If reaction on-line is an accurate gauge, I’m the only one who actually kinda likes this look:

But then, what do I know. I would have read a New Universe revamp even if it didn’t involve Warren Ellis.
(Well, I might check out the first issue at least. Depending on who wrote and drew.)

So, yeah, the company I work for distributes “specialty market items.” Now, I could just say what it is, but I won’t. For one, I really can’t find any way to work what it is into the general tone or content of the site. Second, while the company doesn’t have an official “blogging policy” per se, I did have to sign an agreement not to discuss the company or its business online. Now what they mean, of course, is “don’t say anything online that makes you, your coworkers or the company look bad to our vendors or customers, and whatever you do don’t say anything that will hurt us and help our competition,” but enough people out there have lost their jobs because someone in middle management at their company over-reacted to a blog entry, why take the chance.

And, of course, there’s the fact that “specialty market items” sounds so much more mysterious and sexy than what it actually is. Really, it’s terribly mundane. I can almost guarantee that each and every one of you owns at least one.

For absolutely no reason at all, I was reminded earlier this week of my favorite criticism of this site. It was on one of those many highly specialized comics message boards. Something like “Kitty Pryde/Gor Cross-over Fic” or “Deadpool/Doop Slash Fic.” Anyway, the topic under discussion was, “Are there any good comics blogs” and a few people mentioned my site (for which I’m very grateful).

One person, however, had this to say: “I used to read Post Modern Barney, but I stopped when I realized he had nothing to say and tried to hide that fact by posting rants and funny comic book images.”

Yeah, let that sink in a minute…

I’d wager that if you took this person out to the forest to go sight-seeing, they’d complain about all the trees that were blocking their view.

I’m not bored with comics. I’m not even really bored with comics news. There’s too much unintended comedy to be found there for me to get bored. What I am finding myself increasingly bored with however is comics blogs. Specifically, certain personality types that seem to keep recurring on them. It’s both the hyper-sensitive thin-skinned types and the self-appointed arbiters of merit, as both writers and commentators, that are working my nerves and killing my interest in reading many sites.

A thought I had while responding to a friend’s post on another subject: Being a “high profile comics blogger” is kind of like being the world’s tallest midget. Yeah, good for you, you got the recognition you sought; but only a very small subset of the population cares about the height of midgets, so it’s not as if it’s a title to be particularly proud of.

A parable, composed after looking at many of the books I’ve seen praised lately: There was a wonderful new comic released. At least, that’s what the artist/writer said. He also said that only the most intelligent and discerning of readers would be able to recognize how good the work was. Many readers of comics, upon seeing the work, waxed poetic about the clarity of line and honesty of emotion and the originality of vision contained within this marvelous and stupendous comic. Clearly, they were the most discerning and intelligent readers of the land. Than a small boy looked at the comic. “Why,” he said, “The art in this comic is sloppy and amateurish! I am but a small boy and my crayon scribblings show a greater understanding of artistic principles, not to mention basic drawing skills such as anatomy, lighting and perspective. The page composition is muddied and confused, making it almost impossible to follow the flow of the story. The characters are the basest and broadest of stereotypes and the plot, what little there is, is trite and cliched. This is a truly dreadful comic.”
“Little boy,” the people replied, “Why do you hate the scene?”

So, I was going back and forth, and I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that I’m not going to review any of the “event” comics that have come out from Marvel or DC. There’s simply no point. Looking at those who have, I’ve seen a remarkable uniformity of response to reviews. Should someone have the audacity to actually say something positive about one of these comics, the response is usually seething indignation that someone should fail to see how a horribly wretched piece of filth the comic in question is. Should someone offer a reasonable and reasoned negative review of one of these comics, the response is usually seething indignation that the reviewer doesn’t hate the horribly wretched piece of filth as much as they should. And that’s when the reviewer is not being treated with sneering contempt for even reading a super-hero comic in the first place.
(Naturally, I exclude the “attack reviews” from the category of “reasonable and reasoned” negative appraisals of a work. The intent in these pieces seem to be humor, but they’re not funny. They’re not even well written. You can write a good, horribly mean review. It’s when all someone seems to be able to do is write over-the-top attacks on every single detail of a comic, often in page-by-page detail, and expanding out into other comics by the same company, writer or artist, that I’ve lost faith in that person’s ability to offer any kind of sane response to anything, good or bad.)
So, you know, screw it. I’m in a cranky enough mood as it is lately, I don’t need to deal with that kind of grief. I get plenty of grief from people via this page as it is. You’ll all just have to learn to live in blissful ignorance of what I happen to think about certain comics.
Though, if you like super-hero comics, at this point in time you can’t really go wrong with the work of Greg Rucka or Gail Simone. Particularly on Wonder Woman or Villains United.

