Mark Zingarelli for The Wall Street Journal
The article that accompanies this illustration — about why superhero comics don’t sell well — is an interesting one. The writer brings up the whole creators’ rights argument and how it’s affecting the books — but, while I can understand why creators’ rights is an important topic to address, its ties to superhero sales is tenuous. His insinuation that creators won’t bring their A-game to superhero books just ‘cause they can’t create new characters seems like an over-generalisation. Look at Fraction/Larocca’s run on Iron Man. Or Bendis/Maleev’s run on Daredevil. Or Waid/Wieringo’s run on Fantastic Four. Or all of Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man run.
And I personally don’t agree with the idea that continuity is as big a barrier as he claims. If continuity was such an issue, how is that someone like me, who came into comics in the late 80s and early 90s with very little knowledge of 20 years’ of continuity and a complete lack of tools like Wikipedia, managed to get into the books?
Like I said, an interesting article, but one that — to me at least — reads like something from a literary snob’s point of view.
Continuity? What dat? I’m not going to deny myself good shit just because I was born in 1990. I know jack about the ‘verse, and have read very few Golden Age runs (if any). But I still cried my eyes out over Straczynski’s Earth One (say what you like, talent is talent. Hemingway was a dickhead too), Jack Drake’s death (WTF), and Kitty Pryde’s sacrifice.
I fucking hate it when people say shit like “Oh, all you people who love the Avengers film, you don’t even know who the original team was,” or “Oh, all you people excited about Northstar, did you know about the bisexual Daken?”
All that tells me is you know how to use Wikipedia. Get over yourselves in this mad scramble to don the label “real fan”.
Fuck all of y’all sideways, yo. That’s not what comic books are about, it’ll never be what comic books are about. If it were, why would people get the Snowtown tag tattooed onto their skin?
You don’t need to know somebody’s history to love them completely, do you?
And this article, specifically, is a piece of shit. Anyone who calls anything Grant Morrison “poorly-written” is a moron. I’m not even going to pretend to respect your opinion here, bro.
