In Seach Of: The Elusive "Bridge" Comic?

The bridge book: the future of the medium?

Much has been made of the elusive bridge book, the comic tht would allow the reader to move gracefully from the Ritchie rich to the fantastic four to Kill your boyfriend in three easy steps and 30 years worth of maturity. So much time has been spent looking for this progression that I’m not sure that anyone has recently looked at it in light of today’s marketplace.

We often talk about comics and don’t necessarily define our terms for the discussion that well. There are comics as the things tht we read, a particular issue or trade or long box in the garage, and there are comics, the medium that we have works produced in, in the Scott McCloud definition of words and pictures working in concert to tell a story. Frequently the two get mixed up and the discussion gets muddied, which is not my intent here at all.

What we’re discussing today is comics as medium, a mass medium, which is not something that we could have said as easily 10 years ago, and how it relates to today’s buying public. It is helpful, and occasionally instructive to look at other mediums, vastly more mature mediums, (for all that the comic has been around since the 1930’s) such as books and film in this regard.

I believe that the notion of the crossover comic is not one that is particularly relevant anymore, if we could accept the premise that the person who is likely to rent Terminator 2: The Director’s Cut is not generally the same consumer who rented Mansfield Park, or is going to go pay to see Becoming Jane. What those two people have in common most is a love for the film medium, and an understanding a) of the storytelling conventions of the medium and b) that Terminator 2: The Director’s Cut is not an acceptable choice as date night.

While there is the occasional crossover blockbuster in any medium, as I defy most any of the Merchant/Ivory filmgoers to actually deny, with a straight face, that they have never seen Jaws for instance, it would be far more helpful and interesting for there to be as wide an array of comics available to the potential reader.

Last week I went home with the following in my bag to read:

• Criminal #8 by Brubaker and Philips
• Mighty Avengers #4 by Bendis and Cho
• Powers #25 by Bendis and Oeming
• The Salon by Nick Bertozzi

And I think nothing of mixing Criminal in with the slowest moving Ultron saga ever (literally, Mantis had become the Celestial Madonna in the time it has taken Ultron to take over the world again) or moving over to the over the top art references of The Salon, but I’m beginning to think that there may not be that many of me out there. It has been put to us in America that the manga in Japan, for instance, has so many volumes out that that the adolescent Japanese female who wants to read lesbian vampire fiction can easily have a series targeted towards her particular tastes. Certainly there are enough DVDs out in video stores to accommodate such a specific request for material. The real question is, is there enough American material to allow for targeted reading?

It is, alas, the terrible fact that to be a true mass medium, you need the mass of numbers. Because without that, you're a pretender, which is what comics have been for the last 20 years. It really is my answer to those that think that teh San Diego Comic Con should spin off the comics into their own con again: we've waited long enough in the wilderness as fringe media, don't exile us again because you don't like crowds. We need a huge number of readers, used to the conventions of visual storytelling to continue the tradition, and we need a great wealth of material to bring people back again and again. It is not the book itself a lot of times, but the habit of reading the book. If the habit is there, then they will go seek out the books themselves, and, thankfully, these days there are more and more books to fill in the gaps.

OK, so I'm being a half-full kinda guy these days. Can't help it. Came back from the San Diego Comic Con believing that I saw such an amazing breadth of material being published that almost any age should be able to find a comic to enjoy.

If only they know to look. And its a big IF.

Comics as Pop Culture: Fanboys in the Driver's Seat

Steven Grant, in his recent Master of the Obvious column goes on at length to delve into what I've postulating both live in person and online for a while now: that comics have been moving into actually being pop culture, not fringe culture for quite some time now, and with the ascendency of 300 to the top of the movie charts, we might now consider the movement to be fairly complete.

Of course, Steven, ever the better writer than I, sums it up well as this:

The comic book is no longer the pariah of pop culture.