“Why a fella’s perfectly entitled to get upset when driven to distraction by nay-sayers! You keep your own counsel best, honey, and keep on doing what you’re doing. You still enjoy it on the whole, don’t ya? And you know other people do too, otherwise why would they keep coming back day after day! And those people who keep coming back just because they like to be upset, you can just pay them no mind! What kind of person wastes their time looking for things to be upset by, especially something as silly as what some other person thinks of an ol’ funny-book?”

Carol Channing. Now, and always, the voice of reason.

I really fail to see the appeal of the vampire in horror fiction and films. It’s a ridiculous, over-used, and ultimately dumb concept that just never gets used well. Instead, we’re treated to a lot of silly tragi-romantic figures designed to appeal to people who think that no, really, Anne Rice is a good writer.

Let’s start with the basics here, and look at the vampire figure in Eastern European myth. It’s a bloated corpse, it’s mouth flecked with blood, that spreads corruption and death throughout the community. It’s a breakdown of the natural order, the stubborn refusal of the unwanted to leave people alone. It’s not a pleasant thing. It’s a disease metaphor, in fact. We’ll get back to that later, but come on! What the heck is so romantic and tragic about a blood-bloated corpse.

Clearly, the vampire was in need of some serious renovation in order to make it a figure palatable to the masses. Luckily, Bram Stoker and his Victorian-era sexual fetishes came along and provided just the right refurbishments. Gone is the dead, fat peasant, and along comes the elegant nobleman. And he’s not here to infect everyone with disease, no, he’s just looking for love. Love that requires him to sneak into women’s rooms at night and take them by force. What a bold and terrific improvement! Let’s take a symbol of corruption and disease and turn it into a symbol for rape and sexual violence! Brilliant! And just for good measure, let’s make it damn clear that the women being violated by the handsome stranger derive pleasure from it. Sheesh…

And so the vampire as “man women want to rape them” theme played out for a good long while…until Interview With A Vampire came out. I suspect that, on some level, Anne Rice may have been both aware and uncomfortable with the sexual violence aspect of vampire stories. So, she turned the tables. Instead of a vampire preying on young women because they secretly desire it, she has the vampire prey on young men because they secretly desire it. Now, homoeroticism had already been introduced into the vampire myth, several times. Dracula’s Daughter, Carmilla and Vampyros Lesbos are proof enough of that. Of course, lesbian chic and titillation of the male audience was more the point of those works than any a serious attempt to again reinvent the vampire myth. I sort of have to admire those works for being so shameless in their pandering. No, what Rice did was to attempt to remake the vampire as a symbol of homosexuality while retaining the elements of sexual violence and disease. Just in time, I might add, for a real disease to mark out gay men in the public’s eyes as sexual predators and carriers of disease. Way to go Anne!

Now given all that, you’d think the figure could be opened up to some further deconstruction. Nope, generally people seem fairly content with this figure. I walk into book-stores, and I check out the horror section, in the vain hope that something of merit like House of Leaves has been published, but what I find instead is shelf-upon-shelf of turgid novels all written by women who wear too much black eye-liner about tragic effeminate noblemen who prey on innocents, spouting angst-filled monologues at every opportunity, living a life of decadence until they find that special woman (always named Mary Sue, oddly enough) who can bring some light and life into their endless undead night. I’d find reading a transcript of the goth kids down the street weekly “World of Darkness” gaming session more compelling.

So, what are we left with the vampire…a disease metaphor, a Victorian metaphor for rape, and a very strange woman’s twisted take on gay relationships. And people eat this stuff up! They can’t get enough of it! Vampire books, vampire movies, hell, even vampire cereal! Eat a big bowl of your Eastern European inability to understand the process of decomposition, kids!

