A brief distraction

Pop culture or literature? That's the question I've been asking myself for the past couple of weeks. I've semi-returned to a favorite past-time of mine: reading comic books. This has been somewhat at the expense of my other reads, mostly because comics are short and fun to read, and I can slip one in between homework assignments. But with a reading blog, I knew that I wasn't going to get away with this. So I've been thinking about how to address this in a blog primarily about literature.

The conclusion I've drawn is that comics can be more closely equated with television or newspapers than with books, and for two different reasons. Comics are like television because of their constantly changing creators. Oh, sure, the creators will have limited runs, and often they'll be quite good. (Ellis and Deodato on the Thunderbolts, anyone?) But the point is that the characters, over the course of their decades-long lifetime, will have changing motivations with their new writers and different looks with their new artists. I get the feeling that things were more consistent back in the sixties -- from what I've read of Marvel's Spider-Man archives, changing writers didn't change Spidey's character dramatically. In this age of artistic license, though, Spider-Man will be wary of all things magic one month and make a deal with the devil the next. In the long run, this makes for better storytelling occasionally, but inconsistency overall. The most interesting stories are those with one set of creators -- Planet Hulk was excellent, Ellis's Thunderbolts sublime. But I don't think it's easy to stick with a series for very long now. As for me, I couldn't sustain a relationship with the Marvel Universe for more than two and a half years; the reboot of Spider-Man was the final straw. Coordinated the reboot might have been, but it was completely incongruous with what had come before, with all the characterization I had invested in. So I lost interest.

I'm beginning to think that I was looking for the wrong thing in comics. A congruous character is certainly a good thing -- and I'm appreciative of the early Marvel days where that was easier to do. But here's where comics begin to look like a newspaper -- much as I may be looking for an epic, years-long character piece, this is not literature, but pop culture. Pick up any comic and you can get a pretty good idea of the prevalent issues of the day. Take the Marvel universe. (I can't speak for DC.) A.I.M., a Marvel terrorist group, has grown more prevalent. The role of the government has become more and more oppressive - first regulating all superheroes, then being taken over by supervillains. I tried re-reading the epic "Civil War" storyline from a few years back, and found it hard to get through. The political storyline is very wordy, and light on the action. But back in 2006, it was very interesting -- I think because I was grappling with the idea of how much government regulation should be present myself. (This applies to comics of any other era. Captain America fought Hitler in the 40's; many Thor villains were Communists in the 60's.) Everything gets outdated: even "Watchmen" feels different now. But that's how comics are supposed to be. While good books give us a cohesive creative vision, comics offer a brief distraction from the now.

I have one more note here, to compare comics with pulp fiction, or I might get backlash because of how harshly I just criticized pulp fiction a month ago. (Well, I won't get backlash -- not on this blog, not enough people are reading yet -- but let's say I might.) What can I say? I like comics better. Partially it doesn't take as long to read a comic, so I can abandon it if I want, even mid-story (because a lot of stories are spread over many comics). Partially the visual aspect means if I don't like the story, at least I've got pretty pictures to look at. Partially it's more interesting to read about superpowers than anything else (come on, who didn't want to fly or turn invisible as a kid? I still do). And partially it's a relief to read about people with unequivocably good intentions in this day and age. In a world of ulterior motives, it's nice to know Spider-Man's primary goal is to keep the streets safe.