And this is clearly true in the movies, the "hip" media references, the graphic novel section of the local Borders (significantly, a much better section that then hipper over-all local bookstore, Book Passage) and simply in other media references.

I'll put it as such: We don't suck as much as we used to . At least in the eyes of the public at large.


What I've been thinking since coming home from San Diego is that the movies may be driving people into respecting the comic field now, but comics are actually in the driovers's seat. And part of this this is generational. Many of the same young men that loved the Claremont/Byrne X-men are now pitching and optioning movies in Hollywood. Unlike prior generations of power brokers in Hollywood, who grew up with the view of comics as disposable trash (Oh yeah, like they're gonna throw 35 Million at the Angel and the Ape movie), this generation of movie makers doesn't look down on the source material. And I like that.

Significant is that they have the effects to translate the comic material into proper big screen visuals, which is one of the main reasons that Sci Fi was such a laughing stock before Star Wars. (You want me to take the Cylons seriously? Well, yeah, now we do.) Suddenly, Wolverine doesn't look so stupid with Hugh Jackman playing him, and the claws? Yeah, they work too.

Steven makes some interesting points on the properties, and how they make or break the movies... with some comments on the Green Hornet and Spirit movies. What I find interesting is that they have moved to optioning properties, probably for financial reasons, that have little or no following, unlike the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man. Green Hornet? Never understood that one, especially when you have a further multitude of good properties that could be better mined. Oddly enough, Marvel has been better at getting the small properties to screen. (I really never thought that I'd see the day that I would be seeing a Ghost Rider movie in the threatres. I'm sure that Mike Ploog never did either.) Where is the Wonder Woman movie? Where is the Green Lantern movie? Hell, where is the Black Lightning movie at this rate? How could you not simply let Joss Whedon make the damn WW picture anyway? (Who, in Hollywood, has a better resume with female characters than the man with 7 seasons of Buffy?)

Heroes, by the way is such a close concept to the Good Guys, my first profession venture into the world of comics via the defunct Defiant Comics that I did a head spin when I saw the premise.

Comics have long been about being able to reflect the times, and nowhere is that more apparent than reading books in hindsight, when we are accurately able to judge the tenor of the times. The Batman is a revenge fantasy that spilled over from the lawless Robber Baron Gangster 30's, and by the middle of the 1950's he'd been tamed into a reassuring man in a mask. Marvel had long had a history of moving slowly, due in part to Martin Goodman's "find what's hot and make a copy" philosophy. Thus we had Master of Kung Fu long after the craze, and the Disco Dazzler showing up in 1980. But mainstream America is also slow to get to get with the times. The producers of Saturday Night Fever have gone on record as saying that they did the movie to document a culture that was in New York and that had died out. No one knew that it would ignite a new trend for the entire country.

What I hate seeing is comics having to be reactionary at all. Steven is still thinking of the monthly periodical version of comics, and I think that I'm far more focused on the novel/novella format. I personally like the idea that there should be less layers in the editorial system in publishing, and I'm sure that it's a personal frustration for someone who has pitched as much material as he has that editors cannot simply champion a project and bring it to fruition, but we all know that the star editorial system exists in all layer of the publishing world, and that there are very few Archie Goodwin's out there who have that sort of amazing taste as to the projects that they can get behind. (We can thank Archie for getting behind Starman, the great American comic book for the decade of the '90's.)

Political cartoons are reactionary, we don't need to to. The current crop fo graphic novels currently gaining a certain level of respect have a longer shelf life, and make for interesting movies. Ghost world is a good example, and it doesn't need a $100 million budget. I thought that Linkletter did a great job bringing A Scanner Darkly to life, and Phil Dick's book could easily have been a comic for all its twists and turns and drug addled visuals. Hell, it could have been an Englehart/Brunner comic with its level of paranoia.

And Steven, when I think of Leonard Cohen, I thinkof the chilling album, the Future. That is not easy stuff to digest. Leonard makes it sound nice, but its scary stuff. Just check out Natural Born Killers.