And don’t get me started on zombies…I can’t stand those either. Every zombie film and comic is essentially the same…a band of plucky survivors band together to fight the odds until human nature causes them to pick each other off one by one. And the zombies themselves…come on, yes, we all get that Romero used them as a metaphor for mindless consumerism and the dehumanizing effects of 20th century American culture. SAY SOMETHING NEW! (Shaun of the Dead gets a pass on this critique because it’s not technically a zombie film, it’s a romantic comedy with zombies in it.)

Part 1: Why I Hate Super-Hero Comics

Part 2: Why I Hate Indy Comics

Part 3: Why I Hate Manga

Manga is variously going to save or destroy the Western comics industry, depending on who you ask. People who like manga are convinced that if only they could get all those JSA and X-Men fans to read Tramps Like Us or City Hunter than they will fall in love with manga and Western comics publishing will start looking more like manga publishing and all the comic book stores and publishers will be saved! Hooray! People who dislike manga, on the other hand, are resentful of the fact that all these kids are reading Fake instead of Spider-Man or The Avengers like they “should” be.

Both sides are, of course, wrong. Manga’s audience isn’t anything like the Western comics audience and the rise and potential fall of manga has nothing whatsoever to do with the well-deserved (potential) death of the contemporary comics industry. (To borrow a phrase from Mike, since he seems in no hurry to use it, the comics industry we have today is the last, pathetic gasp of a fad that began seventy years ago.) We need to stop pretending that manga and western comics have anything to do with one another, other than occasionally brushing up against one another on book-store shelves.

Which is not, of course, to say that the manga readers don’t have their faults. They can be just as tiresome as the super-hero fans and the indie scenesters in their own way. In fact, manga fans seem to largely embody some of the worst negative traits of both the super-hero reader and the art-comix crowd.

To start with, there is often quite a deal of pretension amongst manga fans. I’m not talking about manga fans looking down on those “sad, adolescent” people who haven’t evolved past the point of reading super-hero comics, as they go to have their purchase of the latest volume of DragonBall Z rung up, although that element certainly exists amongst manga fans. No, what I’m thinking of most specifically are the people who pretend sophistication because of their deep knowledge and respect of manga, which is the most perfect artistic and literary form ever devised. It’s a peculiar form of Japanaphilia, less creepy than the anglo-American men who obsess over J-Pop singers, but annoying nonetheless. It’s the people who complained incessantly about manga not being presented in the “authentic” format when most publishers were still flipping and touching up artwork to present it in a left-to-right format. The fact that English is read left-to-right and presenting manga in that format might make it easier for people to read it was irrelevant. Now that most manga is presented in the original right-to-left format, their major concern is that the translations aren’t sufficiently “faithful.” “By changing the ‘san’ suffix to ‘Mr.’ they’ve completely changed the author’s intent!” they cry, weeping into their first edition copies of Manga! Manga!.

This is, of course, when they’re not too busy trying to impress you with the fact that they know a particular titles name in the original language, or it’s “cute” fans only name. I’ve lost track of the number of times people have asked me for Furuba or Aa, Megami-sama instead of just asking me for the title that I might actually be able to find it under.

To flip to the other end of the scale, one aspect of manga readership that doesn’t get mentioned very often is that many manga fans are actually very limited in their tastes. Despite the staggeringly large diversity of genres that exists in manga, and despite what a lot of manga-boosters would have you believe, most American readers stick very close to one genre. Their narrowness of taste will often put those of the most fanatical super-hero fetishist to shame. But unlike the spandex fetishist, many manga readers will insist that their purchases somehow actually do display an interest in a wide variety of genres and styles. The person who only buys X-Men comics in which Gambit appears at least has some basic honesty in their posistion; they don’t try to pretend that they’re more open-minded than they’re purchasing habits would indicate. But many manga fans will argue that there are actually significant and important distinctions between titles like Chobits and Love Hina and Oh My Goddess and Ai Yori Aoshi and Negima and Urusei Yatsura and Real Bout High School and they’re not just buying titles that feature under-age Japanese school girls topless and/or in panties, dammit!

