's not even to speak of later super heroes like the X-Men whose entire existence was an exploration in marginalization of groups based on genetic differences. If those aren't main plot points based on social issues, I'm not sure what is.

Maybe it's just that as kids, we didn't recognize these things as being so politically charged as we do in our adulthood. Perhaps it's because as kids, it just seemed like common sense that these things shouldn't even be controversial so much as just being obviously bad things against which a hero would fight. It's hard to maintain a kid's perspective on things when we leave our kid years.

Edit: wording.

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