Now, it is perhaps unfair to blame manga for the short-sightedness of it’s detractors, but there are a couple of comments from the anti-manga peanut gallery that manga publishers have sort of brought upon themselves. First is the notion that manga is a fad. People making this complaint really haven’t been looking up from their DC and Marvel comics long enough to realize what’s been going on in the comics industry for the last twenty years, and now that they have they look around them and see all these (gasp)women! and (shock!) children buying these strange-looking black-and-white paperbacks instead of reverently placing the most recent issue of Jim Lee’s Superman into an acid-free bag-and-board as all comics readers should be. For them, dismissing manga as a “fad” comforts them, and makes them forget that they’re the graphic entertainment version of a dodo–getting eaten into extinction by Dutch sailors because they’re too stupid to learn how to adapt to changing circumstances. Never mind that this “fad” began a good twenty or so years ago when Eclipse tentatively released some translations of Japanese comics into direct market stores to see if anyone would bite. No, what we’re really seeing is more of a “bandwagon.” Tokyopop decided to bite the bullet and throw a bunch of manga out in book-form to see if anyone would care…and they wisely decided to hell with the direct market and pushed to get the books into bookstores where the target audience for the kinds of material they were publishing would see it. And it worked. Very well. So every other manga publisher decided to follow suit. And it worked. Very well. And so other publisher have seen that it works very well to put book-form stories in book-stores and want a piece of that pie for themselves. To someone who was so engrossed in whether or not Peter Parker was a clone or the unflinching virgin purity of Gwen Stacy, all of these manga books suddenly appearing in Previews and where the Kingdom Come and other nostalgia-wanks used to be at Borders, it must look remarkably like, oh, say, the black-and-white comics boom, or the chromium comics boom, or the bad-girl comics boom, or the Crossgen comics boom (oh, wait, that one never actually happened). So, to a certain extent, manga publishers could have done more to differentiate their success from the other bubble-economies that the direct market has gone though over the years. On the other hand, screw the direct market and what it thinks seems to be a business strategy that’s worked well for manga.

The other potentially valid, they’ve-brought-this-on-themselves, issue that manga publishers face and I unfairly blame them for, is the issue of the manga glut. Yes, there are a hell of a lot of manga titles coming out each month now. I think Tokyopop alone accounts for about three or four inches of previews each month. But at this point, manga publishers are still seeing what the market will bear. Not the direct market, Dear God no, but the book-store market, which is several orders-of-magnitude larger than the direct market and therefore potentially more able to handle a wide variety of back-stock and new releases. No, the real issue with the two million or so different manga titles that come out each month is that the overwhelming majority of them are absolutely terrible. Badly drawn, derivative, cliched, and the only reason I give the writing a pass is that all I have to go on are the English translations, which are generally artless in the extreme. It’s not too much manga we have to fear, it’s the tidal wave of crap swamping the worthy titles. As it gets harder and harder for readers to find the wheat amongst the chaff, we run the risk of manga readers losing interest, or worse yet, losing critical discernment. And again, manga publishers and their “throw everything out there and see what sells” approach is largely to blame. Well, no, Tokyopop is largely to blame, to be honest. With most of the other manga publishers I can be reasonably certain that even if something is not to my taste, it still has some merit to someone. With Tokyopop we’re lucky if one of the 4,000 titles they release each month is worth reading.

If anyone ever wonders why I don’t take smarmy comments regarding my occasional venting at comic book fans and comic store customers very well should bear this in mind: I work someplace where people have serious discussions about setting up conscription programs for the Gnomish Lands. The patience of a saint would be sorely taxed by that sort of thing after dealing with it for eight hours a day, five days a week for several years. Believe me, I could be much more foul-tempered about it than I am.

I’m tired of having to explain to people that a coverless comic isn’t in “Gem Mint” condition.

I’m tired of having to explain to people that just because it’s in a bag, that doesn’t mean it’s in perfect condition.

I’m tired of having to explain that the term “graphic novel” is not an indication of sexually explicit content.

I’m tired of having to explain to people that their long-boxes full of Image #1s is probably not going to contain anything we could want or need for the store and that frankly, on the off chance that there is something we could use in there, the amount of time it would take going through the box and checking it against our inventory in comparison to what we would actually pay for the one or two titles we do need isn’t going to be worth either their time or mine.

I’m tired of having to explain to people that just because there are comic books based on “Sonic the Hedgehog” and comic books based on “Aliens” that doesn’t mean that they’re equivalent in terms of content.

I’m tired of having to explain that just because a publisher (*cough*Marvel, *cough-cough* Image) says a book will be released on a certain date that doesn’t neccessarily mean it will actually be released on that date.

I’m tired of having to explain that, yes, I do really need to see a comic for myself before I could hazard a guess as to what it might be worth based on its condition.

I’m tired of having to explain to customers that I don’t actually speak Japanese, and so they might have better luck asking me for help finding a particular title if they’d ask for it by the English title rather than trying to impress me with the fact that they know the Japanese title.

I’m tired of having to tell people not to lay down in the middle of the floor and read comics.

I’m tired of having to listen to people complain about what’s happening in titles they don’t buy.

I’m even more tired of listening to people complain about how much they hate the titles they are buying.

I’m tired of having to listen to the 1000th debate about who’s a better Green Lantern, Hal or Kyle?

I’m tired of smiling politely as customers talk about which comic book heroines they’d “do.”

(Okay, actually I lied, because whenever that particular conversation rolls around and becomes too bothersome I can always interject that I wouldn’t mind a tumble with Wildcat and that usually puts a stop to it right away.)

1) Come in and ask me if we have any books with pictures of “really cool looking devils.” Explain that this is for a tattoo. Yes, that’s right, there’s nothing I like more than having personal responsibility over what people choose to have indelibly etched into their bodies. The corrollary to this is to come in to the store and demand to go through every comic book we have with the “Harvey” logo on it so that you can find that one, perfect image of Hot Stuff you want to get tattooed on your ass.

2) Stand in front of the table at the front of the store with the big sign on it that says “All of these comics are $1.00″ and ask me “How much are these comics?”

3) Less than an hour after we’ve opened, ask me what I thought of a big new theatrical release, like, say “Spider-Man 2″. Bearing in mind that I was here two hours before we opened to prepare for the new comics and unpack them and put them out for sale and that I have a nearly hour-long commute to get to work in the first place, and it takes me at least an hour to get ready for work. So when, exactly, did I have time to go see a movie this morning, hmm?

4) Walk into our store. Look at our three tables holding 24 long boxes full of comics. Look at the 33 short boxes full of comics on the shelves behind the counter. Look at our six floor-to-ceiling book-cases, and our one half-size book-case, each filled to the bursting point with graphic novels and trade paperbacks. Look at our back-wall, which is nothing but the last months worth of comics, representing what is probably about 95% of all the comics solicited in Previews. You won’t know it, but all of this probably makes up less than half of our total stock. When I see you taking all of these comics and graphic novels in, and I know it can be quite over-whelming the first time you see it, and I ask you if there’s anything I can help you find, get really shirty with me because, apparently, we “don’t have a very wide selection of comics.”

5) Be one of the (many) people who packs up shipments at a Diamond warehouse who is seemingly incapable of actually putting the correct number of items we ordered in the boxes making up our shipment. When you even manage to get the items in the boxes at all, that is.

Edit: On #4 that should be 3 tables with 24 long boxes each for a total of 72 long boxes, and that should be 330 short boxes behind the counter. Not 33. It’s 11 shelves with 30 short boxes each. I’m not quite sure how I forgot the zero…

1) At twenty minutes until we open, start shouting at me through the door. Never mind that I’m clearly in the middle of a huge pile of boxes trying to finish counting and putting away the 15-20 (or more) packages of new material we just got in. When it finally becomes painfully obvious that you’re not going to get the hint that I’m ignoring you and I walk over to the door to see what exactly your freaking problem is, don’t ask me if I can check to see if we have a back-issue you’re looking for if you want any reply from me other than “We open in twenty minutes.”

2) When the store is full of customers, and I am clearly busy helping about a dozen people, answering the phone, and ringing up people at the register, ask if you can see the back issues behind the counter. After I get a box down for you, ask to see another box. And another. And another. And so on until I’ve hauled down about 20 boxes for you to poke through while I’m trying to help all the other people in the store, answer the phone and ring up people at the register. Out of all those boxes, buy one 85 cent comic.

3) Ask me if I can get you a chair. So that you can sit and read the comic books, in the aisle, in the middle of a busy store, instead of purchasing any. I dare you.

4) Call the store, on what is usually either the busiest, or second-busiest, day of the week and ask me for the phone number for one of the neighboring businesses. Or for their hours. Or if that store that’s across the street is still open or what, because, y’know, they’re not answering the phone and clearly the best way to get an answer for a query of that nature is to call a completely seperate and unrelated business in a completely different field.

5) Ask me if we carry comic books. Better yet, ask me if we carry comic books as some sort of ironic “joke.” To top it off, get hysterically angry at me for not finding the joke I hear every SINGLE FREAKING DAY hilariously funny and original.

Part 1: Why I Hate Super-Hero Fans

Part 2: Why I Hate Indy Comics Fans

Let me make a forced analogy by way of introduction. There’s a certain type of person who listens to jazz music. He doesn’t listen to it because he enjoys it. He listens to it because there’s a certain cultural cachet to being a “jazz fan.” This type of person listens to jazz because he understands that other people will tend to think that jazz fans are arty, cool intellectuals, and more than anything else, he wants to be an arty, cool intellectual too. So he will make a big show of letting as many people as possible know that he is a jazz fan. He will talk loudly, and at length, about all the jazz concerts and festivals he has gone to. He will spend outrageous sums of money on obscure recordings and back-catalogs of musicians who are only remembered by music historians. And, perhaps most importantly, he will take every opportunity that presents itself to denigrate other genres of music and the fans of those genres.

Get it?

We generally call these people “posers,” though I personally find the phrase “self-consciously hip” tends to describe them better. This type of reader spends a lot of time trying to make other people realize how cool and interesting they are. For them, the actual quality of the work isn’t as important as which company happened to release it. For this type of reader, incomprehensibility in a work is actually a plus. They like autobiographical comics a lot, because for some reason they’re really able to identify with self-important people who think that the entire world gives a damn what they think (yes, I do have a web-site, why do you ask?). They like works to be “important” as it gives them the opportunity to look disdainfully at anyone who has the audacity to complain that they didn’t understand it “Well, of course, you wouldn’t” is their victory cry, their proof that they are the hippest of them all. Fortunately, this type of reader has, for the most part, either left comics for other terminally pretentious mediums now that Raw is no longer being published, or writing reviews for The Comics Journal and can therefore be safely ignored.

(Of course, this is not to say that “complex=bad”. Good writers and artists are fully capable of creating multi-layered, intellectually stimulating works of quality. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are the first examples that spring to mind. Their work rewards careful reading and deep analysis. Coincidentally, these are the two writers whose work I most often hear complaints from super-hero fans about. For super-hero fans, complex most certainly does equal bad. To everyone who says to me “I don’t understand Rock of Ages” I can only respond: that says more about you than it does about Morrison.)

Related to the posers, but not quite the same beast, are the indy scenesters. These are people who have mostly crossed over to comics from some other, well, scene, usually music scenesters, goths and emo kids. Their sole criterion for a comic is that it not be a super-hero book. It could have been printed on recycled paper towels at Kinkos, on a printer running out of toner, on black paper to boot, and they won’t care because it’s just one more accessory that they need to complete their look. To be fair, they generally do enjoy the work they buy. But their standards for quality are woefully low. And they have an unfortunate tendency to look for the next hot thing before their friends do so that they can tell everyone that they were into it before it became popular. It is with some sense of shame that I confess that when I was their age (they’re always young as well) I was just as guilty of placing a work’s “indy” credentials or value as a prop above its merits. Unlike the posers, who are generally a lost cause, these kids will hopefully grow out of this phase and learn that quality really does matter.

And lastly, there are the people who just sort of miss the point. They’re the people who insist that Spawn is an indy comic, on the grounds that it’s not published by DC and Marvel. Well, that statement is only partly correct. Marvel and DC, as the two largest publishers of super-hero fiction, not to mention their corporate identities, certainly qualify as “the mainstream” in super-hero comics. In the sense that the book is not published by Marvel and DC, something like Spawn can maybe be called “indy” by the broadest possible definition. But one of my personal pet peeves is that what comic-book fans call “mainstream” is the opposite of what everybody else in the world calls “mainstream.” For the rest of the world, super-heroes are this strange aberration of a genre, not quite sci-fi, not quite fantasy, not quite pulp. To the rest of the world, “mainstream” means “designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.” By that token, books like Spawn, Savage Dragon and Witchblade are about as far from the mainstream as you can get, designed to appeal primarily to people whose emotional maturity stopped somewhere in early adolescence.

Luckily for all of us, and in direct opposition to the status of the super-hero fan, the vast majority of indy readers don’t quite fit into any of these categories. They mostly represent the people who have out-grown super hero comics (more or less, there’s no shame in enjoying quality super-hero comics as an adult, so long as you acknowledge that the quality super hero work is few and far between) but still enjoy the medium as a whole. I salute those brave souls, going into their comic book stores, week after week, searching for comics with something to say, the talent to say it, and the sense to not try to use people in tights hitting each other as the way to say it.

Part 1: Comic Book Fans

To be more precise: super-hero fans. For the purposes of this discussion, that’s a more useful distinction than the generic “comic book fans.” Not only do super-hero books dominate the current English-language comics market, but the fans of super-hero books are of a fairly recognizable type. There is a remarkable uniformity in thought and behavior, which indicates to a reasonable observer that there may be common factors in background and psychological make-up, certainly enough to make some general observations about the group as a whole.

As I see it, the prevailing psychological component of the super-hero fan’s mind is reactionary conservatism. This doesn’t necessarily translate into the political spectrum, as most super-hero fans tend to be fairly apathetic towards politics, as they are towards anything that they don’t see as having any direct effect on their lives. What this does translate into is a fear of anything new or different and a nostalgic desire to return the world to the condition it was in when they were children. Or, at the very least, return comic books, which are the only things that really matter to them anyway, to the condition they were in when they were children.

Let’s examine the fear of the new and different first. I’ve heard more casual, unthinking racist, homophobic and misogynistic statements come out of the mouths of comic book fans than any other group I’ve ever spent any time around. To examples come immediately to mind: “I’d like that Authority comic if it weren’t for the fags” and “I can’t believe they made Firestorm a colored kid.” And when their statements are challenged, super-hero fans seem surprised that anyone could think that they actually meant the things they said. Which is perhaps true? Most of the super-hero fans are heterosexually identified white males. And like most heterosexually identified white males, they seem to somehow believe that they don’t have any kind of sexual, racial or gender identity. They believe, even if only on a subconscious level, that they are the standard to which others should be compared. So it’s not as if they truly dislike someone of a different sexuality, race or gender. Other people are just “not like” them, and “not like” is the same as “bad.” So they will use words like “gay,” “nigger,” “Jew,” “cunt,” and “bitch” as pejoratives without pausing to consider the wider social contexts of those words. Now, this is possibly a failing of Americans in general, not just of comic-book fans. But consider the loud wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on whenever, say, a new creative team is announced for a book, or a different direction is taken. “Different” in all these cases is almost universally considered “bad.”

This is directly comparable to the idea of anything “new.” What are the best selling comic books in direct market stores right now? Revivals of older properties, tie-ins to other media products, and the same titles that have been published continually for the last thirty to sixty years. New concepts launch with low numbers and rarely survive any length of time without being tied in some way to a recognizable and well known element, such as a popular creator or links to a title “family” such as X-Men or Batman. “New” is, at a basic level, the same thing as “different” and therefore “bad.”

Why do super-hero comics appeal to this personality type? One of the primary failings of the super-hero genre as a story-telling medium is that it presents a world in which the primary goal of all of the characters is to maintain the status quo at all costs. There is the illusion of change, small trivial details may be changed to reflect current tastes, but the basic story never deviates from the central premise. It doesn’t matter whether Batman is fighting the Joker this month, or the Riddler. The structure of the story will never change: man in tights fights criminal, criminal is put in jail only to escape again. Repeat ad infinitum. Real change, on those rare occasions when it does occur in super-hero comics, occurs on a geologic scale. It took sixty years for Clark Kent to marry Lois Lane, and forty years for Aunt May to find out that Peter Parker is really Spider-Man (and on some message board somewhere, I can almost guarantee that somebody is complaining about even those changes). This is a world, in short, in which it is impossible for characters to learn or grow or reach any kind of conclusion. Because as soon as they appear to, it’s time for the next issue to come out and they start all over again at the beginning. It’s a comfort world, in which the reader can be reassured that no matter how scary the real world is, and no matter how rapidly things change, this little world will always be there for them and nothing there will ever change.

This brings us to the nostalgic nature of the super-hero fans. For most super-hero fans, the titles they enjoy were always at their best at the point at which they started to read them. Everything that has come after is but a pale imitation of the title’s glory days. The examples are frankly too numerous to list but let’s touch on a few of the more common ones. Any golden age comic is a good case to examine this claim. Have you read many golden age comics? The art is terrible and the stories make absolutely no sense. The golden age Green Lantern comic is particularly painful to look at. Yet the “Golden Age” is considered to be the greatest period of all time for super-hero comics because the children who read them at the time grew up to write the histories and early critical studies of comic-books. The Marvel titles of the 60s are another good example. The majority of the titles were tepid rehashes of earlier concepts or specific attempts to emulate the success of DC’s super-hero revival. Stan Lee’s scripts often bear little to no relation to the illustrations and beggar all common sense or internal consistency. And the art on the titles often appears rushed and half-finished. And moving into more contemporary work, Alex Ross seems utterly incapable of drawing a DC character in anything other than the costumes they wore in the 70s. Because that’s when he started reading DC comics. These readers are unable to move beyond their childish attachments to the characters. So they campaign to have their favorite, long since cancelled titles brought back, and then complain when they are brought back because “they’re not like they used to be.” No Green Lantern other than Hal Jordan will ever be acceptable. No group of Teen Titans other than the originals, or at least facsimiles of them, will ever be acceptable. And God help you if you try to publish a new version of an older title that doesn’t pick right up from where the old series left off. About the only super-hero title that did possess the illusion of forward momentum was the Legion of Super-Heroes, and marketplace demands eventually required starting over from scratch on that title so that it more closely resembled the Legion that super-hero fans grew up reading.

All of which has lead me to a disturbing realization about some super-hero fans. Asperger’s Syndrome is a mild form of autism which is characterized by an inability to socialize with peers and encyclopedic knowledge of a very narrow field of inquiry. They are unable to read social cues such as eye contact and smiles, and have very little familiarity with the concept of “personal space.” They have a lack of empathy for others, an inability to understand that other people have feelings or opinions of their own that are as valid as those of the person with AS. They prefer “sameness” as one researcher puts it, and dislike anything new or changes to their routine or the world around them. This sounds remarkably like a number of super-hero fans I’ve come into contact with over the years. I think a great deal of what gets chalked up to “fanboy” behavior and attitudes may actually be symptomatic of undiagnosed cases of some form of mild autism, not necessarily Asperger’s Syndrome, but something like it. If this is true, this explains a great deal about the market for super-hero comics and the appeal of super-heroes in general. They’re an almost ideal entertainment medium for those who are unable to adapt to their environment or form meaningful relationships with other people. They never change, and can be a refuge from the changes in the outside environment.

This is not to say I’m trying to pathologize super-hero fans and their behavior. Take this as anecdotal evidence and a broad, preliminary hypothesis based on that evidence. Most super-hero fans, I’m sure, have no developmental disabilities of any kind. But if the more obnoxious of the stereotypical “fanboy” behaviors are indeed symptomatic of an autistic disorder than this places the behavior in a more useful context than “that’s the way nerds act.” And this is also not a plea for “mature” super-hero comics. If anything, super-hero comics are an ideal entertainment for children and child-like minds. And after “Watchmen” there really isn’t much more to say about the subtexts of the genre. Further attempts along that line can only pale in comparison, especially when all the recent examples of “mature” super-hero comics, notably “Supreme Power” and “Ultimates” don’t say anything new about the genre.

Coming soon in this series:

Why I Hate Indy Comics Fans

Why I Hate Manga Fans

Why I Hate Comics News Sources

Why I Hate Webblogs